Jacob Wren om teater, risk och feghet

skillnaden mellan måleriets svar på uppfinningen av fotografiet och teaterns svar på uppfinningen av filmen.
/…/
En målare som målade i en rent historisk stil, som om fotografiet aldrig hade uppfunnits, skulle idag närmast ses som löjlig.
Det är snarast en underdrift om jag säger att teaterns svar på filmen inte utvcklade riktigt samma kreativitet eller energi. /…/
Mitt spontana svar blev att eftersom den tidiga filmen var svartvit och stum medan teatern innehöll både färg och dialog kanske hotet inte verkade stort i början. Den senare utvecklingen i form av talfilm och senare färgfilm kanske kom så gradvis att det inte blev någon riktig chock. /…/
Måleriet är grodan som släpps ner i kokande vaten. /…/ Teatern är den långsamt uppvärmda grodan. /…/
Jag vill faktiskt gå så långt som att säga att filmen är teaterns nutida form. /…/ Teatern kommer aldrig bli nutida eftersom den redan, för över hundra år sedan, har ersatts av något mer nutida /…/

Att börja se film och TV som den chock för teaterns grundförutsättninar som de faktiskt är /…/
Vid en jämförelse mellan teatern och filmen kan man snabbt konstatera det uppenbara: en stor styrka för teatern är att publiken och skådespelarna /…/ befinner sig i samma rum. /…/
Deleuze säger: ‘Det moderna faktum är att vi inte längre tror på den här världen. /…/ Det är inte vi som gör filmen, det är världen som påminner om en dålig film.’ /…/ Detta är förstås också den nutida teaterns situation. Att den helt enkelt tycks ‘falsk’, känns mindre verklig än det vi är vana att se på bio eller TV. Just denna känsla av ineffektivitet, patos och overklighet delar teatern med våra förmodat verkliga liv. Eller med andra ord: även teatern liknar ofta en ‘dålig film’.
Jag påstås absolut inte att teatern någonsin kommer att kunna läka detta sår. /…/ Det är obehagligt att titta på en teaterföreställning, eftersom det alltid är obehagligt att befinna sig med okända människor i samma rum /…/
en teatersituation är en skräcksituation: /…/ teaterns feghet är bara andra sidan av medvetandet om att ett rum fullt med främlingar stirrar på en /…/
Givetvis kan man, på den konkreta nivån, säga att det bara handlar om rädslan för att inte behaga publiken, eller för att inte bli förstådd /…/ Men på en subtilare nivå menar jag, tvärtemot vad man kan tro, att det också handlar om en skräck för att allför väl bli förstådd, att få en alltför direkt och intim kontakt, en kontakt som man känner är falsk (eller kanske tom). /…/

Ju mer man försöker hantera denna grundläggande relation mellan skådespelare och publik, desto mer inser man i hur hög grad teatersituationen är okontrollerbar. /…/ Även på den mest konventionella teater fungerar det dock så att alltför mycket kontroll förstör just de aspekter som gör teatern annorlunda än filmen, de aspekter som gör att teatern fortfarande kan vara relevant i vår desperat övermedialiserade värld. /…/
Dessa aspekter går i någon mening aldrig att fånga in, att ‘fånga in’ dem skulle nämligen innebära att på något sätt hålla dem kvar eller spela in dem /…/

Det finns förstås en annan, mer affärsmässig, orsak till att måleriets svar på fotografin var så mycket kraftfullare än teaterns på filmen: bildkonstmarknaden ser helt annordlunda ut än teatermarknaden. En målning köps av en troligen rik individ eller av en institution (som ofta leds av en individ). /…/ Teatern måste sälja många biljetter och måste alltså kunna locka till sig många olika individer. /…/
Om teatern vill förbli en konstform måste den ta problemet med sin egen ständigt ökande irrelevans på allvar och söka möjliga vägar bort från detta gungfly. /…/

Ofta är jag inte säker på om det finns några lösningar. Verklig risk är mycket sällsynt i teatern (liksom i livet).

Jacob Wren: “Världen som liknar en dålig film. Några tankar om teater, risk och feghet”
Visslingar & Rop, 22-23/2007
s. 65-73

Random perspectives on Haruki Murakami

“The dissociation of the world into two sides is a theme which can be seen in many novels of Murakami. In the novel Dance, Dance, Dance, there is another world on the other side of the wall or in the other hotel. In Hard-boiled Wonderland and the end of the World and Kafka on the Shore, two different parallel stories go on; in one chapter one story, in the next chapter the other one. the other world has the clear implication of a mythological world, the world of Gods and of the dead. The connection to and dissociation from the other side is an important theme in Murakami’s novels. /…/
Something essential is lacking and is probably on the other side. Because of the missing essential, this side is not complete; literature, music, and love are not true. And reality, as such, is not complete. /…/ One can think of this as the cultural complex that Murakami is exploring. /…/
So there is a meaningful but sexless relationship on one side and a meaningless sexual relationship on the other side. This dissociation might be reflected in modern Japanese society where teenaged prostitutes and couples in sexless relationships are often reported.
According to Murakami’s novels it is typical for postmodern consciousness in Japan that there is still a sense of lack and longing for what is lost. /…/ The Japanese soul is still between postmodern consciousness and the list mythological world. This dissociation is possible bevause modern consciousness, in the Western sense, has never been established in Japan. /…/ In many ways, Murakami’s novels and the postmodern consciousness of his characters reflext the emergence of a cultural complex in the Japanese collective psyche. /…/
It is probably a misunderstanding to try to overcome the dissociation and find literal union again. As Jung says, we should not try to overcome the dissociation, but to be thaught by it. /…/
If negation and dissociation are dominant, how can people be connected? In this novel, phone calls and letters are important. In other novels or Murakami, the computer plays an important role. It is not the problem of media to be understood. The point is that there is no directness.”

Toshio Kawai: ‘Postmodern consciousness in the novels of Haruki Murakami’. In The. Cultural Complex, eds. T. Singer & S. Kimbles. London: Routledge. Murakami, H. (2000).

“It was demonstrated in an earlier chapter that the vexed question of Japanese modernity turns on the problem of an inadequately defined subject and subjectivity. /…/
In Nejimakidori, Murakami has utilized three versions or aspects of the sublime in order to deal with the complex issue of referentiality in such a way as to not foreclose new ways of thinking about the subject of/in Japanese modernity. These three versions can be described, in broad terms, as the ‘psychoanalytic sublime’, the ‘historical sublime’ and the ‘political sublime’, and it will be demonstrated that the major narrative strands of Nejimakidori variously employ one or more of these. Each of these versions of the sublime indicates and engagement with the problem of ‘presenting the unpresentable’ as a disjunctive modality of the simultaneous affirmation and negation of the subject, whereby the limits of such subjectivity remain uncertain and tentative.
In narrative terms, these aspects of the sublime are integrated through the discursive trope of irony proposed by White, and assume their apotheosis in the figure of Wataya Noboru, where their threat to subjectivity is expressed in terms of an incommensurability in the modalities of presentation of that which cannot be directly presented – ultimately, that is, in the form of what Lyotard has termed the ‘differend’. /…/
we nevertheless cannot ignore the subject of Japanese modernity in terms of a tendency towards a system of pervasive, ongoing ‘fascism’ in the post-was system of political and economic practices and structures, aptly described by Miyoshi and Harootunian under the rubric of the term ‘emperorism’. Nejimakidori is implicitly concerned with all of these issues, and this fact is justification enough to make it a text worthy of serious critical attention. /…/
The aspects of the sublime with which we will be working in these chapters are based primarily on Kant’s discussion of the sublime /…/, as well as on Hayden White’s ‘historical sublime’ and Lyotard’s re-reading of the Kantian sublime and subsequent invocation of a form of ‘political sublime’. /…/

in our discussion of Nejimakidori we are faced with a consideration of whether it is possible (or indeed desirable) to reconcile three seemingly irreconcilable perspectives on the nature of historu:
(i) History is a recuperable, representable reality which can be spoken and written.
(ii) History is simulacral – it arises merely as an effect of speaking and writing, and is not co-extensive with any referent.
(iii) History inheres only in the unutterable aporia of meaning/sense, arrayed between memory, thought, speech and writing.
Clearly, these competing views on the nature of history are related to the question of subjectivity and Japanese modernity, and turn on the possibility of being able to stipulate history-as-subject, or, alternatively, the subject in/of history. The first proposition incorporates what have been broadly described as ‘reconstructionist’ (empiricist) and ‘constructionist’ (’social theory’) forms of history. The second and third propositions are somewhat complementary, and indicatice of what can be described as a ‘post-structuralist- view of history. /…/

“The opening passage of Nejimakidori, with its cacophony of sound-images – boiling water, whistling, ringing telephone, and radio broadcast – sets a remarkably ‘auditory’ mood for the presented world of the novel. It also helps establish the physicality, the marked corporeality of many of the protagonist’s narrated experiences. /…/
In Nejimakidori, there is no doubt that the focus on the auditory sense broadens the range of interpretative possibilities of the work as fictional art. /…/ The central trope of the mysterious, screeching cry of the unseen ‘wind-up’ bird which marks out ‘individual’ and ‘historical’ time and is often heard by characteers in the in-between state of dreaming and waking, consciousness and unconsciousness, is one of the most obvious examples here, but there are various episodes throughout the novel in which specifically auditory hallucinations and images figure. /…/
In terms of the social dimension, Koizumi suggests that in Nejimakidori Murakami is conducting an original and sustained critique of the hegemony of the visual in contemporary Japanese culture. /…/ stridently ‘anti-mass media’, ‘anti-televisual’ – in short, anti-visual /…/
This critique of the visual exposes the myth of Japan as the ‘information society’ (jôhô shakai) which emerged in the eighties, and is clearly connoted in the figure of the thirty-year-old unemployed Boku whose life is effectively in moratorium mode – he neither watches television nor reads newspapers – and is connected to the outside world only through the auditory modality of the telephone.
In stark contrast to this, claims Koizumi, the figure of Wataya Noboru, the consummate political performer and ‘television man’, violates Kanô Kureta [Kreta Kano] through an ‘act of seeing’ – and this is part of a larger, generalized violence of the visual that permeates and controls every corner of contemporary daily Japanese life. /…/
taking as our starting point the basic fact of the sign as being comprised of an audio-image (signifier) and a visual-image (signified), we are left to ponder the implication of how the privileging of the auditory over the visual might prescribe the range of subject positions available to the reader of Nejimakidori. /…/
Freud acknowledge that although in dreams we do ‘make use of auditory images’, in these non-waking states ‘we think predominantly in visual images’. So there is, in terms of the Freudian system, a clear distinction between the visual and audio in relation to the unconscious. /…/
From this it can be surmised that if we could identify a strong opposition between the audio and the visual as dominant narrative tropes or modalities in Nejimakidori, we could extrapolate from the reading of that text an implied threat to the Lacanian symbolic order, which suggests a movement back to the presymbolic stage of the imaginary and the undifferentiated self-perception of the subject, in a way not dissimilar to – and even indicative of – the moment of the subject just prior to abjection. It will be argued later that this is perhaps one of the effects of the privileging of the auditory: to indicate a potential dissolution of the presented Oedipal configuration in Nejimakidori, constructed around the figure of Wataya Noboru.”

