Deferred Musical Homecomings

1 [Contemporary Music Review 34/1 (2015), 67-83] Deferred Musical Homecomings Anthony Gritten I imagine what it means to talk about the home of listening . I analyse this phrase as denoting something about the functioning of listening within the transcendental constitution of the auditory subject, where the preposition within denotes the presence of a home within which the auditory subject can be found, and insofar as the phrase denotes a property of listening along the grammatical lines of the phrase the colour of paint . I imagine home obliquely, set in motion by several of Lyotard s essays on place, and Szendy s archaeology of contemporary listening practices. Describing how listening regimes regulate the rhythmic constitution of the auditory subject, I work towards the conclusion that there is nevertheless an existential failure built into listening with respect to its desire to return home: listening lags behind the sound that decays before listening. The essay concludes by describing this spiral double bind. Keywords: Entropy, Home, Listening, Lyotard, Phenomenology, Szendy. 2 Callisto had learned a mnemonic device for remembering the Laws of Thermodynamics: you can t win, things are going to get worse before they get better, who says they re going to get better. – Thomas Pynchon (1995, p. 87). 1 Conception In this essay I imagine what it might mean to talk about the home of listening . My approach is loosely but decidedly phenomenological. Depicting home as more than a mere metaphor for a particular, socially sanctioned mode of musical engagement, I am not interested in developing three potential definitions of the phrase the home of listening : first, insofar as it denotes the physical place in which listening is found (the concert hall, the bedroom); second, insofar as it denotes the cultural place that listening occupies in our lives (we go out to concerts with friends, we stay in to seduce with music); third, insofar as it denotes the internal configuration of musical syntax (musical language defined as a tonal homecoming) (Hyland, 2009). Moreover, and definitely more problematically, I ignore the disturbing issue of what the word home denotes to the millions of displaced people across the world today, with the intimate private relationship between home and personal identity continuing to become increasingly more fragile, as a consequence of the drive towards ever increasing globalisation. Rather, I am interested in the still, small matter of the home of listening , insofar as this phrase denotes something about the functioning of listening within the transcendental constitution of the auditory subject, where the preposition within denotes the presence of a home, or at least a habitable dominion within which the auditory subject can be found, or towards which she passes, and insofar as the phrase denotes a property 3 of listening along the grammatical lines of the phrase the colour of paint . I imagine home obliquely, set in motion by material in several of Lyotard s essays on place. I also deploy Peter Szendy s imaginative archaeology of contemporary listening practices as a point of departure for my reduction of listening s potential homecoming. Given two deeply ingrained phenomenological premises, namely that To be a subject is to be in the mode of being aware of oneself (usserl cited in Zahavi, 2003, p. 87) and that the noesis of an act is the concretely complete intentive mental process (Husserl cited in Moran, 2000, p. 156), I imagine the potential complications to this setup that are posed by listening to music, and by auditory experience in general. In order to design a route into this complex matter, ) deploy the auditory subject , a virtual entity that is doubly the subject of listening and subject to listening. The essay depicts the life cycle of the auditory subject, proceeding from the birth of listening through her childhood through to her virtual auditory death with the entropic disappearance of sound. By design, the Husserlian schema for time consciousness (protention, specious present, retention) is distorted, though with a drastic displacement of protention directed towards the destabilisation of its grasping, anticipatory intentionality, and with a caveat that, while a large part of phenomenological method is driven by the desire to listening as such, define the home of things, their transcendental constitution in themselves , such a trajectory itself continually needs to shift its focus from space to time (from the home that space provides to the home that time provides) if it is to develop any traction with auditory perception specifically, and if the mode of sensory perception determined by Husserl to be the paradigm for time consciousness (music perception) is to be properly grounded in the empirical reality of sound – not just imagined and thought, but sensed and felt. I endeavour to reduce the constitution of the auditory subject in terms of the home that defines the mutual relationship between the 4 auditory subject and the music. In discussing the question, )s the subject at home in listening? ) am interested in both the physical and the psychological senses of the words at home : whether the subject is present in the space, and whether she feels comfortable being there. My assumption is loosely Heideggerian, namely that to imagine listening s life cycle is, ipso facto, to depict a home, and this is to depict the subject s mode of dwelling (eidegger, . Another concern is whether or not the relationship between the auditory subject and the music is symmetrical. The basic direction of my argument is as follows. The auditory subject is born into the world as a child, and arrives late on the scene after the music. Her rights as a listener are earned and designed on the job, and can be neither deployed instantaneously nor donated to her fully developed. This means that the potential home of listening its auditory colour , to defend the visual analogy above) is there before the auditory subject albeit functioning