THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.3, ISSUE#19, MARCH-MAY/2024
Brotherwise Dispatch – How would you describe the correlation between existential philosophy, the “spontaneity, improvisation and call-and-response” of the Blues metaphysic, and what you term “active listening” in disclosing the merits Jazz pedagogy?
T. Storm Heter – One of the big take-always of The Sonic Gaze is that there are active and passive ways of listening. The call-and-response tradition, so fundamental to Africana forms of culture, is a model for active listening. Following Fanon, Beauvoir, and Sartre, I’ve come to believe that how we listen is as important as how we speak, sing, or produce rhythms. Philosophers of existence argue that human subjectivity is co-constituted through the relationships we have with others. Or as Mabogo P. More likes to say, drawing on Ubuntu philosophy, “I am because we are.” What a huge contrast to the individualistic tradition embodied by Descartes who proffered, “I think, so I am.” Sartre’s discussion of the gaze in Being and Nothingness is all about how we are seen by others. Sartre’s work challenges the Cartesian tradition of individualism. My humble contribution is to take what existential philosophers have said about the gaze and take it into the realm of sound, hence the title of my book, The Sonic Gaze. I believe that there is a collective practice of “White listening” which is individualistic and Cartesian because it treats sound as something that simply enters the mind from the outside, similar to the way Hume talked about mental “impressions” that get stamped into our minds. Really, sound is a negotiation of our relationships with others. Sound is an intersubjective, dialogical, dialectical phenomenon. I always like to pair phenomenology with history, and so I traced the history of listening in the United States, arguing that the black-face-minstrel tradition is the origin of many of the collective habits of White listening. By “White listening,” I am referring to how institutions like the White church, the White music industry, or White symphony orchestras encouraged a certain type of listening: quiet listening, passive listening, being still and not making noise while listening. To take a simple example, why is there a tradition in many White churches in the U.S. of “shushing” parishioners who are too loud? The underlying metaphysical assumption of the shushing is that one can’t really be listening well if s/he is also vocalizing, talking, signing, or being noisy. One finds similar practices of shushing in certain jazz clubs today, for instance The Green Mill in Chicago and even my home club, The Deer Head Inn in Delaware Water Gap, Pennsylvania. Shushing is often a subtle way of whitening listening. The most explicit example of this can be found in the history of the symphony orchestras here in the United States. Western classical music as we understand it today has a really recent root, despite what most listeners believe. Western classical music has a creation myth — the myth that audiences have “always” listened in very quiet symphony halls where audiences were quiet and still. When U.S. symphony orchestras were created in the late 19th century, the proponents whitened listening by introduced a distinction between so-called “high” culture and “low” culture. In “high” culture — read White culture — the audience was supposed to restrain their bodies through tight, elaborate clothing, prohibitions on dancing, prohibitions on spontaneous audience responses and indeed scripted clapping. In White periodicals of the time, instructions were issued to audiences on how to listen, so that these audience members could distinguish themselves from the low-class, noisy “bands” of the time. (On this topic, I highly recommend Lawrence W. Levine’s work Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Harvard, 1990).) From Levine I learned that the term “low brow” is a racialized term, harkening back to the racist, pseudo-science of phrenology, which claimed that Europeans were physically different from non-Europeans because of their large foreheads, hence the term “highbrow.” As far as pedagogy, I think that many of us who teach in higher ed institutions recognize that our classrooms discourage student participation, and discourage call-and-response — think of the rows of seats, and think of how we try to discipline our students into staying quiet, except for very scripted moments when we ask “Any questions?” It is parallel to the scripted clapping in symphony halls, and the shushing of active listeners. Like most academics I was trained to believe that teaching was all about the monologue, which would then be interrupted only by the last few minutes of class, with again, the very spirit killing words, “Any questions?” I have come to realize that if a teacher does ask the “Any questions” question, they usually wait only about fifteen seconds before saying “OK, no questions, on to the next unit” or whatever. Academics are not trained in how to listen; we are trained in how to talk. Everybody has taken a public speaking class, but almost none of us have had a class in listening — the exception is in music pedagogy, where active listening is considered a core skill. That’s why I’ve tried to draw so much of my thoughts from musical practices where listening is considered a skill to be cultivated and developed.
