WORK
BY DOUGLAS KAHN
WORK
BY DOUGLAS KAHN
Sound saturates the arts of this century; and its importance becomes evident if we can hear past the presumption of mute visuality within art history; past the matter of music that excludes references to the world, past the voice that is already its own source of existence, past the phonetic taskmastering of writing, and past what we might see as hearing. None of the arts is entirely mute, many are unusually soundful despite their apparent silence, and the traditionally auditive arts grow to sound quite different when included in an array of auditive practices. The century becomes more mellifluous and raucous through historiographic listening, just that much more animated with the inclusion of the hitherto muffled regions of the sensorium. Yet these sounds do not exist merely to sonorize the historical scene; they are also a means through which to investigate issues of cultural history and theory, including those that have been around for some time, existing behind the peripheral vision and selective audition of established fields of study. Indeed, many issues have not been addressed precisely because they have not been heard. Thus, the dual task here is to listen through history to sound and through sound to history - in particular, the history of sound in artistic modernism, the avant-garde, and experimental and postmodern points beyond, from the latter half of the nineteenth century into the 1960s, shifting from a largely European context to an American one. Reconstituting the auditory dimension can pry open the century to question and, ideally, better attune us to the changing conditions of aurality and artistic possibilities for sound in our own time.
The book concentrates on the generationof modernist and postmodernist techniques and tropes among artistic practices and discourses. Some are soundful in themselves; others are contingent on ideas of sound, voice, and aurality.1 As products of the new possibilities for hearing and as functional constraints for actually doing so, these techniques and tropes pertain to three main practical areas: the early development of sound within and across artistic practices, the response and accommodation of sound within artistic practices, and the use of ideas of sound within the development of important tropes within the arts. It would be a mistake to put too much stock in abstract categories because when they are examined in their historical contexts, techniques, tropes, and practices overlap, mediate and influence one another, and, most important, alternate quickly and exist simultaneously. The main ones discussed here are noise, auditive immersion in spatial and psychological domains, inscription and visual sound, the universalism of all soundand panaurality, musicalization of sound, phonographic reproduction and imitation, Cagean silence, nondissipative sounds and voices, fluidity at the nexus of performance and objecthood, William Burroughs's virus, and the bodily utterances of Michael McClure's beast language and Antonin Artaud's screaming.
By soundI mean sounds, voices, and aurality - all that might fall within or touch on auditive phenomena, whether this involves actual sonic or auditive events or ideas about sound or listening; sounds actually heard or heard in myth, idea, or implication; sounds heard by everyone or imagined by one person alone; or sounds as they fuse with the sensorium as a whole. It should be stated clearly at the outset that this study, although it no doubt stands in contrast to the wealth of recent material on visuality and visual culture is not constituted in opposition to the visual image. Rudolf Mannheim in his book Radio(1936) was excited that "wireless claims the whole attention of the theorist of art because for the first time in the history of mankind it makes practical experiments with an entirely unexplored form of expression in pure sound, namely, blind hearing,"2 but it would in fact be impossible to discuss sound in this way. Blind hearing, even for the blind, is a difficult proposition to sustain in a society that so thoroughly internalizes vision into every aspect of its being and in other ways integrates aspects of the sensorium with one another. Obviously, the same would apply to deaf seeing.
