Strategic Naivete, a work in progress (one of several)

[This was meant as my opening gambit for a Sound Studies roundtable at the American Studies Association Annual Meeting this year, which I was unable to attend.]

Andy Warhol called his cassette tape recorder his “wife,” and after he obtained it in 1965 it was his constant companion, always faithful, always turned on. In the history of audio technologies, this queer-in-every-sense-of-the-word version of matrimonial bliss stands out dramatically from the historically concurrent, masculine cult of high fidelity, not to mention the production wizardry going into albums like Pet Sounds and Sgt. Pepper. His work as a record producer with the Velvet Underground, as Lou Reed and others have recounted, involved no knowledge of the sound board or microphones; it consisted solely in telling the band to keep it simple, to sound the way they did while rehearsing. Yet despite this apparent dilletantism, he was also one of the first people to own a cassette recorder, because of his strong relationship with the Norelco/Philips company, which also manufactured film and video equipment. This was Warhol’s standard approach to technology—a well-connected expert-insider performing naivete—strategic naivete.

As we know from punk, Dada, and elsewhere, to approach technology naively can in be a radically creative act, resisting the accumulating layers of expertise that both develop and constrain the possible uses of devices like those that reproduce sound. In a historical framework, the naïve approach stalls, reverses, or disorients the triumphalist evolutionary narratives that get told about many aspects of media and how technological “advances” make them better and better able to realize the uses that appear inherent in them and that obscure the ideological and economic forces (among others) that play a central role in shaping media histories. Warhol’s relationship to his cassette recorder was queer, and at the same time it demonstrated his penchant for reanimating the dynamics of a medium’s early historical stages, before its cultural form has taken shape—before, that is, the cultural understanding of what it is for and what it can do have fully concretized. For example, much of this work proceeds as if indifferent to, or only haphazardly dictated by, the principles of selection as to what does and does not “deserve” to be represented.
This historically revisionary aspect of his work is embodied in the content and overall tone of this exchange with interviewer David Ehrenreich in 1966:

DE: Do you like Edison?

AW: I like Edison. Oh, do I like Edison!

DE: Has Edison had a big influence on you?

AW: Oh, yes.

I’m fascinated by how the naïve and the queer undo the ways we understand mediation. I’m fascinated by how they re-orient our understanding of our relationships with technologies. And I’m also fascinated by the ways this depends on undoings of sequential, teleological history, perhaps another embodiment of the queer approaches to historicism and temporality that Beth Freeman, Valerie Rohy and others have developed so richly in recent years.

Thus, in a current project, Drew Daniel and Martin Schmidt, the musicians who make up the electronic/sound-collage band Matmos, are re-invigorating the spirit of the word “medium” as it meant in the 19th century. In a fifteen-minute session with a collaborating non-band member, Daniel attempts to telepathically transmit his ideas for a song to appear on the band’s next album. (they are bringing this piece to Haverford next term). The collaborators then tells the band what s/he thinks the song will sound like. After a series of these sessions, the band and the collaborators produce and perform the music. This project rekindles a far earlier notion of media than the one we are familiar with, a notion that was particularly vibrant in the late 19th century as modern electronic media were emerging under the direction of Edison and others—that is, of course the notion of the psychic medium—the person, usually a woman, who transmits invisible, all but unknowable signals into the real world. The project externalizes the composition process, undermining modernist notions of genius interiority. Given our historical distance from a pre-modernist moment, and the post-modern skepticism toward psychic phenomena, the project relies on a kind of naive faith—a word that also speaks to the issue of fidelity—that something has taken place, that a relationship has been formed, even in a state of inarticulation.
Both Warhol and Matmos illustrate an intensely canny application of naivete, and that’s what I’m trying to get at here, not the type of naivete that disavows knowledge and expertise, that fuels primitivism and the normative romanticism surrounding children and childhood. But what I also want to put out on the table is the question of how such approaches might become a model for critical thought and writing, for us as scholars, intellectuals and academics: how do we make disciplinary forms of knowledge engage productively with naivete? How do we de-familiarize objects of study that we have spent months and years with? How do we come to hear our own writing and thinking habits, the phrases and conceptual routes we use over and over that not only annoy readers but limit us as writers and thinkers? How do we make the canny uncanny?