Making Waves: Fanon, Phenomenology, and the Sonic

Abstract

Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks opens with a discussion of language in the colonial setting. I argue that this is at least in part due to Fanon’s background in phenomenology, and the crucial role that intersubjectivity plays in the phenomenological account of the subject. I begin by demonstrating the phenomenological underpinnings of Fanon’s chapter on language. I then further develop the background phenomenological account of the subject, showing how this informs Fanon’s project. I then develop a sonic account of the subject, arguing that metaphors of sound best represent the phenomenological account of the subject. Finally, I build on this sonic account to draw out the implications for our thinking about communication and liberation in Fanon’s work and beyond.

1. Introduction

Frantz Fanon begins his diagnosis of the colonial condition in Black Skin, White Masks with a chapter on language [1] (pp. 1–23). The proverbial stage is set not by a lesson in history, or political economy, or even psychology, but by coming to terms with the communicative context of the colonial situation. This is because, I will argue, Fanon’s background in phenomenology made him acutely aware of the foundational role that intersubjectivity plays in the development of the subject, whether colonizer or colonized. That is, we come to be who we are in and through our communicative interactions, which means understanding the colonized subject requires an analysis of the communicative and linguistic context in and through which such subjects emerge. In this essay, I will take up Fanon’s insight regarding the role of communication in the colonial context and draw out its implications for our thinking about liberation and freedom. In Section 2, I will establish the phenomenological roots of Fanon’s account. In Section 3, I will explore in more depth and detail the phenomenological account of the subject undergirding Fanon’s text. From this will emerge a dynamic, open-ended, and relational account of the subject, and Section 4 will turn to sonic metaphor as a way of further developing this account. Finally, in Section 5, I will draw out the implications of this turn to the sonic for our thinking about communication and liberation.

2. Fanon and Phenomenology

Fanon writes of his turn to language at the start of his investigation that he considers “the study of language essential for providing us with one element in understanding the black [person’s] dimension of being-for-others, it being understood that to speak is to exist absolutely for the other [1] (p. 1)”1. To grasp his point, it is necessary to bear in mind Fanon’s study of phenomenology in the early 1950s, for it illuminates several key elements of this passage. For instance, when Fanon claims that “to speak is to exist”, his use of the verb “to exist” (exister in the original French) can be misleading absent a phenomenological framing. While one might be tempted to read it simply as “to speak is to be”, this misses the power of Fanon’s claim. As Lewis Gordon reminds us, to “exist” must be understood in the phenomenological context not as a passive mode of being, but as an active verb, linked to a kind of “standing out” or “appearance” [3] (p. 74). Fanon is, thus, linking speech to the act of existing understood as this kind of emergence or appearance. What is more, for the phenomenologist, a given object of consciousness stands-out or exists never as a total cypher, but as bearing certain features and relations that inform its existence (its way of standing-out). Objects of consciousness move from the perceptual background to the foreground, bringing with them sedimented meanings, histories, relations, and potentials (that anthill is to be avoided, this hammer is to be used for driving nails, that car looks like the one my family drove when I was 12, etc.), all of which are only understood within a set of communicative and linguistic contexts.

When the object of consciousness is a human being, we enter the domain that Fanon refers to in the above quote as “being-for-others”. Consider the following quotidian (and, within the phenomenological literature, classic) sort of example. As I sit on my front porch writing, movement across the street draws my attention. Looking up, I see someone walking down the sidewalk. This moves them from a background, passive consciousness to an active object of my intentional consciousness2. But I do not simply see an object, which I then interpret as a person walking down the sidewalk. Rather, they are given to my consciousness as a person, and this, furthermore, is never simply as an abstract entity, but as a bearer of all sorts of meanings and significances3. They appear to me as gendered, as racialized, as of a general age range, and so forth. They may wear the uniform of the US Postal Service, or they may be walking with plastic grocery bags from the general direction of the supermarket a couple of blocks east of my street, either of which will immediately tell me something about what they are doing beyond simply walking on the sidewalk (they are delivering the mail or heading home from the store). Language and communication matters here not because this person and I have exchanged any words (or even a wave or nod), but because all of this information, delivered in an instant as I look up, draws on the communicative context we share. Fanon is, therefore, pointing out that the appearance or standing-forth of human beings qua human beings, in all their individual specificity, is always mediated by language and communication.

