Listening Publics E-Book

Kate Lacey

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 486

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

In focusing on the practices, politics and ethics of listening, this wide-ranging book offers an important new perspective on questions of media audiences, publics and citizenship. Listening is central to modern communication, politics and experience, but is commonly overlooked and underestimated in a culture fascinated by the spectacle and the politics of voice.

Listening Publics restores listening to media history and to theories of the public sphere. In so doing it opens up profound questions for our understanding of mediated experience, public participation and civic engagement.

Taking a cross-national and interdisciplinary approach, the book explores how listening publics have been constituted in relation to successive media technologies from the invention of writing to the digital age. It asks how new practices of listening associated with sound and audiovisual media transform a public world forged in the age of print.

Through detailed histories and sophisticated theoretical analysis, Listening Publics demonstrates the embodied and critical activity of listening to be a rich concept with which to rethink the practices, politics and ethics of media communication.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Dedication

Title page

Copyright page

Acknowledgements

Preface

Listening Overlooked

1 Listening In and Listening Out

Defining Terms

Listening In/As a Public

Listening in the Literature

Audiences as Listening Publics

Polyphonic Cultural History

2 The Modernization of Listening

Historiographical Questions

Writing, Reading and Listening

Revolutions in Sound

Listening in the Air

Listening with Images

Expanded Listening

Listening in the Age of Spectacle

3 Listening in Good Faith: Recording, Representation and the Real

Listening for Real

Phonography as Public Record

Learning Mediated Listening

Listening at a Distance

4 Listening Amid the Noise of Modernity

The Phonographic Imagination

Media, Noise and Silence

Sounds in Body and Mind

Mediation, Representation and History

5 Listening Live: The Politics and Experience of the Radiogenic

Radiogenic Experiments

Radiogenic Reportage

Radiogenic Experience

Totalitarian Radiogenics

Ways of Listening

6 The Privatization of the Listening Public

Overpowering Passivity

Privatized Listening in Public Space

Domesticated Listening

A Distracted Public

7 The Politics and Practices of Collective Listening

Politics on Record

Collective Radio Listening

Collective Listening and Propaganda

Listening in the Public Sphere

8 The Public Sphere as Auditorium

Listening and Political Action

The Freedom of Listening

9 Media and the Ethics of Listening

Discriminating Listening

The Ethics of Being Addressed

Listening as a Responsibility in the Public Sphere

Listening as Erfahrung

Listening Out as Civic Obligation

References

Index

For Adam, Madeleine and Lance

Copyright © Kate Lacey 2013

The right of Kate Lacey to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2013 by Polity Press

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Acknowledgements

This research has been supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and by the University of Sussex. I am also grateful to the archivists at the Bundesarchiv at Berlin-Lichterfelde (BArch) and the BBC Written Archives at Caversham (WAC) for their help and expertise, and to the European Institute for Community and Culture for permission to reprint material first published in Javnost: The Public 18(4), 5–20, in an article entitled, ‘Listening overlooked: an audit of listening as a category in the public sphere’. I am also grateful to Andrea Drugan, Lauren Mulholland, Ian Tuttle and Neil de Court at Polity for all their support and expertise in bringing this book to publication.

I should also thank all those colleagues who have listened to various parts of this work at conferences and symposia over the years, and have made comments that have helped me think through these ideas and persevere with them. In particular, the international network of radio scholars has been a wonderfully supportive and friendly forum, even when I have railed against the very idea of ‘radio studies’. I have also been enormously privileged and pleased to be invited to participate in the AHRC-funded transatlantic Early Broadcasting History Network and in the Australian Research Council-funded ‘Listening Project’ based in Sydney. The Southern Broadcasting History Group has provided endless stimulation and support closer to home, where I also have the very good fortune to work with some brilliant colleagues at the University of Sussex. These, then, are the people from those networks and beyond to whom I owe particular thanks for their advice, engagement and encouragement: Caroline Bassett, Jonathan Bignell, Michael Bull, Hugh Chignell, Andrew Crisell, Julie Doyle, Tanya Dreher, John Ellis, David Hendy, Ben Highmore, Michele Hilmes, Pat Holland, Cathy Johnson, Irmi Karl, Gholam Khiabany, Peter Lewis, Justine Lloyd, Jason Loviglio, Andy Medhurst, Jamie Medhurst, Monika Metykova, Sharif Mowlabocus, Sally Munt, Siân Nicholas, Penny O’Donnell, Kate O’Riordan, Derek Paget, John Durham Peters, Corey Ross, Polly Ruiz, Paddy Scannell, Kristin Skoog, Cate Thill, Sue Thornham, Rob Turnock and Janice Winship.

I am fortunate to be able to count many of these colleagues as friends, but there are other friends and family I ought to thank for helping me, against the odds, to try to keep the work-life balance in check: Jackie Alexander, Anita Barnard, Peter Copley, Thomas Gardner, Liz James, Sarah and Andrew Leyshon, Vicky Lloyd, Caroline and Paolo Oprandi, Angela Pater, Karen Reader, Jo Stein, Sarah Thorne, Ann Downie, Peter Lacey, Phil Wilkes, Alison Fisher, Rachel, Jacob and Lottie Lacey. More than anything, I want to acknowledge the endless love, support and sound advice from my amazing parents, Pat and Malcolm Lacey.

This book has been a long time in the writing. My wonderful partner, Lance Downie, has had to live with it taking away my attention for far too long, and I am fortunate and grateful that he has been so understanding. It might have been written sooner had our children, Madeleine and Adam, not come along in the middle of it, but I want to thank them anyway, for putting it all in perspective, but mostly for just making every day more delightful.

