Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-g7gxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-03T08:43:00.625Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Uncanny Soundscapes: Towards an inoperative acoustic community

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 November 2011

Iain Foreman
Iain Foreman*
Affiliation:
Department of Communication and Arts, Universidade de Aveiro, Campus Universitário de Santiago, 3810-193 Aveiro, PORTUGAL
*
E-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Drawing on field research carried out in the abandoned villages of the Ara Valley, this article seeks to readdress notions of acoustic community and communication in terms of a ‘haptic aurality’ in which listening, as a mode of touch, approximates a figure of spacing, fragmentation and withdrawal in contrast to more conventional communicational models of intimacy, presence and exchange. Arguing that soundscape compositions present an ‘acoustic ontology’, the article explores a form of belonging and being that is, following Jean-Luc Nancy, singular plural in which sound signals ‘unwork’ collectivities through the processes of ‘sharing’ and ‘splitting’ (partage) characteristic of listening and recording. Referring to the work of writer W.G. Sebald (1944–2001), whose hybrid ‘literary ethnography’ was the impetus for my own soundwalks and fieldwork, and considering the role of soundscape composition within the discipline of Trauma Studies, the article scopes out to consider the possibilities of soundscape composition as a form of testimony in light of Agamben's (1999) insistence that testimony is necessarily incomplete. As a form of ‘myopic witnessing’ (Jenckes 2010), the sonic memories of ruined soundscapes are presented as spacings and absences, fragments and lacunae, that are themselves characteristic of both the ontology of ruins and those of testimony.

Type
Research Article
Information
Organised Sound , Volume 16 , Issue 3: Sound, Listening and Place I , December 2011 , pp. 264 - 271
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Adorno, T.W. 1992. Commitment. In Notes to Literature. Vol. 2. Ed. R. Tiedemann. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Agamben, G. 1999. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. New York: Zone Books.Google Scholar
Bijsterveld, K., van Dijck, J. (eds.) 2009. Sound Souvenirs Audio Technologies: Memory and Cultural Practices. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Birdsall, C. 2009. Earwitnessing: Sound Memories of the Nazi Period. In Karin Bijsterveld and José van Dijck (eds.) Sound Souvenirs Audio Technologies: Memory and Cultural Practices. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.Google Scholar
Blanchot, M. 1981. The Gaze of Orpheus, ed. P. Adams Sitney, trans. Lydia Davis. New York: Station Hill.Google Scholar
Blanchot, M. 1982. The Siren's Song, ed. G. Josipovici, trans. S. Rabinovitch. Brighton: The Harvester's Press.Google Scholar
Blanchot, M. 1986. The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.Google Scholar
Boym, S. 2001. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Caruth, C. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Corbin, A. 1998. Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the 19th-century French Countryside (European Perspectives). New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Delbo, C. 1995. Auschwitz and After, trans. R.C. Lamont. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Derrida, J. 1994. Spectres of Marx. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Drever, J. 2002. Soundscape Composition: The Convergence of Ethnography and Acousmatic Music. Organised Sound 7(1): 21–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dubow, J. 2011. Still-Life, After-Life: Nature Morte: W.G. Sebald and the Demands of Landscape. In S. Daniels, D. DeLyser, J.N. Entrikin and D. Richardson (eds.) Envisioning Landscapes, Making Worlds: Geography and the Humanities. Oxford: Routledge, 188–197.Google Scholar
Felman, S., Laub, D. 1992. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Foreman, I. 2010. Vertiginous Spaces, Phantasmagorical Geographies: Soundscape Composition After Sebald. Soundscape: The Journal of Acoustic Ecology 10(1): 7–10.Google Scholar
Fuchs, A. 2007. ‘Ein Hauptkapitel der Geschichte der Unterwerfung’: Representations of Nature in W.G. Sebald's Die Ringe des Saturn. In A. Fuchs and J.J. Long (eds.) W.G. Sebald and the Writing of History. Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann.Google Scholar
Goldsmith, O. 1770. The Deserted Village: A Poem. London: Noel Douglas.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huyssen, A. 2003. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Idhe, D. 2007. Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.Google Scholar
Järviluoma, H., Moisala, P., Vilkko, A. 2003. Not only Vision: Analyzing Sound and Music from the Perspective of Gender. In H. Järviluoma, P. Moisala and A. Vilkko, Gender and Qualitative Methods. London: Sage.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Järviluoma, H., Kytö, M., Truax, B., Uimonen, H., Vikman, N. (eds.) 2009. Acoustic Environments in Change. Tampere: TAMK, University of Applied Sciences.Google Scholar
Jenckes, K. 2010. Myopic Witnessing and the Intermittent Possibilities of Community in Sergio Chejfec's Los planetas and Boca de lobo. Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 44: 200.Google Scholar
LaBelle, B. 2006. Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art. New York and London: Continuum.Google Scholar
LaCapra, D. 1999. Trauma, Absence, Loss. Critical Inquiry 25(4): 696–727.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lanzmann, C. 1985. Shoah (DVD). London: Eureka Entertainment.Google Scholar
Levi, P. 1989. The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal. New York: Random House.Google Scholar
Macfarlane, R. 2007. Afterglow, or Sebald the Walker. Waterlog: Journeys Around an Exhibition. Film and Video Umbrella.Google Scholar
Marks, L. 2000. The Skin of the Film. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Nancy, J.-L. 1991. The Inoperative Community. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Nancy, J.-L. 2005. ‘Uncanny Landscapes’., The Ground of the Image, trans. Jeff Fort. New York: Fordham University Press.Google Scholar
Nancy, J.-L. 2007. Listening, trans. Charlotte Mandell. New York: Fordham University Press.Google Scholar
Nancy, J.-L. 2008. Corpus, trans. Richard A. Rand. New York: Fordham University Press.Google Scholar
Robbins, J. 1987. The Writing of the Holocaust: Claude Lanzmann's Shoah. Prooftexts 7(3): 249–258.Google Scholar
Schafer, R.M. 1994. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Rochester, VT: Destiny Books [1977].Google Scholar
Sebald, W.G. 2002. Austerlitz, trans. Anthea Bell. London: Penguin.Google Scholar
Toop, D. 2010. Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener. London and New York: Continuum.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Truax, B. 2001. Acoustic Communication, Second edition. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Press.Google Scholar
Wylie, J. 2007. The Spectral Geographies of W.G. Sebald. Cultural Geographies 14: 171–188.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wylie, J. 2009. Landscape, Absence and the Geographies of Love. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 34: 275–289.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zilcosky, J. 2004. Sebald's Uncanny Travels: The Impossibility of Getting Lost. In J.J. Long and A. Whitehead (eds.) W.G. Sebald: A Critical Companion. Seattle: University of Washington Press.Google Scholar