Music forms an irreducible origin, instigates the rediscovery of a repressed past and provides an orientation in time. It is no coincidence that the gramophone fulfills the same threefold function in ‘Living with Music’, as it does in the introduction of Ellison’s seminal novel Invisible Man (1951). Both the fictional novel and the autobiographical story capture the pivotal moment in which music re-enters the protagonist’s life. In Invisible Man, the gramophone’s intrusion offers the protagonist an escape from a free but meaningless existence as an outlaw. In ‘Living with Music’, the device transforms the sonic chaos of his house into the musical order that the author needs in order to overcome his writer’s block.
Now in this magical moment all the old love, the old fascination with music superbly rendered, flooded back. When she finished I realized that with such music in my own apartment, the chaotic sounds from without and above had sunk, if not into silence, then well below the level where they mattered. (Ellison: 193)
By the end of ‘Living with Music’, music is all of a sudden no longer an endless strain to the minoritarian musician anymore, but relieves the aspiring author from his constant struggles by giving him a temporal sense of direction. The immediate question that comes to mind when such a drastic change occurs is of course: what has changed? After reading Kittler and McLuhan, the answer is both remarkably simple as well as infinitely complex: technology. As opposed to Ellison’s own testimony, I claim that the narrator actually does not rediscover music… he discovers the gramophone. “All this plunge into electronics, mind you, had as its simple end the enjoyment of recorded music as it was intended to be heard.” (Ellison 194) This new technical medium lures the author with something which he could not achieve with neither the trumpet nor the typewriter: better-than-perfect reproduction of the past in its full detail.
Sound recordings improve on both scores as well as live performances of the same piece of music, because they do not only capture their notes but also the data flows that circulate in-between them. The distinctive feature of this technical medium is that it does not only store the intended content but also all kinds of other accidental sounds and disruptive noises. The ability of the gramophone to store all frequencies and their fluctuations in time leads Friedrich Kittler to the wild but productive hypothesis that the technological device corresponds to the ‘real’ in Lacanian psychoanalysis.
And only the phonograph can record all the noise produced by the larynx prior to any semiotic order and linguistic meaning. To experience pleasure, Freud’s patients no longer have to desire what philosophers consider good. Rather, they are free to babble. Thus, the real — especially in the talking cure known as psychoanalysis — has the status of phonography. (Kittler: 16)
Whereas the typewriter can only deal with the symbolic, the gramophone also registers the streams of data that precede and exceed the linguistic order. This medium does not only record intentions, meanings, and syntactically formed utterances, but also the slippages, mistakes, and plain noises. In other words, the gramophone is capable of storing and transmitting all the nonsensical data flows that resist the symbolic order of the major discourse.
Reproduction is demoted once the past in all its sensuous detail is transmitted by technical devices. Certainly, hi-fi means “high fidelity” and is supposed to convince consumers that record companies remain loyal to musical deities. But it is a term of appeasement. More precise than the poetic imagination of 1800, whose alphabetism or creativity confronted an exclusively reproductive memory, technology literally makes the unheard-of possible. (Kittler: 36)
The real potential of the record player consists in the device’s immanent promise of a better-than-perfect recording. The narrator of ‘Living with Music’ hopes that this multilayered past of sound recordings will ultimately overwrite the official, text-based account called history. Rather than producing a factual representation of an event, the gramophone offers a faithful recording that is simultaneously actual and virtual. He values the gramophone for its potential power to break the hegemony of a conscious, major discourse by confronting it with its subconscious. The technical device’s capacity to physically store and transmit non-symbolic data flows distinguishes it from rivaling writing systems. All of a sudden, the background noises and the neighbor’s singing are no longer nonsensical nuisances, but turn into manifestations of a minor discourse. “I was obsessed with the idea of reproducing sound with such fidelity that even when using music as a defense behind which I could write, it would reach the unconscious levels of the mind with the least distortion. And it didn’t come easily.” (Ellison: 193)
Because of its capacity to bypass the symbolic order of the typewriter, the gramophone transfigures the relation between a major and minor discourse. The latter is no longer external to the first, but has become an integral, though distinct, part of it. Still, it would be too easy to understand Ralph Ellison’s appraisal of the record player as a naive utopian stance towards the latest technology. On the contrary, his enthusiasm stems from the possibilities that the confrontation with the gramophone — and the realm of knowledge that it opens up — offers to his writing. The author does not simply give in to the temptation of a tabula rasa that new technology offers, but proposes a media–epistemic pluralism instead. Without the gramophone he would have never been able resolve the tension between a major and a minor discourse in a satisfactory way. Nonetheless, sound recordings do not replace typed texts or live music performances. The three media, trumpet, type writer and gramophone, are complementary rather than mutually exclusive to Ellison.Despite their coexistence, however, these media do maintain a hierarchical relation with one another. The narrator clearly prioritizes the gramophone over the trumpet and the typewriter. It is the high-tech device that allows him to rediscover the music from his youth, and it is the same machine that helps the author to overcome his writer’s block. “A writer thus celebrates the very opposite of his own medium — the white noise no writing can store.” (Kittler: 45) In ‘Living with Music’, new technology functions as an event to existing, rivaling writing systems. The introduction of the gramophone challenges and transforms the typewriter — and the concepts, speculation, tropes, and metaphors that this device brought into existence — without actually replacing it.
