Abstract
The French word “entente” signifies both understanding and listening. This is helpful to keep in mind, especially when considering the much maligned “critique of rationality” in post-war French political theory. 1 For what seems misguided about this characterization is a miscomprehension of the function of entente. That is to say, contributions of such authors as Irigaray, Kristeva, Derrida, Deleuze, Lacan, Rancière, Foucault, etc. may be appreciated not as irrationalists or skeptics of Enlightenment rationality but as offering an elaboration of the limits to reducing political thinking to a project of the understanding that renders theoretical propositions applicable to politics. The issue, then, might go something like this: What is the nature of political critique when it is not subjected solely to the theoretical and institutional demands of understanding?
It is within the context of this question that we might appreciate Lauri Siisiäinen’s intervention in Foucault and the Politics of Hearing (Routledge, 2013). Siisiäinen’s objective in this volume is challenging: to discuss the relevance of the “auditory-sonorous” in the writings of Michel Foucault. I say that this is a challenging project because, as Siisiäinen readily admits, auditory perception is not something that Foucault discussed at length throughout his writings, and to appreciate the role of aurality on Foucault’s thought requires much digging to unearth the traces of sonority in his works. Siisiäinen’s approach, then, is that of the hermeneut, providing a close reading of a substantial portion of Foucault’s oeuvre (Siisiäinen, 4). Indeed, one of the strengths of the book is precisely its thoroughness. It is clear that Siisiäinen has worked rigorously through both major and minor writings of Foucault. In this respect, Siisiäinen’s book is up to the challenging task it poses for itself and any reader will be rewarded with the occasion to discuss a familiar author anew.
The book is divided into three major chapters, each of which represents the three periods of Foucault’s writing. Chapter one, “The Archeology of our Ears,” focuses on Foucault’s writings of the 1960s; “The Genealogy of the Auditory-Sonorous Power and Resistance” (chapter two) attends to the works of the 1970s and specifically to the role of sound in disciplinary societies, in confessional relations, and the threat of noise in neoliberal governance; finally, chapter three, “Voices of Care, Friendship, and Parresia” looks to the role and cultivation of musicality as a mode of education and sonorous power in the later writings of Foucault. I should add that the book’s introduction is very helpful to understanding the nature of Siisiäinen’s project and also to how he frames the entirety of his discussion. The book concludes with a reemphasis on the important and untapped political potential of the auditory-sonorous.
The book is well situated within the growing canon of literature in political theory on the politics of the senses, affect theory, and the role that our constructions about the nature of perception have in our thinking about political action and political resistance. Siisiäinen intends to champion the role of the ear as an underexplored political organ, and the auditory-sonorous as an underappreciated site of political governance and sensibilities. With Foucault’s oeuvre as his object of study, he faces substantial obstacles given the paucity of explicit statements about aurality in Foucault’s studies. To deal with such limitations, Siisiäinen’s hermeneutic approach is queered in interesting ways: he pursues innuendos and allusions, as much as textual specificity and close reading. Moreover, within each chapter, Siisiäinen diverges from direct textual analysis to provide an extended treatment of other figures of a potential auditory-sonorous canon (i.e., René Laënnec’s 1819 treatise on mediate auscultation, or Italo Calvino’s story titled “A King Listens,” or the writings of the French composer, Pierre Boulez, with whom Foucault had an exchange). Such interventions are less additive than they are aspectival. What do I mean by this? Simply put, Siisiäinen can’t rely on Foucault’s explicitness about the auditory-sonorous and so he must draw out aspects of Foucault’s treatment of sound by juxtaposing it to other (very) distantly related texts. In doing so, Siisiäinen manages to escape some of the ligatures of the hermeneutic approach and to open up his project to a variety of unrelated sources.
