The 1AC is a tapping into the fugitive sounds that refuses the call for order, policy and governance. This process of dialogue allows for the cultivation of black and indigenous sociality.

Sounds from the Undercommons Frank Ocean’s scream – the sonic event that began this meditation on the voice – is such an expression of this fugitive vocality. It is a noise of excess that cannot be contained, a noise that moves relentlessly toward the edge of that which constitutes subject and object. But Ocean’s scream is also captured as a recording, and as such, is able to be reproduced ad infinitum. Some might say that the technology of sound reproduction performs an operation of abstraction akin to the transformation I have described above of the voice into an ideal object. This argument posits that technologies of mechanical reproduction sever the voice from the body that produces it, transforming it into an ‘acousmatic’ object that can be repeated, as well as bought and sold (Truax, 1984; Schafer, 1994). But the problem with this account is that it relies on a set of a priori assumptions that ‘hold human experience and the human body to be categories outside history’ (Sterne, 2003: 20). Such arguments appeal to a conception of the body as already coherent and whole, and an idea of technology that is abstracted from its embeddedness in the social sphere. Jonathan Sterne, in his deconstruction of the ideological assumptions behind such arguments, writes: [T]hese authors assume that sound-reproduction technologies will have a disorienting effect on the senses that are otherwise grounded in coherent bodily experience. The assumption of sensory coherence requires a notion of a human body that exists outside history. For instance, the claim that sound reproduction has ‘alienated’ the voice from the human body implies that the voice and the body existed in some prior holistic, unalienated, and self-present relation. (2003: 20–21) As we have already established, the performance of Blackness emerges from flesh that precedes the formation of body that is autonomous and whole. When I listen to Ocean’s scream, the hairs on my body prickle to attention and goose bumps form involuntarily on my skin.

I register the scream in my flesh. Flesh reaches out toward flesh, across the technological divide. Ocean’s scream might be better understood, following Moten and Harney, as a ‘call for and from disorder’ (2013: 133). In listening again and again to this irruption of noise, I am learning to attune to a vibrational field that opens toward an alternative order of desire. Here we might follow Sterne in challenging the assumption that ‘sound-reproduction technologies can function as neutral conduits, as instrumental rather than substantive parts of social relationships’ (2003: 21). It may seem an obvious point to make but the reproduction of a recording is never identical; the event of listening is always unique and always coded by the social relationships it is embedded in. Ocean’s scream reverberates differently whether I listen to it by myself at home or surrounded by others at a party. The vibrations of the flesh seek connection and refuse to be stilled by technologies of mechanical reproduction. Of course it is not only in song that we may find voices that operate against the logic of improvement and accumulation.

We can find such fugitive impulses in the murmur of a crowd, the noise of a riot, and, as I will elaborate, in the hushed tones of a gossip network. I am interested in gossip as a critical function of the undercommons, suggesting that it might constitute a useful medial modality in the ongoing project of breaking and building socialities. Gossip has long been positioned as a diversion from the pursuit of true knowledge, characterized as a groundless form of feminized speech that trades in falsity and/or triviality. But this has not always been the case. ‘In its original meaning, gossip implied no gender; it meant “godparent,”’ a meaning derived from the etymological roots of the word as ‘godsibb’, which designated God’s kin (Spacks, 1982: 19). The evolution of the term sees it come to be used to refer to a drinking partner; a woman’s female friends invited to be present at a birth; and finally, in its modern connotations, to describe a woman who engages in idle talk, or, the idle talk commonly associated with women (Spacks, 1982: 19). Common to each of these definitions is the notion of an intimacy that is established via proximity. In each iteration gossip denotes a certain closeness – physical, social or familial – and in its original usage describes a relation of care connected to forms of kinship that foreground collective ownership and exchange. Silvia Federici (2004) expands on the conception of gossip as an intimate and feminized social relation, arguing that the term took on a derogatory connotation in the transition from feudalism to capitalism. In this period, the coercive accumulation by dispossession of both resources and bodies also required the destruction of feminist forms of sociality and solidarity. Federici connects the dismissal of gossip to such forms of persecution as the witch-hunts and to biopolitical measures concerned with the regulation of family life, gender, and property relations. Inherently multi-vocal and polyphonic, gossip evades capture and cannot be singularly owned. It is a form of radical knowledge that moves outside of official discourse, circulating noisy information across a social body. As such, we can make a historical distinction between modes of idle talk that affirm and uphold the dominant socio-political order – such as the locker-room talk of influential men – and gossip, a mode of speech that has evolved as a way to circumvent the dismissal of certain voices as noise. Indeed, the refusal to hear gossip as speech is, paradoxically, what gives rise to its interruptive potentiality. This circulation of speech under the guise of noise creates the possibility for a ‘discursive’ social body that may not be recognized as comprising political beings yet may nonetheless be practicing politics. Gossip serves as a productive mechanism, making possible the construction of alternative ways of knowing and socializing that place generative difference at their core. As I have argued elsewhere (Brooks and Lorange, 2017: 39), ‘gossip both points to subjects, objects, events, and affects, and foregrounds points of view. This dual pointing is a gesture that is simultaneously internal and external, an index of the subject and their relation to other subjects, objects and events in the world.’ Gossip requires a mode of listening that, to recall Jean-Luc Nancy (2007: 6), ‘[strains] toward a possible meaning, and consequently one that is not immediately accessible’. To participate in gossip is to engage in feedback and feed-forward loops between speaking, listening, processing and recording/inscribing. This does not refer to linear feedback but rather to a complex dynamic of looping in which directionality is never stable. Feeding forward and backward, gossip involves the dual operations of capture and conversion in which speaking and listening fold into each other. Taken in this way, gossip suggests an active and relational mode of listening, a transversality that attends to social and cultural contexts and dynamics rather than simply the content of the speech.

