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All Sound Is Queer. The WIRE. London. Issue 333: November 2011.

ALL SOUND IS QUEER1
Drew Daniel
THREE QUEERS WALK INTO A BAR
Three queers walk into a bar. The bar is The Eagle, a leather bar on the fringe
of what used to be Manhattans meatpacking district, now the site of yet more
luxury condos for the hedge fund elite. Its Friday night on Black Party weekend, a
circuit party for the muscle-and-amphetamines set. Queer A is transgender, never
goes to gay bars, nervous as he/she obviously doesnt fit in, but giddy and curious,
happy to be there because of the sheer exoticism of this over-the-top macho
environment. Queer B, in tweeds, is here under duress, actively disliking the
bearded, shirtless, beerswilling demographic. Queer C is me, not hairy enough to be
a bear, nor muscular enough to be a gym queen, but down with sleazy cruising.
Waiting to check our coats, we all hear the same song: Lil Louis French Kiss, a
house track from 1989 that synchs a dramatic tempo drop to a female orgasm which
grinds downwards to a brain-erasing petite morte of pure pleasure and then,
basking in the afterglow, ramps back up to speed again. Its the sort of classic
which you cant not know if youre a faggot of a certain age. Its presence here is no
accident. This must be the place. Theyre playing our song.

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Identitarian gay-pride based musical discourse would fasten upon this

moment as an example of the way that sexuality and music intertwine to make
community and belonging possible, and it would afford a political pay off to the
powerfully binding force of such emotional attachments. Subcultures can adopt
mainstream artists or underground anthems and love them with a fanaticism that
supposedly transubstantiates fandom into a kind of passionately vicarious self-
expression, creating human connections across networks mediated by commodities
like recordings. Its an oft-told story, from opera queens loving Maria Callas to
showtune queens loving Judy Garland to 80s pop fans loving Madonna to baby
dykes loving Bikini Kill to the countless queer fans of the present moment being told
to find--or perhaps even finding-- ratification in episodes of Glee or YouTube clips of
Lady Gaga. Pop music approaches its listeners with the Velvet Undergrounds
promise in mind: Ill Be Your Mirror. Buying into this fantasy, we are asked to see
and hear ourselves within the scenarios and implied identities that our music
affords: shelter from misunderstanding, inclusion in a tribe, recognition, affirmation.
Given the actively homophobic, or merely drab and exploitive, environment in
which so many queers live and work and struggle alongside everybody else, its no
surprise that there are plenty of people eager to invest in such deeply pleasurable
virtual acts of communion. For better and for worse, the shared experience of pop
music can create a we within which to party, cruise, hook up, let off steam,
organize, network, protect, include. Or at least it is supposed to do that.
But a funny thing happened as we waited in line to check our coats: friction.
The experience of being met at the door by Lil Louis was meant to be welcoming,

the first familiar caress of a night of debauchery, a way to get everyone to come
together. It didnt click. It didnt bring A, B, and C together as gay men or as
queers. We werent united. Feeling caught out there by clich as I enjoyed a guilty
pleasure, I was struck by the jarring distance between the female orgasm of the song
and the hypermacho setting in which it played. Was it here to remind us that we
were supposed to be men, or to perfume the shame of an imagined inward
femininity that everyones muscled and tattooed bodies were meant to disavow?
Not worrying about such things, A just chuckled at the songs played-out-ness.
Straight up offended, B voiced his hatred of house music as the de facto genre which
gay men are simply assumed to enjoy. What we shared then as three queers hearing
a house anthem in a safe space was . . . nothing. The implied community supposedly
generated at the crossing of queerness and music is contentious and perhaps
illusory, and only ever happens as virtual force field of antagonisms between
pleasure and boredom, familiarity and surprise, inclusion and exclusion.
At its worst and most alienating, the experience of music generates not
belonging, not identity, not community, but an oppressive experience that another
Lil Louis, French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, termed Hailing.2 His oft-
cited example is the beat cop on the street who calls out: hey you! In so doing, our
identities are conferred onto us and reinforced, kept legible, open to being offered
for inspection to the relevant authorities. Whether we are eagerly customizing our
Facebook profile or waiting in the queue for a passport, we are all good subjects in
the capitalist subject-machine. Like the beat cop calling us out on the street, the
presentation of house music in gay bars performs a similar function of social

subjection: Hey you! You are this kind of person! This is your music! The obligation
to Enjoy! is the ceaseless imperative of the culture industry and it sub-cultural
variants. There are all sorts of places to go and people to be, but so long as one is not
free not to be someone, there is really nowhere else to go, and no one worth being.