To hear past the historical insignificance assigned to sounds, we need to hear more than their sonic or phonic content. We need to know where they might touch the ground, momentarily perhaps, even as they dissipate in air. The terms significant soundsand significant noisesare used in the first part of the book‹not to differentiate these sounds and noises from insignificant or meaningless ones but to counter long-standing habits of imagining that sounds transcend or escape meaning or that sounds elude sociality despite the fact they are made, heard, imagined, and thought by humans.3 To understand the sounds of modernism requires closer examination of how phenomena are invoked and muted by amplitude (or lack thereof) and affect. A scream, for instance, is thought to be an irrepressible expression, instantaneously understood through unmediated communication. Indeed, screams in their natural habitat usually demand and receive a direct response. However, the literary, theatrical, musical, or cinematic habitats in which modernist screams reverberated are very different. Does anyone rush to the stage to lend assistance? Art screams bank on emphasis, amplitude, and affect, but they mute significance and deafen us in other ways with their rhetorical force. The same is true for noise, which can interrupt itself as capably as what it ostensibly interrupts, and Cagean silence, which has silenced other things, as it dwells at the problematic edge of audibility and attempts to hear the world of sound without hearing aspects of the world in a sound. In short, the sound and the fury never signify nothing or, rather, just nothing. What such auditive states have proven to drown out are the social in sound - the political, poetical, and ecological - and these are what the present text seeks to reinstate.
The twelve chapters of this book are grouped into five sections. Since each section bears a separate introduction, I will forgo repeating them here. The first two sections are generalist in nature and cover events in Europe and the United States from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. They are structured either as pastiche or loose historical trackings, ending with longer treatments of specific areas - Italian Futurist noise and Russian Revolutionary film, respectively. The remaining three sections consist of detailed studies of artists in the United States (Artaud is the exception here, although his influence on American artists is not) in the two decades following midcentury. To a certain extent, the first two sections set the stage for the more in-depth studies to follow and are tied together by numerous continuities, including a cast of characters who grow increasingly familiar as they reappear throughout the book. One character in particular becomes very familiar: John Cage appears throughout the book and is the subject of an entire section. He would occupy a central position within any discussion of sound and art in this century because of the importance and influence across the arts of his music, writings, and ideas about sound throughout his long and prolific career. Moreover, like Artaud he connects the first half with the second half of the century, but unlike Artaud he lived to see the second half, almost all of it.
By ending in the late 1950s and making only scattered forays into the early 1960s, the book produces an imbalance weighted on the side of Euro-American males. The rhetorical uses of women in terms of immersion, noise, noise abatement, and other instances are examined, but the major historical participation of female artists in their own right begins just after the timeframe of the book. While there are still fruitful studies to be made of female artists in the heart of modernism - Esfir Schub or Gertrude Stein come immediately to mind - practicalities of time and resources have prevented me from attending to them.17 Given that the European-based avant-garde has not often been appreciated for the multicultural dynamics that did exist, the predominance of transmissional themes (as opposed to inscriptive) in the international avant-garde proper, especially in its poetry, places it outside the central themes of this book. Within the American context, the achievements and influences on the rest of the arts of the musics of Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, and others and of African-American poetries and linguistic play are necessary for a more complete representation of aurality in the 1950s and 1960s. Within the specific topics of this book, the screaming in the last chapter needs to be joined by a chorus of saxophones. In fact, there is still much work to be done on all the activities that fall squarely within the focus of the book.
Among reasons for concentrating on the artists included here (apart from the fact that many are among the most prominent artists working with sound in the period under investigation) is that many have held the attention of many contemporary artists working with sound. Indeed, Luigi Russolo, the Dadaists, Dziga Vertov, Antonin Artaud, John Cage, William Burroughs and other Beats, the musique concrètecomposers, artists associated with Fluxus, and others in the book all enjoy solid reputations that continue to grow with each passing year. I have offered here reinterpretations and additional information on these artists and proposed others who might rightfully join this list. The history and theory of the arts are regularly used by artists in developing their own work; I have simply attempted to incorporate this fact more directly in the formation of this book. Likewise, by concentrating on the actions and statements of artists within specific conditions, especially in acknowledging the complexities involved and the artistic possibilities that stem from them both then and now, I am attempting to maintain a perspective on art making that might be of use to working and aspiring artists.