Of course, in this passage, Fanon is particularly addressing speech—“to speak is to exist absolutely for the other”—so his point goes beyond this fundamental claim regarding language and perception. When another speaks, a new and profound dimension of their existence is opened up to me. Before we even touch upon the content of their speech, I may detect an accent, or that they have a cold. They may sound angry, or aggressive, or distracted, or surprised, or melancholy. All of this could be given to my consciousness without me needing to understand what they are saying. Indeed, even when we do not understand a language when it is spoken to us, we understand that it is a language, and this, well, signifies. If I do understand the words, I may perceive them as confused, as curious, as attempting to deceive me, or even, under the right circumstances, as attempting to deceive themselves. Fanon’s use of “absolutely” here is, thus, meant to capture the way that our efforts at communication (of which verbal speech is of course only one aspect) are a means of uncovering or disclosing aspects of ourselves to and for others (and often, perhaps always, to ourselves as well). This is true even when what we aim to disclose is at the same time an obfuscation or subterfuge—I want to be seen as confident, so I speak this way despite my nervousness, for example.

Yet language is not a neutral or transparent medium for communication. It is laden not only with ambiguities and limitations, but, most significantly for Fanon’s investigation, languages have cultural and political valences that must not be ignored. Using a language, Fanon writes, “means above all assuming a culture and bearing the weight of a civilization”, such that one “who possesses a language possesses as an indirect consequence the world expressed and implied by this language [1] (p. 2)”. Throughout his first chapter, Fanon dissects the ways in which language functions in the colonial context of Martinique, where it is inextricably bound up with notions of race, of civilization, and of “the human” as such. One’s mode of speech thus places one within a set of hierarchies, where one’s capacity to express humanity and civilization can be attenuated by virtue of one’s use of creole, or by speaking “proper” French in a Black body. Fanon points out that mastering French, for the Antillean, is a way of “proving to himself that he is culturally adequate [1] (p. 21)”. The point here, however, is not simply to make one’s thoughts known, or to be understood by the other, but precisely, in this phenomenological sense, to exist for the other absolutely as one who is culturally adequate. Fanon has much to say about the pitfalls of this project, but the relevant point at this juncture is that speech and communication are ways of existing, rather than simply modes for transmitting information, and the available ways of existing for any given subject will be conditioned by the linguistic context in which they operate.

My argument so far is that Fanon’s claims here are best understood in terms of his background in and study of phenomenology. Yet, what is it about human beings understood phenomenologically that makes communication so crucial? To address this question, I will turn to some recent work on Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, which draws on important but unpublished materials from his notoriously massive Nachlass. I am not undertaking a project in intellectual history, so my claim here is not that Fanon had access to this material, or even that Husserl was his primary phenomenological source. Indeed, while it is very likely that Fanon had some acquaintance with Husserl’s work, his more direct phenomenological influences would have been Jean-Paul Sartre and (especially) Maurice Merleau-Ponty4. Rather, my aim here is to draw on Husserl as a foundational figure (though without straying too far into the technical “weeds” of his complex work) to elaborate key features of phenomenology that are, I submit, generalizable across the tradition. The claim is that phenomenology is critical to a proper reading of Fanon, and I am using Husserl to illustrate that, but I am not claiming that Fanon was a Husserlian5.

3. Husserl and the Subject

Husserl’s phenomenology is rightly associated with the transcendental subject, but this is often misunderstood6. Importantly, Husserl’s use of the term “transcendental” is emphatically not referring “to the idea of universal, unchanging a priori structures” of consciousness [4] (p. 106). Rather, the phenomenological subject, for Husserl, is transcendental in the sense that it is a condition for the possibility of any experience whatsoever. In this way, it is the necessary “correlate”, as Husserl puts the point, of any object of consciousness [7] (p. 26). Consciousness, being always intentional, or directed toward some object, is, thus, a condition for the possibility of experience, and phenomenology is the study of this relation (correlation) between consciousness and its object(s). As we have already discussed, however, intentional consciousness is active, and the objects of consciousness are always given as bearing meanings, affective features, and affordances or impedances for possible actions. According to Hanne Jacobs, all of this means that Husserl’s transcendental subjectivity is “enworlded”, and not merely in the sense that it is observing or related to its environs. According to Jacobs:

Rather, transcendental subjectivity is also enworlded in the sense that the subject that constitutes a world perceptually explores the world in and through movements with which it is familiar on the basis of acquired bodily habits (an acquisition that occurs in and through performing movements and actions within this world), in the sense that it feels how its movements are more or less effortless, and in the sense that it feels the materiality of its body when confronted with certain bodily constraints from within (e.g., exhaustion).

