Julian F. Henriques

Changing the subject: psychology, social regulation and subjectivity

Changing the Subject is a classic critique of traditional psychology in which the foundations of critical and feminist psychology are laid down. Pioneering and foundational, it is still the groundbreaking text crucial to furthering the new psychology in both teaching and research. Now reissued with a new foreword describing the changes which have taken place over the last few years, Changing the Subject will continue to have a significant impact on thinking about psychology and social theory.

The Vibrations of Affect and their Propagation on a Night Out on Kingston’s Dancehall Scene

This article proposes that the propagation of vibrations could serve as a better model for understanding the transmission of affect than the flow, circulation or movement of bodies by which it is most often theorized. The vibrations (or idiomatically ‘vibes’) among the sound system audience (or ‘crowd’) on a night out on the dancehall scene in Kingston, Jamaica, provide an example. Counting the repeating frequencies of these vibrations in a methodology inspired by Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis results in a Frequency Spectrogram. This ranges from the sociocultural frequencies of nightly, weekly and seasonal cycles and circulations of musical style and fashion, to the material frequencies of the amplitudes and timbres of sound itself, with reggae’s signature low-pitched bass-line, to the corporeal frequencies of the flesh and blood of the dancehall ‘crowd’, pulsating with heartbeats and kinetic dance rhythms. The vibration model then addresses the intensities of affect in terms of auditory amplitudes, as with sonic dominance; feelings as frequencies; and the distinctive meaning of affect as timbre. This aims to encourage the radical impulse of the idea of affect to abandon the traditional envelope of the autonomous, self-consistent, rational individual. The meaning of affect is thus located in the ratio, proportions and patterning of vibrations, that is, outside the discourse of emotions or representation of feelings.

Rhythm Returns: Movement and Cultural Theory

This introduction charts several of rhythms various returns as a way of laying out the theoretical and methodological field in which the articles of this special issue find their place. While Henri Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis is perhaps familiar to many, rhythm has appeared in a wide repertoire of guises, in many disciplines over the decades and indeed the centuries. This introduction attends to the particular roles of rhythm in the formation of modernity ranging from the processes of industrialization and the proliferation of new media technologies to film and literary aesthetics as well as conceptualizations of human psychology, social behaviour and physiology. These are some of the historical antecedents to the contemporary understandings of rhythm within body studies to which most of the contributions to this issue are devoted. In this respect, the introduction outlines recent approaches to rhythm as vibration, a force of the virtual, and an intensive excess outside consciousness.

Rhythmic Bodies: Amplification, Inflection and Transduction in the Dance Performance Techniques of the “Bashment Gal”

This article explores the rhythmic body with the example of the embodiment of the ‘bashment gal’ and the role she plays in the dancehall sound system session. It considers rhythm as an energetic patterning process operating both within and between media. Rhythm provides a means of communication and making sense that does not rely on representation or code. There are three elements to performance techniques of the rhythmic body – amplification, inflection and transduction. Amplification for the bashment gal’s performance techniques involves increasing the size or effort of her dance movements, dancing in a chorus line accelerating her tempo. In what is considered as a hyper-sexualized arena of the dancehall session, it is argued that the bashment gal has to be understood in terms of African traditions where sexual pleasure and fertility are not separate. With rhythmic inflection the bashment gal gives distinctiveness to her performance, as is much prized in the style and fashion of the dancehall scene. The transduction of patterning from one medium to another, via tympanic surfaces, helps to forge the sound system session and the bashment gal as a rhythmic whole and fosters her sense of identity as a rhythmic body.

Sonic diaspora, vibrations and rhythm: thinking through the sounding of the Jamaican dancehall session

Abstract The propagation of vibrations may provide a better way of understanding the spread of diasporas than the conventional focus on the circulation of products (Hall 1980, Appadurai 1986, 1996, Gilroy 1993a, Brah 1996). Jamaican sound systems operate as a broadcast medium and a source of CDs, DVDs, and other commercial products (Henriques 2007a). But the dancehall sound system session also propagates a broad spectrum of frequencies diffused through a range of media and activities – described as ‘sounding’ (following Smalls 1998 concept of ‘musicking’). These include the material vibrations of the signature low-pitched auditory frequencies of Reggae as a bass culture (Johnson 1980), at the loudness of ‘sonic dominance’ (Henriques 2003). Secondly a session propagates the corporeal vibrations of rituals, dance routines, and bass-line ‘riddims’ (Veal 2007). Thirdly it propagates the ethereal vibrations (Henriques 2007b), ‘vibes’ or atmosphere of the sexually charged popular subculture by which the crowd (audience) appreciate each dancehall session as part of the Dancehall scene (Cooper 2004). The paper concludes that thinking though vibrating frequencies makes it easier to appreciate how audiences with no direct or inherited connection with a particular music genre can be energetically infected and affected – to form a sonic diaspora.

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Dread Bodies: Doubles, Echoes, and the Skins of Sound

This essay takes off from Tavia Nyong’o’s “Afro-philo-sonic Fictions” to make a journey into the embodiment of sounding through the dread body. It starts with Prince Buster’s Judge Dread persona and Rastafarianism rather than the sonic bodies of the bashment gal in the setting of the dancehall. It traces the dread body through the sounding of the single-multiple of the “I and I” and the dread for the Old Testament god of Jehovah, or Jah. Dread doubles and troubles. It is inflected and inflicted in two directions. One is dread of authority—whether the Greek god Apollo or Judge Dread. The other is for the “sufferah” for the forbearance of that authority. Sounding also doubles, echoes, and reverberates as a vessel for understanding embodiment, not only the particularities of the “Afro-philo-sonic fiction” of a Jamaican Rastafarianism but also the fundamental fissure of the Western philosophical “fiction,” that is, the dichotomy of mind and body, energy, and matter, or subject and object. In the dancehalls and as the first commodities in the cargoholds of the Atlantic slave ships, sonic bodies are restorative, disruptive, and procreative, accounting in part for why they are considered dread.

Hearing Things and Dancing Numbers: Embodying Transformation, Topology at Tate Modern

This paper reports on a weekend performance event at the Tate Modern that explored how the senses of sound and movement can be used to apprehend geometrical and topological shapes and mathematical concepts. The sound sculpture Knots and Donuts spatialized sound and sonified space. It attuned the ‘mind’s ear’ and the auditory imagination to conceive of a Borromean Knot and a torus within an immersive three-dimensional sound field. Through dance movement, the choreography of Ordinal 5 actualized the specific mathematical entity as understood in category theory. Both parts of the programme are considered as a performance as research experiment with an audience. Its aim was to understand how the sensory experience of the embodied mind might provide a basis of rationality in which meaning is not restricted to text and image, that is, an embodied topology.