Following Lyotard’s famous phrase of the grands récits that legitimize modernity’s claims to truth one may ask: what about sound? Is there such a thing as an acoustic meta-narrative that legitimizes modern knowledge through sound? Conversely, might there be an acoustic “paralogy” in which “sound-games” displace modernity’s totalizing claims? Using three historical works of reference (Kircher’s Musurgia, Rousseau’s Dictionnaire und Carl Einstein’s and George Bataillle’s Documents) in this paper I examine the place of sound in two partly competing, partly overlapping categories of modern knowledge: order and complexity. In so doing I ask how acoustic constructions of order and complexity might serve to legitimize (or delegitimize) some of modernity’s broader master narratives.
About the Author
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Veit Erlmann
Veit Erlmann is a cultural historian / anthropologist / ethnomusicologist and the Endowed Chair of Music History at the University of Texas at Austin. His main areas of interest are music and popular culture in South Africa and Indonesia; sound studies; and the anthropology of intellectual property law. His most recent publication is Reason and Resonance. A History of Modern Aurality (Zone Books, 2010). Currently he is working on a book on intellectual property in the South African creative industries that will be published by Duke University Press.