A Poetics of Interruption: Fugitive Speech Acts and the Politics of Noise

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A Poetics of Interruption: fugitive speech acts and the politics of noise

Andrew Brooks Doctor of Philosophy UNSW Art and Design 2017

THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES Thesis/Dissertation Sheet

Surname or Family name: Brooks

First name: Andrew Other name/s: Navin

Abbreviation for degree as given in the University calendar: PhD

School: UNSW Art and Design Faculty: UNSW Art and Design

Title: A Poetics of Interruption: fugitive speech acts and the politics of noise

Abstract

This thesis investigates interruption, arguing that it is a generative and constructive force in contemporary aesthetics and politics. Organised around the figures of murmur, stutter, gossip and hum, which I identify as fugitive speech acts, the thesis approaches the problem of interruption from the nexus of the sonic and the textual, drawing from contemporary media, sound and poetry. These everyday ‘minor’ figures are activated by and feed back into an ontogenetic noise that both conditions and transforms systems and relations. Developing noise as a conceptual category, the thesis considers these minor figures in relation to questions of power, race, sociality and collectivity. This study proposes a poetics of interruption in concert with a politics of noise that together suggest new, interdisciplinary approaches to reading and listening to contemporary media. In particular, it reads with Michel Serres, Fred Moten, Stefano Harney, Gilles Deleuze, Felix́ Guattari and Saidiya Hartman, developing a theory of noise as a force of interruption that acts upon the socio-political order.

The thesis comprises four long chapters that articulate the fugitive speech acts. Murmur is read as an indistinct noise of many individuating voices sounding at once; a sonic figure that moves toward a heterogeneous conception of dissensual collectivity. The stutter is an interruption to the idealised, individualised voice and the perceived stability of communication; it sets language on a process of continuous variation, interrupting its majoritarian ordering and opening a space to forge ‘minor’ archives. Gossip emerges as noisy, networked speech that circulates in excess of official discourse and gives rise to proto-socialities. Hum detects the noisiness of networked culture, located, counterintuitively, in the interruptive modalities of networked distraction and boredom, and refigures these modalities as haptic and collective modes of (media) perception. Tracking these interruptive figures as they appear in experimental poetry, sonic art and contemporary media, the thesis reads work by artists and writers such as Claudia Rankine, M. NourbeSe Philip, Amanda Stewart and Tan Lin and examines media environments such as ‘Black Twitter.’ Collectively, these works attend to the forces of interruption that emerge from the intersection of sound and language. Such interruptions generate states of suspended animation from which alternate conceptions of sociality and perception can be considered. This thesis develops strategies for reading and listening to (and with) these works as noises that multiply generate a poetics of interruption.

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'I hereby grant the University of New South Wales or its agents the right to archive and to make available my thesis or dissertation in whole or part in the University libraries in all forms of media, now or here after known, subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. I retain all proprietary rights, such as patent rights. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis or dissertation.

I also authorise University Microfilms to use the 350 word abstract of my thesis in Dissertation Abstract International (this is applicable to doctoral theses only). I have either used no substantial portions of copyright material in my thesis or I have obtained permission to use copyright material; where permission has not been granted I have applied/will apply for a partial restriction of the digital copy of my thesis or dissertation.'

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Date ...... table of contents

acknowledgements i list of images iii abstract iv

introduction 1 The Parasite 10 Sonic Figures and Fugitive Speech Acts 14 Listening / Reading 17 Resonances 21 A Poetics of Interruption 23 murmur 28 Originating Murmurs and Original Murmurings 30 Affective Noise 38 The Murmur of the Crowd 42 The Micropolitics of the Murmur 57 A Poetics of Murmur 60 stutter 70 Noisy Exchange in the Mouth of the Parasite 76 Stuttering the Archive 95 Into the Void 111 gossip 116 "Have you heard..." 116 Signal / Noise 120 Toward a (socio-epistemology for the) Undercommons 122 Inscription / Capture 129 Networked Gossip 133 Riot 142 hum 159 Ubiquitous Listening / Ubiquitous Reading 165 Books as Environments 174 Boredom 183 Channel Surfing 189 coda 199

bibliography 204 acknowledgements

Firstly, I would like to acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation as the traditional custodians of the land that I live and work on. This thesis was written on land that was never ceded.

Thank you to my supervisor, Anna Munster, for getting my thinking to move. I am deeply grateful for her generosity and rigour, the fierceness of her intellect has been a constant source of inspiration. She has encouraged my roaming research interests and reigned me in when it looked as if I might get tangled in them. Her influence, as both a mentor and a friend, has been integral to this project. Thank you also to Caleb Kelly, who provided valuable support and encouragement in the early stages of this project.

Thank you to everyone at UNSW Art and Design for creating a wonderful and nourishing intellectual community. In particular, I want to thank the members of the Art and Politics Bureau for forging a space of criticality and solidarity despite the increasing difficulty of doing so in the modern university. A big thank you must go to all the students I have had the privilege of sharing the classroom with over the past few years. The experience of teaching has been central to conceiving of a life in academia and the loop between teaching and research has been both productive and invigorating. I am endlessly inspired by the politics of ‘young’ people and many of the ideas that appear in this thesis are inflected by conversations that have occurred in (and around) the classroom.

A special thanks must go to Tim Gregory, who has been an incredible support in all facets of life. I have learnt an immeasurable amount from working alongside Tim and am ever inspired by his dedication to students, friends and ideas. I met Tim during the course of this project and feel lucky to now call him a friend.

Thank you to my family for their unwavering support and love. Thank you to my parents whose door is always open, and to my sister who demonstrates the deepest level of care for loved ones in everything she does. Shout out to my niece, Frankie, who came into the world halfway through this project and is a total joy.

Thank you my extended family: Martin Wieczorek, Liam Grealy, Miro Sandev, Duncan Hilder, Tom Geue, Kynan Tan, Jess Fragomeni, Tim Gregory, Laura Naimo, Sacha Naimo,

i Clare Milledge, Morten Milledge, Tom Melick, Spence Messih, Uros Çvoro, Dave McNeill, Sam Pettigrew, Monica Monin, Tom Smith, Pat Armstrong, Vaughan O’Connor, Chantelle Lau, Sophie Unsen, Richard Keys, Berish Bilander, Tylor Wilson, the Ferm Handshake, Keg de Souza, Lucas Abela, Ernie Zoze, Lucien Alperstein, Claudia Nicholson, Tios Kyriakidis, Sumugan Sivanesan and Steve Shears for the endless syndication of snacks, meals, drinks, conversation and laughter.

Thank you to our late cat Stella, aka G.O.A.T, aka Slug, who kept me company as I read and wrote much of this thesis. She was a most wonderful pal who taught me much about interspecies love. She will be missed!

Thank you to Astrid Lorange, Tom Melick, Andy Carruthers, Kynan Tan and Tim Gregory for reading various versions of this work and offering invaluable feedback and suggestions. Thank you to Peter Blamey for proofreading with a keen eye. And thank you to Jenni Hagedorn for help with the layout.

Finally, thank you to Astrid Lorange who came into my life as this project began and rearranged it in the best possible way. Building a world with her has been the most instructive, exciting and rewarding of undertakings and has influenced everything I do, including this thesis. Her total commitment to friends, family, politics, scholarship and teaching inspires me daily and has had a profound impact on all of the ideas contained in the pages to come. This thesis is dedicated to her.

ii list of figures

Figure 2.1. Excerpt from "Sound and Sense" by Amanda Stewart 78 Figure 2.2. Excerpt from "Sound and Sense" by Amanda Stewart 80 Figure 2.3. Excerpt from "absence" by Amanda Stewart 86 Figure 2.4. Excerpt from "absence" by Amanda Stewart 87 Figure 2.5. Excerpt from "absence" by Amanda Stewart 88 Figure 2.6. Excerpt from "absence" by Amanda Stewart 88 Figure 2.7. Excerpt from "absence" by Amanda Stewart 89 Figure 2.8. Excerpt from "Icon" by Amanda Stewart 92 Figure 2.9. Excerpt from "Icon" by Amanda Stewart 93 Figure 2.10. Excerpt from "The Thing of It" by Amanda Stewart 93 Figure 2.11. Excerpt from "The Thing of It" by Amanda Stewart 94 Figure 2.12. Excerpt from "The Thing of It" by Amanda Stewart 95 Figure 2.13. Excerpt from "Zong #1" by M. NourbeSe Philip 100 Figure 2.14. Excerpt from "Ventus" by M. NourbeSe Philip 104 Figure 2.15. Excerpt from "Zong #4" by M. NourbeSe Philip 107 Figure 2.16. Excerpt from "Zong #14" by M. NourbeSe Philip 108 Figure 2.17. Excerpt from "Ratio" by M. NourbeSe Philip 111 Figure 3.1. Screen shot taken from Twitter, December 9, 2016 137 Figure 3.2. Image reproduced from The 2015 Baltimore Uprising 149 Figure 3.3. Image reproduced from The 2015 Baltimore Uprising 151 Figure 3.4. Image reproduced from The 2015 Baltimore Uprising 151 Figure 3.5. Image reproduced from The 2015 Baltimore Uprising 152 Figure 3.6. Image reproduced from The 2015 Baltimore Uprising 153 Figure 3.7. Image reproduced from The 2015 Baltimore Uprising 153 Figure 3.8. Image reproduced from The 2015 Baltimore Uprising 156 Figure 3.9. Image reproduced from The 2015 Baltimore Uprising 156

iii abstract

Again, noise is a moving survival. — Lisa Robertson, Nilling

introduction

I begin to fathom the sound and the fury, of the world and of history: the 'noise.'

— Michel Serres, Genesis

Fugitivity escapes even the fugitive.

— Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons

Much of this thesis was written while sitting at my kitchen table. My writing was accompanied by myriad micro-noises — the intermittent whirr of an old refrigerator, the occasional cascade of water moving through old pipes, the footsteps of a geriatric cat, the sporadic rumbling of an exhaust fan beneath the floorboards, the scuttling of bodies in the apartment above. Cutting in on the predictable flow of things, such noises sometimes provided an unconscious cue to get up and make a cup of tea. Alternatively, they passed by without leaving any obvious trace. Despite the intrinsic everydayness of these environmental noises, they can be understood as moments of interruption that unsettle whatever continuities are in progress. An interruption is a cut or break that produces a movement toward disequilibrium and change. While an interruption might occasionally produce a spectacular rupture that commands attention, more often than not it passes unnoticed, a fleeting interference that is felt without being consciously registered. These ‘minor’ interruptions are the most common of occurrences, producing, even if only momentarily, spaces of flux in which relations are unsettled and forced to assemble anew. As my thinking about interruption developed, I gradually became more attuned to the interruptive moments that populate our everyday lives. This thesis aims to articulate the value of interruption and argues that these 'minor' moments may have paradoxically large implications.

This thesis is an attempt to think with the forces of interruption. Activated by and feeding back into an ontogenetic noise that conditions all systems and relations, interruption is taken to be a constructive and generative force of movement and transformation — a force of difference that generates new noise. Emerging from an initial engagement with the concept of noise, this thesis has grown into a study of interruptive sonic figures and fugitive speech acts, namely: murmuring, stuttering, gossiping and humming. Located at the intersection of sound and 1

speech, these sonic figures contour noise toward the socio-political, orienting interruption toward an engagement with questions of power, race, sociality, collectivity and mediatic perception. My intention throughout this project has been to listen to the noises of mainly ‘minor’ interruption, to be moved and unsettled by their force. In the process, I have come to realise that to attend to these forces is to attune to a world in constant movement; to understand difference as the immanent genesis of all relations and change as the only constant. This study offers strategies for listening and reading to (and with) these noises as they generate a poetics of interruption.

One of the vital conditions with which this thesis contends is the contemporary ubiquity of noise. We are immersed in it and engulfed by it. It saturates the world and animates its movement. Yet it is often unclear what exactly noise refers to — noise is itself a noisy concept that carries with it a multitude of different associations and valances. It traverses different disciplinary fields, running through sound studies, media studies, philosophy, politics, literature, art, information theory, economics and more. This study thinks beyond noise as a homogeneous phenomenon, attuning instead to the forces and intensities that move within it, following it into the cracks and breaks through which it constitutes difference. Here my intention is not to offer a survey of noise (if such a thing were even possible) but rather to develop a politics of noise that emerges from its complexity and multiplicity. In order to do so, it is important, in the first instance, to consider some of the ways noise has been acoustically, informatically and philosophically configured.

To begin with, noise is widely understood as an auditory phenomenon. In physical terms, it is a descriptor for erratic acoustic vibrations and has, especially within acoustic engineering, been positioned in opposition to the predictable and regular vibrations of musical tones. Explaining this distinction, the nineteenth century German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz wrote, “the sensation of a musical tone is due to a rapid periodic motion of the sonorous body; the sensation of noise to a non-periodic motion.”1 This physical distinction has worked to carve the sonic realm into the musical and the extra-musical, the linguistic and the extra-linguistic, order and disorder, sense and non-sense. Common sense understandings of noise emerge from this account from physics and tend to position noise as any sound that is unwanted or undesirable. Think, for instance, of the ways that environmental sounds such as construction work, traffic or a barking dog are often described as noise. In such examples, the physical account of noise is

1 Hermann von Helmholtz, On The Sensation of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music, trans. A.J. Ellis (London: Dover Publications, 1954), 8.

extrapolated into a subjective category that carries with it an aesthetic or moral judgement. No longer strictly defined as irregular acoustic vibrations, noise is transformed into an all encompassing category that describes any unpleasant, uncomfortable or disagreeable sound. As such, noise is made to exist in the ear of the beholder. The amorphousness and subjective variation inherent to this conception of noise means that the term is often employed to describe contradictory ends. Here what constitutes noise varies dramatically according to context, it is inflected by a geographical, cultural, social, political and historical factors. Consider, for example, the invocation of noise by anti-Islamic groups and anti-noise lobbies to describe the Muslim call to prayer. The dissmissal of this song as noise demonstrates the transformation of noise into a subjective category imbued with ideology and aesthetic moralism.

Noise also plays a crucial role in art and aesthetics, and the history of the avant-garde is, in many ways, a history of noise. Here noise has functioned both as a sonic material and a source of inspiration for artists and musicians seeking to challenge the distinctions between the musical and the extra-musical. Think, for example, of the birdsong found in the work of Olivier Messiaen, the industrial soundscapes and machine music of Luigi Russolo and the Italian Futurists, the shrieks and cries of free jazz, the environmental noises and ‘silences’ framed by John Cage, the amplification of signal noise in ‘glitch’ music, the extreme density and volume of ‘noise’ music and so on. Here noise is employed as a material for experimentation and as a means of transgressing established artistic and musical boundaries.2

Expanding on the relationship between noise and music, Jacques Attali suggests that noise is radical and politically resistant — a transgressive force resistant to the status quo. Before it was taken up in information theory, Attali tells us that “noise had always been experienced as destruction, disorder, dirt, pollution, an aggression against the code-structuring messages.”3 For Attali, noise is a force of contestation that alters the system as the system attempts to transform the subversive into the palatable. Attali describes a process in which change arises from an

2 This thesis does not deal with the history of avant-garde sound and noise, something that is by now both extensive and well rehearsed. For more on this history, see Brandon LaBelle, Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art (London and New York: Continuum, 2006); Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999); Alan Licht, Sound Art: Beyond Music, Between Categories (New York: Rizzoli Publications, 2007). 3 Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 27.

“aggression against the dominant code by noise destined to become a new dominant code.”4 What begins as transgression paves the way for the new norm, or, put another way, what starts off as noise is destined to eventually become music. This notion of noise as intrinsically radical has been central to conceptions of politics and aesthetics that tend toward vanguardism. Here noise is understood as a type of resistant content, a definition that produces a separation between form and content. This, as Greg Hainge concurs , “is noise placed firmly on the side of content even if that content performs a catalytic function for a process of change, and the opposition between noise and music here is merely one of degree or aesthetics as opposed to a fundamental formal difference.”5 This emphasis on noise as content has produced a tendency to aestheticise noise and fetishise its transgressive possibilities, producing what Frances Dyson refers to as “a process of capitalising on noise.”6 This capitalisation on noise feeds into the avant- garde tendency to self-proclaim a radicalism that is assumed a priori. I turn away from this tendency to position noise as inherently radical and argue against any readymade politics. Instead, I take noise to be a force of interruption that opens a space in which a different kind of radicality is made possible.

By now it should be clear that there are countless different approaches and theorisations of noise. The complexity of the subject is reflected by a resurgent theoretical interest. Led by sound studies and media studies, a growing body of scholarship has emerged that wrestles with the nature of noise from a number of different perspectives. The present study contributes that noisy dialogue and finds both resonances and dissonances with it.

The omnipresence of noise is reflected in the magnitude of Hillel Schwartz's Making Noise: From Babel to the Big Bang and Beyond.7 Schwartz constructs a cultural history of noise that demonstrates the numerous different ways it has been understood and conceptualised throughout history, following noise from the mythical to the sonic and into the inaudible. Similarly, a number of important studies deal with the relationship between sound and culture more broadly, contributing to a sonic turn that has sought to challenge primacy of visuality.

4 Ibid., 34. 5 Greg Hainge, Noise Matters: Towards an Ontology of Noise (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 11. 6 Frances Dyson, The Tone of Our Times: Sound, Sense, Economy, and Ecology (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2014), 9. 7 Hillel Schwartz, Making Noise: From Babel to the Big Bang and Beyond (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2011).

These include Les Back and Michael Bull’s The Auditory Culture Reader, Jonathan Sterne's The Audible Past: Origins of Sound Reproduction and Sterne's edited collection The Sound Studies Reader.8 From a different perspective, the last decade has seen the appearance of a number of studies that deal with the history of sound and noise in art and music. These include, but are in no way limited to, Douglas Kahn's Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts, Brandon LaBelle’s Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art, Alan Licht’s Sound Art: Beyond Music, Between Categories, Salome ́ Voegelin's Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art and Paul Hegarty's Noise/Music: A History.9 While each of these texts makes an important contribution to the shifting role that noise has played in culture, they are largely concerned with conceptions of noise that remain yoked to the sonic.

I find greater resonances with those approaches in sound studies that consider the social, political and philosophical implications of noise. Notable examples include Greg Hainge's Noise Matters: Towards an Ontology of Noise, Frances Dyson's Sounding New Media: Immersion and Embodiment in the Arts and The Tone of Our Times: Sound, Sense, Economy, and Ecology, Brandon LaBelle's Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life and Ben Byrne's Murmur.10 Each of these texts considers noise as a multiplicity, variously attending to it as metaphysical, sonic, social and political.

8 Les Back and Michael Bull, ed., The Auditory Culture Reader (New York and Oxford: Berg, 2005); Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003); Jonathan Sterne, ed., The Sound Studies Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2012). 9 Paul Hegarty, Noise/Music: A History (London and New York: Continuum, 2010); Kahn, Noise, Water Meat; LaBelle, Background Noise; Licht, Sound Art; Salome ́ Voegelin, Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art (London and New York: Continuum, 2011). See also Cristoph Cox and Daniel Warner, eds., Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music (London and New York: Continuum, 2010); Rosa Menkman, The Glitch Moment(um) (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2011). 10 Ben Byrne, “Murmur” (PhD diss., University of Technology, Sydney, 2013); Frances Dyson, Sounding New Media: Immersion and Embodiment in the Arts and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); Dyson, The Tone of Our Times; Greg Hainge, Noise Matters: Towards an Ontology of Noise (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013); Brandon LaBelle, Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life (London and New York: Continuum, 2010). See also Michael Goddard, Benjamin Halligan and Paul Hegarty, eds., Reverberations: The Philosophy, Aesthetics and Politics of Noise (London and New York: Continuum, 2012); Michael Goddard, Benjamin Halligan and Nicola Spelman, eds., Resonances: Noise and Contemporary Music (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013).

In developing strategies of listening and reading that attend to the complex dynamics of race, gender, power, sociality, place and history, this thesis follows in the footsteps of publications such as Alexander Weheliye's Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity and Jennifer Lynn Stoever's The Sonic Colour Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening.11 It joins these texts in their effort to move away from the white, male canon that has dominated much of sound studies literature, arguing that noise is intrinsically connected to social realtions and cannot be understood in purely material or phenomenological terms.

An affective understanding of noise is central to my approach in this thesis. Taking noise to be an ontogenetic force rather than simply a sonic phenomenon, I consider its affective dimensions and attend to the forces and intensities that move in and as noise. Here I am indebted to a number of critical studies that consider sound and noise in relation to affect. These include Nina Sun Eidsheim's Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening As Vibrational Practice, Steve Goodman's Sonic Warfare: Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear, and Marie Thompson's Beyond Unwanted Sound: Noise, Affect and Aesthetic Moralism.12 Such studies take noise to be a generative and transformative force-relation, operating in excess of signification. Building on these studies, I ague that ontogenetic noise gives rise to pre-individual forces and intensities that condition and transform systems, relations and entities.

Despite the dramatic increase in scholarship on sound and noise in the last few decades, the conception of noise that I have developed emerges from the interdisciplinary nature of this research. While my thinking is inflected by the sonic, it is also textured by an engagement with contemporary philosophies of becoming, media studies, affect theory, literary studies, critical race studies and more. Thinking with a number of different disciplines at once has enabled me

11 Jennifer Lynn Stoever, The Sonic Colour Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening (New York: NYU Press, 2016); Alexander Weheliye, Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003). 12 Nina Sun Eidsheim's Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening As Vibrational Practice (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), accessed June 27, 2017 http://web.a.ebscohost.com/ehost/ebookviewer/ebook/bmxlYmtfXzEwOTYwNTBfX0FO0?sid=5a5145a6- 440b-404c-a1d1-afde6821a73e@sessionmgr4009&vid=1&format=EB&rid=1; Steve Goodman, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2010); Marie Thompson, Beyond Unwanted Sound: Noise, Affect and Aesthetic Moralism (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2017).

to develop a politics of noise that attends to the force of interruption as it moves through the socio-political sphere.

Outside of the sonic, the most widespread conception of noise is derived from information theory. The relation of noise to signal in Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver’s original formulation is complex since noise is both unwanted and required for signal to occur.13 This was later simplified by Weaver in an article written for a wider, non-specialist public that summarised Shanon's foundational theory of communication: “in the process of being transmitted, it is unfortunately characteristic that certain things are added to the signal which were not intended by the information source.”14 The adoption of Weaver's summary of information theory outside of specialist circles has given rise to the widespread perception of noise as an externality that breaks in from the outside to interfere with the transmission of a signal. In actuality, for Shannon and Weaver, the reality of noise is that it is both necessary and undesirable. As Weaver explains, “it is generally true that when there is noise, the received signal exhibits greater information — or better, the received signal is selected out of a more varied set than is the transmitted signal.”15 It is important to remember here ‘information’ is used here “with a special meaning that measures freedom of choice and hence uncertainty as to what choice has been made.”16 As such, information can take on both positive and negative connotations. Weaver elaborates:

Uncertainty which arises by virtue of freedom of choice on the part of the sender is desirable uncertainty. Uncertainty which arises because of errors or because of the influence of noise, in undesirable uncertainty… It is thus clear where the joker is in saying that the received signal has more information. Some of this information is

13 For the original and more complex articulation of the relation between signal and noise in information theory, see Claude Shannon, "The Mathematical Theory of Communication," in The Mathematical Theory of Communication by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver (Urbana: The University of Illinois Press, 1949). 14 Warren Weaver, “Recent Contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Communication,” in The Mathematical Theory of Communication, by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver (Urbana: The University of Illinois Press, 1949), 99. 15 Ibid., 109. 16 Ibid.

spurious and undesirable and has been introduced via the noise. To get the useful information in the received signal we must subtract out this spurious noise.17

For information theory, the problem becomes how to identify the characteristics of noise in order to reduce the negative effects it has on the transmission of a message. This conception of communication relies on a series of presuppositions that affirm fixity over movement and structure over process. In this framework, the positions of sender and receiver are preconstituted, conceived as stable and self-contained positions or termini involved in the exchange of clear and coherent messages. Here content and form are once again separated, and perception is configured as a mode of passive reception. Although Shannon and Weaver retained a more complex relation between signal and noise than a binary one, they were nonetheless concerned with how to facilitate signal over noise. The problems that arise from this model of communication have, since Shannon and Weaver’s time, extended into the socio-political sphere and, in particular, into theorisations of power and ideology. Here concepts of mediation derived from classical information theory have been extended to social relations. Sender and receiver are taken to be preconstituted subjects involved in the transmission of an already constituted message or signal. The medium of communication is taken to be an external structure that facilitates the transmission between pre-formed subjects and signals. Such a conception relies on an a priori structure of knowledge that takes perception to follow cognition. As Brian Massumi explains, "perception enters the picture on the receiving end, playing the basically passive role of reception."18 This formulation of mediation upholds a conception of social relations that depends on a series of binaries between sender/receiver, signal/noise, content/form, interiority/exteriority. The transmission of ideology depends on the fixity of these structures, and they are reproduced in such "mediating apparatuses are the traditional family, education, disciplinary institutions such as the police and prison, and the state, in addition to the media."19 Expanding on the connection between this simple two-way model of communication and the production of ideology, Massumi writes:

Theories of ideology rest on the thesis that there is a power of conformity already in place prior to experience. Experience sprouts on the soil of inherited sets of implicit ideas that encapsulate the structure of social relations. These naturalized social relations

17 Ibid. 18 Brian Massumi, “IMMEDIATION UNLIMITED,” in Immediations, vol II, eds. Erin Manning, Anna Munster and Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen, (London: Open Humanities Press, forthcoming 2017), n.p. 19 Ibid.

are transmitted to the individual, in whom they are implanted as a priori beliefs. They come to the individual before the individual consciously comes to herself [sic]. Individuals' self-expression is secondary and derivative, expressing the power relations already structuring society, whose form of domination reproduces itself by means of this inculcation. Individuals come to their thinking in ideological conformity with what is already socially pre-thought. Their form of life comes to them preformed. The inculcation may come as a habitus, or a structure of feeling, but the transmission is always essentially cognitive in tenor.20

This two-way model of communication affirms stasis over movement, structure over process, sameness over difference. In this thesis, I aim to develop a conception of noise that moves against this simplified model of communication. Noise is not considered in opposition to signal but rather as that turbulent movement(s) that conditions and transforms all systems and relations. It is immanent to all signals and relations rather than an externality that enters from the outside. Considering noise as a moving proposition allows us to develop a relational and processual undertsanding of mediation that takes embodied perception to be a crucial site for the production of knowledge.

This then suggests that noise can be understood ontogenetically; that is, as something that processually becomes. Here my thinking is particularly indebted to the work of Michel Serres, who has developed a philosophy of multiplicity and difference grounded in a metaphysics of noise. He writes:

We are surrounded by noise. And this noise is inextinguishable. It is outside — it is the world itself — and it is inside, produced by our living body. We are in the noises of the world, we cannot close our door to their reception, and we evolve, rolling in this incalculable swell. We are hot, burning with life; and the hearths of this temporary ecstasy send out a truceless tumult from their innumerable functions. If these sources are stilled, death is there in the form of flat waves. Flat for recording, flat for closed ears. In the beginning is the noise; the noise never stops. It is our apperception of chaos, our apprehension of disorder, our only link to the scattered distribution of things.21

20 Ibid. 21 Michel Serres, The Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 126.

For Serres, noise is the conditioning turbulence of the universe, the (onto)genesis of all systems and relations. An originating multiplicity with no single point of origin, turbulent noise is itself on the move. It produces transformations and is transformatively generative, the condition for the emergence of novelty:

Noise is a turbulence, it is order and disorder at the same time, order revolving on itself through repetition and redundancy, disorder through chance occurrences, through the drawing of lots at the crossroads, and through the global meandering, unpredictable and crazy.22

The Serresian account of noise undermines the possibility of fixed structures and systems by suggesting that all matter, relations and meanings are activated by and feed back into an ontogenetic noise that produces itself as it produces a system. Yet, for Serres, noise does not only refer to this conditioning turbulence but also constitutes a force of interruption that produces transformation and change. And this brings us to the parasite.

The Parasite

For Serres, the parasite is a figure that accounts for interruption, interference, differentiation, distribution and novelty. In French, the term (le parasite) has three meanings, two of which correspond to the meaning of the English word — the biological parasite and its social equivalent — and a third, which is not reflected in the English and is translated as ‘noise’ or ‘static’. A further double meaning occurs in the French word hôte, which designates the positions of both the ‘guest’ and the ‘host’ in a parasitic relation. The triple meaning of the term and the associated positional slippages mark the parasite as the key concept in Serres’ philosophy of relations. The presence of the parasite is both the condition for all communication and a mischievous figure of interruption that accounts for novelty and transformation. As he writes, “the parasite intervenes, enters the system as an element of fluctuation. It excites it or incites it; puts it into motion, or it paralyzes it.”23 Foregrounding the connection between interference and transformation, the parasite provides a useful framework

22 Michel Serres, Genesis, trans. Geneviève James and James Nielson (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1995), 59. 23 Ibid., 191.

for understanding the generative potential of interruption. To borrow Serres' formulation, perhaps the parasite is “the element of metamorphosis (and by that old word I mean the transforming movement of life itself).”24

For Serres, noise is both the disorder from which all relations emerge and a concept of minor difference that accounts for mutation and transformation. At a minimum, communication requires two entities and the means to move between them. Stephen Crocker elaborates on this notion, noting that any “message has to move through a middle, and each middle, it turns out, has its own distinct properties that affect the message in precise ways.”25 For Serres, noise — what he refers to as 'the excluded third' or 'excluded middle' — is a distinctive medium-middle that makes communication possible. It is this milieu that conditions all communication, and is the immanent genesis of all informatic relations. As an excluded third, the parasite is the channel or medium that allows all entities to communicate. For Serres, all communication requires mediation, and the parasite is the figure of mediation par excellence. Importantly, Serres understands the excluded third to be immanent to all communicative relations rather than an external structure that facilitates exchange between preconstituted entities. This excluded third position now assuming the crucial relation of in-betweeness is not however simply a neutral channel for relay between sender and receiver. Instead it is a noisy space of relational movement in which signal is transformed as it is transmitted. The parasite, “nesting on the flow of relation,” operates as an open region of multiplicity between binarised entities that now come to function as limits.26 As Serres writes, “between yes and no, between zero and one, an infinite number of values appear, and thus an infinite number of answers.”27 The parasite — noise — serves a dual function here as both the channel of communication and the agent of interference. As Stephen D. Brown notes, the third position “inevitably exposes the signal to noise, and thus also to potential transformation.”28 The presence of noise within every signal and every channel of communication means that “mistakes, wavy lines, confusion, obscurity are part of knowledge; noise itself is part of communication.”29 The paradox of the parasite is that successful

24 Ibid. 25 Stephen Crocker, “Noises and Exceptions: Pure Mediality in Serres and Agamben,” CTheory, March 28, 2007, accessed April 21, 2017, http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=574 26 Serres, The Parasite, 53. 27 Ibid., 57. 28 Stephen D. Brown, “Michel Serres: Science, Translation and the Logic of the Parasite,” Theory, Culture and Society 19, no. 3 (2002): 8. 29 Serres, The Parasite, 12.

communication depends on interference. As Serres put it, “systems work because they do not work. Nonfunctioning remains essential for functioning.”30 Accidents, errors, breakdowns, glitches, wrinkles, cuts, snags, breaks and malfunctions are not only unavoidable but are the phenomena that account for novelty and invention.

For Serres, “the parasite is a differential operator of change.”31 A minor figure, the parasite introduces noise into the system, producing a state of disequilibrium with unpredictable consequences. As Serres explains:

It [the parasite] excites the state of the system: its state of equilibrium (homeostasis), the present state of its exchanges and circulations, the equilibrium of its evolution (homeorhesis), its thermal state, its informational state. The difference produced is rather weak, and it usually does not allow for the prediction of a transformation nor what kind of transformation. The excitation fluctuates, as does the determination.32

The parasite is the originary relation, where relation is itself relational. While the parasitic relation is unidirectional, it is also always multiple. As Serres reminds us, “as soon as we are two, we are already three or four.”33 The parasitic relation can be more accurately thought of as a cascade or matrix of parasites. Or, to borrow Serres’ words, “the parasite parasites the parasites.”34 Here the parasite is in the position of both the guest and the host, yet both positions are non-reciprocal and distinct. Snacking is a one-way relation and yet one can simultaneously snack and be snacked on. It is this parasite-host relation that sets off the ontogenesis of a system. In other words, the system of relations forms in relation to the parasite itself. Considered in this way, the parasite as noise can be understood as “a productive force around the exclusion of which the system is organized.”35 This parasitic noise produces a discontinuity that functions not simply as a stoppage or disruption but as the opening of a space of potentiality in which different meanings and ways of being in relation might emerge. Here the three meanings of the parasite (biological, social and informational) converge to produce a logic for how systems transform via interruption. As Stephen D. Brown explains:

30 Ibid., 79. 31 Ibid., 196. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., 57. 34 Ibid., 55. 35 Crocker, “Noises and Exceptions.”

In informational terms, the parasite provokes a new form of complexity, it engineers a kind of difference by intercepting relations. All three meanings then coincide to form a ‘parasite logic’ — analyse (take but do not give), paralyse (interrupt usual functioning), catalyse (force the host to act differently). The parasite, through its interruption, is a catalyst for complexity. It does this by impelling the parties it parasitizes to act in one of two ways. Either they incorporate the parasite into their midst — and thereby accept the new form of communication the parasite inaugurates — or they act together to expel the parasite and transform their own social practices in the course of doing so… Here then is the origin of human relations: the struggle to incorporate or expel the parasite.36

The parasite is an ontogenetic force of becoming, which is in and of itself asignifying but which forces systems to change in unpredictable ways. Serres tell us that “a theory of the parasite brings us to miniscule evaluations of changes of state. It installs unexpected chains where small cases or very tiny differences are followed by zero effects or by effects of return and better resistance or by immense catastrophic effects.”37 The parasite is a generator of difference that alters the state of the system. As a figure of difference, the parasite has a strong resonance with the Deleuzian concept of ‘difference in itself,’ which refers to an abstract and underlying process of continuous intensive differencing in all things and events rather than a comparative difference between things. This concept of difference is at the heart of relational and processual philsophies of becoming. Affirming this, Serres tells us: “the difference is part of the thing itself, and perhaps it even produces the thing. Maybe the radical origin of things is really that difference, even though classical rationalism damned it to hell. In the beginning was the noise.”38 A figure of radical difference, the noisy parasite foregrounds movement over fixity, becoming over being, and immanence over transcendence.

Drawing on Serres, I take noise to be an ontogenetic force whose interruptive potentiality arises in the ways it is immanent to the biological, social, and informational rather than something that cuts into these externally. Noise emerges from and feeds back into the milieu. It is an agent of difference that forces the system toward a state of disequilibrium. Noise always moves in excess of definite categories and structures — it is a force of fugitivity (which I will elaborate upon in the next section) generating relational movement and transformation.

36 Brown, “Michel Serres,” 16-17; italics in original. 37 Serres, The Parasite, 194. 38 Ibid., 13.

Listening to the complexity of noise and attending to the force of interruption contained within it creates an opening in which new socio-political relations can emerge. Here I am following the lead of Serres, who writes:

Hearing is a model of understanding. It is still active and deep when our gaze has gone hazy or gone to sleep. It is continuous while the other sense are intermittent. I hear and I understand, blindly, when evidence has vanished and intuition has faded out: they’re the exceptions.

I begin to fathom the sound and the fury, of the world and of history: the noise.39

Sonic Figures and Fugitive Speech Acts

The thesis is structured around four everyday sonic figures — murmur, stutter, gossip and hum — that perform interruptions of contemporary social, political and aesthetic configurations in media culture. The sonic figures are important insofar as they allow Serres’ more metaphysical elaboration of noise to be contoured toward the socio-political. I take these figures not as metaphors of certain kinds of actual interruption but rather as expressions of noise’s specific operativity. These sonic figures can be understood in line with the Deleuzian concept of “the figural,” that belongs to a logic of sensation.40 We can first begin to see how the figural partakes in such a logic by noting the way that Erich Auerbach traced the etymology of the word to its Latin root, figura, which translates as “plastic form.”41 The plasticity of the figure is significant and for Auerbach gestured toward “the notion of new manifestation, the changing aspect, of the permanent.”42 Here the figure is posited as a processual force that exists in a state of flux. It is not a stable representation but delineates a concept of movement. Articulating the difference between a figure and a symbol, Lisa Robertson writes:

39 Serres, Genesis, 7. 40 Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (London and New York: Continuum, 2003), 1-44. 41 Erich Auerbach, “Figura,” in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, trans. Ralph Manheim (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 11. 42 Ibid.,12.

Where the signifying matter of the symbol typically completes a static idea of nature in a corresponding object — a flower, say, or a planet — by fulfilling nature’s identity in this object, in a manner magical or mythic, the figure tends towards a shaping... that includes temporal change. The figural faces a not entirely determined field of meaning.43

For Deleuze, the figural is developed as a way of moving beyond the “figurative, illustrative, and narrative.”44 That is, the figural offers a way of moving beyond the paradigm of representation and the passive modes of perception that accompany it. Developing this notion in relation to art, Deleuze writes: “it is not a matter of reproducing or inventing forms, but of capturing forces.”45 The figural is not a simple opposition to the figurative but rather moves in excess of representation. It operates as a force of sensation before it comes to signify or represent. In articulating this notion, Deleuze highlights Francis Bacon’s account of his own painting, Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X, in which he cautions against mimetic representation. Bacon writes “I want to paint the scream more than the horror.”46 For Deleuze, Bacon’s scream “captures or detects an invisible force” that is felt in the encounter with the painting. 47 The figure moves us toward an embodied or pathic mode of perception that precedes the discursive. It operates according to a logic of sensation, that is, “it acts immediately upon the nervous system” rather than “through the intermediary of the brain.”48 The figural opens toward, what Deleuze refers to as, “an operative field” in which affective forces and intensities come together in a single compositional plane to produce an aesthetic experience.49 As Toni Pape explains, the figure is “felt before reflection and without signification... As such, it emerges eventfully and does not express anything but itself. It is asignifying.”50 Taken in this way, the figure offers a way of attending to the movement of forces and intensities that co- compose as a relational field. Put another way, the figure offers us a way of understanding the

43 Lisa Robertson, Niling: Prose Essays on Noise, Pornography, The Codex, Melancholy, Lucretius, Folds, Cities and Related Aporias (Toronto: BookThug, 2012), n.1, 11. 44 Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 2; italics in original. 45 Ibid., 56. 46 Francis Bacon as quoted in Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 38. 47 Ibid., 60. 48 Ibid., 34. 49 Ibid., 2. 50 Toni Pape, “Figures of Time: Preemptive Narratives in Recent Television Series,” (PhD diss., Université de Montréal, 2013, 38.

world in movement and produces embodied forms of knowledge that attend to the logic of sensation.

The concept of the sonic figure that I am proposing ties in to this notion of the figural. The sonic figures presented here involve a relational conjoining of affective forces and operate according to a similar asignifying logic. I argue that murmur, stutter, gossip and hum can be understood as sonic figures that allow us to hear the ways in which noise (immanently) operates to interrupt. These figures allow us to attend to the affective dimensions of noise and the ways they are registered directly as sensation. Here noise is taken as a force-relation that acts across, through and between bodies, producing transformations. Importantly, I am here concerned with bodies (which might be organic or inorganic) but which are always already in relation, are always already becoming collective. This figuring, then, does not concern the ways in which noise operates upon ‘the’ body, but rather allows us to attend to the interruptive potential of noise as it moves into and through the social and the political. One of the central contributions this study makes is to construct an intensive politics and socio-technics of noise. These everyday or ‘minor’ figures that are examined in this study allow us to consider interruption in relation to questions of power, race, sociality, collectivity and mediatic perception. Here the sonic figure becomes an open proposition for developing strategies of listening and reading and for tuning in to sounds and texts already attuned to the forces of interruption contained within parasitic noise.

The sonic figures that this thesis deals with — murmuring, stuttering, gossiping and humming — emerge in the intersection between sound and speech. I argue that these figures interrupt the idealised, individualised voice and the perceived stability of communication, offering instead a fugitive movement that gives us broken voices, stuttered language, contagious discourse and noisy networks. For Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, fugitivity leads us to what they refer to as the “movement of things, unformed objects, deformed subjects, nothing yet and already.”51 I take these sonic figures to also be fugitive speech acts that move in excess of signification toward the unformed and the deformed. Specifically, I consider these figures in relation to non- hegemonic politics; that is, I am interested in the ways that they might interrupt dominant forms of power and open spaces for socio-political relations to be conceived of differently. The thesis contends that these fugitive expressions have the potential to interrupt the ways that

51 Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013, 93.

power is enacted by majoritarian orders in and through language. Interrupting regulated flows of language, fugitive expression produces a space of animated suspension in which forces and intensities resonate, interfere and transform. These figures are not inherently radical but are read in this thesis in conjunction with various liberatory (but not necessarily utopian) politics in order to consider how to interrupt hegemonic forms of power. My intent has been to develop strategies for listening and reading that are attuned to the movement of things. Listening to and with these forces of interruption move us toward haptic modes of perception that in turn, might generate new forms of sociality. As Harney and Moten tell us, “hapticality is the touch of the undercommons, the interiority of sentiment, the feel that what is to come is here.”52 Attending to the movement of forces, it constitutes “a capacity to feel though others, for others to feel through you, for you to feel them feeling you.”53

Listening / Reading

Developing noise as a conceptual category for new modes of collective perception and politics, this study tracks sonic figures as they manifest in sound, poetry and contemporary media systems. Here the sonic is considered not only as an audible phenomenon but as something that can be thought, imagined, remembered and written. “Sound,” writes Steven Connor, “spreads and leaks, like odour.”54 Multiple and expansive, it crosses thresholds and penetrates spaces, refusing to be contained. The boundaries it traverses are not simply physical — sound moves through the social, the conceptual, the philosophical and the perceptual. As Ben Byrne observes, “sound does not only surround, it does not only immerse, it acts on and binds into the world but does not do so immediately. It penetrates visible barriers, refracts around corners and echoes into perception.”55 Echoing this idea in his observations of noise, Serres writes:

[Noise] settles in subjects as well as in objects, in hearing as well as in space, in the observers as well as in the observed, it moves through the means and tools of observation, whether material or logical, hardware or software, constructed channels or

52 Ibid., 98. 53 Ibid. 54 Steven Connor, “Ears Have Walls: On Hearing Art,” in Sound, ed. Caleb Kelly (London: Whitechapel Gallery and Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2011), 129. 55 Byrne, “Murmur,” 135.

language; it is part of the in-itself, part of the for-itself; it cuts across the oldest and surest philosophical divisions.56

I am following Serres into the chaos and turbulence of a ‘foundational’ noise. This requires a mode of listening that moves beyond the figurative, concerned less with identifying the origins of a sound and more with developing an attunement to the forces and relations that the sonic figure enacts. Here we might follow Jean Luc Nancy who suggests that “to listen is to be straining toward a possible meaning, and consequently one that is not immediately accessible.”57 The listening proposed in this thesis attends to the affective forces that are contained within noise, and the ways such forces might register in bodies. It is an attempt to listen to the space of the excluded middle and to feel the forces of interruption that pass through this space of mediality. As Les Back and Michael Bull write, “thinking with our ears offers an opportunity to augment our critical imaginations, to comprehend our world and our encounters with it according to multiple registers of feeling.”58

Over the course of this study, I have attempted to think with my ears. Traversing both the audible and the inaudible, this analysis of sonic figures has led me to develop a conception of reading that is inflected by the sonic — one that attends to the capture of noise in text, that strains towards things, and in the process becomes disoriented. I take reading, like listening, to be an experimental activity; that is, a relational encounter yielding an unexpected outcome. In “Time in the Codex”, the poet Lisa Robertson develops a theory of reading that meditates on the relationship between materiality, temporality, and process. Treating reading as a constructive and generative activity, Robertson writes:

7. The inchoate state I crave dissolves and reshapes itself in the codex; reading feels like a discontinuous yet infinite rhythmic dispersal that generates singularities. It isn’t knowledge at all. It’s a timely dallying and surge among a cluster of minute identifications. I prefer to become foreign and unknowable to myself in accordance with reading’s audacity.

56 Serres, Genesis, 13. 57 Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 6. 58 Les Back and Michael Bull, “Introduction: Into Sound,” in The Auditory Culture Reader, ed. Les Back and Michael Bull (New York and Oxford: Berg, 2005), 2.

8. It is the most commodious sensation I can imagine, this being lost. I don’t want to leave this charitable structure that permits my detailed dissipation. Its excess of surface is available only ever in measured increments. I might define thinking this way: The partial access, in a sequence, to an infinite and inconspicuous surface complexity which is not my own.

11. I read garbage, chance and accident. I can’t fix what materiality is. Reading, I enter a relational contract with whatever material, accepting its fluency and swerve. I happen to be the one reading.

13. I read to sense the doubling of time: The time of the book’s form, which pertains to the enclosure and topology of rooms, allegories, houses, bodies, surfaces; and the time of my perceiving, which feels directional, melodic, lyrical, inflectional. Then, because of the book’s time overlaying my own, reading opens a proposition. It receives in me the rhythm I didn’t know I missed.59

For Robertson, reading is an example of becoming — a process in which the reader is brought into relation with contexts, concepts, and objects. Reading “opens a proposition” that extends multi-directionally and multi-temporally from the reading body to the many sites and contexts of reading. It is an activity of wandering, a "timely dallying" that is connected to the feeling of being lost. Robertson configures being and remaining lost as a desirable state to inhabit while reading. It describes a productive vagueness that serves as a model for new ways of thinking and perceiving in which novelty and multiplicity emerge from the relational experience of reading itself. Vagueness, a term closely associated with both being lost, is derived from the Latin vag-us, meaning ‘to wander.’ Rejecting the opposition between vagueness as a negative and precision as a positive, Keston Sutherland argues that vagueness and the forms that it inhabits (such as poetry), suggest a mode of rationally counterproductive thinking. As Sutherland writes, such modes of thought are “not ‘irrational,’ not shifted from the centre of logos: they are a means to create a rational counterproduct.”60 Reading (and listening) are considered here as processes that alter the structure of thinking and the conditions of thought itself. A distracted or vague reading is a relational experience in which novelty emerges from an attentiveness to the interruptions and chance connections that occur in the time its process is taking place.

59 Robertson, Nilling, 13-15. 60 Keston Sutherland, “Vagueness, Poetry,” in Contemporary Poetics, ed. Louis Armand (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 182.

Taken in this way, we can understand reading and listening to be activities entangled with desire and politics. The loss of fixity that comes with reading describes a wandering state from which desire may emerge. Describing the value of reading and not understanding, Jord/ana Rosenberg writes:

Being lost in this particular way is related to having — or developing — a political life: to the extension of ourselves into the world and to the forming and care for the collectivities that we will need to survive this world, and that, perhaps more importantly, we want to survive us into a different future.61

For Rosenberg, the feeling of being lost becomes a site for the expression of desire — for different futures, different modes of thinking, and ultimately, different possibilities of living. Of course, such expressions might not always cohere into positive or utopian desires and Sutherland reminds us that vagueness is a condition that might also account for violence.62 However, being lost affirms reading to be an activity that draws the reader into a series of relational encounters, an activity that is imbricated with both desire and politics. The sense of disorientation that might arise in the time of reading is crucial, for it is a state that might allow us to reorient ourselves differently. Recuperating disorientation as an important site for critical thought and politics, Sara Ahmed writes:

Moments of disorientation are vital. They are bodily experiences that throw the world up, or throw the body from its ground. Disorientation as a bodily feeling can be unsettling, and it can shatter one's sense of confidence in the ground or one's belief that the ground on which we reside can support the actions that make a life feel livable.63

What is important here is the way the experience of being temporarily ungrounded might allow us to re-ground ourselves with a different orientation. I am suggesting that the state of disorientation associated with the activity of reading might create the conditions for an encounter that is felt, surprisingly for an activity so aligned with thought, before it is discursively

61 Jord/ana Rosenberg, ”Gender Trouble on Mother’s Day,” Avidly, May, 9, 2014, accessed July 21, 2017, http://avidly.lareviewofbooks.org/2014/05/09/gender-trouble-on-mothers-day/ 62 Sutherland, “Vagueness, Poetry,” 178. 63 Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006), 157.

registered. Here reading is taken to be an active process that emphasises empirical experience over a priori knowledge. As Robertson writes, reading “isn’t knowledge at all,” but rather it is a dispersed and interrupted experience that produces singularities in the Deleuzian sense of the word, that is, “turning points and points of inflection” that are perceived in movement.64 I posit that reading and listening, in the manner described here, can be understood as a tangle of relational processes; processes of becoming in which interruption creates the conditions for relations to be made and remade.

More concretely, the present study proposes a number of specific strategies for listening and reading. Chapters One and Two develop a type of ‘minor’ listening and reading indebted to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s twin concepts of microperception and micropolitics. Chapter Three introduces the notion of fugitive listening and reading in relation to the circulation of speech outside of official discourse. Chapter Four tunes into the hum of networked media and proposes an atmospheric or ambient mode of listening and reading.

