Phenomenology of Listening and the Challenge of Writing Sound Adam Potts

Volume CIII, No.2, Autumn 2015

A whispered preamble How does writing attend to listening? Are we to be diary keeping auditors, trying to bring sound into words as we hear them? Do we begin from the region of affect, attending to the immediacy of experience with a language sympathetic to its heterogeneous qualities? More importantly, is there even a distance between writing and sound or is sound already within meaning, making listening something akin to reading? Or is writing about sound, beyond the social and political, destined for obscurity? It is with these questions in mind that this paper begins and it is with the radical uncertainty of the last that this paper ends. In many respects, this is a challenge to phenomenology. While phenomenology might seem like the sturdiest way of approaching sound – as a philosophy of experience and embodiment it seems like an obvious place to think about listening – cracks, splits and openings appear on its surface in the moment of writing. Beyond the immediacy of listening we begin to reflect – of which writing is a discernibly committed attempt – and in this moment a distance begins to surface between the words written and the sound heard. Writing pushes the listener beyond the phenomenon of listening into a space of symbolic evocations. Yet this distance and echo of sound manifests in writing as a hollow, yet sonorous, cavity – rumbling beneath the surface of meaning. In this respect, writing about sound challenges phenomenology by bringing forward a space similar to Maurice Blanchot's space of literature; rather than confirm the listening experience or the listening subject, it brings us to the incommunicable centre of the self and the world. No more is this tense relationship between writing and sound apparent than in the work of Daniela Cascella, as she enjoys an intimacy of "hidden processes … incoherence [and] whispers" (Cascella,

- 3