[-empyre-] More on Audio Borders, off topic in the slightest degree

[John Hutnyk]

Hi All

Apologies for being slow at responding, some family difficulties have taken
precedence, and the never ending routines of.. well, no need to whine on
about it.

Many many thanks for the responses. I was planning a post that would take us
elsewhere, but time already achieved that. Let’s say I am happy to stick
with the productivity of going ‘off topic’ in good directions, of even being
out of sync – and of later attempting difficult crossings and even slightly
impatient and breathless connection making (which I really liked, thanks
Micha).

The thing about audio in cinema/movies is that while lip-service is paid to
the ‘silence … action on set’ its exactly that priority – silence because
the action will start that has sound continually relegated to the status of
a second class citizen. Sound recording is fraught, often forgotten – and we
hav become very much accustomed to images, they seem easy (sure, they are
not, but…), well, sound is not of equal import in the discourse on film, and
that’s just the problem. When I was teaching documentary film (in my first
ten years at Goldsmiths) there was one clear consequence of the limited
resources we had. Picture image was pretty good on the various cheap-ish
cameras available, such as TVR 900 and so on, but the sound was terrible.
And when it came to editing, if the sound was terrible, that was about as
good as things got. Great images, crap sound often meant disaster. Some
great films were made (you can see them on Daily Motion) but oftentimes they
could have been a whole lot better.

“Except in music videos and cartoons, the soundtrack seems always to exist
in function of the image” – Menotti

But even in music videos the sound seemed to be relegated – as Andrew
Goodwin long ago argued in “Dancing in the Distraction Factory”, critics had
become deaf. I don’t think he was just bemoaning the fact that New Romantic
music was dominated by rubbish fashion. That he includes factory in the
title of his book did not align him with Adorno or the autonomists, but it
would have been nice if it had – I think there is something to be explored
in the way the visual – surveillance, coding, presence – belongs to the
realm of production under capital. The grooves of the record industry riff
on this over and over, a culture industry, a distraction factory, a machine
for value extraction. In the cinema no-one lets you scream (except when they
show the knife).


I am happy to hear talk of mediation (Menotti) as without mediation, or
rather without theorising mediation, I think we remain unable to comprehend
what is going on. To the extent the cinema escapes its older factory
conditions, it escapes via a mediation into new conditions, new circuits of
occupying the city-space/our lives. Without mediation between the image and
the production apparatus, there are only reified fixations – on the image,
on the auteur, on the screen mechanics, even on the circuit. I like to call
this trinketization – a fascination with abstracted and isolated components
of a system that cannot be grasped without a theory of mediation. The
trinketization syndrome is very strong in cultural studies (objects, things,
the fetish of commodities) and also in cinema. (close up, Kane’s Rosebud).
Here Adorno chastised Benjamin writing his Arcades project wanting to have
the things (all those bits and pieces of Paris etc he collected for so long,
snowdomes and the like) communicate with each other in some kind of
auto-dialectical arrangement. Adorno insisted this could not stand without a
theory of relation, of mediation. I’ve long been a fan of juxtaposition, but
agree that mere montage, revolutionary one, has so readily been co-opted by
the culture industry that its no longer even raising eyebrows. The famous
picture of Sergei Eisenstien shaking hands with Mickey Mouse is a trinket to
ironies exactly this.

I’ve a slowly gestating piece on Citizen Kane (oh no, not again) along these
lines, developed slowly as the opening to my lecture course on Marx’s
“Capital” (lecture one – ‘The wealth of societies in which the capitalist
mode of production prevails presents itself as an immense collection of
commodities’ – Kane collects… Without Kane, without the mediation that is
Kane as capital, Kane in Xanadu, Kane and politics, newspapers, media
(without Kane as William Randolph Hearst…) there are only trinkets, only
Rosebuds. For the record, the gist is in these posts:

http://hutnyk.wordpress.com/2007/10/05/welles-hearst-capital/

http://hutnyk.wordpress.com/2006/09/03/quoting-marx-for-the-slums-–-zizek’s-parallax-viewpoint/<http://hutnyk.wordpress.com/2006/09/03/quoting-marx-for-the-slums-%E2%80%93-zizek%E2%80%99s-parallax-viewpoint/>

http://hutnyk.wordpress.com/2007/10/02/kanes-snow-globe/

http://hutnyk.wordpress.com/2005/10/13/why-film-students-babble-on-about-orsen-welles/


What I meant when I suggested – just threw it out there really – that “the
city, and the border, is an audio-visual enclosure” is that the border is
not just at the airport or the seaport, or the passport control check. The
border extends, like sound, into every register of our lives. I have to
refer to the back catalogue again here. A post on trinketization from the
anniversary of Sputnik, in honour of Leika:

The border is not only geography and vision – though a line on the map and
the sign at immigration control are our most immediate experiences of
control – the border is also a process, an order, an iteration, uneven,
performative and aural. The border is not just at the edge or boundary, it
is also in the street, in the post, in the pub. The border operates between
people. The hand raised to silence the offer of the migrant DVD salesperson
who interrupts your quiet enjoyment of a beer – that too is a brutal moment
of border control. Although of course we can insist that state boundaries
are also porous, continually bypassed, more and less easily, in so many
different ways; immigration control still stands as a block to movement and
mediation.