[10] (p. 100)

It is thus by virtue of its being enworlded (which, as Jacobs discusses, entails its embodiment) that Husserl’s transcendental subject is inextricably enmeshed in, or as he would put it, “constituted” through, communicative relations with others past, present, and future.

The world so given to this enworlded consciousness is conceived by Husserl as the “life-world” (Lebenswelt). Dermot Moran summarizes this concept as follows:

The life-world, as Husserl characterizes it, is the world of the pre-given, familiar, present, available, surrounding world, including both ‘nature’ and ‘culture’…The life-world is, in Husserl’s terms, the ‘fundament’ for all human meaning and purposive activity.

[11] (p. 7)

Husserl’s transcendental subject is thus embodied, enworlded, and in a constitutive relationship with a life-world already present to that consciousness “in terms of its human significance and thus given exactly as a cultural world [12] (p. 121)”. This has, according to Thomas Nenon, two significant dimensions. Firstly, there is a “historicity” to the life-world—both as the cumulative experiences of the subject brought to a given moment of intentionality, and as the sedimented meanings and practices that are immediately given in that experience [13] (pp. 156–157)7. Secondly, it has a “social and interpersonal character”, resulting from the fact that our experiences “are ‘vorgegeben’ in the sense that they are there and at least in principle accessible to anyone, including not just other humans but other animals [13] (pp. 156, 158)”. This means, importantly, that any given subject will experience a world not only as meaningful, but as meaningful to others (and, of course, in potentially different ways to different others). In this way, as Sara Heinämaa puts the point, “the experiencing subject, the ego or the person, does not establish the sense of the world by itself or in solitary activities but constitutes this sense in communication with other subjects [14] (p. 83, emphasis mine)”.

We are thus now in a position to see clearly the fundamental role that communication plays within the phenomenological account of the subject. The transcendental subject is a condition for the possibility of experience, yet, as we have seen, this experiencing has affective, embodied, and historical dimensions. In other words, consciousness is always intentional, it is always directed toward some object, but it is also coming from some set of historical, affective, and embodied conditions. Of course, one can always direct one’s intentionality toward these very conditions. It is possible, in other words, to make my own background assumptions and my embodied proclivities and habits objects of consciousness. In this way consciousness remains open-ended and indeterminate—it is conditioned by the specificities of its enworlded features, but certainly not determined by them. This is why it is crucial to think of consciousness as an activity, as a dynamic process, and not as a substance or defined content. At the same time, objects of consciousness are given not as solipsistic impressions, but always as more than what is available to us by virtue of their being shared (at least potentially) by others. As Timo Miettinen writes, “the very idea of objectivity”, for Husserl, “derives its sense from the multiplicity of subjects [15] (p. 155)”. To intend an object, in other words, is at once to draw on past experiences and sedimented (habitual) meanings, and at the same time to raise the question of how it might appear to others. All of this is only possible in and through a set of communicative frameworks and practices. In this Husserlian account of the subject and its relation with others, Heinämaa concludes, “what we have therefore is not a stable fraternity of pure spirits but a communicative becoming of living persons [14] (p. 84)”.

Given this phenomenological sense of the subject as a communicative becoming, we can see why language is so critical for Fanon. He recognized that, as Jacqueline Martinez puts the point so clearly, communicative contexts make up “the intersubjective conditions through which subjectivity itself emerges [16] (p. 190)”. Thus, if my linguistic context is one that denigrates my selfhood and inhibits my capacities for expression and becoming, then in a very real way, my self and my (life-)world are diminished. In the next sections, I will draw on sonic metaphor to help illustrate the significance of this claim.

4. The Sonic

The phenomenological account of the subject is, thus, as a radically dynamic and relational process (one of communicative becoming). To fully appreciate the dynamism of this account, it is not enough to conceive of the subject as in motion, but rather we must think of the subject as motion itself. In order to accomplish this, we are best served by employing sonic metaphors, as opposed to the more traditional visual and cartographic metaphors8. This is because sound, as a physical phenomenon, exhibits several important features. It is generated through friction, it propagates via a medium, and it is inescapably conditioned by variable aspects of the source, the medium, and the recipient. It is, thus, radically dynamic and relational.

