Sync

Sync
Stylistics of Hieroglyphic Time

JAMES TOBIAS

T E MPLE UN I V E R S I T Y P R E S S
Philadelphia
T E MPL E U N IV E R S IT Y PRES S
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19122
www.temple.edu/tempress

Copyright © 2010 by Temple University

All rights reserved
Published 2010

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Tobias, James S.
Sync : stylistics of hieroglyphic time / James Tobias.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4399-0201-1 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Motion pictures. 2. Motion pictures and music. I. Title.
PN1994.T63 2010
791.43—dc22 2009048502

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National
Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,
ANSI Z39.48-1992

Printed in the United States of America

2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1
Contents

List of Illustrations vii

Acknowledgments ix

1 Ciphers of Hieroglyphic Time 1

2 Eisenstein’s Gesture: Breaking Down Alexander Nevsky 36

3 For Love of Music: Oskar Fischinger’s Modal,

Musical Diagram 76

4 Hanns Eisler’s Dialectical Stream: Sync, Dissonance,

and the Devil 109

5 Black Relationship: Improvising a Black Pacific 146

6 Melos, Telos, and Me: Transpositions of Identity in

the Rock Musical 175

7 Stylistics of Hieroglyphic Time 213

Notes 247

Index 281
List of Illustrations

1.1 Modern Times (1936): The Tramp as factory worker

consumed by the factory (frame capture) 6

1.2 The Time Travelers (1964): Carole’s “time window” and

Reena’s “musical cavern” (frame captures) 32

2.1 Barnet’s The Girl with the Hatbox (1927): Networked

listening (frame capture) 40

2.2 Eisenstein’s controversial Nevsky diagram (detail) 46

3.1 Oskar Fischinger’s Motion Painting No. 1 (1947):

Laboratory scan 81

3.2 Kesting’s Viertalrad (1923): Van Ham Kunstauktionen:

Moderne und Zeitgenössische Kunst, June 9, 2005
(catalog image) 91

4.1 Losey’s A Child Went Forth (1941): Defending her water

pail against a hysterical attack (frame capture) 112

5.1 Anthony Braxton’s Six Compositions: Quartet (1981):

Back cover image (Antilles AN-1005-A, detail) 163
viii / List of Illustrations

6.1 Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001): Audience sing-along

(frame capture) 182

6.2 Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001): The montage-collage of

the self breaks apart (frame capture) 186

7.1 Tischtänzer (Stephan von Huene, 1988–1993) 219

7.2 Steina Vasulka’s Voice Windows (1986), with vocals by

Joan La Barbara 220
Acknowledgments

V
ery early seeds for the research that would become a doctoral dis-
sertation and now this complete, extended study were planted in
1994, when I joined Joy Mountford’s “Expressions” design group at
the Interval Research Corporation in Palo Alto, California. A number of
recent studies emphasizing computational media as “expressive media” do
not fully acknowledge that in the early 1990s, for such designers as Mount-
ford, Bill Verplank, Rachel Strickland, David Levitt, and others, understand-
ing computation as expression was a clearly articulated project, to the extent
of providing the title and research focus of Mountford’s work at Interval.
Senior Interval staff, including Mountford and Bob Adams of the Expres-
sions group, understood that the mainstreaming of the Internet in the form
of the World Wide Web meant that networked computation had become a
matter of everyday experience, yet one that nevertheless lacked the dynamic
cognitive affordances, communicative aesthetics, critical capacities, and
affective power we associate with expressive media instruments.
With Mountford’s team—and while enjoying her expansive vision of the
importance of communicability, aesthetics, critical usability, and emotional
power for computing, along with her ability to offer often startlingly incisive
analyses of complex design questions—we explored musicality at the digital
interface as a key problem area for expressive media generally. We also
designed alternative displays and controllers for composing, displaying, shar-
ing, and revising data in prototypes prioritizing affect over computation:
x / Acknowledgments

computers as musical instruments. It was with Mountford’s encouragement that

I began serious research on historical and contemporary visual music anima-
tion; and it was with her urging that I corresponded with or informally inter-
viewed visual music artists, including David McCutcheon, David Brody, Sara
Petty, Stephen Beck, Stephen Malinowski, Vibeke Sorenson, and Michael Scrog-
gins, as well as other figures, including Elfriede Fischinger, the wife of visual
music pioneer Oskar Fischinger, whom I interviewed at her Long Beach, Cali-
fornia, home in 1995.
In the context of interface and interaction design, visual music animation
provided an alternative to the classical understandings of audiovisual synchro-
nization that Sergei Eisenstein or Hanns Eisler and Theodor Adorno offer, but
it also provided an exemplar of variable, expressive audiovisuality that the com-
putational display had not reached and that interaction design theorists had only
vaguely conceived (often on the basis of such historical sources as Eisenstein,
Eisler, and Adorno). In this context, I realized that, more than visualization,
sonification, or other forms of transcoding data from one realm into another,
expressive computation depended on synchronization and style in broadly his-
torical ways that were crucial for, but were in important ways neglected by,
studies of computing and of media alike. I was fortunate to have Sandy Cohen
of San Francisco State University twice provide me with the opportunity to
present guest lectures on “Styles of Synchronization,” which allowed me to share
my research with his eager, engaged students. The insights I developed during
that early period of research at Interval would ultimately lead me to the materi-
als I present in Chapter 3 of this study. But more generally, my experience with
Mountford’s Expressions team and with the many brilliant artists, technologists,
designers, and engineers who populated Interval during my time there informs
many aspects of this project in more ways than I can describe. While I ultimately
developed the work I initiated at Interval in terms of media historiography,
critical theory, and cultural studies of music rather than in terms of those theo-
ries and practices of interaction design with which I began, nonetheless, Mount-
ford’s early and generous support of my research framing visual music anima-
tion as a rich historical archive for the design of expressive computation had
profound impact on this project.
Subsequently, at the University of Southern California’s (USC) School of
Cinematic Arts (then the School of Cinema-Television), the extraordinary luxu-
ries of a three-year fellowship and the opportunity to carry out doctoral research
with Marsha Kinder, David James, Vibeke Sorenson, Daniel Tiffany, and Dana
Polan provided me with the critical rigor, creative insights, intellectual frame-
works, academic community, time, and material support I needed to place the
early ideas forged in Silicon Valley into more nuanced critical, historical, and
theoretical frameworks. In particular, Kinder’s dual expertise in world cinemas
and digital media, her dazzling critical and creative use of digital media as a
 Acknowledgments / xi

combine of theory and praxis, James’s brilliant modeling of historical and his-
toriographical media critique, and both colleagues’ deeply passionate intellec-
tual commitments to analytics of labor, sexuality, gender, race, and power rela-
tions provided me with treasured intellectual and affective resources that I have
internalized in my way and that I invoke constantly in my own thoughts and
work. To attain their degree of analytical precision, historical vision, and pas-
sionate commitment remains a cherished goal. Also at USC, the critical rigor,
intellectual generosity, and inspired insights that Michael Renov, Todd Boyd,
and Tara McPherson brought to media scholarship provided me with models of
rigorous, ethical, and caring scholarship at its finest. No less crucial to this proj-
ect were the love, support, and admiration shared among my graduate student
peers, included among them Nithila Peter, Deborah Levitt, and Alison Defren.
USC/Annenberg Center’s fertile hybridization of critical and cultural theory
with experimental new media practices—an approach whose long-term pro-
ductivity has been evident in ventures ranging from Kinder’s Labyrinth Project
to USC’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy and the Vectors journal—was a crucial
and formative site especially important for the development of Chapter 2; I thank
Kristy Kang, art director of several Labyrinth Project productions and an emerg-
ing new media theorist in her own right, for the countless hours of inspiration
that helped make our work together on Mysteries and Desire a revelation in col-
laborative digital praxis. USC’s Cinema Library and the USC Doheny Library’s
Feuchtwanger Archive provided me with irreplaceable archival assistance and
access to historical documents as a graduate student and in years since.
More recently, George Haggerty, my colleague in the English Department at
the University of California at Riverside (UCR), read drafts of Chapter 2 on
Eisenstein and provided the rigorously insightful suggestions that are, for Hag-
gerty, de rigueur and that greatly improved the chapter’s focus and readability.
I presented a portion of Chapter 3 at the 2009 Conference of the College Art
Association on a panel organized and chaired by Janeann Dill, to whom I express
my gratitude for including me on an inspiring panel of media art scholars and
practitioners. Over the past few years, Cindy Keefer of the Center for Visual Music
has provided countless hours of her time in illuminating conversations about
Fischinger scholarship; the joys and challenges of archiving precious, yet often
neglected, works of visual music animation; and the state of the art of visual
music animation today. In addition to talking me through insights from her own
publications, Keefer very generously read a prepublication draft of Chapter 3 and
provided a number of helpful suggestions, corrections, and insights for which I
am deeply grateful. Keefer also arranged with the Fischinger Estate the repro-
duction of a film still from Motion Painting No. 1 that appears in Chapter 3.
The Rockefeller Archive Foundation in New York State provided a deeply
appreciated grant-in-aid that allowed me to spend precious days in their archives;
without the assistance of the Rockefeller Foundation’s extremely helpful staff of
xii / Acknowledgments

archivists, the discussion of Eisler in Chapter 4 would not exist in its current
form. The City Library of Berlin, along with various and sundry new and used
bookstores of the German capital, provided research assistance and access to
materials that helped me complete Chapter 4. The Rivera Library of UCR pro-
vided a number of key research sources for Chapter 5, which also benefited from
my reading published work by and having conversations with colleagues at UCR,
including Lindon Barrett—to whose memory I dedicate Chapter 5—as well as
Vorris Nunley. The origins of Chapter 6 were an invited talk hosted by David
James at USC, at which I was delighted to see graduate students singing along,
on cue, with a clip from Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Chapter 6 revises and extends
a previously published version of that talk, which was anthologized in Black-
well’s seminal 2007 collection of contemporary research on LGBT/Q studies,
edited by my colleagues Haggerty and Molly McGarry, whom I thank for includ-
ing me in their extraordinary project.
At an early stage of this project, Roseanna Albertini happily insisted that I
take account of Steina Vasulka’s work, a suggestion that I gladly took up and that
informs my concluding Chapter 7. NTT InterCommunication Center of Tokyo
generously provided archival videotape of the Vasulkas’ performance and work-
shop in Tokyo in 1998. Steina Vasulka kindly provided the still image from Voice
Windows appearing in Chapter 7. The Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnolo-
gie (ZKM; Center for Art and Media) in Karlsruhe, Germany, maintains a stand-
ing exhibition of some of the finest interactive artworks of the past few decades
in its MedienMuseum, without which resource I would not have been able to
complete Chapter 7. I thank ZKM, too, for providing the installation image of
Stephan von Huene’s Tischtänzer appearing in this concluding chapter. The Los
Angeles County Museum of Art very generously provided me with access to its
collections to view von Huene’s Kaleidophonic Dog, which was not on public
view at the time of this writing. Patrick Crogan of the University of West England
provided extremely helpful feedback on the discussion of cognition and techni-
cal synchronization appearing in Chapter 7. Finally, I am grateful to Stanford
University Press for providing me with advance copies of English translations
of Bernard Stiegler’s work, which allowed me to compose the concluding chap-
ter in a timely way.
UCR provided several grants supporting research as well as acquisition of
research materials that were instrumental in the completion of this project. UCR’s
libraries have patiently provided their consistently high level of expertise and
invaluable collections resources at every turn. Editor Micah Kleit, production
editor Joan Vidal, copy editor Heather Wilcox, and the editorial board and pro-
duction staff of the Temple University Press have provided the finest manuscript
review and publishing support possible, and in the most timely of ways, for
which I express my profound appreciation. The anonymous peer reviewers for
the manuscript made critical, constructive suggestions that greatly strengthened
 Acknowledgments / xiii

the final draft. Elizabeth Hamilton made thoughtful proposals that significantly
improved clarity. However, although this project bears debts historically deep
and geographically broad for the extensive assistance that has made it possible,
I alone am responsible for any error that may appear in these pages.
An earlier introduction to this book appeared in Film Quarterly in 2003–
2004, but when it came time to finalize this book’s contents in the spring and
summer of 2009, I had learned so much, and the disciplines and transdisciplines
intersecting the interests of the project had changed so much, that I jettisoned
the earlier introduction, rather than update it, and wrote an entirely new intro-
duction. Writing a new introduction while finishing a new concluding chapter
and continuing with revisions to other chapters resulted in the elevated levels
of stress and exhaustion familiar to many an author facing a looming, fixed
deadline. Still, however common deadline anxiety and the overwork accompa-
nying it may be, these feel nothing like shared experience, despite the constant
need for shared everyday time that this kind of work in particular demands.
Here at the peak, and much as he did once before in a very low valley, Lutz
stepped in, into the midst of my extended hyperfocus on sync and style and my
chronic distraction from everyday things, and, cooking and cleaning and seeing
me through each day, carried me through it all and, when it was done, drove me
away to the sea. Love: the first cipher to be styled, and the last—for Lutz.
1
Ciphers of Hieroglyphic Time

Here again music gives the most extreme expression to certain characteristics of the
artistic, though this too by no means bestows any primacy on music. Music says
“We” directly, regardless of its intentions.
—Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory

Clocks That Don’t Tell Time:

Temporal Diagrams of Personhood and
Publicity in Time-Based Media
Cinema or the digital interface: We consider these time-based expressions
to be, variously, “technologies,” “media,” or perhaps, when thinking of these
technical industrial expressions in specific historical contexts, “institutions,”
“discourses,” “practices,” or “forces.” Sync begins from the observation that
such complex exhibition installations are, very generally, something more
like queer clocks: devices that diagram, express, and interpret unfamiliar
temporal relations. This observation that time-registering devices, such as
cinema—or telephony, phonography, radio, television, or the World Wide
Web—equip us with situations for expressing and interpreting time is a
weak one. It may mean that temporal, temporalizing media devices may
have no more value than as devices—perhaps heterogeneous, arcane,
opaque, or as yet imperfect in terms of their temporal presentation—for
registering, storing, exhibiting, expressing, and exploring the passage of his-
torical or lived contemporary time. Alternatively, such a claim may mean
that queer clocks may be so powerful as to determine entirely their receivers’
capacity to know and to move in time.
Think of Freder in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). He goes in search of
the elusive and entrancing Maria, but, leaving the Elysian heights of the
2 / Chapter 1

city-state’s leisure gardens, he receives a visual shock from which he physically

recoils. In a much sampled and appropriated scene, troops of laborers wrestle
in a choreography of human and machine, struggling to hold on to gears resem-
bling the hands of clocks to maintain their balance on the precarious tiers of the
great “Moloch machine” and the energetic balance of the city. He sees that their
efforts utterly exhaust them, but the callow son of Metropolis’s director has to
know this corporeal exhaustion to experience it.
Young Freder relieves one of the exhausted workers and takes hold of the
clock-hands-as-gears, struggling to hold the truth of the energies animating
modern industrial time in his own hands. His grappling with this haptic knowl-
edge of the force of modern temporalities is not enough: Freder spends much
of the subsequent duration of the film in a fever dream, visualizing an alchemi-
cal-industrial enactment of the ultimate transgression. His patient, caring social
worker, Maria, is transformed in a magical, technological experiment into a
machine-woman whose choreography of erotic surface and machine movement
reduces the individual perspectives of Metropolis’s leisured male elites to a col-
lective mass of protoplasmic, ocular lust. Then, the erotic, robotic dancer shifts
her energies to revolutionary agitation, inciting Metropolis’s exhausted workers
to leave their posts at the gears of industrial time and to run amok, ruining the
tentative historical order of the vertical city and causing catastrophe for all.
Reading Metropolis as a narrative entry in the modernist project of a rhyth-
mic cinema, Michael Cowan1 points out that the film focuses “on the central
question at stake in the [period’s] broader rhythm debates: namely that of the
limits between technology and organic life” (236). As rhythmic cinema, Cowan
explains, it dramatizes then-current debates about tensions between corporeal
rhythm and machine rhythm (takt) but, further, clarifies tensions between
Marxian and Bergsonian understandings of history and temporality. Metropolis
prompts reception, then, of a double, temporal aspect. Its clock-machines do
not “tell” time; it diagrams a relation between contemporary debates about his-
torical transformations in labor and in contemporary cinema.
First, it mobilizes complex affective tensions that it puts to work in present-
ing untenable and more manageable organizations of personhood and public
being. And it dramatizes personhood and publicity in relation to autonomy and
governmentality. It characterizes these tensions in temporalized, energetic terms:
The masculine pleasures of leisure time are suspended over the masculine toil
of work time. Director Freder’s televisual surveillance is ultimately powerless to
constrain the energies that accumulate, and the escalating state of oppression,
in which male workers are feminized as exhausted machines maintaining
Metropolis’s heights, reaches an inflection point of technological transgression
when the machines become superlibidinally human. Innocent Maria, the femi-
nized embodiment of care, and robotic Maria, the feminized embodiment of
machine time (and of cinematic spectacle as alchemical double of industrial
 Ciphers of Hieroglyphic Time / 3

labor), first channelize attention to, and then disastrously incite and release the
explosive forces of, industrial clock time. The disorganized energies of the revolt-
ing workers throw the vertical balance of power in the city into disarray. The
film’s escalation of time as chaos—revealed by wild sequences in which mon-
tages of hallucinatory labyrinthine detours to secret depths lead to frenzied
pursuits back to spectacular heights—is followed by the thermodynamic exor-
cism of techno-magic, as robot Maria is burned at the stake, and her alchemist-
inventor Rotwang falls to his death. The film closes with a horizontal chain in
which Freder and his father clasp hands on the broad steps of the city cathedral.
The unsustainable vertical heights of the city are leveled to more horizontal
relations between worker, mediator, and owner.
Surveillance in the form of televisual information pales in comparison to
the energetic forces of technologized divisions of labor and leisure, but, finally,
gendered, classed divisions of labor remain intact. What Metropolis proposes
is only a tempering and rebalancing of the rhythmic expression of energetic
industrial time. Metropolis is a temporal diagram of complex temporal rela-
tions; it presents wildly fluctuating temporal transformations in the streams of
time-based image and nonsynchronized musical accompaniment. Cinema’s
doubled temporality, presenting temporalized expression in time-based
sequences, proposes an expression and an interpretation of the historical, mate-
rial, and affective relations determining personhood and publicity, autonomy
and governmentality.2
Lang’s film exemplifies the two observations from which this study departs.
Metropolis as cinematic exhibition may have no more value than as an arcane
exhibition device presenting a heterogeneous, opaque, and imperfect temporal
diagramming of history, modernity, labor, personhood, publicity, and power. It
also claims, in its spectacular aspects and its narrative form, that distributed
industrial ensembles, such as power networks or cinema, may be so powerful as
to determine entirely their receivers’ capacity to make sense of or to move in
time. The informatic, networked, televisual processes of surveillance become
powerless to control the larger exhaustions and eruptions of energetic relations
primed in that energetic inflection point where technology becomes magic,
whereby Maria becomes a spectacular, dancing agitating machine. In Metropo-
lis’s temporal diagramming of material, technical, and affective labor, informa-
tion power pales in comparison to energetic power. Metropolis’s diagramming
of audience reception and historical temporality presents the biopolitical gov-
erning of personhood and publicity as still more a bioenergetic than a bioinfor-
matic dynamic.
Metropolis is a temporal diagram of historical transformations that emerges
from a particular, transforming historical moment. It tells us only something
about its own period and production from the vantage point of our own. It does
not represent its time but diagrams complex relations between its own moment
4 / Chapter 1

and the larger historical period in which it was made. The film is a clock that
does not tell time but diagrams temporality, and we diagram some relation
between its complex temporalities and our own in receiving it. Between the two
limit points of presenting an entirely indeterminate and an entirely determining
temporalized expression of time entangled within the time-determined series
of cinematic images, along with the great ambivalence with regard to historical
and contemporary meanings this entanglement entails, to say that technical,
such presentational ensembles as cinema or the computational display are com-
plex, queer “timepieces” more than presentations of representational or deno-
tational images or enframed world pictures means, simply, acknowledging that
such complex ensembles as cinema may express temporality in terms of the
clock time in relation to which their disparate technical mechanisms function
and to which they were viewed. Such works as Metropolis do not exhibit the
contents of their displays as historical or as contemporary clock time in any
reliable way—despite our possible identifications with young Freder’s shocked
gazing on the choreography of exhausted workers.
Cinema or computational interface channel and express streaming, tempo-
ralized expressive material like series of recorded images or sounds; in this
sense, they are “media.” Cinema or computational interface derive their capaci-
ties for time-based expression from techno-scientific processes deriving from
nineteenth-century thermodynamic sciences and are motivated in materialist
geopolitics. They rely on inventions produced in large-scale transformations
of industrial production systems whose increasing automation over historical
time is achieved in compressing and channelizing the serial production pro-
cesses that they draw on and redistribute; in this sense, cinema or interface are
“technologies.”
But however closely we may attend to the clock faces that cinema or com-
putational display may present, these temporalized, technical exhibitions of
mediated sound and image do not represent clock time. Clock time is some
temporal standardization for measuring elapsed duration on local, geopolitical,
planetary, or cosmic scales. Time-based presentational ensembles, such as cin-
ema or digital interface, cannot fully, actually, or factually represent clock time,
nor can they actually represent historical or contemporary time. The materiality
of the display ensures that the representation of time and our apperception of
it are, however apparently precise, to some degree contingent on some larger
series of time. As the saying goes (familiar, perhaps, in Orbital’s sampling, loop-
ing, and remixing of it), “even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day.”
Any temporalized audiovisual display presents some measured ratio of—a tem-
poral diagramming of—complex relations between the order of historical time
and contemporaneity, expressed as complex relations of personhood and pub-
licity, autonomy and governmentality.
 Ciphers of Hieroglyphic Time / 5

And the deployment of these time-based displays of temporalized expres-

sion is itself part of the large-scale reordering of geopolitical world space. Syn-
chronized devices, whether the synchronized gear mechanisms of the synchro-
nome, the cinema, or the synchronized semiconductor mechanisms of computing
displays, relate historiality and contemporaneity, personhood and publicity in
displacements of historical time and space. As complex as the queer clock faces
of cinema or digital interface seem, we can carefully match critical description
to particular instances, historical contexts, and interpretations to determine how
technologies, media, a particular work, and their complex historical social situ-
ation and resituation of time and space become expressive in reception.
Consider, in this light, Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936). Like Metrop-
olis, Modern Times also presents a time-disciplined factory setting surveilled and
controlled by television. As in Metropolis, Modern Times’s factory disciplines
workers whose movements are stressed by their synchronization with the speed
of industrial production and within a larger temporal stream whereby produc-
tion is synchronized in divisions of property and labor. In both films, televisual
communication surveys the “liveness” of the workers’ movements and drama-
tizes the displaced nature of the labor animating the production of everyday life
from the surface of everyday life. Famously, Chaplin’s Tramp persona, appear-
ing as “A Factory Worker,” naively accepts the factory ownership’s increasing
demands to synchronize his every living movement with serialized machine
production, helping prototype a new “feeding machine,” which shovels food at
him faster than he can consume it. Subsequently, a frenetic musical accompani-
ment punctuates the Tramp’s strained efforts to keep up with the increasing
speed of the assembly line. In the converse of his test run of the feeding machine,
though, now he is run through, consumed by, the assembly line. As Christian
Hite3 observes, the Tramp’s frenzied automatisms result in his disgorgement
from the factory in a case of “indigestible” labor.
But before his choreographed path out the factory door, and as he is fed
through the machine, we see a cross-section view revealing the innards of the
assembly line through which he “unreels” (Figure 1.1). The Tramp is flattened
like a filmstrip as he streams through the gears of the machine, reflexively dia-
gramming the film projector apparatus that we, as audience, are watching. Mod-
ern Times reminds its audience of the technical labor whose intensified automa-
tion continues to displace material labor; and, more incisively than Metropolis’s
ostensive analogy of “feminized machine” with cinema reception, it reminds
audiences that cinema itself is a site where these historical displacements occur.
Chaplin’s familiar Tramp persona plays a large part in this revelation. Then, too,
there is the loose yet incisive synchronization of rhythmic pulse and melodic
tone with the Tramp’s hysterical movements in the factory sequence, contrasting
with the general quietude of the anxious director’s office; the intertitles used
6 / Chapter 1

FIGURE 1.1 Modern Times (1936): The Tramp as factory worker consumed by the fac-
tory (frame capture). (Modern Times, dir. Charles Chaplin [Charles Chaplin Productions, 1936].)

throughout the film; and Chaplin’s performance near the end of the film, when,
before a working-class diner crowd, he sings a nonsense song whose polyglot
lyrics telegraph an echo of cinema as “universal language”—all these audiovisual
stagings recall formal and technical aspects of, as well as the affective aspirations
of, cinema before the coming of synchronized sound.
Modern Times uses synchronized sound, then, as needed, and while deploy-
ing the higher fidelity and mixing techniques characterizing new studio sound-
production methods and technologies of the mid-1930s. But it does so in the
interest of articulating its own capacity to prompt our recall of nonsynchronized
(silent) cinema. By charting relative changes in volume balancing music, dialog,
and sound effects during the formative years of synchronized cinema sound
tracks, Rick Altman, McGraw Jones, and Sonia Tatroe argue that the Hollywood
sound track resulted from specific negotiations of “social and cultural work as
well as technical labor, and thus from conflicting contemporary commitments
to differing sound types and uses.”4 Studio sound methods, too, exist within the
changing soundscape, and, as Altman and many others have emphasized, under-
standing cinema sound also means understanding the everyday soundscapes
exterior to cinema.5 In fact, Modern Times presents similar observations and
critique, although in diagrammatic rather than scholarly form. Its narrative
 Ciphers of Hieroglyphic Time / 7

form models tensions in the advance of sound-film technologies, which Altman

and his team track from the late 1920s to the mid-1930s.
It uses musical sound in the manner of silent cinema but also scores such
scenes as the one depicting the factory director in his office without music or
dialog—that is, “real” feeling or actual communication. Too, synchronization of
sound and image in the factory sequence as frenetic labor evokes the noisy fac-
tory floors that such theatrical sound designers as Harold Burris-Meyer helped
the Muzak corporation balance with efficiency-prompting musical sound tracks
during the 1930s and 1940s and that he hoped might be deployed for cinema.
And it also provides a shrill rendition of the bustling soundscapes of urban
metropoles, which, as Emily Thompson6 notes, prompted soundproofing as an
architectural technique while contributing to the iconic musical motifs decorat-
ing such buildings as New York’s Rockefeller Center. By emphasizing the direc-
tor’s suite as anxious, soundproofed quietude, Modern Times depicts anxious
internalized stress as the counterpoint to energetic laboring excess.
The film’s rendition of the affects of modern industrial labor is double. First,
it synchronizes musical imagery as contemporaneity: A working frenzy becom-
ing hysterical in the effort to keep up with the speed of industrial machines or
musical quietude as Tums-popping stress, Modern Times evoke the soundscapes
of metropole and factory using the new sound technologies of the mid-1930s
to telegraph the affective tensions of contemporary life.7 But Modern Times does
not only propose a critique of contemporary work, consumption, and leisure
with cinema projected, as the Tramp and the Gamin (Paulette Goddard) hit the
road, as a momentary critical escape from more unobserved forms of these
activities. The film also provides a history lesson on cinema sound by way of
musical synchronization. It diagrams an earlier period of nonsynchronized cin-
ema sound and image as historically immanent to the contemporary synchro-
nized cinema. Modern Times does not depict contemporaneity; it does not tell
time. It diagrams time, in time.
Using contemporary sound-image synchronization techniques to recapitu-
late expressive aspects of the earlier, nonsynchronized cinema as well as the
earlier cinema’s often-progressive aspirations for mass cultural expression, Mod-
ern Times musically prompts, while reflexively diagramming, its audience’s recall
of the industrial history through which, sitting in the site of reception, it is again
passing and displacing. The historical energies of nonsynchronized cinema are
projected as dated but enduring: not up-to-the-moment like the feeding
machine, yet still to be fully exhausted, still historically resonant. The set piece
of the factory scene, with its closely choreographed synchronization of shrieking
music with Chaplin’s herky-jerky performance and its reflexive cross-sectioning
of industrial cinema as a displacement of historical labor, is also a “timepiece.”
This sequence prompts apperception of the passage of cinematic time as a
strange and complicated historical time: a queer clock ticking away public
8 / Chapter 1

moments of Chaplin’s familiar aging persona. Metropolis and Modern Times

make clear that synchronization, in networks of ensembles that cannot tell time,
is first a matter of coordinating the contemporaneity enframing audience recep-
tion with the historiality of the streaming composition. Whether the ensemble
we receive refuses our interpretations and gestures or incites them, it precedes the
contemporaneity in which we receive it and from which we are excluded. Com-
plex temporal diagrams, such as cinema or the computational interface, what-
ever their capacity to hold or to program cultural or technical memory, begin for
receivers as materialized, antimemorial ensembles of the streaming temporalities
in which they are diagrammed—and that, in turn, they, too, partially diagram.
Chaplin’s historical persona in Modern Times is prepared by Chaplin and
the studio ensemble; but the synchronization of his frenetic gesture with the
frenzy of factory “music” is rendered not simply by the “filmmaker,” as Michel
Chion8 generally insists, but also by the audience for whom it is projected in
reception. As we “hear” Modern Times’s “silent cinema musical sound” carrying
the Tramp’s commoditized serial image object through that cross-section of
the assembly line/film projector, as we see and hear the results of up-to-date
1930s Hollywood sound technologies interpreting the film’s time-out-of-joint
expressive tactics, we travel backward down that path to an earlier period of
cinema whose forward transitions Altman and his team have excavated. Though
it cannot accurately represent time and space because it helps displace them,
cinema begins with a synchronization of reception and production as exhi-
bition, where historiality and contemporaneity are diagrammed via affective
means that audiences feel: differentiations of personhood or publicity, auton-
omy or governmentality. Cinema reception—whether within the production
process or in exhibition—also distributes the process of any cinema’s own his-
torical displacement. The disappearance of the Tramp and the Gamin is the trail
of the leading edge of a never fully elaborated allegory of reception—that is,
when it is not just a tentatively happy ending.

Exhibition Diagrams, Reception Diagrams

The reasons for starting from the very weak claim that “technological media,”
such as cinema, are more like clocks that cannot accurately tell time or register
space in the site of reception and that become expressive in spite of themselves
become apparent, I hope, when we consider the highly musicalized synchroniza-
tion strategies of such canonical works as Metropolis or Modern Times. Classic
apparatus studies, such as those of Jean-Louis Comolli,9 demonstrated that any
complex exhibition installation, such as cinema, is always a sum of more than
simply the material parts constituting its earliest concrete instantiation. As Mar-
tin Jay10 notes, the apparatus theories of Paul Narboni, Comolli, Jean-Louis
Baudry, or Christian Metz may well have been a “culminating moment in the
 Ciphers of Hieroglyphic Time / 9

French critique of ocularcentrism.” But the aspects of Comolli’s argument that

stress cinema’s needs to meet specific material historical conditions of perspec-
tival imaging to become viable for viewing remain worth noting. Further, as
genealogical and discursive analyses, such as those of Friedrich Kittler,11 suggest,
describing large-scale shifts in the means of knowledge production (in Kittler’s
Discourse Networks, a shift from literary, philosophical, and pedagogical net-
works of distributing literary epistemologies to technical, mechanical, and proba-
bilistic networks) may be more revealing than presuming static ontologies, epis-
temologies, and ethics for highly socially freighted, technically sophisticated, and
historically fraught conduct, such as “writing.” It can never be entirely clear at
any particular moment of historical time the precision with which any particular
media apparatus may render its meanings, ideologies, or effects, as cultural stud-
ies of time-based media from Walter Benjamin onward have long observed.
But, as Benjamin’s writing on language and on cinema also make clear, that
aspect of the contemporary we may experience as glassine sphere of everyday
life rolling forward from a continuous, retrospectively accessible historical past
that we need only turn around and view before equipping ourselves to wheel on
forward may, with closer consideration, appear as cracked surface. Perhaps it is
patched together as much by the effect of historical eventuality or of some form
of spoken or unspoken consensus—or by some ensemble of scientist, artist,
historian, or critic. Perhaps it is simply some willful desiring cognitive agent
who, diagramming time in time, conveys discovery, insight, recollection, elabo-
ration, even tentative conclusions as to the meanings of profound displacement,
disruption, or destruction. A willful, desiring cognitive agent does not need to
mean “an individual person.”
Metropolis and Modern Times today demonstrate that whatever the short-
comings of the works or the ensembles of people who made, exhibited, and
received them, cinematic works also diagram cracks and patches, relate histori-
cal time to contemporary time, in being projected. When the interpretation of
recorded, distributed, and exhibited data depends on synchronizing the opera-
tions of an intervening technical device with those of the archival medium in
which the message is encoded, any “social” meaning may, in fact, be written as
“noise,” as Kittler argues, rather than as historical “signal.” Yet history finds ways
of biding its time while the gears or discs of our technological sense and sensa-
tion synchronize in action or strain and fall apart. Even in spite of the material
conditions they may impose or withdraw, and as Theodor Adorno argues for
music, cinema or computing displays say “we.” But contrary to Adorno’s insis-
tence, they say “we” indirectly: They ultimately diagram historiality and con-
temporaneity in only expressive terms, however abstract, of personhood and
publicity. If Metropolis hedges its social observations about material labor and
creative labor by diagramming their spectacular inflection as choreographed,
gendered, gestural movement, Modern Times diagrams its own filmic history as
10 / Chapter 1

the value retained by musical synchronization of sound and image in a trans-

formed regime of studio production practices.
As clocks that don’t tell time but diagram temporality, these films raise the
key questions that Sync attempts to answer: why and how musicality and gesture
have been so frequently, consistently, and broadly deployed for emphasizing the
synchronization not simply of sound and image streams but of historical and
contemporized time, in streaming media undergoing radical transformations in
their technological materialities, in their medium specificities, in their formal
variations, and in their reuse. My own textual diagrams describing highly com-
pressed interpretations of Metropolis or Modern Times, above, begin to offer
evidence of this problem and an initial attempt at the answers. Films such as
these do not propose their visual imagery only as concepts or necessarily as
logical propositional images presenting literal space, movement, or motion in
historical or in contemporary terms. Rather, such works propose complex tem-
poral relations as complex temporal diagrams. Still, as we can already see, weak
claims grant great plasticity. We need to attach a bit more ballast to the balloon-
ing elasticity becoming apparent in my temporal diagrams if they are to be at
all critically descriptive.
Recent scholarship provides wide precedents for reading streaming media
as diagrammatic or emblematic presentation. As Charles Altieri12 notes, although
Gilles Deleuze is appreciated as one of the twentieth century’s most sophisti-
cated thinkers on affect, his long initial engagement with Bergsonism from the
late 1940s into the mid-1960s increasingly engaged with diagrammatic semiotics
after that point. Felix Guattari’s notes on their work together during the 1970s
make clear the debt the two collaborators owed to Charles Sanders Pierce’s mid-
nineteenth-century understanding of diagram as “icon of relation.”13 Pierce’s
notion of diagram as icon of relation allowed Deleuze and Guattari to advance
a still significant if expansive solution of the tensions between the historical
tendencies of organicism and mechanism that had taken on urgent, critical
import with the elaboration of cybernetic semiotics for network computing
between 1950 and 1970. In the context of the growing sophistication and wide
proliferation of global computing networks and media networks, and with no
indication of an abatement in the pace at which the automation of symbolic
processes proceeded yet no clear evidence of the ability of cybernetics to fully
account for thought, memory, or feeling, Deleuze and Guattari pronounce the
machine a “subject” and derive from Pierce’s semiotics of the diagram a genera-
tive theory of nature, history, and capital that they articulate in terms of serial,
symbolic-material “machines.”14
More recently, in ways closer to more conventional phenomenologies of
vision and language and more willing to engage rhetorical interpretations of
cinema as well as audience commentary on computer-generated imagery (CGI)
reception, Vivian Sobchack15 considers CGI in narrative industrial cinema as
 Ciphers of Hieroglyphic Time / 11

diagrammatic. Sobchack follows Peter Wollen’s 1972 derivation of Pierce’s the-

ory of the sign for cinema semiotics. Wollen points out that in Pierce’s semiotics,
a diagram is not precisely an image but a sign presenting relations between parts
of two referents; the diagram tends toward “emblematics” in a larger historical
tension between the emblem and the photograph. Describing the computer-
graphics animation in Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001), Sobchack sug-
gests that this fully CGI-animated film’s promise of convincing photorealism
invites audiences to read the computer-generated images as photorealistic
images and as diagrammatic emblems as they compare CGI animation to the
historical dominant of photorealism. Sobchack argues that the result of audi-
ences reading CGI as a diagram of its own similitude to the photorealistic image
toward which it strives is that they find Final Fantasy’s attempt at CGI photoreal-
ism too detailed but also lacking in its “illusion of life.”16
Sobchack’s cinema-receiver scans for tensions between image and diagram
in reception but also for contemporary rhetorics and ideologies around recent
computer-generated animation and performs a historical comparison of con-
temporary CGI realism to historical photorealism. While Sobchack argues that
CGI presents a diagrammatic emblem of the photorealistic image it strives to
present, her discussion also suggests that receivers also project temporal dia-
grams. As the cinema-CGI audience reads the time of exhibition and relates
exhibitionary time to the historical dominance of photographic realism and the
advent of CGI realism, more than assigning a (negative or positive) value to the
realism of industrial feature-length CGI cinema, the audience is also relating
two complex material and temporal durations. It is diagramming its reception
of cinematic time to the historical transition between the introduction of com-
puter-graphics animation and its uses. Final Fantasy prompts this diagramming
on the part of its audience in its production, in its advance advertising, or in the
ideological rhetorics circulating around both.
Despite the fact that the great majority of audience members are not likely
to assign precise historical calendar dates delimiting either of these durations as
specific periods in calendar and clock time, still, if audiences are weighing CGI
animation with regard to the antinomies of image and emblem, as photorealistic
image and as emblematic diagram, then audiences are also diagramming two
portions of streaming time to one another. We create a ratio of lived contem-
porary time to the historical emergence of computer graphics, and we thus grant
a particular type of historicity to Final Fantasy’s exhibition: its “historic” nature.
The film is trivially historic, Sobchack finds, a matter of actual exhibition not
living up to ideological promise or rhetorical premise. Perhaps, for others, it is
significantly historic, diagrammed, say, as an entry in a series of photorealistic
CGI feature films integrating the epistemologies of navigable CGI computer
gaming of the 1990s with feature-length cinema animation and Web-based
social marketing and fan production whose material, technical, and affective
12 / Chapter 1

values are yet to solidify completely. More than simply evaluating CGI’s photo-
realism or its perceptual realism,17 then, audiences also diagram contemporary
and historical time. Temporal diagramming proposed in the streaming work
and differently conducted by audiences is not exclusive to works expressing
recent media transitions or technical deployments. Modern Times mobilized this
capacity on the part of audiences by designing the reception of its narrative form
as a temporal diagramming of synchronized sound cinema’s historical deriva-
tion from nonsynchronous cinema.
In just this way, though, we should consider temporal diagrams more as
doubled proposals, as doubled projection, rather than as logical propositions
or concepts. They orient us toward streaming media in the streaming history
that they in part displace. And because the considered duration of the contem-
porary or the historical temporality such diagramming relates may be adequate,
confused, wrong, or entirely false, temporal diagrams evaluate commensurate
or incommensurate expressions of time. We may believe we experienced an
event at a moment impossible for us to have done so, or we may assign the
historiality of computer graphics to, say, that of computer games—so the ratio
we diagram for contemporaneity and historiality may be partial, negative, or
even a compounding of the negative. Temporal diagrams may be a kind of
shorthand held for time we have never experienced or grasped or for time that
has never passed.
Such diagramming may help us adjust habits or adapt new ones. But tem-
poral diagramming always risks some commensuration of lived historical expe-
rience with a diagrammatic measure of times never personally lived and or not
yet having had historical passage other than in some medial reception (fantasy,
fiction, dream, speculation, and so forth). Remote, irrelevant, forgotten, lost,
fictive, fantastic time, nonevents, or nondurations belonging either to a sense of
historical order or to our reception of some sensation of it may be recollected
as emblems of contemporaneity that has passed, is being lived, or is impending.
The historicity we grant within partial or negative temporal diagramming may
describe, replace, or destroy the historicity of the lived moment. A replacement
or destruction of lived time by what we may call “mediatic” time, of course, is
the threat that apparatus theories attempted to frame as a matter of political,
ideological determination. They are also the tendency Kittler less dramatically
describes as the discursive noise of technical networks historically replacing
prior networks of written literacy. In their negative forms, temporal diagram-
ming may amount to absolute, passive human dependency and subjection (the
human as machine) on one hand or the dissolution of history as entropic frag-
mentation recouped in the automatisms of new technologies (the machine as
history) on the other. Addiction and noise, in their negative cases, are the two
limit points of incommensurate or noncommensurate synchronization. Time
becomes hieroglyphic.
 Ciphers of Hieroglyphic Time / 13

Echoes of Eisenstein
Barbara Stafford’s18 reading of a range of art-historical works as “echoic objects”
goes some way toward helping explicate the difficulties involved with the under-
standing of temporal diagrams as complex synchronization I offer here. Stafford’s
goal is to guide the arts and humanities and the cognitive neurosciences into
more productive interactions with one another. Stafford observes that, first, in
borrowing historically from the arts and humanities, cognitive neurosciences
may be overestimating many of their discursive claims and, second, that neuro-
science cannot fully account for the cultural and historical dimensions of that
cognitive work that artistic images do or the problems such images continue to
raise in the present. “As both filtering and immersive new media are demon-
strating, we are far from reaching the end point of the long tradition in Western
philosophy of identity as autarkeia—that is, the withdrawal or maximal inde-
pendence of the subject from all external factors as the highest goal” (211), despite
many neural researchers’ claims to this effect. She acknowledges the “neural Dar-
winism” of such cognitive researchers as Gerald Edelman, who suggests selective
pressures cause changes in “populations of synapses” throughout the brain, result-
ing in transformed mental capacities over time. Contemporary cognitive neuro-
science, Stafford thinks, suggests that the “invasive and metamorphosing ‘phatic’
products of visual culture might, in turn, reenter our brain strengthened”:

Such augmented images would then reconfigure the neural-synaptic

organization of the brain before getting distributed in the outside world
again. Explicit advertisements, shock waves of video, salient film clips,
“mashed” digital media, the polymorphous World Wide Web, all design
the neurons and the neural networks re-design popular culture. . . .
Apparently vast populations of neurons must become synchronized at
around a 40 hertz frequency of electrical pulses for conscious activity to
occur. Similarly, at the macro level, for unrelated people to form coher-
ent social groups, their divergent behavior must somehow also become
synchronized. (211–212)

Synchronization at the social level depends on acquiring “social skills.”

Cooperation between people and environment happens, then, in macro- and
microscale networked synchronization, but between neural or social synchro-
nization, historical cultures fill the material, symbolic gaps, building complex
ensembles and associations in mimetic, “compound images” affording empathy
between self and other. The “work of the senses” goes beyond vision; it is affec-
tive, configurative, and performative. “Compound images” are not simply visual
but “are the medium or interface where world and subject get co-constructed,
that is, echoically presented to one another’s view” (211–212).
14 / Chapter 1

If mechanistic synchronization determines neural patterning, Stafford

observes, understanding patterns of attention to the images we create is all the
more crucial (216). The “compound images,” “inlay art,” or “emblazoned inter-
faces” that Stafford explores encompass, then, the antinomies of realist image
and emblem interpreted by Sobchack’s viewer. If cognitive scientists must
embrace the cognitive work such compound “inlay images” or “echo objects”
do, then humanists too will have to accept a cognitive grammar of perception,
those “pathos-laden schema” that over the course of human history have “uni-
fied self-consciousness, consciousness of one’s body, and environmental con-
sciousness into a formal logic. Visual ‘universals’ or visual formulas capture how
we synoptically structure neural content” (209).
Heraldic devices, blazons, mosaics: These and more work as “inlay, mesh,
net, lattice, or grid” (136), devices of fitness assisting in the narrative construc-
tion of the self, and demonstrate the ways thought interpenetrates the “compo-
nents” of sensation and how the elements of sensation enter into thought.
Familiarity with the world will not suffice: “The problem inlaying art formats
specifically illuminate is interaction or the cognitive work of conscious crafting”
(215). Echoic objects afford interaction between universal biological grammar
and living thinking bodies making sense out of the sensations of a changing,
historical world. Echoic objects are diagrams in the sense that Pierce, Wollen, or
Sobchack describe: They relate portions of larger referents. But their “echoic”
nature indicates that they are also reflexive, temporal diagrams.
Such echoic objects relate some portion of the synchronizing sequences
of temporal patterning in mechanistic neural activity with partial sequences of
social networks. What they relate by compounding affective empathy and
mimetic construction is “pathos.” Echoic objects are temporal diagrams that
hold, distribute, and differentiate pathos otherwise out of reach of the synchro-
nized processes of biological neural networks or social networks. Yet Stafford’s
description flattens specific historical geopolities or historical epochs, while
making technological deployments or media transitions appear as aftereffects
of neuro-cognitive aesthetic interaction recoverable as echo objects mediating
the overlapping projects of neurological and aesthetic research.
Demonstrating the value of historical art for contemporary neuro-
cognitivism, echoic objects are Stafford’s resolution to the great historical
tensions of organicism and mechanicism that Deleuze and Guattari resolve by
pushing the meaning of “machine” away from that of functional, nonliving
energetic systems of instruments. Instrument, technology, or medium ceases to
retain specificity in Deleuze and Guattari’s treatment of “social machines,”
dynamic and complex ensembles animated in historical immanence and mani-
festing in and across historical time as enfleshed material-symbolic sense and
sensation. In Stafford’s work, where synchronized informatic mechanisms now
clearly determine the development and processes of organic neural material,
 Ciphers of Hieroglyphic Time / 15

sense and sensation are mediated in echo objects: “The dialogical motion of
mimesis enabling shared affective, experience suggests that learning, affective
control, and the capacity to distinguish self from others is echoic. As social
beings, we seem to bounce off one another” (76).
Chaplin’s film comedy and Sergei M. Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925)
help Stafford illustrate how echoic objects mediate sense and sensation in cine-
matic mimesis, where pathos is effected as a synchrony of cognition resulting
as a network effect coordinating viewers’ responses. Potemkin’s Odessa Steps
sequence, Stafford suggests, succeeds in presenting a unified and realistic orient-
ing view for the mass audience by animating facets within the streaming spatio-
temporal flow of the sequence. Editing modulates continuity and rupture by
ordering in-frame composition against cross-frame cuts, emphasizing salient
“facets” within Eisenstein’s “conspicuous modernist geometry” (84). Stafford
does not describe the larger network effects initializing, activating, distributing,
culminating, and subsiding as historical pathos in this sequence, as if the crowd
were a flock of gentle doves hunted by a ruthless military machine: sudden
alarm; initial shock; mass flight; a cascade of brutality; enervation of the tragic
process; and after all of these events are presented by virtue of complex rhythmic
modulations, the final exhortation to remember Tsarist violence in the name of
the revolution—and this last, not only in a final title but also in the often-noted
hand-tinted red flag borne by the battleship at the film’s finale. Stafford speaks
of montage as echoic schemata apparent in one rhythmic swing of pathos with-
in the larger seriation of historical pathos that Eisenstein designed the Steps
sequence to telegraph. Stafford notes the cut: from a longer view of soldiers
marching diagonally down the stairs cutting down the madly fleeing mass to a
close-up of a defenseless sick boy fallen among the chaos. This cut, Stafford
notes, produces a “nonnarrative diagrammatic starkness” (84) communicating
pathos beyond metaphor by animating salient detail amid general flow.19 In
contrast, Chaplin, she observes, achieved comedic diagrammatic mimesis by
making his own actions salient within more continuous cinematic duration (84).
Narrative is cognitive work rather than a matter of aesthetic or cinematic form.
Eisenstein’s own argument about Potemkin is not entirely dissimilar to Staf-
ford’s account of echoic objects but diverges in important ways. Eisenstein, too,
appropriates all manner of art-historical resources in his arguments for that
“organic unity” achieved by Soviet montage cinema in such films as Potemkin.
But he contrasts U.S. or German cinemas with Soviet montage as a matter of
their historical development of aesthetic resources and of the temporal diagram-
ming of pathos. Soviet montage improved on the tempo characterizing D. W.
Griffith’s films by mobilizing metaphor beyond visual or narrative represen-
tation in a “relentlessly affective rhythm.”20 Rhythmic series trace the line of a
successful film’s “organic” pulse through a play of the “inner contradictions” the
work exhibits. This streaming pulse is never reducible to object or objectivity.
16 / Chapter 1

