No More Learning

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-
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? 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! And yet most of them invented machines a thousand times more complicated. The Phonograph is so simple that its construction owes nothing to materials of sci- entific composition. Abraham might have built it, and made a recording of his
? ? calling from on high. A steel stylus, a leaf of silver foil or something like it, a cylinder of copper, and one could fill a storehouse with all the voices of Heaven and Earth. 30
This certainly applies to materials and their processing, but it misses the historical a priori of sound recording. There are also immaterials of scientific origin, which are not so easy to come by and have to be supplied by a science of the soul. They cannot be delivered by any of the post- Abraham candidates whom Villiers de l'Isle-Adam suspects of being able to invent the phonograph: neither Aristotle, Euclid, nor Archimedes could have underwritten the statement that "The soul is a notebook of phono- graphic recordings" (but rather, if at all, a tabula rasa for written signs, which in turn signify acts of the soul). Only when the soul has become the nervous system, and the nervous system (according to Sigmund Exner, the great Viennese neurophysiologist) so many facilitations (Bahnungen), can Delboeuf's statement cease to be scandalous. In 188o, the philosopher Guyau devoted a commentary to it. And this first theory of the phono- graph attests like no other to the interactions between science and tech- nology. Thanks to the invention of the phonograph, the very theories that were its historical a priori can now optimize their analogous models of the brain.
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JEAN-MARIE GUYAU, "MEMORY AND PHONOGRAPH" (I880)
Reasoning by analogy is of considerable importance to science; indeed, in as far as it is the principle of induction it may well form the basis of all physi- cal and psychophysical sciences. Discoveries frequently start with meta- phors. The light of thinking could hardly fall in a new direction and illumi- nate dark corners were it not reflected by spaces already illuminated. Only that which reminds us of something else makes an impression, although and precisely because it differs from it. To understand is to remember, at least in part.
Many similes and metaphors have been used in the attempt to under- stand mental abilities or functions. Here, in the as yet imperfect state of sci- ence, metaphors are absolutely necessary: before we know we have to start by imagining something. Thus, the human brain has been compared to all kinds of objects. According to Spencer it shows a certain analogy to the me- chanical pianos that can reproduce an infinite number of melodies. Taine makes of the brain a kind of print shop that incessantly produces and stores innumerable cliches. Yet all these similes appear somewhat sketchy. One normally deals with the brain at rest; its images are perceived to be fixed, stereotyped; and that is imprecise. There is nothing finished in the brain, no real images; instead, we see only virtual, potential images waiting for a sign to be transformed into actuality. How this transformation into reality is really achieved is a matter of speculation. The greatest mystery of brain mechanics has to do with dynamics-not with statics. We are in need of a comparative term that will allow us to see not only how an object receives and stores an imprint, but also how this imprint at a given time is reacti- vated and produces new vibrations within the object. With this in mind, the most refined instrument (both receiver and motor in one) with which the human brain may be compared is perhaps Edison's recently invented phono- graph. For some time now I have been wanting to draw attention to this comparison, ever since I came across a casual observation in Delboeuf's last article on memory that confirmed my intentions: "The soul is a notebook of phonographic recordings. "
Upon speaking into a phonograph, the vibrations of one's voice are transferred to a point that engraves lines onto a metal plate that correspond to the uttered sounds-uneven furrows, more or less deep, depending on the nature of the sounds. It is quite probable that in analogous ways, invisible
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lines are incessantly carved into the brain cells, which provide a channel for nerve streams. If, after some time, the stream encounters a channel it has al- ready passed through, it will once again proceed along the same path. The cells vibrate in the same way they vibrated the first time; psychologically, these similar vibrations correspond to an emotion or a thought analogous to the forgotten emotion or thought.
This is precisely the phenomenon that occurs when the phonograph's small copper disk, held against the point that runs through the grooves it has etched, starts to reproduce the vibrations: to our ears, these vibrations turn back into a voice, into words, sounds, and melodies.
If the phonographic disk had self-consciousness, it could point out while replaying a song that it remembers this particular song. And what ap- pears to us as the effect of a rather simple mechanism would, quite proba- bly, strike the disk as a miraculous ability: memory.
