“The Fingerprint of the Living Mind”: Tape, Technology, and Performance
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“The Fingerprint of the Living Mind”: Tape, Technology, and Performance A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Wade Haynes IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Michal Kobialka, John Mowitt January 2015 ©Wade Haynes 2014 i Acknowledgements To my mother Janice Haynes and my sister Leslie Haynes, whose support brought this project through its most difficult personal moments, I owe you both the deepest debt of gratitude. I would like to thank my co-advisors Michal Kobialka and John Mowitt for their advice, support, and feedback during the writing and revision process. I would also like to thank the other members of my dissertation committee Sonja Kuftinec and Margaret Werry for their tremendous help and insights in fine-tuning and navigating procedures. I also reserve special thanks for Cesare Casarino and Megan Lewis for their participation on my M.A. defense and preliminary oral exam committees, respectively. Further, I would like to warmly extend the warmest gratitude to my community of friends and colleagues in the United States: Ryan Hartigan, Stephanie Lein- Walseth, Eric Colleary, Malin Palani, Rita Kompelmakher, Kimi Johnson, Erin Cole, Kelly McKay, George McConnell, Will Daddario, Shannon Walsh, Charles Adams, Beth Ellsworth, Matthew Noble-Olson, Avye Alexandres, Lauren DeLand, Mike Mellas, Bryan Schmidt, Surafel Abebe, Carra Martinez, Sarah Saddler, Kristen Stoeckeler, Kati Sweaney, Jonah-Winn-Lenetsky, and Gretchen Gasterland-Gustafsson. An extra special thanks to the Kennedys Clare, Kate, Morris, and Sara for their loving support along the way. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the tremendous support of Jadrian Miles, Vernon Ezell, Shannon Gutierrez, Tom Smith, Alison Stolpa, Fabian Strauch, Carl Atiya-Swanson, Lisa Channer, Bruce and Kathy Vittum, Celine Guy, Emily and Zach Burnham-Robbins, Nick and Anne Vittum, and others already mentioned above in crowdfunding my travel to the Second Annual Conference of the European Sound Association (ESSA) in Copenhagen, Denmark where I presented the earliest stages of this research to my intellectual and artistic peers in Europe. Without all of you, I would not be where and who I am today. Thank you. ii Dedication I dedicate this dissertation to my father Robert Daniel Haynes and my friend and colleague Ivone Barriga, both of whom passed away during the process of its research and writing. In moments of exhaustion, frustration, and waning motivation, the thought of you both always brought me the strength I needed to continue. I will love and miss you both always. This is for you. iii Table of Contents Introduction Chapter 1 – Ribbons of Rust: Transduction, Traumatic Memory, and Steve Reich Chapter 2 – The Mechanics of Failure: Technological Performance and Industrialized Memory in Samuel Beckett Chapter 3 – The Reproduction of Space: Collaboration and Control in Alvin Lucier and Brian Eno Chapter 4 – Breaching, Scanning, Reworking: Reenactment, Repetition, and Enda Walsh Conclusion Works Cited 1 —Introduction— A relatively obscure talk—published under the title “Kultur and Culture” and delivered at the Hessische Hochschulwochen für staatswissenschaftliche Fortbildung in Bad Wildungen on 9 July 1958—contains Theodor W. Adorno’s only published comments on tape technology. Since the director of the event had decided to tape record the lecture for the purposes of transcription and publication, Adorno took the opportunity to open with a few words regarding recording. His introduction reads partially as an apology for the “improvised” nature of his presentation (although he had delivered a version the same talk on 17 December 1956 at the Historical Society of the U.S. Army’s Third Division in Hanau near Frankfurt am Main) and partially as an apology for the broadness and generality of its subject matter (different understandings of the word “culture” in German and American contexts). At the heart of these opening remarks rests Adorno’s critique of tape recording as a practice: The author regards the ubiquitous tendency to record free speech [die freie Rede], as it is called, on tape, and then to disseminate it itself as a symptom of the administered world that even ties down the ephemeral word, whose truth lies in its own transience, and then makes the speaker swear to it. The tape recording is 2 something like the fingerprint of the living mind [lebendigen Geistes].1 Adorno’s description of the tape recorder as a “symptom of the administered world” here, of course, aligns it with his analysis of scientific rationality and means-end instrumentalism that reduces human expression to a commodity. In Adorno’s analysis, even freedom and