The presence of the listener is inscribed in the utterance. It is I who speaks, Jacques says, but we who say. He asks, "What happens to the philosophical status of the person if we replace the individual's cogito with the proposition 'I speak, but we say'? (Difference and Subjectivity, p. 9) For one thing the refutation of "I do not exist" becomes problematic.
But should we allow such a distinction between speaking and saying? Is there a speaking that says nothing, a babble that isn't somehow destined for language? Is there an impersonal babble? Perhaps. Perhaps necessarily.
What of the inscription of the presence of the listener in the utterance? This echoes an idea of the intertextuality of the utterance while at the same time it responds to Buber, to a sense of that everything in discourse is affected by relations between the I and the you. The listener is not merely referred to but is there in the interlocutive event. Present. We won't shy away from the idea. It's difficult. How do we describe the presence of the listener? How does the listener appear? As the "other side of language," i.e., perhaps it need not be apparent at all? As an ethical constraint? Imperative? Does the listener present us with an imperative for coherence, for example?
A couple of lines of inquiry. First, is "listening" at bottom a too comfortable metaphor for conceptualizing how elephants perceive seismic vibrations, how they live with vibration? In any case let's ask ourselves what listening could possibly be. Second, elephants can apparently recognize each others' "voices." (This too, this thing we call "voice," among the metaphorical—even as we learn that voice may be something that develops "in" nature, as if nature had no concourse with imagination.) "I know you." "I recognize your vibration." "I hear your voice." And already I have gone too far. Does an elephant say "I"?
Barbaras quotes Merleau-Ponty taking off from Malraux' idea that we hear our own voices through our throats while we hear the voices of others through our ears: "I am a sonorous being, but I hear my own vibration from within; as Malraux said, I hear myself with my throat. In this, as he also has said, I am incomparable; my voice is bound to the mass of my own life as is the voice of no one else" (in Being, p. 281). For my part, while cognizant of the sense in which my voice is bound to my concrete existence and my uniqueness, I feel that, as previously noted,the ear comes late to hearing, late to hearing the other as well as (if differently than) the self.
Let's talk about listening to speech in particular, recognizing speech with its implicit dimension of listening as an example of coexistential ideation, an ideation characterized by quasi-interiority, an as if quality of its inner horizon. Here I'm thinking of ideation as allusive, as governed by methectic laterality rather than being directed "from above" or from the outside. Barbaras' thinking about this topic inspires. Under the heading "Sense as Articulation" Barbaras sketches out an ontology of the sign premised on the reversibility of the voice. He says:
Nowhere are we confronted with signs that are strictly vocal; they cannot be characterized as sensible, audible atoms, as individuals situated in exteriority. Most assuredly, I do not hear anything other than sounds, and yet it is not the sounds themselves that I hear. Their relationship escapes worldly exteriority; they are not situated side by side. Rather, they bear witness to a quasi-interiority corresponding to the quasi-reflectivity of the voice. Each sound already slips into the others, makes allusions there and, by this very relationship, sketches a meaningful unity. Nevertheless, this movement does not rest on the presence of a meaning possessed elsewhere; sense is nothing other than this lateral relation between the signs. It is implicated in words and phonemes, as a coherent deformation, rather than being possessed by them. Sense remains, at the heart of expression, "organic" rather than pure meaning, a "matrix of ideas" [Signs, p. 77] rather than an idea. Thus the incarnation of sense in the voice corresponds to the quasi-exteriority of signs.
(p. 288)
Just as it's obvious that there can't be deformation without form, there can't be as if without irrealization. However, irrealization in its usual forms emerges not from an isolated "interiority" (in an Idealist acceptation) but rather from matrices of delocutary vibrations, echoes which one echoes, gnoseologically, as it were. The aesthesiologicality of the vocal recovers a meaning of the as if as coexistential resonance and at the same time cadacualtic.
The vocal, it must be added, represents only one modality of embodied sign usage. Nonvocal coherent deformations are both imaginable and empirically evident. The vocal ought not be reified, as there are other routes to irrealizing coexistential vibration.
Johannes Fabian writes, "oralization, that is, recourse to audible speech, actual or imagined, is an essential part of our ability to read texts. Yet our 'ideology' of literacy seems to put a taboo on revealing what we actually do when we read, for fear that oralization might subvert the authority of the written text" ("Keep Listening: Ethnography and Reading," in The Ethnography of Reading, Jonathan Boyarin ed.,1993, p. 89). The issue is not simply that, to lift an idea, "the ear comes late to listening"; we come to listening, ears and all, by listening. Listening is the elaboration of an idea, its perplication and all that. What is prior about audibility is daring to listen, allowing the power to augment, authority, to be placed within transition—a phase in the metastabilization of the abyssmorphing of reciprocity, i.e., speaking— allowing the pause to resonate.
"The muse is the living voice, as each of us experiences it, of intuition. Intuition is a synaptic summation, our whole nervous system balancing and combining multivariate complexities in a single flash" (Free Play, pp. 39-40).
The synaptic describes the space between touches, the between that enables touch, that touch means. Touch also means the traversal of that space. How is it that touch is brought into that space, for an instant, that space just for touch?
Over and over we meet with a question of shared experience, a question of how experience could possibly surpass the bounds of self, the returning vibe, even as it reinforces them, harmonizes them, evokes the selfsame vibe. Intuitably the synaptic is musical, replete with sweet voices, musical with repletion. We desire to speak with the sweet voices.
