BLANCHOT AND THE RESONANT SPACES OF LITERATURE, SOUND, ART AND THOUGHT

Abstract

This article sets out to think through the double absence of literary language posited by Blanchot in L’Espace littéraire in the shadow (or, rather, echo) cast by a consideration of Alvin Lucier’s piece I am sitting in a room and the sound installation practice of Bernhard Leitner. What I wish to suggest is that a consideration of these sound works enables us to identify a parallelism in the mechanics of the literary sign that creates the space of literature in Blanchot and the (quasi-)phenomenological experience of the visitor entering into and thereby enacting the space of installation. If the term “phenomenological” here requires a parenthetical qualifier, this is because the double absence enacted on the sign in Blanchot is deployed here from within the visitor in the creation of the space of installation in a move that requires us to reformulate our thinking about the creation of space of all kinds. In revisiting Blanchot’s L’Espace littéraire in this way, it is suggested that the ethical and political potential of the work of art that was to occupy Blanchot ever more as his career progressed was always already present in this early work and that it is not so much that literature’s essential solitude later becomes an essential relationality but, rather, that it always was precisely this. If this is so, it is suggested, this is because for Blanchot literature is an experience of extreme passivity, the potential of which becomes apparent when thinking through Blanchot’s conceptualisation of the phenomenon of resonance.

Keywords:

• Maurice Blanchot
• Alvin Lucier
• Bernhard Leitner
• sound art
• installation art
• art theory

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

I would like to thank the guest editor of this special issue, Adam Potts, for making me go back to Blanchot when he originally approached me about this article. More than this, however, I want to thank Adam for making this a much better piece than it would have been otherwise both through his enthusiasm, sensible and pragmatic approach and, more than anything, his expert knowledge.

1 It might be objected that the development of directional sound – which is to say sound that is deployed in a field which spreads less than that emanating from natural phenomena, traditional instruments or loudspeakers – has rendered McLuhan’s theory obsolete. This is not the case, however, since directional sound only intensifies the circumscription of a sonic field that is always produced as a secondary effect of the phenomenon of acoustic attenuation that takes place as sound is propagated through a medium and loses energy as a result. The important consideration in both cases is that the field is produced as a secondary effect of the propagation of the wave and that the field or space thus has no ontological priority in relation to the wave, which is to say that it does not exist as a pre-constituted space into which an expression would then be emitted. We shall have occasion to think more about directional sound later in the next section of this paper dealing with the sound installation art of Bernhard Leitner.

2 While I claim to be going further than Benjamin here, some might object that his use of the term “criticism” could be extended out to encompass what is being described herein.