Sounding is a Queer Way to Know
I presented this work at the Society for Ethnomusicology’s Annual Meeting on 10 November 2019.
Have you ever wondered why universities make graduate students “defend” every major piece of work that we produce? I mean, have you ever wondered why “defense” is the frame for that process? I have. A lot. I’ve learned the hard way that when you call a gathering a “defense,” you imply it’s a space for attacks. When you call a gathering a defense, you actually foreclose any kind of exchange, unless it’s an exchange of fire.
Over time, it’s become clearer to me that there might be something about the way we make research in the North Atlantic academic industry that makes this kind of “defense” necessary. That word “defense” signals a metaphor of war or conflict, and it seems to me that this metaphor structures the dominant ways we approach making and sharing knowledge. As researchers, we argue, for this is how scholarly discourse is made, this is how it looks to critique, to theorize. When you present a paper at a conference, you argue. When you write an essay, you argue. And when you argue, you try to anticipate as many counterarguments as you can conjure so that your argument can “defend” itself. When you argue, you are at pains to erect ramparts of genealogy, lineages of arguments into which or alongside which or against which you position your own. To make research in this way, then, is to practice a form of critique through argumentation.
I make these observations to flag a couple areas of concern for me within the life and work of the North Atlantic academic industry: 1) the ways we conceptualize knowledge; 2) the ways we make knowledge; and 3) the forms that our knowledge takes. I’m also signaling that these three are all thick as thieves. Today, I want to share my perspective on each of these, and then share with you the queer place I’m making for myself, a place in which I’m responding to the ethical and political difficulties that these concerns have raised for me.
I
So, what is knowledge? Depends on who you ask. Following Patricia Hill Collins (2000), we can think of every social collective as an “interpretive context” because the terms of membership in that collective depend on certain things meaning a particular thing. Hill Collins reminds us that whoever controls an interpretive context gets to define truth within that context. We make research in an interpretive context whose means for validating truth were shaped by white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchal settler colonial epistemologies. And whether or not we want to acknowledge it, those of us alive and making research today have inherited these ways of knowing and being. We’ve also inherited the mechanisms through which our predecessors sought to control the kinds of knowledge produced within the industry, to control the kinds of knowledge that got to count as knowledge. We’ve inherited mechanisms like “defenses.”
In our interpretive context, knowledge predominantly takes the form of prose propositions aimed at persuading the reader of a particular truth. Researchers make these propositions, i.e. arguments, by distinguishing themselves as research “subjects” from their research “objects.” To produce academic discourse, one acts upon the other, using research methods. Of course, to approach research in this way, you have to imagine that research subject and research object can be clearly distinguished from each other. Or at least, you have to imagine that it’s analytically productive to do so. But that distance between “subject” and “object” makes it possible to approach research as a kind of pure intellectualism that renders emotions unnecessary and irrelevant. And if feelings don’t really matter to you, then compassion may not need to be part of your professional ethics or your research practice. We’ve inherited the habit of neglecting or marginalizing the intimate relationship between how we know and how we live, how we treat others. Witnessing the violence that this inheritance facilitates is what helped drive me to the place from which I speak today.
Most of what gets validated as knowledge in our industry is knowledge that has to convince you of some truth through argument, knowledge that has to establish the truth-maker as some kind of authority, knowledge that is unconcerned with the ways the truth-maker treats others or relates to the truth-claims. And the truth-claims of this knowledge have to withstand attack in order to be deemed most persuasive. Hence, defense. Let me be clear: we have gained and continue to gain many, many insights from this approach. I’m not suggesting that we stop using arguments necessarily. The thing is, though: knowledge inseparable from the imperative to argue can slip very quickly into knowledge that seeks to dominate all other forms of knowledge. Many thinkers in the academic industry are beginning to talk about images, sounds, and movements as forms of knowledge in themselves. But the argumentative approaches that these thinkers take limit them to propositional prose. So, despite the talk about non-textual knowledge, text remains the primary medium through which most academic thinkers share knowledge. The industry certainly incentivizes the production of prose-work above anything else. So, in our interpretive context, propositional prose dominates any other form of knowledge.
Dwight Conquergood (2013) calls this idealization of propositional prose “textual fundamentalism.” Textual fundamentalism is one of what Shannon Jackson describes as “a set of techniques that facilitates the incorporation of certain knowledges into the educational project of the modern university” (2006, 80, emphasis added).
But how could it look, feel, and sound for us to actually embrace non-texts as forms of knowledge in themselves? To imagine that non-texts don’t need translation into propositional prose in order to convey knowledge? For me, this means turning away from the linearity of argument to a spot on the side of the road where argument is no longer necessary. Here, I am making a queer place for myself. As I turn away from arguing, I focus on the sensory and emotional experiences that attend the process of making and encountering research. And I prioritize relationality between myself as a maker of research and those who encounter my work.
This shifting of priorities is a scholarly and ethical reorientation for me, and it demands ways of making knowledge that aren’t reducible to “methods”––because the concept of “method” is so bound up with the imperative to argue. As I see it, arguments are a currency that keeps researchers relevant and paid in our industry, and methods help produce them. But where a research method needs an object, an objective, to exist, my orientation requires no conclusions. My orientation is fueled simply by a desire to be with. It focuses on the sensory experiences of those who make and encounter research––and such experiences may not quite “make sense.” The fact is, I am having feelings as I make research, I am sensing as I think, and so are you when you encounter my work. What becomes possible when our shared capacity for sensing and feeling––rather than just for thinking and arguing––is what orients our research-making? How could it look, feel, and sound to have some other reason for making research other than trying to convince someone of something?
