Ethical life and musical texture can both be characterized in terms of relationships between particulars and between any given particular and one or more gestalts. When Elliott Carter writes that his fourth String Quartet mirrors ‘the democratic attitude in which each member of a society maintains his or her own identity while cooperating in a common effort’; or when the critic André Hodeir states that it is of ‘the very essence’ of Louis Armstrong's ‘much less purely collective’ Hot Five's playing that ‘Armstrong's personality absorbs the others’ so that ‘your attention’ is ‘spontaneously concentrated on Louis’; or when F. W. Murnau describes the ‘relationship’ between ‘objects’ and ‘characters’ on a screen as a relationship between ‘units in the symphony of the film’ – in all these cases an aesthetic claim, a claim about how a texture in the musical sense of the term appears, has already been mingled with a political claim about the nature of one form of ethical life or another.Footnote 1 Twentieth-century writings are full of references to textured voices, a term I will use to refer both to voices which are heard as interpolated into a texture and to voices which are heard as having their own textured character, whether as a ‘voice’ with a ‘timbre’ made up, as Helmholtz argued long ago,Footnote 2 of many parts, or as a ‘collective voice’ with a ‘composite timbre’ made up of many voices, each one textured itself. These references cannot help but function as claims about ethical life.
Yet in theory at least, their functions might be extremely varied. Glibly listing some descriptions of textures in a series of quotations taken more or less at random will not get us very far towards determining what various key terms – democracy, attitude, society, identity, collectivity, essence, personality, attention, relationship, object, character, unit – have accomplished in specific instances. Carter's ‘democratic attitude’, to take a relatively straightforward example, is not a democratic attitude writ large and outside history, but rather a specific set of interdependent understandings of commonality and identity. His String Quartet No. 4 acquires its transparency at least in part by avoiding homorhythmic or even metrical textures – the sustained harmonies of the ‘Lento’ may be relatively dense and blended, but each voice's attacks and releases are staggered irregularly relative to those of the others so that the defining properties of one line are neither lost inside another's nor absorbed by the quartet as a whole. In this way, each individuated voice is able to shine forth in all its plenitude for the all-hearing listener; its ‘identity’ is holy, set apart from and not masked by the ‘common effort’, measured al tempo stesso, in which it is made to participate. Contingencies have a way of accumulating in cases such as this: textured voices made up of textured voices, each one defined by its own shifting relationships with others, with listeners and other participants (performers or composers, for example), and with variable forms of ethical life, could conceivably come in a daunting variety of shapes. I am not the first to observe that where a ‘texture’ is involved, the results can be unpredictable; undoubtedly this is part of the appeal of textural terms for discussions of the ‘socio-economic’ and the musical.Footnote 3 To make matters still more difficult, for Carter and for the audience he evidently believed he was addressing, the ‘democratic attitude’ was apparently so self-evident and so self-evidently desirable that any careful description of it or explicit assertion of its desirability, let alone any critical account, would have seemed superfluous.
Rather than merely evaluate such a statement from outside, comparing it with other statements, a critic must be able to work through its formal complexity to see what makes it tick. The initial question is not, ‘Is this a realistic depiction of ethical life?’ or even strictly ‘How does this depiction compare with other depictions?’ – although that second question is never entirely avoidable and can be stated more explicitly as criticism progresses through its increasingly ‘systematic’ stages – but rather, ‘How does this performance of ethical life work, for whom, and why?’ An ample secondary literature has already demonstrated that textural qualities have been important for the ‘modern listener’ since the mid-nineteenth century and particularly important for audiences listening to ‘popular music’ since the Second World War.Footnote 4 My goal here is to use a particular case study to make more explicit some of the political and ethical dimensions of the textural. Textured voices, as such, are both produced within and productive of varied and complex forms of ethical life. A listener who hears a texture – a textural listener practising textural listening – is not necessarily hearing, as if on an aural canvas, a representation of society. In a sense, listening for texture serves as one means of entering and thereby producing a particular form of ethical life, whether or not this production proceeds as if from the standpoint of an observer listening to an aural canvas. How a texture sounds for a particular listener listening in a particular way has a great deal to do with what it feels like to participate in that particular form. Even to refer to ‘ethical life’ in the first place is already to begin speaking to readers’ varied beliefs about what it means to live as a ‘political animal’.
To appreciate such a dense particularity from the inside, this article discusses a specific instance in which capital and labour, mediated by conflicting and ambivalent desires, were ‘put to work’ to shape textured voices. Two phantasmagoric cartoons published by TV Guide in the summer of 1966, accompanied by a pair of explanatory articles by Dick Hobson, make a feverish effort to sort through a deeply contradictory ethical life (see Plates 1 and 2).Footnote 5 Invoking an almost Hegelian narrative of freedom and terror, the artist Arnold Roth uses a two-part narrative to produce the contradictions of a ‘Laff Box’ performed upon by ‘Laff Boys’: what appears in the first image as a motley musical instrument emerges from some horrific transformation as the oppressive, univocal, autonomous machine of the second image. On one level, the illustrations and articles work simply as a behind-the-scenes look at skilled labourers fine-tuning ‘extra-musical’ sitcom laugh tracks. Yet in the process of using musical terms and images, they also draw relationships among various actors, including machines, performers, writers, technicians, audiences, and television network executives. Inevitably, they stumble upon the naked injustice of an uneven distribution of power whereby executives retain the final say in what gets broadcast over their network, and, then, the nightmare creature of the panicked second illustration rears its ugly head, seizes individual listeners, and violently tickles them one by one. These cartoons might therefore seem like a fairly straightforward example of a case in which an aesthetic, a way of perceiving, became involved in an ideology or an understanding of the political. Politically conscious musicologists might even see something of their own work in these illustrations – here is a depiction of a musical practice at work in a ‘social context’, if ever there will be one. However, I will show that the aesthetic these cartoons trained readers to practise was politically contradictory through and through. Readers were taught by TV Guide to attend to traces left by the deft weavers of laugh tracks. It did so in part by describing the varied modes of perception involved in the production of a finished laugh track – the purposeful appraisal of network executives, the highly skilled, corporeal involvement of a virtuosic Laff Boy with headphones and score, the disgruntled boredom of another Laff Boy waiting for his shift. Yet if the way of listening proposed by TV Guide might have compelled readers to pay more attention to the heterogeneous relationships involved in a complex system of industrial production, it might likewise have performed an aestheticizing detachment distinguishing the sophisticated TV Guide reader's godlike ‘perspective of perspectives’ from the naive viewing practices of lowly, easily manipulated masses without even a TV Guide subscription to guide them in their listenings.Footnote 6
What exactly actual readers learned from this set of didactic publications or how they actually applied its lessons to their own lives are issues I can only address speculatively by grounding possibilities in the relatively sparse and heterogeneous collection of artefacts I have assembled here. Hobson himself, as I will show below, cites at least two conflicting ideas regarding the lesson people were supposed to take from the situation being depicted, and it is hard to believe that many observers found either alternative especially practical or ‘realistic’ – where one commentator wholeheartedly embraces the laugh track as a practice productive of a new community, another calls for its abolition as an instrument of manipulation. Lending ‘equal weight’ to ‘both sides’ of this ambivalence might only have obscured alternatives unknown to the antagonism determined by TV Guide. As far as the rich secondary literature dealing with the ways that historical audiences have actually listened to television and radio is concerned,Footnote 7 this article is merely supplemental and speculative.
