Acoustic Entanglements: Sound and Aesthetic Practice 9783825366773, 9783825376383

Table of contents :
Cover
Titel
Imprint
Table of Contents
Table of Figures
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction: Sound that Moves
2 Spirited Media, Aural Excesses:
Emily Dickinson and the Phonograph
2.1 Remembering and Recording in the Nineteenth Century
2.1.1 Dickinson’s Phonographic Logic
2.1.2 Composition as Intermedial Gesture
2.1.3 Dickinson’s Aural Excess
2.1.4 Bolts of Melody: Dickinson’s Poetry
2.2 Speaking Machines, Media Archives
2.3 Spiritualism and Techniques of Hearing
2.3.1 Transnationalism: Voices at a Distance
2.3.2 Dictation: Discourses of Hearing in the Nineteenth
Century
2.4 Poetic Transfers
2.5 Detached Voices
3 (Re)Mixing Histories:
Lillian Allen and the Routes of Dub Poetry
3.1 Performing Memory
3.2 Transnational Politics
3.3 The Changing Same: Remix Poetics in the Diaspora
3.4 Canadian Routes and Roots in the Caribbean
3.5 Transgressive Sounds
4 Subjects of Hearing, Subject to History: The Sound Works of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller
4.1 Disciplining Hearing
4.2 Hearing Divided among the Senses
4.3 Sound and Spatiality:
The Audio Walks of Cardiff and Miller
4.3.1 Imagining History without Us: "Walk Münster" (1997
4.3.2 Canada and the Audio Walks
4.3.3 Canadian Subjects and the Spectacle of Modernity
4.3.4 From Oakville to Louisiana: Beyond Site-Specificity
4.4 "Murder of Crows" (2008) and the Politics of Affect
4.5 Practices of Looking in "Eyes of Laura" (2005
4.6 Calling to Attention
5 Stratified Sound: Rebecca Belmore and William Forsythe
5.1 Transnational Trajectories
5.2 "Ayum-ee-aawach Oomama-mowan": The Sound of Protest
5.3 Articulating Indigenous Modernity
5.4 Writing Histories, Reading Systems in William Forsythe
6 Conclusion: Confinement and Liberation
Bibliography
Index
Backcover

Citation preview

sabine kim

Acoustic Entanglements

kim Acoustic Entanglements

C

kim

Sound and Aesthetic Practice

American Studies ★ A Monograph Series Acoustic Entanglements

ombining a cultural history of sound with media and literary studies, Acoustic Entanglements presents a new perspective on the entangled affiliations of transnational mobility, diasporic cultural memory, embodied performance, and the material practices of aesthetic acts. Starting by reassessing Emily Dickinson’s poetry as participating in an emergent phonographic logic, this book proposes that sound in modernity assumes the capacity to cross time and space, ‘entangling’ past and present, living and dead, periphery and alleged center. From this vantage point, the study examines Lillian Allen’s dub poetry as an ethical demand for economic justice made via sound, Janet Cardiff’s audio walks as renegotiating the cultural place of Europe for a North American imaginary, and Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore’s performances as voicing indigenous resilience in the present. Focusing on Canada and the US, the book brings together the fields of sound studies and transnational American studies.

Volume 278

Universitätsverlag

isbn 978-3-8253-6677-3

win t e r

Heidelberg

american studies – a monograph series Volume 278 Edited on behalf of the German Association for American Studies by

alfred hornung anke ortlepp heike paul

sabine kim

Acoustic Entanglements Sound and Aesthetic Practice

Universitätsverlag

winter

Heidelberg

Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar. Printed with support of the Association for Canadian Studies in German-speaking countries (gks).

cover illustration © Francis Jones Barraud: His Master‘s Voice.

isbn 978-3-8253-6677-3 Dieses Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Das gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen. © 2017 Universitätsverlag Winter GmbH Heidelberg Imprimé en Allemagne · Printed in Germany Druck: Memminger MedienCentrum, 87700 Memmingen Gedruckt auf umweltfreundlichem, chlorfrei gebleichtem und alterungsbeständigem Papier. Den Verlag erreichen Sie im Internet unter: www.winter-verlag.de

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For Elisabeth

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Table of Contents Table of Figures …………………………………………………….. 9 Acknowledgements ……………………………………………......... 11 1

Introduction: Sound that Moves ……………………….......... 13

2

Spirited Media, Aural Excesses: Emily Dickinson and the Phonograph …………………......... 21

2.1 Remembering and Recording in the Nineteenth Century ….... 21 2.1.1 Dickinson’s Phonographic Logic...………………………. 23 2.1.2 Composition as Intermedial Gesture……………………... 24 2.1.3 Dickinson’s Aural Excess………………………………... 27 2.1.4 Bolts of Melody: Dickinson’s Poetry…………………….. 29 2.2 Speaking Machines, Media Archives ……..………………… 32 2.3 Spiritualism and Techniques of Hearing……..……………… 40 2.3.1 Transnationalism: Voices at a Distance………………….. 42 2.3.2 Dictation: Discourses of Hearing in the Nineteenth Century ………………..…………………..……………... 44 2.4 Poetic Transfers ………………..……………………………. 49 2.5 Detached Voices ….…..…………………..…………………. 51 3

(Re)Mixing Histories: Lillian Allen and the Routes of Dub Poetry ………………… 53

3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5

Performing Memory ..…………………..……………………. 53 Transnational Politics ………………………………………... 57 The Changing Same: Remix Poetics in the Diaspora ……….. 63 Canadian Routes and Roots in the Caribbean ………………. 74 Transgressive Sounds ………………..…………………..….. 85

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Subjects of Hearing, Subject to History: The Sound Works of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller..…………………... 89

4.1 4.2 4.3

Disciplining Hearing ………………..………………………. 89 Hearing Divided among the Senses……..…………………... 92 Sound and Spatiality: The Audio Walks of Cardiff and Miller …………………...... 97 4.3.1 Imagining History without Us: Walk Münster (1997) …… 99 4.3.2 Canada and the Audio Walks ……..…………………….. 104 4.3.3 Canadian Subjects and the Spectacle of Modernity……... 107 4.3.4 From Oakville to Louisiana: Beyond Site-Specificity ….. 112 4.4 Murder of Crows (2008) and the Politics of Affect…………. 116 4.5 Practices of Looking in Eyes of Laura (2005) ……………… 122 4.6 Calling to Attention ……………………………………….... 128 5

Stratified Sound: Rebecca Belmore and William Forsythe …. 133

5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4

Transnational Trajectories …………………..……………… Ayum-ee-aawach Oomama-mowan: The Sound of Protest … Articulating Indigenous Modernity …………………………. Writing Histories, Reading Systems in William Forsythe …..

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Conclusion: Confinement and Liberation ..…………………. 151

133 135 141 143

Bibliography.…………..…………………..………………………. 159 Index .…………..…………………..………………………………. 175

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Table of Figures P. 13 Fig. 1: John Osler. “Resurrection of Henry Box Brown.” Engraving. William Still. The Underground Rail Road: A Record. 1872. Chicago: Johnson Publishing, 1970. P. 94 Fig. 2: Janet Cardiff during the recording process of Villa Medici Walk. 1998. Photograph © Federico del Prete. Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. The Killing Machine and Other Stories 1995-2007. Exhibition catalogue. Ed. Ralf Beil and Bartomeu Marí. Cologne: Hatje Cantz, 2007. 51. P. 99 Fig. 3: Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. Walk Münster. 1997. Audio walk. Photograph (c) George Bures Miller. Janet Cardiff: A Survey of Works including Collaborations with George Bures Miller. Ed. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. 2nd ed. Long Island City: P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, 2003. 82. P. 104 Fig. 4: Janet Cardiff and Geroge Bures Miller. The Waterfall. 1986. Mixed-media sculpture. Glendon Art Gallery, Toronto. 19 Feb.-29 March 1987. Photographer unknown. Janet Cardiff: A Survey of Works including Collaborations with George Bures Miller. Ed. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. 2nd ed. Long Island City: P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, 2003. 164. P. 124 Fig. 5: Janet Cardiff: Eyes of Laura. 2005. Fictional blog entry. Screen shot. Eyes of Laura. Exhibition catalogue. Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 2005. 45. P. 134 Fig. 6: Rebecca Belmore. Fountain. Video performance. Venice Biennale, 2005. Screenshots.

P. 137 Fig. 7: Rebecca Belmore. Ayumee-aawach Oomama-mowan: Speaking to Their Mother. Performance and installation. Various locations: 1991 to present. Photograph © Rebecca Belmore. Walter Pillips Gallery, Banff Centre. Web. P. 140 Fig. 8: Robert J. Flaherty, dir. Nanook of the North. Film. 1922. Criterion Collection, 1999. Screenshot. P. 149 Fig. 9: William Forsythe. Human Writes. 2005. Choreography. Photograph (c) by Dominik Mentzos. Parole. The Body of the Voice/Stimmkörper. Ed. Annette Stahmer. Cologne: Salon, 2009. 87.

Acknowledgements I gratefully acknowledge the generous financial support of the German Association for Canadian Studies (GKS) in the preparation of this monograph. I also wish to thank the staff and editors at Winter for their patience and attention to detail, especially Gisbert Pisch and Dr. Andreas Barth. This book is attributed to one person, but in actuality, it is written by many more whose hands did not touch the keyboard, but whose advice and commentary structured it. I would like to acknowledge some of these ghosts. Among those are the following, whose words are three a.m. reading, stashed on the night table within easy reach for those times when doubt is strong enough to reach into sleep and rattle one awake.! My work benefitted from the free-ranging and vibrant research environment at Mainz University’s American Studies department, now renamed as the (newly founded) Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies, brought into being by the visionary foresight of Alfred Hornung, who among his many other commitments found time to supervise my doctoral thesis. I gratefully acknowledge his unwavering support and encouragement. I am also grateful to Mita Banerjee, without whom this book would never have seen the light of day, and to her, Oliver Scheiding, and Alfred Hornung for inspiring discussions as well as for their networks and contacts, which brought many scholars across the Pacific and Atlantic oceans to Mainz, including Mary Lawlor, Deborah Madsen, Carla L. Peterson, Jean Pfizer, and Greg Robinson. The work of these latter scholars, although at a remove from my fields of research, was inspiring for its engagement with questions which this book about acoustic culture and aesthetic practice also explores, namely, the entanglements of race and ethnicity with those seemingly neutral categories of land, historical memory, economy, and travel.! Due to the interdisciplinary nature of this work, friends and colleagues in performance and theatre studies were as invaluable for their

! variously generous, supportive, doubting, critical questions and suggestions. In particular, Mashav Balsam’s willingness to discuss early stages of this book has left me with an intellectual debt which would need many more books to repay. Joel Anderson’s impromptu self-fashioned derive through night-time London provided invaluable “research material” when I later came to undertake one of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s audio walks through that same city.! Freddie Rokem’s many evening lectures as part of the Mainz Summer School in Performance and Media Studies, Friedemann Kreuder’s precise vision for performance and performance studies (not to mention his passion for extempore extended commentary during Q and A) were invaluable grounding as were Steve Wilmer’s and Sabine Haenni’s thought-provoking seminars. Sharon Aronson-Lehavi’s work on walking and performance has left an indelible mark and will need years to work through. A special mention must go to Alan Read, whose joie de vivre and common interest in animals, plants, and performance make it impossible to leave him out of these acknowledgments. In the last stages, and as another project was beginning, I was fortunate to be exposed to the intellectually rigorous atmosphere of the Working Group on African and Caribbean Theatre and Performance at several conferences of the International Federation for Theatre Research. My thanks go to the members of that group and to David Donkor especially.! My work has also benefited from discussions with Ian Balfour, Marcus Boon, Dieter Dörr, Anton Escher, Doro Gail, Nadja Gernalzick, Paul Kottman, Matthias Krings, Tom Loebel, Peter Marx, Karl Renner, Brigitte Schultze, and Elke Wagner, among others. Constructive criticism was also offered by the other participants of an ACLA panel on the aural archive convened by Michael C. Cohen and Sarah Townsend.! Perhaps there is always one person whose presence is felt everywhere in a book. I gladly call this spectral presence into daylight by naming him. Best editor, best reader that could be hoped for, best friend and intellectual companion, and great love of my life, much thanks must go to Michael Bachmann.! Finally, the last word goes to those who know me longest, dear friends Maria Dimova-Cookson, Aili, Anne Louise, Regan, and Jeri, Susan, and Joan Givner, whose gift of books set me on this journey, and my family, whose love, laughter, and courage were and remain inspiring.!

1

Introduction: Sound that Moves

In the spring of 1849, in the midst of heightened debates on slavery, a packing crate bound with five hickory hoops and measuring two feet wide by two and three-quarter feet deep and three feet long was delivered by express from Richmond, Virginia, to Philadelphia and into the hands of abolitionists William Still and James Miller McKim. According to the eyewitness account published in Still’s The Underground Rail Road (1872), the crate was immediately taken into a back room where, after barring the doors, McKim rapped on the crate, at the same time uttering “All right,” to which a voice emerged from the box calling out a greeting in return. Sawing off the hoops and prising open the crate revealed the man who had arranged his own transport and had thus travelled out of slavery. Henry “Box” Brown rose up from the cramped container and proceeded to sing a Hymn of Thanksgiving adapted from Psalm 40, “I waited patiently for the Lord, and He heard my prayer” (Still 70; Fig. 1).

Fig. 1: Henry “Box” Brown’s “Resurrection,” as published in Still’s book; engraving by John Osler (1872)

14

Introduction

Although the focus of my study is more broadly on sound and the associated cultural practices of hearing/listening, rather than on music and song as such, the performative aspects of Henry Box Brown’s singing a modified psalm to mark his resourceful escape from lifelong slavery in one of the cruellest slave states of the South function as a way to theorize sound as something which “moves” in various ways: from its (sometimes occluded) source to the (sometimes unwilling) listener, from one state (slavery/Virginia) to another (freedom/Pennsylvania), and— last but not least—in the production of affect. Firstly, as Still’s narrative suggests, the song marks a transition between states, thus performatively bringing into being the very condition which it praises: deliverance. Secondly, the extreme confinement of the packing crate is juxtaposed with the demarcated horizon of sound; the threat of death-in-life which is the condition of slavery is transformed into the miracle of lifein-the-face-of-death. Thirdly, emerging into an expectant room in the free North, Brown acknowledged his awareness of the politicizing potential of his escape, once it became publicized via the Abolitionist papers, through his careful choice of song, modified from psalm and spiritual for the occasion. As Still writes, “he remarked that, before leaving Richmond he had selected for his arrival hymn (if he lived) the Psalm [...] And most touchingly did he sing the psalm, much to his own relief, as well as to the delight of his small audience” (70). In the analysis of Daphne Brooks, “Brown arrived singing in an antislavery world very much accustomed to yoking sacred song with political resistance” (117). The song thus, as Brooks maintains, “articulates and constitutes the movement from putative ‘thinghood’ into personhood” (117), and draws on a tradition of enslaved persons refashioning sacred song to mirror the creation of a new world by transcending the narrow confines of the one in which they were forced to live. They extended the boundaries of their restrictive universe backward until it fused with the world of the Old Testament, and upward until it became one with the world beyond … [T]hey creat[ed] an expanded universe, by literally willing themselves reborn. (Lawrence Levine qtd. in Brooks 117)

Sound that Moves

15

It is no coincidence that Brown chose a hymn to mediate his spectacular emergence from the impossibly small box, the performance itself a referent for the otherwise elusive truth of slavery life. The boundarycrossing characteristic of song is manifested in its role as a vehicle of cultural memory in the diaspora, as Paul Gilroy has asserted in The Black Atlantic and as I argue in my chapter on the transnational routes of dub poetry, where I draw on Gilroy to extend his conceptualization to include Canada within a black transatlantic cultural space. An important cultural context is the shattering experience of the Middle Passage, during which slave traders attempted to strip away props of identity such as African languages and cultural practices and in the face of which modes of performance and cultural communication evolved and transformed themselves (Walcott, “Memory and Lived Experience”). Sound—on the one hand so slight and ephemeral and on the other hand ineradicable insofar that it is ultimately transportable and exceedingly flexible—takes on a crucial role in the work of cultural memory and mourning. This book suggests that through investigating concepts of acoustic perception as well as their relationship to the visual, the study of poetry and performance can be significantly enriched. In recent years, the study of sound has been slowly gaining momentum in American Studies, as witnessed—for instance—by Mosaic’s two-part special issue on sound in 2009, and an American Quarterly special issue, edited by Kara Keeling and Josh Kun in 2011. However, most of the contributions in these issues turn to sound and—more often—music and speech as it is either used or represented in film, on records, in literature and on the stage. Expanding on such work on the one hand, and the more technologically informed field of sound studies on the other hand (see, e.g., Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree), this book attempts to “entangle,” as it were, media history and literary history. More specifically, and linking the different case studies of my analysis, I am proposing four arguments about the role of sound in reading literature and performance, concerning the “acoustic” entanglement of 1) media history and literary history, 2) embodied perception and aesthetic practice, 3) aesthetic practice and media protocol, and 4) the politics of stratification: First, I argue that media history can productively be read alongside literary history because the materiality of media themselves, such as Henry Box Brown’s box, influence the ways in which we experience

16

Introduction

literature and acts of reading. While my study is partly influenced by the work of German media scholar Friedrich Kittler who—critically engaging with and radicalizing McLuhan—sees media as generative of their content and “determin[ing] our situation” as such (Gramophone, Film, Typewriter xxxix), I argue against the view that media are wholly deterministic.1 Instead, media themselves are materializations of particular cultural tendencies. In this sense, Emily Dickinson’s writing and poetic practice at large are not necessarily determined by the new media forms of the nineteenth century but rather rehearse the same constitution of a new techno-logic as those media. Second, sound and other embodied perceptions are often deeply implicated in what we, in post-Enlightenment culture, tend to think of as exclusively visual and/or textual practices. Throughout the study, I thus look at the relationship between writing/performing manifested, for example, in Dickinson’s fascicles as well as the enclosures of her poem– letters (such as, famously, a cricket’s exoskeleton) which I discuss in Chapter 2. In the next chapter on Lillian Allen’s dub poetry, I focus on the creation of public space through the live concert situation and Allen’s decision to publish her poetry first as dub records with musical backing; analysis of embodied perception is especially important in Chapter 4, in looking at Cardiff and Miller’s audio walks, which are meant to be perceived while on the move. In Chapter 5, as well, the acoustic dimension serves as a hinge between artist and audience both in Rebecca Belmore’s performance art and the Forsythe Company’s choreographies. Third, poetry and other aesthetic performance practices themselves form a kind of media apparatus in that specificities of historical time and space are stored in the aesthetic forms themselves and can be reactivated when re-distributed; sound recording media themselves have a spectral quality, something which I am conceptualizing as a “phonographic logic.” Thus, a reference to the strumming of a guitar string in Lillian Allen’s “Revolution from de Beat” can be charged with the history of the Middle Passage, while the division of senses in Cardiff and

1

For a criticism of Kittler and the Kittler-inspired German school of media theory see Sybille Krämer, who argues for a “performative” conceptualization of media that neither imbues them with historical apriority nor ignores their influence on what is transmitted (20-39).

Sound that Moves

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Miller’s walks explicitly relates to what Jonathan Crary has described as suspension of perception for the late nineteenth century. Fourth, at the same time, the overlapping of old sounds in new places (poetry in the so-called New World), or conversely the dissemination of new sounds in old places (dub poetry in the Caribbean), can bring to light the stratified nature of cultural space itself in a politicizing effect. In this book, I discuss primary texts which, at first glance, seem to be very different from one another: the poetry of Emily Dickinson, the dance performances of the Forsythe Company, the audio walks of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, the dub poetry of Lillian Allen and the performance art of Rebecca Belmore. Moreover, I will address texts drawn from a US-American context as well as a Canadian one; each of these national frameworks, however, is strongly embedded in transnational and diasporic contexts, which are particularly evident with regard to dub poetry in Chapter 3. Following Rey Chow’s use of the term “entanglement” as a figure not only for “things held together or laid over one another in nearness and likeness” (as in a material knot), but also “for meetings that are not necessarily defined by proximity or affinity” (Entanglements 1-2), I understand sound—“moving” in the senses described above—as a primary facilitator for such entanglements. Being at the same time related to sites (of enunciation and reception) and “floating” freely between them, sound, like Chow’s “entanglement,” destabilizes the “oncepresumed stable categories of origination and causation” (Entanglements 10), while remaining linked to a non-causal network of affective ties “from which one cannot extricate oneself” (Entanglements 11).2 In addition, through processes of recording and recalling, “acoustic entanglements” not only interlink spaces but also different layers of time. Thus, my case studies are entangled temporally—one instance being the sound works of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller discussed in Chapter 4, which relate to the media technologies prefigured by Dickinson—and also stage “acoustic entanglements” of space: examining

2

Chow’s use of the term is inspired by quantum physics, where “entanglement” designates “mysterious connections between particles, which are said to be entangled due to simultaneous reactions they produce, reactions that are not the results of proximity” (Entanglements 2 fn 2).

18

Introduction

crossovers and connections between the material and the immaterial in Dickinson and Spiritualism, between Canada and the Caribbean in Lillian Allen, between the “New World” and the “Old” in Cardiff/Miller, and between the indigenous history of the Americas and their “discovery” and “exploration” in Rebecca Belmore. In this sense, “acoustic entanglements” are not concerned solely with sound, but expose sound as being “enmeshed in various political, social, cultural, and economic discourses” (Paige 64).3 In my first main chapter, “Spirited Media, Aural Excesses,” which relates mourning practices and new media technologies of sound recording in the nineteenth-century America, I look at Emily Dickinson and the phonograph. An American poet in whose work death looms large, Dickinson fashions a poetics that asserts the radical communicative possibilities of poetry in a time of the emergence of Spiritualism, intense debates over slavery and the rise of new technologies such as the telegraph, telephone and phonograph. If Dickinson’s poetics anticipate the recording and “remembering” properties of the phonograph as a means of mourning, Lillian Allen’s poetics articulate the work of mourning in relation to the Middle Passage and the suppression of transatlantic cultural memory. In my third chapter, “(Re)Mixing Histories: Lillian Allen and the Routes of Dub Poetry,” I examine Allen’s dub poetry as a form of mediating network connecting the transatlantic space of the Caribbean, Britain, the African continent and Canada, where Allen is based. The entanglement of “New World” and “Old World” is a subject I continue to explore in the next chapter, “Subjects of Hearing, Subject to History,” where I turn to the work of Canadian sound artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. Their collaborative audio walks as well as Cardiff’s Internet project Eyes of Laura self-consciously reference a media history with roots in the nineteenth century’s emergent technologies of perception. In Walk Münster, Louisiana Walk, and A Large Slow River, Cardiff and Miller create narratives in which time and space, the orienting coordinates of Kantian subjectivity par excellence, become

3

In an article on folk music in Indian Naiyânti mêlam performance, Aaron Paige uses the term “acoustic entanglement” in this sense, drawing on the work of Jocelyne Guilbault (who talks of “audible” rather than “acoustic” entanglement).

Sound that Moves

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increasingly difficult to keep in order. Via sounds played back over the earphones, the past becomes increasingly entangled with the present in the course of the audio walks. The self-referential nature of Cardiff and Miller’s work points both towards the nineteenth-century emergence of bodily regimes which entrained the senses to look and to hear in specific ways as well as highlighting the entanglement of media in twenty-first century embodied perception. This entanglement is also thematized in the narrative content of the walks, which highlight the difficulty of separating media images from “pure” seeing/experiencing. The spaces of North America and Europe are thus brought into juxtaposition via a narrative that positions Europe as a space filled with history versus Canada as a history-less land. This narrative of historyless-ness in Canada and North America at large of course suppresses the indigenous histories and presence in that place. In my final chapter, “Stratified Sound,” I focus on the performance art of Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore to analyze how sound and body are used in a political performance practice to excavate these allegedly non-existent histories, moving from her work to the choreographies of William Forsythe and the Forsythe Company. Here too sound reveals intensely striated spaces that nevertheless overlap and condense; indigenous epistemologies reveal the land as having very social histories of use and ownership whereas the entrainment of the body thematized in the Forsythe Company’s dance performances is revealed to be both disciplinary and potentially liberatory.

2

Spirited Media, Aural Excesses: Emily Dickinson and the Phonograph

2.1

Remembering and Recording in the Nineteenth Century

Acts of recalling the dead in the latter half of the Anglo-American nineteenth century were acts of remembering and recording that were closely related. “[D]eath and the invocation of the voices of the dead” were everywhere in writings about sound recordings in the late nineteenth century (Sterne, Audible Past 289). The capacity to store sound, which had previously only been possible in the form of poetry as oratory, made technology like the phonograph appealing in the context of mourning because it suggested the transcendence of corporeal limits. The American inventor of the phonograph, Thomas Edison, had various ideas about how his recording and playback instrument (introduced in the 1870s) could be used to preserve voice as a trace of presence. By making wax records of speech, sound could at a later time be reproduced by means of a needle retracing the grooves and inscriptions made by the originary voice. Edison’s “speaking machine” was thus conceived by him as “a registry of sayings, reminiscences, etc. by members of a family in their own voices, including the last words of a dying person” (“Perfected Phonograph” 646), in effect, an “auditory version of the Victorian family album,” as media historian Jonathan Sterne concludes (Audible Past 305). The phonograph played a particular role in the cultural practices of remembering the dead, not just in the period’s so-called phonographic funerals, where the dead person’s voice could suddenly be heard issuing forth from the grave, but also as “the ideal-typical instance” (Sterne, Audible Past 33) of preserving the voice for the future. Sound, in short, became a way of understanding the relation between the past and the present, as well as between self and other. In The Audible Past, his 2003 book on the cultural origins of sound reproduction, Sterne suggests that in modernity hearing became an object and practice of training individuals in attentive and correct listen-

22

Chapter 2

ing—habits instrumental for the new middle-class to display their identification with commodities and practices that would confirm their status. As well, hearing as a non-selective perception had to be brought into focus for the kind of intensely repetitive work done in industrial capitalism’s factories and automated offices. Attitudes towards sound recording and playback in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are best understood, according to Sterne, by looking at telegraphy and the telegraph operators who learned to decode messages by listening, in effect turning writing into pure sound, and at the phonograph’s relation, in so far that it preserved sound, to new processes of embalming bodies: In both cases, something is extended beyond its usual social life in order to serve another function. Thus one could say that the concept of sound and acts of hearing and listening underwent a shift in the nineteenth century, from a Romantic yearning for a communion with a silent but natural world, to a Victorian conception of sound as something concrete and controllable. In an age where the reach of the British Empire was slowly being chipped away and Darwin’s theory of species evolution had created skepticism about divine creation as well as support for belief in individual autonomy, the aural practice of remembering the dead became a way of not only mediating personal loss into a social ritual of mourning but also of manifesting communication with the past. In this sense, “nineteenth-century phenomena such as spiritual telegraphy, automatic writing, and spectral photography functioned as new media” (McGarry 10) and emergent spiritualists enacted the transmission and dissemination of information about the dead in their performance of séances and speaking with those on the other side. “Spiritualism took the concept of mediation literally, … transforming ordinary Americans into spiritual mediums and transfiguring new forms of information and technological media into the means of [spiritualism]’s proliferation” (McGarry 20). Performative enactment fused message and messenger, medium and message “as individual experience collectively mobilized” (McGarry 20). Women played a key role as mediums and trance speakers; because their lack of experience and “worldliness” made women ideal mediators (who were presumed not to filter spirit communications with their own opinions or knowledge), “Spiritualist culture held possibilities for attention, opportunity, and status denied elsewhere” to women (Owen 4). At the same time, women took on the authority of the spirit figures speaking

Spirited Media

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“through” them. In the following, these considerations will be applied to a female poet whose work is firmly embedded in American nineteenthcentury cultures of mourning and recalling the dead, namely, Emily Dickinson.

2.1.1 Dickinson’s Phonographic Logic Death and dying in much of Emily Dickinson’s writing are states that never seem quite finished or complete. Her poems often stage such moments as being both close up and simultaneously far away, a happening that is both charged with the present and yet also already aware of itself as something with a radical finitude. Mortality as well as the sense of time, space, and presence were on the one hand all phenomena being reconceptualised in nineteenth-century America by media such as the telegraph, the telephone, and the phonograph. On the other hand, these media were bound up with already existing social desires. In a sense, the new media embodied anxieties about and hopes for preserving memory, events, and ideas: for a vast ideal archive of sounds that could shore up cultural memory against the ephemerality which sound usually represents—conceptualisations, one might say, which shaped the ways in which such technologies of sound communication could be imagined in the first place. I maintain that Dickinson’s writing, starting with her very specific and constantly changing approaches to composing, often stages a kind of sonic excess in order to draw attention to the radical possibilities for communication seemingly embodied by media such as the telegraph and phonograph—for example, across the realms of the living and the dead—and thereby stages her own poetics as the intermedial process in-between. This chapter argues that a “phonographic logic” associates death with a type of supernatural speaking in some of Emily Dickinson’s poems. Death is not a final state, nor even a resting place. Instead, the dead frequently remain very much involved with worldly affairs. Speech from beyond the grave is one means for those who have passed on to suggest that their connection with this world is very much an ongoing affair. Because of its association with the spirit and intangible energy, the voice can continue to produce the impression of presence even when the body’s matter is inert. Dickinson’s poetry thus anticipates the popular

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success of the phonograph machine, whose inventor imagined it as a kind of sonic version of the Victorian photograph album. Poetry thus performs the double function of communicating across distance and time and preserving the dead within the social fabric. Viewed thus, Dickinson’s lively and talkative dead anticipate the phonograph’s invention, since according to Sterne media are never merely objects but always already exist in social symbolic ways and thus their technological forms are thus a physical manifestation of existing social desires. In discussing the reconceptualizations of media in nineteenth-century America, I argue that the capacities of the phonograph in particular for recording sounds and preserving them for transmission at a later point, regardless of whether the owner of the voice was present, contributed to the development of new concepts of presence, temporality and the relationship to one’s own mortality. However, these new subjectivities were not purely a result of new media technologies so much as an intensification of already existing potentialities in nineteenth-century America. I would like to suggest that in the 1862 poem “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—,” Emily Dickinson uses tropes of technological hearing in a way that foreshadows the Edison “speaking machine.” In making this claim, I also hope to reflect on some ways in which her poetic practice relies on a performative notion of sound as something which might change how we can think of media processes; i.e., towards considering them as events which escape ordinary notions of time and space. Thus Dickinson’s composition process, which draws attention to its own materiality, paradoxically seeks ways to “leave the page” via the page—using the figure of the voice as intermedial hinge.

2.1.2 Composition as Intermedial Gesture During the momentous upheavals of the American Civil War, Emily Dickinson’s poetic practice shifted from composing primarily fascicles—hand-written manuscript pages bound, with stitches, into something resembling books—to using mainly individual sheets of paper and to notating phrases, lines, and single words on paper scraps—such as a small square of wrapping paper or a section torn from an envelope. Along with the interesting problem of genre which Dickinson’s letters create, since the letters were often a means of sharing her poems with

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her correspondents, the notes often contained objects to which the lines made reference, including “ads, dead crickets, valentines, stamps, Poetess verse, pressed flowers, printed paper cut-out birds” (Jackson 235). The “late fragments,” as these writings have come to be known by Dickinson scholars, were initially ignored for posthumous publication by Dickinson’s many editors; when they were taken into consideration, starting in the 1950s, they were often subsumed within a larger corpus in an effort to render them legible and to gloss them as parts of a coherent whole. Thomas H. Johnson, for example, appended some of them as footnotes in the 1955 Belknap Press edition of The Poems of Emily Dickinson. As Marta L. Werner has noted, the editorial problem of how to treat the fragments in relation to the fascicle bundles and in regards to Dickinson’s letters and their enclosures was likely influenced by the cultural climate of the United States during the 1950s: “the ‘Cold War’ attention to national borders may thus be reflected in a similar attention to textual borders—a need to define and contain texts—and, ultimately, to privilege the finished text over the turmoil of the compositional process” (“A Woe” 28). Whereas the fascicles have a certain seriality that encourages a loose association among the poems thus bound together in groups of 11 to 20 poems, the fragments are much more difficult to reconcile into definitive forms of groupings. For one thing, some fragments are adjoined to each other or to a page by means of pins; yet certainly to pin paper together draws attention to the possibility (and indeed perhaps the threat) of unpinning and rearranging. In addition, the temporariness suggested by the pin has a deeply ambivalent vulnerability, given the demonstrated sharpness of the tip and the strength of the steel. If the pins seem to represent a challenge to permanent ordering, the recycled or repurposed status of the paper itself represents a challenge to hierarchical ordering. Many of the fragments are taken from paper already pressed into service for other purposes; these traces of other uses and other users indicate on the one hand the embeddedness of Dickinson in her social world—on the other hand, given that the paper is taken out of one context and put into another, the repurposing mirrors Dickinson’s writing practice itself, in which parts of poems were embedded in letters and vice versa, to the point where it becomes difficult to say which is the vehicle for which. Moreover, the palimpsestic fragments, in which time can be seen as

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layers, highlight the materiality of Dickinson’s writing practice rather strongly. 1 The radical nature of the fragments, some not much larger than the space of a postage stamp, produces questions about how they “fit” in relation to the poems and letters as such. Some fifty years after Johnson’s editorial decision to publish some of the fragments—as supplements to the full poems rather than as independent works in their own right—Werner’s approach in Radical Scatters, her digital archive of Dickinson’s fragments, is more akin to “critic and translator” than editor (“A Woe” 45). Werner reads the fragments as Dickinson’s final and most radical rejection of print publication and its attendant fixing of textual meaning: [N]either residents nor aliens, neither lost nor found, these trace fragments are caught between their attraction to specific, bounded texts and their resistance to incorporation. […] [T]hey require that we attend to the mystery of the encounters between fragments, poems, and letters, listening especially to the ways in which, like leitmotifs, the fragments both influence the modalities of the compositions in which they momentarily take asylum and carry those leitmotifs beyond the finished compositions into another space and time” (emphasis mine, “A Woe” 29-30).

It is perhaps not coincidental that Werner refers to listening as a way of approaching the fragments, since although sound shares the ephemerality suggested by the fragments as being moments torn from time, when figured as something written that can be (over)heard, sound also gains a performative dimension.

1

Because Dickinson chose to circulate her writing via letters rather than print publication, the materiality of the manuscripts has drawn much critical attention, especially concerning Dickinson’s handwriting, her dashes, and her alteration of standard spellings. See Cameron’s Choosing Not Choosing re Dickinson’s variants; Werner’s Emily Dickinson’s Open Folios on the fragments; Smith “To Fill a Gap” and Smith and Macdonald, “Mutilations: What was Erased, Inked Over, and Cut Away,” on the way in which Dickinson’s correspondence was edited by her brother before publication in order to excise references to her relationship to Susan Dickinson Gilbert.

