Violence and the Contexts of Hostility Conference Session 2

Monday 5th May - Wednesday 7th May 2008
Budapest, Hungary

Conference Programme, Abstracts & Papers

Session 2: Violent Mediations and Music
Chair: Aide Esu

Mashing Power: Musical Imaginings of the ‘Unimaginable’
David Weir
Southern Cross University, Australia

Since the 9/11/2001 attacks on the US a mushrooming personal computer industry has converged with a protracted media-hyped war and increasing availability of high speed internet to give rise to a new form of musical political activism.
‘Political mashup’ utilises digital audio technologies to set recontextualised sampled political speech to composed or appropriated musical backings. Digitally captured, manipulated and underscored speech forms new narratives that reflect the political views of their creators. Generally self-produced (often by non professional musicians), political mashup tends to be distributed via the Internet, where it can be downloaded free of charge from many sites. US President George W. Bush’s role as the most visible and audible architect of the ‘war on terror’ has made his speech particularly vulnerable to capture by a multitude of mashup artists eager to express their opposition to the war. In all but a handful of examples currently circulating online, the latitude for constructing meaning enjoyed by mashup practitioners is deployed in acrimonious, often abusive ways that speak more of personal catharsis than envisioned peace. My work problematises this tendency, proposing an alternative approach to political mashup that is guided by ideals of non-violence. Prominent power-wielders in the war on terror are ‘corrected’ by their own words, verbalising confessional narratives that imagine their redemption. The ‘unimaginability’ of such repentant speech from powerful leaders bespeaks the brutal logic of power, seen here as transcending the sovereign power of nation states and their leaders to encompass what Antonio Hardt and Michael Negri have called ‘Empire’.
Presenting audio examples of my works I explicate their multi-faceted nature as expressions of resistance; first against perpetual war but finally against the hegemonic decrees of Empire. I explore the potentialities of the Myspace site as a global network that facilitates communication between the singularities who comprise a resistant ‘multitude’: its aim being the rupturing of acquiescence to hegemonic messages that legitimate violence.

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Violence and the Evolving Social Identity of the Niger Delta People through Popular Music
Olasunkanmi Oluwafiropo Ewenla
Department of English Studies, University of Ibadan, Nigeria

This paper looks into the relationship between the politics of violence and hostage taking in the Niger-Delta region of Nigeria and the vibrant undercurrent of popular musical metaphor of the heterogeneous people of the region. The explosion of technology in the age of globalisation has made some significant impacts in the harvest of violence for the minority population of Niger Deltans in the Nigerian federation. I will look at the evolution of popular music of the region from the days when the agitation for resource control and hostage taking was yet to become the norm to the present time when the region is a boiling point for minority rights agitation and terrorist attacks. For a people who have a form of music for virtually everything they do from child birth to land cultivation and fishing on the rivers, the key transition from docility to volatility might be found in the basic cultural expression of song making. I shall interrogate known representative musical works of the region in all its hybrid forms in order to show the evolution of both a sociological and poetic paradigm for the motivation of agitation to arms and violence. Is the music in this land a mirror of the society or a primary tool for the propagation of violence? The paper shall help in setting a template for further interrogation of similar cultural indices of the people with a view to finding a (dis)connect in understanding why people take certain options in life.

Music and Mediations of Violence: Aural Virtuality in Modern Warfare
Kiene Brillenburg Wurth
Comparative Literature, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

This paper studies music and sound within the context of modern (post-WW2) warfare. It starts from the assumption that music in modern warfare constitutes a virtual space that dynamically enhances a mental process of de-realization, a concept which is here used as a felt separation from reality: an affective dis-engagement from that reality. Drawing on Theodor Adorno’s and Hans Eisler’s observations on film music, as well as theories of the virtual and virtual reality (Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, Paul Virilio, Mark Hansen, Kate Hayles, Brian Masumi), this paper argues for the possibility of a specifically aural, rather than visual, virtuality. It does so by, on the one hand, analysing how music constitutes a buffer; a space of virtual suspension and safety, against reality in modern warfare (Hedy Honigmann’s documentary Crazy (1999) offers a case in point), and, on the other, how it creates a space in which aggressiveness and insensitivity are given free reign (hate music in tanks during the Iraq war). This latter possibility may in fact turn music, and sound amplification, into a weapon of destruction, as Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) already illustrated: “Yeah, use Wagner. Scares the hell out of the slopes. My boys love it.” Thus, by analysing the uses of music and sound in situations of extreme violence and danger, this paper sketches the possibilities of an aural virtuality that shows how music and sound may project an imaginary three-dimensional space folded, as it were, within yet apparently detached from the incursions and effects of reality. It is only afterwards that these effects are once more felt and recognized: aural virtuality here rehearses the rush or Rausch that Friedrich Nietzsche already connected to music.