In 1997, Jacques Attali made great claims on behalf of noise in his book Noise. Noise would be a revolutionary force within music and, indeed, society—the name of resistance to symbolic violence and “channelization.” This essay examines what has happened to the discourse and the practice of noise since this moment. In the first part, the focus is on Michel Chion’s writings that deal with noise—both conceptually and linguistically—across a variety of media (including theater, film, and music). Chion’s work is exemplary of a movement away from noise as paradigm-shifting to heterogeneity and attenuation. The second part of the article examines how noise has been practiced as a musical—or perhaps antimusical—form in Japan and considers the possibility of extending Chion’s arguments about language, sound, and culture to the Japanese context. The article considers the noise artist Merzbow as a representative of the model of noise associated with Attali and the emergence a movement known as onkyou (sound) as a countermodel.

This article posits an absolute difference between the regime of silence and the regime of near inaudibility. The regime of silence pivots equally on avowals of the possibility of sound’s absence and on negated versions, such as John Cage’s declaration, “There is no such thing as silence.” I trace the appearance of this linking of silence to the metaphysical language of presence in the work of Cage, Foucault, and Derrida. My argument is that, while the regime of silence is linked to a dialectic of being and nothingness, plenitude and finitude, the fullness of meaning or the ground of nonmeaning from which meaning is drawn, by contrast, near inaudibility is linked to a separate set of conceptual and aesthetic terms: formal gradations of pressure, tension, intensity, and force. Finally, each regime also contains within itself a theory of violence. For silence, the centrality of the language of being leads to the fantasy of being’s elimination; by contrast, near inaudibility is linked to a violence that imprints its force on and as an effect of tension and duration in form. In a reading of the work of composer Vadim Karassikov, this essay’s claim is that near inaudibility or the form of radical quiet is, in a formulation from Jean-Luc Nancy, “suspended on the limit of its own presentation.” That suspension lifts, at the culmination of the article, into another discourse altogether: the pressure of the tense formal language of a composition by Evan Johnson, written for, and in order to complete, this article.

Signal processing is one of the most important and understudied dimensions of contemporary sound cultures and of electronic media more broadly. In the sonic register, it inflects everything from music production, wired or wireless transmission, and radio broadcast to everyday conversation and listening. Because it is embedded in all stages of contemporary sound production, reproduction, and reception, it has remained an elusive subject for critique. This essay considers the poetics of audio signal processing—the figural dimensions of the technical process and the representations of this process in audio-technical discourse. The article focuses on two metaphorical frames commonly applied to signal processing in the everyday language of musicians and audio technologists: cooking and travel. Through a reading of Claude Lévi-Strauss, it suggests that metaphors of rawness and cooking elevate signal processing to a kind of culturing process by which sound is readied for consumption by listeners through specialized technologies and techniques. The argument situates the spatialization of signal flow and the design of circuit topology within long-standing ideas about travel and voyage that inflect Western epistemologies of sound. As metaphors for signal processing, cooking and travel mark cultural locations (e.g., gendered, classed, able-bodied positionalities) much as they do in broader social contexts. Not only is signal processing subject to the critique of representation, it is, more than any other technical register, directly linked to the contemporary cultural politics of perception and reception. Although this article focuses on sound technologies, a full cultural critique of signal processing would consider its central role in every sense register.

This article explores the potentials for and pitfalls of the virtually nonexistent terrain of rights for undocumented migrants in Turkey to engage the broader question of whether the language of rights can serve emancipatory ends for subordinated groups. As in other capitalist regimes, the question of the rights of undocumented migrants in Turkey presents a major paradox. On the one hand, the undocumented migrants' lack of right to residence, work, and social security intensifies their vulnerability in the flexible, predominantly informal labor market. On the other hand, rights claims risk naturalizing deeper structural inequalities as they simultaneously seek to ameliorate them. The predicament of Bulgarian Turkish migrants brings its own twist to the thorny question of rights for undocumented migrants. Historically the most privileged among migrants in Turkey because of their “Turkish origins,” the recent Turkish migrants from Bulgaria continue to deploy the language of ethnic privilege in pursuing their claims. While such particularistic claims may result in individual gains for some migrants, they tend to preclude collective forms of migrant organizing and foreclose the articulation of more radical political and economic demands. After demonstrating the double binds of the specific rights claims available to Bulgarian Turkish migrants in Turkey, the article concludes by pondering the possibilities for an alternative, incipient discourse of rights that takes labor rather than ethnicity as the basis of entitlement.

