The Instrumental Ear

1. Freud’s Ears and his Acoustic Revolution

One of the many revolutionary ideas introduced by Freud was his rejection of the medical inspection of his patients. Before the inception of psychoanalysis, he began his work — as is expected of any medical practitioner — with an examination. With his transformation into a psychoanalyst, however, Freud seemingly disappears from sight and turns a blind eye to the visual dimension altogether. Such is the metamorphosis of Freud: from Narcissus he transforms into Echo.
Perhaps the eyes are the mirror to the soul, but Freud does not want to see the soul (which is in itself impossible); instead, he wants to hear it. How can it be possible to see the soul? It is as if he contemplates the following quote by Baltasar Gracián, a writer and philosopher of the Baroque period, which itself is so dear to psychoanalysts: «Look into the soul through the windows of the eyes, hear its voice through the mouth, and speak to it through the crevices of the ears» ¹ . A psychoanalyst does not search for the soul in the eyes; he addresses the ears. He provides the other person with an opportunity to express themself, to exercise their right to speak, because «the mouth seems to me the principal gate and door of the soul; for as through the passage of the senses, objects enter, so this is reserved only with respect, for the mind to go forth, and to manifest herself by the help of her expressions» ² .
The subject, the unconscious, the psyche — these are the things one can listen for, the things that can be heard but cannot be observed or seen. And so, Freud shuts his eyes, understanding that the face of the other is a surface upon which the onlooker can project. Freud’s predecessor, Socrates, urged his interlocutor, «Speak, so that I may see you». The eyes may be a mirror of the soul, but they mustn’t cast a glare. Let them remain shut so that they do not interrupt the listening. Freud turns his eyes away; he prefers to perk up his ears in a particular way. It is in the act of listening to the hysterical questioning that psychoanalysis appears, and with it — a formula: the ear is nothing like the eye, and it cannot be shut.
The ears of a psychoanalyst exist in a state of perpetual awareness, unburdened by constant concentration. This state, invented in 1912 by Freud, comprises a dispersed, diffused, evenly suspended awareness of everything that can be heard. Freud strives to remove the conscious aspect from the process of listening in addition to having already removed the visual. The unconscious of one person should be listening to the unconscious of the other as much as possible, excluding the conscious perception, which operates in terms of important/unimportant. Who decides? The speaker? No, the listener decides, and it is Freud’s invention that presupposes that such differentiation should be avoided. Only one thing is important a priori: any one word out of everything that is being said might hold significance.
Let us note that Freud turns a blind eye to what is later going to be called the society of the spectacle, to that which is going to become a pageant of proportions that would leave even the Baroque period envious; he turns a blind eye to the world that will have submerged itself in the omnipresent screens. To keep our eyes closed today is a difficulty on par with being able to absent-mindedly listen to the other. In this regard, Freud would probably agree with Wittgenstein: «The ear receives; the eye looks. (It glances, it flashes, radiates, gleams). One can terrify with his eyes, not with one’s ear or nose» ³ . Fearlessly and without the intention to scare, Freud listens to the voice of the other. He doesn’t examine or attempt to observe; he perceives and embraces the speech of the other. He lends his subject a hospitable instrument — his ear. An ear — ὄργανον*,* meaning both an organ and an instrument, and even a machine.
Hence, in his search for a human subject, Freud gives preference to the acoustic space. Acoustics does not presuppose the concentration of sound in one place; on the contrary, it implies the propagation of sound, its movement, and its formation. The visual space mandates the existence of points on which the sight concentrates, whereas the ear is always dispersed, and it is in his theory of evenly suspended attention that Freud fully utilises the possibilities provided by the acoustic space.
The scattered nature of the acoustic space, with its propagating sounds, presupposes the theoretical possibility of being able to perceive everything within it. Of course there are not many extraneous noises in an analytical space; we cannot say that an analyst in his listening has his attention fully dispersed on everything around him, even though the theory of acoustic space is one of the «all-around». David Schwarz in his analysis of the history of music perception and the conditions for creating the listener experience, mentions this theory: «We hear ‘all-around’ and see in one direction only. The idea is theoretically appealing, it links representations of sound to the pre-symbolic realm of sonorous enclosure; it places visual signs clearly within the binary of the Imaginary Order» ⁴ .
The Imaginary Order — or, more precisely, disorder, –– in which the binary notions are constantly switching places is established on the mirror stage, in the initial doubling, but this disorder is always predetermined by the symbolic order. How that occurs exactly is a different question. If we take its predetermination into account, there will be no pre-symbolic field to speak of. There is no pre-discursive reality, especially where the representation of sound is concerned. The symbolic order, however, establishes itself precisely in the acoustic space, starting with the bath of language into which the subject is born. This begins with the remnants, words heard from the others, which gradually inscribe the matrix of a language. This is meant to become the House of Being (to use Heidegger’s term).

