Din, Dazzle and Blur: Noise, Information and the Senses in Early Twentieth-Century Society and Modernist Cul- Ture
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ORBIT - Online Repository of Birkbeck Institutional Theses Enabling Open Access to Birkbecks Research Degree output Din, Dazzle and Blur: Noise, Information and the Senses in Early Twentieth-Century Society and Modernist Cul- ture http://bbktheses.da.ulcc.ac.uk/15/ Version: Full Version Citation: Wraith, Matthew (2011) Din, Dazzle and Blur: Noise, Information and the Senses in Early Twentieth-Century Society and Modernist Culture. PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London. c 2011 The Author(s) All material available through ORBIT is protected by intellectual property law, including copyright law. Any use made of the contents should comply with the relevant law. Deposit guide Contact: email Din, Dazzle and Blur: Noise, Information and the Senses in Early Twentieth-Century Society and Modernist and Culture Matthew Wraith Birkbeck College University of London PhD Humanities and Cultural Studies Declaration of Authorship I hereby declare that the thesis contained herein is the sole and exclusive work of Matthew Wraith. _____________________________________________ 2 Abstract Modernity brings with it new imperatives for organising sensation into the fundamental binary poles of foreground and background, signal and noise. If there is perhaps nothing particularly new in such a division, the foreground-background division is as it were, brought to the foreground in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries by the daily incursions that the latter makes upon the former. The senses themselves become less a means of access to the outside world than the noise in the transmission and reception of the outside world. Recognising our senses means no longer recognising the forms and figures that our senses are supposed to mediate. Modernism, in a variety of different ways, plays upon this unsettled relation between our senses and the things they sense. If technology was in many ways responsible for this change – making our relation to our senses problematic by assaulting our sensory apparatus with a host of prosthetic extensions and intensifications – the technology of sensation also provided a new way of understanding both sensation and its interference. The theory of noise and information articulated by Claude Shannon at the tail end of the modernist time-grid provides the main theoretical support for my discussion. The metaphysic that the contemporary philosopher Michel Serres’ constructs around the concept of communicational noise and its application to the senses may provide a new way of understanding and interrelating some of the main theoretical staples of modernist criticism: chaos and order; time and timelessness; the individual and the universal. My thesis is organised around Sight and Sound. In Chapter One I look at noise in its ‘native’ element: that of audition. Taking as its starting point Boccioni’s 1910 painting ‘The Noise on the Street Invades the House’, I will put the painting in within its social context and look at how invasive background noise became a topic of heightened social concern. I then go on, in Chapters Two and Three to give close readings of individual authors: T.S. Eliot and James Joyce respectively, showing how urban noise is portrayed in their writings and how it affected their modes of representation. Chapters Four and Five are concerned with light and vision. Chapter four examines the idea of Dazzle: how the apparition of intense light was re-evaluated in the nineteenth and twentieth century, changing from its ancient role as the central, binding, unitary source of the visible realm, to noisy agent of disruption and corruption of vision. In Chapter Five I look at the effect of modern, industrialised speed on the eye that beholds it and the similar corrupting effects. 3 Acknowledgements I owe enormous gratitude for the unstinting support of my family to whom I continually fled in times of crisis and my flatmates who were either suffering with me or had been there before. Without the support, encouragement and tolerance they offered I would not have been able to carry this thesis through to completion. I would like to thank my supervisor Steve Connor for the kindness, help and insight he provided along the way and my colleagues at the London Consortium for being a genuine example of what all University departments claim themselves to be but rarely are to the Consortium’s extent: a ‘fertile research community’. I would like also to acknowledge the financial support I received from the Arts and Humanities Research Council for three years of my research. Last of all, a big thank you to all my friends and to Lina who kept me sane. 4 Contents Introduction The Noise on the Street and the Noise on the Line p.7 Claude Shannon and Michel Serres p.10 Noise, Time and Modernism p.24 Sight vs. Sound (and other senses) p.33 Chapter 1. The Problem of Urban Noise p.41 Chapter 2. T. S. Eliot’s Background Noise p.62 ‘The Music from a Further Room’ – The Early Poems p.68 ‘What is that Noise Now?’ – The Waste Land p.83 Eliot’s synchronised City p.94 Chapter 3. ‘A Shout in the Street’ – Joyce’s Noises p.104 ‘Nestor’ p.108 ‘Proteus’ p.113 ‘Sirens’ p.120 Finnegan’s Wake p.126 Chapter 4. Dazzle – Literature and the Visual Arts p.141 Daylight p.145 Nightlight p.165 5 Chapter 5. Blur – Literature and the Visual Arts p.181 Blurred Snapshot 1. – 1855 p.186 Blurred Snapshot 2. – 1911 p.194 Blurred Snapshot 3. – 1945 p.222 Conclusion p.235 Bibliography p.237 6 Introduction: The Noise on the Street and the Noise on the Line There was something definite and distinct about the age, which reminded her of the eighteenth century, except that there was a distraction, a desperation -- as she was thinking this, the immensely long tunnel in which she seemed to have been travelling for hundreds of years widened; the light poured in; her thoughts became mysteriously tightened and strung up as if a piano tuner had put his key in her back and stretched the nerves very taut; at the same time her hearing quickened; she could hear every whisper and crackle in the room so that the clock ticking on the mantelpiece beat like a hammer. And so for some seconds the light went on becoming brighter and brighter, and she saw everything more and more clearly and the clock ticked louder and louder until there was a terrific explosion right in her ear. Orlando leapt as if she had been violently struck on the head. Ten times she was struck. In fact it was ten o'clock in the morning. It was the eleventh of October. It was 1928. It was the present moment.1 Virginia Woolf’s Orlando enters the Twentieth Century with a shock to the senses, an inundation of light and noise. The present loses its protective cloak of comprehension and stands naked and exposed before her. The increasing clarity of her perception does not result in a happy, clean and comfortable relation to the world, but builds until it seems to turn into its opposite; it mounts to the point of a disruptive explosion of sensation, in which she is exposed to every whisper and crackle of her immediate environment. Orlando’s account of the experience of modernity, the overload of experience that modernity brought with it, is well attested to both in the writing of period itself and in more contemporary critical and socio-historical reflections. As Tim Armstrong states ‘A heightened sensitivity to sensation is central to modern experience.2’ The idea that the modern environment was one in which the citizen was accosted by an unbearable abundance of sensation was one of the major tenets of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century’s self- conception. An enormous body of works in the period testify to this. George Beard, in his work American Nervousness, Its Causes and Consequences famously popularised the 1 Virginia Woolf, Orlando (London: Vintage, 2004), p.195. 2 Tim Armstrong, Modernism (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), p.90. 7 medical category of ‘neurasthenia’ which became the modern ailment par excellence. The neurasthenic was afflicted most of all by his own environment and culture. ‘From the standpoint only of nerve-force’ he writes ‘all our civilisation is a mistake’.3 The popularity of Beard’s work led quickly to a swathe of other works that mixed medical diagnosis with cultural critique. Max Nordau and other theorists of degeneration told of the spiralling descent into a debilitating state of nervousness that the conditions of modern life had inaugurated, a spiral that engulfed the whole of the artistic endeavour of the time.4 Later, in the first decade of the Twentieth Century, Georg Simmel wrote of the need of the modern citizen of the modern metropolis to create a ‘protective organ’ to screen the incoming shocks of his frenzied and unpredictable environment.5 By the modernist period in the early years of the Twentieth Century, the senses had come to be seen as dangerous breaches in the fortifications that kept the self intact. Crucially, it is not only the subject of perception that became liable to interference from the senses in the period, but also the object. The assault on the senses did more than endanger the physical constitution of body of the modernist subject, but also the singularity and unity of his chosen perceptual object in the outside world. Jonathan Crary’s huge work Suspensions of Perception sees the central motivating conflict within the modernist period as that between attention and distraction, the need on the part of capital in particular to channel the collective consciousness of the population, and the equal and opposite potential for the dispersal of perception that capital and its technologies wreaked on that same population.