The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction

Jonathan Sterne. Duke Univ. Press, Durham, NC, U.S.A., 2003. 472 pp., illus. Paper. ISBN: 0-8223-3013-X.

Reviewed by Michael Punt

Mpunt@easynet.co.uk

The apparent emphasis on human vision in popular philosophy, art, science and technology has skewed our understanding of contemporary culture as the historical product a veritable frenzy of the visible (to use J. L. Comolli’s famous phrase). Added to this the availability of the visual record, particularly after 1850, and it is little wonder that the history of society and vision were collapsed into a cultural study of modernism which begins to have a ring of truth. There are a number of consequences of this that some historians have become uncomfortable about. Barbara Maria Stafford, for example has tried to untangle the double bind that has driven the image into a cul de sac of its own success. Stafford’s tack is to rethink our critical tools. Jonathan Crary’s revisionist history of vision and photography also changes the cultural analyst’s tool kit by examining image technologies in relation to the historicisation of vision and observation. Marvellous and insightful as their interventions are, it is depressing to discover how little has changed in the last decade, and how often the same (borrowed) shorthand from visual culture is used by academics as they colonise popular artefacts. There is clearly work to be done, and Jonathan Sterne heroically steps into this battlefield on two fronts. The first is to put sound back into history, to dispel the dubious litany that visual culture has recited when forced to factor it into to theory and history (as for example in Film Studies). The second is to gather up some of the more provocative and interesting methodologies from literary criticism and cultural studies and to write his history of sound from within a history of the senses. In the pursuit of these aims The Audible Past is indeed a valiant effort which deserves attention if only as a source book for those intent on picking up the standard and following him into the field. Indeed anything that draws attention to the way that a history of vision has been reified in order to repress consideration of all the other senses (including the ‘sixth, seventh and eighth’ senses) is worth attending to.

Quite possibly because the struggle to change the agenda is so dispersed through time and space, the management of the historical data and the subtleties of the argument is notoriously difficult. In this book, at times, it appears that there are many enemies in the field all of whom must be dispatched at simultaneously and Sterne swipes and out-manoeuvres them leaving the onlooker somewhat breathless and battle fatigued. It makes it a difficult read which is a great pity given the value of the project to the humanities and the extent of the research that underpins it.

The Audible Past includes a twenty page bibliography. This is in itself a useful resource for researchers but at times its difficult to know why some material is included when, clearly, it has no impact on the argument or its progress. As with the body of the text some draconian editing would have been valuable to the reader anxious to understand the intervention that is being made. As it is, one often feels that the text will collapse under its own weight engulfing both the reader and the laudable objective alike. Any single chapter in The Audible Past would, given more ‘air’, have made a good book, as it is a great deal of work needs to be done by the reader dismissing repetitions while at the same time unpacking excessively dense phrases.

The enormity of the problem confronting Sterne may be an inevitable effect of the compliance of the seamless image to the fracturing routines of language. This in itself has led to the seductions of the routines of literary criticism in the study of culture which have little purchase on the other senses in which complex continuity across dimensions is a given. Consequently the stakes are high and often it seems that in considering sound, the determining impact of language on perception is also under scrutiny. Indeed Sterne’s key move is to recast his enquiry around the technological reproduction of hearing rather than the habitual history of sound recording. In doing so he insists that sound is essentially embodied vibrations. The Audible Past is a valuable contribution in an important field of research that is in dire need of development, it provides excellent material for other scholars to follow up, but as a self-standing champion of the need to rethink the privilege of the visual in cultural analysis, it is unlikely to engage many of the unconverted who will return to old habits and repeat the dubious litany rather than wrestle with the text.