Book Review: Law and the Visible

Abstract

practice, the Manus Recording Project Collective aligns silence with listening, Schuppli works with fragmented stories, Spring discusses hearing loss, d’Envie and Bervin rely on inaudible cosmic vibrations, Dockray connects silent surveillance to modes of power, and Young explicitly distinguishes silence (which is idealistic and attends to the environment) from muteness (which draws attention to itself and trusts the experiment). Important to note is also the Reader’s design which is an eclectic mix of plain text, photography, and primary source materials, often placed next to each other on the page. This design might make the Reader less approachable to some. However, by inviting listeners to read excerpts from voice recordings and answering machine messages (Schuppli and the Manus Recording Project Collective), look at eardrum images (Spring), and juxtapose personal impressions with the transcripts of field recordings (d’Envie and Bervin), the Reader indeed inspires efforts to generate deeper resonances between academic writing-styles and research contents. In that regard, it is disappointing that the Reader itself still predominantly relies on visual language. It is furthermore unfortunate that, with the exceptions of Schuppli and d’Envie and Bervin, its contributors fail to inform the layperson about the actual sound art exhibition and its curational practice. In the “Foreword,” Norie Neumark describes this practice as one that listens to artists, instead of simply giving voice to them. However, Neumark remains silent about the details and implications of this curational listening. Altogether, Eavesdropping: A Reader initiates an important conversation about the ethics and politics of listening, and about ways to understand eavesdropping as a multifaceted practice that involves bodies, materialities and social situations. The conversation is waiting to be continued, and the Reader can be read as a call to develop its artistic ideas into substantive theoretical and empirical frameworks, as well as to think about their wider political implications. Thus, the Reader might unfold its greatest effect when it is brought into conversation with existing scholarship in the social sciences and humanities on listening, reminding social scientists of both the understudied sonic dimensions of legal matters and the political relevance of art, and urging sound artists to reflect on the ethico-political implications of their works.