Sometimes there rises that which they think in their ignorance is a con- fused babble of aspiring voices not knowing what ancient harmonies these are to which they are so faultily lis- tening William Carlos Williams "This thing is bigger than all of us baby..." An anonymous gangster in an anonymous 1920s film...
THESIS Recording the voice proposes an ontological risk: The recorded voice is the stolen sound that returns to the self as the hallucinatory presence of another. The mechanization of war, the electronization of information, the hypercommodification of culture, the exponential growth of mass media - all of these point to a semiotic hierarchy of representation, a locale in which the human mind, consciousness "itself", acts as a distributed network. The spread of global networks of all sorts have created a sense of telephony unprecedented in human history: The complete integration and simultaneous representation of the human world as a single conscious entity based on the implosion of geographic distance. I sit, write, and listen to a mixed tape I made a while ago. Impressions arrive. Is it me or is it memorex? Sound, Symbol, Sentiment: One of the first bootleggers - in this case, one of the first people to sample music - Lionel Mapleson, used a phonograph recorder given to him by his close personal friend, Thomas Edison, to record extracts of his favorite moments from the various operas that played at New York's Metropolitan Opera house when he was working there from 1901-1903. These recordings of various arias comprise the first known "mixed" texts created by the recording medium. With his recording phonograph in hand Lionel Mapleson may just have written himself into the history books as the first DJ. His phonograph was a new way of data-handling that allowed the mechanical implementation of a non-sequential form of text, one including associative trails, dynamic annotations, and cross references: a host of characteristics one finds as common features of computers in our modern hypertext- formatted world. A journalist writes of the experience of listening to these recordings as follows: "[The sense is one] of listening from backstage, through a door that keeps opening and closing, to bits and pieces of performances. The vantage point is at a little distance from the singers, and they seem to be heard through a certain amount of backstage clatter; sometimes they move out of line of hearing, and sometimes the noise obscures the voices. But mostly, they can be heard quite well enough for the listener to get a very definite sense of personalities and occasionally of the full impact of virtuosity, that in terms of the opera house today, is quite beyond the wildest imagination1..."
ANTITHESIS Where Walter Benjamin focused on what he called "aura" as a defining characteristic of the process that distinguished the original from its copies, today, with the ascension of electronic methods of transmitting information, one must now concern oneself with "replication." With reproduction, a copy cannot be made to exceed the original. With replication, the "original" merely acts as a conduit to generate other, new permutations or variations on the information the original contained. In short, reproduction speaks to us of a form of fetishism pertaining to an object-oriented industrial age aesthetic; the other, replication, speaks to us of a method of constructing a non-object oriented work of culture produced and informed by an aesthetics of what we can call "cybernetic." The word "cyber" was coined by Norbert Weiner in the mid 1940's to describe control systems theory. Its root word is derived from the ancient Greek name for the captain of a ship. By guiding the passengers from one destination point to another, the captain acted as a kind of conduit for the passengers in his or her vessel. Weiner felt that information control systems reflected this notion of flow (thus in computer programming jargon the import ance of "flowcharts" and other mapping functions that guide the implementation of a program) and saw in his notion of control theory a method for controlling logic structures. Weiner's concern with the movement of information through a logic structure informed his critique of the passage of structural information defining mechanical objects as well: "variation occurs in the inaccuracy of the realization of the copying process," he writes when comparing the inheritance of genes (which he also concluded were information structures) to mechanical methods of reproduction2). Weiner's concept of copying processes mirrors the way that the transmission of ideas, type, and text have often been described. When Thomas Edison first recorded the human voice onto a tin foil roll singing "Mary Had a Little Lamb", on December 6, 1877, history changed. It became malleable in a form never before seen on this planet. Experiences of events, and the moment-events themselves could be captured, edited, sequenced, and distributed. At the same time that the invention of the typewriter liberated words from their gestural significance and phonetic meaning, and that psychoanalysis disassociated meaning from consciousness, phonography transformed the voice into an object, marking an end to several millenia of the voice being used simply as an extension of corporeal expression. What Edison did was take the voice and reduce it to its basic component: sound. "Sounds" writes Marshall McLuhan as he cites J.C. Carothers article "Culture Psychiatry and the Written Word, "are in a sense dynamic things, or at least indicators of dynamic things - of movements, events, activities, for which man, when largely unprotected from the hazards of life in the bush or veldt, must ever be on the alert... sounds lose much of this significance in Western Europe, where man often develops, and must develop, a remarkable ability to disregard them.3" The Eugenics of Sound: In the world of the DJ, the processes of cutting, scratching, and ÏtransformingÓ (rapidly switching between line/phonograph inputs on a mixing board, thus making the transition from sound to silence become percussive) reconfigures the turntable away from an object of passive reproduction. The turntable in this milieu becomes an instrument of synthetic replication. The characteristics of inscription and amplification create a new form of audio collage that allows for the rhythmic manipulation of sonic material. In this sense the DJ acts as a message source. The amplification of sound creates an immersive environment of acoustic space. Narratives constructed around the deep extensions of the human nervous system fostered by electronic media have created a milieu where people can program music using algorithms to create purely electro-acoustic tones, or use samplers to edit and transform existing material. In the realm of the DJ the turntable is the most important instrument. Second