Portrait of the Artist as an Electrified Monk
Portrait of the Artist as an Electrified Monk
Introduction:
Portrait of the Author, Electrified: On the Transition from Mechanical to Electromagnetic Writing, is the 7th in our series of Martin’s early writings translations. He presented it on the evening of November 11, 1995, at the Berlin House of Literature during the Berlin Radio Play Days1 after performing his psychoanalytic sound piece titled Sounds and Shadows [Klänge und Schatten] that morning. The audience consisted almost entirely of editors, directors, and radio playwrights. The timing of the lecture was rather remarkable as the audience was, on the one hand, confronted with a radical self-production while, on the other, with an elaborate theory – and because preceding these presentations was the recent publication of Martin’s edgy essay in a professional journal2 lamenting the outmoded production techniques of German radio broadcasting – making the atmosphere tense. While this lecture refers to the question of sound art, it also seamlessly fits into our sequence of essays - and thus into the larger context of Burckhardtian thinking. As in the preceding essays of Digitale Metaphysik (April 1988), In Working Memory (January 1990), and Die Universale Maschine (December 1990), it is about the bigger question of that paradigm shift which Martin had tackled in his first major published work: Metamorphosen von Raum und Zeit: Eine Geschichte der Wahrnehmung (1994). The Author, Electrified falls in the period immediately following the Metamorphosen success, when he found himself being asked to lecture with increasing frequency. Intellectually, this was a strange transition for the young Electric Author who, after declaring the Representation of Central Perspective was over in the Metamorphosen, found himself contemplating what returning to the Simulacrum and the movement beyond into simulation meant culturally, eventually leading to the publication of his second major work, Vom Geist der Maschine: Eine Geschichte kultureller Umbrüche in 1999.
It may be there are born thinkers and philosophers, but in Martin's case, he hadn’t set out to be a theorist, let alone a philosopher – and as this series of his early texts makes clear, his writing primarily revolved around his encounter with the computer as a young Electric Author who’d found himself working in Radio production, and then in the recording studio where he understood he was witnessing a temporal rupture in the shifting intellectual and aesthetical paradigms around him. And since he’d always understood the writer as an artist who speaks, he found his writing directly springing from the curiosity he’d experienced in his work. Starting in 1991, the work on the Metamorphosen had already required a philosophical shift in his understanding, with chapters on the Mechanical Clock, the Cathedral, and Photography published as excerpts in scholarly journals before its publication, now this interim period required a more radical shift in his thinking from the experiential praxis of his work to that of a theorist and philosopher – leading to his consideration of such tangentially distant topics as the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception or the Social History of the Guillotine and the Executioner, which became the subject of essays appearing in Lettre and eventually becoming chapters in Geistes der Maschine.
In hindsight, coming across this specific lecture was quite wonderful when talking with Martin about this period and how his ludic sense informed his experimental methodologies of working with actors, radio production, and sound in general – something he writes about in Éducation sentimentale III and IV – primarily because it lets us view the depth of his thinking into both the frightful and beautiful implications of digital technology that‘s re-defining our human intelligence as the power of imagination [Einbildungkraft] and metric of our human dignity. This is an essential insight into understanding Martin’s thought labyrinth – and how it’s so often misunderstood by those who gloss over his words as simply being about technology and computers without adequately considering the meaning of his thinking on the roots of Greek Rationality and its cultural implications on the social drives of Modernity. It’s in this lecture where we catch the Augenblick when his tentative exploration becomes theoretically solidified: It’s the Artist and the Theorist who began shaking hands that portrays how the new Electrified Author goes hand in hand with a recoding of the individual – from the individual to the dividual to the then recently all-connected contemporary3, as the one who will define the end of Philosophy and the beginning of the Psychology of the Machine.
— Hopkins Stanley
Portrait of the Author, Electrified: On the Transition from Mechanical to Electromagnetic Writing, November 1994
Presented by Martin Burckhardt, in the Literaturhaus Berlin4
Dear Sir or Madam,
As you've seen from the announcement, this is about the Portrait of the Author, Electrified. And as the subtitle says, it's about the transition from mechanical to electromagnetic writing in which I've managed to hide a series of riddles. Let's start with a story since the subject is dark and difficult. Let's go back to the middle of the 18th century, where the history of sensibility begins – or where I’d say the modern writer electrifies himself. Imagine a big, empty field in the early morning where an Abbot instructs a thousand Carthusian monks to line up in a circle. The circle is enormous, a few hundred meters in diameter, but the monks can still see each other. However, the real hero of this circle isn’t Abbot Nollet5 but the so-called Leyden jar: that container embodying the first form of conserved electrical energy [elektrischer Energie6] – a battery7. And hanging here, in this arrangement, is the question of electricity: How fast does electricity move – now that is about to be revealed as the monks join hands, forming a circle – when finally, the circle is closed by touching the Leyden jar, meaning the battery and the thousand Carthusian monks immediately begin twitching simultaneously, providing the question's answer. The electricity moves so fast that it’s imperceptible to the naked eye, meaning there’s no observable flow of time here.
