SpokenWeb Podcast

You hear me introduce the panel and also laugh a little bit too loudly, a little bit too close to the microphone a couple of times. The panel was exploring how we understand sound and silence, voice and voicelessness where they intersect with gender, feminism and the expected mandated or performative aspects of speech. This episode also includes a new interview with Dr. Milena Droumeva that reflects on her presentation as well as the larger project that it touched on and the project of sonification in general. And what I’d particularly like you to listen for in this episode is the way that it expands on the way we’ve been talking about archival sound in the Spoken Web Podcast so far. The reflections on noise and silence that you hear in these presentations as well as in Kate Moffatt’s discussion challenges us to ask how certain sounds end up in the archive and what gets left out or ends up being unarchivable. A project like this one, the Spoken Web project is in some ways limited by what’s there, by what’s been recorded by what we can find by what we’ve already found. But of course there’s a lot of power and politics that goes into what ends up in the archive in the first place. We tend to archive things that are remarkable that we mark as important, but that leaves out all kinds of banal background noise. What Brady Marks refers to as the acoustic weather. And when it comes to the challenge of archiving, how would we begin to think about archiving silence?

It’s particularly interesting hearing all of these different speakers on these ideas in the form of an episode where Kate has essentially created an archive of an event that might have otherwise passed by unremarked. I’d love to hear your thoughts on how this episode grapples with the challenges of thinking about the relationship between feminism and noise. So without any further ado, here’s episode five Revisiting Feminist Noise, Silence and Refusal. Taking us back to the 2019 Spoken Web Symposium. As Kate invites us to listen toward a new decade of feminist sound politics.

The Spoken Web Sound Institute 2019 was a Spoken Web members’ event that took place at the Simon Fraser University Burnaby campus over May 28th and 29th. The Institute questions how we work with sound and with literary recordings in particular, recognizing the impact that Spoken Web, as a large scale and widespread project, can have on the future of literary sound studies. How do we interact with sound in the archive? How do we curate it? How do we manage mass amounts of files in ways that make them accessible? How do we name them? How do we store them? How do we make them archivable and resilient in the face of technological advancements?

How do we share what we’re learning, the scholarship that we’re creating, with a broader audience? With individuals both inside and outside of universities? The Institute not only endeavored to begin answering these questions by sharing current research projects and scholarship, putting on workshops on podcasting, copyright, oral history and data management, but it also brought together the geographically widespread members of the project to celebrate the first year of Spoken Web. The Institute was followed by the Spoken Web Symposium 2019: Resonant Practices in Communities of Sound, which took place over May 30th and 31st at Simon Fraser University’s Vancouver campus.

Many of the themes and topics taken up by the Institute were represented, questioned, illuminated and challenged by the Symposium, which was open to all scholars and creators and brought together students, teachers, authors, artists and scholars to share their work in the field of sound studies. The wide ranging presentations, which included everything from recreations of old radio broadcasts to analyses of the use of accent and audio books, took up the themes of performance, space, gender, politics and technology to name just a few. Today we will be revisiting one of the symposium panels, Feminist Noise, Silence and Refusal. Lucia Lorenzi, Milena Droumeva, Brady Marks, and Blake Nemec made up this particular panel and their presentations explored how we understand sound, voice, silence and voicelessness when they intersect with gender, gender, politics and mandated expected or performative speech. First we have Dr. Lucia Lorenzi Introduced by Dr. Hannah McGregor, Dr. Lorenzi’s presentation questions, the rising expectations of speech from survivors of sexual violence and assault in an age of social media and reality and the potential effects that mandating that speech can have on our understanding of voice and silence and noise from activists and survivors.

So trying to think about reading a text and writing about a text that also exists in another world as a performance and as a sonic experience. But as I’ve done this work over the past decade or so, in addition to my work as an activist and an advocate around these issues, one of the main questions that I keep coming back to is this isn’t necessary to speak out about sexualized and gender violence? And to what extent has a particular configuration or understanding of sound, and not just voice, created, yes, feminist communities, but also pressures and expectations around the category or the identity of survivor. So perhaps more simply, what I’m trying to think through is how we challenge the binary of speech and silence that characterizes a lot of understandings and representations of violence.

