Hearing “Media-Capitalism” in Egypt
DOI: https://doi.org/10.59350/746jq-hqk39
As I began researching my first book Ordinary Egyptians, a study of Egyptian culture from the 1870s until the eve of the 1919 revolution, sounds and early sound media were the last thing on my mind. However, When I dug more deeply into the historical sources, I realized the importance of music and the comedic theater in the urban culture of turn of the century Egypt. This made me expand the scope of my research to incorporate the vernacular culture of Egypt as an entire media-system, which as I showed in my book, was instrumental in constructing a modern Egyptian national identity. Music, songs, plays, chants, speeches, conversations and chatter, were very influential in forming an Egyptian national culture at the end of the nineteenth century, especially in a society with low literacy rates. By incorporating performance and sound media–especially the rising record industry–my book strives to expand the historical study of this period beyond just the visual and the printed to include sound, and aural/oral expressions of culture.
Ordinary Egyptians also engages with some of the theories of nationalism and tests their applicability to Egypt and the Arab world. It introduces the concept of “media-capitalism,” which expands the historical analysis of Egyptian nationalism beyond just print and silent reading, through the incorporation of audiovisual, sound, and performance media. By integrating these new media, especially the burgeoning record industry, my book attempts to make room for both the “ear” and the “eye”—for the aural and oral alongside the visual—and in the process provides a more comprehensive explanation for how individuals and communities digest and embody cultural information. As this excerpt explains, cultural productions, in any form, are not socially relevant unless they are communally and socially activated; they must be discussed, breathed, and animated in the routine of everyday life.
The following is an excerpt from Ordinary Egyptians, with thanks to Stanford University Press. Notes have been included in the text to conform to Sounding Out!‘s style sheet.
—
Mundane Nationalism
Egypt’s new mass media reflected on relevant everyday political, economic, and cultural concerns, and amplified them on the national stage in a comprehensible, locally pertinent and entertaining form. The repeated themes of many of these media included: bemoaning the lack of economic opportunities for native Egyptians, portraying the economic exploitation of Egyptians by foreigners, warning of perceived declines in national “morality,” satirizing and at times insulting British and native officials, and rousing patriotism and a sense of collective national solidarity.
However, the most effective way that national identity and a sense of nationhood was ‘absorbed’ was not only through these overstated themes and methods, but through the mundane media portrayals and representations of everyday “national” life and the internalization of these modes in actual practice. As Michael Billig describes in Banal Nationalism, nationalist ideology “might appear banal, routine, almost invisible,” however, these “subconscious” matter-of-fact representations create a common sense “naturalness of belonging to a nation” (15-16). Billig explains that often there is “continual ‘flagging’, or reminding, of nationhood,” as on a daily basis, citizens are reminded of their national identity. This reminding however, is “so familiar, so continual, that it is not consciously registered as reminding” (8). Mundane and unstated representations of Egyptian-ness abounded in most forms of mass culture, where “Egyptians” distinctively spoke and acted and were clearly, though tacitly, differentiated from non-Egyptians. Most of the media examined in this study implicitly addressed their listeners, viewers and readers as members of an Egyptian “nation.” To be sure, the most influential aspect of vaudeville and the satirical press were not necessarily the outwardly nationalistic messages of many of their articles, cartoons, and dialogues, but the recurring and mundane representations of colloquial Cairene as the de-facto dialect of all Egyptians, and the implicit understanding that flawlessly speaking and understanding it was the basic marker of a “modern” Egyptian national identity. Only an “authentic” ibn or bint al-balad (son or daughter of the country) would employ Egyptian Arabic and grasp its multiple meanings and nuances and hence participate in this new mass-produced colloquial culture. In fact, many of the comedic dialogues depicted in political cartoons and vaudeville repeatedly contrasted the mispronunciations of foreigners—who often played unsympathetic or villainous roles—with the “correct” pronunciation of affable Egyptian characters. This repeated portrayal of Cairene as the only “authentic” Egyptian accent reified it as an unofficial dialect of all Egyptians, even if back in the villages and towns of the Sa‛id more localized modes of expression were employed. By way of media-capitalism, Cairo’s dialect and culture was overwhelming—colonizing, if you will— the multitude of other localized dialects and cultures in Egypt. Thus, paradoxically, Cairene Arabic was the primary tool for nationalist, anti-imperialist discourse, and simultaneously, through internal-colonialism, it imposed its own culture on the “nation” [Note: This is very similar to what was happening in France during roughly the same time period. See Eugen Weber’s Peasants Into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914, 486-88].
