In Recognition of Their Desperation: Sonic Relationality and the Work of Deep Listening

ABSTRACT

This essay places composer Pauline Oliveros’s philosophy and practice of Deep Listening in conversation with analytic theories of listening in a duet that explores one central question: What can listening do? Thinking through the impact of cultivated listening practices on the sensorium, the relational implications of listening across difference, and the centrality of practices of listening to the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis as well as the transformational capacity of performance, this essay claims Oliveros as a practitioner and theorist of a central psychoanalytic practice: listening. Deep Listening has the capacity to act as an amplifier for extending the reach of analytic listening beyond the clinic into an expanded cultural field. Likewise, psychoanalytic thinking allows for a rich exploration of the interpersonal and intrapsychic dynamics of Oliveros’s sonic meditations as they resonate in the circuits between the psyche and the social. Her 1970 composition To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe In Recognition of Their Desperation acts as a case study for exploring the dynamics of feminist listening.

Notes

¹ "Video Killed the Radio Star" is notorious for being the first music video to air on MTV when the channel launched in 1981. 

² Of course, Freud himself often fell short of his own ideal listening practices! Nonetheless, for further discussion of the value of inclusive listening in analytic practice see Christopher Bollas (2007, pp. 85–100).

³ We might extend this to the practice Pauline Oliveros describes as “free improvisation”: “What is free improvisation? Nothing is known in advance of making the music. What’s the algorithm for that condition? It may or may not be free of historical patterns or it may use historical patterns in new ways. Theoretically, free improvisation is totally spontaneous like the big bang of creation. Maybe the big bang was the first and only free improvisation. How about holding the possibility of the first unknown sound to begin an improvisation at an unknown time in a group of players who are all new to one another” (2010, p. 57).

⁴ Lawrence Brown (2011) offers up a comprehensive genealogy of the idea of “the analyzing instrument” that was incredibly instructive here.

⁵ For an incisive feminist reading of Solanas’s appearance in I, A Man and her subsequent shooting of Andy Warhol, see Jennifer Doyle’s “I Must Be Boring Someone,” in Doyle (2006, pp. 73–81).

⁶ This move from product to process is the hallmark of a number of feminist artistic practices that emerged from southern California in the 1970s. It is a sort of “dematerialization of the music object” that would be very much at home in Lucy Lippard’s Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966–1972 (1997). Notably, Oliveros’s landmark Sonic Meditations was published in 1971.

⁷ The Tuning Meditation was performed by 75 singers directed by William Duckworth all along the spiral gallery walkway at the Guggenheim Museum for the premiere of Elaine Summers’s Crows Nest (1981: http://elainesummersdance.com/crowsnest2010.html).

⁸ Thinking with Adrienne Harris (1998), we might think about the ways in which the acupuncture needles here also pierce the “psychic envelope” of the body ego, perhaps opening up its interior surfaces to the “sonorous bath” of Montano’s chants.

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Julia Steinmetz

Julia Steinmetz writes about performance and the scene of aesthetic encounter. Her essays have appeared in Signs, Women & Performance, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, and the edited volume Queer (2016) and the monograph Cassils (2015). She teaches in the Performance + Performance Studies MFA program at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY.