![‘‘[The Negro] is not a visitor in the West, but a citi-
zen there, and American; as American as the Ameri-
cans who despise him, the Americans who fear him, the
Americans who love him—the Americans who became
less than themselves, or rose to be greater than them-
selves by virtue of the fact that the challenge he repre-
sented was inescapable. . . . The time has come to realize
that the interracial drama acted out on the American
continent has not only created a new black man, it has
created a new white man too. . . . This world is no longer
white, and it will never bewhite again.—James Baldwin
Lifting up from the circles and grooves of a record can
change the weather. From freezing to hot to cool.
—Toni Morrison
Actively we have woven ourselves with the very warp
and woof of this nation.—W. E. B. Du Bois
Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different
sense of time, you’re never quite on the beat. . . . In-
stead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you
are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands
still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the
breaks and look around.—Ralph Ellison
I wanna wind your little phonograph, just to hear your
little motor moan.—Robert Johnson](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25944127-250515001121-14423ec6/85/Phonographies-Grooves-In-Sonic-Afromodernity-Alexander-Ghedi-Weheliye-9-320.jpg)
![Phonographies
what new modes of thinking, being, listening, and becoming, what Amiri
Baraka terms ‘‘the flow of is,’’ are set in motion by all the cultural idioms
included here.14
The answer: sonic Afro-modernity.
Since the Enlightenment, the sonic, especially in the form of music,
has led a strange existence in the annals of Western thought, function-
ing concurrently as the most abjected and most exalted of the arts. Be-
ginning with Plato, music was thought to have no significance without
the accompaniment of words. Since sound by itself could only generate
affect and not linguistic meaning, Plato and many after him feared the
abandon and sensory pleasure derived from pure sonorousness.15
During
the ‘‘Ensoniment,’’ however, music came to be heard as the most rarefied
of the arts, but only insofar as it interfaced with the mathematicism of
certain types of classical music that eschewed sensory pleasure and the
body in favor of the ‘‘higher’’ regions of the mind; thus the idea of ‘‘abso-
lute music’’ was born.16
Yet, as many recent writers have pointed out,
‘‘absolute music’’ remains an impossibility due to the necessary material
manifestation of any sound whether in human bodies, written scores, on
phonograph records, compact discs, or mp3 files. But the phantoms of
these post-Enlightenment discourses concerning music’s asocial purity
still indefatigably haunt both popular media and academic arguments.17
What remains to be interrogated is the embodiment of sonic matter in
a variety of forms without resorting to any a priori suppositions of the
figuration these materialities will assume, if they do so at all. Jacques At-
tali’s Noise: The Political Economy of Music remains an important text
about the place of the sonic in Western culture(s) since the Middle Ages,
even while it succumbs at points to an unnecessary economic function-
alism. The gauntlet Attali has thrown before traditional musicology has
found its most attentive listeners among academic and journalistic popu-
lar music critics, who have taken seriously the sociality of the auditory.
For Attali, pace conventional musicology, the main factor in establish-
ing an ontological rift between noise and music is culture, or rather the
totality of a given sociohistorical formation. According to his argument,
‘‘we must learn to judge a society by its sounds, by its art, and by its festi-
vals, [rather] than by its statistics,’’ that is, by instigating a style of cultural
analysis that carefully and boisterously lends its ear to the sounds pro-
duced within a sociohistorical context as well as their mutual enmesh-
ment.18
Attali tends to emphasize the primacy of the political and eco-
nomic, especially in its determination of the aural; a shortcoming, to be
10](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25944127-250515001121-14423ec6/85/Phonographies-Grooves-In-Sonic-Afromodernity-Alexander-Ghedi-Weheliye-26-320.jpg)
![Intro
sure, but not so grave as to render his arguments useless. This obsession
with the socioeconomic is most clearly articulated in the principal nar-
rative of Noise, which begins with the sonic at the center of social life in
the Middle Ages (here music serves as ritual sacrifice), moving to its ab-
straction from the quotidian and reification in scores and concert halls
(Attali terms this the epoch of representation), followed by music’s utter
and devastating commodification at the hands of the recording indus-
try (the age of repetition), culminating, finally, in an era of composition
made possible by new sound technologies.
To any reader of Marxist theory this story of an Edenic and precapital-
ist world where the people fall from grace as they are colonized by capital
and then onlyaftera while reclaim their place in an utopian future hardly
contains any surprises; we might even say that it is as comforting as a
fairy tale. In each of these stages recounted by Attali—in a rather circular
and perhaps even tautological fashion—the sonic simply mirrors/redacts
the social contexts from which it initially welled up. To Attali’s credit,
he actually takes a slightly different stance, rendering music as prophetic
of social formations rather than representing them a posteriori. This is
a welcome change, even if it just reverses the order of things by posit-
ing the aural to herald future social and political constellations: ‘‘Music
is prophecy. . . . [I]t makes audible the new world that will gradually be-
come visible’’ (11).19
At the very least, this puts a heavy burden on music
while also making it a cog in a quasirepresentational apparatus. Perhaps
we should tune Attali’s interpretive framework to another pitch or dub
his steady Marxist beat a bit by not reading the prophetic vicissitudes
too literally, but keeping in play the imbrication of the social and the
sonorous—what distinguishes noise from music in the first place. Put dif-
ferently, maybe the sonic does not harbor so much a sheer image—its
figuration as sound qua sound would in many ways preempt this pic-
torializing gesture—of what is to come as much as it renders futurity
audible in its circumvention of strictly mimetic technes. In sonic Afro-
modernity, sound, for a variety of social, ontological, historical, and aes-
thetic reasons (as a general rule, the why is never quite as important as
the how here), holds out more flexible and future-directed provenances
of black subjects’ relation to and participation in the creation of Western
modernity. I am by no means, at least not by any necessary ones, propa-
gating a sonic idealism or hierarchy of the senses with their attendant
structuration in the West since the Enlightenment, but instead welcome
11](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25944127-250515001121-14423ec6/85/Phonographies-Grooves-In-Sonic-Afromodernity-Alexander-Ghedi-Weheliye-27-320.jpg)
![Hearing Sonic Afro-Modernity
phonograph record can shed some sound on the observation that ‘‘writ-
ing [apparently] merely stores the fact of its authorization,’’ while sound
must be constantly reproduced in order for it to gain the same authority
as writing, if at all.9
Phonê in Greek denotes sound and voice; graph, on
the other hand, signifies writing. Thus, the oral and phonetic are writ-
ten down (recorded) by the phonograph (sound writer), imploding the
originary aperture between writing and sound by calling attention to the
improbability of writing sound in any commonsensical manner. The ety-
mology of ‘‘phonograph’’ and the words used to designate many other
nineteenth-century technologies—‘‘photography’’ (picture writing) and
‘‘cinematography’’ (film writing)—suggest that inscription seems to be
at the root of any kind of recording: more than recording itself, it seems
that sound necessitates transposition intowriting to even registeras tech-
nology. The place of script as a preferred, if not dominant, cultural tech-
nology in the West makes for the authority that it relays in relation to
speech and sound, which, in contrast to writing, have to be reiterated and
imagined as writing in order to operate as recordings; sonic recordings
are the means rather than the end to a status as record. Of the hegemony
of writing in Western modernity, Friedrich Kittler writes:
What will soon end in the monopoly of bits and fiber optics began with the
monopoly of writing. History was the homogenous field that, as an aca-
demic subject, only took account of literate cultures. Mouths and graph-
isms were relegated to prehistory. . . . Otherwise events and their stories
could not have been linked.This is whyanything that ever happened ended
up in libraries. . . . [W]riting functioned as a universal medium—in times
where there was no concept of medium. (4–6)
In this scheme, something is heaved into the sphere of script and there-
fore recorded, ensuring its presence beyond the scene of production.
Sound and voice, on the other hand, require an audience to guaran-
tee, legally, epistemologically, and ontologically, their continuing being.
Hence the written record seems autonomous of any reception and repro-
duction processes, whereas sound and voice become documents, when
and if they do so at all, only in the murky domains of reproduction and
reception.
If the etymology of ‘‘phonograph’’ implies that sound and voice are
not capable of recording independently of writing, since they fall short
25](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25944127-250515001121-14423ec6/85/Phonographies-Grooves-In-Sonic-Afromodernity-Alexander-Ghedi-Weheliye-41-320.jpg)
![Phonographies
on sheet music, in order for recorded music to function as intellectual
property, composers—performers did not even merit a footnote—had
to prove that the phonograph read their music in the same or a similar
way as did consumers who played the music from printed scores. In these
debates the sounds contained on phonograph records were only fixable as
objects under the purview of copyright law if they were proven to be the
mechanical equivalent of written notation and/or script. Record compa-
nies, in particular, in order to claim all the profits from record sales, ar-
gued that phonograph records did not represent written embodiments of
the composer’s score since they were not legible by humans. Conversely,
composers and publishers, defending their own economic interests, at-
tempted to establish that the phonograph could, indeed, read recordings.
This new technology also magnified the embodiment of music per se, be-
cause it queried the naturalization of musical notation as the most faithful
record of sonic information.The dispute over the Copyright Act revolved
around whether recordings based on copyrighted sheet music merely
represented the use of the score or a particular performance of a com-
position as opposed to an altogether different material manifestation of
music. Since the phonograph possessed the ability to make sounds au-
dible, even though these noises could hardly be heard as mimetic due
to technological limitations in this particular situation, marks on a page
now seemed glaringly mute in comparison.
Not surprisingly, unmediated mimetic listening was most habitually
ascribed to ‘‘others,’’ such as native subjects, women, and black people.
The mimetic dimensions of recorded sound were also highlighted in
scenes depicting the ascription by ‘‘primitives’’ of paranormal powers
to this machinery, which they most often encountered as an instru-
ment of Western ethnography. Michael Taussig writes of these scenarios:
‘‘Here everyeffort is made to represent mimeticizing technologyas magi-
cal, and the question must be repeated—because phonographic mis-en-
scene [sic] is surprisingly common in twentieth-century descriptions of
‘primitive’ peoples—as to why Westerners are so fascinated by Others’
fascination with this apparatus.’’16
Gitelman analyzes a 1905 story from
the Edison Phonograph Monthly in which the listener reacts to a recording
of a flogging scene in Uncle Tom’s Cabin as emotionally as if it were ‘‘real’’
(119–121). As was and perhaps still is often the case—witness current dis-
cussions of the digital divide—angst about embryonic technologies is
28](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25944127-250515001121-14423ec6/85/Phonographies-Grooves-In-Sonic-Afromodernity-Alexander-Ghedi-Weheliye-44-320.jpg)
![Phonographies
to make a record and perform their music for the technological appara-
tus), and are not always already ‘‘out there’’ configurations waiting to be
represented, even if only partially.28
Drawing on Derrida’s conceptions
of writing and iteration, Lastra comes to the conclusion that it might be
more useful to think of the ‘‘original’’ as an effect of reproduction and
representation rather than its prerequisite (151–153). As a result, we can
begin to perceive the ‘‘absence by which we classify representations as
representations, recordings as recordings [as] a positive condition of pos-
sibility rather than a fault’’ (152). When this absence—which, as we have
seen, not only makes writing possible to operate as writing but also pro-
vides the precondition for recording and reproducing sound—is taken
into account, the emphasis shifts from the ways in which the original is
tainted by the technological process to the ways the apparatus and the
cultural practices (re)shape and (re)frame the musical object.
Despite Lastra’s divergence from the nonidentity theorists, he insists
on a ‘‘theoryof representation’’ that leaves the general economyof ‘‘copy’’
versus ‘‘original’’ intact (153). Any theory of representation, as unmimetic
as that theory may be, fails to abolish the secondariness of the copy, since
what is repeated remains yoked to a principle of sameness rather than
difference, uncannily mirroring the manifold methods through which
black culture is construed as simply ‘‘repeating’’ hegemonic discourses.
But what if we push theveryconcept-metaphors of ‘‘original’’ and ‘‘copy’’
to the side for the time being and think of repetition not as rearticulat-
ing the same but as activating difference? As useful as Lastra’s Derridean
model and notions of repetition with a difference are, they mitigate the
intensity and force of difference by virtue of measuring it against a puta-
tive origin from which the copy diverges. In contrast, what I am suggest-
ing here is not repetition with a difference so much as the repetition of
difference, wherein the original/copy distinction vanishes and only the
singular and sui generis becomings of the source remain in the clear-
ing.29
This repetition of difference does not ask how ‘‘the copy’’ departs
from ‘‘the source’’ but assumes that difference will, indeed, be different
in each of its incarnations. Here, the phonograph emerges as a machinic
ensemble (to cross-fade Fred Moten’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s idioms)
that accents the eventness of the (re)production of the source; the source
is always (re)produced as an (anti)origin while also appearing as a differ-
ently produced occasion in each of its singular figurations.30
As a conse-
quence, records, cds, cassette tapes, or mp3 files should not be thought
32](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25944127-250515001121-14423ec6/85/Phonographies-Grooves-In-Sonic-Afromodernity-Alexander-Ghedi-Weheliye-48-320.jpg)
![Hearing Sonic Afro-Modernity
as attempting to replicate a lost immaculate source/original but as events
in their own right. These questions are not merely abstract and concep-
tual, since this modality of repetition also significantly recasts how we
engage with recorded music in a more quotidian fashion. Most readers
will recall moments in which the repeated listening to a musical object
(and the same can be said of any engagement with a cultural object, read-
ing a novel, watching a film, etc.) exposed new sounds that they had not
heard in previous encounters. These instances of divergence, however,
have no home in the representational brand of recurrence, because it only
accents what supposedly stays the same; in this differently sounded repe-
tition, however, what remains similar is precisely difference. In addition,
as James Snead has shown, this notion of repetition and difference rep-
resents one of the hallmarks of modern black cultural production, due
to its insistence on nonrepresentational and nonprogressive versions of
the said categories.31
But this model also bears out modes of thought that
enable fresh ways to conceptualize the fundamental role of black culture
in Western modernity, for often black culture is cast in the role of simply
repeating majoritarian formations—I will have more to say about this in
mydiscussion of Du Bois in chapter 3—rather than as singular figurations
of difference. Still, we need to return to the source of phonography, since
we’ve only considered one aspect (iterability) of this abstract machine.
