which is the problem of filtering. But an ancient clay tablet from Babylon which
copies an even older astronomical text already notates the material corruption of
textual evidence in the original - with the word hepi (meaning "brocken") (Hunger,
1976, p. 47ff on clay tablet SpTU I 94).
In fact, cultural tradition can be rephrased in terms of engineering. Claude
Shannon's techno-mathematical theory of communication (1948/49) which
concentrates on media channels can be extended to the mechanism of emphatic
cultural tradition as such.
"We may assume the received signal E to be a function of the transmitted signal S
and a second variable, the noise N. The noise is a chance variable just as the
message In general it may be represented by a suitable stochastic process."
(Shannon, 1963, p. 65)
What historians hermeneutically narrate as probability of tradition (Esch, 1985),
can be mathematically expressed exactly. The time axis is the diachronic dimension
for the transmission of encoded signals; such a technically informed semiology does
not distinguish meaningful chance from random events (accidents, noise). But for
historians, only the message, and not the noise created in the transmission channel,
is taken into historiographical signification (and thus limited to what can be
expressed by the alphabet). Looked at in a media-archaeological way, the apparent
noise might be the arbitrary acts of encrypting another message.
Towards a mathematical theory of memory communication
Analog and digital communication, based on continuous signals or discreet symbols
(like telephone talks and archival readings) can be formally expressed as
transmission, be it sequences of dots and dashes (the Morse code) or wave patterns
(telephone, phonograph, analogue electronic television). The notion of cultural
transmission already implies an intentional act, an addressing of posterity. "For
communication as we discuss it here, the addressee is almost always a human
recipient in a multiplicity of channels - whether directly, as in film or on the
telephone, or indirectly as via a postcard or a secret code, across space (as in
radio or television) or across time (as in books or audio recordings) (Krapp,
2011, p. xii) When the historian (researching in the archive which is one such secret
codes) places himself as the receiver, this is an act of supposition. The term
«sending» here can be understood not as destiny in a metaphysical way but as a
concrete act of mailing, corresponding as an act of transmission engineering with
what Walter Benjamin has called the "historical index". Images from the past may
be indexed with a kind of implicit time code:
"The past 'carries with it' a temporal index: the date of its emergence and of its
expiration. The address of the past in all its power will have been if it is read by
the present that it enables; if it is not, it disappears without a trace. Benjamin
always thought the address of truth in historical (or at least temporal) terms;
translatability, after all, comes about only in time and for a time, and translation is
not a mere transcription." (Fynsk, 1978, p. 577 f)
wolfgang ernst technologies of tradition: between symbolic and material
(micro-)transmission
Intended for tradition, records from the past are endowed with addresses (to
posterity) which implies a (virtual) notion of the organisational archive already, as
opposed to random transmission of past remnants which is noise rather than
message. Noise belongs to the kind of signal that the sender does not want to
transmit - a situation the archaeologist is most probably confronted with.
Transmission by symbols here differs fundamentally from the endurance of material
artefacts.
Mathematised electronics (treating signals in terms of information) is able to
detect, filter and regenerate digital pulses in spite of distortion or noise in the
channel - e. g. by application of the repeater-regenerator, as a medium of almost
time-invariant transmission. The binary nature of the digital undercuts the well-
known parameters of historical tradition which are subject to informational loss
over time; a binary signal can be obtained even under conditions of heavy
interference as long as it is possible to recognise the sheer presence of each pulse
almost independent of the length of the channel.
What today is being decoded as "message" from the past can be mathematically
formulated as a function of its signal-to-noise ratio. Let us add the temporal
dimension (the time axis t) which serves as the channel of communication between
past and present. From an engineering point of view, communicative transmission
and cultural tradition interfere, as expressed in 1888 by the inventor of magnetic
sound recording, Oberlin Smith: "Imagine that speech could be transmitted over a
telephone line at a very slow, rate of travel, so that at a particular point in time the
entire message would be somewhere in the wire between speaker and listener"
(Engel, 1986, p. 171) - which is in a literally medial state of existence. Shannon
defines the channel of transmission as "the medium", which corresponds with
Aristotle's ancient definition of "the inbetween" of communication (to metaxy).
Understanding the past by resonance instead of historicity
Among the channels of media-internal communication within early electronic
digital computers, there have been short-time dynamic storage devices such as ultra
sonic mercury delay lines. Media-archaeological imagination feels tempted to
correlate this form of intermediary storage with the temporality of cultural
transmission. This results in the assumption that it might be possible to listen to the
sound of tradition as soon as human perception is tuned to resonate with such
vibrating waves and impulse trains, at the borderline between the physical
materiality (endurance) of the past and the tempor(e)alities of historicism.
Is there something like immaterial communication across time? The cultural
historian J. Bachofen once remarked that when we imagine ancient Rome, a
momentary flash like an electric spark immediately springs from Roman antiquity
to the present, undertunneling the historical distance in between - a kind of radio
communication across time:
There are two roads to every kind of knowledge, the longer, slower, more laborious
one of intellectual combination, and the shorter one, the one we cover with the
archives in liquid times
152
153
