Vít Pokorný

Our aim in this text is to analyse Miéville’s work, both theoretical and fictional, through the perspective of posthumanist sensitivity, which involves critically reassessing the human condition and embracing perspectives that extend beyond the human and more-than-human. We regard posthumanist thought as transcending the notion of an autonomous, rational subject being the sole ethical and meaningful agent, instead positioning humans within a broader network of life that necessitates interaction and negotiation with other non-human actors and forces. This shift in perspective in Miéville’s work can be observed in relation to Lefebvre’s theme of urban reality. We consider the relationship to the city as a non-human element central to the aesthetics of Miéville’s fictional universes. The foundation for examining his fictional worlds is the assertion that Miéville’s writing stems from a catastrophe of modernity and a subsequent radical rupture with it, suggesting that his thinking emerges post-catastrophe from a broken and fragmented world. In this context, he explores a future not based on any predetermined plan but arising from ongoing struggles – failures and renewals – in the pursuit of a future. Its aim is to challenge our present – specifically, the reader’s present – who may still inhabit a world overly centred on human existence.

By phenomenology, we mean the philosophical school founded at the beginning of the twentieth century by Edmund Husserl and further developed by Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and many others up to the present day. In this book, our aim is not to present elaborate and detailed phenomenological investigations; we are simply concerned with the application of phenomenology to the description of sonic environments. Indeed, as we intend to show and justify in this section, the methodological procedures and outcomes of phenomenological investigations offer valuable tools for describing sonic environments. What, then, are these tools offered by the phenomenological method? After a brief introduction to phenomenology, we will list and explain them.

In this section, we explore noise and silence as dynamic elements of experience that exist both within and beyond the auditory horizon that shapes the sonic environments we inhabit. Noise is conceived as a dimension of auditory experience that straddles chaos and information, both interfering with intelligibility and enriching our understanding of sonic environments. Silence, by contrast, is shown to resonate beyond the auditory sphere as a relational space that transcends mere absence, mingling with other sensory modalities and serving as a backdrop against which sounds gain a heightened significance.

The goal of this chapter is to introduce the phenomenological approach to space. For the main objective of our book, which is to phenomenologically describe and define sonic environments, it is vital to distinguish the phenomenological space from a mere sound-space. We have emphasized already in Chap. 2 that it is not sufficient to analyze sonic environments merely as sound-spaces, that is, environments created by a wide range of different sounds. Sonic environments must be rather understood as lived environments, which consequently leads to accounting not only for sounds (and how they constitute sonic space) but also for both acoustic perception and imagination as factors that co-constitute sonic environments. Based on the phenomenological methodology, this chapter focuses, among other things, on the topological significance of the reversible relation between the emergence of an object (e.g., a sound) and its perception. A brief description of this reversibility makes it possible to explain that perception (including audition) can be understood as localization.

In our exploration of sound and the other constitutive elements of sonic environments, we will not be considering such elements—sound, voice, natural versus technological elements—as thematic objects of experience, but rather as aspects of auditory environments; that is, as the different phenomenological fields within which the objects of auditory experience can appear. These horizons comprise the frameworks against which we make sense of our experiences. In the context of sonic environments, we can begin to identify these horizons in the six points later.

We consider sonic phenomenology to be a phenomenology that has been methodologically transformed to be able to adequately describe sonic environments and audition as an orientation within them. In this brief concluding chapter, we want to highlight the contribution of sonic phenomenology in several ways, mostly in methodological terms, underlining what the focus on sounds and sonic environments brings to phenomenology as a philosophical school and method. Additionally, we aim to briefly articulate what sonic phenomenology in turn has to offer for research on sounds and audition at the interface between philosophy and sound studies. Finally, we will touch on the possible ethical and social significance of sonic phenomenology.

Phenomenological approaches to sounds, noises, voices, and music traditionally privilege methods that center visual perception. This book aims not only to phenomenologically describe sonic environments, but also to develop an audition-centered phenomenological methodology to enable this task. "Sonic environment" is this book's term for the acoustic shape of human life-environment, which is multisensory and does not exclude visual, tactile, olfactory, and gustatory sensations connected with sounds or their sources. Sonic environments (in so far as they are lived) are not composed of separate sounds, but created by “sonic phenomena” – i.e., lived (real or imagined) experiences with sounds, noises, voices, and music. Just as phenomenology traditionally privileges the visual over the audio, phenomenology thematically prefers listening to a voice or a music over less articulated sonic experiences (i.e., sounds without an obvious meaning, melody, or rhythm).In this respect, the book not only provides missing phenomenological descriptions of sonic environments, but also redefines phenomenological methodology with respect to acoustic perception.

Posthumanism is presented in this text as a problem and analyzed from a conceptual level, which includes other related concepts such as anthropocentrism, humanism and the Anthropocene, and especially at the level of prefixes, i.e. the expressions posthumanism, transhumanism, dehumanization, inhumanity and inhuman, pre-human or subhuman. The problem of posthumanism is understood here in the context of the interregnum as a time of transition, multiple crises and the transformation of the human into the inhuman. The problem of posthumanism is grasped as a problem of philosophical anthropology related to the question of humankind’s place in the cosmos, as an ontological problem associated with the relationship between identity and hybridity, and as an ethical-political problem associated with the question of human technological domination and control. Posthumanism is seen as an opportunity to formulate a picture of transversal thinking.

This study explores the concept of rhythm and the relation of rhythm to the environment. Rhythm is not conceived of simply as a linear sequence of beats and pauses, but as a formative dynamic principle operating in all living systems. Following the rhythmanalysis of H. Levebvre and C. Regulier, phenomenological analyses of rhythm in Schutz and Richir, and a deleuzian processual approach to rhythm and milieu, this study attempts to address rhythm in terms of polyrhythmic bundles, which may be in states of eurhythmia or arrhythmia. Specifically, the study focuses on three types of polyrhythmic arrangements – individual organism, garden, and city, on which it shows several types of rhythmic formations and rhythmic principles, whose interplay or discrepancy determines the formation of distinct types of living environment.