No More Learning

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
? ? 24 Gramophone
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
? 26 Gramophone
? 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-
Gramophone 27
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
? 28 Gramophone
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.
Gramophone 29
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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.