Preface

This book is about listening in the modern mediated public sphere. It traces how listening changes in relation to successive media forms and how the act of listening figures in modern public life. In so doing, it deals with an aspect of modern life that is ubiquitous and significant – but that has been strangely overlooked. Ever since the late nineteenth century, the recording, manipulation and transmission of sound has opened up the possibility of new industries, new prospects for the commodification of sound, new artistic practices, new cultures of listening, new subjectivities and, not least, new publics. And yet listening has been a curiously absent category in most treatments of media history and in most theorizations of the public sphere. It is a curious absence because listening is actually right at the heart of questions of communication and public life. Listening is essential to the engagement with most of our media, albeit that the act of listening which is embedded in the word ‘audience’ is rarely acknowledged. It is a no less curious absence in theories of the public sphere, where the objective of political agency is often characterized as being to find a voice – which surely implies finding a public that will listen, and that has a will to listen.

The starting point for this book is the idea that the arrival of sound media gradually ‘re-sounded’ the modern public sphere that had been ‘de-auralized’ in the age of print, and that this has had profound consequences for the conduct and experience of public life, not least in the way in which the cultures and practices of listening have come to take on a renewed public significance alongside those of reading and looking. The central argument is that thinking about listening as an activity in public life opens up profound questions for the understanding of mediated experience, public participation and civic engagement. In short, Listening Publics aims to reveal listening as a critical category that can enhance our understanding of modern media, politics and experience.

Kate Lacey, Brighton, June 2012

Listening Overlooked

1

Listening In and Listening Out

Listening has long been overlooked in studies of the media as well as in conceptualizations of the public sphere. It is a curious oversight, given the centrality of listening to communicative, experiential and public life. The aim of these first two chapters is to offer an overview of just how critical is the role of listening in mediated public life.

The curious neglect of listening in relation to media and the public sphere has a long and complex history, but is crucially bound up with a cultural hierarchy of the senses that privileges the visual over the auditory (witness the trio of visual metaphors in the paragraph above!), and a logocentric frame in which listening is encoded as passive in opposition to the acts of writing, reading and speech. This widespread association of listening with passivity has rightly been called ‘one of the worst ideas ever to infest cultural criticism’ (Peters 2006: 124), and this book will present ample historical and theoretical evidence to challenge that association. In so doing, it will also engage with the way in which the active/passive distinction is one of those critical and complex binaries that tends to be mapped all too easily onto other powerful (and often gendered) binaries, not least the public/private distinction. Indeed, it is the association of listening with passivity and with the private sphere that has surely hindered it being properly attended to either as a critical public disposition or as a political action.

Defining Terms

These central binary oppositions – active/passive, public/private – are conceptually problematic, often paradoxical, but remarkably persistent and powerful. Clearly there is little chance of arriving at a single definition of ‘public’ or ‘private’ to encompass all the contradictory uses; yet neither can the distinction simply be ignored, since it is clearly meaningful, for all its inconsistencies. They are not simply adjectives to describe the social world but rather ‘tools for arguments about and in that world’ (Gal 2002: 79). Such arguments include ideological and normative debates about the ‘proper’ separation of the spheres, with all the concomitant fears from either end of the political spectrum about the ‘colonization’ or ‘contamination’ of one sphere by the attributes and practices of the other. Though the terms persist, their meaning is neither stable nor absolute, their referential content shifting according to context and perspective. Linguistic anthropologist Susan Gal (2002) has usefully suggested that the public/private divide – and, by extension, I would argue, the active/passive distinction – should be thought of less as a simple binary opposition than as a series of fractal distinctions, a recursive division that can be projected onto different social objects and in broader or narrower contexts, with often contradictory outcomes. For example, the dictionary definition recognizes listening as active in relation to hearing, yet listening at the same time is insistently described as passive in relation to other communicative actions. Similarly, the individual reception of impersonal public speech via public media in private spaces begins to illustrate the kind of complex and contradictory ways in which the terms are invoked against the backdrop of an ever-changing media landscape. The proliferation and variety of ways in which the terms have been invoked in different times and places have to be taken seriously while at the same time not mistaken for a single overarching distinction.

Of course the ‘activity’ of audiences has long since been acknowledged in terms of how people engage with the media and the variety of ‘readings’ they bring to bear on the texts they encounter. Audiences are understood to be ‘at work’ in accessing, decoding and mobilizing mediated communication. But contemporary reception studies have been fascinated by the television viewer, the film spectator, the reader of magazines, romances and newspapers and the user of web pages. There are astonishingly few studies of contemporary audiences as listeners, except perhaps as listeners to music – despite the fact that modern audience research began with the study of listeners to radio. So, while the notion of the active audience in principle extends to the listening audience, the absence of particular accounts of active listeners has served to perpetuate the commonsense understanding of listening as a passive mode of reception. And even if listening is recognized as an audience activity, the recognition has rarely been extended to thinking about the potential forms and consequences of that activity as a political phenomenon in the public sphere.

But if this project was initially born of a frustration with the neglect of listening in relation to the media and the public sphere, during the intervening years between conception and completion, it has been nurtured by a resurgent interest in the auditory – a veritable ‘sonic turn’ in cultural studies (Drobnik 2004: 10) – that is not unconnected to the increasingly prevalent place that the auditory plays in contemporary culture, in terms of wider access to the production, manipulation and consumption of sound in all its forms. Certainly this book is not unique in arguing that an acoustic dimension be restored to the standard visualist histories of technological and social changes that have characterized the modern mediated public sphere. This book draws on and supplements some of those histories, but the focus is not on sound itself, nor sound technologies per se, but rather the way in which the new possibilities for recorded and transmitted sound shaped – and were shaped by – the idea of listening as a public act, and the consequences that had for what it means to be a member of the public. It is, then, the qualities, practices, experiences and interpretations of listening as a communicative activity in the public sphere that is the central concern.

