No Life Without You emerges as an extraordinary account of real-life experiences through letters, offering not only a love story but a profound exploration of resilience and human connection. Especially poignant in the tumultuous times we are living in, No Life Without Youis a story of history, hardships, and hope. Frank Felsenstein, Reed D. Voran Honors Distinguished Professor in Humanities in the Department of English at Ball State University, founding director of the Honors Program at Yeshiva College in New York, Reader in Eighteenth-Century Studies at Leeds University, and the editor of the book, embarks on an enthralling exploration of his parents’ lives. Mope and Vera, Felsenstein’s parents, were German Jews who fled Nazi Germany for the United Kingdom during the Second World War, and their astonishing love story is encapsulated in over a thousand letters.
We should feel forever grateful to our family and to ourselves for the preservation of letters, journals, diaries, and artefacts. They serve as channels to crucial facets of our identity and origins: Frank Felsenstein’s work certainly stand as a testament to the profound impact that these touchstones can have. The trajectory of Mope and Vera’s lives, refreshed within the pages of this book, can now be sustained through history. Readers are afforded the opportunity to glean insights from their story, while the editor and his family, present and future, can find solace in its reverberation.
The Importance of Then and Now
Felsenstein has created a mosaic woven with thirty-two chapters, dividing it into two realms – the evocative ‘Then’ and the resonant ‘Now’. The former delves into Mope and Vera’s lives before their paths intertwined, and the editor uses journals, letters, and family memoirs to bring their voices to life. The ‘Then’ chronicles unfold a prelude to Mope and Vera’s stories before their lives merged. Delving deep to capture their voices truly, the letters exchanged between Vera and her mother during the year after she fled Nazi Germany offer a glimpse into Frankfurt at the time and unveil the shades of Vera’s childhood. Mope’s story is shared through a typewritten curriculum vitae and the vivid recollections he presented: a chapter dedicated to his engagement with Zionism echoes his ideological musings in the Leipziger Jüdische Zeituing in 1922.
The ’Now’ section, starting in 1936 and ending in 1939, captures the imminence of Mope and Vera’s position. The letters, written in the throes of uncertainty, reflect the instability of their lives amid the looming shadows of war. At the start of each chapter, Felsenstein provides the reader with contextual overviews of the historical backdrop in which his parents were living and writing.
The editor’s decision to separate the ‘Then’ and ‘Now’ offers the reader a kaleidoscopic lens through which to view history. Every chapter stands as a testament to the enduring resonance of human stories across ages. The book’s structure, complemented by Felsenstein’s skilful editing, ensures that Vera and Mope’s authentic voices shine through while vividly telling their story. The editor’s interventions are expertly blended into the narrative, enhancing rather than overshadowing the authenticity of the tale. Their love story serves as a beacon of hope amid the uncertainties in which they lived.
Historical Parallels
This collection of letters delves into the personal exchanges between Mope and Vera, taking place in Nazi Germany, where the utter erosion of civil liberties for Jewish people cast a long-lasting shadow over their lives, and the fascist dictatorship inevitably continued to resound after they left Germany. The book serves as a lens into the wider political turmoil of the time.No Life Without Youoperates as an astute historical commentary, shining light on pivotal moments of the 20th century. However, its true merit lies in preserving a human connection amidst history, making the past come to life.
No Life Without You also investigates Britain’s historical standpoint on refugees, contrasting moral obligations with modern challenges. An introduction by Rachel Pistol, a digital historian & author of modern British and American history, sets the letters against a historical backdrop that has echoes in the present day, while evolving public opinion, government policies, and their impact on refugees in Britain unfold through the lens of Vera and Mope’s journey. This allows readers to witness the complexities of these moral dilemmas and the impact of politics on individual lives. The book is a lesson from history, insisting readers pay attention to early signs of discrimination and hatred. Felsenstein offers the dehumanisation that paved the way for atrocities during the Holocaust as a warning, acting as a call for compassion. It emphasises society’s fragility, highlighting our collective responsibility to protect the rights of every individual, irrespective of their background.
Both the contextual introduction by Rachel Pistol and the rest of the book delve into the refugee experience, encapsulating the nuances of the emotional journey undertaken when escaping one’s homeland to seek solace in unfamiliar territories. It captures the near-inexplicable feeling of the stripping away of identity, the loss of autonomy, and the resounding impact of displacement.
Then, Now, and Forever
As this narrative draws to a close, Felsenstein reflects on the profound legacy laced through the letters between his parents. This story is both his birthright and a fundamental part of who he is, urging the reader to question their own identities, and to think about who we must thank for them. Felsenstein posits that, in more ways than one, there would be no life without his parents. Vera and Mope’s story resonates through time, allowing us to acknowledge history while simultaneously embracing the spirit that transcends it. We are not who we are without the people who preceded us, and this book is a testament to that. The amalgamation of love and history not only imparts insights into the challenges faced by the people during this era, but it stands as a symbol of resilience, love, and the lasting promise of hope.
This is an Open Access title available to read and download for free or to purchase in all available print and ebook formats below.
Sasha Kirkham is an English Language and Russian graduate from The University of Manchester, now pursuing a Masters in Publishing at City, University of London. With experience in copywriting, proofreading, and translation in St Petersburg, Sasha's passions lie in literature, Russian history, publishing, editing, writing, and supporting NGOs.
Recently, a graduate student spoke about a favourite book, one which crystallizes many of the conflicting qualities of Russian literature today: post-colonial angst, fading relevance, moral authority, and sheer ubiquity. Early in this novel, the hero’s father falls in love with Russian fiction (in Bengali translation). He is reading one of Gogol’s short stories at the very moment when his train, speeding across northern India, derails. Seriously injured, he spends two years almost immobile, regaining his strength while gorging on Russian novels. Years later, as a engineering professor at an American university, he names his son “Gogol” after his favourite writer. The strange syllables bewilder other Bengalis as they do most Americans, and young Gogol legally changes his name as soon as he’s old enough. Resenting his intercultural, untranslatable moniker, he never opens the volume of Nikolai Gogol’s stories his father gives him. Only after decades of negotiating cultural difference, and only after his father’s death breaks the direct family connection with Russian literature, can he read those tales and become Gogol again: the Bengali-American namesake of a Ukrainian-Russian writer.
This novel is of course Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake (2003), a key text of contemporary diasporic fiction. Our edited volume, Translating Russian Literature in the Global Context, studies how literature itself acts as diaspora. In this collection of forty-one essays by three dozen international scholars, we trace how, since 1900, Russian literature has been disseminated beyond its political borders; how individual Russian and Russophone authors are translated and emulated abroad; and how cultures and individuals from the Republic of Ireland to South Vietnam have absorbed Russian cultural influence, from Pushkin to Sholokhov. Our methodology is informed by both sociology and Translation Studies, relying upon Pascale Casanova’s concept of central and peripheral languages, Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic capital, Jeremy Munday’s microhistorical methodology, the focus on literary translators consolidated by Klaus Kaindl and colleagues, and David Damrosch’s erudite yet accessible comparatist analysis. National engagement with Russian literature varies with political as well as geographical climate; successful cultural integration is often pre-determined by the literacy of the target audience, and indeed by the nature of the transmission process – whether voluntary or compulsory, state-funded or profit-driven. Hence the definition of ‘Russian literature’ – and public attitudes towards it – alters sharply with time, place, and politics, as our contributors show.
Translating Russian Literature in the Global Context also explores an equally important issue, much harder to quantify: the influence of Russian literature on individual creative inspiration. This edited volume maps, for the first time, global connections between Russian authors (nineteenth-century classics, Socialist Realists, and even Soviet dissidents) and canon-shaping writers around the world, including Norway’s Knut Hamsun, Germany’s Thomas Mann, Greece’s Ares Alexandrou, the great Hindustani author Premchand and Japanese prose stylist Futubatei Shimei, through to modern-day award-winning authors like Turkey’s Orhan Pamuk and South Korea’s Bora Chung. Where Lahiri’s novel traces the progress of Gogol the reluctant reader, we follow the (global) progress of Gogol the reluctant writer. How did a neurotically anxious fabulist, an ex-pat twice over (he left Ukraine for St Petersburg and St Petersburg for Rome, returning to the Russian Empire only to die), leave such a powerful legacy across so many continents? How could writers like Pushkin and Dostoevsky, their horizons restricted by the rigid social hierarchy and narrow politics of the Russian Empire, reach so far and touch so many readers? There are as many answers to these questions as there are nations where Russian literature is read today. This volume speaks for most of them.
Thus, in the mid-to-late twentieth century, Progress and Raduga (Rainbow), the USSR’s gigantic, multilingual, state-subsidized literary translation presses, developed book distribution networks to extend soft power across the Global South. In the process, they introduced Indian readers like Lahiri’s characters to Russian and Soviet literature (morally engaged writers like Tolstoy and Gorky were already popular on the Indian subcontinent even prior to Soviet power). Moscow’s quest for hearts and minds brought Russian literary fiction in translation to readers in South and Central America, Africa and the Arabian nations, Central and South-East Asia, China and to both Vietnams. In Europe and the Anglophone world, where academics, freelance translators and commercial publishers determined the reception of Russophone literature, the nineteenth-century classics and twentieth-century dissidents like Solzhenitsyn and Pasternak have always dominated both sales and literary culture. Across much of the Global South, however, political pragmatism and effective Soviet cultural propaganda ensured the popularity of twentieth-century pro-Communist authors, starting with the so-called father of Socialist Realism, Maksim Gorky, whose name reverberates throughout this volume.