Michael Seats: “Murakami Haruki: The Simulacrum in Contemporary Japanese Culture”

David Wellbery - Post-Hermeneutic Criticism

Foreword to Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900 S. xi-xvi

Kittler’s work cannot be classified as Derridean, Foucauldian, or Lacanian; rather, it grounds itself on what might be termed the joint achievement of the three. Perhaps this is the major methodological innovation of Kittler’s book. By eliciting from the divergent elaborations of post-structuralist thought a collective epistemological apparatus, Kittler establishes a positive research program for a post-hermeneutic criticism.

The first component of this program–the premise that determines its overall perspective–might be termed the “presupposition of exteriority.” The task of Kittler’s critical investigation, in other words, is not to reabsorb the scattered utterances and inscriptions of the past into an inwardness that would endow them with meaning, be this inwardness the reflexivity of the subject as in Romantic hermeneutics or the reflexivity of language itself as in Gadamer. Rather, he practices what Foucault, in an early essay on Maurice Blanchot, called the “thinking of the outside,” the thinking of language as a domain recalcitrant to internalization. Later in his career, Foucault named this domain “discourse” and set out to develop a lexicon of exteriority–series, event, discontinuity, materiality– with which to describe it. Kittler’s discourse analysis follows the Foucauldian lead in that it seeks to delineate the apparatuses of power, storage, transmission, training, reproduction, and so forth that make up the conditions of factual discursive occurrences. The object of study is not what is said or written but the fact - the brute and often brutal fact–that it is said, that this and not rather something else is inscribed.

Inscription, in its contingent facticity and exteriority, is the irreducible given of Kittler’s analysis, as the original German title of his book– Aufschreibesysteme–makes evident. That title, a neologism invented by Dr. Schreber, can be most literally translated as “systems of writing down” or “notation systems.” It refers to a level of material deployment that is prior to questions of meaning. At stake here are the constraints that select an array of marks from the noisy reservoir of all possible written constellations, paths and media of transmission, or mechanisms of memory. A notation system or, as we have chosen to translate, a discourse network has the exterior character–the outsideness–of a technology. In Kittler’s view, such technologies are not mere instruments with which “man” produces his meanings; they cannot be grounded in a philosophical anthropology. Rather, they set the framework within which something like “meaning,” indeed, something like “man,” become possible at all.

Writing (or arche-writing) as the condition of possibility of metaphysical conceptuality: this, of course, is a major tenet of Derrida’s work. In Lacan, the cognate notion is that our existence is a function of our relation to the signifier. Kittler concretizes this post-structuralist theme by situating his analysis not at the level of writing or the signifier in general, but rather at the level of the historically specific machineries–scriptural and otherwise–that in their various arrangements organize information processing. His post-hermeneutic criticism, in other words, renders explicit and productive the tendency toward a radical historicism that is in fact immanent to the work of all the post-structuralist thinkers. To be sure, this historicism is no longer the narrative of a subject–a hero of knowledge, labor, or liberty–in the manner of the master plots of modernity; nor is it a particularist anamnesis of the lived past such as the socalled new historicism pursues. Like Foucault’s, Kittler’s historiography has a systematic thrust, tends toward the delineation of types. These types, denoted simply by the dates 1800 and 1900, are the discourse networks - the linkages of power, technologies, signifying marks, and bodies–that have orchestrated European culture for the past two hundred years.

The presupposition of exteriority, I claimed, determines the overall perspective of Kittler’s post-hermeneutic criticism. The field within which that criticism operates, its domain of inquiry, is carved out by a second major premise, which I shall call the “presupposition of mediality.” Here too Kittler develops insights that emerged within post-structuralism, for instance, in the investigations of the cinematic apparatus carried out by Christian Metz and Jean-Louis Baudry, investigations themselves strongly influenced by the Lacanian notion of the unconscious as a machine. Of course, the studies of Metz and Baudry are concerned with the medium of film alone, and it is principally in the area of film studies that, in both Europe and the United States, the concept of medium is broadly employed. The decisive methodological step undertaken by Kittler is to generalize the concept of medium, to apply it to all domains of cultural exchange. Whatever the historical field we are dealing with, in Kittler’s view, we are dealing with media as determined by the technological possibilities of the epoch in question. Mediality is the general condition within which, under specific circumstances, something like “poetry” or “literature” can take shape. Post-hermeneutic literary history (or criticism), therefore, becomes a sub-branch of media studies.

This reclassification of literary criticism necessarily elicits a rethinking of its object of study. First and most obviously, if literature is medially constituted–that is, if it is a means for the processing, storage, and transmission of data–then its character will change historically according to the material and technical resources at its disposal. And it will likewise change historically according to the alternative medial possibilities with which it competes. In this regard, too, Kittler’s work leads to a radical historicism that finally dissolves the universality of the concept of literature. Moreover, this dissolution does not bear merely on distant epochs such as the medieval period, where the question of orality versus literacy has long been a focus of research. It operates in our own historical backyard, severing, as Kittler shows, Romantic “poetry” (produced under the monopoly of print and universal alphabetization) from modern “literature” (where writing enters into competition with the technical media of phonograph and film). From this perspective, the typewriter, still a component of our historical a priori, can be seen to initiate a fundamental mutation in the mode of existence of language.

But the notion of mediality recasts our notion of literature in another sense. As soon as we conceive of literature as medially instantiated, then we must view its meaning as the product of a selection and rarefaction. All media of transmission require a material channel, and the characteristic of every material channel is that, beyond - and, as it were, against - the information it carries, it produces noise and nonsense. What we call literature, in other words, stands in an essential (and again, historically variable) relation to a non-meaning, which it must exclude. It is defined not by what it means, but by the difference between meaning and nonmeaning, information and noise, that its medial possibilities set into place. This difference, obviously, is inaccessible to hermeneutics. It is the privileged locus, however, of post-hermeneutic thought.

A criticism oriented by the presuppositions of exteriority and mediality has no place for creative human subjects, allows no room to psychology and its internalizations, refuses to anchor itself in a notion of universal human being. This non-anthropological bent of Kittler’s work will seem disturbing to many readers of the book, who will rightly ask: What is the interest that motivates this critical enterprise? Where are its bonds of solidarity? An answer to these questions, I believe, is implied by the third premise of post-hermeneutic criticism, the premise that defines not its analytical perspective (exteriority), nor its domain of study (mediality), but rather its point of reference and focus of concern. I call this premise the “presupposition of corporeality.”

The reason that the concept of corporeality defines the point of reference for post-hermeneutic criticism is clear. The body is the site upon which the various technologies of our culture inscribe themselves, the connecting link to which and from which our medial means of processing, storage, and transmission run. Indeed, in its nervous system, the body itself is a medial apparatus and an elaborate technology. But it is also radically historical in the sense that it is shaped and reshaped by the networks to which it is conjoined. The forerunner of this thinking in terms of corporeality, of course, is Nietzsche, whose philosophy follows, as he put it, the body’s guiding thread and whose aesthetics, as he often insisted, is a physiology. Among the post-structuralists, Foucault cleaves most closely to this aspect of the Nietzschean program, especially in his work on the history of punishment and on sexuality. But in Lacan, too, for whom subject formation takes place at the intersection of the body and the sign)fier, and in Derrida, whose reading of Freud focuses on the question of intra-psychic inscription, the theme of corporeality is insistent. One widespread reading of post- structuralism claims that it eliminates the concept of the subject. It would be more accurate to say that it replaces that concept with that of the body, a transformation which disperses (bodies are multiple), complexifies (bodies are layered systems), and historicizes (bodies are finite and contingent products) subjectivity rather than exchanging it for a simple absence.

The presupposition of corporeality has two major methodological consequences for post-hermeneutic criticism. The first is that the question of agency recedes into the background. The body is not first and foremost an agent or actor, and in order to become one it must suffer a restriction of its possibilities: the attribution of agency is a reduction of complexity. As a result, culture is no longer viewed as a drama in which actors carry out their various projects. Rather, the focus of analysis shifts to the processes that make that drama possible: to the writing of the script, the rehearsals and memorizations, the orders that emanate from the directorial authority. This (in my view) important conceptual shift can be formulated somewhat less metaphorically as follows: post-hermeneutic criticism replaces the foundational notion of praxis (the materialist version of subjective agency) with that of training. Culture is just that: the regimen that bodies pass through; the reduction of randomness, impulse, forgetfulness; the domestication of an animal, as Nietzsche claimed, to the point where it can make, and hold to, a promise.

