Sonic Intimacy: Voice, Species, Technics (or, How To Listen to the World)

By Dominic Pettman

“A perceptive, engaging, and clever set of meditations on . . . how sound produces human, technical, and nonhuman intimacies.” —Richard Grusin,University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
 
Sonic Intimacy asks us who—or what—deserves to have a voice, beyond the human. Arguing that our ears are far too narrowly attuned to our own species, the book explores four different types of voices: the cybernetic, the gendered, the creaturely, and the ecological. Through both a conceptual framework and a series of case studies, Dominic Pettman tracks some of the ways in which these voices intersect and interact. He demonstrates how intimacy is forged through the ear, perhaps even more than through any other sense, mode, or medium. The voice, then, is what creates intimacy, both fleeting and lasting, not only between people, but also between animals, machines, and even natural elements: those presumed not to have a voice in the first place. Taken together, the manifold, material, actual voices of the world, whether primarily natural or technological, are a complex cacophony that is desperately trying to tell us something about the rapidly failing health of the planet and its inhabitants. As Pettman cautions, we would do well to listen.
 
“Pettman is a very engaging writer, and the way he traverses contexts and theoretical horizons is thrilling.” —Naomi Waltham-Smith, Boundary 2

“With Sonic Intimacy, we are manifestly in the hands of a skilled and not a little playful writer who connects new media to long developed philosophical conversations.” —David Cecchetto, York University

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 21, 2017
• ISBN: 9781503601482

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Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

©2017 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Pettman, Dominic, author.

Title: Sonic intimacy : voice, species, technics (or, how to listen to the world) / Dominic Pettman.

Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016039469 (print) | LCCN 2016040749 (ebook) | ISBN 9780804799881 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781503601451 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781503601482 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Listening (Philosophy) | Voice (Philosophy) | Sound (Philosophy)

Classification: LCC B105.L54 P48 2017 (print) | LCC B105.L54 (ebook) | DDC 128/.3--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016039469

Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 11/15 Adobe Garamond

SONIC INTIMACY

VOICE, SPECIES, TECHNICS

(OR, HOW TO LISTEN TO THE WORLD)

DOMINIC PETTMAN

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

For Robin Mookerjee

The earth is affected by harmony and quiet music. Therefore, there is in the earth not only dumb, unintelligent humidity, but also an intelligent soul which begins to dance when the aspects pipe for it.

Johannes Kepler

And in our perfect secret-keeping:

One ear of corn,

in silent, reaping

joy of life.

Joanna Newsom

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction. The Aural Phase

Chapter One. The Cybernetic Voice

Chapter Two. The Gendered Voice

Chapter Three. The Creaturely Voice

Chapter Four. The Ecological Voice (Vox Mundi)

Conclusion. In Salutation of All the Voices

Notes

Works Cited

Name Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I WOULD LIKE TO THANK Emily Jane Cohen, for supporting this project from day one; and David Cecchetto, for one of the most generous and generative reader’s reports I’ve ever received; as well as the anonymous reader who helped shape the final form. Warm thanks also to Pooja Rangan, Julie Napolin, Rey Chow, James Steintrager, Margret Grebowicz, Miriam Piilonen, Kári Driscoll, Jason D’Aoust, Claire Donato, Rachelle Rahme, and Carla Nappi, for helping me think through the question of the voice, as an interloper in the world of sound studies. An earlier version of Chapter 2, titled Pavlov’s Podcast, appeared in a special issue of differences, edited by Rey Chow and James Steintrager (vol. 22, nos. 2–3 [Summer–Fall 2011]). And a much shorter version of Chapter 3, called The Screech within Speech, appeared on the Sounding Out blog on July 16, 2015.

This book is dedicated to all those intimates whose voices still persist deep within my own acoustic flesh (to borrow a term from Michel Serres)—many of whom I have been fortunate enough to hear in person, and others whom I have not but which nevertheless have still deeply affected me, thanks to the magic of media recording technologies. The temptation is to list them all—perhaps from highest pitch to lowest—in one of those compulsive and compensatory accounting gestures designed to recapture the rich cast of our unique, yet shared, experiences. But these inventories ultimately elude us: a melancholic and rather futile census preparation toward our collective finitude. So I hope that those whose voices I still hear—voices in which vibrate the singular spirits of those that have helped sculpt who I am (even if they have since returned to the cosmos)—somehow find themselves circulating through the pages of this text, and enjoy the company they find there.

