Beyond Representation and Signification: Toward a Sonic Materialism

Abstract

Why does sound art remain so profoundly undertheorized, and why has it failed to generate a rich and compelling critical literature? It is because the prevailing theoretical models are inadequate to it. Developed to account for the textual and the visual, they fail to capture the nature of the sonic. In this article, the author proposes an alternative theoretical framework, a materialist account able to grasp the nature of sound and to enable analysis of the sonic arts. He suggests, moreover, that this theoretical account can provide a model for rethinking the arts in general and for avoiding the pitfalls encountered in theories of representation and signification.

Art Practice as Possible Worlds

“…In the next section, "Abstract Movements", I unfold selected concepts from Deleuze and Guattari (1987): the Body without Organs (BwO), assemblage, and haecceity. 1 1 Nietzsche termed these haecceities "becomings" (Cox, 2011), and this paper uses the latter term instead. These concepts are unpacked not as an effort to get them right, but to see how they can move and flow, and what might make them explode (Cox, 2011).…”

“…The flows, intensities, and non-stratified matters become "call me paper blood hands". This might be what Cox (2011) describes as a moment of symbolic creation from experience. A becoming, perhaps, emerges in relation to the experience and breakdown of the red-paint-hands-Justin assemblage.…”

“…Becomings are moments of symbolic creation from experience. Arts practice works in this sense as a process of continual movement, force, becoming (Cox, 2011).…”

“…This paper explores what art can do, and how art works (Cox, 2011). To explore art means to move with art, not to close art down or capture it.…”

Context-based Sound and the Ecological Theory of Perception

“…Christoph Cox (2011) poses the question: why does sound art remain so undertheorised? Cox's answer, from the perspective of contemporary cultural theory, is that the prevailing theoretical models (that is to say approaches based on semiotics, psychoanalysis, poststructuralism and deconstruction) are inadequate to the task because they have been developed to deal with textual and visual forms of culture.…”