PES Memphis was a totalizing experience, such that it consumed all of my philosophical attention in the weeks leading up, the week it happened, and the two weeks after (essentially, the entire month of March). Today, finally, I'm back to thinking beyond (post) PES Memphis, and the gesture that takes me beyond is the sharing of a rough draft of a paper I composed in 2014, when I was completing the work on the paper "Leaning by Jamming" at Drew University
Aural, aurality, oral tradition, audition (in the
sense of hearing), auditory perception: In Praise of Sound and the (re)Turn to a the
revelatory and poetic (making or saying something) power of Sound. [Sonic studies] A (re)Turn to the Auditory Dimension
"In the beginning was the
Word, and the Word was
with God, and the Word was God." (John
1:1)
We recall Heraclitus recognized the primary role
of listening after he found himself hearing Logos. And also Parmenides when he arranged his poem
The Way of Truth around the
revelation spoken to the youth by the
goddess. Socrates is the last Orphic
philosopher, the last of the musical philosophers who emerged from an
oral/sonic tradition of truth telling and meaning making. After him, with Plato and Aristotle, writing
and reading replaced listening and speaking, and the power of seeing become the
ultimate authority. And so, with Luce
Irigaray, we can say: “Western tradition is founded on looking-at rather than
on listening-to. In our tradition,
listening is at the service of looking, especially with regard to
teaching.”(Irigaray, 2008, p. 231)
Reiner Schurmann (1990, p.
65) also registers a similar critique of Western philosophy, which, he says,
culminates with Husserl’s phenomenology and the primacy it grants sight. “Within Western philosophy, there is nothing
new about the primacy Husserl gives sight.
Ever since Aristotle, sight has remained the privileged metaphor for the
activity of the mind. Even more, since
the classical Greeks, to think is to see.” Hearing, by contrast, is a retrieval
of our being in time, and of a temporality understood as movement. “Hearing…is the sense attuned to time: the
ear perceived movements of approach and retreat…A sound is not yet, then it
approaches, it is there, and already fades and is no more.” And, what’s more, hearing, or what occurs
when we listen, denotes much of what has been indicated about the philosophical
education offered by music, especially when we link the English word to its
German sibling, horen. To hear is to be enjoined, implicated in
call. Seeing requires distance, a gap,
or space. Hearing, by contrast, is
intensified by proximity. “The closer a
sound is the better I perceive it. Hence
‘belonging’ has the connotation of ‘hearing’. The German gehoren derives from horen.
In Greek, Latin, and Germanic languages, to be capable of hearing is to be
capable of obeying: horchen [listen]
means gerhochen [obey, follow a
(higher) power]. The eye is the organ
of distance and the constantly present. The ear is the organ of involvement and
of disclosure in time.”
“The primary presence of the God of the West
has been the God of Word, YHWH. ‘And God said…’ The creative power of the Hebrew God is word, which is spoken forth as power: from word comes the world.” (Don Ihde, Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of
Sound. 2nd ed. SUNY: 2007, 14)
“Not only are sounds, in
the metaphysical tradition, secondary, but the inattention to the sounding of
things has led to the gradual loss of understanding whole ranges of phenomena
that are there to be noted.” (Ihde, 13)
“What is being called
visualism here as a symptom is the whole reductionist tendency, which in seeking
to purify experiences belies its richness at the source. A turn the auditory dimension is
thus potentially more than a simple changing of variables. It begins as a deliberate decentering of a
dominant tradition in order to discover what may be missing as a result of the
traditional double reduction of vision as the main variable and metaphor. This deliberate change of emphasis from the
visual to the auditory dimension at first symbolizes a hope to find material
for a recovery of the richness of primary experience that is now forgotten or
covered over in the too tightly interpreted visualist traditions.”(Ihde, 13)
“For what is needed is a philosophy of listening. But is this a possibility? If philosophy has
its very roots intertwined with a secret vision of Being that has resulted in
the present state of visualism, can it listen with equal profundity? What is called for is an ontology of the
auditory. And if any first expression is
a ‘singing of the world,’ as Merleau-Ponty puts it, then what begins here is a
singing that begins in a turn to the auditory dimension.”(Ihde, 15)
“In Praise of Sound,” the
first chapter of Don Ihde’s book, Listening
and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound, offers a compelling genealogy of the
visualist tradition that has dominated western philosophy, explaining how our
most iconic philosophical words express the deeply held assumptions that truth
is revealed through a radiant showing:
…the question is then one
of phenomenology, of the so-called ‘things’ themselves, and whether or not the
reduction is to a material world that can be seen, or towards one that can be
heard. Of course, there is the question
of whether or not a final reduction is necessary. Indeed, my concern isn’t necessarily with mounting
an auralogical ‘revolution,’ not in making a ‘turn’ that would be exclusive or
excluding of the visual. I’m not
interested in ‘over-turning’ but, rather, in ‘re-turning’ to sound, first, by
way of [re-covering (in the sense of re-tracing) the ground] re-turning to the
most ancient of ancient philosophical ideas and modes of teaching and learning
that are oral, and thereby re-articulating the primordial, originating
power/force of sound.
…further I want to make
an important distinction, or emphasize something important that is revealed in
dialogic education: when jamming is happening participants are ‘saying
something’ individually and collectively.
Sounds are heard as words, as expressing the power of Word (Logos[1]). A dialogic jam is so much more than the
interplay or interaction of ‘sound.’
Yes, the movement of bodies, the shuffling of feet, the crossing and
uncrossing of legs, yawning, laughter, the tapping of fingers on keyboards, the
movement of pens and pencils across paper, and all the ‘sounds’ that make up the
gathering of a learning community are integral, of course, but they are not the
principal components of what is being ‘said’ when people are saying
something. When sound is said it expresses the power of words. And it is this power that we hear conveyed in
Genesis, and later by St. John’s gospel. It is the gathering force of Logos, which Heraclitus expressed.
The flow is the flow of Logos.
Nothing faster than light,
but nothing heavier than sound: YHWH
‘said’ let there be light.
a. In pre-Socratic philosophy, the principle governing the cosmos,
the source of this principle, or human reasoning about the cosmos.
b. Among the Sophists, the topics of rational argument or the
arguments themselves.
c. In Stoicism, the active, material, rational principle of the
cosmos; nous. Identified with God, it is the source of all activity and
generation and is the power of reason residing in the human soul.
2. Judaism
a. In biblical Judaism, the word of God, which itself has creative
power and is God's medium of communication with the human race.
b. In Hellenistic Judaism, a hypostasis associated with divine
wisdom.
3. Christianity In Saint
John's Gospel, especially in the prologue (1:1-14), the creative word of God,
which is itself God and incarnate in Jesus. Also called Word.
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