A D V E N T U R E S   in   C Y B E R S O U N D

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The essay continues... [from Part 2]

Poetry, the last philosopher and first media theoretician Nietzsche wrote, is like literature in general simply a mnemotechnology. In 1882, The Gay Science remarked under the heading On the Origin of Poetry:

In those ancient times in which poetry came into existence, the aim was utility, and actually a very great utility. When one lets rhythm permeate speech , - the rhythmic force that reorders all the atoms of the sentence, bids one choose one's words with care, and gives one's thoughts a new colour, making them darker, stranger, and more remote , - the utility in question was superstitious. Rhythm was meant to impress the gods more deeply with a human petition, for it was noticed that men remember a verse much better than ordinary speech. It was also believed that a rhythmic tick-tock was audible over greater distances; a rhythmical prayer was supposed to get closer to the ears of the gods. [118]

At the origin of poetry with its beats, rhythms [and in modern European languages rhymes] were technological problems and a solution which came about under oral conditions. Unrecognized by all philosophical aesthetics, the storage capacity of memory was to be increased and the signal-noise-ratio of channels improved. [Humans are so forgetful and gods so hard of hearing.] The fact that verses could be written down hardly changed this necessity. Texts stored by the medium book were still supposed to find their way back to the ears and hearts of their recipients in order to attain [not unlike the way Freud or Anna Pomke had envisioned it] the indestructibility of a desire.

These necessities are obliterated by the possibility of technological sound storage. It suddenly becomes superfluous to employ rhythmical tick-tock [as in Greece] or rhyme [as in Europe] to endow words with a duration beyond their evanescence. Edison's talking machine stores the most disordered sentence atoms and its cylinders transport them over the greatest distances. The poet Charles Cros may have immortalized the invention of his phonograph, precisely because he was never able to build it, in lyrical rhymes under the proud title Inscription, Wildenbruch, that plain consumer, is in a different position. "For the Phonographic Recording of His Voice" no longer requires any poetic means. Rather than dying and fading away, his voice reaches one of today's engineers. Technology triumphs over mnemotechnology. And the death-bell tolls for poetry that for so long had been the love of so many.

Under these circumstances writers are left with few options. They can, like Mallarmé or Stefan George, exorcize the imaginary voices from between the lines and inaugurate a cult of and for letter fetishists, in which case poetry becomes a form of typographically optimized blackness on exorbitantly expensive white paper: Un coup de dès or a throw of the dice. [119] Or they can for marketing reasons move from imaginary voices, such as Anna Pomke had hallucinated in Goethe's verses to real ones, in which case a poetry of nameless song writers appears, or reappears, on records. Illiterates in particular are their prime consumers, because what under oral conditions required at least some kind of mnemotechnology is now fully automatized. "The more complicated technology, the simpler," that is, the more forgetful, "we can live." [120] Records turn and turn until phonographic inscriptions inscribe themselves into brain physiology. We all know hits and rock songs by heart precisely because there is no reason to memorize them anymore.

In order to provide a demographically exact account of The Employees, including their nocturnal activities, Siegfried Kracauer becomes acquainted with a typist, "for whom it is characteristic that she cannot hear a piece of music in a dance hall or a suburban café without chirping along its text. But it is not as if she knows all the hits, rather, the hits know her, they catch up with her, killing her softly." [121]

Only two years or steps separate this sociology From the Newest Germany from fictional heroes such as in Irmgard Keun's RayonGirl of 1932, who [obviously under the influence of Kracauer] turn into poets [and in Berlin into prostitutes] when listening to the gramophone or the radio. For it is not the typewriter, in front of which the rayon employee Doris spends her days, that turns an entertainment consumer into a producer. Only when she and her current lover hear "music from the radio" and listen to "Vienna, My One and Only," does she "feel like a poet" who "can also rhyme," "if only in limits." [122] And if "a gramophone next door" should be playing in the moonlight, "something wonderful takes hold of her": listening to a hit, Doris first of all has the feeling "of making a poem," and then she decides to write an autobiography or even a novel.

I think it is good when I describe everything because I am an uncommon person. I am not thinking of a diary , - that would be ridiculous for an up-to-date girl of eighteen. But I want to write like a movie, because that's the way my life is and it will soon be more so. [...] And when I later read it, it will be like a movie, I will see myself in images. [123]

My heart is a gramophone, playing excitedly with a sharp needle in my breast... Music comes from the movies, records which are passing on human voices. And all are signing... [124]

This, the literature of nonreaders, is the most widely read literature in the world. Its history has not yet been written. Nor do I feel quite up to the task myself. I would simply like to make reference to one of its branches: poetry. For the literature of non-readers, like "our" own, has a special category for poetry.

Every couple of weeks there is a survey: "Who is the most beloved poet of the year?" Every time, the question is answered incorrectly. The ones we know are not even considered.. Neither Rilke nor Cäsar Flaischgen, not Goethe, and not Gottfried Benn. Rather: Fritz Grünbaum ["When You Can't, Let Me Do it!"], Schanzer and Welisch ["If You See My Aunt"], Beda ["Yes, We Have No Bananas"], Dr Robert Katscher ["Madonna, You' Are More Beautiful than the Sunshine]", and who else? A lot more, before Flaischgen, Rilke and Benn come up.

"The 222 newest hits, that is the most popular poetry anthology of all. The contents are revised and expanded every two months. And the whole thing costs just ten cents. Here there is only one genuine type of poem: the love poem. Girls, women, females, other topics are not favoured. [125]

Even if all the names on both sides of the debate have long since changed, this remains a very exact appraisal. Following the invention of technical sound storage, the effects poetry had on its audience migrate to the new lyrics of hit parades and charts. Their texts would rather be anonymous than deprived of royalties, their recipients illiterate rather than deprived of love. At the same time, however, media technology's precise differentiation brings about a modern poetry that can do without all supplementary sensualities ranging from song to love because, according to a remark of Oscar Wilde's as ironic as it is appropriate, it is not read. [126] And this remains the case even when Rilke plans poetic coronal suture phonography or Benn writes poems which consciously set themselves apart from the entertainment industry. For Benn's poems can merely note but not verify that records and movies are part of a present which outpaces our cultural critics. Otherwise, his poems would be as successful, anonymous, and forgotten as the hits they sing about:

A popular hit is more 1950 than five hundred pages of cultural crisis. At the movies, to which you can take along hat and coat, there is more fire water than on the Kothurn and without the annoying intermission. [127]

[INSERT illustrations and captions pp. 129.:

Edison's notebook, 7 September 1877
Talking and singing doll
First speech recording 1877
The mouth was tightly linked to the membrane moving the embossing point
The voice of Henry Sweet
Emile Berliner's second patent writing
First mass-produced record player [model of 1890]
Stroh violine 1899. The inventor was the electrical engineer John Matthias Augustus Stroh
RCA-Victor recording session
'On the banks of the Rhine' 1911
Futurist laboratory, 1914
Dermée, Prampolini and Seuphor, Paris 1927
[facing p. 129] Sound-detection apparatus from the First World War

Between or before low-brow and high-brow culture, between record sings and experimental poetry, there is only one third party: science. When Wildenbruch spoke into the bell-mouth, the phonograph stored indices rather than poems. And these indices speak precisely to the extent that their sender cannot manipulate them. This, at least, the poet performing"The Phonographic Recording of His Voice" seemed to have been aware of: because "the sound of the voice can never lie," its technological storage reveals the "hidden" and makes the "past", the corpse of a Wildenbruch or a Goethe, speak.