Identity is normative: you are a this, I am a that. The identity politics of the

1990s in particular were about claiming visibility, becoming identifiable, showing

up and standing up and being counted, being recognized by implicit watchers,
overseers, and media outlets. Above all, seeing and being seen is politics as usual.
Which is why the bagging and tagging of identities on behalf of a celebration of
difference is a dead end. The celebration of gay and lesbian difference offers no real
alternative to a dominant neoliberal capitalist democratic culture that is only too
happy to reinforce, include, and cater to them all as a dutiful rainbow coalition of
subject-consumers. Which is what makes hearing sound, rather than being hailed by
music, so powerfully odd, and so potentially queer.
By contrast to vision, sound queers identity, and in the process offers a way
out of the hailing game. It does so by being an involuntary solvent of the self. As
everyone knows, you cannot close your ears. Going further than most, Jacques Lacan
declares that we cannot even fantasize an alternative: In the field of the
unconscious, the ears are the only orifice that cannot be closed.3 The promiscuous
open-ness of the ear, a hole that takes all comers, means that we as living systems
are open to and invaded by the world. Sound queers the self/world boundary, all
day, everyday. In so doing, it blurs the edges of any self that the subject-machine

cares to hail; even in the midst of the hey you, heres your house music there are
other noises afoot, other sounds playing, other ways to become something more or
less than one more obedient minority subject.
Which is why talk about gays and lesbians in music ought to productively
shift towards the queerness of sound itself, as both an agent and a solvent of the
political experience of antagonism encountered when hailing fails and the promise
of gay community peters out. Sound- not music but sound- can let us hear what is not
yet locatable on the available maps of identity. Hearing the queerness of sound
might help us echolocate the edges of subjection, and encounter the all that stands
outside the hailing process.
THE SOUND OF THE WORLD
All sound is queer. The all means: any, and each, and their endless
summation, the sound of the world. To hear this sound is to become queered. This is
the lesson we are taught in The House of Sounds, a short story written by the West
Indian pulp author M.P. Shiel in the 1920s. Here is its opening paragraph:
A good many years ago, when a young man, a student in Paris, I knew the
great Carot, and witnessed by his side many of those cases of mind-malady,
in the analysis of which he was such a master. I remember one little maid of
the Marais who, until the age of nine, did not differ from her playmates; but
one night, lying abed, she whispered into her mothers ear: Mama, can you
not hear the sound of the world? It appears that her geography had just
taught her that our globe reels with an enormous velocity on an orbit about
the sun; and this sound of the world of hers was merely a murmur in the ear,
heard in the silence of the night. Within six months, she was as mad as a
March-hare.4

A queer story, this. For what is this openness to the tune and tone of experience, a
twist which inspires horror and confusion in the bystanders who represent the
productive adult world, if not a kind of audio-orientation, a sonosexuality? To hear
too much, to hear what is too quiet, to claim to hear what we all know is not
there to be heard, is to be cut off from the human community. And yet that occurs
not as a flight from the world, but as a flight into the world, a tunneling into the
telluric grounding of the ultimate Earth, the subtone of planetary hum. Heard in this
way, Shiels sound of the world seems somehow both entirely everyday and yet
inhuman, dangerous, seductive, and alien.
We can hear the unacknowledged sound of the world as many things.
Perhaps it is the grinding daily rhythm of alienated labor in the streets and the
factories and the casual temporary contracts of the quasi-employed, the ongoing
hum and hiss of capital that the prevailing distribution of the sensible- to use the
formulation of Jacques Ranciere- encourages us to tune out and ignore.5 Now, after
the bubble and the crash, do we even know what work sounds like?
If music has served to distract us from work, it has also tried to help us hear
the sound of work in a new way. Its rarely quitting time for the musical citation of
labor: the ship engine sequence in Fred Astaires 1937 film Shall We Dance offers a
heavily swung and highly influential fantasy of obedience, while the metallurgical
hammering of Kollaps-era Einstrzende Neubauten (Zick Zack, 1981) brings the
sturm und drang; Annie Gosfelds ensemble work for industrial materials Flying
Sparks and Heavy Machinery (Tzadik, 1999) zooms in upon the material space of

