No More Learning

Once the beautiful and fictitious, monstrous and unique organ of the poet-bureaucrat Goethe, which commanded an entire literary epoch, rose as an acoustic hallucination from the lines of his poems, things proceeded as desired. In 1 8 19 , Hoffmann's fairy tale Little Zaches noted what "ex- travagant poets . . . ask for" : "First of all, they want the young lady to get into a state of somnambulistic rapture over everything they utter, to sigh deeply, roll her eyes, and occasionally to faint a trifle, or even to go blind for a moment at the peak of the most feminine femininity. Then the afore- said young lady must sing the poet's songs to the melody that streams forth from her heart"90 and, finally, in the Anti-Oedipus, reveal the secret of its media technology: that it is a fictitious elevated phallus born from the alphabet.
For timid middle-class girls, however, everything depended on liter- ally going " blind" when faced with the materiality of printed letters; oth- erwise, they could not have provided them with a melody in the imagi- nary (or at the piano) from their hearts. In doing so, they surrendered un- conditionally to the desires of Classic-Romantic poets. "Oh," Anna Pomke sighs from the bottom of her heart, "if only he could have spoken into a phonograph! Oh! Oh! "
A sigh that will hardly reach the ears of engineers. Pschorr can only discern a "groan" in her "oh," mere vocal physiology instead of a heart. Around 1900, love's wholeness disintegrates into the partial objects of particular drives identified by Freud. Phonographs do not only store- like Kempelen's vowel machine or Hoffmann's Olympia-the one signi- fied, or trademark, of the soul. They are good for any kind of noise, from Edison's hearing-impaired screaming to Goethe's fine organ. With the demise of writing's storage monopoly comes to an end a love that was not only one of literature's many possible subjects but also its very own media technology: since 1800 perfectly alphabetized female readers have been able to endow letters with a beloved voice. But tracing primal sounds has, as Rilke put it, nothing to do with "the presence of mind and grace of love. "
As a modern engineer who wants to spread his knowledge using
Gramophone 71
everyday language, Professor Pschorr minces n o words: " Whenever Goethe spoke, his voice produced vibrations as harmonious as, for exam- ple, the soft voice of your wife, dear Reader. " However, the fact that what Goethe had to say was "meaningful" enough to fill the 144 volumes of the GroiSherzogin-Sophien edition is irrelevant. Once again notions of frequency are victorious over works, heartfelt melodies, and signifieds. As if commenting on Pschorr, Rudolph Lothar writes at the outset of his The Talking Machine: A Technical-Aesthetic Essay:
Everything flows, Heraclitus says, and in light of our modern worldview we may add: everything flows in waves. Whatever happens in the world, whatever we call life or history, whatever occurs as a natural phenomenon-everything transpires in the shape of waves.
Rhythm is the most supreme and sacred law of the universe; the wave phe- nomenon is the primal and universal phenomenon.
Light, magnetism, electricity, temperature, and finally sound are nothing but wave motions, undulations, or vibrations. . . .
The unit of measurement for all wave motions is the meter, the unit of time is the second. Frequencies are the vibrations registered within a meter per second. The frequencies of light, electricity, and magnetism are taken to be identical; with approximately 700 trillion vibrations per second, their speed of propagation is 300 million meters per second.
Sound vibrations exhibit significantly lower frequencies than those described above. The speed of propagation for sound is 3 3 2 meters per second. The deepest sound audible to human ears hovers around 8 vibrations, the highest around 40,000. 91
The new appreciation of waves, those very un-Goethean "primal and universal phenomena," can even result in a poetry that once more stresses the wavelike nature of all that occurs, as in the sonnet "Radio Wave," which the factory carpenter Karl August Diippengiesser of Stolberg sub- mitted to Radio Cologne in 1928:
Wave, b e aware o f your many shapes,
and, all-embracing, weave
at the world's wheel, entrusted from above, the new and wider spirit of the human race. 92
But engineers like Pschorr are ahead of "other people," even radio wave poets: their "spirits hail"-to quote the engineer-poet Max Eyth-"not from the world that was but from the one that will be. " It is more efficient to use waves "to make things that were never made before"93 than to write sonnets about their many shapes. Pschorr makes use of laws of na-
? ? ? ? ? 72 Gramophone
ture that, unlike the Panta rei of Heraclitus or of Goethe's "Permanence in Transition, " are valid regardless of the reputation of so-called person- alities, because they are based on measurements. The law of waves does not exclude the author of "Permanence in Transition. " And because the frequency spectrum and transmission speed of sound are so low, they are easy to measure. (To posthumously film Goethe would require technolo- gies capable of recording in the terahertz range. )
With mathematical precision Pschorr recognizes the frequency of hu- man voices to be a negative exponential function whose value, even after centuries, cannot be zero. In the phonographic realm of the dead, spirits are always present-as sound signal amplitudes "in an extremely dimin- ished state. " "Speech has become, as it were, immortal," ScientificAmer- ican pronounced immediately after Edison's invention under the headline, "A Wonderful Invention-Speech Capable of Infinite Repetitions from Automatic Records. "94
But although he invented a relatively sensitive powder microphone (as opposed to Hughes's carbon microphone), Edison was not able to ac- cess the dead. Because it was only equipped with a mechanical amplifier, his phonograph could do no more than record the last gasps of the dy- ing-by using resonance in the recording bell-mouth. The low voltage output of his microphone was increased somewhat by a relayed inductive circuit, but it never approached the recording needle of the phonograph. Goethe's bass frequencies, vibrating in infinity between roo and 400 hertz in his Weimar abode, remained unmeasurable. A catastrophic signal-to- noise ratio would have rendered all recordings worthless and, at best, provided primal sounds instead of Goethean diction.