Music for us is the loving voice of intimation, of listening wrapped into itself, repletorially, listening, completely open to the announcement to the world of the world, the world that appears instantly in its announcement, of voices on the street below, rising voices of the unsummed love. We desire to speak with the musical voice. The voice of the muse is instantly recognizable as being other than our own, though it resounds within us and without us, multifariously. We share in its vibrations. Synapsis.
In keeping with their nature that entails verbal negation and dissonance, the Erinyes prove to be the enemies of exchange. First, these forces of destructive speech oppose clear and articulate language. Their strident voice imitates animal sounds, bellows and barks. Their song, insofar as it is incompatible with the lyre, denies all harmony between music and human locution, because the lyre is the instrument that meets the clarity of speech. This "lyreless" song raises its voice against Apollo's soothing muthoi: "Here is the song, a frenzy that ruins the mind, the hymn of the Erinyes, mind-binding, without lyre."
(Silence, pp. 42-43)
Do we hear the vulnerability of the listener in this passage? Will the enemies of exchange had laid waste to silence, or does silence endure like it always does, like the empathy one feels for the person who hears the alyric of the Eumenides? Silence is not the splintered lyre but the lyre on the cusp of speech? The broken lyre? Are we not on the verge of weeping for the man who cradles the broken lyre in his arms, always there, on the verge?
Are the Eumenides, however, really the enemies of reciprocity? We are all tragic figures insofar as our ignorance cries out to be interpreted. It's such a small thing to be ignorant of, our involvement in listening, the gives and takes. Furious whispers escape the lyricist's fingers, as they are eternally on the verge of doing. A string that buzzes, a frenzied hymn. This what has become of music, is it completely alien to the lyrical, the lyricist's hands? They hold things of the lyre, memorize them, and forget. By whose hand were the lyre have been broken? If it's not possible to act then none of us is a tragic figure. This is obvious. And if we never know what it means to know by listening?
"In resonance the inexhaustible return of eternity is played–and listened to" (Jean-Luc Nancy, "How Music Listens to Itself," in Listening, p. 67). Routinely I would question "inexhaustible," "return" and "eternity," but what thoughts would turn up if I began by putting only one term into question? Can we admit that returns of eternity both exist and are exhaustible? Or can we acknowledge an inexhaustible return of the ephemeral? Aporias. The eternal's manner of coming into existence would require, to be a coming into existence, an incompatibility with the eternal, and likewise mutatis mutandis for the eternal's other.
Attack is followed by decay, to describe sound, yet in accounts of sonorous experience decay is frequently disregarded. "Sound has no hidden face," Nancy tells us (Listening, p. 13), though I'm still not so sure. He emphasizes the attack, the arrival of sound, while ignoring sound's departure. To me the departure of sound does suggest another facet of sound, a silence looming behind every sound. Of course behind the departure of sound is the arrival of sound–am I confusing conceptual faces with phenomenal faces here? I don't quite think so. I'd like to be talking about an eidos of sonorous experience, or an eidos of resonance, all the while pointing to an eidos of phenomenality in general. Sound is inside-out in relation to phenomenality, Nancy says (ibid.) This of course implies that sound does have faces. However, if what Nancy objects to is the idea of the hiddenness of any of sound's faces, then how should we interpret the disappearance of sound's departure behind phrases such as "the inexhaustible return of eternity"? Is this disappearance the sense of body that Nancy calls "soul" (p. 43)? (It is true, I'm excerpting from different essays ("Listening," "How Music Listens to Itself"); they are linked by common themes, such as resonance.) Could it be that the behind of sound is precisely animated? Perhaps only in order to be imagined. Just perhaps. So what makes it so difficult to imagine, for instance, the exhaustible return of eternity? Is it simply contradiction, or could it be de-animation, the flight of the soul which is at root an attack on the power of the imagination? To imagine the exhaustible would be far more painstaking than to live it. It would mean allowing exhaustion to resonate. Now that the idea's been put forward, can we think otherwise than that exhaustion itself is after all such a resonance of exhaustion? This is but one side of an equation. It should lead us to question whether or how the inexhaustible resonates. It is patently not clear that inexhaustion itself is the resonance of inexhaustion–but one wonders. If resonance is exhausting–in the manner it allows the eternal to come into existence, as return, or else more simply exhausting in the way it takes the air out of sound, slowly, one vibration after another–then listening to the inexhaustible can only go so far, and certainly not as far as the inexhaustible itself, whether or not it's its own resonance. But I'm puzzled. If resonance requires a distance from inexhaustion does it not also by the same token require a distance from exhaustion? Resonance is a phenomenon of distances–and passions. The sympathetic vibration clues us in to the essence of all resonance, which is not merely the antrum at the heart of the material, the chora, but the intensity of a feeling with (which points meontically to distances)–or do the antral and the distal measure the same space, a space that would exist in the absence of sympathies? Resonance would admonish us to be cautious about drawing too sharp a distinction between auditory and visual modes of phenomenality. Our responses to phenomena are imbricated with their arrivals–this defines their modality of arrival–which we perhaps never allow to occur all at once, despite what some have claimed to be true of listening, but always feel along with a feeling for or about their departures, which may be as good as having an intuition–not a pure intuition but an existential one, if you'll afford some meaning to the distinction–about the behind of sounds.
