The apocryphal scene of Haitian revolutionary forces singing “La Marseillaise” (Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle) as they march out against Napoleon Bonaparte’s expeditionary army has proved an irresistible emblem not only of universal freedom but of the dialectical movement by which it comes about. Slavoj Žižek tells us that this rendition of the anthem betrays a misunderstanding on the part of the rebel army, a misinterpellation that inadvertently corrects the substantive shortcomings of the French actualization of the 1789 Declaration asserting liberty and equality for all. Those voices raised in song not only adopted “La Marseillaise,” they perfected it, showing the Haitians to be “more French than…the Frenchmen.” 

In this talk I join Žižek, Susan Buck-Morss and others in fascination around this image-concept, paying particular care in reconstructing its soundscape. I restore both the African accents that break and reset the adopted/imposed French, and those native tongues of the recently shipped bossales. My retelling with its polyphonic blur, suggestive of “laws of historical movement” (Adorno) not proper to the dialectic, does not deny Žižek’s understanding of the nascent state as an apotheosis of the universal freedom project. It does, however, call for some attention to be paid to that in the soundscape, unable to be contained by such. I consider how Žižek’s Haiti is dislimned by these African accents and languages, a glory halo or Brocken specter of subterranean and exalted sound, what Fred Moten might call “outer noise,” that speaks of a capacity for concurrent play in distinct temporalities, rather (or much more) than the presence of an alternate (African) pulse. Frustrating the European universal and its universal dialecticism, Haiti’s infrasonic boom is the out-of-range sound made by the logical exorbitance, “to think at the same time dialectically and un-[or para-]dialectically” (Adorno).

As a concept, unknowability is a watchword that signals radical intervention, challenges to the usual ways-and-means for coming to grips with musical sounds, works, and events—ways that have proven inadequate to the demands of the present, or to any reckoning with the fact that race, gender, and identities (and their intersections with music), are not simply subject to analysis, but themselves produce ex-centric ways of knowing about music.  Unknowability coexists in seeming harmony with ideas about unfixing and de-ontologizing the subject, decentering theory.  It belongs to a sizeable class of warm-temperature words—standing for intellectual actions—that signpost a way forward: vibrational, resonant, sensuousness, heterochronicity, dismantling, un-disciplining, loosening, improvisational.  But what would fidelity to unknowability truly entail?  Like ineffability, unknowability can be effortlessly converted to something with academic use value.

My point is not to underline the obvious, which is that these warm-temperature words, the alternative ways-and-means they invoke, are not immune to slipping into place as novel axioms, new acceptable universals, albeit axioms that are imagined as a counterpoise to Western empiricism and its epistemological blinders. Instead, I want to push against the idea that musical experiences and practices have efficacy—the capacity to transform listeners, model ethical behaviors—and that this efficacy is knowable.  That assumption seems unremarkable; it underpins, for example, many foundational assumptions in Critical Improvisation Studies.  Yet consider this: the efficacy of music—the scene where a song changes everything—is a familiar showpiece in opera and film. And I always think, if opera presents something fantastic as reality, you might want to develop some general skepticism about the idea.

Finally, there is an alchemy in the experience of musical sound, where affect—the way in which a listener reacts to a musical event, the cognitive, neurological effects, the associational firestorm—mysteriously becomes an action the listener has taken, an ethical behavior practiced, which will not be realized or extended into the real world, after the music is over, because the simulacrum has been sufficient. Hypostatization of music-making as transformational, the very passion with which we espouse this notion, suggests an underlying doubt.  Finally, this consideration of phantom efficacy can point towards forward-facing musicological ways and means, where acknowledging unknowability inspires reticence, clearing a space for listening attentively to previously silenced or sidelined sounds.

