But at least their mediocrity is a blessing, which is itself
mediocre
and satisfied with little.
Kittler-Gramophone-Film-Typewriter
According to Arnheim, that is the price they pay for deliv- ering reproductions that are at the same time effects of the reproduced.
Noise is emitted by the channels media have to cross.
In 1924, five years after Rilke's "Primal Sound," Rudolph Lothar wrote The Talking Machine: A Technical-Aesthetic Essay. Based on the not-very-informed premise that "philosophers and psychologists have hitherto written about the arts" and "neglected" phonography,52 Lothar drew up a new aesthetic. Its key propositions center exclusively on the re-
lationship between noise and signals.
The talking machine occupies a special position in aesthetics and music. It de- mands a twofold capacity for illusion, an illusion working in two directions. On the one hand, it demands that we ignore and overlook its mechanical features. As we know, every record comes with interference. As connoisseurs we are not al- lowed to hear this interference, just as in a theater we are obliged to ignore both the line that sets off the stage and the frame surrounding the scene. We have to forget we are witnessing actors in costumes and makeup who are not really expe- riencing what they are performing. They are merely playing parts. We, however, pretend to take their appearance for reality. Only if we forget that we are inside a theater can we really enjoy dramatic art. This "as if" is generated by our capacity for illusion. Only when we forget that the voice of the singer is coming from a wooden box, when we no longer hear any interference, when we can suspend it the way we are able to suspend a stage-only then will the talking machine come into its own artistically.
But, on the other hand, the machine demands that we give bodies to the sounds emanating from it. For example, while playing an aria sung by a famous singer we see the stage he stands on, we see him dressed in an appropriate cos- tl,lme. The more it is linked to our memories, the stronger the record's effect will be. Nothing excites memory more strongly than the human voice, maybe because nothing is forgotten as quickly as a voice. Our memory of it, however, does not die-its timbre and character sink into our subconscious where they await their revival. What has been said about the voice naturally also applies to instruments. We see Nikisch conduct the C-minor symphony, we see Kreisler with the violin at his chin, we see trumpets flashing in the sun when listening to military marches.
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But the capacity for illusion that enables us to ignore boxes and interference and furnishes tones with a visible background requires musical sensitivity. This is the most important point of phonographic aesthetics: The talking machine can only grant artistic satisfaction to musical people. For only musicians possess the ca-
pacity for illusion necessary for every enjoyment of art. 53
Maybe Rilke, who loved the gong, with its resounding mixture of frequencies, above all other instruments, wasn't a musical person. 54 His aesthetic-"Primal Sound" is Rilke's only text about art and the beautiful in general-subverts the two illusions to which Lothar wants to commit readers or gramophone listeners. From the fact that "every record comes with interferences" he draws opposite conclusions. Replaying the skull's coronary suture yields nothing but noise. And there is no need to add some hallucinated body when listening to signs that are not the result of the graphic translation of a note but rather random anatomical lines. Bod- ies themselves generate noise. And the impossible real transpires.
Of course, the entertainment industry is all on Lothar's side. But there have been and there still are experiments that pursue Rilke's primal sound with technologically more sophisticated means. In the wake of Mondrian and the Bruitists (who wanted to introduce noise into literature and music), Moholy-Nagy already suggested in 1923 turning "the gramo- phone from an instrument of reproduction into a productive one, gener- ating acoustic phenomena without any previous acoustic existence by scratching the necessary marks onto the record. "55 An obvious analogy to Rilke's suggestion of eliciting sounds from the skull that were not the re- sult of a prior graphic transformation. A triumph for the concept of fre- quency: in contrast to the "narrowness" of a "scale" that is "possibly a thousand years old" and to which we therefore no longer must adhere,56 Moholy-Nagy's etchings allow for unlimited transposition from medium to medium. Any graphisms-including those, not coincidentally, domi- nating Mondrian's paintings-result in a sound. Which is why the exper- imenter asks for the "study of graphic signs of the most diverse (simulta- neous and isolated) acoustic phenomena" and the "use of projection ma- chines" or "film. "57
Engineers and the avant-garde think alike. At the same time as Moholy-Nagy's etching, the first plans were made for sound film, one of the first industrially connected media systems. "The invention of Mr. Vogt, Dr. Engel, and Mr. Masolle, the speaking Tri-Ergon-film," was
based on a "highly complicated process" of medial transformations that could only be financed with the help of million-dollar investments from
? Gramophone record. (Photo: Moholy-Nagy)
the C. Lorenz Company. 58 The inventors say of it, "Acoustic waves ema- nating from the scene are converted into electricity, electricity is turned into light, light into the silver coloring of the positive and negative, the coloring of the film back into light, which is then converted back into electricity before the seventh and final transformation turns electricity into the mechanical operation of a weak membrane giving off sounds. "59
Frequencies remain frequencies regardless of their respective carrier medium. The symbolic correlation of sound intervals and planetary or- bits, which since [Cicero'S] Dream ofScipio made up the harmony of the spheres, is replaced by correspondences in the real. In order to synchro- nize, store, and reproduce acoustic events and image sequences, sound films can let them wander seven times from one carrier to the next. In Moholy-Nagy's own words, his record etchings are capable of generating a "new mechanical harmony": "The individual graphic signs are exam- ined and their proportions are formulated as a law. (Here we may point
Gramophone 47
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? Block schematic of an analog vocoder. The synthesis component is in the lower signal path, the analysis component, in the upper signal path. The latter's low- and high-pass filters limit the input, for example, of "speech," while its band-pass filters break down the audible range into several component frequency channels. Following its coordination as envelope curves, the analysis output-using a switching matrix with arbitrarily chosen correspondences between the signal paths-controls the voltage-controlled amplifiers (yeAs), whose band-pass filters have also broken down the "input" or carrier into several component frequency channels. The sum signal at the exit (of the vocoder) appears as an instrumental sound encoded by a voice (vox).
out a consideration that is at present still utopian: based on strict propor- tional laws graphic signs can be transposed into music. )"60
This idea had lost its utopian character long before it was written down. Fourier's solution of all continuous functions (including musical notes) into sums of pure sine harmonics was achieved before Helmholtz and Edison. Walsh's equally mathematical proof that square wave vibra- tions may also serve as summands of the Fourier analysis was roughly contemporaneous with Moholy-Nagy's writings. As a result, in 1964 Robert A. Moog, with his electronic talents and the "American vice of modular repetition,"61 was able to equip all the sound studios and rock bands of this world with synthesizers. A subtractive sound analysis, that is, one controlled by frequency filters, transfers the proportional relation- ships of graphic depictions (rectangles, saw tooth curves, triangles, trape- zoids, and maybe even sine curves) into the music envisioned by Mon- drian and Moholy-Nagy. 62
Rilke's urgent demand to put under the needle and try out a "variety of lines, occurring anywhere," to "complete [it] in this way and then ex-
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perience it, as it makes itself felt, thus transformed, in another field of sense": it is realized every night in the combination of amplifier and os- cillographic display.