"Music is not the origin of language, as people have so often wanted to think, but what withdraws and sinks into it" (Listening, p. 75, No. 42). Although I've taken a great interest in the musicality of language I should want to hesitate to adopt the position Nancy criticizes. Does music come before sense? Does it come before a kind of sense that might be called linguistic? What exactly is Nancy's view? "One can say of music that it silences sound and that it interprets sounds: makes them sound and make sense no longer as the sounds of something, but in their own resonance" (p. 32). Music makes sense, but it is not the only sense to be made of the sonorous. There is antemusical sound, the sounds that have been silenced by music. Nancy quotes Wallace Stevens on the existence of an antemusical: "the self/detects the sound of a voice that doubles as its own" ("The Woman That Had More Babies than That," in Listening, p. 72, No. 21). Resonance is the stuff of bodies. Is embodiment a basis on which to deny music priority to language? I'm being crude, it's true. Let's listen to how Nancy speaks of resonance, and its relation to timbre.
Rather than speaking of timbre and listening in terms of "intentional aim," it is necessary to say that before any relationship to object, listening opens up in timbre, which resounds in it rather than for it. In truth, resonance is at once listening to to timbre and the timbre of listening, if one may put it that way. Resonance is at once that of a body that is sonorous for itself and resonance of sonority in a listening body that, itself, resounds as it listens. (At the same time, this resonance is not an immobile given, since timbre itself is an evolving process, and, consequently, listening evolves along with it.)
(p. 40)
Timbre is an evolving process. If we are not to take the musical as given, and therefore simply project a received idea of timbre upon all sounds, interpreting all sounds through this musicological idea, but instead recognize its evolution, then it becomes of prime importance to investigate how one form develops from another, how listening might be said to evolve rather than merely change or manifest itself in a variety of ways. Perhaps, though, the evolutions of listening are many. The analogy with life on Earth only goes so far. Was there ever a stage in the evolution of listening when music became language? See, already this is a misleading question because listenings are indeed surely many, and we wouldn't rush to say that any one adventure of listening recapitulates *listening, or that a listening must repeat or mimic other listenings, other developmental pathways. No outcome is predetermined. And so we confront the obvious problem of separating the given from the elaborated, and, secondarily, of describing the very how of evolution, and of justifying an implied distinction between a variance and a transformation. Now, in the passage immediately above, Nancy speaks of a nonintentional (in a phenomenological sense) listening as prior to intentional listening, yet in the earlier quoted passage he says that music makes sounds nonintentional. Is nonintentional listening made or discovered by music? If we are to speak intelligibly of the evolution of listening, don't we need an answer to this question of how nonintentionality in listening is arrived at? (I'm not completely sure, though I have enough of an opinion to pose the question.)
Do we move from babble to a speaking that is already listening? How does listening develop through infancy? Can we grasp listening in the context of a transcendental murmuring, "the condition of all words and all silence" (p. 25), without confronting what could be taken for a listening that transcends babble, and therewith a speaking that is already listening, at some stage or another? (I honestly don't know enough about transcendence to say whether it is one or many, or whether it really exists at all. It could after all simply be a reality of our linguistic life that we project onto things of experience in accordance with language's power to fashion reality–the withdrawal of the musical into reality, into the plasma of the real–but I'm just tossing ideas around here.)
This profound disposition [musical listening, FtY]–arranged, in fact, according to the profundity of a reverberation chamber that is nothing other than the body from end to end–is a relationship to meaning [sens], a tension toward it: but toward it completely ahead of signification, meaning in its nascent state, in the state of return [renvoi] for which the end of this return is not given (the concept, the idea, the information), and hence to the sate of return without end, like an echo that continues on its own and that is nothing but this continuance going in a decrescendo, or even in moriendo. To be listening is to be inclined toward the opening of meaning, hence to a slash, a cut in un-sensed [in sensée] indifference at the same time as toward a reserve that is anterior and posterior to any signifying punctuation. [T]he beginning of sense . . . takes place nowhere but in a sonorous attack. . . a stridency where a weighty, murmurring matter breathes, opened into the division of its resonance.
(p. 27, Nancy's emphasis)
Likewise, "sense consists first of all. . . not in a signifying intention, but rather in a listening" (p. 30). First of all. Hmmm.
Let's return for a second to the doubling of a voice, a voice of the self. In listening do we communicate with ourselves? "Communication is not transmission but a sharing that becomes subject" (p. 41). Perhaps we communicate with ourselves in our nascent states, but even so we should question the possibility of the frictionless voice, and, especially, frictionless doubling. How then might we describe any friction we feel in communication with our own voice? Is timbre really the bottom of it all? The musical? Now that we have discovered the musical, and brought its style of listening back from the language it'd sunk into, we can ask, paradoxically, whether there exists a voice without timbre, or any voice that isn't yet doubled, and the question may be not simply a variation on a theme of friction, but an evolution, a movement into the musical, from which we've been estranged. In timbre we hear bodies, hear that voices are voices of bodies. Are the voices of bodies bottomless? Is music? What is the bottom to listening? Is communication a condition for all doubling and all singling out? What are the primitive conditions of listening? Having an idea, perhaps? Or something that could double as a person's own idea?
At the moment I'm unable to deliver a proper meditation on the rhythmic listener. I'll get back to it. For now I need to mention that if you're going to be in Seattle you need to check out the Jason Parker Quartet, all of whom are sensitive listeners.
