The symposium was titled Listening to the Sociosonic, a reference to practices of reception that heed the resistant demands of an object that is both sensuous and social. The term was introduced by Fred Moten during his visit to the Word, Sound and Power reading group x Psychosocial Seminar in the spring, when he returned to the primal scene of black performance studies: Aunt Hester’s scream.
After introducing the concept of black performance as a pressure on the presumed equivalence of personhood and subjectivity, Moten’s 2003 introduction to In the Break considers Saidiya Hartman’s refusal to reproduce Aunt Hester’s scream from Frederick Douglass’s slave narrative in her 1997 book Scenes of Subjection, which she evokes as a primal scene of Douglass’s subject formation. Hartman’s refusal raises the question of the text’s unsuitability as a venue for the sensuous excess of Aunt Hester’s sonic dissent. Moten’s dynamic response affirms Hartman’s suspicion that the scream is tempered by repetition, that the retelling threatens to diffuse the sound of its terror, but rather than leave it unaddressed in the text, he hears both the scream itself and Hartman’s refusal as belonging primal scene of black performance, or the “resistance of the object,” which productively exposes the limits of hermeneutic practice.
In other words: if the scream cannot be heard in the text, then what is the basis of this soundproofing?
Aunt Hester’s scream terrifies not only as a record of the violence that led her to produce such a sound, but as a shattering pitch that cracks open two dominant logics of interpretation within the West: Marx’s theory of value and Saussure’s theory of the sign. As a commodity that spoke and speaks, the slave does not utter the counterfactual Marx imagined, nor does it obey the logic of extrinsically assigned value. Similarly, the slave confounds Sausurre’s theory of signs, which relies on the assignment of meaning or value from beyond the arbitrary substance of a signifier. Aunt Hester’s scream is non referential, there is no signifier and signified, there is just the sound of pain, whose meaning is intrinsic to and inseparable from its specific tones and textures.
For Moten, the scream may not be the primal scene of the subject that Frederick Douglass becomes, as Hartman argues. The developmental trajectory of a subject hews too close to something like personhood. But the scream may well be a primal scene of black performance, which says “no” to the logics of interpretation that would mute or silence its power, but “yes” to a form of listening and study that receive a sensuous intrinsic meaning that cannot be reduced, as Hartman fears, to the exchange rates of a commodities or signs.
Papers were vast and ranging, but can be provisionally summarized as:
- Gabriel Bristow on mimicry and mimesis in brass instrumentation of the early 20th century
- James Goodwin on Fanonian “lysis” as principle of black poetic form in the work of D.S. Marriott
- Danny Hayward on the pleasures and perils of association in psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion and UK grime artist Isaiah Hull
- Louisa Layne on the shape of collective hurt in reggae and diasporic Caribbean poetry
- Eliza McCarthy on “sounding” as a mode of embodied listening in Black Atlantic poetry and marine cartography
- Francis Goodwin on sleepiness and distraction as a productive effects of listening to jazz (freeing the mind for other kinds of parallel and often political thought)
- Akshi Singh on mistaking lyrics to Anglophone pop as a youth in India as a generative premise for free association and psychoanalytic listening
- Dhanveer Brar on the sound of Gil Scott Heron’s insurgent third worldism on the global stage of mainstream American entertainment (keynote)
We thank Elleke Boehmer and Adam Harper for their help making this event possible.
Thank you, emphatically, to the presenters for sharing your work and giving us so much to think about.