Sound is generated through the dynamic interaction of at least two different elements—a hand on a drumhead, a bow on a cello string, or air on our vocal cords, for example. The productive friction generated by these interactions causes a compression and rarefaction in the air as a wave. The generation of a sound wave thus requires a dynamic interaction taking place over time. Even the striking of a drum or the collision of two vehicles is not literally instantaneous, but unfolds over time, setting up the wave function that we eventually hear as a drum beat or a “crash”. The characteristics of the resulting sound are a function of several variables. The interacting elements (vinyl strings, stretched animal skin, fiberglass, and metal), the relative movement of those elements, and the qualities of the medium through which the sound travels all condition the resulting sound. Importantly, what that sound is just is the movement of the medium. If we stop the movement, the sound ceases to be. In this way, sound is not a thing in motion, it is motion itself. We may of course describe or represent sounds statically using mathematical formulas, or graphs depicting the wave function, or even musical notation, but these representations of sounds must not be mistaken for sound as such. The sonic is radically dynamic precisely in this way—that its being is a movement, rather than a thing in motion.

Additionally, sound is radically relational, as well as radically dynamic. First, by virtue of its being a product of friction/interaction, sound emerges through the relation between different elements. Second, because sound is a movement of a medium, which in turn must interact with any recipients of the sound, we can see that sound is relational in its propagation and transmission, as well. If there is no medium (in a vacuum, for instance), and thus no way to sustain the necessary relations, there can be no sound. What is more, the features of the medium play a crucial role in the behavior of the sound wave, thereby conditioning how it “sounds” to a given recipient. Air, or water, or wood (if, say, one’s ear is to a door) all condition sound waves in different ways. Indeed, even varying the temperature or density of the air can have a significant impact. Furthermore, receiving a sound involves yet another moment of interaction and relation. In the case of hearing a musical note, for instance, the wave interacts with one’s eardrum and the complex mechanisms of the inner ear, variations in which structures can alter what and how one hears. Finally, the relative motion on the part of the source or the recipient also impacts the behavior of waves and the phenomenon of sound (think of the doppler effect, for instance). Thus, to account in any adequate way for a given sonic phenomenon, one cannot avoid both dynamism and relationality. Without movement and relation, there can be no sound9.

Lastly, the shift to the sonic is especially productive when we attend to the ways in which sound waves interact. The interaction of waves of any sort, whether they be the ripples from two different pebbles tossed in a pond, or the sound waves from the six strings on a guitar, is called “interference”. When waves interfere with each other, their characteristics are altered—a wave before and after an interaction, in other words, is not identical. Such alterations may be more or less significant, and they can be generally classified as “constructive” or “destructive”. When interference is constructive, the waves interact in a way that is mutually enhancing of their amplitude. If you think of a visual representation of a wave, the crests and troughs line-up, and boost each other, so to speak. When those crests and troughs are not in synch, when the interference is destructive, then the waves are diminished through the interaction. When one of the waves is significantly more powerful than the other, the effect can be to cancel-out the weaker wave. This is more or less what noise-cancelling headphones do—they generate waves the function of which is to destructively interfere with a broad spectrum of other waves so as to cancel them out for the user. Thus, the dynamism and relationality of waves has significant implications for their interaction. Unlike the ways we typically think about the interaction of objects, like the tried-and-true example of billiard balls, which remain the same even if their trajectory may be altered by interaction, the interaction of waves alters the waves themselves. They are what they are by virtue of their interactions.

Returning now to the phenomenological account of the subject, my claim here is that it is best understood using the model of a sound wave. As a dynamic process of becoming constituted in and through relations with others, the subject is akin, in significant ways, to a sound wave. Subjects stand in a constitutive relation (correlation) with objects of consciousness (that which is intended). This is a moment of productive friction, where the resulting phenomenon (the subject as a wave) is not reducible to the sum of its parts, but is a dynamic and ongoing result of their interaction. As we have already discussed, because these objects of consciousness are given as available to the consciousness of others, and as meaningful within a larger cultural or communicative context (the life-world), they are immediately, as if part of a larger medium, connected to or in relation with past, present, and future acts of intention. Fanon’s turn to language at the opening of Black Skin, White Masks, therefore, emerges as a natural extension of his phenomenological training and background. Any rigorous investigation of colonized and colonizing subjects will, thus, need to take seriously the communicative medium in and through which they are dynamically and relationally propagating. This makes up the soundscape, so to speak, in which subjects are able to appear (or, as Fanon’s own language stresses, to exist) both to themselves (as objects of their own intentional consciousness) and to others.