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2.1.3 Dickinson’s Aural Excess Sound can have a quality of excess, in that the noise or disruption it introduces poses a problem of integration. The ability to hear differs so sharply from visual perception not only because the body is more permeable to sound than to vision (while one can close the eyes, the ears are always open), but also, as German cultural historian Thomas Macho has argued, because sound contains the potential to make itself heard without revealing its source: What we see finds itself in the field of vision even if the thing or meaning is not immediately clear. What we hear, on the other hand, often cannot be identified, much less localized; the status of what is heard remains, in confusing—and sometimes frightening—ways open. Hence hearing is much more closely related to illusion than is seeing; what is heard does not have a necessary connection to agents, bodies or material objects. (130)2

This inability to fix the source or nature of the sound can lead to a vague irritation, as Macho furthermore contends, linked to the anxiety arising from the fact that the sound seems to be emanating from a non-place, and is not attached to a specific body. This irritation, I would suggest, lends sound the nature of an event. When sound is located in a specific body, or can be traced as originating from a particular place, or can be conceptually located as part of a larger meaning, the threat of autonomy is contained, but sound nevertheless always carries with it an unexpectedness that might be called its character of “eventfulness” as that which introduces newness or the unknown. Sound can be obstreperous, both contributing to semantics but at the same time hinting at an “outside” that makes meaning precarious. Sound has the potential of introducing something unknown. Conceptualisations of sound, from theorists as various as Jean-Luc Nancy (2-4), psychoanalytic critic Mladen Dolar (13-14), and film scholar Mary Ann

2

Unless otherwise noted, translations from the German are mine.

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Doane (248) nevertheless agree in one respect, namely, that sound has a threshold quality that causes it to be capable of mediating across states that otherwise and under normal circumstances are taken to be discrete. Barthes conceptualised as “idyllic communication” the transfers of memory which take place without anything disrupting the process of transformation which occurs between an event and its remembrance (S/Z 145). In this ideal situation, an utterance passes directly from the one speaking to the one listening, without anything outside this frame of perfect communication. Yet this scenario does not account for temporality, much less for the workings of accident, misfortune, chance, or creativity and hence Barthes refers to what he calls “noise” as the privileged form of certain literary texts, which is always a process of mediation with the constitutive possibility precisely of interference, also understood as “countercommunication.” Here the concept of voice brings oppositions into a dialogue of pleasurable friction. Rather than the disturbance of noise being alien to reading and writing, Barthes conceives of literature as precisely this kind of jouissance associated with voice itself. Thus the effect of countercommunication produced by such everrevisable texts results from two voices, received on an equal basis: there is an interference of two lines of destination. [. . .] In relation to an ideally pure message (as in mathematics), the division of reception constitutes a “noise,” it makes communication obscure, fallacious, hazardous: uncertain. Yet this noise, this uncertainty are emitted by the discourse with a view toward a communication: they are given to the reader so that he may feed on them: what the reader reads is a countercommunication; and if we grant that the double understanding far exceeds the limited case of the play on words or the equivocation and permeates, in various forms and densities, all classic writing (by very reason of its polysemic vocation), we see that literatures are in fact arts of “noise”; what the reader consumes is this defect in communication, this deficient message; what the whole structuration erects for him and offers him as the most precious nourishment is a countercommunication; the reader is an accomplice, not of this or that character, but of the discourse itself insofar as it plays on the division of reception, the impurity of communication. (S/Z 145)

Dickinson’s poetry, I argue, points to the pitfalls of poetic “voice” as “idyllic communication.” Because it seems to issue from the interior of

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the body, voice seems to act as the material promise of the immaterial presence of a unified subject and to subsequently point to an authority behind the utterance.

2.1.4 Bolts of Melody: Dickinson’s Poetry Nor would I be a Poet — It's finer — Own the Ear — Enamored — impotent — content — The License to revere, A privilege so awful What would the Dower be, Had I the Art to stun myself With Bolts — of Melody! (Dickinson 157)

Dickinson’s poetic strategies both recall and disrupt the traits of speech: colloquial language mixes with Latinate phrases; repetition and parataxis create an orality that is undercut by the poem’s punctuation, especially the dashes, which in many cases create visual gaps that disturb the rhythm when scanned; perhaps the most famous disjunctions are the semantic gaps which may or may not offer recoverable meaning. Moreover, the voice in Dickinson’s writings operates rather as “Bolts—of Melody” which “stun,” as Dickinson puts it in Poem 348,3 “speaking” in a dramatic, astonished way, at once intimate and public, both identifiable within a “here and now” and also distributing itself across more than one time and space.

3

Dickinson neither titled nor numbered her poems but I follow the convention among Dickinson scholars, who refer to the poems according to the numbering imposed by either Johnson, who in the 1950s eliminated the rather Victorian titles created by other editors and for the first time published the poems in chronological order, as far as could be established, or Ralph W. Franklin, who put the poems back into Dickinson’s fascicle groupings. For one recent overview of the editing history, see Christensen, Editing Emily Dickinson. Here, I refer to Franklin’s 1999 reading edition.

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In his 2006 study, A Voice and Nothing More, Dolar writes that “[t]he acousmatic voice is simply a voice whose source one cannot see, a voice whose origin cannot be identified, a voice one cannot place. It is a voice in search of an origin, in search of a body, but even when it finds its body, it turns out this doesn’t quite work, the voice doesn’t stick to the body, it is an excrescence which doesn’t match the body” (60–61). Dickinson’s unsettling effects, I would argue, do not emerge solely as a result of her disjunctive images, her deliberate misspellings, her unconventional capitalization and the visual and aural hesitation caused by her use of the dash as punctuation.4 It is productive to think about how Dickinson stages the voice itself and its effects in order to think about the possibilities of such unsettling. Voice in Dickinson’s poetry is often a means of address: Brita Lindberg-Syersted calculates that the “I” or other references to the first person occur in about one out of every five of Dickinson’s texts (32). However, the frequent thematization of voice and acousmatic acts of hearing and speaking suggest that such communicative gestures lead not only to sense, but often produce an excess of meaning that is difficult to place. As suggested above, the result of not being able to “find” a voice underscores the power of the voice, which does not have to show itself in order to produce its effects—while also symbolising the omnipresence of its control. In “I heard a Fly buzz— when I died—,” a poem probably composed in 1862 during the American Civil War,5 Dickinson stages a voice speaking from a strange zone between the body and language, an intermedial voice which links the two but belongs properly to neither:

4

5

For a brilliant reading of Dickinson’s orthographic poetics as a telegraphic mode understood not only as metaphor but as a form of performativity, see McCormack’s “Domesticating Delphi”; for an argument about how Dickinson’s misspellings are part of a strategy of double-voiced quotation, in which Dickinson simultaneously pays homage to her literary forebears and also “frames” them within her own contexts, see Messmer, A Vice for Voices, esp. Chapter 5. As Dickinson did not date her poems, the composition dates are rough and based on scholarly analysis of variations in her handwriting styles.

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I heard a Fly buzz—when I died— The Stillness in the Room Was like the Stillness in the Air— Between the Heaves of Storm— The Eyes around—had wrung them dry— And Breaths were gathering firm For that last Onset—when the King Be witnessed—in the Room— I willed my Keepsakes—Signed away What portion of me be Assignable— and then it was There interposed a Fly— With Blue—uncertain stumbling Buzz— Between the light and me— And then the Windows failed—and then I could not see to see— (Dickinson 591)

A first reading of Dickinson’s poem “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died —” suggests a development from the trivial to something momentous; from the fact of the fly buzzing to the uncertainty of facticity at the end. It is difficult to establish what has happened or what is happening. The synaesthesia of the senses means that hearing becomes the dominant sense, even as the poem describes the effects of that displacement in visual terms. Though the suggestion is that the light is failing, it is not eyesight which grows dim but the windows which “fail”; there is yet another displacement in that the windows are blocked not by something barring the field of vision but by the intrusion of the sound of “Blue— uncertain stumbling—Buzz.” The predominance of the sound, which fills up the field of vision as well as the sense of hearing, seems more terrible than something that blocks sight alone because it prevents not only vision but also the consciousness of the senses, “I could not see to see—”. The Fly’s presence, made known through both sound and (synaesthesized) vision, is not only telling at the end of the poem, however, but from the very first line. The poem’s opening statement “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—” uses the figure of a sonic excess that presents a logical impasse which cannot be resolved as the poem continues. Where exactly is this voice

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located? The voice appears to be speaking despite the impossible condition of having died. Hearing in this case is figured as a kind of technological hearing that can separate the voice from body, and both from one particular time and space. That the voice is not necessarily locatable becomes a lesser question during the development of the poem. On one hand, the matter-of-factness of the reportage lends the death scene a casual and informal air which belies the momentous passage of life into death. Ultimately, however, the more urgent question perhaps concerns the reader and where he or she is located within this address from the grave. The poem anticipates the arrival of “that last Onset – when the King/ be witnessed – in the room – ” a figure who could be either God, Christ, or death: to witness his power, the poem suggests, will be the revelation of divine truth. Yet the reference to “that last Onset” suggests a paradox which Christian belief must overcome: eternal life which is granted by dying; the divine truth which is known only after death. The King’s replacement as a sacred powerful figure at the end of the poem by the sound of the banal and mundane Fly suggests a devastating scepticism about the orthodox hope for salvation. To be able to hear the uncanny voice suggests either that the voice is not speaking from the grave (which the first line clearly rules out as possibility), or that the reader is also dead, or, and this is the most radical but also the interpretation that the poem’s logic itself seems to suggest: that the poem attempts to constitute a medium for communicating across the radical distance which death interposes.

2.2

Speaking Machines, Media Archives

Death as something close to life was not an unfamiliar concept to nineteenth-century America. Religious movements such as Spiritualism, which believed in the continuing presence of the dead in the lives of those left behind and sought confirmation of this connection through spirit communication, found some of its assumptions supported by the distance-shrinking, time-capturing and voice-projecting possibilities opened up by new media technologies such as the telegraph, the telephone, photography, the cinema and the phonograph. As Jeremy Stolow, a scholar of religious and media studies, puts it:

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The succession of inventions that came to the fore in the latter half of the nineteenth century radically expanded the terms of human contact, labour, knowledge, and imagination along the axes of transmission and recording: new technologies for erasing distance (such as telegraphy, telephony, and radio), and new forms of mechanized inscription and reproduction (such as photography, phonography, radiography, and cinema). These revolutions in mediated communication had deep and globally extensive repercussions, animating such diverse phenomena as the setting of new standards for measuring world time and space, an increasingly bureaucratic mode of capital accumulation, the ideal of ‘objectivity’ in journalism and other professions, the consolidation of new, gendered distinctions between private and public, or the success of new popular cultural forms. (“Techno-Religious Imaginaries”)

As one of the successful new cultural forms, the phonograph played a particular role in the cultural practices of remembering the dead, as part of a “larger, emergent culture of preservation” which included embalming and the laying out of the corpse for viewing (Sterne, Audible Past 292). By participating in these representations of the body in which death became socially mediated, the phonograph enabled, in the words of one of its inventors writing in 1878, “the gathering up and retaining of sounds hitherto fugitive” (Edison, “The Phonograph and its Future” 69). It is open to debate whether the invention of the phonograph should be credited to the French scientist Charles Cros in the 1850s, who conceived of a speaking apparatus but did not develop it, or some two decades later to Edison, who produced a “speaking machine” in his Menlo Park lab. Certainly Edison’s apparatus differed from Cros’s because the former had the capacity not only to record sound but also to play it back. It was in fact the possibility of listening to ephemeral sounds, until then “captured” only by memory in the form of oral history and poetry, that contributed to the later commercial success of the phonograph in the 1880s, when an improved playback cylinder was put on the market (see Edison, “Perfected Phonograph”). The phonograph worked by inscription: even sound as soft as speech, felt as vibration of the air, was still forceful enough to cause a sharp object, when set up to capture the mate-

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rial trace of sound, to pierce a surface.6 In recording sound, a stylus was used in conjunction with a cylinder covered with tinfoil (and later wax) which would “store” the sound in grooves that would later, on being retraced by the stylus at the proper speed, “give up” their sound again; hence phonographs can be conceived as “machines for writing and reading” (Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves 14). Victorians envisioned the phonograph as a means of shoring up memory and cultural continuity against the inroads which the body’s mortality represents, its “radical finitude”7 in contrast to the capacities for thought, speech, memory, and desire which, it was believed, would be everlasting if freed from the body. As Victorianist John M. Picker has argued, “Victorians in their scientific and technological discoveries and literary innovations went a long way toward dispelling, or at least refining, the mysteries of hearing and sound” (10). Accordingly, the ephemerality of sound, which characterized the Romantic conception of the hearing act and which seemed to conjure the fleeting mortality of humans, was displaced in the late nineteenth century by a concept of sound as “a quantifiable and marketable object or thing, a sonic commodity, in the form of a printed work, a performance, or, ultimately, an audio recording” (10). Noise to the nineteenth-century ear was not merely background sound: “Victorians interpreted sound in newly amplified forms, as voice, noise, vibration, music, and electric echo” (13). As an entrepreneur whose work consisted of adapting and transforming perceptual tendencies, “Edison is a prominent sign of the transition to corporate capitalism in the late nineteenth century,” in the analysis of art historian Jonathan Crary. Edison was someone who had little interest in the aesthetic content of media, but rather saw technologies in terms of “the endless stream of ways in which a space of consumption and circulation 6

Sterne notes that Edison, who was hard of hearing, was working on research relating to the telephone and electric telegraph when he developed the principles of phonography. Based on the observation that sound was “heard” as vibration felt in the entire head, not just the ears (Audible Past 384), Edison’s understanding was mediated by his earlier work on the “invisible” conduction of energy possible via telegraph or phone cable. 7 This phrase is Jacques Derrida’s in his discussion in Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (19).

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could be dynamized, activated” (Crary, Suspensions 31). Thus Edison’s invention did not so much introduce decisively new ideas about storing sounds in relation to cultural memory as it itself was a reflection of social desires already existing (Sterne, Audible Past 285). Friedrich Kittler contends that with modernity a fundamentally different relationship between subjects and objects is introduced by technologies such as the gramophone, film, and in particular the typewriter. The new ability to reverse time sequences or to replay the same segment of a “live” orchestra piece had the consequence of altering how individuals understood temporal relations in relation to their own lives; suddenly, the possibility of storing words and actions for the future made every recordable event loom with momentous potential. Mortality, or rather the potential for immortality, took on an added dimension. More particularly, for the literary arts, the recording and recall capability of these new media shifted attention from the immediate focus on communicative sense towards an uncomfortable realisation that “sense” was closely conjoined to non-sense. This idea is perhaps best illustrated by a commentary made by Michel de Certeau about Lacan’s performative use of his voice for his seminars on psychoanalysis: Coughing, mumbling, clearings of the throat and other noise of the larynx—bridge the chain of words and mark their mystery, namely that they exist “for others,” produced to underscore the meaning effects in the listeners. Spoken words that are clearly audible, however, remain completely misleading in view of what they refer to and what they mean. Sighing is another signature of the speaking body, introducing something tragic into the discourse (is that the price pleasure pays to speak?), interrupting it (the time of another story), and reproaching it (“Are you even still there?). These corporeal traces prompt speaking of which the speaker has no knowledge. (168)

Here, de Certeau points out the paradox that Lacan’s throat-clearing, sighing, and other emphatic sounds are both extra-linguistic “noise” and an intrinsic part of the production of meaning (“bridg[ing] the word chains”). In other words, semantic meaning is not the totality of meaning produced and in fact to concentrate on only that aspect would be to misunderstand what is being referred to. Lacan’s vocalizations thus point to the unconscious irruptions which undergird what should be straightforward lectures, thus suggesting the way in which the uncon-

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scious structures conscious acts of utterance. The dissolution of the autonomous humanist subject is a strong feature of Kittler’s media theory as well, pointing to the way in which the modern subject is not the active agent so much as a mediator of the new media: “Instead of the play between Man the sign-setter and the writing surface, the philosopher as stylus and the tablet of Nature, there is the play between type and its Other, completely removed from subjects. Its name is inscription” (Kittler, Discourse Networks 195). The typewriter represents a new relation between the writing subject and the act of creation. The nineteenth century had closely associated writing acts as twinned with acts of reading, as suggested by the loosely flowing handwriting that continuously connected poetic imagination with the fevered hand of the poet transmitting these images to the page and in turn in an affective gesture to the reader’s eye and also the lips mouthing the words in reading and the ear which cannot close itself off to sensory input. The typewriter stands in stark contrast to this magical presence. Writing as a creative act takes on an automatized aspect. The typewriter intensely cuts down sensory perception, while the keys themselves strike individually, sharply impressing the page. Whereas writing was the ultimate expressive act for the Romantics, in the modern era, cultural faith in origins, plenitude and the self as source of the creative becomes impossible to uphold in face of the sense that the metanarratives are bankrupt, origins are never pure, and the human is radically not in control of either ego, universe, or language. The typewriter emerges in Kittler’s account as the prototypical technology of the discourse network that developed in the twentieth century: The invention of the Underwood typewriter introduced a discontinuity into the relations between the writing hand, the seeing eye, and the written-down word. With handwriting, the contact between the hand and writing surface established a physical analogue for the assumed directness of communication by which expression could be transferred from one mind to another (cf. Discourse Networks 195). The Romantic Poet sought to write down an ideal universal language in which Nature and its objects were translatable and transmissible signs of a human semiotics, a system which Kittler ironically refers to as “the interlocking media network of speaking and writing, of the soul and Poetry” (184). “Not for

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nothing was the typewriter born in the realm of blindness. Whereas handwriting is subject to the eye, a sense that works across distance, the typewriter uses a blind, tactile power” (195). As French economist Jacques Attali has pointed out, the power to record sound has always seemed like a mythic power that, especially if technology is understood in a broad sense, goes back to the earliest societies: “Stockpiling memory, retaining history or time, distributing speech, or manipulating information has always been an attribute of civil and priestly power, beginning with the Tables of the Law” (Attali 87). Both photography, which depicted men and women alike, and phonography, which allowed previously recorded voices to be played back by anyone at any time, were initially seen as dangerously mixing the sanctum of the private sphere with the rough-and-ready world of public life. Insofar that the “new technologies of reproduction and distribution enabled the transmission of potentially dangerous and infectious information” (Enns n.p.), both the phonograph and the camera were understood as creating sites of potentially unhealthy mixing. Suddenly, exterior and interior were no longer clearly demarcated, making it impossible to properly police boundaries between domestic and public, female and male spheres, and even the worlds of the living and the dead. Emergent media technologies fostered the spread of information at a speed and with a density of scale hitherto rarely matched. It was in the nineteenth century, with the accelerated dissemination of information, that “social, technical, and economic structures developed that fostered communication and produced a transfer of news from one body— individual, social, political, or economic—to another” (Gaylin 4). In Eavesdropping in the Novel, Ann Gaylin maintains that it was precisely because of this speeded-up information flow that the borders between public and private realms became a source of cultural anxiety, leading to the growth of suburbs as a place of retreat and the reorganisation of the bourgeois interior space (4-5). The enlargement of the public realm, enabled by the mass circulation of newspapers and novels alongside a boom in memoirs, portrait photography and phonographic souvenirs, paradoxically leads to a precarious sense of putting one’s private life

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into circulation.8 This “‘spectacle of intimacy’” is a specifically “Victorian compulsion,” according to Gaylin, “to publicize private life and its secrets in order to celebrate the virtues of domestic ideology or to provide cautionary tales about families who fail to separate public and private spaces and activities” (5). In the age of empire and the increasing interpenetration of realms—geographical, social, private, literary, aural and public—it becomes vital to maintain the ideology of separate spheres via narratives of natural division. Yet the increasing ease of dissemination of information in the nineteenth century made possible by technologies such as the telegraph, photography and the phonograph paradoxically brings into focus the interdependent nature of public and private. Marketing brings the solitary Romantic writer into contact with the rude world of contracts and fluctuating commercial transactions dependent on readerly whims, and the intimate worlds of the lyric poem only reach the reading public via being opened to public and print circulation. For Gaylin, the figure of the eavesdropper captures these liminal transactions of the nineteenth century’s media technologies: Covert listening stages the problems of demarcating public and private spaces and the passing of information between these areas, spheres that, in this period, become more ideologically weighted, and anxieties about them, more complex. It acts out both the urge to know and the fear of others knowing, both the compulsion to display domestic bliss, and, beneath this obsession, the voices of scepticism, resentment, and defiance that deny middle-class assumptions about separate spheres and gendered identities. (5)

Another aspect of the shift in aural sensibilities between the Romantic and the late nineteenth-century subject concerned the way in which sounds became an index of the physical world. Affect, for instance, was not unimportant, but if it provided the passage between external world and poetic consciousness, the late nineteenth-century impulse was to record and objectively understand the process. This attitude can be seen 8

See, e.g., Marijeke Huisman’s article on “Selling the Self,” concerning the brisk trade in publishing and marketing of memoirs in the nineteenth century.

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in the experiments and writings of various nineteenth-century scientists and philosophers. Physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz, for example, combined exacting and precise work on pitch and harmony with rather Romantic poetic metaphors – comparing sound waves to ocean waves seen from a cliff top. Another paradigmatic work was the 1837 treatise on “natural theology” by English mathematician Charles Babbage (1791–1871). Babbage’s treatise was “perfectly representative of the anxious and industrious Victorian desire to apprehend every incident and accident of the physical world” (Brophy, “Writing the Disaster”). In a chapter entitled “On the Permanent Impression of our Words and Actions on the Globe we Inhabit,” Babbage proposes that time and space hold the key to the events of the future, if only our perceptual abilities were acute enough to pick up on their transmissions. Babbage hypothesises that the physical force of speaking leaves behind tangible traces or marks that can be encountered long after the sound itself is no longer audible, with the result that “[t]he waves of air thus raised perambulate the earth and ocean’s surface” (Babbage 110). Babbage’s theory envisions the world as potentially containing, as Victorian studies scholar Gregory Brophy puts it, “an exhaustive and precise archive of past events [that] would give us an exact vision of our future (to the extent that the latter unfolds as the accumulated consequence of the former)” (“Writing the Disaster”). In Babbage’s conception of “‘[t]he earth itself [as] one vast library, on whose pages are forever written all that man has ever said or woman whispered’” (qtd. in Picker 16), it is apparent that, using the science of natural theology, it becomes possible to read the world as a book of nature in a quite different and much more secularised sense than previous ages. In a lecture entitled “The Telegraphic System of the Universe,” from his 1853 study The Religion of Geology, the American geologist and theologian Edward Hitchcock similarly investigates the everlasting nature of the universe as found in such things as words and actions. Hitchcock attempts to bridge the two competing nineteenth-century meta-narratives of science and religion. To do so, he introduces a theory of sound that bears some distant relation to the ways in which Edison would later imagine his phonograph as a parallel to the visual momento mori of the Victorian photo album. Hitchcock proposes that what was suggested in the Old and New Testament as metaphoric allusions to the power of inanimate things to bear witness to truth can be demonstrated

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with the help of science as indeed having left records of all that was spoken or done. Hitchcock presents the world as a registry of not only past events that can be retrieved and re-sounded, but also of thoughts. Thus sounds, thoughts and actions transmit information about the world; they also make physical processes apparent as culturally rehearsed intermedial processes: “creations” of humans convert nature into not only a “vast picture gallery and […] universal telegraph” but also into a “vast sounding gallery” (Hitchcock 410).

2.3

Spiritualism and Techniques of Hearing

Mourning the dead in mid-nineteenth century America sometimes occasioned the enlisting of spiritualists for solace, in the hope that one might hear—via the voice channeled by the medium—some words of comfort to reassure the living that their loved ones were no longer suffering or ill at ease. It was especially in the cases of those whose passing away held some unresolved element, such as children dying before their parents, the sudden death of a spouse, or soldiers killed in war without any details of exactly how and when they had been killed, that communication was most earnestly and urgently sought.9 In the words from beyond the grave, one could find not only reassurance that there was an afterlife, but that the loved one was in that company and thus able to watch over and spiritually guide the ones who remained behind. As a son informed his grieving mother: “Gentle mother, . . . your little seraph boy is not dead, but liveth. In his uncontaminated life, find comfort for the ills of life” (qtd. in Braude 41). That is, the one who had passed away had entered the beyond, but was not far away; spiritualism, as a means of speaking 9

In the case of the Civil War, for example, more than one third (42 percent) of those who were killed were never identified, creating a double sense of loss, as Bridget Bennett notes: “[O]ne particular challenge that the Civil War posed to bereaved Americans on both sides of the conflict was the absence of the dead from families, both figuratively and literally. The dead often did not return to their places of origin, marking, in huge numbers, a new problem for Americans” (149). Interest in spiritualism spiked during and after times of war (cf. Braude 31).

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with the dead, ensured that communication channels remained open, potentially overcoming the putative divide between the unknown and the known, spirit and matter, voices and media. As a cultural practice, spiritualism brought together religion and science as “mutually productive explanatory systems” (McGarry 17) during a period when belief in matters of faith as “those things that work without explanation” had effectively been marginalized by a modern sensibility which embraced realism and Enlightenment reason. The appeal of the movement was based in part on its synthesis of diverse folk, occult, revivalist, reform, abolitionist and other social and intellectual discourses. The emergence of a national readership who consumed a rapidly growing stream of newspapers, journals, literary magazines, and books meant that “[b]ecause of that bourgeoning print culture, spiritualism became available to many groups who adapted it to their own ends” (Kucich 36). From its marginal position, with practitioners in the thousands, appealing to an audience in the millions and mixing the public and private, life and death, spiritualism proved itself flexible enough to bring together two sets of social longing, “the rebellion against death and the rebellion against authority,” as Ann Braude puts it in her study of the interactions between spiritualism and women’s rights in nineteenth-century America (2). Above all, spiritualism bridged seemingly oppositional tendencies, such as those between romanticism and rationalism, or technology and religion. Spiritualism never gained a large enough base to challenge Christianity as an orthodox religion but it nevertheless garnered a large audience among the white middle class and spread from the United States to England and in varying forms to other parts of Europe and Brazil, the Philippines, India and Australia. Rather than trying to determine whether spiritualist mediums actually contacted the dead, I will examine the cultural conditions in which spiritualism emerged in the United States: as a starting point, I assume that the spiritualist practice was rooted in a transnational understanding of globalized time and space and that it found favor among the white middle class in particular because it alleviated cultural anxiety about the postcolonial legacies of settlement of the Americas. At the same time, the discourse of spiritualism, in so far that it drew on metaphors of communication and contact, and possession via voices, was a way of embedding the unfamiliar technological innovations of the telegraph and the phonograph within a familiar context informed by the cultural desire

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to ensure a social continuum beyond the individual. Ultimately, I will argue that spiritualists acted as mediators of cultural change precisely because they were situated in the triangulated relations of 1) emergent technologies—of the phonograph and telegraph which reflected changing concepts of “communication”—; 2) transnationalism as a spatial parallel to the expanded temporality made evident in both spiritualist beliefs and globalizing dynamics; and 3) the changing role of the senses in ordering knowledge about the world, both in this life and the afterlife. Spiritualism, as a radical enlargement of the concept of “speech,” mediated the debates taking place in America concerning who was allowed to voice an opinion in the public sphere and to what ends. By speaking without appearing to speak, and mediating authority through a female body, women could both exceed and comply with the role of the pious domestic female figure; by displacing political critique of the Middle Passage and the cultural genocide of Native Americans onto the spirits of exotic ethnic subjects or “Indian” spiritual guides, concrete material conditions could be negotiated as if they existed elsewhere, outside the temporal and physical geographical boundaries of the United States. In the end, the practices and beliefs of spiritualism point to the deep ties between the making of modern subjectivities and those things assumed to be external to the human experience.

2.3.1 Transnationalism: Voices at a Distance The spiritualist practice of speaking with the dead, expressed in terms of an invisible agency producing changes in material conditions (the deepening or quickening of a voice, the writing that appeared on slate boards), offered an analogy for physical or scientific phenomena such as the working of electricity, another example of an intangible force that could make machines talk (via gramophone) or (via telephone) produce voices heard over distance. Viewed as such, “[m]ediums extrapolated the new ability to communicate across land and water via wires and cables to a link across time itself” (McGarry 10). This interest in keeping the past in the present was one way that the new middle class and emerging consumer culture could lay claim to a present in which the mechanization of labor resulted in a stilling of workers’ bodies into docile and disciplined “machines.”

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Spiritualism, and specifically the gendered bodies of the female mediums, mediated some of the social changes brought about by rapid technologization. The shrinking of distance introduced by the railway and the near-instantaneous transmission of communication via the telegraph and telephone were made understandable by recontextualizing them within the spiritualist séance circle, for example, which itself syncretized already established folk practices. On the one hand, the connectivity that the electric telegraph ushered in was only an intensification of earlier methods of communicating over distance. On the other hand, the mysterious nature of electricity in itself, as an invisible flow of energy, “charged” telegraphy as a communication system with a different character. Spiritualism, which might be seen as an update of the spectrality of 1830s magic lantern shows of foreign travels (cf. Bennett 21), “offered a way of receiving supernatural gifts through the technologicallyenhanced senses,” as Jeremy Stolow writes: Spiritualist practice involved a delicate negotiation between the agency invested in new technologies of inscription and transmission, and the agency of the human sensorium. And to that extent, spirit communication could be understood as an empirically confirmable condition of the body, the performative gestures of which enacted forms of automatism and mechanization that mimicked (and thereby transvalued) the work of telegraphs and other modern machines. (“Techno-Religious Imaginaries”)

As an abstract technology, telegraphy meshed well with the centralization of modern bureaucracy and the standardization of news reportage. The very modernity of the technology made it attractive to many spiritualists, who saw parallels between the progress, social harmony, and democratic egalitarianism associated with the seemingly limitless sharing of ideas and news made possible by the telegraph and the spiritualist ideals of human perfectability and an afterlife which would be granted to all. The spiritualists’ engagement with telegraphy was one way for the movement to conceptualize the wide reach and the broad access of communication which crossed all types of boundaries. The practice of talking with the spirit world offered a parallel to the technologies that both shrank distances and time but also expanded the possibilities of speech. This is precisely the point that interested spiritualists, who sug-

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gested that the telegraph had been invented in the spirit world in order to make it easier to contact the departed specifically and to generate greater social cohesion in general. Thus a Universalist minister was visited in 1854 by the spirit of Benjamin Franklin, who gave him the plans for a “soul-blending telegraph” which would transmit messages telepathically (qtd. in Stolow, “Wired Religion” 83). Franklin told him to construct high towers which would be used for mediums working in pairs of a man and a woman, whose joint efforts would power an intercontinental service capable of competing with and even outperforming the existing physical telegraph lines. This transnational dimension of both spiritualism and the new technologies of steam, rail, and electrical telegraphy is also illustrated “in the many cases of seance practitioners, who, from their location in bourgeois living rooms of Western metropolises, summoned spirits representing a diversity of ‘other worlds’ and subjected themselves to the authority of these exotic voices” (Stolow, “Techno-Religious Imaginaries”). Not only were mediums visited by the (white and dead) cultural illuminaries of the West: Rousseau, Goethe, Caesar, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine being favorites, but also according to one list in a French spiritualist newspaper, “Hitoti, a savage chief from Tahiti,” “Manouza, a woman from Baghdad,” “a young peasant girl from Algeria,” “black slave from Louisiana,” “a doctor from Russia,” “a queen from Delhi,” a “pasha from Egypt,” and “a widow from Malabar.” Spiritualism thus opened up not only a channel for communication between the living and the dead, but also mediated between past and present, and across colonial divides. The dead enlarged the sense of imagined community and functioned in a similar way to figures of the exotic: difference was made exciting, and to an extent familiar. Thus the radical political theory that some spiritualists proposed, such as abolitionism and women’s suffrage, could be brought into discussion as something whose difference was sanctioned precisely because it was so radically other, so foreign and geographically distant.

2.3.2 Dictation: Discourses of Hearing in the Nineteenth Century As Jonathan Crary has shown, a shift in epistemologies of perception occurred in the nineteenth century as part of the modernization of sub-

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jectivity (Techniques of the Observer esp. 1-3; Suspensions). In Germany in the 1880s, the psychologist Oswald Külpe conceptualized the capacity for attention as vital for ordinary existence, without which “consciousness would be at the mercy of external impressions … thinking would be made impossible by the noisiness of our surroundings” (qtd. in Crary Suspensions 16; ellipsis in orig.). Theories of subjective perception took precedence, in which sensory organization was not so much correlated to external stimuli as to individual faculties of focused attention—“listening” as opposed to “hearing”; “looking” as opposed to “seeing”—displacing the concept of a Kantian knowledge of the world as based on universal categories. Kant’s idealism had posited a world created through the imposition of self; marginalizing the “proofs” of empirical senses such as vision and hearing, Kant argued that perception could only be possible because of a transcendental standpoint, which, through synthetic a priori categories, could impose the self’s unity onto the world. Universal and necessary laws would guarantee the connection of subjects and objects of knowledge and of knowledge to the things known. In the Kantian view, the problem is not so much that the senses do not convey knowledge about the world. Rather, it is precisely the fact that the body is receptive to acts of hearing and seeing that a risk arises of sensory overload. Absent the universal laws that synthesize concepts into knowledge, writes Kant, thought would disintegrate into sensory chaos, “making it possible for appearances to crowd in upon the soul” (138). However, in the nineteenth century, in the wake of the Industrial Revolution and the increasing mechanization of work, the distracted state of consciousness associated with modern subjectivity seems to have become accepted as part of the perceptual process. At least, the ability to selectively organize hearing and sight into discrete events, or rather the lack of such a capacity for synthesis, was believed significant enough to merit research by psychologists in the 1880s. The study of perception as something subjective and influenced by embodiment led to its determination as something that could also be measured and predicted, although there was always also the possibility that quantifying something might reveal the extent to which it defied measurement, as Crary notes:

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Spiritualist practices and beliefs engage this ambivalence of modern techniques of discipline. They point to the ways in which new technologies, just as new religious beliefs, need to be received and embedded within a specific cultural context in order to become meaningful.10 They also reflect the engagement with the sensorial production of modern subjectivity in that the speaking, listening, writing, singing, and the generally performative acts of channeling spirits by mediums always professes to be a speaking as, or listening as, etc., even while the body and voice of the medium enact the authentication of that communication. However, hearing was often privileged over vision in the darkened room of the séance. Not only is the association of voice with presence so very strong, but hearing more so than vision suggests the openness of the subject to the environment. Hearing is a sense that is notoriously difficult to control in that it is involuntary: unlike the eyes, which can be closed, the ears are necessarily subjected to the sounds of the nearby environment. Hearing is also what potentially undermines the autonomy of the self-possessed subject in so far that it is an index of the permeability of the corporeal envelope to that which is properly external to the body. Despite being ranked as a “distance sense,” allowing for sensory data to be retrieved without the direct physical involvement of the observer, hearing nevertheless can 10

Braude points out, for example, that the inventor of the electric telegraph, Samuel Morse, barely got approval from Congress for building his prototype (the bill passed by a margin of three votes and only after Morse’s science was ridiculed by comparing telegraphy to mesmerism and Millenialism). Thus Braude notes that “the major scientific discoveries of the nineteenth century initially appeared no more credible than the claims of Spiritualists” (4).

