On the auditory experience as a political field: politics of listening and organizational action.

The present contribution aims at establishing a dialogue between different literary sources in music theory, disability studies, and performative arts, inquiring about common fields on the issue of politics of listening. This issue will be then reconstructed by following three ideal “formants,” reframing both the meaning this concept has in music theory (the distinctive frequency components of the acoustic signal produced by speech, musical instruments or singing) and legislative theory (the juridical basis on which legal systems are built and judicial positions are taken). These formants will be drawn from literary sources, to give account of the multilayered discourse around politics of listening: from more philosophical issues rooted in music theory, namely concerning politics of sound and biopolitics of music; to practical examples drawn from disability studies and media archaeological methodology, which aim at understanding how politics are inscribed in sound technologies; to examples of acoustemology in settings of violence and segregation, trying to understand how sound can be used as a weapon; to reflections developed within the context of sound art and performance, to understand how listening can be seen as a political counter-weapon. Elements and arguments collected within this framework will be then ideally reinstated in the wider context of organization theories and social sciences.