My concern is instead with Roth and Hobson's depiction of a political or ethical situation in which textural listening has a great deal to hear. I am claiming that an extant representation of an ‘extra-musical’ practice is relevant to the historical study of music not because anyone suggested that the laugh track ‘is music’ – whatever that is for whomever – but because Hobson and Roth both depicted the manufacture of laugh tracks ‘as musical’. People were being taught to listen to the laugh track in a musical way as a textured sound, and what I want to discuss is why listening for a musically textured sound might have been expected to matter for a particular audience in a particular instance. Taking the time to discuss the political work textural listening might have performed in one situation should leave us better prepared to discuss a range of ‘musical’ – in narrower or broader senses of the term – texts in which textures have functioned as performances of ethical life and where some sort of textural listening has been called upon to perform political work.
Since the particularity of any instance has to be read for or produced by a particular observer, we have nothing to lose from getting started by reading widely and unsystematically. Over the course of this article, I will discuss listeners who, independently of a sometimes antagonistic classical training, privileged detail, presumed a corporeity wherein materials and bodies are blended into the same continuous plane, called attention to extremes of temporal duration ranging from fractions of a second measured in frames of film to ‘Mega-Years’ (Nam June Paik's term) comprising centuries, and, perhaps most importantly, described a topological ‘total sound-space’ (John Cage's term) in which music does not so much occupy a social context as it extends through that context to such a degree that it is not clear where the context ends and the ‘music itself’ begins.Footnote 8 I am using the term ‘textural listening’ as a shorthand for the way of listening recognizable in these heterogeneous characteristics. Reading these characteristics as characteristics of textural listening – rather than as random, unrelated ways of listening – has allowed me to produce a dialectic of surface and depth (see next section). I speak of a ‘dialectic’ in this case because the surface and the depth discussed in my sources can be seen mediating or producing one another. If textural listeners as such privilege a textured surface, theirs often seems to be less a ‘pure’ surface than a surface haunted by its own depth. Once we have learned from reading other texts to watch for this haunting, we will be better prepared to observe the crucial role it plays in Roth's cartoons.
Ways of listening privileging detail, corporeity, extremes of temporal duration, and topological spaces hardly ‘originated’ in the mid-twentieth century,Footnote 9 nor does this article go very far towards a systematic study of textural listening as a neatly defined whole. I hope that others will find the dialectic of surface and depth I produce in these pages helpful as they work on studies of various sorts. But as far as ‘theory’ is concerned, for now I do not go much further than to sketch one isolated pathway through the diverse sayings and doings of a few textural listeners. A deeper historical perspective might be used to show how textural listening developed both as a response to and as a constitutive aspect of the changing institutions and practices characteristic of a rolling capitalist modernity. The history of science, philosophy, industry, labour, communications, art, music, entertainment – in short, the history of most of social life over the last two hundred years – can hardly be understood without an appreciation of the ways in which the human senses came to be flattened out into a single material-corporeal plane stretching without interruption through the perceiver's mind and body and through the infinitely detailed phenomena of the physical world.Footnote 10 Any account of these developments must deal with both aesthetics and politics if only because distinct parties with conflicting ends have manipulated their newly discovered or invented corporeity.Footnote 11
Yet although I read across a sparse and loosely defined literature here without the aid of a rigorous theoretical apparatus, my main interest is narrowly defined: I want to talk about how various representations of the imaginary relationships that individuals have with their real conditions of existence – to paraphrase Althusser's description of ideologies – could have been mediated by a small set of cartoons, writings, and audible texts.Footnote 12 The particular confluence of historical conditions that concerns me here is that of the meeting between textural listening and the United States’ proletarian middle class of the postwar decades. This term will require some explanation.Footnote 13 As the New Left historian E. P. Thompson puts it in The Making of the English Working Class (Reference Thompson1963), class is not a static thing, a ‘structure’, or a ‘category’, but rather ‘something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships’.Footnote 14 One of the things that happened in the case of the proletarian middle class was a peculiar experience of being both in the middle and on the bottom. To the extent that the conditions of this experience can be set before us, the proletarian middle class can be shown to have been happening, however imperfectly. Textural listening, with its dialectic of surface and depth, could have become a part of this process by fulfilling a task or a set of tasks.
Texture as surface and depth
Before ‘texture’ in its musical sense was reduced to a bland umbrella term comprising much older terms such as monophony, homophony, and polyphony, the word served for at least a short while in discussions of musical practices not easily described with established vocabularies.Footnote 15 Jonathan Dunsby, in his well-researched discussion of musical texture, finds no uses of the term in its musical sense from before 1930, and I have not been able to do any better.Footnote 16 But precedents for the term are not hard to find. Cowell, for example, used textile metaphors such as ‘weave’ and ‘fabric’ to describe novel ways of relating musical voices to one another.Footnote 17 And these metaphors, in their turn, were part of Cowell's own reading or misreading of acoustic theories derived from Helmholtz.Footnote 18 Thus what has ended up as a narrowly defined and seemingly neutral term, ‘musical texture’, appears to have taken shape as one complex part of a vast set of interrelated changes in listening as a practice involved in, among other things, music and music theory, film and theatre, physics, communications, and medicine.Footnote 19 As early as 1939, when Copland included texture on his didactic list of things ‘to listen for in music’, Cowell's more optimistic hopes for a new musical fabric were already being deferred as texture became merely one of those objective, transhistorical characteristics which the cultivated listener learned to ‘listen for’.Footnote 20 Yet even as late as 1959, a full two decades later, a disgruntled composer named Robert Simpson could still bracket off texture in splenetic scare quotes and denounce it as a term belonging to that class of empty ‘slogans’ preoccupying composers who were not ‘talented’.Footnote 21 Classical training was supposed to teach musicians to listen using one particular mode of perception or one set of such modes, a way of listening that privileged pitch, harmony, and architectonic form. For musicians trained in that mode, the new word ‘texture’ could have seemed irrelevant, even menacing, since it spoke to an alien mode of perception. Simpson's contempt for the word ‘texture’ has to be interpreted as part of a suspicion that textural listening was part of a virtually conspiratorial effort to legitimize a dangerous theory of art. As far as he was concerned, texture was a mere ‘surface’ phenomenon distracting from the composer's only true aim, ‘expressing human feelings in music’.Footnote 22 To his credit, Simpson had a grasp on the stakes: as we will see, it was precisely an emphasis on surface, or rather on surface as a plane of mediation between diverse voices, that made textural listening so compelling both aesthetically and politically.