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have an uncanny effect if the source of the sound cannot be visibly located. By virtue of sound being able to travel around corners or to seep through walls, hearing always has the potential for undoing the regulating and ordering effects of vision. It is precisely for this reason that the performance of obedient listening, as evident in the taking of dictation, appears to signal the highest form of authority being conceded. In 1892, the Phonogram reported on a number of office clerks who were left with cylinders containing the dictation of their employer who had passed away: “the feelings of his clerks, who thus wrote from the dictation of their dead employer, hearing his veritable voice, although he was no more, can better be imagined than described” (qtd. in Sterne, Audible Past 305). What then are we to make of automatic writing or the taking of spirit dictation (where the medium would transmit messages by writing rather than speaking)? In this scenario, the careful transcription of the office clerk is mimicked and transvalued: whereas the perfect loyalty of the worker is demonstrated in the faithful act of translation of sound into copy text, in writing “mediumistically” (Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves 186), spiritualists at once reproduced the figure of obedience and subverted it. Filling the content with “messages” from cross-gender, often cross-racial and transnational spectral figures, mediums were able to renegotiate the parameters of the sayable. This new agency of the spiritualist mediums and trance speakers, potentially threatening to roles and subjectivities constructed on the basis of a division of gender, went largely unchallenged in so far that it operated along the lines of a sexist assumption: female subjectivity, as passive, chaste, and pious, would not be capable of such authority of itself. As Braude puts it, “[t]he fact that a woman stood up in public and gave a lecture in itself evidenced spirit agency since few believed a woman could do such a thing unaided” (85). That spirit mediums were often young girls, as in the case of the Fox sisters, whose communication with the spirit of a murdered peddler through a system of rapping in 1848 is often cited as the originary scene of modern spiritualism, and Cora Hatch, whose trance lectures drew crowds of thousands, was equated with an innocence that made their receptivity to another’s authority plausible, thus affirming the power of the rhetoric seemingly flowing in an unmediated way through the girlish figures of the medium in the darkened parlor or the trance speaker in the public hall.

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Does this passivity of the medium reinforce assumptions of feminine non-agency, conforming female subjectivity to the cult of sentimentality, as Ann Douglas and others have argued? I am not so sure. For one thing, the early phase of spirit communication was achieved by asking a series of yes/no questions to which the spirit responded by rapping or brief answers: Dr. Chase who had recently lost his mother, asked if his Mother’s spirit was present. The answer was, she was. Whether she was happy/ she was, whether her knowledge had increased since she passed away/ it had. Whether she continually watched over him/ she did. Then he asked about … a sister, whether his suspicions in regard to her death were correct. The answer, they were not. Would she have lived if other means had been used? The reply, she would not. Then he asked if [he] could be convinced that there could be spiritual manifestations, then he could get no more answers. (Qtd. in Braude 12; ellipsis in orig.)

In this type of communication, the questioner’s desire to hear a particular answer structures the possibilities for response. Just as the early phonograph experiments resulted in recordings that were difficult if not impossible to understand unless they took the form of a children’s rhyme, a maxim, or some simple question to which the answer was already known, here the spiritualists were dealing with questions whose responses were to a certain extent already given. It was clear which answer might best soothe the anxious inquirer, and in supplying such an answer, the medium could simultaneously affirm the power of her mediation, since without such a staging of dialogue, the same question answered in the same way would not have the same backing. Every detail that contained a certain element of estrangement mediated the domestic space of the parlor or the transgression of women speaking at the podium or pulpit. In contrast to the office clerks who remain bound, after the death of their employer, to his “voice from the grave,” thoughtlessly transcribing his dictation, the mostly female mediums took control over that which they supposedly mediated. By fashioning the answers according to the desires of the listeners, mediums exercised a form of agency that matched the spirit of the age: laying open the selectiveness of listening (as opposed to hearing), mediums also suggested that it is always haunted by what it already knows but disavows.

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Poetic Transfers

Voice has been called the paradigmatic example of performativity (Fischer-Lichte 209-213, Kolesch 19-38, Lehmann 40-66, and Kolesch and Krämer 11). For one thing, just as in a performance, the event is finished the moment that the voice stops uttering. Yet writing acts as a sort of media archive itself, and Dickinson’s writing stages this transfer of cultural memory—from the oral to the written and back again—as the intermedial operation of poetry itself. The fragments, writes Werner, are “Dickinson speaking-writing in extremis. The seminal readings of Dickinson’s language—her broken grammar and syntax, her strange use of the sonic qualities of language—are evident in her late manuscripts, whose visual qualities underscore, even double, her verbal experimentation” (“A Woe” 32). The palimpsestic condition of such writing, in which Dickinson’s words literally overwrite other words or are overwritten by them, suggests the ways in which her writing underwent a change in compositional practice towards an intermediality that grasped media not as transparent vehicles for carrying over meaning but rather as modalities of radically other possibilities. To pursue this idea of communication across impossible distances, it would be helpful to consider the work of contemporary German media philosopher Sybille Krämer. In a recent study of mediality, Krämer refers to the figure of the messenger (der Bote) to conceptualise the sense of both mediating presence (such as the voice and writing) and of process; she also proposes a type of mediality in which the media are invisible as mediating agents, namely in the case of viruses, post, money, and the witness. In either case, the fundamental characteristic of the medium is that it disappears once it has successfully “delivered” the thing with which it has been entrusted. In a sense the very obsoleteness of the messenger suggests two important assumptions: “There is always an outside to media” and “Much of our communication is not dialogic” (10). In other words, messengers are in principle figures who arrive from outside; they are heteronomous and directed towards that which is foreign, strange, and unfamiliar—“media always have an exteriority to them” (10), and in that sense, they should not be regarded as autonomous agents. Moreover, the concept of media as messengers puts the popular communication model into question, since the nature of messaging tends not to be dialogic but rather (“at least initially”) “unidirection-

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al and carried out by one party” (10). The non-dialogic tendency is partly a result of the fact that messengers are needed precisely in those cases when dialogue fails, is overly mediated, or is otherwise impossible. In Krämer’s philosophical thought, to think the media together with philosophy means estranging the culturally familiar idea of communication and thus it critiques a widely accepted theory that assumes that communication constitutes a transparent process of semantic exchange. Jürgen Habermas’s theory of communication as social reciprocity between persons enabled by meaningful and logical signs, usually spoken language, is especially questionable. In the Habermasian model, the problem according to Krämer concerns not only establishing a connection but ensuring that understanding and agreement are reached: “Wherever dialogic communication is attained, the parties who are communicating with one another have become, in a sense, ‘one’. [A]s long as the goal of understanding is reached, they share something with one another and speak as if with a single voice” (15). Addressed to the increasing multiculturalism of Europe, Habermas’s concept of communication attempts to mediate cultural difference on the basis of enlightened reason but Krämer argues that communication is much more often monologic. Hence the implicit normative basis in the Habermasian idea of community is figured critically by Krämer’s metaphor of the voice as that which can signal perfect obedience by mouthing back the words received, a form of copying that foregoes deviation or adaptation to particular circumstances. This can be related to the disciplinary effect which listening as a special, focused type of hearing implies, as Mladen Dolar and others have noted. To hear is to obey, even in cases where one resists or protests the contents of what is heard. Arguably, there is an “always-already” element of submission in hearing, which depends on the fact that the listener is subject to the act of listening, a link which is apparent in many different languages in the paired etymologies of the two words: to listen, to obey. Thus the voice itself is very often correlated to authority (see Dolar 75-76; Attali 92; Kittler, “The City is a Medium” 717). Deviation can thus wreak havoc on the message, since it not only makes it difficult to know what has been transmitted but also subversively foregrounds the process of communication as something with a

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problematic potentiality. This double nature of language is something that Emily Dickinson’s writing makes much of.

2.5

Detached Voices

In “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—,” voice becomes detached from its body not only in space but also in time, creating a temporality which unsettles time and appears capable of playing events in reverse. That the body is not left behind is fully clear from the presence of the fly, which cannot be overlooked as a reference to the Civil War maimed and dead, and from the sense of worldly possessions, “Keepsakes,” asserting their spiritual, economic and domestic obligations right up to the moment of dying. The poem stages a sonic excess in that what seems to be the trivial and obstreperous sound of a fly can neither be ignored nor fully accounted for, since it raises a number of questions concerning, for example, how a sound can be “Blue” and how it blocks out not only vision in the sense of eyesight but also vision in the sense of cognitive perception. These questions circulate around the central cultural narratives concerning the bodies of the dead in terms of how the dead should be remembered, how the identity of the dead could be preserved, and what possibilities for contact remained even after the seeming finality of death. Dickinson’s poem, although it preceded the rise of the phonograph, prefigures the operations of that apparatus, which promises to “write” ephemeral noise as permanent archive and retrievable sound. Dickinson’s “I heard a Fly Buzz—when I died—” traces the sonic excess which both threatens and enables every communication, working as a trace of the contingent in the intermedial sense of a medium that bridges or makes two worlds visible to each other—disappearing into the working of memory and historical reflection once the transaction is completed, once the voice stops speaking and the phonograph record finishes. Mourning in nineteenth-century American Victorian culture was technologically mediated. However, I am not arguing for a technological determinism but rather for its opposite. Dickinson’s poetry demonstrates a phonographic logic—not as a mimetic consequence following from the poet’s exposure to Thomas Edison’s “speaking machine,” but because Dickinson’s poetry, in its slanted way of speaking, had already thought the phonograph, before its invention.

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In this chapter, I have tried to read literary and media history together with a history of sound, using the poetry of Emily Dickinson to chart ways in which the emergence of new technologies of recording and remembering in the latter half of the nineteenth century is conditioned by an ideal of public space which privileged the white, male locutionary voice over all others. However, the female voices of the spiritualist mediums—albeit in a different sonic excess than Dickinson’s—stage an acoustic entanglement exposing the traversals of this space by the past and the present, the living and the dead, the far way and the near at hand. This entanglement, through virtue of sound, reaches that which lies beyond the material world, and, in that process, articulates a mourning that is otherwise disavowed. Fast-forwarding through the upheavals of the traumatic twentieth century and decolonization, the following chapters look at aesthetic practices since the late 1980s that follow the trajectory of what I have conceptualized as Dickinson’s and modernity’s “phonographic logic.” In the dub poetry of Lillian Allen, the colonial after-effects in the postcolonial present are reflected in the entangled acoustics of the remix culture from which dub emerges. While Dickinson’s “phonographic logic” articulates a poetics of loss whereby something which is not present gains a presence through acts of recording and recalling, thus preserving something which is lost within the social fabric, the “phonographic logic” of dub—coming after the commercialization of the phonograph— extends these acts by capitalizing on the availability, and thus repeatability, of recorded sounds. Things normally not repeatable suddenly can be redistributed and placed in a new context, loss is ameliorated. Here, the “phonographic logic” shields from the colonial logic of “active forgetting,” whereby the past and its injustices are sealed of. As Derrida, Spivak and others have shown, repetition produces difference, not sameness. This potentiality, as it is epitomized by remix culture, remains entangled with the potentialities opened up by Dickinson’s sonic excess and her refusal of print culture. Taking up the concept of transnationalism already explored in subchapter 2.3.1, I analyze dub poetry as an acoustic entanglement in which the transatlantic spaces of the Caribbean, England, Canada and Africa are meaningfully connected, thus allowing, through the very form of dub, for the remembrance of the entangled cultural histories of colonial and diasporic presences.

3

(Re)Mixing Histories: Lillian Allen and the Routes of Dub Poetry

3.1

Performing Memory

Reflecting on how cultures and peoples persist in the face of extreme threats to their survival, performance studies scholar Diana Taylor argues in her 2003 work, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, that performance is “not necessarily, or even primarily, mimetic” (32) but rather constitutes a “way of knowing”; Taylor writes that in performing, or in witnessing a performance, “we learn and transmit knowledge through embodied action, cultural agency, and making choices” (xvi). Examining contemporary rituals such as the public mourning manifest in the large numbers of New Yorkers who visited the World Trade Center viewing platforms to look out on the empty scar of land where the towers no longer stood after the attacks of September 11, Taylor investigates performance as a persistence of the ephemeral. While Taylor’s NYU colleague Peggy Phelan would say that performance consists of precisely what fades away and vanishes in the moment that the body stops moving and the voice stops speaking (Phelan 31), Taylor contends that such a perspective ignores the concatenated histories that cultural enactment carries: “[performance means] never for the first time” (28). Building on Richard Schechner’s concept of performance as “twice-behaved behavior” (Schechner 1), Taylor argues that in tracing the double event of performance as both happening here and now (the is) and as simultaneously being a framing of what we know (performance as), we are able to access the past in the present: embodied performance “makes visible, yet again, what was already there, the ghosts, the images, the stereotypes” (28). This haunted ontology is at the heart of Taylor’s investigation of the persistence, despite Spanish colonization, of cultural memory of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. An over-dedication to the written word as the source of stable, reliable and veracious repre-

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sentation of reality overlooks the ways in which traumatic memory and cultural knowledge can be generated, recorded and transmitted by means of such oral expressive forms as singing, playing music, praying, and performance poetry. This false attention to the written document repeats the colonizing erasure of pre-Conquest peoples, whose histories and knowledge stored in religious festivals, ritualized movements and traditions were dismissed as non-existent because they had not been set in writing. Looking at performance as a way in which cultural identity is passed on from generation to generation suggests that the written and the performed have often co-existed; performance is necessary in order for the specific knowledge and facts set in writing to be re-transmitted. While the physical and digital archives offer a place to activate cultural memory, it is also possible to store and transmit cultural memory via the “reiterative process[es]” (16) of performative acts. Performance is what “persists, transmitted through a nonarchival system of transfer” that Taylor terms the “repertoire” (xvii). Performing the repertoire in present-day South and Central America and the U.S. thus makes it possible to bring to light the attempted erasure of indigenous peoples, as testified to in the postcolonial stagings of Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s “Two Undiscovered Amerindians”; the activist theatre of H.I.J.O.S., the children of the disappeared in Buenos Aires who move in a processional march—singing, dancing and shouting through megaphones—to the homes of known perpetrators of Argentina’s Dirty War; Yuyachkani in Peru making a spectacle of the identities and whereabouts of known child torturers; or the repressive criminalization of Puerto Ricans and Cuban Marelitos for playing rumba in Central Park under then New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s “sweep the streets clean” campaign (Taylor 267-74). Transmission of the past, Taylor argues, is also constitutive of the ethics of performance as a way of knowing: as witnesses to embodied acts, the audience’s co-presence constitutes a form of participation that makes us complicit in some way with the frames of knowledge that the performance both enacts and transmits. By seeing the performance as both role-playing and as testimony, both performance as something that was and performance as something that is, the performative role of witnessing assumes a potential for tracing the tensions of the respective social structures: seeing the doubled performative makes it possible to also begin to understand differently.

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This chapter draws on Taylor’s concept of performing cultural memory as well as Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (1993) as a remapping of blackness that exceeds the trammels of nation and race. The black Atlantic as a space of flows of people, capital, and ideas in which slave ships and music circulated as “mobile elements” (16) of cultural and political transmissions linking European, American and Caribbean modernity forms the basis to ask questions about the ways in which sound and poetry are mobile elements which can mediate cultural memory transnationally, across the break which the Middle Passage introduced. Looking at the history of dub performance which emerged in Jamaican dancehalls in the 1970s before being re-routed to the diasporic centers of London and Toronto, I will argue that the work of Canadian dub poet Lillian Allen (born in Jamaica) enacts a moment of collective memory that pulls Canada into the orbit of the circumAtlantic world and works against the still dominant erasure of this history in Canadian politics and culture. As Jenny Sharpe has argued, Gilroy’s influential theory of a black Atlantic space puts the Caribbean at the heart of the European modernity that emerged through networks of slaves, sugar and capital but silently reproduces cultural hegemony by concentrating on the global capitals of London and New York: “As a dialogic engagement with African American intellectuals, the book is a transatlantic exchange between Britain and the United States that passes through the Caribbean. In this regard, the absence of Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America in the black Atlantic is better understood as an effect of the center and periphery structures that are maintained by global capitalism” (263). Sharpe does not extend her analysis to the omission of Canada from Gilroy’s work. It is nevertheless vital to perceive Canada as an important node in the globalization networks of labor and capital that continue “the old imperial politics of appropriation and exploitation” (Cooper, Sound Clash 1) because to do otherwise is to whitewash Canada’s specific colonial history. In this regard, Allen’s dub poetics deploys diasporic forms that enact the conditions of cultural memory in order to recall on the one hand the complicity of Canada in neo-imperial accumulation of land and resources in the Caribbean and on the other as a caution against denying the historical practice of slave-holding in Canada. Allen works from the cultural location of a postcolonial country that has little engaged in recognizing let alone acknowledging the colonial

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frameworks which continue to structure cultural memory as if it was still indebted to white Protestant Anglo-Saxon nation-making projects.1 Allen’s poetic project engages with what Robert J. C. Young calls neocolonial “legacies of history,” which he suggests are to be understood “not as a textual archive, but as the continued productivity of history in the present” (2). Poems such as “The Broken of a Black Man,” which memorializes Albert Johnson, shot by Toronto police in his home, and “His Day Came”—about a student who is arrested after punching a school principal in the face because the student recognizes the former’s white benevolence as a failure to acknowledge the structures of neocolonial racialization—register not only the pervasiveness and scale of such “legacies of history” reflected in racial profiling but also the events themselves, which would otherwise be incorporated into normalizing narratives that give racialized subjects the blame. Allen’s poetry documents injustices and re-tells the stories from an activist perspective. “His Day Came” identifies the principal’s patronizing and sexist condescension toward the mother via the son’s analysis of her job as “slaving / working in some white man’s factory” (ll. 14-15)—a contrast to the principal’s race- and class-blind description of the mother as “a hard working woman / quite happy / and well suited to her job” (ll. 1820). The poem establishes a continuity between the mother’s ill-paid factory job and the concentration of capital in the hands of a white elite. Moreover, the principal’s account serves to naturalize a race-based pairing of work and worker, in which the mother’s blackness is seen as a cause for her “well suited”-ness for the wretched job. Through the poem’s weighted reference to slavery, the job which the mother holds can be interpreted in an ambivalent way; for the principal, it is a sign of the mother’s socialized discipline, whereas for the son the job links the labor exploitation of one system, slavery, to that of another, i.e., capitalism. The principal’s denial of the links which systemically produce “race” as an attribute which enables or compromises capital accumulation, not least the ethical dimension of recognition of the inverse proportion of labor, time, and stress involved for worker versus the owner of labor, lead to his moral blindness being changed, momentarily, into literal blindness by the fist thrust into his face. “His Day Came” enacts 1

See Coleman’s White Civility (2006) on how Englishness in colonial Canada was (re)invented by the Scots to secure their cultural and political dominance.

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a moral payback of sorts, but only at cost. Other poems, such as “Rub A Dub Style Inna Regent Park” similarly reflect on the complicated relations between past history and present conditions but connect the local and the transnational in a more extended way to open up the vision of a broader and more lasting social justice.

3.2

Transnational Publics

Canada has consistently positioned itself as an immigrant country whose multicultural approach to gathering an increasingly racially and culturally diverse population into an imagined community has been much-lauded and has served as a model for Australian multiculturalism (Leung n.pag.). Less often mentioned are Himani Bannerji’s critique of multiculturalism as a bureaucratic measure which actually produces racial categories and racism (Dark Side of the Nation, esp. 48-55) and Richard Day’s observation that multiculturalism’s roots go back to Canada’s colonial period; the reserve system was only one device which aimed at geographically and culturally “locating” and containing different First Nations (Multiculturalism and the History of Canadian Diversity, esp. 110-13). Thus Allen’s dub poetics does not seek to appeal to a (putative) ethics of multiculturalism but instead conceptually maps Canada in relation to a transnational framework. Claims and counterclaims of retributive justice go back farther than the present moment and current geopolitical configurations. As Allen’s focus on those who run afoul of the law shows, the tolerance and social harmony of official multiculturalism is based on a narrow vision of justice and fairness that is anchored in a culturally specific sense of entitlement deriving from the legacy of colonialism. The authority, social power, and economic wealth of those who belong to the culturally dominant groups in Canada has accrued to them not because they possess better leadership skills, greater knowledge, or more financial acumen than others but because they have benefitted from the cultural logic of conquest. This creates a moral blind spot in which exploited labor is made invisible; dispossession is legitimated as the sovereign right of discovery; the murder, rape, and physical and spiritual brutalization that necessarily accompanied the system of slavery are naturalized; and notions of debtor and creditor are turned inside out.

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In her dub poem “I Fight Back” (1986 LP/1993 print), Lillian Allen counterposes the decolonizing perspective of a Caribbean “mother, […] worker, […] fighter” (l. 31) who battles labor exploitation in Canada with the condescending, cliché-bound understanding of a Canadian rooted in national space, who asks “Oh beautiful tropical beach / with coconut tree and rum / why did you leave there” (ll. 20-22). The poem constructs various oppositions: domestic who serves versus employer who is served “backra’s meals” (l. 11); tourist versus “native”; and citizen versus illegal immigrant. The labor conditions of “two days working in one / twelve days in a week” (ll. 12-13) make it clear that the job is demanding as well as badly paid (“I came to Canada / found the doors of opportunity / well guarded” (ll. 7-9). A multicultural reading of this poem would focus on the inequality of the two speakers, the immigrant Caribbean domestic worker and the host Canadian of the leisure class, and might see a resolution by way of an economic leveling in which the worker would be paid better and work less; if the woman were to get Canadian citizenship all her troubles would be solved because the present problem relates to affairs outside the legal jurisdiction of the Canadian state. But Allen’s poem offers a different reading, with a weightier ethical demand. Whereas state multiculturalism privileges equality and equity as principles governing social relations, Allen proposes that the creditors in this scene are not the Canadian state and its welcoming hosts, offering a home and a job to the illegal immigrant from the underdeveloped country, but rather the illegal foreign workers whose historical (slave) labor has already bought them a share in the nation of Canada several times over. By referring to the employer with the term “backra,” which the Caribbean Dictionary defines as a white plantation owner, Allen suggests the “legacies of history” (Young) which structure the exploitation of Canada’s Foreign Domestic Worker programs and which continue to legitimate the authority and power of the Canadian heirs of the slave trade. According to the multicultural approach whose hallmark is neoliberalism, immigrants to Canada are expected to be industrious, moderate, and civic-minded workers. And immigrants who arrive from the so-called developing nations are not only expected to fill the service positions that are low-paying, usually physically strenuous, dangerous, and often extremely tedious jobs, but are also expected to be grateful

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that the Canadian state has offered them a place to which they can “escape from” the conditions of their home countries. In this framework, the immigrant is someone who is indebted to Canada because her home state could not provide the necessary economic security. Yet as Sedef Arat-Koc has shown, the Canadian government was the agent which profited from the presence of Caribbean domestic workers: “During the recession of 1913-15, when unemployed Canadians were willing to take any work, including domestic work, the government deported many Caribbean domestics already in Canada, arguing that they could become ‘public charges’. More important than economic considerations was the fact that black domestic workers were, unlike their British counterparts, accepted only for their labor power, not as ‘permanent assets’ capable of contributing to the social and economic life of Canada” (74). Lillian Allen’s undocumented worker thus appears at the outset to carry a triple debt. Not only 1) moral gratitude to Canada and 2) the economic return which she is expected to deliver as payment for being “taken in”, but also 3) the implied debt which she incurs due to the work which she is “stealing” from the “official” workers. However, “I Fight Back” and other poems by Allen reveal the reverse: For the illegal worker refers to a moral debt owed by Canada that goes back much further than the last few decades. Dominant conceptions of Canadian cultural memory produce a subject who is not well-positioned to grasp Lillian Allen’s ethical demand. In the 1970s, during a period of intense cultural nationalism and around the 100-year anniversary marking Canada’s separation from Britain as colonial power, Canadian novelist, poet and critic Margaret Atwood famously commented about Canadians that “[w]e are all immigrants to this place even if we were born here” (62). Making her remarks in an afterword to her book of poetry entitled The Journals of Susanna Moodie, a collection written from the perspective of a historical nineteenth-century white British settler who has often been hailed as one of Canada’s early colonial writers, Atwood suggested that Canadians are eternal foreigners within a national space in which they are not at home. Atwood implies the impossibility of assimilation due to the overwhelming proximity of England and the United States as cultural forebears and economic competitors. Atwood continues: “the country is too big for anyone to inhabit completely, and in the parts unknown to us we

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move in fear, exiles and invaders” (62). Atwood’s text addresses a cultural anxiety about Canada’s belatedness with regard to the mother country and the putative originary source of culture itself, which is conspicuous by its absence in Canada: no tradition of arts, no great literature of its own. By positioning white settler Canadians as conceptual immigrants, Atwood on the one hand makes victims of them in solidarity with actual immigrants, and on the other hand, displaces actual immigrants who have to negotiate various legal, bureaucratic and social exclusionary frameworks. In a more recent example of active forgetting, Canada’s former prime minister, Stephen Harper, commented at an international press conference in 2009 that no history of colonialism exists in Canada (Walia n.pag.). Harper not only represses acknowledgement of Canada as a postcolonial space but in fact goes one step further by suggesting that “colonialism”—which he implicitly understands as something negative—happened somewhere else; the attempted cultural genocide of the First Nations in Canada, the brutal repression of the Métis rebellion in the nineteenth century, the forced assimilation program carried out by mission schools for Native children: all erased.2 Although the Canadian government in 1988 offered a formal apology and redress to Japanese Canadians interned in labor camps throughout Canada in the Second World War; in 2006 apologized to and compensated Chinese Canadians for the imposition of a head tax and finally—after years of lawsuits, public hearings and royal commissions— offered survivors of the Native residential schools an official apology as well as a form of financial compensation in 2008, the state has remained quiet on the question of financial reparations for slavery in Canada. This of course has to do with the fact that many Canadians do not know of the history of slavery in Canada. The late Yale historian Robin W. Winks published a major study of the history of African Canadians in Canada (The Blacks in Canada: A History) which details a practice of slavery that dates back to 1628, and Katherine McKittrick has highlighted slavery in New France (Demonic Grounds: Black

2

See, e.g., J. R. Miller’s Shingwauk’s Vision: A History of Native Residential Schools, Celia Haig-Brown’s Resistance and Renewal: Surviving the Indian Residential School, and Speaking the Truth.

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Women and the Cartographies of Struggle).3 Yet their work has been sidelined by a discourse of British nativism which relegates all cultural others to the status of newcomers (cf. Atwood). Sunera Thobani has analyzed how such discourses, which on the face of it seem to contradict principles of liberalism, are in fact legitimated by democratic legal regimes. In Exalted Subjects: Studies in the Making of Race and Nation in Canada (2007), she resituates the writings of Agamben, Foucault and Benjamin on law and sovereign violence within a postcolonial context, a move which foregrounds the acts of dispossession which ground the modern state in Canada: In the foundational moment of Canadian nationhood, the British and French were cast as the true subjects of the colony, while the Indian was expelled as the enemy outsider. Constituted as “preferred races” within the bureaucratic apparatus of the settler state, the settlement activities of these true subjects accomplished the violent dispossession of Aboriginal populations—a dispossession duly constituted and preserved as “lawful” to this day. (13) Thobani defines three categories of citizen which were de facto created: Aboriginals, who could only become a member of the nation on giving up indigeneity; the preferred or exalted race of settlers; and the “nonpreferred-race” settlers, including black and Asian Canadians, conceptualized as eternal strangers and threats to social harmony (75). Such conceptualizations formed the racializing framework which official multiculturalism was to administer and which would set the terms for the disavowal of black Canadians as fully fledged nationals. In a work evoking Toronto’s black geographies, Canadian performance artist Camille Turner creates an “Afrofuturist sonic tour” to trace the historical presence of black Canadians which is imperceptible if one relies only on vision. When black Canada is acknowledged, narratives tend to focus on Canada as the terminus of the underground railroad and as 3

The number of Africans who were enslaved was about 12 percent of the population of Halifax in 1750 (Winks 27-28). Captive Pawnee were enslaved alongside Africans in the 1600s. While France had banned slavery, the laws did not apply to its colonial possessions, including Canada. See Winks, McKittrick, and Afua Cooper, and for literary accounts Lawrence Hill.

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refuge while overlooking the economic motivations in which the state welcomed fugitive slaves for the cheap labor they represented (Pabst 113-14). Turner explains that “[f]raming Black bodies as foreign and new reinforces White bodies as the normative bodies that belong in these spaces. This creates a spatial narrative that edits Black Canadians out of the story” (6). An earlier debate on reparations exists in Canada. Descendents of residents of Africville, a settlement in Halifax founded in 1848 by black Loyalists which was eventually integrated into the city of Halifax and then razed for redevelopment in the 1960s/early 1970s,4 have had their right to reparations for dispossession recognized by the United Nations (see James). However, the scope of the federal government’s acknowledgement—a Parks Canada plaque designating Africville as a historical site—minimizes the significant presence of black Loyalists and an even older history of black settlement and exploration going back to the 1600s (Winks 1-28). It is against this framework of forgetting that I would like to examine Lillian Allen’s dub poetry performances. Associated with the dancehall scene from the postwar 1940s to the 1980s, dub as a musical practice involved manipulating records by stripping away and layering sounds, altering them so that the familiar was suddenly new again, or at least new in an old context. In the “deconstructive and reconstructive scheme that joined production and consumption together” (Gilroy, Black Atlantic 106), altered acetate records or dub plates were altered once more by those who played them, adding reverb, playing the same six beats over and over again, using different record speeds. Emerging after the live bands had been drawn away by Britain’s postwar demand for cheap labor and her subsequent wooing of colonial subjects (Stolzoff 41), the sound system operators and their record selectors were able to produce something new from the scarcity of live music and the

4

See Nelson, who argues that the City first produced Africville as a slum by rezoning it and gradually introducing an infectious diseases hospital, landfill dumps, and railway lines running through the community and then pronouncing the area as unfit for human habitation in order to bulldoze and redevelop it. See Compton for an analysis of this as part of a widespread phenomenon in North American cities affecting communities of color in general.

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ashes of the disintegrating social structures. Adjusting, tinkering and tampering with the commercially produced record, they both revealed its unfinished sides and reveled in them.

3.3

The Changing Same: Remix Poetics in the Diaspora

The Caribbean is an archipelago of island nations and the mainland countries of Belize, Surinam and Guyana straddling the oceanic space linking North, Central and South America; the geography of the scattered region, taken together with the history of the slave trade and the diverse histories of colonization—by the Spanish, the Dutch, the Portuguese, the Danish, the British, the French—have led to the Caribbean often being theorized as the paradigmatically modern site of fragmentariness. However, as Antonio Benítez-Rojo has argued in The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective (1992), the trope of the fragment can lead to a reductiveness in which the Caribbean is forever positioned towards some idealized whole in a relation of lack, incompleteness, incoherence, or backwardness. In such a model, against the grand project of modernity, therefore, the Caribbean is read as splintered and its histories of ruptures brought about by the Middle Passage seen exclusively as a trauma: a forced break in cultural memory between African traditions and languages and the resort to the hybrid Creole languages. However, to view the Caribbean as fragmented in an exemplary way is to impose another colonizing framework on the region, in which the Caribbean comprises raw material that can be formed into a usable or intelligible object of consumption for the First World. It is also to deny that theory, cultural resilience, and autochthonous expression can originate in the Caribbean rather than to acknowledge the nations’ producing their own historical consciousness and epistemologies. In retaliation, Benítez-Rojo offers a theory of the Caribbean as a cultural location in which transcultural encounters do not so much lead to cultural dominance and forced assimilation but rather constantly produce mutual cultural copying and sampling. An early forerunner of rapping over music, dub poetry is a cultural form associated with the Caribbean and Jamaica specifically because of its association with the dubbing process of sound recording, which originally referred to a version of a song with the vocals dubbed out,

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usually produced as one-off record pressings on acetate dub plates made for Kingston’s sound system DJs. The relatively non-durable acetate meant that the recordings could only be played a few times before wearing out. A further evolution of dub occurred when, according to this apocryphal scene, a DJ experimenting with the fader accidentally played a dub plate with the vocal track removed instead of the song in full version; switching back to the full version, he noticed the crowd’s reaction to the novelty of the sounds and began deliberately alternating between versions (Stolzoff 23). Sampling along with other experimental techniques such as dropping the needle, adding reverb, and playing records at the wrong speed became practices so popular on the dancehall scene that they made their way into the recording studios, which began the practice of “versioning,” or releasing several versions of the same song. This altered notions of relationality, in an effect which Paul Gilroy has called the “changing same”: “the relationship of the listener to the [sound] is changed by the proliferation of different versions. Which one is the original? How does the memory of one version transform the way in which subsequent versions are heard and understood? The components of one mix separated and broken down can more easily be borrowed and blended to create further permutations of meaning” (Black Atlantic 106). Dub poetry, which emerged from the same social milieu as reggae and Rastafarianism in Jamaica, “fuses reggae beats with the spoken word so that the voice itself is an instrument” (Sharpe 265). The poetry is philosophically aligned with Rastafarian principles of black consciousness and Africa-centered religion and with roots reggae’s “righteous lyrics of political protest, social uplift and spiritual liberation” (Stolzoff xxi). Kingston-based dub poet Oku Onuora, often cited as the “originator” of dub poetry (Habekost 19), describes dub’s aim as being “to dub out the unconsciousness out of people head, and to dub een consciousness” (qtd. in Habekost 4). Dub is the self-determined and self-determining cultural form of the “down-pressed” in society. It explicitly addresses the dynamic of radical constraints and freedoms, a tension which emerges against the background of the historical experiences of the Middle Passage, enslavement, colonialism and imperialism in the Caribbean. According to Allen, it was created “under the sheer steam of people trying to find a voice for something they haven’t yet heard expressed” (Chatterbook interview) and so dub poetry often in-

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corporates Rastafari language as a process of using “Dread Talk” (Pollard) in order to deconstruct meanings and associations. In his study of dub, Christian Habekost writes that “[t]he sound” of dread talk “was the power of the slum dwellers, the creative communicative means of the underprivileged and poor among whom Rastafari originated and flourished” (67). Rastafari language installs a different relationship between word and reference and meaning and sound. Words are altered in order to alter their potential: Instead of saying “I’ll come back to see you,” a Rasta will say, “I’ll come forward to see you,” striking out the negative. “I” is often substituted for the pronouns “me” and “myself” because the former, as the grammatical subject, implies full personhood, whereas “me” is an object. Rastafarian philosophy also alters word forms to more accurately describe social and political conditions. Original Wailer Peter Tosh referred to politicans’ “politricks.” Another example of expanding the lexicon so that “words bear the weight of their phonological implications” (Pollard 24) is the word downpression. Because “oppression” contains the sound “UP” which has a positive connotation, Rastas replace it with “down” because “downpression” more accurately reflects the true conditions of oppression (Habekost 67). Drawing on the roots of Jamaican Creole as a language that originated as a creative linguistic solution to the problem of cultural adaptation in a language context of multiple encounters, and often using Rastafarian talk, with its reconfigurations of sounds and meanings, dub in its very mixing of sound and meaning, draws attention to what Carolyn Cooper has termed “sound clash” or “border clash,” the sites of cultural contestation in which “a series of conflicts within Jamaican society around identity and the representation of the body politic” are provoked (Sound Clash 12). The sound clash between the “slackness” culture of Jamaican dancehall and its critics mirrors the different social spaces of Kingston’s downtown (those on the margins of the economy and politics) and uptown (elite, mostly lighter-skinned Europhiles), which mix in the dancehall yard itself (Bilby 146). For Cooper, the outlaw language, bad words, and sexual licentiousness that slackness represents demonstrates “a potentially liberating space” for women who can assert control over the representation of the female body (Sound Clash 17), and these clashes also have significance for other areas of conflict. As Allen puts it, “dub is something that the English language could not