The emphasis on technique is also derived from the concerns of working artists. With respect to the many ideas of what techniques are, please note that in the present text they are not servants to meanings, content, reception, and social situation but are instead already infused with these very properties as artists finesse the material - conceptual, social, political, aesthetic, and poetical - in the seemingly most insignificant moments wrought within a work. The relationship of techniques to technologies is a little more complicated, since it is clear that technologies can derive from techniques (for example, sound recording from ideas of nondissipative voices) and techniques can derive from technologies (the use of fragmented syntax rationalized through simultaneity of transmissions). While the voice within the arts will always relate to techniques (for example, the mnemotechniques of orature), I would restrict its relation to auditive technologies (architectural, mechanical, electrical) to the times when they are used to modify the sonorous voice or when the voice is clearly understood to function in a technological trope - which means I would never say that the voice is a technology in and of itself. Finally, I would warn against the tendency of subsuming techniques and technologies under technology alone when the two are encountered in the same setting.
I am also responding to the prominence that recorded sound has assumed as artistic raw material since midcentury. While there has been a ready stock of references associated with such work, one of the purposes of this book is to introduce additional historical and theoretical considerations. It would be impossible to write at length about sound in the twentieth century without such an emphasis; both sound and listening have been and continue to be transformed through the cultural elaboration of technology. In fact, I work under the assumption that the history of the arts using auditive technologies, including those in concert with vision, constitute a large, rarely acknowledged portion of the history of the media arts, and while I do not draw out the implications for present-day artistic practice, I believe it would be possible to do so.
It is important to remember that technology has never been manifested in the arts in a simple way. The influence of technologies in early modernism was often registered through mislaid ideas about what actually existed or what they could do, with little regard for the state of technological development, let alone an understanding of the tough realities of institutional access. Yet such presumptions and desires often bore greater insight into the technology and spoke of greater artistic possibilities than the ideas accompanying actual implementation. On the other hand, since the 1920s and especially since midcentury, recording technologies have belonged to a larger culture of recording in media-saturated societies, which necessarily intercedes in any technical consideration within artistic production. This not only would pertain to patently auditive phenomena but would extend to the implications of sound within other forms of recording. In this sense, for instance, William Burroughs stands at a cantankerous cusp between older forms of phonographic inscription and those belonging to present-day digital and genetic modes.
Technologically, the book concentrates primarily on ideas of phonography, by which I mean all mechanical, optical, electrical, digital, genetic, psychotechnic, mnemonic, and conceptual means of sound recording as both technological means, empirical fact, and metaphorical incorporation, including nineteenth-century machines prior to the invention of the phonograph. Moreover, I approach phonography primarily in terms of inscription, although inscription is hardly limited to phonography. As I have written elsewhere, among the discourses of sound within the avant-garde arts (yet limited neither to sound nor to the avant-garde) three prevailing figures can be discerned through which technological tropes were directed: vibration, inscription, and transmission.18 These figures did not originate with actual technologies but existed prior to them and were transformed by their adoption within a technological sphere. The figure of vibration was upheld by the Pythagoreans, refurbished by neo-Platonic and neo-Pythagorean thought centuries later, and invigorated by scientific, Eastern and spiritist thought in the West in the nineteenth century. The monochord - the technology that underscored the harmonic totality of Pythagorean thought, the vibrating string structuring the cosmos - was so overcoded by the late-nineteenth century locus of vibrations in the synesthetic arts that it was functionally nonexistent, although the connections between acoustics, music, and mathematics, not to mention certain ambitions toward the cosmos, remained strong. The inscriptive attributes of phonography became coterminous with the legacies of writing, universal alphabets, and languages, as well as other inscriptive practices, while the telegraphic, telephonic, and radiophonic attributes of transmission became coterminous with a range of mythological, theological, and literary instances where the communication at a distance produced compensatory and exaggerated relationships among objects and bodies.