Let us add that it could distinguish new songs from those already played, as well as new impressions from simple memories. Indeed, a certain effort is necessary for first impressions to etch themselves into metal or brain; they encounter more resistance and, correspondingly, have to exert more force; and when they reappear, they vibrate all the stronger. But when the point traces already existing grooves instead of making new ones, it will do so with greater ease and glide along without applying any pressure. The inclination of a memory or reverie has been spoken of; to pursue a memory, in fact: to smoothly glide down a slope, to wait for a certain number of complete memories, which appear one after the other, all in a row and with- out shock. There is, therefore, a significant difference between impressions in the real sense and memory. Impressions tend to belong to either of two classes: they either possess greater intensity, a unique sharpness of outline and fixity of line, or they are weaker, more blurred and imprecise, but nev- ertheless arranged in a certain order that imposes itself on us. To recognize an image means to assign it to the second class. One feels in a less forceful way and is aware of this emotion. A memory consists in the awareness,
first, of the diminished intensity of an impression, second, of its increased ease, and third, of the connections it entertains with other impressions. Just as a trained eye can see the difference between a copy and the original, we learn to distinguish memories from impressions and are thus able to recog- nize a memory even before it has been located in time and space. We project this or that impression back into the past without knowing which part of the past it belongs to. This is because a memory retains a unique and distin- guishing character, much like a sensation coming from the stomach differs from an acoustic or visual impression. In a similar manner, the phonograph
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is incapable of reproducing the human voice in all its strength and warmth. The voice of the apparatus will remain shrill and cold; it has something im- perfect and abstract about it that sets it apart. If the phonograph could hear itself, it would learn to recognize the difference between the voice that came from the outside and forced itself onto it and the voice that it itself is broad- casting and which is a simple echo of the first, following an already grooved path.
A further analogy between the phonograph and our brain exists in that the speed of the vibrations impressed on the apparatus can noticeably change the character of the reproduced sounds or recalled images. Depend- ing on whether you increase or decrease the rotation of the phonographic disk, a melody will be transposed from one octave to another. If you turn the handle faster, a song will rise from the deepest and most indistinct notes to the highest and most piercing. Does not a similar effect occur in the brain when we focus our attention on an initially blurred image, increasing its clarity step by step and thereby moving it, as it were, up the scale? And could this phenomenon not be explained by the increased or decreased speed and strength of the vibrations of our cells? We have within us a kind of scale of images along which the images we conjure up and dismiss inces- santly rise and fall. At times they vibrate in the depths of our being like a blurred "pedal"; at times their sonic fullness radiates above all others. As they dominate or recede, they appear to be closer or farther away from us, and sometimes the length of time separating them from the present moment seems to be waning or waxing. I know of impressions I received ten years ago that, under the influence of an association of ideas or simply owing to my attention or some change of emotion, suddenly seem to date from yes- terday. In the same way singers create the impression of distance by lower- ing their voice; they merely need to raise it again to suggest the impression of approaching.
These analogies could be multiplied. The principal difference between the brain and the phonograph is that the metal disk of Edison's still rather primitive machine remains deaf to itself; there is no transition from move- ment to consciousness. It is precisely this wondrous transition that keeps oc- curring in the brain. It remains an eternal mystery that is less astonishing than it appears, however. Were the phonograph able to hear itself, it would be far less mystifying in the final analysis than the idea of our hearing it. But indeed we do: its vibrations really turn into impressions and thoughts. We therefore have to concede the transformation of movement into thought that is always possible-a transformation that appears more likely when it is a matter of internal brain movement than when it comes from the out-
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side. From this point of view it would be neither very imprecise nor very disconcerting to define the brain as an infinitely perfected phonograph-a conscious phonograph.
It doesn't get any clearer than that. The psychophysical sciences, to which the philosopher Guyau has absconded, embrace the phonograph as the only suitable model for visualizing the brain or memory. All questions concerning thought as thought have been abandoned, for it is now a mat- ter of implementation and hardware. Thus memory, around 1800 a wholly "subordinate inner power,"31 moves to the fore eighty years later. And because Hegel's spirit is thereby ousted from the start, the recently invented phonograph, not yet even ready for serial production, is superior to all other media. Unlike Gutenberg's printing press or Ehrlich's auto- matic pianos in the brain metaphors of Taine and Spencer, it alone can combine the two actions indispensable to any universal machine, discrete or not: writing and reading, storing and scanning, recording and replay- ing. In principle, even though Edison for practical reasons later separated recording units from replaying ones, it is one and the same stylus that en- graves and later traces the phonographic groove.
Which is why all concepts of trace, up to and including Derrida's grammatological ur-writing, are based on Edison's simple idea. The trace preceding all writing, the trace of pure difference still open between read- ing and writing, is simply a gramophone needle. Paving a way and retrac- ing a path coincide. Guyau understood that the phonograph implements memory and thereby makes it unconscious.
