The Social Listening Deficit: Sound Art as Resistance

Morten Søndergaard

 

Neither the hierarchy of arts nor the traditional framework of the political unconscious are untouched by the cultural change triggered by media culture and information technology. Friedrich Kittler famously claimed that the boundary between media and life are blurring — and that we face a culture dominated by the effects from sound and images creating a ‘deficit’ of attention:

 

“The general digitalization of information […] erases the difference between individual media. Sound and image, voice and text have become mere effects on the surface […] Sense and the senses have become mere glitter.” (Kittler, 1987, 102)

If we accept Kittler’s point of view, the citizens of the distributed public sphere are facing a situation that is radically different from that of the mediated (and, in Kittler’s sense, superficial) framing of aesthetic experience: listening is at the core, but it being limited by the erasure of the differences between individual media, Kittler claims. 

 

Voicing a similar skepticism, Jacques Attali questioned the sense of ubiquitously mediated sound, and the effect it might have on the citizen. Digital media, according to Attali, creates a kind of “survival space”: “Equivalent to the articulation of a space, [sound] indicate the limits of a territory and the way to make oneself heard within it, how-to survive by drawing one’s sustenance from it” (Attali, 20).

 

Listening is an essential feature in a democratic society, one could easily claim. Other people’s arguments and ideas only become political through us attentively listening to them. Musical expressions may also bear witness to this, as it has been the case historically for instance during the French Revolution and, in more recent times, during the ‘youth rebellion(s)’ of the 1960s and until the 1990s. There is, however, a tendency which is growing towards that which Jaron Lanier calls ‘stone-faced’ listening: 

 

“There are undoubtedly musical marvels hidden around the world, but this is the first time since electrification that mainstream youth culture in the industrialized world has cloaked itself primarily in nostalgic styles” (1,130).

 

Retro and unfocused nostalgic listening, according to Lanier, follows the end of the proclaimed innovative and pioneering ‘open culture’ of the Internet (if it ever truly existed beyond the nerdy openness of technological exchange). It is transforming into something else; it is even transforming our habitual roles of citizenship as well as the bio-psycho-social context of human agency, Lanier claims.

 

The main argument of Lanier is that we do not use the real possibilities that the technologies are offering us to our own advantage. The new cultural dynamics that the Internet once promised simply did not happen. 

 

In the 1960s, Habermas defined the modern public sphere as a “citizen sphere” constituted by a literary awareness — laws, newspapers, textualizations of thought (Habermas, 1961, 52-70). Moreover, the public space was metaphorized as a “physical and open” citizen space facilitating dialogue and clash of opinions. However, the very constitution of this citizen space, and the very notion of “the citizen”, has been changing rapidly since the 60s, undergoing several transformations. The literary awareness is partly and increasingly being replaced by a “media awareness” during the 70s and 80s, which, in the digital age, has transgressed even further towards a “distributed awareness” (being mediated on several platforms at the same time changing the configuration of the physical public space and the very notion of the city as the place for citizens and one of complexity).

 

As the examples below will show, the situation of the citizen is always framed by infrastructural underwritings (to use the words of Bowker and Star) to some degree. With ubiquitous information technology everywhere, today the relationality between infrastructures and the space of the public is arguably even more pre-produced with blurring boundaries between private and public and heavy attention deficits. 

 

The citizen today is challenged by this fight for their attention in almost all matters and contexts, but also by the ever-decreasing time when real attention to detail and human matters occurs or is possible. It is still very much a matter of finding ways to short-circuit the ‘simulated environments and their undercover politics: how to reclaim the possibility to produce new spaces for aesthetic experience is still the challenge for art.

 

Two distinct situations of listening may be detected coming out of this more intense challenge, both negotiating the ‘human condition’ of a distributed public sphere. Since we (as citizens of the distributed public sphere), as Bernhard Stiegler claims, are suffering from a disorder of ‘global attention deficit’, and since capitalism has seized the Internet and transformed what promised to be an open and social space of relational experiment and exchange into a marked place (of mostly hidden transactions — through the services provided by ‘cookies’ or other ‘tracking’-technologies), then listening would appear to be situated either as 1) a techno-deterministic nostalgia; or 2) a cultural agency – what Bernard Stiegler, the way I read him, refers to as ‘the struggle for the Mind in Contemporary Capitalism’ [2]. 

