No More Learning

As long as it was moving along, history was indeed Foucault's "wave- like succession of words. "6 More simply, but no less technically than to- morrow's fiber optic cables, writing functioned as a universal medium-
6 Introduction
? Telephone lines, New York, 1888.
i n times when there was no concept o f medium. Whatever else was going on dropped through the filter of letters or ideograms.
"Literature," Goethe wrote, "is a fragment of fragments; only the smallest proportion of what took place and what was said was written down, while only the smallest proportion of what was written down has survived. " 7
Accordingly, oral history today confronts the historians' writing mo- nopoly; accordingly, a media theoretician like the Jesuit priest Walter J. Ong, who must have been concerned with the spirit of the Pentecostal mystery, could celebrate a primary orality of tribal cultures as opposed to the secondary orality of our media acoustics. Such research remained un- thinkable as long as the opposite of "history" was simply termed (again
? Introduction 7
following Goethe) "legend. "s Prehistory was subsumed by its mythical name; Goethe's definition of literature did not even have to mention opti- cal or acoustic data flows. And even legends, those oralized segments of bygone events, only survived in written format; that is, under pretechno- logical but literary conditions. However, since it has become possible to record the epics of the last Homeric bards, who until recently were wan- dering through Serbia and Croatia, oral mnemotechnics or cultures have become reconstructible in a completely different way. 9 Even Homer's rosy-fingered Eos changes from a Goddess into a piece of chromium diox- ide that was stored in the memory of the bard and could be combined with other pieces into whole epics. "Primary orality" and "oral history" came into existence only after the end of the writing monopoly, as the technological shadows of the apparatuses that document them.
Writing, however, stored writing-no more and no less. The holy books attest to this. Exodus, chapter 20, contains a copy of what Yahweh's own finger originally had written on two stone tablets: the law. But of the thunder and lightning, of the thick cloud and the mighty trumpet which, according to scripture, surrounded this first act of writing on Mount Sinai, that same Bible could store nothing but mere words. lo
Even less is handed down of the nightmares and temptations that af- flicted a nomad called Mohammed following his flight to the holy moun- tain of Hira. The Koran does not begin until the one God takes the place of the many demons. The archangel Gabriel descends from the seventh heaven with a roll of scripture and the command to decipher the scroll. "Rejoice in the name of the Lord who created-created man from clots of blood. Recite! Your Lord is the Most Bountiful One, who by pen taught man what he did not know. "ll
Mohammed, however, answers that he, the nomad, can't read; not even the divine message about the origin of reading and writing. The archangel has to repeat his command before an illiterate can turn into the founder of a book-based religion. For soon, or all too soon, the illegible scroll makes sense and presents to Mohammed's miraculously alphabet- ized eyes the very same text that Gabriel had already uttered twice as an oral command. Mohammed's illuminations began, according to tradition, with this 96th sura-in order then to be "memorized by the faithful and written down on primitive surfaces such as palm leaves, stones, wood, bones, and pieces of leather, and to be recited, again and again, by Mo- hammed and select believers, especially during Ramadan. " 12
? ? Writing therefore merely stores the fact of its authorization. It cele-
8 Introduction
brates the storage monopoly of the God who invented it. And since the realm of this God consists of signs that only nonreaders can't make sense of, all books are books of the dead, like the Egyptian ones with which lit- erature began. 13 The book itself coincides with the realm of the dead be- yond all senses into which it lures us. When the Stoic philosopher Zeno asked the oracle at Delphi how he should best lead his life, he was given the answer "that he should mate with the dead. He understood this to mean that he should read the ancients. "14
The story of how the divine instructions to use quills extended be- yond Moses and Mohammed and reached simpler and simpler people is a lengthy one that nobody can write, because it would be history itself. In much the same way, the storage capacities of our computers will soon co- incide with electronic warfare and, gigabyte upon gigabyte, exceed all the processing capacities of historians.
Suffice it to say that one day-in Germany, this may have already been the case during the age of Goethe-the homogenous medium of writing also became homogenous in the social sphere. Compulsory edu- cation engulfed people in paper. They learned a way of writing that, as an "abuse of language" (according to Goethe), no longer had to struggle with cramped muscles and individual letters, but rather proceeded in rap- ture or darkness. They learned to read "silently to one's self," a "sorry substitute for speech " ls that consumed letters without effort by bypassing oral organs. Whatever they emitted and received was writing. And be- cause only that exists which can be posted, bodies themselves fell under the regime of the symbolic. What is unthinkable today was once reality: no film stored the movements they made or saw, no phonograph, the noise they made or heard. For whatever existed failed before time. Sil- houettes or pastel drawings fixed facial expressions, and scores were un- able to store noise. But once a hand took hold of a pen, something mirac- ulous occurred: the body, which did not cease not to write itself, left strangely unavoidable traces.
