Politik des Hörens

The idea behind this book stems from the conviction that listening can be understood as a faculty that is predisposed to, directed toward, and oriented toward the political. The phrase “politics of listening” should be understood in the sense of a genitive of subject, whereby the act of listening to music is conceived and discussed as a sensory-intellectual stance that possesses its own inherent political significance. The focus of this book, which emerged from reflections on the role of listening in the work of composer Luigi Nono, is thus neither aesthetic activity in the sense of an immediate political intervention, nor an examination of the composer’s political stance: rather, it is a matter of theoretically grasping and discussing, through selected examples, that disposition toward the political to which listening to Nono’s music invites us. Fundamentally, the political in Nono’s music did not so much unfold in the immediate referentiality to the real, but rather in the “world-reference” (Albrecht Wellmer) of the sound itself, in the compositional concretion, in the invitation to hear differently and to hear the Other. Nono’s music disposes us to listening, and listening is always also a dis-position toward the political in his work. The political dimension in Nono’s music only comes to light when listeners, in the act of listening to the music, encounter one another as a “community” (Jean-Luc Nancy) of listeners based on a “distribution of the sensible” (Jacques Rancière) and thereby share their plural experiences: The political nature of listening thus lies in sharing meaning with one another. For, as Hannah Arendt put it: “Politics arises in the in-between and establishes itself as a relation.” The subversive potential of the politics of listening lies in the listeners’ own entering into relation and in the discursive negotiation of their own disposition toward the political: for the political dimension of music lies in listening together.

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