5. Materials and Methods

My discussion of the sonic so far has focused mainly on the physical phenomenon of sound—the production and transmission of waves. To grasp the full force both of Fanon’s analysis and the phenomenological insights from which he draws, we must turn our attention to the act of hearing a given sound. Once again, I will use the example of sitting on my front porch to pull out some key elements. I am surrounded by sound waves at all times, such as traffic on the nearby roads, planes approaching and departing the airport, birdsong, etc. This makes up the soundscape of my porch on a summer morning. When I am focused on writing, it remains in the background—heard, but not actively listened to (that is, not actively intended). When I paused just now to direct my attention to my soundscape and catalog the background noises, the individual elements shifted from the background to the foreground. Importantly, as with the earlier example of a person walking down the sidewalk, they are each given as meaningful. I may not be able to identify the type of car, or plane, or bird, but that a given sound was birdsong or an overhead jet is given immediately in the moment of intending the sound. Insofar as I have grown accustomed to these sounds, they sit comfortably in the background as my attention is focused elsewhere. The appearance of something unusual (a car backfiring, or a neighbor firing up their leaf-blower) may arrest my attention, sometimes even demanding an explanation (was that a car backfiring, or a gunshot?), but absent anything unusual, I have no trouble focusing on my writing while surrounded by a quite active soundscape. This notion of being accustomed to my soundscape is in keeping with the idea that intentional consciousness is informed by past experience. In other words, that this soundscape sounds normal to me, and, thus, falls readily into the background of my perception, is a function of habit and custom. This notion of habituation is one key element to understanding Fanon’s discussion of language. What and how we hear is always conditioned by prior experience and the habituated norms and customs by which we have attuned our ears.

Now consider again the elements of my soundscape and suppose that I have developed a particular interest in and study of birds. If this were the case, then when I attend to birdsong, I will not just hear that a given song is that of “a bird”, but rather it will be given to my perception as “a cardinal”, or “a bluejay”. I will have trained or educated my ear to discern details in my soundscape that are unavailable to those who are not educated in this way. If I am particularly well-trained in the hearing of birdsong, then the appearance of a strange or atypical birdsong might become every bit as jarring as a car backfiring. Hearing the call of a nocturnal barn owl in mid-morning, for instance, might well arrest the attention of a bird fancier, but remain in the background for others. The point here is that habituated ways of hearing are not simply passively absorbed, but can be actively pursued, cultivated, and altered. This is a second key element of Fanon’s engagement with language. Our ways of perceiving are always conditioned by and embedded in a communicative context, but we have the capacity to actively engage with and alter that context and our relation to it.

I have been arguing that we should think about subjects using the metaphor of sound waves. They are dynamic processes propagating in a rich soundscape (medium) that brings them into mutually constitutive relation with other such dynamic processes. Colonialism and racism, Fanon is attesting, create a soundscape, the function of which is to habituate and normalize certain ways of existing (enacting one’s subjectivity) and perceiving. They set the conditions for what and how different sounds appear—when certain sounds may sit comfortably in the background or else burst forth to arrest one’s attention. In particular, colonialism and racism impose a normative hierarchy on all of these processes and their interactions, one where some expressions of subjectivity (sound waves) are subjected to destructive interference as a matter of course, lost in a sea of white noise.

In technical terms, “white noise” denotes an intense sound emitted across a broad range of frequencies that functions to cancel out competing sounds. White noise machines are often sold as sleeping aids. In more phenomenological terms, white noise can be thought of as a consistent background sonic presence that makes it difficult for anomalies to arrest one’s attention. As a sleep aid, white noise machines make it less likely that the sounds of traffic, passing trains, or arguing neighbors will break through to our consciousness and interrupt our repose. Of course, insofar as what is important is a strong sound to which we have grown accustomed, and which, thus, operates as background noise, the exact sort of sound or range of frequencies is not as important as this sense of familiarity. An air conditioner, a fan, or even music can, therefore, serve this white noise function. What is crucial phenomenologically is that the sound be present enough to occlude other sounds, and that we are sufficiently accustomed to it that its presence remains strictly in the background of our consciousness. By way of example, for those accustomed to reading and writing in busy cafes, the general din of conversations and the hiss of milk being steamed can all function as white noise. There is ever-present and rather intense noise, but one can be so accustomed to it that it remains in the background, serving to block out what might otherwise be distractions to our focus. This becomes apparent when, for example, a couple takes the table next to yours and has a conversation, where one of the interlocutors has a voice that cuts through that background and cannot be washed out in the general din (it is either loud enough, or maybe at a frequency that evades the white noise background). For just such occasions, one enterprising software designer created a phone app that simply plays café sounds through your headphones. Basically, this functions as an unorthodox white noise machine, raising the intensity of the café din (making it more present) and thereby more effectively washing out the intruding voice. What is important here is that virtually anything can come to function as white noise, once we are sufficiently accustomed or habituated to it.