It seems that Derrida can only conceive of the voice as speech and re-
formulate its function as writing. Or phrased in a different key, this con-
ception of the speech/writing bifurcation that suffuses much of Western
thought in some sense domesticates and humanizes the voice by render-
ing it almost synonymous with linguistic marks, which functioned as the
universal data storage and transmission medium up till the end of the
nineteenth century. This bifurcation leads Friedrich Kittler, in Gramo-
phone, Film, Typewriter, to contend that ‘‘writing [can only] store writ-
ing—no more no less,’’ thus highlighting that in the Derridean scheme
the dimensions of the voice that elude writing cannot but be kept silent
(7).32
Additionally, Kittler observes, ‘‘the phonograph does not hear as
do ears that have been trained to immediately filter voices, words, and
sounds out of noise; it registers acoustic events as such’’ (23). A strik-
ing assertion, no doubt, one that simultaneously gets to the heart of the
matter and completely misses the point, as anyone who has heard early
sound recordings (think about the lack of lower frequencies on many old
recordings, especially those of the acoustic era) or some current mp3s
33](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25944127-250515001121-14423ec6/85/Phonographies-Grooves-In-Sonic-Afromodernity-Alexander-Ghedi-Weheliye-49-320.jpg)
![Phonographies
will realize. While it is true that the phonograph’s sound perception dif-
fers manifestly from human ears, its transmitting of sonic marks per se
appears illusory, given the stark limitations in sound ‘‘fidelity’’ through-
out the history of sound recording. Instead of dispensing with the origi-
nal/copy distinction, Kittler desires something like the transcendental
omniscience of the phonograph. The insistence on the (in)humanity of
the phonograph remains key, for it assists in conjecturing the sonorous
dimensions teleported by the phonograph that are elided in script and
thus shushed in Derrida’s understanding of the voice as speech writing.
In this way, Derrida veers perilously close to another strand in Western
philosophy, ranging from Plato, to Kant and Rousseau, and more recently
to Emmanuel Levinas, who provides the following pithy aphorism: ‘‘The
sounds and noises of nature are failed words. To really hear sound, we
need to hear a word. Pure sound is the word.’’33
These thinkers take in
music and the voice only insofar as they aspire to and/or attain linguistic
signification or mathematical abstraction with the express aim of stifling
and silencing embodiment, sensuality, and most important, the sono-
rous materiality of the aural.34
Thus, Derrida’s influential argument be-
gins to reformulate the status of the voice by underscoring how speech
functions as writing in the general sense, something Afro-diasporic cul-
tures have known and enacted for at least three hundred years, yet falls
short of facilitating any discussion of the sonorous qualities transmitted
by human vocal cords, especially singing, which surely sounds differently
in connection with black cultural production.
Put bluntly, Derrida’s argument, while attuned to the constitutive
writingness of all linguistic signs, redacts these as only linguistic marks,
all the while placing a significant barrier between signifier and signified.
The primacy of this post-Saussurean model, which to this day remains
one of the axiomatic cornerstones of literary and cultural studies, still
maintains the linguistic as the prima facie spot from which to think and
imagine all vocal utterances, or ‘‘[the] occlusion that occurs sometimes
in the name of a deconstruction of phonocentrism and always within the
tradition of logocentrism, which has at its heart a paradoxically phono-
centric deafness’’ (In the Break, 185). Moten’s perspicacious point directs
us to the oft unacknowledged muteness to the lower frequencies (I’m
using this phrase in the full Ellisonian sense) that covertly underlie many
poststructuralist-inspired academic debates, where language is always al-
ready ‘‘pure form’’ (190), in Moten’s phraseology, and therefore the sonic
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![Hearing Sonic Afro-Modernity
is downgraded to its same old place: outside, below, and beyond the stric-
tures of discourse. Although it remains crucial to think the graphicity of
all cultural utterances, Derrida’s model does not quite allow us to con-
jecture the very ‘‘real’’ (re)formulation of the sound/source relationship
occasioned by the phonograph, since, in Jacques’s part of the universe any
vocalization always already appears as phonography (as I’m writing this,
it strikes me that the problem might be the ‘‘always already’’). In other
words, this mode of thinking disables, or at least is not very interested in
making, distinctions between ‘‘human’’ vocalization, written scores, and
phonograph records, echoing, albeit sotto voce, the equation of language
with ‘‘pure form.’’ Although all these factors surely constitute a part of
writing in the general sense, they do not do so in the same way. Thus,
might it not be possible to insist on the writingness of all vocal acts and
their differently calibrated sonic iterability through the technology of the
phonograph?
What would a nonlinguistic archetype and/or a theory of (a)significa-
tion that considered both these domains sound like? While there are no
comfortable answers, here as elsewhere thewritings of Deleuze and Guat-
tari and some of their followers suggest a distinct style of thinking about
this tricky terrain in which nonlinguistic signs are accorded at least as
much, if not more, of a vital force as language as ‘‘pure form.’’35
These cru-
cial additions to the archive of contemporary critical idioms often appear
in the theorization of sensation, expression, affect, and perception. Brian
Massumi tenders the following formulation of both the difference be-
tween and the codependency of perception and sensation: ‘‘ ‘Perception’
[refers] to object-oriented experience, and ‘sensation’ [to] ‘the percep-
tion of perception,’ or self-referential experience. Sensation pertains to
the stoppage- and stasis-tending dimension of reality. . . . Sensation per-
tains to the dimension of passage, or the continuity of immediate ex-
perience. . . . Perception is segmenting and capable of precision; sensa-
tion is unfolding and constitutively vague.’’36
Sensation thus partakes in
the realm of the prelinguistic, alinguistic, and a conceptual, while per-
ception systematizes sensations into recognizable forms.37
For our pur-
poses, the phonograph sounds both sensation, in the guise of the sonic
(phono), and perception, here the sphere of inscription (graph), even
though these two energies are not opposed and, in the realm of speech,
hardly dissociable to/from each other. Yet graphematicity continues to
be seen and read as the sine qua non of human signification, which ne-
35](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25944127-250515001121-14423ec6/85/Phonographies-Grooves-In-Sonic-Afromodernity-Alexander-Ghedi-Weheliye-51-320.jpg)
![Phonographies
through various media of the black voice in the twentieth century. Al-
though I endorse Barrett’s useful differentiation between the signing voice
and the singing voice, at times it runs the risk of configuring the black
singing voice as always alreadyembodied, rather than as a series of strate-
gies and/or techniques of corporeality.39
Far from being transmitted ‘‘in
[a] startlingly authentic form,’’ as Barrett will have it (86), the black sing-
ing voice, decoupled from its human source—which nonetheless remains
a prominent spectral residue—and placed in the context of spiritual col-
lections and, subsequently, phonograph records, insinuates a much more
overdetermined and unwieldy constellation within both black and main-
stream American cultural discourses. This account also mutes the many
ways the singing voice has provided a prime channel for making New
World blackness audible from within Western discourses, much in the
same way that slave narratives, in Ronald Judy’s argument, rendered
the African (il)legible as Negro. In the end, despite his nuanced argu-
ment, Barrett also thwarts any recourse to writing in his treatment of the
si(g)n(g)ing voice—where Derrida can only read the voice as linguis-
tic a/signification, Barrett hears the black voice as pure ludic sonorous-
ness—or rather the coupling of the graphematic and the phonic, which
represents the prime achievement of black cultural production in the
New World. As we shall see in the discussions of Du Bois and Ellison,
neither abandons the graph for the phono or vice versa; this is what we
call phonographies.
Surely, this is not to argue that oralityand musicwere the onlychannels
for black culture in this period, but rather that the relationship between
sound and writing imploded by the discourses around the phonograph
in mainstream American culture carries different cadences in relation
to black culture. Consequently, we need to account for how orality and
music, the two main cultural techniques in African America, were trans-
formed by the technology of the phonograph.40
In what sense does the
de/re/coupling of sound and source shift the central place of orality and
music in the production, transmission, and reception of black culture?
According to Edouard Glissant, ‘‘it is nothing new to declare that for
[black subjects] music, gesture, dance are forms of communication, just
as important as the gift of speech. This is how we first managed to escape
the plantation: aesthetic form in our cultures must be shaped from these
oral structures.’’41
How did these modes of cultural transfer, which are
always constitutive of the contents they transmit, change at the end of
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Phonographies Grooves In Sonic Afromodernity Alexander Ghedi Weheliye
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- 7. Phonographies Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity Alexander G. Weheliye Duke University Press Durham and London 2005
- 8. © 2005 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Designed by CH Westmoreland Typeset in Minion with Helvetica Neue display by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in- Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.
- 9. ‘‘[The Negro] is not a visitor in the West, but a citi- zen there, and American; as American as the Ameri- cans who despise him, the Americans who fear him, the Americans who love him—the Americans who became less than themselves, or rose to be greater than them- selves by virtue of the fact that the challenge he repre- sented was inescapable. . . . The time has come to realize that the interracial drama acted out on the American continent has not only created a new black man, it has created a new white man too. . . . This world is no longer white, and it will never bewhite again.—James Baldwin Lifting up from the circles and grooves of a record can change the weather. From freezing to hot to cool. —Toni Morrison Actively we have woven ourselves with the very warp and woof of this nation.—W. E. B. Du Bois Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you’re never quite on the beat. . . . In- stead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look around.—Ralph Ellison I wanna wind your little phonograph, just to hear your little motor moan.—Robert Johnson
- 11. Contents Acknowledgments ix Intro: It’s Beginning to Feel Like . . . 1 1 Hearing Sonic Afro-Modernity 19 2 ‘‘I Am I Be’’: A Subject of Sonic Afro-Modernity 46 3 In the Mix 73 4 Consuming Sonic Technologies 106 5 Sounding Diasporic Citizenship 145 Outro: Thinking Sound/Sound Thinking (Slipping into the Breaks Remix) 199 Notes 211 Works Cited 257 Index 279
- 13. Acknowledgments The genre rules that I am subject to here require a listing of debts owed to various persons. However, given the stifling economization of so many aspects of life in late capitalism, I prefer to think of such contributions to life and work as aneconomic gifts. As I discuss in my book, the gift, as theorized by Du Bois and several others, functions as both an offering and a poison, and that is what these people have given me, by offering their thoughts, time, energy, and the like while at the same time ‘‘poisoning’’ my thought. They have become voices, apparitions, images, smells, sounds, and so on in my body and mind, enabling me to think and live above, below, beyond, and beside that possessive pronoun ‘‘my,’’ and for that I am forever grateful. Let me commence by thanking a group of intellectuals whose work has sustained me: Stuart Hall, Hortense Spillers, Gayatri Spivak, and Sylvia Wynter. In the years that I have spent thinking about and writing this book, these thinkers, individuallyand as a group, offered me a vital model for intellectual inquiry. I have also greatly benefited from various men- tors and teachers, particularly Elke Stenzel and Ulla Haselstein, who pro- vided challenges and support in high school and college, and Abena P. A. Busia, Bruce W. Robbins, and Cheryl A. Wall, who, as my graduate men- tors offered me a mixture of critical acuity, generosity, understanding,
- 14. Acknowledgments and professional support. I can only hope to live up to the example they have set. At Rutgers I had the good fortune of knowing and working with a group of dynamic graduate students and faculty members: Carol Allen, Deborah Allen, Anthony Alessandrini, Heather Russell Anderade, Kim Banks, Wesley Brown, Elaine Chang, Cheryl Clarke, Joseph Clarke, Sam Elworthy, Donald Gibson, Rachel Herzing, Briavel Holcomb, Myra Jehlen, Jonathan Kahana, Cora Kaplan and David Glover, John Kas- parian, Cindy Katz, Samira Kawash, Thomas Keck, Meredith McGill, Jennifer Milligan, Verner Mitchell, Tricia Rose, Julie Skemp, Neil Smith, Sarah Thompson, Michael Warner, and Maire Veith. I will always be im- mensely grateful for Craig Gilmore and Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s hospi- tality and intellectual generosity. During 1997–1998 I held a fellowship at the Rutgers Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture; there the conversations were invaluable for formulating the beginnings of this project.The staff in the Rutgers English Department, Linda Kazusko, Nancy Miller, and CandaceWalcott-Shepherd, offered endless help and a sense of humor. Tanya Agathocleous and Chris O’Brien, Joseph Chaves, Erik Dussere and Stephanie Hartman, Lisa Gitelman, Helen Hurwitz, Lisa Lynch, and Tamar Rothenberg will hopefully continue to honor me with their friendship for years to come. At the State University of New York, Stony Brook, Helen Cooper, E. Ann Kaplan, and (particularly) Ira Livingston welcomed and sup- ported me in a difficult institutional situation, for which I am thank- ful. I was also fortunate enough to share conversations with numerous outstanding undergraduates at Rutgers, Stony Brook, and Northwest- ern; special thanks go to the students in my ‘‘Sound/Technology/Culture’’ classes, and particularly those in the ‘‘Sonic Afro-modernity’’ gradu- ate class at Northwestern, for discussing much of the material in this project. Parts of the book have been published previously in the following venues: a much earlier version of chapter 3 appeared in American Studies/ Amerikastudien 45.4 (winter 2000), a shorter incarnation of chapter 2 can be found in the summer 2003 issue of boundary 2: an international jour- nal of literature and culture, and a condensed version of chapter 3 appears in Public Culture 17.2 (spring 2005). I am grateful also to many people at Northwestern and in Chicago: Jeffrey Masten, Bonnie Honig, Susannah Gottlieb, John Keene, Tricia Dailey, Carole Boyce Davies, Helmut Müller Sievers, Betsy Erkkila, Lynn x
- 15. Acknowledgments Spigel, Reginald Gibbons, Sam Weber, Sandra Richards, Jay Grossman, Eric Sundquist, Elzbieta Foeller-Pituch, Miguel Vatter, Regina Schwartz, Tori Marlan, Mary Finn, Harry Samuels, and the members of the North- western Theory Reading Group. Particular thanks to Sharon Holland, Jennifer DeVere Brody, Kevin Bell, Dwight McBride, Dorothy Wang, E. Patrick Johnson, and Michael Hanchard for their collegiality and friendship. The staff in the Northwestern English and African American Studies departments provided smooth operations; many thanks to Kathy Daniels, Natasha Dennison, Marsha Figaro, Stacia Kozlowski, Nathan Mead, and Marilyn Williams. Jules Law and Jennifer Brody deserve spe- cial mention for being such exceptional mentors. A great deal of the final work on the manuscript was made possible bya generous fellowship from the Alice Berline Center for the Humanities at Northwestern. Much gratitude goes to all those who read parts of manuscript and/or discussed its arguments with me at one point or another: Jonathan Arac, Kevin Bell, Lawrence Ytzak Brathwaite, Jennifer DeVere Brody, Joseph Chaves, Erik Dussere, Brian Edwards, Robert Gooding-Williams, Lisa Gitelman, Michael Hanchard, Kodwo Eshun, Ronald Judy, Andrea Klein- huber, Jules Law, Ira Livingston, Ruth Mayer, Charles Mudede, Alondra Nelson, Ulfried Reichardt, Ryan Snyder, and the readers at Duke Univer- sity Press and the University of Minnesota Press. I thank Ken Wissoker for believing in this book as it currently stands and the staff of Duke Uni- versity Press for their patience and expertise. A heap of gratitude goes to Sonia Nelson, who undertook the gargantuan task of proofreading an earlier incarnation of the whole manuscript, and Abigail Derecho, who compiled the index. Many thanks go out to Nadine Robinson for the permission to use her artwork and to Alondra Nelson for suggest- ing Robinson’s work. I cannot do justice to the depths of Fred Moten’s engagement with the conceptual architecture of this book. The folks who are last on my long list deserve so much more than mere thanks, since they have been such a forceful presence in my life and will I hope continue to be so for a variety of futures: Patricia Bembo, Arndt Weisshuhn and Miriam Schmidt, Manfred Bertelmann, Christian Schwabe and Jamilla Al-Habash, Patrick Hosp and Roya Djaberwandi, Aki Hanne and Andrea Wiedermann, Frank Kohlgrüber, Aicha Muthu- kumupe Katjivena; many thanks also go out to Wendy Gold, Yves Clem- ent, Leonie Baumeister, Sonja Boerdner, and Julia Kühn and Peter Kraus- kopf. xi