Resonances

My intention with this study has been to follow the noises of difference and interruption that move between, alongside, through and beyond things. I have endeavored to think with noise rather than simply about noise. In other words, I have allowed myself to become entangled in this noise, to move with it, be moved by it, to hear it and to feel it. This has involved an engagement with poetry, sonic art and contemporary media systems. Specifically, I read work by artists and writers such as Claudia Rankine, M. NourbeSe Philip, Amanda Stewart, James Hoff and Tan Lin and examine contemporary networked media environments such as Black Twitter. In conjunction with these works I have drawn on a diverse group of writers and thinkers from a range of different fields and disciplines. Following the force of interruption has produced a noisy dialogue with various different interlocutors.

As I have already established, Serres is a central figure in this study. His thought is a touchstone of sorts, something that moves alongside this project as I have wandered into other disciplines and fields. His work offers an account of systems that foregrounds difference as the

64 Robertson, Nilling, 13; Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 52.

immanent genesis of all relations. To think with Serres is to think in processual terms, to begin with multiplicity and attend to movement. His work is a philosophy of becoming that takes turbulence to be groundlessly foundational and change as the only constant. To read Serres is to be thrust into this turbulence, to experience an unfolding and infolding of differing flows and temporalities. Traversing disciplinary boundaries, his thinking draws from fables, physics and the cosmos. His writing is instructive not only for its ideas but in the way that these ideas are inseparable from their expression. Serres shows us that it is impossible to separate form and content, that any writing about noise is necessarily animated by the very noise it seeks to articulate. Reading with Serres is itself an encounter with noise and turbulence registering as sensation. This same sensibility can be found in many of the texts that I have returned to again and again over the course of this study; a sensibility that has had a great impact on my approach to critical thinking and writing. Such a sensibility allows a poetics to animate criticality.

The thesis offers a poetics of interruption in concert with a politics of noise. This has involved cultivating a resonant field of thinkers and writers whose work has textured, supplemented, extended and problematised my own thinking around interruption. This constellation includes Fred Moten, Stefano Harney, Saidiya Hartman, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Sianne Ngai, Walter Benjamin, Christina Sharpe, Judith Butler, Frances Dyson, Brian Massumi, Frank B. Wilderson, Aria Dean, Édouard Glissant, Ann Laura Stoler, Steven Shaviro and Tan Lin. In differing ways, this constellation of work deals with interruption, collectivity, sociality, sensation, language, sound, power and perception. It also opens toward considerations of difference, deviation, transformation and dissensus. This thesis follows this cast of interlocutors in emphasising emergence, processes, relations, assemblages and becomings over essences, positions, transcendence, or being.

The study is itself full of noises and interruptions. It emerges from a field of resonances and dissonances that brings diverse disciplines into contact with one another. The voices that I think with in this study are variously associated with media theory, politics, critical race studies, affect theory, black studies, poetics, sound studies, intersectionality, decolonisation and aesthetics. The interdisciplinary nature of this study has enabled the question of interruption to move in a number of different directions. I have attempted to follow some of these movements in order to develop an understanding of interruption that is textured by both the resonances and dissonances that have emerged from this vibrational interdisciplinary field.

A Poetics of Interruption

The thesis comprises four long chapters that explore the fugitive speech acts of murmur, stutter, gossip and hum. Chapter One considers the murmur as an indistinct noise of many individuating voices sounding at once. A sonicity filled with differences and differencings, the murmur is a collective noise producing an asignifying affective force that acts upon and modulates bodies, systems and relations. I consider this affective noise in relation to the sound of the rioting crowds that are captured in How Wheeling Feels When the Ground Walks Away, a sound recording made by the conceptual artist James Hoff. This idea is further developed in relation to the ‘human microphone,’ a technology of analogue amplification that emerged during the Occupy movement in response to state instituted bans on electronic amplification. I argue that the ‘human microphone’ always involves the production of new noise and as such can be understood as an expression of the multiplicity and heterogeneity of the crowd. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of microperception and micropolitics, I develop the notion of a micropolitical listening and reading that attends to affective forces and intensities produced by this collective noise.

This chapter argues that noise, in its figuration of a murmur, moves toward a heterogeneous conception of dissensual collectivity. Multi-vocal in nature, I posit that the murmur is an interruption to the expectation that political speech take the form of a univocal demand. The polyphonic nature of the murmur opens toward a conception of collectivity that moves between the individual and the mass. Here collectivity is not considered as a homogenous grouping of individual voices but rather as an active amassing of individuating voices. Full of difference and differencings, the murmur moves us toward a collectivity that is grounded in multiplicity and heterogeneity. Against the historical assumption of the individual voice as connected to a self- possessed subject, the murmur presents us with a collective voice as a process of continual becoming. Listening to the murmur, I contend that we can understand the crowd as a social body sounding, what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten refer to as, “the call for and from disorder.”65 I contend that the murmur follows this call. Listening to the complexity and multi- vocality of the murmur might allow us to develop alternate conceptions of sociality that place difference at their core. This, then, is one of the central concerns of this thesis, and the articulation of a fugitive murmuring public is indebted to Harney and Moten’s conception of

65 Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 133.

the ‘the undercommons.’ The thesis thinks with Harney and Moten, developing the crowd’s fugitive speech acts as new modalities of an undercommon project.

The chapter concludes by developing a poetics of murmur via a reading of the work of the Jamaican-born poet Claudia Rankine. I argue that Rankine’s work can be read as a multi-vocal lyric that gives rise to a voice that moves between the individual and the collective. Rankine’s murmuring collective voice speaks back to the racism of a white supremacist society, enacting a situated subjectivity that oscillates between ‘I’ and ‘we.’ I propose a reading of Rankine that attends to the ways in which her poetry murmurs. This then allows us to consider the ways in which her poetics also proposes a type of fugitive political speech organised around multiple and dissensual voices that come together to form different kinds of collective life than those designated for black subjectivities within hegemonic culture.

Chapter Two attends to the figure of the stutter. The stutter is positioned here as a generative noise that interrupts idealised conceptions of the voice and the perceived stability of communication as a system of signification. Against the common sense notion of the voice as that which shapes signal, meaning, even music, against noise, I argue that the voice is full of noises. These reveal it to be something contingent rather than naturally ‘present’ or ‘well- articulated;’ full, instead, of variation. Contouring noise toward the socio-political, the chapter moves, to paraphrase Deleuze, from the stutter in language to the stutter of language. Here I am interested in the ways that language enacts and upholds majoritarian forms of power and the way that the sonic figure of the stutter might interrupt this ordering by setting language on a process of continuous variation. The stutter interrupts the idea that language is ordered by a logic that precedes it, instead emphasising the line of variation immanent to it. Considered in relation to Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of ‘minor’ literature, I argue that the stuttering of language interrupts its majoritarian ordering and sets off a process of becoming-minor. I consider the figure of the stutter as something that animates the work of Australian poet and performer Amanda Stewart. Her sustained experimentation with both language and the voice destabilises both, creating the possibility for new meanings and relations to emerge in and through the stuttering.

The chapter concludes with a reading of M. NourbeSe Philip’s long poem Zong!.66 The linguistic material of this poem is derived from the legal transcript of Gregson vs Gilbert, a 1783 English court document relating to the massacre of Africans that took place on board a slave

66 M. NourbeSe Philip, ZONG! (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2008).

ship named the Zong as it sailed from the West Coast of Africa to Jamaica. Employing processes of fragmentation and recombination, Philip’s poem makes this archive of slavery and colonisation stutter and fragment. The work sets language in variation, destabilising the authority of the archive and interrupting the legitimacy of received histories. Reading alongside Saidiya Hartman and Achille Mbembe, I argue that Philip’s stuttering of the archive opens a space in which we might forge ‘minor’ archives. Her stuttered poetics produce a space of animated suspense in which new social and political relations can be generated.

Chapter Three moves from broken discourses to contagious discourse, and turns around the figure of gossip. Working against the sexist dismissal of gossip as a feminised mode of speech, I argue that gossip is a mode of networked speech that circulates in excess of official discourse and gives rise to (proto-)socialites. This performative mode of speech produces what I refer to as fugitive listening. Such listening attends to the movement of sensitive information among a social body, but more than this, it is attuned to the affective tonalities that circulate in excess of the informatic content of such speech. Turning from gossip as a mode of speaking and listening, I argue that we can consider networked media environments as gossip networks and read certain texts as gossiping. Here I expand the notion of fugitive listening into a conception of fugitive reading that attends to both the informatic and affective dimensions of networked discourse.

Specifically, this chapter considers the relationship between blackness and digital networks, examining how networked counterpublics (to use Michael Warner’s term) come to be organised around conceptions of race.67 Here I argue that the online counterpublic of Black Twitter can be thought of as an expression of what Harney and Moten refer to as the undercommons; that is, a space in which a version of the commons indebted to the black radical tradition might be enacted. I propose that we can think of Black Twitter as a gossip network, a networked social body that emerges from shared identification and promotes unrestricted inquiry. In turn, gossip is reconfigured as a critical modality that allows new subjectivities and collective forms of political expression to emerge.

The second part of the chapter reads an archive of tweets that were collected and compiled into a chapbook titled The 2015 Baltimore Uprising: A Teen Epistolary.68 Collecting tweets from

67 Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2005) 68 Various, The 2015 Baltimore Uprising: A Teen Epistolary (New York: Research and Destroy New York City, 2015).

the lead up to, and duration of, the 2015 Baltimore riots that occurred in the wake of Freddie Gray’s death, the chapbook forms an archive of the online activity of a community of teenagers operating within Black Twitter. This archive reveals an informatic and affective discourse that moves in opposition to, and in excess of, the dominant one. I argue that Black Twitter functions as a fugitive public animated by an improvisational imperative. It is a gossipy space of black performance mediated by a complex interplay between technocultural process and contemporary modes of organisation — bodies, software platforms, algorithms, digital networks, data flows, affects.

The final chapter detects the noisiness of networked culture, articulating it through the figure of the hum. Hum is taken as the ambient or atmospheric noise that arises from networked media, resonating with and through an environment defined by the ubiquity of sound and text. The hum is taken not to be a static and homogenous drone but rather an atmospheric noise that involves the movement of affective forces and intensities. Focusing on the work of the American poet, critic and artist Tan Lin — whose work is composed from the hum of contemporary, networked media environments — the chapter proposes strategies for listening and reading that attend to the atmospheric tonalities and dimensions of media. I argue that the modalities of networked distraction and boredom are crucial for attending to the noisiness of networked culture. Considering the hum alongside Walter Benjamin’s notion of reception in distraction, Anahid Kassabian’s notion of ubiquitous listening, and Patricia Clough’s theorisation of the teletechnological, I refigure these interruptive modalities as haptic and collective modes of media perception. Drawn from the hum of networked media, Lin’s poetics emphasise distraction and boredom as generative and relational modes of reading that in turn gesture toward new conceptions of networked subjectivity. Listening to, and reading with, the hum, I propose new interdisciplinary approaches to listening and reading that attune to contemporary media and open toward alternate conceptions of collectivity.

Taken together, these interruptive sonic figures and fugitive speech acts form a poetics of interruption. Tracking the force of interruption through sound, text and contemporary media systems, this study offers an expanded conception of noise and considers how it might animate a refiguring of dominant conceptions of power, language, sociality, collectivity and perception. I have attempted in the pages that follow to stage an encounter with interruption that belongs to a logic of sensation. This study then moves with these fugitive speech acts, attending to their force as it is registered in pathic or embodied ways. The central contention of this study is that such interruptive forces give rise to a state of animated suspense from which we might feel for new

connections and relations for the socio-political. This thesis offers strategies for listening and reading that attend to the immanent potentiality of those 'minor' moments that noisily interrupt the unfolding of daily life.

murmur

A murmur, seizing me, I can’t master its source, its increase is out of my control. The noise, the background noise, that incessant hubbub, our signals, our messages, our speech and our words are but a fleeting high surf, over its perpetual swell… Sea, forest, rumour, noise, society, life, works and days, all common multiples; we can hardly say they are objects, yet require a new way of thinking. I’m trying to think the multiple as such, to let it waft along without arresting it through unity, to let it go, as it is, at its own pace. A thousand slack algaes at the bottom of the sea.

— Michel Serres, Genesis

The counting stops. The prosody of disquiet will have failed. Within this immodest failure, the world, worldliness, survives, entirely provisional and improvisatory: within and saturated by historicity. Noise is a semantic survival, a living on and amidst the potential of an unstaunched corporality, the affective site of the migration of perception to an outside always in disequilibrium, as economies and identities and bodies are in uncontrollable disequilibrium. Again, noise is a moving survival. It shapes the collective body as replete historical potential, signifying for nothing.

— Lisa Robertson, Niling

To stand in a field of cicadas is to be engulfed by a noise that whirrs and thrums around you. A chorus of cicadas might produce a barely perceptible static-like sound akin to white noise. Or this collective noise might build to a deafening and high-pitched roar that resembles the throbbing of large machinery. The many individual cicada calls that comprise this chorus fuse together to form an indistinct and agglutinated mass that subsumes any individual call. The sound of each individual cicada dissolves into the collective din. Their sound is monotonous but never static, constantly swarming and shifting in ways that make it impossible to accurately locate. It is a sound that swells and dips, twists and folds, expands and contracts. It is ineradicable and yet never constant. To be in the midst of a chorus of cicadas is to experience waves of sound rising and falling around you. These waves are not like the ripples that form on a calm pond after a stone is thrown but are more closely related to the crashing waves or cresting

surf of a tumultuous and chaotic sea. To be surrounded by the swell of a chorus of cicadas is to be immersed in a noise that is unfixed and unstable, much like the noise of the ocean or the murmur of the crowd.

This chapter considers the murmur as a concatenation of a foundational and ontogenetic noise — a figure that draws disparate voices and forces together in a continuous and processual unfolding.1 I argue that noise, in its figuration as a murmur, interrupts the univocity of being that is so central to Western knowledge and suggests instead a relationality that emerges from multiplicity and difference. Drawing on the work of Michel Serres and Félix Guattari, this foundational noise can be understood as a force of sensation, that is, an affective force that ontogenetically precedes (and exceeds) signification.2 For both Serres and Guattari, asignifying forces and machines produce connections that function in excess of systems of meaning and representation. Moving from metaphysics to the everyday, I turn to the murmur of a crowd and ask what we might learn about the nature of assemblies and collective bodies by listening to the noise that they produce. Considered in socio-political terms, the sonic figure of the murmur interrupts the expectation produced by dominant forms of power that political speech should take the form of a univocal demand. Instead, the multi-vocality of the murmur offers a conception of the voice that disrupts the largely unchallenged historical conception of the individual voice as a marker of the unique, fully-formed subject. Noisy and polyphonic, the murmur suggests a collective voice that continually becomes. The murmur is a sonic figure that produces a subjectivity that emerges from both auto- and allopoietic processes. To think through the murmur is to move toward a conception of collectivity that allows for, and cultivates, dissensus. In this chapter I argue that we can read — or rather hear — the crowd as a social body that voices what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney refer to as “the call for and from disorder.”3

1 The term concatenation is derived from William James, who writes, "loosely speaking, and in general, it may be said that all things cohere and adhere to each other somehow, and that the universe exists practically in reticulated or concatenated forms which make of it a continuous or 'integrated' affair." William James, "The One and the Many," in Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1907), 53. 2 Serres articulates the concept of an asignifying noise while Guattari develops an asignifying semiotics of the machinic register of music, images, diagrams, functions and so on. See Serres, Genesis, 1-27; Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis: an ethico-aesthetic paradigm, trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995), 49-51. 3 Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 133.

Thinking with the noise of the crowd, I argue that the murmur of the crowd produces a noise that functions as an affective force, interrupting and modulating bodies, systems and relations. Listening to James Hoff’s How Wheeling Feels When the Ground Walks Away (2011) — a noisy and chaotic sound work that overlays various recordings of riots — I trace the connection between the murmur and a riot, arguing that the murmur animating crowds also gives rise to physical acts such as rioting. Continuing to listen to assemblies, I then draw on the work of Christoph Brunner, Roberto Nigro and Gerald Raunig to examine the technology of the ‘human microphone’ that is so central to the Occupy movement, arguing that this analogue amplification of voices does not merely transmit a single message, but more importantly produces new noise in its capture of the multiplicity of the crowd.4 Here the murmur of the crowd is considered in relation to Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of micropolitics, developing the idea of a micropolitical listening as embodied, attending to the multiplicity and difference immanent to crowds. Finally, the chapter turns from the murmur of the crowd to a poetics of murmur. I read the work of the Jamaican-born poet Claudia Rankine, arguing that Rankine’s poetics, which engages a lyric voice that moves between the individual and the collective, calls for the radical and open production of a collective and individual, yet situated, multiple subjectivity. Reading this work as a murmur offers us a productive model for developing a reading practice that extends from an embodied listening. Such a practice attends to the ways in which multiple and conflicting voices coalesce to form a collectivity interrupting the perceived stability and authority of one voice.

Originating Murmurs and Original Murmurings

A murmur is a boundless, layered, sonic indeterminacy that is both continuous and dispersed. The coalescing of many discrete and discontinuous sounds into a noisy mass that lacks a definite or identifiable structure, a murmur is inherently multiple. This sense of noisiness and multiplicity is mirrored in the onomatopoeic and repetitive construction of the word. As Ben Byrne observes, “murmur itself murmurs.”5 A murmur is commonly considered to be an indistinct sound at the edges of audibility. The multiplicitous nature of the sound is mirrored in

4 Christoph Brunner, Roberto Nigro and Gerald Raunig, “Post-Media Activism, Social Ecology and Eco- Art,” Third Text 27, no. 1 (2013). 5 Byrne, “Murmur,” 172.

the multiple applications of the word, as it is variously invoked to describe a muted, apprehensive or incomprehensible speech; expressions of discontent; the irregular beating of a heart; the sound of machines; or the noise of the crowd. We might think here of the 'walla walla' sound effect used to produce the murmur of the crowd in early radio, television and film productions.6 This technique involved a mass of extras repeating the phrase 'walla walla' or the word 'rhubarb' to simulate the hubbub of a crowd. Despite the repetition of the same word, the sounding of many voices produces a polyrhythmic noise that exceeds meaning.

Taken as the sound of the crowd, a murmur denotes the noisy speech of many individuated voices simultaneously sounding. It is important here to make a distinction between the concept of individuation and that of the individual. Following Gilbert Simondon, individuation can be understood as a continuous process of change that gives rise to an individual but that is preindividual. The preindividual both precedes and exceeds the individual, operating as a dimension of potentials from which the process of individuation draws, and indeed also processually transforms. Crucially, this relational field-in-process is not exhausted by the individual and contains the possibility for the unfolding of different becomings. Simondon’s theory inverts the Western philosophical tradition by understanding “the individual from the perspective of the process of individuation rather than the process of individuation by means of the individual.”7 For Simondon, the individual is not a stable and fully formed subject given in advance but rather that which crystalises at certain moments in the course of an ongoing process of relation between intensive potentials and extensive relations. The process of individuation does not only produce the individual but also gives rise to its milieu, which is both external and internal. There is a dynamic and continuous interaction between the internal and external milieus and it is this relationality that comprises an individual’s associated milieu. This notion of the associated milieu cuts across the divisions between interior and exterior that emerges from a priori conceptions of the individual (and its interiority) and the environment (and its exteriority). Here, following Thomas Lamarre, we can understand the associated milieu as "the ground of the ground, the true ground, as it were."8 The associated milieu, he continues,

6 See, Robert L. Mott, Sound Effects: Radio, Television and Film (Jefferson: McFarland and Company Inc., 1990), 171. 7 Gilbert Simondon, “The Genesis of the Individual,” in Zone 6: Incorporations, eds. Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter, trans. Mark Cohen and Sanford Kwinter, (New York: Zone, 1992), 300; italics in original. 8 Thomas LaMarre, "Humans and Machines," Inflexions 5 (2012): 39, accessed August 1, 2017, http://www.inflexions.org/n5_Lamarre.pdf

is "energetic, charged, potentiality."9 As such, the crystallisation that is ‘an’ individual can only be understood in relation to its milieu since an individual both carries these charges or potentialities and yet has also left some of them for the preindividual register by individuating: “the process of individuation must be considered primordial, for it is this process that at once brings the individual into being and determines all the distinguishing characteristics of its development, organization and modalities.”10 Emphasising the process of becoming, individuation allows us to attend to the continuously changing relation that is the individual and its milieu. As Steven Shaviro explains, the process of individuation understands “what is unique and enclosed about the individual precisely in terms of its relation to the milieu which it is not, but which it requires contact with and nourishment from.”11

The concept of individuation gives us a processual understanding of the individual. As such, it gestures toward what Muriel Combes describes as "a more-than-individual center of being."12 The register of the preindividual can give rise to different orders of becoming that correspond to different domains, such as the individuation of individuals and the individuation of societies of individuals. These are not distinctly separate but rather can be understood as connected yet internally differentiated processes. In terms of subjects and socialities, the individual subject must always be understood as in relation to the collective. Combes writes:

It is not relation to self that comes first and makes the collective possible, but relation to what, in the self, surpasses the individual, communicating without mediation with a nonindividual share in the other. What gives consistency to relation to self, what gives consistency to the psychological dimension of the individual, is something in the individual surpassing the individual, turning it toward the collective.13

For Simondon, the collective is a condition for the (psyche or subjectivity of the) individual to self-relate. His concept of individuation gives us both an ontogenetic account of collectivity and a preindividual process for the ongoing production of subjects or subjectivities — the emergence

9 Ibid., 39. 10 Simondon, “The Genesis of the Individual”, 300. 11 Steven Shaviro, “Simondon on individuation,” The Pinocchio Theory, January 16, 2006, accessed June 20, 2017, http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=471 12 Muriel Combes, Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual, trans. Thomas LaMarre (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2013), 64. 13 Ibid., 41.

of the individual ‘self’ is intrinscially and relationally connected to the collective as that which, in the self, is always in excess of it.

This is not to claim that people do not experience social reality in particular ways — consider, for example, the ways in which the force of law or induced precarity are differentially experienced. Rather, Simondonian thinking offers an alternate way of conceptualising the social. It moves beyond the regulatory and normativising paradigms that emerge from the treatment of the individual as a given and stable structure or form, emphasising instead the processual relations between the individual and its associated milieu. Lamarre expands:

Simondon’s focus on individuation as process evokes the absolute origin of the form/ground relation in order to re-potentialize the ground of the (modern) individual, because this is where resistance (in the electrical sense) to non-progressive modes of rationalization is already at work, where resistance may be brought into play, activated or potentialized in progressive ways.14

In relation to the murmuring crowd, an attention to individuating voices rather than individual voices allows us to conceptualise the crowd not as a mass of autonomous, fully formed subjects but rather as relational and processual entities undergoing constant change. The crowd can therefore be understood not by its constancy but according to its potential to alter and change. Conceived in this way, a murmur is not the reduction of many voices into an expression of univocality but rather the sounding of a heterogeneous and processual multi- vocality that complicates the ordering of its sound into a meaningful figure that occupies the foreground and a supportive (back)ground of the ‘noise’ against which it is organised. An interruption to this binary logic, a murmur suggests an endless trading of places between signal and noise, speech and sound, inside and outside, figure and field. As such, it is never static: it involves continuous movement and constant change. I argue that to listen to the murmur is to listen to the multiple; an endeavour that calls into question the notion of ontological stability, fixed identity and being in favour of differences, relations and becomings. Here, my conception of the murmur as a sonic figure must be thought back in relation to my complication of it as figuring, which I proposed in the introductory chapter of this thesis. As we shall see, this figuring attends to the specificity of different assemblies and processes of noise. This helps to texture the ways that we might listen to, and for, the noise that moves through various fields from sound studies to philosophy. While indebted to Michel Serres’ generative metaphysics of

14 LaMarre, "Humans and Machines," 41.

noise, I also argue that by attending to the specific processes and textures of figuring, we can move toward and into a politics and socio-technics of noise.

Murmur is a sonicity that configures ontogenetic and processual noise. Serres describes this noise as 'background' noise and understands it to be always multiple and heterogeneous. There is no single point of origin but rather a field of potentiality that conditions the actual. Noise is taken to be a force of production that precedes representation. Using the term 'background' noise to describe a state of disorder and turbulence that is both the condition for the emergence of any signal and that which brings into existence new relations, combinations and orders of exchange, Serres writes:

Background noise is the background of the world, and the world began, it is said, with a big bang. A founding blow in which the universe is embryonic, it precedes the expansion in the universal, space has already received this before receiving the things themselves, it has already formed the space where the things are going to be lodged. I am assuming that there was no big bang, that original cosmological preconcept; I am assuming that there was and still is an inaccessible number of different noises.15

The ‘background’ noise that Serres describes accounts for a metaphysical infinite that cannot be reduced, as Greg Hainge has noted, to “a single, unitary event which would henceforth act as the catalyst for all life on our planet and the existence of astral bodies that surround us.”16 Here we can understand this noise, following Ben Byrne, not as “an original noise but an originating noise.”17 For Serres, this gives us a way of thinking the multiple:

The cosmos is not a structure, it is a pure multiplicity of ordered multiplicities and pure multiplicities. It is the global basis of all structures, it is the background noise of all form and information, it is the milky noise of the whole of our messages gathered together.18

This background noise or foundational turbulence is omnipresent and immersive, accounting for all that is indeterminate in the world. It is not an object that can be pointed to and identified according to a stable set of characteristics, but rather, can be understood as a flux or flow that

15 Serres, Genesis, 61. 16 Hainge, Noise Matters, 19. 17 Byrne, “Murmur,” 168. 18 Serres, Genesis, 111.

foregrounds movement over stasis and difference over homogeneity. Describing the complexity of the multiple, Serres writes:

The multiple as such. Here’s a set undefined by elements or boundaries. Locally, it is not individuated; globally, it is not summed up. So it’s neither a flock, nor a school, nor a heap, nor a swarm, nor a herd, nor a pack. It is not an aggregate; it is not discrete. It’s a bit viscous perhaps. A lake under the mist, the sea, a white plain, background noise, the murmur of a crowd, time.19

For Serres, the multiple cannot, therefore, be understood as a collective reduced to a uniform totality, such as a flock, school, herd or pack. Here the quality of viscosity is central to any understanding of the multiple. It is thick and glutinous. While the multiple may comprise discrete parts, assembled en masse they trade differences and thicken, making it impossible to cleanly separate individual components from one another. The multiple is a sticky and imperfect flow that draws together many modes of differencing. The multiple is not definite or ideal but is always plural and full of movement. For Serres, the murmur of the crowd — thick and indistinct — is one such example of this viscous multiplicity. Like the sound of the sea or a field of cicadas, the murmur of a crowd is this heterogeneous noise.

Serres’ invocation of the ‘background’ to describe this foundational noise or state of pure multiplicity, however, requires clarification. The background does not refer to that which has been pushed away by the foreground but rather to a continuous, indeterminate conditioning from which phenomena emerge. Noise is present in everything and everything is formed out of noise. An interruption to the dualism that dominates Western epistemologies, noise functions through the cumulative and conjunctive logic of ‘both/and’ rather than the binary logic of ‘either/or.’ Describing the omnipresence of noise, Serres writes:

There is noise in the subject, there is noise in the object. There is noise in the observed, there is noise in the observer. In the transmitter and in the receiver, in the entire space of the channel. There is noise in being and in appearing. It crosses the most prominent divisions of philosophy and makes a mockery of its criteria. It is in being and in knowing. It is in the real, and in the sign, already.20

19 Ibid., 4-5. 20 Ibid., Genesis, 61.

Noise exists in and between every entity and every event. We are immersed in it and there is no possibility of being outside of it, even though it is also outside of ‘us’. As he explains, “this noise is inextinguishable. It is outside — it is the world itself — and it is inside, produced by our living body.”21 This conception of noise does not imply a linear or causal movement from outside to inside, nor does it suggest a background that would imply a foreground. Rather, noise is the milieu through which all communication takes place. It is the (meta)medium through which any message must pass; the channeling that makes the transmission of any signal possible; a figure of pure mediality. For Serres, this noise signifies an excess of meaning rather than a lack: “between yes and no, between zero and one, an infinite number of values appear, and thus an infinite number of answers.”22 This pure mediality is a space of relational movement in which noise acts upon the signal, transforming it as it transmits. Inextinguishable medial noise affects the transmission of any message, forcing the communicating parties to respond by either incorporating the noise into the signal or attempting to expel it. In both cases, noise — functioning here as the parasite — interrupts existing relations and in doing so, produces a transformation.23 As Stephen Crocker writes, “the active intention to transmit a signal requires that we open ourselves to the passive reception of the medium in which it can occur. The user is used by the medium.”24

This reformulation of Serres makes clear the processual and immersive nature of noise in which the boundaries between figure and field or background and foreground exchange. Even further, Serres’ noise can be understood as the immanent genesis of all relations. Here noise is more than medial — it is also parasitic, as I argued in the introductory chapter. The parasite allows us to understand noise not simply as background but as the ontogenetic relational generator of all systems. In other words, noise needs to be understood as an ontogenetic force of becoming that is simultaneously being produced by and feeding back into an assemblage. Following Simondon, ontogenesis designates the “becoming of being, that by which being becomes, insofar as it is, as being.”25 Systems and entities that emerge from the force of an ontogenetic noise must be understood via an attention to processes of movement and transformation rather than via stable forms or fixed identities. As such, inside and outside or

21 Serres, The Parasite, 126. 22 Ibid., 57. 23 See the introductory chapter of this thesis for a more detailed account of parasitic noise. 24 Crocker, “Noises and Exceptions." 25 Gilbert Simondon, “The Position of the Problem of Ontogenesis,” trans. Gregory Flanders, Parrahesia 7 (2009), 5.

background and foreground can be conceived of as co-constitutive and emergent rather than causal. That is, they emerge from and feed back into the perpetual process of becoming.

As an originating multiplicity or Serresian foundational noise with no single point of origin, a murmur contours ontogenetic noise. It draws heterogeneous elements into an assemblage that produces a field of and for noise as it produces itself. As Lisa Robertson tells us, such noise “has no meaning at the same time that it signifies an excess of signification; meaning become so dense and continuous that it transforms into field, having previously functioned as figure. In noise meaning has de-coalesced.”26 For Robertson, noise belongs to the plane of immanence, a Deleuzo-Guattarian concept for a virtual topological surface on which all events occur. For Deleuze and Guattari, the plane of immanence refers to a register in which “there are only relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness between unformed elements, or at least between elements that are relatively unformed, molecules and particles of all kinds.”27 Moving beyond representational and transcendental (ideal) approaches, the plane of immanence accounts for the movements, relations, connections and interactions between a multitude of different forces. Understood as belonging to the plane of immanence, noise cannot be reduced to the opposite of meaningful expression nor the support or ground from which ‘order’ emerges. As Hainge argues, this only becomes possible “by contracting noise into a form that no longer seems noisy.”28 But the work done by the sonic figure of the murmur can be located in its drawing together of noise’s figuring and fielding so that these co-exist in absolute proximity.

Here we move beyond simple dualisms concerned with the extraction of meaning or order from noise. As I have already outlined in the introduction, the sonic figure — as it is employed here — is derived from the Deleuzian concept of the figural. For Deleuze, the figural goes beyond the figurative and representational and produces instead a logic of sensation. The figural produces a mode of knowledge that is not pre-constituted or contained in signification alone but is felt as sensation, where sensation refers to the ways affective and insensible forces register corporeally. For Deleuze, we “become in the sensation and something happens through the sensation, one through the other and one in the other.”29 The logic of sensation moves us toward embodied knowledge, one that attends to the flows of forces, affects, relations and materials. As

26 Robertson, Niling, 63. 27 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 310. 28 Hainge, Noise Matters, 18. 29 Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 35; italics in original.

Toni Pape observes, “the figure is a wager for thinking through the body, through sensation.”30 I argue that the collective din of a murmur produces a non-representational and asignifying noise that can be felt viscerally, according to this logic of sensation rather than a transcendental logic.

Affective Noise

Considering the murmur as a figure of sound is not to ask what murmur represents but rather: what does murmur do? Or, what is the immediate sensation of the encounter with a murmur? As we have already established, a murmur is an interruptive and generative noise that operates in excess of the discrete components that it is comprised. Conceived of in this way, we find a resonance between the concept of noise and that of affect, where affect refers to the forces of encounter and shifting relationality of a world in constant movement. Like noise, affect is multiplicitous and cannot be reduced to a fixed form. Rather, as Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth tell us:

Affect arises in the midst of in-between-ness: in the capacities to act and be acted upon. Affect is an impingement or extrusion of a momentary or sometimes more sustained state of relation as well as the passage (and the duration of passage) of forces and intensities. That is, affect is found in those intensities that pass body to body (human, nonhuman, part-body, and otherwise), in those resonances that circulate about, between, and sometimes stick to bodies and worlds, and in the very passages or variations between these intensities and resonances themselves.31

Affect refers to pre-personal forces of encounter that cannot be located in either subject or object, origin or destination. Unlike emotion, which can be understood as captured in states of feeling such as love, hate and anger, affect is, according to Steven Shaviro, “primary, non- conscious, asubjective or presubjective, asignifying, unqualified and intensive.”32 That is, affect refers to those forces that cannot be captured and owned, whereas emotion is affect captured

30 Pape, “Figures of Time" 38. 31 Melissa Gregg and Gregory J.Seigworth, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” in The Affect Theory Reader, eds. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J.Seigworth (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 1; italics in original. 32 Steven Shaviro, Post-Cinematic Affect (Winchester and Washington: Zero Books, 2010), 3.

and rendered as personal experience.33 Affect is immersive and overwhelming while emotion is locatable and able to be organised into linear and causal chains of action and reaction. Preceding the divisions between subject/object, mind/body, past/future, active/passive, affect instead suggests a world comprised of relational forces and intensities, the effects of which register immediately in embodied ways rather than secondarily in emotive or discursive ways. The potency of affect, as Guattari tells us, “is no less complex for being non-discursive, and I would even qualify it as hyper-complex, wishing to mark that it is an instance of the engendering of the complex, a processuality in the throes of birth, a place for mutational becomings.”34

Here we can begin to understand affect — and, as I propose in this chapter, murmuring noise — as both unlocatable and everywhere. As Siegworth explains, “affect is without a place; it is outside (even, and most of all, the distinction of inside and out), it is before (the formation of subjectivity and, then, persists, even after the ‘circumscription of identity,’ alongside), it is in- between (body and soul, materiality and incorporeality).”35 It is of the milieu — the middling, relational space of mediation — and as such exists before, between, outside, inside, alongside, across and beyond.36 As Guattari tells us, affects are “half-object half-subject, already there in sensation and outside themselves in the fields of the possible.”37 In this way, affect can be understood as belonging to the plane of immanence. Taken as the relational force or forces of encounters, affect is ontogenetic and integral to the perpetual becoming of any body, where bodies are defined not as bordered or autonomous subjects but rather by their “capacity to affect and be affected.”38 This concept of force does not necessarily refer to that which is especially forceful but also refers to the quotidian and everyday intensities that make up the ever-shifting

33 Shaviro is following Brian Massumi here in this articulation of the difference between affect and emotion. See Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2002), 27-28. 34 Félix Guattari, “Ritornellos and Existential Affects” in The Guattari Reader, ed. Gary Genosko (Cambridge and Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 160. 35 Gregory J. Seigworth, “Fashioning A Stave, or, Singing Life,” in Animations of Deleuze and Guattari, ed. Jennifer Daryl (New York: Peter Lang, 2003), 80. 36 As Brian Massumi explains, “in French, milieu means “surroundings,” “medium” (as in chemistry), and “middle.” In the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, “milieu” should be read as a technical term combining all three meanings.” Brian Massumi, “Translator’s Foreword: Pleasures of Philosophy” to A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), xv. 37 Guattari, Chaosmosis, 92. 38 This formulation is attributed to the philosopher Baruch Spinoza. See, for example: Brian Massumi, Politics of Affect, (Cambridge: Polity, 2015), ix.

world of encounters that bodies are constantly creating, and by which bodies are constantly being created.

Employing a vocabulary that resonant with Serres, Brian Massumi describes affect as “a third state, an excluded middle, prior to the distinction between passivity and activity.”39 For Massumi, the capacity to affect and be affected are two interrelated facets of the same event, linked by the notion of the “excluded middle.” This middle describes “a region of relation” — a space of transition and connection that accounts for the relational movement of intensities and forces that exist between (and before, around, alongside, beyond) the subject and the object, the mind and the body, the active and the passive.40 As we have already established, for Serres, the excluded middle is the noise or milieu that is both the condition for the transmission of any signal and a force of interruption that transforms the signal (and the communicants) in the process of transmission. For Massumi and Serres, we must always begin in the middle and attend to the relations and connections that occur there. Affect and noise can both be understood as forces in the midst of continually becoming that account for emergence and transformation. Like noise, affect is active yet indeterminate and can be thought, preindividually, in terms of the virtual, where the virtual refers to “ the mode of reality implicated in the emergence of new potentials.”41 Both noise and affect are preindividual forces that are already moving rather than fixed ‘states.’ As such, they produce a reality of continual change.

The sonic figure of the murmur allows us to attend to the ways in which this affective force — noise — sensorially registers with singular qualitative aspects. The murmur affects our capacity to listen, affectively. To listen to a murmur is to attend to the forces existing in this space of in- between-ness. As Serres writes:

I hear without clear frontiers, without divining an isolated source, hearing is better at integrating than analysing, the ear knows how to lose track. By the ear, of course, I hear: temple, drum, pavilion, but also my entire body and the whole of my skin.42

39 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 32. 40 Massumi, Politics of Affect, 50. 41 Brian Massumi, “Sensing the Virtual, Building the Insensible,” in Architectural Design (Profile no. 133), ed. Stephen Perrella, 68, no. 5-6 (1998), 16. Affect is also actual, insofar as, in all the theorists I have discussed, what is actual holds traces of its virtuality and hence of its potential to continue to change. 42 Serres, Genesis, 7.

Following Serres, I understand listening to be a concept that precedes the distinctions between hearing as passive and listening as active (or vice versa).43 I am arguing for a listening practice that is situated in the space of the “excluded middle” — one that listens to and for the affective noise of the milieu. Such a listening precedes the axes of transmitter-receiver and subject-object and instead attends to the unsynthesisable multiplicity of sound, which not only surrounds and immerses but also binds and inscribes into the world. A listening practice that is tied to this conception of sound describes an embodied mode of perception that moves listening toward the realm of what Deleuze and Guattari would call microperceptions; that is, perceptions that register imperceptibly but which we might nonetheless discern in the effects they produce: “microintervals between matters, colours and sounds engulfing lines of flight, world lines, lines of transparency and intersection.”44 Microperception does not refer to a smaller perception but rather, as Massumi relays, describes “a perception of a qualitatively different kind.”45 It is a bodily perception that registers the interruptions produced by affective forces before such entities as ‘sound’ (or silence for that matter) are recognised. Such a conception of listening moves away from a fixed sonic object toward a space of relationality and noise. As François J. Bonnet explains, in listening “the individual no longer seeks to possess the world, it is the world that possesses him [sic] and destitutes him of himself [sic]. This is the experience, the affective experience, that then becomes central to the establishing of an immersive relation to the world, a dynamic and disseminatory relation.”46

The sonic figure of the murmur moves us toward this type of atmospheric listening. As I have already established in the introduction, the figuring that the sonic figure performs can be understood as the “relational coming-together of affective forces to compose an aesthetic experience.”47 The murmur of a crowd can be understood as a collection of discrete sonic elements that intersect and interact to produce a singular aesthetic experience. What is important is the way these discrete and differential elements form and produce relations. Here we can understand the sonic figure of a murmur as an unsynthesisable multiplicity, that is, a multiplicity of differential yet co-composing relations. As the sonic figure belongs to the domain

43 See the introductory chapter of this thesis for more on the nature of listening and hearing. 44 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 329. 45 Massumi, Politics of Affect, 53. 46 François J. Bonnet, The Order of Sounds: A Sonorous Archipelago, trans. Robin Mackay (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2016), 97. 47 Pape, “Figures of Time,” 39.

of affect, it is registered via the traces it leaves on a body. This listening then might attend not only to the audible, palpable or vibratory but also to sound that is remembered, imagined, or written, a notion we will return to later in the chapter and throughout the thesis. In the next section of this chapter, however, I consider the sonic figure of the murmur in relation to the murmur of a crowd. Turning an ear toward the crowd, I argue that to listen to the murmur of a crowd is to engage with the affective tonalities of a collective body and how they register microperceptually yet fold into new kinds of possibilities for public socialities.

The Murmur of the Crowd

The formation of massive public assemblies and crowds, across both physical and digital spaces, is a defining feature of contemporary politics. One needs only to think of the Women’s Marches that occurred around the world in the wake of the 2017 election of Donald Trump as President of the United States of America, the mobilisation of people around the Black Lives Matter movement, Tahrir Square during the Arab Spring, or the Occupy Movement to understand the increasing power of physical and digital public assembly in the contemporary moment. Of course, public assemblies are not a new phenomenon and there is extensive theoretical and philosophical discourse that considers the relationship between official structures of power and expressions of popular will.48 The intention here is not to offer an historical overview of these debates, which, as Judith Butler notes, “tend to be governed either by fears of chaos or by radical hope for the future,” but rather to listen to the noise that the crowd produces.

Following a lineage from Spinoza to Deleuze, I understand the crowd as a type of body, where a body can be understood as that which has the capacity to affect, and be affected by, other bodies. A Spinozist-Deleuzian conception of the body is not defined by its materiality or substance and, as such, is not limited to the human body or body-as-subject; it accounts for nonhuman bodies. As Deleuze explains, “a body can be anything; it can be an animal, a body of

48 See, for example: Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, trans. Carol Stewart (New York: Continuum, 1978); Catherine Malabou, “The Crowd,” The Oxford Literary Review 37, no. 1 (2015): 25-44; Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (New York and London: Verso, 2005); Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Henry Reeve (Cambridge: Sever and Francis, 1863); etc.

sounds, a mind or an idea; it can be a linguistic corpus, a social body, a collectivity.”49 In Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza, a body is defined by the dynamic relations of its parts and by the way it affects and is affected both intensively and extensively. Articulating these two principles in terms of longitude and latitude, Deleuze writes:

We call longitude of a body the set of relations of speed and slowness, of motion and rest, between particles that compose it from this point of view, that is, between unformed elements. We call latitude the set of affects that occupy a body at each moment, that is, the intensive states of an anonymous force (force for existing, capacity for being affected). In this way we construct the map of a body. The longitudes and latitudes together constitute Nature, the plane of immanence or consistency, which is always variable and is constantly being altered, composed and recomposed, by individuals and collectivities.50

Bodies comprise shifting relations and are subject to affective forces. As such, they are subject to constant variation and exist only in temporarily stable relationships. Subject to a continual process of composition, recomposition and decomposition based on all its relational encounters, the Spinozist-Deleuzian conception of the body is one that remains open to change. Here we can understand the body — following Spinoza’s oft-quoted dictum that “no one has yet determined what a body can do” — as oscillating between potentiality and actuality.51

Subject to continual change, a crowd or assembly is constantly composing and recomposing itself according to relations of motion and rest, quickness and slowness (intensively) and by its interactions with its wider milieu (extensively). As such, we can understand the crowd as a body from the Spinozist and Deleuzian perspective. Listening to the murmur of the crowd is a way of attending to the dynamic and affective relations of this collective body. The murmuring crowd produces a noise that both affects itself and other bodies with which it contacts. To understand the crowd as a Spinozist-Deleuzian body is to understand it as a dynamic assemblage of relations and affects rather than a static, homogeneous and immutable entity, such as the way protesters might be defined by conservative politicians and the right-wing media. Recall, for example, US President Donald Trump (at the time the frontrunner for the Republican

49 Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988), 127. 50 Ibid., 127-128. 51 Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, trans. Edwin Curley (London: Penguin Books, 1996), 71.

presidential nomination) labelling of protestors in Chicago as "thugs" or Fox News anchor Sean Hannity's description of protestors as "violent agitators" that "hijacked what was to be a peaceful campaign rally."52

I am specifically interested here in those assemblies and collective bodies that have emerged in recent times as a response and a challenge to the increasingly intertwined power of state and corporate institutions. What might listening to these murmurs tell us about the conditioning and conditions of contemporary collective bodies? While such public assemblies cannot be defined according to a stable set of characteristics or reduced to a single theory, they are also not so disparate that we cannot find resonances between them. Formations of the crowd — such as those that coalesce around Black Lives Matter protests or the Occupy movement, for example — are linked by an ever-increasing exposure to precarity. That is, such gatherings of bodies in public spaces (both physical and digital) are a collective and embodied response to a state of precarity that can be understood, following Butler, “not as a passing or episodic condition, but a new form of regulation that distinguishes this historical time.”53 An instrument of contemporary governmentality, precarisation describes a process that produces a subject defined by vulnerability and establishes security as the ultimate political ideal. As Isabelle Lorey explains:

Precarization means more than insecure jobs, more than the lack of security given by waged employment. By way of insecurity and danger it embraces the whole of existence, the body, modes of subjectivation. It is threat and coercion, even while it opens up new possibilities of living and working. Precarization means living with the unforeseeable, with contingency.54

Contemporary conceptions of neoliberal precarity are simultaneously connected to a long history of instability in industrial capitalism. As Angela Mitropoulos tells us, “capital is precarious, and normally so.”55 Capitalism thrives on instability and the accumulation and

52 Brendan Gauthier, "The Right's Hypocrisy on Trump Protestors," Salon, March 16, 2016, accessed August 1, 2017, http://www.salon.com/2016/03/15/the_rights_hypocrisy_on_trump_protesters_it_was_only_ok_when_t he_tea_party_was_crashing_obamacare_meetings/ 53 Judith Butler, foreword to State of Insecurity, by Isabell Lorey (London and New York: Verso, 2015), vii. 54 Isabell Lorey, State of Insecurity, trans. Aileen Derieg (London and New York: Zone Books, 2015), 1. 55 Angela Mitropoulos, “Precari-us?,” Mute 1, no. 29 (2006), January 9, 2006, accessed May 22, 2017, www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/precari-us

expansion of capital has always been underpinned by the precarious labour of women, children, migrants and slaves. The normalisation of neoliberal precarity in the contemporary moment is marked by the ways in which precarisation has become a key paradigm of contemporary governance, producing a mode of regulation and subjectivation that revolves around exposure to insecurity, instability, vulnerability, contingency and danger. Increasingly precarity is mined and invoked for political gain. Here we can understand precarity, following Lorey, “as a category of order that denotes social positionings of insecurity and hierarchization, which accompanies processes of Othering,” and precariousness “as a relational condition of social being that cannot be avoided.”56 The gathering of bodies in public spaces can be understood in the context of this socio-economic fabric, that is, as a response to the ongoing processes of precarisation. As Butler tells us:

when bodies assemble on the street, in the square, or in other forms of public space (including virtual ones) they are exercising a plural and performative right to appear, one that asserts and instates the body in the midst of the political field, and which […] delivers a bodily demand for a more liveable set of economic, social, and political conditions no longer afflicted by induced forms of precarity.57

Of course, vulnerability is unevenly distributed among different groups and bodies, and there are many different types of precarity. It is vitally important that we acknowledge these different forms of precarity that exist. Consider, for example, the precarity of those who are subject to extraordinary surveillance and violence at the hands of the state; or the precarity of those who lack basic access to social or economic infrastructure; or the precarity of those who seek asylum. Even though precarity can be understood as a defining feature of capitalism, we must be careful not to reduce the concept to a generalised and ubiquitous condition that subsumes difference under the umbrella category of economic precarity. As Tavia Nyong’o writes:

The consideration of race, gender, and nation would not simply be additive (we are also precarious) but transfigurative. To reintroduce difference into theorizations of precarity is to insist, paraphrasing Spinoza, that we do not yet know what a precarious body can

56 Jasbir Puar et al., “Precarity Talk: A Virtual Roundtable with Lauren Berlant, Judith Butler, Bojana Cvejić, Isabell Lorey, Jasbir Puar, and Ana VujanovićIsabell,” TDR: The Drama Review 56, no.4 (2012): 161. 57 Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2015), 11.

do. In particular, we do not yet know how it comes into contact, into assembly, into collective and distributed agency, into “being singular plural” with others.58

In listening to the murmur of contemporary crowds as a strategy for understanding emergent forms and modes of collectivity, we need to tune in to the differential forces that also make up a crowd’s formation. There is a resonance between Nyong’o’s articulation of the precarious assembly and Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s notion of the undercommons.59 For Harney and Moten, the undercommons refers to a space of fugitivity and radical commonality that is indebted to the black radical tradition and based on an acknowledgement of a precarity that is both shared and differential.60 The undercommons is not bound by physical space, nor does it simply refer to subjects marginalised and excluded by dominant systems and structures of power. Instead, it describes a coalition based on the acknowledgement of what Jack Halberstam refers to as “the brokenness of being.”61 Harney and Moten work against the traditional conception of the commons, positing instead the undercommons as a space of fugitivity in which a radical version of commonality might be enacted. Running through the private and the public, the state and the economy, institutions and communities, the undercommons is situated in the 'break,' a space of refuge where one may study, plan and chatter in ways that refuse the call to order that is imposed by the nexus of the state and the market. The undercommons is, as Harney and Moten write, a space “where the commons give refuge, where the refuge gives commons.”62 It is an already existing space where we can “plan to be communist about communism, to be unreconstructed about reconstruction, to be absolute about abolition.”63 We can think of the polyrhythmic oscillations of the murmur as a possible expression of this

58 Tavia Nyong’o, “Situating Precarity Between the Body and the Commons,” Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 23, no.2 (2013), 159. 59 Harney and Moten, The Undercommons. 60 The term undercommons is a critique of the notion of the commons, which has its origins in medieval England and denotes common or public goods and resources. While the commons has come to be associated with the notion of common rights over public resources, the origins of the term are connected to a medieval legacy of property ownership and displacement, in which commoners were granted rights to land that was legally owned by the lord of a manor. More contemporarily, the privatisation and commodification of the commons (that is public resources such as water, transport, health, education, water, green space, communication, etc) has become a hallmark of neoliberal capitalism. 61 Jack Halbertsam, “The Wild Beyond” in The Undercommons by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013), 6. 62 Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 28. 63 Ibid., 82.

undercommon sociality. Arising from the differential force of many voices sounding at once, the murmur is a fugitive mode of speech that moves simultaneously in multiple different directions. It evades capture and resists being reduced to a univocal expression.

