Thresholds of Listening: Sound, Technics, Space

By Fordham University Press

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9780823264391

Book preview

THRESHOLDS OF LISTENING

Thresholds of Listening

SOUND, TECHNICS, SPACE

Edited by

SANDER VAN MAAS

FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York 2015

Copyright © 2015 Fordham University Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Thresholds of listening : sound, technics, space / edited by Sander van Maas. — First edition.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8232-6437-7 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8232-6438-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Listening (Philosophy)   I. Maas, Sander van, 1968– editor.

B105.L54T47 2015

128'.4—dc23

2015009539

Printed in the United States of America

17 16 15      5 4 3 2 1

First edition

in memory of Helen Tartar

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

SANDER VAN MAAS

1. The Auditory Re-Turn (The Point of Listening)

PETER SZENDY

2. Dear Listener . . .: Music and the Invention of Subjectivity

LAWRENCE KRAMER

3. Scenes of Devastation: Interpellation, Finite and Infinite

SANDER VAN MAAS

4. Positive Feedback: Listening behind Hearing

DAVID WILLS

5. Antennas Have Long Since Invaded Our Brains: Listening to the Other Music in Friedrich Kittler

MELLE JAN KROMHOUT

6. Movement at the Boundaries of Listening, Composition, and Performance

JASON FREEMAN

7. The Biopolitics of Noise: Kafka’s Der Bau

ANTHONY CURTIS ADLER

8. Torture as an Instrument of Music

JOHN T. HAMILTON

9. Stop It, I Like It! Embodiment, Masochism, and Listening for Traumatic Pleasure

ROBERT SHOLL

10. Sounds of Belonging: Accented Writing in Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight

LIEDEKE PLATE

11. Back to the Beat: Silent Orality in Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries

KIENE BRILLENBURG WURTH

12. The Discovery of Slowness in Music

ALEXANDER REHDING

13. Negotiating Ecstasy: Electronic Dance Music and the Temporary Autonomous Zone

ANDREW SHENTON

Notes

List of Contributors

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The making of this collection of essays has greatly benefited from the generous support of a number of people. First I express my gratitude to and loving admiration for Kiene Brillenburg Wurth, who shared her enthusiasm for this project from its earliest beginnings and beyond her chapter contributed to its initial design. At Fordham University Press I thank Helen Tartar, Editorial Director, for encouraging this project ever since we discussed liminal auralities over dinner many years ago. It was with great sadness that I and everyone else involved in this book learned of her untimely passing while the manuscript was in its final stages. Together we dedicate Thresholds of Listening to Helen: to the exceptional editor she was; to her intellectually fearless, gentle, and caring personality; and to the sounds and silences of her knitting, which appeared to codify her listening for the ear of the other. At Fordham I also thank Helen’s outstanding colleagues Thomas Lay, Eric Newman, and Andrew Katz for turning the manuscript into this handsome book. Finally, I thank the authors for their patient support and outstanding contributions.

THRESHOLDS OF LISTENING

Introduction

Sander van Maas

When in 1972 the U.S. presidential candidate George McGovern aired a television commercial that portrayed him as a listener, the commercial was hastily withdrawn by the campaign because, according to its producer, Charles Guggenheim, it didn’t make him look presidential enough.¹ Recounting this telling decision in an essay on listening in contemporary politics Andrew Wolvin suggests how in the decades after McGovern the status and meaning of listening evolved to the point that by early the 1990s presenting oneself as a listener became mandatory in the eyes of many politicians and their campaigns.

This collection of essays addresses recent and historical changes in the ways in which listening has been conceived as a cultural agency and act. Indeed, it argues that listening, by emancipating from an essentially implied, passive-receiving, and subjected position, has become an explicit factor in culture and the object of proactive collective and individual politics. As the essays in this volume show, the exteriorization of listening—which is brought into further relief by recent historical studies of technologies of listening—involves a renegotiation of the theoretical and pragmatic distinctions that underpin the notion of listening.²

Focusing on the manifold borderlines between listening and its (former) others, such as speaking, reading, touching, seeing, or hearing, the essays here collected map new frontiers in the history of listening. 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. As it will be argued along multiple lines and using a rich variety of (re)sources, 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 that have historically informed notions of aurality and that are often found at the heart of the new politics, discourses, and technologies of listening emerging today.³

A further example from the recent history of political listening may illustrate this point. Twenty years after McGovern’s television commercial was pulled, Bill Clinton’s biographer Robert Levin portrayed the new president as a good—more than good—listener.