It is only because no philosopher, not even one who has abandoned philosophy for psychophysics, can rid himself of his professional delu- sions that Guyau attempts to crown or surpass the unconscious mne- monic capabilities of the phonograph at the end of his essay by contrast- ing them with conscious human abilities. But consciousness, the quality that Guyau ascribes to the brain in order to celebrate the latter as an infi- nitely perfected phonograph, would result in an infinitely inferior one. Rather than hearing the random acoustic events forcing their way into the bell-mouth in all their real-time entropy, Guyau's conscious phonograph would attempt to understand32 and thus corrupt them. Once again, al- leged identities or meaning or even functions of consciousness would come into play. Phonographs do not think, therefore they are possible.
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? Trademark, "Writing Angel. "
Guyau's own, possibly unconscious example alludes to the imputa- tion of consciousness and inner life: if a phonograph really possessed the consciousness attributed to it and were able to point out that it remem- bered a song, it would consider this a miraculous ability. But impartial and external observers would continue to see it as the result of a fairly simple mechanism. When Guyau, who had observed the brain simply as a technical apparatus, turns his experimental gaze inward, he falls short of his own standards. It was, after all, an external gaze that had suggested the beautiful comparison between attention and playback speed. If the fo- cusing of blurred mental images by way of attention amounts to nothing more or less than changing the time axis of acoustic events by increasing playback speed or indulging in time axis manipulation (TAM), then there is no reason to celebrate attention or memory as miraculous abilities. Nei- ther gramophone needles nor brain neurons need any self-consciousness to retrace a groove faster than it was engraved. In both cases it boils down to programming. For that reason alone the diligent hand of the phonograph user, who in Edison's time had difficulties sticking to the cor- rect time while turning the handle, could be replaced by clockworks and electronic motors with adjustable speed. The sales catalogues of Ameri- can record companies warned their customers of the friend who "comes to you and claims that your machine is too slow or too fast. Don't listen to him! He doesn't know what he is talking about. "33
But standardization is always upper management's escape from tech- nological possibilities. In serious matters such as test procedures or mass
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entertainment, TAM remains triumphant. The Edison Speaking Phono- graph Company, founded two months after Edison's primitive prototype of December 1 877, did its first business with time axis manipulation: with his own hand the inventor turned the handle faster than he had dur- ing the recording in order to treat New York to the sensational pleasure of frequency-modulated musical pieces. Even the modest cornet of a cer- tain Levy acquired brilliance and temperament. 34 Had he been among the delighted New Yorkers, Guyau would have found empirical proof that frequency modulation is indeed the technological correlative of attention.
Of course Europe's written music had already been able to move tones upward or downward, as the term "scale" itself implies. But trans- position doesn't equal TAM. If the phonographic playback speed differs from its recording speed, there is a shift not only in clear sounds but in entire noise spectra. What is manipulated is the real rather than the sym- bolic. Long-term acoustic events such as meter and word length are af- fected as well. This is precisely what von Hornbostel, albeit without rec- ognizing what distinguished it from transposition, praised as the "special advantage" of the phonograph: "It can be played at faster and slower speeds, allowing us to listen to musical pieces whose original speed was too fast at a more settled pace, and accordingly transposed, in order to analyze them. "35
The phonograph is thus incapable of achieving real-time frequency shifts. For this we need rock bands with harmonizers that are able to re- verse-with considerable electronic effort-the inevitable speed changes, at least to deceivable human ears. Only then are people able to return si- multaneously and in real time from their breaking voices, and women can be men and men can be women again.
Time axis reversal, which the phonograph makes possible, allows ears to hear the unheard-of: the steep attack of instrumental sounds or spoken syllables moves to the end, while the much longer decay moves to the front. The Beatles are said to have used this trick on "Revolution 9" to whisper the secret of their global success to the tape freaks among their fans:36 that Paul McCartney had been dead for a long time, replaced on album covers, stage, and in songs by a multimedia double. As the Co- lumbia Phonograph Company recognized in 1 890, the phonograph can be used as machine for composing music simply by allowing consumers to play their favorite songs backwards: "A musician could get one popular melody every day by experimenting in that way. "37
TAM as poetry-but poetry that transgresses its customary bound- aries. The phonograph cannot deny its telegraphic origin. Technological
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media turn magic into a daily routine.