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have imagined by itself” (Chatterbook interview) and as such dub functions as evidence of an outside to systems of meaning that otherwise could be totalizing and oppressive. At the same time, however, Allen makes it clear that her performances are interventions in the processes of racialization. Live performance differs from silent reading insofar that the minimal conditions of theater have often been theorized as the simultaneous bodily copresence of performer and audience (Fischer-Lichte), lending the corporeal presence a meaning-making significance that should not be overlooked. Arguing for the culturally specific significance of theatrical performance for African Americans as a vehicle for processing the experiences of the Middle Passage and the bondage of slavery via public and religious re-enactments, Alfred Hornung has commented about August Wilson’s play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom that “loss of the bodily component of the blues, which explicitly stands for the past history of the South, is the point of contention between Ma Rainey and the four members of her band in Chicago” (239). Just as the loss of the body suggests cultural amnesia in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and must therefore be prevented, in Allen’s performances, she at times employs her voice in ways which are not transparently linked to the semantic content of what she is saying, suggesting an affective impact of shock, disorientation, unease or sorrow that has a specifically racialized meaning. In both her live performance and recording of “Rub a Dub Style Inna Regent Park,” Allen begins with a scream that mimics a highpitched siren so precisely that it is not apparent that the sound is coming from a human throat; nevertheless, argues Maria Caridad Casas: [t]his sound has an immediate meaning, that of “siren” and all its experiential and emotional associations: fire, urban violence, disaster—and thus, pain and/or apprehension. But it has ambiguous meanings for listeners of the song. For listeners in dominant social and cultural positions, it has the meanings I have just presented; but for the listeners from whose point of view the ballad is sung, inhabitants of an inner city housing estate who are the target of racist police violence, the sound of a police siren includes the meanings “racist state oppression” and “community-internal conflict.” (“Framework” 6)

The siren is not found in the print version of the poem as such but once heard in the performance or on the record, the siren also pervades the

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silent reading as a reverberation of the social crisis that the poem describes. The flow between the two media is not one-way but rather indicates the porosity of the communication situation and emphasizes the audience’s role as participants in creating meaning, or enacting knowledge in Diana Taylor’s sense of performative memory. In dancehall, sirens can also be a signal of assertion, a form often taken up by the hip hop group Public Enemy in their live shows for a particular effect. As Chuck D. has commented in a documentary: “Public Enemy’s going to open up with a large logo, sirens, two brothers on top of stanches with Uzi’s, and we’re coming out looking like we’re out of the Black Panthers and Nation of Islam. We don’t give a damn what you white folks think, this is the truth and the truth shall set you free” (Copyright Criminals 14:50-15:11). In the same way that Public Enemy reconfigure the meaning of the siren—which echoes through their second album, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1988), as an affect of alarm traceable in the speeded-up tempo of the tracks—to suggest that the economic vise of the Reagan years and the racialization of space and policing had created a mental war zone, Allen makes the siren speak in a universal sound of mourning. The siren wail humanizes an object, or conversely speaks to the agency of the human despite his or her objectified status. In Allen’s “Rub a Dub Style,” the wail is echoed in the chorus, not literally but in the sounds of the long-drawn out phatic “Lawwwwd.” Set in the downtown neighborhood of Toronto’s Regent Park, intensely multicultural and one of Canada’s most densely populated postal codes, “Rub a Dub Style Inna Regent Park” narrates a scene of crisis. It begins with Pam, who loses her mind after her son is arrested for buying a gun from an ex-policeman, and then focuses on people coming together to dance as one way of coping with the losses. The poem takes place in an actual park, the one for which the neighborhood and the poem are named, and thus it juxtaposes the domestic and private space (the mother, her tears, her removal in a padded wagon) and the outdoor, social space of the public park. The poem has a double movement as well, moving from domestic emergency to community response. The poem “The Broken of a Black Man,” in which, after the police shooting of a Jamaican Canadian man, the narrator shouts “Call an ambulance call an ambulance / Oh Human Wrongs” (ll. 20-21), forms an important intertext here, alerting the audience to the crisis as well as to its proper

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interpretation. In this regard, the sounding of the siren is a form of test, asking whether we have heard the distress call. And the poem models an appropriate response. Casas has argued that in the work of both Allen and Trinidadianborn Canadian poet and writer Dionne Brand, the fluidity of identities—diasporic affiliations mean that the “I” of Allen’s poem “Song for Newfoundland” feels at home in that province because of the (familiar to Jamaican ears) dropped h’s of Newfoundland English—“has often been put in the service of exploring what it means to be female and black. By attending closely to the black female body caught in oppressive structures of meaning, [Allen and Brand] enter a site of contradictions in which the body is both social construct and body-as-self (Butler). This is the site at which they try to reconfigure the terms ‘female’ and ‘black’” (“Orality and the Body” 8). Allen and Brand are writers who belong to the post-1980 “fourth generation” of English Caribbean literature,5 who unlike their predecessors do not write about colonialism in terms of a post-Independence nationalist project but rather explore, as Casas puts it, “their experiences as citizens of the ‘external frontiers’ of the English-speaking Caribbean: London, New York, and Toronto” (9). For Casas, the politicized element emerges from the performance situation, which foregrounds the voice as a means of overcoming hegemonic representations: “Allen and Brand cite meanings clearly in their bodies, clearly practised by their bodies: and these meanings, made as embodied subjects, reverse the perspective of social oppressions aimed at the black female body as object” (Casas, “Orality and the Body” 9). Following Afro-Caribbean performance studies scholar C. M. Harclyde Walcott, who has argued that certain cultural forms such as limbo dancing, capoeira and stick fighting emerged in the New World as a response to plantation slavery (“Memory, Lived Experience”), it is possible to situate dub poetry as a form which privileges innovation over slavish copying and flexibility over brute strength. For Walcott, the cultural forms which emerged in the Caribbean in the eighteenth

5

Casas draws on Frank Birbalsingh’s four stages of Caribbean writing in English, which he defines as colonial (ending with the Second World War); national (1950-1965); micro-national (1965-1980); and transnational (post-1980) (Birbalsingh x-xi). Allen and Brand would be considered fourth-stage writers who focus on diasporic processes and community.

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and nineteenth centuries are not so much neo-African forms which have been revived but rather emergent forms in which New World-specific experiences could be manifested. Thus the preference in capoeira martial dance for using feet rather than hands to fight evokes the shadow memory of hands being shackled. Similarly, the masculinity valued is not one of strength and productivity but rather of Anansi trickster corporeality6 which evades the labor demands of the slavemaster—a bendability of bodies described by Walcott as “you can push it over but you can’t break it” (“Memory, Lived Experience”). A Caribbean aesthetic thus reorients social values as a performative enactment of the lived experience of surviving the Middle Passage, slavery and colonialism. Limbo dancing focuses attention on a body’s ability to prove itself flexible in ways that evoke the cultural memory of the cramped spaces of the hold of slaving ships, and the ways in which those spaces could be negotiated. The liminality brought into being by limbo dancers evokes the Middle Passage as a profound experience of crossing over. Whereas Walcott focuses on the corporeal element of cultural memory, it is useful to think of these resonances between form and performance, cultural memory and lived experience in sonic terms, as a form of echo or reverberation in which different temporalities are brought into unexpected contact. African American ethnomusicologist Michael E. Veal has argued that the sound collage effect of dub music has a “skeletal spookiness” that veers in and out of more familiar radio versions, their producers “dip[ping] in and out of public view” or in and out of range of social range (Veal 9). The ethereal sound cloud produced by studio mixing, fading, reverb and sampling represents a “true music of our modern spheres […] streaked by an infinitude of invisibly competing broadcast signals, intermittently cancelling each other out” (9). The spread of the innovative Jamaican dub sound in the postIndependence 1960s, now intimately part of global remix culture (Veal 6

Jahan Ramazani explains that Anansi, also spelt Anancy, is a West African– derived Caribbean folk hero whose wiliness enables him to triumph over others who are much stronger. He cites the folklorist Daryl Dance: “Anancy is generally a figure of admiration whose cunning and scheming nature reflects the indirection and subtleties necessary for survival and occasionally victory for the Black man in a racist society” (107) and argues that Anansi, more so than Shakespeare’s Caliban, is an exemplary figure for the Caribbean creolization of European languages (Ramazani 107-109).

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2), is not only about voicing a decolonizing critique directed at “colonial European, neocolonial American, and upper-class Jamaican domination” via lyrics but also about taking the tools of European musical forms and redeploying them within a nationalist and postcolonial framework (Veal 16). As a subgenre of reggae that developed into a genre in its own right, dub originally referred to both a studio practice of making music by dropping out the vocals from a track to emphasize the drum and bass rhythm as well as to the result, which was the dub version, often the B side of a record and, originally, pressed on acetate—a material that was so soft that each pressing could be played only a few times before becoming too distorted to use. There are many different versions of who first “discovered” dub (see Stolzoff, Bilby, Allen, Veal, Hebdige), but at least three points are of interest here. First, as a studio practice of altering a completed recording, dub represents, in Michael Veal’s words, a practice that “tampers with song form” (3) in ways that evoke radical freedoms and radical constraints. Insofar that “it implies that no one has the final say,” the open-endedness of dub is democratic, according to Dick Hebdige (14). At the same time, dub’s “turning away” from the original (Hebdige 14) is part of an economic context in which musicians got paid for one recording that producers were able to stretch into several different versions (Stolzoff 91). There was a frission to producing something good since it meant it would have an afterlife out of an individual’s control. Second, as Carolyn Cooper (Noises 80-82) and Christian Habekost (5) have argued, dub’s privileging of the B side suggests its political, anti-colonial critique. The name “dub” itself evokes what Cooper calls “its onomatopoeic drum resonances” with socially critical roots reggae, “a rhythm that is the dub-side of both middle-class respectability and the somewhat constricting conventions of the iambic pentameter” (Noises 80). Third, although dub was a studio practice developed in Jamaica, in its broader sense it refers to all music produced in Jamaica, and thus it is important to pay attention to the fluid exchanges between studio, live music, recording and (re)transmission. Lillian Allen sees the flow of influence not as dub musicians imitating the studio mixes, but rather the other way around: music and studio engineers “became conscious of the way in which live DJs worked with music and the interactive dynamics of their performance in the dance hall context” and tried to replicate these interactions in studio (Introduction 14; cf.

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also Stolzoff 57-64). Moreover, as will be explained in more detail below, the specific techniques of using reverb, echo, and fading created a new set of sounds that was incorporated into dub poetry in the 1970s: dub and reggae rhythms “ignited the imagination of a generation of younger poets; [….] word practitioners, all born in the early fifties” (Allen, Introduction 15). Dub and dub poetry thus cannot be separated from the conditions in which they are created. Just as Caribbean dance forms reorient the audience’s corporeal and collective memory, dub music foregrounds its own constructedness and thus brings into sensory perception the social and performative nature of making, playing and recording songs, as suggested by the following description of Veal’s listening to the LP Wailing (1982) by the reggae band Wailing Souls: This music, in contrast, drew attention to itself as a recording in a peculiar way. These Jamaican singers did not always conform to the chord changes of a song, and sometimes even sang in a different key altogether than the musicians. Vocalists didn’t even always sing; many times they casually rapped over the rhythm tracks as if they were carrying on a conversation in spite of the music underneath. The vocals also sometimes seemed strangely discontinuous; no sooner would a singer complete a stanza of a song, before a different vocalist (usually a DJ) began shouting over the music in apparent disregard of the original vocalist; the varying fidelity made it clear that these vocalists did not record their parts at the same time. The music also seemed oddly mixed. The bass sounded unusually heavy and the equalization seemed strangely inconsistent, as the sound veered back and forth from cloudy and bass-heavy to sharp and tinny. (Veal 5-6)

Veal’s memory of listening for the first time as a young man in 1980s New York to a recording of roots reggae and being struck by its being somehow off-kilter in a not easily identifiable way raises several important points about the routes which sound travels in the Black Atlantic. To begin with, his estrangement belies the essentialist attribution of an inherent African American intimacy with all black musical forms. Furthermore, he describes practices, such as talkover, which point to

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certain aspects of Jamaican dub being shared with American hip hop.7 Finally, the use of samples mixed in such a way that they draw attention to themselves as having been taken from one context and placed in a new framework suggests the operations of a performative memory, one in which the break, the isolation of a fragment of a rhythm or sound from a record, recalls the whole while placing wholeness and continuity under erasure: Before the last notes disappeared, the track abruptly began again, in what seemed to be a reprise of the song we had just heard. The singers again harmonized the first notes of the song’s wistful melody; then, just as suddenly, their voices evaporated into a reverberating void in the mix, to be heard only fleetingly throughout the rest of the performance. The rhythm section was treated similarly: sometimes audible, at other times dissolving into passages of pure ambient sound. In this remixed version of the song, reverberation seemed to be the central compositional element, as the music moved back and forth between music and echoes of music. Even these echoes were themselves manipulated until the track seemed at times to lapse into clouds of pure noise. At this point the mixer would reintroduce the rhythm section, and the music became once again earthbound. It was as if the music was billowing out from the speakers in clouds, dissolving and reconstituting itself before our ears. (Veal 7-8)

Loss is compensated by acknowledgement of loss. This act of making loss productive, termed “the exhilaratingly broken form of hip hop” by Paul Gilroy (Black Atlantic 109), suggests the strategic potential of both hip hop and dub to negotiate the collective memory of enslavement and the Middle Passage in a way that acknowledges the lingering effects of racial terrors without necessarily reanimating them in the present. In this context, it may be useful to refer to Derrida’s concepts of the trace and writing “under erasure.” In her translator’s introduction to Derrida’s De la grammatologie, Gayatri Spivak describes her own dilemma (in which her translation is in one sense “inaccurate yet necessary”) in terms of sous rature as both a solution and a form of double bind: “This is to 7

Hip hop’s transnational “roots” and the formative influence of Jamaican-born DJ Kool Herc in the birth of hip hop in New York in the 1970s are often commented on; see, for instance, Gilroy, Black Atlantic 103; Chang, Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop; and Broughton’s interview with Afrika Bambaata.

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write a word, cross it out, then print both word and deletion. (Since the word is inaccurate, it is crossed out. Since it is necessary, it remains legible)” (xiv). Very aware of the ways in which modernity has often been constructed as the legacy of Enlightenment thought, Gilroy suggests that hip hop stands both inside and outside the modern—a doubleness which he ascribes to the “fundamental dislocation of black culture” and the suppressed consciousness that the globally dominant musical culture of hip hop was “produced out of the racial slavery which made modern western civilisation possible” (Black Atlantic 80). Gilroy focuses on hip hop and “its unique conjunction of body and music” as a form of “the phatic and the ineffable” (Black Atlantic 73) whose expressiveness challenges Hegel’s privileging of philosophy and language as the carriers of human consciousness. At the same time, the break of hip hop and dub can evoke other, more recent conditions; in the case of the former, hip hop emerges “from the deindustrialisation meltdown” (Rose 21) of a South Bronx ravaged by so-called urban renewal development plans, scissored in half by Robert Moses’ Cross Bronx Expressway, and with police, fire and other emergency services mostly withdrawn.8 Similarly, dub’s reversioned fragments, as Harclyde Walcott’s theory of a performative Caribbean aesthetic suggests, enact the social, political and cultural conditions of a post-Independence Jamaica in which “the foundations of the colonial system (the rigid class structure, racial hierarchy, and European cultural hegemony) were still essentially in place” (Stolzoff 65). The social spaces of the dancehall, according to anthropologist Norman C. Stolzoff in Wake the Town and Tell the People: A History of Jamaican Dancehall (2000), are important sites of cultural production, in which social structures are both reproduced and contested.

8

For an informative account of hip hop’s emergence out of the social, economic and political conditions of the late 1970’s South Bronx see Rose, and especially Jeff Chang’s Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip Hop Generation, specifically, his chapter “Necropolis: The Bronx and the Politics of Abandonment.”

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Canadian Routes and Roots in the Caribbean9

Just as dubbing records and dub as a musical form reflect and performatively enact the rupture of the Middle Passage, dub poetry has an affiliation with the ways in which histories are embedded in form as well as content. The poet M. NourbeSe Philip, a contemporary of Allen’s also based in Toronto and also originally from the Caribbean (Tobago), has commented as follows on the ways in which the aftermath of enslavement and empire is made audible in dub poetry: “The havoc that the African wreaked upon the English language is, in fact, a metaphorical equivalent of the havoc that coming to the New World for the African represented” (18). However, dub poetry is as much about flow as about breaks, tracing affiliations, histories and cultural memory back and forth and connecting various diasporic journeys and transnational spaces. In her introduction to her 1993 collection of poetry entitled Women Do This Every Day, Allen provides a history of dub poetry, explaining its emergence from the divisive social conditions which she and other dub poetry initiators found not only in Jamaica but also in Canada. Following on the heels of Toronto’s inaugural International Dub Poetry Festival in 1993—attended by poets from more than twenty countries and the First Nations in Canada—Allen’s essay reflects on the transnational routes which dub has travelled, beginning with the Middle Passage and connecting the Caribbean to the postcolonial spaces of Canada, Britain and the United States. Global audiences associate reggae with Jamaican resistance to systems of oppression, but, to follow Paul Gilroy’s contention in the Black Atlantic (94-95), reggae is nothing else if not a hybrid cultural form par excellence, displaying in both its lyrics and its forms the syncretic borrowings and reworkings of the complex cultural exchanges which form the black Atlantic. Dem a mash it up down inna Jamaica dem a add it up down inna Jamaica dem a mash it up down inna Jamaica dem a add it up down inna Jamaica

9

The distinction between the two concepts of “roots” and “routes” is made by James Clifford in Routes: Travel and Translation.

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Gas prices bounce hoops for the skies a likkle spark and the embers of oppression rise people tek to the streets it’s no negotiating stance (“Conditions Critical” 1-9)

Mashing it up refers to dancehall, the press of bodies moving in a collective “massive,” or crowd, rhythm binding individual gestures and discrete bodies into a larger, common social entity. Writing about the mass demonstrations in Jamaica protesting the devastating financial pressure imposed on the national economy by the global monetary funding instruments and structures of the International Monetary Fund, Lillian Allen uses “mash up” in its extended meanings of “to wreck,” the opposite of fix up, and “to mix different elements together” in order to point to the complex ways in which the after-effects of slavery and colonialism need to be acknowledged and redressed. I will argue that a reading of Allen’s poem “Conditions Critical” in conjunction with “I Fight Back” and “Rub a Dub Style Inna Regent Park” outlines a neoimperialist relationship between Canada and Jamaica—one which troubles the self-understanding of many Canadians as living in a benevolent host country that grants the gift of the Canadian dream to demanding and largely thankless immigrants. Despite the marginalization of its Caribbean Canadian population in the media, economy, and national narrative, Canada profits substantially from its relationship to the Caribbean. Historically, there was an economic gain realized by the stream of poorly paid women whom the Canadian government sponsored to work in Canada as live-in foreign domestics from 1910 to 1911, 1922 to 1931, and from 1955 until the mid-1980s—which effectively enabled middle- and upper-class Canadian households to earn double incomes at the expense of the underpaid nanny who looked after the children, cooked the meals and cleaned house on the promise of permanent citizenship (cf. Macklin 687-92). More recently, Canadian-owned mining and other resource extraction operations such as off-shore drilling companies near Trinidad and the Montreal-based Alcan bauxite mining company in Jamaica have profited Canada at the expense of local needs (Engler 23; “The Canadian Connection” 50). However, the most consistent presence has been in the financial sector. Canadian banks controlled three of the largest

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banks in the English-speaking Caribbean in 2008,10 according to the Economist. Assets in that year were estimated at $42 billion, more than four times the annual revenues earned by the rest of the banks in the Commonwealth Caribbean put together (“The Canadian Connection” 50). “Though tiny compared to its Canadian operations, Scotiabank’s 200 branches in the region have long been a backbone of its international division,” noted one Canadian newspaper in 2010 (Robertson). As the Economist, Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper, and independent journalist Yves Engler have all pointed out, these ties go far back. An agreement signed in 1837 between the Halifax Banking Company and London’s Colonial Bank, which had a strong presence in the English-speaking Caribbean, initiated what was to become a sector so lucrative that in later years prominent Canadian businessmen and politicians would press for Canadian control of the British Caribbean. The Bank of Nova Scotia, for instance, was the first Canadian bank to establish operations outside the UK and the U.S. by opening a branch in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1899, the same year that the Royal Bank of Canada established a branch in the Spanish Caribbean, with 14 branches and offices in other countries to follow (Robertson; “Scotiabank in the Caribbean”). By 1920, the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce had branches in both Kingston and Bridgetown, Barbados, and in the course of the century would expand to 100 branches and offices (Robertson). The expectation that the Caribbean would prove a good investment for Canada is suggested by the fact that the Royal Bank opened some of its branches there before opening branches in the new western provinces of Manitoba and British Columbia (Engler 26). In his study of Canadian influence in the Caribbean and other areas of the global south, entitled The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy (2009), Yves Engler notes that although Canada’s ambitions to take over British possessions in the Caribbean were repeatedly deflected by Britain in the 1870s, around 1909, and again after the First World War, a strong bank lobby in Canada succeeded in gaining a near monopoly over banking in the Com-

10

Carmichael writes that, historically, the English Caribbean’s four largest banks have been controlled by the Royal Bank of Canada, the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, the Bank of Nova Scotia (all Canadian) and Barclays of London (100).

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monwealth Caribbean by the mid-1970s, with between 60 to 90 percent of banks being controlled by Canadians (Engler 23). Canadian financial interests in the Caribbean, especially Jamaica, extend beyond the banking sector, however. In addition to the corporations mentioned above, the Economist lists Canadian natural gas drilling companies off the shore of Trinidad and Tobago, nickel mining in Cuba, gold mining in Suriname, oil development ventures in Guyana, offshore financing arrangements in Barbados, and the management of television and cable companies in Jamaica and the Bahamas (“The Canadian Connection” 50). Engler argues that Canada’s economic might enabled the Canadian elite to more or less dictate the shape of banking11 and other economic policies in the English-speaking Caribbean, and Jamaica in particular, in order to concentrate capital investment in tourism and mining, both sectors which favored Canadian corporate interests at the cost of local economies. At the same time, it must be noted that foreign control of Caribbean national economies and subsequent starving of local economic development is largely supported by another underlying factor: the creation of debt. It is not so much direct foreign ownership which weakens the Jamaican economy, according to Michael Witter, professor of economics at the University of West Indies, but the mechanism of debt produced by the funding conditions of IMF loans, the flooding of the market with cheaper American imports (Sharpe 279 fn 7), and the devaluation of the local currency together with subsequently higher costs of food, oil and medicine for Jamaicans (Black, Life and Debt 9:35-11:00). Lillian Allen stands on the dimly lit stage of a club with a book in one hand, and begins to read/perform: Revolution from de drum Revolution from de beat Revolution from de heart Revolution with de feet De riddim and the heave and the sway of the beat de rumblings and the tumblings down 11

Jamaica’s Banking Law, 1960, was written in consultation with former Bank of Canada governor Graham Towers, then director of the Royal Bank of Canada (Engler 26).

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to the dreams to the beat. To the impulse to be free to the life that spring up in the heat in the heat in the pounding dance to be free to bust open a window crash upon a door strip the crust of confinement seep truth, through cracks through the routing rhythms of the musical tracts tracks De sound of reggae music came on a wave of patter of deeply rooted internal chatter chatter on wings of riddim and melodies gone free the bass strum the heart the bass drum the heart beat and the Rastaman pound! Bong bong bong bong beat them drums mon! Bong bong bong bong

patter

And de sound all around and the voice of impulse crafted into life burning darkness of light of days journeying through the night of riddim pulse wails and dreams and determination to be free of sight of a vision that ignites of a musical bam-bam fling-down-baps get-up-stand-up jam! A musical realignment of the planets a joy and a singing for those on it Liberation impulse dig the colonialists’ grave crunch of the sixties baton carried through civil rights flames spirit of the hippies signify new ways the Black power five the right-on jive women raise their banners for their rights communities organize and workers struggle for human rights for human rights

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De core of the African self separated by four hundred years ties blighted and nipped a continental divide and colonialist lies a sip from the being of the African well uncorked the primal African self and woo…oosh woo…oo…oosh the well spring up and a riddim let loose and reggae music found us It was the pulse in the Caribbean that echoed bright a voice on a beat squashed determination released and the wondrous sighs of Black people once again rose high from a little piece of rock called Jamaica where Arawak and Carib bones lie came a breath of resistance of peace love and liberation spread worldwide on the wings of artists and shaman the bass and drums prance like a winded fire chenk chenke chenke chenke of a guitar strum songs of freedom of spirit of rebellion of love of redemption Revolution from de drum Revolution from de beat Revolution from de heart Revolution with de feet Ah revolution (Allen, “Revolution from de Beat”)

In her poem “Revolution from de Beat,” Lillian Allen formally echoes the “mobile elements that stood for the signifying spaces in between the fixed places that they connected” (Gilroy, Black Atlantic 109) in order to enact the memory of enslavement and tell the story of the breaking of chains. At the heart of the emancipation narrative are the noise of reggae and Rastafarianism, which call resistance into being and give it a unique sound. I would like to consider the ways in which sound and the

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frission between sound, sense, body, and ruptured self-presence in fact structure Allen’s poems, such that although the sounds initially seem to be knots of critical resistance, they are necessary and instrumental to understanding the work of the poem—and the work that the poem performance as a form of “testifying” expects of us as witnesses. Dub poetry has two forebears for Lillian Allen—the Wailers Bob Marley and Louise Bennett, a Jamaican poet—who both critiqued social problems using marginalized cultural forms. In the case of the former, “[r]eggae was associated with ignorance and lack of sophistication, and was much frowned on by the arbiters of Jamaican ‘taste and culture.’ It subverted the complex and subtle structure of censorship under capitalism, a structure maintained by the imposition of classbased and racially-biased ‘standards for expression’” (Allen, Introduction 12). Bennett is a model for Lillian Allen because she popularized Jamaican English in the 1940s, when the language of the church, school, state and business sector was so-called Standard English (Morris 195).12 What Allen accomplishes with her dub poetics is precisely to bring together the differences of the oral (understood as the non-repeatable, existential and indexical moment of being: a calling of presence as inbetween) and the literary (understood as linear and sentence-based understanding). It is an example of what Édouard Glissant theorises as “oraliture” (182-94), namely, the fragmented histories and voices of a people which are shared precisely because they are in pieces. The sounds and images which are most forcefully emphasized are those which embody what the poem-performance itself is doing: the “KING ki king king of a guitar (string) strung,” the print version word play on “tracts” and “tracks” which becomes the rhythmic “tracks tracks tracks tracks tracks” of the performance as well as the crowing of the rooster form the main structural elements of the performance. The meaning of the poem is suspended in arcs across the poem: the “tracks tracks tracks” are audible in several senses. They are the railroad tracks that always hearken back to the time of slavery and the Underground Railroad; concommitantly, the rail tracks themselves are an image of other

12

Bennett and Allen also share a similar biography, having both been born in pre-independence Jamaica, both travelling to England and the East Coast of the United States to perform their work, and both emigrating to Canada.

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tracks such as the scarred-over tissue of injuries to the back and shoulders of those who were punished by whipping. However, the insistent repetition of “tracks” in the performed version moves the poem forward, and in a Rastafarian spirit, projects into the future rather than lingering on the negative: the next line introduces reggae music, and the tracks are therefore something creative and something resistant. Finally, of course, the tracks are also the tracks that Lillian Allen’s poem leaves on the history of the Caribbean. Her work profoundly takes part in disarticulating the histories of slavery and “downpression” from the possibilities and potentialities of the poet, her audience, the people and the poem-performance itself. Allen refers to her repertoire as “action poetry”—the work that her poem-performance act undertakes then, is a complex re-enactment of the revolutionary history of Jamaica. The poem does not narrate a history so much as cut it up and reassemble it with new connections. The history and poem begin with the state of revolution sounding forth “from de drum” (l. 1), the heart(beat), the feet—sound which significantly precedes or perhaps exceeds the conditions of confinement— swaying in the pounding dance to be free. We are moved through the poem down to the ground, which is both oppression and resistance: the heat gives birth to the impulse to be free. In the heat, we are inside an enclosed space, perhaps a bus—the cramped space is not the historic enslavement of Africans imported to the Caribbean by imperial Britain but rather a modern-day entrapment. The poem thus collapses chronologies and insists that the past history continues in the present moment. The bus, if it is a bus, only momentarily confines. Its spaces are surprisingly porous; they are like the parallel lines of the tracks, which lay down a fixed route, but also open space in between them, space in which to “seep truth” (l. 13), which reverberates as ‘see t’r’u’ / ‘see through.’ Significantly, these are cracks through which music can seep, music which carries the spirit of revolution and leads to a musical realignment of the planets or universal peace and harmony which can “dig the grave” of colonialism (l. 35). However, at the middle of the poem is the African core which is divided by four hundred years of slavery. As before, the fragmentation is made a part of the poem-performance-act structure itself. Jamaica is a rock from which liberation and resistance spring, by means of a simple guitar string, signifying the “dread” power of reggae: “In Jamaica – ka – king-king king… the guitar strung” (cor-

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responding to the “chenke chenke chenke chenke of a guitar strum” in the print version, ll. 58, 64) is “song” and “Free-doMG” (corresponding to l. 65). The poem’s lines, words, images, spaces and sounds constantly move outward and flow through what normally would contain them or it: for example, regular rhymes (PATTAH CHATTAH) that work on both page and in performance are side by side with rhymes such as heat/free, which are internal rhymes that become regular only in performance (di he’ di he’ /in di poundin dance/ to be free), with the result that unexpected units of meaning are grouped together through similarity of sound; the homophonic play of “tracks” makes the meaning reverberate from a single possibility in several directions; and finally, there is a refusal of a single narrative subject and chronology. This combines with Allen’s insistence on the poem-performance’s ability to act upon its listeners and to act as something other than itself (as music, as paradoxically heard internal chatter). Allen’s work, by foregrounding moments where the poem lingers in the in-between space where sound does not translate immediately into sense, draws attention to voice as created through social discourse. Her “Jamaica-ca-ka-ka-king-ka-king-king” moves through possibilities of meanings, defying a single experience of time and a single experience of the event. It is multiple. In this sense, Allen’s work, through its use of sound, makes apparent an othering which conditions speech itself. The fact that a speaker is addressing an audience means that this Other is always already embedded in the speaker’s text.13 As a cultural practice which draws attention to the voice as voice, dub makes apparent the estranging effect that voice itself can produce when, for example, unexpectedly played back on a voicemail recording. As such, the voice is something that carries its own reality effect and suggests that voice is a body in the body, a presence that is not selfpresence. The voice’s self-creating presence ruptures self-presence as such. This is the doubling effect where the self’s presence is both attested to and at once present only under erasure.

13

Critics like Blasing see poetic language itself as estranging: “We are never at home in poetry, for we experience at once the foreignness of the familiar language and the intimacy of the alien code” (9).

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In lyric poetry, the self-presence of the speaker is constituted through the fact that the speaker is addressing someone (whether or not it is inanimate nature, whether or not the speaker realizes she or he is being (over)heard, the linguistic context is that of a sender and something or someone who witnesses the message production). In the Platonic account, this ontological guarantee also assures of the authenticity of what is said and (over)heard—whereas what is written is capable of being re-read and in that sense repeated, which opens the interpretation of meaning to the risk of contamination through mis-interpretation and mis-reading. This kind of repeatability and iterability, however, occurs frequently in dub poetry: “dub” refers to not only the “dub-a-dub” sound of the reggae drum but also to the in-studio practice of removing the voice track from LPs and laying down other words, as well as altering the mixing and layering of lyrics, beats, any isolatable part of the song and mixing it into other tracks to create a new hybrid track. In this sense, Lillian Allen does what dub poets paradigmatically do: she takes the voice as voice and radically removes it from a semantic-syntactical arrangement that reads as “meaning” and instead exposes the radical displacement of subjectivity that in fact the basis of the linguistic code itself (Blasing xv). Thus the lyric is doubly displaced: firstly, the sound of voice as sound, noise, voice itself, ruptures self-presence as something that is wholly transparent, conscious and willed; and secondly, the lyric is displaced from being able to speak about itself as originary and authentic: this is in fact an illusion since lyric itself is an effect of an excess of meanings and not in fact a single meaning that is forever and universally guaranteed as the sign of ontological presence. In so far as Allen’s poetry enacts the memory of enslavement and the throwing off of empire in “Revolution from de Beat” using “noise,” which hovers between sound and sense, the poem enacts noise in the sense of poet and historian Kamau Brathwaite’s particular understanding. As a part of nation language, needed to decolonize the mind and to overcome the cultural injunction to make the hurricane roar in Shakespeare’s pentameter (265), noise “is that decorative energy that invests nation performance. Unnecessary but without which is not enough” (301 fn 49). Noise is something which resides external to meaning, but which cannot be detached without losing the meaning as well (271). Brathwaite’s list is extensive: “Whistle, grater, scraper, shak-shak, shekesheke, wood block, gong gong, the cheng-cheng of the steel band,

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the buzz of the banjo or cymbal, the grill of the guitar, vibrato of voice, sax, sound system, the long roll of the drum until it becomes noise, Coltrane sheets of sound, Pharoah Sander’s honks and cries, onomatopoeia, congregational kinesis …” (301-02 fn 49). The sensory richness of this list, whose ellipsis suggests that it could continue indefinitely, foregrounds an important aspect of sound “in” the Caribbean which has been theorized by Julian Henriques in his work on dancehall: The auditory sense has particular value and importance across Jamaican society especially in the downtown ghetto areas of Kingston where dancehall music originates. Here, the open windows and corrugated zinc walls make sonic privacy impossible. The tropical heat pushes people out onto the streets. This makes for a rich cacophony; children playing, car horns, motor bikes, radio, television, church services, sound systems, cocks crowing, not to mention the occasional gun shot. This distinctive shared open-air sonic levity (way of life) also forms part of Jamaica’s rich African musical heritage. (“Situating Sound” 288)

The porousness of sound and its ability to merge spaces (e.g., of inside/outside) gives it a collective potentiality. The physicality of very large sound, like that produced by the outdoor sound systems (Stolzoff refers to them as “sophisticated, megawatt mobile discos, which are essential to dancehall performance” [1]) and their towering stacks of speakers arranged to form a kind of sound bowl in which the audience finds itself, imposes sound not as a sensation of hearing, but of feeling, and makes the idea of place very concrete (Henriques, “Sonic Dominance” 290). This “sound dominance” of the speakers has the effect of linking the crowd because of the kinaesthetic effect in which the vibration of the sound makes sound haptic rather than purely or solely audible, a kineasethesis that Henriques suggests carries over to being in the crowd as a part of something larger than the individual. The sound system had this appeal for Louise Bennett, who saw in the dancehall yard a space for bringing together a set of people who shares the same habit and have the same way of life, the same movements, the same beliefs, the same heritage from that time to this […] it brings a oneness, it brings

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together a people in one surrounding […] It generates a vibe that brings one generation to the other generation, breaking down social barriers. (Henriques, “Situating Sound” 201)

With her dub poetics of address to a community of listeners, readers, potential actors, Lillian Allen draws on the potential of sound in the ways described by Bennett and Henriques, in order to make the transnational ties that bind readily apparent. To evoke the dancehall collectivity in the diasporic outpost of Toronto, Allen reproduces its sonic affectivity by creating a verbal, noise-producing sound system of her own.

