mal d’archive: a capacious metaphor driving death

Music: Stars of the Lid: The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid (2001)

In a little over two weeks, I'll be speaking to the rhetoric folks at Purdue under the title, "On Vocalic Projection: EVP, backmasking, and the Ambivalence of Electronic Speech," or at least something like that. The talk is based on a book chapter and essay I drafted last year. The essay is more akin to a meditation than an actual argument, for in the book it provides a transition in focus from "live speech" to recorded speech (the distinction, of course, is brought into question a la Derrida in the book). What the analysis of my examples is supposed to do is demonstrate the ambivalence we have toward the human voice, the longing for immortality on the one hand, and the fear and truth of death on the other. It is something of an "inter-chapter," if you will. The problem is that as a stand alone article it's just not making sense; I have to fix this for my talk.

To prepare for the talk, I have gone back to the editor and reviewers' comments and, as I mentioned, started to reread Derrida's Archive Fever again.

As my own students are learning this week to review each other's essays, I am reminded of the nastiness that reviews can fall into:

Is there, then, something theoretical that we can learn by virtue of the way that this author answers this question, as insignificant as the question might be? That is what I was hoping as I started the essay. But I grew more and more disappointed as I recognized I was being carried along through an intellectual tour de force, performed by what appears to be the darling of a graduate program, who is yet to develop a sense of disciplined scholarship. I do gain a sense of who are the "smart" people with whom this author has become acquainted, as well as some of the "smart" ideas they had. But I am still waiting for something insightful and informative about the forms of electronic speech reference at the outset.

This is a particularly sadistic way of saying that I have no answer to the "so what?" question. What should a reader care about EVP and backmasking? What does an analysis of EVP and backmasking help us to understand or see better?"

In pondering these questions, I've come up with some tentative answers. They are:

• Examining the EVP and backmasking movements captures an important historical moment in media ecology: the 1970s. The 70s are often a forgotten decade for so many reasons (not the least of which being the end of the sixties, which spills over into understanding the 70s as a kind of cultural recovery period---the aftermath of the end of hope, if you will). Yet what happened in the 70s was the arrival and dominance of "home recording." The 70s was the golden age of home recording, the crowning achievement of what we might simply term "Analogical Culture." Digitalism, as a competing logic, unquestionably marks the onset of a curious from of amnesia that my essay resists.
• How people thought about fidelity and recording in the 1970s participated in a different form of "archive fever" than we witness today. I'm not sure, but I think I would thus disagree here with Derrida's understanding of the digital as somehow more "humane" than the dusty archive of the 1970s. The virtuality of the digital transforms the archive from the interior of a place---and thus the materiality of the traces cataloged "inside"---to an exteriority of no-place; the drive to archive consequently gets caught up in a utopic fantasy that is increasingly less mournful and much more aggressively destructive. What I mean by this is akin to what Benjamin has to say about the "aura" of a work vis-à-vis its reproduction. The Analogical Culture of the 1970s thus has a more theological character.
• Analogical Culture of the 1970s was more sonorously mournful because of the important medium of "noise." Analog recording more literally reproduced a prior "live" event; vinyl records, as I mused last week, raise the dead. Digital recording, however, is music that is produced by the playback device. Digitalism does not re-create the past in the present, but rather, presents sound (or whatever) at the moment. The consequence is the loss of distance or sonorous distancing that the medium of noise provides. In short, in the Digital Age technology has moved us from mourning to melancholia; sound (re)production is traumatic, in the moment, undistanced. The iPod, for example, is the new archive and exacts its own form of cruelty (lacking noise, the sound is so good it surpasses the threshold of pain as listeners go deaf).
• Perhaps the disappearance of noise and the melancholia that can result explains recent battles over forms of sonic mourning: the refusal of authorities to release the black box recording of United Flight 93, as well as the five year battle between The New York Times and the City of New York over hours upon hours of emergency phone calls, seem to be keeping the voices of the dead secret for a reason. That reason is not public, but there is a palpable fear of making the archive public. Perhaps this fear is over the "distancing" of mourning the immediacy of traumatic transmission in melancholia, an immediacy signaled by the digital?
• The relationship between technology and communication with ghosts cannot be separated from the archive as a metaphor for conquering origins and preserving the material trace.

Umm, I think I'm running out of steam. Just thinkin' aloud here about answers to the "so what?" question. I'm not sure any of these are satisfactory.