[INSERT illustration p. 130: Protoype of receiver [Bell & Clarke, 1874]

Edison saw his phonograph "pressed into the detective service and used as an unimpeachable witness" [129] in court. With technological media, a knowledge assumes power that is no longer satisfied with the individual universals of its subjects, their self-images and self-representations, these imaginary formations, but instead registers distinguishing particulars. As Carlo Ginzburg has shown in "Clues and Scientific Method," this new knowledge rules Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Homes, that is, aesthetics, psychoanalysis and criminology. However, Ginzburg fails to see that the shift in power technologies simply follows the switch from writing to media. Books had been able to store and convey the imaginary body self-images entertained by individuals. But unconsciously treacherous signs like fingerprints, pitch, foot tracks etc. fall into the purview of media without which they could neither be stored nor evaluated. Francis Galton's dactyloscope and Edison's phonograph are contemporaneous allies.

Wildenbruch appears to have suspected as much, or else his verses would not refer to the phonograph as the soul's own true photograph. His paranoia is justified. A phonographically recorded state poet no longer enters a pantheon of immortal writers, but rather one of the countless evidence-gathering agencies which since 1880 have been controlling our so-called social behaviour, that is, all the data and signs that are by necessity beyond our control. The good old days in which a self-controlled and "flattering" face could "fool" eyes equally bereft of media are over. Rather, all the sciences of trace detection confirm Freud's statement that "no mortal can keep a secret" because "betrayal oozes out of him at every pore". [130] And because [we may add] since 1880, there is a storage medium for each kind of betrayal. Otherwise there would be no unconscious.

In 1908, the psychologist William Stern publishes a Summary of Deposition Psychology. This new science is designed to cleanse the oral depositions of court protocols, medical reports, personal files and school reports from all guile and deceit on the part of the speakers. Old European, that is to say, literary means of power are not immune from deception. Whether for criminals or for the insane, the traditional "stylized depositions often produce a false impression of the examination and obscure the psychological significance of individual statements." As each answer "is, from the point of view of experimental psychology, a reaction to the operative stimulus in the question," [131] experimenters and investigators provoke countermeasures in their subjects as long as they use the bureaucratic medium of writing. An argument made by the stimulus-response psychologist Stern that, sixty years later, is reiterated by interaction psychologists like Watzlawick [despite all criticism of the stimulus-response scheme]. [132] Which is why examiners of 1908 recommend "the use of the phonograph as an ideal method" [133] and those of 1969 recommend tapedecks. [134

[] In 1905, the Viennese psychiatrist Erwin Stransky, quietly anticipating his colleague Stern, published a study on Speech Disturbances. In order to contribute to the knowledge of such disturbances among the Mentally Ill and Mentally Healthy, German psychiatry for the first time avails itself of the ideal method of phonography. For one minute [the recording time for one roll] Stansky had his subjects "look and speak directly into the black tube" after "all extraneous sense stimuli," that is, all the psychological problems of deposition, had been eliminated. [135] Whatever they say is completely irrelevant. The "aim" of the whole experiment "consists in shutting out all general concepts." [136] To test "concepts like 'speaking at odds', 'hodgepodge', 'thinking out loud', 'hallucination' etc.," [137] the subjects must abandon their so-called thinking. In Stransky's phonographic experiment, "language," in its "relative autonomy from the psyche," [138] takes the place of general concepts or signifieds, as if intending to prepare or facilitate a key concept of modern literature.

Media technology could not proceed in a more exact fashion. Thanks to the phonograph, science is for the first time in possession of a machine that records noises regardless of so-called meaning. Written protocols were always unintentional selections of meaning. The phonograph, however, draws out those speech disturbances psychiatry is concerned with. Stransky's fine statement that "the formation of general concepts" could be inhibited "for pathological or experimental reasons," [139] is a euphemism. The "or" should be replaced by an equal sign. All the more so because the splendidly consistent Stransky not only places psychiatric patients in front of the machine, but also, to collect comparative data, his own colleagues, the doctors. In the case of the latter, the ensuing hodgepodge was, needless to say, related to experimental reasons, while the patients had their pathological reasons. But the fact that psychiatrists, too, immediately produce a whole lot of nonsense when speaking into a phonograph, thereby relinquishing the professional status that distinguishes them from madmen, fully demonstrates the machine's power. Mechanization relieves people of their memories and permits a linguistic hodgepodge hitherto stifled by the monopoly of writing. The rules governing rhyme and metre Wildenbruch employs to arrange his words when speaking into the phonograph; the general concepts Stransky's colleagues use to arrange theirs during the first test runs, Edison's invention renders them all historically obsolete. The epoch of nonsense, our epoch, can begin.

This nonsense is always already the unconscious. Everything that speakers, because they are speaking, cannot also think, flows into recording devices whose storage capacity is only surpassed by their indifference. "The point could be made", a certain Walter Baade remarked in 1913 On the Recording of Self-Observations by Dictaphones, "that such an exertion is unnecessary, because it is not a matter of recording all remarks but only the important ones, this, however, fails to realize that, first of all, utterances of great importance are often made by subjects in moments when they themselves believe only to have made a casual remark and the examiner is altogether unprepared for an important comment, and that, secondly, even when both parties are aware that at least some part of a remark is 'important,' the decision what should and should not be recorded by the protocol is frequently very difficult and, subsequently, has a disturbing effect. For the most part, these two aforementioned reasons make the uninterrupted indiscriminate recording of all utterances appear as an ideal." [140]

Presumably the first to follow this ideal is a fictional psychiatrist of 1897. Bram Stoker's Dracula, that perennially misjudged heroic epic of the final victory of technological media over the blood-sucking despots of old Europe, [141] features a certain Dr Seward, who is baffled by the nonsensical discourse produced by his schizophrenic patient Renfield. The latter keeps screaming that the master is approaching, but Dr Seward has no way of knowing that this refers to Dracula's arrival in England. However, in the wake of a profane illumination anticipating Dr Stransky, Dr Seward resorts to media technology. He purchases one of the recently mass-produced phonographs, not to record [as Stransky did] the patient, but rather his own associations triggered by the latter's speeches. The grooves store, to quote Seward's succinct and precise description, an "unconscious cerebration" which divines the subconscious of the schizophrenic, but which cannot advance all the way to the psychiatrist's ego. It is only [as Baade put it] the uninterrupted indiscriminate recording of all utterances or associations which will allow Dr Seward's unconscious cerebration "to give the wall to [its] conscious brother." [142] And only the typed transcription of all cylinders, recommended as early as 1890 by Dr Blodgett, by a certain Minna Harker will reveal to him and all the others hunting Dracula that the Count himself was behind Renfield's schizophrenic nonsense.

Since 1897, the year of Dracula's publication, this procedure no longer belongs to the realm of fiction. A science emerges which turns it and all its particulars into a method: psychoanalysis.

As is known, Freud's talking cure is based on a segmentation of speech. On the one hand, patients lying on the couch speak, at least that's what they believe, according to classic discourse rules: A Kantian-type ego has to be able to accompany all my representations and provide for correct words and sentences, which, unfortunately, say nothing about the patient. On the other hand, many minor symptoms emerge in the flow of speech, interruptions and paralalia, nonsensical words and puns, in which [to paraphrase Stransky] for pathological or experimental reasons the formation of general concepts has not occurred and a subconscious appears. Subsequently, the attentive doctor need only separate nonsense from sense like wheat from the chaff [and not the other way around]. He feeds the parapraxes back to the patient, thus triggering new associations and parapraxes, which once again are fed back and so on, until an ego in control of speech has been dethroned and the unspeakable truth can be heard.

