Sonorous Deserts: Schizoanalysis, Sound Studies, and Inhuman Ecology

Abstract

The article investigates the impact of the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari on contemporary sound studies and proposes a revision of the schizoanalytic project as a development of the field of sound studies relevant to its present conditions. Being driven by the inhuman and ecological tendencies in the humanities, sound studies are seeking sonic thinkingto be a pathway between reductionist materialism and phenomenological anthropocentrism. The author argues that the schizoanalytic approach, being a process philosophy of abstract machines, is capable of synthesizing material-informational and environmental-agential accounts of the sonorous contemporaneity. Discussing Havana Syndrome, Earth’s hum cases and the transition from electronic dance music (EDM) to intelligent dance music (IDM), he outlines the inhuman sonorous ecology that serves as a cartographic extension of sonic thinking.