Professional Documents
Culture Documents
The Archaeology of Sound Derek Jarmans B
The Archaeology of Sound Derek Jarmans B
The Archaeology of Sound Derek Jarmans B
jacques khalip
I
want to begin with a passage from the essay “White Glasses,”
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s elegy to the writer and activist Michael Lynch in
which the language of grief veers off to evoke queer fantasies of heightened
aural apprehension—sounds and voices in collision:
of the quilt, I see that anyone, living or dead, may occupy the
position of the speaker, the spoken to, the spoken about. When
the fabric squares speak, they say,
“Love you! Kelly.”
“Frederic Abrams. ‘Such Drama.’ ”
“Roy Cohn. Bully. Coward. Victim.”
“Michel Foucault. Where there is power, there is resistance . . .
a plurality of resistances . . . spread over time and space. . . . It
is doubtless the strategic codification of these resistances that
makes a revolution possible.”
“For our little brother, David Lee.”
“Sweet dreams.”
“Hug Me.”
Churned out of this mill of identities crossed by desires crossed
by identifications is, it seems—it certainly seemed in October
1987—a fractured and therefore militant body of queer rebellion.
( Tendencies 264–65)
In the midst of her reflections, Sedgwick moves from the visible markers
of life’s end—newspaper obituaries, tombstones, aids quilt panels—to the
difficult rhetoric of voice and address that haunts these various sites of
mourning. On the one hand, the faint pathos of such epitaphic words as
“We miss you,” “Remember me,” “She hated to say goodbye” evokes the
generic problem of the epitaph’s inscription and severance from human
voice; the quilt’s “fabric squares speak” in almost hallucinatory defiance of
their stitched memorials. On the other hand, however, the words gesture
beyond the grave of the textual and toward an auditory encounter with the
dead. Sedgwick’s felt duty to hear the dead refracts back upon her with the
realization that she is utterly (dis)possessed by the auditory power of her
language. Speech vexes the voiced act of commemoration and redirects
her within the sonorities of the departed.
The strange reconfigurations that Sedgwick registers in this
passage call to mind the limits of what Jacques Derrida has referred to
as the ethical dilemma of confronting “two infidelities, one impossible
choice” in the work of mourning: whether one should choose to remain
silent about the friend who has died and recall him or her purely through
the work of quotation, or utterly renounce identification altogether and
allow the friend’s muteness to reverberate (Work 45). In each case, the
(un)heard audiovisual memory of the friend returns to the mourner and
d i f f e r e n c e s 75
consigns the friend to death in the echo chambers of the ear and the heart.
Looking at the photograph of the 1987 gay and lesbian march on Washing-
ton, Sedgwick doesn’t so much see her friends as hear the unconversable
voices of memory—“I see that anyone, living or dead, may occupy the posi-
tion of the speaker, the spoken to, the spoken about.” The look of her friends
comes with the sound of their looking—in other words, the sound of their
gaze. Voice compounds voice in a phonic melee that records in the inner
ear like a “fractured and therefore militant body of queer rebellion.” The
“time” of the sound always returns a little bit broken, and for Sedgwick,
queer consciousness sounds like a revenant that simply cannot, try as it
might, bring to sight the pitch that it queers.
Within Sedgwick’s elegiac listening, a complex dissonance
strains to emerge: a queering of tone that evokes an aural substantializa-
tion of the past and relates sound to the (im)materialities of sexuality. It is
the remnants of a process Derek Jarman will call, in his masterwork Blue,
an “archaeology of sound,” a concept that develops out of a film that in its
entirety bears no images for seventy-six minutes except for the pulsing,
monochromatic International Klein Blue (ikb) color of the screen:
The archaeology of sound has only just been perfected and the
systematic cataloguing of words has until recently been under-
taken in a haphazard way. Blue watched as a word or phrase
materialized in scintillating sparks, a poetry of fire which casts
everything into darkness with the brightness of its reflections.