Pschorr's optimism, therefore, rests on more advanced technologies. "A microphone to amplify" the "by now diminished" effects of Goethe's voice depends upon the necessary but suppressed premise that infinite am- plification factors could be applied. This became possible with Lieben's work of 1906 and De Forest's of 1907. Lieben's controlled hot-cathode tube, in which the amplitude fluctuations of a speech signal influence the cathode current, and De Forest's audion detector, which added a third electrode to the circuit, stood at the beginning of all radio technology. 95 The electrification of the gramophone is due to them as well. Pschorr's miraculous microphone could only have worked with the help of tube-type technology. Short stories of 1916 require the most up-to-date technologies.
Pschorr has other problems. His concerns revolve around filtering, not amplification. Isolated from the word salad produced by visitors to the Goethehaus from Schiller to Kafka, his beloved is supposed to receive
Gramophone 73
only her master's voice. Pschorr's solution is as simple as it is Rilkean: he, too, links media technology and physiology, that is, a phonograph and a skull. As the first precursor of the revolutionary media poets Brecht and Enzensberger, Pschorr assumes that transmitter and receiver are in prin- ciple reversible: just as "every transistor radio is, by the nature of its con- struction, at the same time a potential transmitter,"96 and, conversely, any microphone a potential miniature speaker, even Goethe's larynx can be operated in normal and inverse fashion. Since speaking is no more than the physiological filtering of breath or noise, and the entry and exit of band-pass filters are interchangeable, the larynx will admit only those fre- quency mixtures which once escaped from it.
The one thing left for Professor Pschorr to do to implement this se- lectivity technologically is to grasp the difference between arts and media. His early idea of fashioning a model of Goethe's larynx based on "pic- tures and busts" is doomed to failure, simply because art, be it painting or sculpture, only conveys "very vague impressions" of bodies.
Malte Laurids Brigge, the hero of Rilke's contemporaneous novel, is asked by his father's doctors to leave the room while they (in accordance with the master of the hunt's last request) perform a "perforation of the heart" on the corpse. But Brigge stays and watches the operation. His rea- son: "No, no, nothing in the world can one imagine beforehand, not the least thing. Everything is made up of so many unique particulars that can- not be foreseen. In imagination one passes them over and does not notice that they are lacking, hasty as one is. But the realities are slow and inde- scribably detailed. "97
From imagination to data processing, from the arts to the particulars of information technology and physiology-that is the historic shift of 1900 which Abnossah Pschorr must comprehend as well. He finds him- self, not unlike Brigge at the deathbed of his father and Rilke at the Parisian Ecole des Beaux-Arts, in the company of corpses. His profane il- lumination, after all, is that " Goethe was still around, if only in the shape of a corpse. " Once more, the real replaces the symbolic-those allegedly "life-size and lifelike busts and pictures" that only a Goethehaus director such as Hofrat Boffel could mistake for anatomical exhibits.
The reconstructed respiratory system of a corpse as a band-pass fil- ter, a microphone- and tube-type-enhanced phonograph as a storage me- dium-Pschorr is ready to go to work. He has engineered a crucial link between physiology and technology, the principal connection that served as the basis for Rilke's "Primal Sound" and all media conceptions at the turn of the century. Only today's ubiquitous digitization can afford to
74 Gramophone
do without such "radicalness," which in Pschorr's case consisted in short- circuiting "cadavers" and machines. Once the stochastics of the real al- low for encipherment, that is to say, for algorithms, Turing's laconic state- ment that there would be "little point in trying to make a 'thinking ma- chine' more human by dressing it up in artificial flesh"98 is validated.
In the founding days of media technology, however, everything cen- tered on links between flesh and machine. In order to implement techno- logically (and thus render superfluous) the functions of the central ner- vous system, it first had to be reconstructed. Rilke's and Pschorr's projects are far removed from fiction.
To begin with, Scott's membrane phonautograph of 1857 was in all its parts a reconstructed ear. The membrane was derived from the ear- drum and the stylus with the attached bristle from the ossicle. 99
Second, "in 1 839 the 'great Rhenish physiologist' and conversation partner of Goethe, Johannes Muller, had removed the larynx from vari- ous corpses-the acquisition of which tended to be rather adventurous affairs-in order to study in concreto how specific vowel sounds were produced. When Muller blew into a larynx, it sounded 'like a fairground whistle with a rubber membrane. ' Thus the real answered from dismem- bered bodies. "loo And thus, with his adventurous acquisition of parts of Goethe's corpse from the sanctuary of the royal tomb, Pschorr perfected experiments undertaken by Goethe's own conversation partner.
Third (and to remain close to Goethe and Pschorr), on September 6, 1839, the Frankfurt birthplace of Germany's primal author witnessed a bold experiment. Philipp Reis had just finished his second lecture on tele- phone experiments when "Dr. Vogler, the savior of the Goethehaus and founder of the Freie Deutsche Hochschulstift, presented the telephone to Emperor Joseph of Austria and King Maximilian of Bavaria, who were both in Frankfurt attending the royal council. "lOl As if the historic shift from literature to media technology had to be localized.