work itself, while the rhythmic labors of the workers in the factory scenes in Bjorks
music for Lars von Triers 2000 film Dancer in the Dark are made critically
complicit in the musical escape fantasy of job-as-song/song-as-job. Working the
other side of the street, the all-singing, all-dancing workforce of the Brighton-to-
Broadway musical theatre franchise Stomp! grin while they grind, sweeping up ad
nauseam for weary tourists. Work is ongoing, all consuming, yet- mostly- outside of
the range of what shows up for us as a sound worth hearing. Work is that which we
know exists and which supports us or eludes us endlessly, but which we either
silence and disavow utterly, or render quaint by harvesting it as a compositional
resource.
But then again, the sound of the world might also be the sound of sex. The
question of how sexuality can be directly transferred or captured as sound is fraught
with the basic problem of where one would delimit the boundaries of such an elastic
term in the first place. Is there a queer pitch to be heard in the synthesized blurs of
Coil, in the tangy alternate tunings of Lou Harrison or Harry Partch? Is there a
sexuality to the care with which Joe Meek mics his vocalists, or the way that John
Cage plucked the needles of a cactus? Or the cries and moans of aktionist noise
performer Sudden Infant? Or does real sex have to be involved? And what would
make sex finally real, anyway? Listening to the recordings of John Duncans
infamous Blind Date, an audio document of an act of necrophilia supposedly
committed in Mexico in 1980 and released on the Pleasure-Escape cassette in
1984, offers a usefully extreme case in point: one cannot co-sign or verify anything
other than the pressure of ones knowledge about its context onto the signal in

question. Is this what necrophilia sounds like, or the sound of someone rummaging
in a pile of clothing and having a good laugh at the listeners expense? On the other
end of the verit spectrum, the falsification of live, consensual acts of carnal
pleasure is an instantly familiar musical-clich that sutures together the
breakdowns of Led Zeppelins Whole Lotta Love (1969), Serge Gainsbourgs Je
Taime . . . Moi Non Plus (1969), Donna Summers Love to Love You Baby (1975),
Throbbing Gristles Catholic Sex (Walter Ulbricht Schallfolien, 1981), Venetian
Snares & Hecates Nymphomatriarch (Hymen, 2003) and countless other orgasm-
as-audio experiences. Quite simply, the implicit epistemological doubt about the
fakery of vocally sounded orgasm troubles every moment of seemingly obvious sex
sound with the shadow of artificiality. Inner and outer vibrations might correspond,
but they might not. The recording moment promises to pin its object securely to our
ears, but that very fidelity is haunted by the transcendental failure of sound to
verifiably align itself with the signs we use to describe it. This possibility of betrayal,
always open, never sure, constitutes the queerness of the sonic- its failure to show
up, reliably, as sex. And that too undoes the theory that the sound of the world
which the little girl hears is, really, the sound of sexuality erupting.
Let us take the speculative thrusts and thought-experiments of weird
fiction and science fiction at their word. What if the capacity to hear the sound of
the world is neither the effect of the repression of work nor the effect of the
repression of sex, but something else: what if there really is something there, that
we are trained to ignore? Describing his attacks of precognitive psychic ability, the
narrator of George Eliots supernatural novella The Lifted Veil, chimes in: It was like

