His
concerns
revolve around filtering, not amplification.
Kittler-Gramophone-Film-Typewriter
Rather, in order to obtain gray, white must be mechanically combined with black, and it has to be chemically united with gray to produce the varied gray of the other colors.
You will never ob- tain white by neutralizing colors.
It merely serves to restore the original con- trast of black and white: and of course white is the only one that can be seen in all its brightness.
But I, dear friend, I see darkness just as clearly, and if Newton only hit upon white, I, most esteemed comrade, also hit upon black.
I should think that a former archer like yourself would greatly appre- ciate such a feat!
That is the way it is, and so be it!
From me our distant grandchildren and great-grandchildren populating this absurd world will learn to laugh at Newton !
"
BbHel had sat down while everybody was cheering. The servants tram- pled with delight, like students in the fiery lectures of that upright and de- monic graybeard, the smashingly revolutionary, lordly Reucken. But Abnos- sah sternly said, "Gentlemen! You are interrupting Goethe! He isn't finished yet! "
Silence resumed and the voice continued: "No, Sir, no and again no! Of course you could have if you had so desired! It is the will, the will of these Newtonians, that is pernicious; and a faulty will is a corruptive faculty, an active inability that I abhor even though I catch sight of it everywhere and should be accustomed to it. You may consider it harmless, but the will is
the true contriver of all things great and small; it is not the divine power but the will, the divine will, that thwarts man and proves his inadequacy. If you were able to desire in a godlike way, dear friend, the ability would be
? ? 66 Gramophone
necessary and not j ust easy to come by, and a lot of what now dare not show its face for fear of meeting hostility or ridicule would become every- day experience.
"Consider young Schopenhauer, a lad of supreme promise, full of the most magnificent desires, but afflicted by the rot of abundance, by his own insatiability. In the theory of colors he was blinded by the sun to the extent that he did not accept the night as another sun but rather deemed it null and void; likewise, he was captivated by the luster of life in its wholeness, in contrast to which human life struck him as worthless. Behold, Sir, that the purest, most divine will is in danger of failure if it is bent on persisting at all cost; if it is not prepared to wisely and gracefully take into account the exte- rior conditions as well as the limitations of its own means! Indeed: the will is indeed a magician! Is there anything it cannot do? But the human will is not a will, it is a bad will. Ha! Haha! Hee! Hee! "
Goethe laughed mysteriously and continued in a whisper:
"Very well then, my dearest friend, I shall entrust, indeed reveal, some- thing to you. You will judge it a fairy tale, but to me it has attained the ut- most clarity. Your own will can vanquish fate; it can make fate its servant provided-and now listen closely-it does not presume that the tremendous and divinely tense creative intent and exertion within should also be clearly manifest without, especially in a most intense display of muscular strain. Behold earth as it is turned and driven! What mundane industry! What ceaseless motion! But mark my words, Eckermann! It is no more than mun- dane diligence, nothing but a fatally mechanical driving-while the vibrat- ing, magical will of the sun rests within itself and by virtue of this supreme self-sufficiency gives rise to the electromagnetism that humbles the whole army of planets, moons, and comets into servile submission at its feet. 0 friend, to understand, to experience and be, in the most serenely spiritual sense of the word, that sublime culprit! -Enough, let us leave it at that. I was accustomed to discipline myself whenever I heard others, and some- times even Schiller, rhapsodize freely, out of love for such a divine activity, in the face of which one should be silent, because all discourse would not only be useless and superfluous but indeed harmful and obstructive by creating a ridiculously profane understanding, if not the most decisive misunderstanding. Remember this, my friend, and keep it in your heart without attempting to unravel the mystery! Trust that in time it will
unravel itself, and this evening go to the theater with Little Wolf, who
is eager to go, and do not treat Kotzebue too harshly even though he disgusts us! "
"Oh, God," Pomke said, while the others eagerly congratulated
Gramophone 67
