Tinnitus, speaking: listening in with Daniel Fishkin

Abstract

ABSTRACT Tinnitus, Speaking is a hybrid text – one part essay, one part interview – which demonstrates how sound artist Daniel Fishkin’s experience of tinnitus might be listened to and thought about from the vantage point of psychoanalysis and in relation to his creative practice. Originally composed for a lay audience of listeners at one of Fishkin’s public presentations, the below work furnishes readers with a preliminary exploration of how a psychoanalytic understanding of bodily symptoms as subjective manifestations of language might add to popular and academic conversations concerning the way tinnitus in conceptualized in relation to the body and discourse. In order to do so, the text approaches the sound art, speech, and symptoms of Daniel Fishkin as a kind of clinical vignette shedding light on how tinnitus can be experienced at the level of language and art while also illuminating aesthetic practice to be an extension of psychoanalysis.