The Auditory Culture Reader

Michael Bull, Les Back, Michael Bull, Les Back

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000181722
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Antropología

The first edition of The Auditory Culture Reader offered an introduction to both classical and recent work on auditory culture, laying the foundations for new academic research in sound studies. Today, interest and research on sound thrives across disciplines such as music, anthropology, geography, sociology and cultural studies as well as within the new interdisciplinary sphere of sound studies itself. This second edition reflects on the changes to the field since the first edition and offers a vast amount of new content, a user-friendly organization which highlights key themes and concepts, and a methodologies section which addresses practical questions for students setting out on auditory explorations. All essays are accessible to non-experts and encompass scholarship from leading figures in the field, discussing issues relating to sound and listening from the broadest set of interdisciplinary perspectives. Inspiring students and researchers attentive to sound in their work, newly-commissioned and classical excerpts bring urban research and ethnography alive with sensory case studies that open up a world beyond the visual. This book is core reading for all courses that cover the role of sound in culture, within sound studies, anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, history, media studies and urban geography.

PART I

SOUND ENGAGEMENTS

This introductory section investigates the various ways that we might engage with sound, historically, culturally and technologically, through to notions of race, gender, disability and the voice. Leigh Schmidt looks at the history of listening in terms of the supposition of the 'decline in listening' and the attendant 'dwindling of hearing as a spiritual sense'. However, Schmidt argues that we have read the Enlightenment as overly occularcentric and have gone on, because of this, to presume the dominance of visuality within modernity. This presumption has led to a familiar tale of the ascendency of vision through which all things 'heard' are filtered. In discussing the work of Walter Ong and Marshall McLuhan, he argues that they produce the familiar (and often counter-factual) narrative of the eclipse of the ear. In the world of the telegraph, telephone, phonograph, radio and television, they dwell on the importance of print, reading sounds as if it were merely a script. Schmidt also points to the incipient orientalism involved in the romanticizing of pre-print cultures in the work of McLuhan in which the 'we look, they listen dichotomy is unreflectively asserted. Schmidt paints a more complex picture of Enlightenment thought, one that also had room for the other senses, and especially sound.

Veit Erlmann's piece on the work of Descartes also re-evaluates his contribution, controversially, to the field of modern aurality. In doing so, Erlmann argues that is a mistake to merely understand Descartes role in the formation of a rationality that was in essence dis-embodied. Erlmann points to the importance that sound, music and listening played in the formation of Descartes' thought through the notion of 'resonance'. In doing so, Erlmann argues that contemporary writers in the field of sound studies as well as feminist-inspired critiques of the masculine bias in epistemology need to re-evaluate the work of Descartes.

Hillel Schwartz's imaginative and provocative piece interrogates how we might make sonic sense of the images he looks at in the sanctuary of Atotonilco in Mexico - looking at images depicting the suffering of Christ infused into its walls. Schwartz muses on the sounds, sighs and shrieks depicted in these scenes in order to discuss the inexpressible and ineffable nature of sounds imagined, sounds heard in one's head, not quite heard, sounds that must not be heard and so on. In doing so he forces us to think of the sonic non-literally, non-objectively, but as untellable, ineffable but with feeling.

David Toop pursues this discussion of the ambiguous role of the sonic with a wonderful discussion of the way we hear in the world which begins with a critique of John Berger's statement that 'Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.' This chapter acts very much as a compliment to Schwartz's in that it invokes the imaginative, transitory edge-like quality of much sonic experience in which 'hearing allows us constant access to a less stable world (than vision), omni-directional, always in a state of becoming and receding, known and unknown.'

Bull's chapter interrogates what an auditory epistemology of urban experience might 'look' like. By drawing upon the ethnography of Walkman users, Bull re-interprets seminal texts on the nature of the urban - in effect re-interpreting their visual epistemologies sonically. In doing so, he offers a transformed account of urban experience that also involves a re-interpretation of the contribution of Critical Theory to a wider understanding of the role of the senses in urban culture.

Freidner and Helmreich question the values embodied in sound studies from the position of those who are deaf. In doing so they both articulate the false dichotomy between vision (the deaf experience everything through the visual) and sound. They rather argue that there is a commonality between sound and deaf studies in the nature of their shared and diverse socialities that rarely fits 'into ideal types such as "seeing" "hearing" "signing" or "vibrating".' (Readers should also refer to the Karis Petty entry in 'sound methodologies' for a discussion on how those with impaired vision listen to the countryside.)

