Parliament – Mr. Wiggles

There is something inherently misleading about the word ‘revolution’. While the term suggests a change of astronomical proportions, these colossal expectations are hardly ever met. That does not mean that revolutions did, do, or will not happen at all; they simply come in unexpected shapes, forms, colors, and sizes. The revolution that I will discuss in the following, for instance, is tiny. Still, even this assessment of its size is not accurate enough. In this particular case, visual metaphors are wrong altogether. Neither a telescope nor a microscope will help a single bit to observe it. This revolution cannot be seen at all.

Resorting to other sensory metaphors, sonic ones for instance, does not help much either. While we expect a revolution to come with a big bang, these loud sounds are hardly ever heard. As a matter of fact, the revolution that I will discuss in this essay was so silent that at the time of its occurrence it could hardly be heard at all. Ironically, this major breakthrough almost got lost amongst the plethora of sounds and noises that surrounded it. Listening back, it is still impossible to hear this revolution directly. Raising the volume does not help either, since it would only amplify the background noises. This strange revolution started neither with a whisper nor a scream but occurred somewhere in-between these other sounds, in a realm that is neither visual nor acoustic.

At this point, I will shift from the word ‘revolution’ to a revolution. The event that I would like to denominate as such is James Brown’s introduction of ‘the One’ into popular music. While this term initially designated the first beat of a measure, its meaning in funk music can no longer be reduced to its original use. In this essay, I will try to explain what James Brown and his successors – Sly Stone, George Clinton, Betty Davis, Bootsy Collins, Rick James, and Prince to name a few – actually mean when they use this enigmatic term, and argue that the One was nothing less than a twofold revolution in soul, pop, and rock music. First, the One released rhythm from its secondary and instrumental role to melody and harmony. Second, and more importantly, this revolution emancipated rhythm from its musical, and even its auditory constraints. After James Brown’s intervention, rhythm is no longer exclusively connected to the ear – or any other sense for that matter – but becomes an interplay between multiple types of sensory data.

Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag

“The James Brown sound I didn’t learn from nobody. It’s from me“
“I taught them everything they know, but not everything I know”

– James Brown

At first sight, Brown’s major breakthrough seems to be restricted to a miniscule intervention. On “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” (1965), the singer broke with the conventions of the popular music of his time. Instead of emphasizing the second and fourth beat of every measure, Brown accentuated the first and the third. In the singer’s own words:

“I changed from the upbeat to the downbeat. Simple as that really.” (Brown qtd. in Pareles)

Simple as it may have been, it is very difficult to precisely determine – let alone explain – what James Brown did. In spite of the singer’s own beliefs, for one, the answer cannot be found in the downbeat itself. In fact, “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” is far from its first or most exemplary occurrence in music history. At best, the song marks a break with the conventions of the soul and pop music of its time. Not nearly enough to call this song a revolution, or so it seems at least.

Let’s shift back to the concept of ‘revolution’ then: if this term proves to be so ambiguous and problematic, why not avoid it altogether? Within the context of this essay, my answer would be that etymologically the concept precisely combines the two contradictory movements that I need in order to call “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” a revolution. In her book On Revolution (1963) Hannah Arendt points out that the term has its origin in 16th century astronomy, and that its literal meaning in that discipline is – at least at first sight – the exact opposite of its metaphorical use in philosophy and politics. ‘Revolution’ does not refer to the men-ignited process that leads to a radical new order in history, but to the eternally recurring cyclical motion of the stars; an unstoppable, natural force radically outside the reach of human agency.

“While the elements of novelty, beginning, and violence, all intimately associated with our notion of revolution, are conspicuously absent from the original meaning of the word as well as from its first metaphoric use in political language, there exists another connotation of the astronomic term which I have already mentioned briefly and which has remained very forceful in our own use of the word. I mean the notion of irresistibility, the fact that the revolving motion of the stars follow a preordained path and is removed from all influence of human power.” (Arendt 47)

Arendt distinguishes between two aspects of astronomical revolutions: irresistibility and cyclicality. In the contemporary, philosophical or political use of the term, the stress clearly lies on the first of these two terms, whereas the second seems to have disappeared. Still, it believe that it is a mistake to think that the moment of a radical new beginning has completely replaced the cyclical aspect of a revolution. While novelty may appear to be irreconcilable with the idea of an eternally recurring cycle, I will argue that it is not. In order to show that, however, it is necessary to make a further distinction within the concept of cyclicality itself.

