The course offers a critical listening to the intellectual undercurrents that shaped the notion of sound in our Modern episteme, both as a theoretical discourse and as an artistic practice. During the course we will lend an ear to the way in which ‘sound’ resonates in our modern era. The course will trace two main theoretical perspectives: The first part will follow the dissemination of ‘sound’ in the wake of the emergence of media technologies in the late 19^th century. We will follow technological developments in sound recording and synthesis from Thomas Edison’s innovative phonograph to the digital era, and examine the way in which artists and thinkers have responded to the challenge. In the second part of the semester we will listen to the ways ‘sound’ constructs political sites. We will consider the appearance of new forms and practices of listening in the 20^th century in the wake of Jacques Rancier’s distinction of the three regimes of the arts and his notion of the distribution of the senses. 

During the lectures we will listen, watch and analyze works of arts, musical compositions, and mechanical blueprints, read seminal texts by thinkers and artists and experiment with different practices of listening. In that liminal space between art and thought, the old spirits that hunt the aesthetic domain return to disturb our minds, for they invoke (yet again) questions of truth and representation, technology and mediation, the ontological status of writing, and the fate of the subject.