But why return to Nietzsche for an analysis Listening as Agon in of listening-especially listening today in the age of big data and surveillance capitalism? the Society of Control I do so for two reasons: first, to remind us that our current situation is not as novel as we sometimes take it to be; and, second, to make a broader point about what listening is and what a politics of listening might be. Let me take up the second of these points. Nietzsche's polemically broad conception of Christoph Cox interpretation contests the special status of human beings and of human interpretation, Before we move too quickly to discuss asserting that all entities (human, animal, "the politics of listening", I would like to vegetable, mineral, mechanical, etc) are offer some philosophical caveats aimed at engaged in this battle of interpretations. reconfiguring the ontological field in which This is relevant to our consideration of both we understand "listening" and "the political". listening and politics. In the announcement The question of listening seems to me to be for this symposium, the organisers quote fundamentally a question of interpretation, a passage by sound artist Lawrence Abu in the expanded sense in which Nietzsche Hamdan, who writes: "Listening is not a uses the term. For Nietzsche, "to interpret" natural process inherent to our perception is to be confronted with a flow (of words, of the world but rather [is] constructed by sounds, images, information, whatever) and the conditions of the spaces and times to filter it in some way according to some set that engulf us."3 Now, I am very fond of Abu of interests or constraints. "The essence of Hamdan's work, which, I th,ink, is smart, subtle, interpreting", he writes, is "forcing, adjusting, and richly manifests the role of sound in abbreviating, padding, inventing, falsifying", social struggles. But I want to contest a key and so on.1 This, of course, is what the scholar presupposition in his claim about listening. does when she selects a particular passage, Implicit in the passage is an opposition reads it in a particular way, and makes it serve between "hearing" and "listening", the former a particular purpose within her argument. But conceived as merely natural, animal, and it is also what the body does when it ingests passive, the latter as properly cultural, human, food, extracts from it the nutrients it needs, and active. 4 This distinction is problematically and eliminates the rest; and it is what takes humanist, taking human intentionality to be place when molecular bonds are broken fundamentally different and distinct from and reconfigured in a chemical reaction. For the receptive capacities of other beings. And Nietzsche, then, interpretation accounts for it is metaphysically problematic, insofar as "all events in the organic world", and beyond. it affirms age-old but dubious oppositions He goes on to remark that, in this broad between nature and culture, sensation and sense, interpretation is the essence of "the thought, passivity and activity, instinct and will to power", and that will to power is the reflection, the animal and the human, the very principle of change in the world.2 1n material and the spiritual, the inanimate and this model, then, listening is interpretation, the animate, and so oh. which is necessarily political insofar as it is The distinction between hearing and involves a constant struggle and negotiation listening is not only ontologically problematic; among entities. it also misleads us about the politics of What Now? listening. If we take listening to be "socially asylurn, and the prison/ But in the "societies constructed" rather than "natural", we of control" in which we now live, argued project a second world of culture on top Deleuze, power is exercised differently. Instead of nature or the real; this allows us to ignore of confining bodies to institutions, "control Nietzsche's point that every entity in the societies" are decentralised and flexible, world is fundamentally interpretive-that involving "ultra-rapid forms of apparently nature is already interpretive, and hence free-floating control" that encourage the political, insofar as interpretation is "will to mobility of bodies while carefully tracking power". The notion of social construction and their movements, charting the nodal points the elevation of listening above hearing places in the networks through Which they paSS. 8 agency only at the level of the human and In short, control societies are post-Fordist suggests that technologies of listening are societies characterised by precarious and inert and passive. Yet, as AJ Hudspeth nicely immaterial labour, information, social media, shows, the human apparatus of listening is far e-commerce, data mining, and so forth. The more passive and habitual than we take it to form of surveillance that characterises societies be, and mechanical apparati of listening are of control is not the visual surveillance of bodies far more active and "interpretive" than we but the statistical accumulation, linking, and take them to be. 5 A fully materialist conception parsing of data that transforms individuals of listening would level the ontological field, into "dividuals", identities reduced to packets rejecting the ancient metaphysical hierarchy of information that generate social, economic, that elevates the human above the animal, the and military profiles. inanimate, and the mechanical, and would De leuze's notion of "control societies" derives reconceive listening in terms of capturing (and from the writer and sonic experimentalist being captured by) flows of sound rather than WilliamS Burroughs, who, in the 1960s and in te.rms of some uniquely human intentionality. 