Carlo Ginzburg on Foucault

Maria Lúcia G. Pallares Burke interviewing Carlo Ginzburg, in The New History (Polity Press, 2002), pp. 208-209.

I think Foucault is much more interesting than his followers. What is so uninteresting about them is that they take his metaphors as explanations, and that is absurd. And I would even say that Foucault before his metaphors is much more interesting than with his metaphors. /…/

There are several Foucaults, and one of them was extremely brilliant. But as an original thinker he has benn in my view highly overraed. He was a footnote to Nietzsche – but there are so few original thinkers, after all. /…/

Personally, he was probably the most agressive person I ever met. And also egocentric in a maniacal way, which allowed him to sell his image effectively. /…/

That is why a sober approach to Foucault by someone who is not a follower would be very refreshing. A lot of rubbish has been written on him, and actually all those eulogies ultimately belittle him. It would be very good if somebody could rescue Foucault from this silly idolatry.

Wim Mertens - Basic Concepts of Minimal Music

La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass. These four American composers were the first tp apply consistently the techniques of repetition an minimalism in their works. Their music developed in the 1960s in America, and during the seventies became very succesful in Europe as well. /…/
The use of repetition is not new at all What is new is only the global musical context in which it is used, and it is only this situation that allows us to distinguish between American repetition and repetition in classical music. In traditional music, repetition is used in a preeminently narrative and teleological frame, so that musical components like rhythm, melody, harmony and so on are used in a causal, prefigured way, so that a musical perspective emerges that gives the listener a non-ambivalent orientation and that attempts to inform him of meaningful musical contents.
The traditional work is teleological or end-orientated, because all musical events result in a directed end or synthesis. The composition appears as a musical product characterized by an organiz totality. By the underlying dynamic, dramatising construction, a directionality is created that presumes a linear memory in the listener, that forces him or her to follow the linear musical evolution. Repetition in the traditional work appears as a reference to what has gone before, so that one has to remember what was forgotten. This demands a learned, serious and concentrated, memory-dominated approach to listening. The music of the American composers of repetitive music can be described as non-narrative and a-teleological. Their music discards the traditional harmonic functional schemes of tension and relaxation and (currently) disapproves of classical formal schemes and the musical narrative that goes with them /…/

There is only a very tenuous polemical relationship between repetitive music and romantic-dialectical music – in fact, the guiding principles of the latter have simply been ignored. But on the other hand, it is clear that repetitive music can be seen as the final stage of an anti-dialectic movement that has shaped European avant-garde music since Schoenberg, a movement that reached its cilmination with John Cage, even though his music has a very obvious polemical-intellectual background and orientation completely absent from repetitive music. /…/

For instance, one finds that in repetitive music the concept of work has been replaced by the notion of process, and that no one sound had any greater importance than any other. /…/
Traditional dialectical music is representationa: the musical form relates to an expressive content and is a means of creating a growing tension; this is what is usually called the “musical argument”. But repetitive music is not built around such an “argument”; the work is non-representational and is no longer a medium for the expression of subjective feelings. /…/
La Monte Young has removed finality, the apocalypse, from his music, and what is left is mere duration and stasis, without beginning or end: eternal music. In fact, Young has said that his Dream House project is a permanent, continuous work that has no begining and goes on indefinitely.

A work becomes a process when it relates only to itself. The most important characteristic of musical proces as defined by Reich is that it determines simultaneously both the note-to-note details and the overall form. /…/ Subjective intervention is strictly ruled out in favour of a complete determinacy. Reich calls this a particulary liberating and impersonal ritual – he nominally controls everything that happens in the compositional process but also accepts everything that results without further modification. Like Reich, Glass rejects any structure that exists outside the musical process – the process has to generate its own structure: “My music has no overall structure but generates itself at each moment.”
In process music, structure is secondary to sound; the two coincide only in so far as the process determines both the sound and the overall form. Repetitive music is mono-functional and sounds are not programmed to achieve a final solution of the opposition between material and structure. In dialectical music the real rama les in the opposition between form and content and the final resolution of this opposition. But with the removal of logical causality sound becomes autonomous, so that in a process work no structure exists before sound: it is produced at each moment. /…/

In repetitive music perception is an integral and creative part of the musical process since the listener no longer perceies a finished work but actively participates in its construction. Since there is no absolute point of reference a host of interpretative perspectives are possible. So that goal-directed listening, based as it is on recollection and anticipation, is no longer suitable and must be in favour of a random, aimless listening, traditional recollection of the past being replaced by something akin to a “recollection into the future”, actualisation rather than reconstruction. This “forward recollection” removes memory from its priviliged position.
Stoianova called this a game of “iterative monadism”: what matters is not what the sound may stand for but its physiological intensity, or, as Young puts it: “One must get inside the sound”. /…/

What is most important: freedom or manipulation? Liberating the listener does not seem to be a major concern of repetitive composers. Since each moment may be the beginning or the end, the listener can choose how long he wants to listen for, but he will never miss anything by not listening. /…/

To what extent the adoption of a mystical ideology is an inevitable by-product of the use of repetition is not too clear, though the use of non-European musical elements has certainly led Riley and Young to come under the influence of Eastern ideology. To Riley and Young the aim of music is to get “far out” /…/
Bu the continous variation in Riley’s accumulative process negates itself because of its emptiness and leads one to perceive passing time simply as stasis. /…/ The extended static sounds of La Monte Young’s music suggest an anti-apocalyptic time as pure duration. /…/
For Glass and Reich, the removal of dialectical content from music is in no way connected with mystical ideology. Reich’s music assumes neutrality of values as a matter of principle. And while his attempt to use Western sound material in the context of non-Western structural methods seems at first sight to be merely a technical procedure without ideological relevance, the fact that both his and Glass’s music takes place in non-dialectical macro-time, brings them very close to the mysticism of Riley and Young. Glass has expressed his opposition to traditional clock-time and denies structured time-relationships and intentionality. In Western music, the musical argument is the result of a dialectical subdivision of time. Yet both Riley and Reich have eliminated this historical negativity: their idea of time is an empty one, and because of this no real change can take place in their music, so that a higher level of macro-time, beyond history, is reahed, which has been called now or stasis or eternity. It is in this non-historical character of repetitive music that is the real negation of subjectivity.

Friedrich Kittler - The City Is a Medium

Just as we are accustomed–when not also subjected–to absorbing energy in different forms at home, we will also find it quite easy there to receive or absorb accelerated changes and oscillations which our sensory organs pick up and integrate to form all that we know. I don’t know whether philosophers have ever dreamed of a society for the domestic distribution of sensory reality.

Paul Valéry ²

Capital. ³ The name already says it: Capitals are named after the human body. The state (since the Greeks) has been conceived of as an organism, whose head is its capital. This capital, in turn, is ruled by a chief, whose name once more means just that, the head.

Historically, the analogy can be shown to have been true. The prehistoric implosion of villages or entire countrysides and the subsequent emergence of the city was due, as Mumford illustrates, less to economic necessity than to the arms monopoly of a warlord. Plato, as lawmaker for an ideal city, proposed that its size be limited to the range of a voice, which would broadcast laws or commands.

And for centuries–from the prehistoric formation of cities, which was also the beginning of high culture or history, through the residential seats of baroque power–the military head remained architectonically visible: as fortress or acropolis, citadel or palace. Not until the first in-dustrial revolution did a growth begin, whose spread, in Mumford’s eyes, changed the face of the city and went, in the name of pure technology, beyond the ecological necessity of living together: megalopolis.

The description, however, of a digression is often itself a digression. When we cling to the clear-cut centrality of the head in thinking the concept “capital,” it may be (as in Foucault’s thesis “in political thought and analysis”) that “we still have not cut off the head of the king.” ⁴ The monarchs, to whom Europe owes most of its capitals, might thereby be said to have transcended architecture and achieved immortality in the head of theory itself. But if ‘man’ with his ecological necessity is only a miniature of these potentates, it then becomes possible to decipher “head” and “capital” from technology rather than vice versa.