The undercommons is a theory of difference that is based on the notion that the structures that inhabit us and that we inhabit are broken beyond repair. For Harney and Moten, this “brokenness of being” does not simply refer to a generalised state of precarity, rather it attends to the specific forms of insecurity that are (re)produced by racial capitalism. That is, the undercommons is an intersectional assemblage attentive to the ways in which induced precarity holds different subjects in specific forms of vulnerable relationality. This attention to difference moves us towards a concept of precarity that is not singularly focused on the economic but is instead, as Nyong’o observes, “concerned with compassion, with co-passion, co-presence, a being in common with that which we do not know, and with those whom we can not speak for.”64 Listening to the sound of the crowd’s differences — the murmur as a fugitive speech act — moves us toward an undercommons’ conception of collectivity. The crowd, an improvisational form, generates cacophonous relational noise that cannot be reduced to a univocal demand. The indistinct and indecipherable murmur of the crowd is the enactment of a being in common that both affirms interdependency and preserves incommensurate difference.

To be in the midst of a crowd is to be engulfed by a murmuring that consumes and generates space. As Serres tells us, “space is assailed, as a whole, by the murmur; we are utterly taken over by this same murmuring.”65 The murmur of the crowd invades bodies and spaces, it rises and falls like the waves of a tumultuous sea. Always moving and mutating, the murmur of a crowd may either build to a roar or dissipate and disperse. It is a viscous blanket of sound that thrums and babbles. Yet the sound of the crowd is often described in negative terms, as riotous, raucous and chaotic. Imbued with an aesthetic moralism that equates noise with unwantedness and unpleasantness, such descriptions of the sonic qualities of the crowd work to produce, as Frances Dyson has noted, “the association of public speech in public arenas with incoherence, insofar as these voices don’t cohere into any one particular ‘message’.”66 Coherence and legibility are inextricably linked to the concept of political agency and to historical conceptions of the autonomous, fully-formed subject in Western philosophy. As Moten tells us, “authorised and

64 Nyong’o, “Situating precarity,” 159. 65 Serres, Genesis, 13. 66 Frances Dyson, The Tone of Our Times: Sound, Sense, Economy, and Ecology (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2014), 150.

authoritative” speech takes “the form of a univocal, single speech.”67 Speech is only recognised as legitimate by dominant structures of power when it mirrors this univocal speech, taking the form of a coherent and legible demand. To dismiss the murmur of the crowd as noise that fails to cohere into any one particular message is a refusal to acknowledge the political agency of such collective bodies. The point here is not to attempt to locate a demand in the multiplicity of the murmur, it is to consider the murmur as a sonic figure that refuses to acknowledge the call to order that is imposed by state and corporate institutions. Noisy and indistinct, the murmur of the crowd is an embodied and performative enactment of a collectivity that is heterogeneous and multi-vocal. It is the collective utterance of those who have been denied a voice or those whose voices have been ignored, disavowed and broken.

Here I want to suggest that the murmur that animates the crowd extends into such acts as rioting. In a riot, the heterogeneous multi-vocality of a murmur builds from an indistinct noise on the edge of audibility into a deafening roar. The riot produces a raucous noise with multiple centres. It is a continuously moving sonicity, thickening and dissipating in ways that make it impossible to contain. The sound of a riot is a collective enunciation that deforms the univocality of authoritative speech, producing noise affectively in which the potential to create collectivities might resonate and interact. Conceived of in this way, we can understand the murmur as a sonic figure that animates the rioting crowd. Contemporary riots — from Watts and Los Angeles to Clichy-sous-Bois, Tottenham, Ferguson and Baltimore, to list only a few — can be understood as a response to ever increasing conditions of induced precarity. As Joshua Clover notes, “increasingly, the contemporary riot transpires within a logic of racialization and takes the state rather than economy as its direct antagonist.”68 I would texture Clover’s claim by arguing that contemporary riots respond to the complex interrelations of race, gender, sexuality, class and nation and are directed at the increasingly entangled relationship between the state and the market. The dismissal of rioters as opportunists, criminals or thugs constitutes a failure to hear the ways in which the riot enacts a multi-vocal and performative declaration of collectivity and solidarity. As Moten writes, “the poetics of the open field [...] was always tied to the sociopoetics of riot, of generative differentiation as a kind of self-care, of expropriative disruption as a kind of self-defense, of seeing things as a performed social theory of mind.”69

67 Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 135. 68 Joshua Clover, Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings (London and New York, Verso, 2016), 11. 69 Fred Moten, “Necessity, immensity, and crisis (many edges/seeing things),” Floor. 3, Ocober 30, 2011, accessed June 23, 2017, http://floorjournal.com/2011/10/30/necessity-immensity-and-crisis-many- edgesseeing-things/

The American conceptual artist James Hoff captures just such a sonicity of the murmur in his 2011 sound recording, How Wheeling Feels When The Ground Walks Away.70 Originally presented as a surround sound installation as part of the Performa 09 biennial in New York in 2009, it was subsequently released as a 19’58” audio recording by the Berlin-based label, PAN. The composition samples audio recordings of different riots, varying from riots that occurred at music concerts to those that took place in the streets. The resulting audio collage is a dense and noisy work that indexes the cacophony produced by voices and bodies sounding together. Shouts and screams punctuate the lo-fi roar of the crowd; fragments of speech emerge and dissolve into the din; grinding machinery and sirens mix with snippets of electronic noise and guitar feedback. We hear voices chanting in unison and voices interrupting one another. In short, we hear the murmuring as noise of collective discontent in its differencing. The intricate layering of sounds in Hoff’s recording works to produce a disorienting soundscape with no clear focal point. There is no form to grasp on to and no obvious structure that organises the composition. The noise-scape that Hoff constructs is one that constantly shifts and dissipates, the density of the noise effacing any sense of a definite centre or coherent form. Hoff’s collage presents an opaque noise that sounds in excess of form or content. The overlapping fragments of sound that are stitched together to produce this noise open toward a conception of rhythm that operates, as Lisa Robertson notes, “as a moving figuring, an improvisational continuance, emphatically not metre, not measure, nor the alternation of beat.”71 For Robertson, rhythm can be understood not as a regulatory temporality but rather as “an embodied historical shaping.”72 That is, rhythm is not a regulating metre but a figuring that moves outside the range of signification and toward a logic of sensation. It accounts for fluctuation and fluidity, for the forces and intensities that shape a world in constant movement. The murmuring noise of Hoff’s densely textured composition is the shared rhythm of a socio-political field. As Robertson explains:

In noise, the listener finds rhythm, and it is discontinuous, effacing its own figuration and count even as it begins. A lurching, a jarring, a staccato surge, a blockage, a meandering, a too-brief alignment: The prosody of noise parses a discomfort that uncovers, in its unstable caesura, the fact of the citizen’s material fragility. The prosody

70 James Hoff, How Wheeling Feels When The Ground Walks Away, PAN 92, LP, 2011. 71 Robertson, Nilling, 84-85. 72 Julie Carr and Lisa Robertson, “An Interview with Lisa Robertson,” Evening Will Come 25, January, 2014, accessed June 23, 2017, http://www.thevolta.org/ewc25-jcarr-p1.html

of noise will not banish that fragility, but will accompany it. This arrhythmia, this enjambment, is what one is — discordant temporality.”73

How Wheeling Feels When The Ground Walks Away is composed of rhythms that lurch, jarr, surge and block. It is a continuous noise comprised of discontinuous rhythms; a sonicity that captures a myriad of tiny, fragmented movements that register corporeally rather than discursively. Here noise is composed through fluctuation bringing us back to Serres’ conception of the way that a ‘form’ such as the murmur might be born out of noise’s formlessness. Almost none of the speech that we hear in the recording is legible in a discursive sense and yet the work has a visceral quality in which we feel the shape of these shared yet discontinuous rhythmic movements. There is a thickness to the quality of the sound that emerges from the many modes of differencing that are drawn together into a noisy mass. The sounding of such noise, as Robertson tells us, “reveals also an intimate structure, a micro-surface of folds, and the continuation of these folds into our bodies.”74 Of course, this is not to say that Hoff’s work gives the listener access to the experience of the riot. There is an obvious distance that is produced when sounds are transposed from the streets to a stereo, and such a gesture runs the risk of aestheticising and spectacularising a politics of life and death. This work — composed entirely of archival material — treads a fine line between documentary and voyeurism. What is produced is a document that attends to the complex sonicity of collective bodies forming. Perhaps we could say that the murmur here is less a formed rhythm and more a rhythmic ‘event’ as suggested by Eleni Ikonaidou: "a transitory flash that may or may not emerge to perception, a feeling that takes on a life of its own outside and beyond the bodies that live and undergo it."75 Listening to the murmur that animates the rioting crowd is to listen to the fluidity and multi-vocality of improvised assemblies; to what exceeds the space and form of ‘protest’ in media reportage. What we hear are the rhythms of disorder that fold into our bodies and emerge out of them toward (proto-)socialities. How Wheeling Feels When The Ground Walks Away provides us with an opportunity to listen to the collective noise of a murmur. Such an affective listening can open new ways of conceptualising what a collective body might yet do.

A murmur contains a general antagonism toward univocal expression. It is an interruption to the status afforded to the voice as the expression of a unique, individual self. As Dominic Pettman observes, “the voice is often considered as one of the prime instances of unmediated

73 Robertson, Nilling, 61. 74 Ibid., 65-66. 75 Eleni Ikonaidou, The Rhythmic Event, 17.

communication.”76 These largely unchallenged conceptions of the voice create an inextricable link between the voice and speech, in which the capacity to speak (coherently) functions as a marker of a subject that possesses autonomy and agency. The murmur of the crowd is the sound of voices operating in excess of legible speech. It reframes the voice as something that functions excessively. As Adriana Cavarero writes, “to reduce this excess to mere meaninglessness — to whatever remains when the voice is not intentioned toward a meaning, defined as the exclusive purview of speech — is one of the chief vices of logocentrism. This vice transforms the excess of the voice into a lack.”77 In other words, logocentrism denies the possibility for the voice (or voices) to function outside of discursive meaning. In opposition to this common understanding, we can understand the voice as something that, first and foremost, produces noise. As Serres articulates:

Before making sense, language makes noise: you can have the latter without the former but not the other way round. After noise, and with the passage of time, a sort of rhythm can develop, an almost recurring movement woven through the fabric of chance… In turn, this layer of music, universal before the advent of meaning, carries all meaning with it: distilled, differentiated language selects the meaning or meanings it will isolate from this complex, and then broadcast.78

Listening to the murmur of the crowd is to listen to, and for, a noise that interrupts the primacy of univocal speech. The murmur of the crowd is a multi-vocal sounding of collectivity. It is the improvised noise of an improvised form. Here I want to consider assemblies that form in response to induced precarity (and the noise that they produce) in relation to the concept of improvisation. Improvisation — as it is derived from the black radical traditions of jazz and blues — refers to a modality that is generative, relational and inherently collective. As Paul Gilroy observes, the improvised antiphony of black music is a site of encounter in which “the lines between self and other are blurred.”79 The novelist Ralph Ellison expands, commenting

76 Dominic Pettman, Sonic Intimacy: Voice, Species, Technics (or, How to Listen to the World) (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017), 5; italics in original. 77 Adriana Cavarero, For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 13. 78 Michel Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies (I) (London and New York: Continuum, 2008), 120. 79 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London and New York: Verso, 1993), 79.

that improvisation produces a tripartite conception of identity: “as individual, as member of the collective, and as a link in the chain of tradition.”80 Improvisation describes a type of collective organisation that is concerned with the creation of new forms (whether those be political, institutional, or aesthetic) and an orientation toward the unknown. Yet, while improvisation is concerned with the production of novelty, it is also defined by techniques and rules, it is grounded in that which can be practised and repeated. As Erin Manning notes:

Without the rigor and precision that comes of repeated, habitual activity, improvisation's potential vocabulary is too narrow, its implicit force too backgrounded to be functionally emergent. To create the new it is vital to have experimented with the outer limits of a vocabulary that is highly technical, and from there, but transversally, to invent.81

For Manning, improvisation emerges from techniques yet has the potential to generate something in excess of those techniques. It produces an opening in the event in which potentials resonate, activating a process from which new relations may emerge. As she explains:

Paired with the careful crafting of technique, improvisation can play an important role as an emergent procedure for the creation of new associated milieus of relation, milieus that subvert the linear time of if-then. What improvisation can do is texture technique to flesh out its potential. It does so by making "if" an open question, a time-loop, a folding proposition for the moving. From habit to invention, from technique to improvisation, the form becomes a folding-through of time in the making.82

Approached this way, improvisation is that which creates an operational field that moves beyond fixed forms and positions. This operational field is akin to a field of cicadas producing a constantly shifting noise that obscures the distinction between background and foreground, individual and collective. While it is dependent on techniques that can be repeated and rehearsed, it moves beyond these techniques to produce an opening in which “form once more becomes force.”83 Improvisation produces a relational field that operates as the condition for the

80 Ralph Ellison, quoted in Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 79. 81 Erin Manning, Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013), 35. 82 Ibid., 37. 83 Ibid., 34.

generation of novelty.

The improvisational imperative is central to Harney and Moten’s formulation of the undercommons, in which the commons are reimagined not as a set of property relations but as a collective disposition. For Moten, improvisation describes the collective labour of a collective ensemble; or a force of operativity that, as Thom Donovan has noted, can “lead to models of collective organization and production that oppose expropriation, the reproduction of private property, enclosure, and other forms of subjection.”84 Moten finds this sense of resistance in the multi-vocality of improvised performances, in what he and Stefano Harney refer to as “the call for and from disorder.”85 For Moten, improvisation (as both a musical and political strategy) involves the “constant organization and disorganization of the demand that takes the form-in- deformation of a single voice consenting to and calling for its multiplication and division.”86 In improvisation, figured as a cacophony of demands, we might find a model of organisation that resists the univocality of dominant power. Such resistance links improvisation to a politics of noise that might variously take the form of assembly, withdrawal, refusal, excess, incoherence, opacity or riot. Such improvised noise interrupts fixed forms and positions, creating an opening within the event in which forces may fold and resonate to produce newness. For Moten, improvisation is a condition for the emergence of what he refers to as an “ante-politics,” where ante-politics describes the forces and relations that precede and condition the political. As Donovan elaborates, ante-politics is “a politics of anteriority or exteriority in which political motivations and formation are not subsumed by their representation.”87 Here we understand the collective bodies that form in response to induced precarity as an enactment of this improvisational imperative and the murmur of the crowd as improvised noise that contains the creative forces of immanent bodies relating and sounding together.

For Moten, “improvisation is located at the seemingly unbridgeable chasm between feeling and reflection, disarmament and preparation, speech and writing.”88 It emerges from the middle or the space of the in-between; or, to borrow Moten’s formulation, it is situated in "the break” or

84 Thom Donovan, “A grave in exchange for the commons: Fred Moten and the resistance of the object,” Jacket 2, April 6, 2011, accessed May 22, 2017, http://jacket2.org/article/grave-exchange-commons 85 Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 133. 86 Ibid., 133. 87 Thom Donovan, “A grave in exchange for the commons” 88 Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 63.

“the cut.”89 Considered in this way, we can think of improvisation as a transversal practice that creates the possibility for creative emergence from disparate forces. Derived from the work of Guattari, transversality refers to “a dimension that strives to overcome both the impasse of pure verticality and that of mere horizontality: it tends to be achieved when there is maximum communication among different levels and, above all, in different meanings.”90 According to Guattari, transversality belongs to the in-between and involves multi-directional movement that breaks with solely horizontal and vertical coordinates but includes all these and more. As Gary Genosko writes, transversality “is a space in which becomings are truly creative — radically open and simply not what is now actual.”91 The murmur of the crowd — taken as an expression of the improvisational imperative — can be understood as an affective noise that activates transversal movements. It is a noise that cannot be held in place, a noise with no definite origin, a noise that cannot be owned. The murmur of the crowd is not just an accumulation or gathering of voices but a sonic figure that is constantly shifting, relating and mutating. A murmur is a field for transversal expression, a space of radical openness from which novelty may emerge.

I want to think here about the human microphone (or people’s microphone) as one expression of the murmur as it is figured in this chapter. Central to the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests that began in September, 2011 in Zuccotti Park, the human microphone is a technique that emerged as a response to the restrictions on amplification that were placed on the OWS crowd. These restrictions — imposed by the City of New York and implemented by the New York City Police Department — prohibited the crowd from using any type of electronic amplification, such as microphones, megaphones or PA systems. As Dyson has observed, the restrictions may not have been primarily concerned with controlling “the sound or the loudness of sound being produced, but rather the status amplification gave to their speech.”92 That is, the restrictions can be understood as an attempt to curtail the authority that amplification bestows upon speech by gathering it into a channeled flow of sound and simultaneously sanctioning it. In response to these limitations and restrictions, the human microphone emerged as a technique in which the unamplified words of a speaker are made audible to the crowd via a process of

89 Ibid. 90 Félix Guattari, Psychoanalysis and Transversality: Texts and Interviews 1955-1971, trans. Ames Hodges (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2015), 113. 91 Gary Genosko, “The Life and Work of Félix Guattari: From Transversality to Ecosophy,” in The Three Ecologies by Félix Guattari (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 56. 92 Dyson, The Tone of Our Times, 150.

repetition and multiplication. The practice involves the crowd echoing the words of a speaker, one sentence at a time, in order that they become audible to the entire assembly. In the case of large crowds, this process may involve multiple waves of repetition.

At first glance, this practice may seem to be contrary to the notion of the murmur that I have been developing here. The reproduction of a single message by a collective body would appear to be a technique that transforms the multi-vocality of the crowd into a homogenising unity of listening and answering back with sameness. Contrary to this, I argue that we can understand the call and response of the human microphone as an expression of what Harney and Moten refer to as “the call for and from disorder.”93 As we have already established, for Harney and Moten, the “call for and from disorder” is derived from an improvisational imperative that can be found in the antiphonal structure of black music — such as jazz, blues, R&B and hip-hop. This call and response structure does not describe a causal relationship in which the response comes only by way of the call, but rather, denotes a co-productive relation in which the call and the response mutually enact each other. As Moten explains, “the one who is said to have given the call is really an effect of a response that had anticipated him [sic], that is the generative informality out of which his [sic] form emerges.” As such, the call is always a call for and from the noise of multiplicity. Here we can understand the human microphone as a polyvocal expression that produces an alternate conception from authoritative speech, in which the authority of the demand emerges. As Moten suggests, this polyvocality comes “from some kind of multiphonic delirium or fantasy that undermines the univocal authority of sovereignty.”94 The human microphone is a technique that produces multiphonic delirium rather than homogenisation, multiplicity rather than unity, difference rather than sameness. Brunner, Nigro and Raunig argue:

The chanting crowd is not reducible to a euphoric or automatic affirmation of the principal speaker. From this point of view the human microphone is neither ‘human’ nor a ‘microphone’. It is not a microphone since its operation is neither electric regulation nor a precise transmission of a signal with a minimum of noise. On the contrary, it produces a new noise, it aims at the multiplication of voices. It is not a mere reproduction of linguistic content, but a continuing bifurcation of enunciations… The human microphone is not human because reducing its practice to humanness would overlook the social-machinic relations from which these collective enunciations

93 Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 133. 94 Ibid., 135.

emerge.95

The human microphone arises from the multiplication of voices and this multiplication transforms the tendency to univocalise technologically toward, instead, a multi-vocal murmuring. It is not simply the amplification of one voice but rather the production of a new, polyvocal noise. According to Brunner, Nigro and Raunig, the technique of the human microphone constitutes “a blurring of author and audience in relation to a schizo-competence, an inventive ‘creationist’ subjectivity engendering the multi-tasking between reception, repetition and development/enunciation of one’s own position.”96 The crowd that deploys the human microphone becomes a collective assemblage of enunciation that gives rise to the proliferation of micro-differences and creates the conditions for the open and transversal production of different kinds of subjectivity. Brunner, Nigro and Raunig tell us that the “micro- amplification” the human microphone engenders “supports singularities and their different forms of organization, assemblage and reterritorialization.”97

I have been arguing for the murmur of the crowd as a web of transversal enunciations, an improvised noise that belongs to the space of 'the cut' or 'the break.' This multi-vocal sonic figure cannot be accounted for by a general theory of communication, but rather produces connections and openings in logics and hierarchies that might otherwise remain closed. It is an affective noise, a force of expression that is registered as sensation yet amasses much more than what is contained in the sensory. The in-betweeness of the murmur marks it as a field of expression that has the potential to produce new alliances and assemblages. Of course, this does not imply that such alliances are necessarily straightforward or harmonious; rather, the multi- vocality of the murmur foregrounds heterogeneity and dissensus. The murmur of the crowd ushers us toward an open production of subjectivity that, to quote Guattari, is “simultaneously singular, singularizing an individual, a group of individuals, but also supported by the assemblages of space, architectural and plastic assemblages, and all other cosmic assemblages.”98 This emphasis on processuality and singularisation foregrounds becoming rather than being; figuring rather than form.

95 Brunner, Nigro and Raunig, “Post-Media Activism," 13. 96 Ibid. 13. 97 Ibid., 13. 98 Félix Guattari as quoted in Maurizio Lazzarato and Angela Melitopoulos, "Machinic Animism," Deleuze Studies 6, vol. 2 (2012): 240.

The Micropolitics of the Murmur

The affective noise produced by the murmuring crowd is a noise that is registered in terms of microperception, suggesting also the potential for a micropolitics of the social field. As we have already established, microperception is a type of perception that registers imperceptibly acting to interrupt and modulate. It is a register of perception where what Massumi refers to as “microshocks” occur; that is, shocks that are produced by the movements of pre-personal intensities and forces. Microperception refers to the ways in which momentary interruptions of the everyday, such as “a change in focus, or a rustle at the periphery of vision that draws the gaze toward it,” are registered corporeally.99 While these interruptions and moments of transition might not be consciously registered, they nonetheless produce a change in routine that makes the quotidian shudder. Microperception attends to the molecular movements and microintervals that escape binary organisation and produce moments of interruption and rupture. Massumi esoterically describes these molecular movements as "a something-doing."100 He explains:

There is always a something-doing cutting in, interrupting whatever continuities are in progress. For things to continue, they have to re-continue. They have to re-jig around the interruption. At the instant of re-jigging, the body braces for what will come. It in- braces, in the sense that it returns to its potential for more of life to come, and that potential is immanent to its own arising.101

For Massumi, the interruptions and modulations open a transitory space between feeling as sensory registration and doing as either routine habit or intentional act. This space is one for difference, in which, “potentials resonate and interfere.”102 This affective space can be understood as micropolitical, where micropolitics refers to the politics of microperception or the politics of affect.

The political can be understood, following Deleuze and Guattari, in terms of rigid and supple

99 Massumi, Politics of Affect, 53. 100 Ibid., 53. 101 Ibid., 53. 102 Ibid., 55.

segmentarities, or what they describe as molar and molecular segments.103 The molar refers to structures that are well defined and based on rigid codings while the molecular is the register in which lines of flight that produce local and singular connections arise. It should be noted, however, that the molar and molecular are constantly in relation rather than in opposition. The molar and molecular are perhaps better thought as two ways of qualifying relations: molar relations are determinate while molecular relations concern nonlocalisable, indeterminate flows. The molecular can be found in the microperceptions that interrupt and destabilise perception as an aggregated mode of sensing the world. Yet this micropolitics of deterritorialisation (of perception or of any determined ‘formation’ or modality) does not necessarily produce positive change. We cannot resort to a simple binary between the molar and the molecular, nor do molecular-becomings necessarily lead to subversions of the macropolitical. For Deleuze and Guattari, the micropolitical and the macropolitical move through each other and, as such, are inseparable:

Every society, and every individual, are thus plied by both segmentarities simultaneously: one molar, the other molecular. If they are distinct, it is because they do not have the same terms or the same relations or the same nature or even the same type of multiplicity. If they are inseparable, it is because the coexist and cross over into each other… In short, everything is political, but every politics is simultaneously a macropolitics and a micropolitics.104

Micropolitics is, in the first instance, an account of the ways in which power functions as a intermeshing of relations. Deleuze and Guattari explain that molecular movements “do not complement but rather thwart and break through” the molar order.105 The molecular accounts for the lines of flight and escape and yet these fugitive movements only produce transformation when they return to the molar order and reshuffle their segments. A micropolitics of perception and affect is concerned with the relations that exist between the molar and molecular segments. It attends to a third space of transversal movement in which new intensities and forces might emerge. Here we can understand the micropolitical via Massumi, who describes it as a “return to the generative moment of experience, at the dawning of an event, to produce a modulatory commotion internal to the constitution of the event.”106 This modulatory commotion is

103 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 243-270. 104 Ibid., 249; italics in original. 105 Ibid., 252. 106 Massumi, Politics of Affect, 79.

produced by affective forces that act corporeally, even though they might pass by unnoticed. Massumi tells us that the potential of this affective interruption is inherently collective. He writes:

Say there are a number of bodies indexed to the same cut, primed to the same cue, shocked in concert. What happens is a collective event. It’s distributed across those bodies. Since each body will carry a different set of tendencies and capacities, there is no guarantee that they will act in unison even if they are cued in concert. However different their eventual actions, all will have unfolded from the same suspense. They will have been attuned – differentially — to the same interruptive commotion.107

What is being described here is a politics in process, a politics that is yet to cohere into a rigid and stratified form. Situated in the space of the in-between, this micropolitics or affective politics places difference at its core. I want to suggest that this is a way to also approach the murmur of the crowd — as an affective noise that operates micopolitically. The murmuring crowd produces a noise that moves transversally between the molar and the molecular. It is a noise of in-betweeness, an asignifying noise that interrupts and modulates. It is a noise that is registered as affect, a noise that destabilises perception as a whole. Given that the micropolitical is not inherently subversive, the task is to develop techniques for grasping the potential of these interruptive moments before they can be subjected to a process of molarisation. The task is not to find the univocal demand within the polyvocal murmuring of the crowd but rather to develop an embodied mode of listening that attends to the “modulatory commotion internal to the constitution of the event.”108 The task is to listen in a way that intensifies the dissensus of the crowd.

I am arguing that the affectivity of the murmuring crowd ushers us toward a collective politics that is grounded in difference rather than commonality. The murmur moves us beyond the fallacy of a common language of political protest or ‘rights’ and takes the complexity of dissensus as its starting point. For Guattari, this micropolitical dissensus leads us to “a collective and individual subjectivity that completely exceeds the limits of individualization, stagnation, identificatory closure, and will instead open itself up on all sides to the socius, but also to the

107 Ibid., 55-56. 108 Ibid., 79.

machinic.”109 Conceived in this way, the murmur brings us to a conception of vocality that is suspended between an ‘I’ and a ‘we.’ The voices that comprise the murmuring crowd are themselves always multi-vocal, moving transversally between the individual and the collective. To listen to the murmur of the crowd is not simply to listen to the audible sound produced by many voices gathered in one place. Rather, listening to the murmur is an invitation to develop a micropolitical listening practice attuned to the affective tonalities of the social field. Listening in this way, as Serres tells us, involves “my entire body and the whole of my skin.”110 Developing such a micropolitical listening is to develop new approaches to being undercommon, or to inhabit the relational space of the in-between. Such embodied listening might offer us a way, as Dyson suggests, to “attend to the ‘unthought’ and the unspoken, to develop other vocabularies and other forms of political, economic, and social organization.”111 Listening to the murmur of the crowd offers us a way of conceptualising collective politics anew.

A Poetics of Murmur

I want to conclude this chapter by thinking about a poetics of murmur. Tracking the sonic figure as it moves into the realm of textuality, a poetics of murmur opens toward a type of atmospheric reading that attends to the ways in which writing itself might murmur with the affective tonalities of collective bodies in the social field. Here we can think of a poetics of murmur as the poetics of many voices simultaneously sounding in the space of 'the cut' or 'the break,' to once again invoke Moten’s formulation. Such a poetics produces an affective noise in which alternate conceptions of collectivity and sociality might sound. The work of the American-based, Jamaican-born poet Claudia Rankine can be heard and read as a poetics of murmur. Rankine’s experimental poetics explores a conception of the voice that is suspended between an ‘I’ and a ‘we.’ The presentation of a voice that exists between the individual and the collective can be conceived as something like a ‘lyric’ murmur; that is, a textuality that enacts a non-homogenised collective voice speaking of and in an undercommon sociality.

Rankine’s two poetry collections — Don’t Let Me Be Lonely and Citizen — are self-described examples of the lyric poem, both bearing the subtitle: An American Lyric. Rankine’s work both

109 Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 46. 110 Serres, Genesis, 7. 111 Dyson, The Tone of Our Times, 149.

plays with and interrupts received understandings of the lyric that assume a continuity and stability with regard to the form and interpretation of the lyric genre and the lyric voice. As a poetic genre, the lyric has a long and contested history; derived from the ancient Greek word for lyre, the term’s origins designated a song form or the coupling of text and music. It has subsequently expanded and evolved to describe a mode of literary production, a form of poetics that is “read, not sung.”112 The lyric, then, is a genre invoked to describe a myriad of different poetic practices, and as such, a clear definition is difficult to come by. As Yopie Prins and Virginia Jackson write:

Often a poem is considered lyric when it represents an utterance in the first person, an expression of personal feeling, according to a model of lyric reading that diverges from the way poems were performed (and read) in antiquity. Or as an alternative to expressive reading, a poem may be called lyric when it foregrounds the musicality of language by appeal to the ear or to the eye. Sometimes poems are called lyrics simply because they are short; sometimes lyric is defined in opposition to narrative, assuming a modern binary in literary modes; increasingly, lyric is a way to describe the essence of poetry, a poem at its most poetic.113

Popularly, the concept of the lyric has come to serve as an umbrella term for a range of historically and culturally determined poetic forms, such as riddles, sonnets, songs, odes, ballads, dialogues, and more. The specificity of these poetic forms is subsumed by a concept of reading that assumes, as Prins notes, “the continuity of ‘the lyric’ as a transhistorical, transcultural phenomenon.”114 In other words, over time the lyric has stood in for many different poetic forms and today stands in for poetry itself, imagined retrospectively as having a continuous, transhistorical value and aesthetic. Jackson refers this retrospective conception of the lyric as "the post-Romantic lyric.”115

This notion of the post-Romantic lyric is commonly understood as a genre of personal expression that is defined by the lyric ‘I’. The singular voice of the lyric is commonly read as an

112 Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins, “General Introduction” to The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology, ed. Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 1. 113 Ibid., 1. 114 Yopie Prins, “Historical Poetics, Dysprosody, and ‘The Science of English Verse’,” PMLA 123, no.1 (2008): 233-234. 115 Virginia Jackson, “Who Reads Poetry?”, PMLA 123, no.1 (2008): 183.

‘I’ that can stand in for the ‘you’ of the reader but that nonetheless speaks to singular unity of individual experience. It is understood, as Jackson puts it, as “a self-address so absolute every self can identify it as his [sic] own.”116 Here the ‘I’ voice is read as a moment of transcendence and the lyric poem an expression of internal solitude that can be transferred from the poet to the reader. Or, as Jackson writes, “the ‘intersubjective confirmation of the self’ performed by a reading of lyric based upon the identity between poet and reader must be achieved by denying the poem any intersubjective economy of its own. On this view, in order to have an audience the lyric must not have one.”117

Rankine’s work disrupts many of the established conventions and hermeneutic expectations of the post-Romantic lyric in order to produce an alternate conception of the lyric that is culturally, historically and politically specific; that is, a contemporary and explicitly black conception of the lyric. Her work might be considered, as Anthony Reed suggests, an example of the “postlyric”, which he describes as “a name for the poetic production of an ‘I’ situated within vectors of power and history whose expression is always already in a certain sense public and intersubjective rather than private.”118 This conception of the lyric frames the lyric subject as collective rather than individual. Rankine’s murmuring poetics eschews post-Romantic lyric conventions that involve the voice of a stable, coherent speaking subject, “addressed to a reader who stands in for the world (or, addressed to the world whose representative is the reader).”119 Here a resonance can be found between Rankine’s reformulation of lyric subjectivity and the work of UK-based poet and critic, Sean Bonney. Considering the politics of the lyric form in relation to the non-subject, Bonney is similarly interested in a lyric subjectivity that is collective and relational. He writes:

I’d rather have a poetry that via its own lyric subjectivity can pose questions about what the limits of that subjectivity are, and the implications of what a collective subjectivity actually means… one of the things that poetry is best-placed to do, in terms of its connections to other kinds of radical discourses, is to engage with the cacophony that

116 Virginia Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2005), 128. 117 Ibid., 129. 118 Anthony Reed, Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 99. 119 Astrid Lorange, “Creativity and the lyric address,” TEXT 40, (2017): 7, accessed May 12, 2017, http://www.textjournal.com.au/speciss/issue40/Lorange.pdf

collectivity really is, to think through the chaos of voices that make up and are not subsumed within their own collectivity.120

Bonney is calling for a poetics that attends to a politics of dissensus. His interest is in the potential of the poetic form to cultivate a subjectivity that emerges from the collective production of what Guattari refers to as “‘dissident’ subjectivities.”121 Rankine and Bonney are interested in forms of collectivity that attend to the cacophony of individuated voices transindividually comprising a collective body. What emerges is a murmuring poetics of unified disunity. For Rankine and Bonney, this expanded lyric form offers a vehicle for enacting alternate modes of being in common. The poem, to borrow Stephen Collis’s formulation, enacts “a commoning of words and voices… a commoning of kinds of social relations, and thus of a kind of subjectivity in history.”122 Here, poetics and politics are thought as one, where the poem engages and enacts a politics through reading, writing, listening and speaking. This collaborative practice of reading, writing, listening and speaking is indebted to Denise Ferreira da Silva's notion of Black Feminist Poethics, which she describes as "a practice a moment of radical praxis [that] acknowledges the creative capacity Blackness indexes, reclaims expropriated total value, and demands for nothing less than decolonization."123 Reading for the force of interruption that moves through the poem requires a reading that is unshackled from conceptions of universal truth and the majoritarian orders that reproduce them. Ferreira da Silva proposes that we read in order "to un-organize, un-form, un-think the world," such that we might interrupt "the dominant fantasies of a kind of knowing that can only determine itself [...] with iron hinges of universal reason."124 Following Ferreira, I propose a mode of reading that foregrounds hapticality and intuition, moving away from truths as they are produced by and handed down in colonial histories.

Rankine’s book of poems, Citizen: An American Lyric, continues her interest in producing a non-universal conception of the lyric that responds to the historical construction of contemporary America — an America conditioned by slavery and its afterlife, and by the

120 Sean Bonney and Stephen Collis, “We Are An Other: Poetry, Commons, Subjectivity,” in Toward Some Air, ed. Fred Wah and Amy De’Ath (Banff: Banff Centre Press, 2015), 289. 121 Guattari, The Three Ecologies, 56. 122 Bonney and Collis, “We Are An Other,” 283. 123 Denise Ferreira da Silva, "Toward a Black Feminist Poethics: The Quest(ion) of Blackness Toward the End of the World," The Black Scholar 44, no. 2 (2014): 85. 124 Ibid., 86.

spectacle of contemporary media culture. As Anthony Reed notes, Rankine’s work presents “a voice suspended between ‘I’ and ‘we,’ centred and diffuse at once.”125 Her lyric — which moves between poetic prose, essay and occasionally a line-broken poem — presents a series of narrative fragments that document the “everyday” or “ordinary” violence of racism in contemporary America. Her capture of these racist micro-aggressions is an index of the ways in which the affective forces and intensities of a racialised social field register corporeally for non-white subjects. Here we can read Rankine’s text as a patchwork of individuated voices that are “not unified by a common experience but by a common historical horizon that defines their speech as confessions, disclosure of the truth of self and of the predicament of the self.”126 The invocation of multiple, interlocking voices — of a voice “suspended between ‘I’ and ‘we’” — interrupts the concept of lyric transcendence and calls for a mode of reading attuned to the complex multi-vocality of collective enunciation. Reading Rankine’s work as a murmur offers us a productive model for developing a transversal reading (and listening) that attends to the ways in which the multiple and conflicting voices that comprise a collective murmur interrupt the perceived stability and authority of the singular (colonially established) ‘I’.

The fragments of narrative prose that run throughout Citizen can be read as a type of documentary poetics. They are a document of Rankine’s personal experiences, as well as the experiences of family, friends and acquaintances. These fragments of narrative are a collection of instances of micro-aggression that are often passed off as misunderstandings, effects of an immovable structure, or commonplace thoughts. Assembled into a single text, they can be read as a collection of anonymous voices, a type of human microphone or a lyric authored by a proliferation of ‘anons.’ They are the murmurings of a collective body that is subjected to racialised forms of precarity and discrimination:

At the end of a brief phone conversation, you tell the manager you are speaking with that you will come by his office to sign the form. When you arrive and announce yourself, he blurts out, I didn’t know you were black!

I didn’t mean to say that, he then says.

Aloud, you say.

125 Reed, Freedom Time, 97. 126 Ibid., 115.

What? he asks

You didn’t mean to say that aloud.

Your transaction goes swiftly after that.127

And:

The real estate woman, who didn’t fathom she could have made an appointment to show her house to you, spends much of the walk-through telling your friend, repeatedly, how comfortable she feels around her. Neither you nor your friend bothers to ask who is making her feel uncomfortable.128

Such fragments of fragments work to produce a sense of collective experience that could be read as a collection of black voices coalescing in 'the break.' Rankine’s use of the 'you' voice works to produce a sense of collectivity, it is a 'you' that stands in for an ‘I’ and a ‘we’ in which individual experiences are acknowledged to be related but not identical. ‘You’ cannot be directly addressed or asserted but can only be felt across the relations of the poet, the reader and the ‘real estate woman’, for example. While all of these can be a ‘you’, together they destabilize each other. While each narrative fragment captures an expression of racism specific to a singular 'you,' the proliferation of these fragments throughout Citizen works to produce a collective murmur, a 'we' that comprises multiple non-unified and non-universal voices and defined by a sense of shared separateness. Rankine’s refusal to produce a stable, single speaking subject — a conventional lyric ‘I’ — interrupts the assumed coherence of speaking from that position. Suspended between an ‘I’ and a ‘we,’ this lyric voice operates, to borrow Sean Bonney’s formulation, as “1) an interrupter and 2) a collective.”129 Here we can understand Rankine’s lyric voice as one that produces an opening within the event in which new relations and forms might emerge. In the continuous movement of Rankine’s lyric voice, we can locate the improvisational imperative that Moten describes: a multiplication of voices, a collective negotiation of the space of the break, and the production of new modes of black expression. Rankine’s destabilised lyric

127 Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (Minneapolis: Greywolf Press, 2014), 44. 128 Ibid., 51. 129 Sean Bonney, All this burning earth (Berlin: Ill Will Editions, 2016), 16.

voice produces something that is, as Reed notes, both “unrecognizable” and “faithful to the textual nature of blackness as a social encoding of difference.”130 Moving between the individual and the collective, the real and the ideal, it is a voice that “holds on to the emotional effects of what we have been trained to read as lyric subjectivity and racial specificity but plays the idea of a coherent self as fantasy, stressing that the raced, language-enmeshed self is always both public and private.”131 The destabilised voice of Citizen works to produce a conception of blackness that is unable to be subsumed by racist representations of black people that are produced and circulated in multiple registers of the political, namely, following Ferreira da Silva, "the juridic, the economic, and the symbolic."132 Instead it seeks to find new ways to identify and respond to the social antagonisms — both material and affective — that condition black life. Rankine’s lyric voice is a collective voice that continually becomes via its relations with the myriad of other voices that compose it and via its relations with a wider socio-political milieu. Rankine produces a voice that enacts an open question.

The “everyday” experiences of racism that Rankine documents in Citizen coalesce to produce a portrait of the structural, institutional and practical privileging of whiteness. Rankine reveals the ways in which these moments of “ordinary” violence — largely normalised in the white imaginary — are inscribed in embodied ways:

The man at the cash register wants to know if you think your card will work. If this is his routine, he didn’t use it on the friend who went before you. As she picks up her bag, she looks to see what you will say. She says nothing. You want her to say something — both as a witness and as a friend. She is not you; her silence says so. Because you are watching all this take place even as you participate in it, you say nothing as well. Come over here with me, your eyes say. Why on earth would she? The man behind the register returns your card and places the sandwich and Pellegrino in a bag, which you take from the counter. What is wrong with you? This question gets stuck in your dreams.133

The text reveals that these micro-aggressions are far from insignificant; they are affective forces constantly bubbling along in the living of black life, sticking to bodies and psyches, producing effects that long outlast the moment of encounter. Here Rankine’s work can be read as an

130 Reed, Freedom Time, 107. 131 Ibid., 107. 132 Ferreira da Silva, "Toward a Black Feminist Poethics," 82. 133 Rankine, Citizen, 54.

account of the ways in which black existence is conditioned by social death; that is, a mode of life marked by the erasure of social subjectivity.134 Her documentary poetics foreground the ways in which whiteness is constituted, both socially and materially, through this constant negation of black bodies and black subjectivities. It speaks back to this modality of erasure, foregrounding black subjectivity by indexing the embodied and material traces that such affective forces exert. For example, as a physical response:

Certain moments send adrenaline to the heart, dry out the tongue, and clog the lungs. Like thunder they drown you in sound, no, like lightning they strike you across the larynx.135

Or as exhaustion:

you are alone and too tired to turn on any of your devices136

Or as general unease:

An unsettled feeling keeps the body front and center.137

Or as stasis:

When you arrive in your driveway and turn off the car, you remain behind the wheel another ten minutes. You fear the night is being locked in and coded on a cellular level and want time to function as a power wash.138

The accumulation of these minor states and embodied ‘shocks’ gives Citizen a distinct tone

134 For more on the concept of social death see, for example: Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985); Frank B. Wilderson III, Samira Spatzek, and Paula von Gleich, “‘The Inside-Outside of Civil Society’: An Interview with Frank B. Wilderson III.” Black Studies Papers 2, no. 1 (2016): 4–22. 135 Rankine, Citizen, 7. 136 Ibid., 5. 137 Ibid., 8. 138 Ibid., 10.

that moves between a sense of immobility, exhaustion and anger. Here I am drawing on Sianne Ngai’s understanding of tone to mean “a cultural object’s affective bearing, orientation, or ‘set toward’ the world… its global organizing affect, its general disposition or orientation toward its audience and the world.”139 Tone accounts for the affective or atmospheric qualities — those shifting intensities and forces of relational encounter that are perceived as formless and unstructured — that give a work its sense of consistency, even when that consistency is a noisy one. While these affective qualities might be uncovered by the reader and registered as subjective feelings, they operate in excess of both the subjective and the objective. As Ngai explains, “tone is never entirely reducible to a reader’s emotional response to a text or reducible to the text’s internal representations of feeling (though it can amplify and be amplified by both).”140 Rankine’s use of tone produces a sense of situatedness in the affective dimension of an encounter. Her use of a lyric voice suspended between 'I' and 'we' moves reading to a space suspended between the subjective and the objective, a space in which affects circulate. Tone, as Rankine writes in an interview with Lauren Berlant, “helps me know how to read the spaces between things,” and it is in these spaces between things that affect resides.141 While Citizen indexes feelings of exhaustion, anger and disgust, the tone of the work exceeds the singularity of these felt states. Citizen moves in and out of these subjective boundaries and in doing so produces a reading environment that attends to the affective dimension of a racialised social sphere.

The tone of Citizen is produced in part through the multi-mediality of Rankine’s writing. Rankine brings together fragmented narratives (that document her own experiences and the experiences of friends and family), with short lyric essays, critical prose pieces, poems and scripts for video works made in collaboration with the photographer and filmmaker John Lucas. Images — such as reproductions of artworks and television stills — are distributed throughout the book, working to both illustrate and complicate Rankine’s text. The movement between the subjective and the objective, the individuated and the collective, text and image, verse and prose produces a tone that is continuously shifting and producing spaces between things. Reading Rankine requires a type of reading that attends to both the formal properties of the text and those that evade our analytics; it must move between the subjective and the objective in order to comprehend the consistency of the text that is encapsulated by its tone. We might think of this

139 Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2007), 28-29. 140 Ibid., 28 - 29. 141 Lauren Berlant and Claudia Rankine, “Claudia Rankine by Lauren Berlant”, BOMB Magazine 129 (2014), accessed May 15, 2017, http://bombmagazine.org/article/10096/claudia-rankine

as a reading with rather than a reading of.

Reading Rankine’s work as a poetics of murmur moves us toward a type of atmospheric reading practice (one that extends from an embodied listening) that attends to the ways in which sonico-textual figures help us become more attuned to the affective tonalities of a social field. In Rankine’s poetics, what emerges is a collective enunciation of a murmuring collective body. Read in this way, Rankine’s poetics of murmur produce a multi-vocal web of transversal enunciations that fold into undercommon modes of sociality. This murmuring is always escaping, moving in excess of what can be understood discursively. This fugitive speech gives rise to a moving noise that pushes us toward a haptic encounter with what is unformed, deformed or in the process of forming. Hapticality, Harney and Moten tell us, is "the touch of the undercommons, the interiority of sentiment, the feel that what is to come is here."142 To attend to the fugitivity of speech, then, is to feel the future coming.

The murmur is a shaping of noise's multiplicity toward collective formations operating in the socio-political sphere. The following chapter — Stutter — further develops this contouring of noise toward undercommon conceptions of sociality. Yet, where this chapter was concerned primarily with the noise that arises from many individuating voices sounding together, the next examines the force of interruption as it acts upon the individuated voice. The stutter reveals the voice to be intrinsically interrupted and interruptive, a fragmented voice that opens toward void-like space that exceeds representation and in which received histories and archives might be contested and rewritten.

142 Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 98.

stutter

The theory of being, ontology, brings us to atoms. The theory of relations brings us to the parasite.

— Michel Serres, The Parasite

the noise of exchange recombinant absence shards of debris molecular machines

coherence — pale and shining under a canopy of wars — silence

— Amanda Stewart, “something amiss” from Emptied Signs

It is no longer the character who stutters in speech; it is the writer who becomes a stutterer in language. He makes the language as such stutter: an affective and intensive language, and no longer an affectation of the one who speaks.

— Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical

A stutter is an interruption in the flow of speech, or the eruption of noise in a signal, produced by the involuntary repetition, distortion, prolongation or suspension of phonemes. This complex mode of speech contrasts with the common conception of the voice as the antithesis of noise. Rehearsing this ‘common sense’ understanding of the opposition between the voice and noise, Connor writes, “noise is anonymous, mechanical and meaningless; voice is personal, animate and expressive. Noise is accident, voice is intent. Noise has no importance,

voice is full of portent.”1 Indeed, the voice is often associated with the image of a fully-formed subject, and in turn, the fully-formed subject is imagined to possess a clear, unbroken voice. Yet, as Connor tells us, “all too often, the voice is experienced as the more-than-body, as the body projected, perfected.”2 This chapter takes the sonic figure right into the heart of proper and universal conceptions of language via the work of stuttering. Here, stuttering is a more explosive generative noise that interrupts ‘common sense’ and idealised conceptions of the voice that posit the voice as functioning in the service of systemised meaning manifest as speech. Interrupting the flow of language (or rather, the idea that language is ordered by a logic that always precedes it), the stutter is considered as an operation that opens language to processes of continuous variation.

