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Plato's Chamber of Secrets On eavesdropping andtruth(s)Martin IddonVersion of record first published: 29 Oct 2010.

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Pe rf o rm a n c e R e s e a r c h 1 5 ( 3 ) , p p . 6 - 1 0 © Ta y l o r & F ra n c i s L td 2 01 0

D O I : 1 0 . 1 0 8 0 / 1 3 5 2 8 1 6 5 . 2 0 1 0 . 5 2 7 1 9 2

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human

creature is constituted to be that profound secret

and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration,

when I enter a great city by night, that every one

of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own

secret; that every room in every one of them encloses

its own secret; that every beating heart in the

hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some

of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!

(Dickens 1993: 10)

I

If, as Jameson contends, the visual ‘is essentially

pornographic, which is to say it has its end in

rapt, mindless fascination’ (Jameson 1992: 1),

might it follow that this voyeuristic aspect of

the gaze finds an analogue in other taxonomies

of the senses? Rather than re-tread the well-

worn binary of passive hearing and active

listening, an extension of Jameson’s visual trope

might make it possible to speculate what could

follow ‘essentially’ in the case of a taxonomy

of the sensual ear. As Fitzgerald proposes, the

‘eavesdropper, perhaps, would be the auditory

equivalent of the voyeur’ (Fitzgerald 2010: 25).

It is tempting to conclude, with him, that this is

hardly a fruitful starting point. It may seem a

happier notion to contend, as Etherington does,

that ‘the listening subject holds no fixed position

within some formulaic model of transmission

and reception.’ Within such a conception, the

listening subject’s position is fluid; even if linear,

there is always the prospect of ‘jumping the rails’

into some new interpretive milieu. It is in this

sort of nexus that Etherington suggests that

‘listening does not rid us of the possessiveness

of the gaze, but it might disperse its tyranny’

(Etherington, 2010: 42). Yet to be in flux, to

hold on to the possibility of multiple strands of

listening practice, necessitates simultaneously

accepting that, at the very least, eavesdropping

might express a part of what it is that a subject

does, or might do, when it listens.

If the figure of the eavesdropper may initially

have appeared to be an unfamiliar stranger

within the world of listening, the language of

listening suggests something rather different.

French, like English, divides the functions of the

sense in two: écouter (‘to listen to’) and entendre

(‘to hear’). Yet the etymologies, and the various

linguistic intersections designated by these

words, may be more enlightening than their

English analogues at first suggest.

In answering the question, what it might be to be listening, to be ‘all ears’, Nancy observes:

After it had designated a person who listens (who

spies), the word écoute came to designate a place

where one could listen in secret. Être aux écoutes,

‘to listen in, to eavesdrop,’ consisted first in being

in a concealed place where you could surprise a

conversation or a confession. Être à l’écoute, ‘to

be tuned in, to be listening,’ was in the vocabulary

of military espionage before it returned, through

broadcasting, to the public space, while still

remaining, in the context of the telephone, an affair

of confidences or stolen secrets. (Nancy 2007: 4)

To listen, then, in these terms, is essentially

to listen to, to over-hear and, moreover, to hear

something secret. To be listening is to come to

Plato’s Chamber of SecretsOn eavesdropping and truth(s)

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know a secret; ‘[w]hat secret is at stake when

one truly listens, that is, when one tries to

capture or surprise the sonority rather than the

message?’, Nancy asks (Nancy 2007: 5). Perhaps

it might be more accurately expressed: to be,

listening, is to be aware that there is a secret: ‘If

‘to hear’ is to understand the sense […], to listen

is to be straining toward a possible meaning,

and consequently one that is not immediately

accessible.’ (Nancy 2007: 6) To stretch the ear,

then, is to try to over-hear a certain veiled

truth. Similarly, in English, ‘to hear’ always

already includes the sense ‘to learn’, ‘to be[come]