Smith continues this analysis of multi-sensory engagement, in his discussion of race and the senses by investigating the construction of racial stereotypes in antebellum America. He argues that whilst 'discussions of "race" and racial identity are hostage to the eye', a more multisensory analysis, one that restores hearing, smell, touch and taste to the construction of racial stereotypes permits a much more nuanced and accurate understanding of the workings of racism in the American South.

For those of us that have sat through a lifetime of tedious presentations, lectures and the like, Greg Goodale's contribution will come as a breath of fresh air. In his article, he tackles the sounds of scholarship. He argues that the sound of speech has been denigrated through the politics of speechwriting - as pejoratively, merely rhetorical. Goodale argues that 'to revel in the imprecision of facts, and the persuasiveness of arguments. To argue persuasively, we must consider how our words sound.' Goodale's wonderful analysis of the value of a 'turn of phrase' we hope has been replicated throughout this present volume.

The sounds of those pieces of technology that surround us in our daily lives is the subject of Maier, Schneider and Schulze's chapter. From the sound of the washing machine to the closing of the car door - these 'functional sounds' are investigated both for their cultural placing in society but also, importantly, in terms of 'the current state of functional sound design practices in actual projects and work situations.' In doing so, the authors advance our knowledge of the creation, reception and understanding of the gamut of industrially produced sound embedded into daily life.

CHAPTER 1

HEARING LOSS

Leigh Eric Schmidt

The voices of the past are especially lost to us. The world of unrecorded sound is irreclaimable, so the disjunction that separates our ears from what people heard in the past are doubly profound. I can see evangelist George Whitefield's crossed eyes in a portrait; I can still see some of the pulpits from which he preached; I can pore over his sermons; I can read his journals. But I can never lend him my ears or eavesdrop on his prayers. Almost all of history is eerily silent and so, to evoke those stilled and faded voices, the historian must act as a kind of necromancer. The historian's ventriloquy, like that of the Witch of Endor, allows the living to hear the dead. And that is the inevitable direction of travel: historians bring the past into the present, a conversation that when necessary rings with contemporary questions.

With the sense of hearing, the presence of the contemporary at the historian's table has created not only resonance but also an excess of clarity about the past. This is especially evident in two sprawling discourses about hearing's modern diminution, twin narrative structures of loss and absence that have taken on the aura of the universal. The first involves the eye's clear eclipse of the ear, the decline of listening in the face of the ascendant power of vision in modern culture. The second concerns the dwindling of hearing as a spiritual sense and the lost presence of divine speech - that is, the peculiar acoustics of modern forms of alienation, disillusionment, and secularism. Recognizing how the sense of hearing has been framed within the metanarratives of modernity is a prerequisite for a more intricate historical narrative. It allows for acknowledgement of the universalized philosophical and religious inscriptions with which modern ears have been marked. The prisoners in Plato's cave, it is easily forgotten, were troubled not only by the flickering images but also by the echoes. What historians hear reflected back at them often proves to be little more than the sounds of their own tongues, but this particular treachery of knowledge is a reality to face, not efface.

More than meets the eye

The hearing impairments of modernity are so often presented as extensive and profound that one is sometimes tempted to scramble for a hearing-aid, or perhaps the early modern equivalent - an ear trumpet. As much of the writing on the modern sensorium has argued or presumed, vision is the dominant sense of modernity, the other senses being comparably

Leigh Eric Schmidt, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 15-37.

'Hearing Loss' reprinted by permission of the publisher from Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion and the American Enlightenment by Leigh Eric Schmidt, pp. 15-37 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). © 2000 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

repressed (such as smell) or vestigial (such as hearing's former centrality in oral cultures). In the very long view, the shift from orality to literacy - according, most famously, to Walter Ong and Marshall McLuhan - gradually transformed people from engaged speakers and listeners into silent scanners of written words, isolated readers in the linear world of texts. The print revolution of the early modern period sharply accelerated this bending toward visuality, this hearing loss, as books, newspapers, tracts, broadsides, charts, and Bibles flooded the cultural marketplace. Words became printed objects more than breathed speech, things to be seen rather than voices to be heard.