Abnossah, "oh, God! If only I could listen forever! How much Eckermann withheld from us! "
After a long while a snoring emanated from the machine, then nothing! "Gentlemen! " Abnossah said, "as you can hear, Goethe is obviously asleep. It makes little sense to wait around; there is nothing to expect for a couple of hours, if not for an entire day. Staying around is useless. As you no doubt realize, the apparatus adheres closely to real time. In the most fortunate case we might hear something should Eckermann have returned to Goethe fol- lowing the performance. I, for one, do not have the time to wait around for that to happen. "
"How i s it," the slightly skeptical Bbffel asked, "that, o f all speeches, we were able to listen to this one? "
"Pure chance," Pschorr responded. "The conditions, in particular the makeup of the machine and its positioning, happened to correspond to these and no other sound vibrations. I only took into account the fact that Goethe was sitting and the location of his chair. "
"Oh, please, please! Abnossah! " (pomke, almost maenadic, was as if in a trance; for the first time she called him by his first name. ) "Try it some- where else! I can't hear enough of it-and even if it is only snoring! "
Abnossah put away the machine and locked the suitcase. He had become very pale: "My dear Anna-Madame," he corrected himself,
"-another time. " (Jealousy of the old Goethe was eating him up inside. ) "How about Schiller's skull? " Bbffel asked. "It would decide the dis-
pute over whether it is the real one. "
"Indeed," Abnossah responded, "for ifwe heard Schiller, the Swabian,
say in a broad Hessian accent, 'How about a glass of wine? ' it wouldn't be Schiller's skull. -I am wondering if the invention couldn't be refined. Maybe I could manufacture a generic larynx that could be adjusted like an opera glass in order to be aligned with all kinds of possible vibrations. We could listen to antiquity and the Middle Ages and determine the correct pronunci- ation of old idioms. And respected fellow citizens who say indecent things out loud could be handed over to the police. "
Abnossah offered Pomke his arm and they returned to the station. They cautiously entered the waiting room, but the locally known one had already left. "What if she let me have the larynx of her famous brother? But she won't do it; she'll claim that the people aren't mature enough and that the literati lack the reverence of the people, and that nothing can be done. Beloved! Beloved! For (oh! ) that! That is! That is what you are! "
But Pomke wasn't listening. She appeared to be dreaming. " How he stresses the rs ! " she whispered apprehensively.
? ? ? 68 Gramophone
Abnossah angrily blew his nose; Anna started and asked him distract- edly: "You were saying, dear Pschorr? ! I am neglecting the master for his work! But the world subsides when I hear Goethe's own voice! "
They boarded the coach for their return journey. Pomke said nothing; Abnossah was brooding silently. After they had passed Halle, he threw the little suitcase with Goethe's larynx out of the window in front of an ap- proaching train. "What have you done? " Pomke shrieked.
"Loved," Pschorr sighed, "and soon I will have lived-and destroyed my victorious rival, Goethe's larynx. "
Pomke blushed furiously; laughing, she threw herself vigorously into Abnossah's tightly embracing arms. At that moment the conductor entered and requested the tickets.
"God! Nossah! " murmured Pomke. "You have to get me a new larynx of Goethe, you have to-or else-"
"No or else ! Apres les noces, my dove ! "
Prof D r. A bnossah Pschorr Anna Pschorr, nee Pomke
Just married
Currently at the "Elephant" in Weimar
This wedding announcement is truly a happy ending: it puts an end to Classic-Romantic poetry. In I9I6 even "timid middle-class girls" like Anna Pomke come under the influence of professors like Pschorr, who as one of the " most proficient" engineers of his day obviously teaches at the new technological institutes so vigorously promoted by Emperor Wilhelm II. Marriage to an engineer vanquishes the middle-class girl's infatuation with Goethe, which lyceums had been systematically drilling into them for over a century. 86 What disappears is nothing less than The Determi- nation of Women for Higher Intellectual Development. Under this title, a certain Amalie Holst demanded in I802 the establishment of girls' schools responsible for turning women into mothers and readers of po- ets. 87 Without the Anna Pomkes there would have been no German Clas- sicism, and none of its principally male authors would have risen to fame.