2. Theodor Reik’s Third Ear

In 1948, Theodor Reik, Freud’s pupil who was not just a psychoanalyst but also a literary and musical expert, wrote a book titled «Listening with the Third Ear». Later in 1964, Jacques Lacan recommended this book to his auditors, although he mentioned his dislike for the title. He said, «as if two [ears] were not enough to be deaf with» ⁵ . Should the psychoanalyst be deaf? The answer is yes, at least to himself, his own voices. In order to listen to music, one is not required to have ears that are capable of hearing, with Beethoven being a prime example. His ears were not able to, but he was not deaf; he was clairaudient. His hearing was turned inward. Lacan, referencing Reik, acknowledges:

«He [Reik] maintains that this third ear helps him to hear some voice or other that speaks to him in order to warn him of deception — he belongs to the good old days, the heroic days, when one was able to hear what was being said behind the deception of the patient» ⁶ .

The third ear hears the other speech, that which is «expressed almost inaudibly, pianissimo, so to speak» ⁷ . While Reik borrows the term «third ear» from Nietzsche, he reinterprets it as a psychoanalytical ear, meant to hear not only tones, but overtones as well. Furthermore, it can be described as «artistic» and «stylistic». This is how Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe interprets Nietzsche’s term: the third ear «discerns in writing, discourse, or a language a fundamental musicality — fundamental, above all, in that it makes sense» ⁸ . Nietzsche conveys the meaning that appears from the musicality of his language: the third ear demands that the text, which it hears/reads, should have a rhythm, a sonority, a pace, and a violation of strict symmetry. Reik’s third ear is sensitive and patient; it is able to capture the way he writes, able to capture each staccato and rubato.
This emphasis on the acoustic space, on the echo, is called catacoustics. Reik, being the echo-oriented catacoustic person, identifies himself as an auditory man. As Lacoue-Labarthe puts it, listening with Reik’s third ear is «what one might call a listening by echo, or catacoustic interpretation» ⁹ . The echo duplicates, as if to signify that there is no self without the other, without someone who responds.
The third ear focuses on the silence, without which psychoanalysis can barely exist. For Reik, unlike Lacan, the silence is primordial. Lacan suggests that the noise brings about the existence of silence, whereas for Reik it is the silence that came first. In this way, Reik adds the magic of silence to the magic of words. The word and the silence are not opposed to each other, because the latter «vibrates with unspoken words» ¹⁰ , while what has been said emphasises the silence. Who is an analyst? — A person who is not afraid of the silence, a proponent of John Cage, whether they know the composer or not. An analyst is a person who

«listens to things other than what is being said; he hears that, which is not conveyed with words. He listens with the ‘third ear’, capable of hearing beyond the patient’s speech, of capturing one’s own internal voices which emerge from the depths of the unconscious» ¹¹ .

Pondering this concept of the third ear, Reik remembers Gustav Mahler, who once noted that the most important part of music is not included in the score. The same is true for psychoanalysis: «the most important is not what is being said, but that, which is concealed by the speech and revealed by the silence» ¹² . One should pay attention to the silence of the other.
Reik’s third ear is psychoanalytical by nature, bi-directional by design: firstly, «it is able to grasp what the others are not saying, but only feeling or thinking; and it can also be directed inward» ¹³ . The ear, however, does not turn inward to then voice what has been heard. It is focused on one’s own internal voices, which should be muffled. Voices which, as Lacan puts it, a psychoanalyst should not be able to hear. The instrumental ear should not create an echo, and neither should the mental ear.
The third ear helps Reik navigate between the audible and the visible, in the interspace between the acoustic echo and the mirror image. It is especially noteworthy that Reik insisted that psychoanalysts should receive a conservatory education. The analytical ear is at the same time a musical ear and thus requires tuning. The other instance requires a different tuning as well, an example of which would be Pauline Oliveros’ Deep Listening.
An instrument must be tuned, and it is tuned relative to the time period, to the history that surrounds it. The ears are not simply a physical organ. They are a historical instrument, and when Bernard Stiegler discusses the music of the 20th century, he suggests that it begins with a transformation of hearing that is indicative of the «deep transformation of the century’s ears» ¹⁴ at the beginning of the 21st century. Hearing is not granted from birth. The new century requires a tuning of new ears, and one could conceivably write a history of musical hearing, that is to say, a «critical theory of hearing» ¹⁵ .
The concept of the third ear has obvious parallels to the third eye. It is meant to hear what the biological ears are unable to hear. When discussing the meeting between Odysseus and Polyphemus, Adorno and Horkheimer postulate the vital twoness of both the eyes and the ears, as well as the necessity of their mutual overlaying:

«the singleness of the eye suggests the nose and mouth, more primitive than the symmetry of eyes and ears, without which, and the combining of their dual perceptions, no identification, depth, or objectivity is possible» ¹⁶ .

