Thresholds of Listening

Sound, Technics, Space

Sander van Maas

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780823264384, 9780823264377
• eBook ISBN: 9780823264391
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

Thresholds of Listening addresses recent and historical changes in the ways listening has been conceived. Listening, having been emancipated from the passive, subjected position of reception, has come to be asserted as an active force in culture and in collective and individual politics.The contributors to this volume show that the exteriorization of listening— brought into relief by recent historical studies of technologies of listening—involves a re-negotiation of the theoretical and pragmatic distinctions that underpin the notion of listening. Focusing on the manifold borderlines between listening and its erstwhile others, such as speaking, reading, touching, seeing, or hearing, the book maps new frontiers in the history of aurality. They suggest that listening's finitude— defined in some of the essays as its death or deadliness—should be considered as a heuristic instrument rather than as a mere descriptor.Listening emerges where it appears to end or to run up against thresholds and limits—or when it takes unexpected turns. Listening's recent emergence on the cultural and theoretical scene may therefore be productively read against contemporary recurrences of the motifs of elusiveness, finitude, and resistance to open up new politics, discourses, and technologies of aurality.

CHAPTER 1

The Auditory Re-Turn (The Point of Listening)

Peter Szendy

As I approach a curve or bend on a road, I am often quite tempted, I confess, to turn about, turn back.

And I am afraid that this may happen to me yet again, here and now.

But unlike Orpheus, who performed what we could consider the first visual turn—turning backward to see if Eurydice was following him—my volte-face, my turnabout is about hearing.¹

The point will be, then (hear it as you wish): about listening.

It is always a weird experience to reread something that one wrote many years earlier—words about listening, for example, written when no one much thought about an “auditory turn in the humanities” or talked about “sound studies.”²

Please allow me to digress here, turning aside even before having properly started. Often regarded as one of the “founders” of “sound studies,” Jonathan Sterne, in his remarkable book The Audible Past, claims to have paved the way:

While writers interested in visual media have for some time gestured toward a conceptualization of visual culture, no such parallel construct—sound culture or, simply, sound studies—has broadly informed work on hearing or the other senses. . . . Sound is not usually a central theoretical problem for major schools of cultural theory, apart from the privilege of the voice in phenomenology and psychoanalysis and its negation in deconstruction.³

In what follows, I hope to be able to suggest, at least indirectly, that this simplistic reading of deconstruction prevents Sterne from considering how hearing has been practiced in theory, if I may say so. And it seems difficult to really think hearing without lending an attentive ear to such a theoretical practice of listening. From this point of view, the “auditory turn” advocated by Don Ihde, decades ago, inside the phenomenological tradition is far more rigorous and consequent. Ihde is fully aware of the various traps awaiting such a theoretical gesture (for example, when he writes, “just as no ‘pure’ auditory experience can be found, neither could a ‘pure’ auditory ‘world’ be constructed”); and while emphasizing that “visualism” is “as old as our own cultural heritage,” he acutely takes into account what he describes as the “auditory tone” in Husserl and Heidegger.⁴ Those who, after Ihde, took over such an “auditory turn,” tend to misread the relationship between deconstruction and the phenomenological tradition with regard to voice, sound, or hearing. Reflecting on an “‘auditory turn’ in scholarship,” Douglas Kahn, for example, writes that “Derrida’s critique of the presence of the voice . . . engendered, among certain sensitive types, a phonophobia and favored instead the visual register of writing and inscription.”⁵ It should soon become evident that this, again, is an oversimplification.

End of my digression. Let us turn back to where we started.

Hearing the voice that “speaks” from pages half forgotten is an uncanny experience, much like listening to a recording of one’s own speech: you do not recognize it (you have never heard it like that), but at the same time, it sounds embarrassingly familiar. If it is true that reading always entails the hearing of a voice, if reading is also listening, what happens when one reads oneself?

There is a word that could describe this strange effect: egophony. It is an old word—yes, I remember encountering it at the turn of a sentence in an old book, René-Théophile-Hyacinthe Laënnec’s Treatise on Mediate Auscultation, published in Paris in 1819. I recall asking myself, What could such a sonority of the ego be? I was already rushing into all sorts of hypotheses when, seized by doubt, I checked the etymology: here, ego comes from the Greek aigos, genitive of aix, goat. And the “ego” that I mistook for “mine” was meant, instead, to somehow translate the quivering resonance—like the voice of a goat—in a patient’s chest.

I was disappointed—worried also, since I used to smoke a lot at the time. And my misunderstanding kept contaminating the correct sense of the word. While I went on reading Laënnec’s Treatise, it was impossible not to think that when a physician presses his ear against an ailing body and hears the noise of his own auditory act, he experiences a sonority of the self that prevents him from listening to the illness of the other: “One cannot apply the ear without pressing strongly the patient’s chest. . . . This circumstance produces irrelevant noises (des bruits étrangers) determined by the observer’s muscular contraction.”⁶ When auscultating without mediation, by applying the ear immediately to the body, one runs the risk of hearing only oneself—oneself listening and the rustling of hearing itself.

Will I be able, then, to read again, hear again, and auscultate what I happened to write on or about the ear, without the unpleasant interference of egophony?

