Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality

Veit Erlmann

ISBN 10: 1935408054 / ISBN 13: 9781935408055

Edité par Zone Books, 2014

A propos de cet article

How the ear came to play a central role in modern culture and rationality. Hearing has traditionally been regarded as the second sense--as somehow less rational and less modern than the first sense, sight. Reason and Resonance explodes this myth by reconstructing the process through which the ear came to play a central role in modern culture and rationality. For the past four hundred years, hearing has been understood as involving the sympathetic resonance between the vibrating air and various parts of the inner ear. But the emergence of resonance as the centerpiece of modern aurality also coincides with the triumph of a new type of epistemology in which the absence of resonance is the very condition of thought. Our mind's relationship to the world is said to rest on distance or, as the very synonym for reason suggests, reflection. Reason and Resonance traces the genealogy of this intimate animosity between reason and resonance through a series of interrelated case studies involving a varied cast of otologists, philosophers, physiologists, pamphleteers, and music theorists. Among them are the seventeenth-century architect-zoologist Claude Perrault, who refuted Cartesianism in a book on sound and hearing; the Sturm und Drang poet Wilhelm Heinse and his friend the anatomist Samuel S mmerring, who believed the ventricular fluid to be the interface between the soul and the auditory nerve; the renowned physiologist Johannes M ller, who invented the concept of sense energies; and M ller's most important student, Hermann von Helmholtz, author of the magisterial Sensations of Tone. Erlman also discusses key twentieth-century thinkers of aurality, including Ernst Mach; the communications engineer and proponent of the first nonresonant wave theory of hearing, Georg von B k sy; political activist and philosopher G nther Anders; and Martin Heidegger.

N° de réf. du vendeur CIN1935408054G

Détails bibliographiques

• Titre: Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality
• Éditeur: Zone Books
• Date de parution: 2014
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN à 10 chiffres: 1935408054
• ISBN à 13 chiffres: 9781935408055
• Reliure: Paperback
• État de l'article: Good

A propos de ce titre

Synopsis

Hearing has traditionally been understood as the second sense -- less rational and modern than seeing, the master of all senses, the first sense. Reason and Resonance is the first full-length study to explode this myth by reconstructing the history of aurality and the process through which the ear assumed a central role in modern culture and rationality.

From the beginning of the seventeenth century to the early decades of the twentieth, scientists believed that resonance was the operative mechanism of the human ear. To comprehend the act of hearing was to recognize the existence of a sympathetic resonance between vibrating air and various parts of the inner ear. But resonance, by extension, also entailed adjacency, sympathy, and the collapse of the boundary between perceiver and perceived -- phenomena usually thought of as polar opposites of reason.

As Veit Erlmann argues, however, with the emergence of resonance as the centerpiece of modern aurality, a new type of epistemology triumphed, one involving an intimate and complex relation between reason and resonance. From 1633 to 1928, philosophy and otology struggled to comprehend a set of strikingly similar problems regarding the foundations of subjectivity, truth, and sensation. Focusing on the materiality and material culture of listening, Erlmann lucidly elaborates a history of aurality that simultaneously provides a new history of modernity wherein the modern subject is neither deaf nor dumb, ocularcentric or logocentric. The subject of modernity takes shape in its uneasy struggles and truces with "cogito" and "audio," the effect of the intertwined histories of thinking and hearing.

Reason and Resonance begins with a transformative interpretation of Descartes that counters the philosopher's usual profile as the "founding father of the modernist visualist paradigm." Erlmann then traces the genealogy of the "intimate animosity" between reason and resonance through a series of interrelated case studies involving a variegated cast of otologists, philosophers, physiologists, pamphleteers, and music theorists. More an auditory history of knowledge than a history of auditory culture, Reason and Resonance follows the movement of modernity through a sense hitherto unheard and thought.

À propos de l'auteur

Veit Erlmann holds the Endowed Chair of Music History at the University of Texas at Austin's Butler School of Music.