Alvin Lucier’s piece I Am Sitting in a Room (1970) is an example of the deconstructive techniques used by the avant-garde to address the limits and interrogate the position of language as a mode of communication. Lucier tape records himself speaking a phrase in an empty room and then continues to double the recording on itself in a process of art creation that at the same time is a deconstruction of language. Solie points out “that with each repetition the natural resonant frequencies of the room are reinforced, until eventually the speech patterns [read language] are entirely obliterated by emergent, eerily surrealistic sounds.”
It is possible to substitute the semiotic and read this work as a comment of the destruction of humanity (language being unique to humans) by technology, or the mass reproductions of capitalism. Ruth Solie, however, has analyzed the unique text-music relationships that exist in the avant-garde and takes the piece as less symbolically layered, she describes it this way: “The composition has a number of features emblematic of postmodernism… Lucier explains the process he will go through in making it, a strangely Derridean procedure in which the composition may be said to deconstruct its analysis.”[1] This is certainly layered, there is more to the piece than simple aural experience, but it avoids projecting on to the object.
Lucier is employing the deconstruction of the language medium to achieve a greater communicative effect. Interesting to note is the “speech impediment” that Lucier possesses. As the piece continues, this “defect” in his speech is essentially removed, but instead of being “another layer of textual deconstruction in the process,” as Solie comments, it is a humanistic approach to questioning the assumed superiority of language in the mediation of communication. If language is the “natural” way humans communicate, if it is intrinsic, why then would deconstruction remove flaws? Why is it flawed to begin with?
What Lucier seems to be suggesting, and what others in the avant-garde music scene also suggest, is a reconsideration of the stress western thought places on words.[2] Through the melting of the text/music or language/music dichotomy Lucier is able to reveal just how much is missed when we pick favorites. This technique allows us to approach in some form whatever exists before mediation. The inevitability of mediation and the folly of a hierarchal preference of its forms, namely language, are addressed and forcibly reconsidered.
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