Voices that start to migrate through frequency spectra and time axes do not simply continue old literary word- game techniques such as palindromes or anagrams. This letter-bending had become possible only once the primary code, the alphabet itself, had taken effect. Time axis manipulation, however, affects the raw material of poetry, where manipulation had hitherto been impossible. Hegel had re- ferred to "the sound" as "a disappearing of being in the act of being," subsequently celebrating it as a "saturated expression of the manifesta- tion of inwardness. "38 What was impossible to store could not be manip- ulated. Ridding itself of its materiality or clothes, it disappeared and pre- sented inwardness as a seal of authenticity.
But once storage and manipulation coincide in principle, Guyau's the- sis linking phonography and memory may be insufficient. Storage facili- ties, which according to his own insight are capable of altering the char- acter of the replayed sounds (thanks to time manipulation), shatter the very concept of memory. Reproduction is demoted once the past in all its sensuous detail is transmitted by technical devices. Certainly, hi-fi means "high fidelity" and is supposed to convince consumers that record com- panies remain loyal to musical deities. But it is a term of appeasement. More precise than the poetic imagination of 1 8 00, whose alphabetism or creativity confronted an exclusively reproductive memory, technology lit- erally makes the unheard-of possible. An old Pink Floyd song spells it out:
When that old fat sun in the sky's falling Summer ev'ning birds are calling Summer Sunday and a year
The sound of music in my ear
Distant bells
New mown grass smells
Songs sweet
By the river holding hands.
And if you see, don't make a sound Pick your feet up off the ground
And if you hear as the wall night falls The silver sound of a tongue so strange, Sing to me sing to me. 39
The literally unheard-of is the site where information technology and brain physiology coincide. To make no sound, to pick your feet up off the ground, and to listen to the sound of a voice when night is falling-we all do it when we put on a record that commands such magic.
? And what transpires then is indeed a strange and unheard-of silver
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noise. Nobody knows who is singing-the voice called David Gilmour that sings the song, the voice referred to by the song, or maybe the voice of the listener who makes no sound and is nonetheless supposed to sing once all the conditions of magic have been met. An unimaginable close- ness of sound technology and self-awareness, a simulacrum of a feedback loop relaying sender and receiver. A song sings to a listening ear, telling it to sing. As if the music were originating in the brain itself, rather than em- anating from stereo speakers or headphones.
That is the whole difference between arts and media. Songs, arias, and operas do not rely on neurophysiology. Voices hardly implode in our ears, not even under the technical conditions of a concert hall, when singers are visible and therefore discernible. For that reason their voices have been trained to overcome distances and spaces. The "sound of mu- sic in my ear" can exist only once mouthpieces and microphones are ca- pable of recording any whisper. As if there were no distance between the recorded voice and listening ears, as if voices traveled along the transmit- ting bones of acoustic self-perception directly from the mouth into the ear's labyrinth, hallucinations become real.
And even the distant bells that the song listens to are not merely sig- nifiers or referents of speech. As a form of literature, lyric had been able to provide as much and no more. Countless verses used words to conjure up acoustic events as lyrical as they were indescribable. As rock songs, lyric poetry can add the bells themselves in order to fill attentive brains with something that, as long as it had been confined to words, had re- mained a mere promise.
In 1 89 8 , the Columbia Phonograph Company Orchestra offered the song "Down on the Swanee River" as one of its 80 cylinders. Advertise- ments promised Negro songs and dances, as well as the song's location and subject: pulling in the gangplank, the sounds of the steam engine, and, 80 years before Pink Floyd, the chiming of a steamboat be1l4? -all for 50 cents. Songs became part of their acoustic environment. And lyrics fulfilled what psychoanalysis-originating not coincidentally at the same time-saw as the essence of desire: hallucinatory wish fulfillment.
