Vox Electronica: Nostalgia, Irony and Cyborgian Vocalities in Kraftwerk’s Radioaktivität and Autobahn

Abstract

This paper takes a close look at the music of Kraftwerk, perhaps the best known of the ‘electronic’ groups of former West Germany’s so-called neue Welle, in order to raise some fundamental questions about the politics of elektronische Musik before the dawn of the digital age and, in particular, how constructions and performances of the voice in late analogue technology rehearse new and critical strategies of resistance in the aftermath of 1968.It is a commonplace of recent cultural-theoretical considerations of digital technology to ascribe to it a fundamental re-positioning of imaginations of the subject, of authorship and of agency in the broadest sense. What has never really been fully worked through in this (usually utopian) figuration of digital technology is the extent to which technology can be conceived as ‘autonomous’ (as Rosie Braidotti would have it) or whether new technologies in themselves are a guarantor of new cultural formations. In particular, this paper seeks to test the extent to which Kraftwerk’s pre-digital imagination can be read as an expression of the politics of the so-called Tendenzwende (a ‘turning inwards’ from explicitly activist politics to a more diffuse politics of the personal) of the Schmidt- and early Kohlzeit. The article looks in particular at Kraftwerk’s use of what might be termed the ‘electronic sublime’ as a way of disengaging the music from the ego-centred practices of earlier German rock music and as a way of anticipating new German subject positions and political identities in the light of de-industrialization and globalization.