Student Blog Post On Henriques, Sonic Bodies: Treviene Harris

Sonic Bodies

“Sound is a transitory event in time, rather than an often more permanent mark on a visual surface.”

Before delving into a summary of the text, I feel it’s important to first situate this critical intervention disciplinarily. Unlike most, if not all, of the texts we’ve read thus far, Julian Henriques comes to us not by way of literary studies, but instead from a Media and Communication background. His faculty page at the University of London lists him as the head of said department, and previously Henrique served as senior lecturer for film and television at the Caribbean institute of media and communication (CARIMAC), at the University of the West Indies in Kingston. I think it’s useful to consider the ways in which this difference in disciplinary focus influences or directs the particular type of inquiry Henriques makes. For me, it was helpful to mark the distinction between how, for example, a scholar from Communication thinks about rhetoric differently than one who is affiliated with an English department. The difference to my mind is that the former is more concerned with epistemology, whereas the latter is concerned with hermeneutics. That is to say the Communication scholar wants to examine the ways in which knowledge is constructed through rhetoric; the English scholar examines what meaning can be deprived through interpretation. Indeed, the title and content of Henriques’ book suggests a strong critical investment in “ways of knowing,” or epistemological pathways.

In his preface, Julian Henriques frames the critical inquiry of his book Sonic Bodies: Reggae Sound Systems, Performance Techniques, and Ways of Knowing in relation his previous work in film by stating, “What I remembered of this work was how, in practice, auditory communication is as meaningful as the visual, representational, and discursive forms of expression that are commonly assumed to have the monopoly on meaning” (xi). With this in mind, this book’s significance to some of the ideas and concepts we’re trying to work through in this seminar is apparent. For example, so far we’ve been contemplating what are the various types of relationships to be made between different modes of text? How does the sonic and aural “interfere” with written and spoken text? And indeed, what even counts as text?

For our purposes, Sonic Bodies is concerned with sound not only in terms of pursuing alternate ways of knowing, but also how sound produces a soundscape that seeks to displace the hierarchy within which we make distinctions between what counts as texts from which we can make meaning. To this end, Henriques proposes that we begin to think through sound, as opposed to merely thinking about sound. In the YouTube clip below, Henriques makes a distinction between how we usually think about sound in term of rhythm, pitch or timbre, as opposed to the spatial dimensions of sound and the ways in which sound orientates us into ways of knowing and experience (echoes of one of his scholarly influences, Sara Ahmed). As part of our class discussion I would like us to explore this notion of sound sculpture. It sounded jarring and disorienting to me, a lot like noise. Why is that? And how does that underscore the keys points of Henriques’ arguments in terms of meaning making, etc.?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ra_zF0NVHWA 

Henriques’ methodology for this project consisted of observing audio engineers, disc jockeys and selectors associated with Stone Love, one of the oldest and most established sound systems in Jamaica. It seems to me that although the sound of the dancehall is Henriques’ object of study, a part of thinking through sound requires an inquiry into the production of sound. He states, “…listening to sound is central to this methodology, followed by describing exactly what was heard of the processes and practices of sounding. This leads to a theorizing of sound itself…with a theory of sonic logos” (xxxii). Through the processes of listening, describing and theorizing, Henriques lights on the actual vibrations of sounds and their relationship to the “vibes” of the dancehall as something that for him is crafted through the mechanical production of sound by engineers, disc jockeys, and selectors. And so, the production of vibes is not simply attributable to sound, but to the process of sounding. His definition of sounding is worth quoting at length. He writes,

Sounding is complex set of relationships that is invariably expressed in several different registers at the same time. Most often these registers are considered separately, isolated from each other as with mechanical and social processes, or technological or psychological levels of analysis, for example. The conceptual force of sounding is to refuse such dichotomies in favour (sic) of an intrinsically relational approach (xxiii)

I thought about how this definition of sounding wants to resist the fixity of meaning on any singular or even dichotomized terms.  What would it mean to say we are listening to sounding and not sound? It seems to me, from Henriques perspective sound presupposes something finished and self contained, whereas sounding is asking us to listen for intersected registers, much like Lordi’s resonances.  Indeed, within his framework of sounding, he also considers propagation and this idea of disturbance embedded within sound waves that allude to dynamism, and I’m assuming plurality of meanings. Later, Henriques goes on to claim that “sounding is more dangerous than music. It asks more questions, has greater disruptive potential-because it escapes the bars and all the other confines of systems of musical meaning” (37). This formulation is exciting to me, and I’d like to raise this point for discussion. Might we think about Rhianna’s video in terms of sound and sounding, especially with the controversies surrounding the sound being mislabelled as “tropical house,” about her words being unintelligible, and why there’s an “Amercianized” version of the video attached?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HL1UzIK-flA

