Audio Media in the Service of the Totalitarian State?

Abstract

The question concerning the logical relationship between the structures and media of totalitarianism has been treated controversially in contemporary scholarship. A large part of the relevant publications (represented by Franz Borkenau, Walter Laqueur and Hannah Arendt) defines totalitarian power primarily as the power of the minority over the majority and, following Aristotle, sees the latter as rooted in structures of political order. A second corpus of research increasingly interprets totalitarianism as technological power and associates it with scientific inventions in the field of telecommunications. In this second corpus, the radio, the loudspeaker and sound film, i.e. media forms that realize the principle of optical sound recording, are assigned a structuralizing function with regard to the reproduction and continuity of totalitarian power. The present article attempts to show that the relationship between the audio media and the listening contexts of totalitarianism should be treated as contingent. Based on an analysis of early film sound projects in the Soviet Union, it intends to demonstrate how, on the one hand, electro-acoustic media were used to reconfigure traditional soundscapes and how, on the other hand, local (social, mytho-religious) semantics of sound entered into the constitution of such electro-acoustic soundscapes.