I'm All Ears: Notes on the Strange Case of Momo and the Art of Listening

Momo bronze sculpture by Ulrike Enders (2007)

Photo: ChristianSchd (2014)

 

I. 

As many readers will know, Michael Ende - son of the German surrealist painter Edgar Ende - had a hugely successful career as a writer of fantasy and children's fiction, including the novel Momo (1973) [a], which concerns issues to do with being, time, and the stresses and strains of living in a consumer society.

 

The protagonist, Momo, is a mysterious young girl who possesses a remarkable ability to genuinely listen to others and who, like other children, understands that playing games, having fun, daydreaming etc., is anything but a waste of time.

 

Several philosophers have written in praise of the book, or drawn inspiration from it, including the Korean-born German philosopher Byung-Chul Han in The Expulsion of the Other [b] ...    

 

 

II. 

 

Thanks to our contemporary narcissism, says Han, "we are increasingly losing the ability to listen" [70] except to the sound of our own voice repeating within the echo chamber of an isolated self. 

 

Today, we lend no one an ear; that is to say, we no longer listen patiently and sympathetically, paying close attention to what is said and "affirming the Other in their otherness" [70]. And, on the other hand, no one listens to (or cares about) us - welcome to the digital madhouse and the hell of so-called social media (which is anything but):

 

"In analogue communication we usually have a concrete addressee, a personal counterpart. Digital communication, on the other hand, fosters an expansive, de-personalized communication that has no need of a personal counterpart, no need of a gaze or a voice. [74] 

 

You might feel you're at the centre of a global online community, but really you're in a void - or, if you prefer, caught up in what Han calls a shitstorm of affects and an accelerated exchange of information. Zoom might connect you electronically, but it simultaneously isolates you; it eliminates distance, "but gaplessness alone does not create personal closeness" [74].

 

And your friends on Facebook - well, they're not your friends; they're just like-minded individuals keen to self-advertise and raise their profile. 

 

We need, says Han, to develop a new political ethics of listening; to lend an ear to others and their language, their lives, their loves and fears, etc. We might simply call this compassion. And how do we develop such? 

 

Well, we might look to literature and characters such as Momo. She may just sit and listen to others, but Momo does so with utmost attention and sympathy and this has a magical effect: "She gives people ideas that would never have occurred to them on their own. Her listening [...] frees the Other for themselves." [76]

 

Han quotes the following passage from Ende's novel:

 

"Momo could listen in such a way that worried and indecisive people knew their own minds from one moment to the next, or shy people felt suddenly confident and at ease, or downhearted people felt happy and hopeful. And if someone felt that his life had been an utter failure, and that he himself was only one among millions of wholly unimportant people who could be replaced as easily as broken windowpanes, he would go pour out his heart to Momo. And even as he spoke, he would come to realize by some mysterious means that he was absolutely wrong: that there was only one person like himself in the whole world, and that, consequently, he mattered to the world in his own particular way. 

      Such was Momo's talent for listening." [77]

 

That's a good thing, I suppose - though admittedly I don't quite find this as moving or as convincing as Han. I wouldn't for example, speak of Momo giving back to people what essentially belongs to them and making some failure feel good about themselves, doesn't actually make them any less a loser.

 

Further, I worry that Momo is in danger of growing up to become one of those inverse cripples that Zarathustra speaks of; that is to say, a human being who lacks everything, except one massively overdeveloped organ, be that a giant all-seeing eye, or, as in this case, a huge ear that is open to every sound and sigh [c].  

 

Uncanny is the ear, as Derrida once said of what Freud calls the most obliging organ; the one we cannot close [d].

 

But isn't that the problem: we may have forgotten how to listen in the manner Byung-Chul Han advocates, but still the ear remains permanently open and thus all kinds of voices have easy access and we continuously receive all sorts of messages, including the lies of the State broadcast 24/7 via the news media, for example. 

 

Sometimes, one wishes not for a Momo-like ability to listen with compassion, but to be deaf to the world and able thus to experience the deepest silence [e].

 

 

Notes

 

[a] The full German title of Ende's prize-winning novel is Momo oder Die seltsame Geschichte von den Zeit-Dieben und von dem Kind, das den Menschen die gestohlene Zeit zurückbrachte [Momo, or the Strange Tale of the Time-Bandits and the Child Who Restored People's Stolen Time].

      The original English translation, by Frances Lobb, was entitled The Grey Gentlemen and published by Puffin Books in 1974. A new translation, by J. Maxwell Brownjohn, followed in 1985.     

 

[b] Byung-Chul Han, The Expulsion of the Other, trans. Wieland Hoban, (Polity Press, 2018). This text was originally published in German as Die Austreibung des Anderen, (S. Fischer Verlag, 2016). Page references to the English edition will be given directly in the post. 

 

[c] See the section 'On Redemption' in Book II of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. 

 

[d] Jacques Derrida, 'All Ears: Nietzsche's Otobiography', trans. Avital Ronell, Yale French Studies, No. 63, (Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 245-50. This essay can be accessed via JSTOR: click here.

 

[e] See the post: 'Dare to See the World Through Deaf Ears' (15 Jan 2013): click here. 

      One is concerned that there is both a phonocentrism and a form of audism running through Han's text, so pro-voice and pro-listening as he is. At the very least, we might question his privileging of speech and hearing.     

On Self-Esteem and Self-Harm; Selfies and Self-Destruction

Keith Negley: Self-Harm (2019)

keithnegley.com

 

 

I. 