a preternaturally heightened sense of hearing, making audible to one a roar of

sound where others find perfect stillness.6 Shiels little girl or Eliots psychic
medium are not particular cases, mad as March hares, but people who have failed to
accede to the prevalent distribution of the sensible, and so attain to and access the
sound of the world itself, potentially open to all. Who are we to disavow what they
hear?
What these examples from literature, film and music collectively
demonstrate is the territorializing force of human language and human knowledge
upon the raw, inhuman fact of sound as a vibrational force. To hear the sound of the
world as capital, to hear the sound of the world as sexuality, even to hear the sound
of the world as the a-signifying outburst of the inhuman real, in each case
presupposes a certain stance towards the sonic, a conceptual a priori which leans
into sound in search of a meaning, a thrust, a tint, a fundamental frequency. Its a
neat little feedback loop, a vicious circle: perception produces knowledge, and
knowledge filters perception. I cant hear the world turning until I know that the
world turns; but once I know the world turns and claim to hear that fact, questions
emerge: am I hearing my mind, the world, or some misleading combination of the
two? To hear and to know what one hears are in a constant battle for priority, and
there is no possible neutrality here. The world makes a sound as it turns or it does
not. There is something to hear or there is not.
But how would we know? And how might an attachment to knowing, to the
secure grounding of verification and proof, itself constitute a way of protecting

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ourselves from the queer surrender of simply listening to the voices of those who
testify to the theft of their labor or listening to the voices of those who testify to the
pleasures of their bodies or the queer surrender of simply letting the vibrational
forces of the world enter us? These are queer stories not because they recount a
momentary realization that isolates a young person from their playmates with the
stigma of difference, and thus resemble the basic coming out narrative (though
they do resemble that). Rather, they are queer because all sound is queer, and the
fact of the sound of the world its universality, not its difference-- ruptures the
commonsense of normative, straight life. It is in the recalcitrance of its universal
and inhuman force that the insistent queerness of sound might offer a resource for
politics and a challenge to aesthetics. Could a new art and a new politics instruct us
to listen harder and better? To stand at odds with the expectations that tend to
govern this very magazine and its readership, might that listening require us to
listen more, yet, perversely, to know less about what we encounter? Conversely,
might listening to and for this universally available yet elusive sound of the world
occasion a re-distribution of the sensible, and, with it, a differently oriented art
practice and a keener sense of political hearing?
A COLLECTIVE SCREAMING
Against this opportunity, there stands an army of hypermobile counterforces,
seductive cottonballs which stuff the ears and dull the edge of what sound offers.
Theyre called words, and I too, dislike them. Sound is a given material plenum of
vibration, an unbroken and continuously self-different surge of turbulent

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information and noise, always there, a cascade of never-ending waveforms, subject

to change, part of a continuum of vibration that precedes and exceeds the spectrum
of audibility. Pulling into and out of range, breaking and building bonds in the
process, sound claims us. But as we know and name, we tame the queerness of
sound with nominalist labels that partition and de-intensify the raw queerness of
the sonic on behalf of the empire of signs. Here sound turns against itself, the
partitioned sound-symbol-signs replacing and effacing the flow of the sonic.
But queer encounters with sound still happen. In the night, I am roused from
dreams by a collective screaming. The night is torn by cries that pour forth from a
permeable darkness. Where do these hidden choruses begin? Who makes up the we
in which I am now entangled against my will? Pulling at the curtains to look out into
the street I see that the bare tree in front of the hospital suddenly has leaves again.
Adjusting, coming back to consciousness, I look again and see that they are not
leaves, but gigantic crows, whose croaks and shrieks have stopped me from
sleeping, again. Of course, its only the birds. The sound of the world shrinks back,
tamed, relocated within a bestiary, taxonomized, found.
My attempt to sleep is a withdrawal into a privacy of self-ownership in
violation of the porosity of the body to its world, a little nocturnal secession from
participation which these masterless and inhuman ambassadors from the plenitude
of sound have summarily revoked. Without consent and in despite of the
economically and politically defined property rights which would delineate what is
my own and protect me from such invasion and violation, I have been included in

