Issue 1.

5 Scenes of Knowledge

RETE MIRABILE; by FRIEDRICH BALKE

The circulation of voices in Philip Scheffners Halfmoon Files
1. What does follow the actors mean?
In the context of a discussion that a professor at the London School of Economics had in
his office with a Ph.D. student about the actor-network theory, or ANT for short, the
professor had to disappoint the student feverishly seeking opportunities to use it. It isn't
applicable to anything! stubbornly asserted the professor, but the student, who after this
unambiguous statement had enough reason to leave the office, would not let himself be
brushed off so easily. ANT is a theory, but not one which says substantive things about
what the social world is made of explained the professor, but a theory about how to
study things. The student should say to himself:
When your informants mix up organization, hardware, psychology, and politics in one sentence,
don't break it down first into neat little pots; try to follow the link they make among those elements
that would have looked completely incommensurable if you had followed normal procedures. 1

People have argued that the ANT basically amounts to a renewal of the ethnomethodological proposal, according to which a social and cultural researcher would be
well advised to follow the actors. The ANT would not, however, enjoy great popularity
among cultural and media scholars if it only boiled down to yet another renewal of
Weberian creed of social science concentrated on action-theory. Sociology, as Weber
famously defined it, should mean: A science concerning itself with the interpretive
understanding of social action and thereby with causal explanation of its course and
consequences. We shall speak of action, Weber continues, in so far as the acting
1

individual attaches a subjective meaning to his behaviour. 2 That the social world lets itself
be reduced to the subjective meaning which the actors bind to their actions, is a
hermeneutic assumption that since the objections of structural anthropology, discourse
analysis, psychoanalysis as well as deconstruction, to name but a few, has lost all
credibility in cultural and media science . Webers definition backslides behind the level of
sociological theory formation reached by Emile Durkheim, who holds that the first and
most basic rule is: to consider social facts as things in which he describes the most
important characteristic of a thing as the impossibility of its modification by a simple
effort of will.3 This reminiscence of the classical definition of things as the object range of
social research of Durkheims is also therefore necessary, because Latour unnecessarily
brings the ANT into a basic opposition with Durkheim, who is made liable for the
sociological development that the meaning of social has increasingly shrunk. But
Durkheim, who operates on the border between sociology and ethnology is, just like
Latour, of the opinion that we should not limit in advance the sort of beings populating
the social world.4 The ANT counts things (apparatuses, technologies) humans and signs as
equal components of the social world and with it contradicts all attempts to reduce it to
humans, meanings or intentions. The social world is, to use Simmels concept 5, engendered
through interactions that occur not only between subjects capable of speech and
action. The ANT raises questions of the following sort: When we act, who else is acting?
How many agents are also present? How come I never do what I want? Why are we all
held by forces that are not of our own making?6
In the following I should like to pursue these questions with the help of a film, which uses
the methodical potential and the methodical point of ANT on a particularly striking level,
and in doing so functions as evidence that ANT is not a method of which academia can
demand a monopoly. Whether one defines the genealogy of the network concept as
microsociological or macrotechnological, as Erhard Schttpelz has recently done, there
always arises the impression that this logistical way of thinking is a question of an
elementary alternative within the game of scientific methods and heuristics. In any case,
at the end of his deliberations Schttpelz asserts that, despite all inflating use of the
network category, its survival is guaranteed through that which is not conceptually
obtainable from it: the metaphor. Networks are not a human invention.7 they already
exist on the level of animal sociability and bind the destinies of humans with those of gods
and ghosts. This is exactly what Philip Scheffners film Halfmoon Files (2007) is about. At the
centre of the film are technical apparatuses, institutions, humans, and certain speech

acts, which on account of the existence of medial recording provisions continue their
spectral life beyond their one-off enunciation with the help of the film. Halfmoon Files
can be characterised in all brevity as a film that shows what it means to increase the
range of agencies.8 According to ANT, social is a certain type of association between
things that are not themselves social.9 The film does not merely document this type of
association; it is itself the chain of operation which produces a link between very different,
heterogeneous elements. The discovery of ANT as mentioned by John Law is that to the
extent society is held together at all, this is achieved by heterogeneous means. Or, to put
it somewhat more radically, that the social is not purely social at all. 10 In light of the ANT,
societies are not social systems which reproduce themselves autopoeitically, but rather
places in which the necessary disunities, inconsistencies and overlappings come
together: their context is not so much sociological as socio-technological in its nature and
overlaps the differentiation between humans and apparatuses, humans and machines as
well as those between humans and signs or humans and discourses.

