#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

‘Oh Baby, I Like it Raw // On Music Production and Knowledge Engineering’

A presentation that I gave on the 27th of October 2008 at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis for the Music and Sound Studies Initiative lecture series organized by Sumanth Gopinath.

earlier (and shorter) versions of this lecture were presented:

I later made an article out of it, that was published in the volume Sonic Mediations: Body, Sound, Technology by Carolyn Birdsall and Anthony Enns.

You can read it on this site:
Oh Baby, I Like It Raw: Engineering Truth (password protected)

The object of the research proposed here will be the figure of the intellectual. In his essay ‘The Dilemma of the Black Intellectual’(1984), Cornel West emphasizes the critical potential of his protagonist that stems from the fact that this situated individual is always caught between two discursive practices, that of the white society and the black community. These practices force conflicting roles – in other words personae – upon the black intellectual. As a result, this figure functions as an arena in which these discursive tensions intersect and clash. In other words, not the situated individual but the conceptual personae are the actual agents of discourse.

According to this line of thinking, the fact that the intellectual is a site rather than a person implies that this concept can no longer be restricted to human beings. Differently put, a text, image, record or movie can also function as an intellectual in this new sense of the word. The situated individual has become a medium amongst others. In my research, I want to show that this so-called medial turn transforms the image from a representation to a collision point where heterogeneous conceptual personae and their corresponding discursive practices come together.

This project resulted in two articles — New Adventures in Low-Fidelity and Oh Baby, I Like It Raw – and several lectures.

In their respective academic, artistic and everyday practices, all of these thinkers deploy creative acts to deal with problems of temporality. In their quest to unravel, master, respect or multiply the mysteries of time, they explore the interstices between arts, media and various academic disciplines. I will argue that these excursions have, either intentionally or accidentally, led to new ways of conceptualizing time. Case studies that I develop in this study range from Gilles Deleuze’s ‘time-image’ to grasp cinema’s unique mode of temporality to Marvin Gaye’s experiments with multi-track recording technology to recover lost times.

Inspired by these non-conventional approaches, Time Tracks exploits the potential of an experimental layout to open up the philosophical problem of time. The book juxtaposes the main argument, set in the body of the page, with small, additional texts in the margins. This spatial separation enables conversations between arts, media, and disciplines. Time Tracks thereby both theoretically argues and visually shows that philosophical problems are not the prerogative of a certain academic practice but transgress the boundaries between theory, literature, music, and life.

Synopsis

Time Tracks starts from the media-theoretical insight that philosophy persistently omits a crucial factor in its analyses, namely the material structure of the texts that it consumes and produces. This book compensates for this negligence by pointing out that the technical medium has – and has had – a decisive impact on its content. This argument applies to theories on time in particular. Since temporality is never experienced directly but always through a medium in the broadest sense of the word – ranging from the sun dial and the human body to the computer – this concept cannot possibly be studied separately from that of mediality.

If there is no time without a medium and vice versa, then the contemporary multi-medial landscape is inevitably also a multi-temporal one. Time Tracks proposes a temporal pluralism. Its central thesis holds that time should be conceived as a multiplicity. I introduce the concept of time track to designate the individual temporal manifestations that make up this multiplicity. I will argue that there is no single concept of time that is eternally and universally valid, but multiple time tracks that maintain a complex reciprocal relation to the medium in which they are expressed. Each medial expression is inextricably linked to a unique constellation of time tracks. Problems of temporality can therefore not be solved if one stays within the straitjacket of textuality; they demand an active exploration of the expressive modalities of different media.

Time Tracks is a mediator of time as much as it is a meditation on time. The book both proposes and performs an experimental use of technical media in philosophy. In an attempt to erode the linearity of the text, theoretical, literary, musical, and biographical excursions appear in the margins of the page. The theoretical function of these side texts constantly shifts throughout the dissertation. Their function depends on the conceptual and medial context in which they appear. Sometimes, they support, complement or criticize the main argument. At others, they contain biographical anecdotes, fictional narratives and other background stories. In all cases, however, the excursions in the margins interrupt the habitual attitude that the reader has developed towards books of philosophy.

In the fall of 2008, he was a visiting professor at the English Department of the University of Minnesota.

In 2007 and 2008, Jan Hein was affiliated to the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht as a postdoctoral researcher, where he worked on a project called Intellectual Image.

Before, he wrote his dissertation Time Tracks at the department of Philosophy of the University of Utrecht, and Media Theory and Cultural Studies at the Humboldt-University in Berlin.

[drain file 2 show]

Jan Hein has published on Prince, Marvin Gaye, Gilles Deleuze, Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka, Friedrich Kittler, Ralph Ellison, Michel Foucault, and the Ol’ Dirty Bastard.

He is currently working on a research project called Medial Operations and a website with the same title, as well as co-editing a volume called Pluralizing Rhythm.

A prezi map made out of individual students projects for my course ‘Space is the Place: Literature, Music and Spatiality’