Finitude and Withdrawal

To say that sound is real is a challenge to more than physics or metaphor. It questions a metaphysical tradition that privileges shape, stability, and sight. Sound, too fleeting, too fluid, is excluded. This does not mean we should abandon philosophy in resisting sonic manifestationism. But it means seeking those strands willing to grant sound autonomy.

Speculative realism and object-oriented ontology (OOO) start from a radical premise: humans are not ontologically special. We are objects among objects – finite, contingent, entangled. Levi R. Bryant calls his theory of existence a democracy of objects: no being is more real simply because it endures, stands still, or matches our expectations.¹ This reorientation asks us to seriously consider the possibility that non- visual, non-static, and non-discrete phenomena – like sound – might also be real objects in the world.

Yet, the term “object” remains slippery. Some critics, like Rein Raud, warn that OOO often repackages metaphysical binaries – flattening difference under the guise of neutrality.² Iain Campbell, writing from within sonic theory, warns against too readily aligning Deleuze with speculative realism.³ For him, Deleuze is a thinker of events, not things – of becoming, not being. These critiques are important. But they don’t mean we should abandon the idea of objecthood. They demand its revision.

A sonic object is not a substance. It’s not fixed, self-contained, or always perceivable. It emerges. It resonates. It withdraws. But it is finite – not because it lacks depth or diversity, but because it is specific. Its presence is always partial, always shaped by the conditions that allow it to appear. It is real in its contingency (dependent on conditions, situations, or contexts to come into being as it does). This view echoes Graham Harman’s notion of withdrawal: all objects exceed the relations in which they appear.⁴

A bell’s tone is not the bell. A waveform is not the sound. A protest chant is not reducible to its words. Each is only a glimpse, a situated expression, never the whole. In OOO, objects are not exhausted by their relations to other objects or to perceivers; they retain “a reality in excess of any relation”. Every encounter is therefore a translation – a partial rendering of a deeper object that remains inaccessible.

Recordings, waveforms or perceptions never fully capture a sound: each offers a different profile of an object that holds something back. The hum of a refrigerator continues whether or not we attend to it; the resonance of a thunderclap lingers in memory beyond its audible decay; a field recording doesn’t exhaust the sonic environment it samples. Withdrawal is not some kind of metaphysical mystery but simply a reminder that sonic objects are more than any single appearance or measure.

This view need not be opposed to Deleuze’s emphasis on becoming. The “object” in sonic realism is not a static thing but a durational system – an open process of emergence, relation and withdrawal. Naming sound as object is not to freeze it; it is to acknowledge that it persists and acts beyond any particular event. It is simply to affirm that the snare hit and the thunderstorm are equal participants in reality, even as they differ in scale, intensity and cultural meaning. Again – a sound is never exhausted by its source or reception.

Unlike some OOO approaches, however, sonic realism insists that relation still matters. Sound is not detached from context. It emerges within networks of mediation: spatial, technological, political, and ecological. Networks of potentiality.

As Deleuze shows, reality is a field of intensities and potential.⁵ In sonic realism, this means sounds are not fixed essences but emergent events: a snare hit or storm as forces that act, linger, and withdraw.

This remainder – this persistence through disappearance – makes sound more than signal. And it’s why Quentin Meillassoux’s critique of correlationism matters.⁶ We must be able to speak of a world that exists without us. Sound must be thinkable when it is not heard. Why? To claim that sound is real is not to ignore perception, but to reject the arrogance of making perception the limit of being.

Levi Bryant refers to this realism as an ethics of equality.7 No object is more real because it stands still, lasts longer, or fits better into systems of classification. A baby’s cry and a symphony are both sonic objects. Their scales differ. Their cultural charge differs. Their effects differ. But their ontological status is equal. Timothy Morton calls such entities strange strangers: real, persistent, and never fully available to us.⁸

Sound fits this model perfectly. It arrives. It touches. It vanishes. But not into absence – into withdrawal. To call sound an object is not to tame it. It is to take it seriously. Not as metaphor. Not as symbol. But as presence, force, and participant.

Notes

1. Bryant, L. R. (2011) The Democracy of Objects. Ann Arbor, Open Humanities Press.

2. Raud, R. (2021) Being in Flux: A Post-Anthropocentric Ontology of the Self. Cambridge, Polity.

3. Campbell, I. (2020) ‘Deleuzian Sound Studies and the Problems of Sonic Materialism’, Contemporary Music Review, 39(5), pp. 361 to 378.

4. Harman, G. (2011) The Quadruple Object. Winchester, Zero Books.

5. Deleuze, G. (1994) Difference and Repetition. Translated by P. Patton. London, Athlone Press.

6. Meillassoux, Q. (2008) After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Translated by R. Brassier. London, Continuum.

7. Bryant, L. R. (2011) The Democracy of Objects.

8. Morton, T. (2013) Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.