Non-fundamental Tones, or, the Pharmakon of Silence

AbstractThe dialogic—a perpetual process of non-hierarchical interaction—is contrasted with both ethnomusicology’s and queerness’s monologic relationship to non-Western sites and people, a colonialist-masculinist stance founded on oppressive language and an implicit positing of the West’s knowledge production as singular, universal, and superior. Understanding communication as more than semiotic/linguistic, and the role of the sonic in relationality, it is argued that attention to the conceptual/material possibilities of echoes and reverberations—contrasting the monologic echo chamber with the expanse of ‘wild’ epistemic possibility—offers a way of conceiving of and working toward postdisciplinary, undisciplined explorations of sound, music, sex/uality, and the social. Silence is revealed as double-sided, a pharmokon—the poison of the silencing monologic, willingly withdrawn, becoming the remedy of self-silencing, a condition of pluriversality.