Sonic Thinking. Indagine su una ontologia che suona

Abstract

This paper explores the foundations, traces, and implications of sonic thinking. The first part contrasts visual thinking—structurally perspectival, synchronic, bounded by closed limits, and dominated by a spectatorial subject—with sonic thinking, which proves diffusive, diachronic, liminal, and grounded in a participating subject. Sound art is reframed from a repository of sonic artifacts into a sonic deterritorializing instrument. The second part traces the philosophical precursors of Christoph Cox's ontology of the sonic flux through three stages—Schopenhauer's Will, Nietzsche's chaos, and Deleuze's impersonal acoustic flow—before presenting Cox's rigorously materialist, anti-correlationist ontology built on six concepts: flux, sonic event, body, effect, attunement, and silence. The third part tests this framework through four pivotal figures in sound art: Burroughs, Schaeffer, Cage, and Schafer. The final part hybridizes sonic thinking with Timothy Morton's dark ecology and hyperobjects, arguing that augmented listening attunes us to the nonhuman and recasting sound art as a means to reveal and dissolve hyperobjective strange loops.