The complexity of the status of the voice is that it is both of the body and in excess of the body — both physical and phantasmagorically transcending that physicality. These projections of a voice that ascribe to it a position or register beyond the body give rise to the image of a pure or ideal dematerialized voice. As Aristotle tells us, “voice is a kind of sound characteristic of what has soul in it; nothing that is without soul utters voice.”3 The corporeal noises of the body are separated from the purity of the voice by an appeal to the voice as the seat for the soul of the subject. Dyson, reading Aristotle, writes, “the voice is ‘a significant sound; not the sound (merely) of air respired, as coughing is’ but rather a sound that travels via the windpipe where it is struck by the soul.”4 Excised of all extraneous noises, including those associated with respiration, this ‘pure’ voice no longer contains any trace of the body. For this reason, Dyson can say “Aristotle holds his breath in order that the soul might speak.”5 This disembodied voice can only ever be a projection, of both the metaphysical soul and an idealised, healthy subject. Disconnected from the body of its production, the voice operates as an example of what Jacques Derrida refers to as the ideal object:

1 Steven Connor, Beyond Words: Sobs, Hums, Stutters and Other Vocalizations (London: Reaktion Books, 2014), 7, accessed March 03, 2017, https://ebookcentral-proquest- com.wwwproxy1.library.unsw.edu.au/lib/unsw/detail.action?docID=1644071 2 Ibid., 17. 3 Aristotle, “On the Soul,” in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon, trans. J.A. Smith (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 572. 4 Frances, Sounding New Media: Immersion and Embodiment in the Arts and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 23. 5 Ibid., 24.

The ideal object is the most objective of objects; independent of the hic et nunc (here- and-now) of events and of the acts of the empirical subjectivity who intends it. The ideal object can be repeated, to infinity, while remaining the same.6

As idealised, the status of the voice is afforded an authority that trumps all other sound. Yet in order for this elevation to occur the voice must transform from sound into speech, from noise into meaning. It is only when the voice is separated from the ambiguous noises beyond signification that it becomes an idealised instance of sound. It signals a distinction between meaningful sound and unwanted noise. As Pettman notes, we “celebrate the vocal vector of speech as one of the finest mediums of communication and connection available. Indeed, the voice is the ticket to entrance into the human community.”7 Here the voice is assumed to function in the service of rational thought and semiotic systems. It is oriented toward meaning, where meaning is located in speech. In such a conception, the voice becomes trapped within a closed system that determines a priori what constitutes sound and meaning. The paradox of this coupling is that the voice becomes disconnected from the body and the mouth that produces it. Expanding on this notion, Cavarero observes, “cut off from the throats of those who emit it, speech undergoes a primary devocalization that leaves it with only the depersonalized sound of a voice in general.”8 Unable to hear the materiality of the voice, we are left with an idealised voice whose authority and authenticity derives from its capacity to (re)produce semantic meaning via univocal speech.

This projected voice feeds into a conception of communication that emphasises and prioritises clarity and precision. The idealised voice that is more than the body gives rise to the production of those heavily mediated voices — such as the voice of the politician or media personality — that litter contemporary media environments and extend into the production of machine voices that are increasingly entwined in our daily lives. Writing about a new generation of wearable technologies — such as the Bragi Dash, “a set of high tech ear buds that connect wirelessly to each other, to any attached peripherals, and to the cloud” — David Cecchetto, Marc Couroux, Ted Hiebert and Eldritch Priest (collectively known as The Occulture) describe the production of a techno-fetishised voice inside the head that blocks out all sounds except for

6 Jacques Derrida, Voice and Phenomenon: Introduction to the Problem of the Sign in Husserl’s Phenomenology, trans. Leonard Lawlor (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2011), 65. 7 Pettman, Sonic Intimacy, 4. 8 Cavarero, For More Than One Voice, 14.

the sound of the device.9 Such technology, inextricably connected to a data-driven conception of the perfect(ed) body, amplifies this notion of disembodied voice by producing a voice that is not only more than the body but also transcends the human:

There is simply a voice inside one’s head sharing information about what is happening in one’s body and mind. There is an intimacy to this interface, an integration of biometric data and motivational speaking that highlights the ability of sound to augment the transparency of technological integration.10

This responsive yet generic voice simultaneously measures and shares, marking it as one that is defined by clarity and efficiency. It shares “our own information back with us, informing us about lives we didn’t even know we were leading.”11 Here the disembodied and idealised voice is returned as a voice inside the head and in command of a technocultural ‘body.’ The demand for clarity — reinforced by contemporary media technologies in their ongoing quest to reduce noise and amplify/perfect 'signal' — produces a voice that must be fully articulated and excised of noise.

Yet despite any and all efforts, noise cannot be contained or eliminated. The intrusion of corporeal, medial or technical noise — stutters, coughs, inhalations, exhalations, hiccups, clicks, squeaks, pops and more — challenges any conception of the voice as seamless, clean or ‘whole’ prior to its passage through the body. It is, instead, fragmentary, interrupted and interrupting; some ‘thing’ that must continuously be made and remade. As Pettman notes, “the voice has the potential to create a glitch in the humanist machinery, when it surprises us with the intensity or force of an “aural punctum” — a sonic prick or wound, which unexpectedly troubles our own smooth assumptions or untested delusions.”12

Dyson explains that all voices are, in fact, full of noise, “moving from the interior to the exterior, carrying traces of the body into evanescent speech, the voice is, and always has been, haunted by its multiple identifications.”13 The voice that is more than a body reveals itself to be a

9 The Occulture, Ludic Dreaming: How to Listen Away from Contemporary Technoculture (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), 97. 10 Ibid., 98-99. 11 Ibid., 99. 12 Pettman, Sonic Intimacy, 5. 13 Dyson, Sounding New Media, 7.

fallacy, and, in its place, we find a voice that stutters. The stutter is an ontogenetic disruption that is already conditioning the transformation that the idealised voice has already (seemingly) undertaken. The stutter interrupts the transfiguration of sound to speech, returning the voice, even if only momentarily, to noise. Interrupting the flow of speech as signification, it re-reveals the volatility of the voice, showing it to be something that oscillates between noise and signal, sense and nonsense, language and babble. But how might we understand a voice that interrupts itself? What are we to make of a voice that surrenders to the limits of meaning?

The stutter moves us from a unified and seamless voice to the voice as always already multiple. This multiplicitous voice is not merely a voice impeded, but also a voice altering and mutating. The stutter conditions speech by generating ruptures that open the voice to parasitic noises that transform it, such as accents, tonal emphases and other eccentricities. Such noise sets off a process of continuous modulation. Connor elaborates:

For the voice to fail is not only for it to wane, weaken, or be broken, to become less itself. It is mixing as well as dimming. For the voice to fail is to become adulterated, more than what it was. The voice is interfered with, picks up interference, as though it were an organ of listening as well as of transmission, impression as well as expression.14

The voice that becomes more than what it was gestures to a voice that was always already moving between the singular 'I' and the collective 'we.' As was argued in the previous chapter, the collective voice that we can find in some forms of poetry — such as Rankine's murmuring lyric — suggests the noise of many individuated voices can be understood as dissensual and collective. This voice is revealed to be both of the subject and in excess of ‘a’ subject — an individual voice that contains the traces of a multiplicity of other voices. This interruptive voice might be better conceived, to borrow Deleuze’s phrase, as “a plurality of centres.”15 Simultaneously acting as an impediment and a generative force, the stutter acts upon the voice to produce transformations. Or, as Connor puts it, “the voice is nourished by the parasites and imperfections that feed upon it.”16

I am arguing that the ubiquity and everydayness of the stutter in voicing provides a useful

14 Connor, Beyond Words, 29-30. 15 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London and New York: Continuum, 1994), 56. 16 Connor, Beyond Words, 32.

figuration for listening to the generative potential of interruption. Placing an accent on the generativity of the stutter, Connor writes: "stutterers tend to become skillful synonymizers, trick-recyclists, unbelievers in the church of the mot juste.”17 Taking this beyond the individual stutterer, I am thinking of the stutter as that which both reveals noise as conditional for the production of any voicing and performs ongoing transformative operations upon vocality and signification. A voice that is full of non-linguistic and non-semantic noise moves us beyond a logocentric definition of the voice. Following this logic, Eidsheim deems the stuttering, noisy voice to be “a voice that ‘transcends the plane of speech’ and indeed ‘plays a subversive role with respect to the disciplining codes of language’ and the fetishization of certain types of vocal sound.”18 This voice that exists in continuous variation interrupts the standardisation of language in speech, creating new conditions for language to transfigure and mutate.

As I discussed in the introductory chapter, the parasite (noise) is the immanent genesis of all informatic relations, serving a dual function as the medium of all communication and the agent of interference and disruption. It produces transformation by forcing systems to either incorporate or expel the noise of difference. Keeping our attention on the mouth of the parasite as its definitive ‘organ,' we can understand the stuttering mouth as productive of a type of parasitic noise that, following Serres, both conditions and modifies systems and relations. The stutter interferes with the flow of signification, creating the conditions for language to transform and mutate. An eruption of noise, the stutter produces a rupture that reveals the noise of intensive and extensive milieus, the pure mediality that affects ‘signal’ and signification as these pass through it. Taken in this way, the stutter can be understood as a figure of fugitivity and difference that impels variation and mutation. Setting off processes of continuous variation, the stutter is a movement of rupture and escape that makes speech itself possible.

This chapter moves from the stuttering voice to stuttering systems, or to paraphrase Deleuze, from stuttering in language to the stuttering of language itself.19 Here I am interested in the work of writers and performers that make language and its relations — always also social and political — stutter. Listening to, and reading, the work of the Australian poet and performer Amanda Stewart, the chapter begins by considering how noise — in its stuttering figuration — can interrupt the majoritarian ordering of language and set off a process of becoming-minor.

17 Ibid., 27. 18 Eidsheim, Sensing Sound, 101. 19 Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 108.

Turning to the long poem, Zong!, by the Tobago-born, Canadian-based poet and lawyer M. NourbeSe Philip, I then examine the ways in which works of literature might make the discourses and lived legacies of slavery and colonisation stutter. I want to suggest that the stutter not only interrupts the flow of signification but is a productive interruption, opening a space of possibility in which (social) relations can be made anew.

Noisy Exchange in the Mouth of the Parasite

“The mouth,” writes Serres, “is the organ of the parasite. Its polyvalence is admirable: it is used for eating, speaking, yelling, singing, burping, hiccoughing, and gargling.”20 It is the site of a multitude of noises: slurps, croaks, groans, lip smacks, rasps, swallowings and more. It is the organ for eating, speaking, and interrupting. Like all of the other activities located in the mouth, speech is full of noise. As Serres puts it, “the first little noises of the mouth parasite speech.”21 Interferences, fluctuations, distortions, malfunctions, errors and opacities are an inevitable part of speech. Interrupting speech in a way that renders linear flow and a stable platform for meaning and speaking impossible, these parasitic noises heterogeneously produce interruptive moments of flux from which relations and meaning may be reconfigured. Conceived of in this way, stutter is a type of parasitic noise — a sonic figure that is interruptive, modulatory and generative.

As I have already noted, stuttering is ubiquitous in speaking. This is not to trivialise the experiences of those whose speech is impeded by a (pathologised) stuttering, but rather to draw attention to the fact that all speech contains a degree of dysfluency and noise. Our everyday speech is filled with distortions, repetitions, breakages and suspensions. Corporeal noises — both audible and not — are woven into the texture of our speech. In this way, stuttering can be understood, following Craig Dworkin, less as a “condition that does or does not exist than a rate at which one aspect of the normal mechanism of speech can no longer be overlooked or ignored.”22 Dworkin’s formulation mirrors a Serresian account of parasitic noise in which stuttering is both an ineluctable aspect of speech and an agent of transformation. The ubiquity of the stutter reminds us that interruption is always just around the corner, that interference is

20 Serres, The Parasite, 243. 21 Ibid. 22 Dworkin, “The Stutter of Form,” in The Sound of Poetry / The Poetry of Sound, ed. Craig Dworkin and Marjorie Perloff (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2009),166-167.

the rule rather than the exception. Attending to the figuring the stutter performs allows us to hear the generative potential of interruption and noise rather than to simply pathologise stuttering as a speech impediment. In other words, treating the stutter as a sonic figure rather than simply a sonic phenomenon allows us to consider not only the ways the stutter is registered in speech and language but also, and more importantly, the ways in which language itself may be made to stutter. This interruptive sonic figure is not simply located in the mouth or the ear, but rather can be understood as an operative producing a relational field that moves between the sonic and the textual. It is not a representation of interruption but a mode of action and a moving figure, where movement can be understood, following Deleuze, as implying “superposition of perspectives, a tangle of points of view, a coexistence of moments which essentially distort representation.”23

The work of Australian poet and performer Amanda Stewart can be located in the movement between sound and noise, text and speech, sense and nonsense. Stewart’s output, which takes the form of printed works, sound recordings and performances, pushes the limits of both the voice and language, revealing each to be contingent and relational. Working across different forms of inscription (aural, written, electronic), for Stewart the poem is a multiple. Her poetry collection I/T: Selected Poems was published as a CD of sound works and performances of poems, and a book of text and visual poems.24 However, as Stewart writes in the liner notes of the release, “the aural forms of the poems are not simply dictated by the page. The two forms (written and aural) exist in parallel, integrally related but also distinct from each other.”25 For Stewart, the aural is not simply a translation of the written or vice versa, but rather involves the noisy exchange between different forms of inscription. Her sonic works often incorporate the corporeal noises of the body, extended vocal techniques, multitracking, virtuosic performance, tonal inflections, intonation and various forms of vernacular and discursive speech. In its written form her work plays with the space of the page, the function of grammar and punctuation, and the fragmentation of words and meanings. The parallel existence of the written and the aural, and the noisy movement between them, shows neither the performative or published work to have been whole per se, either separately or when taken together. The noise that moves through (and across and between) Stewart’s work opens a channel between sound and noise, text and speech, listening and reading. The two versions of Stewart’s poem

23 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 56. 24 Amanda Stewart, I/T: Selected Poems (Surry Hills: Here and There Books; and Potts Point: SPLIT Records, 1998). 25 Stewart, CD liner notes from I/T.

“Sound and Sense” that appear in I/T illustrate this noisy passage between the written and the aural, in which the two versions remain related yet distinct. The poem is organised around a repetitive structure that both juxtaposes and links pairings of words:

2.1. Excerpt from "Sound and Sense"26

The poem continues with this repetitive structure, interrupted only occasionally by the similarly repetitive refrain, “and the sound of my sound of my sound of my.” The poem, which at first seems to pit one term against the other, can be better understood as opening a passage that enables movement between each of these terms. The pairings of words that Stewart selects function as limit points, however, these are not placed in opposition to one another, but rather are yoked together by the adverbial use of the conjunction 'and.' Stewart’s use of 'and' is open- ended here, variously suggesting connections or accumulations or alternatives. The 'and' of the poem emphasises the mobility of language by bringing each set of terms into a relation that modifies them. As Deleuze and Guattari note, “an expression as simple as AND … can play the role of tensor for all of language. In this sense, AND is less a conjunction than the atypical expression of all possible conjunctions it places in continuous variation.”27 For Deleuze and Guattari, atypical expressions interrupt the correct usage of language and in doing so, encourage movement toward “a beyond of language.”28 Such writing can be considered, following Astrid Lorange, as “adverbial in the sense that it focuses on the specifics of becoming, emphasis, and orientation.”29 Lorange, writing about the modernist poet Gertrude Stein, explains:

26 Stewart, I/T, 40. 27 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 116. 28 Ibid. 29 Astrid Lorange, How Reading is Written: A Brief Index to Gertrude Stein (Middletown: Wesleyan

An adverb, very broadly, is a grammatical unit that modifies language. Adverbs are not always in the service of clarification — they can cause ambiguity by generating modifications that negate, confuse or obscure.30

The 'and' of Stewart’s poem enacts a type of relationality that is unfixed, opening a space of multiplicity and possibility between each of the sets of terms in which each term is altered by the ambiguity of the contact with the other. Lorange finds a resonance between adverbial writing and the radical empiricism of William James, who emphasises that the processual relations that connect experiences are part of the structure of knowledge. Making this connection, Lorange quotes from James’s Principles of Psychology:

There is not a conjunction or preposition, and hardly an adverbial phrase, syntactic form, or inflection of voice, in human speech, that does not express some shading or other of relation which we at some moment actually feel to exist between larger objects of our thought… We ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue, a feeling of cold.31

The Jamesian “feeling of and” is captured from a different perspective in the aural version of “Sound and Sense.” Stewart monotonously intones the compact, monosyllabic pairings of words to produce a repetitive rhythmic texture. The multitracked vocals begin to splinter and multiply, echoing and overlapping as they move in and out of phase with each other. The multiplication of voices continues as the track progresses, gradually enveloping the single voice and producing a thick vocal texture in which words dissolve into, and emerge from, the sound and noise. The repetition and accumulation of voices produces a stammering in which words and phrases begin to delay, fragment and layer. The repetition of the stutter produces continuous alteration and transformation as the noises of the mouth begin to parasite speech. Words give way to an endless stream of sibilants and language disintegrates into a pulsating noise full of hisses and gasps. This is the noise of the wider milieu, or, in Serresian terms, the “excluded middle.” The stuttering repetition that Stewart performs renders the conjunctive space of the 'and' as parasitic noise that conditions, connects and transforms the paired relations. The individual voice that

University Press, 2014), 112; italics in original. 30 Ibid., 112-113. 31 William James, Principles of Psychology, Vol. 1 (New York: Cosimo, 2007) as quoted in Lorange, How Reading is Written, 115; italics in original.

speaks the poem alters as it passes through the thick and viscous noise of the wider milieu. Things stick to it and interfere with it “as though it were an organ of listening as well as of transmission.”32 The voice is revealed to be both fragmented and multiple, drawn from a murmuring collective assemblage. The dense sonicity that is performed in the recording demonstrates James’ “feeling of and” as a space of passage and possibility. What we hear is a noise of continuous variation in which voices stutter and multiply, splinter and intersect.

Thick yet full of fluctuation, this noise can be understood, following Serres, as a “fuzzy topology.”33 Stewart allows us to feel the fuzziness of this space of relational movement that exists in between ordinarily binarised entities. We feel the viscosity of this adverbial ‘and’, registering it as a space of conjunction, accumulation, transformation and variation. The two versions of the poem — sonic and textual — reveal knowledge to be “a succession of tunings,” resonant yet distinct, that attends to the conjunctive space between the larger objects of our thought.34 The poem concludes by gesturing to the instability and relationality of both sound and language:

2.2 Excerpt from "Sound and Sense"35

For Stewart, knowledge resides in a relational space. The echo that Stewart invokes is the sounding of a voice that repeats with difference, a repetition that alters as it repeats. Here we can see the parasite at work as a figure of difference that sets off the ontogenesis of a system for bringing things together and for separating them. Serres writes: "The difference is part of the thing itself, and perhaps it even produces the thing. Maybe the radical origin of things is really that difference, even though classical rationalism damned it to hell. In the beginning was the noise."36

For Serres, the parasite is a force of difference generating a movement of variation. He writes:

32 Connor, Beyond Words, 30. 33 Serres takes the concept of topology from mathematics, using it to describe the relations between constituent parts. Serres, The Parasite, 57. 34 Stewart, I/T, 40. 35 Ibid.,,41. 36 Serres, The Parasite, 13.

“the introduction of the parasite in the system immediately provokes a difference, a disequilibrium. Immediately, the system changes; time has begun.”37 For Stewart, the noises that parasite speech give us a voice full of differencings and variation. In the stuttering voice that Stewart presents us with we can find a resonance between the Serresian and Deleuzian accounts of difference as a generative and productive force. For Deleuze, difference is configured in terms of affirmation rather than negation, describing a pure difference that is immanent to every entity. This internal difference — what Deleuze refers to as “difference in itself” as opposed to the comparative concept of “difference from the same” — forms the foundations of an ontogenesis of multiplicities and becomings. Repetition is inextricably linked to this generative conception of “difference in itself.” For Deleuze, repetition is produced not by mimesis but rather by difference, and as such, always gives rise to something new. The echo that sounds in the final line of Stewart’s poem is a sounding of a repetition with difference, and for Stewart, knowledge can be found in this precarious nexus of multiplicities and modulations. The poem demonstrates that knowledge resides less in the actual words and sounds of the poem than in the movement of the words and sounds — that is, in the way they repeat with difference and the ways they form connections and relations. Similarly, the two versions of the poem can be understood as a repetition of difference in and of itself. There is no causal relationship between the two versions of the poem; only their relational movements of repetition and transformation. The two versions of the poem exist not in order to make sense of each other but rather to offer different ways of registering and perceiving “the feeling of and” that the poem(s) relationally enact.

This movement between, and experimentation with, the sonic and the textual in Stewart’s work can be understood as an interrogation of the materiality of language on the one hand, and of the conventions and rules that govern how language is perceived and used on the other. Stewart exposes and disrupts language’s function as an enforcer of social and political order by breaking apart its standardised usages and reassembling it as something that is at once familiar and foreign. Stewart grasps language in a state of perpetual variation, amplifying the noise of difference in her poetics. Language is made to stutter under the force of sustained experimentation and play. Considered in this way, we might think of Stewart’s poetics, following Deleuze and Guattari, as a “minor literature” and Stewart as a “minor writer,” a notion that will be further developed below.38

37 Ibid., 182. 38 The ‘minor’ is a central concept for Deleuze and Guattari and moves through their work on literature, aesthetics, politics and sociality. The concept appears in A Thousand Plateaus and Kafka: Toward a Minor

For Deleuze and Guattari, the task is to attend to what language does rather than what language represents; that is, language can be understood as a mode of action that produces transformations at the level of social relations and positions. As they tell us, “language is made not to be believed, but to be obeyed and to compel obedience.”39 The primary function of language is not to communicate information but to issue orders and to establish an order. As such, according to Deleuze and Guattari, the order-word is the “elementary unit of language.”40 The key to understanding the sociality of language, the order-word simultaneously enacts a command that alters the state of things, and establishes an order by positioning bodies in a field of forces. For Deleuze and Guattari, order-words are not simply imperatives but apply to all statements:

We call order-words not a particular category of explicit statements (for example, in the imperative), but the relation of every word or every statement to implicit presuppositions, in other words, to speech acts that are, and can only be, accomplished in the statement. Order-words do not concern commands only, but every act that is linked to statements by a ‘social obligation.’ Every statement displays this link, directly or indirectly. Questions, promises, are order-words. The only possible definition of language is the set of all order-words, implicit presuppositions, or speech acts current in a language at a given moment.41

Every utterance, Deleuze and Guattari tell us, is inflected by an explicit or implicit imperative. The ordering function of language is produced not only by semantic meaning but also by the connotations, implications and presuppositions that are implicit to any utterance. Implicit presuppositions are nondiscursive and relate to the matrix of forces that condition and position speaking bodies, determining what they say and how they act. Here we can understand order- words as the relation of a statement with the implicit presuppositions and speech-acts immanent to it. For Deleuze and Guattari, “the meaning and syntax of language can no longer be defined independently of the speech acts they presuppose.”42 The semantic content of language cannot be separated from the nondiscursive or extra-linguistic forces that are internal

Literature. 39 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 88. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid., 91-92. 42 Ibid., 90.

to every statement. The context of statement produces a meaning in excess, or outside of, the semantic content of the statement. Brian Massumi offers the following examples: "The head of the house says ‘Who has the salt?’ (read: don’t just sit there, for Christ’s sake, hand it to him). The minister says ‘I now pronounce you man and wife’ (read: Be fruitful and multiply, for Christ’s sake). The principal says ‘Here’s your diploma’ (read: Get a job, sucker)." 43

In Massumi’s example we can see how order-words do not simply communicate a command but also produce, or uphold, an order. In doing so, order-words enact what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as “incorporeal transformations” upon bodies. As was discussed in chapter one, a body can be taken in the broadest sense, defined not by its materiality but rather by the dynamic relations of its parts and its intensive and extensive capacity to affect and be affected. With respect to how order-words are affective (but not necessarily corporeal), Deleuze and Guattari offer the example of a juridical sentence that immediately transforms the accused from the position of a defendant to that of a convict. This speech act – ‘guilty’ – enacts an instantaneous transformation that is incorporeal rather than corporeal (even though it might carry with it future corporeal or capital punishments, such as death). There is no immediate corporeal effect but the position of the body in a social field has been changed. The body has transformed in relation to other bodies and to itself and this transformation is instantaneously enacted by the order-word of the speech act.44

While order-words enact an order and perform its transformations, they do not necessarily produce the same order. Order-words are not constants but variables that belong to a continuum of variation immanent to language. New order-words arise and modify the variables without being part of an existing or known regime. Deleuze and Guattari write, “the instantaneousness of the order-word, its immediacy, gives it a power of variation in relation to the bodies to which the transformation is attributed."45 Here they offer the example of the performative utterance, “I swear!,” noting that it functions as a different statement and produces a different order depending on whether it is spoken by a child to their father, one lover to another, or a witness before the court. The task is not to extract a constant or a constant relation from these different statements but to understand them as belonging to a continuum that has no beginning or end. For Deleuze and Guattari, language exists in a state of perpetual variation, yet the variables can be treated in two distinct ways. These two different treatments of language

43 Massumi, A User’s Guide, 31. 44 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 94. 45 Ibid., 96.

constitute major and minor usages. The major treatment is defined by constants and takes language to be a system in equilibrium; the minor is defined by the force of variation and understands the system to be in a continual state of disequilibrium. The major treatment of language involves the extraction and enforcement of syntactical, grammatical, semantic and phonological constants from variables. Here utterance undergoes a process of standardisation and homogenisation where it is divided into correct usage and dialect. Deleuze and Guattari see the major treatment of language is inextricably linked to dominant forms of political power:

Forming grammatically correct sentences is for the normal individual the prerequisite for any submission to social laws… The unity of language is fundamentally political. There is no mother tongue, only a power takeover by a dominant language that at times advances along a broad front, and at times swoops down on diverse centres simultaneously… The scientific enterprise of extracting constants and constant relations is always coupled with the political enterprise of imposing them on speakers and transmitting order-words.46

In contrast, the minor usage of language involves the placing of linguistic variables in a state of variation. As Daniel Smith notes, the minor treatment of language follows “the virtual line of continuous variation that subtends the entire language, and that is itself apertinent, asyntactic or agrammatical, and asemantic.”47 The minor follows a movement that is immanent to language itself and this movement creates the conditions for language to change. This is not to say that minor treatments of language exist in a simple opposition to major ones, rather, the relationship between major and minor languages is complicated and always singular. As Deleuze and Guattari explain, “minor languages do not exist in themselves: they exist only in relation to a major language and are also investments of that language for the purpose of making it minor.”48 Major and minor can be understood as belonging to a continuum — the more a language acquires the traits of a major form the more likely it is to be affected by perpetual variation that can transform it into a minor language.

For example, we can understand African American Vernacular English (AAVE) as a minor language that takes phonetic, semantic and syntactical elements from a major language — American English — in order to set them in variation. As Deleuze and Guattari tell us, “the

46 Ibid., 117-118. 47 Daniel W. Smith, Essays on Deleuze (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 218. 48 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 122.

problem is not the distinction between major and minor language; it is one of becoming.”49 The minor usage of language sets off a process of becoming-minor that continually interrupts the major, propelling it toward change.

Considered in this way, we can understand the minor as something like an undercommons of language — as a practice of radical sociality. As I established in chapter one, the undercommons is a space of fugitivity in which a radical version of commonality might be enacted. It is not bound by physical space but rather is produced by modes of living and strategies of resistance generating movement that interrupts the majoritarian or institutional order. In Deleuzo-Guattarian terms, the undercommons is minoritarian in that it is “a potential, creative and created, becoming.”50 The undercommons grasps the immanent movement of things and seeks to amplify this movement toward disequilibrium and disorientation. As Jack Halberstam observes, “the movement of things can be felt and touched and exists in language and in fantasy, it is flight, it is motion, it is fugitivity itself.”51 Here fugitivity does not only refer to exit and disappearance but also to the complex movement of becoming “that continually oversteps the representative threshold of the majoritarian standard.”52 We can understand fugitivity as a multidirectional movement of escape or a line of continuous variation. Perpetual variation gives us language as always deterritorialising in some direction or other — language in its production as always in relation with minorising forces. Here the question we must ask is: what, then, might a minor or undercommon literature be generating as both an interruption to signification but also as lines toward fugitive (proto-)socialities?

A minor literature generates a parasitic noise of difference and variation through a stuttering that shifts signification and fixed social relations toward disequilibrium. As Deleuze and Guattari tell us, in a minor literature, language “always has a line of escape by which it escapes itself and makes its enunciations or its expressions take flight and disarticulate.”53 New linguistic possibilities are extracted from this process of placing-in-variation. Deleuze contends that in a minor literature “it is no longer the character who stutters in speech; it is the writer who becomes a stutterer in language. He [sic] makes the language as such stutter: an affective and

49 Ibid. 50 Ibid., 123. 51 Halberstam, “The Wild Beyond,” 11. 52 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 124. 53 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 86.

intensive language, and no longer an affectation of the one who speaks.”54 The socio- significatory stuttering enabled in minor literatures generates deviant syntax and pushes grammar toward its limits.55 A minor literature then, is concerned with the generation of a new language within an already existing language. The minor author makes language strange, inducing a type of disorientation from which one might feel the forces of variation that cause language to vibrate and mutate. For Deleuze, “when a language is so strained that it starts to stutter, or to murmur or stammer ... then language in its entirety reaches the limit that marks its outside and makes it confront silence.”56 The task of minor literature is to impel language toward its limits, repurpose tongues, invite the parasite in and force the system to overstrain and stutter, for it is at these limits that new linguistic and social relations might emerge.

In Stewart's work, the parasite is present as a force that acts upon the expression of language in speech and on the page. The movement her work enacts between linguistic and pre-linguistic utterances, semantic and non-semantic noise, and different registers of language (from colloquialisms to official speech) challenges the conventional ordering of language and the concept of 'sense' that arises from such an ordering. Established meanings and standardised language usages are unsettled in a noisy poetics full of adverbial ambiguities, silences and hesitations, interruptions and phonetic noises. Language is made to approach the boundary between sense and nonsense. Playing with the imperfections, inconsistencies and variation of language moving in the mouth and on and off the page, Stewart’s poetics causes language’s (majoritarian) systematicity to stutter, setting it toward a process of becoming-minor. Enacting this condition in the poem “absence,” Stewart writes:

2.3. Excerpt from "absence"57

It is here at the edge of function that language stutters, rupturing the logic of representation and opening a space of relationality. We feel the immanent variation of language, drawn out in the ways that Stewart amplifies the uncertain gap between phonemes, or utilises the negative space

54 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 107; italics in original. 55 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 121. 56 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 113; italics in original. 57 Stewart, I/T, 67.

of the page. Language's differencing performs itself in the continual shifting of tone, accent and intonation that occurs in Stewart’s work. It is broken apart into extended streams of phonemes; or melds together, with the beginnings and endings of words dissolving into one another; or is subjected to an ever-shifting accenting of phonemes and morphemes. Take, for example, the following passage from “absence”:

2.4. Excerpt from "absence"58

The clarity of meaning is disrupted as words congeal into each other to form an agglutinated mess: ‘economic’ becomes ‘chaotic’; ‘socio’ forms a compound with ‘psycho’; ‘morphology’ is juxtaposed and implicated with ‘parallelism’; the capitalising of ‘GUT’ ruptures the string of words that have bled into each other. The words in the mouth literally spew into the stomach, parasitically collapsing the functions of speaking and digesting. Stewart uproots varying elements of language and disrupts their boundedness to isolated components. Language moves in repetition and difference and toward its limits.

In Stewart's work, the body and language are always moving in relation at this limit; the corporeal noise of a gasp opens a gap in the language as it is made to stutter. Yet, it is not the body alone that parasites language, as we can see from Stewart’s incorporation of language’s own incorporeal variation. Noise is not simply what is playing out via the body (and in her sonic performances which emphasise corporeal gesture). Rather, the relations across the corporeal and incorporeal minorising gestures are what is at stake. Stewart shows us that the process of variation in language itself varies. The stutter that moves between the corporeal and incorporeal dimensions of language reveals the continuity of movement in language, and highlights the ways in which variation is made to vary through the body. Language's incorporeal movement shows us that the ordering of language always happens retrospectively. In other words, there is an immanent fugitivity in language. In the movement between corporeal and incorporeal minorising gestures, Stewart causes language to vibrate and open toward the ineradicable noise of the wider milieu that conditions it.

58 Ibid., 65.

2.5. Excerpt from "absence"59

The extended collection of phonetic sounds with which “absence” opens gestures to this inextricable connection between noise and language, sense and nonsense. The fragmentation of language and its spatial arrangement of poem reveal the continuous movement that is intrinsic to language. Her poetics emphasise the variation of variation, moving between fully formed words and their constituent parts, and moving language and fragments of language multidirectionally on the page. In doing so, Stewart generates hybrid words and compound sentences, new grammatical constructions and unconventional orders of meaning. In her vocal performances, language collects difference as it passes through the body. As Dyson tells us, “noisy and poetic speech, like the wind, like air itself, is open to mutation and resists fixation — to a speaker, an object, an ‘a’.” Drawn together in the mouth, such speech is transformed by the imprecise rhythms of breathing, the intrusion of the gut in to the mouth and whatever the mouth also sucks back in from the outside. Additionally, all these noises and noisy acts change in relation to each other to produce a stuttering. The final lines of the poem emphasise the significance of these corporeal and nonlinguistic noises, not only in regards to language and communication but also in relation to the formation of subjectivities:

2.6. Excerpt from "absence."60

“absence” continues Stewart’s interest in moving between different modes of inscription, appearing in Stewart’s I/T: Selected Poems in both print and aural forms. In the aural version of the poem, the voice literally stutters, producing abrupt shifts in rhythm and broken fragments of language. Philosophical, psychoanalytic, mythological and scientific discourses that turn around the idea of ‘being’ collide with colloquialisms and nonlinguistic utterances to produce a textual- sonic environment that is unstable and open to change. Stewart crams language so full of

59 Ibid., 63. 60 Ibid., 67.

meaning that it begins to stutter and break apart by bringing all its variations together. The phonetic noises that interrupt the directionality of language toward recognisable function and meaning — that is, its majoritarianism — operate adverbially in the poem instead. Here ambiguous conjunctions help to produce new relations between words and sounds, exploring the idea that language both constructs and transforms. This inclusion of noise into the syntax of meaning-making suggests the foregrounding of movement and becoming.

On the page, Stewart subjects language to visual stuttering through variations in textual density, unruly line-breaking and the extensive use of space. Take, for example, this section from the middle of “absence”:

2.7. Excerpt from "absence"61

The visual arrangement of words and fragments of words causes language’s ‘order’ to break apart as it cascades down the page. Words collide and dissolve into one another, moving from sense to nonsense and back again. Stewart’s experimentation — with space and textual density, for example — works to produce truncations, conflations and uncertain sentence constructions. This interruption to the regularity of meaning — standardised via the usual codes that organise printed work — opens a space in which the semantic content of language transforms as it is subjected to variation. In the fragment above, for example, a series of psychoanalytic references dissolve into one another before the words break up into a series of phonemes that imply a shift from English to French. The section returns to English through a stuttered invocation of Lacan’s coupling of desire and lack, only to be interrupted by the distinctly Australian colloquialism, “and whaddaya?”. Imbued with a playful mocking or slight sense of sardonicism, “whaddaya?”

61 Ibid., 64.

— a contraction of the question “what are you?” in Australian vernacular — is, as Ella O’Keefe notes, “usually used to imply a lack of macho backbone.”62 In vernacular speech, the question functions as a challenge to one’s masculinity, a joking taunt that simultaneously secures subjectivations that uphold a major (masculinist) order. Stewart’s use of the colloquialism interrupts Lacanian psychoanalytic discourse, which declares the female subject as one that cannot enter the Symbolic order of language as both female and speaking subject.63 Rather than simply intervening or speaking back, Stewart employs the distinctly masculine (or, to use the appropriate Australian term, ‘blokey’) colloquialism against Lacanian psychoanalytic discourse in order to activate lines of flight and variation within a majoritarian capture of language. She subjects the phrase “whaddaya?” — already a minor deployment within a major language (an Australian ‘becoming’ of English) — to a second minorisation by disrupting the patriarchal order embedded in the phrase. She stutters the stutter, so to speak, and in doing so interrupts not simply the proper grammatical functioning and speech of language but also certain kinds of social relations and subjectivations. In reading “absence” we can begin to understand Deleuze and Guattari’s claim that everything in a minor literature is political since the ‘boundaries’ of speech, grammar and syntax are also modes of binding subjectivities: “the social milieu [serves] as a mere environment or a background” in a major literature whereas “the cramped space” of a minor literature “forces each individual intrigue to connect immediately to politics.”64 The conjoining of form and content in unconventional or experimental arrangements works to unsettle these modes of binding. The interruption to standardised language usage and conventional language systems can be understood as an interruption to majoritarian expression and subjectivation.

A minor treatment of language calls for modes of reading and listening attuned to lines of continuous variation. Such a reading and listening is not merely concerned with interpretation but with following the forces of movement that a text enables. As Deleuze and Guattari tell us:

reading a text is never a scholarly exercise in search of what is signified, still less a highly textual exercise in search of a signifier. Rather it is a productive use of the literary

62 Ella O’Keefe, “Those Strange Movements of the Mouth and Throat: Merging Fields of Inscription in the Work of Amanda Stewart,” When Pressed, July 2008, accessed March 12, 2017, http://whenpressed.net/work/ellaokeefe/those-strange-movements/ 63 This critique of Lacan is the same one that is made by many feminist scholars. See Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). 64 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 17.

machine, a montage of desiring-machines, a schizoid exercise that extracts from the text its revolutionary force.65

Such a reading can be conceived of as a properly experimental practice, where the term experimental is understood, following John Cage, “not as descriptive of an act to be later judged in terms of success and failure, but simply as an act the outcome of which is unknown.”66 A minor reading and listening can be understood as a relational encounter that attends to language’s continuous variation, which always leaves its determination unknown. This reading/listening is a (dis)orientation toward the unknown, a commitment to the absence of coherence and toward novel outcomes. Such a practice is interested in the ways the experience of disorientation might allow us to reorient ourselves differently. Following Astrid Lorange, we can understand reading as “an active, constructive, affective process that involves the body and is itself a kind of writing — an inscriptive thinking.”67

Elsewhere in Stewart’s work — notably in poems such as “Icon” and “The Thing of It” — the minor voice gains traction and begins to build a politics beyond particular subjectivations and toward a becoming ‘collective.’ According to Deleuze and Guattari, a minor literature always constitutes a common action and “summons forth a people to come.”68 Importantly, the notion of a collective voice or “a people to come” must be one both self-determining and fluid enough to allow for the cultivation of dissensus, a notion that Guattari elaborates in his later work. Here Guattari suggests that collectivity requires the production of dissident subjectivites, which involves a process of continuous resingularisation in which “individuals must become both more united and increasingly different.”69 The minor writer understands language as a common action with the potential to “express another possible community and to forge the means of another consciousness and another sensibility,” without speaking on behalf of any given minority.70 The opening of a space for the production of a collectivity comprised of ‘dissident

65 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (New York: Penguin Books, 2009), 106. 66 John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 13. 67 Lorange, How Reading is Written, 29. 68 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994 176. 69 Guattari, The Three Ecologies, 47. 70 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 17.

subjectivities’ can only take place when the writer engages in a becoming-minor or becoming- other. As we have already established, this occurs by opening language to forces in which lines of flight and variation are activated:

The writer uses words, but by creating a syntax that makes them pass into sensation that makes the standard language stammer, tremble, cry, or even sing: this is the style, the ‘tone,’ the language of sensations, or the foreign language within language that summons forth a people to come… The writer twists language, makes it vibrate, seizes hold of it, and rends it in order to wrest the percept from perceptions, the affect from affections, the sensation from opinion — in view, one hopes, of that still-missing people.71

Stewart’s work — full of adverbial constructions, material investigations and fragmented forms — moves us toward a collective voice that is yet to come. In the poem “Icon” she confronts the question of the individual, stable ‘I’ directly:

2.8. Excerpt from "Icon"72

This section of the poem introduces the concept of a single individualised ‘I’ and articulates its centrality to Western thought: “To / speak in the first person is one of the fundamental constructs / of most Western languages. It presupposes a one.”73 The use of underlining reinforces the position of the ‘I’ as both the object of the poem and an object of veneration. “‘I’ is an Icon itself” writes Stewart. As the poem progresses, Stewart begins to challenge and critique

71 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 176. 72 Stewart, I/T, 48. 73 Ibid.

the presupposition of a one that this ‘I’ has come to represent. The prose style of the opening five lines begins to fragment in the sixth line — “always, I must admit I would say I believe I think this society” — giving way to a more line-broken style in which the words begin to repeat. At this point, the syntax begins to break down and stagger, the earlier coherence of the poem giving way to fragments of language that move in contradictory directions. The underlining of the ‘I” ceases as the voicing complicates the assumption of its stability and individuality. The ‘I’ of the poem no longer suggests a sense of oneness but rather starts to stutter and contradict itself. The poem concludes with a series of oppositions linked adverbially by the conjunction 'and.'

2.9. Excerpt from "Icon"74

I read this section of the poem as moving from a single ‘I’ to an ‘I’ that stands in for a ‘we’ that is inherently unstable and contradictory. This stuttering of language works to open a space for an alternate conception of collectivity. As Jean-Luc Nancy suggests, “the stuttering itself betrays the form of the problem: we, 'we,' how are we to say 'we'? Or rather, who is it that says 'we'...?”75 Stewart takes up this question, proposing a collective voice — a 'we' — that moves in multiple directions at once, allowing for dissensus and encouraging the production of subjectivities that are already in themselves both divided and multiplied.

“The Thing of It” opens:

2.10. Excerpt from "The Thing of It."76

The stuttering of the capitalised “THE” that opens the poem calls into question the matter of factness of the statements that follow — “paddocks are square” and “nomads are dead”. Both an indefinite and definite history is being forged between these statements and the history of a

74 Ibid. 75 Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 70. 76 Stewart, I/T, 53.

majoritarian order of dispossession, genocide and colonisation in Australia. This tension between the major and the minor, the definite and the indefinite, the canonical and the forgotten continues throughout the poem. Stewart moves between drawing attention to, and interrupting, the power relations of such a majoritarian order. She writes:

2.11. Excerpt from "The Thing of It"77

Here, as O’Keefe has noted, Stewart has “capitalised White and Dad, the syntax of the sentence they appear in is definite and not problematic. It is only as she starts to speak of mother that we encounter absence and uncertain words.”78 This fragmentation of language works to open a space in which the established and historical usages of certain words in relation to women is disrupted and unsettled. Meaning is both confused and upheld as Stewart simultaneously refuses to disavow these historically feminised terms or ascribe a clear function to them. The poem stages a confrontation with colonial and patriarchal expressions of power. I read Stewart's poem as a refusal of the representational paradigm produced by colonial orders and their legacies. Instead she locates meaning in the space between things, in the absences and cuts, in the gaps and stutters:

77 Ibid., 53-54. 78 O’Keefe, “Those Strange Movements.”

2.12. Excerpt from "The Thing of It"80

The collective voice that sounds in Stewart’s work occupies, returning to Moten’s formulation, the space of 'the cut' or 'the break'; that is, a space of multiplicity and movement from which an undercommon sociality might be enacted. The collective voice is a voice that sounds from the middle of the crowd and recognises the noise of the crowd to be the meaning itself. Here the stutter sounds alongside the multiplicitous noise of the murmuring crowd that I discussed in chapter one. Where the murmur gives us the indistinct noise of many individuated voices sounding at once, the stutter gives us a noise that acts upon the voice (and language) to produce continuous variation and difference. I am arguing that this stuttering collective voice that sounds in the space of the break might, to borrow Deleuze and Guattari’s phrase, “summon a people to come.”81 As readers and listeners we are faced with the challenge of attending to this collective stuttering. Here we encounter a reading practice that is modulated by the sonic, listening to and for the noises of the parasite and understanding these interferences to be an integral part of world-breaking and world-making. Such a reading demands a reconfiguration of our modes of perception in order that we might register the vibrational forces immanent to language, best heard in its stuttering.

In the following section of this chapter, I want to consider how a reading and writing practice attuned to this kind of noise might make the majoritarian language and archives of slavery and colonisation stutter.

Stuttering the Archive

“There is no telling this story; it must be told” writes M. NourbeSe Philip, of her book-length poem Zong!82 Philip’s poem is drawn from the legal transcript of Gregson vs Gilbert, a 1783 English court document relating to the massacre that took place on board a slave ship named

80 Stewart, I/T, 55. 81 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 176. 82 Philip, ZONG!, 189.

The Zong as it transported its “cargo” from the West Coast of Africa to Jamaica.83 Employing the legal transcript as a linguistic database, Zong! can be understood as an interrogation of the nature of history and the facticity of language. The work consists of a long poem in six parts; a glossary of terms; a manifest of the African groups and languages, animals, body parts, crew, food and drink, figures of nature, and women who appear in the poem; a fragmented ‘notanda’ that describes the process of writing the poem; and the transcript of the Gregson vs Gilbert ruling that the poem is derived from. The poem and its archival milieu fragments and atomises the major archive to produce a poetics of the unknowable and the unsayable. Full of silences and voids, noises and interruptions, Philip’s refusal to make sense of the incoherence of the Middle Passage can be understood as an attempt to construct new uses of language that might adequately attend to the histories and afterlives of slavery and colonisation.84 Philip’s poem refuses to make language make sense, or rather, produces its own field of sense-making that is a dissonant one. Philip constructs a poetics of opacity and relation that moves between sound and silence, meaning and opacity, linguistic and nonlinguistic utterance. Zong! subjects the legal archive to processes of minorisation, repurposing historical materials in order to produce a language that, to quote Saidiya Hartman, “revisit[s] the scene of subjection without replicating the grammar of violence.”85 This involves a refusal to fill in the gaps and incoherencies of archives and language systems. This is a refusal to allow the majoritarian order of ‘the’ archive to ‘accommodate’ a minority position. Instead, the officialdom of legal discourse and historiography is made to confront the gaps and spaces at their very core and at the limits of their capture — both the noise and silence of “the shipped.”86

The slave ship Zong set sail in 1781 with a crew of seventeen and more than 440 captive Africans on board, twice as many as the ship was designed to hold.87 The transatlantic crossing,

83 The transcript of the Gilbert vs. Gregson case is included as an appendix in Philip, ZONG!, 210-11. 84 The Middle Passage refers to the trade route that was used to transport enslaved Africans from the West Coast of Africa to Europe and the Americas. 85 Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 26 (2008): 4. 86 The concept of the “shipped” is indebted to the work of Stefano Harney and Fred Moten. The concept refers to the subjectivities and forms of sociality that emerge from the histories of dispossession connected with the middle passage. For Harney and Moten, the hold of the ship is the site of both dispossession and connection, flight and fantasy. It is a space that gives rise to an undercommon sociality. Crucially, the twin concepts of the shipping and the shipped are concerned with the forces and relations that precede and condition ontology. Key to the notion of the undercommons, the concept will be explored in further detail later in this chapter and throughout the thesis. 87 James Walvin, The Zong: A Massacre, the Law and the End of Slavery (New Haven: Yale University

typically a six to nine week journey, would end up taking four months on account of navigational errors. During the voyage, Captain Luke Collingwood and his crew would throw somewhere between 130 and 150 of the enslaved overboard with the justification that this was carried out for “the preservation of the rest.”88 Collingwood’s actions were motivated not simply by a lack of water and provisions but, crucially, by the conditions of the insurance policy that covered the human “cargo” aboard the ship. Treated as commodities rather that persons, the enslaved Africans aboard the Zong were insured at a value of £30 per head under a policy that covered the ship’s owner for any losses incurred during the voyage, except for those that were a result of “natural death.”89 John Wesket explains the legal conventions of maritime insurance that were established as a result of the transatlantic slave trade:

The insurer takes upon himself the risk of the loss, capture, and death of slaves, or any other unavoidable accident to them: but natural death is always understood to be excepted — by natural death is meant, not only when it happens by disease or sickness, but also when the captive destroys himself though despair, which often happens: but when slaves are killed, or thrown into the sea in order to quell an insurrection on their part, then the insurers must answer.90

Collingwood’s actions aboard the Zong were motivated by a desire to minimise uninsurable losses, to shift the financial burden of the loss from the ship’s owner to the underwriter. As Philip puts it, “the massacre of African slaves would prove to be more financially advantageous to the owners of the ship and its cargo than if the slaves were allowed to die of ‘natural causes.’”91 The court case — Gregson vs. Gilbert — from which Philip’s long poem is derived was an insurance dispute rather than a murder trial, in which the owners of the ship (Gregson) sued the

Press, 2011), 27. 88 Gregson vs. Gilbert as quoted in M. NourbeSe Philip, ZONG! (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), 210. Note: there is some variation in the different accounts of the Zong massacre with regards to the exact number of slaves that were killed. The transcript of Gregson vs. Gilbert mentions 150; Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005); and Walvin, The Zong both put the number at 132. 89 John Wesket, A Complete Digest of the Theory Laws and Practice of Insurance, (London, 1781) as quoted in James Walvin, The Zong: A Massacre, the Law and the End of Slavery (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 112. 90 Wesket quoted in Walvin, The Zong, 112; emphasis in Walvin. 91 Philip, ZONG!, 189.

underwriter (Gilbert) for failing to pay the insurance claim for the “cargo” that was destroyed.92 While the case does not directly concern slavery, it does shed light on the legal status of slaves, highlighting the limits of what the law covers and assumes and the ways in which legal discourse contributed to the exclusion of slaves from the category of the human. The transcript of this ruling is one of the only surviving records of the victims of the massacre and yet the language of the document paradoxically works to erase any trace of identity. Reflective of a legal system that excludes black people, the drowned Africans appear in the transcript as abstractions, reduced to numbers, values and categories. As Ian Baucom notes, “what we know of the trans-Atlantic slave trade is that among the other violences it inflicted on millions of human beings was the violence of becoming a ‘type’: a type of person, or, terribly, not even that, a type of nonperson, a type of property, a type of commodity, a type of money.”93 Philip’s engagement with the archive is an interrogation of language’s capacity to produce incorporeal transformations. Philip is concerned with the role language plays in constructing a normative (white) subjectivity that is predicated on black exclusion and the ways in which language produces and upholds social relations and positions. In Zong!, she invites the parasite into the archive, subjecting the language of the law to a process of minorisation in order to produce what she describes as “a recombinant antinarrative” in which the fixity of meaning in language and the authority of the archive is interrupted.94 The inclusion of an exclamation mark in the poem’s title transforms Zong from the proper name of the ship (a name that is, in itself, an error of inscription — a modulation from the Dutch word Zorg or Zorgue, which in English means ‘care’), to the nonsensical exclamation Zong! This had occurred during a repainting of the ship’s signage and mutates meaning into a cry of the voice. As Philip writes, “Zong! is chant! Shout! And ululation! Zong! is moan! Mutter! Howl! And shriek! Zong! is ‘pure utterance.’ Zong! is Song!”95 This constitutes a transformation from signifier to what Deleuze would call an “utterable,' opening a relational space between signifying and asignifying, meaning and noise, sound and silence, knowing and

92 The transcript is actually an appeal of the original finding. Initially, the court found in favour of the owner (Gregson), however the insurer (Gilbert) appealed the decision to the Court of the King’s Bench which ruled a new trial should be held. The transcript is of this decision and is the last official record of The Zong case. As Philip’s elaborates: “I have found no evidence that a new trial was ever held as ordered, or whether the Messrs Gregson ever received payment for their murdered slaves…” M. NourbeSe Philip, ZONG! (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), 189. 93 Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005), 11. 94 Philip, ZONG!, 204. 95 Ibid., 207.

unknowing. Describing this proto-language of an utterable, Deleuze writes:

Even with its verbal elements, this is neither a language system nor a language. It is a plastic mass, an a-signifying and a-syntaxic material, a material not formed linguistically even though it is not amorphous and is formed semiotically, aesthetically and pragmatically. It is a condition, anterior by right to what it conditions. It is not an enunciation, and these are not utterances. It is an utterable. We mean that, when language gets hold of this material (and it necessarily does so), then it gives rise to utterances which come to dominate or even replace the images and signs, and which refer in turn to pertinent features of the language system, syntagms and paradigms, completely different from those we started with.96

This transformation of Zong to Zong! is a gesture that interrupts the power of language to name and then to possess. The utterable operates as a force of movement, a malleable material that moves in excess of signification and allows different kinds of temporal relations within the archive to erupt. Philip’s refusal to reconstruct a linear and coherent counter-narrative from this archive activates a complex temporality that weaves together the past, the present and the future. Zong! grapples with a history that cannot be verified yet continues to haunt the present. It is, to borrow Hartman’s words, “a history of an unrecoverable past... a history written with and against the archive.”97 It moves us not only into the past but toward a future sociality that is, as Harney and Moten tell us, “beyond ends and means, out where one becomes interested in things, in a certain relationship between thingliness and nothingness and blackness that plays itself out in unmapped, unmappable, undercommon consent and consensuality.”98 From subjects excluded from the archive, the shipped ‘sing’ of a people to come.