The third ear is meant to hear what cannot be heard, that which enters the psychoanalyst’s ear unexpectedly. The third ear should not have any expectations. Anticipations and premonitions are the things that hinder the psychoanalytic understanding of the other. A priori knowledge allows one to listen but not to hear. A psychoanalyst listens with equal attention to everything that is being said, without putting any emphasis on anything in particular, without expecting to hear something specific. The ear-machine works autonomously and automatically. It isn’t tuned to one specific thing. It does not follow any a priori principle, because if one follows his own expectations, he might be «in danger of never finding anything but what he already knows; and if he follows inclinations, he will certainly falsify what he may perceive» ¹⁷ . A psychoanalyst hears by scanning — by listening and paying no heed.
One’s own expectations are a guiding illusion. By following them, you find what you have already known, which, of course, helps inflate your narcissism, but at the cost of barring any pathways to possible unknown findings. Scan-listening does not have an aim; it is teleological by nature. It does not tune to any particular frequency. Derrida follows in Freud’s footsteps, saying «yes» to «who or what turns up, before any determination, before any anticipation, before any identification» ¹⁸ . Not listening, but hearing. Not trying to tune in, but instead trying to hear, as if listening absentmindedly. Instrumental ears are organs that facilitate both the passage-through and the passage-by.
Lacan, too, does not shy away from the topic of hearing, of how he is being heard, and of the psychoanalyst’s hearing in general. In his «Discours de Tokyo», he firstly notes that the material he presents in his seminars quite often magically corresponds with what the psychoanalysts in the audience have heard from their patients mere days ago — word for word. He offers an ironic explanation for this coincidence:

«It’s highly likely that were it not for my seminar, they wouldn’t have heard, quite literally, what the patient said. It has happened to all of us: there is a way of hearing and understanding that entails that we only ever hear and understand what we have grown used to» ¹⁹ .

Hence, we usually hear what we have already heard instead of what is actually being said. The repetition and resonance are of principal importance here. If we hear something unusual, we, as Lacan proposes, censor it or, simply put, do not hear anything we are not accustomed to hearing. Lacan ends this passage of «Discours de Tokyo» by saying that desire alone is not enough. The patient’s desire to say what he wants to say is not enough. And the analyst’s desire to hear what he wants to hear is not enough. The latter of the two is also not appropriate:

«Here we enter into what is important within my teaching: it wants to say something, but wanting isn’t enough. One wants to say, but what one wants to say is generally missed. This is where the psychoanalyst’s ear intervenes, insofar as it notices what the other really wanted to say. And what he wanted to say is, generally speaking, not what appears in the text» ²⁰ .

This is exactly the issue that the ear, which Reik labelled as the «third», is meant to solve. The third ear is meant to hear the unheard. The third ear is the ear of the echo.

3. The gap between what is heard and what is understood

The difficulty also lies in the fact that what is heard obtains its meaning retroactively. What is being said here and now is going to be made sense of and comprehended only in the future. We should not forget that «the things one hears are for the most part things whose meaning is only recognized later on» ²¹ .
A psychoanalyst listens but does not employ consciousness as a means of differentiation and distinction, selection and hierarchization; he listens — but he is not «all ears». If the meaning of what is being heard now is going to become apparent only after the fact, why pick, decide, and construct right now? But how does one not pay any significance to what he is hearing in the moment? And is it even possible to discuss what is being heard as something that is heard in the moment? Ultimately, the rule, which the psychoanalyst abides by, is phrased as such:

«He should withhold all conscious influences from his capacity to attend, and give himself over completely to his ‘unconscious memory’. Or, to put it purely in terms of technique: he should simply listen and not bother about whether he is keeping anything in mind». ²²

In order to hear the other, you should at least attempt to stop listening to yourself. It is necessary to suspend all conscious choice, all conscious hierarchisation. Another paradox: in order to hear the Other, you should surrender to your own unconscious memory. In order to hear the Other, you should transport yourself onto the Other stage, where the question of noticing anything is irrelevant. The Other stands on the Other stage.
The Other cannot be reduced to the same. The clinical picture of «I have had a patient like this» or «I have heard people like this many times before» has to be put aside. A patient who is «like this» does not exist. Positivist categorical typology must remain outside of psychoanalytical practice. So should the objectifying discourse. Any teaching aids on «psychoanalytical diagnosis» that recommend approaches to «such and such clients» are not suitable for one to analyse the Other, who is perpetually the Other. Psychoanalysis deals with singularity and, much like a psychoanalyst would, Derrida insists that «hospitality [is] invented for the singularity of the new arrival» ²³ . The experience of professional knowledge allows one to let that, which arrives, pass by. And this is a different kind of skipping over, or omission — the bypassing of the other.
The ear in psychoanalysis becomes a tool used to withdraw from within oneself and care for the other. The ear is an organ used to address other at the beginning of interpretation. The labyrinths of the ear are the space of care, of departure towards the non-subjugative non-satisfaction of the inquiry. The ear is used to transport oneself onto the Other stage. And this stage appears in the aftereffect, in the postponing, in time itself, especially when an audial subject is concerned instead of the visual: «While the subject of the target is always already given, posed in itself to its point of view, the subject of listening is always still yet to come, spaced, traversed and called by itself, sounded by itself…» ²⁴ .
The focusing of the ears on that which has not yet come opens up the space of resonating transference and unfolds an acousmatic trans-space, which is not bound by the fixating gaze. One cannot help but remember the story of Pythagoras’ students, the acousmatics. According to Diogenes Laertius, these students had spent five years in silence, listening to Pythagoras without seeing him. Their teacher remained behind a curtain. It was only after five years of intensive transference that they were finally able to behold him.

