Reading Group: 10 Years Audibly Past

By Peter McMurray

The centerpiece of the “Hearing Modernity” seminar will be the presentations by various authors of some of their latest writing on sound, listening and culture. With the exception of the final session with Jacques Attali, those sessions will consist of each author giving a 10-minute overview of their pre-circulated paper, followed by an open Q/A discussion with attendees.

But these conversations hardly constitute a new beginning; instead, they are continuations of various scholarly engagements of recent years, pushed forward in exciting new ways. With that in mind, every other week a reading group will be meeting to discuss earlier writings (mostly books) by these authors. Our first formal gathering will be held this  Tuesday, September 10, 12-2 pm in the Davison Room in Harvard’s Music Building. (Please let us know if you’d like to attend, info [at] hearingmodernity [dot] org. We have limited capacity for virtual/online attendees as well.) We’ll discuss recent books by our first two presenters who will be in residence the following week: Veit Erlmann’s Reason and Resonance (2010) and Jonathan Sterne’s MP3: The Meaning of a Format (2012).

However, as a preliminary to these recent publications, we also had an informal test-run of the reading group in late August, focusing on Jonathan Sterne’s seminal work, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Now a decade old, the book has become a mainstay in classrooms and beyond as a touchstone of sound studies. A few key themes emerged:

1. The Audiovisual Litany. Perhaps the most oft-cited section of the book is Sterne’s critique of what he terms “the audiovisual litany.” This litany posits clear-cut distinctions between sound and sight (or rather, hearing/listening and seeing/looking): for example, “hearing is concerned with interiors, vision is concerned with surfaces” (The Audible Past, 15). As Sterne argues, these sharp divisions don’t hold up under scrutiny, nor do they have particular theoretical purchase; indeed, the separation of the senses has always been a fraught venture. If the audiovisual litany was gospel for many earlier writers on the senses, Sterne’s opening critique of the litany has produced its own generation of reformers who have similarly embraced his more nuanced position.

2. Acoustics of Death. Sterne’s final chapter on preservation of sound as a kindred practice to canning and embalming is “speculative” (to use his word) in the best sense, pointing to a dense web of cultural connections in which sound recording is part of a much larger historical moment. Although scholars of sound have long looked at death as an important sonic event for a variety of reasons (think no further than the oft-recycled discussions of Nipper and His Master’s Voice), Sterne picks up an important theme here—death, sound and recording—that has long featured in literary contexts (think Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain or William Gaddis’s Agapē Agape) and has been taken up in important ways in recent scholarship.

3. Against the Acousmatic. In addition to his critique of the audiovisual litany, Sterne also raises serious questions about notions of the acousmatic or schizophonic, at least implicitly. (He doesn’t take these terms on per se.) Instead, he repeatedly highlights the shortcomings of talking about a sound detached from its source because the two are co-constituted in the moment of recording. For him, this holds for the concept of the medium more generally: “A medium is a recurring set of contingent social relations and social practices, and contingency is the key here” (182); and, “The medium…can be said to precede even the technology itself….Sound reproduction is a social process. The possibility of reproduction precedes the fact” (219). To invert Friedrich Kittler’s famous phrase, our situation (socially, culturally, etc.) determines our media in equally profound ways.

4. Unintended Consequences. Sterne also raises many questions about the historiography of sound and recording technology, using an approach that owes a clear, acknowledged debt to Foucault’s archaeology. In ascribing so much power to human actors (whether individually or collectively), Sterne moves decidedly away from technological determinism. This commitment to the social is welcome in many regards, but it perhaps misses some opportunities to account for what Anthony Giddens has called “unintended consequences” of such agency (not to mention more emphatic pronouncements on the limits of human agency by Bourdieu and others). For Giddens, the “juggernaut of modernity” entails a complex set of human choices tempered by diffuse institutions and reliance on experts that impinge on human ability to see and keep pace with the consequences of their choices.

As one example of such restricted agency, recent scholarship on connections between sound and war/violence show how sound technologies emerge from and feed back into political contexts that are often not aligned with the intentions of musicians/users. Sterne manifests a strong sensitivity to the political on many fronts but stays generally silent on this front (again, as one example). In any case, the question of agency in encounters between humans and technology remains salient not only for sound studies but also for much of the humanities and social sciences. Ironically, The Audible Past may belong to a period of intellectual efflorescence with regards to sound that similarly seems to be outpacing the social constellations that produce it.

We look forward to continuing our discussion of Sterne in tandem with Veit Erlmann this coming Tuesday as we continue to explore some of the long-term trajectories of hearing and listening through their work.