Foucault & the Politics of Hearing

Lauri Siisiäinen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136266393
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The issue of the senses and sensual perception in Michel Foucault's thought has been a source of prolific discussion already for quite some time. Often, Foucault has been accused of overemphasizing the centrality of sight, and has been portrayed as yet another thinker representative of Western ocularcentricism. This innovative new work seeks to challenge this portrait by presenting an alternative view of Foucault as a thinker for whom the sound, voice, hearing, and listening, the auditory-sonorous, actually did matter.

Illustrating how the auditory-sonorous relates most integrally to the most pertinent issues of Foucault - the intertwinement and confrontations of power, knowledge, and resistance - the book both presents novel readings of some of Foucault's most widely read and commented-on works (such as Discipline and Punish, the first volume of History of Sexuality ), and discusses the variety of his lectures, essays, and interviews, some of which have not been noted before.

Moving beyond a commentary on Foucault, Siisiainen goes on to examine other philosophers and political thinkers (including Roland Barthes, Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Rancière) in this context in order to bring to the fore the potentials in Foucault's work for the generation of a new perspective for the political genealogy of the sound, hearing, and listening, approaching the former as a key locus of contemporary political struggles.

This work will be of great interest to students and scholars in a range of areas including political theory, philosophy, and cultural studies.

1 The archaeology of our ears

Murmur, madness, and language

Let us start from the very beginning of the 1960s. Foucault's Preface for the first edition of Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l'äge classique (later translated as “Madness and Civilization”), from 1961, is an early text that is noteworthy from our angle. There, already, the issue of sound and hearing comes to the fore, when Foucault reflects on the basic orientation of his work in this period, and its central issues, i.e. reason and madness, their differentiation, and the historicity of these. To compare, in the actual work Madness and Civilization (Foucault 2002), sound, murmur, noise, and hearing do not come to the center of Foucault's explicit treatment. Thus, the original Preface is a text that deserves a particularly careful scrutiny: “The necessity of madness throughout the history of the Occident is related to this gesture of decision which detaches from the background noise, and its continuous monotony, a signifying language [ … ]” (Foucault 2001a: 191, my emphasis). The background noise is something that precedes the formation of signifying language, i.e. the existence of the whole system (or any particular system) composed of signifiers and meanings/senses (of words, sentences, texts, etc.). It precedes the whole set of determinations through which signifying language is formed, and also, through which it is separated from what is non-signifying, or nonsense. This same division is also what gives birth to reason (associated with signification), and madness (associated with what is non-signifying) (ibid.: 187–94).

Thus, Foucault (ibid.) evokes “noise” to characterize what precedes this fundamental divide of Western culture and society. The continuity, the “continuous monotony” of noise means that everything is still entangled too tightly, that all the sounds are still “implicated in a confused way” (ibid.: 188, my emphasis) with one another. The negativities—all the divisions, separations, refusals, and exclusions that constitute signifying language and “sense,” together with its opposite (or its “other”), nonsense and madness—are not yet, or no longer established.

Although noise may be continuous and monotonous, we should not think of it as stable, or unmoving. On the contrary, noise consists of events of interactions, exchanges, and communications, taking place between sounds, between imperfectly constituted words, as well as between the realms of sense and nonsense, reason and madness. It is this movement of exchange and intertwinement, which is continuous, i.e. it takes place incessantly, and is characterized by the suspension (not yet, no longer) of the distinctive (discontinuous) identities. The continuity of noise can also be understood by the incessant arrival and passing away of elements, of sounds, i.e. the continuity of their withering away as soon as they appear. All the signifiers, all the words, all the signs, all utterances are left imperfect in their form, precisely because they disappear “too quickly,” without attaining any fixity, left indeterminate (ibid.: 187–94). In the noise, sounds are “collapsing before having reached all formulation, and returning without glamour into silence (ibid.: 191, my emphasis).”

