First off, I want to preface my (relatively brief) post by saying that this space, for me, is a chance to hash out ideas as much as anything else. As such, I hope it goes without saying that many of the things I write about are as much a product of conversations I’m having and books that I’m reading as they are indicative of any ‘original’ thinking. To be clear, I don’t mean this as an apology and certainly don’t mean to suggest that my formal (scholarly) writing is somehow the product of a single author, but I want to make the point nonetheless because (while I’ll make every effort to cite appropriately) the great affordance of this space, for me, is to be able to ‘simply write’ (if not, alas, to be able to write simply).
This non-apology is particularly apt for this first post of mine because I’d like to think a little about modes of concentration, and I owe a lot of my thoughts in this area to eldritch Priest (who will also be posting here regularly, and who has a fantastic book called Boring, Formless, Nonsense: experimental music and the aesthetics of failure out with Continuum/Bloomsbury). To my mind, a corollary to McLuhan’s famous (and problematic) conception of technology as an ‘extension of man’ is that the senses are themselves technological, or perhaps medial. That is, we might understand (in the context of a distributed notion of cognition that we might call ‘affect’) technological extension to mean that to speak of hearing or seeing or touching et cetera is more to acknowledge a quality of attention than it is to define a discrete site of perception. This is why, for example, one can speak sensibly of seeing with one’s ears or hearing with one’s eyes: what is called forth is not so much a metaphor (though it is that, too) as it is set of affordances and constraints emphasizing certain distinctions over others. Or, put differently, each of what we think of as our five senses (or seven, if you include premonition and proprioception) is a kind of stand-in for a different way of articulating the ongoing system-environment difference that is embodiment. So, my aural body is different than my optical one (and, indeed, neither are properly ‘mine’), raising the question: in what does this difference consist? There are (of course) numerous answers to that question, but also (paradoxically) none that are categorically true precisely because sense-differentiation is operational rather than categorical, as I’ve just alluded to.
All of which doesn’t really matter, except in so far as this operational emphasis allows us to think about listening itself as a mode of concentration without erasing the material differences that obtain between sound and vision; that is, without adopting a necessarily anthropocentric perspective. There are any number of ways to pressure this operational difference (Marc highlighted eight in his post), but for the remainder of this post I’d like to focus on one: sympathy.
As Aden Evens points out in Sound Ideas, listening always involves attending to a differential play. Evens notes (as others have) that we don’t hear air pressure, but rather air pressure changing; to hear a ‘constant’ pitch is literally to hear something that is nothing but constant change. That is, despite sound waves travelling longitudinally (rather than transversely, as with a ripple on a pond), sound is resolutely not found in the particular air that impacts a resonant surface, but rather emerges from the pattern of the impact. Thus, we are always listening durationally in the doubled sense that to hear is: (1) to compose a succession of particular impacts into a pattern that is directed towards meaning; (2) and to exist outside of any fiction of a ‘pure present’ such that this direction towards meaning is always also a misdirection, since there is not even the fiction of a fixed referent.
This is actually a remarkably disturbing (in the best sense) observation—despite its simplicity—because it means that to ‘listen to’ is always to ‘feel with’ (to sympathize), to be attuned to the dynamics of a process that at once exceeds and composes oneself (composes because this process of attunement enacts a system-environment difference). Put differently, listening composes a form of relating that does not establish a subject/object distinction but rather an immediate (!) dynamism. In this, it is dramatically different from vision, which requires a minimal distance in order for light to be reflected.
(As an aside, I came across this podcast of a lecture by Daniel Black—who I don’t know at all—some time ago; he makes the crucial point that since nanotechnology is smaller than the wavelength of light it is constitutively invisible. As a result, visual nanotech interfaces are not so much magnifications—as we are invited to believe—as they are material translations that introduce qualititatively different parameters of potential manipulation…a point which is always true of magnification to an extent, but which is radicalized in that case. Thacker’s Global Genome similarly unpacks the radical material slippages that are collapsed into the concept of DNA.)
Moreover—and more politically—we might say that to listen is to draw proximate to the risks of entrainment. That is, in so far as listening entails a kind of primary relationality—i.e. a relation that logically precedes its relata—a position of critical distance is no longer possible (indeed, I have it in the recesses of my memory that the etymology of the word critical may in fact tie it to separation…). While this is perhaps simply another articulation of thinking politically after the transvaluation of value, it is nonetheless particularly pertinent today: as Hayles (and others) have argued, the ubiquity of technological networks compels us today to move beyond the psyche, the body, and even the social as the privileged sites of nonconscious activity. In short, Hayles’s project describes the myriad ways that we are persistently and relentlessly entrained by and through ubiquitous technologies, an entrainment that is typically unilateral because such networks are constitutively outside the realm of our conscious knowledge (she argues, for example, that 99% of all communicated language is machine to machine data that is unintelligible to humans). To listen, then, is to risk further immersion in precisely such networks.
This risk, though, is also listening’s potential, its political gambit. That is, if listening collapses (in advance) the spatial distinction between subject and object, it also temporalizes the relation that it posits: listening is dynamic. Thus—to return to the question of attention—the great possibility that listening presents is that one might attend to sympathy itself, to the possibilities that emerge in relations that cannot be traced to their constituent parts. Thus, for example, to learn to play a drum roll is not a question of learning to play faster, but rather of bringing the resonant potentials of all of the relevant actors (the drum skin, the sticks, one’s hands, et cetera) into sympathy with one another. Importantly, the argentine shimmer that makes a roll a roll emerges as a qualitatively different vector than any intensities found in the individual parts: it’s not just a question of speed. And crucially, such sympathies gain intensity over time: the roll might swell or compress, but it does so precisely because its status as a roll continually accrues.
In broad strokes then, perhaps we can say that to look attentively is to attend to a world that will persist in precisely the same manner independent of our attention. Unless we are solipsistic, we assume that objects persist even when we look away. To listen attentively, though, is to attend to a world where resonances are continually established, maintained, and broken; paraphrasing McLuhan, the question of solipsism is not intelligible to the ear. In listening, then, what Hayles calls the ‘technological nonconscious’ is still not brought into the light of conscious thought, but perhaps conscious thought itself might learn how to entrain bilaterally, which is to say to act.
– Cecchetto
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