O’er Mithgarth Hugin and Munin both
Each day set forth to fly;
For Hugin I fear lest he come not home,
But for Munin my care is more.
Bellows, Henry Adams, trans. The Poetic Edda. American-Scandinavian Foundation, 1923. 92.
*Huginn (Old Norse for “thought”) and Muninn (“memory”) are Odin’s two raven companions who tell him everything they see and hear.
What does a society that becomes suddenly “mistress of its own memory” do with all the distancing mirror effects that this implies? What to do—and this is what this phonographic invention teaches me—with a memory that I, as subject, can not only formulate and fix but also and above all constitute at will, a mechanical memory, infinitely extensible, practically limitless and outside of myself?
In the beginning was the word, okay. Now I can finally, and without end, reproduce, phonographically, the original situation—the one where this word supposedly was spoken (without me, for me). I can start the beginning again—start over, hence erase. Question: What is a subject whose origin is incongruously postponed?
Phonography: suppression of time, suppression of divinity, suppression of creatures! Thus have we beecome phonographically of the creative species. “God is dead,” but the living voice of the apparatus makes me equal, wretched me, to his eternity. It’s my revenge—revenge through sound.
Grivel, Charles. “The Phonograph’s Horned Mouth” in Kahn, Douglas and Gregory Whitehead, eds. Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1992. 37.