- 16. Acknowledgments I am enormously appreciative of my family’s inspiration and support, especially to my parents, Nuur Ahmed Weheliye and Barbara Christine Weheliye, for being model organic intellectuals, for bestowing upon me the pleasure (and pain) of cultural nomadism, for teaching me how to make hard decisions, and for making of me always a man who questions. My siblings Daud Ahmed, Asli-Juliya Weheliye, and Samatar Weheliye deserve a great deal of gratitude for being co-conspirators and teach- ers. Thanks also to my uncle Said Ahmed and my sister-in-law Qadiiya Ahmed. I wish my grandmother Margarete Wittkat had been alive to see the publication of this book. My other family also deserves my great ap- preciation: E. Nancy Markle, George Enteen, Sharon Enteen and Doug Prusso, Alice and Bernie Learman, Henrietta and Morris Mitzner, and George and Sylvia Levy. This book is dedicated to the two people from whom I have learned the most in my time in this galaxy: my mother, Barbara Weheliye, and Jillana Enteen. My mother has always given me the freedom to explore, a trait at once more generous and rigorous than mere encouragement, because it allowed me to make my own mistakes, and hopefully to get some things right as well. It is far from easy to describe her pervasive influence on my life and work, but I want to single out her fearlessness. Although she herself would never claim that particular quality, her strength, courage, and erudition will never cease to amaze me. This book could not have been written without Jillana Enteen, whose presence sounds from every page of this book; I look forward to many more years of collaborative endeavors in life and work. xii
- 17. Intro It’s Beginning to Feel Like . . . Prolegomena Beginnings and introductions are occasions for sonic events or apparitions—and song intros are no exception: the soft, mid-tempo, yet insistent drum-machine rumblings and water tap sounds of Mtume’s ‘‘Juicy Fruit’’ that prolong the wait for the grand entrance of the bass, especially in the extended twelve-inch ver- sion; the lengthy cinematic string section of Phantom/Ghost’s ‘‘Perfect Lovers (Unperfect Love Mix)’’; the looped invocations of ‘‘love ya babe’’ in conjunction with the crisp, syncopated snare drums and sampled bird sounds that introduce Aaliyah’s ‘‘One in a Million.’’ I could continue this list indefinitely, but I trust that you get the picture, or the sound as it were, of the allurements that lurk in the crevices of sonic beginnings, those sonorous marks that launch new worlds, holding out pleasures to come while also tendering futurity as such in their grooves. My all-time favorite in this category is Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes’ ‘‘Wake Up Everybody,’’ which gently burrows into the tympanum with its harp swooshes, a tambourine, and two different piano motifs, to then guide us into the pièce de resistance: a very subtle bass solo that never reappears in the duration of this 7:33-minute masterpiece. These fifteen seconds invite repetition by virtue of denying the listener recurrence and as a re- sult haunt and shadow the remainder of the track, compelling him/her to return the needle to the first grooves of the record, rewind the tape,
- 18. Phonographies or push the back button on the cd/mp3 player. Because these sounds defy reiteration in the musical text, they compel the listener to actively intervene in its structure via the tools of technological re/production, which in turn calls attention to their singularity and the singularity of all sounds. These resonant instigations also amplify the integral enmesh- ment of sound and technology in the modern era, underscoring some of the ways sound technologies are a vital element of the musical text rather than supplementary to its unfolding. If the coexistence of the ‘‘human’’ with various ‘‘technological’’ structures and processes presents one of the central challenges of the contempo- rary world, then Afro-diasporic subjects and cultures surely form a cru- cial part of this mix. But perhaps we should begin differently, since this statement already assumes too much, or too little, depending on your viewpoint. It presumes that the human and the technological represent separate, if not antagonistic stable entities, which at this point, and per- haps always already, seems untenable, to say the least, given that one is hardly conceivable without the other. Why then does black cultural pro- duction still function as a convenient outside to this interface that will not quite listen to the catachrestic nominalism ‘‘cyborg’’? For all intents and purposes, it seems to be a resolutely stubborn child. Recent debates about the ‘‘digital divide,’’ while surely drawing much needed attention to certain politicoeconomic inequities, cannot but reinforce the idea that Afro-diasporic populations are inherently Luddite and therefore situ- ated outside the bounds of Western modernity. Samuel R. Delany, for instance, distinguishes ‘‘the white boxes of computer technology’’ and ‘‘the black boxes of modern street technology.’’ The former, particularly in the form of the Internet and World Wide Web, are deemed central to the techno-vanguard of a continually progressing machine, while the latter—sound technologies for instance—are not regarded as technologi- cal at all.1 Too often this bifurcation locates black cultural production beyond the pale of what counts as technological in contemporary criti- cal discourse. Routinely, most academic considerations of technology, especially those found in studies of cyberculture (where the term ‘‘digi- tal divide’’ was coined) remain deaf to the sonic topographies of popu- lar music, which is not surprising, given the general hegemony of vision that permeates Western modernity. Yet popular music offers one of the most fertile grounds for the dissemination and enculturation of digi- 2
- 19. Intro tal and analog technologies and has done so at least since the inven- tion of the phonograph at the close of the nineteenth century. Pop music also represents the arena in which black subjects have culturally engaged with these technoinformational flows, so that anyconsideration of digital space might dowell to include the sonic in order to comprehend different modalities of digitalness, but also to not endlessly circulate and therefore solidify the presumed ‘‘digital divide’’ with all its attendant baggage.2 Phonographies hopes to circumvent and reroute this path by examin- ing the numerous links and relays between twentieth-century black cul- tural production and sound technologies such as the phonograph and Walkman. Recognition of these connections will in turn lead us away from the assumption that black cultures are somehow pre- or antitech- nological. That is not to suggest, however, that this project reduces black cultural production to an ‘‘objective’’ technological sphere; it is neither a strict history of black people’s involvement in the processes of sound recording and reproduction nor a comprehensive survey of representa- tions of sound recording and reproduction in black culture.3 Rather, I assess specific instances in the technological and social histories of sound recording and reproduction as they cut across twentieth-century black cultural production in order to suggest that the interface of these two dis- courses provides a singular mode of (black) modernity.4 Phonographies imagines not a strict historicist account of the interface between sound technologies and black culture but instead a conceptual intervention into the fields of African American studies, musical histories of the twenti- eth century, and cultural studies. Black culture’s reciprocal engagement with sound technologies amplifies this formation’s indicativeness of and centrality to modernity rather than affirming its status as a minor moder- nity or countermodernity.5 That said, this modernity appears not as an overparticularized and identitarian minority configuration as much as modernity per se, which, although marked by certain particularisms (as all cultural formations are), cannot and should not be wholly contained by them. What is generally at stake are the fates of black sounds in the age of mechanical, electrical, and digital reproduction. And, while the appearance of the phonograph suggests the most obvious point of entry into ‘‘sonic Afro-modernity,’’ given the clearly technological dimensions of this summit so central to twentieth-century global culture, we will have to cast a wider and differently tuned historical net that considers the vexed place of writing—both in a limited and general sense—and orality 3
- 20. Phonographies vis-à-vis New World slavery, in order to come to grips with the singu- larity of black sounds as they ricochet between ‘‘humans’’ and modern informational technologies. The phonograph and other sound technolo- gies in its wake offer prime loci from which to consider the ineluctable imbrication of black cultural formations with technology and Western modernity. Although there exist many theories of modernity, three moments are commonly taken to be the grounds upon which this longue durée is erected: first, the beginnings of secularization in the Renaissance; sec- ond, the Enlightenment, as well as the rise of capitalism and the Indus- trial Revolution in the eighteenth century and early nineteenth cen- tury; and third, the proliferation of information technologies such as the phonograph, telegraph, telephone, and cinematograph at the end of the nineteenth century. All these prostheses of modern origins emphasize the ascent and proliferation of reason, secularization, progress, human- ism, individualism, rationalization, industrialization, and so on.6 Yet— as writers such as Walter Benjamin, Aimé Césaire, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Sylvia Wynter, to name but a few, have argued—slavery, colonial- ism, scientific racism, and the Holocaust are not, as has often been as- sumed, aberrations from the ‘‘higher’’ ideals of the modern but lie at its molten nucleus. In fact, these supposed archaisms provide the props, both conceptually and sociohistorically, upon which the hubristic edi- fices of unmitigated reason and progress rest, if uneasily so. Modern dis- courses and institutions have found it necessary to produce and project their own outsides in various guises—the contemporaneousness and co- dependency of industrialization and anthropology is a prima facie case in point—the primitive or insane serving as some obvious candidates.7 Afro-diasporic subjects and blackness in general have had to bear the burden of being cast in the role of the other to Western modernity in nu- merous ways, heightening the bitter irony that marks the fractured dia- lectic of Enlightenment, since spatial proximity had to be compensated by a temporal displacement that deems blackness beyond the epistemo- logical and ontological reach of theWest even while this category is a fab- rication of its discourses, practices, and institutions.8 Phonographies sur- veys some of the mechanics by which (technosonic) blackness came to be fashioned as antithetical to modern structures, asking why it seemed, and in some ways still does seem, imperative to stress ad nauseam these anti- and/or premodern facets of black cultural production if, indeed, these 4
- 21. Intro were thought to reside beside reason, progress, and rationality. Phrased differently, how does blackness operate paradoxically as both central to and outside of Western modernity? The node of black cultural practices and sound technologies acts as one of the chief areas for examining this conundrum in the twentieth century. The sonic remains an important zone from and through which to theo- rize the fundamentality of Afro-diasporic formations to the currents of Western modernity, since this field remains, to put it bluntly, the prin- cipal modality in which Afro-diasporic cultures have been articulated— though clearly it has not been the only one. Consequently, it seems only fitting that I center my analysis on the cultural, political, economic, and epistemological complexities that ensue from the new-fangled technolo- gization of black sounds beginning at the end of the nineteenth century. Even though my argument will most clearly be situated in the last of the three models for the origins of modernity (see the beginning of the pre- ceding paragraph), I do not want to construct a decisive rift, choosing instead to trace the rhizomatic reverberations of sonic Afro-modernity through a variety of historicocultural patterns. For instance, the volatile liaison between racial formation and vision would not appear quite com- prehensible without nods to the structuration of the scopic as the disem- bodied sense of reason par excellence since the Renaissance. Similarly, my discussion of race, writing, and difference draws on debates about the status of black subjects as (non)human in the Enlightenment and after. At its broadest, Phonographies hopes to establish the centrality of both sonic blackness—here characterized as an unwieldy compound com- prising all the discourses (black and nonblack) that imagine and cir- cumscribe racial formation within Western modernity—and black cul- ture (the totality of cultural marks produced by those who have been labeled and/or define themselves as black) to Western modernity. The very category ‘‘black’’ is an invention of Western modernity, which does not mean that it can be reduced to a mere colonialist imposition on empirically verifiable black beings that preexist this classification, but that this arrangement defies any sort of quasi comprehensibility, if it does so at all, outside the modern West. In this regard, Ronald Judy, in (Dis)forming the American Canon, makes an important intervention in the debates concerning the function of writing in the New World slave narrative.9 Hitherto, critics have assumed that because of the interfacing and/orequating of writing with reason the slave narrative facilitated black 5
- 22. Phonographies peoples’ ingress to the domain of the human, since their ability to mas- ter alphabetic script proved their humanity. Judy, however, maintains that ‘‘the humanization in writing achieved in the slave narrative required the conversion of the incomprehensible African into the comprehensible Negro’’ (92). This subtle and supple syncopation of emphasis is vital be- cause it does not suppose the Negro and the African to be fungible, even if they occupy the same continuum, while also making possible the conjec- ture that Afro-diasporic cultural formations are not intrinsically beside Western modernity. Instead, the argument magnifies the ways in which blackness becomes (il)legible from within this assemblage; paradoxically, this decipherability rests on the supposed externality of black culture to Western modernity, amplifying the manifold ways in which the inside always alreadydischarges the outside and viceversa. Or, in Ralph Ellison’s phrasing, ‘‘Black is . . . an’ black ain’t.’’10 And while Judy is chiefly con- cerned with the figuration of ‘‘the Negro as a trope, indeed as a misapplied metaphor’’ (94) in the realm of the writing, my endeavor lies in scruti- nizing the in/audibility of blackness in this field, which designates how blackness is sounded and heard by a whole range of cultural, philosophi- cal, political, social, and economic discourses. What strikes the auditory apparatus via this line of inquiry is not so much a monolith of negritude as a series of compounded materiodiscursive echoes in and around black sounds in the West, what Edouard Glissant would call an opacity. In this way, the dub version or remix of blackness precedes and envelops both temporally and conceptually any putative original over the last hundred years or so; this is what I term ‘‘sonic Afro-modernity,’’ no more, no less. Prior to the twentieth century, orality and music served as the main modes of dissemination for NewWorld black cultural productions. In the twentieth century, we see the indexing of music and orality in the aes- thetic productions of major black authors such asW. E. B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, James Weldon Johnson, Paule Marshall, and Toni Morrison. In addition, black music from ragtime to hip-hop has enjoyed massive suc- cess on a global scale over the last century. The engagements with sound technologies are both an extension of and a divergence from these pre- twentieth-century musical and oral technes. While many studies of black culture and literature discuss the two concepts, these works frequently posit music and orality as static constants, mapping one particular form of music, such as the blues, onto all of black culture, or locating a pre- technological orality in black cultural history. As a result, these theo- 6
