Belarus’s Sound Body

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This paper breaks new ground by integrating contemporary studies of sound with the normative pragmatic perspective on argumentation. The integration promises to make a significant contribution to both bodies of scholarship. And the case study is intriguing and worthwhile, since it represents citizens attempting to achieve peaceful change through persuasion even when the normal structures of liberal democracy are absent (freedom of speech, rule of law, etc.). To ensure that the paper is truly compelling, I do think that the normative pragmatic analysis needs to be sharpened and the overall organization of the paper clarified. This is a "major revision" in the sense that some re-thinking is needed. But since the areas of concern are quite targeted, the actual changes do not have to be "major."

1. Sharpening the normative pragmatic analysis of the case. The overall contours of the normative pragmatic program are laid out clearly. The central question for this case study is what force does a clapping protest have, and why. The paper's current answer to this question is inadequate, in my view.

(a) First, in the analysis section (5), the paper relies on Innocenti's analysis of a specific speech act: DEMANDING. I believe this is unhelpful. For one thing, the protest failed to meet the criteria specific to DEMANDING. (i) The protests were not conspicuously "indecorous"--although they were illegal under Belarus' authoritarian legal system, as the paper documented, international audiences viewed the protests as peaceful and civil. The protest was well inside norms, especially for the 'pan-mediated' audience that the paper emphasizes. Further, the protesters did nothing to explicitly demonstrate that they had exhausted other options. (ii) Similarly, the protesters did nothing to "demonstrate a justified, ethical reason to step outside of norms." In contrast with the numerous justifications explicitly offered by the protesters Innocenti studied, the paper presents no evidence that the Belarus protesters invested much rhetorical energy into establishing the moral rightness of their cause--likely because they didn't have to, especially again with the international audience. So: without explicit design features meeting the conception of DEMANDING, this just doesn't look like a demand.

A final consideration suggesting that a focus on DEMANDING is not helpful: if the clapping protest was a demand, it conspicuously failed, since the regime change (or whatever was being demanded--the fact that this is vague also suggests that the protest was not a demand) did not in fact occur. But that would contradict a strong intuition that these protests were successful, indeed, successful despite the very constrictive circumstances of a violent and authoritarian regime. The protests may not have been demanding--but they were doing something--something else.

The normative pragmatic program presumes that there are a large variety of strategies for generating force--both a wide array of speech acts as well as unnamed activities, so I'm confident a better account can be given. I think a more promising approach would be to return to the more general model of force presented in the lit review section (3), also drawn from Innocenti. Speakers (in this case protesters) openly hold themselves out as living up to certain norms. This makes apparent the audience's failure to do the same. To avoid looking bad (i.e., being out of compliance with the specific norms), the audience has an incentive to act well--an incentive the audience experiences as a force. Based on this general model, one key question for the paper to address would be: what norms are the protesters trying to bring to bear on the situation? Some evidence of the norms in play can be gleaned from the actual outcome:  these protests succeeded in making Lukashenko look conspicuously ridiculous. That was their force, a force that the paper needs to explained. 

(b) The paper repeatedly states that a protest by a sound body "flouts pragmatic accountability," imposing responsibility on others without reciprocally undertaking it themselves. In other words, a sound body cannot be actually held responsible for living up to the responsibilities it has undertaken to follow some specific norms (whatever they turn out to be). I agree with the paper's comments that clapping as a protest was tactically wise for the protesters, since it made it harder for the police to target individuals. But the inability to be held responsible is actually fatal to a normative pragmatic analysis of force, which depends on audiences understanding that speakers have taken on specific, enforceable risks. To the extent that a speaker can obviously "wiggle out", force is weakened; speakers thus frequently make conspicuous efforts to limit their own "wiggle room" (Kauffeld on ACCUSING and SAYING makes this point, as does Goodwin on EXERCISING AUTHORITY.) If indeed a sound body can generate force without being held responsible for living up to its commitments, that would be a serious criticism of the normative pragmatic program.

Since the paper is relying on normative pragmatics for its theoretical frame, the potential criticism should be converted to an important research question: how can collectivities, especially one constituted in and through sound, undertake responsibilities that they can be held to--and thus also run real risks of criticism/punishment/bad consequences if they fail to meet them? Answering that question would make a significant contribution to the literature on normative pragmatics. 