The second methodological consequence of the presupposition of corporeality is that the sufferance of the body, its essential pathos, becomes a privileged locus for the analysis of discourse networks in terms of both their systematic character and their effectivity. In other words, the point at which discourse networks reveal most sharply their specific impress is in the pathologies they produce. Just as post-hermeneutic criticism focuses on the difference between information and noise, sense and nonsense, that defines every medium, so too it attends to the difference between normal behavior and aberrance (including madness) that lends every cultural formation its identity. The victims who people Kittler’s book–the Bettinas, the Gunderodes, the Nietzsches, the Schrebers–speak the truth of the culture they suffer. Whoever would look for the bonds of solidarity that orient Kittler’s investigation will find them here: in its unmistakable compassion for the pathos of the body in pain. Hermeneutics would appropriate this corporeal singularity in the construction of a meaning. Post-hermeneutic criticism, however, draws its responsibility precisely from the unassimilable otherness of the singular and mortal body. This is the ethical reason it stops making sense.

Marshall McLuhan on recorded sound

From “Understanding Media” (Routledge Classics, 2001), first published 1964

300: “The phonograph, which owes its origin to the electrical telegraph and the telephone, had not manifested its basically electric form and function until the tape recorder released it from it mechanical trappings.”

300: “Just how obliquely the phonograph was at first received is indicated in the observation of John Philip Sousa, the brass-band director and composer. He commented: ‘With the phonograph vocal exercises will be out of vogue! Then what of the national throat? Will it not weaken? What of the national chest? Will it not shrink?’
One fact Sousa had grasped: The phonograph is an extension and amplification of the voice that may well have diminished individual vocal activity, much as the car had reduced pedestrian activity.”

302: “In [Edison's] own case, his determination to give the phonograph, like the telephone, a direct practical use in business procedures led to his neglect of the instrument as a means of entertainment. Failure to foresee the phonograph as a means of entertainment was really a failure to grasp the meaning of the electric revolution in general. In our time we are reconsiled to the phonograph as a toy and a solace; but press, radio, and TV have also acquired the same dimension of entertainment. Meantime, enterteinment pushed to an extreme becomes the main form of business and politics.”

303: “Electric media, because of their total ‘field’ character, tend to eliminate the fragmented specialties of form and function that we have long accepted as the heritage of alphabet, printing, and mechanization. The brief and compressed history of the phonograph includes all phases of the written, the printed, and the mechanized word. It was the advent of the electric tape recorder that only a few years ago released the phonograph from its temporary involvment in mechanical culture.”

304-305: “It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of complex mechanical forms such as film and phonograph as the prelude to the automation of human song and dance. As this automation of human voice and gesture had approached perfection, so the human work force approached automation. Now in the electric age the assembly line with its human hands disappears, and electric automation brings about a withdrawal of the work force from indystry. Instead of being automated themselves – fragmented in task and function – as had been the tendency under mechanization, men in the electric age move increasingly to involvement in diverse jobs simultneously, and to the work of learning, and to the programming of computers.
This revolutionary logic inherent in the electric age was made fairly clear in the early electric forms of telegraph and telephone that inspired the ‘talking machine’. These new forms that did so much to recover the vocal, auditory, and mimetic world that jad been repressed by the printed word, also inspired the strange new rhythms of ‘the jazz age’.”

305: “Jazz is, indeed, a form of dialogue among instrumentalists and dancers alike. Thus it seemed to make an abrupt break with the homogenous and repetitive rhythms of the smooth waltz. /…/ The waltz is precise, mechanical, and military, as its history manifests. /…/ To the eighteenth century and to the age of Napoleon, the citizen armies seemed to be an individualistic release from th feudal framework of courtly hierarchies. Hence the association of waltz with noble savage, meaning no more than freedom from status and hierarchic deference. The waltzers were all uniform and equal, having free movement in any part of the hall.”

306: “If jazz is considered as a break with mechanism in the direction of the discontinous, the participant, the spontaneous and improvisational, it can also be seen as a return to a sort of oral poetry in which performance is both creation and composition. It is a truism among jazz performers that recorded jazz is ‘as stale as yesterday’s newspaper’. Jazz is alive, like conversation; and like conversation it depends upon a repertory of available themes. But performance is composition. Such performance insures maximal participation among players and dancers alike.”

306: “The separate virtuousity of voice and instruments became the basis of the great musical developments of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The same kind of fragmentation and specialism in the arts and scieces made possible memmoth results in industry and in military enterprise, and in massive cooperative enterprises such as the newspaper and the symphony orchestra.

306-307: “Certainly the phonograph as a product of industrial, assembly-line organization and distribution showed little of the electric qualities that had inspired its growth in the mind of Edison. /…/
It was radio that finally injected a full electric charge into the world of the phonograph. the radio receiver of 1924 was already superior in sound quality, and soon began to depress the phonograph and record business. Eventually, radio restored the record busines by extending popular taste in the direction of the classics.
The real break came after the Second War with the availability of the tape recorder. This meant the end of the incision recording and its attendant surface noise.”

308: “To be in the presence of performing musicians is to experience their touch and handling of instruments as tactile and kinetic, not just as resonant. So it can be said that hi-fi is not any quest for abstract effects of sound in separation from the other senses. With hi-fi, the phonograph meets the TV tactile challenge.
Stereo sound, a further development, is ‘all-around’ or ‘wrap around’ sound. /…/ The hi-fi changeover was really for music what cubism had been for painting, and what symbolism had been for literature; namely, the acceptance of multiple facets and planes in a single experience.”

309: “But the rape recorder in combination with l.p. revolutionized the repertory of classical music. Just as tape meant the new study of spoken rather than written languages, so it brought in the entire musical culture of many centuries and countries.”

309: “A bried summary of the technological events relating to the phonograph might go this way: /…/
The telephone: speech without walls.
The phonograph: music hall without walls.
The photograph: museum without walls.
The electric light: space without walls.
The movie, radio, and TV: classroom without walls.
Man the food-gatherer reappers incongruously as information-gatherer. In this role, electronic man is no less a nomad than his paleolithic ancestors.

Hans Magnus Enzensberger: Constituents of a Theory of the Media (1970)

Originally printed in the New Left Review, no. 64, 1970, pp. 13-36.

Potentialities of communication media
“For the first time in history, the media are making possible mass participiation in a social and socialized productive process, the practical means of which are in the hands of the masses themselves. Such a use of them would bring the communications media, which up to now have not deserved the name, into their own. In its present form, equipment like television or film does not server communication but prevents it. It allows no reciprocal action between transmitter and receiver /…/
This state of affairs, however, cannot be justified technically. On the contrary. Electronic techniques recognize no contradiction in principle between transmitter and receiver. Every transistor radio is, by the matters of its construction, at the same time a potential transmitter; it can interact with other receivers by circuit reversal. The development from a mere distribution medium to a communications medium is technically not a problem. It is consciously prevented for understandable political reasons. The technical distinction between receivers and transmitters reflects the social division of labor into producers and consumers.”

“The radio wars of the 1950s demonstrated that in the realm of communications, national sovereignty is condemned to wither away. The further development of satellites will deal it the coup the grâce. Quarantine regulations for information, such as were promulgated by Fascism and Stalinism, are only possible today at the cost of deliberate industrial regression.
Example. The Soviet bueraucracy, that is to sat the most widespread and complicated bueraucracy in the world, has to deny itself almost entirely an elementary piece of organizational equipment, the duplicating machine, because this instrument potentially makes everyone a printer. /…/ It is clear that Soviet society has to pay an immense price for the suppression of its own productive resources – clumsy procedures, misinformations, faux frais.”

Against unionist interpretations of media
“There is the danger of underestimating growing conflicts in the media field, of neutralizing them, of interpreting them merely in terms of trade unionism or liberalism, on the lines of traditional labor struggles or as the clash of special interests /…/ An appreciation of this kind does not go far enough and remains bogged down in tactical arguments.”

Contradiction
“the contradiction between the present constitution of the media and their revolutionary potential /…/ leads, subjectively, to a split between a puritanical view of political action and the area of private ‘leisure’; objectively, it leads to a split between politically active groups and subcultural groups.”

Manipulation?
“The New Left of the 1960s has reduced the development of the media to a single concept – that of manipulation. /…/ it now threatens to degenerate into a mere slogan which conceals more than it is able to illuminate /…/
The liberal superstition that in political and social questions there is such a thing as pure, unmanipulated truth seems to enjoy remarkable currency among the socialist Left. It is the unspoken basic premise of the manipulation thesis. /…/
The electronic media do away with cleanliness; they are by their nature ‘dirty’. That is part of their productive power. In terms of structure, they are antisecterian – a further reason why the Left /…/ has little idea what to do with them. The desire for a cleanly defined ‘line’ and for the suppression of ‘deviations’ is anachronistic and now serves only one’s own need for security. /…/
It often seems as if it were precisely because of their progressive potential that the media are felt to be an immense threatening power, because for the first time they present a basic challenge to bourgeois culture”

“At the very beginning of the student revolt, during the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, the computer was a favorite target for aggression.”

“Manipulation – ethymologically, ‘handling’ – means technical treatment of a given material with a particular goal in mind. /…/
Thus every use of the media presupposes manipulation. /…/ There is no such thing as unmanipulated writing, filming or broadcasting. /…/ A revolutionary plan should not require the manipulators to disappear; on the contrary, it must make everyone a manipulator.”

“An all-too-widely disseminated thesis maintains that present-day capitalism lives by the exploitation of unreal needs. /…/ A socialist movement ought not to denounce these needs, but take then seriously, investigate them, and make them politically productive. /…/
These desires are not – or are not primarily – internalized rules of the game as played by the capitalist system. They have physiological roots and can no longer be suppressed. Consumption as spectacle is – in parody form – the anticipation of a utopian situation. /…/
‘Open spaces’ and ‘free time’ are concepts which corral and neutralize the urgent wishes of the masses.”

“Intellectual property”, producers and consumers
“The new media are oriented toward action, not contemplation; /…/ Their attitude to time is completely opposed to that of bourgeois culture, which aspires to possession, that is, to extension in time, best of all, to eternity. The media produce no objects that can be hoarded and auctioned. They do away completely with ‘intellectual property’ /…/
It is wrong to regard media equipment as mere means of consumption. It is always, in principle, also means of production /…/
The contradiction between producers and consumers is not inherent in the electronic media; on the contrary, it has to be artificially reinforced by economic and administrative measures. /…/
– the prevailing laws for control of the air are anachronistic. They recall the time when the operation of a printing pres was depentent on an imperial license.”