This text is a draft. Please do not quote from it!
Invisible Man, the title of Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel refers to the lack of opacity of its main protagonist. Rather than reading this book as the exemplary story of a concrete, situated individual – an African-American intellectual before and during the so-called Harlem Renaissance – this article-in-progress will concentrate on the figure of thought that this central character expresses.
The Invisible Man’s most striking feature is his ongoing struggle for social and medial recognition.
“You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you’re a part of all the sound and anguish, and you strike out with your fists, you curse and you swear to make them recognize you. And, alas, it’s seldom successful.” (Ellison, 7)
In fact, as a conceptual persona, the Invisible Man is the element that is unrecognized by dominant discourse.
The flip side of the Invisible Man’s transparency is his extreme adaptability. In Ellison’s novel, the main character goes through several metamorphoses: he starts as a naive country boy who subsequently becomes an uppity student, a factory worker, a civil right activist, a preacher, a pimp, until he finally realizes that he is in fact defined by an inherent absence of a positive identity.
“So after years of trying to adopt the opinions of others I finally rebelled. I am an invisible man.” (Ellison, 462)
The main protagonist of Invisible Man is a conceptual persona that cannot be positively recognized within discourse. He does not appear to have any other intrinsic features but negativity and arbitrariness. Following this line of argumentation, one could argue that the function of the Invisible Man in discourse is comparable to that Jacques Derrida’s différance in texts; an irreducible absence that precedes and obstructs any kind of meaning.
As opposed to différance, however, the absence of the Invisible Man is only apparent. Even though the main protagonist is excluded from all forms of discursive representation, this bare fact itself already presupposes his existence. As such, his invisibility is a modified form of presence rather than an absolute lack. The few remainders of this persona’s presence in discourse can therefore be creatively transformed into something different and expressed in another medium. The narrator of Invisible Man discovers the emancipatory potential of adaptation while listening to a jazz record.
“Perhaps I like Louis Armstrong because he’s made poetry out of being invisible. I think it must be because he’s unaware that he is invisible. And my own grasp of invisibility aids me to understand his music.” (Ellison, 11)
It is the medial translation from the (in)visible to the audible – from texts and images to sounds and music – that can be interpreted as a solution to the problem of recognition in Ellison’s novel. The process of adaptation has the power to render the unseen heard (and the unheard seen).
“So under the spell of the reefer I discovered a new analytical way of listening to music. The unheard sounds came through, and each melodic line existed of itself, stood clearly from all the rest, said its piece, and waited patiently for the other voices to speak. That night I found myself hearing not only in time, but in space as well. I not only entered the music but descended, like Dante, into its depths.” (Ellison, 11)
Louis Armstrong’s adaptation of transparency into jazz makes apparent that the Invisible Man is not really an empty, arbitrary position in discourse but an unrecognized space that is actually filled with potential meaning. Through his descent into the depths of music, the Invisible Man discovers that by postulating presence/absence as an absolute and fundamental dichotomy this promise is actually overlooked. There is never complete absence, because even at empty spaces there is still materiality. As a matter of fact, it is the medium that by definition resists absolute negation.
