Depth can be perceived by the eye, but most satisfactorily as a series of surfaces… the eye does not perceive an interior strictly as an interior: inside a room, the walls it perceives are still surfaces, outsides.
Hearing can register interiority without violating it. I can rap a box to find whether it is empty or full or a wall to find whether it is hollow or solid inside. Or I can ring a coin to learn whether it is silver or lead. (Ong, 2005/1982, pp. 69–70)
Walter Ong, philosopher of the oral versus the typographic and mentor of Marshall McLuhan, positions surfaces as the territory of the visual, giving sound the privilege of being able to sense the inside of a thing. I propose that what he is really suggesting is that sound reveals the material of its source (its substance), which is contained in a surface (Gibson, 1986). To rap on a box is actually to activate the surface of knuckle (skin covered bone) with the surface of the box (wood, metal, cardboard). ¶ 1
Don Ihde suggests that “surface significations anticipate the hearing of interiors” (2007, p. 69). Surfaces that surround an empty space tell us of this emptiness. However, we don’t get a clear idea of the inside of something from its sounding; rather, we hear its qualities of hollowness, fullness, its density. Say the box is full of some grain that we can hear moving around as we activate the box. We cannot say for sure what this grain is, just that it has a “graininess”. We make assumptions about the substance based on the sonic quality of each grain’s surface interacting with another and the interior surfaces of the box. All this is to say that hearing the inside of something is still a matter of hearing the interaction of surfaces. ¶ 2
Ong’s interest with insides is to highlight the bodily interiority of the aural and oral: “Sight isolates, sound incorporates. Whereas sight situates the observer outside what he views, at a distance, sound pours into the hearer.” (Ong, 2005, p. 70). Additionally, sound surrounds, placing us “at a kind of core of sensation and existence” (p. 70). At the centre we gather our world into ourselves, such that “[t]he consciousness of each human person is totally interiorized” (p. 70). ¶ 3
Which brings us to Ong’s arguments around the effect of writing and typography. He proposes that prior to this technology, the immersive and interiorising nature of the aural/oral led to a sacral understanding of our place in the cosmos:
In a primary oral culture, where the word has its existence only in sound… the phenomenology of sound enters deeply into the human beings’ feel for existence, as processed by the spoken word… The centring action of sound affects man’s sense of the cosmos. (p. 71)
Ong proposes that with the invention of print and the subsequently printed maps, our understand of the world and cosmos shifted from something that surrounds and immerses us to something “laid out before [us]… a vast surface or assemblage of surfaces (vision presents surfaces) ready to be ‘explored’” (p. 71). ¶ 4
Jonathan Sterne proposes that this association of the oral, aural, interiority and spirituality results in the theoretical tendency that he has crticially called the “Audiovisual Litany”. In this elements of sound and vision are compared as neat binaries such as “hearing immerses its subjects, vision offers perspective”, “hearing involves physical contact with the outside world, vision requires distance from it”, “hearing is a sense that immerses us in the world, while vision removes us from it” (Sterne, (2003, p. 15). Sterne cautions that the Audiovisual Litany “elevates a set of cultural prenotions about the senses (prejudices, really) to the level of theory”, and that it confuses cause and effects (2012, p. 10). Sterne suggests this thinking comes from Ong's “spirit/letter distinction in Christian spiritualism” (p. 16), which emphasises the interiority of sound as a notion of the internalised divine. Sterne contests that we cannot hear the “inside world of sound” and that it “emerges and becomes perceptible only through its exteriors”; consequently a history of sound is an “externalist and contextualist endeavor” (p. 13). The insular and interior focus of the litany separates sound from its context in a way that renders it intellectually lax and undisciplined. ¶ 5
Sterne's objection to an all-to-easy polarity and romanticisation of sound—a complaint picked up and amplified by Steven Connor with his argument against acousmania (2015)—is not without merit. However, that is not to say that sound does not still have different perceptual specificities to vision in terms of space and temporality; different demands of the subject-object relations. My quibble with Ong's essentialised internalism, within the context of this discussion of surfaces, is that speech/orality can also be understood as an externalising of inner thought, a bringing of the inside out. (For mor detail see chapter 3 “To Prick Up The Philosophical Ear”) ¶ 6
Anne Carson says “every sound we make is a bit of autobiography… A piece of inside projected to the outside” (1995, p. 130). (See module (vi): In the Wolf Thickets.) Is speech not essentially a calling of our sense of self to the surface? To speak not only involves the interaction of surfaces within our bodies—a column of air through vocal folds, the orchestration of the surfaces of tongue, teeth and lips—but perhaps speech can be seen as offering the sense of self as a permeable surface with which it can interact with the summoned-to-the surface interiorities of others. Speech can then be conceived of as a kind of sonic psychic surface—speech as a kind of skin of the soul. ¶ 7
Carson, A. (1995). The gender of sound. In Glass, irony and god (pp. 119–142). New Directions.
Connor, S. (2015). Acousmania. Retrieved May 18, 2022, from http://stevenconnor.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/acousmania.pdf
Gibson, J. J. (2015). The ecological approach to visual perception (Classic ed.). Psychology Press. (Original work published in 1979).
Ihde, D. (2007). Listening and voice: Phenomenologies of sound (2nd edition. E-book.). State University of New York Press.
Ong, W. J. (2005). Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word . Taylor & Francis. (Original work published 1982).
Sterne, J. (2003). The audible past: Cultural origins of sound reproduction. Duke University Press.