TECHNOLOGY. What strikes the eye of the passerby as a growth or entropy is technology, that is, information. Since cities no longer lie within the panopticon of the cathedral or castle and can no longer be enclosed by walls or fortifications, a network made up of intersecting networks dissects and connects the city–in particular its fringes, peripheries, and tangents. Regardless of whether these networks transmit information (telephone, radio, television) or energy (water supply, electricity, highway), they all represent forms of information. (If only because every modern energy flow requires a parallel control network.) Even in those unthinkable times when energy still needed beasts of burden like Sinbad and information required messengers like the first marathon runner, networks existed. They just hadn’t been built yet or, in technician’s jargon, implemented. The narrow, rugged mule trail was replaced by the railway and the highway, which in turn have been replaced by no less transient copper and fiber optic cables.

NETWORKS. It is common in the open spaces of the city to see the skeletal infrastructure on the backside of a building–these are networks, too.

To best reconstruct the way out of a labyrinth (as the Greeks were said to have done in reading the ruined foundations of Knossos, Phaistos, or Gournia), one doesn’t need to sketch the still visible connecting walls, rather their inverse: the invisible passages between path and door. Thus (in mathematical terminology) a “tree” takes shape, whose bifurcations distinguish the dead ends from the exits.

Or one can, like Claude Shannon, head mathematician for Bell Telephone laboratories, construct a mechanical mouse, capable of nosing its way through the labyrinth on the basis of trial and error. Whereas the mouse would be able to optimize city plans without Ariadne’s thread, Shannon himself was able to optimize an invisible something else: the telephone network in America.

GRAPHS. Mathematics first began around 1770 to take networks, such as the ones above, into account. Topology and graph theory not only reflect modernity, they are, in fact, its beginnings.

In the city still known at that time as Königsberg, seven bridges crossed the Pregel. A city is not only “the corollary of a street,” ⁵ rather by virtue of its network of rivers, canals, and news channels, a city is “the point at which all these paths meet.” ⁶ Leonhard Euler, newly appointed from medieval Basel as mathematician to the new capital St. Petersburg, was moved to question whether or not it would be possible to cross all seven of these bridges over the Pregel once and only once on the same round-trip. ⁷ Euler’s proof that it could never be done disregards all topographic data such as the layout of streets, their twists and turns, and their blind alleys. Euler could just as well have drawn the city plan of Königsberg on a rubber mat, since graph theory consists of just two abstract elements: coordinate points and their connecting lines. From these two abstract elements, all structures in space can be reconstructed: trees and stars, junctions and bridges, rings and hubs, regions and countries–and maps.

Place de l’Etoile, Ringstraße, and Anulare: these graphs have imprinted themselves upon our imagination. Nonetheless, city road maps don’t describe streets and railway lines any more concretely than that rubber mat geometry. “The space in which the modern city unfolds its structures is clearly an abstract space in which the individual constraints are of a topological order; seen from the point of view of the unfolding of these structures, the territory is simply the surface effect of its own topicality.” ⁸

What returns in the form of the topographic passion of the nineteenth century, that is, of the generals, resembles in and of itself the oldest maps: On the Tabula Peutingeriana, which maps out early St. Pölten ⁹ as a relay station within the Roman postal system, the north-south boundaries (probably to better transport the medium “map” across country) have become so frayed that land, sea, and mountain formations are barely discernible. An empire, the Roman empire, vanishing into a pure media landscape.

INTERSECTIONS. Roads between cities are, nevertheless, the single connection which the Peutingeriana maps out. The Roman postal system ignored other arteries of life, such as aqueducts and, as Hölderlin wrote, the “shadowless streets” of the sea. Border towns were coordinate points along a line, relay stations created the tangents, while Rome, where all roads proverbially met, formed the axis of an entire system of intersections. Because no other system intersected or crossed the road system, one level sufficed to represent the graph. The proliferation, thanks to technology, of pure media channels renders that impossible. In a well-known textbook example, three houses need to be hooked up to three different energy systems–gas, water, and electricity–without one connection crossing the other. But this GWE-graph is not a flat graph, that is, the various connections cannot be flattened. A city, likewise, is not a flattenable graph. In a city, networks overlap upon other networks. Every traffic light, every subway transfer, and every post office, as well as all the bars and bordellos, speak for this fact. Bridges, of course, span other rivers besides the Pregel and railway viaducts don’t just cross the Traisen. ¹⁰ Modern city planners doubtlessly have tried to model the networks in Chandigarh, Brasília, and other new cities using a tree-graph whose branches and stems do not intersect and can thus be conflated. However, “a city is not a tree,” rather a “half-grid” whose overlappings themselves belong to the system. ¹¹

CAPITALS expand upon this rule exponentially. It is not alone the state with its limes or system of borders, its self-induced “resonance” (MP 540), which defines the city. Rather in capitals, networks between cities overlap upon other networks between other cities. Beneath, upon, and above the ground, the overloaded nodes make a mockery of every conflation. Time in the city is a function of transfers, turn-ons and turn-offs. Jacques Offenbach’s “Paris Life” (1866) is the first play to be set in a train station. In Vienna, imperial Austria connected the intersection of its four European railways and their terminals with an internal rail ring, which at the time was connected to the outlying regions by a light railroad. The sheer frequency of actual intersections in the capitals and metropoles is Tyche, that is, Fortuna or Chance, whom Valéry envisioned upon first awakening in Paris to the endless rush of traffic and then went on to celebrate as the prerequisite for all fortuitous conjunctions. Forgetting for a moment the rolled head of the king–the capital is clearly the “daughter of great numbers.” ¹²

MEDIA exist to process, record, and transmit numbers. A Greek city, probably Milet, provides us with two of our oldest forms of media: the coin and the vowel alphabet. ¹³ Rome, in order to extend itself from a city into a state, adopted the most advanced form of oriental transmission media: the Achaemenidian postal system. ¹⁴

Thus our terms for media, if not directly, like “heart” or “brain of a circuit,” derived from the human body, stem nonetheless from the city. From the day Shannon applied George Booles’s circuit algebra to a coupling of telegraph relays, the elements which are logically the most simple, and which have no memory, have been known as gates or ports. Circuits, on the other hand, whose initial and final positions are not only a function of the gates and ports, but also of the circuit’s own prehistory, presuppose (no less municipal here) a built-in memory. When the World War II mathematician John von Neumann laid down the prin-ciples for sequential working-off or computation for almost all present-day computer “architectures,” he bestowed the fitting name “bus” on the parallel channels between hard drive, gate, and memory, and thus extended the Biedermeier tradition of metropolitan traffic. Von Neumann’s prophesy that only computers themselves would be capable of planning their own, more intelligent, next generation, because the complex knot of networks would surpass the planning ability of the engineers, has been fulfilled by computer programs called “routing”: network models, like Shannon’s mouse, which operate as if they were street plans (with all the aggravations of jaywalking and traffic jams). Entire cities made of silicon, silicon oxide, and gold wire have since arisen. Yet the living units or houses in these cities must be measured in terms of molecules whose total surface area, even after having been reproduced millions of times, barely fill a square millimeter. The technologic media miniaturize the city, while magnifying the entropy of megalopolis. Not only have the technological traffic modules of modernity, such as parking garages and airports, rendered obsolescent the age-old module “life-sized,” indeed, it seems to me that modulization itself has been rendered obsolescent. And graph theory is responsible. The more one thinks about a capital like Paris, wrote Valéry, the more one learns about oneself from the city. No system, however, is self-governing, neither the city nor the module. It is hence more urgent, in a grey field without reference points, to connect up networks without value systems, and to take leave of

MUMFORD’S POINT OF DEPARTURE.