Over the course of this same period, many artists spoke of the textured surface as a place where corporeity could be not only manipulated but also actually produced from scratch. Moholy-Nagy suggested that because sound could be inscribed by hand directly onto sound reproduction media, microscopically textured surfaces could be productive of sounds that had not yet sounded.Footnote 23 Lucius Egroizard, a character in Raymond Roussel's Locus Solus (1914), attempts to bring his daughter back to life by etching the sound of her voice as he remembers it by hand on a wax tablet, the idea being that once the little girl's voice has begun to sound, the body and soul which had once given that voice life will materialize.Footnote 24 While some applications of the principle have proven more practicable than others, the idea itself should be clear: modern listeners have heard sound as being neither wholly interior nor wholly exterior to various sounding and listening bodies. The textured surface seems capable of producing its own depth.
By definition, such a corporeity extended through art and life. Kristine Stiles has shown that from the 1930s and especially after 1945 a variety of artists, including Hans Arp, Wassily Kandinsky, and Max Bill, used the term ‘concrete’ to argue that artistic objects, processes, and media were fully as material as the rest of the world.Footnote 25 The Hochschule für Gestaltung founded by Inge Aicher-Scholl, Otl Aicher, and Max Bill in Ulm started training students in a synthetic approach to art and science in 1950, and courses such as Max Bense's on ‘information aesthetics’ were at the cutting edge of artists’ interest in cybernetics and communications theory, two fields of especially eager activity during the 1960s and 1970s.Footnote 26 Since the founding of the Bauhaus at least, artists had placed front and centre their considerations of the material function of the artwork in a broader society.
This new emphasis on an increasingly complex set of functions helped artists to speak of art not as a unidirectional action with singular effects but as always already involved in unpredictable interdependencies. ‘The reason for building a pyramid was one thing’, Gerhard Richter put it in 1972. ‘As we see it today is quite a different matter altogether.’Footnote 27 Even the shape of perception mediating human involvement with reality was a haphazard affair, as Richter demonstrated by pushing his argument into the deepest recesses of cosmic history: ‘Our eyes have developed such as to survive. It is merely a coincidence that we can see stars with them as well.’Footnote 28 In their theoretical writings of the early 1960s, artists and critics discussed the problem of being and reality using terms such as ‘New Ontology’ (Nam June Paik), ‘Nouveau Réalisme’ (Yves Klein and Pierre Restany), and ‘Correalism’ (Frederick Kiesler).Footnote 29 ‘The era of experimentation in materials and forms over half a century has run its gamut’, Frederick Kiesler (1890–1965) wrote shortly before his death in his ‘Second Manifesto of Correalism’ (1965). A ‘new era has begun, that is an era of correlating the plastic arts within their own realms but with the objective of integrating them with a life freed from self-imposed limitations.’Footnote 30
Experiences of rapid, pervasive, and unmistakable social change after the Second World War only served to reinforce the impression that development – more to the point, desirable development – could be actualized. For Richter, corporeity and its contingencies set the preconditions even for the age-old heavenward glance. As artists demystified the firmament, they also implied the potential for a totally new way of relating to the sky, one expressed in Kiesler's space-age vision: ‘To look up at the sky, at the stars, at the moon, at the sun was a romantic or fearful dream. Now the outer-space (as the super-galaxies are called) is coming closer and closer to us and is changing from an abstraction into the realism of our world.’Footnote 31 New ontologies, realisms, correalisms, and happenings were at the basis not of the abolition of art in the name of a flat, hyper-empirical capitalist rationality, but of an art that, for Joseph Beuys writing in the 1970s, could reshape ‘the TOTAL ART WORK OF THE FUTURE SOCIAL ORDER’.Footnote 32 John Cage struck a similar yet aptly fatalistic and ambivalent tone in his own reflections in 1957 on a ‘total sound-space’ shaped with attention to every conceivable parameter:
Any sound at any point in this total sound-space can move to become a sound at any other point. But advantage can be taken of these possibilities only if one is willing to change one's musical habits radically. That is, one may take advantage of the appearance of images without visible transition in distant places, which is a way of saying ‘television,’ if one is willing to stay at home instead of going to a theatre. Or one may fly if one is willing to give up walking.Footnote 33
Cage's elliptical description of watching television or flying as a kind of suicide – the death of theatre and the end of walking – only requires a corporeity more rigorously consistent than those referred to in some of the other writings discussed here. In an eternally flat corporeity, doing something, anything, would also mean bringing to an end a former way of life because no voice could be said to exist at all except as it exists within the total order of a continuous sound-space. This is an extreme theory in the sense that it eliminates depth altogether. In his Darmstadt lectures the following year, Cage mitigated the creepiness of such a space by suggesting that performers who might otherwise ‘act like sheep rather than nobly’ could benefit from a ‘separation in space’.Footnote 34 But his total sound-space remained a pure surface where all possible sounds appear, each in its plenitude. With nothing beyond the surface, only a noble detachment could preserve any kind of independence.
More than a direct line of influence stretches from Helmholtz's ‘physiological basis for a theory of music’ to Cowell's ‘fabric’ to Cage's ‘total sound-space’. All three conceptions presuppose that sounds are heard through relationships mediated by one continuous corporeity. A theory of music can be grounded in a physiological plane of perception; a fabric can be woven from equivalent sounds; sounds can move through a sound-space in its totality.
