Ghosts in the machine? Applying sonic theory to structure and agency

Rendering “pale and ghostly” agents in flesh and bone while accounting for structural aspects of human experience has long preoccupied academic endeavour. If we are to understand the impact of harms suffered both within and through the social worlds we inhabit, we must work towards an appreciation of the mutable qualities of time through which these harms are felt. Social creatures, we haunt and are haunted by the ripples of our actions and those of others. Yet representations of humanity struggle to overcome the dichotomous constraints of the structure/agency divide. Using an aural ethnography of a local men’s prison as a starting point, I explore what using sound as a theoretical framework can do to challenge this binary reductionism. Kodwo Eshun’s sonic fiction creates space for re-imagining present and future, transcending the limitations of imprisonment and disrupting mechanistic distance. Malcolm James’ sonic intimacy emphasises the ongoing existence of countercultural communications conveyed and amplified by sound. Brandon Labelle’s sonic agency charts the role of sound in expressions of agentic resistance. Together sonic fiction, intimacy and agency add layers and textures to representations of human experience and the multiplicities of time, as well as the warping of it in the context of the prison. Foregrounding listening and voice evokes memory, experience and expectation of the prison and life beyond the walls, extending the flesh and bone of shared humanity to those too often rendered ghostly figures within the carceral machine. The temporal sense, sound transcends time and space, and in so doing enables us to see beyond and beneath the peripheries of vision, to understand beyond, beneath and in between.