Affect was an essential component of the Arab uprisings, and it remains an important medium for shaping everyday politics in the Middle East and beyond. Yet while affect is beginning to be conceived as integral to studies of social movements, endeavors to control individual and collective affect in the praxis of statecraft remain understudied—despite robust evidence that affect and emotion are intimately entwined with political behavior and decision-making on a wide range of issues spanning voter preference to foreign policy. This article examines how such control takes effect, situating the sensory body as a bridge and key site of interaction and contestation for diverse projects that seek to influence behavioral outcomes via the manipulation of public space. From among the bodily senses, it singles out the auditory realm as a particularly potent generator of affect and examines the entanglement of sound, hearing, and power to foreground ways the sensory body is routinely engaged in state projects. Drawing on examples from the protests that ricocheted across the Middle East from 2010–2012, and framing these with historical antecedents from original archival work, this article bridges phenomenological experience and political outcomes to reveal how sensory inputs such as sound, wielded by elite and subaltern actors alike, are engineered for political effect. In so doing, I argue that a necessary prerequisite for grasping the role of affect and emotion in politics is a better understanding of technologies and modalities of control that go into the structuring of the sensory environment.

情感是阿拉伯起义的重要组成部分，它仍然是塑造中东及其他地区日常政治的重要媒介。然而，尽管人们开始将情感视为社会运动研究不可或缺的一部分，但仍未研究在治国之道中控制个人和集体情感的努力-尽管有力的证据表明，情感和情感与政治行为和决策密切相关。范围广泛的问题涉及选民对外交政策的偏爱。本文探讨了这种控制是如何生效的，将感觉身体定位为各种项目的互动和竞争的桥梁和关键场所，这些项目试图通过操纵公共空间来影响行为结果。从身体的感觉中 它选择听觉领域作为一种特别强大的情感产生器，并检查声音，听觉和力量的纠缠，以探知感官身体日常参与国家项目的方式。本文以2010年至2012年在中东各地发生的抗议活动为例，并结合原始档案工作中的历史先例，将这些现象学现象与政治成果相结合，以揭示感官输入（例如声音）是如何被精英和次要人物所利用的演员们都是为了政治效果而设计的。通过这样做，我认为掌握情感和情感在政治中的作用的必要先决条件是对进入感觉环境结构的控制技术和控制方式的更好理解。