Hearing the Silence
Malcolm Bull
Jonathan Rée, I See a Voice: A Philosophical History of Language, Deafness and the Senses, HarperCollins,
Of the few myths about the sense of hearing, the most memorable is that of Ulysses and the Sirens. Lashed to the mast of his ship, Ulysses alone experiences the pleasure of the Sirens' song, while the crew, their ears plugged with balls of wax, row on regardless of his signals to be released. Like most myths, this story can be interpreted in many ways, but the question of hearing is obviously crucial since the narrative is concerned with the power of the voice, the desire to listen, the difference between those who can hear and those who are unable to hear, and the problems of wordless communication. Nevertheless, of the literary reworkings of the myth, it is perhaps only Joyce's that develops these themes.
In the Sirens episode in Ulysses, Joyce separates the enchantment of song from the allure of the barmaids in Ormond's Bar, and allows the experience of hearing to become the axis around which the narrative revolves. It begins with the sound of a tuning fork heard from the saloon: `You hear? It throbbed, pure, purer, softly and softlier, its buzzing prongs. Longer in dying call.' The single fading note of the tuning fork is followed by a sequence of songs sung or played on the piano, but not everyone can hear them equally well. When Simon Dedalus sings an aria from Flotow's Martha,
Bloom signed to Pat, bald Pat is a waiter hard of hearing, to set ajar the door of the bar. The door of the bar. So. That will do. Pat, waiter, waited, waiting to hear, for he was hard of hear by the door.
-Sorrow from me seemed to depart.
Through the hush of air a voice sang to them, low, not rain, not leaves in murmur, like no voice of strings of reeds or whatdoyoucallthem dulcimers, touching their still ears with words, still hearts of their each his remembered lives. Good, good to hear: sorrow from them each seemed to from both depart when first they heard.
But, of course, we do not know exactly how much of `love's old sweet song' Pat actually hears, or how many of his sorrows the song dispelled. Maybe little, probably few. Shortly afterwards Bloom tries to get his attention:
Pat! Doesn't hear. Deaf beetle he is.
Car near there now. Talk. Talk. Pat! Settling those napkins.
Bald Pat who is bothered mitred the napkins. Pat is a waiter hard of his hearing. Pat is a waiter who waits while you wait. Hee hee hee hee.
Like the crew of Ulysses' ship, Pat keeps things going while those who can hear are enthralled by the magic of sound. One of the barmaids holds a seashell to George Lidwell's ear: `Hear! He heard. Wonderful. She held it to her own and through the sifted light pale gold in contrast glided. To hear.'
And it is not just shells that contain music: `Sea, wind, leaves, thunder, waters, cows lowing, the cattle market, cocks, hens don't crow, snakes hisses. There's music everywhere.' From this, Pat is largely excluded, and not by chance, for as Joyce notes when Bob Cowley plays the minuet from Don Giovanni, pleasure and exclusion from pleasure are intimately connected:
Court dresses of all descriptions in castle chambers dancing. Misery. Peasants outside. Green starving faces eating dockleaves. Nice that is. Look: look, look, look, look, look: you look at us.
Just as the enjoyment of the dancers in the castle is enhanced by the sense that they are being watched by those who cannot participate, so, in the bar, a series of auditory pleasures is thrown into relief by the constant presence of someone who cannot fully enjoy them. Ben Dollard sings `The Croppy Boy': `Listen. Bloom listened. Richie Goulding listened. And by the door deaf Pat, bald Pat, tipped Pat, listened.'1
Joyce's version of the Sirens is unusual in two respects. Like Adorno and Horkheimer, but unlike most other interpreters, he makes it clear that the story hinges on the differential nature of the experience of the Sirens. In the figure of Pat, we have a reincarnation of the crew whose inability to experience the Sirens' song is the chief guarantee of its beauty. Here there are obviously questions to be asked about the nature of aesthetic experience: who would believe in the enchantment of the song if everyone had heard it and lived? But what is peculiar to Joyce is his willingness to recast the tale in terms not of a spiritual or aesthetic incapacity but of a physical one. The pleasures enjoyed by the patrons of Ormond's Bar are of a fairly ordinary kind, yet they too are exclusive, for the experience of hearing is no more universal than an invitation to a dance. Pat may be folding napkins rather than eating dockleaves, but the structure of the situation is the same. The questions that arise are therefore not about a specific form of experience, but about the nature of experience itself. How far is our experience of the world determined by the real or imagined inability of others to experience it in the same way?
I see a voice
This is the question addressed in Jonathan Rée's remarkable study of the history and philosophical implications of deafness, I See a Voice.* The Sirens do not feature in Rée's book, but the myth can be used to articulate some of its recurring themes. The central, and by far the longest, section of I See a Voice is devoted to a history of deaf education from the seventeenth century to the present. This is followed by a sequence of brief essays on the role of the senses in modern philosophy and aesthetics. The opening section, a series of provocative phenomenological meditations on hearing and the experience of sound, sets the agenda and raises the questions the book sets out to answer. The first of these is one Rée first put to himself as a child, when he tried to simulate the effects of blindness and deafness by screwing up his eyes and sticking his fingers in his ears. Which incapacity would be worse?, he wondered. Rée takes the question as it stands, but the experiment, surely a common one in childhood, may be less an exploration of disability than an attempt to place a value on certain abilities, and a value on oneself as a being who has them. Trying out the role of the deaf (or the blind) is not like trying on a new lipstick - no one is going to persist with the experiment even if they enjoy it - its purpose is to affirm the satisfactory nature of status quo: the more unpleasant the experiment, the more gratifying the result.
