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.

Hardly anything ages as quickly as reflections on technology. As waves of innovation succeed each other at a pace that is hard to follow, the relevance of such texts usually vanishes overnight. Moreover, since they depend on a time-bound technical lingo, these reflections are destined to become completely illegible within a couple of decades. For these reasons, it is nothing short of amazing that Friedrich Kittler’s Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1985) has managed to avoid this fate for a very long time. The book’s renowned introduction predicts the merging of all individual media into a single digital information channel. Kittler sketches an apocalyptic and deterministic scenario in which all media strive towards their effacement. In optical fiber networks — a now obsolete term for the material infrastructure of the internet — the German media theorist recognizes the imminent telos of this historical development. Because it translates all kinds of data flows into series of numbers that can be manipulated, this super-medium has the potential to replace all others.

With numbers everything goes. Modulation, transformation, synchronization; delay, storage, transposition; scrambling, scanning, mapping — a total media link on a digital base will erase the very concept of medium. Instead of wiring people and technologies, absolute knowledge will run as an endless loop. (Kittler: 2)

Given the extremely short life cycle of the genre, Friedrich Kittler’s insight should be considered as a truly untimely meditation. As I write this essay, over two decades of frantic technological innovation have strived towards the complete unification of all media but failed to completely realize this goal. Despite its extraordinary endurance, however, even Gramophone, Film, Typewriter is now finally starting to show its age. If anything, rereading the book today proves that yesterday’s science fiction will be tomorrow’s prehistory. “Sound and image, voice and text are reduced to surface effects, known to consumers as interface.

Sense and the senses turn into eyewash. Their media-produced glamour will survive for an interim as a by-product of strategic programs.” (Kittler: 1) After Tron, virtual reality, cyberspace, The Matrix and Second Life, the reign of digital media has become a commonplace in contemporary art, culture and theory. Nowadays, everyone seems to be convinced that computers are going to take over every aspect of everyday life; whether this is a good or a bad thing is the only remaining point of controversy. The idea of unification of all media has lost its futuristic appeal. The main response that one can expect to such a utopian / dystopian prophesy is a loud yawn. Considering this collective fatigue with regard to digital cyber dreams, it has become almost impossible to recall the immense promise that analogue media once carried. I will take this as a challenge.

Whereas the technical means to preserve memories continuously improve, the previous generations of storage media are paradoxically forgotten. Oblivion appears to be the inevitable fate of outdated technology and the necessary price that has to be paid for progress… but does it really have to be? Before sealing this Faustian deal, the underlying deterministic relation between technological progress and amnesia needs to be further interrogated. In this essay, I will therefore examine how these terms come together in the construction of biographical narratives. Obviously, technological inventions open up new expressive modalities to construct such stories. Nowadays, only a technophobe would deny that photos, videos, and audio recordings can have a surplus value over mere textual descriptions of events. Still, the possible downsides of these inventions should not be overlooked. Can and did new media destroy old possibilities to capture a life? And are there events and stories that are impossible to express within contemporary or future media? These questions are not specific to the current digital age but are recurrent throughout history. They emerge when one medial episteme is threatened to be replaced by another.

Just like Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Ralph Waldo Ellison’s auto-fictional story ‘Living with Music’ (1955) captures such a technological shift. The story looks back upon an era in which analogue media were not yet doomed to disappear but rather possessed an immanent promise and lurking threat to take — and make — over everyday life. Ellison’s personal medium of choice is the gramophone. The author describes in detail the practical, esthetic, and political rupture that the introduction of this hi-tech device inflicted upon his own life and work. Whereas the record player may have become a clumsy piece of low fidelity equipment for many, I will argue that Ellison’s implicit theoretical position — which I will call media-epistemic pluralism — has survived the gramophone’s decay. In fact, his story prefigures a complex attitude towards technological progress that manages to avoid the wearisome dichotomy between utopia and its inverse.