But to the extent that Cage's sound-space represents an extreme, a range of alternative approaches to the mingling of surface and depth remain possible. Not all listeners had much use for Cage's noble vision of ethical life as an absolute, divisible surface. Interpolation into a class society involves a depth of field where what one ‘is’ at one level has already been mediated by a set of relationships or a shape existing on another level of ethical life. As we will see, textured voices in a corporeity structured by multivalent relationships can take on a contradictory appearance unknowable in a world as absolutely flat as Cage's.
Textural listening and the proletarian middle class
The two parts of my term, ‘proletarian middle class’, perform two different functions, referring to two different yet interrelated aspects or levels of social class. ‘Proletarian’ describes a definite position: a person who has virtually no means of earning a living without selling his or her labour power to a capital formation belongs to the proletariat, whether the sale involves wage, debt, or nefarious wage–debt mechanisms. At this level of social class, one has to agree with Lukács that, ‘Bourgeoisie and proletariat are the only pure classes in bourgeois society.’Footnote 35 As capital has become increasingly concentrated and centralized, as alternative means of earning a living have been decimated all around the globe, the statement has come to appear almost prophetic. And yet it is also the case that members of the proletariat in the 1960s did not routinely describe themselves as such. To work with this situation, we need to appreciate another level of class, one privileged by Thompson. At this level, class is ‘an historical phenomenon, unifying a number of disparate and seemingly unconnected events, both in the raw material of experience and in consciousness’.Footnote 36 To understand class, it is necessary to see how these two levels – class as a determinate position in class society and class as a historical phenomenon made up of raw material and consciousness – mediate and work on one another.
During the 1950s, as the historian of labour Harry Braverman points out, sociologists made the embarrassing discovery that the enormous group of people in the United States describing themselves as ‘middle class’ – up to 90 per cent of respondents in some cases – rapidly disintegrated as soon as sociological questionnaires included the option ‘working class’ alongside W. Lloyd Warner's three classical options, ‘upper’, ‘middle’, and ‘lower’.Footnote 37 In cases such as this, it can be seen that the term ‘middle class’ has in part been foisted upon the working class. Yet at the same time, ‘working class’, whatever other virtues the term may have had, is not a more scientific term than middle class, and it would be premature for me to decide that respondents who did in fact sometimes identify themselves as middle class were merely duped. One can learn so much but only so much about the making of a class from studying the words people use to describe themselves, especially since, whether or not a questionnaire is involved, those words are often provided to individuals by their antagonists in conflicts between classes and between segments of a class.
Thus I use the term ‘proletarian middle class’ not to tell historical actors after the fact what they should have called themselves, but to call attention to the contradictions involved in being both in the middle and on the bottom. Circumstances provided observers with many occasions to get a sense of those contradictions. The proletarian middle class as a whole was better educated than the industrial working class had ever been, and yet more often than not the jobs it was assigned turned out to require virtually no education whatsoever.Footnote 38 Members of the class often crossed over the barrier between ‘manual’ and ‘mental’ labour, seemingly insurmountable for many of their parents, only to find that ‘mental’ labour had already been subjected to the rigorous division of ‘conception’ and ‘execution’, with the power of conception monopolized by capital.Footnote 39 In part because of the general increase of prosperity during the postwar decades, in part because the unpaid labour of married women was being converted into paid labour – though with the prices of consumer goods exercising a restraining influence on the increased standard of living depicted in contemporary advertising – members of the class were often better paid than their parents had been, and yet their pay was on average less than that of skilled workers in manufacturing.Footnote 40 The proletarian middle class and its booming ‘tertiary’ or ‘service’ economy were held up as the future of US society, all the more so, and all the more desperately so, after the ‘secondary’ or ‘industrial economy’ suffered a premature absolute decline in employment in 1965 (premature in the sense that the corresponding decline in Western Europe did not arrive for another decade).Footnote 41 Yet that future seemed medieval.Footnote 42
For all the possible reasons that can be given for the meeting of textural listening and the proletarian middle class,Footnote 43 the main aspect that interests me here concerns a specific way of relating listeners, sounds, and sounding sources. Textural listening as it appears in TV Guide seems to put the listener inside complex and contradictory systems of production without quite reducing that listener to the status of a mere societal appendage. This placement of the listener works in specific ways, and I will discuss these now at length, but already we can anticipate why a peculiar insideness would have helped people in the proletarian middle class deal with the contradictions of their class position. History was big, and so was Capital, much bigger than individual observers. At least one contemporary said that the world sometimes seemed to go on ‘over their heads’.Footnote 44 Given these circumstances, it would have made sense if people had embraced pre-political theories of ethical life for which history is at most merely a grasping illusion distracting from the little things that really matter, if they had simply drawn back in horror and disgust from the contradictions of their daily life, contradictions which may have appeared for them not as contradictions at all, but as the hostile machinations of an alien power. Textural listening as taught by TV Guide, however, makes an alternative way of relating to history possible. Its inside-look produces a depth populated by menacing antagonists – surly Laff Boys, monstrous machines, and soulless corporate executives – and it does so by teaching people to hear that depth as mediated by a delightfully textured surface. We can well imagine that people might have used the aestheticizing detachment of textural listening to produce a melancholic vision of some eternal, sensational unfolding of superficial appearances – textural listening may have served as one means of hearing history rush over their heads. Hobson's description of the ethical ambivalences of the laugh track could easily have contributed to such a melancholic perspective. Some people say the laugh track is good, he reports, others that it is bad, and it is hard to avoid inferring a subtext: that unless you are fanatical enough to pick one side, you are obliged to concede that ‘it is what it is’. But melancholia is sweetest for people who have found a way to resign themselves to whatever they have decided merely ‘is’. And although Roth's narrative resolves itself into one singular relationship of exploitation – the laugh track manipulates the listener – this is hardly a satisfying resolution to the dynamic, heterogeneous antagonisms involving diverse textural listeners introduced in the first cartoon. The possibility which interests me, and which I am suggesting might have been of special interest to people living in a position as contradictory as that of the proletarian middle class, is that textural listening might have provided a way to get inside those antagonisms, to hear the laugh track not as a pure surface which simply ‘is what it is’, but as a surface mediated by a depth of conflicting desires. If not by any inherent affinity, the meeting of a class and a way of listening could have been occasioned by a historical need, the need for a way of entering history without being liquidated.