2. Clarifying the organization. One of the major contributions of this paper is to integrate sound studies and normative pragmatics. The justifications for this integration need to be signaled to the reader starting early and continuing throughout.

Both the sections on acousmatic sound (2) and normative pragmatics (3) should start and end with paragraphs linking them explicitly to this overarching theme and pointing to specific gaps that can be filled by the other theory. I'm not sure which theory should go first--maybe:

Sound studies have established the ability to create sound bodies--but how can those bodies exert force on other agents in civic space? That is a question that normative pragmatics can answer...

Or:

Normative pragmatics has provided an account of how civic agents can move each other--exert force. But these accounts are ordinarily based on relatively local transactions among individuals. Can normative pragmatics explain what happens in more highly mediated settings with collective agents? Sound studies can help with this...

Section 4 is currently dedicated to a series of overclaims about what happens when sound studies and normative pragmatics are integrated. I say "overclaims" because this section throughout uses assertions where questions are called for. For example, right at the beginning: "These fluid imaginary constructs use sound's visceral power to amplify rhetorical presence and obligation." It is plausible that sound's visceral power can amplify rhetorical presence and obligation in some cases--but of course, also not in others. It is the purpose of this paper to show in detail the mechanisms of such amplification in one case, which is enough to establish the potential interest of continued exploration of how this works, requiring further integrations these two theories. 

I could go on and suggest similar revisions to almost every sentence ("Its amplified reverberations [CAN] exert magnified normative pressure" etc.). However, what really needs to happen is for Section 4 to be reconceived to raise specific questions to be answered by the case study, e.g.  what are the specific responsibilities undertaken by the sound body created by the protesters, and how did they generate force? And in general, how does a sound body undertake responsibilities?--and likely other questions as well.

Once the overall logic of the paper has been clarified, the Introduction can be revised to convey the importance of both the subject (integration of the two research programs) and the case study, to prepare readers for the challenging theoretical overviews of the following sections.

Author Response

I followed the first reviewer's suggestion and sharpened the case's normative pragmatic analysis. I did this by first removing the language of demand and instead focusing on how the clapping (and other sonic tactics) supported people’s claim that the government was not legitimate. This revision enabled me to account for a more nuanced view of how accountability was distributed in a crowd and created the conditions for more people to join the sound body.

I also followed the first reviewer's suggestion and clarified the organization. Specifically, I added language in the introduction, at the end of the acousmatic sound, and in normative pragmatics that clarifies the relative intervention.

Under the guidance of the first reviewer, I substantially revised the concluding sections. This involved replacing overclaims with more modest assertions firmly grounded in the evidence presented.

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The article argues that protest movements in Belarus in 2011 against the authoritarian government of Lukashenko, where participants engaged in a novel form of expressing dissent by clapping, can be understood in light of the concept of sound body. Sound bodies, so the authors, shed light on how sound, in a context of authoritarianism and new social media (characterized by its pan-mediality and a fierce competence for attention), is able to coalesce collective identities, shared meanings, intervene in power dynamics and convey demands. 

The concept of sound body lies above two pillars, namely, acousmatics and normative pragmatics. Acousmatics refers to the amplification of the experience of hearing by means of hiding the source of the sound. Particularly in this contexts, it refers to the political, social and normative effects of the collective action of clapping. On the other hand, normative pragmatics describes illocutionary acts that manipulate the normative realm as a mean of inducing to engagement from the other, all of this in a social context marked by the pan-mediality and fragmentation of social media. From the standpoint of normative pragmatics, arguments possess an expresive (they construct meaning) and a functional dimension (they "delineate(s) obligations, undertake(s) roles, and distribute(s) risk").

Sound bodies are therefore argument agents able to introduce "new power dynamics and agent conceptions into pragmatic argumentation frameworks, demonstrating sound's ability to construct novel persuasion contexts". Sound bodies are described as an "unseen presence", as fluid, protean, as exerting normative pressure, as an "imaginary construct".

