Hearing is spherical, vision
is directional; hearing immerses its subject,
vision offers a perspective; sounds come to
us, but vision travels to its object; hearing
is concerned with interiors, vision is
concerned with surfaces; hearing involved
physical contact with the outside world,
vision requires distance from it; hearing
places you inside an event, seeing gives you a
perspective on the event; hearing tends
towards subjectivity, vision tends towards
objectivity; hearing brings us into the living
world, sight moves us toward atrophy and
death; hearing is about affect, vision is
about intellect; hearing is a primarily
temporal sense, vision is a primarily spatial
sense; hearing is a sense that immerses us in
the world, while vision removes us from it -
Jonathan Sterne.(1)
|
Tristan calls out to Isolde, as his
last breath 'What, am I hearing light?' This breath, as
Jean-Luc Nancy has said then, joins all the other of the
noises of the world.(2)
How can Tristan hear what he should be seeing or does he
just intimate the perfection of the final sounds he
hears in death? What is there, more pointedly, in the
work of Jean-Luc Nancy that we can use in thinking about
sound and the nature of humanness? Can the multiple,
largely unanswered and rhetorical questions that Nancy
himself asks elaborate for us a philosophy and sociology
of music that evades the terrors of aesthetic analysis
in favour of the description of musical and sound
practice that is itself divorced from the vulgarities of
social determination? This paper's position is not to
reassert the centrality of Nancy but to use his ideas on
listening to think more about questions of matrices and
indices and the utility of these for thinking about
sound and identity in critical theory, specifically
Marxist conceptions of identity which have an affinity
with Nancy's human and social aspirations, by way of
Derrida's original reading of Marx.
The idea of contamination and
subhumanness and the idea that some forms of music were
inherently impure and monstrous were linked by German
Fascism in the middle part of the last century by
discursive racial doctrines about the womb and the kinds
of monsters that could come forth from it. And it in
this idea of the womb or the 'matrice' that Nancy's
specific value to an idea of listening can begin to be
extrapolated or brought to nativity itself and
specifically the stomach where the womb resides.(3)
Recent commentators on Nancy such as
Adrienne Janus and Brian Kane have focused on the
translational aspects of his work on listening, to some
extent recomposing aspects of Charlotte Mandell's recent
translation. I will use both the French and the English
text but for ease will refer only to the English
translated edition whilst retaining the concepts of sens
and corps sonore from the original rather than
the problematic translations as sens as
meaning and corps sonore as sonorous or
resonant body – issues that Janus herself has pointed to
where using 'meaning' rather than 'sense' means
'silencing its suggestions of sensual perception and
movement'.(4)
For Janus the question of sonority is intimately bound
to what she calls the 'rhythmical constitution of
subjectivity' in Nancy.(5)
The resonant body is an explication in listening terms
of the sense of the world, of being and identity which
Nancy had previously elaborated in his earlier work on
identity and the refutation of the plural/singular
dichotomy – a world of 'all existents, those past and
those to come, the living and the dead of the objects,
fauna, mechanics, of humans themselves – all of which
make up the world of being.(6)
The human subject, the 'listening subject' is an echo
chamber in which sound reverberates expressed as renvoi
and its multiple nuances of feedback, return, boundness
and offering. The nuance of language is the central
focus of Brian Kane's explication of Nancy. The two
forms of listening of Entendre and Écouter(7)
become for Kane a way in which we can attempt to
understand Nancy's mystical formulations. In terms of renvoi
'Listening reveals sound as a structure of resonance –
an infinite sending and resending. Nancy's analyses also
reveal that resonance is the structure of the subject
and of sense'.(8)
The distinction between these two forms stress 'Écouter
is selective, positional and indexical' – as a natural
attitude of listening (2012:440) and Entendre
more rooted in the intentionality of the Husserlian
phenomenology and its significations that Nancy wishes
to elide or avoid.(9)
In reading Nancy, Kane elaborates the natural listening
of the first and the understanding and meaning
of the latter and argues for Nancy's 'allegiance to
non-indexical and non-significational modes of
listening'.(10)
Centrally these means a focus on listening as resonance
rather than listening to hear signification – for Kane
'To make listening into something other than listening
for signification or indices implies an emphasis on the
sensory relationship between world and listener, a
listening that begins not with the search for meanings
but on the basis of the sensory qualities of sounds'.(11)
The listening subject, the sonorous body is then a
'subject that is listening to the infinite renvoi
of meaning, sound, and self'.(12)
Useful as these commentaries are, there
are other things to work through and discover in Nancy,
specifically the problem of vision, meaning and
signification. If the sense of an indice or set of
significations is so problematic, what then becomes the
basis for subjectivity and identity, and can we think
about an alternative vision of identity and subjectivity
through ideas of birth and nativity and resonances which
are profoundly linked to the birth-blindness of the
womb, of the matrice? Rather than an
index which can be looked up, an inventory which can be
assessed, marking each part of the human subject and
directly correlating it, can we think of Nancy's work as
introducing us to a matrix, no less disciplinary in its
way, but sonorous and reverberative rather than
signifying and determining?