to that is the mixing board. But it is the process of textual atomization that gives the interaction of the two their dynamic force. When left unamplified the mixing board and turntables amount to little more than a listening post for the idle. Amplification takes the turntable away from its background in the home environment - it paints an invisible geometry of convergence. The word "replication" (derived from "reply") implies dialogue as a core element of its meaning, the body immersed in a virtual space of seductive artifice and simulation, contextual malleability - the iconography of sound becomes utterly malleable - meaning rests in its rhythmic character. In this milieu the sample represents a form of metonymy, and it acts as a mnemonic construct. Put an object into a new tempo or rhythmic arrangement and through analog or digital manipulation one completely alters its context and feel4. The recursive arrangement of sound lends itself immediately to the notion of redundancy that informs much of cybernetic theory. Sound in this manner acts as the epistemological equivalent of information transformed into a spontaneous mental screenplay. The sampler, the turntable, the sound studio - all of these posit sound as a kind of information.The manipulation of sound in this milieu constructs and reconstructs information5 . Thus the act of DJing creates a highly personal mental artifact and calls it memory.
SYNTHESIS One finds a similar conclusion in the writings of David Hume, the skeptic philosopher of the eighteenth century. Hume felt that human cognitive structures were based on the immediate replication of sense impressions: "Every idea is copied from some preceding impression or sentiment; and where we cannot find any impression, we may be certain that there is no idea6" For Hume all of our ideas and perceptions are either sense-impressions or copies of them, remembered, imagined, or thought of. What he established in his Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding was a deep psychological linkage between the human environment and our sensory perceptions of it. For Hume, the two are inextricably bound into what he calls Ïcustom or habit.Ó The direct incorporation of previously existing sound source material into an aural text has had implications far outreaching any critique of appropriation. It obeys a logic of bricolage that contains objects moving at different cultural velocities, and creates a multi-valent temporal structure that is presented simultaneously. This is what we call "the mix." Allegorical procedures, the prolonged present, composition, and structure in timeÛall of these mark out an invisible terrain shaped and configured the elements of a world of symbolic connections where all things lose their boundaries: a locale where the record acts as an elaborate synecdoche.
PROSTHESIS A brief etymology of three crucial words: conscience, personality, and phonograph. Conscience literally means "collective knowing". Beginning, middle, end, all signifiers of linear thought are irrelevant to it. The accretion of aura in electro-modernity is associated with the construction of personae. Personality means "that through which sound enters." Adrift etymologically, the word ÏphonographÓ means "writing sound." The encryption and systematic regulation of time and the social construction of subjectivity are the anchor points in the constellation of sonic information a DJ gathers together and then disperses in their mix. Playing with presence and absence, sound and silence, the mix demostrates how to condense fact from the vapor of nuance. With cutting, scratching, and "transforming," there's a double wave action, the mix establishes a unified field of amplified spatial representation with an aural logic of its own. This field has a fluid tendency of continuously fading into the past and future in complete defiance of any arbitrary divisions of time, the loops that comprise the main elements of this music act as a method of prolonging the present, mutating it into an allegorical procedure of portraying durational flux. It speaks to us like Heraclitus's Fragments On Nature : "Into the same river you could not step twice, for other (and still other) waters are flowing. To those entering the same river, other and still other waters flow... Into the same river we both step and do not step. We both are and are not7." The stream of consciouness narrative made of sound as an isolated of object of both replication and reproduction that a DJ assembles has as its salient features the use of records that contain elements of other records (indeed in these days most records made for the specialist DJ market are made entirely of other records...). In this way, the mix acts as a continuously moving still frame, the records are fused into a seamless fabric of sound made of fragments that collide and cross fertilize one another. The linkages between memory, time, and place, are all externalized and made accessible to the listener from the viewpoint of the DJ who makes the mix. Thus the mix acts as a continuously moving still frameÛa camera lucida capturing moment-events. The mix in this picture allows the invocation of different languages, texts, and sounds to converge, meld, and create a new medium that transcend its original components. The sum created from this audio collage leaves its original elements far behind. People find themselves electronically fused, networked, and oddly interfaced in the evolution of our phantasmal world of digital subjectivity. Call it "cyborg society", or the human race as a series of confluences: Flesh becomes the heir to biological trangressions of codes that seem like some sort of speech momentarily frozen into artifact, imbricated with the confused yet primal vernacular architecture of the subconscious. Changing economic and social conditions have altered the way we perceive music. Sound and music have, through the very methods used to create and distribute them, established a postindustrial link between entertainment and social engineering that mixes aural and spatial motion, one that gives the impression of a superimposed technicolor terrain onto personal experience. Governed by the unconscious forces of the market system, Adam Smith's "invisible hand" has made cyborgs of us all. Trangressive mixtures of biology, technology, and code, the mix has become a model of information: epistemological equivalence, vernacular cybernetics, and a vernacular architecture of audio collage are its informing motifs. Riding the alternating currents of mass communication, we have become melody subordinated to a newly spliced code, spliced as it were, into our collective consciousness, a dimly lit landscape of riddling images, asymmetries in time, space, and culture. To make a mix, you open yourself up to these currents of techne, psyche and symbol, and mesh with them.