Where Stafford’s echoic object engages a dialogical crafting of interaction be-

tween neural microsynchronization and social macrosynchronization allowing
the narrative constitution of self and other, in Eisenstein’s work, montage pro-
jects a “microcosm” (235) bearing inner contradictions rather than an object.
For Eisenstein, rhythmically diagramming historical pathos in montage art
results not simply from technological advance, as Stafford seems to agree, but
also in terms of historical, social, political, and art-historical differentiation that
Eisenstein believes montage expressed but that Stafford sees as independent of
the dialogical echoic object. Eisenstein’s essay on “Synchronization of Senses”21
helps make the point. Here, typically, Eisenstein cites sources as disparate as Karl
von Eckartshausen’s account of inventing a color organ influenced by Père Cas-
tel,22 recent writing on jazz as “disunion,” or German romantic author and phi-
losopher Novalis, Hermann von Helmholtz, and Arthur Rimbaud (and again,
in the essay “Color and Meaning,” Walt Whitman or Havelock Ellis in the devel-
opment of what we may call a bioenergetic notion of color sensation and sense).
For Eisenstein, synchronization of the senses in cinema means creating terms
of correspondence using such materials as temporal rhythm or color, so as to
afford a rhythmical “fusion” between the streams of phenomena projected. A
successful qualitative “fusion” has nothing to do with fusing, say, “yellow” and a
particular sound but is a dynamic effect discovered in the compositional process.
The work cannot be taken apart from the compositional labor that produces it;
but at its best, “fusion” arising in the composition of rhythmic streams results
in a diagram that literally “reproduces” historical sense and association: “the very
image of an epoch and the image of the reasoning process of those who are linked
to the epoch” (100). This linkage becomes concrete in reception but arises from
the various phases of compositional labor.
Such a projection of an epochal image via a link to those who lived its his-
tory relates to the contemporary audience some measure of historical time in
that qualitative fusion. This diagram of a link to remote historical contradictions
(rather than conditions or objects) also models the expressive internal contra-
dictions of the present in the dynamic microcosm of montage, as well. Montage
expands in reception into a microcosm relating two historical, sociopolitical
streams in some measure of their contradictions. For Eisenstein, of course, this
measure itself is temporal, and it must move forward as a historical develop-
ment. The temporal diagram must be a positive commensuration not simply of
the mass reception of mass art but the collectivized, socialist production and
reception of mass art. Temporal diagramming as rhythmic stylization takes the
measure, finally, of an ethical streaming of cinema exhibition.
The montage stream is not simply a dialectical object as opposed to a dia-
logical one. The specific art-historical dynamism of montage’s double modeling
of dynamic internal contradictions results from Eisenstein’s own production
context: his “worldview both monistic and dialectic.”23 The streaming nature of
 Ciphers of Hieroglyphic Time / 17

the montage sequence projects the phases of the cinematic work’s production;
it expands the flat notational series of planning documents, serial images, musi-
cal accompaniment or optical sound, and technical exhibition in reception.
Streaming forth, it bears with it complex potentialities: It is plastic and affective,
a living cell but also historical rupture. The “harmonic recurrence” Eisenstein
describes (241) as defining montage, and lacking in Griffith’s work, stylizes cin-
ema in resounding “harmonic series”: that is, temporalized streams, not objects.24
The macrocosm would be the historical stream, the microcosm of montage
linking to history by virtue of accomplishing a leap in the present. For monistic
immanence to prepare and to animate dialectical contradiction and synthesis,
pathos must be composed in production, projected in exhibition, and then
made concrete, by audiences, in reception. Cinema composition and reception
are the sites where that monad as cell breaks open and expands in series. It
changes history—if not socialist history, at least art history.
This rhythmic and haptic expansion that montage effects in reception is,
further, a matter of historical specificity and of metaphor and narrative passing
beyond representational limits. To extend cinema’s plastic capacities for meaning
beyond representation, through metaphor, as affective rhythm expressing his-
torical pathos took time; cinema had to develop from modeling eye and vision
to becoming capable of presenting “the image of an embodied viewpoint” (233).
The haptic embodiment of perspective is double: “Organic unity” of montage
unifies production workers and audience in complex synchronization—of rea-
son, affect, and history—arising in diagrammatic, rhythmic gesture.
Montage as streaming, temporal diagram, then, performs the configurative
and cognitive work Stafford ascribes to echoic objects in the present but further
makes complex historical claims. This work is achieved in a rhythmic, pathic act
rather than through nonnarrative presentation of cognitive objects. In other
words, Eisenstein conceived of the historical contingency also unfurling through
the montage stream (allowing such critics as Stafford or myself to isolate a cut
or a montage sequence) as having been historically necessary. Eisenstein’s
description of Potemkin makes greater claims for cinema as monistic, dialectic
diagramming than those Stafford makes for dialogical echoic objects. Such
films as Potemkin achieve a (socialist) synchrony of production, exhibition, and
reception streams, differentiating the expressive power of montage from the
metaphoric poverty and less-developed temporal relations Eisenstein observed
in Griffith—and from Griffith’s casual racism (234).
Stafford resolves the historical tensions between mechanicism and organi-
cism by observing autonomic neuronal and social synchronization mechanisms
mediated in an echoic organic crafting of aesthetic experience. Thus, Stafford
isolates a single cut from Eisenstein’s Odessa Steps sequence from its narrative.
But montage becomes nonnarrative, because narrative now exists in cognition,
not in the material object of the film or the material stream of temporalities
18 / Chapter 1

the film conducts. For Eisenstein, historical tensions between mechanicism and
organicism, cognition and aesthetic form are less important than an elaboration
of monistic and dialectical materialisms. His shift away from more conventional
concerns of human-as-machine is not surprising, since, as I discuss in Chap-
ter 2, in postrevolutionary Soviet Russia it was the capitalist state “machine” that
had been seen as synchronizing sovereign power and social, technological, and
political underdevelopment. Machine extension was not a symptom of social
decay but a problem to be overcome through industrial, political, and cultural
labor. Narrative was a quality of the work of art, its history, and its reception:
Narrative or metaphor could be transmuted into rhythm or gesture in exhibi-
tion only with a doubling of the meanings of pathos—pathos in art’s composi-
tion and in its material, historical, and political reception.
What is important, though, is Eisenstein’s doubling of pathos as rhythmic
energetic potentials: pathos immanent to privileged instances of art appropri-
ated from the historical past (Charles Dickens, Whitman, Griffith, and so many
more) and to the immanent historiality of the postrevolutionary present. Pathos
connotes the material, aesthetic historicity of Soviet montage—its artistic
achievement—but also a historicity that we associate with “liveness” in contem-
porary critical terms. In philosophical terms, what expands the flattened cine-
matic series into the organic unity of its embodied viewpoint is the streaming
of rhythmic gesture informed by Marxian understandings of historical, dialecti-
cal potential and Bergsonian understandings of potential as virtuality.25 The
montage of historical and contemporary pathos takes the ratio of a complex
temporal diagramming of sociopolitical and aesthetic experience. More than
echoic object, its rhythmic pulse elaborates a line, the musicality of lyricism or
phrasing, to trace doubled potential. Montage scores the moving image as com-
plex musical diagram deciphering the hieroglyphic of modern contemporaneity
as the becoming historical of Soviet art. Relating compositional labor and cre-
ative, interpretive labor to historical temporality, pathos expressing “affective
logic” (250) or “sensual thought” (251) in Eisenstein is an expression of what
has been recently described as “affective labor.”26
An important point of Stafford’s argument is that if the synchronization of
contemporary sociality may be determined in a blast of “polymorphous” digital
media forms evolving our neuronal connections collectively and autonomously
while feeding through social forms and practices, then how and what we attend
to as we craft our interactions with one another and the world around us are
crucial. Yet even while neural cognition defines the limits of human cognition
and affect, neither neuroscience nor echoic objects respond to any need for a
critical history of neuroscience, as Stafford allows when deferring from pursuing
biopolitical considerations. Nor do we learn of the pathos of intimate or grand
historical failures of artistic, neural, or social synchronization not evident or
recoverable in the cognitive-affective emblematics of echoic objects. We are left
 Ciphers of Hieroglyphic Time / 19

wondering how “salience” and “attention” might be expanded to Eisenstein’s

“devastating rhythm.”
In Eisenstein, stylizing cinema as devastating rhythm claims the most
advanced capacities of cinema to conduct historical pathos in the memorializa-
tion of traumatic violence. Too, if temporal diagrams may reproduce affect as
commensurate, incommensurate, or noncommensurate relation between con-
temporaneity and historiality, Eisenstein’s consideration of montage as having
a doubled potential for such ends suggests pathos as commensurate and non-
commensurate relation. It can only be affective labor as an expression of syn-
chronizing composition and reception that reproduces historical pathos as
pathic act. In Eisenstein, affective labor expresses the fluctuating capacities of
the temporal diagram in a medial ethics, as if to say, “This is what aesthetics can
do; this is what we can do; this is what history can do.” Temporal diagramming
does not tell time; it risks wild, even destructive relations. But it expresses the
ethical capacities of the medium in affective labor. Yet why echoic objects or
rhythmic pathos? Why should a medial ethics arise in rhythmic, musicalized
temporality rather than a literal description or representation of world space?
Echoes, of course, present displacements of space and spatial objects: Think
of sonar. Stafford’s echoic objects present an ethical hinge between aesthetics
and science trading echoes in a shared world or interdisciplinary space. Rhyth-
mic line, though, has to do with continuous, streaming displacement of tempo-
ral streams. Indeed, whether in early nonsynchronized or synchronized cinemas,
exhibition prompted observations of the cinematic exhibition’s unreeling of
the serial image in terms of time as musical diagram—as various of Eisenstein’s
writings attest. I have noted27 the broader significance of French critic Emile
Vuillermoz’s comments that the nonsynchronized cinema might “orchestrate
our images, score our visions and memories according to a strictly musical pro-
cess.”28 Musicality seemed to score the cinematic image and diagram it in time,
a more dynamic version of the way that Sobchack describes computer graphics
as diagramming their own photorealistic image. Thinking about cinema as
musical scoring of the serial image allowed such critics as Vuillermoz to attribute
specific historical capacities to the emergent mass art: what it could do—that is,
its ethical capacities.
Musicality, as the term is used in this study, comprises those effects of music
as they may be performed or represented in other than auditory media: perfor-
mances that may only mime or otherwise do not produce audible music, or
qualities specific to music presented in visual terms. Musicality may inform
visual lyricism in the mediated work even as it invites performative actions by
audiences in response: foot tapping, head nodding, hand clapping, or even sim-
ply breathing. Musicality is what Eisenstein attempts to exploit in his plans for
isomorphic movements between visual and sonic domains. It is what Eisler aims
to enrich by means of a film music counterpointing the filmic image. It is this
20 / Chapter 1

same musicality in which Berkeley immerses the audience of the classical

Hollywood musical with kaleidoscopic visual patterns set to music; that music
video uses to advertise the body of the pop star; that television jingles implement
to enhance the appeal of cars, cigarettes, or hygiene products; and from which
film and television narratives draw to clarify for viewers what are often ambigu-
ously sequenced image fragments.
Musicality synchronizes medial or narrative form with audience knowledges
and practices to create emergent meaning out of the conflict between what is
given to us, what we demand, and how we respond. In this conflict of narrativity
and enunciation, music begs the investigation of materials synchronized as
instrumental mediation: the ways in which the noise of a representational appa-
ratus is transformed into an instrument. Attending to musicality in these terms
requires a radical decoupling of musical meaning so that aesthetic effect is no
longer strictly tied to material form, visual or auditory perception, or mode of
reception. Sync aims to address this need for a transmedia, transcritical, and
affective description of musicality emergent within synchronized streams of
time-based media. At the same time, Sync responds to the historiographical
concerns raised by new media claims of digital transcodability of all prior
forms.29 As the following chapters show, musical meaning in time-based media
today extends explicitly to the indexical gesturality of interactive digital media,
so it should not be surprising that, historically speaking, musicality and gestural-
ity provided key registers for prototyping the heterogeneous futures of media
out of which digital cultural forms have arisen.

Transposing Diagrams for Affective Labor

During the 1940s, preparations for the industrial deployment of television also
prompted musical proposals for television broadcast. Much early U.S. commer-
cial television, indeed, was first programmed by such industrial behemoths as
CBS, according to models informed by studies of programmed radio listening,
such as those Paul Lazarsfeld carried out at Princeton and Columbia. But more
speculative proposals suggested that the television image might be broadcast
most effectively as a musical synchronization of studio production ensemble
with domestic viewing audience—whether the televisual broadcast communi-
cated news or music and whether it featured live action drama, more abstract
imagery, or musical performance.
In a 1946 Hollywood Quarterly essay, Carl Beier30 brainstorms television
broadcast as something like a streaming version of Stafford’s echoic object, a
musical synchronization of the gamut of film-studio techniques—including
mise-en-scène, mise-en-cadre, visual montage, sound performance, mixing and
dubbing—and even suggests hypothetical, live electronic compositing. The ref-
erences in Beier’s article are so lively as to make television an unintentional
 Ciphers of Hieroglyphic Time / 21

musical pastiche of the “seven arts”:31 cinema; the framed sprawl of action in a
Breughel painting; the Living Newspaper theater experiments (where Joseph
Losey gained initial fame); Orson Welles’s production of Julius Caesar; sound
cartoons; techniques proper to the vast archive of cultural expression, properly
prepared, may be presented unrehearsed along the lines of improvised jazz,
“less of an orchestral performance than of a jam session” (5). This mélange of
studio production, broadcast network, and domestic reception might become
an ensemble of dynamic, musical process:

Since this televisual “orchestra” is not sufficient unto itself, the director’s
position during a performance is comparable to that of the conductor
in the pit at a musical play. . . . The pace and flow laboriously achieved
in the shooting of a motion picture, and in the cutting rooms and
special-effects laboratories, must be given to a television production as
it goes. The texture and tempo of the sound that is achieved in recording,
cutting, scoring, and dubbing must all be “played” in television, instead
of being finally assembled as in films. All the processing of film (both
sound-track and picture)—exposure, development, cutting, the addi-
tion of special photographic effects, dubbing, and projection—is com-
pressed, in television, into the instant of electronic pickup and transmis-
sion. . . . It is not enough for the director to conceive and rehearse the
actions of his performers: he must “conduct” them in performance as
well.32

Beier’s interest in what Eisenstein described as ideological-intellectual and

professional-technical matters,33 however extravagantly presented, is still crucial
to the historical experience of diagramming contemporary time and historical
time in terms of material, technical, and affective labor. Conceiving the TV
director as an improvisational, multimedia conductor invokes jazz epistemolo-
gies while associating quality television with contemporary musical art rather
than with the production of information: “Spontaneity is no substitute for skill,
but art need not always be deliberate” (5). For the young Eisenstein working in
theater, jazz rhythms were coordinated with other modernist influences to
enliven a theatrical montage of attractions in which a “potentate-automaton” is
overthrown.34 Here, jazz epistemologies, transposed from a minor jazz cinema,
allowed a speculative temporal diagramming of live television broadcast in a
streaming ratio of revered historical aesthetic expressions to contemporary net-
worked mass culture on the cusp of another industrial transition.35
Perhaps Beier was aware of Oskar Fischinger’s visual music animation in
Allegretto (1936), which floats the receiver through a closely synchronized but
expressive creative visualization of Hollywood jazz as illuminated radio broad-
cast. The work of the John and James Whitney in synchronized synthetic sound
22 / Chapter 1

and image, like the work of Fischinger, was also discussed in Hollywood Quar-
terly during this period, along with proposals of “audivisual music” and “cine-
plastics” in numerous articles proposing speculative research or technical pro-
cedures for more expressive or more efficient synchronization of sound and
image.36 In any case, for his part, Beier imagines the new television studio as
an improvisational, industrial combine of cinema production, radio network-
ing, and jazz performance. Beier overestimates the technical capabilities he
thought would afford synchronizing the studio ensemble with broadcast net-
working and with domestic reception in his vision of musical televisual con-
ducting of improvisational performance. But, in doing so, he also raises esti-
mations of the skills this live musical television would require of the
director-conductor: the aesthetic and technical expertise of the film director, the
conducting skills of an orchestra leader, and the turn-on-a-dime facility of the
jam-session improviser—with access to an internal technical network worthy
of Metropolis’s Freder. The television director would be the lead player shaping
all elements of the orchestration of a massive, musically synchronized social
and technical apparatus. As for program material for this apparatus, an “Infor-
mation Please movie short is no trick to shoot, but Gjon Mili’s Jammin’ the
Blues [1944] should, I think, be ranked as superior because it is brilliantly pro-
duced” (9). Beier is thinking, then, of the range from information to contem-
porary musical cinema. But aiming for a live conducting of television as net-
worked cinematic improvisation allows him to sketch a speculative medial
ethics: what television should be made capable of doing. This proposal invests
a premium on the new director’s labor. As a speculative temporal diagram, Beier
outlines an ethics of material, technical, and affective labor worthy of television
as history-making new medium.
Beier’s reference model for the content of televisual expression as improvi-
sational multimedia conducting is Mili’s critically acclaimed jazz “soundie”
(1944). The Life magazine photographer, known for his work with jazz musi-
cians and time-lapse photography using electronic flash, shot the short for War-
ner Brothers; it features Lester Young in a synthetic cinematic jam session. Marie
Bryant scats to “Sunny Side of the Street” between the slow blues that kicks off
the short and the jitterbug choreographed to the ensemble jam of the title track
that concludes the film. Jammin’ the Blues dramatizes apparently spontaneous
and continuous musical temporality using carefully choreographed camera
work, editing, and sound mixing. It also uses optical printing to reproduce mul-
tiple exposures, duplicating saxophonist Young in a cascade of echoing repeti-
tions across the breadth of the frame. Further, it carefully combines special-
effects superimposition with precision editing so that singer Bryant first appears
as a reflection in the surface of the piano, following a series in which the pianist
is reflected above its keyboard and on its lid. Then, Bryant materializes out of
the rippling mesh of her own reflection.37
 Ciphers of Hieroglyphic Time / 23

Jammin’ the Blues is a complex temporal diagram in its own right. Its careful
compositing of jazz sound and image as personified gesture reflecting, rippling,
disjoining, or even bouncing off one another in dance stresses synchronization
as musical continuity rather than as Eisenstein’s “devastating rhythm.” Although
we routinely refer to the expert synchronization of sound and image in such a
composition as this as “montage,” it is important to differentiate the emphasis
on improvisational continuity that Jammin’ creates synthetically. Jazz instru-
mental, vocal, dance, and cinematic composition are all made to flow rhythmi-
cally together, whether as a cascade of serial disruptions within the frame as
Young’s image doubles and quadruples across it or as the rippling mesh from
which Bryant’s image emerges across the cut.
Differently from Eisenstein’s early use of jazz in the theater, here, jazz stages
the improvisational continuity of Young’s saxophone breaking the coherent
spatial geometry of the framed image or, alternatively, Bryant’s song staged as
emerging across the breaks of serial composition. Jitterbugging, along with the
camera choreographed to follow dance movements or to contrast dance against
instrumental gestures, then intrudes on the space of musical performance, rede-
fining its framed, geometric coherence so that musical swing tests and expands
the camera’s perspectival foci and its energetic limits. Disjuncture and conjunc-
ture are synchronized within the sound mix to project the effect, then, of impro-
visation continuing in the audiovisual stream even as musical performance or
visual emphasis passes between performers. Jammin’ the Blues indicates the
important role that musical innovation played in expressing and recasting his-
torical and emergent stresses in the temporal fabric of midcentury modern life
in Los Angeles. It diagrams the “meshes of the evening,” relieving the “meshes
of the afternoon” that Maya Deren notably diagrams as oceanic wave energies
crashing on the psychic littoral of a subject whose selfhood refracted, attenuated,
and tracked to the point of self-obliteration in the harsh everyday sunlight of
the studio capital.
As Arthur Knight38 points out regarding Warner’s cinematic capitalization
of midcentury bebop’s creative innovations, “The setting never intrudes because
there is none—only apparently limitless blackness or whiteness surrounding the
players” (33). In fact, an audio setting exists, and although it frames the entire
piece along with the title credits it follows, it withdraws its authority early on:
An announcer’s voice frames the film by explaining that it demonstrates the
stylistics of a jam session often taking place “at midnight.” Otherwise, the cus-
tomary framing of cinematic orchestras often balanced against and anchoring
song-and-dance fantasies in period musicals, such as Busby Berkeley’s The
Gang’s All Here (1943), is adjusted to better characterize the musical personali-
ties, the creative productivity and expressive power of their performances, and
the similarly virtuoso dancing they excite. The spectacular staging and editing
of production numbers in such film-musical fantasies as Berkeley’s Gang are
24 / Chapter 1

also deferred here in favor of shifts between shots of varying range that call,
carry, shift, elaborate, and punctuate the receiver’s improvisation of memory,
attention, and anticipation, as audiovisual stream moves from soloist to ensem-
ble or between instrumentalists and dancers. Jammin’ conducts audience recep-
tion as “hot,” improvisational performance.
Jammin’s temporalized forms and rhetorics emphasize synchronization not
simply in terms of auditory or visual continuity, then, but in terms of jazz epis-
temologies; indeed, as Knight observes, they emphasize the distinct performers’
musical mastery and the currency of their recognizable personas, also identifi-
able in their title credits (30). Knight concludes that although the film attempts
to present a filmic jam session as a fusion of the jazz players’ productivity with
a fraught, less-expressive national, racial, and ethnic imaginary, “the categories
that Jammin’ the Blues partakes of and tries to fuse mark the complexity of the
film’s project, the complexity of music as a social-cultural, visual, and aural
representation, and the contradictions of the United States as a ‘community’ in
the mid-1940s” (47). The film “simultaneously” emphasizes the creativity and
humanity of black musicians, desiring to achieve “colorblindness” but also to be
racially mixed, all at a moment “when the impulse behind such simultaneity was
not yet widely acceptable” (47).
However, the synthesis of hot performance distinguishing this film from
that of the film musical, and the aspect that Beier seems to have in mind, is less
that of a national communitarian simultaneity and more a through-composed
audiovisual continuity inflecting a distributed, networked musical temporality
fusing innovative, local media production with circulating musical knowledges.
This complex continuity is achieved in the choreography of sound and image
streams in the cinematic rendering of musical performance, not as failing
national imaginary but of radio broadcasts and local dance spots. Jammin’ does
not, in fact, attempt to present a jam session as if it were a live session. For
example, we never see any technical equipment, such as that typically apparent
in live performance, and the sound mix is typical of 1940s radio: Even when
Bryant sings from the background, we neither see a microphone nor hear a shift
in volume. As the announcer’s voice-over makes clear, the film presents a jam
session that usually would take place at midnight—a cinematic demonstration
of the affective labor associated with radio broadcast or with jazz dance spots,
not simply an imaginary presentation of a live jam session.39
As the camera tracks dancers whose movements nudge the frame along to
make room for their movements, the image emphasizes cinema’s accommoda-
tion of radio broadcasting while making adjustments for localized performance
and production. Audiovisual synchronization as “jammin’” musical continuity
animates jazz photography to visualize music heard somewhere between radio-
network sound and such jazz spots as those of south Los Angeles on Central
Avenue. Bryant appears as a credited singer in Jammin’, but Central Avenue
 Ciphers of Hieroglyphic Time / 25

musicians such as Clora Bryant (no relation) remember Bryant from the Cen-
tral Avenue scene as a talented choreographer who produced routines for Betty
Grable and Marilyn Monroe.40
Knight’s conclusion that the film presents a model for a U.S. jazz cinema
that would go unfulfilled during its own period indicates that Jammin’ the Blues
could hardly model the audiovisual representation of race, race mixing, and
colorblindness as a mediation of a sovereign national imaginary. Viewing the
film as a complex series whose parts incorporate musicalized disjuncture and
conjuncture to communicate improvisation as continuity distinct from other
modes of cinematic continuity, we can see that it synchronizes sound and image
in a meshing of affective knowledges associated with radio broadcast and con-
temporary popular dance. The Central Avenue music and dance scene sup-
ported undervalued, behind-the-scenes studio contractors, such as singer-dancer
Bryant, and prompted Hollywood residents to travel south of Pico Boulevard
to segregated South Central, contributing to official concern about race mixing
that was expressed through increased policing of Central Avenue’s “sidewalk
university.” That increased policing helped cement Central Avenue jazz’s demise
in the 1950s, as musicians’ unions integrated and segregationist housing policies
were struck down.41 In this context, Jammin’ attempts less to imagine a national
imaginary than to animate cinema as a “radiophonic” locale where national jazz
stars play with local stars to demonstrate a jam session as if in a Hollywood
studio appearance. It dramatizes, in other words, a boundary breaking localiza-
tion of network dissemination. This network dissemination of musical meaning
in the continuous productivity of Jammin’s gestural scenics, then, is transposed
in Beier’s proposal for conducting improvisational television.
The stylization of a cinematic jam session in Jammin’ derives from its entan-
gling of two historical sources. First, as Paul Gilroy42 observes, “Dislocated from
their original conditions of existence, the sound tracks of the African American
cultural broadcast fed a new metaphysics of blackness elaborated and enacted
in Europe and elsewhere within the underground, alternative, public spaces con-
stituted around an expressive culture that was dominated by music” (83). Twen-
tieth-century black music distributed in rhizomic form (including tours, local
musical productions, print, and media recordings) cultivated four antifounda-
tional antiessentializing epistemologies communicated in musical kinesics: the
political language of citizenship, justice, and equality; commentary on work’s
relation to leisure and the respective freedoms associated with these opposing
worlds; a folk historicism reclaiming historical experience through music; and
the representation of sexuality and gender identity, particularly in antagonistic
relationships between black women and men, inviting identification across
color lines. The tensions between instrumental performance and dance move-
ments in the film amply translate tensions between working and leisure free-
doms; between the management of race mixing in the film and the political
26 / Chapter 1

languages of citizenship; between masculine instrumental mastery and Bryant’s

vocal mastery as gendered antagonisms; and between the construction of the
film itself as a historic surfacing of talent, innovation, technical mastery, and
contemporaneity modeled on jazz itself as a changing folk historiality.
The second historical resource I have already mentioned: that of the visual-
music cinema, which, in contrast to montage cutting, emphasized the through
continuity of the audiovisual work, whether consisting of profilmic materials
or graphical materials. Just as Fischinger’s Allegretto illuminates network radio
in closely synchronized musical visualization, Jammin’ presents the abbrevi-
ated radiophonic version of a midnight jam session whose broadcast is localized
as dance. Beier’s proposal, then, reverses this localization.
The year his Hollywood Quarterly article appeared, Beier, a New Yorker who
had made training films for U.S. Air Force pilots during World War II, directed
a CBS radio documentary on the positive uses of radioactivity in cancer treat-
ments called The Sunny Side of the Atom; the next year, he directed the late-
November broadcast of Joy to the World for the Ford Theater series for CBS
television. The Princeton alumni Web site indicates the pride Beier took in hav-
ing assisting blacklisted artists—the blacklisting of artists began in 1947, the year
after Beier prioritized the jazz soundie Jammin’ over the radio quiz show Infor-
mation Please as a model for TV production in his Hollywood Quarterly essay.
In the transition from the war economy to the peacetime economy, amid
the rising tension of what would soon become the Cold War and the revival of
commercial television’s long-delayed deployment, the pedagogical effects of
national media production became complicit with sovereign disinformation
produced to exclude skilled creative laborers whose output was considered dan-
gerously and spontaneously expressive.43 At this complex juncture, black affec-
tive labor modeled creative labor for a new media director who proposed con-
ducting the televisual broadcast as quality, improvisational music: spontaneous
art that does not always need to be deliberate, controlled as information. The
continuity conducted in audiovisual synchronization as a skilled modulation of
ecstatic form bounding beyond but then returning within energetic limits is
irreducible either to the conceptual or logical information producing it. The
ecstatic, skilled indeliberation of Jammin’ also typifies the synchronized conti-
nuity of that form commonly known as visual music. As Fischinger once said
of his Motion Painting No. 1 (1947), which I discuss in more detail in Chap-
ter 3, “The film isn’t ‘cut,’ it is a continuity, the absolute truth, the creative truth.
Any observer can verify that, and I consider myself an observer.”44
Visual music continuity is the classical antinomy of montage cutting. Fi-
schinger inscribed an even-tempered, affective labor of self-observation into
Motion Painting’s spiraling textured displacements. Meanwhile, Deren and Alex-
ander Hammid’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) cuts and structures durations
of sound and image patterns to capture the creative and destructive waves of
 Ciphers of Hieroglyphic Time / 27

psychic energy from everyday light and shadow and to render cinematic recep-
tion as the subjective refraction of more distant waves of oceanic, quantum
energies. Meshes appears something like an intimate optical telegraph, tipping
askew the cinema’s meshing of thermodynamic power and informatic inscrip-
tion for its audience, casting the cinematic image as a shadow projected by the
vital energies of space-time. For its part, Jammin’ demonstrates historical black
epistemologies animated by an ensemble of skilled jazz masters whose energies
bound through and across or push aside the frame.
Each of these strategies pursues continuity between the site of reception and
some larger temporality in an ecstatic disciplining of the doubled entangled
potentialities of the technicized media stream exhibits as materialized time:
immanence and information. Whether mythifying jazz performance, reusing
Bach, or introducing drastic disruptions into cinematic subjectivity, these strate-
gies deciphered the hieroglyphic of midcentury modern time to exhibit an
ecstatic continuity rather than the historical pathos animated in Eisenstein’s
montage. Taken together, Fischinger’s Motion Painting, Mili’s Jammin’, and
Deren and Hammid’s Meshes serve to expand the notion of visual music from
a cinematic genre dedicated to illustrating musical sound toward a particular
ethics of affective labor. Chapter 2 presents Fischinger’s visual music animation
as ecstatic stylization of cinematic temporalities and posits a historical reading
of cinema and painting within Fischinger’s work of this period.

Diagramming Critical Distance

Cinematic continuity is never airtight in any of these ecstatic cinematic dia-
grams of modern, hieroglyphic time—it is, rather, the opposite: necessitated in
historical contingency. Each of these works constitutes a locally situated but
widely resounding exemplar produced in 1940s Los Angeles, understood as a
media capital through which a range of epistemologies circulated, especially in
relationship to New York and San Francisco, as David James45 has extensively
documented. Each of these cinematic diagrams provides a distinct expressive
and technical resolution to the problem Hanns Eisler and Theodor Adorno
diagnose in their critique of Hollywood and Soviet cinemas: the hopeless myth-
ification of cinematic time as representation of historical reality with the use of
advancing technologies of synchronization whose unconsidered power of amal-
gamation worked to the detriment of cinematic art, musical art, and creative
labor. Fischinger’s, Mili’s, or Deren and Hammid’s films are temporal diagrams
of affective labor and of ethical media composition and reception.
But Eisler develops a more specifically dialectical expression in response
to concerns about the increasingly automated means of synchronization used
in commercial and noncommercial cinemas (see my discussions of Eisler
and Adorno’s critique in Composing for the Films [1947] in Chapters 2 and 4).
28 / Chapter 1

A two-year grant from the Rockefeller Foundation running from 1940 to 1942
allowed Eisler to investigate the uses of serialist music composition in cinema’s
serial production processes and imagery; this funding gave Eisler his chance in
the role of director-conductor.46 Having worked in cinema composing from the
nonsynchronized cinema of the late 1920s and through the maturing sound era
of the early and mid-1930s, Eisler nonetheless had never produced a thorough
conception and execution of cinema music as the final determinant of meaning
in the site of reception. Instead, he had reused musical material composed for
different films, illustrating a dialectical conflict, progression, and synthesis
recoverable across different films.
For example, musical material Eisler composed for Joris Ivens’s New Earth
(1933) leads to the film’s concluding sequence, in which its quasi-triumphal
images of ocean reclamation in the Netherlands are punctuated with musical
commentary—and hesitation. We hear Eisler’s “Ballad of the Sackslingers,” a
sarcastic ode whose caustic lyrics, sung by Ernst Busch, note the glut of world-
wide production being thrown away to shore up consumer prices; the song
closes with a rousing demand to throw the capitalists into the sea, instead. The
jaunty march tempo of “Sackslingers” is inflected throughout with slight jazz
syncopation that develops into the more resounding musical agitprop lyrics of
its conclusion. The song’s aural and textual materials first parody economic
doublespeak and then counter it with the defiant finale.
However, the same harmonic and developmental materials of the musical
cues anticipating “Ballad of the Sackslingers” in New Earth also appear in Eisler’s
score for Ivens’s Komsomolsk (Song of Heroes; 1932). Here, underscoring the
Magnitostroy Workers Recruitment sequence, where jobless laborers are inter-
viewed and given positions building the giant Magnitostroy plant, Eisler’s cue
segues into a workers’ chorus incorporating folk music and then factory sirens.
Musical material Eisler scored for Komsomolsk as the synthesis of dialectical
conflict appears as prefatory to a coming conflict in New Earth. Musical syn-
chronization performed distinct stages of a dialectical progression. Still, by the
time of his residence in the United States, Eisler had little faith left in any further
potential for the Soviet model he had celebrated in Komsomolsk.
Eisler’s Film Music Project gave him the time, the New School for Social
Research’s institutional support, and the financial and technical assistance to
reconsider cinema production from the point of view where musical production
would determine final production stages and exhibition. He and Adorno wrote
in Composing for the Films that film music, deploying advanced techniques of
musical composition and advanced technical means of production and synchro-
nization, must become visible in its own right in the site of cinema reception:
It must “sparkle and glisten” apart from the streaming image. It may join with
but develops essentially apart from the contents of the image. Here, the dialecti-
cal conflict, opposition, and synthesis are prompted by sound and image streams,
 Ciphers of Hieroglyphic Time / 29

but while reflecting the film composer’s touch, they are resolved by the cognition
and feeling on the part of the audience. In Eisler’s dialectical stream of sound
and image, the audience maintains, or perhaps gains, critical distance from the
cinematic exhibition by virtue of music’s autonomous development sharing in
the autonomous development of the serial image.
Rather than organic unity and historical pathos, or continuous ecstatic
musicality in reception, in Eisler, musical exposition splits the totalized social
and technical architecture of cinematic reception into two parts by virtue of
active musical listening. Eisler and Adorno’s description of this process encom-
passes the technical-professional and the ideological-intellectual positions, of
which Eisenstein claimed the latter. For Eisenstein, the technical-professional
axis was less important because of the character of Soviet labor, which tended
to deploy professional specialization in relation to ideological and structural
needs. But for Eisler and Adorno, both of whom were cultural workers in the
United States when they wrote Composing for the Films, a critique encompassing
both these axes worked toward emancipating film music composition not, say,
for California farm workers, but from prejudices and bad habits. The often-
observed counterpoint of sound and image for which Eisler is known does not
specify a total formal separation or immediately political contestation of sound
against image. Rather, it proposes that the cinema audience ultimately resolves
any dialectical synthesis of art and labor beyond the site of exhibition. This
reorganization of dialectical aesthetics aims at deflating, even musically diagnos-
ing, the hysteria that Eisler and Adorno associate with the subjection of human
feeling to mass-produced, standardized cultural-industrial prescriptions. It also
insists on access to greater technical advances: adapting post-Schoenberg tech-
niques for music on the one hand, but also the further automation of sound-
image sync on the other.
So far, we have observed a central problem, that of the production of modern
temporality as hieroglyphic: cut off from historical time or the sensible tip of
radically expanded, relativistic space-time; and time contested in terms of labor
and in terms of advancing technologies. And we have seen the ways in which a
wide range of cinema diagrams this hieroglyph by mobilizing sound-image syn-
chronization. Exhausting individual workers in the massive instrumentalities of
networked technical systems seemed to produce not simply exhaustion or apathy
but also hysteria. The films and the creative processes that produced them or that
they inspired that I have introduced here thus aim at synchronizing the newly
observed materiality of the streaming temporalized image as musical affect: the
pathos of Eisenstein’s devastating rhythm, the ecstatic continuity of Fischinger’s
visual music or Jammin’s cinematic jazz ensemble, Eisler’s dialectical stream as
diagnostics of hysteria. These musical diagrams stylize the hieroglyphic of a
contemporaneity entangled in, but also separated from, the understandings of
historical change their creators held. Too, all these projects anticipated further
30 / Chapter 1

mediations of time in terms of production labor, technology, and critical inter-

pretation. In diagramming audiovisual synchronization as musical rhythm,
each project diagrammed affective labor on the part of the audience in terms of
musical gesture. The “synchronization of sense” in Eisenstein allows the con-
temporary audience to “link” to remote historical times, to receive their imma-
nent historical meanings, and to reframe the contemporary contradictions that
they lived in everyday life. The choreography of cinema as a musical apparatus
in Fischinger allows observation of an otherwise invisible but creative energetic
temporal continuity. Eisler’s musical essayism prompts critical apperception of
the exhibition itself as a site of streaming but conflicted material temporality.
In each case, the site of exhibition is not so much a historical repetition of a
Platonic cave of flickering images as that of a Pythagorean cavern.
For Alfred North Whitehead, writing in 1925, the Pythagorean roots of
“logical harmony” had served to renew and to redeem an exhausted “scientific
materialism”; music rivaled philosophy as a way of thinking the limits of mod-
ern techno-science, although Whitehead himself carefully keeps to philosophy.47
Eisenstein, Fischinger, and Eisler, whose work I explore in more detail in Chap-
ters 2 to 4, are less reticent. After nineteenth-century thermodynamic physics
had produced the technical epistemologies necessary for automating the cal-
culation of harmonic series whose technics and expressive power had once
belonged primarily to music, animating the technological ensembles of stream-
ing media as musical cavern allowed the measure of contemporaneity to be
taken in relation to the history from which it seemed split. The measure taken
in streaming media, then, is not that of form to appearance but of a relation of
contemporary time to historical time.
In each of the cases I have introduced here, the musical animation of an
unstable ratio of historical stream and materialized temporality prioritizes ener-
getic temporality over informatic inscription. In each case, musical reception is
understood in one or another sense as active mobilization calling, carrying,
shifting, and elaborating audience gesture or kinesics beyond any specific infor-
matic inscription of sound or image. Yet, in each case, historical time takes over.
A final example from the history of cinema helps illustrate how. In Ib Melchior’s
minor science-fiction film The Time Travelers (1964), a small group of men and
one woman working in a science lab rush to finish a project to open a cybernetic,
televisual window to the future before they lose institutional support. As they
make final adjustments, technician Carol White (Merry Anders) notices a
shadow flitting across the lab; shortly afterward, in a fluke of technical function,
time pressure, and group effort, they notice that the window to the future has
opened—and that it is a door, not a window.
One after another, the scientists walk through the door, first to explore the
future’s desert landscape, then to run after colleagues fleeing the future’s hostile
denizens. The door closes behind them, but they are rescued from aggressive
 Ciphers of Hieroglyphic Time / 31

mutants by the beautiful if severe Gadra (Joan Woodbury), who leads them to
a secret laboratory where a small band of humans unaffected by the radiation
of a nuclear holocaust make plans to leave Earth for good. Earth after nuclear
holocaust is depicted at its most advanced in a sequence in which electrician
Danny McKee (Steve Franken) is seduced by Reena (Delores Wells), who plays
a futuristic color organ for him. As she moves her hands lightly over an organ
keyboard, the display reacts: A series of multicolored waves ripple over its sur-
face. The futuristic color organ’s sensual special effects, in fact, were those of an
actual instrument: Fischinger’s Lumigraph, the gestural color instrument he
patented in 1950 and presented in performance at the Coronet Theater and the
Frank Perls Gallery in Los Angeles in 1951 and again at an Art in Cinema screen-
ing in San Francisco in 1953. The version seen in The Time Travelers, like the
later brighter one seen on The Andy Williams Show, had been rebuilt for bright
studio lighting by Fischinger’s son Conrad.48
The narrative of The Time Travelers, however, does not present color-music
seduction as a replacement for sex in the way William Moritz argues: In fact,
one reclining couple listening to Reena’s performance leaves to consummate
sensuous musical pleasures in private. Rather, Reena’s sensuous musical cavern
counterpoints the final denouement of the film. After mutants wreck the rocket
built to escape Earth, scientists and future humans must reopen the door of time
and step back into the past. But when they do, they find themselves in a mutation
of time: They learn that they were the shadows that had flickered momentarily
through the lab as they tested their equipment. Now, they have closed a temporal
circuit: from the branching of time diagramming actual technical development,
to the future attempt to displace Earth once and for all, and back to the retrospec-
tive voyaging into a technical, instrumental time they can no longer embody.
If caring Maria could not coexist with lascivious robotic Maria, Reena’s
futuristic color organ alternates with but is finally dominated by Carol’s com-
puter window (Figure 1.2). Carol and her colleagues observe their own bodies
as if they are a wax museum exhibit and then step through the door of time
again. From this point, they unleash an algorithmically escalating loop that
accelerates to the point of absolute temporal incoherence. This loop is presented
as an ever-faster montage sequence, with ever-greater portions of duration
deleted from it and proceeding in ever-shorter durations. At first, then, the voy-
agers find a musical cavern of sensuous, continuous pleasures; then, they grasp
the pathos of their situation by virtue of repiecing it together; finally, they are
frozen in a technical overview that obliterates any critical, situated relation to
self-imaging, world imaging, or time imaging.
Their displacement in time cannot itself be displaced and so annulled, but
only further compounded. Finally, then, montage cutting and visual music con-
tinuity are eclipsed in a computational feedback loop whose violent acceleration
results in extreme hermeneutic violence: historical pathos, instrumental ecstatic
FIGURE 1.2 The Time Travelers (1964): Carole’s “time window” and Reena’s “musical
cavern” (frame captures). (The Time Travelers, dir. Ib Melchior [American International Pictures, 1964].)
 Ciphers of Hieroglyphic Time / 33

play, critical distance—all become illegible. In its informatic version, cinematic

audiovisuality is at once frozen and exploded. The new instrument folds into its
power the pathos of montage, the ecstasy of visual music, and the critical dis-
tance provided in a dialectical streaming of cinematic time. The scientists meet
a fate that is opposite that of the dodo: They go extinct precisely by flying
through time. The audience gains no critical grasp of a historical transformation
from which it might critically extricate itself; rather, caught in the escalating
loop, the audience is confused, unable to process either the media stream or its
historical relations.
Of course, the film’s play of, as Mary Anne Doane puts it, narrative and
probabilistic tendencies was and remains legible. The Time Travelers diagrams
the emergence of a new configuration of bioinformatic temporalities that dis-
turb the old, bioenergetic ones, even as they incorporate them. The long meta-
morphosis of hieroglyphic time, whose tensions had developed in the nine-
teenth century and reached a peak in the mid-twentieth century, appears in its
new aspect. Hieroglyphic time is doubled, its energetic aspect now subsumed to
the informatic.
Moritz notes that Fischinger’s influence would continue in traditional
hand-drawn, computer-generated, and videographic forms. Yet Fischinger’s
work would also be studied as a model for expressive computer-interaction
design at think tanks, such as Silicon Valley’s Interval Research Corporation,
along with a wide range of visual-music animation, by the effort called “Expres-
sions” led by Joy Mountford—who supported my own research into the histori-
cal and contemporary values of visual music animation for more expressive
human-computer interfaces and interaction devices.49 This was the same con-
text in which Marc Davis’s “Media Streams” video remixing project—an impor-
tant phase of whose justification reconsidered Eisenstein’s theory of montage
as collision of dynamic ideograms—was developed for possible commercial
deployment. Other projects, meanwhile, continued the automation of synchro-
nized media streams that Eisler and Adorno saw would reach new, as yet un-
determined forms. For example, Malcolm Slaney’s development of “Video
Rewrite” automated the laborious processes of synchronizing synthetic lip sync
so that it appears natural regardless of whoever originally spoke what is heard.50
Inspired by such films as Robert Zemeckis’s Forrest Gump (1994), Video Rewrite
prototyped the automation of laborious processes required to produce spec-
tacular synchronization effects, whereby historical figures might speak words
they never uttered to fictive characters. Video Rewrite structured video data-
bases for computational access to prerecorded gestures of body and voice
actors, whether fictional or historical. The semantic content of the sound did
not matter, only sound as recorded vocal gesture. Demonstrations of the proto-
type used ideal conditions: talking-head shots of staff members presenting in
34 / Chapter 1

direct address without moving their heads, or three-quarter profile shots of JFK
from digitized video.
Such projects, then, made immanent to the new histories they were attempt-
ing to create those older inventions, relations of everyday life, or media produc-
tions originating in locations as far flung in time and space as Palo Alto, Moscow,
Berlin, Los Angeles, or New York in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To
the extent that informatic epistemologies, ontologies, and ethics were, by the
1990s, considered adequate to describing not only everyday life but also trans-
coding historical experience, such projects attempted to configure the mediation
of experience in informatic terms, displacing the very energetic formats and
methods upon which they drew. Their efforts, nonetheless, require the recon-
figuration of experience and expression in terms of affective labor: the creative
and interpretive task of reshaping historical time, as in user-generated content.
Neither a Marxian analysis of labor value fetishized as money51 nor Michel Fou-
cault’s discursive analysis of the statement (enoncé)52 can sufficiently describe the
transpositions of affective labor differentiated over time in streaming media.
Sync begins with the observation that streaming media devices are time-
pieces that don’t tell time, then, but diagram it in affective labor. Chapters 2 to
4 explore in more detail the ways that Eisenstein, Fischinger, or Eisler stylized
the hieroglyphic time of streaming media reception in and as temporal dia-
grams. In Chapters 5 to 7, Sync explores streaming media as complex temporal
diagrams revising the classical stylistics of synchronization seen in Eisenstein,
Fischinger, and Eisler after the rise of what Langston Hughes calls “an IBM land.”
In the final case study, I extend the implications of stylizing cinema or the digital
interface as temporal diagrams of historical affective labor. We see again a famil-
iar patterning: Where contemporaneity seems exhausted, dying out, or danger-
ously complex, temporal diagramming turns to music and gesture to stylize time
become hieroglyphic. In every case, as temporal diagramming attempts to
resolve the entanglement of material, technical, and affective labor, not only do
the capacities or “medial ethics” of streaming media become clear but we also
begin to discern the ways that displacements of material labor and the affects of
creative labor determine publicity and personhood in relation to changing his-
torical relations. This changing relation is not simply determined by new tech-
nologies, by new media industries, or by new formations of capital. Personhood
or publicity, autonomy or governmentality, diagrammed in affective labor sug-
gests that affective labor is biopolitical: Biolabor is the resource via which one
historical apparatus transposes its concerns to another.
The goals of this study, then, are to explore the ways in which temporal dia-
grams relate determinations, displacements, and differentiations of material,
technical, and affective labor according to five distinct capabilities. First, temporal
diagrams presume, whether they depict them or not, the initial material, devel-
opmental conditions in which they arise. Second, they specify relations with
 Ciphers of Hieroglyphic Time / 35

prior work or treatments in or of the varying ontological, epistemological, and

ethical aspects of those material conditions. Third, temporal diagrams propose
some disjuncture and conjuncture with those conditions and the materialities,
epistemologies, and pragmatics according to which conditions become action-
able. Fourth, they propose, rightly or wrongly, some measure of the relations they
propose and the conditions and treatments to which they relate. Fifth, temporal
diagrams propose further, not yet undertaken elaboration in other conditions
and according to other treatments for other problems and resolutions.
As a result, the historical, exhibitionary, and ongoing and incomplete aspects
of those situations in which temporal diagrams arise and are received may be
deeply entangled in the diagrams themselves—like Chaplin’s resorting to early-
cinema sound conventions while using synchronized cinema sound technolo-
gies. More demonstrative or pedagogical temporal diagrams, like those of the
conventional scholarly abstract of an essay or talk, may proceed with these five
capabilities in sequence and as statements. But the most interesting temporal
diagrams rarely do, and these are the most interesting, informing the choice of
works presented here. Further, while any of these five conditions, treatments,
problems, resolutions, or incomplete elaborations may be representational or
propositional, they can never be exclusively so; temporal diagrams, then, may
be, alternately, techno-scientific, aesthetic or expressive, or critical and reductive.
Unlike James Elkins’s53 recent work on diagrammatic images from art to quan-
tum mechanics, and unlike Stafford’s echoic objects resounding between their
uses in the arts and the cognitive neurosciences, Sync concentrates only on dia-
grams of affect whose presentation is primarily aesthetic and critical: those
elaborated in streaming media ensembles and works.
But this focus also allows us to propose a nonteleological determination of
the ways in which technology and media are deployed where personhood and
publicity are related to each other in complex ensembles also relating contem-
poraneity and historicity. In other words, we are able to see the ethical capacities
of technology and media respectively and differently. As biopolitical deploy-
ments, technology builds capacities for temporal diagramming of material,
technical, and affective labor outward, through bodies, built modernity, geo-
political world space, and historical time in biopolitical tensions between sover-
eignty and autonomy. Conversely, media relay capacities for temporal diagram-
ming inward through historical time, geopolitical world space, built modernities,
and bodies, expressing the biopolitical tensions between personhood and pub-
licity. Thus, more than the material labor displaced in technical operations or
media exhibition, temporal diagrams exhibit affective labor. To clarify affective
labor as the exhibition and reception of pathos, I turn to the first of three canon-
ical stylistics of streaming media synchronization: Eisenstein’s montage cinema.
I begin with a review of the ways in which Eisenstein has functioned as an avatar
of new media since Benjamin’s embrace of Potemkin in 1927.
2
Eisenstein’s Gesture
Breaking Down Alexander Nevsky

Aren’t the eyes capable of seeing in the dark with the aid of infra-red glasses; aren’t
the hands capable of guiding missiles and aircraft from a very great distance by
means of radio; isn’t the brain capable, with the help of electronic computers, of
calculating within a few seconds something that used to require months of work on
the part of a whole army of accountants; isn’t the consciousness, waging an incessant
struggle since the end of the war, shaping a concrete image of a truly democratic
International ideal; doesn’t all this demand absolutely new arts of unheard-of forms
and dimensions, arts that should leave far behind all such palliatives as the
traditional theatre, traditional sculpture and traditional . . . cinema?
—Sergei M. Eisenstein, “Stereoscopic Films”

My observations lead me to the conclusion that homosexuality is in all ways a

retrogression—a going back to the state where procreation came with the dividing
of the cells. It’s a dead-end. A lot of people say I’m a homosexual.
—Sergei M. Eisenstein, quoted in Marie Seaton, Sergei Eisenstein

“Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov were both liars. . . . Their films can be regarded as
fantasies completely divorced from historical reality. These directors had great
technical skill, but their work can only be taken seriously as formal exercises in
editing and cinematography. . . . Man is always free to go to prison. . . . Eisenstein
simply should not have made the films he did, or at least”—and here I thought I
detected some Slavic humor—“he should not have made them so well.”
—Néstor Almendros (reporting the response of a member of the delegation of new
Soviet filmmakers at the Los Angeles Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences,
1989), quoted in Annette Michelson, “Eisenstein at 100”

Sergei M. Eisenstein: Avatar of New Media . . .

or Director of History Films?
For Soviet director Sergei M. Eisenstein, changing technologies were second-
ary to the social meanings of a historical totality that had been politically
transformed by war. That Eisenstein’s cinema became, even in his own time,
an emblem of transformed technological media standing in for historical
transformations occurring in political terms is surprising in many ways.
 Eisenstein’s Gesture / 37

From Walter Benjamin’s 1927 defense of Battleship Potemkin (1925) to designers

of novel interfaces for streaming media in our own time, Eisenstein’s montage
cinema has been repeatedly configured as a signal instance of art-technological
innovation representing historical continuity in terms of technological change
instead of political conflict or historical rupture—emphasizing technical inno-
vations in combinatorial media in spite of the director’s oft-stated interests in
the pathos of historical expression and in aesthetic expression itself as a site of
historical rupture. Eisenstein’s treatment of pathos, indeed, seems willing to
sacrifice the representation of history. As he puts it in Nonindifferent Nature:
Film and the Structure of Things, the “construction of pathos” requires a “passage
of representation into music” (216).1
The citations above schematize my concerns in this chapter. Taken in order,
they indicate the political fallacy—and ethical failure—we mobilize when we
read technologies as media, read media as the affects experienced in reception,
and then understand affect in terms of either partial or excessive reception or,
as a result of inadequate or misdirected technology, failed political engagement,
and so, subjection, passive subservience, or an entropy of affect: the exhaustion
of human creativity, finally, “a lie.” This chain of proposals almost always ter-
minates in requiring some intensified technologization of media to repair the
damage it incurs, so that the history of conditions is canceled out, prompting,
conversely, the positive reading of such figures as Eisenstein as technological
innovator rather than the negative one as homosexual liar. Either interpreta-
tion results in a biographical misreading or a misdirection of historical meaning,
however productive.
Of course, Eisenstein himself seemed to commend precisely this logic when
he stated his conviction in socialist technology rather than, say, in socialist sexual
variegation. But, if his reasoning was that new media would continue to express
a concrete image of an expanded, dynamic international socialism—rather than
allow new forms of socialization under capital—he also reasoned that self-
expression through the montage principle would relieve him of suspicions of
the failed corporeal affect, affective death, or entropic degeneration associated
with homosexuality. Neither technology nor sexuality, then, is adequate, though
both are required, to understand the ways Eisenstein’s montage relates tempo-
rality and historicity in the cinematic work.
I begin by reviewing the ways Eisenstein’s montage has been diagrammed
for new media approaches in a politics of technology tending to make affective
labor secondary to technological change. Then, conversely, I explore the ways in
which Eisenstein’s montage diagrammed an affective politics of historical labor
by stylizing cinema montage in terms of musicality and gesture. Here, I explicate
the problem of affective labor in Eisenstein with reference to what Gilles Deleuze
emphasizes as the organic, pathetic, and pragmatic dimensions of Eisenstein’s
“movement-image” as it strained toward becoming a “time-image.”2 I suggest
38 / Chapter 2

instead that montage diagrammed synchronization in a doubled ratio—musical,

gestural—of aesthetic labor expressing personhood and publicity. In this non-
indifferent ratio of music and gesture, pathos as diagrammatic ratio expresses
the complex historical relation between composer of montage and receiving
audience and a historial relation, where montage construction emerges as a
modality of cinematic time to impinge upon the larger biopolitical relation of
laboring autonomy and state governmentality. Eisenstein’s stylization of mon-
tage developed over the course of the historical period in which he lived, but
while both the technical means available to cinematic expression and the politi-
cal context in which he worked changed, the expression of the relation between
composition and reception as historical and affective—that is, as pathos—did
not.3 Certainly, he modulated his stylization of montage: I argue that Eisenstein’s
was a modal cinema critiquing not only the expressive contradictions of other
national cinemas but also the role and function of the party-as-historical-image
in postrevolutionary Soviet Russia.
Eisenstein’s modal cinema raises the question, then, as to what resource, if
not cinema technologies or the Soviet State, provided the creative capacities of
Eisenstein’s montage. In the fourth section, I clarify the key transmedia negotia-
tion through which Eisenstein derived his early style of montage as rupture and
the more plastic theatrical style of his final films: Eisenstein deployed the rhyth-
mic elaboration of streaming, energetic materiality typifying Vsevolod Meyer-
hold’s theatrical workshops in biomechanics, along with Vladimir Mayakovsky’s
poetry, to express precarious affective labor as pathos—in this instance, creative
affective labor rupturing and realigning aesthetico-political experience. The
result is that Eisenstein’s temporal diagramming of precarious homoaffectivity
as pathos made the director’s labor inseparable from, rather than a waste prod-
uct of, a natural and technical history of expression, allowing his audiences to
know and to remember the turbulent history they lived.
One lesson in particular to be taken from Eisenstein’s modal cinema is that
cinema is not simply a medium obsolescing as novel techniques, such as digital
computation or network computing, arise. Rather, cinema or the computational
interface is an exhibitionary idiom deploying technological means for channel-
izing compositional sense and receiver sensation in time-based networks. Fur-
ther, the montage cinema was Eisenstein’s idiom; and he styled montage to
express historical transformations—including the exhibitionary capacities of
the time-based work itself—as expressions of historical, affective labor: Experi-
ence, suffering, and pathos are divisions of precarious affective labor shared
between creative producers and creative audiences. Explicating Eisenstein’s
montage as a modal stylization of the idiom of montage cinema allows me to
introduce several concerns important for the chapters on Oskar Fischinger and
Hanns Eisler that follow: (1) the temporal and, therefore, historical specificity
of informal affective labor in media composition and reception; (2) the primary
 Eisenstein’s Gesture / 39

need to synchronize composition, exhibition, and reception in complex tem-

poral schema for audiovisual media to become expressive; (3) the roles musi-
cality and gesture have played in diagramming expressions of complex, lived,
historical time; and (4) the diagrammatic expressivity that cinema or the digital
interface attains as each becomes capable of expressing historical relationships
between receivers and the complex temporality that we live.
Eisenstein’s cinema remains one of the clearest instances of a stylization of
complex, conflicted temporality; his work is oriented emphatically toward his-
tory. On the surface, of course, all his films, even given the contemporary subject
of agricultural collectivization taken up in Old and New (also known as The
General Line; 1929), are always, in the end, history films: Even contemporary
subjects are treated as expressing complex historical processes. But more impor-
tantly, Eisenstein’s historicizing montage exemplifies pathos as pathic act elabo-
rated through the doubled potentiality of the streaming media work; in his case,
pathos is the work doubling potentiality, the affective labor making material
history palpable. Of the three classical stylistics of synchronizing cinema to
express authorial sense and audience sensation, Eisenstein’s cinema montage
tends to express the historicity of pathos in streaming media.