For Philip, absence is configured not as a lack but rather as a non-thing and non-place that opens a space with which to move simultaneously toward an unknowable past and an uncertain future. She breaks apart the language of the archive in order to rebuild it anew. In “Zong! #1,” one of twenty-six short poems that comprise the “Os” (‘bones’) section of work, Philip subjects the normative operations of legal discourse to processes of fragmentation and recombination. Stutter breaks up and open the archive.

96 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 29. 97 Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 12. 98 Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 95.

2.13. Excerpt from "Zong! #1"99

Words emerge from and dissolve into plosives, labials, grunts, stutters and moans, producing a poetics that we can understand as both anti- and ante-meaning. The poem fragments words and phrases from the legal transcript that deal with the question of whether or not there was enough good water on board the Zong to sustain the lives of all the African slaves. Words, phrases and fragments — such as “water was good,” “water was sour,” “want of water,” “one day/s,” “won dey” — appear and disappear as the text stutters, interrupting itself. The spaces that open up between these fragments of language and noise function to produce relationality across language, subjectivations and emergent collectivities. Connections form not simply by reading from right to left and top to bottom but transversally through the text in multidirectional ways. The text becomes a rhizomatic structure that draws language into new relations in which meaning can be continuously made and remade. In part, this is achieved through an engagement with the materiality of language, as Philip experiments with the visual and spatial arrangement of words and letters on the page.

99 Philip, ZONG!, 3.

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Philip’s use of techniques associated with concrete and visual poetry produce a proliferation of pathways through the text, emphasising that reading enacts meaning. Here we can find a resonance between the poetics of Philip and Stewart; both experiment with the visual and spatial arrangement of words on the page, playing with the materiality of language in order to place it in a continuing variation and disrupt a fixing of it to ordered regimes of meaning and speaking. Both authors are indebted to the innovations of concrete poetry, a post-World War II movement that explored the formal, structural and material qualities of language.100 The experimentation with the visual and spatial arrangement of language tries to amplify the line of continuous variation immanent to language and produce new modes of reading that, as Anthony Reed tells us, interrupt “rationalist understandings that [link] the poetic act, as expression, to a self-sufficient, self-transparent subject or language.”101 These techniques of concrete poetry disrupt conventional grammar and syntax by producing textual environments that foreground shifting spatial relationships between letters, words, fragments of words and phrases.

The unconventional arrangement of language in Zong! works to produce what we might think of as constellations of text. The atomised fragments of language and stuttering syllables that are strewn across the page in “Zong! #1” form meaning clusters rather than coherent lines, sentences or paragraphs. For the concrete poet Eugen Gomringer, the constellation is the ur- linguistic formation; a way of (dis)organising language in order to activate lines of flight that move language beyond whatever its established order has become:

The constellation is the simplest possible kind of configuration in poetry which has for its basic unit the word, it encloses a group of words as if it were drawing stars together to form a cluster.

The constellation is an arrangement, and at the same time a play-area of fixed dimensions.

The constellation is ordered by the poet. He [sic] determines the play-area, the field or force and suggests its possibilities, the reader, the new reader, grasps the idea of play,

100 Notable concrete figures in the development of concrete poetry include the Bolivian-born Eugen Gomringer, the Brazilians Augusto and Haroldo de Campos and the Noigrandes group. 101 Reed, Freedom Time, 28.

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and joins in.

In the constellation something is brought into the world. It is a reality in itself and not a poem about something or other. The constellation is an invitation.102

For Gomringer, the constellation foregrounds language as a mode of action, “a reality in itself” rather than a system of representing some other reality. A "field of play," the constellation opens language to minorising forces — "suggests its possibilities" — by emphasising multiplicity over a unified single meaning. It interrupts any possibility of language carrying direct one-to- one relations between signifier and signified by producing a textual environment in which multiple and shifting meanings always coexist. Thinking Zong! as constellatory, we can see the words and fragments that appear in Philip’s poem as a challenge to the attempt to authorise and fix history that is the work of the official archive. Philip instead takes a sculptural approach to language, subjecting it to processes such as cutting, slicing, breaking, splintering, fragmenting, fracturing, moving, heaping, and reassembling. This simple act of disassembling and reassembling the linguistic components of the archive makes visible and sensible the idea that there are, as Reed observes, “other ways of arranging texts, knowledge, history, bodies, and social order.”103 The visual and linguistic stuttering of Zong! is not a simple disavowal of the signification that this document carries, but rather can be understood as both an interrogation and disruption of the archive as an assemblage of unity and true representation. Considered in this way, Philip’s relational constellations mirror Édouard Glissant’s description of the diaspora as “the passage from unity to multiplicity.”104 The atomisation and rearrangement of the archive interrupts the ordering function of legal and historical discourses, creating a noise with which the archive itself stutters different subjectivities into processes of becoming.

The polyvocality of Zong! becomes increasingly apparent as its stuttering and fragmentation take hold. The voice(s) presented here are akin to the post-lyric voice that I discussed in chapter one in relation to the murmuring poetics of Claudia Rankine; that is, it is a voice suspended between an 'I' and a 'we.' For Philip, this voice is also suspended temporally and geographically by the history (and reverberations) of the Middle Passage. Fragments of French, Spanish, Latin,

102 Eugen Gomringer, “From Line to Constellation,” trans. Mike Weaver, UbuWeb, accessed March 20, 2017, http://www.ubu.com/papers/gomringer01.html 103 Reed, Freedom Time, 29. 104 Manthia Diawara and Edouard́ Glissant, “One World in Relation,” trans. Christopher Winks, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art 28, no. 1 (2011): 5.

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Portuguese, Italian, Hebrew, Dutch, Shona, Twi, Fon, Patois and Yoruba begin to interrupt the English text in the later sections titled “Sal” (“salt”), “Ventus” (“wind”), “Ration” (“reason”), “Ferrum” (“iron”) and “Ebora” (“spirits”). Major and minor languages connected by the histories of the transatlantic slave trade and colonisation sound, as the English archive is broken apart and stitched back together. Languages associated with the dominant history of shipping and colonisation (French, Spanish, Latin, Portuguese, Italian and Dutch, for example) mix and trade places with minor languages and dialects (Shona, Twi, Fon, Yoruba, and so on). Philip draws this multilingualism out of the major language of the archive (English), setting off its process of becoming-minor. What is produced is a type of polyvocal improvisation, a spontaneous irruption of the many voices, who indeed were immanently already there, but whose sounding allows the emergence of new subjectivations. Philip’s recombinatory approach reveals the ways in which language, vocabularies and orderings of knowledge are already overflowing with these histories. The refusal to make order from the cacophony of voices sounding in multiple languages can be understood as an attempt to decolonise the language of the 'master,' to continue to minorise it until it begins to stutter and break apart. As Ferreira da Silva tells us, practices of decolonisation "[aim] to go beyond denouncing" colonial orders and their regimes of representation and instead "[move] to dismantle and/or counteract the effects of epistemic violence."104 Such practices, which include Philip's poetics, are concerned with a breaking of the world in order to make it anew. Following Ferreira da Silva, this project can be understood as one that is concerned with producing "the end of the world as we know it."105

104 Denise Ferreira da Silva, "Reading Art as Confrontation," e-flux Journal 65 (2015): 1, accessed March 15, 2017, http://supercommunity-pdf.e-flux.com/pdf/supercommunity/article_1283.pdf. 105 Denise Ferreira da Silva, "On Difference Without Separability," in Incerteza Viva (São Paulo: 32nd Biennial of São Paulo, 2016), 58; italics in original.

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2.14. Excerpt from "Ventus"107

The sense of a polyvocal, minor collectivity occurs in numerous ways in Philip’s text: through the construction of a voice that is constantly interrupting and remaking itself; through the invocation of an invented ancestor, ‘Setaey Adamu Boateng,’ who is credited as a co-author; and through the absent presences that haunt the work. Philip’s experimentation with the language of the archive activates the immanent lines of difference toward generating new inventions of collectivity.

But there is also much that is not sounded in Zong! It is equally a work of voids and hauntings — a calling out the voices of the drowned in order to interrupt the foundational violence upon which the archive of slavery is built. As Hartman tells us, the violence of this archive “determines, regulates and organizes the kinds of statements that can be made about slavery and as well it creates subjects and objects of power.”108 The implication of Hartman’s statement is that the archive is not a static repository of historical documents but rather

107 Philip, ZONG!, 79. 108 Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 10.

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something that enacts a world by determining, regulating and organising discourse, utterance and speakers. The complexity of archives is that they are simultaneously sites of preservation and destruction, the inclusion of certain things means the exclusion and neglect of others. Put another way, the archive is always radically incomplete; its perceived wholeness and authority is derived from what is exterior to it, and, as such, it can only be properly understood in juxtaposition to that which it simultaneously excludes. As Jacques Derrida explains, “there is no archive without a place of consignation, without a technique of repetition, and without a certain exteriority. No archive without outside.”109 For Derrida, the power of the archive depends on this exteriority, its ability to repeat the outside inside — to (faithfully) reproduce that. Paradoxically, this exteriority also marks it as inherently unstable, as something open to revisitation — as for example, when new archival material emerges — and then to reinterpretation. Or, we might say, the archive is an assemblage that contains both territorialising and deterritorialsing axes. Considered in concrete terms, archives are the product of processes of power in which certain documents are categorised as important and worthy of preservation and others are not. As Achille Mbembe argues:

It seems clear that the archive is primarily the product of a judgement, the result of the exercise of a specific power and authority, which involves placing certain documents in an archive at the same time as others are discarded. The archive, therefore, is fundamentally a matter of discrimination and of selection, which, in the end, results in the granting of a privileged status to certain written documents, and the refusal of that same status to others, thereby judged ‘unarchivable’. The archive is, therefore, not a piece of data, but a status.110

The archive can be understood as both a repository/enactment of authority and power, and a space that is inherently incomplete. Zong! interrupts the majoritarian ordering of the archive — that is, the conception of it as faithful or complete — by listening to those voices that are the gaps in the official records. For Philip, this involves listening to, and amplifying, archival gaps and silences. Refusing to make sense of the incoherence and violence of the archive as an exclusionary mechanism, Philip subjects legal transcripts to processes of fragmentation and

109 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 11; italics in original. 110 Achille Mbembe, “The Power of the Archive and Its Limits,” trans. Judith Inggs, in Refiguring the Archive, ed. Carolyn Hamilton et al. (Dordrecht, Boston and London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), 20.

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layering, and makes extensive use of space and silence around and in them. The resulting poem produces ruptures in which the counter-histories immanent to archiving are sounded. Here we can follow Philip in understanding Zong! as “a work of haunting, a wake of sorts, where the spectres of the undead make themselves present.”111 Although the poem is a work of remembrance and mourning, it is also more than this. It is an interrogation of the ways in which the past continues to haunt the present. This past continues to haunt by revealing, borrowing Saidiya Hartman’s words, “the time of slavery as our present.”112 The hauntological expression, content and form of the poem seeks to interrupt the ways in which language continues to (re)produce black exclusion, and in doing so propels us toward a radical concept of futurity. Jasbir Puar has argued for the ways in which past, present and future can all be radically reconsidered via a conception of the hauntological:

Here, ‘ghostly matters’ signal the primacy of the past and our inheritance of the past: its hauntings, its demands, its present absences and absent presences. However, in part what I mean to highlight through an antecedent temporality are the ghosts of the future that we can already sniff, ghosts that are waiting for us, that usher us into futurities. Haunting in this sense defuses a binary between past and present — because indeed the becoming-future is haunting us…113

These ghosts — existing beyond the binary logics of absence and presence, being and non-being, living and dead — open a space of relationality in which past, present and future temporalities interpenetrate. This sense of multiple temporalities is activated in ”‘Zong! #4” (another of the twenty-six poems that comprise the “Os” or ‘bones’ section of Zong!).

111 Philip, ZONG!, 201. 112 Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 12. 113 Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007), xx.

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2.15. Excerpt from "Zong! #4"114

The poem’s opening couplet, “this is / not was”, interferes with a chronology of the past passing in order to give way to the present. Instead, Philip draws the past into the time of the present, suggesting that the structures and institutions that produced and upheld slavery continue to structure black life even now. The overlapping temporalities that are at play in the poem gesture toward what Hartman refers to as “the afterlife of slavery”:

If slavery persists as an issue in the political life of black America, it is not because of an antiquarian obsession with bygone days or the burden of a too long memory, but because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery — skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment.115

114 Philip, ZONG!, 7. 115 Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 6.

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“Zong! #14” demonstrates this coexistence of the past and the present in the same temporal experience. It speaks directly to the afterlife of slavery, collapsing the distinction between past and present to produce a sense of time lived disjunctively. The intersecting temporalities that exist in the poem not only reveal the ways that slavery and colonisation reverberate into the present but also interrupt the reproduction of racial categories that depend on an unbroken conception of linear time. Ferreira da Silva tells us that this is central to dismantling the power and authority of colonisation and its afterlives. She writes, "ending the grip of Time restores the world anew, from the position Blackness registers" and in excess of categories such as the object, the other and the commodity.116

2.16. Excerpt from "Zong! #14"117

Using repetitive phrases and shifts in tense conjugation, Philip builds this sense of the experience of a black lived duration. She reduces the events of the Zong massacre to a series of ‘factual’ statements harvested from the legal transcript: “the ships sailed / the rains came / the loss arose.” These statements recur in the poem, framed in the first instance by the phrase “the

116 Ferreira da Silva, "Toward a Black Feminist Poetics," 90-91. 117 Philip, ZONG!, 24.

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truth was,” which locates the events of the Zong massacre in historical time. The repetition of the triplet — “the ships sailed / the rains came / the loss arose” — moves the events from the past into the present by prefacing the return of these lines with the phrase “the truth is.” This gesture from past to present tense produces a shift in our understanding of what the lost object of the poem is — from the loss of ‘cargo’ or income to loss of life and the consequent erasure of an entire lived subjectivity. The arrangement of the phrases that comprise the poem into three distinct columns highlights the link between the past and the present through the facts of the case, at the same time as it modulates our understanding of those facts. This accumulation and exchange of temporalities disrupts our understanding of the archive as a historical record, demonstrating instead the ways in which the absent presences of the past continue to haunt the contemporary moment. The final lines of the poem — “the negroes is / the truth was” — gestures toward a radical ongoingness, in which blackness as a mode of continuing to live depends on an acknowledgment of, and engagement with, absence or loss as a constitutive force. The ungrammatical phrase, “the negroes is” — a plurality that also collects itself and acts as a force — suggests also the ways in which these temporalities come to inhabit ‘now’ in overlapping and co-existent ways.

This fluid movement backwards and forwards through time suggests a disjointed temporality that resonates with what Derrida refers to as hauntology.118 A play on ontology, hauntology breaks the link between ‘being’ and presence, suggesting instead that there is no point of origin in which being and presence coincide but that being is always also marked by absences of the no longer and the not yet. This invocation of spectres and hauntings constitutes a challenge to traditional conceptions of ontology that understand being in terms of self-identical presence. Derrida’s hauntology posits the being-ness of that which no longer exists; the ways in which histories and logics continue to haunt the material world. Derrida argues that ‘to be’ is “to learn to live with ghosts, in the upkeep, the conversation, the company, or the companionship… And this being-with specters would also be, not only but also, a politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations.”119 The importance of the spectre is that it can never be fully present, or as Martin Hagglund observes, “it has no being in itself but marks a relation to what is no longer or not yet.’’120 Hauntology involves a dual movement: on the one hand, the compulsive repetition

118 Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York and London: Routledge, 2006). 119 Ibid., xvii-xviii. 120 Martin Hagglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 82.

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and return of absent presences that belong to the past; and, on the other, an anticipation of that which is yet to come but already shaping the present. As Mbembe expands, “the present as an experience of a time is precisely the moment when different forms of absence become mixed together: absence of those presences that are no longer so and that one remembers (the past), and absence of those others that are yet to come and are anticipated (the future).”121 Hauntology, then, offers a way of conceptualising temporality not as the passing of time but rather as the disjunctive accumulation of time structured by absent presences. In this way, hauntology also gestures to a becoming-future that emerges from an engagement with the “unactivated potentials of the past.”122 Hauntology, in relation to blackness as subjectivation, provides a mechanism for understanding how the past and present might coexist in the same spaces and forms, as the afterlives of slavery and colonisation. Yet, more than this, it provides a lens for considering how the forces of absence have historically and contemporaneously worked to produce black subjects and subjectivities.

Philip’s stuttering poetics follows and encourages language’s immanent movement toward disequilibrium: the stuttering of grammar and syntax; the fragmentation of a unified text into fragmented and recursive constellations of language; the sounding of minor languages and dialects within the major; all of these work to interrupt the perceived unity and authority of the archive. The stutter opens the text or the archive to the hauntological movements between past, present and future. The poem shows us that the possibilities for collective self-invention can only emerge when language is made to confront the limits of meaning and legibility. Again, as Deleuze suggests, “when a language is so strained that it starts to stutter, or to murmur or stammer ... then language in its entirety reaches the limit that marks its outside and makes it confront silence.”123 Philip’s stuttering and recombinatory poetics brings language to this confrontation with its limit where it refuses to conform to the representational orders established by colonial powers. In doing so, she opens up the possibility of listening for different registers of meaning that attend to the noise of silences and voids.

121 Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2001), 16 122 Mark Fisher, “The Metaphysics of Crackle: Afrofuturism and Hauntology,” in Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture 5, no. 2 (2013); 53. 123 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 113; italics in original.

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Into the Void

These gaps that emerge as language breaks up in Zong! bring us to relations between blackness and nothingness. The poem’s stuttering and fragmenting produce elongated silences and textual voids — dense spaces of nothingness.

2.17. Excerpt from "Ratio"124

Opening spaces of nothingness is an attempt to, borrowing Frank B. Wilderson’s formulation, “stay in the hold of the ship, despite my fantasies of flight.”125 Philip’s inhabitation of the space of the hold is an attempt to develop a poetics of nothingness in which voids and absences are understood as constitutive elements of blackness. Drawing on Frantz Fanon’s formulation that “the black man is not,” theorists such as Wilderson, Hartman, Moten, Jared Sexton and Hortense Spillers (albeit in different ways), argue that the social, political and economic order of the world is established on the basis of black exclusion. As Moten writes,

124 Philip, ZONG!, 103. 125 Frank B. Wilderson, III, Red, White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010), xi.

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“normative subjectivity is precisely that which moves by way of the exclusion of black possibility… In the context of this world, we are literally nothing.”126 The void — a space of nothingness — can be thought of central to the formation of black (and therefore white) subjectivities.

The concept of nothingness is central to both the Afropessimism of thinkers such as Hartman, Sexton and Wilderson, and the black operationalism of thinkers such as Moten and Ferreira da Silva.127 While Afropessimism describes a field of heterogeneous scholarship, it emerges from the notion that blackness is marked by an ontological absence, or as Wilderson put it, “that the collective unconscious of the entire world is fundamentally anti-Black.”128 For Afropessimists, blackness is structured by the absence of time and space in the world, by the opening of a space of nothingness. As Wilderson argues, blackness can be understood as “a structural position of noncommunicability in the face of all other positions,” one that is “predicated on modalities of accumulation and fungibility, not exploitation and alienation.”129 Moten’s conception of black operation draws from this understanding of black exclusion and negation in order to develop a theory that moves towards an undercommons for a different mode of sociality, or what Stefano Harney refers to as “the blackness of becoming.”130 For Moten, black operation can be understood as an expression “of an autopoetic organization in which flight and inhabitation modify each other.”131 Here, remaining in the void or the hold of the ship is an operation that animates “the reality of escape in and the possibility of escape from.”132 Both the positions of Afropessimism and black operationalism configure nothingness as foundational to a politics of active refusal that responds to conceptions of the human predicated on the exclusion of blackness. As such, both positions make whiteness stutter and yet, they do so in fundamentally different ways. Afropessimism foregrounds structural

126 Fred Moten, A Poetics of the Undercommons (Butte and New York: Sputnik and Fizzle, 2016), 19-20. 127 Other important contributors to this field of knowledge that is often referred to as Afropessimism include: Hortense Spillers, Ronald Judy, David Marriott, Achille Mbembe, Frantz Fanon, Kara Keeling, Jared Sexton, Joy James, Lewis Gordon, George Yancey, and Orlando Patterson, to name just a few. 128 Frank B. Wilderson, III, Samira Spatzek and Paula von Gleich, “‘The Inside-Outside of Civil Society’: An Interview with Frank B. Wilderson, III,” Black Studies Papers 2, no. 1 (2016): 9. 129 Wilderson, Red, White and Black, 58-59. 130 Stefano Harney, “Undercommons and Utopia,” in A Poetics of the Undercommons (Butte and New York: Sputnik and Fizzle, 2016), 4. 131 Fred Moten, “Black Op,” PMLA 123, no. 5 (2008): 1745. 132 Ibid.

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positionality and ontology as the generative point for an understanding of black exclusion- constitution, while operationalism is concerned with how being is itself produced through movement. Afropessimism turns around the question of being while operationalism is concerned with becoming. For Moten, black operationalism is fundamentally about forces and relations: the staying and the moving; the shipped and the shipping. To remain in the hold of the ship is to attend to the forces and relations that condition black (social) life; to feel the absent presences and present absences and to forge an ongoing connection with black sociality from that relationality. As Harney and Moten tell us, “to have been shipped is to have been moved by others, with others. It is to feel at home with the homeless, at ease with the fugitive, at peace with the pursued, at rest with the ones who consent not to be one.”133 These fugitive movements — toggling between an escape in and an escape from — follow an improvisational impulse that both interrupts ontology and conditions undercommon sociality. As Moten argues:

… it is not (just) that blackness is ontologically prior to the logistic and regulatory power that is supposed to have brought it into existence but that blackness is prior to ontology… blackness is the anoriginal displacement of ontology… it is ontology’s anti- and ante-foundation, ontology’s underground, the irreparable disturbance of ontology’s time and space.134

The ontological reduction of black subjects to the status of ‘no-thing’ reveals the foundational violence of metaphysics and forecloses the possibility of black recognition and incorporation. For Moten, after Wilderson, blackness as anti- and ante-foundation opens a space from which we might consider what exists between “the subjectivity that is refused and which one refuses and nothing, whatever that is.”135 Inhabiting this void is a gesture of refusal that is also the condition for imagining a different and unknown future. The extensive use of negative space in Zong! makes this condition of nothingness palpable. The space that opens up through the stuttering of language in Philip’s poem is a void from which we might consider what Hartman and Wilderson refer to as “the position of the unthought.”136 The sounding of silence that is produced in this movement between speech and noise can be understood as an active series of

133 Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 97. 134 Fred Moten, “Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh),” South Atlantic Quarterly 112, no. 4 (2013); 739. 135 Ibid., 741. 136 Saidiya Hartman and Frank B. Wilderson, III, “The Position of the Unthought: An Interview with Saidiya V. Hartman Conducted by Frank B. Wilderson, III,” Qui Parle 13, No. 2 (2003).

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refusals: the refusal to reproduce the violence of the scene of subjection; the refusal to accept the authority of the archive; and the refusal to fill the void or render it legible. Crucially, Philip renders this as a poetics of nothingness in order to operationalise black expressiveness, which, as Moten also tells us, is “a poetics of the undercommons.”137

The voids and silences that structure Zong! work across registers of subjection to different possibilities for subjectivation. Such silences speak, and in speaking, acknowledge the impossibility of knowing — an order indebted to what Glissant refers to as “the right to opacity.”138 For Glissant, opacity is of central importance to both epistemology and politics, in that it produces new modes of (un)knowing that must be continuously negotiated and renegotiated. Glissant suggests that the “right to opacity… [is not an]... enclosure within an impenetrable autarchy but subsistence within an irreducible singularity.”139 His notion of opacity interrupts the demand to make objects of inquiry transparent by emphasising instead their irreducible differences. Opacity brings differences into relation without demanding that these differences be understandable or resolvable: “opacities can coexist and converge, weaving fabrics. To understand these truly one must focus on the texture of the weave and not on the nature of its components.”140 Here, opacity opens on to a heterogeneous space of unknowability. Philip’s use of negative space enacts this kind of opacity as both an order of knowledge and a production of multiplicity. Opening a space between speech and noise, song and stutter, official meanings and opacity, Philip encourages us to listen to the nothingness that arises when she makes language confront its limits. This absence is configured not as a lack but as an active refusal to clarify difference(s). Considered in this way, the silences of Philip’s text gesture toward a type of undercommon sociality: one that can be found when one remains in the hold of the ship and attends to the forces that move there; that is situating itself but not surrendering to the realms of both social and corporeal death. By making language stutter, Philip reveals silence to be a crucially noisy site from which knowledge — official and unarchived — is made. Listening to the silence is configured as a way of inhabiting the void, a space from which we might begin to imagine future becomings.

The stutter, then, is a parasitic noise that forces a system to transform. For Deleuze and

137 Moten, A Poetics of the Undercommons. 138 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997), 189. 139 Ibid., 190. 140 Ibid.

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Guattari, stuttering contains an important political potential in that it animates the disequilibrium immanent to language. In doing so, stuttering produces zones of becoming in which new enunciative registers might emerge. Experimentation with language works to produce what Deleuze refers to as “zone of vibration” in which language is made to “tremble from head to toe.”141 An interruption to the idealised, individual voice and the perceived stability of communication, the stutter brings language to the limits of its ordering functions of policing and homogenising. Considering language as engendering a politics and a people (to come), the parasitic stutter both eats these functions and spits out new possibilities for speaking- writing that are multiplicitous.

Moving from the potential of the stutter to create new modes of listening and reading, the following chapter considers gossip as a noisy mode of discourse that might generate alternate socialities. Here I consider what the proto-sociality of a gossip network might do as a form of undercommons.

141 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 109.

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gossip

Noise is essential to speech. Din is discourse.

— Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse

To hear this noise as we do, we must hear the parts which make up this whole, that is the noise of each wave, although each of these little noises makes itself known only when combined confusedly with all the others, and would not be noticed if the wave which made it were by itself.

— G. W. Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding

“Have you heard…”

Gossip is both a noisy mode of speech and a networked system of communication. The quality and movement of gossip can be elaborated via a further exploration of the Serresian figure of the parasite, which as we have seen in the previous chapter actively interrupts, distributes and transforms the system or host upon which it ‘feeds.’ To reiterate, for Serres the parasite (as noise) is both the conditioning turbulence from which all relations emerge and an interruptive phenomenon that accounts for the continual making and remaking of these relations within a system. Figured as the relation of relations, the parasite interrupts commonplace understandings of communication as a linear flow of information from ‘x’ to ‘y’, suggesting instead a chaotic and multidirectional communication model. Here order is not imposed or pre-existing but, as Stephen D. Brown tells us, “made gradually through a series of transformations of disorder linked to one another.”1 Understanding gossip as a system conditioned by parasitic noise is to understand it as a complexly relational communicative system. Emerging from an ontogenetic noise that produces the system as it produces itself, gossip can only be understood via an attention to the process of emergence rather than as that

1 Brown, “Michel Serres,” 13.

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which is itself a stable form.

So far we have tracked the force of interruption through the sonic figures of murmur and stutter. Murmur involved involved shaping noise toward multiplicity in order to listen to, and feel, the sonicity of dissensual collectivities. In the last chapter, I argued that noise is capable of not simply introducing us to voids in language but helps us to listen differently to what other relations inhabit those voids. The inhabitation of these spaces and silences is not only sensory and aesthetic but also social and political. This chapter turns to gossip, considering it as a noisy and parasitic communicative mode that produces, rather than reflects, social relations. I argue that the way gossip performs as a particular kind of sonic figure might turn this fugitive mode of speech toward emerging socialities. Here I consider the figure of gossip in relation to race — primarily in contemporary American contexts, debates and politics. I am specifically interested in how the noisy relationality of a gossip network performed by subjects who have been racialised in specific ways might nonetheless be interruptive. What is being interrupted here is the logic through which nonwhite subjects are excluded from the category of the human, which gives access to the capacity to figure at all. I am suggesting that gossip performs the force of interruption by circulating discourse in excess of official channels. As I will argue, this interruption is also generative in that the production and circulation of gossip produces new (proto-)socialities that are organised around the transmission of counter- hegemonic discourse.

While the transmission and mutation of gossip depends on parasitic noise — the way gossip translates and mistranslates relations within a system — the ability to gossip is learnt through a process of transindividual imitation that moves between the individual and the collective. Gossip is dependent on the reproduction and performance of social practices rather than the acquisition of ‘factual’ knowledge, and so relies on and works to produce bonds of intimacy and standards of trust. This is not to claim that gossip only trades in falsity, indeed, it often trades in important factual information. Yet its performative structure — encapsulated by the phrase, that itself functions as a crucial performative aside, 'have you heard?' — is one that foregrounds dialogical relations, interaction and, ultimately, multi-vocality. The question is an invitation or solicitation to participate in the sociality of speech exchange, concerned as much with shaping and generating social relations as with sharing and circulating information. Its indeterminacy with respect to content, located in its emphasis on 'have you' rather than ‘what have you

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heard?’, is central to how and why gossip enacts an emergent sociality. Gossip stages a scene of encounter that positions and moves bodies in a social field.

Gossip has long been positioned as a diversion from the pursuit of true knowledge, characterised as a groundless form of feminised speech that trades in falsity and/or triviality. But this has not always been the case. As Patricia Spacks writes, “in its original meaning, gossip implied no gender; it meant ‘godparent,” a meaning derived from the etymological roots of the word as ‘godsibb,' which designated God's kin.2 The evolution of the term sees it come to be used to refer to a drinking partner; a woman’s female friends invited to be present at a birth; and finally, in its modern connotations, to describe a woman who engages in idle talk, or, the idle talk commonly associated with women.3 Common to each of these definitions is the notion of an intimacy that is established via proximity. In each iteration gossip denotes a certain closeness — physical, social or familial — and in its original usage describes a relation of care connected to forms of kinship and community.

I want to consider gossip as a critical and interruptive speech act, its fugitivity located in this in this very form of intimacy established via proximity. In this proto-social setting, gossip is informal speech that sits outside of official discourse, containing the potential to interrupt established epistemologies and received histories, and cultivating instead a potential site for the production of radical forms of knowledge and care. Here gossip is considered alongside the politics of signal and noise, specifically in relation to how these play out socio-politically in terms of racialised conceptions of identity. Drawing on Jacques Rancière's critique of consensus politics, I will argue that politics has been conceptualised as the ability to determine what constitutes signal as opposed to noise, where signal and noise are understood according to a simple two-way communication model.4 The dismissal of certain voices as 'noisy' resonates with the exclusion or marginalisation of these speakers as subjects in a political sphere that is commonly understood as comprising those with full and equal 'rights' in the public domain. The multi-vocality of gossip interrupts this logic of signal and noise, posing a challenge to the legitimacy of authorised and authoritative speech and, by extension, the truth claims that

2 Patricia Meyer Spacks, “In Praise of Gossip,” The Hudson Review 35, no. 1 (1982): 19. 3 Ibid., 19. 4 Jacques Rancière, “Ten Theses on Politics,” trans. Rachel Bowlby, Theory & Event 5, No.3 (2001), accessed September 15, 2016, doi:10.1353/tae.2001.0028

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such speech enacts.

This chapter considers gossip as a mode of speaking and listening, a networked form of communication, and a textuality that produces alternative archives and new approaches to reading. In each instance, gossip occupies a complex relationship to inscription and capture, never a total evasion but rather a continuous oscillation between capture and fugitivity that produces differing forms of inscription — both technological and affective. Expanding from the feminised origins of gossip, this chapter considers contemporary forms of gossip that have integrated networked technology and produced modes of discourse that move between the authorial and the invisible. Specifically, this chapter considers Black Twitter as a gossip network, that is, as a networked sociality that emerges from shared identification and promotes unrestricted inquiry. Understanding Twitter in terms of a contemporary media assemblage in a diagram of networked power, I argue that the emergence of Black Twitter can be understood as an interruption to hegemonic whiteness. Black Twitter reveals itself instead to be a multi-vocal space that incorporates a multitude of different counterpublics within a collective formation. We can understand this networked space as one in which information, discourse, jokes and memes can be circulated in excess of, or in opposition to, those official discourses that uphold and (re)produce the logic of black exclusion. Here gossip is understood not only as a way of speaking that produces unique listening practices but also as a way of composing and reading texts — broadly speaking, as a textual modality that produces counter-archives. This movement from the oral to the written is considered by reading a collection of tweets collected during the 2015 Baltimore riots and anonymously published as The 2015 Baltimore Uprising: A Teen Epistolary. A reading practice that attends to the multi- vocality of gossip can be conceived of as a reading informed by sonicity contoured by the ongoing figuring that I have argued is the operation performed by the different figures of noise in this thesis – thus far, murmur, stutter and now gossip. By listening in to hear those voices commonly rendered inaudible or dismissed as noise we also engage in a different mode of textual engagement and indeed interruption. The concept of listening in might work here as an apt metaphor for thinking about how we read and reread archives in ways that attend to forgotten voices or, simply, voices that are engaged in fugitive acts.

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Signal / Noise

Much maligned as a mode of feminised speech that trades in the inconsequential, malicious or unsubstantiated, gossip has been, and continues to be, dismissed as a shapeless and groundless discourse.5 Yet the largely sexist denigration of gossip as trivial, as talk that trades in personal matters, pure speculation or untruths, belies the concern that it might actually reveal things that would otherwise remain concealed. The charge of inauthenticity can be explained as an attempt to curtail and dismiss the speech of those who ‘retell.’ It is no surprise that ‘retellers’ are those ‘non-philosophers’ existing outside dominant structures of truth and power — women, workers, queers, people of colour and indigenous people, for example. This constitutes what we might think of as a politics of signal — fashioned here as ‘true’ speech carrying real information — and noise, imagined as ‘groundless’ and inauthentic sound. As Rancière has shown, the political turns on the ability to decide what constitutes information as opposed to noise, that is, on the ability to distinguish between speech and noise:

If there is someone you do not wish to recognize as a political being, you begin by not seeing them as the bearers of politicalness, by not understanding what they say, by not hearing that it is an utterance coming out of their mouths... And the politics of these categories has always consisted in re-qualifying these places, in getting them to be seen as the spaces of community, of getting themselves to be seen or heard as speaking subjects... It has consisted in making what was unseen visible; in getting what was only audible as noise to be heard as speech; in demonstrating to be a feeling of shared ‘good’ or ‘evil’ what had merely appeared

5 In philosophical and historical discourses, gossip is rejected as a groundless and inauthentic discourse that concerns “neither true ‘intelligibility’ nor true ‘Being-in-the-world.’” Spacks, “In Praise of Gossip,” 23. Idle talk is portrayed by Heidegger as the undoing of philosophical thought and concealment of the reality of being: “the fact that something has been said groundlessly, and then gets passed along in further retelling, amounts to perverting the act of disclosing into the act of closing off.” Heidegger is concerned with metaphysical conceptions of authenticity and truth, dismissing gossip as an obstacle to true being. And while I am interested in ‘truth’ as socially determined rather than metaphysical, it is interesting to trace this historical conception of gossip as an obstacle to ‘truth’ – a conception that continues to haunt it. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell, 1962), 213.

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as an expression of pleasure or pain.6

This refusal to acknowledge an utterance as speech, played out as a refusal to listen or hear, constitutes a denial of the legitimacy of the speaker of such utterances. In relation to gossip, such a dismissal amounts to an inability to hear in poly- or multiphonic ways. As Moten has noted, authoritative speech — such as the discourse of the state and its institutions — takes “the form of a univocal, single speech.” 7 The perceived authority of such speech arises, in part, from its reduction to a stable, coherent voice and position. In contrast, gossip spreads through a social network, transforming as it circulates. Its proliferation of multiplicity works to displace the centrality of the speaker; the individual speaker becomes but one voice among many in the networked social body that gossip circulates within. Unable to be reduced to something that is individually owned or claimed, in a gossip network every contributor is both author and audience. As a result, gossip becomes the subject of the double dismissal that Rancière speaks of, being heard as noise rather than speech and relegated to the domestic realm, where domestic and private life is segregated from public and political life.

The dismissal of gossip as noise creates the possibility for gossip to develop systems of knowledge and communication that operate independently of sanctioned discourses — systems that might not need to be policed or standardised in order to achieve consistency. The refusal to hear gossip as speech is, paradoxically, what gives rise to its interruptive potentiality. As Édouard Glissant writes, “the dispossessed man [sic] organized his speech by weaving it into the apparently meaningless texture of extreme noise.”8 This circulation of speech under the guise of noise creates the possibility for a ‘discursive’ social body that may not be recognised as comprising “political beings,” to borrow Rancière’s terminology, yet may nonetheless be practicing politics.9 Gossip serves as a productive mechanism, making possible the construction of alternative ways of knowing and socialising that place generative difference at their core. Additionally, such alter- epistemo-socilaities might also give rise to different kinds of medialities — ones that account for the decentralised circulation of discourse within a social body. In this context,

6 Rancière, “Ten Theses on Politics.” 7 Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 135. 8 Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), 124. 9 Rancière, “Ten Theses on Politics.”

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gossip might, as Irit Rogoff says, “serve us well in the reading and rewriting” of history.10

To be clear, the intention here is not to re-value gossip through a system of morals, suggesting that gossip is good by default, for example, or to distinguish between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ forms of gossip (gossip as healing talk versus gossip as malicious rumor- mongering, for example), an established argument that attempts to elevate gossip from the status of inauthentic speech by redefining the distinction between trivial and significant, positive and negative.11 Instead, I want to consider how gossip interrupts the disciplining of knowledge by foregrounding the presence of parasitic noise in social and political contexts. This thesis is specifically concerned with this interruption in relation to forms of political action that seek to counter hegemonic power, and therefore should not be considered as synonymous with tactics of the alt-right — such things as the production of fake news and ‘alternative facts’ — that ultimately work to uphold dominant forms of power. Such noise gestures toward an open-ended conception of subjectivity, that is, the becoming of subjectivity rather than a subjectivity determined a priori. Here we can see the value of gossip to those minor (in the Deleuzo-Guattarian sense) subjectivities that are continually denied. Gossip serves not only as mode of counterpublic speech but also as speech that enacts this processual and relational subjectivity.

Toward a (socio-epistemology for the) Undercommons

As I have already established in chapter one, the undercommons is not a physical space but rather, as Harney tells us, is “a kind of comportment or ongoing experiment with and

10 Irit Rogoff, “Gossip as testimony: a postmodern signature,” in Generations & Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings, ed. Griselda Pollock (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 59. 11 See, for example: Max Gluckman, “Gossip and scandal,” Current Anthropology 4, no.3 (1963): 307-316; Alexander Rysman, “How the “gossip” became a woman,” Journal of Communication 27, no.1 (1977): 176-180; Patricia Meyer Spacks, Gossip (New York: Knopf, 1985); and Spacks, “In Praise of Gossip.” This chapter also does not deal with the relationship between celebrity and mass media that has produced the ‘gossip industry’, since this is a kind of post-noise conception of gossip. I am dealing with gossip specifically as a figure that can be understood within the Serresian framework of ontogenetic noise. For further information about the gossip industry see, for example: Joshua Gamson, Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).

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as the general antagonism, a kind of way of being with others.”12 It refers to the riotous production of difference that moves in excess of institutional arrangements and regulatory structures. Or, as Moten writes, “a gathering in the break of all those already broken voices,” organised by the desire to “tear this shit down completely and build something new.”13 Harney and Moten are concerned with the forging of a sociality that, in its production, challenges and dismantles the structures of precarity that are produced and perpetuated by contemporary forms of governance and capitalist economies in the afterlife (and continuation) of slavery and colonialism. To this end, they develop a series of modalities — study, blackness, (non-)performance, planning and disorder — that comprise strategies of resistance and modes of living shared by the undercommon project. I am interested in gossip as a critical function of the undercommons, suggesting that this figure might constitute a useful medial modality (that can be added to the list above) in this ongoing project of breaking and building socialities.

As radical knowledge, gossip is situated in the break, cutting across or slipping between dominant forms of speech in order to circulate noisy information across a social body. Gossip both points to subjects, objects, events, and affects, and foregrounds points of view. This dual pointing is a gesture that is simultaneously internal and external, an index of the subject and their relation to other subjects, objects and events in the world. Gossip involves both the acquisition and distribution of knowledge: as Maryann Ayim has observed, gossip can be thought of as a mode of inquiry or investigation, an active combination of listening and speaking in order to solicit or acquire sensitive information rather than simply the passive reception of information.14 Gossip requires a listening that, to recall Nancy, "[strains] toward a possible meaning, and consequently one that is not immediately accessible."15 Unlike other modes of public speech — such as a lecture or broadcast — gossip involves complex backward and forward interactions between speaking and listening in which the gossiping parties must actively evaluate and respond to the conversational content in order to elicit the relevant information. In other words, gossip works on us and through us. As Ayim notes:

12 Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 112; italics in original. 13 Ibid., 132 and 152. 14 Maryann Ayim, “Knowledge Through the Grapevine: Gossip as Inquiry,” in Good Gossip, ed.

Robert F. Goodman and Aharon Ben-Zeʼev (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1994), 87.

15 Nancy, Listening, 6.

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Those who limit their contribution to talking are unlikely to learn much; such gossip may provide them with enjoyment, but is unlikely to lead to knowledge. On the other hand, those who listen exclusively will learn more, but much of what they learn will be of little relevance to their own particular interests. The epistemological winner here will be the person who plays both roles strategically, maintaining the desired focus on the conversation by contributing judiciously to the discourse and then recording responses with a phonographic ear.16

To participate in gossip is to engage in feedback and feed-forward loops between speaking, listening, processing and recording/inscribing. This does not refer to linear feedback but rather to a complex dynamic of looping in which directionality is never stable. Feeding forward and backward, gossip involves the dual operation of capture and conversion in which speaking and listening fold into each other. Taken in this way, gossip suggests an active and relational mode of listening, a transversality that attends to social and cultural contexts and dynamics rather than simply the content of the speech. Gossip involves a listening with rather than simply a listening to. This is akin to what Michael Nardone calls “fugitive listening,” a modality in which “a listener is always in movement, allowing the resonances to carry one off on the various lines of flight the sounds induce — toward other sounds and sound-making, into the mesh where one registers and attempts to comprehend how such sounds leave their mark — then back again to the event itself of listening.”17 Fugitive listening attends not only to formal and informational content but also to the forces, relations and contexts that code conversational exchange. Here we can think of gossip as a mode of speech in which affective forces and intensities are transmitting, in addition to conversational content. In other words, gossip can be understood as a type of atmospheric of and for speech. Participating in gossip requires a type of listening that attends to the extralinguistic affective aspects of speech that are produced by context and conveyed in tone, for example. A fugitive listening attends to that which escapes and exceeds signification, it registers the forces and intesnities that circulate within the social field and has the potential to point out what is actually going on at the register of the felt.

16 Ayim, “Knowledge Through the Grapevine,” 91. 17 Michael Nardone, “Fugitive Sound: The Phonotext and Critical Practice, Part I, ” Jacket 2, May 11, 2015, accessed September 20, 2016, http://jacket2.org/commentary/fugitive-sound-phonotext- and-critical-practice-part-i

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Attending to both the affective and informatic dimensions of gossip requires a transversal listening and speaking practice that is similarly collective and collaborative. For Ayim, gossip involves a dual movement between the acquisition and dissemination, and is motivated by the same impulses that Charles Sanders Peirce describes as animating scientific pursuits, that is, “the desire to find things out.”18 Ayim traces the resonance between gossip and Peirce’s account of science, noting that both are driven by a “community of investigators” who contribute small fragments of information into a networked discourse that is constantly evolving.19 Furthermore, the test of informational validity is socially determined, not by an appeal to an a priori truth but by a consensus that emerges from collaborative inquiry. As a mode of investigation, gossip always follows Peirce's first rule of reason: “do not block the way of inquiry.”20 Gossip refuses to adhere to, or to be curtailed by, the conventions of discipline or the demands of formal discourse, instead promoting an informal and collective mode of knowledge production that is truly dialogic. Gossip requires an active interplay between speaking and listening, that is, an active dialogue between the gossiping parties or community of investigators in order for new knowledge to be produced. In this sense, it is always a multi-vocal and collaborative form of speech and inquiry. As a mode of inquiry it is speculative and imaginative and yet, as has been already noted, the fear of gossip is that it contains and will reveal truths that might otherwise go unacknowledged. Taken in this way, we can think of gossip as producing a type of under- or counter-history.

While gossip promotes unrestricted inquiry, it also trades in the secretive. However, gossip's relationship to secrecy is complicated as there is always a risk that gossip will spread beyond its intended recipients (with consequences that will vary depending on the content of the gossip and the political context of its capture). Never totally private, we might think of gossip as the speech of counterpublics, producing and disseminating what Moten refers to as “the open secret”, that is, the freighting of sensitive information across the break, in the open.21 This information is never static and never fixed but rather in a continuous state of evolution — or as Moten writes, “the secret is only transmitted in

18 Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers, Vol. 1, ed. Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss and Arthur Burks (Cambridge: Harvard University Press) as quoted in Ayim, Good Gossip, 87. 19 Ayim, “Knowledge Through the Grapevine,” 87. 20 Peirce, Collected Papers, Vol. 1 as quoted in Ayim, Good Gossip, 88. 21 Fred Moten, B Jenkins (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010), 84.