The divisions do not come from the outside (from some transcendent origin of order) to “cut” and organize the continuity of noise into distinctive elements and domains. Noise itself is the event (the multiplicity of events), or, as Foucault also calls it in the 1961 Preface, the gesture and decision of partitioning, division, separation, and refusal. It is in noise that “the man of madness, and the man of reason, separating themselves, are not yet separate” (ibid.: 188). Or, in the same light, noise or murmur offers us the “undifferentiated experience, the non-partitioned experience of partitioning as such” (ibid.: 187, my emphasis). Noise gives us an experience of incomplete splitting apart in the course of its happening, which is still also an unfinished confrontation with no teleological certainty concerning its direction and outcome (ibid.: 187–94).

From this basis, Foucault (ibid.: 191) can suggest that the noise, murmur, and stutter are the “charred root of sense.” This root is silenced, muffled, and forgotten inside the already fixed and established order of signification, reason, and madness. It is, indeed, akin to “cinder,” precisely because it is not a solid origin, or a foundation; because it is neither a subject, nor an object; because it is only the movement of non-distinctive particles. By characterizing the root of language as noise, Foucault also underlines that language does not originate in the speaking subject and its activities, and that language does not come back to the model of inter-subjective communication. As noise, or murmur, the root of language is anonymous: “the obstinate murmur of a language that would speak all alone—without speaking subject and without interlocutor, subsiding on itself” (ibid.: my emphasis).

Although Foucault stresses that noise is something preceding the division between madness and reason, he also ponders on another possible approach to the issue. Could we think of madness not in terms of the cultural, social, and discursive partitions, i.e. as a domain separated from the area of reason, sense, and signification, but instead, in a more primary sense? In this more primary sense, madness would be discovered in the noise and murmur as such. Then, we would be dealing with madness that is still “vivid,” still in a “savage state,” before it has been captured, given determinate identity, and “tamed” by psychiatry, or any other regime of knowledge. As this more primary madness belongs inseparably together with the anonymous noise and murmur, we should “prick up our ears,” i.e. practice an art of listening, in order to hear it: “History, not of psychiatry, but of madness itself, in its vividness, before all capture by knowledge. One should, thus, prick up one's ears, lean over towards that mumbling of the world [ …]” (ibid.: 192, my emphasis). However, Foucault quickly adds that such a task of immediately perceiving madness in its savage state, and of writing its history, is an impossible one. First, this is so simply because of the evanescence of the noises. Second, it is impossible because our perception, and also our enunciations, belong necessarily to a world which has already captured the noises/madness (ibid.).

Yet, affirming this impossibility does not imply any cynical renouncement. What still remains open is the “mediated” attempt to “bring to the surface of the language of reason” (ibid.: 194) the noises of madness, and as a result, to remind reason and signifying language of the common descent they share with their “other.” This is, then, the task of archaeology. When Foucault describes archaeology in this fashion, it actually resembles an artistic experimentation with language creation, more than historiography in its established, academic forms. Especially, the endeavor to bring the noises of madness to “resound” at the surface of reasonable language, reminds us of the manner in which young Nietzsche once characterized tragedy, i.e. as “musicalization” of language, through which the Dionysian rapture comes to be manifested through words and concepts:

[A] language that is neutral enough (sufficiently free from scientific terminology, and of social and moral options) to be able to approach as closely as possible these primitively entangled words, and so that this distance is abolished, through which the modern human being assures itself against madness [ … ]

(ibid.: my emphasis)

We have seen how noise and murmur characterize language before it has been fixed into the linguistic system. A couple of years after the Preface discussed above, in an essay entitled “Language to Infinity” (Le langage à l'infini, originally published in Tel quel journal in 1963), Foucault picks up the issue again, albeit in a somewhat different context.

