REDIRE has enabled significant advances in research on the uses and political imagery of phonography, and on the uses of sound as conceived and employed by a totalitarian regime, in this case the Italian fascist regime.
First, the database implemented for REDIRE has made it possible for the first time to identify a vast corpus of records useful for fascist propaganda, which will promote research on political phonography, aesthetics, propaganda, politics, and fascist imagination.
Second, REDIRE has implemented a method of analyzing the political uses of sound in four categories (Sound Shaping; Listening, Territorialization, Apparatus) through which it is possible to write their pragmatic history and contribute to the fields of sound studies and media studies
with new lines of research on the political functioning of sound and its media.
Third, by focusing on the uses and imaginaries of phonography and sound in the context of fascist colonialism, REDIRE has opened up a new line of research into the study of the expansion of fascism.
Fourth, REDIRE has also made it possible to reflect on how the fascist regime articulated its own relationship to time with that of sound media (radio; phonography) by combining, in its propaganda operations, the immediacy of radio listening with the re-presented past of phonographic listening. REDIRE has thus opened up a new line of research into the temporality of Italian fascism and the practices it adopted in an attempt to perpetuate itself.
Fifth, by tackling head-on the issue of the political uses of sound, REDIRE questioned the possibility that there might be a specifically fascist use of sound, thereby questioning the technological determinism of sound media, the differentiation of political practices, and the nature of sound as a mediator. In doing so, REDIRE introduces sound as one of the possible elements of a general definition of fascism, which is still debated today.
Sixith, the results of the research conducted for REDIRE were linked to those of research conducted on France between the two world wars in order to establish a unique point of comparison between a democratic regime and a totalitarian regime.
By launching these lines of research, REDIRE has brought a transnational dimension to the study of political phonographies and the practices they nurture. In doing so, REDIRE has initiated a European history of the production and political uses of phonography, as well as a broader reflection on the circulation and differentiation of political practices at the European level, which will need to be fully investigated in the future.
