The Political Possibility of Sound

The essay is the perfect format for a crisis. Its porous and contingent nature forgives a lack of formality, while its neglect of perfection and virtuosity releases the potential for the incomplete and the unrealizable. These seven essays on The Political Possibility of Sound present a perfectly incomplete form for a discussion on the possibility of the political that includes creativity and invention, and articulates a politics that imagines transformation and the desire to embrace a connected and collaborative world.

The themes of these essays emerge from and deepen discussions started in Voegelin's previous books, Listening to Noise and Silence and Sonic Possible Worlds. Continuing the methodological juxtaposition of phenomenology and logic and writing from close sonic encounters each represents a fragment of listening to a variety of sound works, to music, the acoustic environment and to poetry, to hear their possibilities and develop words for what appears impossible.

As fragments of writing they respond to ideas on geography and migration, bring into play formless subjectivities and trans-objective identities, and practice collectivity and a sonic cosmopolitanism through the hearing of shared volumes. They involve the unheard and the in-between to contribute to current discussions on new materialism, and perform vertical readings to reach the depth of sound.

Auteur

Salomé Voegelin is Professor of Sound at the London College of Communication, UAL, and an artist and writer engaged in listening as a socio-political practice of sound. She is the author of Listening to Noise and Silence (2010), Sonic Possible Worlds (2014) and The Political Possibility of Sound (2018), all by Bloomsbury Academic. Her work and writing deal with sound and the world sound makes: its aesthetic, social and political realities that are hidden by the persuasiveness of a visual point of view.

Contenu

Acknowledgements
Light Song (A Text Score)

1. Introduction: Writing Fragments
2. The Political Possibility of Sound
3. Hearing Volumes: Architecture, Light and Words
4. Geographies of Sound: Performing Impossible Territories
5. Morality of the Invisible, Ethics of the Inaudible
6. Hearing Subjectivities: Bodies, Forms and Formlessness
7. Sonic Materialism: A Philosophy of Digging
8. Reading Fragments of Listening, Hearing Vertical Lines of Words
   Putting on Lipstick (A Text Score)
   Index