4. Listening to Oneself: The Echo of an Acoustic Mirror

Just as the acousmatics were learning to listen, Freud and Reik were doing the same. Listening to the other more so than to oneself, as listening always implies listening to oneself. The resonance of the acoustic mirror cannot be eliminated completely. No plugs can help this.
Listening and hearing are not the same thing. As Paul Hegarty writes, «Hearing is the simple perception of sound, listening is the reflective conscious hearing» ²⁵ . The «conscious» is exactly the part of this definition that the third ear attempts to remove, whereas reflexive hearing alludes to the acoustic mirror.
Two ears, as well as two eyes, by their duality indicate an echo or a reflection (both meanings are applicable here). The mouth at the same time remains singular. It speaks, and the ears hear. To speak is to hear oneself. The acoustic mirror is already there by design. But another consideration has to be put forward. The acoustic mirror does not have an external reflexive foothold, because of which, in this mirror, «one could see there the kernel of consciousness prior to any reflection» ²⁶ .
This mirror was mentioned as early as the 17th century by Athanasius Kircher. In Book V of his «Experimental Physiology», which is titled «On Philosophy of Sound», he writes about the acoustic mirror and the elliptic acoustic mirror. He begins with this: «There exists a parabolic mirror, which is able to reflect sound, as an ordinary mirror is able to reflect light» ²⁷ .
In 1974 Didier Anzieu starts developing a number of concepts — sonorous bath, sonorous envelope, sonorous mirror, and sonorous cavern. The sonorous font or envelope combines sounds: one’s own and those of the other, with the former being internal and the latter belonging to one’s mother and the outside world. This is the beginning of the separation between the internal and the external. The mother in this instance provides the child with a sonorous mirror, which echoes all sounds that the child produces. Didier Anzieu also refers to this sonorous mirror as the audio-phonic skin, the surface between the internal and the external. And yet another name for the same concept — a bath of melody, i.e., her voice, her ritournelles, her lullabies.
The sonorous mirror precedes the visual, as the auditory space precedes the observable. Anzieu’s visual space can be imagined in the form of a sonorous cavern, which is constituted by the entirety of one’s body. During the first year of life, the infant is busy with differential ordering of bodily sounds, a discernment that is going to become the defining factor in the formation of his psychic apparatus. The sonorous space…

«is the earliest physical space: noises from outside which cause pain when they are loud or sudden, gurgles from inside the body that are disturbing because it is not clear where they are coming from, cries that arise automatically at birth and are later associated with hunger, anger or momentary loss of the object, but which are accompanied by an active motor image — all these noises make up something like what Xenakis must have meant to represent by the musical variations and light-show or laser-beams in his polytope» ²⁸ .