Bill is a legendary listener. This is not a party trick developed for Campaign ’92. He gets lost in people. He always has. I’ve never been out to dinner with him in Arkansas that someone didn’t approach him—a farmer, a teacher, a teenager—with a suggestion or complaint or a story. Bill turns all the way around to them and gives them his full attention and we’ve got lost him for awhile. When he turns back to us it’s Listen to what he just told me! or Did you hear her idea? Listen to this!⁴

While Clinton’s alleged ability to lend his ear is framed as a matter of a personal aptitude, the construal of political listening was soon to make its next transformation. Several years after the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton’s husband, Hillary adopted her adviser and polling expert Mark Penn’s concept of a listening tour when running for the U.S. Senate in New York in 2000.⁵ This concept proved successful insofar as it generated wide media coverage and was readopted in the decade after Clinton’s election to the Senate, both by herself and by other politicians on both sides of the political (and gender) spectrum, all wishing to put the listening before the talking in their campaigns.⁶

If things have changed since the days of McGovern, it is not only because the ability to listen has changed significance and meaning but also because listening itself has gone through a process of instrumentalization. Listening now sits on the side of power as a tool in the politician’s toolbox rather than as a contingent aptitude of a particular individual. It is no longer thought of as a quality belonging to the realm of the individual psyche but as something that can be projected, represented, performed, manipulated, communicated, shared, and monetized. Since the late 1990s listening has moved center stage in leadership theories and business-management literature with dozens of publications appearing.⁷ It may legitimately be asked what this apparent turn to listening is about, beyond the ebb and flow of trends in (political) leadership culture.

If listening’s time to step into broad daylight has come, the question is why this should be the case. Why now, in this particular form? How can these events in the history of listening be accounted for, and how do they project onto its future? Is listening still the right term for the practices discussed under its name? What is listening, in the first place?

Coinciding with the emergence of listening as a political factor in the early 1990s, cultural theorists and scholars of music began to make a significant turn toward listening as an object of historical and theoretical reflection.⁸ This field of research was inaugurated by the lifting of the faculty of hearing from its double status of pure receptivity and hyperconductivity. The ears, the oft-repeated perception holds, do not have (ear-)lids, separating them biologically and culturally from notions of voluntary selection.⁹ This view of the ear as a biological, wetware recording device is complemented by its construal as a type of hyperconductor. With reference to its anatomical position between the outer world and the inwardness of the mind, the ear is often construed as subservient to the integrity and content of the acoustic and auditory signals it transduces. The ear leaves no trace or it malfunctions, in which case it needs medical or technical intervention to restore it to its presumed natural silence. A key challenge of the new cultural and theoretical listening studies has been to criticize this dominant view that expresses and maintains a minimal or liminal awareness of listening in Western culture by listening into its active, sonic, and conceptual presence.

This criticism introduces the question of sources and methods, that is, of where, when, and how listening can be accessed if it cannot be reduced to any particular object of listening. Even though this introduction started by listening into the intersubjective political ear, musical experience has remained to be considered an important area for such access. According to Theodor W. Adorno, whose typology of musical listening from the 1960s (even though he had drafted them as early as 1939) provides a major point of reference for the early development of the field, the presence of musical works is essential for understanding the nature of listening.¹⁰ Construing listening as a subjective relation to an object, Adorno nevertheless believes that any aesthetic theory should begin on the side of the produced work rather than that of the listener. His typology of listening (more precisely, on music relations, musikalisches Verhalten) reads as a gradient that starts at the top with the expert listener who is capable of fully adequate and self-accounting listening to types of music relation determined by undefined subjective sensations and motor reactions that, according to Adorno, are only remotely related to the musical work’s dialectical form and structure.¹¹

Critical responses to Adorno’s typology, which intensified with Rose Subotnik’s celebrated 1988 essay on structural listening, have typically targeted its implicitly hierarchical and elitist presuppositions, defending the subjective content of modes of listening that are less determined by the object (or by an object conceived differently).¹² Recently Peter Szendy has highlighted the multiplicity of points of listening implicit in accounts of listening as an object relation by reading musical works—in particular musical arrangements—as layers of listening that are engaged by listening listeners.¹³ Jean-Luc Nancy argues that no musical work could ever possess identity without having a self-relation, which he finds no other concept is better able to express than the concept of listening itself (écoute). Musical works, he argues, are always engaged by the ear while in the act of listening to themselves (s’écoute) and only present themselves as objects for listening to the extent that they express such self-relations.¹⁴ Indeed, Nancy argues, when listening to music, our ear addresses listenings rather than (intentional) objects.

