Turning The Century

Essays In Media And Cultural Studies

Carol Stabile

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429983030
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The essays in Turning the Century make a significant contribution to our understanding of America's love affairs with novelty and the mass media. The essays also show that neither the current communications revolution nor the response to it is unprecedented. Through this book, Carol Stabile provides a historical context within which scholars and students of American culture can interpret and understand end-of-the-millennium-fever --particularly, the claims of politicians, pundits, and even cultural studies scholars who maintain that recent information technology innovations make the present moment unique. Contemporary studies of mass media and popular culture reflect a similar emphasis on what is new, distinct, and therefore specific to contemporary culture. Claims of millennial transformation, however, are only possible insofar as the history of mass media can be forgotten or ignored. In Turning the Century, Carol Stabile analyzes those hidden, and now all but forgotten, conditions and relations of production that continue to shape and inform contemporary culture.

1

Sound Out of Time: Modernity’s Echo

JONATHAN STERNE

A phonograph industry periodical no doubt hoping to amuse its readers printed this report of racial difference in the spring of 1897:

Long Island City has placed nickel in the slot machines at the train station. Lately one of these machines played the popular negro melody ‘All Coons Look Alike to Me’ to a genuine Alabama coon, and those who were in the station at the time will not soon forget this little concert, although none but the coon heard a note of the music.

It was at a popular train hour and the station was thronged with people, when a typical Southern darkey sauntered into the building. A long blue frock coat, a pair of light trousers which went almost twice around him and were well fringed at the bottoms, a broad-brimmed, grease coated felt hat which had once been of a light color, and an odd pair of number 12 shoes, made up a costume which inspired a smile all ’round before he had a chance to say a word or do a thing. As the boys say charcoal would have made a white mark on his face and his ears were all that stopped his mouth from going clean around his head.

Mr. Darkey jerked a huge brass watch out of one of his trouser pockets, pried the case open and compared it with the big regulator in the station. Satisfied that he had some time to while away, he began to look around and see the sights.

After a couple of turns around the station, he brought up in front of one of the phonographs. He evidently mistook the thing for a corn sheller judging from the way in which he twisted the crank, but the more he twisted the more mystified he became. At last his curiosity got the best of whatever timidity he may have had and he hailed one of the doormen, who was passing, and inquired as to the nature of the machine.

The darkey’s big white eyes began to roll and his mouth flew open in amazement as the doorman unfolded the working plan of the machine and he decided to invest a nickel. The coin was dropped into the slot and with the trumpets jammed against his ears the Alabamian braced himself for whatever might follow. “Whir-r-r” went the machine after its usual preparatory fashion, and the darkey got a better brace. There was another whir-r-r and an idea struck him. He removed one of the trumpets from his ears and shouted into it ‘sing louder, I can’t hear.’ Then the machine began to sing and none of the crowd which was watching the darkey could be deceived as to the exact time it began. His eyes glistened and danced in their sockets. His mouth gradually spread itself all over his face. Big drops of perspiration trickled down from under his hat and way down on the floor the big shoes begin to show signs of life. Finally his whole body was in a wiggle and even the big yellow rose on his lapel seemed to have become animated also. But it was too good to last. The end came and the darkey nearly collapsed.

“Say, boss, is dat all dar is to it fo’ a nickel?” he asked of the doorman.

“Yes, but you can put in another and have it all over again,” answered the man in the brass buttons.

“Golly! dat’s what I’se goin’ to do,” chirped the delighted darkey, and he fished another coin out of the mysterious depths of those trousers’ pockets and fed it to the machine.