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the sound of crows in the night, enlisted into the murder in my midst. The
indifference of animal being to my desires puts us into a partnership without
community. We have nothing in common, yet here we are, together in the night,
sounder and sounded.
It had to happen, both the release of sound and its capture into the sign. As I
see and recognize and know and name the mysterious screaming as crow sound, I
become a second Adam, asserting dominion over creation through the sorrowful
descent into language. But I wish to rewind to the moment of confusion, the
primordial chaos in which the sound is within me and I am ignorant, in the dark,
traversed by vibrations I cannot yet place, cannot yet hear as the sound of crows. To
a moment of knowledge to come which opens out a potentiality contained in Steve
Goodmans purloined translation of Spinoza and Deleuze: We do not yet know what
a sonic body can do.7 What can be made portable from that moment on behalf of a
queer politics and a queer aesthetics of listening to and with the world? When faced
with the hailing call of French Kiss upon entry to the local gay bar, could it be as
simple as cracking open a window so that the crows can invade the Eagle, and
disrupt the house music and the identity politics-as-usual with a multi-species
Parliament of Fowls of their own? Less bears, more birds?
I am not talking about a top-down form of charitably anthropomorphizing
solidarity which would consist in my electing to speak for, or with crows, thus
magnanimously broadening the scene of political representation across the species
barrier. The crows do not seek the vote, nor have they asked if I care to hear their

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screams, nor do I acquire some honorific new status as their insomniac

eavesdropper. They too live within the city, and their sounds in the night
obnoxiously insist upon their presence, without regard, referendum or respite. In
the spirit of Jane Bennetts Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, I have in
mind a chastening encounter with the minimal political agency of the crows as my
neighbors along an ever expanding rollcall of vital materialist presence within the
city. The sonic disruption of crow-sound can re-shuffle who appears within that
community, but it can also fail to have any other effect whatsoever beyond its own
dissemination into space. Thus its virulent queerness.
We can hear this sound of non-communication and purposelessness in an
ironic moment of failed animal mimicry: the climax of Josef von Sternbergs 1930
film The Blue Angel, when Emil Jannings as Professor Immanuel Rath reaches his
rock bottom of degradation and madness, and, now turned clown, is pressed into
service as a human sound effect by his mocking employers. Expected to make a
cock-a-doodle doo noise as a gag at a precise point in a skit put on for his former
colleagues, Rath/Jannings erupts instead with a hideously in-human gargle, a
grating outburst which leaps past any particular emotion and achieves a kind of ur-
sound of pure affective charge. To be sure, one could claim that this sound above all
was saturated with plot significance: it is the character-driven expression of his
impotent rage at being cuckolded by Lola (Marlene Dietrich). But if we hear it as a
moment of raw sound intruding into the texture of the film, this noise manifests a
pure sonic expression that goes beyond even the timbre/music borderline
phenomena which Roland Barthes termed The Grain of the Voice.8 Barthes, alert

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to the point of contact between music and language, sought to re-define what would
count as the musical object in the first place- and in his analysis of operatic voices
he coined the distinction between pheno-song and geno-song to capture minute
shades of distinction in musical performances. But to capture the point at which
Emil Jannings throat queerly opens onto the ragged terrain of something that isnt
culturally specific or even species-specific, we shall have to abandon music in favor
of the sonic as such. Instead of the vowels and phonemes of this or that language,
when we hear Emil Jannings human bird call we hear something beyond emotion,
language, and humanity: the material sound of air ferociously barked out of a tube of
quivering flesh.
Of course, animal practices of soundmaking are not in any sense purposeless:
signals can warn of the approach of predators, announce ones presence for mating
purposes, rebound upon space as part of an echolocation system, mimic the sound
of a more successful organism, and so on. Living systems which eat, mate, and
predate upon others are hardly indifferent. Even a cursory listen to the sounds of
vultures feeding on a dead zebra captured on Chris Watsons Outside the Circle of
Fire (Touch, 1998) or the sounds of Weddell seal mothers nurturing their pups on
Douglas Quins Antarctica (Miramar, 1998) will convey the intentionality of animal
soundmaking on its own intimate terms. But it is even here that the sonic as a
manifold detaches from its causal connections to sources in intentional
performances from interested parties, human, animal or otherwise. The sound of
the world can be a truck passing by, it can be a parade of drunken frat boys, it can be
the twist of tree branches in the wind, the settling of leaves upon themselves, the

