ABSTRACT
Maps, musics and memories: the perpetual translation of space-the space of a language, a sound, an image, a life-into the peculiarities of a place, into the shaft of existence constituted by the passing ‘now’, inevitably invokes the translation of geography into ontology, of the formal grammars of music and image into the inscription of being in the event of hearing and seeing, of the abstract into the body. I have chosen to consider these questions in the metropolitan context of aural maps, in the recording of sound, in the metaphorical and metamorphosing power of music-giving ‘voice to the enigma’ (Ernst Bloch) —in the epoch of global technological reproduction. The focus of the essays in this book has concentrated on cinema and the city. I propose to adopt that perspective not as a point of arrival, but as a point of departure for a further set of questions while employing aural, rather than visual, maps to orientate my journey. However, since the testimony of film and cinema clearly remain central to such considerations, let me briefly commence with the question of cinema. As a language, as an economic and cultural institution, a way of picturing and enframing the world, cinema contributes to the making of the visualscapes, soundscapes and culturalscapes in which we move. As such it is also ‘a repository of our knowing and our memory’.1 This perhaps suggests that we should not readily subscribe to the mimetic fallacy and rush in to seek a causal or immediate connection between cinema and society, in which the former is presumed to
mirror, reflect and represent the latter, but should instead consider cinema as one of the languages we inhabit, dwell in, and in which we, our histories, cultures and identities, are constituted. To ask what cinema is is to ask what our culture is, who we are, and what we are doing here. To propose this moment of reflection is to oppose theoretical seizures of the world that seek to reduce language, be it of the cinema or everyday speech, to a transparent medium that is deployed in a second moment, after the subject. The idea that language comes after the subject, rather than constituting something that is already waiting and calling us, is a proposal that does not allow us to travel very far into the entwined enigma of cultural speech, historical being and social becoming. Languages, whether literary, cinematic, musical, or verbal, and even if often dependent upon quite precise techno-cultural systems, are not turned on and off by the flick of a switch. They persist and permeate our world. They ghost our presence and circulate beyond our individual volition. As part and parcel of the ecology of our lives they exist prior to our knowing and thus inform our being and becoming. They are irreducible to a medium or technology. They are part of our understanding.