Halfmoon Files demonstrates the apparatuses and media which we can thank for a
certain acoustic experience of an event which dates back a long time and its sociotopic
constitution; the film also shows that already the phonographic storage of linguistic signs is
subject to a special technical arrangement and distribution and on its own part serves as
a starting point for further academic application of data won from speaking people.
Perhaps the most decisive achievement of the ANT exists in the renunciation of a certain
use of the differentiation between local and global and therewith in the identification of
the social as an effect of circulating entities. Halfmoon Files is not a film about agents or
structures, but a film about an endless circulation of humans, objects and signs, which the
film simultaneously makes tangible and of which it is a part. Halfmoon Files is a film about
camps (Lager) and storages (Lagerungen)11, rooms of internment, barracks and archives,
which collect humans and data gained from them, along with the institutions which
enclose these spaces. The film shows how the global, the First World War, redistributed
and

translated

is

localised:

the

war

produces

camps

in

which

humans

are

accommodated, who came from afar to the European theatre of war. The global exists
only on very specific local stages; conversely, the local does not retain the bodies,
objects and signs which have collectively streamed to it, but rather sends them on a
renewed journey, to which the film itself, as its last present exponent bears witness:
localisation of the global, globalisation of the local. The camp around which the film
focuses, is not just a construct of the military, but also the starting point for the dream of a

linguist, who as leader of the Prussian phonographic commission makes sure that the
camp would spread locally everywhere12, for which reason besides the black boxes of
barracks and archive rooms, into which the camera penetrates vague landscapes
appear through the fog bearing witness to this impossibility of retaining in camp that
what began as contoured topography of the camp, or to limit it to its epicentre of
genesis.

2. Documents and ghosts, or: who else is acting?

Giorgio Agamben has called the camp a biopolitical paradigm of the modern,
because within it an extensive politicization of life occurs, therefore the the growing
inclusion of man's natural life in the mechanisms and calculations of power. 13 Since the
First World War refugees and prisoners of war from European and non-European regions
undo the order of the modern nation state, which established a correlation between
birth and political affiliation nativity and nationality. 14 This biopolitical change of the
modern nation state, the uncertainty triggered by it of the political-juristic status of
subjects, who live in the sphere of power of a state, without juristically belonging to it, also
has consequences for philosophical thought about humans, as it is expressed in the many
forms of a so-called philosophical anthropology. With the discovery of life as an object of
knowledge and aim of power in the nineteenth century, as described by Foucault, arises
the conceivability, respectively the enunciative profile of a philosophical anthropology, for
instance explicated in Helmut Plessners essay Macht und menschliche Natur (Power
and Human Nature) in concepts such as inscrutability, open question, exposure, venture,
riskiness or in the formula redolent of Nietzsche of man as power.15 What in Plessner,
Gehlen, or even Scheler appears in the form of anthropological quasi-essential
determinations can be traced back in a history of science to certain processes and
configurations, which establish the questionabilty of man (so often discussed in the texts of
political anthropologists) as an object of philosophical knowledge in the first place. In the
following I should like to develop the way of looking at this problem not by the exegesis of
texts, but by means of Scheffners Halfmoon Files, because the film reveals philosophical
determinations of human nature as an effect of a many branched networks
anthropological generation of knowledge. Halfmoon Files does not only exemplarily
demonstrate the complicated relationship between anthropological articulabilities and
visibilities in the political situation of the First World War. The documentation work of the film

is inseparably linked to a specific artistic intervention in the complex apparatus of

anthropological knowledge building which thereby has its eventfulness and ghostly
presence restored to it.

Halfmoon Files is a film about stores (Lager) and storages (Lagerungen), camps and
archives of bodies and days16 as Foucault says more precisely: a film which exhibits the
overlapping of different functions or dimensions of the camp (Lager). In Discipline and

Punishment Foucault writes: The camp was to the rather shameful art of surveillance what
the dark room was to the great science of optics. 17 This sentence, which appears
mysterious at first glance could be used as an introductory motto to Halfmoon Files,
because in the camp which this film with its peculiar medial means resurrects before the
eye of the observer, something is developed: what for Foucault had the status of an
illuminating comparison camp and darkroom defines in the case of the filmic store
the storing and ordering of historical as well as current optical, acoustic and textual
vestiges in the medium of film the main operative principle of the facility. On the one
hand, the film transports us to the time of the First World War and to the so-called

Halbmondlager (Halfmoon Camp) in Wnsdorf, a small site near Berlin, a camp in which
prisoners of war of non-European extraction, so-called colonial soldiers, were interned. On
the other hand, the film makes explicit with its title that it is in no way satisfied with showing
the viewer life in a very particular prisoner of war camp and inviting him to view this
locality. Scheffner did not arbitrarily delete camp from the title of his film and replaced it
with files records, documents, data because access to the space of the camp is
possible only via another space, namely that of the archive in which the transmitted
media, in particular the acoustic vestiges of its former existence, are stored.
But Halfmoon Files does not only expose the mode of indirectness of every possible
experience of the former camp life by complementing the place and the remnants of
buildings of the former camp with the archive rooms in which on thousands of sound
storage devices acoustic vestiges of this life are to be found, or on the glass slides
hundreds of photographs of the camp inmates can be seen. Scheffners film is field
research in the sense that he makes a whole network of knowledge traces visible, into
which the camp and its inmates entered: anthropologists such as Egon von Eickstedt
took comprehensive body measurements of 76 Sikhs in order to confirm through the use
of the garnered data, which were then related to each other by elaborate mathematical
models the phantasm of an homogeneous ethnicity in the context of an ethnological
dissertation without success, as the commentary succinctly attests (ill. 1 and 2).