Although the notion of the public sphere is no longer exclusively associated with the model that Habermas (1962/1991) set out, it is, nevertheless thanks to a creative translation of his term ‘Öffentlichkeit’ (literally, ‘openness’ or ‘publicness’) that the spatial metaphor of the ‘sphere’ is introduced into Anglophone discussions of politics and civil society (Peters 1993: 542–3). This accident of translation is perhaps particularly fortuitous for an analysis of listening as a public activity. Sound surrounds, and can be approached from any and every direction, whereas the visual field is fixed and has to be presented face-on. These different qualities of sound and vision are as much cultural constructs as they are descriptions of physical or physiological reality, but as such they have been enormously powerful as metaphors mobilized in competing models of subjectivity, communication and public life. The spherical character of acoustic space was particularly significant in the work of Marshall McLuhan who, since his early collaborations with the ‘communications group’ in Toronto, had contrasted it to the linearity of visual space in terms that will echo through the discussions that follow (Carpenter and McLuhan 1960; Schafer 2007: 83–4; Cavell 2010: 142–5). In Law of Media, written with his son Eric, he offered the following summary of what was at stake in the contrasting conceptualizations of space:

Visual space, created by intensifying and separating that sense from interplay with the others, is an infinite container, linear and continuous, homogenous and uniform. Acoustic space, always penetrated by tactility and other senses, is spherical, discontinuous, non-homogenous, resonant, and dynamic. Visual space is structured as static, abstract figure minus a ground; acoustic space is a flux in which figure and ground rub against and transform each other (McLuhan and McLuhan 1988: 33).

For McLuhan, visual space is an intellectual construct, a technological effect of alphabetic perception. Acoustic space, by contrast, is grounded in experience. Visual space is conceived as a unified field of perception; acoustic space as a discontinuous field of relations. Visual space breaks up into categories and groups; acoustic space is a ‘resonant sphere’ with no centre and no margins. The relativity and dynamism of space was increasingly recognized in a series of profound revolutions in art, science and technology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (examples would include Picasso’s cubism, Schoenberg’s atonality, Le Corbusier’s architecture, Einstein’s theories of relativity, and the development of quantum physics) that for McLuhan are set against the ‘ground’ of electric technology and represent a technologically determined return to the ‘common sense’ of acoustic space (McLuhan 2004: 69).

If the visual space of print culture was associated with rationality, objectivity, abstraction, linearity, individualism and nationalism, then, McLuhan argued, electronic culture reverses those attributes to favour partiality, involvement, experience, simultaneity, collectivity and globalism. From this perspective, acoustic space sits somewhere between the physical and the virtual, just as the public sits somewhere between the real and the imaginary. By extension, listening becomes the defining mode of experience under these new conditions, not only metaphorically, but also literally, by virtue of the new media technologies of recording and transmission.

It is not coincidental, as Stephen Connor (1997: 208–9) has argued, that this destabilization and reconfiguration of the soundscape coincided with reconceptualizations of the modern self as unstable, malleable and fragmented. In fact, the qualities of the auditory resonate in a variety of ways with modernist, feminist and postmodern conceptualizations of subjectivity, not least because privileging an acoustic subjectivity throws into disarray conventional distinctions between interior and exterior worlds, public and private, active and passive, even subject and object (Bhaba 1992; Salvaggio 1999; Ihde 2007). The new sound media of the phonograph, the telephone and the radio radicalized these attributes of auditory experience, for the first time in history ripping sound away from its secure and organic location in time and space, and shattering the once stable connection between sound and vision, between sound and body.

So my intention in this book is to examine the listening relation in modern public life rather than focus on what was listened to. Of course, the distinction is only an analytical one and has its limitations – the sounds people listened to will still resonate through the pages that follow – but the distinction is a necessary step in moving beyond the conventional histories of media, or sound technologies or specific media audiences in order to connect the material history of listening to the idea of listening as a public act.

The distinction has its roots in the fact that ‘to listen’ is both an intransitive and a transitive verb. In other words, it is possible to listen without necessarily listening to anything. Listening can therefore be understood as being in a state of anticipation, of listening out for something. The listening public in this sense is an always latent public, attentive but undetermined. Any intervention in the public sphere is undertaken in the hope, faith or expectation that there is a public out there, ready to listen and to engage. One of the features of public discourse that distinguishes it from other forms of collective address is precisely that it is addressed to an indeterminate set of people defined only insofar as they participate in or find themselves interpellated in the discourse that addresses them.

This ‘listening out’ is in a sense the mirror image, or perhaps the necessary corollary, of the indiscriminacy of the public address. There is a faith in the moment of address that there is a public out there, and there is a faith in the act of listening that there will be some resonance with the address. We are familiar with the idea of the reading public, an idea that suggests a potential, the sum of people with the critical skill of literacy, rather than the readers of any one particular publication. Yet the idea of the listening public that emerged with the infant sound media at the turn of the last century – and that has dominated ideas of the audience ever since – has tended to be associated with particular texts or media, with no connotations of latent critical practice. Early radio, for example, was attended by the usual mix of utopian idealism and cultural pessimism that habitually surrounds the emergence of new media. For both sides it rapidly came to stand as the paradigmatic mass medium. With its rapid adoption by whole populations, the simultaneity of its centralized and monologic address to a vast atomized and domesticated audience together with its ‘immediate’ sensory appeal, it seemed to offer either the possibility of a newly inclusive democratic forum fit for the modern age, or a pernicious threat to a participatory democracy and an effective public sphere. When ‘screen radio’, as television was once called, arrived, it only intensified the debates. This is familiar territory. What is rarely considered, however, is the role that listening played in this history and in these debates. For some, the return to the spoken word breathed new life into public communication and opened it up to all, reinvigorating public participation. For others, the identification of the public as an audience of listeners as opposed to readers was the quintessential proof of the passification of the public, rendered mute and helpless in its position as listener in a culture that celebrates and privileges the freedom of expression. The relegation of listening (standing in for media consumption as a whole) as a public activity remains clearly evident in contemporary celebrations of ‘interactivity’ and ‘produsing’ and so on, where the ‘progress’ is more often identified in the proliferation of voices and opportunities for expression than in the proliferation or quality of opportunities to listen.