There was a repetition of the whir-r-r, a repetition of the song and a repetition of the circus for the spectators. Trains came in and trains went out but the darkey stuck to that machine. Nickel after nickel was freely fed into the greedy slot and it is not improbable that when the old brass watch ran down he was still doing a shuffle to the tune ‘All Coons Look Alike to Me.’¹

Moments like this might appear to be neatly contained in long trajectories of racist iconography in writing, imaging, and music. They also might appear to contemporary readers—perhaps as comfortable in their own “modern” sophistication as the unnamed observer in this tale—as something of a shock from the past, a kind of aberration to be gotten over. And although both reactions are to a certain degree valid—we should contextualize this description among other similar descriptions, and we should want to move beyond a brutally racist past and present—I believe documents like this also offer another kind of historical insight. One could easily find a hundred similar racial caricatures from this moment in American middle-class culture; but this racist representation of difference is centered on the writer’s fascination with the encounter between cultural other and a phonograph. The description is framed by the perspective of a contemporary and contemplative observer, sophisticated enough to be familiar with and unsurprised by the workings of a coin-in-the-slot phonograph, and self-consciously cosmopolitan enough to notice someone else’s lack of such familiarity. The text goes into great descriptive detail—essentially, parodying anthropological style—exploring the listener’s reactions, gestures, and postures. Though meant as light reading for people in the entertainment business, the article clearly bespeaks a fascination with others’ fascination with the apparatus of sound reproduction. The roots of that fascination lie in the twisted connections between the phonograph in the story and the understanding of racial difference on which the story is based, a set of connections that this chapter retraces.

When read through the cultural history of sound reproduction, alongside the larger cultural history of racism, the phonograph in this and similar tales simultaneously referenced a certain sense of modernity for its relatively well-off, middle-class users at the turn of the twentieth century, through two related em-bodiments of time: (1) a sense of present time as objectifiable, repeatable, and exchangeable; and (2) a sense of historical time as linear and all-encompassing. As a result, early users of the phonograph could experience sound recording as both bolstering an already present self-understanding as “modern” (since it could be located as the latest step in a long history of technological progress) and a way of marking and containing the difference between their own self-understanding as “modern” and their understandings of cultural others such as African Americans or Native Americans as “nonmodern.” The extract quoted above is but one example of how the connection between the phonograph and this very particular sense of temporality in effect marked and delineated the difference between the “modern” and the “nonmodern” for their readers.

Because the phonograph was so thoroughly embedded in particular cultural understandings of time by its early users, it could be experienced as moving sound out of time through a double temporal movement: first through isolating and objectifying a sound event and then through transposing it, so that the voices of the “modern”—people thought to be inhabiting an unavoidable future— could be brought to the “primitive,” and so that the voices of the “primitive,” ever receding into the past, could be preserved for the future listening experiences of the “modern.”

“Modernity” here should be understood as a highly particularized construct. In this chapter, I defer the larger philosophical questions concerning “modernity” as an analytic or descriptive term (and leave open the question of whether you or I should or could describe something as “modern”) and turn instead to an analysis of modernity as a form of self-understanding manifested—sometimes only implicitly—in early uses and depictions of sound reproduction technology. Early users were framed as quintessentially modern and up-to-date through their use of these machines; the machines were proof of their owners’ modernity. Commercial representations of sound reproduction technologies played to this sensibility: AT&T Long Distance signs were advertised as “the sign board of civilization”; the Orthophonic Victrola was a “really modern instrument”; radio receivers were “essential conveniences of modern life.”²

Yet it was not simply their status as commodities that bound up sound reproduction technologies’ conceptualization as modern; after all, the description of a product in early twentieth-century advertisements as “modern” was hardly unique to sound reproduction technologies. Rather, their particular modernity was a result of the combination of bourgeois understandings of time and of the basic function of sound reproduction technologies at the turn of the twentieth century. Throughout this essay, I use the words modern and primitive to denote the understandings of “self” and “other” that were operative among middle-class users of the phonograph at the turn of the twentieth century, and not as objective descriptions of periods or people. The very concept of modernity is a social artifact susceptible to historical analysis—a project to which this chapter contributes.

