“Here was a way out. If I was to live and write in that apart­ment, it would be only through the grace of music.” (Elli­son: 193) Whereas the blank spaces of the type­writer gave rise to the­o­ret­i­cal spec­u­la­tions about the in-​between as an anti–space with­out any form of pos­i­tive deter­mi­na­tion, the con­tin­u­ous groove of the gramo­phone record ren­ders all such con­junc­tures obso­lete. In this ana­logue medium, the in-​between is nei­ther a meta­phys­i­cal nor a metaphor­i­cal con­cept but an actual mate­r­ial space inscribed in vinyl. Despite the medium speci­ficity of this mate­r­ial in-​between, Elli­son does not con­fine it to the gramo­phone, but actu­ally intro­duces it as a metaphor in the prac­tice of writ­ing. Through the gramo­phone, the author can re-​signify the mar­gins and the blanks his typed pages as spaces where his minori­tar­ian back­ground resides. In this sense, the in-​between remains a site of exclu­sion. The gramophone’s intru­sion, though, trans­forms this inter­me­di­ary space from a rel­a­tive out­side into an imma­nent other. This in-​between there­fore acquires the poten­tial to dis­turb, sub­vert and even reshape the major discourse.The seem­ingly triv­ial trans­fig­u­ra­tion of minor dis­courses from empty into non­sen­si­cal mar­gins, gaps and breaches of their major coun­ter­parts opens up a pos­si­bil­ity for inter­ven­tion. Although the outer lim­its of these inter­me­di­ary spaces remain ini­tially fixed, their inte­rior does not. The newly dis­cov­ered in-​between thereby avoids the dilemma between pro­duc­tive deter­min­ism and crip­pling free­dom. It allows absolute free­dom within set boundaries.

But not yet. Between the hi-​fi record and the ear, I learned, there was a new elec­tronic world. In that real­iza­tion our apart­ment was well on its way toward becom­ing an audio booby trap. (Elli­son: 193)

Elli­son opens up a new inner realm that is nei­ther fixed nor bound­less, but simul­ta­ne­ously pro­duced and restricted by the his­tor­i­cal and geo­graph­i­cal con­tin­gen­cies of the major dis­course. As a con­se­quence of the per­fo­ra­tions inflicted by minor dis­courses, on the other hand, the major dis­course is in con­stant need of inter­ven­tions in order to make sense. With­out some form of agency, its musi­cal notes and alpha­bet­i­cal char­ac­ters would not have any mean­ing. in ‘Liv­ing with Music’, the cor­re­spond­ing agent comes in the form of a third per­sona — next to the author and the musi­cian — the engi­neer. A sub­stan­tial part of this story is ded­i­cated to gar­gan­tuan task of mas­ter­ing the gramo­phone. “There were wires and pieces of equip­ment all over the tiny apart­ment (I became a com­pul­sive exper­i­menter) and it was worth your life to move about with­out first tak­ing care­ful bear­ings. Once we were almost crushed in our sleep by the tape machine, for which there was space only on a shelf at the head of our bed. But it was worth it.” (Elli­son 194) The nar­ra­tor describes the com­plex inter­play between the­o­ret­i­cal knowl­edge and prac­ti­cal inter­ven­tions needed to elim­i­nate the sta­tic, cracks and hisses from the record­ing as much as pos­si­ble. The engineer’s goal is high fidelity: min­i­miza­tion of the noise between the record­ing and the ear, max­i­miza­tion of infor­ma­tion.

In this process of puri­fy­ing sound, Ralph Elli­son acci­den­tally dis­cov­ers a sec­ond in-​between: the gap between the gramo­phone and its lis­tener. Even though he real­izes that the first in-​between — the one inscribed into the vinyl — makes it pos­si­ble to rec­og­nize a repressed past, the pro­tag­o­nist treats this sec­ond realm as mere nui­sance. The phys­i­cal space between him and the loud­speaker is a sonic obsta­cle that pre­vents him from fully enjoy­ing music and obstructs the past from being fully rec­og­nized. Con­se­quently, the engi­neer tries to elim­i­nate this sec­ond in-​between. Unwit­tingly, he thereby rids the gramo­phone of its biggest poten­tial: noise record­ing and production.

The phono­graph does not hear as do ears that have been trained imme­di­ately to fil­ter voices, words, and sounds out of noise; it reg­is­ters acoustic events as such. Artic­u­late­ness becomes a second-​order excep­tion in a spec­trum of noise. (Kit­tler: 23)

The impor­tance of the gramo­phone lies in the fact that it is a low rather than high fidelity sound device. Its capac­ity to store noises rather than sym­bolic data flows, trans­forms the in-​between from a black hole into a rich space stuffed with for­got­ten, repressed or excluded sounds, smells and images. In fact, it is exactly this trans­for­ma­tion that takes place in both the intro­duc­tion of Invis­i­ble Man as well as ‘Liv­ing with Music’. The engineer’s dis­cov­ery of this excluded space stains the metaphor of the in-​between as a clean sheet. This zone of inde­ter­mi­nacy is smudged with noise, dirt, chaos, sex, and vio­lence… which could very well be the major discourse’s rev­o­lu­tion­ary becom­ing. By con­tin­u­ously try­ing to ban sonic nui­sances from his house, Ralph Elli­son actu­ally fails to rec­og­nize the full poten­tial of his own dis­cov­ery. Despite good inten­tions, he actu­ally effaces the minor dis­course that he wanted to res­cue. It is noise that resists assim­i­la­tion by a hege­monic medium and that forces the major dis­course to adapt and transform.