In the context of Black life’s tether to Black Death, Christina Sharpe defines “the wake” as a consciousness that arises from sitting with and listening to the dead. This practice (both literally and metaphorically), what she calls “wake work”, prefigures a recuperative praxis of “care” that moves the ethical imperative of scholarship beyond justice and toward a paradigm of lateral relation, with implications for the sonic. Sharpe’s notion of “defending the dead” bears deep resonances with Derrida’s description of the hauntological as holding open a space for a necessary and ethical taking “responsibility” for past and future ghosts (especially victims of various “kinds of exterminations”). Both Derrida and Sharpe (and their intellectual kin) deploy the non-living as a means of insisting on conceptual configurations that can account for the paradoxes of our present (or our present as overlapping paradoxes). This presentation takes the aquatic register of Sharpe’s approach to the paradoxical present as an invitation to think simultaneously about, with, and beyond oceans, islands, and their specters.

Scholars of Black music have identified the “duppy” (Jamaican patois for ghost or spirit) as the master metaphor for dub music’s doubling, deconstruction, and reconstruction of prior sounds, which set the methodological and sonic groundwork for contemporary global popular music. Staging brief visits to other islands of the Caribbean and the unfathomable depths of the sea around them, this paper conjures the Leeward archipelago’s “jumbie” (another term for a haunting spirit) and the practice of moko jumbie (mock-jumbies who dance on stilts during carnival celebrations to scare away unwanted, malevolent spirits). Heeding Sharpe’s call to think with our ghosts, it mines the fragmented, speculative, archipelagic archive of sonic entanglements (including sayings, songs, and sermons) between the living and the undead. Where recent music scholarship has been consumed by how (or if) we might better represent music in our contemporary global landscape, the characteristically paradoxical “sunken cordillera” of the Caribbean, a region of the world Kevin Yelvington has described as “an origin-point of the modern global system,” may be of use.

This talk is a thought experiment provoked by a “haunting question”: Why isn’t the Haitian Revolution the paradigm for western music history of the last two “long” centuries, the way the French Revolution is? Why isn’t the only successful revolution against colonial slavery—a historically singular struggle unto death, by those already condemned to social death, for recognition of their humanity—the axiom for a radically dispersed and generalized historiographical project of defining and redefining music’s relationship to human liberation, freedom, and flourishing?

I initially engage these questions through the frame of spectrality, specifically a psychoanalytic “return of the repressed.” Rather than argue for Haiti’s fuller inclusion or better representation within an allegedly well-intentioned and increasingly “capacious” western music history, I instead argue that precisely this is not possible; Haiti is already included as a pre-conditional exclusion, an “unknown known” haunting a musical history of freedom whose unfolding requires its ceaseless erasure and disavowal; see Gibbs, Taruskin 2018; Burkholder, Grout, Palisca 2019; Kerman, Tomlinson 2019; et al. Such erasure and disavowal are easy enough to track in canonical monuments of the western classical traditions, but minor objects may tell us more. I argue that Schubert’s 1828 Lied “Der Doppelgänger,” superficially a portrait of neurotic misery, can also be heard as an inversion of the Romantic trope of the double itself: the double here is not the saboteur-commander of the subject it doubles, but rather enslaved by the subject, a tormented engine denied all humanity and agency, powering the Lied’s neurotic fantasy with its silent “wringing of hands”—the song’s only act of labor, necessary so that the singer-subject can enjoy full human being, the freedom to sing its misery. This trope is remarkably durable; the 2022 film Tár can be seen and heard as an ambitious extension, superficially a “timely take” on cancel culture, but more capaciously, a parable about Western classical music’s auditory repressed and their catastrophic return.

If psychoanalytic spectrality invites such hearings, however, it does not leave us there. It produces a further fork in the historiographical road, between an Afropessimist reading (Wilderson 2020) that asserts the violence always already predicating bourgeois-colonial fantasies of freedom; and an invitation to insurgent new universalisms (Táíwò 2022, Getachew 2019, Brooks 2021) that might point the way to a modern music history beyond the logic of spectrality itself.