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transformation and transmutation.”22 For Moten, the secret presents itself as an obscurity that may not be decipherable via traditional interpretive strategies but that is nonetheless felt or known in some form or another. Far from serving as an obstacle to meaning and social relevance, obscurity, as Daniel Tiffany writes, “provide[s] the key to models of community derived specifically from the nature of lyric expression.”23 This lyric obscurity is not just to be found in poetry but also, Tiffany tells us, in the slang and jargon of vernacular modes of speech, such as tavern talk, riddles, oaths and spells. To this list I will add gossip. Drawing on the work of Georg Simmel, Tiffany argues that the secret does not imply a closing off or a lack of sociability, but rather that secrecy constitutes “a universal sociological form.”24 He expands:

Every social relation possesses a ‘quantum of secrecy’, and one may therefore assess the ‘ratio of secrecy’ in any relational structure. Thus, every relation is secretive to some degree, yet every secret forms a relation — a dialectic evident in the formation of secret societies and social underworlds. Because of its sociological properties, secrecy implies exposure, yet one could go further, following Simmel’s argument, and say that every secret is an open secret.25

For Simmel, every social relation is secretive in some way and in turn, every secret produces a social relation. Even at the most fundamental level, the secret implies exposure. Derrida tells us that in order to keep a secret, one must possess it and tell it to oneself. This act of auto-affection establishes the relation of hearing-oneself-speak, producing the possibility of repetition. Here a trace of the secret is formed, marking it, nonetheless, as open or shareable.

There is a secret of denial and a denial of the secret. The secret as such, as secret, separates and already institutes a negativity; it is a negation that denies itself. It de-negates itself. This denegation does not happen to it by accident; it is essential

22 Ibid., 105. 23 Daniel Tiffany, Infidel Poetics: Riddles, Nightlife, Substance (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2009), 4. 24 Georg Simmel, “The Sociology of Secrecy and of Secret Societies,” trans. Albion W. Small, American Journal of Sociology 11, no. 4 (January 1906): 463, quoted in Tiffany, Infidel Poetics, 4. 25 Tiffany, Infidel Poetics, 5.

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and originary.26

The secret is engendered in the act of communication and so must be understood as an open secret. While the secret may be marked by a certain obscurity, it is never completely private or closed off from exchange. Likewise animated by the circulation of open secrecy, gossip also always involves the production of social relations. Here I am thinking about gossip as a mode of speech that arises in the midst of collaborative activities such as study or ‘minor’ planning, returning here to Harney and Moten’s concept of how these modalities function to produce undercommon socialites. Gossip’s continuous movement between the secretive and the open can be understood as just that movement that supports the threshold of a becoming public of information.

Opposed to the practices of governance and policy, fugitive modalities of study and planning foreground multi-vocality, producing a cacophony of demands and practices that refuse to conform to the corrective demands put forward by policy and policy makers. For Harney and Moten, policy comes to represent a mentality or disposition, and the mobilisation of policy produces governance, which they define as follows:

Governance should not be confused with government or governmentality. Governance is most importantly a new form of expropriation. It is the provocation of a certain kind of disinterestedness, a display of convertibility, a display of legibility. Governance is an instrumentalisation of policy, a set of protocols of deputisation, where one simultaneously auctions and bids on oneself, where the public and the private submit themselves to post-fordist production.27

Describing, alternately, an informal and improvisatory set of practices and activities — or perhaps a disposition counter to the one articulated by policy — planning and study gesture towards modes of intellectuality and communality. Such modalities of social life emerge from a general antagonism, which cannot “be tamed either by the feudal authority or social violence that is capitalism, much less by policy initiatives like agnostic dialogues

26 Jacques Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” trans. Ken Frieden, in Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory, ed. Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 25; italics in original. 27 Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 80.

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or alternative public spheres.”28 Such modalities enact modes of being together that interrupt and refuse the logics of governance and policy that define post-fordist capitalism. Gossip contains a general antagonism toward formal discourse or policy — it moves information that is counter to or in excess of that which is officially sanctioned, and generates transversal lines of communication that cut the linear movement of discourse via policy. It produces a sociality that is informal but not formless. As such, it can be understood as a way to productively speak and listen in the undercommons. To be clear, this is not to say that the undercommons exists strictly outside institutions and institutionality, but rather that undercommon activity moves within and through institutional structures that are continually trying to subsume or exclude it. It is important to note that gossip is not necessarily a fast moving mode of discourse that circulates against slow moving institutional speech. Oftentimes, gossip is a slow moving and viscous mode of speech that resists governmental discourses issued via the directness of policy that are designed to obscure, resolve or forget. Transforming as it circulates, gossip involves a cacophonous production of difference that arises from its inherent multi-vocality. It is a collective form of speech that allows for dissensual positions to communicate.

Here I want to think briefly about the relationship between gossip and improvisation. As we established in chapter one, improvisation can be understood as a type of collective organisation that is concerned with the production of novelty and with openings toward indeterminant socialities and shared ways of knowing. Concerned with movement and relation, improvisation produces an operational field that goes beyond fixed forms and positions. It creates an opening in which form gives way to force, a space in which potentials might resonate and new relations might emerge. For Harney and Moten, improvisation is inextricably linked to the black radical tradition and is central to both politics and aesthetics. In the artistic practices of collective black improvisation, we can find styles of organisation that foreground multi-vocality, movement and collaboration. As Harney and Moten tell us, improvisation follows the “call for and from disorder.”29 In this sense, it can be understood as the collective navigation of forces and relations that precede and condition the political. Re-thinking the etymology of the term, Moten writes:

Improvisation—as the word’s linguistic roots indicate—is usually understood as

28 Ibid., 109. 29 Ibid., 133.

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speech without foresight. But improvisation, in whatever possible excess of representation that inheres in whatever probable deviance of form, always also operates as a kind of foreshadowing, if not prophetic, description. So that the theoretical resources embedded in the cultural practice of improvisation reverse, even as they bear out, the definition that etymology implies and the theoretical assumptions it grounds. That which is without foresight is nothing other than foresight.30

Gossip’s paradoxical relationship to truth — dismissed as groundless and yet producing and disseminating socially determined truths — resonates strongly with Moten’s account of improvisation as “that which is without foresight is nothing other than foresight.”31 As a dialogical speech act, gossiping depends on an improvised exchange in which information is transmitted as it is transformed. Gossip — spontaneous, collective, multi- vocal, noisy and interruptive — is animated by the improvisational imperative. It is a fugitive speech act helping to enact a relational field that operates as the condition for the generation of novelty.

Inscription / Capture

As an oral form, gossip typically moves through a social network as a series of informal and unrecorded exchanges of stories and information that evade capture by official archives. In this sense, gossip can be read as an example of what Peggy Phelan calls “unmarked” performance; that which operates outside the economies of reproduction.32 Gossip’s resistance to capture would seem to fit Phelan’s taxonomy, a line of argument taken up by the art historian Gavin Butt, who writes, “gossip is invariably unrecorded as cultural document, and it is preserved instead within a chain of individual speech acts; in the telling and retelling of certain stories as they are urgently swapped from one to another.”33 While the embodied nature of gossip certainly does trouble the “text-based episteme of the archive”, I would argue that gossip is not unrecorded but rather involves

30 Moten, In the Break, 63; italics in original 31 Ibid., 63. 32 Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 1993). 33 Gavin Butt, Between You and Me: Queer Disclosure in the New York Art World, 1948-1963 (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005), 18; italics in original.

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different forms of recording and inscription.34 Gossip relies upon various forms of technological, affective and embodied inscription in order for it to circulate and proliferate and these are often unable to be captured or recognised by official archives. In other words, gossip always involves economies of capture and reproduction that operate in excess of informational content. Think, for example, of the ways in which urgency, care, concern or fear, and so on are part of the transmission of gossip. These sentiments may not be addressed directly by the dialogue of the gossiping parties but they move in, and through, the conversational exchange. Gossip, then, is a mode of speech that attends to the affective forces and intensities that condition, act upon, and become part of all social relations.

By extension, texts, such as the works discussed in this chapter or for that matter, the arguments of this chapter itself, occupy a relationship to inscription and reproduction that is resonant with oral forms of gossip. Whilst such works are situated within economies of reproduction — as books, videos, audio recordings — they also produce modes of inscription that exceed their media specific materiality; that is, their circulation and reproduction depends upon affective and embodied inscriptions. As we will see later in this chapter, gossip as a textual modality produces ‘alternative’ public archives that attend not only to the fidelity of the text but to that which is produced in excess of the text. We might think of these inscriptions as something like a discursive register for a sociality of the undercommons. The task, then, would be to develop strategies for listening and reading to both the text and that which exceeds it; that is, to develop strategies for attending to what Michael Nardone refers to as “the negotiation between captivation and fugitivity.”35 Listening to this excess is to listen to, and for, the noise that is already in production prior to the emergence of a signal. Or rather, it is to listen with this ontogenetic noise in order to hear the lines of flight that move in excess of what is being constrained.

Listening to, and reading, texts as gossip is an explicit attempt to interrupt established epistemologies and their archives, not in order to gain recognition from a broken system (even though such a thing may occur), but in order to enable knowledge of and for the undercommons. It is to consider the ways that the performativity of informal and unfixed speech acts leave marks on the body of a fugitive public. This is the coming-together of

34 Ibid., 18; italics in original. 35 Nardone, “Fugitive Sound.”

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gossip as speech and gossip as text, co-productive of a relational field that operates in, yet also in excess of signification. Distinct yet intersecting, speech and text are made to come together in gossip to generate a singular aesthetic experience that attends to the movement of forces rather than simply the (re)production of representation. The figuring that gossip performs moves us toward an embodied mode of thought that is thought’s becoming — its "thinking-feeling."36 Encompassing the sonic and the textual, the sonic figure of gossip moves between the captive and the fugitive, the unrecorded and the inscribed. This is not to say that gossip does not deal with representation — it can involve the circulation of information that is figurative, illustrative or narrative. Rather, I am arguing that the work performed by gossip as figural moves beyond the figurative, producing something in excess of representation and signification. As Toni Pape has observed, “going beyond is not the same as leaving behind: working toward the figural is to work with the figurative. In this sense, the figure ‘extracts’ from the figurative.”37 Considered in this way, the sonic figure is an open proposition for different listening and reading practices, one that attend to the forces and intensities that belong to the order of sensation’s logic. Noise, in its figuration as gossip, opens a space of possibility for challenging certain kinds of primarily representational paradigms. The sonic figure of gossip allows us to develop alternate ways of thinking about which bodies do and do not become visible within the social. Emphasising listening and speaking exchanges, gossip involves a shift away from the primacy of the visual. Such a shift might allow conceptions of race to move beyond an ocularcentrism that renders people of colour alternately invisible and hypervisible, and toward new (undercommon) conceptions of sociality.

This is not to imply that the sonic is completely separate from the domain of visuality. As Jennifer Lynn Stoever posits, the concept of the colour line can be extended to incorporate a “sonic colour line.”38 The colour line — a term taken up by W.E.B. DuBois to describe the social construction of race and racism — stems from an understanding of the ways in which visuality is structured by a racial schema. Writing in the wake of the Rodney King case, Judith Butler states that “the visual field is not neutral to the question

36 Massumi offers this term to account for pure experience and develops a concept of unmediated perception, that is, a thinking of perception in perception. See Brian Massumi, Semblance and Event (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2011), 1-29 and 39-87. 37 Pape, “Figures of Time,” 37; italics in original. 38 Jennifer Lynn Stoever, The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening (New York: NYU Press, 2016).

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of race; it is itself a racial formation, an episteme, hegemonic and forceful.”39 The act of seeing always involves the act of reading, problematising the assumption that seeing is natural or neutral. Seeing, as Butler observes, is not “an act of direct perception, but the racial production of the visible.”40 Seeing (and reading) are always mediated by a complex assemblage of factors to do with class, race, gender, sexuality, geography and history. For Butler, racism structures white perception and produces a white paranoia in which the black subject is read as containing an impending threat of violence. Intention is inscribed phantasmatically upon the black subject, producing a justification for any pre-emptive action to which a black person is subjected. As Butler writes of the King case, “he is hit in exchange for the blows he never delivered, but which he is, by virtue of his blackness, always about to deliver.”41 This visual field, defined by a white gaze that is assumed to emanate from a ‘neutral’ or ‘natural’ position, works to produce subjectivations that uphold the majoritarian order. What is continually reproduced is a logic of racism that both inscribes and erases — erasing individual subjectivity while projecting a generic and racialised conception of identity onto black people.

The sonic colour line can be understood as an extension of this visual paradigm into the realm of aurality. It can be understood as the conceptualisation and categorisation of sound in order to produce and uphold a normative (white) social and political order. As Stoever explains:

The sonic color line is both a hermeneutics of race and a marker of its im/material presence... The sonic color line produces, codes, and polices racial difference through the ear, enabling us to hear race as well as see it. It is a socially constructed boundary that racially codes sonic phenomena such as vocal timbre, accents, and musical tones. On one level, the sonic color line posits racialized subject positions like “white,” “black,” and “brown” as historical accretions of sonic phenomena and aural stereotypes that can function without their correlating visual signifiers and often stand in for them.42

39 Judith Butler, “Endangered/Endangering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia,” in Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising, ed. Robert Gooding-Williams (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), 17. 40 Ibid., 16. 41 Ibid., 19. 42 Stoever, The Sonic Color Line, 10-11.

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This socio-political articulation of the sonic is propelled by a normative listening that assumes white masculinity as the default position. Such a listening produces and reinforces racialised binaries such as sound/noise, speech/dialect, sense/nonsense, cultivated/raw, controlled/excessive, proper/improper.43 The task, then, is to develop sonic figures that evade capture by normative social and political orders, and to develop a listening (and by extension reading) that attends to the fugitivity of noise. A listening that attends to the movement of asignifying forces and relations allows us to move beyond the dominant visual paradigm and its extension into normative modes of listening and toward recognition and comprehension of black social life. The sonic figure of gossip moves us toward the production of undercommon socialities.

Networked Gossip

In the final sections of this chapter I want to build on this notion of gossip as a critical, interruptive modality by looking at the concept of networked gossip in relation to Black Twitter. Tracing the connection between blackness, technology and digital networks, I argue that black culture and social life thrive in certain online spaces. Further developing this notion of gossip as a mode of speaking and reading, this section considers Black Twitter via a chapbook produced by the collective Research and Destroy New York City, titled The 2015 Baltimore Uprising: A Teen Epistolary.44 Collecting tweets from the lead up to and duration of the 2015 Baltimore riots that occurred in the wake of Freddie Gray’s death, the chapbook forms an archive of the online activity of a sub-community of Black Twitter — Baltimore teenagers. I am interested in how networked counterpublics have emerged in relation to online platforms and how they have come to be organised around race. Following Michael Warner's lead, counterpublics can be understood as publics that are "formed by their conflict with the norms and contexts of their cultural environment."45 Taking this one step further, they can also be understood in relation to shared cultural practices and the circulation of texts and discourse. I am suggesting that the production and circulation of information on Twitter can function like a gossip network, working to produce counterpublics that have the potential to disseminate ‘news’ outside, or in excess

43 Ibid., 13. 44 Various, The 2015 Baltimore Uprising. 45 Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2005), 63.

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of the official channels. Of course, this is not to claim that Twitter is a radical political platform. On the contrary, it emerges from the corporatisation of networks that configures the social as a mass of discrete individuals, a phenomenon that has given rise to the univocal blustering that is a hallmark of Donald Trump’s online presence, for example. Rather than ascribing an inherent radicalism or conservatism to the platform, we can understand Twitter as belonging to a diagram of contemporary power that is inflected by different kinds of subjectivations. Put another way, Twitter is a technocultural assemblage that contains both vectors of territorialisation and deterritorialisation.

Here I am thinking about Black Twitter as a gossip network freighting sensitive information across the break; a fugitive public animated by the improvisational imperative; and a space of black performance mediated by a complex interplay between technocultural processes and structures (bodies, software platforms, algorithms, digital networks, data flows, affects). It is a set of operations that move, following Moten’s formulation, according to “the reality of escape in and the possibility of escape from.”46 I also trace the connection between gossip and the riot, arguing that the riot erupts through gossip torrenting out from the ontogenetic noise that animates modes of speaking, reading and living in the undercommons. The 2015 Baltimore Uprising: A Teen Epistolary can be read as both an archived moment of a networked counterpublic and as a cultural artefact in its own right. It is a critical text that interrupts established epistemologies and works to produce a counter-archive of and for the undercommons.

Twitter is a micro-blogging platform that enables users to post, circulate and read short messages called ‘tweets.’ Since launching in July of 2006, Twitter has become a major social media platform, and while its 328 million active monthly users pales in comparison with Facebook’s 1.94 billion monthly active users, the simple interface and focus on posts rather than profiles has resulted in its prominence as an online news and information sharing platform.47 As Sanjay Sharma notes, Twitter “has become the ‘real time’ of the digital media landscape because of the precipitous speed of its propagation of

46 Moten, “Black Op,” 1745. 47 “Twitter Usage / Company Facts,” last modified June 30, 2016, accessed July 18, 2017, https://about.twitter.com/company; “Facebook Company Info,” last modified March 31, 2017, accessed July 18, 2017, http://newsroom.fb.com/company-info/

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messages, information and ‘news.’”48 Its 140 character limit is modelled on short message service (SMS), a design that encourages users to post from mobile devices and enables real-time updates on breaking news and current events, as well as social activities and personal updates. All tweets appear as public and searchable by default and are published in reverse chronological order on both the user’s page and aggregated public feed.49 The frequency and speed of posts to Twitter marks it as a noisy, informationally dense and multi-vocal environment. In addition to text, tweets can contain compressed multimedia (images, short video, gifs, sound files, etc) and hyperlinks (often in the form of shortened or ‘tiny’ URLs). Users have the ability to follow, address and interact with other registered users without permission or the expectation of a reply, and like other social media Twitter has produced a unique set of communication practices and linguistic conventions that enable counterpublics to form within the Twittersphere. Communication on Twitter is defined and organised around five main functions: the ‘@’ and ‘follow’ functions, likes, retweets (RT) and hashtags (#).50

The ‘@’ function (@username) enables addressivity by creating a mechanism for users to address, reply to, or reference other users in their tweets. This function creates the possibility of direct conversation, giving users the opportunity to direct posts to specific users and to reply to posts directed at them. Twitter’s ‘follow’ function enables users to follow other users, working to produce something like a personalised RSS (Rich Site Summary) feed. As André Brock observes, “Twitter’s ‘follow’ mechanism serves to curate content, allowing users to build personal information environments centered around

48 Sanjay Sharma, “Black Twitter? Racial Hashtags, Networks and Contagion,” New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics 78 (2013): 49. 49 Users do however have the ability to make their Twitter accounts private, in which case, their tweets are directly only to their followers. 50 As Sharma notes, Twitter’s communication conventions emerged from “the earlier openness of the software platform” which “enabled users to influence the development of the architecture of the system.” Sharma, “Black Twitter?,” 49. However, it should be noted that the openness of the platform has conversely produced an environment in which ‘signal’ fluctuates between major and minor usages. The functionality of the platform has produced the conditions for counterpublics to emerge around the minoritarian usages of language. Simultaneously, it has given rise to the type of online shouting and trolling that is closely associated with the alt-right. This situation is best understood by considering Twitter as part of a diagram of contemporary power, a notion that will be explored in greater depth later in this chapter.

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topics and people of interest.”51 This, coupled with Twitter’s architecture, which works to aggregate many different twitter accounts into a single view, produces a ‘real-time’ web experience tailored to each individual user. As Michele Zappavigna writes, Twitter’s “real- time web experience combines with the social web to produce a semiotic world in which users have almost immediate access to what is being said in their social networks at any given moment.”52 The ‘like’ function allows users to like other users’ tweets, enabling connections based on shared identification to form. Garnering likes is crucial for a tweet to spread virally. Retweeting — the practice of reposting someone else’s tweet often, with the abbreviation ‘RT’ — is central to the circulation and viral spread of posts on Twitter, constituting a practice of citation in which tweets are shared and reposted beyond the network of the original user. The ‘quote tweet’ function allows users to comment on a retweeted post, enabling the retweet to circulate with a discursive addition attached to it. Retweeting can function in myriad different ways and is an important practice in establishing the affective and political dimensions of online counterpublics. They can operate, for example, as endorsements, critiques, parodies, expressions of solidarity, gestures of calling out, or expressions of incredulity.

Hashtags are created using the # symbol followed by a word or phrase (#hashtag) to indicate the topic or subject of the tweet. Stemming from existing Internet Relay Chat (IRC) practices, hashtagging is central to the way information is organised and disseminated on Twitter. Attached to tweets, hashtags function as a type of user- generated metadata that categorises and makes content searchable according to topics. While tagging has become central to the user-generated content and economies of Web 2.0, Twitter hashtags are unique in that they are, as Zappavigna observes, “a form of ‘inline’ metadata, that is, ‘data about data’ that is actually integrated into the linguistic structure of the tweets.”53 Take the tweet below as an example of how hashtags can be incorporated into the discursive structure of a tweet:

51 Andre ́ Brock, “From the Blackhand Side: Twitter as a Cultural Conversation,” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 56, no. 4 (2012): 531. 52 Michele Zappavigna, Discourse of Twitter and Social Media (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), 4 53 Michele Zappavigna, “Ambient Affiliation: A Linguistic Perspective on Twitter,” New Media and Society 13, no. 5 (2011): 791.

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3.1. Screen shot taken from Twitter, December 9, 2016.

On Twitter, hashtags are not only a means of categorising content but also enable users to organise and channel conversations around specific topics. In becoming a part of the linguistic structure of a tweet, Twitter hashtags collapse the distinction between form and content, producing a type of online chatter that is instant, responsive and searchable. In addition, hashtags take on a primarily collaborative and social function in the Twittersphere, functioning as “a social form of verbal indexing involving a ‘bottom-up’ approach to the kind of classification previously achieved by reference librarians.”54 The hashtag, then, is central to the viral spread of information on Twitter. The noisy and seemingly random practices of tweeting “are afforded a semblance of organisation as hashtags are able to relate together potentially thousands of individual messages across the Twitter network.”55 The centrality of hashtagging as a communicative practice on Twitter has given rise to one of the platform’s key functions — ‘Trending Topics’ — which rank and aggregate the most popular hashtags according to location (global or national) or to an individual user’s profile (tailored trends that are based on a combination of who the user follows, their interests and their location). The result of algorithmic processes, ‘trending topics’ are determined by a combination of the volume of tweets and the time taken to create that volume. Not simply a reflection of total tweets,

54 Ibid., 791. 55 Sharma, “Black Twitter?,” 50.

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the algorithm favours sharp spikes of activity around a certain hashtag rather than gradual or sustained activity over time. The intention is to create a responsive environment that reflects real-time Twitter trends rather than long-term patterns. Top trending hashtags afford topics an enormous degree of visibility in the Twittersphere, creating a feedback loop whereby their appearance in trending lists often works to further amplify the activity around the trending hashtag.

The generativity of hashtags, like memes, revolves around their relatability and affect. While hashtags operate on semantic level, when they go viral, they do so because “they enable a collective (heterogeneous) capacity to affect and be affected in online networks.”56 It is their affective capacity that accounts for the way they are felt, shared and circulated online. The emergence of counterpublics or ad hoc communities around certain hashtags or shared topics of interest reflects “a new kind of sociality” based on “ambient affiliation.”57 As Zappavigna explains, “the affiliation is ambient in the sense that the users may not have interacted directly and likely do not know each other, and may not interact again.”58 Ambient affiliations based on the transmission of affect go some way toward explaining the cultural generativity of hashtags, a generativity that is both unique to digital networks and yet often ends up exceeding the confines of the online realm.

An example of this would the Black Lives Matter hashtag (#BlackLivesMatter), which has developed from a trending hashtag into a social and political movement involving the mobilisation of both online and offline communities in the form of protests, demonstrations, sit-ins, talks and more. Of course, given their multiplicity, it is impossible to generalise about the communication conventions, intentions or social practices of Twitter communities, many of which are built on shared politics and histories, direct interaction, or standards of trust and bonds of intimacy. What can be observed, however, is how Twitter users move between mass and interpersonal communication in ways that appear to collapse the historic distinction between each. This collapse is the result of the corporatisation of networked space in which the social is reduced to a mass of individuals in communication. As Munster writes:

56 Anna Munster, An Aesthesia of Networks: Conjunctive Experience in Art and Technology (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2013), 103. 57 Zappavigna, “Ambient Affiliation,” 801. 58 Ibid.

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The focus becomes all about the individual elements and how in turn these connect. The very relationality that constitutes the force, the ground, and the experience of networking is somewhere else… We see constituted connections rather than the possible fact of where and how networks conjoin.59

Against this emphasis on individual elements and connections, I am arguing that we can understand Twitter as part of a complex contemporary diagram of power. Following Deleuze, the diagram can be understood as that which not only attends to homogenising forces but also to asignifying movements and lines, as it continuously traces and regenerates relations between forces conditioning and constituting power and knowledge:

Every diagram is intersocial and constantly evolving. It never functions in order to represent a persisting world but produces a new kind of reality, a new model of truth… It makes history by unmaking preceding realities and significations, constituting hundreds of points of emergence or creativity, unexpected conjunctions or improbable continuums. It doubles history with a sense of continual evolution.60

The diagram is not a plan or a model but a processual unfolding that registers movement and opens up onto potential movements. It contains both majoritarian and minoritarian forces, movements of capture and lines flight. In the case of Twitter, we can see this in the ways that the platform functions to both amass fascism and racism, and to oppose it. What is crucial here is not the platform per se but the ways in which it becomes part of a diagram of power that can be inflected by minor and major subjectivations. The recursivities of the Twitter platform — the @ function, retweeting, and hashtagging as inline metadata, for example — allow for the diagram to be inflected via different assemblages, such as Black Twitter. Such inflections work to interrupt the majoritarian ordering of the network, setting off a process of becoming-minor.

As the artist, curator and writer Aria Dean notes, “black people love social media, and

59 Munster, An Aesthesia of Networks, 31. 60 Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Seán Hand (Minneapolis and London: Unniversity of Minnesota Press, 2000), 35.

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social media love black people.”61 This formulation is evidenced by 2015 Pew Research Center survey “The Demographics of Social Media Users” that showed black users outnumber white users on platforms such Twitter and Instagram.62 The prominence of black Twitter users has led to the phenomenon known as Black Twitter, a formation that illustrates the importance of digital networks and social media platforms for what Dean, riffing on Cedric Robinson, refers to as “the collective being of blackness.”63 Following Kodwo Eshun and John Akomfrah, Dean traces a connection between the Middle Passage and digital networks, arguing that blackness “prefigures digital networks in its effects on bodies and subjectivities.”64 The African diaspora, or what Paul Gilroy refers to as “the Black Atlantic,” is, and always has been, a “transcultural, international formation” that has a “rhizomorphic, fractal structure.”65 Or, in the afterlives of slavery, blackness is already distributed and networked.66 For Dean, formations such as Black Twitter reflect the historical conditions in which black “collective being has always been scattered, stretched across continents and bodies of water.”67 Black Twitter offers a space of

61 Aria Dean, “Poor Meme, Rich Meme,” Real Life, July 25, 2016, accessed November 10, 2016, http://reallifemag.com/poor-meme-rich-meme/. For more on this, see Kodwo Eshun, More Brilliant Than Than The Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction (London: Quartet Books, 1998); John Akomfrah, The Last Angel of History, documentary film, directed by John Akomfrah (Brooklyn: Icarus Films, 1997). 62 The 2015 Pew Research Centre Report shows that 28% of Twitter users were black compared to 20% white, and 47% of Instagram users were black compared to 21% white. Maeve Duggan, “Mobile Messaging and Social Media 2015,” August 19, 2015, accessed November 10, 2016, http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/08/19/the-demographics-of-social-media-users/. It should be noted that this study failed to account for users under the age of 18 years old. 63 Dean, “Poor Meme, Rich Meme.” 64 Ibid. 65 Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 4. 66 This conception of blackness, and its intertwined relationship to technology, can be found in black radical traditions such as afrofuturism, free jazz, hip hop, dub and house music. See, for example: Mark Dery, Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1994); Eshun, More Brilliant Than Than The Sun; Martine Syms, “The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto,” Rhizome, December 17, 2003, http://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/dec/17/mundane-afrofuturist-manifesto/. See such artists, musicians and writers as Octavia Butler, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Samuel Delany, A Guy Called Gerald, Larry Heard, Janelle Monáe, Outkast and Sun Ra. 67 Dean, “Poor Meme, Rich Meme.”

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connection and distributed identification, a space in which black social, political and cultural life is expressed and circulated.

We might think of Black Twitter as an expression of the undercommons in which we can find the collective and heterogeneous becoming of blackness. Yet it is important here to caution against the totalising tendencies that often accompany a term such as Black Twitter. As Sarah Florini writes:

Talking about ‘Black Twitter’ helps guard against subsuming Black users within a generic and generalized user—one generally presumed to be white. However, I should be clear that Black Twitter does not exist in any unified or monolithic sense. Just as there is no ‘Black America’ or single ‘Black culture,’ there is no ‘Black Twitter.’ What does exist are millions of Black users on Twitter networking, connecting, and engaging with others who have similar concerns, experiences, tastes, and cultural practices.68

Here we can understand Black Twitter as a noisy and contested collection of tendencies within the Twittersphere that emerges around a shared set of concerns to do with blackness. Considered as a discursive plane, Black Twitter is a cacophony of voices drawn together in “the blackness of becoming.”69 And while it cannot be reduced to a unified whole, there is perhaps some sense of cohesion that emerges from within what Moten refers to as “the call for and from disorder.”70 As Dean tells us, “this cohesion only becomes necessary, perhaps, as the collective being is made visible to nonblack society.”71 This sense of cohesion exceeds the interpellation of blackness by nonblack society and functions to produce an important politics of solidarity in the context of ongoing anti- blackness.

Considered from outside the interpellative gaze of whiteness, Black Twitter can be understood as an intrinsically multi-vocal space. Here we can think of Black Twitter as a gossip network, that is, a networked social body that emerges from shared identities and

68 Sarah Florini, “Tweets, Tweeps, and Signifyin’: Communication and Cultural Performance on ‘Black Twitter,’” Television and New Media 15, no. 3 (2014): 225. 69 Harney, “Undercommons and Utopia,” 4. 70 Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 133. 71 Dean, “Poor Meme, Rich Meme.”

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generates unrestricted inquiry. The sound of many black voices assembling in the break, Black Twitter describes a networked space in which open secrets can be transmitted. It is a space in which information, solidarity, jokes and memes can be circulated in excess of, and in opposition to, official discourses. An interruption to the hegemonic whiteness of the online realm, Black Twitter shows us, to borrow a phrase from Moten, “how the underground operates out in the open and, perhaps deeper still, as the open.”72 In other words, it shows the noise to be the signal.

Riot

The collective becoming of blackness that we can find in formations such as Black Twitter must be considered in relation to dominant structures of power that (re)produce black exclusion and black death as norms in the United States (to name one key site for this study). In a media landscape defined by smartphones and ubiquitous computing, the structure of Twitter enables users to provide real-time streams of information (in the forms of text, images and videos) that can often work to interrupt dominant flows of traditional media sources and political speech. The production and sharing of information in real-time has resulted in the viral dissemination of information among social bodies, a situation we can see clearly in the responses of Black Twitter to the numerous black deaths at the hands of police in recent years. The tweets collected in The 2015 Baltimore Uprising: A Teen Epistolary form an archive of a networked counterpublic that contests the narratives of the majoritarian order. Within these fragments of information, produced and circulated by a “community of investigators,” we can find relations of intimacy and care that are animated by what Glissant describes as the “consent not to be a single being.”73

I want to suggest that we can read this chapbook as gossip. But in order to do so, we must first consider what it means to read things as gossip. Here my thinking is indebted to Ann Laura Stoler’s work in which she considers the instability of the colonial archive and its capacity to be read and reread in the spirit of critical ethnography and towards a

72 Fred Moten, “Black Optimism/Black Operation,” October 19, 2007, accessed November 20, 2016, https://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/politicalfeeling/files/2007/12/moten-black-optimism.doc. 73 Manthia Diawara and Edouard́ Glissant, “One World in Relation,” 5.

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politics of what might be called an uncommon (or undercommon) sense of history.74 The archives that comprise received histories and uphold dominant forms of power involve much that is left unwritten. This includes, as Stoler writes, “what was ‘unwritten’ because it could go without saying and ‘everyone knew it,’ what was unwritten because it could not yet be articulated, and what was unwritten because it could not be said.”75 Gossip traffics in these unwritten forms, often involving the circulation of unwritten information that is both already known yet unable to be said officially. And for Stoler, this constitutes critique: “critique emerges in the interstices of what goes without saying and what should not be said.”76 Gossip, then, can be considered as critical modality that works to interrupt the perceived stability and authority of received archives. The 2015 Baltimore Uprising: A Teen Epistolary is a work that freights the open secret across the break, constructing a mode of critique that points to, points out and signifies pointedly the ways that black people are subjected to anti-black racism in everyday life. The move from gossip as a spoken form to gossip as a textual form that we can locate in The 2015 Baltimore Uprising: A Teen Epistolary can be considered as a critical ethnographic re-reading of the received, the given, and the reasonable.

The Teen Epistolary, to borrow a phrase from Moten, “enacts and tells the open secret.”77 Composed (or rather, organised) in the manner of gossip, it produces an alternative archive that can, in turn, be read as a form of critique by a fugitive public. This counter-archive documents both that which goes without saying and that which cannot be officially said. Such an undertaking remains crucial in the afterlife of slavery where political rhetoric that reduces freedom to a question of individual rights has conversely produced new structures of exclusion and subjugation. As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak tells us, “the ‘subaltern’ cannot appear without the thought of the ‘elite.’”78 Producing a

74 While Stoler specifically considers the nineteenth century colonial archives of the Dutch East Indies, her approach to decolonising the archive is relevant here. See Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009). 75 Ibid., 3. 76 Ibid., 28. 77 Moten, B Jenkins, 84. 78 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography,” in Selected Subaltern Studies, ed. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 11-12

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counter-archive then, requires not only re-reading these histories against the archival grain but continuing to produce the archive in ways that interrupt the majoritarian production of history. As Hartman remarks, this undertaking requires that we turn “to forms of knowledge and practice not generally considered legitimate objects of historical inquiry or appropriate or adequate sources for history making,” and that we attend to “the cultivated silence, exclusions, relations of violence and domination that engender official accounts.”79 This might mean considering tweets reorganised like this as a vital and important form of knowledge. Taken as a type of critical ethnography, this chapbook serves as both a document of black collective becoming and challenges the established epistemologies that exclude black people from the category of the human. Reading as gossip is to read with an awareness of the open secret; to listen to those unheard and silenced voices; to hear the multiple rather than the single; to hear as speech what was once dismissed as noise. The 2015 Baltimore Uprising: A Teen Epistolary reminds us that such reading must be practised again and again as every day requires a renewed commitment to reading history differently; such is the tiring work of freighting gossip across the break.

The chapbook documents the Twitter activity of Baltimore teenagers in the lead up to, duration of, and immediate aftermath of the riots that occurred in the wake of Freddie Gray’s death in police custody. Gray, a 25-year-old black man, died on April 19, 2015 from serious spinal injuries that he received while in police custody seven days earlier. Gray was arrested in West Baltimore at 8:40am on the morning of April 12, 2015.80 A bystander video of the arrest shows Gray screaming in pain, his leg clearly injured as officers handcuff him and load him into the back of a police van without hooking his seatbelt. Off camera, someone shouts "His leg broke and y'all dragging him like that!"81 The police van stopped four times between arresting Gray and arriving at the Western

79 Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 11. 80 Gray was initially detained for running from the police and subsequently arrested for the possession of a switchblade.The then Baltimore State's Attorney, Marilyn Mosby, argued that the switchblade was in fact a knife, which is not illegal to possess under Maryland law. 81 Brandon Longo, “Timeline: Freddie Gray’s Arrest to His Fatal Spinal Cord Injury,” CBS Baltimore, June 23, 2016, accessed November 20, 2017, http://baltimore.cbslocal.com/2016/06/23/timeline-freddie-grays-arrest-to-his-fatal-spinal-cord- injury/

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District police station some thirty minutes later, including one stop to put Gray in leg shackles despite the obvious injury he had sustained. By the time Gray arrived at the Western District police station at 9:24am, he had suffered the serious spinal injuries that would eventually kill him. Conscious and speaking at the time of his arrest, by the time he had been transported, Gray was in a critical condition and unable to speak. He subsequently fell into a coma and died seven days later. Ruled a homicide, charges were brought against the six officers involved in Gray’s death. The first three trials resulted in a mistrial and two acquittals, and the remaining charges against those still awaiting trial were dropped on July 27, 2016.

Gray’s death, and its subsequent handling by the state, can be understood in terms of a structural anti-blackness that is foundational to contemporary Western democracy. Black exclusion arises from a process of racialisation that Alexander Weheliye describes as “ongoing sets of political relations that require, through constant perpetuation via institutions, discourses, practices, desires, infrastructures, languages, technologies, sciences, economies, dreams, and cultural artifacts, the barring of nonwhite subjects from the category of the human as it is performed in the modern west.”82 Western modernity’s origins in slavery and colonialism have produced a schema that renders the black subject non-human, positioning the (always white) liberal humanist subject (‘Man’) in opposition to black life. This expulsion of black life from the category of humanity is fundamental to the establishment (and continuation) of whiteness as a paradigm of modern power. The perpetuation of a series of structural antagonisms between subject and object, whiteness and blackness, master and slave, and human and non-human in the afterlife of slavery works to reproduce, as Hartman explains, “a subject who is socially dead and legally recognized only to the degree that he [sic] is criminally culpable.”83 Black exclusion can be understood through the lens of what Achille Mbembe calls “necropolitics” which refers to the ability of sovereign powers to determine who lives and who dies. Mbembe’s concept accounts for the ways in which sovereign power can exercise control over life by subjecting it to the constant threat of death. Necropolitics aptly describes the logics of slavery and its afterlives in which subjection of black life to “the power of death” continues to produce both the state sanctioned, extra-legal killings of black people and the

82 Alexander Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2014), 3. 83 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 24.

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condition of social death.84

Understanding the death of Freddie Gray as yet another example of the expendability of black life, protests began in Baltimore on April 18, 2015, outside of the Western Districts police department and continued for the following week, escalating on April 25th when rioting began outside of Camden Yards toward the end of a protest march from Baltimore City Hall to Inner Harbour. This relatively small-scale instance of rioting was a precursor to the riots that began on April 27, in the wake of Gray’s funeral. The latter riots resulted in the widespread destruction of property, the declaration of a state of emergency, the deployment of the National Guard and the imposition of an official curfew that was put in place until the 1st of May. This erruption of unrest led to the looting and burning of a CVS pharmacy (which had been evacuated), the destruction of two police cars, 144 vehicle fires, 15 structural fires and nearly 200 arrests.85 The 2015 Baltimore Uprising: A Teen Epistolary archives this moment in Baltimore’s history, capturing the circulation of information within a gossip network and the movement of such a network between online and offline spaces during the period between April 19 and May 1, 2015. We can read this chapbook as a document of black resistance, an expression of blackness that takes the form, to quote Moten, of “the extended movement of a specific upheaval, an ongoing irruption that anarranges every line.”86 Here Moten figures blackness is a generative and interruptive force that persistently disrupts existing and established orders.

84 For more on the concept of black exclusion, see such texts as: Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto Press, 2008); Hartman, Scenes of Subjection; Joy James and João Costa Vargas, “Refusing Blackness-as-Victimization: Trayvon Martin and the Black Cyborgs,” in Pursuing Trayvon Martin: Historical Contexts and Contemporary Manifestations of Racial Dynamics, ed. George Yancy and Janine Jones, 193-204 (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2013); Frank B. Wilderson III., “‘We’re trying to destroy the world’ — Anti- blackness and police violence after Ferguson: An Interview with Frank B Wilderson III,” (Berlin: Ill Will Editions, 2014); Ruth Gilmore Wilson, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2007). 85 Associated Press, “Latest on Police-Custody Death: Court Waits Could Increase,” AP News Archive, accessed November 17, 2017, http://www.apnewsarchive.com/2015/The-latest-on- Baltimore-police-custody-death-More-than-150-fires-in-Baltimore-city-says/id- 0b32a37d8b0440b8a444403f5c7ad647 86 Moten, In the Break, 1.

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Before examining the text, I want to momentarily address the use of the term ‘riot’ here. There is much debate over what language to use when describing events such as those that occurred in Baltimore. Commentators on the left and the right argue over the distinctions between riots, uprisings, rebellions and civil unrest. Many on the left have called for a shift to the more explicitly political language of uprising and rebellion as a way of countering the consistent racialisation and criminalisation of rioters. Dominant political discourse and mainstream media have coupled the term ‘riot’ to an image of spontaneous black violence, a tactic that attempts to reproduce a conception of blackness as ‘pure criminality,’ the antithesis of (white) order. As Joshua Clover writes, “the purportedly thoughtless and natural character of riot, lacking reason, organization, and political mediation, is aligned with the racist tradition wherein racialized subjects are figured as natural, animalistic, irrational, immediate.”87 Despite the weight of these negative associations, I am suggesting that the language and grammar of the riot is important to preserve. Attempts to reframe the event of the riot as a rebellion or uprising are borne from the desire to combat conservative media portrayals of riots and rioters as apolitical and out of control. However, this move tends to subsume the actions of rioters under a homogenising political rhetoric that ignores the riot’s cacophonous multi- vocality. A similar tendency can be found in the attempt to discipline gossip into a coherent policy or demand. The desire to ascribe a univocal political position to the actions of rioters is reflective of, what Jackie Wang describes as, “an impulse to contain, consolidate, appropriate, and accommodate events that do not fit political models grounded in white, Euro-American traditions.”88 Here the rebranding of the riot as a rebellion is an overt appeal to a logic of innocence that is defined by whiteness. This politics of recognition is circumscribed by a foundational black exclusion that is unable to account for the ways that, to borrow Wilderson’s formulation, “blackness is always- already criminalised in the collective unconscious.”89 Keeping the term riot is a small but important gesture that seeks to move the political discourse beyond the fundamentally anti-black logic of innocence and criminality. The riot is a force of difference and disruption that moves, even if only momentarily, in excess of established orders. The task, then, is to stay with the noise of the riot.

87 Clover, Riot, Strike, Riot, 112. 88 Jackie Wang, “Against Innocence: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Safety,” LIES: A Journal of Materialist Feminism 1 (2012), accessed July 14, 2017, http://www.liesjournal.net/volume1-10- againstinnocence.html 89 Wilderson, “‘We’re trying to destroy the world,’” 6.

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The word ‘riot’ designates, on the one hand, a certain sense of disorder, noise, wildness, and interruption, and on the other connotes revelry, celebration and excess. But I want to argue that we can understand the riot as erupting from the parasitic noise of gossip. Catalysing change by forcing the system to incorporate or expel the noise of difference, gossip moves social systems toward a state of disequilibrium. Here the riot is configured as the movement of the system at its limit, a physical expression of the movement toward chaos and disorder. This amplification of noise should not be understood as a crisis, but as a generative and productive interruption that creates an opening for relations to be reconfigured. In relation to blackness, the act of rioting is animated by both disorder and revelry. As Moten tells us, “the riot that’s goin’ on is a party for self defense.”90 Moten links the riot with the party in order to demonstrate that the riot is an expression of blackness as surplus — simultaneously an expression of multiplicity and communality, spontaneity and inevitability, interruption and generation.91 The riot is not to be understood solely as a response to black exclusion and can be taken, to use Moten's words, as “a performative declaration of what we are and what we have and what we give.”92 It is an instance — however fleeting — in which black life cannot be contained by the racist structures that emerge from, and continue to produce, black exclusion. Taken in this way, the riot is an expression of the improvisational imperative, a collective action that involves “the constant organization and disorganization of the demand that takes the form-in-deformation of a single voice consenting to and calling for its multiplication and division.”93 The riot is a cacophony of demands, a performative declaration of blackness as surplus which emerges as an expression of a form of noisy communality in which multi-vocality and difference are expressed and preserved at all costs. It is an instance in which the call and the response are enacted in each other; that is, the noise is already in production prior to the emergence of the signal. Here the act of rioting can be conceived of as an expression of an ontogenetic riot that is already, and always, occurring in the space of the undercommons

90 Moten, “necessity, immensity, and crisis.” 91 Clover elaborates on this notion, noting that the riot is both “an instance of black life in its exclusions and at the same time in its character as surplus, cordoned into the noisy sphere of circulation, forced there to defend itself against the social and bodily death on offer.” Clover, Riot, Strike, Riot, 122. 92 Moten, “necessity, immensity, and crisis.” 93 Moten and Harney, The Undercommons, 133.

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in the form of a “call for and from disorder.”

The 2015 Baltimore Uprising: A Teen Epistolary begins with the following tweet:

3.2. Image reproduced from The 2015 Baltimore Uprising: A Teen Epistolary94

The tweet bears the timestamp 8:21AM - 23 Apr 2015 and was retweeted 2964 times. Over the following week this refrain is circulated again and again, transforming — as gossip does — as it circulates through a social body. In these tweets, Black Twitter functions as a means of: disseminating crucial and sensitive information; expressing care and solidarity; organising dissent; expressing anger and rage; interrupting dominant media narratives; circulating black joy in amongst black death; and as a platform for performatively declaring “what we are and what we have and what we give.”95 The ability to share information through retweets affords Twitter the power to ‘break’ news. In the case of Freddie Gray’s death and the Baltimore riots, we can see Black Twitter working to produce and circulate information. The eruption of the riots on April 27 was followed by news reporting that reproduced the language and logic of racialisation and black exclusion.96 The description of black people as “violent criminals” and “thugs” echoes

94 Various, The 2015 Baltimore Uprising, np. 95 Moten, “necessity, immensity, and crisis.” 96 Some of the more explicit examples of this include Fox News captioning from the night of the riots, which read “Baltimore Police: Violent Criminals Continuing to Throw Rocks at Officers,” see http://www.mediaite.com/tv/the-worst-moment-of-foxs-baltimore-riot-coverage; or The New York Post’s headline, “BALTIMORE BURNING: Anti-police ‘thugs’ riot,” see New York Post, April 28, 2015, http://nypost.com/cover/covers-for-april-28-2015/; or The Boston Herald’s headline also

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Fanon’s classic account of interpellation by the white gaze.97 In the eyes of a socio-political assemblage that includes such forces as the state, the law, the mainstream media and the market, black people assembling in the streets will only ever be understood as the manifestation of the threat of violence that is projected onto black bodies every day and every night. Such reportage functions as a justification of continued pre-emptive violence against black subjects.

In contrast, Black Twitter tells a different and more complex story of black insurgency and black life during this period. The tweets gesture to the existence of a collective sentiment within this fugitive public. Initially this sentiment is organised around a series of hashtags that respond to the process of racialisation that produced the death of Freddie Gray as a norm. The hashtags #R.I.P FREDDIE, #Justice4Freddie, #NoJusticeNoPeace and #Fuckthepolice circulated as refrains in the lead up to the riots. Often attached to selfies (fig 3.3 and 3.4), these hashtags function as an acknowledgment of the shared experience of blackness, that is, the idea that violence against a black body is never singular or isolated. These tweets are declarations that the black bodies in these selfies are commensurate with the body of Freddie Gray, or with countless other black people murdered by police. They are an acknowledgement that 'I' is always implicated in the 'we,' that black life follows an improvisational imperative in which the individual is inextricably connected to the multiple. It is an expression of the lyric voice which, to recall Bonney and Rankine, is a voice suspended between 'I' and 'we' — both interrupter and collective.98

from April 28, 2015, “RAGE: Baltimore in Flames as Rioters Target Police,” see http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/entry/baltimore-media-coverage_n_7164064 97 See Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 84. A contemporary example of this act of interpellation can be found in the statements of current American President, Donald Trump, when he spoke of “thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon” in a speech at the Suffolk County Community College on July 28, 2017. See Mark Berman, "White House says Trump was kidding about police mistreating suspects, but cops say ‘it doesn’t matter if he was joking,’" The Washington Post, July 31, 2017, accessed August 12, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/07/31/why-police-departments- lashed-out-at-trump-for-his-comments-on-how-they-treat-suspects/?utm_term=.607c93b3ddf3 98 Bonney, All this burning earth, 16.