Immanence and Information

Boris Barnet’s The Girl with the Hatbox (1927), a feature-length film advertise-
ment for Soviet state lottery tickets, provides a succinct image marking the ten-
sions mediating personhood as a networked mass during the years of the Soviet
Union’s New Economic Plan (NEP, 1921–1929). In Girl, hatmaker Natasha’s
laboring potential is frustrated by her customers, the dissolute tax-dodging mil-
liner Madame Irène and her husband, a querulous and abusive couple who have
secured the large spare room in their apartment for their own use by registering
it in Natasha’s name. Natasha’s hats, too, pile up in excess in the room she is
supposed to occupy, where Madame Irène’s husband relaxes as if in a private
office or hosts lavish dinner parties. Instead of paying Natasha for her output,
Madame Irène’s husband gives Natasha a lottery ticket he believes worthless. Of
course, the slip of paper turns out to hold the winning number, dramatizing the
artificiality of currency and wealth. The ensuing madcap pursuit of Natasha and
her winning ticket dramatizes inequalities accruing not simply in classed divi-
sions of labor (those who block the girl from her rightful rewards resist any
productive activity) but in technological divisions of privilege and privation.
Natasha’s employers lounge about in house robes, putting on airs while using
up resources and money rightfully belonging to workers like Natasha by virtue
of her and her grandfather’s precarious labor designing, fabricating, and distrib-
uting hats. Meanwhile, Natasha goes the extra mile, not only supporting herself
and her grandfather but also resettling the hapless, homeless Ilya Snegiryov,
40 / Chapter 2

FIGURE 2.1 Barnet’s The Girl with the Hatbox (1927): Networked listening (frame
capture). (The Girl with the Hatbox, dir. Boris Barnet [Mezhrabpom-Rus, 1927].)

who, in spite of his initial disorientation in the new society, becomes Natasha’s
love interest and ultimately helps her claim her prize.
The turning point in Natasha’s destiny comes in an image of Madame Irène’s
husband learning of the wealth he has thoughtlessly gifted to the working girl
he intended to exploit. He sits relaxed, listening through a headset to a radio
broadcast while a series of superimposed images reveal the content of the radio-
phonic sound he hears (Figure 2.1). We see a luxuriously dressed female vocalist
accompanied by violins superimposed over the reclining radio receiver, suggest-
ing a feminized, unearned leisure in listening. Then, a state official wearing
proletarian clothes and cap interrupts his musical reverie with the announce-
ment of the winning ticket, drawn by a similarly roughly dressed boy. The voice
of the workers’ state replaces the sound of musical leisure. In this nonsynchro-
nized film, sonic and network epistemologies indicating clashing rhythms,
habits, and affective positions are amply communicated by the superimposition
of the radio singer’s image, then that of the worker announcing the lottery win-
ner, and that of the boy drawing the winning ticket, over the image of Natasha’s
nemesis. First sinking into a state of listening plenitude accompanied by the
singing voice, Madame Irène’s husband sits up in alarm as he checks a notation
of the ticket he has given to Natasha.
 Eisenstein’s Gesture / 41

Labor’s power to create and to distribute wealth in the production of the

networked mass is visualized here as an unerring wheel of Soviet fortune inter-
rupting unearned leisure with a rude awakening to the new reality. The sequence
of superimpositions shows the voice of the state directing the workers’ collective
fortune away from the radio listener hoarding goods, living space, access to
communication technologies, and leisure time, while directing it toward the
working girl whose place as rightful receiver of state benefits has been usurped.
The rest of the film’s plot disentangles Natasha from a complex narrative net-
work of technical, class, and gendered disadvantages, finally recognizing her and
Ilya as history’s protagonists. Privation and privilege are resolved in favor of
Natasha, not the idle radio listener using new media to accumulate the benefits
of labor’s new, productive power.
The worker inherits the return of the party’s representation of networked
mass labor; advantage taken in privileged access to the network of masses counts
negatively in comparison to being, probabilistically, one of the hundreds of mil-
lions producing the wealth of those networks.4 Creative, or, in thermodynamic
terms, negentropic, labor trumps decaying, or entropic, waste. These polarities
are designated from the outset in terms of personhood: The bourgeois Franco-
philic Madame Irène and her boorish husband receive derision; characters with
the familiar names “Natasha” and “Ilya” experience setbacks on their way toward
material and affective rewards. Together, their earnestness—and their produc-
tive potential for romance—overtakes the wasteful greed of the postrevolution-
ary bourgeoisie holding on to status and property that are no longer theirs to
claim. Natasha and Ilya reap the benefits of combining material labor (hat mak-
ing) and affective labor (care) as ethical labor. They warrant recognition in a
cinematic diagram of networked mass culture asserting negentropic labor as the
mediator of personhood and publicity.
For Benjamin, Eisenstein’s Potemkin, seen in 1927 during his visit to Moscow
toward the end of the NEP, provides the dialectical image of personhood in this
networked mass. In Moscow, Benjamin describes the new men and women of
the USSR, as in Girl, living the precarious tensions of poverty and reconstruc-
tion, but in areas where powerful images of party activism dramatized everyday
close contact and attestations of conviction, where, for instance, legal proceed-
ings provided “pedagogical theater”: “For mobilizing the public on questions of
Bolshevik morality in accordance with party wishes, there can be no more effec-
tive means. . . . The austere forms of such educational work are entirely appro-
priate to Soviet life, being precipitates of an existence which requires that a stand
be taken a hundred times each day.”5 Ethical labor as negentropic excess organ-
ized image networks to overcome the legacies of capitalist underdevelopment
in the byt (“everyday life”) of the Soviet body politic. The proletarian “physiog-
nomy” was permeated by a “new rhythm,”6 in a “mandate, however virtual,” to
integrate “personal thoughts with a preexisting force field” incessantly producing
42 / Chapter 2

“organized, guaranteed contact with comrades” (30) on the basis of party mem-
bership as “caste.” Potemkin’s technologization of narrative, then, is another way
of imaging this force field, otherwise seen only from an airplane “of the indus-
trial elite of [Moscow], the film and automobile industries” (39).
Benjamin’s ambivalence about state production of industrial images of ethi-
cal labor within a virtual public sphere explains his treatment of technology in
his 1927 response to a German critic who dismissed Potemkin’s politicization of
cinema as lacking in realism. Benjamin responds that Potemkin is ideologically,
not realistically, descriptive—not simply of everyday life in Soviet socialism but
of revolutions in technology and media and their broader meaning for art and
culture: “The technical revolutions are the fracture points of artistic develop-
ment; it is there that the different political tendencies may be said to come to
the surface. In every new technical revolution the political tendency is trans-
formed, as if by its own volition, from a concealed element of art into a manifest
one”;7 cinema having “exploded [the] prison-world” of modern industrial life,
“the technological revolution takes precedence over both [new content and new
forms]” (17). Soviet montage shared with American slapstick a pragmatic case-
by-case resolution of deeply motivated historical tensions in cinema’s social
form and content not directly observable but legible in cinema’s technical imag-
ing of social and political transformations. But, anticipating Deleuze’s evalua-
tion of Eisenstein’s montage as demonstrating materialist reason where U.S. film
narrative provided spectacular equivalencies, Benjamin argues that “the obverse
of a ludicrously liberated technology [in U.S. slapstick] is the lethal power of
naval squadrons on maneuver, as we see it openly displayed in Potemkin” (17).
The montage method’s technical mediation of industrial and state power gives
Potemkin its special value: Its production “in a collectivist spirit” (18) empha-
sized the vital role of collectivist organization that was a primary concern in the
Soviet Union.
Since postrevolutionary Soviet life allowed private thought, Benjamin thinks,
only as a form of “solitary confinement,”8 the collectivized montage cinema—in
its complicity with the modern “milieu that rebukes it,” in the bloody violence
of its imagery, and in its foregoing of coherent narratological form—succeeded
in annihilating the bourgeois subject’s self-reflection in art.9 What Barnet’s hat
girl did for the NEP bourgeois radio listener, Potemkin’s mutinous sailors did
for the bourgeois spectatorship that Benjamin thinks decayed along with the
remnants of romantic systems of the arts. Barnet’s networked, musical listener
is shocked into reactive self-consciousness of his historical loss of personhood
by the radiophonic voice of the state. For Benjamin, Eisenstein advanced cine-
ma’s expressive capacity by deploying rhythm on the level of montage construc-
tion rather than by narrativizing rhythmic pulse or melodic line as diegetic events
or characterizations.
 Eisenstein’s Gesture / 43

But to make Potemkin render a dialectical image of Soviet life, Benjamin

flattens the complex relationships between party and masses into a single force
field: The “virtual mandate” to which Benjamin refers is epiphenomenal to the
already realized force field making subjection to state power possible in every
act and belief. Distinctions between Soviet policy and actual economic or tech-
nical development or between material and affective labor were not crucial for
Benjamin’s purposes. Transposing the montage cinema to his own critical con-
text was a matter of establishing its value not simply as art but as critical, col-
lective, technical mass art: historically necessary for conceiving the expression
of an ethical relation between culture and politics. Benjamin’s flattening of detail
in Potemkin, then, made power relationships patent despite the opaque post-
revolutionary context or Eisenstein’s supposed attenuation of narrative content.
But Benjamin is selective in his emphasis of the film’s narrative details. Less
important than the collusive relation between church and state the film depicts
(the ship’s priest and captain are the two authorities whom the rebelling sailors
most spectacularly attack) is the ship’s doctor who prompts the mutiny. The
“sadistic acts of the ship’s doctor . . . become interesting only if we establish a
relationship between the medical profession and the state”; while “no other
medium could reproduce this collective in motion” (18–19). Potemkin provides,
then, a dialectical image of biopolitical resistance in postrevolutionary Soviet life,
where the probabilistic field of statistics demonstrated an epistemological rela-
tionship between newly transformed material ontologies of everyday life, the
transformed governmental epistemologies of the body politic, and an ethical,
collectivist mode of production. To a degree, this reading mitigates fears about
Potemkin’s promulgation of revolution abroad.
At this historical remove, Benjamin’s reading makes general questions
around cinema’s conditions of production, its medium specificity, or its aes-
thetic criteriology less important than observations as to the montage cinema’s
historical, material, expressive necessity. Configuring the film’s energies as resis-
tant rather than as memorializing recent memory, Benjamin reads Potemkin as
informatic in rendering the technical force field modulating Soviet health and
governmentality, mass contact and mass conviction. Meanwhile, montage is
immanent to a critical, historical mediation of everyday biopolitical life in
aesthetico-political terms. As for an immanence of affect, more than the energies
of historical, memorial pathos, an enervated, pervasive melancholia glows dully
through Benjamin’s account of Potemkin’s technical achievement,10 while Ben-
jamin’s logic of “new media”—more precisely, of medial succession—configures
collectivist organization as the salient content of a biopolitical diagram relating
historicity to technicity in the Soviet context, and beyond it.
Diagramming historicity and contemporaneity in terms of immanence
and information continues to condition the theoretical reception of montage
44 / Chapter 2

cinema. What has changed, though, is the degree to which a bioenergetic con-
ception of immanence and information gives way to a bioinformatic one. His-
torically, the overriding tendency in contexts where advances in technology
rather than in politics mediate discourses of social transformation is to valorize
the montage cinema in some logic of medial succession—cinema conceived as
new technology or digital computation as new media—rather than explicating
political revolution as a historical event. In such accounts, however, whether
bioenergetic or bioinformatic, “technology” either animates or exhausts “affect”;
here, montage becomes a key instance of a technological advance and a technical
expression that share priority. For example, in Bernard Stiegler’s recent account
of consciousness as “montage flux,” the exhaustion of affect resulting from the
informaticization of everyday life is more pronounced even than in Benjamin’s
melancholic account of technological modernity. From Hollywood cinema to
global digital networks, Stiegler argues, we suffer a planetary “exhaustion of the
desire for histories.”11 In such accounts, Eisenstein’s montage becomes a signal
historical exception, where the time-based medium’s capacity for historical
expression does not suffer a predictable discursive transfiguration into affirma-
tions of the priority, desirability, and thus inevitability of technological change
over social or political change.
But these accounts may relinquish historical, political specificity for Eisen-
stein’s cinema. Logics of medial succession proceed by taking the medium in
which the work is made for a larger given: The production of contemporaneity
appears in terms of technology, technology appears as medium, medium as idiom,
and the stylization of an idiom (here, Eisenstein’s cinema montage) as an instance
of a revelatory use, perhaps a historic, even political use, of the new technology.
Historical contemporaneity is thus determined in relation to the technical
instance of expression.12 All such accounts configure some complex relation of
historicity to contemporaneity in terms of material, technical, and affective
labor but prioritize the relation of historicity to technical transformations.
Neither Benjamin’s melancholia nor Stiegler’s melancholic “symbolic mis-
ery,” then, describes pathos in Eisenstein’s cinema montage. And while for these
critics technological change becomes the key transformation observed, still, cin-
ema technologies, production methods, and output were not as advanced in the
Soviet Union as they were in other industrial economies. Generally, the claim
of the montageurs was not that Soviet cinema was more technologically advanced
or new but that the Soviet montage cinema was more expressive of the historical
material dynamics producing social, technological, and political transforma-
tions in modes of belonging best characterizing advanced industrial culture
(such as collectivist socialism). Benjamin’s appreciation of the technical and
expressive achievements of Eisenstein’s montage cinema and the uses of appro-
priating Eisenstein for critical melancholia concretize a long-enduring tendency
 Eisenstein’s Gesture / 45

in Eisenstein’s reception, one that becomes clear when we reconsider cinema as

biopolitical expression. Where information exhausts (bioenergetic) immanence
in a technological conditioning wherein collectivist cinema best expresses the
conflicts of everyday life, or where information entirely renovates (bioinfor-
matic) immanence in the wealth of new possibilities engendered by the dis-
semination of new digital media, Eisenstein’s montage methods—considered in
part or entirely a matter of transformed technological expression—are trans-
posed away from their historical conditions to different contexts.
For Soviet critics, Eisenstein’s montage principle became a matter of debate
around formalist aesthetics and socialist epistemologies symptomatic of more
complex movements and events in Soviet politics and culture.13 A Soviet docu-
mentary titled Sergei Eisenstein made in 1958, the year of Ivan the Terrible, Part
Two’s belated and posthumous release, indicates a hesitant remembrance of the
director: Characterized as a cultural worker of genius and generosity, with the
capacity to “work, and work, and work,” he was, the voice-over explains, subject
to occasional delusion and ideological error. At this point in the film, the cam-
era pans over Eisenstein’s diagrammatic score of Alexander Nevsky, which thus
becomes an index of nervous exhaustion. By the collapse of Soviet socialism
during the late 1980s, such characterizations had been distilled to simple con-
demnations of the director as a canny liar, as in the epigraph cited at the begin-
ning of this chapter.
In Western criticism, Benjamin’s review of Potemkin concretizes a series
of debates wherein Eisenstein’s montage method becomes a matter of advanc-
ing technics and modernist (or postmodernist) epistemologies and where the
expressive capacities of audiovisual media become a matter of informatic new
media or of opportunities to recuperate epistemologies associated with older
media for a transformed technological context. The concerns Victor Hugo
expressed during the mid-nineteenth century—that the culture of the book
would kill that of the cathedral—are transposed to streaming media.
In their 1947 critique of Eisenstein’s claims of isomorphic synchronization
of sound and image in Alexander Nevsky (1938), Eisler and Theodor Adorno
produce the negative version of Benjamin’s affirmation of Potemkin. Their well-
known critique takes on claims that Eisenstein makes in his essay “Vertical Mon-
tage” (1939)14 and that he illustrates with a graphical score diagramming simul-
taneously rising and falling movements in sound and image in a key sequence of
his cinematic collaboration with Sergei Prokofiev on Nevsky (Figure 2.2). In “Ver-
tical Montage,” Eisenstein claims that any correspondence between sound and
image of the sort associated with modernist painters, such as Wassily Kandinsky,
must be an artifact of historical material circumstances rather than an expres-
sion of some ambiguous spiritual dimension of aesthetic experience. He asserts
that the Nevsky diagram’s rising and falling rhythm shows how the sequence’s
46 / Chapter 2

FIGURE 2.2 Eisenstein’s controversial Nevsky diagram (detail). (S. M. Eisenstein, “Vertical
Montage,” Selected Works Volume 2: Towards a Theory of Montage [London: BFI, 1991], 327–399, insert.)

isomorphic sound and image reproduce a gesture of “breath.”15 This portion of

the film depicts the Russian Prince Nevsky’s late medieval army anxiously await-
ing, on the shores of a frozen lake, an impending attack by invading Teutons.
Eisler and Adorno acknowledge that Eisenstein’s interest in gesture in music
and in plastic, serial imagery agrees with their contention that gesture has pri-
macy in the audiovisual work as in ballet or pantomime (77). Eisenstein is also
right, they think, in considering “rhythm” as an important consideration for
auditory and visual registers of the audiovisual work. Rhythm is evident in the
musical illustration especially common in synchronized cartoons (“Mickey
Mousing”) but more significantly describes the “higher aesthetic quality” of the
work (68). As Benjamin does, they acknowledge the importance of collective or
collaborative production. But rather than construe montage rhythm as a cine-
matic engagement with the superstructure promulgating technical advancement
while denying the specific meanings of collective production, as Benjamin does,
Eisler and Adorno argue that any rhythmic correspondence arising in sound
and image would have to be metaphorical, refuse any phenomenological status
for any qualitative fusion of sound and image, and dismiss any other source of
metaphor apart from audience interpretation as a claim of musica ficta: the
musical score forced to “represent something to which it refers instead of merely
being itself ” (85). This tendency to deploy music in service of the image origi-
nated, they argue, in the ghostly quality of the moving image, its living and
nonliving quality, where musical accompaniment became useful “to exorcise
 Eisenstein’s Gesture / 47

fear or help the spectator absorb the shock” (75) of this entangled exhibition of
living and dead labor. It is motivated in a cultural symptom, in other words, that
should not be indulged.
Eisler and Adorno instead present a plan for film scoring informed by Eisler’s
experiences in a recent Rockefeller Foundation–funded Film Music Project and
in Hollywood and by Adorno’s experience as consultant on the Princeton Radio
Project, another Rockefeller Foundation–funded project that helped facilitate
Eisler’s grant. The means for emancipating cinema music will be “objective plan-
ning, montage [methods for sound and music], and breaking through the uni-
versal neutralization” (88) of musical value and audience affect resulting from
then-inferior sound-production practices as well as standardized composition
practices. Acknowledging further technical advances in synchronization while
insisting on access to those uses for advanced aesthetic uses, they read the Nevsky
diagram as an informatic fallacy. All Eisenstein’s graphical score of isomorphic
breath gesture in Nevsky proves, Eisler and Adorno argue, “is that there is simi-
larity between the notation of the music and the sequence. But the notation is
already the fixation of the actual musical movement, the static image of a
dynamic phenomenon. The similarity between the music and the picture is
indirect, suggested by the graphic fixation of the music; it cannot be perceived
directly, and for that reason cannot fulfill a dramatic function” (153).
Eisler and Adorno attribute to Eisenstein’s chart a parametrical, informatic
character that Eisenstein does not, in fact, explicitly claim for it. This reading of
the Nevsky diagram and of “Vertical Montage,” like Benjamin’s appropriation
of Potemkin, serves numerous purposes: Eisenstein becomes a useful straw man
for Eisler and Adorno’s argument.16 But it indicates Eisler and Adorno’s larger
interests: making advances in compositional technique parallel advances in
recording technique so that musical scoring would have greater autonomy in
the production process and in cinema reception. Synchronization techniques
shortly would be “automated,” they argue (109), and given the reduction in value
for musical labor such advances implied, film music must become visible in its
own right rather than disappear in subservience to the filmic image. It should
“sparkle and glisten” without illustrating what is already on screen (133). Eisler
and Adorno advocate a kind of doubled screen for the streaming audiovisual
work. Disney’s higher-definition stereo sound for Fantasia (1940) provided the
problematic reality their program might improve. The composer of a “visible”
film music would no longer be taught that “he is only a cipher” (115)—that is,
a creative worker become hieroglyph.
The difference, then, has to do with the ways distinct critical methods con-
sidered labor and cultural reproduction. For Eisenstein, sound and image might
reproduce a gesture, such as breath; this was not a technological advance but
an aesthetic and political one. For Eisler and Adorno in Hollywood, film music
workers had to plan montage using the most advanced technologies possible as
48 / Chapter 2

a way of being gainfully employed, but, further, epistemology and cognition

for Eisler and Adorno must pass through the concept rather than through
musical affect, precisely because Hollywood’s incipient automation of synchro-
nization techniques threatened to automate cognition as false feeling. The
sound-image combinatoire had to be pulled apart and submitted, in separate
streams, to audience reflection.
During the 1960s, Christian Metz and Peter Wollen produced new versions
of Benjamin’s and Eisler and Adorno’s pro-and-con valorizations of Eisenstein’s
montage. In both accounts, the newly perceived dominance of cybernetic pro-
cesses is clear. For Metz, Eisenstein’s montage fetishizes an informatic approach.
Just as Eisler and Adorno claim in regards to the Nevsky diagram, Metz asserts,
in essence, that Eisenstein had confused immanence with informatics, helping
prepare the way for a general triumph for the cybernetic apparatus:

The machine has ground up human language and dispenses it in clean

slices, to which no flesh clings. Those “binary digits,” perfect segments,
have only to be assembled (programmed) in the requisite order. The code
triumphs. . . . It is a great feast for the syntagmatic mentality . . . [as the
natural object is] analyzed, literally and figuratively, and its constituent
parts are isolated; this is the moment of breakdown analysis, as in the
cinema. Then the parts are distributed into isofunctional categories:
straight tracks to one side, curved to another. This is the paradigmatic
aspect—and it is only preparatory, as was the filming of individual scenes
for Eisenstein. The grand moment, which one has been waiting for and
thinking about since the beginning, is the syntagmatic moment [in
which a duplicate of some original object is fabricated so that it will be]
“perfectly grasped by the mind, since it is a pure object of the mind.”17

Metz argues for an urgent distinction between cybernetic technics and the
cinema’s exhibition value as utterance within a negative logic of medial succes-
sion wherein cybernetics had parceled out idealized reality as binary code and
where cinema might resist that totalization as actualized speech, not idealized
mental copy. In response, Wollen18 perfects the opposite response to the “old-
new” axis where new technologies replace the old. Much as Eisler and Adorno
think that rising technical standards for sound reproduction necessitate “the free
and conscious utilization of all musical resources,” Wollen describes cinema
generally as requiring an eclectic, political aesthetics. For Wollen, cinema as
new medium draws on extensive, motley media archaeologies and thus requires
historicization in relation to older modes of expression (just as, in a less pointed
way, Eisler and Adorno compare cinema to ballet or mime). Rejecting the cyber-
netic implosion of Saussurean semiotics Metz theorizes, Wollen draws on
Charles Sanders Pierce’s semiotics of icon, index, and symbol to argue that
 Eisenstein’s Gesture / 49

distinct referential qualities mingle in the same cinematic sign. Cinematic mean-
ing can never be reduced to a single syntagmatic encoding. Wollen thus under-
stands multifarious historical artifacts belonging as much to the history of
cybernetics and robotics as providing cinema’s impure origins, like automata.
Cinema becomes not a final holdout against cybernetic idealization but wildly
combinatorial and incorporative:

The cinema is not simply a new art; it is also an art which combines
and incorporates others, which operates on different sensory bands,
different channels, using different codes and modes of expression. It
poses in the most acute form the problem of the relationship between
the different arts, their similarities and differences, the possibilities of
translation and transcription: all the questions asked of aesthetics by
the Wagnerian notion of the gesamtkunstwerk and the Brechtian cri-
tique of [Richard] Wagner, questions which send us back to the theory
of synaesthesia, to [Gotthold] Lessing’s Laocoön and [Charles] Baude-
laire’s Correspondences. (8)

Wollen’s account recalls Benjamin’s sense of immanent historical fracture

lines brought to the surface in the expressive power of a new technological
medium, although here, the fracture lines seem to be radio “bands” or television
“channels,” while Eisenstein becomes the exemplar for a second, combative
avant-garde rather than for collective production of mass art. Whether in Metz’s
totalized account of Saussurean logic giving way to cybernetic idealism or in
Wollen’s heterogeneous semiotics, the laboring indexes of the director and his
collaborators on the work and those of the audience interpreting the work tend
to be erased.
Later, Eisenstein’s “montage of attractions” serves as a generative, supple
logic for locating historical points of media origin or transition and for new
historicizations of transnational modernisms, and not only in scholarly works.
As such accounts as Tom Gunning’s influential elevation of cinematic attrac-
tions to the status of neglected modern vernacular19 tended to generalize the
excavation of cinema memory in order to reveal the displacement of alternative
modernities, citations of Eisenstein become a mark of directorial mastery in
Hollywood industry. Roughly concurrently, Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables
(1987) is one of numerous cinematic works to knowingly reference Potemkin’s
Odessa Steps sequence or to otherwise pay homage to Eisenstein to emphasize
their mastery of cinema’s historical, spectacular display: Roller coaster–like
attraction is integrated with historicist fiction. In The Untouchables, at a moment
of imminent suspense, a runaway baby carriage recalls the carriage released
from the hands of a murdered woman to bounce down the Odessa staircase in
Potemkin. Here, it rolls down the marble staircase of 1930s Chicago’s Union
50 / Chapter 2

Station, caught in the crossfire of Al Capone’s gangsters. The reference chal-

lenges the audience with a formal riddle about film-studies academicism and
pop-culture interpretation but for meanings that are the very opposite of those
Eisenstein intended: Baby and mother survive in The Untouchables, of course.
Zbigniew Rybczynski’s video Steps (1987) parodies the appropriation of
Eisenstein’s montage into Hollywood cinema and Western film studies according
to logics of new media succession and cinema historicism. The video mobilizes
tensions between immanence and information to question whether montage-
as-technological-attraction is not actually a sophisticated form of historical
kitsch. In Steps, a visiting Eastern Bloc director restages the Odessa Steps se-
quence on a U.S. blue-screen stage as an experiment in media immersion. Dra-
matizing the power of electronic compositing technologies, whereby the blue-
screen studio-as-computer expands the spectacular qualities of cinema into
participatory immersion, Steps presents a group of Eisenstein fans and tourists
of cinema history who enter the Steps sequence and climb a “virtual” form of
the steps presented somewhere between the blue-screen stage, a supervisory
control booth, an unseen digital computer performing a live composite, cinema
history, and commercial appeal. The tourists climb the Steps to “touch” film
history come alive, to explore the power of electronic “reality,” or, simply, to
become “stars.” One couple’s attempt to secretly film erotica and others’ attempts
to touch the blood of a dying woman make a point shortly made even more
glaringly obvious, as the Steps tourists mime gestures suggestive of hungry
vampires or slowly rioting zombies in a Romero film. The user of participatory,
immersive digital media risks becoming more a vampire-zombie of late capital
than a participatory media revolutionary who will know what to do with the
future of image production soon to be available at his or her fingertips. Immer-
sion in electronically composited environments holds the promise to renew the
political aspirations of montage or the political meanings held in cinema mem-
ory but instead only fetishizes cinema history and memory, appropriating these
in illusionistic participation whereby the interactive media attraction mines
historical pathos less for historical lessons than for greed, lust, and ignorance—
at least, in this director’s vision.
But by the mid-1990s, with the novelty of digital compositing increasingly
a thing of the past and interactive forms widely available in computer games or
CD-ROMs, its very lack of novelty allowed digital compositing to serve as mem-
ory theater. Oleg Kovalov’s compilation film of 1996, Sergei Eisenstein: Auto-
biography, loosely excerpts Eisenstein’s memoirs while using digital composition
to reassemble fragments from a broad range of European modernist cinema
experiments from the 1920s into the 1930s. Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy’s
Ballet mécanique (1924) or Fischinger’s early musical motion studies circulate
through the film as reflections in Eisenstein’s mind’s eye: evocative but vague art-
historical references seen from a pseudoautobiographical point of view guiding
 Eisenstein’s Gesture / 51

the receiver through the narrated excerpts of Eisenstein’s diary. Although the
narrative of the film is drawn from Eisenstein’s memoirs, a montage of modern-
ist cinema stands in as his cinematic autobiography and as testament to an almost
plastic everydayness seemingly transforming as he moves through it. Here, Eisen-
stein’s own contributions are subsumed to a European field of practice whose ret-
rospective geopolitical generality defies the historical fault lines that fractured it.
With the dissemination of digital-media technologies underwriting Kovalov’s
fictive Eisenstein autobiography, interdisciplinary approaches ranging from
information design,20 film music and musicology,21 or narratology and digital
media theory22 explored Eisenstein’s theories with renewed insight, emphasizing
Eisenstein’s sense of the active engagement of the cinema viewer, his recognition
of the capacity for musical meaning to arise in visual as well as auditory registers,
or montage’s emphasis on affect, breakage, and association. Marc Davis’s 1995
doctoral dissertation explicates the design of his Media Streams authoring sys-
tem for video remixing by acknowledging the social nature of fan remixing that
Henry Jenkins23 observes and by working through Eisenstein’s theories of mon-
tage as prior work in recombinant cinema semiotics. Media Streams was not an
early version of YouTube.com but a proposal for more advanced versions of the
video-authoring interfaces typified by such programs as Adobe Premiere or
Adobe After Effects. Davis expands on a central insight of Eisenstein’s Nevsky
diagram: Specific elements of an audiovisual work might be isolated as gestures,
such as Eisenstein’s breath gesture. In Media Streams, icons allowing elements
to be parametrically controlled appear in a stacked column on the left-hand side
of the interface window, while their tracks to the right show changes over time.
Authoring video elements by icon rather than simply adjusting timing informa-
tion of audio and visual tracks allows any semantically meaningful component
of an audiovisual work to have its own stream.
Davis, like Metz, situates Eisenstein’s work in relation to Saussurean semi-
otics but, like Eisler and Adorno, reads the Nevsky diagram as an incomplete
proposal of informatic synchronization. Davis writes, “Eisenstein was on the
right track though [he was theorizing] at the wrong level of representation.
Shots are not letters or even words, but utterances whose semantics does radi-
cally depend on their position in a syntagmatic structure” (98). Davis’s graphi-
cal language for video remixing describes an “invariant” semantics independent
of the sequence in which it occurs and a “variable” semantics dependent upon
the sequence in which it occurs; interactions between the two account for the
play of meaning arising in video remixing. Davis separates, in the manner
characteristic of bioinformatic epistemologies, the medium substrate (the
hardware) from the medium of expression (the software interface). Davis pro-
poses two semantics, then, but by removing the substrate of computation,
implicitly includes three. Any original context, content, or exhibition becomes
subject to an independent semantics allowing the work to be input, analyzed,
52 / Chapter 2

and reordered; the Media Streams interface allows the determination of new
dependent semantics rendered in output; but beyond these, the manipulability
of the temporal sign at the graphical interface itself evinces a further seman-
tics. At this third level, the gestural of Eisenstein’s breath gesture is transposed
to the interface icon and the hands of the computer user (rather than being
transposed between composer and audience in exhibition). This third seman-
tics is that of the interface design itself; that the software design might be bro-
ken apart and redistributed is not part of Davis’s design (at least in this docu-
mented version).
Because the nature and number of semantics proposed remain unclear,
Davis is able to collapse software design of video production, exhibition, and
reception into a double articulation whereby semantic variability wins out over
syntactic determination, meaning over context; video remixing wins out over
the givenness of content or historical authorship. Media Streams reconfigures
the material, technical, and affective gesture of Eisenstein’s montage for video
remixing and social networking; its ostensible value would be its capacity to
facilitate novel exhibitions of personhood and publicity.24 Davis’s video remix-
ing software is not so much medium as instrument. It models the variegation
of authorship as a straightforward activity for which exemplars and concepts
circulate widely in professional and informal domains. Why would participatory
media practices grown up around existing, often low-quality tools require such
a fine-grained tool? A theory of user-generated content in search of a participa-
tory user base that is also a software consumer base, Media Streams remains
interesting in the ways it works through a series of important questions around
instrumentality and participation in the form of software design: what counts
as historical and what counts as social, what counts as medium and what counts
as tool, and how digital tools mediate participation differently from the exem-
plars they call on.
For Eisenstein, active interpretation of historical pathos in reception was
crucial to expressing and revising the memory of political transformations in
streaming image and sound. For Davis, active reauthoring and circulation of
any content in any sense would have been crucial for Media Streams in the
event of commercialization. The meanings of history become an effect of what
can be made to circulate rather than what can be marked as a memorial, affec-
tive event. As we have seen in the works of Benjamin, Eisler, and Adorno, as
well as in those of Metz, Wollen, De Palma, and Rybczynski, Media Streams did
not originate this problematic. Davis’s software, steeped in but resisting Eisen-
stein’s theory of pathos as creative, ethical labor, presents a clear articulation
of a long-emerging problematic wherein immanence is displaced by informa-
tion. Meanwhile, informal users of video seem less interested in fine-grained
composition of digital video content but doubly interested in digital video as
a medium for variegated self-exhibition and in the networked site of video
 Eisenstein’s Gesture / 53

exhibition as a medium of commentary—that is, in scoring the mediated his-

toricity of personhood and publicity.
In the obverse of Davis’s interpretation of Eisenstein, such critical media
comparatists as Marsha Kinder draw insights from Eisenstein’s cinema that help
explain this interest in exhibitionary scoring of comparative personhood and
publicity. Kinder argues that Eisenstein’s specific characterizations of the cinema
sign, which varied widely, are less important than his self-conscious appropria-
tion of prior works of art and his insistence on reframing art-historical material
for streaming exhibition and reception: “It was not just the conflict between the
object and its framing that provided a new resource for dialectic montage but
also the way he framed this conflict through a comparison across contextualizing
media, cultures, and periods, a process that generated a productive analogy be-
tween framing and adaptation” (160–161).25 Framing and appropriation em-
phasize the expressive power of open-ended association mobilizing desire, not
computation, yet also exhibit immanent historical conflict on the media screen
rather than the subjection of historical meaning to informatic structuring. This
conflict of framing and adaptation arises as an expression of highly mediated
but historically expressive desire playing out in transmedia appropriations rang-
ing from Peter Greenaway’s A TV Dante (1989) to children’s gaming software.
Kinder’s reformulation of psychoanalytic theories of desire requires a rethinking
of theories of digital media reception as self-exhibition: Any engagement of Eisen-
stein’s montage means writing oneself into the processes of “promiscuous” asso-
ciation according to which contemporary transmedia production proceeds.26
“Promiscuous association” rather than technical instrumentality enchains
desire and cognition in Kinder’s account of adaptation and reframing, working
across historical and contemporary fields of expression. Similarly, more than
any single dominant technical instrumentality, Eisenstein himself invokes the
ways in which technical ensembles were adapted to and expressed reframed
association. In “P-R-K-F-V,” he writes admiringly of Prokofiev’s cognitive capac-
ity to submit telephonic communication, alphanumeric mnemonics, and com-
positional expertise in the composer’s signature emblem made up of the con-
sonants in his surname.27 Eisenstein’s own fascination with configurable medial
forms, such as the “spherical book,”28 the adjustable quadratic screen, or the
ancient scroll as a protocinematic panorama, similarly, is a claim about his own
facility to compress historical or technological ensembles into new expressions
that might then be given an explosive new power.
For Kinder, similarly, biographical memory may be narrativized in compu-
tational forms—for example, as “database narrative”—but association is moti-
vated and elaborated in terms of affect. In her interactive CD-ROM Mysteries
and Desire: Searching the Worlds of John Rechy (2000), Kinder and art director
Kristy H. A. Kang implement a contemporary version of Eisenstein’s spherical
book: The notion of a vast spherical projection of montage materials becomes
54 / Chapter 2

a cylindrical scrapbook of photos and text from the archives of gay Chicano
writer John Rechy.29 The project speaks to Stiegler’s fears of a general exhaus-
tion of desire for history as a result of the symbolic work demanded by pro-
grammed media; it insists on a desire for biographical, historical narration. In
Mysteries and Desire, the mysteries are the personal history, motivations, or
historical significance of Rechy’s exploits in U.S. literature. The CD-ROM draws
on cinematic as well as literary and life-writing epistemologies to frame desire
as motivating Rechy, the readers of his works, and the user of the interactive
biography’s interface.
Using the navigable panorama technology of QuickTime VR—more often
employed to present perspectival, quasi-immersive touristic scenes—Kinder
and Kang design the introductory “Memories Zone” of Mysteries and Desire as
an intimate but navigable collage of Rechy’s personal archive, a collection of
associations programmed as embedded hotlinks leading the reader to additional
pathways and into other “zones” of Rechy’s biography. Where a navigable pan-
orama presenting a cylindrical scrapbook motivates user navigation in this first
primary encounter with Rechy’s life and work, cinematic and literary episte-
mologies are invoked in the pathways to which associations programmed into
the scrapbook lead. Linearly sequenced, often containing animated imagery, and
sometimes including digital video or sound, these pathways fill in historical
details not apparent on the psychic surface of writerly memory. The reader
travels through primary and secondary mediations of intimate and public mem-
ory, then, breaking elements blurred together in the first level of the collage out
into secondary series where historical associations or cultural meanings are
filled out.
The archive of personal history turns out to be the precipitate of accumu-
lated but partial, not entirely recoverable intersubjective experiences or events,
which are further elaborated and complicated in other zones of the CD-ROM.
The other zones are devoted to creative depictions of affective labor imbricated
in the complex collage of personal and public self and that are paradoxically
more descriptively presented as fictive rather than documentary or historical
interpretation. These consist of illustrated, annotated, or reinterpreted versions
of Rechy’s writing, presented via a fictive navigation of factual obsessions: fic-
tion, life writing, sexuality, bodybuilding. The aesthetico-political shaping of
concrete reality undertaken by Rechy is delivered over a navigable media stream
but with no promise of radical extension or of infinite navigation or variation.
In Mysteries and Desire, conflict is presented, on the surface, as beautifully
informatic: a polished, if also blurred and worn, resolution of personhood and
publicity in a sphere of memory. But the meaningful associations making this
exhibition of selfhood cohere, the user learns, lie in additional conflicts imma-
nent to that surface, requiring energetic actions on the part of the user to crack
and to unfurl. At key moments between select sections, Kinder directs that a
 Eisenstein’s Gesture / 55

random number generator determine which section will be the next destination.
Rather than promise infinite interactivity, at moments when energetic move-
ment exhausts a sequence, the ensemble of technically prepared associations,
animated by desire, introduces entropic calculation into the navigable path,
scrambling and renewing the sequencing of associations. Kinder and Kang’s
design of digital biography treats history and the desire for history as factic and
fictive by turns: made, but generative, given to be remade in repeated revision
of pathways, even if users are no more allowed to remix the CD-ROM’s contents
than Davis’s users are allowed to remix his authoring program. The drawback
of this design is that the play of fact and fiction is most illuminating to readers
of Rechy’s work, whose reading habits may or may not adapt easily to this
gestural-technical versioning of literary repetition. If Media Streams’s potential
digital authors remixed without needing such sophisticated software, Mysteries
and Desire’s readers’ habits may not have found immediate points of literary
entry with the CD-ROM’s navigable associations.
Barbara Stafford30 argues that Potemkin’s montage creates “animated, salient
images . . . generating interbrain correspondences” that unify its audience.31
Stafford argues that such a generation of correspondences across thinking bod-
ies exemplifies the “cognitive work” that artistic images do as “echoic objects,”
vibrant diagrammatic emblems binding the thinking body and its surrounding
environment in a mimetic “interface” (233). Davis’s Media Streams prototype
and Kinder and Kang’s Mysteries and Desire’s experimental biography each sug-
gest, though, that revisions of cinema montage animate desire for mediological
expression—that includes the cognitive work Stafford describes but is not lim-
ited to it—to introduce or to rediscover historical meanings not apparent in the
“compound image.” In other words, the echoic object arises in and is subject to,
historical change beyond any specific work that it does. This lesson about his-
torical relation is proffered in Eisenstein’s work, in his reception, and in these
prototypes: The historical play of personhood and publicity engages affective
labor informally where technical development differentiates and displaces mate-
rial work. Potential historical, social, or cognitive-corporeal correspondences
diagrammed through media streams (whether in the energetic sense of bodies
resonating together in the modulation of personhood and publicity in a single
site and moment or in the more general modulatory dissemination of pro-
grammed media networks) are transduced as certain possible gestures to be
taken or deferred—and not as other gestures that thereby become impossible
or go unrealized. This larger, complex historical relation is not directly subject
to cognition in the sense of a cognitive, thinking self.
Affective labor determines an informal difference between potential and
possible gesture-technical act. But Mysteries and Desire prompts us to ask: What
kind of act is the affective labor of pathos for Eisenstein? For Nicholas Cook, the
Nevsky diagram is an exemplar of the plasticity of affective meaning that becomes
56 / Chapter 2

available in the dynamic, cognitive combination of image and sound. Cook

notes Eisler and Adorno’s concern that rhythmic gesture in audiovisual synchro-
nization is metaphorical and glosses Eisenstein’s Nevsky diagram with reference
to cognitive theories of metaphor. Cook argues that when two expressions, in
whatever medium, are made coextensible in some aspect, metaphor results in
the transfer of meaning proper to one expression to the other, so long as the two
different expressions share some attribute. Sound and image may transfer mean-
ing to one another, then, if they share, or are interpreted as sharing, attributes.
Eisenstein’s Nevsky score thus diagrams a complementary synchronization of
sound and image: The metaphors presented in sound or image roughly agree.
More precisely, shared meaning results in conformant synchronization; negative
transfer results in expressions that contest one another. The cognitive theory
Cook calls on to make sense of the Nevsky diagram reads it in terms of metaphor
and reference, but here, metaphor becomes something more like metonym. It
references attributes of formal expressions by indexing sets of attributes to the
nominal identity of the expression. This cognitive model of metaphor parallels
the nominal referencing structures of object-oriented computing, where attri-
butes of objects may be called to pass parametrical expressions from one object
to another, creating computable chains of transfer and inheritance between soft-
ware objects using dynamic referencing. Beyond the close readings Cook pro-
vides of media works ranging from Eisenstein’s cinema, record-album covers,
Disney’s Fantasia, or film works by contemporary European auteurs, Cook’s
reading suggests how the Nevsky diagram might partially anticipate certain
aspects of object-oriented media expression, at the cost of turning metaphor
into metonym. Cook’s explanation also does not explain how a gesture of breath
structured as an emergent quality of an event arising in the shared duration of
a musical phrase and an image sequence communicates historical pathos as an
artifact of its being composed and received.
The argument made in “Vertical Montage” and by the Nevsky diagram is
that the complex contrapuntal meanings of the synchronized image as gesture
are not simply produced in collision, as in Eisenstein’s 1923 montage of attrac-
tions, nor are they simply “stratigraphic,” as in the four layers of montage he
hypothesized in 1929. Rather, building on these earlier approaches, the Nevsky
diagram presents four isomorphic layers of composition—visual composition,
shot, musical score, and final synthetic gesture—in a larger contrapuntal flow.
Each contrapuntal voice helps shape a larger combined expression whose ges-
tural concreteness is also partly determined by its audience reception; interpre-
tation may also, as in counterpoint, pull out voices on the basis of combined
relation. But these streams correspond to the material and collaborative process
of making meaning, not simply to cognitive meaning inhering in the film (or
the diagram of it). Vertical montage, then, emphasizes a specific collaboration
and a specific production history in Soviet sound film (rather than a general
 Eisenstein’s Gesture / 57

collectivization of labor), does not map music and image as informatic and
parametrical, and does not insist that music follow image. The enfolding of
polyphonic and contrapuntal rhythm and lyricism results from the collaborative
labor of production and reception. The Nevsky diagram, in other words, is a
compressed production and exhibition history of compositional sense and audi-
ence sensation, charting a quasi-autonomous breath projected and received
within a “cinema Soviet.” This breath draws immanent history as pathos into
everyday time and releases possibility into everyday life through the complex
temporal expression of precarious affective labor. Its production history and
exhibition occupy a key phase in Eisenstein’s work, during which he moved
further away from historicizing the violent memory of the revolution in forms
relying on profilmic materials and toward historicizing the revolution’s sus-
tained meanings in the face of futural violence, where the correspondence of
pathos between the historical and the contemporary is effected with intensified
attention to plastic symbolic forms rather than materials familiar from everyday
Soviet life or recent history. (The comparison of his later works to Disney ani-
mation is, in this latter respect, justified.)32
As Davis’s and Cook’s discussions make clear, some aspects of Eisenstein’s
graphical score do anticipate formally and conceptually the graphical authoring
interfaces for contemporary software products ranging from digital video
authoring to special effects authoring to consumer entertainment software. The
interface displays of authoring tools, such as the various versions of Adobe Pre-
miere or Adobe After Effects, allow audio and visual media to be graphically
co-positioned and processed according to a common, mathematically deter-
mined time base specific neither to auditory nor to visual material and not
intrinsically subject to the limits or constraints thereof. This time base, though,
is subject to the limits of the clock ticks of the digital computer; the algorithmic
modulation is subject to the hardware and software limitations of the computer.
Here, rather than creative labor and audience gesture, binary sound and image
material become inputs, and the compressed final segment of digital video
becomes the output. Placing media of historically distinct materialities as logical
materiality within a generic time base subject to hardware clock, programmed
algorithm, and software memory is a basic desideratum informed by the tem-
poral contingencies of production labor or of audience reception. This same
temporal modularity also informs the play or authoring modes presented in the
diagrammatic interfaces of such musical computer games as Frequency (Har-
monix, 2002), Amplitude (Harmonix, 2003), or Guitar Hero (Harmonix, 2005).
These programs produce value to the degree that they can reduce disparate
media materials to the logical convertibility of the binary digit. This reducibility
indicates not a ready extension of Eisenstein’s affective labor as pathos but rather
a massive intensification of the fragmenting of labor power in abstract general
labor distributed according to exchange value, as argued by Karl Marx in his
58 / Chapter 2

analysis of the alienated commodity object.33 The historical pathos Eisenstein

aimed to express to his audiences as gesture is intensified and fragmented as part
and parcel of the gestural-technical modulation of tensions between person-
hood and publicity animating contemporary bioinformatic belonging. In this
sense, Davis’s or Kinder’s prototypes are useful: They stress the extreme and
often fragile modulation, not the historical inevitability, of technical function
and possibilities for exhibition in the contemporary production of personhood
and publicity. But the only parametricization here is what Eisenstein describes
in his memoirs as a “charmed parameter”:

There is deep within me a long-standing conflict between the free course

of the all’improviso, flowing line of drawing or the free run of dance,
subject only to the laws of the inner pulse of the organic rhythm of
purpose (on one hand); and the restrictions and blind spots of the
canon and rigid formula (on the other).
Actually, it is not entirely appropriate or fair to mention formulae
here.
The charm of a formula is that, while laying down a general rule, it
allows, within the free current which filters through it, “special” inter-
pretations, special cases and coefficients.34

The rhythmic diagramming of breath in the Nevsky diagram illustrates the pulse
of serialized expressive materials articulating not an advance for automation but
a claim of deep historical belonging, enabling cinema to reproduce powerful
plastic gestures in the collaborative hands of two cultural workers who shared
tendencies and in those workers’ audiences.35
In comparison, gesture remains radically underrepresented, undertheo-
rized, and underdeveloped in terms of material and affective labor at the digital
interface—it is pointedly and strategically reduced. The working body at the
software interface belongs to a bioinformatic capitalization of attention, gestural
action, and programmed process. Gesture at the interface is implemented within
a distinct regime of affective and technical labor as a negative form of laboring
exchange: Programmed gesture works as a productivity gain for the producer
of the intellectual property output in the computational process before it works
for an audience or the state. The exhibition and commentary of user-generated
or remixed video express tensions of personhood and publicity in this bioinfor-
matic regime.
The Nevsky diagram read in this light allows us to confront a certain fissure
and fusion of two regimes of modern historical corporeal production that are
not limited to the uneven economies of either capitalism or socialism during
the 1920s and 1930s or to contemporary digital media but that have to do with
energetic and symbolic processes. The first regime is that of the bioenergetic, in
 Eisenstein’s Gesture / 59

which the body is understood as having a complex ontology, epistemology, and

ethics for producing meaning between the energetics of the living body and the
energetics of industrial machines: Ergonomics, for example, arose to study the
fatigue this interaction produced.36 The second regime is that of bioinformatics,
also a complex ontology, epistemology, and ethics, but one for the production
of engagements between the symbolic materiality of the corporeal body and the
symbols of information streams.37
The difference between the two regimes has to do with the relationship
between energetic and symbolic streams powering the production of corporeal
experience and sense. As N. Katherine Hayles38 has shown, cybernetics did not
arise in a vacuum; its historical context was marked precisely by a formulation
of informatic messaging requiring that context as such be discarded from the
cybernetic message, as well as by subsequent reformulations arising in part
because of the deferral of historical or social context from the cybernetic sign.
The result was that information streams, while requiring energetic resources,
made energetic interactions either internal or external to the content of the
symbolic stream of information. But the future of our own bioinformatic regime
lies in the fact that it cannot separate itself fully from the thermodynamic, ener-
getic regimes from which it derives historically.
In Eisenstein’s time, the transformed political context meant that bioener-
getic epistemologies were reconsidered by such theatrical artists as Meyerhold
in theatrical biomechanics; these epistemologies were stops on the way toward
bioinformatic corporeality but neither aimed at nor achieved its conception.
Meyerhold’s biomechanics or other modern vernaculars of bioenergetic pro-
duction required further symbolic elaboration; Eisenstein’s cinema montage
was one response. Cybernetics in its modern form as the automation of sym-
bolic processes was also a distinct aspect of vernacular responses to the demands
of bioenergetic technocultures. To the degree that bioinformatic regimes require
the bioenergetic regimes to which they seem to defer in their emphasis on sym-
bolic processing as nature, bioinformatic corporeality continues to require the
production of bioenergetic corporealities. The robotic as a diagrammatic flag
for bioenergetic history continues to mark our time along with a menagerie of
other corporeal ontologies, epistemologies, and ethics: Donna Haraway’s ironic
cyborg or Deleuze’s “spiritual automaton,” rubrics for the manufacture of the
automatic out of the involuntary.39
Eisenstein’s theory of vertical montage, then, takes on what appears to be a
more total and completely formalized appearance in terms of musicality and
gesture at precisely the moment at which the cybernetic automation of work
becomes feasible (instead of the nineteenth century’s “social cybernetics”—that
is, harmonic civil governance).40 On the cusp of a historical transposition from
bioenergetic industrialism to bioinformatic industrialism, Eisenstein’s compo-
sition methods for Nevsky travel to the point of the bioinformatic regime’s
60 / Chapter 2

concrete appearance in world historical materiality and turn back toward the
symbolic and even the constructivist tendencies of Meyerhold’s biomechanical
theater. The moment at which Eisenstein returns to symbolic theories by then
immanent to Soviet history rather than those of an emergent bioinformatic
regime constitutes a bifurcation point in the alignment of montage practices
within Soviet politics: By the time Eisenstein composed “Vertical Montage,”
Meyerhold had been assassinated, a “catastrophe” to which Prokofiev, Eisen-
stein’s musical collaborator on Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible, Part One
(1944), refers in a letter to the director in July 1939.41 Organizing montage as
symbolic, musical affective labor had value: This stylistics of media composition
provided Eisenstein an ethical mode of conducting public personhood while
generating an aesthetico-political sequence of work diverging from conventional
spectacles dramatizing state power.

