Susan Hiller in conversation with Gavin Jantjes
In: A Fruitful Incoherence: Dialogues with Artists on Internationalism. London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 1998, pp. 20-31.
GJ What did you mean when you once said that you wanted "to speak from the side of night, the unknown, while not reducing yourself to darkness and the unknownable?" [1]
SH I was trying to deal with some of the debates and theoretical arguments around the position of the feminine within art practice that formed the context I emerged in. I wanted to reserve the right to speak, to speak in ways that might appear to be irrational, anarchic and untheorised, while at the same time refusing to locate my work within a romantic discourse as being untheorised and irrational. There were certain things that were then considered to be off limits for women artists who were interested in feminist issues - themes around the body, nature, the irrational and the supernatural were no-go areas because they had been traditionally used to associate women with nature. And women artists in the surrealist period and also later on had been relegated in that way, to function as the muse for men. I've always been trying to do two things. One is to create a context in which there can be space between previous either/or positions. And the second is to bring into my work things and ideas which have been left out or relegated to the margins. Now, I understand all of that has to do with notions of the other. Gradually, representing myself as a gendered speaker led, by means of making work, to a deeper understanding. In The Myth of Primitivism, [2] a collection of texts about art issues arising from post-colonialism, I defined the realm of the primitive as the home of supernatural beings, of people who live far away and are therefore thought to have mysterious powers, the inhabitants of the lands of the dead, fabulous monsters - all the beings who live at the edge of the known world. I was suggesting that the contents of this area - the psychological, the irrational, the distant and the different, have for us, for our society, collapsed into a simple sense of the other as an unredeemed primitive. For us, the category of the other includes real people who became closely related to us by colonialism and who have been burdened with all these projections of stuff we reject in ourselves. In my own practice, I say yes, these complex projections are within me, part of me.
GJ You've talked about yourself and your practice in terms of both ethnography and map making, and this wonderful vision of being a dreamer. I want to open up these different roles. In postmodernity there is this notion that artists shouldn't have roles, shouldn't be responsible. Yet what you're asking us to do is to be responsible as practitioners and humans - to wonder and explore.
SH It's just that it's difficult to talk about this spontaneously and off the cuff, for the simple reason that if I were able to present it really clearly in words, briefly and succinctly, I wouldn't have to make the artwork. So it gives me a dilemma. I feel badly equipped to deal with these areas in a conversation. But what I think is important to draw out from what you've just noted is that in the history of the West, artists were one of the few groups in society who didn't buy in, oddly, to Descartes' dualism. And the reasons for that are many and varied. But it might go back to something as basic as the physiological nature of our brain with two sides. Artists need to use both sides of their brain in their practice. It's not so easy for artists to position themselves on one side or the other. And reading into the texts of other artists, you know, particularly artists of the modernist period, they range between scientific justifications for their practices and intuitive, romantic, traditional justifications. It's almost as though there's no way to find a place to locate in words their actual intention and endeavours. And I think that kind of problem has come down to us in the postmodern period as a situation in which we feel it is impossible really to accept responsibility as artists for a different type of epistemological stance, which probably is pretty hard to pin down in words. It's a fluid awareness which experiences reality. Therefore the experience of the dreamer is real. That's sort of how I would see that problem. And in talking with younger artists I find that they feel these tensions so acutely that they seem to abandon the effort to position themselves. It may have to do with the fact that they haven't had enough time yet to define themselves through their work. Certainly, when I first began to work I didn't have a great deal I could say about it. All the thoughts that I have on these kinds of issues at the moment have been generated through practice. It takes time to find out what your work is saying.
GJ That does involve a shift by the viewer. Your work asks that we engage with it to make it work. The responsibility is shared almost equally between the viewer and the practitioner. What is required is what I call a conscientious viewing position.
SH Yes, that's absolutely true. Of course that doesn't mean I'm not full of intentions and fantasies about how people will respond to my work. But I have quite consciously and deliberately tried to give the viewer a set, often, of colliding awarenesses. For example in Élan, there's visual material, there's sound. Well, of course already that means that the viewer becomes aware that her or his eyes and ears are providing different inputs all the time. Then there's the empty space in the middle which, in fact, is one of the major elements of the piece. The fact that there's nothing there is as important as the somethings which are also there and, yes, that's structured in such a way as to nudge the viewer towards a situation of a conscious sense of self-fragmentation and multiplicity. So there's no one single ground you can rest on completely which does mean that you can have problems in trying to reconcile inputs that appear to be taking you in opposite directions. But the space I reserve for the viewer allows for the creation of a unified experience.