(13–14)1
d i f f e r e n c e s 77
gay identity. What sounds of the social are we paying attention to when we
turn to sonorities for queering our relationship to what we have ostensibly
left behind? And what or whom are we meant to hear? These are questions
that Blue resonates with in the time of the pandemic; more to the point,
what is at stake here is the art of listening, as Jean-Luc Nancy notes, since
to listen (écouter) is decidedly not the same as to hear (entendre):
d i f f e r e n c e s 79
d i f f e r e n c e s 81
(qtd. in Peake 400). Sharing takes place in the empty breath of the infinite
moment where silence awaits as the condition of listening to the image of
sound. As Jarman’s biographer, Tony Peake, has noted, Blue ambitiously
sought a total cinematic reorganization of the senses by amplifying aural
perception:
d i f f e r e n c e s 83
use because it covers over the more pressing claim that “all practices of
audition are equally constructed [. . .]. The sonic differences to which
we attribute significance are always contextually determined, hence no
single context provides a reference point” (“Reading” 70).12 If sounds are
understood to be specific to particular contexts, one cannot say that there
is ever an authentic or essential core to any sound because our hearing
already insists on the repetition of that sound as a necessary cause of our
audition of it. Put another way, we should think of sound “as if, happening
later than the original, the repetition has worn away some, weathered a
little. Yet is it not through this ‘wearing away,’ this non-originality, that
we are able to imagine an original?”:
d i f f e r e n c e s 85
But the whole thing was very mysteriously put together because
first the words had to be recorded and then the words had to be
placed. And so we had 75 minutes of blank blue footage with time
code on it and Marcus [the engineer] and I spent a day placing
22 minutes worth of dialogue in order—randomly. We knew the
order, we just put them in order. We’d go, so the beginning goes
there. Ok, so let’s talk that through and so we’d go, blue, into the
blue, bla bla bla. Ok, silence, one, two . . . is that long enough?
No, longer. Ok, carry on. Ok, let’s make it 45 seconds and then
we’ll bring in a new poem. And we just did it like that and occa-
sionally we’d move a bit of dialogue and Derek came up the next
day and we played him the placements of the dialogue and we
then set about doing the music for the words, the prose and then
the silences between the words as well. So really we were scor-
ing words and we were scoring silence as well. (Kimpton-Nye)
These sounds are heard as absences; they are not located somewhere
within or “inside” the film, as if the latter were merely an aesthetic con-
tainer; rather, the sounds effectively fabricate Blue’s ontology and demar-
cate what we might call, after Slavoj Žižek, “the ontological horizon,
the frame of reality itself, the very texture that holds reality together”
(Metastases 115). Žižek remarks that the question of sound in film brings
up the “modern notion of the ‘open’ universe [. . .] the hypothesis that every
positive entity (noise, matter) occupies some (empty) space,” implying that
the removal of sound would still keep some kind of surrounding spatiality
intact. However, Blue’s ambience emphasizes Žižek’s point that the “pri-
mordial noise” of the universe is “constitutive of space itself ” and that the
sound of this noise is equivalent to a silence that marks the nonidentity of
that noise (115). Blue thus beckons us to hear its “dreams and recollections,
the gemstone city of Revelations, brazen trumpets, the Song of Solomon”
as elements of a sonic “ontological horizon” that remains silent or unheard
because it evokes the limit of the filmic form.
A question begs to be asked at this point: What kind of acoustical
history, knowledge, or affect would such an archaeology of sound provide?
