The Form of the Phonograph Record
Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno, Thomas Y. Levin · October · 1990
laid upon the platter. It is covered with curves, a delicately scribbled, utterly illegible writing, which here and there forms more plastic figures for reasons that remain obscure to the layman upon listening; structured like a spiral, it ends somewhere in the vicinity of the title label, to which it is sometimes connected by a lead-out groove so that the needle can comfortably finish its trajectory. In terms of its form, this is all that it will reveal. As perhaps the first of the technological artistic inventions, it already stems from an era that cynically acknowledges the dominance of things over people through the emancipation of technology from human requirements and human needs and through the presentation of achievements whose significance is not primarily humane; instead, the need is initially produced by advertisement, once the thing already exists and is spinning in its own orbit. Nowhere does there arise anything that resembles a form specific to the phonograph recordin the way that one was generated by photography in its early days. Just as the call for radio-specific music remained necessarily empty and unfulfilled and gave rise to nothing better than some