A cyclical movement is more complex than it initially may seem to be; twice as complex to be precise. From a theoretical perspective, a cycle is not a single but a twofold motion. Two elements are necessary to define a cyclical movement: it has to consist of both a radical change as well a return. In order to distinguish a cycle from mere movement, both of these aspects need to be present. Neither one of them can be more important than the other. The fact of the return does not reduce the change to a mere surface effect, nor does the radical nature of the change relativize the return.

Eshun does not conceive the future as radically open. Nowadays, it has become a space that is under a constant threat of being colonized:

“In the colonial era of the early to middle twentieth century, avantgardists from Walter Benjamin to Frantz Fanon revolted in the name of the future against a power structure that relied on control and representation of the historical archive. Today, the situation is reversed. The powerful employ futurists and draw power from the futures they endorse, thereby condemning the disempowered to live in the past. The present moment is stretching, slipping for some into yesterday, reaching for others into tomorrow.” (Eshun 289)

He distinguishes three groups of cultural objects through which this colonization takes place: mathematical formalizations, science fiction, and hybrid forms between them. As long as these projections are uncritically received, these projected images of the future appear to be the causal result of the present. Eshun therefore proposes three chronopolitical practices that try to counter the colonization of the future: a theoretical practice that critically reads these produced futures, an artistic practice that constructs alternative images of the future, so-called counterfutures, and finally an archeological practice that analyzes past counterfutures.

Strangely enough, Eshun observes, that historically there has been a taboo on creative reflections on the future exactly by the proponents of countermemory.

Because the practice of countermemory defined itself as an ethical commitment to history, the dead, and the forgotten, the manufacture of conceptual tools that could analyze and assemble counterfutures was understood as an unethical dereliction of duty. Futurological analysis was looked upon with suspicion, wariness, and hostility. (Eshun 288)

Through its reluctance to engage the future, the practice of countermemory unwittingly fortifies the existing power relations

The following analogy might help to clarify Eshun’s argument. The function of the future in history, I would argue, is identical to that of a vanishing point in painting. While a vanishing point makes it possible to combine different elements in a single scene, this heterogeneity does not constitute multiple perspectives. On the contrary, it captures these diverse elements in a single image and includes them in a single point of view. The pluralizing of elements depends on a fixation of the perspective. Understood like this, a vanishing point is not an element in the scene – not even a special one – but an operation. One that simultaneously has a totalizing and a pluralizing effect.

The future conceived as a single point functions in exactly the same way. It actually enables the inclusion of multiple stories in a single history. Without a pluralized account of the future, countermemories do not offer alternative views on history; they only contribute to an all-encompassing vision.

Paradoxically, though, opening up the future can only occur by critically investigation objects from the past. Eshun thereby creates a new category of cultural objects. That of past images of the future: counterfutures. It would be a mistake to confuse this new category with that of utopia (or dystopia for that matter).

Science fiction

What actually happens, is that Eshun simply reverses the temporality. Whereas in the practices of countermemory, the past is pluralized by fixating either the present or the future, he proposes to do exactly the opposite. The future is pluralized through the fixation of an (not the) image of the past.

“The field of Afrofuturism does not seek to deny the tradition of countermemory. Rather, it aims to extend that tradition by reorienting the intercultural vectors of Black Atlantic temporality towards the proleptic as much as the retrospective.” (Eshun 289)

In order for this practice to function, however, it is necessary to constantly shift between operations that invoke countermemories and those that produce counterfutures. Otherwise, it remains impossible to pluralize perspectives on history. Eshun implicitly argues for a plurality of operations. As long as a single operation dominates practices – in this case emancipatory ones – cannot avoid totalization, in spite of its good intentions. Totalitarianism resides on the level of operations rather than content.

This text is a (very, very early) draft. Please do not quote from it!

The fact that this extremely short abbreviation of Aristotle’s biography does not contain any real information clearly expresses Heidegger’s disregard of the genre. All personal details are intentionally left out in his version. Heidegger does not mention the fact that Aristotle was born in 384 BC in Stagira as the son of a doctor, nor does he pay any attention to the fact that the ‘Stagirite’ was the tutor of Alexander the Great before the latter became the king of Macedonia and a merciless imperialist. Even the philosopher’s years as a student at Plato’s Academy are of no importance to his distant German successor. In fact, as long as we assume that thinking is not the prerogative of academic philosophers, Heidegger’s sentence could be the biography of any other person that ever lived.

