Towards an acoustemology of detention in the ‘global war on terror’

Cusick, Suzanne G.

doi:10.1017/cbo9780511675850.017

Cited by 52 publications

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“…On the contrary, the ultimate effect—particularly resonant in the case of Saydnaya—is to accentuate prison torture as sound leakage can actually reinscribe the carceral environment as a shared space of communal suffering (suffering as a contagious, continuous, and thus all the more excruciating experience). This “paradoxically unprivate isolation” (Cusick, 2013: 276) allows no repose or safe distancing from pain. An acoustically porous wall is essentially a weaponized wall, performing against inmates since it proves to be an inadequate shield against the sonic blow of suffering.…”

Section: Acoustic and Acousmatic Violencementioning

confidence: 99%

“… 6 Writing on detention in the context of the “global war on terror,” Cusick (2013: 285) describes how prisoners were purposefully transferred through sonic intervention in some kind of “acoustic dystopia”—“a world divided acoustically between the aggressively noisy and the silent” which essentially disrupted their sense of orientation and placing in the world. …”

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confidence: 99%

“… 11 Cusick (2013: 275–291) has written extensively on the deliberate blend of these two opposing soundscapes (noise and silence) in carceral environments as a mechanism for torture and loss of self-orientation. …”

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confidence: 99%

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Sound prisoners: The case of the Saydnaya prison in Syria

Ristani

2020

Violence: An International Journal

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This article seeks to explore the manifold ways in which carceral violence and acoustics intermingle, as manifested in the case of the military prison of Saydnaya—an infamous, state-run torture jail in Syria. As revealed by survivors’ ear-testimonies and by the recent digital reconstruction of the prison’s interior (available on the Amnesty International website), sound seems integral to the dynamics of power at play in the Syrian prison. A great part of the violence committed there is acoustic, one that is meticulously based on defining properties of the aural experience. Sonic weaponization in Saydnaya has not been much addressed in the existing academic literature, except for discussions of its extreme silencing tactics, which this study intends to complement by a further inquiry into the sound/silence interchange in the Syrian prison, as well as into the ways in which the listening mode per se is turned into a mechanism of surveillance and torture, and also (paradoxically enough) of re-action and survival. To explore these issues, I draw upon existing theoretical perspectives on sound, silence, and listening per se—all measured against the actual backdrop of the Syrian prison. Herein, Saydnaya is theorized as an acoustically surveilled place of extreme listening and deliberate partial sensory deprivation, of weaponized silence and acousmatic violence, that is, a violence whose sound has no visually identifiable cause. Such practices form no exceptional case; Saydnaya rather joins, in this light, the sadly endless list of sonic warfare cases—the dark history of sound—as this has been recently brought to light by a number of critical sound theorists drawing attention to sonic weaponry, and more specifically to the all-powerful acoustics of incarceration. This study relies on ex-prisoners’ aural testimonies as published in Amnesty International Reports and not on self-conducted primary research, and thus many of the points raised here retain the character of hypotheses, pointing to directions of further research that may fully test them out.

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Section: Acoustic and Acousmatic Violencementioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Sound prisoners: The case of the Saydnaya prison in Syria

Ristani

2020

Violence: An International Journal

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“…We are reminded of this most obviously when amplified sound is powerful enough to chatter teeth and shatter eardrums (Stevens and Davis 1936;cf. Jasen 2012;Cusick 2013). But, given the loudspeaker's perceptual technics (Sterne 2012), it is no less true in the everyday contexts in which the modulations are less apparent.…”

Section: The Loudspeaker and Twentieth-century Musicmentioning

confidence: 99%

A mysterious music in the air

Devine

2014

POMH

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A mysterious music in the air: cultural origins of the loudspeaker* Kyle Devine is Lecturer in Music at City University London and a consultant to the Music and Digitization Research Group at the University of Oxford. This is the second in a set of three articles on the musical and cultural history of loudness. The first, a critical history of the 'loudness wars' , appeared in Popular Music. The third, on the intellectual history of the decibel, is forthcoming. AbstractLoudspeakers are everywhere in the built environment. Indeed, music, sound, and listening today are arguably defined by their apparently inevitable mediation by an electronically amplified loudspeaker. But it wasn't always so. When and how did that transformation take place? What was its musical and cultural significance? Whereas popular and historical accounts tend to emphasize the concentricity of the loudspeaker and rock music, this article roots such developments in an essential but under-researched prehistory, showing how the loudspeaker went from an incredible novelty to a predictable ubiquity between 1915 and 1940. I sketch the loudspeaker's early history and offer an assessment of its role in twentieth-century musical and acoustic culture. I suggest that the loudspeaker needs to be understood as a cultural technology in a broader history of sound, and that it played a central role in the formation of modern listening.phonographic mediation-has influenced not only how music is bought and sold, but also how music is composed, performed and heard, and how it works to foster senses of community and self (

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“…Suzanne Cusick's 'Acoustemology of Detention in the ''Global War on Terror''' takes a somewhat contrary position. 29 The article extends the author's interview-based work on music as a tool of violence in detention camps, which are themselves disquieting examples of politically constructed space. Her emphasis, however, is not on the extralegal space of the offshore prison, but on the evisceration of bodily privacy and subsequent domination of subjectivity enacted by musical torture.…”

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confidence: 91%

Review Article

Tausig¹

2014

Twentieth-Century Music

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Towards an acoustemology of detention in the ‘global war on terror’

Cited by 52 publications

References 0 publications

Sound prisoners: The case of the Saydnaya prison in Syria

Sound prisoners: The case of the Saydnaya prison in Syria

A mysterious music in the air

Review Article

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