A passage in Nancy's Listening serves to amplify an idea of Lefebvre's that rhythm requires another time besides or outside of time in order to meditate upon time. Here's Nancy:
We should linger here for a long while on rhythm: it is nothing other than the time of time, the vibration of time itself in the stroke of a present that presents it by separating it from itself, freeing it from its simple stanza to make it into scansion (rise, raising of the foot that beats) and cadence (fall, passage into the pause). Thus, rhythm separates the succession of the linearity of the sequence or length of time: it bends time to give it to time itself, and it is in this way that if folds and unfolds a "self." If temporality is the dimension of the subject (ever since Saint Augustine, Kant, Husserl, Heidegger), this is because it defines the subject as what separates itself, not only from the other or from the pure "there," but also from the self: insofar as it waits for itself and retains itself, insofar as it desires (itself) and forgets (itself), insofar as it retains, by repeating it, its own empty unity and its projected or . . . ejected [protojée, ou . . . jetée] unicity.
(p. 17, Nancy's emphases)
A quick thought. In addition to thinking about the methectic quality of listening, which Nancy invites, we should mull over the improvisatory attribute of (contribution to) methexis. Where is the methexis in a trumpet full of my emptiness?
A cryptic statement from Lefebvre: "The–recent–irruption of pure rhythm is found in all memories, as it often is when listening" (Rhythmanalysis, p. 61). He's talking about music (I think). Perhaps melody, which is always rhythmical to some degree, would be associated with memories because in listening to melody we exercise our mnemonic faculty, and the mere use of this faculty is enough to stir the irruption of memories. Or, perhaps, we exercise a musical faculty when forming memories, an idea which might be close to Lefebvre's, and merely using our musical abilities makes whatever we are doing musical. However, are we sure that this isn't a single faculty at play? In our everyday understanding do we forget that our memories are also musical? Do we forget our own musical abilities in order to experience memories in something like a reverie?
With respect to memory, how would quiet listening differ from the listening that goes with a more active participation in the creation of music? Does it help us to experience memories if we are able to forget or lay aside our capacity for making music? In that case we would rely on both the ability to "make" rhythm, or to rhythm forth, and the abilty to be made by rhythm, to be touched by rhythm, shaped. Would listening then be something like an acquiescence to a shaping force, or even an acquiescence to a plasticity? A plastic faculty.
Vibration represents the perturbation of a continuum. Rhythm is a play of perturbations, or disturbances, which typically means a play of vibrations, plural. Are all dynamic conducts (guidances) of perturbation to be subsumed under the heading of "play"? If the player of rhythm can't be certain that he isn't being played by rhythm, then the benignant nature of the play of disturbances is thrown in doubt. Discontinuation, like play, must always be ambivalent. Does memory cover over this ambivalence even as it thrives on it as one thrives on a rhythm? Quietly and–and being the irruption of a rhythm–to the sound of music, an inner melody, we remember. How will we remember beginning to think that memory is not automatic and still, in that moment, be able to remember?
Irigary, in a criticism of Hegelian dialectic, recommends a turning away from "an absolute saturated with language. . .in order to return to the absolute silence that the respect for other as irreducible to oneself calls for" (Between East and West, p. 100). She continues, "Negativity is then applied to the absolute itself as the accomplishment of the subject, an absolute reduced not to nothing but to a silence attentive to the other" (ibid.).
I'd like to give a moment's thought to the possibility of a meontic mode of silence, a mode of silence that invites us to hear what isn't voiced in order to better hear the voice. (It is appropriate to speak of voices, to hear voices in these words. We are indeed speaking in interpersonal terms. At issue is something like an egalitarian imperative, what Irigaray refers to as "horizontal transcendence," and the whisper of a radical panecastics that would resituate negativity, thought and the question without the violence of a depersonalization.
Let's say, for the sake of conversation, that the duration of silence is dialectical in every direction. Naturally. The attentionality of a silence is dialectical in every direction, open to interlocutors from all corners, speakers of the between, so it is might be expected that its duration should be multidirectional or polyvalent. Is this true of even the most intimate silences? The nature of the most intimate of silences is to not be widely known. That limitation too represents a kind of meontics. Maybe to be intimate is to be incompletely answered in a special way, to not know all of the valences of a silence's duration, to not let them be known.
Where would our interiors be without silence? Could we then build an interior without attention to others? This is an anxiety I think many people have, that one can indeed build build an interior away from all attention. People fear being trapped, and at the same time they fear a threat to betweenness. Perhaps though it is a question of durations. One attention span does not perfectly synchronize with another. Silences overlap, perhaps even lay askew. They seem not to attend to each other, and for a moment at least, the each other is thrown into doubt. Where would each other be in the absence of attention? Well, let's not rush to fill every silence with a lack of attention.
Will silence tell us whether it masks attentiveness or inattentiveness? Will words?