The Sensorium and the Public Sphere
The efficacy of the new mass media and its potential for mass mobilization was best demonstrated during times of national crisis. The 1906 Dinshaway Incident and the 1919 Revolution in particular reveal how all forms of mass media functioned together to effectively document, memorialize, celebrate, and mobilize on a national scale. The growth of popular Egyptian mass culture, articulated almost exclusively in colloquial Egyptian, was the pivotal factor in the popularization and dissemination of an Egyptian national identity. The evolution and universalization of a colloquial Egyptian middle culture, made possible especially through the utilization of sound and audiovisual media, allowed for a shared and “uniquely” Egyptian cultural landscape. It is primarily within this non-official web of colloquial Egyptian mass culture, driven in large part by media-capitalism, that Egyptian national identity was widely disseminated and popularized.
One crucial aspect of this study was the critical role coffee shops played as cultural hubs, where differing mass media from newspapers to recorded music were publicly merged, negotiated, and digested. Many of the songs initially written for musical and comedic plays were recorded and played, or performed by street musicians at coffee shops and even in the streets and sidewalks. The role of the thousands of urban cafés and other public meeting areas in the broadcasting and reception of these new cultural productions is central to understanding the potency and effectiveness of this developing nationwide culture. Indeed, coffeehouses, as Peter Burke has remarked in A Social History of the Media, “inspired the creation of imagined communities of oral communication” (30).
However, as discussed in previous chapters, this was never a one way conversation, as writers of these vernacular media were plugged into the streets and public squares through these very same cafés. As we have observed in this study, it can be said that the entire vaudeville theater industry arose out of the cafés on ‘Imad al-Din Street, where most of the vaudeville theaters were housed [Note: See Ibrahim Ramzi, Masrahuna ’Ayyam Zaman wa Tarikh al-Fananin al-Qudama’ (Cairo: Matba‘at al-Salam (1984), 25. There were at least three major cafés in Imad al-Din Street that were frequented by actors, singers, writers, and musicians— Qahwat al-Fan (The Arts Café), Qahwat Barun (The Baron Cafés), and Qahwat Misr (The Egypt Café)]. It was through these dialogical “physical” interactions with the people in the streets, market places, and cafés that the writers, musicians and performers of these media (re)calibrated with the subtleties, textures, and flavors of everyday Egyptian life. As Mikhail Bakhtin cautions in The Dialogic Imagination, we must not ignore the “social life of discourse outside the artist’s study, discourse in the open spaces of public squares, streets, cities and villages;” for it is in these public spheres that Egyptian mass culture is embodied into everyday life, acquiring its socio-economic, political relevance, and more importantly perhaps, its perceived authenticity, and contemporaneity (259). Indeed, access to any form of knowledge— be it visual, aural, tactile, gustatory or olfactory—is corporally mediated and is acquired through a living dialogical engagement. Or as Bakhtin elaborates in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, “the single adequate form to verbally expressing authentic human life is the open ended dialogue . . . In this dialogue a person participates wholly and throughout his whole life, with his eyes, lips, hands, soul, spirit, within his whole body and deeds” (293). In other words texts alone are meaningless when viewed in isolation of the socially embodied realities of their production, and more importantly perhaps, their reception on the street. It is in their interrelationship with social life that texts become meaningfully activated and authenticated as genuinely reflecting popular concerns and realities. As we have seen throughout this book, colloquial Egyptian culture is better equipped in engaging in this dialogue with the everyday, and hence guaranteeing its circulation and popularity.
(Ordinary Egyptians, p. 170-172)
—
Featured Image: View 042: Egypt – Street in Native Quarter, Cairo., n.d., T. H. McAllister, Manufacturing Optician. 49 Nassau Street, New York. Brooklyn Museum Archives (S10|08 General Views_People, image 9785).
—
Ziad Fahmy is an Assistant Professor of Modern Middle East History at the department of Near Eastern Studies. Professor Fahmy received his History Ph.D. in 2007 from the University of Arizona, where his dissertation “Popularizing Egyptian Nationalism” was awarded the Malcolm H. Kerr Dissertation Award (2008) from the Middle East Studies Association. His first book, Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern Nation through Popular Culture (Stanford University Press, 2011), examines how, from the 1870s until the eve of the 1919 revolution, popular media and culture provided ordinary Egyptians with a framework to construct and negotiate a modern national identity. His articles have appeared in the International Journal of Middle East Studies and in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Professor Fahmy is currently beginning another book project tentatively titled, Listening to the Nation: Sounds, Soundscapes, and Mass Culture in Interwar Egypt. In 2011-2012, he was a Faculty Fellow at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, where the focal theme was “Sound: Culture, Theory, Practice, and Politics.”
