I am currently at work on my first book, Muting Modernism: Sonic Technique and the Culture of Silence, in which I examine the role of silence in technoculture through readings of literature and film, between 1901 and 1938.

By the turn of the twentieth century, the telephone network had infiltrated far corners of the western hemisphere, wireless radio signals had transcended the Atlantic, and the phonograph had brought ragtime to the living room. These technologies heralded a century in which sound would yield to human control as never before and limitless information would reach every listener, but not everyone embraced this newly audible world—or was embraced by it. Muting Modernism examines the role of silence in technoculture through readings of literature and film, between 1901 and 1938. I argue that thinkers from across the northern Atlantic disputed the power of rising technocracies in the communication, entertainment, and war industries by establishing counter-informational listening practices. We have heard that “silence is complicity,” but this book argues that we must recover the practice of silence if we are to check the industries that capture, regulate, and monetize sound. This means learning from filmmaker Oscar Micheaux, who refused movie studios’ faddish demands for song and dance and instead told stories of voicelessness under Jim Crow. It means investigating the mariners who drew on the quiet threat of the U-boat to fashion a new poetics. It means studying the quiet labor of typists, who envisioned a professional feminism. These thinkers offer us their hard-won lesson that when the powerful control sound, silence is the last means of dissent.

My book rehabilitates silence to the cultural history of transmission technology, with the goal of recovering listening practices that emerged from modernism’s noisy soundscape and remain relevant in today’s technoculture. It reveals ways of refusing the compulsion to record, of rejecting consumptive listening habits, and of dignifying silenced speakers. To reclaim these understudied practices, I investigate scenes that range from the Apollo Theater, where Black patrons muted racist musicians before live radio audiences, to the Western Front, where British sappers imagined community under the reverberant earth. These explorations reveal forms of silence as elegant as the “—” that signals transatlantic communion in Robert Frost’s poetry and as elaborate as the long-deferred confession in Micheaux’s filmmaking. I gather these diverse recordings under the concept of muting, which reimagines silence as a social action that validates lives marginalized by modernism’s noisy industries. This concept establishes a category of counter-informational expression that enables resistance within an information-saturated culture—a culture emergent in the early-twentieth century, but ubiquitous today.

Muting Modernism offers its readers a new language for communicating and asserting silence. This language pushes back against the dominant culture of the early-twentieth century, when rising technocracies redefined sound in terms of rationalization and control. This culture excluded many voices from public discourse, and it cast numerous aesthetic practices to the margins of society. While we have come far in advocating for individuals historically excluded from public expression, we still lack the terminology for identifying the voices that cannot be recovered. Muting reinstates gaps in our closed histories of sound, reminding attentive listeners of all that audible records have left behind. This book guides readers as they reimagine silence, not as a lack of information but as the archetypal concept for refusing information hegemony in all its forms. This means that silence’s pivotal role in modernism can be projected onto contemporary life, where once again technocratic forces drive new forms of social fragmentation. These modernist aesthetic provocations and social strategies remain relevant as we strive to slow the social media torrent and bar the algorithms that listen in on our digital lives. The concept offers us ways to reassert privacy within ubiquitous electronic surveillance, to rebuild community across digital partitions, and rediscover creativity where deterministic algorithms reign.