But there is more to it. Between 1942 and 1945, while working for Bell laboratories and the British Secret Service, respectively, Shannon and Turing developed the vocoder, a wonder weapon that would make the transatlantic telephone conversations between Churchill and Roosevelt safe from interception by Canaris and the German Abwehr63 and that, like so many electronic achievements of the Second World War, is now in- dispensable to popular music. It lives up to its name: it encodes any given data stream A with the envelope curves of another sound sequence B, for example, the voice of a singer, after a switching matrix has changed the frequency of the envelope curves by way of free permutation. In the case of Laurie Anderson's electronic violin, the one-third octave band between 440 and 550 Hz follows in absolute synchronicity the volume her voice happens to have in the one-third octave band between 1760 and 2200 Hz, while a third one-third octave band of her songs controls a fourth band of her violin, and so on and so forth. Primal sounds do not cor- respond to anatomical features and sounds do not follow Mondrian's graphics; rather, the paradoxical result is that one and the same controls one and the same: one acoustics controls the other.
To test his vocoder, by the way, Turing first played a record of Win- ston Churchill's belligerent voice, whose discreet or cut-up sampled val- ues he then mixed with a noise generator using modular addition. Where- upon British officers heard the voice of their prime minister and com- mander in chief contaminate the speakers as just so much white noise (not to say, primal sound). Appropriately, Turing's vocoder was named af- ter Delilah, who in the Book of Judges tricked another warrior, the Danaite Samson, out of the secret of his strength. Turing's skill as a tin- kerer, however, revealed the secret of modern political discourse to be something far worse than weakness: it is "a perfectly even and uninfor- mative hiss,"64 which offered no regularities and, therefore, nothing in- telligible to the ears of British officers or those of German eavesdroppers. And yet, sent through the vocoder a second time, Churchill's original voice emerged from the receiving end.
This is what has become of the "abysses" that, according to Rilke's ingenious formula, "divide the one order of sense experience from the other. " In today's media networks, algorithmically formalized data streams can traverse them all. Media facilitate all possible manipulations: acoustic signals control the optical signals of light consoles, electronic lan-
50 Gramophone
guage controls the acoustic output of computer music, and, in the case of the vocoder, one set of acoustic signals controls another. Finally, New York disc jockeys turn the esoteric graphisms of Moholy-Nagy into the everyday experience of scratch music.
But Rilke's astute diagnosis only applies to the founding age when the three ur-media-phonograph, film, and typewriter-first differentiated acoustics, optics, and writing. Nevertheless, as if anticipating today's me- dia systems, he searched "for a way to establish the connection so ur-
gently needed between the different provinces now so strangely separated from one another. " Which is why he fell back on "Arabic poems, which seem to owe their existence to the simultaneous and equal contributions from all five senses," and which let eyes trained in the art of calligraphy enjoy the very materiality of letters. This explains his criticism, histori- cally extremely accurate, of literary epochs such as the Age of Goethe, in which "sight" alone seems to dominate authors and readers because cor- rect reading involves a hallucinatory process that turns words into a real and visible world. This explains as well his proposition for an equally lyrical and scientific coronal suture phonography, which would pay more attention to acoustics than did the "inattentive hearing" of authors from
the Age of Goethe.
But before Rilke wrote down his proposal on the Assumption in the alpine solitude of the Bergell, he related it to a woman. Synchronicity of the asynchronic: on the one hand a writer whose "extension" or combi- nation of sensory media goes beyond "the work of research"; on the other a woman who mistakes coronal suture phonography for "love," and love-as involuntary evidence for "the sublime reality of the poem"-for poems. Only as long as the unchallenged and unrivaled medium of the book was able to simulate the storage of all possible data streams did love remain literature and literature love; the ascension of female readers.
But a writer whose school teaches physics instead of philosophy ob- jects. The combination of sensory data streams achieved by love is devoid of "permanence. " It cannot be stored by any medium. Moreover, it loses "all individual character. " That is, no real can pass through the filter of love. Whichiswhylovedoes "notserveforthepoet,forindividualvari- ety must be constantly present for him; he is compelled to use the sense sectors to their full extent," or, simply, to become a media technician among media technicians.
Marinetti's Technical Manifesto ofFuturist Literature of 1912 pro- claimed that crowds of massed molecules and whirling electrons are
Gramophone 5 I
more exciting than the smiles or tears of a woman (di una donna). 65 In other words: literature defects from erotics to stochastics, from red lips to white noise. Marinetti's molecular swarms and whirling electrons are merely instances of the Brownian motion that human eyes can only per- ceive in the shape of dancing sun particles but that in the real are the noise on all channels. According to Rilke, the "abysses" dividing the or- ders of sense experience are "sufficiently wide and engulfing to sweep away from before us the greater part of the world-who knows how many worlds? " Which is why love is no longer sufficient for authors who, like Rilke himself, transcribe all the details of sensory perception into an inner world-space known as the brain or literature and, subse- quently, phonographically trace the facilitations of this unique container as primal sound itself.
Phonography, notation, and a new eroticism-this is precisely the constellation described by Maurice Renard in a short story of 1907, ten years prior to Rilke's essay. What Rilke saw in the coronal suture Re- nard's fictitious composer Nerval encounters in a roaring seashell, which, like Rilke's skull, is a physiological substitute for Edison's apparatus. Thirty years later Paul Valery used almost the same title as that of Re- nard's story to celebrate shells as architectural works of an artistic na- ture,66 but Renard focuses on the central nervous system, on the labyrinth of shells, auricles, and sound. Since machines have taken over the func- tions of the central nervous system, nobody can say whether the roaring comes from the blood or from the sirens, from the ears or from the sea goddess Amphitrite.
MAURICE RENARD, "DEATH AND THE SHELL" (1907)
And her shape is of such mysterious nastiness that you
brace yourself to listen.
-HENRI DE REGNIER, Contesasoi-meme
Put the shell back where it belongs, Doctor, and do not hold it to your ear for the pleasure of mistaking the roaring of your blood with that of the sea. Put it back. The very man we just buried, our beloved great musician, would still be alive had he not committed the childish mistake of listening to what the mouth of a shell has to say . . . Yes indeed: Nerval, your very own patient . . . You talk of congestion? Maybe. But I am skeptical. Here are my reasons. Keep them to yourself.
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Last Wednesday night, on the day before the accident, I dined at Ner- val's. His close friends have been meeting there every Wednesday for twenty years. There were five in the beginning. But this time, and for the first time, there were only two of us: a stroke, a contagious flu, and a suicide left Ner-
val and me facing each other. When you reach sixty such a situation has nothing amusing about it. You keep asking yourself who will be next.
The meal was as gloomy as a funeral feast. The great man remained silent. I did everything possible to cheer him up. Maybe he was mourning other deaths, the secrecy of which made them even more bitter. . . .
Indeed, he was mourning others.
We went to his study. The piano had not been closed; on it there was the first page of a new composition.
" What are you working on, Nerval ? "
H e raised his finger and spoke like a sad prophet announcing his god:
"Amphitrite. "
"Amphitrite! At last! For how many years have you been saving her up? " "Since the Rome prize. I waited and waited. The longer a work is al-
lowed to mature, the better it is, and I wanted to infuse it with the dream and experience of a whole life . . . I believe it is time . . . "
"A symphonic poem, isn't it? . . . Are you satisfied? "
Nerval shook his head.
"No. In a pinch, it might work . . . My thoughts are not distorted be-
yond recognition . . . "
He interpreted the prelude with great virtuosity: a " Train of Neptune. "
You will relish it, Doctor; it is a miracle!
