A crime caper replete with a formidable male adversary prone to self-delusion and secrecy, a loyal secretary all too quick to take the fall, a well-intentioned archivist and a team of determined forensic detectives hot on the magnetic trail.

This case begins with a fundamental misconception, a tautology of inscription:
1) An analogue tape recorder does not have an erase button.
2) A tape can therefore only ever be rewound and then re-recorded over an existing track.
3) The recording process must by definition and design record something.
4) It is thus technically impossible to deliberately or accidentally erase anything.

At some point during the evening of June 20th 1972 a conversation between two men was secretly taped on a SONY TC-800B reel-to-reel voice recorder. An innocuous machine that uses 0.5mm tape, and was set to run at the peculiar speed of 15/16 IPS—or half the rate of a standard tape recorder. In keeping with this low-fidelity recording mode, the tiny lavalier microphones that picked up this particular conversation were cheap and poorly distributed throughout the space. The result was a tape of degraded sound quality produced under deficient recording conditions.

FAST-FORWARD to 1973. An entire nation is now magnetized by the pull of forces un-spooled by this single reel of 0.5mm tape.

Tape 342 as it is officially referred to, is but one of a sprawling archive of approximately 3,700 hours of audio recordings taped surreptitiously by the late American Republican President Richard Nixon over a period of several years. Known as the Nixon White House Tapes, these recordings detail conversations between the President, his staff, and visitors to the White House and Camp David. Of the many thousands of audiotapes confiscated from the Oval Office, Tape 342 remains by far the most infamous. Not because of the damaging or volatile nature of the information it contains but precisely because of its absence: a gap in the tape of 18 1/2 minutes. A residual silence which is haunted by the spectre of a man who refused to speak, who refused to fill in the gap and suture the wound that opened up the corruption of the American political system for all to see.

This gap takes place during a conversation between Nixon and J.R. Haldeman three days after the break-in at Democratic National Committee Headquarters in the Watergate Hotel. The timing of the conversation on June 20th and subsequent tape-gap so close to the temporal unfolding of criminal events at the Watergate Hotel have lead many to speculate that the tape must have contained highly incriminating evidence. Evidence, which perhaps implicated President Nixon himself in the crime. American constitutional law, under the aegis of the Fifth Amendment, gives one the right not to speak on the grounds that such speech may be self-incriminating it does not however allow one to take back or erase something already spoken. Silence becomes a de facto admission of guilt.

Existence of the White House taping system was made public during testimony before the Senate Watergate Committee in July 1973, but the equipment was not removed until after the disgraced President left office a year later. Although the muteness of both the tape and the man defied efforts to conjure forth truth in 1973, the tape was still understood an important historical artefact that needed to be treated accordingly. Fear of disturbing the remaining few magnetic particles that clung to the 18 1/2 minute gap was immediately recognized and after a mere half-dozen playbacks the tape was permanently removed from circulation and placed into the storage vaults of the US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). There the tape has lain undisturbed in cryogenic sleep for over 30 years at precisely 65 degrees Fahrenheit & 40 percent relative humidity. Waiting like some fairy tale creature for that moment when the kiss of technological progress will revive it from its somnambulant state; moreover, it waits for an explicitly digital caress that will not only revivify but also restore its capacity to speak. This is the promise that technology continues to propagate through a rhetorical program that maps ideas of progress onto narratives of technological determinism.