as a virtual il y a , to distort Levinas s term , and the auditory subject is always in the middle of endeavouring to return home, a kind of Sisyphean tag game, catch-up, baton relay. If there is a home of listening, a home for listening to drive towards, then its appearance on the temporal horizon is deferred, and it is unclear whether a proper return home ever arrives in the full plenitude of selfpresence, or indeed whether home is simply temporally out of reach of the auditory subject. Listening regimes regulate listening in particular ways (structural listening is discussed as an example below) and draw the auditory subject out of herself and initiate her slow passage from birth towards childhood. These listening regimes offer the auditory subject a preliminary and sketchy sense of personal identity (albeit virtual), channelling the tag game in individual ways and regulating the gradual rhythmic constitution of the auditory subject, as she becomes increasingly attracted to a particular individual listening regime. However, despite the best efforts of listening 5 regimes, there is a certain existential failure built into listening with respect to its desire to return home: listening lags behind the sound that decays before listening. The essay concludes by describing this spiral double bind. 2 Birth In this section I deliberate over various questions. In what discursive space does the auditory subject dwell, given that she is younger than music, born as a listener through the music s vibratory invasion and disturbance of her ear canals? To what extent is her late delivery onto the auditory scene a constraint on her subjectivity, on her possibilities as a subject? When does the auditory child develop into a fully paid-up listening citizen? The issue in this section is what might be described as listening s birth and passage towards childhood, and whether this passage is ever complete or over. This includes when, where and how it happens, and thus has implications for the first stage of imagining the potential home of listening and rightful dominion. What happens the first time the auditory subject begins to listen? What happens each time she begins to listen? These two senses of beginning are related, although ) direct more attention to the second sense here. Given everything that we know about communicative musicality in the development of homo sapiens, both at the level of the species and for individuals (Malloch & Trevarthen, 2009), why demand (as listening regimes often do) that there must be a categorical moment in the auditory subject s development after which she must no longer listen like a child? One writer who dreams about the issue of when and how (his) listening began is Peter Szendy. (e writes: ) forget when ) listened to music for the first time. […] )t seems to me there has always been music around me; impossible to say if – and when – it began one day Szendy, , p. . And elsewhere he asks: What if the ears ) have and 6 carry everywhere with me were older than ) am? Szendy, Listen, p. 13). Even before music (or at least programmed sound) was decreed to be henceforth the soundtrack to the megalopolis, and an expedient tool for its expansion and self-assertion, the auditory subject has always already been bathed in music, if not drowned in it. Her every act of listening has always already begun in media res: her consciousness is of what precedes it, of what lies before it in both senses of before : in front of it; earlier than it . The lack of a identifiable origin for her listening functions as a destabilising Heraclitean flux, driving it onwards, neither stopping nor returning, against which she stretches her ear, and it is central to the phenomenology of her listening, not just the mechanisms of individual listening regimes and their attendant cultural practices. The auditory subject is physiologically set in motion by music, and the act of listening dramatises the process of growing older; or, put another way, auditory ageing is the most explicit and easily recognisable of her body s many ageing processes. The auditory subject is lent her ears in order to develop into and as a musical subject, and she arises after, d après, nach music. This locution denotes that the subject arises in a primal impression (usserl s term), both temporally in the wake of sound s acoustic onset its attack draws the subject out of its dreamy slumber), and in pursuit of music (deliberately set in motion by it, drawn forth into response, driven into resonance, put in question). Thus, listening is physiologically and aesthetically child-like, and its auditory subject is born into a familial relationship with sound: Within the domestic rhythm, [the child] is the moment, the suspension of beginning again, the seed. It is what will have been. It is the surprise, the story starting over again Lyotard, a, p. . It is significant in this context that Lyotard describes sound as follows: This mother is a mother who is a timbre before it sounds, who is there before the coordinates of sound, before destiny (Lyotard, 1991b, p. 189). Open to the delicate wonder and delightful marvel of the 7 event, listening consists of the slow process of learning moment by moment how to feel in control of the senses and their body, and how to reduce the likelihood of distraction or error in execution; it consists, if not exactly of embracing failure (the auditory subject s body is maintained in an ergonomic trajectory), then at least of learning through failure, living with failure (dreaming that failure is not what it seems). This constitutional constraint on the auditory subject is her Nachträglichkeit with respect to sound, listening being the very model of a Freudian Durcharbeitung, a working-through (Leader, 1994, n. pag). It functions irrespective of how specific listening regimes design their cultural pull on the child-like auditory subject, irrespective of how they endeavour to regulate, channel, and sometimes drag listening in one direction rather than another. The structural listening