I'm ashamed to tell of it. I'm ashamed of my handwriting. It exposes me in all my spiritual nakedness. My handwriting shows me more naked than I am with my clothes off. No leg, no breath, no clothes, no sound. Neither voice nor reflec- tion. All cleaned out. Instead, a whole man's being, shriveled and misshapen, like his scribble-scrabble. His lines are all that's left of him, as well as his self- propagation. The uneven tracings of his pencil on paper, so minimal that a blind man's fingertips would hardly detect them, become the measure of the whole fellow. 1 6
Introduction 9
Today, this shame, which overcomes the hero of Botho Strauss's last love story, Dedication, whenever he sees his handwriting, is no more than an anachronism. The fact that the minimal unevenness between stroke and paper can store neither a voice nor an image of a body presupposes in its exclusion the invention of phonography and cinema. Before their inven- tion, however, handwriting alone could guarantee the perfect securing of traces. It wrote and wrote, in an energetic and ideally uninterrupted flow. As Hegel so correctly observed, the alphabetized individual had his "ap- pearance and externality" 17 in this continuous flow of ink or letters.
And what applied to writing also applied to reading. Even if the al- phabetized individual known as the "author" finally had to fall from the private exteriority of handwriting into the anonymous exteriority of print in order to secure "all that's left of him, as well as his self-propagation"- alphabetized individuals known as "readers" were able to reverse this ex- teriorization. "If one reads in the right way," Novalis wrote, "the words will unfold in us a real, visible world. "18 And his friend Schlegel added that "one believes to hear what one merely reads. "19 Perfect alphabetiza- tion was to supplement precisely those optical and acoustic data flows that, under the monopoly of writing, did not cease not to write them- selves. Effort had been removed from writing, and sound from reading, in order to naturalize writing. The letters that educated readers skimmed over provided people with sights and sounds.
Aided by compulsory education and new alphabetization techniques, the book became both film and record around 18oo-not as a media- technological reality, but in the imaginary of readers' souls. As a surro- gate of unstorable data flows, books came to power and glory. 20
In 1 774 an editor by the name of Goethe committed handwritten let- ters or Sorrows of Young Werther to print. The "nameless throng" (to quote the dedication of Faust), too, was to hear an "early song" that, like "some old half-faded song," revived "old griefs" and "old friends. "21 This was the new literary recipe for success: to surreptitiously turn the voice or handwriting of a soul into Gutenbergiana. In the last letter he wrote and sealed but did not send off before committing suicide, Werther gave his beloved the very promise of poetry: during her lifetime she would have to remain with Albert, her unloved husband, but afterwards she would be united with her lover "in the sight of the Infinite One in eternal embraces. "22 Indeed: the addressee of handwritten love letters, which were then published by a mere editor, was to be rewarded with an im- mortality in the shape of the novel itself. It alone was able to create the
? ? 1 0 Introduction
"beautiful realm"23 in which the lovers of Goethe's Elective Affinities, ac- cording to the hope of their narrator, "will waken together once more. "24 Strangely enough, Eduard and Ottilie had one and the same handwriting during their lifetime. Their death elevated them to a paradise that under the storage monopoly of writing was called poetry.
And maybe that paradise was more real than our media-controlled senses can imagine. Reading intently, Werther's suicidal readers may well have perceived their hero in a real, visible world. And the lovers among Goethe's female readers, like Bettina Brentano, may well have died with the heroine of his Elective Affinities only to be "reborn in a more beauti- ful youth" through Goethe's "genius. "2s Maybe the perfectly alphabetized readers of 1800 were a living answer to the question with which Chris Marker concludes his film essay Sans Soleil:
Lost at the end of the world on my island, Sal, in the company of my dogs strut- ting around, I remember that January in Tokyo, or rather I remember the images I filmed in Tokyo in January. They have now put themselves in place of my mem- ory, they are my memory. I wonder how people who do not film, take photos, or record tapes remember, how humankind used to go about remembering. 26
It is the same with language, which only leaves us the choice of either retaining words while losing their meaning or, vice versa, retaining mean- ing while losing the wordsY Once storage media can accommodate opti- cal and acoustic data, human memory capacity is bound to dwindle. Its "liberation"28 is its end. As long as the book was responsible for all serial data flows, words quivered with sensuality and memory. It was the passion of all reading to hallucinate meaning between lines and letters: the visible_ and audible world of Romantic poetics. And the passion of all writing was (in the words of E. T. A. Hoffmann) the poet's desire to "describe" the hal- lucinated "picture in one's mind with all its vivid colors, the light and the shade," in order to "strike [the] gentle reader like an electric shock. "29
Electricity itself put an end to this. Once memories and dreams, the dead and ghosts, become technically reproducible, readers and writers no longer need the powers of hallucination. Our realm of the dead has with- drawn from the books in which it resided for so long. As Diodor of Sicily once wrote, "it is no longer only through writing that the dead remain in the memory of the living. "
The writer Balzac was already overcome by fear when faced with photography, as he confessed to Nadar, the great pioneer of photography. If (according to Balzac) the human body consists of many infinitely thin
? ? Spirit photography, 1904.