Freud's "Project for a Scientific Psychology" ( 1 89 5 ) saw the state of "be- ing hallucinated in a backward flow of Q to <\l and also to (0. "41 In other words: impermeable brain neurons occupied by memory traces rid them- selves of their charge or quantity by transferring them onto permeable neurons designed for sensory perception. As a result, data already stored appear as fresh input, and the psychic apparatus becomes its own simu-
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lacrum. Backflow or feedback comes as close to perfect hallucinatory wish fulfillment as Freud's "Project for a Scientific Psychology" does to technological media. "The intention is to furnish a psychology that shall be a natural science: that is, to represent psychical processes as quantita- tively determinate states of specifiable material particles, thus making those processes perspicuous and free from contradiction. "42 That is psy- chophysics at its best. All of Freud's elaborations on neurons and their cathexes and on facilitations and their resistance are based on the "views on localization held by [the] cerebral anatomy"43 of his time. That the psychic apparatus (already technified by its name) can transmit and store data while remaining both permeable and impermeable would remain an insoluble paradox were its analogy modeled upon writing. (At best, Freud's famous "Mystic Writing-Pad," commented upon by Derrida,44 might be able to carry out both functions. ) A brain physiology that fol- lowed Broca and Wernicke's subdivision of discourse into numerous sub- routines and located speaking, hearing, writing, and reading in various parts of the brain (because it exclusively focused on the states of specifi- able material particles) had to model itself on the phonograph-an insight anticipated by Guyau. It comes as no surprise, then, that Sigmund Exner, whose research formed the basis for Freud's notion of facilitation in "Sci- entific Project," also "provided the basis for the construction of a scien-
tific phonographic museum" at the University of Vienna. 45
"When it comes to molecules and cranial pathways, we"-that is, the brain researchers and art physiologists of the turn of the century-" auto- matically think of a process similar to that of Edison's phonograph. "46 These are the words of Georg Hirth, author of the first German treatise on art physiology. Twenty years later, they were written into art itself. In I9I9, Rilke completed a prose "essay" that, using the modest means of bricolage or literature, translated all the discoveries of brain physiology
into modern poetry.
RAINER MARIA RILKE, "PRIMAL SOUND" (1919)
It must have been when I was a boy at school that the phonograph was in- vented. At any rate it was at that time a chief object of public wonder; this was probably the reason why our science master, a man given to busying himself with all kinds of handiwork, encouraged us to try our skill in mak-
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ing one o f these instruments from the material that lay nearest to hand. Nothing more was needed than a piece of pliable cardboard bent to the shape of a funnel, on the narrower orifice of which was stuck a piece of impermeable paper of the kind used to bottle fruit. This provided a vibrat- ing membrane, in the middle of which we stuck a bristle from a coarse clothes brush at right angles to its surface. With these few things one part of the mysterious machine was made, receiver and reproducer were com- plete. It now only remained to construct the receiving cylinder, which could be moved close to the needle marking the sounds by means of a small rotat- ing handle. I do not remember what we made it of; there was some kind
of cylinder which we covered with a thin coating of candle wax to the
best of our ability. Our impatience, brought to a pitch by the excitement of sticking and fitting the parts as we jostled one another over it, was such that the wax had scarcely cooled and hardened before we put our work to the test.
How now this was done can easily be imagined. When someone spoke or sang into the funnel, the needle in the parchment transferred the sound waves to the receptive surface of the roll slowly turning beneath it, and then, when the moving needle was made to retrace its path (which had been fixed in the meantime with a coat of varnish), the sound which had been ours came back to us tremblingly, haltingly from the paper funnel, uncer- tain, infinitely soft and hesitating and fading out altogether in places. Each time the effect was complete. Our class was not exactly one of the quietest, and there can have been few moments in its history when it had been able as a body to achieve such a degree of silence. The phenomenon, on every reception of it, remained astonishing, indeed positively staggering. We were confronting, as it were, a new and infinitely delicate point in the texture of reality, from which something far greater than ourselves, yet indescribably immature, seemed to be appealing to us as if seeking help. At the time and all through the intervening years I believed that that independent sound, taken from us and preserved outside of us, would be unforgettable. That
it turned out otherwise is the cause of my writing the present account. As will be seen, what impressed itself on my memory most deeply was not the sound from the funnel but the markings traced on the cylinder; these made a most definite impression.
I first became aware of this some fourteen or fifteen years after my school days were past. It was during my first stay in Paris. At that time I was attending the anatomy lectures in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts with consid- erable enthusiasm. It was not so much the manifold interlacing of the mus-
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cles and sinews nor the complete inner agreement of the inner organs with another that appealed to me, but rather the bare skeleton, the restrained en- ergy and elasticity of which I had already noticed when studying the draw-
ings of Leonardo. However much I puzzled over the structure of the whole, it was more than I could deal with; my attention always reverted to the study of the skull, which seemed to me to constitute the utmost achieve- ment, as it were, of which this chalky element was capable; it was as if it had been persuaded to make just in this part a special effort to render a de- cisive service by providing a most solid protection for the most daring fea- ture of all, for something which, though itself narrowly confined, had a field of activity which was boundless. The fascination which this particular struc- ture had for me reached such a pitch finally, that I procured a skull in order to spend many hours of the night with it; and, as always happens with me and things, it was not only the moments of deliberate attention which made this ambiguous object really mine: l owe my familiarity with it, beyond doubt, in part to that passing glance with which we involuntarily examine and perceive our daily environment, when there exists any relationship at all between it and us. It was a passing glance of this kind which I suddenly checked in its course, making it exact and attentive. By candlelight-which is often so peculiarly alive and challenging-the coronal suture had become strikingly visible, and I knew at once what it reminded me of: one of those unforgotten grooves, which had been scratched in a little wax cylinder by the point of a bristle!