The illustrated Laff Box
TV Guide’s articles and illustrations were compelling in part because the Laff Box called for an especially complex manipulation of sound as material.Footnote 45 Roth's first illustration in particular thrives on expanded and exaggerated details explained in Hobson's accompanying article (see Plate 1). A padlock keeps the lid shut and the box's contents, thirty-two loops of tape with ten separate recordings each, hidden from prying eyes. A shining red bulb indicates that the machine is on, and buttons, switches, dials, pedals, and the ‘master mixer pot’ or ‘potentiometer’ all stand ready to help craft a carefully tailored laugh track. Below a small television, a score, perhaps marked with timings from the illuminated footage indicator, rests atop the lid.Footnote 46 The ‘Laff Boys’ have removed their right shoes ‘for sensitivity’ as they press the single ‘damper’ (expanded into multiple foot pedals in Roth's illustration), the purpose of which must have been to adjust reverb since, according to Hobson's article, its ‘function is that of expanding or contracting the size of the presumed auditorium’.Footnote 47
The musical Laff Box as illustrated by Arnold Roth. Scan by the author, courtesy of the New York Public Library. Dick Hobson, ‘The Hollywood Sphinx and His Laff Box (First of Two Parts)’, TV Guide 14/27 (1966), 3.
Texturally, the Laff Box allowed performers to weave together as many as thirty-two separate strands, each playing one of ten possible recordings at independently adjustable volumes. The machine was used less as a substitute for than as a means of sculpting a pre-existing audience laugh track: ‘sweetening’, ‘desweetening’, increasing or decreasing duration, or filling in details such as titters, gasps, chuckles, ‘oo's and ah's’, ‘sharpies’, and simulations of an audience's ‘presence’ – ‘the sound of breathing, rustling of clothing, [or] shifting in seats’.Footnote 48 Finished weaves could be adjusted in terms of volume and reverb, subtly changing the apparent spatial relationship between a studio audience and on-screen performer. The illuminated footage indicator provided an external point of reference for planning extremely precise rhythms. The impression, exaggerated by Roth for dramatic effect, is that of a sample-based synthesizer capable of shaping the sound of a laughing audience in an infinite variety of ways, despite depending upon ‘prerecorded giggles and guffaws [. . .] begged or borrowed’ from undisclosed sources.Footnote 49
Charley Douglass (1910–2003),Footnote 50 the inventor of the Laff Box and the ‘King of the Laugh Tracks’, must have felt he stood to profit from cultivating this aura of magical power because, as the padlock on his contraption attests, he ascribed his relatively privileged position in a perilous system of production at least in part to the value of his proprietary secrets. His contraption had evidently been designed with a variety of political-economic strategies in mind. To try designing a machine that could dethrone the ‘Yock Czar’ was said to be ‘like trying to unlock the Coca-Cola formula’.Footnote 51 Five boxes were stored in Douglass's private, padlocked garage, signed out by Laff Boys, and repaired in locked men's rooms. Clearly Douglass had thought extensively about how to retain control over his contraption even as it crossed proprietary borders in its journeys across Los Angeles. Perhaps Douglass thought of himself as something like what Immanuel Wallerstein calls a ‘petty proprietor’, the owner of a productive piece of property who needs to sell finished wares almost immediately (as opposed to the capitalist proper who accumulates surplus value by avoiding ‘free trade’ as long and as often as possible). In Marx's terms, however, Douglass produced no commodities, since in a large system of manufacture, ‘only the common product of all the specialized workers [. . .] becomes a commodity’.Footnote 52 Since Douglass's potential customers evidently comprised only a tiny handful of extremely powerful networks, his actual position might have been more like a subcontractor dependent on large capital formations than like a capitalist himself, however small.
It is hard to believe that Douglass had much leverage over the networks. Indeed, the rituals he used to protect his proprietary secrets seem to resemble less an effective strategy than the obsessive behaviour of a man desperate to believe that he had control over his working life. Douglass might have been at least in part the beneficiary of a large concern's lavish display of its own beneficent wealth. After all, whether they were conscious of the fact or not, the networks stood to gain from fostering the illusion that an industrious worker could become the owner of his own capital.
In a sense, however, the fantasy life of the middle class had something to gain from that illusion as well. At least one part of the dreamwork in the first cartoon has to do with the depiction of a world where skilled or innovative workers operate just beyond the reach of the anonymous forces of watchful management. In Roth's illustration at least, the Laff Box looks messy and unfinished. Before digital software made it possible for producers to work on a soundtrack from ‘outside time’ – or from outside the soundtrack's own temporal unfolding – the diverse functions involved in the shaping of a laugh track had to be separated out manually while remaining within the reach of a single operator. The Laff Boy's score, like a musical score, gave the performer a big picture of the temporal unfolding, but the actual operations had to be performed ‘in real time’ or as the laugh track played – the worker and the laugh track had to share a temporal ‘reality’. Since industry had evidently not yet found a way to atomize the manufacture of laugh tracks into manageable – in the loaded sense – tasks, the Laff Boy might have appeared to retain the privileges of a skilled worker. At a time when monopoly capital already had at its disposal highly sophisticated strategies of managerial control,Footnote 53 the Laff Boy and his Laff Box could easily have seemed like desirable spectres from a bygone era. Much of the charm of the Laff Box, brilliantly captured in Roth's illustration, had to do with the sense that the Laff Box's complexity escapes human control – the Laff Boy gets lost completely to his unruly musical practice. Still, the disgruntled Laff Boy waiting for his shift illustrates the looming shadow of an all too modern industrial timetable.Footnote 54
Each of the main players in the production of the laugh track appears to be living on the cusp of modern strategies of managerial control. Here Braverman's vocabulary is especially helpful. The Laff Boy seems to be highly skilled at a time when the ‘degradation of work’ was already well under way. Douglass, confronted by the forces of an extremely advanced monopoly capital, appears to occupy the position of a ‘subcontractor’, a position that was supposed to have been a mere ‘transitional form’ belonging to a much earlier phase of capitalism.Footnote 55 And, in stark contrast to the capital-intensive machinery involved in postwar mass-production, the Laff Box appears as an unwieldy contraption requiring skilled craftsmanship for its invention, maintenance, and operation. Many, perhaps most, of TV Guide’s readers lived in a world of work where the engineering department had already been separated from the labour process in both time and space, and where even the engineering department was already being subjected to an atomizing division of labour. These readers suffered through the monotony of their working life.Footnote 56 Looking at a picture, an enchanting picture no less, of a new device which seems to lie outside yet on the edge of their degraded working life, could have been a way of performing a dreamlike wish-fulfilment, of enjoying an imaginary resolution of a real social problem.Footnote 57
Although much of what might have made Douglass, the Laff Boys, and the Laff Box seem like desirable figures out of a vanishing age cannot be separated from this realm of fantasy, it is not inconceivable that Douglass's machine helped him, in limited ways at least, to negotiate a favourable agreement at a bargaining table otherwise governed by major networks. The Laff Box described by TV Guide would have been relatively cheap to build, meaning that Douglass would not have been trapped by ruthless debt mechanisms. And its workings were, ostensibly at least, shrouded in mystery, allowing him to maintain a monopoly on a new, more efficient means of production. To put it in the terms Marx uses in Capital, Douglass needed considerably less labour time to produce a satisfactory laugh track than had previously been ‘socially necessary’. Because he was the sole proprietor of a new machine, he could sell his wares at a price below that of any potential competitors, yet above the cost of labour power and raw materials, leaving him with a precarious ‘surplus value’. If some of this were a mere illusion, it would have been an illusion the networks could afford to maintain.