This experimental arrangement is something like the phantasm of modernity. Here, you have the man in the crowd, and you have the idea of what’s called the public today (or better yet: the phantasm); you have the flow of energy, the mass medium of electricity; you have the archetype of what can be called the aesthetics of shock; and finally, you have the sensation of synchronization through space and time: what we call actuality and what can be called the removal of distance: Right Now, Live in New York... This experimental arrangement becomes even more interesting when we formulate some questions about it. As an exemplary, we could ask who’s the sender and who’s the receiver here – difficult, isn't it? Or: what’s the message? Also difficult to answer, isn’t it? That’s because there is no message in the linguistic sense, yet something is undoubtedly being transmitted. Here, it’s not sufficient simply saying that it’s electricity. Instead, we need to recognize it’s the archetype of modern society being mediated here – which, in the 19th century, was called nation or audience, and today in a more sober sense: communication, membership. This sensation of being stuck in the same cycle [Kreislauf8 ]. This something being communicated with the monks was something new that’d never before been so intensely conveyed: Synchronization, which is that certainty of forming a collective body. But let's ask this question the other way around: Is it still possible to speak of an individual action in this circuit? You see: this boils down to the question of the Author. As far as the Carthusian monks are concerned, it’s clear they’re moved – seized in the sense that one-seizes-the-other – thus, the flow is established. If only one of them were to break away from this chain, the cycle would be interrupted. You see: in this context, where one-is-in-the-other, it’s rather pointless to bring a historically powerful, autonomous subject into play. Nevertheless, let’s set out on a search; let’s assume that he exists: this electrified author – what would his actions be? If you see it’s not okay to stay out of it, the only conceivable act is closing the circle [Kreis]; it means touching the battery. The Author would be the one having the authority to make and close such a circuit. Let's put ourselves in the position of the One-who-closes-the-Circle, who seizes the battery and who puts the others into paroxysmal spasms. Naturally, this is megalomania par excellence: I lift a finger, and everyone starts twitching with me. Understandably, this is the longing of the electric author and anyone else with access to such batteries. In this phantasm, the Author's body becomes a mega-body through its simultaneous interconnection with his audience. This is the phantasmic transmission of charismatic radiosity9.
But now we're at the Berlin Radio Play Days and dealing with the fact that we've been beaming into empty space for a long time. The radiating brilliance has become a kind of diffuse illumination. Naturally, this has to do with the fact that there's no longer the one-and-only-beatifying-circle (as it’s prefigured in electrified Carthusian monks’ chain); instead, now we're dealing with a growing number of shrinking, overlapping circles. It’s impossible to eliminate this feeling that we're already dealing with a bunch of batteries just beaming away – and this is a proliferation of its own kind10.
But now, what does the Author do? If he’s intelligent, he'll understand that he can no longer rely on putting a thousand others into twitching paroxysms by merely connecting himself to the battery – and this insight, like every narcissistic disturbance, constitutes a significant wounding all the more so because the aesthetics feed on this circuit's high voltage. The experience of this cycle, where one-is-in-the-other, where the message is electrically prolonged, as such, had the formula: IT WRITES. This capitalized IT, or ES11, could be called our socius existence (the social, the political, the theme that’s on the street). But that's the situation you can no longer rely on. Lieschen Müller is at home...and yet she isn't – because she watches television, letting herself be catapulted through telegraphic space via remote control. The author, electrified, must experience that the circle he’s moving in becomes smaller and smaller. That collective ID (the idea of the mega-subject, the spatial aggrandizement) transforms itself (already lacking an audience) back to an I. This I, however, neither cannot be nor any longer wants to be the one it was before becoming an ES – because it's now an I that’s taken up the message of the electricity, which therefore knows that one-is-in-the-other.
That brings me to the interesting point; namely, as confidence in the I-magnification and ID fades, something else emerges: writing. This makes visible what was already laid out from the beginning: our author has long since been operating within a kind of new writing. He no longer sits down at the table and writes in black and white – I AM WRITING, but he sits down at the microphone and says I AM [ICH BIN’s12] (or he imagines while writing this out how someone else will sit down at the microphone and say it). There’s a thousand ways to say this. And in these thousand ways, it’s not just one who makes himself heard, but it becomes visibly apparent that there's always another-in-the-One (like in one of those little Russian dolls). The experience, if you will, is that of an dividual13 – precisely the message that the acoustically multiplied voices send.