"You see," Nerval said to me while striking strange, outrageous, and
brutal chords, "up to this fanfare of Tritons it works . . . "
"Marvelous," I answered; "there is . . . "
"But," Nerval continued, "that is all there is to it. The choir that fol-
lows . . . a failure. Yes, I can feel my powerlessness to write it . . . It is too beautiful. We no longer know . . . It would have to be composed the way Phidias created his sculptures; it would have to be a Parthenon, as simple
as . . . We no longer know . . . Ha ! " he suddenly screamed, "to have arrived there, I . . . "
"Listen," I said to him, "you are among the most famous, so . . . "
"So, if this is how I end up, what do others know?
But at least their mediocrity is a blessing, which is itself mediocre and satisfied with little. Famous! What is fame when engulfed in sadness! . . . "
"The peaks are always clouded! . . . "
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"Enough," Nerval resumed, " a cease-fire for flattery! This is truly a sad hour, so let us, if you wish, dedicate it to real sorrows. We owe it to the departe d . "
Following these rather mysterious words he took a phonograph from underneath a blanket. I understood.
You can well imagine, Doctor, that this phonograph did not play the "Potpourri from The Doll, performed by the Republican Guard under Pares. " The very improved, sonorous, and clear machine only had a few cylinders. It merely spoke . . .
Yes, you guessed it: on Wednesday the dead spoke to us . . .
How terrible it is to hear this copper throat and its sounds from beyond the grave! It is more than a photographic, or I had better say cinemato- graphic, something; it is the voice itself, the living voice, still alive among carrion, skeletons, nothingness . . .
The composer was slumped in his chair next to the fireside. He listened with painfully knit brows to the tender things our departed comrades said from the depths of the altar and the grave.
" Well, science does have its advantages, Nerval! As a source of miracles and passions it is approaching art. "
"Certainly. The more powerful the telescopes, the larger the number of stars is going to be. Of course science has its good sides. But for us it is still too young. Only our heirs will benefit from it. With the help of each new in- vention they will be able to observe anew the face of our century and listen to the sounds made by our generation. But who is able to project the Athens of Euripides onto a screen or make heard the voice of Sappho ? "
He livened up and played with a large shell he had absentmindedly taken off the chimney mantelpiece.
I appreciated the object that was to revive his spirits, and because I an- ticipated that the elaboration of the scientific, if not paradoxical, theme would amuse him, I resumed:
"Beware of despair. Nature frequently delights in anticipating science, which in turn often merely imitates it. Take photography, for instance! The world can see the traces of an antediluvian creature in a museum-I believe it is the brontosaurus-and the soil retains the marks of the rain that was falling when the beast walked by. What a prehistoric snapshot! "
Nerval was holding the shell to his ear.
"Beautiful, the roaring of this stethoscope," he said; "it reminds me
of the beach where I found it-an island off Salerno . . . it is old and crumbling. "
? 54 Gramophone
I used the opportunity.
"Dear friend, who knows? The pupils of the dying are said to retain the last image they received . . . What if this ear-shaped snail stored the sounds it heard at some critical moment-the agony of mollusks, maybe? And what if the rosy lips of its shell were to pass it on like a graphophone? All in all, you may be listening to the surf of oceans centuries old . . . "
But Nerval had risen. With a commanding gesture he bid me be quiet. His dizzy eyes opened as if over an abyss. He held the double-horned grotto to his temple as if eavesdropping on the threshold of a mystery. A hypnotic ecstasy rendered him motionless.
After I repeatedly insisted, he reluctantly handed me the shell.
At first I was only able to make out a gurgling of foam, then the hardly audible turmoil of the open sea. I sensed-how I can not say-that the sea was very blue and very ancient. And then, suddenly, women were singing and passing by . . . inhuman women whose hymn was wild and lustful like the scream of a crazed goddess . . . Yes, Doctor, that's how it was: a scream and yet a hymn. These were the insidious songs Circe warned us not to lis- ten to, or only when tied to the mast of a galley with rowers whose ears are filled with wax . . . But was that really enough to protect oneself from the danger? . . .
I continued to listen.
The sea creatures disappeared into the depths of the shell. And yet minute by minute the same maddening scene was repeated, periodically, as if by phonograph, incessantly and never diminished.
Nerval snatched the shell away from me and ran to the piano. For a long time he tried to write down the sexual screaming of the goddesses.
At two in the morning he gave up.
The room was strewn with blackened and torn sheets of music.
"You see, you see," he said to me, "not even when I am dictated to can I transcribe the choir! . . . "
He slumped back into his chair, and despite my efforts, he continued to listen to the poison of this Paean.
At four o'clock he started to tremble. I begged him to lie down. He shook his head and seemed to lean over the invisible maelstrom.
At half past five Nerval fell against the marble chimney-he was dead. The shell broke into a thousand pieces.
Do you believe that there are poisons for the ear modeled on deadly
perfumes or lethal potions? Ever since last Wednesday'S acoustic presenta- tion I have not been feeling well. It is my turn to go . . . Poor Nerval . . .
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Doctor, you claim he died of congestion . . . and what if he died because he heard the sirens singing?
Why are you laughing?
There have been better questions to conclude fantastic tales. But in ways both smooth and comical Renard's fantasy finds its way into technical manuals. In 1902, in the first German monograph on Care and Usage of Modern Speaking Machines (Phonograph, Graphophone and Gramo- phone), Alfred Parzer-Miihlbacher promises that graphophones-a Co- lumbia brand name also used by Renard-will be able to build "archives and collections" for all possible "memories":
Cherished loved ones, dear friends, and famous individuals who have long since passed away will years later talk to us again with the same vividness and warmth; the wax cylinders transport us back in time to the happy days of youth-we hear the speech of those who lived countless years before us, whom we never knew, and whose names were only handed down by history. 67
Renard's narrator clarifies such "practical advice for interested cus- tomers" by pointing out that the phonographic recording of dead friends surpasses their "cinematographic" immortalization: instead of black-and- white phantom doubles in the realm of the imaginary, bodies appear by virtue of their voices in a real that once again can only be measured in eu- phemisms: by carrion or skeletons. It becomes possible to conjure up friends as well as the dead "whose names were only handed down by his- tory. " Once technological media guarantee the similarity of the dead to stored data by turning them into the latter's mechanical product, the boundaries of the body, death and lust, leave the most indelible traces. According to Renard, eyes retain final visions as snapshots; according to the scientific-psychological determinations of Benedict and Ribot,68 they even retain these visions in the shape of time-lapse photography. And if, in strict analogy, the roaring shell only replays its agony, then even the dead- est of gods and goddesses achieve acoustic presence. The shell that Re- nard's fictitious composer listens to was not found on a natural beach; it takes the place of the mouthpieces of a telephone or a loudspeaker capa- ble of bridging temporal distances in order to connect him with an antiq- uity preceding all discourse. The sound emanating from such a receiver is once again Rilke's primal sound, but as pure sexuality, as divine clameur
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sexuelle. The "rosy lips" and the "double-horned grotto" of its anatomy leave that in as little doubt as the death of the old man to whom they appear.