—
Share this:
Quebec’s #casseroles: on participation, percussion and protest
en francais suivant
NOTE: Due to the ongoing nature of the protests and the official bilingualism of Quebec, Sounding Out! wanted to ensure Jonathan Sterne’s work could be read by as many participants of the manifs casseroles as possible. Therefore, we bring you his wonderful post in English and French, with the French below. This translation could not have happened without the lightning-fast English-to-French skills of the excellent Frédéric Milard, fredericmilard@yahoo.ca, and of course, Jonathan’s generous flexibility and patience. Merci beaucoup and bang on! –JSA, Editor-in-Chief
DOI: https://doi.org/10.59350/1ytnc-c9b81
Every night around 8pm, in neighborhoods across Montreal and Quebec, you can hear the din of clanging pots and pans in manifs casseroles (manif is short for manifestation en cours, a street protest). About a block from our home in Montreal’s Villeray neighborhood, at the intersection of Jarry and St-Denis—one of the major epicenters—our local manif begins with people crossing in the crosswalks, banging loudly and rhythmically. We see neighbors and people from local businesses, families with small children, elderly and retired people, working adults, and many students.
.
Sometimes a manif casserole sounds like random banging, but most I’ve experienced leave sheer raucous pounding for moments when one march meets up with another, or when someone on a balcony does something particularly cool to cheer on the marchers. A rhythm usually arises from the chaos, encircling the disorder and enveloping everyone. Sometimes the rhythms connect with chants like “la loi spéciale, on s’en câlisse,” which roughly translates to “we don’t give a fuck about your special law.”
Eventually, the numbers grow, and then all of a sudden, as if by magic or intuition, we stand in the middle of the intersection, blocking traffic. The police have taken to simply routing traffic away from the protest. Eventually, we march south on St-Denis toward other neighborhoods (the exact route varies), often swelling into a giant parade of thousands, or as E.P. Thompson might suggest, a parody of a formal state procession, announcing the “total publicity of disgrace” for its subject. (“Rough Music Reconsidered,” 6,8).
The numbers are part of the politics. For the last 100-odd days most Quebec students have been on strike against tuition increases of over 70% in five years. Some protests have numbered in the hundreds of thousands. The Quebec government tried to suppress the student movement by passing Bill 78 on May 18, 2012. Among its many preposterous provisions, any spontaneous gathering of over 50 people is illegal without prior police approval—even a picnic. Protesters not only must disclose their planned route, but also their means of transportation, According to Law 78, people are criminals the minute they join a protest, which is why so many people have taken to the streets.
21st Century Charivari
In a piece I co-authored with Natalie Zemon Davis for the Globe and Mail, we connected the casseroles with a 700-year-old Francophone tradition of charivari. In English, the tradition is called “rough music”; there are also Italian, German and Spanish versions and the practice has spread from Europe throughout its former colonies. Groups of disguised young men would meet up at night and bang on pots and pans and make a grand din outside an offender’s home. Usually the offense was against some heterosexual norm, but they sometimes took on a political character, and older people would join in. As Allan Greer has shown in The Patriots and the People, they played an important role in Lower Canada’s failed rebellion of 1837-8, where charivaris greeted British officials who would not surrender their commissions (252-57).
In the French tradition, charivaris were (usually) an alternative to violence on occasions where community reparation was possible. Charivaris were largely inclusive, as the subjects of harassment were usually allowed to return to good standing after paying some type of fine. This history may well have resounded in Jacques Attali’s ears when he described music is a simulacrum of violence in Noise: “the game of music resembles the game of power: monopolize the right to violence; provoke anxiety and then provide a feeling of security; provoke disorder and then propose order; create a problem in order to solve it” (28).
Of course, the broader multinational traditions of rough music have no guaranteed politics. Pots and pans were sometimes heard before lynchings in the American South, but also as improvised instruments for black musicians in New Orleans’ public squares. John Mowitt has even suggested that rough music is one of the cultural roots of the drummer’s trap kit, that backbone of rock and jazz music.
In the 20th century, varieties of rough music largely moved from domestic concerns to political protest, though again without guarantees. Rough music has greeted bank failures in Latin America and—most recently—Iceland; it was the sound of Spanish citizens opposed to their government’s involvement in the 2003 Iraq war. In Chile, protesters used pots and pans to protest Allende in the early 1970s, and later to protest Pinochet in the mid-1980s.
The casseroles thus have symbolic roots in charivari, but of course they are also creatures of social media and the particularities of Quebec culture and politics. A popular 2003 Loco Locass song “Libérez-nous des libéraux” (“Liberate Us From the Liberals”), written for the provincial election, mentions a charivari for Quebec’s liberal party.