Thus, when I claim that colonialism and racism create a hierarchical context of white noise, my point is that they generate a metaphorical soundscape in which many sounds are washed out (subjected to destructive interference), but that goes generally unnoticed by many who occupy that dominant soundscape by virtue of their taking it to be normal background noise. In the context of Fanon’s discussion of language, this has three important, though certainly interrelated, implications. Firstly, there is the problem of appearance. Fanon’s point is that colonialism and racism generate a dominant soundscape that functions to cancel-out the appearance of Black/colonized subjects (non-white noise, one might say). A certain linguistic framework, in his case French, presents itself as the “civilized” and “civilizing” tongue, and once so established, “all colonized people” must “position themselves in relation to the civilizing language [1] (p. 2)”. In the Martinican context in particular, where non-white subjects are educated in French and exist in a world normatively oriented around the Metropole, this leads to a form of alienation or mystification where the white noise soundscape is habituated as normal even for the colonized [1] (p. 12). As Fanon points out, the speaking of Creole in Martinique is fundamentally different from the speaking of Breton in Brittany, precisely because the Bretons were never “civilized” in a colonial/racial relation [1] (p. 12). Against such powerful background noise, therefore, it is difficult for colonized subjectivity to appear—it is constantly in a struggle against a generalized soundscape that serves to offer destructive interference to Black or colonized subjectivity (understood as a dynamic and relational process). Every attempt to articulate oneself, to position oneself in a productive relation with others (to exist absolutely), is inevitably set against the overwhelming force of white noise.

Secondly, there is the problem of illicit appearance. While the white noise context works to thwart efforts on the part of Black/colonized subjects to appear at all, this is never entirely successful—sometimes subjects will, despite the odds, manage to break through the noise. Nevertheless, the embodied dimension of subjectivity means that efforts to appear on the part of the colonized will be read by those accustomed to the white noise context as aberrational and illicit. Fanon discusses the experience of the Martinican in the Metropole, and returning home from the Metropole, to exemplify this. The returnee’s fellow Martinicans will be waiting for her to either put on airs and assume a position of superiority (because she has become “civilized”), or to make a mistake in her language, and subject herself to ridicule [1] (pp. 8–9). To assume the French language, Fanon is illustrating, is to assume the French culture and civilization, but to do so in a Black body is always to do so illicitly or illegitimately. Likewise, for the Martinican in France, to speak proper French is rendered by the white noise context as a kind of imposture (“‘Basically, you’re a white man’ [1] (p. 21)”). White noise interference will, thus, preclude much appearance, and position what leaks (or, more viscerally, bleeds) through in ways that reinforce or confirm the normative hierarchy. This is particularly evident in Fanon’s discussions of the many examples of White subjects speaking “pidgin” (petit-négre) to Black subjects. In such cases, Fanon argues, the message is clear: “You, stay where you are [1] (p. 17)”. The place of the Black subject in a hierarchical white noise soundscape is, of course, beneath the civilized/white, and assuming or imposing what is understood to be Black language is a way of reinforcing this relation. As Fanon writes, “speaking pidgin means imprisoning the black man and perpetuating a conflictual situation where the white man infects the black man with extremely toxic foreign bodies [1] (pp. 18–19)”. In other words, the communicative becoming of Black subjects meets with profound destructive interference at every turn by virtue of the larger white noise context that has become generally habitual and normalized. Where the appearance of such subjectivity is not thwarted outright, it is constituted as illicit.

