Mack Hagood

Keynote Lecture, Saturday, 16 April 2022, 10:00–11:00 (UTC+9)

Tinnitus and the Politics of Listening

Society is awash with injunctions about the encroaching loudness of our modern world, warning us of the dangers of loud sound, yet it is less often noted that our very attention to sound can cause its own set of problems. Tinnitus, which often results from noise-related hearing damage, can indeed signal the noisiness of modernity, but tinnitus is also a form of self-noise with self-reflexive dimensions. People with problematic tinnitus, hyperacusis, and misophonia are so aurally sensitive that their listening exceeds their own abilities of control. In a real sense, tinnital suffering signals a moment when a subject’s aural relationship to self takes on a sinister resonance.

In this talk, I approach tinnitus through the filters of sound studies, disability studies, and neurophysiology to suggest that this audiological phenomenon can teach us a lot about the politics of listening. Tinnitus can be a particularly acute example of not wanting to hear something—and of feeling that controlling one’s own listening is essential to self-preservation. As such, it speaks to current controversies around so-called filter bubbles, media echo chambers, campus safe spaces, disinformation, political tribalization, and so on.

A similar behavior and even a similar physiology are at work when we recoil from a sound we don’t like—such as tinnitus—and when we recoil from an idea we don’t like. The interplay between ideology, ways of listening, and neurophysiology in tinnital suffering can serve as a model of the politics of listening in contemporary, Western, neoliberal cultures. Tinnitus sounds the ways that we embody our diverse histories and traumas as listening subjects, as well as the ways that troubled modes of aural and political listening can go viral.