Modal Cinema
We now need to come to terms with the imbrications of pathos and instrumen-
tality and, more broadly, the entanglement of organicism and mechanism De-
leuze resolves with his account of cinema’s “spiritual automaton” in Cinema 2:
The Time-Image. How does cinema unreel the serialized indexical traces it
captures photographically in an automated exhibition of memory and thought?
Cinema’s stream of serial images is not simply projected on the screen but
cleaves to our innermost consciousness, Deleuze observes. The organization
of temporalized narrative in D. W. Griffith or Eisenstein emerges from cinema’s
capacity to shape spectatorship not for an individual viewer but for a “spiritual
automaton.” Deleuze argues that the “pathetic” dimension of Eisenstein’s
montage—for my purposes, the affective labor of pathos, what I have called a
“pathic act”—constitutes a dialectical materialist aesthetics insofar as it could
be expressed in terms of the energetic visuality of early and classical cinema.
Deleuze gives Eisenstein’s achievements a privileged status within the cin-
ema of the movement image, the first of two successive historical epochs of a
“universal cinema.”42 Eisenstein’s “dialectical assemblage” of pathos adds a
“developmental” reason to montage, differentiating Soviet montage from U.S.
film style. Privileged moments are not composed as contingent, equivalent indi-
vidual persons, places, or events, as in Griffith’s editing. Rather, dialectical, affec-
tive reason motivates pulsating transitions where Deleuze notes a “leap into the
opposite,” where transitions develop from one point of intensity to another—
from sadness to anger, from doubt to certainty—resulting in an upsurge of the
new quality born in the transition (35). These pathetic “movement images”
include the sudden appearance of color in the hand-tinted red flag at the end of
the otherwise monochrome Potemkin. Such moments “compress” then “explode”
 Eisenstein’s Gesture / 61

the film’s development, so that such transitions express “the dawn of conscious-
ness and consciousness attained, revolutionary consciousness attained” (36).
The painterly images of Leonardo da Vinci or El Greco that Eisenstein ana-
lyzed require their perceivers to fabricate any possibility of movement with
regards to them; choreographic or dramatic movement, too, remain attached to
a moving body. Eisenstein’s movement images begin to build on cinema’s his-
torical expression of a shock to thought: “It is only when movement becomes
automatic that the artistic essence of the image is realized: producing a shock to
thought, communicating vibrations to the cortex, touching the nervous and cerebral
systems directly” (156). Cinema finally makes potential—that is, “virtual”—what
had been only a possibility for the other arts. Cinema’s “spiritual automaton” no
longer refers to the logical, abstract deduction of thoughts from one another.
Now, “spiritual automaton” refers to “the circuit into which [thoughts] enter
with the movement-image, the shared power of what forces thinking and what
thinks under the shock; a nooshock” (151–152). As D. N. Rodowick43 explains,
this understanding of cinema as effecting a long destined shock to the receiver
of the streaming image means that “what cinema contributes to the history of
thought is a powerlessness—in fact, a dispossession of thought in relation to the
image—that is equivalent to the division of the subject by the pure form of time”
(190). Thus, the earlier cinema semiotics of Griffith or Eisenstein would break
apart into the virtual “time image” of postwar cinemas, characterized by narra-
tive disjunctions, hallucinatory sequencing, or wandering dream states rather
than coherent spatiality and sensorimotor movement.44 The time image relates
the identity of the temporal image itself: It shows time. The time image haunted
the classical cinema’s movement image, but, Deleuze argues, it requires a frag-
menting of spatiality in the interest of the temporality of the image itself, toward
which Eisenstein strained but never reached, according to Deleuze.
For Deleuze, potentiality as virtuality is real, immanent, and unrepresented,
not a possibility to be realized. Deleuze believes that understanding the mani-
festation of material reality as possibilities realized results in a severe problem:
It means that differentiating material existence from the concept of material
existence is unnecessary. The result is that we get lost in representation. The
movement image, then, strains toward the virtuality of the time image, but to
the degree that it remains a representation of time in space rather than a com-
munication of temporality as such, it is still bound up in a false problem. If the
modern subject is split from the historical world, the time image communicates,
without representing the spatial world, the flux of time splitting the subject in
modernity. The time image relates the spiritual automaton to its historicity
through an affective ratio of cinematic duration.
In spite of Deleuze’s recognition of pathos at the heart of Eisenstein’s rhyth-
mic developments and transitions, his reading of Eisenstein’s montage as
62 / Chapter 2

projecting coherent space and sensorimotor movement is strange—too close, in

fact, to the claims that Eisenstein’s cinema lacks adequate narrative structure,
distorts history, or indulges in scientistic, quasi-parametrical formalisms. The
historical, representational, spatial, or descriptive aspects of Eisenstein’s films
are fraught precisely because he engaged in possible reproductions of the revolu-
tion while projecting these reproductions as virtual image. This paradox of vir-
tually streaming image projecting a possible gesture is not the movement image
straining toward a time image. It is rather an action feeling, a pathic act, engen-
dered by musicalizing the media stream. It has, too, a historicizing, memorial
aim as well as the futural calling Deleuze theorizes as an essential aspect of
modern art’s function: to invoke a not-yet-formed community, a coming com-
munity, a “missing people.”45 For Eisenstein, a socialist people had been achieved
in part, but the socialist body politic itself was historically traumatized, exces-
sively stressed in the present, and futurally unfinished. In this situation, any
“world historical consciousness” of an unfinished socialist people, because their
governmentality had been settled for the moment by the party as state, could be
furthered, at least for such film artists as Eisenstein, only by articulating its
immanent historical potential via cinematic possibility. Still, today, the ethical
force of pathos as affective labor in Eisenstein’s cinema remains to be brought
alongside the ontological and epistemological dimensions of montage as “epis-
temophilia” or “figural philosophy.”46
The concern with projecting a virtual streaming image in exhibition to be
received as possible gesture is consistent across Eisenstein’s theories of montage.
Eisenstein’s (now much-studied) rejoinder to Dziga Vertov’s proposal of the
Kino-Eye, for example, was what he called The Strike’s (1924) “cine-fist.” The
stylistics Eisenstein’s cinema instantiates in each case from his earlier theater
works through his late films demonstrate the variegation of his responses to his-
torical tensions between aesthetic and political epistemologies. The Strike depicts
a parable, set in 1912, of a wrongly accused worker who hangs himself, prompting
workers’ agitation and an ensuing strike. The eventual mass liquidation of the
strikers depicted in the film conveys historical agitation for worker autonomy
under the tsar in images of revolt against capitalists of the sort Vladimir Lenin
invoked: The key sequences follow a boiling over of movement into organized,
directed action. But the film also diagrams struggles taking place in the Soviet
cultural sphere in 1924, the year of Lenin’s death. Eisenstein’s conflicts with the
postrevolutionary Soviet institution for proletarian arts and culture, Proletkult,
center on the rationale according to which the audience as mass receiver was
conceived. Rather than a more geneticist account using adaptive means to edu-
cate through cultural production, The Strike’s montage insists on a teleological,
instrumental, and interventionist account of reception. Eisenstein’s notably
intensified editing techniques—using an average of 379 edits per reel instead of
the conventional 40 to 60 cuts and including corresponding shifting—dissociate
 Eisenstein’s Gesture / 63

perspectives.47 Strike’s finale of dying workers intercut against shots of an abattoir

is, then, the synthesis of a teleological aesthetics attempting to force the convey-
ance of a historical motive for the coherence of mass, laboring corporeality and
agitating against developmental or otherwise adaptive deployments of mass cul-
ture. Contrarily, the breath gesture of Nevsky elicits a correspondence between
contemporary Soviet audiences anxious about hostilities with Germany and the
medieval Russian army awaiting the approaching Teutons on the frozen lake.
Instead of the earlier, more instrumentalist gesture, this gesture is adaptive.
And as Joan Neuberger notes, Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible is a “richly polit-
ical” work; the montage of the film, including its development of the narrative
thematics with the use of color as well as music, is worked out on the basis of
inspiration from Russian icon paintings.48 Central to the film is a dualism re-
flected in the highly visual narrative that Neuberger suggests Eisenstein devel-
oped from historical icons to illustrate the dialectical tensions inherent in Ivan
as a “soul torn by contradictory impulses, a ‘unity of opposites’” (385). Neuberger
allows that these “dualisms” include dualisms of gender, such as androgyny or
bisexuality, but cautions that in Ivan, these have more to do with a philosoph-
ical problem than with sexual affect as such. Yet the transcoding of philosophical
problems into the affects of the ecstatic or the pathetic via a dynamically pro-
jected montage image with “richly political” meanings could hardly be restricted
to philosophical implications. And thus here, too, the means of this transcoding
immediately raise temporal concerns whereby musicality and gesturality become
primary. Further, here, the tension between monadological temporalities and
dialectical materialisms—that is, between Bergsonisms and Marxisms—is turned
specifically toward the problem of the projection, exhibition, and reception of
affect in musical and gestural terms. The archaic site where state identity is
reproduced is rendered not in terms of essentialized, biological destiny but
rather in terms of a tense relation between social exhibition and self-projection:
circus and masquerade. This is a materialist, affective, sexed theory of differen-
tial technocultural reproduction.
Eisenstein designed the sequence of Ivan the Terrible, Part Two (1958) in
which Ivan murders Vladimir Staritsky such that the lighting of the rotund set
invokes a sense of the embryonic, with Prokofiev’s music proceeding in a dra-
matic pulsing. Ivan was, as Joseph Stalin believed, the first to unify Russia and
thus lent a historical rationale for the violence of his own regime. 49 And as
Oksana Bulgakowa points out, Ivan the Terrible, Part One and Part Two were,
Eisenstein knew,50 a state assignment from Stalin to mythify his image, even
while historical research had speculated about Ivan’s homosexuality. In Ivan,
then, the (historically) homosexual despot Ivan kills the feeble-minded effemi-
nate usurper Vladimir as a gesture of traumatic, violent birth, not justifying
state violence under Stalin, and not simply drawing a tragic figure according
to the dialectical synthesis of opposites, but affirming a brutal profiling of
64 / Chapter 2

homoaffectivity—that is, the range of affect according to which same-sex feel-

ings relate personhood and publicity: homophobia, homosociality, homoeroti-
cism, homosexuality, and homophilia. The black-and-white sequence in which
Vladimir is fatally stabbed as he takes Ivan’s place in a procession punctuated
by rhythmic groans follows the previous scene, whose palette is designed in
shades of red and is punctuated by a recurring bacchanale of dancing and drink-
ing in which Ivan seduces Vladimir into believing in his own future destiny as
tsar. Alternating circus with masquerade, Ivan depicts the complex homoerotic,
homophobic violence at work in the historical installation of a legendary state
image, which repeats in the modern biopolitical drama of the party as state.51
The montage transposition of circus into masquerade, of spectacular
streaming image into a haptics of pathic gestural act, attributes Russian/Soviet
identity to a perverse, traumatic, and repetitive political labor through which
some dangerously undifferentiated homoaffective violence circulates. Ivan
makes the action of Soviet-imperial unification felt in the audiovisual sequenc-
ing of slaughter birth, but in ambiguous conceptual terms. Bulgakowa notes that
Stalin interpreted it as his recent murder of Nikolai Yezhov, the brutal chief of
police. Eisenstein’s stylization, then, unfolds homoerotic violence by virtue of
the pathic cinematic act as a diagrammatic, dead-end gesture of uninterrogated
homophobic violence grounding state power. As Eisenstein explains in Non-
indifferent Nature, rather than a subject, a contrapuntal theme “uncoils” (340)
in Ivan. His description of counterpoint here is not simply of musical form but
of historical and cultural force fields The funeral scene in which Ivan grieves his
wife’s murder has a specific contrapuntal theme—“the theme of power” (324).
If blood and sacrifice is immanent to the historicity pouring forth on Eisen-
stein’s screens, looking for either a technological or a modernist vernacular
leaves us blind to the pathic impulses and acts animating the works, differentiat-
ing the works from the dependencies that threatened them or, in other cases,
that mutilated or destroyed them. The cultural labor producing transpositions
of spectacular, haptic image into felt, concrete gesture, was, if perverse, per-
versely different from Stalin’s politics: This stylistic of action feeling was achieved
in an aesthetico-political mode rather than in the political one.
Eisenstein’s revision of his thoughts in “Montage in 1938”52 makes his tactics
more clear than elsewhere in his writings. Composing sequenced or sequenced
and layered materials in time, montage assembles “partial representations” not
as “readymade,” but so that a projected image “comes into virtual being” (77).
Spectators, “included in the creative process,” “concretize” this virtual image—
that is, they may receive it in as a possible, pathic act.53 The profilmic image
serially recorded in the shot and cut into the sequence is not the image montage
projects in exhibition. The image in exhibition is virtual and is made concrete
in reception; its indexing of historical temporality is not the profilmic indexing
of material reality in the photogram. Instead, montage’s virtual image is an
 Eisenstein’s Gesture / 65

image “of the dynamic process” that does not project representation as seen by
the director and captured by machine, but historical materiality as it “was expe-
rienced by the author [or director]” (77).
Montage projects immanent historicity before representing possibility for
the audience. What transforms the virtual stream of projected imagery into
possible concrete representation, affect into pathic gesture, is pathos, upon
which Eisenstein insists throughout his writings. Eisenstein’s montage thus
produces reception as a site where two series, virtual and possible, are mutually
disjoined and fused. The precipitation of a pathic act from the virtual stream-
ing image maintains the director’s experience in projection but fissures the
director’s experience from possible audience reception, inasmuch as it becomes
generalized affective labor. Invariably, the director describes this fissuring and
fusing of history in musical terms, such as rhythmic, lyrical, contrapuntal, and
so forth.
Such directors as Eisenstein and Vertov, in spite of their polemics against
one another during the mid-1920s, shared a need to justify to their state spon-
sors the value of their creative methods and of the questionable possibilities
around the reception of their works. For both, montage expression provides
claims about the generative merits of their creative labor. Vertov, like Eisenstein
in “Vertical Montage” and Nonindifferent Nature, responds to the acclaim he
garnered for Three Songs about Lenin (1934) by asserting the value of his general
methods: “In [requiring exceptionally complex editing] the experience of The
Man with a Movie Camera, One-Sixth of the World, of Enthusiasm and The Elev-
enth Year were of great help to our production group. These were, so to speak,
‘films that beget films.’ ”54 This socialist, socializing montage carries forward the
revolutionary subject of history not fully within political or social orders, but
in an aesthetico-political mode of Soviet production. At the same time, this
modulation of adaptation and instrumentality suggests that the exhibition or
audience of cinema is never fully and finally social. Montage cinema required
an audience capable of quasi conduct: a virtual public sphere mandated by the
force field organizing the possibilities of everyday life. Reconsidering Eisenstein
in relation to political, social, cultural, and technological change means rethink-
ing the relation of style and idiom to historical experience. Eisenstein reconsid-
ers this relation by turning to musicality to mediate virtuality and possibility
and to gesture to mediate creative and interpretive labor as pathos: The ecstatic
aspect of Eisenstein’s cinema is the successful case of pathos attaining an ethical
force in reception.55
Eisenstein’s depiction of the Odessa uprising is hardly literal in terms of his-
torical record, geopolitical space, or identifications of energetic movement. Hear-
ing the news of the 1905 mutiny, Lenin dispatched party agents to Odessa, but
they arrived after the Potemkin’s mutineers had already left port after the mas-
sacre near the famed stairs dramatized in Potemkin. State telecommunications
66 / Chapter 2

trumped Lenin’s agents, and Lenin’s subsequent understanding of the value for
coalitions of workers and peasants during the period of world war, revolution,
and civil war between 1914 and 1918 responded to his observation that “spon-
taneous” uprisings by nonpartisan worker Soviets could not finally effect a deci-
sive seizure of power from even a weakened state. If “spontaneous” revolution-
ary struggle could not compete with capital’s organizational command, the
party form itself must find a more immediate logic by which to bring the lacking
motive force of workers and peasants to a breaking point.56
Capitalist temporality as much as its abstraction of general labor had become
central. Lenin’s subsequent theories turned what had been treatments of imma-
nent contradictions (tensions of capital and labor) into contradictory possibili-
ties to be directed within and as party organization.57 Sylvain Lazarus summa-
rizes the shifts in Lenin’s thought vis-à-vis the larger sequence of events: “History
and politics are thus out of phase” for Lenin in 1917; shortly, the role of the
revolutionary party would shift:

Politics is charged with assuming its own thought, internal to itself. This
is the condition for its existence, and it is also this point that requires
the disjunctions. As we know, the Stalinist mechanism was quite differ-
ent: circulation of notions between politics, philosophy, and history, the
party no longer being the system of condition for politics but the real
subject of all knowledge and decision. . . . [W]e enter a historicist prob-
lematic of politics in which the key word becomes revolution.58

In this transposition between governing toward the revolutionary event and

governing the maintenance of the meaning of that event as the historical datum
originating and validating the party’s coherence, generalized socialist labor was
split between adapting to actual needs and instrumentalizing futural outcomes.59
The party became a national-imperial simulacrum of revolutionary workers’
action, a simulacrum of which the labor of conducting the party itself stands as
first exponent, the vanguard. The party displaced the interests of varied parties
and classes or factions of workers, peasants, minorities, women,60 and sexual
minorities61 with its own interests, while directing and shaping these corporeali-
ties’ energies within a labor now generalized to produce excess. The revolution
as event warranted the gap between actual adaptation and futural teleology, but
by the end of the NEP years, it would be filled with programmatic industrializa-
tion according to technical means62 along with a massive variety of programs
designed to produce laboring excess: “reforging” criminals as laborers in the sys-
tem of prison camps63 shock labor; Stakhanovism, from the mid-1930s (159); or,
starting at the end of the 1930s, the massive expenditure of generalized human
labor in the industrialization and militarization required for war.64 Overall, struc-
turing general labor as excess allowed the maintenance of party metastability
 Eisenstein’s Gesture / 67

by enacting a division between the larger populace and the “pyramid of bureau-
crats” who constituted party membership (numbering, by the 1930s, into the
millions).65 As the metastable party form increasingly mediated its own image
of governmentality, the result was collectivization without individuation rather
than the pursuit of industrialization through some never-identified collectivist
individuation.66 Dan Healey documents the ways in which these concerns and
measures coincided with the recriminalization of homosexuality in 1934.
The process beginning with Lenin’s dissolution of the constituent assembly
in 1918 proceeded henceforth with centralization of political and media func-
tions in or around the Bolshevik party apparatus. In the course of this large-scale
transposition, Eisenstein trained in state workshops, including Meyerhold’s
workshop. That Eisenstein never held party membership while receiving (or
being denied) state support points to the deeply entangled conditions for cul-
tural and political labor that characterized his entire career.67 In Eisenstein’s
or Vertov’s cinemas, the material and affective labor of the directors and their
collaborators tend to provide the energetic value, the “conviction” behind the
“formalist delusions” such directors were sometimes believed to harbor.68 Eisen-
stein’s return to a style reminiscent of Meyerhold’s theater, then, had illumi-
nating implications.69

Circus and Masquerade

In his memoirs, Eisenstein recalls the bravado of the young artists’ collective
who joined him to mount Enough Simplicity for Every Wise Man at Proletkult
in 1923, with Grisha Alexandrov starring in an acrobatized reconfiguration of
the original play. He writes of revisiting the theater, but, instead of listening to
the banter of a British official he accompanied, he reminisced about “a whole
horde of young enthusiasts, on the very spot where we sit now, climbing no
mountain with puritanical slogans, but up the slope of a cable to the balcony,
turning somersaults on mats, making love to each other at night on roll-up
carpets, under stage flats plastered with dried-up placards, and bringing into
this very hall . . . a live camel to participate in one of my productions.” Their
labors unexpectedly birth “a camel!” in Eisenstein’s retelling: the wild “reproduc-
tion” achieved by musicalizing precarious affective labor. An important point,
however, is the implied subject of “making love.” In this translation, Eisenstein
is included within the horde of love-making artists; the Richard Taylor transla-
tion of this chapter in Eisenstein at Ninety: A Celebration of the Life and Work
of Sergei Eisenstein allows a similarly ambiguous reading: “making love to one
another under the drying posters for the sets.”70 A more recent English trans-
lation of this chapter excludes Eisenstein from the crowd by specifying a subject
for this clause in the third-person plural: “They made love here at night, under
the drying posters for the sets.”71
68 / Chapter 2

An effect of our reception of Eisenstein as master of advanced technical art

is that we are left to wade through a vast, partial archive of films, theories, and
still emerging accounts to wonder about the reproductive power of Eisenstein’s
affective labor. Marie Seton early on raises this question in terms of sexuality
and state power. More recently, Bulgakowa follows the conventional reasoning
in attributing Eisenstein’s often seemingly tortured logic or images to the cre-
ative sublimation of his homosexuality. This convention contains Eisenstein’s
deployment of the range of homoaffective exhibition with a psychosexual inter-
pretation of a sad masquerade. Eisenstein thus functions as an avatar of new
media even as he provides a virtual object of mourning in historical cinema and
cultural studies marking a dead wish for political revolution entangled with a
refusal to acknowledge queer affect as precarity. This tendency is most highly
pronounced in readings of sublimation in the films.72
Susan Buck-Morss efficiently sums up the approach, finding that a sado-
masochistic aesthetic pervades the imagery of a director “remarkably capable
of sublimating desire into artistic creativity”; “but his own homoeroticism, for
which Soviet society had no place, took the form of sadomasochism, thus paral-
leling the erotics of domination and submission generated by the power of Sta-
lin’s regime.”73 For Buck-Morss, Eisenstein’s films sublimate sex but mirror the
corporeal anguish of workers under Stalin’s competition with capitalist indus-
trialization where laboring excess formed the “underside of the monumentality
of Stalinist style,” “their ecstatic smiles expressing pleasure at physical pain.”74
Elsewhere, Buck-Morss describes “technology” as concretization of material,
social relation. The result is that Eisenstein appears not to know the pathos he
suffers, even as he forces it into spectacularly technical images of masochistic
subjection. Buck-Morss reads against the very trope of the open secret Eisenstein
proposes as a reading strategy for his autobiography, a trope he designed partly
to not shame “the Americans.”75
The need to not waste labor power in bourgeois or tribal excess and to
deploy labor to excess to overcome underdevelopment in the historical articu-
lation of party identity as class identity isomorphic to state identity meant
particular investments with regards to affect and to homoaffectivity: the range
of affects mediating same-sex personhood or publicity, from homophobia to
homosociality to homoeroticism to homosexuality or homophilia. Individual
corporealities, too, like social, cultural, or political programs, were reconsidered
in terms of postrevolutionary energetics. Where all image or belief is granted a
contingent power to reproduce, in fact, nonbiological corporeal reproduction
becomes tactical and strategic, poetic and pragmatic. Viktor Shklovsky, return-
ing to Moscow in 1924 after exile in Berlin, invokes public sex between men as
the bioenergetic image of German decadence. Here, the concerns around mas-
culinity and purity that Healey describes as instrumental in 1930s trials of men
arrested after the recriminalization of homosexuality are projected as foreign
 Eisenstein’s Gesture / 69

impotence. Defeated German soldiers “fragment” into haunted homosexual

flanerie ; music overflows Berlin’s cafés. Western capitalist powers divert Ger-
many’s resources as if picking the pockets of the desperate cocksuckers:

The old Germany has disintegrated.

The fragments of the old army haunt cafes and indulge in
pederasty.
The streets are filled with terribly subdued cripples.
Three hundred thousand Russians of various nationalities
wander aimlessly in the cracks of a perishing city.
The cafes are filled with music.
An enclave of waiters and singers within a conquered nation.
Meanwhile, in the dark public toilets of Berlin, men
indulge in mutual onanism. They are suffering from a
devalued currency and hunger; the country is perishing.
And slowly, gobbling up the spoils, foreigners pass among them.
The whole thing is simple—straightforward and
elementary.
Down with imperialism.
Long live the brotherhood of peoples.
If one must perish, let it be for that.
Was it conceivably for this piece of knowledge that I
journeyed so far? 76

Shklovsky’s narrator barely avoids perishing.

By the time Eisenstein wrote his memoirs, homoaffect had become even
more instrumental, in part through the recriminalization of homosexuality.
Maxim Gorky would demonstrate the renewed values succinctly: “Destroy the
homosexuals—Fascism will disappear.”77 Eisenstein, of course, celebrates Gorky
in his essay “Montage in 1938” while working with Prokofiev on Nevsky. Eisen-
stein’s writerly relations with Shklovsky or Gorky were a means of styling his
modal practice of cinema in print, integral for sustaining crucial friendships, for
winning back official support, or for successfully hiding Meyerhold’s personal
archive after his murder.78
That all artistic production was subject to state organization by 1921 and to
central review and censorship by 193479 indicates that the party as state and
cinema directors alike understood the liabilities and benefits of crafting a sin-
gular style in Soviet arts as well as the forms and limits of official style in the
1930s.80 Eisenstein’s exercise of power in his cinema productions resembles
Stalin’s political exercise of power, in one way—characteristically for Eisenstein,
not by channeling Stalin’s particular brand of governmentality but in the circu-
lation of homoaffective labor. Stalin’s subordinates resented him for making
70 / Chapter 2

members of his inner circle engage in homoerotic slow dancing, a humiliating

ritual about which one participant noted that these humiliations at least gave
the dancers a chance to whisper comments in each other’s ears that otherwise
could not be spoken aloud at Stalin’s drunken parties.81 Eisenstein, too, was
faulted for abuses of authority. Mikhail Nazvanov, who played Andrei Kurbsky
in Ivan, commented, “Ever since his rough cut [of Ivan the Terrible, Part One]
was enthusiastically received in Moscow, Eisenstein has become a complete boor.
He yells at everybody. In the studio he is so inaccessible and so prickly that it
has become unpleasant to talk to him. But that doesn’t stop him from fawning
over young men.”82
A key difference between Eisenstein’s montage and that of other Soviet
montage directors is his structuring of the laboring excess demanded by post-
revolutionary Soviet policy in the temporalized sign itself rather than in images
of the power of the state. He mediated affective precarity to excess in the tem-
poral diagram: in preproduction and production, in technical exhibition, in
reception. In this excess, two topoi are doubled in fissioned, fused montage:
Circus and masquerade emblematize the pathic gesture of Eisenstein’s cinema
in a Dionysian machine.83 But I should stress that affective precarity takes pre-
cedence over any notion of machinic, desiring generativity. The excess of
“circus”: a rhythmic revelation of publicity whose energies overflow in a larger
transposition. The excess of masquerade: a rhythmic revelation of personhood
as affective precarity in some larger transposition. Eisenstein’s doubled, Diony-
sian ensemble, rather than psychic sublimation, exhibits homoaffectivity not
solely in terms of waste but rather as having profound historical meaning despite
its improbable representation.84
Whether collaborating with such figures as Shklovsky or complimenting such
figures as Gorky, Eisenstein develops methods for synthesizing rhythmic pathos
drawing on exemplars provided by Mayakovsky, Lev Kuleshov, or Meyerhold.
Eisenstein elaborates the rhythmic exemplars of Mayakovsky’s constructivist
poetry or Meyerhold’s biomechanics in an expressive musical gesture for the at
once living and nonliving, material and streaming imagery of the montage cin-
ema. In Meyerhold’s experiments with precision synchronized ensemble move-
ment, Eisenstein encounters a rigorous theorization of corporeal, verbal, and
dramaturgic pulse and line within dramatic theatrical narrative aimed at an
active audience. Eisenstein viewed Meyerhold’s Masquerade in 1917.85 Demobi-
lized from the Red Army and having worked a short stint as scenic director for
Proletkult, Eisenstein joined Meyerhold’s workshop in 1921. In Meyerhold’s
conception, biomechanical dramatic method enables the conceptual parameter-
ization of stage movement according to a supratemporal compositional scheme.
Biomechanical diagramming enables, then, rhythmic modulation of dramatic
movement and audience states, such as calm or excitement, as if by “pressing
a button,” as Eisenstein’s early collaborator in Meyerhold’s workshop, Sergei
 Eisenstein’s Gesture / 71

Yutkevich, later recalled: 86 “It was interesting to observe how this born impro-
viser would teach us a system in which for every execution no coincidence
might arise.”87
Meyerhold insisted on knowing “how to act ‘with the music,’ and not ‘to the
music.’ There is a colossal and not yet completely understood difference.”88 In
this context, Yutkevich and Eisenstein set Pierrot’s bohemian revolt against the
capitalist taskmaster-as-automaton to jazz rhythms, with costumes inspired by
those Pablo Picasso designed for Jean Cocteau’s Parade (1916–1917): Such were
the elements assembled in the pair’s theatrical production of Columbine’s Garter
(1922).89 Although Wollen90 cites Yutkevich as evidence of a problematic Ameri-
canism placing the younger Eisenstein at odds with the postrevolutionary con-
text, Yutkevich remembers that while riding the American-style roller coaster
Wollen mentions, he and Eisenstein would scream out verses by Mayakovksy.91
While the influences explored by the two collaborators (and many other of
their contemporaries) included a wide array of postromantic staging theories92
or musical correspondence theories such as those of Alexander Scriabin, Mey-
erhold’s emphasis on biomechanical rhythm, Vertov’s or Kuleshov’s montage
experiments, and Mayakovsky’s rhythmic appropriation of “unliterary” adver-
tising, musical hall, or satirical news93 for poetry provided the immediate con-
tacts in the postrevolutionary context.94 Rhythmic and lyrical diagramming
pushed Eisenstein’s cinema aesthetics forward: “Thus [in Battleship Potemkin]
as the sail of the passing ships slowly closes in the aperture, so the wound-up
sails on the yawls announce the beginning of a new, so-to-say musical phrase.
The pilgrimage of the people on the jetty to the dead body of Vakulinchuk
begins”; or again, in the celebrated sequence of the stone lions in October, “rage
and vengeance” arise in the most dramatic rhythmic intersection of the film’s
action.95
These contacts are important to reestablish, because, as Yutkevich points
out, in the Soviet context, Eisenstein’s Potemkin would be confused with “facto-
graphic” or “historical films,” of a piece with Vertov’s Kino-Eye—or, as I have
shown, seen as the revelatory sheen on the technological surface serving state
power from abroad. Whether as historical document or as technological surface
or notation, immanence is confused with information. Yutkevich argues, though,
that shaping the “immanence of montage art” (380) in terms of the “informing
rhythm” of “revolutionary pathos” (382) results in effective, agitational art:
“What is distinguished in the staging of these films lies directly in that from all
fundamental situations much humanism shines out, and man is seen to be
found not in a ‘mechanical world,’ but in one of men” (374).
Eisenstein could not easily adduce in any predictable or repeatable way the
operative principles for recreating earlier achievements.96 On one hand, vast art
historical impulses may come to inform the construction of cinematic event
streams in this musicalized principle of montage—a powerful capacity in a time
72 / Chapter 2

out of joint. On the other, new efforts at continuing this modal cinema’s media-
tion of international cinema and the state image also upended Eisenstein’s own
practices, requiring him to transform them. The rhythmic parameters of mon-
tage are charmed: musical mediation of an unstable aesthetico-political relation;
affective precarity excessive to general informatic law; circus and masquerade,
personhood and publicity.97
The range of homoaffective positions that Eisenstein compounds as pathos
marking the powerful production of affective precarity in his gesture of resis-
tance to the image of party as state was lived in the byt as a marked form of
resistant and public sexual relation punished in irregular ways by the party as
state, as Healey documents.98 Eisenstein’s montage diagrams a modal cinema in
which the stylization of an aesthetico-politics of pathic gesture counterpoints
sovereign governmentality. His cinema projects its displaced working publics in
the expression of negentropic labor as historical and transformative rather than
simply presenting what appear to be cinematic representations of important
historical dates, figures, or events. In October (1928), as Anne Nesbet describes,
an actor’s portrayal of Lenin risks demythifying Lenin’s historical personage.99
In The Strike, NEP values are battled; in Potemkin, heroism is overlaid on images
of sailors conforming to homoerotic ideals; or instrumentality of collectiviza-
tion programs is upended as villages are modernized but also retraditionalized,
as in Old and New, where Marfa, the progressive village maid, is masculinized,
inseminating and fertilizing the sleepy superstitious backwardness of her village
via the new technology of the cream separator and dreams of a traditionally
festooned bull.
In Eisenstein’s failures to complete film projects—¡Que Viva Mexico! (1932)
or Bezhin Meadow (1937)—we also discern violent conjunctures and disjunc-
ture around the politicization of affective labor and aesthetico-political form
after the more genetic policies of the NEP period gave way to the more instru-
mental policies of the 1930s. ¡Que Viva Mexico! is a case in point. Its sweeping
panoramic portrait of autochthonous Mexican history could hardly have been
amenable to more intensively instrumentalized central planning. Further, com-
plicating matters were Upton Sinclair’s naiveté regarding funding a feature film
and, as Nesbet and Bulgakowa document, controversies around Eisenstein’s
sexual conduct in Mexico during its making. Sinclair viciously uses news of
Eisenstein’s homosexual activities in Mexico against the director in his corre-
spondence with Stalin in disputes over the footage after the production had been
dissolved.100 In this case, Eisenstein’s modal cinema works at counterpurposes
to U.S. regimes of bioenergetic knowledge as well.
Affective precarity as gendered, sexed pathos refracts in the archived remains
of ¡Que Viva Mexico! The film’s epilogue, edited differently in distinct versions
of the film compiled, when viewed along with Eisenstein’s plans for the film,
speaks to the reservoir of value produced in Eisenstein’s modal cinema methods
 Eisenstein’s Gesture / 73

and utilized by others who have edited the footage. This conclusion was to be a
“Soldaderas” segment dramatizing the women who had trailed Mexico’s revo-
lutionary armies in 1910. What remains of the footage suggests that this finale
depicts the unresolved and immanent contradictions of contemporary Mexico
in terms of women’s histories and realities but also in relation to the film’s initial
invocations of matriarchal traditions and local historical variations in sexual
customs.
The footage of this final sequence101 features vibrant images of Day of the
Dead festivities. After an extraordinary series of masked dancers shimmy in
skeleton costumes before a Ferris wheel, a young girl takes a healthy bite out of
a candied skull—the Mexican equivalent, perhaps, of shouting out Mayakovsky
verses while riding a roller coaster. Circus, masquerade, the young girl’s sugary
snack: a future yet to be metabolized concretely but virtually presented as imma-
nent, historical rhythm.102 Eisenstein’s version of Mexico’s history begins with
matriarchy and fond glances between young peasant men but ends with a young
girl snacking on death, invoking the given, historical possibility of revolution
and the pathos actualized in the becoming historical of its virtual duration—
that is, its future lies in transforming the past dancing in the present.
In Eisenstein’s films, corporeal characteristics denote affective correspon-
dences developing over time, subject to modulation in network effects: inhibi-
tion, excitation, distribution, catastrophe, reformation—a circus and masquer-
ade of pathic expression. Individual bodies diagram enfleshed affective labor
where aesthetico-political exhibition mixes virtual temporality through repre-
sentational possibility. What is communicated is affective precarity in transfor-
mation: Bodies proliferate in masses or die in succinct configurations, but not
strictly according to their sexed, gendered capacities to reproduce. Bodies break
apart or come together in rhythmic, pathic effects; complex temporality becomes
sensible; the conditions of political being are transformed into aesthetico-
political being. Rhythm or lyrical line as musical energy makes the generation
of affiliation in affect primary rather than the reproduction of cognition of
kinship.
Musicalizing pathos means that the sacrificial valiance of Potemkin’s heroic
mutineer, Vakulinchuk, is redeemed in mass mourning, but, then again, it is also
compounded in the bloody massacre of the mourning masses on the steps. The
homoaffectivity of the sailor as type is not recouped as individual sacrifice but
is rather redeemed in a temporal sequencing of yet greater excess demonstrating
undeniable historical motive—that is, the ostensive, affective cause for and con-
ditions of the revolution and civil war. Or, again, in Nevsky, the woman warrior
Vasilisa, named the most valiant fighter of Russia’s battle with the Teutons, is for
a split second awarded the virgin bride whose pure body is the sacrifice prom-
ised to the soldier drawing the most blood. Only as a slight necessary adjustment
does the bride get reoriented toward one of the male clowns who also fought
74 / Chapter 2

bravely. Marriage is an aftereffect, adjusted for appropriate ends within net-

worked mass personhood. Nevsky concludes according to the socialist-realist
telos of conventional Stalinist family values, but in the modal cinema diverging
from official values, the woman warrior is named, for a pregnant, confused
instant, as the winner of the bride’s blush.103 For a moment, the circus mask of
homoaffectivity is brandished in relief from socialist-realist instrumentalities.
Even when struggling to maintain his capacities and status as state artist,
Eisenstein commingles circus and masquerade in the pathos of hiding in plain
sight: “I do not look for help. But what I find I do not hide; I bring it out into
the open—in lectures, books, magazines, newspapers. And . . . did you know, the
most effective way of hiding something is to put it on display?”104 Circus and
masquerade provide rhythmic, energetic modes of presenting precarious affect
as deeply productive, deeply memorial pathos: a temporal resource for stylizing
a diagrammatic production of everyday life as cinematic time.

Critical Tools for Modal Media

Eisenstein’s cinema gives us a key, critical stylistics of synchronization where
immanence and information animate aesthetico-political transformations, and
key critical tools as well. First, Eisenstein’s cinema was more significant for dem-
onstrating the differential reproduction of precarious, affective labor—pathos—
rather than technical reproducibility. Second, Eisenstein’s stylization of a modal
cinema diverging from other national cinemas and from official Soviet aesthet-
ics indicates the theory and practice of a modal cinema, an ethical practice
relating historicity and contemporaneity, personhood and publicity. Third,
each work in this modal series is instantiated according to a developing stylistics
for synchronizing compositional and receptive labor, requiring some suprarep-
resentational or complex temporality opened up in the instance of reception,
provided by rhythm or music. The orchestration of monistic and dialectical
potentiality elucidates an energetic thematics of biopower in musicalized pathos
rather than projecting a unified historical subject. Fourth, such modal media
evinces the ethical force of a time-based work as we identify its theoretical and
pragmatic stylistic divergence.
These conceptual tools will help clarify the ways that other stylistics of syn-
chronization developed in other musical cinemas, which also may be obscured
within logics of medial succession. In Chapters 3 and 4, I extend this analysis of
the stylistics of synchronized streaming media to two additional cases. In Chap-
ter 3, I show how Fischinger’s stylization of visual music deploys musicality to
express the sense of an ecstatic futurity for time-based media. In Chapter 4,
I show the ways in which Eisler’s stylization of film music deploys film scoring
to defer any historical pathos or futural ecstasy attributable to the media appa-
ratus back toward the present site of reception—that is, to the listening audience.
 Eisenstein’s Gesture / 75

Stylizing audiovisual synchronization to express affective labor as history, as

future, as present: These are the three classical stylistics of audiovisual synchro-
nization. Each case study isolates what are more commonly the mixed temporal
inflections of streaming media, whereby mass personhood and mass publicity
are expressed.
If Eisenstein’s musical montage stylized cinema as a bioenergetic idiom, how
have montage style or other classical stylistics of audiovisuality been reworked
in bioinformatic cinemas? The chapters on Larry Clark’s Passing Through (1977),
John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001), and Steina Vasulka’s
video work each provide answers. However, Eisenstein’s approach also prompts
another question I can only raise: If new means often justify critical ends,
whereby changes in technological medium become representative of radical
transformations in labor, affect, politics, history, and personhood, then what
practices might relate personhood and publicity in properly political—that is,
democratic—terms? Beginning to answer this question does not require that we
transpose Eisenstein’s montage to our own time, but rather that we relate our
own conflicted moment to his.
3
For Love of Music
Oskar Fischinger’s Modal, Musical Diagram

“My Statements Are in My Work”

—Title of short essay by Oskar Fischinger in 1947 Art in Cinema catalog

Visual Music as Style and Idiom

Throughout Oleg Kovalov’s Sergei Eisenstein: Autobiography (1998), a veri-
table catalog of modernist experimental cinemas is edited into a quasi-
historical semifictional account of Sergei M. Eisenstein’s travels through
industrial modernity. Fragments from Dudley Murphy and Fernand Léger’s
Ballet mécanique (1924) or Oskar Fischinger’s Liebesspiel (Love Games; 1931)
are cut into the work, suggesting that Eisenstein’s montage is a way of seeing
modernisms as much as or more than the creative response to postrevo-
lutionary Soviet modernity the director himself describes in his own writ-
ings. Here, long marginalized by art histories of the modernist avant-garde,
visual music becomes a kind of flowering patch on the modernist aesthetic
horizon, but only from within that perspective where montage produces
cinema as the pathos of personal and cultural memory.
In a diametrically opposed rendering, excerpts from such works as
Fischinger’s Radio Dynamics (1942), along with an entire archive of other
visual music animators, appear sampled, processed, and repurposed in the
digital video of a mash-up artist whose work is presented in a U.S. univer-
sity course on “open source” aesthetics. The course blog describes the artist’s
methods in the following way: “Fake data or real data, surveillance cameras
or internet spy software, in the end, [this artist] is tracking the vibe of the
interface itself.”1 The visual music canon this artist mashes up in his often-
 For Love of Music / 77

collaborative work might amount to, in that description, “fake data,” appropri-
ated historical resources going unattributed in the videos’ credits. Here, media
of the past become a kind of historical noise open for reinterpretation and resale
by “new media artists” stylizing the “vibe” of the interface to demonstrate digital
media’s apparently unfettered historical and creative power.
These contrary and contemporary uses of visual music animation summa-
rize the degree to which montage permeates modernist aesthetic production (in
Kovalov, even visual music becomes montage) on the one hand, or the ways in
which “new media” art often grounds its own medium specificities by appropri-
ating, while denying, those of “old” media art (classical visual music sampled to
represent “the vibe” of the interface) on the other. But they also present two
crucial historical problems. First, however much they mischaracterize the his-
torical sources they appropriate, still, neither characterizes visual music cinema
in the conventional terms by virtue of which visual music has been marginalized
in histories of the avant-garde: as an attempt to render the forms and meanings
of the animated screen musical in some way; as a modern and industrial reca-
pitulation of neo-Pythagorean philosophies or color organs; as an attempt at
modeling synesthetic experience in technical forms; and as speculative, pure, or
visionary cinema. Rather, visual music animation appears as a kind of historical
evidence somehow exceptional and mundane, a given of mediatic invention and
reinvention that requires no account.
Additionally, these examples prompt our notice of the protean capacities the
visual music cinemas offer for appropriation, receiving continuous acclaim and
formal neglect in a wide range of academic histories and theories of cinema and
the historical avant-gardes.2 Appropriations of visual music animation for the
purpose of historicizing or characterizing a new medium are hardly original. As
I note in my introduction, in the 1940s, work by Fischinger or John and James
Whitney was cited as evidence for far more than technicized synesthesia or some
postindexical moment when the expressive capacities of time-based media were
liberated, a moment from which everything can be transcoded. Before being
intensively studied in Silicon Valley for lessons in interaction design during the
1990s, Fischinger’s work served as a model for resolving the chicken-and-egg
problems of new medium specificities and the complex historical relation of
emergent technologies to dominant and residual ones during the 1940s and
1970s. The 1940s was a period when audiovisual production was broadening to
include preparations for early television as well as increasing fidelity in sound
production, including stereo exhibition. Fischinger’s and the Whitneys’ work, as
well as Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1940), are either cited or ostensively referenced
in articles grappling with these expansions in such journals as Hollywood Quar-
terly as well as in the archival documents of Hanns Eisler’s Film Music Project
(see Chapter 4). In my introduction, I point out the ways in which Gjon Mili’s
Jammin’ the Blues (1944) provided Carl Beier3 with a model for “conducting”
78 / Chapter 3

the new medium of television as improvisational multimedia performance.

Ralph Potter4 reasons that since the work of contemporary “animationists”
(Fischinger, Mary Ellen Bute, Len Lye, the Whitney brothers, Disney, and Nor-
man McLaren) developed from earlier efforts by Walter Ruttmann, Viking
Eggeling, or Eggeling and Hans Richter to achieve the fusion of sound and image
in a synthetic “music,” applying aesthetic insights to that development might
be more effective for deploying “audivisual music” for the mass audiences of
film and television “at once” and as “rule,” rather than as exception (69). Tech-
nological development programs, Potter thinks, would be too long and drawn
out. His reasoning is partly based on what he sees as common principles whereby
musicality had been graphed in a wide range of image types: filmstrips by the
Whitneys; an image automatically derived from musical sound in Cecil Stokes’s
Auroratone process; samples of “bird song motion” from a spectrum analyzer;
and spectrograms of cymbal clashes and violin tones. Potter, like many before
and after, thinks Fischinger’s musical synchronization of audience with the exhi-
bition of sound with image expressed new capacities to visualize sound. The
term “audivisual music” confuses Fischinger’s visual music animation with sci-
entific visualization of sound rather than seeing it as achieving a higher-order
continuity for the temporalities of reception.
If visual music cinema during this period was often seen as successful artistic
expression of processes enabled by sound visualization rather than as musical
expression in its own right, this confusion arose because of a presumption of
convergent media practices enabled by deploying new technologies as new
media: Potter is proposing visual music cinema for television as well as cinema.
At the same time, Potter’s proposal also foresees programming capacities for
television to “visualize” those typical of more established, commercial-radio
practices and the more marginal but nonetheless historically important prac-
tices associated with the modernist avant-gardes of the 1920s. Fischinger’s pre-
eminence in that context, though, goes unacknowledged: Potter describes him
as a contemporary, even though artists Potter mentions (Lye, McLaren) describe
him as an inspiration.
As Beier’s or Potter’s articles suggest, the production processes of visual
music animation and jazz improvisation provided ways of thinking through
new processes of creative labor amid technological and media transition: ways
of retaining innovative aesthetic expression while engaging new “improvisa-
tional” modes of creative labor composing streaming media in technology
intensive workflows. Beier’s notion of the television director as improvisational
conductor or Potter’s analysis of workable approaches to synchronizing sound
and image to create a fused “audivisual music” indicate then-emergent problems
for television as programmed and live production. New production processes
needed to arrange and to modulate a broad number of workers and processes
in time, and television’s material conditions and aesthetic limits for future
 For Love of Music / 79

audiences were unclear; visual music or jazz shorts described temporal processes
and, further, emphasized the affective and improvisatory effects at which Beier
and Potter think television should aim.
Similarly, the increasing availability of microelectronics during the late
1960s and early 1970s allowed such artists as Stephen Beck to engineer “color
sound” processing equipment, allowing “real-time” manipulation of a synthetic
audiovisual stream. Here, too, historical documents indicate, was the familiar
goal of a musical animation of a new apparatus. An unpublished 1969 proposal
by Beck to the Zenith Corporation5 identifies “new uses for color television”; a
1976 San Francisco Examiner article gives an overview of Beck’s subsequent
work. Having received a grant to collaborate with Jordan Belson on the film
Cycles in 1974, at the time the article appeared, Beck was working on “a dozen
TV games [that is, video games] for National Semi-Conductor Corporation.”6
The Examiner report characterizes Beck’s electronic-imaging equipment as
updating Belson’s mechanical and optical approaches. Beck’s references to
“sound color” art are accompanied by citations of “force,” Eastern philosophy,
and the proposal of a more immediate conjunction between authorial composi-
tion and audience reception: The terms he uses differ, but the themes are sig-
nificant. Beck cites Fischinger as a historical source, along with Wassily Kandin-
sky and Pablo Picasso: This “video music television” is presented as a second,
electronic modernism. The article thus attempts to clarify the broader appli-
cations now apparent: “Imagine weaving your own textile patterns on the [tele-
vision] tube. Imagine the games people could play.” As in Beier’s and Potter’s
hopes for a more improvisational mode of communicating information as
music during the 1940s, Beck’s proposal to Zenith emphasizes technical, artistic,
and educational aims, while his comments in the Examiner article and elsewhere
make clear the motives of uplift and regeneration as well. The rhetoric of a
musical negentropy tropes on informatic entropy—the larger dream of cosmos-
creating musical energy informing the informatic cavern of musical sense and
sensation visualized in Ib Melchior’s The Time Travelers (1964) by virtue of Fi-
schinger’s hand-animated Lumigraph color-light instrument.
Beck’s performance of electronic color music on PBS in the San Francisco
Bay Area in 1974 and his reported intent to create color music in computer games
revisit and project forward the dream of color music as a mode of innovating
industrial-art practices, updating Beier’s and Potter’s articles invoking Mili’s
Jammin’ or Fischinger and the Whitneys as conceptual prototypes for the new
medium of broadcast television conceived as musical programming in the broad
sense. Visual music in these accounts appears as ahistorical and futural; it seems
somehow indiscriminately present, a familiar achievement of modernist aes-
thetics that is as yet technologically unfulfilled, a still-to-be concretized new
medium awaiting its avatar. These repetitions confirm that visual music anima-
tion offers more than simply visualizing temporal rhetorics and metaphors
80 / Chapter 3

deriving from musical epistemologies, studies of synesthesia or empathic gestalt,

or an archaic history of color organs updated in motion graphics and computer
animation. Visual music is a mode of stylizing the futural capacities of the cin-
ema’s instrumentalities—or those of television or of digital gaming.
Taken together, these examples of visual music practice and the documents
of its reception begin to clarify a complex historical problem. Much more than
a visualization of musical metaphor or the technical translation of psychological,
phenomenal, or perceptual states, visual music animation appears as the histori-
cal font and futural horizon of a three-part problem of technique, affect, and
ethics in periods of new media transition. In Beier’s 1940s proposal, visual music
animation requires animating not simply the framed image but to a large degree
the entire production process; Beck, who did in fact produce attractive electronic
pattern tapes, developed equipment that might have helped automate and ratio-
nalize such a speculative reorganization of time-based media, if it had ever come
to that. But why should such a painstakingly specialized practice as visual music
animation be invoked as a proposal for animating the very processes according
to which the possibility of a new medium becomes a historical realization?
Potter’s citations of Fischinger or Beier’s citations of the jazz soundie are
significant: The ontologies, epistemologies, and ethics of jazz and visual music
animation had to do with modulating a continuous expression animating a
block of immanent time. As the diagrammatic scores of theatrical plays that
Fischinger produced in 1921 and 1922 suggest, his work was more concerned
with submitting the technics of framing and the graphic capacities of cinematic
space to an energetic and affective understanding of time. One early graphical
score of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night presents organically flowing pencil gestures
rolling more smoothly or more turbulently from left to right, aiming to depict
the musicality of the larger succession of theatrical movements7 rather than, as
in Vsevolod Meyerhold’s biomechanical diagramming,8 the motor gestures of
actors and their coordination with scenic space and props.
If that diagram depicts, as William Moritz suggests, “the changing moods,
flow of emotion, intensity, style, flourish of the ideas, and the experience created
by the process of the action,”9 these are first and foremost expressed as tempo-
ralities rather than as spatial or objective elements. No localized positions are
given in the graphical score, only a global overview of the moods, emotion,
intensity, style, ideas, and experience of the work, sketched as graphical intensi-
ties scrolling along and above the bar lines. Energetic temporal intensities pulse
and touch above the musical lines, animating the notational space.
What Fischinger sought, suggests Moritz, was a new language of dynamic
visual form that, in ways similar to musical form, might transcend particular
languages and cultures.10 Although much is “new” about any one of Fischinger’s
films, perhaps what is “newest” today is his exploration of musical and visual
form in a body of work that encompasses what constitutes the three-limit cases
 For Love of Music / 81

FIGURE 3.1 Oskar Fischinger’s Motion Painting No. 1 (1947): Laboratory scan. (Copyright
© Fischinger Trust. Courtesy of the Center for Visual Music.)