 

Self-harm is an interesting phenomenon: one that the German philosopher Byung-Chul Han relates to the terror of authenticity, i.e., a neoliberal imperative that "intensifies narcissistic self-reference".*

 

For Han, there is a healthy (non-pathological) form of self-love, but narcissism is distinct from it. For one thing, the narcissist is blind to the Other: "The narcissistic subject perceives the world only in shadings of itself" [21].     

 

And that's not good: not only does the world soon becomes boring when everything is the Same, but excessive narcissism has a profoundly damaging effect on the individual. Ultimately, we need other people to make us feel good about ourselves. 

 

For the Other is a gratifying authority. Without such a figure to love, praise, acknowledge and appreciate us, bang goes our self-esteem.

 

And that's not good either. For according to Han, lack of self-esteem underlies self-harm and the act - I almost wrote art - of cutting oneself with a knife, razor, or broken bottle "is not only a ritual of self-punishment for one's own feelings of inadequacy [...] but also a cry for love" [23] 

 

I'm not sure of that last claim, but let's hear the good professor out:

 

"The sense of emptiness is a basic symptom of depression and borderline personality disorder. Borderliners are often unable to feel themselves; only when they cut themselves do they feel anything. For the depressive performance subject, the self is a heavy burden. It is tired of itself. Entirely incapable of stepping outside itself, it becomes absorbed in itself, which paradoxically results in an emptying and erosion of the self. Isolated in its mental enclosure, trapped in itself, it loses any connection to the Other." [23-4]

 

If you deny negative thoughts and feelings any form of expression, they eventually come back to bite you. And yet, of course, the elimination of all negativity is "a hallmark of contemporary society" [24] which is designed to be a safe space, free from all forms of hate speech (in case someone is offended) and all types of conflict (in case someone gets hurt). 

 

But just as sometimes people need to express hateful ideas - not because that's what they really think, but so that they don't have to think such thoughts any longer - so too do they need a degree of conflict in their lives: "It is only from conflicts that stable relationships and identities ensue. A person grows and matures by working through conflict." [24] 

 

Deny people - particularly young people - the chance to express their anger and release their rage and it's little wonder they end up cutting their arms, for example. 

 

For such an act "quickly releases accumulated destructive tension" [24] - not to mention endorphins - so there's undoubtedly a pleasurable aspect involved (an aspect often overlooked or downplayed by those who are worried that by admitting such they might make self-harm seem attractive).     

   

I think where Byung-Chul Han gets more interesting, is when he attempts to relate self-harm first to the taking of selfies and then, perhaps more controversially, to the practice of suicide bombing ...

 

 

II.  

 

Some readers might recall that I wrote a post on selfies and the rise of the look generation way back in October 2013 [click here], in which I argued against those commentators who greet every development to do with technology, sex, and the play of images with moral hysteria. 

 

And I still have no wish to add my voice to those that suggest the selfie is evidence of either the empty narcissism of today's youth, or a sign that they have been pornified and suffer from low self-esteem - all of which puts me at odds with Byung-Chul Han, who writes:

 

"The addiction to selfies also has little to do with self-love. It is nothing other than the idle motion of the lonely subject. Faced with one's inner emptiness, one vainly attempts to produce oneself. The emptiness merely reproduces itself. Selfies are the self in empty forms; selfie addiction heightens the feeling of emptiness. It results not from self-love, but from narcissistic self-reference. Selfies are pretty, smooth surfaces of an empty, insecure self. To escape this torturous emptiness today, one reaches either for the razorblade or the smarthphone. Selfies are smooth surfaces that hide the empty self for a short while. But if one turns them over one discovers their other side, covered in wounds and bleeding. Wounds are the flipsides of selfies." [24-5]

      

Apart from not sharing Han's horror of the selfie, a further problem I have with this is that, as a sex pistol, I find inner emptiness aesthetically pleasing rather than torturous and vacancy simply isn't something I care about. 

 

Many young punks - including most famously Sid Vicious - engaged in self-harm as an act of provocation; they stuck safety pins through their lips and burnt their arms with cigarettes to outrage and signal their nonconformity, not because they wished to deal with negative emotions, communicate distress, or cry out for love. It also facilitated bonding with other like-minded individuals (i.e. enforced group identity).   

 

Anyhoo, returning to Han's text, he now asks a series of questions:

"Could suicide attacks be perverse attempts to feel oneself, to restore a destroyed self-esteem, to bomb or shoot away the burden of emptiness? Could one compare the psychology of terror to that of the selfie and self-harm, which also act against the empty ego? Might terrorists have the same psychological profile as the adolescents profile as the adolescents who harm themselves, who turn their aggression towards themselves?" [25]

 

I suppose they could; I suppose they might. But I don't think so. But, again, let's allow Han to speak for himself (starting with a dubious gender claim):

 

"Unlike girls, boys are known to direct their aggression outwards, against others. The suicide attack would then be a paradoxical act in which auto-aggression and aggression towards others, self-production and self-destruction, become one: a higher-order aggression that is simultaneously imagined as the ultimate selfie. The push of the button that sets off the bomb is like the push of the camera button. Terrorists inhabit the imaginary because reality [...] denies them any gratification. Thus they invoke God as an imaginary gratifying authority, and can also be sure that their photograph will be all over the media like a form of selfie directly after the deed. The terrorist is a narcissist with an explosive belt that makes those who wear it especially authentic." [25-6]  

 

Again, I find this problematic in parts, but that's an important last line that reminds one not only of the need to curb enthusiasm, but be wary also of those who pride themselves on their authenticity and the truthfulness of their values.   

 

  

* Byung-Chul Han, The Expulsion of the Other, trans. Wieland Hoban, (Polity Press, 2018), p. 19. Future page references to this work will be given directly in the post.