Drone and Response: Pierre Boulez and Dassault

The above image is an artist's impression depicting the nEUROn Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle (UCAV, or drone) whose prototype, designed by French defence contractor Dassault, was first displayed at the Paris Air Show in 2005. The name, presumably, is intended to indicate its pioneer status as one of the first combat drones developed by a European company. 

I happened across the nEUROn drone when browsing through recent posts from the official Wikileaks Twitter account. After a somewhat catty blog post at the New York Times by former editor, Bill Keller, the 'Leaks are currently using their tweets to explain exactly why they decided to go home and take their ball with them, and while we're at it we dropped the NYT, Guardian, Le Monde, El Pais, etc., not the other way round, thank you very much. 

One of the reasons for their ire was apparently the amount of redactions insisted upon by their media partners - not just names of diplomats, but frequently also names of banks and major corporations. So they're publishing the unredacted versions over at Cabledrum.net. Including this one in which someone evidently insisted on redacting Italy's interest in investing in Dassault's new UCAV.

There's an interesting connection between Dassault and the world of avant-garde music. Back in 1984, Pierre Boulez's IRCAM institute needed its new 4X computer put into production - and fast! The premiere of Boulez's Répons was looming and four such machines were required to make work its delicate interplay of acoustic and digital music interacting in 3D space. So, IRCAM sold the designs to Sogitec to put them into production. Sogitec had at that time just been bought by Dassault.

In her book, Rationalising Culture, an ethnographic look at the inner workings of the famously secretive IRCAM institute, former Henry Cow / National Health bassist, Georgina Born recounts the frustration of some IRCAM workers at the sale of their baby to the notorious arms manufacturer:

"The 4X-Sogitec saga was kept quiet during 1984 and was not spoken of freely within IRCAM. A few workers mentioned confidentially that they were upset by the militarist implications of the deal, and equally b the failure of the 4X to reach a larger musical public, but most remained silent."

Since the early 80s, Sogitec has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Dassault, with a particular speciality for flight simulators and 3D imaging. IRCAM sold them the 4X on the basis that it would be able to create realistic flying noises for their flight sims. The 4X was IRCAM's flagship computer, probably the most sophisticated piece of music hardware ever built, capable of real time filtering and morphing of sounds, and the last of its kind - after Sogitec made only a small run of 4Xs, insufficient to be put into use at other music research centres around the world, the emphasis largely moved to software based systems like MAX.

Of course, Sogitec make simulators - not actual combat vehicles. Except of course that with drone warfare the line between simulation and real warfare becomes increasingly blurry. From the pilot's point of view - and perhaps even from the point of view of at least some of the hardware and software components - controlling a combat drone in an actual field of war and taking part in a flight simulation might be almost impossible to distinguish.

As one final note, it may be amusing to recall that in his April 2000 column for The New Yorker about Pierre Boulez ("a great but ungenerous artist"), Alex Ross singles out Répons for criticism precisely because of its over-reliance on drones!

Radio's Uncanny Origins

If Guglielmo Marconi had once considered the possibility of using his wireless telegraph as a means of contacting the dead, it would not be long before the same technology was being put to the service of mass slaughter. Already, by the dawn of the twentieth century, Marconi had demonstrated his new technology to the British and Italian navies and it was not long before it was in regular military use for the purpose of ship to shore communication and, with the invention of the thermionic valve, would prove an essential part of strategy and manoeuvres in the First World War. However, at this time, the use of wireless was still largely reserved for point to point communication and the idea that broadcasting, at that time considered a nuisance side effect of the technology, might become its principal use was largely foreign to those who used it. This was all to change in 1916, during the Irish Easter Rising.

On the 25th April, the day after Easter Monday, as the British troops called in reinforcements and declared a state of marshal law in Dublin, the Irish volunteers made the first broadcast from the post office on Sackville Street, using the same point to point technology to make a diffused message in the hope that their message, the declaration of an Irish republic, would reach the American press (Marshall McLuhan). In the same year, an employee of the Marconi Wireless Telegraphy Company of America called David Sarnoff would suggest to his bosses the possibility of radio becoming a “household utility” much as the piano had been; and so began the domestification of the radio at the very moment of the realisation of its revolutionary potential.

The formation of the British Broadcasting Company in 1922, at the suggestion of the Post Office, was largely a pragmatic attempt both to appease the commercial interests of the wireless manufacturers and to suppress the possibility of unrestrained amateur broadcasting. It was the BBC’s first Managing Director (and, later, first Director-General of the British Broadcasting Corporation), John Reith, who would articulate the philosophy of public service that would come to define the BBC’s mission (with true missionary zeal) in terms of universalism and national unification. Reith’s universalism was threefold, as Georgina Born explains,

First, universal availability: a national service meant that the entire population of the United Kingdom should be able to receive a high-quality broadcast signal. Second, there was a commitment to a form of social and cultural universality, in that the BBC undertook to produce both a regional and a national programme service. The audience was conceived both as a unity and as socially and culturally diverse. The BBC was to be an impartial arbiter, assessing the various constituencies and tastes and responding accordingly. Third, there was a universality of genre in the policy of mixed programming from the outset, BBC radio broadcast a wide range of genres each day and week, including news, talk, sports, drama, religion, light entertainment and a variety of music – both popular and classical. 

