Anahid Kassabian: Response to Nigel Thrift
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 Kassabian
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 Kassabian