Full Description
Thresholds of Listening addresses recent and historical changes in the ways listening has been conceived. Listening, having been emancipated from the passive, subjected position of reception, has come to be asserted as an active force in culture and in collective and individual politics.
The contributors to this volume show that the exteriorization of listening— brought into relief by recent historical studies of technologies of listening—involves a re-negotiation of the theoretical and pragmatic distinctions that underpin the notion of listening. Focusing on the manifold borderlines between listening and its erstwhile others, such as speaking, reading, touching, seeing, or hearing, the book maps new frontiers in the history of aurality. They suggest that listening's finitude— defined in some of the essays as its death or deadliness—should be considered as a heuristic instrument rather than as a mere descriptor.
Listening emerges where it appears to end or to run up against thresholds and limits—or when it takes unexpected turns. Listening's recent emergence on the cultural and theoretical scene may therefore be productively read against contemporary recurrences of the motifs of elusiveness, finitude, and resistance to open up new politics, discourses, and technologies of aurality.
Contents
Contents Introduction Sander van Maas 1. The Auditory Re-turn (The Point of Listening) Peter Szendy 2. Dear Listener ...: Music and the Invention of Subjectivity Lawrence Kramer 3. Scenes of Devastation: Interpellation, Finite and Infinite Sander van Maas 4. Positive Feedback: Listening Behind Hearing David Wills 5. Antennas Have Long Since Invaded Our Brains: Listening to 'the Other Music' in Friedrich Kittler Melle Kromhout 6. Movement at the Boundaries of Listening, Composition, and Performance Jason Freeman 7. The Biopolitics of Noise: Kafka's 'Der Bau' Anthony Adler 8. Torture as an Instrument of Music John Hamilton 9. Stop it, I Like it! Embodiment, Masochism and Listening for Traumatic Pleasure Robert Sholl 10. Sounds of Belonging: Accented Writing in Jean Rhys's Good Morning, Midnight Liedeke Plate 11. Back to the Beat: Silent Orality in Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries Kiene Brillenburg Wurth 12. The Discovery of Slowness in Music Alexander Rehding 13. Negotiating Ecstasy: Electronic Dance Music and the Temporary Autonomous Zone Andrew Shenton Notes List of Contributors Index
