Chap­ter by chap­ter description

Intro­duc­tion: Life Time

This method­olog­i­cal part intro­duces the key terms of this study – time, media, tracks – in rela­tion to the con­cept of biog­ra­phy. Using bio­graph­i­cal data in phi­los­o­phy has become unfash­ion­able ever since Roland Barthes pro­claimed the death of the author (1968). By using Barthes’ cri­tique on the use of bio­graph­i­cal data in the­ory as a prob­lem rather than a solu­tion, an alter­na­tive, con­struc­tivist method to writ­ing life sto­ries will be devel­oped in this intro­duc­tory chapter.

Tem­po­ral plu­ral­ism is a pre­req­ui­site for this con­struc­tivist method. As long as time is under­stood as a sin­gle line of suc­ces­sive moments, bio­graph­i­cal data will always be regarded as insignif­i­cant to the­ory. The rea­son for this is sim­ple: the rela­tion between indi­vid­ual moments is always the same; chronol­ogy deter­mines the struc­ture of the biog­ra­phy. As soon as time is con­ceived as a mul­ti­plic­ity, how­ever, a plethora of new pos­si­bil­i­ties to relate bio­graph­i­cal events to each other emerges. Instead of recre­at­ing a chrono­log­i­cal suc­ces­sion, biogra­phies should be con­structed as inter­twined con­stel­la­tions of con­cepts, facts, fic­tion, and affects.

Obvi­ously, these con­structed con­stel­la­tions can­not rep­re­sent ‘real’ peo­ple. Instead, I will argue that the pro­tag­o­nists of this new kind of biogra­phies are so-​called ‘con­cep­tual per­sonae’ (Deleuze/​Guattari, 1992). I posit con­cep­tual per­sonae as fig­ures of rad­i­cal imma­nence that are beyond dichotomies such as text and world, fact and fic­tion, sub­ject and object, life and death. Most impor­tantly, con­cep­tual per­sonae are not nec­es­sar­ily restricted by the lim­its of the human body, and are there­fore an ideal method­olog­i­cal device to explore the realms of time.

I: Out of Time

The first chap­ter of Time Tracks dis­cusses the prob­lem of tex­tu­al­ity. It poses the ques­tion whether or not there is an out­side to the text that is acces­si­ble from within it. Here, Franz Kafka’s Let­ter to the Father is read as a failed but nonethe­less pro­duc­tive attempt to escape the con­fine­ments of the ‘Guten­berg Galaxy’ (McLuhan, 1962) and its inher­ent lin­ear tem­po­ral structure.

“Why do I main­tain that I am afraid of you?” is Kafka’s des­per­ate ques­tion to his father from his let­ter unfolds. The author tries to over­come his fear by play­ing dif­fer­ent roles through­out the text, such as the role of the pris­oner, the hus­band, the ani­mal, the lawyer. Each of these fig­ures explores a pos­si­ble strat­egy to escape from father’s rule. In the end, how­ever, none of the actors in ‘Kafka’s world the­atre’ (Wal­ter Ben­jamin, 1932) suc­ceed in mak­ing a rad­i­cal break with father.

‘Out of Time’ locates the rea­son for Kafka’s fail­ure in the ambi­gu­ity of lit­er­a­ture – even a minor one (Deleuze/​Guattari, 1975) – as an exit strat­egy. On the one hand, the act of writ­ing offers a kind of free­dom that is unat­tain­able in the out­side world. Fic­tion con­sti­tutes a pri­vate uni­verse in which the author con­trols the course of events. On the other hand, it is equally impor­tant to real­ize that these cre­ative pos­si­bil­i­ties of lit­er­a­ture are not bound­less. Although lit­er­a­ture often cul­ti­vates the illu­sion of absolute free­dom of expres­sion, fic­tion and espe­cially the medium in which it unrav­els (printed text) are bound by an array of limitations.

On the basis of a close read­ing of Kafka’s Let­ter to the Father, I con­clude that cer­tain ideas and the­o­ries can­not be cap­tured in writ­ing. I argue that one of the cru­cial, inher­ent lim­i­ta­tions of the pho­netic alpha­bet is its inabil­ity to express a plu­ral­ist con­cept of time. For that rea­son, the next two chap­ters – ‘Still Would Stand All TIme’ and ‘Keep­ing Track of Time’ – will be devoted to an explo­ration of the poten­tial of other media to express tem­po­ral pluralism.

II: Still Would Stand All Time

In the sec­ond chap­ter, I will argue for a more active use of the expres­sive modal­i­ties of non-​textual media in con­tem­po­rary phi­los­o­phy. A con­fronta­tion between the Guten­berg Galaxy and alter­na­tive medial epis­temes is staged in my analy­sis of Prince’s Sign ‘O’ the Times. Dur­ing the record­ing process of this album, the artist used a vocoder to divide his char­ac­ter in two sides. He manip­u­lated his own voice to cre­ate both a male and a andro­genic alter-​ego: Prince – not to be con­fused with the artist him­self – and Camille. “What’s this strange rela­tion­ship that we hold on?” The album inves­ti­gates the destruc­tive rela­tion between the two sides of his split personality.

