Liquid citizenship, liquid voice and sensorial sovereignty

Abstract

First, galleries became accustomed to being places of sound, and then they became places full of the sound of voices. In the process, the traditional documentary “Voice of God” voice-over has species-hopped into the artworld. Much has been written about the acousmatic voice (a voice that one hears without seeing what causes it) and the power-relations it instates. We know that since at least about 500BC, the “underdetermination of the sonic source” in acousmatic listening has been understood to produce, in Brian Kane’s terms “auditory access to transcendental spheres […] a way of listening to essence, truth, profundity, ineffability or interiority” (Kane 2014: 9). In this essay I want to consider how the voiceover is used to usurp sensorial sovereignty in a single voice-driven art project that imagines, packages and promotes a distinctly 21st-century model of sovereignty. I’m going to take as my case study Christopher Kulendran Thomas’ New Eelam project: a cloud-based housing subscription service promising a “more liquid form of citizenship beyond borders; citizenship by choice” (Kulendran Thomas 2017a: 108).[1] As advertising-as-art, it sells a dream of neoliberal sovereignty: a near-future in which “likeminded people” form cloud communities in unbounded geodesic space. However, the new economic model sustaining this hazy utopia is predicated upon a curiously homogenous (though mobile and globally distributed) demographic, and while it denounces the coup that precipitated the dissolution of the neo-Marxist autonomous state of Eelam and the annihilation of Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority, the project positions itself as irrecuperably post-political. A 2017 press release for the project states that the “authoritarian Sri Lankan president” carried out this act of genocide while “protected by a cloak of national sovereignty” (Kulendran Thomas 2017b). In its stead, Kulendran Thomas proposes a kind of deterritorialized hipster sovereignty premised on frictionless mobility and liquid citizenship.

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