Special session organized for Modern Language Association, Chicago, Illinois, January 3-6.

Abstract:

If textual transactions refer to the mutually constitutive arrangement of texts mediating and mediated by bodies, then sound can scarcely be anything other than such a transaction. Indeed, the emergent “sonic turn” in the humanities is motivated in part by renewed questions of ontology, perception, and mediation that get at precisely this notion of bodies in constant ambient flux. But just as the presence of sound produces such an affective intensity, its absence offers similarly productive avenues for rethinking relationality, co-presence, temporality, and commensurability. This panel considers the transactional potential of silence in contemporary Japanese literature and media. By examining Deaf poetry in the medium of the screen, deafness versus blindness to racial difference in Japan’s Korean community, and the radical potential of listening to a never quite audible future, we imagine a reconfiguration of assumed relationships among bodies, speech, and time.

Why Japan? While the panelists by no means subscribe to essentialist notions of Japanese uniqueness—and proceed with the conviction that our work is relevant beyond Japan—there are elements of the Japanese language and accidents of history that make Japanese media fertile ground for these inquiries. First, in the Japanese language, the future is held within the present tense: reading a work of Japanese literature in the present moment means listening to the sound of possible futures. Second, the Japanese written language resists pronunciation, its ambiguity allowing for a more palpably silent reading experience. Finally, the especially early, deep, and widespread adaptation of digital communication technologies and infrastructures in Japan—each of which had to contend with the particularities of Japanese languages, written and signed—has resulted in a contemporary media history that has in many ways diverged sharply from that of the world, one that leads to different questions of language, sound, and technology than those that tend to emerge in largely English-centric considerations of digitality and the internet.

Together, these three papers search for new modes of listening to bodies, texts, and futures that are necessarily silent, and urge a theoretical orientation that understands this listening not as passive reception, but as constitutive of its (lack of) sonic object.