The Actors’ Boycott During Polish Martial Law: A Case Study in the Politics of Listening as Collective Action

This essay considers the musical stakes of boycotts, basing my work on the close analysis of the actors’ boycott during Polish martial law in the 1980s. Attuned to the heightened importance of scrutiny— even paranoia—and restraint that is generated by boycotts and imposed upon the boycotted, I understand this form of protest action as a reconfiguration of everyday social life and, by extension, listening techniques and aural culture. First, I define and theorize the boycott as a form of collective action in which ideas about the political possibilities of sound/music in relation to silence percolate. Second, I show a genealogy of musical boycotts in which writing on music, such as music criticism and musicology, is also implicated. This theoretical backdrop paves the way for my turn to the Polish actors’ boycott of state media. I trace modes of listening and performing across live and recorded articulations of the boycott by artists to show how different modes of collaboration reveal music and sound as the means of activating political intensities. Archives of cassette tapes circulated through the opposition’s unofficial publishing networks provide glimpses into the sound and music of home theater, church concerts, and other sonic mediations of recusal.