And now I do not know: is it due to a rhythmic peculiarity of my imag- ination that ever since, often after the lapse of years, I repeatedly feel the impulse to make that spontaneously perceived similarity the starting point for a whole series of unheard-of experiments? I frankly confess that I have always treated this desire, whenever it made itself felt, with the most unre- lenting mistrust-if proof be needed, let it be found in the fact that only now, after more than a decade and a half, have I resolved to make a cau- tious statement concerning it. Furthermore, there is nothing I can cite in favor of my idea beyond its obstinate recurrence, a recurrence which has taken me by surprise in all sorts of places, divorced from any connection with what I might be doing.
What is it that repeatedly presents itself to my mind ? It is this:
The coronal suture of the skull (this would first have to be investigated)
has-let us assume-a certain similarity to the close wavy line which the needle of a phonograph engraves on the receiving, rotating cylinder of the apparatus. What if one changed the needle and directed it on its return jour- ney along a tracing which was not derived from the graphic translation of
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sound but existed of itself naturally-well, to put it plainly, along the coro- nal suture, for example. What would happen? A sound would necessarily result, a series of sounds, music. . . .
Feelings-which? Incredulity, timidity, fear, awe-which of all feelings here possible prevents me from suggesting a name for the primal sound which would then make its appearance in the world? . . .
Leaving that aside for the moment: what variety of lines, then, occur- ring anywhere, could one not put under the needle and try out? Is there any contour that one could not, in a sense, complete in this way and then expe- rience it, as it makes itself felt, thus transformed, in another field of sense?
At one period, when I began to interest myself in Arabic poems, which seem to owe their existence to the simultaneous and equal contributions from all five senses, it struck me for the first time that the modern European poet makes use of these five contributors singly and in very varying degree, only one of them-sight overladen with the world-seeming to dominate him constantly; how slight, by contrast, is the contribution he receives from inattentive hearing, not to speak of the indifference of other senses, which are active only on the periphery of consciousness and with many interrup- tions within the limited sphere of their practical activity. And yet the perfect poem can only materialize on condition that this world, acted upon by all five levers simultaneously, is seen, under a definite aspect, on the supernat- ural plane, which is, in fact, the plane of the poem.
A lady, to whom this was mentioned in conversation, exclaimed that this wonderful and simultaneous capacity and achievement of all the senses was surely nothing but the presence of mind and grace of love-incidentally she thereby bore her own witness to the sublime reality of the poem. But the lover is in such splendid danger just because he must depend on the co- ordination of his senses, for he knows that they must meet in that unique and risky center in which, renouncing all extension, they come together and have no permanence.
As I write this, I have before me the diagram which I have always used as a ready help whenever ideas of this kind have demanded attention. If the world's whole field of experience, including those spheres which are beyond our knowledge, be represented in a complete circle, it will be immediately evident that when the black sectors, denoting that which we are incapable of experiencing, are measured against the lesser, light sections, correspond to that which is illuminated by the senses, the former are very much greater.
Now the position of the lover is this: that he feels himself unexpectedly placed in the center of the circle, that is to say, at the point where the
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known and the incomprehensible, coming forcibly together at one single point, become complete and simply a possession, losing thereby, it is true, all individual character. This position would not serve for the poet, for indi- vidual variety must be constantly present for him; he is compelled to use the sense sectors to their full extent, as it must also be in his aim to extend each
of them as far as possible, so that his lively delight, girded for the attempt, may be able to pass through the five gardens in one leap.
As the lover's danger consists in the nonspatial character of his stand- point, so the poet's lies in his awareness of the abysses which divide the one order of sense experience from the other: in truth they are sufficiently wide and engulfing to sweep away from before us the greater part of the world- who knows how many worlds ?
The question arises here as to whether the extent of these sectors on the plane assumed by us can be enlarged to any vital degree by the work of re- search. The achievements of the microscope, of the telescope, and of so many devices which increase the range of the senses upward and down- ward: do they not lie in another sphere altogether, since most of the increase thus achieved cannot be interpreted by the senses, cannot be "experienced" in any real sense? It is perhaps not premature to suppose that the artist, who develops the five-fingered hand of his senses (if one may put it so) to ever more active and more spiritual capacity, contributes more decisively than anyone else to an extension of the several sense fields; only the achievement which gives proof of this does not permit of his entering his personal exten- sion of territory in the general map before us, since it is only possible, in the last resort, by a miracle.