The examples of Szendy and Nancy suggest how the distinction between the who and the what of listening has become less clear-cut since the inception of aural studies. Whereas in Adorno this distinction is still capable of organizing the relation between the subject listening and the object listened to, in contemporary theories listening appears to turn around and fold back on itself. This turning and folding is at the heart of the listening tour (in the sense of a circling, turning, torsion, version) conducted throughout this volume. Which musical, aural, sonic, historical, philosophical events cause listening to perform this turn and engage and represent (impress, inscribe, project, touch) itself? How is this aural reflexivity mediated? That is, what kind of traces does listening produce? How could these traces be identified, archived, analyzed, read, theorized, exchanged, broadcasted, translated? Finally, how could these otographical and otological practices be supported by an aural epistemic (or acoustemics to come, as proposed by Wolfgang Ernst)?¹⁵ In this collection such questions arise from the discussion of practices of listening that, both in the realm of music and beyond, are becoming ever more (inter)mediated—ever more important as examples of how listening is progressively understood as always being out loud rather than silent, immediate, and implied.

The underlying process of what might be called (but only problematically so, as these essays make clear) an emancipation or enlightenment of listening has been a slow and protracted one.¹⁶ Roland Barthes may have been among the first to call attention to the historicity of listening by highlighting the great changes the twentieth century brought to the concept of listening (écoute). In his seminal essay Écoute (Listening) from 1976, starting from a general distinction between hearing as a physiological phenomenon and listening as a psychological act, Barthes defines three different forms of listening.¹⁷ The first form, called indexical listening, is exemplified by the animal that pricks up its ears after hearing a sound and is directed toward the realm of possibility as it transforms noise into an index. The second, called hermeneutical listening, Barthes defines as a listening for meaning. This type of listening is exemplified by the dialogue through which man metamorphoses . . . into a dual subject in that each utterance will be heard as a sign to be decoded or, more generally, a secret to be disclosed, in an act of interpretation.¹⁸ This second type of listening, then, paves the way for a third that Barthes situates historically with Freud. According to Barthes, psychoanalysis courted the risk inherent in its aim to listen past a patient’s words and into their origin in the unconscious. The listening cure of psychoanalysis acknowledges that the object of its listening—the other’s desire—is a thing not quietly to be listened to but to be engaged through and to some extent produced by the act of listening.

If Barthes argues that listening cannot be constructed under the shelter of a theoretical apparatus, it is because in psychoanalysis listening is ultimately determined by displacement.¹⁹ Listening is displaced, first, by the logic of shifting and condensation in the patient’s unconscious that it aims to bring to speech. Second, it is displaced by the analyst’s own unconscious, which dissimulates the truth of listening in soundless dream images that convey aural experiences only in indirect visual, and sometimes narrative, form.²⁰ In Freud, then, listening is reconceived as a mode of productive perception that is a prerequisite for dealing with the newly invented outside located inside the human mind, called the unconscious, but that can never be fully equal to this eminent task. Hence, even though he foregrounded the ear as a site for the analysis of the modern self and culture, Freud insisted on its liminal status to the point of evoking the danger inseparable from deliberate attentiveness through the ear.²¹

As recent interventions suggest, liminality remains a recurrent theme in the history of listening as it is in the process of being written. Veit Erlmann suggests in his historical study of aurality’s relation to reason, Reason and Resonance, how Cartesian reason as it was construed by the antirationalist critique of the later twentieth century is decisively at odds with Descartes’s thinking. The latter’s focus on vision (such as in the "clair et distinct" of the ideas) as well as the theatricality of consciousness in the elaboration of the Cogito, Erlmann argues, should not blind us to the fact that Descartes spent many pages on the workings of the ear and on the perception of musical relationships. These provide a view of the ways in which, even for Descartes, the Cogito should never be understood as a power and a principle that would be fundamentally alien to the logic of resonance or percussion—or, for that matter, to the realm of the aural in general.²² On the contrary.