informed of’ (Nancy 2007: 69, n. 5). One might

recall the way in which, in everyday speech,

to ask ‘have you seen?’ is to ask regarding

information in the public domain (‘have you

seen the news?’, ‘have you seen such-and-such a

film?’); to ask ‘have you heard?’ is to ask about

the private realm. Importantly, to ask ‘have you

heard?’ already denotes the expectation that

the listening subject addressed is not yet privy

to the secret about to be disclosed. It is in this

sense that one might remember that entendre

means more than simply to hear; it means, too,

comprende, to understand, ‘as if ‘hearing’ were

above all ‘hearing say’ (rather than ‘hearing

sound’), or rather, as if in all ‘hearing’ there

had to be a ‘hearing say,’ regardless of whether

the sound perceived was a word or not.’ (Nancy

2007: 6). The secret that is to be understood in

hearing, then, is, or might be, nothing to do with

a linguistic message as such but, rather, a bodily

one. At any rate, the body might be considered the

site of Nancy’s eavesdropping: it is the resonant

chamber in which the secret is unveiled.

Yet, if these are ‘private’ listenings, there

are yet more secretive ‘professional’ listening

practices to be had. The French, écouter, itself

stems from the Latin, auscultare: ‘to listen’, to be

sure, but also to ‘overhear’ and to ‘listen secretly’.

To examine the Latin root more carefully, it itself

is comprised of a contraction of auris, meaning

ear, and the frequentative -culto. Though it is

hardly clear whence -culto itself may derive,1 it is

evident that, in Latin at least, it is concerned with

concealment and, significantly, a concealment

from vision. Aside from ausculto, the other three

lemmata given by Lewis & Short are caeculto

(‘to be like one blind’), occulto (‘to hide, conceal,

secrete’), and subausculto (‘to listen secretly, to

eavesdrop’). In modern medical terminology, the

idea of listening for that which cannot be seen,

that which is hidden, survives: auscultation is a

listening to sounds that are within the body. It is

worth noting, too, the correspondence between

the auricle, the external part of the ear, and the

left and right auricles: muscle pouches attached

to the atria of the heart. The ear and the heart

are, in a sense, both involved in what it might

mean to ‘listen in’.

In this sense, listening is always already

qualified: one listens in, one overhears, to catch a

bodily message. Other qualifications are possible,

of course. As the German, horchen (‘to listen’,

but also ‘to eavesdrop’), is intimately related

to gehorchen (‘to obey’), so the Greek akouı contains both the meanings ‘understanding’

and ‘following’ or ‘obeying’ (Nancy 2007: 69

n. 5). To hear, in this sense, can only be also to

obey. Yet to follow – to have faith in the message

offered through hearing in this sense – cannot,

as Wannenwetsch argues, survive as akoae alone.

Though faith may derive from akoae, it ‘must

become hyp-akoae: literally, to ‘under-hear’, to

hear from below, also translatable as to ‘open

up’’. (Wannenwetsch 2010: 94). In the terms

Wannenwetsch posits, those who are ‘opened up’

by hearing follow, obey, the message: the body

must do as well as be the site of hearing; the

body must be opened up as the chamber in which

listening resonates. The alternative is to be a

‘mere hearer’, one of those who ‘actually practise

par-akoae: they literally ‘hear aside’, disobey’

(Wannenwetsch 2010: 94).

Wannenwetsch’s assertion that faith derives

from akoae contains an intriguing reference

to Galatians 3.25: ‘Now that faith has come,

we are no longer under the supervision of the

law/ ε’λθουσης δε της πιστεως ου’ κετι υ‘ πο

παιδαγωγον ε’σµεν’. Though paidagogon might

equally well be translated as a ‘tutor’ rather than

1 Lewis & Short propose a

union of auris and the

Sanskrit, çru (‘to hear’).

Plato’s Chamber of Secrets

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‘the law’, to have faith in the secret message of

listening might be interpreted, once more, just

as Etherington suggests, as a way of fighting

against the hegemonies symbolized in discourse

by the Gaze just as much as by the Law. In any

case, the logic (and not only the scriptural logic)

asserts that ‘listening’ qua listening is nothing

of the kind; it is always a qualified activity. One

may, as Wannenwetsch suggests, ‘under-listen’

or ‘listen aside’, but one might also ‘over-hear’

or ‘listen in’. Wannenwetsch suggests that ‘we

either communicate or fail to communicate’, yet

when considered both within and without the New

Testament logic, it might be possible to suggest

that listening involves more than just this ‘either-

or’, since it is possible to make choices beyond

this: whether to listen in to resonance, or to allow

the resonance to reverberate within the body.