INTRODUCTION

THE AURAL PHASE

HOW MIGHT WE ATTEND to the act of listening itself, rather than to a specific sound? Moreover, how might we do so in a way that does not presume anything essential about the listener? In suspending habitual assumptions, we can better appreciate the ways in which the sonic environment not only interpellates us, through ideology, but constitutes us, as ontological beings. We are born in and of sound. Our first prenatal experience is overwhelmingly aural: we become embodied and enfleshed within the squelches, rumbles, and pulsing thumps of the mother’s body. Even before we have ears, we can hear through our skin. (Indeed, this capacity continues into adulthood.) Then, after leaving the womb, we learn who we are by the sound of our name and the names of others.¹ We respond to sonic stimuli, like good Pavlovian subjects. Gradually, we sort the friendly sounds from the unpleasant ones, absorbing a universe of aural materials, from the intimate caress of the lullaby to the impersonal Doppler effect of the ambulance. I hear, therefore I am (who I am)—a biological and biographical cogito that does not so much exclude the hearing-impaired as acknowledge the ways in which sound creates subjectivity through its own surplus as much as absence. (Vibrations are the interface between the experience of an ear that functions as designed and one that does not, since no one—not even the profoundly deaf—can escape the sonic feeling of sound waves.)

So we begin this little meditation with a human being, caught in the act of listening. This obliging heuristic figure may be straining to hear something, perhaps even through a curled hand, imitating a Victorian ear trumpet. Alternatively, this hypothetical person may be covering her ears in the hope of diminishing a din. (For it is an evolutionary blessing and curse that we cannot close our ears in the same way we can close our eyes.) Practitioners of sound studies never tire of lamenting the fact that the world has become a scopophilic place and that vision is the royal register of both understanding and action. (After all, Martin Heidegger named the decisive historical shift into modernity as the age of the world picture and not the age of the world composition.) They seek to redress the balance and reveal the ways in which sound continues to shape, influence, and punctuate our lives, both in a personal sense and in a wider social context. In the beginning was the Word, they will say, in order to demonstrate how the ear has been demoted over the centuries in order to make way for the less intimate, more distanced and critical eye. Oral culture is thus offered as the linguistic Eden from which we’ve been exiled, now obliged to navigate our complex environments primarily with visual cues and symbolic signs. (And yes, I’m simplifying things. Kindly indulge me, however, while I set the scene.)

In a work titled Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality, Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis state that the prototype of the signifier lies in the aural sphere (49). In other words, the ear is the first organ to posit a generic referent within a geometry of relations from which the subject engenders him or herself, in a psychic sense.² The abstract Other—usually assumed to be the mother—is registered aurally, and the rest of the universe is assembled from this mobile but steady sonic source, including the listening self. Thus, in hearing our infant self vocalize, we sing, click, hum, and shout ourselves into the world. (Tiny Walt Whitmans, all of us, singing the songs of ourselves.) Thus, our preverbal sounds are a series of increasingly confident vibrational speculations that there is an I whom we can hear (from the inside, as it were). This might be considered an aural prequel to Lacan’s famous mirror stage, establishing a foundational auto-affection with the self that is soon alienated by visual recognition of the same (thereby giving breech birth to our own split subjectivity—a redundant phrase, in Lacan’s scheme).³ But even before our traumatic fall into visual self-recognition, the infant soundscape is a challenging environment in which to orient ourselves. For every soothing piece of music there is a barking dog or the shrieking of one’s own hungry throat. (Shut that baby up, for Pete’s sake! . . . Oh. Wait a minute. That’s me.) A caricature to be sure—but, I hope, not one without conceptual utility.