Through its concentration of physical and cultural power, the city heightened the tempo of human intercourse and translated its products into forms that could be stored and reproduced. Through its monuments, written records, and orderly habits of association, the city enlarged the scope of all human activities, extending them backwards and forwards in time. By means of its storage facilities (buildings, vaults, archives, monuments, tablets, books), the city became capable of transmitting a complex culture from generation to generation, for it marshalled together not only the physical means but the human agents needed to pass on and enlarge this heritage. That remains the greatest of the city’s gifts. As compared with the complex human order of the city, our present ingenious electronic mechanisms for storing and transmitting information are crude and limited. ¹⁵

Based on these remarks, Mumford clearly understands cities to be analogous to and compatible with computers–and therefore media. The analogy and its specific points only deal, however, with the two functions of the recording and the transmission of information, and it succumbs moreover to diachrony in its crossing of networks. The fundamental third function, information processing, is absent (because it would pull the carpet out from under Mumford’s humanistic value judgments). It is almost as if the historian of cities had forgotten his insight that part of the greatness of ancient Florence consisted in having erected with the Uffizi, the first office building–a central bureau for data processing.

MEDIA record, transmit and process information–this is the most elementary definition of media. Media can include old-fashioned things like books, familiar things like the city and newer inventions like the computer. It was von Neumann’s computer architecture that technically implemented this definition for the first time in history (or as its end). A microprocessor contains a processor, the memory and buses, not just in addition to something else, but exclusively. The processor carries out logical or arithmetical commands, according to the parameters set up in the memory; the buses transmit commands, addresses, and data based on the parameters of the processor and its most recent command; the memory ultimately makes it possible to read commands or data at precise addresses or to encode them. This network of processing, transmission, and recording, or restated: of commands, addresses, and data, can calculate everything (based on Turing’s famous proof from 1936) that is calculable. ¹⁶ The development of technologic media–from digital transmission media, like the telegraph, to analog recording media, like gramophone and film, and to the media for their transmission, radio and television–comes logically full circle. ¹⁷ Other media can, likewise, be transferred to the discrete universal machine. And this is reason enough to bring together the workings of the city with concepts from general information science. Reason enough, moreover, to decipher past media and the historical function of what we refer to as “man,” as the play between commands, addresses, and data.

DATA can consist of random variables, so long as these variables have a predetermined format (analog or digital, bytes or words, and so forth). Von Neumann machines can assign strings standing for numbers and strings standing for letters to one and the same address. Thus an imperial edict for reform, dating from January 12, 1782, permitted, in the city of St. Pölten, “the charter of the Carmelite cloister (with 19 nuns), devoted solely to the life of introspection, to be revoked, the spaces to be converted into the boys’ schoolhouse of the Regiment Pelegrini and to be used as a garrison, the ornaments and ritual objects of the chapel to be either confiscated, sold or given away and to establish the chapel itself as the magazine.” ¹⁸ A unit of memory once set up for eternity became a memory unit with unrestricted access, serving henceforth the disciplined mobilization of troops and pupils. In the computer system, a read-write capable school boy obviously corresponds to read-write memory (random access memory) for variable data; in contrast, the ritual objects form a repository of value (read only memory) for programming commands and constants. Thus the so-called late Enlightenment, viewed as the revolution from above, which took place in Austria no differently than in the northern German states, simply replaced the mode of memory, installing a system not only capable of recording information, but also capable of erasing it: from eraser to “individual” to capital. We have forgotten that the city, as an event or data, once existed on its own apart from the state. More delicate, however, than the exchange of data is its formatting. In the case of the city, the modules upon which it has been built help to determine that format. The railway stations, which have (in the words of Napoleon III) ascended by the middle of the nineteenth century to the status of city gates, could not so readily give, as Joseph II did to Austria’s cloisters, a new function to the old portals, which had been up until that point the incoming/outgoing point for a postal system whose coaches transmitted people, goods, and news, that is, addresses, data, and commands. The railway not only stole the people and the goods away from the carriages of the postal system, it also assigned a new module or format to this information: in the carriages of the first class, the railway mobilized the officers; in second class, the lower ranking officers; and in third class, the battallion’s infantry. ¹⁹ This explains Benjamin’s euphemistic remark on “the historical signature of the railway”: it is “the first–and except for the ocean liner perhaps also the last–means of transportation which also forms the masses.” ²⁰

Traffic in the city, the masses of automobiles, need too to be formed or formatted. Richard Euringer, speaker for the National Association of German Writers, expressed the hope as late as 1935 that those “collisions, damages, injuries and bottlenecks,” which stem from the “freedom of self-propulsion” or auto-mobility, could be minimized through traffic regulations and the Führerprinzip. ²¹ The engineers, however, know better. The present-day computer gate–binary myths or horror stories to the contrary–does not take into account just two, rather it takes three possible circuit states into account: aside from the positive state “I” and the negative state “0,” there is a third state of higher impedance which isolates the corresponding data sources at their outgoing channel and thereby permits, after a short transition interval, other data sources to be transmitted by the same bus without collision. The yellow state on every stoplight performs the same function. In the endless circulation of green, yellow, red–or “I,” tri-state, “0″–the city’s countless streams of traffic (from the pedestrian to the bus) can be reduced to an alphanumerically digitizable data format, which a computer somewhere in the city’s central processing unit has also been tracking. Only an observer from an airplane or skyscraper–like Claude Lévi-Strauss in the megalopolis of New York City–can recognize once more behind the universal discrete street machine, that analog or continuous flow of vehicles, which once was called traffic, but since has come to be known as frequency.

ADDRESSES are data which allow other data to appear. In order to connect a computer’s memory to the data bus, the address bus first must address a single unit of memory, and secondly the command bus must address the entire memory. Media are only as good and as fast as their distributors. When books were still antique endless rolls, you couldn’t very well flip to a page or double-check a reference. Even in a handwritten medieval codex, the page numbers were not of much help, since varying copyists had, each to a different degree, distributed the text widely or narrowly with each individual copy. Gutenberg’s printing press first made it possible that “this page here resembles thousands of others,” ²² meaning it can be found, using the table of contents or index, in every printed edition. Cities are no different. It was the police prefects of absolutism (such as La Reynie in Paris) who saw to it that the hand-painted guild signs on the older houses conformed to the same standard and ultimately made them independent from the location of the house number. ²³ From the national postal service to the public telephone to the license plate on every registered vehicle, media are at work replacing people with their addresses.

Stephan Daedalus, James Joyce’s fictitious other, signed the front page of his geography book (of all books!):

Stephan Dedalus
Class of Elements
Clongowes Wood College
Sallins
County Kildare
Ireland
Europe
The World
The Universe ²⁴

A bit more prosaic, but no less specific, are personal ads which include a telephone number and/or a regional specification based on the license plate. Whether or not someone picks up the telephone receiver is of secondary interest. There is a good reason for that, too. It sufficed, legally, in the nineteenth century when the registered letter from the authorities landed in the mailbox, even when it could be proven that the addressee was never at the given address. “The nymphs are departed . . . have left no addresses,” ²⁵ wrote Eliot, granted about nymphs and their playmates–but even river deities themselves are addresses. The readjustment of the course of the Nadelbach, which later came to be known as the Tragisa or the Traisen, was cause for St. Pölten’s historic first inscription: The Roman vice-magistrate Marcus Aurelius Julius dedicated an altar to Neptune, god of the waters.