BD – Based on your ongoing dialogue with the “critical sociological and existential thought of W.E.B. DuBois”, what does it mean to raise “the problem of White listening”?
TSH – The notion of problematizing whiteness is central to the book. And you are right, DuBois is the key voice. In Souls of Black Folks, DuBois asked “how does it feel to be a problem?” He identified the subjective, phenomenological side of anti-Blackness in the U.S. He paired phenomenology with sociology. If we remember that sociology is a recent creation, we can see that DuBoisian sociology is not like that of Auguste Comte, where the scientist is considered a neutral, objective observer of a state of affairs that is mind-independent. DuBois was an existentialist in the sense that he recognized that in studying society, he was studying himself. By identifying himself as a Black subject he opened up a whole new door for what it meant to study society and culture. He was able to show, brilliantly, that the “feeling” of Blackness was a sociologically relevant phenomenon. Souls is also phenomenological in the sense that many of its central claims are set up in terms of a dialogue between White folks and Black folks. This is the intersubjective moment, the I-you, or in Sartrean terms, “the look” and one’s “being-for-others.” That moment in the text where DuBois writes “How does it feel to be a problem?” is a dialogical moment: he is speaking to the White gaze and how that gaze posits Blackness as a “problem.” At the turn of the century in the U.S. it was common for White social critics to speak of White-Black race relations in terms of “The Negro Problem.” The so-called “Negro problem” was itself an echo from European social critics who spoke of “The Jewish Problem” and “The Jewish Question.” Famously Marx (who came from a family of rabbis) wrote a piece in 1844 called Zur Judenfrage (“The Jewish Question.”) DuBois offers an ontological reversal of the logic of the “Jewish/Black Problem.” He says quite clearly, that being-White and whiteness is the real problem, not the other way around. That’s an existential move par excellence: the White critic is unaware that he himself, though his gaze, has produced the thing he thinks he discovered in nature. The field of Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS) is not really new — it’s a footnote to DuBois. That’s not to say that there’s nothing more to be said in CWS, but it’s a sign of how disciplinarity works in academia. White mainstream academics are about one hundred years behind, and we are playing catch up to what DuBois laid out at the turn of the century.
BD – How does your conception of “the Sonic Gaze” speak to “existential notions of intentionality, recognition, intersubjectivity, and freedom” and the ways they “can be rethought by prioritizing sound”?
TSH – Western thought is fundamentally visualist. Visualism, as the name suggests, is the prioritization of the sense of sight above other senses. Think of basic epistemological terms like “enlightenment” — knowledge is connected to that which can be seen. In casual conversation, we say things like “I see what you mean.” If we take classic European existentialism, there is a heavy bias towards the sense of sight, over hearing, smelling, touching, and tasting. Sartre’s vocabulary is saturated with visualism, most basically in his notion of “the look.” Sartre’s notion of intersubjective is cast as “seeing oneself through the eyes of the other,” etc. The interesting thing is that just below the surface, Sartre acknowledges that the look is not merely a visual phenomenon. In the famous keyhole scene in Being and Nothingness, it is actually the sound of the footsteps of the other that triggers ontological shame. So there is a tension in Sartre’s work: he explicitly says that ontological shame (the feeling of being looked at) can come through the sound of the other, not through the other’s eyes, and yet, his metaphors, cases, and his basic language are all visualist. I challenge Sartre by suggesting that there is such a thing as “the listen,” that is, the sonic gaze. Hearing is not passive. We tend to think of hearing as just receiving signals from the outside, while we tend to think of sight as active, as going out into the world and grasping things. That’s one of the features of visualism, which falls apart as soon we really think about it. This is where the case of Charles Mingus at the Fivespot becomes useful. In an outburst from the stage, Mingus accused his audience of having “clogged ears,” of not listening to him actively. He was feeling the White sonic gaze of his audience. Part of the real joy of doing research for the book was finding out that in Africana traditions of philosophy of existence, sound is prioritized. Think of all the discussions of blues music, jazz music, spirituals, etc in the Africana tradition. The readers of The Brotherwise Dispatch will not be at all surprised by the claim that philosophies of sound are central in Africana