"From Chaos to Calm": Schizophrenic Listening and Hong Kong's New Infrastructural Acoustic
Winnie W. C. Lai
Abstract
Infrastructure enables modes of politics to come into being and gives rise to an apparatus of governmentality. Through sensing and "listening in" (LaBelle 2019) to the city, the urban "acoustic habitus" (Feld 1982) emerges out of the city's governmentality; it comprises ways of listening that define a biopolitical "sonic citizenship" (Western 2021). Governance in Hong Kong's new "lawscape" (LaBelle 2021) reorients one's acoustic being in urban spaces, resounding an aural monopoly, which I call the infrastructural acoustic. In the new environment, the "semi-authoritarian" system (Tai 2020) has muted the cacophony of raging roars and unintelligible protests, infusing the city's atmosphere with an affective entanglement of tear gas and bodies during upheavals in the passé "semi-democratic" (Tai 2020) spaces. Together with Hong Konger self-reflexive poetry, this short film juxtaposes photos, footage, interviews, and field recordings of Hong Kong's urban spaces during and after years of pro-democracy protests in the old and new Hong Kong to reveal an invisibilized "sphere of appearance" in the "inhabitable ground" (Butler 2016). Insisting on the significance of sound and listening in making sense of the affective spheres that circulate in a transforming environment, this combined work crafts an intermedial space where the audience can sense these forces and attunements through a mode of schizophrenic listening and discern the dynamics between sounds, collective memories, and infrastructural matters to reimagine the possibilities of the counter-infrastructural acoustics where sounds of freedom attempt to retrench state violence.
Keywords: Hong Kong Protests, Experimental Ethnography, Ethnographic Film, Multimodal Archive, Schizophrenic Listening, Acoustemology
Poem
A Glittering Future:
Yet Exiled Listening Resounds
With the Fading Hong Kong Voices
Knowing it might sound strange, I'm stuck between then and the present, A renewed citizen Of this emerging acoustic habitus. From chaos to calm, I was told A bright, concordant future Looms over the contradictory inhabitable ground.
Gridlocked streets hustle— But I breathe the forgotten pungent tear gas Rowdy wheels roar— Yet I hear the fading chants unspoken. This infrastructure affords A bold, glittering future. I shall forget the candlelights Embrace the red sun's brights Inner exile must stop Winding down the unruly thoughts. ☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒ Whatever it is Freedom or nothing We have no fear And no silence Only a shining, prosperous future.
Winnie W. C. Lai, From Chaos to Calm (2025) References
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