Lauri Siisiinen

Foucault and
the Politics
of Hearing

interventions

Foucault and the Politics of Hearing

The issue of the senses and sensual perception in Michel Foucaults thought
has been a source of prolic discussion already for quite some time. Often,
Foucault has been accused of overemphasizing the centrality of sight, and
has been portrayed as yet another thinker representative of Western
ocularcentricism. This innovative new work seeks to challenge this portrait
by presenting an alternative view of Foucault as a thinker for whom the
sound, voice, hearing, and listening, the auditory-sonorous, actually did
matter.
Illustrating how the auditory-sonorous relates most integrally to the most
pertinent issues of Foucaultthe intertwinement and confrontations of
power, knowledge, and resistancethe book both presents novel readings
of some of Foucaults most widely read and commented-on works (such
as Discipline and Punish, the rst volume of The History of Sexuality), and
discusses a variety of his lectures, essays, and interviews, some of which
have not been noted before.
Moving beyond a commentary on Foucault, Siisiinen goes on to
examine other philosophers and political thinkers (including Roland
Barthes, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Jacques Rancire) in this context in order
to bring to the fore the potentials in Foucaults work for the generation
of a new perspective on the political genealogy of the sound, hearing, and
listening, approaching the former as a key locus of contemporary political
struggles.
This work will be of great interest to students and scholars in a range of
areas including political theory, philosophy, and cultural studies.
Lauri Siisiinen is a researcher in the Department of Social Sciences and
Philosophy at the University of Jyvaskyla, Finland.

Interventions
Edited by Jenny Edkins
Aberystwyth University and

Nick Vaughan-Williams
University of Warwick

As Michel Foucault has famously stated, knowledge is not made for

understanding; it is made for cutting. In this spirit The Edkins
Vaughan-Williams Interventions series solicits cutting-edge, critical
works that challenge mainstream understandings in international
relations. It is the best place to contribute post-disciplinary works that
think rather than merely recognize and arm the world recycled in
IRs traditional geopolitical imaginary.
Michael J. Shapiro, University of Hawaii at Mnoa, USA
This series aims to advance understanding of the key areas in which scholars
working within broad critical post-structural and post-colonial traditions have chosen to make their interventions, and to present innovative
analyses of important topics.
Titles in the series engage with critical thinkers in philosophy, sociology,
politics and other disciplines and provide situated historical, empirical and
textual studies in international politics.
Critical Theorists and International Relations
Edited by Jenny Edkins and Nick Vaughan-Williams
Ethics as Foreign Policy
Britain, the EU and the other
Dan Bulley
Universality, Ethics and International Relations
A grammatical reading
Vronique Pin-Fat
The Time of the City
Politics, philosophy, and genre
Michael J. Shapiro
Governing Sustainable Development
Partnership, protest and power at the world summit
Carl Death

Insuring Security
Biopolitics, security and risk
Luis Lobo-Guerrero
Foucault and International Relations
New critical engagements
Edited by Nicholas J. Kiersey and Doug Stokes
International Relations and Non-Western Thought
Imperialism, colonialism and investigations of global modernity
Edited by Robbie Shilliam
Autobiographical International Relations
I, IR
Edited by Naeem Inayatullah
War and Rape
Law, memory and justice
Nicola Henry
Madness in International Relations
Psychology, security and the global governance of mental health
Alison Howell
Spatiality, Sovereignty and Carl Schmitt
Geographies of the nomos
Edited by Stephen Legg
Politics of Urbanism
Seeing like a city
Warren Magnusson
Beyond Biopolitics
Theory, violence and horror in world politics
Franois Debrix and Alexander D. Barder
The Politics of Speed
Capitalism, the state and war in an accelerating world
Simon Glezos
Politics and the Art of Commemoration
Memorials to struggle in Latin America and Spain
Katherine Hite
Indian Foreign Policy
The politics of postcolonial identity
Priya Chacko

Politics of the Event

Time, movement, becoming
Tom Lundborg
Theorising Post-Conict Reconciliation
Agonism, restitution and repair
Edited by Alexander Keller Hirsch
Europes Encounter with Islam
The secular and the postsecular
Luca Mavelli
Re-Thinking International Relations Theory via Deconstruction
Badredine Ar
The New Violent Cartography
Geo-analysis after the aesthetic turn
Edited by Sam Okoth Opondo and Michael J. Shapiro
Insuring War
Sovereignty, security and risk
Luis Lobo-Guerrero
International Relations, Meaning and Mimesis
Necati Polat
The Postcolonial Subject
Claiming politics/governing others in late modernity
Vivienne Jabri
Foucault and the Politics of Hearing
Lauri Siisiinen
Volunteer Tourism in the Global South
Giving back in neoliberal times
Wanda Vrasti