But as Reis himself wrote, his telephone produced "the vibrations of curves that were identical to those of a sound or a mixture of sounds," since "our ear can only perceive what can be represented by similar curves; and this, in turn, is sufficient to make us conscious of any sound or mixture of sounds. " However, in spite of all theoretical lucidity, Reis "had not been able to reproduce a human voice with sufficient clarity. " 102 Which is why, fourthly and finally, Alexander Graham Bell had to intervene.
A telephone ready for serial production and capable of transmitting not just Reis's musical telegraphy or Kafka's sound of the sea but speeches "in a clarity satisfactory to most everybody" did not exist until 1876.
? Gramophone 75
Two years earlier, the technician Bell, son of a phonetician, had consulted a physiologist and otologist. Clarence John Blake, MD, acquired two middle ears from the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary. And once Bell realized that "such a thin and delicate membrane" as the eardrum "could move bones that were, relatively to it, very massive indeed," the techno- logical breakthrough was achieved. "At once the conception of a mem- brane speaking telephone became complete in my mind; for I saw that a similar instrument to that used as a transmitter could also be employed as a receiver. "103
It is precisely this interchangeability which decades later was to strike Pschorr, Brecht, Enzensberger, e tutti quanti. Which is why Bell and Blake did not hesitate to undertake the last step: in the course of a single exper- imental procedure they coupled technology with physiology, steel with flesh, a phonautograph with body parts. Wherever phones are ringing, a ghost resides in the receiver.
And there is no reason to spare the most illustrious organ in German literature. Pschorr simply reverses the experiment of Blake and Bell a sec- ond time: the larynx as the transmitting organ replaces the ear, the re- ceiving organ. And while Pschorr turns the handle, Goethe's recon- structed corpse voices Goethe's verses. As if the "darkened chamber" from which all "friends" are to flee were a grave known as the book.
So far, so good. Anatomical and technical reconstructions of lan- guage do not belong to fiction as long as they remain within Pschorr's ex- actly delineated boundaries: as the "repetition of a possibility, not of a re- ality. " Immediately prior to Pschorr's reconstruction, Ferdinand de Saus- sure had based a new linguistics on the difference between langue and parole, language and speech, the possible combinations from a repository of signs and factual utterances. 104 Once it was clear how many phonemes and what distinctive qualities made up Goethe's dialect, any conceivable sentence (and not only the "Tame Xenium" chosen by Pschorr) could be generated. That is all there is to the concept of langue.
Once Saussure's Cours de linguistique generale turned into a general algorithm of speech analysis and production, microprocessors could ex- tract the phonemic repository of speakers from their speeches without having to fear, as did the media-technological heroes of yore, the blood and poison of corpses. A Turing machine no longer needs artificial flesh. The analog signal is simply digitized, processed through a recursive digi- tal filter, and its autocorrelation coefficients calculated and electronically stored. An analysis that continues Pschorr's band-pass filtering with more advanced means. A second step may involve all kinds of linguistic syn-
76 Gramophone
theses-once again the "repetition of a possibility" that computing logic has extracted from language. Instead of lungs and vocal chords we have two digital oscillators, a noise generator for unvoiced consonants and a controlled frequency generator for vowels or voiced sounds. Just as in hu- man speech, a binary decision determines which of the two oscillators connects with the recursive filter. In turn, the autocorrelation coefficients derived from the speech analyses are by way of linear prediction directed towards the filters, an electronic simulation of the oral and nasopharyn- geal cavity with all its echoes and running times. Now we only need a simple low-pass filter to translate the signal flow back into analog sig- nals105-and we are all as "strangely moved" or "deceived" by the arriv- ing phoneme sequences as Anna Pomke.
But Pschorr wants more. In order to fulfill the desire of timid middle- class girls in its "entirety," he attempts an "actual replay of words actu- ally spoken by Goethe. " As if, half a century before Foucault, it were a matter of discourse analysis. As is known, The Archaeology of Knowl- edge is based on the Saussurian notion of language as "a finite body of rules that authorizes an infinite number of performances. " "The field of discursive events, on the other hand, is a grouping that is always finite and limited at any moment to the linguistic sequences that have been for- mulated. "lo6 Statements, then, "necessarily obey" a "materiality" that
"defines possibilities of reinscription and transcription,"lo7 as in Pschorr's real repetition.
But how discourse repetition exactly is to be achieved remains (at least in Pschorr's case) a professional secret. For once, Hofrat Boffel's skeptical inquiry, why "of all speeches we were able to listen to this one," is justified. After all, the air is full of sound waves caused by decades of Goethean speechifying. Citing Pschorr, another of Friedlaender's heroes claims that "all the waves of all bygone events are still oscillating in space. "108 Pschorr's phonograph is confronted with a parallel data input that it would first have to convert into a serial arrangement, lest the sum of all Goethean discourses appear as so much white noise on the cylinder.
Stochastic signal analyses such as linear prediction or autocorrelation measurement may enable a technologically enhanced future to assign a time axis even to past events, provided that signal processors have been programmed with certain parameters concerning the language, vocabu- lary, conversation topics, and so forth, of the object under investigation. The chip production of not-von Neumann machines has begun. But no machine in I9I6 could have "adhered so closely" to real time as to have
Gramophone 77
captured Goethe's words in the exact sequence in which they were spo- ken in the course of one particular evening.