But that's not our problem at the moment; I'm concerned with writing; I'm concerned with the question of what communicates itself to the Author when he (in the absence of the audience) enters into a cycle with just himself, when he, in a feedback loop with just himself, has to feed himself. Or put metaphorically: what happens when the great field of monks I’d conjured up from the 18th century is suddenly cleared? When there’s no one left except the Author, alone with his battery. Over the last two hundred years, this battery has become a highly complicated piece of machinery [Maschinenpark14]. There are cameras and microphones; there's the possibility of recording my own voice and my own body utilizing electromagnetic writing (that is: the possibility of looking at myself as another). On the other hand, there's the possibility of incorporating something I’ve not experienced in my own body. And it’s at this moment that I’ve finally reached my thesis: the assertion that the novelty, as what was relieved-out in Abbé Nollet’s experimental arrangement – is conceptually that mechanical writing has been replaced by electromagnetic writing15.
At this point, I'd like to set out again on a small excursion that aims at specifying what I understand by mechanical writing – which, in my thought labyrinth, is the antithesis of electromagnetic writing – but what do I mean by this? I understand it as a process that dates back to the 12th century when it found its final form in letterpress printing. So what you can read with lead letters set and printed in black on white was the valid order of things until my youth. Since the alphabet itself hasn't changed because of mechanization, it'd be very naive to assume only the concept of writing has been changed, and what could only be made by hand in the Middle Ages can now be reproduced on a massive scale. Naturally, this isn’t the case as everything becomes different.
The whole concept of storytelling changes as it moves from the oral to the visual and the storytellers (you could almost say the singers) who are in direct contact with the audience become literary figures. In other words, those operating not with the spoken word but with the printed word, with letters. What emerges, as Marshall McLuhan called it, is the typographic man. If you want to see the losing side here, it’s with the beginning of the videotape: videocy where you attribute to the eye what you deny to the ear.
Of course, there is also a gain of increasing abstraction here, which, first of all, has to do with the emergence of a reading public – with what Kant calls the public sphere (which he always understands as the book's readership). This public, an early prototype of our electrified monks, is not visible as such; at first, it’s constituted around the book and thus forming an artificial body16. This change is perhaps most noticeable in the figure of the Author. The Author becomes a kind of mega-subject – he experiences (with the book) a first-order bodily expansion. But this isn’t the end of the story. Because the book, which previously was a second-hand product (the image of the writing hand), also becomes an artificial body – it becomes a corpus where the ego-expansion of the Reader and Author are equally represented. All this is to be taken as quite palpably unmetaphorical. Because what constitutes a quasi-phantasmatic body on the Author's side – in other words, the aura of literature – becomes a reality on the Political side, the book can homogenize a linguistic space in such a way that it forms a unity. This is the core of mechanical writing: Homogenization, Rationalization, the constitution of artificial bodies, and corporations. We’re thus dealing with vernacular languages codified and unified by book culture, which soon makes political claims as they form themselves into political spaces: precisely what in Europe is called the nation-state. Seen in this light, it’s no coincidence that the letter, that is, what’s written in black and white, becomes a representative of authority: it vouches for what faith can no longer do.
That is the concept: black on white. This concept, which I would like to call mechanical writing, was for a long time unchallenged and, until our days, was considered the most advanced form of the Sign.
So, what does electromagnetic writing mean? First, it means nothing other than that the character is written down in an electromagnetic form on a tape or a hard disk. This concept of the written word also includes, as a special case, what we conventionally call writing: the written, or better yet: the printed word. Because, of course, the author who prefers to write in black and white (for several good reasons) has long been an electrified, text-processing author. This very broad definition of electromagnetic writing not only has the advantage of undermining the antinomy of audiovisual writing in what is now called the print medium, but it also attempts to conceive of the differences we make between analog and digital not so much as a caesura but as a continuum. Digital: that just means that something is notated in a much more intelligent way, so it is no coincidence you can see patterns of working that eventually take the form of machines long before being aesthetically anticipated. In short, however you say it: I AM [ICH BIN’s] it, whether in front of a camera, a microphone, or typed into the computer; it depends on the same battery that makes our electric monks twitch.
Now, I want to discuss what concerns us here because I haven’t forgotten my topic, which isn’t the future of literature or images, but it’s about sounds as Sound signs [Klangzeichen17]. My question is: how do you write, what do you write on, what is the place of writing? The answer is just as clear: it doesn’t appear as black and white images on paper – but as a tape on which sound signs are stored. And because you’re dealing with electric writing, you need an electric reader, whatever form it may be (radio, cassette recorder, tape, or video recorder). Naturally, as such, this seems like a trivial consideration, but it’s by no means superfluous for that very reason. This thought marks a most remarkable shift: the place of writing, which previously followed the logic of black on white, now shifts into the terrain of electromagnetic writing: into the field of sound signs. Or, putting it more precisely: the place of writing is where the sound signs are assembled and edited. In the sound studio. Or, since this place is also the process of shrinkage: in the computer.
