The Political Possibility of Sound

Invited Speaker at unthinking/unlearning, part of the Year of Germany in Russia, University of the Arts Berlin and HSE School of Design Moscow.

The Political Possibility of Sound is the title of a book I published with Bloomsbury in 2018. An event that now seems to have taken place not only in the past, but in an entirely different world, with a very different sense of what appears possible, and with seeming impossibilities that have become real: politically as well as socially, and in terms of the concepts and conditions that frame existence, human and otherwise. These impossibilities include positive and hopeful imaginations. Agitating towards a new generosity, empathy and a sense of care. But they also present as darker and disturbing realities, where care is a decoy for political violence and suppression, and the confident reassertion of patriarchal and supremacist power structures, in broad daylight, as a norm that apparently takes care and reassures, or hidden under the swell of current anxieties and struggles.

Can we hear these transformations? Can we sound with and against them? Could listening as a critical practice of nuance, and as a leaning-in when social distance dictates otherwise, prepare us, if not for now, then for the next pandemic, which will surely arrive, should this one ever end. So that we are equipped to sound the possibilities and impossibilities of care and collectivity in a connected world, rather than support individuated imaginings of power.