regime, for example, regularly deconstructed, though for good reason still a forceful presence in cultural discourse (particularly in conservatoires, where many of the students have the skills to do it and are docile enough to accept its demands), attracts the auditory subject in a particularly diligent way. Szendy, writing autobiographically, describes the matter down to a tee: I began to listen to music as music. With the keen awareness that it was to be understood, deciphered, pierced rather than perceived. […] musical listening that is aware of itself has always been accompanied in me with the feeling of a duty. Of an imperative: you have to listen, one must listen. (Szendy, 2008, p. 1) In general, he decides, it is not only that the auditory subject devotes herself to that which summons [her] to listen Szendy, , pp. , , , . )n addition, she 8 must work through a prior state of affairs that overrides the sensory physicality of the event itself. According to this state of affairs, she is compelled to comply , to recall listening to a structural memory , to recall the law of a structural listening , and to yield to a certain economic law of listening Szendy, , pp. , , , respectively). The desired result of successful structural listening is the coming into self-presence of the auditory subject. The stakes of the structural listening regime are high though, for, duped and deceived by the demands of the work, perhaps even doublecrossed by the work, what initially seems like an open-ended auditory summons to the subject is in fact a ruse disguising a quite specific question that demands an equally specific answer. Moreover, the consequences of failing to listen dutifully – decorously, structurally – can be socially distressing, even drastic, as reading between the lines of Adorno s moralistic and threatening typology of listening types suggests Adorno, 1976). Thus, how the auditory subject begins to engage sound as a listener, as she departs from birth towards childhood, has various potential consequences. Those of structural listening are just one set. ) extrapolate now beyond Szendy s explicit concerns). Given that the auditory subject is not responsible for the beginning of listening as such (music has always been there anthropologically and physiologically, as developmental psychologists conclude, and culturally it is central to every culture, as ethnomusicologists conclude); given that the auditory subject is not responsible for defining the precise terms of engagement as a listener (she is born into a pre-existing musical, sonic, auditory, and sensory cultures and discourses); given that it is something other than the auditory subject herself that regulates listening (notwithstanding an enactive reading of the constitutional reciprocity of the auditory subject and the music ; given that listening begins outside itself and only later on comes to articulate 9 feelings of interiority often deciphered as being a mark of the subject s emergence ; and given that listening to music develops in the auditory subject an understanding that she is an auditory child; given all of these things, it is clear that the auditory subject is always driven into playing a kind of tag game with herself, always developing better and increasingly well developed and differentiated listening skills in search of a way of coming into full self-presence. This suggests a preliminary conclusion about the relationship between auditory birth and the sense of home that functions as a place of and for listening. This conclusion can be phrased in two ways with different degrees of strength: first, the auditory subject lacks the aesthetic luxury to call her place of listening anything more than a temporary mobile home; second, the auditory subject is existentially nomadic and permanently in limbo, neither inside, nor outside a home Lyotard, 1997a, p. 17), forever in search of a house qua mother. As Lyotard says, analogously, about the perception of a face as a landscape, You never reach the end. Draw back Lyotard, 1991b, p. 185). We do not need to decide between these two positions here, but we need to develop the consequences of listening s constitutional lateness in a little bit more detail. Emerging late on the auditory scene, the auditory subject rents her epistemological and aesthetic space as a listener, forever unable to raise the capital to purchase the freehold on her own property, and this means that she can never satisfactorily claim to be listening with enough propriety, and on the basis of her own sui generis constitution as a subject. In each of its acts of listening, noesis and noema fail to meet fully. In other words, if music listening has a home, a dominion, a space of its own, then this home exists by virtue of its necessary dispossession of the auditory subject. The relationship between auditory subject and musical object is nonsymmetrical, and, to the extent that music constructs a home for its auditory subject, 10 this is at the price of the auditory subject s constitutional inability to abide in that home (Lyotard, 1991a, p. 200; 1991b, p. 183). For listening cannot be regulated fully, both because of an empirical reason that I discuss in section 4, and for the reason that the relation between home and subject is more complex than simply a reciprocity or negation; Thought cannot want its house. But the house haunts it Lyotard, a, p. 202). Thus, the popular belief that music and its listener have a home, which relies on the Cartesian assumption that listening is a highly developed adult activity (poised, controlled, masterful), is back to front: it is less that music and its listener have a home in the subject, and more that listening and its subject have a home in music. There are diverse consequences to all of this. One consequence concerns the auditory subject s assumption of certain rights as a listener, her gradual and emergent development (I deliberately avoid the term maturation as a regulated listener. Put schematically, what matters after auditory birth is the following sequence of passages: from possession to property, from property to propriety, and from propriety to proper listening. The last of these passages delivers a basis for listening regimes like structural listening, which construct a sense of home in various ways. And , Lyotard says, the dwelling of the work is built only from this passage from awakening to the inscription of the awakening Lyotard, 1991a, p. 198). Thus, the next section dutifully considers the emergence and inscription of listening regimes, as the potential basis for the home of listening, as donating it some kind of dwelling (eidegger s term in return for regulation. 