On vibrations: cosmographs

摘要

Vibrations have emerged as a construct within cultural theory, intersecting significantly with sound studies, discourses on materiality and concepts of music qua music. This paper pulls two paragraphs from this literature that picture an idealised cosmic continuity as a means to examine some general features of the theory. These cosmographs are framed in historical and rhetorical contexts, across considerations of elementary physics and figurations of other energies, based upon the substances that mechanical vibrations require and theoretical vibrations imagine. Rhetorical transformation from vibrations to rhythms, with their inscriptive capacity for ordering beyond material immediacies, is questioned, as is the reliance of both upon a naturalisation of cycles given that a unity of circadian and seasonal cycles has long been broken by climate change.