Thus Renard's short story introduces a long series of literary phan- tasms that rewrite eroticism itself under the conditions of gramophony and telephony. As a result, apparitions no longer comprise those endear- ing images of women whom, as Keller put it, the bitter world does not nourish; instead, the temptation of a voice has become a new partial ob- ject. In the same letter in which Kafka suggests to his fiancee and her par- lograph firm that old-fashioned love letters be replaced by technical re- lays of telephone and parlograph,69 he relates a dream:
Very late, dearest, and yet I shall go to bed without deserving it. Well, I won't sleep anyway, only dream. As I did yesterday, for example, when in my dream I ran toward a bridge or some balustrading, seized two telephone receivers that happened to be lying on the parapet, put them to my ears, and kept asking for nothing but news from "Pontus"; but nothing whatever came out of the telephone except a sad, mighty, wordless song and the roar of the sea. Although well aware that it was impossible for voices to penetrate these sounds, I didn't give in, and didn't go awayJo
News from "Pontus"-as Gerhard Neumann has shown,71 in pretechni- cal days this was news from Ovid's Black Sea exile, the quintessential model for literature as a love letter. Letters of this kind, necessarily re- ceived or written in their entirety by women, were replaced by the tele- phone and its noise, which precedes all discourse and subsequently all whole individuals. In La voix humaine, Cocteau's one-act telephone play of 1930, a man and a woman at either end of a telephone line agree to burn their old love letters. 72 The new eroticism is like that of the gramo- phone, which, as Kafka remarked in the same letter, one "can't under- stand. "73 "The telephone conversation occupies the middle ground be- tween the rendezvous and the love letter" :74 it drowns out the meaning of words with a physiological presence that no longer allows "human voices" to get through, as well as by superimposing a myriad of simulta- neous conversations, which in Kafka's The Castle, for instance, reduces the "continual telephoning" to "humming and singing. "75 Likewise, in Renard's short story the superimposition of all the goddesses and sirens that ever existed may have resulted in white noise.
There can be no doubt that Kafka dreamed telephony in all its infor- mational and technological precision: four days prior to his dream he read an essay by Philipp Reis in an 1 8 63 issue of Die Gartenlaube on the
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first telephone experiments. 76 As is clear from the essay's title, "The Mu- sic Telegraph," the apparatus was built for the purpose of conveying the human voice. It failed to do SO,77 but like Kafka's imagined telephone mouthpieces it was capable of transmitting music.
Ever since Freud, psychoanalysis has been keeping a list of partial ob- jects that, first, can be separated from the body and, second, excite desires prior to sexual differentiation: breast, mouth, and feces. Lacan added two further partial objects: voice and gaze. 78 This is psychoanalysis in the me- dia age, for only cinema can restore the disembodied gaze, and only the telephone was able to transmit a disembodied voice. Plays like Cocteau's La voix humaine follow in their wake.
The only thing that remains unclear is whether media advertise par- tial objects or partial objects advertise the postal system. The more strate- gic the function of news channels, the more necessary, at least in interim peace times, the recruitment of users.
In 1980 Dieter Wellershoff published his novella The Siren, unfortu- nately without dedicating it to Renard. A professor from Cologne plans to use his sabbatical to finally complete his long-planned book on commu- nication theory. But he never gets down to writing. An unknown woman who once witnessed Professor Elsheimer's telegenic partial objects on a TV screen starts a series of phone calls that begin like a one-sided suicide hot line and culminate in mutual telephonic masturbation. 79 Written the- ories of communication stand no chance against the self-advertisement of technological media. Even the most taciturn of European " civil services" 80 recruited for "the profession of telephone operator" and made it "acces- sible to German women," because from the very beginning its "telephone service" could not "do without" the "clear voices of women. "81
Therefore, Professor Elsheimer's only means of escaping the spell of the telephonic-sexual mouthpiece is to use one medium to beat another medium. During the last call from the unseen siren he puts on a Bach record and pumps up the volume. 82 And 10 and behold, drowned out by Old European notated music the siren magic ceases to exist. Only two technical media communicate between Cologne and Hamburg. "Here," Kafka wrote from Prague to his beloved employee of a phonograph man- ufacturer, "by the way, is a rather nice idea; a parlograph goes to the tele- phone in Berlin, while a gramophone does likewise in Prague, and these two carry on a little conversation with each other. "83
Wellershoff's The Siren is an inverted replay of "The Man and the Shell. " Renard's fictional composer had not yet acquired the technologi- cal skill to employ, of all pieces, the Art of the Fugue as a jammer in the
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? "When telephone and gramophone . . . " Caricature, ca. 1900.
war of the sexes. On the contrary, he wanted to transfer onto musical sheets what was no longer fugue or art: "a goddess's lusty scream," which coincided with the roaring of the sea.
It remained an impossible wish as long as it depended on the five lines of a musical staff, but that changed in the founding age of modern media. In the beginning there was, as always, Wagner, who, by courtesy of ice-cream poisoning in La Spezia, experienced an acoustic fever delir- ium of "swiftly running water" that suggested to him the Rhinegold pre- lude. 84 Debussy's Sirenes for orchestra and female voices followed in
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1 89 5 , the score o f which n o longer dictated words, o r even syllables or vowels, but sums, as if it were possible to compose the noise of channels or, as Richard Dehmel put it a year later, the "hollow din" of the "tele- graph wires. "85 Between 1903 and 1905 Debussy completed the "sym- phonic poem" which in Renard's tale was named after a Greek sea god- dess but which Debussy simply called La Mer. Finally, in 1907 Wagner's monotonous, ice cream-induced E-flat chord with all its overtone effects became Nerval's unwritten Amphitrite, that "poison for the ear. "
Berliner's gramophone is to the history of music what Edison's phono- graph is to the history of literature. At the price of being monopolized and mass produced by big industry, records globalized musical noise. Edison's cylinders in turn made the storage of speech a daily enjoyment, even if in each case only a very few copies could be made. As a result, literature's letter-filled papers suffered the same crisis as sheet music.
In 19 16, three years before Rilke's "Primal Sound, " Salomo Friedlaend- er delineated the new constellation of eroticism, literature, and phonog- raphy. More than any other writer of his time, Friedlaender, better known under the pseudonym Mynona (a palindrome of anonym), made stories again out of media history. In 1922 he published the novel Gray Magic, which anticipates a technological future in which women are turned into celluloid (and men, incidentally, into typewriters). In 1916 he wrote a short story that conjures up the technological past in the shape of Germany's ur- author in order to predict the transformation of literature into sound.
SALOMO FRIEDLAENDER, "GOETHE SPEAKS INTO THE PHONOGRAPH" (1916)
"What a pity," remarked Anna Pomke, a timid middle-class girl, "that the phonograph wasn't already invented in 1 8001 "
"Why? " asked Professor Abnossah Pschorr. "Dear Pomke, it is a pity that Eve didn't present it to Adam as part of her dowry for their common- law marriage; there is a lot to feel pity for, dear Pomke. "
"Oh, Professor, I would have loved to listen to Goethe's voicel He is said to have had such a beautiful organ, and everything he said was so meaningful. Oh, if only he could have spoken into a phonographl Ohl Ohl"
Long after Pomke had left, Abnossah, who had a weakness for her
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squeaky chubbiness, still heard her groans. Professor Pschorr, inventor of the telestylus, immersed himself in his customary inventive thoughts. Was
it possible retroactively to trick that Goethe (Abnossah was ridiculously jealous) out of his voice? Whenever Goethe spoke, his voice produced vi- brations as harmonious as, for example, the soft voice of your wife, dear Reader. These vibrations encounter obstacles and are reflected, resulting in a to and fro which becomes weaker in the passage of time but which does not actually cease. So the vibrations produced by Goethe are still in existence, and to bring forth Goethe's voice you only need the proper receiver to re- cord them and a microphone to amplify their effects, by now diminished. The difficult part was the construction of the receiver. How could it be ad- justed to the specific vibrations of Goethe's voice without having the latter at one's disposal? What a fascinating idea! Abnossah determined that it was
necessary to conduct a thorough study of Goethe's throat. He scrutinized busts and portraits, but they provided a very vague impression at best. He was on the verge of giving up when he suddenly remembered that Goethe was still around, if only in the shape of a corpse.
