Professor Cusick´s talk will explore how United States authorities have systematically used music and sound as elements of detention and interrogation practices so harsh as to have been de-fined by some as psychological torture aimed at destroying prisoners’ subjectivities. She will use first person accounts of former prisoners to show how manipulations of the acoustic disrupted prisoners’ use of hearing and vocalization both to locate themselves in intelligible worlds and to create relationships with those worlds. This is an ultimate kind of violence that batters prison-ers’ bodies, shatters the capacity to control the acoustical relationality that is the foundation of subjectivity, and blasts away all sense of privacy, leaving in its place a feeling of paradoxically unprivate isolation.
Program
6:00 p.m. Introduction Ellyn Toscano, Executive Director, New York University Florence
6:10 Music as Torture in the United States´ ´War on Terror´ Suzanne Cusick, Professor, New York University
