This week we have focused on the early recording history of the United States. Both the pop music and world music culture industries developed in accordance with shifting notions of whiteness/blackness, masculinity/femininity, and modernity/tradition. Sound therefore has world-making power- the ability to make difference sensible without direct reference to a body or the visual register. Genres of the human are therefore sounded out and heard vis-a-vis sound reproduction technologies.
The association between industrial ‘modernity’ and ‘masculinity’ made possible an insurgent ‘feminist’ subjectivity but not without fortifying a racialized division between ‘white’ ‘moderns’ and ‘indigenous’ ‘traditionals’.
The monopolization of ‘modernity’ as the time-space of ‘whiteness’ set in motion an anxiety and paranoia around a newly emancipated black subject- how was ‘blackness’ to be assimilated into ‘modernity’- ultimately fortifying a gendered division between ‘white men’ who mock and deride difference and ‘white women’ who consume difference voraciously. It is through ‘feminine’ listening that ‘tradition’ threatens the project of ‘modernity’ or the sounds of ‘savagery’ threaten the harmony of ‘civilization.’
The division between ‘modernity-civilization’ and ‘savage-tradition’ is mediated sonically vis-a-vis the phonograph. The phonograph functions as a bridge between the past and the future, and producing a multiplicity of subjectivities- while reserving industrial ‘modernity’ for (users of) the phonograph, those ‘traditionals’ captured by the phonograph- black, femme, and indigenous subjects, etc.- enter modernity as hybrid subjects. These hybrids are therefore always heard as either a civilizing of the savage (bettering the Other) or a making primitive of the modern (sullying our lot).
Properly ‘Modern’: Pre-/Non-Modern Subjects:
‘White Man’ (‘White’) Women
‘Talking Machine’ ‘Black Man’
Aural Record Indigenous People
Hybrid Moderns:
Phonograph Assisted White Woman
Black Man As White-Assisted Talking-Machine
Indigenous People As Aural Record
For participation points this week, elaborate on how these three hybrid moderns establish an equivalence between the human body and transduction technologies (how do sound reproduction technologies become essential to ideas about their humanity?) In other words, how do these constructed identities emerge as phonographic effects? (How did sound reproduction technologies alter the systems of representation for those deemed Other?)
