James Parker
My research explores the many relations between law and the acoustic, and particularly in the context of international law. How do legal institutions conceive of sound in and across various different substantive contexts? In what ways are legal institutions themselves soundful, and with what consequences for the practice of judgment? In what ways are sonic environments lawful? How is sound experienced through or in relation to law?
My monograph Acoustic Jurisprudence: Listening to the Trial of Simon Bikindi (OUP 2015) explores the trial of Simon Bikindi, who was accused by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda of inciting genocide with his songs. The book develops two main threads: one substantive, the other methodoligical. Substantively, it is the first detailed study of a trial of considerable legal, historical and musicological importance, both to Rwandans and to the wider international community. Methodologically, the book examines a dimension of legal thought and practice that is scarcely ever remarked upon. Sound is a condition of the administration of justice, and yet as a community of jurists we have become deaf to law and to the problem of the acoustic. The book argues therefore for a specifically acoustic jurisprudence, an orientation towards law and the practice of judgment attuned to questions of sound and listening. In 2017, it was awarded the Penny Pether Prize (ECR) for scholarship in law, literature and the humanities
In terms of more 'public facing' stuff, I've provided commentary for the ABC, BBC and CNN, amongst others, on controversies including police use of the Long Range Acoustic Device and the alleged ‘sonic attacks’ at the US Embassy in Cuba in 2017. My music and art criticism has appeared in publications such as Tiny Mix Tapes, Frieze, Discipline, Sounding Out and Bloomsbury’s How to Write About Music (2015). And I've given public lectures and performances at universities and art institutions across the world, including Harvard, the Rietveld Academy, Gertrude Contemporary, firstdraft and the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane.
Between July and October 2018, I will be co-curating Eavesdropping, a unique collaboration between Liquid Architecture and Melbourne Law School, comprising an exhibition at the Ian Potter Museum of Art, a public program, series of working groups and touring event which explores the politics of listening through work by leading artists, researchers, writers and activists from Australia and around the world. Please do get in touch if you want to be involved!
Address: Melbourne
My monograph Acoustic Jurisprudence: Listening to the Trial of Simon Bikindi (OUP 2015) explores the trial of Simon Bikindi, who was accused by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda of inciting genocide with his songs. The book develops two main threads: one substantive, the other methodoligical. Substantively, it is the first detailed study of a trial of considerable legal, historical and musicological importance, both to Rwandans and to the wider international community. Methodologically, the book examines a dimension of legal thought and practice that is scarcely ever remarked upon. Sound is a condition of the administration of justice, and yet as a community of jurists we have become deaf to law and to the problem of the acoustic. The book argues therefore for a specifically acoustic jurisprudence, an orientation towards law and the practice of judgment attuned to questions of sound and listening. In 2017, it was awarded the Penny Pether Prize (ECR) for scholarship in law, literature and the humanities
In terms of more 'public facing' stuff, I've provided commentary for the ABC, BBC and CNN, amongst others, on controversies including police use of the Long Range Acoustic Device and the alleged ‘sonic attacks’ at the US Embassy in Cuba in 2017. My music and art criticism has appeared in publications such as Tiny Mix Tapes, Frieze, Discipline, Sounding Out and Bloomsbury’s How to Write About Music (2015). And I've given public lectures and performances at universities and art institutions across the world, including Harvard, the Rietveld Academy, Gertrude Contemporary, firstdraft and the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane.
Between July and October 2018, I will be co-curating Eavesdropping, a unique collaboration between Liquid Architecture and Melbourne Law School, comprising an exhibition at the Ian Potter Museum of Art, a public program, series of working groups and touring event which explores the politics of listening through work by leading artists, researchers, writers and activists from Australia and around the world. Please do get in touch if you want to be involved!
Address: Melbourne
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Books by James Parker
Featuring contributions from James Parker, Joel Stern, Norie Neumark, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Susan Schuppli, Sean Dockray, Joel Spring, Fayen d’Evie and Jen Bervin, Samson Young, and the Manus Recording Project Collective.
Purchase here: https://shop.perimeterbooks.com/products/eavesdropping-a-reader
Full project details and documentation here: https://eavesdropping.exposed/
Acoustic Jurisprudence is the first detailed study of the trial that followed. It is also the first work of contemporary legal scholarship to address the many relations between law and sound, which are of much broader importance but which this trial very conspicuously raises. One half of the book addresses the Tribunal's 'sonic imagination'. How did the Tribunal conceive of Bikindi's songs for the purposes of judgment? How did it understand the role of radio and other media in their transmission? And with what consequences for Bikindi?
