Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention, and Distributed Subjectivity

Abstract

Despite the profound transformations of music recording and distribution since the advent of digital audio encoding, critical discourses around music still tend to value a Gilded Age conceit: encounter with a work. In Ubiquitous Listening, Anahid Kassabian, a leading figure in popular music studies and known best for pioneering research on music and the moving image, offers an alternative framework for how to understand music and its reception.Kassabian starts with a logical argument. Building on the concept of pervasive, or ubiquitous, computing, promoted by researchers at Xerox in the late 1980s, she asserts that music today similarly follows us everywhere in our daily lives, emanating “out of the wall, our televisions, our video games, our computers, and even out of our clothing” (xii). Moreover, instead of demanding the kind of concentrated aural attention expected of concert music, this ubiquitous and ambient music is more sensed than heard, often becoming meaningful in ways that emphasize affective potential more than semiotic decoding. This inattentive but affective stance, facilitated through what Kassabian calls “ubiquitous listening,” creates “distributed subjectivity,” a condition that is non-individual and “not simply human” and that renders “identity” as an always emergent node in a constantly shifting field of sound and affect.The body of the book comprises a series of essays (some already published over the last decade) that together function as case studies for the theory. Through analysis of her own experiences of listening, for example, to videos by Armenian filmmakers, musical episodes of TV programs such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and programmed music at the Olive Garden restaurant chain, Kassabian shows how listening, attention, affect, and subjectivity are linked. Her approach in the chapters is fundamentally theoretical; she is less interested in proving an argument with evidence than with asserting its plausibility. Kassabian goes further, though, by intentionally using the book's entire form to reinforce the content of her theory. At first, the chapter essays appear confusingly unrelated to music or to each other. As Kassabian jokes in the conclusion: “She says what? Based on thinking about TV musicals and Armenian jazz?” She subsequently explains that she intended the book's chapters to mimic the theory of distributed subjectivity by forming “the field on which I theorized” (111–12). Thus, despite a typical monograph structure, the book works as a distributed field of ideas, with each chapter an emergent, suggestive bundle of meaning.This emphasis on a “distributed field” is a fascinating way to think about what it is we do when we listen to music. In fact, Kassabian challenges readers to explore whether the very sentence construction “when we listen to music” is even the right way to think about contemporary musicality. Since the nineteenth century, Western cultural understandings of music have been shaped around the work of producing sound, supporting discourses of composition, performance, and talent. Kassabian suggests that in a world in which sound is already everywhere, disarticulated from its performance source, music must become instead about affective experience, supporting discourses of technology, attention, and subjectivity. Listening is not an act of receiving or decoding meaning, but rather an emergent aural subjectivity, “a range of engagements across human bodies and music technologies” (xxi). Kassabian's radical de-reification of music casts a bright light on the limits of text-based disciplinary approaches for assessing culture in the contemporary world.Yet, despite offering the promise of reconceiving music reception, the logic of her theory does not always hold up. Ubiquity, for example, has enormous power as a given in her thought, creating the multivalent “field” that enables the possibility of distributed subjectivity, but it is not clear, exactly, how one would measure such a “field.” How and when is musical ubiquity a recognizable condition in history? Kassabian argues for the rise of twentieth-century mass media as a seminal moment, but she briefly juxtaposes this turn only with the concert-based auditory culture of the late Victorian period that immediately preceded it. While it may be true that there was no music “everywhere” until the advent of mass media, there was certainly perceived ubiquity in other times. Consider Walt Whitman's written experience of orators, singers, barkers, and bands in New York City during the antebellum era, for instance, or the experienced ubiquity of minstrelsy or ragtime in journalistic testimony at the turn of the century.It is also unclear how Kassabian would compare contemporary ubiquitous listening with alternative frameworks of unconcentrated attention in other time periods, such as the “ambient reading” favored in early modern England, as described by Bruce R. Smith in The Key of Green (2008) or the distracted listening of eighteenth-century opera goers investigated by James Johnson in Listening in Paris (1996). Both books center on moments of changing conceptions of emotion and how they operate bodily and socially; does Kassabian's own focus on “affect” similarly indicate a major historical shift? Kassabian's theory needs a stronger basis in the history of reception, and in the cultural history of emotions, to better situate the significance of the present moment.Even if we accept contemporary musical ubiquity, is distributed subjectivity the only way to describe how people are behaving relative to it? Beyond Kassabian's assertive insight, what is the causal link between the condition of ubiquity and the changing nature of human subjectivity? Kassabian repeatedly cites Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to make the case for a new subjectivity, but one could easily point to the ways that Enlightenment individuality remains quite alive in North American and European law and discourse, from intellectual property to social policy. Could we not understand ubiquity as a condition leading to greater opportunity for individuated and bounded subjectivity rather than less? At times, Kassabian sounds like early proselytizers of the Internet, who touted the technological promise of distributed and democratized knowledge but failed to predict the ways that the Internet came to facilitate the commodification of idiosyncrasy on blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and so on.Scholarship on fandom provides yet another interesting contrast. Like most fan scholars, Kassabian rejects Adornoesque condemnations of passive consumption, trying to move beyond the restrictions of an active/passive binary. But fan scholars tend to emphasize a new social dynamics of media participation and flow (“convergence,” to use Henry Jenkins's term) rather than Kassabian's more existential postmodern subjectivity. What is the difference between participatory culture and distributed subjectivity? Might one help us to understand the other?In the end, maybe these questions are the point. Kassabian is not so much trying to put readers into a theoretical model as break them out of one. In this sense, Ubiquitous Listening is part of a wave of several recent studies that explicitly challenge the current conventions of reception studies, from Leah Price's How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (2012) to Kiri Miller's Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and Virtual Performance (2012) to Cathy Davidson's Now You See It: How Technology and Brain Science Will Transform Schools and Business for the 21st Century (2012). Reception studies scholars would find their time well spent by engaging with such work, including Kassabian's unconventional and provocative book.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Reception Texts Readers Audiences History, 2014 · DOI ↗