What is the “work” of neoliberal legal technologies in the global south? What do the processes of their transplantation to and appropriation in the semi-peripheries of the global political economy tell us about the sociopolitical context that made these technologies possible? This article approaches these questions from an unusual angle, focusing on the passing of competition and antitrust laws and the establishment of a Competition Authority in Turkey alongside the story of a fictional institute called The Clock Setting Institute in Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar's novel of the same name. Arguing that Tanpınar's story, and the modernization parody it constructs, offers significant insights that help bring to light otherwise invisible dimensions of neoliberal state reforms, the author discusses how neoliberalism and its technologies are translated into a language of modernization and appropriated as tools in the service of civilizing the nation, in Turkey and in the global south. This translation—and transformation—not only shows how an otherwise alien legal and economic technology takes root by being translated into the local lingua of statehood in Turkey but also highlights a remarkable continuity between the practices of the modernizing state and the neoliberal state. According to this article, the real work of neoliberal technologies, competition law, and economics consists of importing and mobilizing the “scientific” (economic) tools of representing the economic reality “out there.” Such representations, similar to what clocks do for the concept of time in Tanpinar's novel, end up in fact producing what is “out there.”

During its formative years—its short happy life in the latter decades of the twentieth century—black feminist criticism focused almost exclusively on literature by and about black women, a body of work it claimed as its own “precious” private property. This essay uses a foreign body—Ernest Hemingway's most written-about story, “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”—to attempt to expand the theoretical boundaries of black feminist literary study in the twenty-first century. Because of its gender politics, its showcasing of heroic white manhood and its manhandling of white women, “The Short Happy Life” has been a popular target of mainstream feminist critique. Far less attention has been paid to the story's racial dynamics, despite its African setting and the crucial role that both race and class, that is, “whiteness” and white privilege, play in advancing the narrative. Racializing “whiteness,” this essay asks whether a male-authored work, which contains no black characters of consequence, is nevertheless fair game for a black feminist reading. What happens to the text of the white male “other” when it is read through the lens of black feminist theory?

This article puts an emerging war doctrine archive through the paces of its philosophical analogues. Establishing in the first part of the article the “weaponizing of culture” (a now-common U.S. military phrase), which is occurring autogenically, that is, within and without the remnants of the liberal representative state, the author argues that war is now a fully operational part of the organizational work that terms like community, culture, and humanity are now doing (and doing differently than before). War in the sense invoked here is activated at various levels of intensity and visibility (think Katrina, the Patriot Act, Wall Street) as a civil or civilian war within the United States that is everywhere present but is hardly recognizable as such. In addressing one essential area of governmentality—demographics—the author makes the case for a change in liberal governmental reason that is evident in the U.S. Census 2000, concluding that demography has taken a uniquely post–civil rights turn in the unprecedented context of a coming U.S. white minority. Categorical self-identification within the permeable race and ethnic categories that the state now endorses paradoxically releases it from whatever previous civil-rights obligations the state may have had. In unpacking how this process works—call it autogenic violence at the level precisely of “recognition”—this article revisits Habermas's reliance on a juridically grounded base for intersubjectivity. Habermas extends the appeal for liberal international law to an updated endorsement of Kant's quest for perpetual cosmopolitan peace. With the problem of history and the relationship between temporality and the “cultural” disciplines such as philosophy in mind, the author updates Habermas's updating of Kant in a context of perpetual war that neither figure is willing to imagine.