3.5

Transgressive Sounds

In his autobiographical history of steelband in 1940s Trinidad, John E. Slater tells of sneaking out of his father’s house in the evenings to join school friends who were making music. Like a marching band, the percussion orchestra would perform while on the move, slowly gathering its members as it made its way through the streets. Some would be equipped with the brake hub of an automobile, producing a loud, penetrating sound that could carry long distances, while “others were beating dustbins, bottles and spoons” (3). The spontaneous music flowed from the ad hoc nature of the band. Dustbins, cardboard boxes, biscuit containers, milk tins, pitch oil tins, and, in the early days, pieces of bamboo, were all used to create sound. Many instruments were devised on the spot from readymade materials, and anything with a surface that could be beat was fair game: “As the band went along revellers would pick up anything that could produce a sound, depriving people in the neighborhood of their dustbins, etc. around the festive season” (5). Although bamboo proved to be less versatile and was eventually dropped because of the limited range of sounds that could be produced, the emphasis was on experimentation and innovation rather than on reproducing a finished score. As Slater explains, “We had no set patterns in anything. Every panman was doing his own thing, that is

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to say each of us had his own style in beating the pan and one thing that was certain is that we always knew what each other was doing. Although pan was outlawed at that time, we used to ‘hit the road’ whenever we felt like doing so” (7). Like his father before him, Slater became an experienced musician. He describes the formative period of steelband in the decades before and after independence from Britain, the sound’s transition from bamboo sticks to steel pans, as well as explaining the development of techniques for producing different notes. However, his narrative is remarkable not only for its documentary and historical character, but for recording his own and other pannists’ achievements in light of the fact that they learned to “beat the pans” at all—at a time when the steelband sound was tightly regulated in Trinidad. Except for a brief number of years following the Second World War, beating pan was allowed only on Carnival days (Slater 3) and outlawed at other times of the year. The punitive manner in which civil law was selectively applied to racialized members of society is suggested by Slater’s memory of a day when six panmen who had encountered some police officers on patrol were arrested on the street and charged with disturbing the peace, an offence which meant one had to appear before a judge as well as pay a hefty fine. “That was the kind of treatment to which panmen were subjected” (15). The ban on steelband goes back to the days of the British colonial government, which banned African drumming and stick fighting in the 1880s, following the Canboulay Riots in which the free population protested attempts by the colonial administration to use police force to limit and in some cases prevent the celebration of Carnival (Dudley 45). The outlawing of drumming is significant in itself, since Slater’s description of the extreme loudness of the hub beater evokes the Jamaican abeng, a modified cow horn used by the Maroons in their wars against British slavers to transmit detailed information over long distances. In her study of Queen Nanny, an eighteenth-century military leader of the Maroons, Karla Lewis Gottlieb attributes part of Nanny’s success to the use of the abeng, whose sound alone instilled fear in the British troops (Gottlieb 45). Slater’s memoir does not dwell on the colonial logic which informed the strictures regarding steelband, but his account of heavy police repression of panmen nevertheless emphasizes the dynamic between social repression carried out via the twin state

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apparati of the police and the courts and transgression vented via creative (mis)use of social objects such as dustbins, which through their association with home ownership and a certain kind of social respectability (properly disposing of one’s waste) represent a kind of fixity and propriety that becomes progressively unraveled in the cacophonous sounds and impromptu routes of the mobile percussion orchestra.14 Just as Paige McGinley has suggested that folk music in the Jim Crow South served as a vehicle of mobility that stood both in connection with and in contrast to the historical immobility of captive African Americans (McGinley 129), the pannists’ compulsion to be constantly on the move can be read not only as a reflection of the fact that the bands had to evade the ever-watchful surveillance of police authorities but also as a conscious exercise of the liberating potential of precisely those evasions.15 In this chapter, I have shown that the acoustic entanglements of dub poetry make it a privileged transnational form of performing memory, that is, for recording and remembering the collective trauma of slavery and the Middle Passage in the diaspora. As a poetic practice with roots 14

Sound is often an object of repressive attention in struggles over sovereignty rights and control of space, as Larry Blumenfeld has noted in his essay about the redevelopment of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina: “The jazz funerals and second line parades referenced in [then president George W.] Bush’s speech in fact formed the first post-Katrina expressions of community, the earliest assertions of the right to return. A year later, those parades were threatened by Draconian fees and restrictions. The musicians who honor their dead in the processions Bush described occasionally faced arrest, cited with ‘disturbing the peace’” (146). 15 As Angela Davis argues in Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude ‘Ma’ Rainey, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday (1998), “for people of African descent who were emerging from a long history of enslavement and oppression during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, sexuality and travel provided the most tangible evidence of freedom” (67), and the blues style encoded a similar kind of independence in its lyrics but also and more crucially in its form. The emphasis on explicitly articulating sexual desires and transgressions in the blues takes on special significance when read against the social history of emancipation from slavery. Among other things, African American blues privileged the radical freedom of both men and women to choose when and how they would enter into relations, and with whom (Davis 21).

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in embodied performance, dub emerged as a discourse network connecting official political speech with the commentaries, satire, and signifying talk of everyday public life in Jamaica. It aligns the alleged immateriality of music, poetry and speech with material practices embedded within the performance, language and technological framework (LPs, sound systems) of dub. In the following chapter, I continue my exploration of the relationship between the material and the immaterial—also linking back to the “phonographic logic” described for Dickinson—when analyzing the sound works of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, especially their audio walks, as something that, while rooted in sites, transgresses the site-specificity of performance through sound.

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Subjects of Hearing, Subject to History: The Sound Works of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller

4.1

Disciplining Hearing

In Techniques of the Observer and Suspensions of Perception, art historian Jonathan Crary demonstrates that technologies of perception are never purely technological but are also inescapably social objects insofar as they are manifestations of the collective imaginary of their time. As I have argued in Chapter 1, the phonograph was not (only) a device for capturing and perceiving an aural event, but also, through its use as a sonic memento, the embodiment of a social desire for preservation and continuation in an age following the ruptures of the Civil War and the introduction of other technologies such as photography in practices of memorializing the dead (cf. Sterne, McGarry). In this chapter, I examine the immersive audio walks and sound and video installations of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, arguing that, rather than the nineteenth-century anxiety about forgetting and thus losing the past, in Cardiff and Miller’s sometimes playful, sometimes uncanny dislocations and doubling-up of recorded and actual ambient sound, it is the present which is shown to be inextricably entangled with both what has already happened and also with a future presciently sensed. In the moments when we encounter a space within another space, such as the installation Opera for a Small Room (2005) that has a life-size diorama-like set with a large cut-away window showing an interior crammed with old vinyl records and record players, speakers, and a chandelier juxtaposed with a simple wooden school-house chair, the theatricality of the room-withina-room framing emphasizes the immersive and entangled dimension of Cardiff and Miller’s sound works, which make audible the layered nature of space as a site of potentially overlapping presents and pasts and multidirectional memory. In their ability to create liminal spaces, in

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which physical places such as underground vaults, backstage spaces, service corridors, and little-used stairwells suggest the psychoanalytic topographies of the subconscious, the artists engage sound media as hybrid objects of technology and culture in ways that make perceptions of sound visible as phenomena that are “techniques,” in Crary’s sense, of hearing, that is, of historically specific and learned practices. This is perhaps most clear in the works with puppets, such as Sad Waltz and the Dancer Who Couldn’t Dance (2015), in which a tiny marionette brokenly dances while her accompanying pianist plays flawlessly, or The Marionette Maker (2014), in which a miniature opera singer and pianist perform a melancholic romantic song from Tchaikovsky’s Opus 6 for voice and piano, where we are positioned as audience and hence listen and observe attentively. Although the puppets’ strings and visible wooden joints underscore the theatrical framing, the performance context of both the theatrical set-up and the chairs we occupy or windows through which we watch create our role as spectator–audience and thus the opera performance and the dance choreography are simultaneously real and “unreal,” happening and not happening, due to the ways in which the sound works engage the cultural practices of listening to opera and going to the theater. While Crary’s discussion focuses on the intertwined processes of changing models of visual perception and the emergence of a new observing subject in the nineteenth century, in the following, I will extend his concepts to sound and the subject who listens. According to Crary, cultural changes in the way that perception was understood in the nineteenth century came about largely as a result of a change in the organization of knowledge, based on new physiological and psychological understandings of perceptual processes. In Techniques of the Observer (1990), Crary examines the profound break with Renaissance perspectivism that took place in the nineteenth century, tracing it to the ways in which vision became increasingly abstract and liberated from a grounded body and a stable point of view. The emergence of a modern or impressionist paradigm came about not because of a radical change in visual representation, as is usually argued, but because of new modes of subjectivity and new modes of understanding vision itself, as well as its relation to the observing subject. In Crary’s analysis, the body of the nineteenth-century observer was situated in tandem with particular new emergent techniques, practices, institutions

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and procedures of subjectification. New forms of subjectivity which emerged from the falling off of agrarian and artisanal work coincided with serial industrial production that made it possible for objects to be created that were absolutely similar and thus perfectly exchangeable; photography and money became homologous forms of social power in a new commodity economy. Crary argues that technologies of perception are not “inert and neutral piece[s] of equipment” or “a set of techniques to be tinkered with and improved upon over the years.” Rather, “they are embedded in a much denser organization of knowledge and of the observing subject” (24, 2). Taking the camera obscura as a paradigm of the classical model of vision and model of the observing subject in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Crary argues that the effect of the camera obscura was based on a stable and fixed set of visual relations and was understood to produce an objective truth. It worked by admitting a beam of light through a pinhole that passes through its dark enclosed space and projects an image of an object, upside down, on the opposite wall. Various scientists and philosophers in antiquity and the early modern period were interested in this phenomenon for its possible analogy in explaining how human vision might function; it was also an instrument used by physicists such as Kepler and Newton. But the camera obscura’s significance went beyond “proving” that an image can be produced in this way. As Crary notes, the camera obscura, because it seemed to be “an apparatus that guaranteed objective truth about the world,” “became a model […] for how observation leads to truthful inferences about an external world” (25, 24).1 However, starting in the nineteenth century, another model of visual perception emerged. In his study of color, Zur Farbenlehre, Goethe’s ideas of the body as the basis for observation introduced a theory of the observer as someone who produces perceptual experience without reference to or necessary parallel with things external to the observing subject (Crary, Techniques of the Observer 68-69). Specifically, his studies of the afterimage, i.e., the image which, after staring directly at a source of bright light, remains as a negative shape in the perceptual field of 1

Descartes in the Third Meditation: “I will now shut my eyes, I shall stop my ears, I shall disregard my senses” (qtd. in Crary, Techniques of the Observer 25).

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sight, suggested that the eye could retain a vision even after the object was no longer present in front of the eyes. The observer was corporeally involved in producing the visual experience. Things formerly considered illusions of sight or tricks of the fallible human eye or ear, were in the nineteenth-century positivist science taken as affirming “the positivity of vision” (28). This newly subjective observer was also someone whose body demonstrated the temporality of subjective processes of perception, which also destabilized dominant notions of a direct correspondence between the object and the process of perceiving it. During the same period, the theory of the senses developed by German physiologist Johannes Müller, widely discussed in the first part of the nineteenth century, were key to a major shift in the way that the body was understood to organize knowledge. In contrast to the widespread belief that the ears and eyes provided raw data which the perceiver could use to affirm empirical facts, Müller’s experiments with electricity applied to the sensory nerves suggested quite the opposite. What Müller discovered was that electrical current used on the eye would produce the illusion of light whereas electricity applied to the skin would create the sensation of touch. In other words, the same “raw data” or input – electricity – would result in a different “reality” according to the different nerves. Goethe’s and Müller’s ideas, along with other work done around this time as well as the forms of exchange of signs represented by money and photography—which detached value from a singular, unique and material object and instead invested it in abstractions—contributed to a new, subjective mode of perception in which vision was lodged in the body of the observer, rather than being an external process, and in which objects and their perceptions were detached and could circulate independently of reference to each other. 4.2

Hearing Divided among the Senses

In many of their audio works, Cardiff and Miller situate hearing as a site of divided attention in which the displacement of sight as the primary sense-making instrument results in perception being shared across the senses. Stressing that hearing is phenomenologically linked to an under-

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standing of space, Cardiff and Miller use sound to suggest that the “picture” of the world is determined by a mixture of sensory impressions, not only vision. Situating their art practice at the intersection of sound performance, theater, film, and visual art, they produce sound works that are highly metatheoretical. Collaborating since the late 1980s, the Canadian-born artist pair have produced dozens of mixed-media and sound works that could be roughly divided into three genres: First, sound and mixed media installations, in which viewers physically enter a space that the artists have constructed within the gallery, such as the Paradise Institute (1999), which consisted of a mock cinema with two rows of seating in a balcony overlooking a foreshortened projection screen. Second, sound sculptures that consist of a room or outdoor space filled with engulfing sound, such as Forty-Part Motet (2001) which plays back a choral concert of Thomas Tallis’s Spem in Alium with 40 speakers arranged in the same spatial layout as the choir itself. And third, audio and video walks, which take the form of a journey, guided by a voice heard over earphones, through city streets, outdoor spaces, theaters, or train stations, such as Her Long Black Hair (2008), which winds through Central Park in New York. Although distinct in effect, the separate genres as Cardiff and Miller interpret them have in common that the audience must physically traverse space in order to experience the work and thus undergo a change in perception of that space. Here it is necessary to describe the experience of the audio walks in detail in order to make the argument that they create a sense of time and space that is outside the habituated organization of perception. The concept of the audio walks is loosely based on that of the museum audio guide that comprises a set of headphones and an audio device which allows visitors to guide themselves through the exhibition at their own pace, and as if listening to an individually tailored museum tour. Cardiff and Miller’s audio walks use the same technologies of a headset and playback device which visitors also don while standing in the museum or gallery. But rather than being toured through a show, listeners instead hear Janet Cardiff giving very specific directives and urging them along a route that focuses attention on the physical space and takes the museum-goer past, rather than to, the artworks, foregoing stopping in front of them to edify visitors about the significance of a particular work or the importance of a particular artist. The audio walks

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entrain the listener in that actions which are normally carried out unconsciously, such as walking and gazing, suddenly become charged with a different physicality. The habitus of the museum-goer is disrupted.2 The listener is drawn into an acoustic space created by the warm, intimate voice of Janet Cardiff, who directly addresses the listener and thus affectively and imaginatively links up consciousnesses with the one wearing the headset. Walks are scripted, recorded and edited by Cardiff and Miller and involve what seems to be a narrative with expository gaps, punctuated by brief segments of films, film sound effects, and music scores. The ambient sounds which the walker hears both disturb and mix with the pre-recorded sounds of the walks, already undertaken by Cardiff during the process of recording. Thus the walker may experience Cardiff’s walk as though it were immediately taking place in a simultaneity that may play havoc with the senses of sight and sound that normally should provide orientation. The scripts of the audio walks are open to the gaps between hearing and seeing, and between recorded reality and present reality, that will inevitably occur. Their audio walks use sound architecturally, to create the verbal map for walkers as well as to suggest the layering of different spaces that disrupt the pure “here and now.” By literally leaving the building, stepping outside the gallery and onto the street or into the spaces adjacent to the gallery, Cardiff and Miller’s audio and video walks plunge the viewer/listener/walker into an immersive environment in which vision is clearly no longer the privileged sense that is activated and that must be used to guide the museumgoer across busy intersections, crowded sidewalks, through deserted gardens, or through echoing backstage spaces. Cardiff and Miller’s audio walks frequently employ sound to explore the interdependency of sound and vision, specifically effects on perception when hearing and vision contradict each other. The leaky nature of audition becomes apparent. Noises from the “off” that cannot be located or accounted for within a field of vision can disturb us, suggesting that the fullness of vision is lacking. Similarly, the fact that noises are not always containable makes for a mobility that has a potentially uncanny 2

Sohal proposes that Cardiff and Miller’s audio walks unsettle the museum as an institution that inculcates taste and distinction, in Bourdieu’s sense, via the audio guide (esp. 12-35).

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aspect. Hearing the voice of someone no longer present, for example, has a spectral effect that introduces new connections between past, present and future. Because Cardiff and Miller record the walks using binaural microphones, the recorded sound has an unusual three-dimensional quality. A pair of microphones set head-width apart and carried at roughly the height of a person mimic the experience of auditory perception (Fig. 2). When heard through earphones, the audio resounds around the walker. The effect can be startling; Cardiff is interested in the effect produced in which things sound as if they are taking place inside the listener’s head. Thus sound has the inherent capacity, as Cardiff suggests in an interview with Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan, to take us out of ourselves and to enable us to imaginatively inhabit other bodies (97).

Fig. 2: Janet Cardiff recording with a dummy head

Cardiff and Miller’s work is frequently associated with the embodied walking practice of Michel de Certeau in both its narrativizing aspects as well as its alternative mapping (see Fischer; Schaub; Pinder; Carl-

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son).3 The audio walks, notes Daniela Zyman in “At the Edge of the Event Horizon,” are “created in particular surroundings and are inseparable from those physical settings and those moments in time from which they have been created. They incorporate and reveal the hidden nature of the sites and circumstances that are experienced during the process of walking” (11). The walks exist only in the moment of being undertaken, and the walker is directed along a route that is mapped out by the narration heard through a headset. The audio walks enable a dualistic experience. The experience of dualism is a result of a specific recording technique as well as the playback effect of sound in three dimensions which places the hearer inside an ambient soundscape, rather than as a spectator in front of a painting. Cardiff records a route by carrying a dummy’s head in which binaural microphones are set in each ear. Thus the walker who follows the verbal directions retraces the path walked by Cardiff and hears the site sounds played back, which may or may not coincide with what is actually seen. Routes are site-specific (the Villa Medici in Rome; the London neighborhood where Jack the Ripper was active; Central Park in New York; the streets around the Münster Dom), and often veer from the visible pathway to detour across a lawn, or to duck into an unmarked stairwell, thus making the route itself subject to a type of de Certeauxian practice of unfolding and enfolding as fiction and reality, memory and experience overlap. As Zyman puts it, “[a] Cardiff site […] is a net of possible references and relationships between the inner space of the walker and their external environment. […] Equipped with headsets, walking around and following Cardiff’s words and stories, we sense that past, present, and future collapse into a dense, expanding field of possibilities” (11).

3

In “Walking in the City,” from The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau contrasts the embodied experience of a city that one undergoes when walking through the streets with the abstracted sense of a city one receives when gazing at it from above. The latter practice is associated with power and the ability to impose one’s vision upon others, while the former suggests that one may evade the rules of space by choosing alternate routes.

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97

Sound and Spatiality: The Audio Walks of Cardiff and Miller

The work of Cardiff and Miller is relevant to this study of sound culture not so much because of the centrality of sound to their audio and installation works, which often incorporate sounds of the street and other soundscapes, snippets of film, and music, but more importantly because their sound walks and installations self-reflexively comment on cultural ways of looking and hearing, sensing and knowing.4 Using high-tech media hidden in the trappings of “old” media, for example, the works both heighten and confuse the senses, both appear to deepen reality and to alter it in a way difficult to delineate. Cardiff and Miller invite us to reflect on philosophies of sensory knowledge alongside habits of perception and practices of everyday life. These reflections circulate among the various works in a cross-referencing intertextuality that, because they are “voiced” within different narrative levels and within supposedly independent contexts, dissolve the clarity of boundaries between artist and “consumer,” auditory experience and corporeal sensation, and memory and cognition. As many critics have noted, undertaking one of their audio walks can produce an effect of doubled or co-experiential space, in which different points of past, present and future are layered in a single moment (see Carr-Harris, Scott, Christov-Bakargiev, Zyman). Each of the walks has a particular character of its own but many have in common a focus on maps and routes that challenge the concept of cartography as an instrument that fixes space and makes it transparently knowable; The Missing Voice (1999) was made for Artangel, an art gallery that has no physical site; Walk Münster (1997)5 was part of Skulptur Projekte Münster, a septenniel exhibition of art in Münster’s public spaces; the Villa Medici Walk (1998) was part of a larger group exhibition—on the permeability of nature and architecture in the context of gardens and the city—set in Rome in a 16th-century palace that now

4

As acoustic artist and critic Seth Kim-Cohen has commented, works in which sound is simultaneously the medium and the content seem to miss the potential of sound art to engage with more than the material qualities of sound (17 June 2013 blog entry). 5 The 2001 CD containing this walk entitles it Walk Münster, as does the website of Skulptur Projekt Münster, which commissioned the walk, but most sources, including Cardiff and Miller’s site, refer to this work as Münster Walk.

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houses the French Academy; and both Louisiana Walk #14 (1996)6 and A Large Slow River (2000) self-reflexively lead through a sculpture garden before meandering along a seawall. Sound moves beyond expressivity towards the status of an event, as that which remains unique even as it is being repeated and recalled during performance. Sound is thus something which traverses the passage between outer and inner, in the process flipping experience, memory and futurity inside out. However, Cardiff and Miller’s references to Kafka’s penal colony (The Killing Machine 2007), to the quotidity of surveillance in big cities (Eyes of Laura 2005), and to the felt presence of repressed histories (Walk Münster 1997), suggest that the sonic effects of layered experience are not only playful and subjectively associative, but can also be understood as a calling-to-attention of perceptual capacities in an age that simultaneously supports reality TV programs and Guantanamo Bay. Cardiff and Miller engage discourses of obsolescence and technological nostalgia in works such as the installation Opera for a Small Room (2005), in which scratchy records can be heard playing classical music on an ancient gramophone machine, or the Villa Medici Walk, which features an old-fashioned cassette recorder whose messages, like a kind of time-travel machine, seem to arrive from someone located in the near future. The presence of a gramophone should therefore not be taken to characterize their work as uncritically celebrating a bygone acoustic age, but rather as a means of evoking the magical space of cinema and theater, in which we do not question the veracity of the voice, nor inquire into its source but instead focus on what it might have to tell us. Likewise, the machines that run amok, such as a tape recorder that evokes the maverick master computer Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey, are not meant to evince paranoia about media technological machines displacing humans. Instead, as I will show below, Cardiff and Miller view new media as a means of forging intensified relations to the “analogue” world. The amplified sense of the material environment and the heightened senses, however, also enable subjects of hearing to become subjects of history insofar that sound has the potential to create an affectivity that can reveal the politics of everyday life. 6

Often referred to simply as Louisiana Walk.

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4.3.1 Imagining History without Us: Walk Münster (1997) This chapter proposes tracing the multisensory experience produced by the experimental sound works of Cardiff and Miller as an investigation of the problem of historiography. The walker is directed along a route that is mapped out by the narration heard through a headset. On the one hand, the retracing of the route implies that a historical dimension can be salvaged. On the other hand, Walk Münster explicitly stages the outsider status of “Janet,” a Canadian who not only comes from elsewhere but has trouble with the gaps between/entanglement of the media image of these countries and all that she perceives as she traces the route which the walker-listenerparticipant follows. “Janet’s” encounter is that of a Canadian walking through an old European city and thus her experience of Germany is doubly mediated. The landscape is overlaid by images she “remembers” from war movies and espionage thrillers. The scripts of the audio walks are open to the gaps between hearing and seeing, and between recorded reality and present reality. While the audio walks verbally guide and direct walkers along a route, the path is far from straightforward, suggesting the layering of different spaces that disrupt the pure “here and now.” As Cardiff has suggested in an interview with curator Kitty Scott, the immersive effect of the headphones combined with the effect of intently listening to the walk’s narrative and trying to match Janet’s rhythm of footsteps and breathing create a sensation of haunted corporeality: Just as our dreams sometimes infiltrate our waking reality, I think the walking pieces break down the barriers of what the listeners think of as their singular self. My surrogate body starts to infiltrate their consciousness while in reverse their remembered dreams, triggered by phrases and sounds, invade and add to the artwork. (Scott 15) The audio walk foregrounds the divide between the feeling of being fully attentive to one’s surroundings and being in the distracted mode of consciousness which Benjamin characterized as the modern condition. The enormous sensory demand of the newly Hausmannized boulevards, shopping arcades and modern transport created what Benjamin called “a

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complex kind of training” (328) of the human sensorium. While Walk Münster’s narrator stresses the idyllic scene of the German town she is experiencing as a tourist – she draws our attention to the pastoral ivy vine growing over a stone wall, “how nice it is to get away from the traffic,” – the very fleetingness of such a state of being returned to oneself within nature (and its constructed character) is constantly underscored by the interruptions of the script and the shifts between mediated layers of reception from recording we are encouraged to hear as “personally” spoken to us by Cardiff, to recording-within-a-recording or short film snippets. What most obviously disrupts the pastoral regime, however, is a gap of attention created by the inconsistencies between what is heard and thus “seems” to be there but is not visually present (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3: Janet Cardiff doing her Münster Walk (1997)

The study of perception as something subjective and influenced by embodiment led to its determination as something that could also be measured and predicted, although there was always also the possibility that quantifying something might reveal the extent to which it defied measurement, as Crary notes: Once the empirical truth of vision was determined to lie in the body, vision (and similarly the other senses) could be annexed and controlled by external techniques of manipulation and stimulation. . . . [C]onceived in this way, [vision] became compatible

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with many other processes of modernization, even as it opened up the possibility of visual experience that was non-rationalizable, that exceeded any procedures of normalization. (12) Writing about a sociology of the urban in 1932, before he was forced to flee fascist Germany, Siegfried Kracauer famously commented that the social functionality of Weimar Republic Berlin had stripped the city spaces of their historical embeddedness and remade time into an endless parade of eternal newness: “What once existed is on its way to never being seen again…. Many buildings have been shorn of the ornaments that formed a kind of bridge to yesterday. Now the plundered facades stand uninterrupted in time and are the symbol of the unhistorical change that takes place behind them” (“Straße ohne Erinnerung” 316). It is against this kind of enforced present and its erasure of historical experience that Kracauer proposes that certain memories can retain elements of the past. Such a “memory-image”—which has the potential to include the “nasty stories” circulating around the grandmother—gains its significance from contingent meanings that operate as condensed history. In his 1927 analysis of modernity and the parallel emergence of photography with a positivist historicism, Kracauer counterposes the organization of memory offered by the camera, which orders things in a continuum of space and time, to that of memory’s images, which are by comparison full of gaps. What the memory records are “memoryimages,” in which, from the photographic perspective, certain elements might be left out, or even misrepresented. However, Kracauer contends that the memory-image retains those fragments that “touch upon” elements of “what has been perceived as true” (“Photography” 426). “Memory encompasses neither the entire spatial appearance nor the entire temporal course of an event.” A photograph of the grandmother is no longer recognisable to her grandchildren; the exactitude of the photographic detail—the realism effect—is precisely what, over time, distances the grandmother (Kracauer uses the word “vernichten”) and reduces her to a costumed manikin dressed up in an old-fashioned, “peculiar” crinoline and wearing her hair in a chignon: The fact that the grandmother was at one time involved in a nasty story that is being recounted time and again because one really doesn’t like to talk about it—this doesn’t mean much from the photographer’s perspective. He knows the first little wrinkles on

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her face and has noted every date. Memory does not pay much attention to dates; it skips years or stretches temporal distance. The selection of traits that it assembles must strike the photographer as arbitrary. The selection may have been made this way rather than another because disposition and purposes required the repression, falsification, and emphasis of certain parts of the object; a virtually endless number of reasons determines the remains to be filtered. No matter which scenes a person remembers, they all mean something that is relevant to him or her without his or her necessarily knowing what they mean. Memories are retained because of their significance for that person. Thus they are organized according to a principle that is essentially different from the organizing principle of photography. Photography grasps what is given as a spatial (or temporal) continuum; memory-images retain what is given only insofar as it has significance. Since what is significant is not reducible to either merely spatial or merely temporal terms, memory-images are at odds with photographic representation. From the latter’s perspective, memory-images appear to be fragments but only because photography does not encompass the meaning to which they refer and in relation to which they cease to be fragments. Similarly, from the perspective of memory, photography appears as a jumble that consists partly of garbage. (425-26) Walk Münster is not a re-enactment of history, of recuperating the story of Münster and of Germany’s past. This would be photographic memory, the total organization of space and time in which every moment and every incident could be fully accounted for. Rather, another concept of spatial organization is provided by Michel de Certeau in his analysis of an old French rural practice of determining land ownership via stories (often attached to trees as boundary markers). He explains the role of narrative in the discursive construction of legal relations as something which both sets up borders but in the same moment opens the possibility for their being crossed, as: there is no spatiality that is not organised by the determination of frontiers. In this organization, story plays a decisive role. It “describes,” to be sure. But “every description is more than a fixation,” it is a “culturally creative act.” It even has distributive power and performative force (it does what it says) when an ensemble of circumstances is brought together. Then it founds

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spaces. Reciprocally, where stories are disappearing (or else being reduced to museological objects), there is a loss of space: deprived of narrations (as one sees it happen in both the city and the countryside), the group or the individual regresses toward the disquieting, fatalistic experience of a formless, indistinct, and nocturnal totality. By considering the role of stories in delimitation, one can see that the primary function is to authorize the establishment, displacement or transcendence of limits) and as a consequence, to set in opposition, within the closed field of discourse, two movements that intersect (setting and transgressing limits) in such a way as to make the story a sort of “crossword.” (123) In Walk Münster, because the various narrative levels are not easy to resolve into a total understanding of what happened/is happening, it is difficult to evaluate whether the old man is benign or harmful; a figure of conscience who digs up gardens to discover underground chambers filled with books hidden in order to save them from being destroyed, or a strange old man who experiments in unethical ways with interventions into time and space? The deeply ambivalent and highly complicated operation of the memory-image allows us to apprehend the world without us: as it was before we were born and as it might be after we are dead; as Miriam Bratu Hansen has commented about Kracauer’s theory of photography: “[T]he photograph allows a momentary encounter with mortality, an awareness of a history that does not include us” (456). By inserting “Janet” as an outsider figure into Münster’s history as a specifically German site of memory, the walk allows the museum visitor to undertake the imaginative journey of reflecting on the past as it might be without us. Both Janet and the old man are intruders; the former by virtue of her coming from elsewhere, armed with preconceptions that, however misguided, nonetheless form an affective bridge between past and present, and the latter by his actions of digging up gardens and exploring underground tunnels in his attempts to excavate the past. That these “experiments,” as the walk calls them, in inhabiting another time and space are also fraught with problems is suggested by the fact that the very buildings which the Canadian tourist admires as Old Europe are most likely to be reconstructions—as vast portions of present-day Münster had to be rebuilt after the war and were made as historic reproduc-

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tions7—and by the final moments of the walk, which ends with the museum-visitor waiting for the old man to arrive from the past, seated in the dark, dank, cold and malodorous space of an underground cellar. Whereas in Walk Münster Cardiff and Miller highlight the difficulties of writing history by foregrounding a precarious position to history (embodied by the unworldly Canadian tourist), in other works, Cardiff and Miller investigate and put into question the conceptualization of Canada as a space allegedly without history. 4.3.2 Canada and the Audio Walks From a 1950s-style TV with an integrated television stand on legs, positioned in front of a bearskin rug, comes a thin, faltering voice singing the Canadian national anthem. The looped fragment of “O Canada” makes a demand on the viewer to stand to attention, and at the same time, interrupts the patriotic imperative, preventing it from being taken fully seriously. On closer inspection, the “rug” turns out to be a sheet of plywood cut in the form of a bearskin fur spread out on the floor, complete with painted claws. The TV broadcast switches between the singing of “O Canada” and what sounds like a dialogue from a Hollywood romance; two people are declaring their undying devotion to each other. The dialogue loops, so the beginning and end are difficult to determine. Looping subtly underscores the hyperbolic nature of the sentiment as well as its ubiquitous familiarity from media and pop culture; the dramaturgy of romantic love here has the same rise–fall–rise trajectory as TV ads, which press for attention and interpellate the audience in similar ways. The TV, too, turns out to be not quite as rustic as it may suggest. The front of the plywood TV has been cut out, creating a miniature stage or something like a diorama: it appears to hold a nature scene of a birch tree with a misty waterfall in the distance (Fig. 4). Looking closer, you notice that it is Christmas lights blinking behind a screen which create the pulsating effect of flowing water. Just as the fragmented nature of the dialogue/anthem creates the feeling of something slightly off-kilter, 7

On the cultural politics of rebuilding German cities after the war see Blümle and Lazardzig.

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the foreshortened perspective and the regularity of the water’s movement emphasise the rather bizarre nature of this “scene.” It is not so much the constructedness of the nature/culture divide that is being pointed to but rather the willingness with which we as audience respond to these cues (“scenic nature”, “national pride”, “true love”), filling out the empty content with readymade narratives.

Fig. 4: Cardiff/Miller: “The Waterfall” (1987)

The installation – “The Waterfall” from the exhibition Another Fiction (1987) by Cardiff and Miller – might refer to a family recreation room, some idealized space to which the family retreats to watch Sunday night movies on TV in a gesture of pseudo solidarity with each other. As art critic Ralph Rugoff has remarked in a conversation with Janet Cardiff about another of her works: “the piece has got quotation marks around it” (qtd. in Biagioli 12). All the same, there is a certain pleasure in recognition. The rough grain of the plywood, the old-fashioned TV, the rug spread out on the floor, and last but not least the two sound bytes are all in their own way iconic formats, reassuringly familiar in their clichéladen quotation of the everyday, and anchored in references to North American consumer capitalist media culture. Perhaps there’s something comforting about the bear who can be tread upon without trepidation

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and comprises a (relatively) animal cruelty–free product. Gathered together in close proximity, these symbols of rugged Canadian life, barely out of the bush, seem to comment on each other in an intriguing way. Is there a competition between the waterfall as a scene of unspoilt nature, the Canadian anthem and the bearskin as the dominant trope for “Canada”? On the walls of the “rec room” hang more scenes of hyper-real frontier living: “Prints” that are based on postcards and then reversioned on plywood and titled One of several picturesque waterfalls along the west coast of British Columbia or A mountain sheep contemplates the panorama of sky, mountains, rivers and verdent [sic] forest, surrounding Vancouver in beautiful western Canada are chiselled onto wood panels. There is intermediality at play: As Liz Wylie has argued about the exhibition, “the rough-hewn frames […] immediately give the viewer a sense they might refer to something other than the nature images they contain” (n. pag.). The scenes’ content is contained as much in the titles, the roughshod frames, the frame that the exhibition itself provides (Another Fiction), as well as the conceptual movement between them, as in the images as such. Cardiff and Miller remediate the tourist postcard and use it as a lens for examining how media images not only mediate representations of nature but, in a media-saturated society, are in fact the content; by citing tourist postcards as the way in which people relate to mountains, forest and wild animals, “Cardiff is noting here the sentimental wish to remove the less pleasant, instrumental field of relations that exist ‘out there,’ to register dynamic patterns (predatory, symbiotic, etc.) as static scenes” (McGrath 37). What has frequently been overlooked in the reception of Cardiff and Miller’s work is the self-reflexive role which Canada and canadianness play. However, nation and nationalism are not evoked as a kind of flagwaving gesture but rather are deployed tactically, in the manner of the clichéd landscapes, to draw attention to the perceptual act and its entanglement with a mediated subjectivity. In standard formulations, Canada is the snowy space north of the United States border, where the English colonials won the war, people lead quiet lives, play ice hockey, and pride themselves on achieving civic virtues such as civility and law and order. However, in their works, Cardiff and Miller self-reflexively use references to Canada and canadianness as a way of reflecting on cultural belatedness and technological nostalgia.