GJ In one of your texts from a previous interview, you speak of "a fruitful incoherence". I understand this as a space which you the practitioner and I the viewer have to make use of, a space located between polarities. And the action within this space results in "a fruitful incoherence". One has to discover it and it requires a certain input from both parties. A revealing space in which your role is almost like, not a guide - no, that would be too authoritarian - more a. . .
SH Hostess [laughs]. It comes out of those early pieces I did which were participatory and non-hierarchical in the sense that, although I structured and thought up the proposals, when the time came to enact the work I was simply one participant amongst others. It was as a group, collectively, that people were responsible for the results, including responsibility for producing documentation in so far as there was any. And I think what I always wanted to do with works that inhabited more conventional gallery spaces was again to set up that sort of situation, where of course I'm taking responsibility for the structure, but as for the interpretation, that's the role of the viewer. I guess I always had sort of a hobby-horse about intention and interpretation because although my intention is very clear, I don't think it can substitute for your interpretation.
GJ There's another aspect of the work which has always intrigued me - words and text. Borges, the Argentine poet says 'Language is a map in search of a territory; it imposes order, it draws boundaries; it classifies and taxonomizes and yet remains always an abstraction, separate from the world of the living experience, separate from the things it seeks to describe.'
SH Well, that's marvellous. That's exactly how I feel about words, but as to language, and we are talking about language in visual art, that's another issue. Let's discuss words. I began to use words in my work gradually after years when I didn't do anything that involved words at all. And they seemed to come into my work in a strange way. Almost as a questioning or problematizing of the relationship between words and image, in that I felt images always were going off in one direction and words were going in another direction. A lot of the writing I did later on was an attempt to raise exactly this point at a period of time when theory has become increasingly significant. The problem with that for me is that I've no wish to illustrate theory. I consider visual art to be a first order practice and that the discoveries and mirrors that artists are making are as important as the work of any theorist. So then where's the place of the use of text in the work of artists? Those are the kind of questions that made me want to use words. As I began to use them I realised that I was making pieces in which the text and images didn't read easily one to the other. And again I think, looking back at some of those pieces, there was opening out a space for the viewer to stand between viewing and reading, and a space to ask what is this, what is this place. Because that's the place where I find myself.
GJ Yes that's true when you use words and they are substantive or codified descriptions of things. But what happens when words are not used like that, when they are like materials, found like any other piece of material resource? Then there's a difference. Having used words myself, in my own practice, I have also had to cope with this difficulty. In the last ten years I've not used any. But prior to that I used words all the time.
SH Well, I suppose the liberating feelings that I get from utilising my fascination with "fruitful incoherence", in other words with made-up languages or nonsense languages, is in contrast with the constriction that I feel from using the acceptable language of everyday discourse, from which I always feel distanced. I don't suppose this really answers your question directly, but what I think is happening is a rapid fluctuation, back and forth, between the two. And I think I did say several times in past statements that when I use words, by which I mean "real" words, I can only use them as materials, as part of a material practice. I see them on a piece of paper or I type them out, I can cut them up, transpose them, and I can do this and that with them. And when I realised I had the freedom to treat them as materials, I was suddenly freed up to be able to use them when I needed to. It also helped me tremendously because I was able to write more normal texts from that stage onwards. But it is this sense I have of being a body in the world, of being embodied in some way, which I find has kept me from being able to accept the overarching abstractedness of words. Let's talk about something concrete.
GJ I want to talk a little about Sisters of Menon and Belshazzar's Feast. In both there are references to Egyptian and European traditions. But you don't develop them; what I mean by that is, these traditions serve you as a kind of springboard to leap into the dark. What should artists do with tradition?
SH With tradition? Ah! Well, I don't know what artists should do with tradition. I only know, speaking for myself, that - and this is always why I would consider myself a post-modernist - there's probably nothing I've ever thought, said or done that hasn't already occurred somewhere. And my job is a sorter - to re-juggle the whole thing and take those fragments and make something else, as someone will take our fragments and make something else of them. So I guess I just always allow myself to poach in territories that I feel deeply influenced by in some way. And I'm very aware of being part of the European tradition, which in turn has drawn upon certain selected traditions from other places. We grew up with a set of our own myths and legends which are rarely articulated or acknowledged, and I suppose in these two pieces you mentioned there's a kind of marrying of a spontaneous eruption from the unconscious with a wish to share that, to make it shareable, with other people. I think that's where these inherited mythic themes are probably coming from - the vehicle to hang the sharing onto.