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crush of contrary air currents within the clouds, or it can be the nameless, colorless,
ambient drone of a nonspecific continuum of animate and inanimate matter
expressing nothing but its own being. Sound stands aside from the purposes and
aims which occasion its production. It is indifferent, universal, and queer.
Going further, practices of recording, archiving and storage, in severing that
immanent occasion from its audio outcome, render everything potentially
acousmatic, autonomous, adrift. All that is needed is to break the linguistic bond of
referentiality that ties source to waveform. Consider how the Dalmatian fishing
village immortalized in Luc Ferraris Presque Rien (INA-GRM, 1970), or the desert
insect preserved within Hildegard Westerkamps Cricket Voice (1987) would
sound if they were robbed of their respective signifiers of village and insect and
were instead set free to be themselves, prior to any identification, prior to their
entirely justified canonization as enduring classics of sound art annexed to an
ecology of preservation. Queerness abides in the refusal to preserve, in the
willingness to enter the space of ruinous, risky anonymity, to let sound pull us with
it into the black hole of an experience that is not yet stable. No fixed co-ordinates to
locate us in geopolitical space, no identifiable genus and species left to taxonomize.
Where the labels come off and the designation of particularity ends and the sound of
the world subsumes and dissolves, it is there that the queer universality of sound
makes itself available to thought, not as some ineffable audio-mysticism, but as the
way we already hear, all day and all night long.

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Purposeless indifference to production would then be one of the hallmarks of

the queerness of the sonic in itself, an orthogonal digression from intentionality and
subjectivity which Alain Badiou calls, in the second of his Fifteen Theses on
Contemporary Art: the impersonal production of a truth that is addressed to
everyone.9 At once micro and macro, the sound of the world turning resonates and
resounds whether you are listening or not, and it is addressed to all. A vibrational
ontology manifests the oscillations and Lucretian swerves of material being,
whether you have ears to hear it or not. You dont need to know what you are
hearing to be moved, even changed, by what you hear. Sometimes, this
purposelessness emerges for someone who detects its very transience and is
changed by the sheer fact of passage. Zarathustras Convalescent attests to this as
sound momentarily upstages self: For me- how could there be something outside
me? There is no outside! But we forget this with all sounds; how lovely it is that we
forget! . . . In every Instant being begins; round every Here rolls the ball. There. The
middle is everywhere.10 Sound intrudes upon us with the fact of the world, an
intrusion which affords us the possibility of forgetting our me-ist attachments to
our subjective particularity and affiliation and instead forces us to register the
everywhere of an ongoing being, an outside where we thought there was no outside.
Yet it is this recognition of an outside which, as it becomes transmissible and
shareable, might also constitute our human community as precisely the queer
indifference of having nothing-in-common.
Sound, the confusing eruption of the sonic into our life, can reinforce our
privacy, our alone-ness. But it is also shared and shareable, and thus makes possible

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a certain kind of collectivity, or better, a perceptual community that we share

together by remaining perpetually open to the world beyond that community.
Sound constitutes a common pluriverse for its auditory recipients who partition
and co-create that world in and through sound through sonic practices of spoken
language and music-making. Yet the capacity of sound to exceed the human, in its
ongoing expansion of frequencies above and below the human boundaries of 20 to
20,000 hz also manifests a purposeless surplus, a superabundance, an inhuman
exteriority that precedes that world and resists capture in the terms set by human
hearing. Heard beyond its own bounds, this pervasive and non-specific sound of the
world signals the fact of a grounding material indifference that potentially breaks
mind-dependent phenomenological scenarios upon a hard kernel of the real. Thus,
community is both the positive assemblage of partitionings made within the sound-
plenum by the total set of actors included within it (human beings, citizens, slaves,
immigrants, corporate advertising, sound art), and the fact of a nihilistic exposure to
a sonic remainder that is implacably indifferent to those partitions, folds and forms
(crows, planets, magnetic resonance, VLF interference generated by weather
phenomena, and, yes, that old standby of philosophical smalltalk, the tree in the
forest that falls with no one to hear it).