Having finished Johnson's Listening in Paris I now feel that any apposite critique of Romanticism must come from a posture of having, if not embraced Romanticism, gone hand in hand with Romanticism for some way. Perhaps I wouldn't want to defend Romanticism except for the existence of anti-Romanticism, which leans towards pulling the shade down on what it's really like to have an experience. Our first anomaly evinces itself in recognizing an experience that one would rather not have taken for an experience in any Romantic sense. It points to a shortcoming in vision of *language as a giver of experience, for even though Johnson is a historian who specializes in musicology, the key to his thinking is the idea that "music is a language," and by "language" he means something that, unconsciously and from the outside, constructs experience. (We may wish to credit Johsnon with giving us something more subtle than a simple critique of Romanticism; he means to criticize the conditions of possibility of Romanticism. I would still turn the critique around to investigate the conditions of possibility of an "anti-Romantic" experience.) The specific problem Johnson's discourse raises is this: given an expectation of silent listening, how does one adequately and appropriately communicate one's boredom at the opera without being mistaken for either having a profound experience or for genuinely being polite? At this point I'd like to register my sympathies with elite audiences who feel that their responsivity, their very capacity for formulating and communicating responses to music, which must in only one respect happen both spontaneously and at once if they are to be responses, has been truncated, repressed, or otherwise mired in stupidities and awkward, if all too easy, niceties. Do such listeners suffer from too much Romanticism or, as may be evident were we to take our feelings into account, too little? Bear with me a second. I'm not going to argue that boredom represents a deep experience or an experience any less constructed or more interior than any other kind of experience. I will say that boredom is felt, and, most germaine to our critique, an urge to communicate this feeling arises even when approved codes of expressing such a feeling are not readily at hand. To think this through we must return to the question of response, which now must be thought with a new understanding of readiness, for it is only in one respect that responses are formulated and communicated spontaneously and at once, and that is in respect to the synkairotic and the spasmoreality that pertains to its breach. The synkairotic differs from synchronic in that its at onces are not in binary opposition to the diachronic, and may be stretched and bent in response to exigencies of moment. What we call one respect of response may be better conceptualized as one moment of response. The fact that response has other moments is not obscured or obliterated by the breach of the synkairotic. In actuality the inculcation of stillness (of which silence is but one mode) into the body of the elite listener reveals itself as an extreme kind of violence not because it denies an expression–this would the Romantic conceit of the anti-Romantic–but because it misplaces readiness. This may also stand as a metaphor for zombification, this stillness. We should not think of this zombification, however, in the sense of there being a Difference between Life and Death which may be suspended, but only in the sense of a readiness having been misplaced or even misappropriated. Readiness belongs with the response and with experience at once. Of course in embracing the momentary we must depart from the instant and the infinite experience it has been made to represent. So be it. We cannot listen well while allowing readiness to be restricted to the instantaneous.
Our second anomaly is a straightforward critique of the Boasian linguistic unconscious by Claude Hagège: On the Part Played by Human Conscious Choice in Language Structure and Language Evolution (pdf). (This may appear to be an ordered catalogue of anomalies; I take the existence of linguistic consciousness to be a single fact which any adequate thinking about language would have to account for, so I count it as one anomaly, without ruling out any finer analyses.)
James H. Johnson argues that the revolutionary politics of the Terror fostered a musical style that was conservative and reactionary. Here he talks about polyphony:
[T]he cultural climate of Jacobinism worked against polyphony, for polyphony implied a divided social body. Dramatically, it signified protagonists at cross purposes; experientially, it made transparency between stage and spectator difficult; and musically, it promoted dangerously personal experience. In short, polyphony was the musical equivalent of dissent.
(Listening in Paris, pp. 152-154)
Perhaps the relation between personal experience and music seems obvious, but I will probe it just a bit. How would polyphony in particular promote a personal experience of music? Is it actually animus towards the personal that drives the suppression of polyphony? The political forces that would stomp out plurality would also stomp out personal liberty and in extreme though not genuinely rare cases they would stomp out music as well. Should we let the people who would stomp out music tell us what music means, or even provide the vaguest outline of what constitutes a musical experience?
The suppression of music ranks among the most vicious forms of the challenge to pluralism for which there is no easy rejoinder, no unambiguous defense. The champion of liberty must concede that one is free to hate music, to express one's hatred of music and to persuade others to hate music even while denying that one is a person, or, more commonly, that a human being must be thought of as an entity endowed with personal liberty. I sense there is more at stake in the suppression of music than any particular variety of political liberty, though I am not quite imagining a musical experience absent a political liberty.
Do I have to be precisely at liberty to even think that there must be something more than liberty? That is, is it liberty that affords me something more than itself?
Liberty without music is worthless to me. I can even say that music is liberating. Music gives liberty as much as it is born in liberty and for this reason liberty appears to me to be polymorphous. There are as many forms of liberty as there are forms. (I might be sliding away from a view that liberties exist as such.) In addition there are transformative liberties, metamorphoses, monstruations and kaleidiations of liberty.
Is personal experience the domain of the transformative par excellence? (I don't know that this is true, but I will not fear to think it.)
In all likelihood personal experience doesn't need to be promoted. Johsnon has shown that the dominant aesthetic during the reign of the Jacobins heard music as something that promoted feelings, or, perhaps, elicited feelings. I imagine a danger arising from a diffuse feeling that the feeling touches the personal, but maybe that would have been beside the point. The transition from the elicited to the illicit may have to do with an atmospheric hostility towards feelings; on the other hand the stomping out of feelings may be an unintended casualty of an aggression against free representations of liberty–I'd even say relatively free representations of liberty, because unlike Nancy I don't know what absolute freedom would mean in this context. I don't know that feelings elicited by music, created or sounded by music, are themselves absolute feelings or have any contact with an absolute freedom or a domain of the absolutely personal. At the same time, I don't deny the existence of the feeling or the personal or the free. Perhaps the Jacobins correctly surmised the polymorphousness of liberty, and, given a certain dogma about representation, the injuction (the enjoinment, which would be at the same time a disjunction) against polyphony took shape as if by necessity. And the most dangerous liberty of all would be the transformative.
Questions for a later date: is the formless transformative? Is the transformative necessarily formless or of the formless?
On May 29, 1789, professors of the Conservatoire de Musique gave a concert for a pair of Asian elephants, Hanz and Marguerite. The concert was part of a scientific experiment intended to determine whether music stirred the passions of listeners in a natural state.
