Listening on All Sides: Toward an Emersonian Ethics of Reading

Abstract

Listening on All Sides: Toward an Ethics of Reading by Richard Deming. Stanford U. Press, 2007. Pp. 182. $50. At the same time that we moderns learned about living regimes of vision that include spectacle (Guy Debord, Laura Mulvey), panopticon (Foucault), and print (Walter Ong), our literary criticism skewed towards vision at the expense of the other senses, especially hearing. Think of the close reading that runs from the New Criticism deconstruction and beyond, or what Charles Bernstein calls the Euclidean prosody of most modern poetics (Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word [Oxford U. Press, 1998]). Ironically, we still see evidence for this hearing loss recent literary criticism such as Richard Deming's Listening on All Sides: Toward an Ethics of Reading, which, like Helen Vendler's Invisible Listeners: Lyric Intimacy Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery (Princeton U. Press, 2005), paradoxically inscribes a regime of vision into its very title. For her part, Vendler regularly reduces listeners readers through an aggressive form of synesthesia common our critical moment when readerly interpretation, engagement, and understanding are usually figured visually. For instance her architecture for the eye situates the lyric poem's addressee in the or out, rather than maintaining a distinctly aural orientation characteristic of the material she examines, including most obviously George Herbert's devotional lyric (Heaven / O who will show me those delights on high? / Echo. / I) or Walt Whitman's bardic persona (O you singer solitary, singing by yourself, projecting me, / O solitary me listening, nevermore shall I cease perpetuating you). Despite the recent emergence of sound studies the literary humanities by way of Bruce Smith and Charles Bernstein, among others, the is regularly collapsed into more sophisticated epistemologies and practices of the eye despite all efforts the contrary. In fits and starts, Richard Deming's book advances a project of sensual reorientation the spirit of Stanley Cavell's ordinary language philosophy, and his achievements are noteworthy a few directions, including a sophisticated intertextuality, a knack for aphorisms, and most importantly a contribution literary ethics where the can play a central role. Articulating Emersonian modernism, Deming thoughtfully sets Hawthorne, Melville, Wallace Stevens, Whitman, and William Carlos Williams conversation with Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, among others, marking where a European sense for historical consciousness informs, and is informed by, a distinctly American project of skepticism and innovation. Sometimes these connections follow the traditional contours of influence as when Emerson reads Hegel and turn Nietzsche reads Emerson, and sometimes the connections expand inform Deming's own efforts to find and even make new vocabularies new tools ... order find new ways address and respond (and thus be responsible for) the world (26). More than an informative interpretation of canonic literature, Deming positions his book as an act of literature itself. Unnecessary complications follow, such as the effort fold too much material without adequate room left for argument or explanation--the stuff of mere information, I suppose--as with the sequence of two pages that lurch inexplicably from Wittgenstein Wordsworth Shelley Blake Williams at the same time that Deming generates aphorisms that crystallize his thought and complicate his relationship his myriad interlocutors. Who says interrogatives are one manner of delineating the gaps between groups of language users (25)? I love this aphorism, which resonates with the insight of Cavell's explanation A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises (Harvard U. Press, 1994) that J. L. Austin's stories required an ear the most technical sense. Deming fact thematizes the ambiguity of the speaking agent and thus this question of attribution might seem unfair. …