Towards a periodization of listening

Abstract

Taking its cue from literature on visual culture this article addresses the possibility of a plurality of listening positions or, more precisely, the possibility of periodizing competing or co-existent ‘auditory regimes’. It therefore contributes to what Douglas has recently described as an ‘archaeology of listening’. By the 1920s film was being theorized as a new sense organ presenting a distracted, modern (and potentially progressive) way of seeing. But the really new medium of the 1920s was the radio, which quickly became defined as a secondary medium broadcasting fragmentary, ephemeral content. By drawing on theoretical discourses of perception in the work of Kracauer and Benjamin and on contemporary sources about radio and everyday life in Weimar Germany, this article examines the ‘modernization’ of an aural mode of perception, and the reversal of conventional gender roles in contemporary writings on the cinema, given radio’s primary location in the private sphere.