McCarthy's Transmission is a good account of the prosthetic polyphony, the hearing before speech, in literature and authorship. For more, see Avital Ronell's The Telephone Book (1989), a challenging read, but excellent on Freud and Derrida, and much of the latter's work, particularly on presence, speech and writing.
Highlights:
I have nothing to say. Indeed, I’d go as far as to claim that no serious writer does. [Location 42]
year 458 BC. This is the year that Aeschylus’s Oresteia premiered at Athens’s Festival of Dionysus. This trilogy of plays appears to me, despite its ripe age, eminently modern. I mean that in the sense that it lays down the structural and thematic contours that literary works will trace and retrace right up to our own era. We see the roles and concepts of the house, the family, the city or city state (polis in Greek, base of the English ‘politics’), practices and rituals of mourning, institutions of the law and the very notion of justice itself being not simply represented but actively produced, configured, put into the world. [Location 54]
the beacon’s coded message (‘Troy is finally ours’) is demoted, downgraded, enjoying only secondary importance: what dominates the monologue, what Clytemnestra emphasises constantly, is the means by which the signal moved from Troy to Argos. The beacon visible to them is the final one in a long chain of beacons, each one visible only to the next. She names each of the signal’s staging posts, [Location 65]
When listened to attentively, Clytemnestra’s speech starts whispering a truth I hope to amplify and echo in this essay: that we are always not just (to use a dramatic term) in medias res, i.e. in the middle of events, but also simply in media. In the beginning is the signal. [Location 74]
The ‘first’ poet, as everybody knows, is Orpheus. He’s Greek too, of course – although it’s in the work of the first-century AD Latin writer Ovid that he makes what’s generally held up nowadays as his ‘original’ appearance. (To put it another way, he comes to us already reconfigured and repeated.) [Location 79]
you built a temple there inside their hearing. [Location 106]
his short 1959 text The Way to Language that ‘For the longest time – before it comes to be said, that is, spoken – the poet’s work is only a listening.’ Thinking, Heidegger continues, should also take the form of listening: [Location 144]
Thus, it is a listening not while but before we are speaking.’ The proposition is quite paradoxical; it requires that time be first split up (speaking right now, I am inhabiting a previous moment, a moment of previousness, of which the now, right now, is but an echo), then coiled back into itself in an endless feedback (speaking is listening to speaking, which, as we’ve just learnt, is listening – round and round). [Location 149]
as Freud himself put it, ‘by adjusting himself to the patient as a telephone receiver is adjusted to the transmitting microphone’ [Location 162]
for Freud, technology can best be understood as prosthesis. In a famous passage from Civilisation and Its Discontents he describes engines as mechanical muscles, telescopes and microscopes as synthetic upgrades of the eye, cameras and gramophones as material extensions of memory. [Location 163]
we are promoted and demoted at the same time; augmented, but in diminished form. Technology might allow us to pass unpassable borders, penetrate and traverse impossible distances, to move even into and through the space reserved for gods – but this move also entails anxiety, bereavement. If you’ve got an artificial body part, it means you’ve lost an arm, a leg, that you’re an amputee: like Orpheus, you’ve had your limbs ripped off. [Location 171]
As a student, Alexander stole an ear from a morgue so that he could try to reproduce its inner workings mechanically; [Location 179]
The second brother did die, and Bell invented the telephone. [Location 182]
remained a sceptic vis-à-vis the question of existence after death – but only because his brother never called. The desire for that call was there, wired into the very apparatus, haunting it. [Location 183]
in the original, that ‘box’ was a coffin: so well has His Master’s Voice been reproduced (the implicit visual strapline went) that the dog doesn’t even know he’s dead. [Location 189]
recording their children’s voices, found themselves bereaved, and the plate or roll on which little Augustus’s or Matilda’s voice outlived him or her thus became, for them, a kind of miniature tomb. [Location 192]
‘marks the site of some secret burial.’ [Location 197]
from being a point of distribution, of transmission, he became transmission itself, turned into the network – and in so doing, or in so being done to, disappeared. [Location 207]
In fact, like the first act of the Oresteia, with its beacon-telegraph so lyrically eulogised by Clytemnestra, Orpheus was always, from the off, a story about broadcasting technology. The broad-casting, or scattering, of Orpheus, his disappearance, doesn’t end his singing; on the contrary, it has the opposite effect of expanding its area of coverage: his severed head continues holding forth long after its dismemberment, conveying his song to all of Greece. [Location 210]
(here’s my second point), given that Orpheus is the Ur-writer figure within Western culture, that literature was also always, from the off, a question of broadcasting technology. And now a third point rears its head: if literature is, and always was, a comm-tech issue, then, as we’ve already seen, it can’t be separated from the topics of dismemberment and death, of loss, dissolution, vanishing. [Location 214]
