| This dissertation introduces new ways of thinking about German radio and sound film in relation both to theories of modernity and to trends in psychology in the early twentieth century. The idea of an acoustical unconscious derives from Walter Benjamin's concept of the "optical unconscious." Benjamin showed that both photography and film begin to stretch our optical perception, so that it includes visions that previously could not have been consciously perceived. The dissertation argues that this theory can also illuminate the analysis of acoustical media. The first chapter examines Benjamin's optical unconscious alongside his various references to sound, concluding that the acoustical unconscious involves a complex relationship to phonetic and linguistic phenomena that distinguishes it from its optical counterpart. Subsequent chapters examine the implications of the acoustical unconscious in three different media: the written word, radio, and film. Starting with Ludwig Tieck's "Der blonde Eckbert," which provides a link between romantic theories of the voice and listening to twentieth-century concerns of the same, Chapter Two examines how the acoustical unconscious is both structurally similar to and yet distinct from Proust's memoire involontaire. Chapter Three builds on claims in previous chapters, arguing that, if the acoustical unconscious involves a word's detachment from its meaning through its multiple sound parts, then it also dissociates and displaces the voice as it is commonly understood---namely, as unified and expressive---by allowing sounds of the human voice to emerge, which are amplified in radio. Chapter Three thus explores the relationship between voice and language in both the radio theory of Rudolf Arnheim and three radio plays by Gunter Eich: Traume, Sabeth, and Das Jahr Lazertes. Finally, Chapter Four reads the theoretical work, various stories and two films by Alexander Kluge, who directly addresses Benjamin's theory of the optical unconscious while also developing and describing "sound perspectives" that push sound material to the verge of disintegration. In examining how Kluge appropriates and reorganizes previous music and sound material in order to give them new meaning beyond their otherwise fixed historical contexts, it is also possible to interpret Kluge as politicizing the acoustical unconscious. |
