Do a Number: The Facticity of the Voice, or Reading Stop-and-Frisk Data

• Published in: Discourse (Berkeley, Calif.) Calif.), 2017-10, Vol.39 (3), p.397-424
• Main Author: Yoon, Soyoung
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: African Americans; Artists; Bibliographic literature; Bland, Sandra; Capital punishment; Collaboration; Conventions; Crime prevention; Criminal sentences; Documentaries; Documentary films; Domestic violence; Enumeration; Erotica; Exegesis & hermeneutics; Facticity; Fate; Historiography; Ideology; Intersectionality; Killing; Knowledge; Literary devices; Literary influences; Logic; Meaning; Narrative techniques; Neoliberalism; Noise; Numbers; Oral Reading; Plot (Narrative); Police; Police services; Political discourse; Proximity; Radio; Repetition; Sexual violence; Source materials; Stop & frisk; Vertigo; Violence; Visualization; Voice data; Voice mail; Voiced sounds; Websites
• ISSN: 1522-5321; 1536-1810
• DOI: 10.13110/discourse.39.3.0397

For Documentary Audibilities, this special issue of Discourse, this essay offers another chapter in the authority of the documentary voice-over: the "reality effect" of the presentation of knowledge as "raw data," of the impersonal enumeration of information through numbers arranged in the rows and columns of a grid. If the artists' sonification of data displaces the centrality attributed to the audiovisual testimony of video, it also underscores how techniques of data visualization and sonification continue to depend on conventions of documentary film, especially the "voice" of documentary. At stake is not so much the epistemic value of this enumeration of numbers as its affective force, the force of the presentation, the affect of the sheer rawness of the data, which seems all the more valuable in its proximity to the very threshold of meaning and nonsense, of signal and noise - a representation of reality that presents the experience of knowledge as the vertigo of standing at the edge of the precipice, the thrill of the potential fall into the senselessness of noise as well as the sense of security in the knowledge that the ground will not fall under our feet: the sublimity of knowledge as data. Who is the subject of this knowledge? Who is speaking as well, when and from where and when, and for whom? And what type of history can be told through this knowledge? Whose history? And what are its modalities? Can it even be called a history?