 

Thus, it could be claimed that listening is involved in a deep struggle of the mind and the emergence of alternative ways of creating political awareness in the distributed public sphere; new roles and patterns are emerging. The struggle of the mind is indeed a struggle of the ear.

 

Artistic production is a way to stage the struggle of the ear in the (distributed) public sphere and investigate matters further. It is exhibiting investigations and questions, without necessarily offering any answers. What sound art offers is an eventual setting for asking essential and moral questions about what I am choosing to term a ‘social listening deficit’.

 

This manifests itself in the following ways (which will be more detailed below): Firstly, sound art is trans-aesthetic and not bound to the norms of one specific artistic genre. Rather, it is genre-dynamic and constantly experimenting with new ways of presenting and representing artistic expression. 

 

Secondly, sound art is infrastructurally complex as it is open to feedback from audience and science. This tendency to intentionally leave behind the control and simplicity of an autonomous work of art, and instead seeking out the indeterminacy of an audience interpreting and experiencing materialities and textualities are key elements of these early examples countering social listening deficits. It may even be said to be one of the formative aspects of that which we call sound art.

 

To better unpack what this may entail, I will revisit for a moment the notion of ‘The space of the event, as defined by Slavoj Zizek’. The space of the event is that which separates an effect from its causes. As such, the event points towards a gradually widening gap in the basic epistemological framing of (our concept and use of) “reality”, which could be paraphrased in this way: either an event is a change in the way reality appears to us, or it is a shattering transformation of reality itself.  He sees the event as a destruction of the (conventional cognitive and social) frame through which we perceive the world and engage in it. In its most radical configuration, the event may even be a destruction of that frame, in the sense that it stages “the surprising emergence of something new which undermines every stable scheme” (Zizek, 2014, 6). This destruction of the symbolic order Zizek calls “enframing” (inspired by Heidegger’s concept of Gestell — which is the notion that technology designates an attitude towards reality which we assume when we are engaged in such activities). On the one hand, enframing poses a danger of the “total enframing”, where technological manipulation reduces the human to an object devoid of being aesthetically open to social reality. On the other hand, it promises the possibility of approaching “concrete universality”, which according to Zizek sees events not just as empty containers of specific content, but as “an engendering of that content through the deployment of its immanent antagonisms, deadlocks and inconsistencies” (Zizek, 2014, 9).

 

It is specifically this notion of events as an engendering of that which a symbolic order is hiding which points towards the idea of a sonic infrastructure. Here, the space of the event is enframing an existing speaker installation or public communication technology. The emergence of new meaning undermines every stable scheme connected to the existing speaker system.

 

In what follows, I will be looking further into the (curatorial and techno-material) genealogies of sonic infrastructures: from early artistic pioneers like Nicolas Schöffer and Max Neuhaus (1) to more curatorial experiments and contextual considerations in the exhibition Under Cover – Sound/art in Social Spaces project (The Museum of Contemporary Art in Roskilde DK, 2003).

 

In many ways, event and infrastructure could be perceived as opposites: Whereas the event separates effect and cause, an infrastructure stabilizes their connection and relation. And where an event might be said to forefront a sensuality, the infrastructure is all about conceptuality; in fact, infrastructure might be said to be a harbinger of the very symbolic order that the event is re- or enframing (if Zizek is our guide).

 

This opposition is interesting because it points towards a central dynamic (or paradox) that exists in Sound Art, which consequently should always be part of any curatorial considerations: the dynamics of the sensual and the conceptual.

 

This is very basic to all artistic expressions; it could be argued. Certainly, sound art does have a peculiar oppositional relationship which is unique in comparison with other artistic practices in that it (may) exist and be understood without (primary) textual or visual references. It constitutes a situation of representation which may be called ’open’ (in the sense of Umberto Eco: it is up to the audience to ’finish’ the interpretation based on an interplay between perception and contextual framings).

