Reading Notes Week 11

Cultural Geographies of Music

Julio E. Quinones

A visceral politics of sound:

Article arguments that bodily sensations respond to physical and sonic stimuli and affect the
ways people react in political protests. More specifically the ways in which people are moved by
the rhythm of sound, flow beat and pulse, exploring the visceral politics of a parade.

Queer, feminists and non-representational theorists have begun to rethink the importance of
the materiality of bodies in mobilising individuals…

Activism both involves the official political understanding of discurse, while also recognizing the
body’s capacity to react viscerally to these issues.

As Keil and Feld (1994:167) suggest, habitualised rhythm operates to sustain a psychological
understanding of “being in the groove together”.

Probyn proposes assemblage thinking to help think anew the agency of the body and the reality
of ambiguous states.

This thinking supposes that sound “mediates the affective and emotional energies within,
across human and non-human bodies”.

This kind of non-essentializing manner of conceiving of the body seeks to observe and note
then body’s many processes and reactions as ways of internalizing and viscerally responding to
sounds between other bodies and this ineffable ability to bring a perceived formation of unity
that may or may not reflect internalized beliefs.

The authors move on to explain the ways in which they recorded their research and explained
their methodologies while immersed in the parade. Logging not only their attire but also video
recording, as well as documenting their own internal visceral responses, employing their bodies
as research instruments.

Further, accounts of the beginning of the parade narrate the ways in which incidental, non-
organized “pots and pans” percussion gave a sense of alignment between the bodies present,
not urging them per se to much but affording a space in which the mind and body could meet
or be disrupted.
This led to a variety of chants that emanated in call and response between the protestors, as
well as a clever rewording of Toni Basil’s Mickey, into a version that delineated the displeasures
the general public have with the coal company that runs the site of protest. These actions made
people be connected through the affects and flows of the music performed.
The moment when the parade and its panoply of sounds entered the mining town, their own
unifying sounds were perceived by the people there, as well as people employed by the mine to
be a disruption to their sonic environment and in these clashes of rhythms proved to be a shock
to the onlookers, especially counter protester employees and loved ones.

During the last moment of confrontation, both walkers and counterprotestors supported their
own sides through sonic expression (shouts, improvised percussion, chants,etc), however
tensions defused when walkers that members of the community committed civil disobedience
and were arrested for trespassing the perimeter of the coal mine. The bystanders and
counterprotestors had visceral reactions that denoted what later the authors would note as
shame and the ensuing involuntary re-evaluation of their own positions and actions.