Mourning the Nightingale’s Song: The Audibility of Networked Performances in Protests and Funerals of the Arab Revolutions

Abstract

Since the disintegration of Syrian society in 2011, my ethnographic methods have substantively adapted towards digital media and social networking and away from in-situ fieldwork. In the course of making this understandable shift, I have grown more attentive to the role of sound in sustaining a feeling of "being there" and how a particular sense of place emerges despite or perhaps due to the hybridity of lives, on/offline and in/out of Syria. This article considers the relationship between the real and digital mediation as mutually constitutive and attends to how sonic mediations amplify such intermediality; it is arguably through the affective politics of recorded sound that I, and others, am able to sustain the presence of connection, however networked, decentered, and partial. Yet the challenge in thinking about the intermedial relations of sound is not only the privilege afforded image in the representational economy—of violence in particular—but also how these mediations affect structures of feeling that are vital to global civic engagement and the narratives that sustain engagement. This paper traces my participation in the formation of particular narratives, their divergences and convergences, among networked publics in the five years since the Syrian uprising to ask whether and how mediated sound engages us more deeply and intimately in intermedial acts of world-making.