Ebbs and flows in translation in places as disparate as Brazil and Greece obeyed political trends: leftist governments promoted Russian literary authors, while far-right leaders discouraged them. Our essays on Latin America explore Cuba’s immersive Cold War reception of Russian language, literature and culture (including cinema); the contributions made by Brazil’s Russophone émigré diaspora to their native milieu; and Mexico’s uneven relationship with Russian culture (even now, no Mexican publishing house specialises in Russian literary translation into Spanish). Within the Soviet Union, soft-power infiltration gave way to forcible translation programmes: our contributors describe how target-language translators in Estonia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine were often brutally co-opted into replacing their native literature with fiction translated from Russian. Our Ukrainian contributors strikingly liken the era of literary control by the Kremlin to “the slow but increasingly deadly compression of a rabbit by a boa constrictor”. Even Finland did not escape such tensions. But pro-Soviet authors’ value as Communist propaganda does not negate their genuinely inspirational value; Gorky’s Mother (1906) remained an ideological beacon for the poor and oppressed globally, as many essays show. Today, for reasons that are all too obvious on the battlefields of Eastern Ukraine and in the ruined homes of bombed-out cities, Russian influence has become toxic: a legacy to reject, an identity to disavow. Translation, of course, never has been separate from politics; and Russian is not the only literature to be implicated, if not actively complicit, in imperialist expansionism and aggressive cultural policies. In The Namesake, Lahiri’s hero “Gogol”, struggling with his complex, unwelcome name and mixed-up identity, eventually accepts the impossibility of rejecting a gift woven into the fabric of one’s character. Today, Russian authors are indelibly inscribed in the library of world culture: this volume introduces the translators, publishers, politicians, editors and readers who made Russian literature a global phenomenon.
This is an Open Access title available to read and download for free or to purchase in all available print and ebook formats below.
Intimate correspondence of a Jewish couple writing in the face of Nazi persecution
COMPILED AND EDITED BY FRANKLIN FELSENSTEIN. With an Historical Introduction by Rachel Pistol.
This book voices, through their personal letters, the love story of a German Jewish couple caught up in the turmoil created by the Nazi regime in the years leading up to the Second World War. It is a story of refugees and lovers torn asunder by political events and reliant on correspondence as their primary means of communication.
Vera Hirsch, a final year medical student at Frankfurt University, flees Germany shortly after Hitler comes to power in 1933, seeking refuge in England. She meets Moritz Felsenstein, a fur trader with a background in the sciences, on a spur-of-the-moment visit to Leipzig in January 1936 when, during the year of the Olympic Games, the Nazis moderate their anti-Semitic agenda. Their correspondence begins immediately, and continues uninterrupted through to the end of August 1939, with explicable gaps when they are able to be together. It is supplemented by extracts from Vera’s private journals and from other such primary sources.
Nearly all the letters are written from Germany, England, and the Soviet Union, where Moritz is given temporary working papers in 1937 after an SS arrest warrant prevents him from returning to Leipzig. The couple are able to marry in London in August 1937 but lack permission to settle together in England. In separate environments, each engages in the business world. The correspondence provides unique insights into the pre-war fur market in Moscow and Leningrad and the retail trade in Britain, where Vera joins the first (and, at that time, quite experimental) personnel management team at Marks & Spencer, the major retail chain. Moritz’s peripatetic life style, with short visits to his wife, continues over the next two years, the pair being reunited on the final night before the start of the war.
The letters and journals are written in German, but have been fully translated into English. The present book is abridged to less than one third of the full correspondence. It has been edited by their only son. The first part of the book contextualizes the early lives of these two individuals in the aftermath of the First World War, with telling indications of their ties to the emergent culture of Weimar Germany. It provides an intimate picture of two different versions of German Jewish family life during the era prior to the Holocaust, the one Orthodox with a strong commitment to Zionist ideals, the other assimilated and skeptical in its religious beliefs.
For us today, there exists a profusion of memoirs, several of them now iconic, relating to the Holocaust. Most of these are written after the fact, but gain their immediacy through our fascinated fear and accompanying horror, engendered through their disclosures. However, given the lack of available material and a secure place to write, the chronicling of the on-the-run happenings of Jewish refugees endeavoring to escape the Nazi strong arm has rarely had the attention it deserves. It represents a major lacuna in our knowledge of the everyday lives of exiles during one of the most tragic eras in human history. The existence of this large, and hitherto untapped, cache of letters and journals by Vera Hirsch and Moritz Felsenstein presents a rare opportunity to document and to authenticate a largely unrecorded element of the refugee experience.
Because the letters were written to each other on an almost daily basis, they are incredibly immediate. They record not only the couple’s against-the-odds escape, but also the desperate – and ultimately unsuccessful -- endeavors to evacuate from Germany Moritz’s older sister, brother-in-law, and close cousins, who were to perish at Auschwitz. Most centrally, the letters recount an astonishing love story, sensual in its intimate detail, and full of dramatic pathos in its unfolding of hope for the creation of a new life and the anxieties of coping with pregnancy when apart. It is told through the voices of two exceptionally articulate letter writers, unraveling profound moral and psychological dilemmas, and the fears brought about by separation and the ongoing intrusion of political events. Incredibly, more than fifty years after the death of Moritz and over thirty years since the passing of Vera, their distinctive voices are kept alive through their letters and resonate for our own age in which the plight of refugees has once again found its way into our consciousness.
This is an Open Access title available to read and download for free or to purchase in all available print and ebook formats below.
“So I have heard The Hum… The rest of what I’m about to tell you is beyond reasoning, and understanding.” Here, in a Reddit post, Michael A. Sweeney prefaces their story of their first encounter with “the hum,” an unexplained phenomenon heard by only a small percentage of listeners around the world. The hum is an ominous sonic event that impacts communities from Australia to India, Scotland to the United States. And as Geoff Leventhall writes in “Low Frequency Noise: What We Know, What We Do Not Know, and What We Would Like to Know,” the hum causes “considerable problems” for people across the globe—such as nausea, headaches, fatigue, and muscle pain—as it continues to be an unsolved “acoustic mystery” (94).
..
Sweeney’s story of encountering the hum for the first time is remarkable. It begins in Taft, California, which Sweeney recounts as “a podunk little desert bowl town in the middle of nowhere. You can literally drive from one end to the other in under 10min, under 5 if you was speeding.” On this particular night, while walking down the main road of Taft, they report the scene being charged with electricity, and following this charge, hearing a moving sound, a traveling yet invisible sound. “This invisible thing was creating a noise like I had never heard before and sending a wave of static electricity throughout the air in every direction around it,” Sweeney explains. They try to track it down, but to no avail. After following the hum a few blocks and around a couple of corners, it just simply vanishes. As Kristin Gallerneaux aptly claims in her bookHigh Static, Dead Lines: Sonic Spectres and the Object Hereafter, “the Hum’s oppression seems to come from everywhere and nowhere” (196), and this is especially true in Sweeney’s encounter.
“Spectrogram of Papuan Malay Sentence De Bicara Keras” by WikiMedia User EmflazieCC0 1.0 DEED
While their account of the hum as electrically-charged is exceptional, Sweeney’s story adequately represents both the anomalistic qualities of the hum and its ability to elude a locatable and identifiable source. They attempt to describe the hum during this encounter as “like an invisible traveling vehicle of some sort,” but that, altogether, they are “not really sure” what it is. And they even admit that this explanation “makes no sense… whatsoever.” This difficulty in describing the phenomenon is reaffirmed not only by the stories told by other listeners but, too, the numerous scientific experiments that have been conducted after the hum’s frequent emergence beginning around the 1970s (Deming “The Hum: An Anomalous Sound Heard Around the World” 583).
Beyond the limits of current scientific logics which attempt to make sense of sonic events and their impacts, the hum exists as an exceptional and unknown anomaly. It transcends the valuative limits of current knowledge in acoustics and ways of understanding how sound moves through, across, and within spaces to address potential listeners. “I’m not saying I saw waves of electricity or anything of the sort,” Sweeney adds to their above description of the hum as a sound “charged with electricity.” “It was more of a feeling than something you saw. I could just feel electricity everywhere, and see little tendrils of it from my fingertips as I ran them across each other… I just KNEW it was coming from whatever was making that sound, this invisible force that was traveling down the road.” In such an account, the hum defies scientific explanation, and this fact is supported by the multiple failed investigations into the phenomenon. As Franz Frosch details in their article “Hum and Otoacoustic Emissions May Arise Out of the Same Mechanisms,” some scientists have built multiple “custom shielded chamber[s]” out of copper and magnetic material to test for a potential acoustic or electromagnetic source of the hum (604). These investigations, time after time, can’t provide an answer—leaving it up to listeners of the hum to form their own.
Sweeney’s story—and the endless other stories of the hum that have been told across the world—depict the lived, affective, and rhetorical experience of anomalistic listening. To hear, to listen with the hum, is to experience the affective dimensions of a “sound” that has no apparent acoustic or electromagnetic source. This is because “sonic knowledge is framed through acoustics and experience” (84), as Mark Peter Wright notes in his bookListening After Nature: Field Recording, Ecology, and Critical Practice. So, to listen with the hum is to occupy a state of affection that is altogether unknown to not only science but the listener themself. Sweeney bluntly continues, writing about their experience of the hum, saying, “I only know exactly what I’ve told you today.” To know this sound, for this sound to exist as truth, this unfolds through stories found in the still-to-be-explained.
I consider “after sound” to characterize this felt condition for rhetorical action that is a result of listening beyond or after acoustic valuations. Instead of this being a moment void of sound, “after sound” defines a state of experience that is complicated by an attempt to control the valuative limits of what is and isn’t sonic. In this way, “after sound” only gestures toward the temporal to develop the different emergence of the sensorial. Because the hum affects in a manner similar to sound but without acoustic or electromagnetic origin, people who hear the hum make sense of this relentless experience through a condition that is after sound. Such a claim is represented in Sweeney’s admission that “[they] just have this weird feeling that this story needs to be told. That there’s more to The Hum than anyone has realized, and that maybe it needs to be further studied and looked into” (added emphasis). This felt, “weird feeling” is initiated after sound, and this is what I am considering as the call for rhetorical action. Such an affective, felt, and lived experience may only exist after the “logical” answers, failed scientific studies, and experiments lacking helpful results become determinative of sonic limits.
Further, “after sound” moves from Marie Thompson’s discussion of “source-oriented” noise (30) that she posits in her bookBeyond Unwanted Sound: Noise, Affect, and Aesthetic Moralism. Speaking to the phenomenon of the hum, Thompson explains that an “unidentifiable noise is often amplified in perception, grasping the attention of the listener” (29). “After sound” is an hyper-attuned condition wherein the rhetorical actions of listeners are always attentive to what-may-(not)-be acoustics. It is their presence within utter sonic mystery that fuels the potential for persuasive response. And David Deming, a researcher in Geosciences, articulates in his article “The Hum: An Anomalous Sound Heard Around the World” that “in the absence of an answer provided by science, Hum hearers tend to find an explanation and hang on to it” (579), which illustrates the potential for listeners to respond via story within the conditions foregrounded by anomalistic encounters. “After sound” describes a moment of malleability that opens up in soundtime for different negotiations of sense and affect.