Foucault and the Politics

of Hearing

Lauri Siisiinen

First published 2013

by Routledge
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Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
2013 Lauri Siisiinen
The right of Lauri Siisiinen to be identied as author of this work has
been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Siisiinen, Lauri.
Foucault and the politics of hearing / Lauri Siisiinen.
p. cm. (Interventions)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Foucault, Michel, 19261984Political and social views.
2. Political psychology. 3. HearingPolitical aspects. I. Title.
II. Title: Foucault & the politics of hearing.
JC261.F68S55 2012
320.01'9dc23
2012001297
ISBN: 978-0-415-51926-7 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-10856-7 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Taylor & Francis Books
Cover image: Iina Kuusimki

but the real beauty, that is, for me, a musical phrase, a piece of music
that I do not understand, something of which I cannot say anything.
I have this ideamaybe it is arrogant or presumptuousthat I could
say something about any one of the greatest paintings in the world.
And that is the reason why they are not absolutely beautiful.
(Michel Foucault, in a discussion with Stephen Riggins in 1983)
You are not convinced? You want absolute proof that what you hear
comes from within you, not from outside? [ ] But perhaps you
have never been so close to losing everything as you are now, when
you think you have everything in your grip. The responsibility of
conceiving the palace in its every detail, of containing it in your mind,
subjects you to an exhausting strain. The obstinacy on which power
is based is never so fragile as in the moment of its triumph.
(Italo Calvino, from A King Listens)

Contents

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction

1
10

The archaeology of our ears

Murmur, madness, and language 10
The order of discourse and anonymous voice 19
The Birth of the Clinic and the exclusion of the
auditory-sonorous 24
Message or Noise? 31
Confession and voice in Foucaults early encounter
with Jean-Jacques Rousseau 34
Metamorphoses of the ear: Renaissance, Classicism,
modernity 42
From anonymous murmur to vocal knowledge
and power 52

The genealogy of auditory-sonorous power and resistance

55

Surveillance and discipline: panoptic or panauditory

power? 55
Panauditory surveillance and its fragility:
A King Listens 60
Sexuality, confession, and the sensualization of power 66
Multitudes and noise-abatement 70
The liberal governmentality, homo conomicus, and the
threat of noise 77
3

Voices of care, friendship, and parre-sia

Care of the self and the interior voice 89
Education, sonorous power, and the struggle of voices

89
93

Contents
The musical event: Foucault and Boulez 99
Music and the politics of friendship 109
Parre-sia and the voice of the crowd: auditory-sonorous
politics in the nal Collge de France lectures 115
Conclusion: historicizing and politicizing our ears

126

Notes
References
Index

133
140
148

Acknowledgments

First, I would like to thank the Department of Social Sciences and

Philosophy and the Political Science unit at the University of Jyvskyl for
oering the institutional framework and the basic facilities for my research,
whose outcome this study is. Furthermore, I would like to thank all
those numerous people with whom I have had discussions, and more or less
formal cooperation in conferences, symposia, seminars, projects, and
publications over the past years. The names of Matti Hyvrinen, Sakari
Hnninen, Markku Koivusalo, Tommi Kotonen, Mika Ojakangas, Davide
Panagia, Tuija Parvikko, Sergei Prozorov, Michael J. Shapiro, and Jon H.
Simons come immediately to my mind, although there would be many
others as well. William Hellberg, Susanne Kalejaiye, Lisa Muszynski, and
Sophia Broom have given help with the English.
Of course, the research would not have been possible without its having
been funded by a variety of sources, above all, by The Academy of
Finland. Also, my parents Anni and Martti Siisiinen have supported the
work in more ways than one.
Without exaggeration, I can say that the time I have spent in Paris with
my wife Hanna was crucial for my research: it was then that I rst
discovered and read some of the texts that turned out to be most central for
the thesis. It was in Paris, I believe, that the key argument rst became
suciently articulate for me. Now, it is in Montparnasse that I am putting
the nishing touches on the book. Thus, at the risk of sounding sentimental,
I have to thank various bookstores in Paris; I have to thank Bibliothque
Nationale, but also the cafs, restaurants, marketplaces and parks. In all,
I want to thank the environment that was invigorating in so many ways. It
was in Paris that I really learned to understand the sense of lightness as
a real intellectual virtue.
As I have already expressed my gratitude to a city, to a milieu, to an
atmosphere and to an environment, I see no reason to stop the transgression
with the community of human addressees. I denitely want to thank Arvo,
our magnicent blue British cat, even though, or precisely because, he might
be above the human all too human give-and-take of gratitude. It is a
privilege to live with such a truly enigmatic creature, giving me a chance

