THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.3, ISSUE#23, JUNE-AUG/2026
BD – What do your regard as the political, metaphysical and “deeply epistemological” questions at stake when you “honor those who have struggled and continue to struggle for liberation” through your work?
MJM – There are so many! Some I have touched on already – we need an account of the political subject (of oppression, or liberation). We need an account of the political as such. We need an account of sociality more broadly. For instance, I argue in the book that we need an account of “collective” or “plural” subjectivity, and that the identity of individuals and of groups are co-constitutive, such that who I am is always also a matter of who we are, all of which is relationally constituted by virtue of the you and the they. Again, it is the politics of purity that insists on distinct and pure divisions between self and other, between individual and group, etc.
But I think at the root of my response to this question lies a point about method. Rather than beginning with the metaphysical claims and positions I’ve touched on so far, my approach is to begin with and take seriously the claims and approaches to these questions (the theories!) we find among historical and contemporary struggles for liberation, from the Haitian revolution of the “age of enlightenment” to the civil rights and anti-apartheid struggles of the 20th century, to #BlackLivesMatter. What do those on the front lines tell us about how they understand what they are up to, and how can that inform our emerging accounts of oppression and liberation? For instance, those involved in these struggles often make claims about their humanity or their “personhood,” and understand their oppression as a violation of this principle or status. For someone to come along who is steeped in recent “political” philosophy and say that such claims are empty or even themselves oppressive strikes me as woefully misguided and irresponsible. We need to look at these claims so that they can inform the emerging theory, and we need to hold those emerging theories accountable to those historical and ongoing struggles. This needn’t be uncritical, certainly. For instance, claims for humanity can frequently be gendered in ways that raise crucial questions. From Sojourner Truth’s famous and powerful challenge to consider her womanhood, to mid-20th century Black protestors here in Memphis affirming their manhood, we see a consistent and not always unproblematic appeal to humanity or personhood in gendered terms. This, too, must part of the way we honor those struggles and the people to fought and sacrificed in and for them. Again, this is an ongoing and creolizing process, where different approaches and different examples must be brought together in productive interaction, and where what emerges from that interaction is not reducible to the sum of its parts.
BD – As far as your own search for a method, what does it mean to consider your orientation as “sonic” and indicative of what you conceptualize as “productive friction”?
MJM – At the root of this turn to the sonic is the distinction, long discussed in the philosophical literature, between “being” and “becoming.” We might also describe it as the distinction between an ontology of substance as opposed to an ontology of process. One’s terminology will differ depending on the philosophical traditions from which one is drawing. Being or substance has to do with determinate objects (both in the sense of material objects, but also in the sense of “objects of thought,” such that concepts can be fixed and determinate), while becoming or process has to do with more dynamic, ambiguous objects. The politics of purity prioritizes a substance ontology. It holds forth as an ideal the delineation of pure and discrete objects defined by clear and distinct boundaries. One way this plays out in the context of theory is through the normalization of the visual metaphor. The observer is distinct from the object of vision, which object, as in a photograph or a still image, is presumed to be static, allowing for a complete and final cataloging of its features and properties, at least in the ideal. Of course, this is not really how vision operates at all, but the metaphor, with its misunderstanding of vision, continues to have a wide-spread and long-standing influence on our thinking. So much so, that even when theorists talk about becoming or process ontology, they tend to maintain the root sense of object from substance ontologies, but simply put it “in motion.” The result is akin to a moving picture or film – a collection of still images that can give the appearance of movement when they are exposed in rapid succession to the observer, but which is ultimately reducible to just a series of static objects of perception. In other words, my experience studying and working with approaches that emphasize becoming and process is that they are often not understood in a radical enough fashion. Like the appearance of movement in a film, the process is “really” just a feature of observation – it is epiphenomenal. Reality, in other words, is substance.
What would it take to truly appeal to a dynamic ontology of becoming? The move I make in the book is to emphasize sound or the sonic as the primary metaphor to which one should appeal in one’s theorizing (and I don’t think this sort of theorizing is really possible without appeal to some metaphor). Sound is, at a fundamental level, movement, and cannot be reducible to static objects or parts. A sound wave, at the level of physics, is not a “thing” that moves from point A to point B. It the result of the interaction of different dynamic elements, like a hand on a drum head, or a bow on a cello string, which moves a medium at a particular frequency (note it is not a movement through a medium so much as a movement of the medium). When we hear a sound, that is the wave function of the medium interacting with our ear drum, then on through the complex biological mechanisms of our inner ear that ultimately results in what we perceive sonically. There are some important observations to make at this point. First, because the sound just is the movement, there is no way to describe it where it is static. If we take a “time slice” to conceptually freeze the movement, then there is no longer sound. Sound is thus necessarily dynamic, taking place over time. Second, it is always necessarily relational. It is produced through interaction (friction), is conditioned by the medium through which it propagates (traveling through air is different than traveling through water), and is conditioned by the relative movement of the source and the recipient (as in the doppler effect). In other words, there is no way to describe a sound as such – it is always deeply relational and contextual. Finally, it is important to bear in mind that even the “productive friction” which generates the sound is not reliant on a substance ontology. What we are learning from physics is that matter itself is movement and relation. In other words, the “sonic” metaphor may help illuminate material objects, as well.