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I would like to suggest that this is a subtle response to a constellation of ideas that circulate about “Canada”; first, that Canada exists as an extra-historical space; second, that Canada shifted from nineteenthcentury self-fashioning to postmodernity, thereby bypassing modernity.8 4.3.3 Canadian Subjects and the Spectacle of Modernity In a paper on “Spectacle, Attention, Counter-Memory” (1989), Jonathan Crary explores a potential prehistory of the spectacle—the conjunction of the rise of mass media, consumer capitalism, and the culture industry: the spectacle comprises not (only) images but a social relationship between people, according to Guy Debord—that goes back to the nineteenth century and the transformation of bourgeois life into practices organized around the rights of man. Crary quotes Walter Benjamin and Jean Baudrillard on the way that the right to equality and the right to happiness are “animated” by “ideological forces” in which happiness becomes for the first time something which “had to be measurable in terms of signs and objects” (Baudrillard), and equality becomes a “phantasmagoria” (Benjamin) of consumer access (98). Crary argues, following T.J. Clark in The Painting of Modern Life, that modern subjectivity emerges in parallel with this shift from citizen to owner of objects, i.e., a subject who can, and indeed needs to, display signs of wealth, leisure and happiness: If one agrees with Clark, not only do the origins of modernism and the spectacle coincide, but the two are inextricably related. Writing about the 1860s and ’70s, Clark uses the spectacle to explain the embeddedness of Manet’s art within a newly emerging social and economic configuration. This society of the spectacle, he writes, is bound up in “a massive internal extension of the capitalist market – the invasion and restructuring of whole areas of free time, private life, leisure and personal expression.... It indicates a new phase of commodity production – the marketing,

8

See Northrop Frye’s The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination (1971).

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the making-into-commodities of whole areas of social practice which had once been referred to casually as everyday life.” (99; ellipsis in original) Modernity could be understood then not as the freeing of oneself from the exclusivity and fixity of social status and power under feudalism, but rather as inextricable from the struggle against them. Hence the proliferation of signs and objects at this particular historical moment: “[i]mitations, copies, counterfeits are all challenges to that exclusivity” (Crary, “Spectacle” 98). The status of the copy and the counterfeit have a slightly different register within the Canadian context, I would argue. On the one hand, this modernity was arrived at via colonial occupation by first the French and then the British, which had the effect of physically displacing the social power to be imitated outside the border of the colony. So one could argue that the practice of cultural copying always already had a certain self-reflexive and metatheatrical quality to it. The work of fashioning subjects was carried out first and foremost as the education of the imperial subject as upright Christian souls—most clearly seen in the brutal and vicious practice undergone but survived by many First Nations children who were compelled to attend the so-called Indian residential schools in Canada.9 On the other hand, as Crary’s argument also makes clear, copying exposes a gap of subjectivity, a gap in the subject which endlessly defers closure; just as the best Canadian was the one who could perform Englishness best, the best English subjects in Canada turned out to be from Scotland, since the Scots proved to be able to perform Englishness better than the English themselves and assumed many of the state functions.10 Most important, however, is the way in which history is treated in Canada as something which has taken place (or is still taking place) elsewhere. As just one example of this curious attitude, take the state9

Richard Day has argued that the nineteenth-century social technologies of residential schooling could be considered a prehistory of the modern-day production of docile citizen subjects under multiculturalism. 10 For an elaboration of this point, see Daniel Coleman’s White Civility (81-125), which examines mythic heroes in literature to investigate how discourses of whiteness function in Canada to produce race as a category that underwrites hierarchies of social power.

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ment by Stephen Harper, prime minister in 2008, when he infamously told the international press that Canada has no history of colonialism, thereby erasing from public record the postcolonial space inhabited by First Nations peoples in Canada. In Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, Mary Louise Pratt describes in her preface the long hold of British empire in Canada. Growing up in small-town Ontario, Pratt learned of the famous Englishman, Dr. Livingstone, who had traveled to Africa to do missionary work; yet the fact of his Britishness, as well as his achievements, distances him to such an extent that she is inclined to disbelieve that this great colonial hero could be embodied by a flesh-and-blood person, let alone one whom one might know through the seven degrees of separation. This disbelief is a symptom of the cultural unconscious, summed up by Pratt as follows, in her story about the Dr. Livingstone who ran the corner drugstore: It was through Dr. Livingston, for example, that I was introduced to the miracles of the dribble glass, the squirt ring, the Chinese handcuff, the phony pack of Juicy Fruit gum that snapped down on your finger, and, around 1955, a horrifying new item Dr. Livingstone secretly sold my older brother and his friend: plastic vomit. I was therefore unsure if he really meant it the day he produced a discolored sheet of faded writing in a frame and said it was a letter written by a great uncle of his who had been a famous missionary in Africa. Only after consulting at Sunday School with Miss Roxie Ellis, herself a former missionary, did I take the story for true. “Our” Dr. Livingstone was a grand nephew of the “real” Dr. Livingstone in Africa. Canada was still colonial in the 1950s: reality and history were somewhere else, embodied in British men. (1) Cardiff and Miller rightly focus in “The Waterfall” on television viewing as a cultural practice with weighty stakes in national claims of identity; not only did CBC, Canada’s national public broadcaster, start TV programming in 1952 partly as a response to a perceived dominance of American media, but it deliberately shaped its policies as a moral stronghold of pedagogic, family-centred, and “high” cultural programming and news designed to shelter Canadians from “the symbolic powers attached to American formulations of the modern, the free, and the fun.” Moreover, if radio “redefines space and restructures time,” it is

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partly true of public television as well that it “both joins people together and reaches them where they are lonely, which may be why it was embraced by Canadians so vigorously from the beginning. Its centrality is clearly related to the geographic scale of the country” (Berland 214, 215). However, even though television and radio are not much thematized in Cardiff and Miller’s later work, other distance-shrinking and/or temporality-altering technologies like the telephone, the answering machine, the video camera, the gramophone, and devices like the Viewfinder turn up repeatedly in both the audio walks and the sound installations. What these works have in common is their immersive quality; a frequent commentary describes the work as physical cinema but I would suggest that there is also a strong critical and reflective dimension. One example is a walk which takes place in Canada, which I describe below in more detail, but the ways in which recording and playback alter the sense of time and space are crucial to think about in the context of Pratt’s suggestion that the Canadian imaginary constructs history in such a way that the concept of “history in the present” is difficult to grasp in terms of a “real” here and now. On the one hand, this elusive history has to do with what Crary has argued about techniques of perception. Namely, Cardiff and Miller, in a way experimenting with the situationniste dérive, negotiate the type of distracted attention that became newly vital in isolating and disempowering individuals as disciplinary subjects in the nineteenth century. The vital point here, is that the senses, as Crary suggests, became a special focus of control as a result of processes of modernization and rationalization which drew on new ideas about the way the human subject was constituted (Techniques of the Observer 1-24, 99). On the other hand, the seeming deferment of history and the idea of something happening in the present is most clearly investigated by Cardiff and Miller in their audio walks, which play with the sense of here and now and overturn it. In “Deixis and Origo,” Robin Curtis investigates how cinema can achieve creating an immersive sense of time and space in which the embodied subject’s sense of here and now seems to merge with that of the film’s here and now; the broad framework is the assumption that film is performative and one of the questions which arises is how co-presence is then defined.

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Curtis considers the 1890s short film, Dickson’s Experimental Sound Film. The 17-second black and white film made by W. K. L. Dickson in 1894 or 1895 shows him playing a fiddle into the horn of a recording gramophone while two men are waltzing to the music. Mislabelled in an inventory done in the 1960s, the fragment was lost in the archives for decades before being identified in the late ninties by a Library of Congress archivist as early Kinetescope footage (Ondaatje 201). The affective power of this brief historic film material, Curtis suggests, largely arises from the anomaly it seems to present: created long before the days of the first commercially synchronized sound film (The Jazz Singer 1927), with the visual images stored for many years separately from the wax sound cylinder and then first in 2000 newly synchronized by sound designer Walter Murch and his assistant Sean Cullen, Dickson’s Experimental Sound Film seems to defy its historicity. As Curtis puts it: the film “offers synch-sound when it should, ostensibly, be silent” (266). The great odds which had to be overcome in order to bring the sound and visual images together, and the sense of handling historic material that could be viewed as by an audience more than a century ago, are summed up by Walter Murch: “It was very moving, when the sound finally fell into synch: the scratchiness of the image and the sound dissolved away and you felt the immediate presence of these young men playing around with a fast-emerging technology” (qtd. in Curtis 256). Coded as silent film, “film from the past,” because of its black and white technology, “obsolete technology [usually binds] films […] to the historical moment of their production,” but here the film underscores our self-reflective gaze, or doubled vision: knowing what we do about the history of film, we are suddenly confronted with a film that shouldn’t be possible and that thus offers a sense of being contemporary with us, drawn into our here and now. Curtis’s take on media theory proposes that “media are constituted by means of the practices in which they are implemented.” As such, “it is not possible to arrive at a definition of the term ‘medium’ by simply sorting the world into things that may be termed ‘media’ and those that are ‘non-media.’ Instead it is essential to recognize that anything at all may become a ‘medium’ by being used as one” (257). Broadly stated, media are a process of interaction but always historical in the sense that

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the ways in which we put them into use are self-conscious and selfreflective attempts to bring into the framework of the perceptible something that is removed in space or time. 4.3.4 From Oakville to Louisiana: Beyond Site-Specificity The walks in London, Rome, and Oakville, Canada, have very distinctive soundscapes which function to impress the walker with a sense of being in the particular place in question, whether it is the constantly shifting sights and sounds of urban, cosmopolitan London, the slow pace of a hot summer day in the enclosed gardens of a Roman villa which suddenly reveal an underground system of labyrinthine tunnels directly underneath the path one was just following, or a walk through a pristine sculpture garden situated along the edge of an enormous lake in Canada that is unexpectedly shot through with the sounds of an air raid, although the skies are perfectly clear. The social and the natural environments are intertwined in the audio walks so that each becomes inseparable from the other: church bells sound in Münster, marking the acoustic environment as European at the same time that the very clichéd nature of the iconic sound indicates the cultural distance of the narrator (and possibly other listeners) who grew up in a land where church bells are rarely heard in this proximity or this everydayness. In both the German and the Italian walk, we also access the church interior and hear the sound of choirs, but in Rome, the hymns sung in Latin have a particular affective hold because culture is being located here, just as the lost villa that is buried under the contemporary city and that comes to light through archaeological investigation haunts the Villa Medici walk with its material sediments of past and present times, echoed in the walk’s own layers of voices and narratives that evoke other times and spaces, recorded events that insist on being newly present again. The artists deliberately introduce sound cues to mark a jump in time or space; the honking of Canada geese, for instance, will mark the transition to Canada; these cues repeat themselves in the manner of shorthand: geese means Canada; church bells means Europe, to the point that a discursive reference to geese by one of the characters is enough to convey to the

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listener that the character is in Canada. Yet while certain motifs locate space and stabilize it, other motifs render space and time completely permeable. I would like to briefly examine two audio walks: Louisiana Walk (1996), created for the Louisiana Museum in Humlebæk, Denmark, and A Large Slow River (2000), created for Oakville Galleries in Oakville, Ont., Canada, in order to argue that although the audio walk retraces the path of the artists who recorded the journey so that one is literally walking in their footsteps, and obviously refers to the physical location in which the walk takes place, the works are site-specific in a very unconventional way. Typically, site-specific works refer in some aspect to the specific physical site in which they are located. The implication is that the artwork will lose some of its meaning if removed or detached from the particular site in which it is experienced. However, as Miriam Schaub’s work on Cardiff and Miller has demonstrated, it is far from easy to isolate “location” as a physical geography in the experience of the audio or video walk. A Large Slow River (2000), one of the few walks made in Canada, takes its title from a book that the walk refers to as Experiments with Time11 and loosely explores the notion of time travel and existing in several places simultaneously, with all its attendant problems of memory gaps, epistemological uncertainty about which reality one is inhabiting, and a traumatic sense of time—i.e., that time is hyper-subjectively experienced and at the same time experienced as if in the third person. The structure of the walk mirrors the thematic content. It begins in what you take to be the present, with the sound of a woman walking through an echoing house, searching for someone. However, you also hear what sounds like a tape-recorded message from a man who apparently can hear the woman but is prevented from responding. This second voice represents a rupture of narrative in several ways: its obvious recorded quality; its difficulty in being chronologically ordered (if he can hear the woman now, when did he leave this message?); its unclear addressee (is he talking to you, the listener-walker?); and finally, its intertextual refer11

Possibly a reference to An Experiment with Time (1927), a book by an Irish engineer of aviation, J.W. Dunne, in which he proposes a theory of simultaneous time, i.e., the ability to experience the co-presence of past, present and future in a single instant.

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ence “I can hear her calling but I can’t seem to make a sound” to an early Cardiff-Miller installation with film, An Inability to Make a Sound. Continuing outside, the woman remarks on the beauty of the gallery’s sculpture gardens beside the lake. It becomes unclear whether the woman, who is the narrator whose steps and breathing you try to match in order not to get lost, is in the same present after all, since she refers to changes in the landscape that do not correspond to what you are looking at. You do not see the devastated house she describes, nor the graffiti on the statues; however, when she says “Something’s wrong” and tells you to stop, you are connected again, since the sound of a helicopter flying overhead followed by the sound of a bomb dropping right beside you would certainly qualify as something wrong. Later, the man (but now no longer via the answering machine tape) tells of flight, escape, a cottage being burned down, the loss of his brothers. The event(s) are/is never clarified in the sense of knowing who exactly did what, why or when; but you as witness, I would argue, do bear the trace of something having happened. The difficulty of paying attention to walking “correctly” and without danger (“Careful. They’re small steps”, the narrator-walker says), is compounded by the strain on your senses in striving to match up sight, sound, soundtrack, narrative time, walking time, corporeal body and fictive body. At the end, your senses function slightly differently, you see and hear otherwise. Louisiana Walk uses similar strategies, in which disorientation and the blurring of subjectivity with objectivity suggest that a range of experiences and events have taken place (and continue to take place), which we are unable, or perhaps more precisely, unwilling to perceive. These aesthetic strategies include: the illusion of intimacy to create a sense of phenomenological doubleness; the ambivalent instructions in which the narrator warns you to take care with the steep steps (or is she in fact inducing the vertigo and the danger of falling that she warns about, through a quasi-performative act of description); and the use of binaural recording which firstly makes “background” sounds, such as a fly buzzing past your ear, seem “unnaturally” clear and full of significance, and secondly plays back recorded sound in its “sculptural and physical qualities” (Christov-Bakargiev 17), as if you were at the center of the sound event. Thematically, Louisiana Walk seems to set up storylines which are cross-referenced in A Large Slow River. The woman walking through the abandoned house at the beginning of the Oakville walk

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seems to be referred to in the Danish walk by the narrator, who says: “While you’re here, listening to my voice, I’m lying in my bed in Canada, dreaming my dreams of wandering through empty houses and down long hallways.” Both walks lead through sculpture gardens beside a large body of water; both involve a plot with a videotape that has the power to reveal the future, an assignation with a man dressed in a suit, waiting at the beach (or in A Large Slow River, also a woman dressed in a man’s suit), a telephone number found on a scrap of paper, unstable steps leading down to water, and a man playing accordion music. But in Louisiana Walk, the difficult task of re-tracing someone who has disappeared seems more likely to succeed, since resolving the miscommunications and the missed meetings seems to be a matter of lining up the videotape, in which the absent man is “present,” with the right moment in time and place, whereas in A Large Slow River, only the recording of the man can be traced and it is uncertain whether the man himself will turn up. But the greatest difference between the two walks described above is the role the listener-walker plays; in A Large Slow River, you are complicit with the narrator, and even if she seems to be oblivious to the acts of unspecified violence and risk, you are obliged to take up the role of witness at the end, since the man describing his brothers’ death in a fire set either by arson or through an act of war is speaking directly for your ears. As curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev has commented, the “spatial geography” of recent Cardiff and Miller work can be read as referring to the proliferating fear, violence, repression, torture and war of this putative age of human rights and political justice, a world marked by disjunctive flows […] of mass migrations and diaspora, on the one hand, and the flows of electronic mediation, on the other. […] A radical uncertainty about key social identities in today’s world results in extreme violence while borders are obscure and contested and a sense of secure locations for daily life vanishes. (“Murder of Crows” 40) Against this understanding, the “bombing” of Oakville in A Large Slow River (in a nation which has never been militarily invaded) is a necessary shock tactic in addressing the question of what is actually happening, here, now. Another way of describing Cardiff and Miller’s complex elaborations—of trauma, state violence, the interpellation of the subject

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as innocent bystander to the events of history—might be Alain Badiou’s concept of the political event as rupture; the absolute singularity of what has happened cannot be assimilated to state purposes. In this sense, the event is that whose truth is known only in retrospect, as a form of knowledge rather than a principle. Most importantly, this truth is imparted by the actors involved, not the spectators to the event. The uncertainty which surrounds the “event” in Cardiff and Miller—hearing something but not seeing it—suggests the need to grasp the present in a different way. Ultimately, the “quotation marks” which set off the waterfall TV in the cosy recreation room, are the beginning of a long negotiation which attempts to make perceptible the ways in which subjects of hearing are entangled as subjects to history. 4.4

Murder of Crows (2008) and the Politics of Affect

In Cruel Optimism, Lauren Berlant suggests that the historical present (as opposed to the extended sense of crisis which Berlant contends characterizes the present in the wake of the global financial crisis) is difficult to recognize. Whereas I argue that Cardiff and Miller investigate a similar claim, the latter trace the problem of recognition to phenomena such as the emergence of a society of the spectacle and, as I suggested above, a specifically Canadian ideology of cultural belatedness which shields the Canadian subject from culpability in planetary problems such as war and the flow of wealth and resources from the south to the north. Berlant, however, describes a political landscape that is ravaged in the long wake of Reaganomics, the failed promise of a social-democratic state in America, and the global financial meltdown. She argues that the concept of the “good life” has such a powerful hold on us that we cling to this notion despite all evidence of an existing financial and environmental crisis, enormous social precarity, and ruinous healthcare costs. Berlant names this steadfast belief in the possibility of upward mobility “cruel optimism” because it keeps subjects tied to a hope for the future that is, ironically, an obstacle to making changes in the present (16). In the following, I will focus on an aspect of Berlant’s argument that has a conceptual overlap with Cardiff and Miller’s work. Namely, Berlant suggests that affect offers a way of grasping the historical present and recognizing it.

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Murder of Crows (2008) is one of Cardiff and Miller’s most elaborate sound installations to date, consisting of almost a hundred loudspeakers from which pour forth waves of sound: the marching of boots, the swelling of a men’s chorus singing “The Sacred War” (a military march composed by Alexander Alexandrov when Hitler invaded Russia in 1941), the rushing of ocean waves, and the restless cawing of crows. Installed in Berlin’s cavernous Hamburger Bahnhof in 2009, the work was arranged with the speakers lining the perimeter of the room as well as being nestled amongst an informal circle of folding chairs facing a large gramophone horn atop an otherwise bare table.12 During the 30minute loop, the source of the sound alternates between the gramophone, from which comes Janet Cardiff’s voice quietly narrating three nightmarish dreams, and the loudspeakers, whose visual presence is minimized by their unobtrusive placement at the edges of the room, and, for those sitting in the chairs, at the edges of sight. In other words, the sound switches between something localizable and frontal—in the sense of classic Renaissance perspective, which assumes a viewing relationship that takes a particular form in space with the viewer stationed in front of the painting at the central vanishing point13—and a soundscape that envelopes the audience, with sounds coming from several directions and in varying volume. The soundtracks are not entirely separate, however, since they merge into one another, creating a carpet of sound and suggesting that the world of sleep and the waking world have porous boundaries. The installation implicitly evokes Goya’s 1797 etching, “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters” (Christov-Bakargiev 38). Just as in Goya’s print, in which an artist has fallen asleep at a table on which his drawing materials can be seen, in Murder of Crows, the artist, represented by the speaking gramophone, is at a table and recounting her nightmares; in the Goya print, various feathered and furred fantastic creatures that vaguely resemble bats, owls, and a lynx are gathering in 12

To date, Murder of Crows has been shown at the Sydney Biennale (2008), Berlin (2009), Edmonton, AB (2010) and New York (2010). My discussion is based on the Berlin show, as well as on the DVD made of the Berlin installation. 13 Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev has argued that one of the major contributions of sound art has been to release the viewer from the relation of frontality (“Artist’s Talk”).

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the menacing gray background behind the artist, an oppressive atmosphere that is in the same affective register as the dream content of the sound installation. If Goya’s work is interpreted as suggesting that, without the restraint of reason, art and the imagination are dangerous forces, Cardiff and Miller’s installation can be understood as a reflection on the efficacy and purpose of art. The beauty of the Russian march, washing over the body in waves of sound, jars with the strong undercurrent of patriotic song in a juxtaposition of emotion and corporeal sensation that hints at the quandary introduced by affective regimes of wartime.14 Critics have interpreted Cardiff and Miller’s installation as an exploration of trauma in a world of disastrous globalization (ChristovBakargiev 29) and as a reflection on the costs of war (Crowston 18). I agree with these readings, but I would extend them by arguing that Murder of Crows foregrounds the capacity of animals and specifically crows—rather than humans—to register the affect of war and death through mourning. The presence of crows is striking in the installation. They are heard at a moment of emotional climax, just after a military sequence in which the sounds of marching mix with a war song and the beat of a military drum before ending in a crescendo of music and then intense silence. Crows are known to gather in large collectives, referred to as a “murder” of crows, and will gather in one place when one of their community has died (King 94-95). For a period of up to two days, the birds will remain in the same area, crowing constantly before observing a silence and then departing collectively (King 95). Since crows sometimes flock together in communities of several thousand, such gatherings can be quite dramatic, literally darkening the heavens. The number of crows heard in Cardiff and Miller’s installation is quite small in comparison, partly due to technical reasons (Crowston interview, 51-52), but the dynamic nature of the sound compensates for this: The sound of the squawking and cawing moves restlessly across the field of hearing, rippling across a series of speakers staggered through the room; multiply this sonic motion by ten, and the effect is that of a sky blanketed with the swooping, searching sound of crows. The crows in the installation do not “speak” as such but, aside from Cardiff’s character, neither do 14

See Steve Goodman, Sonic Warfare and, re affect, Brian Massumi, “Microperception and Micropolitics.”

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any of the other figures—who chant, march, and sing—and thus the crows are in comparison equally articulate or inarticulate. The question of articulateness is an important and overlooked aspect of Cardiff and Miller’s sound works. Both the New York audio walk, Her Long Black Hair, and the New York installation of Murder of Crows were criticized by New York-based critics for being somewhat light on insight. Reviewing Murder of Crows when it was shown at Park Avenue Armory in 2010, an art critic for the New York Times praises the technical virtuosity but pans the intellectual content, commenting negatively on the dream texts as “maddeningly cryptic and embarrassingly trite” (Rosenberg, “A Funereal Presence”). Similarly, when reviewing Her Long Black Hair, another critic is underwhelmed by the walk’s narrative, which reveals a history of Central Park that in the reviewer’s opinion fails to go beyond what “everyone already knows” (Greith, “Walking in the Park”). This criticism is interesting because it rightly raises the question of Murder of Crows being (in)articulate, but it nevertheless misses the point. Not only does the criticism of banal narrative 1) ignore the performative nature of the works, such as the process of walking and the experience of sound as a physical sensation which, over the passage of time during which one views the works, takes on the character of an event; and 2) exclude what could be called a tourist element that I would argue is an important structural component inherent to (especially) the walks, since the routes, objects, buildings, and sounds are presented (or ignored) in such a way that the possibility of taking the wrong turn, linking the wrong signified to the signifier, and mishearing always presents itself at some point during the work (walking into the installation in the middle of the loop, for example)—a listening situation that alters the relationship to what one hears and knows; but also overlooks the possibility that the triteness of the narrative plays a functional role. In a 1993 article about the banality of Chinese pop music played in Hong Kong before its handover to the People’s Republic of China, Asian American cultural critic Rey Chow positions its “noise” against the background of an official culture that demands ultra-clarity from its subjects in terms of assertions of ideological faithfulness. In her analysis, “inarticulateness is a way of combating the talking function of the state, the most articulate organ that speaks for everyone” (“Listening Otherwise” 464). The forty years of post-Maoist revolutionary class

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struggle have defined ‘the people’ and their speech as an important part of a foundational narrative of collective struggle against enemies of the state (466). Patriotic song, including “Dongfanghong” (The East is red) and the International Song, played on ceremonial occasions form what Chow calls “the symphonic effects of official culture” (467) and contribute to its being felt as “an irresistible grid of emotions” (466). Scale is important: in making the invisible tangible, music has to be played at attention-arousing levels while songs must be sung at the top of one’s lungs. The collectivizing and mobilizing effect of sound corresponds with a certain ostentation: loudness, fullness, and completeness. Visiting Hong Kong in 1990, a mere seven years before the British colony’s return to Communist China, Chow describes a soundscape of commerce, represented by the curt and grudging help of poorly paid shop assistants working in luxury goods stores, and ambient pop music, which has simultaneously a ubiquitous presence—heard everywhere in the stores and on the streets—as well as a marginal presence—played too softly to be the center of listening attention. The music itself uses Western styles and the Chinese lyrics tend to be banal. Chow’s analysis locates the politics of the music not so much in its lyrics but in its lack of demands on the listener: Muzak heard on the street blends in with other street noise and heard inside the store is simply a low-level background to commercial activity. According to Chow, the music has not a totalizing but a “partializing” effect: in all such public places [in Hong Kong, Taipei and other East Asian cities], it is not uncommon to hear this kind of popular music being played on the side for entertainment by people tending the stores. What the music contributes to the public sphere is a kind of “easy”, non-verbal culture that conditions passers-by, who none the less never focus on it seriously. Unlike the overwhelming presence of commodified images, popular music leads a life on the side, as a kind of distraction made possible by technology, a distraction that, moreover, is not visible. (“Listening Otherwise” 474) Clearly, Cardiff and Miller are not addressing the same political orthodoxy in Murder of Crows, although their citing of “The Sacred War” song commissioned by Stalin in a beautiful rendition does venture into territory that is to a certain extent similar. The irresistible pull of ideolo-

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gies do make themselves felt in ways that are difficult to identify, since their traces are rarely consciously or overtly registered. Rather the sonorousness of Murder of Crows and its foregrounding of a non-human ethics of care point towards a kind of resistance to verbal articulation that, with reference to Lauren Berlant’s contention that the political present is understood first through affect, can nevertheless be read as political. The operation of cruel optimism consists of a double bind, according to Berlant: What we desire is what might cause us the most grief. Berlant describes a political landscape of neoliberalism in which crisis has become ordinary and has blunted the individual sense of past, present and future into a stretched-out moment of ahistorical consciousness. However, she counterposes cruel optimism with another form of optimism. Against the impoverished sense of the political which neoliberal optimism about the autonomous subject inculcates, Berlant argues that subjects are nevertheless capable of assessing and reacting to the present. Through an examination of contemporary theatre, literature, performance and video art, Berlant traces different responses to the withdrawal of the state’s promise of the good life: “a becoming-private that ranges from a desperate self-hoarding (Two Girls, Fat and Thin) to embodiments of the neoliberal subject aspiration that equates entrepreneurial activity with sovereign, democratic personhood (in Human Resources, Time Out),” responses which Berlant notes are in a “minor” key because they do not support the fantasy of the good life (259). There is a potential for reactivating politics through the affirmation that not being worn out by politics is indeed a mode of being political. Affective community, being bound together in what Berlant calls the “scavenging for survival that absorbs increasingly more people’s lives” (262), is one way of forging a new public space in the face of the dissolution of more familiar models of citizenship. In my reading of Murder of Crows, I am not suggesting that affect brings viewers together into an intimate public in Berlant’s sense. Rather, it is important to note that Cardiff and Miller stress the flatness of tone which they try to achieve both in Cardiff’s voicing of the script as well as when working with actors (Crowston 54), as well as paying attention to Cardiff and Miller’s deliberate use of melodramatic music and iconic images, both aural and sonic: Taken together, although one

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may be touched by Murder of Crows, the installation resists an immediate affective response. There is never sufficient context provided for a narrative to emerge that can explain the scenes of industrial killing, war atrocities and personal loss. For example, when Janet tells of dreaming of a small house on a beach and discovering a severed leg in the bed, her account does not horrify so much as open up questions. And indeed, Janet’s discovery of the leg is followed by a soprano and a chorus who alternately sing: “Where is my leg? Where has it gone?” and “She’s lost her leg, where has it gone? It was blown off by a bomb.”

The installation script notes simply: “it feels like an aria from an opera” (Crowston [15] n. pag.); the bathetic text, i.e., the sudden stylistic transition from the exalted to the commonplace, the ridiculous and “lazy” rhyming of “gone” and “bomb,” make it difficult to focus on the loss of life or the violation of the dead body indicated by the separation of body and limb. The theatricality of the scene are worth reflecting on. Chow and Berlant provide a way of approaching this affectively charged moment that opens up a disjuncture between the affective charge and the affective response. Rather than meeting what Chow, following Susan Stewart, calls the “[g]igantic emotions” of reverence and obedience (464), Murder of Crows deflects the emotions into an aesthetic, enchanted space of the theater, in which, as Berlant might argue, viewers might find a way of re-charging the ability to commune with others. Distraction and risibility are the first steps towards asking why it is that we need the crows to teach us the lesson of mourning the disasters of war and the strictures of security cultures in the post-9/11 world. 4.5

Practices of Looking in Eyes of Laura (2005)

Janet Cardiff’s sole web-based work departs from the audio walk format in exploring the interrelation of the senses in the context of new media, in part a reflection on the new cultures of surveillance that emerged following the Sept. 11th terrorist attacks and in part a crime story in which the stability of truth, the veracity of technologies of perception,

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and the ability to control public space are progressively undermined. For the Internet project eyesoflaura.org (2005), Cardiff created a persona called Laura, who works at the Vancouver Art Gallery as a security guard in charge of monitoring the closed-circuit television cameras. Rather than revealing a world of crime and unmasking criminals, however, the cameras seem to produce more mysteries than they resolve. Moreover, Laura breaches the security network herself by initiating a personal web log in which she posts snippets of security camera video. In the course of her work, Laura discovers that a reader who has been following her blog may be sending her clues about a dead body discovered on a nearby beach. Those familiar with the 1978 thriller Eyes of Laura Mars might recognize the intertextual reference. In the film, a female photographer who is helping the detective to solve a serial murder case realizes that the visions she has been experiencing are in fact the murders seen through the killer’s eyes. In the blog version, however, it proves impossible to determine if the material sent by the fan is indeed linked to the crime. In this guise of a bored employee who has begun uploading CCTV footage to the public domain, Cardiff arranged for emails to be sent to Internet user groups in the art world, inviting them to check out Laura’s personal website, where Laura promises to be regularly posting “video and images of things that happen” (eyesoflaura.org). By using a web blog form and embedding it with audio and video files as well as “hacking” a security camera so that viewers can use the controls to observe the street, Cardiff seems primed to present a de Certeau-inspired thesis on the gaze that controls from above, here disembodied in virtual space, and the embodied walks that evade such surveillance. But as the references to fictive representation suggest, the Internet work foregrounds practices of re-presentation (recording, replaying) as well as the ways in which desire and imagination reconfigure both what is seen and how it is understood. Entering the site Eyes of Laura, you are greeted by a voice that tells you: “My name is Laura. I’m tall with reddish-blonde hair. I’ve lived in Vancouver for 10 years. I’m waiting for something to happen in my life.” After a page in which they confirm the technical specifications of their computers, visitors can read through Laura’s diary, listen to occasional voice messages from her, and view footage apparently from the cameras or other sources such as readers of Laura’s blog, who send in

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photos and other material. The first entry is self-reflexive: “Sometimes I wonder whether more happens because I’m watching or whether events line themselves up for my benefit or something” (1 June 2005; Fig. 5).

Fig. 5: “Laura’s” blog entry from 1 June 2005, as reprinted in the exhibition catalogue

Further diary entries speculate on possible connections between what appear to be randomly captured scenes. Film clips begin to appear as well, such as from The Conversation, Coppola’s Cold War–era film about an elaborate American espionage plot to trap a double agent by means of wiretapping and trailing. Laura notes that the camera is being used to send messages, not necessarily only to her but (also through her) to the online community: “Another blurry photo was sent to me today. One of you told me that you were getting the photos too. I wonder what is going on” (19 Sept. 2005). Seductively, Eyes of Laura seems to provides a view from above similar to the bird’s eye perspective described by Michel de Certeau, gazing down at the orderly pattern of city streets adjoining the Art Gallery of Vancouver. As a visitor to the site, you have the option of participating in this alert gaze, since Laura’s blog is designed so that you can remotely take control of the surveillance cameras. By a link-up, you can zoom in and out on shots, as well as move the camera to the left or

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right, thus adjusting the live feed of video images to the web site.15 The “liveness” of the scenes is somewhat mitigated by the lack of action, and often, the lack of actors, i.e., people to be watched. As well, the graininess of the image tends to emphasize the mediated nature of this panoptic observation. Or, rather, perhaps Eyes of Laura suggests some of the mediations inherent in all acts of looking, from the framing and construction of an object of vision that constitute the gaze, to the voyeuristic impulse with its contradictory imperatives that structure desire: both “to look” and “to look away” or perhaps, “to see without looking.” Even more so, Eyes of Laura thematizes our desire to see and the seductiveness of the surveillance camera as an opportunity to look. The site originally not only connected visitors with a multitude of surveillance camera views, but through an interactive navigation panel allowed users to log in and manipulate the cameras’ zoom and focus functions as well as change the angle and direction of the point of observation. The implied pun on (Internet) navigation and (navigation) understood as movement through physical space is underscored by the twinning of the functions of the computer with so-called security operations. Eyes of Laura thus suggests the everyday character of surveillance not so much in a Foucauldian critique of the panopticon’s all-seeing surveillance as a technique of power, but rather as a reflection on the ways in which in a radical manner the body is a medium of perception. The Panopticon is the prison designed but never built by the eighteenth-century British social reformer, jurist and philosopher Jeremy Bentham. Regarded as the founder of modern utilitarianism, Bentham proposed a new type of prison in his model of the Panopticon (1789). Built in the round, with individual cells arranged in a stacked ring around a central observation tower, the Panopticon’s major innovation was the emphasis on sight as a means of control and surveillance of inmates. Each cell would be built in such a way that the interior would be backlit, exposing the inhabitant’s every move and position to the watchful eye of the guard who could survey any of the cells at any given moment. It was not simply that the Panopticon set itself apart from the conventional open common yard holding hundreds of prisoners crowded 15

For visitors to the site when it was launched in 2005; this feature has since been disabled, although the remote control panel can still be seen on the website.