The resonance of the war and power is strong here – echoing with the sounds
of silence, dispossession and death to which our eyes become deaf, our ears
have become blind.

Is our boundary prejudice built into the structure of the border control? A
logic of presence, geography and vision govern the strong sense of truth
that belongs to knowledge. We say knowledge is divided into fields
(geography) and seem most often to designate knowing through a confident
designation. We indicate truths by pointing (vision), there is presence in
under*standing*. Now perhaps there is an alternative in the metaphoric code
with which we name movement and sound. It may be possible to hear a more
critical tone, to raise questions about the assertions of certitude – when
critical we say we are not sure we agree, we doubt, we say we do not like
the tone. Can thinking through travel and sound suggest new ways of linking
across the borders between us all – as sound crosses the border in ways that
tamper with visual and geographic blocks (pirate radio, music, language, the
sound of falling bombs…). But we also say, when critical, that we cannot see
the point. Ahh, with this last the too easy divide of metaphor into those
that point and assert knowledge through vision and those that question and
challenge through sound does finally break down. But perhaps there is
something in sound that can suggest more, that allows us at least to listen
to another possibility, temporarily opening up ears and minds.

It is often thought, but we could be more precise – that movement across
borders of all kinds is a good thing, breaking taboos and genre rules is an
unmitigated good. Of course, cross disciplinarity is claimed as a boon (in
cultural studies for sure), but clearly other crossings – of capital, of
weapons, of imperial power – are not so welcome. Capital moves one way,
surplus value extraction another. Cross-border global movement (music
distribution, television news, democracy) might not always be a boon. No
doubt pirate radio enjoys much approval, but communications media also have
a less favourable heritage (radio as used, say, by the National Socialists
in Germany) and present (the contemporary normative narrations of
‘democracy’ by the Voice of America, the BBC, or with the televisual
uniformity of CNN). A more careful thinking that notes the metaphors of
critique, distinguishes movement and sonic registers that affirm or disavow,
works to undo that which destroys and divides, fosters that which unites,
organises capacity to live otherwise with others…

Crossing the border, a great achievement, pushing the boundaries, also
sometimes caught and fraught in contradictions. *For* cross-disciplinarity
and border transgression, *against* control by Capital – we need to sublate
movement out of, under and around control. No simple task. The sound of a
dog barking in space might caution against uncritical celebrations. Lest we
forget Laika, dead on  Sputnik 2 these 51 years ago
today<http://www.novareinna.com/bridge/laika.html>
.


And earlier, an attempt to suggest we could start working against a
geographical model of the Border or the Boundary. If we recognize the border
is not just the port, but the entire city, as in “everywhere, in everything
we do”, in each interaction between people related, somehow somewhere to
belonging – how violent this is – if we recognize the border as a wall
between us all, then we might see reason to have to reconfigure the very
idea of nation, boundary and movement that so distracts us. Secondly, the
border is not just at the edge, but at any port, at the immigration office,
in the postal service that delivers the visa, in the police checks, the
detention procedure – in the everyday reactions of people to each other even
as they stand and stare. Thirdly, if we think of the way sound and meaning
travels across the border, might we start to develop ways of thinking
critically against this geographic boundary – and the old models of nation,
culture, race that the border secures? What would it be to ask critically
about, and so reject, the way we have fixed the border through property,
maps, geography – and so leave that space that has been deaf to other
movements, transmissions, resonances. Would this work things differently,
otherwise?


Which might be what I might - maybe - could - possibly have meant by
"filming your way across"? The ‘second life’ of theoretical language (thanks
Johannes, I like that) is pretty useless if it does not provoke suggestions
that might lead us to actions more effective, more capable, more able to win
(against Capital, which has tanks and theory… there is so much more to do
here… but I must run elsewhere).

Thanks so much for the time, if you read this far. I will lurk on...

John


-- 
Professor John Hutnyk
http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/cultural-studies/staff/j-hutnyk.php
http://hutnyk.wordpress.com/
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