The sonorous mirror is at the same time tactile. The sound can touch and affect. «To communicate is, above all, to resonate or vibrate in harmony with the other» ²⁹ . An infant tunes to the sound of its mother’s voice; their voices must be able to find each other, pass through each other, and suit each other. One must be in tune with the other. Perhaps this is the harmony that Anzieu is talking about.
As the acoustic field of the mother’s voice is incorporated, the child, as Kaja Silverman puts it, «could be said to hear itself initially through that voice—to first “recognise” itself in the vocal “mirror” supplied by the mother» ³⁰ . The so-called «own voice» is based on the patterns of the introjected mother’s voice. When the phase of the acoustic mirror begins, the sensation of swimming in mother’s voice changes; now this mirror sounds like a mother’s Echo: «the child imitates the sounds it hears and has the illusion of producing those sounds» ³¹ . Similarly to the optical stage of the mirror, we are dealing with un-recognition, with an acoustic méconnaissance of one’s own voice and the voice of the other. The paradox, however, lies in the fact that at the same time, we are dealing with the recognition of oneself within the voice of the other.
Didier Anzieu is now and again reminded of the harmony possessed by the acoustic mirror of the mother-and-child, and Guy Rosolato even refers to the auditory womb as a sonorous abode, which subsequently determines all musical experiences. Building on Rosalto’s ideas, David Schwarz approaches the sonorous envelope as a fantasy concept and a fantasy space. The space of fantasy that is built on sound.
Just as the mother’s voice surrounds, envelops, and swaddles the child, it simultaneously captures and lures it into a trap. The acoustic mirror, similar to its visual counterpart, presupposes a wandering between voices. Moreover, the two mirrors are connected; one is seemingly superimposed on top of the other, but there is no intersection between them. This is exactly what the myth about the impossibility of love between Narcissus and Echo illustrates. It marks the «precedence of the sound mirror over the visual mirror, as well as the primarily feminine character of the voice and the link between the utterance of sounds and the demand for love» ³² .
The acoustic mirror is still a mirror and cannot escape the perpetual (even if metaphorical) referencing of the visual field. The same can be said about the phantasm. When this concept is mentioned, we usually imagine some form of a visual scene, but it is assembled through sounds. The transition between the eye and the ear is at the same time the transition between the mirror image and the resonating echo.
According to Jean-Luc Nancy, the phenomenon of echo is already incorporated in music: it’s not only the subject who is listening to it; the music listens to itself; it is reflexive by nature, orientated towards its own self in a sound recursion. When writing on this topic, Nancy emphasises that «the introduction of rhythm already diverts the progression towards repeating the rhythm» ³³ . Repetition belongs to the field of drive, if not always already belonging to the deathdrive. Repetition is the fact that music listens to itself, «because all of its movement is prone to this — its own repetition» ³⁴ .
When I speak, my ears — my instruments — hear me. I hear myself. The ear resonates in the name of Echo. Do I hear myself or the other? Or myself as the other? A paradox: we speak with a different voice. Our voice is not the same as the one we hear, and it is assembled based on many other voices; our voice is not our own. The voice of a subject is a constellation of multitudes of incorporated voices: «incorporating the voice of the Other is essential if one is to learn to speak; for the acquisition of language depends not simply on emulating the signifiers, but crucially consists in incorporating the voice» ³⁵ . The voice enters the body. The voice is made flesh.
When we speak, we hear ourselves. We hear ourselves from the outside and from within; the external is intertwined with the internal. This hearing is an act of labour, εργον. Michel Chion calls the process of hearing oneself ergo-audition. Hearing is labour. There can be no passive ear. The ear is performing work that turns a person into a listener.
The person is simultaneously the sender of a message and the recipient. The ear of an analyst displays Lacan’s dis-communicative principle: each receives their own message from the other in an inverted form. Between the sender and the recipient is a code and the desire that is embedded within it. Desire returns the message that the sender wants to receive back, but in an inverted form. This is where the idea that everyone hears what they want to hear comes from.

5. The Ear as an Organ of Articulation

The ear is an articulatory organ. Hearing is the process of assembling oneself in terms of the speech that is directed at us. Hearing is assembled depending on the message, and the assembly of what has been heard then structures the order of the discourse. At the same time, hearing is not reducible to psychophysiology. Hearing does not require an organic ear.
Heidegger repeated time and time again that hearing should be understood from the point of view of listening or lending an ear. He argued that we do not hear because we have ears — instead, we have ears because we are able to hear. During his XVII seminar, Lacan follows in Heidegger’s footsteps: «It is said that the function creates the organ. On the contrary, one makes use of the organ as best one can» ³⁶ . There are no two identical ears. There can be no two identical instruments.
The ear is an articulatory organ. If we are able to hear, we are able to differentiate. What do we hear with? Both Plato, in his dialogue «Timaeus», and Pythagoras before him stress that it is the ear that hears, but the mind that differentiates. The ear cannot function as an instrument without the mind that makes distinctions. The instrument is created by the ear-mind assemblage, which provides reasoning to discuss the historicity of not only music but also of perception and of hearing.
During the period of the Enlightenment, the perception of music started to be regarded as an intellectual activity. The listener must assume the responsibility for their perception, absorption, and understanding of music. It was precisely during the period of the Enlightenment that the phrase «musical understanding» became widespread. “Understandable music” and “incomprehensible music” are both historical terms. Schoenberg talks about a specific kind of musical understanding:

«There are relatively few people who are capable of understanding, purely in terms of music, what music has to say. The assumption that a piece of music must summon up images of one sort or another, and that if these are absent the piece of music has not been understood or is worthless, is as widespread as only the false and banal can be» ³⁷ .

Schoenberg insists on the existence of a purely musical understanding that moves away from the Enlightenment standpoint. It moves away from the semiotic register that assumes an interconnectedness between the word and thing presentations. A pure musical understanding is not guided by the structure of a sign.

6. An Organ of Obedience — An Instrument of Subjugation

Organology regards the ear as an instrument of obedience, an agent of command, and even, to quote Nietzsche, «an organ of fear». The ears are a terrible double that subjugates the subject to the Other. It is specifically the ear that is the instrument of subjectification, the imposition of a submission-obedience modality. The ear is an agent of the internal or, to be more precise, the externally-internal voice of the super-ego.
The ear as an intermediary, as a midwife of discourse, is responsible for the formation of an ideology’s loyal subject. When analysing Nietzsche’s attitude towards the state apparatus of permeating into subjects, Derrida adjusts his cap of hearing:

«The hypocritical hound whispers in your ear through his educational systems, which are actually acoustic or acroamatic devices. Your ears grow larger and you turn into long-eared asses when, instead of listening with small, finely tuned ears and obeying the best master and the best leaders, you think you are free and autonomous with respect to the State. You open wide the portals [pavillons] of your ears to admit the State, not knowing that it has already come under the control of reactive and degenerate forces. Having become all ears for this phonograph dog, you transform yourself into a high-fidelity receiver…» ³⁸ .