 

Interestingly, what could arguably be seen as a first attempt of operationalizing a sonic infrastructure in an art practice, Nicolas Schöffer’s ’Türme’ (1954, Paris), is rooted in ’kinetic art’ (which was one of the sources for Umberto Eco’s original The Poetics of the Open Work): it is an attempt to re-functionalize art beyond the confines of the gallery spaces and use the public sphere instead. The result is a sculptural sonic object, which Schöffer describes as ’spatio-dynamic’. The idea was to make or compose a sonic background that is directed at the people living and moving around in a city. Schöffer supplied the infrastructure for this, whereas it was Pierre Henry who supplied the sonic material — based on a cybernetic feedback system of 12 tapes, the tower was intersected by a generator of noises.

 

Some 10 years later, Max Neuhaus pushed this further into making, what he termed, ’audience instruments’. Drive In Music from 1967 was aiming at people in their cars, or rather: their car radio and speakers. As a location, Neuhaus chose Lincoln Parkway with a starting point at the Alberight-Knox Art Gallery. Along half a mile of the Parkway he installed a number of antennas in such a way that each antenna transmitted one sound for only a shorter distance — each sound occupying its own ‘area’. In this way, Neuhaus built up a piece which you could only experience while driving through the entire array of antennas with the car radio tuned in to the transmitters placed along the section of Lincoln Parkway (2). 

 

Eventually, Neuhaus would call these kind of works ‘passages’, creating an aural topography by ‘setting a static sound structure into motion for themselves by passing through them’(3).

 

“Enframing as the setting-something-static-into-motion, and making an everyday situation dynamic, is implied in the curatorial concept of the sonic infrastructure; another thing implied is an active audience: The Passage works are situated in spaces where the physical movement of the listener through the space to reach a destination is inherent. They imply an active role on the part of listeners, who set a static sound structure into motion for themselves by passing through it. My first work with an aural topography, Drive In Music in 1967, falls within this vector.”

 

Neuhaus makes a number of ‘Passages’ throughout his career (Drive In Music was the first in a long series, which is not possible here to go deeper into in any detail) and what is significant to notice, in the context of this short paper, is that he does not consider them as a form of music. Rather, as he writes, “… we have blocks of constant sound texture, sound continuums which are unchanging. It is the listener who puts them into his own time”. And, furthermore:

 

“The other difference between these works and music is that here the sound is not the work. Here sound is the material with which I transform the perception of the space” (4). 

 

It is rather relevant to compare this to the question of what work infrastructures do? This question is posed by Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star and, even though they pose it in the context of a book about classification standards, it does point towards the domain of the sonic infrastructure in a number of significant ways. 

 

• What work do classifications and standards do? … what goes into making things work like magic: making them fit together so that we can buy a radio built by someone we have never met in Japan, plug it into a wall in Champaign, Illinois and hear the world news from the BBC.

 

• Who does that work? … there is a lot of hard labor in effortless ease… We will discuss where all the ‘missing work’ that makes things look magical goes.

 

• What happens to the cases that don’t fit? We want to draw attention to cases that don’t fit easily into our magical created world of standards and classifications.

 

Schöffer (with Pierre Henry) and Neuhaus were interested in separating the situation of being immersed and surrounded by everyday processes and spaces from the perception and representations of those processes and spaces; they shared a philosophy, one might argue, running behind their sonic activities (and their artistic differences), which states that what moves us is hidden (in symbolic infrastructures framing our daily use and understanding of them), and we (artists, audiences — who are all citizens, after all) need to move as well in order to ‘uncover’ those infrastructures. Sound is a way to make that movement ‘go’. And this goes for art as well as audiences: there are patterns of expectations framing the way we look at, or listen to, art and music — as genres moving them outside of the domain of everyday life (and into institutions). What Schöffer and Neuhaus are pointing out is that we need to move art out of the infrastructural classifications of institutions and into the socio-infrastructural settings of everyday life. 