Heidegger’s portrayal of Aristotle’s biography, however, is more than mere mockery. The implicit assumption that underlies this parody, is that philosophy should only be concerned with a person’s thoughts and not with his actions. In the – heavily edited – transcription of the above mentioned lecture, Heidegger transforms his refusal to elaborate on Aristotle’s life into a maxim:

“Regarding the personality of a philosopher, the following is of interest: He was born than and than, he worked and died. The ‘Gestalt’ of the philosopher, or something similar, will not be given here.”(Heidegger 2002:5)

In this view, the person has nothing to do with the thinker; or, a bit less radical, there is no need to pay attention to the life of the former because all the philosophically relevant elements are already present in the writings of the latter.

Heidegger’s categorical rejection of biography entails a normative definition of the practice of philosophy. Aristotle, as well as any other philosopher, should be judged solely on the basis of his work and not on the contingent facts and anecdotes that surround it. In Heidegger’s view – and I dare to claim that for once the little magician from Meßkirch speaks for the majority of his peers – biography has no value in philosophy.

Implicitly, Heidegger’s normative definition of his academic practice also works the other way around. If philosophy is only concerned with a person’s theoretical thoughts, there is no need for the individual thinker to be overly concerned with everyday life either. A philosopher’s life takes place in an abstract, conceptual realm. His only responsibility are his ideas. All moral, aesthetic, and practical issues are ultimately meaningless distractions that need to be overcome. A philosopher should dedicate – preferably even sacrifice – his entire life to his thoughts.

Martin Heidegger’s denial to acknowledge the relevance of biographical contingencies for philosophy is ironic to say the least. His name is inseparable from a controversial biographical event: his Nazi engagement and presumed anti-semitism. There is large corpus of academic studies that discusses to what degree Heidegger works are influenced by these biographical events, and a substantial subset that argues that it is entirely contaminated by the fascist ideology.

Without entering these moral, political and psychological debates, I dare to claim that it indisputable that there is a strong relation between the crucial events in Heidegger’s biography and the decisive turns in his philosophy. In my opinion, the philosopher’s life had a direct, almost measurable impact on his thinking. To give a detailed analysis of the reciprocal relation between Heidegger’s philosophy and biography, however, exceeds the goals and limitations of this essay. For present purposes. it suffices to briefly mention two of the most obvious cases:

1. In 1933, Martin Heidegger’s enthusiasm about the person Adolf Hitler, and his wife Elfride’s enthousiasm about the National Socialistic Party (Safranski ..), led the philosopher to accept the rectorate of the university of Freiburg. This new stage in his career almost immediately found a reflection in the concept of ‘leader’ (Führer) that he develops in his acceptance speech The Self-Assertion of the German University (1983). This concept, however, was completely absent and even inconsistent with the existentialist philosophy of Being and Time (1927).

2. Twelve months later, Heidegger’s resignation and subsequent disappointment with the Hitler and the National Socialistic movement resulted in an ever-growing scepticism about the possibilities of human action altogether. A development in Heidegger’s thinking that culminated in his so-called “Letter on Humanism” (1946) and his so-called ‘second’ magnum opus Contributions to Philosophy (1989).

In order to fully comprehend – or reject – Heidegger’s philosophy, it seems crucial to take such events into consideration. In my opinion, the important and often sudden turns in the philosopher’s thoughts – which have been heavily debated amongst Heidegger scholars – cannot be explained solely on the basis of his writings. It is neither possible nor preferable to ignore the influence of such biographical contingencies on his philosophy altogether. Heidegger’s own life story shows that the harsh line that he drew in order to separate thought from life needs to be softened.

“That double lead voice was a mistake on my part […] Marvin had cut two lead vocals, and wanted me to prepare a tape with the rhythm track up the middle and each of his vocals on separate tracks so he could compare them. Once I played that two-track mix on a mono machine and he heard both voices at the same time by accident.” (Sands qtd. in Edmonds 2001: 121–122)

Gaye liked this side-effect to such an extent that he not only decided to keep it, but pushed it to the extremes on his next album also titled What’s Going On. No longer content with the mere duplication of the single version, the artist multiplied his voice several times on the final mix of title track and the other songs on the album. After the release of What’s Going On, these harmonic, multilayered vocals quickly became Marvin Gaye’s hallmark style.