“It has long been clear from apparatus like miniature and 8 mm movie cameras, as well as the tape recorder, which are in actual fact already in the hands of the masses, that the individual, so long as he remains isolated, can become with their help at best an amateur but not a producer. Even so potent a means of production as the shortwave transmitter has been tamed in this way and reduced to a harmless and inconsequential hobby in the hands of scattered radio hams. /…/
Any socialist strategy for the media must, on the contrary, strive to end the isolation of the individual participants from the social learning and production process. /…/ Anyone who expects to be emancipated by technological hardware, or by a system of hardware however structured, is the victim of an obscure belief in progress.”

Georg Lukács as example of a reactionary position
“‘Anything that culture produces’ can, according to Lukács, ‘have real value only if it is in itself valuable, if the creation of each individual product is from the standpoint of its maker and a single, finite proces. It must, however, be a proces conditioned by the human potentialities and capabilities of the creator. The most typical example of such a process is the work of art, where the entire genesis of the work is exklusively the result of the artist’s labor /…/ In highly developed mechanical industry, on the other hand, any connection between the product and the creator is abolished. The human being serves the machine, he adapts to it.’ /…/
These nostalgic backward glances at the landscape of the last century, these reactionary ideals, are already the forerunners of socialist realism, which mercilessy galvanized and then buried those very ‘cultural values’ which Lukács rode out to rescue.”

On the N.Y. avantgarde and McLuhan
“From the Cabaret Voltaire to Andy Warhol’s Factory, /…/ the apolitical have made much more radical progress in dealing with the media than any grouping of the Left. /…/ Today this apolitical avant-garde has found its ventriloquist and prophet in Marshall McLuhan, an author who admittedly lacks any analytical categories for the understanding of social processes, but whose confused books serve as a quarry of undigested observations for the media industry. /…/
This charlatan’s most famous saying – ‘the medium is the message’ – perhaps deserves more attention. In spite of its provocative idiocy, it betrays more than its author knows. /…/
The complementary mistake consists in the widespread illusion that media are neutral instruments by which any ‘messages’ one pleases can be transmitted without regard for their structure or for the structure of the medium. In the East European countries the television newsreaders read fifteen-minute long conference communiqués and Central Committee resolutions which are not even suitable for printing in a newspaper, clearly under the delusion that they might fascinate a public of millions.
The sentence, ‘the medium is the message’, transmits yet another mesage, however, and a much more important one. It tells us that the bourgeoisie does indeed have all possible means at its disposal to communicate something to is, but that it has nothing more to say. /…/ It wants the media as such and to no purpose.
This wish has been shared for decades and given symbolical expression by an artistic avant-garde whose program logically admits only the alternative of negative signals and amorphous noise. Example: the already outdated ‘literature of silence’, Warhol’s films in which every thing can happen at once or nothing at all, and John Cage’s forty-five-minute-long Lecture on Nothing (1959).”

Writing and talking
“Written literature has, historically speaking, played a dominant role for only a few centuries. /…/ Now it is being succeeded by the age of the electronic media, which tend once more to make people speak. /…/
The formalization of written language permits and encourages the repression of opposition. In speech, unresolved contradictions betray themselves by pauses, hesitations, slips of the tongue, repetitions, anacoluthons, quite apart from phrasing, mimicry, gesticulation, pace, and volume. The aesthetic of written literature scorns such involuntary factors as ‘misdirections’. It demands, explicitly or implicitly, the smoothing out of contradictions, rationalization, regularization of the spoken form irrespective of content. /…/
Structurally, the printed book is a medium that operates as a monologue, isolating producer and reader. /…/
None of the characteristics that distinguish written and printed literature apply to the electronic media. Microphone and camera abolish the class character of the mode of production (not of the production itself). /…/
As at present constituted, radio, film, and television are burdened to excess with authoritarian characteristics, the characteristics of the monologue, which they have inherited from older methods of production – and that is no accident. These outworn elements in today’s media aesthetics are demanded by the social relations. They do not follow from the structure of the media. On the contrary, they go against it, for the structure demands interaction.”

Original and reproduction, document and fiction
“In the productions of the consciousness industry, the difference between the ‘genuine’ original and the reproduction disappears /…/ Strictly speaking, it has shrunk to its legal dimensions. A document is something the ‘forging’ – that is, the reproduction – of which is punishable by imprisonment. This definition naturally has no theoretical meaning. The reason is that a reproduction, to the extent that its technical quality is good enough, cannot be distinguished in any way from the original, irrespective of whether it is a painting, a passport, or a blank note. The legal concept of the documentary record is only pragmatically useful, it serves only to protext economic interests.
The productions of the electronic media, by their nature, evade such distinctions as those between documentary and feature films. They are in every case explicitely determined by the given situation. The producer can never pretend, like the traditional novelist, ‘to stand above things’. He is therefore partisan from the start. This fact finds formal expression in his techniques. Cutting, editing, dubbing – these are techniques for conscious manipulation without which the use of the new media is inconceivable. /…/ The material, whether ‘documentary’ or ‘fiction’, is in each case only a prototype, a half-finished article, and the more closely one examines its origins, the more blurred the difference becomes. (Develop more precisely. The reality in which a camera turns up is always faked, e.g. the moon landing.)”

Friedrich Kittler - The City Is a Medium

Just as we are accustomed–when not also subjected–to absorbing energy in different forms at home, we will also find it quite easy there to receive or absorb accelerated changes and oscillations which our sensory organs pick up and integrate to form all that we know. I don’t know whether philosophers have ever dreamed of a society for the domestic distribution of sensory reality.

Paul Valéry ²

Capital. ³ The name already says it: Capitals are named after the human body. The state (since the Greeks) has been conceived of as an organism, whose head is its capital. This capital, in turn, is ruled by a chief, whose name once more means just that, the head.

Historically, the analogy can be shown to have been true. The prehistoric implosion of villages or entire countrysides and the subsequent emergence of the city was due, as Mumford illustrates, less to economic necessity than to the arms monopoly of a warlord. Plato, as lawmaker for an ideal city, proposed that its size be limited to the range of a voice, which would broadcast laws or commands.

And for centuries–from the prehistoric formation of cities, which was also the beginning of high culture or history, through the residential seats of baroque power–the military head remained architectonically visible: as fortress or acropolis, citadel or palace. Not until the first in-dustrial revolution did a growth begin, whose spread, in Mumford’s eyes, changed the face of the city and went, in the name of pure technology, beyond the ecological necessity of living together: megalopolis.

The description, however, of a digression is often itself a digression. When we cling to the clear-cut centrality of the head in thinking the concept “capital,” it may be (as in Foucault’s thesis “in political thought and analysis”) that “we still have not cut off the head of the king.” ⁴ The monarchs, to whom Europe owes most of its capitals, might thereby be said to have transcended architecture and achieved immortality in the head of theory itself. But if ‘man’ with his ecological necessity is only a miniature of these potentates, it then becomes possible to decipher “head” and “capital” from technology rather than vice versa.

TECHNOLOGY. What strikes the eye of the passerby as a growth or entropy is technology, that is, information. Since cities no longer lie within the panopticon of the cathedral or castle and can no longer be enclosed by walls or fortifications, a network made up of intersecting networks dissects and connects the city–in particular its fringes, peripheries, and tangents. Regardless of whether these networks transmit information (telephone, radio, television) or energy (water supply, electricity, highway), they all represent forms of information. (If only because every modern energy flow requires a parallel control network.) Even in those unthinkable times when energy still needed beasts of burden like Sinbad and information required messengers like the first marathon runner, networks existed. They just hadn’t been built yet or, in technician’s jargon, implemented. The narrow, rugged mule trail was replaced by the railway and the highway, which in turn have been replaced by no less transient copper and fiber optic cables.

NETWORKS. It is common in the open spaces of the city to see the skeletal infrastructure on the backside of a building–these are networks, too.

To best reconstruct the way out of a labyrinth (as the Greeks were said to have done in reading the ruined foundations of Knossos, Phaistos, or Gournia), one doesn’t need to sketch the still visible connecting walls, rather their inverse: the invisible passages between path and door. Thus (in mathematical terminology) a “tree” takes shape, whose bifurcations distinguish the dead ends from the exits.

Or one can, like Claude Shannon, head mathematician for Bell Telephone laboratories, construct a mechanical mouse, capable of nosing its way through the labyrinth on the basis of trial and error. Whereas the mouse would be able to optimize city plans without Ariadne’s thread, Shannon himself was able to optimize an invisible something else: the telephone network in America.

GRAPHS. Mathematics first began around 1770 to take networks, such as the ones above, into account. Topology and graph theory not only reflect modernity, they are, in fact, its beginnings.

In the city still known at that time as Königsberg, seven bridges crossed the Pregel. A city is not only “the corollary of a street,” ⁵ rather by virtue of its network of rivers, canals, and news channels, a city is “the point at which all these paths meet.” ⁶ Leonhard Euler, newly appointed from medieval Basel as mathematician to the new capital St. Petersburg, was moved to question whether or not it would be possible to cross all seven of these bridges over the Pregel once and only once on the same round-trip. ⁷ Euler’s proof that it could never be done disregards all topographic data such as the layout of streets, their twists and turns, and their blind alleys. Euler could just as well have drawn the city plan of Königsberg on a rubber mat, since graph theory consists of just two abstract elements: coordinate points and their connecting lines. From these two abstract elements, all structures in space can be reconstructed: trees and stars, junctions and bridges, rings and hubs, regions and countries–and maps.