Which merely serves to show that all this electronic discourse proves the obvious: Friedlaender fabricated Goethe's phonographed speech. Mynona, the most nameless of authors, outdoes the most illustrious au- thor by putting new words into his mouth. According to Goethe, litera- ture was a "fragment of fragments, " because "the least of what had hap- pened and of what had been spoken was written down," and "of what had been written down, only the smallest fraction was preserved. " Ac- cording to Friedlaender, literature in the media age is potentially every- thing. His hero could supplement all the conversations Eckermann al- legedly "withheld from us. "
Especially a chapter from the Theory of Colors that (in spite of a common contempt for Newton) has more to do with Friedlaender than with Goethe. Friedlaender borrowed the Ubermensch notion that "one's own will," united with the "magical sun-will," can "overpower fate" from his teacher Dr. Marcus, who in turn borrowed it from Kant. "We are at the dawn of the magic of reason; it will make a machine of nature itself,"lo9 proclaims Dr. Sucram, the hero of Friedlaender's cinema novel and whose name is a palindrome of Marcus, while turning Goethe's the- ory of color into Gray Magic, that is to say, the world into film.
At the same time that technology (to quote Sucram's antagonist, the film producer Morvitius) finally "moves from magic to machine,"llo phi- losophy becomes delirious. Machines are supposed to turn back into magic. Pschorr and Sucram are inspired by a technified version of Kant's pure forms of intuition. "All that happens falls into accidental, uninten- tional receivers. It is stored, photographed, and phonographed by nature itself. " United with the spatial and temporal forms of intuition, "these ac- cidental receivers only need to be turned into intentional ones in order to visualize - especially cinematographically, Morvitius-the entire past. " 1 1 1
Loyally and deliriously, Friedlaender's philosophy follows in the wake of media technology. On May I9, I900, Otto Wiener delivered his highly appropriate inaugural lecture on "the extension of our senses" by instruments. As with Friedlaender, his point of departure was the recog- nition that "in principle it would not be difficult to take stock of our en- tire knowledge by using self-recording machines and other automatic de- vices, thus creating a physical museum of automata. " This museum would even be able to inform extraterrestrial intelligence of "the level of our knowledge . " In conclusion, however, Wiener declared that the "Kan-
78 Gramophone
tian notions of the a priori nature of the perception of time and space are unnecessary. "112 Media render Man, "that sublime culprit in the most serenely spiritual sense" of his philosophy, superfluous.
Which is why Friedlaender has Goethe's philosophical journey com- mence with "hissing, hemming, and squeezing," only to end in "snoring. " It may not be as random and mathematical as the "perfectly even and un- informative hiss" into which Turing's vocoder turned the radio speech of his commander in chief, but Goethe's "actually recorded" voice, too, be- longs to the real. The fictional elevated phallus shrivels up. And once Pschorr has train wheels "defeat his victorious rival, Goethe's larynx," the engineer has finally beaten the author.
"The new phonograph," Edison told the staff of Scientific American in 1887, "is to be used for taking dictation, for taking testimony in court, for reporting speeches, for the reproduction of vocal music, for teaching languages," as well as "for correspondence, for civil and military orders" and for "the distribution of the songs of great singers, sermons and speeches, the words of great men and women. "113 Which is why since 1887 those great men and women have been able to do without body snatchers like Pschorr.
To secure the worldwide distribution of these possibilities, Edison sent representatives into all the countries of the Old World. In England, the "willing victims" who "immortalized their voices in wax" included Prime Minister Gladstone, an Edison admirer of long standing, and the poets Tennyson and Browning. In Germany, Edison recruited Bismarck and Brahms, who by recording one of his Hungarian rhapsodies removed it from the whimsy of future conductors. ll4 The young emperor Wilhelm II, however, did more than merely provide his voice. He inquired about all the machine's technical details, had it disassembled in his presence, then pushed aside Edison's representative and took it on himself to conduct the assembly and presentation in the presence of an astonished court. ns The military command-to freely paraphrase Edison-entered the age of techno logy.
And it was only after the heroic action of their emperor-who for reasons obviously related to naval strategy had studied radio telephony,116 founded the Telefunken company, and in what almost amounted to mili- tary prophecy prompted the construction of the AVUS as the first high- way117-that Germany's writers paid attention to the alphabetless trace. In 1897, the foreign office legation council and Wilhelmine state poet Ernst von Wildenbruch may have been the first to record a cylinder.
Gramophone 79
Wildenbruch wrote a poem expressly for the occasion, "For the Phono- graphic Recording of His Voice. " The history of its transmission says it all: it is not collected in the Collected Works. Professor Walter Bruch, who as chief engineer of AEG-Telefunken and inventor of the PAL televi- sion system had access to the archives of historical recordings, had to transcribe Wildenbruch's verses from the roll. They are quoted here in a format that will horrify poets, compositors, and literary scholars.
Das Antlitz des Menschen hRt sich gestalten, sein Auge im Bilde fest sich halten, die Stimme nur, die im Hauch entsteht, die korperlose vergeht und verweht.
Das Antlitz kann schmeichelnd das Auge betriigen, der Klang der Stimme kann nicht betriigen, darum erscheint mir der Phonograph als der Seele wahrhafter Photograph,
Der das Verborgne zutage bringt und das Vergangne zu reden zwingt. Vernehmt denn aus dem Klang von diesem Spruch die Seele von Ernst von Wildenbruch.
We may model the human visage, and hold the eye fast in an image, but the bodiless voice, borne by air, must fade away and disappear.