layers of "specters," and if the human spirit cannot be created from noth- ingness, then the daguerreotype must be a sinister trick: it fixes, that is, steals, one layer after the other, until nothing remains of the specters and the photographed body. 30 Photo albums establish a realm of the dead in- finitely more precise than Balzac's competing literary enterprise, the Co- medie humaine, could ever hope to create. In contrast to the arts, media do not have to make do with the grid of the symbolic. That is to say, they reconstruct bodies not only in a system of words or colors or sound in- tervals. Media and media only fulfill the "high standards" that (accord- ing to Rudolf Arnheim) we expect from " reproductions" since the inven- tion of photography: "They are not only supposed to resemble the object,
Introduction I I
? r 2 Introduction
but rather guarantee this resemblance by being, as it were, a product of the object in question, that is, by being mechanically produced by it-just as the illuminated objects of reality imprint their image on the photo- graphic layer,"31 or the frequency curves of noises inscribe their wavelike shapes onto the phonographic plate.
A reproduction authenticated by the object itself is one of physical precision. It refers to the bodily real, which of necessity escapes all sym- bolic grids. Media always already provide the appearances of specters. For, according to Lacan, even the word "corpse" is a euphemism in ref- erence to the real. 32
Accordingly, the invention of the Morse alphabet in r837 was promptly followed by the tapping specters of spiritistic seances sending their messages from the realm of the dead. Promptly as well, photo- graphic plates-even and especially those taken with the camera shutter closed-furnished reproductions of ghosts or specters, whose black-and- white fuzziness only served to underscore the promise of resemblance. Fi- nally, one of the ten applications Edison envisioned for his newly invented phonograph in the North American Review (r878) was to record "the last words of dying persons. "
It was only a small step from such a "family record,"33 with its spe- cial consideration of revenants, to fantasies that had telephone cables linking the living and the dead. What Leopold Bloom in Ulysses could only wish for in his Dublin graveyard meditations had already been turned into science fiction by Walter Rathenau, the AEG chairman of the board and futurist writer. 34 In Rathenau's story "Resurrection Co. ," the cemetery administration of Necropolis, Dacota/USA, following a series of scandalous premature burials in r 898, founds a daughter company en- titled "Dacota and Central Resurrection Telephone Bell Co. " with a cap-- ital stock of $750,000. Its sole purpose is to make certain that the inhab- itants of graves, too, are connected to the public telephone network. Whereupon the dead avail themselves of the opportunity to prove, long before McLuhan, that the content of one medium is always another me- dium-in this concrete case, a deformation professionelle. 35
These days, paranormal voices on tape or radio, the likes of which have been spiritistically researched since r959 and preserved in rock mu- sic since Laurie Anderson's r982 release Big Science,36 inform their re- searchers of their preferred radio wavelength. This already occurred in r898, in the case of Senate President Schreber: when a paranormal, beautifully autonomous "base or nerve language" revealed its code as well as its channels,37 message and channel became one. "You just have to
Introduction 1 3
choose a middle-, short-, or long-wave talk-show station, or the 'white noise' between two stations, or the 'Jurgenson wave,' which, depending on where you are, is located around 1450 to 1600 kHz between Vienna and Moscow. "38 If you replay a tape that has been recorded off the radio, you will hear all kinds of ghost voices that do not originate from any known radio station, but that, like all official newscasters, indulge in ra- dio self-advertisement. Indeed, the location and existence of that "Jiir- genson wave" was pinpointed by none other than "Friedrich Jurgenson, the Nestor of vocal research. "39
The realm of the dead is as extensive as the storage and transmission capabilities of a given culture. As Klaus Theweleit noted, media are al- ways flight apparatuses into the great beyond. If gravestones stood as symbols at the beginning of culture itself, our media technology can re- trieve all gods. The old written laments about ephemerality, which mea- sured no more than distance between writing and sensuality, suddenly fall silent. In our mediascape, immortals have come to exist again.
War on the Mind is the title of an account of the psychological strate- gies hatched by the Pentagon. It reports that the staffs planning the elec- tronic war, which merely continues the Battle of the Atlantic,40 have already compiled a list of the propitious and unpropitious days in other cultures. This list enables the u. s. Air Force "to time [its] bombing cam- paigns to coincide with unpropitious days, thus 'confirming' the forecasts of local gods. " As well, the voices of these gods have been recorded on tape to be broadcast from helicopters "to keep tribes in their villages. " And finally, the Pentagon has developed special film projectors capable of projecting those gods onto low-hanging clouds. 41 A technologically im- plemented beyond . . .
