Tyson's sonic intervention

The notorious boxing match between Tyson and Holyfield suggests a curious intervention onto the scene of audition – the ear as a vulnerable, flabby appendage to the human body. Tyson’s vicious biting of Holyfield’s ear, not only once, but twice during the match held in June1997, places the ear in the ring, as a target for immobilizing another. The very act also pushes the movements of the boxer toward barbarity, turning Tyson into a monster (and his ultimate suspension from professional boxing). I linger over this scene, of the bitten ear, of the act of absolute aggression as it locates itself against the site of audition: what did Holyfield hear at those instances of Tyson’s jaws clamping onto his ears? And what led Tyson to pinpoint this part of the body, as if in the grip of some total form of animality? Is the ear and barbarity attached in a mysterious and ancient form of fighting, where the bitten ear not only stuns and wounds the opponent but expresses the lethal intentions of the attacker – to bite the ear is to articulate that one is not beyond animality. Professional boxing has never witnessed the likes of this scene before – even while flirting with a total abandonment of reason boxing remains coded according to a certain professionalism (encapsulated in the mythological stature of Rocky Balboa), which Tyson surely undermines by explicitly going for the ear. Tyson’s bite suggests a form of sonic sculpture that delivers the full breath of the body down upon listening. His literal reconfiguration of Holyfield’s ear sits within the aural imagination as a radical link to forms of invasive sonics, and perfectly encapsulates (without relying on loudspeakers) a particular aesthetic drive towards noise.