Even more, how might the “radically unthinkable” thought of aids in Blue
be heard? In his book Atomic Light (Shadow Optics), Akira Mizuta Lippit
suggests that we consider the term a/visuality as inscribing, on the one
hand, “a visuality of the invisible, a mode of avisuality [. . .] herald[ing] a
form of unimaginable devastation,” and on the other, bearing a relation
to audiovisuality—the impossible listening to an unlistenable sound, or
sound heard in terms of its utter unlistenability (92).15 To think about
the irrecuperability of sound is to invoke it in terms of a loss that one
can never know existed—a loss within sonority itself that beckons to be
heard as loss. The ear’s mournful labor can never perfectly register what
it is listening to because its labor destroys the recovery of anything like
a coherent subject position, composed of the unity of sound and image. It
anticipates an absence already intrinsic to the sonic image, which itself is
always mixed with the remains of an otherness that has seemingly been
rendered inaudible yet still persistingly “resounds” within the sonic image
as its audiovisual residue. The a/visual work of Blue is also, by implica-
tion, a work of mourning, a point poignantly felt in those moments in the
film where the names of Jarman’s dead friends and lovers are turned into
the Serresian “noise” of an intransmissible archaeology: casualties of the
film’s audiovisual technics that mourn the nonreproducibility of those
aural memories Blue simultaneously engineers and erodes.
d i f f e r e n c e s 87
As Nigel Terry intones these names, almost questioning them, his voice
becomes inseparable from its drift into the blank ambience of the film’s
acoustic tides. As sounds now rather than appellations, the names of Jar-
man’s friends cannot tell us who or what we are speaking of or with; they
neither situate nor connect with one another. They merely are, like the
snowflakes that fall, singular patterns on their own that as a group remain
patternless. The repetition of names as sounds undoes the individuating
effect of naming and lumps Jarman’s friends into an aural swarm: “David.
Howard. Graham. Terry. Paul . . . .” This “echo of many voices” (10) distorts
any semblance within earshot of a normative intersubjectivity since it
prevents any expectation of their return to reciprocity. The necrological
sounds of friends long gone or gone much too soon intimate the anonymous
remains of phonic substances that exceed the social and are undone of
every possible predicate and face, having become in the “time” of aids
the “radically unthinkable” predicaments that Blue summons but also
sonically—and mournfully—disavows.
If the acoustical reminiscences of dead friends that punctuate
the film serve in part to relinquish them to the ecology of Blue, the sounds
of their names bear traces of an inhumanity within vocalized speech
that never can be properly claimed, never can be spoken, never can be
sounded—what Lippit, in another context, calls “a sonic blindness [. . .] [a]
convergence of sound and nonsound images that initiates (or secretes) a
secret phonography” (“Derrida” 87). The sounds of the names in Blue, like
the sounds of waves, the thunder, the Song of Solomon, or the conversation
between Yves Klein and St. Rita of Cascia mark the unfurling of semantic
meaning from sound, the very possibility of sound not referring to anyone
at all. If Blue does provide a quasi-narrative of sorts (one that is somewhat
“reproduced” in the Overlook Press’s printed text of the film with specific
syntax, punctuation, paragraphing, and line spacing), the film’s words,
spoken throughout by various actors on the soundtrack who remain dif-
ficult to distinguish, should also be heard in terms of their unreadability.16
To be sure, to watch and listen to Blue is to participate in an exegetical
process that Jarman himself, living his own unimaginable destruction
through the pandemic, linked to a practice of a/visuality: “Thou Shall Not
Create Unto Thyself Any Graven Image, although you know the task is to
fill the empty page. From the bottom of your heart, pray to be released
from image” (15). As Deborah Esch has remarked, Jarman’s iconoclastic
“caveat to the commandment invokes the ongoing ‘task’ of writing, and
with it the inevitable, invisible images in the language enlisted ‘to fill the
empty page’: the images we hear rather than see in Blue” (“Blue” 525).17
In this sense, the task of writing (echoed in Jarman’s several published
journals, notes, memoirs) is synonymous with an attentiveness to the a/
visuality of a language whose figural capacity is broken down, where the
images in words aren’t mere figures produced by the language to signify or
refer, but tokens of a negativity in language that is heard as the blind spot
or “sonic blindness” within the audiovisual image itself. The interpretative
problem of a/visuality thus lies in its apparent breaking down of the chain
of significations that are produced at the expense of an ocularcentrism
that dampens the sounds that embed the logos in the first place.
Even if it is tempting to think of Blue as in some way imagining
the transcendence of one sense over another, we should note that what
is at issue in Jarman’s archaeology of sound is less the hegemony of the
eye over the ear, or vice versa, than a distrust of the plenitude and self-
sufficiency of any one of the senses. The spectacular “pandemonium” of
the image arises from the falsely redemptive promises of visualization.
