Christoph Cox

Beyond Representation and Signification: Toward a Sonic Materialism

Why does sound art remain so profoundly undertheorized, and why has it failed to generate a rich and compelling critical literature? It is because the prevailing theoretical models are inadequate to it. Developed to account for the textual and the visual, they fail to capture the nature of the sonic. In this article, the author proposes an alternative theoretical framework, a materialist account able to grasp the nature of sound and to enable analysis of the sonic arts. He suggests, moreover, that this theoretical account can provide a model for rethinking the arts in general and for avoiding the pitfalls encountered in theories of representation and signification.

Sound art and the sonic unconscious

This essay develops an ontology of sound and argues that sound art plays a crucial role in revealing this ontology. I argue for a conception of sound as a continuous, anonymous flux to which human expressions contribute but which precedes and exceeds these expressions. Developing Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s conception of the perceptual unconscious, I propose that this sonic flux is composed of two dimensions: a virtual dimension that I term ‘noise’ and an actual dimension that consists of contractions of this virtual continuum: for example, music and speech. Examining work by Max Neuhaus, Chris Kubick, Francisco Lopez and others, I suggest that the richest works of sound art help to disclose the virtual dimension of sound and its process of actualisation.

A questionnaire on materialisms

Recent philosophical tendencies of “Actor-Network Theory,” “Object-Oriented Ontology,” and “Speculative Realism” have profoundly challenged the centrality of subjectivity in the humanities, and many artists and curators, particularly in the UK, Germany, and the United States, appear deeply influenced by this shift from epistemology to ontology. October editors asked artists, historians, and philosophers invested in these projects—from Graham Harman and Alexander R. Galloway to Armen Avanessian and Patricia Falguières to Ed Atkins and Amie Siegel—to explore what the rewards and risks of assigning agency to objects may be, and how, or if, such new materialisms can be productive for making and thinking about art today.

Sonic Realism and Auditory Culture: A Reply to Marie Thompson and Annie Goh

The emergence of ‘sound studies’ over the past few decades marks a welcome theoretical development to which the special issue of parallax, ‘Sounding/Thinking’ (vol. 23, no. 3 [2017]), offers new contributions. Yet several essays in this issue widen an unfortunate rift that has developed in this new field, a rift between two tendencies that Brian Kane has called ‘sonic ontology’ and ‘auditory cultural studies’. While sonic ontologists claim to investigate the nature of sound itself, proponents of auditory culture explore sound in specific cultural and social contexts. Critics of sonic ontology (including Kane and, in ‘Sounding/Thinking’, Marie Thompson and Annie Goh) argue that there is no such thing as the nature of sound or that, if there is, it is inaccessible to human beings, who always inhabit particular subject positions and are situated within specific auditory cultures that shape and frame what sound is and does. In an essay published in 2011, I challenged this position and in so doing inadvertently fueled the rift between sonic ontology and cultural studies of sound. Here I want to clarify that I conceive ontology and cultural analysis to be complementary rather than adversarial projects.

Aura Satz in conversation with Christoph Cox, April/May 2017

A conversation between Aura Satz and Christoph Cox, exploring sirens and emergency signals, acoustic ecology, and economies of attention. Aura Satz is a film-maker and sound artist who has performed, exhibited and screened her work nationally and internationally, including at Tate Modern; Oberhausen Short Film Festival (Oberhausen); the Rotterdam Film Festival (Rotterdam); the New York Film Festival (NY); Gallery 44 (Toronto); InterCommunication Centre (Tokyo) and the Sydney Biennale. In 2012, she was shortlisted for the Samsung Art+ Award and the Jarman Award. She teaches at the Royal College of Art, London. She was in conversation with Christoph Cox, a philosopher, critic, and curator who teaches at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. He is the author of Sonic Flux: Sound, Art, and Metaphysics (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming) and Nietzsche: Naturalism and Interpretation (University of California Press, 1999), and co-editor of Realism Materialism Art (Sternberg, 2015) and Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music (Continuum, 2004/Bloomsbury, 2017). Cox is editor-at-large at Cabinet magazine. His writing has appeared in numerous journals including October, Artforum, Journal of the History of Philosophy, Journal of Visual Culture, The Review of Metaphysics. He has curated exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, The Kitchen, CONTEXT Art Miami and other venues.