In 1924, five years after Rilke's "Primal Sound," Rudolph Lothar wrote The Talking Machine: A Technical-Aesthetic Essay. Based on the not-very-informed premise that "philosophers and psychologists have hitherto written about the arts" and "neglected" phonography,52 Lothar drew up a new aesthetic. Its key propositions center exclusively on the re-
lationship between noise and signals.
The talking machine occupies a special position in aesthetics and music. It de- mands a twofold capacity for illusion, an illusion working in two directions. On the one hand, it demands that we ignore and overlook its mechanical features. As we know, every record comes with interference. As connoisseurs we are not al- lowed to hear this interference, just as in a theater we are obliged to ignore both the line that sets off the stage and the frame surrounding the scene. We have to forget we are witnessing actors in costumes and makeup who are not really expe- riencing what they are performing. They are merely playing parts. We, however, pretend to take their appearance for reality. Only if we forget that we are inside a theater can we really enjoy dramatic art. This "as if" is generated by our capacity for illusion. Only when we forget that the voice of the singer is coming from a wooden box, when we no longer hear any interference, when we can suspend it the way we are able to suspend a stage-only then will the talking machine come into its own artistically.
But, on the other hand, the machine demands that we give bodies to the sounds emanating from it. For example, while playing an aria sung by a famous singer we see the stage he stands on, we see him dressed in an appropriate cos- tl,lme. The more it is linked to our memories, the stronger the record's effect will be. Nothing excites memory more strongly than the human voice, maybe because nothing is forgotten as quickly as a voice. Our memory of it, however, does not die-its timbre and character sink into our subconscious where they await their revival. What has been said about the voice naturally also applies to instruments. We see Nikisch conduct the C-minor symphony, we see Kreisler with the violin at his chin, we see trumpets flashing in the sun when listening to military marches.
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But the capacity for illusion that enables us to ignore boxes and interference and furnishes tones with a visible background requires musical sensitivity. This is the most important point of phonographic aesthetics: The talking machine can only grant artistic satisfaction to musical people. For only musicians possess the ca-
pacity for illusion necessary for every enjoyment of art. 53
Maybe Rilke, who loved the gong, with its resounding mixture of frequencies, above all other instruments, wasn't a musical person. 54 His aesthetic-"Primal Sound" is Rilke's only text about art and the beautiful in general-subverts the two illusions to which Lothar wants to commit readers or gramophone listeners. From the fact that "every record comes with interferences" he draws opposite conclusions. Replaying the skull's coronary suture yields nothing but noise. And there is no need to add some hallucinated body when listening to signs that are not the result of the graphic translation of a note but rather random anatomical lines. Bod- ies themselves generate noise. And the impossible real transpires.
Of course, the entertainment industry is all on Lothar's side. But there have been and there still are experiments that pursue Rilke's primal sound with technologically more sophisticated means. In the wake of Mondrian and the Bruitists (who wanted to introduce noise into literature and music), Moholy-Nagy already suggested in 1923 turning "the gramo- phone from an instrument of reproduction into a productive one, gener- ating acoustic phenomena without any previous acoustic existence by scratching the necessary marks onto the record. "55 An obvious analogy to Rilke's suggestion of eliciting sounds from the skull that were not the re- sult of a prior graphic transformation. A triumph for the concept of fre- quency: in contrast to the "narrowness" of a "scale" that is "possibly a thousand years old" and to which we therefore no longer must adhere,56 Moholy-Nagy's etchings allow for unlimited transposition from medium to medium. Any graphisms-including those, not coincidentally, domi- nating Mondrian's paintings-result in a sound. Which is why the exper- imenter asks for the "study of graphic signs of the most diverse (simulta- neous and isolated) acoustic phenomena" and the "use of projection ma- chines" or "film. "57
Engineers and the avant-garde think alike. At the same time as Moholy-Nagy's etching, the first plans were made for sound film, one of the first industrially connected media systems. "The invention of Mr. Vogt, Dr. Engel, and Mr. Masolle, the speaking Tri-Ergon-film," was
based on a "highly complicated process" of medial transformations that could only be financed with the help of million-dollar investments from
? Gramophone record. (Photo: Moholy-Nagy)
the C. Lorenz Company. 58 The inventors say of it, "Acoustic waves ema- nating from the scene are converted into electricity, electricity is turned into light, light into the silver coloring of the positive and negative, the coloring of the film back into light, which is then converted back into electricity before the seventh and final transformation turns electricity into the mechanical operation of a weak membrane giving off sounds. "59
Frequencies remain frequencies regardless of their respective carrier medium. The symbolic correlation of sound intervals and planetary or- bits, which since [Cicero'S] Dream ofScipio made up the harmony of the spheres, is replaced by correspondences in the real. In order to synchro- nize, store, and reproduce acoustic events and image sequences, sound films can let them wander seven times from one carrier to the next. In Moholy-Nagy's own words, his record etchings are capable of generating a "new mechanical harmony": "The individual graphic signs are exam- ined and their proportions are formulated as a law. (Here we may point
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? Block schematic of an analog vocoder. The synthesis component is in the lower signal path, the analysis component, in the upper signal path. The latter's low- and high-pass filters limit the input, for example, of "speech," while its band-pass filters break down the audible range into several component frequency channels. Following its coordination as envelope curves, the analysis output-using a switching matrix with arbitrarily chosen correspondences between the signal paths-controls the voltage-controlled amplifiers (yeAs), whose band-pass filters have also broken down the "input" or carrier into several component frequency channels. The sum signal at the exit (of the vocoder) appears as an instrumental sound encoded by a voice (vox).
out a consideration that is at present still utopian: based on strict propor- tional laws graphic signs can be transposed into music. )"60
This idea had lost its utopian character long before it was written down. Fourier's solution of all continuous functions (including musical notes) into sums of pure sine harmonics was achieved before Helmholtz and Edison. Walsh's equally mathematical proof that square wave vibra- tions may also serve as summands of the Fourier analysis was roughly contemporaneous with Moholy-Nagy's writings. As a result, in 1964 Robert A. Moog, with his electronic talents and the "American vice of modular repetition,"61 was able to equip all the sound studios and rock bands of this world with synthesizers. A subtractive sound analysis, that is, one controlled by frequency filters, transfers the proportional relation- ships of graphic depictions (rectangles, saw tooth curves, triangles, trape- zoids, and maybe even sine curves) into the music envisioned by Mon- drian and Moholy-Nagy. 62
Rilke's urgent demand to put under the needle and try out a "variety of lines, occurring anywhere," to "complete [it] in this way and then ex-
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perience it, as it makes itself felt, thus transformed, in another field of sense": it is realized every night in the combination of amplifier and os- cillographic display.
But there is more to it. Between 1942 and 1945, while working for Bell laboratories and the British Secret Service, respectively, Shannon and Turing developed the vocoder, a wonder weapon that would make the transatlantic telephone conversations between Churchill and Roosevelt safe from interception by Canaris and the German Abwehr63 and that, like so many electronic achievements of the Second World War, is now in- dispensable to popular music. It lives up to its name: it encodes any given data stream A with the envelope curves of another sound sequence B, for example, the voice of a singer, after a switching matrix has changed the frequency of the envelope curves by way of free permutation. In the case of Laurie Anderson's electronic violin, the one-third octave band between 440 and 550 Hz follows in absolute synchronicity the volume her voice happens to have in the one-third octave band between 1760 and 2200 Hz, while a third one-third octave band of her songs controls a fourth band of her violin, and so on and so forth. Primal sounds do not cor- respond to anatomical features and sounds do not follow Mondrian's graphics; rather, the paradoxical result is that one and the same controls one and the same: one acoustics controls the other.
