The Possible Impossible

In Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett encourages us to consider an approach to matter and material agency, not primarily for its metaphysical veracity but for the sake of its ethical import. That is, she establishes a thought experiment in order to explore the benefits that the accordance with a certain paradigm would provide in our present ontological state.

This model serves as an influence on my project. The ability to hear past agency on the scale of effective inaudibility that I suggest, may well be purely speculative but it is worth pondering how it could engender different approaches to history and relationality. The work asks what might we be able to hear if we could. As Bennett claims: “What seems to be needed [in exploring such an ethic] is a certain willingness to appear naive or foolish” (Bennett 2010: xiii).

A similar argument has been put forward within sound studies by Salomé Voegelin who writes: “The inaudible, as the possible impossible, continues the actual and the possible and we need to start hearing it, or at least we need to start listening out for it, in order to understand the rationale of our judgement of the world” (Voegelin 2014: 158).

Once we truly grant existence to some amorphous unknowable we may be forced to tread more lightly and to withhold habits of arrogant certainty. The spomenik sites may have been classified according to a level of national significance, but to focus on this to the exclusion of every manner with which it has been previously interacted, ignores the reality that a site’s meaning can never be fixed.

Voegelin’s notion (2014: 48) of a non-ontological phenomenological possibilism allows for the fictions of sound worlds to illuminate the plurality of the real world. In the case of A Spectral Geology, the fiction may be the audibility of past agency and the efficacy of geologic paradigms in granting new access to these sounds.

Perhaps Derrida’s alternative idea of agency – as something moving away – is also helpful here. This is the open-ended promissory quality of an entity which Derrida calls messianicity. Things in the world appear to us alluding to a completeness that is elsewhere. This promissory note can never be redeemed: The “straining forward toward the event” never finds relief (Bennett 2010: 32). While we can never quite make out those sounds of the past, it shouldn’t prevent us from reaching out.