ABSTRACT
Three qualitative revolutions impact upon the discursive appropriation of music in this period: the advent of recording technology (1877, with Edison’s phonograph) and the subsequent acceleration of the “objectification” and commoditization of music; Freud’s (and Breuer’s) work on hysteria and sexuality, in which “desire” is posited as a kind of aimless “flow” without any fixed object to which to attach itself or in which to satiate itself; and crucially, the collapse of what Friedrich Kittler has termed universal translatability (1990)—for Kittler, the advent of the new technologies of recording, mechanical typing, and film constitute a radical breakdown in the assumption that the “message” of an artwork is somehow easily separated from the medium in which that message is presented (its “mediality”) and readily “translatable” into another medium.