Now, Foucault sets out to examine a central change, a turning point that he designates as “one of the most decisive ontological events of language” (ibid.: 280). It takes place when language confronts death (i.e. the condition of finiteness), and begins a striving to overcome death. This means that speech refuses to disappear without leaving a trace. It refuses to be reduced to the function of representing and naming exterior things (objects and subjects), and of communicating, and to become extinguished after the fulfillment of these tasks. The essential shift (which Foucault dates as far back as the Ancient storytelling of the Iliad and Odyssey) occurs when language, in order to overcome death, “carries forth in extreme haste” in order to rush into the future, beyond the evanescent moment of enunciation. This gives birth to a temporality in which speech is always “still there ahead of itself,” and correspondingly, always “already there behind itself (ibid.). Speech turns toward itself, and establishes a particular self-relation: it starts itself again, re-launches itself again and again (a story begins to tell of itself). Language begins to reflect and represent itself (ibid.: 278–89).

First, language divides itself when it generates its own reflection out of itself. It detaches from itself a “mirror” reflecting its own image:

Headed towards death, language reflects itself: it encounters there something like a mirror; and in order to arrest this death that would stop it, language has only one power: of giving birth, in itself, to its own image, in a play of mirrors without limits (ibid.: 279, my emphasis) [ … ] the great, invisible labyrinth of repetition, of language that splits itself, and makes itself into its own mirror.

(Ibid.: 281, my emphasis)

Yet, when an enunciation detaches itself from a mirror, its image, what happens is not the generation of two distinctive parts, partes extra partes. Instead, the separated parts become, in the very same event, “embedded” or “incorporated” within each other, i.e. they interpenetrate one another. The mirror, and what it reflects also come back to each other, so that they are neither one, nor distinctive (mutually exclusive). The play of mirrors is, at the same time, both differentiation, repetition, incorporation, inter-penetration, and participation or “taking part.” This is Foucault's manner, as early as 1963, of approaching language as dynamics of repetition which subverts against the principle of identity and distinction, and makes the latter inoperative (ibid.: 279–80).¹

The “play of mirrors” and images are central ideas for Foucault. However, when he attempts to delineate the event of repetition as such—its dynamic quality, together with its temporal modality (behind itself and ahead of itself)—he does not do so in optic-visual terms. Repetition produces a labyrinth of images, but this labyrinth itself is invisible, i.e. it does not show itself as a visible image. When Foucault wants to portray the dynamic generation of mirrors, images, and representations, and the incessantly mobile, labyrinthine play of reflections, it is again “murmur” that he picks up as the central trope: “[F]rom the day that men spoke towards death and against it, in order to hold and detain it, something was born, a murmuring which starts itself again, recounts, and redoubles itself endlessly, following a fantastic multiplication, and thickening” (Ibid.: 280, my emphasis). The “decisive ontological event in language,” i.e. its becoming self-representative without end, is also one in which language becomes “murmur.” In Foucault's view, it is not the emergence of writing, consisting of visible-graphic signs, which is decisive in language's confrontation with, and its striving to overcome, death. The central change in the being of language—its beginning to “murmur”—precedes writing, is “behind writing,” and makes writing first possible. In Foucault's account presented here, there is no fundamental difference, let alone any antagonism between speech and writing. The murmuring of speech has already opened the space, i.e. the possibilities of repetition, which writing and literature then come to actualize. We could also say that writing comes to continue, and take further the murmuring of language, the play of mirrors that has already begun before its birth (ibid.: 280–1).

It is by following this line that Foucault comes to an analysis of modern literature, or the literature of his own days. What marks the birth of these is language's becoming, in a way, self-conscious, i.e. its becoming aware of its own unending movement of self-representation, and also of the motivation of this in the constant struggle to overcome death. What emerges thus, is writing that listens to the murmur and noise discovered at its source:

Writing, in our times, has moved infinitely closer to its source, in other words, to that disquieting noise which announces from the depths of language, as soon as we prick up our ears a little, that against which we take shelter, and towards which we address ourselves at the same time. Like Kafka's beast, language now listens from the bottom of its burrow to that inevitable and growing noise. And to defend itself against the noise, it has to follow its movements, become its loyal enemy. One must speak without end, for as long and as loudly as this indefinite and deafening noise, longer and more loudly, so that in mixing one's voice with it, one might succeed, if not in silencing and mastering the noise, then at least in modulating its futility into that ceaseless murmur we call literature.