Around 1900, only media theoreticians play as revolutionary a part as the physician Freud. Experimenting with telephones and phonographs, Hermann Gutzmann, a lecturer in speech disorders in Berlin, discovers that the prompting of nonsense words to his patients produces nothing but parapraxes. Precisley because both machines, due to transmission economy or technical imperfections, limit the frequency band of language on either end, what subjects "understand" can differ from what they "heard." Gutzmann speaks nonsense syllables like "bage" or "zoses" into the mouthpiece, the ear at the other end receives "lady" or "process." [144] A simple question brings to light an unconscious. And the research On Hearing and Understanding is able to "answer the question what such experiments may mean for experimental psychology":

First of all, it is evident that using fake words stimulates the combinatory powers to such a degree that even against his will the listener is forced to replace the nonsense syllables he has heard with those words which are closest in his mind, in the pertinent constellation of ideas, that is, to hear the latter in the former. This can be seen very clearly in the protocol of subject 1, a fickle eighteen-year old who is deeply in love; he is attracted by everything feminine, and the many girls' names and an additional "lady" make his constellation of ideas easily recognizable. This also applies to the fake French words of the two "well-educated young ladies". If we wanted to conduct phonographic tests aimed at discovering certain suspected trains of thought, we would only need to use syllables sounding like the corresponding words as stimuli in order to arrive at the positive or negative result. [145]

Freud turns Gutzmann's simple suggestion into his explicit goal and imaginary constellations into the subconscious. In other words, he himself takes the place of phonographic tests. And for good reason: the psychoanalyst in his chair would also be faced with the problem of repressing or filtering the communication of an alien subconscious with his own subconscious, had he not from the very beginning turned his ears into a technical apparatus. Unlike Gutzmann's subjects, Freud's patients fall from sense into nonsense; yet their doctor is not allowed to use his understanding to turn it back into sense. For that reason, Freud's Recommendations to Physicians Practising Psychoanalysis simply amount to telephony:

Just as the patient must relate everything that his self-observation can detect, and keep back all the logical and affective objections that seek to induce him to make a selection from among them, so the doctor must put himself in a position to make use of everything he is told for the purposes of interpretation... without substituting a censorship of his own for the selection that the patient has foregone. To put it in a formula, he must turn his own unconscious like a receptive organ towards the transmitting unconscious of the patient. He must adjust himself to the patient as a telephone receiver is adjusted to the transmitting microphone. Just as the receiver converts back into sound-waves the electric oscillations in the telephone line which were set up by sound waves, so the doctor's unconscious is able, from the derivatives of the unconsciousness which are communicated to him, to reconstruct that unconscious, which has determined the patient's free associations. [146]

The fictional Dr. Seward had been obliged to first record his unconscious associations, which traced those of another unconscious, before he was able to arrive at a conscious interpretation upon replaying them. In exactly the same way the historical Dr. Freud turns into a telephone receiver. Following the nationalization of the Vienna telephone exchange in 1895, he not only has a telephone installed in his study, [147] but also describes the work that goes on in that study in terms of telephony. As if "psychic apparatus," Freud's fine neologism or supplement for the antiquated soul, were to be taken literally, the unconscious coincides with electric oscillations. Only an apparatus like the telephone can transmit its frequencies, because each encoding in the bureaucratic medium of writing would be subject to the filtering and censoring effects of a consciousness. Under media conditions, however, "selection and refusal," to quote Rilke, are no longer permissible. [148] Which is why the conscientious deposition psychologist Freud abstains from note-taking during his sessions; instead, and much like Dr. Seward listening to his cylinders, he produces them later. [149]

The question remains, however, how the telephone receiver Freud can retain the communication from another unconscious. The phonograph owners Drs Seward, Stransky and Gutzmann are not faced with this problem since they are in possession of a storage medium. Producing psychoanalytic case studies, that is, putting into writing what patients said, requires that one record whatever the two censors on and behind the couch want to render unsaid: parapraxes, puns, slips, signifier jokes. Only technological media can record the nonsense that [with the one exception of Freud] technological media alone were able to draw out into the open. Freud's telephone analogy elides this point. Nonetheless, his principle that consciousness and memory are mutually exclusive [150] formulates this very media logic. For that reason, it is consistent to define psychoanalytic case studies, in spite of their written format, as media technologies. Freud introduces his Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria with the audacious avowal that his written "record" of hysterical speeches has a "high degree of trustworthiness" though it is "not absolutely, phonographically, exact." [151]

Evidently, psychoanalysis is competing with technological sound recording. Its enemy or image is the phonograph and not film, as Benjamin concluded from global parallels. [152] Neither as a word nor as a subject does film occur in Freud's writings. Rather, psychoanalytic texts are haunted by the absolute faithfulness of phonography. Thus, Freud's method of detecting unconscious signifiers in oral discourse and then interpreting these signifiers as letters of a grand rebus or syllable puzzle, [153] appears as the final attempt to establish writing under media conditions. While women, children and madmen simply stop reading assigned novels and desert to the movies like to a "Couch of the Poor," [154] psychoanalysis once again teaches them letters which, however, are signifiers devoid of all meaning and phantasms. As a science it performs what Mallarmé or George inaugurate as modern literature.

In his own words, Berliner's Gramophone holds on to the sound of letters; [155] conversely, Freud's psychoanalysis holds on to the letters of sound. While the entertainment industry transmits speech flows, the factual data input of every talking cure, and his teacher Brücke, the ancestor of German speech physiology, analyses them as such, Freud writes down their signifiers. His justification: unlike any street urchin, he "could not imitate" [156] all the stuttering, clicking of the tongue, gasping and groaning [157] of his female hysterics. Which is why psychoanalysis is "not absolutely, phonographically, exact"; and why "[r]eality will always remain 'unknowable.'" [158]

[INSERT illustration p. 140: Transcription of the phonogramm of a schizophrenic, 1899] []

A global success that falls short of the absolute or real has only one precondition: patients, who thanks to the telephonic and equidistant receptivity of Freuds' unconscious may indulge in any kind of babble as long as they stick to the everyday medium of orality, are themselves not allowed to make use of storage technologies, lest they incur the wrath of psychoanalysis, the discrete textual recording of contractually arranged indiscretions. [159]

[] Concerning "The Employment of Dream-Interpretation in Psychoanalysis" its inventor notes that it would be a mistake to let patients write down their own dreams. "For even if the text of a dream is in this way labouriously rescued from oblivion, it is easy enough to convince oneself that nothing thereby has been achieved for the patient. Associations will not come to the text, and the result is the same as if the dream had not been preserved." [160] The storage medium writing fails once it is utilized by the patient and not by the analyst. To turn speech flows into syllable puzzles or "letters," which "do not occur in nature," [161] remains the monopoly of the scientist seated in his chair. Precisely because a dream text already amounts to half an interpretation, it can no longer draw ideas or speech flows out of the sick unconscious. As a result of this drainage, writing assumes the transitoriness of orality; it is consumed by oblivion. And thus psychoanalysis establishes with self-recursive elegance the renown and status of its own text. In 1932, Freud's writing are awarded the Goethe prize.