Nevertheless, this nexus of hearings reinforces

the seeming potency within Wannenwetsch’s

assertion: that there is ‘no escape from the

morality of listening into the purity of a theory

[…] explains why the act of listening is intimately

bound up with our perception of the truth.’

(Wannenwetsch 2010: 101).

I I

It is hardly surprising that, in the ocularcentric

culture of the Modern West, Plato’s Allegory

of the Cave (Republic VII, 514a–520a) has been

interpreted in modes related almost without

exception to vision. Plato’s own text is complicit

in this, since, although he does introduce the

echo of the voices of those moving the objects,

this ‘is so quickly set aside by Plato himself

in favor of the visual and luminous scheme

exclusively’ that the reader might be forgiven

for having forgotten that there was, too, noise

resounding within the cave (Nancy 2007: 75,

n. 42). The forgetfulness is hardly restricted

to philosophical thought; composers too, it

might seem, when they think of the cave at all,

remember the cave as a space for seeing, and

not for reverberation. Brian Ferneyhough’s Opus contra naturam (2000) requires its speaking,

Liberace-style pianist, who accompanies Walter

Benjamin’s descent into the Underworld, to

ask: ‘Are the shadows of objects on cave walls

themselves objects?’ (see Whittall 2003: 26).

For Plato, even if it is allowed presence in the

text only briefly, a listening to voices has a vital

function. There are only two references to voices

within Plato’s text. In one, Plato has Socrates ask

Glaucon: ‘[I]f the wall of their prison opposite

them reflected sound, don’t you think that they

would suppose, whenever one of the passers-

by on the road spoke, that the voice belonged

to the shadow passing before them?’ Here, the

purpose of listening is confirmatory; listening

authenticates the truth of what the eyes have

already witnessed. The second reference is more

telling, though: ‘[I]f they were able to talk to each

other, would they not assume that the shadows

they saw were the real things?’ (Republic VII,

515b). In this case, then, listening – or at any rate

the possibility of communication afforded by

listening – is the condition by which one might

presume that the shadows on the cave wall were

the real objects; only through the resonance of

the cave does the possibility of identification,

and of agreement upon that identification, arise.

It is precisely this function of hearing – this

confirmation of truths – to which Rancière

alludes in his discussion of Flaubert and ‘the

age of clairvoyance’, in which ‘saying and seeing

have entered into a communal space without

distance and without connection.’ Rather than

confirmation of the truth in what has been said

being found in what one sees, for Rancière,

it is the ear which, by identifying a repetition or an

assonance, will make it known that the sentence

is false – that is, that it does not possess the sound

of the true, the breath of chaos undergone and

mastered. (Rancière 2007: 47)

Notably, though, where for Plato the power

of listening was to reinforce, to confirm, a

‘truth’ that was, truly, no truth, for Rancière, at

least in the context of Flaubert, listening does

quite the opposite: it identifies the falsehood

in that presented as if it were true. Whatever

the specifics, for both Plato and Rancière the

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9

Plato’s Chamber of Secrets

internalisation of sound in the cavity of the ear

is a process which leads to the revelation of some

‘truth’.

Certainly, it is clear that, for both, the truths

of listening are not the same truths as those of

viewing. As Jankélévitch suggests, if the truths

of viewing become clear through an unveiling,

the truths of listening do not develop in the same

way; the truths of listening, articulated through

music in Jankélévitch’s thinking, always already

are that unveiling: ‘music is not an exposé,

revealing some nontemporal truth; rather, it

is exposition itself that is the only truth, the

serious truth’ (Jankélévitch 2003, 66–67).2

Nancy makes clear at least one aspect of the

distinction, by reference to acousmatics – by

which I (with Nancy) mean the Pythagorean

esoteric tradition of listening to the unseen

teacher in silence – and the later Catholic

tradition of confession, with its ‘secret intimacy

of sin and forgiveness’. In the case of the ear,

Nancy suggests, there is ‘withdrawal and turning

inward, a making resonant’, while in the case

of the eye there is, instead, ‘manifestation and

display, a making evident’ (Nancy 2007: 3).