spontaneity have been repurposed by the Culture Industry as means to maintain the hegemony of late capitalism, which reflects here in the emphasis he places upon the danger recording presents of tying down the “ephemeral word, whose truth lies in its own transience” to the intentionality of the speaker. In situating tape recording against the ephemerality of speech, Adorno articulates a position similar to a by now classic argument proffered by Peggy Phelan and others in performance studies, which grounds performance in corporeality and transience over and against the permanence of recording. In her book Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (1993), Phelan’s argument examines the intersection of visuality and representation. Working through a critical Lacanian framework, Phelan positions the feminine in performance as that which is “unmarked” and “invisible” in the normative field of social and technological reproduction. The troubled alliance between late capitalist modes of reproduction (including the documentation of performance) and patriarchal 1 Theodor Adorno, “Kultur and Culture,” Social Text 99, 27.2 (2009): 145-146. 3 regimes of visibility prompts Phelan to locate a resistive space for the feminine in disappearance, in the ephemerality of performance. Both Phelan and Adorno, who fundamentally differ in many other ways, agree on this single point: recording reduces performance (spoken, musical, theatrical, or otherwise) to a commodity and inserts it in the circulation of reified cultural production. For Adorno, resistance to the process of reification in reproduction entails more "difficult" works of art that privilege an individual intellectual encounter with the enigmaticalness of the art object. Phelan shares with Adorno an interest in unconventional works of art (for her, emerging trends in “body art” and “performance art”), but identifies resistance with the corporeal presence of the performing body vis-à-vis an audience: an affective experience that eludes recording and thus "disappears" into memory once the performance concludes. Phelan's association of performance with corporeality and visuality (and memory with disappearance) marks a crucial tension between her argument and Adorno's image of tape recording as “something like the fingerprint of the living mind.” Adorno's metaphor designates recording as a process analogous to the indexical trace of a finger (a residual corporeality) and thus emphasizes some material transfer of information between the human speaker and recording technology. Phelan, on the other hand, maintains an ontological distinction between performance and recording, which posits the latter in terms of the former’s “other.” In this dissertation, I locate my own particular interest in this tension by engaging with an array of musical and theatrical works that position tape 4 recording and playback as performance. Through a close examination of the materiality and historicity of magnetic tape crystallized in these works, I aim to nuance the critical position that identifies the materiality of performance with the corporeality of the performers/audience as distinct from its historicity in the inscriptive archive. These tensions and intersections rest at the heart of my particular methodology in materialist historiography. Diana Taylor’s concept of “acts of transfer” repositions Phelan’s heuristic within the context of the performance of cultural memory in the Americas. In The Archive and the Repertoire (2003), Taylor highlights the tensions between document/recording (archive) and embodied performance (repertoire) as two different configurations of cultural memory. As comprised of “supposedly enduring materials,” the archive “works across distance, over time and space; investigators can go back and reexamine an ancient manuscript, letters find their addresses through time and place, and computer discs cough up lost files with the right software.”2 Taylor’s argument, of course, identifies these various technologies of memory at work in the archive with Western logocentrism. The repertoire resists or escapes regimes of inscription insofar as it “whether in terms of verbal or nonverbal expression, transmits live, embodied actions. As such, traditions are stored in the body, through various mnemonic methods, and 2 Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham: Duke UP, 2003), 19. 5 transmitted ‘live’ in the here and now to a live audience.”3 Taylor’s distinctions between the inscriptive practices of the archive and the corporeal practices of the repertoire locate within the latter a space for resistance to Western logocentrism specifically aligned with the “liveness” of performance. Although this distinction functions as a very useful critical heuristic for her own project, which pertains to