From the Empire of the Gaze to Noisy Bodies: Foucault, Audition and Medical Power

As we know, the epistemological difference between the eye and the ear, sight and hearing, visual- and auditory perception/experience or gaze and listening, in all its historical-, ethical- and political significance, is a much discussed and debated issue in the field of contemporary political theory (taken in a broad sense). To begin with, the debate revolving around the primacy of vision in Occidental culture – in philosophy, science and politics as well– and around the concomitant downplay of the other sense, especially audition – has been persistent in the post-World-War II- cultural- and political theory (and, to be sure, also before). While some have still defended the pre-eminence of vision as the necessary condition of civilization, historical progress and autonomy (from nature, from authority), various other theorists have argued that the inevitable downside of Occidental ocularcentrism is the increasing social domination generated by the all-penetrating, distant, objectifying, reifying and “freezing” gaze, and suppression or oblivion of the affective, participatory and temporal capacities of audition. However, both sides appear to share one presupposition in common: the eye and the ear, vision and audition can be distinguished or juxtaposed– also in their political significance –in terms of their unique nature (their intrinsic capacities, powers, “functions”, limitations etc.). As we will see, this presupposition has been adopted – and still is – by a number of divergent contemporary thinkers.

Subsequently, the essentialist, trans-historical and reductive character of the juxtaposition between “audio” and “visual” has become the target of various critical interventions. Firstly, the theoretical reduction of vision (and the “visual”) to the objectifying and dominating gaze has been disputed, suggesting instead a more pluralistic approach, affirmative of the historical and cultural multiplicity of heterogeneous scopic regimes (to use the term of Martin Jay), of visual cultures (in plural) with their divergent ethical and political potentialities. The demand for historicity and plurality has been extended also to the ear, audition and auditory culture (s). First of all, this has meant recognition of the fundamental changes, transfigurations and metamorphoses of the ear, hearing and listening – in auditory perception as such – as they become articulated into different cultural or discursive forms or “regimes”. In political terms, this has meant emphasis on the multiple potential articulations between auditory perception and different modalities of political action, including apparatuses of power with their rationalities, knowledge(s), arts and techniques.

In this context, the thought of Michel Foucault (among many others) has been taken into critical re-reading and re-evaluation. Various critics have labeled him as “one of” the anti-visual (“iconoclast”) thinkers, who tend to reduce the political potentialities of sight and visual culture to the operation of the objectifying, surveying and dominating gaze (the clinical/medical gaze, the Panopticon etc.). ¹The tone of the discussion has been critical as well, when it comes to Foucault’s attitude towards hearing and auditory perception. It seems that he was hardly at all interested in the “ear” (unlike various other contemporary French thinkers). When Foucault did come across the issue of auditory experience – in his Birth of the Clinic – he has been accused of reducing it – in quite essentialist terms –to the inherently non-objectifying and non-spatial “other” of vision and, consequently, of the (supposedly) visually biased forms of modern knowledge and power. The critics have argued that Foucault’s adoption of this reductive-essentialist conception of audition leads him to neglect its various political uses, in the modern forms of power most importantly, as well as its historical role. The conclusion of the criticism is severe: that Foucault quite uncritically adopts the conventional, transhistorical binary opposition of “audio” and “visual”. Or, even if he does admit the plurality of vision and visuality, he still reduces the ear and audition in conventional, essentialist terms to the “other” of sight, and assumes that modern power-knowledge (surveillance, discipline, normalization, bio-power) by necessity is in the last instance power of the gaze, in which audition can really have no actual, independent significance, i.e. any role not reducible to the gaze.²

In this essay, I focus precisely on...