The Neoteric Thinking Podcast

Civic Acoustics - What must be made audible for justice to be possible? - The Neoteric Thinking Podcast

Listen Later

Civic Acoustics - What must be made audible for justice to be possible?

The Neoteric Thinking Podcast

What if public space could hear? What if we designed our cities not only for what is seen, but for what is sounded—and more importantly, for what is heard together? This episode explores the concept of Civic Acoustics: a cultural and ethical framework for sound in public life, where volume, rhythm, and auditory presence are shaped by mutual awareness and negotiated cohabitation. In a world of hyper-amplified voices, we ask what it means to sound with, not over, one another.

Our sonic environments are not neutral. As Jean-Luc Nancy teaches us, listening is relational—it opens the body to others. And Christina Sharpe reminds us that in the wake of historical violences, how we listen becomes a political act. The episode also draws on Brandon LaBelle’s work on acoustic justice, and considers how a shared auditory commons might make room for Deaf-centered spatial ethics and the unheard within everyday governance.

Civic Acoustics invites us to hear infrastructure differently. It challenges us to listen across difference, to hear not just expression but relation, not just signal but the conditions of sounding. This is not a utopian silence—it is a call to recalibrate presence, to reimagine audibility as a civic capacity. We ask what it means to make space sonically, ethically, together.

Extending the Framework of Civic Acoustics

The audio essay introduces civic acoustics as a way to understand sound not as atmosphere or background, but as a structure of governance—where tone, rhythm, and silence shape who is recognized, who is erased, and how public life is composed. What follows deepens that proposition, extending the framework with greater precision around sonic power, refusal, epistemic authorship, and the ethics of silence.

  • Rhythm is political. It is not simply shared—it is set. The ability to shape time, to determine pacing, and to interrupt or continue a sound is a form of control. Civic acoustics must acknowledge that rhythm is authored by institutions, enforced by platforms, and often normalized by dominant cultural logics. A just civic acoustics must name who has the power to detune, and who is expected to adjust. Rhythmic equity is not only a matter of listening—it’s about redistributing temporal authority.
  • Not all rupture belongs in relation. While the concept welcomes dissonance, it must also allow for sonic acts that resist absorption. Some refusals, traumas, and silences cannot be composed into a shared civic rhythm without being diminished or violated. Civic acoustics must honor the reality that some sonic presences seek distance, not recognition. Holding space for refusal—not as absence, but as unassimilable ethical stance—is essential to the framework’s integrity.
  • Deaf and neurodivergent epistemologies must shape the grammar, not just the content, of civic acoustics. The theory must not simply reference these perspectives as sources of moral insight or inclusive design. It must be co-authored by their temporalities, spatialities, and communicative norms. This means reconfiguring the foundational assumptions of rhythm, presence, and even sound itself. 
  • Theological references must be treated as metaphysical commitments, not symbolic structures. If liturgical forms—like interruption, sacred time, or the call and response—are invoked as models, the theory must engage with what they signify beyond design. Sacred sound carries obligations, histories, and metaphysical weight. A civic theory that borrows these forms must do so carefully, either by participating in their ethical logic or explicitly translating their relevance to secular public life.
  • Silence must be given full ethical complexity. It is not always offering. Sometimes it is harm, absence, or abandonment. Other times it is an act of resistance—a refusal to be made legible. Civic acoustics must make space for silence that cannot be explained, categorized, or aestheticized. This is not a failure of relation; it is a recognition that the civic field must sometimes hold what it cannot comprehend.
  • Dissonance must be understood not as texture, but as structure. A revised civic acoustics holds unresolved tension as a condition of civic life, not a problem to be solved. The refusal of harmony is sometimes the most faithful form of relation. Justice may require cohabitation without resolution, resonance without agreement, and presence without mutual translation.
  • Sound is not the foundation of civic life. Relation is. Civic acoustics must remain attuned to the fact that not all publics are built on sonic terms. For Deaf, non-verbal, or sensorily diverse communities, presence is registered through other modes—gesture, vibration, stillness, spatiality. Sound must be treated as one medium among many. The core commitment is to shared vulnerability, not shared audibility.

    • Why Listen?

    • What Civic Acoustics means for shared public life
    • How sound reveals hidden infrastructures of power and care
    • Why listening is a political and relational act
    • The philosophical and spatial stakes of how we cohabit sound

      • It fuses:

        • Simone Weil’s attention ethics

        • Buber’s second-person stance

        • Borgmann’s focal practices

        • Liturgical logics across traditions

        • Relational ontology from Nancy and Levinas

        • Disability justice epistemologies

        • The method is itself neoteric—not interdisciplinary, but trans-epistemic. It synthesizes into an emergent civic philosophy.

          •  

          Further Reading

          As an affiliate, we may earn from qualifying purchases through these links.

          • Sonic Warfare by Steve Goodman — On sound as force, weapon, and infrastructure. Amazon link
          • Listening by Jean-Luc Nancy — A meditation on the body, sound, and shared resonance. Amazon link
          • Undertow by Christina Sharpe — Listening to the wake of history, grief, and resistance. Amazon link
          • Acoustic Territories by Brandon LaBelle — Mapping soundscapes of the city and the politics of auditory life. Amazon link

            • Listen On:

            • YouTube
            • Spotify
            • Apple Podcasts

              • Bibliography

              • Goodman, Steve. Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012.
              • LaBelle, Brandon. Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life. 2nd ed. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.
              • Nancy, Jean-Luc. Listening. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. New York: Fordham University Press, 2007.
              • Sharpe, Christina. Undertow. Toronto: Coach House Books, 2023.
              • ———. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.
              • Ahmed, Sara. Living a Feminist Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017.
              • Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace. Translated by Emma Craufurd. London: Routledge, 2002.
              • Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. 4th ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2012.
                • ...more
                View all episodesView all episodes
                Download on the App Store
                The Neoteric Thinking PodcastBy The Neoteric Thinking Podcast