.
And, as the student movement has already demonstrated, the protest cultures here are extremely vital. While New York’s May Day Parade was happy to attract tens of thousands in a metropolitan area of over ten million, participation here can be counted in the hundreds of thousands for a region with three million.
Rhythm and Participation
We need to listen to the casseroles protests to understand them. They are, after all, embodied acts in the old-fashioned sense, performed loudly and defiantly by people in the streets. They have a politics of volume and frequency, as well as rhythm.
In Percussion, Mowitt writes: “there is something extraordinary about the importance of beating, of creating a specifically percussive din … as though a distinctly sonoric response was called for when a breach in the community’s self-perception was at issue” (98). Rhythmic participation in the casseroles is a kind of political involvement, and participation of various kinds plays a role in most of the positive political visions associated with music.
“Participation is the opposite of alienation,” wrote Charlie Keil in his essay “Participatory Discrepancies and the Power of Music”, and his account of music as a social process in “Motion and Feeling through Music” helps us better understand the casseroles’ particular combination of clangor and rhythm. Writing amidst massive changes in the 1960s, Keil challenged prevailing theories of musical affect, like Leonard Meyer’s, which assumed that musical meaning was lexical and syntactic, contained in melody and harmony. While Meyer attempted to draw universal conclusions about emotion from Western Art Music and its attendant values, Keil derived his theory of musical affect from African-American traditions like blues and jazz. Against the ideals of concert hall perfection and rational mastery, Keil—along with writers such as Christopher Small, Leroi Jones, and Steven Feld—argued that music should be understood as action. Thus, Small coined the term “musicking,” describing music not as a collection of rarefied texts performed by experts and professionals, but rather as a field of social action that includes all participants, from musicians to the people cleaning up after the event.
By the 1980s, Keil specified the affective power of music through its “participatory discrepancies,” the mixture of groove on one hand, and timbre and texture on the other (96): “music, to be personally and socially valuable, must be ‘out of time’ and ‘out of tune.’” Over the minutes and hours, the casseroles sway in and out of both, as people join and exit, and as the procession happens to each new block. Because of their unique musical character, the nightly manifs casseroles are profoundly inclusive. They are in many ways closer to the utopian ideals of collective musicking one finds in Keil and Small’s work, and that of Attali’s “composition,” than the so-called digital revolution in musical instruments. They are also good fun, as any child will tell you.
Despite Anglophone press caricatures that recast the protests as the product of entitled, rabble-rousing students, the casseroles transcend differences that often structure local politics–like language, class, and race–as well as gender and age, which can present barriers in music-making (especially drumming) in addition to politics. Because the instruments are simple, cheap and improvised, almost anyone can join. Because the music is deliberately non-professional, the ideals of mastery and perfection and the weighty gendered and aged assumptions about who can be a “good musician” are inoperative. The beats are easy to pick up and play in time—and if you swing a little out there, all the better. I have heard skilled drummers syncopate catchy rhythms on single drums or cymbals, but most people are content to simply move in and out of time with everyone else. (My partner and I join with maracas and an otherwise-rarely-used buffalo drum—I am a bassist at heart—though we offer guests pots and pans).
Taken together, volume and frequency work to immerse some in its proximal footprint, while hailing others at a distance. The sheer power and volume for someone inside a casseroles protest is hard to convey. My neighbor on a pot is a lot like my drummer hitting a cymbal. The transient (the sharp, initial part of the hit) can be piercing at close range due to frequencies at the very top of the audible range traveling at a high sound pressure level (this is why drummers often lose their hearing faster than guitarists). Inside the casseroles march, our ears are percussed with every hit; many people show up wearing earplugs.
The frequencies dull a bit farther away, and the more pitched sounds of the casseroles tickle the ear’s center of hearing in a gentler cacophony that is both declarative and invitational. Since the point of the protests is to audibly flout Law 78, the fact that they can be heard much further than they can be seen helps make this lawbreaking an expressly public and political act. Montreal mayor Gerard Tremblay acknowledged as much: “They can stay on their balconies to make noise. I’m in Outremont [a wealthy enclave next to Mile End and the Plateau, another epicenter of the protests] and I can hear it. No need to go onto the street, to walk around and paralyse Montreal.”
The volume’s territorial reach also works as an invitation to join in, either by banging along on one of Montreal’s ubiquitous porches, or by entering the procession itself. While at the other end of the frequency spectrum from Steve Goodman’s “bass materialism,” it affords some of the “collective construction of a vibrational ecology” he describes in Sonic Warfare (196), as the whole of the pots and pans becomes greater than the sum of its parts.
