The Voices of the Phonograph: Poetry and New Technologies at the Turn of the Century in Latin America

Abstract

The phonograph, together with the daguerreotype, represent two of the earliest modern artifacts, capable of offering a mechanical reproduction of reality. Even though the phonograph – and its derivative, the gramophone – currently retain a mainly historical and even archaeological interest, given the discontinuation and obsolescence of both technologies, their impact on the culture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was vast; and its legacy survives in the present, through the recording devices that have subsequently replaced them. This work focuses on examining this impact in the context of the intellectual debates around the phonograph that generated in Latin America at the turn of the century. In an intellectual context dominated by modernist aesthetics and the denunciation of “Nordomania” and technological utilitarianism promoted from the North, the debate around the introduction of the phonograph and its potential as a tool to aid creation was extremely tense and contradictory, even among representatives of the same school of thought. The cases of José Martí and Rubén Darío clearly illustrate these antipodes regarding the creative potential of new information technologies, such as the phonograph. The present work explores this ideological rupture between representatives of modernism, late romanticism, and realism at the end of the century, as well as its European counterparts in the symbolist and naturalist schools. Finally, I argue in favor of the need to establish a historical evolutionary line that connects the information technology innovations of the 19th century with the most recent innovations in the sphere of computational culture and contemporary media studies in other to better understand its reach.