Even though the engi­neer in ‘Liv­ing with Music’ tries to purify the sound of the gramo­phone, it is very easy to think of a dif­fer­ent engi­neer: one that actu­ally max­i­mizes the noise. Accord­ing to Friedrich Kit­tler, noise pro­duc­tion was the only remain­ing strat­egy to sub­vert hege­mony in the ana­logue age.

If media are anthro­po­log­i­cal a pri­oris, then humans can­not have invented lan­guage; rather, they must have evolved as its pets, vic­tims, or sub­jects. And the only weapon to fight that may well be tape salad. Sense turns into non­sense, gov­ern­ment pro­pa­ganda into the white noise of Turing’s vocoder, impos­si­ble fillers like is/​or/​the are edited out, pre­cisely the ingre­di­ents of William Burroughs’s tape cut-​up tech­nique. (Kit­tler: 109)

Amidst all his appraisal for the gramo­phone. It is easy to for­get that to Kit­tler the uni­verse of tech­ni­cal media main­tains the same rela­tion to the dig­i­tal age as the Guten­berg Galaxy to the ana­logue age. With the decay of this medial epis­teme, so con­vinc­ingly proph­e­sied in the intro­duc­tion of Gramo­phone, Film, Type­writer, a unique his­tor­i­cal oppor­tu­nity to resist hege­mony seems to dis­ap­pear. The gramo­phone was a sin­gu­lar medium that stored non-​symbolic data flows, not as pure chaos but as man­i­fes­ta­tions of a minor dis­course. Its cracks and hisses actively resisted assim­i­la­tion by their hege­monic coun­ter­part and its cor­re­spond­ing medium. In a uni­verse that exclu­sively exists out of 0 and 1, though, these non­sen­si­cal — in the good sense of the word — data flows can no longer be stored or transmitted.

Not unlike Turing’s cor­re­spon­dents, every­one is desert­ing ana­log machines in favor of dis­crete ones. The CD dig­i­tizes the gramo­phone, the video cam­era dig­i­tizes the movies. All data streams flow into a state n of Turing’s uni­ver­sal machine; Roman­ti­cism notwith­stand­ing, num­bers and fig­ures become the key to all crea­tures.” (Kit­tler 19)

Still, every­thing might not be lost. ‘Liv­ing with Music’ implic­itly devel­ops, in my opin­ion, an alter­na­tive to McLuhan’s and Kittler’s media deter­min­ism. The sub­tle cri­tique that this text offers, does not con­sist in its analy­sis of the gramo­phone but in the way in which Ralph Elli­son treats the device. In his strug­gles with the tech­nol­ogy, a new kind of agency is born; an agency beyond the dichotomy of pro­duc­tive deter­min­ism and crip­pling free­dom. The engi­neer regains some degree of con­trol, exactly because this fig­ure bypasses the sym­bolic order and directly inter­venes in the under­ly­ing, mate­r­ial struc­ture. He does not speak, he acts. Nonethe­less, the engi­neer is fully aware of the fact that his inter­ven­tions are never fully autonomous. Nei­ther he nor the medium are in full con­trol. Instead, agency emerges from the con­stant nego­ti­a­tions — rather than nega­tions — between the engi­neer and dif­fer­ent tech­no­log­i­cal media. In ‘Liv­ing with Music’, new media do not auto­mat­i­cally replace exist­ing ones; they func­tion as events that chal­lenge and trans­form their pre­de­ces­sors. Man, in its role as engi­neer, is fully inscribed into this com­plex net­work of machines. Through his nego­ti­a­tions with the gramo­phone and the type­writer, Ralph Elli­son pre­fig­ures a sub­ject that belongs to a uni­verse in which medial epis­temes do not diachron­i­cally suc­ceed each other but syn­chron­i­cally coex­ist. Although dif­fer­ent ways to cap­ture the past, present and future con­tinue to com­pete with one another, the bare fact of this com­pe­ti­tion should be inter­preted as proof of a medial-​epistemic plu­ral­ism… no mat­ter if it is 1952, 1985 or 2008. Against Friedrich Kittler’s own expec­ta­tions, the fol­low­ing state­ment is there­fore still valid more than twenty years after he first wrote it: “But there still are media; there still is entertainment.”(Kittler: 2) and I will be sur­prised if it does not stand the test of time. /​/​bib­li­og­ra­phy

This arti­cle was first pub­lished in the aut­ofic­tion issue of Image and Nar­ra­tive edited by Joost de Bloois en Anneleen Masschelein.