The Political Possibility of Sound: Fragments of Listening
Saturday 4 May 2019 | 6:30pm
The Lab, Darat al Funun – The Khalid Shoman Foundation, Amman, Jordan | DIRECTIONS
Salomé Voegelin will present a lecture/performance, responding to her recently published book of essays about possibility and sound. The event forms part of Darat al Funun’s 2019 program ‘At The Lab’, which brings together artists and cultural practitioners exploring sound, listening and sonic practices in relation to forms of collective agency, alternative socialities and the emergence of milieus.
The Political Possibility of Sound: Fragments of Listening (Bloomsbury, 2019)
"This 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."