Zachary Weinstein

It might seem that booing’s only function is to draw attention away from a performance and towards an individual booer’s disdain. But booing—or at least a certain kind of booing—can serve a distinctive, positive role in the aesthetic realm. Through collectively expressing collective disapproval, booing can forge and sustain an Audience—a kind of aesthetic community committed to the continued flourishing of a particular aesthetic practice. We have failed to recognize this potential for booing because of an entrenched tendency to theorize about (the expression of an) aesthetic judgement at the level of the individual. This tendency blinds us to cases of collective expression of a collective aesthetic judgement, such as the kind of booing I discuss. Considering this speech act and its value suggests a radically collectivist account of aesthetic engagement, one marked by collective commitment, rather than individual taste.

The debate over the metaphysics of sounds is about the nature of what we immediately auditorily perceive. There are good reasons to identify a sound with some kind of event. But what kind of event? I articulate and defend the _broad event view_ of sounds, on which a sound is identified with a broad event that produces and shapes an acoustic wave. I show that other views that identify a sound with some kind of event face serious problems. In particular, Casati and Dokic’s (La philosophie du son, Editions Jacqueline Chambon, 1994 ) monadic event view fails to capture the full range of sounds, while O’Callaghan’s (Sounds: a philosophical theory, Oxford University Press, 2007 ; in: Nudds, O’Callaghan (eds) Sounds and perception: new philosophical essays, Oxford University Press, 2009 ; Oxford Stud Metaphys 5:247–270, 2010 ) relational event view identifies sounds with too narrow of an event, leading to problems capturing important differences between sounds and putting the perceiver at an unnecessary remove from the kind of broad events she typically cares about. The broad event view avoids these pitfalls.