The Affective Politics of Sound

Through regenerative environmentalism, the international ecoproject scene aims to re-create human-environment relations. To do so, eco-activists reject the dominant narrative of individuation that underlies capitalist resource extraction in favor of a notion of relationality that collaboratively cocreates all life. In Greece, as elsewhere, eco-activists assert that such regeneration of relationality necessitates personal transformation. Some of them aim to raise cognitive awareness of this situatedness through embodied practices of sound healing. Framed by integrative medicine and cross-cultural transcendental spirituality, such therapeutic employment of sound aims to restore and sustain an equilibrium of energy flow. I experientially explore two specific sound-healing practices, vowel meditation and gong therapy, to show how raising awareness of affect and experiencing the relational self beyond individuation inspires open-ended personal transformation. Employed for ecosocial change, such self-transformational efforts at once reproduce what they seek to overcome and challenge dominant narratives of duality and separation. As regenerative eco-activists employ a politics of the self for a politics of belonging, they render the notion of relationality political in ontological terms and produce an affective politics of sound.