But if we are looking for a way by which to establish the connection so urgently needed between the different provinces now so strangely separated from one another, what could be more promising than the experiment sug- gested earlier in this recollection? If the writer ends by recommending it once again, he may be given a certain amount of credit for withstanding the temptation to give free reign to his fancy in imagining the results of the as- sumptions which he has suggested.
Soglio. On the day of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, I 9 I 9 .
Rilke dedicated the most impassionate of reports to phonography. Re- gardless of the fact that he wrote it on the Assumption, "he was a poet and hated the approximate. "47 Therefore the strange precision with
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which his text enumerates all the parts of an apparatus that Rilke's physics teacher, employed not coincidentally at an imperial military school, constructed around 1890. As if to confirm the fictional Edison of Tomorrow's Eve, who had no supply problems whatsoever when design- ing the phonograph, a combination of cardboard, paper, the bristles of a clothes brush, and candle wax suffice to open a "new and infinitely deli- cate point in the texture of reality. " Oblivious to the knowledge of the physics teacher and the school drill, students hear their own voices. Not their words and answers as programmed feedback by the education sys- tem, but the real voice against a backdrop of pure silence or attention.
And yet the "unforgettable" (in the word's double meaning) phono- graphic sound recording is not at the center of Rilke's profane illumina- tion. In the founding age of media, the author is captivated more by the technological revolutions of reading than of writing. The "markings traced on the cylinder" are physiological traces whose strangeness tran- scends all human voices.
Certainly, the writer is no brain physiologist. His amateur status at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts enables him to become acquainted with the vi- cissitudes of the skeletal structure, but not with the facilitations on which Exner or Freud based their new sciences. But when it comes to mounted and exhibited skeletons, Rilke is fascinated by that "utmost achievement" known as the skull, because "it was as if it had been persuaded to make just in this part a special effort to render a decisive service by providing a most solid protection for the most daring feature of all. " During his Parisian nights, Rilke reduces the skull sitting in front of him to a cerebral container. Describing it as "this particular structure" with a "boundless field of activity," he merely repeats the physiological insight that for our central nervous system, "our own body is the outside world. "48 One no less than Flechsig, Schreber's famous psychiatrist, had proven that the cerebral cortex contains a "sphere of physical perception" that neurolog- ically reproduces all parts of the body, distorted according to their im- portance. 49 Rilke's belief in later years that it was the task of poetry to transfer all given data into an "inner world space" is based on such in- sights. (Even though literary scholars, still believing in the omnipotence of philosophers, choose to relate Rilke's inner world space to Husserl. )50
"Primal Sound" leaves no doubt whatsoever about which contempo- rary developments were most important to literature in 1900. Instead of lapsing into the usual melancholic associations of Shakespeare's Hamlet or Keller's Green Henry at the sight of a human skull in candlelight, the writer sees phonographic grooves.
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? Coronal suture from stp to stp.
A trace or path or groove appears where the frontal and parietal bones of the "suckling infant"51-to use Rilke's anatomically correct term-have grown together. As if the facilitations of Freud and Exner had been projected out of the brain onto its enclosure, the naked eye is now able to read the coronal suture as a writing of the real. A technologically up-to-date author follows in the wake of the brain physiologists, who since the days of Guyau and Hirth have automatically thought of Edison's phonograph when dealing with nerve pathways. Moreover, Rilke draws conclusions more radical than all scientific boldness. Before him, nobody had ever suggested to decode a trace that nobody had encoded and that encoded nothing.
Ever since the invention of the phonograph, there has been writing without a subject. It is no longer necessary to assign an author to every trace, not even God. "Project for a Scientific Psychology" centered on fa- cilitations inscribed by acts of perception, but there is no reason not to set the gramophone needle to random anatomic features. A transgression in the literal sense of the word, which shakes the very words used to phrase it. Acoustics arises from physiology, technology from nature. In Rilke's time, skulls were measured in search of all possible features: intelligence and idiocy, masculinity and femininity, genius and racial characteristics. But their transposition into the acoustic medium remained a challenge that forced dots and question marks onto the writing hand.