Douglass might have further benefited from a production process dependent upon an independently contracted workshop of highly skilled labourers. The subcontractor himself could remain ‘a hopeless square with no sense of humor’ because he stood on one side of the property relation, his ‘boffola technicians’ on the other – is there perhaps something self-consciously or ironically patriarchal about referring to employees as ‘Boys’ as late as 1966?Footnote 58 Indeed, Douglass remained a stealthy party in a complex system of production; he does not appear at all in Roth's crowded illustrations. Although his recordings were merely ‘begged and borrowed’ (evidently without either payment or attribution), his workers might have engaged every day in a renewable, ‘high value-added’ process:
Picture if you will Lon Chaney Sr. in ‘Phantom of the Opera’ flailing at the pipe organ in the darkened cathedral crypt and you have some notion of the Laff Boy at work. Hunched over the keyboard of Charley's box on the darkened dubbing stage, his fingers punching at the keys, his feet manipulating the pedals, he wrings forth his fugues and caprices. He's a veritable virtuoso of titters and snorts.Footnote 59
It would have been hard to name a contemporary handicraft so physically elaborate. With Lisztian fingers, Roth's Laff Boy harmonizes tape loops, leaving the tiniest gap between punchline and laugh. ‘George Burns, a pioneer of the “laugh spotting” art, contends [this gap] should be eight frames or one-fifth of a foot of film, which on the screen is a third of a second’, Hobson explained.Footnote 60 The finished product needed to be shaped according to the most precise specifications and with the most exact synchrony. This meant measuring time in units determined by the media involved in the total production process.
To manufacture a natural sounding laugh, the Laff Boy must let a few ‘people’ in his box anticipate a joke. This is called ‘giving it a little tickle.’ Then he might punch in a ‘sharpie’ just before the main laugh. The climax of the laugh is equally intricate. He has to punch his keys so as to ‘tail out’ with a little chuckle and ‘slide under’ the incoming line. [. . .] He must take care not to ‘laugh’ a straight line, not to ‘cover’ a line of dialog, and never to ‘bury’ a gag line.Footnote 61
Finally, at the level of architectonic form, a laugh track needed to build gradually in intensity, saving the ‘biggest laugh’ for ‘the payoff’.Footnote 62
Thus a successful laugh track needed a personal touch on two levels. From moment to moment, the ‘natural sounding laugh’ had to sound like a knotty group of diverse individuals, each with a distinctive personality. And over the architectonic sweep of an unfolding track, the audience needed to sound as though it felt itself to be moving forward in time, following the ebbs and tides of a well-written script. The audience had to be made up of personalities while at the same time possessing its own unified personality. By referring to this as a ‘natural sounding laugh’, Hobson spoke to a political desire for some supposed state of nature where individuals could retain their individuality within a harmonious whole.
Yet Hobson also speaks of a much darker sort of nature, because what sounds most natural in this scheme of things also turns out to be the sound born feasting on the freshest labour: ‘They say that the Laff Boys are getting stale over the years.’Footnote 63 It is not hard to guess why. Both the article and the illustration play with a tension between intricate crafts and industrial manufactures – the Laff Box is a musical instrument crowned by an unruly tower of factory whistles. Hobson describes a performer exhausted and sweaty at the end of a take, and the cartoon is even more evocative. One bald and surly Laff Boy can be seen awaiting his shift at the machine, a cigarette hanging bend-dexter from his scowling profile, while the other performs in concert black and tails, his face hidden behind a ruddy, leering theatrical mask. The Laff Boy must be lost completely to the craft, covered from head to sock-clad toe, his body impressing hardly a trace on the finished track, for the most skilled Laff Boy is the one with ‘a lighter touch’.Footnote 64 The article suggests that there is a difference between a desirably stylized, tailor-made artifice and something more rigidly mechanical. ‘Too many rehearsals’ can spoil a take, and, from the standpoint of the producer, Laff Boys are best wrangled up for the morning shift ‘because by afternoon they're all laughed out and nothing is funny to them anymore’.Footnote 65 The lifeblood coursing through the ostensibly natural laugh track must be syphoned out of the spontaneous, passionate, yet ideally imperceptible Laff Boy. If the finished laugh track seemed to prefigure a harmonious state of nature, the processes involved in the production of that state of nature evidently seemed considerably more Hobbesian.
Little of this appears to matter very much from the standpoint of the three suits, all bleeding into a cloud of grey, aloof on the far side of the Laff Box, appraising their purchase with detachment. What seems to matter for them is the material value of a finished product. The suits do not laugh – actually, no human being in either image ever does unless violently coerced – and they show no interest in the Laff Boy at work behind the bellowing yuks and yoks. They have learned to listen carefully using their own highly disciplined mode of perception.
Part of what makes the image comic is the way that it draws together three or four otherwise incompatible modes of perception. First, the suits isolate and measure a laugh track as a material product shaped according to precise specifications. Second, on the other side of the machine, the Laff Boy's mode of perception requires an even more intent focus on sound – he wears a pair of headphones – and, furthermore, a visual attention to screen and score. Sitting at the heart of the process, the Laff Boy's mode of perception requires a multi-sensorial attention to sound, image, and synchrony. Third is the distracted mode of perception of the disgruntled Laff Boy involved in his cigarette. Implicitly there is also the mode of perception of the ostensibly passive audience member, another actor with whom the TV Guide reader could have identified,Footnote 66 who evaluates a finished programme solely in terms of its entertainment value and thus its capacity to evoke laughter. Readers could discover with delight that the programming they watched every night was capable of being perceived in varied ways. By describing an intricate handicraft of rhythm and weave, by explaining how a Laff Boy used a Laff Box to shape a laugh track as if out of streams of clay, TV Guide also provided the materials for a kind of crash course in diverse, specialized modes of perception. Ominous shadows loom within this first cartoon, but for the most part the observer enjoys all the pleasures involved in looking down from on high.
