Sonic encounters and intensive politics: The immanent emergence and structuration of affective publics at a live music event, and beyond

Abstract

The article concerns the ways sound can afford the formation and recomposition of affective publics by acting directly on bodies, prior to the discursive framing of acoustic experience. In particular, it focuses on a violent altercation that broke out during a live hip hop concert in Poland in 2009, arguing that the deployment of sound might have affectively primed the audience to participate in the incident. In this sense, sound is conceived as a complex of intensive forces that pass across and in-between bodies triggering immanent processes of emergence and structuration, thus affording incipient and fragmentary publics to come into being.