for synchronized audiovisual works. Fischinger studiously produced, using the

rhetorics and motives of musical form as an analog, what might be considered
a set of prototypes for synchronized motion in multiple media. His work may
be divided into these three types: silent works, presenting only the image as music
(such as Liebesspiel or Radio Dynamics); tightly synchronized sound works pre-
senting the image in musical synchronization (such as Allegretto [1936] or An
Optical Poem [1937]); and sound works only very loosely synchronized, or syn-
chronized in nonlinear correspondences, between sound and image (such as the
early R-1 [1927] or the late Motion Painting No. 1 [1947; Figure 3.1], although
this last film was painted to and retains as its sound track Bach’s third Branden-
burg Concerto).11
Yet Fischinger’s is not a cinema of language or of montage, but of pulsing,
material duration. Joseph Fourier’s development of what would become har-
monic analyses during the early nineteenth century revealed nature as a teeming
reserve of inexhaustible energy, as Anson Rabinbach12 explains; modern time-
based media are the biopolitical means of technical reproduction specific to the
revelation of a unified electromagnetic spectrum. Thus, from Italian Futurism
to digital media, the temporal materialities composed in visual music animation
correspond to the epistemologies of electromagnetic phenomena known since
Fourier, extending them to an Einsteinian worldview, where, after Werner Hei-
senberg, the observer is assumed to help create the phenomena he or she ob-
serves. As Fischinger states in the catalog issued by the film festival where Mo-
tion Painting No. 1 took first prize in 1949: “The film isn’t ‘cut,’ it is a continuity,
the absolute truth, the creative truth. Any observer can verify that, and I con-
sider myself an observer.”13 Fischinger’s visual music cinema does not aim at
82 / Chapter 3

animating semiotic elements within either the frame or according to some per-
fectible notational schema informed by notions of musical performance. Rather,
it submits shot structure and compositional space to an energetic temporality
that is brought into pulsing contact with the meter of the filmstrip. Classical visual
musical animation expresses the modulating pulse of an energetic block of time.
In this chapter, I attempt to clarify what Fischinger might have meant when
insisting that his statements are contained in his work. While recent curatorial
practice has recognized Fischinger as part of a broader avant-garde practice than
what Peter Bürger’s description14 accounts for, Fischinger’s work is still routinely
appropriated, if not for montage history or digital art’s specificity, then for theo-
ries of synesthesia, musical meaning and technical advance in synchronized arts,
or alternative modes of documentation—roughly the range of thematics pro-
posed in two large-scale exhibitions on Visual Music (Hirshorn/MOCA Los Ange-
les) and Sons et Lumières (Centre Pompidou) in 2004 and 2005. These recent
approaches only begin to compete, though, for the vast reception of Fischinger’s
work since his death, although generally on a small scale. Moritz15 points out that
screenings of his work continued immediately following Fischinger’s death; my
own review of more than 150 reviews, essays, commentaries, screening notices, or
other documents spanning roughly the early 1970s to the present, in trade news-
papers and journals from Germany, France, the United States, and the U.K., re-
veals that Fischinger’s work has been in constant circulation and an object of
comment, mostly without sustained focus or analysis. In that time, in fact,
Fischinger’s work has become a constant touchstone for essayistic approaches
wondering how the narrative film and film music might be improved or how
the expression of musical ideas in cinema might be more meaningfully executed.
Visual music, as a result, has become not so much a genre of cinema but an every-
day hermeneutic, as well as a mode of stylizing particular relations of affect,
visuality, audition, musicality, and history. Fischinger tends to be the name that
anchors a broad and popular notion of musical expression in the moving image.
If art institutions have recently and increasingly acknowledged Fischinger’s
work as occupying a central place within the twentieth-century arts of painting,
animation, and cinema, this acknowledgment is partly because of interest in
visualized musical expression prompted by the central and long historical mar-
keting function fulfilled by cinematic narrative thematizing musical epistemolo-
gies, sound-track recordings, and musical promotion clips, and because of a more
recent rise of alternative moving image formats particular to the nightclub, DJ/
VJ performance, or interactive work. Fischinger’s work has been “performed”—
that is, remixed, usually without permission or acknowledgement—in perfor-
mances for DJs of international stature at locations ranging from a recent
installment of the Coachella Music Festival (2008) to small scale rave-type set-
tings, where it has long been in rotation with computer-graphics mix tapes in
chill-out rooms. Additionally, electronic and digital forms have easily appropri-
 For Love of Music / 83

ated the mantle of a populist avant-garde since approximately 1980. Video

games, Internet-working (and, later, Web-working), or electronic music releases
and events have become critical sites of aesthetico-political contestation because
of their very proximity to, and capacity to represent, the investments of techno-
cratic capital, and because of their interests in the meanings of instrumental
action and intensively mediated affect. Finally, however, these digital cultural
forms’ explicit interests in problems of technical synchronization also emphasize
the ways that expressive attempts at synchronizing digital cultural forms, digital
distribution, and the affective production of sense by networked masses of
receivers articulates a goal still not resolved in digital technologies, contrary to
their claims of “real-time” eventuality: that of the fully programmable and par-
ticipatory audio-visual-gestural synchronization of the expression of affect. In
fact, synchronization technologies lack significantly all around, from network
access—where broadband access to Web-based materials is uneven and unreli-
able, depending on such factors as local traffic or Web providers’ configurations
of consumer services—to rapid introduction of changing hardware platforms,
where significant expressive resources for flexible synchronization of sound,
vision, and gesture may barely be fleshed out at all. As designer Erik Loyer has
remarked of his work designing “Opertoons” for the Apple iPhone, many of his
efforts were frustrated because such mobile devices are often released with very
limited capacities for programmable, precise, and variable synchronization of
audio, visual, and gestural streams.16 The popular Guitar Hero series and the
automatic frequency and rhythm analyzer, which come standard with digital
music players, are not the end of the line; indeed, they are more simply state-
ments of the meanings of “visual music” as a problem of everyday hermeneutics
for or stylization of uses of time as material. And although Fantasia’s debt to
Fischinger is well known, we should also note the industrial, vernacular appeals
to visual music or vernacular homage to Fischinger routinely appearing in U.S.
cinema since the commercialization of computer graphics: If Steven Spielberg’s
color organ finale in 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (one of the first
Hollywood feature films to attempt integration of computer-graphics anima-
tion with the live-action image) is too general to be a citation, perhaps Wall-E’s
(2008) love duet between two robots soaring through space, their exhaust trails
recapitulating the glowing trails of Fischinger’s Liebesspiel, will be allowed. In
all these ways, from everyday interface to computer-graphics entertainment to
challenges for further advance in interactive synchronization technologies,
visual music as style and idiom is recognized as having a newly historical role
to play, if for no other reason than digital technologies have much to improve
when it comes to providing sophisticated synchronization techniques for expres-
sive audiovisual and gestural streams. But if visual music is an idiom and a style,
what does it say, and how does it say it? These preliminary observations, then,
only beg the question: “What statements are in Fischinger’s work?”
84 / Chapter 3

Cinema as Block of Time

Fischinger’s Wachsexperimente (Wax Experiments; 1927) produced striking
organic and atmospheric effects, unfurling chromium roses or turbulent clouds
by slicing away and filming in stop-motion the surface of a block of wax molded
to produce dynamic textures when projected.17 München-Berlin Wanderung
(Walking from Munich to Berlin; 1927) subjects a geographical region to treat-
ment as a block of time, an early exemplar, as Moritz18 points out, of the later
flicker film. In his tightly synchronized promotional films for Electrola Records
from the late 1920s and early 1930s, Fischinger used a slide rule to measure the
phonographic spiral and thus calculate a common time base for the prerecorded
music and the image track to be animated; the time base he calculated existed
above and beyond the meter of the filmic and phonographic spirals.
More than parametrically synchronizing sound and image, Fischinger’s cin-
ema depended on working out a higher-order temporal stream. Yet it also coin-
cided with attempts in fine-art and critical-philosophical contexts of his period
to rework the ways in which contemporaneity and historicity might be measured.
We are more likely to find the reflexively political avant-gardism sought by such
critics as Bürger19 in the later, more overtly political films of Hans Richter. Rich-
ter’s painting and film work displays a tendency toward universalist nominalism
that comprised one strain of modernist avant-garde practice; Fischinger’s focus
on energetic radiance emphasizes musical affect over logical information in pur-
suit of a not entirely dissimilar interest. In his German Constructivist paintings
and films, Richter works out actual prototypes for the universal language that,
he explains in a manifesto written with Eggeling, illustrates the “possibility of a
language above and beyond all national language frontiers.”20
Richter and Eggeling invoke musical strategy in their paintings and early
film work to articulate an internationalist and constructivist symbolic system
with revolutionary potential. Musical titles indicate the formal inspiration and
the tentativeness of their achievements: Richter’s 1919 painting Präludium
shows compact and solid black and white lines and rectangles at lower left gen-
erating through increasing tension a metamorphosis that produces their oppo-
site: lightly rendered, elongated rising rectangles at upper right, bounded by
arcing curves. Music here is both inspiration and objective, but distant. Film
brought it closer by concretizing the temporality that the paintings and drawings
suggest. For Rhythmus 21, Rhythmus 23, and Rhythmus 25 (all composed between
1921 and 1925, although Richter is believed to have backdated his works of this
period in a bid for historical primacy), Richter orchestrates geometric shapes
in time, attaining in film form what could be suggested only in static painting.
Avant-gardists, such as Richter, recognized revolutionary Soviet aesthetic
achievements. The goal of international intelligibility through abstraction was
explicitly a political one: Soviet Constructivism was seen as the “expression of
 For Love of Music / 85

an optimism which swept the public along with it and promised to grant artists
in the most free, abstract development a new, functional place in society. A rare
moment in the history of a people, in which the efforts of government and
people, artists and those who commission their works, are identical.”21
The notion that a graphical language might learn from music ways to speak
of whole, identitarian relations between self and society retains as a central
concern the problematic of the constitution of the audience. I suggest in the
next chapter that it is precisely the formation of the cinema audience as an
emergent class of networked, mass collectivity that underlies this tendency. In
any case, for Richter or Fischinger, it appears that a listening knowledge that is
believed to bear universal meanings was found possible in the cinema and was
prototyped on the model of music. For Richter, the move to film grants a way
of gaining the temporality that this dynamic language seems to need. At the
same time, the difficulty of animating graphics musically questions notions of
parallelism and synchronization between visuality and musicality. This central
problematic of musicality in film, as well as its perceived promise of universal
intelligibility, was established almost a decade before synchronized sound tracks
would become viable.
Before Fischinger, Richter made advertising films for Muratti cigarettes,22
and, just as Richter’s work does, Fischinger’s visual music animation raises the
intertwined questions about a universal intelligibility perceived to be possible
through musicalized abstraction. But important differences have to be drawn
out here: Fischinger went from engineering to film and ended by painting musi-
cal abstractions, unable to afford the cost of filmmaking. Throughout his career,
he achieved innovations in the creation of special effects and the construction
of apparatus for executing them for Germany’s Universum Film AG (UFA) as
well as for Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM), Paramount, and Disney Studios in
Hollywood.23 On the other hand, Richter was originally trained as a carpenter
and committed to internationalist politics, successively championing construc-
tivist idealism during the rise of the fascists, the values of surrealist subversion,
and, after his move to the United States, documentary filmmaking as exempli-
fied by the Soviets or the Italian neorealists (although his experience of Dadaist
aesthetic anarchism remains part of the creative contexts of his evolving work).
But more than simply their distinct talents and achievements, Richter’s notes
for a “Document of Universal Language” demonstrate the key difference between
Fischinger’s treatment of cinematic time in terms of immanence as opposed to
Richter’s treatment of cinematic time in terms of information.
Richter’s annotated sketches on paper are essentially a study of elements for,
and a key to, the more finished scrolls Richter and Eggeling were creating to be
filmed. This work comprises pages of graphical transformations effected in the
visual field, pencil-drawn experiments conceived quickly as elements of a lan-
guage yet to be. Annotations describe the interests of the artists: permutations
86 / Chapter 3

of proportion, intensity, color. The artists identify the formal elements of com-
position that could be made to affect the visual field according to rules that are
considered musical. The intent here was to use those elements they identified to
compose graphical scrolls that would translate directly into a universally intel-
ligible cinema capable of communicating potentially revolutionary messages.
But, once the experiment was tried at UFA (with the backing of a banker friend),
Richter was disappointed to learn that no such direct translation of static forms,
however musically conceived, would produce an interesting piece of film. Part
of the Präludium scroll, did, however, appear in Rhythmus 23.24
The demonstration of universal language forms, however, contains annota-
tions by Richter that shed further light on the problematic of synchronization,
visuality, and musicality. In Richter’s early conception, the notion of composing
informatic logos for films is potentially autopoetic and generative, thus, a revo-
lutionary liberation of aesthetic meaning. The scrolls, Richter writes, “are meant
to express knowledge (knowledge) knowledge that cannot be realized in theo-
retical ways—only through them. Only if they exist does the theoretical knowl-
edge of them obtain its content + form + value.” And, on the same page of this
key to the scrollwork, Richter notes:

The scrolls are “machines,” complicated constructions like life with

organic + alive and ever-changing expression—due to the relations which
they themselves really possess within these representations + those
which the inventory creates within them out of its own (everyone under-
stand—as in music). They are machines not like a hammer that bangs
on your head—more like an active living power—like a radioactive ele-
ment, for example, that without your knowing it transforms you.25

A vital and diagrammatic cinema, if it could be realized. Far beyond a robot

or cyborg, such a cinema would be a living mechanism, enveloping, transform-
ing, and moving far beyond the merely mechanical, sentient, or transforming.
The graphical score—the scrolls—are machines composed according to a her-
meneutic whose value is knowledge itself, the theory of which is proven in the
realization of its aesthetic effect. For Richter, the guarantee of the effects of this
revolutionary cinema is that it will be universally intelligible in the way that he
believed music to be. The precise relationships between instance of forms,
inventory of forms, and laws of transformation of forms are unclear, other than
that through their own unalienated self-possession, the scrolls in projection
attain a performativity through which they will transform their viewers on some
supraconscious level. In an interesting comparison, Richter indicates a more
basic quality of music than of formal mathematical law, which is that of vibra-
tion—here, expressed as radioactivity. Music’s intelligibility effectively is equated
with a living, robotic, radioactive organic cinema of metamorphosis.
 For Love of Music / 87

The musicalization of cinema that produces revolutionary knowledge does,

Richter suggests, follow a law for meaning—a logos. Musicality provides the
systematization by which opposites are united: “Chaotic” intuition and “tamed”
intellect are seen, in action, to follow this law:

nature + mind are

not opposites.
The one completes itself in
the other. The law lies above
them.

As I attempt to reproduce above, the text itself takes over from the penciled
diagrams and begins to move itself according to its own law. Here, in the index
to the scrollwork, the pages begin to be at least half full of text, as the diagram-
matic transformations fulfill Richter’s performance to produce their own law.
The textual explanation of the penciled gestures takes over from their scribbled
abstraction and brings a conclusive formula near the bottom of the page:

truth must be (1) recognized

(2) wanted
(3) created 26

This is, in short, an aesthetic reformulation of a materialist dialectical progres-

sion between the real and desire that results in creative transformation. But this
musical law—resolving in a simultaneous pathos and logos—is problematic. My
contention is that the problematic revolves around the potential of synchroniz-
ing in time forms, already considered dynamic, of the visual and the sonic, in
such a way that this correspondence also dynamically generates meaning. What
is at stake, finally, is not formalist experimentation, but rather the instantiation
in visual art of musical performativities and instrumentalities that communicate
a transformative “gnosis.”
Musicality as gnosis is well illustrated in Ernst Bloch’s 1919 The Spirit of
Utopia, in which he posits that the modern subject is “becoming blind to the
outside.”27 Bloch’s complex probing answer is to propose a historical succession
of musical “carpet motifs.” Through such carpet motifs, Western musical motifs
are transposed in material form and in signifying capacities from Mozart’s time
into the time of modern music. But the implication of the complex temporality
of the suprahistorical carpet motif is also that it can be applied back to moder-
nity: The carpet motif diagrams complex historical transformations not observ-
able to the subject, but, by the same token, such transformations are not limited
to musical histories. Like Eisenstein’s montage as a doubling of monadic seria-
tion and dialectical progression, Bloch’s carpet motif seems to materialize at the
88 / Chapter 3

surface of a doubled temporality: history stalled, the subject blinded, a supra-

temporal dimension invoked. (Richter’s scrolls follow a similar formula.)
Diagramming history in terms of Bloch’s carpet motif is a speculative theory
of musical-historical invention, where rhythmic repetition relates musical time
to historical time (129), and orthothetic convention relates listener to collective
(120). Musical process as historical process repeats historical idiom as compo-
sitional style. Mozart repeats and differentiates a “Grecian” idiom of musical
historicity, Beethoven and Wagner, a “Luciferan” idiom. Although carpet motifs
repeat in historical differentiations, music spatializes historical temporality and,
in being heard, becomes innermost experience in the listener who colors it.
For such figures as Eisenstein, Richter, and Fischinger, the “speaking musi-
cality” Bloch describes had arrived in the media arts. In Eisenstein’s work, cin-
ema articulates these qualities to communicate historical pathos in the virtual
image and affective gesture of montage.28 For Bloch, of course, the arrival is still
to come. Bloch’s listener looks forward to a fourth stage of the carpet motif, a
revolutionary moment in which the listener will understand and possess the
“ideogram” of the “we” through musical-historical experience.29 Diagramming
that experience in terms of carpet motifs serves to indicate a futural eventuality,
Bloch thinks, where vision fails but revolution prevails.
Fischinger’s musical cinema also consistently places the planning, exhibi-
tion, and reception of the cinematic apparatus within a higher-order temporal
stream, synchronizing the expression of authorial sense, technical apparatus,
and the sensation of the work received by the audience within its terms. The
challenge of this cinema is taking an immanent but energetic block of time and
articulating it according to a “musical” instrumentality conceived as technical
ratio, affective relation, and historical measure of material, industrial progress
that must be engineered and animated. This musical animation of energetic
time requires a certain ratio of aesthetic composition, technical display, and
spectatorial reception. Rather than determine the relation of author and audi-
ence in terms of techno-scientific reason, then, visual music animation treats
author and audience as a problem of mensuration that is “historical” and “supra-
historical,” in Bloch’s terms. Musical instrumentality expresses sense in composi-
tion and impresses sensation in reception.
If Fischinger’s larger aim is to express energetic temporality as musical, each
attempt diverges to some degree from the last in the way that the author’s sense
of time is received as temporal sensation. For “sense,” we might think of the way
in which Gilles Deleuze describes the divergent seriation of psychic and corpo-
real identity; for “sensation,” the way in which Deleuze describes the reception
of the diagrammatic rhythm of Francis Bacon’s canvases. Yet in Fischinger, sense
and sensation are better understood as being not entirely distinct orders of sen-
sual logics, but rather entangled with one another, where musical instrumental-
ity mediates authorial style and technocultural idiom.
 For Love of Music / 89

Painting Musical Sentences

Much of the tessellated patterning of Fischinger’s Motion Painting No. 1 was
prepared in earlier canvases, such as Plan (1938), and later extended in Flower
(c. 1950) and Abstract Landscape (1959). More familiar are the ways in which
Motion Painting No. 1 revisits graphical motifs and tropes familiar from his
earliest films. In the second movement of Motion Painting No. 1, concentric
circles are formed as a line traces its own circular curvature then closes the cycle
by drawing its leading edge back to the center of the completed spiral form.
These figures dynamically trace in time two figures appearing early on in Fi-
schinger’s work: the spiral and the concentric circle.
In Fischinger’s Spiralen (Spirals) film experiments from 1926, among the
glowing spiraling forms are also modulations of concentric circular curves as
well as an array of small concentric circles that fill up the entire screen space.
These spiraling and circular forms became key graphical motives across his
oeuvre. They surface in his production of the first three-strip color film, Kreise
(Circles ; 1933), a Gaspar Color “color-play” commercial advertisement in which
they feature in new radiantly colored forms; similarly, they provide one of the
two graphic theses of Radio Dynamics, which alternates between sequences of
blinking and scaling rectilinear forms and pulsing, glowing orbs. Fischinger
paints continuously on sheets of Plexiglas, with the cumulative result a “motion
painting.” Painted to Bach’s third Brandenburg Concerto, here Fischinger is
intensely concerned with what Bloch describes as the spatial aspects of the
Bachian carpet motif.
Understanding the visual music genre as the aesthetic practice of a phi-
losophy of music instead of simply a translation of musical forms into graph-
ical representation allows us to see the spatialization of musicality in the cin-
ema as the drawing of carpet motifs. The primary carpet motif, the “sentence”
that dynamically occurs and recurs transformed in Motion Painting No. 1, is
the spiral. The form that conditions the very possibility of well-tempered music
as it was synthesized in Bach’s time, the spiral first appears reaching vertically
in a calligraphic form and, on reaching its apex, dissolves the scene into an
elaborate sequence of mosaic motifs. The spiral returns in varying forms but
flattens out at the end, finally, in what Guggenheim Museum director Hilla
Rebay, who commissioned the piece, called “Fischinger’s awful little spaghet-
tis.”30 In its recurrence, the motif of the spiral functions as the visual equiva-
lent of the ritornello structure that Bach deploys in the concerto itself.31 Just
as well, it might figure the technological innovation of even temperament
underlying Bach’s musical invention. Finally, the spiral also emblematizes a
cycling, open-ended, and improvisatory process of interpretation itself, as the
audience follows sound, then image, then sound in serene and superabundant
economy.
90 / Chapter 3

Although elaborations of circular return or other articulations of spiral

form here repeatedly appear, develop, and disappear, rarely are these motifs or
any of the other visual patterns synchronized to the music in the phrasal style
of Allegretto, or the phrasal-rhythmic style of Optical Poem. As Fischinger con-
ceives it:

This music, concerto by Bach, is like a smooth river flowing on the side
of open fields—
And what you see—is not translated music, because music doesn’t
need to be translated on the screen—to the Eyes music is in itself
enough—but the optical part is like we walk on the other side of the
river—sometimes we go a little bit farther off (away) but we come back
and go along on this river, the concerto by Bach.32

The film approximates, in Fischinger’s words, an “optical dance” to Bach. In

providing a motion painting that returns, and returns, and returns to the river
of Bach’s concerto, Fischinger seems to approximate in limited form what Bloch
determines as the musical logic of noncontemporaneity. Moments occur when
the carpet motif of the spiral and the ritornello form of the concerto almost
resolve to one another but never really do, and when the synchronization is
close, it is only so in large steps. The movement here is, as in Bloch’s philosophy,
toward the celestial, and where Bloch criticizes Wagner’s use of pseudo-Hindu
figuration, Fischinger invokes Vedic notions to clarify the design process (184–
186). Here, interpretive actions in the musical dance take the soul on a journey.
The gestural appearance of the time-based forms as they evolve in time is clear,
but Fischinger himself emphasizes their emotional import in his private notes
on the film:

The optical thought the optical dance to the sound of the river of your
soul The flowers of a mind The dance of handwriting and the song of
flowers and the white of the clouds and the blue of the sky—Sometimes
it is dark and you see in the darkness nothing but your own feeling your
own movements your own pulse and the rapture of your heart your
blood this is what you see what goes with the music—the Stars the
Heaven the Darkness and the Light of your own love your own heart
The Light of your mind The Dancing Light of your blood—and your
feeling. (185–186)

Affect and meaning are destructured from their conventional opposition to

each other in referential representation. The notes elaborating the artist’s con-
ception of the film compare to Bloch’s musical immanence for a subjectivity
now blind to the outside. In Fischinger’s terms, “Sometimes it is dark and you
 For Love of Music / 91

FIGURE 3.2 Kesting’s Viertalrad (1923): Van Ham Kunstauktionen: Moderne und Zeit-
genössische Kunst, June 9, 2005 (catalog image).

see in the darkness nothing but your own feeling” (185). But for Fischinger,
illuminating musicality in synchronization results in meaning dancing between
sound and image, a dance at times calligraphic and at other times broadly
graphical that leads to an ecstatic state by which the body literally becomes feel-
ing. The musical design of this pulsing rhythmic film makes it everything that
Disney’s Fantasia is not: unified, but heterogeneous; through composed, but
progressing through distinct movements. It is as if Fischinger has drawn the film
as a single, very complex line of multiple, spiraling temporalities that call, carry,
distribute, culminate, and complete one another, again and again.
Motion Painting No. 1 references a modernism of pulse and phrase distinct
from the musical intimations of Kandinsky, Paul Klee, or Piet Mondrian in
painting or from Eisenstein’s pulse in vertical montage—one that has yet to be
fully accommodated in the art historical archive. The polytopic field of spiraling
circles featured in the second movement of Motion Painting No. 1, for instance,
also recalls Edmund Kesting’s 1923 painting Viertalrad (Figure 3.2). The title of
this work refers to the mechanical workings of a timepiece; the painting presents
a polytopic interlinked field of spiral forms, such that the dynamic “gears” of
the painting seems to pulse and to rotate, communicating with one another
across the energetic canvas. Consider the second movement of Motion Painting
92 / Chapter 3

No. 1, where one spiraling composition leads to another, finally saturating the
frame in darkness and disappearing into obscurity. That the variegated tech-
niques of stroke used throughout the film were not determined in a tightly
synchronized schema for the film as a whole leaves us with the suggestion that
rather than an attempt at a pure cinema, Motion Painting No. 1, in addition to
further elaborating Fischinger’s intentions for a choreography of sound and
moving image, also summarizes the motives and achievements of a visual cul-
ture of pulse and tact rendered for nearly a half century by 1947 on canvas and
cinema screen.
In Motion Painting No. 1, then, a long series of interests is recapitulated
and, in a sense, completed: The circle becomes the spiral, and two incompatible
graphical forms are unified in terms of a larger sustained temporality in spite
of historical displacement. These circles-become-spirals and the wonderful
tumult of messy energy into which they finally dissipate are surely the portion
of Motion Painting No. 1 that Rebay angrily cited as “Fischinger’s awful little
spaghettis.” Indeed, much of this sequence suggests interests other than those
that Fischinger’s commentators usually attribute to him: technical innovation
and inner visions, a modernist pure cinema.33
Thus, another important possibility for interpreting this sequence of Fi-
schinger’s Motion Painting No. 1 should be considered. Circles and spirals are not
directly derivable, but they can be turned into one another by being flattened
into a graphical line, gathered into what might be round bundles of threaded
lines to be knitted into yet another series of spiraling derivations and then cross-
stitches. It is as if the graphical pulsing thread of light were yarn that, after being
collected into a ball, was knitted into a dynamically patterned surface. Perhaps
this sequence of Motion Painting No. 1 presents an analog to wife Elfriede Fi-
schinger’s design of specially knit fashion sweaters. The sweater, the result of the
technical craft of knitting together color and line, is worn on body as fashion (by
such customers as Bette Davis); the film, the result of the technical crafts of image
and sound making, is to be mixed in the eye and ear of the cinema spectator.
Motion Painting No. 1, arguably very different from the more explicitly
commercial or meditative films, demonstrates how visual music animation
might survey a larger practice of the diagrammatic mode of production deter-
mining artisanal in terms of industrial cinema: (1) Recapitulate and extend the
major theses, techniques, motives, and interests of the historical author; (2)
express a rapport with the larger trajectory of visual cultural production from
which that author’s work extends or in parallel to which it continues; (3) lay
out a demonstrative work that builds a self-revealing logic of variable synchro-
nization in its own textures; (4) draw, perhaps, inspiration from other small-
scale craft forms of industrial production situated in the immediate environs of
everyday life; and (5) disseminate the film through whatever channels possible,
including gallery or museum shows, and include statements on the intentions,
 For Love of Music / 93

techniques, and effects of the work. These five concerns characterize the broader
import of Motion Painting No. 1; what is at stake here is not simply the goal of
a meditative or affective cinema or the question of integrating or differentiating
experimental art with the industrial cinemas but the larger historical logics of
industrial arts, artisanal-industrial production, techno-scientific epistemolo-
gies, speculative interests, aesthetic histories, and conditions of everyday life.
An account of the ethics and affects of visual music as style and idiom would
begin with this array of concerns.
Fischinger’s work should be seen in this complex series of contexts in which
the avant-garde and the industrial cinemas, as David James shows,34 worked in
separation, conjunction, or divergence from one another. Carrying on the prac-
tice of artisanal cinema production in this way constitutes, beyond any single
context or work, a mode of technocultural style and idiom that animates cinema.
This modal cinema operates a divergent continuity, whether carried out during
the rise of the German film industry during the 1920s, the institutionalization
of fascism during the 1930s, or the conglomeration of the Hollywood studio
system around the sound film or its decline during the 1950s and 1960s.
For James, as for Moritz, Fischinger’s great works are those that propose
the “absolute cinema” in terms of its possibilities for popular engagement, as
in Allegretto, and then advance its motives toward a form that dispenses with
the music that these critical historians dismiss as distracting or banal.35 This
reading makes sense in terms of a championing of the avant-garde in Los Ange-
les, but it does not fully elaborate, as I attempt to above, the greater historical
catalog of aims, interests, and achievements that Motion Painting No. 1 docu-
ments in the terms of the visual music idiom. Its variable synchronization with
Bach’s third Brandenburg Concerto is an important aspect of Motion Painting
No. 1; as Walter Frisch clarifies, Bach’s music played a particular role in the
musical, critical, and cultural debates around German modernisms—debates
that Bloch attempts to recast with an understanding of musical history as
differential repetitions of “carpet motifs.” Bach was, in brief, a musical sign for
musical purity, vigor, and health—an important rediscovery for modernist
German musical history and criticism during a period when modernist com-
posers of competing tendencies were debating future directions in musical
culture.
For such composers as Ferruccio Busoni, Frisch notes, music retains its
absolute identity regardless of arrangements or transcriptions, since it is always
“‘pure’: no text, context, or extra-musical additions could ever alter its basic
condition.”36 Busoni, like Kandinsky, shared the idea that spirit and emotion,
and nothing else, give the artwork its essential meanings. As Frisch observes,
“Busoni turns the traditional definition of ‘absolute’ music on its head. Absolute
music is not about ‘form-play’ without ‘poetic program.’ On the contrary, form
is ‘the opposite pole of absolute music,’ which is attained only in the absence of
94 / Chapter 3

any imposed structure” (174). Bach was the greatest example of music’s unity,
or “oneness.” For Arnold Schoenberg, too, Bach’s music provides a key historical
exemplar, but here that exemplarity has to do with his project of emancipating
tonal harmony. For Schoenberg’s theory of harmony, Bach’s music becomes a
demonstration, Frisch writes, of tonality not as a natural but as an artificial
phenomenon and of harmony as any group of tones sounding together rather
than those tonal combinations thought universally valid on the basis of mathe-
matical harmonics (147).
Given this context, we may also consider Eisler’s recollections of Bertolt
Brecht’s understanding of Bach’s music. Eisler recalls Brecht’s sense that in Bach,
musical affect does not excessively stimulate the receiver’s passions but allows a
measured response to the affects expressed in the work.37 Eisler’s recollections
help us better understand how the reception of Bach’s music as a “healthful,”
even-tempered relation of corporeal sense and musical sensation may have had
a critical function in a modal cinema: The work expresses passion, of course, but
it is measured, a commensuration of sense and sensation—that is, the scaling of
an even temperament between composer, technique, instrument, and receiver.
Fischinger came of age as interpretations of Bach turned from more histo-
ricizing to more synthetic. After his early attempts to diagram musical transfor-
mations of theatrical time, Fischinger moved on to a series of technical experi-
ments, including his well-known wax-slicing process, in which designs are
shaped three-dimensionally in a wax block and then sliced as in a CAT scan to
produce successive film frames that, when projected, present organic, flowing
movement. Moritz notes that Fischinger was interested in the debates on expres-
sionism and cinema, and Wachsexperimente produces atmospheric visions in
eerie remarkable ways. Some of the wax footage turns up in R-1 (for multiple
projectors; c. 1927) as dynamic atmospheric background for the more solid
repeating forms of the foreground. R-1 approaches synchronization between
multiple image tracks and musical accompaniment in terms of musicality, but
only as interpreted between sound and image synchronized experientially, not
technically (that is, by virtue of a mechanically indexed sound track). Fischinger’s
already sophisticated, rhythmically dynamic animated geometries in this work
for multiple projectors look toward technical synchronization (which, in fact, is
rapidly becoming perfected for sound cinema), though it relied on live perfor-
mance when shown in 1926 and 1927.38
As in Bloch’s work, over and over in Fischinger’s films, music is taken as the
range and potential for a series of expressive transformations whose ground and
extent needs to be defined. Expressive ambient pieces, such as Wachsexperi-
mente, led to and are combined with forms whose transformation in time is
verifiable and more clearly replicable. Fischinger’s craft demands the elaboration
of these expressions in terms of gestures of synchronization. Although Moritz
claims that such Fischinger films as Liebesspiel are not inspired by music and do
 For Love of Music / 95

not obtain to music, the musicality of these films is apparent, and even Moritz
refers to qualities routinely associated with musical meaning and sense.39 The
difference is simply that musicality arises in the play of series rather than in
synchronization to image or in some graphical representational schema that
translates the idiom of rhythmic or harmonic musical form. In Liebesspiel, two
glowing white shapes on a black background coalesce to play out a dance
between them. Stripping the elements of visual music bare, the musicality of the
vision here has its say in terms of the qualities that Bloch relays: rhythm attained
in inflection and onset (attack). At the same time, as each shape plays off of and
mirrors the other, the film becomes an emblem of the goals of visual music
animation itself. The radiating ghostly images lay out a music of the self and its
other, without sound. Here, synchronization in musical form is limited entirely
to the visual field itself.
Still, musical synchronization across sound and image calls. Allegretto uses
the Hollywood apparatus of multiple-layer cell animation as well as Hollywood
jazz (composed by Ralph Rainger and performed by a Paramount studio orches-
tra) as the means to perfect visual music synchronization: glowing, radioactive,
and timbrally and chromatically synchronized by phrase development. Made
after Fischinger fled the Nazis and came to Los Angeles, this piece was originally
to be called “Radio Dynamics.”40 The name recalls the strange immaterial mate-
riality of the new materials of that era: electronics, but also radiation. We have
seen that Richter attempts to model his universal language on music to create
meanings that are radioactive; Fischinger too is taken with strange transforming
power across distance common to music and radioactivity. Conceptually, then,
once again, the problematic is not strictly auditory. Fischinger used the pseudo-
nym “Raidon” in a number of early black-and-white drawings and in proposals
for projects he pitched to the UFA during the late 1920s. The content of one of
these proposals concerned a man from Mars who is exiled to Earth for trying
to create a better world. These proposals brought him his first job in Berlin, as
special-effects animator for Fritz Lang’s Woman in the Moon (1929).41
In Allegretto, a “radioactive” musical transformation is seen literally, now
in a musical form that is analogically condensed and immediately apparent:
Musical supralegibility is achieved here, not through political revolution but
rather through Hollywood craft and cinematic installation. Perhaps an illumi-
nation of radio broadcast is not exactly what Bloch means to prophecy, how-
ever. The Tin Pan Alley–style pop music is often denigrated, even by Fischinger’s
biographer Moritz. Allegretto has been seen as an example of what might have
been, if Fischinger had been able to get funding for his own Fantasia. That film,
which Disney had hired Fischinger to work on after his productions for Para-
mount and MGM, was probably inspired by his own earlier work, but he quickly
resigned from the Disney Studios in profound disagreement over the direction
the production had taken.
96 / Chapter 3

Still, the animation of Allegretto is masterful and successfully captures the

excitement of radio-transmitted popular jazz in a form that combines Fi-
schinger’s artistry with the production values of Hollywood. And, if in the use
of popular music, Fischinger reaches a Blochian goal, he further reveals the
critical problematic. Are these glowing shapes a womb for revolution or the
tomb of experimental cinema in a commercial industry? In fact, these films and
others by artists with similar goals are crucial to multiple generations of experi-
mental artists working under their influence: Len Lye, Harry Smith, James and
John Whitney, and many others. Visual music, not music at all, in fact, may best
be approached as the synchronization within and across media of musicality,
with the aim of leading its audience on a journey through the very creation of
affective meaning. These meanings are dynamic, composed or coordinated in
motion and attaining legible effects of action experienced only virtually. While
on Orson Welles’s payroll during the early 1940s, Fischinger again refers to
transformation achieved at a distance: He made the meditative silent exercise in
“color-rhythm” Radio Dynamics. Here is Bloch’s problematic placed in the cin-
ema and moved through to its antithetical conclusion: The supralegibility of
music is achieved, but without sound.
Fischinger wrote in 1956 about his filmmaking activities since 1919 in a
catalog for the Pasadena Art Museum. As might be expected, it is an all-or-
nothing proposition:

But painting in motion, combined with music, or painting without

motion: that is the problem. The difference is tremendous. “Motion
paintings” give to the painter a new potentiality. He must develop and
become something like a “visual-motionist” creating not only in space
but in time. Within sixty seconds or sixty minutes he must present not
only one static, framable two or three dimensional creations of a virtual
nature, but he must also create sentence after sentence of moving, devel-
oping visual images changing and changing, in continuously different
ways. At times, these may be composed of successive ideas, bringing new
life into images. Forms are basic, but changes develop from the orches-
tration of forms and lines and colors. This is a tremendous new world—
a tremendous new tool—a challenge to creativeness comparable only to
music.42

A “new world”: Bloch tells us that this much was likely in music. But further, a
“new tool” exists: The function of the time-based means of expression is to
temporalize the production of meaning, make meaning ex-static. “Sentence after
sentence of moving developing visual images changing and changing, in con-
tinuously different ways” (189): This might be a description of Motion Painting
No. 1. As for Eisenstein, Fischinger accomplishes a similar process of musical
 For Love of Music / 97

abstraction and cumulative adduction into the visual field, but to the end of
animating dynamic forms on screen and, finally, to release visual music from
any necessary correspondence to the sound track. The two go forward freely in
parallel, returning to each other, according to the musical will of each. The
important difference between the Eisenstein’s musical montage and Fischinger’s
vision—and this is signaled early on in the fragments of graphical scores of
theatrical works—is that Fischinger ultimately is not working from any objective
or indexical image.
Rather, his approach is based on drafting and illustration techniques derived
from his engineering background but applied to the musical imaginary. The
result is musical gesture visualized, moving in time through the audience of a
musical cinema world. The techniques he develops stress visual musicality being
produced for either exact or noncontemporaneous synchronization with musi-
cal sound through correspondences of musical meanings. Fischinger moves the
audience into a precisely timed musical cosmos, first explored with such works
as Allegretto and An Optical Poem. He insists on the power of the moving image
to produce musical meanings in its own right with Radio Dynamics: a visual
music masterpiece without audio. This work produces musical meanings—the
rhythms that suggest breaths, or cycles—that reverberate silently as a meditation
on spiritual experience. And, he finally releases sound and image from their
mutual grasp into an instantiation of audiovisual noncontemporaneity, or at
least complex heterogeneous temporal layering, in Motion Painting No. 1.
Fischinger’s use of what were by the mid-twentieth century considered a
form of industrial pop—“light classics” overly familiar in terms of then-
contemporary musical epistemologies, as David James points out43—should be
considered in the following way: Where Brecht and Eisler, through his film
scores, seek to distance the audience from the screen display, Fischinger’s stylis-
tics of the idiom of pulse and tact seek to animate an energetic block of time
that ultimately may be deployed toward a conception of a situated convertibility
between author and audience. Allegretto is, in this view, the mature culmination
of the pop strain of Fischinger’s modal cinema; Radio Dynamics, its purified
poetic form; and Motion Painting No. 1, its critical, historical, and autobio-
graphical exposition.
What to make, finally, of Fischinger’s insertion of his own index finger,
appearing as a flash at the lower center of a single frame, pointing upward at a
climactic point of the final movement of Motion Picture No. 1? In the reading I
offer here, Fischinger’s inclusion of this brief flash of finger orienting the view-
er’s eye upward toward the suprahistorical dimension of the historically situated
screen relays the stylistics of the work back to the idiom conducted via the ener-
gies of his own sustained divergent labors. This gesture reflexively points to the
film’s historical and autobiographical exposition of what Erwin Panofsky 44
describes as the coexpressivity of sound and image and the dynamization of
98 / Chapter 3

space and spatialization of time. Yet visual music animation as a modal cinema
deploys style and idiom transposable across the material substrates of the pre-
sentational medium—that is, beyond style and medium, the terms with which
Panofsky describes cinema’s dynamism. The deictic flash of Fischinger’s hand is
a signature effect: It rebinds the sensation of the work’s reception to the sense
of its authorial composition; it rebinds the historical time of the site of reception
to the suprahistorical temporality where visual music animation previously per-
formed, and would again in the years ahead, as a cipher for reframing and dis-
seminating style and idiom in new media to come.

Musical Gesture, Star Gestures

One constant in all of Fischinger’s animated films is the artist’s solution to a
basic problem of nonobjective animation. The animator, to effect a fluidity of
motion, must use visual elements whose shapes allow them to move continu-
ously over time as they are translated through two- or three-dimensional space.
It is this choice of shapes and transformations, with the attendant movement,
that comes to constitute the animator’s “language,” or, rather, a toolbox of
dynamic visual technique. Fischinger’s visual forms are designed to retain their
shape while they move in a given direction (melodiously, or rhythmically, in
musical terms), while moving quickly and uniquely enough to visualize a musi-
cal phrase or to simply persist in motion in the visual field throughout a given
duration.
Of course, the simplest visual form that can retain its shape as it moves
directionally through space is the circle. The circle, full of symbolic and meta-
phorical connotations, is a common motif in the work of many artists of visual
music. As such, its use may provide a point of comparison between works. Com-
paring Fischinger’s independent art productions to Busby Berkeley’s lavish
Hollywood production numbers by focusing on the use of circular motifs in
each, for example, might help us glean an idea of how musical rhetorics com-
plicate and subvert traditional narrative form. Such a comparison can also pro-
vide a notion of the nature of the relationship between independent artist labor
and studio artist labor.
Between Fischinger and Berkeley we might identify, to begin with, a sup-
plementary relation based on the idea of prototype. That is, Berkeley uses Fi-
schinger’s radiant dot motif as a successful experiment that, as a graphical effect,
might enhance and expand his own musical adventurism. In this way, we see
one relationship that helps define part of the complex dynamic between art and
commodity film: The industry accommodates the avant-garde as a prototype.
Berkeley, himself an avant-garde visual music artist by virtue of his transforma-
tion of singing, dancing bodies out of a strict narrative teleology and into musi-
cal form less reliant upon cause and effect and the need for closure, nonetheless
 For Love of Music / 99

functions as industry as he recovers Fischinger’s graphical effects into the

Hollywood musical. Berkeley takes up Fischinger’s tool.45
Fischinger uses circular form as the figure of expansion and return, the way
onward and the way home. In his earliest works, we encounter it in many
instances, from ellipse to spiral. The circular motif or gesture figures promi-
nently in all the complete works he produced while in Hollywood—namely,
Allegretto, An Optical Poem, American March (1941), Radio Dynamics, and Motion
Painting No. 1. The motif is clearest in An Optical Poem, whose visual forms are
primarily circular dots painted a radiant golden hue that move in time to Lizst’s
Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2. An Optical Poem is closely synchronized to the musi-
cal sound track, but, unlike Allegretto, which retains one style of synchronization
throughout,46 it uses the two different styles of synchronization I have briefly
referred to: phrasal and rhythmic. In the phrasal style, the music “draws,” as
Bloch would say. The animation traces precisely an instrumental line—a visual-
ized carpet motif—heard on the sound track, moving up when the melody goes
up, or vice versa. In the rhythmic style, the radiant dots simply dance around
each other in a rhythmic choreography. Sometimes, in An Optical Poem, both
styles occur at once. Routinely, the circles and circular movement imply the very
poetry of celestial transport that Fischinger invokes in his notes.
This “orbit” metaphor suggests a transcendental view of the cosmos, allud-
ing to the oldest known figures of astronomy. In this view, we see many possible
“worlds” moving with and against each other in outer space. But the metaphor
also suggests a microscopic view of atoms and molecules, invoking the recently
gained knowledge of particle physics and atomic fission. Ever the synthesist,
Fischinger switches between or combines “harmonic views,” with dots following
melodic contours, and “views of harmony,” with dots dancing around each
other. Harmonics in music, celestial mechanics, and particle physics all coexist
in rhapsodic form, and the fact that you can see instrumental and choreographic
synchronizations together in some views shows that in visual music, at least,
duality need not imply binarism. Later, in Radio Dynamics, Fischinger dispenses
with the music, simply putting forth a silent meditation piece that glows with
pulsing rhythmic circles, among other forms. The radiating dot here is tripled
in the frame, as three circles slowly give way to one that zooms out at the viewer.
The effect is hypnotic.47
The difference between Fischinger’s abstraction and Berkeley’s figuration is
as clear as that between dance and song. Although Fischinger’s work consistently
evokes the figure of return as a dance of orbiting spheres, Berkeley has a different
problem: To get to the circle, the simplest geometrical form for regular repeating
movement, he must allow for song but reformat the human body inside the
frame48 with the camera. Although Berkeley accomplishes this task in one way
or another in all his films, for The Gang’s All Here (1943) he adds a graphic effect
never before used in his films. Gang is a wartime distraction starring Alice Faye
100 / Chapter 3

as Edie Allen, a nightclub singer who learns that her returning soldier has a
fiancée, leading her to perform a mournful version of the film’s theme song,
“Journey to a Star.” Edie had serenaded her lover with this tune the night before
he left for the Pacific front, and it has haunted her ever since. After she sings out
her melancholy and resentment, she overhears a conversation that explains that
the engagement that has broken her heart was just a family arrangement. Then
Edie begins the production number that ends the show and the movie, an elabo-
rate final sequence that radically redefines the meaning of the lyrics to “Journey
to a Star,” which is reprised.
The production number starts from a gag song whose lyrics intone, “The
polka is gone / but the polka dot lives on.” Couples of children in turn-of-the-
century clothing crowd around Edie as she croons, “And gentlemen still love /
the polka dotted glove.” A musical fantasia breaks out: The camera fixes in close-
up on a girl’s glove, similar to Faye’s, and this close-up dissolves to a massive
facsimile of the glove, now floating in darkness. The fetishized “manu-factory”
of musical stardom literally displaces the performer’s gestures, its operations
getting underway as the polka dot patterns begin to glow neon bright and fall
away from the fabric of the glove. Becoming halos, they fall upon the heads of
chorus girls in factory-worker catsuits who begin to work the neon dots into
larger patterns. The work to be done, it seems, by these worker angels is to
reverse-engineer musical stars out of the diegesis and place them into the cin-
ematic heavens above the spectators. Before the stars can appear, symbols of
physical desire are coded into the production, and the polka dots spill away,
out of control.
Finally, Edie appears as the strange fabrication of the production number,
swallowed up at the center of the frame in blue fabric, with only her head visible.
While the camera hovers above her, her movements turn into a psychedelic
kaleidoscope of pulsating color, and the fetishized veiling of the body that began
with the glove now proceeds from her singing head as a riot of bodies moving
in abstract patterns forms a circle. The production number ends as the polka
dots form halos behind the heads of the stars as each star in turn sings a line
from the song “Journey to a Star.” And here appears Fischinger’s zooming radi-
ant dot: A complex compositing process highly unusual for Berkeley turns the
dot into the halo of a musical star who is offered not only as a subject position
within a narrative trajectory but also as the object of desire in an orgiastic musi-
cal display. Each star’s head zooms out at the viewer, framed in circle, until
finally Edie’s head appears again as she sings the last line of the song. Then, all
the actors’ heads appear clustered around Edie’s, a star field on a sky-blue back-
ground as the musical fanfare concludes.
Although Berkeley’s production numbers often rehearse motifs similar to
these, in this particular instance, the graphical nature of the finale is unlike
 For Love of Music / 101

anything before or since. The cosmological carpet motifs in Berkeley’s and

Fischinger’s films are striking. In Fischinger’s An Optical Poem, musical views
of astronomical and atomic space put the viewer in a position to perceive tran-
scendent harmony. In Berkeley’s Gang, we are distracted from a military con-
flict extending around the world with the story of a singer and a war hero’s
romantic “Journey to a Star” at the same time as we undertake a “journey to a
star” ourselves.
The allure of Hollywood replaces fears about the war, as the uncertain
future of our couple is conveniently forgotten. From the dangers of war to the
production of glamour, as the song suggests, “isn’t very far.” In both films,
spectators find their relations to the world they experience completely trans-
formed, not simply defamiliarized. By Bürger’s standards, both of these films
would fall into the category of practical art that “enthralls” the consumer and
so performs a “false sublation of art as institution.”49 With his emphasis on
Adornian negative dialectics and his somewhat naive acceptance of the avant-
gardists’ manifestoes as an accurate description of how their work actually
performed in the social field, Bürger valorizes one style of avant-garde produc-
tion at the expense of others.
Fischinger’s small-scale craft production and Berkeley’s large-scale indus-
trial production can put the consumer at the center of worlds where the pleasure
of musical experience allows multiple levels of meaning to become explicit in a
purposefully ambiguous work. In Fischinger’s case, the viewer’s knowledge of
the physical world might be turned into the sense and sensation of musical
engagement with the real. In Berkeley’s case, Hollywood conventions shame-
lessly expose themselves in blatant attempts to keep people’s minds off the war’s
effects even as they are asked to cheer the war effort itself. Perhaps the sheer
exhibitionism of Berkeley’s pastiche is what ensured that he made very few films
after this one; the musical film turned to ever-subtler integration of musical and
narrative form, and Hollywood was never quite so brazen again.
I have suggested one possible relationship between Fischinger’s experimen-
talism and Berkeley’s commercialism as that of “prototyping,” and others cer-
tainly exist. But at the same time, I do not want to overlook Berkeley’s humilia-
tion in Hollywood to concentrate on Fischinger’s. Both are artists who were put
out to pasture before their times, possibly because their prototyping was too far
advanced or their productions too risky to continue being the right sort of nov-
elty for the Hollywood cinema. What’s important is how these artists mobilized
musical fervency to open up the narrow flow of the traditional narrative work.
The ecstatic quality of visual music has potent effects on the cinematic work.
Artists use philosophical visions of music to involve spectators in a reproduc-
tion of the world that can reveal it to be deeply complex, pleasurably engaging,
individually subjective, collectively mobilizing, and in sum a profound lens for
102 / Chapter 3

reviewing the world outside the film. A major difference is in the gesture of
movement each work makes.
As Martin Rubin points out, Gang is the Berkeley film that most radically
puts narrative to the uses of music. Rubin contrasts Berkeley-esque spectacle
with conventions of realism and naturalism that are generally considered “nar-
rative.” For Rubin, narrative, from this point of view, is almost an afterthought
in Gang. Lyrics for the musical numbers reach an “extreme of nonsensicality”
in the musical numbers, such as “The Polka Dot Polka.” He points out the
paucity of analytical editing sequences, such as those in the “shot, reverse-shot”
pattern, even in comparison to musical narrative conventions of the early
1940s. The film begins with a spectacular musical number featuring Carmen
Miranda as Dorita, whom Rubin describes as “a walking alienation effect.” This
introductory sequence is only marginally integrated into the film’s excuse of
storytelling—but technically, the smooth and surprising continuity from the
musical world of this number to the musical world of the film’s primary diegesis
is pure spit ’n’ polish. In general, Rubin notes, narrative space is flattened to
become musical: “Space in The Gang’s All Here is not so much penetrated or
analyzed as unscrolled, spun out.”50
It is understandable that, in arguing that Gang is a film that unscrolls musi-
cally without diegetic depth, Rubin opposes music to narration; this is part of
the tradition of cinema studies that accommodates only with difficulty the work
of Fischinger, Richter, or Bloch. Rather than say that almost no narration occurs
or that the musical numbers do not resolve narrative tension, I would suggest
that musical narration is taking on a greater role and taking the film someplace
else all together. By flattening the diegetic world so that, effectively, it is read as
performance, Berkeley simply allows music to take on almost all narrative func-
tions in a way that is less grating than the usual story/number division. The more
conventional solution during the early 1940s, and the reason why Berkeley was
fired from MGM, was to more carefully craft the narrative and lyrics so that
when song did burst into a scene, it was fully motivated in terms of the charac-
ters’ cohesive internal worlds. Instead of the backstage musical, with its tendency
to turn the external world into a stage, the Arthur Freed Unit at MGM tended
to place a star at the center of a film and motivate musical numbers through his
or her emotional conflicts. Splashy production numbers might come at the end
to grandly resolve these conflicts constructed in terms of character interaction
and character interiority.
The suspension of the usual role of cutting so that Gang tends to float away
from analytical convention is signified above all in the “The Polka Dot Polka”
scene, in which the gargantuan woman’s gloved hand floats prosthetically above
the chorines in darkness. This image perhaps emphasizes the lack of distinction
throughout the film in what Rubin refers to as “audience/narrative” space and
 For Love of Music / 103

