Jean-Luc Nancy and the Listening Subject (original) (raw)
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Jean-Luc Nancy's phenomenology of listening (trans. 2007) makes a series of claims about the sonic / auditory nature of the subject. First among these is the claim that the subject is a subject to the extent that it is listening, that it is all ears. The subject emerges on the back of the resonance of timbre in the body and the body's becoming-rhythmic.
Aiming at examining Schaefferian phenomenology from the viewpoint of phenomenology proper, and in particular, critically observing how successfully Schaeffer understood the workings of key phenomenology concepts and applied them to his research on sound objects and listening, this paper conducts a short survey on the relationship between natural and phenomenological attitudes as well as the concept and implications of phenomenological reduction understood by phenomenology proper as well as by Schaefferian phenomenology. The survey shows that, while Schaefferian phenomenology rightly—and timely—recognized the acousmatic situation, or more accurately, acousmatic attitude, as the phenomenological attitude under which our listening experience can be investigated phenomenologically, it misunderstood the workings of phenomenological reduction and employed only part of it. Consequently, as this essay argues, Schaefferian phenomenology limited the totality of listening phenomena to its part, thus endangering the phenomenological project that it set out to do. Keywords: phenomenology; Pierre Schaeffer; acousmatic; reduced listening; listening phenomena; phenomenological reduction; epoché; natural and phenomenological attitudes
Current Musicology, 2008
Peter Szendy's first translation into English has appeared on the shelves not merely by chance. It arrives in the wake of two recent trends in the academic world: an intense interest in all things having to do with the history and culture of the senses, and the sudden accession of Jean-Luc Nancy as the Academy's philosophe du jour. Of course, these two trends are not unrelated, for few philosophers have questioned the senses, especially the sense of touch, in the way that Nancy has over the past two decades. Nancy's foreword to Szendy's book is guaranteed to draw attention to the new release, especially coming immediately on the heels ofFordham's translation of Nancy's short volume, Listening. Its "positioning" couldn't be better. However, unlike the terse, Heideggerian-inflected prose of Nancy, Szendy's work appears far more sober. At first glance, it is little more than a piecemeal work, centered around three topics: a sketchy history of m...
"Acts of listening through: towards a history of multiple ears"
Une généalogie des grandes oreilles by Lauren Tortil, 2019
This article was written as an invited commentary of the beautiful iconographical book created of Lauren Tortil, "Une généalogie des grandes oreilles", Nevers, France: ed. Tombolo Presses, 2019, in English and French. It evokes a reading through of the book. This text was written during Melissa Van Drie's Sound Delicious project, which received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 753565.
L’Objet Sonore Maintenant: Pierre Schaeffer, sound objects and the phenomenological reduction
NOTE: A more comprehensive analysis of Schaeffer's "sound object" based on this essay appears as chapter 1 of Sound Unseen. I recommend to researchers working on Pierre Schaeffer to consult that chapter. ABSTRACT: The work of Pierre Schaeffer (theorist, composer and inventor of musique concrète) bears a complex relationship to the philosophical school of phenomenology. Although often seen as working at the periphery of this movement, this paper argues that Schaeffer’s effort to ground musical works in a ‘hybrid discipline’ is quite orthodox, modelled upon Husserl’s foundational critique of both ‘realism’ and ‘psychologism’. As part of this orthodoxy, Schaeffer develops his notion of the ‘sound object’ along essentialist (eidetic) lines. This has two consequences: first, an emphasis is placed on ‘reduced listening’ over indicative and communicative modes of listening; secondly, the ‘sound object’ promotes an ahistorical ontology of musical material and technology. Despite frequent references to Schaeffer and the ‘sound object’ in recent literature on networked music, concatenative synthesis and high-level music descriptors, the original phenomenological context in which Schaeffer’s work developed is rarely revisited. By critically exploring Schaeffer’s theorising of the ‘sound object’, this paper aims at articulating the distance between contemporary and historical usage of the term.