The other half of the book is addressed to how such concerns played out in court. Bikindi's was a 'musical trial', as one judge pithily observed. Audio and audio-visual recordings of his songs were played regularly throughout. Witnesses, including Bikindi himself, frequently sang, both of their own accord and at the request of the Tribunal. Indeed, Bikindi even sang his final statement. All the while, judges, barristers, and witnesses alike spoke into microphones and listened through headphones. As a result, the Bikindi case offers an ideal opportunity to explore what this book calls the 'judicial soundscape'.
Through the lens of the Bikindi trial, the book's most important innovation is to open up the field of sound to jurisprudential inquiry. Ultimately, it is an argument for a specifically acoustic jurisprudence.
Papers by James Parker
https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Handbook-of-International-Law-and-the-Humanities/Chalmers-Pahuja/p/book/9780367420741?_cldee=cGFya2VyQHVuaW1lbGIuZWR1LmF1&recipientid=contact-ad03ed013c59e11185140050568d0d27-8e5a82e0469d49c082abe718154f47ff&utm_source=ClickDimensions&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=MLS_IILAH_LeadGeneration&esid=34cf21a7-3d5c-eb11-94d1-0050568d0279
This essay introduces how are you today along with a series of reflections on it, including by two of the artists. We see our task as twofold. First, to document the work’s conception, production, and key realisations, both for the record and to spare the pieces that follow the trouble. Second, to offer a curatorial perspective in the process, since we were the ones who commissioned how are you today at the end of 2017.
http://www.index-journal.org/issues/law/part-2-lacunae/forensic-listeningin-lawrence-abu-hamdans-saydnaya-the-missing-19db-by-james-parker
This piece was originally published on Critical Legal Thinking as if it were a finished set of thoughts. It's not. It emerged from conversations with friends, and will hopefully provoke further conversation. If you have any thoughts, please do share them. Ideally in person...geography permitting.
Featuring contributions from James Parker, Joel Stern, Norie Neumark, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Susan Schuppli, Sean Dockray, Joel Spring, Fayen d’Evie and Jen Bervin, Samson Young, and the Manus Recording Project Collective.
Purchase here: https://shop.perimeterbooks.com/products/eavesdropping-a-reader
Full project details and documentation here: https://eavesdropping.exposed/
Acoustic Jurisprudence is the first detailed study of the trial that followed. It is also the first work of contemporary legal scholarship to address the many relations between law and sound, which are of much broader importance but which this trial very conspicuously raises. One half of the book addresses the Tribunal's 'sonic imagination'. How did the Tribunal conceive of Bikindi's songs for the purposes of judgment? How did it understand the role of radio and other media in their transmission? And with what consequences for Bikindi?
The other half of the book is addressed to how such concerns played out in court. Bikindi's was a 'musical trial', as one judge pithily observed. Audio and audio-visual recordings of his songs were played regularly throughout. Witnesses, including Bikindi himself, frequently sang, both of their own accord and at the request of the Tribunal. Indeed, Bikindi even sang his final statement. All the while, judges, barristers, and witnesses alike spoke into microphones and listened through headphones. As a result, the Bikindi case offers an ideal opportunity to explore what this book calls the 'judicial soundscape'.
Through the lens of the Bikindi trial, the book's most important innovation is to open up the field of sound to jurisprudential inquiry. Ultimately, it is an argument for a specifically acoustic jurisprudence.
https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Handbook-of-International-Law-and-the-Humanities/Chalmers-Pahuja/p/book/9780367420741?_cldee=cGFya2VyQHVuaW1lbGIuZWR1LmF1&recipientid=contact-ad03ed013c59e11185140050568d0d27-8e5a82e0469d49c082abe718154f47ff&utm_source=ClickDimensions&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=MLS_IILAH_LeadGeneration&esid=34cf21a7-3d5c-eb11-94d1-0050568d0279
This essay introduces how are you today along with a series of reflections on it, including by two of the artists. We see our task as twofold. First, to document the work’s conception, production, and key realisations, both for the record and to spare the pieces that follow the trouble. Second, to offer a curatorial perspective in the process, since we were the ones who commissioned how are you today at the end of 2017.
http://www.index-journal.org/issues/law/part-2-lacunae/forensic-listeningin-lawrence-abu-hamdans-saydnaya-the-missing-19db-by-james-parker
This piece was originally published on Critical Legal Thinking as if it were a finished set of thoughts. It's not. It emerged from conversations with friends, and will hopefully provoke further conversation. If you have any thoughts, please do share them. Ideally in person...geography permitting.
This paper situates both reviews the book and situates it relative to Reynolds' previous work. It argues that Retromania is best read as a provocation, an exercise in what Mark Fisher calls 'negativity', a spur to thought and action, an attempt to force us — musicians, critics, listeners — to think more carefully about what is at stake in retro, to think twice before we endorse or applaud it, to remember that sometimes, in some contexts, retro is simply not good enough, that we can and sometimes should do better.
