The Lossless Self

“The word analog, like fidelity, is pure gimmick. These terms easily detach from any clear meaning and become fetishes ready to be enlisted in the service of a variety of agendas.”

“We know the concept of fidelity to be a sham, yet many of us still pursue it as a mode of resistance to haste, waste, and careless consumerism.”

“At stake in the possibility of “counterfeit listening”—listening that acknowledges degraded sound as equally real—are some of our deepest moral values, including mindfulness, attentive citizenship, and conscientious consumption.”

“Inattentive listening can open one up to deceit, control, and manipulation.”

“From this perspective, to accept degraded sound is to give in to ethical decay in other realms of life. To be not only fooled but happily fooled by unfaithful sound can indicate the worst sort of decadence.”

“Fidelity has less to do with what is heard than with who hears it. Listening for fidelity is not about empirical comparison between two measurements, but about similarity, or resonance, between two emotional experiences. Fidelity is not something absolute but something dreamed, sensed, and felt.”

“We seek affective fidelity: faithfulness to our own pasts, preferences, and principles.”

“But the history of fidelity has taught us that we can no longer blame our dissatisfaction on the sluggish bit rate, the faulty needle, or our lousy headphones, acquired second-hand. Even if they were perfect, perfection is boring, and not what we want.”

“Fidelity is deployed to compensate for the loss it reveals. The achievement of what we call fidelity has always involved the recuperation of things once lost: loss of information, loss of quality, and—more so today than ever before—loss of self. The ambivalence of contemporary discourse on selfhood, from feminist reclamation of narcissism to research on brain plasticity, suggests a destabilization of our very concept of self. How can we be true to our own listening habits if our ears are unsteady to begin with?”

“To cope with loss of all kinds, we aestheticize loss as a gain”

“Perhaps audiophiles are concerned less with loss of quality than with loss of motivation to recover from that loss. When Spotify instructs us to “just sit back” and listen, immersed in passive pleasure, who among us is not tempted to comply? And even if we maintain consciousness, what if we are among the 80.6 percent of listeners who failed NPR’s audio quality quiz, yearning to resist but never knowing how? Consumer capitalism leads us to believe that lapses in listening are best offset through increased consumption.”

“If fidelity can be achieved only through our own faithful performance of listening, then to accept loss is to risk losing something of ourselves. My own fantasy of achieving full affective fidelity is a lost cause; I know I am far too fickle to ever feel the same way more than once. Fidelity to ourselves, however appealing, joins high fidelity as an impossible dream.”

“What we love about noise is the way we lose ourselves in it. The trouble settles in when we are not even sure what we’re losing.”