Berger's ‘Field’

The implicit problem and the potential of Jean-Luc Nancy's call to ‘capture or surprise’ the ‘sound just for itself’ resonate together in Berger's 1971 essay ‘Field’. The apparently fixed boundaries between auditor and field, between past and present apprehensions, become disturbed. Berger's essay stages the perceptual agency of encounter, the event of environment not as backdrop but as participatory exploration. What Berger records in writing is the field as itself in proprioceptive fusion with the listener and, by extension, the reader. Listening, seeing, reading and writing are presented as near-simultaneous manifestations of this reciprocal meeting between context and perceiver.

Berger's essay shares obvious affinities with the work of a number of sound artists for whom the specific locality is an integral element of the recording. This environmental encounter opens correspondences with the concerns of two contemporary poets whose work engages with both literal and conceptual ‘fields’ in terms of the physical, social, cultural, political and linguistic environments that we inhabit. Peter Gizzi and Juliana Spahr have, in different ways, approached the field recording as writing through a series of explorative associations of subjectivity and attention involving an attunement of the senses through listening, seeing and remembering. The resulting poems proliferate the temporality of the field recording beyond a single duration in a continuous present.

Berger's essay opens with a conception of environment that finds expression in relation to a domestic and even subjective landscape of memory. His experience of the field is as much about a return to a series of past sensory impressions as it is to a locatable present encounter. There is a ‘shelf of a field’, the walls are ‘papered with blue sky’, and there is also a ‘curtain of printed trees’. This field is the space of earliest identity formation and it is at once visual, linguistic and sonic: a lullaby of landscape where ‘repeated lines of words and music are the paths’ (p. 31).