Of course the Pentagon does not keep a handwritten list of good and bad days. Office technology keeps up with media technology. Cinema and the phonograph, Edison's two great achievements that ushered in the present, are complemented by the typewriter. Since 1865 (according to European accounts) or 1868 (according to American ones), writing has no longer been the ink or pencil trace of a body whose optical and acoustic signals were irretrievably lost, only to reappear (in readers' minds) in the surro- gate sensuality of handwriting. In order to store series of sights and sounds, Old Europe's only storage technology first had to be mechanized. Hans Magnus Malling Hansen in Copenhagen and Christopher Latham Sholes in Milwaukee developed mass-producible typewriters. Edison com- mented positively on the invention's potential when Sholes visited him in
? ? 14 Introduction
Newark to demonstrate his newly patented model and to invite the man who had invented invention to enter a joint venture. 42
But Edison declined the offer-as if, already in r868, the phono- graph and kinetoscope preoccupied their future inventor. Instead, the of- fer was grabbed by an arms manufacturer suffering from dwindling rev- enues in the post-Civil War slump. Remington, not Edison, took over Sholes's discourse machine gun.
Thus, there was no Marvelous One from whose brow sprang all three media technologies of the modern age. On the contrary, the beginning of our age was marked by separation or differentiation. 43 On the one hand, we have two technological media that, for the first time, fix unwritable data flows; on the other, an "'intermediate' thing between a tool and a machine," as Heidegger wrote so precisely about the typewriter. 44 On the one hand, we have the entertainment industry with its new sensualities; on the other, a writing that already separates paper and body during tex- tual production, not first during reproduction (as Gutenberg's movable types had done). From the beginning, the letters and their arrangement were standardized in the shapes of type and keyboard, while media were engulfed by the noise of the real-the fuzziness of cinematic pictures, the hissing of tape recordings.
In standardized texts, paper and body, writing and soul fall apart. Typewriters do not store individuals; their letters do not communicate a beyond that perfectly alphabetized readers can subsequently hallucinate as meaning. Everything that has been taken over by technological media since Edison's inventions disappears from typescripts. The dream of a real visible or audible world arising from words has come to an end. The his- torical synchronicity of cinema, phonography, and typewriting separated optical, acoustic, and written data flows, thereby rendering them au- tonomous. That electric or electronic media can recombine them does not change the fact of their differentiation.
In r 8 60, five years before MaIling Hansen's mechanical writing ball (the first mass-produced typewriter), Gottfried Keller's "Misused Love Letters" still proclaimed the illusion of poetry itself: love is left with the impossible alternatives of speaking either with "black ink" or with "red blood. "45 But once typing, filming, and recording became equally valid options, writing lost such surrogate sensualities. Around 1880 poetry turned into literature. Standardized letters were no longer to transmit Keller's red blood or Hoffmann's inner forms, but rather a new and ele- gant tautology of technicians. According to Mallarme's instant insight, lit- erature is made up of no more and no less than twenty-six letters. 46
? Lacan's "methodological distinction"47 among the real, the imagi- nary, and the symbolic is the theory (or merely a historical effect) of that differentiation. The symbolic now encompasses linguistic signs in their materiality and technicity. That is to say, letters and ciphers form a finite set without taking into account philosophical dreams of infinity. What counts are differences, or, in the language of the typewriter, the spaces be- tween the elements of a system. For that reason, Lacan designates "the world of the symbolic [as1 the world of the machine. "48
The imaginary, however, comes about as the mirror image of a body that appears to be, in terms of motor control, more perfect than the in- fant's own body, for in the real everything begins with coldness, dizziness, and shortness of breathY Thus, the imaginary implements precisely those optical illusions that were being researched in the early days of cinema. A dismembered or (in the case of film) cut-up body is faced with the illu- sionary continuity of movements in the mirror or on screen. It is no coin- cidence that Lacan recorded infants' jubilant reactions to their mirror im- ages in the form of documentary footage.
Finally, of the real nothing more can be brought to light than what Lacan presupposed-that is, nothing. It forms the waste or residue that
Introduction 1 5
? r 6 Introduction
neither the mirror of the imaginary nor the grid of the symbolic can catch: the physiological accidents and stochastic disorder of bodies.
The methodological distinctions of modern psychoanalysis clearly co- incide with the distinctions of media technology. Every theory has its his- torical a priori. And structuralist theory simply spells out what, since the turn of the century, has been coming over the information channels.
Only the typewriter provides writing as a selection from the finite and arranged stock of its keyboard. It literally embodies what Lacan illustrated using the antiquated letter box. In contrast to the flow of handwriting, we now have discrete elements separated by spaces. Thus, the symbolic has the status of block letters. Film was the first to store those mobile doubles that humans, unlike other primates, were able to (mis)perceive as their own body. Thus, the imaginary has the status of cinema. And only the phonograph can record all the noise produced by the larynx prior to any semiotic order and linguistic meaning. To experi- ence pleasure, Freud's patients no longer have to desire what philosophers consider good. Rather, they are free to babble. 50 Thus, the real-espe- cially in the talking cure known as psychoanalysis-has the status of phonography.