In other words, most treatments of listening within media and cultural studies tend to privilege the action of listening in to something, to use the telling phrase adopted in the early years of radio. ‘Listening’ in such formulations tends to be relatively unproblematized, presented simply as the natural receptive mode of consuming media messages in sound. Even when listening is taken to be a sense formation, the apperception of sound tends to be examined at the level of intimate, individual experience. Despite the growth in ‘sound studies’, academic treatments of listening rarely attend to the connections between the act of ‘listening in’ to specific media texts, the sensory experience of listening and a political philosophy of listening. This book challenges such a restricted understanding of the listening public by identifying listening as a category that bridges both the realm of sensory, embodied experience and the political realm of debate and deliberation. Moreover, it will make the case that, unlike a reading public constituted of individuals in isolation, a listening public is made up of listeners inhabiting a condition of plurality and intersubjectivity. Its ambition is to think these different aspects of listening together, to address the public aspect of listening, an aspect which has at least as much to do with listening out, as listening in – listening as a form of radical openness, literally, Öffentlichkeit – the German term commonly translated as ‘the public sphere’.

Listening In/As a Public

The analytical separation of ‘listening out’ (an attentive and anticipatory communicative disposition) from ‘listening in’ (a receptive and mediatized communicative action) opens up a space to consider listening as an activity with political resonance. Indeed, it becomes possible to think of listening as a political action in its own right. Where political theory has concentrated on the rights and responsibilities of speech and expression, the intention here is to examine the rights and responsibilities of those listening in the act of listening (that is to say, the object of enquiry is not on the activities that follow on as a consequence of having listened, for example the production of more speech or other forms of political action). This apparently simple switch of focus opens up surprisingly far-reaching speculations about the guarantee of plurality in modern political society (the role of ‘auditing’ political discourse), and proposes listening as a powerful conceptual corrective to nostalgic political models based on idealized notions of the face-to-face dialogic encounter.

This image of the ‘face-to-face’ indicates how our dominant communicative models tend to be conceptualized in terms of a visual logic and a dyadic exchange, rather than in terms of an embodied and pluralistic encounter. It is a construct that implicitly privileges interpersonal, private conversation over impersonal, public communication. ‘Face-to-face’ also implies a ‘live’ and ‘immediate’ exchange, but in the age of electronic mediation, liveness, of course, can also happen at a distance – a radical sensory reorganization of communicative experience that was first registered as a listening experience via the sound media of the telegraph, the telephone and the radio. If ‘face-to-face’ is coupled with ‘live’ as some sort of ideal of communicative exchange, then the communications media are always to be found wanting.

This is just one example of how beginning from a perspective that takes listening seriously can usefully recast some of the most fundamental tenets of communication theory. This has nowhere more profound consequences than in balancing the normative ideal of free speech with a normative freedom of listening that encompasses both a responsibility and a right to listen. In chapter 8, the concept of ‘freedom of listening’ will be proposed as a necessary corollary to the ‘freedom of speech’, and that listeners be understood not just as an ‘audience’ for public discourse, but as ‘auditors’ of public exchanges, performances and plurality. Where the freedom of speech is a right ascribed to the individual, I will argue there is a ‘freedom of listening’ that, by contrast, inheres in the space between individuals, and is concerned precisely with guaranteeing the context within which freedom of expression can operate not as speech, but as communication.

However, it is sensible to point out in these introductory remarks that while the central argument of Listening Publics is for listening to be considered as an activity in the public sphere, it will be taken as read that this listening is necessarily just one activity among others. Listening is neither autonomous nor primary either as a sensory or a communicative activity. The neglect of listening as a public action has, however, been so pervasive and so profound, that the case has to be put as strongly as possible, even if doing so runs the danger of appearing to make overblown claims for listening as the principal or most profound dimension of communicative activity in the public sphere. True, the acknowledgement of listening as public action can open up new ways of thinking about old questions, and is a necessary corrective, but it would be absurd to claim listening as a self-sufficient activity, let alone a sufficient political activity. On the other hand, the starting point of this book is that to have ignored listening as an activity in the public sphere for so long is equally absurd.

Listening in the Literature

Counter to this general trend of neglect, there are two aspects of the cultural work of listening that have been the subject of much attention, although they will play only a tangential role in this book. The first is the ‘skill’ of listening in therapeutic, interpersonal or pedagogic situations; the second is the ‘art’ of listening to music and other sonic forms. The former tends to concentrate on the psychology of the individual listener, and is rarely applied to public or mediated situations. For example, the International Listening Association was founded in 1979 to ‘identify, and institutionalize “listening” as a legitimate area of scholarly enquiry’ (Wolvin et al. 1999: 111). It subsequently launched a journal that in 1995 became The International Journal of Listening, where the focus is, with a few notable exceptions, very much on interpersonal communication from the perspective of cognitive psychology and is very often concerned with a kind of ‘strategic’ listening in business, education and the professions (Gehrke 2009: 2; Beard 2009: 15; Wolvin 2010). Where media are considered within this framework, it tends to be the interpersonal forms like telephony. Another related body of work considers the skill of listening as a research method in interview-based disciplines like journalism, anthropology and sociology (Wiley 1998; Merritt and McCombs 2004: 105; O’Donnell 2009; Erlmann 2004; Angel-Ajani 2006; Burghart 2008; Forsey 2010; Back 2007, 2009).

Meanwhile, the specialist musicological discourses on listening tend to treat music (and sonic arts generally) as an aesthetic more than a sociological or political phenomenon, and so these, too, lie broadly beyond the remit of this book.1 Yet the importance of music in the development and expansion of the listening public, and indeed the political role of music more broadly, cannot be denied. It is clear that the rapid and ubiquitous adoption of sound technologies in modern public life have been significantly driven by the desire for more music to be more accessible to more people in more and more different situations. Certainly music has brought people together in ‘listening publics’, and of course music can have its own political force, directly or indirectly. Moreover, musical and other aesthetic and cultural experiences are inescapably social, of course, however much they seem also to be individual, affective experiences (Bourdieu 1986). To this extent, music will feature in the story, albeit rather sotto voce, if only for the pragmatic reason of keeping the project within manageable limits, and in recognizing that listening to music in modern public life has already been the subject of many studies, from histories of recording technologies to genealogies of musical genres, from stories of fans and analyses of youth cultures to textual analyses of protest songs and biographies of musicians with a political edge. Still, in many considerations of music in public life, the idea of the listening public tends to be conflated with the notion of particular taste publics and identity politics, and the wider public dimension folds in again around the individual and around listening as a practice of individual consumption.