"Should we let Patients write down their own Dreams?" Karl Abraham asks in an essay of 1913 that appears to confirm Freud's authoritarian words with examples from the couch practise. "Against the doctor's orders" one of Abraham's patients "put writing materials next to his bed" and, following a "a very extensive, eventful and highly charged dream," brought "two quarto pages full of notes" to the session. But to his own shame and the delight of Abraham he realizes "that the notes are almost completely illegible." [162] The psychoanalyst's love of nonsensical speeches has no written or cryptographic equivalent. As is well known, only printed works of literature solicit interpretations, not so illegible commonplaces.

But in spite of its title and veneration for Freud, Abraham's essay does not limit itself to the old medium of writing. Something far more modern and "ingenious" caused the essay to be written or shocked: a phonograph in the hands of a patient.

Observation. 2nd patient, who in response to his question was advised by me not to write down dreams, produces a whole series of dreams in the following nights. Upon awakening , - in the middle of the night , - he ingeniously tries to save from oblivion the dreams he considers important. He owns an apparatus for recording dictations and proceeds to speak the dreams into the bell-mouth. Characteristically, he forgets that for the last couple of days the machine has been malfunctioning. As a result the dictation is difficult to understand. Patient is forced to fill in a lot from memory. The dictation had to be complemented by the dreamer's memory! The dream analysis proceeded without notable resistance, thus we can assume that in this particular case the dream would have been retained even without any recording.

The patient, however, was not convinced by this experience and instead repeated the experiment one more time. Following a dream-filled night, the machine, which in the meantime had been repaired, delivered a clearly audible dictation. But according to the patient its content was so confused that he had difficulties enforcing some kind of order. As the succeeding nights furnished a bounty of dreams which centred on the same complexes and could be reproduced without artificial aid, this case, too, proved the uselessness of immediate recording. [163]

In terms of deposition psychology, a patient who no longer writes down but phonographically records his dreams is on the same level as his psychoanalyst. No writing material or filter interposes itself between the unconscious and its storage, no consciousness making the "selections" disdained by Freud creates order. Reason enough to bring along the repaired machine to the session and set it up next to the couch. Then the patient would be free to go for a walk while his phonograph, to paraphrase Kafka, could exchange dream-related information with the telephone receiver called doctor. But no, pre-programmed by the analyst's instructions, Abraham's patient, for a change, reverses the judgement deposition psychology had passed on phonography, its ideal method: audible to the ear and the unconscious, but confused and useless when it comes to content and level of consciousness. Thus, the historic opportunity to test during Freud's lifetime what distinguishes absolute, phonographic, faithfulness from medical reproduction without artificial aid is missed

The test did not take place until 1969, when Edison's awkward machine was replaced by mass-produced magnetophones. Jean-Paul Sarte receives [and publishes] an anonymous tape with an enclosed letter which suggests that the recording be entitled Psychoanalytic Dialogue. [164] A., a thirty-three year old patient in a lunatic asylum, smuggled a tape recorder into his last session and recorded everything: associations, interpretations and ultimately the terror of the doctor upon discovering the machine:

Dr. X : Help! Murder! Helllp! Helllp!

A : Shut up and sit down.

Dr. X : Hellllllp! [screams again]

A : You're afraid I'm going to cut off your weenie?

Dr. X : Helllllllp! [That's the most beautiful scream of them all.]

A : That's a funny recording! [165]

As a result of which, according to the editor Sartre, "the analyst now becomes an object" and "the encounter of man with man is thwarted once again." [From an existentialist perspective, psychoanalysis was itself already a form of alienation.] [167]

[] Writers faced with media and philosophers faced with technology are blind. As if so-called face-to-face communication could do without rules or interfaces, storage or channels, Man has to once again see to it that information systems are ignored. What Sartre calls the second alienation is simply the demolition of a monopoly. In the hand of the patient the tape recorder advances on a notation technique which could never be "absolutely, phonographically, exact" and which therefore once more re-enacted Old Europe under technologically advanced conditions: On the one hand patients, who unlike bygone illiterates are able to read and write but are not allowed to; on the other hand highly professional writers guarding and monopolizing their archives as if universal literacy or even media technology were some pie in the sky. According to Foucault, "the political credit of psychoanalysis" rested on the fact that it opposed the unrestricted "extension and intensification of micro-powers," which not even Foucault designated as media technologies, with "the system of law, the symbolic order, and sovereignty". [168] This law, however, from Freud's "Mystic Writing-Pad" to Lacan's "Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious," is writing about writing, alphabetized monopoly squared. Only psychoanalysts [they say] can write what does not cease not to write itself.

But the beat must go on. Technology and industry do no tolerate any delay simply because a couple of writers or psychoanalysts are sticking to white paper. From Edison's primitive phonograph cylinders all the way to popular music, the true lyrics of the present, everything went like clockwork. Berliner's record of 1887, which no longer allowed consumers to make their own recordings but which, since 1893, allowed producers infinite reproductions of a single metal matrix, became the "prerequisite of the record mass market" [169] with a turnover that already exceeded the 100 million dollar mark before the advent of the radio. [170] The mass-produced sound storage medium only needed mass-produced communication and recording media to gain global ascendancy. Far removed from old notions of sovereignty, all the powers of this and only of this century are striving to reduce the "population's leadership vacuum" [171] [to quote a German media expert of 1939] to zero.

[INSERT illustration p. 146 with csaption: Edward Kienholz, Concrete Box [detail], 1975]

Broadcasting of weightless material came about for the purpose of mass transmission of records: in 1921 in the US, in 1922 in Great Britain, and in 1923 in the German Reich. "The uniting of radio with phonograph that constitutes the average radio program yields a very special pattern quite superior in power to the combination of radio and telegraph press that yields our news and weather programs." [172] While Morse signs are much too discrete and binary to be a symbolic code for radio waves, the continuous low frequencies of records are ideal for the amplitude and frequency modulations known as broadcasting.

In 1903 a principal switch for transmitting such records was achieved by Professor Slaby of the Berlin Technical University, whose Voyages of Discovery into the Electric Ocean delighted "His Imperial Majesty's dinner table at tranquil Hubertusstock." [173] The same Imperial Majesty put Slaby's assistant Count von Arco in charge of Telefunken Ltd. Based on Valdemar Poulsen's procedure the two Berliners were able to produce a high frequency, whose wireless oscillations "were no longer in the range of audibility but delighted the electrician as much as the thrice-accented C of a famous tenor would a music lover." [174] On this radio carrier frequency "Caruso's singing, though emanating from the bell-mouth of a gramophone, could be transmitted in all its purity to our ears through the roaring metropolis" [175] : that is, all the way from Sakrow to Potsdam. [176] Slaby's choice of tenors was not coincidental: on 18 March 1902, Caruso had revamped his immortality, from the hearsay of future opera audiences to gramophony.

Slaby and Arco, however, were conducting their research in the service of the emperor and his navy. But soon civilians, too, came to enjoy electrically transmitted records. A recording of Händel's Messiah is said to have been part of the first actual radio broadcast hosted by Reginald A. Fessenden of the University of Pennsylvania on Christmas Eve 1906. Long before the St. Petersburg revolutionaries, Brant Rock, Massachusetts, had started its broadcast with "CQ, CQ, to all, to all", but only wireless operators on ships [178] were able to receive the call and the Christmas record.