What makes the film a piece of art and

pushes it over the boundary of merely being
a documentary is best characterised by
means of a concept which Gilles Deleuze
and Flix Guattari formed in the last book
which they wrote collaboratively: bloc of
percept. What an artist produces has
nothing to do with remembrance or memory
Ill. 1: The dissertation of Egon v. Eickstedt

or expressive will. The work of the artist is far

more to extract a bloc of sensations, a pure
being of sensations.18 By means of the
material and not by the help of artistic
intentions or ideas something is wrested
from an object or a field of facts: the thus
ensuing

percept

is

differentiated

by

Deleuze/Guattari from usual perceptions,

Ill. 2: From the appendix to Egon v. Eickstedt's which belong to an empirical subject or
dissertation

which refer to an object. When the director

right at the beginning of the film had to make clear to the Indian embassy official, whose
permission he had to gain before being allowed to film in India, that he planned a ghost
story, then the persistency of ghosts and the ghostly in the film, which seems not to fit the
indexical data of the phonographic voices and photographic pictures he uses, stands for
the search for complexes or blocs of percepts, which do not refer to any empirical state or
at least cannot be reduced purely to this reference. The blocs of sensations or percepts
are beings whose validity lies in themselves and exceeds any lived. They could be said to
exist in the absence of man, as he is caught in stone, on the canvas, or by words, is himself
a compound of percepts and affects.19
The question of the beings or the ghosts which dwell in the archives is not approached
from outside by the film, it is given by one of the recorded voices from the camp, which
holds out an answer to this question. As the film shows, this answer can be given in many
different ways, namely genealogical-documentary on the one hand, literarily on the
other20:

What is a ghost? How does he live?

How many types of ghost exist?
How does someone become a ghost?
This is what I will tell you.
Actors have their own elaborate and fully reflexive meta-language. 21 In the language of
legends this passage formulates nothing more than the epistemic questioning of the
actor-network theory, whose peculiarity arises from the fact that it does not make its
enquiry based on previous knowledge of the relevant elements of a social setting, but
takes indeterminacy as its starting point: When we act, who else is acting? 22 Thus
Latour very unbiasedly names his endeavour an enquiry into practical metaphysics. 23
How many types of ghosts are there? How many types of agents are there? The worst sin
that sociologists commit in their enquiries is to cling to the most limited list of agencies,
ceaselessly translating the indefinite production of actors into their short one. 24 The
beings or ghosts are not what the film layers as a fictionalising element over the
documentalising trace. They arise much more from the heart of a medial murk, which rules
in the archive rooms25 and is conjured through the voice of the archivist: I'm alone in this
room most of the time. I don't have any colleagues []. Indeed it is such that with 7500
shellac records in the background one is never really quite alone.
For the historian, there is nothing unusual about the consultation of archive material. His
work refers him inevitably to the study of data and sources which are stored in one archive
or another. The historian is however concerned with situating the archive on the border of
the historical effectivity of his subject: by its archiving an historical subject relinquishes its
place on the stage of history. Files are deposited in archives when they have their active
time behind them files, acta, are by their name agents par excellence. Halfmoon Files
shifts the position of the archive in relation to its subject in two ways: the medial operations
of storage and preservation of data do not occur only after the camp is disbanded. The

Halbmondlager proves itself not only as a place in which bodies of prisoners of war are
stored for a certain period of time and are exploited for political and economical
objectives, but also simultaneously as a space for medial concentration and generation of
knowledge, whose objects are the internees. The will to power, which is exemplarily
expressed in conditions of war as the sovereign decision over life and death, binds itself in
the Halbmondlager to a will to knowledge. The second way in which the film shifts the
position of the archive to its subject exists in a genuine filmic strategy of recording and

assembling medial vestiges of the camp, which cannot be analysed as simply as the
prevalent format of history-TV, but rather constitutes an archive within the film itself.

Halfmoon Files in fact runs an archive fever, in the way which Jacques Derrida
described as the technical structure of the archiving archive, archiving that produces
as much as it records the event.26 The film does not simply show content that is stored
elsewhere, but is itself involved in the production of files about a place which by its
structure is a place of anthropological data acquisition and storage: archive about

archive.
What

exactly

is

the

story

of

the

Halbmondlager? The camp was set up

especially for the reception of mostly Muslim
prisoners, many of them came from India or
north Africa and who had before fought on
the British and French side as so-called
colonial soldiers. The Muslims in the colonies
and the dependencies were obliged, in
accordance with the brotherhood in arms
Ill. 3: Scene from Halfmoon Files

of the German and Ottoman empires, to

lead the holy war in the form of revolts and other acts of defiance against the British,
French and Russian oppressors; in their armies, however, into which they were conscripted
to bear arms, they would have had to refuse the struggle against their brothers in faith in
the Austrian and Ottoman ranks and finally defect to the side of the Central Powers in
order to help the cause of Islam to victory. 27 The hope was that the Muslim prisoners of
war could be won over to the side of the German empire by way of courteous and
considerate treatment, in order to motivate them after their release to attack the colonial
rulers, who were also Germanys enemies in war 28 (ill. 3). When this jihad strategy did not
bear fruit for the German empire and its imperial Supreme Army Command 29, the military
lost interest in the prisoners and left the field to language researchers, ethnologists and
anthropologists who from then on were in and out of the camp. The internees there
offered them the rare opportunity to treat the exotic people as human objects of
research at close quarters, without having to go to their indigenous countries. The film
quotes Felix von Luschan, director of the Berlin ethnological museum with the sentence:
In our prisoner camps, all kinds of races are represented, from all corners of the globe and of all
colours. A visit to one of these camps is for the expert almost as profitable as a trip around the
8

world.

