The following is an excerpt from the middle of my paper “Fugitive Sound: The Phonotext and Critical Practice,” read at the MLA convention in Vancouver, for the panel Weird Media.

–Michael Nardone

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In regard to poetry and poetry criticism, we’re in a moment of considerable or growing interest in and engagement with poetry phonotexts produced in a variety of formats. I see this growing interest mainly due to the specific format that the majority of poetry phonotexts now circulate – the MP3 – and to the specific digital collections that curate – perhaps the better word is publish – these phonotexts, such as PennSound, UbuWeb, and SpokenWeb. In addition to these collections, there have been a few critics who for years have argued for the importance of critically engaging the phonemic aspects of works, and the social and technological infrastructures that support these performances and their media. Yet, despite these digital repositories and despite the contributions of these writers, literary critical practices for engaging the sonic aspects of poetic works are still rather limited and remain largely unexplored.

An example will help illustrate these particular limitations. I’ve recently completed an essay on the American poet, composer, and multimedia artist Jackson Mac Low. The essay focuses on a specific 1971 reading by Mac Low in Montréal. During the reading, Mac Low collaborates with a up to a dozen people at once of people on his improvised, constraint-based score-poems. Mac Low is rather well-known for these kinds of multivocal and participatory performances, but what makes this performance remarkable is his other “collaborators”: 4 reel-to-reel players that he is constantly manipulating and playing throughout the performance: he actually refers to them as collaborators several times during the performance. On the four reel-to-reel players, Mac Low is playing from his personal reel-to-reel collection of his own performances. In reading one of his “Simultaneities,” Mac Low plays four distinct prior performances of the poem. In this sounded aspect of his performance, Mac Low is not simply aiming to produce a certain palimpsestual or palimtextual noise, though, throughout, there are many moments of cacophony. Instead, this practice is a way to open up the site of the performance to other collaborators, to extend and tune the acts of listening in that space and time to other spaces, other times, and to develop ways to relate and respond to those sounds in their own performance of the poem.

Examining the breadth of criticism on Mac Low’s works, one can find exceptional passages thinking through the pluriformity of a Mac Low poem, recognizing them as multimodal: the poems exist simultaneously as instructions for performance, as performance, and, often, as some kind of text-document that is produced out of performance. Here, the sonic aspects of Mac Low’s works are always acknowledged as being a crucial part of the performances, yet the sounds are not in and of themselves directly addressed. Two exceptions are found in the writings of Tyrus Miller and Hélene Aji, who detail specific performances and the concept of sound in the those works. Yet, despite the great care with which Aji and Miller discuss the sonic aspects of Mac Low’s repertoire, neither writer actually listens to the works. When they discuss the sounded elements of Mac Low’s works, they rely solely upon the scores for performance: either the poem-text or the instructions for performance. This is to say that each time Aji and Miller discuss sound in Mac Low’s works, they are writing about an abstraction of sound based upon what Mac Low intended as author and composer, as opposed to the sounds produced in performance in and of themselves. This is also to say that for all of the attention that Aji and Miller give to the specificity of Mac Low’s instructions for performance, they willfully ignore the imperative that Mac Low pronounced on numerous occasions to be his primary admonition for performance: “Listen! Listen! Listen!”

This is only one example, but this approach is very much the case in critical writings if they choose to engage with the sounded elements of poetic works in the first place.

The omission of the phonotext exposes a certain critical limit in textual scholarship as being unable to engage the pluriformity of poetic works. Even media-centred anaylses like the ones of Mac Low’s poetic repertoire insist upon the centrality of the written document, the grapheme and substrate of paper. This omission makes a certain degree of sense: Literary scholars are, after all, trained to read closely and interpret texts. Yet this reliance upon a conception of the poetic text as primarily a graphemic document, especially when considering the expanded field of poetic practice, seems an inadequate endeavor at its very outset.

So, what I want to begin to develop here is a media-centered approach to think about specific modes of textuality, inscriptions across an array of formats – here, I’m looking to Friedrich Kittler, Johanna Drucker, and Jonathan Sterne – and to combine that approach by paying close attention to writers working today at the interface of literary studies, performance studies, and black studies – Nathaniel Mackey, Fred Moten, Daphne Brooks, Alexandra T. Vazquez, in particular – who think about phonotextual production over series of lived, embodied events.