Serious trouble arises only after the laugh track seems to possess its own vitality. As the complexity of the production process fades in importance, the Laff Box appears to gather terrifying autonomy. The narrative's peripety suffocates the variety of the opening illustration (see Plate 2). Prolific pedals, knobs, cranks, and buttons are reduced to only a few brown switches, crowds of horns and whistles meld into an ominous, univocal mouth, and the laugh track bellowing red from a gnathostomatic smirk appears now as one long serpentine tongue rather than as a bubbling, multi-coloured symphony. Once the finished product can be poured out like thread from an automatic loom, the craftsmanship of the Laff Boy no longer enters into the picture at all. This is the future of the quaint Laff Box, the follow-up illustration seems to say – what is worse, that future might already be here.
The unethical Laff Box as illustrated by Arnold Roth. Scan by the author, courtesy of the New York Public Library. Dick Hobson, ‘The Laff Box (second of two parts)’, TV Guide 14/28 (1966), 20.
Furthermore, whereas the first cartoon played on differences between varied modes of perception, the second appears to suggest that what matters is not perception at all, but violent affect. Executives, Laff Boys, and presumably readers of TV Guide as well are all bound up, waiting to be stripped barefoot and tickled. To speak in dialectical terms, the relationship between subjects and objects has been reversed. Whereas in the first illustration people handled sound, manipulating and perceiving it, in the second, sound touches people, forcing them to laugh.
On careful consideration, then, this dramatic reversal depends upon a submerged contradiction: the manipulative laugh track is only understood as such in light of the exceedingly complex labour and labour relations involved in its manufacture, yet when the laugh track is shown to be manipulative, labour and labour relations are erased. TV Guide, no doubt unconsciously, helped spare this contradiction from interpretation. The cartoons were printed discretely, a full week apart, thereby only encouraging a tendency to express contradictions using misleading formulations such as, ‘on the one hand/on the other’ – as if the two aspects of a contradiction are not an actual unity. Continuities running across the two cartoons are easily dismissed and differences treated as unconnected aspects of separate narratives, the tale of the musical Laff Box and that of the manipulative Laff Box. Related to this first problem, the follow-up article also appears to break from the concerns of the introductory article, leaving aside the techniques of the Laff Box to debate the ethics of the laugh track. ‘The worst thing that ever happened to radio was the studio audience’, Fred Allen is quoted saying. ‘Somebody like Eddie Cantor brought these hordes of cackling geese in because he couldn't work without imbeciles laughing at his jokes.’Footnote 67 From Allen's perspective, the laugh track stultifies individual freedom and is only appropriate for people living at the level of easily manipulated sheep.Footnote 68 Roth's second illustration in some ways appears as nothing more than an illumination of Allen's assertion, and it is telling that this illumination only works by excising most of the complexity of the first illustration. The layout of the publications suggests that the separate editions deal with separate topics. Consequently, their contradictions appear merely incidental.
And yet those contradictions have a way of seeping back into the frame in odd places. As a counterpoint to Allen, Harry Ackerman is quoted as saying that Lucille Ball ‘was “dead” on a bare soundstage’, not because she was not funny, but because her performances were not her performances at all without the accompaniment of an audible audience.Footnote 69 Ball's performances involved an interaction, even co-labour, between performer and audience. Audience laughter was a constituent part of her style. It was recognized as such by sound technicians, writers, directors, actors, and film editors, all of whom deliberately created a space for this crucial stylistic element, an element that the Laff Boys became responsible for stylizing.Footnote 70 Nevertheless, Ackerman's valid counterargument hardly does away with Allen's objection to the manipulative laugh track. It simply expands upon the first article's observations about stylized audible practices, further fleshing out a lingering problem. The programming TV Guide’s readers consumed in their living rooms every evening was the meticulously crafted, valuable product of highly skilled labour, yet it was also a polished, mass-marketed commodity processed by a complex system of production, a system that, at every stage, hid the manipulative actions of various parties. The issue was not the fact that laugh tracks made people laugh. Presumably, from the standpoint of the television viewer, one of the main reasons to watch a sitcom was to be made to laugh. The issue was that the laugh track worked in and through a partially hidden field of heterogeneous actors each with different aims and expectations. The laugh track worked for all concerned, but not in the same way for each of them. Part of what makes the Laff Boy's mask so eerie is the sense that something unseen is going on behind the smile. The very fact that the Laff Box works, that it evidently does what everyone wants it to do, is itself already a contradictory political problem. The audience at home, enlightened by TV Guide, could be expected to rest uneasy knowing that their programming had been tailor-made to suit them. Where textural listening appraised laugh tracks in the manner encouraged by the cartoons, what was heard would have been simultaneously delightful and alarming.
TV Guide only raised this internal contradiction as an external duality, without suggesting how actors in existing relationships might act in ways that could change those relationships, and thus the actors within those relationships as well. It portrayed complex social relationships and relations of domination, but not both at once. In some ways the publications can be made to serve as merely one more example of a general tendency remarked upon by Braverman in 1974: ‘It has become fashionable [. . .] to attribute to machinery the powers over humanity which arise in fact from social relations.’Footnote 71 The cartoons do not perform a fluid dialectical reversal. Univocal manipulation was made to appear on the other hand only after heterogeneous forms of semi-autonomous labour – the paid labour of Laff Boys and executives, but also the unpaid labour of audiences working their way through programming and, most importantly, advertisements – had already been dealt with on the one hand. Neither the articles nor the illustrations show the heterogeneity of working life becoming the homogeneity of monopoly capital as the machine performs its work in and through social relations.
But there is also a way in which that first cartoon lingers as an afterimage even after we turn to pick up the second issue of TV Guide. If the second cartoon seems to participate in the fashionable attribution denounced by Braverman, the first one makes it hard to fully invest oneself in that mystification. Besides which, there are already shadows in the first cartoon, the grey suits on one side, the scowling Laff Boy on the other. By providing visible sources for the minute audible details readers were learning to hear with ambivalence, the first cartoon illustrates what is at stake in textural listening. And this is hugely important because for those who could not understand the problem as being the mere existence of the laugh track in itself, any kind of political intervention would have needed to take place in a world that more closely resembled the first cartoon than the second. The first cartoon might have seemed more realistic not by more closely corresponding to some sort of external reality, but by seeming more relevant to what readers were already doing. Although the discreet cartoons fail to depict heterogeneity becoming homogeneity, a return to the comic heterogeneity of the first cartoon was a precondition for any attempt to imagine the laugh track as a voice becoming something else, rather than merely as a voice being silenced.