The anthropological field research becomes camp research. The prisoners in the camp
were pernicketely photographed, their bodies measured but above all they were made
to speak, and the resulting discourse was recorded with special phonographic recording
technology and then archived with meticulous precision.

3. Command to speak and linguistic data collection

The transformation from prisoners of war into epistemic objects did not just concentrate on
the bodies of inmates as in the case of Egon von Eickstedt's anthropometries but also
on a capacity which since the famous Aristotelian definition has been regarded as one, if
not the defining feature of man: his ability to speak. In addition to the anthropologists,
linguists were also interested in the camp and its inhabitants. The human, as it is called, is a
being which has language or logos. Of course it is true to say of language that it comes
from humans, and yet simultaneously the question arises: where does it go? As much as
we would like to understand speech as inclusive to the human being, and, since Rousseau
and Herder, as the medium of revealing or expressing inner (mental, affective) state,
there can also be no doubt that it is also bound up in a space of outwardness, a neutral
space, in which language does not enter in its alleged essence, but rather gets as far
away from itself as possible.30 The most diverse medial functions are ready to detach the
spoken words from man, as soon as they are faded away, and to store them more or less
permanently or to send them to far away places by means of cunning transport
techniques or postal operations. Not least of all because of developments in media and
knowledge history in the 19th century, philosophical anthropologies of the 20 th century
were completely lacking trust in the certainty with which classical philosophy classified
man in terms of his speech capability and once and for all set against the animal (as well
as the machine later on). With regard to the classification of humans in these
anthropologies, one can speak of a strategic segmentation of the anthropos31 strategic
because by then no attribute that has been drawn upon in the history of anthropological
definition still enjoys the trust of philosophers. That is why they make a virtue out of
adversity, and out of lacking trust in the traditional concepts end up developing concepts
empty of meaning, whose distinctive power is even more intensive, the more undefined
their content turns out to be: the human being as productive point in the emergence of

a culture32, as an open question33, as unfathomable34, as a point of creative

breakthrough35 and lastly and unavoidably as power 36, these are all concepts with
which Plessner plies. They all tend to put man, once he is cleared from metaphysical
assumptions, under the control of a sovereign power which was formerly the power of
kings, which is now meant to be vested in man and to which he is also subjugated. The
philosophically grounded insight into the undefined of the human makes it necessary to
put man at the mercy of politics, that define, depending on the historical situation, what
man should be and how he is to lead himself. For this philosophy, politics are a means of
fixing man's nature (Feststellung des Menschen)37 a fixing that cannot be made once
and for all and as such must remain incomplete and a risk by which man as power in
the struggle for this definition [stands] necessarily in the opposition of familiarity and
strangeness, of friend and enemy 38, as Plessner puts it systematically and symptomatically
taking up Carl Schmitts Concept of the Political. Plessners human is a figure of
masterfulness (Bemeisterung), of achievement, of the risk taking leap, of leading himself
a figure who can only experience the unfamiliar-uncanny, threatening and
unfathomable to wrest its sphere of ownness from it. Indeed, for Plessner, the experience
of spectrality exists, as experience of the limits of mastery. Yet this spectral is only the not

yet mastered uncanny which is waiting for being mastered by man.

In order to estimate the extent to which the film is successful in transposing the acoustic
vestiges of the camp into a spectral afterlife which through its inclusion in entirely
different assemblages opposes its original function as the building up of the first sound
library in the world (Wilhelm Doegen), it is necessary to scrutinise the meticulous way in
which the film reconstructs the transformation of the camp into a site of language and
knowledge production. As prisoners of war, by law the internees of the camp have little
or no command over their lives and are therefore in a very concrete way put into a multifaceted space of outwardness. In the case of speech recordings the photo overleaf (ill. 4)
provides information about the place (a camp barrack) as well as the network of the
different places, which had to be taken by individuals involved in the project in order that
the carefully planned speech event could take place. The voice recordings took place
under the leadership of Wilhelm Doegen, the business-leading secretary of the Royal
Prussian Phonographic Commission (founded in 1915) and later leader of the Berlin sound
archive, of whom no less than the Kaiser himself said it was your excellent idea to suggest
making these recordings in the prisoner of war camps. We will be victorious and then we
will have all the wretches on record for millennia.

10

The voice recordings followed a very strict protocol, which comprised of the following
elements:

Agreement about a text to be read

aloud.

Production of a text paper to be

presented to the proband to read
aloud.

The installation of the phonographic

equipment

together

with

technician to supervise it.

The guarantee of readability through

the exact fixing of the position of the
text paper between the speaker's
face and the phonographic funnel.

Supervision of the recording process

by

one

of

the

scientists,

and

registering of omissions or reading

mistakes.

The

guarantee

of

the

technical

quality of the recording by ensuring

the same distance between the
prisoner

and

the

phonographic

funnel.

Production of a data sheet after the

recording, which due to technical
difficulties could not be corrected:
The data sheet keeps record of all

Ill. 4: The speech recording apparatus

unforeseen

deviations

of

the

recording from the text.