Participants’ overwhelming response to the casseroles has been a kind of weighty sentimentality, an outpouring of emotion and relief. One can hear it in the viral video that has been making rounds:
and one can see it in letters like this one to the editors of Le Devoir:
Now people greet and talk. Now neighborhood meetings, discussions, vigils start up casually among neighbours on the steps and balconies of Montreal. The neighborhood will be less and less alien. This is a true political victory!
We should repeat this friendly beating [the evocation of tapage doesn’t quite work as well in English] possibly in other forms, until the land is occupied by neighbors who recognize one another, encounter one another each day by chance, and have known one another over the years. That is how we live in a place, that is how we become citizens.
My heart swells with joy.
Because “the clashing of pots and pans […] is so blatantly percussive, it is hard not to hear in the retributive structure of rough music something like a beating back—a backbeat, in short, or a response on the part of the community to what it perceives as a provocation, a call to act,“ writes Mowitt (98). The connections to charivari matter: the casseroles protests are local, neighborhood, community movements asking for a simple redress—the repeal of a heinous law. Of course there are many other resonances: signs can be seen challenging various aspects of neoliberalism alongside symbols of Quebec nationalism (which, I must remind Anglophone Canadians, is not automatically separatist). In my neighborhood, people collect food donations.
When we recently spoke about the differences between student activists in the 1960s and now, my former teacher Lawrence Grossberg pointed to the central role of music in the 1960s. Those movements had songs that everyone knew, and through which shared affect grew. Like many other observers, he doesn’t see music playing the same role today (perhaps supplanted by a wider range of media practices, as the usual story goes).
Apart from viral videos and the revivified Loco Locass tune, I’m not sure the current Quebec movement has unifying songs.
But it certainly has a groove we can move to.
—
Many thanks to Natalie Zemon Davis, Manon Desrosiers, Nicholas Dew, Dylan Mulvin, Derek Nystrom and Carrie Rentschler for comments on and conversations leading up to this piece. Thanks also to Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman for the space to do it and the engaged editorial eye.
—
Jonathan Sterne teaches in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies and the History and Philosophy of Science Program at McGill University. He is author of The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Duke, 2003), MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Duke 2012); and numerous articles on media, technologies and the politics of culture. He is also editor of The Sound Studies Reader (Routledge, 2012). Visit his website at http://sterneworks.org.
—
Quebec’s #casseroles: on participation, percussion and protest
Tous les soirs vers 20 heures, plusieurs quartiers de Montréal et de Québec s’animent au tumulte des manifs de casseroles. J’habite tout près d’un des épicentres du mouvement, à l’intersection des rues Jarry et Saint-Denis, dans le quartier Villeray à Montréal. Ici, comme ailleurs, la manifestation démarre quand quelques personnes se mettent à traverser sans discontinuer des passages piétons en martelant poêles et chaudrons. Ce sont des voisins, des commerçants du coin, de jeunes familles, des personnes âgées, des retraités, des travailleurs et, surtout, des étudiants.
.
Si, parfois, les manifestations de casseroles peinent à s’élever au-dessus du simple tapage informe, la plupart de celles dans lesquelles j’ai été tiennent en réserve le vacarme pur et simple pour les moments où l’on croise une autre marche ou lorsqu’il est question de saluer ceux qui, sur leur balcon, se distinguent par leur ferveur pour la cause. Autrement, le chaos cède généralement la place à une structure rythmique qui vient encercler chacun et contenir le désordre. Parfois même, les rythmes s’accrochent aux slogans qu’on scande, du type : « la loi spéciale, on s’en câlisse! ».
Bientôt, les rangs grossissent et, sans qu’on sache trop comment, comme par magie ou par intuition, nous voilà en plein milieu d’un carrefour à bloquer la circulation. Les policiers, dépassés, se contentent de faire dévier le trafic dans les rues adjacentes. La marche finit par descendre le boulevard Saint-Laurent vers d’autres quartiers plus au sud (les itinéraires varient sans cesse). Elle se transforme alors en un gigantesque défilé de plusieurs milliers de personnes ou, comme le suggère E.P Thompson, en une parodie des processions politiques, annonçant pour ses sujets une « total publicity of disgrace » (“Rough Music Reconsidered,” p.6,8).