Although the singer and the engineer never planned to record them as such, the strange duet did not fall from the sky either. I would argue that the occurrence of the singer’s and engineer’s fortunate accident was due to an excess rather than a lack of talent. This mistake builds on Gaye and Sand’s respective expertise and skill sets. To use philosophical jargon: their fortunate accident was not random, it was contingent .

Marvin Gaye – who produced the album himself – and his team of musicians and engineers were engaged in many experiments with the sound recording technology available to them. They wanted to record an album that sound different from anything else on the market at the time. One of the biggest challenges that they faced was a way to make What’s Going On sound like one cohesive unit rather than a collection of songs. Gaye wanted to eliminate the cuts between the individual tracks so that the album flowed continuously. While conductor and arranger David van dePitte suggested the use of so-called segues to connect the individual songs, the sound engineers came up with a different solution:

“The studio technology was still pretty primitive […] To edit, you had to physically cut the tape with a blade. So when the basic rhythm tracks were done, Ken Sands and Cal Harris took the multi-tracks and edited the entire album together by hand. It was quite an accomplishment.” (Smith qtd. in Edmonds 2001: 167–168)

After they cut and pasted the entire album together, Sands and Harris overdubbed the strings and horns directly onto the master mix.

There is no causal relation between the engineers’ experiments and the accident that occurred during the “What’s Going On” sessions Nonetheless, I believe such innovations testify to an openness that is needed to recognize such fortunate contingencies when they occur. In a more traditional recording session, the creative potential of the same event would probably have been dismissed or even gone unnoticed.

Marvin Gaye’s extraordinary vocal talents were also essential to the occurrence of this particular accident. A lesser singer simply would not have pulled it off. Gaye originally intended to have The Originals – a male vocal group that he occasionally wrote and produced for – to record “What’s Going On”. Like many other Motown acts, such as The Temptations and The Four Tops, the members of The Originals all covered a different range in the spectrum. Gaye’s own voice, however, could cover the entire range. By multilayering his voice, multitrack recording rendered other singers obsolete. Gaye did not need anyone else to record complex harmonies any longer. Through the doubling, tripling and sometimes even quadrupling of his voice, multi-track recording made it possible for the artist to sing the different voices on What’s Going all by himself.

“His multitracked voices were startling. He’d become a one-man Moonglows, a one-man Originals, singing duets and trios with himself, juxtaposing his silky falsetto and sandpapery midrange, weaving the fabric of his voices into a tapestry of contrasting shapes and colors.” (Ritz 149)

Apart from the skills and talents of everyone involved, “What’s Going On”’s duet between Gaye and himself also presupposes the multitrack technology – an eight-track recorder to be precise – itself. It might sound obvious, but it is crucial to acknowledge that Sands and Gaye would have never stumbled upon it on a typewriter, or even a single tape deck. The mistake now known as What’s Going On is part of a complex constellation that consists of the artist, musicians, engineers, and technology.

In ”Signature Event Context”, Derrida unfolds the radical consequences of Ferdinand de Saussure’s argument that spacing – on a material level – is a precondition for any kind of linguistic structure:

“This force of rupture is due to the spacing with constitutes the written sign: the spacing which separates it from other elements of the internal contextual chain (the always open possibility of its extraction and grafting), but also from all the forms of a present referent (past or to come in the modified form of the present or to come) that is objective or subjective. The spacing is not the simple negativity of a lack, but the emergence of the mark.” (Derrida 317)

As opposed to the aspirations of the Swiss linguist’s, “Signature Event Context” demonstrates that these constitutional gaps and breaches can never be bridged. Breaking with a context, any context, is both cause and effect of all writing and speaking. Since the emergence of these meaning-producing ruptures can impossibly be explained from the context with which they break, Derrida refers to them as events.

Due to these ruptures, statements and utterances cannot be used in an inappropriate manner. Or at least, there is no false use in respect to an original context or addressee. The intentions of an author, or the norms, values, and customs of a historical discourse, can never – not even partially – determine the proper use of an utterance. A statement has to be iterable (repeatable, citable) in any possible context in order to be legible at all.