There is no question that the prisoner who is in this way part of a speech apparatus,
which is an arrangement comprised of technical and apparative, normative and personal
elements, which enforces a speech that meets a precise scientific standard does not

11

confront the speech which is extorted from him as his own speech. The linguistic work of
the data collection carried out on prisoners of war proves that the language which is
collected in this way and which is amenable to grammatical description and appraisal of
its phonetic quality (ill. 5), originates from a command to speak and from the
(temporary) institutional arrangement that enables it: Language is not life; it gives life
orders.39
One recognises this in Halfmoon Files in the
explicit interdiction of using the opportunity
of being able to speak to tell a personal
story or to share a spontaneous train of
thought. The prisoner does not speak, he
verbalises a script. In many cases that what is
prewritten or simple: the prescript remains
under the threshold of text, namely when
Ill. 5: Expert assessment of the voice test

standardised lists of words or letters are to be

verbalised, or it remains purely under the threshold of speech when the speaker had only
to reproduce rows of numbers. If the text were to supersede this level of paradigmatising
speech, then it was preferably limited to ritualised discourse: fairytales and religious texts
that should preserve the recordings from the break-in of everyday speech events, or in
the terminology of those making the recordings from unforeseen statements, or, again
in another terminology, from parapraxises. Nevertheless the confidence in these control
and selection measures of pre-written discourses is fallacious. The filmic commentary
registers this ambivalence of linguistic control-power: The scientists are not interested in
personal stories of their objects of enquiry, but they rely on stories that are told to them.
In the apparatus of speech recordings different constraints of what is allowed to be said
are combined with procedures to choose the speaking subject and to position it: the
interdiction to say things that are not pre-written is at the beginning of the procedure,
which is at the same time driven by an epistemic will to truth, as conveyed in the
extreme standardisation of the speech process. A text to be read aloud is agreed upon
and written up. The strictly normalised operation of collecting the scientific data is
naturally prone to disturbances of all kinds which were to be eliminated as they
endangered the scientific comparability of the samples or created additional work, as it
is laconically labelled in the film. The danger that event or contingency would occur in the
discourse was reduced through monitoring procedures and restriction of the discourse

12

its reduction to a pre-determined set of sentences as well as by the choice of probands,

who by process of inquiry were guaranteed as coming from homogenous language
groups but even for this classification one was dependent on the information of the
chosen prisoners. Unforeseen statements were to be avoided at all costs during the
recording, because they were not erasable due to the technology and therefore had to
be marked with increased effort as textual observations written after the recording on
data sheets and then regarded as excluded from the recordings. Under the rubric of
extra observations, such unforeseen statements were noted down on the data sheet
which was created after the recording (ill. 6). Wilhelm Doegen maintains in a handwritten
note signed by him that a proband of his own accord, without prompting, cried Guten
Abend at the end of the recording. Another recording met a more complex discursive
insubordination. The speaker, Chote Singh, countered the sentence the German Kaiser
looks after me very well with three laughs. It follows the greeting he repeated three times
and gets its event character by breaking through the rules about the text to be spoken
and by its nature as a repeated act cannot be trivialised as background noise or a
mistake: here, in and through laughter the speaker rises to speak.
The joke of the statement about the Kaiser
who cares is due to a double transmission.
On the one hand, the subject marks his
distance from the object or meaning of the
statement by laughing: the Kaiser, the
possessor of sovereign power, is supposed to
care about me, who has never been part of
Ill. 6: Unforeseen statements

the German people? That deserves not one

but three laughs. At the same time, the comedy of this sequence arises from a kind of
representational effect. Representational of his own subjects who he as the Supreme
Commander impassively sent millionfold to death on the battlefield, a sentence is
laughed at which expresses the expectations of the Kaisers own people and is of all
things confirmed by a prisoner of war, who, to use Plessners words, has come into the
familiar sphere from the unfamiliar outland. 40 The sovereignty that manifests itself in the
laughter and the other affect phrases is exactly that of the joke which already Freud
attested to as having an aggressive and political tendency. This tendency finds its
expression in the process of degradation or debasement of what, being the sublime,
requires an additional expenditure of mental energy to be recognized. 41 The speaking

13

prisoners refuse this additional expenditure when they break into laughter or produce
other unforeseen statements. Of all people, those who were completely shut in the
outwardness of a space which excluded them not just physically but also enclosed their
language, of all people, those prisoners of the Great War prove themselves as beings
taking distance from something42 insofar as they do not conform completely to the
arrangement of speech. Their direct speech, which is merely a detached fragment of a
mass order to speak , is made to sound like a murmur again43.

4. Ghost Story
In Halfmoon Files, we see how a director makes a film which takes the place of a film he
really wanted to film in India. The director in the film (played by the director of the film)
never managed to get to India, despite all efforts. He wanted to pursue the last traces of
Mall Singh, an Indian colonial soldier who was interned at the Halbmondlager. Although
the planned film did not come to fruition, it is true to say that the film that took its place is
in large measure (on account of its medial basis) a ghost story, simply because records
present the voices of the dead as if they were living.
What turns the film into a ghost story is precisely its principle of opening the voice archive
not to exploit its documentary richness, but to let the voices appear in their original
monumentality. Halfmoon Files is a film about an assemblage also because it does not
exclude its own speech and shot positions (the operations through which the spaces,
processes and statements are made accessible to the observer and listener) from the film,
but arranges the material on the same level at which it shows it. An assemblage is by no
means the famous historical context which allots a place to each document, but instead
that which includes, in addition to the past arrangements of the military and of scientists,
also the present filmic operations which are performed on pictures, non pictorial material,
as well as on audio and other noises. Thereby an albeit changed agency is restored to
its already historical components, since the assemblage brings all kinds of dead and
living voices and the technical media and channels of communication used by them
together, which only the film in its multisensory complexity allows.
The different data or files that the film collects, assembles and commentates: the sound,
video and pictorial files and the discourses (epistemic and above all anthropological and
anthropometric) which are attached to these documents as well as their capacity for use
as propaganda testify to the potency of a life that was transposed from the juridically