Even though his interest in the ear never crystallized into a coherent theory . . . Descartes did ponder . . . the deeper association of sum with sonus. In fact, instead of the alleged exclusion of the ear from the search for truth, Descartes’ philosophy enacts an uneasy truce between cogito and audio, a precarious entente between entendre, hearing, and entendre, understanding. More than a thought experiment, Descartes’ nocturnal ruminations can thus be interpreted as a psychosonic exercise, setting off what one might call the philosopher’s lifelong (and never quite complete) quest for reasonance, for the joining together of reason and resonance in a new concept of personhood.²³

The critique of ocularcentrism and rationalism of previous generations of scholars, then, calls for a more complete and nuanced picture.²⁴ The histories of reason and resonance appear to run in parallel, one never allowing the other to be excluded or eclipsed. As a consequence, being entangled in resonance, reason cannot stand as a principle that would allow for a pure and complete enlightenment of aurality. Its process will perhaps always be that of a liminal reasonance rather than of a clear and distinct elucidation of the foundations of the aural. Generalizing this point, it might be asked whether—against the rising tide of available listening studies, which each in its own way lays claim to the progressive enlightenment of its subject—listening may remain to be understood as a liminal phenomenon, if liminal is taken to mean in the process of formation, not yet established or identifiable as such, emerging.

If this collection of essays bears the idea of the threshold in its title, it is in order to maintain an awareness of the important role of limits, thresholds (limen), and turning points in our approach to, and understanding of, listening. Without suggesting that each of the essays here collected can be reduced to a single and stable constellation of concepts, it might be observed that in each such an awareness is expressed. To quote Stanley Cavell, collecting resonance (or should we rather say, reasonance) from one another, these essays do not quite compose a book, but they do invite a consideration of the ways in which listening emerges while hearing such re(a)sonance.²⁵ The following account of one essay to the next aims to retrace some of these ways by hearing or listening out loud the resonances produced along these series.

In The Auditory Re-turn (The Point of Listening) Peter Szendy critically reviews the recent debate on listening in the wake of the auditory turn in the humanities and the rise of sonic studies. Szendy argues that while over the past decade there has been an admirable effort to expand the study of listening practices, proponents such as Lawrence Sterne have tended to construe this turn by misrepresenting the achievements of poststructuralism in this area.²⁶ Szendy foregrounds the practicing of hearing in the medium of theory in the works of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida, emphasizing the ways in which these thinkers had made countless auditory turns well before the advent of the fields of aural and sonic studies properly speaking. Szendy’s presentation of their otological work expands the lexicon of listening to include a series of prefixes, inflections, and sematic expansions. Nietzsche reconceived thinking in terms of an "Überhören," an overhearing that Szendy interprets as eavesdropping, as kleptomaniac Abhören, and as a panoramic hearing. Placing Nietzsche in the historical context of medical auscultation, he argues that Nietzsche was the first to expand listening into (and out of) the human body by means of knocking on the bodies and idols of the world. Through this percussing and listening out of the hollowness of the idols, Nietzsche was able to articulate his philosophy of nihilism. Creating a new alignment between the fingers, the ears, and the eyes, he conceived of a liminal knowing that announces what has been echolocated rather than submitted to a knowing gaze. According to Szendy, Heidegger used the ear of his thinking to listen into philosophical discourses, insisting on the detectability of the unison (Einklang) between concepts or between thinking and sensing. Derrida, in deconstructing the alleged logocentricity and monaurality of Heidegger’s ear, nevertheless stops short of the binaural or interaural approach that Szendy later developed in his own work on listening.²⁷

With regard to thresholds of listening, Lawrence Kramer in his essay ‘Dear Listener . . .’: Music and the Invention of Subjectivity points toward the importance of address in the constitution of listening subjectivity. He argues that in contrast to hearing, listening is not merely concerned with the event of sonority but with its cultural appropriation in what he calls the theater of human agency. Rather than subjectively receiving musical address, this appropriation is mediated by the tropes and structures of call, echo, and response that emerge at the threshold of subjective or, Kramer writes, asubjective forces. As the history of musical thought since the nineteenth century suggests, these forces may be imagined to arise both from within subjectivity (for instance, as the monstrous or the undead) and from music as an impersonal, prosthetic, ghostly, but no less compelling source of address. In contrast to what Louis Althusser’s theory of interpretation would lead us to believe, such address will not elicit listening subjectivity. According to Kramer, listening subjectivity is never given but results from an oblique and inventive response to musical address, which, as is illustrated by his reading of a concerto of Vivaldi, in certain cases may be determined by the possibility of asubjective cancellation. Kramer’s account of listening, then, shows how the figure of the threshold operates to support a historically and contextually sensitive account of the ways in which musical address has been key to the invention of listening subjectivity in Western classical music.