This article explores the relation between the work of Lacan and Derrida, focusing on the use of modal logic in both writers (the categories of necessity, impossibility, contingency, and possibility). The author explores the structure of the aporia in Derrida as a peculiar conjunction of necessity and impossibility, distinct from previous forms of contradiction (antinomies in Kant and dialectical contradiction in Hegel) and therefore historically situated in relation to the tradition of metaphysics. He argues that the other two modal categories, possibility and contingency, are largely absorbed by the aporia of necessity and impossibility. In Lacan, by contrast, modal categories are introduced in Encore, his notorious seminar on sexual difference, to develop the distinction between masculinity and femininity. The author argues that the sexuation graph of Encore, which is written in symbolic logic, is later redescribed by Lacan in modal terms, and this later description alters Lacan's initial presentation, allowing for greater flexibility among these categories. The essay shows that Lacan eventually presents a model of discursive transformation in which each modal category is capable of being shifted into another. This produces a model of discursive transformation that brings Lacan closer to Foucault than most commentators have acknowledged. The broader horizon of the argument concerns psychoanalysis and historical change, and the author argues that Foucault, Lacan, and Derrida all address the problem of history and that the relations among these thinkers deserve more attention than their polemical reception has allowed, particularly with regard to attacks on psychoanalysis as ahistorical.

This commentary opens with an exposition of Alison Stone's novel reading of Irigaray's philosophy of sexual difference. This reading proposes that Irigaray's philosophy of sexual difference is a realist essentialism that reposes upon a general ontology of natural rhythm whose philosophical source is the nature philosophy of Schelling. Distinguishing between two accounts, a rhythmic account of natural, human sex difference and a relational account of cultivatable human, sexual difference, Stone's book unites these accounts to provide a comprehensive reading of Irigaray's philosophy of sexual difference. This article raises questions about the content of this new reading. The commentary asks whether and to what extent the rhythmic account of sex difference is established independently of a prior nonrhythmic or more conventional, biological notion of sex difference. It questions the classification of rhythmic processes that are purportedly differentiated by sex and offers a note of skepticism about the comparative classifications of reproductive and sexual impulses by sex. Finally, it treats the work's metaphysics of expression and tendency, inspired by Schelling's metaphysics, so as to inquire into its utility. The suggestion is that the value of this metaphysics may be undermined by the epistemological difficulty of distinguishing between a suppressed tendency and an absent one. The conclusion identifies this metaphysics of expression as a serious point of divergence between Stone's thought on sexuality and that of one of her interlocutors in the text, Judith Butler.

This article explores the impossibility and necessity of belonging to gender, race, and place. It does so against the background of Ivan Sen's Australian film Beneath Clouds (2001), with the specificities of Australian landscape and the rural/urban divide that it captures, and of race politics in contemporary Australia. In the context of the film, the question “Where' your people from, girl?” implies the recognition of the addressee's indigenous heritage at a time when she has been passing as white. Such a question could be viewed as sexist or racist, as a call to identify oneself in terms of fixed, hierarchical, and discriminatory categories of gender, race, and family. But given who asks the question and where, this article argues that the question is an offer of community, though not community understood as shared group identity based on mutual recognition and understanding. Rather, the idea of community developed in this article is of an open sense of belonging together to race, gender, and place, a sensibility of belonging that expresses one's indeterminate difference, that opens one toward a future and a past, that must be continually renewed through relations with others, and that is essential to one's life. The paper also argues that this belonging is corporeal, lived, and that it engenders and transforms sociopolitical meaning. On the basis of this model of community, the harm of racism and sexism lies not in the effects of categorization and objectification, but in the impact of any political denial of the uniqueness and openness of belonging and in the disabling of the capacity for community that accompanies this denial. These ideas are explored with reference to the philosophies of Merleau-Ponty and Nancy and contemporary theorists of race and gender including Alcoff, Haslanger, Langton, and Ziarek.