“stage/performance” space. But his conclusions here are based on audience

interpreting narrative and performer performing musically; the implication, as
usual, is that music is beyond rationale, and its magical transmission from per-
former to audience is the right way of producing spectacle. The audience is
closed off from music, which is kept to the stage.
With Bloch’s notion of synthetic cultural creation through musicality, we
can better understand what Berkeley attempts in the face of the increasingly
music-resistant Hollywood narrative of his day. The visual spectacle of the
star, in effect, passes over into the visual spectacle of music through the cine-
matic space of the audience. Edie’s gesturing hand becomes separated from
her screen body and continues, without her, into the next number, directing
the refabrication of the star into an ensemble production. Here, the visual
conventions of solo-number presentation tend toward continuous musical-
ization, with visual elements and even body parts reforming into motifs. This
fragmentation of the star’s musical gesture is strained in the tension with her
star body. The motif undergoes transformation beyond recognition only to
reoccur in a new formation later: Edie’s gloved gesture initiates the later appear-
ance of the blooming flower of her head, which is then itself placed in orbit, in
a constellation of “stars.” Of course, it is more difficult to fabricate a motif out
of a star’s hand than a polka dot, but Berkeley shows here that it can indeed
be done.
Above all, gesture in the Berkeley-esque spectacle is that of bodies become
motifs for organization into a musical narrative that simply wants to carpet the
audience’s eyes as well as its ears. This gesture, of course, is under extreme con-
straints as to its transformation once it is derived from a human figure. The
female figure is chosen to dissolve and to recombine, usually, simply because
such anatomical nondifferentiation would be threatening if it were configured
male: It would reveal a disturbing picture of male fabrication during wartime,
a moment that would tend, perhaps, to display male invulnerability, not con-
structability. More generally, under the terms of heteronormativity, a motif in
feminine construction always helps prevent the male ensemble from dissolving
together, with its attendant risk of confusion of man and (musical) instrument.
But finally, the very femaleness essential to the movement of the cogs in this
cinematic machine becomes nominal at best once the sequence proceeds through
its initial lapses of cinematic narrative convention. After the stage has been non-
differentiated from the audience space and after the performance has been
nondifferentiated from the narrative, the body is simply the last thing to go. If
we accept that cinema might be the staging ground for the musical interiority
that Bloch projects, the destination is utopia. More than the literal representa-
tion of the gesture of a female body and beyond the fetishization of the female
figure, this gesture is Hollywood’s instrumentalization of the audience.
104 / Chapter 3

Alternatively, Fischinger’s hand appears literally in his work, but only under
the guarantee that it would not be seen beyond a single flicker. Robert Haller
notes that Fischinger would place his hand in front of the camera to indicate a
mistake in the animation process.51 The flicker of his hand is surprising, because
the visual motifs of Fischinger’s films tend to aspire to fluid and nonobjective
form. The hand in the frame that Haller refers to appears to be stopping the flow
of time. In fact, Fischinger’s gesture as painter is what guarantees the temporal
transport experienced in his films. But the flash appearance of a single, clearly
intentional finger gesture pointing upward suggests that gesture as music is pat-
ent in Fischinger’s work and not hidden because of its obtrusiveness. Fischinger’s
gestural Lumigraph device would be the material instantiation of the even tem-
perament of Fischinger’s modal cinema.
In this account, then, are not simply two gestural logics of experimental
cinema, as Akira Lippit52 argues. Rather, four divergent series of gestures ani-
mate the apparatus, modulating producer and receiver, sense in composition
and sensation in reception: A first series of gestures, in the preparation of the
apparatus for the work, where the apparatus itself varies, is animated, over his-
torical time; a second series of gestures in the production of the work as experi-
ment, study, or mature work, and where the author’s work develops in relation
to its historical epoch; a third series of gestures, the reception of the work in any
number of passive positions, whether the commercial cinema spectator, the gal-
lery or art gallery or dome environment, or again, the camera that records the
Lumigraph performance for television or cinema special effects and that lives
on after the author; and fourth, the gestures of the audience member who might
step “behind the screen” to animate the apparatus him- or herself, so clearly
modeled by Fischinger with the Lumigraph, but also in those artists’ work who
acknowledge his work as influential exemplar. Here, the passive synthesis of
cinematic contemplation becomes the active synthesis of calculation graphically
projected through the bioenergetic or bioinformatic screen. Receiver becomes
author; the historical epoch of the author is transposed to, while being displaced
by, that of the receiver. Style and idiom in the modal cinema implies far more
than a problem of old and new media.
Taken in this light, Fischinger’s practice is not simply a decorative alterna-
tive to more critical avant-gardes, nor is it simply a neglected history finally
getting its due from art-historical scholarship. I argue that Fischinger’s cinema
demonstrates in historical fact and consequence a subtle resistance as much as
a major modality of industrial style and idiom. More than just a seminal part
of the history of musical, special effects, expanded, or motion-graphic cinemas,
more than an invitation to revisit a Hollywood renaissance of transnational
localization of the avant-gardes, it is, in fact, an ecstatic, if difficult-to-maintain,
form of resistance: to the early industrial cinemas, which marginalized the
avant-gardes; to fascism, which branded it impermissible; to the Hollywood
 For Love of Music / 105

studio system, which detached its stylistics while obscuring its signatures with-
out disseminating to any sufficient material degree an idiom through which
these styles could be maintained; and also, finally, to art-historical methods
that insist on a critical avant-garde antithetical to the braided seriation of the
popular, the technical, and the ecstatic. It is difficult, indeed, given the great
number of meditative works Fischinger inspired, to underestimate the “spiri-
tual constructions” motivating the animated screens of many who have worked
in this idiom. Yet it is more important to emphasize the material and effective
nature of this mode of stylizing the idioms of transnational industrial arts and
cultures.
Gesture in Fischinger’s work is made explicit with his invention of the Lumi-
graph, a musical instrument of light he played from behind a screen. Moritz
recounts an early Fischinger performance on the Lumigraph: “Soft glowing
images begin to appear where the screen was. Is it a film? No, it has a luminous
presence quite unlike [film]. . . . Sometimes it seems almost like a hand but then
it can flicker, and swirling leave a vague trail like a comet’s tail. The bright satu-
rated colors have a ghostly three-dimensional presence. The shapes change so
easily, yet are so solid.”53
The patent diagram for the Lumigraph gives the key for the real-time
performance of visual music. Describing the latex screens that are pushed out
toward the audience through a band of lights to produce colored movements,
the diagram notes: “RUBBER SKIN—LIGHT TOUCHES SKIN ONLY IF PUSHED
FORWARD INTO THE LIGHT .” These are instructions for enlightening the
audience as well as for the patent office. Here, though, gesture outstrips the
prosthetic.
After cinema has materialized temporality, finally, gesture emerges into tem-
poral materiality. Visual music now happens directly through artist movements.
When performing at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Fischinger
arranged his costume and the instrument so that only the musical gestures and
his white gloves could be seen. The disembodied hand here again indicates the
unseen labor of aesthetic production that underlies the movement of music into
the visual field and, in this case, directly into the audience space.
Elfriede Fischinger notes that the Lumigraph was enjoyed by Lionel Hamp-
ton and his friends, was shown to Gene Kelly, and also served as the prototype
for a “love machine” during the production of The Time Travelers. Fischinger
performed with the Lumigraph in museums and galleries in Los Angeles and
San Francisco. A contract was signed to use the instrument for an Andy Williams
television special called Kaleidoscope (in the mid-1960s, apparently), but, because
of low light emissions, the cameras could not adequately capture its subtle
effects. Visual music on the Lumigraph was insufficiently “radioactive” for tele-
vision.54 Stephen Beck’s live television performance of highly saturated elec-
tronic musical patterns, however, was only a few years away.
106 / Chapter 3

Radiant Historicity
This chapter’s aim has been to provide a critical framework restoring Fischinger’s
work as well as the tendencies informing visual music cinemas to their historical
positions mediating classical debates on film form (where Eisenstein stands as
the central exemplar) and audience reception (where Eisler and Adorno, to
whom I turn next, provide the key discussion). Doing so, too, we avoid the situ-
ation depicted in Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude.55 In this coming-
of-age story set in New York City during the 1970s, Abraham, the protagonist’s
father, seems increasingly distant, occupied with a near-mystical painting prac-
tice. As he grows up, the protagonist begins to realize that his father is more
active, too. Invited to speak on a panel at a local university, a lively discussion
on painting ensues. But at least one audience member is unconvinced: He
jumps up and shouts, “But what about Oscar [sic] Fischinger? None of you are
acknowledging Oscar Fischinger!”56
Fischinger’s stylization of cinema and the Lumigraph have been similarly
constantly convoked in the developments of streaming media over the twentieth
century. Thanks to shifts in accounts of avant-garde activity deriving partly from
1950s and 1960s engagements with popular culture that Fischinger helped
inspire, art-historical studies have granted him a tentative place in scholarly
histories, but without fully granting the importance of his work or its influences.
Fischinger’s practice had little to do with modeling synesthesia, visualizing
sound or music, musicalizing narration, or making cinema painterly—these
perspectives have merely helped condition the reception of his work.
What is remarkable, though, is that Lethem could make the joke and that
the joke might be humorous in 2004. From Fischinger’s steady production of
musicalized cinematic space environments during the 1920s to the Lumigraph
and to hundreds of diagrammatic paintings, he constantly gestured upward:
beyond his branding as a degenerate in Germany, biases of language, and eco-
nomic privation in Hollywood, toward, as Moritz puts it, a nonobjective world
he knew “had always existed, even though European art was just rediscovering
it.” Moritz fittingly suggests a range of carpet motifs for Fischinger’s animations
and inventions: geometric color fields, organic auroras, and mathematical tra-
jectories, Plato or the Tibetan painter of yantras, Einstein and Heisenberg and
Hopi Shaman. Moritz also points to artists working with computer-generated
graphics in the California school of color music—Michael Scroggins or Vibeke
Sorenson—and argues that Fischinger understood that his influence would be
deeply generative in spite of the difficulties of working in this style and the hard-
ships of economic marginalization or art historical neglect that he experienced
and saw others experience as well: “Perhaps [my own films] will be primitive.
I think I am mostly a catalyst.”57
 For Love of Music / 107

Lethem’s humorous scene in which the frustrated audience member calls

out for acknowledgment of a properly historical exemplar of ecstatic moving
painting, then, points less to Fischinger’s actual reception and more to the sus-
tained inability of advancing industrial arts in the United States to grasp the
aesthetic and ethical dimensions adequate to, first, the establishment of varie-
gated public spheres where, second, receivers might become “literate” in terms
of that ecstatic affect that Bernard Stiegler58 suggests characterizes learning to
write and that is commensurate to the practices of politically vital regimes of
technocultural production. For Stiegler, learning literacy means time away from
and a dissynchronization with the site of writing, allowing an accommodation
of literacy, with its internalization and habituation of reading and writing that
shifts, in inobservable moments, the writerly systems of inscription that are
habituated. In streaming media, however, the opposite tendency is vaunted as
the equivalent of literacy: persistently networked habits of using streaming
media appliances. A double inadequacy of the aesthetic and ethical dimensions
of media reception and the time required to effect reception in ecstatic terms
help explain not only the enduring appeal of Fischinger’s work but also the very
different meanings assigned to it as a cinematic modeling of internal synesthesia
or as external technical invention of a more powerful synchronization of stream-
ing media.
This double inadequacy of styles for expressing techno-political ontologies,
epistemologies, and ethics, and of idioms adequate to their dissemination, is the
ethical problem of modern historical time and not simply that of advanced
capacities for digital composition or of remix culture posited on the model of
open-software production. We know the broad outlines of this problematic, in
long-standing debates around industrial design, visual anthropology, documen-
tary practices, and mass-media publics. When a historical period, an industrial
process, or a situation of reception fails to adequately condition access not sim-
ply to the tools of production but to the models, criteria, and differentiation of
their uses, in mass-cultural terms, this failure points to a kind of social death, a
necrosis of time, diagnosible in terms of developmental dynamics alternating
between symbolic infantilization and symbolic senility. We gesture, like children,
toward the opaque and carefully protected capacities of a new mass medium,
only to find, as the devices and the affects we invest in them obsolesce, that we
have forgotten to animate the site of technocultural reception as a place for
public life. “Democracy” is the stand-in term for this repeating failure of every-
day industrial or postindustrial life. For Stiegler, the reality is symbolic misery
accruing in what he calls hyperindustrialism, the regime where the means for
producing goods and programming “spiritual nourishment” converge.59
Yet since early cinema (at least, that is, from the point at which these liabil-
ities and tendencies become clear for industrial mass cultures), faced with that
108 / Chapter 3

failure such theorists as Bloch and such artists as Fischinger have turned to
music. Fischinger’s musical animation and its reception should be seen in this
light: As style and idiom of a modal cinema, it constitutes a sustained example
of a broader and continuing musical turn, a means not simply of radiantly illu-
minating the industrial screen but of reanimating the historical rhythms of
industrial or hyperindustrial time. Where Eisenstein’s montage diagrams hiero-
glyphic time as historical pathos, then, Fischinger diagrams it as futural ecstasy.
Between the two, and not entirely exclusive to these, Eisler develops another
classical stylistics of streaming audiovisuality that is neither anchored in histori-
cal or futural immanence, but in the site of reception itself: a dialectical stream.
I turn next to the ways in which Eisler’s dialectical streaming of sound and image
modulates the affect of “hysteria.”
4
Hanns Eisler’s Dialectical Stream
Sync, Dissonance, and the Devil

By keeping itself at a distance, [Eisler’s score] also creates a distance from its place
and hour. Something of this element—the formal self-negation of music that plays
with itself—should be present in every composition for motion pictures as an
antidote against the danger of pseudo-individualization.
—Hanns Eisler and Theodor Adorno, Composing for the Films

Diagramming Cognition
In previous chapters, Sergei Eisenstein’s and Oskar Fischinger’s distinct reso-
lutions to the problem of synchronizing the creative labor of production with
cinema’s automated technical presentation and the interpretive labor of the
audience provide two crucial exemplars of stylizing the complex temporali-
ties of time-based industrial media in what I have termed “modal cinemas.”
Hanns Eisler’s film-scoring practice clarifies a third classical stylistic of
audiovisual media synchronization. Eisler’s use of post-Schoenberg musical
insights; his political engagements; his wide range of scoring activities for
documentary or narrative features; his seminal Rockefeller Foundation–
funded experiments in cinema music composition in the Film Music Project
(later elaborated, with Theodor Adorno, in Composing for the Films [1947]);
and the historical continuity of his activities in film music between the
1920s, in his scoring for nonsynchronized cinema with Walter Ruttmann,
and the 1950s, in his score for Alain Resnais’s Nuit et brouillard (Night and
Fog ; 1955): All of these make Eisler a key figure where musicality is con-
ceived to mediate the production and reception of a time-based work within,
and yet diverging from, the dominant conditions and conventions of music
production in cinema.
In this chapter, I consider Eisler’s compositional methods vis-à-vis those
of Bernard Herrmann. Eisler, with Adorno, provides one of the earliest
110 / Chapter 4

critiques of Eisenstein’s isomorphic correspondences, although, as I show in

Chapter 2, they interpret Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky chart as a parametrical
informatic diagram rather than as a diagram of threatened cultural labor that
might secure itself in asserting a deeply historical immanence. Nicholas Cook1
notes that an uncritical reliance on some less than fully acknowledged notion
of formal unity seems to persist in Eisenstein’s Nevsky chart and in Adorno and
Eisler’s critiques of classical Hollywood scoring practices and of Eisenstein:
“Oppositional scoring, as its designation implies, represents merely the oppo-
site of [Eisenstein’s] parallelism. It is the inversion of a principle, a parasitic
concept, and its practice represents no more than the exception that proves the
rule” (65).
The larger strategy of reading that Cook suggests (as discussed in Chapter 2)
is that of a cognitive, “metaphoric” transfer of meaningful material from two
distinct expressions. Eisenstein, Eisler, or, again, Walt Disney’s elaboration of
sound-image doubling in Fantasia illustrates three distinct models of this meta-
phoric transfer: conformance when similar meanings are expressed in similar
terms; complementation when similar meanings are expressed in different
terms; and contestation, when opposite meanings are expressed in different but
somehow still comparable terms. These terms may describe the production of
metaphoric meaning in multimedia musical objects, but Cook also suggests that
they may characterize interpretive strategies in music criticism or scholarship.
Eisler’s work seems to attempt but fails to demonstrate sound and image as
“contesting” one another.
Yet like Barbara Stafford’s “echo object,” Cook’s notion of cognitive transfer
of metaphoric meaning is less descriptive when it comes to the historical mate-
rialities informing Eisenstein’s and Eisler’s very different approaches to synchro-
nizing the audiovisual stream or to the varying purposes to which these critiques
have been put since they were elaborated. Too, the very preliminary cognitive
study on which much of Cook’s account depends gets little historical treatment.
Cook’s framework, then, serves not so much to describe cognitive metaphor as
problematic but to contain unruly historical examples of music across multi-
media that are fraught with multiple layers of meaning. Invoking his own terms,
Cook argues that Eisler’s apparent insistence on “oppositional scoring” is hard
to reconcile with what Cook regards as the conventional score Eisler composed
for Joris Ivens’s Rain (1929) as part of his work on the Film Music Project: “The
difficulty is not so much in understanding the principles behind Eisler’s scoring
[of Rain], but in understanding how they are meant to conform to principles
set out in his text” (64).
Cook’s powerful model of three tendencies of metaphoric transfer in multi-
media object and criticism of the multimedia object, then, allows Eisler to be
drawn into a contradiction based entirely on an anachronistic and partial
understanding of Composing for the Films. Cook acknowledges the book as a
 Hanns Eisler’s Dialectical Stream / 111

problematic example of joint authorship but generalizes the meanings of syn-

chronization as “fit” that Eisler presents in text and in his fi lms as meaning
close timing of significant events between sound and image rather than as a
much more complex term. Rather than reading Eisler’s score for Rain in terms
of what it is—“variations” whose meaning develops over the duration of the
composition and the film—Cook reads Rain as simply matching shifts in musi-
cal tonality with a cut from long shot to close-up.
In reading Eisler’s score for Rain in this way, Cook risks the sort of reduction
to which Eisler and Adorno subject Eisenstein—reading Eisler’s notion of “fit”
as an informatic “fitting” to film frame as event and by virtue of the rhetorical
strategy of synecdochic reduction according to which Eisenstein’s Battleship
Potemkin becomes entirely a nonnnarrative cognitive object in Stafford’s recent
description (see Chapter 1). Viewing and listening to Rain make clear that the
iconic links between musical figure and image sequence that Cook identifies
vary throughout the film and that the score contains neither a through-composed
unity nor an uncoordinated, ad hoc assembling of sequences of the sort that
Eisler and Adorno critique in Hollywood practices. The score and its relations
to the image track vary over time, then, and the counterpoint Cook claims Eisler
fails to theorize as “concept” is an artifact not of a relation of image to music
but rather a much more complex streaming effect whose meanings accrue and
develop over time. Cook’s reading of Eisler’s film music as facilitating the emer-
gence of icons linking sound and image continues film studies’ conventional
epistemology in which music must link with image to provide musical elabora-
tion or sound effect, special effect, narrative commentary, geographical siting,
temporal adjustment, or affective direction.
The problem with this analysis is that it turns a film studies cliché—that of
Eisler’s scoring as a political contestation of the filmic image via the musical
supplement of the film score—into a conceptual error by referring Eisler’s work
back to the modes of production from which it diverges, and under the cover
of once again reducing the film score to largely supplemental and, here, cogni-
tive functions. Composing for the Films is a problematic text, complicated by
joint authorship but also by misstatements that, as I discuss below, must have
been intentional. But my interest lies in the way that Cook reiterates the notion
of the film score as a supplement to the image by turning musical figures into
conceptual objects that can be synchronized as associative icons. Cook’s analy-
sis is a valuable example of temporal diagramming, in other words, but it begs
the question of how we can account for Eisler’s scoring practices in terms of
temporal streams rather than simply in terms of iconic conceptual objects
informatically synchronized as serial events reducible to the common time base
provided by the filmic or digital recording.
In the following section, I introduce the historical context in which Eisler
and Herrmann moved from New York to Los Angeles. I then devote the two
112 / Chapter 4

FIGURE 4.1 Losey’s A Child Went Forth (1941): Defending her water pail against a hys-
terical attack (frame capture). (A Child Went Forth, dir. Joseph Losey [National Association of Nursery
Educators, 1941].)

subsequent sections to discussions of the ways in which each composer rendered

hysteria in fiction and nonfiction works. I close the chapter with a discussion of
the implications to be drawn from what I clarify as Eisler’s “dialectical stream-
ing.” Cinema and film music studies have long attempted to ascertain how
Eisler’s “counterpoint” of sound and image could “emancipate” film music, as
Eisler and Adorno describe their project in Composing for the Films. I clarify that
what is at stake in Eisler’s work is not simply the linkage or breakage of musical
figure and framed image or image sequence but rather a larger concept of musi-
cality in audiovisual works achieving commentary or essayistic dimensions. I
show the radical ways in which Eisler’s rendition of hysteria in A Child Went
Forth (Figure 4.1) differs from Herrmann’s depiction of hysteria in Hangover
Square. Eisler’s achievement here not only builds on an earlier approach in
which dialectical tensions are proposed in one film and resolved in another but
also provides a stylistic of synchronizing sound and image that is still relevant
for cinema and digital-media studies. Eisler demonstrates in A Child Went Forth
the qualities that would later be apparent in such films as Resnais’s Nuit et
brouillard : not a sound-image counterpoint of audiovisual icons but a larger
dialectical streaming of temporalized, audiovisual materiality.
 Hanns Eisler’s Dialectical Stream / 113

Composing Mass Listening as “Hysteria”

Eisler’s approaches to film music in his U.S. period, in his rescoring of Ivens’s
Rain and in his writing with Adorno in Composing for the Films, respond to
two distinctly U.S. approaches to mediating mass corporeality: one situated in
the New York intellectual, aesthetic, commercial, and political contexts of the
late 1930s and early 1940s, and the other situated in Hollywood of the mid-
1940s. The first prepared the way to the second. Eisler came to Hollywood in
1942 with the practical experience, theoretical insights, and personal contacts
gained from his Rockefeller Foundation–funded Film Music Project carried out
at the New School for Social Research in New York, where he composed mul-
tiple variations of scores for a range of moving image types, including anima-
tion and documentary.
Threatened with deportation by the House Committee on Un-American
Activities during the Red Scare, Eisler voluntarily returned to Europe in 1948
after receiving two Academy Award nominations, for Fritz Lang’s Hangmen Also
Die! (1943) and Clifford Odets’s None but the Lonely Heart (1944), and scoring
numerous other theater and cinema productions, including Joseph Losey’s pro-
duction of Bertolt Brecht’s stage play Galileo (1947). Eisler’s most direct cri-
tiques of cinema scoring practice may be found in his scores for documentaries,
notably Resnais’s Nuit et brouillard and the now largely neglected A Child Went
Forth (1941; also known as The Children’s Camp), Losey’s short film about a
summer day camp sold as pedagogical treatment outlining priorities in the care
of child refugees during World War II. The latter film is seminal for its economy
and clarity of sound-image synchronization and was central in Eisler’s career
development in the United States. In his work for the Rockefeller Foundation
and for Resnais, working without the stringent demands and divisions of cre-
ative labor he would roundly if at times cavalierly critique with Adorno in
Composing for the Films, Eisler makes significant historical contributions to
cinema music worth considering.
Eisler’s scores for these films present sound effects and commentary apart
from each film’s authoritative voice-over. They are not simply attempts to ame-
liorate film music in “musical” terms but rather aim to create, by virtue of explo-
rations of serialist aesthetics in cinema, a mode of musical enunciation whose
complex forms and effects are developed throughout the filmic text. There is
also their Brechtian aspect: their attempt to achieve a degree of interpretive
agency, but through musical audition. Eisler’s scoring practices differ from
those of functional accompaniment or even descriptive narration of framed
objects or edited events in providing extended commentary on the subject mat-
ter of the work and its reception, not simply on the image. Earlier Eisler had
deployed serialist strategies not to advance new harmonic combinations or the
serialist method itself but to raise the aesthetic standards of composition for
114 / Chapter 4

proletarian march songs or agitative populist lieder while working with Brecht
or figures in Germany and France. Again, the larger goal was not simply to
appeal to popular song but rather to help compose the musical function of a
public that did not yet exist as such.2
In a similar way, Eisler’s Rockefeller-funded film music experiments at the
New School from 1940 to 1942 had more to do with developing a pragmatics
for composing cinema music where listening might help prompt critical (and,
consequently, properly historical rather than escapist) spectatorship. Still, if
Eisler had earlier rejected the elitism he perceived in Arnold Schoenberg and his
circle to turn to more explicitly political projects, now, he composed proletarian
marches as musical cues within more subtle underscoring for narrative films,
such as Lang’s Hangmen Also Die!—a film whose antifascist politics had rela-
tively little to do with, say, forging a public character for workers’ struggles in
California. If Eisler’s film music in New York or Hollywood is less oppositional
in intent than the actual union organizing for whose events he formerly had
composed musically sophisticated agitative marches, it is nonetheless directly
engaged with actual conditions of industrial cinema production. The “contes-
tational” tone of Eisler’s remarks in Composing for the Films or elsewhere, then,
does not translate into film scores producing countercinematic icons at every
juncture of musical cue and image sequence in the audiovisual stream. There is
no critical need to “conform” Composing to Eisler’s composing, inasmuch as
the production process of each work necessitates different positionalities to be
enjoined. Adorno’s claims that Eisler overly politicizes the content of the Ger-
man edition of Composing for the Films3 indicate not the incoherence of Eisler’s
practices but rather that the book’s production process proceeded through
phases different from that of his film music production.4
Rather, Eisler’s primary contribution to the U.S. cultural industries is less
the production of film scores that would become canonical in cinema than the
development of a pragmatics for the theoretical critique of the culture indus-
tries, deploying flexible serialist style to press against the conventions of audience
listening as inattentive and parenthetical. Rather than a problem of unheard
melodies, Eisler’s problem in such films as Rain is that new recording technolo-
gies were not sufficiently advanced and still tended to neutralize much of the
sound and musical resources available to the composer, even while increasingly
sophisticated synchronization techniques for sound and image design rendered
the exhibitionary capacities of the cinema more powerful than before. The tech-
nical “neutralization” of musical sound in the production process, then, corre-
sponded with a neutralization of audience response in reception, as Composing
for the Films suggests and as archival documents also make clear. New techniques
might transform or worsen this condition. Eisler’s concerns were as much equip-
mental as conceptual, but because the techniques have changed, we do not easily
acknowledge the creative labor required to change them. But Composing presents
 Hanns Eisler’s Dialectical Stream / 115

in any case not simply a proposal of contrasting sound and image metaphors—
it presents a social and technical program aimed at raising the value of musical
labor in the film industry. That creative labor in the Hollywood cinema could
not become expressive in material, historical terms was complicated by the con-
ventions of the synchronized cinema: “The talking picture too is mute.”5 Eisler
and Adorno’s concrete, critical plan is aimed not simply at musical supplemen-
tation but the transformed, technical aspects of sound expression: “objective
planning, montage [methods for sound and music], and breaking through the
universal neutralization” resulting from then-inferior sound production prac-
tices and alienated mode of aesthetic production (88; and see Chapter 2).
Eisler’s film scores thus raise the creative status of the film composer but
also expand the expressive means and capacities for film music toward critical
narration as such. Such works as the rescore of Rain or of the original score for
A Child Went Forth, composed during his time as a Rockefeller researcher, dem-
onstrate the critical, creative, and administrative pragmatics informing Eisler’s
revaluation of creative labor and musical expression in the production of the
audiovisual work, not simply in oppositional iconic linkage between musical
score and image. And despite numerous attempts within historical film studies
to grasp Eisler’s scores in reference to Composing for the Films, his commentary
with Adorno does not actually describe the production process he used on the
Film Music Project when scoring and evaluating such films as Rain or A Child
Went Forth.
For instance, for the films he scored as part of the Film Music Project, Eisler
prepared multiple variations of each score, allowing musical experts and film
connoisseurs the Rockefeller staff selected to “test” the experiments in screenings
at which this aesthetic, expert opinion was gathered and discussed. Eisler and
his coordinators at the Rockefeller Foundation refrained from using the statisti-
cal methods and technical apparatuses that other Rockefeller researchers had
developed for evaluating studies of radio reception or experiments in theatrical
sound effects. His organization of multiple possible film scores with variably
configurable sound-image combinations for the purposes of testing and evalu-
ation was predicated on divisions and displacements of material, creative, and
affective labor, even if he did not describe the conditions of labor in those terms.
Yet the “methods” Eisler and Adorno describe leave out this last, fourth stage
(Composing, 140); if they had described this phase as they describe the rest of
the project, it would appear in the place where Eisler and Adorno resume their
critique of Eisenstein, in fact. They explain their elision of the actual New York
screenings of Eisler’s results this way: “Sociological investigations might have
been undertaken in connection with the general plan of the project. For instance,
some of the feature-film sequences could have been performed for different
groups of listeners, accompanied by the old music and sometimes that worked
out in the project, and the reactions could have been studied under laboratory
116 / Chapter 4

conditions, by means of questionnaires and interviews. But such investigations

lay outside the scope of the project; moreover, their results would merely con-
tribute data concerning the possible mass audience reactions to the use of mod-
ern music in motion pictures” (138).
Eisler in fact considered questionnaires and interviews of the sort developed
by Paul Lazarsfeld on Princeton/Columbia Radio Research, for which Adorno
was an early consultant. He also considered using the synchronized gestural
feedback mechanisms Lazarsfeld’s project had developed to gather audience
reactions to radio programming. A budget item was included in his project for
such “data” gathering. Although he finally carried out only a focus group–like
gathering of experts, in Composing, Eisler and Adorno entirely deny any such
evaluative stage of the project existed at all! In this light, not only is Eisler con-
ceptually incoherent, as Cook claims, but he has a very short memory as well.
But we need to invoke a different theoretical measure, here: Eisler and Adorno
simply grant no apparent credence to the cognitive measurement of aesthetic
values in terms of the popular reception of post-Schoenbergian music in terms
of either discursive or rationalized gestural measurements. Eisler could hardly
have believed that an audience made up of the likes of the Rockefeller Founda-
tion’s John Marshall, who coordinated Eisler’s project, or Iris Berry, of the
Museum of Modern Art’s Film Department, represented “the masses.”6
Despite a more radical political stance during the 1920s and 1930s, by the
early 1940s, rather than drawing on the overtly agitative stylistics that character-
ize his earlier music aimed at building a public function for workers’ rallies or
Brecht’s theater, Eisler composed cinema music in New York and Los Angeles that
reflects a critical pessimism increasingly shared by other German émigrés during
and after their exiles in the United States. As John Fuegi notes, Brecht had dis-
carded his earlier theories of a Verfremdungseffekt (alienation effect) by 1948, as
he turned to a new, apparently more conventionally Aristotelian and less overtly
politically engaged theater upon his return to then–East Germany. Brecht’s later
aesthetic strategies are aimed more at resistance than agitation—as Heiner
Müller observes, they are theatrical works with the “Stalinist brakes on.”7
Eisler’s compositional approaches in U.S. wartime and postwar contexts also
move away from his attempts at engaged serialisms during the 1920s, designed
to motivate the audience to cohere in a mass unit, toward an engineered critique
of image and music relations designed to programmatically insert cognitive and
affective distance between the cinema presentation and the audience. Already
considered to be acting as a bloc, the audience was now regarded as a body
programmed for atomization by the cultural industries at the site of reception.
Eisler’s U.S. film scores can be understood, then, as a pragmatics for modulating
distraction with critical distance rather than as effecting a radical agitative intent.
This modulation of distraction with distance indicates a diagram of music, affect,
 Hanns Eisler’s Dialectical Stream / 117

and compositional technique distinct from that associated with the avant-garde
relying on a strong sense of oppositional relation.
Whereas the earlier marches or theatrical assignments are predicated on the
theory that class cohesion could be an outcome prompted by performance
(whether musical, theatrical, or, indeed, the cinematic montage in Kuhle Wampe,
oder: Wem gehört die Welt? [1932], or tap dance and black song in Niemansland
[1931]), the film music Eisler undertook in New York and Los Angeles pushes
any Brechtian notion of Gestus beyond Brecht’s conception of Gestus as verifi-
able in relation to music but stopping short of musicality as such. Very broadly,
Brecht meant by Gestus the critically informed social reality that an actor denotes
through his character’s movements or attitude: “A good way of judging a piece
of music with a text is to try out the different attitudes or gests with which the
performer ought to deliver the individual sections: politely or angrily, modestly
or contemptuously, approvingly or argumentatively, craftily or without calcula-
tion.”8 Eisler’s great contribution to cinema, for his part, would be to emphasize
less of a performed, performative Gestus on the part of a historical agent, an
actor, or a musical performer or ensemble and more of a musicalized Gestus on
the part of a cinema audience. This ostensively resistant audience reception
would be achieved, unironically, by flexibly harvesting the new musical resources
of avant-garde composition for the synchronized industrial cinema, whose
capacities for sound reproduction continued to develop rapidly while continu-
ing to make music and sound production secondary.9 If Adorno comments that
Schoenberg’s music is “no longer aural,” Eisler uses synchronized counterpoint
to deploy a gestural stylistics for the intermediation of sound and image that,
just so, is no longer aural. Sound cinema as a doubled site of listening and of
spectatorship is, similarly and as a consequence, not unified in terms of narrative
or presentation. Rather, cinema as site of musical design hosts the situational
development of a divided couple, such that the site of listening and the site of
viewing are mutually modulated in time. The dialectical image becomes the
problem of the dialectical stream.
And what is key to recognize in A Child Went Forth and in Nuit et brouillard
is Eisler’s composition of not simply sound and image relations in iconic linkage
but a relation between musicality as essay or commentary to audience reaction
in ways that address then-contemporary concerns with affect, including hyste-
ria. Eisler’s film music thus elaborates an alternative to what Brecht or Eisler
conceives as a cinematic image anchoring realist audiovisual synchronization
whose passive consumption legitimates class privilege.10 Eisler’s scoring prac-
tices, like Fischinger’s visual music animation or Eisenstein’s cinema montage,
are a modal cinema aiming at a medial ethics of reception. This project of
“emancipating” film music would be analogous to Schoenberg’s “emancipation”
of dissonance (and, for Schoenberg, with reference to Bach),11 but by inserting
118 / Chapter 4

a Brechtian Gestus, distancing audience from exhibition while claiming access

to advancing technical procedures of recording and synchronization to increase
the creative autonomy of the cinema composer as creative worker.12 In fact,
Brecht and Schoenberg were paid consultants for Eisler as he prepared the final,
April 1942 previews serving as the evaluative component of his research.13
Eisler and Adorno removed any account of the actual evaluation of Eisler’s
work on the Film Music Project from Composing for the Films not because what
they heard did not conform to their theories but because neither questionnaires
nor biological measurement could register the meanings Eisler felt mattered,
and perhaps because they felt that reactions from roughly fi ve years prior to
the book’s long and drawn-out publication were no longer relevant. Between
completion of the Film Music Project and publication of Composing, too, Eisler’s
lectures on the project in Los Angeles prompted considerable interest. Eisler was
invited to appear on a panel in Beverly Hills on May 17, 1945, to speak on ques-
tions that would later be presented in Composing, but here in anticipation of
publication in the initial summer 1945 issue of Hollywood Quarterly, which
never panned out.14
Rockefeller archives document the problems of mass listening that helped
motivate funding for Eisler’s project and mitigate Lazarsfeld’s psychoanalytically
inflected studies of radio reception. One of these problems, and one that Eisler
refers to his method of dialectical pragmatics rather than to formal observer
evaluation, is mass listening’s power to produce the “mass hysteria,” as observed
in the radio reception of Orson Welles’s October 1938 pre-Halloween prank, War
of the Worlds broadcast.15 Worlds demonstrated to Rockefeller administrators
that the U.S. public was not immune to the apparent mass hysteria manipulated
by Hitler’s regime in Germany. Mass-media listening was not simply a problem
of exhausted workers caught between unrewarding work, inadequate education,
and aspiration mythified in passive reception of mass media, as Rockefeller
administrator John Marshall observed, then, but also of overreactive response.
Mark Micale argues that Freud’s early work marks a point at which the
individual symptoms of hysteria were ceasing to be indicators of a generally
recognized disorder; by 1910, without a strong etiological theory to maintain its
coherence, hysteria as a unitary disorder, its “constituent symptomatological
parts” were broken apart and redistributed to other medical categories (525–
526).16 Yet by the mid-twentieth century, mass hysteria had been re-created out
of these parts. Hysteria was invoked to describe reactions pertaining to mass
listening and helped prompt important studies of sound and music in mass
media. Eisler’s Film Music Project was one of these projects. It is in this context,
then, that Eisler observes in Composing for the Films that his score for A Child
Went Forth demonstrates affective states, such as “sadness, nervousness, even
hysteria.”17 Film music should not provoke or even depict such states but rather,
 Hanns Eisler’s Dialectical Stream / 119

in a sense, diagnose them in relation to others and within a larger commentary

on their conditions and development.
Yet Eisler’s rising profile in Hollywood after World War II occurred amid the
turbulent wave of anti-Semitism and fears around Soviet influence and the
emergence of Communist China. In this context, the very mass hysteria that had
helped motivate funding of Eisler’s project and that Eisler had used film music
to diagnose now turned against him, as he himself recognized. One pamphlet
that was particularly thorough in its claims of conspiracy named Eisler’s pro-
Soviet journalist brother Gerhard as a secret Jewish infiltrator of the United
States and went on to proclaim that although the U.S. public’s hatred of “the
Nazis” had become “hysterical” after cinematic dramatizations of Hitler’s brutal-
ity became commonplace, because Hollywood had failed to similarly demonize
Stalin, “Reds” must control all cinema writing.18
Eisler gave his response at his hearing before the House Un-American Activ-
ities Committee:

The committee hopes to create a drive against every liberal, progressive,

and socially conscious artist in this country, and to subject their works
to an un-Constitutional and hysterical political censorship. It is horrible
to think what will become of American art if this committee is to judge
what art is American and what is un-American.
This is the sort of thing Hitler and Mussolini tried. They were not
successful, and neither will be the House Committee on Un-American
Activities.19

Eisler underwent voluntary deportation in 1948.20

Eisler’s 1942 move to Los Angeles had been facilitated by his friendships with
other displaced German artists and intellectuals as well as the industry connec-
tions he had made through the Rockefeller-sponsored Film Music Project. Herr-
mann had arrived in 1941 as part of Welles’s creative entourage. Both men’s
moves to Hollywood coincided with creative opportunities created by maturing
sound and synchronization technologies as well as by larger political or eco-
nomic urgencies. Eisler and Herrmann ultimately undertook stormy departures,
although in very different times and circumstances. Herrmann enjoyed a long,
if tempestuous, career as part of the Los Angeles film community but, a devoted
Anglophile, finally removed himself to England after repeatedly infuriating and
alienating his Hollywood employers, Alfred Hitchcock among them.21 Despite
his signature ability to move audiences’ passions into realms by turns ironic
(Citizen Kane [1941]), grand (Beneath the 12-Mile Reef [1951]), or diabolical
(Psycho [1960]), the composer’s tendency to openly criticize his directors made
him hard to employ in the 1960s until a revival of interest in his work developed
120 / Chapter 4

shortly before his death in 1975. During that decade, Herrmann was again often
engaged in high-profile projects, but now by younger directors who began their
careers in independent cinema and who aspired to create a renewed cinematic
expressivity to rival that of classic Hollywood: Brian De Palma (for whom Herr-
mann scored the thriller Sisters [1973]) and Martin Scorsese (for whom Herr-
mann scored much of Taxi Driver [1976]).22
Herrmann rose to early fame as a conductor for NBC radio broadcasts dur-
ing the 1930s, introducing the U.S. listening public to new scores from emerging
(often Continental or British) composers he admired and reintroducing forgot-
ten or neglected American ones (he was an early defender of Charles Ives, who
was later recognized, partly as a result of Herrmann’s efforts, as a pioneer in the
incorporation of noise in the compositional techniques of modern music).
Herrmann’s music, distinct from Eisler’s, uses dissonance and noise with respect
to conventional tonal harmonics. His rousing fanfares and operatic tragi-parody
in Citizen Kane enabled his permanent move to Hollywood by securing his
reputation there in advance. Later, his scores lent metallic sheen and spectral
texture to such films as The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947), in which Rex Harrison’s
pirate ghost appears to Lucy Muir (Gene Tierney) as something like a suddenly
embodied radio signal emanating from the distant past of her mysterious home,
appearing at the prompt of a musical cue. Dissonance in Herrmann’s scores
tends to approximate a musical sound or special effect connoting psychic unset-
tlement or dissolution, or corporeal dismemberment, disintegration, or disap-
pearance, as in Hangover Square (1945), Psycho, or Taxi Driver. Yet like so many
of the historical composers he admired (Wagner, Debussy, Ives) and like so
many film-music composers before and after him, Herrmann deploys disso-
nance in relation to anchoring tonalities in his works, establishing complex,
coloristic tensions sustained in relation to, if not always resolved into, the domi-
nant thematics of the thus-defamiliarized setting.
Herrmann’s and Eisler’s work, then, provide counterexamples of the way
serialist composition was deployed or resisted in midcentury U.S. cinema, radio,
and theatrical music: either to provide the motivation and development of the
effects of hysteria and the psycho-corporeal fragmentation such hysteria might
name or to offer a dialectical stream of sound and image whereby the site of
listening reception may not be reducible to spectatorship and, thus, where such
affects as hysteria may be expressed for critical audition. Herrmann tends to
invoke serialist dissonance as punctuation of exceptional affective states trans-
gressing their generating conditions, so that resolution is often tentative or
ambiguous. In Eisler’s work, the characteristic dissonance of serialism simply
recoups conventional harmonic tones as needed within compositional auton-
omy derived from Schoenberg’s methods. Eisler thus shifts any tensions to be
developed more fully into audience apperception, allowing the musical score
 Hanns Eisler’s Dialectical Stream / 121

greater formal heterogeneity even while paradoxically liberating dissonance

from musical sound. Eisler’s scores may often sound, or read, as “conventional,”
as Cook finds. But their planning and effects worked toward greater creative
autonomy on the part of the composer and aimed for greater interpretive auton-
omy on the part of the audiovisual receiver.
Even when Herrmann’s cinema music was conceived as integral to the cin-
ematic work, the extreme of corporeal dissolution in Herrmann’s cinema music
exhibits the classical film’s score lack of interest in making palpable the doubled
complexity of sound cinema as a site of reception: cinema’s doubled quasi-
architectural diagram of itself as a site of image and aural exhibition. Harmonic
dissonance in Herrmann’s cinema music indexes the composer’s struggle to
maintain a sense of artistic innovation, integrity, or reputation against divisions
of creative labor that tended to make anonymous key procedures of his work.
These divisions of labor (composition, part copying and orchestration, perfor-
mance, sound mixing, recording, conducting, dubbing, editing, and so on) did
not innocently inherit the division of labor typical of Western art music but
resulted from Hollywood’s long transmedia marketing imperatives requiring
greater resources for programming reception of the cinematic sensorium than
the moving image itself could provide. As a Los Angeles fan wrote to the produc-
ers of The Spanish Main (1945) about Eisler’s score of the film after its release:

Since “The Spanish Main” first started running at the Pantages I found
it impossible to forget the background music. Since then I have seen it
sixteen times and I love it. The music, I mean. My request is do you know
of any way that I can get a recording of it, from the very beginning to
the very end. I would be very proud and happy to add it to my record
collection.
I would appreciate this very much, because it out does [sic] any
background music I have ever heard, “Spellbound” and “The Song of
Bernadette” included. This is, I know, a very clumsy way of putting it
but I do hope you can help me.23

By the early 1940s, the sound-track recording was a fully commercialized

object (even if not as a long-playing record).24 Herrmann’s tendencies toward
grandiose musical fanfare or disintegrating corporeal affect in cinema scoring
are as much narratological elements as they are indices of his resistance to the
secondary status of labor granted to film-music composers. Their work, Herr-
mann thought, rose above difficult narrative or technical problems only to be
further constrained and diverted by being packaged according to secondary
marketing procedures, such as phonograph sales, that had no clear motivation
in relation to the narratological problems film music had to solve and that might
122 / Chapter 4

benefit from entirely different production practices. The paradoxical capacity

of apparently passive audiences to respond so actively to marketing imperatives
is the issue here.
Herrmann argues that film-music marketing detracted from what made
film-music marketable:

[Karol Rathaus] treated for the first time the music of a film as an inte-
gral emotional part of the whole, not as a decoration. Because the film
[Der Mörder Dimitri Karamasoff (The Brothers Karamazov; 1931)] deals
with one of the Karamazov’s falling in love with a prominent harlot and
visiting her in her establishment wherein a gypsy orchestra plays, the
music of the picture begins with a gypsy orchestra simply playing Rus-
sian gypsy music. But as the picture progresses, the brother becomes
more and more involved with the harlot, the music stops being orna-
mental and becomes an emotional mirror of him. It becomes more and
more tragic and more and more hysterical. It reaches its greatest moment
. . . when the brother hysterically drives a troika through a raging bliz-
zard accompanied musically by a great battery of percussion instru-
ments. Remember: this was done way back in the early 1930s! . . .
I don’t know why, today, a film has to cost four million dollars to
push a record costing seventy cents, but it does! . . . Music for film should
be no more noticed than the camera work.25

Film music’s incorporation of dissonance, in Herrmann’s work, was a strategy

of disappearance that might allow hysteria to appear in the media stream, much
like Lucy Muir’s first disturbing, then ultimately accommodating, “ghost.”
By contrast, dissonance for Eisler is a matter of synchronization understood
neither simply as a mutual indexing of coexpressive narratological relationships
between recorded image and sound, as in Herrmann’s music, nor of immanent
time circulating, via the film, between creative workers, audience, and the trans-
position of their mutually sensible history into the materialities of the work of
(socialist) mass culture, as in Eisenstein’s montage. Rather, sound-image syn-
chronization in Eisler’s music, where the site of listening reception is not entirely
reducible to the site of visual exhibition, foregrounds the site of reception and
the machinery of exhibition as enacting actual historical conflict between (exhib-
ited) narrative and (unattended) audience speech. “Dissonance” in terms of lis-
tening and watching is as much an aim as the use of advanced techniques of
composition. As a result, in Eisler’s work, especially after his work with Losey
on A Child Went Forth, musical narration opens to essayistic commentary as
much as it engages in storytelling. The administrative rather than purely audi-
tive Gestus of Eisler’s film music supplies tension whereby the relationship
between cinema music’s audibility and the cinematic image’s exhibition becomes
 Hanns Eisler’s Dialectical Stream / 123

in itself a mode of critical speech that is interpreted—but not in itself heard—

by an active audience.
For Herrmann or Eisler, as for others, the tensions and paradoxes encoun-
tered as sound cinema entered into a new phase of transitions (and as radio
broadcasting breached national boundaries with international information and
the phonograph extended its aural reach into factories and homes) suggested
danger: an exaggerated capacity on the part of audiences and publics for passive
experience on the one hand and for unpredictable activity prompted by artifi-
cial or synthetic messages on the other. The positive version of this paradox, of
course, was productivity; the negative version, hysteria. “Hysteria” in cinema as
a site of mass listening, then, describes or diagnoses some too-passive state of
reception alternating with, leading to, or otherwise sharing potential with a
too-active state of response. It is an energetic dysfunction of networked, mass
corporeality.
Despite Kurt London’s influential 1936 study of contemporary film music,26
despite the attention given to sound and music in such trade journals as Holly-
wood Quarterly (and see Chapters 1 and 3), and despite the fact that the work
of such figures as Eisler and Herrmann dramatizes a thorough integration of
mass-media aesthetics, critical theory, institutional policy making, and cinema-
industry marketing, academic cinema studies did not significantly extend theo-
retical coverage of critiques of musical sound in time-based work until the
1980s and 1990s. Mass listening, which had been a first-rank problem from
1930 to 1950, was reconfigured in understandings of the film sound track as
“supplement”—a much more critical treatment of Herrmann’s complaint cited
above. Appearing after Jane Feuer’s and along with Rick Altman’s analyses of
the film musical,27 works by theorists as diverse as Claudia Gorbman,28 Kaja
Silverman,29 Mary Ann Doane,30 Royal S. Brown,31 or Lawrence Kramer32 recon-
sider film music and film sound as supplementary to the narratological and
spectatorial functions presumed to be anchored in the cinematic image. Musical
sound afforded a symptomatic stratum for critical interrogation of the exhi-
bitionary unconscious (as in Michel Chion’s influential book-length analysis
in Audio-Vision).33
In the most rigorously musicological of this generation of analyses, Brown
also sees musical meaning as exterior to narrative and representational mean-
ing, but not simply in terms of marketing. Rather, in this view, music represents
a logic of aesthetic supplementation,34 a conclusion that Kramer formulates
explicitly in regard to music and narrative, with film scoring a primary example
of music as narrative supplement.35 A slightly later alternative to these analyses
was to situate cinema music in relationship to popular music, resulting in the
“pop film-score,” which Smith suggests emerged in tandem with the long-
playing record during the late 1940s. Here, though, the most obvious historical
negotiations of music in cinema—between music industries, cinema industries,
124 / Chapter 4

and radio industries—is drastically and retroactively shortened to the period of

postwar consumer culture, against the historical evidence.36 For example, Ivor
Montagu, who accompanied Eisenstein to Hollywood in the late 1920s, later
wrote of the vast libraries of commercial music held at Paramount Studios,
where they visited. More recently, Katherine Spring37 demonstrates the extent
of cross-industry marketing between industrial cinema and industrial popular
music at Warner Brothers.
With increasing critical attention recently given to computer games, digital
downloading of music, and musical appliances, questions and doubts about
how musical scores function across historical formats or media canons return.38
Gorbman draws on Cook’s analysis of musical media discussed above and, while
retreating from her earlier psychoanalytic investigation into cinema music’s
“unheard melodies,” turns to an aesthetic and rhetorical account of music in
digital gaming. Gorbman suggests that music’s “linearity in a nonlinear environ-
ment” emphasizes medium-specific aesthetic and rhetorical challenges prompted
by the “interactivity and variability” of computational production. Artificial
intelligence computationally generating dynamic musical variations now appears
to threaten human intelligence, and, in doing so, prompts theoretical challenges:
“What kind of blow does this replacement of human intelligence (or rather its
displacement, since the musical parameters are in fact composed by humans)
strike to notions of musical aesthetics and rhetoric? Is dynamic music just a
giant convention/cliché machine? And if we claim it is, must we also acknowl-
edge that the bulk of live musical performances are also convention/cliché
machines? . . . The rapid evolution of technology, markets, and social functions
of music make these questions all the more compelling” (24–25).39
In fact, whether the cultural industries’ new sound technologies resulted in
giant convention/cliché machines was a compelling question for Herrmann,
Eisler, and many others between 1930 and 1950, although the ways in which the
question was asked and answered differed from the ways in which it is raised
today. But we should be careful not to overstate the case that cinema, radio, and
television differ from digital works in their “linearity” (digital games are linearly
encoded and proceed in generally linear patterns of development but differ in
the flexibility of display and use that cybernetic programming and random-
access memory afford). Nor are cinema products distinct from digital-gaming
products in being limited to stand-alone one-time consumption—whether his-
torically or in the contemporary digital markets of DVD or online downloading.
Any time-based work exhibits complex temporalities and may support variable
exhibition practices, regardless of the appearance of a dominant paradigm or of
critical accounts affirming dominant paradigms to the detriment of our under-
standing of significant variability in practices of display and interpretation. What
is distinct, then, in addition to the computational capacities of the medium and
any stylistic variegations in its use, is the reconfigured and intensified divisions
 Hanns Eisler’s Dialectical Stream / 125

of creative labor that digital audiences actualize in terms of interactive gesture.