In Kramer’s essay in this volume as well as in earlier texts, his account furthermore suggests that, as the epoch of musical listening’s coming into its own is drawing to a close, it may have entered its endgame. This epoch, he suggests in Why Classical Music Still Matters, runs parallel to the epoch of classical music, which, he claims, invented listening itself. The music attuned itself to previously unheard and unheard-of potentialities of listening and made them available to be given. The recipient is the modern self, which has to listen differently, as it has to live differently, from its forebears. This music gives subjectivity ears.²⁸ If classical music is now losing ground in terms of its cultural presence and authority, this may partly be because the way it is perceived by listeners and audiences has transformed under the impact of media technologies.²⁹ The fate of listening would then be played out in the triangle of technology, address, and subjectivity.

In Scenes of Devastation: Interpellation, Finite and Infinite I respond to Kramer’s account of musical address by offering a reinterpretation of the failure of interpellation as an explanatory model for listener subjectivation. The starting point for this dialogue is Kramer’s celebrated analysis of Jane Campion’s film The Portrait of a Lady, based on Henry James, in which the protagonist, Isabel, appears interpellated by the music of Schubert. I argue, with Kramer, for the importance of both address and subjectivity in listening but emphasize the role of infinity and negation over against what I read as an insistence on the finite and positive in Kramer (who, in his essay in this volume, responds with his view of these matters). Introducing a distinction between finite and infinite interpellation, I turn toward the Orphic ascent from Hades as recounted by the neomodernist composer Beat Furrer. For me, Orpheus’s turning around (and around) exemplifies the dark and devastating power of interpellation as an infinite process, as an aural call into being that maintains a radically asymmetrical relation to any attempt to respond and reconnect. Listening subjectivity, I conclude, always remains on the side of Eurydice, that is, behind the one who is interpellated.

In Positive Feedback: Listening behind Hearing David Wills returns to the tropology of the back that he developed in his work on technology and the concept of dorsality.³⁰ At issue here is the common distinction between hearing and listening, which some languages make and some do not (ancient Greek, for instance, does not) and which begs the question of the priority of either. Do we begin to listen after we have first heard? And if we listen to the extent that we hear, are we then supposing that reception (listening) and perception (hearing) coincide to create immediacy? As discussed at the beginning of this introduction, questions such as these have come up throughout the history of listening and its theorization. Like Adorno, Wills is interested in the relation between hearing, listening, and technology. But unlike Adorno, he is not suggesting that listening is on the side of the musical expert, whose ears have been trained to listen skillfully and technically and who, due to this, may resist a media-induced regression of listening, whereas nonexperts supposedly hear music in a nontechnical way.³¹ On the contrary, Wills argues that technologization, as he calls it, is the key determining event of both hearing and listening. His interlocutor here is Laurie Anderson, who in an electronic song from the 1980s asks that we listen to her heartbeat. Introducing the notion of dorsal listening, Wills proposes to think and hear listening as an interruption of pure hearing by prostheses, including those that seem surprisingly continuous with the natural body and its organs. An illuminating example is Wills’s discussion of the figures of the tending and lending of the ear, which, he argues, show that listening needs to be thought of as an exposure to detachment, substitutability, and ultimately inanimation. Wills suggests in reference to Anderson’s song that listening, being coextensive with hearing, is about what we hear out of earshot, on our way back to her heartbeat.