Consequently, Pomke can only think of the old century when con- fronted with the technological innovations of the new one. As if to prove that the Soul or Woman of Classicism and Romanticism was an effect of automata, she laments the unstored disappearance of Goethe's voice with
? ? 'mrt<'"'''ln-,'? ;'\
,- --'; r
::;? -:Oie 5timme seines Herrn
the very same sigh, "oh" (ach), uttered by the talking robot Olympia in Hoffmann's Sandman, a sigh that, though it is the only word it can speak, suffices to underscore its soul. In Hegel's words, a female sigh, or a "dis- appearance of being in the act of being," loves a male poetic capability, or a "disappearance of being in the act of being. " And as if to prove that the voice is a partial object, Pomke praises Goethe's voice as "a beautiful organ. " Which not coincidentally makes the "psychiatrist" and "psycho- analyst" Professor Pschorr "jealous," for all the power Classical authors had over their female readers rested in the erection of that organ.
Not that middle-class girls were able to hear their master's voice. There were no phonographs "around 1800," and therefore none of the canine obedience for a real that became the trademark of Berliner's gramophone company in 1902. Unlike that of Nipper, the dog that started sniffing at the bell-mouth of the phonograph upon hearing its dead master's voice, and whose vocal-physiological loyalty was captured in oil by the painter Francis Barraud, the brother of the deceased, the loy- alty of female Classic-Romantic readers was restricted to the imaginary- to their so-called imagination. They were forced to hallucinate Goethe's voice between the silent lines of his writing. It was not a coincidence that Friedrich Schlegel wrote to a woman and lover that "one seems to hear what one is merely reading. " In order for Schlegel wholly to become an author himself, women had to become readers and "appreciate the sa- credness ofwords more than in the past. "ss
"To the extent that graphism"-that is, in the shape of alphabetic writing-"is flattened onto the voice" (while in tribal cultures "it was in-
_
Gramophone 69
? ? 1:; :-:. 4. . ,
70 Gramophone
scribed flush with the body" ), "body representation subordinates itself to word representation. " But this "flattening induces a fictitious voice from on high that no longer expresses itself except in the linear flux,"89 be- cause at least since Gutenberg it has announced the decrees of national bureaucracies.
Thus Anna Pomke's loving sigh confirms the theory of media and writing of the Anti-Oedipus.
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.
BbHel had sat down while everybody was cheering. The servants tram- pled with delight, like students in the fiery lectures of that upright and de- monic graybeard, the smashingly revolutionary, lordly Reucken. But Abnos- sah sternly said, "Gentlemen! You are interrupting Goethe! He isn't finished yet! "
Silence resumed and the voice continued: "No, Sir, no and again no! Of course you could have if you had so desired! It is the will, the will of these Newtonians, that is pernicious; and a faulty will is a corruptive faculty, an active inability that I abhor even though I catch sight of it everywhere and should be accustomed to it. You may consider it harmless, but the will is
the true contriver of all things great and small; it is not the divine power but the will, the divine will, that thwarts man and proves his inadequacy. If you were able to desire in a godlike way, dear friend, the ability would be
? ? 66 Gramophone
necessary and not j ust easy to come by, and a lot of what now dare not show its face for fear of meeting hostility or ridicule would become every- day experience.
