Encounter
Matters are not resolved: this implicates me, also, as a subject that is situated in these as yet unresolved historical continuities and as a researcher writing papers on material sonic methods.
In conclusion, I want to again make a case for situating my own sonic methods – always, but in particular when “writing about”[17] minoritarian works as the white, Western-Europe-based, Austrian, Dominanz academic I live my life as. In this paper, I have argued that scholars interested in engaging with sonic materialities as a method (such as myself) can learn a responsibility for and responsiveness to historical situatedness from Bilir-Meier’s artistic strategies. I have amplified how in Bilir-Meier’s film, tape hiss acts as a quiet sonic texture. I have argued that this hiss communicates, from her minoritarian point of audition, the filmmaker’s twofold irritations with representation: first, as a structure in 1980s West German Dominanz media culture that implements and (re-)performs racist stereotyping; and second, as a strategic necessity in her own artistic remediation of archival material, which strives to provide a historical counter-narrative of the period. I have attempted to trace how tape hiss (as a sonic texture generated from electric charges conventionally coded as blank, empty, and without signal) corresponds to the artist’s strategy of working with fragments and for positing that diasporic historical counter-knowledges hold space for those stories and positions that the artist herself cannot tell – stories and positions that belong to other migranticized subjects, that are yet unheard, or that are still to come.
What I take from this learning experience is twofold and contradictory. First, I understand that trying to correct representation by using representational tools alone can be treacherous. Bilir-Meier’s remediation of Ertan’s estate amplifies that other forms of thinking and feeling with archival materials – such as engaging material textures in their sensorial and affective affordances – can unfold modes of relationing that go beyond a mere speaking for a historical subject that was, and has remained, absent from Dominanz history writing. Second, however, Bilir-Meier’s film teaches me that sonic methods, too, – and no matter how tactile or direct they may feel to a Dominanz researcher – can remain responsive to, and responsible towards, matters of representation. I understand this second learning as a necessary yet not necessarily adversarial response to optimist, utopian sonic methodological propositions like Voegelin’s. After all, unequal power relations, in particular those via politics of representation in vision and in sound, still play out in media archives. As I see it, the methodological move of declaring representation as an analytical concept incompatible for thinking-with-sound – which is a move that new material sonic thinking has repeatedly claimed as one of its core practices to distinguish itself from other methods in sound studies (Cox 2011; Voegelin 2021)[18] – will not make these very material effects disappear. As a hearing, listening scholar who wants to take sound, and sonic relations, seriously in their materiality, I must keep the differences in situatedness that pertain in questions of representation within earshot.
The claim to acknowledge, and remain responsive to, differences in situatedness also applies to me, both personally and structurally; and as such, it is safe to guess that it also applies to many of my fellow researchers in the field of academic sound studies. What subject positions do “we,” as theorists and teachers from Dominanz backgrounds, bring to artworks that offer to encounter “us” from partisan, minoritarian positions? Following Dylan Robinson, the conciliatory promise inherent in the term “encounter” must always be probed “through interrogation of the specific power dynamics in the meetings each […] work or performance engenders” (Robinson 2020: 117). In other words, power dynamics that shape unjust structures also manifest in meetings of sounding agents in resonance, however direct and material they might feel. What does it mean, then, for differently situated subjects to relate to each other sonically – that is, per touch, in proximity, and through breath, as it passes through bodies who are not the same but who can possibly come into contact? Is there even a Dominanz “us,” and thus, as a necessary consequence, a minoritarian “them,” to begin with? What lines of differences cross both of these pools? What meshes, textures, or tangles bind agents either across or in spite of of differences and different situatednesses? And how does one write these tangles into being without either cementing epistemological and structural differences as fundamental or pretending that epistemologies and structures were simply not there?
What stays with me from my encounter with Semra Ertan is a visceral knowledge and acknowledgment that differences do in fact exist, and that they cannot be wiped away in a single methodological gesture. Listening to Cana Bilir-Meier’s handling of the quiet and the loud that she encounters in the archive means, to me, listening to how one might navigate both the tension between representational aims and the desire to de-categorize spaces for collaborative encounters in the present. Listening to Semra Ertan, I understand – with my thinking head and with my skin that wants to resonate – that sound-that-touches connects. I also understand, however, that in those connections, in those zones of direct sonic contact, there are areas that have boundaries. Holding the tension of this knowledge while bearing with it and with the consequences it might hold for one’s own work can lead to asking different questions when producing academic knowledge via sonic material and with sonic methods. Feeling oneself touched by an artwork, Campt writes,
[…] should not be confused with empathy. It is not putting yourself in the place of another […]. It is the work of feeling done both in spite of and because of these differences, and choosing to feel across that difference, rather than feeling with or for someone living in very different circumstances. […] [H]apticity is a commitment to feeling the discomfort and the disparities of being better off and doing the work of making them generate a different outcome. (Campt 2021: 104, italics in original)
Yes.