With the market introduction of music-identification applications, the gesture of lending an ear has recently become quite literally practicable. In Antennas Have Long Since Invaded Our Brains: Listening to ‘the Other Music’ in Friedrich Kittler Melle Kromhout reads the media revolution in music from the pages of Kittler’s oeuvre. As Kromhout shows, throughout Kittler’s career the German theorist—known for his project to drive the spirit (Geist) out of the humanities—had been consistent in his musical preferences, focusing as he did on Richard Wagner, Jimi Hendrix, and most important, Pink Floyd. For Kittler this music exemplified an other music that was no longer based on a theory of harmonic order but on a cutout from the totality of worldwide noise as it was theorized after Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Kromhout construes Kittler’s turn toward noise as a turn away from language as a model for music and toward mathematics and media as a model. The development of Fourier analysis and the invention of the phonograph paved the way for a concept of music based on sound (Klang). Reducible neither to meaning nor to pure materiality, sound became the new anchor for listening in the twentieth century. Kittler’s practice and concept of listening, Kromhout argues, may be understood as replacing interpretation with feedback systems, suggesting the redundancy of concepts such as inwardness, Geist, and soul in musical engagement. In Kromhout’s analysis of Shazam, a music-identification application that allows users to identify recorded songs by having a mobile device listen to their sounds, he further examines the impact of digitality on our concepts of listening and listenership. Listening, his account seems to suggest, is no longer in the position to perceive the fundamental tone (auf seinen Grundton hören) that Heidegger wanted to auscultate (erhören) in his philosophy.³² Instead, digital music technology, Kromhout writes, may be said to have programmed a detachment of the ear by increasing the speed of processing and the vastness of information beyond the human perceptual scale. When the medium creates listeners, they in turn may discover new possibilities through their status as substitute (Ersatz).

In these first five essays issues of space and place come up more than once, in particular in relation to the border zones between listening subjects and sounding objects. Peter Sloterdijk argues in his 1993 essay Where Are We, When We Hear Music? that aurality is always positioning itself in the midst of things, in the mode of enstasis. "No listener (Hörer) can believe himself to be standing at the edge of the audible."³³ Hence, in a dialogue with Descartes, Hegel, and Heidegger, Sloterdijk develops a notion of the subject as a medium percussum. With a slightly different emphasis, Jean-Luc Nancy argues that aural relationships with the world are modes of partaking (methexis) rather than mimesis, that is, of participation without being contained or comprehended (enclosed) in terms of identity and the implied notions of community.³⁴ In Jason Freeman’s contribution to this volume, Movement at the Boundaries of Listening, Composition, and Performance, the author discusses several compositional projects, including three of his own, that thematize such aural being-in-the-world (soundscapes) and partaking of music (interactivity). Starting with examples of contemporary works that rethink the static, frontal positioning of listeners in traditional concert venues by allowing listeners to wander around the real space of the hall and to penetrate the performers’ space, Freeman proceeds to examples where real space and virtual spaces are layered over one another. While retaining properties of real space in one layer, new freedoms are allowed by the virtual layer in that it enables listeners to become more active and creative by sharing and modifying both the space and the musical content. Movement and navigation are key to understanding how listening in a sense has moved inside the musical work, now reconceived as a place where users, performers, and composers meet. Freeman argues that this allows him as a composer to challenge listeners to make individual and collective creative decisions that feed back into the work and that may ultimately move all parties, as he writes, beyond the background listening experiences that dominate most of our lives. All the while these works and frameworks only appear to give more urgency to John Cage’s question in Freeman’s epigraph, asking what composing, performing, and listening have to do with one another.

If Freeman’s listener appears to have reinvented the work as a place to meet other listeners, performers, and composers, in Anthony Curtis Adler’s The Biopolitics of Noise: Kafka’s ‘Der Bau’ the listener is moving in the opposite direction. In Adler’s reading of Kafka’s story of an unidentified creature whose life unfolds in a burrow just below the earth, it almost appears as if the animal has retreated into its own auditory duct. As Adler shows, the creature lives its life listening to its inner voice(s) and to noises that occur in and around the burrow. Associating property with silence inside the burrow, noise for the creature is an index of intrusion, violence, and death. Adler argues that Kafka’s narrative may be understood as a mapping out of three different political spaces. Above the burrow, along the surface of the earth extends what Adler calls the classical political, nomadic space as theorized from Plato to Kant and that is closely related to panoptic visuality. It is a space in which signals are able to appear above the noise. Below the burrow, there is the nonclassical, chtonic space of the earth that is, by contrast, compact and unexposed. In between, Adler writes, the burrowing creature builds its existence on a wholly different kind of space that originates from its individual body, from its silences and noises, and from its labors, that is, from a biopolitical sphere that, Adler claims, mediates classical and nonclassical political spaces. Read in this way, he argues, Kafka’s narrative may be said to juxtapose two political regimes. In the first part of the story the creature attempts to assess its security situation on the basis of classical space, foregrounding silence and a desire for panoptic control. In the second part the creature attempts to come to terms with a hissing noise—a noise that cannot listen—that puts it on the alert and forces it to rethink the aural map of its existence biopolitically. For Adler, Kafka incites to rethink the sense of noise (and for noise) as transforming our sense of the political.