[INSERT illustration of de Forests' audion, p. 148]

A world war, the first of its kind, had to break out in order to facilitate the switch from Poulsen's arc transmission to Lieben or deForest's tube-type technology and mass-produce Fessenden's experimental procedure. It was not only in Germany, where the signal corps created in 1911 went to war with 550 officers and 5800 men but returned with 4831 officers and 185,000 men, [179] that the development of amplifier tubes was given the highest priority. [180] Fighter planes and submarines, the two new weapons systems, required wireless communication, just as military command required vacuum tube technology for the control of high and low frequencies. Tanks, however, which were equally in need of communication, kept losing their antennas in the barbed wire of the trenches and for the time being had to make do with carrier pigeons. [181]

But exponentially growing radio troops were also in need of entertainment, since apart from machine-gun skirmishes and drumfire offensives trench warfare is nothing but sensory depravation, or War as Inner Experience, as Jünger so succinctly put it. [182] After three years of waste land between Flanders and the Ardennes the military staffs, the British ones in Flanders [183] and a German one in Rethel in the Ardennes, had pity on their troops. Though trench crews had no radios, they were in possession of "army radio equipment." Beginning in May 1917, Dr Hans Bredow, an AEG engineer before the war and afterwards the first undersecretary for the national German radio network, was able to "use a primitive tube transmitter to broadcast a radio program consisting of records and the reading of newspaper articles. The project, however, was cancelled when a superior command post got wind of it and prohibited the 'abuse of army equipment' for any future broadcast of music or words!" [184]

But that's the way it goes. The entertainment industry is, in any conceivable sense of the word, an abuse of army equipment. When Karlheinz Stockhausen was mixing his first electronic composition Kontakte in the Cologne Studio of the Westdeutsche Rundfunk between February 1958 and fall 1959, the pulse generator, indicating amplifier, pass-band filter as well as the sine and square wave oscillators were made up of discarded US Army equipment: an abuse that produced a distinctive sound. A decade later, when the Cologne studio had at its disposal professionally developed audio electronic equipment and the record industry demanded that Kontakte attain Hi-Fi-stereo quality, Stockhausen attempted in vain to reproduce the sound: as an echo of a world war it could not do without the abuse of military equipment.

And what is true microcosmically is also true macrocosmically. In November 1918, the 190,000 radio operators of the imperial German army were demobilized but kept their equipment. Supported or supervised by the executive of the USPD [the Independent Socialist Party], the inspectorate of the technical division of the signal corps [Itenacht] founded a Central Broadcasting Bureau [ZFL], which on 25 November was granted a broadcasting license by the executive committee of the workers and soldiers council. [185] A "radio spectre" which could have nipped the Weimar Republic in the technological bud triggered the immediate "counterattack" by Dr Bredow. [186] For the simple purpose of avoiding the anarchistic abuse of military radio equipment, Germany received its entertainment radio network. Records that hitherto had been used to liven up military communication in the trenches of the Ardennes now came into their own. Otherwise people themselves rather than the government and the media industry could have made politics. In December 1923, two months after the first Berlin broadcast, Postal Minister Dr. Höfle, a member of the centrist party, listed [in order of increasing importance] the three tasks of the "Entertainment Broadcasting Network":

1. Wireless music, lectures etc. are to provide the general public with quality entertainment and education.

2. It is to be a new and important source of national revenue.

3. The new installations are to provide a convenient means for the nation and the states to convey whenever necessary official information to the public at large; the latter may be of importance with regard to state security.

But what is intended for consumers is determined not only by state security but also by technology. "[E]ven at the risk of losing to radio all they have earned with their records," [188] the record industry had to submit to the standards of the new medium. Struggle in the Ether was the fitting name of Arnold Bronnen's novel that dealt with the establishment of the radio networks and the music industry, a novel which cunningly puts the desires of postal ministers into the mouths of the people and in particular into that of a Berlin typist: "'Records, gramophones, money,' she smiled, lost in a dream, 'if one could sit here without records, gramophones, money but still hear music....'" [189]

In order to fulfil these wishes, the major arms and communications technology cooperations had to get rid of the old shellac craft. Pioneering tinkerers like Edison or Berliner left the stage. The vacuum-tube amplifier proceeded from high to low frequencies, from radio to records. In 1924, the Bell Labs developed electromagnetic cutting amplifiers for recording and an electromagnetic pick up for replaying, and delivered sound recordings from the mechanical scratching of Edison's needle. In the same year Siemens presented the recording studios of the media conglomerates with equally electric ribbon microphones, as a result of which grooves were finally able to record frequencies ranging from 100 bass hertz to 5 kilohertz overtones, thus rising to the level of medium wave transmitters.

Edison's prototype had for good reasons preferred human voices to orchestras. Only with electrical sound processing are records ready for Höfle's "wireless music." "At last," the Sunday Times wrote, mistaking frequency bandwidth for sensuality, "an orchestra really sounds like an orchestra; we get from these records what we rarely had before, the physical delight of passionate music in the concert room or opera house. We do not merely hear the melodies going this, that or the other way in a sort of limbo of tonal abstraction; they come to us with the sensuous excitement of actuality." [190]

And actuality itself can be produced once composers are up to date. For the third movement of the Pini di Roma, Respighi wrote or rather demanded the recorded voice of a nightingale played against the backdrop of a fully composed strings accompaniment. Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's fictional Edison had already surrounded his woman of the future with metallic birds of Paradise, who "by using the Microphone" make "an immense volume of sound" with their songs. [191] But only Bell Lab nightingales were capable of overtoning entire symphonic orchestras. Thus, Arturo Toscanini was able to premier Respighi's sound poem as a media link combining an orchestral score with phonographic kilohertz sensuality. [192]

And the band played on. In the same year, 1924, US researchers hit upon the idea of applying the technique of producing intermediate frequencies to sound processing. Thanks to frequency reduction, bat voices outside of the range of human audibility were caught on record. At least that was reported by newspapers in Prague; the same Prague in which immediately afterwards a story entitled Josefine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk was written. "Is Josefine's art singing at all?" Kafka's mice ask. "Is it not perhaps just a piping? And piping is something we all know about, it is the real accomplishment of our people, or rather no mere accomplishment, but a characteristic expression of our life. We all pipe, but of course no one dreams of making out that our piping is an art, we pipe without noticing it, and there are even many among us who are quite unaware that piping is one of our characteristics." [193]

"The universe of sound," Cocteau's radio theory concludes, "has been enriched by that of ultrasound, which is still unknown [...]. We shall know that fish shout, that the sea is full of noises and that the void is peopled with realistic ghosts in whose eyes we are the same." [194]

But the enemy was not left standing behind. German record companies participated in the Battle of the Bulge. To avoid Allied suspicions when the Chief of Army Communications ordered a sudden radio silence for all areas of troop concentration south of the Cologne-Aachen line on 12 November, 1944, the enemy had to be fed simulated attack preparations at other parts of the front. The Army High Command's propaganda division developed special recordings for army loudspeakers "which, among other things, simulated: tank noises, marching troops, departing and arriving trucks, the unloading of equipment etc." [196]

The whole spectrum of sound from infra- to ultrasound is, as was the case with Kafka's mice, not art but an expression of life. It finally allows modern detection to locate submarines wherever they may be, or tank brigades where they are not. The great musicologist von Hornbostel had already spent the First World War at the front: sound location devices with huge bellmouths and superhuman audibility ranges were supposed to enable ears to detect enemy artillery positions even at a distance of 30 kilometres. Ever since then human ears are no longer a whim of nature but a weapon, as well as [with the usual commercial delay] a source of money. Long before the headphone adventures of rock'n'roll or original radio plays, Heinkel and Messerschmitt pilots entered the new age of soundspace. The Battle of Britain, Göring's futile attempt to bomb the island into submission in preparation for Operation Sea Lion, began with a trick for guiding weapon systems: radio beams allowed Luftwaffe bombers to reach their destination without having to depend on daylight or the absence of fog. Radio beams emitted from the coast facing Britain, for example from Amsterdam and Cherbourg, formed the sides of an ethereal triangle the apex of which was located precisely above the targeted city.