- 23. Intro ries do not fully account for the overdetermined contingency of orality or particular genres of black music, and, most important, they seldom address their technicities. We find these complexities both in the con- tinuities between nineteenth- and twentieth-century formations and in the ruptures created by modern sound technologies. The advent of tech- nological sound recording embodied in the phonograph made it pos- sible to split sounds from the sources that (re)produced them, creating differently pitched technological oralities and musicalities in twentieth- century black culture. In other words, oralities and musicalities were no longer tied to the immediate presence of human subjects, a situation that occasions not so much a complete disappearance of the human as much as a resounding through new styles of technological folding. On the one hand, this (dis)juncture between sound and source ren- dered sound more ephemeral, since it failed to provide the listener with a ‘‘human’’ visual point of reference. On the other hand, sound gained its materiality in the technological apparatuses and the practices surround- ing these devices and in the process rematerialized the human source. We should understand this disturbance of the alleged unity between sound and source not as an originary rupture but as a radical reformu- lation of their already vexed codependency, which retroactively calls at- tention to the ways in which any sound re/production is technological, whether it emanates from the horn of a phonograph, a musical score, or a human body. The singularity of the technological instantiation, how- ever, does not remain the same. This interplay between the ephemer- ality of music (and/or the apparatus) and the materiality of the audio technologies/practices (and/or music) provides the central, nonsublat- able tension at the core of sonic Afro-modernity.11 The novel cleft be- tween sound and source initiated by the technology of the phonograph in twentieth-century black culture supplies the grooves of sonic Afro- modernity. By drastically re/constructing the flow between sounds and an identifiable human source, the technology of the phonograph worried the complex intersection of orality, music, and writing. This joint proves particularly pertinent to black culture since music and orality carried a different weight in nineteenth-century African American culture. Be- cause alphabetic script did not represent the primary mode of cultural transmission, the phonograph did not cause the same sorts of anxieties about the legibility of music as it did in mainstream American culture. Instead, black cultural producers and consumers productively engaged 7
- 24. Phonographies the split between sound and source in order to create a variety of musics, literary texts, and films. The nexus of black culture and sonic technolo- gies tenders notions of temporality, spatiality, and community unlike those that insist on linearity, progress, and the like, but without renounc- ing these tout court, thus enabling black subjects to structure and sound their positionalities within and against Western modernity. The chapters that follow isolate some majorcurrents within sonic Afro-modernity that boost the ephemoromaterialityof sound transmitted through technology and reveal how black cultural producers have created a plethora of prac- tices and objets d’art that (re)mix the divide between the ephemerality and materiality of technologized sound in the twentieth century. Surveying literary texts, films, and sound media that highlight the recording and reproduction of sonic material provides the occasion to explore the ways in which black culture has utilized and created the tech- nological innovations that now characterize sound technologies’ cen- tral features. I draw on these cultural representations, because sonic technologies and their attendant listening practices have received scant attention in analyses of black music or, until recently, of music in gen- eral. While some studies have begun to address the new technologi- cal developments and their cultural ramifications, few works thoroughly probe the explicit connection between black culture and developments in sound recording and reproduction.12 My method, although situated within (black) cultural studies, is not beholden to one particular school of thought. As an alternative, I establish a dialogue between literary texts and current popular culture to conjecture how sonic technologies and black cultural production have fruitfully contaminated each other, analyzing specific musical practices and their technological (un)folding. Phonographies practices what I dub—with all its resonances of echo, delay, and Afro-diasporic studio tricknology—‘‘thinking sound/sound thinking.’’ This approach eschews a strict opposition between popular culture and canonical forms of cultural expression, without erasing their differing institutional articulations; it involves using the insights of each field to critically reconfigure the other. Like the practices of disc jock- eys, it juxtaposes historically and formally (supposedly) disparate arti- facts and methodological approaches to yield new meanings, intensities, and textures in the field of sonic Afro-modernity. This style of inquiry not only offers different modalities for probing the crosscurrents and dis- 8
- 25. Intro continuities of twentieth-century black cultures as they intersect with the histories of sound technologies, but also, and perhaps more significantly, transacts different registers for apprehending modern cultural forma- tions in theWestern world (readers interested in a more elaborate discus- sion of these methodological questions might want to jump ahead to the outro).13 Framed by this intro and the outro, the core of the book takes up specific concerns central to Western modernity (subjectivity, tempo- rality, spatiality, and community) from the conceptual purview of sonic Afro-modernity, adding new interpretive layers to the initial argument instead of ‘‘applying’’ the theoretical insights developed at the onset. In short, this book elaborates both the black cultural specificities and gen- eral modern Western provenances of these patterns and asks whether the distinctions between the two are as steadfast as we would like or assume them to be. Phonographies also contains substantial (re)readings of African Ameri- can canonical texts by W. E. B. Du Bois and Ralph Ellison from a techno- auditory standpoint. Ellison has emerged as a central figure in the process of writing, since he, more than any other writer, engages the poetics of sonic Afro-modernity by returning time and again to questions of sound, technology, and (black) culture. My engagements with Ellison and Du Bois provide occasions from and through which to think and hear both lyrically and critically the three fields that form this book’s core: sound, technology, and black culture. Just as important are the popular works of art and practices, which, on their own and in their interfacing with Elli- son’s and Du Bois’s texts, form the other archive of this book. And while I am aware of the differential positions occupied by the bibliotheques and discotheques ‘‘out there,’’ in here they meld into a splintered totality that cannot be encapsulated by either field separately. What is more, my analysis takes the purportedly ephemeral cases as seriously as those al- ready enshrined in consecrated timelessness, insisting, as I mentioned above, on their singularity. Discussing popular culture only qua popular culture commonly leaves unsullied the orders of discourse that relegate noncanonical formations to the dustbin of ‘‘history’’ until they are ex- cavated as important texts in the future at the same time as neglecting pop culture’s constitutive conceptualness. In other words, Phonographies does not celebrate popular cultural resistance; nor does it scrutinize its ideological containment or hegemonic rearticulation. More exactly, I ask 9
- 26. Phonographies what new modes of thinking, being, listening, and becoming, what Amiri Baraka terms ‘‘the flow of is,’’ are set in motion by all the cultural idioms included here.14 The answer: sonic Afro-modernity. Since the Enlightenment, the sonic, especially in the form of music, has led a strange existence in the annals of Western thought, function- ing concurrently as the most abjected and most exalted of the arts. Be- ginning with Plato, music was thought to have no significance without the accompaniment of words. Since sound by itself could only generate affect and not linguistic meaning, Plato and many after him feared the abandon and sensory pleasure derived from pure sonorousness.15 During the ‘‘Ensoniment,’’ however, music came to be heard as the most rarefied of the arts, but only insofar as it interfaced with the mathematicism of certain types of classical music that eschewed sensory pleasure and the body in favor of the ‘‘higher’’ regions of the mind; thus the idea of ‘‘abso- lute music’’ was born.16 Yet, as many recent writers have pointed out, ‘‘absolute music’’ remains an impossibility due to the necessary material manifestation of any sound whether in human bodies, written scores, on phonograph records, compact discs, or mp3 files. But the phantoms of these post-Enlightenment discourses concerning music’s asocial purity still indefatigably haunt both popular media and academic arguments.17 What remains to be interrogated is the embodiment of sonic matter in a variety of forms without resorting to any a priori suppositions of the figuration these materialities will assume, if they do so at all. Jacques At- tali’s Noise: The Political Economy of Music remains an important text about the place of the sonic in Western culture(s) since the Middle Ages, even while it succumbs at points to an unnecessary economic function- alism. The gauntlet Attali has thrown before traditional musicology has found its most attentive listeners among academic and journalistic popu- lar music critics, who have taken seriously the sociality of the auditory. For Attali, pace conventional musicology, the main factor in establish- ing an ontological rift between noise and music is culture, or rather the totality of a given sociohistorical formation. According to his argument, ‘‘we must learn to judge a society by its sounds, by its art, and by its festi- vals, [rather] than by its statistics,’’ that is, by instigating a style of cultural analysis that carefully and boisterously lends its ear to the sounds pro- duced within a sociohistorical context as well as their mutual enmesh- ment.18 Attali tends to emphasize the primacy of the political and eco- nomic, especially in its determination of the aural; a shortcoming, to be 10
- 27. Intro sure, but not so grave as to render his arguments useless. This obsession with the socioeconomic is most clearly articulated in the principal nar- rative of Noise, which begins with the sonic at the center of social life in the Middle Ages (here music serves as ritual sacrifice), moving to its ab- straction from the quotidian and reification in scores and concert halls (Attali terms this the epoch of representation), followed by music’s utter and devastating commodification at the hands of the recording indus- try (the age of repetition), culminating, finally, in an era of composition made possible by new sound technologies. To any reader of Marxist theory this story of an Edenic and precapital- ist world where the people fall from grace as they are colonized by capital and then onlyaftera while reclaim their place in an utopian future hardly contains any surprises; we might even say that it is as comforting as a fairy tale. In each of these stages recounted by Attali—in a rather circular and perhaps even tautological fashion—the sonic simply mirrors/redacts the social contexts from which it initially welled up. To Attali’s credit, he actually takes a slightly different stance, rendering music as prophetic of social formations rather than representing them a posteriori. This is a welcome change, even if it just reverses the order of things by posit- ing the aural to herald future social and political constellations: ‘‘Music is prophecy. . . . [I]t makes audible the new world that will gradually be- come visible’’ (11).19 At the very least, this puts a heavy burden on music while also making it a cog in a quasirepresentational apparatus. Perhaps we should tune Attali’s interpretive framework to another pitch or dub his steady Marxist beat a bit by not reading the prophetic vicissitudes too literally, but keeping in play the imbrication of the social and the sonorous—what distinguishes noise from music in the first place. Put dif- ferently, maybe the sonic does not harbor so much a sheer image—its figuration as sound qua sound would in many ways preempt this pic- torializing gesture—of what is to come as much as it renders futurity audible in its circumvention of strictly mimetic technes. In sonic Afro- modernity, sound, for a variety of social, ontological, historical, and aes- thetic reasons (as a general rule, the why is never quite as important as the how here), holds out more flexible and future-directed provenances of black subjects’ relation to and participation in the creation of Western modernity. I am by no means, at least not by any necessary ones, propa- gating a sonic idealism or hierarchy of the senses with their attendant structuration in the West since the Enlightenment, but instead welcome 11
- 28. Phonographies Attali’s challenge, albeit without resorting to the functionalism that inter- mittently mars Noise. What I take from Attali are the jerky perimeters of the noise/music bifurcation within modernity and black cultures’ funda- mental part in its fluctuation; as Attali himself observes, the global domi- nance of the recording industry was made possible by ‘‘the colonization of black music by the American industrial apparatus’’ (103). My argu- ment versions Attali’s work by hearing the flux of the world in the traffic between music and a variety of social formations, minus any representa- tional or idealist guarantees, choosing instead to dwell on the singularity framed by their close encounters (of the third kind). Chapter 1 of this book, ‘‘Hearing Sonic Afro-Modernity,’’ commences with a discussion of recent theories of ‘‘minor’’ modernities as they inter- face with sonic technologies and follows with a short history of the pho- nograph. Then the argument turns to the thorny intersection of speech and writing—as framed by debates in African American literary studies and poststructuralist theory—to analyze how this bifurcation is both compounded and reframed by the technology of the phonograph. Re- lating these debates to a number of contemporary writings on race, modernity, and sound situates my concept of ‘‘sonic Afro-modernity’’ within a broad theoretical field. These thoughts are followed by a discus- sion of W. E. B. Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness as put forth in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). I scrutinize the role of vision and sound in the construction of modern black subjectivity, amplifying both the ma- teriality of the visual by way of racial formation and suggesting different ways of combining the phono and the optic. Overall, I take the phono- graphic technologization of black music and speech not as an instance of ‘‘inauthenticity’’ but as a condition of (im)possibility for modern (black) cultural production. ‘‘I Am I Be’’ (chapter 2) draws on the prologue of Ralph Ellison’s In- visible Man (1952) to query the vexed intersections of sound, technology, and black subjectivity in the twentieth century. I investigate how Elli- son’s nameless protagonist’s subjectivity is framed by his engagement with Louis Armstrong’s recording of ‘‘(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue.’’ Ellison’s insistence on sound and technology as forceful mo- dalities in the construction of black selfhood suggests a path that circum- vents, or at least refigures, the identity/subjectivity split by refusing to pit one against the other. Armstrong’s voice on a phonograph provides an acoustic mirror for the protagonist’s social invisibility and serves as 12
- 29. Intro the structuring metaphor for the protagonist’s subjectivity. The resulting increased technological audibility provides the necessary backdrop for the social invisibility of black subjects. The chapter then considers more generally how identity, as a particular, local, and minoritized category, is often construed against the subject, as its universal and disembodied other within academic discourse.Thus, the ‘‘sounds of blackness’’ articu- lated through constantly shifting sonic technologies represent a crucial signifying locus for the formation of (black) subjectivities throughout the twentieth century and help recalibrate the identity-subject gulf by calling attention to their mutual interreliance. ‘‘In the Mix’’ (chapter 3) links the formal structure of W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk to the contemporary mixing practices of djs. First, the argument returns to Ellison’s Invisible Man, where he imagines his- tory in the form of a groove inscribed on the surface of a phonograph record, offering a model of temporal change that ‘‘spins around’’ a linear and progressive version of history. Ellison’s description of the ‘‘groove of history,’’ I argue, locates black culture in the technologized sounds of the phonograph. Du Bois’s text suggests a continuous mix of differ- ent genres and media (sociology, history, narrative fiction, poetry, and music). Moreover, the musical bars at the beginning of each chapter of Souls, quotations from the vast archive of spirituals, appear in the text not as accurate mimetic representations but as distorted, layered, linger- ing traces that disrupt the flow of words. ‘‘In the Mix’’ then surveys the history and mechanics of disc jockeying as an art form in contemporary (black) musical culture in order to conjecture how this practice is echoed in Du Bois’s textual strategies and vice versa. My analysis shows that one of the major currents of sonic Afro-modernity is ‘‘the mix’’ as it appears in Souls and djing, for it offers an aesthetic that realigns the temporalities (grooves) of Western modernity in its insistence on rupture and repe- tition. If, in Ellison, history appears in the form of a groove, then the mixing tactics of Du Bois and djs provide ways to noisily bring together competing and complementary beats without sublating their tensions. While the first three chapters dwell in the dominion of the primarily conceptual (and in some ways literary), the final two chapters draw on a more clearly discernable cultural studies approach, in part because the works discussed therein are not as well known as those central to the earlier arguments, so contextualization seems more paramount here. Nevertheless, I want to caution against the easy opposition of the ‘‘theo- 13