Responding to the conditions of listening with story, like Sweeney does, reflects an intention to share and persuade through an expression of sonic experience. As Katherine McKittrick states in her bookDear Science and Other Stories, “story opens the door to curiosity; the reams of evidence dissipate as we tell the world differently, with creative precision” (7). And V. Jo Hsu, speaking to the rhetorical potential of story, elucidates in their bookConstellating Home: Trans and Queer Asian American Rhetorics that “story can slow down, hold still, redefine, and/or reimagine our physical movements to renegotiate their shared meanings” (18). How I’m conceiving of storytelling after sound develops from the insights developed by these authors and other scholars exploring the rhetorical potential of story in cultural rhetorics.
Story, in the domain of sound, enables listeners to reconsider how, when, why, and where the sonic is defined and valued. While it must not be the sole rhetorical technology after sound, Sweeney clearly relies on storytelling to make sense of their encounter with the hum. This story and other stories told about the hum illustrate how listeners practice the negotiation of sound’s meaning by collectively exploring ways of investigating and experimenting with(in) phenomena. Telling stories after sound is to reach across and through a community of listeners to find shared truths that come to be through encounters with hearing. Altogether, rhetoric after sound queries the intersection of perception and intelligibility to jostle forward the meaning of listening. At a moment when the world is at a loss for answers, this is a practice of seizing opportunities for hopeful and imaginative intervention into the valuative limits of the sonic.
“I’ll end it here,” Sweeney begins in their last paragraph, “and I can assure you that everything I have told you is the absolute truth. It happened to me and not a friend of a friend. I was awake, I’m not making any of it up, and all I want are REAL answers.” Sweeney’s call for a resolution was posted 10 months ago, in May 2023. And still today, the hum continues to lack answers, and the unsolved mystery continues to impact listeners. More recently, Popular Mechanics reported in a November 2023 article, titled “A Ghostly Nighttime Hum Is Invading Random Towns. Scientists Don’t Know What It Means,” that the hum has reached Omagh in Northern Ireland and that citizens are “trapped inside [of a mystery].” So far, no matter the amount of media coverage nor number of affected people across the world, encounters are ultimately defined by sounds unknown. After sound—when communities of listeners are left behind by these valuative limits—rhetorical action persists in search of an explanation.
Trent Wintermeier is a second-year PhD student in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas at Austin. He’s a Graduate Research Assistant for the AVAnnotate project, where he helps make audiovisual material more discoverable and accessible. Next year, he will be an Assistant Director for the Digital Writing & Research Lab. His research interests broadly include sound, digital rhetorics, and community. Currently, he’s interested in how researchers can responsibly engage with communities impacted by sound and the local rhetorical ecologies which materialize under sonic conditions.
“So I have heard The Hum… The rest of what I’m about to tell you is beyond reasoning, and understanding.” Here, in a Reddit post, Michael A. Sweeney prefaces their story of their first encounter with “the hum,” an unexplained phenomenon heard by only a small percentage of listeners around the world. The hum is an ominous sonic event that impacts communities from Australia to India, Scotland to the United States. And as Geoff Leventhall writes in “Low Frequency Noise: What We Know, What We Do Not Know, and What We Would Like to Know,” the hum causes “considerable problems” for people across the globe—such as nausea, headaches, fatigue, and muscle pain—as it continues to be an unsolved “acoustic mystery” (94).
..
Sweeney’s story of encountering the hum for the first time is remarkable. It begins in Taft, California, which Sweeney recounts as “a podunk little desert bowl town in the middle of nowhere. You can literally drive from one end to the other in under 10min, under 5 if you was speeding.” On this particular night, while walking down the main road of Taft, they report the scene being charged with electricity, and following this charge, hearing a moving sound, a traveling yet invisible sound. “This invisible thing was creating a noise like I had never heard before and sending a wave of static electricity throughout the air in every direction around it,” Sweeney explains. They try to track it down, but to no avail. After following the hum a few blocks and around a couple of corners, it just simply vanishes. As Kristin Gallerneaux aptly claims in her bookHigh Static, Dead Lines: Sonic Spectres and the Object Hereafter, “the Hum’s oppression seems to come from everywhere and nowhere” (196), and this is especially true in Sweeney’s encounter.
“Spectrogram of Papuan Malay Sentence De Bicara Keras” by WikiMedia User EmflazieCC0 1.0 DEED
While their account of the hum as electrically-charged is exceptional, Sweeney’s story adequately represents both the anomalistic qualities of the hum and its ability to elude a locatable and identifiable source. They attempt to describe the hum during this encounter as “like an invisible traveling vehicle of some sort,” but that, altogether, they are “not really sure” what it is. And they even admit that this explanation “makes no sense… whatsoever.” This difficulty in describing the phenomenon is reaffirmed not only by the stories told by other listeners but, too, the numerous scientific experiments that have been conducted after the hum’s frequent emergence beginning around the 1970s (Deming “The Hum: An Anomalous Sound Heard Around the World” 583).
Beyond the limits of current scientific logics which attempt to make sense of sonic events and their impacts, the hum exists as an exceptional and unknown anomaly. It transcends the valuative limits of current knowledge in acoustics and ways of understanding how sound moves through, across, and within spaces to address potential listeners. “I’m not saying I saw waves of electricity or anything of the sort,” Sweeney adds to their above description of the hum as a sound “charged with electricity.” “It was more of a feeling than something you saw. I could just feel electricity everywhere, and see little tendrils of it from my fingertips as I ran them across each other… I just KNEW it was coming from whatever was making that sound, this invisible force that was traveling down the road.” In such an account, the hum defies scientific explanation, and this fact is supported by the multiple failed investigations into the phenomenon. As Franz Frosch details in their article “Hum and Otoacoustic Emissions May Arise Out of the Same Mechanisms,” some scientists have built multiple “custom shielded chamber[s]” out of copper and magnetic material to test for a potential acoustic or electromagnetic source of the hum (604). These investigations, time after time, can’t provide an answer—leaving it up to listeners of the hum to form their own.
Sweeney’s story—and the endless other stories of the hum that have been told across the world—depict the lived, affective, and rhetorical experience of anomalistic listening. To hear, to listen with the hum, is to experience the affective dimensions of a “sound” that has no apparent acoustic or electromagnetic source. This is because “sonic knowledge is framed through acoustics and experience” (84), as Mark Peter Wright notes in his bookListening After Nature: Field Recording, Ecology, and Critical Practice. So, to listen with the hum is to occupy a state of affection that is altogether unknown to not only science but the listener themself. Sweeney bluntly continues, writing about their experience of the hum, saying, “I only know exactly what I’ve told you today.” To know this sound, for this sound to exist as truth, this unfolds through stories found in the still-to-be-explained.
I consider “after sound” to characterize this felt condition for rhetorical action that is a result of listening beyond or after acoustic valuations. Instead of this being a moment void of sound, “after sound” defines a state of experience that is complicated by an attempt to control the valuative limits of what is and isn’t sonic. In this way, “after sound” only gestures toward the temporal to develop the different emergence of the sensorial. Because the hum affects in a manner similar to sound but without acoustic or electromagnetic origin, people who hear the hum make sense of this relentless experience through a condition that is after sound. Such a claim is represented in Sweeney’s admission that “[they] just have this weird feeling that this story needs to be told. That there’s more to The Hum than anyone has realized, and that maybe it needs to be further studied and looked into” (added emphasis). This felt, “weird feeling” is initiated after sound, and this is what I am considering as the call for rhetorical action. Such an affective, felt, and lived experience may only exist after the “logical” answers, failed scientific studies, and experiments lacking helpful results become determinative of sonic limits.
Further, “after sound” moves from Marie Thompson’s discussion of “source-oriented” noise (30) that she posits in her bookBeyond Unwanted Sound: Noise, Affect, and Aesthetic Moralism. Speaking to the phenomenon of the hum, Thompson explains that an “unidentifiable noise is often amplified in perception, grasping the attention of the listener” (29). “After sound” is an hyper-attuned condition wherein the rhetorical actions of listeners are always attentive to what-may-(not)-be acoustics. It is their presence within utter sonic mystery that fuels the potential for persuasive response. And David Deming, a researcher in Geosciences, articulates in his article “The Hum: An Anomalous Sound Heard Around the World” that “in the absence of an answer provided by science, Hum hearers tend to find an explanation and hang on to it” (579), which illustrates the potential for listeners to respond via story within the conditions foregrounded by anomalistic encounters. “After sound” describes a moment of malleability that opens up in soundtime for different negotiations of sense and affect.
Responding to the conditions of listening with story, like Sweeney does, reflects an intention to share and persuade through an expression of sonic experience. As Katherine McKittrick states in her bookDear Science and Other Stories, “story opens the door to curiosity; the reams of evidence dissipate as we tell the world differently, with creative precision” (7). And V. Jo Hsu, speaking to the rhetorical potential of story, elucidates in their bookConstellating Home: Trans and Queer Asian American Rhetorics that “story can slow down, hold still, redefine, and/or reimagine our physical movements to renegotiate their shared meanings” (18). How I’m conceiving of storytelling after sound develops from the insights developed by these authors and other scholars exploring the rhetorical potential of story in cultural rhetorics.
Story, in the domain of sound, enables listeners to reconsider how, when, why, and where the sonic is defined and valued. While it must not be the sole rhetorical technology after sound, Sweeney clearly relies on storytelling to make sense of their encounter with the hum. This story and other stories told about the hum illustrate how listeners practice the negotiation of sound’s meaning by collectively exploring ways of investigating and experimenting with(in) phenomena. Telling stories after sound is to reach across and through a community of listeners to find shared truths that come to be through encounters with hearing. Altogether, rhetoric after sound queries the intersection of perception and intelligibility to jostle forward the meaning of listening. At a moment when the world is at a loss for answers, this is a practice of seizing opportunities for hopeful and imaginative intervention into the valuative limits of the sonic.