This sort of ‘turning inward’ is identified by

Jankélévitch in his claim that music ‘inhabits

our intimate center’, creating a listening which is

‘lived’ ‘with the ontic participation of our entire

being.’ In comparison,

[f]or an observer who is perched in the observatory,

protected by the heights he commands, everything

can be seen together; he grants himself global

vision, immediate vision, cavalier toward the

existences that unfold below, where dramas are

being rolled out like a tapestry.

(Jankélévitch 2003: 95)

The consequence of this, as Jankélévitch

outlines it, is that the ‘human being who sees is

looking in order not to be.’ One need not subscribe

to such an extreme stance – that looking at

represents an attempt to disavow one’s own

ontology – in order to consider that there might be

a distinction in the sorts of being that are implied

by considerations of particular sense data.

Again, it seems entirely consistent with a culture

dominated by lines of sight, that existence itself

– long before Heidegger – came to be regarded

as Dasein, being there, an outward-looking

ontology that, while it may involve a being-in-the-

world, considers Hiersein, being where one is,

secondary.3 Little surprise, then, that Hegelian

‘man’ might be conceived of as a ‘negative being

who is solely to the extent that he abolishes

being’ (Hegel, quoted in Debord 1995: 92), who is

there only to the extent that ‘he’ is not here. Little

surprise either that existence, when conceived

through tropes of vision, becomes bewildering:

sight is, necessarily, multiple, while sound,

through its ubiquity, unites space.4 As Bachelard

has it, like Argus Panoptes, ‘[s]ight says too many

things at one time. Being does not see itself.

Perhaps it listens to itself’ (Bachelard 1994: 215).

Yet there is something else that is vital in

Plato’s account or rather, in his failure to account

for voices and the hearing of voices. Plato

outlines the process the individual might pass

through on the route toward understanding the

truth of objects in the light of day:

[I]f he were forcibly dragged up the steep and rugged

ascent and not let go till he had been dragged out

into the sunlight, the process would be a painful

one, to which he would much object, and when he

emerged into the light his eyes would be so dazzled

by the glare of it that he wouldn’t be able to see a

single one of the things he was now told were real

(Republic VII, 515e–516a).

He would need to grow accustomed to the light

before he could see things in the upper world

outside the cave. First he would find it easiest to

look at shadows, next to the reflections of men and

other objects in water, and later on at the objects

themselves. After that he would find it easier to

observe the heavenly bodies and the sky itself at

night, and to look at the light of the moon and stars

rather than at the sun and its light by day

(Republic VII, 516a–b).

The thing he would be able to do last would be to

look directly at the sun itself, and gaze at it without

using reflections in water or any other medium, but

as it is in itself (Republic VII, 516b).

2 It is worth noting, too,

that the notion of unveiling

in this context is basically a

fusion of Schopenhauerian

and Heideggerian modes of

thought. Just as, for

Schopenhauer, music is not

a representation of the Idea

but instead a copy of the

Will, here, for Jankélévitch,

music does not enact a

Heideggerian unveiling of

truths; instead music

always already is that

unveiling, which is itself

the disclosedness of truths

(aletheia). See Heidegger’s

‘The Origin of the Work of

Art’ (Heidegger 1978).

3 Karl Jaspers’s notion of

Existenz, which was, too,

conceived in opposition to

Heidegger’s Dasein

operates according to

similar parameters. Yet,

while Existenz in Jaspers’s

sense is arguably

internalised, listening,

understood as I try to

outline above, is a process

of reverberation and

resonance. To be sure,

though, Heidegger’s

particular

conceptualisation of Dasein

– as opposed to the more

everyday German-language

usage – involves a process

of reverberation and

reflection. It is worth

noting, too, that the

Heideggerian Dasein is, as

well as da-sein (being

there), also dass-sein (that

it is). This latter sense

contrasts with the was-sein

(what it is) that Heidegger

suggests has characterised

the underlying aims of

ontological study in

Western thought and,

arguably, metaphysics as a

whole.

4 Serres suggests that it is

precisely this distinction

that is exemplified in

Hermes’ defeat of the

many-eyed Argus, achieved

by lulling him to sleep

through the telling of

stories (according to some

accounts) and playing on a

shepherd’s pipe (in others)

before killing him with a

stone (Serres 2008: 108).

