Forum on Disciplinary Listening: An Introduction

Forum on Disciplinary Listening:An Introduction Jason Camlot (bio) and Katherine McLeod (bio) As we prepared our call-for-papers for this special issue, "New Sonic Approaches in Literary Studies," we went back and forth about if it should be in or to in our title. We started out with to but then caught ourselves switching to in whenever we wrote or spoke about it. We decided that in was the word we wanted because this special issue has been designed to consider how new sonic approaches find their ways into literary studies. The sonic approaches described in the essays in this collection may not originate in literary studies, but here they are—in literary studies. That word in also conveys that the aim of this special issue is not necessarily to determine what sonic approaches tell us about literary studies (although we have welcomed this, too) but to learn about new sonic approaches as popping up, existing, thriving, meddling, intervening in literary studies through situated methods of listening within particular case studies. As such, in shaping this special issue, we have been profoundly aware of disciplinarity and how it informs the authors' listening practices as they have approached their subjects. All of the articles enact literary studies through their listenings, but we would argue that what listening means for each author is deeply conditioned by the disciplines through which they were trained and within which they now work. The question of how we listen called for closer consideration and we, as editors, [End Page 259] thought that the format of a forum on disciplinary listening would afford an engaging, imaginative, and useful way to think about listening as it is practised across disciplines and for that thinking to be dialogic, in flux, moving, like sound. We listen from positions of cultural protocol and assumption and in doing so practise listening as "cultural techniques." German media theorist Bernhard Siegert conceives of cultural techniques in terms of media history and technological objects. Cultural techniques, he argues, incite "a more or less complex actor network that comprises technological objects as well as the operative chains they are part of and that configure and constitute them" (Siegert 11). Among Siegert's many interesting assertions about cultural techniques is that they begin with the introduction of interpretive distinctions that work to comprise assertions of truth or the nature of the real and that these distinctions are recursive and may create new distinctions out of the single element of another distinction (so, for example, the distinction beautiful/ugly may be applied to the noise side of the signal/noise binary and produce new distinctions between beautiful noise and ugly noise) (14). Cultural techniques of listening in their more developed forms have often been advanced with critical distinctions made through analysis that aims to produce knowledge about the world. Often the nature of the distinctions has depended on the disciplinary parameters by which analysis is pursued and knowledge sought. Much of Jonathan Sterne's work on the cultural history of sound recording media technologies, and techniques of listening, already anticipated the cultural theory that Siegert maps out. Sterne defines "audile technique" (or techniques of listening) as "a concrete set of limited and related practices of listening and practical orientations towards listening" (90). He explores these practices and orientations in distinct historical (and, we would say, disciplinary and professional) contexts, namely, those of modern medicine from the 1760s to 1900s, sound telegraphy from the 1840s to 1900s, and then in the context of emergent technologies of sound reproduction, telephony, phonography, and radio. Sterne outlines audile technique as a combination of "a relatively stable set of practical orientations toward sound and listening" (93). He argues that these orientations of listening developed in braided relation to the media technologies that extend and instantiate their capacity and authority, and he demonstrates how they captured and integrated a wide range of disciplinary practices of listening that had been developing in different ways as practices of knowledge since the eighteenth century. [End Page 260] A loud and clear example of such a disciplinary practice of listening that falls within the history of audile technique Sterne has presented is that of auscultation...

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