In Écoute, une histoire de nos oreilles and later in Sur écoute, I investigated many auditory postures, all of them leading to what we could call, using a word dear to Derrida, an exappropriation at work in the process of hearing. That which is audible, so fragile and evanescent, as if made of bubbles, urges the ear to steal, to keep, and to possess all the more intensely so that what it “has” instantaneously escapes its grasp.

Long before the development of digital audio piracy, one of Bach’s sons, Carl Philipp Emmanuel, characterized listening (Abhören) as “a kind of tolerated larceny” (eine Art erlaubten Diebstahls).⁷ If hearing is a sort of licit theft, then music lovers could just be, as I have suggested elsewhere, kleptomelomaniacs.⁸ This would be one of the main guises under which the “drive for mastery” (the Freudian Bemächtigungstrieb) appears in the auditory dimension. Another guise corresponds to a much more recent meaning of the verb abhören, which also designates various forms of electronic surveillance. Like overhearing in English, abhören belongs to a paradigm that I once tried to analyze as pertaining to the “aesthetics of spying”: I wanted to emphasize the active power of the ear, a power to which we are so oblivious today, since we conceive of hearing as a passive reception. I was looking for another way to name our auditory practices, without canceling their penetrating and punctuating potential but also without ignoring their appropriating strategies, which are always bound to fail.

I realize now that I could also have enlisted, in my auditory vocabulary, the old noun, the good old signifier used by Laënnec, auscultation. This is what I would like to do here, by briefly returning to some auditory turns, in Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida.

Thinking hearing as an auscultation: this is one of Nietzsche’s many legacies. And it is an injunction that Derrida took over and powerfully redeployed, first in the “Tympan” of his Margins and then in his critical radiography of “Heidegger’s Ear.”⁹ But before listening to them listening, we have to recall what the practice of medical auscultation meant for its inventor, for Laënnec.

In the first edition of his Treatise on Mediate Auscultation, in 1819, Laënnec pays his debts, first to Jean-Nicolas Corvisart, his professor at the Hôpital de la Charité in Paris, then to the Austrian physician Joseph Leopold Auenbrugger, the inventor of the practice known as “percussion.”¹⁰

Auenbrugger, in his Inventum novum (1761), compared the sound of a percussed chest to the sound of “drums” (tympanis), “when covered with a sheet or a cloth.”¹¹ Corvisart, translating Auenbrugger’s work from the Latin, insisted in his preface on the remarkable auditory capacity that the practitioner has to develop:

When properly exercised, the senses, and touch in particular, can achieve such a degree of perfection that, even in the places where, according to the author [Auenbrugger], a fatty and fleshy mass obscures the sound, the practitioner who studied percussion in a precise and consequent manner will feel, at the tip of his fingers, a sensation equivalent for him to the sound that the ear is unable to grasp [éprouve, au bout de ses doigts, une sensation qui équivaut pour lui au son que l’oreille ne peut saisir].¹²

The physician, here, seems to be listening at the tip of his fingers. And this digital hearing, inherited from Auenbrugger via Corvisart, will not be “forgotten,” Laënnec insists; it will not be replaced by auscultation. On the contrary, auscultation will confer a “new importance” to percussion, by “extending its usefulness to other diseases,” by generalizing it beyond its former limits.¹³ Even if mediate auscultation introduces the distance of an auditory prosthesis, so to speak, between the ear and the patient’s body, something will remain of the punctual and punctuating tactility of percussion.

While retaining a tactile character, auscultation, as Foucault remarked, is also a delayed or deferred vision, since it is essentially meant to “draw the dotted outline of future autopsy.”¹⁴ Indeed, Laënnec emphasizes the necessity of “verifying . . . by means of an autopsy the diagnoses established with the cylinder [i.e., the stethoscope],” in order to “convince oneself with the eyes of the certainty of the signs given by hearing.”¹⁵ Auscultation, then, appears suspended between the tangible punctuation of percussion and the pending optics of necropsy.¹⁶

To grasp the singularity of medical hearing, we should consider it in this in-between status: it is not an immediate touch anymore, and not yet a knowing gaze. While dotting the surface of the body, as Foucault says, auscultation does not proceed by tapping blindly around, like percussion does: it stops at some points on the surface in order to overpunctuate them, by dividing their stigmatic unity, by listening to more than one sign in one point. Indeed, Laënnec writes, one can “hear in the sa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Auditory Re-Turn (The Point of Listening)
• 2. “Dear Listener . . .”: Music and the Invention of Subjectivity
• 3. Scenes of Devastation: Interpellation, Finite and Infinite
• 4. Positive Feedback: Listening behind Hearing
• 5. “Antennas Have Long Since Invaded Our Brains”: Listening to the “Other Music” in Friedrich Kittler
• 6. Movement at the Boundaries of Listening, Composition, and Performance
• 7. The Biopolitics of Noise: Kafka’s “Der Bau”
• 8. Torture as an Instrument of Music
• 9. Stop It, I Like It! Embodiment, Masochism, and Listening for Traumatic Pleasure
• 10. Sounds of Belonging: Accented Writing in Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight
• 11. Back to the Beat: Silent Orality in Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries
• 12. The Discovery of Slowness in Music
• 13. Negotiating Ecstasy: Electronic Dance Music and the Temporary Autonomous Zone
• Notes
• List of Contributors
• Index