Abstract

We learn something from the mistakes we make with a book. In this case I read the word “quarkism” where I should have read the word “Quakerism.” As in the sentence on page 102 of Lisbeth Lipari's quirky book: “This kind of listening is perhaps what is called in Quakerism [or was it “quarkism”] the ‘gathered meeting,’ where the assembled silent worshipers cease being individual selves and instead join together in ‘gathered harkening.’” You can guess “worshipers” alerted me to this mistake, but the first part seemed perfectly plausible, as the discussion in the first chapter of holism versus atomism runs through quantum mechanics and brings up subatomic particles like quarks and the space in between.I venture there is no other book on earth that would have produced this mistake. And that is high praise: we are rightfully pleased when academic commonplaces are foiled for a good cause. More on that later.First, in Lipari's book we do also, thankfully, encounter some of the expectations that her title creates. We run into the philosophers of hearing and listening—Murray Schafer, Walter Ong, Don Ihde, David Michael Levin, and especially Gemma Corradi Fiumara—who theorize what happens when “the listening interlocutor actually becomes a participant in the nascent thought of the person who is listening” (199). Hence one contribution: Lipari draws together such philosophy and communication psychology to make a case for what she calls “constitutive listening” (133–35), which frames some interesting laboratory research on the ways in which attentive listeners make us remember things and talk more (sometimes a dubious gift!).As expected, we also encounter Martin Heidegger on being, especially the late Heidegger working around Heraclitus toward noninstrumental language, as it calls, “Being's poem, just begun, is man” (101). And Lipari is right: Heidegger sees language neither as an ideally transparent means of communication between minds nor as an arbitrary system of differences, à la Saussure. Instead, language is understood discursively; now stretching Lipari in a pragmatic direction I would say rooted in shared moods, human institutions and the nonchronological history these institutions compose. Here I emphasize an important relationship between Heidegger's early work on language—its use and abuse, its emergence and silence—and his later work on this topic in Unterwegs zur Sprache. In his earlier 1924 Aristotle lectures, Heidegger describes rhetoric as the art of listening, not as the art of speaking. It is the rhetor who has “genuine power over being-there” (“ῥητορική πειθοῦς δημιουργός”) (2009, 74, referencing Plato, Republic 453a), which for Heidegger doesn't mean the ability to manipulate others by way of the voice. Instead he gives us a being who, insofar as that being can hear, is constituted as someone among others, Mitsein, someone in a particular situation who demands action or who goes conspicuously unheard (2009, 72). In other words I think the ethical attunement Lipari finds beyond Heidegger in a figure like Levinas actually does appear in its nascent form circa 1924, only to be abandoned by Heidegger soon thereafter. But that's another story.We also encounter, as we might expect, Nel Noddings (181) on feminist care ethics, and as I just mentioned, Levinas, along with his proximate reader Michael Hyde on response as responsibility (178). This is to say an “ethics of attunement,” as we read it in the title of Lipari's book, figures the ear centrally as a genuinely engaged response (178) that can hear what she calls the otherness of the other.But as you start to see by way of my introductory confusion, Lipari's book is not just this recap of listening philosophy in its largely Continental, twentieth-century incarnation. Quantum physics gives way to music smoothly enough, where metaphors of vibration and resonance and also dissonance become concrete. It is a virtue of Lipari's book that she works through material registers like the physicality of music without losing track of the phenomenology typically missing from sound studies and from the sciences of audiology (as Heidegger insisted, we don't hear a sound but a motorcycle, for example). Then, also importantly, Indian music with its twenty microtones (38), Indian cosmology, including holistic theories of sound in language (27), then in some depth ancient Eastern language philosophy (fifth/sixth-century Sanskrit grammarians and then others) as it developed through competing schools that can now provide some rich resources for listening projects designed, like Lipari's, to foreground holistic, not atomistic, perspective on language (78).So emergent patterns, including particles and plants, musical resonance, ancient Eastern and Western language philosophies, being/becoming—all mobilized against atomism as an apparatus of capture (not her term) — my liberties there at the end should remind you of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, which is similarly designed to upset the linear expectations of academics. And like A Thousand Plateaus, which, incidentally, Lipari doesn't cite, this listening book is hugely ambitious but in a different way, as it gestures toward world peace: “By changing our thinking about listening, we may be freed to dismantle the linguistic prison house that confine us to misconceptions of our own making about who we are, what we do, and how we might live peacefully together with others on this planet” (3). Indeed phrases regularly appear like those I fondly remember from Grateful Dead shows during the 1980s: “Space infuses all things” (17), and we are guided into the “elusive mysteries of listening” (101). When everything is connected, Lipari's project becomes ambitious to the point of courageous impossibility: “So what would a holistic paradigm of listening include?,” Lipari asks. “In short, everything” she answers (99).At that point I do get overwhelmed, and I retreat to critical pragmatism. It is not untrue that everything is connected, but at the same time footholds suggest themselves strongly, or, to shift the modality, we are subject to earworms not of our choosing, as Lipari explains well enough. Perhaps our difference as listening theorists ultimately lies in the ethics I see emerging out of these impositions—how we are hailed, who is rigorously unheard—whereas Lipari looks for a listening ethics that precedes or exceeds such worldly imposition. I can only hope she is right.