‘Sound’ and the excavation of ‘soundscapes’ tend to fare better than ‘listening’ per se. In 2005, Michele Hilmes commented sardonically that sound studies have been ‘hailed as an “emerging field” for the last hundred years’ and that it might well remain that way, ‘always emerging, never emerged’ (Hilmes 2005: 249), although the growing number of degree courses, research centres and anthologies in the field suggest that it is becoming more established (Bull and Back 2003; Morat 2011; Pinch and Bjisterveld 2011; Sterne 2012). Whatever its status, it has certainly been a dynamic one in recent years, albeit widely distributed across different disciplines that do not always speak (or listen) to each other, and where the production of sound tends to receive more critical attention than its reception. Much of the most important work in historical sound studies has concentrated on attempts to reconstruct historical soundscapes, for example the contested sounds of Shakespearean or Victorian England, nineteenth-century rural France, colonial America or the American Civil War (Corbin 1998; Smith 1999, 2001; Picker 2003; Cullen Rath 2003). Not coincidentally perhaps, most studies of this sort seem to deal with periods that pre-date the era of recordable sound, almost as if we could turn to a more direct ‘record’ of more recent soundscapes. The ambition of this book is not to reconstruct the modern media soundscape (which would be to try to recreate a sense of what was heard in particular times and places), but to try to think through how innovations in media technologies might have impacted on ways of listening in a reconfigured soundscape in which sounds were no longer in the same way bound to a specific time and place and to ask the question what impact that might have had on public life and listening as a political activity.

Finally, there are plenty of media histories on which this study draws. This book does not claim to offer sustained chronological or institutional histories of the media, for its historical span is too broad and its conceptual ambition lies elsewhere. The notion of the ‘listening public’ does not arise in relation to a single medium or at any single identifiable historical moment, but is, rather, a latent term that appears in different guises in various contexts throughout the modern media age. Instead, the focus is on moments of transition, be they moments of technological development or political change, inasmuch as they present ‘privileged moments of genuine uncertainty and improvisation’ (Boddy 2004: 3), that can potentially destabilize preconceived notions of the public consequences of now familiar political and media ecologies. In the spirit of Miriam Hansen’s (1991) work on early cinema publics, the book begins with the contention that, in periods of transition with successive sound media, we might well expect to find the activity of listening as an explicitly contested terrain in the public sphere, which in turn raises the possibility of identifying alternative listening publics that lie behind the dominant historical narrative of a passified audience.

It is predominantly in these periods of innovation and instability that the debates, discourses and decisions that helped to shape the social application of these various technologies are at their most prolific and urgent. The phonograph and the radio will be taken as the archetypal technologies of this new era of sound, representing the key attributes of all subsequent sound media, recording and transmission. For that reason, the weight of the historical evidence presented in this book lies between the 1870s and the 1930s when there was a veritable ‘aural awakening’ (Biocca 1990) by virtue of there being more sound, (certainly more music), and also a greater variety of sounds being produced by the sound factories of recording studios and radio stations. The simple possibility of playback, of repeating, of listening again and again to the self-same sounds, be that for study or amusement, was nothing short of revolutionary. Sound for the first time could be captured, repeated, slowed down, speeded up, reversed, and could be transmitted to far-flung times and places – all literally unheard of possibilities just a few years before. The modern ear, then, was faced with a richer sonic environment to decipher than ever before, new businesses grew up as veritable ‘empires of sound’ (Millard 1995), and listening to mediated sound became established as a public phenomenon. Moreover, this period also saw the extension of the vote to women and the working class, the upheavals of war and economic depression, and the sharpening ideological divide between right and left. For all these various reasons, the debates about the proper role of the emergent media in a democratic culture were particularly urgent, and the foundations that were laid when these media were in their infancy resonated throughout the twentieth century and into our contemporary digital media culture.

Given the extensive public attention to the new horizons opened up by the auditory technologies of telegraphy, telephony, phonography and radio, there is a surprisingly impoverished vocabulary for writing about mediated listening. There are no easy auditory equivalents to the visual concepts of the ‘gaze’ or the ‘glance’, ‘surveillance’, ‘voyeurism’ or ‘spectatorship’. Despite increasing scholarly attention to the sound of cinema and of television, this somehow has not widely translated into attending to the question of ‘listenership’. The very word rings oddly – in fact the OED offers it only as a noun to describe ‘the estimated number of listeners to a broadcast programme or to radio (specifically as opposed to television)’ [my italics], whereas the common definition of ‘spectatorship’ is ‘the state of being a spectator or beholder’. In short, ‘listenership’ is the quantitative product of a media event, while ‘spectatorship’ is an existential condition. One of the themes of this book is that the modern technologies of mediation have, in fact, contributed to the production of ‘listenership’ not only as a collective noun, but as a state of being and a civic disposition.

And yet studies of both media and politics are shot through with auditory terminology though on the whole we remain deaf to the implications of such language. Within political discourse, analyses of political relations are often framed in terms of ‘harmony’ or ‘discord’, where judgements can be ‘sound’, and ideas can ‘resonate’, where people can act in ‘concert’ or produce a ‘cacophony’, and where ‘having a voice’ is central to all kinds of politics. And of course, democratic theory places great weight on ‘the freedom of speech’, without quite recognizing that speech is sounded out, and therefore demands a listener. The most significant example of this auditory terminology is obviously the word ‘audience’, which etymologically clearly privileges the listening relation in the process of communication, and yet has all but lost that particular association. There is potentially much at stake in recovering an understanding of that listening dimension if only because modern citizens habitually spend a significant proportion of their lives as members of audiences in one form or another. For all the attention to ‘the spectacle’ in modern culture, there are in fact few spectacles that unfold in utter silence. But the shift to an acoustic rather than a visual register in understanding the mediated world also, I will argue, offers productive ways of thinking about even purely visual culture inasmuch as it shifts our attention from the subjectivity of the individual to the intersubjectivity of the public, plural world.