To turn to sound, however, as a rival source of “direct” experience would
be foolhardy; it would effectively reinscribe sound with the same power
as the visual image that, according to Chion, has subjugated sound within
a certain history of filmmaking that conceives it as nothing more than
“added value” or “the expressive and informative value with which a
sound enriches a given image so as to create the definite impression, in the
immediate or remembered experience one has of it, that this information
or expression ‘naturally’ comes from what is seen, and is already contained
in the image itself” (5). Faith in the image’s ontological fullness effects a
total subordination of audiovisuality, a condition Guy Debord presciently
critiqued when he implied that the commodified optical “spectacle” of
modernity was an attempt at controlling sociality by way of pulverizing
the world through sensory deprivation:
d i f f e r e n c e s 89
Before we have set eyes or ears upon the spectacle, it already exists in
advance of our encounter with it as the reifying gaze of what we should
choose to be. The spectacle is the corrupted audiovisual record of a
past that appears incontrovertibly finished, immunized, and singularly
unheard because its message allows no auditory participation, no audi-
tion. You cannot hear the spectacle; it is, in the words of Blue, “a prison of
the soul, your heredity, your education, your vices and aspirations, your
qualities, your psychological world” (15). The spectacle of aids tyrannizes
by consolidating aurality and visuality in commodified queer bodies that,
as objects in the age of capital, are produced as symptomatic representa-
tions of society’s homophobic zeal for spectacularization. The ocular gaze
of the spectacle precisely denies the appeal of act up!’s call: “Stop looking
at us: start listening to us.” In this way, the aestheticization of the image
simultaneously mutes all our capacities to hear otherwise.
The image that Jarman militates against is the one manufac-
tured by the spectacle to relieve us of one of our most serious and ethical
obligations: to listen to the world as lost. Indeed, Blue’s virtual and inde-
terminate audience ponders the International Klein Blue less as an optical
opacity that commands a kind of subordinating identification with itself,
and more as a sonic smear over the media of visualization, an affectively
corrosive encounter with what Fred Moten has called the aurality of the
Lacanian gaze, which defines its maleficence over and against sound but
never quite excludes the ethical “blessing” that sound returns and cuts
over the gaze’s visual tyranny (183). Jarman intimates something of the
force of this disturbing phonic disidentification in the following “scene”:19
The description of the unseen photo in the film doesn’t compensate for
its actual invisibility, nor (for that matter) does it do so for Jarman’s own
blindness. What is missing here is precisely what cannot help but remain
missed or, put otherwise, is missing as remains: the sound the photograph
cannot bring to the ear, the sound of the woman’s sobbing, a sobbing that
searches for a proper listener to allow for its audition. In other words, the
woman’s unheard sobs require a poetics of tears in order to be understood,
but they only deepen the gulf between her and the film’s narrative voice,
as if the impossibility of her crying is a condition of the nonspectacular-
ized colloquy that Jarman here unfolds. In both instances, there is the hint
of a belief that “[t]he thereness of sound becomes the hereness of sound
in the ear of the receiver,” as Bruce R. Smith puts it (8). But again, such a
spatiotemporalization of aurality fails to account for the fact that sound in
Blue is nowhere in that it is technologically mediated and deracinated from
space. At the beginning of the film, a speaker describes sitting in a café
being served by “young refugees from Bosnia” as the “war rages across
the newspapers and through the ruined streets of Sarajevo” (3). Sounds
of the café mix into the sounds of a wartime that is somewhere else but
is experienced in a cinematic present that is pure contemporaneity, event
slamming against event like a trauma that brings past, present, and future
into unsettling proximity. “Listening takes place at the same time as the
sonorous event,” writes Nancy, “an arrangement that is clearly distinct
from that of vision [. . .] [V]isual presence is already there, available before
I see it, whereas sonorous presence arrives—it entails an attack” that
infiltrates the body as an unprecedented presence that is “omnipresent,
