MPhil Criticism and Culture _______________ EARWORKS: AUDITORY CULTURE AND CRITICISM Seminar Series Lent Term, 2013

Prof. Steven Connor Course Structure: 6 x 1.5 hr seminars running in weeks 2-7 of Lent Term. Reading: Each seminar will use one or two short extracts (to be supplied in advance) from the texts marked with an asterisk to focus discussion, but students should also read more widely in the topic under considerations through the suggested texts. Essays: Students are asked to generate their own essay subjects, arising from, responding to, or extending the ideas and arguments of the course. Overview For decades, perhaps even centuries, the study of sound has been pursued in separate intellectual areas, that have made contact with each other only intermittently or by accident music, acoustics, phonological linguistics, orality studies. Only with the development of Sound Studies over the last three decades has there been an effort to pay attention in a more consolidated way to the phenomena of sound and voice. Sound Studies now cuts across and draws together work in anthropology, music, art, literature, history, philosophy, neuroscience, linguistics and animal ethology and linguistics and psychology. This course of seminars aims to consider the most important areas of development and debate in the study of sound. Week 1. Acousmania: Idealising the Ear The first phase of sound studies was characterised by an intensely idealising or even utopian attitude towards sound and listening, which were read as a kind of redemption from the dominative regime of the eye. In the work of Walter Ong, this romanticism is made explicitly religious. Works like Seth Kim Cohens In the Blink of an Ear propose a cooler and more sceptical view of the capacities of the ear. *Seth Kim-Cohen, In the Blink of an Ear: Towards a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art (New York and London: Continuum, 2009) *Don Ihde, Listening and Voice: A Phenomenology of Sound (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1976) R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester VT: Destiny Books, 1994) Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007) Walter J. Ong, The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1967)

2 Week 2. Voice and Hearing in Psychoanalysis Oddly, given the importance of utterance and audition in its therapeutic practice, psychoanalysis has been focussed much more intently on the structures of desire and control associated with the eye than on the operations of the voice and the ear. Even Jacques Lacans inclusion of the voice among the part-objects did little to unsettle the ocularcentrism of psychoanalysis. This seminar will consider some of the ways in which sound makes an appearance in earlier psychoanalytic writing, such as the Freudian Ernest Jones, or the Kleinian Dider Anzieu, alongside the more systematic thinking about the voice in particular developed by Lacanian writers. *Didier Anzieu, The Sound Image of the Self, International Review of Psycho-Analysis, 6 (1979): 23-36 *Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press) Oscar Isakower, On the Exceptional Position of the Auditory Sphere, International Journal of PsychoAnalysis, 20 (1939): 340-348 Ernest Jones, The Madonnas Conception Through the Ear, in Essays in Applied Psychoanalysis, 2 Vols (London: Hogarth, 1951), Vol, 2, pp. 266-357. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan X; Anxiety, trans. Cormac Gallagher (London: Karnac Books, 2002), online at http://www.lacaninireland.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/THESEMINAR-OF-JACQUES-LACAN-X.pdf Alice Lagaay, Between Sound and Silence: Voice in the History of Psychoanalysis, e-pisteme, 1 (2008): 53-62: online at http://research.ncl.ac.uk/e-pisteme/ Guy Rosolato, La voix: entre corps et language, Revue franaise de psychanalyse. 38 (1974): 75-94

Week 3. Noise and Music This seminar considers an issue that is frequently referred to in sound studies, namely the difference between sound and noise. The changing relations between noise and music have been intensely generative in postwar music from John Cage onwards, and the problem of accounting for noise connects the study of sound to information theory and cybernetics, most particularly in the work of Michel Serres, who has meditated on this topic in work over almost four decades. *Jacques Attali, Noise: An Essay on the Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985) *Michael Serres, Genesis, trans. Genevive James and James Nielson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995) -------------------, Boxes, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies, trans. Margaret Sankey and Peter Cowley (London: Continuum, 2008), pp. 85-150 Paul Hegarty, Noise/Music: A History (London and New York: Continuum, 2007)

3 4. Playback: Sound in History For centuries, sound phenomena were distinguished from visual phenomena in their ephemerality, such that sound could be made to stand for time itself, with vision being identified with the order of space. This economy has been transformed utterly by the development of sound recording media at the end of the nineteenth century. From the very beginning of recording, efforts have been made to try to cross in imagination and through reconstruction the gulf separating the era of sounds persistence from earlier eras. This seminar will focus in particular on the new importance of sound in the work of literary and cultural historians, and the efforts they have made to hear the vanished sounds of the past. *Florence McLandburgh, The Automaton Ear, The Automaton Ear and Other Sketches (Chicago: Jansen, McClurg and Co., 1876), pp. 7-43. Online at http://www.stevenconnor.com/dumbstruck/archive/autoear.htm *Mark M. Smith, ed. Hearing History: A Reader (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004) Alain Corbin, Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the Nineteenth-Century French Countryside, trans. Martin Thom (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998) John M. Picker, Victorian Soundscapes (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003) Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999)

Week 5. Sound in Film Synchronised sound was initially thought of as an ornamental extra, or even a damaging and distorting excrescence, to film. As such, the nature and function of sound remained for many years a neglected topic in film criticism. Recent studies have emphasised the complex ways in which sound not only contributes to cinema, but perhaps fundamentally changed it as a medium. *Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, trans. Claudia Gorbman (Columbia University Press, 1994) Jay Beck and Tony Grajeda, eds., Lowering the Boom: Critical Studies in Film Sound (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008) Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, trans. Claudia Gorbman (Columbia University Press, 1999) Elisabeth Weis and John Belton, eds., Film Sound: Theory and Practice (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985)

Week 6. Sound in Art Sound art is one of the most rapidly-developing areas of art practice and theory, and has developed in parallel with critical theories of sound. This seminar will consider examples of sound art in the context of some of the most influential claims made on its behalf. *Caleb Kelly, ed., Sound (London: Whitechapel Gallery; Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press Documents of Contemporary Art, 2011) Brandon LaBelle, Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art (London and New York: Continuum, 2006) Alan Licht, Sound Art: Beyond Music, Between Categories (New York: Rizzoli, 2007) Douglas Kahn, Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999)