In short, Siisiäinen’s ambition is neither limited to a critique of Foucault for not taking the auditory-sonorous seriously enough, nor is it merely a topical concordance of the ear in Foucault’s oeuvre. Rather, Foucault and the Politics of Hearing aims to be a prolongation of Foucault’s project of political resistance that looks at the entanglement of sensory organs as the one with the other. A case in point is Siisiäinen’s treatment of panoptic surveillance that is, no doubt, overdetermined by the optic as its site of organic investment. In a virtuoso rereading of Bentham, Siisiäinen shows how, along with the panoptic, there is also a panauditory dimension to Bentham’s scheme (citing Bentham’s Letter XXI) that looks to produce the illusion not only of constant visibility but constant audibility too. This detail dovetails nicely with Siisiäinen’s discussion of optics and visibility in terms of light (and not just sight). Light is a wave that renders things visible through illumination, which suggests that at the level of the wave-function, the visual and the aural overlap (sound is also a wave). The organoleptic entanglement of the sonorous with the visible starts to take on new and interesting features—features that make auditory surveillance not so much an oxymoron (how can one see sound?) as a political problem (how is the entanglement of sight and sound conceived in modern society?).
There is a manner, however, in which Siisiäinen’s ambitions and his attempt to fulfill them in this book fall short. That is to say, the book is limited by the hermeneutic approach Siisiäinen adopts—an approach that in his hands privileges an optics of exegesis; this despite the fact that the method of hermeneutics is undecidable between the optical and the auditory. He interprets words on a page and these words are read silently with the mind’s eye; thus the sonorous aspect of Foucault’s words remain unthought in this text. The soundlessness of such contemporary exegesis has repercussions to our appreciations of the auditory-sonorous in a text simply because when we read, we tend not to pay attention to sonorous movements therein. Thus, exegesis limits us to insights of analytic exposition, and this is what Siisiäinen offers throughout the book. They are excellent and helpful insights and will no doubt be read as a major contribution to Foucault studies and political theory, but they are also insights surprisingly inattentive to the sonority of Foucault’s prose and gestures—something that Michel de Certeau, for instance, privileges in his writings on Foucault.
I am thinking here, especially, of de Certeau’s essay titled “The Laugh of Michel Foucault” 2 (not cited by Siisiäinen). That essay begins by recounting an episode of Foucault’s life when he was questioned about his situatedness as an investigator: “In what capacity do you speak?” asked an audience member during a stop during one of his Brazilian tours. Foucault’s reply began with the following declaration: “No, no, I’m not where you are lying in wait for me, but over here, laughing at you” (de Certeau, 193). The noise of Foucault’s laughter is, of course, famous also from his initial remarks in The Order of Things when he recounts the classifications in Borges’s writings. When he would read such things, according to de Certeau, Foucault would “roll with laughter” (de Certeau, 194), a laughter that marks the “miniscule lapses” (de Certeau, 194) of otherness that “were for him citations of an unthought” (de Certeau, 194).
Michel de Certeau’s sonorous reading practice raises this methodological question that is, I believe, a burden for any project committed to a politics of the senses: how does one engage the unthought, with what mode of entente? Clearly, the sound of Foucault’s laughter would suggest that an exegetical entente (understanding) is insufficient to the sonorous entente (listening). More than this, it is also the case that the sonority of laughter (among other noises) complicates the heremeneut’s mode of situating the reader in the text. And here I return to my initial point about the dual nature of the French entente: the understanding and the listening seem to be in tension with one another. In order to listen, one cannot stand still in any one place; sound waves disperse in a manner that the unmoveable posture of the exegetical hermeneut’s eye cannot follow. Could it be, then, that a politics of the senses that privileges the auditory-sonorous complicates our commitment to the quiet stillness of reading for understanding? If so, then the project of critique would have to start to imagine practices of reading, and learning, that were not reducible to the linear correspondences that the ocularity of reading for understanding prescribes. Despite limiting its approach to exegesis, Siisiäinen’s book offers wonderful insights as to where we might begin to think through some of these important issues for a politics of the senses.