Place de l’Etoile, Ringstraße, and Anulare: these graphs have imprinted themselves upon our imagination. Nonetheless, city road maps don’t describe streets and railway lines any more concretely than that rubber mat geometry. “The space in which the modern city unfolds its structures is clearly an abstract space in which the individual constraints are of a topological order; seen from the point of view of the unfolding of these structures, the territory is simply the surface effect of its own topicality.” ⁸

What returns in the form of the topographic passion of the nineteenth century, that is, of the generals, resembles in and of itself the oldest maps: On the Tabula Peutingeriana, which maps out early St. Pölten ⁹ as a relay station within the Roman postal system, the north-south boundaries (probably to better transport the medium “map” across country) have become so frayed that land, sea, and mountain formations are barely discernible. An empire, the Roman empire, vanishing into a pure media landscape.

INTERSECTIONS. Roads between cities are, nevertheless, the single connection which the Peutingeriana maps out. The Roman postal system ignored other arteries of life, such as aqueducts and, as Hölderlin wrote, the “shadowless streets” of the sea. Border towns were coordinate points along a line, relay stations created the tangents, while Rome, where all roads proverbially met, formed the axis of an entire system of intersections. Because no other system intersected or crossed the road system, one level sufficed to represent the graph. The proliferation, thanks to technology, of pure media channels renders that impossible. In a well-known textbook example, three houses need to be hooked up to three different energy systems–gas, water, and electricity–without one connection crossing the other. But this GWE-graph is not a flat graph, that is, the various connections cannot be flattened. A city, likewise, is not a flattenable graph. In a city, networks overlap upon other networks. Every traffic light, every subway transfer, and every post office, as well as all the bars and bordellos, speak for this fact. Bridges, of course, span other rivers besides the Pregel and railway viaducts don’t just cross the Traisen. ¹⁰ Modern city planners doubtlessly have tried to model the networks in Chandigarh, Brasília, and other new cities using a tree-graph whose branches and stems do not intersect and can thus be conflated. However, “a city is not a tree,” rather a “half-grid” whose overlappings themselves belong to the system. ¹¹

CAPITALS expand upon this rule exponentially. It is not alone the state with its limes or system of borders, its self-induced “resonance” (MP 540), which defines the city. Rather in capitals, networks between cities overlap upon other networks between other cities. Beneath, upon, and above the ground, the overloaded nodes make a mockery of every conflation. Time in the city is a function of transfers, turn-ons and turn-offs. Jacques Offenbach’s “Paris Life” (1866) is the first play to be set in a train station. In Vienna, imperial Austria connected the intersection of its four European railways and their terminals with an internal rail ring, which at the time was connected to the outlying regions by a light railroad. The sheer frequency of actual intersections in the capitals and metropoles is Tyche, that is, Fortuna or Chance, whom Valéry envisioned upon first awakening in Paris to the endless rush of traffic and then went on to celebrate as the prerequisite for all fortuitous conjunctions. Forgetting for a moment the rolled head of the king–the capital is clearly the “daughter of great numbers.” ¹²

MEDIA exist to process, record, and transmit numbers. A Greek city, probably Milet, provides us with two of our oldest forms of media: the coin and the vowel alphabet. ¹³ Rome, in order to extend itself from a city into a state, adopted the most advanced form of oriental transmission media: the Achaemenidian postal system. ¹⁴

Thus our terms for media, if not directly, like “heart” or “brain of a circuit,” derived from the human body, stem nonetheless from the city. From the day Shannon applied George Booles’s circuit algebra to a coupling of telegraph relays, the elements which are logically the most simple, and which have no memory, have been known as gates or ports. Circuits, on the other hand, whose initial and final positions are not only a function of the gates and ports, but also of the circuit’s own prehistory, presuppose (no less municipal here) a built-in memory. When the World War II mathematician John von Neumann laid down the prin-ciples for sequential working-off or computation for almost all present-day computer “architectures,” he bestowed the fitting name “bus” on the parallel channels between hard drive, gate, and memory, and thus extended the Biedermeier tradition of metropolitan traffic. Von Neumann’s prophesy that only computers themselves would be capable of planning their own, more intelligent, next generation, because the complex knot of networks would surpass the planning ability of the engineers, has been fulfilled by computer programs called “routing”: network models, like Shannon’s mouse, which operate as if they were street plans (with all the aggravations of jaywalking and traffic jams). Entire cities made of silicon, silicon oxide, and gold wire have since arisen. Yet the living units or houses in these cities must be measured in terms of molecules whose total surface area, even after having been reproduced millions of times, barely fill a square millimeter. The technologic media miniaturize the city, while magnifying the entropy of megalopolis. Not only have the technological traffic modules of modernity, such as parking garages and airports, rendered obsolescent the age-old module “life-sized,” indeed, it seems to me that modulization itself has been rendered obsolescent. And graph theory is responsible. The more one thinks about a capital like Paris, wrote Valéry, the more one learns about oneself from the city. No system, however, is self-governing, neither the city nor the module. It is hence more urgent, in a grey field without reference points, to connect up networks without value systems, and to take leave of

MUMFORD’S POINT OF DEPARTURE.

Through its concentration of physical and cultural power, the city heightened the tempo of human intercourse and translated its products into forms that could be stored and reproduced. Through its monuments, written records, and orderly habits of association, the city enlarged the scope of all human activities, extending them backwards and forwards in time. By means of its storage facilities (buildings, vaults, archives, monuments, tablets, books), the city became capable of transmitting a complex culture from generation to generation, for it marshalled together not only the physical means but the human agents needed to pass on and enlarge this heritage. That remains the greatest of the city’s gifts. As compared with the complex human order of the city, our present ingenious electronic mechanisms for storing and transmitting information are crude and limited. ¹⁵

Based on these remarks, Mumford clearly understands cities to be analogous to and compatible with computers–and therefore media. The analogy and its specific points only deal, however, with the two functions of the recording and the transmission of information, and it succumbs moreover to diachrony in its crossing of networks. The fundamental third function, information processing, is absent (because it would pull the carpet out from under Mumford’s humanistic value judgments). It is almost as if the historian of cities had forgotten his insight that part of the greatness of ancient Florence consisted in having erected with the Uffizi, the first office building–a central bureau for data processing.

MEDIA record, transmit and process information–this is the most elementary definition of media. Media can include old-fashioned things like books, familiar things like the city and newer inventions like the computer. It was von Neumann’s computer architecture that technically implemented this definition for the first time in history (or as its end). A microprocessor contains a processor, the memory and buses, not just in addition to something else, but exclusively. The processor carries out logical or arithmetical commands, according to the parameters set up in the memory; the buses transmit commands, addresses, and data based on the parameters of the processor and its most recent command; the memory ultimately makes it possible to read commands or data at precise addresses or to encode them. This network of processing, transmission, and recording, or restated: of commands, addresses, and data, can calculate everything (based on Turing’s famous proof from 1936) that is calculable. ¹⁶ The development of technologic media–from digital transmission media, like the telegraph, to analog recording media, like gramophone and film, and to the media for their transmission, radio and television–comes logically full circle. ¹⁷ Other media can, likewise, be transferred to the discrete universal machine. And this is reason enough to bring together the workings of the city with concepts from general information science. Reason enough, moreover, to decipher past media and the historical function of what we refer to as “man,” as the play between commands, addresses, and data.

DATA can consist of random variables, so long as these variables have a predetermined format (analog or digital, bytes or words, and so forth). Von Neumann machines can assign strings standing for numbers and strings standing for letters to one and the same address. Thus an imperial edict for reform, dating from January 12, 1782, permitted, in the city of St. Pölten, “the charter of the Carmelite cloister (with 19 nuns), devoted solely to the life of introspection, to be revoked, the spaces to be converted into the boys’ schoolhouse of the Regiment Pelegrini and to be used as a garrison, the ornaments and ritual objects of the chapel to be either confiscated, sold or given away and to establish the chapel itself as the magazine.” ¹⁸ A unit of memory once set up for eternity became a memory unit with unrestricted access, serving henceforth the disciplined mobilization of troops and pupils. In the computer system, a read-write capable school boy obviously corresponds to read-write memory (random access memory) for variable data; in contrast, the ritual objects form a repository of value (read only memory) for programming commands and constants. Thus the so-called late Enlightenment, viewed as the revolution from above, which took place in Austria no differently than in the northern German states, simply replaced the mode of memory, installing a system not only capable of recording information, but also capable of erasing it: from eraser to “individual” to capital. We have forgotten that the city, as an event or data, once existed on its own apart from the state. More delicate, however, than the exchange of data is its formatting. In the case of the city, the modules upon which it has been built help to determine that format. The railway stations, which have (in the words of Napoleon III) ascended by the middle of the nineteenth century to the status of city gates, could not so readily give, as Joseph II did to Austria’s cloisters, a new function to the old portals, which had been up until that point the incoming/outgoing point for a postal system whose coaches transmitted people, goods, and news, that is, addresses, data, and commands. The railway not only stole the people and the goods away from the carriages of the postal system, it also assigned a new module or format to this information: in the carriages of the first class, the railway mobilized the officers; in second class, the lower ranking officers; and in third class, the battallion’s infantry. ¹⁹ This explains Benjamin’s euphemistic remark on “the historical signature of the railway”: it is “the first–and except for the ocean liner perhaps also the last–means of transportation which also forms the masses.” ²⁰

Traffic in the city, the masses of automobiles, need too to be formed or formatted. Richard Euringer, speaker for the National Association of German Writers, expressed the hope as late as 1935 that those “collisions, damages, injuries and bottlenecks,” which stem from the “freedom of self-propulsion” or auto-mobility, could be minimized through traffic regulations and the Führerprinzip. ²¹ The engineers, however, know better. The present-day computer gate–binary myths or horror stories to the contrary–does not take into account just two, rather it takes three possible circuit states into account: aside from the positive state “I” and the negative state “0,” there is a third state of higher impedance which isolates the corresponding data sources at their outgoing channel and thereby permits, after a short transition interval, other data sources to be transmitted by the same bus without collision. The yellow state on every stoplight performs the same function. In the endless circulation of green, yellow, red–or “I,” tri-state, “0″–the city’s countless streams of traffic (from the pedestrian to the bus) can be reduced to an alphanumerically digitizable data format, which a computer somewhere in the city’s central processing unit has also been tracking. Only an observer from an airplane or skyscraper–like Claude Lévi-Strauss in the megalopolis of New York City–can recognize once more behind the universal discrete street machine, that analog or continuous flow of vehicles, which once was called traffic, but since has come to be known as frequency.

