In Sonic Bodies, Julian Henriques offers an invitation to "become a listener" (xvii). While the book is focused on dancehall, I am interested in Henriques' claim that "thinking through sounding is relevant well beyond the particular example of the Jamaican sounds system" (xxvii). Henriques goes on: "There is a distinct and different way of thinking expressed through sounding. This emerges from the intimate nature of the relationship between sound and embodiment, one that is only matched by that between vision and the disembodied mind…"(xxvii). In this way, while paying attention to sound and sounding may involve images and calculation, it necessarily moves beyond these ways of knowing into embodied ways of knowing—or into "depths rather than surfaces" (xxix). Part of this depth work is the literal "sinking into sound" that brings the person/researcher not only into the deepest of bass/base but also calls for a complete immersion in subject and sound, an acceptance of relationality of which the person/researcher/sound scientist is inevitably a part.
In chapter one, Henriques makes a move from sound (n.) to sounding (v.) drawing from Small's concept of musicking and Mackey and Baraka's theories of subjugation of the verb into noun form. Henriques, bringing these scholars together, posits that "the movement from verb to noun can be considered as a process of subjugation, if not oppression" (35) (emphasis mine). By reclaiming the verb form and all the actions that are encompassed therein, listening expands to include all variations of "black inventiveness," pointing to details that are not typically available for consideration in listening to sound alone (35). At the same time, Henriques is careful to differentiate sounding from musicking, though they do share characteristics. While musicking creates similar Latourian maps of relationships and vibrations beyond hearing, sounding "asks more questions, has a greater disruptive potential—because it escapes the bars and all the other confines of systems of musical meaning" (37). Part of this seems to be because sounding starts at a much smaller level—the vibrations themselves (whether material, corporeal, or sociocultural)—rather than the meta-vibrations of rhythm. Sounding is also decidedly unconcerned with discourse, as Henriques discusses in the preamble.
Finally, I want to consider how this basis of sounding and thinking through sounding is espoused as potential methodology in chapter four. Though the chapter starts with the lessons of listening shared between "prento" engineer and teacher, there are meaningful advances toward research methodology offered both through Henriques' understanding of the apprenticeship model as well as his own embodied research in Kingston. He understands his methodology as moving to projects beyond those concerned specifically with sound. He argues that listening implies "a mode of attention" or a way of "giving attention" rather than "simply responding to a stimulus" (100). This mode of attention, as mentioned above, eschews distance in favor of a "sinking into," a "coming forward" rather than a "sitting back" (102). It is through this process of coming forward that brings the researcher into embodiment, literally vibrating from the sonic dominance of the dancehall sounding. With a methodology focused on listening, "participation is simply unavoidable, attesting to listening as a two-way reciprocal process" (107). For Henriques, dancehall sound engineers are simultaneously his group of research subjects and the ideal listeners, occupying a central space between theory and practice, creating a form of grounded theory (more of this on 115). This seems to be Henriques' call for a methodology: an emplaced researcher, balancing monitoring and manipulating, someone as a bridge.
I wonder if we can take these ideas and put them together with any of the other readings from this semester or outside of our course. I am personally interested in the potentially liberatory potential of sounding (v.) in conjunction with Vazquez's theory of listening in detail as well as Campt's ideas of listening to "lower frequencies" of images, though I'm not quite sure these texts are asking us to do the same work (but maybe they are in some ways). I am also drawn to overlaps between Sarah Pink's work Doing Sensory Ethnography (2009) and Henriques' methodology of listening. Like Henriques, Pink makes extensive use of Ingold and theories of embodied knowledge and learning, destabilizes viewing as the pinnacle of the sensory hierarchy, and is highly concerned with place (and how place is formed through social, sensory, and material contexts). Pink is also interested in participation as research strategy, though she seems to question how this form of knowledge can then be transferred back into the academy. With some of this in mind, I want to think about how we might "become a listener" both with other types of sound as well as with studies that are not grappling with sound as a main factor. How might we imagine Henriques' work expanding beyond the dancehall sound engineers of Jamaica?
Though we see efforts across fields to infuse a materialist reading into our epistemological projects, Henriques quite explicitly locates knowledge production in the body. Building off of the discussion last class on the difference between what something *does* as opposed to what something *is* Henriques offers another method of navigation, wherein he privileges the “know-how” over the “know-what” (xxviii). The know-how mobilizes his sonic epistemology, and by situating us in the Jamaican dancehall (and its wider auditory culture) we are offered a glimpse into the porosity of this epistemology (a spilling out into the streets). Henriques extends his metaphor and methodology to take in bass/base culture and to establish bodies as events, not objects (19).
ReplyDeleteThroughout my reading I kept thinking about rupture, because, for Henriques, “sound is always a disturbance” (20) even on low frequency planes and in quotidian ways. This haptic experience of (collision with) sound results in *sounding,* which Brittney helpfully describes above as active investment in asking questions and inciting disruption on a much smaller level, at the level of vibrations. I think Brittney’s interest in turning Henriques toward our other readings would be generative for class discussion. Indeed, what are the commonalities and divergences, and how are those divergences important? Further, how do we apply *sounding* to our own research, or to our reading of Ellis and her work on masculinity in the dance halls?