In 2001 NARA initiated a process to test the 18 1/2 minute gap in an attempt to recover erased audio material. Several tests were conducted over a period of 2 years using highly specialized forensic technologies. To-date all such tests have failed. In reading through the NARA press releases as they relate to Tape 342, is it clear that the history of the tape is largely a history still waiting to be written and is therefore intimately conjoined with teleological accounts of technological development. As a national archive and steward of its nation’s heritage, NARA is mandated to implement the rational ordering and classification systems that French philosopher Michel Foucault analysed with such prescience in The Order of Things. Foucault also discusses the autopsy of the body in similar terms in The Birth of the Clinic. ‘Not merely the scalpel cuts open the medical body; rhetorical formulations, silent and otherwise, made it possible for the opened body to “speak”. If the body were to speak out of its silence, it had to be composed, patterned. It had to be ordered.’ (Doyle, 2002: 64)

In spite of its duty to police the objects entrusted to its care, one senses that Tape 342 has only ever been placed under temporary house arrest and that NARA itself is inflicted with a kind of archive fever, a malady that longs for originary truth: the fantasy that one-day technology will be capable of restoring meaning to Tape 342. In his short text of the same name, Jacques Derrida states that to suffer from archive fever: ‘It is to burn with a passion. It is never to rest. . . It is to have a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement.’ (Derrida, 1995: 91)

In an earlier passage, Derrida stress that the question of the archive is not a question of the past. ‘It is a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow. The archive: if we want to know what that will have meant, we will only know in times to come, later on or perhaps never. A spectral messianicity is at work in the concept of the archive and ties it, like religion, like history, like science itself, to a very singular experience of the promise.’ (Derrida, 1995: 36)

If the rhetorical pledge of NARA is to rescue Tape 342 from its imprisoned state of silence, Derrida reminds us that the question of the future must remain open, that the full significance of the tape will not be understood even at the moment that its gag order is lifted—the moment of its revelation. The task of this paper is to conceptually extract Tape 342 from its archival mooring, to remove it from the contagion of le mal d’archive in order to consider it as other than a mute artefact lying-in-wait for its eventual resuscitation. This strategic gesture acknowledges that Tape 342 already speaks in many complex ways. For in fact the tape is not silent, it is resonant with the sounds of clicks and magnetic detritus. The tape noise speaks a language but not one that is intelligible in terms of cognitive human speech patterns.

In John Cage’s extensive writings on silence, particularly after his legendary visit to the anechoic chamber at Harvard University, he insists upon the impossibility of complete silence. As the story goes, Cage was perplexed to hear two sounds in the anechoic chamber, which by definition as a vacuum should have been soundless. When he queried this residual sound, he learned that he was in fact hearing the interior sounds of his own body, the low throbbing of his blood in circulation and the high-pitched sound of his nervous system. Cage thus conceptualized silence as always-sound, a state of sonic contingency that is no longer tied to events, such as his famous silent piano performance 4’33”, but as a continuous unfolding that resonates from each and every atom.

The act of erasure, like the concept of silence, is a technical misnomer that is immediately refused through an empirical investigation of the tape recorder [the body] itself, which alas reveals only six buttons: PLAY, STOP, PAUSE, REWIND, FAST-FORWARD and RECORD. The most important button is missing. But not only is it missing, it has in fact never even existed. The ERASE button is a mechanical delusion for perpetuating the logic of repression.

The technical organization of an analogue tape recorder does consist of something called an erase-head over which the tape passes each time the record button is activated. Erasing is only ever achieved as an abstraction, a by-product that the act of recording sets into motion only to turn around and negate. Immediately upon passing over the erase-head, the tape glides over the record-head, which reassembles its electro-magnetic particles and re-inscribes it with a kind of soundless sound. The alternating positive and negative fields emitted by the erase-head reformat the tape so that minimal electronic bleed is archived by the substrate. A good erase-head should reduce the signal by 60 dB or more resulting in minimal telegraphy of noise. Only a bulk-eraser where the reel of tape is immersed in and withdrawn from the field of a large AC magnet operated at the frequency level of a high-voltage power line can actually eliminate almost all extent tape noise. In short, it is virtually impossible to erase an analogue tape, only the digital allows for the deletion of a track but even then deep-data recovery is still possible.

