Retrieval of the Ordinary (How It Sounds)

In memory of Nathaniel Bruns.

The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something—because it is always before one’s eyes.)

— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

My thesis is stated (plainly if not quite exactly) by the Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky in his canonical essay, “Art as Technique” (1917):

Habituation devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war. If the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been. And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique is to make objects “unfamiliar,” to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important.

I imagine Wittgenstein reading this passage, nodding in agreement, but deleting the italicized sentence, arguing that the work of the work of art would be to restore us to an intimacy with the things that inhabit the world around us but which a carnivorous habituation consigns to oblivion. In effect, the artwork recontextualizes what is around us, rather the way Marcel Duchamp relocates an ordinary urinal in an exhibition of artworks, thereby placing us into a new proximity with an everyday artifact.

Shklovsky (“the object is not important”) anticipates Theodor Adorno who, in his Aesthetic Theory (1970), famously complained that modernist “artworks are at the point of regressing to the status of a mere thing as if in punishment for the hubris of being more than art”—as, for example, in the exhibition of an empty canvas. Little wonder that Adorno’s monumental study—perhaps the premier work of philosophical aesthetics in the twentieth century—has little time or space for examples. The cubist collage, Joseph Cornell’s boxes, Robert Rauschenberg’s white paintings, Andy Warhol’s soup cans—such things would distract from his effort to restore the authority of formalism as the philosophy of art. (Naturally, Adorno nowhere mentions Shklovsky or the Russian Formalists.)

(Here, did time and space allow, would be the place to explore the philosophical differences between two major art critics of the twentieth century, Arthur Danto and Michael Fried, where the one develops a stout defense of the mere things that turn up in the New York artworld of the 1960s, while the other mounts a powerful polemic against, for example, minimalism, with its exhibition of squares and rectangles, blank canvases and monochromes, and objets trouvé.)

Mere things are all very well, but what about mere sounds? Here John Cage steps forward with his aesthetic anarchism, as in “The Future of Music: Credo” (1937): “Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating. The sound of a truck at fifty miles an hour. Static between the stations. Rain. We want to capture and control these sounds, to use them not as sound effects but as musical instruments.” In his essay on Erik Satie, he writes: “A time that’s just time will let sounds be just sounds and if they are folk tunes, unresolved ninth chords, or knives and forks, just folk tunes, unresolved ninth chords, or knives and forks.”

In his essay on “The History of Experimental Music in the United States,” Cage affirms that “noises are as useful to new music as so-called musical tones, for, the simple reason that they are sounds.” And he mentions Edward Varèse as the composer “who fathered forth noise into twentieth-century music”—for example, “the repeated note resembling a telegraphic...