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3.3. Image reproduced from The 2015 Baltimore Uprising: A Teen Epistolary99

3.4. Image reproduced from The 2015 Baltimore Uprising: A Teen Epistolary100

99 Various, The 2015 Baltimore Uprising, np. 100 Various, The 2015 Baltimore Uprising, np.

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We can read these tweets as an expression of what Christina Sharpe refers to as the weather. For Sharpe, “the weather is the totality of our environments; the weather is the total climate; and the total climate is antiblack.”101 Sharpe’s invocation of the weather is a way of drawing our attention to the atmospheric or affective conditions of anti-blackness as well as the material ones. Not simply concerned with documenting unfolding events, the tweets archived in The Teen Epistolary capture the affective forces and intensities that move through the social field. Hence the role of the chapbook as ‘archive’ here — or the transduction of gossip/speech to riot/text — is not simply to document and preserve. Rather, we can feel the presence of a compounding and atmospheric anti-blackness in the following collection of tweets, that gather, among other things, black anger;

3.5. Image reproduced from The 2015 Baltimore Uprising: A Teen Epistolary102

101 Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016), 104. 102 Various, The 2015 Baltimore Uprising, np.

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and black fear;

3.6. Image reproduced from The 2015 Baltimore Uprising: A Teen Epistolary103 and black humour;

3.7. Image reproduced from The 2015 Baltimore Uprising: A Teen Epistolary104

Often associated with small talk or idle chatter, the weather is commonly taken as a conversational entry point or warm-up act for more substantial social interaction. Talk of the weather is often dismissed as idle talk, the conversational banalities that one employs to merely pass the time or be polite. Yet, these phatic expressions are not simply conversational icebreakers or trivial exchanges but more importantly function to set the tone of an interaction. What is important is not merely the informational content but rather the affective tonalities that are circulating with, and through, the exchange. Considering the weather in line with Sharpe’s formulation, we can understand the way that the accumulation of everyday 'trivialities' that works to produce a total climate. The value of talking about the weather becomes clear: it is a way to share experiences, build

103 Ibid. 104 Ibid.

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resistance and demonstrate care. It is a temporal locator that calls for an attention to changing circumstances and to who is and is not exposed in such circumstances. And as Sharpe notes, the weather also “necessitates changeability and improvisation; it is the atmospheric condition of time and place,” and as such, “it produces new ecologies.”105

The content of tweets that are shared and spread widely through the online network of Black Twitter is reflective of the weather or wider milieu. Such tweets contain an affective force that exceeds both the informatic and the semiotic, or as Munster puts it, in such content “something elusive moves and moves us.”106 The sharing and spreading of digital content illustrates a type of networked affectivity, that “enable[s] a collective (heterogeneous) capacity to affect and be affected in online networks.”107 What Aria Dean refers to as “the collective being of blackness” can be understood as emerging from this sense of networked affectivity, that is, from the transmission of affect in black digital content.108 While we can point to tweets that index anger, fear, rage or joy, I want to suggest, following Munster, that what spreads online exceeds simple identification to contain an “affectivity that is not yet categorised or owned.”109 Considered in terms of the movement of (often miniscule or molecular) forces, affect, as Munster tells us, “has the capacity to facilitate the passage between one thing and the next.”110 In the movement of affect, novelty emerges. Black Twitter can be understood as an example of a formation that emerges from the passage of affective forces and intensities through a network. Black digital content that is shared possesses a certain stickiness, a viscosity that brings individual subjects in a network into a kind of social cohesion — something like “the collective being of blackness.” Of course, this is not to imply that such a collectivity is homogenous or static. Rather, I am describing a relational and multi-vocal space that emerges, in part, from the ways in which affects stick to bodies as they circulate. Such a collective structure will always be heterogeneous as it requires relations to be constantly made and remade due to the continuous movement of affect.

In the tweets collected in The Teen Epistolary we can register the circulation of an

105 Sharpe, In the Wake, 106. 106 Munster, An Aesthesia of Networks, 103. 107 Ibid., 103. 108 Dean, “Rich Meme, Poor Meme.” 109 Munster, An Aesthesia of Networks, 107. 110 Ibid., 107.

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affectivity that is unable to be categorised simply but that arises from a complex intersection of exclusion and affirmation. Humour, creativity and joy intersect with anger, rage and frustration in content that indexes the ongoing subjection of black social and bodily life to the power of death at the same time that it affirms blackness as generative and vital. A prime example of a tweet that produces an uncategorisable affectivity that emerges from the space between black joy and black death can be found in fig. 3.7. The tweet is a screenshot of a CNN news report being broadcast live from the Baltimore riots. A reporter stands in front of a crowd of protesters and the CNN captioning reads “Gray did not get timely medical care.” A protester stands behind the reporter and holds a CD up towards the camera. The tweet reads: “When Black Lives Matter but your mixtape is fire too.” Mixtapes, here, refer to full-length hip hop albums, mostly released for free, that are an increasingly important aspect of contemporary R&B and hip hop. The tweet works both as a gesture of solidarity and care toward the protesters and black life in general, and as humourous commentary — indexing black culture and creativity — attached to a well selected, and comical, image. We can find in the production and circulation of such tweets a momentary interruption to the ascendancy of whiteness that emerges from black exclusion.

Reading Black Twitter as a gossip network demands an attentiveness to the specific communication conventions and modes of identification that define this social body. On Black Twitter, the performance of blackness often occurs through displays of cultural competence such as references to black culture or the use of African American Vernacular English (AAVE). These social practices work to establish a type of social cohesion, and participation in the network often requires the ability to engage with or reproduce such social conventions. This sense of performativity is central to the emergence of Black Twitter as a social body and enables the movement of information, jokes, memes, and so on within such a social body and outside the reaches of official discourse. Tweets referencing the looting of iconic symbols of black culture such as New Balance 990s (fig 3.8) and hair weaves (fig 3.9) perform this cultural competence and signification.111 Tweets that reference the looting of commodities long associated with black culture (such as weaves and sneakers) operate on one level as signifiers of blackness in the online space. This performativity can be understood as an example of what Tiffany refers to as lyric obscurity, a mode of expression which involves the transmission of an

111 ‘990s’ refer to New Balance 990s, a popular shoe in Baltimore while ‘weave’ refers to hair extensions, both signifiers of black culture.

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open secret, which in this case, is the generativity of blackness itself. Lyric obscurity such as the slang, jargon or vernacular language we might find on Black Twitter does not obscure meaning but rather enacts a type of sociality derived specifically from the transmission of the open secret.

3.8. Image reproduced from The 2015 Baltimore Uprising: A Teen Epistolary112

3.9. Image reproduced from The 2015 Baltimore Uprising: A Teen Epistolary113

112 Various, The 2015 Baltimore Uprising, np.

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While these tweets can be read as a reference to black identity, they also operate as commentary on the unfolding riots. That these tweets reference looting can be read as a tacit acknowledgement that looting, to quote Guy Debord, “instantly undermines the commodity as such, and it also exposes what the commodity ultimately implies: the army, the police and other specialized detachments of the state’s monopoly of armed violence.”114 Such tweets disrupt the logic of political appeals for a return to rule of law such as those made by the then Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, when she said (in reference to the Baltimore riots): “let’s remember that everyone in every community benefits when there is respect for the law, and when everyone in every community is respected by the law.”115 The tweets collected in The Teen Epistolary and read here as gossip — that is, as fugitive speech — reveal the impossibility of the law’s respect for black subjects and can be understood as an immanent critique of Clinton’s appeal for a return to order. An affirmation of the generativity of blackness, the riot and the gossip network interrupt official (white) discourse and in doing so create a momentary rupture from which we might consider a different paradigm for political action.

From the din of the murmur, gossip produces emergent socialites as it moves through a network. Stuttering and transforming as it circulates, it is a mode of speech that varies continuously. Moving in excess of official discourse, gossip has the potential to interrupt the ways that power is enacted in and through language. It traffics vital information across 'the break,' attentive to the affective tonalities that act upon social bodies. As a mode of fugitive speech animated by an ontogenetic noise of difference, gossip has the potential to interrupt majoritarian orders as it generates undercommon modes of sociality.

The final chapter of the thesis moves from the noisy speech of (proto-)socialities to the ambient hum of networked culture. The generalised ambient noise of the network is

113 Ibid. 114 Guy Debord, “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy,” trans. Ken Knabb, Situationist International Online, accessed November 28, 2016, http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/decline.html 115 Hillary Clinton, “Remarks at Columbia University on criminal justice and mass incarceration,” February 14, 2016, accessed November 28, 2016, https://www.hillaryclinton.com/post/remarks- columbia-university-criminal-justice-and-mass-incarceration/

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interruptive in that it induces states of boredom and distraction that produce modes of collective perception. Building on the strategies for attending to noise that I have already developed in this thesis, the final chapter turns most explicitly to the question of perception itself, arguing that the interruptive noise of a networked hum offers a way of developing a collective perception.

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hum

What are the forms of non-reading and what are the non-forms a reading might take? Poetry = wallpaper. Novel = design object. Text as ambient soundtrack? Dew-champ wanted to create works of art that were non-retinal. It would be nice to create works of literature that didn’t have to be read but could be looked at, like placemats. The most exasperating thing at a poetry reading is always the sound of a poet reading.

— Tan Lin, Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking

A hum implies a continuous sound; a drone or a dull vibration. As a sonic figure, hum is connected with — among other things — swarming insects, electrical infrastructure, computers, industry, refrigerators, warfare, radio, speechless singing, wordless speech acts, a continual murmur, information overload, and the collective din of the social. Indistinct and omnipresent, singular and multiple, hum is a specific and identifiable sonic phenomenon, as well as the generalised noise of active life. In moving into the sonicity of hum, the thesis, in many ways, undertakes a recursion to where it began, with murmur. The intention here is to show how far we have moved from noise as sonicity through to a fully fleshed out conception of the socio-political-poetics of noise that I have been developing throughout the thesis.

Approaching hum as a foundational ambience, Goodman proposes an “ontology of vibrational force” that seeks to account for “the basic processes of entities affecting other entities.”116 He writes:

That humming background sound is ancient—the ringing of a huge bell. Exploding into a mass of intensely hot matter, pulsing out vast sound waves, contracting and expanding the matter, heating where compressed, cooling where it was less dense. This descending tone parallels the heat death of the universe, connecting all the discrete atoms into a vibrational wave. This cosmic

116 Goodman, Sonic Warfare, 81.

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background radiation is the echo of the big bang.117

Goodman’s notion of the background hum — the ways in which discrete parts conjoin to become something more, like a vibrational mass — is central to his theory of relationality, that is, a theory of how entities affect other entities and come to produce some thing else. Goodman's vibrational ontology deals with the relations and rhythms that emerge from a concept of turbulence derived from Serres’ reading of Lucretian physics. Drawing on the ancient Roman philosopher Lucretius, Serres develops a contemporary materialist theory that foregrounds complexity and nonlinear dynamics. As we have already established, for Serres, everything arises from a conditioning and ontogenetic noise. Central to the emergence of ‘order’ from chaos, or what Goodman terms “rhythm out of noise,” is the concept of the clinamen, or the swerve.118 For Lucretius and Serres, who emphasise change over stability and deviation over continuity of sameness, the clinamen is central to any account of invention in nature. Lucretius tells us that the aleatory swerve of atoms contains a world-making and world-breaking potentiality:

When the atoms are travelling straight down through empty space by their own weight, at quite indeterminate times and places they swerve ever so little from their course, just so much that you can call it a change in direction. If it were not for this swerve, everything would fall downwards like rain-drops through the abyss of space. No collision would take place and no impact of atom on atom would be created. Thus nature would never have created anything.119

As we can see, the clinamen accounts for the collisions that give rise to every creation. It complicates the concept of a laminar flow, which describes the undisrupted and parallel movement of matter — the swerve, in its disruption and nonlinearity, conditions all novelty. For Serres, “the clinamen is the smallest imaginable condition for the original formation of turbulence.”120 Appearing both by chance and necessity, the clinamen is, as Serres notes, “the minimum angle of formation of a vortex, appearing by chance in a

117 Ibid. 118 Ibid., 105. 119 Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe, trans. Ronald E. Latham (London: Penguin, 1951), 66. 120 Michel Serres, The Birth of Physics, trans. Jack Hawkes (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2000), 6.

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laminar flow.”121 A vortex describes a form of movement that enacts a space of passage amid the noise of the wider milieu — in its figuration through the vibrations of hum, the vortex is a medial noise from which relations and rhythms may emerge. The clinamen, operatively akin to the parasite, can be understood here as the immanent genesis of relations, generating difference that produces variation in systems. As we have already determined in chapter one, Serres’ description of this foundational noise as a ‘background’ is slightly misleading: it does not refer to a background that has been pushed away by a foreground, but rather to a continuous, indeterminate condition from which phenomena can be said to emerge. In this chapter, I am arguing that hum, with its association of continuous sound, better describes this ontogenetic noise than the concept of a background noise that, by extension, might falsely imply a foreground. Having followed the figuring performed by murmur, stutter and gossip, which moved ontogenetic noise into the socio-political sphere, hum offers us a way of reconceptualising this 'background' as a noise textured by such movements. Taken as the cumulative noise of social, political and media systems, the 'background' is transformed into an omnipresent and atmospheric hum. This hum moves through and between all phenomena, an active yet indeterminate force. Having understood ontogenetic noise as a politics as well as a poetics, such in-betweeness thus also opens onto how this might also be a register for a noisy undercommons. The hum is a relational field in which perception can simultanesouly be attuned to the overlapping of different registers.

Goodman’s vibrational ontology attends to the collisions and refractions that occur in the vortex. His account is not simply concerned with the physical properties of vibration or with vibration exclusively as it is registered by human audition, but with a concept of vibration that attends to “the abstract rhythmic relation of oscillation.”122 Moving beyond a substantialist materialist position, Goodman prioritises “the in-between of oscillation, the vibration of vibration, the virtuality of the tremble. Vibrations always exceed the actual entities that emit them.”123 A vibrational ontology goes beyond the dualisms and binaries that encode common conceptions of sound, moving past the “opposition between a celebration of the jouissance of sonic physicality and the semiotic significance of its symbolic composition or content.”124 A vibrational ontology attends to the collisions

121 Ibid. 122 Goodman, Sonic Warfare, 82. 123 Ibid. 124 Ibid., 83.

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and potential collisions that occur in the vortices of the noise of the milieu. Its movements deal with amodal and asignifying forces. Resonant with Goodman, Eidsheim considers “sound as a vibrational field” that exists in “the relational sphere.”125 The vibrational takes things to be in constant motion. It attends to the fluidity of the sound, emphasising its becoming through the unfolding of dynamic relations. Considering sonicity in terms of vibration leads us back to ontogenesis, which, recalling Simondon, refers to “the becoming of being, that by which being becomes, insofar as it is, as being.”126

Attending to the movement of forces and micro-vibrations that are generated by and feed back into turbulence requires us to consider different, non-occularcentric, modes of perception. Here we can think of a hum both as turbulence and as the atmospheric, ambient, or affective dimensions of turbulent systems. Dyson draws this connection between the sonic and the atmospheric, noting that sound moves in excess of audibility.

Like the aural, the atmospheric suggests a relationship not only with the body in its immediate space but with a permeable body integrated within, and subject to, a global system: one that combines the air we breathe, the weather we feel, the pulse and waves of the electromagnetic spectrum that subtends and enables technologies.127

Here atmosphere can be thought of as a kind of ambience comprised of affective forces and intensities that permeate social bodies but cannot be attributed to any individual source. But we have also considered atmosphere in the previous chapter in relation to the weather, as something that includes the felt dimension of sociality. Thinking of the way the term is employed to describe the feeling of a space, Sara Ahmed describes atmosphere “as a surrounding influence which does not quite generate its own form.”128 It is not a homogenous entity but a collection of forces and intensities in a state of continuous movement — a vibrational environment generating affective tonalities that are pre- inidividual and collective. Taken in this way, the atmosphere can be understood as expressive in that it both indexes complex social processes and actively participates in

125 Eidsheim, Sensing Sound, 7 and 3. 126 Gilbert Simondon, “The Position of the Problem of Ontogenesis,” trans. Gregory Flanders, Parrahesia 7 (2009): 5. 127 Dyson, Sounding New Media, 16-17. 128 Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010), 40.

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them. In other words, we can understand it to be simultaneously symptomatic and productive, a total environment that acts upon bodies. Understanding the atmosphere as an active force, Peter Sloterdijk writes, “we begin to understand that man [sic] is not only what he eats, but what he breathes and that in which he is immersed. Cultures are collective conditions of immersion in air and sign systems.”129 Thinking about the history of industrialisation, Sloterdijk argues that the management and control of the atmosphere (both physical and affective) has become increasingly central to modern governance. While this is undoubtedly true — think for example of the atmosphere of fear and dread that has been cultivated through such events as the so-called 'War on Terror'; or the pervasive atmosphere of anti-blackness (what Sharpe refers to as 'the weather') discussed in chapter three — I would emphasise that the affective forces and intensities that produce a general atmosphere cannot be completely contained or controlled. In chapter three, this was seen in the ways that atmospheres of racialisation can also generate forms of sociality, such as Black Twitter, that exceed capture and containment. The atmospheric includes the shuttling of the miniscule and the molecular, it seeps into things and sticks to bodies. Taken as the atmospheric or ambient dimension of a complex system, a hum is not a homogenous droning noise but an assemblage of multiplicitous noises passing between each other (and different forms of media and mediation) to produce ever more complex atmospheres of relationality. It produces noise as it produces itself. The hum is an amassing of differences and differencings, a bundling of countless interruptive relations and noises into a thick yet moving fog. Taken in this way, a hum is something that we might feel rather than simply hear. Engaging with this atmospheric sonicity requires a haptic mode of listening.

Listening to hum from a sonic-poetic nexus, this chapter focuses on the American poet, critic, and media artist Tan Lin, whose work — which he describes as ambient poetics — attempts to tune into these multiple conceptions of hum. The chapter considers the sonic figure of hum in relation to contemporary networked media environments and suggests that new modes of perception are required to attend to the multiple noises and forces that comprise the hum of such systems. If, thus far in the thesis, I have emphasised that new (proto-)socialities allow us to listen differently to the noise of (counter) public spaces and archives, then this chapter returns to the question of perception itself and argues that it needs refiguring by the sonicity of hum.

129 Peter Sloterdijk, Terror From the Air, trans. Amy Patton and Steve Corcoran (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009), 84.

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To be clear, I do not want to suggest that the social and perception are separate registers. On the contrary, I am arguing that hum allows us to think perception simultaneously with social and political life. Perception is not to be taken as something that is mediated, occurring from a distance but rather as something that is felt immediately in the experience of the social and the political. Here I argue that the hum attunes us perceptually to the ways in which noise conditions medial networking. Hum detects the noisiness of networked culture, located, counterintuitively, in the interruptive modalities of networked distraction and boredom, and refigures these as haptic and collective modes of (media) perception. Hapticality refers to a mode of perception that emphasises touch, a grasping for something that gives rise to a felt sensation. It does not necessarily describe the experience of taking hold but rather refers to a process of grasping and letting go. It is registration of touch as felt experience, and in this way, hapticality is a useful concept for considering how we might feel the movement of forces and intensities that we can grasp at but never hold. Lin’s poetics, which are drawn from the hum of networked systems, emphasise distraction and boredom as generative modes of interruptive reading that attend to the atmospheric dimensions of networked culture and foreground the relationality of reading. Reading his poetics in relation to Anahid Kassabian’s notion of ubiquitous listening and Walter Benjamin’s concept of reception in distraction, this chapter develops new, interdisciplinary approaches to listening to, and reading, contemporary media and the forces of interruption that move within them.

The hum is a sonic figure that describes a network of relations in which entities affect other entities, which then recursively affects the ‘mass’ and so on. Considered in this way, hum is operable as a concept that accounts for the audible and inaudible alike, focused not only on what is registered as sonic in relation to human audition but also on the constant and continuous vibrational movement of turbulence. This chapter is concerned with developing interpretive strategies for reading (and listening) that attend to the affective tonalities that emerge from a ‘post-digital’ present, which I discuss in the following section — one that is characterised by massive networks and their mass participation. It centres on the ambience of vibrational systems, where ambience designates the atmosphere, mood, or affective dimension of such systems. What follows is a consideration of the ways in which sensory bodies register the forces of relational encounter and the subtle shifts in intensity that circulate within this humming. Here the practice of reading is considered as something modulated by vibration; that is, by a

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sonicity that might be felt.

Lin engages with noisy media to construct an ambient poetics of ‘post-digital’ systems and networks. His poetics taps into the hum of such systems and suggests a relational mode of reading that is atmospherically attuned to the reading environment, both physical and affective. In Lin’s hands, the technology of the book is transformed into a mood modulator, suggesting a distracted mode of reading in which the affective tonalities that circulate within the reading event might be haptically registered. Emphasising reading as an activity that is generic and collective, he treats the book as a type of ambient media that brings the reader into a relation with the internal and external milieus. Lin is interested in the production of generic objects in which the boundaries between specific media are blurred. His self-identification as an ambient writer connects the practice of reading and writing to other disciplines that deal with space, such as architecture, music, painting, cinema and philosophy. The results are book ‘objects’ — perhaps even atmospheres — that can be engaged ambiently by looking, skimming, or relaxing into, rather than through interpretative reading. My approach to Lin's poetics offers us a way out of the binarised debates that have arisen in digital humanities around 'close' versus 'distant' reading.130 An atmospheric reading calls for pre-cognitive modes of perception that attune to the unstructured forces of encounter that are registered via the effects they have on bodies. Such an approach to reading gives us a way to enter into reading affectively that perhaps circumvents the pitfalls that arise from these oppositional debates. Here reading can be understood as an activity that attends to rhythms and micro-rhythms that emerge from noise; to the “vibration of vibration” and “the virtuality of tremble”; to the tremors and rumblings that coalesce to produce an ambience.131

Ubiquitous Listening / Ubiquitous Reading

In a 2005 interview with the American poet and critic Charles Bernstein, Tan Lin

130 For more on the concept of distant reading see Frank Moretti, "Conjectures on World Literature," New Left Review 1 (2000): 54-68. For a response to Moretti and an articulation of different styles of reading, see N. Katherine Hayles, "Combining Close and Distant Reading: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes and the Aesthetic of Bookishness," PMLA 128, no.1 (2013): 226-231. 131 Goodman, Sonic Warfare, 82.

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described his writing practice as interested in creating “not a book, but a reading environment.”132 Lin’s work, such as Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking (2010), and Insomnia and the Aunt (2011) develops an ambient poetics drawn from the hum of noisy media and composed with the concept of a distracted reading practice in mind.133 Drawing heavily on techniques of mashup and remix, Lin’s work assembles myriad sources — appropriated and composed; textual, paratextual and epitextual; data and metadata — into a single integrated platform. A product of media such as the internet and television, his work not only derives source material from these technologies but more importantly, it reproduces the modes of attending and interacting that are specific to television and the web. Such media are networked and inescapable, producing a type of ubiquitous listening and reading that skims and darts from one thing to another. The television, as Shaviro notes, “is really just part of the furniture. Often we leave it on in the background, as we go about our daily chores.”134 It is an ambient texture that subtly “draws us into discourse” and “absorbs us into the network.”135 Elaborating on this notion, Massumi tells us watching television involves “constant cuts from the screen to its immediate surroundings, to the viewing context where other actions are performed in fits and starts as attention flits.”136 Pushing this condition further, the internet bleeds into every aspect of our daily lives — it is an environment in which multiple spaces, speeds and times coexist and overlap. Describing this experience, Shaviro writes:

Enveloped in the network, I am continually being distracted. I can no longer concentrate on just one thing at a time. My body is pulled in several directions at once, dancing to many distinct rhythms. My attention fragments and multiplies

132 Charles Bernstein and Tan Lin, “Tan Lin in Conversation with Charles Bernstein,” Close Listening, May, 23, 2005, accessed June 12, 2016, https://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Lin/Close-Lstening/Lin- Tan_Intrvw_WPS1_NY_5-23-05.mp3 133 Tan Lin, Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2010); Insomnia and the Aunt (Chicago: Kenning Editions, 2011). Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking will henceforth be referred to as 7CV. 134 Steven Shaviro, Connected, or What It Means to Live in the Network Society (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 6. 135 Ibid. 136 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 42.

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as I shift among the many windows on my screen. Being online always means multitasking.137

The ubiquity of networked media has resulted in image-expression events that give rise to distracted modes of looking and listening.138 Lin produces textual environments that reflect contemporary media and encourage skimming or browsing. His work foregrounds distraction over contemplation, proposing a mode of reading that involves looking or browsing rather than the forms of interpretative reading historically associated with the study of poetry and literature. Working within the genre conventions of the poem and the novel, his experiments in ambient language aspire to the condition in which, to borrow his own formulation, “poetry equals wallpaper” and the “novel equals design object.”139 Eschewing the demands — associated with both modernist and avant-garde interpretative strategies — that the reader/listener approach text with a fine-tooth comb, hanging closely to every word and line, Lin suggests that text can function as an atmosphere or mood modulator — something best absorbed ambiently or in a state of relaxation. His assertion that “the poem [or novel] should never be turned off” and that “like a thermostat, it should regulate the room’s energies” positions reading and writing as a distribution platform that is mediated by a technosocial paradigm.140 Such statements are performative, humorous and ironic at the same time as they are genuine. There is a productive tension that emerges from the often didactic claims that Lin makes about reading, writing and the function of books, and the work itself, which can be understood as a book in a traditional sense and read in more or less conventional ways. These claims — which are incorporated into a text like 7CV and also feature prominently in interviews with Lin and critical writing about Lin — speak to the approach a reader takes when surrounded by networked media rather than functioning as an attempt to compose poems that resemble such media in terms of content, style or form. It should be noted,

137 Shaviro, Connected, 7. 138 I would argue that these distracted modes of looking and listening extends into the binge watching associated with contemporary streaming platforms such as Netflix. I argue that such binge watching arises from the hum of networked culture and takes place in a general atmosphere of distraction. For more on the emergence of binge watching, see Michaela Bronstein, "Modernist Binge Watching," in The Contemporaneity of Modernism, ed. Michael D'Arcy and Mathias Nilges, 190-202 (London and New York: Routledge, 2016). 139 Lin, Seven Controlled Vocabularies, 16. 140 Ibid.

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however, that Lin's (often absurd) directives complicate any reading of his work as much as they guide it and in doing so, add new atmospheric apparatuses to the work itself.

The concept of the post-digital has recently been deployed in order to think about the increasingly messy and paradoxical media environment of contemporary technoculture. The post-digital refers not simply to life after the digital, but rather to a period defined by digital and computation systems, processes and technologies in which “our almost obsessive fascination and enthusiasm with new media” has become historical, replaced by “a broader set of affectations that now includes unease, fatigue, boredom and disillusionment.”141 First coined by the experimental musician and theorist Kim Cascone in relation to glitch aesthetics, ‘post-digital’ has come to refer to the ways that the digital has become a taken-for-granted dominant paradigm for thinking, making, and being.142 As Florian Cramer writes, it describes the ongoing “state of affairs after the initial upheaval caused by the computerisation and global digital networking of communication, technical infrastructures, markets and geopolitics.”143 Describing an ambivalent affective relationship to digitality, David Berry and Michael Dieter posit the post-digital as “a condition in which digital disruption is not transcended as such, but becomes routine or business and usual.”144 I want to position Tan Lin’s poetics as post-digital within, especially, this latter understanding of the term. His work revolves around the ways in which media relationally mediates reading and writing, and by extension subjectivity. In this way, his work resonates as much with post-internet or post-digital artistic strategies as it does with histories of avant-garde poetry. Post-internet art describes work that is informed by the internet and its digital networks and processes, yet is often presented in offline or hybrid forms. Alternatively, following Cramer, we can think of Lin’s work as post-digital literature; that is, a literature that emerges from a complex assemblage of ‘old’ and ‘new’ media and occupies a space that constantly shifts between the physical and the virtual.

141 David M. Berry and Michael Dieter, “Thinking Postdigital Aesthetics: Art, Computation and Design,” in Postdigital Aesthetics: Art, Computation and Design, ed. David M. Berry and Michael Dieter (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 5. 142 Kim Cascone, “The Aesthetics of Failure: ‘Post-Digital’ Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music,” Computer Music Journal 24, no. 4 (2000). 143 Florian Cramer, “What is ‘Post-digital’?,” in Postdigital Aesthetics: Art, Computation and Design, ed. David M. Berry and Michael Dieter (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 15. 144 Berry and Dieter, “Thinking Postdigital Aesthetics,” 6.

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Lin’s work is entangled in the systems, networks and materiality of digital media, often transcoding the reading environments and practices of the web into other materialities and technologies such as the book. Employing an aesthetic sensibility that merges ‘old’ and ‘new’ media — email, Google Translate, photographic images, programming languages, hand-written Post-it notes, book scans, Google reverse image searches, RSS feeds, and so on — he is interested in how we might understand the technology of a book in its networked milieu, and how we might approach reading in a post-digital, post-book, post-reading environment. His work also functions as an archive of various web-based media and platforms, documenting and historicising the web, and the ways various web- based media produce reading and writing practices at specific points in time. For example, his 2008 book, Heath: plagiarism/outsource, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, Untitled Heath Ledger Project, a history of the search engine, disco OS, draws heavily from Rich Site Summary (RSS) feeds – a web format that aggregates frequently updated information on the web, such as blog posts, news headlines, etc.145 RSS feeds are a platform that enabled the automatic and instant syndication of content published on the net and typically include full or summarised text, as well as metadata, such as the date and time of publication and the author's name. The RSS feeds that Lin draws from in Heath are now largely obsolete, and RSS feeds generally have been displaced by interfaces such as Twitter feeds. Here Lin’s work functions as a type of media archaeology, documenting the ways specific media influence reading and writing practices.146

The present is a thoroughly discursive, textual and semantically-saturated moment. For example, mediated by smart phones and various self-publishing platforms, those with access to the web are able to continuously produce a continuous stream of language in the form of texting, tweeting, emailing, blogging and commenting. The result is that we are producing more text in our everyday lives than ever before. By extension, contemporary writers are constantly encountering new platforms and technologies for composing,

145 Tan Lin, Heath: plagiarism/outsource, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, Untitled Heath Ledger Project, a history of the search engine, disco OS (La Laguna: Zaesterle, 2007). 146 For more on media archaeology see Lori Emerson, Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound (London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Jussi Parikka, What is Media Archaeology? (Cambridge: Polity, 2012).

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organising and distributing text.147 In addition, visuality is increasingly entangled with, and dependent on this textually inflected media environment; that is, the material basis of what we see or look at on the web is comprised of various aspects of language — program codes, machine codes or scripting languages. The entanglement of text and image in the post-digital era reflects the increasing dissolution of medium and the increasingly blurry relationship between production, dissemination and consumption. Lin, whose work mirrors this situation, writes “poems to be looked at” and reads non-print forms — such as “architecture, paintings, strip malls, potted plants, spoken words, the back stitching on a Margiela blouse, traffic lights, WD50, reality TV” — a gesture that complicates the distinctions between reading, writing and looking.148 In an interview with the poet Angela Genusa, Lin ties these ideas together, describing reading as a kind of integrated software:

Integrated software is a genre of software that combines word processing, database management, and spreadsheet application, and communications platforms. This genre has been superseded by various full-function office suites, but I was interested in reading modelled in that way, i.e., different kinds of reading, each with specific functions. I mean, you read Harlequin romances differently than recipes, and you read Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheets differently than you read Excel, and you read experimental Japanese novels differently than you read text messages… So reading is an application that processes or assembles varied kinds of material. I was interested in creating works of literature that could be read like recipes or spreadsheets or PowerPoint presentations.149

Lin’s notion of reading as integrated software gives us reading that moves effortlessly between different types and registers of text. Reflecting the omnipresence of text in our

147 For more on pioneering digital writing see, for example: Mark Amerika, Meta/Data: A Digital Poetics (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2007); Anna Gibbs, “Writers, writing and writing programs in the information age,” TEXT 15, no 2 (2011), http://www.textjournal.com.au/oct11/gibbs.htm; Darren Tofts and Lisa Gye, eds., Illogic of Sense: The Gregory L. Ulmer Remix (Boulder: Alt X Press, 2007); Gregory L. Ulmer, Internet Invention: From Literacy to Electracy (London: Longman, 2003). 148 Lin, Seven Controlled Vocabularies, 20; Angela Genusa, “A Book is Technology: An Interview with Tan Lin,” Rhizome, October 24, 2012, accessed June 25, 2016, http://rhizome.org/editorial/2012/oct/24/interview-tan-lin/ 149 Genusa, “A Book is Technology.”

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everyday lives, I am proposing that we can think of such reading as ubiquitous reading. Here my thinking is indebted to Anahid Kassabian's notion of ‘ubiquitous listening,’ which names a mode of listening arising from the ubiquity of music and sound in industrialised, late capitalist cultures. Think, for example, of the music that is embedded in shops, homes, workplaces, buses, trains, cars, restaurants, smartphones, films, televisions, video games and so on. Kassabian argues that we are immersed in a sonicity to which we do not actively listen. This ambient body of music is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere; its omnipresence reflects a situation in which the distinctions between background and foreground have become increasingly opaque. As Kassabian writes, “its projection looks to erase its production as much as possible, posing instead as a quality of the environment.”150 The embeddedness of music in the everyday complicates conceptions of genre as disparate music and texts are made to rub against each other in a “pluralist levelling of difference and specificity” that gestures toward the general ambience of contemporary culture.151 From this situation, we get a fragmented and distracted listening that drifts across and through the ubiquitous hum.

Kassabian deliberately employs the term listening rather than hearing in an attempt to problematise the distinctions between listening as active, hearing as passive; listening as conscious, hearing as unconscious; and listening as constructed and attentive, hearing as physical and undifferentiated. Pushing against these binaries, she suggests a mode of listening that is active yet distant in which things move in and out of focus — something like a distracted listening. Taking up this idea, Brandon LaBelle argues “distraction may act as a productive model for recognizing all that surrounds the primary event of sound — to suddenly hear what is usually out of earshot.”152 Extending LaBelle’s formulation, I would argue that a distracted listening might also attend to what is in excess of the audible; that is, the affective noise that is both generating, and generated by, the ambience of contemporary culture.

150 Anahid Kassabian, Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention, and Distributed Subjectivity (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2013), 10. 151 Anahid Kassabian, “Ubiquitous Listening and Networked Subjectivity,” ECHO: a music- centered journal 3, no. 2 (2001), accessed June 12, 2016, http://www.echo.ucla.edu/Volume3- issue2/kassabian/index.html 152 Brandon LaBelle, Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life (London and New York: Continuum, 2010), 184; italics in original.

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Following ubiquitous listening, ubiquitous reading can be understood as occuring alongside everyday activities, emphasising the idea that reading is always in relation with humming. Here the hum of generic procedural culture seeps through to textual experience, engaging a multi-focused or fragmented attentiveness. Ubiquitous reading distractedly attunes to the constant production of text via media such as the internet, smart phones, computers, film, television, video games, point of sale displays, public transport displays, print media, urban infrastructure, advertising and so on. Such reading incorporates all forms and genres of texts into a single dispersed reading environment.153 Lin works from this environment, producing texts that move between different streams of information and blur the boundaries between specific mediums, genres and disciplines. His poetics of fragments gestures toward what he refers to as a “new kind of generic production.”154 I argue that this, in turn, calls for new kinds of reading, not just of Lin's work but of this distracted milieu.

Taken together, ubiquitous listening and ubiquitous reading can be understood as two expressions of what Patricia Clough refers to as the “teletechnological,” a concept that describes our networked media environment as it is mediated by televisual and computational processes and systems.155 For Clough, the teletechnological accounts for the interdependent relationships between technologies, bodies and affects in a networked system, and suggests the dissolution of the boundaries of what has historically constituted the self. This gesture makes it possible to “think of bodies as intensities in a flow of electronic images, texts, and sounds, that is, as imagined materialities.”156 The teletechnological develops a theory of networked experience, in which singular subjectivities are inter-implicated in collective networking. As Kassabian concurs “parts

153 Developing a similar line of thought, N. Katherine Hayles describes as such reading as “hyper reading.” For Hayles, hyper reading foregrounds the practices of “skimming, scanning, fragmenting, and juxtaposing texts” and correlates to hyper attention, which accounts for a cognitive mode not dissimilar from distraction. Ubiquitous reading extends this notion by foregrounding the embeddedness of text in our everyday lives and emphasising reading as a practice that occurs alongside and in relation to other activities. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2012), 12. 154 Bernstein and Lin, “Tan Lin in Conversation.” 155 Patricia Ticineto Clough, Autoaffection: Unconscious Thought in the Age of Teletechnology (London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). 156 Ibid., 11.

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phase in and out of participation in ubiquitous subjectivity, but it never leaves us — and we never leave it.”157 This conception of subjectivity poses a challenge to the construction of subjectivity based upon individualised experience. It gives us a subjectivity that is both singular and collective, oscillating between an 'I' and a 'we.'

Lin is interested in reframing the practice of reading as a form of writing in order to draw our attention to the torrents of text that surrounds us, but also, and more importantly, in order to produce a mode of reading that extends from the book into the social, moving us toward a type of networked subjectivity. In an interview with Katherine Elaine Saunders, Lin expands:

I’m interested in the formats and micro-formats of reading, and their coupling to other things in the world, like restaurants, yoga mats, poems, former boyfriends or girlfriends, wives and husbands (and their photographs), and of course other books (and their photographs and the photographs they contain within them).158

His ambient reading environments suggest that reading is an activity that is always undertaken by a degraded and distracted attention. Here we might recall Robertson, from the introductory chapter of this thesis, who tell us that reading “isn’t knowledge at all.”159 Rather, it can be understood as a dispersed and interrupted experience that produces singularities and generates relations. It is an experimental practice of roaming and traversing that reconfigures vagueness as a rationally counterproductive mode of thought that belongs to the order of sensation. Distraction, and its companion, boredom, are ways of inhabiting the teletechnological that, far from obscuring meaning, encourage an attentiveness to the chance encounters and connections that might occur during ubiquitous reading. Such a practice hums along with networked systems, yet does not get absorbed by the overload of text in the post-digital moment. Here we can take reading to be a practice that attends to the noise of the intensive and extensive milieus, the relations that emerge from these and the force of interruption immanent to both.

157 Kassabian, “Ubiquitous Listening and Networked Subjectivity.” 158 Katherine Elaine Saunders, “Tan Lin,” BOMB Magazine, March 29, 2010, accessed June 29, 2016. http://bombmagazine.org/article/3467/ 159 Roberston, Nilling, 13.

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Books As Environments

Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking (7CV) is a distributed book ‘object.’ Like Lin’s earlier work, such as Heath, plagiarism/outsource, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, Untitled Heath Ledger Project, a history of the search engine, disco OS, 7CV is both drawn from and returned to the hum of the contemporary media environment. At the level of the title, the work is already a multiple; the Wesleyan University Press edition of 7CV stitches two titles together: Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004 and Irma S. Rombauer’s classic American cookbook, The Joy of Cooking.160 Lin’s appropriation of Rombauer’s title functions on a number of levels: as an index of his Asian American heritage, being the cookbook his family “used to become American”; as a way of simultaneously increasing search engine hits and inserting the book into networked dissemination systems where it becomes searchable data connected to other data; and as a suggestion that the book could be read in the manner one reads a cookbook rather than as a book of poems or a work of literary theory.161 The back cover bears yet another title, [AIRPORT NOVEL MUSICAL POEM PAINTING FILM PHOTO HALLUCINATION LANDSCAPE], which extends the idea of reading this book as a cookbook, suggesting that 7CV be read as, or might even function as, any or all of the objects/categories/environments listed in this title. In actuality, 7CV exceeds this list, tapping into the multi-directional flows of information and materials that typify a post-digital landscape in order to construct an ambient reading environment.

7CV is a book that might be better described as “temporal processes cast into words” and rendered into multiple forms, or better still, as a text in continuous process of feeding backwards and forwards.162 In addition to the 2010 Wesleyan edition of 7CV, the text exists in numerous different forms, not simply as a translation of content across different media but as a re-editing, remixing or re-sampling of the text. A “first edition” (“eighth revision”) appeared in 2007 as a print-on demand book through Lulu; there is a Google ebook edition; the Wesleyan edition is available in full through the paywall protected

160 Irma S. Rombauer and Marion Rombauer Becker, The Joy of Cooking (New York: Scribner, 1995). 161 Genusa, “A Book is Technology.” 162 Charles Bernstein, “The Poet’s Sampler: Tan Lin,“ Boston Review, April 1, 1999, accessed June 5, 2016. https://bostonreview.net/poetry/tan-lin-poets-sampler-tan-lin

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Project Muse (though here the text is distributed as countless individual PDFs with each PDF containing different paratextual and metadata content); versions of the text appear on Lin’s Blogspot and Tumblr sites; there are recordings of readings; interviews that form a dialogue with the text; an animated version of the first chapter exists as a stand-alone video titled Eleven Minute Painting; and a one-day “on the spot republication event” that took place at the University of Pennsylvania in April 2010 during which the book was re- edited by numerous people and (re)presented as a series of books, texts, emails, and so on.163 This movement between different forms and formats recalls the movement between the aural and the sonic that occurs in the work of Amanda Stewart that I discussed in chapter two. The myriad forms that Lin's work takes extends this notion of the work as a multiple, not in order to produce a whole from the many different iterations but to reveal the text as always already part of a network. The proliferation of so many different forms, milieus and contexts in Lin’s work transforms the book into a kind of literal hum.

Each variant version of 7CV draws attention to the relationship between both text and material, suggesting each time a different mode of readerly engagement. Taken together, the multiple iterations of 7CV demonstrate a complex dynamic of feedback and feed- forward loops between production, dissemination, and consumption, with new material (emails, interviews, and so on) regarding the content of previous versions being recursively incorporated into subsequent versions. As such, Lin’s writings about his own writing — in the form of interviews, essays, email correspondences, appendices or revisions — are read here as an extension of his ambient poetics. Highly performative, these secondary texts are understood to be inextricably connected to the 'source' texts, read as extensions of his poetics rather than explications. Taken in isolation, each version

163 Among the collectively authored and produced books that were produced during the University of Pennsylvania event were Tan Lin, Appendix, (Philadelphia and New York: Edit Publication, 2010); Mashinka Firunts and Danny Snelson, eds., Tan Lin’s Seven Controlled Vocabularies: A Critical Reader (Philadelphia and New York: Edit Publications, 2010); and Danny Snelson, ed., Selected Essay About a Bibliography (Philadelphia and New York: Edit Publications, 2010). While these can be read broadly as a series of interconnected textual experiments, each iteration materialises differently and so experiments with different aspects of a readerly engagement. For example, an on the spot publication event experiments with form, authorship and the materiality of the book object, while the various different publication platforms that 7CV takes can be understood as experimentation with the materiality of, and relationship between, analogue and digital publication and an examination of the different reading publics that each distribution platform enacts.

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of 7CV is concerned with producing a reading environment that simulates the hum of information across networked media. Fragmented and nonlinear, 7CV encourages an interrupted or distracted mode of reading — skimming and skipping rather than interpretive reading. 7CV combines a wide variety of different textual materials and modes — anecdotes, fragmented narratives, OCR scans, Library of Congress Classification (LCC), essays, RSS feeds, photographs, barcodes, bits of programming language, metadata tags, poems and quasi-poems, subtitles, scanned images, fragments of Google translated text, indexes, forewords to other books, among many others. These codify reading in specific and often standardised ways. The assemblage of such diverse forms of text, paratext, epitext, and meta-text works to draw attention to the ways in which the various standardised processes of reading are “tied as much to publishing, marketing, distribution, layout, inclusion on syallabi, etc. as they are to writing or composing.”164 The architecture of the book removes many of the structural devices such as footnotes, bibliographies, indexes and so on that historically differentiate between primary and supplementary material. In Lin’s hands, these different, and often conflicting textual and visual materials are organised into a single controlled vocabulary that treats all of the assembled material as equally interesting, or rather, equally disinteresting. This deliberate gesture of framing 7CV multiply demonstrates Lin’s desire to “dissolve ‘the book’ into reading and its objects.”165 This gesture of proliferation complicates our understanding of the book as an object and returns us to Lin’s interest in reading environments; that is, works that encourage a mode of reading that expands from a particular object (the book) into social-aesthetic space. Lin employs the notion of a reading environment in order to evoke a sense of the architectural and the spatial. This suggests that the book, like a space or a structure, can be perceived via its ambient dimensions. The book, taken as an ambient reading environment, bears a distinct resonance to Benjamin’s account of architecture as “the prototype of a work of art the reception of which is consummated by a collectivity in a state of distraction.”166

In his 1936 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin draws a pointed distinction between concentrated contemplation as that which

164 Chris Alexander et al, “Writing as metadata container: An interview with Tan Lin,” Jacket 2, January 20, 2012, accessed June 30, 2016. http://jacket2.org/interviews/writing-metadata-container 165 Ibid. 166 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” trans. Harry Zohn, in Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 239.

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describes the state of being absorbed by the work of art, and distraction as an apperceptive modality that accounts for the ways in which the work of art is absorbed collectively. Concentrated contemplation — a legacy of the historic coupling of the work of art to ritual — involves what Michael Taussig describes as “the studied, eyeful, aloneness with and absorption into the ‘aura’ of the always aloof, always distant, object.”167 Reception in a state of distraction — a mode that Benjamin observes as being amplified by the dynamics of modern technologies — describes an apperceptive mode that darts and flits around the barely conscious edges of perception.168 Describing Dadaism as a precursor to film, Benjamin notes the limits of concentrated contemplation for apprehending Dadaist work that “became an instrument of ballistics” and “hit the spectator like a bullet.”169 Dadaism foreshadows the arrival of film, a medium in which, according to Benjamin, “the distracting element… is also primarily tactile, based on changes of place and focus which periodically assail the spectator.”170 Distraction is posited not as a negation of attentiveness but as attention of a different kind — one that is registered through a sense of tactility or what we might simply refer to as a certain quality of everydayness. Drawing on architecture to illustrate how distraction operates as an apperceptive mode, Benjamin asserts that buildings cannot be understood through attentive concentration but are rather apprehended through this sense of everydayness; that is, by usage or forms of proprioception that result in the formation of habits. Benjamin refers to this mode of perception arising from habitual or everyday knowledge, and that, in turn, exerts an influence on optical reception as “tactile appropriation.”171 This approach emphasises haptic experience over a priori knowledge of an environment. In other words, Benjamin is concerned with embodied forms of knowledge that are attentive to the subtle movements that occur at the edges of optiocentric consciousness.

Reception in distraction is a notoriously slippery concept in Benjamin’s oeuvre. Treating the concept with ambivalence, he moves beyond the simple binary of distraction/concentration, avoiding the moralism and value judgements that accompany a reading of distraction as either positive or negative. Rather, his interest lies in the

167 Michael Taussig, “Tactility and Distraction,” Cultural Anthropology 6, vol. 2 (1991): 148. 168 Benjamin’s essay refers specifically to the advent of film and technologies associated with the burgeoning advertising industry. 169 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 238. 170 Ibid. 171 Ibid., 240.

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experience of distraction and how this complicates the traditional relations between perception and apperception. For Benjamin, distraction gestures towards pure experience, a concept derived from William James to describe the “one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed.”172 Pure experience, then, stands outside of the transcendental structure of knowledge as posited by Immanuel Kant in Critique of Pure Reason.173 For Kant, metaphysics concerns an a priori structure of knowledge that precedes experience, that is, it is concerned with the categories through which we know objects before we experience them. Kant refers to this knowledge as transcendental: "I call all cognition transcendental that is occupied not so much with objects but rather with our a priori concepts of objects in general.”174 According to this taxonomy, experience is always secondary to knowing’s forms and structures, and distraction is likewise relegated to a ‘fault’ of the empirical realm. As Paul North writes, “the continuity of consciousness — despite the limits that Kant places on our ability to intuit its sources — is maintained by banishing distraction to the sphere of accident and illness.”175 In opposition to Kantian metaphysics, Benjamin seeks to elevate experience to the highest plane, and in doing so, reclaims distraction as a modality that, to quote North, “calls for experience to be purified of knowledge” and demands “that what knowledge has emptied out be filled up again from experience alone.”176

In order to understand the implications of Benjamin’s notion of reception in distraction, we need to first examine what exactly is meant by distraction. Benjamin's notion of distraction is derived from a translation of the German word, Zerstreuung, which designates both distraction and, in more popular parlance, amusement or entertainment. Derived from the verb zestreuen, meaning to disperse, dissipate, or scatter, Zerstreuung implies a dispersed or scattered mode of attention. For Benjamin, distraction

172 William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1912), 4. 173 The concept of ‘reception is distraction’ appears in the early essays “Theater and Radio” (1932) and “The Author as Producer” (1934). However, it is explored in most detail in the third and final revision of “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936) and notes titled “Theory of Distraction” (1936). My reading of distraction is derived primarily from these two later works. 174 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 133. 175 Paul North, The Problem of Distraction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 156. 176 Ibid.

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and entertainment come together in the medium of film, where shocks or interruption in the continuity of perception produce distraction in the cinematic audience. Zerstreuung stands in contrast to the distraction encapsulated by the German word Ablenkung, which denotes ‘a steering away’ from something. While both words can be translated as distraction, the English fails to capture the nuanced difference between these differing modes of distraction that exist in the German language. Ablenkung implies a misdirected attention or a turning away from the object of inquiry, whereas Zerstreuung implies a scattered or interrupted attention. Contrary to common representations — which lament the disintegration of attention, positioning distraction as attention’s opposite — the concept of Zerstreuung suggests that distraction is a decomposed or dispersed mode of attention rather than its antithesis. This conception of distraction works to unshackle attention and perception from normative and historical conceptions of thought, suggesting instead an attention that drifts and might give rise to a productive vagueness in which the unexpected and the unknown can be registered. Benjamin’s concept of reception in distraction proposes a form of the unthought; or, put another way, suggests a mode of embodied attention that precedes cognitive capture. This refiguring of perception is a crucial undertaking for moving toward a mode of existence that is not bound by universal reason and the structures and institutions that it has given rise to.

