Sonic Collage As Methodology for Studying New Materialist Publics

Community Remix in Progress: Sonic Collage as Methodology for Studying New Materialist Publics Ben Harley Northern State University Present Tense, Vol. 7, Issue 2, 2018. http://www.presenttensejournal.org | [email protected] Community Remix in Progress: Sonic Collage as Methodology for Studying New Materialist Publics Ben Harley In a recent Rhetoric Society Quarterly review of world rather than how scholars think they should four contemporary books on public rhetorics, invites the development of new methodologies Nathaniel Crick argues that each book’s author for studying publics in their specific singularness, establishes a dichotomy between an ideal public seeing them as materially composed by complex they consider real and an actual public they social meshworks of human and nonhuman consider unreal. Largely, Crick uses this actors whose embodied interactions shape their un/real terminology to claim that each author worlds. The problem with such methodologies, finds existing publics deficient when compared to however, is that the specificity they demand is the ideal ways they believe publics should difficult to enact. The actors who compose a behave. He asserts that instead of comparing public are always shifting and, if scholars attend actual publics to fictional, romantic, or nostalgic to nonhumans with any degree of specificity, are ideals, scholars should focus on understanding perhaps innumerable; similarly, the rhetorical publics as they exist. This approach invites actions and associations connecting actors within scholars to consider publics in material, rather a public are subtle and at times ineffable. than formal, terms by suggesting that publics are not defined by a shared Platonic identity but In the face of the problem of specificity, I suggest rather are uniquely composed by a confluence of that the medium of sound, because it operates in human and nonhuman actors interacting with a manner uniquely intimate and affective, can one another. enable public rhetoric scholars to better represent the multifaceted relationships among A new materialist comportment to publics that actors that compose publics. Specifically, I argue focuses on how embodied actors operate in the that the creation of sonic collages—a term 1 almost synonymous with Jean Bessette’s “audio Defining a New Materialist Public collage” that I use to describe curated soundscapes composed of short audio samples— In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt defines if thoroughly researched, can help public rhetoric the public sphere as “the world itself, in so far as scholars present versions of publics that are more it is common to all of us and distinguished from nuanced and emotionally intelligent than written our privately owned place in it” (52). This accounts alone. Though all representations of definition sees the public not as a crude realism publics are limited because researchers filter the but as a complex world curated by humans to lived experiences of others through their own relate and separate them both from each other perspectives to create representative and from nonhumans. This public is defined by its compositions, sonic collages uniquely allow for a plurality of people; it is the place in which diverse multitude of material voices to participate within groups of people discuss, argue about, and compositions that highlight each participant’s reform their shared world. All that is demanded singular corporeality. The embodied voices of of the involved parties is that they agree they actors demonstrate their singularness, making it share a world and acknowledge that they occupy difficult for the researcher to make abstract it in different material and social ways that comparisons or claim the public they are studying influence how they understand it, interact with it, is unreal. and wish to see it changed. In this article, I define a conception of new Arendt contrasts this deliberative public sphere materialist publics that roots itself not in with the conversational social sphere, which she idealized forms of communication but in defines as, “the collective of families embodied material and social relationships economically organized into the facsimile of one among human and nonhuman actors—a concept super-family” (29). In the Arendtian social, that should compel public rhetoric scholars to see private interests assume public significance, and all publics as real, regardless of their discourse distinctions and differences are erased by shared practices. Building on this definition, I examine outlooks and values to the point that behavior how sound enables public rhetoric scholars to replaces action as the “foremost mode of human listen to unique actors, represent the relationship” (44). In other words, whereas the singularness of their embodied experiences, and public is focused on politics, action, and create scholarship that invites the audience to difference, the social is concerned with culture, empathize and understand themselves as behavior, and conformity. Despite the differences interconnected with the public described. Finally, between the two spheres, Arendt argues that in I end this article by offering an annotated version the modern world they are not particularly of my own sonic collage on the history of the Los distinct: “the two realms indeed constantly flow Angeles street gang the Crips as an example of into each other like waves in the never-resting how to enact this methodology. My collage does stream of the life process itself” (33). not claim to be a definitive history of the Crips; rather, it serves as an example of how to The blurriness that exists between the public and acknowledge the embodied realness of a public. the social in contemporary culture is evident in the way new materialist philosophers 2 understand social to mean something understandings of place that would unite people reminiscent of Arendt’s public. In his 2005 by stressing their different perspectives on their book Reassembling the Social, Bruno Latour shared world in a system similar to Arendt’s defines the social as an aggregate of human and public. For Latour, some of the primary actors nonhuman actors joined together in complex present in ding politics were objects, which were networks by relationships as diverse as chemical considered actors because they influenced bonds, legal systems, gravity, and lust that others, were influenced by others, and were influence how actors coexist in the world. For entangled in the concerns of humans. Latour example, people becoming couch potatoes are argues that if human actors are to consider enabled by their networked associations with nonhumans as actors, realizing that they have televisions, remote controls, the media industry, shared concerns, then they need to find ways of and a number of other actors (77). Beyond lazy engaging with them as neither brute matter nor days, such new materialist thinking has serious socially constructed symbols. There are ways to political ramifications. If actions emerge from the engage members of the public whose interactions of human and nonhuman actors, perspectives are different from the dominant then the public sphere should consider how model. those relationships can be adequately and justly governed. Jane Bennett explains such a relationship in her book Vibrant Matter by arguing that the public Taking emergent actions seriously asks humans efficacy of nonhumans can be seen by examining to enact politics in a way that is more open to the the habits of worms. Combining Charles Darwin’s diversity of the world than Enlightenment models notebooks on the creatures—which demonstrate of representative governance allow. In “From their conscious decision making—with a case Realpolitik to Dingpolitik,” Latour argues that study of worms changing the aluminum content representative governments are organized of a patch of soil in the Amazon—which enabled spatially, symbolized by the gigantic domes that forest plants to thrive in grasslands—Bennett gather-up political assemblies under a common argues that worms act in ways that have roof, in order to generate cohesive collective repercussions for our shared world. If, like Arendt identities among humans in a relationship that is and Latour, public rhetoric scholars understand reminiscent of Arendt’s social. This kind of the public sphere as a realm of differentiation sociality attempts to erase difference. The and action, then they should also see worms are concerns, discourses, and perspectives of those a part of the public. Moreover, they should populations beyond the socially dominant public acknowledge that there exists a myriad of are silenced, which is a problem for many nonhumans who act in politics such as bacteria, humans and many nonhumans. hurricanes, and pollen to name a few. In contrast to the social hegemony of With all of this in mind, a new materialist parliamentary systems, Latour asks his readers to public understands plurality to mean that though consider the assemblies of old Nordic and Saxon all members of a public share a common world in cultures who would meet at dings, which were which they enact agency, they do not necessarily understood as both material spaces and shared hold the same beliefs, concepts, identities, 3 understandings, or even species-being. In the last with meaning; rather, sound establishes what decade, the field of composition and rhetoric has Diane Davis refers to as “an affective report that begun to embrace this kind of radical, meshwork operates in excess, at the

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