GJ You've mentioned that art is a first order activity. The recorded chanting that you have in some works, the verbal translation of your automatic writing, is that talking about a one-time, first-order activity of language?
SH You're getting to the kind of questions I ask myself all the time. The way I think about the improvisations - the vocalisations and the handwriting - is that of course initially this is a surprise. After you've done it a few times you become extremely good at it, you become adroit and practised. And the marks which began rather roughly in a work like Élan by now have become very codified, smoothed out. What I'm trying to draw attention to is the fact that out of the unconscious comes nonsense perhaps, but if you insist on repeating that nonsense and if you can share that nonsense and if other people recognise that nonsense, then it's no longer nonsense: it's language. And this work is sort of positioned quite uneasily on that basis. I haven't exhibited any new automatism works for a few years, because it can easily become a habit. That's the problem with abstract expressionism.
GJ You say that you want your art to "illuminate its field". You talk about it as if it were light, or casting light. It's the way I think of your practice: it clarifies, it focuses us, it gets our attention. Yet you also seem to be saying that there's a limitation to the terrain in which that light can shine. Its limitation is based on the fact that the artist has to be within the issue, within the problem of the work.
SH There are so many things being brought up by what you're saying. Yes, first of all I'm not an observer or an external authority. And second, all cultures divide up known and unknown, light and dark, very, very differently. And third, for some reason, you made me think of those old noir movies where you see someone's feet walking into a dark house, and then a torch is shone round which illuminates just fragments but you do get a sense of the whole space just through seeing these fragments. I think we share a view of consciousness, that it's able to illuminate specific things but not everything. I think that is what art does too. The curious thing if you look at art practice overall, not just one's own work, it's almost as though certain areas get illuminated at certain time periods and then they become obscured, while another area becomes illuminated. And it's impossible to get the whole room in light. So it's sort of the way I think about that. That's what we are each doing. We are drawing attention to - perhaps that's a less pretentious way of putting it - rather than saying illuminate.
GJ This drawing attention to the world through fragments, points to the fragmentary nature of both spatial concepts and our identity. Each fragment increases our consciousness of where we are and the realisation of who we are. Berger says: "Home is the centre of the world, both in the geographical and ontological sense." [3] He goes on to talk about nomads who when they stop travelling, stick a pole in the ground to connect and locate themselves to the earth. The tepees being a good example. He also says: "Home is the place from which we become cognisant of the world and in which we construct meanings." The implication being that knowledge radiates from a centre. That we start from home and work outwards. Where's home to you?
SH That's a dilemma. And it's an interesting one for me. Because I did realise a few years ago a lot of the work I was doing I would think of as letters home. To whom are these letters addressed and where is home? I think home is wherever I am, but as I was trying to explain before, recognising that who I am is also who I'm not. And not suppressing the foreignness in myself, both psychological and ethnic, allowing that to come out is often very surprising to me. I know this isn't a direct answer to your question. But home isn't so much a geography as a kind of an ideal.
GJ Duality is for me the intriguing part, because it occurs so often in the pieces that you make. When you're talking about the space of "fruitful incoherence", it's always between things, it's never fixed, it's always re-negotiating itself as you move through history making. . .
SH Yes. I've just a few obsessions that keep coming up and they come up in different ways all the time. However, I would say multiplicity where you've said duality. I'm very interested in your question about home. I've done a lot of pieces that are about home, that are about domesticity, and that are about strangeness. Belshazzar's Feast is, after all, located in a crypto living-room. So it's an irruption of the unconscious in the midst of a domestic setting; or the wallpaper works that I've done, or even the postcards - which are tiny little things that, when you are away from home you send back home. . . it's an ongoing theme. One of the very first pieces that I made in the late Sixties when I was travelling extensively and didn't actually live in any particular country, was a series of boxes called Studies for Home, and home was in quotes Studies for "Home" it's something I suppose I'm in quest of, you know.