Audiences as Listening Publics

‘Audience’, according to the OED, refers to the action, state, condition or occasion of hearing, or ‘an assembly of listeners’. The modern idea of an audience certainly retains that notion of a collectivity. An ‘audience of one’ is a phrase that draws attention to the rarity of being a singular member of an audience. ‘Audience’ is a collective noun for the activity of listening that has been assimilated for other activities, precisely because no parallel nouns existed that gave the same sense of collectivity. ‘Readership’, for example, still conjures up a vision of individual readers; ‘spectatorship’ remains primarily an abstraction associated with individual viewers, not the cinema public. And yet the inescapable collectivity suggested by the word ‘audience’ resides in its relation to sound and listening (Ong 1982: 74).

This sense of ‘the audience’, in the singular, this image of a unity created out of the diversity of a group of individuals, lies at the heart of much of the mistrust of ‘mass’ media, since the ‘mystery of the collective noun’ conjures up the idea of a singular body with ‘a collective consciousness that is analogous to a unified individual subject’, despite all evidence and experience to the contrary. Addressing this problem in relation to theatrical audiences, Alice Rayner (1993: 3–6) has argued that since ‘the audience’ is made up of diverse individuals and since the constitution of the audience changes over time (rather like the pronoun ‘we’), it makes less sense to talk about the ontology of the audience than to talk about it in terms of ‘the listening function that would constitute the action of audience’. Thought of in these terms, the audience ‘is an instance of intersubjective relations with specific reference to the act of listening’, and since listening involves a fundamental openness towards others,2 listening and the action of audience is an act that is both political and ‘fundamentally ethical’.

It is this sense of openness in relation to others in the act of listening that connects with definitions of the public, although ‘public’ is another of those apparently ordinary but extraordinarily complex words that defy easy definition. Already in these first few pages, it has appeared as a noun in the singular and in the plural, as an adjective that either stands alone or is conjoined with other nouns, like ‘sphere’ or ‘life’. And always tagging along is its equally difficult other half: ‘private’ (Weintraub and Kumar 1997). It would be impossible to give a definitive, or even concise definition, of ‘public’ – even the OED struggles, acknowledging as an opening gambit that, ‘the various senses pass into each other by many intermediate shades of meaning’. But for all its nuances, as an adjective it means something to do with being open so that all may see or hear; and as a noun, something that describes a community, nation or people as a whole. Yet ‘the public’ is not coterminous with these other collective nouns. Michael Warner (2002: 50) points to the essential circularity in the idea of ‘a public’, which is, at least in principle, simply ‘a space of discourse organized by nothing other than discourse itself’, a self-creating and self-organizing space that ‘exists by virtue of being addressed’. However, despite acknowledging that a public is constituted by being addressed, in the very next sentence Warner supposes the only way of being actively involved in a public is in ‘speaking, writing and thinking’. In short, there is no active part to play in being addressed: ‘merely paying attention is enough to make you a member’ (Warner 2002: 62).

This innocuous phrase ‘merely paying attention’ is worth unpacking, for the ‘merely’ suggests that paying attention comes easily. And yet ‘to pay attention’ would suggest precisely an intentional effort to engage with the ‘speaking, writing and thinking’ of others, presumably by listening, reading and more thinking. Since it is hard to conceive of literacy as something that is not a skill, or of reading or thinking without intent, the ‘merely paying attention’ seems to be a reference to listening (looking would also fit here, but ‘appearing’ is not granted the status of a public activity in Warner’s trio of possibilities). So here, albeit implicitly, is an acknowledgement of the critical role of listening in becoming a member of a public – critical, that is, both in the sense of crucial, and in the sense of a rational disposition.

The media are doubly implicated in the modern constitution of things public: first, by virtue of their role in publicizing events, ideas and performances; and second, by virtue of their role in enabling the constitution of the public – or rather, publics – as an imagined community with an intersubjective horizon. The media also have various public functions according to liberal political theory: to hold the state to public account, to act as a forum for public information, debate and civic participation, and to channel the voice of the people as public opinion. There is, of course, a vast scholarly literature that engages with the term in very precise ways in a variety of political and sociological traditions,3 and some of those debates will reveal themselves in the chapters that follow, but the term is left deliberately open here, in order to explore the variety of ways in which listening plays out as a public activity. The idea of a singular, overarching public is a rhetorical fiction, albeit perhaps a necessary or inevitable one, and there are instances where the idea of a single ‘listening public’ maps on to such a fiction; but on the whole, the theoretical, historical and empirical evidence suggests the presence of multiple publics with distinct characteristics, functions and political capital, overlapping and interrelating in potentially significant ways. By focusing on an activity like listening that is central to so much public engagement and yet has been almost entirely ignored as a critical category in considerations of the public sphere, it is possible not only to delineate some specific incarnations of the public which have escaped attention, but also to indicate some of the ways in which those overlaps and interrelationships have played out.

Certainly there is a tendency and a temptation to set up publics and audiences as opposites, the one made up of (potentially) active citizens, the other made up of more or less passive consumers. The term ‘public’ commonly has a strong normative dimension, whereas ‘audience’ is more commonly a descriptive term. This dichotomy has a long history and is evidently ideological, especially in the way in which audiences – as opposed to publics – are ascribed feminine, emotional and racialized characteristics, and are thereby frequently denigrated. Richard Butsch has explored the ways in which ‘the audience’ has been produced in discourse, by both participants and observers, highlighting how those produced by cultural authorities about the audience are more powerful – and accessible to the historian – than those produced by members of the audience. Moreover, those dominant discourses have tended to characterize the audience as a problem, as something to be tamed, regulated or exploited for commercial gain. Audiences in this sense share a conceptual lineage with ‘the crowd’ and ‘the mass’, the one made up of people sharing the same physical space, the other made up of people dispersed and isolated by virtue of media technologies. Both provoke fears that the individual – together with their individuality, their reason and their independence – is lost and vulnerable under such conditions. The dispersed media audience remains broadly invisible – and inaudible – a fact which has rendered it phantasmatic, at turns less alarming than the sight of an unruly mob and yet in some ways more disturbing for its unknowability.

