This (extremely) short entry was written in response to and summary of a seminar conducted by the School of English, Media and Performing Arts at UNSW entitled “The Prospect of Politeness: Soundproofing the Country Estate in Eighteenth-Century Britain” by Dr Peter Denney, April 5th 2011.
Dr Peter Denney began this seminar with something which had never crossed my mind beforehand, that the ”peace and quiet” we so often connote with the image of the contemporary countryside bathed in birdsong, breeze and babbling was once quite the contrary. Instead, at the turn of the eighteenth century in Britain, it was predominated by the industrious tinkering of bustling villages, the songs, chatter and sickling of plebeian labour working the fields, the clanging dings of artisan crafters, the chimes of various bells, the wooden jittering of horsedrawn wagons and the thunderous roars of hunting and other games.
At this point, Denney turns to a question. He makes it clear that he is talking about the representation of sounds (in art, poetry, literature etc), as he asks how it is that the aural perceptions of bucolic society in eighteenth century Britain could change from “noisy and busy” to “peace and quiet” in a relative blink of the eye. And relatedly, how could a picturesque landscape become stratified so esoterically that numerous ‘sound walls’ popped up across the vast green pastures of yore, dividing plebeian and elite rural cultures?
Moving away from the militaristic and epic notions of clamor, contemporaries such as Shaftsbury and Aken rebuked the ‘noble’ noises of the hunt, and instead argued for a countryside which would act as a backdrop for a cultural Renaissance in Britain, a nation cringed by its neighbours for a lack of the arts, seen as uncouth and rugged. Additionally the rural panorama became an extension of a classical republican ethos, which downgraded heroism and patriarchy, and in its place promoted civility, liberty, virtue, order, capitalism, humanism and morally-justified luxury. As a result there is a tangent in English-Georgic poetry and painting from 1750 onward which no longer adorned a soundscape of partitioned cavalry surveillancing rowdy militia, but rather instated the image of a muted, quietened and cerebral landscape acquired through capital success.
The creation of sprawling country estates with lavish landscape gardens created a whole imposed atmos and community of polite conversation, silent observation, reflective contemplation which the ‘noisy poor’, squallering in strident poverty, could not access. Octagonal summerhouses, sunken ‘ha-ha’s (effectively built sound barriers) and ‘thinking towers’ were constructed atop hills to afford for a privatised, polite and dignified space for the elite to consume culture. Former epic battleground panoramas were framed into windows for civilisation to peer out of. Aesthetics predominated mechanics.
What Denney maps out is that this shift coincides with the emergence of early modern visual culture, a convergence of pictorial and pastoral culture in which the eye of the Western spectator was privileged as the central organ and emphasis of philosophy, politics, society and culture. The quietening of the eighteenth century British countryside “internalised vision”, the corporeal eye becoming a means to discern taste and virtue. In doing so it forged a subsistent manual and tactile plebeian counterpart which it distinguished itself from. What bridged the two was sound, a sense able to taint and penetrate the private circuits of polite space. From this juncture in Western thought and philosophy, Deleuze’s Logic of Sensation could be brought into discussion. The polite space was the attempt to create a “purely optical space”, but was still connected to it by aural and likewise ‘tactile referents’. Interestingly, as the ear was subordinated and the countryside muted, the voices of the industrial revolution were relocated to more urban and industrious spaces. And so the eye and mind, and not the distant, silent hand and body, sat atop this new world order and saw the bucolic as an art gallery, filled with static sublime paintings.
