In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

New Literary History 32.3 (2001) 747-768



[Access article in PDF]

T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, the Gramophone,
and the Modernist Discourse Network

Juan A. Suárez


Here is a well-kept secret about modernism: during the period of composition of The Waste Land, throughout 1921 and early 1922, T. S. Eliot was attached to his gramophone much in the same way as Andy Warhol was later "married" to his movie camera, polaroid, and tape recorder. Both artists, representative of very different cultural moments and vastly separate in ideology, social and cultural positioning, self-understanding, and public personae, were nonetheless equally dependent on the technological continuum for the production of their work. While Warhol flaunted this dependence and a sense of kinship with the machine ("I've always wanted to be a machine"), 1 Eliot concealed it, recoiling into interiority, religion, myth, and tradition. But for a brief moment, Eliot's writing, like Warhol's multimedia projects, was uneasily entangled in gadgets, circuits, media networks, and technologies of textual production and reproduction. If Warhol mimed the workings of his gadgets, so did Eliot; if Warhol was a recorder-camera-xerox machine, Eliot was a gramophone. But the point here is not to pursue the (certainly contrived) parallel between these two wildly divergent figures. It is to rescue the technological dependency of one of the gray eminences of modernism and to resituate The Waste Land, an "apotheosis of modernity" 2 and mainstay of the twentieth-century canon, within the discourse networks of its time.

The term "discourse network" (English translation of Aufschreibesystem) was coined by German historian and theorist Friedrich A. Kittler to designate the material and ideological substratum of discourse and textuality--the web of "technologies and institutions that allow a given culture to select, store and produce relevant data." 3 A discourse network is, then, a sort of unconscious, or impensé, of signification. In a way, the concept combines Michel Foucault's concept of the "archive," which had been applied mostly to print culture, with Marshall McLuhan's insights on the influence of media technologies on thought and cultural processes. In Kittler's work the term has a materialistic thrust. It seeks to deflect the interiorizing, psychologizing tendency of traditional literary hermeneutics by exploring how the material support, or hardware, of [End Page 747] signification shapes textuality. This hardware connects abstract meanings to real, tangible bodies, and bodies to regimes of power, information channels, and institutions. Discourse and information hardware filter out some signals as "noise" and process others as meaningful. At the same time, conceptions of "noise" and "meaning" are never sanctioned within a single discursive realm or medium. They are promoted and circulated by partially connected notation and information protocols. Hence in his description of "the discourse network of 1900" (where "1900" stands for the period stretching from the media revolution of the 1880s to the 1920s), to which modernism belongs, Kittler traces the traffic of ideologies, forms of discourse, and inscription mechanisms through the fields of psychophysics, psychoanalysis, the electronic recording media, and literature. Kittler's proposals stem largely from his analysis of German literature and culture. In applying them to T. S. Eliot and to Anglo-American modernism, we will have to adapt them somewhat to preserve their validity. Hence in much of what follows, I will seek to situate The Waste Land within a discourse network that brings together the electronic media, language automatism, psychotherapy and the discourse of the unconscious, and the idiom of popular culture. 4

This approach entails a shift in the customary parameters of discussion of Eliot's most influential piece. Rather than an expansion of the usual hermeneutic debates on The Waste Land's formal-conceptual unity (or lack of it), symbolism, sources, and meaning, what will be performed here is a surface exploration of its textual mechanics. The point is not to discover what but how the poem signifies. At the end of this path lie no further interpretations of the text but the unveiling of modes of inscription on which its...

pdf

Share