The book focuses on inscriptive practices (but is in no way restricted to them), whereas ideas of vibration and transmission occur only intermittently and have not been addressed directly. The book ends with a contrast between the manner in which, with Burroughs's virus, inscription has been sunk from the surface of bodies into each and every cell (a shift that itself should complicate notions about writing or inscribing on bodies), and the energetic configuration and situation of bodies and environments found in Artaud's post-Rodez work and McClure's meat science. Their use of energetic flows, derived from Eastern bodily practices and elsewhere, poses a challenge to techniques and tropes of inscription that have so strongly informed and problematized modernism and suggests that any theorization of contemporary aurality will have to take into account not only the changed status of inscription and the historical background of transmission but also a figure or phenomenon, particle and wave, capable of spatial elaboration and vice versa, which supersedes both.
On a more anecdotal level, the present writing has flowed from work initially undertaken in the mid-1980s at the World Music Program at Wesleyan University, where I studied composition with Alvin Lucier and Ron Kuivila. Wesleyan, because of its association with John Cage, was one of the few places in the United States where one could study music by first asking about the composition of sound prior to composition withsound, whereas almost everywhere else the nature of sound remained unproblematic with attention paid instead to how it might be organized. The former admitted the possibility of attention to the sounds of the world, whereas the latter was restricted to a set of analytical and practical conventions. On undertaking an investigation into what the avant-garde meant by sound, I was surprised to find that it was repeatedly recuperated into musical sound. There was an historical unwillingness to allow certain characteristics of sound into compositional practice that contradicted the transgressive rhetoric of noise and the emancipatory claims of an openness to the world of sound, among other positions. The banishment of these characteristics was due primarily to the fact that theysignified.Through their banishment, they became the new noises; but unlike the old noises, they brought the world with them. A position that considered signification to be the noise of noise was obviously unsatisfactory on a number of counts. It was ill adapted to understanding sound within contemporary arts, mass media, and the culture of recording, and it foreclosed too many artistic possibilities, including those available to music itself. In the course of trying to hear what was muted, the actual abundance of historical moments of sound became evident. Awkwardly situated in their original contexts, once brought into proximity with one another these moments formed a very different story about sound, voice, and aurality.
A number of other people were interested in similar questions during the mid-1980s. Nearly all of them were artists of one type or another who had grown dissatisfied with what historical, theoretical, and critical texts had made of sound and significance. Although the reigning poststructuralist and postmodern theories did little to address the issues concerning sound, they did raise expectations about the possible nature of discussions one could have. Among the intellectual disciplines, there were a number of important texts,19 but it was left to the film and media studies to provide examples of how sound and signification could be approached.20 However, the nature of film and television where sound has had secondary if not ancillary status meant that too many matters of concern for artists interested in a more central role for sound were left untreated.
With respect to music, the emergence of sound art in the 1980s was characterized by a problematic attitude toward Western art music - in particular, the avant-garde and experimental work claiming a relationship to sound per se. The idea of the musicalizationof sound arose as a means to identify and supersede techniques in which sounds and noises were made siguificant by making them musical.21 As a tactic to direct attention toward the semiotic complexity of sound and new ways of thinking about sound, it was a way to begin to account for artistic activities already underway and to invite a greater range of artistic possibilities, including those operating within music. It was also a means to examine the status of musical tropes underscoring so many other discourses, including philosophy and contemporary theory, since aerating the bounds of music itself might very well destabilize what the tropes supported.
Over the past decade the growing interest and activity in sound and the arts have been demonstrated by a number of important publications, conferences, exhibitions, and events.22 My own participation within this area has been concerned, as you might suspect, with the interdisciplinary history and theory of sound within the avant-garde and experimental arts and with the use of sound by contemporary artists. The publication that relates most directly to the present text is the book I coedited and introduced, Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio and the Avant-Garde.While I would refer readers to this book for a more wide-ranging treatment of the general topic, the present text undertakes fundamentally different approaches to some of the same topics (Artaud, Cage, Burroughs) and investigates many areas not covered in the book. It is apparent that innumerable new topics and fundamental revisions are attendant on studies of sound and the arts, more so once they are brought into play with developments in other disciplines, and that the same holds true for innovation and sophistication with artistic practice itself. Indeed, despite the din we are in, it seems like the early days of sound.