In a perverse way, this analysis of Armstrong’s music actually corresponds with Theodor W. Adorno’s critique of jazz. In his 1935 essay ‘On Jazz’, the philosopher devalues the often praised dissonance and syncopation in this musical genre as deceptive. As opposed to the a-metrical and atonal elements in the music of Arnold Schönberg and Alban Berg – Adorno’s composers of choice – jazz just offers irregular modifications of meter and harmony. These are not just formal difference, since Adorno believes that music transcends its aesthetic meaning. He conceives the underlying rigid metric and harmonic structure of jazz as significant manifestations of an omnipresent logic of a dominant discourse (In Adorno’s words, culture industry/global capitalism). Although jazz at first seem to break with this hegemonic system, it actually confirms it. In other words, to Adorno jazz fails to be a real negation because the structure prevents it.
Despite a similar analysis of jazz, however, the Invisible Man does not share Adorno’s rejection of the musical genre. This derives from the fact that the main character of Ellison’s novel has a different perspective on dominant discourse than Adorno has. This conceptual persona’s point of view is diametrically opposed to that of the German-Jewish philosopher. The protagonist does not want to escape from the totalitarian logic of a hermetically closed system, on the contrary, he wants to enter it. Therefore, the Invisible Man does not conceive dissonance and syncopation in jazz as failed efforts to implode discourse from within, but as successful attempts to enter it from the outside. To him, they are discontinuous interventions of presence in discourse that – in accordance with Adorno’s analysis of the musical genre – cannot be negated. Since negation is a necessary condition for synthesis, jazz is an odd element of dissonance that can never be fully annihilated by the musical conventions. The Invisible Man aspires to infiltrate discourse in a similar fashion.
Apart from dissonance, jazz and invisibility also come together in syncopation. The main protagonist emphasizes that his lack of recognition provides him with a different access to temporality.
“Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you’re never quite on the beat. Sometimes you’re ahead and sometimes behind.” (Ellison, 11)
In this quote, The Invisible Man brings together two different senses of time: his own and that of the a hegemonic discourse; the beat and its deviation. In other words, a pluralist concept of temporality is already a given for this particular conceptual persona. Syncopation inevitably implies that time is not single but multiple.
As the combined result of dissonance and syncopation, pluralism is a given to the Invisible Man. His reality by definition consists of at least two separate domains: discourse and its other. But this duality as such already presupposes a third element, namely the realm in which the tension between inside and outside manifests itself. The Invisible Man is this third space; he is the intervening medium in which the confrontations between discourse and its other are played out. To the Invisible Man inside and outside are therefore not principally separated, this distinction only exists in practice. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari would say that they are distinct zones on the same plane of immanence. In What is Philosophy? (1991) the philosopher and the psychoanalyst claim that immanence is not the flip side of transcendence, but that transcendence is only an illusion of immanence. To them, there is neither an absolute outside nor an inside; they are both contingent zones on a so-called plane of immanence. Although Deleuze and Guattari render the binary opposition between inside and outside obsolete, this does not imply the end of all distinctions. On the contrary. it is exactly because of borders that meaning becomes possible. In other words, they do not only divide but also converge.
Although he uses – once again – a sonic rather than a spatial metaphor, the Invisible Man expresses a similar figure of thought:
“Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” (Ellison, 469)
The sparse interventions of his presence within discourse – the lower frequencies – simultaneously diverge and connect the inside and the outside of discourse and thereby render the binary opposition between both zones obsoletes. The Invisible Man is inside nor outside the system; he is both at the same time. The lack of recognition of this conceptual persona turns out to be a blessing in disguise. He has access to a reality that is both larger as well as more diverse than that of those who are an integral part of the system.
“Men out of time, who would soon be gone and forgotten… But who knew […] – who knew but that they were the saviours, the bearers of something precious? The stewards of something uncomfortable, burdensome, which they hated because, living outside the realm of history, there was no one to applaud their value and they themselves failed to understand it.” (Ellison, 355)
Although Invisible Man refers to them as such, ‘men out of time’ are not really outside of time; rather they are outside of history. History, however, is only one particular time track – namely that of dominant discourse – amongst others.