To some degree the history of the treatment of the deaf by the non-deaf can be viewed in the same way, with the deaf being permanent experimental subjects for the ongoing self-appraisal of the hearing. If, as Rée suggests, we respond to voices as we do to faces, then not having a voice is like not having a face. (The idea is captured by Joyce's terse `Paint face behind on him and then he'd be two': Pat's face is as blank and inexpressive as the back of his head.) And without faces or voices, people do not have identities, so for most of history, deafness (or at least lifelong pre-lingual deafness) has been considered sufficiently dehumanizing that it warranted the exclusion of the deaf from civil, religious and social benefits. As Rée observes, `Few groups in history have suffered such sustained and uncomprehending cruelty as the so-called "deaf and dumb". In most civilizations they have been treated like animals if not worse.'
The corollary of the obliteration of the identity of the deaf is that the hearing have been free to construct them as the negation of themselves. From antiquity onwards, a maximally negative appraisal of the condition of the speechless deaf was accompanied by an exceedingly high valuation on auditory and oral skills - a valuation that persists in conservative social forms such as religion and the law. Somewhere around the time of the Renaissance, things began to change. The invention of printing, the spread of literacy, and a new confidence in the power of observation all contributed to a reassessment of the condition of the deaf. Rée, who is wary of historical generalizations, might not agree, but it is hard not to see this shift as part of a move to a more ocularcentric culture - the new willingness to teach the deaf written language going along with the recognition that shared participation in the visible world might be a sufficient basis for acknowledgement of a common humanity.
However, teaching the deaf to read, write, spell out through gestures, and even enunciate written language only allowed them to simulate participation in a linguistic community. Taught in this way, the deaf lacked both the fluency and the ready comprehension of ideas that characterized hearing speakers. Two means of achieving this were developed. The first involved the systematization of a language of gesture, based partly upon the gestures through which the deaf communicated with each other, and partly upon the direct translation of the vocabulary of spoken languages into signs. The second, which could be combined with the first, but which was often presented as an exclusive alternative, was to teach the deaf to lip-read and to speak. Much of Rée's book is concerned with the historical development of both systems and with the competition between them that, to some degree, persists to this day. But it concludes with the realization that the language of gesture is, in fact, just as much a natural language as any spoken language, in that it has more or less the same structural and psychological character. Rather than being alingual subhumans, or having a distinctively visual rather than a verbal language, the deaf are no more different from the hearing than are speakers of one language from another. For a child, imagining what it is like to be deaf need be no more terrifying than imagining what it is like to be French.
On Autonomy and the Avant-Garde
John Roberts
Surveying the current state of Anglophone art criticism, cultural theory and philosophical aesthetics, I am repeatedly struck by how disoriented or effervescently celebratory this writing is in the face of the art of the last thirty years. Indeed, the problem of how the last thirty years of art might be assessed and periodized after the great achievements of modernism would seem to present an inordinate stumbling block, particularly on the Left where there remains an unfailing distrust of art's disaffirmative complexities and critical identity under the conditions of late capitalism, despite the rush to turn art into cultural practice. In this respect, this bewilderment or effervescence coheres under one substantive question: how is art to function and to be evaluated under the impact of the new technologies and the logic of the Spectacle? That is, how is art to operate in conditions that openly reify and dissolve the traditional values of art?
In an obvious sense this is an old question for art and modernity, as old as the 1860s, but its implications are now unavoidable under advanced technological culture. Since the 1960s it has usually been answered in two directly opposed ways: (1) by insisting on the need for the category of art to continue `out of time', so to speak, with the mass culture to which it is symbiotically linked; and therefore on the need for art to cultivate an aesthetic distance from popular cultural forms; and (2), by insisting on the need for art to be `in time', to embed its techniques and modes of attention in modern forms of technology and the visual structures of a `shared, popular culture'. In broad terms, the latter position is what is now known commonly as postmodernism and the basis of what largely passes for art theory in the academy. The dissolution of the traditional categories of art after conceptual art is relativized as a series of strategies of intervention into social and artistic institutions and forms of everyday life. This position, in fact, is now the cultural dominant of our age. It presents a vision of art as a kind of low-level or micro-social practice.
But if this position rightly demolishes the opposition between art and technological mediation enshrined in late modernist theory1 it nevertheless suffers from its own kind of blindness: the identification of technological mediation with the democratization of form. By subsuming art under technology, this kind of thinking renders the connection between form and ethics harmless or redundant. For instance, in the contemporary assumption that ephemeral, mass-produced forms in art - art as t-shirts, art as flyers, art as beer mats etc. - are able to provide an unassailable democratic solution to the would-be elitism of high forms such as painting. There is an absence in postmodernist art theory of what I would call a discourse of the critical work of art - its continuous labours of negation - from inside the social relations of technological mediation. In simply subsuming art under technology as an abstract category of machines and democratic reproduction, an understanding of technological mediation as a set of problems immanent to the identifications and resistances of modern practice is left out of the picture. This is why it needs to be made clear that the internalization of the technological mediations of modern experience has been the basis of both art's modernity and its resistance to this modernity over the last two centuries. Manet's quickly mapped flat colour and Van Gogh's rapid, ferocious handling of painterly surface - as ways to avoid the laborious process of drawing, colouring and glazing in academic practice - are no less mediations of modern technology than Duchamp's ready-mades. Postmodernists tend to positivize the social effects of technology at the expense of the technologies of form; while latter-day modernists, confronted by the vast technological landscape of contemporary practice, are continually trapped by their mourning for what they feel to be the lost modernist object. Any projective commitment to thinking art and technological mediation in terms of practices of critical reinscription is thereby dissolved.
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