14

exceptional structure of the camp to the medial space of knowledge and then, 90 years
later, into the still different space of film. Due to the specific arrangement of the film, the
data collected in the camp regain another dimension of discourse which one could call
its dramatic or theatrical dimension that Foucault talks of 44 as it is tangible in the style of
recitation which is distinctive of the voice recordings 45 and which lends them an
emphasised solemn quality (against the backdrop of the pictorial or non-pictorial
material with which they are assembled). The filmic opening of the files develops a
spectral effect also as it sets a conjuring of the dead against the vitalistic reference to a
basis of life in the philosophical anthropologies. This necromancy awakens the
phonographic, photographic and filmic remains to life not in an historicist manner, but
through continual confrontation with the present places of the earlier incidents. These
places do not randomly take the form of landscapes in the film. Deleuze/Guattari define
the sensation or the percept also as the landscape before man, in the absence of
man.46 They are reminiscent in this context of Cezanne's enigma, which has often been
commented upon: Man absent from but entirely within the landscape. 47 Scheffner builds
his film in the sense of this enigma around the absence of the former prisoners of war,
which, though this absence in the physical sense is definite, can still be turned into a
meta-physical or media supported presence. The voice recordings literally enter a
landscape, whose contours are hardly perceptible, because with it, just as the people
whose voices we hear, it is not about its empirical recognition (ill. 7).
The artistry of building the ensuing film as the
product of the failing of another originally
planned film, also inscribes the problem of
the percept into the filmic diegesis: in the
film, the director stubbornly tries to obtain
information about Mall Singhs place of
origin in India, or more precisely modern-day
Ill. 7: Man within the landscape

Pakistan; the film which then forms from this

proves Cezannes sentence true, that the person one looks for should be absent where
he is expected or where he is at home. Instead, his voice enters the landscape of the
former Wnsdorf camp and becomes a part of the filmic bloc of percepts.

15

5. Recording the Kaisers Voice and Philosophical Afterlife

Halfmoon Files does not merely set itself at that pole of power relations which one could
call the least body of the condemned man 48, or of the prisoner. The film draws relevant
esprit out of the presentation of documentary material which demonstrates one, if not the
last, key situation of the exercise of imperial power. This key situation proves itself to be on
closer inspection the effect of a media-technical afterwardness. The Kaiser himself
became an element of the already described procedure, which was trialled on the
prisoners of the Halbmondlager. On the 16th August 1914 Kaiser Wilhelm II gave a speech
from the balcony of the Berlin City Palace, in which he called the German people to
arms. Transcripts of this speech remain (ill. 8), and there is a photograph of the event (ill.
9) in which the Kaiser can be seen, and how he shows the crowd the way with his raised
left hand and establishes the horizon line which marks the familiar sphere from the
unfamiliar outland.49 In short: it separates friends from foes. There are no further pictures
of the Kaisers war speech, neither can one recognise recording equipment in the
photograph that shows the Kaiser speaking. Strangely there nevertheless exists a recorded
sound document of this historic speech, which throws up the question of when and under
what circumstances it was recorded.

Ill. 8: The text of the Kaiser's speech.

Ill. 9: On the balcony of the Berlin City Palace

Without doubt the Kaisers speech was recorded under very different circumstances from
that of the 1650 voice recordings of the Wnsdorf Halbmondlager. And yet in the case of
recording the Kaiser's voice the same elements and operations make up the apparatus
that is required for the production of the recording: the person leading the recording, Prof.
16

Doegen, the Kaiser, a technician, the cue, the rotating turntable, the funnel which was to
be spoken into, the text to be read aloud, the process of reading aloud and lastly the
meticulous control and regulation of the distance between the speaking Kaiser and the
phonographic funnel, which in respect of the symbolic position of the speaker could only
be controlled with a light touch of the Kaisers back. The addressee of the speech is the
German people, its contents is best described in Plessners words as the transformation of
a situation (until now we have borne all open and private acrimonies) into a mythically
bedecked situation, in which decisions are demanded from people, in this case: the
decision par excellence, namely the one of the sword that is to say over life and death
that the Kaiser makes as possessor of ius belli and as representative of the people.
The production of a belief in a world of enemies (put differently: the refusal to firmly
locate the enemy in the context of the speech), in a world of not merely open enmity but
of secret one, in short: the totalisation and virtualisation of enmity is an operation which will
translate itself into the discourse of a decidedly political anthropology, when its author
declares the friend-enemy dichotomy to be an essential condition of man and
entrenches it, referring to Carl Schmitt and Sigmund Freud, in the uncanny of the
stranger and in the constraint of disassociation, that is to say of taking distance. Seen
from this angle, the political anthropology of Plessner and the speech to the German
people are part of the same discursive space. Plessners theory is, in ANT jargon, the
product of a philosophical translation of political specifications: it stabilises a discourse
beyond the historical moment which brought about its downfall as a state political
speech. Not only do the moment of its foundation but also the conditions of its

