Radiophonic Ontologies and the Avantgarde
1996; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 40; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/1146549
ISSN1531-4715
Autores Tópico(s)French Literature and Poetry
ResumoFor Artaud, expression does not have the same value twice, does not two lives; [...] all words, once spoken, are ([1938] 1958:75), and this unwholesome aspect of language, when coupled with the incantatory and vibratory properties of radio, propels what Allen Weiss, in an essay on the work of Gregory Whitehead, describes as the project of radio art: Radiophonic art is guided by the serendipity of a fata morgana, the bewildering, aleatory process of recuperating and rechanneling the lost voice (1995:79). That is, in the one ear, we have the poststructuralist scenario (inaugurated by the scenographemes of Artaud), in which meaning progresses noisily, without stable referent, as one word cannot double or replicate another in intent, force, meaning, or effect. Yet, in the other ear, in its struggle to rechannel loss, the art of radiophony attempts to circuit language back to some original, predictable, even replicable source in the living human body, even though this circuit is formed by chance operations in an illusory referential system. In Whitehead's Dead Letters (1994), postal clerks in the dead letter office become an apt subject for the radio artist, as they echo this serendipitous rechanneling of loss in their quixotic attempts to resuscitate nixies and redirect them towards their intended, living addressees. The art of radio, like Luigi Russolo's Art of Noise, is invested in choosing, coordinating, and dominating all noises, [...] enriching mankind with a new unsuspected voluptuousness ([1911] I986:I71), paradoxically recuperating the referent without mimetically reproducing life. Reproduced mechanically or mimetically, life is actually death, a paradox that is most obvious in the live aesthetics of broadcast media:
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