The Vanishing Point of Audition

This is the seventh and last of the interlude chapters that are interspersed throughout the book to give an impression of conditions the author encountered. It includes unattributed snippets of banal conversation among journalists and academics contemplating the Red Shirt protests, and forming a chattering space at the putative zero-point of audition. It is in spaces like this, and conversations like this, where observers attempted to make sense of a profoundly unsettled situation, and our efforts were far from confident or disentangled from the events themselves.

Developing Musical Economies II

This chapter describes the position of the musicians who participated in the musical economy described first in the previous chapter. Some of these musicians achieved a degree of celebrity, which required a delicate balance between earning money for themselves and the movement and appearing humble and authentically motivated. This balance was tremendously difficult to achieve, and was fraught with peril in the form of the judgment of outside observers, as well as the legal constraints of the government. The chapter focuses ethnographically on two musicians who appeared as celebrities within the movement, and whose entrepreneurial lives constrained their political participation. The discussion enters into conversation with Judith Butler and Rosalind Morris on the topic of contemporary protest movements and the problems of visibility and audibility.

Wireless Road and the Ground of Modernity

Red Shirt protest occupation spaces were situated in the center of Bangkok. One of the roads that was occupied is called Wireless Road, and is named after Bangkok’s first radio station, which was founded there in 1920. This chapter considers how Red Shirt radio stations played a key role in mobilizing the movement. It further reflects on the meaning of the occupation taking place at the inaugural site of radio in the country, an important symbol of modernity. Red Shirt radio in the present is in some ways closely connected to the history of radio in the country, but in other ways it breaks from it sharply. The chapter concludes with the suggestion that Red Shirt radio suggests a kind of neoliberal turn within the movement.

Vehicular Stereo Systems

This is the fourth of several interlude chapters that are interspersed throughout the book to give an impression of conditions the author encountered. The author states that vehicular sound, video, and even laser lights are mostly unregulated in Thailand, and drivers indulge themselves. Car audio installation shops abound in Bangkok, serving the drivers of motor scooters, taxis, middle-class cars, and SUVs. Using such amped-up vehicles, the Red Shirt protesters fed an insatiable desire for the generation and regeneration of musical events. As their demonstrations evolved, so did their use of these sound devices. All of which suggested the movement’s desire for upward mobility and identification with globality.

A Quiet Mourning

This chapter argues for a poetry of dynamics within the Red Shirt movement. Rather than always aiming to be louder, various protesters found ways of producing sound that were intense and intensely affective without necessarily being volume-dependent. Working with the keyword “pity” or “pitiful,” which many dissidents used to describe themselves, I claim that different protest contexts valorize different modes of political engagement. For sound studies and music studies, it is necessary to consider the vernacular ways in which sound and dynamics are rendered poetic. The Red Shirts aimed toward pitiful sounding that hailed listeners to feel responsibility for their plight. The chapter engages three ethnographic examples: a man who sits in theatrical silence, orphan girls, and a stage musician.

Megaphonic Somsak Comes by His Goddamn Self

This chapter explains the use of the megaphone by Red Shirt protesters as an act of figuration, in Donna Haraway’s sense. The figured performance of megaphone singing or oration specifically suggested that Red Shirts were self-motivated, rather than agents provoked or paid by outside forces. Megaphone lectures gave the impression that the Red Shirts were authentically motivated. The author calls this sense of self-motivation kuu maa’eng (“I came by my goddamn self”) protest, after a slogan commonly used by the Red Shirts themselves. The chapter focuses ethnographically on one particular megaphone orator who came to most large Red Shirt protests in 2010–11.

Megaphone Singing

This is the third of several interlude chapters that are interspersed throughout the book to give an impression of conditions the author encountered. The author joins the Red Sunday group at a candlelight vigil, in which protestors pantomime death. The group’s demonstration is in the vicinity of a larger political rally, which has its own stage and sound system. Orn, a member of the Red Sunday group, sings into a megaphone, but her song is all but lost among sounds of the larger rally. The group was in its own “sonic niche.” Its disjuncture relative to the surrounding protest was hard, audible, and maintained on purpose.

Conclusion

The conclusion moves forward several years in order to reflect on how the Red Shirt movement has been constrained, even forced underground in the years since the research was conducted. Opening with an anecdote about Mark Zuckerberg in Bangkok, I argue that whereas protesters previously had access to very different media forms, which created a variegated protest movement, after the recent military coup most dissent has been pushed online only. This creates a condition amenable to government surveillance and stifles protest. I argue further against certain literature on protest and media, suggesting that ethnographic attention to local details is necessary in order to understand how media and dissent connect, and to know whether or not this condition is profitable for dissent. (In Thailand, for instance, it has not been).

Outer Space

This is the sixth of several interlude chapters that are interspersed throughout the book to give an impression of conditions the author encountered. It reflects on the scales of audition, from near to far.

Atrocity Broadcasts

This is the second of several interlude chapters that are interspersed throughout the book to give an impression of conditions the author encountered. It reflects on media material that showed violence committed by the Thai military against Red Shirt demonstrators. Thai society.