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.
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