“They were outside the groove of history, and it was my job to get them in, all of them.” (Ellison, 357)
It is no coincidence that the main protagonist refers to the gramophone in this quote. As Friedrich Kittler convincingly argues in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1985), the tracks of this technical device – or more precise its short-lived predecessor the phonograph – became the model for all other forms of inscription soon after its invention. These primal tracks not only incorporate but also surpass textual ones in many ways. First of all, the gramophone actually realizes the alchemist and poetic fantasy of time axis manipulation. Records can be sped up, slowed down and even reversed. Moreover, however, phonographic tracks can store and transmit different voices, instruments and noises simultaneously. For that reason, the gramophone is the pluralist medium par excellence.
The adaptation into a different medium reveals the shortcomings of the original. The necessary detour through sound recording, makes clear that invisibility is not simply the absence of time but the actual presence of alternative time tracks. As opposed to text, records are capable of storing and transmitting such alternative time tracks in forms more diverse than sheer absence or negativity. The Invisible Man for instance describes his own time as follows.
“Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look around. That’s what you hear vaguely in Louis’ music.” (Ellison, 11)
From this conceptual persona’s duplication of time, it is only a small step towards further multiplication. The tracks of the gramophone not only render the invisible recognized, but also pave the way for a pluralist philosophy of time.
new adventures in low-fidelity
Music forms an irreducible origin, instigates the rediscovery of a repressed past and provides an orientation in time. It is no coincidence that the gramophone fulfills the same threefold function in ‘Living with Music’, as it does in the introduction of Ellison’s seminal novel Invisible Man (1951). Both the fictional novel and the autobiographical story capture the pivotal moment in which music re-enters the protagonist’s life. In Invisible Man, the gramophone’s intrusion offers the protagonist an escape from a free but meaningless existence as an outlaw. In ‘Living with Music’, the device transforms the sonic chaos of his house into the musical order that the author needs in order to overcome his writer’s block.
By the end of ‘Living with Music’, music is all of a sudden no longer an endless strain to the minoritarian musician anymore, but relieves the aspiring author from his constant struggles by giving him a temporal sense of direction. The immediate question that comes to mind when such a drastic change occurs is of course: what has changed? After reading Kittler and McLuhan, the answer is both remarkably simple as well as infinitely complex: technology. As opposed to Ellison’s own testimony, I claim that the narrator actually does not rediscover music… he discovers the gramophone. “All this plunge into electronics, mind you, had as its simple end the enjoyment of recorded music as it was intended to be heard.” (Ellison 194) This new technical medium lures the author with something which he could not achieve with neither the trumpet nor the typewriter: better-than-perfect reproduction of the past in its full detail.
Sound recordings improve on both scores as well as live performances of the same piece of music, because they do not only capture their notes but also the data flows that circulate in-between them. The distinctive feature of this technical medium is that it does not only store the intended content but also all kinds of other accidental sounds and disruptive noises. The ability of the gramophone to store all frequencies and their fluctuations in time leads Friedrich Kittler to the wild but productive hypothesis that the technological device corresponds to the ‘real’ in Lacanian psychoanalysis.
Whereas the typewriter can only deal with the symbolic, the gramophone also registers the streams of data that precede and exceed the linguistic order. This medium does not only record intentions, meanings, and syntactically formed utterances, but also the slippages, mistakes, and plain noises. In other words, the gramophone is capable of storing and transmitting all the nonsensical data flows that resist the symbolic order of the major discourse.
