The problem of right-wing populism and extremist politics does not lie only in the content of particular claims or ideologies. More fundamentally, it is a question of how collective affect is organized: how certain sensations, tones, rhythms, modes of utterance, and bodily attitudes are circulated, repeated, and intensified through technical media. Elfriede Jelinek’s texts are especially sensitive to these mechanisms of anti-democratic affective organization. Through propagandistic language, repetition, excess, choral utterance, and the accumulation of violent rhetoric, she reveals that anti-democracy is not merely a political position, but a mode of organizing sensation, embodiment, language, and mediation.

Starting from this problem, the present project investigates, from the perspective of composition and artistic research, how right-wing populism organizes affect within contemporary digital media environments. In particular, it takes as points of departure the recurring political tones, inflections, breathing patterns, speech speeds, rhythms, and bodily implied modes of speaking that emerge in short-form videos, online speech, forum posts, and comment cultures. The aim is not simply to reproduce or content-wise criticize the speech of particular political actors. Rather, the project focuses on the conditions that make such utterances possible: specific ways of using the body, gestures of speech, and the conceptual and medial systems that support them.

As a composer and artistic researcher, I am less interested in sound as such than in the conditions under which sound emerges. Whether instrumental or vocal, sound is always produced through the body. Yet the body never exists as a purely material basis. It is always already organized by social, conceptual, and technical norms, and these norms shape movement, utterance, and ultimately sound itself. In this sense, the project approaches sound not as a surface result, but as part of a material loop connecting body, concept, medium, and sonic formation. More precisely, the work seeks to compositionally dismantle and reconfigure the body of utterance and the conceptual principles that sustain the affects of right-wing populism.

Methodologically, the project does not aim to imitate political speech directly, but to extract and transform the formal conditions that make it effective. To this end, it takes as analytic material vocal inflection, rhythmic contour, breathing patterns, tension and release, commanding or persuasive tones, and structures of repetition amplified by digital media. These materials are then translated into new compositional structures through instrumental gesture, vocal performance, electronics, processes of repetition and accumulation, and bodily movement. In this process, composition becomes not merely expressive, but a critical practice that exposes and displaces the sensory principles through which political affect is produced.

The project seeks to extend Jelinek’s political aesthetics beyond textual interpretation by engaging it through musicality, performativity, and the corporeality of utterance. In doing so, it explores acoustically how anti-democratic language and affect are formed through bodies and media, while also experimenting with other possibilities of listening and other organizations of sensation. As an ongoing artistic research project, it is intended to be further developed through the workshop’s mentoring and discussions, especially with regard to the relationship between utterance, body, and sound, and its connection to Jelinek’s critical legacy.

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Bibliography

Jelinek, Elfriede. Am Königsweg. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2017.

Mouffe, Chantal. For a Left Populism. London: Verso, 2018.

Butler, Judith. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015.

Cox, Christoph. Sonic Flux: Sound, Art, and Metaphysics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018.