Dyadic Modernism and the Scene of Listening

Dr. Adrienne Janus

18 Nov 2016

University of Aberdeen

Professeur Invité,

Université de Paris X

Paper delivered as Invited Professor at the University of Paris X to the Société d'études modernistes (SEM), Institut du monde anglophones, Paris, France, 18 Nov 2016.

“The Revenge of the Ear: Dyadic Modernism and the Scene of Listening”

This paper is part of a larger book project on Modernist Scenes of Listening: 1848, 1968.  The concern of the book is not only what sounds modernists were listening to (words, music, noise, silence), but also more importantly how modernist modes of listening were shaped in relation to different spaces and media.  For example, what happens when the perceptual intoxication associated with metaphysical modes of listening developed in the 19th century concert hall (particularly associated with wagnérisme post-1848) are transferred to the space of the modern city? How is the development of new media technologies - gramophone, radio, film - implicated in the shift away from metaphysical modes of listening towards the materialities of listening- in other words, the shift away from listening conceived as a function of the more or less disembodied spirit, towards listening conceived as a function of both organic and mechanical bodies? 

Insofar as this project is concerned with space and media, rather than with time and consciousness, and with transnational connections between peripheral modernisms (Irish/Italian) and central or dominant modernisms (Franco-continental/Anglo-American), it can be associated with what has become known as the ‘spatial turn’ characteristic of New Modernist Studies. One of the more dominant trends in New Modernist Studies involves particular attention to visual culture -- a field that emerged from the decoupling of the image from art history and is concerned with how the circulation of images through space, media shapes ways of looking. An excellent example of this trend in New Modernist Studies is Jean-Michel Rabate’s recent Handbook of Modernism, which includes essays on transnational and global modernism, on modernist things (Bill Brown) and on modernism and visual Culture (Laura Marcus), which opens with the claim, ‘Literary modernism is a visual culture.’  My project, and my paper today, attempts to gently push back against this claim: to what extent is literary modernism a visual culture? What avenues of thought, and what kinds of perceptual experience, are privileged and what kinds are closed off with such formulations?    Given the mutual implication of image and sound in literary modernism (not to mention modernist performance), is it not possible to think in terms of modernist ‘audio-visual culture’?

In relation to the ‘spatial turn,’ just as visual culture emerged from the decoupling of images from art history, visual culture’s more eccentric cousin, sound studies, emerged from the decoupling of sounds from music history and musicological analysis, to bring new attention to the circulation of sounds through different spaces and media and to how these shape ways of listening. While in Rabate’s New Modernist Studies Handbook, a section on sound studies is markedly absent, there is a growing number of fascinating projects in the area modernist sound studies.  For example, the seminar series ‘Hearing Modernity’ at Harvard, addressed the work of Jacques Attali (noise), Steven Connor (sadistic listening), Veit Erlman (a history of modern aurality), and Douglas Kahn (The Wireless Imagination; Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Voice, Sound and Aurality in the Arts, MIT 1999).  What is startling about most of these works in sound studies is the problematic place or displacement of women. Noting that listening is often coded as feminine (because women, traditionally deprived of authority of the voice, are assumed to be experts in the passive arts of the ear), Steven Connor, for example, attempts to override this stereotypical gendering not by addressing the powerful impact women modernists have had in the active arts of the ear, but by arguing that listening in modernity (particularly in relation to recording technology) is in fact an active, aggressive, powerful and indeed sadistic mode of perception ---i.e. listening is masculine.  Douglas Kahn, in the preface to that fascinating book Noise, Water, Meat, on sound-studies in the modernist avant-garde (which ranges from Sergei Eisenstein, to Luigi Russolo to William Burroughs, John Cage, and Fluxus) offers a more genuine mea culpa: “there are still fruitful studies to made of female artists in the heart of modernism - Gertrude Stein comes to mind-- but practicalities of time and resources prevent it”).  Rather than attempting to redress the imbalance in new modernist studies by replacing visual culture with sound studies and modernist men with modernist women, what I’d like to do in this paper then is to move between, bridge the gap, between the two extremes.

The Revenge of the Ear: Dyadic Modernism and the Scene of Listening

The visual has become so dominant in current critical discourse that it is easy to forget that many modernists perceived their era otherwise.  Condemning the out-moded 19th century as “the century of sight,” future-oriented thinkers and artists such as Jean-Richard Bloch welcomed on-scene “our twentieth century, [...] with talking machines, wireless, sound movies,” as a time when “the ear will take its revenge.”[1] Bloch’s own revolutionary theatre of the 20s and 30s, in its attempt to overturn the illusory visions of reality offered by Naturalist theatre, would draw inspiration from the sound-scapes of avant-garde film (Fernand Leger-George Antheil’s Ballet Mécanique, 1924) and in turn inspire the young Antonin Artaud. Bloch’s contention that 20th century media technology would end the hegemony of the visual associated with 19th century print culture, furthermore, prefigures 1960s media-guru Marshal McLuhan’s own thesis regarding his modernity as ushering in a new age of secondary orality/aurality (constituted by the auditory-tactile space of technological transmission), a thesis McLuhan declared to be merely ‘applied Joyce’.  McLuhan’s claim makes sense if we remember that Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is a book whose ‘soundscapes’ are inspired by technological transmissions, as, for example when, Humphrey Chipenden Earwicker tunes into the radio-genic ‘mudwake service,’ of the ‘wireless Harps of old Aerial,’ as well as the televisual ‘syncopulses’ of the ‘bairdboard bombardment screen’ (John Logie Baird’s television). And of course, well into the second half of the 20th century, when talking machines, wireless and sound movies (not to mention John Logie Baird’s black and white television) seemed less futuristic than obsolescent, the iconic ‘last modernist,’ Samuel Beckett would declare to his friend, art critic Georges Duthuit, “It’s strange how we are drawn towards listening, we who are not after all auditory people.” 