Although Tape 342 was recorded on a SONY TC-800B, it was determined by the Advisory Panel to Judge John Sirica (1974), that a UHER 500 was the machine that actually erased or re-recorded the 18 1⁄2 minute portion of Tape 342. This machinic deterritorialization increases the likelihood of conserving latent vocalizations. ‘A crack in the erase head, a dust mote on the tape or heads, slack in the tape at start-up, a misaligned head’ would have severely compromised the erase-head’s effectiveness. (McNichol, 2002: 3) When news of the tape glitch was made public, Nixon’s secretary, Rosemary Woods claimed that she might have inadvertently caused the erasure while transcribing the tape when startled by the telephone. However when audio experts examined the tape in 1974 they concluded that the RECORD/STOP/RECORD button had actually been pressed 5 to 9 times, thus refuting the secretary’s attempted admission of guilt. Qualified researchers who have had access to copies of Tape 342 describe the 18 1/2 minutes of silence as follows: ‘At the point of the first erasure, the muffled conversation is suddenly replaced by a buzzing noise, presumably the sound of a 60-cycle hum leaking from the power grid as interpreted by a high-grain microphone input circuit. Throughout the gap, the buzz occasionally drops in volume, but never is there any discernible speech.’ (McNichol, 2002: 2)

‘Archivist of the United States John W. Carlin announced today (May 8, 2003) that he has accepted the recommendations in the final report of the National Archives Technical Evaluation Panel. . . Based on the results of two tests that were conducted by participants in an open-invitation proof-of-concept exercise, Mr. Carlin decided not to proceed with further testing. . . “I am fully satisfied that we have explored all of the avenues to attempt to recover the sound on this tape. The candidates were highly qualified and used the latest technology in their pursuit. We will continue to preserve the tape in the hopes that later generations can try again to recover this vital piece of our history.’ (http://www.archives.gov)

NARA’s stalled fantasy constitutes the baseline for my argument, which contends that the rhetorical framework of ‘recovery’ that has been overlaid onto Tape 342 disavows its present status as already fully enunciatory. Moreover, this research argues that NARA, in focusing upon the singular goal of the ‘recovery of intelligible speech’ overlooks the possibility of activating other potentially generative narratives. Privileging the continued ascendancy of certain preoccupations, in this case the promissory note of technology, maintains its conceptual purchase with not only the past, but also with the future yet to come. However, the rhetorical filiation of Tape 342 is not simply a problem of language that requires an empirical intervention, but as Isabelle Stengers makes explicit, involves a risk that in learning ‘how to ask the right or relevant questions’ we may need to abandon the very epistemological ground that produced the conditions for such an inquiry.

‘The possibility that it is not man but the material that ‘asks’ the questions, that has a story to tell, which one has to learn to unravel.’ (Stengers, 1997: 126) As an ontologically driven detective story, Stengers proposes that it is not man’s ‘grey matter’ that needs to be harnessed in order to solve the mystery, but that matter itself both contains the clues and poses the questions. What story does Tape 342 want to tell?

Aden Evens in his article ‘Sound Ideas’ provides a detailed analysis of analogue and digital music recording techniques in order to account for perceived differences in the psychoacoustic dimensions of sound. Audiophiles often assert that analogue phonographic equipment creates a smoother, fuller, and richer sound in spite of the capacity of digital technology to produce much cleaner recordings. Evens makes two points that are important to the discussion of Tape 342. First, that it is not so much noise—the scratches and surface debris which interferes with grooved sound—that creates musical affect and expression, but rather the high frequency rates of analogue recording which the body perceives only physiologically at the level of cellular vibration. Digital sampling by contrast, limits the recordable range to that of human intelligibility. In short, it cuts off those frequencies, which register beyond the accepted threshold of human hearing. Evens’ second point, concerns the method of digital sampling itself, which takes sound measurements at precise and regular intervals and then through a process of interpellation fills in the space between these measurements creating the illusion of continuity and flow. In actuality, the digital track is reduced to a series of singular states or positions along a syntagmatic linear axis.

