The Political Possibility of Sound : Fragments of Listening

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.

“Salomé Voegelin's careful, poetic essays explore what she calls the 'complexity of the ephemeral' in several registers at once - political, personal, philosophical, cultural. Each essay explores the possibility of a politics of sound that emphasises always the 'incomplete, the unfamiliar, the unrecognizable and the unheard?'. Describing the emergence of a 'sonic cosmopolitanism', Voegelin's text operates both as multiple entryways into various artists and sonic practices, but the essays also work as a united, stirring plea for the polyphony of the present.” —Nina Power, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Roehampton, UK

“Drifting in and out of physical matter, The Political Possibility of Sound is an in-depth adventure into hearing, listening and cross-referencing the politics of sound and also its making. This is a very slow read in a fast world – it is like a rare intellectual dream world of expanded possibilities of the audio thinking space. A must-read for all musicians!” —Antye Greie-Ripatti (aka AGF), sound sculptor, poet, composer, gender activist and new media curator, Germany