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Slow Activism: Listening to the Pain and Praise of Others

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 January 2016

Deborah Kapchan
Deborah Kapchan*
Affiliation:
Department of Performance Studies, New York University, New York, N.Y.; e-mail: dk52@nyu.edu
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Extract

For what is needed is a philosophy of listening. But is this a possibility? If philosophy has its very roots intertwined with a secret vision of Being that has resulted in the present state of visualism, can it listen with equal profundity? What is called for is an ontology of the auditory.

Type
Roundtable
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 48 , Issue 1 , February 2016 , pp. 115 - 119
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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References

NOTES

1 See Erlmann, Veit, Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010)Google Scholar; Schmidt, Leigh Eric, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Sterne, Jonathan, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Thompson, Emily, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

2 Sterne, The Audible Past.

3 I limit myself to scholarship in English, in which there are some notable exceptions. See Hirschkind, Charles, The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Deborah Kapchan, “Learning to Listen: The Sound of Sufism in France,” Special Issue, The World of Music (2009): 65–90; and Gautier, Ana Maria Ochoa, Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Columbia (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015)Google Scholar.

4 LaBelle, Brandon, Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life (New York and London: Continuum, 2010)Google Scholar, emphasis added.

5 Deborah Kapchan, “Witnessing the Pain and Praise of Others,” in Theorizing Sound Writing, ed. Deborah Kapchan (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, forthcoming). Kapchan, Deborah, “Body,” in Keywords in Sound Studies, ed. Novak, David and Sakakeeny, Matt (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015)Google Scholar.

6 On the inseparability of matter and meaning, as well as ontology and epistemology, see Barad, Karen, Meeting the Universe Halfway (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Deborah Kapchan, “Hearing the Splash of Icarus: Theorizing Sound Writing/Writing Sound Theory,” in Theorizing Sound Writing.

8 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway; Bennett, Jane, Vibrant Matter: A Political Economy of Things (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010)Google Scholar; Rancière, Jacques, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, ed. and trans. Steven Corcoran (New York: Continuum, 2010)Google Scholar.

9 Deborah Kapchan, “Slow Ethnography, Slow Activism: Lingering in Paradox and Listening in the Longue Durée” (keynote lecture, International Society for Ethnology and Folklore, “Utopias, Realities, Heritages: Ethnographies for the 21st century,” Zagreb, Croatia, 2015).

10 “Stop Islamization of America,” Wikipedia, last modified 2 October 2015, accessed 2 October 2015, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Islamization_of_America.

11 “empathy, n.,” Oxford English Dictionary Online, accessed 2 October 2015, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/61284?p=emailA/VIVibJvFOMc&d=61284.

12 Brennan, Teresa, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

13 Nussbaum, Martha C., Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Erlmann, Veit, Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

14 Indeed, this veering into otherness may have both positive and negative effects, as sound can be a tool of violence, whether intentionally inflicted, as in the torture at Guantanamo Bay, or overheard. See Cusick, Suzanne, “‘You Are in a Place That is Out of the World . . .’: Music in the Detention Camps of the ‘Global War on Terror,’” Journal of the Society for American Music 2 (2008): 1–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Daughtry, J. Martin, Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma, and Survival in Wartime Iraq (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Kapchan, “Learning to Listen: The Sound of Sufism in France.”

16 Ibid.

17 Ethnomusicologist Charlie Keil describes “participatory discrepancies” as the slightly off the beat, tone-bending conversations that jazz musicians have. “To be personally involving and socially valuable,” he says, music “must be ‘out of time’ and ‘out of tune’” (italics in original). Charles Keil, “Participatory Discrepancies and the Power of Music,” Cultural Anthropology 2 (1987): 275–83, accessed 2 October 2015, doi:10.1525/can.1987.2.3.02a00010. Steven Feld describes this aesthetic as “lift-up-over-sounding”—which, in Kaluli culture, he says “feels like continuous layers, sequential but not linear; non-gapped multiple presences and densities; overlapping chunks without internal breaks; a spiraling, arching motion tumbling slightly forward thinning, and thickening back again.” Feld, Steven, “Aesthetics as Iconicity of Style, or ‘Lift-Up-Over-Sounding’: Getting into the Kaluli Groove,” Yearbook for Traditional Music 20 (1988): 78–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 If violence expresses a kind of hypermasculinity (Daughtry, Listening to War), then sublimity is an opening of a radically feminine nature (Kapchan, “Slow Ethnography, Slow Activism”). On the in-between, see Stoller, Paul, The Power of the Between: An Anthropological Odyssey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

19 “Sound writing” is its translation. See Kapchan, Theorizing Sound Writing.

20 Sontag, Susan, Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Penguin Books, 2004)Google Scholar.

21 Barthes, Roland, Image, Music, Text (New York: Hill and Wang: 1977)Google Scholar

22 On the materiality of attunement, see Morton, Timothy, Hyperobjects: Philosiphy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 2013)Google Scholar.