Fans still correspond with producers asking for unavailable recordings—but
handling of the request and the transaction now tends to be automated, whether
in a musical download or in a computer game revealing musical pattern.
When Adorno or Eisler assail the culture industries, theirs is not simply a
critique of specificities wrongly instrumented in technological mismatches of
content and medium. Rather, they are concerned with a massive rationalization
of the corporeal affects, social relations, and worldly knowledge, where passive
consumption by audiences whose attitudes toward mass-cultural transitions
seemed to border on hysteria was thought to indicate deepening social alienation.
They believed that a propensity toward political delusion had its corollary in the
incapacitation of critical thought. Such institutions as the Rockefeller Founda-
tion shared their concerns, albeit without the insistence on the critical methods
of dialectical materialist aesthetics. Generally, “passive synthesis,” the capacity for
thought to become habit, was observed as subsumed within passive consump-
tion, such that habitual consumption replaced critical learning. This concern
that passive synthesis gives way in advanced capitalism to habitual consumption
without learning, of course, is the refrain of twentieth-century media studies.
In the late 1930s and early 1940s, it was marked by the transposition of “hysteria”
to “mass hysteria” in critical, aesthetic, and political discourses and diagnoses.
Eisler directed his Film Music Project under the auspices of Alvin Johnson
at the New School for Social Research from 1940 to 1942; Adorno provided
critical theoretical expertise to Lazarsfeld’s Radio Project and later collaborated
with Eisler on writing Composing for the Films. From 1938 to 1948, Harold
Burris-Meyer received funding for Sound in the Theatre, a sound-design proj-
ect extending Adolphe Appia’s notions of “image and light” on the postroman-
tic stage to a contemporary electronic processing of sound in the theater.
Burris-Meyer applied his theatrical sound-mixing techniques to workplaces
wired by Muzak and to the World War II Pacific Theater but envisioned them
also as providing enhanced sound control in the cinema theater.40 Support
staffer Harry Robin moved from Burris-Meyer’s to Eisler’s project; all three
initiatives shared access to consultants provided by the foundation’s John Mar-
shall, as well as to other institutional resources. Iris Berry of the Museum of
Modern Art, New York, for example, reviewed Burris-Meyer’s “Sound Show,”
a demonstration of his work in sound design, but also facilitated aspects of
Eisler’s project, researching Eisler’s film work before his grant proceeded and
promising to archive and to distribute the results. All three projects were coor-
dinated for the foundation by Marshall, whose longtime interest and adminis-
trative expertise in mass-media reception, mass-cultural aesthetics, and project
management helped inform the projects’ methods and goals. Motivating these
projects was the long-standing concern on the part of the Rockefeller Founda-
tion that the commercial effects of mass media were undermining their social,
126 / Chapter 4

educational, and aesthetic potential and, in the worst case, contributing to

emotional exhaustion or mass hysteria.
As Caryl Flinn notes in her historically informed close readings of Detour
(1945) and Penny Serenade (1941), listening and responding to music is a prob-
lematic of affect, engagement, and mobility. Flinn makes clear that affective
epistemologies are visualized within narrative in terms of phonograph players,
recordings, music, or performance, and as dramatic interpersonal negotiations
conducted in terms of musical functions. In these films, music on and off screen
reflects greater tensions at large in the socius—and, sometimes, their tentative
resolutions. Resolutions happen in terms of affect, whether cinema music shapes
a contingent, repeating utopia through feminine nostalgia in the women’s melo-
drama (as when Penny Serenade’s Julie works through her doubts about mar-
riage and motherhood to music) or through a contingent, repeating dystopia
giving rise to masculine hysteria in the noir road film (as when Detour’s Al is
tortured by a recurring pop song that brings back unwanted memories of the
woman he loves and drives him to strangle the femme fatale who has led him
to dissolution in a dingy Hollywood apartment). Each of these narratives pre-
sents nonlinear plots and requires nonlinear interpretation, although the exhibi-
tion format is linear. “Musical memory” affords Julie’s assertion of choice in
Penny Serenade but prompts Al’s violent dissociation in Detour. In both films,
music as passive memory or music as hysterical excess shows the ways that net-
worked listening across radio, theater, cinema, and phonography suggests an
exterior, programmed reservoir alternately drained or overflowing: a kind of
impersonal inorganic affect not easily reduced to cognitive models of active or
passive synthesis. Musicality in works of this period connotes this affective labor
standing in reserve. Far more than simply expressing the “cinema memory”
Annette Kuhn41 has recently described, music also expresses the capacity of the
audience to hold the sexed, gendered narrative of the film apart from the view-
ers’ interpretations or to be lost to its flow of manipulations: “holes” in music’s
synthetic recall.42 In what follows, I distinguish two competing modes of syn-
chronizing musical sound in the classic sound film, whereby Herrmann attempts
synchronization as overflowing affect and whereby Eisler attempts sync as a
measured, temperate observation of affect, draining the audiovisual work of its
potential hysteria by naming it. I show the way that Herrmann’s “consonant
synchronization” of music and image differs from Eisler’s “dissonant” synchro-
nization. Herrmann’s work in Hangover Square dramatizes contemporary con-
cerns around hysteria: the conflict of commercial media versus quality media,
imagined as music, sex, murder, and sacrifice. I close the chapter with a discus-
sion of Eisler’s work with Losey on A Child Went Forth, which also depicts
affective labor as hysteria but localizes it as an affective event in a series of affec-
tive events to deflate its power.
 Hanns Eisler’s Dialectical Stream / 127

Musical Pandemonium in Everyday Life

Hangover Square, John Brahm’s 1945 psycho-thriller for Fox Studios, presents
the mid-twentieth-century threat of musical pandemonium arising in excessive
listening by transposing listening cultures backward: to turn-of-the-century gas-
lit streets and musical salon reminiscent, in fact, of romantic auditoria. The
film’s title sequence opens with Herrmann’s “Hangover Square Concerto,” which
Herrmann composed before shooting began to provide tempo and emotional
pacing for the film’s visual design and narrative direction. The film’s finale con-
cludes with a performance of the final concerto, but this performance is drowned
out in a conflagration that destroys the musical salon and the film’s disturbed
protagonist, George Bone (Laird Cregar).
The final concert scene at the climax of this film specifically calls up two
transformations that allow audiences to be optimally configured for the com-
bined reception of audio and visual display. The first of these is the conform-
ing of the seating to an arc within which perspective on the stage (and later,
screen) could be established for a maximum of people to minimize visual
obstruction (as opposed to the varied seating arrangements of eighteenth-
century listening rooms). As we hear the elusive concerto in its “entirety” in the
final moments of the film, the orchestra is seated in a half circle behind and
around the pianist and conductor, while the audience is seated in a half circle
facing the stage. No warranted guarantee of a centrally framed perspective on
the piano performance takes place; the optimization of the musical space for
the synchronization with dramatic space is not specifically pictured here. How-
ever, the camera’s ability to compose the scene of musical performance makes
up for its incompletely rendered historical antecedent and effects a narrative
climax for the film as a whole. Herrmann’s score is profoundly engaged in
introducing, developing, and concluding the narratological trajectory of the
film.
The second transformation is the presentation of the performance as a
visual spectacle.43 Within the film, that spectacle includes prominent use of
gaslights in a brightly lit room. The feverish subjectivity of the composer,
performing his overwrought composition amid flaming torches, presents a
synchronized musical topos wherein his emotions burn brightly before the
expectant audience. The spectators can still see each other, which is historically
appropriate to the lighting of such a room and also useful for camera presen-
tation of their responses to us, the cinematic audience. In this way, a listening
situation from the classical age is reconstituted for the filmic performance of a
neo-romantic concerto. The concert hall is rendered as an excessive site where
musical spirit collides with musical labor, a location that recenters for the cin-
ema audience the diabolically displaced sexual urges of a mad pianist.
128 / Chapter 4

Brown points out that in film, diegetic music can become nondiegetic music,
and directors often play on the notion of the “invisible” music of the sound track
by introducing a cue to indicate the mood of a character.44 Brown also observes
that in Hangover Square, the piano concerto presented in the film’s fiery climax
works within and outside the film’s diegesis to function as source music and
emotional cue. Yet this film’s story is so musicalized through strategies of syn-
chronization as to be compulsively overcontrolled by musical sound itself—just
like poor, mad George Bone, the film’s pianist protagonist. Hangover Square is
an example of a film that recapitulates the position of listener as viewer, but so
that a romantically scored love story becomes a musically excessive thrill-kill
shocker. The modulation from romance to murder comes consistently through
the overt synchronization of musical themes and cues with visual framing and
characterization, so that any final division between a visual narrative diegesis
and nondiegetic nonnarrative music is untenable. Instead, George’s instability
is presented in terms of sound passing into music through George’s unstable
psyche. In key moments of the film, a grating dissonant chord, heard in jostled
violins or in the clang of falling pipes, sends George into a fugue state, flipping
his split personality like a record and transforming him from passionate strug-
gling artist to degenerate sex-killer.
Brahm’s film sets up George as a dedicated, if poorly spoken pianist at work
on a concerto he cannot quite bring to completion, partly because his murder-
ous sexuality is “randomly” cued by those recurring, dissonant musical events.
Over the film’s title sequence, we hear the first tortured chords of the concerto
that George is struggling to complete. George’s first murder occurs during the
opening moments of the narrative: Crashing chords play, the camera settles on
a view through a window, and, through a shop window, we see George con-
fronting an unknown man. As the man screams for him to stop, George sets
him on fire. George then groggily wanders home to find his loving fiancée
waiting anxiously. The gap inserted here, between the opening strains of “Con-
certo Macabre” heard over the title sequence and the initial murder following
shortly afterward, is then broken out into a stream of seriated events occupy-
ing the audience’s distracted attention. In due time, we learn to unfold this
gap-as-development from one unreasoned motive to the next and apply it to
the whole of the film: from musical overture; to illegible conflicts of desire,
art, and commerce; to murder; to flames. Our gapped attention to initial title
sequence, applied to the larger narrative trajectory, finally implodes in the
concerto’s spectacular refrain: George himself goes up in flames at the film’s end,
as he finally delivers the creative work he has long promised but been unable
to complete.
Here, musical reasoning as an indeterminate interval of synchronized sound
and image remains “irrational” but becomes increasingly concrete. This musical
 Hanns Eisler’s Dialectical Stream / 129

reasoning, irrational as it may be, nonetheless insists on narrative power, con-

trary to cinema studies’ parceling out of primary narrative meaning to the image
and supplementary modulation to the musical sound track. We never learn the
precise motive for George’s early morning visit to the unidentified man, but
soon enough a clearer pattern emerges: George later kills vampy music hall
singer Netta (Linda Darnell), who has humiliated him by making him compose
pop songs for her to perform. George’s problem is not musical mastery, for his
talent is fully demonstrated early on (at the outset, even, if we grant that his
“concerto” introduces the film). Rather, his problem is some uncertain ratio of
commercial distraction to artistic production. He suffers nervous exhaustion
brought about by incessant commands on his creative power to produce, whether
for himself and for his art (the concerto, whose composition fulfills him when
he can do it and grants him social status) or for Netta and for commerce (the
cheap pop tunes, which distract him from higher pursuits). As any frustrated,
romantically inclined genius might, George experiences music issuing from
around him and within him—but in gas-lit London, he is surrounded by con-
struction noise. George (and the audience) cannot know whether the music
experienced is internal or external, so his fugue states begin with random musi-
cal noise emanating from his surroundings, develop with the screams of his
victims, and cadence to their end in musical fire.
The threat of ambiguous sexuality is coded in terms of a musical schizo-
phrenia whose destructive motif the narrative follows and develops. The chords
that set George off can come from anywhere, inserting an element of deviant
sexuality into otherwise everyday struggles; they function as musical sound both
objective and subjective, transitioning from diegetic noise to musical underscore
via sound effects, bringing the audience, like a moth to the fl ame, closer to
George’s dangerous musical perspective and relating to us the partial measure
of a corporeality alternately slumbering in fugue states or bursting out in hys-
terical violence. In the body of the narrative, unlike the body of George himself
(whose musical sense is stripped bare to the poverty of its commercial potential
by Netta), music is doubly potential: materially ubiquitous as sound and sub-
jectively expressive as music, exhibiting and inhibiting at the same time.
The result of these tensions on George’s action is a diagram of musicalized
sexuality that is intensely interior and exterior by turns. The sound track (alter-
nating between concerto and pop song) and the settings (alternating between
posh salon and cheap music hall) vampirize George’s artistic potential, making
a puppet of his musical will. Although the musical conflict animates pleasures,
cares, and threats for all who know George, his murderous productivity none-
theless belongs intimately only to him and to his nighttime consorts. His creative
labor, subjected to exhausted habitual productivity in two different directions,
has its own special side effects: rising class status and excessive criminality. These
130 / Chapter 4

tendencies cycle in a repeating pattern that finally condenses and completes

itself in the climactic scene in which George immolates himself, almost singeing
the fleeing audience.
Chion describes the victim’s scream in such suspense thrillers as Psycho—
whose violin stabs musically condense the sudden, upward more harmonic vio-
lin shrieks of Hangover’s “Concerto Macabre”—as a “screaming point.”45 Less
than a sound object, Chion points out, the “screaming point” is better under-
stood in terms of sound-image synchronization: It is a “black hole toward which
there converges an entire fantastic, preposterous, extravagant mechanism—the
celebration, the political crime, the sexual murder, and the whole film—all this
made in order to be consumed and dissipated” (76). For Chion, this screaming
point is heterosexually gendered in a straightforward way: Men shout; women
scream. The woman’s scream is the black hole of female orgasm, neither spoken
nor thought; the woman’s cry is “more like the shout of a human subject of
language in the face of death” (78). While generally the screaming point is “of a
properly human order,” Chion asserts that in the male-directed film it poses a
question of masculine “mastery”—where the male shout “delimits a territory,
the woman’s scream has to do with limitlessness”; it is the point at which “speech
is suddenly extinct, a black hole, the exit of being” (79).
Yet such a screaming point (gendered explicitly in terms of heterosexual
dynamics for Chion, within which he configures its relation to the order of lan-
guage, humanity, and death) is less relevant to Hangover Square than a stream
of screams. George’s victims’ screams are serial, a motif within a refrain that
repeats, a crime of musical passion among men motivating the pattern. George’s
criminal serial identity is never made part of that pattern, and no attempt is
made within the film to construct a genealogy of his crimes.
In Hangover Square, an entire passage of hysterical time is marked by an
extended musical development in sound and image, where diegetic Foley initi-
ates the musical fugue state and where musical score and pacing, tempo, and
increasingly hurried movements in the image drive George’s states of depressive
alterity into manic disidentifications of creative and sexual labor. The anonymous
murder glimpsed during the opening of the film is, in musical retrospect, a
crime whose sexual nature becomes pointedly clear in the refrain that defers the
homophobic projection of musical scream for a heterophobic one: the ambigu-
ous and potentially explosive power of determining meaning by modulating
sound and image streams. The more precisely these streams are synchronized,
the more radically their meanings may proliferate through them or through the
events and objects that populate them. Musicality serves to stabilize or to sus-
pend this distributive tendency, allowing transpositions determining Bone’s
authorship of the concerto even as they cover up the tracks of his murderous
unreason. Desire ordered as synchronized streams rather than as synchronized
objects renders desire for the image as desire for the image as music. Personhood
 Hanns Eisler’s Dialectical Stream / 131

and publicity arise in terms of contact and contagion. Finally, the pianist burns
out; the police clear up, and the film composer has had his say to his cinema
listeners.
Hangover Square’s musical score is synoptic—it models a large-scale pattern
of transpositions according to which the film’s meaning unfurls and that eventu-
ally determine the meaning of visual spectacle in relation to musical sacrifice.
The narrative hermeneutic constantly refers to the score, the musician, and the
warping of his musical expression, setting up his conflict with his environment
as noise, rendering George’s sanity in a push and pull between the meanings of
creative labor: impulse or program? Inner drive or exterior command? Com-
merce or art? Still, creative labor loses the musical measure of its visually unre-
flected force precisely in its conflation with excessive affect and that affect’s
authorization in a body whose creative debts must be repaid. And because
music’s productive forces are properly exterior to visual quality, those debts
must be assigned to the struggling musician himself. George’s recalcitrant but
determined creative expression patterns his inevitable downfall in the spectacu-
lar pyre: flames out of gravity.
George’s crimes are not further investigated, because the sonic and musical
cues reveal their logic, so he just burns up, as any romantic, criminally insane
pianist should. As he collapses from strain during the final performance, the
concerto hits the dissonant cue to madness that the sound track has been giving
to us all along, at the last, crucial moment moving the extradiegetic key back
into Bone’s composition itself. His unfinished concerto is the wounded contrary
side of his unbridled sexual violence. When they come together, subject, object,
and any affective vectors that might distinguish them collapse in haptic specta-
cle. Whether the concerto on fire or the earlier clanging pipes, clattering violins,
or fluttering piccolos as Netta’s body burns at the top of the bonfire—all of these
carefully indexed moments of synchronized cue and frame have music, even
while managing to direct the story’s temporal flow, punctuating or suspending
what is musically excessive with that which becomes logical through visual com-
position (framing, editing, and pacing). Musical ratio is visually rationed while
the site of listening is destroyed. Regarding the turn to extinguishing George’s
labor in the name of rationalizing its effects, as a psychologist tells George’s
fiancée while George, his piano, and the listening salon go up in flames: “It’s
better this way.”
Herrmann thought so. For Herrmann, the film score should be as transpar-
ent as camera movement; otherwise, it might become intrusive, losing its power
to measure motive and involuntation precisely by expressing them fully. The
film’s explicit meaning is that popular music’s commercial spirit can danger-
ously contaminate the artistic soul, much like a prostitute can contaminate a
good man—that is, after he gives up anonymous cruising. But considered more
closely, the film diagrams divisions of creative labor across media industries as
132 / Chapter 4

well as displacements of creative labor between production personnel and audi-

ences of the time-based industrial artwork. Even when music is scored for a film
before production begins; even when it is used to set the tone, pacing, and mood
of the shot and sequence design; and even when it is used as narrative synopti-
con, musical ratio can only make secondary claims on stories industrially pro-
grammed according to, and thematically resolved within, the glassine visual
reason of a world picture. That is Hangover Square, and that is melodrama, for
the ever-frustrated Herrmann: For film music to have its say, the site of listening
distinct from the site of reception of the image must be destroyed. But more
than this personal stylization of the site of listening as subject to the logics of
vision on the part of Herrmann, and more than evidence of the unchangeable
identity of sound-track music as supplementary to the cinematic image, this
stylistics of synchronization is identifiable in its particularity: This is consonant
synchronization.
Consonant synchronization works to forward the complex temporal rela-
tions of the work as those that define the meaning of the exhibition of the work
as the audience’s reception of the work (which actually only history can define,
and then only partially). Consonant synchronization deprivileges the meanings
of sound or sight and their effects on the basis of the audience’s laboring inter-
pretation in favor of determining exhibition as the condition of material, techni-
cal, and affective meanings in the work. Hence, the recurring industrial concern
whereby quantity and quality, commodification and art, technical display and
audience corporeality are resolved as shots of burning flames. All transformative
potential tends toward potential exhibited within the exhibitionary frame as
object and gauge of affective measure. But this style of synchronization can go
only so far—the fire that consumes George at the end of the film is the “resolu-
tion” of his masculine hysteria in a burnt offering as much as it is a statement
on the limits arising in multiplex narration of affective positions, dispositions,
and orientations shaped temporally in relation to the work itself. Consonant
synchronization can never recoup that inevitable mutual dissonance arising
between the mass corporeality of the viewing, listening audience and the com-
plex temporal relations the work exhibits, if only because the audience and the
technicized work cannot properly belong to one another’s distinct ontological,
epistemological, and ethical domains.
Consonant synchronization is an affective rhetoric of temporal framing
and deframing: It frames temporally not simply the profilmic or animated
image but the networked mass corporeality of the audience. Hangover Square
relies on technical instrumentalities for framing and deframing and so suspends
unprogrammed instrumentalities that may be active within the site of reception.
This suspension is accomplished through analytic narrative and editing, realist,
performative, or other formal codes but here depends on musical cuing and
 Hanns Eisler’s Dialectical Stream / 133

musical narration, mimesis, and allusion to conduct the audience into affective
dispositions that the larger narrative then clarifies, continues, or explains in
terms of its temporal modalities: what was, is, and will be happening. The nar-
ratological events programmed in the time-based work, then, are always them-
selves generated within and as serial processes whose convergence or divergence
is orchestrated in processes of synchronization; the possibility of their coher-
ence or incoherence is conditioned on the prior displacement of everyday life
from the site installed to facilitate audience reception. Consonant synchro-
nization functions by leveraging sound and image in moments of indexing
these series to bind the film in packages of icono-mimetic stress.46 The con-
sonance of the sound track with the visual track depends on orchestrating
synchronized series that deframe the audience from the temporal ontologies,
epistemologies, and ethics expounded in the work. Suspense or thrill in con-
sonant synchronization, however it is resolved in the work, also presents an
open question about the audience’s relation to history, actuality, and futurity
beyond cinematic time. The musical flames in Hangover Square, precursors to
Herrmann’s violin shrieks in Psycho, exorcise the devils of creative history and
creative labor, distinctly displacing the time of production and of reception.
Yet to identify consonant synchronization is also to say that other modalities
of synchronization challenge it, informed by different notions of parallelism
between musicality and visuality and other modes of orchestrating composi-
tion, exhibition, and reception.
Consonant synchronization may deploy the effects popularly known as
“Mickey Mousing,” which Kathryn Kalinak47 describes in terms of early syn-
chronized film in Hollywood. As she points out, this form of musical illustration
and repetition of visuality operates in classical scores, such as Max Steiner’s for
King Kong (1933), but is more popularly recognizable in the Disney visual musi-
cal style, as seen in animated films from Steamboat Willie (1928) to Snow White
and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). It is turned to pedagogical visualizations of the
sound track itself in Fantasia (1940) and The Three Caballeros (1944) but is
distributed across animated and live-action films or television commercials in
terms of contact and contagion: displaced material forms or resources, transi-
tioning technology and technical systems, creative labor. Sound sources may be
on screen, off screen, or in the apparatus exhibiting synchronization itself but
never in the mass corporeality of the audience. Karaoke can be, thus, a mode of
introducing dissonance into, of “playing” with, consonant synchronization.
Consonant synchronization deploys the audiovisually correspondent gestural
quality of Mickey Mousing as well as lip sync, diegetically correct sound effects,
and phrasal underscoring tied to shot sequence, whether through motivic struc-
turalization or rhythmic delineation. But it properly is concerned with confin-
ing complex temporal relations, relating the past tense and future tense of the
134 / Chapter 4

cinematic work to the delimited time of its actual exhibition, not simply syn-
chronizing points of coincidence between sound and image.48
Reading Hangover Square as a diagram of tensions in divisions of creative
and affective labor allows us to more fully delineate the strategy of consonant
synchronization in one dimension of its bedeviling of historical time: The film
represents a scene conceived as a traditional music room for a cinema audience
that has heard the musical motivation for that scene’s, and its prime agent’s,
hysterical conflagration. The possibilities of the cinematic medium in terms of
audiovisual synchronization and the possibilities of cinematic reception in terms
of the spatially oriented and rhetorically deframed corporeality of the audience
operate together to emphasize the pitches or turns of fantasy in a confined
environment articulated through the exhibition of musical “symptoms.” Neither
these symptoms nor their logics are unconscious or unheard. Rather, as Hang-
over Square shows, they are the index of tensions between commodity and affec-
tive utterance and so between the time-based narrative work’s overt temporal
form and content, taken in their larger modes of historical production.
Other exemplars could be listed at length here. To give just one, in Jacques
Tourneur’s I Walked with a Zombie (1943), a Canadian nurse comes to a West
Indies plantation to care for the owner’s wife. The plantation’s time-out-of-joint
relation between the Eurocentric will to world pictorial representation and a
laboring body animated beyond individual will by means of the Afro-diasporic
epistemologies of voodoo is exhibited as haunting musical difference. In one
sequence, after it becomes clear that an exhausted but vital life beyond death
haunts the plantation, a curtain ripples mysteriously to the soft, dissonantly
chromatic rise of harp strings; some distant presence from outside the planta-
tion window communicates the movement of laboring commodities animated
beyond their physical characteristics, rippling in some larger temporal stream
of material corporeality that produces illness within the plantation and bodies
animated beyond natural limits beyond it. These dynamics of world temporality
are long rehearsed in tales of diabolic agency: vampiric contamination on the
one hand and involuntary animation as golem, puppet, zombie, robot, or cyborg
on the other. In consonant synchronization, cinema’s world picture of energetic
motion does not redeem “physical reality,” as Siegfried Kracauer49 proposes,
but rather is itself redeemed in some ethics accomplished in reception via the
musical streaming of world historical time.
Conversely, Eisler’s active mobilization of critical faculties for audience
reception can be described as dissonant synchronization. On the one hand,
Eisler’s was a pragmatics of musical agitation adapted for the industrial cinema.
On the other hand, his concerns also aligned closely with concerns at the highest
levels of U.S. cultural, corporate, and governmental policies over mass media’s
capacity to induce mass hysteria in audiences. Although Eisler’s dissonant syn-
 Hanns Eisler’s Dialectical Stream / 135

chronization of music and image overdetermines musicality as modern music

and the sound track as music, it rests on the larger assumption and desire that
the audience be recognized not simply as actively responding, which all indus-
trial cinema does (and which was precisely the concern of policy makers), but
also learning, in spite of and perhaps through its material constraints, conflicts,
and contradictions. Even if the lights go down while screening a film, for Eisler,
the lights need not go out.

Eisler’s Dissonant Modal Cinema

Contestation comes in various and complex forms, be they, as discussed in
Chapters 2 and 3, the craft interventions of visual music animators or Eisen-
stein’s montage gesture. Schoenberg’s serial methods are directed toward a
transformation of the aims of musical expression, from the nineteenth-century
melody-oriented motif to a musical idea in the form of a tone row expressing
the totality of a musical work.50 Part of a critical movement in the arts, Schoen-
berg’s innovations in musical composition bear comparison to Adorno’s elabo-
ration of the critical notion of a “total social process,” a theoretical coherence
that is necessary, finally, for rigorous critique. “Materialist determination of cul-
tural traits is only possible if it’s mediated through the total social process,”
Adorno writes to Walter Benjamin in 1938.51 The status of music and film as
cultural products occupying different strata of artistic coherence is at stake in
Adorno’s concern with correctly grasping totality and, ultimately, with the pro-
duction of culture in a moment properly conceived as being within living and
lived history. The critical engagement of cultural production within a history
that is grasped through dialectical materialism requires that the great axes of
Adornian method will turn on inverting the dynamics of totality: Individual
experience and cultural identity are mediated only negatively through the
instrumental strategies of the culture industries.
In a slightly earlier letter responding to Benjamin’s only partially formalized
dialectics of play and appearance in the work of art, Adorno claims that not only
technicization and alienation but also appearance as such must be seen as oper-
ating dialectically. If the kitsch film is to be defended against the quality film,
then so is art for art’s sake, precisely because the autonomy of art is not identical
with art’s value:

It would be bourgeois reaction to negate the reification of the cinema

in the name of the ego, and it would border on anarchism to revoke the
reification of a great work of art in the spirit of immediate use values.
“Les extremes me touchent,” just as they touch you—but only if the dia-
lectic of the lowest has the same value as the dialectic of the highest,
136 / Chapter 4

rather than the latter simply decaying. Both bear the stigmata of capital-
ism, both contain elements of change (but never, of course, the middle-
term between Schoenberg and the American film). Both are torn halves
of an integral freedom, to which however they do not add up. It would
be romantic to sacrifice one to the other, either as the bourgeois roman-
ticism of the conservation of personality, and all that stuff, or as the
anarchistic romanticism of blind confidence in the spontaneous power
of the proletariat in the historical process—a proletariat which is itself
a product of bourgeois society.52

It is clear from this passage that for Adorno, even a dialectical criticism of high
and low cannot be revolutionary in and of itself—an integral freedom as such
will not be the result of an enterprise that seeks to bring these fields together,
because not only is each alienated from the other but each also manifests its
alienation in terms specific to its production and form. Effectively, no critical
gesture can be made as a “middle-term between Schoenberg and the American
film” (130). Benjamin, says Adorno, falls into the second kind of romanticism
in suggesting that certain Hollywood films might offer a kind of value to a pro-
letariat that would have to be liberated to actually produce such an object of its
entertainment—in which case, the proletariat would neither produce the kind
of kitsch that Hollywood does nor exhibit the kind of affective investments in
it that Benjamin prizes. In the final analysis, the American cinema is a trap of
dialectical mediation, at least in the short term. For Adorno, the critic must
grasp this confinement—for the proletariat, living it more fully means it cannot
be grasped. Eisler’s film scoring in the United States would confront just this
conundrum and crisis.
After leaving Schoenberg’s tutelage, Eisler began composing for films, writ-
ing the live musical accompaniment to Ruttmann’s Opus III (1924) before the
synchronized film had been standardized in Germany. The book Eisler wrote
with Adorno, Composing for the Films, was reprinted in English in the early
1990s and is still cited as a practical, critical, and historical source in the canon
of film-music literature, especially in regard to the inadequate or manipulative
nature of and motivations for Hollywood film music, as is Eisler’s output for
the cinema.
Brown cites Eisler’s score for Resnais’s Nuit et brouillard as a “perfect exam-
ple of a nonnarrativizing, nonmythifying film score”:

Eisler’s score does not even attempt to join with the visuals and the
voice-over narration to create a closed-off universe of consummated
effect. Instead, the composer wrote a score of chamber-like propor-
tions—a solo flute and clarinet back the post-title sequence, for
instance—that moves parallel to the filmic and verbal texts. Occasionally
 Hanns Eisler’s Dialectical Stream / 137

dramatic, occasionally sad, once or twice ironic . . . Eisler’s often rather

pastoral music communicates on a musical level what Nuit et brouillard
often communicates in its visuals . . . the brutal irony of the indifferent
ordinariness that can mask unspeakable horrors.53

Yet this account neglects the clear strategies of synchronization on display

in Nuit et brouillard (or those that Cook points to in Eisler’s score of Ivens’s
Rain). Still, Brown rightly distinguishes Eisler’s approach from what I have
called the tendency toward consonant synchronization of industrial narrative
features of the same period, as we have seen at work in Herrmann’s Hangover
Square. Eisler’s score for Nuit et brouillard does something more specific than
“not even attempting to join with the visuals.” Instead, it joins with them to
disjoin the given sense of the affect they might otherwise recall. Meanwhile,
any “brutal irony” would be only one affect that would finally have to be given
over to the audience to determine. The horrors of the concentration camp may
become passively “spoken” in reception instead of being mediated in terms of
a mask of false remembrance or historical denial. Eisler does more than “con-
test” or “disjoin”—he effects a dialectical stream of dissonant synchronization,
rendering a fuller spectrum of effects than either Cook or Brown describe.
Brown’s interpretation understands music as primarily an affective rhetoric
outside of the intelligible instead of accomplishing the reverse, as I feel Eisler’s
score does: It renders an essayistic legibility as speech, and this speech remains
to be interpreted by the audience. It might articulate nostalgia or denial in
spite of itself while working to demythify the motives or effects that the image
might assign to such affects, but it leaves the relation of affect to the audience
to synthesize.
We can describe the score perhaps as actively demythifying rather than
merely nonmythifying. But more importantly, this score is conducive to ren-
dering the cinematic site of reception and exhibition as a site of contest, not of
sound and image but of exhibition and reception. Rendering plural affects from
ironic detachment from the possible (and false) familiarity of the images, from
sweetness to terror to sadness, the sound-image stream is subtly synchronized
for a dissonant conduction of affect that Eisler had already perfected in earlier
scores.
Richard Raskin points out that one effect of Resnais’s film may be to medi-
ate an impossible experience of massive senseless horror with which all manner
of complicity went unspoken and about which survivors were not fully able to
speak, complicating questions around complicity. World War II was over, and
the matter of responsibility, especially in Vichy France, which had under Ger-
man occupation officially collaborated with the Nazi extermination of Jews,
blacks, homosexuals, Slavs, and Gypsies, was ultimately complex to determine.
As survivors, guilt might be felt for those who were slaughtered—how could
138 / Chapter 4

one speak for those lost when the fact of the absence was so real? And how
could one explain to loved ones or families the magnitude and degree of or-
chestration of violence? On the other hand, in what ways might those complicit
with the horror benefit from simple denunciation as a convenient removal of
their own guilt? For Raskin, Resnais’s accomplishment is that the film provides
a form of mediation such that those who had already been through such horror
do not bear the responsibility of having to articulate it all over again. And yet,
in this particular form, those with questions, those in denial, are faced with a
presentation of the camps that provokes engagement rather than defers it to
the unspeakable.54
Eisler’s critical methods in this New Wave documentary raise questions that
go deeper yet. How would a representation of the camps be affected by and
impact the practices of postwar cinema? More precisely, this question might be
broken into three dimensions: How would this Franco-German collaboration
counter the Franco-German collaboration during the war? How would this
documentary constitute a critical engagement with the cinematic space of con-
finement, where Hollywood narrative dominated international cinema? How
would the narration of confinement and extermination itself be broached? The
achievement of Nuit et brouillard is precisely in terms of essayistic narration,
then, rather than content.
With the disjunctive operation of music working against the image to pro-
duce the irony Brown describes, a performative dimension in the synchroniza-
tion of sound track and visual track is opened up and exposed to the audience.
What is indexed more than any experience of the camps is the distantiation
enacted not by theatrical performers or the work but by the audience itself—
not expressly for agitation but for reorienting the address of totally mediated
experience, with the massive corporeal risks of that mediation acknowledged as
eminently repeatable without adequate interpretation.
As a documentary exposing the experience of the audience’s mediation
through sound and image and narrating the pandemonium of the death camps,
the space of the cinema is called into audience knowing. But, once there, it is
displaced from the totality of mediated social process. In this case, the total
social process undergoes an opening. Any possible romanticizing of total war or
capitalist reconstruction after winners or losers have been determined, any
denial of the experiences of the war, is referred to indeterminate individual
responses and, to the extent that it can be, is substituted with a questioning of
mediation and collaboration toward the critical coherence of the artwork. Nota-
bly, the effects of this cinema of dissonance do not preclude a relation of affect
to time that would be neither “rationalized” nor “emotional.”55
Rather than grounding audience response either in the formal coherence of
the work or the identification with celebrity performance or personality, affect
 Hanns Eisler’s Dialectical Stream / 139

is deferred to some coherence to be bestowed upon it by an audience who listens

and views sound and image stream discretely and dialectically. This removes any
presumption of affect on the basis of false historical relation or spectacular
effect. The sense of synchronization refers to the space where the work performs
as mediation and where cinema (as radio had for Lazarsfeld) has to do with
learning history, not in terms of taste and everyday alienation but with the
rationality of horror bequeathed by the recent historical past to the historical
present. The film does not attempt to represent or even to emotionally connote
in a tragic mode, because the historical trauma being mediated cannot be
thought or felt in any universal way. A dissonant stylistics of synchronization
forwards instead an essay on actuality (of reception) in relation to historical
trauma (which informs the actuality of reception as its impossible—that is,
undeniable but unknowable—historical ground). This work is facilitated by the
time-based work as dialectical stream, not as dialectical image.
To clarify Eisler’s role in developing the essayistic tensions of Nuit et
brouillard and the way these tensions propose an opening of the site of recep-
tion to learning not oriented toward cultivation of taste, the development of
human or social capital, or emotion as synchronized spectacular effect, I turn
to the lesser-known A Child Went Forth, a thirty-minute documentary and
the first film scored as part of Eisler’s Film Music Project.56 The score was com-
posed using a transposed version of Schoenberg’s serial methods, and Eisler
attempts to prevent the pantonal serial idiom from functioning as an exclusive
aesthetic ideology opposing either previous compositional methods or stan-
dardized popular music. Here, we see Eisler’s style directed neither at musical
agitprop nor oppositional critique but rather, as in the terms of the Rockefeller
Foundation’s other projects, at a potential for learning (whether in terms of
“behavior”57 or in terms of “educability”).58 As well, Eisler aligns himself with
Burris-Meyer’s redefinition of music as an art-technological medium trans-
posable to radically different “theaters” of work, recreation, or war, capable of
incorporating the narratological functions of sound and special effects.
At the same time, musical sound and special effects are handled in terms of
the tensions between music and image and between sound track and image
sequence; here, unlike in such films as Hangover Square, where musical listening
is understood as psycho-corporeal conflict, music tends to work in tension with
and against the image to emphasize musical learning as a general response to
the meanings of war. These are the general characteristics of Eisler’s modal cin-
ema: He mediates the broad “social functions” identified for listening in the
Rockefeller projects and their spectacularized form in such films as Hangover
Square in the process, moving away from a strictly agitative or oppositional
notion and toward an essayistic legibility for synchronized time-based media.
The film makes clear that the legibility of the postwar cinema, which Gilles
140 / Chapter 4

Deleuze ascribes to a shift from the kinesthetic movement image to the readerly
temporal signs of a cinema of the time image,59 was always a matter of relations
of synchronization broadly, first between audience and history, and secondly,
mediated in terms of exhibition and reception.
In this film, Eisler shows the new theoretical strength of his film-music
methods as well as their potential in practice. A Child Went Forth, like Nuit et
brouillard, treats the confinement of moving bodies in restricted spaces, but
under very different circumstances and conditions: Its subject is a day at a
summer camp for children. Though shot at the camp Losey’s children attended,
it was packaged as a plea for the humane treatment of child refugees of war.
The film attempts to show children’s unblemished potential, but it also suggests
the ways in which children replay the worlds that adults give them. We see them
embracing gender equality in their play, learning to be kind to animals they
care for, and constructing buildings for themselves, but we also see them in
conflict with one other. The adult world is allowed a perspective on its own
realities, its own desires for peace. Although the politics of the film were clearly
left of center for the time, Losey sold it at a profit to the U.S. Department of
State to be used as a guide for evacuating children in wartime situations.60 Thus,
a day at a progressive summer camp becomes a model for wartime evacuation
of refugees.
The scores Eisler prepared for the Film Music Project, of which this film was
one exercise, indicate the ways in which variable and probabilistic methods
instrumentalized today as “interactivity” were already aspects of the cinema
production process before modern cybernetics. Eisler’s scoring of distinct ver-
sions of rain for a sequence of the eponymous Ivens documentary, for exam-
ple, is a composition-intensive way of differentiating his own methods from
standard film-industry procedures. Further, his development of these scores
shows them to be—as distinct from Eisenstein’s graphical diagram of the labor
value of his and Prokofiev’s collaboration—data intensive, collated as docu-
ments in a larger administration of experiment and affect. Rockefeller Founda-
tion support personnel considered some automatic registration device of the
sort sought for Burris-Meyer’s measurement of audience response and Prince-
ton Radio’s recording of audience reactions to radio content.
They concluded that it was precisely the aesthetic responses of people able
to articulate their opinions as to the distinct effects different score fragments
provided that would in this case be necessary.61 As the titles of the rain scores
make clear, Eisler approaches the variegation of musical possibility as an
expanded problem of serial stylistics: Vierzehn Arten den Regen zu beschreiben.62
For Eisler, rain is a cipher, in Verlaine to Rimbaud and beyond, for Trauer—that
is, sadness or melancholia—and these were virtual (gewissenmaßigen) styliza-
tions of rain as sadness. “I won’t say,” Eisler comments in 1958, “that it is the
central theme of the twentieth century; we should say that that would be an
 Hanns Eisler’s Dialectical Stream / 141

‘Anatomy of Sadness,’ or an ‘Anatomy of Melancholy.’ But that can also appear

in the oeuvre.”63 Eisler’s work for the Rockefeller Foundation should be seen in
this light: His Film Music Project scores are a highly abbreviated attempt at an
affective anatomy for film music; but such a project only coheres inasmuch as
it relates affect to historical time. Here, again, is the doubled potentiality of the
media stream: its virtual stylization of historial relation, to be evaluated for some
more concrete possible historical value in reception.
Developing a distinct order of musical ciphers for A Child Went Forth, Eisler
plunders surprising musical territory for his material. He composes complex,
delicate passages depicting children’s dispositions, moods, actions, and inter-
actions with the world around them, reworking such sources as nursery songs.
Yet Eisler also achieves a mediating effect between learning and synchronization
without submitting learning to the reception of spectacle; the feeling of action
here is our own capacity to rethink the way we understand childhood as a time
for learning. Musical listening provides the critical gesture by which our con-
sideration of children is accomplished by calling attention to precisely our envi-
sioning of childhood. Losey’s intimate editing works together with his relatively
hands-off direction and Eisler’s score to make this educational film operate
through more dissonant than consonant synchronization, though any final
determination of effects rests finally with the audience.
The film opens with a violin narrating a theme suggesting hunting or a game
of hide-and-seek, with flutes answering the stringed instrument. On screen,
children arrive at the summer camp. A narrator quotes Walt Whitman and sets
up the message of the film: “‘There was a child went forth every day, and the
first object looked upon, that object he became.’ . . . How children play, how they
stretch those muscles and minds of theirs is of crucial importance.” Violins play
a tentatively rising questioning theme with unresolved harmonics and then drop
with a musical “splash” as children jump in a pool of water. By starting with a
theme suggesting hunting or hiding, the music asks the audience to wonder
what the message of the film might be. “Search like a child,” the music continues
to suggest, “and you will find it for yourself.” The treasure found? Image and
audio creating a synchronized splash. However, the prior phrasal sequences and
those that follow mediate any “immersion” here; the music narrates what are in
essence high-quality home movies providing the low-budget visual resources
for an educational film.
In just these first few moments, musicality orders the modes of dissonant
and consonant synchronizations, with an onomatopoetic splash following a
question presented through unresolved yet gentle pantonal dissonance. Themes
of autonomy, independence, self-confidence, and respect for nature follow. The
score streams loosely along with the image, providing sound effects as well as
commentary, in terms of pleasing, tentative, or contradictory emotions as we
see the children play, fight, build things, or swim. The narrator suggests that
142 / Chapter 4

children in wartime should be treated with the respect accorded to adults, refer-
ring to their similar problems and feelings and, in doing so, appealing to the
audience’s capacities for feeling childhood as adults. As we see one child hit
another and the abused friend immediately hit back, we reflect, led on by the
dry, witty, and attentive sounds we hear, that while the narration asks us to
consider the children as humans, another message seems to be that adults often
act just like these children, but with far more serious consequences. The first of
those messages is found and emphasized through the accompanying voice-over,
but the second is found primarily in the mediated gesture of synchronization,
placing music in some more autonomous relation to the image to performa-
tively narrate our capacity to learn as an audience:

The musical problem was to save the picture from the usual saccharine
sentimental and humorous romanticism of magazine stories about chil-
dren. The effect of the music could be neither stirring nor funny. Its
range of feeling had to include elements that usually are not associated
with children: genuine seriousness, such as children often show in their
play; sadness, nervousness, even hysteria; but all these conceived loosely,
thinly as though inconsequentially. Above all, the music should not tap
the children on the shoulder, as it were, and make them the object of
adults’ jokes or ingratiate itself by adopting a spurious baby talk.
The form of the suite seemed most natural—in other words, not an
elaborate form of leitmotifs, but a sequence of small, distinct, clearly
differentiated pieces, each complete in itself with an unmistakable begin-
ning and ending.64

Here again, hysteria is produced in synchronization, but according to a dialectics

of media streams that submit the spectacular hysteria conducted in such films
as Hangover Square to the audience for critical consideration. At the same time,
taking the measure of hysteria in this way also undercuts the personality profi l-
ing used in radio surveys attempting to discern the motives of radio listeners
who panicked and took flight during Welles’s War of the Worlds broadcast. But,
rather than through leitmotifs composed to signal interiority or emotional
response, audience identification with dramatized emotion, or background
environmental moods, Eisler constantly emphasizes a feeling of action taking
place in the actuality of reception, of being in historical time. He moves from
one distinct section of the suite to the next as the children romp from activity
to activity during the course of their day. A recurrent developmental thematic
never develops in the harmonic or rhythmic sense, nor does a finale sum up
those developments. Musical comments are more discretely articulated around
the movements and interactions of the children on screen in particular instances,
yet they are more aleatory in their overall sequencing.
 Hanns Eisler’s Dialectical Stream / 143

Synchronization here does render, then, subjective reactions as well as envi-

ronmental events, but with equal weight, and the combined audiovisual effect
communicates an impression of children who must play at learning in order to
grow up and who live in a world that expects them to do precisely that. No
foregone musical conclusion leads them, or us, along. Does our world place the
same expectations before children? Can we? We watch their careful eyes and ears
as we hear a woman tell them a story about other children, but she is also telling
their story, just as the film tells us the story of the children we see as a story
about ourselves. We learn, through the mediating effects of dissonant sync
employed with consonant synchronization, that these are the two separate
stories of two distinct sets of bodies, but they may become intimately related
through the actions we take. Will we translate understanding into action?
The film ends with a quietly sinister march as the narrator suggests that
perhaps the methods used at this camp would be appropriate for children whose
parents have been killed in war or those whose mothers have been called away
to work in the defense industries. But the film also implies that if we have ques-
tions about how we should care for children, the camp may present a model for
times of peace and war. The music invites serious reflection without insisting
on its own sonic authority, just as the images do not insist on analytical trans-
parency; the viewer-listeners are neither persuaded nor rushed to conclusions.
Still, the long summer day, the cool water, the farm animals, and the curious
music all would have seemed brighter and more generous than the everyday life
otherwise mediated in radio listening and cinema viewing during wartime: Per-
haps a more critical, more social, even more rigorously childlike way to raise
children exists. The film ends as a final citation of Whitman concludes the nar-
ration, the poet’s multitudinous voicing of the American body politic punctuat-
ing the site opened out between Eisler’s dissonant stream and Losey’s implied
antiwar message. The effect is musical thoughtfulness, questioning rather than
the destructive annihilation of the symbolization of the site of listening, as in
Hangover Square.
The use of dissonant synchronization invites mediation or negotiation
between an already plural sound track and an already plural visual track, a
negotiation engaged in the work’s avowal of our reception of their dynamic
combination. The effect of dissonant synchronization, like that of consonant
synchronization, rests on the configuration of moving bodies confined in space
to open out interpretive actions toward different dispositions toward the bodies
and gestures screened. Eisler’s musical agitation utilizes both styles of synchro-
nization in A Child Went Forth; “counterpoint,” in synchronization, does not
necessarily translate as “opposed metaphors” in the formal sense Cook suggests
but rather a tactics of conducting sound and image in a dialectical stream
prompting the audience’s critical and passionate investments rather than hys-
terical ones.
144 / Chapter 4

Streaming Media Pedagogies at Midcentury:

The Call to Cybernetics
If the concert hall held, as Hangover Square postulates, a specific discovery of
mass-corporeal hysteria accumulating in the tension between qualities and quan-
tities of mass media, A Child Went Forth should enlighten our understanding of
how musicality, deployed as a measure of opening up the site of reception as one
of reflection, may mediate the spectacular pedagogies of Hollywood suspense
with those of statistical analysis or art-technological orchestration of mass-cor-
poreal effects. Thus, the theater of sound effects, distributed listening, “the chil-
dren’s camp,” or other dynamic spaces show the ways in which total mediation
(the futural specter of some triumphant historical fascism) may be amplified or
mitigated through orchestrating synchronization of reception and exhibition,
shedding light on our ability to see screened actuality and to hear immanent
historicity or futurity at the same time. These dynamic sites of stylizing tempo-
rality contribute to our contemporary understanding of stasis and mobility, now
profoundly reconfigured not so much through “new technologies” but by new
divisions and mediations of material, technical, or affective labor: Interactive
experiences, too, yield the orchestration of gestures of interpretation.
Perhaps we will return to understand the way music’s capacities were refig-
ured in the midcentury instrumentation of social conditions, broadly distrib-
uted through the working and recreational conditions whereby everyday life
was dislocated or ameliorated. Listening, sound, and music were seen as condi-
tion and medium, not event, of social violence or war: the substance of mass-
corporeal expressivity, available to investigation as an art-technological effect of
synchronization and thus portable across distinct environments. These capaci-
ties for music informed a synoptics of spectacular dissolution in the consonant
synchronization deployed in such films as Hangover Square (becoming even
more graphically explicit in the spiraling titles and narrative of Hitchcock’s Ver-
tigo [1958]) as well as an essayistic mediation on care in a time of total war
through the stylistics of dissonant synchronization in such films as A Child Went
Forth or Nuit et brouillard. These were midcentury modern pragmatics for styl-
izing time-based materialities of musical communication to be grasped by audi-
ences. Because of the deep histories and the continued deployment of these
modes of consonant or dissonant synchronization—that is, their historical and
futural values—they should not be reduced to the sound track (in cinema or in
gaming) as supplement, nor should the radio listening or cinema viewing of the
past be understood as at all linear. Time-based media is serial, not linear, and
no instance of reception may be reduced to any one term in a series.
For these reasons, musicality and gesture are primary to the learning effects
Eisler’s essayistic orchestration of serial sound and image aims to produce, but
these had been, since before his own Film Music Project began, primary problems
 Hanns Eisler’s Dialectical Stream / 145

encountered in attempting to understand the ways audiences create, interpret,

or move locally through temporally determined modes of globalized everyday
life. Modal media reception never exhausts historical time that is hieroglyph-
ically transposed as cinematic time but rather animates the creation of more
of it, engendering further divisions of labor. Recognizing the operations—
synchronization, dissonance, and the devil of mass corporeality—through
which Eisler configures his path through global hieroglyphic time may bring us
to a pandemonium regained: the reinvention and restylization of a musicalized
everyday life. Returning to the powerful affects attributed to musical listening
in this period further allows us to observe the range of problems having to do
with assigning coherent contexts and identities to network effects distributed
over world space as media. As I discuss in Chapter 5, an “IBM world” had mate-
rialized for writers on jazz, such as Langston Hughes; Burris-Meyer’s attempt at
closely synchronized sound control, Eisler’s attempt to resist it, and Herrmann’s
attempt to dramatize it as individual (rather than mass) hysteria give us a pre-
liminary set of exemplars against which to measure the demand for more
powerful technics for calling, carrying, distributing, culminating, and rework-
ing the network effects of material, temporal media streams.
Eisenstein’s, Fischinger’s, and Eisler’s stylistics of sound-image synchroniza-
tion comprise the three major stylistic tendencies mediating musicality and
gesture in classical cinema. As we shall see, montage, visual music, and dialectical
streaming provide resources that later works will rework as they transform the
historical, futural, and present tenses of the site of reception. Pathos, ecstasy, and
hysteria will be reengaged in modal cinemas that pass creative labor through
mass mediation. However, in Chapters 5 through 7, I show that these historical
resources will not be sufficient for new, materialist cinemas or for the compu-
tational interface. In Chapter 5, I review the musical cinemas of the 1960s and
1970s, which generated a full complement of interrogations of cinema style and
popular music. Of pop, rock, and jazz, jazz in particular maintained a political
history whose trajectory would be commensurate to a countercinema marking
the extensive development of transnational media industries in terms largely
antithetical to it. At the point of its near-disappearance in the sphere of mass-
market commodity recording, the free-jazz cinema achieves a critical treatment
thoroughly integrating the classical stylistics of sound-image synchronization
into its formal materials and narrative thematics by drawing on the epistemolo-
gies of black music. In Chapter 5, then, we observe the ways in which the prob-
lems of bioenergetic control and expression are reframed in bioinformatic terms.
In the jazz cinema of the 1970s, engagements between improvisation and bio-
politics become, precisely, a question of deciphering and reciphering cinema as
style.
5
Black Relationship
Improvising a Black Pacific

Ultimately the phonograph records are not artworks but the black seals on the
missives that are rushing towards us from all sides in the traffic with technology;
missives whose formulations capture the sounds of creation, the first and the last
sounds, judgment upon life and message about that which may come hereafter.
—Theodor Adorno, “The Form of the Phonograph Record”

Americans began to realize for the first time that there was a native American
music as traditionally wild, happy, disenchanted, and unfettered as it had become
fashionable for them to think they themselves had become. . . . Race records swiftly
became big business.
—LeRoi Jones, Blues People: Negro Music in White America

Have you ever suffered from political despair, from despair about the organization
of things?
—Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition

Growth as inherent right.