And yet there is much that ‘public’ and ‘audience’ have in common – not least the very people who are being categorized. Both are made up of ‘members’ drawn from the general population, taking up ‘a situated role that people temporarily perform’ (Butsch 2008: 3). People in either role constitute a collectivity that is reflexively aware of other members of that grouping, engage in discussion and reflection and shape and share in (national) events. Indeed, efforts to increase civic participation in public affairs often turn to mediated forums to generate interest and discussion, apparently harnessing the vivacity of the audience to resuscitate the ailing public. But even these more positive treatments of the audience have tended to posit membership of an audience as just a staging post in becoming an informed citizen, a necessary, but separate, step towards participating actively in the public sphere. In such formulations, participation in an audience acts as a preparatory stage for the constitution of a public, albeit that not all audience activity is connected to the political in this way (Livingstone 2005). This raises questions about the experiential dimensions of citizenship and the practices that link private identity and experience to the public sphere (Couldry et al. 2007a: 28). Citizenship in this sense is understood not simply as a right or an attribute, but in the republican or radical democratic sense of a habitual practice, ‘motivated by circumstance and obligation, cultivated through education and experience, consistently performed’ (Barney 2007: 39; see also Eley 2002: 230). Listening is a particularly interesting category in relation to these debates about the connections between audiences and publics precisely because it bridges the conventionally political realm of debate and deliberation and the realm of sensory, embodied experience.

‘Listening’ is distinct from ‘hearing’, but not separate. Although it can be useful analytically to distinguish between listening and hearing, the distinction is not a straightforward one, nor should it be mapped simply onto the problematic binaries of mind and body, culture and nature, cognition and perception. One definition of listening is the active direction of the sense of hearing. Lisbeth Lipari (2010: 349) summarizes the significance of this distinction as follows: ‘Etymologically listening comes from a root that emphasizes attention and giving to another, while hearing comes from a root that emphasizes perception and sensation of sound.’ But ‘listen’, like ‘lust’, also shares a common root in the Old English ‘list’ – to like, desire or lust to do something. It is a concept that combines agency and desire.4 So listening is both a public activity and a private experience, and it can be both these things at the same time. This is significant in considering the role of listening in a world of mediation, where the media have served to challenge and redraw once familiar distinctions between public and private. The reintroduction of the spoken word into the ‘impersonal’ address of public discourse, for example, brought with it a sense of presence and ‘the present’ associated with listening to the human voice that was absent from the disembodied written word. Politics in the broadest sense does not play out only in institutions and officially sanctioned spaces, but also in the production and reproduction of immediate, everyday life; or rather, it plays out precisely in the articulation between formal political space and everyday experience, an articulation that is grounded in a sense-making process. Just as there is a double articulation (Silverstone 1994) to media in their textual and material aspects (technological and environmental), so mediated listening restores a double articulation to the reception of public speech as information and affect.

Habermas’ account of the emergence of the public sphere notably rests on a similar formulation in identifying an ‘audience-oriented subjectivity’ (1962/1991: 49) rooted in the intimate familial sphere as a prerequisite for the circulation of rational critical discourse on political practice. Habermas here acknowledges the way in which print culture – literary as much as political – was meaningful to specific readers at the same time as it was meaningful to unspecified others, a mode of address described as ‘a ground condition of intelligibility for public language’ (Warner 1992: 378). The reference to the audience orientation of the subject is telling here, because it recognizes a moment in the development of a public sensibility in which reading takes on (or returns to) the status of collective listening. These ideas will be developed further in later chapters, but for the moment it is enough to recognize that in properly understanding ‘the audience’ as a ‘listening public’, new light is cast on the conventional – and problematic – delineations between ‘audiences’ and ‘publics’.

Polyphonic Cultural History

Listening Publics is not, however, intended as an abstract treatise on listening or publics, though it does draw on and connect with phenomenological and other philosophies of listening and theories of the public sphere. Rather it is intended as a contribution to a cultural and material history of listening in modernity, which is to say it takes listening to be a cultural practice that changes under changing historical and material conditions. Given the immense technological transformations in communicative practice since the late nineteenth century, it seems apposite to consider how listening has been configured in relation to changing techniques and technologies of mediated sound – while recognizing that listening is not necessarily or straightforwardly determined by those technologies. That relation is a dialectical one, where the techniques and technologies of mediated sound are transformed in their turn in relation to the figure of the listener (and in relation to a host of other cultural, social, political, technical and economic factors). As James Lastra (2000: 4) put it in his history of cinema sound:

Vision was neither the only sense to be transformed nor the only one to act as an agent of transformation. Hearing was just as surely dislocated, ‘mobilized,’ restructured, and mechanized. The ‘annihilations’ of space and time affected hearing as much as seeing, and acoustic experience was as thoroughly commodified as its optical counterpart.

This book draws on disparate sources to provide both new historical narratives of the modernization of listening as well as making an argument for the centrality of listening as a category in public life across the long twentieth century. The broad historical sweep – from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first – is a self-conscious bid to counter the ‘rhetoric of amnesia’ around new media, to reveal those patterns or meanings that only emerge over very long periods of time and that might exceed the lifespan or specific national version of any particular media form. It also takes an interdisciplinary and cross-national approach to the problematic of historicizing the act of listening by presenting some of the cultural and political responses in Europe and America to the possibilities thrown up by technological innovations in the mediation of sound. Along the way it offers a mix of medium theory, institutional histories, textual analysis and political philosophy. Examples will be drawn primarily from the US, UK and Germany, in an attempt to draw connections and contrasts between the various nationally inflected histories, although this is not intended as a fully fledged comparative history as such. These three countries have much in common as Western states negotiating the processes of modernization, and there was much direct and indirect communication between them in relation to media trade and policy (Hilmes 2012). But there were also significant differences politically, economically and culturally. Relatively few media histories, particularly perhaps those concerned with broadcasting, go beyond the national context, but a cross-national perspective offers the chance of building on that literature to examine listening strategies within contrasting media systems, be they democratic or authoritarian, elitist or populist, public service or commercial.5