What this means for my project as one of political philosophy is that we need to think of subjects, and of identities, and of goals or ideals (like freedom) as dynamic processes, like sound waves, rather than like objects in the traditional sense. Who I am is a matter of the interaction (the productive friction) of different elements (each of which, in turn, is its own dynamic function) unfolding as an open-ended process through time, constitutively conditioned by different relations with others and with my larger material and cultural environment. My “being” me, in other words, is always a matter of my being undefinable (ambiguous) insofar as I am an ongoing, dynamic, and relational process (like a sound). If you arrest that process, you don’t uncover the “real” me, but rather annihilate me, in the same way that stopping the movement of a sound annihilates the sound as such.
Finally, the shift to the sonic opens what I take to be an important aspect of the theorization of oppression and liberation. When sound waves interact, or any wave function for that matter – light does this too, as do waves in water, etc. – they can do so constructively or destructively. That is, they can enhance each other, which is “constructive interference,” or they can mitigate or diminish each other, which is “destructive interference.” If we think about ourselves as waves, we can characterize our interactions with others (i.e., other waves) and with our environment in terms of constructive or destructive interference. Does this interaction enhance my wave function, where each participant emerges from the interaction stronger than before (we might think of this as “empowerment”)? Or does it diminish (“disempower”) me? Oppression can in this way be understood as the set of conditions that normalize destructive interference for particular groups and the individuals who comprise them – I call this “white noise” in the book. Under conditions of oppression, targeted subjects are constantly confronting destructive interference, and the praxis of liberation aims to generate conditions of constructive interference. As I argue in the book, this has a whole host of implications for how we think about oppression and liberation, and all of it follows from adopting an ontology that is genuinely and radically dynamic, appealing to the sonic as its principal metaphor.
BD – Describe what informs the way you choose to characterize your work as an “overture”, rather than a “final articulation” of freedom and liberation?
MJM – This for me is simply an implication of the ontological moves I make in the text. If freedom exists not as a state but as a kind of movement and interaction/relation, then it is never the sort of thing that admits of some final realization (or articulation). Every advance one makes simply sets the stage for future inquiry and struggle. What is crucial, however, is that I think the approach I am taking offers the tools necessary to distinguish between progress and regress – between practices that are liberatory and practices that are oppressive (though seldom, if ever, in a “pure” and unambiguous way). However, such progress or regress is measured not by appeal to some fixed and final ideal state or regulatory ideal. That is, we aren’t “more free” because we are coming closer to some determinate state. That would be to abandon the dynamism that is at the heart of the creolizing methodology I am advocating. Rather, I argue we should think of this as a “telos without a terminus,” where we can see real improvement and progress, but the end-state (the terminus) is never defined, and where each moment of progress opens up new possibilities for further progress (the horizon is always moving). If what we are is an open-ended and dynamic process, then “progress” is a matter of opening up new possibilities for enacting that process, and where “constructive interference” empowers more robust modes of enactment, rather than foreclosing and diminishing these processes. An “overture” just is the French term for “opening,” and its common use in the context of music made it particularly appealing as I was writing. This is also why I ended with a “coda,” rather than a conclusion. I wanted to assess what progress I hope to have made here, but the idea is that my effort is successful to the extent that it opens up (that is stands as an overture) and invites new possibilities that I could not, as I was writing, anticipate. It is an opening and an invitation to participate in new unfolding relations with different thinkers and ideas – in other words, it is a position from which, I hope, new creolizing practices can emerge.
BD – This has been another one of our BROTHERWISE FIVE interview series, during which THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH interrogates intellectuals, artists and activists with five probing questions to the delight of our readers.
On behalf of Michael J. Monahan and THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH,
Peace.
-A. Shahid Stover
(this is the second of a two part interview of Michael J. Monahan for THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH conducted by A. Shahid Stover through email correspondence from January 4th – January 15th 2023.)
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