With its clear-eyed pursuit of detached observation, imperial sweep, and visual instrumentation, the Enlightenment was the keystone in the arch of the eye's ascendancy 'The ocular obsession of Enlightenment thought', as historian of the senses Constance Classen has recently labelled it, served to clinch the gaze's domination of the modern sensorium. So the favoured story goes. From this critical perspective, the consumer society of spectacle, with its mediated and cinematic pleasures, becomes little more than the froth on the Enlightenment's visual wave, the bedazzled eyes of the shopper and the spectator only redoubling vision's power. With Chance the gardener, in the film Being There, we moderns like to watch. In a culture of science, spectacle, surveillance, sexism, shopping, and simulacra (to conflate the views of many cultural critics into one), voyeurism is often the least of the eye's transgressions (Classen 1993a).

That ocularcentrism is peculiarly modern may seem at first glance surprising, especially given the deep-rootedness of such visuality in classical orderings of the senses. For both knowledge and delight, the sense of sight was, according to Aristotle, 'above all others'; it was the most developed sense, the clearest and most discerning, the one most able to bring 'to light many differences between things'. Hearing was a close second, superior for its conduciveness to learning. Taste and touch, associated with animality, had the 'least honour'. Smell fell as a mediator in the middle. Despite Christian reservations about the dangers of the eye and its seductions, this hierarchic view of the senses was widely replicated in theological terms from Augustine onward, including Aquinas's repetition of sight's crowning perfection in the Summa Theologica (followed still by hearing and smell, then by taste and touch). In commentary on the senses, this has been one of most deep-seated philosophical formulas to follow the ancients in establishing a hierarchy of perception, a system of nobility. Though hearing has had its apologists, from Lactantius in the fourth century to Charles de Bovelles in the sixteenth to Walter Ong in the twentieth, sight has commonly stood at the apex for more than two millennia. Even after the time-worn suppositions have largely passed that made such rankings seem so sensible - ordered relationships of honour and nobility are not how one would think modern citizens would imagine the senses - the Aristotelian forms of appraisal have continued, often with a vengeance.¹

It the supreme nobility of sight is thus deeply ingrained in Western religious and philosophical traditions, many nonetheless argue that this privileging of visuality reached its apogee only during the Enlightenment and its aftermath. Modernity is seen as distinctly ocularcentric, even hypervisual; it is marked, as philosopher Jaques Ellul puts it, by 'the unconditional victory of the visual and images'. Historian Martin Jay, in his monumental account of modern ocularcentrism, has surveyed the dominance of the eyes and the ambivalences that power has generated, especially since the ascent of what he calls Cartesian perspectivalism. It is evident, Jay concludes

that the dawn of the modern era was accompanied by the vigorous privileging of vision. From the curious, observant scientist to the exhibitionist, self-displaying courtier, from the private reader of printed books to the painter of perspectival landscapes, from the map-making colonizer of foreign lands to the quantifying businessman guided by instrumental rationality, modern men and women opened their eyes and beheld a world unveiled to their eager gaze.

While acknowledging some Enlightenment dissenters from the visual paradigm, Jay nonetheless builds on and replicates the hierarchy of the senses in which sight is the noblest and most powerful. Whether in Francis Bacons aphorism, 'I admit nothing but on the faith of the eyes', or in Thomas Reid's, 'Of all the faculties called the five senses, sight is without doubt the noblest', Jay lifts up vision as 'the dominant sense in the modern world'. He also presents the technologies of vision - from the microscope to the panopticon - as the quintessential instruments of the modern 'scopic regime'. Sight, 'the most comprehensive of all our senses', as John Locke concluded in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, reigns with unquestioned supremacy over the Enlightenment enterprise.²

The counterpart to the history of increasing ocularcentrism has been the history of diminished hearing. As an aspect of cultural history, this account of the senses was pioneered by the Annales school, especially Lucien Febvre and Robert Mandrou. In an evocative section entitled 'Smells, Tastes, and Sounds' in The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century, Febvre commented of Rabelais and his contemporaries: 'They were open-air men, seeing nature but also feeling, sniffing, touchin...