Next comes the jagged, alphabetic internalization of language, along with the prioritization of becoming an eye-witness to our own lives. We are encouraged not to march to the beat of our own ear drums but rather to follow the bright banner of visual evidence. We are seduced by smiles, which have no sound. By clothing, which is mute. Our eyes begin to devour the world, and our souls are re-scrambled by the reprogramming of our sensoriums that this necessitates, so that the five senses fall into an obedient—and thus efficient—hierarchy and chain of command. Of course, the ear is still on the alert, perhaps as much as it always was (even as it is obliged to screen out all the undesirable noises that pollute the place). But we are spectators first and auditors second in most of the most important arenas of life. Only in specific media-cultural contexts is the ear pampered or brought to the fore as before (during a concert, for instance, or on the phone).⁴ Life is audio-visual—a term that is deceptive in putting sound before image.⁵ We can watch a movie with substandard sound, but we are unlikely to tolerate a film with a high-quality sound track and compromised visuals. After all, we watch a movie; we don’t listen to it. (Although sound-engineers might vociferously disagree.)

All of which is to say that we are sonic creatures to a large extent but historically have had trouble recognizing this fact, let alone acting upon it—aesthetically (making more beautiful sounds), politically (organizing ourselves around democratic sonic principles), or ethically (in listening to the Other rather than being captivated or repulsed by her visage).⁶ And yet, despite the heavy bias toward the eye, the overwhelming cultural tendency has been to fetishize the voice as the location and medium of expression for the human being. All our desires, frustrations, and confusions can seemingly be registered in the grain of the voice—as if unconsciously admitting that some kind of authenticity is to be found in neglected or taken-for-granted phenomena. We might argue—as many have—whether the voice is the sonic sign of singular human life (fleeting, unique, precious) or a sound that captures and unites the estranging, generic nature of existence (I am legion).⁷ We don’t know what kind of there is there, in the voice, just that something—or rather someone—makes a sound that emanates from an obscure source (life? spirit? Being?). If the eyes are the window to the soul, then the voice is the sound of that soul after the curtains have been drawn.⁸

Humans, as always, monopolize the metaphysical condition. We use our voices to sing the praises of our own voices. As such, the human voice is, on the whole, a sonic form of narcissism: a bio-cultural artifact in concert with what Giorgio Agamben calls the anthropological machine (that is, the all-encompassing apparatus designed to sort the human element from the animal, on one side, and the machine, on the other).⁹ Even as we ignore or disavow the voice of those we choose not to hear, for psychically or politically expedient reasons—perhaps not even granting the speaker the status of someone who has a voice¹⁰—we still celebrate the vocal vector of speech as one of the finest mediums of communication and connection available. Indeed, the voice is the ticket to entrance into the human community, as the laws concerning deaf-mute people made clear until relatively recently (likewise the Victorian custom of children being seen and not heard).¹¹

But the voice also has the potential to create a glitch in the humanist machinery, when it surprises us with the intensity or force of an "aural punctum"—a sonic prick or wound, which unexpectedly troubles our own smooth assumptions or untested delusions. Beneath the words being spoken lies the grain of the voice, itself shaped by the multitextured materiality of the larynx as well as the sonic traces or index of experience.¹² There are many nonlinguistic elements in any vocal form of human communication, and these blur the neat distinction between form (voice) and content (speech).¹³ Tone, for instance, is crucial when it comes to interpreting a spoken missive. Sarcasm, irony, gravity, levity, vocal fry—such modes show that the sonic envelope in which a message is delivered alters the message itself. The same words can be rendered into polar opposite meanings (Great!). The medium is the message. And yet the voice is often considered one of the prime instances of unmediated communication (not yet tainted by technologies such as the telephone). Speaking face-to-face is a model of intimacy, even presumed immediacy, which must, as a consequence, be formalized in more public settings. Thus, in meetings at the workplace, for instance, specific linguistic protocols come into play, designed to diffuse the existential intensity of being exposed to the voice of the other (two unstable ontological elements, working in tandem).

The voice is ambiguous, ambivalent, and enigmatic. We don’t trust things we can’t seize with our eyes and hands. We might squeeze the beloved’s body in passion or fury, but we can never hold his or her voice hostage (and thus