- 30. Phonographies retical’’ and ‘‘cultural’’ that so often occurs in contemporary debates; rather, my approach queries the foundations upon which these distinc- tions are routinely administered. In other words, in the recent history of the Anglo-American humanities, ‘‘theory’’ and ‘‘cultural studies’’ desig- nate not only two supposedly dissimilar ways of analyzing cultural ob- jects and subjects but also two points in a fairly traditional narrative of supersession, where the more ‘‘empirical,’’ ‘‘historical,’’ ‘‘ethnographic,’’ and so on discourse pays for the ‘‘sins’’ of its ‘‘abstract,’’ ‘‘lofty,’’ and ‘‘elit- ist’’ father (maternity—and this will come as no great surprise—remains absent in this context: papa’s baby, mama’s maybe). Now—according to this account—we are dealing with real people instead of intangible sub- jects, with politics and history (always functioning as the ultimate guar- antors for the real) and not textuality or philosophy, or so we tell our- selves time and again. This story, taken at face value, frequently serves as a safeguard against various criticisms from outside the academy in the wake of the theoretical turn and the culture wars. It also makes ‘‘us’’ feel important, since we are now actually helping ‘‘the people’’ and not just onanistically relishing abstract otherworldly thought. But I have little tol- erance for this line of thinking, given that it preempts inventive and idio- syncratic ideas and smuggles in an unarticulated positivism that calcifies how things are instead of imagining how they could be. Conversely, my patience is equally lacking (maybe my problem is that I just don’t have enough patience) for the calls for a return to the heady days of ‘‘pure theory.’’ Phonographies is very much a product of and in dialogue with both of these forces, and, while the chapter structure of this book might indicate a schizophrenic dualism, all the arguments reflect an engage- ment with a theoretically inflected (black) cultural studies, just differ- ently so. In the end, I hope that readers will discern the cultural dimen- sions of the first three units and the theoretical spirits of the final chapters, as well as their complementary intersections.20 Chapter 4, ‘‘Consuming Sonic Technologies,’’ considers Ralph Ellison’s essay ‘‘Living with Music’’ (1955) and Darnell Martin’s film I Like It Like That (1994). These texts exemplify how recorded music and its techno- logical embodiment construct public and private spaces. Ellison’s essay meticulously describes his living quarters in terms of the music that ema- nates from the apartments around him and the manner in which he uses recorded music (phonograph records on his sound system) to distinguish his space from that of his neighbors. Similarly, Lisette, the protagonist of 14
- 31. Intro Martin’s film, uses sonic technologies (boom box, radio, and Walkman) to create a space that simultaneously differentiates her from and links her to her family and neighbors. As these texts progress, both characters re- define themselves vis-à-vis their spatial and social surroundings through sound technologies. Where Ellison fetishizes the stereo equipment itself, Lisette deploys audio technologies to access sound and establish a zone of privacy. Still, both instances underscore the integrality of sound tech- nologies in making and recasting modern urban geographies, while also highlighting how these spatialities are inflected by the history of tech- nologies and gendered access to these apparatuses. The final chapter represents an aberration of an aberration; fittingly it is also the longest of the five. Not only does ‘‘Sounding Diasporic Citizenship’’ focus narrowly on contemporary popular music in a cul- tural studies fashion; it also includes little deliberation on sonic tech- nologies per se. What this chapter does in fact is zero in on the culturo- political practices initiated by sonic technologies. So, while its analysis of three contemporary Afro-diasporic musical acts—the Haitian and Afri- can American rap group the Fugees, the Afro- and Italian-German rap collective Advanced Chemistry, and the black British artist Tricky and his partner, Martina—does not concern itself with the specific machina- tions of recording and reproducing sonorous material, the very existence of these artists would not have been possible without the technological shifts discussed in the preceding chapters. I begin with a deliberation of current discussions of diaspora and citizenship, coming to the conclusion that both figurations are too narrow to contain the complexities of Afro- diasporic subjectivities. These forms of belonging also belie any easy in- vocations of hybridity as a cultural and political free-for-all, given that they direct attention to the difficult political, cultural, and affective labor involved in maintaining multifarious forms of association. Music as it is transmitted through different sound technologies provides alternative spaces for the articulation of ‘‘diasporic citizenship’’ and offers avenues for present-day black musical artists to envision and sound their multiple sites of political and cultural membership. The diasporic citizenships of these musical acts imagine black political and cultural subjectivities that encompass local/global and national/transnational affiliations through sonic technologies. As a whole, my project examines particular instances in black culture that would have not been possible without sound recording and repro- 15
- 32. Phonographies duction and their entanglement with the world at large. Yet, rather than merely seeing them as instances of commodification, I have chosen to focus on the conditions of im/possibility these technologies represent for twentieth-century black culture. The bulk of Phonographies builds its ar- gumentative intensity by way of examples rather than by attempting any sort of comprehensive overview that assumes to uncritically represent the encased totality of a field already preestablished in ‘‘the real world.’’ I cling to the importance of the example, since, as Giorgio Agamben ex- plains, it enhances the singularity of the cases in question: ‘‘Neither par- ticular nor universal, the example is a singular object that presents itself as such, that shows its singularity.’’21 Insisting on singularity, and not, say, particularity and/or universality with reference to black cultural ar- chitectonics offers different styles for thinking this field, modes of in- quiry that do not cast black culture as belated or dislocated from some general sphere of Western modernity. In general, my ‘‘method’’ is best described by what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari term ritournelle, a rhythmic pattern in a field of chaos, or rather the autopoeticvacillation of the universe.Translated as ‘‘the refrain,’’ the ritournelle is for Deleuze and Guattari a ‘‘prism, a crystal of space-time. It acts upon that which sur- rounds it, sound or light, extracting from it various vibrations, ordecom- positions, projections, or transformations.The refrain also has a catalytic function.’’22 The refrain is decisive for the phono-graphic unfolding and folding of this book, because it allows for theorizations from and with the sonic, while also underscoring the singularity of the subjects and objects under scrutiny. Focusing on the conditions of im/possibility that these technologies engender for twentieth-century black culture and how black cultural sen- sibilities have shaped the history of sonic technologies accents the com- plicated rapport among sound, writing, orality, and technology in the twentieth century. Instead of emphasizing either the technological or the cultural, the grooves of sonic Afro-modernity integrate both. Pho- nographies acknowledges the technological mediation of black popular music in the twentieth century but does not relegate these practices to the apparatus itself, at least not any notion thereof in which technology’s materiality remains anterior to or outside of the machinations of (black) culture. The grooves of sonic Afro-modernity can be found in the spaces and times between technological change and a variety of cultural prac- tices, and the interplay between the hard- and software poignantly en- 16
- 33. Intro codes the competing notions of subjectivity, temporality, spatiality, and community without dissolving them. Post Script Let us return for a moment to the planet of popular music, if you will permit me to indulge in a further instance of ‘‘high-fidelity-ism’’ before we begin ‘‘properly.’’23 One of my favorite songs over the last year has been a recording by British rb girl-group Mis-Teeq. The refrain of this song repeats the phrase ‘‘It’s beginning to feel like.’’24 Of course, what it is beginning to feel like is love, the central topos of rb and perhaps all popular music. Yet, when the lead singer utters the L-word the back- ground harmonies contrapuntally interrupt and/or augment the central voice with the following lines: ‘‘Like the sun on my skin on a hot sum- mer’s day / Like a song in my head that won’t go away / Like a smile on my face coz you make me happy / Ohhh.’’ Here, love is indefinitely postponed both sonically and linguistically, lingering in the quagmire of simile and creating aural ellipses by making language stutter (as Nathaniel Mackey and Gilles Deleuze remind us).25 This musical example, along with the ones invoked earlier, provide fragile complexities from which academic discourses can learn a thing or three, even though there does not seem to be a need to treat academic language and pop culture all that differently. While I surely cannot claim creating something as majestic as Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff’s work with Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes on ‘‘Wake Up Everybody,’’ or Mis-Teeq’s rigorous vocal acrobatics, I take these sonoric flickers as inspirations, since they make perceptible singu- lars that only signify in their ‘‘poetics of relation’’ to other sounds and matters.26 A literary approximation of these instances appears in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man: ‘‘Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look around’’ (9). These lines from Ellison appear, disappear, and remateri- alize throughout Phonographies as epigraphs, mantras, choruses, or re- frains, to heighten the texturality and intensity of my contentions (and to remind myself of the pleasures, responsibilities, and dangers attached to this gliding), honing in on singular temporospatial nodes found in the tumultuous relationship between black cultural production and sound technologies in the streams of the twentieth century, an intimate affair, to be sure, one marked by both soft screams and loud whispers. 17
- 35. 1 Hearing Sonic Afro-Modernity The invention of the phonograph at the end of the nineteenth century offered a different way to split sounds from the sources that (re)produced them, thus generating a new technological orality and musicality in twentieth-century black culture (even though orality is always already techne-logical). Now that the space and time of audition were separated from the contexts of reception, both orality and musicality relied differently on the immediate presence of human sub- jects. One result of this development is that the technological recording and mass distribution of music are often construed as lacking the authen- ticityand immediacyof live performances and/oras thewholesale appro- priation of musical cultures by various capitalist formations in current critical discourses. Although these interpretations surely possess some value, they tend to neglect the possibilities occasioned by this audiovisual disjuncture for black cultural production, orany form of cultural produc- tion for that matter.The complex interfacing of modern black culture and sound technologies in fact provides the venue for imagining and produc- ing a variety of cultural practices, constituting in their open totality sonic Afro-modernity. Nevertheless, while the literature on black musics com- prises an expansive and everexpanding archive, encompassing numerous disciplinary approaches and spanning various historical periods, work that considers the technological instantiation of these sounds occurs less frequently. However, if we are to analyze a sounding black modernity, we should strive to understand how technologies have affected the produc-
- 36. Phonographies tion, consumption, and dissemination of black popular music and vice versa; an endeavor that is even more pertinent today with the increasing globality of black musical practices. In other words, we need to probe the conditions for the im/possibility of modern black sounds: black sounds are made perceptible in the modern era by sonic technologies, and these technologies have been shaped significantly by black music. Although the phonograph rendered sound more ephemeral—it seem- ingly removed the performer from view—its materiality was displaced onto the recording apparatus itself and the practices surrounding it and, as a result, rematerialized the sonic source. As we shall see, the puta- tive split between sound and source created anxieties about the writing of sound and the visual dimensions of music, but it also opened new ways to engage these spheres. Sound recording and reproduction tech- nologies have afforded black cultural producers and consumers different means of staging time, space, and community in relation to their shifting subjectivity in the modern world. In fact, sound recordings of African American–derived music have dominated the American and now global record industry. It is my contention that the radical reconstruction of the previous relation between sound and source created fresh cultural spheres that would not have been possible without recording and repro- duction technologies, just as these technologies are unthinkable without black music. Paul Gilroyand Houston Bakerattempt to account for the crucial place of sound within modern black culture; yet they gloss over the techne- logical aspects (which are never simply reducible to technology) of black popular music.1 While carefully assessing the effects of the recording, re- production, and international distribution of black popular music, they stop short of reflecting on the ramifications of these factors themselves. In The Black Atlantic, for instance, Gilroy stipulates an integral connec- tion between music and modern black cultural production, granting the sonic a privileged place within Afro-diasporic formations because of its ability to convey the horrors of slavery via its primarily nonrepresenta- tional attributes.2 Because of these nonrepresentational dimensions, says Gilroy, ‘‘engaging with black popular music demands an embarrassing confrontation with substantive intraracial differences that make the easy essentialism from which most critical judgments are constructed simply untenable’’ (36). Although at pains to stress the musical properties that exceed the strictly textual and literary, Gilroy primarily focuses on the 20
- 37. Hearing Sonic Afro-Modernity lyrics of black popular music and the interaction of performers with audiences. Sound recording and reproduction are mentioned briefly and do not occupy center stage, an omission that reduces the force of his ar- gument regarding black popular music’s intimate relationship to moder- nity. At the close of his examination, Gilroy asks how contemporary global flows will change the interactive patterns between black audiences and performers, stating that ‘‘calls and responses no longer converge in the tidy patterns of secret, ethnically encoded dialogue’’ (110). However, while current forms of globalization might be reconfiguring certain kinds of ‘‘tidy’’ ethnically marked conversations around black popular music, it is anything but a recent phenomenon. As Gilroy himself shows in a differ- ent part of his book, the historyof black popular music, from nineteenth- century spirituals to contemporary hip-hop, makes any easy (or even difficult) essentialisms impossible. We can hear the developments Gilroy attributes to the current moment as far back as the 1920s, when Afri- can American popular music was first recorded and disseminated on a large scale, or even earlier, with the Fisk Jubilee Singers’ global travels, so eloquently elucidated by Gilroy.3 By enabling disparate audiences in a variety of locations to consume black music, sound technologies as- sured that local calls and responses would differ according to spatio- temporal coordinates, facilitating the emergence and reconfiguration of numerous cultural practices. The phonograph’s recalibration of locality effected changes in its relation to other vicinities rather than erasing the local altogether. Thus black popular music transmitted through sonic technologies failed to generate the same meanings and textures—neither worse nor better, simply different—as those sounds produced and con- sumed exclusively in geographically circumscribed locales. Nevertheless, we should note that geographic proximity does not guarantee that all present will derive the exact same meaning from the event. When these questions about the recording and distribution of black popular music are relegated to the present and future, previous forms of black popu- lar music remain auratically suspended in an authentic pretechnologi- cal bubble. And this bubble appears only as such in contradistinction to the technological—much in the same way as the source of phonographic framing. Houston Baker describes a ‘‘modern Afro-American sound’’ found in African American literature from Charles Chesnutt, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Booker T. Washington at the end of the nineteenth century, for in- 21