The so-called modernity of sound reproduction technologies was framed through the machines’ perceived ability to move sound out of time, and in so doing to cross over between modern and nonmodern time in the minds of those observers who considered themselves modern. Contrary to others who argue that the phonograph—as a machine that “amplified and extended sound across space and/or time”³—brought about a revolution in temporal sensibility in turn-of-the-century American and west European culture, I argue that early users essentially built the phonograph into the machine it was and experienced its mechanical manipulation of vibrations the way they did because of an already highly developed sense of temporality. In other words, the phonograph did not transform bourgeois senses of time. It was itself a tributary element in what Matei Calinescu (1987) calls bourgeois modernity—a culturally specific sense of time linked to middle-class self-understandings that predated sound recording and clearly informed even the most rudimentary understandings of the machine’s workings at the turn of the twentieth century.

In order to develop this thesis, this chapter first offers a brief discussion of the concepts of “modern” and “primitive” in their historical contexts before turning to examine in turn (1) an enduring fascination with watching people who are understood as primitives listening to sound reproduction technologies and (2) the desire to preserve the voices of “primitive” cultures for future, “modern” listeners, through the emergent practice of anthropological sound recording at the turn of the twentieth century.

Bourgeois Modernity as a Form of Self-Consciousness

I have argued thus far that although contemporaries understood the new technologies of sound reproduction as evidence or agent of those individuals’ own (and possibly others’) modernization, we would do better to consider sound reproduction technologies as artifacts of particular moments in culture and society. Following the work of Henri Lefebvre,⁴ who argues that any theory of the modern requires a critique of the ideology of the modern, in this chapter I critique the former conceptualization of sound reproduction—as agent or emblem of modernization—via the latter conceptualization, in the service of clearing the ground for a new theory of sound and modernity.⁵

Modernity—even when used in specific reference to self-description or self-consciousness—suggests several different, contradictory tendencies. It is a notoriously difficult term to define. For the purposes of this essay, Matei Calinescu’s phrase bourgeois modernity best captures the sense of modernity I describe.⁶ This sensibility is not so much a formalized set of concepts as a practical self-understanding— “a logic of practice,” in the words of Pierre Bourdieu.⁷ Bourgeois modernity is defined by the rise of middle-class self-consciousness in industrial capitalism:

The doctrine of progress, the confidence in the beneficial possibilities of science and technology, the concern with time (a measurable time, a time that can be bought and sold and therefore has, like any other commodity, a calculable equivalent in money), the cult of reason, and the ideal of freedom defined within the framework of an abstract humanism, but also the orientation toward pragmatism and the cult of action and success—all have been associated in various degrees with the battle for the modern and were kept alive and promoted as key values in the triumphant civilization established by the middle class.⁸

Bourgeois modernity hails the existence of a sense of the present that Jacques Attali calls “exchange time”: Time becomes something measurable, something that can be apprehended and felt, stockpiled, repeated, spent, saved, broken, fragmented, or mended.⁹ Yet this sense of the present immediately collides with linear-progressive “historical time, linear and irreversible, flowing irresistibly onwards.”¹⁰

Bourgeois modernity implies a temporalized understanding of cultural difference: It implies the historical superiority of “modern” civilization (which is generally urb...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Sound Out of Time: Modernity’s Echo
• 2 Maintaining the Order of Things: Class, the Gospel of Scientific Efficiency, and the Invention of Policy Expertise in America, 1865–1921
• 3 Sensationalism, Objectivity, and Reform in Turn-of-the-Century America
• 4 “All Love Making Scenes Must Be Normal”: Pennsylvania Movie Censorship in the Progressive Era
• 5 Only Flossy, High-Society Dudes Would Smoke ’Em: Gender and Cigarette Advertising in the Nineteenth Century
• 6 Trotting Horses and Moving Pictures: A Sporting View of Early Cinema
• 7 “Girls Who Come to Pieces”: Women, Cosmetics, and Advertising in the Ladies’ Home Journal, 1900–1920
• 8 Race Betterment and Class Consciousness at the Turn of the Century, or Why It’s Okay to Marry Your Cousin
• 9 Conspicuous Whiteness: The New Woman, the Old Negro, and the Vanishing Past of Early Brand Advertising
• 10 Constructions of Violence: Labor, Capital, and Hegemonic Struggle in the Pullman Strike of 1894
• Afterword
• About the Editor and Contributors
• Index