Listening to the Noise of the Multitude: On Siisiäinen’s Foucault and the Politics of Hearing

In 1976, Michel Foucault was interviewed by the editors of the newly established geography journal Hérodote.¹ At the beginning of the interview, the editors explain to Foucault that his concerns intersect with their own reflections on the ideologies and strategies of space, and that there are resources in his thought that have helped them to form a clearer understanding of geographic discourse. They express their surprise, then, at the lack of attention he has paid to geography. Foucault’s response to this is initially dismissive: “If I made a list of all the sciences, knowledges and domains which I should mention and don’t, which I border on in one way or another, the list would be endless,” he replies.²

To work on a science or an area of knowledge simply because it is important or interesting, he continues, is not a good method. Rather, if one wants to do historical work that has a political meaning and effectiveness, this is only possible on the basis of a deep involvement in the struggles that take place in the area of a particular question. “It’s up to you, who are directly involved with what goes on in geography, faced with all the conflicts of power which traverse it,” he tells the editors, “to confront them and construct the instruments that will allow you to fight on that terrain.”³ By the end of the interview, however, Foucault announces that he has enjoyed the conversation because, in the course of it, he has changed his mind. At the beginning, he tells the geographers, he had wondered why they wanted him to do their archaeology, rather than doing it themselves. By the end, he admits he can now see that the questions they have posed to him are crucial ones for him. “Geography must indeed necessarily lie at the heart of my concerns,” he acknowledges.

I begin this review of Lauri Siisiäinen’s Foucault and the Politics of Hearing with this interview because Foucault’s remarks there seem to provide a model for thinking about the work that is necessary if one wishes to stage an encounter between his thought and an area that is generally considered to lie outside his immediate concerns: in this case, what the book’s title terms “the politics of hearing.” In a context in which the commercial imperatives of publishing generate new industries around the work of major thinkers like Foucault, the weakest of these encounters will feel arbitrary and strained, and will fail to deepen our understanding of either Foucault’s work or the topic that they seek to investigate. At their best, however, such encounters hold the potential both to shed new light on Foucault’s thought, by revealing the little-acknowledged importance a particular question has for it, and to enhance our understanding of that question with the tools it provides.

It is the latter task that Siisiäinen’s book sets for itself. Foucault, as the author readily acknowledges, is not known as a thinker of the ear. And yet, the book’s basic aim “is to contest the view of Foucault as a thinker, for whom sound, voice, and auditory perception was an issue of only minor (if any) importance, and who devalued their political and historical role” (4). Not only does the book set out to uncover what its author suggests is the centrality of sound, or the ‘auditory-sonorous’ in each period of Foucault’s work; it seeks also to extend Foucault’s own insights on the politics of sound, the voice, and listening, in order to produce a new theoretical account of the political history of the ear.

To this end, the book ranges chronologically from the archaeological works of the early 1960s to the final lecture series at the Collège de France in 1982-83. In doing so, it traces numerous themes and historical settings, from Foucault’s account of the...