Addresses, literally, create channels. They separate mountain streams from waterways, people from subjects, cities from capitals. Under highly technologized conditions, capitals scarcely need to be built; they only need to be assigned addresses. Paul Hindemith didn’t write his didactic play “Wir bauen eine Stadt” (We’re Building a City) in 1931 for brick-layers or architects, rather for the midrange frequency of the Southwest German Radio Corp.; and to be more precise, he wrote it for his brother-in-law, the Frankfurt radio mogul Hans Flesch. ²⁶

Founding a capital today means that at highway intersections and in train stations, in time tables and computer networks, a new “hub” arises, which centralizes the flow of energy and information. Even in the twenties, major European cities, in order to keep the dream of the center alive, didn’t like to see their names on road signs. And “it was often the case that even the administrative agencies responsible for road work were unfamiliar with regions lying outside of the narrower confines of their borders, which is why they didn’t appear on the road signs–sometimes even deliberately.” ²⁷ The strategic opening of space first placed the hub among the technological forms of animal life and began to number channels according to right-of-way. On computer buses, the tri-state commands regulate the right-of-way relations between “master” and “slave.” On highways, it was Napoleon who instituted the concept of driving on the right-hand side of the road, thereby eliminating the chaos in the streets and clearing the national avenues, as well as the rows of poplars, for the marching columns of his autonomously operating divisions. It could also be said that it was the railway, at the very latest, which installed (in computer terminology) bidirectional traffic and gave modern media the model of divided lanes of traffic. Collisions have since then come to be known as derailings and passersby really are just passing by.

It was a provisional center stripe, which from February 1916 onward restricted French pedestrians, bicyclists, ox-carts, and so forth, from using the poplar-lined national highways, in order to better organize the transport, on the right, of munitions and, on the left, of corpses, that saved the besieged city of Verdun from the bloody imperial “gristmill.” This improvisation of the enemy was turned by Guderian, ²⁸ the World War I tank commander of the Wehrmacht, into the center stripe–with an eye toward the next war–on his autobahn. “The counterattack–as a general rule in the art of war–never attacks same with same. Rather against artillery you have the tank, against the tank, the helicopter, and so forth. The war machine thus possesses a factor of innovation, which differs radically from the innovations of the machines for production” (MP 494).

COMMANDS, although termed “instructions” in the pedagogically modest Anglo-American of the inventors of the computer are, in fact, orders. An analogy without algorithm, which requires its own auto-execution, might have been left, as it has been in the past, up to the resourcefulness of mathematicians. Data processing, however, makes the genius or the boss superfluous.

Because in the final analysis “to command” simply means “to address.” This is true for the lowest level of digital computation devices, in the so-called microcode, where the patent wars are the most vicious; and it also applies, as Althusser’s analysis illustrates, to the lowest level of everyday city life: a citizen is anyone whom the cry–”Hey, you there!”–of a police officer on the street causes to stop and turn around.

Command centers thus aren’t rooted in the forest of symbols planted by a power. Rather they spring up in the less obvious tangents that, like bridges, connect them with unflattenable graphs.

If it is true that the first ministries in Prussia originated from a central privy council, the bureaucrats of Kafka and Austria know better. The central administrative authority during Kaiser Maximilian’s reign did not arise out of the aristocratic agency of the Roman-German emperor. On the contrary, this is an entirely technological moment of liquidation in Austria: the Hapsburgs came into power step by step with the bourgeois lawyers in their chancery court. Chancery courts for the individual states followed, linking cities and provinces to the hub, the capital. ²⁹ Power thus means occupying at the right moment the channels for technological data processing. And centrality becomes a variable dependent on media functions, rather than vice versa.

On April 9, 1809 Kaiser Franz II declared war on France. Within days his patriotically charged armies had crossed internal borders. A letter to the Bavarian monarch, containing the order to sever the treaty with Napoleon, went unheeded. So the Austrian forces of war set out to deliver the transmitted information personally and marched on Munich. King Max fled, but the French envoy had just enough time to get off a courier to Strasbourg where Napoleon’s staff general Berthier was headquartered.

France’s border cities had been connected to the capital since the creation of the fourteen independent armies of the revolution in 1794 by optical telegraph, the first high-speed transmission system in history. Berthier thus had no problem dispatching a telegram to Napoleon in Paris, and Napoleon could then telegraph his army; until the French, in the record time of two weeks, had liberated Munich. As a result, the Bavarian ruler commissioned his academy of science to develop an improved telegraph, the electric telegraph. ³⁰

Napoleon’s war machine meanwhile marched onward to Wagram and unified Europe with the optical telegraph (just as the Roman postal system had once done with its pony express). Church steeples, which for centuries had been the one and only channel between power and people, were assigned a new function. “On the northern face of the cathedral’s steeple” in St. Pölten, the occupation army installed “a ‘telegraphic machine,’ which was part of the pipeline of military information running from Vienna to Strasbourg. This pipeline consisted of military outposts placed on towers or overlooks and stationed at one- to two-hour intervals; signals could be transmitted using three flags (blue, red and white) whose meaning was only known to the ‘directors’ at the end of each line.” ³¹ While the equally functional tricolor flew above Austrian cities, foreign forces of the Enlightenment surveyed the Austrian countryside, which maps since the Peutingeriana had more or less ignored. Marshall Marmont, for instance, dispatched a cavalry division to cartographically document the mountains, valleys and marshes around St. Pölten, whose very impenetrability cracked the code on a new technology of warfare.

Since then, armies have been able to bypass cities and, moreover, capitals. Over mountain ranges, through swamplands, or across desert sands, the Blitzkrieg attacks the enemy from the rear, seeking to enclose spaces rather than cities. The sole prerequisite is a precise map, once top secret information but increasingly after 1800 the monopoly of staff generals in France, Prussia, and Austria.

The total air war beginning in 1942 reconstituted the urban centers. The module for destruction, however, has ceased to be “man.” Rather for phosphorous bombs it is a city; for uranium bombs, a major city; and ultimately for hydrogen bombs, megalopolis. The wide green spaces and broad arteries of life in the cities of the Federal Republic are indeed a small consolation, even if they do originate from architectural plans made during the World Wars to avert the next bomb terror. ³²

The “invisible city,” with which Mumford concludes his world history as the history of the city, consists of more than mere information technologies operating seamlessly and at the speed of light. The computer commands for deletion are also ready to be called up. “This is the last and worst bequest of the citadel (read ‘Pentagon’ or ‘Kremlin’) to the culture of cities.” ³³

Wilhelm von Humboldt University, Berlin

(Translated by Matthew Griffin)

Notes

1. This essay first appeared in a volume on Vienna, Geburt einer Hauptstadt am Horizont, ed. Dietmar Steiner, Georg Schöllhammer, Gregor Eichinger, and Christian Knechtl (Vienna, 1988); it was reprinted in Mythos Metropole, ed. Gotthard Fuchs, Bernhard Moltmann, and Walter Prigge (Frankfurt a.M., 1995), pp. 228-44. [Tr.]

2. Paul Valéry, “La conquête de l’ubiquité,” Oeuvres, vol. 2 (Paris, 1960), p. 1285; my translation. All subsequent translations are my own unless otherwise noted.

3. The author puns on the German word Hauptstadt, literally “head-city,” a translation from the Latin capitalis, which means “at the head, foremost or chief” and stems from caput / capitis, the “head.” [Tr.]

4. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, tr. Robert Hurley (New York, 1978), pp. 88-89.

5. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Capitalisme et schizophrénie: Mille Plateaux (Paris, 1980), p. 539; hereafter cited in text as MP.

6. Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, tr. Ralph Manheim (New York, 1961), p. 152.

7. Joachim Jäger, Elementare Topologie (Paderborn, 1980), p. 129.

8. Didier Gille, “Maceration and Purification,” Zone Magazine, 1:2 (1986).

9. St. Pölten is the capital of southern Austria and has its own independent charter. [Tr.]

10. The Traisen, a tributory of the Danube, flows through St. Pölten. [Tr.]

11. See Christopher Alexander, “A City is not a Tree,” Design Magazine (1965).

12. Paul Valéry, “Présence de Paris,” in Oeuvres, vol. 2, p. 1015.

13. Johannes Lohmann, “Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik,” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft, 37 (1980), 167-86.

