Maurice Windleburn is a current PhD candidate in musicology and music history tutor at the University of Melbourne. His dissertation examines the hypertextual and cinematic qualities of John Zorn’s “file card” compositions. Maurice’s research interests include music and philosophy, and experimental or avant-garde music. He has an article published in SoundEffects - An Interdisciplinary Journal of Sound and Sound Experience.

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Bryon Hawk’s Resounding the Rhetorical: Composition as a Quasi-Object uses sound as a metaphor for how composition and rhetoric operate through dispersed ecologies. Hawk incorporates ideas from New Materialism to achieve this, using concepts and terms originally developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Bruno Latour, Michel Serres, and (through a certain reading) Martin Heidegger. Hawk also implements research from the burgeoning field of sound studies, making his book of interest not only to scholars of composition and rhetoric but also to those who deal with music and sound (Hawk’s helpful literature reviews at the beginning of each chapter also provide context for those less familiar with the discipline of composition and rhetoric). Although sound is used as an explanatory model and most of Hawk’s examples are taken from music and sound, he considers the act of composition irrespective of its medium or form, and makes particular use of Serres’s notion of the “quasi-object” to explain how composition and rhetoric work. According to Hawk, acts of composition disperse themselves through a material ecology via a multitude of means (just like sound): as Hawk mentions in his introduction, “Composition is this broader material process; researchers are a part of that process; and that process is coordinated, public, and rhetorical” (13).

Instead of either summarising, recapitulating, or criticising Hawk’s ideas in this review, I will instead use them: I will apply Hawk’s ideas, not to music and sound as he does, but instead to the format of the book review itself. My review of Hawk’s book is therefore an application of Hawk’s ideas to a discussion of book reviews. As a result, I will hopefully exemplify Hawk’s own stance on research as expressed throughout Resounding the Rhetorical: that it should aim “not to produce reliable conclusions but to engage in experimentation and coproduce a version of the object of study” (80).

A book reviewer is like a quasi-subject; the book reviewed a quasi-object. Using Serres’s well-known example of the ball as quasi-object, Hawk remarks on how “In games such as football, soccer, or rugby, the one with the ball garners all of the attention and becomes the player to be stopped in order to stop or redirect the circulation. The ball marks the player as a subject and in doing so it becomes a quasi-object. But as a quasi-object, the ball is also a quasi-subject, ‘since it marks or designates a subject who, without it, would not be a subject’” (23).  

In the field of academia, the reviewer garners the attention of readers (some of whom may also be reviewers) through their review: the reviewer then becomes the one with whom a reader agrees or disagrees: the reviewer becomes a subject in the spotlight (albeit, a rather dim one). Through their review of a book the reviewer becomes a subject followed by a reader, not unlike the player with a ball.

But the book is also itself the subject of circulation here, and not just the object: reviewers and their reviews are “only the stations and relays” (23) that the book and its ideas must pass through as they enter into discourse. The book review is always about a particular book and the reviewer is forced into channelling this book (like the player who must follow the ball). Even if the book gives the reviewer an opportunity to be in the spotlight—even if the book gives the reviewer a chance to purview their own personal views, beliefs, criticisms and prejudices—it is nonetheless the case that, these views, beliefs, criticisms and prejudices are all determined by the book itself. The purpose of a review is therefore to extend the book out into a broader realm of discourse. As Hawk notes, “In this movement, the purely individual subject or object is abandoned for circulation grounded in enaction” (23): like balls, like players, books and their reviewers are quasi-objects-subjects in a co-reliant relationship of dispersive resonance.

As a quasi-object-subject, the review hence comes to affect its counterpart (the book) at the same time that it is engendered by it: “Host and guest … operate in a system of feedback and coproduction” (28). This is particularly evident with a reader who reads a review before reading the book that the review is of; the reader then has their perception and understanding of the book pre-contaminated by the review. The reader may either endorse or dismiss the book in accordance with this review in a way that they may not have, had they read the book first; and, the reader may take up a reviewers idiosyncratic reading of a book (if one is provided), reading through another’s reading (will the reader of my review read Hawk’s book thinking of book reviews?). Therefore, while the book is always chronologically prior to its reviews (insofar as reviews are of books), for the reader in question here, the review is what has chronological primacy: the reader reads the book because of the review, and their perception and understanding of the book is shaped by it.