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Vitally, the function of listening does not change according to Plato’s formulation of the

philosopher’s awakening to truth. In short, even

the philosopher ruler conceived by Plato is still,

as a listener, always already in the cave. In the

process of becoming subject described by Plato

here, the sense of hearing, and the particular

truths revealed by it, remain possible only with

the enclosed resonant chamber of the cave.

It might not be too surprising that Plato would

skirt around the issues of sound, given his

suspicion, elsewhere in Republic, of the power

that listening might exert upon impressionable

youth: ‘For rhythm and harmony penetrate

deeply into the mind and take a most powerful

hold on it, and, if education is good, bring and

impart grace and beauty, if it is bad, the reverse.’

(Republic III, 401d–401e). This power is given

its full force, though with little sense of the

negative intimated by Plato, in Jankélévitch’s

extrapolation from the same text of the

possibilities afforded by that particular mode of

listening which involves music:

By means of massive irruptions, music takes up

residence in our intimate self and seemingly elects

to make its home there. The man inhabited and

possessed by this intruder, the man robbed of a

self, is no longer himself: he has become nothing

more than a vibrating string, a sounding pipe. He

trembles madly under the bow or the fingers of the

instrumentalist; and just as Apollo fills the Pythia’s

lungs, so the organ’s powerful voice and the harp’s

gentle accents take possession of the listener. This

process, at once irrational and shameful, takes

place on the margins of truth, and thus borders

more on magic than on empirical science.

(Jankélévitch 2003: 1)

There is little need to go so far as Jankélévitch

to speculate that, if empirical science may be

considered a science of observation, the sorts

of truths revealed by listening are closer to

those of transcendental idealism. If the listener

is, in Plato’s sense, always already within the

cave – within the resonant chamber – the world

of the listener is, arguably, a world closer to

that of ‘pure thought’. In this sense, as in many

others, hearing in the cave precedes seeing:

‘The ear knows then that the eyes are closed, it

knows that it is responsible for the being who

is thinking and writing’ (Bachelard 1994: 181).

The inhabitants of Plato’s cave seem to have an

unblinking gaze, in the half-light of the fire;

they might have found themselves closer to the

truth had they, rather than leaving the cave and

entering into the light, simply shut their eyes.

R E F E R E N C E S

Bachelard, Gaston (1994 [1954]) The Poetics of Space,

trans. Maria Jolas, Boston, MA: Beacon.

Debord, Guy (1995 [1967]) The Society of the Spectacle,

trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, New York, NY: Zone

Books.

Dickens, Charles (1993 [1859]) A Tale of Two Cities, London: Everyman.

Etherington, Ben (2010) ‘Sound Gazes?’ in Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 135 (Special Issue,

no. 1): 39–43.

Fitzgerald, William (2010), ‘Listening, Ancient and

Modern’ in Journal of the Royal Musical Association,

135 (Special Issue, no. 1): 25–37.

Heidegger, Martin (1978 [1936]) ‘The Origin of the Work

of Art’, trans. Albert Hofstadter, in Basic Writings, ed.

David Farrell Krell, London: Routledge, pp. 139-212.

Jameson, Fredric (1992) Signatures of the Visible,

London: Routledge.

Jankélévitch, Vladimir (2003 [1961] Music and the Ineffable, trans. Carolyn Abbate, Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press.

Nancy, Jean-Luc (2007 [2002]) Listening, trans.

Charlotte Mandell, New York, NY: Fordham University

Press.

Plato (1987) The Republic, trans. Desmond Lee, Second

Edition, London: Penguin.

Rancière, Jacques (2007 [2003]), The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliott, London: Verso.

Serres, Michel (2008 [1985]) The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies, trans. Margaret Sankey

and Peter Cowley, London: Continuum.

Wannenwetsch, Bernd (2010) ‘’Take Heed What Ye

Hear’: Listening as a Moral, Transcendental and

Sacramental Act’ in Journal of the Royal Musical Association 135 (Special Issue, no. 1): 91–102.

Whittall, Arnold (2003) ‘Connections and

Constellations’ in The Musical Times, 144 (1883): 23–32.

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