Font Size: 

Like strangers on a train.  This is the mundane image Jean-Luc Nancy offers to illustrate our Being as exposure to singularity; exposure to an absence of any substantial identity; a “relation without relation”; community. Our being-in-common, thus, does not refer to a commonality that binds us together, rather to a shared experience of finitude in which there is no unity only alterity. In this paper I explore the claims made in the interdisciplinary field of soundscape studies and acoustic ecology that communities can be defined advantageously along acoustic lines.  Through the neologism “soundscape” Murray Schafer attempted to draw attention to the experiences of particular acoustic environments and to create compositions – either through focused listening and soundwalks or recording and studio processing the sounds found in these environments.  By drawing on Nancy’s work – from his ontological writings on being-with, to his ideas on community, landscape and most importantly listening – I rethink the emphasis on an acoustic community as a “bounded system which involves shared acoustic experience among its participants” (Truax) and explore instead, following a lineage of thought that begins with Blanchot and Bataille, the idea of an acoustic community as an “unworking” (désouevrement) that follows not a logic of unity and boundedness but one of dispersal, disruption and fragmentation.  Soundscapes inscribe being-in-common (as opposed to common being) since listening itself is a limit experience in which we are simultaneously withdrawn from and exposed to the Other.  Furthermore, as a form of composition listening/sonority-as-methexis approximates Derrida’s arche-writing: sound is difference, a difference that is captured through resonance – having presence but always becoming different from itself thus revealing an unworking, a workless, inoperative activity.  This rethinking of the sonic environment and the role soundscapes play in the unworking of community can pose new questions to both landscape studies and geographies of listening.