In the Pocket

Somewhere between 1915 and 1920, a gesture as simple as fumbling through one’s pocket came to signify a completely different kind of cultural technique.  Rather than sifting among a private collection of utilitarian or discarded objects, the user of the “pocket wireless” receiver now opened himself up to a “receptive situation” in which live bits of information (time, weather, stock quotes) or messages from home might be skimmed from the airwaves.

Five or six years ago, [Leon W. Bishop of Elizabeth, NJ] won a reputation as being more or less of a nut because he might often be seen walking about the streets with wires dangling from his hat and running down to a cane, while another wire trailed from one foot.  Occasionally Bishop would hold out his cane, put one hand in his pocket, fumble with something—and announce that he was receiving a wireless message.  Today almost anyone would know what he was doing, but five or six years ago the man who knew anything about wireless was an exception and unless Bishop took the time to let spectators ‘listen in’ to the dots and dashes, no one believed him.

(Binns, Jack, “Amateurs Race to Make Vest-Pocket Set,” New-York Tribune, February 19, 1922, p. 6.  Above, illustration from F.H. Collins’s 1898 patent application for the Magneto Ear Phone.)

Review: Jonathan Sterne’s The Audible Past

Since its publication in 2003, Jonathan Sterne’s The Audible Past has become a staple in the growing field of sound studies. A story about the development of sound-reproduction technologies, Sterne’s book was one of the first in a now well-populated list of scholarship across many different disciplines that aims to rigorously examine sound as an historical, analytic, and philosophical category. Recently referencing The Audible Past on his blog, Sterne writes,

I guess the main thing to say is that the book was written at a time where there wasn’t a whole pile of other contemporary scholarship on sound that was aware of OTHER scholarship on sound. So there is a lot of effort to think through what it means to talk about sound in the humanities and why that matters. I’m not sure someone starting a sonic project today has to do that kind of work or deal with that kind of problem.

The foundational status of this book may account for some of its slightly awkward moments. Neologisms such as the “Ensoniment” (as opposed to Enlightenment) take some getting used to, and continuous polemics against the “visual bias” in the humanities at times become redundant (if only because the field of sound studies has since gained so much traction). But the conceptual trajectory of the book as a whole is so well organized, one which makes such a pointed intervention not only in the historiography of sound, but of technology in general, that the reader can easily overlook these slight bumps.

The Audible Past surveys the history of––to name only a sample of the devices Sterne deals with in this book––the stethoscope, sound telegraphy, telephone, phonograph, graphophone, gramophone, headsets, recording studios, wax cylinders, and hearing aids. However, Sterne is careful to characterize the scope of his study as “a deliberately speculative history” (27). In the book’s introduction, entitled “Hello!”, Sterne acknowledges the massive task facing the historian of sound-reproduction technologies. Rather than aspiring to any claims of exhaustiveness or finality, Sterne writes, “this book uses history as a kind of philosophical laboratory” (27), an approach that requires the book to “continually move between the immediate and the general, the concrete and the abstract” (29). From long forgotten aberrancies such as the ear phonautograph (constructed out of an actual cadaver ear) to modern telephone networks, Sterne seeks to locate amid these various devices a unifying set of cultural practices and beliefs. Read the rest of this entry »

Brief notes on Bernard Stiegler’s theory of “technics”

For me, one of the biggest “aha!” moments in Bernard Stiegler’s mathemagical (for someone not proficient in continental philosophy but very much keyed in to the specificities of modern media and theories thereof, I swear this thing reads like alchemy––in a good way…) Technics and Time 1, the Fault of Epimetheus (1998 [1994]) comes toward the close of the first full chapter titled “Theories of Technical Evolution. After moving through the wildly different (yet excellently synthesized) writings of Bertrand Gille on technical systems, André Leroi-Gourhan on the technological origins of the human, and Gilbert Simondon on autopoietic “concretization” of technical objects, Stiegler moves us into the pressing need for a theory of technics in our present technological moment. After all, the “technics” (an anglicization of the Ancient Greek concept of technê or tekhnê) of contemporary, everyday life seem far removed from the term’s original sense of handicraft, skill, or artisanal invention, a “making” or a “doing” in opposition to the “disinterested understanding” of epistêmê. (Ideally, I will put together a subsequent post tracking some of the shifts in meaning between technê andepistêmê, which tend all too often to stand as anchors in the virulent opposition between theory and practice). Today, we no longer work with tools, per se, but with machines and complex systems. We do not make or invent, but operate (and this goes far beyond some sort of programmer/end-user, mod/newb distinction; rather, it gets at a historical movement from technology and science to technoscience, from invention and discovery to institutionalized research and development). Read the rest of this entry »

Michael Fried’s "absorption and theatricality."

Briefly: I just came from a lecture by Michael Fried, and in the discussion session afterward, the question of subject/object interaction kept coming up in Fried’s constant employment of the pair “absorption and theatricality”–Yves-Alain Bois described it as “the engine that allows you to see.” This was challenged at several points–it seems that your (Fried’s) criticism only takes into account the presence of a single beholder. What about a crowd viewing the work? Similarly important to Fried’s “absorption and theatricality” is the staging of a kind of absorption. But in so doing, how do you ascribe the intentionality of the artist to that work and stage a sort of direct one-on-one confrontation with it? Fried keeps going back to the art object ‘performing’ these types–performing the address to an observer (anything else is virtually impossible?), performing a kind of intentionality of its creator. The art Fried is interested in does not provide raw access to intentionality, but thematizes intentionality itself.

It strikes me that this debate never seemed to be resolved in discussion–the various partisans remained entrenched. And it also strikes me that Benjamin seems to easily skate across this binary of subject-object interaction in his discussion of folk art and kitsch, when he writes “Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch teach allow us to see outward from within things.” And it’s even more striking to me that the media through which Benjamin ‘solves’ this problem, or at least finds a way to think beyond it, is through a (sort of) technics of mass art, through collective, popular culture.

Neil Armstrong’s physiology of floating

Apropos the recent death of Norman Mailer, I figured I’d cite a passage of his from his 1970 book Of a Fire on the Moon, which grew out of his coverage of the Apollo mission for Life Magazine. Initially bored to tears by NASA’s alphabet soup of technical terminology, Mailer’s penchant for sweeping statements is reinvigorated when Neil Armstrong describes a recurring childhood dream he had. As it did for Mailer, this dream has stuck with me since I first learned of it. In this dream, Armstrong is able to hover just above the ground when he holds his breath. Mailer is blown away by this first sign of life from the otherwise mechanically dry man:

On the one hand to dwell in the very center of technological reality (which is to say that world where every question must have answers and procedures, or technique cannot itself progress) yet to inhabit—if only in one’s dreams—that other world where death, metaphysics and the unanswerable questions of eternity must reside, was to suggest natures so divided that they could have been the most miserable and unbalanced of men if they did not contain in their huge contradictions some of the profound and accelerating opposites of the century itself.
–Norman Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon, pp. 46-47

For Mailer, the opposition of this image of floating while holding the breath with the language of technology and “technique,” distills the very essence of that 1960s dream of existence in outer space. This opposition no longer holds today. If anything, the plane has shifted and its poles have been synthesized. As the media of technique shifts from code to sound/image/text, the deployment of technique itself is moved from the outer to the inner:

The literally unheard-of is the site where information technology and brain physiology coincide. To make no sound, to pick your feet up off the ground, and to listen to the sound of a voice when night is falling–we all do it when we put on a record that commands such magic.
–Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1986), p. 36