It’s here under this premise that the crucial questions formulate themselves. As an illustration of what’s at stake, let's take a sound, and for the sake of simplicity, let's say: I AM. Now, I could have read that off a piece of paper. But it could also be that I've just said this right into the microphone because the paperiness sound of reading from paper bothers me – I don't want (and this is remarkable) to hear the paper. It's no coincidence that a great deal of effort is put into blocking out the rustling and scrolling sounds of the paper or, if you take it intellectually: it's eliminating the author's paper tigers from the world. If there is a text, the text should be such that it sounds like something. It doesn’t matter if it’s Art or Life; the main thing is it sounds like something. What I want to get at is that the register on which I'm considering this linguistic event is no longer the register of literature nor the register of the theater but the register of the sound sign itself. This remark is trivial since I'm not proclaiming anything other than a media-specific language here. But what, and here it becomes interesting again, what is the language of a sound sign? What is sound sign language [Klangzeichensprache]?
First of all, by recording it, a Sound becomes a Sign. And from now on, I don't have to repeat myself because the tape recorder says I AM; I can double this snippet as it pleases me; I’ve got a whole chorus of voices that I could let run one after the other like a canon or layer them on top of each other like a cluster; I can also edit my snippet with scissors, a sampler, delay, or reverb – I can time stretch or pitch shift it (or whatever these devilish tools are called) –, and so I have not just one, but one-inside-the-other, a whole armada of clones and hybrids; and since I'm not short of supplies, I could use my sound sign body – which constantly claims to be I – as a crash test dummy that I can subject to a series of experiments; I could investigate how long it remains recognizably doing this – and if and when it disappears into the shallows of sound; and I could investigate what happens when I turn it upside down, turn it inside out, snip it, or shut down its circulation so that I can look at it in slow motion. In this sense, the instruments of the sound studio workshop function as analytic tools, or put metaphorically, as surgeon's knives, which make it possible to examine the anatomy of the sound sign.
I could also leave this process of systematic deformation to coincidental randomness; I could feed my snippet into the machinery, letting it circulate as it feedbacks on itself. Meaning I could construct an aleatory I-Machine, which deforms itself all by itself if my ambition is to keep myself out of it. You’ll admit that at the latest, with the seventh variation, the interest of even the most well-intentioned listener will no longer be able to figure out who this peculiar dividual [dividuum] is –but only follow the mutations and metamorphoses; watch how it inflates, how it flocculates at the edges and loses form; and how it, as an amorphous, hardly recognizability, dissolves in the noise.
I readily admit: All this may irritate someone who, attached to the Alphabet, only understands writing as what can be read in black and white. Because when something liquefies and sinks, you can feel as if you’re thrown adrift, plankless, into a sea. If Audio Art is experienced as a provocation, it’s because it leaves behind the solid ground of literature. You can imagine a piece in which text no longer appears – where only a voice says: I AM, always new and always different.
Of course: this insight shouldn’t concern the radio producer. Going back to the mythical beginnings of Radio, one of the first radiophonic broadcasts was the Titanic, reporting its sinking via wireless telegraphy. After picking up the sinking Titanic's cries for help, a young American radio pioneer named Sarnoff cobbled together an improvised telegraphic network for coordinating rescue efforts. Indeed, marine radio (as an attempt to remind homesick sailors of home with familiar songs) was a kind of untethering from writing: it is no longer the letters, as written texts, that evoked the feeling of home, but the song – meaning Radio goes back to the pre-modern, animistic mode of expression as we’ve finally arrived at the beginning of a modern mythical odyssey. On Christmas Eve in 1906, the telegraph operators of a ship in the Caribbean were surprised by the fact that their machine suddenly began to speak: ‘A human voice is coming out of this machine, someone is speaking. A woman's voice is singing. It's incredible!’18
If we read the documents of this early, mythical time when Radio was in the air, it becomes visible we're dealing with the birth of a new genus: the electromagnetic ghost. Radio means telepresence, space extension; it’s, as a sibling of Telephony, the possibility of super-corporeal presence. That means: animistic forms of thinking return via radio. With this background in mind, the idea that it's possible to write a radio play where someone with a heavy step and sturdy shoes stomps up a flight of stairs, rings the bell, and says: ‘My name is Paul Meier,’ is quite an abstraction. In a certain sense, this type is a touching displaced person, an undaunted landwalker and survivor of a time that hasn’t yet been shipwrecked.