Once the technological differentiation of optics, acoustics, and writ- ing exploded Gutenberg's writing monopoly around r 8 80, the fabrication of so-called Man became possible. His essence escapes into apparatuses.
Machines take over functions of the central nervous system, and no longer, as in times past, merely those of muscles. And with this differenti- ation-and not with steam engines and railroads-a clear division occurs between matter and information, the real and the symbolic. When it comes to inventing phonography and cinema, the age-old dreams of hu- mankind are no longer sufficient. The physiology of eyes, ears, and brains have to become objects of scientific research. For mechanized writing to be optimized, one can no longer dream of writing as the expression of in- dividuals or the trace of bodies. The very forms, differences, and fre- quencies of its letters have to be reduced to formulas. So-called Man is split up into physiology and information technology.
When Hegel summed up the perfect alphabetism of his age, he called it Spirit. The readability of all history and all discourses turned humans or philosophers into God. The media revolution of r880, however, laid the groundwork for theories and practices that no longer mistake infor- mation for spirit. Thought is replaced by a Boolean algebra, and con- sciousness by the unconscious, which (at least since Lacan's reading) makes of Poe's "Purloined Letter" a Markoff chain. 51 And that the sym-
Introduction 1 7
bolic is called the world of the machine undermines Man's delusion of possessing a "quality" called "consciousness," which identifies him as something other and better than a "calculating machine. " For both peo- ple and computers are "subject to the appeal of the signifier"; that is, they are both run by programs. "Are these humans," Nietzsche already asked himselfin1874,eightyearsbeforebuyingatypewriter, "orperhapsonly thinking, writing, and speaking machines? "52
In 1950 Alan Turing, the practitioner among England's mathematicians, gave the answer to Nietzsche's question. He observed, with formal ele- gance, that there is no question to begin with. To clarify the issue, Tur- ing's essay "Computing Machinery and Intelligence"-appearing in, of all places, the philosophical periodical Mind-proposed an experiment, the so-called Turing game: A computer A and human B exchange data via some kind of telewriter interface. The exchange of texts is monitored by a censor C, who also only receives written information. A and B both pre- tend to be human, and C has to decide which of the two is simulating and which merely is Nietzsche's thinking, writing, and speaking machine. But the game remains open-ended, because each time the machine gives itself away-be it by making a mistake or, more likely, by not making any-it will refine its program by learning. 53 In the Turing game, Man coincides with his simulation.
And this is, obviously, already so because the censor C receives plot- ter printouts and typescripts rather than handwritten texts. Of course, computer programs could simulate the "individuality" of the human hand, with its routines and mistakes, but Turing, as the inventor of the universal discrete machine, was a typist. Though he wasn't much better or skilled at it than his tomcat Timothy, who was allowed to jump across the keyboard in Turing's chaotic secret service office,54 it was at least somewhat less catastrophic than his handwriting. The teachers at the honorable Sherborne School could hardly "forgive" their pupil's chaotic lifestyle and messy writing. He got lousy grades for brilliant exams in mathematics only because his handwriting was "the worst . . . ever seen. "55 Faithfully, schools cling to their old duty of fabricating individu- als (in the literal sense of the word) by drilling them in a beautiful, con- tinuous, and individual handwriting. Turing, a master in subverting all education, however, dodged the system; he made plans for an "exceed- ingly crude" typewriter. 56
Nothing came of these plans. But when, on the meadows of Grant- chester, the meadows of all English poetry from the Romantics to Pink
? 1 8 Introduction
Floyd, he hit upon the idea of the universal discrete machine, his early dreams were realized and transformed. Sholes's typewriter, reduced to its fundamental principle, has supported us to this day. Turing merely got rid of the people and typists that Remington & Son needed for reading and writing.
And this is possible because a Turing machine is even more exceed- ingly crude than the Sherborne plan for a typewriter. All it works with is a paper strip that is both its program and its data material, its input and its output. Turing slimmed down the common typewriter page to this lit- tle strip. But there are even more economizations: his machine doesn't need the many redundant letters, ciphers, and signs of a typewriter key- board; it can do with one sign and its absence, I and o. This binary in- formation can be read or (in Turing's technospeak) scanned by the ma- chine. It can then move the paper strip one space to the right, one to the left, or not at all, moving in a jerky (i. e. , discrete) fashion like a type- writer, which in contrast to handwriting has block caps, a back spacer, and a space bar. (From a letter to Turing: "Pardon the use of the type- writer: I have come to prefer discrete machines to continuous ones. ")57 The mathematical model of 193 6 is no longer a hermaphrodite of a ma- chine and a mere tool. As a feedback system it beats all the Remingtons, because each step is controlled by scanning the paper strip for the sign or its absence, which amounts to a kind of writing: it depends on this reading whether the machine keeps the sign or erases it, or, vice versa, whether it keeps a space blank or replaces it with a sign, and so on and so forth.