In November 2021, the San Diego TRUST Coalition, a group of community leaders from southeast neighborhoods, successfully lobbied City Council to drop the San Diego Police Department’s $1 million contract with ShotSpotter Flex, an acoustic surveillance technology using microphone arrays and GPS to “pinpoint” gunshots and relay location data to dispatchers and squad cars. This distinguished San Diego from over a hundred US cities that integrate ShotSpotter sensors into surveillance networks. The Coalition characterized ShotSpotter as a recipe for police escalation that rendered Black and Brown neighborhoods sites for disastrous technological experiments. As geographer Andrew Merill has shown, ShotSpotters protract gunshots well past the instant of acoustic detection. They generate data trails with locations and responses that produce risk models and feed back into predictive police logics within the racialized and neocolonial domination of urban space. ShotSpotter weaponizes spectral information to reassert the intelligibility of bodies and objects and to foreclose countervailing evidence. Yet unsurprisingly, spectral analysis employed in ShotSpotter’s “acoustic fingerprinting” struggles to distinguish gunshots from fireworks, nail guns or jackhammers. How can spectral analysis be contested between power, acoustics, and data within anti-surveillance politics?

This paper considers how spectral attention functions within a volatile mixture of technologies and structural forces—law, policy, gentrification, neocolonial development—to produce modes of everyday listening animated by desires for police power. In online neighborhood fora like Facebook and Nextdoor, self-deputized white majorities generate hyperlocal spectral pedagogies that attempt to localize explosive acoustical events, effectively redoubling ShotSpotter’s purported function. Users generate homegrown spectral morphologies that give aural expression to what political theorist Geo Maher calls “white fear,” a “perilous quantity” structured by fantasies about being both under siege and proximate to intervention with impunity. Such fantasies enroll spectral listening in structures that Mark Neocleous calls the “social police,” which fabricate a version of social order in which “police not only preserve the law, but make and remake it.” Oriented within sound studies, feminist STS and anti-police organizing, this paper seeks out spectral modes of listening through which perceptual, embodied, and affective continuity with policing and surveillance networks can be undone.

Specters of past inequities haunt the present, envoicing historical silences for those willing and able to attend to them. At the same time, these very ghosts have helped to predetermine a volatile ecological future of inexorably increasing precarity and ever-attenuating habitability, a future whose inevitability seeps into and cathects present and past alike.

This presentation, a staged encounter hocketing wildly between pragmatism and speculation, considers the spectrality of this future to be a relatively new affect in the history of music and sound studies–as the sensuous unfolding of ecological crisis occupies a scale incommensurable with the human-sized spatialities and temporalities of most sound-centered investigations (Chakrabarty 2009). In whose name and through what means do we lend our ears and voices to a sonorous world that is the preverberation (Helmreich 2016) of human absence? How can the study of musicking co-exist with the awareness of an end-of-the-world that is already underway—an end that musicking itself may have hastened as well as chronicled? (Daughtry 2020) Is it still possible, under the current conditions, to maintain music scholarship’s loving curatorial relationship with our musical pasts, its caring encounters with music praxes the world over, and its commitment to recovering unheard and unheeded voices from the margins? Can we do so while also attending to the inhuman expressions of a volatile biosphere that has been thoroughly “humanized” (read: toxified)? How does resource depletion everywhere coexist with the contemporary hyperabundance of musical “everywhens”?

Resolving these contradictions and paradoxes starts with acknowledging our own spectrality today. We reckon with this spectrality by enstranging two familiar spheres—vocality and aurality—and retooling them to suit the task of maintaining affective ties and intimate relationships in the face of irreversible loss. We conceive vocality in posthuman, atmospheric terms as a consequential movement of air that renders disparate environments co-vulnerable (Daughtry 2021). We conceive aurality as a sensuous mediation between bodies, worlds, and definitions of life (Ochoa Gautier 2014, Feld 2020). We deploy aurality as a tenuous practice for reaching out toward the inaudible voices of our ecological future.

