EDM Christmas Music on Infinite Repeat

This article examines the repeated encounters young civil society activists in the city of Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia, have with a public hi-fi system playing music for an empty traffic intersection and their choice to describe this roundabout as absurd. I read these claims as symptomatic of uncanny dynamics in Kuchingite urbanity. Deploying the language of absurdity helps my interlocutors evade political risk by constructing strategic ambiguities. Through a Derridean analytic of speech acts I articulate how these ambiguities serve pragmatic ends. My interlocutors’ use of absurdity manipulates subtle overlaps of satirising play and power appeasing elisions of critique. Through this playful tension the exploitative logics embedded in Kuching's capital-centric urbanity may be productively managed by careful instrumentalisation of the ambiguities of Kuching's urban uncanny

Absurdity · Invisibility · Politics · Uncanny · Urbanity · Rhetoric and Communication Studies · Socioeconomic Development in Asia · Sound Studies and Aurality