welthassle
Mikel R. Nieto
Photo by Sebastian Meyer. Ras Lanuf (Libya), 11 March 2011: Rebels duck for cover after a pro-Gaddafi jet bombs their position.
The term “Weltschmerz” (“world-pain”) was popularized in nineteenth-century German Romantic literature to describe a deep melancholy in the face of the imperfection and suffering of the world. The concept—both philosophical and affective—does not necessarily refer to a specific event, but rather to a general feeling of anguish and existential exhaustion. The pain of the world today, produced by wars, seems even more present and ubiquitous. Perhaps it is worthwhile to pause, to listen to it and attend to it—not with romanticism or melancholy, but with a critical sense and within a collective awareness. Listening to the pain of today’s world, filled with warlike sounds, may not be merely an aesthetic matter, but also—or above all—an ethical one that demands our attention. When war becomes normalized, its sounds are no longer only spectacular; they become background noise.
Wars do not manifest themselves solely through explosions, screams, and distant gunshots; they also infiltrate the everyday sounds that surround us, entering our social and personal soundscape and altering the acoustic ecology of urban spaces and of our daily lives. The sounds of wars—in the plural—are no longer heard only from afar; they are also located in front of us and among all of us. The battlefield of today’s soundscape is not merely ecological, but above all geopolitical and inevitably biopolitical.
Every gunshot, every scream, every explosion, and the ubiquitous buzzing of drones and other warlike sounds are always perceived before they are interpreted, shaping both our attention and the responses of our bodies. The concept "belliphonic", proposed by Martin Daughtry, describes precisely this specific acoustics of war and how it reorganizes the sonic environment, positioning the ear as a sensor of survival and placing listening inevitably in the middle of the battlefield. War is also suffered through the ear, through the act of listening itself, as well as through the entire body.
The question that arises before these sounds—as before the images we see every day—leads us to the same ethical question that Susan Sontag posed in “Regarding the Pain of Others” (2003) in relation to war photography: “What do we do in the face of the pain of others?”. The answer is not easy and is likely to be uncomfortable. Let us remember that when we see the suffering of others, as Sontag pointed out, an ethical distance is created. The image distances us from its subject, whereas when we hear the sounds of war this distance is reduced: sound and the act of listening include us, embrace us, and pass through us. In listening, our bodies are immersed in sound; we resonate with what is sounding.
For this reason, sound inevitably creates immersion—not only of the body but also of the suffering of others. To hear the suffering of the other—that background noise—is also to experience it in our own flesh, because listening is not located solely in hearing; it exceeds auditory perception, passing through our bodies and questioning the meaning of our judgments, both as individuals and as a society. What we leave outside of listening—though not outside of mere auditory perception—betrays us as individuals and as a society. Perhaps the question now is this: What does it mean to listen to the pain of others?
If Sontag analyzes the politics of representation, Daughtry analyzes the politics of sensory perception in the hearing of the sounds of war. His concept of the “belliphonic” may help us think precisely about the audibility—and also the inaudibility—of the pain of others within the warlike soundscape. By “no longer hearing” distant conflict, the subject ceases to recognize the presence and suffering of the “Other.” It is here that an ethical deafness emerges—the same distance that Sontag described—where personal survival seems to require the suppression of an empathetic response to the suffering of others. Perhaps the battlefield of ethics lies within the act of listening itself. And perhaps distance aestheticizes the world—the landscape knows this well. Without distance, there is no landscape and no beauty.
Perhaps it would be good to reduce this aestheticizing distance and listen to the pain of the world firsthand so as not to disconnect from reality. When we treat the sound of violence as an aesthetic spectacle—as happens in the soundtracks of war films—our listening to these spectacular sounds may normalize violence and make us less sensitive to real and external harm, compromising our ethical judgment. The question here is whether, in the realm of aesthetics, we can—or should—listen to the sonic violence of war as a spectacle. When soldiers process explosions and gunfire not as trauma but as an adrenaline rush or as an aesthetic experience of the sublime, they are immersed in a euphoric hyper-masculinity that creates a distance for the sake of survival and inadvertently aestheticizes the world, silencing the suffering of others and producing a terrifying ethical void.
This is the issue: aesthetics cannot be used to trivialize violence; rather, it may possess the strange capacity to pacify or enable human agency in the face of a dehumanized environment. War produces sonic events and therefore an acoustic condition of the world that exists before us and among us—even if we do not wish to attend to it or listen to it. Perhaps it is therefore worthwhile to pause and listen to the ethical silences of the world.
Finally, it is worth recalling the soundscape described by Rachel Carson in “Silent Spring” a silent spring marked by the absence of birdsong. Our present soundscape resonates with the ubiquitous noise of drones and military engines, generating a latent tension that transforms the perception of the everyday and constructs a permanent sonic background—an index of a devastated planet caught in a crisis of ecological thought amid what appears to be an Apocalypse and the potential emergence of a Third World War. For all these reasons, it may be worthwhile to allow ourselves to listen to that distant, diffuse background noise that crosses both spaces and bodies, generating an atmosphere of constant friction between perception and ethics. Perhaps we should learn to listen to what we do not want to hear.