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together in its architecture, but that the very architectural forms would create a type of compulsion in the prisoner him- or herself to behave modestly and discreetly in order to avoid attracting attention. The mechanism of social reform would thus not so much be the abstract ideals of the social contract and the principles of democracy but much more so the disciplinary power of the all-seeing guard, himself invisible. As Michel Foucault has written of Bentham’s concept, his design is more or less “the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form.” That is, the controlling gaze of surveillance would be so perfectly adopted and internalized by the inmate that “the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary” (Discipline and Punish 205, 201). As a contemporary medium of surveillance, the security camera offers a fantasy of the gaze as the perfect apparatus of power, seeing without itself being seen and creating new flows of knowledge between image, transmission, technology, and the observer and the observed. But in monitoring even the most banal acts, the cameras, which capture the average resident up to 300 times per day (Barrett, “One Surveillance Camera for Every 11 People”), expose a split in the putative totality of the world picture as a way of organizing knowledge. Recording individual journeys and behaviours, and at the same time being at once dispersed across the city, the cameras aspire to (impossibly) produce both what Heidegger calls “whatness” or essence and “thatness” or representation (401-403). Because the cameras strive to be a complete tracking of someone’s journey, they produce a record that is excessive. In fact the camera’s precise capturing of images produces an unreal effect because it records details that we would not “see” as such (i.e., would be unconsciously edited out) if watching the same event live. Moreover, the lack of contextualizing information, including the lack of ambient sound or conversation, is also missing. The structure of webcam surveillance therefore demands much more of the viewer that he or she be an interpreter. Curiously enough, the surveillance camera brings into view the role of imagination and empathetic identification necessary in order to organize the images into a field of perception. Whereas in Foucault surveillance functions through an internalization of discipline impelled by the dual invisibility of the watcher and the full visibility of the persons being watched, here the camera functions rather as a communication device or platform for performances.

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The structure of the site itself is playful. When it first appeared on the web, the project was not directly associated with Janet Cardiff, nor with the Vancouver Art Gallery. Six months after the website was launched, emails sent out under Laura’s name to certain user groups, targeting people who would be sure to recognize “Laura’s” voice from Cardiff’s audio walks (Grenville 9). However, even without this clue to the identity of the site, visitors might guess from the elaborate lead-up that their desires are being played with: before reading any entries (which they can do in random order if they so choose), visitors first have to listen to the greeting from Laura and then go to a page where they must specify their modem connection, and finally, while being connected to the site, they are confronted with the icon of a miniature figure of a scantily dressed woman, dancing with eyes cast down but revealing her body very openly. The initial interactions provide a formality that signal the rules and expectations that order the boundaries of cyber reality. As an Internet artwork, the project offers a very different type of embodied experience than in Cardiff and Miller’s two dozen audio walks. While the audio walks establish a connection between the walker and his or her surroundings, jolting them into awareness of their situatedness as well as of their being embodied, Laura’s blog emphasizes the constructed nature of one’s understanding of what is happening, despite the chance to “see” in real time. On entering the site, one encounters a rush of ambient traffic sounds. The sounds of a horn and of cars moving steadily situate the viewer momentarily, and in the brief introduction of sound, introduces a temporality that alters the spatiality of the web page. The sound has the same effect as of movement. Pointing out how fixed the attention has been, the traffic noises break into concentration, briefly bring the viewer into another mode of experience where vision is supplemented and the viewer, released from the concentrated visual attention that transfixes one before the computer screen, is momentarily transformed into a participant.

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Calling to Attention

Voice, says Jenny Schrödl, has a particular insistence, like that of a call to attention. This calling to attention of the voice has a deep ambivalence. On the one hand the voice’s injunction to listen is always bound with experiences of power, authority, violence. On the other with love, erotics, intimacy. And this indeterminacy, according to Schrödl, opens a particular intersubjective space in which “I am listening” also at the same time means: “Listen to me” (152). Eyes of Laura is of course – judged by its title – a Web blog where acts of seeing and looking are foregrounded: eyes of Laura. The video clips, the various forms of photography, the stills from films, the iconic form of the typewritten diary page—all attest to the centrality of vision and technologies of seeing. The screen is divided in two. On the left side is a short written text that is typeset to resemble a journal entry with a date at the top and font that conjures up the typewriter. Facing it on the right side is an image of a video camera, with the message (either invitation or instruction) “Launch live surveillance camera.” Laura shares some of the surveillance images with her blog readers: “Hi, it’s me Laura,” she informs those who click on the link “Extend Camera Privileges,” “I’m adding to my journal almost daily, and putting up footage from the surveillance camera. I want to keep you posted. So, sign up below with your email. I send off a note when I see interesting things happen.” The risk contained in viewing these images (privacy issues aside, Laura is authorised to view the images, but we are not) is defused by the revelation of Laura’s name, job, workplace and the friendly tone of the note. In other words, we are encouraged to trust her. The blog is unusual in that it regales the visitor not only, as might be expected of a Web blog as a form of journal self-published through the Internet, with written texts and as suggested in the name Eyes of Laura, with many video clips as well as the occasional photograph, but also with a compelling voice. The voice distracts us from moral qualms about participating in the surveillance.

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As Doris Kolesch has commented, voices that are detached from their sources produce an effect of dislocation (“Wer Sehen Will” 46);16 Cardiff doubles this disorientation by counterposing the ‘voice’ of writing (which appears to ‘speak’ to us because of the impression of being produced by a manual typewriter) with the ‘real’ voice of the voicemail. Although the voice of the voice messages encourages intimacy, its citational nature ultimately suggests that it too is also a creation. In her study of how social practices adapt to new media technologies, Hille Koskela is skeptical of claims that suggest that “cyberspace constitutes a new sphere of public space.” Koskela contends that web cams on the Internet do not in fact reduce surveillance so much as democratize it. Looking at the case of Internet use of web cameras, which are often used to link, for example, friends living in different parts of the country, in a face-to-face or image-to-image communication, she asks whether webcams take on a different social meaning when installed as part of a web blog which allows online readers real-time images of physically and perhaps socially remote spaces, which blurs the private and public divide when one is allowed, for example, to partly see inside the private home. Web cameras change current conceptions of space. As she puts it: “Web cams form somehow ageographic spaces, simultaneously within and without attachment to the geographies we know” (165). Whereas de Certeau’s walking produces narratives, Laura’s website rather demonstrates that one cannot take a step without having, according to Laura, one step forward in the future, while the other foot is in the past. This is to say that the spaces which are opened up in walking are not neutral or empty space but rather shot through with the trace of persons, times and places that no longer exist where they once did. Or, the social nature of space attains a new historical depth as well as a futurity apparent in instances such as those Laura describes in her blog: I was thinking how a long time ago, people lived where I’m sitting. Well, not exactly where I’m sitting, because my office is actually in the basement, but above me, there were settlements of 16

This can be compared to Michel Chion’s concept of the acousmatic voice of film, an uncanny effect produced whenever the audience can hear a voice on screen but is unable to locate the body to which it belongs.

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native tribes, long before Vancouver was established. The three tribes that lived around here were the Squamish, the Musqueam and the Tsleil-Waututh. (Entry for 12 Nov. 2005) The seemingly fixed territory of urban streets is here disturbed by the knowledge that the land in question was improperly taken from the lawful Indigenous owners and guardians, whose land claims were at the time of writing being heard in Canadian courts. Through the trope of the surveillance camera which comes to be used against its one-way disciplinary force when it is preemptively used as a two-way transmission machine as it's filmed subjects of observation fashion private messages which they hold up to the camera or perform small ceremonies whose meaning remains mysterious to outside observers. Similarly, Doris Kolesch has commented on the close ties between voice and space—between for example the utterance of voice and the creation of an experience of space. Remarking on the layering of memory, history, and embodied experience evoked by Richard Serras’s sculpture Berlin Junction installed in front of the Berlin Philharmonie,17 where voices can be heard seemingly emerging from the ground between, and the walls created by, the spacing of two massive curved panels of steel, Kolesch comments: “The ‘here’ always names the same place geographically but represents a completely other space, historically, socially and culturally, a space generated by users’ practices, constellations of power, and temporal conditions—never a neutral space” (“Wer Sehen Will” 57). Eyes of Laura thereby introduces a complex form of intimacy. Hearing, like vision, is a distance sense, conveying perception about objects that do not necessarily have a relationship of proximity. Hearing and vision are not as firmly attached to the body as are the senses of taste, touch and smell. Yet, as Schrödl argues, hearing is very much a social sense. It mediates and binds the listener to his or her surroundings because, and this is a difference to seeing, ears unlike eyes cannot be shut at will. Sound has a leaky character. The voice of Laura is thus intimate in this sense of being compelling in its insistence on being heard. On 17

The work was initially part of an exhibition at the Martin-Gropius-Bau museum before being moved to the Berlin Philharmonie site at Tiergartenstrasse 4. See Senie for a critique of the way the work takes part in a German politics of remembrance (67).

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reading the journal, one can read chronologically, but one can also skip pages, by choosing to navigate by means of an interactive calendar. But what one cannot do is avoid the voice of Laura. Certain pages are embedded with an audio file that plays automatically when the page is opened. “Voice messages from me” are ostensibly Laura’s messages, although it is (as those familiar with Cardiff and Miller’s audio walks know) Cardiff’s voice. The voice is, finally, a way of entering more fully into the created world and acknowledging the play between the different temporalities (of recording time and listening time) and the new types of connections they enable: “When recording, I feel it is me who is speaking; when playing back my voice, I have a feeling of not knowing this woman. The voice has become a ‘she’ not an ‘I’,” Cardiff has commented on her art process (qtd. in Scott 11). Mladen Dolar, writing in The Voice and Nothing More, theorizes the voice as that which is in-between articulation and aesthetics. That is, the voice is not only the invisible and unheard vehicle for meaning, nor only the sublime object of art, but a remainder or objet petit a outside meaning and aesthetics yet intrinsic to both. While Laura is at first positioned in a position of power, both in her job and her function within two institutions (gallery and security industry), her camera becomes not a disciplinary instrument but rather a site of rupture. There is an indeterminacy created by being in control of the cameras but simultaneously being led away from answers into more questions about what has been seen, what has been said, and what has happened. Here we come back to the double connotation of the voice’s command: “listen to me” is meant by Roland Barthes in the sense of an ethical injunction (249), but in Eyes of Laura, the imperative has a feeling of risk. In the next chapter I take up these oscillations between surveillance and its disruption, discipline and liberation, risk and desire, as well as the entanglement between sound and embodied perception as analyzed in the work of Cardiff and Miller. With regard to the aesthetic practice of choreographer William Forsythe, situated between “performance, embodiment, and voice” (Shetsova 3), and the performance art of Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore, I return to the question, already posed in relation to Cardiff/Miller (subchapter 4.4) and Lillian Allen (subchapter 3.2), of how sound can become political. While the previous chapters primarily dealt with transnational entanglements (regarding Canada and

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the Caribbean as well as Europe and the “New World”), my analysis of Belmore shows how her work, in an act of sonic excavation, provides for an acoustic entanglement of present-day politics with the suppressed histories of indigenous presence within the Americas. Even though references to indigenous culture and land rights come up in the work of Cardiff/Miller, for instance in Murder of Crows and in the 12 Nov. blog entry from Eyes of Laura that I have quoted above, their critical engagement with the supposed dichotomy between “Old World” history and the alleged historyless-ness of the Americas is not as overtly political as Belmore’s use of sound art to lay bare the stratified histories of land.

5

Stratified Sound: Rebecca Belmore and William Forsythe

5.1

Transnational Trajectories

In Fountain, a video-based performance commissioned for the 2005 Venice Biennale, viewers see Anishnaabe performance and installation artist Rebecca Belmore struggling in an ocean and eventually emerging with a battered steel bucket of water which she slowly and painstakingly transports across a beach strewn with salvaged lumber. Her sodden clothes, the gray sky with lowering clouds, and the inexplicable fire which bursts into flame apparently without human hands and in an act of spontaneous combustion, all suggest a sense of dread and threat which is affectively displaced onto the landscape because there is no locus or object to which the threat can be traced. The narrative is silent on this point regarding the source of unease and apocalyptic ending. Belmore’s labored breathing, clearly heard, becomes louder as she approaches and then, without warning, hurls the contents of the bucket at the camera; what was formerly water has now been changed to blood which flows down the screen, through which the artist can be seen, gazing steadily at the viewer until the video ends. The site of the filmed performance is Iona Beach on Sea Island, a few hundred meters from Vancouver International Airport, 15 kilometers from Vancouver’s city center, and across the river from the Musqueam First Nations reserve, which has a Longhouse that has been in use for more than a thousand years. Sea Island also holds a sewage treatment plant. This site then is rich with criss-crossed uses and meanings: The Fraser River is an important source of fishing for the Musqueam, who have inhabited the land since time immemorial and who have played an important role in court processes to assert unextinguished Aboriginal title to traditional lands that include large parts of

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the metropolitan city of Vancouver.1 As a sewage treatment center on Aboriginal land, Sea Island is also a place in which questions about environmental sustainability and the co-dependence of the human and more than human worlds can usefully be raised. As a site signifying international travel, the island is a reminder of the other travellers who have passed through here, global tourists, and longer ago explorers and colonizers who settled on land they claimed, via the doctrine of discovery, for the British Crown.

Fig. 6: Rebecca Belmore in the video-based performance Fountain (2005)

The site’s meanings are rather charged; both intensely local (“Super, Natural British Columbia” as the province’s slogan has it), but also contested: Whose local? As one of Canada’s largest and wealthiest cities, with a population of 2 million, Vancouver is situated on the unceded traditional land of several Coast Salish Nations. While the Musqueam, Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations have 1

In 1984, the Musqueam Nation successfully challenged the city of Vancouver for legal recognition of the Musqueam’s prior presence to the founding of the Canadian state. In 2007, an agreement was reached with the provincial government which ordered the latter to reimburse the Musqueam for the unauthorized sale of Musqueam territory as golf course lands to the University of British Columbia, and in 2014, Vancouver City Council voted to formally acknowledge that Vancouver is located on local First Nations land that has never been ceded.

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historically recognized each other’s overlapping use of the same territory, they have had to resort to the courts in almost every decade of the past century in order to affirm their sovereignty vis-à-vis the white settlers—these shifting and competing notions of property and presence are signalled by the transmutation of elements in Belmore’s video: fire into water into blood (Fig. 6). The blood which flows down the screen has thus the potential to both separate and/or connect. Although the materiality of the screen is suddenly made visible, it is also not present. Similarly, the video projected at the Venice Biennale was projected onto a waterfall of falling water, making the act of viewing simultaneously more difficult and more heightened, underscoring viewing both as an act of sensory perception and as an act of imagination. Fountain carries the fountain back to Europe, reversing the colonial gesture of “discovery” while also slyly referring to Duchamp’s Dadaist urinal (Fountain, 1917). Thus Belmore’s work reflects a recent turn in contemporary Indigenous art and performance being produced in the Americas in that its focus lies not on identity politics as such, but rather addresses, on the basis of Indigenous sovereignty, intersubjective relations to land and the politics of land. Land in Belmore’s work can be understood in the following ways: First, as economic base, which is often lacking; second, as relationship of responsibility towards the environment, thus a future-oriented relation; and third, conceptually, as a specific site which exists at the intersection of complex and ambiguous colonialisms and postcolonialisms.

5.2

Ayum-ee-aawach Oomama-mowan: The Sound of Protest

In this section, I will argue that Rebecca Belmore draws on the transgressive potential of sound in order to expose the complex entanglement of postcolonial space, colonial histories and indigenous negotiation of these relations. Significantly, the work on which I will now focus is one in which sound itself is embodied in a form (a giant phonograph-like voice amplifier) that refers to specific Aboriginal experience with ethnographic discourses. Belmore’s performance Ayum-ee-aawach Oomama-mowan: Speaking to Their Mother repurposes the phonograph.

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She thus allows the possibility of salvaging something of the technology, thus reworking the ethnographic discourse network, a recuperative move along the lines of what Mita Banerjee has suggested in her rereading of American Renaissance literary minstrelsy as a form of ethnic ventriloquism that deprivileges the visual regime of anthropology and gives “voice” to the “ethnic native,” even if from within a white body (271-73). In Belmore’s performance, the mediating white body of the ethnographer collecting indigenous cultural property is symbolized in the physical form of the voice amplifier at the center of the performance, a phonograph which no longer records and stores sound but rather uses sound to alter the way in which the surrounding space is experienced, an acoustic entanglement that parallels the cultural and socio-political work of stories—which map the land in a fairly precise way. In a 1992 performance, for instance, a group of First Nations elders take turns speaking into a megaphone in the shape of a giant, six-foot phonograph horn set up on a hillside in northern remote Saskatchewan. In the far distance, a neat patch of bare earth can be seen, like a handkerchief cut out against the surrounding dark green timbered landscape. The sound of the oversized megaphone reverberating through the woods comprises an invitation to speak amongst each other but even more so to “something larger than ourselves” (Evans, “Megaphone?”). Ayum-eeaawach Oomama-mowan has been performed at contested land sites in Western Canada in 1991 and 1992, 1996 at a First Minister’s Conference on Parliament Hill and thereafter revisited in various iterations in the US and Canada, most recently in 2014 at the shores of Toronto’s picturesque and very polluted harborfront. First performed in the months following the Canadian Oka Crisis in 1990, in which the Mohawk Nation in Quebec resisted the expansion of a golf course onto ancestral lands,2 Belmore’s work amplifies the sound of Aboriginal languages to draw attention to complexly layered Native histories of and relations to the land. “Using aboriginal language,” notes Cree curator and artist Gerald McMaster, “often signifies the construction of a post-reservation identity” (“The New Tribe” 186).

2

For an account of the Oka crisis, see Alanis Obomsawin’s documentary film Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993) and Craig MacLaine’s journalistic account, This Land is Our Land (1991). Also see below, p. 137-39.

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What is important with regard to stratified sound in this particular installation and performance piece are the different implications of the phonograph, as recording and playback machine, and the megaphone, normally regarded as a simpler, less technological object because it can only recast sound but not store it (Fig. 7). While Ayum-ee-aawach Oomama-mowan is usually regarded as a megaphone because it is used as such in the performance, it is precisely the movement between its use as a megaphone and its visual referencing of the history of the phonograph that makes the performance readable as an engagement with the social power implied in recording technology, a power detailed by Jacques Attali in Noise: The Political Economy of Music (87-90).

Fig. 7: Rebecca Belmore’s Ayum-ee-aawach Oomama-mowan

The megaphone’s exaggerated size highlights the simultaneous invisibility and hypervisibility of indigenous citizens. In this sense, it represents forbidden knowledge in the sense of Michael Taussig’s concept of the “public secret”: a piece of knowledge which everyone possesses but which cannot be articulated in public speech (Defacement 5). In Private Perimeter (2013), a performance documented on video, Belmore walks through and thus joins the three spaces of “the amalgamated communities that make up Greater Sudbury, the mining territories bordering the city, and the Atikameksheng Anishnawbek (Whitefish Lake) First Nation Reserve” (GNO blog). Meandering along, the artist

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and by implication the viewer transgress and bring into visibility borders demarcating privately owned land and public space, industrial property and residential property, social geographies of the haves and the havenots, the relations between dominant society and those on the sociopolitical peripheries. Trespassing on property owned by the mining company, Belmore carries a roll of what looks like red surveyors’ tape or police tape (“caution, do not cross”). As Ann Gaylin has argued about the Victorian domestic space, with its hidden stairwells and passages for servants to carry out their invisible labor, the creation of private space simultaneously produces the possibility of its being breached. Belmore’s walk thus has an aspect of self-fulfilling prophecy. Nevertheless the walk brings into view the histories of the land that the newly erected property boundaries of the mining company seek to erase. The periphery constantly circled in this video performance walk is thus a liminal space suggested by the poetry Belmore writes on the gallery wall: “Somewhere between a town, a mine and a reserve, is a line” (“Artist’s talk”). Just as Private Perimeter and many of Belmore’s works are situated in multiple spaces of overlapping temporalities and geographies, Ayumee-aawach Oomama-mowan also self-consciously situates itself between the hyper-audibility of the ground of the anthropological recording. On the one hand the ethnographer’s phonograph suggests the condition of always being spoken for, translated and edited; on the other hand the work shifts this recording device from a one-way distribution apparatus to a more open communication technology. The difference introduced by inscription technology—recording devices that inscribe the sound, such as early phonographs that drove a needle through wax, etching the cylinder with a material record of the acoustic event—suggests a record that has a certain permanence, an archival difference that the phonograph introduces vs. the megaphone. Belmore changes that because the history of the structures of power suggested by the role of the objective observing recorder always favor the inscribed document over the reciting subject. As Lisa Gitelman notes about the early history of the phonograph, sales pitches frequently claimed that the fidelity of recording erased the machine and the entire apparatus of recording itself, connecting the sophisticated listener directly with the music, speech, or work of literature, and opening a channel for affective listening:

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I wish to relate an incident which occurred in our store this evening, which I considered the highest compliment that has ever been paid to a talking machine. I was exhibiting a Home [Phonograph] with a 24-inch silk horn. Among other Records, I put on … the Flogging Scene from “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” When the Record was ended, a man sprang out of his chair, wiped the tears from his eyes, and said, “I’d give ten dollars for the privilege of hitting that damned slave driver just once.” (qtd. in Gitelman, Always Already New 279)

For Gitelman, the interest of such testimonies lies not so much in whether they correspond to reality, but rather in that they make the claim that the “speaking machines” could indeed activate a mimetic effect in which the listener saw and felt the scene unfolding in front of his or her eyes. This powerful blurring of reality and fiction is, she comments, “likely of equal consequence to the circulation and persistence of the anecdotes themselves. With each telling they present and assert culture as an exclusive activity for those who have it and ‘get it’” (Always Already New 280). Belmore’s giant megaphone-phonograph activates this performative notion of culture; but she does so in order to underscore the indigenous perspective as the listening ear, the affirmative wink, or the knowing nod of the head signalling ironic awareness. In other words, Ayum-eeaawach Oomama-Mowan deliberately challenges a specific history of the phonograph, one described as follows: Phonographic and cinematic inscriptions fit the logic of ethnography exactly. The recording phonograph and the camera interceded between the ethnographer and his subject, offering a rhetorically valuable sense of technological impartiality and receptivity. The resulting records and films concretized what is now called the ethnographic present tense of anthropological description, freezing the ethnographic subject in time, providing ‘live’ recordings as specimens for further study at home. (Gitelman, Always Already New 281)

Even though Belmore’s sculptural work functions as a megaphone, clearly used as an amplifying rather than a recording device, its humansize bell horn strongly evokes the phonograph used extensively on the North West Coast of the US and Canada by anthropologists such as Franz Boas to capture “the vanishing race.” It also challenges the putative divide between indigeneity/modernity which rests upon, in part, the

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assumption that the phonograph is a technological device supposedly “foreign” to the indigenous subjects. Think, for instance, about the staged scene in Robert J. Flaherty’s widely distributed 1922 ethnographic film, Nanook of the North, where the Inuit protagonist3—while in reality well acquainted with such technology—is presented as the perfect audience for the spectacle of white power (Fig. 8).4 He affirms the binary opposition between civilized vs. primitive, technologically savvy vs. technologically naïve.

Fig. 8: Robert J. Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922)

As Sophie McCall has commented: “The scene’s humour, which supposes that Nanook ‘the great hunter’ would have no knowledge of recording technologies, depends upon a strong split between orality and literacy, and between the ‘hunter’ and the ‘white man.’ The film implies that the Inuit have never developed any technical means of recording 3 4

The “Nanook” of Flaherty’s documentary was in actuality called Allakariallak. Nanook of the North was financed by the French fur trading company Revillon Frères; US-American filmmaker Robert Flaherty had also been earlier hired by the Canadian railroad magnate William Mackenzie as part of a prospecting commission, during which he documented the far Northern landscape, but the raw film footage was destroyed by a fire. See Sherill E. Grace for a discussion of Canada government’s interest in the North (esp. 77-111).

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their stories, and that their songs and stories would eventually disappear” (100). Yet through his ad-lib responses and spontaneous extension of this playing, the Inuit man turns the whole scene of pedagogical instruction upside-down. By biting the record, he suggests that another inscription of sound might be possible.

5.3

Articulating Indigenous Modernity

Given this Aboriginal history of the phonograph, Belmore’s reference extends Nanookian play. Building on a reading of Nanook that affirms that the Inuit were familiar with so-called modern technologies, Belmore repurposes the phonograph as an instrument of speaking back. As a giant megaphone, it suggests the seriousness of the issues at stake. As Belmore has said, she created the work in order “to break the windows of government on Parliament Hill because they don’t listen to us” (Beaucage video; qtd. in C. Robertson 175). Starting in 1991 and then toured across Canada, stopping at contested land sites, Ayum-ee-aawach Oomama-mowan was—as mentioned above—a response to the Oka crisis, also known as Canada’s “Indian Summer.” In the summer of 1990, the state-sanctioned use of military force against Mohawk defending ancestral lands against the bulldozers of developers became a call for land rights justice and the recognition of Native sovereignty across Canada. Despite calls for negotiation, the town of Oka, just outside Montreal, planned to expand a golf course from 9 to 18 holes onto a tract of Mohawk land containing a sacred pine forest. Mohawk Warriors blockaded the road into their territory and were then barricaded in by the Quebec special police force, with food and medical supplies to the reserve cut off. The 78-day siege became infamous because the Canadian prime minister called in the army to force an end to the Mohawk blockade. The government’s reaction galvanized First Nations in Canada. As Ric Knowles (145) and Helen Gilbert (527) have suggested, the transnational dimension of Indigenous politics has the potential to connect struggles for land justice across the Americas. Following the stand-off at Oka, Ayum-ee-aawach Oomama-mowan was used in 1992 in almost a dozen Aboriginal communities where land claims were being contested. That year, 1992, is also significant for

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being the “de-celebration” of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas by Native activists.5 In Meadow Lake, northern Saskatchewan, Cree elders protested the clear-cutting of ancient forests by blocking the logging road after the first results of the clear-cutting by the pulp and paper corporation NorSask became obvious. In what was to become one of Canada’s longest-running blockades, the elders built cabins in the Wiggins Bay area and remained at the site for one and a half years before being forced to abandon their protest. The scale of the megaphone, usually a handheld, extremely portable instrument of amplification, here underscores the presence-granting qualities of large sound. As mentioned, Belmore is an Anishnaabe artist from Ontario and thus the semantic content of the address, here made in Cree, is not necessarily open to her. On the one hand this suggests a relinquishing of artistic control in favor of the collective nature of protest and the repurposing of the phonograph for this performance. On the other hand, the use of various Aboriginal languages does important cultural work in reversing the debilitating effects of cultural genocide, in which Indigenous languages in the US and Canada were targeted as vehicles of transmission of cultural memory and values and thus in the eyes of the colonial power necessitated as it were their extinction in order to produce the Indigenous subject as a proper Christian and moral citizen. In a 1997 Supreme Court decision on Aboriginal title, Canada’s highest court ruled that oral history and the life stories of elders could be accepted by the courts as evidence, thus binding story, history and land: “oral histories may be the only credible account of pre-sovereignty title or pre-contact rights” (Thom 5). Set up at sites where struggles over land continue, the towering form of the oversized megaphone visually reinforces the rich, booming “speaking back” of the oversized megaphone. Partly hand-carved from wood and partly made by weaving bark into a form resembling an eightfoot phonograph horn, Belmore’s megaphone unmistakably evokes associations with the anthropologist’s recording device, but is here put to use in a different kind of field work. The artist’s performance focuses 5

Widely used, the term “decelebration” was perhaps first put into circulation in 1989, when the Saw Gallery (Ottawa) group exhibition of the same name featured work by Shirley Bear, Lance Belanger, Domingo Cisneros, Peter J. Clair, and Ron Nonagosh (Ryan 240).

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on the dialogic, rather than monologic, potential of the voice. Whereas the colonial powers and then the Canadian state discursively legitimated their expropriation of Aboriginal territories by declaring them vacant and thus available for settlement, Belmore’s performance repurposes the anthropological phonograph in order to release rather than to capture sounds. This reversal excavates the fractured spaces of postcolonial indigenous Canada. Ultimately, Ayum-ee-aawach Oomama-mowan reveals four different layers of sound: First, the claims to land which provide an oral map of territory; second, the re-emergence of Indigenous languages as evidence of the resilience and survival of Indigenous peoples in the US and Canada; third, voice as something which exceeds semantics; and fourth, the ethnographer’s recording instrument refashioned as a “constructive technology” that connects networks and builds community. Thus, Belmore’s supersized phonograph/megaphone makes audible the invisible but structuring social power of money and land title, and the concomitant entitlement to claiming space and speech as one’s own. This act is related to an embodiment of voice through the visible presence of speaking bodies behind the phonograph—usually thought of as erasure of body—turned into megaphone.

5.4

Writing Histories, Reading Systems in William Forsythe

The second part of this chapter continues the analysis of sound as related to the acoustic entanglement of “performance, embodiment, and voice” (Shetsova 3) in choreographer William Forsythe’s critical reexamination of classical ballet as a normative corporeal regime, thus approaching the question of stratified sound and the histories of body and land—that I have examined in the work of Rebecca Belmore—from yet another perspective. It concerns the ways in which power has moved to the inside, i.e., that physical controls on behavior are no longer needed, as Foucault’s work on discipline and punishment, governmentality, biopower, and the emergence of the modern subject within regimes of knowledge as power has shown. No longer spectacular displays in which death is the threat which would follow transgressions, power now produces itself via life as something that can be placed in suspension in the bare-life figure, whom we might recognize in the Guantanamo Bay

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political prisoners, as well as the refugees seeking political and/or economic asylum, to name only the most obvious cases. However, despite Giorgio Agamben’s and Judith Butler’s interventions, one of the questions is whether we do in fact “recognize” those who have been stripped by the state—and even within the scope of international law are precariously positioned as exceptions to the law, subject to exclusion but not yet subject to rights. Although the question of recognition of involvement in forms of disciplinary power may not seem to be a problematic in the work of the Forsythe Company, I would like to argue that disciplinarity, or confrontation of disciplinarity, plays a key role indeed in the representational strategies of the performers. In the earlier history of William Forsythe and many of the dancers in the ensemble, with the state-funded Ballett Frankfurt from 1984 to 2004, ballet was the form which undergirded the matrix of performance. Ballet, as the cultural form associated with a strict code of prescribed movements and visual tableaux, aligns itself with the gaze of the spectator as a disciplinary power, as Christiane Berger has argued (57). In classical ballet, the purity of the line of the dancer’s body is privileged. Ballet dancers train at the bar, in front of a mirror: The ballet dancer works on the external forms that his or her body takes on and which can be controlled by means of the gaze, from outside. Dancers have to learn by training what the proper position feels like in ballet – relying for this on the control gained through the mirror or through the corrections from the instructor or choreographer, coming to know what the look of the iconic balletic forms, seen from outside, feel like, so that they can later reproduce this, even when neither mirror nor choreographer are present. (Berger 56)

Moreover, ballet has more overt associations with power because of its origins in the court and “in warfare,” as Steven Spier has noted. In the mediaeval period, ballet evolved from a folk art called Moresque, “that chronicled in dance form the wars between the Christians and the Moors. It developed further in the late Renaissance into court ballet, combining music, dancing, and acting into one dramatic production lasting hours. Appropriately, its subject matter was confined to ideals of refinement, splendor, and affectation, and it tended to be viewed from

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above and therefore emphasized geometric movement and patterns” (Spier, William Forsythe 145 fn 8). Ballet is also a courtly form in the sense that it presents idealized relations in the form of idealized models. Female dancers are not only expected to discipline their bodies to correspond to a specific physical type, but also to mask their athleticism and muscular strength in order to make balletic femininity appear effortless, “natural,” and given. On the other hand, it would be somewhat naïve to examine ballet, despite its “ideologies of gender,” as inherently ideological in itself. Without question, ballet is a “highly evolved” art form in terms of its history, politics and formal elements (see Shetsova), and it carries, as William Forsythe has commented, a history of codifications: “When you speak about the vocabulary of classical dance, you’re talking about ideas. You say, this is a place the human body can occupy” (qtd. in Sulcas 9). What Forsythe Company dancers do, as Peter Boenisch, Gerald Siegmund, Maria Shetsova and Gabriele Brandstetter, among others, have noted, is to take the highly disciplined forms regulating precise degrees of turnout, verticality and positions of balance, spatial orientation, and rethink them; modifying the stable central axis of the dancer’s body, which, as Shetsova has said, is “rich in aesthetic and cultural assumptions about stability and harmony” (138). Given this centrality of the form, it takes only a few alterations to irritate the highly trained eye of the balletviewing audience, as Peter Boenisch has commented: “Changing relatively simple details in the spatial and dynamic constitution of strictly fixed ballet patterns – the position of the arms just an inch higher [than] normal, the legs just a little more bent outwards as “prescribed,” – ballet loses […] its [readability as a code]” (155). Forsythe directs his practice of neo-ballet along this trajectory. Speaking about his 1998 choreography Artifact, he comments: What I began to do was imagine a kind of serial movement and, maintaining certain arm positions from ballet, move through this model, orienting the body towards imaginary external points. It’s like ballet, which also orients steps towards exterior (croisé, effacé […]) but equal importance is given to all points, nonlinear movements can be incorporated and different body parts can move towards the points at varied rates in time. (qtd. in Siegmund, Abwesenheit 244).

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Shetsova argues that the technique is used against itself, so that the restrictions become liberating, in “a field whose principles of subordination […] are legion” (12). Hence Forsythe can say that “I use ballet, because I use ballet dancers, and I use the knowledge in their bodies” (qtd. in Shetsova). Moreover, the dancers are encouraged to develop techniques which expose the disciplinary gaze that they themselves turn on their bodies: we started to use internally refracted coordinations – the hip would be connected to the hand, for instance. […] What we discovered was that the opposite of this epaulement was an inverse operation which we called disfocus. The focus in epaulement is very important: the angle of the eye forms a sort of axis for the movement. So if you move your head in a sort of oblique counter-rotation to the movement, it engenders a kind of physical blindness which intensifies your proprioception and causes your sense of gravity to shift. […] By discussing and approaching this point where your ability to see your own limbs, your surroundings is severely impaired, you can no longer dance the way your body has been trained to as a ballet dancer. It’s not that you destroy the foundations— you just end up in an opposing state of support.… [T]he small detail that is lost is your physical orientation. (qtd. in Spier, William Forsythe 139-140)

Along with using ballet dancers and seeing ballet as a type of cultural knowledge which can be activated via individual instantiations, Forsythe as a choreographer is interested in the organization, in space, of bodies with other bodies. Choreography for him is about the composition in space of bodies which is about energy and potentiality, so that the experience locked inside the bodies in individual ways can be activated. The training of classical ballet dancers conventionally focuses on “strict repetition” which ensures that the movement becomes second nature: “At the same time the torso is trained to be stable and to inhibit almost any echo from the extremities. The aesthetic ideal is that every dancer will move in the same way and any individual traces will be erased” in favor of the overall effect of the ballet corps (Hetz 248). The end effect of such training, according to contemporary choreographer Amos Hetz is that the upper body and the straight spine are inhibited from integrating what happens outside the body to the bodily reaction and to the “personal expression of those images, feelings and actions” (248).