The experiment was a success. The swift and direct effect of music upon sensitive listeners uncorrupted by the monarchy was confirmed. A rough correlation between particular types of music and specific response could now be made. Most important, the passionate impact of military music, just as the Greeks had chronicled, now seemed indubitable. The central lesson of the experiment was just what Ginguené had said earlier in the decade: music acts most strongly when listeners respond most naturally. The report offered a lofty conclusion: "Such is the empire of music over all beings endowed with life and with sensitivity, that men may make use of it. . .to civilize themselves and regulate their morals."
(James H. Johsnon, Listening in Paris, p. 131)
Johnson touches on without answering the questions "What is music?" and "What is listening?" The latter question suggests how Johnson would go about answering the former. The question "How is collective experience possible?" also arises from his work. These are all good questions. Johnson's work has forced me to acknowledge my own prejudices regarding music, to realize that my thoughts about music are culturally, historically shaped. My prejudices about music are also personally shaped to such an extent that I notice that nobody really shares exactly my views of what music is or what it means.
I spent some time this morning listening to Dr. Chandrakant Sardeshmukh's cd, Celebration. "Happiness Forever: Raga Hemant" is in 16, so it was good to work out to–I do all my exercizes in reps of 16; 32 of these, 48 of those, 64 of the other, 96, 128, 192....–though perhaps not as good for working out as the Ohio Players. My counting was a bit of a distraction. Is this an unnatural way to listen to "Happiness Forever"? Well, is there a natural way to listen to "Happiness Forever"? It was a live recording but the audience was silent until the very end when they all burst into applause. That was nice, I thought. Would I want to call that unnatural? Dr. Sardeshmukh links to the following video clip on Youtube, make of it what you will:
I'll add a thought. Is it the case that there's one activity called "listening" that people pursue in various ways, with varying intensity, with varying degrees of attentiveness; or is "listening" in fact a label for diverse activities that would be given different names were our common language more precise. If one follows the latter path, what must one say about music? Oh, and since I'm at it, what does the phrase "aesthetic imperialism" suggest to you?
Some maintained that it was bad form to stay for the entire opera. The young dandy Almair in La Morlière's Angola, described as a "scrupulous observer of etiquette [bienséance]," claims that there is "nothing so indecent as staying to the end" of an opera. The practice was apparently common enough for the Mercure to mention it disapprovingly: it was a "disgrace," the paper wrote, for women to leave during the last acts of Atys and Roland. Others held a prejudice against listening too intently to the music. A traveler to Paris who was quick to grasp the dynamics of behavior at the Opéra wrote with some derision that the only spectators who listened to the music were "several clerics, several shopkeepers, several schoolboys, sucklings of the muses and soldiers just returning from or about to leave for a tour of duty." And a young nobleman explained to his guest that listening to the music with focused attention was "bourgeois." "There is nothing so damnable," he went on, "as listening to a work like a street merchant or some provincial just off the boat."
For these spectators, attentiveness was a social faux pas, as the Mercure observed: spectators who attempted to listen to a work before judging it, the paper claimed, were regarded by the rest as "creatures from another world." Circulating, conversing, arriving late, and leaving early were an accepted part of eighteenth-century musical experience, grudgingly tolerated by some and positively encouraged by others. "We listen at most to two or three pieces consecrated by fashion," as a character in Angola declares, "and at the end we excessively praise or thoroughly damn the whole work."
(James H. Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (University of California Press, 1995), p. 31)
A peculiar effect of Johnson's brand of cultural history is that the experiences at the opera of sucklings of the muses and others on the sidelines of the business of the aristocracy don't really count as musical experiences. They have no meaning. Musical meaning, Johnson says, "resides in the particular moment of reception, one shaped by dominant aesthetic and social expectations that are themselves historically structured" (p. 2). He denies that there are as many Don Giovannis as there have been listeners. He holds that there is absolutely zero meaning outside of a horizon of expectations which is socially defined and cannot be understood as belonging to individuals (p. 3). Johnson' analysis, then, produces the curious effect that an Eighteenth-Century aristocrat who doesn't listen to an opera has a musical experience while attendees who do listen do not have meaningful musical experiences. Of course, we recieve Johnson's work amid dominant aesthetic and social expectations that are themselves historically structured. (How then should I interepret signs of conflict in his account, the possibility of other readings of the same material?) One dominant expectation greeting Johnson's work may be that sucklings of the muses have no meaningful experiences, no horizons worth exploring, no history that needs to be told. Yet if I didn't suspect Johnson of harboring a secret affection for the sucklings of the muses I would read no further–and I intent to read further. I've already decided that Listening in Paris is quite an engaging book.
Corradi Fiumara's maieutics of listening seeks to enhance the creation of language and the growth of the whole person, freeing "humans in the making" from the constraints of using and imitating the languages that have dominant positions in the marketplace of ideas (The Other Side of Language, p. 167). She reminds us that Socrates tells Theatetus that midwives are prouder of their skill in forming unions than they are of their skill in cutting umbilical cords, and he distinguishes proper matchmaking from pandering. Corradi Fiumara skirts around the issue of whether childbirth is actually less painful than philosophical dialogue, as Socrates says. I raise it because I want to question the real consequences of bringing thinkers or concepts together.
The decision to go to war in Iraq was a bad idea with horrible consequences. From its inception to the vote to authorize the use of military force, public institutions of dialogue failed to properly evaluate the idea of going to war against Iraq. Voices of dissent were not properly heard. That is to say, I don't believe the subsitition of good ideas for bad ideas can enduringly protect a polity from making poor decisions. A culture of genuine dialogue provides a defense against making horrible decisions, but, paradoxically, it requires and even encourages the airing of horrible ideas; it requires, among other things, that we have public spaces set aside for the free play of ideas. Although I'd like to remain open to other views, I am taking a position against the proposition that the play of ideas is a waste of time.