and its presence is never a simple being-there or how things stand, but is
always at once an advance, penetration, insistence, obsession, or posses-
sion” (14, 15). Listening has no preconditions because it occurs within a
“sonorous presence” that isn’t simply a naive presentism, but a complex
temporality that is all temporalities at once—and not:
d i f f e r e n c e s 91
Queered Pitch
d i f f e r e n c e s 93
d i f f e r e n c e s 95
d i f f e r e n c e s 97
Listening to the sonic, carillon-like tolling, one of the film’s guiding voices
(the actor Nigel Terry) is ushered in; and yet who compels whom to say
this to the boy, and why? And who is (are) the speaker(s)? Between the
address of the first line and the apostrophic pitch of the fourth, a blurring
of positions occurs: Can we discern if the voice recommends, witnesses,
or performs these lines? And who is the “you” or “the boy”? In one sense,
the “you” might very well signal an inaugural moment, a call into being
that speaks to and potentially brings us as Jarman’s audience into relation
with the International Klein Blue. Indeed, the “you” is evoked in the very
instant that it/we are counseled to “say to the boy open your eyes.” That
is, in making this “you” speak to another, it acquires a sonic materiality
that cedes to the boy’s aural gaze, embedded in the rich dominant-tonic
alternations that punctuate this moment. Jarman’s soundmix voice com-
prises nothing more than a technical humanization of sound, manipulated
by the complexities of the film’s acoustic reproductions. The voice doesn’t
accusatively interpellate “us,” the boy, or itself; rather, it resounds at the
beginning only to mark its own deferral. In this way, the opening of Blue
gestures toward a mode of nonantagonistic recognition that depends upon
the voice’s utter lack of difference, its continuity with a certain queerness
of the sonic that is awaited and received rather than injuriously consum-
mated. In Blue, the act of speaking for someone means attending to the
nonvocality of their sound—the “taking place” of their sound within our
own, without fetishizing voice as a sign of sound’s humanistic modulation
into “authenticity.”27
In Jarman’s Blue, “the sound that arises from the lacuna, the
non-language that one speaks when one is alone” (Agamben 36) creates
an anonymous acoustic space that maintains its sounds and voices as
irrecuperable—or rather, it bears witness to a sonic ambience that cannot
be transmuted back into spectacularization and intelligibility. The non-
positivist emergence of “homosexuality” is enabled by the queerness of its
voice, or rather, by the negativity of its sonority around which homosexu-
ality is conjured as voice: the nothingness of a testimony that knows no
voice except its sound, at once material and immaterial. Put another way:
voice and sound occur or open up as a result of a blurring on the level of
d i f f e r e n c e s 99
cites and recites the past as its futural projection. Blue throws itself into
a future acoustic resonance that listens to the past within the present, a
sonic blindness or unhearable frequency whose full aural portent always
remains in advance of listening, of écoute. 31
If Jarman’s Blue has taught us anything, it is that we have yet
to properly listen to the virus and the communities it effects and that our
hearing, even at the best of times, might very well prove to be a sign of
a tonal deafness. It isn’t even a matter of properly hearing for the sake
of knowing what might save us—as if reason can rid us of aids and con-
vince us of a final, future deliverance from it by exterminating all those
abandoned by the illness. Such impossibilities in the time of aids come
with powerful ethical pressures: as Alexander García Düttmann has
trenchantly remarked in his indispensable book At Odds with aids , the
political expediency of speaking for and on behalf of the virus is often
accompanied by identifications that must be resisted (“being-not-one”),
identifications that produce aids , gay, homosexual as terms that give the
lie to testimony’s capacity to cure through speech:
Such testimony bears the sounds of a refusal to hear, to identify the aurality
of the virus as if it had a kindly human voice or face, but it does so while
also never ignoring the kinds of queer relationalities that the sonic com-
pels. What Blue does ask of us is this: what forms of attention might we
offer to the virus, and in what sense is our attentiveness deeply bound with
unraveling the ways in which aids summons us to listen, to hear, to attend
to it? All of which is to say: what might be the sounds of aids, after all?
