Murmur

Contrary to what Michel de Certeau, in May 1968, famously called the recapture of speech ("prise de la parole"), there is the unnerving sense today that speech, ever more proliferating, massified, mediated, polarized, ventriloquized, mischaracterized, weaponized, is less a tool than a trap for counterculture and critique. To resist is to argue, refuse, convince, touch and move with spoken and written words: yet we witness in our time informed and addressed gestures of protest being drowned out or disfigured, turned perilous yet powerless. How might thought survive such enunciative saturation? What para- or infra-discursive modes may allow an act of counter-imagination to elude the forces of its neutralization?  

The notion of murmur is proposed here as one that might offer unexpected potential. Unsettling the clarity of source and of meaning, a murmur can be collective and indistinct, thus evading distortion or capture. A form of voicing at the limit of the regulatable, a rumbling of collective dissent, a muttering "below one's breath" that defies cooptation, a murmur can also be a simple emanation of the friction or empathy of being, the sound of water, wind or a forest.

Murmur conjures a complicit recipient and activates a deep listening practice. In relation to speech or writing, murmur opens a poetics of discerning interpretation or delicate reading. Understood broadly, murmur implies attending and attuning to the transpersonal--the emotion of a group, the energy of a historical moment--and the infra-symbolic--signs beyond articulated language, from asemic speech and writing to the murmurs of plants and animals, the tones of stones.              

We invite proposals that consider the politics and poetics of murmur: whether to reflect on subdued or encrypted expressions that unnerve reigning regimes of discourse and power, or to call for more subtle modes of observation that might register alternative intensities of collaboration and dissent. We welcome critical as well as critical/research-based creative approaches to the theme, which incorporate poetry, fiction, performance, or multimedia components.