Nevertheless, I've wondered for quite a while why the medium’s modernity could be so misunderstood, how theater and literary forms had effortlessly migrated into this mediality, and how past-tense human perception apparently can take such an appearance at its face value. Even today, we’re still surrounded by formulas and figures of thought that are at home somewhere else, in cinema, in literature, in so-called reality – but not where the mediality is at home: in the workshop of the recording studio. We’re attached, it seems, to a dark and unflattering reality, to a set of ideas that in psychoanalysis are called cover memories: memories whose function is principally to cover something else up, to keep it from coming up. Take, as exemplary, the talk of the O-Ton19 where you find a naive reflective thinking: as if a microphone could represent anything 1:120. This is quite apart from the fact that every technical medium deforms the world in a specific, systematic way, meaning certain regularities already lie in the form of reflection – but it’s more evident that as such, an O-Ton becomes a Sign in the hands of the one working with it – that he operates with a writing that’s only real in appearance – which, in reality, is a writing transforming a reality segment into a Sign. All the representational mirroring that’s talking us, as such, into the theoretic thought monstrosities of realism, naturalism, or the like are essentially conceptual and thought-preventing apparatuses obstructing the view of our mediality. Even the most minor example clarifies that everything standing under the Sign of the mirror (or, to put it more complicatedly: everything following the logic of representation) is of no further help here. For if I feed my voice, which says, I AM, into a sampler, then I have an exact double and can be satisfied with having this acoustic mirror image that a keyboard can now call up; however, this digitalization amounts to something else: namely a tremendous liquefaction of the original sound sign. Because through this operation, I have given myself a gene pool21 from which I can create hundreds of derivatives, clones, and mutants. The digitized voice thus becomes a pluralis, a kind of genetic choir; at its edges, it ceases to be a voice at all; it becomes a voice-like noise or a metallic and chaotically vibrating stringed instrument.
If I'm lapsing into somewhat out-of-place terminology here, it's no accident. In analyzing the advanced working methods of the studios, you'll find that you can follow the genetic operations here in a crystalline, purely conceptual form: COPY, DELETE, PASTE, INVERT, CYCLE. Yes, you could see it exactly the other way around: whatever the geneticists practice in vivo and with a genetic material that’s only barely as of yet seen (what Chargaff22 calls, not inaccurately, Genetic-Adulteration) is prefigured in the operations given to the sound sign body: clearly and with the utmost rationality.
I must confess: it was a frightening moment when I first stood before a sampler a few years ago and read on the small display that the sound derivative presented to me was a hybrid. This fright was the fundamental realization: what you're doing here is something you despise; you're cloning. This isn’t merely a technique but the downfall of a man’s image. Even more: this image already perished long ago (and the geneticists aren’t to blame for it), and it wasn’t with a roar, but casually under the hand: in the moment, for example, when you were cutting out the breath of a human being with a pair of scissors, to experience how such a breathless human being sounds. Or when you fed a child's voice into the machinery until it had become, via the feedback, a kind of heart-death sound.
This symbolic death is the point that preceded the Machine, and the sampler was in your head long before that. Seen in this way, looking at the display of the sampler was a look into the inside of your own head; it was what was designated here with a terminus technicus, the shock of an inner world never before experienced this way: the experience of the digital hybrid.
This highly ambivalent view set me out on my long journey into the history of things to find where the Machine had its beginnings. All the mental flotsam that's flowed back to me from distant times into the present has confirmed my belief that the recording studio is the magic workshop of the modern age because it’s here, in how you work on sound sign bodies, that things become comprehensible, which otherwise only show themselves unclearly after the fact.
What before was only a sensation became a certainty: even from a sweeping historical point of view, you could only be certain witnessing a temporal rift on your own instrument. Could you take, for example, your notion of a musical instrument and consider what the sampler has done to a few centuries of musical instrument making? It is evident that the idea of the instrument is about to disappear because everything that’s sound is virtually capable of becoming a musical instrument.
Or, to put it another way, there are no longer any specifically musical-sounding bodies that transcend the ordinary, that is to say, the unmusical world. This is a caesura comparable to the development of polyphony, the musical deep space in the fourteenth century: and like this (which is to be understood as the initiation of a new order), something that will have unforeseeable, unheard-of consequences.