Sound is essential to the administration of justice, an inalienable part of our legal worlds. But not just any sound. Listen carefully. What do you hear? To begin with, silence: a powerful quiet. Mobiles are switched off. Conversations whispered. Soundproofing isolates against the volume of daily life. The judicial soundscape depends on and entrenches an association between silence and civility, noise and disorder, with an exceptionally long pedigree in the West and elsewhere. In the courtroom, silence is figured as the proper condition out of which legal discourse emerges.
The opening of proceedings. An aggressive cross-examination. Latinisms. A witness stumbling to make themselves understood. The portentous eloquence of a barrister in closing. In a word, words. Speech, discourse, dialogue. And in court, this speech acts; subtended by the power of the state, the threat of handcuffs and incarceration, a violence that may or may not remain latent but which is required to sustain the operation of law.
A courtroom is not a gallery.
Legal practice is, of course, highly aesthetic and theatrical, yet in its imagined pursuit of justice according to rule and dispassionate reason, the law expends great energy on the denial or repression of this fact. The aesthetic is everything that law, in the West, is not supposed to be. The courtroom and gallery exist in tension: each insisting that they are not the other.
This insistence is our point of departure. Sometimes it is only from the edge that the centre becomes clearly discernible. Precisely by transgressing, over-reaching and extending the ordinary principles of courtroom o/aurality, attention can be drawn to them. They can be made audible, and so susceptible to critique. Then again … What constitutes a transgression when the court is not ‘in session’? When is a courtroom just a room? How much does the courtroom remain one even when it has been offered up as a gallery?
There are a range of means to use sound as a way of crowd control.
From the bombastic sound cannon, the LRAD, to using noise at a pitch that's specific to the target, to blasting Katy Perry at protests, what are the regulations around using noise to control people?
The inverse is true of Sound Studies. Its account of law could afford to be both more central and much richer. To take a crude but nevertheless telling measure, none of the discipline’s major collections –– Bull and Back’s The Auditory Culture Reader (2003), Sterne’s Sound Studies Reader (2012), Pinch and Bijsterveld’s The Oxford Handbook of Sound (2012) –– even mentions ‘Law’ in its index, whereas terms like ‘Gender’, ‘Capitalism’, ‘Race’, ‘War’ and ‘Religion’ all feature. Even when Sound Studies has addressed legal questions, from a jurisprudential perspective its account looks quite orthodox: confined to an interest in state-posited rules which in turn are presumed to operate mechanically, as if that were the extent of legal practice or the juridical world. And Sound Studies seems to care much more about cars, clinics and concerthalls than it does courtrooms. It worries about a diverse range of sonic environments, but never the ‘soundscape of judgment’.
This is a problem, I think, a failure of both disciplines. On the one hand, as a community of jurists, we must teach ourselves to listen to law, to attend properly to questions of sound in legal thought and practice. On the other hand, because law and legal institutions play a key role in determining both the kinds of sounds we hear and the ways in which we listen, Sound Studies could stand to learn from Jurisprudence too.
In elaborating these claims, in arguing for what I call an ‘acoustic jurisprudence’, this paper will work with examples from the trial of Simon Bikindi, accused by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda of inciting genocide with his songs. How, for instance, did the Tribunal understand Bikindi’s songs and their ‘deployment’ on the radio for the purposes of judgment? And what did it mean that, when Bikindi was offered the floor in order to make a ‘final statement’ at the close of his appeals hearing, for five and a half minutes he sang?
Please click on the link above to listen to a recording of the first in the Constellations seminar series, 'Thinking with Sound', co-organised with James Parker, author of Acoustic Jurisprudence: Listening to the Trial of Simon Bikindi (OUP, forthcoming) and presenter of the experimental music show 'Far Side Virtual' on PBS. Joining James on the panel to talk about why they do what they do in the way they do it are Joel Stern (sound artist/curator), Linda Kouvaras (musician/musicologist) and Neil McLachlan (neuropsychologist/instrument-maker).
Constellations is a seminar series encouraging new ways of thinking about interdisciplinary and the politics of method. The series is directed by me (Rose Parfitt) at Melbourne Law School, under the auspices of the Institute for International Law and the Humanities (IILAH) -- see attachment for more details.
This piece was originally published on Critical Legal Thinking as if it were a finished set of thoughts. But it emerged from conversations with friends and would ideally provoke more. In that spirit, please free to comment here: a better venue, I think (hope?), more conducive to discussion than facebook, twitter et al. We'll see...