ИСТИНА

Talking about the institualization of sound studies in the academy, as the call for papers suggests, brings to mind quite a few issues that may not be exclusive to the field, but may shed some light on deeper changes experienced by modern scholarship. First, new fields have to map themselves onto an existing scholarly landscape, which often envolves appropriation of various disciplinary histories and re-imagining them as ‘pre-histories’ of the new field. Such developments may be construed in both negative and positive terms, as an unceremonious intrusion or a refreshing revision. Another issue has to do with the fact that the existing system of disciplines are often rooted (or entrenched?) in an emphatically national tradition of reseach. Newer fields tend to be more internationally oriented, and may therefore be seen as a threat to the current national canon of research. In my paper, I’d like to address these issues talking from my own experience organizing courses in sound studies at Moscow State University’s School of Philology. As Mladen Dolar notices in his On Voice and Nothing More, the phenomena of voice and sound were until quite recently downplayed (if not majorly ignored) in linguistics and literary scholarship. However, it is precisely within the Russian humanities we can find figures such as Mikhail Bakhtin or Sergei Bernstein who directed their attention to the materiality of sound and made extensive use of sonic metaphors in their work. The concept of voice seems to be of particular interest as it helps inscribe such traditionally philological areas as phonetics or oral literature studies into a broader anthropological and media context. Moreover, abstract ideas like Bakhtin’s ‘polyphony’ may acquire a more material meaning. In my paper from 2015, I similarly suggest a new understanding of Bakhtin’s chronotope (space-time) as a space in which the voices of the author and the characters undergo transformations similar to those affecting sound propagating in a reverberating environment. I found that such reinterpretations not only help productively destabilize disciplinary canons and revise curricula but also reduce distrust towards foreign influences. In line with Jonh Mowitt’s idea of ‘sonic humanities’ I believe that the question of whether sound studies can ever aspire to be labeled a ‘discipline’ must be addressed in sonic terms. Rather than calling them a ‘field’ or an ‘area’ I would suggest thinking of them as a new mode of exchange within the existing landscape, a fluid network of echoes, resonances and conversations that does not necessarily have to institutionalized to be institutionally significant.