To test his vocoder, by the way, Turing first played a record of Win- ston Churchill's belligerent voice, whose discreet or cut-up sampled val- ues he then mixed with a noise generator using modular addition. Where- upon British officers heard the voice of their prime minister and com- mander in chief contaminate the speakers as just so much white noise (not to say, primal sound). Appropriately, Turing's vocoder was named af- ter Delilah, who in the Book of Judges tricked another warrior, the Danaite Samson, out of the secret of his strength. Turing's skill as a tin- kerer, however, revealed the secret of modern political discourse to be something far worse than weakness: it is "a perfectly even and uninfor- mative hiss,"64 which offered no regularities and, therefore, nothing in- telligible to the ears of British officers or those of German eavesdroppers. And yet, sent through the vocoder a second time, Churchill's original voice emerged from the receiving end.
This is what has become of the "abysses" that, according to Rilke's ingenious formula, "divide the one order of sense experience from the other. " In today's media networks, algorithmically formalized data streams can traverse them all. Media facilitate all possible manipulations: acoustic signals control the optical signals of light consoles, electronic lan-
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guage controls the acoustic output of computer music, and, in the case of the vocoder, one set of acoustic signals controls another. Finally, New York disc jockeys turn the esoteric graphisms of Moholy-Nagy into the everyday experience of scratch music.
But Rilke's astute diagnosis only applies to the founding age when the three ur-media-phonograph, film, and typewriter-first differentiated acoustics, optics, and writing. Nevertheless, as if anticipating today's me- dia systems, he searched "for a way to establish the connection so ur-
gently needed between the different provinces now so strangely separated from one another. " Which is why he fell back on "Arabic poems, which seem to owe their existence to the simultaneous and equal contributions from all five senses," and which let eyes trained in the art of calligraphy enjoy the very materiality of letters. This explains his criticism, histori- cally extremely accurate, of literary epochs such as the Age of Goethe, in which "sight" alone seems to dominate authors and readers because cor- rect reading involves a hallucinatory process that turns words into a real and visible world. This explains as well his proposition for an equally lyrical and scientific coronal suture phonography, which would pay more attention to acoustics than did the "inattentive hearing" of authors from
the Age of Goethe.
But before Rilke wrote down his proposal on the Assumption in the alpine solitude of the Bergell, he related it to a woman. Synchronicity of the asynchronic: on the one hand a writer whose "extension" or combi- nation of sensory media goes beyond "the work of research"; on the other a woman who mistakes coronal suture phonography for "love," and love-as involuntary evidence for "the sublime reality of the poem"-for poems. Only as long as the unchallenged and unrivaled medium of the book was able to simulate the storage of all possible data streams did love remain literature and literature love; the ascension of female readers.
But a writer whose school teaches physics instead of philosophy ob- jects. The combination of sensory data streams achieved by love is devoid of "permanence. " It cannot be stored by any medium. Moreover, it loses "all individual character. " That is, no real can pass through the filter of love. Whichiswhylovedoes "notserveforthepoet,forindividualvari- ety must be constantly present for him; he is compelled to use the sense sectors to their full extent," or, simply, to become a media technician among media technicians.
Marinetti's Technical Manifesto ofFuturist Literature of 1912 pro- claimed that crowds of massed molecules and whirling electrons are
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more exciting than the smiles or tears of a woman (di una donna). 65 In other words: literature defects from erotics to stochastics, from red lips to white noise. Marinetti's molecular swarms and whirling electrons are merely instances of the Brownian motion that human eyes can only per- ceive in the shape of dancing sun particles but that in the real are the noise on all channels. According to Rilke, the "abysses" dividing the or- ders of sense experience are "sufficiently wide and engulfing to sweep away from before us the greater part of the world-who knows how many worlds? " Which is why love is no longer sufficient for authors who, like Rilke himself, transcribe all the details of sensory perception into an inner world-space known as the brain or literature and, subse- quently, phonographically trace the facilitations of this unique container as primal sound itself.
Phonography, notation, and a new eroticism-this is precisely the constellation described by Maurice Renard in a short story of 1907, ten years prior to Rilke's essay. What Rilke saw in the coronal suture Re- nard's fictitious composer Nerval encounters in a roaring seashell, which, like Rilke's skull, is a physiological substitute for Edison's apparatus. Thirty years later Paul Valery used almost the same title as that of Re- nard's story to celebrate shells as architectural works of an artistic na- ture,66 but Renard focuses on the central nervous system, on the labyrinth of shells, auricles, and sound. Since machines have taken over the func- tions of the central nervous system, nobody can say whether the roaring comes from the blood or from the sirens, from the ears or from the sea goddess Amphitrite.
MAURICE RENARD, "DEATH AND THE SHELL" (1907)
And her shape is of such mysterious nastiness that you
brace yourself to listen.
-HENRI DE REGNIER, Contesasoi-meme
Put the shell back where it belongs, Doctor, and do not hold it to your ear for the pleasure of mistaking the roaring of your blood with that of the sea. Put it back. The very man we just buried, our beloved great musician, would still be alive had he not committed the childish mistake of listening to what the mouth of a shell has to say . . . Yes indeed: Nerval, your very own patient . . . You talk of congestion? Maybe. But I am skeptical. Here are my reasons. Keep them to yourself.
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Last Wednesday night, on the day before the accident, I dined at Ner- val's. His close friends have been meeting there every Wednesday for twenty years. There were five in the beginning. But this time, and for the first time, there were only two of us: a stroke, a contagious flu, and a suicide left Ner-
val and me facing each other. When you reach sixty such a situation has nothing amusing about it. You keep asking yourself who will be next.
The meal was as gloomy as a funeral feast. The great man remained silent. I did everything possible to cheer him up. Maybe he was mourning other deaths, the secrecy of which made them even more bitter. . . .
Indeed, he was mourning others.
We went to his study. The piano had not been closed; on it there was the first page of a new composition.
" What are you working on, Nerval ? "
H e raised his finger and spoke like a sad prophet announcing his god:
"Amphitrite. "
"Amphitrite! At last! For how many years have you been saving her up? " "Since the Rome prize. I waited and waited. The longer a work is al-
lowed to mature, the better it is, and I wanted to infuse it with the dream and experience of a whole life . . . I believe it is time . . . "
"A symphonic poem, isn't it? . . . Are you satisfied? "
Nerval shook his head.
"No. In a pinch, it might work . . . My thoughts are not distorted be-
yond recognition . . . "
He interpreted the prelude with great virtuosity: a " Train of Neptune. "
You will relish it, Doctor; it is a miracle!
"You see," Nerval said to me while striking strange, outrageous, and
brutal chords, "up to this fanfare of Tritons it works . . . "
"Marvelous," I answered; "there is . . . "
"But," Nerval continued, "that is all there is to it. The choir that fol-
lows . . . a failure. Yes, I can feel my powerlessness to write it . . . It is too beautiful. We no longer know . . . It would have to be composed the way Phidias created his sculptures; it would have to be a Parthenon, as simple
as . . . We no longer know . . . Ha ! " he suddenly screamed, "to have arrived there, I . . . "
"Listen," I said to him, "you are among the most famous, so . . . "
"So, if this is how I end up, what do others know?