3 Childhood Szendy asks some imaginative questions about musical rights: Flighty and fickle or attentive and concentrating, silent or dissolute, is listening strictly my private affair? But 11 then, from where does this you must, which dictates my duties, come to me? And what are these duties? This you must that always accompanies me, that sends this demand to me: to whom am ) accountable, to whom and to what do ) have to answer? […] Who has a right to music? Who can hear it as if it belonged to him, who can appropriate it? Who has the right to make it his own? Szendy, , pp. –5). Configuring the passage from birth towards childhood, less as an epistemological change in the object of listening where object is both the topic and the goal), and more as an epistemic change in the auditory subject s mode of listening, he analyses how works configure in themselves their reception, their possible appropriation, even their listening Szendy, , p. . (is point depends on the assumption that, if the auditory subject has rights, at the very minimum imagined by extrapolation from the rights of composers, arrangers, sound engineers, distributers, and performers, then so, reciprocally, does the musical work to which she listens. The issue is to determine what listening regimes (of which structural listening is one) offer the listener, and what it means for an auditory subject to subscribe to a listening regime. Put interrogatively: What place does a musical work assign to its listener? How does it require us to listen to it? What means does it put into play to compose a listening? But also: What scope, what space for play does a work reserve, in itself, for those who play it or hear it, for those who interpret it, with or without instruments? (Szendy, 2008, p. 7) Lyotard writes, for example, of listening as follows: Losing oneself in a world of sound. Hearing breaks down the defences of the harmonic and melodic ear, and becomes aware of T)MBRE alone. And then we have the landscape of Beethoven s late quartets 12 (Lyotard, 1991b, p. 183). But this slightly Cageian position begs the question of how the auditory subject engages with the set- up into which listening throws her: if her defences are disarmed, disempowered and distracted by sound, then she needs to discover a way of working through her own deep constitutional lack of ability as a listener, and of discovering and learning to live as a listener in the contemporary world of T)MBRE alone – of matter devoid of (or in advance of) form. Upon what might she depend? In due course an Ars Auditus – an art of listening – comes from subscribing to a listening regime. The listening regime to which the auditory subject eventually subscribes offers a home for her listening. This is legally determined in terms of heart and hearth, property and propriety, rhyme and rhythm, borders and boundaries. On the back of her arrival late onto the auditory scene, the auditory subject declares her rights, delimiting her limits and dynamics, the boundaries of her property, the tempo of her life cycle, the space she is allowed to inhabit, her auditory home. Gradually, on the back of the activities of cultivation and construction (eidegger s approach to building as dwelling) (Heidegger, 1971, p. 148), one listening regime asserts itself above others, drives itself into the auditory subject s daily grind, and becomes more or less dependable. The transformation that turns musical listening into listening-to-a-work (Szendy, 2008, p. 15) is the essential function of a listening regime: decisive protectors guard the domus, defending the object from danger, homing in on its essential meanings and regulating access to the sonic object, filtering unwanted or distracting intensities and perceptions (Lyotard, 1991b, p. 185). The boundaries of the object being listened to define it as property, determine the size of the mortgage taken out by the auditory subject in order that it might relate to the music, and describe its propriety vis-à-vis the object. Listening qua hermeneutic understanding dominates this space. In different 13 listening regimes, the doubly-articulated relationship between the auditory subject s rights and the work s rights, the latter being recognised by the listener as constraints on her activity and as the broker of the listening regime, is balanced in various ways, creating its own rights, self-imposed rules of thumb, auditory heuristics, and rhythmic regularities. A neutral balance is generally not desirable, for the dominant cultural value of each listening regime comes from a dynamic and continuous weighting of the two moments of emphasis. Either way, talk of the listener s rights is defensive, since what the auditory subject decides that she should be listening to is a matter of politics, negotiation and conflict resolution. Given that in any culture there are always certain listening positions that are unauthorised, rejected, and repressed, the issue dominating listening is exclusion from the critical space of the musical field pure and simple (Szendy, 2008, p. 97). Listening regimes are essentially rhythmic regimes, a focal point for the dutiful emergence of a rhythm to the auditory subject s activity, the beginning of aesthetic law and order. Listening regimes set up a rhythm to the auditory subject s engagement with sound and donate a feeling of narrative shape and thematic coherence to her activity. The rhythm of