1. The term generationis used for its inseparable sense of old and new. Examining the generation of techniques, tropes, and practices has many advantages, especially in the way that contributing factors can be observed before becoming too obscured by further elaboration. Of course, we can never be present at the birth, and there can never be a fully adequate account of the origins, of an individual's ideas by anyone - whether by authors like myself close friends of the individual, or the individual himself or herself - only a representation that takes a certain density of sources and maneuvers into account. No matter how inadequate in comparison to an individual's experience, emphasizing this type of density at least avoids the limiting myths of individual action by posing a greater range of plausibility within an array of social practices.
2. Rudolf Arnheim, Radio(London: Faber & Faber, 1936), 226. While writing the book in the mid-1930s Arnheim thought the topic of radio itself was retrograde, since television was surely just around the corner. See the preface to the American edition (New York: Da Capo Press, 1972), 7.
3. Certain sounds may indeed express the inexpressible, but are they incapable of "expressing" other things at the same time, despite who might be listening and how they might be listening? And why would the inexpressible demand such superb isolation? Historically, the inexpressible has been defended by thinking of certain sounds as mundane.The word derives from mundus,meaning "world" and its pejorative sense has religious roots in the rejection of pagan attachments with the world in favor of a transcendence from the world. The scholarly disciplines and artistic practices that continue to rely on such a notion, whatever productive role such discrimination may have locally, will necessarily indulge in a deracination of these worldlysounds by denying them their subtleties and intensities in the terrestrial sphere of culture.
17. Stein - like James Joyce or Samuel Beckett, who are also absent from this book - would require a dedicated study. Some exclusions are truly regrettable. For instance, Carolee Schneemann's work and the sounds of Meat Joywould have been integral to part 5. As the present manuscript was being prepared, however, a new book appeared that makes an important contribution to the area, Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies,ed. Adalaide Morris (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1997). Of special note with regard to women and modernism is Morris's own essay on H.D. [Hilda Doolittle].
18. Douglas Kahn, "Histories of Sound Once Removed," introduction to Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio and the Avant-garde,ed. Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992).
19. Two were by composers: John Cage's Silence(Middletown: Wesleyan University, 1961) and R. Murray Schafer's The Tuning of the World: Toward a Theory of Soundscape Design(New York: Knopf, 1977). Whereas Cage's ideas are addressed throughout the book, Schafer is mentioned only in passing, since artistic activities influenced by his approach fall outside the historical timeframe of the book. There were also materials associated with intermedia, Fluxus, text-sound, poésie sonore, soundscapes and acoustic ecology, electroacoustic music and other new musicactivities, Das neue Hörspieland the like. Again, most of these were by artists themselves. A brief list of relevant publications would include Neues Hörspiel: Texte Partituren,ed. Klaus Schöning (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1969); Mark Ensign Cory, The Emergence of an Acoustic Art Form: An Analysis of the German Experimental Hörspiel of the l960s(Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1974); Michael Nyman, Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond(New York: Schirmer Books, 1974), as well as his magazine articles during the same period; Henri Chopin, Poésie Sonore Internationale(Paris: Jean-Michel Place Éditeur, 1979) and his review Ou; Germano Celant, The Record as Artwork: From Futurism to Conceptual Art,exhibition catalog (Fort Worth: Fort Worth Art Museum, 1977); René Block et al., Für Augen und Ohren(Berlin: Akademie der Künste, 1980); Ursula Block and Michael Glasmeier, Broken Music: Artists' Recordworks(Berlin: DAAD and gelbe Musik, 1989), Nicholas Zurbrugg's journal Stereo Headphones. People such as Amirkhanian and Schöning also published acousticallyover the radio - the former at KPFA-FM in Berkeley, the latter at the WDR-Köln.