Throughout the reading we have done in this music and sound studies section of the course, it is evident that becoming a listener is harder that it seems, at least in my personal experience. Throughout my reading of Henriques, I did wonder how we might expand his notions of sonic bodies, sonic dominance, sounding as compared to sound, and any other of the many theories mentioned, to pertain to phenomena that seemingly do not have to do with sound or music. My first thought after reading the assigned chapters was that Henriques does not necessarily answer this question, either. As opposed to Campt’s "Listening to Images" for example, it is easier to understand the method of becoming a listener when the focus is on music, in this case Dancehall, and the processes associated with its production, staging, and reception. This being said, my question is: Is it possible to listen to images, or anything that is not normally characterized as sonic, if we still do not know how to listen to sound itself? As pointed out by Brittney, listening to different phenomena may involve different process, but I do think that, ultimately, they are related. Based on the many studies on learning to listen to music and sound in different, deeper ways, it seems to me as if we still need a lesson on the intimacies of listening itself. While I believe Henriques (and Vazquez and Campt) tries to do this, I wonder if it is possible to just theorize listening alone, not listening to anything in particular, if that makes sense, to create a wider definition of what it means to listen as a standalone practice/process. Although I agree with Henriques in that the procedures associated with sounding are highly relational, I think that our notion of listening, which we automatically associate with music and other clearly sonic transactions, hurts our ability to conceive of listening in other ways, outside of sound.
ReplyDeleteI do, however, see some ideas drawn out by Henriques that could help us think about learning to listen in environments traditionally thought to be non-sonic. Most notably, I found his section on the relationship between engineering apprentices to be quite useful and his conceptualization of sonic bodies as necessitating an environment of “mutual recognition and respect,” where being listened to is also an invitation to listen. These are just some of my initial thoughts on Henriques’ theories.
The model of apprenticeship as a site for theory and methodology also stuck out to me in this book, specifically in how it emphasizes embodied transfers of knowledge. One potential connection is the work of Diana Taylor, who more directly relates these embodied transfers to performance in the book we read for the first day of class, as well as a chapter some of us read for 'Intersectionality in the Archives'. Specifically, I'm referring to Taylor's notion of the repertoire, described in Performance as a set of "embodied behaviors and practices" that "allows for a broad range of transmissions" (145). The recognition of knowledge in actions and nondiscursive modes of communication is central to the possibilities Henriques sees in the apprenticeship model, specifically with how it allows for theorizing knowledge sharing as more than written transfers of detached information, and how it recognizes the engineer's unique ability to discuss and shape practice and theorizing about a subject. And, at least for Taylor, the stakes are high and heavily tied to histories of colonialism. In The Archive and the Repertoire, she ties the erasure of non-written forms of knowledge transmission to the legacies of violence used to delegitimize indigenous knowledge productions and allow for local violence and continent-spreading centers of control (33). The way senses are blended and presence is emphasized in sounding and dancehall adds to this conversation, and reflects how Henriques practices a form of generalizing and theory from specifics that makes performance studies so full of potential.
ReplyDeleteIn the Introduction //Sonic Bodies//, Henriques presents his project as one of thinking //through// sound–not one of thinking //with// and not one of only thinking //about// sound. I am interested in how these prepositions, given their relational affordances, might help us better understand the sound-based or sound-inspired methodologies that Henriques and other authors read in this class (particularly Campt's) put forth.
ReplyDeleteHenriques speaks of his book as a “journey into sound,” an immersion. He promises to teach us the way to understanding sound as event and listening as methodology, to examine “sound //qua// sound”–as opposed to sound //qua// text (xvii). He also positions sounding against seeing and reading, and I believe that his book is a testament of the challenges of this oppositional approach: For instance, In Chapter I, although I find his articulation of the wavebands of sounding (material, corporeal and sociocultural) potentially generative, I personally struggle to understand how his application of “sounding” opposes to other analytical frameworks. I am interested in Henriques’ gesture of emphatically introducing his way of thinking as “distinct” from Western and ocular-centric traditions only to later use Aristotle to examine the work of selectors (just to give an example). I’m curious to know if you have any thoughts on this.
Another thing that interests me from Britney’s post is her invitation to connect //Sonic Bodies// with other works read in this seminar. There’s one quote by Henriques in particular that prompted me to consider how his approach, although connected to listening, is *not* like Campt’s: “This is distinct and different from how certain sounds are taken to indicate objects or events” (xvii). While Henriques is interested in “sonic dominance” or “massive” sounds, Campt is drawn to the sounds of quiet, those that emerge only when we stop and attune ourselves to different frequencies to pick up sound that might not even be perceptible to the ears. In this sense, her approach to sound and listening is synesthetic (e.g.: to listen by noticing bodily tension in images, by considering and sometimes imagining details of their contexts). It is in this sense that I find Campt’s invitation to listen transferrable from images to other objects and events, an exercise that results much harder for me when considering Henriques’ argument about the portability of sounding. Here I join Lana in her question: “Is it possible to listen to images, or anything that is not normally characterized as sonic, if we still do not know how to listen to sound itself?”