Not only that, the time structure and the way music has been notated over centuries turns out to be something pointing to the past – not the future. Look at a sheet of music and try analyzing the elements of its writing: You have something like an arrow of time that’s timed in a certain way, then you have certain events (of pitch and duration) attributed to certain instruments and sound sources. Naturally, this is a variation of what I called mechanical script in black and white. Following Newtonian logic, we assume an abstract, homogeneous, spaceless, and portable sound. However, exactly here lies this notation's limitation. Sound is diametrically opposed to this kind of notation because it's a spatial event inseparable from its spatiality. After all, sound is created by resonance; it's located by the reflections of its space. None of the things characterizing a conventional sheet of music are really relevant to those working with contemporary sound sign bodies – thus, no one will entertain the idea of writing scores of this kind because you're working with things that can't be notated in conventional, mechanical concepts. When you work with how the sound sign body appears in space, with the spatial depths and perspectives that can be interlaced one-into-the-other, then you’re working with the sound sign body itself – with its volumes, its heights, and its depths – and finally, you’re working with its clones, with the digital mutants and derivatives of its original sound. In short, the parameters with which you look at a sound with have become different; they've multiplied. Take any sound, the sound of an espresso machine as an exemplary. How should a composer describe it? And when he’s transformed it so much that the linguistic sign espresso machine can’t convey it? I think there’s one clear thing: it’s one thing to understand such a complex sound event as a note, which is sufficiently defined by its place and its time value on a time track, corresponds to the old geometrical ideal of the body, but if we analyze the sound event’s complex physicality, it becomes an almost negligent way of describing it. Another point (or, more precisely, just another way of looking at the same phenomenon) is that its sense of time is also different. You no longer think on the same timeline as a seventeenth-century composer thought on – that is, in the regularity of sonata form, where we know after you say A, you always have to say B. Instead, you’re operating in a temporal-spatial order. Now, I'll readily admit this is where it gets complicated, so I'll try to simplify it by taking the storage medium, which gives us our experience of time as an exemplary. The hard drive – in contrast to magnetic tape, which still reflects the time track’s ‘arrow of time’ – already describes the new order. Where magnetic tape stores information linearly, nothing on the electromagnetic hard drive is stored linearly. Because sounds stored are no longer as a sequence of ABC – but more or less spatially distributed randomly, if something is to be read as an ABC sequence, it isn’t a physical successive reading but a spatial jumping from here to there on the drive. There is no linearity here, just spatiality, only spatiality. This is probably the decisive leap of thought: we must break away from the last bonds binding us to conventional temporality. Time is now a mode of spatial appearance where everything is simultaneously, and if it appears in time, it’s because it has been coded as such by a kind of written time program.
Forgive me for these somewhat abstract remarks amounting to a kind of Philosophy of the Hard Drive, or what is otherwise called virtual reality in the old language of magic. It's as if something new was really being added and not just as a different way of moving through stored material (which, after all, Lieschen Müller, who’s been zapping through her TV channels, has long been practicing: for she, too, no longer follows the ABC’s of watching a program, but like the logical movement mapped out on the hard drive: jumps from here to there, surfing channels). This change in temporal-spatial experience takes us back precisely to our electric monks – which I understand as the heart of electromagnetic writing. I've written a long book titled Metamorphoses of Space and Time. A History of Perception that’s all about these questions: if you are interested in learning more, read it; otherwise, I can only ask you to excuse my cryptic abbreviations here. But let's go back to the place of this writing, to the recording studio, or even better: let's sit down at the computer’s workshop – that’s where we actually work on sound sign bodies. Stored in memory, it still claims I AM, but naturally, in my perception, it's long since become just another sound we're no longer afraid to double, pump up its volume, shrink it, crumple it, or let it crash into another Sign body. As you can see, this terminology wouldn't survive an ethics committee, but it does raise extremely relevant questions. What is this image of man? What is an originator? What is an instrument? What is work if it, fed into the computer, disappears in a museum of work? If you’ve ever worked with the material this way described, you'll inevitably have asked yourself all these questions. For this reason (and even if this seems like a kind of impertinent trivialization of the highest intellectual activity), I wouldn't hesitate for a second to claim that here, in a very practical form, all essentially philosophical questions arise: Questions whose explosiveness is because they don't get lost in the thin air of conceptual abstraction, but tangibly change thinking. All the procedures I’ve elaborated in the processing of sound sign bodies are marking something like an extreme avant-garde of thinking – that’s assuming everything graspable here is also already taken up into conceptual abstraction. But unfortunately, that’s not the case. There isn't (at least I'm not aware of) any attempt to analyze these processes philosophically; there isn't even an effort to arrive at a theory of the sampler, or better: of the digital sound sign. Considering this revolution, that’s an astonishing fact: an almost unnatural, artificial silence like the silence on a CD.
