Listening Alone Together. Political Subjectivation in the Time of Pandemic

Naomi Waltham-Smith

doi:10.6092/issn.1971-8853/11288

Authors

Naomi Waltham-Smith Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6268-7950
Naomi Waltham-Smith is Associate Professor in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at the University of Warwick. At the intersection of music, sound studies, and recent European philosophy, her work appears in journals including boundary 2, The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, CR: The New Centennial Review, diacritics, Music Theory Spectrum, parallax, parrhesia, and Sound Studies. She is the author of Music and Belonging Between Revolution and Restoration (Oxford University Press, 2017) and Shattering Biopolitics: Militant Listening and the Sound of Life (Fordham University Press, 2021). In 2019–2020, she is a fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude.

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1971-8853/11288

Keywords:

Listening, Politics, Media

Abstract

This short piece reflects on the challenges of poltical subjectivation at a time when organising largely had to move online. It also explores the play of liveness and mediation in mediatised street actions that have erupted in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd. The sense of isolation in both contexts stems not only from being physically apart from other activists but also from the loss of a common world. Following Derrida, it proposes that listening, as a form of carrying by ear in solitude after the end of the world, represents a way to interpellate caring subjects whose ecological attunement offers a possibility for repairing and recreating the world.

References

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Listening Alone Together. Political Subjectivation in the Time of Pandemic

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