14. Harold Adams Innis, Empire and Communications (Oxford, 1950), p. 71. The Achaemenidian dynasty ruled in Persia from 550 BC to 331 BC. [Tr.]

15. Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, its Transformations, and its Prospects (New York, 1961), p. 569; see also Lewis Mumford, Megalopolis: Gesicht und Seele der Groß-Stadt (Wiesbaden, 1951).

16. Alan Turing, “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, 2:42 (1936), 23-165; see also Mechanical Intelligence, ed. D. C. Ince (Amsterdam, 1992); and Alan Turing, Intelligence Service: Schriften, ed. Bernhard Dotzler and Friedrich Kittler (Berlin, 1987).

17. See Friedrich Kittler, Grammophon Film Typewriter (Berlin, 1986).

18. See August Hermann, Geschichte der Stadt St. Pölten, 2 vols. (St. Pölten, 1917-1930).

19. Sven Hedin, Ein Volk in Waffen: Den deutschen Soldaten gewidment (Leipzig, 1915), p. 75.

20. Walter Benjamin, Schriften, vol. 7 (Frankfurt a.M., 1982), p. 744.

21. Richard Euringer, Chronik einer deutschen Wandlung, 1925-1935 (Hamburg, 1936),
p. 263.

22. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Mausoleum: Thirty-Seven Ballads for the History of Progress, tr. Joachim Neugroschel (New York, 1976), p. 4.

23. See Jacques Saint-Germain, La Reynie et la police du Grand siècle d’après de nombreux documents inédits (Paris, 1962).

24. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man (New York, 1928), pp. 11-12.

25. T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land,” in Selected Poems (London, 1954), 3.179-81.

26. See Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Intellektuellendämmerung: Zur Lage der Frankfurter Intelligenz in den zwanziger Jahren (Frankfurt a.M., 1983).

27. Kurt Kaftan, Der Kampf um die Autobahnen: Geschichte und Entwicklung des Autobahngedankens in Deutschland von 1907-1935 unter Berücksichtigung ähnlicher Pläne und Bestrebungen im übrigen Europa (Berlin, 1955), p. 13.

28. Heinz Guderian oversaw the expansion of the Autobahn after World War I. [Tr.]

29. See Otto Hintze, “Der österreichische und preußische Beamtenstaat im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert: Eine vergleichende Betrachtung,” Historische Zeitschrift, 86 (1901); see also “Der Beamtenstand,” Vorträge der Gehe-Stiftung zu Dresden, vol. 3 (Leipzig, 1911).

30. Rolf Oberliesen, Information, Daten und Signale: Geschichte technischer Informationsverarbeitung (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1982), p. 241.

31. Herrmann, Geschichte.

32. Manfred Durth, Deutsche Architekten: Biographische Verflechtungen 1925-1970 (Munich, 1987), pp. 252-68.

33. Mumford, The City in History, p. 569.

Matthew Fuller on pirate radio, material media and nomadology

Matthew Fuller: Media Ecologies. Materialist energies in art and technoculture
Excerpts from Chapter 1, “The R, the A, the O, the I, the O”

18: The metallurgist posseses an intense relation to materiality: a proprioception of and through changes of state of the matter that one is working with, becoming aware of its tics and glitches in terms of how they are mobilizable, in that realms they operate in topological terms, what they connect to or elide. An experimental science or tacit knowledge formed through the use of impurities and changes in structure and integration of metals by leaps between temperatures through heating and quenching. /…/ This minor science is presented in A Thousand Plateaus as being a tradition counter to or partly submerged by that of hylomorphism. This schema, or “form-matter model”, has dominated Western thought since the first systematic schools of ancient Greece. In the treatise on nomadology by contrast, Deleuze and Guattari propose an emphasis on the morphogenic capabilities of material itself: the moments when a series of forces, capacities, and predispositions intermesh to make something else occur, to move into a state of self-organization.
Hylomorphism is “a model of the genesis of form as external to matter, as imposed from the outside like a command on a material which is thought inert and dead”.

19: But as Kittler easily points out, “Electrics does not equal electronics”. The media systems that in combination produce the current form of pirate radio include both the primarily electrical or electromagnetic (the T1200 gramophone, the transmitter coil, etc.) and those that exist in the mode of digital information and electronics (e.g., the GSM phone – something of a bastard case in that it necessarily maintains an interface to electromagnetic waves; and computationally based samplers and synthesizers, etc.). Both electric and electronic sound technologies also allow a sense of a doubling of the machinic phylum in that the manipulation of singularities and flows at one level becomes explicable only when it manifests as another – in sound waves.

20-21: Radio’s section of the electromagnetic spectrum was born regulated. At the end of the nineteenth century, the British government “Made the wireless telegraph a state monopoly, assigning it to the Post Office, with oversight granted to the Admirality.” The only portion of the spectrum not directly falling under state control and procedures of listening is that visible to the naked eye.

23: Pirate radio has shown a capacity to generate medial growths that ground themselves in the attempt to impose form on them, to synthesize what is fundamentally heterogenous. That is, the attempted hylomorphism itself becomes “content” – there is a coevolution, an arms race that feeds the machinic phylum. /…/
Mutual escalation of competing technologies, of legislation and its object, of the appropriation of locations for studios and for transmitter sites, produces its own mutational field in the composition of the machinic phylum of radio – /…/ but the result is in excess of what had previously been legislated against. It is now harder to locate and capture a radio station connected in this way to a transmitter than it was before the legislation was introduced.

24-25: The turntable, with its appendages, is a stalled computer: a head and an infinite tape. It can read stored material, it can reproduce any sound; but used in the standard way, it can only read, not store. Hip hop declared war on this nonfacility by throwing the disc into reverse, mutilating predetermined regimes of speed and frequency. Hip hop mobilized the third category of action of the computer; alongside reading and storing information, the universal machine must be able to act on itself, to calculate. The pace space of all possible sounds of the turntable is determined by the table drawn up at the intersection of speed and frequency. turntablism opens this space up to mutation outside of the regimes of melody, harmony, and voice by forming a copula between the two series, thythm and noise. The endless tape of the Turing machine is imposed on the finite coil, causing it to leap from break to break. /…/ The turntable invents the DJ in order to compute.

40: The aesthetic of mass radio is formed at the same time as that of the autobahn. The conjunction of car and radio accelerates toward the absolute immobilization of drive time.

40-41: The MP3 file format, which has achieved such mass usage as a means of circulating tracks via the Internet, is designed simply to match the included middle of the audio spectrum audible to the human ear. Thus, it obligerates the range of musics designed to be heard with the remainder of the body via bass. This is not simply a white technological cleansing of black music but the configuration of organs, a call to order for the gut, the arse, to stop vibrating and leave the serious work of signal processing to the head.

51: SMS triangulates the historical interconnection of wireless telegraphy, the telegraph, and the phone by providing a way for the compressed forms of writing employed in the telegraph to return via the telephone. The constraints imposed by the multiple usages of every key on the keypad, by the 160-character limit to each message and the tight limit on the amount of text viewable at any time on the small screen of the phone, have been taken up by a telegrammatic speech in which compression is achieved via the shedding of vowels redundant in signifying the word /…/ Language reinvents the alphanumeric character set into thick clots of association.

Clips on Symbolic/Imaginary/Real

Jacques Lacan: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory; edited by Slavoj Zizek (introduction)

2: “the elementary matrix of human experience: ‘Imaginary‘ is the deceptive universe of fascinating images and the subject’s identifications with them; ‘Symbolic‘ is the differential structure which organizes our experience of meaning; ‘Real‘ is the point of resistance, the traumatic ‘indivisible remainder’ that resists symbolization.”

