Core Post 2: TV-Muzak

For the purposes of this response, I will limit myself to a moment from Tania Modleski’s essay “The Rhythms of Reception: Daytime Television and Women’s Work.”

I’m interest in Modleski’s the inter-/intra-medial routes criticism takes in “making sense” of television—this phenomenon is, of course, not limited to setting the ontology, phenomenology, or identity of television but of all media and things. Thinking television in relation to radio (both informational talk radio and [perhaps to a lesser extent?] music programming), film/cinema, and books/texts seems rather common. I’m intrigued, then, by Modleski’s turn to architecture (via Benjamin) and music/muzak in the penultimate paragraph; I’ll reproduce it in full here:

Benjamin, writing of film, invoked architecture as the traditional art most closely resembling the new one in the kinds of response they elicit. Both are mastered, to some extent in a state of distraction; that is, both are appropriated “not so much by attention as by habit.” It is interesting to recall this connection the Dadaist Eric Satie’s concept of furniture music, which would be absorbed while people went about their business or chatted with each other. Television is the literalization of the metaphor of furniture art, but it must be stressed that this art is more than simply background noise in the way, for example, that muzak is daytime programs, especially soap operas, are intensely meaningful to many women, as a conversation with any fan will immediately confirm. Moreover, as I have tried to show, their rhythms interact in complex ways with the rhythms of women’s life and work in the home. (74)

I’m interested in situating the sonic and the aural in a history of the constitution of the subject: how is sound and hearing (e)valuated, and how does Modleski’s incorporation of the metaphor of the sonic architecture inflect her discussion of the co-production of the television soap and the housewife vis-a-vis sound? How do we understand sound, architecture, and infrastructure based on what we’ve read so far? According to McLuhan, radio is a “hot" medium, high in information and extending a single sense, but television is a “cool” one. Is the soap about reading or rendering detail out of a medium that is ‘low’ in information (like / as training to read the impenetrable husband who refuses communication but expects to know and be known, as Modleski narrates)? Benjamin holds a liberatory potential to the cinema training the spectator to the “shocks” of modernity; does Modleski?