<underfire> Response to Nigel Thrift

[Anahid Kassabian]

I apologize for the lateness of this response. I kept hoping to offer a
thoroughgoing, thought-through response to this week's provocative offering,
but I'm still thinking about it. Rather, I thought I might draw out or take
up and expand on a few points.

The first is something that came up in Thrift's response - the question of
spaces and how they dampen or boost affect. My own interests in this
question focus on sound design, acoustics, and what I've called ubiquitous
musics, which connects with my concerns with sound targeting and weapons.
We're being aurally designed and targeted into intensities and affects
before we even have adequate language to think about sound and music in the
most basic ways, tools and strategies we can entirely take for granted in
the visual realm.

This leads to the second point I want to take up, the engineering of affect
in political psychology. The place of music in this terrain is both stunning
and stunningly under-theorized--from older technologies such as national
anthems to more recent ones (vide the 'Born in the USA' controversy in
Reagan's re-election campaign and Bill Clinton's Arsenio Hall sax
performance) to the utterly unclear (and misrepresented, or perhaps too
uncomplicatedly represented, by Michael Moore) use of the Bloodhound Gang's
'Fire Water Burn' by US soldiers in Iraq. The use of music and sound in
video games also becomes pertinent here.

Third, I think the question of attention and attention span requires a great
deal more thought. I have been searching for a theory of attention, and the
only works of interest I've found so far are Jonathan Crary's *Suspensions
of Perception*, Jonathan Beller's "Capital/Cinema," and some passages in
Patricia Clough's *Autoaffection*.

Finally, with Thrift, I worry about paranoia - a lot. I keep wondering about
the relationship between trauma and paranoia, which perhaps comes from
having lived in NY in 2001 and in the UK, though not in London, since 2005.
I can't help thinking that both the NY and London attacks, however horrific,
were basically one-offs; my friends who have lived through decades of
violence in Beirut are less paranoid than many of my friends in NY, but I
don't know enough about political discourse in Lebanon to know how to think
this through. Still, I keep coming back to the question of the relationship
between power and political or national paranoia. Is the kind of paranoia
circulating now in the US and UK a consequence of political privilege and
power? Is there a parallel in the absence of power? Despair? The absence of
affect? or the appearance thereof?

Anahid


-- 
Anahid Kassabian
James and Constance Alsop Chair
School of Music
University of Liverpool
80 Bedford Street South
Liverpool L69 7WW

+44 0151 794 3098
+44 0151 794 3141 (fax)
http://www.liv.ac.uk/music/
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