Reith’s universalism was centred around a concept of “the best of everything,” conceived as politically neutral and, ultimately, transparent, but which was to prove highly flexible given the different articulations of subsequent Director-Generals. The drawing together of the diverse strands of audiences and programming in the specific manner undertaken by the early BBC was thus responsible for a “new kind of public, commensurate with the whole of society, which it brought into being.” .

The BBC, under the “massive, totalitarian, and idiosyncratic” stewardship of John Reith came to exist in a ‘hegemonic relation’ to the British populace, “the nation [as] one man,” in Reith’s famous phrase - a spectral substitution whereby, “a certain body tries to present its particular features as the expression of something transcending its own particularity.” (Ernesto Laclau) The form of this relationship was through the metaphor of the National Family (David Morley) and the image held in the mind of BBC programme-makers of their audience was of “a family audience, seated round the fireside at home.” The radio thus became instituted, not just as a piece of furniture at the heart of the family home, but as the principal symbolic association between the domestic family and the nation state. At the heart of radio’s familiar homeliness, however, was an unsettling movement of the uncanny.

In Sigmund Freud’s (1919) essay on ‘The Uncanny’ [Das Unheimliche] he lays stress on a certain undecidability to be found in standard dictionary definitions of unheimlich’s apparent opposite, heimlich [homely]. Freud’s dictionary defines heimlich as both the “familiar and agreeable” and “what is concealed and kept out of sight.”. Freud thus sees in heimlich a meaning “which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich.”. This precisely is what is at work with regard to the position of the radio in the family home in modern Britain. By bringing the public sphere into the very heart of the private space of the home ), broadcasting created a structural indeterminacy between inside and outside, an intimacy that whispers in your ear, and the exteriority of an actuality constituted through outside broadcasts, summed up by Lacan’s concept of extimité or extimacy. The extimate object is the disembodied voice, which “functions as a strange body… a ghost-like apparition which can never be pinned to a definite visual object;” (Slavoj Zizek) The appearance of the voice, transmitted and transfigured through the ether, was perceived as a kind of uncanny intrusion from the very first radio transmissions, as Harlow describes of an early long distance transmission by R. A. Fessenden on Christmas Eve, 1906,

They listened eagerly, and to their amazement heard a human voice coming from their instruments – someone speaking! Then a woman’s voice rose in sound. It was uncanny!

Briggs, A., The History of Broadcasting in The United Kingdom Volume I: The Birth of Broadcasting, 1961, London: Oxford University Press; 

Cardiff, D. & Scannell, P., ‘Broadcasting and National Unity’, in Impacts and Influences: Essays on Media Power in the Twentieth Century, Curran, J., Smith, A. & Wingate, P. (ed.s), 1987, London: Methuen, pp.157-173;

Morales, C., ‘Radio From Beyond the Grave’, in Radiotext(e), Strauss, N. (ed.), 1993, New York: Semiotext(e), pp. 330-2;Scannell, P. & Cardiff, D., A Social History of Broadcasting – Volume One 1922-1939: Serving the Nation, 1997, Oxford: Blackwell;

Seaton, J., ‘Broadcasting History’, in Power Without Responsibility, Curran, J. & Seaton, J., 1981 [1997],London: Routledge.

The BBC Radiophonic Workshop: Institutional Pre-History

In a 1997 interview with John Cavanagh for BBC Radio Scotland’s Original Masters series, Delia Derbyshire claimed that when the first “boss” of the Radiophonic Workshop was appointed in 1958, “there were two applicants from a drama background and three applicants with a music background. And drama won.” But things were not quite as simple as this statement implies. At the time the BBC had a particularly adventurous Drama department, heavily influenced by the ground breaking work that came out of Laurence Gilliam’s post-war Features department, and a largely conservative Music department. In the 1930s, writers like Tyrone Guthrie were already talking about “symphonic form” in radio drama, and paying attention to the significance of words as sound forms in themselves.

Though the BBC had developed a strong reputation for ‘modern’ music in the twenties and thirties, with the coming of the Second World War, a decision was made by the Programme Planning Department to move to a ‘lighter’ programming schedule against the wishes of Head of Music, Adrian Boult. In a Musical Times article from 1943, otherwise full of praise for the high standard maintained in broadcast music, the author remarks on a “falling short” in the field of contemporary music, “due to causes that nobody can remedy.”

Despite the newfound pressures of commercial competition, R. J. F. Howgill, Head of Music 1952-1959, insisted on maintaining the BBC’s commitment to the “very best” – in the ideology of the times however, this consisted of a spectacular spectrum with “at one end” the Last Night of the Proms and “at the other end of the spectrum, ‘celebrity recitals’ by Menuhin, Fischer-Dieskau, and others." Things were about to change. In 1957, William Glock conducted a performance of works by Stockhausen, Boulez and Nono on the Third Programme, 3 March 1957 and would become head of music in 1959 with a remit to broadcast “a wider selection of contemporary music.” Of course, by this time, the Radiophonic Workshop was already set up under the stewardship of the Drama department.

Born, G. (2004), Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC, 2004, London: Secker & Warburg;
Briggs, A., The History of Broadcasting in The United Kingdom Volume V: Competition, 1995, Oxford: Oxford University Press;
Doctor, J. R., The BBC and Ultra-Modern Music, 1922-1936, 1999, Cambridge University Press;
McN., W., ‘The BBC Comes of Age’, in The Musical Times, vol. 84, No. 1210. (Dec. 1943), p.367;
Rodger, I., Radio Drama, 1982, London: Macmillan