GJ Let's talk about home in connection to your piece, At The Freud Museum which is located in what was Freud's home and which today has become a museum. It is a work in a home that ignites all these issues that you've just described. One could approach this work from so many different positions. It is firstly a collection within a collection, within a collection. One had to negotiate the space of Freud's home to be able to reach and then deal with the objects you positioned in the museum. I believe this to be an important, strategic work. Quite overwhelming. I keep going back to it. Every time I see those boxes these feelings occur. I think it's offering me so many insights into this question. It's a confrontation not only with Freud and his time but a contemporary encounter with the psychology of Home.
SH Well, my Freud Museum piece is now called From the Freud Museum since I've expanded it and shown it in other places. There's also a book I made with some of the same material, called After the Freud Museum. As you mentioned, the notion of the Freud Museum is a great deal wider than the little house in Hampstead that has become the Freud Museum: it is the fact that we are all living in the Freud Museum and we can't get out of the Freud Museum. In realising that, then everything becomes loaded with a set of references and metaphors, and more than that, the wish to uncover, explore, reveal and search for meaning in trivia - which of course is what I have always wanted to do. And it came initially as a sort of surprise to me that this particular piece would have such a powerful impact on people. I attribute that primarily to the invocation of the word 'Freud', which carries these desires of all of us to understand. Unlike earlier museological pieces of mine from the Seventies, this piece is happening in the Nineties and I already have lived a life, and I've made work and so forth, and I can reference that within the piece too, which allows people who might remember earlier work of mine to find those triggers and to discover that in a succinct way another whole reference has been opened up.
GJ At The Freud Museum and Fragments, which includes pottery shards, both have an ethnographic dynamic. This links them to our earlier comments about the shift in the condition of looking. That it was the first act in the process of conscientisation. Freud has said that everything that is buried can be located. He wants us to look in at ourselves. Yet the vogue in the late Eighteenth Century, and at the start of the Nineteenth, was ethnography. Europe looked out at something distant, it examined others to discover something about itself. You are saying that the ethnography of our postmodern present is in the opposite direction. Locating meanings in what you have called trivia, those things that surround us, is a very dynamic exercise for the conscientious viewer.
SH Well, that's interesting too, this idea of the conscientious viewer. Too many installations now are made for a snapshot view. D.H. Lawrence fulminated against the notion of snapshot art a long time ago: he recommended Picasso for not providing snapshot art and beyond that African sculpture, which had to be experienced in the round. I used to think installations and site-specific work were not for snapshots. But nowadays people are making installations which basically look good in a single picture, from one angle. I thought, oh well, this piece with many, many little units was going to be overlooked by viewers, but I really had underestimated people's ability to enter into the spirit of the work, because I found that people spent an inordinate amount of time with it. And I think it's because, relatively inadvertently, by a regular rhythm it moves people along like breathing or walking, and allows them to take their own time through the piece. In From the Freud Museum I juxtapose psychoanalysis with ethnography, and look at both through art. It very clearly designates a space for the viewer - that is, each individual box is labelled, then there's a picture and there's an object. Where does the meaning reside? Well, it resides in those many possible combinations of ways of making sense of this. And even more importantly, in the gaps and intervals between meanings, the vast chasms between individual boxes, and in the sense of these intervals and spaces becoming very vivid, very real. And ultimately it seems to me there is a kind of meaning about the quest for meaning in the work as a whole - you may only grasp it for a second, but it comes together. I spent a lot of time in making each of the units, the individual boxes, which initially I thought of as individual spaces for individual installations or maquettes for installations. A lot of time and thinking and psychological self-examination goes into making each unit, each of which begins with an object, a thing, that I feel strongly about and need to find out why. Things I deeply love and or deeply loathe. It's only when I perceive something new emerging through the combination of placing, titling, contextualising that I consider any individual unit is sufficiently rich to go out in public and become part of the larger configuration. I discovered that viewers as well do seem to work that way. That is, if the work is presented in such a way that the space at the centre is clearly theirs, they take up that place. And perhaps in this particular piece I've been able to do it in a much more overt way and also maybe be simpler about it.
GJ What comes to mind when one sees these objects in glass cases is the sense of the tactile. One wants to touch them. They also remind one of books, which returns them to text, and to the conditioned way we discover meaning. I think of these boxed collections as open, naked discoveries, standing there, revealing themselves to you. That's one of their other dynamics. I don't know how you have them at home, in your studio. Are they stored in shelves so that one can just pull them out?