John Hamilton’s Torture as an Instrument of Music presents a radical intervention in the debate on music and violence—in particular war violence—that intensified during wars in Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003), notably by the public outrage at the Abu Ghraib (musical) torture and prisoner-abuse case of 2006.³⁵ While Suzanne Cusick, Jonathan Pieslak, Steve Goodman, and others have gathered and discussed evidence of music being used as a weapon of war and as an instrument of torture, Hamilton approaches the question of music’s relation to such violence in a new way. An underlying theme in the debate, Hamilton writes, is the old puzzlement regarding the special power of music to circumvent or bring down the protective barriers of individual subjects and, in some cases, of entire communities or even material objects (e.g., the walls of Jericho). Whence music’s power to penetrate, circumvent, disorient, confuse, deform, hurt, terrorize, and torture the other? One possible answer, Hamilton suggests, may be found if we reverse the notion of music as an instrument of torture. Taking the expression to make someone sing (also familiar in French, fair chanter, meaning to blackmail or to release information while being under threat or tortured) as his starting point, Hamilton shows that the notion of torture as an instrument of music has a rich history in the Western imagination and literature. His selection of examples includes the torturing of animals and humans into music from ancient times through medieval Christianity to modern secular culture. In response to the recent debate on music as an instrument of torture Hamilton may be understood to suggest that, in the West, music itself is not without its own complicity with imagined or real acts of torture of living beings. This fact is often overlooked when in contemporary discussions musical torture is construed as an act of violence against music’s supposed nonviolent nature. In listening, Hamilton reminds us, the crossing of the other’s threshold of pain often looms as a cruel prerequisite for our own musical pleasure.³⁶

If such pain is rephrased in terms of sadism, Robert Sholl can be said to explore its counterpart in Stop It, I Like It! Embodiment, Masochism, and Listening for Traumatic Pleasure. Presenting a series of musical case studies, Sholl focuses on three aspects of masochistic interaction in musical listening: first, the oscillation or reversibility of role play; second, the dissolution of narrative into fantasy; and third, the desire for but absence of fulfillment or synthesis. Throughout his case studies Sholl explores how listening is inscribed at the limits of identification, ecstasy, and the phantasmatic, respectively. Its liminal position is closely associated with a logic of embodiment as it takes place right at the body as the site of masochism’s endless (and painful) delays and deferrals. The first part of Sholl’s triptych reinterprets Adorno’s critique of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring as a reading of the spectators’ reversible relation to the girl who is chosen to dance her sacrificial dance. In order to understand a listener’s relation to the girl, Sholl argues, it is first of all necessary to acknowledge the opacity of her body. While the work appears to invite an identification with power, it is in fact a masochistic reversal that dominates the scene. Embodying the Law of the Father, the girl’s (ultimately silent, dead) body deflects and reverses the aural gaze to confront the listener and to occasion a diagnostic auscultation at the border of life and death. The second part of Sholl’s essay turns toward Saint Francis’s ecstasy in Olivier Messiaen’s opera Saint François d’Assise. Dissecting the opera’s representation of Francis’s spiritual development, Sholl argues that musical silences and dissonances in the work resist the phantasmatic bridging of the gap between the human and the divine that is suggested by the narrative. They create apertures for the listener to experience the self as contingent and to become aware of a certain neutralization of religion in the opera. Listening to Saint François appears as a confrontation with the absence or death of God—a movement that began with the crucifixion and that, according to Sholl, is answered by Moshe Feldenkrais’s concept of maturation. Finally, Sholl completes his triptych by examining Cathy Berberian’s visceral rendering of Luciano Berio’s 1960s work Visage, again bringing the body in full focus as a site of liminal aurality. Placing the work in a postwar musical historiography informed by attempts at aural control over the listener, the vocal performance by Berberian is read as an example of how masochistic reversal may ultimately, and surprisingly, provide a point of listening on the aural, granular self-relation of the other. Berberian, Sholl argues, supremely in control as she is over the phantasmatic dimension of listening, opens her body so as to allow the listener to hear her hearing herself from within. Such reconnecting by traversing power and rationality returns listening to a more