The sense of sound
The starting-point of
critical elaboration is the consciousness of
what one really is, and is "knowing thyself"
as a product of the historical process to date
which has deposited in you an infinity of
traces, without leaving an inventory - Antonio
Gramsci(13) |
Jean-Luc Nancy's philosophy of
listening marks a new direction in thinking about sound
but one which is opaque and difficult, in terms of both
concept and translation.(14)
Henk Oosterling has pointed to the difficulty and
density of reading Nancy making a serious survey of his
ideas a perilous prospect.(15)
Nancy initiates his thinking-through
listening (or what amounts to listening supplanting
thinking-through) by contrasting philosophical practice
with listening and questions whether that practice can
truly listen rather than understand. In order to grasp
this we have to see philosophy as a way of looking for
meaning and signification, to locate something one hears
in an index, to situate, to provide context.(16)
This means that in reality we evade listening in order
to look for something else – that which listening
signifies – a philosopher might be trying to locate a
concept that she will find through hearing a sound or a
piece of music, a historian might be listening for a
rendition of crusader chants in early music ensemble
performances, a geographer may listen to Delius in order
to hear the signification of landscape. The project of
deconstruction, of which Nancy has played no little
part, has problematized, if not severed those
relationships of signification, displacing the visual
motifs of sight and clarity with opaqueness and
instability.(17)
As Nancy says 'Is listening something of which
philosophy is capable? Or – we'll insist a little,
despite everything, at the risk of exaggerating the
point – hasn't philosophy superimposed upon listening,
beforehand and of necessity, or else substituted for
listening, something else that might be more on the
order of understanding'.(18)
For Nancy the practice of philosophy has to hear (and
hinting at totality, 'hears everything'), but to
practice philosophy has to neutralize, as part of that
practice the very practice of listening rather than
understanding.(19)
Listening, or sonority, eclipses and
outweighs vision and visual description. It becomes more
than the form - ' It does not dissolve it, but
rather enlarges it; it gives an amplitude, a density,
and a vibration or an undulation whose outline does
anything but approach. The visual persists until its
disappearance; the sonorous appears and fades away into
its permanence'.(20)
Acoustic penetration and resonance do not come from far
away and disappear into its horizon as a visual object
does – the 'withdrawals', turning inwards, solipsisms of
sound are profoundly different processes to the objects
of visuality, its referents and its indices - 'Why and
how is it that something of perceived meaning has
privileged a model, a support, or a referent in visual
presence rather than in acoustic penetration?'(21)
This inwardness and withdrawal is a process of sonorous
resonance in the very being and materiality of the corps
sonore whereas visualisation the opposite is true
– rather than inward resonance the eye conjures up the
images, makes manifest, displays – 'a making evident'
(2007:3). Nancy privileges the body of the listening
subject against the rational, seeing determining and
signifying intellect. It is that internality and
inwardness that we will return to in a moment, but what
is the knowledge that the resonance of sound brings to
us in its wave? How, for Nancy, is meaning engendered,
modulated, determined or dispersed in the process of
listening where knowledge arises not in intellectual
capacity or the search for the signified listening but
in accent, tone, timbre, resonance and sound?(22)
The evocation of form, or a sonorous vision, can be
possible through listening and its signification, but
can we visualize sound and resonance itself?(23)
This then problematizes the question of
truth and the truth of listening and the kinds of
resonances and echoes that inhabit the human subject and
to its inwardnesses.
Shouldn't truth "itself," as
transitivity and incessant tradition of a
continual coming and going, be listened to
rather than seen? But isn't it also in the way
that it stops being "itself" and identifiable,
and becomes no longer the naked figure
emerging from the cistern but the resonance of
that cistern – or, if it were possible to
express it thus, the echo of the naked figure
in the open depths?(24)
|
Replacing the naked figure of truth
with echo and resonance of the cistern displaces the
forms of knowledge of visuality. We do not perceive the
figure but bear the resonance of the sound in our own
inwardness. This does not mean that listening does not
disclose truths and secrets and neither does it
eliminate social identifications and social being, the
plural of the singular:
What secret is at stake when
one truly listens, that is, when one
tries to capture or surprise the sonority
rather than the message? What secret is
yielded – hence also made public – when we
listen to a voice, an instrument, or a sound
just for itself? And the other, indissociable
aspect will be: What does to be
listening, to be all ears, as one
would say "to be in the world," mean?<(25)
|
We will return to those secrets of
inwardness momentarily but the excision of the forms of
truth becomes, for Nancy, of some importance. Entendre,
hearing becomes a hearing of sense and
signification. To hear a sound (siren, bird, drum) is to
begin to understand a wider world beyond that sound.