‘Still Would Stand All Time’ argues that each of these two con­cep­tual per­sonae is linked to a par­tic­u­lar medial epis­teme. Prince is inex­tri­ca­ble from the Guten­berg Galaxy – or ‘uni­verse of alpha­bet­i­cal codes’ – and Camille from a ‘uni­verse of tech­ni­cal codes’ (Flusser, 2002). More­over, these two epis­temes are marked by a dif­fer­ent tem­po­ral struc­ture. The Guten­berg Galaxy cor­re­sponds to a lin­ear con­cept of time; the uni­verse of tech­ni­cal codes expresses a tem­po­ral pluralism.

Sign ‘O’ the Times reveals that there is a fun­da­men­tal inequal­ity between Prince’s uni­verse of alpha­bet­i­cal codes and Camille’s uni­verse of tech­ni­cal codes. Whereas the lat­ter can eas­ily incor­po­rate the texts, the reverse is impos­si­ble with­out reduc­ing its images, sounds, tex­tures and smells to alpha­bet­i­cal char­ac­ters. I will argue that this inad­e­quacy is, at least partly, caused by the lim­ited tem­po­ral struc­ture of printed texts.

The medial diver­sity of Camille’s uni­verse of tech­ni­cal codes, on the other hand, is its strength as well as its weak­ness, as it threat­ens the coher­ence and con­sis­tency of this epis­teme. ‘Still Would Stand All Time’ pro­poses the con­cept of rhythm that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guat­tari intro­duce (1980) as a solu­tion to this prob­lem. On Sign ‘O’ The Times, rhythm links, alters, and jux­ta­poses its het­ero­ge­neous ele­ments and per­sonae with­out reduc­ing these to either music or text. This poten­tial of rhythm, I will argue, can eas­ily be extended to other multi-​medial expres­sions and can func­tion as a con­cep­tual foun­da­tion for a plu­ral­ist account of time. (18.000 words)

III. Keep­ing Track of Time

The final chap­ter of this mono­graph con­sists of a par­al­lel analy­sis of a medial and a the­o­ret­i­cal object. It unrav­els the dif­fer­ent time tracks that are con­tained in Mar­vin Gaye’s auto-​fictional album Here, My Dear (1978) and Wal­ter Benjamin’s unfin­ished Arcades Project (1929−1940) and con­cludes that the for­mer per­forms a tem­po­ral plu­ral­ism for which the lat­ter gives a the­o­ret­i­cal foundation.

On Here, My Dear, Mar­vin Gaye uses his dra­matic divorce from Anna Gordy and its sub­se­quent spec­tac­u­lar set­tle­ment as a start­ing point to explore the prob­lems of tem­po­ral­ity. “When did you stop lov­ing me? When did I stop lov­ing you?” are the two recur­rent ques­tions around which the entire album revolves. In his quest for an answer, the singer uses multi-​track record­ing to mul­ti­ply his voice and per­son­al­ity and to simul­ta­ne­ously record dif­fer­ent time tracks. The result is a com­plex tem­po­ral constellation.

Wal­ter Ben­jamin argues in his Arcades Project against the com­mon belief that tracks nec­es­sar­ily mark a uni­di­rec­tional, lin­ear move­ment. To Ben­jamin, a sign – any sign – can never con­tain its own read­ing instruc­tions. By apply­ing this argu­ment to tracks, he shows that it is impos­si­ble to deter­mine the begin­ning, the end, and the direc­tion of any given track. Instead of demot­ing tracks as meta­phys­i­cal enti­ties with­out an intrin­sic mean­ing – a posi­tion that Jacques Der­rida defends in ‘La Dif­férance’ (1971) – Benjamin devel­ops a posi­tion that can be described as per­spec­tivism. To him, a track is an effect of the inter­ac­tion between a cer­tain set of signs and their interpreter.

In ‘Keep­ing Track of Time’, I will use Benjamin’s argu­ment to ques­tion the hege­mony of lin­ear time. Just like tracks, time is usu­ally mis­un­der­stood as a uni­di­rec­tional sequence of moments; it is a straight line between a past ori­gin and a future goal. Because of this shared mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion of tracks and lin­ear time, the exact same argu­ment that is used to ques­tion the for­mer can also be used to cri­tique the lat­ter. Lin­ear time is linked to a spe­cific point of view as well. Con­se­quently, adopt­ing a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive could open up the pos­si­bil­ity to con­ceive and express alter­na­tive time tracks.

Tem­po­ral plu­ral­ism derives directly from this per­spec­tivist cri­tique of lin­ear time. Since the begin­ning, the end, and the direc­tion of tem­po­ral move­ments can­not be deter­mined, a uni­fied con­cep­tion of time becomes impos­si­ble. One spe­cific man­i­fes­ta­tion of time can no longer be con­fused with time as such; it is only one time track among oth­ers. Tem­po­ral­ity is nei­ther an exter­nal mea­sure nor a con­nec­tive thread but rather a net­work of time tracks.