But at least their mediocrity is a blessing, which is itself mediocre and satisfied with little. Famous! What is fame when engulfed in sadness! . . . "
"The peaks are always clouded! . . . "
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"Enough," Nerval resumed, " a cease-fire for flattery! This is truly a sad hour, so let us, if you wish, dedicate it to real sorrows. We owe it to the departe d . "
Following these rather mysterious words he took a phonograph from underneath a blanket. I understood.
You can well imagine, Doctor, that this phonograph did not play the "Potpourri from The Doll, performed by the Republican Guard under Pares. " The very improved, sonorous, and clear machine only had a few cylinders. It merely spoke . . .
Yes, you guessed it: on Wednesday the dead spoke to us . . .
How terrible it is to hear this copper throat and its sounds from beyond the grave! It is more than a photographic, or I had better say cinemato- graphic, something; it is the voice itself, the living voice, still alive among carrion, skeletons, nothingness . . .
The composer was slumped in his chair next to the fireside. He listened with painfully knit brows to the tender things our departed comrades said from the depths of the altar and the grave.
" Well, science does have its advantages, Nerval! As a source of miracles and passions it is approaching art. "
"Certainly. The more powerful the telescopes, the larger the number of stars is going to be. Of course science has its good sides. But for us it is still too young. Only our heirs will benefit from it. With the help of each new in- vention they will be able to observe anew the face of our century and listen to the sounds made by our generation. But who is able to project the Athens of Euripides onto a screen or make heard the voice of Sappho ? "
He livened up and played with a large shell he had absentmindedly taken off the chimney mantelpiece.
I appreciated the object that was to revive his spirits, and because I an- ticipated that the elaboration of the scientific, if not paradoxical, theme would amuse him, I resumed:
"Beware of despair. Nature frequently delights in anticipating science, which in turn often merely imitates it. Take photography, for instance! The world can see the traces of an antediluvian creature in a museum-I believe it is the brontosaurus-and the soil retains the marks of the rain that was falling when the beast walked by. What a prehistoric snapshot! "
Nerval was holding the shell to his ear.
"Beautiful, the roaring of this stethoscope," he said; "it reminds me
of the beach where I found it-an island off Salerno . . . it is old and crumbling. "
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I used the opportunity.
"Dear friend, who knows? The pupils of the dying are said to retain the last image they received . . . What if this ear-shaped snail stored the sounds it heard at some critical moment-the agony of mollusks, maybe? And what if the rosy lips of its shell were to pass it on like a graphophone? All in all, you may be listening to the surf of oceans centuries old . . . "
But Nerval had risen. With a commanding gesture he bid me be quiet. His dizzy eyes opened as if over an abyss. He held the double-horned grotto to his temple as if eavesdropping on the threshold of a mystery. A hypnotic ecstasy rendered him motionless.
After I repeatedly insisted, he reluctantly handed me the shell.
At first I was only able to make out a gurgling of foam, then the hardly audible turmoil of the open sea. I sensed-how I can not say-that the sea was very blue and very ancient. And then, suddenly, women were singing and passing by . . . inhuman women whose hymn was wild and lustful like the scream of a crazed goddess . . . Yes, Doctor, that's how it was: a scream and yet a hymn. These were the insidious songs Circe warned us not to lis- ten to, or only when tied to the mast of a galley with rowers whose ears are filled with wax . . . But was that really enough to protect oneself from the danger? . . .
I continued to listen.
The sea creatures disappeared into the depths of the shell. And yet minute by minute the same maddening scene was repeated, periodically, as if by phonograph, incessantly and never diminished.
Nerval snatched the shell away from me and ran to the piano. For a long time he tried to write down the sexual screaming of the goddesses.
At two in the morning he gave up.
The room was strewn with blackened and torn sheets of music.
"You see, you see," he said to me, "not even when I am dictated to can I transcribe the choir! . . . "
He slumped back into his chair, and despite my efforts, he continued to listen to the poison of this Paean.
At four o'clock he started to tremble. I begged him to lie down. He shook his head and seemed to lean over the invisible maelstrom.
At half past five Nerval fell against the marble chimney-he was dead. The shell broke into a thousand pieces.
Do you believe that there are poisons for the ear modeled on deadly
perfumes or lethal potions? Ever since last Wednesday'S acoustic presenta- tion I have not been feeling well. It is my turn to go . . . Poor Nerval . . .
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Doctor, you claim he died of congestion . . . and what if he died because he heard the sirens singing?
Why are you laughing?
There have been better questions to conclude fantastic tales. But in ways both smooth and comical Renard's fantasy finds its way into technical manuals. In 1902, in the first German monograph on Care and Usage of Modern Speaking Machines (Phonograph, Graphophone and Gramo- phone), Alfred Parzer-Miihlbacher promises that graphophones-a Co- lumbia brand name also used by Renard-will be able to build "archives and collections" for all possible "memories":
Cherished loved ones, dear friends, and famous individuals who have long since passed away will years later talk to us again with the same vividness and warmth; the wax cylinders transport us back in time to the happy days of youth-we hear the speech of those who lived countless years before us, whom we never knew, and whose names were only handed down by history. 67
Renard's narrator clarifies such "practical advice for interested cus- tomers" by pointing out that the phonographic recording of dead friends surpasses their "cinematographic" immortalization: instead of black-and- white phantom doubles in the realm of the imaginary, bodies appear by virtue of their voices in a real that once again can only be measured in eu- phemisms: by carrion or skeletons. It becomes possible to conjure up friends as well as the dead "whose names were only handed down by his- tory. " Once technological media guarantee the similarity of the dead to stored data by turning them into the latter's mechanical product, the boundaries of the body, death and lust, leave the most indelible traces. According to Renard, eyes retain final visions as snapshots; according to the scientific-psychological determinations of Benedict and Ribot,68 they even retain these visions in the shape of time-lapse photography. And if, in strict analogy, the roaring shell only replays its agony, then even the dead- est of gods and goddesses achieve acoustic presence. The shell that Re- nard's fictitious composer listens to was not found on a natural beach; it takes the place of the mouthpieces of a telephone or a loudspeaker capa- ble of bridging temporal distances in order to connect him with an antiq- uity preceding all discourse. The sound emanating from such a receiver is once again Rilke's primal sound, but as pure sexuality, as divine clameur
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sexuelle. The "rosy lips" and the "double-horned grotto" of its anatomy leave that in as little doubt as the death of the old man to whom they appear.