= = =

Tarrying With the Negative, by Slavoj Zizek

178: “The triad Imaginary-Real-Symbolic renders the fundamental coordinates of the Lacanian theoretical space; but these three dimensions can never be conceived simultaneously, in pure synchronicity, i.e., one is always forced to choose one pair at a time (as with Kierkegaard’s triad of the aesthetical-ethical-religious): the Symbolic versus the Imaginary, the Real versus the Symbolic. The hitherto predominating interpretations of Lacan tended to accent either the axis Imaginary-Symbolic (symbolization, symbolic realization, against imaginary self-deception in the Lacan of the fifties) or the axis Symbolic-Real (the traumatic encounter of the Real as the point at which symbolization fails in the late Lacan). What Boothby offers as a key to the entire Lacanian theoretical edifice is simply the third, not yet exploited axis: the Imaginary versus the Real. That is to say /…/ the theory of the mirror-stage /…/ designates also the original fact which defines the status of man: the alienation in the mirror image, due to man’s premature birth and his/her helplessness in the first years of life /…/ it introduces an irreducible béance, gap, separating forever the imaginary ego – the wholesome yet immobile mirror image, a kind of halted cinematic picture – from the polymorphous, chaotic sprout of bodily drives – the real Id. From this perspective, the Symbolic is of a strictly secondary nature with regard to the original tension between the Imaginary and the Real: its place is the void opened up by the exklusion of the polymorphous wealth of bodily drives. /…/ it is therefore a kind of compromise formation by way of which the subject integrates fragments of the ostracized Real.”

= = =

The Other Side of Desire: Lacan’s Theory of the Registers; by Tamise Van Pelt

49: “the methodological danger in register theory is that it tempts the critic to define the imaginary and the symbolic ‘relationally in terms of [each] other’ as opposed functions. /…/ Instead, critics ‘ought to be able to distinguish Imaginary from Symbolic at the moment of emergence of each’”

= = =

History of Structuralism: 1967-Present; by Francois Dosse

119-120: “Lacan called this his theriac, the name of the best-known medication in antiquity, which long sustained the hope of finding a panacea. This was also his ternary, and later, simply RSI, or his heresy with respect to Freud. /…/
Linguistic binarism became a triadic order, consonant with the structure of Hegelian dialectics and with the Freudian topic separating the id, the ego, and the superego /…/ Lacan reversed Freud; the symbolic governed the structure whereas the id, which Lacan assigned to the Real, was at the core of the drives for Freud. This was the major shift, both in language and in structure; the unconscious was no longer assigned to a sort of interred Hell from which it had to be driven out, but could be grasped at the surface of words and in slips of the tongue.”

= = =

The End of Dissatisfaction: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment; by Todd McGowan

19: “The status of enjoyment, in fact, provides an easy way of grasping Lacan’s symbolic-imaginary-Real triad: in the Real, we can enjoy; in the imaginary, we imagine that we enjoy; and in the symbolic, the symbolic enjoys in our stead. Even though it only provides an imagined enjoyment, the imaginary nontheless seems to provide enjoyment as such, while the symbolic order only offers desire. This is why one cannot think the society of prohibition without the imaginary housing the image of the denied enjoyment. /…/
The imaginary, however, does not exist outside of or prior to the symbolic. It is the Real that marks the limit point – the failure – of the symbolic order, not the imaginary. The imaginary is simply a perspective within the symbolic, a way of seeing that fails to grasp its own symbolic determination. /…/
Lacan minimizes the distinction between imaginary and symbolic /…/ imaginary experience never actually breaks from the structure of the symbolic order.”

= = =

For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor; by Slavoj Zizek

xii: “There are three modalities of the Real: the ‘real Real‘ (the horrifying Thing, the primordial object, from Irma’s throat to the Alien); the ‘symbolic Real‘ (the real as consistency, the signifier reduced to a senseless formula, like quantum physics formulas which can no longer be translated back into – or related to – the everyday experience of our life-world); and the ‘imaginary Real‘ (the mysterious je ne sais quoi, the unfathomable ’something’ on account of which is the sublime dimension shines through an ordinary object). The Real is thus, in effect, all three dimensions at the same time /…/
And, in a strictly homologous way, there are three modalities of the Symbolic (the real – the signifier reduced to a senseless formula; the imaginary – the Jungian ’symbols’; and the symbolic – speech, meaningful language); and three modalities of the Imaginary (the real – fantasy, which is precisely an imaginary scenario occupying the place of the Real; the imaginary – image as such in its fundamental function as decoy; and the symbolic – again, the Jungian ’symbols’ or New Age archetypes).”

= = =

Symbolic Exchange and Death; by Jean Baudrillard

31: “From now on political economy is the real for us, which is to say precisely that it is the sign’s referential, the horizon of a defunct order whose simulation preserves it in a ‘dialectical’ equilibrium. It is the real, and therefore the imaginary, since here again the two formerly distinct categories have fused and drifted together. /…/

= = =

Re-Inventing the Symptom: Essays on the Final Lacan; edited by Luke Thurston

2: “Lacan’s work is often divided into three periods: the Imaginary (1936-1952), the Symbolic (1953-1962), and the Real (1963-1981).”

4: “It is only through the identification with an external point that the illusion of unity is installed and can be maintained. It is as if unity can only be realized in a unity that is not one but in fact two. For this reason, the Imaginary relation is called a dual relation.”

= = =

The Fugitive’s Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession; by Stephen Michael Best

59: “The novelty of piano secondi reproduced ‘without understanding a single Rudiment or Written Music,’ is, in fact, the novelty of the mechanical reproduction of sound before its technical achievement – an imagining, in short, of acoustic property (of the acoustic as alienable and commodity) in advance of the phonograph and the application of the law of intellectual property to sound.”

60: “By the formal associations of the law, by its apparent logic, writing stands as the necessary analogue to all forms of intellectual and awsthetic property. Writing provides the cornerstone to the social contruction of authorship and the cultural legitimation of literary proprty. /…/
The metaphoric abstraction of the ‘book’ into the author’s ‘grounds’ joins literary property and real estate in an imaginary complex, a counterfactual synthesis of the immaterial and the material /…/
Acoustic phenomena resist such synthesis yet come nearer than any other class of phenomena (nearer, even, than literary property) to what may be called the ‘metaphysics’ of intellectual property; for, intangible and evanescent, sounds typify a whole class of disembodied and immaterial items that, seemingly incapable of clear demarcation, often require the translation of property claims into secondary symbolic systems.”

= = =

Catherine Liu, in: The Cambridge Companion to Lacan; edited by Jean-Michel Rabaté

264: “Kittler /…/ underlines what Zizek, Krauss, and Cultural and Visual Studies miss when they intellectualize mass media and popular culture by making it the bone of academic contention:

‘Technical media have neither to do with intellectuals nor withg mass culture. They are strategies of the Real.’”

= = =

Larson Powell, in: Sound Matters: Essays on the Acoustics of German Culture; edited by Nora M. Alter, Lutz Koepnick

236: “Cage – pace his apologists – could not reduce art to nothing more than a direct transcription of the real, which would be a contradictio in adjecto“

238: “From the real of radio noise, the piece has arrived finally at the real of the composer’s body /…/ The periodicity of breathing is an exact answer to commercial music’s tautological reinforcement of pulse-beats, the diciplinary rituals of aggressive imaginary periodicity. Stockhausen can only return to this real of breathing /…/ Almost all the rhythms in Western music are those of the human body – when we march or run or walk or move slowly – the rhythms of our limbs and their subdivisions and multiplications. A work like Hymnen incorporates rhythms and durations that are no longer bound to the body. ‘Western music’ (in Stockhausen’s view) has been tied to the imaginary, ego-bound, conscious body. Rather than simply overwhelming the listener with the noise of the insane real (as Kittler would have it, which is an impossibility), Stockhausen’s piece has, as Christian Metz wrote of film, inscribed a new area of the real into the symbolic, thereby changing the latter itself. /…/
Stockhausen risked the va banque gambit of turning to the electronic instruments that the mass public still associates only with pop – even though the latter most often did little more than borrow Stockhausen’s technocal inventions and incorporate them as decorative, illustrative sound effects over a restoration of tonal harmony at its most symmetrical and repetitive. Nothing could be further from the mark than Kittler’s claim that pop and rock are a direct irruption of madness and the real. In fact, in most pop, electronics function as a conventional version of the sublime /…/ Nor can Kittler’s notion that media are opposed to the subjectivity of high art hold up (an idea depending, in fact, on the systematic exclusion of musical modernity from Kittler’s historiography).”

