Resistance and resonance: A political anthropology of sound

Abstract

This article presents a first and tentative inquiry into the field a political anthropology of sound and the senses. Recent riots, contemporary protest marches and sit-ins in mediated and intensely networked societies serve as a starting point to explore corporeal and perceptual intensities as a common reference in various political strategies of resistance these days. Yet in contrast to these apologies of corporeal existence historical research in acoustics willfully moved methodologically away from exactly such corporeal intensities; in consequence sound research contributed consistently to the construction of a closed and phantasmatic, technologically and globalized auditory dispositive. The individual tensions in humanoid aliens resulting from this development might in the end though lead to an actual emergence of new personae-born out of the negotiations between sociotechnologically psychotic demands of the dispositive and the idiosyncratically corporeal, fragile and fundamental desires: born out of resistance. »Créer c'est résister, résister c'est créer.« (Hessel).