Melted Honey; Sax and Sex
55
their hearing transparently. Hearing hears right through itself, being preoccupied
instead with what is heard, not with the project of hearing itself.^® Hearing,
which must be deaf to itself if we are to hear habitually at all, leaves the site of
the body to dwell in noise, and then brings that noise back to the hearer. Hearing
necessitates a journey outbound from the body and into noise, from which it
returns with its noisy treasures. But hearing is not alone in its project; touch is
very heavily implicated in the way that players’ hearing extends itself beyond
itself
Touch cannot be separated from the hearing sense, because it is
touching the instrument body that produces sound. Hands, fingers, mouths, and
tongues that reach out to touch instruments during rehearsals are highly
surveilled in the rehearsal moment, as each touch (a touch too light, a tongue
flicking too hard) is monitored for its technical correctness, creating a divide
between what is self and what is not. During performance experiences, bodies
are, as Serres suggests, not experienced as subject organs or flesh parts that exist
in distinctive separation from objects. Asking, ‘Svhat is a hand,” Serres answers
himself, “It is not an organ, it is a faculty, a capacity for doing, for becoming a
claw, or paw, weapon or compendium. It is a naked faculty. A faculty is not
special, it is never specific, it is the possibility of doing something in general. . .
our hands are that nakedness I find in gymnastics, that pure faculty, cleared up
by exercise, by the asceticism of undifferentiating.”^^
Similarly, a band member’s hand or tongue or finger no longer
exists as a hand or tongue or finger when it habitually takes
hold of instrument, nor is the instrument simply an instrument.
Serres continues, “The hand is no longer a hand when it has
taken hold of the hammer, it is the hammer itself, it is no
longer a hammer, it flies transparent, between the hammer and
the nail, it disappears and dissolves, my own hand has long
since taken flight in writing. The hand and thought, like one’s
tongue, disappear in their determinations.”^^
During performances, the body similarly becomes sax, trumpet, trombone; the
body becomes wholly instrumentalised. At the same performance moment in
which hearing-sense occurs, touch-sense reaches out to dwell in that which is
simultaneously touched and heard: the body of the instrument. As a sax man
becomes “saxophonised” through extending his touch down through the
instrument by wholly ignoring the point at which he and sax meet, the sax
sounds produced through touch entice his hearing out of his body, and touch and
hearing take flight together.
While touch and hearing senses merge together to allow players to
escape the sites of their own bodies, vision is conspicuously absent from the
sensuous knot that characterises performance. Players are left metaphorically