CONCLUSION There can be no utterance without previous utterance. In the process of enunciation, layers of meaning shed other layers. Meaning flows both forwards and backwards in an intricate dance of moments suspended in the dynamic flux of language. We begin here with language as a metaspace of human communication. It encompases all human interaction - gestural, oral, genetic, visual, musical, sexual, and so on. Traces of previous migrations of meaning move across a cartographic surface whose constituent elements are comprised of memory, place and historicity etched into its surface - the fabric of its textuality. See the phonograph needle playing on the record as a device that allows for the mnemonic construction of a paraspace where all is flux, and the only constant is change. A place where there is no such thing as an immaculate perception. The mix: a fusion of different meanings whose previous connotations have been corralled into a space where they are so placed that differences in time, space, and culture are collapsed within the immediated realm of the teletopological present. Here you will experience cartographic failure. The intersection of this space and our daily reality contours the mind and creates places of disappearance in it psychospatial makeup. In this way experience becomes mediated. The fusion of "reality" and the paraspaces of our own desires (if they are anything it is that) takes oneÌs perspective on association lines from place to paraspace, memory to memory, mindscreen to mindscreen. In this way experience is made immediate. PerspectiveÌs movement in this scenario is controlled by the trajectory path of the mix (put the needle to the record put the needle to the record...). The mix's chronotopes8 (see the records, samples, and various other sonic material in this milieu as a form of externalized memory which act as shards of time) are coordinates on the invisible terrains of culture. The DJ is a spatial engineer of this vista, a spatial engineer of the invisible city. Translating the untranslateable in a prismatic fashion through the union of form and content, the DJ refracts meaning from the dense locale of culture and places the rays of meaning, in a rhizomatic fashion, back in their original locale: the human mind. This refraction of meaning leads one >from the singular to the plural, and in the process opens the ego-centric self to the spaces of the multiple where all things are linked. People live with things mostly, even exclusively since sentiment and action in us depend on our mental representations - as they are conveyed to us through the faculty of language, our Ïcode of consciousness.Ó Through the same act by which we spin language around ourselves we weave ourselves into it, and every language draws a circle around the people to which it belongs, a circle that can only be transcended in so far as one at the same time intersects and enters another. Sometimes, to be is to be enunciated. I leave you with this: "Dionysus, the mad god, breaks down the boundaries; releases the prisoners; abolishes repression; and abolishes the principium individuationis, substitituting for it the unity of man and the unity of man with nature. In this age of schizophrenia, with the atom, with the individual self, the boundaries disentegrating, there is, for those who would save our souls, the ego-psychologists, "the Problem of Identity." But the breakdown is to be made into a breakthrough; as Conrad said, in the destructive element immerse. The soul that we call our own is a not a real one. The solution to the problem of identity is, get lost. Or as it says in the New Testament: "He that findeth his own psyche shall lose it, and he that loseth his psyche for my sake shall find it.9 "
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Paul D. Miller is a writer and conceptual artist. He also DJ's frequently under the persona "DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid." His records, Necropolis, a compilation he edited, and Songs of a Dead Deamer, an LP of his own material, were released in March of this year. He is also currently at work on two books: Flow My Blood The DJ Said, a theory exploration of the linkages between semiotic theory, electro- modernity, and urban youth culture; And Now A Message From Our Sponsors, a sci-fi narrative of a DJ who becomes involved in a war between genetics and technology. He lives and works in New York City.