En politique, les chiffres ont leur importance. Depuis plus de 100 jours, une bonne partie des étudiants du Québec fait la grève pour s’opposer à une augmentation des frais de scolarité de plus de 70 % sur cinq ans. Certaines des manifestations se sont chiffrées à plusieurs centaines de milliers de personnes. Le 18 mai 2012, le gouvernement du Québec a voté la loi 78 pour tenter de mater le mouvement étudiant. Une de ses nombreuses dispositions aberrantes rend illégale toute manifestation spontanée de 50 personnes et plus si celle-ci n’a pas été approuvée au préalable par les autorités; un pique-nique rentre dans cette catégorie. Les manifestants doivent révéler non seulement leur itinéraire, mais aussi le moyen de transport qu’ils entendent utiliser. Selon la loi 78, une personne est coupable dès qu’elle se joint à une manifestation; c’est pour cela que tant de personnes sont descendues dans la rue.
Un charivari du vingt-et-unième siècle
Dans un article écrit en collaboration avec Natalie Zemon Davis pour le Globe and Mail, j’ai rapproché le phénomène des manifestations de casseroles à la tradition du charivari, qu’on retrouve dans les pays francophones depuis 700 ans. En anglais, on appelle rough music cette tradition, qui existe aussi dans des variantes italienne, allemande et espagnole et dont la pratique s’est propagée de l’Europe vers ses anciennes colonies. Des groupes de jeunes hommes déguisés, auxquels se joignaient parfois des personnes plus âgées, se retrouvaient le soir pour faire du tapage devant la maison d’un individu au comportement jugé déviant, généralement à l’aune de quelque norme hétérosexuelle. La faute, cependant, pouvait être de nature politique. Ainsi, comme l’a montré Allan Greer (The Patriots and the People, p.252-57), les charivaris jouèrent un rôle important au Bas-Canada lors de la rébellion manquée de 1837-38 et visèrent les fonctionnaires au service de la Couronne qui refusaient d’abandonner leurs fonctions.
Dans la tradition française, les charivaris étaient (habituellement) une solution de rechange à la violence dans des cas où il était possible d’expier sa faute envers la communauté. Les charivaris avaient un caractère inclusif, les victimes rentrant généralement en grâce après avoir fait amende honorable. Il est probable que Jacques Attali, dans son livre Noise ait eu en tête de telles pratiques quand il décrit la musique comme un simulacre de la violence : « The game of music resembles the game of power: monopolize the right to violence; provoke anxiety and then provide a feeling of security; provoke disorder and then propose order; create a problem in order to solve it » (p.28).
Les diverses traditions internationales de la rough music n’ont évidemment pas toutes cette dimension politique. Le son des casseroles a parfois servi de prélude aux lynchages du sud des États-Unis, mais a aussi enrichi les improvisations des musiciens noirs dans les squares publiques de La Nouvelle-Orléans. John Mowitt suggère même que la rough music est une des origines culturelles de la batterie, pierre angulaire du rock et du jazz.
Au 20e siècle, les variantes de la rough music ont migré, en grande partie, des affaires domestiques vers les manifestations politiques, avec encore une fois quelques bémols. La rough music a ainsi servi de bande sonore à la faillite des banques en Amérique Latine et, plus récemment, en Islande; c’est au son des casseroles qu’en 2003 les Espagnols se sont insurgés contre leur gouvernement au sujet de l’engagement de leur pays en Irak. Au début des années 70, au Chili, les opposants d’Allende sortirent leurs casseroles, imités quinze ans plus tard par ceux de Pinochet.
Le phénomène des manifestations de casseroles puise donc ses racines symboliques dans le charivari. Mais pas seulement : il est aussi, bien entendu, une créature des médias sociaux et le fruit des particularismes politiques et culturels du Québec. Une célèbre chanson du groupe Loco Locass, Libérez-nous des libéraux, composée au lendemain des élections provinciales de 2003, appelle ainsi explicitement au charivari contre le Parti libéral du Québec.
Les traditions de militantisme, comme celle entre autres du mouvement étudiant, sont aussi très actives. Tandis que New York, forte de ses 10 millions d’habitants, s’enorgueillit d’attirer les manifestants par dizaines de milliers pour son défilé du premier mai, ils se comptent, à Montréal, une ville d’à peine trois millions d’habitants, par centaines de milliers.
Rythme et participation
Il faut écouter ces manifestations de casseroles pour en saisir le sens. En effet, elles sont avant tout des spectacles vivants (au sens classique du terme) donnés dans la rue, par bravade et à plein volume. Elles participent ainsi d’une politique du volume et des fréquences, une politique du rythme.
Dans son livre Percussion, Mowitt écrit : « There is something extraordinary about the importance of beating, of creating a specifically percussive din … as though a distinctly sonoric response was called for when a breach in the community’s self-perception was at issue » (p.98). La participation aux rythmes des casseroles est une forme d’engagement politique; de même, la participation sous toutes ses formes joue un rôle dans la plupart des visions politiques positives portées par la musique.
