“Auditioning” Ontology: Ambient Realism and the Practice of Critique

Abstract 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.