listening to repeating

Monday, December 7, 3:30-5:00 PM, CMU 202, University of Washington, Seattle

“Queer/ing/s Online” (with Queer + Public + Performance),

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Ok, I’ve rationalized my exam lists (again). Essentially, I’m treating the rationale process as a way of working through the reading. I’m hoping this rationale-in-process approach will better prep me for my exams and prospectus.

It begins with the “epigraphs” below. Here are the lists (tho they have changed a bit since I last posted them):

List One/Period: Anglo-American Modernism

List Two/Critical Genealogy: Technoculture Studies

List Three/Focus Area: Sound Technologies and Sonic Modernity

And a previous draft of the research questions, which have now changed

And thanks to Curtis for reading a draft.

“Let’s hear the time, he said.” — James Joyce, Ulysses

“Now I have one radio-phonograph; I plan to have five.” — Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

The following exam lists engage three research questions, the first of which is: How might Western modernity be understood differently if emphasis is transferred from traditionally “ocularcentric” (Jay 459) or scopic principles to a sonic register? As scholars including Martin Jay, Jacques Attali, and David Michael Levin have noted, the cultural history of Western modernity emerges principally from visual frameworks and structures. Levin goes so far as to articulate a “hegemony of vision” (7). That is, while few would disagree with the assertion that, at least for those who can see, vision is the primary mode of human perception, the privileging of a visual paradigm for knowledge-making nevertheless carries with it significant—and often reductive—warrants about artistic production, embodiment, subjectivity, identity, ideology and power (2-3). Of course, a shift to a different sense does not remedy all dilemmas. In fact, it just generates new ones, with new questions, such as: How is “sonic modernity” documented in historical moments where sound recordings are rare or nonexistent? What is the relation of a sound recording to print in literary and cultural studies? How does a “sonic” emphasis blur, if at all, subject-object dichotomies? And is the very notion of “sonic modernity” necessarily phono-, and by Derridian association, logocentric? Whatever the dilemma or question, in the title above, the function of “sound” in “sound technologies” or “sonic” in “sonic modernity” is not intended to elide the optic in favor of the aural or oral. Instead, in tandem with Michael Bull and Les Back’s assertions in The Auditory Culture Reader, my research mobilizes the claim that “a visually based epistemology is both insufficient and often erroneous in its description, analysis, and thus understanding of the social world” (3). Bull and Back’s concerns are essentially methodological; they are challenges to how, for example, literary and cultural critics not only frame problems, but actually “make sense” of them and make them matter. As such, one of the chief aims of the lists below, especially the third exam list or “focus area” (i.e., “Sound Technologies and Sonic Modernity”) is to replay modernity’s record and reposition sound’s relation to it. In so doing, my research attempts to enrich the vocabulary for how we historicize and theorize the complex intermediations between the human senses, technology and culture.

Yet rather than tackle the entirety of modernity (sonic or otherwise) in the lists below, I locate my studies of sound and sound technologies in Anglo-American modernism (i.e., my first exam list or “period”). My reasoning here is best attributed to the marked advancements in and popularization of sound technologies, including the phonograph (invented by Edison in 1877), the radio (demonstrated by Tesla in 1893) and magnetic tape (invented by Pfleumer in 1928), between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. Importantly, this historical period occurs after the Industrial Revolution and the advent of the rotary printing press in the West and yet before the current digital age of so-called network societies. In this post-press, pre-Internet era, technologies such as the radio, phonograph, and magnetic tape did more than allow for the mass reproduction and circulation of sounds. They literally resituated the inscription, storage and transmission of information and knowledge, and of bodies and art, too. And if, as Rita Felski argues, modernism is associated with “aesthetic self-consciousness, stylistic fragmentation, and a questioning of representation” (13), then the simultaneity, modularity and ephemerality afforded by modern sound technologies certainly resonate with Felski’s associations. Texts by Conrad, Du Bois, Ellison and Woolf, in addition to the radio broadcasts of Pound, Wells, Forster and H.D. and the magnetic tape experimentations of Beckett, Cage and Burroughs, suggest that modern sound technologies were not merely modern instruments. They became symptomatic of a new way of making that offered a kairos moment for modernist culture, hence my second research question: How and to what effects do Anglo-American modernist texts document, aestheticize and critique the processes of “sonic modernization”?