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This is where the open-endedness of event also enters into the nonmimetic representational strategies of the Forsythe Company. Performances retain elements of rehearsal, whether in the dancers’ costumes, which sometimes resemble streetwear or the light, loose clothing of rehearsal, or in the form of accidents and happenstance events that get repeated. For example, in the performance Eidos: Telos in 1995, a curtain call that came too soon, cutting off the audience’s sight of the stage in the middle of a scene, was incorporated as a sort of film cut that created a montage effect. Forsythe and the dancers thus work with theatre and performance as processes that involve embodiment and the activation of the senses both in the work of memory and of grasping the moment as it happens. The curtain that drops across the stage unexpectedly is a “Cut / Schnitt / shit / Schnitzel” as one of the performers labels its. Accident opens up the choreography to the status of an open event. As Gerald Siegmund has commented: Forsythe’s choreographies can thus be understood as a field in which something can happen, a field not occupied by [particular] preconceived ideas, but open for the unforeseen, for new ideas, a room for discovering possibilities which one would not have considered before. In the same spirit, the training concept Dance that he directs together with other choreographers is not based on teaching young dancers a specific dance technique. The knowledge about [for example,] designing a video or about architecture that is imparted to the students during the training is meant as a tool, a thought-provoking impulse with which they can set their own creative work processes in motion, With an open approach like this, ballet stops being a portrayal of a story. (“William Forsythe”)

Thus using ballet for non-ballet purposes moves the focus from the individual orientation in space towards a relational sense of shared space. “If proprioception is about experiencing oneself, [about] entrainment,” then, as Steven Spier puts it, “the process that occurs when two or more people become engaged in each other’s rhythms, when they synchronise,” is about “experiencing someone else[’s bodily space]” (William Forsythe 142), which anthropologist Edward T. Hall has called “the phenomena that allow a conversation to happen – […] pauses, sounds, nods, and body language” (qtd. in Spier, “A Difficult” 111). The collaborative space that allows dancers to hurtle past one another at dangerous speeds, to allow themselves to fall into someone’s arms, is

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one part of a networked space in Forsythe Company performances. Another part of criss-crossing relations is the ways in which repetition of formal elements, such as the unexpected curtain closing, or the use of visual text, also creates what Maria Shetsova has called an “intraForsythe semiosis” that allows one to read forwards and backwards from one performance to another. As Marcia Siegel has commented about One Flat Thing Reproduced, “a group of people doing ordinary things in an incongruous setting can suggest meanings, metaphors, and relationships that transcend the place or action alone” (272). Thus while Three Atmospheric Studies (which premiered in 2005) is the one of the most overtly political pieces by the Forsythe Company, it might point to the politics of mis-recognition that I argue emerge in other works. In Three Atmospheric Studies, a slow process of immobilization overcomes a mother whose son has been arrested. Although she tries to file a police report, issues of translation interfere. Lest we think that this scene is about immigration problems as such, the translator’s words tell us that the faulty semiosis lies at a conceptual level, since there are simply no words that match what has happened. As the translator says to the woman: “You say ‘Airplane’; I can give you ‘Bird; for ‘Apartment building’ how about ‘Castle’?” (qtd. in Plank). This obliteration of the event is also directed at the viewers, since as we listen to the mistranslation of the arrest, we are shown several photographs and paintings, which another dancer attempts to convey to us using gestures and words. Occasionally, the translator seizes on the dancer’s words and attempts to fit them into the mother’s police report, but equally fails at translation. Here we as audience are interpellated twice as (faulty) witnesses: on the one hand, there is a commentary about the media transmission of a story that becomes garbled not only by the sheer difficulty of accounting for trauma which has been experienced by someone else, but also by the journalistic structure which reduces events to tableaux that become interchangeable and tragically made transhistoric (airplane for bird; castle for apartment building). But on the other hand, we viewers are also faulty witnesses in the sense that the first scene in which the son is arrested is filled with so many bodies, movements, violent actions and reactions, that the actual moment of arrest can pass by without being seen.

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Fig. 9: William Forsythe and the Forsythe Company, Human Writes (2005)

The Forsythe Company (re)uses material from one production in another, so that it is possible to “read” from one dance piece back to another. The ashes used to produce writing in the performance Human Writes are at once a memorialization and a comment on the fragility of human rights as a legal measure protecting or securing human lives (Fig. 9). When ashes are used in the final ritual scene of a different performance, Decreation, then they are no longer signify simply within the framework of ritual as marking the body with ash, but also function as a way of evoking death on a mass scale such as the chimneys of Auschwitz/the Holocaust, Hiroshima/Nagasaki. Thus, Forsythe says, “the logic of the event” can be communicated by something “as simple as the lines of a person’s throat,” which can convey “everything about the dynamic that we used in the coordinations” (qtd. in Noltenius, n.pag). In Decreation, based on an essay-poem by Anne Carson about three female figures (philosopher Simone Weil, mystic Marguerite de Porete, and the goddess Aphrodite) and subtitled An Opera in Three Acts, dancers speak into microphones, directing a stream of sound at the person standing next to them rather than addressing them directly. The mediated nature of communication is also made apparent in the way that feedback often makes it difficult for the audi-

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ence to hear what is being said, that along with the volume which often begins with a stage whisper and then crescendos so that the performance space spills over the stage and into the audience space not so much as a wave of sound but as a blanket that covers the gap between spectator and performance. This is especially the case because action, as in many Forsythe company pieces, is split between foreground and background, with simultaneous scenes taking place, forcing the viewers to choose where to turn their attention. In Decreation in particular sound is itself an event, something which happens; it not only contributes to the movement, it is the dance movement, according to Forsythe: “[N]ormally I distribute the solution [of the dance as mathematical equation], the expression, all over the body. In this case [of Decreation] I directed it towards the throat, which produces sound” (qtd. in Noltenius, n.pag). The difficulty of producing the sound is related to the difficulty to move in Three Atmospheric Studies, i.e., the difficulty of moving someone and of attaining empathy in light of what Forsythe has named “compassion fatigue” (qtd. in Solway, “Is it Dance?”). Normally applied to those who work in the front line dealing with trauma victims and become affectively detached over time, compassion fatigue moves to a general level in Three Atmospheric Studies, a ubiquity which is conveyed via the articulation (or not), of sound. Similar to Cardiff and Miller’s Murder of Crows, in which the room becomes an envelope of sound in the middle of which the act of listening is the event to be witnessed, the Forsythe Company’s choreographies test the limit of affective labor. In Decreation, the throat strains to speak; as in, for example, the case of the heretic Marguerite de Porete, who was burned at the stake in the fourteenth century for declaring that God could be found in humans by means of his Divine love. Decreation, therefore does not attempt to represent the three women on stage but rather evokes the transgressiveness of their ideas. Hence, the “work itself is hard to find visually” (Forsythe qtd. in Noltenius, n.pag), since Decreation is an acoustic piece. And this mis-recognition is precisely what is at stake in disciplinary power.

6

Conclusion: Confinement and Liberation

If, as I have argued throughout this book, power is intimately connected to sound, then struggles over sound can be understood as struggles that bring into view disciplinary apparatuses. In the Forsythe Company’s choreographies, these struggles are mirrored in the gap between a visual regime of classical ballet which disciplines bodies in a strict vocabulary of dance, and the introduction of sound into this system of meaning based on the dominance of visual signifiers. The argument is not that sound per se is liberating or confining as such. Rather, acoustic entanglements of the visual and the sonic, the bodily and the extracorporeal, the present and the past, are sites of cultural struggle. This can be seen, for instance, in the brutal persecution of the steel bands by Trinidad’s police and judicial system, who asserted their social control in repressing associations with African cultural expression by criminalizing Carnevalesque activities (Slater). In doing so, they repressed memories of the struggle against slavery by repressing the music which evoked— in the transformation of ordinary household objects such as pots into percussion instruments—the latent possibilities of sound-making and the resistance to control from above. As I discussed in the chapter on Lillian Allen and the mimetic transfer machine of dub poetry—its ability to store and transatlantically transmit collective histories—it is significant that music from instruments fashioned from unmusical, otherwise very dumb and still objects, carries a special resonance in this context where to be socially vulnerable means that one’s status is perpetually under threat of being questioned or is in fact being demoted. The mobility of sound, as embodied by the itinerant steel panmen, who were not officially permitted to play and thus had no fixed venues for performance, is at once token of liberation and containment. Sound thus has two modes, one that affirms the agency of the subject who is producing or listening to sound, and another that highlights the compulsion of the subject to being disciplined via sound.

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Struggles over sound are thus often struggles over power. This logic can be seen in an extreme form when sound is literally deployed as a weapon of sonic warfare, as Elaine Scarry outlines in the introduction to The Body in Pain, noting that in torture the voice becomes the agent of violence, or as in the military tactic of sonic bombing of the Gaza Strip by Israeli Airforce planes. Flying at the speed at which sound breaks the sound barrier, when done at a low overhead level, creates a disturbance in air pressure strong enough to break windows and damage eardrums (cf. Attali 27). However, as Steve Goodman analyses in his book Sonic Warfare, these “abilities to make bodies move” against their own volition do not aim primarily at noise or violence as such (12).1 Rather they are directed at creating an acoustic landscape in which affect, in this case fear and unease, can be intensified and mobilized through the creation of what Goodman calls affective ecologies (cf. 11) and which Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller experiment with in Murder of Crows and Forest. However, Cardiff and Miller’s immersive soundscapes engage with the sonic event in both the forward-reaching dimension of the acoustic, that is, the body’s prioproceptive ability to orient and locate itself in relation to space and react accordingly (cf. Sohal), as well as its disorienting, multi-sensory and multi-temporal qualities, which have a Freudian structure of trauma. Disorientation is introduced by the gap between the precise directions given in the audio walks and a kind of hyperacoustic reality in which the senses of sight, sound and movement are heightened through the extreme focus on hearing and the layering of sitespecific recordings and the walker’s own presence in that site. These 1

To avoid the risk of misrepresenting Goodman’s work, I must emphasize that his focus is not on militarized sonic warfare but rather a more philosophical engagement with the continuities between the explicitly military instrumentalization of sound and the opposite effect of collectivity that music and other sound systems can produce. Drawing on Brian Massumi’s work on affect and potentiality and Julian Henriques’s work on dancehall culture, Goodman argues for the possibility of pre-emptively engaging with fear as a positive, energizing force in which sound becomes kinetically translated into dance. Much of his book discusses the future-oriented affectivity of Afrofuturism, the alternative temporalities opened up by dub, and the ways in which sound acts as a force that mobilizes the body affectively and physically (noting the potential to tip over into fascism).

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mild dislocations—of the body from itself, and of time from its usual forward-oriented movement—are evoked pleasurably, however, in Cardiff and Miller’s media nostalgia, their deliberate mix of media technologies that are achronistic in relation to one another, such as the recording of a cassette tape inserted into a sound walk that the listener hears through the earbuds of an MP3 player. Here as well, Cardiff and Miller play upon the audience affectively, creating an intimacy through what seems to be an experience that is intensely private and singularly corporeal but is paradoxically also a shared experience, with all the ambiguity that this implies. While much scholarship on Cardiff and Miller draws attention to the site-specificity of their work, I have argued here that the site-specificity of the walks introduces a gap that opens up rather than reveals the past as such. The secret underground passage in which we are left after Janet has announced that she is going to explore beyond the closed door, for instance, or the furniture that releases snippets of recorded conversation and film dialogue when touched by the museum goer, point to a conceptualization of potentiality that adopts a situationniste tactic to prise open the shell of habitus. The walks in a sense begin where they end off, in a state of heightened sensory perception and with a feeling of being out of time and place in a way that is both pleasurable and disturbing. This suspension between contradictory affects—the same body registering conflicting states at the same time—is, as I have argued, the condition of being subject to a history that is grasped and perhaps can only be grasped symptomatically, after the event has passed over. This posterior anteriority has the structure of trauma and is navigable via experiments with forays into time and space in attempts to recover a historical consciousness. If, as Freddie Rokem has suggested, the encounter between materiality and sign allows theatre spectators a space “to evaluate and measure their own humanity … in relation to the human/non-human divide” (75), so too do Cardiff and Miller’s acoustic events experiment with expanding the limits of consciousness towards memory and a grasping of history. In the hybridity of one sense sliding into the other, sound is wellsituated to offer an expanded field of experience. This can evoke an ethical dimension, as when Rebecca Belmore’s sound and land art works refashion the circuits of power, changing the one-way recording device of the phonograph into the two-way communication implied in

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the voice-amplifying megaphone. As Paul A. Kottman suggests about the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet, “speech constitutes action, or interaction, in a way that the gaze alone cannot. After all, it is only when Romeo takes the initiative to move from merely looking at Juliet to engaging her in conversation that their relationship emerges. Only when they audibly address one another does the scene become relational” (x). The speaking to one another under the open skies in Belmore’s work also engages the human/more than human divide in a new way, since the Earth itself is addressee, which leaves open the possibility of the Earth speaking back, hopefully to the politicians in Parliament. Unease about the unlocalizable voice, which speaks without revealing the location of its body, or which suggests that it escapes authority through being absent while being present (cf. Chion 19),2 is at heart unease about the transgression of borders already hinted at in sound’s leaky ability to seep out of houses and dangerously mix private and public exchanges. A phenomenology that embraces this hybridity, however, is found in the work of Michel Serres’s Five Senses, in which he counters the phenomenologies of Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger and theorizes the body as modernist sensorium: “I touch one lip with my middle finger. Consciousness dwells in this contact. I start to explore it.… [E]ach part is proportional to the magnitude of sensation, swells in those automorphic places, when the skin tissue folds upon itself. By itself, the skin takes on consciousness” (20). Commenting on this passage, Stephen Connor has noted the importance of asymmetry in Serres’s thought, which forms a precondition for the meeting of body and world (cf. Connor 320-22). Against the duality implied in the association of the left hand with the devil and the right with virtue, in Serres we find the possibility for a sensory excess that is radically embodied, according to Connor: “But these relations [of left hand with the sinister and right with the lawful], though formalizable as a black and white dichotomy, in fact are mobile. For one thing, we have more than two hands. To some degree, whenever we touch, we grow a temporary hand. V.S. Ramachandran reported a neurological correlative 2

Chion attributes the term acousmatic, that which is heard yet not traceable back to a body or source, to Pierre Schaeffer’s work in the 1950s (cf. Chion 18). An important critique of Chion’s concept of the maternal voice in his La Voix au cinéma is provided by Kaja Silverman in The Acoustic Mirror (see ch. 3).

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for this effect in patients whose hands had been amputated but who reported intense sensation in their missing hands when their faces and upper arms were stroked” (321). This mingling is, I have proposed, precisely where sound enacts a particular type of relationality that is best described as acoustic entanglement. Underlying the various acoustic entanglements of this book, I would argue, is a question of audibility, and of (often willed) mis-recognition. For instance, there is the inability on the part of the figures of power to recognize as language the “nation language” invented in the Caribbean as a response to the imposed speech of the colonizing countries (Brathwaite 260), a hierarchy which dub and dub poetry seek to challenge through a kind of haunting suggested by the spectral technological effects of reverb and mega-amplification. Mis-recognition is not necessarily only negative, however. Thus we come back to Henry Box Brown, who not only transformed that which was intended to confine—the box—into the ultimate escape vehicle but also signified upon this performance of liberation: Born Henry Brown, he changed his name to Henry Box Brown, thus not only, as Daphne Brooks has noted, passing from the state of being property to the state of personhood (117), but also, I would argue, reciprocating the act by conferring a status of dignity to the box as “object,” taking it into his name and in a sense incorporating it into his legal person and thus blurring categories of the human/property. In arguing this, I do not wish to suggest a type of animism but rather that Brown is performatively exercising the power inherent in being able to confer status.3 Brown, who delivered himself from the inhumane conditions of slavery by inhabiting an inhumanly small shipping crate, stands at both beginning and end of this book because in his actions he draws on and exploits the performative potential of sound that I have examined throughout this study. Most importantly, sound has the potential to transport cultural memory and redraw borders between absence and presence, subject/object, here and there, then and now. Unpacked from the cramped wooden crate in which he had travelled for days, Brown 3

As opposed to the powerlessness of being imposed upon—although this latter condition is often falsely ascribed to those who are suppressed but not completely without agency, a mis-recognition that the dramatic structure of Melville’s story “Benito Cereno” exploits.

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rose up and, in his words, “burst into a him [sic] of thanksgiving,” singing a modified Psalm 40 to the room of expectant white abolitionists (Narrative … Written by Himself). Reflecting on the structures of white abolitionism in the mid-nineteenth-century US, I would like to suggest that Brown consciously selected song as an instrumental means of transforming the situation into which he emerged. Certainly, the men gathered in that Philadelphia room in 1849 were committed to the cause of ending slavery, yet it is also true that the discourse of white abolitionism overwhelmingly produced identities which reproduced (white) active subjects assisting (black) vulnerable “objects” of mercy, aid, and pity. Brown’s act of singing was addressed to this context and, through song, transformed it. If we briefly imagine the scenario without song, many of the important points that I have attempted to address in this book become apparent concerning what I have been calling the performative potential of sound: the ethical demand created by listening, which is always a listening to (cf. Nancy); the creation of community through the proximity of sound, which sometimes via sound vibrations crosses boundaries between bodies and within bodies, such as when the heart is heard at the surface of the skin (cf. Allen, “Revolution from da Beat”; Henriques); the bringing into being through doing, which, however, is closely tied to disciplinary regimes (cf. Butler). Because sound is intimately connected with the cultural and social contexts in which it emerges, Brown’s choice of Psalm 40 must be read in light of the ways in which it self-reflexively referred to the Christian sentiment within which the white abolitionists understood their aims and motivations. By singing, Brown signifies upon his awareness of the framing conditions of his “delivery” in the several senses of that word. At the same time, he modifies the text of the Bible verse, omitting the reference to bondage and leaving away the final pleas that deliverance arrive speedily. In his version of the song, which he provides in his second autobiography—whose title underscores his greater agency, “written by himself”—the rhetorical emphasis lies on praise. “Blessed, Blessed, Blessed, Blessed is the man, Blessed is the man, / Blessed is the man that hath set his hope, his hope in the Lord” (n pag.). Within such a framework, Brown’s presence is both necessary—in his capacity to witness slavery for the white audience—and unnecessary— his singularity and individual biography must be smoothed out except

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for the graphic details that would stir gentle hearts. In a sense, Brown is both present and absent. Here, singing gains importance as an act which modifies the framework of white abolitionism: if the body of the enslaved is meant to testify to the horrors of the slavery system, it is mostly a silent body; singing does not resist this instrumentalization completely but rather modifies it. Without the song, the scene’s focus would lie on the agency of the receivers of the package, who take the crate into a back room, lock the door, and uncrate the fugitive, who is rescued in large part due to their benevolence. But rather than presenting himself as an immobile package to be uncrated by William Still, with all the troubling undertones of patronage and possessiveness implied in such a dynamic, Brown transforms his stiff, cramped and near dead body into a figure of song, which in its very adaptiveness and everchanging modes of performance, is a trope for that which escapes fixity. Re-enacting his own “resurrection” as a free man for abolitionist audiences in antebellum America and as magician and entertainer for postbellum audiences, Brown was able to overcome the “problem” of his presence—i.e., being present in a place where he should not be: as person sent by shipping crate, as fugitive in the “free” North, as racialized subject in post-slavery America. Bringing together the discourses of abolitionism and Spiritualism, Brown’s re-enactment of deliverance exploits what I would like to suggest are auditory tropes. A version of Henry Box Brown’s story goes something like this: Being delivered in Philadelphia, the box was uncrated not in the presence of abolitionists and their supporters but rather during a Spiritualist meeting. Springing up from the crate, Brown was greeted with great reverence—as a messenger from the other world. I read this apocryphal account not so much as a competing but rather as a complementary version, in which the “Resurrection” (as William Still titles the narrative) of Brown takes on slightly different nuances. Although Frederick Douglass was among those who visited the Spiritualist mediums, and although there were social reformers and utopians among the Spiritualists (see McGarry), the group assembled for a séance could nevertheless not be counted upon to be sympathetic to the abolitionist cause—Brown arrived in Philadelphia a scant year before the Fugitive Slave Act was strengthened in 1850. Thus, Brown’s presence could only be accounted for if he were there, not in his own person, as it were, but as mediator of a greater communication, as if transformed into sound, being able to move to unexpected

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places and to move subjects unexpectedly. Brown’s extraordinary, sudden appearance was much more plausible and socially acceptable if he could be understood as a spiritual manifestation, rather than as a corporeal reminder of unresolved injustices. However, this manifestation could only occur with the mediation of sound, which, as we have seen, is the site where borders constitute world-making entities.

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Index abolitionism 13-15, 41, 44, 15558 acousmatic voice 30, 129fn, 154fn acoustic entanglement 15-18, 52, 87-88, 131-36, 143, 154-56 acoustic envelope 46, 117, 150 affect 14, 17, 38-39, 66-67, 85, 93, 98, 116-22, 138-39, 150 Africville 62; also see Black Canadians Afrika Bambaataa 72fn Agamben, Giorgio 61, 144 Allakariallak 140-41 Allen, Lillian 16-18, 52, 53-88, 151 animals and animal sounds 11622 Arat-Koc, Sedef 59 archive 23, 26, 32-40, 49, 51, 5356 Attali, Jacques 37, 50, 137 attention and attentive listening 21-22, 45, 92-93, 97, 99, 110, 128-32 Atwood, Margaret 59-61 audible past 21-22, 33-35, 74 audio walks 16-19, 92-115, 127 automatic writing 22, 47 Babbage, Charles 39 Badiou, Alain 115-16

ballet 143-48 Banerjee, Mita 136 Bannerji, Himani 57 Barthes, Roland 28, 131 Baudrillard, Jean 107 Beaucage, Majorie 141 Belmore, Rebecca 16-19, 13132, 133-43, 153-54 Benítez-Rojo, Antonio 63 Benjamin, Walter 99-100, 107 Bennett, Bridget 40, 43 Bennett, Louise 78, 84-85 Bentham, Jeremy 125-26 Berlant, Lauren 116, 121-22 Bilby, Kenneth 65, 70 binaural recording 95-96, 114 Birbalsingh, Frank 68fn Black Atlantic 15, 55-56, 62, 64, 71-73, 79 Black Canadians 56, 59-61, 6668 Blasing, Mutlu Konuk 82fn, 83 Blues 66, 87fn Boas, Franz 139-40 Boenisch, Peter 145 Brand, Dionne 68 Brandstetter, Gabriele 145 Brathwaite, Kamau Edward 8384 Braude, Ann 40-41, 46fn, 47-48 Brooks, Daphne 14, 151 Brophy, Gregory 39 Brown, Henry “Box” 13-15, 15558 Butler, Judith 68, 144 Cameron, Sharon 24fn Cardiff, Janet 16-19, 89-132, 150, 152-53

176! Carson, Anne 149-50 Casas, Maria Caridad 66, 68 Certeau, Michel de 95-96, 102, 123-25, 129-30 Chang, Jeff 72fn, 73fn Chion, Michel 129fn, 154 choreography 146-50 Chow, Rey 17, 119-20, 122 Christov-Bakargiev, Carolyn 97, 114-15, 117-18 Chuck D 67 cinema/film sound 32-33, 92-96, 109-112 Clark, T.J. 107 Clifford, James 74fn Coleman, Daniel 56fn, 108fn colonialism 44, 52, 55-64, 68-70, 74-81, 86, 135 communication 28, 42-44, 48-51, 149-50, 153-54 composition 23-26, 49, 146 Compton, Wayde 62fn Connor, Stephen 154-55 Cooper, Afua 61fn Cooper, Carolyn 55, 65, 70 Coppola, Francis Ford 124 corporeality see embodiment Crary, Jonathan 17, 34-35, 4445, 89-92, 100, 107-8, 110 creolization 63, 65, 69fn Crowston, Catherine 118, 121-22 cultural memory 15, 18, 23, 35, 49, 53-57, 59-60, 62-63, 67, 69-74, 87-88, 142 Curtis, Robin 110-12 dance 69, 71, 81-82, 143-50 dancehall 55, 62, 64-65, 67, 71, 73-75, 84-85

Acoustic Entanglements

Davis, Angela 87fn Day, Richard 57, 108fn Debord, Guy 107 debt 57-63, 77 derive 110 Derrida, Jacques 34fn, 52, 72-73 diaspora 52, 55, 63-73, 87, 115 Dickinson, Emily 16-18, 21-52, 88 dictation 44-48 discourse network 36-37, 88, 136 disembodied voice 30, 32, 51-52, 129fn, 130-31; also see embodiment dispossession 57-58, 61-62 Doane, Mary Ann 27-28 Dolar, Mladen 27, 30, 50, 131 Douglas, Ann 48 dub and dub poetry 52, 55, 58, 62-75, 80, 82-88, 151 eavesdropping 37-38 Edison, Thomas 21-24, 33-35, 39, 51 Egoyan, Atom 95 embodiment 27, 30, 45, 68, 8991, 100, 114, 121, 131, 14350; also see disembodied voice Engler, Yves 75-77 ephemerality of sound 15, 23, 26, 33-34, 51, 53-54 ethnic ventriloquism 136 ethnography 135-143 event/sound as event 27-28, 45, 49, 82, 88, 89, 98, 112, 11416, 119, 149-50

Index!

female voice 37, 42-52, 65, 68, 145; also see gender and sound First Nations 57, 60, 74, 107-8, 133-43; also see indigeneity Fischer-Lichte, Erika 49, 66 Flaherty, Robert J. 140-41 Forsythe, William 131, 143-50, 151 Foucault, Michel 61, 125-27, 143 Franklin, Benjamin 44 Franklin, Ralph W. 29fn Frye, Northrop 107fn Gaylin, Ann 37-38. 138 gender and sound 37, 40-52, 68, 87fn, 145 gesture 24-26, 30, 36, 43, 75, 148 ghosts see spectrality Gilbert, Helen 141 Gilroy, Paul 15, 55, 62, 64, 7274, 79 Gitelman, Lisa 15, 34, 47, 13839 Glissant, Édouard 80 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 44, 91-92 Gottlieb, Karla 86 Goya, Francisco 117-18 Grace, Sherrill E. 140fn Guilbault, Jocelyne 18fn Habekost, Christian 64-65, 70 Habermas, Jürgen 50 Haig-Brown, Celia 60fn Hansen, Miriam Bratu 103-4 Harper, Stephen 60, 108-9 Hatch, Cora 47

177! ! hearing 21-22, 24, 27, 30-32, 34, 40-48, 50, 84, 89-96, 115, 130; also see listening Hebdige, Dick 70 Heidegger, Martin 126 Helmholtz, Hermann von 39 Henriques, Julian 84-85 Hetz, Amos 146 Hill, Lawrence 61fn hip hop 67, 71-73 Hitchcock, Edward 39-40 Hornung, Alfred 66 Huisman, Marijeke 38fn hymn 13-15, 112 indexicality of sound 38-39 indigeneity 18-19, 53-54, 61, 131-32, 133-43 indigenous modernity 141-43 intermediality 23-26, 30-31, 40, 49-51, 106 Internet art 122-132 intimacy 29, 38, 93, 114, 121, 128-30 Jackson, Virginia 25 Johnson, Thomas H. 25-27, 29fn Kant, Immanuel 18-19, 45 Keeling, Kara 15 Kim-Cohen, Seth 97fn kinaesthetic 84, 144 Kittler, Friedrich 16, 35-37, 50 Knowles, Ric 141 Kolesch, Doris 49, 129-30 Koskela, Hille 129 Kracauer, Siegfried 101-103 Krämer, Sybille 16fn, 49-50 Kucich, John J. 41 Kun, Josh 15 Lacan, Jacques 35-36

178! language 15, 29-30, 36, 49, 5051, 63, 65-66, 74, 80, 83, 136, 142-43 Lehmann, Hans-Thies 49 Levine, Lawrence 14 Lindberg-Seyersted, Brita 40 listening 21-22, 24, 38, 45-48, 50, 93-95, 99-100, 119-20, 128-32; 138-29; also see hearing Livingstone, David 109 locution 52 lyric poetry 38, 83 Ma Rainey 66, 87fn Macho, Thomas 27 Mackenzie, William 140fn Marley, Bob 80 masculinity and male voice 37, 52, 69; also see gender and sound materiality 15-16, 24, 26-28, 88, 97fn, 135, 153 McCall, Sophie 140-41 McCormack, Jerusha Hull 30fn McGarry, Molly 22, 41-42, 89, 157 McGinley, Paige 87 McKim, James Miller 12 McKittrick, Katherine 60-61 McLuhan, Marshall 16 McMaster, Gerald 136 media history 15-19, 21-52, 96, 98, 103-106, 129 medium (spiritualism) 22, 40-48, 52, 157-58 medium and media theory 16-19, 24, 36, 49-51, 97fn, 110-12, 129; also see media history

Acoustic Entanglements

megaphone 54, 136-43 melody 29-32, 72 Melville, Hermann 155fn memory-image 100-103 Messmer, Marietta 30fn Middle Passage 15-18, 42, 55, 63-66, 69, 74, 87-88 migration 57-60, 74, 115, 148 Miller, George Bures 16-19, 89132, 150, 152-53 Miller, J.R. 60fn Miss Lou see Bennett, Louise modernity 21-22, 35-36, 40-48, 52, 55, 63, 69, 73, 89-91, 99104, 107-12, 140-43; also see indigenous modernity Moodie, Susanna 59 mourning 15, 18, 21-23, 40-41, 51-53, 67, 118, 122 Müller, Johannes 92 multiculturalism 50, 57-61, 108fn Murch, Walter 111 Nancy, Jean-Luc 27 Nanook see Allakariallak nation language 83-84; also see language Native Americans 43, 136, 14142; also see indigeneity Nelson, Jennifer J. 62fn noise 27-28, 34-36, 51, 72, 7980, 83-85, 94, 119-20, 137; also see nation language NourbeSe Philip, M. 74 Obomsawin, Alanis 136fn Oka crisis 136, 141-42 onomatopoesis 70, 84 Onuora, Oku 64

Index!

oral history 33, 142-43 oraliture 80 orality 29, 49, 54, 68, 80, 140-41 Owen, Alex 22fn Pabst, Naomi 62 Paige, Aaron 18 panoptic observation 125-26 performance 15-16, 18fn, 34, 5355, 63-73, 79-85, 88, 97, 133-50, 151, 157 performativity 14, 24, 26, 30fn, 35-36, 43, 49-51, 61-62, 74, 102, 110, 114, 119, 139, 15556 Phelan, Peggy 53 phonographic logic 23-24, 51-52, 88 phonography 21-52, 89, 135-43 photography 21, 24, 32-33, 3738, 89, 91-92, 101-103 Picker, John M. 34, 39 poetic transfer 28, 36, 49-51 Pollard, Velma 65 postcolonialism 41, 52-62, 70, 74, 108, 135, 141-43 Pratt, Mary Louise 109-110 Public Enemy 67 public sphere 32-38, 42, 47, 52, 120-23, 119, 138 radio 33, 69, 84, 109 Ramazani, Jahan 69fn rap music see hip hop Rastafarianism 64-65, 77-81 reggae 64, 70-71, 74, 77-85 religion 32-34, 39-47, 54, 64-66 remix 52, 63-73 repertoire 53-54 residential schools 60, 108fn

179! ! rhythm 29, 70-72, 75, 81, 147-48 Romanticism 22, 34-42 Rose, Tricia 73 sampling 63-64, 69-70, 72 Scarry, Elaine 152 Schaub, Mirjam 95-96, 113 Schechner, Richard 53 Schrödl, Jenny 128-31 Scott, Kitty 97, 99, 131 Serres, Michel 154-55 Sharpe, Jenny 55, 64, 77 Shetsova, Maria 131, 143, 145, 146, 148 Siegel, Marcia 149 Siegmund, Gerald 145, 147 site-specificity 89, 96-97, 11216, 133-35; also see spatiality Slater, John E. 85-86 slavery 13-15, 18, 44, 55-75, 7988, 139, 155-58 Smith, Martha Nell 26fn sonic excess 23, 27-31, 51-52, 83 sonic warfare 117-18, 152 sound clash 55, 65-66 soundscape 96-97, 112, 117, 120-21 spatiality 42, 62, 97-98, 100-103, 115, 127-28; also see sitespecificity spectrality 16-17, 22-23, 43, 48, 53-54, 94-95, 98-99, 112; also see Spiritualism Spier, Steven 144-47 Spiritualism 41-52, 157-58 Spivak, Gayatri 52, 72 steelband 85-86, 151

180! Sterne, Jonathan 21-22. 24. 33, 34fn, 46, 89 Still, William 13-14, 157-58 Stolow, Jeremy 32-33, 43-44 Stolzoff, Norman C. 64, 70-71, 73, 84 stratified sound 15, 17, 133-50 subject formation 24, 28, 35-36, 47-51, 60-62, 68, 89-132, 143-44 subjective perception 44-46, 8992, 100-1, 113, Sulcas, Roslyn 145 surveillance 86-87, 97, 122-32 tape recorder 98. 113-14 Taussig, Michael 137 Taylor, Diana 53-55, 67 technological nostalgia 98, 106, 153 technology 21-24, 32-44, 46, 5152, 89-93, 109-110, 120, 129, 135-42 telegraphy 22-23, 30fn, 32-33, 34fn, 38-44, 46fn telephony 23, 33, 34fn, 42-44, 109 television 77, 104-107, 109-10, 116 temporality 24, 28, 34, 42, 51, 69, 92, 101-2, 109, 127-28, 130-31, 138 Thobani, Sunera 61 Tosh, Peter 65 transnationalism 41-44, 47, 55, 57-63, 68fn, 72fn, 87-88, 131-32, 133-35 Turner, Camille 61-62 typewriter 35-37, 128-29

Acoustic Entanglements

utterance 28-29, 31-32, 49, 130 Veal, Michael E. 69-72 voice 21, 23-24, 28, 30-32, 35, 42-44, 49-52, 68, 82-84, 12831, 143 Wailers 81 Wailing Souls 71 Walcott, C. M. Harclyde 15, 6869, 73 walking 17-19, 97-116, 129-31, 137-38 Werner, Marta L. 25-26, 49 Wilson, August 66 Winks, Robin W. 60-62 Wylie, Liz 105 Young, Robert J. C. 56, 58 Zyman, Daniela 96-97

sabine kim

Acoustic Entanglements

kim Acoustic Entanglements

C

kim

Sound and Aesthetic Practice

American Studies ★ A Monograph Series Acoustic Entanglements

ombining a cultural history of sound with media and literary studies, Acoustic Entanglements presents a new perspective on the entangled affiliations of transnational mobility, diasporic cultural memory, embodied performance, and the material practices of aesthetic acts. Starting by reassessing Emily Dickinson’s poetry as participating in an emergent phonographic logic, this book proposes that sound in modernity assumes the capacity to cross time and space, ‘entangling’ past and present, living and dead, periphery and alleged center. From this vantage point, the study examines Lillian Allen’s dub poetry as an ethical demand for economic justice made via sound, Janet Cardiff’s audio walks as renegotiating the cultural place of Europe for a North American imaginary, and Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore’s performances as voicing indigenous resilience in the present. Focusing on Canada and the US, the book brings together the fields of sound studies and transnational American studies.

Volume 278

Universitätsverlag

isbn 978-3-8253-6677-3

win t e r

Heidelberg