First notes on Brandon LaBelle’s “Sonic Agency: Sound and Emergent Forms of Resistance.”
Beyond the self with courage: The individual space is a space held tightly together by an increasing unknowing of the other, and whose longing is dispersed along virtual lines of communication, where the other is translated onto our portals without the need to engage with their thick complexities and differences. With virtual technologies such as applications and social mass media, we have mediated communication to protect us from the contamination of the other, a process which reinforces the fear of the other and the safety of the self. This space of safety is the metabeing; a state of being uploaded and tied to a net of virtual symbols for one’s sense of comprehending reality. Metabeing surrounds itself with amplified sounds and repeating rhyhyms of owns own liberated taste and style. The self becomes an identity. The other we push away is not only other bodies, but the chaotic becoming of our own bodies and conciousness, the sea of triggers and anxieties. Perhaps a oto simple binary, but it seems that the nimistic religions made confrontational music, and the new age ambient soothes.
To exist through listening in the thickness of worldy relations descends us from the polished safety of the self. How can we pull ourselves back to the shared space with its discomforts and shifting particularies, to organise collectively? The virtual net is not enough to hold us, and it’s ruptures will increase.
LaBelle’s Sonic Agency calls for an amplification of the objections to neoliberal systems and privatisation. He calls for a listening to the invisible and unheard, that may provoke a new sense of the public space which reveals cracks of diversity within an oppressive regime.