Jamie Stephenson

This essay develops ambient realism as a critical reorientation of contemporary realism that challenges the persistence of anthropocentric and ocularcentric assumptions in Western metaphysics. I argue that philosophy’s inherited reliance on visual metaphors – presence, access, and disclosure – continues to structure realist discourse even within post-Kantian and posthumanist frameworks. The argument begins by identifying a scopic inheritance: a long-standing alignment of vision with cognition and ontological access that encourages a model of reality composed of stable objects presented to a perceiving subject. This visual paradigm also stabilises familiar binary oppositions – object and relation, static and dynamic, being and becoming – by privileging spatial form and perceptual mastery. In response, the essay proposes “auditioning” ontology as a methodological shift that foregrounds sonority, resonance, and affect as alternative registers for articulating being. Rather than replacing sight with sound, auditioning names a philosophical attunement to vibration and relational interaction – processes through which entities register one another beyond the frame of visual representation. Adjacent to this approach is the concept of ontological aphonia, which designates a deliberate suspension of the demand for epistemic mastery. Drawing on the work of Martin Heidegger, Jean-Luc Nancy, affect theory, and contemporary sound studies, the essay reconceives being as relational, dynamic, and excessive of representation. These insights culminate in the formulation of ambient realism: an ontological orientation in which entities persist neither as isolated objects nor as dissolved relations, but as participants in a transjective field of resonant interaction – ambience. Attending to ambience, I argue, enables a more ethically responsive realism for the metamodern era – one that affirms a mind-independent world while rethinking how philosophy listens to, rather than surveys, reality.

This paper explores themes of liminality and interstices, consonant with Lola Olufemi’s idea of “activat[ing] the bond of the otherwise” (2021). Operating between the practical and the theoretical, I employ two compositions by my “ambient grindcore” project, Hermetic Abyss, to aestheticize themes of “between”-ness on several levels. Where extreme metal bands have employed elements from “non-metal” idioms in their work(s)—e.g., (dark) ambient, industrial, free improvisation, noise, drone—such engagements have tended towards the liminal. Works such as Bolt Thrower’s War Master (1991); Morbid Angel’s Blessed are the Sick (1991); Sepultura’s Arise (1991); and Napalm Death’s “Discordance” (1992) use this aesthetic via intros, segues, or outros. While these practitioners use non-idiomatic aesthetics sparingly, the vernacular/art music of Hermetic Abyss inverts this, synecdochically, turning such practice into a compositional total. The experimental-metal intersection becomes the whole. Utilising a musicological analysis of these extreme metal texts and my own artistic practice, I also explore cultural “between”-ness. Both pieces were composed via file-sharing and mutual reconstruction on either side of the Atlantic Ocean, between me in York and experimental guitarist, Miguel Peréz in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. My practice emerges from my philosophical research into nonbinary articulations of reality through a poetics of resonance, an experimental affect theory that reaches for the more-than-human, through a broad (and speculative) conceptualisation of “feeling” (Olufemi, 2021), adjacent to Jean-Luc Nancy’s ideas around “touch” (2008).

Theorising time as sequential suggests a correspondingly durational and serial reality. This temporality reiterates Western philosophy’s privileging of the present and is symptomatic of greater issues concerning the reluctance of Anthropocene discourses to think outside of time’s passive “givenness”. Contra normative conceptions of time as fundamentally continuous, French metaphysician Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion of “renvoi [return]” – as an ontological echo, a folding back – disrupts traditional temporal narratives, implying a time that is nonlinear. Consonant with renvoi, Nancy’s related thesis of “le corps sonore [the sonorous body]” rethinks bodies through a similar sonic aesthetics – as a certain tension, or tone – exceeding orthodox articulations of beings as somatic and bounded. Both renvoi and corps sonore provide valuable tools for the critique of anthropocentric philosophies which quantise bodies as closed and finite. Subsequently, this paper employs Nancy’s broadly “sonic” realism to critique human exceptionalism, reorienting temporality toward more-than-human ecological processes, as continuous discontinuities.

Following Toma in Understanding Nancy, Understanding Modernism (2023), one might define relations between modernity and modernism as a series of tensions connecting “then” and “now”. What follows suggests that, by employing sound as an ontological starting place, such tensions could be productively contemporized through an aesthetics of sonority, specifically a hermeneutic methodology I term “auditioning”. Amplifying the relational themes of coexistence and correspondence inherent to sound, this framing allows for the simultaneous consonance and dissonance of “then” and “now”. This essay applies the motif of auditioning as a kind of meta-critique of recent attempts – e.g., Moraru’s Flat Aesthetics (2023) – to engage with the contemporary modern, in a manner that disrupts anthropocentrism.

Immanuel Kant is often conveyed as a Platonic or Newtonian thinker of the temporal, expressing time as an absolute and continuous repository wherein all objects occur. However, employing themes from his aesthetic writings, what happens when Kantian “sublime” time is reoriented towards a more discontinuous temporal register? This essay employs just such a reading, while also utilising Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), as a methodological device for rethinking both Kantian and object time as neither solely continuous nor discontinuous, but somewhere inbetween these two determinations, in what I term their “ontological ambience.” By doing so I offer a critique of both Kantian orthodoxy and Harmanian OOO, via a comparative analysis of (1) how Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger thematise Kantian temporality, and (2) how Harman develops their subsequent ideas about time. This schema provides post-Kantian philosophy with a provisional model for thinking posthuman time in new and productive ways: as ambient temporalities.