xii

Acknowledgments

every day to encounter, to question, and to arm the limits of my reason

and understanding. On the other hand, even at the risk of succumbing to
certain humanist/humanizing imagery, Arvo has oered me an indispensable
example of independence, unruliness, and enjoyment of life, Unschuldigkeit
in the best of senses.
What I want to express last, is the most signicant, the most encompassing, the most pervasive sense of gratitude, one that is also most dicult
to articulate. I want to thank Hanna, my wife and my beloved companion
for life simply for who she is, and for the life we live together.

Introduction

The peculiarity of the auditory-sonorous (the sense of hearing, sound,

and auditory perception), and its comparison with the optic-visual
(sight and visible objects, appearances, and images) has been a source
of curiosity and inspiration for several thousand years. We can see this
already in ancient mythologies and religions. In Ancient Greek culture,
we nd the myth of the Medusan gaze, which freezes and petries everything. On the other hand, there is the rich mythology of the god Dionysus
and his cult, in which sound and the ear, noise, and noisemaking, have an
essential anity with the forces of life, with frenzy and madness, with
movements of transgression and metamorphoses (see, e.g., Detienne 1989,
2003; Otto 1960: 857; Burkert 2001: 2235; Kernyi 1996).
In Hebrew and Christian traditions, there have always been iconoclastic
strains relating the eye, gaze, vision, and image with pagan spectacles and
the dead objects of idolatry, whereas the ear and voice have been understood as the privileged medium of the living Word of God, through which
the divine power addresses and calls us (see, e.g., Revault dAllonnes 1984;
Blumenberg 1993; Pickstock 2003: 24378; Amselek 2006).
In Ancient Greek philosophy, the interest in the specicities of the ear did
not vanish, but rather became rearticulated. In Platos dialogues, we meet
the insight on the uniquely penetrating, aective power of sound, seizing
both our soul and body (e.g. Platos The Republic: 401; Timaeus: 67bc;
cf. Cohen-Levinas 2005: 10114). In an even more explicit and systematic
fashion, we nd Aristotle arguing that the ear, hearing, and sound have
a unique role as the sensual medium of pure movement (Aristotle 1957:
418b421a, 422a, 437a).
It is possible to pursue the trajectory of this idea further on into modernity, while noting its continuity. We discover the argument on the mobility
and spreading of sound in Immanuel Kant (1987: 53), and the idea of
hearing, voice, and music as the privileged medium of pure time, movement,
and sympathy between abstract or empty subjectivities in Hegels
philosophy (see, e.g., Mallet 1999: 51547; Cohen-Levinas 2005: 10121).
Then, in the late nineteenth century, Henri Bergson presents perhaps the
most forceful and inuential argument on the juxtaposition between vision

Introduction

(as objectifying, spatializing, quantitative, distant) and hearing, as the purely

temporal medium of participatory, sympathetic, intuitive relationships
between singulars (see, e.g., Bergson 1993: 645, 75, 78, 8990, 93, 122,
1289, 1424, 170, 1734; Bergson 1996: 1024, 1637, 1812, 196). As we
reach the twentieth century, the argument on the fundamental dierence
between sight/visual experience (as essentially spatial-objective) and hearing/
auditory experience (as temporal-aective) is perhaps most familiar from
certain representatives of the phenomenological tradition (see the seminal
essay of Hans Jonas 1954; cf. Arendt 1978: especially 112; see also Muldoon
1996; Kerszberg 1999; in analytic philosophy, cf. Strawson 1993).
After World War II, the juxtaposition of visual and auditory perception,
as giving birth to two fundamentally dierent types of communal relations,
has been elaborated extensively in the media-anthropology of Edmund
Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan. In their version, the auditory-sonorous,
or acoustically generated community is understood as a contingent, open,
and horizontal network of interdependencies, relating anyone with anyone
else, whereas the community of vision is a vertical and exclusive one,
based on individualization, distance, hierarchy, territoriality, and organization of dierent tasks and functions. Arguably, the visually dominated
community is brought to perfection in occidental modernity (Carpenter
et al. 1959: 267; McLuhan 1967: 1432, 45, 567, 6371; McLuhan and
Fiore 1967: 445, 48, 50, 61, 68, 111; McLuhan and Powers 1989: 3570).
In their turn, Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari (1986: 22, 34, 53) have
found inspiration in Carpenters and McLuhans concept of auditory
space, in their own reections on the desert, smooth space, and
nomadic space.1
More recently, in the eld of cultural theory and cultural studies, but
also more broadly, in political and social theory and philosophy, we can
witness the growing criticism towards the strong juxtaposition of
the audio and visual. What have been problematized are the transhistorical and reductive premises behind this setting. Above all, many have
argued that it is an error to attempt to bring sight, visibility, and
the visual back to the objectifying and dominating gaze. Instead, they
have suggested a more pluralistic approach, armative of the historical
and cultural multiplicity of heterogeneous regimes of visibility, of dierent
visual cultures with their divergent ethical and political potentialities (see,
e.g., Jay 1994; Crary 1993, 1999).
Moreover, a similar critical claim for the acknowledgment of historicity
and plurality has been extended to the ear, audition, and auditory culture(s).
First of all, we should note the fundamental historical changes, metamorphoses, and irruptions pertaining to the ear, to hearing and listening, as
they become articulated into dierent cultural and discursive forms, and
organized into dierent regimes. In political terms, this has meant
the emphasis on the various, potential integrations of auditory perception
into political action, including the use of power with its rationalities,