When using the term “sonic modernization,” or the techno-scientific innovations of sound and its concomitant role in art, the public sphere, and state development, I am highlighting an important methodological aspect of how I am approaching my research and the lists below. My foremost investment is neither in “music” or “sound” as a theme in literature, nor in poetic, narrative or otherwise literary devices that might dubbed “musical” or “sonic.” Instead, through sonic modernization in the context of Anglo-American modernism, I understand the primary sources in my third list as spaces where technology, sound and culture converge. Per the language of my second research question, these texts-cum-convergences are aesthetic objects, socio-historical documents, and cultural critiques. And in a fashion similar to the work of N. Katherine Hayles, they might then be read or heard as correspondences with modernist subjectivities that emerge from specific human-technology interactions. While I am not attempting to delimit a single “modernist subjectivity,” I am interrogating and attempting to situate an array of modernist subjectivities and how they were sonically instantiated. A part of this inquiry will no doubt include historicizing and theorizing through what, in Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity, Alexander Weheliye refers to as the “disturbance of the alleged unity between sound and source” (7). To add to this mix, I will attend to what Douglas Kahn identifies as “three figures of . . . abstract character—vibration, inscription, transmission—that account for how sounds are located or dislocated, contained or released, recorded or generated” (14). Finally, related to both Weheliye and Kahn, I will consider how modern sound technologies navigate, in Susan M. Squier’s words, “our biological and social worlds” (10). Each of these lines of inquiry runs parallel not just with canonical works of Anglo-American modernist literature, but also with the field of technoculture studies. Accordingly, my final research question is: As a critical lens, how might technoculture studies enable nuanced readings of the feedback loops between sound technologies and modernist subjectivities?

Scholars of technoculture, including Donna Haraway and Sandy Stone, have noted technology’s strange antinomies: its affiliations with freedom and domination, utopia and dystopia, inclusion and exclusion, and embodiment and disembodiment. As such, my second exam list (or “critical genealogy”) explores the dynamics of these antimonies by tracing stress points in technoculture studies. Broadly speaking, the genealogy provides for a non-reductive survey of a scholarly field, but, to return to my final research question, it also highlights particular interstices between subjectivity, embodiment, and technology in twentieth century Anglo-American culture. By drawing from a broader historical spectrum and wider range of genres and cultural formations than my other two exam lists, this genealogy allows me to construct a rich theoretical framework, which preserves tension in order to work through it. My hope, then, is that my second exam list, “Technoculture Studies,” will map onto my third, “Sound Technologies and Sonic Modernity,” to produce complex, multi-layered engagements with modernist literary culture. As Michael Davidson argues, “[w]hen historians speak of ‘literary culture,’ they usually mean the history of print technologies” (98) and thus focus on the stable space of the page, the architecture of typography, the mass reproduction of images, and so on. This version of literary culture arguably correlates with a limited understanding of modernist subjectivities. For instance, through more research on the peculiar interdependency of radio, the phonograph and magnetic tape with embodying processes (where bodies are cut, copied, spliced, stored, and transmitted), perhaps a less fixed, more contingent strain of Anglo-American modernism is possible. Consequently, technology’s antinomies once again rear their heads: visual and oral media, print and sound production, and the seeing and listening audience. In an age of multimedia, multitasking, and mashing up, these antinomies may now appear at best superficial. Nonetheless, to read and rationalize these contemporary, digital phenomena and Web 2.0 forms back onto modernism is a problematic mode of making sense. Even in their ostensible wirelessness, sound technologies and sonic modernity can be situated in material contexts, which very well may be noisy. Whatever the case, sound’s been quiet in literary and cultural studies for long enough.

Works Cited:

Bull, Michael, and Les Back. “Introduction: Into Sound.” The Auditory Culture Reader. Sensory Formations Series. Ed. Michael Bull and Les Back. Oxford, UK: Berg, 2003. 1-24.

Davidson, Michael. “Technologies of Presence: Orality and the Tapevoice of Contemporary Poetics.” Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies. Ed. Adalaide Kirby Morris. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1997. 97-125.

Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. 1952. New York: Random House, 1980.

Felski, Rita. “Introduction: Myths of the Modern.” The Gender of Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard U P, 1995. 1-34.

Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993. 1-20.

Joyce, James. Ulysses. 1922. New York: Random House, 1946.

Kahn, Douglas. Introduction. Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde. Eds. Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. 1-29.

Levin, David Michael. Introduction. Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision. Ed. David Michael Levin. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1993. 1-29.

Squier, Susan M. “Communities of the Air: Introducing the Radio World.” Communities of the Air: Radio Century, Radio Culture. Ed. Susan M. Squier. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2003. 1-35.

Weheliye, Alexander G. Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity. Durham: Duke U P, 2005.