I think your questions point us to really important and challenging places as we think about Henrique's text and our present and future practices. As we talked a little bit about in class, I'm also thinking about how sound--despite its difference--so often gets subsumed under discourses that perpetuate the dominance of the visual; however (at least in my reading) I think that this is where the value of focusing on "sounding" as opposed to "just" sound comes in since "sounding" allows us to think about sound as methodology rather than object of study. I haven't read the original text where Spillers talks about this, so my knowledge of it is only from Vazquez, but I think that all of these texts (Henriques', Campt's, and Vazquez's) are clearly connected through their challenges to disciplinary protocol. The passage from Spillers that is cited in Vazquez reads:
ReplyDeleteIt is not customary that a studies protocol discloses either its provenance or its whereabouts. By the time it reaches us, it has already acquired the sanction of repetition, the authority of repression, and the blessings of time and mimesis so that, effectually, such a protocol belongs to the smooth natural order of the cultural (56).
Not speaking for everyone, but I think that this "smooth natural order" is what "we" (re: I) are constantly bumping up against as we read these texts and are challenged to think about their praxis; however, I'm also wondering about the way that thinking of particular artistic mediums (photography, music, etc.) and applying a listening methodology to our scholarship, in turn, makes this methodology function as a kind of savior for our academic conservative banality. I don't think it has to function that way by any means, but I appreciate Henriques because rather than representing the sonic and the rational as opposites, he is attuned to the way in which things like the sound systems have their own rationality, their own protocols, even while they allow for play and uncertainty. (Related, but kind of a side note: an example that comes to mind is how we always stress the improvisatory in jazz music but to what is often such an extreme that we don't talk about the protocols and structures that also attend jazz music). Ultimately, I'm left wondering about the stakes of the listening methodology that we've been getting in varied forms in these last few texts. I'm genuinely interested in applying this methodology in my own work, but I do think it will be important to remember that all of these things (photography, music, etc) carry their own "doing" protocols for their producers--I do think Henriques points to this--in order to not assume that as academics adopting listening as a methodology will give us access to everything we didn't know before. (And this seems related also to our conversations in the class on Campt when Lana, if I remember correctly, brought up not being sure whether or not she was listening "correctly" which I think is and will continue to be a valuable question to ask as we try to consider the ways in which our academic position can sidestep the initiative to learn about the "actual" doing/producing of whatever we're studying).
Throughout the listening exercises which Brittney prompted, I reflected upon the seeming entanglement of Campt, Vasquez, and Henriques’ methodologies and invocations [this is perhaps further evidenced by my misremembering of Vasquez’ title as alternatively “Listening to Details” or “Listening for Details,” rather than Listening in Detail]. Though Henriques’ articulations of sounding and the relationship between “prento” engineer and teacher are unique (as Brittney notes), his ultimate desire that we evaluate and/or feel projects broadly (“beyond those concerned specifically with sound,” Brittney) with a certain “mode of attention” (100) does not feel all that different to me, particularly in praxis/practice.
ReplyDeleteIn thinking through this mode of attention which demands a “sinking into” and “coming forward” (102) -- along with discussions of sensory ethnography as pointed to by Sarah Pink --, I return to a notion of attending to the emergence of “data” as espoused by Maggie MacClure in an article “Researching without representation? Language and materiality in post-qualitative methodology” (International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 2013). She states:
[S]ome detail – a fieldnote fragment or video image – starts to glimmer, gathering our attention. Things both slow down and speed up at this point. On the one hand, the detail arrests the listless traverse of our attention across the surface of the screen or page that holds the data, intensifying our gaze and making us pause to burrow inside it, mining it for meaning. On the other hand, connections start to fire up: the conversation gets faster and more animated as we begin to recall other incidents and details in the project classrooms, our own childhood experiences, films or artwork that we have seen, articles that we have read. And it is worth noting in passing that there is an affective component (in the Deleuzian sense) to this emergence of the example. The shifting speeds and intensities of engagement with the example do not just prompt thought, but also generate sensations resonating in the body as well as the brain – frissons of excitement, energy, laughter, silliness. (MacLure, 2010, p. 282)
“Data” is to MacClure what images are to Campt and sound (et. al.) is to Henriques, it seems. MacClure notes that the affect engendered in the “researched” by attending to the glowing vibrance (vibrant materiality, a la Jane Bennett) is significant and helps thwart the notion of an objective (human) authority who can and will decipher the situation (object/thing, ambience, assemble) “properly.”
Bringing in MacClure article and her use of scientific “data” brings me to the interdisciplinarity of our discussions. As Diana Taylor noted at the Dead Capital lecture today, science is now “discovering” phenomenon which Aristotle chronicled/postured centuries ago. It seems to me that Performance Studies, Literary Studies, Rhetoric, and New Materialisms (to name but a few) are always, and ought to be, in conversation with one another.
(From a preliminary glance at Yasmine’s post, this discussion of attending to emergence of/and “data” seems an apt bridge between Henriques and Jones).