listening regimes is that of the domus, a point that Lyotard drives home: The temporal regime of the domus is rhythm, rhyme. […] Domestic language is rhythmic. […] Rhythmed wisdom protects itself against pleonexia Lyotard, 1991a, p. 192). This differs from life in the megalopolis, in which things are drawn out according to No-one s memory, without custom, or story or rhythm Lyotard, 1991a, p. 194). Consider the case of structural listening. The listener s rights are managed – defended is not putting it too strongly – by a discursive criminology of listening (Szendy, 2008, p. 16) in which, put schematically, crime presupposes intention, intention presupposes voice, and voice presupposes subject. An auditory crime against 14 structural listening is configured by the listening regime, as a symbolic violence against the subject s property and/or the subject herself the subject as property . Appropriately trained and authorised criminologists – music theorists? instrumental pedagogues? – adjudicate the general line, and determine what constitutes a transgression of the listening regime – the aesthetic polis – and, not just what listening could be, but what it must perforce be if the auditory subject is to deserve a place in the megalopolis, to be a proper citizen. The auditory subject cannot listen structurally without this criminology of listening haunting her listening and policing her rights, even if the structural listening regime demands categorically but falsely that the polemical nature of listening is forgotten, erased when faced with the allegedly self-evident values of authenticity and authorship Szendy, , p. . Outside of the criminology of structural listening, which is unusual in defining itself as an extreme listening regime (an aesthetic police state?), the law is flexible, and listening is a practice of auditory jurisprudence Szendy, , p. . )n general, we might dare the following: if The life in music belongs in the musical process, abstract, indeterminate, unowned except through the act whereby we listeners possess it Scruton, , p. , if, that is, an essential part of music is unowned , anonymous, and set in motion by rules other than those of the auditory subject, then we might ask what right the auditory subject has to demand more than temporary possession of music while listening? Does the music itself have the right to remain outside (the home of) the subject, or can it leave and disappear without requiring a dispensation? So, on first listening, listening regimes seem to deliver some kind of home for the auditory subject, regulating, policing, haunting, and defining a trajectory for listening, insofar as it seeks to pass from birth towards childhood, to work through its deferred arrival on the auditory scene. However, under phenomenological reduction, as I suggest 15 in the next section, listening as such has a decidedly more complex relationship to sound than this preliminary conclusion suggests. In fact, it is ambushed, bothered, cajoled, diverted, and exercised by sound. This is because sound itself, by virtue of its phenomenology (as described above), is external, alien, Odradek (Kramer, 2010, pp. 184–5), and un-homely (un-heimliche is Freud s term for the uncanny . Lyotard depicts the large dimensions of the matter when he defends the proposal that The sensible is always presented, here and now, within forms. But what is artistic in forms, or the artistic, is a gesture, a tone, a pitch, received and intended, which transcends them all while inhabiting them Lyotard, a, p. . Thus, the next section duly depicts what it is in sound that simultaneously inhabits and transcends it, what it is that drags against the auditory subject s assertive construction of her right to listen according to a particular listening regime (e.g. structural listening), and what it is in sound that problematises the attribution to listening of a simple sense of home, of domicile, dominion, and Domus. 4 Death Above, I imagine two elements of what it might mean to talk about the home of listening. To wit: when it occurs (forever late on the auditory scene), and how it compensates for its own lateness (it subscribes to a listening regime). The practical consequence of these two elements is the deferral of the subject s return to self- presence. I turn now to the duration and end of listening: how long it remains at home. This is the issue of music s ruin and decay, to displace terms from architecture and thermodynamics respectively. I now extrapolate, less from (eidegger s Building Dwelling Thinking , and more from Lyotard s critique of (eidegger in essays on the complexification of the contemporary post-industrial western developed world, which 16 he defines as the megalopolis in contradistinction to the home (which he terms variously Domus and Oikos) (Lyotard, 1993). To distort Heidegger, it might be dreamed at this point that what is needed is to displace building with listening to be sure, another of (eidegger s terms . Deploying Lyotard at this point affords a means of triangulating between the constitutional birth of the auditory subject, her child-like assumption of certain quasi-legal rights and her subscription to certain listening regimes, and the unavoidable empirical reality of sound. I begin this section with what might seem like a digression about sound in contemporary life, before drawing matters back to the auditory subject s journey home, and the fate of her listening. Lyotard feels a certain disquiet at what disappears when the primary telos of the megalopolis becomes the gaining, saving, and stockpiling of time. His disquiet is about the megalopolis in which it is asserted that You must think in a communicable way. Make culture , in which there must be no excess in each transaction; in which Thought today makes no appeal, cannot appeal, to the memory which is tradition, to bucolic physis[,] to rhyming time, to perfect beauty Lyotard, 1991a, p. 202); in which there must be nothing left after listening; in which Secrets must be put into circuits, writings programmed, tragedies