Lacan, seemingly following up on this idea, writes on the tendency to follow authority: «unfortunately, he was a professor, and you were too happy to turn against his teachings the ass’s ears that you were made to wear at school and which have since served as ear-trumpets for those of you who are a little hard of hearing» ³⁹ .
The formation of a subject is unimaginable without the ear-hearing. The subject always already belongs to someone or something. In this regard, it is not surprising that Derrida, when reading Nietzsche, questions the education system and the university discourse, noting the formal similarities between the ear and the umbilical cord. The ear is the place of symbolic birth. It shifts to a place that Freud labelled as the «umbilical cord of dreams». The ear is the place of the submission to the Other, the place where the unbreakable bonds with Him are established. All this, regrettably, can take terrible shape, especially when the ear becomes part of a fascist machine of total annihilation.
Primo Levi remembers fascists’ favourite marching songs that he has heard in a concentration camp. These songs are forever etched into the mind, so much so that one might be able to forget the camp but not the melodies. The horror is that music is the only art form available in a concentration camp. Such melodies are

«the voice of the Lager, the perceptible expression of its geometrical madness, of the resolution of others to annihilate us first as men in order to kill us more slowly afterwards. When this music plays we know that our comrades, out in the fog, are marching like automatons; their souls are dead and the music drives them, like the wind drives dead leaves, and takes the place of their wills. There is no longer any will: every beat of the drum becomes a step, a reflected contraction of exhausted muscles. The Germans have succeeded in this. They are ten thousand and they are a single grey machine» ⁴⁰ .

7. Lacan’s Ear: The Resonating Void

Lacan could not ignore the ear. Firstly, because the openings between the external and the internal are especially important for psychoanalysis and, secondly, because the ear is an instrument-object of the invocatory drive. The body has openings that prevent it from being able to lock on itself, from being able to withdraw from the outside world and, most importantly, as Lacan points out in his XXIII seminar, is the ear because of which «the body responds with that, which I have called voice» ⁴¹ . The ear is such an unusual organ in organology that it makes Lacan intently stare at its form, attempt to surpass his own psychoanalytical boundaries, and say that physiology is the point of origin in understanding the apparatus of hearing:

«in the form, the organic form, there is something which appears to us akin to these primary, topological, transpatial data which made us interest ourselves very especially in the most elementary form of the created or creative constitution of a void, the one that we have incarnated in the form of an apologetic for you in the story of the pot. A pot also is a tube, and one that can resonate» ⁴² .

Trans-space of the ear canal labyrinths constitutes the void. Lacan is true to himself; he insists on creation around the void and out of the void. The void is important for Lacan not just because of its aesthetic qualities, but as the void of the Other, the symbolic, the home of human existence. What lies on the other side of the void of the Other? It is the void of reality, which cannot be heard.
During the first meeting for the XVI seminar, Lacan asks for permission to talk about music. He then proceeds to talk about pots, graves, burial grounds, and spaces that possess «sonorous capabilities». The sound resonates in the void. The void is the inception place of sounds; it also creates the symbolic space ex nihilo.
To Lacan’s ear, the hearing apparatus does not remind him of musical instruments. Although comparing the ear to musical instruments already presupposes that the ear, in fact, is a musical instrument. Nonetheless, Lacan says that the hearing apparatus is not at all resemblant of musical instruments, but then adds:

«it is a tube which could be, as I might say, a tube with keys, in this sense that it seems that it is the cell put in the position of a cord, but which does not function like a cord, which is involved at the point of the return of the wave, which takes charge of connoting the resonance involved» ⁴³ .

Lacan says that the ear is not resemblant of any musical instrument but describes a musical instrument nevertheless. A wind and string instrument: the «tube with keys» is a resonator chamber that is «put in the position of a cord». But looks can be deceiving. This is Lacan’s formula: the form is deceiving, far-fetched. This form is not meant to produce sounds but to capture the return of the wave, to «connote the resonance involved». Thus, the ear is a resonating device.

8. The Ear as an Instrument of Drive

The ear is an erogenous zone. There exists the organ, and there exists the drive, which Lacan calls invocatory. The voice is a partial object that fondles the ear as it passes along its edge. The drive is recurrent. The voice caresses the ear and then returns to its source. During his VIII seminar, Lacan draws a distinction between two mirrors — between the two recurrent forms of a subject’s behaviour towards oneself: to see oneself and to hear oneself.

«It has been long remarked that it is proper to phonation to resonate immediately in the subject’s own ear according to as it is emitted, but this does not mean that the other to whom this word is addressed, has the same place or the same structure as that of visual unveiling, precisely because the word, for its part, does not give rise to sight because it is, itself, blindness» ⁴⁴ .

