On not coming to terms with indeterminate sound

I assess two approaches to the contribution made by indeterminate sound to postdramatic audio drama. One is from sound studies, the other from postdramatic theatre. Both approaches, I maintain, fail to provide a coherent account. The first is sonic materialism: the view that indeterminate sound possesses a materiality which places it beyond interpretation and makes it encounterable only as a sensory or bodily effect or affect. Affect theory arguably does the most to conceptualize the nature of materiality, but there is a contradiction at its core. It fails to recognize that any event or chunk of materiality that is deemed to be beyond signification will occur within the organized, structured flow that is experience and, therefore, be locatable and describable within a bodily framework of interpretation. The second approach is the semiotic theory of Julia Kristeva. This is the theory that Lehmann reaches for in order to provide his own explanation of how indeterminate sound contributes to dramatic narrative. Unfortunately, this appeal does not succeed because it departs from the technicalities of Kristeva's concept of chora , transforming it from a specific bridging action between the linguistic and the nonlinguistic to the general idea of the collective creativity of a group of people. I consider the prospect that Kristeva's theory might nevertheless be able independently to address the place of indeterminate within postdramatic audio drama. Sadly, even on its own terms, the theory proves to be unhelpful. The promise of the ‘outside of language’ entering the ‘inside of language’ amounts only to the semiotic manifesting itself through the interference it brings to an established, symbolic order, as opposed to enabling a text that interprets indeterminate sound.