the audio archive is the mother of memorials

Music: Between Interval: Secret Observatory (2005)

Last night I had a delightful dinner with colleagues, and then a splendid time at a kind of after-party at Dale's. The after-party was boy-heavy, but that's ok. I like fraternities, after all. I was a little fuzzy this morning, but managed to write a bit more on the acoustic projection essay. I just may get this done before the deadline. I have hope. Here is the next section:

Embalmic Sonority and the Archival Womb

For Walter S. J. Ong, "communication, like knowledge itself, flowers in speech" (2). Ong argues this is because words are the most fundamental unit of communication, and they are assigned such a status because they are sonorous:

Sound, bound to the present time by the fact that it exists only at the instant when it is going out of existence, advertises presentness. It heightens presence in the sense of the existential relationship of person to person (I am in your presence; you are present to me), with which our concept of present time (as against past and future) connects: present time is related to us as is a person whose presence we experience. It is 'here.' It envelopes us. Even the voice of one dead, played from a recording, envelops us with his presence as no picture can. (101; my emphasis)

It is no mere coincidence that Ong's primary example of presence is recorded speech, and that this example is immediately yoked to death: voice betokens an aliveness, an immediacy that one senses when playing back a recording of the dearly departed. Recorded speech cheats death. Unlike the word or the letter-the parchment message and the email missive-speech has long been assumed to be the bearer of life and the trace of the soul. The letter and image alike are dead, requiring the animation of spirit that speech betokens by default (Sterne 17).i Although Derrida's critique of the metaphysics of presence displaces speech as "the center of subjectivity and the point of access into the divine," Ong's observations give voice to common, soul-deep assumptions about vocality (Stearne 17). As EVP makes clear, whether or not speech is truly alive-and not, say, just another form of writing-does nothing to deny its powerful, haunting purchase in the popular imaginary.

Ong's recourse to the example of speech from the dead also helps to underscore a point that numerous media scholars have argued in the past half-century: communication technologies-from writing on parchment to banging out email messages-amplify anxieties about death and hopes for immortality. And as Jonathan Sterne has argued, none has been caught up with the figure of the ghost more so than phonography. Of course, the double- and over-exposed accident of spirit photography had convinced some that the existence of ghosts was demonstrable with the image, yet owing to the strong association of human speech with presence, Victorian writers "believed there was something special about the relation between sound recording and death" (Sterne 291). The Spiritualist practices of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were a direct consequence of vocal disembodiment; the intellectual leap from voices of the living traveling across a geographical distances to the speech of dead souls traveling across the spiritual plane is a rather short one (Sconce 59-91). As Sterne demonstrates in his history of sound reproduction, writers interested in sound recording

repeatedly produced tracts on the possibilities for hearing voices of the deceased as some kind of guarantee or signature for the cultural and affective power of recorded sound. The chance to hear 'the voices of the dead' as a figure of the possibilities of sound recording appears with morbid regularity in technical descriptions, advertisements, announcements, circulars, philosophical speculations, and practical descriptions. (289)

Telepresence promised communication with deceased loved ones; sound recording, however, promised a new form of archival immortality-one that escaped the deadness of script to dwell in the interior presence of recorded speech. "Death has lost some of its sting since we are able to forever retain the voices of the dead," read one early reaction to the phonograph (308). In an 1877 reaction to the news of the invention, Scientific American declared that "speech has become, as it were, immortal" (298).

To the cognitive and psychological predispositions, as well as the logocentric habit of associating voice with presence, then, we should add that EVP intrigues listeners because it amplifies fantasies of immorality through its use of a new writing technology: sound recording. In his landmark study of the human sensorium, The Presence of the Word, Ong heralded the arrival of the "new orality" in reference to recording technologies at the very same moment when historians began the oral history "from below" project, an endeavor to cheat death in the name of Humanity by capturing the verbal stories of the isolated and forgotten who lived through history's worst hits, and an endeavor only made possible by increasingly smaller, portable recording machines (insert sources here). Only in the late sixties could Dr. Raudive conduct his EVP experiments in Peter Bander's dining room. With portability, History's archive was freed from bricks-and-mortar buildings in a way that also frees bodies from the sarcophagus, and in so doing, the soul from this mortal coil.

