but the real noise and smell of a combat could not be recorded for the archive and transmitted until the arrival of the Edison phonograph. ( 1 7 ) P h o no gra phy did n ot just p rov i d e histo ric al res earch with a new ki n d of s o urce mater ial; it rathe r ar t i c u late d new, rath er ah istor ic al for m s of te mpo r (e)alit y on th e leve l of t h e physic a lly an d math ematic al l y rea l (w h ich is, literally, tech n o-log y) . With the phonograph, hearing became attentive of all kinds of sounds, regardless of their source, quality and meaning(lessness), just like the inner ear impassionately transduces vibrations analogue to electromechanical sound reproduction. With phonographic recording, listening became ahistorical, subject to the time-invariant reproducibility of acoustic signals. The phonograph provided sound production with a different kind of unhistorical index (in terms of Walter Benjamin), preserving its unique “auratic” experience, keeping the aural quality (in both senses) of its time quality since a tone exists only in
transience, that is: as Husserlean “time-object” ( 1 8 ) . The Greek term mousiké encompassed not only musical articulation in the narrow sense, but dance and poetry as well. The essential operation to create a memory of such “time-based” arts, of course, is recording: either as symbolical archive (by dance notation in the tradition of writing as graphé), or by media endowed with the capacity to un-archivally register the physically real audiovisual signals. Re me mbe r i n g past s on osph e re s by te c h n i c al me di a
The earliest effort of sound recording was a symbolic machine: language written in the phonetic alphabet. But the presence-generating power of technically recorded voices differs fundamentally from the gramaphonic notation of speech in the vocal alphabet. With the refinement of the Phenician alphabet to the Greek phonetic alphabet (which Ong actually called a “technologizing of the word” ( 1 9 ) ), acoustic articulation
nsition of sound provenience to permanent storage, it is just an idiosyncratic Georgia Press) 2004. ( 1 7 ) Bernhard Siegert, Das Leben zählt nicht. Natur- und en. Dreizehn Vorträge zur Medienkultur, Weimar 1999, 161-182 (175). ( 1 8 ) Edmund Husserl, d. (Indiana University Press) 1964 ( 1 9 ) Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy. The Technologizing
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