“I’ll end it here,” Sweeney begins in their last paragraph, “and I can assure you that everything I have told you is the absolute truth. It happened to me and not a friend of a friend. I was awake, I’m not making any of it up, and all I want are REAL answers.” Sweeney’s call for a resolution was posted 10 months ago, in May 2023. And still today, the hum continues to lack answers, and the unsolved mystery continues to impact listeners. More recently, Popular Mechanics reported in a November 2023 article, titled “A Ghostly Nighttime Hum Is Invading Random Towns. Scientists Don’t Know What It Means,” that the hum has reached Omagh in Northern Ireland and that citizens are “trapped inside [of a mystery].” So far, no matter the amount of media coverage nor number of affected people across the world, encounters are ultimately defined by sounds unknown. After sound—when communities of listeners are left behind by these valuative limits—rhetorical action persists in search of an explanation.
Trent Wintermeier is a second-year PhD student in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas at Austin. He’s a Graduate Research Assistant for the AVAnnotate project, where he helps make audiovisual material more discoverable and accessible. Next year, he will be an Assistant Director for the Digital Writing & Research Lab. His research interests broadly include sound, digital rhetorics, and community. Currently, he’s interested in how researchers can responsibly engage with communities impacted by sound and the local rhetorical ecologies which materialize under sonic conditions.
In Britain in the 1870s, when Eliza Orme began to think about going to university to study law, there were no women lawyers because the institutions that controlled entry to the profession were open only to men. The nominal reasons for this prohibition were taken very seriously, although they sound ridiculous today: in court, a lady barrister might hear evidence of sexual misconduct that was deemed unsuitable for her feminine sensibilities; she would have to wear a wig, which would make her look ridiculous; her brain was not designed to encompass the logic necessary to deploying legal argument; or the intellectual labour might impair her body for its foreordained purpose, that of childbirth. And so on.
Nevertheless, to coin a phrase, she persisted. University College London permitted women to study law, although there was no pathway from academic degree to credentialed practice. Eliza Orme earned her degree, and found ways to work around the professional barriers without challenging them directly. She earned good money and developed a reputation for competence and responsibility. In her own words, Orme was ‘hopelessly practical’. Some twenty-five years later, when a handful of younger women were making yet another (unsuccessful) effort to attain official recognition as pupil barristers, she was interviewed about her own career. The interviewer, rather than pursue Orme’s success in property conveyancing, expressed concern that male lawyers would be too gentlemanly to engage in acrimonious courtroom debate with a lady:
In 1903, the Law Journal asked ‘Would not the introduction of women into the field of advocacy hinder the administration of justice by checking the fighting instincts of the chivalrous barrister? Is not the struggle in the Courts too keen and personal to admit of the rivalry of women?
Eliza Orme responded: No undesirable results have followed the admission of women to the legal profession in America. I have met a number of American advocates of both sexes, and have been told that any sense of strangeness has soon disappeared. I cannot believe that any man would be less vigorous in the cause of his client merely because he was opposed by a woman. The forensic attitude would be too strong, and no woman who succeeded in becoming a member of the Bar would expect or wish it to be otherwise.
Here is a splendid recording of the London actor Julia Pascal, of the Pascal Theatre Company, reading those magnificently dismissive words. Eliza Orme doesn’t engage with the Law Journal’s provocative question on its own trivial terms. Instead, she takes the opportunity to report on her experience of a more enlightened jurisdiction. She reminds the hapless reporter that a well-trained lawyer is a lawyer, regardless of gender.
Law recording
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When I first started the research that eventually became Eliza Orme’s Ambitions, it was before the days of search engines. In libraries I found this Law Journal article, some journalism that Orme had written, and a little about her family. I learned that she had been involved in politics, as a member of the Liberal Party and a leader of the Women’s Liberal Federation. In 1892 she headed up a government sub-commission on the employment of women in various industries including bartending and metal forging. A few years later she reported on the conditions of women in prison. That was all good to know, but unsatisfying. It didn’t help me understand how she might have felt, in 1903, still being asked the same question she’d been answering throughout her working life: how is it possible for a woman to be a lawyer?
Recently and with the help of digital searches and online sources, I have learned enough to guess what was behind Eliza Orme’s sarcastic remarks about gendered politeness having no place in a court of law. I can also speculate on what she might have been thinking during the quarter-century between the interview and her own legal education and training: I believe the answer lies in her ambition. It was wildly ambitious to aim to practice law on the same basis of men, but I believe she wanted even more: to challenge the assumptions that excluded her from something else lawyers could do, namely use their professional experience and connections to launch a career in parliamentary politics.
This is an Open Access title available to read and download for free or to purchase in all available print and ebook formats below.
Sous la direction de Benjamin Coriat, Justine Loizeau et Nicole Alix
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Parler aujourd’hui des communs de proximité répond à au moins deux actualités. Dans un contexte où l’impératif de la transition écologique se consolide tandis que la dégradation des services publics sur les territoires ne permet plus de pallier les exclusions créées par un marché lucratif en extension sur de nouvelles sphères de l’activité humaine (social, santé, culture, éducation, accès à une alimentation digne…), les initiatives citoyennes qui prennent en charge l’intérêt général se multiplient, y compris dans des domaines où on ne les attendait pas. Comment nommer ces initiatives de proximité?
Par ailleurs, la théorie et la pratique des communs ne cesse de s’enrichir dans la lignée légitimée par Elinor Ostrom. On parle désormais de communs fonciers, numériques, urbains, ou même globaux. Pourquoi ne pas ajouter les communs de services de proximité?
Dans cet ouvrage collectif, nous explorons des initiatives et réfléchissons à partir d’une définition proposée par Benjamin Coriat. Nous caractérisons les communs de proximité par trois critères interreliés : (1) une initiative citoyenne et autogouvernée, (2) dont la visée est le service de l’intérêt général dont l’accès reste ouvert et (3) ancrée sur le territoire et respectueuse des écosystèmes dans lesquels elle est insérée.
La Coop des Communs a réuni pendant trois ans des personnes praticiennes et du monde de la recherche qui se sont mis à l’écoute et l’analyse d’autres, actrices de terrain venues présenter leurs expériences et leurs questions. Le présent ouvrage est le résultat de ce travail collectif.
Within this issue, you'll discover a wealth of updates, valuable insights, and fantastic new open access books. Prepare to immerse yourself in a realm of knowledge, innovation, and our forthcoming releases. Here's a glimpse of what awaits inside:
Announcements • Exciting Website Updates! • Introducing the First Publication from the St Andrews Studies in French History and Culture Series • Share your experience with the OA Books Toolkit • Featured Blog: 'Open access book publishing: a series editor writes' • Unveiling 'Prismatic Jane Eyre': A Video Series
Books, Resources and Reviews • Featured Book • New Open Access Publications • Forthcoming Open Access Publications • New Blogs and Resources • Call for Proposals • Latest Reviews
Exciting Website Updates!
We have recently completed a comprehensive update to our website! This update has made it more informative and visually engaging for our readership.
Here are some of the key updates our team has implemented:
Content Refresh: Our team has meticulously updated numerous pages that were previously outdated.
Enhanced Visuals: To improve user experience, our team has incorporated a variety of visuals, including diagrams, graphs, and logos, across various pages (see, for example, Our Vision). These additions not only make the content more visually appealing but also aid in conveying complex information effectively.
New Page - 'Our Reach': Our team has introduced a new page titled 'Our Reach' (accessible here) which meticulously showcases our readership statistics. This page serves as a testament to our impact and is prominently linked from our home page for easy access.
Improved Organization: To streamline content presentation, our team has relocated information regarding our readership statistics from the open software section to the newly created 'Our Reach' page. This change not only enhances the coherence of our website but also addresses previous concerns about content alignment.
We invite you all to explore the revamped website and discover the wealth of new information our team has meticulously curated. Take a moment to visit the updated site and delve into the latest content
Introducing the First Publication from the St Andrews Studies in French History and Culture Series
We are delighted to unveil the inaugural book of the St Andrews Studies in French History and Culture series, a distinguished collaboration between the Centre for French History and Culture at the University of St Andrews and Open Book Publishers.
The St Andrews Studies in French History and Culture series endeavors to enrich scholarly discourse surrounding the historical culture of the French-speaking world. Covering a diverse array of themes—from political and military history to literary culture—the series is committed to publishing concise yet illuminating monographs and studies.
Each title in the series undergoes rigorous peer review by our editorial board and external assessors, ensuring academic integrity and excellence. Available in both digital and hard copy formats, these publications will contribute significantly to our understanding of French history and culture.
Stay tuned for more groundbreaking publications from the St Andrews Studies in French History and Culture series!
Share your experience with the OA Books Toolkit
Over three years after the launch of the OAPEN OA Books Toolkit, a round of redesign and enrichment with new, research-based content is taking place this year. To make sure that the Toolkit offer users what they need, we’re reaching out to you, as users of the Toolkit. Please help us to redesign by sharing your user experience in this survey. It will take less than 5 minutes to complete and the deadline for responses is Thursday 29 February. We look forward to your feedback!
Of course, please feel free to forward this survey to other users, such as your colleagues or authors. For more information, please contact Lotte van Aalten, Publisher Relations Manager at the OAPEN Foundation: l.vanAalten@oapen.org
Featured Blog: 'Open access book publishing: a series editor writes'
Dive into the latest insights on open-access publishing in 'Open access book publishing: a series editor writes', a new blog post written by Geoffrey Khan. Delve into the foundational principles behind the Cambridge Semitic Languages and Cultures series, its mission to democratize access to Semitic studies, and the transformative impact of open-access initiatives on academic scholarship and global knowledge exchange. Click the link to embark on a journey of scholarly exploration: https://blogs.openbookpublishers.com/open-access-book-publishing-a-series-editor-writes/.
Geoffrey Khan, Regius Professor of Hebrew at University of Cambridge, is the series editor of Cambridge Semitic Languages and Cultures, an open access book series published by OBP. He first delivered this post as a talk at a seminar co-hosted by CRASSH and the University of Cambridge’s Research Culture Team on 28 November 2023: 'Should I consider publishing my monograph open access?'
Join the minds behind this book as they delve into the intricacies of their essays, offering a thought-provoking journey through the prism of languages and cultures that shape Charlotte Brontë's timeless classic. In this exclusive series of videos, each author prvides a unique perspective on their contribution to the collaborative work.
edited by Floriana Cerniglia, Francesco Saraceno and Andrew Watt
We are thrilled to announce the release of the fourth installment in our 'European Public Investment Outlook' series. Tackling the pressing issue of financing essential investment amidst high levels of public debt, this book stands as a beacon of insight for governments grappling with this complex challenge across Europe.