- 38. Phonographies stance, to Richard Wright’s work in the 1940s.4 Sound functions as a metaphor for Baker, while it does not for Gilroy. Not so much inter- ested in the particular properties of black music itself, Baker contem- plates how music and certain black vernacular oral expressions are in- scribed in African American literary works. Key to Baker’s analysis is how particular sounds are (re)sounded in literary artifacts and the ways in which this resounding bespeaks a specific black American literary mod- ernism. His points, however, remain largely abstract, not probing the changes the incorporated sounds themselves undergo in the process of de/relocalization: what happens if these formerly orally and locally trans- mitted ‘‘modern Afro-American sounds’’ become nationally consumable as parts of literary texts and recorded on phonograph discs? Such ques- tions are crucial because, instead of leaving the sounds intact, they ask how sonic marks are transformed by entering into the age of mechanical reproduction, either in literary texts or on records. Moreover, by either not thinking the effects of these transformations at all or by pitting them against a prelapsarian instance of spatiotemporal unity, these consider- ations disregard the constitutive technicity of black music in the modern era. Gilroy and Baker are right to think together black popular music and modernity, since Afro-diasporic musical practices are routinely de- scribed as pristine and untouched forms of ‘‘vernacular’’ expression even though they are such crucial parts of modern formations. Still, any con- sideration of black music might do well to ponder the ramifications of this particular culturoinformational imbrication without succumbing to the pitfalls of technological determinism or celebrating the vernacular authenticity of black popular music; addressing that imbrication would not only broaden the scope of Gilroy’s and Baker’s arguments but also emphasize the centrality of black musical cultures to modern sonic tech- nologies. Building on Baker’s and Gilroy’s concerns about black music’s rap- port with modernity and the spatiotemporal aperture engendered and amplified by the phonograph, we can come to an understanding of the multifarious ways in which these currents have impacted black music in the twentieth century and vice versa, albeit not in a functionalist man- ner that emphasizes either technology or culture at the cost of the other. For black music is not merely a byproduct of an already existing moder- nity, ancillary to and/or belated in its workings, but a chain of singu- lar formations integrally linked to this sphere, particularly as it collides 22
- 39. Hearing Sonic Afro-Modernity with information technologies. Homi Bhabha offers a conception of such a modernity that differs radically from the hegemonic Western model, imagining the fluid structural position of marginalized subjects vis-à- vis Western modernity as follows: ‘‘Modernity . . . privileges those who ‘bear witness,’ those who are ‘subjected,’ or . . . historically displaced. It gives them a representative position through spatial distance, or the time-lag between the Great Event and its circulation as a historical sign of the ‘people’ or an ‘epoch.’ . . . The discursive address of modernity— its structure of authority—decentres the Great Event, and speaks from the moment of ‘imperceptibility,’ the supplementary space ‘outside’ or uncannily besides.’’5 This ‘‘modernity otherwise’’ disrupts and displaces the grand narratives of reason and technological progress by incorpo- rating those who fall outside of these categories into the mix, which dis- ruption, in turn, revamps the meanings of modernity as it resists sepa- rating these two spheres (modernity and minority cultures) into neatly distinct categories, asking us to rethink the very source of this putatively universal and homogenous sphere.6 Modernity, according to Bhabha, is transformed into a series of competing and, at times, conflicting singular spatiotemporal terrains marked by constitutive lag: ‘‘It is the function of the lag to slow down the linear progressive time of modernity to reveal its ‘gesture,’ its tempi, ‘the pauses and stresses of the whole performance’ ’’ (253). This lag, imagined by Bhabha as primarily temporal, suffuses the (anti)ontology of the modern and finds its uncanny home in the poetics of relation that mark the node where the phono joins the graph and/or optic. We will now make a pilgrimage to this spot in order to come to a fuller understanding of sonic Afro-modernity. For the Record: Phono-Graph The Random House College Dictionary gives no fewer than eighteen definitions of ‘‘record.’’ The first and most general signification reads as follows: ‘‘To set down in writing or the like, as for the purpose of preserving evidence,’’ a definition that stresses writing, but does not exclude other modalities. Written records conserve already existent materials; the act of writing transforms the content of recording into evidence. According to this characterization, writing can stockpile data without the baggage of the reproductive because it seem- ingly wields an ontological presence beyond its ontic replication: it can exist as such. In the context of this definition, only the act of producing script (or any other form of writing) matters, everything else is simply 23
- 40. Phonographies window dressing; neither the writer nor the reader seem to have any con- sequence in this assemblage. Definition number 10, the second pertinent one for my purposes, reads: ‘‘a disc or other object on which sounds are recorded for later reproduction.’’ Since sound is located in the sphere of the oral and phonic, sound recordings appear to subsist principally for duplication, falling short of standing on their own as records, especially since they constantly have to corroborate their authority via replication; in fact, their Dasein seems to emanate from repetition and (re)iteration. Keeping within the taxonomy of the characterization cited above, sound recordings do not secure evidence of preexisting information but ‘‘merely’’ disseminate recorded sounds: they are forever suspended in a circulatory tide. Hence, writing attains record status in the act of produc- tion, whereas sound recordings cannot achieve evidentiariness through production alone: they are permanently lacking, always secondary. Or, put in a slightly different way, in these discourses alphabetic script is con- strued as a natural extension of the human body, as if there were any- thing natural about the human or its varying prostheses, where sonic in- scription interjects spacing and absence into this flow. These divergent dictionary significations of written and phonic records stem, at least to some extent, from the different sociotemporal contexts in which both emerged: script appeared well before the advent of mechanical repro- duction, and sound recording is a product of the late nineteenth cen- tury, a period when informational technologies such as the telephone, telegraph, and photography proliferated. Still, the definitions of written and phonograph records summoned earlier were devised at a time when both writing and sound were readily recordable and reproduciblevia me- chanical means; they appear even more startling if we take into account that writing has been in the age of mechanical reproduction at least since the fifteenth century when Gutenberg invented the printing press.7 Why, then, do written documents conjure the finality of script when sound ne- cessitates reproduction in order to escape the throwness of finitude? It seems that in order for writing not to come into view as a technology, and therefore not a biological extension of homo sapiens, the process of its motorized mediation had to be rendered imperceptible; making it seem as if script exists outside thevicissitudes of historyand ideology.8 As will become apparent, this naturalization had particularly volatile con- sequences for Afro-diasporic cultural constellations. An inquiry into the etymology of ‘‘phonograph’’ and the history of the 24
- 41. Hearing Sonic Afro-Modernity phonograph record can shed some sound on the observation that ‘‘writ- ing [apparently] merely stores the fact of its authorization,’’ while sound must be constantly reproduced in order for it to gain the same authority as writing, if at all.9 Phonê in Greek denotes sound and voice; graph, on the other hand, signifies writing. Thus, the oral and phonetic are writ- ten down (recorded) by the phonograph (sound writer), imploding the originary aperture between writing and sound by calling attention to the improbability of writing sound in any commonsensical manner. The ety- mology of ‘‘phonograph’’ and the words used to designate many other nineteenth-century technologies—‘‘photography’’ (picture writing) and ‘‘cinematography’’ (film writing)—suggest that inscription seems to be at the root of any kind of recording: more than recording itself, it seems that sound necessitates transposition intowriting to even registeras tech- nology. The place of script as a preferred, if not dominant, cultural tech- nology in the West makes for the authority that it relays in relation to speech and sound, which, in contrast to writing, have to be reiterated and imagined as writing in order to operate as recordings; sonic recordings are the means rather than the end to a status as record. Of the hegemony of writing in Western modernity, Friedrich Kittler writes: What will soon end in the monopoly of bits and fiber optics began with the monopoly of writing. History was the homogenous field that, as an aca- demic subject, only took account of literate cultures. Mouths and graph- isms were relegated to prehistory. . . . Otherwise events and their stories could not have been linked.This is whyanything that ever happened ended up in libraries. . . . [W]riting functioned as a universal medium—in times where there was no concept of medium. (4–6) In this scheme, something is heaved into the sphere of script and there- fore recorded, ensuring its presence beyond the scene of production. Sound and voice, on the other hand, require an audience to guaran- tee, legally, epistemologically, and ontologically, their continuing being. Hence the written record seems autonomous of any reception and repro- duction processes, whereas sound and voice become documents, when and if they do so at all, only in the murky domains of reproduction and reception. If the etymology of ‘‘phonograph’’ implies that sound and voice are not capable of recording independently of writing, since they fall short 25
- 42. Phonographies of record status per se, the early history of the technology of the phono- graph reproduces, as it were, this dilemma, since the machine was judged incapable of securing evidence, although expressly invented with the aim of preserving oral communication, public opinion, and legal discourse. When the phonograph first appeared in the late 1870s it was not intended as a device to record music oras a source of home entertainment; its main function was to record human voices.10 The phonograph was marketed as an office instrument to record and preserve court proceedings and busi- ness letters.11 It was not until the turn of the century that the phonograph became a player in the home entertainment market, serving to reproduce music and human voices in domestic settings. Set in 1877, there is some dispute concerning who authored the creation of the phonograph; while Thomas Alva Edison is commonly credited with its invention, a French scientist, Charles Cros, was working on a strikingly similar machine at the same time. Yet Edison was the first to ‘‘go on record’’ with this inven- tion—here the ontological authority of writing meets its doppelgänger in the annals of patent law. In fact, the phonograph was a byproduct of research on the telephone and telegraph and formed a part of the com- plex web of other proliferating informational technologies in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Alexander Graham Bell, Elisha Watson, and Edison were all working on perfecting the telephone, which had been patented by Bell in 1876; however, it was Edison who, in the process of recording telephone messages, ‘‘invented’’ the phonograph. Andre Mil- lard describes Edison’s discovery as follows: One night in July 1877, his staff rigged up an indenting stylus connected to a diaphragm, which in turn was attached to a telephone speaker. As Edison shouted into the speaker, a strip of paraffin-coated paper was run underneath the stylus. An examination of the strip showed the irregular marks made by the sound waves.When the stripwas pulled back under the stylus, the group of men crowded around the laboratory table heard, with disbelief, the faint sound of Edison’s shouts from a few minutes earlier.12 Yet it took some time to come up with a functional machine that both recorded and reproduced sound, and even more time for one that would allow for large-scale industrial manufacture, which was needed for this appliance to penetrate and appeal to the national populace. The phonograph led a tenuous existence as an office dictation device 26
- 43. Hearing Sonic Afro-Modernity for a time before it hit upon its unforeseen entelechy: although it was able to record and reproduce sound, the machinery was too unreliable and expensive for mass production and consumption. The tin foil on which sonic information was by then being imprinted could only sound out what it had recorded twice or thrice at maximum, and the hand crank to power the phonograph was so delicate that slight shifts in speed altered and/or distorted the content completely.13 Failing as an administrative appliance, the phonograph’s purpose changed from recording and repro- ducing sound in business and court environs to serving as a machine for the mass consumption of entertainment in the domestic sphere. First, however, the phonograph (by now much more robust) accidentally held a role as a successful vehicle for public entertainment in the form of automated slot machines.14 What began with demonstrations in Edison’s laboratories soon spread to traveling phonograph exhibitions, arcades, and train stations during the late 1880s, thus unexpectedly shifting the machine’s main utility from recording to reproducing sound. Peoplewere not so much interested in hearing their own recorded voices as those of singers and comedians, perhaps because the voice, even more so than writing, represents pure interiority and the proper domain of the sover- eign human subject. In addition, the invention of the phonograph co- incided with the rise of the entertainment industry in the United States and was taken up by this branch of capital and made into a desirable commodity. By the early 1890s the phonograph primarily brought musi- cal (vocal and nonvocal), spoken word, and comedic entertainment into the homes of middle-class Americans. In 1894 Columbia Records pro- duced the first inexpensive phonograph; prices now ranged from twenty to fifty dollars, compared to two hundred dollars, which was the sum hitherto charged by Edison’s National Phonograph Company. Suddenly, the phonograph became a mass-produced and mass-distributed house- hold item, despite the fact that the unreliability and high cost of this young technology complicated its development. Several critics writing about the wider social and epistemological im- plications of the technology of the phonograph stress the way in which the machine refigured the connection between sound and writing. For in- stance, in a discussion about the musical Copyright Act of 1909 (the first such act to include recorded music), Lisa Gitelman shows that the central debate concerned the split between sound and vision, especially writing, in the phonograph.15 Since musical copyright law was heretofore based 27