Introduction

knowledge(s), and techniques (see, e.g., Szendy 2001, 2007; Schmidt 2003;
Johnson 1995).
To summarize, the theoretical as well as the more concretely oriented
studies on sensual culture have challenged both the reductive demonization of sight and visuality (as inherently nothing but objectifying, distant,
freezing, dominating, excluding, and discriminating), as well as the nave
appraisal of hearing as the inherently inter-subjective, open, and participatory sense. This challenge is really a remarkable one, and it should not
be neglected in the eld of political theory, in thinking of power, resistance,
and the formations of political communities.
In this framework, Michel Foucaults (192684) thinking (among others),
has been taken into reexamination. It seems that this has often taken a
critical tenor. To be sure, recent cultural studies on senses and sensuality
have applied Foucaults archaeological and genealogical historicizing
approach, and also given it credit more or less articulately, at the general
(methodological) level (see, e.g., Crary 1993, 1999). However, when it
comes to Foucaults actual thinking of perception, senses, and sensuality,
this has either been left out of focus, or it has been challenged for its
remaining attached to the trans-historical, transcendental settings of the
philosophical tradition, thus being, evidently, inconsistent with Foucaults
overall approach.
When it comes to the optic-visual, the criticism has targeted Foucaults
strong emphasis on the dominating and surveying functions, epitomized
by gures, such as the eye of power, the clinical/medical gaze, the empire
of the gaze, and the Panopticon. It has been argued that Foucault has
neglected the culturalhistorical multiplicity of dierent opticvisualvisible
regimes, having their divergent subversive and democratic potentialities.
Thus, we end up with a portrait of Foucault as yet another representative
of the iconoclastic theoretical gesture, which still identies visual perception and experience with the freezing Medusas gaze, or the evil eye
(see Jay 1988, 1989, 1994: 67, 126, 381416, 58795; Jay 1996; Flynn
1993; Bal 1993); the picture of Foucault as an iconoclast thinker,
showing partial suspicion against vision, is problematic, as can be seen in
his various analyses of visual arts (see Rajchman 1988; Shapiro 2003;
Whitehall 2006).
When it comes to the ear, voice, and sound, the retreatment of Foucault
has not been very favorable either. First of all, Foucault is not really
known as a thinker of music, or more generally, as a thinker of the
auditory-sonorous at all, unlike other contemporary French thinkers
like Roland Barthes or Gilles Deleuze. Often, still, we come across a portrait
of Foucault as someone who was not interested in any other sensory
modalities except vision; as someone who either wholly neglected, or explicitly downplayed, the role of auditory perception and sound in his analyses
of power and knowledge. We have been fairly strongly accustomed
to approach Foucault as a thinker, whose focus was on the eye, as well as on

Introduction

language and discourse; not on the auditory-sonorous (see Schmidt 2003;