Financing Investment in Times of High Public Debt: 2023 European Public Investment Outlook brings together a wealth of expertise from academics, researchers at public policy institutes, and international governance bodies. Through meticulous analysis and thoughtful proposals, the contributors illuminate the current landscape and offer feasible solutions to this critical dilemma.
This book offers a comprehensive examination of cross-continental policies and trends while delving into specific contexts in France, Italy, Germany, and Spain. Part II of the book ventures into the challenges of financing climate investments, the role of national promotional banks, EU budget reform, and evolving trends in tax progressivity.
A must-read for economists, policymakers, and anyone invested in European public policy, this book provides invaluable insights into the intricacies of EU governance and institutions. Whether you're seeking to implement effective policies or understand the evolving landscape of public finance, this Open Access title is an indispensable resource.
Don't miss out on this essential addition to the discourse on European public investment. Grab your copy today and embark on a journey towards informed decision-making and impactful policy implementation.
Endorsements
This book should be the go-to-book for anybody working on European Union fiscal rules and their potential interactions with public investment and the fight against global warming.
Prof Olivier Blanchard Robert M. Solow Professor of Economics emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics
Europe's growth prospects hinge on balancing sustainable public finances with the need for greater investments in our common priorities, from the green and digital transitions to our competitiveness and security. This requires a reformed framework of fiscal rules and new tools and resources at EU level. The 2023 European Public Investment Outlook is the go-to text to understand the trends shaping this debate and explore possible solutions.
Dobbs-Allsopp, Professor of Old Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary, explicitly approaches Whitman from the perspective of a biblical scholar. Utilising his wealth of expertise in this field, he constructs a compelling, erudite and methodical argument for the King James Bible’s importance in the evolution of Whitman’s style – from his signature long lines to the prevalence of parallelism and tendency towards parataxis in his works.
This edited volume brings together contributions from a wide range of international academics and practitioners. It traces innovations within classical music practice, showing how these offer divergent visions for its future. The interdisciplinary contributions to the volume highlight the way contrasting ideas of the future can effect change in the present.
This book presents a detailed analysis of the translation of the Qur’an in Saudi Arabia, the most important global actor in the promotion, production and dissemination of Qur’an translations. Mykhaylo Yakubovych provides a comprehensive historical overview of the debates surrounding the translatability of the Qur'an, as well as exploring the impact of the burgeoning translation and dissemination of the holy book upon Wahhabi and Salafi interpretations of Islam. Backed by meticulous research and drawing on a wealth of sources, this work illuminates an essential facet of global Islamic culture and scholarly discourse.
How Divine Images Became Art tells the story of the parallel ‘discovery’ of Russian medieval art and of the Italian ‘primitives’ at the beginning of the twentieth century. While these two developments are well-known, they are usually studied in isolation. Tarasov’s study has the great merit of showing the connection between the art world in Russia and the West, and its impact in the cultural history of the continent in the pre-war period.
Dive into thought-provoking philosophical insights on limitarianism, now accessible to Spanish-speaking readers worldwide. Explore the ethical considerations, societal implications, and philosophical inquiries presented in this groundbreaking work.
This book is a treasure trove comprising core writings from Hans Walter Gabler‘s seminal work on James Joyce, spanning fifty years from the analysis of composition he undertook towards a critical text of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, through the Critical and Synoptic Edition of Ulysses, to Gabler‘s latest essays on (appropriately enough) Joyce’s sustained artistic innovation.
This book draws on the life stories told by shepherds, farmers, and their families in the Andalusian region in Spain to sketch out the landscapes, actions, and challenges of people who work in pastoralism. Their narratives highlight how local practices interact with regional and European communities and policies, and they help us see a broader role for extensive grazing practices and sustainability.
Why are some figures hidden from history? Eliza Orme, despite becoming the first woman in Britain to earn a university degree in Law in 1888, leading both a political organization and a labour investigation in 1892, and participating actively in the women’s suffrage movement into the early twentieth century, is one such figure.
What was it like growing up during the Cold War? What can childhood memories tell us about state socialism and its aftermath? How can these intimate memories complicate history and redefine possible futures? These questions are at the heart of the (An)Archive: Childhood, Memory, and the Cold War. This edited collection stems from a collaboration between academics and artists who came together to collectively remember their own experiences of growing up on both sides of the ‘Iron Curtain’. Looking beyond official historical archives, the book gathers memories that have been erased or forgotten, delegitimized or essentialized, or, at best, reinterpreted nostalgically within the dominant frameworks of the East-West divide. And it reassembles and (re)stores these childhood memories in a form of an ‘anarchive’: a site for merging, mixing, connecting, but also juxtaposing personal experiences, public memory, political rhetoric, places, times, and artifacts. Collectively, these acts and arts of collective remembering tell about possible futures―and the past’s futures―what life during the Cold War might have been but also what it has become.
In only 50 years, from the 1870s to the early 1920s, Japanese people laid the foundations for the country’s post-war rise as a musical as well as an economic power. Meanwhile, new types of popular song, fuelled by the growing global record industry, successfully blended inspiration from the West with musical characteristics perceived as Japanese.
We have various Open Access series all of which are open for proposals, so feel free to get in touch if you or someone you know is interested in submitting a proposal!
Global Communications
Global Communicationsis a book series that looks beyond national borders to examine current transformations in public communication, journalism and media. Special focus is given on regions other than Western Europe and North America, which have received the bulk of scholarly attention until now.
St Andrews Studies in French History and Culture
St Andrews Studies in French History and Culture, a successful series published by the Centre for French History and Culture at the University of St Andrews since 2010 and now in collaboration with Open Book Publishers, aims to enhance scholarly understanding of the historical culture of the French-speaking world. This series covers the full span of historical themes relating to France: from political history, through military/naval, diplomatic, religious, social, financial, cultural and intellectual history, art and architectural history, to literary culture.
Studies on Mathematics Education and Society
This book seriespublishes high-quality monographs, edited volumes, handbooks and formally innovative books which explore the relationships between mathematics education and society. The series advances scholarship in mathematics education by bringing multiple disciplinary perspectives to the study of contemporary predicaments of the cultural, social, political, economic and ethical contexts of mathematics education in a range of different contexts around the globe.
The Global Qur'an
The Global Qur’an is a new book series that looks at Muslim engagement with the Qur’an in a global perspective. Scholars interested in publishing work in this series and submitting their monographs and/or edited collections should contact the General Editor, Johanna Pink. If you wish to submit a contribution, please read and download the submission guidelines here.
The Medieval Text Consortium Series
The Series is created by an association of leading scholars aimed at making works of medieval philosophy available to a wider audience. The Series' goal is to publish peer-reviewed texts across all of Western thought between antiquity and modernity, both in their original languages and in English translation. Find out more here.
Applied Theatre Praxis
This series publishes works of practitioner-researchers who use their rehearsal rooms as "labs”; spaces in which theories are generated and experimented with before being implemented in vulnerable contexts. Find out more here.
Digital Humanities
Overseen by an international board of experts, our Digital Humanities Series: Knowledge, Thought and Practice is dedicated to the exploration of these changes by scholars across disciplines. Books in this Series present cutting-edge research that investigate the links between the digital and other disciplines paving the ways for further investigations and applications that take advantage of new digital media to present knowledge in new ways. Proposals in any area of the Digital Humanities are invited. We welcome proposals for new books in this series. Please do not hesitate to contact us (a.tosi@openbookpublishers.com) if you would like to discuss a publishing proposal and ways we might work together to best realise it.
This book is a fitting tribute to the life and work of William Moorcroft (1872-1945), one of the most celebrated and successful artist potters of his time. […] Mallinson draws on extensive primary sources throughout the book, combining Moorcroft’s personal archive of diaries, notebooks and letters with company minutes and ledgers to give a fascinating insight into the relationships and financial realities involved in running a small pottery in early 20th-century Britain. Authorship, recognition and reputation are recurring themes presented through the lens of contemporary press coverage and reviews. Moorcroft’s project is also helpfully placed in context with the shifting debates in art and design and the work of other makers, from Pilkington’s and Howson Taylor to Leach and Staite Murray. This scholarly, detailed approach gives a strong impression of Moorcroft’s pioneering spirit […].
Florence Tyler Newsletter of The Decorative Arts Society, vol. 130, 2024.
This book arises out of a body of work that was explicitly pushing back on the Exercise paradigm, i.e., it is pushing back on perspectives such as the Acquisition metaphor wherein “knowledge” is something objectively measurable and individually held which is accrued through exercising the brain. Instead, the metaphor of “Landscapes” views learning as inherently complex, dialogic (collectivist), and cultural. [...] Landscapes are not objects. Landscapes aren’t even nouns. Landscapes are verbs: Living things, in a constant state of happening. [...] This book is not the only work to embrace the metaphor of Landscapes, but it is a fantastic collection of dialogically constructed work that centers this liberatory metaphor. [...] That this book is written and constructed in a way that will invite both newcomers and longstanding users of this metaphor to gain insight and push their understanding further speaks well to the care the Authors took in its construction.
David M. Bowers "Book Review: Landscapes of Investigation: Contributions to Critical Mathematics Education (2022) (M. G. Penteado & O. Skovsmose, Eds.)". Journal for Theoretical & Marginal Mathematics Education, vol. 2, no. 1, 2023. doi:10.5281/zenodo.10440243
By studying the complex and multifaceted relationships that people have with media technology, this book makes a significant contribution to the area of media studies. This book is an invaluable tool for researchers, academics, and students working on the subject because it draws on several different fields and creates a new framework and instrument [...] Despite the subject matter being broadened by the sheer number of disciplines used, the author does a commendable job of condensing the most relevant concepts into a meaningful body of work. Media ecology, post-humanism, complexity theory, and post-phenomenology are all properly employed in the crafting of the instrument used by the author to draw his conclusions [...] Academics in media and communication studies, philosophy of technology, and post-humanities can all find value in the arguments posed by Lewis here. The author’s style and thorough treatment of the topic add further credibility to the argument presented, making it effective in convincing readers of its validity. Alternatively, such professionals can improve their competencies by leveraging this information into actionable insight to be applied in the frontline.
Hanan Elsayed Information, Communication & Society, 2023. doi:10.1080/1369118X.2023.2252480
In this interesting book - which employs diverse sources of evidence - Morag Grant examines the song in its pre- and post-Burns contexts, and in some of its international guises (including its German reception), bringing her discussion up to the modern day. [...]This is an important study for scholars of oral transmission, as well as for those interested in the transmission of Scottish culture more generally, and Morag Grant is to be congratulated on the detailed research and analysis which underpin this scholarly yet accessible book.