“The possibility of repeating, and therefore identifying, marks is implied in every code, making of it a communicable, transmittable, decipherable grid that is iterable for a third party, and thus for any possible user in general” (315)

According to Derrida, every linguistic system has to consists solely of quotable marks. A system of differences – spacing – is a precondition for this radical iterability. Even speaking is therefore a form of writing. The fact, however, that these potential citations neither have an original nor an ultimate meaning, does not imply that they are completely devoid of sense. On the contrary, each utterance or statement – more precisely, each instantiation of an utterance or a statement – by definition produces its own context. Its proper use and meaning coincide with an act of writing, and it is in that very broad sense that language is performative.

To a student of Friedrich Nietzsche like Jacques Derrida, this universalizing conclusion — every statement is iterable; language is always performative — would not make sense, if it were not immediately followed by a pluralizing gesture: there are different modes of iteration. It is exactly in pluralizing and specifying these broad, abstract categories that Derrida sees opportunities for future philosophical research. Towards the end of “Signature Event Context”, he states:

“Thus, one must less oppose citation or iteration to the noniteration of the event, than construct a differential typology of forms of iteration, supposing that this is a tenable project that can give rise to an exhaustive program, a question I am holding off on here. In this typology, the category of intention will not disappear; it have its place, but from this place it will no longer be able to govern the entire scene and the entire system of utterances. Above all, one then would be concerned with different type of marks or chains of iterable marks, and not with an opposition between citational statements on the one hand, and singular and original statement-events on the other.” (326)

Rather than finding or constructing an origin, truth, presence, or consciousness, Derrida proposes to capitalize on the possibilities that emerge from the lack of such a foundation for knowledge. Hence, a typology of iterations. To cover this programmatic aspect of “Signature Event Context”, however, I find the terms iteration and citation an unfortunate choice. These two words suggest that Derrida’s argument is limited to linguistics, while it actually applies to all forms of writing. Each mark that emerges necessarily breaks with its context; every inscription is an event.

I would argue that Derrida’s usage of the terms iteration and citation in “Signature Event Context” is strategic. He needs them to emphasize the impossibility of singularity in language; To show that every utterance is defined by it iterability. When Derrida calls for a typology of forms iterations, however, these concepts actually obscure rather than clarify his point. Derrida does not literally wants to classify different forms of citation, he wants to explore the heterogeneous acts that invoke events. There are many ways to break with a context. In order to emphasize this broader relevance of Derrida’s critique, I propose to replace the term iteration with (medial) operation.

Occasionally, the results of mistakes are much more interesting than those of hard work. Marvin Gaye’s hallmark album What’s Going On (1971) serves as one of those miraculous examples of serendipity. During the mixing sessions of the title song and first single in 1970, a rather fortunate accident occurred. When the artist asked his sound engineer Ken Sands to play two alternate takes of the main vocals, the technician unwittingly played both tracks simultaneously. The unintended result was a duet between the singer and himself. Gaye liked this side-effect to such an extent that he not only decided to keep it, but even pushed this mistake to the extremes. Not content with mere duplication, the artist multiplied his voice several times on the final mix of the album. The harmonic, multilayered vocals became this record’s most recognizable feature.

By the time of the recording of his next solo album, Let’s Get it On (1973), Gaye had mastered this technique of overdubbing to perfection. In fact, he used it so frequently that his ‘old-school’ producer, Ed Townsend, even openly wondered if the singer was still capable of singing an entire song in one take. Nonetheless, it was precisely this extensive use of multitrack recording that turned his multilayered vocals into more than just a stylistic novelty. On this album, the singer capitalized on the immanent possibilities of the technical medium to play out the doubts, discussions and arguments that he had with himself. As a result, Let’s Get it On released the dissonant voices from the isolated existence in Marvin Gaye’s head and harmonized them on the multiple tracks of the recording.

Nevertheless, the album was more than just a therapeutic exercise of a troubled artist. In my opinion, the accidental duplication and intentional multiplication of Gaye’s voice are not harmless but have enormous philosophical, psychological and practical ramifications. Multitrack recording irreversibly cut the person Marvin Gaye up into a wide range of alter egos. The contradicting voices that were captured on Let’s Get it On can impossibly be reunited into a single, coherent one. They are autonomous personae rather than different aspects of a schizophrenic personality.