The fawning face can deceive the eye, the sound of the voice can never lie; thus it seems to me the phonograph is the soul's true photograph,
Which brings to light what is suppressed and makes the past speak at our behest. So listen to the sound of what I declare, and Ernst von Wilden- bruch's soul will be laid bare. u8
Even the copious writer Wildenbruch did not always rhyme so poorly. His phonographic verses sound as if they had been improvised in front of the bell-mouth without the benefit of any written draft. For the first time since time immemorial, when minstrels combined their formulaic or memorized words into entire epics, bards were in demand again. Which is why Wildenbruch was bereft of written language.
Poetry, the last philosopher and first media theorist Nietzsche wrote, is, like literature, in general simply a mnemotechnology. In 1882, The Gay Science remarked under the heading "On the Origin of Poetry":
In those ancient times in which poetry came into existence, the aim was utility, and actually a very great utility. When one lets rhythm permeate speech-the rhythmic force that reorders all the atoms of the sentence, bids one choose one's words with care, and gives one's thoughts a new colour, making them darker, stranger, and more remote-the utility in question was superstitious. Rhythm was meant to impress the gods more deeply with a human petition, for it was noticed that men remember a verse much better than ordinary speech. It was also believed
80 Gramophone
that a rhythmic tick-tock was audible over greater distances; a rhythmical prayer
was supposed to get closer to the ears of the gods. 119
At the origin of poetry, with its beats, rhythms (and, in modern European languages, rhymes), were technological problems and a solution that came about under oral conditions. Unrecognized by all philosophical aes- thetics, the storage capacity of memory was to be increased and the sig- nal-to-noise ratio of channels improved. (Humans are so forgetful and gods so hard of hearing. ) The fact that verses could be written down hardly changed this necessity. Texts stored by the medium of the book were still supposed to find their way back to the ears and hearts of their recipients in order to attain (not unlike the way Freud or Anna Pomke had envisioned it) the indestructibility of a desire.
These necessities are obliterated by the possibility of technological sound storage. It suddenly becomes superfluous to employ a rhythmical tick-tock (as in Greece) or rhyme (as in Europe) to endow words with a duration beyond their evanescence. Edison's talking machine stores the most disordered sentence atoms and its cylinders transport them over the greatest distances. The poet Charles Cros may have immortalized the in- vention of his phonograph, precisely because he was never able to build it, in lyrical rhymes under the proud title "Inscription"-Wildenbruch, that plain consumer, is in a different position. "For the Phonographic Recording of His Voice" no longer requires any poetic means. Rather than dying and fading away, his voice reaches one of today's engineers. Technology triumphs over mnemotechnology. And the death bell tolls for poetry, which for so long had been the love of so many.
Under these circumstances writers are left with few options. They can, like Mallarme or Stefan George, exorcise the imaginary voices from between the lines and inaugurate a cult of and for letter fetishists, in which case poetry becomes a form of typographically optimized black- ness on exorbitantly expensive white paper: un coup de des or a throw of the dice. 120 Or for marketing reasons they can move from imaginary voices, such as those Anna Pomke had hallucinated in Goethe's verses, to real ones, in which case a poetry of nameless songwriters appears, or reappears, on records. Illiterates in particular are their prime consumers, because what under oral conditions required at least some kind of mnemotechnology is now fully automatized. "The more complicated the technology, the simpler," that is, the more forgetful, "we can live. "121 Records turn and turn until phonographic inscriptions inscribe themselves into brain physiology. We all know hits and rock songs by heart precisely because there is no reason to memorize them anymore.
Gramophone 8 I
To provide a demographically exact account of White-Collar Work- ers, including their nocturnal activities, Siegfried Kracauer becomes ac- quainted with a typist, "for whom it is characteristic that she cannot hear a piece of music in a dance hall or a suburban cafe without chirping along its text. But it is not as if she knows all the hits; rather, the hits know her, they catch up with her, killing her softly. "122
Only two years or steps separate this sociology "from the newest Germany" from fictional heroes such as those in Irmgard Keun's Rayon Girl of 1932, who (obviously under the influence of Kracauer) turn into poets (and in Berlin into prostitutes) when listening to the gramophone or the radio. For it is not the typewriter, in front of which the rayon em- ployee Doris spends her days, that turns an entertainment consumer into a producer. Only when she and her current lover hear "music from the ra- dio" and listen to "Vienna, My One and Only" does she "feel like a poet" who "can also rhyme, . . . if only up to a point. " 123 And if "a gramo- phone next door" should be playing in the moonlight, "something won- derful takes hold of her": listening to a hit, Doris first of all has the feel- ing "of making a poem" and then decides to write an autobiography or even a novel.
I think it is good when I describe everything, because I am an uncommon person. I am not thinking of a diary-that would be ridiculous for an up-to-date girl of eighteen. But I want to write like a movie, because that's the way my life is and it will soon be more so. . . . And when I read it later, it will be like a movie-I will see myself in images. 124
Entertainment novels (including Keun's) describe their own medial con- ditions of production with great precision. The medium of the gramo- phone has as its effect a type of poetry that is nothing but the inside of its outside. Skipping all textuality it jumps straight into the medium of film.
My heart is a gramophone, playing excitedly with a sharp needle in my breast. . . . From the movies comes music, records that are passing on human voices. And all are singing . . . 125
Novels that flow from hits in order to end in movies are part of the "lit- erature of nonreaders" reviewed in 1926 by, of all journals, Die liter- arische Welt:
This, the literature of nonreaders, is the most widely read literature in the world. Its history has not yet been written. Nor do I feel quite up to the task myself. I would simply like to make reference to one of its branches: poetry. For the litera- ture of nonreaders, like "our" own, has a special category for poetry.