While I agree it is of the utmost importance to study novel forms of resistance to authoritarianism and that, in this sense, clapping and maybe also cacerolazos (hitting kitchen pots as a form of protest, a practice initiated in Pinochet's Chile) constitute very interesting examples, I will argue that the concept of sound body contributes little to explain the phenomenon at hand and also that it unnecesarily obscures the argumentation of the article.

Normative pragmatics offer indeed an interesting perspective as to what actual argumentation in the real world looks like, however getting to equate acousmatics to an argument, to a speech act, getting to affirm that sounds can construct "novel persuasion contexts" means going beyond the limits of a suggestive metaphor. The authors end up distorting the concepts of argumentation theory and even language philosophy in order to acommodate them to their argumentation.

Although acousmatics are in their own right meaningful communication, they do not possess the characteristics of language and symbol systems so as to afford reasoning and argumentation. For such an argument to be sound enough, acousmatics would have to meet the following requirements:

1. Possess a finite systems of tokens or signs. In this case, it should be a finite set of distinguishable and discrete sounds.

2.  This system of tokens ought to be ruled by a set of rules and/or conventions that specify how the elements of the set can be combined to produce new elements of the set.

3. This system must be selfreferential and be able to express the truthfulness and falseness of its statements.

4. It must be closed, namely, the rules of production of elements cannot but produce elements of the same system.

5. It will exhibit semantics as an emergent property, namely it will be possible to distinguish between syntactically correct but absurd statements, syntactically incorrect but meaningful statements and syntactically correct and meaningful statements.

Contrarily to what the authors suggest, acousmatics are closely tied to the context. They lack the capability of generalization. They are irreflexive, namely, cannot metacommunicate. There is no clapping about clapping.

In this line of thought, the relationship between acousmatics and digital media is not quite like the authors depict it. Being digital media pan-mediatic, as the authors correctly describe it, how can the acousmatic, as the amplification of the experience of sound, even succeed?

Further, the argument that the globalization of certain experiences  (line 137, among others) can be explained referring to the sound body and the acousmatic is hardly convincing. The authors would need to discard pan-mediality as the cause of dissemination and successfully identify the acoustic as the sole causal factor.

As consequence of these flaws the concept of sound body becomes some sort of metaphysical especulation, totally superflous to the subject matter.

Finally, though tangentially, the authors conflate the problem of social movements and social disobedience with the intricate and complex process of authoritarian regime's collapse (line 693). Although usually connected causally, that is nothing but an attribution made by an observer. The truth is much more complex. As statisticians like to say, correlation is not causality. And more importantly, discussing this issue goes beyond the goal of the article. 

I would recommend the authors to abandon the concept of body sound and reframe the article in terms of normative pragmatics, where sound is not an argument but a social meaningful action (Weber) or a form of communication (Luhmann) capable of contesting authority and legitimacy in an authoritarian regime.

 

 

Author Response

Thank you for your review of my article. I appreciate the time and effort you invested in reading and commenting on my work. While I focused primarily on addressing the first reviewer's comments in my revisions, as they aligned more closely with the core arguments of my paper and the editor's guidance, I want to acknowledge your contribution to the review process.

Your perspective offers an interesting angle on the topic, though it diverges somewhat from the main thrust of my argument. In future work, I may explore some of the tangential points you raised, as they could potentially open up new avenues for discussion in this field.

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

I think my main objection to the article can be condensed in the critique of the lines 89-100 at the introduction.

The semantic entanglement between loudness, noise, on the one hand, and accuracy, judiciousness and fairness, on the other, is just a singularity of the English language. It does not exists in Spanish (sonido-razonable), nor in German (Geräusch-vernünftig), nor in French (bruit-juste)... This is due to a property of sign systems Ferndinand de Saussure called the arbitrariness of signs. As a consequence, the statements that follow are a non sequitur. It seems that the author stubbornly tries to link behavior with discourse/speech. Certainly, the latter is a kind of social behavior among others. And every kind of social behavior communicates. Therefore, behavior can communicate and thus it can challenge authoritarianism too. I believe that this detour through rhetoric and pragmatics is completely unnecessary.

I must admit that the idea of sound bodies is nice and suggestive, though conceptually hollow.