What is the thing that within one and the same story gathers closer such different notions as a master, a voice, a letter, a mirror, a noise? It is a record player, a machine which within itself has numerous components that enable the occurrence of these notions on the level of record player's communication. As a machine, the record player has for long stopped being the latest development in the field of sound reproduction. However, as a symbol of phonocentrism, record player still releases the images which are useful in the analysis of any kind of centrism based on reproductive economy of sound. It was thanks to Adorno that we stepped into the fascinating world of record player's phonocentrism. He builds up an image of a middle class family from the end of the 19th century that gathers around the record player, not the piano, to listen to the music. This image symbolize the beginning of an era of the "technical reproduction" where traditional forms of dominance are converted into technical forms.

"One can hear more noise in a Paris market in a
day than in the city of Istanbul within a year".

(Tournefort, Relation d'un voyage au Levant)

The record player is a phonocentric machine, a symbol of the master of the sound, but it is a universal symbol of mastery as shown in the emblem HIS MASTER'S VOICE. The relation between the master and his servant is always the relation between a sound and silence, between speaking and listening, between a producer and a consumer of the sound. The master is not to be addressed or answered to. There is no dialogue with him - he is in absolute control of the speech, and the voice his symbol, his very name. The record player is a symbolic master's twin, a body which reproduces his voice and indicator of his invisible presence.

In Eastern despotic states the invisible and inaccessible despot rules through his voice which is in public is being reproduced and multiplied by his servants - his record players. His every word echoes many times and reaches the remote provinces with amazing speed so that it could return to him "fragmented and refined by thousands of mouths"¹. In fact despots real voice is never heard, only his faceless and automatic reproduction spoken by colorless voices of servants - record players.

The route of despot's voice coincides with the route of his letter (decree) which "always reaches its destination" (Lacan) - the subjects who are not ruled by the despot in person, but by his name. However, during it's travel, the despots voice - letter always releases more than one literal meaning and produces more than one effect of repetition. Though it is formally addressed to people, the letter is at the same time addressed to the despot himself who Narcissus-like indulges in the echo of his own voice. At the same time he behaves as if he does not know who the real sender of the letter is and he also attributes the message to the people, the symbolic Other necessary to establish mirror-like relation of feedback. Adorno stated at the time that the record player has a function of a mirror because singer's voice is brought back to our own ears² just like body reflection is brought back to the body in front of the mirror. Despotic, record player's urge "to speak and to be heard" (Merleau-Ponty) asks for the intermediating of the Other in the shape of radio station where the surplus of meanings and messages will be released in a disguised form and return to the sender's address as vox populi (the voice of the people).

Any other discordant voice which could upset this harmony of reflection would represent a rebellion, that is the intrusion into ruler's domain and the undermining of the phonocentric state system. That is why the despot's police force play the part of a microphone which should register and turn down the subversive voices of "those who do not want to listen". Despotic state is a state of record player's communication where the whole city (as the 18th century Istanbul described by Tournefort was) is like the dog which listens to HIS MASTER'S VOICE on the serai - record player.

However, isn't the colonial system of dominance a kind of phonocentric machine containing a mechanism of symbolic executors of the policy which is being created in European capitals? The invisible and remote monarch rules in his colonies through the lips of his colonial servants - record players who govern the colony by reproducing his voice, with the help of his name: "In the name His Majesty... on behalf of His Majesty". The voice of a subject is no more than silence, a noise, an unintelligible murmur without any meaning for the ruler because it does not convey any messages. "Each ruler", claims Attali, "muffles other people's noise and enriches his arsenal with a strategy of sound prevention"³. The prevention is carried out by creating an institution out of phonocentrism which removes the noise of local voices from official communication and expels it into the ghetto of private conversation. In order to reach the law and to communicate with a ruler in a legitimate way, the voice of a subject has no other choice but to accept record player's rules of communication and to reproduce the voice (language) of the ruler. There is "an irreducible difference" between the voice of the ruler and the voice of the servant. This difference, as shown by Lyotard⁴ is always the benefit for the more powerful discourse, for the ruler, for the record player.

During the round journey which finishes on the sender's address, a voice - letter gets "a different nature". And just as the reflection always comes back as "a different image" from the mirror, so the voice from the record player comes back as "a different voice" from the machine. The recorded voice is virtual, a virtual object taken over from reality. That takeover according to Deleuse "implies first of all an isolation or distancing which squeezes the reality in order to extract an attitude, an aspect, a part"⁵. However, continues Deleuse, this isolation has its qualitative aspect and does not consist only of "keeping a real object", but also of the fact that "the kept part acquires new nature functioning as a virtual object"⁶. However, there is an aspect of real master's voice which has to be kept by a virtual voice by all means. This aspect is, actually, his name which, in the visible presence of the body guarantees the origin of virtual voice that could not have the power of authority and law without this name - symbol. Thus when the virtual voice speaks in the name of the real one which is absent, it completely takes over its powers so much so that the virtual voice becomes real.

Colonial (and despotic) system of representation is based on economic effect of the virtual aspect which prevents the subjects from any immediate contact with real, original voice. By doubling the real voice, virtual voice improves it and makes it almost abstractly ideal by eliminating its "too human" a character. When spoken by depersonalize, mechanical voices of servants-record players, virtual voice sounds above personal, and is like the voice of God which comes from nowhere and is heard by prophets and mystics or like a synthetic voice of a machine. Although the virtual voice brings closer the real voice on the formal-symbolic plane, it makes the real voice even more lonely and alienated than it really is. It/The virtual voice encourages the kind of imagination which fosters the feelings of fear and paralysis in the nearness of the omni-seeing presence of the leader by making his personality mythical, almost divine.

