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.

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: //