That's all. But no computer that has been built or ever will be built can do more. Even the most advanced Von Neumann machines (with pro- gram storage and computing units), though they operate much faster, are in principle no different from Turing's infinitely slow model. Also, while not all computers have to be Von Neumann machines, all conceivable data processing machines are merely a state n of the universal discrete machine. This was proved mathematically by Alan Turing in 1936, two years before Konrad Zuse in Berlin built the first programmable computer from simple relays. And with that the world of the symbolic really turned into the world of the machine . 58
Unlike the history to which it put an end, the media age proceeds in jerks, just like Turing's paper strip. From the Remington via the Turing machine to microelectronics, from mechanization and automatization to the implementation of a writing that is only cipher, not meaning-one century was enough to transfer the age-old monopoly of writing into the
? Introduction 1 9
omnipotence of integrated circuits. Not unlike Turing's correspondents, everyone is deserting analog machines in favor of discrete ones. The CD digitizes the gramophone, the video camera digitizes the movies. All data streams flow into a state n of Turing's universal machine; Romanticism notwithstanding, numbers and figures become the key to all creatures.
? GRAMOPHONE
"Hullo! " Edison screamed into the telephone mouthpiece. The vibrating diaphragm set in motion a stylus that wrote onto a moving strip of paraf- fin paper. In July 1877, 81 years before Turing's moving paper strip, the recording was still analog. Upon replaying the strip and its vibrations, which in turn set in motion the diaphragm, a barely audible "Hullo! " could be heard. 1
Edison understood. A month later he coined a new term for his tele- phone addition: phonograph. 2 On the basis of this experiment, the me- chanic Kruesi was given"the assignment to build an apparatus that would etch acoustic vibrations onto a rotating cylinder covered with tinfoil. While he or Kruesi was turning the handle, Edison once again screamed " into the mouthpiece-this time the nursery rhyme "Mary Had a Little Lamb. " Then they moved the needle back, let the cylinder run a second time-and the first phonograph replayed the screams. The exhausted ge- nius, in whose phrase genius is I percent inspiration and 99 percent per- spiration, slumped back. Mechanical sound recording had been invented. "Speech has become, as it were, immortal. "3
It was December 6, 1877. Eight months earlier, Charles Cros, a Pari- sian writer, bohemian, inventor, and absinthe drinker, had deposited a sealed envelope with the Academy of Sciences. It contained an essay on the "Procedure for the Recording and Reproduction of Phenomena of Acoustic Perception" (Procede d'enregistrement et de reproduction des phenom? mes pert;us par ! 'ouie). With great technological elegance this text formulated all the principles of the phonograph, but owing to a lack of funds Cros had not yet been able to bring about its "practical realiza- tion. " "To reproduce" the traces of "the sounds and noises" that the "to
21
22 Gramophone
and fro" of an acoustically "vibrating diaphragm" leaves on a rotating disk-that was also the program of Charles Cros. 4
But once he had been preceded by Edison, who was aware of rumors of the invention, things sounded different. "Inscription" is the title of the poem with which Cros erected a belated monument to honor his inven- tions, which included an automatic telephone, color photography, and, above all, the phonograph:
Comme les traits dans les camees J'ai voulu que les voix aimees
Soient un bien qu'on garde a jamais, Et puissent reperer Ie reve
Musical de I'heure trop breve; Le temps veut fuir, je Ie soumets.
Like the faces in cameos
I wanted beloved voices
To be a fortune which one keeps forever, And which can repeat the musical Dream of the too short hour;
Time would flee, I subdue it. 5
The program of the poet Cros, in his capacity as the inventor of the phonograph, was to store beloved voices and all-too-brief musical rever- ies. The wondrously resistant power of writing ensures that the poem has no words for the truth about competing technologies. Certainly, phono- graphs can store articulate voices and musical intervals, but they are ca- pable of more and different things. Cros the poet forgets the noises men- tioned in his precise prose text. An invention that subverts both literature and music (because it reproduces the unimaginable real they are both based on) must have struck even its inventor as something unheard of.
Hence, it was not coincidental that Edison, not Cros, actually built the phonograph. His "Hullo! " was no beloved voice and "Mary Had a Little Lamb" no musical reverie. And he screamed into the bell-mouth not only because phonographs have no amplifiers but also because Edi- son, following a youthful adventure involving some conductor's fists, was half-deaf. A physical impairment was at the beginning of mechanical sound recording-just as the first typewriters had been made by the blind for the blind, and Charles Cros had taught at a school for the deaf and mute. 6
Whereas (according to Derrida) it is characteristic of so-called Man and his consciousness to hear himself speak? and see himself write, media
? The first talking machine, built by Kruesi.