NOTES
1 Clinton Heylin, Bootleg: The Secret History of the other Music Industry, St Martins Press,1994. pp29
2 Norbert Weiner, God Golem Inc.: A Comment on Certain Points where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion. ( MIT Press Cambridge, MA, 1964) p48. Weiner here discusses a notion of replication and how many religious thinkers were disturbed by the notion that a machine could reproduce itself. Weiner took up the argument that God made man in his own imageÛfor Weiner, the propagation of species could be seen to function as a process though which an individual makes another individual in their own image, and machines for him would be able to make other machines in their image, thus transferring this notion of hereditary characteristics; the distinction between the two being that the machine images are not mere pictorial representations, but operative images. The information carried in the instruction program of genes, computer programs, ideas, or for that matter language itself, for Weiner, is transmitted in a similar manner. In this way cybernetics acts as a langugage that is common to the organic and inorganic, and it can explain organic and machinic processes.
3 Marshall Mcluhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (University of Toronto Press, 1962)Pp19
4 One of the simplest explanations of the difference between analog and digital representation can be found in Ron Eglash's essay "African Influences in Cybernetics": "Cybernetic theory is based on two dimensions of communications systems. One is the information structure, the other the physical representation of that information," he writes. What concerns me here is the linkage between semiosis, sound, and memory, and their deployment through syntactic space of sound systems. Eglash continues: "The most fundamental characteristic of a representational structure is the analog-digital distinction. Digital representation requires a code table (the dictionary, Morse code, the genetic code, etc.) based on physically arbitrary symbols (text, numbers, flag colors, etc.) Saussure postulated this characteristic when he spoke of the arbitrariness of the linguistic signifier. Analog representation is based on a proportionality between physical changes in a signal and changes in the information it represents (e.g. waveforms, images, vocal intonation)... While digital systems use grammars, syntax, and other relations of symbolic logic, analog systems are based on physical dynamics - the realm of feedback, hysteresis, and resonanAce." Ron Eglash, African Influences in Cybernetics, The Cyborg Handbook, Edited by Chris Hables Gray, Routledge , 1995. pp18
5 In information theory, as postulated by Claude Shannon (whose papers written for Bell laboratories in the 1940's initated the entire information theory movement that led to the discovery of a theory of cybernetics by Norbert Weiner), redundancy makes complexity possible. Jeremy Campbell, in Grammatical Man: Information, Entropy, and Life describes Claude Shannon's notion of information and continuous change: "Error and how to control it, was one of the main themes of information theory. Shannon took it for granted that error will always be with us, because noise in communications systems is as natural as entropy in thermodynamic systems..." Campbell goes on to introduce Shannon's concept of redundancy in code as a method of compressing information into units that would contain patterns of fragments that could be contructed to reveal an overall theme in the information being transmitted. This is where Shannon's information theory becomes linked to sensory input, and how we now perceive the world as a series of patterns signals. It also separates analog information from digital information: " The code works by adding redundancy. This means that some sameness is mixed in with change. Change is the essence of information. A message source must be free to vary its messages, to send different sequences of symbols. There is no point in sending the same sequence over and over again. But redundancy insures that a pattern of probabilities remains constant across all the messages. That is something the receiver can depend on. A measure of consistency is introduced into a system which, by its very nature, needs to be partly inconsistent, to surprise with the unexpected. The same general principle is at work when we look at the ever-changing flux of impressions, of "messages" reaching the eye. Nearly always we are able to make sense of them, to experience them as consistent... this is possible because the brain unconsciously selects stable, reliable elements, from the bombardment of sense impressions. In perception this is, as Shannon said of his code, "the crux of the matter." Jeremy Campbell, Grammatical Man, Simon and Schuster, 1982, pp201
6 David Hume, On Human Nature and the Understanding, edited by Anthony Flew, Macmillan Publishing, 1962, pp91
7 These three fragments No's: XLI, XLII, LXXXI, are from The Fragments of the Work of Heraclitus of Ephesus on Nature, (translated from the Greek text of Bywater by G.T.W. Patrick), 1889, as reprinted in Shiv K. Kuman, Bergson and the Stream of Consciousness Novel, The Gotham Library, 1963, pp108
8 In The Dialogic Imagination,, Mikhail Bakhtin, with his "chronotope," was able to penetrate the dense hierarchies of symbolic meaning in texts based on the dynamic movement of language within a fragmented temporal framework, such as the "heteroglossic texts" of Rabelais and Joyce. For Bakhtin, the chronotope was a method of conveying particular aggregates of historical time. "We will give the name chronotope (literally "time space") to the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature... In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history. This intersection of axes and fusion of indicators characterizes the artistic chronotope."
9 Norman O. Brown, LoveÌ's Body, University of California Press, 1966, pp. 161