Read an Excerpt
Phonographies
Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity
By Alexander G. Weheliye Duke University Press
Copyright © 2005 Duke University Press
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8223-3577-1
Chapter One
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 subjects. One result of this development is that the technological recording and mass distribution of music are often construed as lacking the authenticity and immediacy of live performances and/or as the wholesale appropriation 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, or any form of cultural production for that matter. The complex interfacing of modern black culture and sound technologies in fact provides the venue for imagining and producing a variety of cultural practices, constituting in their open totalitysonic Afro-modernity. Nevertheless, while the literature on black musics comprises an expansive and ever expanding 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 production, 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 seemingly 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 putative 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 technologies 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 reproduction technologies, just as these technologies are unthinkable without black music.
Paul Gilroy and Houston Baker attempt to account for the crucial place of sound within modern black culture; yet they gloss over the technelogical aspects (which are never simply reducible to technology) of black popular music. While carefully assessing the effects of the recording, reproduction, 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 connection 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 nonrepresentational attributes. 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 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 argument regarding black popular music's intimate relationship to modernity. 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 different part of his book, the history of 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 African 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. By enabling disparate audiences in a variety of locations to consume black music, sound technologies assured 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 consumed 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 popular music remain auratically suspended in an authentic pretechnological 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 instance, to Richard Wright's work in the 1940s. Sound functions as a metaphor for Baker, while it does not for Gilroy. Not so much interested in the particular properties of black music itself, Baker contemplates how music and certain black vernacular oral expressions are inscribed 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 modernism. 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 transmitted "modern Afro-American sounds" become nationally consumable as parts of literary texts and recorded on phonograph discs? Such questions 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 considerations 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 described as pristine and untouched forms of "vernacular" expression even though they are such crucial parts of modern formations. Still, any consideration 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 technologies.
Building on Baker's and Gilroy's concerns about black music's rapport 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 manner that emphasizes either technology or culture at the cost of the other. For black music is not merely a byproduct of an already existing modernity, ancillary to and/or belated in its workings, but a chain of singular formations integrally linked to this sphere, particularly as it collides 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." This "modernity otherwise" disrupts and displaces the grand narratives of reason and technological progress by incorporating those who fall outside of these categories into the mix, which disruption, in turn, revamps the meanings of modernity as it resists separating 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. 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 seemingly 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 window dressing; neither the writer nor the reader seem to have any consequence 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 production, 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 construed as a natural extension of the human body, as if there were anything natural about the human or its varying prostheses, where sonic inscription 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 reproduction, and sound recording is a product of the late nineteenth century, 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 reproducible via mechanical 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. Why, then, do written documents conjure the finality of script when sound necessitates 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 the vicissitudes of history and ideology. As will become apparent, this naturalization had particularly volatile consequences for Afro-diasporic cultural constellations.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Phonographies by Alexander G. Weheliye Copyright © 2005 by Duke University Press . Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
