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.