Windbags and Skinsongs 8: Conclusion

Windbags and Skinsongs

9. Conclusion

The answer to Marsyas’s question – ‘why do you tear me from myself?’ – is that Marsyas dies as a victim of the desire for Apollonian distinction and autonomy, which must always have a subject and an object, a player and an instrument. But we have seen that the very multiplicity of Marsyas’s appearances and revivals asserts a copulative commixture. Grafted and extended as it is into the stories of so many other sounding skins, and imaged not just as plane, screen or surface, but as a sounding volume, the skin of Marsyas portends the complex topology of contemporary intermedial relations. Since the work of Marshal McLuhan in the 1960s, the struggles and relations between different media or technologies have been seen in terms of the different sense modalities. According to this model, the senses are mapped on to the different media: the hand with the pen, stylus and keyboard, the ear with the telephone, phonograph and radio and the eye with the camera and the screen. Thus the history of technologies and media which is currently being so energetically undertaken in so many areas is accompanied by an investigation of the cultural history of the senses. We tend to think of these different media either opposing each other, or complementing each other, as though one piece of equipment were being bolted on to another, or one piece of territory being added to another. In either case, the sense, or medium, or technology in question is regarded as inhabiting its own demarcated area in space, as though there were some common ground or substrate upon which they rested.. However, at times of convergence or general aggregation such as ours, new, more dynamic relationships began to become visible, not only in our present, but in the past.

Media and mediation suggest that which comes between or moves across spaces and places. But what is the location in or at which the meeting of the spatial media of the eye – the image and the text – and the nonspatial media of the ear, composed not of shape and space but of duration and intensity – take place? On whose ground does the meeting or mediation of eye and ear, or, come to that, ear, nose and throat, take place, that of the eye, or that of the ear? Perhaps the skin, or the surprisingly composite sonorous skin I have been examining in this chapter, which is not wholly in the grip of the eye, the ear, or even the hand, is most apt to be recruited to this role, providing the milieu in which the mingled body of the intermedial is shaped.

The skin can provide this topological repertoire, as well as the idea of a plane projection because, as has often been noted, it is the most mingled or intersensory organ. The skin is that of us which is presented to the eye, and our picturings of ourselves and of the world have often been borne and borne out too on one or another kind of skin. But the skin also includes, scooped or coiled within it, all the other organs of sense. The skin is both surface and depth. If skins are the favoured surfaces for inscription of text and image, a kind of primal bodily correlate for every kind of page, canvas or screen, then skins, membranes and diaphragms have also been the favoured forms in which sound has been both gathered and transmitted. Since the inauguration of the era of stored and reproducible sound in the late nineteenth century, it has been various kinds of sensitive surface which have furnished the mnemonic supports for sounds – in tinfoil cylinders, shellac or vinyl disks, ribbons of tape, magnetic or digital, and the exquisitely untouchable surfaces of the CD. Of course, digitisation may appear to have dispensed with the need for this kind of sensitive skin as a carrier of sound, for sound can now be encoded as a string of integers. But touch is liable to linger and make unexpected returns in the imagination of sound. Laurie Anderson introduced in performances of her Songs and Stories From Moby Dick a 'sound-stick', which was part crutch, part harpoon, and part fiddle-bow. A process that she calls 'granulation' allowed different pitches and timbres to be as it were distributed over the surfaces of the stick, so that sounds could be drawn out by the friction of her hands, as though a violin were to play its bow. The effect resembled that conveyed by other apparently virtual or bodiless instruments, such as the theremin, which the performer plays by generating sound waves by movements of his hands in the air, and the hypercello, which one can similarly play by sawing at thin air. These may be thought of as reversals of the Aeolian harp, that favourite Romantic instrument, which consists of strings designed to be played by the air; in the theremin and the hypercello, it is the air itself which seems to be being played. Perhaps behind all these actual and imaginary membranes of sound is the thought of the delicate tympanum of the ear, which vibrates to the impact of sound-waves and also transmits them inwards: the thought of a sounding ear, intimated to a resonating eye.