Life, Re-Scaled provides much-needed rigorous analyses of the affective and aesthetic potentials of literature and performance to engage with, and attend to, the heterogenous scales of life across microbiological and planetary scales [...] What is particularly salient about Life, Re-Scaled is that it includes methodologies in which science and art are not domains that merely influence each other: the contributors explore the “cross-currents” and “cross fertilizing of imaginaries” across contemporary artistic work, cultural representational popularizations of the life sciences, and philosophy.
Dr Sarah Hopfinger Performing Arts Journal, 2024. doi:10.1162/pajj_r_00704
On an almost visceral level, we may likewise remark that states of “latency” involve downward movement, as in the case of something falling by the wayside and lying unnoticed until its presence is felt.
— Hans Gumbrecht, After 1945: Latency as Origin of the Present
Sometime last year, during a recent deep clean of the apartment, I pulled out a wooden chest that my father built for me when I was ten, a pine-scented time capsule of that period of my life, full of assorted construction-paper projects and faded movie tickets. Buried underneath all this loose paper, set apart by a shiny laminated cover, is the first “novel” I ever wrote, our final project in fourth grade, which was really just a few typed pages folded and stapled together, held between a cardstock cover. In this book, I write about a mall janitor with magic powers, who uses his mop handle to transform villains into piles of fabric, and who time travels throughout history by way of a magic corvette (clearly, I had just seen a certain Robert Zemeckis film).
Having rediscovered this story, I am struck by the realization that my writerly voice has hardly changed. I am still drawn to the same hokey surrealism, the same comic book sensibilities, the same spirit of hand-stapled publishing projects. This is to say: I could not help but to identify in this proto-novel traces of my work to come, early impulses that echo throughout my present practice. As Lisa Robertson puts it in an interview: “Defunct forms resurface after years of latency. New work speaks with old work, as well as with the future.”
This work speaks to a recurrent theme in my life: namely, my pervasive sense of feeling out-of-sync with the world, or as Vonnegut puts it, “unstuck in time.” In this essay, I want to think about latency—essentially, the time it takes for data to transfer between two points—as a poignant extended metaphor for the temporal disjunctures of the present moment. Indeed, the frantic mantra of “being present,” as popularized among Western spiritualists by Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now(1997), is a kind of antiphrasis, a phrase which evokes precisely the opposite thought. In this case, the power of now simultaneously diagnoses the perils of asynchronicity. And yet, perhaps there are some counterintuitive reasons why latency might be politically productive at times, as I will discuss in the sections that follow.
Fittingly, the concept of “echoic memory” suggests that the brain acts as a kind of temporary holding tank for sounds, not unlike an old wooden chest full of memorabilia. The difference, in this case, is that echoic memory is a short-term storage system. One example of this memory structure at work is when someone asks “What did you say?” only to answer their own question after a half-second, since they are somehow able to retrieve this latent information, one might say unconsciously, from the holding tank.
As a sound artist, I am interested in multiple facets of latency, from its aesthetics to its politics, and especially its psychoacoustics, the way that sound acts tangibly upon bodies and minds. This post will examine how audio latency encapsulates the paradoxical tension between the desire for sonic immanence—in the sense of longing for an immediate experience—and the frustrations of technology, its delays and disruptions. A prime example of this tension is that you and I could be seated right beside each other and still experience a laggy phone call. The paradoxical element starts to emerge when one tries to achieve zero latency, since any signal must travel through space and time, just like Achilles and the tortoise, and thus subject itself to delay.
Latency, as such, is a shifty concept. By one definition, it refers to any length of interval between impulse and response, including the time it takes to respond to a handwritten letter, or, in my case, the rediscovery of an old book after twenty-something years. By another definition, latency refers to all manner of system delays, including the quality of a network connection, the time it takes for data to transfer between two points. The term might also be familiar from biology or psychology, where it refers to anything hidden or dormant that has not yet manifested, like a disease or an unconscious desire. Another context in which the term frequently shows up is laboratory studies, measuring the delay between some kind of sensory stimulus and reaction, such as a honeybee’s conditioned response to a scent. Lastly, and most importantly for the purposes of this discussion, “audio latency” refers to a very short period of delay that causes sound to lag behind imagery, or, ultimately, behind itself.
The latency test video above provides a helpful listening exercise. Though such small intervals of time, measured in milliseconds, are hard to conceptualize in the abstract, they are jarringly comprehensible as sound. With just five milliseconds of latency, a chorus effect is applied to the experimenter’s finger snap, which now sounds as though it has been placed inside a drainpipe. At ten milliseconds of latency, one can already hear two distinct transients, otherwise known as amplitude spikes, where the sound of the snap abruptly begins. By fifty milliseconds, a more dramatic delay effect emerges, and it sounds as though the finger snap is being pulled apart. This bifurcation process culminates at three hundred milliseconds, when the concept of “latency” begins to overlap with that of “delay,” such that there are now two distinct snaps.
Latency, then, can be both a problem and an intentional effect. If you have ever tried to record an acoustic guitar, or a vocal track, on an outdated computer, you may have encountered this phenomenon in the form of a technological issue. Everything is plugged in and ready to go, the active track in your audio workstation is armed, headphone monitoring is turned on, and you begin to strum or sing. To your dismay, the sound you hear from the computer starts to fall behind the sounds you are making in the real world. Not only does the recording sound off, and out of time, but it becomes physically impossible to play an instrument when your fingers and ears are thrown out of alignment, like attempting to ride the backwards brain bicycle.
Diagnosing and solving latency issues is another game entirely: lowering the buffer size, enabling delay compensation, or simply going rogue and recording without monitoring playback, with the hope of nudging the recording back into alignment after the fact. In a home studio, sometimes a full half of the day’s recording session will get swallowed up by these technological battles, trying to shrink latency down to smaller and smaller increments. Given the sheer number of YouTube tutorials dedicated to reducing latency, it is clear how pervasive this issue is for musicians and audio engineers.
As Mitch Gallagher suggests in the video above, some singers can detect latency as short as three milliseconds, which can significantly throw off their performance. If you have ever been in a Zoom call where you can hear yourself through the other person’s speaker, this feeling will be all too familiar. This is not unlike a less aggressive form of speech jamming, which refers to a kind of crowd-control tactic employed by the military in order to break someone’s concentration using delayed audio. Known as “acoustic hailing and disruption” (AHAD), this process makes it very difficult to speak consistently, because a live recording of one’s voice is beamed instantaneously back at the speaker with a certain length of delay, in milliseconds, as demonstrated in a 1974 piece by Richard Serra and Nancy Holt, called Boomerang. As with the backwards brain bicycle, but perhaps far less benign, latency can take the form of weaponized confusion. The same principle, however, is used for positive ends in the case of Delayed Auditory Feedback (DAF) devices which people who stutter use as an assistive technology.
Being out of sync with the present moment, in other words, can be both disorienting and orienting. Latency can mean one thing for a musician trying to lay down a vocal track, but something else entirely for a political protestor attempting to address a crowd, or someone consciously manipulating their own speech patterns.
As a form of sonic violence, weaponized latency has an ancient Greek precedent in the myth of Echo, a nymph who is cursed with repeating the last words spoken to her, such that she can no longer express herself. This archetypal figure, both gendered and pathologized, embodies a form of perpetual exclusion from discourse. Speaking to this subject, Katie Kadue underlines a pertinent quote in literary critic Barbara Johnson’s essay, “Muteness Envy”: Feminist criticism has been pointing this out for at least thirty years. But why is female muteness a repository of aesthetic value? And what does that muteness signify?” At the same time as Echo’s curse represents a metaphorical silencing, it also signifies something else in its insistence on rhetorical conformity, denying and dislocating her from the present of her own thoughts—a “living death,” in the words of Rebecca Solnit.
If patriarchy loves the sound of its own voice, then capitalism loves the beat of its own drum, which speeds up or slows down depending on competing urgencies. Ultimately, this manufactured present moves much faster than the embodied present, moving at such a rate that one cannot even decipher the words that one is meant to repeat.
To operate outside of this temporal structure then, is to move and make sound at a tempo that does not match the dominant rhythms of hypercapitalism. To this end, Fred Moten quotes the following passage from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952): “Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you’re never quite on the beat. Sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes behind.” Moten calls this “improvisational immanence,” characterized by “disruptive surprise.” Bringing these concepts together, Fiamma Montezemolo’s Echo (2014) is a work of video art that “disrupts and dissents from the ways that race and gender are produced and experienced through sound and listening,” to quote Lois Klassen and Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda. It does so by assembling an archive of earlier artworks in which women share their personal testimonies of discrimination and inequality, along with hopes for the future. Through this archive, Montezemolo helps these voices to reverberate, latently, in the present. With this in mind, one begins to hear how latency can function both as a barrier, as well as a boon, to expressivity. Especially in those cases where the original sound might have gone unheard, or was actively obstructed, there is always the possibility of a disruptive re-sounding.
In practice, audio latency can often feel like a curse, and it is difficult to see the upsides. In the recording studio, it can turn even the most fluid riff into a halting mess, interrupting creative flow with high-tech tedium. As Rebekah Wilson points out in her study of networked music performances, these technological failures have “aesthetic implications” beyond a mere computer glitch, insofar as rhythmic music is much harder to coordinate over long distances; more than anything, latency “affects time keeping and human-level rhythms” (Wilson 2020).
Must audio latency always be met with resistance, however? No doubt, such glitches could be treated as opportunities for creative misuse. What might happen, for example, were someone to treat these rhythmic glitches as an intentional musical element or a compositional technique reminiscent of a musical canon? As discussed in a previous post, Eleni Ikoniadou presents such thought experiments in The Rhythmic Event (2014), where the author asks what alternative modes of expression might arise when we are able to “twist chronology and rethink the latent tendencies of the event, outside the tyranny of the ticking clock” (68). Latency takes us off the grid and into the abstract, unquantized space of the timeline, where notes are free-floating, and other temporalities become possible, as in Ellison’s description of the jazz musician who plays behind or ahead of the beat, while still remaining “in time,” moving within a loose present that is spacious enough for jazz artists to name it “the pocket.”