"Consider young Schopenhauer, a lad of supreme promise, full of the most magnificent desires, but afflicted by the rot of abundance, by his own insatiability. In the theory of colors he was blinded by the sun to the extent that he did not accept the night as another sun but rather deemed it null and void; likewise, he was captivated by the luster of life in its wholeness, in contrast to which human life struck him as worthless. Behold, Sir, that the purest, most divine will is in danger of failure if it is bent on persisting at all cost; if it is not prepared to wisely and gracefully take into account the exte- rior conditions as well as the limitations of its own means! Indeed: the will is indeed a magician! Is there anything it cannot do? But the human will is not a will, it is a bad will. Ha! Haha! Hee! Hee! "
Goethe laughed mysteriously and continued in a whisper:
"Very well then, my dearest friend, I shall entrust, indeed reveal, some- thing to you. You will judge it a fairy tale, but to me it has attained the ut- most clarity. Your own will can vanquish fate; it can make fate its servant provided-and now listen closely-it does not presume that the tremendous and divinely tense creative intent and exertion within should also be clearly manifest without, especially in a most intense display of muscular strain. Behold earth as it is turned and driven! What mundane industry! What ceaseless motion! But mark my words, Eckermann! It is no more than mun- dane diligence, nothing but a fatally mechanical driving-while the vibrat- ing, magical will of the sun rests within itself and by virtue of this supreme self-sufficiency gives rise to the electromagnetism that humbles the whole army of planets, moons, and comets into servile submission at its feet. 0 friend, to understand, to experience and be, in the most serenely spiritual sense of the word, that sublime culprit! -Enough, let us leave it at that. I was accustomed to discipline myself whenever I heard others, and some- times even Schiller, rhapsodize freely, out of love for such a divine activity, in the face of which one should be silent, because all discourse would not only be useless and superfluous but indeed harmful and obstructive by creating a ridiculously profane understanding, if not the most decisive misunderstanding. Remember this, my friend, and keep it in your heart without attempting to unravel the mystery! Trust that in time it will
unravel itself, and this evening go to the theater with Little Wolf, who
is eager to go, and do not treat Kotzebue too harshly even though he disgusts us! "
"Oh, God," Pomke said, while the others eagerly congratulated
Gramophone 67
Abnossah, "oh, God! If only I could listen forever! How much Eckermann withheld from us! "
After a long while a snoring emanated from the machine, then nothing! "Gentlemen! " Abnossah said, "as you can hear, Goethe is obviously asleep. It makes little sense to wait around; there is nothing to expect for a couple of hours, if not for an entire day. Staying around is useless. As you no doubt realize, the apparatus adheres closely to real time. In the most fortunate case we might hear something should Eckermann have returned to Goethe fol- lowing the performance. I, for one, do not have the time to wait around for that to happen. "
"How i s it," the slightly skeptical Bbffel asked, "that, o f all speeches, we were able to listen to this one? "
"Pure chance," Pschorr responded. "The conditions, in particular the makeup of the machine and its positioning, happened to correspond to these and no other sound vibrations. I only took into account the fact that Goethe was sitting and the location of his chair. "
"Oh, please, please! Abnossah! " (pomke, almost maenadic, was as if in a trance; for the first time she called him by his first name. ) "Try it some- where else! I can't hear enough of it-and even if it is only snoring! "
Abnossah put away the machine and locked the suitcase. He had become very pale: "My dear Anna-Madame," he corrected himself,
"-another time. " (Jealousy of the old Goethe was eating him up inside. ) "How about Schiller's skull? " Bbffel asked. "It would decide the dis-
pute over whether it is the real one. "
"Indeed," Abnossah responded, "for ifwe heard Schiller, the Swabian,
say in a broad Hessian accent, 'How about a glass of wine? ' it wouldn't be Schiller's skull. -I am wondering if the invention couldn't be refined. Maybe I could manufacture a generic larynx that could be adjusted like an opera glass in order to be aligned with all kinds of possible vibrations. We could listen to antiquity and the Middle Ages and determine the correct pronunci- ation of old idioms. And respected fellow citizens who say indecent things out loud could be handed over to the police. "
Abnossah offered Pomke his arm and they returned to the station. They cautiously entered the waiting room, but the locally known one had already left. "What if she let me have the larynx of her famous brother? But she won't do it; she'll claim that the people aren't mature enough and that the literati lack the reverence of the people, and that nothing can be done. Beloved! Beloved! For (oh! ) that! That is! That is what you are! "
But Pomke wasn't listening. She appeared to be dreaming. " How he stresses the rs ! " she whispered apprehensively.