= = =

Symbolic Logic Game of Logic; by Lewis Carroll

2: “As this Process is entirely Mental, we can perform it whether there is, or is not, an existing Thing which possesses that Adjunct. If there is the Class is said to be ‘Real‘; if not it is said to be ‘Unreal‘, or ‘Imaginary.”

Simon Frith: The industrialization of music

From Andy Bennet, Barry Shank, Jason Toynbee (red.): The Popular Music Studies Reader (Routledge, London 2006), s. s. 231-238

231: “The contrast between music-as-expression and music-as-commodity defines twentieth-century pop experience. /…/ Read any pop history and you will find in outline the same sorry tale. However the story starts, and whatever the author’s politics, the industrialization of music means a shift from active musical production to passive pop consumption, the decline of folk or community or subcultural traditions, and a general loss of musical skill. [...]
What such arguments assume /…/ is that there is some essential human activity, music-making, which has been colonized by commerce. /…/
The flaw in this argument is the suggestion that music is the starting point of the industrial process – the raw material over which everyone fights – when it is, in fact, the final product. The industrialization of music cannot be understood as something which happens to music, since it describes a process in which music itself is made.”
231-232: “Twentieth-century popular music means the twentieth-century popular record; not the record of something (a song? a singer? a performance?) which exists independently of the music industry, but a form of communication which determines what songs, singers and songwriters are and can be.”
232: “We are coming to the end of the record era now (and so, perhaps, to the end of pop music as we know it) /…/
rock and roll was /…/ the climax of (or possibly footnote to) a story that began with Edison’s phonograph.”

236: “Pop music meant pop records, commodities, a technological and commercial process under the control of a small number of companies. Such control depended on the ownership of the means of record production and distribution /…/ Live music-making was still important but its organization and profits were increasingly dependent on the exigencies of record-making. The most important way of publicizing pop now – the way most people heard most music – was on the radio, and records were made with radio formats and radio audiences in mind”
237: “Record companies quickly realized tape’s flexibility and cheapness, and by 1950 tape recording had replaced disc recording entirely. This was the technological change which allowed new, independent producers into the market – the costs of recording fell dramatically even if the problems of large-scale manufacture and distribution remained. Mid-1950s American indie labels like Sun were as dependent on falling studio costs as late-1970s punk labels in Britain /…/
what could be done during this intermediary stage, to the tape itself, that transformed pop music-making. Producers no longer had to take performances in their entirety. They could cut and splice, edit the best bits of performances together, cut out the mistakes, make records of ideal not real events.”
238: “By the mid-1960s the development of multi-track recording enabled sounds to be stored separately on the same tape /…/ Studio-made music need no longer bear any relationship to anything that can be performed live; records use sounds, the effects of tape tricks and electronic equipment, that no one has ever even heard before as musical. /…/
It was pop producers, unashamedly using technology to ‘cheat’ audiences (double-tracking weak voices, filling out a fragile beat, faking strings) who, in the 1950s and 1960s, developed recording as an art form, thus enabling rock to develop as a ’serious’ music in its own right.”

Paolo Virno: A Grammar of the Multitude.

Paolo Virno: A Grammar of the Multitude. For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life
Semiotext(e), Los Angeles/New York 2004

24: “I believe that in today’s forms of life one has a direct perception of the fact that the coupling of the terms public-private, as well as the coupling of the terms collective-individual, can no longer stand up on their own, that they are gasping for air, burning themselves out. This is just like what is happening in the world of contemporary production, provided that production – loaded as it is with ethos, culture, linguistic interaction – not give itself over to econometric analysis, but rather be understood as a broad-based experience of the world.”

40: “My thesis, in extremely concise form, is this: if the publicness of the intellect deos not yield to the realm of a public sphere, of a political space in which the many can tend to common affairs, then it produces terrifying effects. A publicness without a public sphere: here is the negative side – the evil, if you wish – of the experience of the multitude.”
41: “The general intellect, or public intellect, if it does not become a republic, a public sphere, a political community, drastically increases forms of submission.”

50: “It was not necessary to have read Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics to know that labor, political action, and intellectual reflection constituted three spheres supported by radically heterogeneous principles and criteria. /…/
So then, this ancient tripartioning which was still encysted into the realm of common sense of the generation which made its appearance in the public scene in the Sixties, is exaclty what has failed today.”

51: “In fact, political action now seems, in a disastrous way, like some superflous duplication of the experience of labor /…/ it follows them closely while offering a poorer, cruder and more simplistic version of these procedures and stylistic elements.”
67: “The peculiar publicness of the Intellect /…/ manifests itself indirectly within the sphere of the State by way of a hypertrophic growth of the administrative apparatus. The administration, and no longer the political-parliamentary system, is the heart of ’stateness’ /…/ because the administration represents an authoritarian coalescence of the general intellect, the point of fusion between knowledge and control /…/ In short, we no longer face the well-known processes of rationalization of the State; on the contrary, we must acknowledge the achieved statization [statizzazione] of the Intellect which has occured.”

52-53: “The performing arts [...] have indeed a strong affinity with politics. Performing artists – dancers, play-actors, musicians, and the like – need an audience to show their virtuosity, just as acting men need the presence of others before whom they can appear; both need a publicly organized space for their ‘work’, and both depend upon others for the performance itself.” (Hanna Arendt, Between Past and Future)

56: “The speaker alone – unlike the pianist, the dancer or the actor – can do without a script or a score.”
66: “While the virtuoso in the strictest sense of the word (the pianist, the dancer, for instance) makes use of a well defined score, that is to say, of an end product in its most proper and restricted sense, the post-Fordist virtuosos, ‘performing’ their own linguistic faculties, can not take for granted a determined end product.”
41: “The sharing of linguistic and cognitive habits is the constituent element of post-Fordist process of labor. All the workers enter inte production in as much as they are speaking-thinking.”
56: “contemporary production becomes ‘virtuosic’ (and thus political) precisely because it includes within itself linguistic experience as such. If this is so, the matrix of post-Fordism can be found in the industrial sectors in which there is ‘production of communication by means of communication’; hence, in the culture industry.”

102: “all of post-Fordist labor-power can be described using the categories with which Marx analyzed the ‘industrial reserve army’, that is, unemployment.”
103: “there is no substantial difference between employment and unemployment. It could be said that: unemplyment is non-rumerated labor and labor, in turn, is remunerated unemployment.”
102: “For the post-Fordist multitude every qualitative difference between labor time and non-labor time falls short.“

61: “My hypothesis is that the communication industry (or rather, the spectacle, or even yet, the culture industry) is an industry among others, with its specific techniques, its particular procedures, its peculiar profits, etc.; on the other hand, it also plays the role of industry of the means of production. /…/
The culture industry produces (regenerates, experiments with) communicative procedures, which are thendestined to function also as means of production in the more traditional sectors of our contemporary economy. This is the role of the communication industry, once post-Fordism has become fully entrenched: an industry of the means of communication.”
60-61: “When money mirrors in itself the value of commodities, thus showing what society has already produced, the spectacle exposes in a separate form that which the aggregate of society can be and do.”

85: “Nihilism is a praxis which no longer enjoys a solid foundation, one made up of support structures and protective practices upon which one can rely.”
86: “Opportunists are those who confront a flow of ever-interchangeable possibilities, making themselves available to the greater number of these, yielding to the nearest one, and then quickly swerving from one to another.”
87: “Cynics recognize /…/ both the preeminent role played by certain cognitive premises as well as the simultaneous absence of real equivalents.”