Last but not least, let's return to our Author. What is the portrait of the Author, Electrified? It’s, first of all, a swan song: namely, the end of the man of letters, the end of the great writer and creator of worlds, who succeeds in making a new world emerge from the imagination in black and white. Our electrified Author changes the writing (which, as the Middle Ages exemplary shows, is not so unusual). However, this new writing, which I wanted to say in our opening, isn't completely free but assumes certain conditions. It depends on electricity. The electric Author – this lonely descendant of the electric monks, has had the experience that one-is-in-the-other, and because of this experience, he'll no longer be able to say: I AM WHO I AM. As one-in-the-other, he'll try to assimilate the other, just as he'll try to transfer his own-into-the-other, he'll note the modes of his changes, its interstices and transfers. The electrified Author catches the vibrations of things with a greater ear and eye. He’s someone who records and stores images, sounds, and sensations. You might call this syncretism, but that doesn't quite hit the mark. Because it doesn't remain with the recording and the borrowed form, but it's about how these signs are reassembled. The electrified author will be the one who re-listens to the recorded images, sounds, and sensations and who succeeds in analyzing them by re-listening again and again, who immerses himself in the writing accessible to him. The one who begins developing a hearing ear, a seeing eye. Who's trained on the material itself: to listen more acutely, to look more closely in greater detail. It’s only this experience with writing, and nothing else, authorizing him, giving him the right to call himself an Author.
You see: my portrait of the Author, Electrified, has little to do with the supplier of texts smuggling himself into the big houses through the back door, humbly handing over his delivery. This image makes it unclear where the Author's boundary-work is and what distinguishes him from the sound engineer, the director, and so on. If I take this talk of the place of writing seriously, this usurpatory tendency is an inevitability. Because if we analyze how the electromagnetic writing of a radio play has been made up to now, we’re dealing with a highly complex system of strict labor division in which a whole series of people are involved. And as life being what it is, the more people involved, the more dubious the result. This kind of writing always amounts to consumptive forms, at least where those involved aren't able to electrify each other and are only bored with each other. Against this background, it’s no coincidence, but an almost intrinsic necessity, that the mediality of the medium hasn't yet reached this essential point: the idea of sound sign writing—Audio Art.
Exposure to the experience of the sound sign has always been the most tremendous promise of mediality for me. However, for this to occur, it is necessary to eliminate all prejudices: as if we actually know what a text is, what a piece of music is, and what a sound is. Precisely, that's not determined here – that's my message. The sound sign, as such, is largely indifferent; it's defined in its use as what it appears to be: text, noise, or music. The sound understood this way is a novelty. We're dealing with a new sign body that we can't yet say much about – but must first grasp and understand it. I don't know the details of what this will lead to; I only know that what was previously amorphously experienced as mere noise becomes recognizable as a complex event: it gets a body. Just as the body in the painting of the 15th century gets a shadow, the sound sign body also receives a shadow, hundreds of them.
This radical state of newness is in a world that's coming to an end in so many wonderful ways, and yet it's also something that's, perhaps, the most frightening of all. And the resistances (again quoting a term from electricity) are considerable. They lie not only with those who feel threatened because of their vested interests but also extend far beyond this meditation on the radio play. For some reason, we've become accustomed to despising those electromagnetic specters that we've brought onto the scene ourselves as simulacra – we speak of simulation as the opposite of the real. But if we look around, we can see our world is becoming increasingly filled with such simulations – and to disparagingly speak of simulation in this sense is to refuse the new writing. The electrified author will take it for granted as part of himself; he will have to practice an aesthetic that will take the word simulation as a title of honor.
I thank you for your time...
Translated by Hopkins Stanley and Martin Burckhardt
Berlin Radio Play Days was an annual event organized by the ARD to allow its regional radio broadcasters to show the public what their taxes were supporting; part of the event included a meeting of Chief Editors, their assistants, writers, and engineers with various presentations and meetings. [Translator’s Note]
Burckhardt, M. - Im Blinden Fleck der Öffentlichkeit: Zur Situation des Hörspiels, Rundfunk und Fernsehen 2/1994. Rundfunk und Fernsehen was a publication of the Hans-Bredow-Institut. [Translator’s Note]
Historically: In late 1993 (a year earlier), the Mosaic browser had seen the light of day, and in October 1994, Netscape Navigator was launched, thus marking the beginning of our internet-connected society and its cultural implications. [Translator’s note]
The Literaturhaus Berlin is a state-funded cultural institution missioned to promote German literature and is considered very prestigious for literary events. [Translator’s note]
Jean-Antoine Nollet was a French Catholic Deacon who suspended his clerical role in favor of investigating his interest in what was then the new science of Electricity. [Translator’s note]
