Foucault's voices : toward the political genealogy of the auditory-sonorous

Abstract

Michel Foucault (1926-1984) is not really known as a thinker of music, or more generally, as a thinker of the voice, of the sound, of audition and listening. Often, one comes up with the portrait of Foucault as a visualist of some sort, one who either was not interested in the other sensory modalities, or at least, did not have much, if anything, to say about them. However, in this study I attempt to argue against this portrait. The aim is to bring to the fore the occurrence of the theme of the voice, sound and audition in various occasions and contexts, as we follow the course of Foucault’s intellectual history. Furthermore, the aim is to show that it is not just any sort of occurrences that we are dealing with, but ones in which the auditory-sonorous becomes related integrally to some of the most pertinent political issues in Foucault’s thought in its different periods from the 1960’s until his death: the modes of power, governance and resistance. The particular emphasis is on the published Collège de France - lectures, as well as on the various minor texts, such as essays, lectures, discussions and interviews.

The method, or perhaps a more apt term would be the orientation- and strategy of reading endorsed in the study is to discover, to tease out, and also to further elaborate on the potentialities of considering the politics of the auditory-sonorous. Hence the study is not limited only to Foucault’s explicit statements on the issue, but also attempts to bring to the fore certain points, where the said potentiality is more of the implicit, inarticulate quality, in order to ponder, how this could be further elaborated. Throughout all the readings of Foucault presented in the study, across all the different contexts and issues touched upon, the idea of the auditory-sonorous as the locus of struggles is emphasized and defended, that is, struggles about our ears and about our voices, struggles pertaining to the formation and organization of our sensory perception as such.