nanopolitics handbook - Minor Compositions

phenomena have come to represent wider political dissonance. During the2008 American presidential elections President Barack Obama was criticisedfor adopting a ‘black’ dialect in his addresses to predominantly blackconstituencies at the same time that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid wasaccusing him in private of speaking ‘white’. As Gillard’s did for class, Obama’sphonological identity functioned to reinstate racial signification when theplane of the visual had lost some of its novelty.Recording 4. Accent Gillard and ObamaThe line of attention given to the accent and dialect might prompt us to wonderwhat this suggests of the reality of parliamentary politics? Is it symptomaticof a condition in which ‘individuals are elected primarily on the basis of theirpersonality, voice and any other factors as opposed to a party being electedin the basis of policy’? 12 Potentially, yes, at least more so than we might careto admit, especially at a time when more and more ideological and politicaleffects are being produced by non-ideological and affective means, that is tosay through a capitalisation of expression, creativity and emotion.The breaks and disruptions that the accent or dialect provides within anaffective economy can be argued for in the same way. Whether interpreted asartificial or not, the accent or dialect can act as a distraction that modulatesand arrests the flow of information and intervenes in the mode of listening,in the same way that a phonological mispronunciation, a lisp or stutter cancause a double take or confusion in a conversation. At the same time, therogue accent is codified, it becomes the basis for various prejudices andnarratives of identity, as seen in the instances above. In radical politicalorganisation, this can both act to elevate or degrade the speaker through herexoticisation or connection to an imagined authentic subject position, withboth positive and negative associations depending on her presumed originand background, and the relation of this background to the political contextshe is participative of.Recording 5. AccentIII. Intonation and PitchIntonation works in a similar manner to make the sonic qualities of thevoice present, ‘for the particular tone of the voice, its particular melody andmodulation, its cadence and inflection, can decide the meaning’. 13 The shadesof intonation, the affective resonances that tone can transmit, can derail the240