From: The Cassette Mythos, Autonomedia 1990
Like a hundred million other people listening to the BBC World Service, I heard their broadcast about the oral tradition, a special feature of their arts program Meridian. Some chap with a double name covered the folk song, the fireside chat, and the recently published Oxford Book of Narrative Verse, edited by those wondrous Opies, Peter and Iona. All good, as far as it went. Unfortunately they ignored the startling post-literate technological developments, accelerated now by the rapid advancement in the miniaturization of sound reproduction. It is no exaggeration to say, From oral text to oral sex, orality is on everyone's lips.
William Burroughs, always avant-garde, investigated the uses of the newly-invented portable Philips cassette recorder in the mid-sixties, when he was living in London. Burroughs saw this machine as a way to turn words into weapons, ploughshares into swords. In Electronic Revolution (Bonn: Expanded Media Editions, 1982), these theories and the results of his experiments are collected. We see he wanted to use pre-recorded cut-up tapes to spread rumors, to discredit opponents, and as a front-line tactic to produce and escalate riots. For example, if demonstrators played recorded police whistles, it would draw police. Pre-recorded gunshots would draw fire. Burroughs suggested that the creative effect would be to scramble and nullify associational lines put down by the media.
Not much was made of this start; or rather, it served only Nechaevian political and hallucinatory personal fantasies. The idea of the artist using the cassette as a color on his palette was there, but the proper machine wasn't. The transistor had made sound reproduction portable; it took the chip to make it pocketable.
By the end of the seventies, Sony had produced a miniature cassette player; it could be carried around almost like a piece of costume jewelry. Better yet, it came with headphones so small that one could walk on the street without embarrassment and with total mobility. Awkward as this Japanese-made English word sounds, the walkman and its clones became a worldwide phenomenon. At last one could fit the equipment into a pocket and stroll through the city listening to the high-quality sounds previously available only in the living room from specialized speakers, amplifiers, and turntables many times its size. The way THE STATE has recognized this revolution somewhat defines national character.
In America they have banned the more radical expressions. By the summer of '83, New York City had made it illegal to drive a car or ride a bicycle under the influence of a walkman. In Germany they have tried to absorb it through Marcusian "repressive tolerance," by listing cassettes in the official books-in-print catalogs. In Holland, the materialistic Dutch have sought a money-making scheme: the post office offers a kind of spoken letter, a five-minute cassette together with a mailing envelope, for only $1.50.
The walkman, however, is a prime example of the successful introduction of a new type of hardware for which no specific software exists. This has always been the case: people need machines, but machines desire people. When a new material is invented, the first impulse is to imitate what it was created to replace. Early plastic objects were merely copies of wood, metal, glass, etc. When the station wagon automobiles first appeared, they had wood paneling along the sides to give them the appearance of a farm cart; then plastic was introduced--grained to look like wood.
It is not surprising that the walkman + cassette is misallocated to imitate and reproduce the experience of other arts, other machines. According to Shu Ueyama, Deputy General Manager of Sony Advertising Division, the musical genres utilized through the walkman are as follows: Pop 52.5%; Jazz 18.3%; Classical 16.4%; Miscellaneous 12.8%. The occasions for use are over 75% outside the home. Of those using the walkman, 80% are between fifteen and thirty-five years old. Also not surprisingly for a machine called the Walk-man--rather than Walk-mate--93% of the users are male. In other words, young men are listening to the same thing they could on the radio or on their home stereos, but now outside the home, in the street and in parks.
To be sure, all new media developments have a profound effect on societal developments and individual consciousness. Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communication and Cultural Transformation in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979, two volumes) reminds us of this emphatically. But it is worth reflecting on the enormousness of Gutenberg's achievement because, directly or indirectly, it transformed the world. It broke the stranglehold of the Medieval Church, for example; it also paved the way for the Reformation; instigated the process of dissemination and codification of knowledge from which modern science and rationalism evolved; hastened the rise of individualism and its grotesque alter ego, capitalism; and segregated the world into two classes: those who could read and those who could not.