In his short seminal 1955 text ‘The Gaze of Orpheus’, Blanchot identifies in the Thracian poet’s fatal backwards glance towards Eurydice an enactment of the very origin of literature. [Location 220]
a moment where desire, surging and unmanageable, sweeps away all the writer’s previous concerns in a huge wave of ‘unconcern’ that carries the literary work itself beyond all boundaries, not least the very ones that gave rise to it in the first place [Location 222]
the core, the primary spark, the Big Bang moment, of all writing – and yet, at the same time, it’s a moment that could only ‘happen’ after Orpheus’s poetry had already brought him to the Underworld and ushered him past its bouncers. ‘Which is to say’ (Blanchot concludes) ‘that one can only begin to write if one is already writing’ – which is to say that writing has no origin. Or, to be precise, it means to say that writing’s origin will always lie within this blind spot off the map and out of time – a spot whose retrieval is both impossible and the sole true task of any good writer (every significant literary work enacts, or re-enacts, in some way or other, the doomed escapade of attempting to retrieve it, and surrenders itself to the consequences): an unsolvable quandary that leads Blanchot to tie writing to the act of suicide. [Location 226]
The work’s (or oeuvre’s) true, fundamental purpose, he argues here and elsewhere, is désoeuvrement: ‘un-working’, an unravelling from within through which the very content that the work purports to convey or recover becomes lost, the avenues and relays through which it promised to deliver this to the reader become degraded. [Location 243]
‘the vanishing, broken off by static’ [Location 250]
When an author tells you that they’re not beholden to any theory, what they usually mean is that their thinking and their work defaults, without their even realising it, to a narrow liberal humanism and its underlying – and reactionary – notions of the (always ‘natural’ and pre-existing, rather than constructed) self, that self’s command of language, language as vehicle for ‘expression’, and a whole host of fallacies so admirably debunked almost 50 years ago by the novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet. [Location 257]
If literature, on the other hand, is to do anything worthwhile (and I don’t mean socially or even philosophically worthwhile; I mean truly and profoundly useless in a way so powerful it devalues use itself) – if it’s to be worth the paper or the screen it’s written on, it needs to appreciate its own interruptedness, its disarticulation; to understand its own embedding within media, and mediation; to understand that media’s own history is always and automatically at play in it, the shift from one-to-one to one-to-many to many-to-many networks in which sender and addressee are simultaneously masked and multiplied; to understand that it not only broadcasts, but is subject to the logic of broadcasting (of dissemination) – and to embed this understanding too, and broadcast it again, regressively. [Location 266]
Most of all, it needs to appreciate, with vertiginous exhilaration, the unique and ultra-paradoxical condition that’s at once its blessing and its curse: namely, that it only works because (as Blanchot so profoundly understood) it doesn’t work. [Location 272]
As such, their activity is a secondary one – yet secondary in a universe that, truly speaking, has no origin, whose origin is no more than a point of disappearance. Which means, paradoxically, that in being absolutely secondary – that is, in carrying the logic of secondariness to its most extreme configuration – they achieve a kind of primacy within this universe. [Location 279]
he has uploaded the right verbal remix software. He has read and memorised his Dante, his Shakespeare, his Eliot – to such an extent that his activity as a composer consists of giving himself over to their cadences and echoes, their pulses, codas, loops, the better that these may work their way, through him, [Location 294]
Cervantes was remixing Montalvo, Ariosto, Apuleius and any number of picaresque authors – and doing this with such delirious self-consciousness that at one point he even makes the characters of Don Quixote pause to take stock of the library, the engine room behind their mad associate’s re-enactments, perusing it as though it were some kind of source-code – which it is. [Location 300]
With The Cantos, he kept up this furious enterprise for five whole decades, ramping its intensity up and up until the overload destroyed him, blew his mind to pieces, leaving him to murmur, right towards the end: ‘I cannot make it cohere.’ [Location 305]
Thus, the sending out (in German, ‘transmission’ is Sendung), the dispatch, loss, or scattering of signal and identity (when I sit at a transmitter, both my words and I dissolve into the aether) also brought about, contained, entailed, a coming back together. [Location 311]
Erect no gravestone, only let the rose year after year bloom in his memory. For that is Orpheus. His metamorphosis through this or that. We do not need to look for other names. When there is poetry, it’s Orpheus singing. He come and goes. [Location 317]
It reverberates with everything I’ve been tracing here: loss, anxiety, dispersal, interruption, retrieval in which loss repeats itself, on and on endlessly. [Location 335]
old Krapp angrily fast-forwards, cursing – as though rectifying his misplaced youthful assumption that he had something to know, to tell the world; and at the same time, of course, creating the very type of blank, cut or elision in the current text’s surface that we should by now have come to recognise as so important to the writing process. [Location 340]
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