transcribed into bits of information Lyotard, a, pp. , 201 respectively); and in which time must be tightly managed and controlled. In Baumann s distinctive terms, the time of liquid modernity drips away from the subject. The megalopolis is forever distracting attention away from the domus, maintaining life As if it were already done. That s what it is, the world today. Everything that is to be done is as if it were already done Lyotard, b, p. . This is a life without life, a life that never quite happens, stillborn. This is a life in which Timbre is consigned by the megalopolis to the ghetto Lyotard, 1991a, p. 202). Lyotard also calls timbre variously matter and nuance , and by this he denotes more than only or specifically musical 17 timbre. Matter, he discerns, seems to matter no longer, and this makes him feel distinctly uneasy; not because he is a materialist or behaviourist, but because he is acutely aware of the role of the body in aesthetics and the deployment of the body in justice. Lyotard s disquiet can be described in greater detail. Many things, he discerns, disappear into the megalopolis s temporal black hole, amongst them aesthetic events and their potentials, meanings, and consequences. Moreover, what disappears into the megalopolis are not simply individual aesthetic events or the category of the aesthetic in general, but something more fundamental: the sound of the world, the sound of events (including, but not limited to, aesthetic events), the sound of the subject. Fundamentally, the sense of the world disappears Nancy, , and, along with it, listening. Why does sound disappear, rather than another adjectival property or parameter of the event, such as its spatial configuration, or a different articulation of its temporal dimension? Because sound is what, paradigmatically or extremely, takes nothing but time, needs time above all, and cannot function without time: it is sound that is most immediately and ontologically affected by the disappearance of time – diluted, Baumann might say. All other disappearances into the megalopolis are secondary to the disappearance of sound, and all other changes in the event can cope with the disappearance of time. For Lyotard, sound is more than mere physical vibration and physiological excitation (Dayan, 2012, pp. 23–25). Thus, Lyotard s disquiet is this: if there is no time in the megalopolis left to be taken because everything is already perfectly telegraphically efficient Lyotard, c and needs no further expenditure of time, or (making the point in less absolute terms) if the megalopolis is driven by the attempt to ignore, suppress, and reject anything that takes time, then there is no sound to listen to and no sound worth listening to: or at 18 least, nothing to listen to that has received prior endorsement by the megalopolis. This means that listening is not so much purposeless (in a loosely Kantian sense) as redundant, even homeless, which is potentially more disquieting. And with time increasingly disappearing into private stockpiles in the contemporary world (Foucault has long since been updated: today, time is power , Lyotard s disquiet is that there is increasingly less and less time remaining for sound to sound, and that it is thus increasingly less and less likely that we will encounter aesthetic events and need to listen up in the devoted way that specifically aesthetic events demand, and which is transferable to life per se. Such is Lyotard s disquiet, which is not so much paranoid as suspicious , after Marx, Nietzsche and Freud (Lyotard, 1995–1996). His disquiet is certainly well-founded. There is a strain of life in the megalopolis – a polemology that always paralyses our organs Szendy, , p. – that wishes away time, events and sound, and for which, notwithstanding well-meaning claims about upstanding citizens being creative in the Big Society, time is no more than capital, events are no more than data, and sound is no more than feedback. This is the strain of life that is happy, Now that we have to gain time and space, gain with and against them, gain or earn our livings. When the regulation of things, humans and capacities happens exclusively between humans, with no nature to serve, according to the principle of a generalised exchange aiming for more… Lyotard, a, p. : ellipses original But the bleakness of Lyotard s diagnosis (I depend here on essays from the late 1980s and early 1990s) is perhaps slightly over-exaggerated, even for a thinker of his 19 pedigree. Why? Because time tells, disquiet passes, and sound finds its way. Sound is pragmatic: unbeknownst to the megalopolis, it escapes from the stockpile and sounds. The megalopolis may be stillborn and able to deliver nothing more diverting or unexpected than a climate-controlled aesthetics Lyotard, a, p. , but sound is forever being born and disturbing the atmosphere; indeed, its birth to presence is its only unproblematic component, and the notion of sound without time, or of the sound of an infinitely thin slice of time, is mistaken, the musicality of a moment being precisely its taking time (Phillips, 2008). Sounds have duration O Callaghan, , p. and take advantage of the fact that Aesthetics is the answer the megalopolis gives to the anxiety born for lack of an object Lyotard, a, p. . (usserl was essentially right that sound and time are ciphers for each other, and that time consciousness might be productively modelled by melody qua sound. This is why a prophesying function is sometimes attributed to music (Attali, 1985). While the megalopolis, believing that silence has no time and takes no time, wants things to become less noisy and more silent, and accepts that an increase in silence might be an ideological consequence of more important things, sound is much less efficient in terms of its temporal profile and thus its energy usage. This disturbs the megalopolis, which would definitely prefer silence and sound to be opposites. Unbeknownst to the megalopolis, even silence plays its part in opening up the megalopolis, for Silence is