Thus Renard's short story introduces a long series of literary phan- tasms that rewrite eroticism itself under the conditions of gramophony and telephony. As a result, apparitions no longer comprise those endear- ing images of women whom, as Keller put it, the bitter world does not nourish; instead, the temptation of a voice has become a new partial ob- ject. In the same letter in which Kafka suggests to his fiancee and her par- lograph firm that old-fashioned love letters be replaced by technical re- lays of telephone and parlograph,69 he relates a dream:
Very late, dearest, and yet I shall go to bed without deserving it. Well, I won't sleep anyway, only dream. As I did yesterday, for example, when in my dream I ran toward a bridge or some balustrading, seized two telephone receivers that happened to be lying on the parapet, put them to my ears, and kept asking for nothing but news from "Pontus"; but nothing whatever came out of the telephone except a sad, mighty, wordless song and the roar of the sea. Although well aware that it was impossible for voices to penetrate these sounds, I didn't give in, and didn't go awayJo
News from "Pontus"-as Gerhard Neumann has shown,71 in pretechni- cal days this was news from Ovid's Black Sea exile, the quintessential model for literature as a love letter. Letters of this kind, necessarily re- ceived or written in their entirety by women, were replaced by the tele- phone and its noise, which precedes all discourse and subsequently all whole individuals. In La voix humaine, Cocteau's one-act telephone play of 1930, a man and a woman at either end of a telephone line agree to burn their old love letters. 72 The new eroticism is like that of the gramo- phone, which, as Kafka remarked in the same letter, one "can't under- stand. "73 "The telephone conversation occupies the middle ground be- tween the rendezvous and the love letter" :74 it drowns out the meaning of words with a physiological presence that no longer allows "human voices" to get through, as well as by superimposing a myriad of simulta- neous conversations, which in Kafka's The Castle, for instance, reduces the "continual telephoning" to "humming and singing. "75 Likewise, in Renard's short story the superimposition of all the goddesses and sirens that ever existed may have resulted in white noise.
There can be no doubt that Kafka dreamed telephony in all its infor- mational and technological precision: four days prior to his dream he read an essay by Philipp Reis in an 1 8 63 issue of Die Gartenlaube on the
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first telephone experiments. 76 As is clear from the essay's title, "The Mu- sic Telegraph," the apparatus was built for the purpose of conveying the human voice. It failed to do SO,77 but like Kafka's imagined telephone mouthpieces it was capable of transmitting music.
Ever since Freud, psychoanalysis has been keeping a list of partial ob- jects that, first, can be separated from the body and, second, excite desires prior to sexual differentiation: breast, mouth, and feces. Lacan added two further partial objects: voice and gaze. 78 This is psychoanalysis in the me- dia age, for only cinema can restore the disembodied gaze, and only the telephone was able to transmit a disembodied voice. Plays like Cocteau's La voix humaine follow in their wake.
The only thing that remains unclear is whether media advertise par- tial objects or partial objects advertise the postal system. The more strate- gic the function of news channels, the more necessary, at least in interim peace times, the recruitment of users.
In 1980 Dieter Wellershoff published his novella The Siren, unfortu- nately without dedicating it to Renard. A professor from Cologne plans to use his sabbatical to finally complete his long-planned book on commu- nication theory. But he never gets down to writing. An unknown woman who once witnessed Professor Elsheimer's telegenic partial objects on a TV screen starts a series of phone calls that begin like a one-sided suicide hot line and culminate in mutual telephonic masturbation. 79 Written the- ories of communication stand no chance against the self-advertisement of technological media. Even the most taciturn of European " civil services" 80 recruited for "the profession of telephone operator" and made it "acces- sible to German women," because from the very beginning its "telephone service" could not "do without" the "clear voices of women. "81
Therefore, Professor Elsheimer's only means of escaping the spell of the telephonic-sexual mouthpiece is to use one medium to beat another medium. During the last call from the unseen siren he puts on a Bach record and pumps up the volume. 82 And 10 and behold, drowned out by Old European notated music the siren magic ceases to exist. Only two technical media communicate between Cologne and Hamburg. "Here," Kafka wrote from Prague to his beloved employee of a phonograph man- ufacturer, "by the way, is a rather nice idea; a parlograph goes to the tele- phone in Berlin, while a gramophone does likewise in Prague, and these two carry on a little conversation with each other. "83
Wellershoff's The Siren is an inverted replay of "The Man and the Shell. " Renard's fictional composer had not yet acquired the technologi- cal skill to employ, of all pieces, the Art of the Fugue as a jammer in the
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? "When telephone and gramophone . . . " Caricature, ca. 1900.
war of the sexes. On the contrary, he wanted to transfer onto musical sheets what was no longer fugue or art: "a goddess's lusty scream," which coincided with the roaring of the sea.
It remained an impossible wish as long as it depended on the five lines of a musical staff, but that changed in the founding age of modern media. In the beginning there was, as always, Wagner, who, by courtesy of ice-cream poisoning in La Spezia, experienced an acoustic fever delir- ium of "swiftly running water" that suggested to him the Rhinegold pre- lude. 84 Debussy's Sirenes for orchestra and female voices followed in
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1 89 5 , the score o f which n o longer dictated words, o r even syllables or vowels, but sums, as if it were possible to compose the noise of channels or, as Richard Dehmel put it a year later, the "hollow din" of the "tele- graph wires. "85 Between 1903 and 1905 Debussy completed the "sym- phonic poem" which in Renard's tale was named after a Greek sea god- dess but which Debussy simply called La Mer. Finally, in 1907 Wagner's monotonous, ice cream-induced E-flat chord with all its overtone effects became Nerval's unwritten Amphitrite, that "poison for the ear. "
Berliner's gramophone is to the history of music what Edison's phono- graph is to the history of literature. At the price of being monopolized and mass produced by big industry, records globalized musical noise. Edison's cylinders in turn made the storage of speech a daily enjoyment, even if in each case only a very few copies could be made. As a result, literature's letter-filled papers suffered the same crisis as sheet music.
In 19 16, three years before Rilke's "Primal Sound, " Salomo Friedlaend- er delineated the new constellation of eroticism, literature, and phonog- raphy. More than any other writer of his time, Friedlaender, better known under the pseudonym Mynona (a palindrome of anonym), made stories again out of media history. In 1922 he published the novel Gray Magic, which anticipates a technological future in which women are turned into celluloid (and men, incidentally, into typewriters). In 1916 he wrote a short story that conjures up the technological past in the shape of Germany's ur- author in order to predict the transformation of literature into sound.
SALOMO FRIEDLAENDER, "GOETHE SPEAKS INTO THE PHONOGRAPH" (1916)
"What a pity," remarked Anna Pomke, a timid middle-class girl, "that the phonograph wasn't already invented in 1 8001 "
"Why? " asked Professor Abnossah Pschorr. "Dear Pomke, it is a pity that Eve didn't present it to Adam as part of her dowry for their common- law marriage; there is a lot to feel pity for, dear Pomke. "
"Oh, Professor, I would have loved to listen to Goethe's voicel He is said to have had such a beautiful organ, and everything he said was so meaningful. Oh, if only he could have spoken into a phonographl Ohl Ohl"
Long after Pomke had left, Abnossah, who had a weakness for her
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squeaky chubbiness, still heard her groans. Professor Pschorr, inventor of the telestylus, immersed himself in his customary inventive thoughts. Was
it possible retroactively to trick that Goethe (Abnossah was ridiculously jealous) out of his voice? Whenever Goethe spoke, his voice produced vi- brations as harmonious as, for example, the soft voice of your wife, dear Reader. These vibrations encounter obstacles and are reflected, resulting in a to and fro which becomes weaker in the passage of time but which does not actually cease. So the vibrations produced by Goethe are still in existence, and to bring forth Goethe's voice you only need the proper receiver to re- cord them and a microphone to amplify their effects, by now diminished. The difficult part was the construction of the receiver. How could it be ad- justed to the specific vibrations of Goethe's voice without having the latter at one's disposal? What a fascinating idea! Abnossah determined that it was
necessary to conduct a thorough study of Goethe's throat. He scrutinized busts and portraits, but they provided a very vague impression at best. He was on the verge of giving up when he suddenly remembered that Goethe was still around, if only in the shape of a corpse.