Pondering the relationship of “latency” to the present moment, I am reminded of Boris Groys’ definition of the contemporary: “To be con-temporary does not necessarily mean to be present, to be here-and-now; it means to be ‘with time’ rather than ‘in time.’” For the percussionist whose dexterity has been scrambled by latency issues, to be a “comrade of time,” in the words of Groys, would mean “collaborating with time, helping time when it has problems, when it has difficulties.” This is a counterintuitive approach, however, which does not call for latency to be fixed, necessarily, but rather to be adopted as a political and aesthetic strategy.
The laggy outbursts of latency belong to the anti-capitalist “ritual of wasting time,” in resistance to “contemporary product-oriented civilization,” which would have us chase ultra-low latency for the sake of faster sports betting and stock trading. This ritualistic rejection of capitalist time resonates with Kemi Adeyemi’s description of “strategic pattern interruptions,” in a previous article, where the author shows how “lean” (a narcotic drink consumed by some rappers) is absorbed into the slowed-down aesthetics of their music, in objection to “the demands the neoliberal state places on the black body.” In this way, Adeyemi underscores the racial politics of latencies, particularly in the way that the “dissociative pleasures controlled substances offer to black people have been historically criminalized, and radically different sentencing guidelines continue to be handed down,” depending on the drug.
Where the cocaine-fuelled algorithmic traders of Wall Street chase a asymptotic present in their attempt to reach zero latency (transfers are now measured in picoseconds), contemporary sound artists might explore more audaciously the latent present, wherein one moment, one sound, is always imbricated in the next. To quote Groys once more: “we are familiar with the critique of presence, especially as formulated by Jacques Derrida, who has shown—convincingly enough—that the present is originally corrupted by past and future, that there is always absence at the heart of presence.”
Such absent presences are reflected in one of the secondary definitions of latency (as concealment). For instance, Alan Licht references Alvin Lucier’s famous sound art piece, I Am Sitting in a Room, as an example of a room’s latent resonant frequencies, which are amplified via a feedback loop. Aptly, room tone is also referred to as “presence” in the film industry. Lucier’s piece resonates with Groys’ model for the prototypical time-based artist: Sisyphus. Like the happy boulder-roller, Lucier commits to a process of absurd repetition, and reveals the present to be, in Groys’ words, “a site of the permanent rewriting of both past and future.” In the case of Serres and Holt’s experiment in Boomerang, this rewriting is also an overwriting of thought, with latency preventing the speaker from formulating her next sentence. As if to evoke the dislocation of a time traveler, at one point Holt says, “I am not where I am.” With the undercurrent of cruelty running throughout this performance piece, the artists demonstrate the disembodying effects of latency and its potency as a metaphor for systemic threats to women’s self-expression.
Groys also mentions Francis Alÿs’ animated film, Song For Lupita (1998) in which a woman pours water back and forth between two glasses, in a gesture of anti-capitalist counterproductivity. Here, it is worth noting the discrepancy in attitudes between the tragic male heroism of Sisyphus and the cursed mimicry of Echo, whereby one is celebrated for his resistance in the face of futility, whereas the other is not often mythologized in the same way, though women working in contemporary sound art have begun to redress this representational imbalance by mobilizing the concept of subversive difference. The Alÿs animation linked above takes a similar but slightly different approach, of subversive indifference, where pointless repetition pushes back against capitalism’s intolerance of delay (unless it serves the status quo, e.g., climate inaction). Underscored by lyrics which repeat the phrase “mañana, mañana,” the score reflects this theme of deferral while also indicating that actions taken (or not taken) today might have a delayed effect tomorrow.
As I work through the second draft of this essay, I can hear the boomerang of latency returning to me, offering another chance to rethink, reformulate, reword, and re-listen. Much like how latency has the potential to alienate performers from the flow of a recording session, it can often feel to me as though I am permanently trailing behind the sonic present, caught in its slipstream, an exasperated Achilles chasing after the tortoise of time. As I type these words, I can just barely sense the time it takes the letters to leave my fingers through the keyboard and appear on screen. I think about the illusion of instantaneity, and how the typewriter was a constant reminder of this delay between the exciter of the key and the resonator of the page. Suddenly I can hear the letters smacking the screen. I feel anxiously attuned to the basic math of my estrangement, knowing that sound travels at just over a thousand feet per second.
As a matter of fact, this means that my sonic present and yours are subject to a proximity effect, depending on who is closer to the megaphone. Sometimes it can feel like one is always trying to make sense of a belated reality. And yet, old books are often showing up just when they are needed most, and it is in this way that “intense collective potentials hover as forms in the present,” in the words of Lisa Robertson. The poet reminds us that not only is every historical moment charged with the latent potential to act, but that such political actions are latent in language, surviving as poems and essays “across long durations,” ready to reach someone in a new instant.
Matthew Tomkinson is a writer, composer, and postdoctoral research fellow based in Vancouver. He holds a PhD in Theatre Studies from the University of British Columbia, where he studied sound within the Deaf, Disability, and Mad arts. His current book project, Sound and Sense in Contemporary Theatre: Mad Auralities (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), examines auditory simulations of mental health differences. As a composer and sound designer, he has presented his work widely throughout the US, Canada, Germany, Austria, Ireland, Portugal, Bosnia, Kosovo, and the UK, collaborating with companies such as Ballet BC, Company 605, Magazinist, and the All Bodies Dance Project. Matthew lives on the unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples, including the qʼʷa:n̓ƛʼən̓ (Kwantlen), q̓ic̓əy̓ (Katzie), SEMYOME (Semiahmoo), and sc̓əwaθən məsteyəx (Tsawwassen) Nations.
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On an almost visceral level, we may likewise remark that states of “latency” involve downward movement, as in the case of something falling by the wayside and lying unnoticed until its presence is felt.
— Hans Gumbrecht, After 1945: Latency as Origin of the Present
Sometime last year, during a recent deep clean of the apartment, I pulled out a wooden chest that my father built for me when I was ten, a pine-scented time capsule of that period of my life, full of assorted construction-paper projects and faded movie tickets. Buried underneath all this loose paper, set apart by a shiny laminated cover, is the first “novel” I ever wrote, our final project in fourth grade, which was really just a few typed pages folded and stapled together, held between a cardstock cover. In this book, I write about a mall janitor with magic powers, who uses his mop handle to transform villains into piles of fabric, and who time travels throughout history by way of a magic corvette (clearly, I had just seen a certain Robert Zemeckis film).
Having rediscovered this story, I am struck by the realization that my writerly voice has hardly changed. I am still drawn to the same hokey surrealism, the same comic book sensibilities, the same spirit of hand-stapled publishing projects. This is to say: I could not help but to identify in this proto-novel traces of my work to come, early impulses that echo throughout my present practice. As Lisa Robertson puts it in an interview: “Defunct forms resurface after years of latency. New work speaks with old work, as well as with the future.”
This work speaks to a recurrent theme in my life: namely, my pervasive sense of feeling out-of-sync with the world, or as Vonnegut puts it, “unstuck in time.” In this essay, I want to think about latency—essentially, the time it takes for data to transfer between two points—as a poignant extended metaphor for the temporal disjunctures of the present moment. Indeed, the frantic mantra of “being present,” as popularized among Western spiritualists by Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now(1997), is a kind of antiphrasis, a phrase which evokes precisely the opposite thought. In this case, the power of now simultaneously diagnoses the perils of asynchronicity. And yet, perhaps there are some counterintuitive reasons why latency might be politically productive at times, as I will discuss in the sections that follow.
Fittingly, the concept of “echoic memory” suggests that the brain acts as a kind of temporary holding tank for sounds, not unlike an old wooden chest full of memorabilia. The difference, in this case, is that echoic memory is a short-term storage system. One example of this memory structure at work is when someone asks “What did you say?” only to answer their own question after a half-second, since they are somehow able to retrieve this latent information, one might say unconsciously, from the holding tank.
As a sound artist, I am interested in multiple facets of latency, from its aesthetics to its politics, and especially its psychoacoustics, the way that sound acts tangibly upon bodies and minds. This post will examine how audio latency encapsulates the paradoxical tension between the desire for sonic immanence—in the sense of longing for an immediate experience—and the frustrations of technology, its delays and disruptions. A prime example of this tension is that you and I could be seated right beside each other and still experience a laggy phone call. The paradoxical element starts to emerge when one tries to achieve zero latency, since any signal must travel through space and time, just like Achilles and the tortoise, and thus subject itself to delay.
Latency, as such, is a shifty concept. By one definition, it refers to any length of interval between impulse and response, including the time it takes to respond to a handwritten letter, or, in my case, the rediscovery of an old book after twenty-something years. By another definition, latency refers to all manner of system delays, including the quality of a network connection, the time it takes for data to transfer between two points. The term might also be familiar from biology or psychology, where it refers to anything hidden or dormant that has not yet manifested, like a disease or an unconscious desire. Another context in which the term frequently shows up is laboratory studies, measuring the delay between some kind of sensory stimulus and reaction, such as a honeybee’s conditioned response to a scent. Lastly, and most importantly for the purposes of this discussion, “audio latency” refers to a very short period of delay that causes sound to lag behind imagery, or, ultimately, behind itself.
The latency test video above provides a helpful listening exercise. Though such small intervals of time, measured in milliseconds, are hard to conceptualize in the abstract, they are jarringly comprehensible as sound. With just five milliseconds of latency, a chorus effect is applied to the experimenter’s finger snap, which now sounds as though it has been placed inside a drainpipe. At ten milliseconds of latency, one can already hear two distinct transients, otherwise known as amplitude spikes, where the sound of the snap abruptly begins. By fifty milliseconds, a more dramatic delay effect emerges, and it sounds as though the finger snap is being pulled apart. This bifurcation process culminates at three hundred milliseconds, when the concept of “latency” begins to overlap with that of “delay,” such that there are now two distinct snaps.
Latency, then, can be both a problem and an intentional effect. If you have ever tried to record an acoustic guitar, or a vocal track, on an outdated computer, you may have encountered this phenomenon in the form of a technological issue. Everything is plugged in and ready to go, the active track in your audio workstation is armed, headphone monitoring is turned on, and you begin to strum or sing. To your dismay, the sound you hear from the computer starts to fall behind the sounds you are making in the real world. Not only does the recording sound off, and out of time, but it becomes physically impossible to play an instrument when your fingers and ears are thrown out of alignment, like attempting to ride the backwards brain bicycle.