Multitrack technology accidently rendered the unified subject obsolete. The resulting effect of polyphony, however, has often been accused of being of mere esthetic interest. According to this line of criticism, the multiple voices of Marvin Gaye’s records and other works of art are purely fictitious, not part of any concrete discursive practices and can therefore impossibly initiate any social and cultural transformations. In this presentation, I will argue that it is exactly the other way around. Personae rather than individuals are the genuine subjects of discourse. Any person is part of multiple, diverse practices and is therefore incapable of fully identifying with the role that any particular one of them forces on him. Correspondingly, I suggest a re-conceptualization of the post-human subject as an arena in which the confrontation between different roles takes place. The new intellectual proposed here, is an example of such a battle field.

The Dilemma of the Black Intellectual

In his essay ‘The Dilemma of the Black Intellectual’ (1985) Cornel West vocalizes the unique predicament of the title’s protagonist:

“Caught between an insolent American society and insouciant black community, the Afro-American who takes seriously the life of the mind inhabits an isolated and insulated world.”

Although it is quite easy to misinterpret this quote as such, West actually refuses to define the subject of his dilemma in essentialist terms. The importance of the black intellectual neither consists in his skin complexion nor his ethnic lineage but in the ongoing tension between the contradictory roles that are imposed on him. Cornel West situates this specific individual in the struggle between the American society and the black community.

Instead of repeating the exact details of West’s analysis of the black intellectual’s predicament, I will here focus on the text’s implicit but crucial, theoretical contribution to discourse analysis. ‘The Dilemma of the Black Intellectual’ subtly shows that a subject first emerges when an individual finds himself caught between at least two practices. As long as an analysis is limited to a single discourse, one can only speak of a subject position or a persona. Subjects, on the other hand, emerge in the confrontations between multiple practices; they are borderline figures by definition.

It is precisely such a clash of discourses that gives rise to West’s so-called dilemma of the black intellectual. The singularity of this situated individual consists in the fact that the white society and the black community both try to impose a particular role on him. In the specific case of West’s protagonist, the former practice pushes the intellectual to adapt to its “bourgeois model of academic legitimation and placement”, whereas the latter only seems to value his ‘life of the mind’ when it comes in the form of a performance or a sermon. Although West claims that the black community does not have an intellectual tradition in the academic sense, he nevertheless recognizes

“…two organic intellectual traditions in African-American life: the black Christian tradition of preaching and the black musical tradition of performance.”

West, however, neglects to further distuingish between these two intellectual traditions and treats them as identical. In my opinion, he thereby misses a chance to fully capitalize on the opportunities that his method offers, because he does not take the situatedness of his protagonist seriously enough.

West’s juxtaposition of two practices implies that in order to be acknowledged by both practices the aspiring intellectual has to play the role of The Scholar and The Performer at the same time. Both the white academy as well as the black community try to impose a specific set of norms, rules and expectations on the black intellectual. In other words, these discursive practices force him to act out contradictory roles. It is of crucial importance to notice that the black intellectual can never fully identify with neither The Scholar nor The Performer. What constitutes the protagonist of Cornell West’s dilemma is the struggle between two discursive practices rather than a fixed identity. Instead of lamenting the loss of a coherent subject, however, he values the transformative possibilities that this split personality offers.

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.

#1 How do technological media produce, shape and transform knowledge?

In this research project, I depart from an insight developed by (amongst others) the philosopher Walter Benjamin and the media theorist Marshall McLuhan: the technological a priori of art, culture, and – most importantly – (academic) knowledge are not secondary to their content. Media matter; they are not just the accidental and transitory shape of a necessary and eternal truth. Inside and outside, content and form, message and medium are inextricably linked. In fact, without some kind of (technological) apparatus of storage and transmission there would not be any content at all.

Since all technological media have a unique material structure, they produce, shape, and transform information in many different ways. What is data to a certain medium could therefore just as well be noise or nonsense to another. ‘Medial Operations’ is the concept that I would like introduce to designate the complex transitions between noise, nonsense, information, and knowledge. This research website questions the ontological and epistemological ramifications of such shifts between different media. Or, to avoid unnecessary abuse of philosophical jargon:

#2 What happens when data travels from one medium to another?

Through medial operations the technology of a certain era often links up. Rather than functioning in isolation, media work with and against each other. Friedrich Kittler has baptized such historically determined sets of competing and cooperating media writing systems. A writing system forms the technological a priori of an age. Each of these media-dependent epistèmes has its own singular set of operations to select and extract sections of noise and transform them into data.

