ANDREW J. CHUNG University of North Texas College of Music Vibration, Difference, and Solidarity in the Anthropocene Ethical Difficulties of New Materialist Sound Studies and Some Alternatives ABSTRACT Taking the new materialist and climate change themes of Ashley Fure’s The Force of Things: an Opera for Objects as a departure point, this article examines sound studies’ recent invocations of new materialist philosophy alongside this philosophy’s foundational concern toward the Anthropocene ecological crisis. I argue that new materialist sonic thought retraces new materialism’s dubious ethical program by deriving equivalencies of moral standing from logically prior ontological equivalencies of material entities and social actors rooted in their shared capacities to vibrate. Some sonic thought thus amplifies what scholars in Black and Indigenous decolonial critique have exposed as the homogenizing, assimilative character of new materialism’s superficially inclusional and optimistic ontological imaginary, which includes tendencies to obscure the ongoingness of racial inequality and settler-colonial exploitation in favor of theorizing difference as a superfice or illusion. As I argue in a sonic reading of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, some of new materialism’s favored analytical and ecological terms such as objecthood, vibrationality, and connection to the Earth are also terms through which anti-Blackness, colonial desire, and the universalization of Whiteness have historically been routed. This historical amnesia in new materialism enables its powerfully obfuscating premises. As a result, I argue that new materialist sound studies and philosophy risk amplifying the Anthropocene’s similarly homogenizing rhetorics, which often propound a mythic planetary oneness while concealing racial and colonial climate inequities. If sound studies and the sonic arts are to have illuminating perspectives on the Anthropocene, they must oppose rather than affirm its homogenizing logics. KEYWORDS Anthropocene, Ashley Fure, new materialism, Frantz Fanon, ontology, settler coloniality, race, vibration Given that Anthropocene climate change concerns help to motivate recent philosophical posthumanism, “new materialism,” and related formations, this article interrogates what it means ecologically for some work in sound studies and music to recruit posthumanist new materialism’s emphasis on the agency of nonhuman matter and its radically inclusive material ontologies. The speculative gambit of these theories is that an adequate analysis of matter’s agency and vitality not only demonstrates interspecies entanglements and relations, but goes even farther by rendering all earthly entities as co-substantial—that is, legible as being made of the same ontological building blocks. Related sonic and musical scholarship argues that we are all made of, involved in, and affected by vibrational phenomena such as making and sensing sound, the oscillations governing bodily processes and movements, all the way down to the vibratory movements of atoms. This sameness— secured by positing vibration as the shared physical propensity par excellence—is meant to incite identification across a radically flat more-than-human polity, a central telos of 218 Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture, Vol. 2 , Number 2 , pp. 218 –241 . Electronic ISSN: 2688 -0113  2021 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, https://www.ucpress.edu/journals/reprints-permissions. DOI: https://doi.org/ 10 .1525 /res.2021 .2 .2 .218