Sonic Possible and Impossible Bodies

This talk will consider the notion of sonic possible worlds in relation to the body. I will discuss the body as material and fleshly body, as human and more than human form, whose sonic possibilities ruptures norms and expectations through invisible permutations, silences and screams. Thus, I will sound and articulate a body in trans-formation, ephemeral and porous; questioning of individuation and the boundary of the skin. And hope to hear the unrecognizable body, at the margins of the representational frame and at the brink of viability, to engage in how its sonic possibility challenges who we count as real, and how we hear their actuality: the norms and naturalizations that give us the recognizable body and its name.

Making connections between the work of, among others Hannah Silva, Jocy de Oliveira, Shilpa Gupta and Pamela Z, and the writings of Margrit Shildrick, Donna Haraway, Elizabeth Grosz and Rosi Braidotti, et al., we hear the promises of monsters, the dreams of cyborgs, the ambiguity of freaks, and reach the posthuman, and come to speculate on a vampiric invisibility that is the body’s material-self in its sonic shape, and in its being as being with every other thing, human and more than human in concatenation.

Not only did bodies indicate a world beyond themselves, but this movement beyond their own boundaries, a movement of boundary itself, appeared to be quite central to what bodies ‘are’.”

(Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter, On the Discursive Limits of Sex, New York and London: Routledge, 1993, p. ix.)