A third implication of this shift to the sonic for our reading of Fanon has to do with the interference, constructive and destructive, occurring at the level of individual interaction. We might think of this as the problem of oppression. Recall that the account of the subject developed so far is one characterized by a communicative becoming, where the subject is an ongoing and open-ended process, and where relations with others are not a secondary feature of subjectivity, but rather a condition for the possibility of subjectivity at all. One’s capacities for participating in what Husserl called the “intersubjective constitution” of one’s life-world [8] (p. 168), are, thus, profoundly conditioned by the character of one’s communicative interactions with others (and as we have already seen, by the normative structures of the medium in which that communication takes place). Understood sonically, we might think of these sorts of interactions as exhibiting constructive or destructive interference. In constructive interference, waves interact in such a way that each enhances the other—they grow stronger as a result of the interference. We might well think of this as a kind of empowerment, where participants act toward each other, manifest their power, in ways that enhance the power of the other. In destructive interference, waves interact in such a way that each diminishes the other, as a sort of disempowerment. Rather than opening up new possibilities for self-expression and meaning-making, disempowering interactions foreclose possibilities and compel us to “stay where we are”. Of course, while it is true that destructive interference diminishes both of the interacting waves, where one wave is significantly more powerful, and especially when that more powerful wave is embedded in a soundscape that fosters and normalizes it, then its diminishment is minimal, and the less powerful wave is often simply cancelled (rendered inaudible). The white noise soundscape, in other words, works both to cancel the appearance of non-white subjects generally, but also serves to normalize destructive interference at the I/thou level, as well. The result is a condition that we might well call oppressive.

Fanon’s diagnosis of colonial alienation and racist oppression can, thus, be productively developed through a turn to the sonic. Language is fundamental because it is the transcendental condition for the possibility of our communicative becoming and the intersubjective constitution of our life-world(s). When our communicative context creates hierarchical normative arrangements establishing the dominance of certain linguistic practices at the expense of others (white noise), then our capacities to engage productively in these processes of communicative becoming are impaired. The larger context of white noise conditions both how we hear (what appears aurally as well as what sounds normal), and how we are able to make ourselves heard. If oppression is, at least in part, about this inhibition of one’s ability to appear within a shared soundscape, then how ought we think of struggles for liberation? That is, what does this shift to the sonic tell us about communication and liberation10?

Liberation, understood in this sonic register, is about creating the conditions in which constructive interference is normalized. In the colonial context that was Fanon’s focus, we might think of this in terms of colonized subjects building sufficient constructive interference among themselves that they are able to generate sufficient power to appear despite the omnipresent destructive interference of white noise. Turning to Fanon’s later work, we might read his articulation of “national consciousness” as precisely this sort of effort in the context of the Algerian anti-colonial struggle [18] (pp. 206–48). The struggle for a national consciousness is the effort to build a community the function of which is to enhance the power of the individuals participating in it (and in turn being shaped and conditioned by that participation in community) that is at once free of the alienation of white/colonial normativity and empowered sufficiently to avoid being cancelled out by the larger white noise context. We must build our power through constructive interference. So empowered, the colonized subject is still engaged in a relation of destructive interference with that larger context, but with sufficient power to both maintain its integrity and perceptibility, and to appreciably diminish the power of that white noise context. In this way, it is able to appear, rather than being canceled out. Again, destructive interference diminishes all waves involved, and it is only the asymmetry of power that enables white noise to effectively cancel the “illicit” sound. The liberatory move here is, thus, to generate sufficient power to break through the wash of white noise. By creating the communicative conditions that enable constructive interference among the colonized, it becomes possible to diminish the power and efficacy of white noise.

Communication is, thus, central to liberatory praxis, and not simply as a means of transmitting information or sharing ideas. Rather, we must think of communication as itself a form of productive friction that is a necessary condition for the possibility of subjects as such. Where oppression seeks to disavow or foreclose such open-ended processes of productive friction, normalizing practices and interactions that serve to keep us “in our place”, a liberatory communicative practice seeks openness. Furthermore, because communicative becoming is a result of friction, which requires difference, liberatory practices aim not at homogeneity or even communicative transparency, but rather foster productive encounters with difference, and an openness to opacity. What is important is conditions of reciprocity, where productive interference (which again, requires difference) is normalized. This is what I take Fanon to mean when he concludes Black Skin, White Masks with an acknowledgement of a “right to demand human behavior from the other [1] (p. 204)”. Where “the human” is understood as this open-ended practice of communicative becoming, the demand for human behavior is precisely this demand for reciprocity and constructive interference.