What the coronal suture yields upon replay is a primal sound with- out a name, a music without notation, a sound even more strange than
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any incantation for the dead for which the skull could have been used. Deprived of its shellac, the duped needle produces sounds that "are not the result of a graphic transposition of a note" but are an absolute trans- fer, that is, a metaphor. A writer thus celebrates the very opposite of his own medium-the white noise no writing can store. Technological media operate against a background of noise because their data travel along physical channels; as in blurring in the case of film or the sound of the needle in the case of the gramophone, that noise determines their signal- to-noise ratio. According to Arnheim, that is the price they pay for deliv- ering reproductions that are at the same time effects of the reproduced. Noise is emitted by the channels media have to cross.
In 1924, five years after Rilke's "Primal Sound," Rudolph Lothar wrote The Talking Machine: A Technical-Aesthetic Essay. Based on the not-very-informed premise that "philosophers and psychologists have hitherto written about the arts" and "neglected" phonography,52 Lothar drew up a new aesthetic. Its key propositions center exclusively on the re-
lationship between noise and signals.
The talking machine occupies a special position in aesthetics and music. It de- mands a twofold capacity for illusion, an illusion working in two directions. On the one hand, it demands that we ignore and overlook its mechanical features. As we know, every record comes with interference. As connoisseurs we are not al- lowed to hear this interference, just as in a theater we are obliged to ignore both the line that sets off the stage and the frame surrounding the scene. We have to forget we are witnessing actors in costumes and makeup who are not really expe- riencing what they are performing. They are merely playing parts. We, however, pretend to take their appearance for reality. Only if we forget that we are inside a theater can we really enjoy dramatic art. This "as if" is generated by our capacity for illusion. Only when we forget that the voice of the singer is coming from a wooden box, when we no longer hear any interference, when we can suspend it the way we are able to suspend a stage-only then will the talking machine come into its own artistically.
But, on the other hand, the machine demands that we give bodies to the sounds emanating from it. For example, while playing an aria sung by a famous singer we see the stage he stands on, we see him dressed in an appropriate cos- tl,lme. The more it is linked to our memories, the stronger the record's effect will be. Nothing excites memory more strongly than the human voice, maybe because nothing is forgotten as quickly as a voice. Our memory of it, however, does not die-its timbre and character sink into our subconscious where they await their revival. What has been said about the voice naturally also applies to instruments. We see Nikisch conduct the C-minor symphony, we see Kreisler with the violin at his chin, we see trumpets flashing in the sun when listening to military marches.
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But the capacity for illusion that enables us to ignore boxes and interference and furnishes tones with a visible background requires musical sensitivity. This is the most important point of phonographic aesthetics: The talking machine can only grant artistic satisfaction to musical people. For only musicians possess the ca-
pacity for illusion necessary for every enjoyment of art. 53
Maybe Rilke, who loved the gong, with its resounding mixture of frequencies, above all other instruments, wasn't a musical person. 54 His aesthetic-"Primal Sound" is Rilke's only text about art and the beautiful in general-subverts the two illusions to which Lothar wants to commit readers or gramophone listeners. From the fact that "every record comes with interferences" he draws opposite conclusions. Replaying the skull's coronary suture yields nothing but noise. And there is no need to add some hallucinated body when listening to signs that are not the result of the graphic translation of a note but rather random anatomical lines. Bod- ies themselves generate noise. And the impossible real transpires.
Of course, the entertainment industry is all on Lothar's side. But there have been and there still are experiments that pursue Rilke's primal sound with technologically more sophisticated means. In the wake of Mondrian and the Bruitists (who wanted to introduce noise into literature and music), Moholy-Nagy already suggested in 1923 turning "the gramo- phone from an instrument of reproduction into a productive one, gener- ating acoustic phenomena without any previous acoustic existence by scratching the necessary marks onto the record. "55 An obvious analogy to Rilke's suggestion of eliciting sounds from the skull that were not the re- sult of a prior graphic transformation. A triumph for the concept of fre- quency: in contrast to the "narrowness" of a "scale" that is "possibly a thousand years old" and to which we therefore no longer must adhere,56 Moholy-Nagy's etchings allow for unlimited transposition from medium to medium. Any graphisms-including those, not coincidentally, domi- nating Mondrian's paintings-result in a sound. Which is why the exper- imenter asks for the "study of graphic signs of the most diverse (simulta- neous and isolated) acoustic phenomena" and the "use of projection ma- chines" or "film. "57
Engineers and the avant-garde think alike. At the same time as Moholy-Nagy's etching, the first plans were made for sound film, one of the first industrially connected media systems. "The invention of Mr. Vogt, Dr. Engel, and Mr.