Ideas can have horrible consequences without having the force of law behind them. However, it would be detrimental to the culture of dialogue to judge the consequences of a thought before it has been heard, or even before it has been thought. Perhaps we sometimes fear the consquences of ideas instead of directly facing our fear of horrible violence, subverting, along the way, any desire for a peaceful coexistence. If we examine our fears of violence, we may discover that fear is but one of our emotions, and desires are not without contradictions. Learning about our emotions, and assessing the entire range of consequences of thinking, requires that thoughts be heard.
I won't flatter myself that I'm anything like a good Socratic midwife, or that I'm not susceptible to making use of and imitating intellectual discourses that happen to be ready to hand. It would be desirable, though, to free myself for becoming. To that I end I am taking Corradi Fiumara's message to heart.
Corradi Fiumara insists that we should want to be able to find time for listening. We should not merely listen to others, but to our own inner voice. Exploring this idea, Corradi Fiumara says some interesting things about time. To begin with, she puts forward an idea of biological time in order to criticize a concept of time defined by a rationality that does not know how to listen.
With the technology of informatics and the achievement of 'real time', which constitutes precisely the annulment of the time spent in waiting, we move ever further away biological time, undeniably contained within the limits of birth and death and scanned by such rhythms as sleeping and waking, diastole and systole. Structured by a sequence of rhythms that are in evidence as early as in pre-natal life, biological time is conspicuously different from the concept of time created by western rationality: a time, that is, which has lost all rhythmical flow and only speeds up in a planar, uniform and unhalting way. It is a notion of time that can be integrated more easily with a technology of treatment than with the prevention of pathological states; two different views of time, linked to horizons that seem to diverge ever more and that render one another both alien and alienated.
(The Other Side of Language, p. 134)
Corradi Fiumara considers Heidegger's idea that time, as the basis of the possibility of selfhood, enables the mind to be what it is (Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, pp. 196-197). She comments as follows:
An number of queries thus emerge: first and foremost whether selfhood represents an indisputable fact or a simple possibility of realization. And if it is really the function of time to make the mind what it is how can we know whether time fulfils its role and whether the mind exists as such; we must ask, therefore, if time is 'alive', if it works. Time, which can not be seen, touched or controlled by following it as we choose, is nevertheless capable of paralysing humans with boredom or disintegrating them with haste. If we actually believe that time 'enables the mind to be what it is', it is only fair to ask ourselves how we can have experience of it. And it, in our haste, our boredom, or other forms of deterioration, time fails us, the mind might cease to be what it is. And what might a mind be when it is no longer what it is?
(pp. 140-141)
It occurs to me as I write that I have an inner voice that holds me back and never urges me forward. It is the voice of an editor. Obviously I can tune it out. It can become boring, and if it sounds boring maybe that's because it's bored. Dreadfully bored. Other times it's much too hasty, to quick to edit. Well, I can't be sure. Is it me or my inner voice that's too hasty? Probably both. There's a reciprocity even in our deterioration, our getting down, which may or may not be getting down for real. Do I long to have an inner voice that wouldn't be mine? Would such an other voice be a disintegration, or a deeper integration? If I say I am mindless, it is only in the sense of not having a mind. My mindspace is shared with another voice. I mind it, and I don't mind it. I mind it, though I feel minding it doesn't completely block our getting down. But Corradi Fiumara has a point. If I'm going to get down with my inner voice, the last thing I want to be is arhythmical.
A theme of surprise has surfaced in my recent readings. Nancy talks of the surprise of freedom, Tengelyi of the surprise of new sense, and now Corradi Fiumara speaks of the emergence of something with an "almost unhoped-for spontaneity" when we properly listen to the philosophical tradition (The Other Side of Language, p. 76). I think that something is meaning. All three authors discuss meaning in some way, but whereas Nancy and Tengelyi thematize experience as the opening onto meaning, Corradi Fiumara's discussion of experience (pp. 120-123) connects the surprise of the experienced event to an attitude of not listening, rather than aligning listening directly with the unexpected. In Corradi Fiumara's existential hermeneutics the "almost" is key.
Something "speaks," in Corradi Fiumara's opinion, if it is listened for, rather than their being something said that one would subsequently listen to (p. 72). Does her thinking take us beyond the hermeneutic circle? It's not an easy question. She speaks of a "connubial listening propensity" (p. 75) and a "propensity for conjunctions, possibly similar to Heidegger's concept of 'dwelling by something'" (p. 78). I feel that "dwelling by something" is not the best guide for the problem of coexistence Corradi Fiumara's work poses. The idea of the connubial, if wed to an idea of the experience of listening as that which surprises, might offer an alternative to a paradigm of meaning according to which an interpreter constructs meaning out of an engagement that requires a prior understanding of the whole of the engaged. That is, while Corradi Fiumara takes notice of coexistence, and will thematize dialogue, I'm not sure she fully appreciates plurality as it relates to meanings. Perhaps she almost does. Perhaps she will surprise me.