Shortly before his death, the avowed son of the last castrato, Giulio Moreschi (1904-1955), was busy orchestrating a careful bequest of his paternal inheritance (including recordings and a gramophone), working to suture a wounded lineage while ensuring that both he and his father would return to the living as revenants. Giulio’s concern for his afterlife still reverberates in his descendants. My conversations with them show they understand themselves as haunted by repetitions and phantoms. In a gesture of future repair, they have worked to preserve the archive of their castrato great grandfather Alessandro Moreschi (1858-1922) and transmuted a large old family tomb into a photographic gallery of four generations of the dead. Complexly registered in such acts and verbal accounts, their hauntings also consciously echo the hauntological theories of Derrida’s mentors, psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, as filtered through popular transgenerational theories. They are also expressed in the manuscript memoir of Alessandro’s great-granddaughter, which intermixes mourning and melancholia over her maternal family with descriptions of the occult pathways she explored with her paternal uncle Federico Fellini.

Any attempt to account for a castrato legacy will run aground on the perpetuum mobile of intergenerational displacements and dispersions that ensue as repressed memories, broken lineages, and future longings cause temporalities to double over. The castrato-(as)-subject defeats linear description because his fragile ontology merges with colonial modes of production that he also upsets. Alessandro was mutilated through what I call “castropolitical power,” following Achille Mbembe’s “necropolitical power” (2011)—here the sovereign’s right not to kill but to maim. That right, still utilized by late-nineteenth-century popes, put abjected bodies face-to-face with the prying eyes of voracious yet ambivalent cis-gendered observers, recalling Saidiya Hartman’s dialectics of refusal and enjoyment in Scenes of Subjection (1997). Demonstrations of abjection swirled around the castrato cohort in the papal choirs of Moreschi senior’s time, as expressed in literato Enrico Panzacchi’s castrato melophilia and the yearnings for lost castrato voices of trans Victorian expat Vernon Lee. Such encounters produced in castrati a “fractured subjectivity” (Weheliye 2005), something like DuBois’s double consciousness (1903). Yet far from modern affordances preempting such haunted legacies, phonography, spectrographic analysis, YouTube streaming, and digital-vocal reconstruction have all invested dead castrato voices with new life, as abstract fetishized commodities perpetuate them phantomatically, obsessively reviving castrati only to reiterate their deadness.

Christopher Columbus was an operatic sort who articulated himself as a cross between a fifteenth-century Aeneas and an agent of the Catholic King’s manifest drive for a universal empire. The written account of his fourth voyage, which details Job-like struggles, cadences with a lament. “I clambered up to the highest point of the ship crying in a trembling voice with tears in my eyes to all your Highness’ war captains at every point of the compass to save me, but there was no reply.  Tired out and sobbing I fell asleep and heard a very compassionate voice.” He reported that he never thought of any of his destinations without tears in his eyes. The reader is supposed to empathize.

To Columbus, the global south was not the new world but rather an “other world” or otro mundo. Otro mundo referred to places outside of known inhabited lands. The Carib Indians were not like Columbus, and they matched most clearly the “monstrous men” he knew he would find. Diego Álvarez Chanca, a Spanish royal physician who accompanied Columbus on the second voyage that began in May of 1493, wrote that “they castrate the boys that they capture and use them as servants until they are men. Then, when they want to make feast they kill and eat them, for they say that the flesh of boys and women is not good to eat. Three of these boys fled to us, and all three had been castrated.”

My talk positions the singing castrato, like the castrated men encountered by Columbus and Dr. Chanca, as figures inhabiting ghostly contact zones. Mary Louise Pratt describes contact zones as “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths.”  Castrati were and are instruments in the maintenance of narratives that use geography to inscribe temperamental differences which in turn justified the subjugation and enslavement of southern people and settler colonialism.