dissolve such feedback loops. They await inventors like Edison whom chance has equipped with a similar dissolution. Handicaps isolate and the- matize sensory data streams. The phonograph does not hear as do ears that have been trained immediately to filter voices, words, and sounds out of noise; it registers acoustic events as such. Articulateness becomes a second- order exception in a spectrum of noise. In the first phonograph letter of postal history, Edison wrote that "the articulation" of his baby "was loud enough, just a bit indistinct . . . not bad for a first experiment. "s
Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk, that monomaniacal anticipation o f mod- ern media technologies,9 had already transgressed the traditional bound- aries of words and music to do justice to the unarticulated. In Tristan, Brangane was allowed to utter a scream whose notation cut straight through the score. 10 Not to mention Parsifal's Kundry, who suffered from a hysterical speech impairment such as those which were soon to occupy the psychoanalyst Freud: she " gives a loud wail of misery, that sinks grad- ually into low accents of fear," "utters a dreadful cry," and is reduced to "hoarse and broken," though nonetheless fully composed, garblingY This labored inception of language has nothing to do with operas and dramas
Gramophone 2 3
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that take it for granted that their figures can speak. Composers of 1 8 80, however, are allied with engineers. The undermining of articulation be- comes the order of the day.
In Wagner's case this applies to both text and music. The Rhinegold prelude, with its infinite swelling of a single chord, dissolves the E-flat major triad in the first horn melody as if it were not a matter of musical harmony but of demonstrating the physical overtone series. All the har- monics of E-flat appear one after the other, as if in a Fourier analysis; only the seventh is missing, because it cannot be played by European instru- ments. 12 Of course, each of the horn sounds is an unavoidable overtone mixture of the kind only the sine tones of contemporary synthesizers can avoid. Nevertheless, Wagner's musico-physiological dream13 at the outset of the tetralogy sounds like a historical transition from intervals to fre- quencies, from a logic to a physics of sound. By the time Schoenberg, in 19 ro, produced the last analysis of harmony in the history of music, chords had turned into pure acoustics: " For Schoenberg as well as for sci- ence, the physical basis in which he is trying to ground all phenomena is the overtone series. "14
Overtones are frequencies, that is, vibrations per second. And the grooves of Edison's phonograph recorded nothing but vibrations. Inter- vals and chords, by contrast, were ratios, that is, fractions made up of in- tegers. The length of a string (especially on a monochord) was subdi- vided, and the fractions, to which Pythagoras gave the proud name logoi, resulted in octaves, fifths, fourths, and so on. Such was the logic upon which was founded everything that, in Old Europe, went by the name of music: first, there was a notation system that enabled the transcription of clear sounds separated from the world's noise; and second, a harmony of the spheres that established that the ratios between planetary orbits (later human souls) equaled those between sounds.
The nineteenth century's concept of frequency breaks with all thisY The measure of length is replaced by time as an independent variable. It is a physical time removed from the meters and rhythms of music. It quantifies movements that are too fast for the human eye, ranging from 20 to 16,000 vibrations per second. The real takes the place of the sym- bolic. Certainly, references can also be established to link musical inter- vals and acoustic frequencies, but they only testify to the distance be- tween two discourses. In frequency curves the simple proportions of Pythagorean music turn into irrational, that is, logarithmic, functions. Conversely, overtone series-which in frequency curves are simply inte-
? ? ? ? Gramophone 2 5
? gral multiples o f vibrations and the determining elements o f each sound-soon explode the diatonic music system. That is the depth of the gulf separating Old European alphabetism from mathematical-physical notation.
Which is why the first frequency notations were developed outside of music. First noise itself had to become an object of scientific research, and discourses "a privileged category of noises. "16 A competition sponsored by the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences in 1 7 8 0 made voiced sounds, and vowels in particular, an object of research,17 and inaugurated not only speech physiology but also all the experiments involving mechanical lan- guage reproduction. Inventors like Kempelen, Maelzel, and Mical built the first automata that, by stimulating and filtering certain frequency bands, could simulate the very sounds that Romanticism was simultane- ously celebrating as the language of the soul: their dolls said "Mama" and "Papa" or "Oh," like Hoffmann's beloved automaton, Olympia. Even Edison's 1878 article on phonography intended such toy mouths voicing
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? the parents' names as Christmas presents. IS Removed from all Romanti- cism, a practical knowledge of vowel frequencies emerged.
Continuing these experiments, Willis made a decisive discovery in 1 8 29 . He connected elastic tongues to a cogwheel whose cogs set them vi- brating. According to the speed of its rotation, high or low sounds were produced that sounded like the different vowels, thus proving their fre- quency. For the first time pitch no longer depended on length, as with string or brass instruments; it became a variable dependent on speed and, therefore, time. Willis had invented the prototype of all square-curve gen- erators, ranging from the bold verse-rhythm experiments of the turn of the century19 to Kontakte, Stockhausen's first electronic composition.
The synthetic production of frequencies is followed by their analysis. Fourier had already provided the mathematical theory, but that theory had yet to be implemented technologically. In 1830, Wilhelm Weber in Gottingen had a tuning fork record its own vibrations. He attached a pig's bristle to one of the tongues, which etched its frequency curves into sooty glass. Such were the humble, or animal, origins of our gramophone needles.