8 2 Gramophone
Every couple of weeks there is a survey: "Who is the most beloved poet of the year? " Every time, the question is answered incorrectly. The ones we know are not even considered. Neither Rilke nor Casar Flaischlen, not Goethe, and not Gottfried Benn. Rather, Fritz Griinbaum ("When You Can't, Let Me Do It! "), Schanzer and Welisch ("If You See My Aunt"), Beda ("Yes, We Have No Ba- nanas"), Dr. Robert Katscher ("Madonna, You Are More Beautiful than the Sun- shine)"-and who else? A lot more-before Flaischlen, Rilke and Benn come up.
"The 222 Newest Hits"-that is the most popular poetry anthology of all. The contents are revised and expanded every two months. And the whole thing costs just ten cents. Here there is only one genuine type of poem: the love poem. Girls, women, females-other topics are not favored. 126
Even if all the names on both sides of the debate have long since changed, this remains a very exact appraisal. With the invention of tech- nical sound storage, the effects that poetry had on its audience migrate to the new lyrics of hit parades and charts. Their texts would rather be anonymous than deprived of royalties, their recipients illiterate rather than deprived of love. At the same time, however, media technology's pre- cise differentiation brings about a modern poetry that can do without all supplementary sensualities ranging from song to love because-accord- ing to a remark of Oscar Wilde's as ironic as it is appropriate-it is not read. 127 And this remains the case even when Rilke plans poetic coronal suture phonography or Benn writes poems that consciously set themselves apart from the entertainment industry. For Benn's poems can merely note but not verify that records and movies are part of a present that outpaces our cultural critics. Otherwise, his poems would be as successful, anony- mous, and forgotten as the hits they sing about:
A popular hit is more 1950
than five hundred pages of cultural crisis.
At the movies, to which you can take along hat and coat, there is more firewater than in the cothurnus
and without the annoying intermission. 128
Lowbrow and highbrow culture, professional technology and profes- sional poetry: the founding age of modern media left us with those two options. Wildenbruch's third way was eliminated. "So listen to the sound of what I declare, and Ernst von Wildenbruch's soul will be laid bare," the imperial state poet rhymed, as if one could simultaneously speak into technological machines and claim an immortal name. From sound back to poem, from poem back to soul-that is the impossible desire to reduce the real (the physiology of a voice) to the symbolic, and the symbolic
? ? Gramophone 8 3
(an articulated speech) to the imaginary. The wheel o f media technology cannot be turned back to retrieve the soul, the imaginary of all Classic- Romantic poetry. What effectively remains of Wildenbruch in "For the Phonographic Recording of His Voice" is nothing but noise, posthumous already during his lifetime. Record grooves dig the grave of the author. Wildenbruch pulls out all the stops of the imaginary and the symbolic, of his immortal soul and his aristocratic name, so as not to have to speak of his speaking body. "By virtue of our bodies," Paul Zumthor's theory of oral poetry states, "we are time and place: the voice, itself an emanation of our physicality, does not cease to proclaim it. "129 Upon replaying the old cylinder of r 897, it is a corpse that speaks.
Between or before lowbrow and highbrow culture, between hit records and experimental poetry, there is only one third party: science. When Wildenbruch spoke into the bell-mouth, the phonograph stored indices rather than poems. And these indices speak precisely to the extent that their sender cannot manipulate them. The poet performing "The Phono- graphic Recording of His Voice" seemed at least to have been aware of this: because "the sound of the voice can never lie," its technological stor- age reveals the "hidden" and makes the "past"-the corpse of a Wilden- bruch or a Goethe-speak.
Edison saw his phonograph "pressed into the detective service and used as an unimpeachable witness" 130 in court. With technological media, a knowledge assumes power that is no longer satisfied with the individ- ual universals of its subjects, their self-images and self-representations- these imaginary formations-but instead registers distinguishing particu- lars. As Carlo Ginzburg has shown in "Clues and Scientific Method," this new knowledge rules Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes, that is, aes- thetics, psychoanalysis, and criminology. However, Ginzburg fails to see that the shift in technologies of power simply follows the switch from writing to media. Books had been able to store and convey the imaginary corporeal self-images entertained by individuals. But unconsciously treacherous signs like fingerprints, pitch, and foot tracks fall into the purview of media without which they could neither be stored nor evalu- ated. Francis Galton's dactyloscope and Edison's phonograph are con- temporaneous allies.
Wildenbruch appears to have suspected as much, or else his verses would not refer to the phonograph as the soul's own true photograph. His paranoia is justified. A phonographically recorded state poet no longer enters a pantheon of immortal writers but rather one of the countless
? ? 84 Gramophone
Proroype of receiver (Bell & Clarke, 1874).
evidence-gathering agencies that since 1880 have been controlling our so- called social behavior, that is, all the data and signs that are by necessity beyond our control. The good old days in which a self-controlled and "flattering" face could "fool" eyes equally bereft of media are over. Rather, all the sciences of trace detection confirm Freud's statement that "no mortal can keep a secret" because "betrayal oozes out of him at
Gramophone 8 5
every pore. "131 And because (we may add) since 1880, there has been a storage medium for each kind of betrayal. Otherwise there would be no unconsclOUS.
