Abstract
This chapter develops and presents the conceptual framework for Part III’s exploration of the technological-architectural staging of listening with specific regards to its ambient implications: What are the material and techno-aesthetic conditions, advanced by sound technology, for the development of the ambient mode as a norm for technical listening? And how has modern sound technology cultivated the shaping of the modern listening subject as an ambient listener? By raising such general questions, the chapter pursues the proposition that the modern auditory dispositive, on an overall cultural and historical level, is guided by a deep ambient inclination, which has vast implications for the shaping of subjectivity and auditory practice in modern and contemporary culture.
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Notes
- 1.
Importantly, there is an essential environmental and affective dimension of Foucault’s notion of the dispositive. As Deleuze notes in his short text on Foucault’s dispositive: “We belong to social apparatuses [dispositifs] and we act within them” (Deleuze 1992, p. 164). In an interview, Foucault has himself described his notion of the dispositive in the following manner: “What I’m trying to pick out with this term is, firstly, a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions—in short, the said as much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of the apparatus. The apparatus itself is the system of relations that can be established between these elements” (Foucault 1980, p. 194). In his text on the dispositive, Giorgio Agamben further expands Foucault’s notion to include a whole ecology of material and discursive circumstances, within which living beings are captured and affectively conditioned through various processes of subjectification: “I shall call an apparatus [dispositif] literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings. Not only, therefore, prisons, madhouses, the panopticon, schools, confession, factories, disciplines, judicial measures, and so forth (whose connection with power is in a certain sense evident), but also the pen, writing, literature, philosophy, agriculture, cigarettes, navigation, computers, cellular telephones and—why not—language itself, which is perhaps the most ancient of apparatuses—one in which thousands and thousands of years ago a primate inadvertently let himself be captured, probably without realizing the consequences that he was about to face” (Agamben 2009, p. 14).
- 2.
I will in my analyses of listening technologies focus exclusively on the material aspects of the auditory dispositive. For further discussions of the auditory dispositive in relation to modern and contemporary sound, technology and listening in the twenty-first century, see Schulze (2013, 2018, pp. 85–110), and Schulze (2019, pp. 198–200). For a discussion of the auditory dispositive in early sound and listening technologies of the late nineteenth century, see Drie (2015, 2016).
- 3.
Jonathan Sterne (2003) evokes a similar distinction between technology and technique inspired by Marcel Mauss’ classic analysis, from 1934, of the ‘techniques of the body.’ Sterne thus understands listening as a skilled activity learnt through habitual practice and co-developed with the evolution of sound and listening technologies. This idea of habitual practice as a technique shaped by societal-material dispositives is also central in Foucault’s late writings (especially Discipline and Punish, 1979, and The History of Sexuality, Vol 1–4, 1978–2021). Hence, Foucault famously speaks of the “arts of existence” as a “technique of the self,” and he suggests that “the study of the problematization of sexual behavior in antiquity could be regarded as a chapter—one of the first chapters—of that general history of the ‘techniques of the self’ ” (Foucault 1985, p. 11). This Foucauldian idea of technique as learned practice, which in part forms processes of subjectification, is in turn the guiding perspective in Jonathan Crary’s influential studies (1990, 2001) of how nineteenth-century media technologies have framed the historical development of a set of “techniques of the observer” (1990). For Crary’s discussion of Foucault and the idea of the new disciplinary techniques of the subject as associated with the development of perceptual “norms of behavior,” see Crary 1990, pp. 14–18. Following this line of thinking, Bernhard Siegert has in turn introduced a broader socio-cultural perspective with his concept of “cultural techniques,” which includes basic learnt practices such as reading, walking and navigating (Siegert 2015).
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- 5.
Learning how to navigate this synthetic double environmentality as a general “cultural technique” (Siegert 2015) arguably entails one of the most pertinent challenges in modern hyper-affective and hyper-aestheticized culture. Interestingly, the notion of double mediality I propose here as a key aspect of modern and contemporary media also resonates closely with the double etymological origin of the concept of medium in the Greek terms periēchon and to metaxý. As I have briefly discussed earlier, periēchon entails a basic notion of the medium as an elemental surrounding environment. In contrast, to metaxý—literally meaning ‘that which is in-between’—underlines the intermediary capacities of the medium; its role as mediator between separate milieus. To metaxý is the Aristotelian concept which Thomas Aquinas turned into the Latin medium in his translation of Aristotle’s writings on sensorial perception in the thirteenth century. Combined, periēchon (surrounding elemental medium) and to metaxý (mediating medium) constitute an elemental double capacity of the medium for simultaneously surrounding an isolated body and transferring energy and information from the outside (Hoffmann 2002, pp. 29–30; see also Hagen 2008; Kittler 2009; Schmidt 2017). On another note, the idea of double mediality can also be seen as constituting a form of ‘master diagram’ for the whole book. Most importantly, it informs my general conception and analysis of environmental sound and listening between mediatized, immanent surroundability and mediated, transcendental directionality.
- 6.
A few remarks by Sterne can be highlighted to support this interpretation: “Listening is a directed, learned activity” (Sterne 2003, p. 19); “The history of audile technique thus offers a counternarrative to Romantic or naturalistic accounts that posit sight as the sense of intellect and hearing as the sense of affect, vision as the precise, localizing sense and hearing as the enveloping sense” (ibid., p. 95); “That the technicized auditory field had certain characteristics setting it apart from ‘direct audition’ is central to understanding the development of listening in the age of technological production. Foremost among these characteristics is the emphasis on directionality and detail against a ‘holistic’ perception of the auditory environment” (ibid., pp. 156–157).
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Sterne (2015, p. 79). According to Neil Verma, who introduced the term, ‘audioposition’ entails a sensation of being placed, virtually or actually, in a techno-material sound environment, thereby suggesting that listeners “do not just ‘have’ a point of audition; they are ‘positioned’ by audio composition” (Verma quoted in Sterne 2015, p. 70).
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Schmidt, U. (2023). Staging Ambient Listening. In: A Philosophy of Ambient Sound. Palgrave Studies in Sound. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-1755-6_8
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