 

Hereby, they are enframing, on the one hand, art as a practice carried out only by artists; and on the other, the audience and the representational system they themselves represent. In their ‘philosophy’, artists and audiences are no longer artists and audiences, but they are all citizens, implying that they produce the relations needed for us to operate truly ethically and aesthetically, standing outside representation of the public spaces while being inside the artistic presentation that they themselves are carriers of.

 

In other words, artists as well as audiences, are immersed in cultural classifications and standards. Bowker and Star ask what lies behind the hype of the simulations we are surrounded by — showing that even though we cannot in theory separate simulations from nature (as Baudrillard argued), then they want to pay “attention to the work of constructing the simulations, or the infrastructural considerations that underwrite the images/events…” (Bowker and Star, 1999, 3) Because, as they point out, there is more at stake — epistemologically, politically and ethically — in the day to day work of building classification systems and producing and maintaining standards than in abstract arguments about representation. Their pyrotechnics may hold our fascinated gaze, yet they cannot provide any path to answering our moral questions. 

 

Infrastructures and events, after all, are not opposites. Infrastructures underwrite events, or to use the words of Zizek: they are framing them. Events, on the other hand, seek the destruction of the habitual cognitive structures through which we perceive the world (Zizek, 2014, p. 32). It seems possible to argue that it is in the dialogue and dynamic relationship of the production and destruction of habitual framings that the sonic infrastructures of Schöffer and Neuhaus are operating.

 

Slavoj Zizek notes, in what I read as an analysis of the same general cultural and social (and political) situation as Jerome Lanier and Bernhard Stiegler both are pointing out (however framing it in a different philosophical discourse), how the citizen (in the capacity of being a human) risks losing the very feature of being aesthetically open to reality (5). I will refer to this situation as the ‘social listening deficit’. The artist is always involved in an unconscious political discourse to some extent, but the ability of the citizen to recognize that, and to map into the political discourse, is transformative.

REFERENCES

Attali, Jacques. (1985). Noise: The Political Economy of Music, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Cage, John. (1939). Silence: Lectures and writings of John Cage. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

de la Motte-Haber, Helga. (1999). In: Handbuch der Musik im 20 Jahrhundert, Volume 12, Laaber.

Habermas, Jürgen. (1962). Strukturwandel der ôffentlichkeit Zu Einer Kategorie der  Bürgerlichen Gesellschaft, Neuwied: H. Luchterhand.

Higgins, Dick. (1969). foew & ombwhnw: a grammar of the mind and a phenomenology of love and a science of the arts as seen by a stalker of the wild mushrooms, Something Else Press, New York.

Hayles, Katherine. How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

Jameson, Frederic. (1982). The Political Unconscious. Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. London: Routledge.

Kittler, Frederich. (1987). Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Lanier, Jaron. You Are Not A Gadget. (London: Penguin, 2011).

Neuhaus, Max. “Modus Operandi”. 1990. http://www.max-neuhaus.info. Accessed 6 July, 2016. 

Stiegler, Bernhard. “Interobjectivity and Transindividuation.” In: Seijdel, J. eds. The Politics of Things. (Amsterdam: Open – Journal of Public Space, 2012).

Tarantino, Michael. 1998. “Two Passages: Conversation with Max Neuhaus”. Quoted from http://www.max-neuhaus.info. Accessed 6 July, 2016. 

Zizek, Slavoj. (2014). Event – Philosophy in Transit. London: Penguin..

NOTES

1) Many could be mentioned here: Edward Bellamy, Thaddeus Cahill, Arsenij Avraamov, Satie, Brecht, Maricio Kagel, Michael Jüllich, Klaus Schöning, Brian Eno, Piers Headley, Espace Nouveaux, Alvin Curran, Llorenc Barber, Robert Minard.

2) A diagram of the positions of antennas and transmitters can be seen here: http://www.max-neuhaus.info/soundworks/vectors/passage/DriveInMusic.jpg 

3) Max Neuhaus. 1990. “Modus Operandi. Quoted from http://www.max-neuhaus.info.

4) Tarantino, Michael. 1998. “Two Passages. Conversation with Max Neuhaus”. Quoted from http://www.max-neuhaus.info.

 5) Zizek, 2014, 31.