The book begins with a broad, though naturally not exhaustive, overview of the ‘modernization’ of listening in relation to a succession of media technologies, from the written word to current social media trends. The three following chapters explore aspects from this history in more detail, looking in turn at how ideas of realism, noise and liveness figure in the construction of listening publics in the age of spectacle. The focus then shifts to the practices and experiences of listeners encountering mediated sound in private and public spaces. The final section turns to the implications of these new cultures of listening for more abstract and philosophical questions about the politics and ethics of listening in a mediated world, to argue that critical attention to the roles and responsibilities of listening holds up a sounding board to the ethics of media production and policy.

Although media from papyrus to the iPod will appear in these pages, it is the phonograph and the radio which take centre stage, standing in for the paradigmatic innovations of recordability and transmission of sound that have transfigured the entire media landscape. But this is not a medium-specific study. Carolyn Marvin (1988: 4–6) long since cautioned against the biases of ‘artefactual histories’ that tend to assume audiences are produced and their actions determined by the technological properties of artificially separated media. In tracing the history of any technology, the tributary sources can be almost infinitely extended, although often enough we tell ourselves only partial histories, inflected with the prejudices of hindsight. On the other hand, contemporary media questions can alert us to blindspots in previous iterations of media histories. Today’s vocabulary of intermediality, multimedia, immersion and convergence, for example, helps us more clearly to see how distinctions between the various media are historically contingent (Altman 2004: 15; Elsaesser 2006; Wurtzler 2007: 11).

Listening as a political activity is not contained by mediated sound, let alone by any single medium, however defined. For that reason, too, listening cannot be considered only in relation to non-visual media. The questions about mediated listening as a public phenomenon that arise in relation to these particular instances of recorded and broadcast sound are also relevant to the plethora of audiovisual media, analogue and digital, mainstream and alternative, global and local that characterize contemporary culture and everyday life. As will be argued in the next chapter, the first media technology to have ‘modernized’ listening was the written word; indeed, to the extent that listening is the most fundamental mode of communicative reception, understanding and reflexivity, it makes just as much sense to talk about listening to print as it does to speak of ‘reading’ a film.6 Given the qualities of plurality, intersubjectivity and liveness associated with the listening position, this is more than idle wordplay, as it potentially opens up new ways of thinking about the reception of mediated texts in general.

To the extent that different media do allow for different experiences and affordances, there is also a sense in which the media together have increasingly come to ‘define a space that is increasingly mutually referential and reinforcive, and increasingly integrated into the fabric of everyday life’ and have correspondingly become ‘resources for thought, judgement and action, both personal and political’ (Silverstone 2006: 5). Roger Silverstone coined the term ‘mediapolis’ to describe this space, suggesting that, while the public sphere is made up of more than just the media, to all intents and purposes the media have arguably come to constitute the very idea of ‘publicness’ in the modern world, and they have come to provide a material grounding and context for our sense of commonality, our common sense. This book argues that the act of listening needs to be attended to as one of the central ways of making sense of this mediated space, and not just in relation to specific audio media. The role of listening in public life has changed and become more pronounced with the advent of mediated sound, while the constitution of the listening public under these new mediated conditions has in turn expanded the dimensions and experience of public life.

Despite these explanations, the attempt to engage with listening publics across media, across such a long period of time and across national boundaries is perhaps foolhardy, and certainly some readers might find the rapid switching between fragments from different contexts disconcerting, compared to more conventional media histories. But this way of working has emerged somewhere between a pragmatic response to the lack of sustained engagement with mediated listening and a principled attempt to work within a ‘polyphonic paradigm’ (Curtis 1978). This involves a multidimensional, analogical approach to cultural enquiry, an ‘acoustic’ approach that looks for plausible relationships alongside the provable, cause-and-effect relations privileged in logical and visual paradigms. It is the product of collecting fleeting or implicit references to listening in a wide variety of public and academic discourses, drawing together a range of sometimes competing historical voices, piecing together various historical fragments in an attempt to create a fresh analysis. It draws on some original archival sources (though listening is not a well catalogued subject!) and reports in contemporary newspapers, magazines and journals, as well as synthesizing references from an eclectic range of literatures to demonstrate the embeddedness of listening cultures in the public sphere and experience.

In fact, it is worth qualifying the assertion that mediated listening in the public sphere has been ignored. It would be more accurate to say it has not received much sustained attention. There is actually no shortage of commentary on listening during the period under review. At one level, this is obvious. It could hardly be the case that such an important aspect of experiential and informational life could have been entirely overlooked in either popular, specialist or technological discourse. Indeed, references to the modernization of listening and the development of the listening public do appear in media histories, but generally in a fragmentary, accidental or oblique way. Meanwhile studies on sound media specifically tend to focus more on the production and textuality of sound and its individuated reception, rather than its public dimensions. There are many aspects of the narrative that follow that deserve greater amplification or that magnify particular moments from more complex stories, but the variety of material presented is required in order to attend to the connections between the sensory experience of listening, the philosophy of listening, and the act of listening in; and to restore the question of listening in public and as a public to a range of media histories.

By exploring the negotiation of listening practices in relation to these moments of media transition, Listening Publics hopes to offer an historical perspective from which to reconsider contemporary media technologies and public soundscapes, but also to make an argument for considering listening as a critical activity in public life.

Notes

1 There are, of course, exceptions, perhaps the best known – and controversial – in the field of media and cultural studies being Adorno’s (1938/1991, 1941, 2009) pessimistic analyses of the ‘regression of listening’ produced by the recording and radio industries. For an interesting discussion of listening, music and mediation, see Born (2010) alongside other articles in a special issue on listening of the Journal of the Royal Musical Association.

2