? ? ? 68 Gramophone
Abnossah angrily blew his nose; Anna started and asked him distract- edly: "You were saying, dear Pschorr? ! I am neglecting the master for his work! But the world subsides when I hear Goethe's own voice! "
They boarded the coach for their return journey. Pomke said nothing; Abnossah was brooding silently. After they had passed Halle, he threw the little suitcase with Goethe's larynx out of the window in front of an ap- proaching train. "What have you done? " Pomke shrieked.
"Loved," Pschorr sighed, "and soon I will have lived-and destroyed my victorious rival, Goethe's larynx. "
Pomke blushed furiously; laughing, she threw herself vigorously into Abnossah's tightly embracing arms. At that moment the conductor entered and requested the tickets.
"God! Nossah! " murmured Pomke. "You have to get me a new larynx of Goethe, you have to-or else-"
"No or else ! Apres les noces, my dove ! "
Prof D r. A bnossah Pschorr Anna Pschorr, nee Pomke
Just married
Currently at the "Elephant" in Weimar
This wedding announcement is truly a happy ending: it puts an end to Classic-Romantic poetry. In I9I6 even "timid middle-class girls" like Anna Pomke come under the influence of professors like Pschorr, who as one of the " most proficient" engineers of his day obviously teaches at the new technological institutes so vigorously promoted by Emperor Wilhelm II. Marriage to an engineer vanquishes the middle-class girl's infatuation with Goethe, which lyceums had been systematically drilling into them for over a century. 86 What disappears is nothing less than The Determi- nation of Women for Higher Intellectual Development. Under this title, a certain Amalie Holst demanded in I802 the establishment of girls' schools responsible for turning women into mothers and readers of po- ets. 87 Without the Anna Pomkes there would have been no German Clas- sicism, and none of its principally male authors would have risen to fame.
Consequently, Pomke can only think of the old century when con- fronted with the technological innovations of the new one. As if to prove that the Soul or Woman of Classicism and Romanticism was an effect of automata, she laments the unstored disappearance of Goethe's voice with
? ? 'mrt<'"'''ln-,'? ;'\
,- --'; r
::;? -:Oie 5timme seines Herrn
the very same sigh, "oh" (ach), uttered by the talking robot Olympia in Hoffmann's Sandman, a sigh that, though it is the only word it can speak, suffices to underscore its soul. In Hegel's words, a female sigh, or a "dis- appearance of being in the act of being," loves a male poetic capability, or a "disappearance of being in the act of being. " And as if to prove that the voice is a partial object, Pomke praises Goethe's voice as "a beautiful organ. " Which not coincidentally makes the "psychiatrist" and "psycho- analyst" Professor Pschorr "jealous," for all the power Classical authors had over their female readers rested in the erection of that organ.
Not that middle-class girls were able to hear their master's voice. There were no phonographs "around 1800," and therefore none of the canine obedience for a real that became the trademark of Berliner's gramophone company in 1902. Unlike that of Nipper, the dog that started sniffing at the bell-mouth of the phonograph upon hearing its dead master's voice, and whose vocal-physiological loyalty was captured in oil by the painter Francis Barraud, the brother of the deceased, the loy- alty of female Classic-Romantic readers was restricted to the imaginary- to their so-called imagination. They were forced to hallucinate Goethe's voice between the silent lines of his writing. It was not a coincidence that Friedrich Schlegel wrote to a woman and lover that "one seems to hear what one is merely reading. " In order for Schlegel wholly to become an author himself, women had to become readers and "appreciate the sa- credness ofwords more than in the past. "ss
"To the extent that graphism"-that is, in the shape of alphabetic writing-"is flattened onto the voice" (while in tribal cultures "it was in-
_
Gramophone 69
? ? 1:; :-:. 4. . ,
70 Gramophone
scribed flush with the body" ), "body representation subordinates itself to word representation. " But this "flattening induces a fictitious voice from on high that no longer expresses itself except in the linear flux,"89 be- cause at least since Gutenberg it has announced the decrees of national bureaucracies.
Thus Anna Pomke's loving sigh confirms the theory of media and writing of the Anti-Oedipus.
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.