- 44. Phonographies on sheet music, in order for recorded music to function as intellectual property, composers—performers did not even merit a footnote—had to prove that the phonograph read their music in the same or a similar way as did consumers who played the music from printed scores. In these debates the sounds contained on phonograph records were only fixable as objects under the purview of copyright law if they were proven to be the mechanical equivalent of written notation and/or script. Record compa- nies, in particular, in order to claim all the profits from record sales, ar- gued that phonograph records did not represent written embodiments of the composer’s score since they were not legible by humans. Conversely, composers and publishers, defending their own economic interests, at- tempted to establish that the phonograph could, indeed, read recordings. This new technology also magnified the embodiment of music per se, be- cause it queried the naturalization of musical notation as the most faithful record of sonic information.The dispute over the Copyright Act revolved around whether recordings based on copyrighted sheet music merely represented the use of the score or a particular performance of a com- position as opposed to an altogether different material manifestation of music. Since the phonograph possessed the ability to make sounds au- dible, even though these noises could hardly be heard as mimetic due to technological limitations in this particular situation, marks on a page now seemed glaringly mute in comparison. Not surprisingly, unmediated mimetic listening was most habitually ascribed to ‘‘others,’’ such as native subjects, women, and black people. The mimetic dimensions of recorded sound were also highlighted in scenes depicting the ascription by ‘‘primitives’’ of paranormal powers to this machinery, which they most often encountered as an instru- ment of Western ethnography. Michael Taussig writes of these scenarios: ‘‘Here everyeffort is made to represent mimeticizing technologyas magi- cal, and the question must be repeated—because phonographic mis-en- scene [sic] is surprisingly common in twentieth-century descriptions of ‘primitive’ peoples—as to why Westerners are so fascinated by Others’ fascination with this apparatus.’’16 Gitelman analyzes a 1905 story from the Edison Phonograph Monthly in which the listener reacts to a recording of a flogging scene in Uncle Tom’s Cabin as emotionally as if it were ‘‘real’’ (119–121). As was and perhaps still is often the case—witness current dis- cussions of the digital divide—angst about embryonic technologies is 28
- 45. Hearing Sonic Afro-Modernity projected onto those subjects already marginal, highlighting not so much the roles of technologies in minority cultures, or the manner in which these are construed as always after the temporospatiality of modernity, as it proves symptomatic of the mainstream anxieties about emergent technologies and minority subjects. When phonographs began to augment and replace live performances and/or musical scores at the end of the nineteenth century, they cre- ated a glaring rupture between sound and vision.17 Both performer and score clearly provided some discernible human origin for sounds—even though we should not assume this to represent any form of prelapsar- ian unity and/or simple presence—where the phonograph only gave the listener ‘‘a voice without a face,’’ to use David Laing’s phrase.18 Now this newly invented technological apparatus stood as the main visual counterpoint to the sounds emanating from its horn, ostensibly repro- ducing sonic data without the cumbersome intervention of human sub- jects. Even the telephone, although similarly disrupting the spatial con- figuration of linguistic communication, offered a clearly palpable live human source for its sounds at the other end of the line. As a direct re- action to this gash between sound and human visual source, a profu- sion of cultural maneuvers have sought to yoke the two back together; the iconography of record covers and music videos are some obvious examples. Before these developments, however, records were produced without much graphic and/or visual accompaniment. In this particu- lar historical context written notation suggested the most natural ma- terial grounding of music’s ephemerality. Because the technology of the phonograph seemingly heightened the nonrepresentational, disembod- ied, transient qualities of music, almost from its very inception various discourses, more specifically those revolving around questions of copy- right, attempted to capture fleeting sounds in writing, extending the link- age between writing and sound already embedded in the designation ‘‘phonograph.’’ The phonograph suggested a machinic materiality, one that acutely destabilized any notion of an ‘‘absolute music’’ and called attention to other forms of aural embodiment, whether a concert stage, a musical score, or a human body. It is precisely this conflict between the phonograph’s material and ephemeral dimensions, as well as the ma- chine’s worrying of the immediate connection between sound and writ- ing, that makes it such a crucial site for the articulation of black cultural 29
- 46. Phonographies practices in the twentieth century.19 For, in many ways, the phonograph refracts technosonically the shape-shifting textures of blackness in West- ern modernity as hyper(dis)embodied and (in)human. Source Material The act of writing signals truth-value and indestructi- bility, while sound and voice are rendered effervescent. In other words, writing ‘‘must be repeatable—iterable—in the absolute absence of the addressee or of the empirically determinable set of addressees.’’20 This re- mains one of the most crucial insights of Jacques Derrida’s early work, which insists on the endemic absence that authorizes writing qua writ- ing; that is, writing needs to be discernible beyond the immediate context of its re/production. Yet we should not understand writing to only be synonymous with alphabetic script: ‘‘This iterability . . . structures the mark of writing itself, and does so moreover for no matter what type of writing (pictographic, hieroglyphic, ideographic, phonetic, alphabetic, to use old categories). A writing that was not structurally legible—iter- able—beyond the death of the addressee would not be writing’’ (315).21 If writing always already carries a trace of an absence that constitutes its graphematicity, then speech, at least in Derrida’s conception of certain Western philosophical traditions, signifies unmediated presence, acting as a humble servant of interiority and meaning.22 Whereas writing re- lies on externality and the materiality of the signifier, speech is config- ured as nonrepresentational, ideal, that is, an unmitigated reflection of pure thought. Derrida extends his reformulation of the speech/writing problematic thus: ‘‘This structural possibility of being severed from its referent or signified (and therefore from communication and its con- text) seems to make of every mark, even if oral, a grapheme in general, that is, as we have seen, the nonpresent remaining of a differential mark cut off from its alleged ‘production’ or origin’’ (318). Clearly, Derrida is not after any simple privileging of the written over the oral, rather this argument exhumes the writingness of all linguistic and cultural charac- ters, their difference and deferral, as it were. Following Derrida’s formu- lation of writing in the general sense, the phonograph appears to un- earth the iterability of speech by abstracting oral communication (or human sounds in general) from its scene of (re)creation beyond the death of the addressee. This abstraction is magnified by the intrusion of the phonographic machine, both in the limited and general sense, into the flow of oral marks and the human body. As a consequence, the machine 30
- 47. Hearing Sonic Afro-Modernity and the various abstract machines that frame and produce it not only make sounds mechanically repeatable but also highlight the fundamen- tal iterability of human speech. The phonograph suggests a ‘‘space-time distanciation’’ in which cultural productions are ‘‘distanced from this context, both spatially and temporally, and re-embedded in new con- texts which may be located at different times and places,’’ introducing a spatio-temporal rift between the moment of production and reception that allows for different conceptions of the cultural object: the absence that enables sound’s iterability.23 Accordingly, the phonograph recon- structs the speech/writing antinomy by disseminating speech in the gen- eral sphere of semiosis, although not in the same way as those forms of script listed by Derrida, since the machine actually sounds, which clearly does not imply any form of wholesome mimesis, human speech, albeit under the conditions of iterability and seriality.24 Thus we can under- stand the rupture brought about by the phonograph as an anxiety about speech as absence; hence the link between the apparatus and haunting often cited in its early stages.25 In order for human vocalization to con- tinue in its role as unmediated presence, the sounds of the phonograph had to necessarily be yoked to writing, otherwise the materiality and iter- ability of the voice would become all too audible. In Sound Technology and the American Cinema, James Lastra provides a much-needed corrective to previous treatments of film sound, not only to earlier film theorists, who heard no difference at all between a sound and its technological (re)production, but also to more recent writers who subscribe to the ‘‘nonidentity’’ conception of film sound.26 These critics, Rick Altman and Tom Levin among others, postulate no strict correla- tion between the original sound and its reproduction within the cine- matic apparatus, yet, says Lastra, ‘‘they too, nevertheless assume a stan- dard, and essentially prior sound, which is transformed or violated by recording’’ (127). Instead of supposing that there exists a crudely mimetic relationship between source and reproduction, ‘‘nonidentity’’ theorists concede the partial and representational dimensions of sound recording and reproduction; still, they leave the original intact qua original. That is, they grant this occurrence an ontological reality above and beyond the intrusive forces of representation and do not conjecture how the original itself only functions as such in relation to its later reproduction.27 Even so, ‘‘original’’ performances or sound events are often created purely for the purposes of recording and later reproduction (musicians go in the studio 31
- 48. Phonographies to make a record and perform their music for the technological appara- tus), and are not always already ‘‘out there’’ configurations waiting to be represented, even if only partially.28 Drawing on Derrida’s conceptions of writing and iteration, Lastra comes to the conclusion that it might be more useful to think of the ‘‘original’’ as an effect of reproduction and representation rather than its prerequisite (151–153). As a result, we can begin to perceive the ‘‘absence by which we classify representations as representations, recordings as recordings [as] a positive condition of pos- sibility rather than a fault’’ (152). When this absence—which, as we have seen, not only makes writing possible to operate as writing but also pro- vides the precondition for recording and reproducing sound—is taken into account, the emphasis shifts from the ways in which the original is tainted by the technological process to the ways the apparatus and the cultural practices (re)shape and (re)frame the musical object. Despite Lastra’s divergence from the nonidentity theorists, he insists on a ‘‘theoryof representation’’ that leaves the general economyof ‘‘copy’’ versus ‘‘original’’ intact (153). Any theory of representation, as unmimetic as that theory may be, fails to abolish the secondariness of the copy, since what is repeated remains yoked to a principle of sameness rather than difference, uncannily mirroring the manifold methods through which black culture is construed as simply ‘‘repeating’’ hegemonic discourses. But what if we push theveryconcept-metaphors of ‘‘original’’ and ‘‘copy’’ to the side for the time being and think of repetition not as rearticulat- ing the same but as activating difference? As useful as Lastra’s Derridean model and notions of repetition with a difference are, they mitigate the intensity and force of difference by virtue of measuring it against a puta- tive origin from which the copy diverges. In contrast, what I am suggest- ing here is not repetition with a difference so much as the repetition of difference, wherein the original/copy distinction vanishes and only the singular and sui generis becomings of the source remain in the clear- ing.29 This repetition of difference does not ask how ‘‘the copy’’ departs from ‘‘the source’’ but assumes that difference will, indeed, be different in each of its incarnations. Here, the phonograph emerges as a machinic ensemble (to cross-fade Fred Moten’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s idioms) that accents the eventness of the (re)production of the source; the source is always (re)produced as an (anti)origin while also appearing as a differ- ently produced occasion in each of its singular figurations.30 As a conse- quence, records, cds, cassette tapes, or mp3 files should not be thought 32
- 49. Hearing Sonic Afro-Modernity as attempting to replicate a lost immaculate source/original but as events in their own right. These questions are not merely abstract and concep- tual, since this modality of repetition also significantly recasts how we engage with recorded music in a more quotidian fashion. Most readers will recall moments in which the repeated listening to a musical object (and the same can be said of any engagement with a cultural object, read- ing a novel, watching a film, etc.) exposed new sounds that they had not heard in previous encounters. These instances of divergence, however, have no home in the representational brand of recurrence, because it only accents what supposedly stays the same; in this differently sounded repe- tition, however, what remains similar is precisely difference. In addition, as James Snead has shown, this notion of repetition and difference rep- resents one of the hallmarks of modern black cultural production, due to its insistence on nonrepresentational and nonprogressive versions of the said categories.31 But this model also bears out modes of thought that enable fresh ways to conceptualize the fundamental role of black culture in Western modernity, for often black culture is cast in the role of simply repeating majoritarian formations—I will have more to say about this in mydiscussion of Du Bois in chapter 3—rather than as singular figurations of difference. Still, we need to return to the source of phonography, since we’ve only considered one aspect (iterability) of this abstract machine. It seems that Derrida can only conceive of the voice as speech and re- formulate its function as writing. Or phrased in a different key, this con- ception of the speech/writing bifurcation that suffuses much of Western thought in some sense domesticates and humanizes the voice by render- ing it almost synonymous with linguistic marks, which functioned as the universal data storage and transmission medium up till the end of the nineteenth century. This bifurcation leads Friedrich Kittler, in Gramo- phone, Film, Typewriter, to contend that ‘‘writing [can only] store writ- ing—no more no less,’’ thus highlighting that in the Derridean scheme the dimensions of the voice that elude writing cannot but be kept silent (7).32 Additionally, Kittler observes, ‘‘the phonograph does not hear as do ears that have been trained to immediately filter voices, words, and sounds out of noise; it registers acoustic events as such’’ (23). A strik- ing assertion, no doubt, one that simultaneously gets to the heart of the matter and completely misses the point, as anyone who has heard early sound recordings (think about the lack of lower frequencies on many old recordings, especially those of the acoustic era) or some current mp3s 33
- 50. Phonographies will realize. While it is true that the phonograph’s sound perception dif- fers manifestly from human ears, its transmitting of sonic marks per se appears illusory, given the stark limitations in sound ‘‘fidelity’’ through- out the history of sound recording. Instead of dispensing with the origi- nal/copy distinction, Kittler desires something like the transcendental omniscience of the phonograph. The insistence on the (in)humanity of the phonograph remains key, for it assists in conjecturing the sonorous dimensions teleported by the phonograph that are elided in script and thus shushed in Derrida’s understanding of the voice as speech writing. In this way, Derrida veers perilously close to another strand in Western philosophy, ranging from Plato, to Kant and Rousseau, and more recently to Emmanuel Levinas, who provides the following pithy aphorism: ‘‘The sounds and noises of nature are failed words. To really hear sound, we need to hear a word. Pure sound is the word.’’33 These thinkers take in music and the voice only insofar as they aspire to and/or attain linguistic signification or mathematical abstraction with the express aim of stifling and silencing embodiment, sensuality, and most important, the sono- rous materiality of the aural.34 Thus, Derrida’s influential argument be- gins to reformulate the status of the voice by underscoring how speech functions as writing in the general sense, something Afro-diasporic cul- tures have known and enacted for at least three hundred years, yet falls short of facilitating any discussion of the sonorous qualities transmitted by human vocal cords, especially singing, which surely sounds differently in connection with black cultural production. Put bluntly, Derrida’s argument, while attuned to the constitutive writingness of all linguistic signs, redacts these as only linguistic marks, all the while placing a significant barrier between signifier and signified. The primacy of this post-Saussurean model, which to this day remains one of the axiomatic cornerstones of literary and cultural studies, still maintains the linguistic as the prima facie spot from which to think and imagine all vocal utterances, or ‘‘[the] occlusion that occurs sometimes in the name of a deconstruction of phonocentrism and always within the tradition of logocentrism, which has at its heart a paradoxically phono- centric deafness’’ (In the Break, 185). Moten’s perspicacious point directs us to the oft unacknowledged muteness to the lower frequencies (I’m using this phrase in the full Ellisonian sense) that covertly underlie many poststructuralist-inspired academic debates, where language is always al- ready ‘‘pure form’’ (190), in Moten’s phraseology, and therefore the sonic 34