1970s, developed a conception of control that Indeed, it would turn the discussion away seemed paranoid at the time but has turned from human intentions and turn it toward the out to be strikingly accurate.9 Alongside this complex material conditions and apparati that notion of control, Burroughs developed a determine what is captured, how, and why. rigorous conception of listening as a political Let me bring this back to the discussion practice. Instead of asserting the value of of listening in the age of surveillance. What human intentionality and insisting that we Seeta Peiia Gangadharan and Shoshana wrest control from machines, Burroughs Zuboff call "surveillance capitalism" is what, argues that everything is fundamentally a 25 years earlier, Gilles Deleuze proposed to machine. The mind or the brain, for example, call "control society". In a brief but remarkably is a recording apparatus-a "soft machine", prescient text from 1990, De leuze notes that as Burroughs called it: an archive of received we are moving from what his friend Michel opinion, prejudice, ideology, gossip, instinct, Foucault called "disciplinary societies" toward physical habit, conceptual furrows cut by a new organisation of power that Deleuze grammar and logic, and mental patterns termed "societies of control". 6 The "disciplinary of association. This is made apparent to us societies" that arose in the seventeenth and by another machine, the tape recorder. In eighteenth centuries were fundamentally an experimental text titled "The Invisible concerned with social regulation through the Generation", Burroughs writes: visual surveillance of bodies and operated through spaces of confinement such as the [A] tape recorder is an externalized school, the army, the factory, the hospital, the section of the human nervous system ... Listening as Agon in the Society of Control you can find out more about the nervous 1. Nietzsche, Friedrich, On the Genealogy of Morals, Walter system and gain more control over your Kaufmann and RJ Hollingdale trans, New York: Vintage, 1989, 3: 24, p 151. reactions by using the tape recorder 2. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, 2:12, p 77. For than you could find out sitting twenty a more detailed discussion of this expanded conception of years in the lotus posture or wasting interpretation as will to power, see Cox, Christoph, Nietzsche: Naturalism and Interpretation, Berkeley: University of California your time on the analytic couch ... listen Press, 1999, chapters 3 and 4. to your present time tapes and you will 3. Lawrence Abu Hamdan, notes on the project Tape Echo, 2013, begin to see who you are and what you http://lawrenceabuhamdan.com/#/tapeecho/, cited in http:// www. vera li stce nte r.o rg/en gage/eve nt/19 51 /what-now-the­ are doing here ... study your associational politics-of-listening/ patterns and find out what cases in what 4. For a text that develops this distinction, see Barthes, Roland, "Listening", The Responsibility of Forms, Richard Howard trans, 10 pre-recordings for playback. New York: Hill and Wang, 1985, pp 245-260. 5. Hudspeth, AJ, "A Scientific Definition of Listening", paper We must become attentive to the mechanisms presented at the 2015 symposium What Now? The Politics of Listening, Vera List Center for Art and Politics, The New School, of control, Burroughs insists; and this requires New York City, 24 April, 2015. that we make manifest its codes, defaults, 6. Gilles De leuze, "Postscript on Control Societies", and memes. For Burroughs, this was primarily Negotiations: 1972-1990, Martin Joughin trans, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995, pp 177-182. See also "Control a practice of listening, of careful attention and Becoming", a discussion between Deleuze and Antonio Negri to the word as it is registered and looped from the same year, in the same volume. Deleuze first made the back through "pre-recordings" that infect distinction between discipline and control two years earlier, in a 1988 text on Foucault called "What is a Dispositif?" in Two and replicate in our cognition and imagination Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995, David in the form of speech patterns, cognitive habits, Lapoujade ed, Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina trans, New York: Semiotext[e], 2006, pp 345-346.