In 1908, the psychologist William Stern publishes a "Summary of De- position Psychology. " This new science is designed to cleanse the oral de- positions of court protocols, medical reports, personal files, and school re- ports from all guile and deceit on the part of the speakers. Old European, that is to say, literary, means of power are not immune from deception. Whether for criminals or for the insane, the traditional "stylized deposi- tions often produce a false impression of the examination and obscure the psychological significance of individual statements. " As each answer "is, from the point of view of experimental psychology, a reaction to the op- erative stimulus in the question,"132 experimenters and investigators pro- voke countermeasures in their subjects as long as they use the bureau- cratic medium of writing. An argument made by the stimulus-response psychologist Stern that, sixty years later, is reiterated by interaction psy- chologists like Watzlawick (despite all criticism of the stimulus-response scheme). 133 Which is why examiners of 1908 recommend "the use of the phonograph as an ideal method"134 and those of 1969 recommend tape decks. 135
In 1905, the Viennese psychiatrist Erwin Stransky, quietly anticipat- ing his colleague Stern, published a study, On Speech Disturbances. In or- der to contribute to the knowledge of such disturbances among the "men- tally ill and mentally healthy," German psychiatry for the first time availed itself of the ideal method of phonography. Stransky had his sub- jects "look and speak directly into the black tube" for one minute (the recording time for one roll) after " all extraneous sense stimuli, " that is, all the psychological problems of deposition, had been eliminated. 136 Whatever they said was completely irrelevant. The "aim" of the whole experiment "consists in shutting out all general concepts. "137 To test "concepts like 'speaking at odds,' 'hodgepodge,' 'thinking out loud,' 'hal- lucination,' etc. ,"138 the subjects had to abandon their so-called thinking. In Stransky's phonographic experiment, "language," in its "relative au- tonomy from the psyche,"139 takes the place of general concepts or signi- fieds, as if intending to prepare or facilitate a key concept of modern literature.
Media technology could not proceed in a more exact fashion. Thanks to the phonograph, science is for the first time in possession of a machine that records noises regardless of so-called meaning. Written protocols were always unintentional selections of meaning. The phonograph, how-
? ? ? 8 6 Gramophone
ever, draws out those speech disturbances that concern psychiatry. Stran- sky's fine statement that "the formation of general concepts " could be in- hibited "for pathological or experimental reasons"140 is a euphemism. The "or" should be replaced by an equal sign. All the more so because the splendidly consistent Stransky places in front of the machine not only psy- chiatric patients but also, to collect comparative data, his own colleagues, the doctors. For the latter, the ensuing hodgepodge was related to exper- imental reasons, needless to say, while the patients had their pathological reasons. But the fact that psychiatrists, too, immediately produce a whole lot of nonsense when speaking into a phonograph, thereby relinquishing the professional status that distinguishes them from madmen, fully demonstrates the machine's power. Mechanization relieves people of their memories and permits a linguistic hodgepodge hitherto stifled by the. mo- nopoly of writing. The rules governing rhyme and meter that Wilden- bruch employs to arrange his words when speaking into the phonograph; the general concepts that Stransky's colleagues use to arrange theirs dur- ing the first test runs-Edison's invention renders them all historically ob- solete. The epoch of nonsense, our epoch, can begin.
This nonsense is always already the unconscious. Everything that speakers, because they are speaking, cannot also think flows into record- ing devices whose storage capacity is only surpassed by their indifference. "The point could be made"-a certain Walter Baade remarked in 19 1 3 in
"On the Recording of Self-Observations by Dictaphone"-
that such an exertion is unnecessary, because it is not a matter of recording all re- marks but only the important ones-this, however, fails to realize first of all that utterances of great importance are often made by subjects in moments when they themselves believe only to have made a casual remark and the examiner is alto- gether unprepared for an important comment, and secondly that even when both parties are aware that at least some part of a remark is "important," the decision what should and should not be recorded by the protocol is frequently very diffi- cult and, subsequently, has a disturbing effect. For the most part, these two afore- mentioned reasons make the uninterrupted, indiscriminate recording of all utter- ances appear as an idea[. 141
Presumably the first to follow this ideal is a fictional psychiatrist of 1897. Bram Stoker's Dracula, that perennially misjudged heroic epic of the final victory of technological media over the blood-sucking despots of old Europe,142 features a certain Dr. Seward, who is baffled by the non- sensical discourse produced by his schizophrenic patient Renfield. The latter keeps screaming that the master is approaching, but Dr. Seward has no way of knowing that this refers to Dracula's arrival in England.
? ? Gramophone 87
However, in the wake of a profane illumination anticipating Dr. Stran- sky, Dr. Seward resorts to media technology. He purchases one of the re- cently mass-produced phonographs, not to record the patient (as Stran- sky did) but rather his own associations triggered by the latter's speeches. The grooves store, to quote Seward's succinct and precise description, an "unconscious cerebration" that divines the subconscious of the schizo- phrenic but cannot advance all the way to the psychiatrist's ego. It is only (as Baade put it) the uninterrupted, indiscriminate recording of all utter- ances or associations that will allow Dr. Seward's unconscious cerebra- tion "to give the wall to [its1 conscious brother. "143 And only the typed transcription of all cylinders, recommended as early as 1 890 by Dr. Blod- gett,144 by a certain Mina Harker will reveal to him and all the others hunting Dracula that the Count himself was behind Renfield's schizo- phrenic nonsense.
Since 1897, the year of Dracula's publication, this procedure has no longer belonged to the realm of fiction. A science has emerged that turns it and all its particulars into a method: psychoanalysis.
