Poetry, sound and the designing of 'phantom objectivity'

Gertrude Stein recognised what Benjamin called the now most unfashionable 'universal equality of things' at the level of the word. For Stein, the literary work was based on surface relations rather than psychological depth or subjection to a transcendental signified. Similarly, it is this surface relation which informs the audio-tactile model of the poem as performance piece. This paper explores the paradoxical nexus between surface relations and psychological depth with reference to a collaborative project between a poet and a sound artist curated by a visual artist at a series of venues from August 2008 to June 2009. As a model of interactions of aesthetic modes, the project uncovered a discursive struggle that highlighted the dominance of the scopic field over the aural field. This paper seeks to explain the reasons for this 'phantom objectivity'.