SH The idea initially was for them to be available to people, open. Cruelly, that doesn't work out if you are using fragile, cardboard things, and the vitrine form made sense. It made sense in the Freud Museum and it goes along with conventions of museums. All sorts of friends of mine and I myself have worked to try to break up the notion of the museum, yet it seems a useful one to use in this particular case. It seems as though behind glass, the nakedness of the open boxes has a certain seduction to it. But there's one other point - I think it's important - I'd like to make just very briefly about this piece. In addition to the individual sentence which each box might be, the piece is about collecting, as you said at the beginning of your remarks. And I think that there is another kind of attraction here which is the same attraction we feel when we look at Freud's collection of fabulous objects. I feel that this plenitude or this multiplicity is almost a form of the sublime. We can't pin it down, its on-goingness is consoling, like breathing, but its actual finitude suggests death. And that is built in, of course, to my piece.
GJ Talking about the whole notion of communication, I just want to extend that by one jump. A very recent work, Dream Screens, is out there on the Internet for the whole world to see. Here again is this wonderful dichotomy, this duality, of language, of spoken texts. Sometimes you hear it, sometimes you can't. It also has a wonderful sense of rhythm or pulse which is in the air, which one's immediate visual sensory perception cannot read. There are sounds from frequencies our ears cannot hear, whale sounds, Morse code.
SH There actually aren't any whale sounds. It's interesting you should hear that. There's the human heart beat, there's Morse code of someone who's actually having a lucid dream and he's tapping out: "I am dreaming, I am dreaming, I am dreaming", and there are pulsar frequencies. You are absolutely right: these are pulses that run through the whole piece as in Raudive's idea of amplifying silence which was my starting point for the soundtrack of Élan. It's based on Raudive's experiments when he left tape recorders running in empty, silent rooms and he then amplified the silence, discovering audible ghostly, voices. [4] I don't want either to debunk or to approve of his findings, I just consider this a very compelling metaphor for the kind of things that interest me, wanting to find the space between - I want to find the sound in the silence, the meaningful in nonsense. This interest in all sorts of marginal and marginalised manifestations is sort of brought together in Dream Screens, where the soundtrack consists of people reading, in different languages, scenarios of films that have dream in the title, and these are sort of put forward as collective dreams, or dreams that have formed all of our personal dreams. All that is intercut with the pulses that you've mentioned. The visuals are simply colours, an infinite interactive sequence of colours which no two people will programme in the same way.
GJ What's striking about it is, when you're surfing the Net it's very busy, reflecting something of our mad reality and what's out on the streets - an excess of activity and information - then there's your screen, a quiet, meditative space, offering you an opportunity not to surf the Net, but to dream in it. I think that it's a great metaphor for us right now.
SH It came from my slight disquiet about the overabundance of things to see and do on the Net. And when you were reading the Borges quote about maps, I was thinking about the Internet. You see it isn't at all a map of our world - or if it's a map it's as big as the world itself. So it doesn't really tell us any more than the chaos of the streets as you put it; I mean it's exactly the same kind of unformulated, uncodified kind of situation and I thought that in a way it's like the junk theory of dreaming - the idea some people have that you are just going through junk programmes, computer programmes of your brain, getting rid of them at night. That's sort of what the Internet is like. So I thought, well, where is the space for the reflective self, and where's the space for pleasure, aimless pleasure, and where's the space for sensuality as opposed to information? And that's how the piece came together. Having said that, it's also important that the dreaming metaphor came quite naturally from being based here in England where people stay up all night to access the Net.
GJ Finally, I want to place before you the word "internationalism". A contemporary definition of this term is that it's a new interpretation of what happens to visual art that strategically places itself between polarities of tradition and contemporeanity. An art emerging from "a fruitful incoherent space" to use your words. I see in your practice a sense of duality, of being rooted in many things. You have discovered how to make art in the realm of the in-between. The fruitful part is how it engages our senses. Its incoherence being the difficulty of translation, and the acceptance that certain translations are impossible. Internationalism today is how we acknowledge that there are realms and practices which basically we do not understand completely but are seduced into interpreting, knowing untranslatability to be the sign of our times. This change in the visual arts implies the negotiation of an in-between and offers a way forward to other aspects of life.