The real potential of the record player consists in the device’s immanent promise of a better-than-perfect recording. The narrator of ‘Living with Music’ hopes that this multilayered past of sound recordings will ultimately overwrite the official, text-based account called history. Rather than producing a factual representation of an event, the gramophone offers a faithful recording that is simultaneously actual and virtual. He values the gramophone for its potential power to break the hegemony of a conscious, major discourse by confronting it with its subconscious. The technical device’s capacity to physically store and transmit non-symbolic data flows distinguishes it from rivaling writing systems. All of a sudden, the background noises and the neighbor’s singing are no longer nonsensical nuisances, but turn into manifestations of a minor discourse. “I was obsessed with the idea of reproducing sound with such fidelity that even when using music as a defense behind which I could write, it would reach the unconscious levels of the mind with the least distortion. And it didn’t come easily.” (Ellison: 193)
Because of its capacity to bypass the symbolic order of the typewriter, the gramophone transfigures the relation between a major and minor discourse. The latter is no longer external to the first, but has become an integral, though distinct, part of it. Still, it would be too easy to understand Ralph Ellison’s appraisal of the record player as a naive utopian stance towards the latest technology. On the contrary, his enthusiasm stems from the possibilities that the confrontation with the gramophone — and the realm of knowledge that it opens up — offers to his writing. The author does not simply give in to the temptation of a tabula rasa that new technology offers, but proposes a media–epistemic pluralism instead. Without the gramophone he would have never been able resolve the tension between a major and a minor discourse in a satisfactory way. Nonetheless, sound recordings do not replace typed texts or live music performances. The three media, trumpet, type writer and gramophone, are complementary rather than mutually exclusive to Ellison.Despite their coexistence, however, these media do maintain a hierarchical relation with one another. The narrator clearly prioritizes the gramophone over the trumpet and the typewriter. It is the high-tech device that allows him to rediscover the music from his youth, and it is the same machine that helps the author to overcome his writer’s block. “A writer thus celebrates the very opposite of his own medium — the white noise no writing can store.” (Kittler: 45) In ‘Living with Music’, new technology functions as an event to existing, rivaling writing systems. The introduction of the gramophone challenges and transforms the typewriter — and the concepts, speculation, tropes, and metaphors that this device brought into existence — without actually replacing it.
This text is a draft. Please do not quote from it!
Invisible Man, the title of Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel refers to the lack of opacity of its main protagonist. Rather than reading this book as the exemplary story of a concrete, situated individual – an African-American intellectual before and during the so-called Harlem Renaissance – this article-in-progress will concentrate on the figure of thought that this central character expresses.
The Invisible Man’s most striking feature is his ongoing struggle for social and medial recognition.
In fact, as a conceptual persona, the Invisible Man is the element that is unrecognized by dominant discourse.
The flip side of the Invisible Man’s transparency is his extreme adaptability. In Ellison’s novel, the main character goes through several metamorphoses: he starts as a naive country boy who subsequently becomes an uppity student, a factory worker, a civil right activist, a preacher, a pimp, until he finally realizes that he is in fact defined by an inherent absence of a positive identity.
The main protagonist of Invisible Man is a conceptual persona that cannot be positively recognized within discourse. He does not appear to have any other intrinsic features but negativity and arbitrariness. Following this line of argumentation, one could argue that the function of the Invisible Man in discourse is comparable to that Jacques Derrida’s différance in texts; an irreducible absence that precedes and obstructs any kind of meaning.
As opposed to différance, however, the absence of the Invisible Man is only apparent. Even though the main protagonist is excluded from all forms of discursive representation, this bare fact itself already presupposes his existence. As such, his invisibility is a modified form of presence rather than an absolute lack. The few remainders of this persona’s presence in discourse can therefore be creatively transformed into something different and expressed in another medium. The narrator of Invisible Man discovers the emancipatory potential of adaptation while listening to a jazz record.
It is the medial translation from the (in)visible to the audible – from texts and images to sounds and music – that can be interpreted as a solution to the problem of recognition in Ellison’s novel. The process of adaptation has the power to render the unseen heard (and the unheard seen).
Louis Armstrong’s adaptation of transparency into jazz makes apparent that the Invisible Man is not really an empty, arbitrary position in discourse but an unrecognized space that is actually filled with potential meaning. Through his descent into the depths of music, the Invisible Man discovers that by postulating presence/absence as an absolute and fundamental dichotomy this promise is actually overlooked. There is never complete absence, because even at empty spaces there is still materiality. As a matter of fact, it is the medium that by definition resists absolute negation.
In a perverse way, this analysis of Armstrong’s music actually corresponds with Theodor W. Adorno’s critique of jazz. In his 1935 essay ‘On Jazz’, the philosopher devalues the often praised dissonance and syncopation in this musical genre as deceptive. As opposed to the a-metrical and atonal elements in the music of Arnold Schönberg and Alban Berg – Adorno’s composers of choice – jazz just offers irregular modifications of meter and harmony. These are not just formal difference, since Adorno believes that music transcends its aesthetic meaning. He conceives the underlying rigid metric and harmonic structure of jazz as significant manifestations of an omnipresent logic of a dominant discourse (In Adorno’s words, culture industry/global capitalism). Although jazz at first seem to break with this hegemonic system, it actually confirms it. In other words, to Adorno jazz fails to be a real negation because the structure prevents it.
