Abstract

     The metaphors through which we model knowledge are not just rhetorical ornaments, but shaping principles which affect how we understand, value and deploy knowledge, and even why we conduct research. These metaphors affect how different topics of research are valorised, and how research is written up, stored and used. It is a cliché of cultural analysis and commentary that the age of print displaced the age of orality, privileging sight over sound. An epistemological model of the ear was replaced by that of the eye. The idea of the modern era as a regime of surveillance has enjoyed transdisciplinary authority through writers from Foucault to Mulvey.

     I am arguing that scopism is to a great extent in the eye of the beholder. The experience, the creation, consumption, dissemination, and the record of culture, have been increasingly pervaded by the aural since the beginning of the 19th C, with a sudden, exponential after-burner jolt from the late 19th C. I am suggesting that ocularcentric thinking and discourse, which still enjoy academic and scholarly hegemony, might not be the most resonant way to explore cultural shifts which to a significant extent involved, and were experienced as, rising levels of noise. Perhaps it is useful to attempt to hear rather than read the record, and at the same time to attend to the way sound is represented.

     Noise defines the sensory experience of urban modernity. And it also enters the written record of that experience more pervasively than our fixation on visual documentation might lead us to expect. As part of current research I am exploring the hypothesis that the literature of the nineteenth century discloses the city and its crowds as becoming less 'legible' and more 'audible'. Hearing is a key to understanding the modern city. The urbanisation of the modern world has also raised its volume and pluralised its voices, and at a rate far more rapid than any scribal hand could cope with.

     Over the same period, the very act of recording experience and disseminating that record emerges from the silence of that secular scriptorium which was the schoolroom, the office, the study. Stenographic technology transformed the acoustics of scribal sites, its noise became the inescapable and constant reminder of the technologisation of knowledge. This related to gender politics: the scrivener was usually male, while the very word ‘typist’ meant female. Women with informational machine guns replaced the old male scribes with their silent weapons. Writing, that had been a silent regime that established ascendancy over sounded utterance, became a site of sound, and of emancipation.