Future Sounds: The Temporality of Noise.

摘要

According to its introduction, Kennedy's volume sets out to speculate about an "atemporal realm" collapsing critical distance, which is expected to produce the "ability to reliably predict what is yet to come." What would be the academic value of such trendspotting or futurism if it came at the price of oblivion or ignorance about what preceded it? Who decides (and how) whether such predictions are reliable if there is no critical distance or precedent in this atemporal realm? In a few pages, we encounter Foucault and Lefebvre, Attali and Whitehead, plus glancing references to Shaviro, Nancy, Virilio, Fukuyama, Thrift, Harman, Heidegger, Derrida, and a loop via Bergson and Bachelard back to Attali. Yet with the exception of Attali, none of the works invoked address sound or music or noise, and there is no acknowledgement of the fact that many of the names dropped are incompatible. This is noise of a different sort: the dissonance of suppressed, unexplored disagreements between systems of thought, intoning radically different political, aesthetic, conceptual, and methodical positions. It might have interested the intended readers of this volume in a Sound Studies series to consider these thinkers' sense of the acoustic register, but that kind of mapping of the theoretical terrain never happens here.