Charlie Keil écrit dans son essai P“Participatory Discrepancies and the Power of Music”: « Participation is the opposite of alienation ». Sa description de la musique comme processus social permet de mieux saisir la combinaison particulière de bruit métallique et de rythme qu’on retrouve dans les manifestations de casseroles. Plongé au coeur des bouleversements des années 60, Keil entreprit de réfuter les théories alors dominantes de l’affect musical, comme celle de Leonard Meyer pour qui le sens de la musique était lexical et syntaxique, et résidait dans la mélodie et l’harmonie. Alors que Meyer cherchait à tirer des conclusions universelles sur l’émotion depuis l’art musical occidental et ses valeurs sous-jacentes, Keil, lui, élaborait une théorie de l’affect musical à partir des traditions afro-américaines, telles que le jazz et le blues. S’opposant aux idéaux de virtuosité formelle et de perfection des salles de concert, Keil — tout comme Christopher Small, Leroi Jones, et Steven Feld— soutenait que la musique doit avant tout être comprise comme action. C’est pourquoi Small a proposé le terme musicking : la musique doit être conçu non pas comme une collection de textes ésotériques joués par de rares experts et musiciens professionnels, mais plutôt comme un champ d’action sociale qui inclut tous les participants, des musiciens jusqu’à ceux qui s’occupent de nettoyer les rues après les manifestations.
Dans les années 80, Keil précisa la nature de ce pouvoir affectif de la musique grâce à sa description des participatory discrepancies (qu’on pourrait traduire par « hiatus dans la participation ») : un mélange de groove d’un côté, et de timbre et texture musicale de l’autre. Il écrit : « Music, to be personally and socially valuable, must be ‘out of time’ and ‘out of tune » (p.96). Au fil des minutes et des heures, les manifs de casseroles passent d’un ton à l’autre, suivent et perdent le rythme pour en créer d’autres à mesure que la procession grossit en nombre à chaque pâté de maisons. En raison de leur caractère musical unique, ces manifestations nocturnes demeurent profondément inclusives. Elles se rapprochent, à bien des égards, de l’utopie du collective musicking des travaux de Keil et de Small, et de celle de la composition décrite par Jacques Attali. En plus, et ça n’importe quel enfant vous le dira, ces manifestations sont franchement amusantes.
N’en déplaise à la presse anglophone qui aime à caricaturer les manifestations comme la seule oeuvre d’étudiants gâtés et dissipés, les manifestations de casseroles viennent transcender les différences qui souvent structurent la politique locale — la langue, les classes sociales, les différences de race, de genre et d’âge —, tout ce qui peut faire obstacle à la production de musique (particulièrement celle faite à l’aide de percussions) ainsi qu’à l’implication citoyenne. Parce que les instruments sont improvisés, simples et pas chers, tout le monde peut participer. Délibérément non professionnelle, la musique se départit de ses idéaux de virtuosité et de perfection, et l’argument éculé selon lequel il y a un âge et un sexe pour être un « bon musicien » devient soudainement caduc. Les rythmes sont faciles à suivre et à reproduire; qui perd la cadence en créer de nouvelles, et ne s’en porte que mieux. J’ai entendu des batteurs chevronnés se lancer dans des rythmes syncopés sur des tambours ou des cymbales, mais la plupart des gens se contentent de suivre les cadences capricieuses du groupe. (Ma compagne et moi — un bassiste invétéré — avons déterré nos maracas et un vieux tambour en bison pour l’occasion, et laissons les chaudrons aux invités.)
Pris ensemble, volume et fréquences pénètrent complètement les marcheurs qui tombent dans leur aire, en même temps qu’ils interpellent ceux qui se tiennent au loin. Il est difficile de rendre compte du volume et de la puissance purs ressentis à l’intérieur d’une manif de casseroles. Mon voisin qui se déchaîne sur son chaudron produit le même effet que mon batteur qui frappe sur une cymbale : à proximité, le son transitoire (la partie initiale, suraiguë du coup) peut être perçant parce qu’il mobilise des fréquences au faîte du champ auditif et qui voyagent à un niveau élevé de pression sonore (c’est pourquoi l’audition d’un batteur se détériore souvent plus vite que celle d’un guitariste). À l’intérieur d’une manif de casseroles, chaque coup atteint l’oreille; on voit ainsi beaucoup de manifestants porter des bouchons.