Scientists today estimate that the universe began approximately fifteen billion years ago. The standard model of present-day cosmology also accepts the theory that universe began approximately one second after the singularity of the big bang. But as physicist Illya Prigogine notes ‘the state of the universe during its first second of life still remains an open question.’ (Prigogine, 1996: 175) If this intensive and compressed space between nothing and something can facilitate the profound transformation of negative gravitational energy into positive matter-energy [the universe] than surely the interval of the digital sample regardless of it hyperbolic frequency rate could also theoretically contain information that the process of interpellation simply over-writes. As Evens makes explicit any variations that occur in the time between two digital samples will be missed entirely. The high level of digital encoding that Tape 342 underwent and NARA’s subsequent admission of failed recovery is not entirely an open and shut case. It is mathematically feasible that the space between the digital intervals could contain the entirety of Nixon’s syncopated lost speech, that is, if interpellation were eliminated from the process.

Stengers dares us to call an innovative hypothesis—the remote possibility of a series of speech-acts occurring within the intervals—a propositional fiction rather than a hypothetical thesis that we set out to test and/or prove. At this point I wish to press the PAUSE button for a moment and reflect upon Stengers ontological provocation to listen to the questions that the material itself wishes to ask. While the concept of the interval in digital sampling currently offers the greatest likelihood of recovering traces of human speech, the machinic utterances that unwind as the tape recorder itself reels off towards an unknown future has the ability to activate even more radical imaginary registers. In comparison with the network of speculative ideas and possibilities that the gap in the tape invites, the recovery of intelligible speech seems a rather pedantic objective.

Sound is the chatter of atoms that reverberates within all bodies and objects whether carbon or silicon. It is the expressive potential of a cluster of pure sine waves as they ripple across smooth surfaces, entering and exiting conduits to trigger responses deep within the subcutaneous layers of matter; a journey chronicled by the vibrations of an infinite frequency range. As a detective/researcher, Tape 342 offers a complex array of possible investigative leads. Only a few have been followed in this short text. There are many more sources to track down. We have already witnessed the dead-end that comes with jumping to conclusions and making assumptions. Only the team of archivists and scientists at NARA have the rhetorical authority to proclaim the “case closed” but that should not deter further inquiry on our part.

Whether the volt-producing machine of the digital or the mechanistic apparatus of the analogue, a media object is never simply silent or inert. It is always already animated through its connective tissues to the machinic assemblage of the social. To quote Deleuze ‘machines are social before being technical. Or rather there is a human technology which exists before a material technology.’ (Deleuze, 1988: 39) Although the ontological status of Tape 342 is anchored in its materiality as a technical artefact, it is also a contingent archive containing an 18 1/2 minute record of an incident or an accident. As an event it calls for a narrative account of the past and future yet to come, and as an object it immediately turns around and annuls its discursive status as merely a rhetorical overture delineating a set of temporal fictions. Tape 342 is ultimately a placeholder for the multiplicity of different resources that the future has to both imagine and re-create itself differently. (see Grosz, 2005: 38)

References

Carlin, J.W. ‘Archivist Accepts Watergate Tape Panel Recommendations’ (2003) The U.S. National Archives & Records Administration [http://www.archives.gov/press/press-releases/2003nr03-43.html] accessed on 28/11/05
Derrida, J. (1995) Archive Fever. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Deleuze, G. (1988) Foucault. London: The Althone Press.
Doyle, R. (2002) Wetwares: Experiments in Postvital Living. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.
Evens, A. (2002) ‘Sound Ideas,’ in B. Massumi (ed.) A Shock to Thought, pp. 171-187. London: Routledge.
Grosz, E. (2005) Time Travels. London: Duke University Press.
McNichol, T. ‘Richard Nixon's Last Secret’ (2002) Wired 10.07 [http://wired.com/wired/archive/10.07/nixon_pr.html], pp. 1-5 accessed on 25/11/05
Prigogine, I. (1996) The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos, and the New Laws of Nature. New York: The Free Press.
Stengers, I. (1997) Power and Invention: Situating Science. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.