Even if we do not understand the text or utterance fully
itself, it begins to provide a wider context to that
hearing, ones that lies beyond the sound itself, a
meaning that is not directly accessible through the
sound or is somehow distant but connected with it.(26)
The constant referral to something else is meaning. The
constant referrals of sound however may not necessarily
infer and defer meaning, it spreads in space at the same
time as resounding 'in me' - in those inward spaces,
inside of the human form.(27)
Here meaning is not inferred or deferred we just have
the presence of sound resounding through the body making
the body itself a resonance chamber, an acoustic space
which receives and refracts the sounds emanating through
it. If the self is the constitution of multiple
referrals and identities, the resonating subject is as
much a product of the echoes of sound without
signification as it is of meaning. The intelligibility
of the self then means an understanding of these
multiple referrals and resonances.(28)
This becomes both a referral to indices and an
understanding of what Nancy means by matrices, or what
we can understand from Nancy to take this concept
further.
Echo chambers
The creation of a 'global sonorous
space' of music(29)
means the ubiquity of sound and resonance. Unlike visual
spatialities the spatiality of music is encompassing -
'To listen is to enter that spatiality by which, at
the same time, I am penetrated, for it opens up
in me as well as around me, and from me as well as
toward me: it opens me inside me as well as outside'.(30)
The reverberation chamber of the body(31)
is one which echoes beyond meaning.(32)
The bringing of humans into the world is at once a birth
of subjectivity but also of a subjectivity into sound
worlds;
Perhaps we should thus
understand the child who is born with his
first cry as himself being – his being or his
subjectivity – the sudden expansion of an echo
chamber, a vault where what tears him away and
what summons him resound at once, setting in
vibration a column of air, of flesh, which
sounds at its apertures: body and soul of some
one unique. Someone who comes to
himself by hearing himself cry
(answering the other? calling him?), or sing,
always each time, beneath each word, crying or
singing, exclaiming as he did by
coming into the world.(33)
|
Not only is the human birthed into the
sound world but sonority itself is constitutive of the
human subject 'a friction, the pinch or grate of
something produced in the throat, a borborygmus, a
crackle, a stridency where a weighty, murmuring matter
breathes, opened into the division of its resonance.
Once again, the birthing cry, the birth of the cry –
call or complaint, song, rustling of self, until the
last murmur'.(34)
The sound of the new human itself becomes enmeshed with
the sound of the world – the sounds of other humans but
also, importantly, with the sounds of objects,
mechanics, the inanimate, flora, fauna, all of the
living and the dead or as Marx says 'all the tradition
of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on
the brain of the living'.(35)
The emergence of the human from the
stomach, the stomach in which we feel resonance, a
stomach stretched like a drum, a 'sonorous cavity' in
which the soul resides becomes for Nancy the
constitutive moment of identity formation through sound.(36)
The womb/matrice is the beginning of sound, where we
feel sound, the origin of identity, the origin of
difference, an instrument of sound production and sound
reception, a border and a passage between singularity
and plurality, the space where we begin listening;
The womb [matrice]-like
constitution of resonance, and the resonant
constitution of the womb: What is the belly of
a pregnant woman, if not the space or the
antrum where a new instrument comes to
resound, a new organon, which comes
to fold in on itself, then to move, receiving
from outside only sounds, which, when the day
comes, it will begin to echo through its cry?
But, more generally, more womblike, it is
always in the belly that we – man or woman –
end up listening. or start listening. The ear
opens into the sonorous cave that we then
become'.(37)
|
The matrice is also fundamentally
somewhere where we listen without signification, where
the sound is received but not a sound indicative of
referral, deferral, or meanings not present. But this
does not mean that it is not disciplinary or that the
multiplicity of our identities somehow avoid the
subjective and objective makings of our human psychic
form. When Marx called the human 'the ensemble of social
relations'(38)
he did not mean the conscious adoption of the human
cultural and psychic form by new human but the ways in
which totality invested itself into the form of the
human surreptitiously and without consent and the ways
in which identities were formed by the process of
history. If one were to try to uncover those social
relations constitutive of the human, which as Gramsci
has said has left no inventory, then the search for meaning
and signification is in itself already lost.