So put another way, is there a third option to this formulation proposed by Arundhati Roy who in their now famous remarks at the 2004 Sydney Peace Prize stated, “We know there’s no such thing as the voiceless. There are only the deliberately silenced or the preferably unheard.” I wonder if there is such a thing ,and here I’m going to invoke Sara Ahmed’s ideas around willfulness, could there be something like the willfully silent? And what might those silences, or what I’m calling sonic refusals, look like in an era of digital mediation? The performances I’m looking at are several, but I want to talk about one in particular that stands out to me that I’m still really trying to understand from a sound studies perspective.

Emma Sulkowicz is a queer nonbinary Asian American artist who’s best known for their 2014/2015 endurance performance piece entitled Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight) And they carry around this standard size dorm room mattress everywhere they went on the campus of Columbia University until either they graduated or their rapist was expelled. They graduated and you see them carrying it with friends across the stage. Their art went viral in part because this work emerged at the height of the student activist movement around campus sexual assault in the United States. Sulkowicz was featured on the cover of New York Magazine and their work was really seen as I think emblematic of the campus movement, antiviolence movement more generally. Much of their work in the intervening years has not received the same level of public attention, but it’s received a great deal of positive critical attention in the art world, and several of their pieces have worked to think through the experience with being a very public survivor of sexual assault including the kinds of discursive pressures, ways of speaking that have been placed on them. Their 2016 performance, Self Portrait (Performance with Object) takes place on two, I guess technically four, pedestals in a gallery space. So on the one pedestal Sulkowicz stands ready to engage in conversation with audience members who are free to ask them about anything.

While broadly used across antiviolence work of all kinds, the slogan of ‘breaking the silence’ and imagery such as a person with a hand or tape over their mouth, has to become also iconic and representative of the ways in which voice, a particular kind of voice, a particular use of that voice, perhaps a particular intonation has been linked to a particular kind of identity politics. Because a survivor as opposed to a victim isn’t just someone who speaks but they break or shatter silences, which calls up this very material instantiation of sound, so shouting or chanting at rallies using a megaphone. And these forms of sonic production are deeply related to feminist practice, we amplify voices, we pass the mic.

Now I’m still struggling with the ways that silence seems to be a kind of counter intuitive mechanism, because I’m aware of the deep history and the weight politics and oppression that mean that people are silenced or that they are unheard. But I’m also trying to connect this to rich traditions of silence as a means of political disruption. In describing the political strategies employed by American suffragists in the early 20th century, Mary Chapman notes that a key strategy of the suffrage movement was the use of voiceless speech. So obviously that the historical context surrounding these activists, and I’m thinking particularly about, queer, trans, racialized activists in the 21st century, could not be in some ways more different, but I think that contemporary activists are still grappling with some of the same difficulties. So to what extent can survivors participate in public spheres of discourse? Where can they use their voice? What are the political risks, including risks to physical safety? Knowing the myriad ways in which survivors continue to be silenced, how can survivors, and I’m going to quote Chapman here, quote, “creatively rework the cultural significance of their political silence, changing it from a sign of powerless citizenship to an example of creative forms of participation in the modern public sphere.”

So Sulkowicz’s piece helped me think about these creative forms and participation, and I want to make a few suggestions, however preliminary, about how I’m reading how it uses sound and silence. So the first thing that I think of is this divide in terms of, this sort of divide, this little physical divide in terms of how audience members can interact. So Emmatron I had is still voiced by Sulkowicz, but the voice is predefined and limited. And I wonder if that also then resists manipulation, it has boundaries around it, it cannot be altered. I’m thinking about the use of audio recording and the ubiquity of access to voice recording technology, and also the alleging democratization. Listening to Sulkowicz’s recorded voice isn’t a private experience, which sort of seems, you know, my experience of gallery spaces often with sound art, unless it’s an exhibition that’s sort of, you know, is curated in particular ways, is that you listened to it in headphones, you’re listening to it privately. But as audience members have observed, there’s this sort of dual listening where you’re trying to listen to the iPad and you’re also trying to listen in on what’s going on with the fact that you don’t get to have that private experience. Sulkowicz’s voice is, this is really interesting to me, described by many reviewers as pleasant and joyful and warm like as if it’s a surprise. And I think that comments on the ways in which survivors literal voice is also a point of suspicion. A comment on a YouTube video which provides a little bit of documentation of this piece, one of the commenters says “She laughs a lot. Not sure what’s so funny.”

