Cusick, Suzanne G. Towards an acoustemology of detention in the ‘global war on terror’

Suzanne G. Cusick addresses the topic of acoustical torture at detention sites. Building on personal accounts of former detainees, Cusick examines how the specifically designed soundscape there participates in the distortion of subject formation processes of the prisoners (277, 282). Her argument draws mainly on the material approach to sound understood not necessarily as audible sensations, but rather as bodily vibrations produced “sympathetically with other entities in our environment” (278). Cusick, thus, indicates the direct character of acoustical violence’s impact on the human body; either perceived and processed or not, the vibrations affect the body simply because of its physical presence in a certain space.

Therefore, the acoustemology of detention draws on a correlation between soundscape, space, and subject. Cusick pays specific attention to the acoustical mechanisms that alienate the detainees from their surroundings by reducing their ability to “distinguish between public and private space in the block” (280), or even making them unable to map their location with regards to the space beyond their cells (281). Spatially disoriented and deprived of the possibility to actively interact with their surroundings, the detainees are forced to turn into themselves in order to “produce self-preservation, not the call-and-response relationship with the world” (282).

Cusick indicates that the mechanism of alienation from the external space – dominated by the loud, repetitive, and harmful sounds – makes the detainee even more vulnerable to the physical pain that accompanies the interrogations. Exposed to “an irreconcilable conflict between somatic and acoustic distress” (284) generated respectively inside and outside his body, the detainee has ultimately no space of self-preservation to seek shelter in. This way he is supposed to become aware of the interrogator’s omnipotence and omnipresence; even abandoned by the interrogator, the detainee could “feel in the acoustical pressure on his skin and the vibration of his bones the certainty that he was not alone” (285).

In Cusick’s conception, music becomes a synonym of power that overtakes the physical, bodily, and mental space of the detainee; a power that “can deliver a miraculously ubiquitous battering to the sympathetically vibrating bones and skin of a man, beating him from within and without, while leaving no marks” (288). 

Cusick’s approach is innovative and nuanced for at least two reasons. Firstly, Cusick argues convincingly that acoustic violence is not limited to its audible manifestations, but can appear on many levels of social and sensorial (un)recognizability, which connects this idea to other notions such as i.e. slow violence. Secondly, this conception is multidimensional in that it brings together the soundscape, the space, the body, and the subject, and thus demonstrates the value of an interdisciplinary approach to perpetrator studies. 

Author of this entry: Mateusz Miesiac.

Cusick, Suzanne G. “Towards an acoustemology of detention in the ‘global war on terror’”. In Music, Sound and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Experience, edited by Georgina Born, 275–91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.