Insurgent Matter: Paralanguage as Techné
This presentation builds upon Hypatia's ongoing research on the performance and politics of paralanguage. Her interest in the paralinguistic stems from multiple sites, including her own brush with aphasia, as well as the signs and sounds of the Indonesian archipelago, and in particular, the historical formation of its national language insofar that it is an explicit anticolonial project mobilized by way of incited performativity and materiality. This presentation seeks to further explicate on what she terms “paralinguistic insurgencies”through an engagement with the contemporary independent Indonesian noise scene. She will be arguing that the anarchic voicings and machinic assemblages of Indonesian noise performers unleash deliberate disruptions to constructed coherence. These insurgent matters are inseparable from Bahasa Indonesia’s role as anticolonial linguistic endeavor and its ongoing institutionalized iterability as condition for postcolonial sovereignty. Indonesian noise artists including duos Senyawa, Sarana, and Gabber Modus Operandi will be brought into raucous conversation with thinkers such as sound theorist Jonathan Sterne and Jacques Derrida on communication and iteration, Kamau Brathwaite, Edouard Glissant, Joan Rettalack on poetic swerves, and Ann Sauvagnargues’s art machines, to name a few. Attending to the paralinguistic enables a discussion around the differences between communication and communicability; the materialities of aesthetic insurgency; and a rethinking of the technologies and technés of movement and recording by way of an anticolonial attunement to mutinous archipelagic poethics and sonic ecologies.