not the absence of sound but the beginning of listening Voegelin, , p. . To be fair to Lyotard, the important thing about his diagnosis is that the disappearance of time is quite real from both phenomenological and physical perspectives. Sound does disappear from the auditory subject. This is because, like all domains of energy transfer, it is subject to the second law of thermodynamics: entropy. The generally accepted scientific definition of entropy is that it measures the relative 20 degree of (dis-)order in a system (the arrangements of its components) in relation to energy transfer, and that in a self-contained system the level of entropy always increases towards thermodynamic equilibrium and that uncertainty always decreases. For Lyotard, as for Pynchon in his short story Entropy, entropy is a poetic figure that serves a dual purpose: first, it defines the limits of relationships between bodies, whether physical, virtual, aesthetic, organic or inorganic; secondly, it affords a way of plugging in a proposal for what should be valued in and by homo sapiens into the diagnosis of its physical fate. Entropy is energy s natural rhythm, its slowing down and decay Aristotle cited in Adam, , p. , the dying out of sound, the ruin of structure. At the denouement of Pynchon s short story two of the characters, Aubade and Callisto, having just witnessed the slow death of an injured bird that they had been tending delicately, face each other and wait for everything to cool down, until the hovering, curious dominant of their separate lives should resolve into a tonic of darkness and the final absence of all motion Pynchon, dramatic form of their waiting is listening. , p. . Significantly, the The important point for imagining the home of listening is that the way in which sound sounds is a matter of entropy, which means that the claim that This ear that I lend is certainly above all lent to me and its associated question, By whom? Szendy, 2008, p. 13), are decidedly and mistakenly anthropomorphic. Given that Our acts and experiences are themselves temporal unities which arise, persist, and perish Zahavi, , p. , listening is necessarily forever a matter of the draining of sound s echo O Callaghan, , pp. – , the dying out of running-off phenomena (usserl, 1964, §10, pp. 48–50), the dissipation of vibration (Goodman, 2009), and the dispersion of resonance (Nancy, 2007). Die-hard attempts to dovetail listening neatly with the discourses of possession, mastery, and ownership (the discourse of the developed west) 21 and to force listening regimes upon the auditory subject beyond their natural attraction are doomed to derailment. Cage praised Feldman for avoiding this simultaneously artistic and political faux pas (Cage, 1968, p. 128). Thus we might work through Lyotard s disquiet by proposing that a distinction is demanded between the accumulation of time in the megalopolis and the time of entropy: while the potential disappearance of time is, notwithstanding the ambitions of the megalopolis, a local cultural matter for politicians and criminologists of listening to fret about, entropy is the real transcendental issue facing humanity, and is something that Dasein should find distinctly disquieting, if familiar from its being-toward-death. Of interest here as a potentially positive way of working through Lyotard s diagnosis of time s disappearance into the megalopolis is the role that he donates to timbre. Initially he sets up domus (the personal) and megalopolis (the system) in diametric opposition to each other, placing the former above the latter and reading timbre as a metaphor for the subject s inner sanctum. (e goes on to implicate the megalopolis in the domus by claiming that there is sedition in the secret of timbre. Deployed as sound s avant-garde infantry, he argues, timbre defers the subject s homecoming, turning her potential arrival into a continual process of never quite arriving definitively. In addition, the timbre of the domus is quiet and slow, which disturbs the megalopolis. Thus, while rhythm disappears from the domus, and while timbre will get analysed, its elements will be put into a memory, it will be reproduced at will, it may come in useful to the megalopolis, Lyotard has a ruse up his sleeve that he feels might give rise to a hope for listening and its auditory subject, on the basis that Thinking, writing, is, in our sense, to bear witness for the secret timbre Lyotard, 1991a, both at p. 203). It is interesting how music or sound plays a direct role in this bearing witness (following Nancy (2007), I take it that listening is more a matter of 22 listening to sound than of discovering its meanings; that music psychology is a subset of sound studies), and how it might be politically expedient to cultivate: An ear deaf enough not to be seduced by the melody and harmony of forms, but fine enough to take in pitch and nuance. Impassive before the seductions of the aestheticising megalopolis, but affected by what they conceal in displaying it: the mute lament of what the absolute lacks. (Lyotard, 1997a, p. 31) Focussing on the resonance of timbre Nancy s phrase , an ear for this sort of detail might develop into a driver for the auditory subject s journey home. )f such a deaf […] but […] fine ear plays a central role in the opening up of the megalopolis, then the minor senses [… must be] honoured Lyotard, 1991a, p. 194; 1991b, p. 185. Lyotard, 2006, p. 133); timbre/matter/nuance must be the driver. As Lyotard says: Matter is that element in the datum which has no destiny. Forms domesticate it, make it consumable. Especially visual perspectives, and modes and scales of sound. Forms of sensibility which have come under the control of the understanding without difficulty. Things are less clear when it comes to their lower sisters who smell, drink in and touch. […] So many untameable states of matter. Lyotard, 185–6) b, pp. 23 In other words, sound matter defers the auditory subject s return home, and the decision to give matter a destiny is temporary at best and deluded