Corradi Fiumara sides with pensiero debole ("weak thought") without acknowledging its weakness. She says that "the qualities of attention, tenacity, patience, respect, resilience, rigour and farsightedness that contribute to the development of 'weak' thinking constitute a way of relating that is based upon strength" (The Other Side of Language, p. 71). The real target of criticism, she contends, is not "strong" thinking but power, and she holds that the body of knowledge associated with power and violence is in fact quite fragile (pp. 68-69). So what would it mean to recover the "strength of the listening word" (p. 64)?
Logomachical culture chains us to dilemmas, enchantments and perversions that we can't cut loose from by means of alternative disourses. It would be utopian, Corradi Fiumara argues, to expect those who wield discursive power to disarm themselves and listen to those who yearn for a different kind of "noetic coexistence"; the best that can be hoped for in the culture of the deaf logos is a political turn-taking (p. 53). And yet she does hold out hope that proper hearing "might perhaps induce an evolutionary transformation in the coexistence of philosophical schools" (p. 54). On the one hand Corradi Fiumara says that the logos is speaking and hearing together, and on the other hand she is not proposing a discursive formation that would supplant other discursive formations. She says quite clearly, "No tradition of listening could be identified that draws upon or belongs within a specific institutionalized community" (p. 67). It's as if she were proposing an accomodation with discourses that didn't fall prey to their enchantements and their violence. She says that a force is released in listening that cannot be converted to a power without disappearing (p. 61).
"A listening atmosphere is not improvised," Corradi Fiumara says. "It is, on the contrary, the product of a strenuous process of conception, growth and devoted attention" (p. 60). When I say "improvisation" I mean a strenuous process of conception, development and devoted attention, but I take her point. She means that we need to cultivate a thinking that can sustain "the innovative concreteness of experience. Some of the myths that sustain culture can only be disenchanted by a way of thinking that may draw upon the source of its own strength, not so much in the form of an introspective isolation as in a solidarity of reciprocities that will allow for authentic listening" (ibidem, Corradi Fiumara's emphasis). She wants us to do away with the myth that the listener is stupid, unable to wield discourse and therefore unworthy of reciprocity. We have an ethical obligation not only to those who say something to us, but to those who listen (pp. 61-62). The figure of the unenchanted listener appears rather heroic in Corradi Fiumara's critique, and yet the unenchanted listener is not a solitary hero. The listener "is not isolated in the sense that he is connected once again to a network of vivid, moving and complex dynamics" (p. 61).
So I am back to the question of Corradi Fiumara's utopianism, such as it is. She doesn't offer an alternative discursive formation, or an ideal intellectual community. She does though hint at an alternative to Western culture, one that doesn't confuse strength and power, and recovers, in listening, "the primal vicissitudes of thinking" (p. 64). Since this is not a question of the introspective individual, how then do we cultivate a common attitude of listening outside of any cultural institution? Do we throw every new thinker back on the primal vicissitudes of thinking without calling therefore for an exclusion of the thinker or the vicissitudinous? Can we have a culture without institutions? I'm not sure that's what Corradi Fiumara is suggesting, but the question arises.
I don't want to be an administrator of concepts, so it is always with some sense of relief that I find an attempt to administer a concept has failed. Neither do I want to sink into trepidation. How then should I share with you Corradi Fiumara's concept of listening?
There are two voices to Corradi Fiumara's thinking about listening: resistence to a logocentric cultural system, and "generative listening," a capability of response and questioning that is not dictated by the said, and does not conform to the style of a deaf logos (The Other Side of Language, p. 22). The two voices are a madrigal. An attitude of genuine listening does not discount attitudes stemming from divergent Weltanschuungen; it occupies no space but "in a paradoxical sense creates ever new spaces in the very 'place' in which it is carried out" (p. 19). Modern rationalism, Corradi Fiumara argues, is "sustained by an unknowing frenzy in the sense that it is not limited to the pursuit of new ways of its thinking but also tends to deny that earlier, minor or unsuccessful traditions ever existed. And, in order to avoid the labor of listening–a labour comparable to the germination of any real dialogue–a single tradition is recognized in which everything alien is considered irrelevant: the product of intellectual blindness or of an unwillingness to evolve" (p. 26). I'd like to say that no Italian humanist is alien to me without putting Corradi Fiumara in such neat little boxes. I feel that her philosophy of listening is speaking to me even though I don't concern myself much with stridently rationalist discourses.
An aversion–almost–towards listening to the rich multiplicity of 'reality' seems to be linked with a background of profound fears and to the resulting defensive postures that express themselves in a tendency to reduce knowledge in general to a set of principles from which nothing can escape. A relentless battle is waged as an attempt is made to organize everything in the light, or shadow, or the 'best' principles of knowledge: a chronic struggle of territorial conquest where the 'territory' is the set of notions and principles for constructing reality. Listening thus comes to be an essential function in the attempt to indentify and monitor possible predatory aspects of our knowledge, no longer even capable of rememorizing or imagining the Parmenidean function of the 'shepherds of being'.
(p. 21)
It was of course Heidegger who said that the human being is the shephard of being (Letter on Humanism). On reflection, Corradi Fiumara is deeply indebted to Heidegger for her ecological thinking and perhaps her ideas of the spaces opened up by listening. This is not without irony when one considers the many voices that were silenced and the many voices that were sent into exile by Heidegger's National Socialism.
Do we hear the vulnerability of the listener in this passage? Will the enemies of exchange had laid waste to silence, or does silence endure like it always does, like the empathy one feels for the person who hears the alyric of the Eumenides? Silence is not the splintered lyre but the lyre on the cusp of speech? The broken lyre? Are we not on the verge of weeping for the man who cradles the broken lyre in his arms, always there, on the verge?