Politiques Sonores

A collective work edited by Maxime Boidy, Fred Pailler and myself.

Why discuss sound in POLI, a journal whose intellectual field of intervention usually concerns the politics of image?
Quite simply because sound has multiple relationships with the visual. While the notions of "sound culture" and "visual culture" are still struggling to gain a foothold in the French-speaking world, the primary goal is to grasp the complexity of the articulation of the visible and the audible, and to consider it as a scientific and political problem in its own right.

This eleventh issue of POLI is structured around an interview with Jonathan Sterne, retracing the work carried out on his book “The Audible Past“. The author explores his visual inspirations, his connections with musicology, his deep affinities with cultural studies, and how to rethink forms of discipline and repression through sound. This issue seeks to resonate with these themes by discussing the appropriation and authoritarian production of sound in artistic, ethnographic, colonial, industrial, digital, and educational situations. Mediated by bodies and reproduction technologies, sound is here, like images, a medium of thought, a path to what transcends it on a historical scale, closer to social and political visibilities.*

Contributions by Maxime Boidy, Pali Meursault, Fred Pailler, Michael Taussig, Juliette Volcler, Paul Hegarty, Elizabeth Saint-James, Judith A. Peraino, Yannick Dauby, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Stéphan-Eloïse Gras, Yann Leguay, Jonathan Sterne.

In addition to coordination and translation work for the book, i contributed an article: Phonographies et transmissions, plastiques sonores; and co-wrote the presentation text with Maxime Boidy and Fred Pailler: (Ré)visions du Sonore (both are only available in French).

[Watch the video recording of the launch event at BPI/Centre Pompidou.]