Therefore, no symmetrical communication. Each party engaged in this «communication» turns in on itself. Moreover, there is no synchronisation between the word and the image, the speech and the representation; the thunder and the lightning. The word blinds. Lacan continues to spread apart the two perceptive apparatuses of the visual and the audial. We see that we are being seen, but cannot hear that we are being heard. The hearing loop, unlike the visual, breaks off. In other words:

«one does not hear oneself where one is heard, namely in one’s head, or more exactly those who are in this situation — there are in effect those who hear themselves being heard and these are the mad, the hallucinators, it is the structure of verbal hallucination — could not hear themselves being heard except at the place of the Other: there where one hears the Other sending back your own message in its inverted form» ⁴⁵ .

The voice enters the ear, affirming the self-existence of the subject. The ear hears one’s own voice. Here lies the metaphysics of presence: I am here, present before myself, hearing myself. I hear, therefore I exist.
Voices and sounds have long become the object of technology, of registration, of mechanical reproduction. Ears in headphones. Technology appropriates the ears. Technology enters the ears. Voices, words, and sounds are played directly into the skull. Everything occurs as if…

«there were no distance between the recorded voice and listening ears, as if voices travelled along the transmitting bodies of acoustic self-perception directly from the mouth into the ear’s labyrinth, hallucinations become real» ⁴⁶ .

9. The Perceiving Transmitter

Is the ear passive or active?
From the dawn of time, there have existed two theories of perception. One is based on the thought that the ear and the eye passively perceive the sound and light emitted by external sources. The other claims that the analysers are active, that the eye operates as a projector, and the ear as a radar that sends outgoing signals.
Democritus thought that the secret to this conundrum lies in perception: the image of lightning is seen before the crash of thunder because sight travels towards the flash, whereas hearing remains passive. Sounds enter the hearing apparatus and spread within it, as if it were similar to a vase. Contrary to Democritus, Lucretius supposes in his poem «On the Nature of Things» that this difference lies not in perception but in the speed at which the visible and the audible spread:

«things always move more slowly to the ears than things which stir the eyes. That you may learn from this too; if you see someone far off cutting down a giant tree with a double-edged axe, it comes to pass that you see the stroke before the blow resounds in your ear; even so we see the lightning too before we hear the thunder…» ⁴⁷ .

These two theories — of active and passive perception — were united in the 5th century B.C. by Empedocles. The object of sight is located between the eye and the source of light, while the object of hearing is between the ear and the source of the sound. Everything seems to point to the fact that our perception of the world is as internal as it is external, as intimate as it is, to use Lacan’s word, extimate.

10. The Labyrinths of Kirkegaard’s Ear

The ear is an active organ-instrument. It produces sound. This is exactly what revolutionary composer Arseny Avraamov described in 1916:

«Even more complex are the formulas for the vibrations of the membrana basilaris of the cochlea, the organ of hearing that perceives music. <…> How many others know that the physiological structure of our ear requires careful handling of fourth octave tones, which are excessively amplified by the resonance of the organ of hearing itself!» ⁴⁸

Lacan reminds us that the hearing apparatus «does not resonate to just anything; it only resonates <…> to its own note, to its own frequency» ⁴⁹ . Hearing is tuned to its own frequency. It has its own reason. The sounds resonate; the sounding resonates. Resonance lies in «the sound itself: sound itself is an echo chamber» ⁵⁰ .
In 2007, Dutch musician, composer, and sound artist Jacob Kirkegaard was commissioned by Medical Museion in Copenhagen to «write» a piece, which was subsequently titled «Labyrinthitis». The Labyrinth, in this instance, is the internal ear. The piece was based on a known phenomenon in which the meeting of two frequencies produces additional vibrations in the internal ear, thus creating a third frequency. This third frequency belongs to the ear. This phenomenon, the distorted product of an otoacoustic emission, is known as a combination tone or a Tartini tone. This tone is the base upon which Kirkegaard’s «Labyrinthitis» is built.
The «Labyrinthitis» begins with a «subjective» sounding of the musician’s ears. These sounds are put through electronic equipment, allowing the audience to then «objectively» hear them by «reacting» with the production of their own third tones. At first, each new tone is perceived by each listener «intersubjectively», after which these sounds are «objectively» returned into the composition. Gradually, there emerges a pattern of a downward sound structure, the spiral form of which mirrors the resonance within the cochlea of the internal ear. The sound recreates the form. «Labyrinthitis» is quite literally an intersubjective echo-piece, which takes shape between the ear sounds of the composer and the ear sounds of the audience.