- 51. Hearing Sonic Afro-Modernity is downgraded to its same old place: outside, below, and beyond the stric- tures of discourse. Although it remains crucial to think the graphicity of all cultural utterances, Derrida’s model does not quite allow us to con- jecture the very ‘‘real’’ (re)formulation of the sound/source relationship occasioned by the phonograph, since, in Jacques’s part of the universe any vocalization always already appears as phonography (as I’m writing this, it strikes me that the problem might be the ‘‘always already’’). In other words, this mode of thinking disables, or at least is not very interested in making, distinctions between ‘‘human’’ vocalization, written scores, and phonograph records, echoing, albeit sotto voce, the equation of language with ‘‘pure form.’’ Although all these factors surely constitute a part of writing in the general sense, they do not do so in the same way. Thus, might it not be possible to insist on the writingness of all vocal acts and their differently calibrated sonic iterability through the technology of the phonograph? What would a nonlinguistic archetype and/or a theory of (a)significa- tion that considered both these domains sound like? While there are no comfortable answers, here as elsewhere thewritings of Deleuze and Guat- tari and some of their followers suggest a distinct style of thinking about this tricky terrain in which nonlinguistic signs are accorded at least as much, if not more, of a vital force as language as ‘‘pure form.’’35 These cru- cial additions to the archive of contemporary critical idioms often appear in the theorization of sensation, expression, affect, and perception. Brian Massumi tenders the following formulation of both the difference be- tween and the codependency of perception and sensation: ‘‘ ‘Perception’ [refers] to object-oriented experience, and ‘sensation’ [to] ‘the percep- tion of perception,’ or self-referential experience. Sensation pertains to the stoppage- and stasis-tending dimension of reality. . . . Sensation per- tains to the dimension of passage, or the continuity of immediate ex- perience. . . . Perception is segmenting and capable of precision; sensa- tion is unfolding and constitutively vague.’’36 Sensation thus partakes in the realm of the prelinguistic, alinguistic, and a conceptual, while per- ception systematizes sensations into recognizable forms.37 For our pur- poses, the phonograph sounds both sensation, in the guise of the sonic (phono), and perception, here the sphere of inscription (graph), even though these two energies are not opposed and, in the realm of speech, hardly dissociable to/from each other. Yet graphematicity continues to be seen and read as the sine qua non of human signification, which ne- 35
- 52. Phonographies glects to take in the phonograph’s most radical gesture: its sonic materi- ality. In other words, writing does not lack sensation ontologically but its reduction to linguistic structures, even if these can never achieve trans- parency, in the aftermath of structuralism preempts any discussion of the many nonlinguistic ways in which it achieves its effects. So Derrida’s notion of graphematicity remains crucial for any consideration of the phonographic-machinic ensemble, since, although it allows us to think the iterability of the graph as part of the equation, it does not offer much in thewayof theorizing the endemic difference between reading the score or listening to a recording of a Prince song such as ‘‘The Ballad of Dorothy Parker.’’ In order to come to grips with both sameness and difference in these iterations we need a theory of phonography—and of aesthetics in general—that blends sensation and perception and listens to the variety and intensity of their intermingling. The invention of the phonograph and the different status of the speech/writing compound vis-à-vis New World blackness provide the occasion to think and hear these matters in slightly different versions that do not lose sound or sight of the surplus gift inherent to Afro-diasporic double consciousness. One of the prime modes of this excess comes in the form of a phonography that rebuffs any separation of the two forces in this compound, whether it rolls up in the sphere of literature or music. The Sounds of Blackness Surely, the conjoining of writing and sound has particular ramifications for black cultural production, given the im- portance of orality as the major mode of cultural transmission in this temporal setting. Because alphabetic writing was such an embattled ter- rain for black subjects in nineteenth-century America, the phonograph did not cause the same anxieties in black cultural discourses, and musi- cal notation and writing were not necessarily understood as the most natural way of recording music. Much has been written about the fraught status of writing in Afro-diasporic configurations, particularly in regard to nineteenth-century African American literary history, but rather than redacting these arguments here, I will just say that black subjects did not have the same access to alphabetic writing as white subjects and therefore were also barred, both discursively and materially, from writing’s atten- dant qualities of reason, disembodiment, and full humanity by a variety of repressive and at times violent mechanisms. Because graphic mastery functioned as a sign for civilization and humanity, black subjects were 36
- 53. Hearing Sonic Afro-Modernity placed outside these domains. Some critics, nevertheless, consider the act of writing, chiefly in the slave narrative genre, to be revolutionary, since it not only highlighted black people’s ‘‘humanity’’ but also worried the very messy bond between writing and reason; more recently this tenet has come under scrutiny and has been revised significantly. Lindon Barrett, for instance, maintains that the black voice functions as a figure of value within African American culture, particularly as it is contrasted with the lack of worth ascribed to blackness in American mainstream culture.38 He distinguishes the singing voice from the sign- ing voice of Euro-American alphabetical literacy, writing that the singing voice ‘‘provides a primary means by which African Americans may ex- change an expended, valueless self in the New World for a productive, recognized self’’ (57).The signing voice, on the other hand, represents the literacy of the white Enlightenment subject. The signing voice signals full humanity, whiteness, and disembodiment, where the singing voice met- onymically enacts blackness, embodiment, and subhumanity. For Bar- rett, corporeality, or ‘‘sly alterity’’ as he terms it, furnishes the black sing- ing voice’s most destabilizing feature (58): The African American singing voice emphasizes—rather than merely glances at—the spatial, material, dative, or enunciative action of voice. Singing voices undo voice as speech per se. By highlighting the enunciative or vocative aspect and moment of voice, singing voices mark the absence that allows iteration and repetition. They imprint above all the pure so- norous audibility of voice, and not a seeming absolute proximity to fixed meaning and identity. (84) Thus, the black singing voice suggests a rather different access to the En- lightenment category of humanity from the signing voice, and in the pro- cess undermines the validity of the liberal subject as the quintessence of the human, instead providing a fully embodied version thereof. Black subjectivity appears as the antithesis to the Enlightenment subject by virtue of not only having a body but by being a body. But what hap- pens once the black voice becomes disembodied, severed from its source, (re)contextualized, and (re)embodied and appropriated, or even before this point? All these things occurred when the first collections of tran- scribed spirituals became readily available for public consumption dur- ing the Civil War and continued with the recording and reproduction 37
- 54. Phonographies through various media of the black voice in the twentieth century. Al- though I endorse Barrett’s useful differentiation between the signing voice and the singing voice, at times it runs the risk of configuring the black singing voice as always alreadyembodied, rather than as a series of strate- gies and/or techniques of corporeality.39 Far from being transmitted ‘‘in [a] startlingly authentic form,’’ as Barrett will have it (86), the black sing- ing voice, decoupled from its human source—which nonetheless remains a prominent spectral residue—and placed in the context of spiritual col- lections and, subsequently, phonograph records, insinuates a much more overdetermined and unwieldy constellation within both black and main- stream American cultural discourses. This account also mutes the many ways the singing voice has provided a prime channel for making New World blackness audible from within Western discourses, much in the same way that slave narratives, in Ronald Judy’s argument, rendered the African (il)legible as Negro. In the end, despite his nuanced argu- ment, Barrett also thwarts any recourse to writing in his treatment of the si(g)n(g)ing voice—where Derrida can only read the voice as linguis- tic a/signification, Barrett hears the black voice as pure ludic sonorous- ness—or rather the coupling of the graphematic and the phonic, which represents the prime achievement of black cultural production in the New World. As we shall see in the discussions of Du Bois and Ellison, neither abandons the graph for the phono or vice versa; this is what we call phonographies. Surely, this is not to argue that oralityand musicwere the onlychannels for black culture in this period, but rather that the relationship between sound and writing imploded by the discourses around the phonograph in mainstream American culture carries different cadences in relation to black culture. Consequently, we need to account for how orality and music, the two main cultural techniques in African America, were trans- formed by the technology of the phonograph.40 In what sense does the de/re/coupling of sound and source shift the central place of orality and music in the production, transmission, and reception of black culture? According to Edouard Glissant, ‘‘it is nothing new to declare that for [black subjects] music, gesture, dance are forms of communication, just as important as the gift of speech. This is how we first managed to escape the plantation: aesthetic form in our cultures must be shaped from these oral structures.’’41 How did these modes of cultural transfer, which are always constitutive of the contents they transmit, change at the end of 38
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- 56. listen to music. They come in their pure essence—not as qualities of something else. And this is what is meant by the familiar statement that the other arts are representative while music is presentative. Poetry, painting, and sculpture show us things outside ourselves, joyful or grievous things perhaps, hopeful or desperate or beautiful or ugly things, but still things. But music shows us nothing but the qualities, the disembodied feelings, the passional essences. Let the reader recall for a moment the effects of painting or of poetry, the way in which they present emotion. Is it not always by symbolism, by indirection? Does not the feeling merely exhale from the object instead of constituting the object as it does in music? In looking at a pastoral landscape, for instance, do we not first think of the peaceful scene represented, and only secondarily feel serenity itself? In reading «La Belle Dame sans Merci» is it not only by a process of associative thought that we come to shudder with a sense of unearthly and destructive passion? Yes, in the representative arts emotion is merely adjective; in music alone is it substantive. We see in a portrait a lovely woman; we behold in marble a noble youth; we read in poetry a desperate story; in music, on the contrary, we hear love, nobility, despair. And since this emotional life is the deepest reality we know, since our intuitions constitute in fact the very essence of that world-spirit which is but projected and symbolized in sky, sun, ocean, stars, and earth, music cannot but be a richer record of our ultimate life than those arts which deal with objects and symbols alone. It is the penetration, the ultimacy, of music that gives it such extraordinary power. The other arts excel it in definiteness, in concreteness, in the ability to delineate a scene or tell a story; but music surpasses them all in power to present the naked and basic facts of existence, the essential, informing passions. A secondary and subordinate advantage of music proceeds from the nature of its material. Tones, produced and controlled by man, are far more easily stamped with the unity he desires than the objects of external nature. These are stubborn outer facts, created without regard to the æsthetic sense, and in a thousand ways unamenable to it. The great dazzle of sunlight is too keen for human eyes, which
- 57. perceive better on dim, gray days; many of nature's contours are larger than we can grasp. Every painter will tell you that there are inharmonious colors in the sunset, and one daring critic has gone so far as to impugn the «vulgarity of outline» of the American hills. It matters not whether the maladjustment indicate a fault in nature or a limitation in man; the point to note is that the representative arts deal with a material less pliable than tones. Words, the material of poetry, occupy in this respect a curious intermediate position. Like tones, they are man-made, but, like outer objects, they are «given,» fixed and indocile to man's æsthetic needs. (We remember the example of the «hatter.») Though made by man, in fact, they are made not by his æsthetic but by his practical energy. They were devised, not for beautiful adjustment, but to convey thoughts, and when the poet comes and uses them to make an art he finds them almost as perverse as the painter's trees and hills. Tones, however, have no practical utility whatever; not only do they not exist outside of music, but they would be of no use if they did. Hence they may be chosen and grouped by the free æsthetic sense alone, acting without let or hindrance, except what is imposed by the thing to be expressed. For hundreds of years man has been testing and comparing, accepting and rejecting, the elements of the tonal series, with the result that we have to-day the ladder or scale of ninety-odd definitely fixed tones, out of which all music is composed. And though the series has been developed wholly by instinct, and it is only within the last half-century that the natural laws underlying it have been discovered, yet it has been built up so slowly and tentatively, and with so sure and delicate a sense of its internal structure, that it is an unsurpassable basis for complex and yet perfectly harmonious tone-combinations. In a word, the material of music is by origin self-congruous, fitted to clear structure, preordained to an order at once rich and transparent. Preordained to beauty, then, is the musician's material: and yet the musician is not exempted from the difficulties of his brother artists. If they work in a less plastic material, he has to govern subtler and more wayward forces. He can attain a wonderful perfection, but only
- 58. through unremitting labor. His task is to embody the turbulent, irrational human feelings in serene and beautiful forms. He is to master the dominating, to reconcile the warring, to impose unity on the diverse and the repellant. Mozart and Haydn might handle their art with ready ease, because their emotions were naïve; but Beethoven, who essayed to look into the stormy and tortured heart of man, found himself involved in a travail Titanic and interminable. Nevertheless he did succeed in harnessing the vast forces with which he deals, and his success is as conclusive a vindication as we could desire of music's power to deal with its profound verities. When we think of Beethoven's immortal works, immortal both by their strength and by their beauty, can we doubt that music expresses our deepest emotional nature with unrivalled fullness, and yet so reconciles it with itself as to symbolize our highest spiritual peace? From the swelter and jungle of experience in which it is our lot to pass our mortal days, days which philosophy cannot make wholly rational, nor love wholly capable of service, nor religion wholly serene, we are thus privileged to emerge, from time to time, into fairer realms. Tantalized with an unattainable vision of order, we turn to art, and especially to music, for assurance that our hope is not wholly chimerical. Then «Music pours on mortals Its beautiful disdain.» Disdainful it is, truly, because it reminds us of the discord and the rhythmless onmarch of our days. It voices the passions that have torn and mutilated and stung and blinded us; we meditate the foolishness, the fatality, of our chaotic lives. But beautiful it is also; and it has been wisely said that beauty offers us «a pledge of the possible conformity of the soul with nature.» Music, at once disdainful and beautiful, shows us our deepest feelings, so wayward and tragic in experience, merged into ineffable perfection.
- 59. Printed in the United States of America.
- 60. TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES: A number of words in this book have both hyphenated and non-hyphenated variants. For the words with both variants present the one more used has been kept. Obvious punctuation and other printing errors have been corrected.
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