The association here drawn between death and sound is literal. Sterne argues that sound recording arrived shortly after the historical moment when there was a profound need for preserving the dead soldiers heaped-up by the Civil War. Matthew Brady's widely publicized pictures of piles of dead bodies only intensified the zeal for the preservative properties of chemicals (insert source here). "Recording," writes Stearne, "was the product of a culture that had learned to can and to embalm, to preserve the bodies of the dead so that they could continue to perform a social function after life. The nineteenth century's momentous battle against decay offered a way to explain sound recording" (292). Thus, when the phonograph arrived the American public was already primed to think about recording as way to prevent soul-rot. This is why the trope of "voices of the dead" began to appear in writings about phonography that has continued right up through the work of one of our most revered media ecology gurus, Father Ong.

Because of the intertwined history of canning, chemical embalming, and sound recording, taped voices of the deceased are unmistakably associated with mourning. The preservative impulse to record the human voice consequently leads to the archive, usually understood as "a place where documents and other materials of public interest are preserved," but also increasingly recognized in the theoretical humanities as a memorial to the dead and departed and a repository of mournful inscriptions (Manoff 10). The idea of an archive usually entails the notion of pilgrimage, a religious form of traveling to a auratic site to re-member something that has been forgotten or something that has died. "At the heart of the archive," argues Ann Cvetkovich, "are practices of mourning, and the successful archive enables the work of mourning" (271). Voices of the dead, collected first on records, then tape, and today in digital form, enable the auditor to do a kind of mournful labor. When we reckon with EVP as a practice of vocalic projection, then, for Raudive and his colleagues, finding of departed loved ones was not simply a means of mourning another's death, but the inevitable future of one's own.

According to Freud and countless thinkers after him, mourning is better understood as the ability to detach oneself from a loved object (usually a person) by working through and filing-away the mnemonic traces and memories of that object (243-258). Insofar as the archive is simultaneously a memorial and a storehouse, however, Jacques Derrida has argued that the labor of mourning encouraged by the archive is inherently paradoxical, at once driven by the violence of putting a corpus to rest as well as the drive to re-member and revive (29-30). In this respect archives are simultaneously ghostly prisons and parlors. Because for Derrida psychoanalysis was principally preoccupied with processes of remembering and forgetting (e.g., "repression," "projection," and so on), it

proposes a new theory of the archive; it takes into account a topic and a death drive without which there would not in effect be any desire or any possibility for the archive. But at the same time, at once for strategic reasons and because the conditions of archivization implicate all the tensions, contradictions, or aporias we are trying to formalize here, notably those which make it into a movement of the promise of the future no less than of recording the past, the concept of the archive must carry in itself, as does every concept, an unknowable weight. (29-30)

Such an unknowable weight nevertheless leaves mnemic traces and "inflects archive desire or fever," metamorphosing the mournful labor of the archive into a kind of melancholy, an abject inability to detach oneself from the beloved object because something about it-that is, something around it-eludes us. However metaphorical, "archive fever" is the restless, ceaseless process of memory itself; the archive is not a thing or a place, but a doing, a putting away and a taking-out; it is repression . . . and the return of the repressed.

Perhaps nothing betokens repression more than the return announced in the English translation of Raudive's archival achievement: Breakthrough: An Amazing Experiment in Electronic Communication with the Dead. Reportedly based on an archive of over 100,000 audio tapes, almost 300 pages of the 400 page book consists of transcriptions of voices that have broken through from a "hidden world" to ours, interspersed with and brief commentaries from Raudive. His first example is indicative of the mournful work of the archive and the drive toward origins it represents:

Amongst roughly 72,000 audible voices the "mother-motive" is statistically the most frequent. My mother appears in manifold forms and uses various languages, including some she did not know during her lifetime; Spanish, Swedish, and German, for instance; but most of all she uses Latgalian, the dialect of Latgale, a Latvian province. Usually she addresses me directly and personally, but sometimes other entities report her presence, introduce her or give some messages regarding her. [offset] A female voice: "Tava mate!" (Latvian: "Your mother!") "Mote te atrudas. Tekla." (Latg.: "Mother is here. Tekla") . . . At times she uses very tender terms in addressing me: "Kostulit ta tove mote." (Latg.: "Kostulit, this is your mother.")

Although Raudive's voices frequently brought unpleasant or confused messages, their capture always registered the delight of discovery in a manner that underscored a quest and longing for the good, comforting voice, embodied by mother's speech, which is a delight that is similarly reflected in Ong's arguments about the presence of the word. Owing to privileged status of human speech, the audio archive is the mother of memorials.