There are no indices, or if there are, they are
fragmented and dispersed with no order, no form other
than as remnants of the historical process, or if
talking about sound, the dispersed tatters of sounds
which have presented themselves to us as we try to make
sense of what they might signify and mean. Reworking
Nancy's poetic and opaque notion of the womb/matrice
hints at something that is central but hidden to the
human listening subject – that the sounds which resonate
through us, invest us just as much as the forces of
history, and the ubiquity of that sound world, that noise,
annihilates any sense of uncovering meaning.
Anticipations
Todd May(39)
has presented an outstanding political analysis of
deconstruction and the concept of identity and community
in Nancy's work and in doing so has stressed the nature
of exposure and closure on the formation of the
individual subject and the ways in which the outside
impacts upon the inside of the subject. In what sense
then can sound, as we turn away from signification and
indices, provide some insight into the very birth of the
human form, the matrices that act as the nativity for
human subjectivities? What kinds of inwardnesses are
created by the resonance of sound for the listening corps
sonore? If we can offer the following emerging
themes from our analysis of Nancy it may go some way
towards demystifying or making less opaque his listening
in order to enhance new ways of thinking about sound.
Firstly, Nancy's reworking of listening
disparages the privilege of both hearing as
understanding and the totalizing will of sight. The
displacement of vision in recent phenomenological and
poststructuralist thought has not in any serious way led
to the emergence of new ways of thinking about sound
philosophically except perhaps in the recent work of
Salome Voegelin. For Voegelin the constitution of the
subject is formed in complicity with the materiality of
sound and is 'complicit with its production'.(40)
The subject position of the self is enwrapped by the
materiality of sound and a sense of the world with it is
implicitly bound to hearing, whereas in sight there is
always distance and removal.(41)
The simultaneity of self with sound stresses this
complicity against detachment in the practice of
listening. (42)
In listening, knowledge and experience liberates
itself from vision. The co-production of sound makes the
subject complicit with and constituted by that sound
world.(43)
Like Nancy, Voegelin listens to that 'ephemeral
complexity of sound that avoids classification and
focuses on being heard rather than on being understood'.(44)
Secondly, Nancy's work raises
significant questions about the nature of sound and its
relationship to knowledge. As sound resonates through us
and we are tempted to either understand its
signification or to accept the resonance through the
echo chambers of the subject in which that very
proximity of the soundwave problematizes our being in
the world and what that sound is doing to us. As Brandon
La Belle has noted;
Sound is already always
mine and not mine – I cannot hold it for long,
nor can I arrest all its itinerant energy.
Sound is promiscuous. It exists as a network
that teaches us how to belong, to find place,
as well as how not to belong, to drift. To be
out of place, and still to search for new
connection, for proximity. Auditory knowledge
is non-dualistic. It is based on empathy and
divergence, allowing for careful understanding
and deep involvement in the present while
connecting to the dynamics of mediation,
displacement, and virtuality.(45) |
Even if we, as Nancy does, reject the
project of auditory knowledge, there is still an
imperative to understand knowledge in another way: to
understand not music-as-knowledge but the process by
which resonance achieves its route through us and what
happens inside us. Nancy speculates philosophically
about the stomach, sound, and modes of resonant but his
work also offers us ways of thinking about descriptions
of the impact of sound on inwardness.
Thirdly, the whole notion of
inwardness, of windowlessness, of the relationship of
the inside of the human to outside 'being-in-the-world'
is a constitutive project of philosophy itself, if not
the centrality of its whole practice. If the inside
could be read off against a set of indices which
directly match and correlate out there in the world with
in here in my being, then that form of inventory would
provide a solution to the whole nature of the human as
simply a product, 'an ensemble of social relations'. But
the species-being, the biological nature of the human
would have to be bracketed as something we would have to
be silent about. Not only does Nancy postulate some
significant ways of thinking about sense and being, he
also raises questions about the nature of sound and its
impact on the human which transcends the time and space
of a contemporaneous humanity and its immediate
ensemble. In actuality, his discussion of Titian and the
resonating power of the stomach stresses the
universality, spatially and temporally, of our mode of
being and its sounds – the reception of sound is
trans-historical. More than this, Nancy's awareness of
modes of listening not only point to the constitutive
role of sound in the production of the human, but also
to the role of sound in the construction of the world –
the noise of the world is the first thing that the human
uses to locate its nature and its place. Sound is of the
essence of human subjectivity, before vision, in the
womb, the 'sonorous cave' in which the human becomes
open and conscious to the world.