d i f f e r e n c e s 101
For their generous (and generative) readings of this essay, I would like to thank Nancy Arm-
strong, Tim Bewes, David L. Clark, Julie Chun Kim, Alix Mazuet, Timothy Morton, and two
anonymous readers for differences. Some of the arguments were first presented as a talk
at Brown University’s lgbtq Center, and I also thank those at the center for kindly inviting
me, and my audience that day for their engagement.
jacques kh alip is Robert Gale Noyes Assistant Professor of Humanities and Assistant
Professor of English and of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. His areas of
specialization include Romanticism, aesthetics, poetry, and queer theory. He is the author
of Anonymous Life: Romanticism and Dispossession (Stanford University Press, 2009) and
coeditor of Releasing the Image: From Literature to New Media (Standford University Press,
forthcoming). His current book manuscript, “Dwelling in Disaster,” considers Romantic
and post-Romantic explorations of extinction and wasted life.
d i f f e r e n c e s 103
all the other identifications the the visible subject, or the impos-
camera has led us to make” (159). sibility of an overall view as soon
In addition, see their book Forms as the sonorous subject has lasted
of Being. a certain amount of time” (74).
Nancy’s larger point, however, is
16 The speakers are John Quentin, that sound is multistimulating,
Nigel Terry, Tilda Swinton, John multidirected, and disembody-
Lynch, and Jarman himself. ing: it unfastens the subject from
any single point of contact and
17 For a discussion of writing’s multiplies one’s sensitivity to
haunting of cinema, see Gibson. penetration.
18 Debord’s own first film, Hurle- 21 As Butler states, “The ‘I’ cannot
ments en faveur de Sade (Howl- give a final or adequate account
ings in Favor of Sade), was a of itself because it cannot return
ninety-minute blank screen and to the scene of address by which it
voice-over. For a brief consid- is inaugurated and it cannot nar-
eration of Debord in relation to rate all of the rhetorical dimen-
Jarman, see Wollen 128. sions of the structure of address
in which the account itself takes
19 I am much indebted to Moten’s
place” (Giving 67).
book throughout this article. See
also Žižek’s Enjoy Your Symptom!, 22 I should add that Haver’s use of
where he describes the effect of hearing is homologous to Nancy’s
the “traumatic voice” in film as a term listening, which, as I men-
“strange body which smears the tion near the beginning of this
innocent surface of the picture, article, separates itself from
a ghost-like apparition which entendre, “to understand.”
can never be pinned to a definite
visual object” (1). 23 In the chapter “Strata or His-
torical Formations” in Foucault,
20 In response to Nancy, Alix Mazuet Deleuze states:
has said to me, “I agree with the Foucault continued to be
idea of an attack, but not with fascinated by what he saw as
that of a sonorous event, which much as by what he heard or
would place it at the same time read, and the archaeology he con-
as listening. You may listen to a ceived of is an audiovisual archive
sonorous event, and you may not. (beginning with the history of
If you do, it’s here, for you. If you science). Foucault delighted in
don’t, it’s not. Same thing for a articulating statements and in
visual phenomenon: it’s here if distinguishing between them, only
the subject looks at it; it’s not if because he also had a passion for
the subject doesn’t. ‘Visual pres- seeing: what defines him above all
ence’ is not ‘already there, avail- is the voice, but also the eyes. The
able before I see it,’ any more eyes and the voice. Foucault never
than audio presence is” (personal stopped being a voyant at the
communication, 24 Aug. 2008). I same time as he marked philoso-
would agree with Mazuet’s cri- phy with a new style of statement,
tique here, especially since Nancy though the two followed different
frequently insists on an imme- paths, or a double rhythm. (50)
diacy for the acoustic that he does For an application of Fou-
not grant the visual. In a footnote, cault’s argument on the confes-
he describes “the impossibility of sion to musicological studies, see
a recoil or a coming closer of the Peraino.
sonorous subject, as opposed to
d i f f e r e n c e s 105
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