ADDRESSES are data which allow other data to appear. In order to connect a computer’s memory to the data bus, the address bus first must address a single unit of memory, and secondly the command bus must address the entire memory. Media are only as good and as fast as their distributors. When books were still antique endless rolls, you couldn’t very well flip to a page or double-check a reference. Even in a handwritten medieval codex, the page numbers were not of much help, since varying copyists had, each to a different degree, distributed the text widely or narrowly with each individual copy. Gutenberg’s printing press first made it possible that “this page here resembles thousands of others,” ²² meaning it can be found, using the table of contents or index, in every printed edition. Cities are no different. It was the police prefects of absolutism (such as La Reynie in Paris) who saw to it that the hand-painted guild signs on the older houses conformed to the same standard and ultimately made them independent from the location of the house number. ²³ From the national postal service to the public telephone to the license plate on every registered vehicle, media are at work replacing people with their addresses.

Stephan Daedalus, James Joyce’s fictitious other, signed the front page of his geography book (of all books!):

Stephan Dedalus
Class of Elements
Clongowes Wood College
Sallins
County Kildare
Ireland
Europe
The World
The Universe ²⁴

A bit more prosaic, but no less specific, are personal ads which include a telephone number and/or a regional specification based on the license plate. Whether or not someone picks up the telephone receiver is of secondary interest. There is a good reason for that, too. It sufficed, legally, in the nineteenth century when the registered letter from the authorities landed in the mailbox, even when it could be proven that the addressee was never at the given address. “The nymphs are departed . . . have left no addresses,” ²⁵ wrote Eliot, granted about nymphs and their playmates–but even river deities themselves are addresses. The readjustment of the course of the Nadelbach, which later came to be known as the Tragisa or the Traisen, was cause for St. Pölten’s historic first inscription: The Roman vice-magistrate Marcus Aurelius Julius dedicated an altar to Neptune, god of the waters.

Addresses, literally, create channels. They separate mountain streams from waterways, people from subjects, cities from capitals. Under highly technologized conditions, capitals scarcely need to be built; they only need to be assigned addresses. Paul Hindemith didn’t write his didactic play “Wir bauen eine Stadt” (We’re Building a City) in 1931 for brick-layers or architects, rather for the midrange frequency of the Southwest German Radio Corp.; and to be more precise, he wrote it for his brother-in-law, the Frankfurt radio mogul Hans Flesch. ²⁶

Founding a capital today means that at highway intersections and in train stations, in time tables and computer networks, a new “hub” arises, which centralizes the flow of energy and information. Even in the twenties, major European cities, in order to keep the dream of the center alive, didn’t like to see their names on road signs. And “it was often the case that even the administrative agencies responsible for road work were unfamiliar with regions lying outside of the narrower confines of their borders, which is why they didn’t appear on the road signs–sometimes even deliberately.” ²⁷ The strategic opening of space first placed the hub among the technological forms of animal life and began to number channels according to right-of-way. On computer buses, the tri-state commands regulate the right-of-way relations between “master” and “slave.” On highways, it was Napoleon who instituted the concept of driving on the right-hand side of the road, thereby eliminating the chaos in the streets and clearing the national avenues, as well as the rows of poplars, for the marching columns of his autonomously operating divisions. It could also be said that it was the railway, at the very latest, which installed (in computer terminology) bidirectional traffic and gave modern media the model of divided lanes of traffic. Collisions have since then come to be known as derailings and passersby really are just passing by.

It was a provisional center stripe, which from February 1916 onward restricted French pedestrians, bicyclists, ox-carts, and so forth, from using the poplar-lined national highways, in order to better organize the transport, on the right, of munitions and, on the left, of corpses, that saved the besieged city of Verdun from the bloody imperial “gristmill.” This improvisation of the enemy was turned by Guderian, ²⁸ the World War I tank commander of the Wehrmacht, into the center stripe–with an eye toward the next war–on his autobahn. “The counterattack–as a general rule in the art of war–never attacks same with same. Rather against artillery you have the tank, against the tank, the helicopter, and so forth. The war machine thus possesses a factor of innovation, which differs radically from the innovations of the machines for production” (MP 494).

COMMANDS, although termed “instructions” in the pedagogically modest Anglo-American of the inventors of the computer are, in fact, orders. An analogy without algorithm, which requires its own auto-execution, might have been left, as it has been in the past, up to the resourcefulness of mathematicians. Data processing, however, makes the genius or the boss superfluous.

Because in the final analysis “to command” simply means “to address.” This is true for the lowest level of digital computation devices, in the so-called microcode, where the patent wars are the most vicious; and it also applies, as Althusser’s analysis illustrates, to the lowest level of everyday city life: a citizen is anyone whom the cry–”Hey, you there!”–of a police officer on the street causes to stop and turn around.

Command centers thus aren’t rooted in the forest of symbols planted by a power. Rather they spring up in the less obvious tangents that, like bridges, connect them with unflattenable graphs.

If it is true that the first ministries in Prussia originated from a central privy council, the bureaucrats of Kafka and Austria know better. The central administrative authority during Kaiser Maximilian’s reign did not arise out of the aristocratic agency of the Roman-German emperor. On the contrary, this is an entirely technological moment of liquidation in Austria: the Hapsburgs came into power step by step with the bourgeois lawyers in their chancery court. Chancery courts for the individual states followed, linking cities and provinces to the hub, the capital. ²⁹ Power thus means occupying at the right moment the channels for technological data processing. And centrality becomes a variable dependent on media functions, rather than vice versa.

On April 9, 1809 Kaiser Franz II declared war on France. Within days his patriotically charged armies had crossed internal borders. A letter to the Bavarian monarch, containing the order to sever the treaty with Napoleon, went unheeded. So the Austrian forces of war set out to deliver the transmitted information personally and marched on Munich. King Max fled, but the French envoy had just enough time to get off a courier to Strasbourg where Napoleon’s staff general Berthier was headquartered.

France’s border cities had been connected to the capital since the creation of the fourteen independent armies of the revolution in 1794 by optical telegraph, the first high-speed transmission system in history. Berthier thus had no problem dispatching a telegram to Napoleon in Paris, and Napoleon could then telegraph his army; until the French, in the record time of two weeks, had liberated Munich. As a result, the Bavarian ruler commissioned his academy of science to develop an improved telegraph, the electric telegraph. ³⁰

Napoleon’s war machine meanwhile marched onward to Wagram and unified Europe with the optical telegraph (just as the Roman postal system had once done with its pony express). Church steeples, which for centuries had been the one and only channel between power and people, were assigned a new function. “On the northern face of the cathedral’s steeple” in St. Pölten, the occupation army installed “a ‘telegraphic machine,’ which was part of the pipeline of military information running from Vienna to Strasbourg. This pipeline consisted of military outposts placed on towers or overlooks and stationed at one- to two-hour intervals; signals could be transmitted using three flags (blue, red and white) whose meaning was only known to the ‘directors’ at the end of each line.” ³¹ While the equally functional tricolor flew above Austrian cities, foreign forces of the Enlightenment surveyed the Austrian countryside, which maps since the Peutingeriana had more or less ignored. Marshall Marmont, for instance, dispatched a cavalry division to cartographically document the mountains, valleys and marshes around St. Pölten, whose very impenetrability cracked the code on a new technology of warfare.

Since then, armies have been able to bypass cities and, moreover, capitals. Over mountain ranges, through swamplands, or across desert sands, the Blitzkrieg attacks the enemy from the rear, seeking to enclose spaces rather than cities. The sole prerequisite is a precise map, once top secret information but increasingly after 1800 the monopoly of staff generals in France, Prussia, and Austria.

The total air war beginning in 1942 reconstituted the urban centers. The module for destruction, however, has ceased to be “man.” Rather for phosphorous bombs it is a city; for uranium bombs, a major city; and ultimately for hydrogen bombs, megalopolis. The wide green spaces and broad arteries of life in the cities of the Federal Republic are indeed a small consolation, even if they do originate from architectural plans made during the World Wars to avert the next bomb terror. ³²

The “invisible city,” with which Mumford concludes his world history as the history of the city, consists of more than mere information technologies operating seamlessly and at the speed of light. The computer commands for deletion are also ready to be called up. “This is the last and worst bequest of the citadel (read ‘Pentagon’ or ‘Kremlin’) to the culture of cities.” ³³

Wilhelm von Humboldt University, Berlin

(Translated by Matthew Griffin)

Notes

1. This essay first appeared in a volume on Vienna, Geburt einer Hauptstadt am Horizont, ed. Dietmar Steiner, Georg Schöllhammer, Gregor Eichinger, and Christian Knechtl (Vienna, 1988); it was reprinted in Mythos Metropole, ed. Gotthard Fuchs, Bernhard Moltmann, and Walter Prigge (Frankfurt a.M., 1995), pp. 228-44. [Tr.]

2. Paul Valéry, “La conquête de l’ubiquité,” Oeuvres, vol. 2 (Paris, 1960), p. 1285; my translation. All subsequent translations are my own unless otherwise noted.

3. The author puns on the German word Hauptstadt, literally “head-city,” a translation from the Latin capitalis, which means “at the head, foremost or chief” and stems from caput / capitis, the “head.” [Tr.]

4. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, tr. Robert Hurley (New York, 1978), pp. 88-89.

5. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Capitalisme et schizophrénie: Mille Plateaux (Paris, 1980), p. 539; hereafter cited in text as MP.

6. Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, tr. Ralph Manheim (New York, 1961), p. 152.