However, the reader may also, on reading the book, decide that the reviewer was misinformed; biased; the reader may disagree with the reviewer; or the reader may not know what on earth the reviewer was even talking about (am I reading the same book here?). So then, the reader’s chronologically-first reading of the review is retroactively contaminated by the book that the review was of: the reader recognises the book’s primacy and dismisses the review (although, it is really only their own reading of the book that the reader is prioritising here – over and above that of the reviewer).

This is the sonorous feedback that Hawk mentions throughout Resounding the Rhetorical. Books are born from their reviews in the same way that reviews are born from books: because books are only known through their being read, and these readings are shaped—sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly—by an ecology that is partly made up of reviews. However, this ecology is itself built around the book it shapes, and the reading of the book itself comes to produce a reader’s disposition towards the ecology that the book formed (including its reviews). This confusion of chronological primacy, this circular feedback, is indicative of Latour’s “polytemporality”, readily invoked by Hawk (42). The review is an interpretation that enacts changes within its own environment, acting as an agent and not just a representation.

A book review can even feed back into the disposition of a reviewed book’s author. A review might cause the author to change their mind about what that they have written (though probably not), and there are always those readers who read reviews after reading the book itself – for consolidation and support of their own opinion, more often than not, but also at times to obtain further clarity or an alternative viewpoint. These readers might also have their opinions changed by the review that they have read, and the temporal gap between these readings and the changes in disposition that they cause may be short or incredibly long. Indeed, Hawk himself mentions how “A review of a book written two years ago can be timely or have a qualitative importance in the context of a search right now” (174) (is it not reasonable, in light of this fact, that journals start reviewing old books just as often as they review new ones?).

Book reviews are indeed a form of research – which Hawk (after Latour) also reappraises throughout Resounding the Rhetorical. Hawk mentions how “research produces new actants rather than reports on pre-existent objects or subjects” (39); that is, reviews are not only documents or recordings but actants, who go on to have their own dynamic role in shaping the ecologies they are part of, and shaping the book from which they sprung. The review is, therefore, never just a summary (even when it is): it is a link in a network between the “nodes” of author, book and future audience. These links are themselves also active processes “of remaking and coproducing versions of those very nodes” (39); that is, reviews remake and coproduce the book that they review as well as the book’s audience: “Research results in the expansion of quasi-objects, not simply their explanation, and coproduces a version of the object of study particular to that project” (77).

The book and its reviews are, however, themselves mediated by a number of additional material and institutional links that contribute to the ecology in question. Although writing a book review is generally a rather solitary process (at least, when compared to the inherently collaborative studio session that Hawk uses as an example in his book), it nonetheless relies on numerous “outside” factors. In writing this review I am aided, inhibited, or otherwise impacted by the electronics of my computer; the distractions of my noisy apartment; the caffeine that I consume in copious amounts. These are some of the numerous things that will affect my ideas and writing style: the very words that find their way into this review are sped up by the coffee I consume (sometimes to the point of ramble), or they are stopped in their tracks by the disruptions of noisy neighbours or the faltering electronics of my laptop. These interruptions may then either destroy a thought, which is lost to the ether, or give me space to reconsider what I will write next. In addition, the very fact that I have read Resounding the Rhetorical to write a review affects the very way in which I read the book. It is highly unlikely that I would have been thinking about how Hawk’s ideas apply to book reviews had I not been reading his book with the need to write a review of it in mind. My review has hence been affected by the ecology that engendered it: it has been affected by the need or want to write a review.

Reviews therefore partly construct the environment through which a book itself resounds (even though these reviews presuppose the book that resounds through them). In much the same way that sound is dependent on its environment—the sound of a clap is shaped by the room in which it occurs—the book is shaped by its distribution ecology, of which book reviews are an important part. The book resounds through each and every one of its reviews, which are documents of particular readings, and these reviews in turn fold back onto the book itself, its ecology, and future readings of the book: books therefore “articulate new version[s] of themselves” (35) through their reviews. The book is like a sound that engenders numerous review-echoes, which feed back into their own generating sound.