Tom McCarthy and Aura Satz
This course will use firsthand encounters with instruments and technologies of inscription, encryption and transmission as investigative portals opening to wider aesthetic and theoretical concerns. Both thematically and practically, processes of writing, recording and reproducing lie at the heart of culture. The course will trace the outline and development of the ‘trace’ itself – materially, from the wax tablet to acoustic patterns, punched paper, Morse codes, gramophone grooves, magnetic tape and wireless frequencies; conceptually, from Plato to Derrida, Freud to Burroughs. Questioning the act of inscribing and deciphering scripts, encrypting, archiving and reproducing data, the sessions will be structured as a collective effort at thinking through objects.
1. Chladni Plate
Is it possible to talk of ‘Ur-writing’? What is ‘indexicality’? How does sound look? What is the status of the graph? And what’s this got to do with poetry?
Reading
*CS Pierce, ‘Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs’, Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Bucher (New York: Dover, 1955), pp. 104-115. A reworking of the same material by Peirce can be found online ‘What is a Sign?’ (MS404 of 1894)
*Johann Wilhelm Ritter, ‘Appendix to the Fragments from the Estate of a Young Physicist’ in Key Texts of Johann Wilhelm Ritter (1776-1810) on the Science and Art of Nature, Translations and Essays by Jocelyn Holland (Leiden: Brill 2010, 474-507)
Margaret Watts Hughes, ‘Visible Sound, Voice Figures’, The Century Magazine, Vol. XLII, May 1891, pp. 37-40 (Online at Cornell University).
Charles Wheatstone, ‘On the Figures Obtained by Strewing Sand on Vibrating Surfaces, Commonly Called Acoustic Figures’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 123 (1833): pp. 593-633
*Martin Heidegger, ‘What Are Poets For?’ in Poetry, Language,Thought. Trans. Hofstadter, Albert (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), pp.15-88
2. Jacquard Loom
From weaving patterns to pianola rolls and through to the computer, what constitutes, properly speaking, a technology of inscription and encryption? When does text become data? What are the effects of the removal of the writing/performing/labouring hand?
Reading
William Gaddis, Agape, Agape (London: Atlantic Books, 2003)
Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, ‘Mechanical Music,’ in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 597–600
Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (London: Vintage, 1996)
3. Gramophone
How does gramophonic inscription transform the understanding of texts? How do we engage with a script without a reader or performer/re-enactor other than a machine? What are the implications of surface and surface noise? How does the gramophone affect temporality (reversibility, speeding up and slowing down)?
Reading
Thomas A. Edison, ‘The Perfected Phonograph’, North American Review, 146 (1888): 641-650
Theodor W. Adorno, ‘The Form of the Phonograph Record’, Theodor W. Adorno: Essays on Music, ed. Richard D. Leppert, trans. Susan H. Gillespie (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 277-82
László Moholy-Nagy, ‘Production-Reproduction’, De Stijl no. 7, reprinted in Moholy-Nagy, ed. Krisztina Passuth, trans. Matýas Esterhazy (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985), pp. 289–90.
Michel Leiris, ‘Persephone’, Rules of the Game: Vol. 1. Scratches (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997)
4. Radio
What did Hoffmann mean when he claimed that ‘death is primarily a radio topic’? What is the relation between crypts and encryption? And why do schizophrenics hear voices?
Reading
Konstantin Raudive, Breakthrough: An Amazing Experiment in Electronic Contact with the Dead, trans. Nadia Fowler (Garrards Cross: Smythe, 1971)
Pierre Schaeffer, ‘Acousmatics’, in Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, edited by Christopher Cox and Daniel Warner (Continuum, 2006), p.76-81.
Orange Edward McMeans,’Eavesdropping on the World: The Log of a Listening-Post in the Little Back Bedroom’ , in Scribner’s Magazine, Vol. 72, No. 2 1922-08, pp. 225-232. Download Pdf here.
5. Reel-to-reel
What are the aesthetic, political and metaphysical implications of manipulating media? How do techniques such as collage and cut-and-paste migrate from painting to sound and the written word? Does consciousness, as William Burroughs claimed, ‘run on a seven-second loop’?
Reading
William Burroughs: ‘The Electronic Revolution’, Electronic Revolution/Die Elektronische Revolution, Expanded Media, (1970) available online here.
Daphne Or,a, An Individual Note of music sound and electronics (Norfolk: Galliard, 1972), chapter 6, pp.60-67
6. The Archiving Machine - with Marko Daniel, Tate Curator
Could the museum itself be thought of as an archiving machine? What is the relation between the collection and the archive, between an artwork and a document, the archaeologist and the archivist?
Additional Screenings
Jean Cocteau, Orphée (1950)
William Burroughs/Anthony Balch, The Cut-up Films (1963-1972); Towers Open Fire (1963)
Mark Aerial Waller, The Sons of Temperance (2000)
Key Reading
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997)
Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000)
Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999)
Tom McCarthy, C (London: Jonathan Cape, 2010)
Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2000)
David Toop, Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener (London and New York: Continuum, 2010)
Further Reading
Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy, trans. Nicholas Rand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986)
William Burroughs, Nova Express (London: Panther, 1978)
William Burroughs, The Ticket that Exploded (London: Paladin, 1987)
Steven Connor, ‘Looping the Loop: Tape-Time in Burroughs and Beckett’, http://www.stevenconnor.com/looping/looping.pdf
François Dagognet, Etienne-Jules Marey: A Passion for the Trace, trans. Robert Galeta and Jeanine Herman (New York: Zone Books, 1992)
Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982)
Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 2001)
Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996)
Evan Eisenberg, The Recording Angel: Music, Records and Culture from Aristotle to Zappa (London: Picador Books, 1988)
Sigmund Freud, ‘The Wolf Man’, in Case Histories 2,(Pelican Freud Library, vol. 9), ed. Angela Richards, trans. James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979)
Sigmund Freud, ‘A Note upon the “Mystic Writing Pad”, in Complete Works 11 (London: Penguin, 1987)
Thomas Hankins, and Robert J. Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995)
Hannah B. Higgins, The Grid Book (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2009)
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (London: Penguin, 2006)
Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead, eds., Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio and the Avant-garde (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1994)
Michel Leiris, Rules of the Game: Vol. 1. Scratches (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997)
Thomas Y. Levin, ‘ “Tones from out of Nowhere”: Rudolf Pfenninger and the Archaeology of Synthetic Sound’. Available online at http://www.centerforvisualmusic.org/LevinPfen.pdf
John Durham Peters, Speaking into Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999)
Laurence Rickels, Aberrations of Mourning: Writing on German Crypts (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988)
Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, trans. Stephen Cohn (Manchester: Carcanet, 2000)
Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book: Technology – Schizophrenia – Electric Speech (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989)
Simon Singh, The Code Book (London: Fourth Estate, 1999)
T. L. Southgate ‘On Various Attempts That Have Been Made to Record Extemporaneous Playing’, Proceedings of the Musical Association, 8th Sess., (1881-1882): 189-196
Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2003)
Mary Désirée Waller, Chladni Figures: A Study in Symmetry (London: G. Bell, 1961)
October, 55 (1990)
Allen S. Weiss, Phantasmic Radio (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1995)
