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Downloading the siren's song: the technological management of otherness.

Article Excerpt
Despite our occasional longing for it, the fact remains that for a human being there can be no such thing as genuine silence. This is what composer John Cage discovered when he entered a sealed chamber at Harvard University in 1951. Instead of silence, Cage became aware of the high-pitched whir of his circulating blood and the pounding rhythms of his heart. The intensity of sound in such environments is something of a revelation, but can also be disturbing. While we might assume silence to be a natural state, the closer our approach to it, the stranger the world seems. It's not a comfortable feeling being too proximate to our own biological rhythms--the experience of one's heartbeat, or the sound of one's circulating blood--especially in a culture bent on denying the finiteness and fragility of the body. Witness the protracted debate over Terri Schiavo--suspended like Kafka's hunter Gracchus between the realm of the living and the dead. The technological capacity to redetermine the boundaries between life and death seems to have made us less able as a culture to deal with absolutes. Death, like silence, remains largely unimaginable.

Cage took his own revelation about silence and composed a piece of piano music 4'33", where no sounds emanate from the pianist on stage for the length of the title. Of course, there is no real silence, rather musically empty time, where the normally intrusive and indeterminate...