In describing distraction as a modality that is at once dispersed, interruptive and collective, I want to bring Benjamin’s theory into dialogue with more contemporary affective understandings of experience. As we have already established, affect refers to the forces of encounter and intensities that comprise the relational experiences of a world in constant movement. While affect is pre-personal and unformed, it is also, as Massumi points out, “highly organised and effectively analysable (it is not entirely containable in knowledge but is analysable in effect, as effect).”177 Affect is registered corporeally; it is felt in and as pure experience. I am arguing that distraction is a modality that attends to these asignifying movements and forces. It follows the force of interruption, registering the rupturing of seamless continuities. In a state of distraction, the affective forces that cut in and force relations to reassemble are felt, even if they are not consciously elaborated. Distraction does not simply change what we are attentive to, and to what degree, it also fundamentally changes the relationship between perception and apperception, knowledge and experience. A multi-focused or dispersed attention admits pure experience into the structuring of knowledge, a gesture that reorganises the conditions of thought and attends

177 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 260n3.

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to the complex and relational movements of affect. For Benjamin, reception in distraction is a mode of perception attentive to atmospheric or environmental conditions. It is attuned to the pre-personal forces and intensities that pass between and through the social sphere and the traces these forces leave. We can understand distraction, then, to be a modality that enacts a collective networked subjectivation, a notion that will be further explored in the later part of this chapter. If, in the previous chapter, we saw the ways in which the sonic figure of gossip took us into new (proto-)socialities, here, with distraction as a poetics for listening into hum, we find the social conjoin with the medial.

The generic reading environments that Lin constructs are concerned with, as Gregg and Seigworth write, the “minuscule or molecular events of the unnoticed.”178 His poetics is an exploration of the affective states and tonalities that emerge from contemporary networked culture. Decidedly uninterested in producing works that result in a specific emotion, his reading environments are generic atmospheres that simulate the ordinariness and singularity of reading and writing: “someone (I think) said the time for poems written with words and the era of reading poems with feelings in them is long gone.”179 Instead, he sets out to produce a general affective tonality and encourages a distracted mode of moving through these spaces. 7CV produces diffuse, directionless and boring ambience that is nonetheless both interesting and engaging.180 For Lin, the experience of boredom is central to reception in distraction. The bored mind is one that begins to drift, opening toward the periphery or the fringe. Despite being a montage that moves constantly between different materials and textual registers, 7CV is directionless and disorienting. Lin’s montages are seamless rather than shocking or jarring, flattening the different textual modes through the uniformity of the book’s design and the recursive re-sampling and remixing of fragments of the text throughout. The resulting text is, paradoxically, both discontinuous and seamless.

The fragmented nature of 7CV prevents it from cohering into a single, recognisable genre. It is simultaneously an artist book, a book of poems, a work of fiction, a theory text, a codex, an appendix, and a scrapbook. At the same time, it is also none of these things.

178 Gregg and Seigworth, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” 1. 179 Lin, Seven Controlled Vocabularies, 24. 180 For more on boredom in relation to sound and experimental music, see Eldritch Priest, Boring Formless Nonsense: Experimental Music and the Aesthetics of Failure (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013).

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Constantly interrupting itself, it fails to cohere into a unified whole, producing a state of animated suspension from which the bored or distracted reader may register the shifting and subtle affects that are present in the practices and structures of reading. Employing a great deal of appropriated and plagiarised material, 7CV is also a composite of multiple authorial voices. Yet unlike other conceptual writing practices — practices that often adhere to strict procedural methods that, to quote Kenneth Goldsmith, transform the “writer into an information manager” — Lin’s poetics is an attempt to reproduce the generic spaces rather than generic text in which reading takes place.181 In this way, his choices are determined not by strict procedural methods but rather by an interest in the interdependent relationship between individual and mass experience. For Lin, the author reflects a “self that labors to produce text in a particular environment of which it is a part as well as an observer of.”182 Loosely following a thread that stretches out from McLuhan’s famous maxim that “the medium is the message,” his work is interested in the ways in which the spaces of networked media produce collective reading habits and in turn, how those habits are registered by the reading body.183 He is interested in the event of reading — the dynamic interplay between text, context, objects, spaces, affects and so on. And he is interested in the relations that are made and remade in the time of reading. For Jennifer Scappettone, Lin’s ambient poetics draws a comparison with a “softer” and “performatively domestic” form of architecture.184 In reading Lin’s work, we would do well to follow Henri Lefebvre’s call to “analyse not things in space but space itself, with a view to uncovering the social relationships embedded in it.”185 Such a reading does not dwell at the level of the line but rather gets lost in the general ambience of the text, humming along with it. This hum connects the physical spaces in which reading takes place with the immaterial spaces central to the contemporary ubiquity of text.

Following Scappettone, we can understand the generic reading spaces that Lin creates

181 Kenneth Goldsmith, "Being Boring," November 2004, accessed July 4, 2016, http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/goldsmith/goldsmith_boring.html 182 Chris Alexander et al, “Tan Lin Interviewed,” Galetea Resurrects 12, May 18, 2009, accessed July 5, 2016, http://galatearesurrection12.blogspot.com.au/2009/05/tan-lin-interviewed.html 183 Marshall McLuhan, “The Medium is the Message,” in Understanding Media (London: Routledge, 2005). 184 Jennifer Scappettone, “Versus Seamlessness: Architectonics of Pseudocomplicity in Tan Lin’s Ambient Poetics,” boundary 2 36, no. 3 (2009): 65. 185 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 90.

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in terms of what the architect Rem Koolhaas has described as ‘junkspace,’ a term that refers to a space of continuity across disjunction that “deploys an infrastructure of seamlessness: escalator, air-conditioning, sprinkler, fire shutter, hot-air curtain...”186 Borrowing Koolhaas’s phrase we can understand 7CV as “a space of collision.”187 The book produces a generic architecture for reading that mirrors the contemporary media environment in which we find ourselves simultaneously reading or looking at multiple screens and windows. Just as Koolhaas’ wandering and performative essay shifts the emphasis from a formal analysis of the built environment to a consideration of the dynamics of the space itself, Lin’s poetics shifts our attention from the sentence or line break to the space of reading itself. Koolhaas writes, “there is a special way of moving in junkspace, at the same time aimless and purposeful,” and this sentiment is an equally apt description for moving through the space of Lin’s text.188 The paradox of moving in simultaneously aimless and purposeful ways describes the distracted nature of modern reading — following hyperlinks; skimming and skipping between multiple screens or windows; simultaneously reading, watching and listening. Lin’s experiments in ambient textuality lull the reader into a distracted state by producing a poetics that is seamless, smooth and relaxing as opposed to jarring or shocking. With a dry sense of humour, he writes, “as we all know, poetry and the novel should aspire not to the condition of music but to the condition of relaxation and yoga.”189 7CV is laden with such performative claims that are both parodic and genuine, employing humour to appeal to a distracted, bored or relaxed readerly attention that aptly fits informatically generated and inscribed architectures.

Here Lin’s concept of distraction diverges slightly from Benjamin’s. For Benjamin, reception in distraction relies on what he refers to as the “shock effect” of film. The advent of film ushers in a mass medium that centres on constant motion and sudden changes, creating a situation where the work of art cannot be grasped via concentrated contemplation but only through distracted reception. On the other hand, Lin’s poetics couples distraction with a sense of seamlessness, smoothness and relaxation. Rejecting the

186 Rem Koolhaas, “Junkspace,” October 100 (2002): 175. Scappettone highlights the connection between Lin’s ambient environments and Koolhaas’ notion of junkspace in her essay “Versus Seamlessness.” 187 Ibid., 179. 188 Ibid. 189 Lin, Seven Controlled Vocabularies, 24.

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notion of shock, Lin’s poetics breaks with historical strategies of the avant-garde that sought to produce a radical disjuncture or rupture with the status quo. Of course, it is important to acknowledge the radical technological and cultural changes that have taken place in the more than seventy years that separate “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” essay from 7CV. Montage, a radical technique in the context of early Weimar cinema no longer produces that shock effect Benjamin describes. Modelled instead on disco, sampling and remixing, for Lin, montage conjures a certain feeling of seamlessness or smoothness attached to it. For Benjamin, the inability to arrest an image with the eyes produces a situation in which reception in distraction may occur, whereas for Lin, distraction is produced by inducing a state of boredom or fatigue. While the way in which distraction is produced differs for Benjamin and Lin, both understand distraction as produced collectively and as something that cannot be easily reduced to the antithesis of attentiveness, attending as it does to the movement of affect and its registration in embodied ways.

Boredom

In a 2005 interview, the poet and critic Charles Bernstein asks Lin: “But do you really want your writing to be boring?”, to which Lin replies: “Yes… in a way. I like it to be relaxing, I like people to just sit there and forget that it was happening, and I like them to glean something from it that they didn’t mean to glean from. And if they fell asleep that would be ok too.”190 For Lin, boredom is a state in which the reader may glean the unexpected, a state from which novelty emerges. Obvious links can be drawn here with the dense language of modernist writers such as Samuel Beckett and Gertrude Stein; the recursive compositions of twentieth-century artists such as John Cage, Robert Ryman and Jasper Johns; and the permutational logics of writers such as Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec and Jackson Mac Low. Although there are many productive resonances to be found in such precedents, Lin’s work marks a notable departure from these historical avant- garde practices, employing boredom and tedium not as strategies to produce (however paradoxically) innovative or shocking new cultural transformations but rather to reflect an everydayness of aesthetic experience as it is registered through the activity of reading. His work reflects the complex and contradictory conditions of contemporary culture in

190 Bernstein and Lin, “Tan Lin in Conversation.”

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which the web has facilitated the mass production, circulation and consumption of information. Here autonomous artwork is increasingly indistinct from the form of the commodity; aesthetic experience is ambivalently registered as a complex mix of positive and negative affects; and immaterial labour is increasingly aestheticised as concepts historically tied to art — such as experimentation and play — are incorporated into neoliberal, post-fordist models of labour.191 For Lin, boredom, tedium and fatigue are middle-range or everyday intensities inextricably connected to late capitalist culture. His poetics induces these states in order to produce a type of reading that he refers to as “middle brow,” one that mirrors the “everyday experiences of reading distractedly or unintentionally by just looking.”192

While Lin’s work distances itself from the twentieth-century avant-garde’s obsession with innovation, there is a resonance between the way boredom functions in his ambient poetics and in the modernist literature of Gertrude Stein, particularly Stein’s notion that repetition can produce “an open feeling” in the reader.193 Elaborating on Stein’s notion, Ngai describes this opening feeling as “a condition of utter receptivity in which difference is perceived (and perhaps even ‘felt’) prior to its qualification or conceptualisation.”194 For Ngai this state of receptivity is registered by the reader in a state of “stuplimity,” a term she coins to describe an aesthetic category that accounts for the simultaneous experience of shock and boredom in contemporary life, and in so doing, supplants the Kantian sublime. In Ngai’s reading of Stein, the experiences of boredom and fatigue are reconfigured as receptive modalities that foreground haptic perception. They produce an open feeling from which one might register the micro-vibrational movements of difference circulating within the hum. Such a notion has a distinct resonance with the Benjaminian idea of reception in distraction.

Ngai describes stuplimity as “a concatenation of boredom and astonishment — a

191 For more on the incorporation of affect into post-fordist capitalism see Maurizio Lazzarato, "Immaterial Labor," in Radical Thought In Italy: A Potential Politics, ed. Michael Hardt and Paulo Virno (Minneapolis: Unniversity of Minnesota Press, 2006); Paulo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito and Andrea Casson (London and New York: Semiotext(e), 2004). 192 Alexander et al, “Tan Lin Interviewed.” 193 Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans (Normal: Dalkey Archive Press, 1995), 294. 194 Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 261.

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bringing together of what ‘dulls’ and what ‘irritates’ or agitates; a sharp, sudden excitation and prolonged desensitization, exhaustion, or fatigue.”195 Producing a state of suspended animation, stuplimity holds the reader in a tension between the opposing experiences of shock and boredom. While Lin’s ambient poetics perhaps cannot be fully accounted for by Ngai’s notion of stuplimity, I argue that his interest in boredom, distraction and relaxation as modalities for reading, work to produce an experience of suspended animation. This constructive state of suspension is resonant with the open feeling that arises from the experience of stuplimity. For both Ngai and Lin, a state of suspended animation is produced through a correlative suspension of the reader’s active engagement and expectation of a text. A sense of fatigue that is induced by boredom slows down the emotional responses of the reader, paving the way for a receptiveness that can attend to the movement of unformed and unstructured affects. In Lin’s ambient poetics, boredom and fatigue are produced through familiarity, generated by reproducing the generic and the everyday. By contrast, in an encounter with the stuplime, this effect is a result of the combination of boredom — produced via techniques such as repetition and permutation — and the shock of scale. As Ngai writes, “stuplimity reveals the limits of our ability to comprehend a vastly extended form as a totality, as does Kant’s mathematical sublime, yet not through an encounter with the infinite but with finite bits and scraps of material in repetition.”196

Lin’s poetics is one that is comprised of fragments of generic text. Following Giorgio Agamben we can understand the fragment as a poetic form that gestures toward a whole that is impossible to grasp. For Agamben, an inversion takes place after modernity in which the concept of a fragment is transformed from a relic or a ruin into a poetic form that indexes an impossible whole. As Agamben writes, fragments “allude to something (the absolute poem) that can never be evoked in its integrity, but only rendered present through its negation.”197 Agamben quotes the German Romantic poet Friedrich Schlegel, who states: “many works of the ancients have become fragments, and many works of the moderns are fragments at their birth.”198 Considered in the way, Lin’s heaping of fragments can be understood as alluding to a whole (the textuality of the post-digital

195 Ibid., 271. 196 Ibid. 197 Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Words and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. Ronald L. Martinez (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 32. 198 Friedrich Schlegel as quoted in Agamben, Stanzas, 32.

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present) that can never be fully grasped. That is, his work produces a tension between the finite (the book) and the infinite (the web) which is traversed by the form of the fragment.

In Lin’s work, these bits and scraps of generic textual material cohere into what Frederic Jameson refers to as “heaps of fragments,” forming something like a poetics of the post-digital.199 Here coherence operates not as a value imposed on existing works but as a generative principle or structuring device for assembling material into a complex form. It refers to the process in which discrete parts hold together as a mass. Assembling bits and scraps of generic textual material — anecdotes, re-typed newspaper articles, found images, metadata and so on — Lin investigates how a principle of coherence functions in relation to the architecture of a book and the practice of reading. These collections of fragments bring different systems of reading into contact with one another, a gesture that both complicates the reader’s concept of form and the very concept of a reader. Foregrounding the ubiquity of text, his atmospheric reading environments call into question the centrality of the reader, suggesting a type of reading without ‘a’ reader. Here we might think of reading as a type of technocultural mechanism in which texts, algorithms, digital networks, physical objects, reading subjects, affects, spaces, shifting temporalities and more are assembled. This conception of reading is concerned with the relations between forces and things rather than with extracting concrete meaning for a subject position. Lin enacts this condition of ubiquitous reading in 7CV by blurring the distinctions between the discourses of film, architecture, contemporary art, painting, cooking, design, shopping, cultural criticism, advertising and television. Sampling from the ‘controlled vocabularies’ of various forms of traditional and web-based publishing — such as autobiography, fiction, poetry, theory, essay, Yelp review and artist book — Lin mirrors the everydayness of reading as it is mediated by the web, where one might move effortlessly between reading restaurant reviews, Twitter feeds, critical theory and advertising material. In Lin’s hands, the heaping of fragments coheres as an ambient hum that both draws attention to, and challenges, the systems and process that organise reading as a semantic activity.

7CV is organised into seven sections — “A Field Guide to American Painting”, “A Field Guide to American Landscape”, “American Architecture Meta Data Containers”, “2

199 The phrase, “heaps of fragments” is borrowed from Ngai who, in turn, takes the phrase from Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1991).

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Identical Novels”, “A Dictionary of Systems Theory”, “Various Library Standards”, and “A Field Guide to American Cinema” — with each section dedicated to a different art form, classification system or discipline. It slides between being an artist’s book, an autobiography, a work of theory, a work fiction, a review, a collage and a readymade. In the physical edition of the book published by Wesleyan University Press, the front cover reproduces American Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data, a series of key terms that suggest how to categorise the book in library databases. It reads:

1. China—poetry. 2. Mass media and language. 3. Wives—family relationships. 4. Literary form—data processing. 5. Poetry—therapeutic use. 6. Literary criticism and the computer. 7. Metadata—standards. 8. Poetry—social aspects. 9. Poets— 20th C—anecdotes. 10. Information retrieval. 11. Book design—history. 12. Poetics. 13. Poetry—data processing. 14. Book covers—reproductions.200

Lin moves this metadata from its usual place in the (often ignored) front matter of a book to the front cover, granting it increased visibility. He wants the reader to attend to these metadata tags from the outset. They are a suggestion for how to read the book, or as Kristen Gallagher notes, “they activate its poetics.”201 Playing with the ways in which genre and classification systems involuntarily encode the ways we read, 7CV works to both establish and disrupt these stylistic conventions throughout the book. Lin's interest is less in the content of the text and more in the ambience that surrounds its production and reception. In other words, Lin is interested in the processes (publishing, distribution, classification, criticism) that condition the production of texts, as well as how such processes become lexical elements of a text. That is, he is concerned with how the stylistic features and characteristics of a text frame the practice of reading it. For example, the proliferation of images and the use of image plates as a structural device throughout the text (even though these often do not correspond to images) suggest a reading mode associated with an ‘art book.’ Whereas the following fragment indexes the controlled vocabulary of poetry though the use of line breaks and spacing:

They saw each other occasionally

200 Lin, Seven Controlled Vocabularies. 201 Kristen Gallagher, “Cooking a book with low-level durational energy: How to read Tan Lin's 'Seven Controlled Vocabularies,'” Jacket 2, May 27, 2011, accessed July 17, 2016, http://jacket2.org/reviews/cooking-book-low-level-durational-energy

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None of them they screwed a fake console

Over the ATM machines202

Or, consider the following fragment, which evokes the genre of the autobiography through first person references to familial structures and personal experiences that we understand as possibly commensurate with Lin’s own life:

When my father passed away in 1989, I inherited my father’s favorite car, a brown 1978 Mercedes SE. I had just moved to Charlottesville, Virginia, where I had been hired to teach literature. By the time I got the car, it leaked whenever I drove in the rain, and the floor absorbed all sorts of water from the road because the undercarriage was rusted out. I hardly ever drove the car because I thought it would rain, but for some reason I could never bring myself to sell it. And in that way I was never allowed to think about driving at all or experience my feelings of driving while I was driving but only after I came home or was no longer driving, which was the more relaxing part of driving anyway. Reading like consumption should be very fast and very hypnotic and very wasteful of actual time so that one doesn’t really know what one is reading or consuming or throwing away at the moment one is throwing it away. I never knew why my father loved that car or why I kept it for so long. One should never know one is reading a book when one is reading it.203

The emphasis here is less on what word to use or where to line break a poem and more on the way these fragments of text contain the lexical elements of specific controlled vocabulary systems. Specifically, Lin is interested in the ways in which such vocabularies act to discipline reading. 7CV interrupts this disciplining of reading by constructing a reading environment in which the distinct vocabularies that cohere to form the book slowly blur and dissolve through a process of mixing and sampling. The fragment above provides the reader with a series of involuntary cues to read the text as autobiography,

202 Lin, Seven Controlled Vocabularies, 182. 203 Ibid., 100.

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however the autobiographical mode is punctuated toward the end of the section by the following: “Reading like consumption should be very fast and very hypnotic and very wasteful of actual time so that one doesn’t really know what one is reading or consuming or throwing away at the moment one is throwing it away.”204 This sentence ruptures the autobiographical narrative by drawing the reader’s attention momentarily to the act of reading itself. Tapping into the general ambience of contemporary culture, Lin gives us a poetics that hums along with networked systems. Mixing and sampling this ambience, his work begins to dissolve the boundaries between discipline and form, reading and writing, consumption and production. Here we can think of his work as a “low level durational experience,” one that tunes into the omnipresent hum of media and mediation.205 Opening toward the wider milieu, Lin’s work suggests that boredom and distraction are important modalities for a drifting perception in this relational space.

Channel Surfing

For Lin, duration does not simply refer to the measurement of time in a quantitative sense, but rather accounts for what happens in time as (pure) experience. Duration describes a relational flow in which diverse events, objects and experiences coexist. It is a complex term that accounts for temporal experience as a continuity or singular flow, one that is comprised of many different continuities and discontinuities. In Whiteheadian terms, duration describes the most common of experiences and can be characterised simply by the fact that “it happens and passes.”206 As Isabelle Stengers writes, “insofar as it happens and passes, each duration exhibits the passage of nature, but no duration provides a privileged testimony with regard to this passage. Every Whiteheadian passage is qualified insofar as it contains other durations and is contained in other durations.”207 Simultaneously fragmented and continuous, singular and multiple, this conception of duration is concerned with the experience of time rather than with its measurement. It describes a temporal space of emergence, a span of becoming in which unity and

204 Ibid. 205 Bernstein and Lin, “Tan Lin in Conversation.” 206 Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), 54. 207 Isabelle Stengers, Thinking with Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 52.

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difference coexist in a relational flow. Massumi affirms this when he writes, “process — event, change, production of novelty, becoming — all imply duration.”208 Lin understands duration in this processual vein, considering the experience of reading as a temporal activity in which things do (and do not) happen. His work, taken as a “low level durational experience,” suggests the idle passing of time that one might associate with half-watching television or the temporal wormhole one enters when browsing the web; that is, the coupling of an experience of vastly nonsequential time with a mode of reduced attention.209

Importantly, the distracted and dispersed space-time of the now is not medium specific for Lin. He also considers television to have shifted into the same kind of duration as the web. The 2011 novel Insomnia and the Aunt is perhaps Lin’s most ambient work to date, modelled on the technology of television. In Lin’s hands the television serves as a cultural marker, a family member, a storyteller, a distributor and regulator of affect, and a generator of subjectivity. The activity of television watching can be thought of, following Lin, as “an ongoing affair with blurry temporal markers.”210 Television is a constant that runs through Insomnia and the Aunt, a 24/7 presence that forms a backdrop to the fading memories the narrator has of an insomniac aunt who runs a motel in the Pacific Northwest of America. Peppered with descriptions of and references to reruns of TV shows, the novel creates the sense of an unfolding, low intensity duration that has neither a beginning nor an end. It hums along as a constant yet singular texture. This is further amplified by the evocation of insomnia in the title. A condition of sleeplessness in which the body exists in a state of suspension, simultaneously unable to fully function or properly rest, insomnia suggests a temporality in which the measure of time loses it importance. Day and night merge in the condition of sleeplessness, producing a continuous durational unfolding that gestures toward distraction and boredom. In the grips of insomnia, concentrated contemplation becomes near impossible, replaced by an attentiveness in which conflicting or contradictory affective experiences might coexist.

Insomnia and the Aunt continues Lin’s interest in the conventions of genre and how the lexical elements of a text encode its reading. In Western aesthetics, the notion of genre

208 Brian Massumi, Semblance and Event, 24. 209 Bernstein and Lin, “Tan Lin in Conversation.” 210 David Foote, “Your Closest Relative is a TV Set,” Asian American Writer’s Workshop, July 8, 2015, accessed July 28, 2016, http://aaww.org/your-closest-relative/

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can be traced to Aristotle and is a literary term that refers to the classification of texts according to form, style or purpose.211 Articulating this classificatory function, Daniel Chandler writes, “conventional definitions of genres tend to be based on the notion that they constitute particular conventions of content (such as themes or settings) and/or form (including structure and style) which are shared by the texts which are regarded as belonging to them.”212 Broadly speaking, genre describes a form of categorisation that allows members to be identified and grouped together according to a set of common characteristics. In other words, genre is concerned with the articulation of limits and boundaries. While the media rich environment of our present involves the constant creation of new genres, and while there is a certain porousness with regards to what constitutes the boundaries of a genre, the concept is nonetheless concerned with establishing limits and norms.213 As Anahid Kassabian writes:

Across the media, genre has, of course, become a central organising principle of both production and consumption; as John Hartley puts it: ‘genres are agents of ideological closure — they limit the meaning potential of a given text, and they limit the commercial risk of the producer corporations.’ In this sense, genres might be understood to discipline reception.214

Insomnia and the Aunt marks Lin’s most explicit foray into genre to date. Where 7CV evaded identification with any one specific genre, Insomnia and the Aunt is clearly presented as a novel — a notion reinforced by the book’s cover blurb, the marketing language that accompanies its distribution, and its metadata tags. Framed as a novel, it invokes a set of historical conventions to do with fiction, narrative, development, length, style and so on that are challenged and complicated as the text unfolds. Although it should also be noted that the novel is itself considered to be a very loose form of genre. As

211 Aristotle, Poetics, trans. S. H. Butcher (Mineola: Dover Publications, Inc., 1997). 212 Daniel Chandler, “An Introduction to Genre Theory,” 1997, accessed July 25, 2016, http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/intgenre/chandler_genre_theory.pdf 213 This is by no means an attempt to oversimplify the concept of genre and the important relationship genre has to criticism and classification. For more the historical development of the concept of genre, and complexities of defining genre see, for example: Rick Altman, Film/Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1999); Stephen Neale, Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1980). 214 Kassabian, “Ubiquitous Listening and Networked Subjectivity.”

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Mikhail Bahktin observes, the novel can be understood as an inconclusive form, producing what he refers to as "a novelistic zone of contact" that gives rise to a "new temporal orientation."215 Lin's approach to the novel is in line with Bahktin's account of it as an open-ended form and disrupts any preconceived notions of the novel as an easily identifiable genre.

From the outset, and in regard to its materiality, the work disrupts the formal conventions of the novel. As David Foote has observed, the book perhaps resembles a Fluxkit rather than a novel, combining text, black and white photographs, reproductions of postcards, Google reverse searches, letters, footnotes and web links into a single form.216 The assumption that it is a work of fiction is complicated by the succinct, documentary-style prose that immediately gives the work the feel of a memoir or autobiography. Conscious of the ways in which the biography of a writer has become inextricably connected to the marketing of a literary work, Lin constructs a familial scene that can be understood as possibly corresponding to the structure and experience of his own family. The narrative is one of immigrant life in America. Yet, this apparent grounding in reality is continuously unsettled by prose that moves between fiction and nonfiction, memory and fantasy, truth and falsity. He writes, “I remember seeing a photograph of a door that had been kicked in and which my aunt had pasted onto the back office wall. I don’t know if this memory is based on something or whether I clipped the picture from a magazine many years later.”217 The ambiguity of the statement opens it to being read as a fictional construction, or a fading memory, or a description of his writing process (and therefore the inclusion of the autobiographical in the fictional). The latter understanding is produced by the numerous descriptions Lin has given in interviews of using photographs found in flea markets as material in his writing or his

215 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 33. 216 Foote, “Your Closest Relative.” A Fluxkit is a concept developed by artists belonging to the Fluxus movement — an interdisciplinary conceptual art movement that emerged in the 1960s and ‘70s. Fluxkits were collections of objects grouped together in and presented as an artwork. They often included such things as graphical scores for events and happenings, interactive games, text works and poems, images and small objects. 217 Lin, Insomnia and the Aunt, 10.

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interest in rewriting newspaper articles as fiction.218

The sense of autobiography returns via Lin’s use of black and white photographs and reproductions of postcards throughout the text. Punctuating the text without caption or reference, these aged and worn images index the genre of autobiography, providing a visual referent that at first glance appears to correspond to the text. The images work to produce a certain air of authenticity. Yet, while the quality and type of images (black and white, reproductions of old postcards, and so forth) are lexical elements of the memoir or autobiography, their content is not. Once again, Lin destabilises the ground he has established by including only generic images, which vaguely relate to the content of the text. Stock images of America circa the 1950s–60s — motels, Chinese restaurants, hotel lobbies, Hollywood press shots of Ronald Reagan and Jackie Gleason — hang obliquely throughout the novel. The result is a text that is at once specific and generic, authentic and inauthentic. Insomnia and the Aunt is an extension of Lin’s experimentation with genre, highlighting the importance of the generic both to the practice of reading and to the production of networked subjectivity. Despite its framing as a novel, the work subtly combines and blurs the lexical elements of different genres into a single form, creating a work in which fragmented forms of classification cohere under the guise of a narrative. It channel surfs between modes of presentation (novel, autobiography, media theory, Fluxkit, scrapbook), relations to reality (fiction vs nonfiction), and conceptions of subjectivity (individualised and collective). In doing so, it challenges the limits and conventions of genre rather than adhering to them. It interrupts the disciplining of reception, reconfiguring the book instead as a relational space of becoming.

Insomnia and the Aunt revolves around the technology of the television and its relationship to bodies, affects, subjectivity and modes of perception. The omnipresence of the television in the narrative mirrors the ubiquity of the televisual in contemporary culture, echoing Shaviro’s formulation that “the entire world exists only in order to be televised.”219 Permeating both the public and private spheres, the hum of the televisual emanates from homes, businesses, institutions, shops, pubs, cafes, airports, public transport and more. In Lin’s narrative, the television functions, on the one hand, as a generic and habituating media object, and on the other as a low intensity unfolding of

218 See, for example: Alexander et al, “Writing as metadata container”; Genusa, “A Book is Technology”; and Saunders, “Tan Lin.” 219 Shaviro, Connected, 4.

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duration. As the novel progresses, the narrator’s recollections of his immigrant aunt seem to both emerge from and dissolve into the omnipresent figure of the television.

A motel in the middle of nowhere is kind of a distracted family, my aunt and my TV watching is pretty much an unchanging seasonal routine whenever I visit, eating and chatting slowly and occasionally as the night wears on, with the routine broken up only when the late night news comes on at three or four a.m. and my aunt shuffles in her Chinese slippers to the vending machines in the lobby where she buys some Ho Hos and puts them in a freezer for our desert.220

The temporality of Insomnia and the Aunt is not defined by a schedule of TV watching but rather by the presence of a TV that runs all day and all night. It is an accompaniment to daily activities such as "eating and chatting slowly," consumed with an only partially engaged attention.221 It is an extended and continuous duration in which relations are made and repeated. Lin continues, “because we don’t watch TV continuously or closely, a few seasons or even decades of TV can pass before us without us quite realising it, and by three or four a.m. my aunt seems to be a part of the anthropology of somebody else’s TV set.”222 Timescales intersect and overlap as the discrete components of television coalesce to co-compose a relational field that opens toward a new experience of the tele-temporal. The figure of the aunt appears as an emanation of the television set, an index of generic experience in the form of a family member, or an expression of the technical substrate that gives rise to the television as a mass medium. The narrator’s claim that “by three or four a.m. my aunt seems to be part of the anthropology of somebody else’s TV set,” is one that reinforces both the generic nature of television watching and the notion of networked subjectivity that arises from Clough’s teletechnologisation. It describes a mode of watching that is both continuous yet fragmented, individual and interchangeable.

Insomnia and the Aunt does not, however, simply employ the figure of television as an analogy for reading. It is, rather, a novel humming with the simultaneously unified and fragmented nature of television. The broadcast content of television is comprised of bits and scraps of material — programs, movies, ads, logos, public service announcements, promotions, lead-ins, IDs, and so on — that cohere to produce a programming that is

220 Lin, Insomnia and the Aunt, 15. 221 Ibid. 222 Ibid., 18.

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both seamless and discontinuous. Similarly, Insomnia and the Aunt continues Lin’s interest in coherence as a generative principle, creating an ambient hum by drawing together disparate yet generic cultural material. The assemblage of these disparate fragments blur the boundaries between different genres or controlled vocabularies, mirroring the programmatic and material plane of television in which narrative flow is constantly interrupted by fragments of unrelated, non-program material. The novel’s durational environment is best traversed with a bored or distracted attention from which one might attune affectively to the forces of interruption that circulate within the hum of networked culture.

To conclude this chapter, I want to consider Benjamin’s notion of reception in distraction in relation to the notion of networked subjectivity I have been developing. As we have already established, distraction is a mode of mass experience that enables pure experience and pure receptivity. This state of receptivity unshackles experience from being subjugated to transcendental knowledge and moves us toward a haptic mode of perception in which asignifying forces and intensities might be registered corporeally. Associating distraction with the medium of film, Benjamin invokes the concept of a mass and gestures toward a mode of collective reception that resonates with the idea of networked subjectivity I am positing here. For Benjamin, mass experience arises from the work of art that is reproducible and the reproducible work of art is, in turn, absorbed by a mass of participants in a state of distraction. Here Benjamin’s theory takes on a political dimension, gesturing towards what Paul North describes as “a politics without knowledge, not burdened by governing transcendental or normative structures. It would be something like a politics of pure experience, which would in a real sense be unknowable.”223 Distraction, then, could become a precondition for historical or political turning points, a modality in which pure experience interrupts the disciplining of attention and creates the possibilities for thought to be re-opened. Distraction gives us a conception of politics as belonging to the plane of immanence. Taken in this way, it can be understood as a key state for the production of a networked subjectivation that is not simply standardised and generic but generic and open-ended.

For Benjamin, a mass arises when “quantity has been transmuted into quality.”224 Benjamin’s definition, which borrows from physics, posits that a mass is a qualitative

223 North, The Problem of Distraction, 156. 224 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 239.

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collection that cannot be reduced to its individual units nor simply considered as the quantitative sum of its constituent parts; rather, it is an indivisible entity that produces a unique set of qualities. As such, a mass is not defined or organised around a common purpose but can be understood as amorphous. As North writes, “the communality of the mass does not depend on predetermined self-knowledge or identity among its members.”225 A mass does not perceive in the same manner as a collection of individuals but generates something in excess of the discrete parts of which it is comprised. By massifying the senses, new modes of perception and reception are generated. The indivisibility of a mass produces what Benjamin refers to as “a change in the mode of participation,” whereby its constituent units become susceptible to a collective reception that gestures toward pure experience while nonetheless maintaining plurality and amorphousness.226 Put another way, a mass affects, and is affected by, the bodies that comprise it and the other bodies with which it comes into contact. It generates an affective noise that moves in excess of its constituent parts and gives rise to a form of collective reception attuned to such noise. Hum may be just this noise for the mass aesthetics of networked culture.

Benjamin’s observations regarding film in the context of reproducibility can be transported to the teletechnological age and applied to the ‘mass’ media of the internet and the post-televisual. Both the internet and contemporary television are media that involve reproduction; both create a type of amorphous experience that is best understood through concepts of affect; and both produce a distracted or multi-focused attention. For Benjamin, the emergence of the mass and mass experience calls for a mode of perception that foregrounds the haptic rather than the visual. The mass absorbs things through a process of tactile appropriation “which is accomplished not so much by attention as by habit,” and which “determines to a large extent optical reception.”227 This haptic or tactile reception occurs not in the grasping of an object or concept but in the process of letting go. It fails to hold onto things and indeed often grasps at that which is without fixed form, such as affects and intensities. Expanding on this notion, Paul North explains that the action of letting go constitutes “a positive loss, an active, moving letting go in which sensation flees behind the sensor, which rushes to keep up, to keep losing.”228 This

225 North, The Problem of Distraction, 157. 226 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 239. 227 Ibid., 240. 228 North, The Problem of Distraction, 163.

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continuous experience of grasping and letting go brings us to the space in-between things. That is, the haptic attends to the movement of things, reaching out toward that which cannot be held or contained. Distraction is a modality that gives us a distributed attention in which what is received is unable to be grasped and apprehended and is instead absorbed and registered as dispersed embodied experience.

Understood as an entity that functions in excess of its discrete components, an affective mass serves as a useful concept for understanding the collective nature of networked subjectivity. Distraction and boredom are states of suspended animation in which one might perceive the forces of interruption that move in and as hum. Such states interrupt the conditions for thought and create the possibilities for a future thought to operate differently. Distraction does not disperse thought once and for all, but rather produces the necessary conditions for thought to be interrupted. Here the habituation of distraction might create a situation where thought is continuously interrupted and remade anew.

Grasping that this dual sense of habituation and distraction is central to television, Lin writes: “like most things in my aunt’s life, running a motel was a ritual enhanced by television. It was repetitive and beautiful. It was the opposite of metaphysical. It was the geography of the living room in the discontinuous form of a TV broadcast.”229 The television is not merely a static object that transmits sound and image, it is a constant, repetitive and discontinuous experience that organises daily life. Conceiving of the television as part of the physical and affective architecture of a space, he writes:

For her, TV is not a screen upon which remote images flicker or a metaphysical conduit for the selling of soap but furniture that moves like a glacier through American life, picking up all sorts of magnetised debris and junk which it affixes to the other side of the TV glass, like a rear view mirror in a pick up truck that reflects things passing by.230

This description of the television as a piece of furniture that picks “up all sorts of magnetised debris and junk” like “a rear view mirror in a pick up truck that reflects things passing by” describes a type of reception that is continuously interrupted or dispersed;

229 Lin, Insomnia and the Aunt, 33. 230 Ibid., 19.

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only receiving in letting go.231 Like a rearview mirror reflecting things as they pass by there is always something cutting in at the edge that forces things to reassemble and rearrange. This continuous dispersal of attention and letting go of objects of inquiry produces a thinking-feeling experience that is relational and multiplicitous:

Because there are only one or two channels that we get and they frequently fade out or cloud over with interference, most of our TV watching is involuntary and chronological, a kind of anthropological dumb show wherein we watch segments of competing old westerns, switching to late night shows and Jackie Gleason reruns when reception is particularly atrocious.232

The interruption of the television broadcast is also television’s distracted or multi-focused receptivity, one that moves seamlessly and involuntarily between objects of interest and yet also produces a haptic perception that lets go of an a priori space-time for thinking outside of experience. Lin’s account of television suggests that “TV watching is not idle time” but rather an activity that constitutes an intensively distributed embodied experience.

The hum of networked systems and culture is a noise that refigures perception by admitting pure experience into conceptions of knowledge. In other words, the sonic figure of hum allows us to think perception with the social, the political and the medial. This generic noise reshapes distraction and boredom as critical modalities that allow for haptic attunement to the affective forces and intensities that circulate in and as networked hum. Attending to hum moves us toward a type of thinking-feeling that interrupts the structures of knowledge tied to universal reason, and in doing so, opens the possibility for thought to be made anew. The modes of perception that emerge from the hum offer us, following Ferreira da Silva, a way "to un-organize, un-form, un-think the world."233 The hum is a networked noise that gives rise to collective modes of perception that might allow us to move beyond received structures of knowledge and the dominant forms of power they reproduce.

231 Ibid. 232 Ibid., 16. 233 Ferreira da Silva, "Toward a Black Feminist Poethics," 86.

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coda

The movement of things will not cohere.

— Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons

I want to conclude by thinking about how the figures presented in this thesis might be deployed collectively, and how they might come to bear on the visual, in addition to the sonic and the textual. I want to consider here how murmur, stutter, gossip and hum might perform a collective figuring that allows us to approach the force of interruption simultaneously from a number of different perspectives. This is not intended as a definitive conclusion but rather as an opening toward further possibilities, an attempt to move with the fugitivity of the sonic figures I have explored so far. Specifically, I am thinking about the force of interruption in relation to Vernon Ah Kee’s remarkable four-channel documentary video work Tall Man (2010).

Ah Kee’s work takes as its subject the 2004 Palm Island riot that occurred in the wake of Mulrunji (Cameron) Doomadgee’s death in police custody. Palm Island, also known by the Aboriginal name Bwgcolman, is an island on the Great Barrier Reef that lies 65 kilometres north-west of the Australian city of Townsville (in North Queensland) and is one of the largest Aboriginal communities in Australia.1 It has a long history of colonial violence, with the Queensland government using the island as a penal colony for First Nations people until the late 1960s. On November 19, 2004, Doomadgee, an Aboriginal man, was arrested by Palm Island police for allegedly causing a public nuisance. Less than an hour later he was found dead in his cell with injuries that included a cut above his right eye, four broken ribs, and a ruptured liver

1 As Chloe Hooper writes: “Aborigines were sent to the Palm Island Mission in leg iron and deemed variously: ‘a troublesome character,’ ‘a larrikin,’ ‘a wanderer,’ ‘a communist.’ Usually they had made the mistake of asking about their wages, or were caught speaking their languages or practising traditional ceremonies. In its isolation the mission became increasingly authoritarian — a kind of tropical gulag, with all the arbitrary abuse of power the that term implies.” Chloe Hooper, “Tall Man: Inside Palm Island’s Heart of Darkness,” The Monthly, March 2006, accessed August 12, 2017, https://www.themonthly.com.au/monthly-essays-chloe-hooper-tall-man-inside-palm-island039s-heart- darkness-185

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and portal vein.2 Doomadgee was the 147th Aboriginal person to die in police custody since 1990. While police claimed that Doomadgee had sustained his injuries tripping on a concrete step outside, reports circulated that the injuries were the result of police brutality inflicted by a white police officer, Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley. Riots broke out on November 26, following a public meeting of Palm Island residents in which the results of Doomadgee’s autopsy report were read out but the cause of death withheld. In the ensuing riot, the police station, the police barracks and the court house were burnt down. Ah Kee’s Tall Man deals with the riot and its aftermath.

The work is entirely composed of footage captured by Palm Island police, members of a police ‘tactical response group’ flown in to the Island, members of the local community and other unnamed sources. This footage was anonymously posted to Ah Kee after he travelled to Palm Island to make a portrait of his cousin Lex Wotton, a former councilor who was convicted of inciting the riot. The footage, much of it shaky and frantic, comes from hand-held video cameras, CCTV feeds and phones. The work, distributed across four screens, juxtaposes the perspectives of police and Islanders, moving between a number of different locations and vantage points. A test tone and coloured test pattern with the text ‘nsville’ (Townsville, the city that presides over Palm Island, and the place that Wotton’s trial took place) interrupts the footage at various points, organising the work into six discrete sections. Tall Man opens with the sound of a murmuring crowd and video footage that moves in and out of focus. The footage blurs, jerks and stutters before gradually coming into focus to reveal images of a crowd juxtaposed with police standing in a line. At various points in the unfolding of the work we see and/or hear: the Palm Island community gathered and awaiting news of Doomadgee’s cause of death; Wotton addressing the crowd, asking repeatedly “Will we accept this?”; the police in lockdown, preparing for, and anticipating, the impending riot; the police station alight and burning; the panicked utterances of police, “Fuck … you gotta take your Glock. They just smashed in all the windows … Fuck. Fuck.”; scenes of rioting; long shots of the island, smoke rising as the police station burns in the distance; the arrival of the riot squad; a police briefing, “I’d be very careful with the firearm. It may be the case that you will have to discharge a few fuckin’ rounds in the air to scare the shit out of these c**ts”; police and police dogs standing in formation; police retreating into the barracks; and finally, scenes of protest outside the Townsville Courthouse in the wake of the riot.

2 Office of the Queensland State Coroner, “Inquest into the death of Mulrunji,” May 14, 2010, accessed August 14, 2017, http://www.courts.qld.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0008/86858/cif-doomadgee- mulrunji-20100514.pdf

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The interruptive figures that are developed in this thesis come together in Ah Kee’s Tall Man, demonstrating noise’s capacity as both an interruptive and generative force. The work is a ‘portrait’ of a murmuring crowd producing a heterogeneous and multi-vocal noise that interrupts the authoritative speech of the white, settler-colonial state. We see and hear many individuating voices coming together to generate a collective noise that refuses to adhere to a majoritarian order that is inextricably linked to colonisation and foundationally anti-black. This sense of the multiplicitous and dissensual collectivity is reflected in the multi-channel structure of the work, which allows for the simultaneous presentation of differing perspectives of the same event. As the work unfolds, the murmuring of the crowd transforms into a riot, and we come to see these as linked manifestations of the force of interruption. The murmur and the riot are both animated by what Harney and Moten refer to as “the call for and from disorder.”3 Ah Kee shows us that the affective noise produced by the murmuring crowd is, on the one hand, full of difference, and on the other, contains an undercommon force of interruption. Perhaps most crucially, the work shows us that these things are not mutually exclusive but rather are co- constitutive.

Tall Man comprises footage that jerks, shakes and blurs. It stutters, both visually and conceptually. The footage moves between being in focus and out of focus, legible and illegible. Although it deploys the same video material that was used by the state to convict Wotton of inciting the Palm Island riot, in Tall Man it is assembled into a continuous and multi-channel work, with the stuttering footage producing a sense of disorientation that interrupts and complicates the state’s attempt to rhetorically reduce the riot to a scene of criminality. The stuttered juxtaposition of police racism and violence with depictions of the riot open a space from which we are able to consider the limits of the legal system. The work makes the legal system itself stutter, revealing how its intrinsic racism is built on colonial dispossession. Here the stutter contains a force of interruption that opens a space in which alternate archives are literally able to be forged out of actual source material.

Reading Tall Man as gossip is to understand it as a work that is explicitly of, and for, the undercommons, inhabiting and affirming its fugitive sociality. It captures the sense that the act of rioting is moved by the same desire as that which motivates speaking, reading, writing, pointing to, calling out — a reaching out to find relation in the space of dispossession. Tall Man makes explicit the relationship between gossip as a mode of speaking and gossip as a mode of

3 Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 133.

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reading: there is the circulation of information as gossip, which we see in the anonymous and covert delivery to Ah Kee of the footage from which Tall Man is composed; there is capture of actual gossip in the content of the work, the recording of the many voices of a marginalised community speaking back at the univocal authority of the sovereign state; and there is the transformation of gossip into a work of art and a work of protest, to be read by fugitive publics as gossip. The work points to the illegitimacy of the sovereign state as it produces and circulates a point of view of the undercommons to the undercommons. As Ah Kee says of his work, “It’s made with the idea that my family reads my work, that they understand what it’s about, and that they see themselves in it. That’s the context that I make my art in.”4

Finally, we can read Tall Man as a work that is drawn from the hum of networked media. Comprised of early camera phone footage and CCTV feeds, the work reflects the ubiquity of text, image and sound in our contemporary moment and shows how these things can be produced and circulated with a view to generating undercommon forms of sociality. Drawn from a medial hum, Tall Man foregrounds a collective and haptic perception that attends to new socio-political formations via an attunement to noisy media. The work reflects a networked media environment but reveals that not all humming is ambient in nature. We are made to feel the network through rapid cuts and the juxtaposition of footage rather than via a seamless, immersive ambience.

Reading this work through the interruptive sonic figures of murmur, stutter, gossip and hum allows us to attend to the complexity of an always moving noise that has the potential to interrupt hegemonic forms of power and generate new (proto-)socialites. Engaging with these figures allows us to feel the force of interruption, to be taken by what Harney and Moten refer to as “the movement of things.”5 In relation to Tall Man, attending to these interruptive figures produces a sense of disorientation or momentary ungrounding in which our relation to the white, settler-colonial state and its accompanying structures and institutions might be reconfigured. Here I am suggesting that this experience of disorientation is a constructive suspense that results in a reorientation of sorts. In other words, interruption is a rupture that always contains a generative potential — it is an experience that allows us to attune differently to the world.

4 Elizabeth Mead, “Interview with Vernon Ah Kee,” MONA Blog, August 8, 2012, accessed September 1, 2016, https://monablog.net/2012/08/08/interview-with-vernon-ah-kee/ 5 Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 93.

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I want to conclude by staying with the generativity of noise as I have developed it in these pages. The sonic figures and fugitive speech acts presented in this thesis offer a way of moving beyond representation and signification and their opposite: chaos, nonmeaning. As such, this thesis has concerned itself with the how rather than the what of interruption — I have taken interruption to be a moving force that evades capture. Attending to the movement of things is to understand the world in processual and relational terms; that is, in terms of becoming. My central thesis here has been that the interruptive potential of noise enables a becoming-minor that suspends majoritarian forms of power in everyday ways. I have argued that noise contains a force that opens the way for an alternate figuring to occur. The thesis has largely focused on the sonic and the textual, developing new strategies for reading and listening that attend to the force of interruption. But my brief reading of Ah Kee’s Tall Man gestures toward a movement into visuality, as well as a different figuring of the figures themselves. I want to suggest that the figures and speech acts I have developed might also extend into other modalities, offering a way to conceptualise, for example, new modes of looking that likewise belong to a logic of sensation and can be understood through a poetics and politics of noise.

In the end, the thesis has tried to stay with the force of interruption and follow its movements in multiple directions. I have not tried to construct a definitive account of noise, since such an undertaking would be contrary to the operations of noise. Rather, this study has offered some strategies for thinking with the noises that multiply to generate a poetics of interruption. It is my hope that this study assists the reader in attending to the noise that moves around and through us.

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