Locating listening: Technological space, popular music, Canadian mediations

Abstract

Because of the traditional relationship between places and situations, group identities have usually been closely linked to shared but special access to physical locations. … By severing the traditional link between physical location and social situation, electronic media may begin to blur previously distinct group identities by allowing people to ‘escape’ informationally from place-defined groups and by permitting outsiders to ‘invade’ many groups' territories without ever entering them. Space has its own reality in the current mode of production and society, with the same claims and in the same global process as merchandise, money, and capital. Natural space is irreversibly gone. And although it of course remains as the origin of the social process, nature is now reduced to materials on which society's productive forces operate …. Spatial practice defines its space, it poses it and presupposes it in a dialectical interaction. Social space has thus always been a social product, but this was not recognized. When [the child] shifts to a second stage of listening … that of meaning, what is listened for is no longer the possible (the prey, the threat, or the object of desire which occurs without warning), it is the secret; that which, concealed in reality, can reach human consciousness only through a code, which serves simultaneously to encipher and to decipher that reality.