Thresholds of Listening Sound, Technics, Space [Hardcover]

Thresholds of Listening addresses recent and historical changes in the ways listening has been conceived. Listening, having been emancipated from the passive, subjected position of reception, has come to be asserted as an active force in culture and in collective and individual politics.

The contributors to this volume show that the exteriorization of listening brought into relief by recent historical studies of technologies of listeninginvolves a re-negotiation of the theoretical and pragmatic distinctions that underpin the notion of listening. Focusing on the manifold borderlines between listening and its erstwhile others, such as speaking, reading, touching, seeing, or hearing, the book maps new frontiers in the history of aurality. They suggest that listenings finitude defined in some of the essays as its death or deadlinessshould be considered as a heuristic instrument rather than as a mere descriptor.

Listening emerges where it appears to end or to run up against thresholds and limitsor when it takes unexpected turns. Listenings recent emergence on the cultural and theoretical scene may therefore be productively read against contemporary recurrences of the motifs of elusiveness, finitude, and resistance to open up new politics, discourses, and technologies of aurality.

Thresholds of Listening intervenes into an extraordinarily wide range of subjects, ranging from masochism and torture at one extreme to Cage and Kafka at the other. Chapters zoom by at high speed, covering enormous ground and wrestling on all fronts with musics potential value as a transformative biopolitical praxis. The level of scholarship is excellent, and van Maass cast of contributors includes stellar names alongside emerging scholars. This is less a book about listening to music than a virtuosic inquiry into the relationships between listening, hearing, sound, and space and an investigation of the limits of the human body.This collection of essays addresses reclc5