The much earlier shift from oral to literate societies was equally dramatic. In The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), Julian Jaynes relates changes in consciousness to neuro-physiological changes in the two-chambered mind; however, these would also appear to lend themselves to much simpler and more verifiable description in terms of the shift from orality to literacy. Or so says the great Jesuit scholar Walter J. Ong, who, like Francis Yates, Mircea Elaide, and Gershom Scholem, is an academic whose work has touched a popular nerve: he doesn't merely correlate data, he thinks about his subject. Ong calls a historical synchronicity to our attention. In Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London and New York: Methuen, 1982) he writes: Jaynes discerns a primitive stage of consciousness in which the brain was strongly "bicameral," with the right hemisphere producing uncontrollable "voices" attributed to the gods which the left hemisphere processed into speech. The voices began to lose their effectiveness with the invention of the alphabet around 1500 B.C., and Jaynes indeed believes that writing helped bring about the breakdown of the original bicamerality.
Likewise, in our own time, post-typography developments like telephone, radio, and television have created an acoustical ecology, or a new orality--a secondary orality different from anything predicted. Yet if Eisenstein, Ong, and Jaynes are right, with the mobile cassette player there should be a holism with maximum inner differentiation. Even though in Europe pirate radio has become the communication network that alternative newspapers formerly were, and cassettes have taken the place of slim volumes of verse, current attempts to issue poetry, new music, or cassette-based audio magazines, however worthwhile, ignore the basic difference between sound and print; they are merely old wine in new bottles. Recent studies on pocket electronics suggest that this is the case.
Shuhei Hosokawa has published two works exploring the impact of the walkman. In Walkman No Shujigaku: The Rhetoric of the Walkman (Tokyo: Asahi Shuppan, 1981), he considers this machine mainly as a concrete instance of a new tension between production and consumption of music. Indeed it is: cassettes are killing the music business, and it's so easy. In a later publication Hosokawa examines "The Walkman as Urban Strategy" (Pop and Folk Music: Stocktaking of New Trends, Trento, 1982), and concludes: "The walkman makes the walk act more poetic and more dramatic...We listen to what we don't see, and we see what we don't listen to...If it is pertinent to the speech act it will make the ordinary strange...It will transform the street into an open theater."
Hear! Hear! We need something that would once again take art out of the galleries, politics out of the parliaments.
Even more to the point was the inquiry made by the semiotic philosopher Philippe Sollers ("Seul contre tous...!" Magazine Litteraire, Paris: April 1981). He interviewed young people--eighteen to twenty-two years old--who were using the walkman on the street. His questions were: Are you losing contact with reality by listening to programs codified in advance? Are you schizophrenic or psychotic? Is the relationship between your eyes and ears changing drastically?
One of the interviewees responded, "Your questions are old. All these problems of communication and incommunicability are of the sixties and seventies. The eighties," he continued, "are not the same at all: they are the years of `autonomy'--of an intersection of singularities in the way of creating discourses." Whether or not Screaming Jay Hawkins was prophetic or not in proclaiming "I hear voices," this boy marvelously broke up the typical interrogation about the walkman. Literal, I mean literate, people presuppose that most of us are the lonely crowd in our alienated society; and the walkman, according to this view, should be a sign, an ikon, for self-enclosure. Instead, it is an instrument for effecting visible historical change, an absolute collective, for the simple reason that sound unifies. Sight isolates, sound incorporates. Whereas sight situates the observer outside what he views, at a distance, sounds pour into the hearer. By contrast with vision--the dissecting sense--the auditory ideal is harmony, a putting together.
Although time-based, the cassette is also a medium of the plastic arts because it plays with space, and non-space. It is the artist's job, the poet's, to revivify this new dialectic. Like owls we must hunt by sound, not sight. Viya con Cassettes.
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