Electricity as energy [Elektrische Energie] is intimately connected with the battery on the other side of the sudden raising of the colon’s stage curtain in the thought labyrinth of Martin’s œuvre as the simulacrum of Imagination’s Pulsating Power. Note how he hints that ‘it’s not sufficient saying this is electricity’ in the next paragraph, cluing us in that he’s thinking of electricity anew. [Translator’s note]
This observation that the Batterie [Battery] is the real hero is the beginning thread of what becomes defined as the Kraftwerk of the metaphysical battery that stores the pulsating energy of human imagination [Einbildung], which powers the Gesellschaftstriebwerk [Social Drive] of a particular Universal Machine. We’ll see this traced as Martin’s thinking matures into defining what becomes known as cultural theory. [Translator’s note]
Kreislauf [Kreis=Circle, Lauf=Run] translates as running in a circle; circular flow as a cycle or closed, cycling loop; an electrical loop or circuit. This notion of electrical connection and circulation becomes important leitmotifs as Martin’s thought labyrinth develops, particularly concerning the dividual, dieta, metabolism, the Socioplasm, and the Psychotope. [Translator’s note]
Ausstrahlung is a technical term specific to broadcasting, roughly translating as radiosity or the transmission of Charisma and vibrancy that connects, refracts, and illuminates. In the next paragraph, Martin uses this notion of radiosity specifically in reference to an object whose radiant rays no longer connect with something but only radiate into nothingness. [Translator’s note]
At the time, after realizing their listener numbers were way down, German Public Radio was desperately trying to gain the listener’s attention, coinciding with the beginnings of the Attention Economy; note this proliferation is an early tracing of the Burckhardtian Boolean x=xn. [Translator’s note]
Das Es [Id], Das Ich [Ego], and Das Über-Ich [Super-Ego] are the familiar interacting, structural agents of Freud’s psychical apparatus. In German terms, the sequence literally is the IT, the I, and the OVER-I; note how Martin shifts between the literal German translations and the familiar psychoanalytic terms, depending on how he’s emphasizing the One. [Translator’s note]
‘ICH BIN’s’ translates as IT’S Me or the individual I, which Martin uses to indicate a specific ego as my ego, me here now – but, as the text progresses, he uses it to refer to the dividual. [Translator’s note]
Dividuums is the dividual experience reflected in the fluidity of the self rather than the notion of an isolated monad. In this lecture, Martin explores the impact of digitalization on the end of Representation as announced by the Guillotine, which heralded a return of the Simulacral self, but now as a simulation rather than a simulacrum. This notion of the dividual as a dividend will continue being developed as a significant leitmotif in the labyrinth of Burckhardtian thinking.
Maschinenpark translates as a pool of machinery; here are the beginnings of the Kraftwerk [Powerplant] or the metaphysical battery powered by our Imagination, which, in turn, powers the Universal Machine’s Gesellschaftstriebwerk [Social Drive] and its anti-gravitational effects of maintaining a cultural open future. This starts with the Greek Typenrad [Alphabetic Wheel], which allows for writing that becomes scripture; in modernity, it becomes electrified, eventually becoming digital writing. It’s this battery of electrified writing that Martin is referring to here as cameras, microphones, as the mediums that fission the individual self into the dividual. [Translator’s note]
This is the moment when the Middle Age’s Universal Machine, the Räderwerk [Wheelwork], is being replaced by Modernity’s Digitalwerk [Digital Engine], which we know as the Computer but started when writing was telematically electrified. [Translator’s note]
This is the central thesis of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Nation and Nationalism is a symptom of the printing press. [Translator’s note]
Klangzeichens, which translates as sound sign, is how Martin refers to the physical sound captured and transformed into either an electromagnetic wave or its digital representation; both make up Klangzeichensprache or sound-sign-language that can manipulated in a wide variety of ways – leading to the question of the Klangzeichenkörper or the simulacral sound-sign-body that can be copied in an xnth fashion which shows up as the significant leitmotif of the Boolean formula of x=xn in his mature thinking (see Trans. note 5 and 10 above). [Translator’s note]
It’s widely held that Reginald Aubrey Fessenden made the first radio broadcasts for entertainment purposes on Christmas Eve in 1906. [Translator’s note]
O-Tone or original tone is a radio term referring to the original, untouched recording of something. [Translator’s note]
Here, for the academically curious, we find the forma formans/forma formata thread, which started in Digitale Metaphysik and slowly progressed as the Lost Form in Philosophie der Maschine (Berlin, 2018). What’s important to understand following this trace is that the mirror paradigm is over; instead, you have a multiplicity of mirrors as in a mirror cabinet where the original image is lost, which is what’s behind Martin’s discussion here of a gene pool. [Translator’s note]
Here, Martin refers to how a genotype is a simulacrum that dissimulates into various phenotypes, depending on how the genotype responds to its environment – which is another way of saying it’s manipulated. The critical point here is that the age of representation is over, and we’re now in the age of simulation. At the time, people didn’t understand what this meant, and, unfortunately, this continues to be the case, which he continues exploring in the Psychology of the Machine series. [Translator’s note]
Erwin Chargraff taught Watson and Crick about Chargaff’s rules, which was the basis of their work on the DNA double helix. [Translator’s note]