From Weber's writing tuning fork Edouard Leon Scott, who as a Parisian printer was, not coincidentally, an inhabitant of the Gutenberg Galaxy, developed his phonautograph, patented in 1857. A bell-mouth amplified incoming sounds and transmitted them onto a membrane, which in turn used a coarse bristle to transcribe them onto a soot-covered cylinder. Thus came into being autographs or handwritings of a data stream that heretofore had not ceased not to write itself. (Instead, there was handwriting. ) Scott's phonautograph, however, made visible what, up to this point, had only been audible and had been much too fast for ill-
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equipped human eyes: hundreds of vibrations per second. A triumph of the concept of frequency: all the whispered or screamed noises people emitted from their larynxes, with or without dialects, appeared on paper. Phonetics and speech physiology became a reality. 20
They were especially real in the case of Henry Sweet, whose perfect English made him the prototype of all experimental phonetics as well as the hero of a play. Recorded by Professor F. C. Donders of Utrecht,21 Sweet was also dramatized by George Bernard Shaw, who turned him into a modern Pygmalion out to conquer all mouths that, however beau- tiful, were marred by dialect. To record and discipline the dreadful dialect of the flower girl Eliza Doolittle, "Higgins's laboratory" boasts "a phono- graph, a laryngoscope, [and] a row of tiny organ pipes with a bellows. "22 In the world of the modern Pygmalion, mirrors and statues are unneces- sary; sound storage makes it possible "to inspect one's own speech or dis- course as in a mirror, thus enabling us to adopt a critical stance toward our products. "23 To the great delight of Shaw, who saw his medium or his readability technologically guaranteed to all English speakers,24 machines easily solve a problem that literature had not been able to tackle on its own, or had only been able to tackle through the mediation of peda- gogy:2S to drill people in general, and flower girls in particular, to adopt a pronunciation purified by written language.
It comes as no surprise that Eliza Doolittle, all of her love notwith- standing, abandons her Pygmalion (Sweet, a. k. a. Higgins) at the end of the play in order to learn "bookkeeping and typewriting" at "shorthand schools and polytechnic classes. "26 Women who have been subjected to phonographs and typewriters are souls no longer; they can only end up in musicals. Renaming the drama My Fair Lady, Rodgers and Hammerstein will throw Shaw's Pygmalion among Broadway tourists and record labels. "On the Street Where You Live" is sound.
In any event, Edison, ancestor of the record industry, only needed to com- bine, as is so often the case with inventions. A Willis-type machine gave him the idea for the phonograph; a Scott-type machine pushed him to- ward its realization. The synthetic production of frequencies combined with their analysis resulted in the new medium.
Edison's phonograph was a by-product of the attempt to optimize telephony and telegraphy by saving expensive copper cables. First, Menlo Park developed a telegraph that indented a paraffin paper strip with Morse signs, thus allowing them to be replayed faster than they had been
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transmitted by human hands. The effect was exactly the same as in Willis's case: pitch became a variable dependent on speed. Second, Menlo Park developed a telephone receiver with a needle attached to the di- aphragm. By touching the needle, the hearing-impaired Edison could check the amplitude of the telephone signal. Legend has it that one day the needle drew blood-and Edison "recognized how the force of a membrane moved by a magnetic system could be put to work. " "In ef- fect, he had found a way to transfer the functions of his ear to his sense of touch. "27
A telegraph as an artificial mouth, a telephone as an artificial ear- the stage was set for the phonograph. Functions of the central nervous system had been technologically implemented. When, after a 72-hour shift ending early in the morning of July r6, r888, Edison had finally completed a talking machine ready for serial production, he posed for the hastily summoned photographer in the pose of his great idol. The French emperor, after all, is said to have observed that the progress of national welfare (or military technology) can be measured by transportation costs. 28 And no means of transportation are more economical than those which convey information rather than goods and people. Artificial mouths and ears, as technological implementations of the central nervous system, cut down on mailmen and concert halls. What Ong calls our sec- ondary orality has the elegance of brain functions. Technological sound storage provides a first model for data streams, which are simultaneously becoming objects of neurophysiological research. Helmholtz, as the per- fecter of vowel theory, is allied with Edison, the perfecter of measuring in- struments. Which is why sound storage, initially a mechanically primitive affair on the level of Weber's pig bristle, could not be invented until the soul fell prey to science. "0 my head, my head, my head," groans the phonograph in the prose poem Alfred Jarry dedicated to it. "All white un- derneath the silk sky: They have taken my head, my head-and put me into a tea tin! "29
Which is why Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, the symbolist poet and author of the first of many Edison novels, is mistaken when, in Tomorrow's Eve, he has the great inventor ponder his delay.
What is most surprising in history, almost unimaginable, is that among all the great inventors across the centuries, not one thought of the Phonograph!