It’s interesting here that Beckett, in stating that ‘we are drawn towards listening,’ doesn’t provide an object for this turn towards listening -- he doesn’t indicate what we, who are not auditory people,’ were listening to.  Most literary critics and musicologists conceive of listening as being about listening to identifiable objects of auditory perception in the standard ranges of modernist hearing: noise, words and music, and silence.[2]  There are several interesting limitations to this kind of treatment. In the first case, it reduces the complexity and range of the perceptual experience associated with listening in modernist art and thought to objects of auditory perception that nevertheless require the (visual) support of text, script or score to provide the critic a stable object of interpretation. Secondly, it reduces the space occupied by the ‘we’ of listening to a traditional subject-object relation of individual artist or critic to the stable, printed object (text, script or score), closing of the relational space of performance and the complexities of the perceptual experience occasioned by the work.  The limitations of this standard mode of interpretation is the point of departure for the second part of my talk, Dyadic Modernism and the Scene of Listening.

Here, I offer a different interpretation of Beckett’s claim, ‘It’s strange how we are drawn towards listening, we who are not after all auditory people.’ This would be to say that modernist listening is not a question of listening to identifiable objects of perception – listening to words and music, noise and silence.  Rather it is a question of LISTENING AS. In this first case, this has to do with listening as a relational sense that involves the state of being doubled beside oneself and between selves and worlds. I’ll explore how this paradigm of listening might entail a doubling of subjectivity, of self and other, in relation to some interesting dyads on the modernist scene -- d’Annuzio and Eleanora Duse, WB Yeats and Maud Gonne, Artaud and Casares, Beckett and Billie Whitelaw. I take this doubling to be not merely of individual male artists and their female muses as animating forces behind the perceptual experiences that are thereafter are associated with their works.  I also want to explore how their performance during some interesting modernist scenes (in life as well as art) involves a de-stabilizing doubling of perception, of eyes that listen as a mode of perceiving an otherwise ephemeral, ungraspable image, and ears that look with what Jean Starobinski calls ‘an acoustic gaze,’ that listens in order to capture an otherwise unidentifiable presence hidden from view.  Secondly, this doubling of perception involves listening as a mode of aesthetic perception drawn towards that which resonates between the traditional dyads – words and music, sound and silence, between both auditory and visual perception.  I’d like to suggest that the perceptual experience associated with that which resonates between these traditional dyads, that which appears in the scene of listening across the modernist arts, are audio-visual phenomena such as murmuring, rustling, shimmering, and flickering, kinaesthetic phenomena such as trembling or vibrating.[3]  (and I’ll just note that the etymology of word ‘scene’ involves not only the space of staging, but that which appears on stage "to shine, flicker, glimmer"). These phenomena can be taken both as markers of the threshold experiences of modernity, when identifiable fields of reference and modes of representation are de-stabilised; and as strategic productions by which artists and thinkers, since the inception of cultural modernism in the wake of the events of 1848 through the ‘post-modernism’ emerging after the events of 1968, have both marked and de-stabilised the boundaries of previously fixed aesthetic, cultural and conceptual forms.

In exploring these phenomena, I’d thus like to shift our attention away from the space of the work (text, script or score), towards the spaces that shape the perceptual experiences occasioned by the work. This would move us into the space of performance, that, as spaces of appearance, are both auditory and visual -- not only concert-hall, theatre, radio, and television (or indeed, the street), but also into the space that opens between artists, performers and audience.  Finally, the space that opens between artists, performers and audience, involves interactions, movements, between and across national and disciplinary boundaries – disciplinary boundaries between continental and anglophone modernists, as well as central and peripheral modernisms (the central modernisms of England, France and German, the peripheral modernisms of Italy and Ireland).

*** [End of prefatory remarks and introduction to the talk]***

[1] See Denis Hollier, “The Death of Paper, Part Two: Artaud's Sound System” October

Vol. 80 (Spring, 1997), pp. 27-37.

[2] A great deal has been written about Samuel Beckett and music by literary critics such as Mary Bryden and Catherine Laws (Mary Bryden, Beckett and Music, Catherine Laws, Headaches among the overtones: Beckett in Music, Music in Beckett) and by musicologists such as Harry White and David Metzer.  

[3] These phenomena, and the perceptual experience attendant to them, is what contemporary philosopher Martin Seel calls borderline phenomena of resonance (Grenzlichen phenomen des Rauschens). Seel, The Aesthetics of Appearing, Stanford University Press, 2004.