Having reached the widest possible theoretical bandwidth and the lowest

common denominator in a single bound, let us return to the gay bar in which Lil
Louis French Kiss plays on. How might a capacity to listen for the sound of the
world obtain here? Is there something not just reassuringly gay but indifferently
queer about this overcoded anthem? Must we abandon the pleasurable familiarity of

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this dancefloor chestnut in order to hear the sound of the world that supposedly lies
beyond or behind it? The risk of arguments such as the one I have been pursuing is
that it will be misunderstood as a transcendental declaration that there is a
somewhere else and a something else that is better than the limited and oppressive
world of music and the cultures of human knowledge that contain, capture and
domesticate the raw queerness of sound. Like all transcendental arguments, this can
have the effect of soiling and rejecting what we have all around us in favor of an
elsewhere, a heavenly domain of purity, which we cannot really access, except in
traumatic and exciting flashes of insight.
But music too is part of the sound of the world. Human making and human
knowing falls within the open, endlessly plural totality of the world, and it too, can
show up as queer for us, queer in its articulation of material being, in its fusion of
what is human with what merely is. There is, then, a latent inhumanity within even
the human which is not the fact of our moral failing but the fact of our sheer
materiality, our continuity with the world we use and change. As Jane Bennett
points out in Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things with reference to our
carbon composition; we are walking, talking minerals.11 That is what links the
grinding tectonic plates that generate the sound of the world for M.P. Shiels little
girl with the grain of the voice in Emil Jannings bird-croak with the grain of the voice
in the orgasmic moans of Shawn Christopher, the vocalist on French Kiss. Even her
histrionic and theatrical cries of passion are so much air shoved through a tube of
meat which is within the world, and the magical synchronization of her moans and
sighs with the ramping down and ramping up of the tempo of the drum machine

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embodies a kind of synthetic silicon/flesh interface which dissolves their

boundaries. Beyond sexual difference, the song registers an even deeper ontological
continuum between stomping drum machine and coming human being, suggesting
that the electrons pulsing through circuitry in the drum machine and the neurons
firing in the ganglia of Shawn Christophers brain are somehow the same, deep
down, in their essential physical reality as electromagnetic charge. To take up a
buzzword much bandied about within recent metaphysics in the wake of Bruno
Latour and Graham Harman, humans and machines are all located within a flat
ontology, a continuum of being which levels down distinctions about what is more
or less important, more or less actualized, by advocating for what Levi Bryant terms
the democracy of objects within a pluriverse of worlds.12 Sound is queer because
this continuum of being is, in its very indifference to human agendas of valuation,
already queer. All sound is queer because the world itself is queer. The totality of
vibrational force is not a deep secret hiding at the margins but, exactly, a totality
that includes everything we as humans do. Accordingly, the choice between
listening to Lil Louis and listening to the sound of the world, is, at the very least, a
false choice. Here history has the last laugh. Club Lonely, the follow up single to
French Kiss is credited not to Lil Louis, but to Lil Louis & The World.

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1 This essay was originally published as All Sound Is Queer. The WIRE. London.
Issue 333: November 2011. Given the journalistic context of a popular forum, citation was
kept to a minimum.
2 Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. Lenin and
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3 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Ed. Jacues-Alain
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4 M.P. Shiel The House of Sounds. The House of Sounds and Others, Ed. S. T. Joshi,
New York: Hippocampus Press, 2005, 53.
5 Jacques Ranciere, The Distribution of the Sensible: Politics and Aesthetics, The
Politics of Aesthetics, Trans. Gabriel Rockhill, London: Continuum, 2004, 19.
6 George Eliot, The Lifted Veil, Hoboken: Melville House Publishing, 31.
7 Steve Goodman, Unsound- the (Sub)Politics of Frequency. Sonic Warfare: Sound,
Affect, and the Ecology of Fear, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010, 191.
8 Roland Barthes, The Grain of the Voice. Image Music Text. Trans. Stephen Heath.
London: Fontana Press, 1977, 181.
9 Alain Badiou, Fifteen Theses On Contemporary Art. Lacanian Ink 22.
10 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Convalescent. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Trans. Adrian
Del Caro. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006, 175.
11 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Chapel Hill: Duke
University Press, 2009, 11.
12 Graham Harman, Object Oriented Philosophy, Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour
and Metaphysics, 207, 14.; Levi Bryant, The Democracy of Objects, University of
Michigan Press, 2011.