Page - 60 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 02/01

60 | Florian Heesch www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/1, 49–69 cord labels such as Motown Record Corporation, the first African American record company, founded by Berry Gordy (b. 1929) in Detroit in 1959, strived to establish an idiosyncratic sound.35 The Motown Sound became a kind of auditive trademark and was associated with artists like The Marvelettes, Marvin Gaye, and the early Stevie Wonder. The development of the studio means that what we hear in recordings of popular music is regularly not, or at least not only, a human voice but a sound that results from a combination of bodily and technological practices. This observation raises questions about authenticity: for instance, as concerns playback, whether the singer we are watching on the stage is able to sing this without the large apparatus in front of and behind her or him. In extreme cases we may listen to a singing voice while watching a non-singing body, as in the case of Milli Vanilli, a pop duo whose Grammy Award for their debut album was withdrawn in 1990 because they did not sing themselves.36 Indeed, the identity of the singer in recorded popular song, crucial according to Moore for any hermeneutic approach, seems to be only partially a bodily defined iden- tity. It makes sense to describe that vocal identity generally as, in Wicke’s words, “a synthesis of human sound production and machine-made mutations”. Wicke is right in calling that sound “bodiless”, in as much as it is recorded and hence characterised by the absence of the body I described in the first category. However, even a highly processed studio recording of a human voice still includes bodily produced elements of sound. The technologically transmitted sound makes the absent body present, even if we would see (or hear) that presence as an audible illusion. Thus, the sound of recorded popular song is not absolutely bodiless, but a hybrid of human body sounds and technological processing. The vocal identity, then, is less the pure result of human performance than a hybrid of human and technology. Donna Haraway theorised such hybrids early as cyborgs.37 A cyborg, according to Haraway, “is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction”.38 Haraway considers the cyborg a chal- lenge to common dualistic views of human beings, hence its potential to overcome stereotypes of race, gender, and totalitarian politics in general. Therefore, Haraway’s concept can be regarded as one possible strategy of what later has been called queer- ness, although it has been criticised for its rather utopian view and lack of censure of the dangerous aspects and militaristic and totalitarian concepts of cyborgs.39 Still, it is revealing to study the subversive potential of cyborg-like hybrids, as long as one keeps in mind that hybridity does not include subversion per se. 35 In 1959, the company was founded as Tamla Records; the renaming as Motown followed in 1961, cf. Bowman 2015. 36 See the complex discussion on that example of questioned authenticity in Auslander 2008. 37 Haraway 2010. 38 Haraway 2010, 2190. 39 Cf. Leibetseder 2010, 229–250.