Despite the plurality of writing systems, it would be a mistake to presume an unmediated outside. All data is inscribed in a medium. The only distinctions possible are those between different modes of storage, processing, and transmission. In other words, all that is left are different modes of medial expressions. Following one of Jacques Derrida’s suggestions, this research website does not make a distinction between original and mediated expressions, but aims to develop a typology of iterations … or, better yet, a topography of operations.

The concept ‘medial operations’ is chosen to indicate the similarities and differences with Michel Foucault’s ‘discursive operations’. Just like discursive operations, medial operations precede positivities. They do not directly produce content, but determine the expressive modalities and limits of knowledge in a given epistème.

Following Kittler’s critique of Foucault, though, I believe that the a priori of an epistème do not primarily depend on discourse but on technology. Whether discursive or medial, though, the word ‘operation’ is used to erase the mechanistic connotations that such transitions may invoke and emphasize their productive dimension instead. Medial operations do not happen automatically; they are creative acts. This leads to the third and perhaps most important question:

#3 How can scholars capitalize on medial operations to develop new ways of knowing?

Medial Operations tries to redefine the concepts of university, discipline, and intellectual in the age of digital media. How can academics use the possibilities of past, present, and future media to develop new ways of knowing, as well as alternative educational models? The acceptance of new media in the humanities, however, does not only depend on the availability and accessibility of the latest technology. Even more importantly, it demands an openness to change.

In order to grasp the institutional complexity of this last problem, media theory alone does not suffice; discourse analysis – in some shape or form – has to be brought back in. The study of the technological a priori of knowledge needs to be complemented with insights from poststructuralism, gender and race studies, and psychoanalysis. The discourse that needs to be critically analyzed, however, turns out to be our own. // bibliography

Reading Friedrich Kittler’s Musik und Mathematik

The name Friedrich Kittler is inextricably linked to Media Theory, but in fact the rich diversity of his work exceeds this disciplinary label.

Throughout his career, Kittler has attempted to achieve “the expulsion of Spirit from the humanities,” as the title of one of his early essays—“Austreibung des Geistes aus den Geisteswissenschaften” (1980)—announces. For a contemporary English-speaking audience, a better translation of the same phrase might be “overcoming humanism.” This has been Kittler’s goal ever since, as becomes particularly evident in seminal works such as Discourse Networks (1983) and Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1985), though it is also apparent in more recent texts such as “Universities: Wet, Hard, Soft, and Harder” (2000).

One of the most important but undervalued accomplishments of Kittler’s work is that he redefines the relation between humanities and science. Kittler’s emphasis on the media-technological a priori of knowledge not only allows him to criticize and reject many of the age-old dogmas in the humanities, but, conversely, poststructuralism and psychoanalysis enable him to reflect critically on technology. Kittler thereby envisions a new kind of humanities—one that can no longer bear that name, of course!

This new seminar focuses on Kittler’s latest and perhaps most ambitious project, Musik und Mathematik. This work aims to present a cultural history of the Western world in four volumes, starting in ancient Greece, then passing through Rome, the middle ages and up to the present computerized age. In 2006 the first volume appeared (Wilhelm Fink Verlag), bearing the subtitle Hellas 1: Aphrodite. Written by Kittler with the help of dozens of assistants, the book explores the early entanglement of eros, music, mathematics, and the alphabet. On the basis of an original and arguably controversial reinterpretation of the Sirens passage from the Odyssey, Kittler aims to show how Western culture was born from the notation of the vowels of the Sirens’ song. Kittler takes mathematics to refer to the moment of, and the desire for, learning implicated in this singular event.

The book’s narrative comprises a patchwork of contrasting sections, containing in-depth studies of Greek texts, references to contemporary (popular) culture, travels to the Tyrrhenean Sea, and discussions with Theodor W. Adorno, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and countless others. Balancing as it does between grand synthesis and local, rather free association, the book invites a patient and critical reading. The organizers propose to afford this strange but inspiring book the time required for such a reading. In the Fall of 2009, alternating between locations at Utrecht University and the University of Amsterdam, they invite scholars from all disciplinary backgrounds to join in the reading. In view of the Homeric context of the book, specialists in ancient Greek, archeology, and other relevant fields will be asked to present their views on the books’ theses.

For more details, please visit the website or contact the organizers: //