From the Edison rupture to acid house

79: “Until the rise of recording, sound was essentially fleeting and intangible, floating above the site of its making, before fading inevitably away. Every performance of a song or scored composition would be different, varying according to circumstance, musicians, instruments and acoustics /…/ In contrast, recording changed this by capturing a singular snapshot, replacing the aura of the artwork with the permanance of the ‘audio document’”

80: “Listen to one of Edison’s early recordings and what strikes you is not so much the words transported from another age, as the surface of noise that obscures them, a surface of static over which recognisable shapes – a human voice, the words to a poem – flicker like shadows. Edison intended his phonograph to offer a transparent window onto past events, to revord for posterity business transactions or the last words of a dying relative. But within the inconvenient cloud of interference can be heard the first hints of the subsequent century of sound waiting to unfold, for this inherent imperfection contained within itself a musical potential that would come to be explored during the course of the twentieth century within electronic music, in a counter-history marked by accident, manipulation and reuse that detached itself from the telos of representational technologies.
Moreover, in preserving sound as a material trace, recording created an artefact that is available to be reworked, and so a second order domain of sonic transformations. /…/ This opened the door to a new kind of music making, one based in a foregrounding of interference, citation and secondary processes, a plastic art working within and through the grain of the machine.”

82: “What we might term a ’studio art’ came of age when producers surrendered the transparent reproduction of live performance and instead explored the potential of the recording medium in its own right. The key shift sway from documentary realism and towards the productivity of the simulacra came with developments in electrical recording. Once sound was converted to a set of electrical signals, studio technicians were able endlessy to manipulate variable parameters.”

83: “the sence of music being transformed from the transport of song and voice into the production of a surface affect is most clearly captured in the ‘wall of sound’ developed by the Los Angeles based producer Phil Spector in the early 1960s /…/
A decisive break came with the echo chambers of 1970s Jamaican dub.”

84: “Another well documented case, one which highlights how the sonic machinic broke from the telos of representational technologies, is the assemblage of acid house and the Roland TB-303. Indeterminacy in music had been extensively explored by Cage and Fluxus, but with the Roland TB-303 it arose in an implicit way within a culture of misuse. This piece of studio equipment was designed to produce an accurate reproduction of bass-guitar lines to be used in studio sessions, but notoriously bad at what it was intended for, it was very good at making mistakes. /…/ Soon the misuse became the norm, as the unique squelching sounds produced by its filters came to define a whole genre of music – acid house – mapping out a template first sketched in 1985 by DJ Pierre, Spanky and Herbert J with Phuture’s ‘Acid Trax’. In the place of the despotic studios of dub there emerged the ‘bedroom producer’, deterritorialising yet further studio production.”

Drew Hemment: Affect and Individuation on Popular Electronic Music.
In Ian Buchanan & Marcel Swiboda (ed.): Deleuze and Music. Edinburgh University Press, 2004, p. 76-94

Deleuze/Guattari on music and arts

From A Thousand Plateaus/1730: Becoming-intense, becoming-animal

300-301:
“Music is a creative, active operation that consists in deterritorializing the refrain. Whereas the refrain is essentialy territorial, territorializing, or reterritorializing, music makes a deterritorialized content for a deterritorializing form of expression. (…)
Is the situation similar for painting, and if so, how? In no way do we believe in a fine-arts system; we believe in very diverse problems whose solutions are found in heterogenous arts. To us, Art is a false concept, a solely nominal concept; this does not, however, preclude the possibility of a simultaneous usage of the various arts within a determinable multiplicity. The ‘problem’ within which painting is inscribed is that of the face-landscape. That of music is entirely different: it is the problem of the refrain“

Jacques Derrida: The Word Processor

From: Paper Machine, Standford University Press, 2005 (2001)

19-20:
“Heidegger deplores the fact that even personal letters are now typewritten and that the singular trace of the signatory are no longer recognizable through the shapes of the letters and the movements of the hand. But when we write ‘by hand’ we are not in the time before technology; there is already instrumentality, regular reproduction, mechanical iterability. So it is not legitimate to contrast writing by hand and ‘mechanical’ writing, like a pretechnological craft as opposed to technology. And then on the other side what we call ‘typed’ writing is also ‘manual’.
You would like me to speak of my own experiences. Well, yes, like so many other people I have gone through this history, or I have let it come my way. I began by writing with a pen, and I remained faithful to pens for a long time (faith is the right word here), only transcriving ‘final versions’ on the machine, at the point of separating from them. The machine remains a signal of separation, of severance, the official sign of emancipation and departure for the public sphere. (…)
But I never concealed from myself the fact that, as in any ceremonial, there had to be repetition going on, and already a sort of mechanization. (…)
Then, to go on with the story, I wrote more and more ’straight onto’ the machine: first the mechanical typewriter, then the electric typewriter, in 1979; the finally the computer, around 1986 or 1987. I can’t do without it any more now, this little Mac, especially when I’m working at home; I can’t even remember or understand how I was able to get on before without it. It’s a quite different kind of getting going, a quite different exercise of ‘getting to work’.”

21:
“I don’t feel the interposition of the machine as a sort of progress in transparency, univocity, or easiness. Rather, we are participating in a partly new plot. Heidegger points out that the work of thinking is a handiwork, a Handlung, an ‘action’, prior to any opposition between practice and theory. Thought, in this sense, would be a Handlung, a ‘maneuver’, a ‘manner’, if not a manipulation. But is that a reason for protesting against the machine? Having recourse to the typewriter or computer doesn’t bypass the hand. It engages another hand, another ‘command’, so to speak, another induction, another injunction from body to hand and from hand to writing. (…) Ultimately it’s the hand we’re talking about (…) With mechanical or electrical writing machines, with word processors, the fingers are still operating; more and more of them are at work. It is true that they go about it in a different way. You do it more with the fingers – and with two hands rather than one. All that goes down, for some time to come, in a history of digitality.”

22-23:
“I was very late in coming to this figure of ‘word processing’. I resisted for a long time. I thought I would never manage to submit to the rules of a machine that basically I understand nothing about. I know how to make it work (more or less) but i don’t know how it works. So I don’t know, I know less than ever ‘who it is’ who goes there. Not knowing, in this case, is a distinctive trait, one that does not apply with pens or with typewriters either. With pens and typewriters, you think you know how it works, how ‘it responds’. Whereas with computers, even if people know how to use them up to a point, they rarely know, intuitively and without thinking – at any rate, I don’t know – how the internal demon of the apparatus operates. What rules it obeys. (…) this might give us plenty to think about with regard to our relationship with technology today – to the historical newness of this experience.”

24:
“It’s a different kind of timing, a different rhythm. First of all you correct faster and in a more or less indefinite way. Previously, after a certain number of versions (corrections, erasures, cutting and pasting, Tippex), everything came to a halt – that was enough. Not that you thought the text was perfect, but after a certain period of metamorphosis, the process was interrupted. With the computer, everything is rapid and so easy; you get to thinking that you can go on revising forever. An interminable revision, an infinite analysis is already at the horizon, as though held in reserve behind the finite analysis of everything that makes a screen. At any rate it can be more intensely prolonged over the same time. During this same time you no longer retain the slightest visible or objective trace of corrections made the day before. (…) Previously, erasures and added words left a sort of scar on the paper or a visible image in the memory. There was a temporal resistance, a thickness in the duration of the erasure. But now everything negative is drowned, deleted; it evaporates immediately, sometimes from one instant to the next. (…)
All in all, it’s getting a bit too easy. Resistance – because ultimately, there’s always restistance – has changed in form. You have the feeling that now this resistance – meaning also the prompts and commands to change, to erase, to correct, to add, or to delete – is programmed or staged by a theater. The text is as if presented to us as a show, with no waiting.”