Composition for Voices: Jean-Luc Nancy's Musical Subject
Symposium. Canadian Journal for Continental Philosophy, 2024
This article presents Jean-Luc Nancy's ideas of music in relation to being singular plural. Nancy elaborates on the themes of sharing of voices and of resonance in several texts, and he relates resonance specifically to sound, voice, and music. Although in other contexts Nancy thinks that the question of the subject belongs to the past, he maintains the question of the subject in the context of sonority. We will see that this subject is not only the subject of sensation but more precisely the musical subject. Finally, we will see how musical themes help him deconstruct the idea of community on individual, dialogic, and collective levels. Nancy opposes his idea of musical community to the total musical community that characterizes Ro- manticism. In the end, he objects to all forms of formatting in gen- res and invites to open, active, and inventive forms of listening all sounds that resonate in the world.
Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice, by Brian Kane, Oxford; New York, Oxford University Press, 2014, 336 pp., £44.99 (hardback), ISBN 9780199347841 / 2016, 336 pp., £18.99 (paperback), ISBN: 9780190632212 The Order of Sounds: A Sonorous Archipelago, by François J. Bonnet, Falmouth, Urbanomic, 2016, 364 pp., £14.99 (paperback) ISBN: 9780993045875
On Listening, 2010
In this article, Pieter Verstraete focuses on ‘auditory distress’ as a constitutive aspect of listening to the extent that it bears a new perspective on sound experiences in contemporary performance practice. As a departure point, he contends that sound is always distressing, however pleasurable the experience may be. He finds subsequent support for this claim in R. Murray Schafer’s Tuning of the World, and in Roland Barthes and Roland Havas’s chapter “Écoute”, which both appeared in 1977. Despite their different angles and objectives, both texts claim for an understanding of sound as spatially transgressing certain acoustic horizons, hearing thresholds and subjective boundaries, as the ear cannot be closed off at will. Therefore, we have produced psychological and cognitive mechanisms to deal with the continuous intervention of sound. In a rather throw-away remark in his book The Concept of Music (1990), Robin Maconie suggests in a similar vein that the activity of listening and hearing consists of keeping unwanted intensities at bay. Such drastic explanations of the workings of the ear made Hillel Schwartz to conclude in her chapter “The Indefensible Ear: A History” (2003) that the ear’s accumulative susceptibility and its lingering breakdown are the epitomes of our modern hearing culture. As such, our increasingly noisy soundscapes in the theatre and outside call for an awareness of our listening competences. By bringing together such novel perspectives on sound and by contextualizing the historical validity of these claims, Verstraete maps out a conceptual framework to discuss the performative role of sound in relation to present-day cultures and politics of listening. He discusses the ramifications of this framework by means of a case study: The Wooster Group’s recent music drama interpretation of Francesco Cavalli’s La Didone (2007-2009). In this performance, the musical spaces of Cavalli’s original dramma per musica are complemented by the sound-effects of blips and beeps and disembodied voices from Mario Bava’s science-fiction film Terrore Nello Spazio (aka Planet of the Vampires from 1965). The continuous juxtaposition of these two diegetic worlds and respective narratives creates a schizophonic perspective that urges the listener to create new connections, a new synthesis between the sounds, texts and images in an attempt to ‘perceive it all’: a global or evenly hovering attention. Yet the auditory distress constantly disrupts the evident mechanisms that would compensate the auditory distress. As such, the constant split in looking and listening (acousmatization) stresses the unframeability of sound and the necessity of the spectator to position oneself through her or his modes of listening, constantly shifting the attention. In this way, La Didone highlights the effects of auditory distress, causing awareness for the attitudes and regimes in listening that give salience, coherence, meaning and relative ‘closure’ to our fragmented experiences, ultimately filtered by our auditory imagination as the basis of these mechanisms. This awareness, in turn, gives rise to a mode of relating and positioning of the spectator as listening subject. Hence, the proposed conceptual framework aims to offer a new perspective on the listener in contemporary theatre performances. In particular, it explains how the spectator as listener feels a desire to relate to sounds or music within the context of theatre’s hypermedial mechanisms, offering him occasional flashes of awareness about his responsibility as a listening subject. The spectator’s urge to respond to the auditory distress and the theatre’s promise to provide resolution in this desire precisely constitute the performative power of sound in the theatre. Ultimately, with the help of the case study, the conceptual framework aims to anchor the discussion of sound in contemporary (music) theatre within the comprehensive though much contested space of aurality. Verstraete concludes with a proposal to relate the still ill-defined notion of aurality to an understanding of listening as a foremost discursive practice.