There is, then, an archival association to be made between the womb and the grave by means of speech. Previously I noted the research of Nass and Brave that suggested the human voice is the first medium for identity in the developing child. Insofar as she is the primary source of sustenance inside and outside the womb, the mother's voice-as Kate Bush once sang-"stands for comfort." In the theoretical humanities, the idea that maternal speech is the original site of social relationality and therefore subjectivity has been termed the "acoustic mirror," a concept that was developed by Guy Rosolato, a psychoanalytic theorist and critic, in the 1970s. As later elaborated by Kaja Silverman, the acoustic mirror refers to a pre-verbal form of identification that precedes image-based identification (in Lacanian argot, the so-called mirror stage). Because

the subject lacks boundaries [as an infant], it [does not] yet have anything approximating an interiority. However, the foundations of what will later function as identity are marked out by these primitive encounters with the outer world, encounters which will occur along the axis of the mother's voice. Since the child's [symbolic] economy is organized around incorporation, and since what is incorporated is the auditory field articulated by the maternal voice, the child could be said to hear itself initially through that voice-to first "recognize" itself in the vocal "mirror" supplied by the mother. (80)

Raudive's mother is his first example and "statistically the most frequent" for a reason that is determined in infantile life. The violence of the archive-the death drive central to its practice-that Derrida is at pains to detail is thereby reflected in the violence of independence central to subjectivity itself: self-consciousness entails the realization that one is not one's mother, but rather a separate entity with a voice of his or her own (Lacan 3-9). The pleasure of learning of one's independence is simultaneously a violence of separation from the maternal bosom. This is why psychoanalyst Melanie Klein has argued that living as such, especially living ethically, is fundamentally mournful; the responsible life is a continual reparation toward a maternal figure (211-229). In this sense, Raudive's Breakthrough might have simply been re-titled, Regression On a Stick.

By transposing the infantile scene of maternal sonority with its later-in-life surrogate in romantic love-that is, the way in which the maternal voice is replaced in life by the speech of a lover-Geoffrey Sax's 2005 EVP thriller White Noise captures the ambivalence we have toward human speech, as well as the paradox of archive fever, in a stark and helpful way-a way in which, I should add, real-world EVP enthusiasts rarely acknowledge. In a pivotal scene from the film, Sax and screen writer Niall Johnson movingly capture this longing for the good or maternal voice in the desperation of a widower: Jonathan [DH1]Rivers (played by Michael Keaton) is a successful architect who tragically loses his wife Anna (played by Chandra West) in what is initially presumed to be a car accident. One day at work he is followed by Raymond Price (played by Ian McNeice), an EVP expert who eventually tells Rivers that his wife has been sending him messages from beyond the grave. Rivers is incredulous, but eventually gives into his desire to communicate to his wife and visits Price at his home, which is cluttered with boxes of videotapes, cassettes, and disks of all sorts, and stacked-high with various kinds of electronic equipment. They sit together in a parlor in front of a bank of screens, computers, and media and, in a tone that reflects Ong's wide-eyed excitement about the possibilities of new sound technologies, Price explains to Rivers the fundamentals of EVP detection. As Rivers sits dumbstruck, Price retires to another room in search of a Sony mini-disk:

RIVERS: [yelling slightly] Is this your job, or hobby, or what?
PRICE: [off-screen; laughs] I think obsession would be more appropriate, Mr. Rivers. Ah-here we are [returns to frame with disks]. Now they don't always appear visually the first few times. We tend only to pick up their voices, and people can find that frustrating. But when it works, and you see the faces of the people you're able to help . . . nothing, believe me, nothing comes close. [inserts disk into player]. Mr. Rivers: do you want to hear your wife?
RIVERS: [long pause] yes. [Price presses the play button]
VOICE OF ANNA: [static; garbled voice] Johnathan [inaudible]. Johnathan [gable].
RIVERS: [weeps].

Notably, in every scene in which Price explains EVP to someone he stresses the primacy of voice: when the dead first reach out to touch someone, they do so by vocal expression.ii Furthermore, in the film speech is used to establish the uniqueness of a visitor. When Price, Rivers, or others see the dead on a screen, it is difficult to determine identity (for example, later in the film when the presumed face of Anna appears on a snowy television screen it turns out to be the face of someone else).

Although Rivers announces his desire is to see Anna, Price urges Rivers to believe him and attend more closely to sound as the authentic stamp of communication. Once he hears the voice of Anna, Rivers' tears suggest that he realizes Price was right after all: a voice is what he longed to hear, a comforting voice sounding his name affirmatively, as if to say "I'm alright . . . [and therefore] so are you." This regressive narcissism of EVP enthusiasm is in a sense reflected in a familiar, cheerful refrain: "Sometimes you want to go/where everybody knows your name/and they're always glad you came."iii As I soon detail, however, if you play that refrain backwards the threatening "bad voice" of Satan or Hitler emerges to dispel such fantasies hospitality.