It is the latter set of writers – with particular attention to Moten –I’ll focus upon in these remaining moments – and this is a cursory sketch at the moment – and I want to do so specifically with regard to a concept of fugitivity. To do so, first, I want to route – note ROUTE, as opposed to its homonym ROOT (see Gilroy) – a concept of the fugitive back through the early history of sound recording technologies. Thomas Edison, in his initial reflection on the phonograph entitled “The Phonograph and Its Future” (1878), writes these opening sentences: “Of all the writer’s inventions, none has commanded such profound and earnest attention throughout the civilized world as has the phonograph,” then notes the “almost universal applicability” of the instrument’s “foundational principle”: “the gathering up and retaining of sounds hitherto fugitive.” Shortly thereafter, Edison lists his five “essential features of the phonograph”:

1. The captivity of all manner of sound-waves heretofore designated as “fugitive,” and their permanent retention.
2. Their reproduction with all their original characteristics at will, without the presence and consent of the original source, and after the lapse of any period of time.
3. The transmission of such captive sounds through the ordinary channels of commercial intercourse and trade in material form, for purposes of communication or as merchantable goods.
4. Indefinite multiplication and preservation of such sounds, without regard to the existence or non-existence of the original source.
5. The captivation of sounds, with or without the knowledge or consent of the source of their origin.

Counter to this idealized captivation, and against the rhetoric of enslavement and commodification of sound in which Edison steeps the dream of his phonograph’s future, Fred Moten [in his Theorizing Lecture “Black Kant (Pronounced Chant)”] imagines a “lawless phonography,” a trajectory of sound moving with “dispossesed and dispossessing fugitivity in its very anticipation of the regulative and disciplinary powers to which it responds.” Here, Moten theorizes, via Foucault, how sound is not “totally integrated into techniques that govern and administer it, it constantly escapes them.”

I see Edison’s and Moten’s articulations of the fugitive as limit cases for considering the regulation and migration of sounds and of the phonotextual object. Embedded in Edison’s techno-fantasy are actual inscriptions, though they are impermanent and format-specific retentions of not “all,” but specific and contingent characteristics of performance. The sound recording instrument itself is a part – in certain instances, a collaborator, in others, a warden – of that performance’s reiterations. Here, one could imagine Edison’s machine-centered perspective as a precursor to Kittler’s own writings on sound recording technologies, writings that are exceptionally important for their scrutiny of how and what machines are actually doing, yet fraught for their notable absence of the political economy and the cultural practices in which the machines are produced and used.

At the core of Moten’s notion of fugitive sound is an acknowledgment of differential inscriptions, a sense of inscription that is technological, and also affective, embodied. Yet, there are inscriptions; there is a capture: there needs to be a mark, a marking, a marked body for a sound to resound. Here – in beginning to construct notions of a phonocritcal practice –one might ask: What is inscribed? How is it inscribed? What exceeds a specific inscription, and what are the means by which it is exceeded. To bring this back to poetry sound recordings, here, one is reminded that the phonotextual object is a record of – and a record produced by – dynamic living agents. To perform a poem is not simply to ossify one’s voice to the record, but to lay down your voice in the hopes of being revisited, or being revised (see Vazquez).

In Moten’s emphasis to depict the cultural techniques by which sound-waves are captured – how they are “governed and administered,” to use his own terms – in some occasions “without consent,” to use Edison’s repeated phrase – one confronts a politics of recording and recorded sound that ought to be a point of reflection for any critical engagement with a phonotextual object. Who is recorded? How is it recorded? What is the subject of the recording’s relationship to those who are recording and the technologies they are using to record? So, again, to bring this back to the poetry sound recording, this is an interesting point to think about institutions that produce and archive the recordings – there is a big difference between PennSound or Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room and, say, Andrew Kenower’s A Voicebox, a collection of recordings that is not financially supported in any way and emerges out of a very specific non-institutional space of community poetry readings, and I think this is something that needs to be considered further, and is simply one of many points to think about in terms of the regulation of sounds.