II
I want to share something with you.[1]
Playing and performing in sound helped me to find juxtaposition and suggestion as creative modes through which to make research. This kind of play frees me from the argumentative mode, letting me focus instead on what I’m feeling and on how you might be feeling when you encounter my work. I can turn away from citation and coherence and the imperative to convince. I can layer different authorial voices. I can play with the many shades of meaning of a word or phrase because a sound recording foregrounds inflection and timbre in ways that prose cannot for me.
Playing and performing in sound also affords me new ways of thinking and making with historical archives. The piece we’ve just listened to is a good example of this. It’s called “mel’s son,” and it’s from my project elsewhere (Chavannes 2018b). The script for the first voice in this piece, a voice like a news anchor on the radio, was taken directly from a front-page article in a Jamaican newspaper. The imprisonment, the police violence, the diplomatic intervention that the piece narrates, they all really happened in 1963. The man to whom these things happened was my mother’s uncle. And he was a gay man. I was struck by the complexity of his life, and of this episode. I thought about the differences among the racial contexts that Uncle occupied that year: Britain (from which he was returning after medical study), the United States, and Jamaica. I thought about how it must have felt to taste the blunt baton of white American racism for the first time. I thought about how this must have felt to someone whose wealth and brownness had often protected him from the worst kinds of harm that many same-sex desiring, gender non-conforming, and poor people face in Jamaica. I thought about the fact of him being a gay man, being that way, and yet being so prominent, so important, to Jamaica. This gay man who was crucial in the development of Jamaica’s healthcare infrastructure, the island’s first neurosurgeon. I made this piece in part to try and know Uncle differently, to leave a different and perhaps more complicated trace of his life other than that left by the Jamaican state and its media mouthpieces.
In other sound projects, I play more explicitly with Jamaican musical forms. I approach Jamaican musical traditions as a historical archive comprised of song lyrics, melodies, instruments and techniques of instrumental performance, and rhythmic patterns. While this aural and haptic archive has been inscribed into various kinds of texts by researchers, I came to them as embodied practices and continue to interact with them as such. When I play and perform in sound, I get the chance to embody this living archive of Jamaican musical forms.
I get excited in this kind of play because it allows me to practice what Nadia Ellis (2011) calls a “queer performance hermeneutic,” i.e. it helps me to invoke or to realize the queer potentialities of this archive. By manipulating the melodies, lyrics, and rhythms of the archive, I’m able to imagine same-sex desiring and gender non-conforming people as part of the historical milieux in which the archive emerged and grew. Inspired by Ellis’s formulation, I’m performing queer sexualities in Jamaica’s history as not just marginal and besieged but as present, expressive, and playful. It’s a way of claiming membership within Jamaican collective identities. Because people like me are constantly and ritualistically disavowed by those empowered to police Jamaican belonging. In making this claim, I help others like me to claim membership, too, and I’ve begun to forge bonds with other queer Jamaicans who’ve encountered my work online.
Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley theorizes queerness as a “praxis of resistance” and a “disruption” of “the violence of normative order” (2008, 199). Terms like “resistance” and “disruption” might conjure aggression, force, and conflict. But when Tinsley uses these words, she’s writing about kidnapped Africans sailing through the Middle Passage toward uncertain futures, and she finds something queer in the ways they resisted the commodification of their bodies by “feeling and feeling for their co-occupants on these ships” (2008, 192). With her formulation in mind, and in the wake of the physical and psychological trauma that attends professionalization into the academic industry, I therefore fashion a queer place to dwell. In this dwelling place, making place by the roadside affords a disorderly play that making sense risks interrupting. In this place, I can feel––feel for those who make commodities of ourselves and our ideas when we “go on the market”; feel for those whose practices and experiences I am expected to commodify for the enrichment of academic discourse; feel for myself. In this place, juxtaposition and suggestion can be enough to help make knowledge. In this place, I practice song, as Lisa Stevenson describes it: a “[form] of address that seek[s] the company of an other rather than … attempt to identify, situate, or render an other intelligible” (2014, 165).
Because it allows me to feel and feel for, to be with, to embrace not-knowing while making an otherwise, to make audible lives that my society would rather silence, the queer dwelling place I am making disrupts the norms that seek to define my place in the academic industry. To dwell here is to step outside the immense pressure of disciplinarity that gushes like a broken hydrant into our overfull mouths, our waterlogged bellies. Though our relations are so often fractured by the desire to dominate and by the imposition of domination, as Stevenson reminds us, companionship can remake us (154). I want to make research that invites your company.
[1] David Chavannes, “mel’s son,” SoundCloud audio, 3:13, May 19, 2018, https://soundcloud.com/dapacha/mels-son?in=dapacha/sets/elsewhere-2018.
References
Chavannes, David. 2018. elsewhere. https://soundcloud.com/dapacha/sets/elsewhere-2018.
Conquergood, Dwight. 2013. “Beyond the Text: Toward a Performative Cultural Politics.” In Cultural Struggles: Performance, Ethnography, Praxis, pp. 47-63. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Ellis, Nadia. 2011. “Out and Bad: Toward a Queer Performance Hermeneutic.” Small Axe 15, no. 2 (July): 7-23.
Hill Collins, Patricia. 2000. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge.
Jackson, Shannon. 2006. “Genealogies of Performance Studies.” In The SAGE Handbook of Performance Studies, eds. D. Soyini Madison and Judith Hamera. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Stevenson, Lisa. 2014. Life Beside Itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic. Oakland: University of California Press.
Tinsley, Omise’eke Natasha. 2008. “Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic: Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage.” GLQ 14, no. 2-3, pp. 191-215.