Schafer 2003; Szendy 2007: especially 329).
To take one notable case, Jonathan Sterne, in his perceptive study on the
development of modern technologies of sound and listening, points out
Foucaults categorical reduction of the signicance of medical auscultation
in The Birth of the Clinic. Sterne suggests this to be the consequence of
Foucaults adopting the idea of inherent and insurmountable ontological
dierence separating sight from hearing, and visible appearance from
sound (Sterne 2003: 1419, 1278).
The conclusion to draw from this criticism seems to be quite harsh: when
it comes to the history of our ears, and to the attempt to understand
the political signicance of the auditory-sonorous, there is not much we
can gain from Foucault, except perhaps at the methodological level. In his
rare, explicit takes on the issue, he reduces the auditory-sonorous to
the other of vision and, consequently, of the visually biased forms
of modern knowledge and power. The critics have argued that Foucaults
adoption of this reductive-essentialist conception of audition leads him to
neglect its various political uses, and its historical role in the development
of modern forms of power most importantly.
Also this study at hand has its starting point in the general problematics
outlined above. However, the basic aim is to contest the view of Foucault
as a thinker, for whom sound, voice, and auditory perception was an issue
of only minor (if any) importance, and who devalued their political
and historical role. The essential attempt will be to show Foucaults
continuous interest in the auditory-sonorous throughout the course of
his intellectual biography, from the beginning of the 1960s until the nal
years of his life.
Furthermore, the objective is to demonstrate that it is not just any sort
of occurrences of marginal signicance that we are dealing with,
but ones in which sound and hearing are related integrally to the most
pertinent political issues in Foucaults thought in its dierent periods:
forms of knowledge, power, governance, and resistance. Thematically,
the book follows the path of the auditory-sonorous through the
seminal themes of the 1960s Foucault (language and discourse, the archaeology of empirical knowledge), the 1970s (genealogical analyses of
power, governance, and resistance), and the early 1980s (the care of the
self, asceticism, ethics and aesthetics of existence, and parre-sia). In all
of these frameworks, we will see that the issue of sound and auditory
perception has a signicant role, which unfortunately has not been given
much notice.
The methodological approach applied in the book could probably be best
characterized as hermeneutic. It is based on a close reading of Foucaults
uvre, both of his generally known major works, as well as a variety
of minor texts, i.e. essays, introductions, discussions, interviews, etc.
This method means also paying attention to the historical contexts of the

Introduction

source materials, rst of all, by situating them in the course of Foucaults

intellectual history, but also, in the more general, intellectualhistorical
context. This helps us to assess the signicance of the discoveries made, i.e.
of Foucaults insights on the auditory-sonorous, during the dierent
periods from the 1960s until the last years of his life.
Yet, the interpretation put forth aims to go beyond merely presenting a
commentary on Foucault. The book also explores and develops further
the potentials found in Foucaults thought for our understanding of the
politics of voice, sound, and hearing. Occasionally, this calls for a more
critical approach, which points out how these potentials are only partly
realized by Foucaults own explicit treatment. In order to elaborate these
potentials, we will have to take some distance from Foucaults corpus of
texts, and discuss the works of other authors, including works of literature
by Franz Kafka and Italo Calvino.
As for the source materials of this study, the established English translations of Foucaults major works (The Birth of the Clinic, The Order of
Things, The Archaeology of Knowledge, Discipline and Punish, History
of Sexuality, etc.) are used as references. However, a considerable part of
Foucaults texts discussed are either not translated, or have been translated
only fairly recently, so that the available translations and their terminological choices do not yet have the position of generally accepted standards.
In these cases, for the sake of accuracy, as well as consistency, the original
French texts will be used, and when needed, I provide my own English
translations of these. The editions of Foucaults Dits et crits will be used,
when referring to the various minor texts.
As to its structure, the book consists of three major parts, based on the
chronology of Foucaults intellectual biography. Hence, the rst part
of the book, The archaeology of our ears, is devoted to Foucaults
1960s thinking. First, we will draw attention to the manner in which
he thinks of language, discourse, and literature through auditory-sonorous
terms or tropes, above all, noise and murmur. We will note the consistency
of the way in which Foucault characterizes language and discourse
in auditory-sonorous terms, when wanting to underline their anonymous
and pre-subjective quality. A reading of one of Franz Kafkas stories,
The Burrow (Der Bau), will throw still further light on this matter.
We will also discuss the problematic argument, through which Foucault
marginalizes the role of auditory perception and auscultation in The Birth
of the Clinic (cf. the critique of Foucault on this by Sterne 2003), when
dealing with the formation of modern clinicalmedical knowledge, clinical
perception/experience, and the medicalization of society and politics. Yet,
I will argue that in order to form an adequate account on the role of the
auditory-sonorous in Foucaults archaeologies of empirical knowledge,
and empirical regimes, it is insucient to focus exclusively on The Birth of
the Clinic. The former is only one particular instance, in which Foucault
tackles this issue.