[INSERT illustration [map] p. 155]

The right transmitter beamed a continuous series of Morse dashes into the pilot's right headphone, while the left transmitter beamed an equally continuous series of Morse dots, always exactly in between the dashes, into the left headphone. As a result, any deviation from the assigned course resulted in the most beautiful ping-pong stereophony [of the type which appeared on the first pop records but has since then been discarded]. And once the Heinkels were exactly above London or Coventry, then and only then did the two signal streams emanating from either side of the headphone, dashes from the right and dots from the left, merge into one continuous note which the perception apparatus could not but locate within the very centre of the brain. A hypnotic command that had the pilot, or rather, the center of his brain, dispose of his payload. Historically, he had become the first consumer of a headphone stereophony which today controls us all, from the circling of helicopters or Hendrix' Electric Ladyland all the way to the simulated pseudo-monophony in the midst of the soundspace of Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here, that once more wishes for the acoustics of targeted bombing. [197]

[INSERT illustration p. 156:

Hughes microphone with recorded fly

The very fly whose step the carbon microphone of Hughes [1878] amplified to make it audible, circles between the left and right channnel in Pink Floyd's "Ummaguamma"

How difficult it was for British intelligence to counter stereophonic remote control is told by its chief technical officer, Professor Reginald Jones. Because the Luftwaffe's radio beam transmitters operated in frequency ranges even beyond VHF, which in 1940 the Secret Service was incapable of receiving and of which it had no conception, help could only come from a profane illumination. An incident occurred on the Farnborough airfield while testing a loudspeaker system attached to a fuselage, which, just like in today's Pentagon project, was designed to blast rebellious natives in North-West India with divine voices. When the officer standing in front of the microphone heard his voice coming from the distant loudspeaker two seconds later, he laughed about this acoustic delay. His laughter, in turn, was returned as another echo until the feedback affected all the participants and Farnborough resounded with a noise similar to that heard when rock musicians lean their guitars against the speakers. "[A] system that laughed by itself," Jones called it. But instead of laughing along, he chose to understand: feedback, the principle of all oscillators, can also generate centimetric wave frequencies, something the experts refused to believe. [198] Jones ordered the construction of synchronized receivers which, in turn, located the Luftwaffe's radio beam transmitters and their targets. The Battle of Britain was won. [Even if the warlord Churchill, not wanting to reveal to the enemy that his secrets had been revealed, disallowed the evacuation of Coventry which had already been identified as a target city.]

Survivors and those born later, however, are allowed to inhabit stereophonic environments which have popularized and commercialized the trigonometry of air battles. Ever since EMI introduced stereo records in 1957, [199] people caught between speakers or headphones are as controllable as bomber pilots. The submarine location duties of aspiring air force officers or the bombing target locations of Heinkel pilots turn into the hypnosis, which in Stoker's 1897 Dracula still had to be used in order to solve a very strategic submarine detection problem without the help of radio technology. [200] But in 1966, following two world wars and innovation surges, hypnosis and recording technology finally coincide: engine noises, hissing steam and a brass band move across the walls from left to right and back, while a British voice sings of the literal chain that linked Liverpool's submarine crews to post-war rock groups.

In the town where I was born
lived a man who sailed to sea
and he told us of his life
in the land of submarines.

So we sailed up to the sun
till we found the sea of green
and we lived beneath the waves
in our yellow submarine.

And our friends are all on board
many more of them live next door
and the band begins to play

"We all live in a yellow submarine..." [201]

Once again, these deceptions were programmed by the admirable Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. By design or accident, his Edison places "his hand on the central control panel of the laboratory," whereupon the telephonic voice of his agent in New York "seemed to come from all the corners of the room at once." A dozen speakers scattered across the laboratory, obviously modelled on the first sound space experiments conducted between the Paris Opera and the Palace of Industry in 1881, make it possible. [202]

With the help of stereo recordings and stereo, VHF acoustic deceptions can invade operas altogether. When, in 1959, John Culshaw produced Solti's beautifully overmodulated Rhinegold, the homelessness of spirits was implemented. Of course the other gods and goddesses, male and female singers, were each assigned their own space between the stereo channels. But Wagner's great technician Alberich, upon tearing the newly completed Tarnhelm out of his brother Mime's hands and demonstrating in hands-on fashion the advantages of invisibility, appears to be coming, like Edison's telegrapher, from all corners at once. "Thus, in scene III, Alberich puts on the Tarnhelm, disappears, and then thrashes the unfortunate Mime. Most stage productions make Alberich sing through a megaphone at this point, the effect of which is often less dominating than that of Alberich in reality. Instead of this, we have tried to convey, for thirty-two bars, the terrifying, inescapable presence of Alberich: left, right, or centre there is no escape for Mime." [203]

Culshaw's stereo magic simply puts into practise what the great media technician Wagner had in mind for his dramatic doppelganger. "Everywhere now he lies in wait," sings Alberich, lost in acoustic space, making those he keeps "under guard" "subject to him for ever." [204] In other words, Wagner invented the radio play, as Nietzsche immediately realized: "His art always carries him in two directions, out of a world of auditory drama into a mysteriously kindred world of visual drama, and vice versa." [205] The Ring of the Nibelung, that zero series of all word wars, could just as well be called Struggle in the Ether.

[INSERT illustration p. 160: "Weltsendung Bayreuth"

To broadcast the ethereal struggle, radio merely had to take over the world war innovations and, in a move which reversed the one following the First World War, adapt itself to the standard of records. Because amplitude modulation did not leave enough frequency range, the old AM radio would have been unable to transmit Hi-Fi songs or stereo radio plays. "The spectacular growth of FM is attributable to its technical superiority to AM, and relative cheapness as an investment medium. In the late fifties, it was found that the great range of FM channels could not only sustain a higher fidelity for single transmissions, but could in fact also be used to broadcast separate signals simultaneously in a process called 'multiplexing'. This discovery made possible stereo musical broadcast. Stereo broadcast was particularly attractive to those audiences discriminating and wealthy enough to prefer high fidelity music [...] As the rock audience grew in size and sophistication, it came to demand the same sound quality which it could get from records at home [reflected in the tremendous increase in the middle and late sixties in the stereo component market], but could not get from AM radio." [206]

Frequency modulation and signal multiplexing, the two components of VHF, are of course no 1950s US commercial discovery. Without "his ingenious technical decision" in favour of signal multiplexing, General Fellgiebel, Chief of Army Communications, would not have been able to control the invasion of Russia, that is, "the most immense task ever faced by any signal corps in the world." [207] Without Colonel Gimmler of Army Ordnance and his refutation of the delusion "that very high frequencies [between 10m and 1m] propagate in a straight line and are therefore of no use in the battle field," [208] Colonel General Guderian, strategist of the tank blitzkrieg, would have been forced to resort to WWI-carrier pigeons. Instead, his armoured wedges, "from the tanks in the most forward position back to divisional, corps and army command," were, unlike his enemies, equipped with VHF. [209] "The engine is the soul of the tank," Guderian used to say, "and radio," General Nehring added, "its number one." Then as now VHF radio reduces the leadership vacuum to zero.

