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In the early 1980s, an intellectual sea change occurred in the economic theories describing the former colonial world. Denounced by opponents as a counterrevolution in development economics, this transformation accompanied the shift of American and British fiscal policy from a post-World War II Keynesian consensus to what is now commonly labeled neoliberalism. Post-war theories of development accepted that a combination of public ownership and economic planning, aided by international investment, would create the basis for the modernization of the so-called Third World. In contrast, neoliberal economists located the main cause of "backwardness" in the failures of state intervention espoused by the previous orthodoxy. While the attack against the Keynesian model started after the recession of 1973-4, the election of anti-Soviet crusaders Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan inspired a new alloy of far-right conservatism and monetarist economics. The "unfettered magic of the free market" provided the rationale for an international shift in financial policy, including International Monetary Fund and World Bank structural adjustment projects, that coincided with –– and was partially touted as a response to –– a profound economic retrogression throughout the underdeveloped world. Ironically, the neoliberal paradigm met widespread opposition only after the destruction of the Soviet Union, which all manner of would-be prophets trumpeted far and wide as the ultimate vindication of free market capitalism.

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1. Introduction: Solitude's talk

If a flower-streaked inward eye could constitute Wordsworth's bliss of solitude, the inward voice has fared less glamorously. Its merest mention doesn't so much conjure up the consolation of inner riches recalled sotto voce as the pathos of this chattering internal radio for the antisocial; a poor comforter of enforced solitariness, or some misanthropist's illusion of company on his culpable flight from society. Inner speech is the touchstone of a privacy which needn't depend on the isolation of its silent speaker, for it may mutter forcefully in our ear even when we are among some animated social gathering. The very topic of inner speech conjures an aura of loneliness, whether hapless or wilful. It covers an emotional spectrum shading from the self-consciousness which eavesdrops on itself to the manias of aural possession. There's a thick history to this, intersecting with historical fluctuations in the idea of solitude and its worth. At periods the solitary became decorative; so hermits were hired to grace, hairily, the grottos of eighteenth century estates. And if there was an acceptable sex of solitude, this wasn't usually female, unless unsexed by saintliness. But compulsive or enforced sociability is a very modern aim and prescription; on the other hand, some psychoanalytic thought has held to the value of our being able to tolerate being alone.

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Who is responsible for all that gets said and done in a speech act? Is the speech act an act of speech, an act performed by speech and not just in speech? Is there, in other words, a "voice" of language that says things, whether or not we speakers say them? In her book Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony (2000), Denise Riley examines the manifold, unaccountable ways in which things get said and get done in language, without anyone's consent, intent, acquiescence, or concurrence. Specifically she refers to what she calls the "effectivity" of language, the "emotionality" of grammar and the "affectivity" of syntax. Riley poses the following dilemma: is this effectivity of language to be located ultimately in human speakers or in language itself? The idea that we could ascribe an effectivity or even agency to language may be cause for worry in some quarters because, as Riley writes, "If words are accorded their own head, it's often hastily assumed that speakers must be rendered abject, as if any consideration of language's own affect must lead straight to human dejection" (WOS, 4). Riley suggests, however, that the apparent necessity to ascribe agency to either the word or the speaker is in fact a false choice of loyalties.

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"It is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident any more, not its inner life, not its relation to the world, not even its right to exist.” Adorno's famous opening sentence especially applies to the field with which he was so concerned: new music. Contemporary composers acutely feel the problem of music's right to exist: while relying on performers, audiences and institutions to bring new music into existence, they also feel the antipathy of these same performers, audiences, and institutions towards "new music" in general. Moreover, different schools of composition spend just as much time criticizing their fellow composers' works as do newspaper and magazine critics.

If we want to see just how bad the situation has become, we need not look further than the pages of The New Yorker. In a recent broadside on German music, Alex Ross sets his sights on Helmut Lachenmann, Germany's current "great man." Of course, "there is no denying Lachenmann's virtuosity; he is able to arrange the unlikeliest assortment of sounds –– flutes blown at the wrong end, cellos bowed in places other than the strings, papers crinkled, sheet metal banged with rods –– into an intermittently gripping narrative ... Lachenmann has repeatedly emphasized the novelty and uncontaminated aspect of his sound worlds." But Ross' critique centers on Lachenmann's use of "uncontaminated" (read: anti-populist) sounds.

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This essay belongs to a series of writings on what I call "transgressive listening." They involve meditations on musical instances where the conditions of listening are altered, not only because of the formal nature (compositional and/or performative) of certain musical pieces, but also as a result of social-historical relations and practices. I consider the problem of listening less a matter of production of musical form or musical innovation as such –– though no doubt this is a decisive element in the process –– and more a matter of social practice, of history, of patterns of life and response to life in the world. In this respect, the composer or the musician faces the predicament of being listened to not as an agent of what s/he does as a practitioner of music but as a member of a society who listens –– or doesn't.

Listening certainly does not involve some natural talent. One might not say this about composing or playing an instrument or even having an ear for proper pitch, although in all these cases an effective performance depends on serious application and practice. Listening, in any case, is learned. (Or unlearned: whole communities can be rendered unskilled to listening, generation by generation, through certain patterns in musical production; that's what the hit market of commercial music is all about). One certainly learns to listen by listening, and by listening further: by expanding one's boundaries of exposure to sound, as well as by repeating the listening experience of a well known piece of music in the spirit of discovery. 

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Everyone knows that Invisible Man is a classic, but if that designation is to be anything other than a death sentence, then we must admit that we have yet to comprehend the novel, yet to understand completely what it has to say, in particular, regarding the interaction of the acoustic, the visual, and the racial. All three dimensions are invoked on its first page:

“ I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination –– indeed, everything and anything except me. . .. Nor is that invisibility exactly a matter of a biochemical accident to my epidermis. That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact.

The narrator insists that his invisibility is not natural, nor even accidental, but the product of a "refusal" on the part of others to see him. "Blackness," the unnamed "biochemical accident" to which he refers, would appear to provoke this refusal. But insofar as the narrator is able to speak, to write, to figure his condition, his invisibility would appear not to be absolute. Indeed, the very figure of the "bodiless head" by which he means to mark his invisibility would appear to confer some minimal visibility on the narrator, and it suggests that the refusal of the black body is perhaps never complete.

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A review of Greenberg, Clement. Late Writings. Edited by Robert C. Morgan. (Minneapolis and London, ME: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).

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