     The Jamaican Dancehall scene, for Henriques, is “a unique living laboratory” in which to begin his journey into sound because of what he defines as the immersive quality and excess of sound in that permeates that space (xvi). And so, his journey into sound takes on quite a literal meaning as he becomes engulfed in sound: its production, circulation and reception. As a space of sonic dominance which Henriques defines as one that “explodes with all the multisensory intensity of image, touch, movement and smell,” the dancehall soundscape is occupied by sonic bodies on various terms- the corporeal, the social, the epistemological, and the technical- all of which are trying to make sense of sound at any given moment. In theorizing how these bodies interact with sound while immersed in and dominated by it, Henriques first identifies the material waveband of sound which is the physical transference of soundwaves; second, the corporeal waveband which involves actual physical response to the material wavebands; and last, the sociocultural waveband which seems to gesture toward the affective response to a collective corporeal experience of the material, or the “vibes” which erupts and moves through the session. Effectively, the link between sonic bodies is always relational.  Below Is a link to a popular sing by Beres Hammond and Buju Banton. It is an homage to the dancehall, the sound selector, and the vibes, and much of the intensity of feeling Henriques tries to get at.

From this threefold formulation of how sound works on the body, Henriques asks us to become attuned to the ways in which sound as sound-the actual auditory vibrations- demands that we think differently than we do about images or text. For Henriques, attention to sound relies more on feeling, process, movement, and event. In other words, images and (written) texts have already marked out meaning in ways that foreclose the very idea of non-meaning or non-representation. That is to say images and text rely on codified ways of knowing which are often not value-free. Because of the ephemeral and immaterial quality of sound as distinct from the fixed nature of written text, Henriques suggests that thinking through sound demands a continuous negotiation of meaning, or rather a triangulated negotiation of meaning. His concept of triangulation is the antithesis to “the way visual counterparts favor binaries” or the way in which the eyes can only see in a straight line (265).

Henriques’ work seems to be firmly situated in the field of Sound Studies, which as I stated at the outset, is decidedly removed from the mainly literary based texts we’ve read this far. In his introduction, he emphasizes that his “journey into sound was from music,” to point out that his intervention is less concerned with a specific form of sound than how society interacts with. By “form of sound,” I mean music, song, poetry, etc. I’m interested in how he is able to call for a privileging of sound that is able to do something entirely other than the visual or the textual even without undercutting the value of the last two forms. As such, I find there to be some points of intersection between his and Lordi’s work. Where Lordi points out resonances between the literary and the sonic, decisively not as a way to elevate one form over the other, Henriques too does not suggest that the sonic assume a primacy over the visual and textual, only that it affords a new way of un/thinking and un/theorizing meaning.

However, I found there to be some unresolved tension between how Henriques was thinking about sound in seemingly rational (I may mean phenomenological here) terms, but at the same time wanting to make a gesture toward the affective quality of sound, at least in the event if its reception. And so he attributes some degree of skill and intuitiveness to the sound men who are able to “engineer” the sounds to their particular audiences. Further, he seems to suggest that it is the sound that incites an affective response in the audience, when that isn’t entirely the case. There are visual and other sensory stimuli that converge to create a “vibes” in the dance that he doesn’t quite acknowledge or tease out. Still, he does allude to the feeling of sound that is precisely non-representational. But can the sonic be both these things--rational and affective in the ways that he’s laid them out here? Thus far we’ve mainly discussed the affective quality of sound, so what does understanding the techniques and mechanics of the production of sound afford us? 

While I’m on board with this new type of (non) literacy that Henriques proposes, I’m curious to know how we can “port” this critical approach to our work, as all of us are writers, whether creatively or otherwise. In writing about sound, even as Henriques does, are we not relying on some structures of meaning making? And so the highly technical ways in which Henriques talks about the engineering and production of sound, the theories of listening and voicing, I find with his reliance on such dense Eurocentric rational theory is itself making a case - indeed making meaning - about all he claims thinking through sound does/can do.

I was also somewhat put off by the heavy reliance on Western/Eurocentric high theory that underpinned much of Henriques’ argument. I’m always a little skeptical when theorists use high theory to interrogate low, or to use his word bass, cultures. I have ambivalent feelings because it seems to be a sort of recuperative gesture and a way of saying “this is worthy to be discussed in these terms,” and at the same time saying “this is worthy to be discussed in these terms” at the same time. I suppose in some ways Henriques’ approach can be considered a worthwhile supplement (or complement) to the usual ways in which dancehall culture has been written about/theorized. Still, what would it mean to develop a theory of sound, sounding, and sound culture that take into account the origins of the society that produces the culture? What would it mean to theorize sound starting with/at the Caribbean or Black Atlantic or Global South?