A Sinister Resonance

Abstract

"This article poses two attendant questions. The first asks how we might think silence as a modality of en-voicing, particularly in the work of the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission. I use the term en-voicing here because it offers a resonant mode of reading both image and sound, but also accounts for those sounds that we regard as absences, or non-sounds. En-voicing, as invoked by Ana Maria Ochoa Gautier, accounts for the ways in which vocality might be thought of as a mode of intelligibility marked by aurality rather than orality, in the sonic rather than solely within the linguistic parameters that the phonic might connote. It can therefore be suggested that through a concept of en-voicing, the visualism in linguistic theory, De Saussure’s sound-image, might be displaced.... A second question this article asks is what it is about silence that textures the Truth Commission as an institution. By briefly turning to analyses by Adam Sitze, this article also asks how silence as invoked in the South African context would translate in other spaces in which the modality of the truth commission has been instituted, such as Canada. It therefore seeks to latch onto the impossibility of sound as a direction from which to audit the event that is the death of Lungile Tabalaza and its reverberations, but also to audit the relationship between the TRCs in South Africa and Canada.... if the gaze
designates that which can be seen, in the sense of what constitutes the limits of seeing and what organizes what is visible, the audit operates by asking what it is we hear and how we listen. Put simply, this article is concerned with what it means to encounter a sinister resonance, in terms of both the sonic and the political."