"Reproductive technique, speaking generally, takes
out the reproduction from the field of tradition"

(Walter Benjamin)

When trying to trace down the origin of the unexpectedly discovered wax cylinders with Arab music and voices that have been recorded at the beginning of this century, a group of West European phono-archaeologists called Arab experts to help⁷. It turned out that one of them was the descendant of the family who used to sell bees' wax in Yemen (some of the recordings come from that country) at the beginning of the century. He remembered his grandmother telling him how they were very surprised when their buyers mentioned that the wax "should somehow be used to record certain tunes of great musicians"⁸. As a reminder of the time when the first phonographs came to Saudi Arabia, there is a word in Arabic, "ustuwana", which today means a record, but its literal meaning is "a cylinder".

With the occurrence of "ustuwana" a new chapter of colonial phonocetrism is opened - the dominant position is no longer kept by the one who spoke, but by the one who listened: the producer of sound becomes a servant, and its consumer the master of sound.

To record the voice of a subject meant colonizing it in the master's code of listening and understanding/comprehension, subjecting it to the master's technical systematization of space and time, and incorporating it in the master's history and memory. Thus, the voice is alienated from the tradition due to the technical presence of "ustuwana", and does no longer belong to the "traditional reality" (Adorno). It loses its immediacy of "here and now" of the original so that it could become an item in the master's wax (vinyl) museum of sound. While in the system of colonial institutions the voice of the subject is being marginalized as incomprehensible and unusable, in the reproductive system it is being put into such a frame of representation which could make it comprehensible and usable under a label of ethnographic preservation, scientific knowledge or, simply, tourist postcard. "Ustuwana" is now reversed: it is not the master's voice which is being reproduced, but the voice of the subject. Besides, the recorded presence of the master is no longer made crucial, but that of his subject.

The real voice of the subject becomes a virtual voice on "ustuwana" and their inter-relationship is of the same kind as the relationship between the real and the virtual voice of the master. According to Deleuse, "following the reality principle, real objects are made to be or not to be somewhere, whereas the virtual object has a capacity to be and not to be where it is"⁹. The voice is on the "ustuwana", but only partly, due to the fact that there is no a body that creates it. As a matter of fact, the voice has been forcefully separated from the body. "This voice", says Deleuse, "lack the true identity"¹⁰, that is why it looks unnatural and unreal when it comes out of a loudspeaker like a phantom. For Arabs a record player is something foreign in their world, a magic box which produces a kind of "schizophrenic split: it "captures" their voices and separates them forever from their bodies. Completely intangible thing as a voice is, it, as if by a miracle, materializes and finds itself a new territory within another artificial body, and they feel well how that voice is and is not theirs at one and the same time.

The thing that makes record player top master's machine is "the compulsion of repetition" (Freud). During this communication through a record player all participants are under this compulsion: clerks, servants, "ustuwanas", even the master himself who is forever haunted by the echo of his own voice. According to Freud, within the domain of therapeutic evocation of the suppressed, the reproduction always happens in the field of transmission, that is in the field of the patient's relation towards his doctor¹¹. As for the record player's reproduction, the transmission is expressed as mastership itself: the message that the reproduced voice is conveying is not serving the subject's but the master's ego, that is, the master's need for repetition. That is why every message in this system is reversible and every letter gets to the sender's address regardless of the fact who might have read it in the course of "transmission".

"I should like to make it clear that I do not have any records in my home".

(John Cage)

The piece of John Cage "33 1/3" for 12 record players and a hundred records is actually a sound installation that asks from the visitors to take part in the creation of a music composition for 12 record players by putting on one of the records. This piece is the outcome of Cage's concept "Everything is music" and it has a symbolic subversive role within the system of record player's phonocentrism.

If within this system it becomes impossible to carry out any changes in terms of decentralization, then it can be done by an outside intervention consisting of adding another record player. Two masters cannot speak at the same time, servants-record players cannot reproduce different voices simultaneously and finally, one cannot listen to two "ustuwanas" at the same time. The reproduction of one voice is annulling the effects of another voice by introducing noises in its channels of communication, by interfering with its codes and by hampering its speakers. The outcome of the juxtaposition of two record players is a noise which uncovers the record players' phonocentrism by caricaturing it and ridiculing it in the twisted mirror of another record player. "To raise the noise", says in one writing on noise, "means to interrupt the transmission, to separate, to kill"¹². Shapeless and nihilistic, the noise destroys the duality of the real and the virtual due to the fact that in the realm of noise everything is real and everything is virtual, that is, as Cage would say it, everything is and is not music. "The noise" continues the writing, "unveils the ideology of a repetitive society" and "it confirms the negation of meaning"¹³ by eluding every institutional control and systematization. Chaotic and unpredictable, without a firm morphology, the noise cannot be used in any of the systems of representation, it cannot be tamed and articulated without stopping being a noise. The noise cannot be written down or reproduced, which means that it fundamentally undermines the institution of literacy which is the basis for every reproductive economy. The noise, simply, is neither the ally of the master nor of the subjects, because after the initial subversive shock, it can turn against its user and make his position equally absurd and impossible to hold.

The emblem HIS MASTER'S VOICE is now read in a different key: the dog starts barking back into the horn of the record player and is deafening his master's voice. In such a cacophony of human and animal voice, we can no longer refer to the "voice" of the master, for we can hear no "voice" any more. There is only HIS MASTER'S NOISE.

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