SH Well, I would like to feel that we could accommodate that notion. I hope it isn't a luxury. I think it's a necessity. The problem for me is as an artist I do get a tremendous aesthetic pleasure from all sorts of things that I know I don't understand. And if I could see those things in a situation that is not formulated by economic and political hierarchies I would be absolutely delighted. But because I know that a lot of the experiences I'm being provided with are being institutionally engineered in a kind of tokenism, I'm afraid my more puritanical side gets quite worked up about that, because all along I've been arguing for the really deep significance of art. And part of it, of course, always is its mysteriousness, that is: although I can be the viewer in your work, you and your work will always be different from my idea of your work and you. I consider that exciting, but it's opened up all sorts of problems.
GJ What I'm searching for is how does one touch those other mysterious things. We've been through modernity's institutionalised use of the word "international". It certainly didn't consider the fruitfulness of that mystery as part of its history. My optimism is not to stand in opposition to what has been. What one's trying to do is to almost rewrite this word "internationalism", in your automatic writing.
SH Through the experience of the past few years in Yugoslavia, the situations in Africa and India, let alone European problems with racism, I would like to think in terms of secular, non-ethnic identities, except in so far as people choose to locate themselves. Maybe identity, ethnicity, gender, sexuality are always in flux, always being remade and redefined. Maybe they are always actually incoherent, not fixed, as far as experience goes, but institutions want to define and use them. And in the art world we've been experimenting with a lot of this, haven't we, going back to the early African art shows.
GJ Sisters of Menon asks a question about the self, which I consider to be one of the most important questions of the last twenty years certainly: "Who am I?" Menon answers: "I am we."
SH Yes that's right. "Who is this one?" "We are this one."
GJ Exactly! "We are this one." Ricoeur talks of the possibility of everybody being an other. [5] We have to face the collapse of notions of territory and geography, of specific definitions of centre and periphery. It opens up the possibility for finding a space between these polarities. The kind of "fruitful incoherent" space we imagine ourselves in, place ourselves in, work in.
SH This is why I'm saying it's so very difficult for me to talk about these things. Because of course I know philosophers and poets address these things in language. If I could talk about them, I wouldn't make the work. I'm sure everything I've said today is absolutely full of contradictions. But it is interesting how one learns to practise, isn't it? You know the Sisters of Menon text really took me by surprise. When I said to you before that artists haven't bought into Descartes, I meant if you say "I think, therefore I am", the whole notion of the "I" is already implied. "I am." It's a territory. It's this place, here where I am. It's already given. And everything is fudged over in that statement.
GJ When Menon says "I am we", you have to rethink and open up that thought. Suddenly the ground is very slippery and unstable, and the certainties of the past develop cracks and fissures. Where are we?
SH The thing that has been interesting to me about that work is that it goes back to the question you asked before, about being on the side of night, and so forth. I suppose I was attempting to challenge orthodoxies of all kinds, not just the traditional, patriarchal orthodoxy which would locate me quite easily, and rather acceptably I think, as a very mystical, charmingly loony young woman artist. I was trying to challenge that and I was also trying to challenge the quickly becoming orthodoxy of feminism which was that I should stay away from these areas because I would be positioned in this way. And I think that by association, and because of both my embarrassment and empowerment through having made some of those works, I have met a great many people outside the art world who are tremendously in sympathy and drawn to this kind of thinking. And it seems to me that a lot of the effort of education in our system is to discourage people from thinking outside categories or from thinking in between places. And maybe art - I mean visual art practice as it now stands - is the only public arena for showing, as well as telling, these kinds of insights.
[1] Interview with Rozsika Parker, in Susan Hiller 1973-1983: The Muse My Sister, (Derry, Glasgow, London: Orchard Gallery, Third Eye Centre, Gimple Fils, 1984).
[2] The Myth of Primitivism: Perspectives on Art. Introduced and compiled by Susan Hiller (ed.), (London and New York: Routledge, 1991).
[3] John Berger, And our faces, my heart, brief as photos (London: Writers and Readers, 1984), p. 55.
[4] During the late 1960s the Latvian psychologist Konstantin Raudive conducted a series of experiments in which he left a tape recorder running in an empty soundproofed room. He claimed that the resultant amplified sound recordings were the voices of historical figures (mostly famous modernist men like Mayakovsky, James Joyce, Winston Churchill) who had their own transmission station.
[5] Paul Ricoeur, 'Universal Civilisation and National Cultures', in History and Truth, trans. by Chs. A. Kelbley (Evanston: North Western University Press, 1965), p. 278.