This study of the subtlety, complexity, and variety of modes of hearing maps out a “sonorous archipelago”―a heterogeneous set of shifting sonic territories shaped by the vicissitudes of desire and discourse.Profoundly intimate yet immediately giving onto distant spaces, both an “organ of fear” and an echo chamber of anticipated pleasures, an uncontrollable flow subject to unconscious selection and augmentation, the subtlety, complexity, and variety of modes of hearing has meant that sound has rarely received the same philosophical attention as the visual.In The Order of Sounds, François J. Bonnet makes a compelling case for the irreducible heterogeneity of “sound,” navigating between the physical models constructed by psychophysics and refined through recording technologies, and the synthetic production of what is heard. From primitive vigilance and sonic mythologies to digital sampling and sound installations, he examines the ways in which we make sound speak to us, in an analysis of listening as a plurivocal phenomenon drawing on Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Barthes, Nancy, Adorno, and de Certeau, and experimental pioneers such as Tesla, Bell, and Raudive. Stringent critiques of the “soundscape” and “reduced listening” demonstrate that univocal ontologies of sound are always partial and politicized; for listening is always a selective fetishism, a hallucination of sound filtered by desire and convention, territorialized by discourse and its authorities.Bonnet proposes neither a disciplined listening that targets sound “itself,” nor an “ocean of sound” in which we might lose ourselves, but instead maps out a sonorous archipelago―a heterogeneous set of shifting sonic territories shaped and aggregated by the vicissitudes of desire and discourse.

The Order of Sounds: A Sonorous Archipelago (Urbanomic / Mono)

BONNET, François J.

Humor & Entertainment

Urbanomic

A disturbing portrait of a society deliriously dreaming itself as eternal, instantaneous, and infinite. At least for the time being, we humans are still finite and mortal-but death isn't what it used to be. As the body is technologically extended in space and time, we are split between our finitude and our doubled presence in a limitless web of signs, an "immortal" world of information. After Death offers a penetrating philosophical diagnosis of our contemporary condition, describing not only an anesthesia, but an amnesia in which the compulsions of a hyper-present colonize both past and future, prevailing over any sense of duration, becoming, or appreciation of the "thickness of the real." Are we living in a kind of counterfeit eternity in which we are effectively already dead? Against the anxiety of the constant present, how can we hope to return to the experience of being in time and facing death? After Death is a disturbing portrait of a society deliriously dreaming itself as eternal, instantaneous, and infinite.

After Death (Urbanomic / Mono)

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

La Musique à venir

SHELTER PRESS

The Music to Come

LES MOTS ET LES SONS - UN ARCHIPEL SONORE

Arts & Photography

ECLAT

APRES LA MORT - ESSAI SUR L'ENVERS DU PRESENT

Essays & Correspondence

L'Infra-Monde

Genre Fiction

EDITIONS MF

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by BONNET, François J.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by BONNET, François J.