Sound art and the annihilation of sound

This thesis describes the way in which sound is taken up and subsequently suppressed within the visual arts. The idealisation and development of sound as a plastic material is able to be traced within the modernist trajectory, which, reflecting a set of cultural practices and having developed its own specific terminologies, comes to regard any material, or anything conceived of as material, as appropriate and adequate to the expression of its distinctive and guiding concepts and metaphors. These concepts and metaphors are discussed as already having at their bases strongly visualist biases, the genealogies of which are traced within traditional or formal philosophies. Here, the marginalising tendency of ocularcentrism is exposed, but the very nature and contingency of marginalisation is found to work for the sound artist (where the perpetuation of the mythologised 'outsider' figure is desired) but against sound which is positioned in a purely differential and negative relation. In this epistemological and ontological reduction, sound becomes simply a visual metaphor or metonymic contraction which forecloses the possibility of producing other ways of articulating its experience or of producing any markedly alternative 'readings'. Rather than simply attempting to reverse the hierarchisation of the visual over the aural, or of prefacing sound within a range of artistic practices (each which would keep the negative tradition going) sound's ambiguous relation to the binarism of presence/absence, system and margin, is, however oddly, elaborated. The strategy which attempts to suspend sound primarily within and under the mark of the concept is interrogated and its limits exposed. The sound artist, the 'margin surfer' is revealed as a perhaps deeply conservative figure who may in the end desire the suppression of sound, and who, actually rejecting any destabilising and threatening notion of 'radical alterity' anxiously clings to the 'marginalised' modernist pretence. It is the main contention of this thesis that the marginalisation of sound obscures the more pressing question of its ambiguous relation to notions of sameness and difference, and that its conceptualisation suppresses the question of the ethical. That the ethical question should (and always does) take 'precedence' over purely epistemological and ontological considerations, and that more genuinely open attitudes should be assumed with respect to sound studies are forwarded in this thesi