Victor Mazin

References

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Footnotes

1. Baltasar Gracián, Criticón, (Moscow: Nauka, 1981), 134. Quoted from the Russian translation; translation Maxim Morozov. ↩
2. Ibid. p. 143. ↩
3. L. Wittgenstein. Zettel. (V. Anashvili, Trans.) М.: Ad Marginem. P. 100. Quoted from the Russian translation; translation Maxim Morozov. ↩
4. Schwarz D. Listening Subjects: Music, Psychoanalysis, Culture. Durham, London: Duke University Press, 1997. P. 96. ↩
5. Lacan J. (1964) Seminars. Book XI. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. N.Y., London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1981. P. 258. ↩
6. Ibid. ↩
7. Reik T. Listening with the Third Ear. The Inner Experience of a Psychoanalyst. N.Y.: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1948. P. 145. ↩
8. Lacoue-Labarthe Ph. “The Echo of the Subject” // Lacoue-Labarthe Ph. Typography. Cambridge, L.: Harvard University Press. P. 161. ↩
9. Ibid., P. 164. ↩
10. Reik T. Listening with the Third Ear. P.125. ↩
11. Ibid., p.126. ↩
12. Ibid. ↩
13. Ibid. P. 146-7. ↩
14. Stiegler B. De la misère symbolique. 1. L’époque hyperindustrielle. P. : Galilée, 2004. P. 53. ↩
15. Szendy P. Écoute. Une histoire de nos oreilles. P.: Minuit, 2001. P. 24. ↩
16. Horkheimer M., Adorno T.W. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. P. 50 ↩
17. Freud S. (1912) «Recommendations to Physicians Practicing Psycho-Analysis» М.: Firma STD, 2008. P. 172. ↩
18. Derrida J. De l’hospitalité. P.: Calmann-Lévy, 1997. P. 73. To listen – hear not something that you expect to, «to listen is to reach for a possible meaning» (Nancy J.-L. À l’écoute. P.: Galilée, 2002. P.19). ↩
19. Lacan J. (1971) «Discours de Tokyo» (D. Nobus, Trans.) Journal for Lacanian Studies, Vol. 3 No. 1*.* (2005). Pp. 129-144. ↩
20. Ibid. ↩
21. Freud S. (1912) «Recommendations to Physicians Practicing Psycho-Analysis». P. 172. ↩
22. Ibid. ↩
23. Derrida J. De l’hospitalité. P.77 ↩
24. Nancy J.-L. À l’écoute. P.44. ↩
25. Hegarty P. Noise: A History. L., N.Y.: Continuum, 1997. P. 197. ↩
26. Dolar M. A Voice and Nothing More. L., Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006. P. 40. ↩
27. Kircher A. Experimental Physiology. М.: Chaosss Press, 2022. P. 470. ↩
28. Anzieu D. The Skin-Ego (N. Segal, Trans.) L.: Karnac Books, 2016. P. 188. Polytope is a concept, which Janis Xenakis used from his spatial compositions that utilized both light and music in creating an architectural space. ↩
29. Ibid. P. 56. ↩
30. Silverman K. The Acoustic Mirror. The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988. P. 80. ↩
31. Schwarz D. Listening Subjects. P. 20. ↩
32. Anzieu D. The Skin-Ego. P. 187. ↩
33. Cohen-Levinas D., Nancy J.-L. Inventions à deux voix. Entretiens. P.: le félin, 2015. P. 63. ↩
34. Ibid. P. 64. ↩
35. Dolar M. A Voice and Nothing More. P. 81. ↩
36. Lacan J. (1969/1970) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XVII. Psychoanalysis upside down/The reverse side of psychoanalysis. (C. Gallagher, Trans.). L.: Karnac Books, 2001. P. 81. ↩
37. Schoenberg A. (1912) «The Relationship to the Text». // Schoenberg A. Style and Idea. N.Y.: Philosophical Library, 1950. P. 1. ↩
38. Derrida J. «Otobiographies». (A. Ronell, Trans.) // Derrida J. The Ear of the Other. N.Y.: Schocken Books, 1985. P. 35. ↩
39. Lacan J. «The Freudian thing, or the meaning of the return to Freud in psychoanalysis». (A. Sheridan, Trans.) // Évolution Psychiatrique XXI. I (1956). P. 122. ↩
40. Levi P. If This is a Man. (S. Woolf, Trans.). N.Y.: The Orion Press, 1959. P. 52. ↩
41. Lacan J. (1975-76) Livre XXIII. Le sinthome. P.: Seuil, 2005. P. 17. ↩
42. Lacan J. (1962/63) Seminars. Book X. Anxiety. (C. Gallagher, Trans.). L.: Karnac Books, 2002. P. 254. ↩
43. Ibid. P. 254. ↩
44. Lacan J. (1960/61) Seminars. Book VIII. Transference. (C. Gallagher, Trans.). L.: Karnac Books, 2002. P. 293. ↩
45. Ibid. P. 293. ↩
46. Kittler F. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. P. 37 ↩
47. Lucretius. On the Nature of Things. (C. Bailey, Trans.). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921. P. 240. ↩
48. Avraamov A. «Gryadushhaya muzykalnaya nauka i novaya era istorii muzyki» (Upcoming Science of Music and the New Era in the History of Music) // Muzykalny Sovremennik, №6, February 1916. Quoted from the Russian translation; translation Maxim Morozov. ↩
49. Lacan J. (1962/63) Seminars. Book X. Anxiety. P. 253. ↩
50. Nancy J.-L. “Ascoltando” // Szendy P. Écoute. Une histoire de nos oreilles. P. : Minuit, 2001. P. 8. ↩