Deleted expletives: Vibration and the modernist vocal imaginary

Abstract

Recent considerations of sound, music, voice and noise have opened up alternatives to what has been characterised as the ‘death circuit’ of modernity, polarised between ‘the disembodied voice of mass communications, and the non-vocal, non-sounding, anaerobic voice of the mind’.1 These approaches often depict western modernity as beset by a cultural desiccation of the moist and fecund sonic ecologies to be found in other cultures and historical epochs. Whilst a re-engagement with the thinking through vibration, as it were, that emerged in the nineteenth century has produced more complex and contradictory accounts of the emergence of the modern sensorium, it remains the case that bodies and expressive individualism have been, to a significant extent, displaced from their previous humanistic centrality. Instead, this revised history situates the human organism as a relay in the transmission of more or less impersonal energies, which are in turn harnessed to the prosthetic expansion of human communicative capacities through technologies such as the phonograph, telephone and their digital progeny.