"I Am I Be": The Subject of Sonic Afro-modernity

We clamor for the right to opacity for everyone.

—Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation

And let us not insist upon the optic metaphor which opens up every theoretical view under the sun.

—Jacques Derrida, White Mythology

Sounds go through the muscles
these abstract wordless movements
they start off cells that haven't been touched before
. . . waking up slowly.

—Björk Gudmundsdóttir, "Headphones," from Post

 

Surely "the subject" represents one of the more embattled concepts in the recent history of the Anglo-American humanities; structuralist and poststructuralist discourses were almost singularly concerned with dissolving and/or resituating the self-same subject (in some cases putting it under erasure) as it appeared in Western thinking, idealist philosophy in particular. The main thrust of these debates troubled the coherence and unmediated presence of this subject, seeking to displace the subject as the uncontested center in a variety of thought systems, with varying structures (linguistic, anthropological, political, psychic, economic, and so forth), or, in the poststructuralist case, rendered visible the fissures, traces, and ruptures contained within and undermining these very structures that enabled the subject's intelligibility, and, therefore, constrained its ability to appear as the center from which all movements flow. If the advent of structuralism and its ensuing postformations provide one of the crucial reformulations of the humanities project since the 1960s, then the coming to the fore of "minority discourses" stands as the other major shift in this context. Although some scholars, for example, Hortense J. Spillers and Sylvia Wynter, have thought these two developments together fruitfully, usually they are perceived as mutually exclusive, at least contradictory. In most instances, however—and this bears stressing—the two processes are not thought related at all. ¹ One version of this argument discerns the irony in the dissolution, and perhaps even abandonment, of the subject as a category of critical thinking, just as "minority" subjects are being recognized as subjects within academic discourse; in fact, the uttering of minority and subject in the same breath seems counterintuitive, if not paradoxical. ² While this essay surely does not seek to undermine this particular claim here, or reinstate an earlier and more innocent version of the subject, I would like to take the occasion to think about the subject from the perspective of the "minoritarian" with this particular critique in mind. In that vein, I refer to "black studies" as opposed to more specified forms of Afro-diasporic thought to keep concerns of institutionality in mind, since neither of these forces can be disarticulated from the other. Furthermore, while I focus primarily on black studies for the purposes of this argument, many of these points pertain to other forms of racialized minority discourse in the U.S. academy as well. These reflections will be preceded by a discussion of how sound recording and reproduction figure in twentieth-century black culture, followed by an analysis of the prologue of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, in which I examine the way he imagines a subject of "sonic Afro-modernity." Ellison constructs a model of subjectivity in relation to sound technologies, which bears witness to specificities of black life while also gesturing toward a more general condition of Western modernity. I use the playful yet germane phrase "I am I be" as a shorthand that garners its argumentative and evocative force via juxtaposition and facilitates both the magnification of the putative gulf that divides "subjectivity" and "identity" within current academic discursive formations as well as their suggested compatibility within the context of my own argument. ³ In other words, by linking "I be" as a linguistic instantiation of Afro-diasporic particularity (identity) and the normative declaration "I am" (subjectivity) without the interruption of punctuation worries the manner in which these two modalities are routinely construed as mutual exclusives rather than as coeval.

Sonic Afro-modernity

The invention of technological sound recording in the form of the phonograph at the end...