(Ibid.: 283, my emphasis)

What takes place is that writing no longer repeats words, sentences, or stories. Instead, it now repeats the noise and murmur itself, which means that it now repeats the event of repetition itself, i.e. it now follows the event of language's self-representing, its movement, and its temporality as depicted above. In the kind of literature Foucault is referring to, language doubles this murmur, but also modifies it on the way. As becomes evident in the quotation above, when language starts to listen to the noise, it may be motivated by certain hostility. Still, what really counts is that by starting to follow as closely as possible its every movement, writing actually takes part in this noise, and its own enunciating voice becomes mixed with the noise it is listening to, so that writing is, in the end, an echo of the labyrinthine murmur of representations.

It is remarkable that in order to clarify his insight on the above, Foucault takes up one particular piece of literature: Franz Kafka's story entitled “The Burrow” (Der Bau). It is hardly exaggerating to say that this is one of the greatest accounts of sound and listening in twentieth-century literature. Although Foucault does not discuss it in any more detail, we ought to read the story to better understand what Foucault really means when he is recurrently evoking the issue of noise; and furthermore, what really is the status of these auditory-sonorous tropes in his understanding of language, writing, and literature (even though it is not possible to do justice here to the stylistic brilliance of Kafka's story)?²

As Foucault notes, the story (Kafka 1994–2007) tells of a beast of some kind (we are not told what it is), living in an underground complex of caves. The crux of the story is in the minuscule description of the attempts of this creature to pursue and identify a noise, and in the last instance, to discover (and eliminate) the origin of the sound that has intruded inside its underground dwelling space. Indeed, Foucault's expression “loyal enemy” is very apt: the beast must listen constantly, and as attentively as possible, and it must try to follow every movement of the noise.

The real problem (from the point of view of the inhabitant) is that the noise is ubiquitous, i.e. it intrudes in the same manner from everywhere and into everywhere, in and throughout all the parts of the spatial complex. Anywhere the inhabitant of the burrow goes, the noise is already there, it has already arrived there, wholly irrespective of all the solid and visible partitions and enclosures, of the “insides” and “outsides” of the burrow. There is no escape from the sound.

The beast reflects: “it is this very remaining-the-same of the noise in every location that most disturbs me” (ibid.). No matter where the subject places itself in the physical-visible space, the monotonous continuity of the sound makes it impossible to make any estimation about respective location, distance, or direction. The real threat is that the noise is encountered everywhere and in nowhere in particular, but only in its ubiquitous reemergence. Kafka masterfully depicts how every attempted localization turns out to be uncertain, so that the subject has to begin all over again, to come up with new “hypotheses” that turn out to be just as uncertain as the previous ones.³ The desire to locate or emplace is doomed to failure. The ultimate source of anxiety is found in the sound's persistent flight from spatial coordinates of points, fixed intervals, and clear-cut dividing lines. The sound is threatening, because it is atopic [atópos].

As the attempt to emplace and locate the noise runs into a dead end, so does the strive to resolve the identity, or the nature of the sound, and further on, the strive to trace it back to its cause, and to reveal its origin. The listening creature cannot decide whether the source of the noise is one, or whether there are instead many sources.⁴ The attempt to pursue the sound, or sounds, never leads to any subject, or object. Nothing is really found beyond, beneath, or above the noise. It remains without any identifiable cause, origin, or subject to which the sound and the threat can be traced back.

When Foucault relates his idea of language to the noise in Kafka's story, he brings to the fore the anonymity of language. Language, just like the noise, spreads and circulates in a manner which thwarts the identifying operations attempted by the subject. The attempt to determine the identity, the nature, or the character of the noise, or that of a language incessantly differing from itself and repeating itself, turns out to be impossible. Neither of them...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Foucault and the Politics of Hearing
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The archaeology of our ears
• 2 The genealogy of auditory-sonorous power and resistance
• 3 Voices of care, friendship, and parrēsia
• Conclusion: historicizing and politicizing our ears
• Notes
• References
• Index