Despite a similar analysis of jazz, however, the Invisible Man does not share Adorno’s rejection of the musical genre. This derives from the fact that the main character of Ellison’s novel has a different perspective on dominant discourse than Adorno has. This conceptual persona’s point of view is diametrically opposed to that of the German-Jewish philosopher. The protagonist does not want to escape from the totalitarian logic of a hermetically closed system, on the contrary, he wants to enter it. Therefore, the Invisible Man does not conceive dissonance and syncopation in jazz as failed efforts to implode discourse from within, but as successful attempts to enter it from the outside. To him, they are discontinuous interventions of presence in discourse that – in accordance with Adorno’s analysis of the musical genre – cannot be negated. Since negation is a necessary condition for synthesis, jazz is an odd element of dissonance that can never be fully annihilated by the musical conventions. The Invisible Man aspires to infiltrate discourse in a similar fashion.
Apart from dissonance, jazz and invisibility also come together in syncopation. The main protagonist emphasizes that his lack of recognition provides him with a different access to temporality.
In this quote, The Invisible Man brings together two different senses of time: his own and that of the a hegemonic discourse; the beat and its deviation. In other words, a pluralist concept of temporality is already a given for this particular conceptual persona. Syncopation inevitably implies that time is not single but multiple.
As the combined result of dissonance and syncopation, pluralism is a given to the Invisible Man. His reality by definition consists of at least two separate domains: discourse and its other. But this duality as such already presupposes a third element, namely the realm in which the tension between inside and outside manifests itself. The Invisible Man is this third space; he is the intervening medium in which the confrontations between discourse and its other are played out. To the Invisible Man inside and outside are therefore not principally separated, this distinction only exists in practice. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari would say that they are distinct zones on the same plane of immanence. In What is Philosophy? (1991) the philosopher and the psychoanalyst claim that immanence is not the flip side of transcendence, but that transcendence is only an illusion of immanence. To them, there is neither an absolute outside nor an inside; they are both contingent zones on a so-called plane of immanence. Although Deleuze and Guattari render the binary opposition between inside and outside obsolete, this does not imply the end of all distinctions. On the contrary. it is exactly because of borders that meaning becomes possible. In other words, they do not only divide but also converge.
Although he uses – once again – a sonic rather than a spatial metaphor, the Invisible Man expresses a similar figure of thought:
The sparse interventions of his presence within discourse – the lower frequencies – simultaneously diverge and connect the inside and the outside of discourse and thereby render the binary opposition between both zones obsoletes. The Invisible Man is inside nor outside the system; he is both at the same time. The lack of recognition of this conceptual persona turns out to be a blessing in disguise. He has access to a reality that is both larger as well as more diverse than that of those who are an integral part of the system.
Although Invisible Man refers to them as such, ‘men out of time’ are not really outside of time; rather they are outside of history. History, however, is only one particular time track – namely that of dominant discourse – amongst others.
It is no coincidence that the main protagonist refers to the gramophone in this quote. As Friedrich Kittler convincingly argues in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1985), the tracks of this technical device – or more precise its short-lived predecessor the phonograph – became the model for all other forms of inscription soon after its invention. These primal tracks not only incorporate but also surpass textual ones in many ways. First of all, the gramophone actually realizes the alchemist and poetic fantasy of time axis manipulation. Records can be sped up, slowed down and even reversed. Moreover, however, phonographic tracks can store and transmit different voices, instruments and noises simultaneously. For that reason, the gramophone is the pluralist medium par excellence.
The adaptation into a different medium reveals the shortcomings of the original. The necessary detour through sound recording, makes clear that invisibility is not simply the absence of time but the actual presence of alternative time tracks. As opposed to text, records are capable of storing and transmitting such alternative time tracks in forms more diverse than sheer absence or negativity. The Invisible Man for instance describes his own time as follows.
From this conceptual persona’s duplication of time, it is only a small step towards further multiplication. The tracks of the gramophone not only render the invisible recognized, but also pave the way for a pluralist philosophy of time.