Managing the Sonic Environment: Ambient Noise, Creativity and the Regime of Ubiquitous Work

Artur Szarecki

About this exposition

In contemporary neoliberal capitalism, sound is increasingly employed to modulate the affective tonalities of environments and, as a result, attune bodies to everyday habitual regimes of conduct. In this paper, I argue that comprehending this new mode of sonic governance requires going beyond cultural theories that approach politics in terms of a symbolic struggle over meaning. Instead, I attempt to analyze Coffitivity – a web service that transmits recordings of ambient noise from coffee shops in order to boost the creative capabilities of workers – according to posthegemonic theory, positing it as a sonic apparatus designed to modulate the affective environment in such a way as to habituate the distributed multitude into a regime of ubiquitous work. Consequently, I claim that posthegemonic analysis can provide insights into the potential of sound to immanently modulate the field of embodied interactions, thereby contributing to the development of new techniques of power in contemporary neoliberal capitalism.

type	research exposition
date	30/11/2017
published	14/12/2017
last modified	14/12/2017
status	published
share status	private
license	All rights reserved
url	https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/409483/409484
published in	Journal of Sonic Studies
portal issue	15. Issue 15

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Managing the Sonic Environment: Ambient Noise, Creativity and the Regime of Ubiquitous Work (2017)

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