I have considerable sympathy for the task Metz sets himself. I really, really do. And I suspect more than one of us would easily agree with Metz that sound remains a “bad object” from the perspective of western cultural praxes, which continue to favor the visual and the linguistic as preferred objects of analysis. In fact, for Metz, this problem is so systemic that the “aural” – or if one prefers, the “sonic” or “acoustic” – has trouble even entering our symbolic economy as an “object” altogether: hence his preference to speak of “aural objects” rather than, say, of sound. Worse still, our philosophical and linguistic systems are afflicted with a bad case of “primitive substantialism” (366) that means we have trouble conceiving of objects beyond just the most elemental aspects of their materiality. Visual (and tactile) qualities are these primary elements, and as such they assume a position of supposed superiority at the symbolic level of language, i.e. a subject-position, through which they experience their consistent reaffirmation. This is, of course, a social construct of superiority which privileges certain aspects of experience. By contrast, sound (together with smell and particular “subdimensions” (366) of the visual order like color) experience a linguistic trauma of sorts, forced – or so Metz claims – to occupy an inferior world of mere attributes. Demoted as they are to this secondary status, our own experience of them is also delimited. We are incapable of experiencing them to their fullest in part because we are incapable of talking about them. Or more grandly still: sound is the victim of an “Indo-European worldview” predicated, as it were, on the structuralist distinction between predicates and subjects.

By way, then, of an example from the fashion-world, Metz attempts to prove just how pervasive and troublesome this worldview really is. “No one,” he asserts vis-à-vis his chosen example, “will say or think that the store was offering ‘the same color in two different articles of clothing’…One would be more likely to say that these were ‘two articles of clothing,’ this scarf and this skirt, for example, ‘of the same color.’ The utterance put color back in its place, that of predicate: these are two distinct objects which have an attribute in common.” (367) But why draw our attention to sound’s marginal status only to seemingly confirm it yet again? To use Metz’s own example: isn’t it a bit odd that sound - that bad object supposedly under discussion here - is in fact so bad that it cannot even be used for the sake of Metz’s example? Why should he make recourse to the visual order or even a subdimension (i.e. color) of this order here, of all places? If one concurs with Metz that sound occupies a kind of subaltern status, then its inability to register as a viable example of certain discursive practices is at least stubbornly consistent. But there are all too obvious problems with this: Metz comes across as though he were surreptitiously repressing sound in order to sustain the affective plea of his argument. After all, the dialectic between sound and image offers seductively easy examples to the contrary, which suggest that sound is not so easily subordinated as Metz himself wishes to imply. For example, one can speak with ease of “the same sound in two different films.” Who among the visually-fixated would think to speak of “two different films in the same sound?” This is but one example of the high degree of artifice on which Metz’s argument depends. Still another glitch persists: for even if we could not recuperate sound from its attributive status, it is unclear why the attributive order is necessarily something inferior in the first place. The problem of “objectification,” after all, is one of attributions: attributive features of an object all too often degrade the object itself, overwhelming our confidence in its pristine superiority. The luminaries of the star-system are described – indeed, even selected – on the basis of an attributive shorthand of sorts: “blond,” for example, or “strong.” Or perhaps “throaty.” Tired of being an object yet?

Such problems obfuscate rather than elucidate the problematic status of sound – not just for film theorists who wrongly speak of “off-screen sound” but also for those in search of an answer to what is really a much broader question: Now that we know that it isn’t the sound itself that is “off” but rather its source, are we still misguided by impulses to go to this source in search of an image? I’m actually doubtful. All things considered, I find Metz’s view a useful caveat not to forget about sound, but from our own perspective in 2004, I would say that his gripe is beginning to sound like a quaint technical glitch, one which has since undergone considerable adjustment. So, too, does his admiration of and willful alliance with the phenomenological project bespeak a premature cynicism of sorts: today, we are arguably in the midst of a sonic “boom” that cries out for interpretation. The potential inventory of such sound-objects, their qualities as such and the cultural practices that produce them in the first place all deserve a detailed enumeration, something not possible here. But within the logic of the film industry, for example, there is the rise of the soundtrack, no longer limited to mere songs. “Noise,” too, as opposed to organized sound is no longer the sonic detritus it once was and so interesting only for the most intrepid avant-gardists. Noise has approached the limits, it seems, of its anarchical existence. It now finds itself interesting for its own sake, for example as a number on a film-soundtrack or as a “sample” available for easy manipulation. Such manipulation, crucially, is intended with reference to other aural objects, creating new soundscapes that do not depend on a surreptitious trafficking in visual images (though some of these are surely along for the ride). How we choose to write, talk about, or otherwise record our experiences with these new aural objects will surely have consequences for the experience itself: but what will those be? While I do not find Metz’s essay convincing from the standpoint of its argumentative logic, his plea to think about sound still stands. And to his credit we are provoked to think about it on its own terms before moving on to the status of a particular cultural artefact like M.