On 11 September 1944, American tank vanguards liberated the city of Luxembourg and its radio station. Radio Luxembourg returned to its pre-war status as the largest commercial broadcaster and advertiser of records in a continent of postal, telegraphic and radio state monopolies. [210] But four years as an army station had left its traces: traces of a new way of storing traces.

"By the early 1940s, German technicians had made some startling advances. Radio monitors who listened to the German broadcasting stations day after day for British and United States intelligence soon realized that many of the programs they were hearing could not possibly derive from live studio broadcasts. Yet there were a fidelity and a continuity of sound, plus an absence of surface scratching, in the German transmissions that ordinary transcription records could never have yielded. The mystery was solved... when the Allies captured Radio Luxembourg ... and discovered among the station's equipment a new Magnetophone of extraordinary capabilities." [211]

It was not until 1940 that technicians at BASF and AEG had by chance hit upon the technique of radio frequency premagnetizing, thus turning Valdemar Poulsen's experimental Telegraphone of 1898 into an operational audio tape with a 10 kilohertz frequency bandwidth. Up until then, the record-radio media link had operated as a one-way street. Transmitters and gramophone users replayed what Berliner's master disc had once and for all recorded, even if radio stations, in a late vindication of Edison, made use of special phonographs developed for the specific purpose of program storage. [212] But under combat conditions those wax cylinders, which, since 1930, were allowed to record parliamentary sessions strictly for "archival purposes," were useless. A propaganda ministry, which turned radio into "the cultural SS of the Third Reich," [214] needed a recording and storage medium as modern and mobile as Guderian's tank divisions.

Major General von Wedel, Chief of Army Propaganda, recounts:

"We were also essentially dependent on developments of the propaganda ministry with regard to radio equipment for war correspondents. That also applied to the appropriate vehicles. When it came to tank divisions, the Luftwaffe, or parts of the navy, the opportunities for original combat recordings were hampered by the fact that we could not obtain the stable and horizontal supports necessary for producing discs. At first, we were forced to make do with belated dispatches. A significant change occurred after the Magnetophone was invented and thoroughly designed for the purpose of war reports. Original combat reports from the air, the moving armoured vehicle, or the submarine etc. now became impressive first-hand accounts." [215]

But reaching beyond the acoustic experiences of the so-called general public, the magnetic tape also revolutionized secret transmissions. According to Pynchon, "operators swear they can tell the individual sending-hands." [217] As a consequence, the Abwehr as part of the German Army High Command had the 'handwriting' of every single agent recorded at the Wohldorf radio station close to Hamburg before they went abroad on their secret missions. Only magnetic tapes guaranteed to Canaris and his men that it "was really their agent sitting at the other end and not an enemy operator." [218]

Inspired by this success, the Abwehr switched from defence to offense. Because the enemy was not yet in possession of magnetic tapes, the Abwehr was in a position to transmit its famous Funkspiele [radio games], which in spite of their name did not result in entertaining millions in front of speakers, but in the death of 50 British agents. The Abwehr managed to capture and turn around agents who had parachuted into the Netherlands. As if nothing had happened, they were forced to continue their transmissions in their own handwriting. The transmission of German Funkspiel messages to London [or, in one parallel case, to Moscow] lured additional agents into the Abwehr trap. Normally, intelligence agencies arrange emergency signals with their agents for such situations, "such as using an old code, making absurd mistakes, or inserting or emitting certain letters of punctuation." [219] Each Morse message of the converted agents was taped, analysed and, if need be, manipulated, before it was transmitted. This procedure continued uninterrupted for years in the hardly civilian ether.

The world war audio tape inaugurated the musical-acoustic present. Beyond storage and transmission, gramophone and radio, it created empires of simulation. In England, Turing himself considered using a captured German Magnetophone as the storage mechanism for his projected large computer. Like the paper strip of the Universal Discrete Machine, tapes can execute any possible manipulation of data because they are equipped with recording, reading and erasing heads as well as with forward and reverse motion. [220] Which is why today's cheap PCs work with attached tape decks.

In a far more practical vein, captured magnetic tapes aroused sleepy US electric and music giants which had, naturally, taken on other than commercial duties between 1942 and 1945. Inserted into the signal path, audio tapes modernized sound production, by replacing gramophones they modernized sound distribution. Tape decks made music consumers mobile, indeed automobile, as did the radio producers in the Magnetophone-equipped German lead tanks of old. Thus, the "American mass market" was "opened up" by "the car playback system." [222] In order to minimize the leadership vacuum and exploit the possibilities of stereophony, the only things missing were new VHF stations with rock'n'roll and traffic reports on the transmitting and car radios with FM and decoders on the receiving end. Six-cylinder engines whisper, but the stereo equipment roars. Engine and radio are [to paraphrase Guderian/Nehring] also the soul of our tourist divisions, which under so-called postwar conditions rehearse or simulate the blitzkrieg.

The central command, however, has moved from general staffs to engineers. [223] Sound reproduction revolutionized by magnetic tape has rendered orders unnecessary. Storing, erasing, sampling, fast-forwarding, rewinding, editing, inserting tapes into the signal path leading from the microphone to the master disc made manipulation itself possible. Ever since the combat reports of Nazi radio, even live broadcasts have not been live. The delay, which in the case of tapes is due to separate head monitoring [and which is now more elegantly achieved by digital shift registers], [224] suffices for so-called Broadcast Obscenity Policing Lines. It appears that listeners, once they have been called by a disc jockey and are on the air, are prone to exhibit an unquenchable desire for obscenities. Today everybody can and [according to Andy Warhol] wants to become famous, if only for two minutes of air time. In the blind time which media, as opposed to artists, are subject to, chance is principally unpredictable. But the 6.4 seconds of dead time the Broadcast Obscenity Policing Line inserts between telephone call and actual broadcast make censorship [if not art] possible in the data flow of the real.

That is precisely the function of audio tapes in sound processing. Editing and interception control make the unmanipulable as manipulable as symbolic chains had been in the arts. With projects and recourses, the time of recurrence organizes pure random sequences; Berliner's primitive recording technolology turns into a Magical Mystery Tour. In 1954, Abbey Road Studios, which did not coincidentally produce the Beatles sound, first used stereo audio tapes; by 1970 eight-track machines had become the standard; today discos utilize 32 or 64 tracks, each of which can be manipulated on is own and in unison. [225] Welcome to the Machine, Pink Floyd sang, with which they meant "tape for its own ends, a form of collage using sound". [226] In the Funkspiele of the Abwehr, Morse hands could be corrected; in today's studios, stars do not even have to be able to sing anymore. When the voices of Waters and Gilmour were unable to hit the high notes in Welcome to the Machine, they simply resorted to time axis manipulation: they dropped the tape down half a semitone while recording and then dropped the line in on the track. [227]

But neither is tape technology always an end in itself, nor does editing always amount to correction or beautification. If media are anthropological prioris, then humans cannot have invented language; rather, they must have evolved as its pets, victims, or subjects. And the only weapon to fight that may well be tape salad. Sense turns into nonsense, government propaganda into the white noise of Turing's vocoder, impossible fillers like is/or/the are edited out [228] , : precisely the ingredients of William Burroughs's tape cut-up technique.