Fourthly, the noise of the world is not
just a human noise, it is the noise of all existents,
the human and non-human, the living and the dead, the
song sung and the record, the inanimate object and the
sound of the sea and the weather. The unmediated
reception of resonance of this in the echo chamber of
the body and in the matrice that gives it its nativity
means that the unsignified complexity of the sound world
is unmappable but culpable for everything that that
human subject will become. There is no such thing as a
pure sound. The immersion in sound is various and
polymorphous. When Tristan hears the light as he is
dying, he does not ask what it means, or where it comes
from, he just receives the sound as we receive light. We
revel in it, it gives us life. It also means that any
attempt to reassert the purity of a doctrinal sound
designed to ward against pollution and contamination
will always fail. The attempt by German fascism to
purify culture, including its Tristans, of its
contaminants can only fail because of the perversity and
the encompass of world sound. We are born monsters, from
the matrice we emerge as contaminated beings, into light
and light we will become.
|
References
(1) ^
Sterne, Jonathan.(ed.)The Sound Studies Reader
(Abingdon:Routledge, 2012), 9.
(2) ^
Nancy, Jean-Luc. Listening trans. Charlotte
Mandell (New York:Fordham University Press, 2007), 45.
(3) ^
Ibid, 51-53.
(4) ^
Adrienne Janus 'Listening: Jean-Luc Nancy and the
"Anti-Ocular" Turn in Continental Philosophy and
Critical Theory' Comparative Literature 63:2
(2012) 182-202, 185.
(5) ^
Ibid, 188.
(6) ^
Nancy, Jean-Luc. Being Singular Plural trans.
Robert Richardson and Anne O'Byrne Stanford:Stanford
University Press, 2000), 21.
(7) ^
Brian Kane Jean-Luc Nancy and the Listening Subject,
Contemporary Music Review, 31:5-6
(2012), 439-447, 439.
(8) ^
Ibid.
(9) ^
Ibid, 440-441.
(10) ^
Ibid, 442.
(11) ^
Ibid, 443.
(12) ^
Ibid, 446
(13) ^
Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison
Notebooks trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey
Nowell Smith, (London:Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), 324.
(14) ^
Mandell in her translators notes entendre means both
to understand and hear. Matrice means both womb and
matrix. Renvoi means return, send back, repeat. Sens
means meaning and sense as in the senses.
(15) ^
Henk Oosterling 'From Interests to "Inter-esse:"
Jean-Luc Nancy on Deglobalization and Sovereignty' SubStance
34:1, No. 106, (2005), 81-103, 82.
(16) ^
Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2007, op.cit., 1.
(17) ^
There is little intention in this paper to assess
this although I have critiqued the same project and its
dissolution of truth elsewhere (Hudson, see below).
(18) ^
Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2007, op.cit., 1.
(19) ^
Ibid.
(20) ^
Ibid, 2.
(21) ^
Ibid, 2-3.
(22) ^
Ibid,3.
(23) ^
Ibid.
(24) ^
Ibid, 4.
(25) ^
Ibid, 5.
(26) ^
Ibid, 6.
(27) ^
Ibid, 7.
(28) ^
Ibid, 9.
(29) ^
Ibid, 12.
(30) ^
Ibid, 14.
(31) ^
Ibid, 27.
(32) ^
Ibid, 31.
(33) ^
Ibid, 18.
(34) ^
Ibid, 28.
(35) ^
Martyn Hudson. 'The Clerk of the Foresters Records:
John Berger, the Dead, and the Writing of History' Rethinking
History 4:3, (2000) 261-279 and Martyn Hudson.
'On the dead of world history' Race and Class, 43:4,
(2002), 26-33.
(36) ^
Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2007, op.cit., 42-43.
(37) ^
Ibid, 37.
(38) ^
Geras, Norman. Marx and Human Nature: Refutation of
a Legend (London:Verso, 1983).
(39) ^
Todd May.(1997) Reconsidering Difference:
Nancy, Derrida, Levinas, and Deleuze
(Pennsylvania:Pennsylvania State University, 1997),
21-75.
(40) ^
Voegelin, Salome. Listening to Noise and
Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art (New
York: Continuum, 2010), 5.
(41) ^
Ibid.
(42) ^
Ibid, xii.
(43) ^
Ibid, 5.
(44) ^
Ibid, 54.
(45) ^
LaBelle, Brandon. Acoustic Territories: Sound
Culture and Everyday Life (New York:Continuum,
2010), Xvii.
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