get on the good foot

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James Brown

This is the first draft of my con­tri­bu­tion to the vol­ume Plu­ral­iz­ing Rhythm that I am cur­rently edit­ing with Bir­gitte Stougaard. All com­ments and sug­ges­tions are wel­come! In this text I analyse James Brown’s con­cept of ‘The One’ (or down­beat) into pop­u­lar music as a rev­o­lu­tion. “Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag” — the song in which ‘The One’ was intro­duced — is not a rev­o­lu­tion because it made any major alter­ations. On the con­trary, it sim­ply per­formed a minus­cule shift. A change that can­not be seen, touched, smelled, or heard but is real nonetheless.

(don’t) listen to the one

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Szendy 5

A pre­sen­ta­tion that I gave at Utrecht Uni­ver­sity on the 6th of Novem­ber 2009 for Journée Szendy (a small con­fer­ence ded­i­cated to the works of musicologist/​philosopher Peter Szendy) orga­nized by Sander van Maas.

philosophy or your life

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heidegger-2

When one of his stu­dents dared to ask Mar­tin Hei­deg­ger if he could tell him some­thing about the life of Aris­to­tle, Hei­deg­ger mock­ingly answered: ”Aris­to­tle was born, he worked, he died.” This denial to acknowl­edge the rel­e­vance of biog­ra­phy for phi­los­o­phy is ironic to say the least. There are hardly any philoso­phers whose works were as notice­ably influ­enced by per­sonal events as his own. More­over, this rejec­tion of biog­ra­phy is incon­sis­tent with other aspects of his philosophy.

a rather fortunate accident

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Gaye

Iron­i­cally, the results of mis­takes often end up to be far more inter­est­ing than those of hard work. Mar­vin Gaye’s 1970 hit “What’s Going On” serves as one of those mirac­u­lous exam­ples of serendip­ity. Dur­ing the record­ing ses­sions a rather for­tu­nate acci­dent occurred. The singer had recorded two alter­nate takes of the lead-​vocals that were one octave apart. When the artist asked the sound engi­neer on duty, Ken Sands, to play these two tracks for him, the tech­ni­cian unwit­tingly played them simul­ta­ne­ously in mono. The unin­tended result was a duet between the singer and himself

a typology of iterations

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quotes-185x185

The cri­tique of lin­guis­tic pres­ence that Jacques Der­rida devel­ops in “Sig­na­ture Event Con­text” (1971) has become a com­mon place in con­tem­po­rary phi­los­o­phy and lit­er­ary the­ory. Often for­got­ten, how­ever – and not in the last place by the French philoso­pher him­self – is the fact that this essay does not just pro­claim the ‘death of meta­physics’ but also sug­gests a path for future philo­soph­i­cal research. “Sig­na­ture Event Con­text” ini­ti­ates a shift from signs and mean­ing them­selves to the acts, pro­ce­dures, and oper­a­tions that invoke them.

towards a new intellectual

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West - new

A paper on Cor­nel West’s “The Dilemma of the Black Intel­lec­tual” and Mar­vin Gaye’s Let’s Get It On that I pre­sented on the 25th of Octo­ber 2006 at Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity dur­ing the ACLA Annual Meet­ing: The Human and its Others.

about medial operations

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down-the-drain-1

How do media – old and new – shape and trans­form knowl­edge? The research-​in-​progress web­site, Medial Oper­a­tions, focuses on the com­plex tran­si­tions between noise, non-​sense, infor­ma­tion, and knowledge.

about ulysses lied

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img0082.jpg-JPEG-Image-600x378-pixels2-300x300

This sem­i­nar focuses on Kittler’s lat­est and per­haps most ambi­tious project, Musik und Math­e­matik. This work aims to present a cul­tural his­tory of the West­ern world in four vol­umes, start­ing in ancient Greece, then pass­ing through Rome, the mid­dle ages and up to the present com­put­er­ized age. In the Fall of 2009, alter­nat­ing between loca­tions at Utrecht Uni­ver­sity and the Uni­ver­sity of Ams­ter­dam, orga­niz­ers Sander van Maas en Jan Hein Hoogstad invite schol­ars from all dis­ci­pli­nary back­grounds to join in the reading.

down the drain

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down-the-drain-2-185x185

A pre­sen­ta­tion that I gave at the Ams­ter­dam School for Cul­tural Analy­sis on the 29th of April 2009 for the How To Do Cul­tural Analy­sis and Why (Not) lec­ture series orga­nized by Murat Aydemir.

new adventures in low-​fidelity

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amms__001507_0917-185x185

This essay makes a case for media-​epistemic plu­ral­ism, by stag­ing an encounter between Friedrich Kittler’s Gramo­phone, Film, Type­writer and Ralph Ellison’s auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal story ‘Liv­ing with Music’. It argues that a medium does not func­tion autonomously, but always forms a com­plex con­stel­la­tion with other media. This con­stel­la­tion takes shapes through the inter­ven­tions of the con­cep­tual per­sona of the engineer.