‘Failing on Deaf Ears’: A Postphenomenology of Sonorous Presence

Abstract

In this paper I engage with how we attend to sound in terms of musical performance, but also more generally. Whilst recent work in geography has begun to approach the significance of practices of listening, particularly in terms of its performance, its interpretative role, and its cultural politics, I want to approach the act of listening itself and sound itself. In doing this I take inspiration from the recent work of Nancy and particularly his rethinking of ontology as being-with. More specifically, I will focus on three themes central to his general philosophical project, namely sense, the subject, the body, and, further, his conceptions of sonorous presence, resonance, rhythm, and timbre which relate more specifically to his work on listening. The discussion decentres the role of interpretation, or as Nancy suggests ‘hearing’, in academic and geographic accounts of listening and calls for a greater understanding of the resonance produced when sound impacts upon the body when we ‘listen’. In turn, this contributes to the development of a postphenomenology through its critique of the intentional subject in understanding the subject as resonant, always still to come, folding and unfolded, echoing in its being-with sound. This also develops understandings of the nonrepresentational in its affirmation of a finite thinking of the singular-plural. I take as a lens into this discussion a recent experiment undertaken by the Washington Post where the world-renowned, virtuoso violinist Joshua Bell busked at a Washington Underground station, and, apparently, fell on a thousand pairs of ‘deaf ears’.