Perfect Listening: Audiophilia, Ambiguity, and the Reduction of the Arbitrary

In the increasingly demanding sonic environment of contemporary urban life, consumers-now we are all consumers, of even our own experiences-have developed various strategies for maintaining at least an illusion of control over what they hear and how they hear it. What I am interested in is the particular activity of audiophilia, the ardent pursuit of high-fidelity sound reproduction, and its place within the larger field of the reception of music in contemporary American culture,1 as a means of understanding something about the nature of commodity aesthetics and the way in which certain consumers re-empower themselves by full immersion in the conditions of their profoundly mediated acoustic worlds. Audiophilia depends upon reducing sonic arbitrariness to the point where communication can take place in what Niklas Luhmann in his writings on art and social systems calls the medium of meaning [Sinn] (Art 2-52). All sound reproduction operates by reducing arbitrariness in the acoustic field, in which noise is exactly the arbitrary, and hence meaningless, state of vastly possible sound. A meaningful musical event is constituted by reproducing a relatively narrow range of sounds in predetermined ways. The audiophile, however, typically invests his faith in the idea that once noise has been excluded from the listening experience, his high-fidelity playback equipment can, by transmitting an informationrich signal, most nearly ideally reproduce/recapture/recreate an originary event, providing the fullest sense of being, thus the greatest pleasure. The audiophile, although he2 claims to pursue the "absolute sound," the perfect reproduction of an originary event using expensive and laborintensive electronic equipment,3 is, I argue, actually trying to over-reduce both a real and imagined initial chaos to a knowable state in which he can exercise domination and thereby reduce his existential anxiety. Audiophilia resembles many of our other relationships with modern technology-automobiles, computers, cell phones, or televisions are not merely tools for more easily accomplishing traditional human tasks but generators of uniquely modern experience -but it might be more instructive to think about how audiophilous experience illuminates the relationship between observers and art, pointing to the observer's role in the creation of aesthetic quasiobjects.4 Luhmann sees art as the mediation between perception (the operation of the individual psychic system) and communication (the operation of the social system) (Art 2-52). When we discuss audiophilia, we are concerned with a system within the larger system of art. How audiophilia functions as a (sub)system and ideological quasiobject within the social system of art must address the relationship among the recording artists, the engineers, the producers, the composers, the marketers, the critics, the recording and playback technology, the conditions of composition, the site at which the recording was produced, the site(s) at which it is reproduced, and the audiophile listener's unique physical and psychic condition. This autological network of operations becomes what Luhmann, borrowing from biological research by Maturana and Varela, terms an autopoietic system, i.e., a system that is self-generating, self-perpetuating, and operatively closed but structurally coupled with the environment.5 Autopoietic systems are marked by recursiveness and reflexivity. By this standard, audiophilia-indeed, all ideology-is autopoietic. One reason it is useful to look at connoisseur pursuits such as audiophilia as a system rather than simply a social phenomenon or a psychological disorder6 is that doing so leads us to consider the reproduction of sound as a quasi-object of the audiophile's reactionary ideology of strong knowing through ultra-mimesis, which is called into question by the very activity of his specialized listening. By considering this paradox, we can begin to understand how the form of this experience determines and is determined by its place in American consumer culture. …