Diagnosing and solving latency issues is another game entirely: lowering the buffer size, enabling delay compensation, or simply going rogue and recording without monitoring playback, with the hope of nudging the recording back into alignment after the fact. In a home studio, sometimes a full half of the day’s recording session will get swallowed up by these technological battles, trying to shrink latency down to smaller and smaller increments. Given the sheer number of YouTube tutorials dedicated to reducing latency, it is clear how pervasive this issue is for musicians and audio engineers.
As Mitch Gallagher suggests in the video above, some singers can detect latency as short as three milliseconds, which can significantly throw off their performance. If you have ever been in a Zoom call where you can hear yourself through the other person’s speaker, this feeling will be all too familiar. This is not unlike a less aggressive form of speech jamming, which refers to a kind of crowd-control tactic employed by the military in order to break someone’s concentration using delayed audio. Known as “acoustic hailing and disruption” (AHAD), this process makes it very difficult to speak consistently, because a live recording of one’s voice is beamed instantaneously back at the speaker with a certain length of delay, in milliseconds, as demonstrated in a 1974 piece by Richard Serra and Nancy Holt, called Boomerang. As with the backwards brain bicycle, but perhaps far less benign, latency can take the form of weaponized confusion. The same principle, however, is used for positive ends in the case of Delayed Auditory Feedback (DAF) devices which people who stutter use as an assistive technology.
Being out of sync with the present moment, in other words, can be both disorienting and orienting. Latency can mean one thing for a musician trying to lay down a vocal track, but something else entirely for a political protestor attempting to address a crowd, or someone consciously manipulating their own speech patterns.
As a form of sonic violence, weaponized latency has an ancient Greek precedent in the myth of Echo, a nymph who is cursed with repeating the last words spoken to her, such that she can no longer express herself. This archetypal figure, both gendered and pathologized, embodies a form of perpetual exclusion from discourse. Speaking to this subject, Katie Kadue underlines a pertinent quote in literary critic Barbara Johnson’s essay, “Muteness Envy”: Feminist criticism has been pointing this out for at least thirty years. But why is female muteness a repository of aesthetic value? And what does that muteness signify?” At the same time as Echo’s curse represents a metaphorical silencing, it also signifies something else in its insistence on rhetorical conformity, denying and dislocating her from the present of her own thoughts—a “living death,” in the words of Rebecca Solnit.
If patriarchy loves the sound of its own voice, then capitalism loves the beat of its own drum, which speeds up or slows down depending on competing urgencies. Ultimately, this manufactured present moves much faster than the embodied present, moving at such a rate that one cannot even decipher the words that one is meant to repeat.
To operate outside of this temporal structure then, is to move and make sound at a tempo that does not match the dominant rhythms of hypercapitalism. To this end, Fred Moten quotes the following passage from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952): “Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you’re never quite on the beat. Sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes behind.” Moten calls this “improvisational immanence,” characterized by “disruptive surprise.” Bringing these concepts together, Fiamma Montezemolo’s Echo (2014) is a work of video art that “disrupts and dissents from the ways that race and gender are produced and experienced through sound and listening,” to quote Lois Klassen and Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda. It does so by assembling an archive of earlier artworks in which women share their personal testimonies of discrimination and inequality, along with hopes for the future. Through this archive, Montezemolo helps these voices to reverberate, latently, in the present. With this in mind, one begins to hear how latency can function both as a barrier, as well as a boon, to expressivity. Especially in those cases where the original sound might have gone unheard, or was actively obstructed, there is always the possibility of a disruptive re-sounding.
In practice, audio latency can often feel like a curse, and it is difficult to see the upsides. In the recording studio, it can turn even the most fluid riff into a halting mess, interrupting creative flow with high-tech tedium. As Rebekah Wilson points out in her study of networked music performances, these technological failures have “aesthetic implications” beyond a mere computer glitch, insofar as rhythmic music is much harder to coordinate over long distances; more than anything, latency “affects time keeping and human-level rhythms” (Wilson 2020).
Must audio latency always be met with resistance, however? No doubt, such glitches could be treated as opportunities for creative misuse. What might happen, for example, were someone to treat these rhythmic glitches as an intentional musical element or a compositional technique reminiscent of a musical canon? As discussed in a previous post, Eleni Ikoniadou presents such thought experiments in The Rhythmic Event (2014), where the author asks what alternative modes of expression might arise when we are able to “twist chronology and rethink the latent tendencies of the event, outside the tyranny of the ticking clock” (68). Latency takes us off the grid and into the abstract, unquantized space of the timeline, where notes are free-floating, and other temporalities become possible, as in Ellison’s description of the jazz musician who plays behind or ahead of the beat, while still remaining “in time,” moving within a loose present that is spacious enough for jazz artists to name it “the pocket.”
Pondering the relationship of “latency” to the present moment, I am reminded of Boris Groys’ definition of the contemporary: “To be con-temporary does not necessarily mean to be present, to be here-and-now; it means to be ‘with time’ rather than ‘in time.’” For the percussionist whose dexterity has been scrambled by latency issues, to be a “comrade of time,” in the words of Groys, would mean “collaborating with time, helping time when it has problems, when it has difficulties.” This is a counterintuitive approach, however, which does not call for latency to be fixed, necessarily, but rather to be adopted as a political and aesthetic strategy.
The laggy outbursts of latency belong to the anti-capitalist “ritual of wasting time,” in resistance to “contemporary product-oriented civilization,” which would have us chase ultra-low latency for the sake of faster sports betting and stock trading. This ritualistic rejection of capitalist time resonates with Kemi Adeyemi’s description of “strategic pattern interruptions,” in a previous article, where the author shows how “lean” (a narcotic drink consumed by some rappers) is absorbed into the slowed-down aesthetics of their music, in objection to “the demands the neoliberal state places on the black body.” In this way, Adeyemi underscores the racial politics of latencies, particularly in the way that the “dissociative pleasures controlled substances offer to black people have been historically criminalized, and radically different sentencing guidelines continue to be handed down,” depending on the drug.
Where the cocaine-fuelled algorithmic traders of Wall Street chase a asymptotic present in their attempt to reach zero latency (transfers are now measured in picoseconds), contemporary sound artists might explore more audaciously the latent present, wherein one moment, one sound, is always imbricated in the next. To quote Groys once more: “we are familiar with the critique of presence, especially as formulated by Jacques Derrida, who has shown—convincingly enough—that the present is originally corrupted by past and future, that there is always absence at the heart of presence.”
Such absent presences are reflected in one of the secondary definitions of latency (as concealment). For instance, Alan Licht references Alvin Lucier’s famous sound art piece, I Am Sitting in a Room, as an example of a room’s latent resonant frequencies, which are amplified via a feedback loop. Aptly, room tone is also referred to as “presence” in the film industry. Lucier’s piece resonates with Groys’ model for the prototypical time-based artist: Sisyphus. Like the happy boulder-roller, Lucier commits to a process of absurd repetition, and reveals the present to be, in Groys’ words, “a site of the permanent rewriting of both past and future.” In the case of Serres and Holt’s experiment in Boomerang, this rewriting is also an overwriting of thought, with latency preventing the speaker from formulating her next sentence. As if to evoke the dislocation of a time traveler, at one point Holt says, “I am not where I am.” With the undercurrent of cruelty running throughout this performance piece, the artists demonstrate the disembodying effects of latency and its potency as a metaphor for systemic threats to women’s self-expression.
Groys also mentions Francis Alÿs’ animated film, Song For Lupita (1998) in which a woman pours water back and forth between two glasses, in a gesture of anti-capitalist counterproductivity. Here, it is worth noting the discrepancy in attitudes between the tragic male heroism of Sisyphus and the cursed mimicry of Echo, whereby one is celebrated for his resistance in the face of futility, whereas the other is not often mythologized in the same way, though women working in contemporary sound art have begun to redress this representational imbalance by mobilizing the concept of subversive difference. The Alÿs animation linked above takes a similar but slightly different approach, of subversive indifference, where pointless repetition pushes back against capitalism’s intolerance of delay (unless it serves the status quo, e.g., climate inaction). Underscored by lyrics which repeat the phrase “mañana, mañana,” the score reflects this theme of deferral while also indicating that actions taken (or not taken) today might have a delayed effect tomorrow.
As I work through the second draft of this essay, I can hear the boomerang of latency returning to me, offering another chance to rethink, reformulate, reword, and re-listen. Much like how latency has the potential to alienate performers from the flow of a recording session, it can often feel to me as though I am permanently trailing behind the sonic present, caught in its slipstream, an exasperated Achilles chasing after the tortoise of time. As I type these words, I can just barely sense the time it takes the letters to leave my fingers through the keyboard and appear on screen. I think about the illusion of instantaneity, and how the typewriter was a constant reminder of this delay between the exciter of the key and the resonator of the page. Suddenly I can hear the letters smacking the screen. I feel anxiously attuned to the basic math of my estrangement, knowing that sound travels at just over a thousand feet per second.
As a matter of fact, this means that my sonic present and yours are subject to a proximity effect, depending on who is closer to the megaphone. Sometimes it can feel like one is always trying to make sense of a belated reality. And yet, old books are often showing up just when they are needed most, and it is in this way that “intense collective potentials hover as forms in the present,” in the words of Lisa Robertson. The poet reminds us that not only is every historical moment charged with the latent potential to act, but that such political actions are latent in language, surviving as poems and essays “across long durations,” ready to reach someone in a new instant.
Matthew Tomkinson is a writer, composer, and postdoctoral research fellow based in Vancouver. He holds a PhD in Theatre Studies from the University of British Columbia, where he studied sound within the Deaf, Disability, and Mad arts. His current book project, Sound and Sense in Contemporary Theatre: Mad Auralities (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), examines auditory simulations of mental health differences. As a composer and sound designer, he has presented his work widely throughout the US, Canada, Germany, Austria, Ireland, Portugal, Bosnia, Kosovo, and the UK, collaborating with companies such as Ballet BC, Company 605, Magazinist, and the All Bodies Dance Project. Matthew lives on the unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples, including the qʼʷa:n̓ƛʼən̓ (Kwantlen), q̓ic̓əy̓ (Katzie), SEMYOME (Semiahmoo), and sc̓əwaθən məsteyəx (Tsawwassen) Nations.
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