Abstract
This chapter investigates the question of technics and memory in the context of mediated soundscapes of exile by bringing the field of soundscape studies into a dialogue with the work of Bernard Stiegler. The role of technologically mediated memory is underlined while offering a critique of the industrialization of memory under the dominance of mass, standardized media. The video works of Mona Hatoum and Basma Alsharif, however, encourage an alternative artistic style and political desire by intervening into the already-there of history that has been destroyed or repressed. Ultimately, this chapter complicates acoustic ecology’s prescriptive emphasis on balanced “ecology” and suggests that the practice of soundscape composition provides a template for grasping how media practice is being used to articulate the subjectivity of global patterns of displacement.
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- 1.
Mona Hatoum recorded the slides and conversations in Beirut in 1981. She produced Measures of Distance at the artist-run and Vancouver-based Western Front Art Centre in 1988 with the materials she carried over from Beirut.
- 2.
See Ong, W.J. (1982). Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. London, UK: Routledge, pp. 71–74.
- 3.
Following Gilles Deleuze and Pierre-Félix Guattari, Marks appropriates Alois Riegl’s distinction between an optical and haptic image. Marks describes optical visuality as a way of seeing things from a distance to perceive them as distinct forms where the viewer is separated from the object (as “an all-perceiving subject”), whereas haptic visuality directly addresses the viewer’s body in intimate ways: “It [haptic image] is more inclined to move than to focus, more inclined to graze than to gaze” (Marks, 2000, p. 162).
- 4.
Stiegler shares a similar tone with Martin Heidegger’s text The Question of Technics that set the technics as a way of “bringing forth” and criticizes its appropriation as a means-ends relationship in the modern era. Eventually, however, Stiegler puts more emphasis on the constitutive role of technics in its coupling with humans than Heidegger does.
- 5.
In Heidegger, the past does not only refer to one’s own past, but also the past that Being acquires through history and tradition without having lived it. This point explains both how Being is already temporally constituted and why Stiegler’s tertiary memory is constitutive of primary and secondary retentions, and not vice versa.
- 6.
As Westerkamp lays out, The Muzak Corporation got its start in the 1930s, supplying background music to industry (and settings like hotels, shopping malls, and offices in the later decades). Since the 1970s, Muzak has provided many other services including security and surveillance systems (1988, pp. 36–38).
- 7.
Here, Westerkamp draws upon Jacques Attali’s work Noise: The Political Economy of Music (1985) that tackles the political economy of the music industry.
- 8.
See Foreman’s article for a more in-depth discussion of Nancy’s theoretical concepts.
- 9.
See Nancy, J.-L. (2007). Listening. (C. Mandell, Trans.). New York, NY: Fordham University Press, p. 12.
- 10.
See Dabashi, H. (Eds.) (2006). Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema. New York, NY: Verso.
- 11.
As Tawil-Souri notes, this is a deliberate reference to “present absentees”, referring to the majority of Palestinians who were dispossessed from their land by Jewish forces during the Nakba. The transformation of Palestinian refugees into “present absentees” was institutionalized with Israel’s 1948 Emergency Regulation Concerning Absentee Property, the 1950 Absentee Property Law, and the 1952 Citizenship Law.
- 12.
Like Hatoum, Alsharif was born to Palestinian parents living in exile. She was born in Kuwait in 1985, but has had a nomadic life since then. Alsharif belongs to a younger generation of Palestinian woman artists of whom Hatoum was one of the pioneers. One of the early video works of Alsharif was titled We Began by Measuring Distance (2009), which can be read as a reference to Hatoum’s earlier work Measures of Distance (1988).
- 13.
Alsharif also produced a sound piece titled Deep Sleep II (2015), based on a brainwave generating binaural beats interwoven into field recordings from the Gaza Strip. From overcrowded streets to overgrown fields, drones in the sky, and birds flying by, it is meant to be an invitation to experience a place through its sounds. Within her nomadic position, Alsharif connects the viewer to larger histories of dispossession and inequality while interrogating what Gaza represents as a site, a conflict, and a metaphor. For further discussion on metaphors through which the realities of Gaza are obscured or exposed, see: Tawil-Souri, H. & Matar, D. (2016). Gaza As Metaphor. London: Hurst Publishers.
- 14.
This quote is taken from an interview between Raquel Schefer and Basma Alsharif that took place in 2015. The text titled The Impossibility of Describing a Place: An Interview with Basma Alsharif was accessed on the website of the journal La furia umana, May 15, 2018: http://www.lafuriaumana.it/index.php/58-archive/lfu-25/399-raquel-schefer-the-impossibility-of-describing-a-place-interview-with-basma-alsharif
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İşcen, Ö.E. (2019). The Uncanny Soundscapes of the Palestinian Exile: Rethinking Technics, Memory, and Sound. In: Droumeva, M., Jordan, R. (eds) Sound, Media, Ecology. Palgrave Studies in Audio-Visual Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16569-7_10
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