20. See Cinema/Sound,special issue of Yale French Studies60 (1980); Tom Levin, "The Acoustic Dimension;" Screen25, no. 3 (May-June 1984): 55-68; Film Sound: Theory and Practice,ed. Elisabeth Weis and John Belton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988); Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen(New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Rick Altman, Sound Theory, Sound Practice(New York: Routledge, 1992); and Margaret Morse, "Talk, Talk, Talk;" Screen26, no. 2 (March-April, 1985); 2-15.
21. To my knowledge, the Canadian audio artist Dan Lander first coined the term in the mid-1980s. It spread quickly throughout Canada and the United States, although the general concept seems to have developed independently around the same time in Australia among individuals associated with the audio arts at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and with students and staff at the University of Technology, Sydney. On the basis of Lander's suggestion, I presented a paper entitled "The Sound of Music" at Der freie Klangsymposium at the 1987 Ars Electronica festival, ed. Gottfried Hattinger et al. (Linz: Ars Electronica, 1987), 33-51. Individuals who favored the critique surprisingly found themselves accused of hating everything musical and of not appreciating the complexity of meanings and politics attendant on music. In fact, they were merely concerned with inhibitions within certain traditions of music (those that impinged on notions of worldly sound as discursive foil and actual material and promised response to changing social conditions of aurality and to create others) and with reading politics through such inhibitions. Still, the implications for music itself were much more consequential than standing Hanslick on his head. In keeping with the thinking of the day, those involved in sound were clearly intent on not repeating the type of demarcative procedures they criticized in others.
22. Among publications in Australia have been Earshot,ed. Shelly Cox et al., special issue of 3rd Degree,no. 4 (1988); special issue on sound, ed. Martin Harrison et al., Art & Text,no. 31 (December-February 1989); special issue on sound, ed. Frances Dyson, New Music Articles,no. 8 (1990); Sound Cultures,ed. Cohn Hood, special issue of West,no. 5 (192); the journal Essays in Sound(since 1992); and Paul Carter, The Sound Inbetween(Kensington: University of New South Wales, 1992); Lyre's Island,special section on Australian sound art and new music, ed. Douglas Kahn, Leonardo Music ]ournal,no. 6 (1996). Among publications in Canada have been the influential Sound by Artist,ed. Dan Lander and Micah Lexier (Toronto: Art Metropole, 1990); special issue on sound, Public,nos. 4-5 (1990); Radio-phonics and Other-phonies,special issue ed. Dan Lander of Musicworks,no. 53 (Summer 1992); Radio Rethink,ed. Daina Augaitis and Dan Lander (Banff Walter Phillips Gallery, 1994). Among publications in the United States have been Wireless Imagination(1992); Radiotext(e),ed. Neil Strauss (New York: Semiotext(e), 1993); Allen S. Weiss,Phantasmatic Radio(Durham: Duke University Press, 1995); Experimental Sound and Radio,ed. Allen Weiss, special issue of TDR40, no. 3 (Fall 1996); and other relevant publications, including a special issue on the voice of Notebooks in Cultural Analysis,ed. Norman Cantor and Nathalia King (Durham: Duke University Press, 1986); Voice-Over: On Technology,ed. Laurence Rickels, special issue of Substance61, 19, no. 1(1990); and Octoberno. 55 (1991). For a very few European publications: the catalog for the 1987 Ars Electronica Festival mentioned above, the book associated with the Sonambiente festival, Klangkunst,ed. Christian Kneisel et al. for the Akademie der Künste, Berlin (Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1996); see also Oor/Earspecial issue of Mediamatic6, no. 4 (1992), and various special issues of Positionen(Berlin). In Japan there have been the special issue on sound of Music Today,no. 19 (1993); Tuning Forks: Technologies of Sound and Music,special issue of InterCommunication,no. 9 (1994), and the activities dedicated to sound and new music of Xebec in Kobe, including their newsletter Sound Arts.