The mono­graph Time Tracks con­structs anachro­nis­tic and eclec­tic con­stel­la­tions of philo­soph­i­cal con­cepts, bio­graph­i­cal nar­ra­tives and pop­u­lar music. It stages unex­pected encoun­ters between Gilles Deleuze, Prince, Wal­ter Ben­jamin, Franz Kafka, Vilém Flusser, Mar­vin Gaye, Michel Fou­cault, Camille and Mar­shall McLuhan. What brings this wide range of philoso­phers, media the­o­rists, authors, and artists together is a shared con­cern; they all strug­gle with time.

In their respec­tive aca­d­e­mic, artis­tic and every­day prac­tices, all of these thinkers deploy cre­ative acts to deal with prob­lems of tem­po­ral­ity. In their quest to unravel, mas­ter, respect or mul­ti­ply the mys­ter­ies of time, they explore the inter­stices between arts, media and var­i­ous aca­d­e­mic dis­ci­plines. I will argue that these excur­sions have, either inten­tion­ally or acci­den­tally, led to new ways of con­cep­tu­al­iz­ing time. Case stud­ies that I develop in this study range from Gilles Deleuze’s ‘time-​image’ to grasp cinema’s unique mode of tem­po­ral­ity to Mar­vin Gaye’s exper­i­ments with multi-​track record­ing tech­nol­ogy to recover lost times.

Inspired by these non-​conventional approaches, Time Tracks exploits the poten­tial of an exper­i­men­tal lay­out to open up the philo­soph­i­cal prob­lem of time. The book jux­ta­poses the main argu­ment, set in the body of the page, with small, addi­tional texts in the mar­gins. This spa­tial sep­a­ra­tion enables con­ver­sa­tions between arts, media, and dis­ci­plines. Time Tracks thereby both the­o­ret­i­cally argues and visu­ally shows that philo­soph­i­cal prob­lems are not the pre­rog­a­tive of a cer­tain aca­d­e­mic prac­tice but trans­gress the bound­aries between the­ory, lit­er­a­ture, music, and life.

Syn­op­sis

Time Tracks starts from the media-​theoretical insight that phi­los­o­phy per­sis­tently omits a cru­cial fac­tor in its analy­ses, namely the mate­r­ial struc­ture of the texts that it con­sumes and pro­duces. This book com­pen­sates for this neg­li­gence by point­ing out that the tech­ni­cal medium has – and has had – a deci­sive impact on its con­tent. This argu­ment applies to the­o­ries on time in par­tic­u­lar. Since tem­po­ral­ity is never expe­ri­enced directly but always through a medium in the broad­est sense of the word – rang­ing from the sun dial and the human body to the com­puter – this con­cept can­not pos­si­bly be stud­ied sep­a­rately from that of mediality.

If there is no time with­out a medium and vice versa, then the con­tem­po­rary multi-​medial land­scape is inevitably also a multi-​temporal one. Time Tracks pro­poses a tem­po­ral plu­ral­ism. Its cen­tral the­sis holds that time should be con­ceived as a mul­ti­plic­ity. I intro­duce the con­cept of time track to des­ig­nate the indi­vid­ual tem­po­ral man­i­fes­ta­tions that make up this mul­ti­plic­ity. I will argue that there is no sin­gle con­cept of time that is eter­nally and uni­ver­sally valid, but mul­ti­ple time tracks that main­tain a com­plex rec­i­p­ro­cal rela­tion to the medium in which they are expressed. Each medial expres­sion is inex­tri­ca­bly linked to a unique con­stel­la­tion of time tracks. Prob­lems of tem­po­ral­ity can there­fore not be solved if one stays within the strait­jacket of tex­tu­al­ity; they demand an active explo­ration of the expres­sive modal­i­ties of dif­fer­ent media.

Time Tracks is a medi­a­tor of time as much as it is a med­i­ta­tion on time. The book both pro­poses and per­forms an exper­i­men­tal use of tech­ni­cal media in phi­los­o­phy. In an attempt to erode the lin­ear­ity of the text, the­o­ret­i­cal, lit­er­ary, musi­cal, and bio­graph­i­cal excur­sions appear in the mar­gins of the page. The the­o­ret­i­cal func­tion of these side texts con­stantly shifts through­out the dis­ser­ta­tion. Their func­tion depends on the con­cep­tual and medial con­text in which they appear. Some­times, they sup­port, com­ple­ment or crit­i­cize the main argu­ment. At oth­ers, they con­tain bio­graph­i­cal anec­dotes, fic­tional nar­ra­tives and other back­ground sto­ries. In all cases, how­ever, the excur­sions in the mar­gins inter­rupt the habit­ual atti­tude that the reader has devel­oped towards books of philosophy.