The Mathematics of Anacoustic Reason is an aphoristic image-text work in response to an invitation to respond to the concept: Out of the Equation: Roads to Reality. The project responds to this invitation by expressing an equation written primarily in the formal language of mathematics and by elaborating on this expression with images and a brief accompanying text. The equation attempts to condense an articulation of the relationships between silence, disquiet, power, and the actions of the multitude with a view to yielding a measure of understanding about who or what gets a hearing in the world

‘Anacoustic reason’ refers to the condition of ‘anacoustia’ in which a sound signal cannot be received to a form of reasoning that insulates itself from listening, even to its own inability to listen. Raqs sees anacoustic reason acting through ‘turning a deaf ear’:  the unwillingness or inability to listen to the voices that refuse to be accommodated into the master narratives of progress, of instrumental reason and the domestication of space through the geomancy of corporations and nation-states. Democracy can then be seen as a battle between ‘acoustic’ and ‘anacoustic’ modes of the relationship between power, speech and silence.