Conclusion
The substance of any change would need to occur in the depth mediating the textured surface. Yet textural listening may have become an especially effective activity in this case by hearing that depth as itself mediated by the surface. The laugh track as a voice made up of voices could not be followed back into the depths to find the simple, secret truth it expressed. Rather, it took shape through relationships between sounding and listening bodies. A kind of audience ‘presence’ could be produced by minute textural details; an auditorium could be given shape by manipulating reverb. The truth about the bodies made present and the spaces they inhabited was not their mere ‘being’, but their accomplishments in an ethical life with a determinate shape structured by relationships drawn between actors with conflicting interests. The natural-sounding laugh was the laugh that sounded untouched by human hands. What made it sound that way was that it had been soaked in human labour. Listeners reading TV Guide were able to learn to hear the laugh track in and through such contradictions. But of course they had to actually learn to hear it that way. They would have had to produce the depth before they could have felt that they inhabited it.
Textural listening can be read as characteristic of a class not because it can be shown to have originated with members of that class or to have expressed some sort of hidden essence, but because it had the ability to satisfy a contradictory class's need to enter history without being reduced to a mere expression of a zeitgeist. As a practice, textural listening had certainly been characteristic of other classes before the 1960s – the broadening acceptance of the word ‘texture’ in its musical sense from the 1930s onward can be taken as symptomatic of the standardization and codification of a listening technique – and it may have since become characteristic of other classes. At the specific historical juncture studied here, however, both textural listening and the proletarian middle class can be understood in their correlation and co-labour. Members of the proletarian middle class must have been aware that powerful actors used sound as an instrument of control: the TV Guide publications alone depict laughter being compelled by laugh tracks and work being evaluated by sophisticated listening techniques and devices. Where futile attempts to retreat from these modes of control might have seemed tempting, textural listening gave listeners an opportunity to evaluate their conditions, even to do so with a certain amount of comic delight. That the determinate form of political knowledge cultivated by textural listening could have guaranteed nothing politically – that it might have aestheticized politics instead of politicizing aesthetics – would not have made it any less important for the political life of that class. It would only have made that import open-ended.
The way that TV Guide positioned the textural listener precludes passivity. There is a peculiar choice of preposition in the TV Guide publications. The voice crying for ‘Help!’ in the second cartoon is not the prisoner of but rather the prisoner ‘in’ a Laff Box. The preposition was evidently not chosen by accident. Attentive readers could have come to the second cartoon remembering the three hundred and twenty anonymous recordings literally padlocked inside the Laff Box. The article itself does not make any mention of those unpaid audiences condemned to sweeten laugh tracks for decades on end in a syndicated limbo. Perhaps the slippery identification of home audiences with the recorded voices actually inside the Laff Box was just too mind-bending to be developed any further by TV Guide. But the identification had been made, at least by way of a slippage, and even in its undeveloped form, it was a provocative one: whether they were at home or on tape, audiences were already inside a complex system of production, distribution, and consumption.Footnote 72 Textural listening could have helped them to feel that they were inside such a system.
Textural listening, as such, involves a thought of totality – this is one reason why references to ‘essence’ and ‘truth’ are so easy to find in discussions of texture.Footnote 73 The essence which appears in all of its plenitude on the surface of Cage's ‘total sound-space’, however, is unlike the one which haunts Roth's first illustration. A textured voice in Cage's total sound-space is exactly what it appears to be in and through that absolutely flat sound-space, so that the only way to maintain nobility is through a separation dividing that space between individuated voices. By contrast, the textured-voices described by TV Guide become what they are by appearing, and since they appear for diverse listeners with divergent, conflicting interests, their essence can be fraught with contradiction. Roth's second cartoon resolves those contradictions by creating a single, master voice wrapping all listeners in its malevolent coils. This is precisely the kind of singular voice Cage cordoned off by means of a separation in space. His total sound-space is free of both contradiction and conflict. It is also a space where the totalizing listener hears only one composite voice. And this is a totalizing listener who listens in only one way, for texture as a pattern on a pure, singular surface. But outside the conception of the voice as the pure expression of an underlying essence or as a sound heard in and through its contingencies there are other possibilities. Pieties about hearing a voice as contingent upon its context do nothing to address the ethical problem I have tried to tease out here: to listen for a textured voice at all is to participate in the making of a voice and the weaving of contingencies. This is as true for Cage as for Roth and as true in the case of Roth's second cartoon as in that of the first. What makes the first cartoon so interesting from an ethical standpoint is that it rewards listeners who can incorporate a range of antagonistic listenings into their own listenings. For such listeners, the natural-sounding laugh track's intricately detailed surface gains depth. This depth is lost the moment that the same laugh track is heard as a totally external enemy audible only as an enemy.
Critical listeners can be content neither to merely contextualize a voice nor to piously comment that there are many different ways of listening. Both activities impose a form of ethical life as if it were already given, as if a context were simply out there waiting to be heard or as if each way of listening was self-contained and equivalent with every other. Textural listening as a critical practice cannot proceed in any way but by proposing ways of listening and thereby producing voices not as things which are merely out there – whether they wait to be uncovered in their plenitude or elude our humble grasp – but as voices which become voices for us, for us as people with historical aims and interests of our own. By continuously proposing ways of listening, we can continuously become who we, the listeners, are. For a study of class consciousness, that is the most interesting thing about these TV Guide publications: they involve the reader in the production of historical relationships. There is no point of remove at which we can find listening/sounding bodies prior to their dynamic interrelationships; we are already interpolated into those relationships in one way or another, and in one way or another we participate in and produce our own interpolation. A way of listening which obliges us to produce a voice as an enemy voice can turn out to be a way of listening which demands that we destroy a part of ourselves. Readers of TV Guide would only have destroyed some of the best performances available to them by swallowing moralizing arguments in favour of the eradication of laugh tracks. Yet in the same way, merely trying to preserve a voice as it ‘is’ ends up as a way of denying our own dynamic involvement in the making of that voice. Roth's first cartoon better served the proletarian middle class to the extent that hearing a textured voice in its deep contradictions served as a means of getting inside a surface. That was where individuals in their capacities as voices and as listeners were going to live or die.