Gossip involves a listening with rather than simply a listening to. Listening with is a modality in which ‘a listener is always in movement, allowing the resonances to carry one off on the various lines of flight the sounds induce – toward other sounds and sound-making, into the mesh where one registers and attempts to comprehend how such sounds leave their mark – then back again to the event itself of listening’ (Nardone, 2015). Fugitive listening attends not only to formal and informational content but also to the forces, relations, and contexts that code conversational exchange. Here we can think of gossip as a mode of speech in which affective forces and intensities are transmitted, in addition to conversational content. Gossip, writes Judith Butler (2018: 2) in relation to José Esteban Muñoz’s championing of this minor mode of speech, is ‘a way of passing along affect that makes it larger, letting it lift off from reality, where the affect is not a discrete bit of excitation, a quantity: it conditions and enters the collective crafting that augments its intensity; it is never quite separable from the scene of address that it transforms’. Participating in gossip requires a type of listening that attends to the extralinguistic affective aspects of speech that are produced by context and conveyed in tone. A fugitive listening attends to that which escapes and exceeds signification. It registers the forces and intensities that circulate within the social field and has the potential to point out what is actually going on at the register of the felt. Gossip is speech that not only cannot be owned but can only be collectively produced. Of course, this is not to suggest that gossip is always virtuous – my intention here has not been to distinguish between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ forms of gossip, an established argument that attempts to elevate gossip from the status of inauthentic speech by redefining the distinctions between trivial and significant, positive and negative. Instead, I am interested in how fugitive speech acts like gossip might interrupt the disciplining of knowledge by foregrounding noisy and relational modes of speaking and listening. In such a communicative system, ‘bad’ sentiments might be as valuable as ‘good’ ones. As Butler (2018: 12) writes, ‘bad sentiments … can signal the capacity to transcend hopelessness … Feeling bad things, like anger and rage, and doing bad things, like being rude, can fulfill the editorial function of commenting upon the massive unacceptability of present reality’. This admittance of ‘bad’ sentiments into the structure of fugitive speech foregrounds the value that the gossip network places on the affective dimension of communication and the structures of feeling such exchanges produce. Attending to both the affective and informatic dimensions of gossip requires a transversal listening and speaking practice that is similarly collective and collaborative. Gossip involves a dual movement between acquisition and dissemination, and is sustained by a community who contribute small fragments of information into a networked discourse that is constantly evolving (Ayim, 1994: 87). The test of informational validity is socially determined, not by an appeal to an a priori truth but by a consensus that emerges from collaborative inquiry. It operates according to an epistemological order outside of those that we inherit from liberal and Enlightenment traditions. Gossip refuses to adhere to, or to be curtailed by, the conventions of discipline or the demands of formal discourse, instead promoting an informal and collective mode of knowledge production. As a mode of inquiry it is speculative and imaginative, and yet the fear of gossip is that it contains and will reveal truths that might otherwise go unacknowledged. Taken in this way, we can think of gossip as producing a type of under- or counter-history. While gossip promotes unrestricted inquiry, it also trades in the secretive. However, gossip’s relationship to secrecy is complicated as there is always a risk that gossip will spread beyond its intended recipients (with consequences that will vary depending on the content of the gossip and the political context of its capture). Never totally private, we might think of gossip as the speech of counterpublics, producing and disseminating what Moten (2010: 84) refers to as ‘the open secret’; that is, the freighting of sensitive information across the break, in the open. This information is never static and never fixed but rather in a continuous state of evolution – ‘the secret is only transmitted in transformation and transmutation’ (Moten, 2010: 105). For Moten, the secret presents itself as an obscurity that may not be decipherable via traditional interpretive strategies but that is nonetheless felt or known in some form or another – it is a relation of the flesh. The secret is engendered in the act of communication and so must be understood as an open secret.