repeatability belong to the space of discourse. The rule of materiality that statements
necessarily obey is therefore of the order of the institution rather than of the spatiotemporal localization.50 This insight of Foucaults is adopted by the ANT, where it sees its
mission as following the process that solves the problem of extending some standard
everywhere locally through the circulation of some traceable document. 51 Already the
Kaiser, not only the philosophical anthropologists, puts the repeatability of his speech to
the test. The rule of materiality of a discourse defines possibilities of re-inscription and

transcription and not merely limited and perishable individualities.52 The life of
statements, put in other words, is indistinguishable from their afterlife, which they owe not
to themselves but to places or institutions, which give them a definite authority and
simultaneously define positions from which they can be repeated again and again. What
Wilhelm II said as Kaiser of Germany must not, as with the fall of the institutions of the

17

monarchy, fall victim to oblivion or be given over to the memory of the historian. Other
institutions can elaborate on the theme of the speech and ascribe a new truth value to
it, which will now be taken care of by philosophy and academia, which reinscribe and
transcribe these statements and finally hold them ready for their pragmatic reactivation.
Scheffner inserts a sound document from the archive into the film that allows us to listen to
the Kaiser trying to find the right tone of voice for a speech that had been held long ago
and the effects of which seemed to be linked to the time and place of its inaugural
performance. Therefore the film sequence operates also in medial respect on the level of
the archive material: when we see the photograph, we cannot hear the Kaiser, when we
hear the Kaiser, there is nothing to see a nothing that in the medium of film takes the
form of lingering shots of blackness, onto which quotations from another archive, the
memoirs of the leader of the recordings, Prof. Doegen, about the Kaiser's voice exercises
are projected. The Kaiser repeats again and again what he said before:
So must the sword decide! In the middle of peace, the foe assails us. Now to arms! Every
hesitation, every falter would be treason to the fatherland! It is about the existence or nonexistence of our empire [] about existence or non existence of German might and German
nature.

Already the repetition of the speech for purposes of its technical recording at Bellevue
palace contributes to ascribe a value to it that supersedes its documentary function and
which others, such as philosophers, could take up later. The Kaiser was, in any case, as
Prof. Doegen remembers, full of enthusiasm for what he heard after the playback of the
test recording and is supposed to have cried: Now things become more serious.
Doegens commentary about his description of the effect of the reconstructed Kaisers
speech on the Kaiser himself is decisive as here from the place of a scientist a confirmation
of the phantasmatic effect of historical afterwardness took place: Only today I can
appreciate that I have experienced an historic moment. The time of the recording of the
speech and the event to which it refers and of which it was a part melt together in the
concept of the historic moment.
In contrast to the ability of the prisoners to deviate from the text set in front of them by
means of wit, the listeners at Bellevue palace were witnesses to an extreme identification
in the case of the Kaisers reverbalising of his speech: the Kaiser and the conductor of the
recording experience the pre-written as the truth of this event and slide over the
apparatus-like structure as a condition of possibility of this afterwardness effect. The truth
18

of this event also inscribes itself into a political anthropology that considers the so-called
exposure of man in light of the Kaisers paradigm of German exposure to a world of the
enemies. The Kaiser's spectres are not just his former prisoners of war, whose archived
voice recordings are eerily brought to new life from shellac records played back nearly 90
years after they were recorded and thereby confirm the banal, media-historical fact that
since Edisons invention the dead can speak. The Kaisers spectres also appear where
they are least expected: in the heart of academia and philosophy of man, in
anthropologies, that long ago had abjured the existence of spectres and dedicated
themselves to the gathering of human facts through strictly regulated procedures.

Translated by Andrew Miles

Picture Credits:
Ill. 1-7 and 9: Stills from Philip Scheffner's film The Halfmoon Files (2007).

19

This essay was first published under the title: Rete mirabile. Die Zirkulation der Stimmen in
Philip Scheffners Halfmoon Files. In: Sprache und Literatur, 2009, Vol. 40, 2nd half-year.
Copyright by Friedrich Balke.

New York Magazine of Contemporary Art and Theory in collaboration with Alwin Franke
would like to thank Friedrich Balke and Andrew Miles
Jan Van Woensel (founder, curator & editor-in-chief), Alwin Franke (editor)
www.ny-magazine.org, editor@ny-magazine.org

20

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Bruno Latour: Reassembling the Social. New York 2005. P. 141f.