I’ve been thinking about reading this laughter alongside the laughter of other performance regarding sexual assault, namely survivors who use stand up comedy to talk about their experiences and who in that interaction is able to laugh and why, who is laughing at who. And then scrolling through the iPad and thinking about where it is that we now most frequently encounter the voices of survivors and where that archive lives. Cause I’m trying to think about the archiving of, you know, the Women’s March or other kinds of marches and then the ways that that’s hard to access, versus you can go through and you can literally pick any hashtag that you want. And it’s really easy to be able to sort of go through that archive and sort of make notes of the kinds of stories that are being told there.

So in an article from the early nineties, maybe 1994 perhaps, or ’91, I can’t remember, Linda Alcoff and Laura Gray, they sort of read Foucault talk about, you know, is survivor speech transgressive, right? So it’s almost 30 years ago and I feel like those questions are coming up, but they’re coming up differently because of the technologies and the types of public assembly and the way that public assembly is archived or not archived have changed. They say, quote, “when breaking the silence is taken up as the necessary route to recovery as or as a privileged political tactic, it becomes a coercive imperative on survivors to confess, to recount their assaults, to give details, and even to do so publicly.” This is justly deserving of the critique Foucault offers of the way in which the demand to speak involves dominating power. So freedom through speech or voice then is no longer one of a series of possibilities, I worry about the way in which it becomes mandated. And Tarana Burke echoed this recently in an interview with the Washington Post where she mentioned her frustrations with the goals of the MeToo movement. She says, “culture shift doesn’t happen in the accusation and it doesn’t happen in the disclosure, culture shift happens in the public grappling with these questions because nobody has firm, definitive, or perfect answers.” What I wonder, then, is if we’re shifting away from disclosure or ‘the speaking,’ maybe what we’re trying to articulate is a different politics or a different strategies for eliciting that seems to be what Burke is calling for. And I also think that’s what Sulkowicz’s piece asks of audience members.

The MolyBDenim sound project’s creative process was also often syncopated. In 2016, after finishing a manuscript that would become my hybrid book Sharing Plastic, I reached out to sound artist friends of mine, who had also done informal trade work, to create a collaborative sound project named MolyBDenim. As the collaborators were spread across the United States, we met online to rehearse and created a lot of video conference chatter about the music we could manifest, how our collaborations could grow, or how to make our performances interactive. Then the video conference would pixelate, or drop one of us from the call. Our online rehearsals, uncontrollable and truncated, mirrored elements of the informal trade work we were using as source material. The rhythms had feedback or echo, the beats from one piece of equipment would eclipse another, truncating words allows for rapid dialog and fast talk creates energy.

Yugoslavian born experimental fiction writer Dubravka Ugrešić speaks about the verbal steam of the communal bath in her book Lend Me Your Character. This postmodern book of short stories portrays dialogue as heat by including everyday conversations between women as communal bath and verbal steam. Listeners don’t need to imagine steam or water particles to consider dialogue as animate. Musicology shows us how sentient beings hold emotional connections to sound waves. The idea of language as steam simply assists us in acknowledging and sound wave particles as matter. The difference between the verbal scene of protected chatter and unprotected worker conversations, however, exists in the underlying temporality of unprotected worker positions, while making observations when starting during or departing work, cognisance about safety, the time, the customer, or the work landscape can be signaled by the intonations within ‘hello,’ within the tone of ‘okay,’ within the pitches of ‘oh, I see.’ Workers who have no job security do not speak to each other like nine to five workers. In my experiences with other unprotected labor, informal work may only have predictable tools their job uses and coworkers may converse about those tools while sonically implying other information. We may be ‘uh-huh’ or ‘mhm’. We can only vocalize interests or critiques through volume, intonation, or tone because more explicitly it could cost us arrest, incarceration, or deportation. Coworker chatter in United States secure employment, however, is centered on and validated by what coworkers think of each other’s lives in a shared understanding that they will see each other again. The unprotected worker is legally and socially accepted as toxic because the voices are not consistently heard.