While the secret may be marked by a certain obscurity, it is never completely private or closed off from exchange. Animated by the circulation of open secrecy, gossip also always involves the production of collective social relations. It is a mode of speech that is conditioned by its contact with others, a mode of speech that refuses to be stilled and refuses to be disciplined. It inhabits an antagonistic relation to the proper and the proposed. Here I am thinking about gossip as a mode of speech that arises in the midst of collaborative activities such as study or ‘minor’ planning, returning here to Moten and Harney’s notion of undercommon modalities. Gossip’s continuous movement between the secretive and the open can be understood as just that movement that supports the threshold of a becoming-public of information. Opposed to the practices of governance and policy, fugitive modalities of study and planning foreground multi-vocality, producing a cacophony of demands and practices that refuse to conform to the corrective demands put forward by policy and policy-makers. For Moten and Harney, policy comes to represent a mentality or disposition, and the mobilization of policy produces governance, which they define as follows: Governance should not be confused with government or governmentality. Governance is most importantly a new form of expropriation. It is the provocation of a certain kind of disinterestedness, a display of convertibility, a display of legibility. Governance is an instrumentalisation of policy, a set of protocols of deputisation, where one simultaneously auctions and bids on oneself, where the public and the private submit themselves to post-fordist production. (2013: 80) Describing, alternately, an informal and improvisatory set of practices and activities – or perhaps a disposition counter to the one articulated by policy – planning and study gesture towards modes of intellectuality and communality that exist outside the logics of categorical distinction. Such modalities of social life emerge from a general antagonism, which cannot ‘be tamed either by the feudal authority or social violence that is capitalism, much less by policy initiatives like agnostic dialogues or alternative public spheres’ (Harney and Moten, 2013: 109). Gossip contains a general antagonism towards formal discourse or policy – it moves information that is counter to or in excess of the officially sanctioned and generates transversal lines of communication that cut the linear movement of discourse via policy. We can locate something akin to a gossip network in certain mediated environments that allow for participatory interaction, such as in the use of Twitter in the lead-up to, and duration of, the 2015 Baltimore riots that occurred in the wake of Freddie Gray’s murder at the hands of police. This networked discourse is captured in a chapbook produced by the collective Research and Destroy New York City, titled The 2015 Baltimore Uprising: A Teen Epistolary, which forms an archive of the online activity of a sub-community of Black Twitter – Baltimore teenagers. Looking at this archive, it strikes me that the production and circulation of information on Twitter can function like a gossip network, working to produce counterpublics that have the potential to disseminate ‘news’ outside, or in excess of, the official channels (news media, statements from police and politicians). Of course, this is not to claim that Twitter is a radical political platform. On the contrary, it emerges from the corporatization of networks that configures the social as a mass of discrete individuals, a phenomenon that has given rise to the univocal blustering that is a hallmark of Donald Trump’s online presence, for example. Rather than ascribing an inherent radicalism or conservatism to the platform, we can understand Twitter as belonging to a diagram of contemporary power that is inflected by different kinds of subjectivations. Against the violence of white supremacy, this collection of tweets indexes a collective voice that announces the existence of other possibilities, of forms of life that exceed the terms given by the modern subject. This gossip network is a chorus that is full of noise that: freights sensitive information across the break; indexes a fugitive public animated by an improvisational imperative; and documents Black performances that are mediated by a complex interplay between technocultural processes and structures (bodies, software platforms, algorithms, digital networks, data flows, affects). It is a set of operations that move, following Moten’s formulation, according to ‘the reality of escape in and the possibility of escape from’ (2008: 1745).

Thinking back through the logics of race and racialization, I want to suggest that we might understand those voices that engage in fugitive modes of speech such as gossip via Denise Ferreira da Silva’s notion of Black Feminist Poethics, which she describes as ‘a moment of radical praxis [that] acknowledges the creative capacity Blackness indexes, reclaims expropriated total value, and demands for nothing less than decolonization’ (2014: 85). Ferreira da Silva (2014: 86) proposes that we read and listen in order ‘to un-organize, un-form, un-think the world’, such that we might interrupt ‘the dominant fantasies of a kind of knowing that can only determine itself […] with iron hinges of universal reason’. Attending to those voices that belong to the order of the flesh might constitute a first step toward a process of un-organizing, un-forming, and un-thinking the world. In other words, we must listen to such voices not out of some desire to incorporate them into liberal conceptions of the public sphere, but rather to radically transform our very conception of the public sphere. Developing a listening practice attuned to these fugitive voices might be the first step toward a form of sociality that exists outside the epistemic violence of liberalism.