7. Joachim Jäger, Elementare Topologie (Paderborn, 1980), p. 129.

8. Didier Gille, “Maceration and Purification,” Zone Magazine, 1:2 (1986).

9. St. Pölten is the capital of southern Austria and has its own independent charter. [Tr.]

10. The Traisen, a tributory of the Danube, flows through St. Pölten. [Tr.]

11. See Christopher Alexander, “A City is not a Tree,” Design Magazine (1965).

12. Paul Valéry, “Présence de Paris,” in Oeuvres, vol. 2, p. 1015.

13. Johannes Lohmann, “Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik,” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft, 37 (1980), 167-86.

14. Harold Adams Innis, Empire and Communications (Oxford, 1950), p. 71. The Achaemenidian dynasty ruled in Persia from 550 BC to 331 BC. [Tr.]

15. Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, its Transformations, and its Prospects (New York, 1961), p. 569; see also Lewis Mumford, Megalopolis: Gesicht und Seele der Groß-Stadt (Wiesbaden, 1951).

16. Alan Turing, “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, 2:42 (1936), 23-165; see also Mechanical Intelligence, ed. D. C. Ince (Amsterdam, 1992); and Alan Turing, Intelligence Service: Schriften, ed. Bernhard Dotzler and Friedrich Kittler (Berlin, 1987).

17. See Friedrich Kittler, Grammophon Film Typewriter (Berlin, 1986).

18. See August Hermann, Geschichte der Stadt St. Pölten, 2 vols. (St. Pölten, 1917-1930).

19. Sven Hedin, Ein Volk in Waffen: Den deutschen Soldaten gewidment (Leipzig, 1915), p. 75.

20. Walter Benjamin, Schriften, vol. 7 (Frankfurt a.M., 1982), p. 744.

21. Richard Euringer, Chronik einer deutschen Wandlung, 1925-1935 (Hamburg, 1936),
p. 263.

22. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Mausoleum: Thirty-Seven Ballads for the History of Progress, tr. Joachim Neugroschel (New York, 1976), p. 4.

23. See Jacques Saint-Germain, La Reynie et la police du Grand siècle d’après de nombreux documents inédits (Paris, 1962).

24. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man (New York, 1928), pp. 11-12.

25. T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land,” in Selected Poems (London, 1954), 3.179-81.

26. See Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Intellektuellendämmerung: Zur Lage der Frankfurter Intelligenz in den zwanziger Jahren (Frankfurt a.M., 1983).

27. Kurt Kaftan, Der Kampf um die Autobahnen: Geschichte und Entwicklung des Autobahngedankens in Deutschland von 1907-1935 unter Berücksichtigung ähnlicher Pläne und Bestrebungen im übrigen Europa (Berlin, 1955), p. 13.

28. Heinz Guderian oversaw the expansion of the Autobahn after World War I. [Tr.]

29. See Otto Hintze, “Der österreichische und preußische Beamtenstaat im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert: Eine vergleichende Betrachtung,” Historische Zeitschrift, 86 (1901); see also “Der Beamtenstand,” Vorträge der Gehe-Stiftung zu Dresden, vol. 3 (Leipzig, 1911).

30. Rolf Oberliesen, Information, Daten und Signale: Geschichte technischer Informationsverarbeitung (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1982), p. 241.

31. Herrmann, Geschichte.

32. Manfred Durth, Deutsche Architekten: Biographische Verflechtungen 1925-1970 (Munich, 1987), pp. 252-68.

33. Mumford, The City in History, p. 569.

Norbert Bolz: Der Kult des Authentischen im Zeitalter der Fälschung

[in Anne-Kathrin Reulecke (hrsg.): Fälschungen, Suhrkamp 2006]

408-410:
“Man könnte auch fragen: Gibt es Entwicklungen unserer modernen Gesellschaft, die einer Kultur der Fälschung den Boden bereiten? Zur Beantwortung dieser Fragen beschränke ich mich zunächst auf fünf Punkte:
1. Die Kultur des Vergleichs. /…/
2. Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit. Auch das kann man als Verlust der Echtheit erfahren, aber auch als Befreiung von der Aura des Hier und Jetzt – Walter Benjamins großes Thema. Entscheidend ist hierbei, daß Reproduzierbarkeit nich ein äußerliches Schicksal ist, das der Kunst widerfährt, sondern daß sie die innersten Produktionsbedingungen von Kunst selbst verändert. Mit Originalem, Einmaligem und Echtem kann man nun gar nichts mehr anfangen.
3. Die Digitalisierung als Schlüsseltechnik für das Zeitalter der Fälschung. Ein neues digitales Alphabet gilt heute für Bilder, Worte und Klänge gleischermaßen. Die Pixelkonfigurationen der errechneten Bilder kennen, außer den technischen Standards, prinzipiell keine Grenze der Gestaltwerdung und Bildmanipulation. /…/
4. Die Konjunktur des Konstruktivismus. Diese Radikalisierung des Kantianismus macht aus der spezifisch modernen Not des Referenzverlusts allen Wissens eine Tugend. /…/ Das Problem der Täuschung hat den Kantianismus provoziert, das Problem der Fälschung provoziert den Konstruktivismus.
5. Die Konjunktur der Verschwörungstheorien. Die Annahme, daß verschwörische Unternehmungen in Gang seien, entlastet von der Unverständlichkeit des Weltlaufs dursch Zuschreibung auf Schuldige, Drahtzieher im Hintergrund. Das reicht von dem sanften Wahn, die Amerikaner hätten den Mond nie betreten und das Ereignis in einem Filmstudio inszeniert, bis zu dem perniziösen Wahn, die amerikanische Regierung selbst habe den Terroranschlag aud die Twin-Towers angeordnet. Je komplexer die Welt, desto anfälliger für Paranoia.”

411:
“Techno ist eigentlich keine Musik, sondern CAD-Sound: computer aided sound design. Techno-Musiker können meistens keine Noten lesen, aber mit dem Sampler umgehen. Um es aud eine einfache Formel zu bringen: Techno ist die Emanzipation der Musik vom Musiker. /…/
Der Sampler ist ein Computer, der Musik in einen frei variierbaren Datenstrom verwandelt. So entsteht autorenlose No-Copyright-Musik. Jetzt gehören die Töne – John Cage behält recht – tatsächlich nicht mehr dem Menschen.”

414-415:
“Aber die spannende Frage nach den Wechselwirkungen von Krieg und Medienberichterstattung sollte nicht gleich wieder ‘kritisch’, d.h. mit heißem Herzen, in die Sackgasse des Manipulationsverdachts hineingesteuert werden. Viel zu unterschiedlich sind die Effekte der Weltnachrichten, als daß man sie aufs Schema der ‘Legitimation’ reduzieren könnte. /…/

Im letzten Irak-Krieg wurde denn mitt dem Einsatz der embedded journalists die Schraube der Desinformation noch eine Windung weiter gedreht. Das hatte zur Folke, daß die kritischen Berichterstatter nur noch berichteten, daß kritische Berichterstattung unmöglich sei. Und deshalb hat man mehr denn je die Wirklichkeit des Krieges mit den Bildern der Opfer identifieren wollen. Der kritische Journalismus was gewissermaßen auf dem Niveau Adornos angekommen: Leiderfahrung als Wahrheitsbedingung. Doch das war gleich doppelt neiv. Man hatte zum einen nicht begriffen, daß ein Info-War eine unabhängige Berichterstattung ausschließt, weil ja jede Information eine Waffe ist. Und man hatte zum anderen nicht begriffen, daß die stets verfügbaren Bilder vom Leiden der Zivilbevölkerung selbst Elemente des Informationskrieges sind. Nolens volens werden Journalisten damit zum Kombattanten im Info-Krieg.
Gerade deshalb blüht heute die Rhetorik der Authenzität, und Medienleute formulieren in den Medien selbst eine Radikalkritik der Medien. Hier kann man beobachten: Genau so wie die Kopie das Original erzeugt, so erzeugt die Medienwirklichkeit erst die Erwartung einer authentischen Realität. Deshalb gehört komplementär zur Hi-Tech-Popkultur der Kult der Straße.”

416:
“Authentizität ist der Begriff für den spezifisch antimodernen Affekt. Soziologen könnten aber sicher zeigen, daß er gleichzeitig mit der Geldwirtschaft und ihren Abstraktionen entstanden ist. /…/
Die Krise der Echtheit und der Kult des Authentischen sind also Komplementärphenomene. Daß Echtheit der Kultwerk der Kunstwelt und Authentizität sein Nachfolgebegriff ist, hat ja schon Walter Benjamin sehr schön gezeigt.”

Matthew Fuller on pirate radio, material media and nomadology

Matthew Fuller: Media Ecologies. Materialist energies in art and technoculture
Excerpts from Chapter 1, “The R, the A, the O, the I, the O”

18: The metallurgist posseses an intense relation to materiality: a proprioception of and through changes of state of the matter that one is working with, becoming aware of its tics and glitches in terms of how they are mobilizable, in that realms they operate in topological terms, what they connect to or elide. An experimental science or tacit knowledge formed through the use of impurities and changes in structure and integration of metals by leaps between temperatures through heating and quenching. /…/ This minor science is presented in A Thousand Plateaus as being a tradition counter to or partly submerged by that of hylomorphism. This schema, or “form-matter model”, has dominated Western thought since the first systematic schools of ancient Greece. In the treatise on nomadology by contrast, Deleuze and Guattari propose an emphasis on the morphogenic capabilities of material itself: the moments when a series of forces, capacities, and predispositions intermesh to make something else occur, to move into a state of self-organization.
Hylomorphism is “a model of the genesis of form as external to matter, as imposed from the outside like a command on a material which is thought inert and dead”.

19: But as Kittler easily points out, “Electrics does not equal electronics”. The media systems that in combination produce the current form of pirate radio include both the primarily electrical or electromagnetic (the T1200 gramophone, the transmitter coil, etc.) and those that exist in the mode of digital information and electronics (e.g., the GSM phone – something of a bastard case in that it necessarily maintains an interface to electromagnetic waves; and computationally based samplers and synthesizers, etc.). Both electric and electronic sound technologies also allow a sense of a doubling of the machinic phylum in that the manipulation of singularities and flows at one level becomes explicable only when it manifests as another – in sound waves.