Max Weber: Economy and Society. Los Angeles/London 1978. P. 4.
Which does not mean, as he adds in the next sentence, that the thing is refractory to all
modification. Emile Durkheim: The rules of sociological method. New York1958. P. 28f.
Bruno Latour 2005. P. 16f.
Cf. Georg Simmel: Das Gebiet der Soziologie. In: id.: Schriften zur Soziologie. Eine Auswahl.
Frankfurt/Main 1983. Translation: A. M.
Bruno Latour 2005. P. 43.
Erhard Schttpelz: Ein absoluter Begriff. Zur Genealogie und Karriere des Netzwerkkonzepts. In:
Stefan Kaufmann (ed.): Vernetzte Steuerung. Soziale Prozesse im Zeitalter technischer
Netzwerke. Zrich 2007. Translation: A. M.
Bruno Latour 2005. P. 119.
Bruno Latour 2005. P. 5.
John Law: Introduction: monsters, machines and sociotechnical relations. In: id.: A Sociology
of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology and Domination . London/New York 1991.
The text employs the polysemy of the German word Lager meaning both camp and store
and which is not reproducible in English. Translator's note.
Bruno Latour 2005. P. 229.
Giorgio Agamben: Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford 1998. P. 119.
Giorgio Agamben 1998. P. 131.
Helmuth Plessner: Macht und menschliche Natur. Ein Versuch zur Anthropologie der
geschichtlichen Weltansicht. In: id.: Macht und menschliche Natur. Gesammelte Schriften V .
Frankfurt/Main 2002. Translation: A. M.
Michel Foucault: Discipline and Punishment. New York 1991. P. 189.
Michel Foucault 1991. P. 172.
Gilles Deleuze/Flix Guattari: What is philosophy? London/New York 1994.
Gilles Deleuze/Flix Guattari 1994.
For a genealogist, Nietzsche writes, grey is a hundred times more potent than blue. Grey, by
what he means authentic facts capable of definite proof and having actually existed.
(Friedrich Nietzsche: Genealogy of Morality. New York 2007. P. 6).
In its documentalising dimension the film obviously moves in the grey, but this grey, as one could
expose in the filmic colour scheme, also affects the fabulation: where nothing is to be shown,
where no picture corresponds to a sound, the film even employs black images in order to
document the point zero of documentalising. For the rest, grey colours are dominant for
instance in the scenes in which the camera shows the places where the camp was located
through a veil of mist.
Bruno Latour 2005. P. 30.
Bruno Latour 2005. P. 43.
Bruno Latour 2005. P. 50.
Bruno Latour 2005. P. 51.
In the film, the archive with the voice records of the internees is meticulously described by the
voiceover, yet the description remains incomplete. The room is 12 meters long and 4 meters
broad. There are 20 metal cabinets on the right, each with 4 drawers. Each drawer is 40 by 36 by
62 centimetres in dimension. Each drawer contains 11 boxes of equal size...
Jacques Derrida: Archive Fever. A Freudian Impression. Chicago 1996.
Gerhard Hpp: Muslime in der Mark. Als Kriegsgefangene und Internierte in Wnsdorf und
Zossen, 1914-1924. Berlin 1997. Translation: A. M.
See also the memorandum of Max von Oppenheim who was the director of the NfO (the
information office for the Orient, founded in 1914) which was subordinated to the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs: Memorandum concerning the revolutionisation of our enemies' Islamic
territories from October 1914, in which the jihad strategy was comprehensively developed.
Through a range of measures one wanted to win the Islamic prisoners' political favour: One
wanted to build a small mosque in the camp, the inmates should be provided with an Imam
and ritual slaughter should be made possible. Through the employment of interpreters an
influence on the prisoners should be guaranteed and their association and the development
of their convictions should be observed. In the result, one hoped that a few particularly
qualified prisoners would consent either to go to the struggling front and/or to convince
their comrades to go over to our side . P. 37. Translation: A. M.
Concerning the reasons for the failure of this strategy, see: Gerhard Hpp 1997. P. 85 et seq.

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Michel Foucault: The Thought of the Outside. In: id.: Aesthetics, method and epistemology.
New York 1998. P. 149.
Following Giorgio Agamben: The open: man and animal. Stanford 2004. P. 13.
Helmuth Plessner 2002. P. 149. Translation: A. M.
Helmuth Plessner 2002. P. 181.
Helmuth Plessner 2002. P. 161.
Helmuth Plessner 2002. P. 160.
Helmuth Plessner 2002. P. 185.
The expression Feststellung des Menschen (fixing of man's nature) refers to Nietzsche who
defined man as the animal whose nature has not yet been fixed. In German: der Mensch [ist]
das noch nicht festgestellte Thier. (Friedrich Nietzsche: Beyond Good and Evil. Prelude to a
Philosophy of the Future. London 1973. Translation: R. J. Hollingdale. Aphorism 62, P. 69).
Translator's note.
Helmuth Plessner 2002. P. 191.
Gilles Deleuze/Flix Guattari: A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia . New York 2004.
P. 84.
Helmuth Plessner 2002. P. 192.
Cf. Sigmund Freud: Jokes and their relation to the unconscious. In: The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Freud. Volume VIII. London 1959. P. 209f.
Helmuth Plessner 2002. P. 231.
Gilles Deleuze/Flix Guattari 2004.
Michel Foucault: The Scene of Philosophy. Published in this Issue.
Even if presumably this impression is only due to the camp linguist's guideline that required the
speaker to speak loud and clearly for the recordings.
Gilles Deleuze/Flix Guattari 1994. P. 169.
Gilles Deleuze/Flix Guattari 1994. P. 169.
Michel Foucault 1991. P. 29.
Helmuth Plessner 2002. P. 192.
Michel Foucault: Archaeology of Knowledge. London/New York 2002. P. 116.
Bruno Latour 2005. P. 230.
Michel Foucault: Archaeology of Knowledge. P. 116.