thought. DuBois made music and listening a major part of his analysis. Douglass wrote not only of the slave songs and their existential importance, but he also wrote extensively on how his White audiences listened to him — he challenged the way his audience listened. The Harlem Renaissance writers, especially Alain Locke, gave priority of place to listening, music and sound. Hurston’s attention to patterns of Black speech as well as her claims about folk music make her indispensable. Among contemporaries, the Africana philosopher of existence Angela Davis wrote the seminal book on blues; Lewis R. Gordon, who is himself a fine drummer, has written extensively on sound; Mabogo P. More is another Black philosopher of existence for whom sound is central; Another important figure is LaRose T. Parris, who has shown how the denigration of oral culture in the West has formed the background of resistance and struggle for many people in the African diaspora. In short, I would say that the visualism is mostly a product of Western European assumptions about knowledge, the body, and human reason.
BD – In what sense did your engagement with Angela Y. Davis’s “feminist phenomenology of listening” demonstrate “how White listeners have misunderstood the call-and-response of the Blues”?
TSH – Davis’s book Blues Legacies and Black Feminism was written twenty-five years ago and yet it could have been written yesterday. I just finished teaching the book in an independent study with a student who had a strong interest in music, but had no background in the blues or jazz. I kept asking myself, how is this text going to be received by a student who wasn’t even born when the book was written, and whose playlist basically has no music before 2010? My student did great with the book, making her own connections to the contemporary music she’s most familiar with; that says a lot about Davis’s ability to lay out dense philosophy in a clear way. I teach courses in Introduction to Africana Philosophy, Black Humanism, and Philosophy of Hip-Hop. I’ve taught Davis’s work in all those contexts, and you know what, the students totally get it. The reason the 1920s are so critical is because that’s the moment when sound and how we consume it changes for ever: for the first time in the history of the world, there are recordings of sound (especially music) that are mass produced. Davis’ point is that Black women, the “Blues women,” were at the very forefront of culture; their music made bold claims about Black self-expression, the female body, and ways of fighting oppression (especially male violence). Before the so-called “race records” of the 1920s that Davis analyzes, the travelling minstrel shows were the primary forms of mass consumption of music in the U.S. White listeners who consumed music in the minstrel shows muted the call-and-response by confusing the actors and the roles they were playing. Racial burlesque was one of the standard forms of entertainment, and Whites conflated racial caricature with reality. So many of our anti-Black racial myths can be traced back to the black-face minstrel tradition — that’s one of the main claims of The Sonic Gaze. So, I try to add to Davis’s claims about Black women’s’ empowerment in the blues by showing how ‘race records’ of the 1920s directly challenged the minstrel tradition. I also try to show that within the minstrel tradition, it was not as simple as current critics make it out to be — I emphasize the Black and Creole performers in the minstrel tradition who, despite performing racial burlesque, saw themselves as full human beings, who were often performing for one another, and not just pandering to Whites. When mass produced records took over from live performances, the White public became indifferent to the blues and jazz, and so record companies called these records “race records,” assuming that only Black Americans would buy them. What Davis shows is that blues women challenged patriarchy, challenged sexism, and carved out a space for sexual desire, personal freedom, and women’s voices. The way these records functioned in the Black community was important: they would often be played for house parties, for local communities, for “juke joints” and such. The Black women who danced and sang along to Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith were offering a liberatory “response” to the “call” on the record. Again, we see that the record was not treated as passive among Black communities — records were played in social contexts; they created spaces that challenged capitalist logic of passive consumption. The blues records were played in houses where Black folks danced, sang, drank, smoked, gambled, and had sex. White listeners muted the call-and-response implicit in race records, first, by ignoring these voices at the time they were first introduced. Whites simply didn’t buy race records in the 1920s. Then, there was a huge shift in collective White consciousness beginning in the 30s, and running to the 1960s — the change goes under the name of the American Folk Revival. Alan and John Lomax led the movement, considering themselves “ballad hunters” who would drive across the country to rural Black areas to record the supposedly “long lost” or “dying” culture of the blues. They muted the call-and-response because they tried to pickle and preserve blues cultures as part of a nostalgic past, in need of recovery. Unlike the feminist listening carried out by blues woman, they treated the record as an inert object, to be preserved. They also arrogantly posited themselves as the saviors of this music (I call this “White savior listening”). These ballad hunters got money and support from major White institutions like the Library of Congress. But if we look at the way the Lomaxes in particular treated the Black folks they were recording, it’s nothing short of colonial. I talk quite a bit in the book about how Lomax treated the musician Huddie Lead Belly Ledbetter. If we think of Davis’s feminist critique of the prison system, we can also zero in on how Lomax would go into prisons to record Black musicians. In one particular instance, Lomax had his food cooked by female inmates when he stayed the night in a prison as a “guest,” so that in the morning he could record some of the incarcerated men sing the blues. Davis’s prison abolitionism demands that we understand the history of White carceral institutions controlling Black women’s labor, and then turning that labor (music) into a commercial product to benefit the supposedly sympathetic White ally who has come to “listen to the real deal.” Again, Davis has really seen this phenomenon from so many perspectives, weaving in Black Feminist critiques of women’s labor with prison abolitionism. Can’t go wrong with teaching her books, since they are so deeply interconnected.
BD – Describe your thought process behind the inspiration for creatively concluding each chapter of The Sonic Gaze with listening exercises and playlists?
TSH – Many times the university classroom becomes sterile because of the physics of the room, the rows students sit in, the yellow of the cinderblock walls and the hum of the fluorescent lights. In American schools, students are told to shut up, to sit still, and not talk. Passivity is encouraged, because grade school teachers want to discipline their classroom. There is a huge fear of “losing control” of the class. As a young teacher, fresh out of grad school, I adopted these same crummy ways of teaching and disciplining students. Think about how deadening it can be to just stand in the front of the classroom – a concrete box – and talk monotone for fifty minutes. As I loosened up and tried to inspire rather than discipline, I started using songs and sound each day to stimulate the students. Playing music in class became one of my favorite parts of teaching. Let’s say we were spending the day talking about racialized language and the function of different terms like “Black” or “African-American,” “Negro,” or the n-word. I could start the class with the classic A Tribe Called Quest tune “Sucka N*****.” If you listen to the lyrics, the main point is a philosophical discussion about racialized language and the difference between the origin of the n-word (“falling out between the dome of the white man’s mouth”) and how after a variety of discursive inflections the n-word word can at times become “a term of endearment” which the “youth embrace.” The playlists in the book were inspired by my teaching style. I am often quite improvisatory in which songs I’ll play to go with a particular lesson, including asking my students to give me suggestions that we can listen to together and analyze. A great benefit of listening together with a group of students, or any other colleagues, is that it creates a common experience. The music becomes a “text” that we all experience together in real time. I also hope that readers of The Sonic Gaze might play the playlists for the songs as they read the book. Most of us like to have music in the background when we drive, or walk, or study. Why not listen to some great creole jazz while studying? Then, for a more intense experience, you can read the listening exercises and work on active listening. The idea for that type of active listening exercise came from being a musician and having studied tons of music instruction books, especially for guitar and drums.
BD – This has been another one of our BROTHERWISE FIVE interview series, during which THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH interrogates intellectuals, artists and activists with five probing questions to the delight of our readers.
On behalf of T. Storm Heter and THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH,
Peace.
-A. Shahid Stover
(this interview of T. Storm Heter for THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH was conducted by A. Shahid Stover through email correspondence from June 11th – August 10th, 2023.)
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