20-21: Radio’s section of the electromagnetic spectrum was born regulated. At the end of the nineteenth century, the British government “Made the wireless telegraph a state monopoly, assigning it to the Post Office, with oversight granted to the Admirality.” The only portion of the spectrum not directly falling under state control and procedures of listening is that visible to the naked eye.

23: Pirate radio has shown a capacity to generate medial growths that ground themselves in the attempt to impose form on them, to synthesize what is fundamentally heterogenous. That is, the attempted hylomorphism itself becomes “content” – there is a coevolution, an arms race that feeds the machinic phylum. /…/
Mutual escalation of competing technologies, of legislation and its object, of the appropriation of locations for studios and for transmitter sites, produces its own mutational field in the composition of the machinic phylum of radio – /…/ but the result is in excess of what had previously been legislated against. It is now harder to locate and capture a radio station connected in this way to a transmitter than it was before the legislation was introduced.

24-25: The turntable, with its appendages, is a stalled computer: a head and an infinite tape. It can read stored material, it can reproduce any sound; but used in the standard way, it can only read, not store. Hip hop declared war on this nonfacility by throwing the disc into reverse, mutilating predetermined regimes of speed and frequency. Hip hop mobilized the third category of action of the computer; alongside reading and storing information, the universal machine must be able to act on itself, to calculate. The pace space of all possible sounds of the turntable is determined by the table drawn up at the intersection of speed and frequency. turntablism opens this space up to mutation outside of the regimes of melody, harmony, and voice by forming a copula between the two series, thythm and noise. The endless tape of the Turing machine is imposed on the finite coil, causing it to leap from break to break. /…/ The turntable invents the DJ in order to compute.

40: The aesthetic of mass radio is formed at the same time as that of the autobahn. The conjunction of car and radio accelerates toward the absolute immobilization of drive time.

40-41: The MP3 file format, which has achieved such mass usage as a means of circulating tracks via the Internet, is designed simply to match the included middle of the audio spectrum audible to the human ear. Thus, it obligerates the range of musics designed to be heard with the remainder of the body via bass. This is not simply a white technological cleansing of black music but the configuration of organs, a call to order for the gut, the arse, to stop vibrating and leave the serious work of signal processing to the head.

51: SMS triangulates the historical interconnection of wireless telegraphy, the telegraph, and the phone by providing a way for the compressed forms of writing employed in the telegraph to return via the telephone. The constraints imposed by the multiple usages of every key on the keypad, by the 160-character limit to each message and the tight limit on the amount of text viewable at any time on the small screen of the phone, have been taken up by a telegrammatic speech in which compression is achieved via the shedding of vowels redundant in signifying the word /…/ Language reinvents the alphanumeric character set into thick clots of association.

Ingenting är så ont att det inte har något gott med sig.

Wien, den 2 maj 1890, klockan 7.46. Orientexpressen hade helt enligt sitt rykte ankommit till stationen en timme försenad.

I mörkrets och i Karpaternas hjärta, högt över Burgopasset mellan Transylvanien och Bukovina, dyker en räddare upp. Han var europe… han var samtidigt en av seklets modigaste moderniserare. På samma gång som han var ungrare. Fåfäng som han var, bröt han mot de för honom välbekanta reglerna för den finsk-ugriska språkstammen.
Endast tonhuvuden är kapabla att i det reala inskriva ett tal som går över förstående huvuden. Det är ca tio år sedan man började använda mikrofon, elektriska ledningar och tonförstärkare i stället för trattar.

Hela denna utveckling ledde till att den tidigare så populära patrioten kom att möta ett allt större motstånd i Ungern. Härskardiskursen har spelat i det symboliska registret; den vetenskapliga diskursen känner endast till det reala.

Vi måste anstränga oss för att vinna böndernas vänskap och förtroende. Kärlekens ord sänds ut, mottages, sänds ut igen av mottagaren, mottages återigen av sändaren och så vidare, och så vidare, tills förstärkaren når det värde som i växelströmsteorin kallas svängningsvidd och i den aktuella diskursen kallas kärlek.
För första gången i tänkandets historia tillåts dumheten att fortsätta i evighet.
Från och med nu är ni, och i långt större utsträckning än ni kan föreställa er, underkastade apparater eller instrument – från mikroskop till radio och television – vilka kommer att bli delar av ert vara. Ni förstår inte för närvarande den fulla innebörden av detta.

I mitten av juni stapplar en namnlös patient in på ett sjukhus i Budapest. Några årtionden tidigare anlände en ungersk äventyrare till Teheran i ett liknande tillstånd. Dr Seward flyr till sitt vetenskapliga arbete, sina medietekniska innovationer och C2HCl3OH2O. För att kunna nå “stormens öga”, måste den engelska tjänstemannen bege sig bortom the point of no return.

Informationen: Fienden har smugglat in 50 kistor fyllda med transylvanisk jord och deponerat dem på hemliga orter. I en sådan situation förutsätter varje motattack att informationen för det första koncentreras, för det andra demokratiseras och för det tredje lagras på ett absolut säkert sätt.
Ingenting är så ont att det inte har något gott med sig. Nazismen gjorde ett tvärt slut på atonalismen i Tyskland. Translatio studii sive imperii.
Men å andra sidan är priset för fonografins snabba inregistrering en extremt långsam accesstid. Alltså har, när allt kommer omkring, den ‘rasorenhet’ som utbildats haft ett avgjort välgörande inflytande. Fullständig avskiljdhet från främmande inflytande innebär stagnation.
När allt kommer omkring förhåller sig grammofonupptagningen till den ursprungliga musiken, efter vilken den är gjord, såsom konserverad frukt till färsk frukt; i den ena finns det inga vitaminer, i den andra finns det.

Vi var tvungna att söka upp byar, som låg så långt borta som möjligt från civilisationscentra och kommunikationslinjer… Vi fick leva i de fattigaste byarna, under de primitivaste förhållanden. Mäns karriärvägar.
Enligt landets sed tog vi av oss skorna och slog oss ned på mattorna, medan vår värd gjorde upp eld. Efter några minuter var rummet fyllt av kvävande rök… Det är inte för inte som vampyrer uppstår ur dammkorn i månskenet. Långsamt fylldes huset med grannar, med vilka vi fram emot klockan sju hade den mest förtroliga samvaro… Så där ja, tänkte jag, nu är det dags för fonografen. Riktigt så enkelt var det emellertid inte. Min gode sångare fruktande att han skulle förlora rösten om man sjöng i apparaten, som tydligen var djävulens påfund.
Det har alltid varit en av konstens viktigaste funktioner att framavla en efterfrågan, för vars fulla tillfredsställande tiden ännu inte är kommen. Mänskligheten, som en gång för Homeros var de olympiska gudarnas skådeobjekt, är nu för sig själv. Hennes självförfrämligande har nått den grad att hon kan uppleva sin egen förintelse som en första klassens estetisk njutning.
Undertryckandet av subjektet i den vetenskapliga diskursen är sålunda kvantifierbart: det uppgår till 84%.

Vampyrism är en kedjereaktion och kan därför bara bekämpas med hjälp av den maskinella textreproduktionens tekniker. Konstverkets tekniska reproducerbarhet befriar det för första gången i världshistorien från sitt parasitära beroende av ritualen.

Simon Frith: The industrialization of music

From Andy Bennet, Barry Shank, Jason Toynbee (red.): The Popular Music Studies Reader (Routledge, London 2006), s. s. 231-238

231: “The contrast between music-as-expression and music-as-commodity defines twentieth-century pop experience. /…/ Read any pop history and you will find in outline the same sorry tale. However the story starts, and whatever the author’s politics, the industrialization of music means a shift from active musical production to passive pop consumption, the decline of folk or community or subcultural traditions, and a general loss of musical skill. [...]
What such arguments assume /…/ is that there is some essential human activity, music-making, which has been colonized by commerce. /…/
The flaw in this argument is the suggestion that music is the starting point of the industrial process – the raw material over which everyone fights – when it is, in fact, the final product. The industrialization of music cannot be understood as something which happens to music, since it describes a process in which music itself is made.”
231-232: “Twentieth-century popular music means the twentieth-century popular record; not the record of something (a song? a singer? a performance?) which exists independently of the music industry, but a form of communication which determines what songs, singers and songwriters are and can be.”
232: “We are coming to the end of the record era now (and so, perhaps, to the end of pop music as we know it) /…/
rock and roll was /…/ the climax of (or possibly footnote to) a story that began with Edison’s phonograph.”

236: “Pop music meant pop records, commodities, a technological and commercial process under the control of a small number of companies. Such control depended on the ownership of the means of record production and distribution /…/ Live music-making was still important but its organization and profits were increasingly dependent on the exigencies of record-making. The most important way of publicizing pop now – the way most people heard most music – was on the radio, and records were made with radio formats and radio audiences in mind”
237: “Record companies quickly realized tape’s flexibility and cheapness, and by 1950 tape recording had replaced disc recording entirely. This was the technological change which allowed new, independent producers into the market – the costs of recording fell dramatically even if the problems of large-scale manufacture and distribution remained. Mid-1950s American indie labels like Sun were as dependent on falling studio costs as late-1970s punk labels in Britain /…/
what could be done during this intermediary stage, to the tape itself, that transformed pop music-making. Producers no longer had to take performances in their entirety. They could cut and splice, edit the best bits of performances together, cut out the mistakes, make records of ideal not real events.”
238: “By the mid-1960s the development of multi-track recording enabled sounds to be stored separately on the same tape /…/ Studio-made music need no longer bear any relationship to anything that can be performed live; records use sounds, the effects of tape tricks and electronic equipment, that no one has ever even heard before as musical. /…/
It was pop producers, unashamedly using technology to ‘cheat’ audiences (double-tracking weak voices, filling out a fragile beat, faking strings) who, in the 1950s and 1960s, developed recording as an art form, thus enabling rock to develop as a ’serious’ music in its own right.”