As is known, Freud's "talking cure" is based on a segmentation of speech. On the one hand, patients lying on the couch speak-at least that's what they believe -according to classic discourse rules: A Kantian ego has to be able to accompany all my representations and provide for correct words and sentences-sentences that, unfortunately, say nothing about the patient. On the other hand, many minor symptoms emerge in the flow of speech-interruptions and paralalia, nonsensical words and puns-in which (to paraphrase Stransky) for pathological or experimen- tal reasons the formation of general concepts has not occurred and a sub- conscious appears. Subsequently, the attentive doctor need only separate nonsense from sense like wheat from chaff (and not the other way around). He feeds the parapraxes back to the patient, thus triggering new associations and parapraxes, which once again are fed back, and so on until an ego in control of speech has been dethroned and the unspeakable truth can be heard.
Around 1900, only media theoreticians play as revolutionary a part as the physician Freud. Experimenting with telephones and phonographs, Hermann Gutzmann, a lecturer in speech disorders in Berlin, discovers that the prompting of nonsense words to his patients produces nothing but parapraxes. Precisely because both machines-due to transmission economy or technical imperfections-limit the frequency band of lan- guage on either end, what subjects "understand" can differ from what
? 8 8 Gramophone
they "hear. " Gutzmann speaks nonsense syllables like "bage" or "zoses" into the mouthpiece, and the ear at the other end receives "lady" or "process. "145 A simple question brings to light an unconscious. And the research in "On Hearing and Understanding" is able to "answer the ques- tion what such experiments may mean for experimental psychology":
First of all, it is evident that using fake words stimulates the combinatory powers to such a degree that even against his will the listener is forced to replace the non- sense syllables he has heard with those words closest in his mind, in the pertinent constellation of ideas; that is, he is forced to hear the latter in the former. This can be seen very clearly in the protocol of Subject I, a fickle eighteen-year-old who is deeply in love; he is attracted to everything feminine, and the many girls' names and an additional "lady" make his constellation of ideas easily recognizable. This also applies to the fake French words of the two "well-educated young ladies. " If we wanted to conduct phonographic tests aimed at discovering certain suspected trains of thought, we would only need to use syllables sounding like the corre- sponding words as stimuli in order to arrive at the positive or negative result. J46
Freud turns Gutzmann's simple suggestion into his explicit goal and imaginary constellations into the subconscious. In other words, he him- self takes the place of phonographic tests. And for good reason: the psy- choanalyst in his chair would also be faced with the problem of repress- ing or filtering the communication of an alien subconscious with his own subconscious had he not from the very beginning turned his ears into a technical apparatus. Unlike Gutzmann's subjects, Freud's patients fall from sense into nonsense, yet their doctor is not allowed to use his un- derstanding to turn it back into sense. For that reason, Freud's "Recom- mendations to Physicians Practising Psycho-Analysis" simply amount to telephony:
Just as the patient must relate everything that his self-observation can detect, and keep back all the logical and affective objections that seek to induce him to make a selection from among them, so the doctor must put himself in a position to make use of everything he is told for the purposes of interpretation . . . without substi- tuting a censorship of his own for the selection that the patient has foregone. To put it in a formula, he must turn his own unconscious like a receptive organ towards the transmitting unconscious of the patient. He must adjust himself to the patient as a telephone receiver is adjusted to the transmitting microphone. Just as the receiver converts back into sound waves the electric oscillations in the telephone line which were set up by sound waves, so the doctor's unconscious is able, from the derivatives of the unconsciousness which are communicated to him, to reconstruct that unconscious, which has determined the patient's free associations. 147
? Gramophone 8 9
The fictional Dr. Seward had been obliged to first record his uncon- scious associations, which traced those of another unconscious, before he was able to arrive at a conscious interpretation upon replaying them. In exactly the same way the historical Dr. Freud turns into a telephone re- ceiver. Following the nationalization of the Vienna telephone exchange in 1895, he not only had a telephone installed in his study148 but also de- scribed the work that went on in that study in terms of telephony. As if "psychic apparatus," Freud's fine neologism or supplement for the anti- quated soul, were to be taken literally, the unconscious coincides with electric oscillations. Only an apparatus like the telephone can transmit its frequencies, because each encoding in the bureaucratic medium of writ- ing would be subject to the filtering and censoring effects of a conscious- ness. Under media conditions, however, "selection and refusal," to quote Rilke, are no longer permissible. 149 Which is why the conscientious depo- sition psychologist Freud abstains from note-taking during his sessions; instead-and much like Dr. Seward listening to his cylinders-he pro- duces them later. ISO
The question remains, however, how the telephone receiver Freud can retain the communication from another unconscious. The phonograph owners Drs. Seward, Stransky, and Gutzmann are not faced with this problem, since they are in possession of a storage medium. Producing psy- choanalytic case studies, that is, putting into writing what patients said, requires that one record whatever the two censors on and behind the couch want to render unsaid: parapraxes, puns, slips, signifier jokes. Only technological media can record the nonsense that (with the one exception of Freud) technological media alone were able to draw out into the open. Freud's telephone analogy elides this point. Nonetheless, his principle that consciousness and memory are mutually exclusivelSI formulates this very media logic. For that reason, it is consistent to define psychoanalytic case studies, in spite of their written format, as media technologies. Freud in- troduces his "Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria" with the au- dacious avowal that his written "record" of hysterical speeches has a "high degree of trustworthiness," though it is "not absolutely-phono- graphically-exact. " lS2
Evidently, psychoanalysis competes with technological sound record- ing.