The Call For Sonic Thinking: Gilles Deleuze and the Object of Sound Studies

This thesis proposes to define and to dramatize a relation between Deleuze studies and sound studies in terms of a conception of theoretical work as an experimental practice that bears not upon objects but upon Ideas—or rather, that reconfigures the sense of object in relation to a renewed conception of the Idea. This relation between two discourses will proceed through an engagement between the work of Gilles Delueze and that of John Cage, constituted as an “interference between practices”, with the intent of furnishing, to sound studies, a meta-theoretical reflection on the problem that sound poses to thinking, and on the conditions under which theory can respond to such a problem without, thereby, reducing it to something all-too-recognisable.