Feedback from Watergate to the Garden of Eden begins [like all books] with the word, and in the beginning that word was with God. But not only in the shape of speech, which animals, too, have at their command, but also as writing, the storage and transmission of which made culture possible in the first place. "Now a wise old rat may know a lot about traps and poison but he cannot write a text book on DEATH TRAPS IN YOUR WAREHOUSE for the Reader's Digest." Such warnings or "tactics" [229] are restricted to humans, with the one exception that they are not capable of warning of the warning system writing, which subsequently turned into a deadly trap. Because apes never mastered writing, the "written word" mastered them , : a "killer virus" that "made the spoken word possible. The word has not yet been recognized as a virus because it has achieved a state of stable symbiosis with the host," that now seems to be "breaking down." [230] Reconstructing the apes' inner throat which was not designed for speech, the virus created humans, especially white males, who were stricken with the most malignant infection: they mistook the host itself for its language parasite. Most apes died due to sexual frenzy or because the virus "caused death through strangulation and vertebral fracture." [231] But with two or three survivors the word was able to launch a new beginning []

"Let us start with three tape recorders in the Garden of Eden. Tape recorder 1 is Adam. Tape recorder 2 is Eve. Tape recorder 3 is God, who deteriorated after Hiroshima into the Ugly American. Or to return to our primevil scene: Tape recorder 1 is the male ape in a helpless sexual frenzy as the virus strangles him. Tape recorder 2 is the cooing female ape who straddles him. Tape recorder 3 is DEATH." [232]

What began as a media war has to end as a media war so as to close the feedback loop linking Nixon's Watergate tapes to the Garden of Eden. "Basically, there is only one game, and that is war." [233] World war weapons like the magnetophone have been put to commercial use in the shape of tape recorders, as a result of which ex-writers like Burroughs can take action. The classic rift between the production and reception of books is replaced by a single military interception. [234]

"We now have three tape recorders. So we will make a simple word virus. Let us suppose that our target is a rival politician. On tape recorder 1 we will record speeches and conversation carefully editing in stammers, mispronouncing, inept phrases... the worst number 1 can assemble. Now on tape 2 we will make so a love tape by bugging his bed room. We can potentiate this tape by splicing it in with a sexual object that is inadmissible or inaccessible or both, say the senator's teenage daughter. On tape recorder 3 we will record hateful disapproving voices and splice the three recordings in together at very short intervals and play them back to the senator and his constituents.

This cutting and playback can be very complex involving speech scramblers and batteries of tape recorders, but the basic principle is simply splicing sex tape and disapproval tapes in together." [235]

As simple as any abuse of army equipment. One just has to know what Shannon/Turing's scrambler or the German magnetophone can be used for. [236] If "control" or, as engineers say, negative feedback, is the key to power in this century, [237] then fighting that power requires positive feedback. Create endless feedback loops until VHF or stereo, tapedeck or scrambler, the whole array of world war army equipment, produce wild oscillations of the Farnborough type. Play to the powers that be their own melody.

Which is exactly what Burroughs does after having "described a number of weapons and tactics in the war game": [238] he joins Laurie Anderson in producing records. Which is exactly what rock music does in the first place: it maximizes all electroacoustic possibilities, occupies recording studios and FM transmitters, and uses tape montages to subvert the separation into composers and writers, arrangers and interpreters induced by writing. When Chaplin, Mary Pickford, D.W. Griffith and others founded United Artists following the First World War, a movie executive announced that "the lunatics have taken charge of the asylum." The same thing happened when Lennon, Hendrix, Barrett and others started recording their Gesamtkunstwerke by making full use of the media innovations of the Second World War. [239]

Funkspiel, VHF tank radio, vocoders, magnetophones, submarine location technologies, air war radio beams etc. have released an abuse of army equipment that adapts ears and reaction speeds to World War n+1. Radio, the first abuse, lead from WWI to WWII, rock music, the next one, from WWII to WWIII. Following a piece of very practical advice from Burroughs's Electronic Revolution, [240] Laurie Anderson's voice, as usual on Big Science distorted by a vocoder, simulates the voice of 747 pilot who uses the plane's speaker system to suddenly interrupt the ongoing entertainment program and inform passengers of an imminent crash landing or some other calamity. Mass interception media like rock music amount to mobilization, which makes them the exact opposite of Benjamin's distraction. [241] In 1936, only the unique "Reichsautozug Deutschland, a motorcade consisting of eighty vehicles," was able to "broadcast party congresses and mass rallies without any local help by setting up speaker systems on a giant scale, erecting stands, and so on" [242] , : today, the same is achieved night after night by the trucks and kilowatt systems of any rock group. Filled to the brim with electronics or army equipment, they carry us away to Electric Ladyland. The theme of love, that production secret of the literature for non-readers, has run its course. Rock songs sing of the very media power which sustains them.

Lennon/McCartney's stereo submarine is not the only post-war lyric in the literal sense of the word. The Final Cut, Pink Floyd's latest record, was written by Roger Waters [born 1944] for Eric Fletcher Waters [1913-1944], that is, for a victim of a world war. It begins, even before the first sound, with tape cut-ups of news broadcasts [on the Falklands, NATO fleet transporters, nuclear power stations], which all simply serve to point out that "post-war," both the word and the thing itself, is a "dream," a distortion made to mollify consumer ears. Post War Dream is followed by The Hero's Return. The cut-up returns to its origins, : when army communication equipment, the precursor of the mass medium radio, cuts up the symbolic and the real, orders and corpses. A commemoration which is the flip side of post-war, love and Muzak.

Sweetheart, sweetheart, are you fast asleep, good
'cos that's the only time I can really talk to you
and there is something that I've locked away
a memory that is too painful to withstand the light of day.

When we came back from the war
the banners and flags hung on everyone's door
we danced and we sang in the street
and the church bells rang.

But burning in my heart
a memory smoulders on
of the gunner's dying words
on the intercom. [243]

Thus, the random distribution of newspaper headlines results in the law of information technology and a martial history of rock music. The devil, whose voice is immortalized by Sympathy for the Devil, was there when the revolutionaries of St. Petersburg killed the czar and with their radio transmission "CQ, to all" turned army equipment into global AM radio; he was there when television broadcast both Kennedy assassinations, turned "you and me" into murderers, and exorcized all radio magic. But above all Lucifer screams out which radio spectre, ghost army or tank general VHF and rock music are indebted to:

I rode a tank
held a gen'rals's rank
when the blitzkrieg raged
and the bodies stank. [245]

From War Heroes to Electric Ladyland, : a mnemotechnology of rock music. Nietzsche's gods still had to receive the sacrifice of language; cut-up techniques have done away with that virus. Before Hendrix, the paratrooper of the 101st Airborne, cuts his machine-gun-like guitar to the title song, tape technology operates for its own sake: tympans, jet engines, pistol shots. Writing can write nothing of that. The Songbook of Electric Ladyland notes the tape's forward and backward motion as well as its changing speed and the test points of a blind but manipulable time. [246] The title on the cover, : that which does not cease not to write itself.

[INSERT illustration p. 173]

[INSERT caption p. 173: AND THE GODS MADE LOVE]

Source: http://www.leland.stanford.edu/class/history204i/Kittler/GramFilmTypwriter/Kittler_Gramophone.html#fn0

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