Our equipment compelled us to be ready to change a track mid performance because the loop pedal, if not press softly, would erase all our layered songs. This loop pedal and the unlimited amount of repetitions of dialogue sounds temporarily recording to two beats was the core of our sound art. As you heard, we would start with truncated dialogues, then loop phonemes into rhythms or melodies. We knew the looping pedal could erase all the loops during the performance, so prepared for that switch. When it happened during our performances, we had to shift, start over, going to accidental openings, re-imagine the track or recenter our sound. Unprotected workers are similarly ready for change, reframing and recentering their identities, thus their voices. Every system D worker voice has a frequency, a speed pattern of which they move through the world, and MolyB’s speed also had a great range that moved from brilliant to chesty in short amounts of time. Silence. Within MolyBDenim syncopations and delicious switches are equally paralleled by deafening silences. The loop pedal switch could be started after it cut out. First, however, was the silence. Disenfranchised workers talk to each other, they also consistently do not. Silence between workers reflects the reality of the many workers cannot communicate because of their worker residency or criminal status. Therefore, some of the poems or tracks have negative spaces or silence to reflect the losses.

The lofty idea that workers in conversation are energized is met with portrayals where worker dynamics are iced. Is in these tense worker moments, the vulnerable truths of cyclical violence, for example, can emerge. Marginalized or oppressed groups of people, in this case informal trade workers, don’t have access to the right privileges. In MolyBDenim we simply allowed the pedal cuts to be. To give silence before starting up again. Mel Chen discusses toxic animosities, environmental sensitivity and how a person articulates how vulnerable bodies navigate pollutants, able bodied people, and syntax. They ask which bodies can bear the fiction of independence and un-interuptability. Noise. I began this discussion with my personal one-on-one dialogues with other workers.

A further impetus for excavating sonic intimacies or animosities of informal trade worker dialogues in MolyBDenim came from Days in April, a 2008 grassroots response to the depoliticization of United States mayday. Several meetings were organized for informal workers to gather and speak about their experiences, and these conversations between and among sex workers, domestic workers, farm workers, and hotel workers resulted in alliance building and a room full of transformative noise. This discussion troubles the idea of good worker versus bad worker. It amplifies, remixes, unprotected worker dialogues to extremes. It requests listeners to hear cacophony screams, loud sirens as sonic landscapes the informal worker navigates partly to explore ideas of toxicity. Conditions informal trade workers experience are toxic and my sound projects use metaphoric toxicities such as uttered frustrations then loop and layer such emotionally angry phrases until they evolve into noise. Sound art and poetry remain a vehicle to amplify syncopations, transport and silent volitions of vulnerable workers to validate and demand respect by the unprotected. Languages and semantic innovations are occurring amid neofascist efforts of language and sound solemnisation, both working to silence the unprotected. But sound is more than this.

And so years later when I started thinking about the emotional impact of sound or the possibility of emotional impact of sound, a lot of people have written, a lot of sound scholars write about the, you know, sound being a special modality and having a special relationship to our interior world and creating a special kind of intimacy, so I don’t know though, there’s a lot of factors, right? There’s, there’s that and, but there’s also the fact that you heard it as part of a conference podcast as opposed to came across it in your Facebook feed. Would it have been different if you came across this in your social media feed as opposed to in a conference? And people had a big reaction in the conference, but again they were there as captive audience, they were there for a certain, with a certain intentionality, you know? And a certain open mind. So I’m really fascinated by this idea of what can create impact, especially about things as important as the NeToo movement and any other subsequent movements that are unfolding on social media. But really they’re not about the virality of social media, they’re about real people having experienced harassment and assault and making that public and joining their stories together into a big weave of, you know, evidence.