Final notes on Brandon La Belle’s “Sonic Agency”.
La Belle’s last chapter of his book, titled “The Weak”.
La Belle is outlining a politics of vulnerability and weakness, a “passionate politics” (hooks) held in spaces where our deep longings and desires are shared as a process of building community. Relating to bell hook’s work on critical education, the classroom represents this potential space to carry and educate methods of collectivising. Rather than an imposition of determined knowledge, a classroom of “enagaged pedagogy” becomes a space enriched with “the commonality of feeling”, an embodied present reflecting the thickness of social tensions and connections of everyday life. Through feeling together, the subjectivity of knowledge is displayed through living bodies. hooks’ classroom is a space in continuous flux, shifting with the present moods and dynamics of the students and teachers. The engaged classroom reflects a politics free from the subtractive qualities of the “campaign”: instead as fluid as the “nonmovements of everyday life”.
Back to La Belle’s words, these places of learning can function as “shared spaces of (erotic) becoming, sites of desire and longing, bridges between private and public life.”
La Belle’s expanding view of agency goes beyond, or before politics. He echoes Herbert Marcuse’s call for an “emergence of a new historical subject”, calling for a political subjectivity beyond ideology, a transformation of the self that goes “against the prevailing technological reasoning of our times. It is this technological reasoning of ideology that La Belle claims to reduce “the creativity of our speech, to an overarching functionality, restricting the full dimensionality of discourse.” (pg 133).
This possibility of self-transformation opens an expanding view of political subjectivity, one that is “expressed not solely in gestures of speaking up, or in rational formations of energetic attunement, ecstatic togetherness, and affective intervention – vibrational formations in which the personal is deepy political and the political is something to be shared.”
La Belle is outlining a potential bridge between the fuzzy realms of the spiritual and the rationalism of politics, that to be together as a “vibrational formation”, connecting as much through non-verbal energetic becoming as speech and ideology, is a continued expression of our political subjectivity. In this framework, subjectivity does not start and end with a ‘campaign’, but is continously emerging from our embodied interactions as individuals or collectives. Connection, joy and togetherness are seen as powerful political actions against systems that rank, divide, and alienate individuals. Perhaps to avoid the rationalisation of these ecstatic human qualities of togetherness, La Belle makes a claim for this subjectivity to be “beyond the purely political”, and refers to Václav Havel’s term the “pre-politcal”, which he describes as the “fundamental responsibility of a life lived with others, that overrides party politics.”
“in being weak, one is in need of others.”