Bientôt, les fréquences ardues s’estompent quelque peu, les sons les plus aigus des casseroles finissent par amadouer l’oreille et se fondent en une douce cacophonie, à la fois déclarative et invitante. Puisque le but de ces manifestations est de bafouer la loi 78 de la manière la plus assourdissante possible, le fait qu’on puisse les entendre plus loin qu’on puisse les voir transforme ce délit en un acte public et politique exprès. C’est d’ailleurs ce que le maire de Montréal, Gérard Tremblay, reconnaît bien malgré lui : « Ils peuvent rester sur leur balcon pour faire du bruit. On va l’entendre le bruit. Moi, je suis à Outremont [une riche enclave entre le Mile-end et le Plateau, deux des épicentres du mouvement] et je l’entends le bruit. Pas besoin d’aller sur la rue, de se promener et de commencer à paralyser Montréal ».
La portée territoriale du volume fonctionne aussi comme une invitation à se joindre à la manifestation, soit en faisant du tapage sur les porches (emblématiques) de Montréal, soit en entrant dans la marche même. Si elle se situe à l’extrémité opposée du spectre sonore de ce bass materialism dont parle Steve Goodman dans son livre Sonic Warfare, cette portée territoriale du volume participe de cette « collective construction of a vibrational ecology » qu’il décrit (p.196). Là aussi, le tout formé par les casseroles finit par dépasser la somme de ses parties.
La réaction souvent unanime des participants aux manifs de casseroles est pleine d’effusion et teintée d’un sentiment de soulagement, comme on peut l’entendre dans cette vidéo virale qui a beaucoup circulé :
et comme on peut le constater dans bon nombre de lettres, comme celle-ci, envoyée au journal Le Devoir :
Désormais, les gens vont se saluer, se parler. Maintenant, mine de rien, s’amorcent entre voisins des rencontres, des discussions, des veillées sur les perrons et sur les balcons de Montréal. Le voisinage sera de moins en moins étranger. Ça, c’est une vraie de vraie victoire politique !
Il faut répéter ce tapage sympathique, éventuellement sous d’autres formes, jusqu’à ce que le territoire soit entièrement occupé par des voisins qui se reconnaissent, se parlent, se fréquentent au hasard des jours et se connaissent au fil des ans. C’est comme ça qu’on habite un lieu, c’est comme ça que nous devenons citoyens.
J’ai le coeur gonflé de joie.
Mowitt écrit : « [Because] the clashing of pots and pans […] is so blatantly percussive, it is hard not to hear in the retributive structure of rough music something like a beating back—a backbeat, in short, or a response on the part of the community to what it perceives as a provocation, a call to act » (p.98). Le rapprochement avec le charivari est ici capital : les manifs de casseroles sont en effet des mouvements locaux, communautaires qui, à l’échelle d’un quartier, demandent réparation : l’abrogation d’une loi liberticide. Évidemment, d’autres éléments entrent ici en résonance : on y voit autant de signes de défi contre certains aspects du néo-libéralisme que de symboles du nationalisme québécois (qui, il est bon de le rappeler aux Canadiens anglais, n’est pas forcément indépendantiste). Dans mon quartier, on organise même des collectes de denrées alimentaires.
Alors que je discutais récemment des différences existant entre l’agitation étudiante des années 60 et celle d’aujourd’hui avec mon ancien professeur Lawrence Grossberg, celui-ci soulignait le rôle de premier plan joué par la musique à l’époque : ces mouvements avaient des chansons que tout le monde connaissait et qui venaient renforcer des affects communs. Comme beaucoup d’autres, il considère que la musique n’assume plus aujourd’hui le même rôle (supplantée, peut-être, par un ensemble plus large de nouvelles pratiques médiatiques, comme le veut l’analyse habituelle).
Mis à part les vidéos virales et la reprise de la rengaine de Loco Locass, je ne suis pas certain que le mouvement québécois actuel possède de tels hymnes rassembleurs.
Une chose est incontestable cependant : elle a un groove sur lequel il fait bon marcher.
—
French Translation by Frédéric Milard, fredericmilard@yahoo.ca
—
Many thanks to Natalie Zemon Davis, Manon Desrosiers, Nicholas Dew, Dylan Mulvin, Derek Nystrom and Carrie Rentschler for comments on and conversations leading up to this piece. Thanks also to Jennifer Stoever for the space to do it and the engaged editorial eye.
—
Jonathan Sterne teaches in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies and the History and Philosophy of Science Program at McGill University. He is author of The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Duke, 2003), MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Duke 2012); and numerous articles on media, technologies and the politics of culture. He is also editor of The Sound Studies Reader (Routledge, 2012). Visit his website at http://sterneworks.org.
—
Share this:
Current Top Posts
April 2021
January 2020
November 2019
October 2019
August 2019
April 2014
November 2017
March 2015
December 2017
October 2015
Recent Comments