at worst. Listening regimes from Muzak through music appreciation and aural skills curricula to structural listening can be discerned at various points along this spectrum, from the temporary to the deluded, and each one can be valued accordingly; but all defer to entropy eventually. Listening to matter, to timbre, means being aware that it will always give the slip to all listening regimes, however tightly organised they are. In fact, matter also gives the slip to listening itself; entropy guarantees as much: that sound will be gone before listening is done with it. What happens is that listening regimes are given the slip by the loss of energy from the rhythms criminological or otherwise that they have worked to set up in the listener. Rhythm being the pre-entropic moment of listening, Pynchon writes that form and motion [are] abolished and there is a passage from the differentiated forms of objects to the quiet silence of the singular: the faint rhythm […] begin[s] to slacken and fail. [… and] the heartbeat tick[s] a graceful diminuendo down at last into stillness (Pynchon, 1995, pp. 85, 97 respectively). Thus, although the deferral of the auditory subject s return home to self-presence is a temporal phenomenon, the point is to avoid implying that the subject experiences her deferred listening psychoanalytically, as a desperate failed return to some kind of prelapsarian utopia, that is, as essentially a traumatic experience. The lesson of sound is that there is nothing to go back to, nothing to get wound up about indeed, that experience ultimately may not be the best term for what happens in listening . Of all the body s senses the least nostalgic nostos = return home, algia = longing) (Boym, 2001, p. xiii ) and the most unforgiving (hence the particular insidiousness of music s use in torture , listening forces its subject to stretch itself forwards into the future, even if it is unable to do so proactively. 24 5 Reincarnation By way of a more or less defined conclusion, we could say that, despite the auditory subject s delusions of grandeur about the extent of her musical property while listening, which are quite understandable given the way in which, in the wake after auditory birth, she becomes a musical child by asserting her rights and subscribing to a listening regime, nevertheless the listening regime provides her with only a temporary home, and music stays with her only temporarily. So, the answer to the question, When is listening home? , is a bit disappointing: never properly. )f music presents a landscape, as Adorno argues apropos of Schubert (Adorno, 2005), then this is not a landscape in the everyday sense, namely as a geographically delimited area which the auditory subject can navigate around, map out, return to and dwell in. Rather, it is a landscape that is the opposite of place. )f place is cognate with destination. […] Landscape as a place without DEST)NY Lyotard, b, p. . )t thus presents the auditory subject with an uninhabitable terrain. While Lyotard argues that We inhabit the megalopolis only to the extent that we declare it uninhabitable Lyotard, a, p. 200. See Heidegger, 1971, p. 145), he implies (Lyotard, 1991a, p. 194) that the same is ultimately true of the domus: sound defers the auditory subject s passage towards the full selfpresence of an arrival home, and a relaxing homecoming never quite happens. )t is not the house passing away, like a mobile home or the shepherd s hut, it is in passing that we dwell Lyotard, a, p. . This leads into the issue of listening s double bind, mentioned at the outset of this essay. The spiralling movement of consciousness, identified by Husserl as protention simultaneous with but displaced by retention, distorted here into listening s life cycle from conception to reincarnation, is the musical moment par excellence. It is 25 also the constitutional double bind of listening. Put schematically: listening is deferred (too late on the scene) while sound decays (leaves the listener too early). Given this double bind, a question arises. After sound has disappeared and died out, after its energy has dispersed, dissipated and decayed, what is left for the auditory subject to listen to? The immediate short answer is: nothing. When sound dies, the auditory subject dies. Put another way, and with only a little dab of speculative licence, the test of universal doubt Lyotard, 1988, §94, p. 59) at the heart of western thought since at least Descartes – and which is the paradigmatic moment of resistance to entropy – is also a test of whether the subject is able to return home, and the answer to that question is that time survives but she does not; there is no returning home. However, pace the disappointing tone dropped into the previous paragraph, all is not lost for the auditory subject. There is more to the future than a novelistic drift into the graceful decadence of an enervated fatalism Pynchon, 1995, p. 87). She retains a memory directly inscribed on her body of what she had listened to. This variously full or faded memory affords music its afterlife, its future home, and its hope. The home of listening is in memory, which explains why listeners enjoy different things each time Cone, ; they never arrive at a full self-presence. (A proper analysis of auditory and musical memory is beyond the scope of this essay). I draw to a close with a simple metaphor. Imagine an animal that carries its home on its back, moves slowly forwards, follows its senses, leaves behind a fading trail of engagement with the world, the mark of when, how and where its home had passed through the specious present en route to wherever it might be led next. Such an animal would be fully co-constituted in and by its world, and the primary driver of its biological success would be its listening mechanism, its mode of attending to what surrounds it 26 we might dub this mechanism a pair of ears for ease of argument . Such an animal is a hermit crab. Perhaps the auditory subject is a hermit crab. 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