—Cecil Taylor, liner notes for Taylor and Mary Lou Williams, Embraced

“Jazz Is the Teacher”

—“Magic” Juan Atkins, techno-house track title

Cinema and Jazz as Style and Idiom

In the preceding discussions of Sergei Eisenstein’s “charmed” montage,
Oskar Fischinger’s spiraling musical animation, and Hanns Eisler’s admin-
istrative synchronization of sound and image as dissonant, dialectical
stream, I have identified three classical stylistics for synchronizing audio-
visual exhibition as a relation of contemporary and historical time. For sub-
jects cut off from history and from one another, and reprojecting and rede-
fining historical meaning in exhibition, pathos characterizes the complex
relation between the affective labor of composition and that of reception.
Eisenstein’s “charmed” montage provides the key exemplar of this stylistic
 Black Relationship / 147

of streaming synchronization. When exhibition emphasizes a continuous stream-

ing of temporal relation above and beyond the materiality of the exhibition con-
text, so the futural tense of the work exhibited coincides with a futural sense of
the audience’s ability to convene in exhibition, an ecstatic sense of affective labor
emerges. Here, Fischinger’s visual music provides an influential, widely recog-
nized example. And when the affective labor of interpreters becomes excessive,
whether positively or negatively, and cannot be localized either in terms of the
historical or futural potentialities of the audiovisual stream, a potential for (or,
in some cases, actual fact of) “mass hysteria” appears—that is, wild interpretation
not on the part of an individual subject but on the part of networked mass sub-
jects. Eisler’s stylization of dissonant synchronization proposes a dialectical,
streaming display of affective labor, aiming at a diagnostic capability achieved by
differentiating the affective labor of interpreters from that affective and technical
labor combined in exhibition. Eisenstein’s, Fischinger’s, or Eisler’s work, then,
demonstrates modalities of affective labor and attempts to stylize it in relation
to historical, futural, or contemporary immanence. Each of these styles of syn-
chronizing time-become-hieroglyphic aimed at some medial ethics by constru-
ing the materialized temporality of the media stream as music and its reception
as gestural. Each of these cases, then, presents a canonical style of preparing
corporeal relations to media spectacle as music and as gesture. Although each
of these attempts emerged historically as responses to specific problems in spe-
cific contexts, the stylistics they demonstrate have been adopted, appropriated,
and reworked far beyond their immediate concerns, conceptions, and uses.
Eisenstein’s various appeals to a material kinesthetics of affect modeled on
the roller coaster or circus, the biomechanical theater, drawing as choreography
(or jazz or music, more generally), in addition to his concerns with the visuality
of painting and drawing or the textuality of poetics of literature, make clear that
he understood that cinema’s historical and contemporary ontologies, episte-
mologies, and ethics were transmedial—that is, cinema was historical and revo-
lutionary precisely inasmuch as its capacities to relate personhood to public
being in affective terms derived from earlier media but were more expansive
and more dynamic than other forms of expression. Fischinger similarly worked
with cinematic composition and reception as a particular medium in relation
to others—that is, as requiring transmedial resources for crafting cinematic sense
and making sense of cinematic sensation. Fischinger’s abstraction of parametri-
cal data for sound-image synchronization from phonograph records, his pre-
sentation of the kinesthetics of visual music as radiophonic flight, or his elabo-
ration of his works in terms of a medial choreography all contributed as much
to the narrative Fischinger had to tell about musical expressionism, its anti-
authoritarian orientation, and the contemporary relations between painting and
cinema at the mid-twentieth century as to his own work. Musicality and gesture
shaped affective labor to make “statements” in his works. Eisler turned from
148 / Chapter 5

stronger to weaker claims, relying ultimately on politically incisive strategies of

dissonant synchronization that nonetheless were designed only to prompt audi-
ences to interpret what affective meanings were to be made of the compression of
material and technical labor composed in and as the material, streaming work.
All these figures engaged, to some larger or smaller degree, improvisational
epistemologies associated in their own times with jazz music. A range of recent
scholars have observed the ways in which “noise” functions as musical and
technocultural aesthetic in black musics;1 more broadly, cultural theorist Jacques
Attali influentially claims that new music foreshadows broader cultural change
as a kind of annunciatory noise.2 Typically, for Eisenstein, Fischinger, or Eisler,
as for other artists of temporal media in the early twentieth century, jazz or jazz
aesthetics are invoked to characterize an improvisational capacity on the part
of receivers of otherwise highly programmed media streams. In this chapter,
I explore in more detail how improvisation and media program are concretely
characterized in transformed stylistics of synchronization after cybernetic net-
works had redefined relations of temporality and corporeal contact after the
midcentury era. Director Larry Clark’s Passing Through (1977), one of the films
made by the Los Angeles group of independent filmmakers, which included
Charles Burnett (Killer of Sheep, 1977) and Haile Gerima (Bush Mama, 1979),
provides an exceptional exemplar. Jazz as relation of history and contempora-
neity provides not only the structure and narrative for Passing Through but also
the broader aesthetic resources for reworking montage, visual music, and dis-
sonant synchronization.
Any consideration of cinema as transmedial stream suggests a consideration
of cinema as the stylization of a temporal and material idiom. Cinema as style
and idiom coincides not only with the long historical rise of computational
technologies but also with globalizing musical forms, such as jazz (or tango,
for example).3 In this sense, jazz becomes central to considerations of transme-
dial stylistics in precisely the degree to which its importance for cinema tends
to be neglected.4 That cinema is a global industry while jazz is a musical genre
or form is an asymmetry in terms of which industrial priorities condition the
critical reception of auditory, visual, or audiovisual and gestural productions of
meaning. In fact, this asymmetry and the historical abandonment it may suggest
are where Passing Through begins. Clark’s film not only is the temporal diagram
of a struggle for a future cinema but also rewrites the cinematic archive in terms
of jazz playing, recording, and listening. Audience reception of Passing Through’s
sound and image track is synchronized as an improvisational seeing-hearing of
jazz history as correlate of world historical struggle. If, as David James5 argues,
the film ultimately fails in its attempt to found a jazz cinema that would articu-
late the meanings and languages for a feature-length black cinema, the film does
employ complex ciphers of jazz performance, recording, and listening to docu-
ment jazz as style and idiom relating historical struggle. In Passing Through,
 Black Relationship / 149

styling jazz in relation to historical struggle underwrites a medial ethics where

playing and hearing music opens to liberatory modes of affective labor rather
than destructive and dependent ones. Here, too, musicality and gesture point to
cinema as transmedial configuration and as ethical engagement as much as
industry, institution, or mass cultural form.
Further, Passing Through provides a crucial example—at precisely that his-
torical moment of the mid-1970s to which contemporary theorists of affective
labor, such as Michael Hardt6 or Hardt and Antonio Negri,7 refer as charac-
terizing the transition from “old,” Fordist industrial networks to “new,” post-
Fordist and cybernetic models of labor—of a musical cinema whose stylistics
for relating audience to personhood and to public being historicize affective
labor as a mode of biopolitical resistance. The film reworks then-conventional
sound-image relations of cinema by deploying improvisational stylistics for syn-
chronizing sound and image. Cinema had long been contemporary and argu-
ably capable of engaging sound and image as improvisation, as different phases
or works by Eisenstein, Fischinger, or Eisler show, but for complex political,
economic, and social reasons, it had not yet fully elaborated this engagement
or its implications. Passing Through, regardless of its marginality in canons of
cinema, jazz, or critical studies, not only elaborates this engagement but also
dramatizes the contradictions and tensions, the doubled potential, such an
engagement entails.

Free Jazz and Program Media

Passing Through functions, in some ways, as a musical cipher: It was made for
the revolution but hardly surmounts capitalist contradictions on its own. Still,
its achievements are numerous. First, Passing Through’s primary interest is not,
I think, in deploying jazz to allegorize cinema production as such but rather in
allegorizing, more broadly, an audiovisual medium that might project an impro-
visational jazz musicality in reception. Seeing the film in this light suggests larger
historical currents in which jazz works as a historical resource extensible across
media. Importantly, broadening our understanding of the film’s rhetorical
address in this way allows us to see the ways in which Passing Through’s trans-
media jazz rhetoric corresponds to others produced in black poetry, literature,
and critical social theories. Of considerable importance for interpreting the film
and situating it in relation to jazz history is the way it draws on one crucial
resource to present such correspondences: the jazz album cover.
Passing Through is a historical treatment, in musical narration, of the mate-
rial, technical, and affective meanings of jazz in cinema, transferred to the screen
by virtue of the historical meanings immanent to free jazz music’s marginalized
condition during the 1970s. The film begins with an affirmative dedication to
“black musicians everywhere” and proceeds to a visual-music sequence that
150 / Chapter 5

introduces the musical resources that inform its entire narrative, emphasizing
the historical and contemporary sources of jazz production: black history and
black performers. This sequence starts with a close-up of jazz pianist Horace
Tapscott’s hands, bathed in blue light, on a keyboard; he performs the music we
hear as the repeating refrain slowly adds, in the image, other hands on additional
instruments, their corresponding sounds joining together. This sequence pre-
sents a music whose structural density gradually expands to a chaotic sound
image whose rhythmic and timbral density challenges the very auditory and
visual capacities of the medium in which it is inscribed.
The film’s protagonist, Eddie Warmack, is a jazz saxophonist who, having
recently been released from prison, is struggling to find his sound again. He
realizes that he needs to organize his former bandmates for a new recording
venture to succeed; this move arouses violent anger from the record-company
conglomerate that formerly held him under contract. A series of events reestab-
lishes Warmack’s friendship with a former lover as well as with his bandmates
and introduces a new love interest, Maya, the single mother and photojournalist
whose photographer ex-husband documented the struggle to decolonize Guinea-
Bissau. The key events of the film, then, comprise Warmack’s rediscovery of his
signature sound, his transformation of the music that his ensemble makes
together, and his working through the meanings of lost and new love. Transfor-
mations become possible, not simply potential, for Warmack because of his
recognition of parallel histories, established through montage composition.
The film employs pseudohistorical recreations of recognizable yet fictional-
ized historical events. It includes actual newsreel footage and photographs of
African revolutionaries but Clark edits them into carefully composed sequences
where montage functions as forms of musical memory, speech, recounting, or
storytelling. Within the narrative, for Warmack, these highly synthetic montage
sequences elucidate the relationship between the struggle for African decoloni-
zation and black political recognition in the United States. Montage as pathos,
then, projects personal and impersonal historical time.
Warmack’s personal breakthroughs are depicted instead through the stylis-
tics of visual music. To find his sound after being released from prison, he goes
to the beach at the Santa Monica piers. Later, he loses his sense of self and sound
at a point at which he again should be performing as a contributing member of
his ensemble.
Here, dissonant distortion using electronic feedback synchronized with
Warmack missing notes shows he is “out of sync” with the diegetic reality of his
surroundings. Dissonant synchronization, then, is used to suggest a deeply per-
sonal political despair, while montage or visual music styles indicate jazz as his-
torical resource: personal and impersonal; private and intimate.
Passing Through deploys classical stylistics but stylizes them as jazz perfor-
mance of personhood and publicity. Warmack finds, as he rejoins the ensemble
 Black Relationship / 151

and relearns what it means to lead it, the means to upend political despair and
to move through complex time. His musical breakthroughs, whether intimate
or raucous, appear in often-hallucinatory or visionary terms: History can con-
tinue into a new phase only by virtue of a cut or interruption allowing “cut-off ”
memories to be recalled.
At the end of the film, Warmack retaliates against record-company gangsters
who have marginalized his ensemble’s economic prospects, encouraged their
drug dependency, and even murdered and attacked them. Warmack kills two of
the gangsters in a roadside ambush. The tenor of this sequence is doubled in
terms of sense and sensation. On the one hand, armed struggle and jazz recording
are depicted as parallel endeavors: They share sense. On the other, the gangsters
are represented in the film according to a reversal of the logics of minstrelsy—
one corporate hack pretends, in a way that is clearly embarrassingly unconvinc-
ing even to him, to be “down” with the ensemble by badly miming black gestures.
The other, the head of the recording conglomerate, appears with a pencil mous-
tache drawn above his upper lip. When Warmack dispenses with these vicious
clowns at the close of the film, even as the film dispatches a sense of “realistic”
catharsis, it also caricatures corporate ownership of black musical commodities
as comic sensation: denuded forms of white minstrelsy and cinematic masquer-
ade. Passing Through closes with a sequence of held frames presenting African
independence fighters, and at the end of this historical photo album, Warmack
appears in a circular matte shot: at the center of a record label, that is, which has
begun to produce sound heard and recognized as historical struggle.
The significance of Passing Through’s narrative, like other films of the period
treating music commodities, transnational media industries, and progressions
of musical genre, material, form, or style, is that it elaborates the material and
historical development of musical meaning in jazz as cinematic narrative. In
other words, to a degree that is not achieved in other films of its period, it trans-
poses the aesthetics and rhetorics of free jazz performance and recording to
cinematic temporality. Here, jazz recording histories and musical epistemologies
provide immanent historical resources transposed to cinematic spectacle, a
translation of musical epistemologies that other comparable film narratives
either pointedly refrain from doing or fail to do, so the differences between such
films are illuminating.
In Peter Watkins’s Privilege (1967), a highly critical film about the manufac-
ture of pop-music stardom, rock is a carefully administrated outlet for youth
aggression that functions by channeling libidinal investments—depicted as
screaming teary fans and as a masochistic, self-flagellating rock star—into nihil-
istic consumerism that resolves tensions between the British state, public culture,
transnational capital, and religious institutions. Two successive stages of pop star-
dom, the passage from transgressive break-out hit to iconization, are presented
literally as gestural performances. First, the pop star appears on stage in a cage
152 / Chapter 5

and, in a dramatic miming of his desire for liberation, gesturally pleads for
release by police officers, who do so and then beat him. Later, to the backing of
police, corporation, and state, the church adds its support, too. This second
performance presents the pop star’s kinesic iconography as sustained gesture
of hands outstretched: canonization.
Similarly, Ken Russell’s 1975 film adaptation of the Who’s 1967 rock opera
Tommy also presents the rock star’s body as the center of his fans’ libidinal
investments, but here as directed in search of an alternative to mind-numbing
postwar middle-class status. Here, rock is aligned with emergent media tech-
nologies rather than biopolitical control: In an early sequence allegorizing this
alignment, pinball machines are depicted as transforming into electronic games
whose iconic airplanes recall World War II bombers. In Tommy, media are dia-
lectically divergent and convergent; their divergence allows fans to catch on to
the exciting implications of the star’s pseudotranscendent corporeality, and their
convergence allows fans to catch on to the commoditization of his pseudotran-
scendence. Where Watkins presents the musical commodity system as a closed
circuit, Russell finds historical progressions of new technology, new media, and
new musical genre, in relation to which fan rebellion partially determines the
passage from one rock style to the next but where any coherent social agency or
actual political change that might result from fan insurrection initiating a new
school of rock is illusory, when it is not regressive.
Distinct from these films in which music’s capacity to relate personhood
and public being is entirely contained within a critique of transnational capital’s
production of hysterical, corporeal affect, Passing Through’s central concern is
rather the need to organize musical production for autonomous recording, and
thus for transnational distribution and for historical archiving. Taking jazz as
its form and as its narrative thematics, opening an ensemble jam and ending
with an image of its protagonist as icon of recorded music, Passing Through
presents a cinematic allegory of the musical localization and globalization of
commodity and community relations. The film’s ending suggests that Warmack
has resolved these contradictions not simply by making sound but by recording
musical sound in relation to, and as an analog of, the historical and contem-
porary political struggles that continue to inform its meaning. Thus, Passing
Through presents the jazz ensemble as an improvisational staging ground for
the individuation of the soloist—that is, it historicizes jazz as the aesthetic cor-
relate of a contemporary political assembly, with the free jazz solo requiring an
ethical performance guiding the ensemble to resolve tensions between commod-
ity and community relations in some more autonomous form of laboring, affec-
tive production. Here, jazz cinema becomes a series of didactic lessons for
decoding the laboring relation of black assembly and leadership as deciphered
historical and musical facts. The film presents, in effect, the complex counter-
 Black Relationship / 153

narrative to Watkins’s or Russell’s critique of a threadbare, transnational musical

postmodernism.
Where the site of jazz reception is depicted in Passing Through as marginal-
ized, deprived of origins, and made threadbare in its dysfunctional dependency
on the recording industry, the stylistics of Eisler’s dissonant synchronization are
engaged and revised. Passing Through uses dissonant synchronization, paradoxi-
cally, to effect a cinematic naturalism for jazz, making playing jazz a natural fact
in spite of its historical neglect. In the key scene I briefly describe above, Warmack
cannot synchronize his own sound to that of the players around him. His musi-
cal incapacity is correct in terms of the diegesis, although the notes he plays are
wrong for the ensemble that performs in the scene. But this wrong, failed sound
is the jazz sound track; the site of jazz production is placed in tension with the
audience’s reception of it. An ensuing fugue state leads Warmack to see class
conflicts playing out among family members mourning the death of “Poppa”
Harris, Warmack’s musical mentor. Similarly, attending to the conflict between
jazz as a site of production and reception, the viewer diagnoses unresolved his-
torical tensions playing out through family, class, and history.
In another key scene, the sound of musicians rehearsing narrates a flashback
in which Poppa intervenes in the overdose of a drug-addicted musician who has
died in a hospital room. Again, naturalizing improvisational jazz as cinematic
sound and image capable of departing from its own constraints or of interrupt-
ing its own dependencies contests what were then still-current associations of
jazz with corporeal dependencies: violence and addiction. Here again, dissonant
synchronization of sound and image prompts improvisational sense making
whereby receivers’ attention is called and then follows, notes, and interprets
tensions to make conclusions about relations between production and recep-
tion. This dissonant sync leads to psychic or social insights or perhaps renewals
for the film’s key players. In essence, the jazz rehearsal space functions as what
Vorris Nunley has termed a “hush harbor,” a musical version of those quasi-
public “safe spaces” Nunley sees as central to the production of community-
centered knowledges since slavery.8 Yet in projecting the cinema, too, as a
musical hush harbor, Passing Through places the improvisational stylistic of
synchronized sound and image in a powerful role, musically mediating the
quasi-public hush harbor in terms of the virtual public sphere of the cinema.
In the process, jazz music as deployed in Passing Through teaches political
despair, as Fred Moten puts it, precisely because jazz’s centrality in twentieth-
century musical production and epistemology is routinely projected and mar-
ginalized as weak, fixed, and dependent—the opposite of what its own historical
narrative knows it to be. But, in projecting despair and musically parsing the
affect of despair in terms of its historical production and in terms of the affective
contrariety to despair forged in love or solidarity, the film improvises toward its
154 / Chapter 5

conclusions: Jazz is a complex streaming of heterogeneous, historical modalities

of action rather than an industrial product or musical genre.
As a result, Passing Through finds jazz rhetoric holding immanent resources
for futural movement, perhaps surprisingly depicted here in terms of visual
music synchronization in the early scene I note above, wherein Warmack plays
his saxophone at the beach. By projecting and playing off musical waves echoing
between his instrument and the ocean, Warmack resynchronizes himself to
localized temporality after the alienating temporality of prison. He also “flows”
into the sound of the Pacific Ocean, which seems to connect him distantly to
Poppa and to Africa. Here, again, the stylistics of visual music are turned around:
Rather than transporting or abstracting, visual music instrumentalities localize
a connection with global Afro-diasporic crosscurrents.
Passing Through also uses montage techniques to establish the epistemologi-
cal broadening and reorientation of jazz as liberation music. In a key moment of
musical narration that establishes character backstories and narratological aims,
the film presents a fictional prison revolt carefully shot and edited to match news-
reel footage of the 1970 Attica, New York, prison uprising, introducing photo-
graphs of African rebel fighters to position the jazz musician’s historical status for
comparative analysis. These parts are woven into a whole not in terms of a larger
montage narrative; rather, they are patterned into the film’s often-hallucinatory
sequencing according to the tension established between the story of recording
jazz and the story of improvising historical struggle, a tension narrated primar-
ily in terms of or with reference to the film’s improvisatory sound track.
As Todd Boyd9 demonstrates, black musical styles, such as jazz or hip-hop,
exhibit the ways in which black aesthetic expression in the United States modu-
lates vernacular and formal. Describing a modulation of vernacular expression
and techno-scientific media as a historical development, Fred Moten10 suggests
that radical black aesthetics engage recording media as a transition from the
vernacular to the modern. In this regard, Moten sees Eisensteinian montage—
canonical in liberal film schools and in independent and commodity film
production—as crucial for understanding “the break” and “the ensemble” of
black radical aesthetics. Boyd’s and Moten’s comments suggest black radical
aesthetics as intervening practices of what Miriam Hansen11 refers to as vernac-
ular modernisms, whereby Hollywood globalized cinema as exportable senso-
rium. For Moten, in particular, Eisenstein’s montage provides a theory of the
dynamisms animating the transformed ensembles of techno-scientific moder-
nity and their framing of resistant social relations: “For montage comes into its
own by way of the deconstruction of the elemental status, which is to say, the
staticity, of the frame. Such a deconstruction cannot but include an improvisa-
tion through the idea of the frame as pure singularity: This means not only a
theorization of movement in/of the frame, but an iconization that acts as an
affirmation against the very idea of the frame.”12
 Black Relationship / 155

As I discuss in Chapter 2, Eisenstein describes “learning to draw”: his impulse

toward montage as a form of “drawing” a tension between the improvisatory
and the programmatic, where montage serves as a partial modal deconstruction
of the frame—it does not aim entirely to negate its “idea” but to mobilize it
ethically.13 Eisenstein’s “charmed” parameter passes through the frame while
negotiating its political history and use. It charges cinema’s historicity with
framing the appearance of nonindifferent nature as dynamic historical change
and as the historical indifference of cinematic institutions to some more robust
exhibition of his own corporeal labor: the degree that he could “keep secrets”
by simply placing them in plain view. New historical conditions do not make
Eisenstein’s montage directly accessible; instead, as it recedes into our own his-
torical immanence, it awaits further improvisational informatic work. Similarly,
visual music synchronization and dissonant synchronization provide additional,
but immanent, gestures for framing and deframing the cinematic image and its
mutually inscribed sound track.
These considerations suggest that no production of sense or sensation can
simply apply the aesthetics of prior stylistics of synchronization without appro-
priating them for conditions other than those at which they were directed or
without working through its own complex historical relationships in terms of
aesthetics, politics, and ethics. Passing Through, reworking classical stylistics of
musical audiovisuality, emphasizes free jazz as an articulation of the capacities
of black musicians historically and in the 1970s14 but without visually erasing
their gestures in service of an alienated mode of abstraction, contributing to
further commoditization of radical music in popular media, or visually fetish-
izing the bodies of jazz performers. To the degree that global media production
circulates affective labor precisely in the terms Passing Through rejects, Passing
Through critiques global media production while articulating the musical iden-
tity of a “Black Pacific” in relation to what Paul Gilroy calls the “Black Atlantic,”
a West Coast site where jazz’s transatlantic epistemologies are recalled and re-
oriented with regard to global decolonization movements.

A Black Pacific
In articulating these historiographies and epistemologies in relation to a haptic,
gestural reception of improvisational jazz poetics, Passing Through produces a
cognate form of Paul Gilroy’s version of black musical epistemologies15 (but
some two decades earlier) and instantiates what Gilroy sees as the “rhizomatic”
and kinesic transversality of black historical meaning in another place: the Black
Pacific. As cinema, Passing Through achieves the instantiation of a Black Pacific
by deontologizing those extraordinarily problematic practices of synchronizing
jazz as a musical function of dependency that became conventional and even
praised in commercial cinemas of the 1950s and 1960s. Passing Through subjects
156 / Chapter 5

montage, visual music, and dissonant synchronization to an improvisational

aesthetic so their utility can be entirely contrary to conventional uses, and anti-
thetical within the same work. Concretely, montage, visual music, and dissonant
synchronization are subjected not to particularized or foundational meanings
but to the poetics of antiphony. Bringing the antiphonic gesturality of impro-
visation to cinematic narrative and to the cinema audience, the film privileges
the salient instance of antiphony, the ensemble, which Moten theorizes as the
aesthetic “unit” of the black radical aesthetic.
Passing Through works through a great number of black relationships, then,
testing the meanings of masculinity, sexuality, and community as lessons in
biopolitical resistance and learning that loving music means loving people. Yet
alienation “in the European sense,” as James16 puts it, is never shorted here, nor
is the questioning of social alienation in terms of the social politics of its time.
Not the least of the black relationships that the film explores brings a poetics of
relationship to counter what Édouard Glissant17 calls the “flash agents” of the
transnational media industries. Since the film concludes by suggesting the
recording of not only the ensemble’s music but also, more pointedly, the pro-
tagonist’s solo, Warmack relearns and expands his understanding of political
history and jazz performance, contesting flash agencies of transnational media
by drawing out the ensemble as well as drawing the soloist out of the ensemble.
The future of the ensemble as community is found in the capacity for the
ensemble to host the potential leadership heard in the contingent individuation
of the solo.
Jazz as a musical rhetoric of social ensemble and creative individuation re-
lates U.S. “hush harbors” to global developments—namely, the still ongoing
complications of decolonization to which Langston Hughes had earlier linked
jazz as historical and contemporary Afro-diasporic musical articulation, as I
discuss below. Ernst Bloch’s utopian notion of music as historical presentiment
and utopian imagining (see Chapter 3) is reversed here. Instead of history
framed through the development and recapitulation of carpet motifs that the
critical imagination can entirely grasp, jazz struggles to capture, by remaking
differently, a musical force field that does not subsist in supratemporal time;
it struggles to recognize and construct the difference between local situation
(Warmack’s release from prison) and historical dissemination (Poppa’s travels
and death). Historical relationships are lost, fragmented, or distant to one an-
other. Jazz as a legacy of historical temporality requires reinvention in material
conditions and so takes the form of Warmack’s struggle to recompose his per-
forming ensemble as a recording unit in a privative present tense. This struggle
depends on and so illuminates Warmack’s ties to Poppa, his spiritual and musi-
cal mentor, albeit one who is most often displaced from the musical group and
who dies before Warmack can reunite with him and his musical rootedness. The
production of privation in south Los Angeles, then, means that the rhizomatic
 Black Relationship / 157

connection to global struggle is broken and must be reassembled—in musical

terms, “reensembled”—not simply as event but also in commodity terms, requir-
ing the skills of image production as well as those of musical performance.
The film’s enactment of Warmack’s romance with Maya, a photographer and
graphic designer, notably does not deny the difficulty of creating love against
the raced, sexed, and gendered histories of economic alienation and incarcera-
tion. Yet their romance plays without exploitation or stereotype, singular in
American jazz film. Crucially, Maya’s narrated memories provide the important
point of view that connects Warmack’s Los Angeles struggle, framed in terms of
the legacies of the U.S. civil rights movement, to global struggle: Maya’s deceased
husband, the father of her child, was a photographer who documented decolo-
nization movements in Africa. Musical production is local; distribution is global.
While Poppa turns out to be the remembered link to jazz as sound, Maya’s
images provide the crucial contemporary production of memory as circulating
vision. Together, historical sound and contemporary memory lead Warmack to
the card reader Oshun, who prophecies Warmack’s fortune while gifting him
with a box of seemingly banal objects once belonging to Poppa. Warmack
decodes these object symbols, understanding their formal hieroglyphics in a
logic of temporal destiny, and maps a path toward greater autonomy.
And perhaps because so many of the visual stories of jazz, and black music
in general, have been told outside filmic narrative, we find this film deriving its
strategies for visualizing a jazz mode of production from graphic materials out-
side cinema history but belonging squarely to musical history: record album
covers. These provide the visuality iconizing the key temporal junctures and
disjunctures of the film whereby its lasting meanings are inscribed. If the film-
makers had few recent resources by which to mount a lasting black cinema, the
film can hardly be faulted for not shouldering those historical burdens in a sin-
gle work. The cryptic ending, culminating in what appears to be a jazz record
label, thus invokes other historical sources from those of industrial cinema.
Although period critiques of jazz as a musical subversion of “cockroach
capitalism”18 seem obvious critical sources for the depiction of the recording
conglomerate’s relation to Warmack’s ensemble, Hughes’s literary interpre-
tation of the child’s poetry primer as jazz album with liner notes in Ask Your
Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz19 provides a lesser-known model of the relation of
the jazz listener to the jazz commodity object, as I argue in the next section.
Moten observes that jazz is an aesthetic, epistemological, and material project:
“That which would be named—the sound of the structure and agency that is
improvisation—is that which the crossroads only figures: the ensemble.” Sug-
gesting that improvisation in jazz amounts to a resistant gesture similar to Lud-
wig Wittgenstein’s “ostensive gesture,” an “enactment on the other side of lin-
guistic failure,” Moten asserts, “improvisation is sounding in linguistic failure”:
“Meanwhile, the ensemble—the complex phenomenal object—is what asserts
158 / Chapter 5

itself at the moment when phenomenon and object each appear in the and as
the eclipse of the other.”20 Moten discusses jazz performance as phenomenon
and as object. Passing Through deploys stylistics of synchronization with regard
to the ensemble to be recorded, though, as if to better handle and to archive
the appearance and eclipse that Moten describes and that Warmack repeatedly
enacts not only in his musical performance but, for example, in his failure to
communicate with Maya or in his failure to be able to describe to his collabora-
tors why he cannot play as he used to. In this sense, the mediation of jazz as
enduring, circulating object is necessary to bridge eclipses and failures that
repeat in the music and in the everyday life where music is made.
Jazz solo and jazz ensemble, as cinematic rendering of world historical
meanings—that is, including radical dependency and radical liberation—
pertain to the process of creating a musical recording: Warmack and his ensem-
ble enact the crossroads where phenomenon and object appear and eclipse the
other but, further, must also mine oral histories, visual production, and futural
relation to circulate the ensemble and solo as media commodity. Oshun and
Maya contribute these measures to the temporal relation Warmack unfolds as
he gathers the affective modalities of time. In this way, Warmack’s ensemble’s
sound proceeds to its archival, recorded temporalities, fulfilling the destiny of
the improvisation as object and phenomenon that the film itself has prepared.
The questions Passing Through raises and answers are also taken up in other
narrative allegories thematizing black public spheres and popular musical com-
modities. Perry Henzell’s The Harder They Come (1972) presents a not-dissimilar
narrative of a struggle to record, but set to reggae. In this Jimmy Cliff vehicle, a
musician struggles to cut a reggae record amid the obstacles of drug dealing and
record-industry corruption. Setting its affirmative resources in the crossroads
of black production and black reception, The Harder They Come allegorizes the
country/city binary to frame a struggle for black musical independence that is
similar to that depicted in Passing Through.
Another, more immediate precedent for Clark’s film is Wattstax (1973), the
Mel Stuart documentary made in association with the Stax/Volt record company
and for which Passing Through director Clark served as cinematographer.21
Wattstax and Passing Through set out the problematic of production against the
problematic of reception as a crossroads, wherein sound-image relations, stylis-
tics of synchronization, and historical allegory develop futural calls for future
responses without minimizing the difficulties of actual tensions or the violence
of historical displacements.
At the time of Wattstax’s production, as Mark Anthony Neal points out,22
soul music had become the dominant form of black musical speech, though it
was pulled between the increasing pressures of commercialization and the
notion of soul music informing a black public voice. Wattstax presents these two
pressures and attempts to reconcile them in the concert that inspired the film,
 Black Relationship / 159

featuring artists on the Stax/Volt label and, after the concert footage itself seemed
inadequate to telling the story of the music, emphasizing the community of
Watts in south Los Angeles. Throughout, the film documents discussions of
history, work and leisure, civil rights and American identity, and gender differ-
ences related to the experience of race that take place in casual social venues,
such as hair salons or barbershops. Watts’s music locales are also emphasized to
show that soul music, however much an occasion for a national gathering, is
also the local expression of storefront churches and neighborhood nightclubs.
These last are gendered along the lines that Gilroy suggests: Masculine vocalists
in the nightclub celebrate illicit love affairs and the ability to provide sexual
pleasure; female gospel singers in the church stress a musical corporeality that
vocalizes liberation as a spiritual deliverance. Significantly, Wattstax closes with
Isaac Hayes, the quintessential organic intellectual as priestly musician repre-
senting the journey out of bondage that Gilroy describes and prefiguring hip-
hop celebrity’s preoccupation with hyperconsumerist adornment as he takes
off his cape to reveal a harness of gold chains while singing “Down from the
Mountain.”
Much as Angela Davis describes the importance of airing grievances through
song at blues gatherings or in jazz clubs in the 1920s and 1930s,23 here again,
musical antiphony is found not only to be active within specific locations but
also to structure the passing back and forth of meaning between community
and concert more broadly. Similarly, in Passing Through, the location of the
nightclub where Warmack and his group practice constitutes a musical public
sphere, though the film’s fictional setting allows this to be presented as an over-
lapping of the pressures of marginalization and violence and the power of
instrumental jazz music to convoke historicity and futurity in the present. When
the drug dealers who cooperate with the music industry to keep their musicians
dependent enter the club, the scene seems to depict “cockroach capitalism.” Yet,
when the music plays, framing flashbacks that provide historical context and
character development, the jazz club, though without vocalists, works similarly
to the ways that Gilroy and Davis describe.
Otherwise, of course, the musical styles and visual materials of Passing
Through as a whole are very different from those of the documentation and
commentary compiled in Wattstax. Passing Through is as interested in the rhi-
zomatic connections of the local, national, and global as Wattstax is concerned
with locality as a site where national discourses are anchored and reframed.
Further, Passing Through animates meanings of musical history and collective
identity in a graphical allegory, proposing that to watch the film is actually to
watch the process of conceiving, rehearsing, and recording the music that sets
the film’s narrative in motion and propels it toward its political conclusions.
Few stories of jazz have been told in musical or narrative film with as integral
a role for local music or as attuned to the ontologies, epistemologies, and ethics
160 / Chapter 5

of jazz globality.24 It is useful, here, to keep in mind the conflicts and tensions
playing out historically between U.S. cinema and jazz performance. In such films
as Leo Penn’s A Man Called Adam (1966), a black jazzman played by Sammy
Davis, Jr., proves himself too arrogant for a white agent’s ego to handle. The
agent retaliates by withholding bookings until Davis literally crawls to him on
his hands and knees, begging for work. Accurate in its characterization of the
primarily white-owned recording industry’s attempt to control musical produc-
tion and horrifically racist in its punitive humiliation of the character played by
Davis, the movie compounds its insult by depicting Davis as being forced to sing
for his supper on a tour of his hated homeland, the Deep South. Once tragic in
his substance abuse, he again meets tragedy when he is killed by a white suprem-
acist, but the music is not lost: His white protégé on the trumpet inherits his
mouthpiece. Jazz here narrates national race relations but from the point of view
of an appropriative white guilt that appreciates jazz music if only because the
deaths of black musical stars have inspired so many talented white men to (con-
tinue to) occupy the spotlight. The gestures in question—inscribing domina-
tion, addiction, and death—are precisely those of the racial terror that Gilroy
argues was unspeakable or that Moten describes in terms of linguistic failure.
Here, however, they recapitulate jazz sound being delivered to dominant histori-
cal epistemologies, ontologies, or ethics.
Passing Through is also singular in its upsetting of conventional associations
between musical genius and drug addiction. Consider the way that the jazz
sound track of Otto Preminger’s The Man with the Golden Arm (1955) deploys
some of the angular harmonic stridencies of postbop jazz yet ties them to the
exoticizing character of a bass line more appropriate to striptease. In a key
sequence of Man, jazz drummer Frankie Machine (Frank Sinatra) can no longer
resist the temptations of his neighborhood heroin dealer, Louie (Darren
McGavin). Frankie, frustrated with his inability to become a professional drum-
mer, sits at the counter of the neighborhood bar and, in the mirror hanging over
the counter, sees Louie approach. Frankie visually “connects” with Louie through
the reflection in the overhead glass. The sound track rises, emphasizing the
exchange of gazes that leads Frankie after Louie and into the dealer’s apartment.
The sequence carefully choreographs the image track and the musical score to
synchronize the off-kilter economy of corporeal attraction between the two
men, with the dealer’s seduction of Frankie taking over suspense as to his fate
as a musician. The sequence musicalizes lower-class street masculinity and
frustrated aesthetic aspiration as a desire for dependency and subjugation. The
sequence climaxes with a melodic flourish and rhythmic thrust as Louie injects
heroin into Frankie’s arm. Frankie’s eyes widen, then he passes out; the sound
track softens and fades out. The penetration of Frankie’s inept musical body
by Louie’s pharmacological needle shuts off Frankie’s vision and, with it, the
insistent rhythmic drive of need, making him deaf to the world around him.
 Black Relationship / 161

The jazz cue here is a “record” of addiction playing again, silencing the under-
employed musical worker’s rhythmic “machine.”
In contrast, in Passing Through, addiction is presented as a biopolitical
equivalent of disciplinary incarceration and economic marginalization. When
Maya visits the jazz club where Warmack and his musicians are rehearsing, one
of the musicians tells her about his past as an addict. A flashback begins that,
like many of the flashbacks in the film, is carefully photographed in black and
white to match historical footage. This musical-flashback sequence follows an
earlier series of flashbacks in which jazz music being played is juxtaposed with
scenes of a prison uprising and a civil rights–era riot. Some of that footage is
archival, but some was created to feature Passing Through’s players as protago-
nists in a history of racial conflict and demands for equality. Here, though, the
jazz being played in Warmack’s club takes us to a run-down room where the
band member narrates, without dialog, a past heroin overdose. The narration
is delivered in terms of improvised musical synchronization, recounting the
struggle with addition but with a different outcome, one emphasizing jazz as an
ensemble struggle for historical consciousness and working freedom rather than
historical narcosis compensating for frustrated ambition. As the musical sound
track becomes increasingly insistent in the flashback, we see the band member
taken to a hospital, his friends and girlfriend frantic with desperation. He is
pronounced dead by the attending physician. His physical stasis is diagrammed
by a hospital monitoring device that traces his nonexistent pulse: He has flat-
lined. This diagram is a graphical scoring of techno-scientific time, of dominant
time, of the biopolitical present. It is not the time of free music, which continues
to play on the sound track—ragged, insistent, unstopping, hardly attached to
the scene at all except for the living desperation it animates, dramatized in the
desperate gestures of the musician’s girlfriend in the hospital corridor. Poppa
suddenly enters the hospital room, and, seeing the band member’s condition,
he blows a note on a folkloric horn. The note fuses with the sound track, syn-
chronizing sound and image in musical time and taking over what had been a
dead relationship between techno-scientific or biopolitical time and the still
body of the comatose musician.
The note that Poppa plays to revive the musician belongs as much to the
history being narrated in audiovisual terms as to the jazz being played in the
present tense in Warmack’s club. This complex musical narration of overlap-
ping temporal modalities synchronizes jazz as doubled immanence, belonging
to suprahistorical duration but activated in the material contradictions of the
present moment. It calls the musician back into his body, but this is the musical
narration of memory: Poppa’s sound calls the musician back into his body,
then, but from the future tense of his own musical voice. Hearing Poppa’s note,
we see the musician’s eyes flutter and open. Here is jazz as pharmakon:25 This
is jazz as affective labor and as antidote to, rather than the condition of, the
162 / Chapter 5

affective labor of addiction. Its time unfurls through doubled potentiality as

traveling multiplicity, heard in the present, transversal to history and to future
but remembered and related in the present. It awakens the musician, restores
his body, and allows him to speak a past tense of which he was otherwise
unconscious. Passing Through’s jazz temporality interrupts, alters, and cures
by way of narrating and releasing the biopolitical confinement of the musi-
cian’s body and by way of recalling the memory of jazz in the present tense of
struggle.
This complex temporality informs the entire film. Between Passing Through’s
opening shot of jazz musicians improvising and its final shot of an album cover
signaling an emergent mode of record production, an exploited ensemble liber-
ates itself by taking control of its musical destiny. The film moves from the pre-
sentation of jazz performance to presenting the film itself as a jazz recording:
Performance and recording are storied ways of articulating jazz. With this
graphical allegory of jazz as mode of production, the film also suggests a jazz
model for other forms of performance and recording, such as film. Passing
Through performs the relation between jazz and its own material, technological,
and affective reproduction.26 Whether seen as a demand for a black cinema in
its own moment or as a summary of jazz as developmental music, the listening
knowledge of the audience and the visual knowledge necessary for identifying
African independence leaders are crucial to viewing Passing Through.

Jazz in the Hands of Listeners

Historically, whether in the Baroque era’s “eye music” or in the long-playing
album cover, the presence of auditory and visual musical materials suggests
transpositions in the circulation of composed music for performance, where
musical emblems diagram the affective dimensions of knowledge associated
with not only seeing and hearing but also “holding” music—remembering or
archiving music. Musical emblems may be otherwise representative depictions
of composers or performers or may be diagrams of heard mobilities, claims on
historical, social, cultural, economic, or technological relationships. In these
ways, musical commodities, such as printed scores, media recordings, or album
covers, may fold in an ethics apart from their notational instructions, which may
be obscured by the marketing appeal such emblems may make formally. Clark’s
distinct aims and methods in presenting the cinematic recording of a materialist
aesthetics of free jazz have numerous historical parallels or predecessors.
Consider the pun on dominant modernity and black transatlantic moder-
nity appearing on Anthony Braxton’s 1981 release (Figure 5.1). The album cover
features a reproduction of Wassily Kandinsky’s painting Black Relationship
(1924); on the reverse, Braxton’s diagrammatic graphical scores for improvisa-
tory performance, presented as near hieroglyphics of shape, color, line, and text,
 Black Relationship / 163

FIGURE 5.1 Anthony Braxton’s Six Compositions: Quartet (1981): Back cover image
(Antilles AN-1005-A, detail).

point to the participatory dynamics guiding the performance of each track. The
thoughtful Braxton appears amid the miniature scores on the back cover, as if
he were contemplating his diagrammatic work. The juxtaposition of the front
and back cover imagery invites multiple comparisons: If Kandinsky’s meditative
paintings are part of a modernism that reacted against objective figuration
through intimations of musical experience, Braxton’s diagrammatic composi-
tions describe the musical generation of open-ended works in what Braxton
calls a “trans-African” idiom.27 During a moment when jazz, as a popular music
genre, had largely dissipated, and black music was renewing its energies in soul,
funk, disco, and hip-hop, Braxton’s cover signifies a switch in focus from the
164 / Chapter 5

immanent energies harnessed in the musicalization of modernism’s painterly

image to the graphical notations indicating the compositional coherence of his
highly variable musical forms. Creating music whose form depends on processes
invoked in its performance, Braxton utilizes for his own notational ends spa-
tialized geometries similar to those figured in Kandinsky’s painting.
Here, the relationships between composer and score, between members of
the quartet, and between performer and composition constitute black relation-
ships. But perhaps the relationship between free jazz and mass-cultural repro-
duction of image and text is also a black relationship. Braxton’s appropriation
of Kandinsky for the front of his record humorously suggests that, rather than
being considered transcendental or nonobjective, musical meanings are to be
considered generative as well as concrete.
Braxton’s placement of his graphical scores in the hands of his listeners can
be understood by imagining the instructions for a planned yet indeterminate
series of musical kinesics embedded within the instructions for another planned
and indeterminate series of gestures for listening. The album sleeve sets up this
contrast between two series of gestures separated into distinct regimes: one
musical, the other technical; one of articulation, the other of listening—distinct
regimes, of course, separated by time and space. As an invitation to listen and
to reconsider the meaning of a black relationship, though, the album-cover
graphics lead one to listen for productive gestures and perhaps to compensate
for the absence of the performers and composers. To reclaim the visual repre-
sentation of music through geometrical figures on an album-cover sleeve as
reference to improvisational composition and performance at the same time
provides suggestion for repeated hearings that produce variegated experiences
for the listener.
If a black circle dominates Kandinsky’s Black Relationship, a black shellac
record dominates Theodor Adorno’s early critique of the recording industries:
“What the gramophone listener actually wants to hear is himself, and the artist
merely offers him a substitute for the sounding image of his own person, which
he would like to safeguard as a possession.”28 Late in life, Adorno found that
opera could best be served by records’ ability to be collected and listened to
repeatedly. The opera auditors of Adorno’s imagination are “lonely and percep-
tive . . . hibernating for purposes unknown” (285). He also suggests that filmic
montage might inform musical production and, finally, that music must look
to film for its production motifs. Adorno’s emphasis tends to be on an individu-
alized listening to composers and performers. Listening as a form of enacting
or experiencing knowledge is not considered, nor is music explored as a form
capable of representing cultural knowledge. Additionally, he does not consider
the material gestures of listeners who have (limited) means to activate and to
control their musical apparatus. In his description of girls listening to public
phonographs in Nice, France (273), they are literally hooked up to the recording
 Black Relationship / 165

industry, standing below text and images advertising the songs they pay a token
to hear while waiting to be picked up by strangers. It is a strangely louche yet
hysterical connectivity—rather than auditory or economic mastery—that ani-
mates this image: bourgeois female bodies closing the circuits of capital precisely
in offering themselves up to Adorno’s troubled gaze.
If, as Thomas Levin suggests, Adorno concentrates on music’s own autono-
mous gesture (it writes itself),29 this emphasis discounts the immanent episte-
mologies within musical production where reception commands the hearing of
actions exterior to recorded products. Adorno’s interest in establishing the
indexicality of the record groove has more to do with an interest in applying the
techniques of cinematic montage to audio production. So Adorno treats culture
industries as monolithic entities producing kitsch and “light music,” such as
jazz, when the real power of his critique might be more effectively directed at
the nature of cross-holdings and conflicts of interest between various industries,
forms of media, media distribution, and media properties. Also, differing econo-
mies of scale and production regimes mean products differ greatly in their rela-
tionships to reception communities. In these differences, one finds immanent
contradictions not entirely registered in the material contradictions of music or
cinema production to the degree that production communities and reception
communities can be made coincident: immanence and information in whose
synchronization a different subject of history appears.30
Album sleeves and recorded discs may make visual claims toward the ex-
change value of media products: Here are the mass visualities of advertising,
promotion, and calculation or, at the material surface of the disc, indecipher-
ability, blankness, the “picture” of the phonographic spiral, and the faint reflec-
tion of the listener. But these surfaces also may enact claims about the value of
the musical experience set in motion by the gestures of listeners. The form of
the commodity, its production, and its self-promotion as object of exchange
necessarily are mediated by the utility of the commodity for a listener and the
musical meanings to be interpreted. The phonograph album cover lacks depth
but has a flipside and interiority. These are tactile diagrams of music whose
visuality is turned inside out; they guide the hand toward the recording they
protect, but in an open-ended invitation to hear the music they diagram. For
those leaning toward Braxton’s often-demanding music, the graphical scores at
minimum provide an index to guide selections. Still, his scores remain largely
hieroglyphic to the uninitiated; as pictures of general dynamics that produce a
particular instance, they require a kind of mastery, some form of inside informa-
tion. If free jazz is to be counterposed to European modernism, how exactly is
free jazz to relate to audiences?
If it is a strain to hear the music within the free jazz wrapper, that is partly
because here, interiority operates in relation to the exteriorities of biopolitical,
bioinformatic time. The flip side, as it were, of Adorno’s reflective black pane and
166 / Chapter 5

the abyss of light music might precisely be jazz music as it records black cultural
production. If Adorno—or Eisler, for that matter, as discussed in Chapter 4—
wants sound recording to model itself on cinematic montage, during the 1970s,
jazz composers, such as Braxton, and cinema directors, such as Clark, wanted
to construct recording media as jazz history. This history and its futures have
long been emblematized in and on jazz recordings, which have long provided
resources for their telling. Hughes’s Ask Your Mama literally presents his long-
developed verbalization of liberation poetics from jazz musicality. The book is
a musical primer of Afro-diasporic struggle that takes the form of a book-length
poem designed to be read as a jazz album cover in expanded form. The poetic
content of the text takes up jazz as music and as contemporary social commen-
tary, evincing Hughes’s long-standing interest in the poetics of jazz music as a
historical subject and a historical form, instantiated earlier as his illustrated
essay primer The First Book of Jazz.31
In Ask Your Mama, a score of the book’s “leitmotif,” the melody of the “Hesi-
tation Blues,” and a scored fragment of the melodic and rhythmic material of
“shave and haircut, fifteen cents” provides additional material to the reader, who
is invited to improvise, in the course of reading, an imagined musical ending
for each poem. Providing a visual design based on the graphical aesthetics of
the jazz album cover to support the performativities of jazz reading, the twelve
“moods” included in this book as album cover constitute musical “tracks.” Each
mood, or poem, is printed on the left side of the page, and this is, in essence, the
vocal “performance.” On the right side of each page, in italics, is a poetic descrip-
tion of an imaginary musical accompaniment, apparently derived from scored
material “gathered” for the reader from the resources of black musical history
by Hughes in the preface. The book as album cover, then, is musicological
archive, poetic essay, and performative reading, achieving social commentary—
a historical record presented as an opportunity for improvising with the musical
materials of black history. With the music heard in the process of reading gener-
ated in the engagement with the textual object, Ask Your Mama provides no
musical sound in the auditory domain but instead uses the graphic design of
jazz album covers as a musical setting and staging for the text.
Each of the twelve moods of Ask Your Mama, as well as the cover of the book,
is introduced with a small mosaic of abstract geometric shapes—graphic
emblems punctuating the title of each mood that suggest, variously, the crystal-
line asymmetries of postbop jazz; the integration of compositional and impro-
visational, directed and participatory aesthetic methods of jazz production; and
the piecing together of musical meaning that is demanded of the jazz listener.
The poems themselves situate the black poetic voice as emanating from “the
quarter of the Negroes,” an imagined locale for black articulation that is segre-
gated, restricted, contained, and yet, at the same time, broadly historical, dias-
poric, with global ramifications.
 Black Relationship / 167

At the end of the book, short texts gloss each of the twelve poems, provid-
ing a set of “liner notes” for the book as album. Significantly, while these notes
are supplemental in form, given to explain and to provide context for the
musical material (as in the tradition of many jazz album liner notes), they are
also given in language that is less poetic only by degrees, and there is no mark-
ing off the language of “jazz exegesis” as explication from jazz as poetic lan-
guage. Didactic or exegetic values of information are not delimited from musi-
cal performance. The notes, then, too, pertain to a jazz aesthetic where the
poetics of idiolectal composition give reason and occasion for explanation,
which is joined as a variation, or improvisation, to the musical body of the text.
The textuality of the liner notes does not situate the meanings of the musical
poetics given in the main text by functioning as their exterior but rather extends
and folds the performativities of jazz meaning back into the body of the text
held by readers.
For the reader, then, the gesture of turning pages, moving from musical
track to musical context, “mood” to “liner note,” is refashioned after the gestures
conditioning the reception of musical commodities: the flipping or unfolding
of the album cover, the drawing out of the flattened double album, the dual and
reversible planes that each contain a record. The jazz poem, in book form,
entreats the user to interrupt the dominant form of the book, generally sepa-
rated into poetic or descriptive languages, by applying the practices of orienting
oneself toward knowledge anchored in listening to recorded music. In folding
these gestures into the turning of book pages, and in doing so rustling, inter-
rupting, and resettling the conventional order of leafing through the sequential
pages of printed text, Hughes’s design prepares a musical grasp of the book for
the reader by presenting its artifactual surface as an antiphonic progression, a
sequence of calls and responses: a musical flipping or unfolding, a holding, then
a folding back and a moving on. Jazz musicality passes through the book, inter-
rupting its conventional serial form.
Just as the jazz hearer is folded into the antiphonies of black musical produc-
tion, so the reader’s experience of the poem comes as an antiphony, a call and
response engagement with the haptic and the visual, holding and beholding.
What does the listener “ask mama”? Jazz meanings are confined not to jazz
musical production necessarily or to American national identity but to Afro-
diasporic liberation struggles worldwide, and they are construed in the context
of, on the one hand, techno-scientific production and, on the other, cold war
geopolitics. The liner notes for the first mood, “Cultural Exchange,” explain:

A State Department visitor from Africa comes, wishing to meet Negroes.

He is baffled by the “two sides to every question” way of looking at things
in the South. Although he finds that in the American social supermarket
blacks for sale range from intellectuals to entertainers, to the African all
168 / Chapter 5

cellophane signs point to ideas of change—in an IBM land that pays

more attention to Moscow than to Mississippi. (86)

Observing a present in which superpower politics and supermarket commodi-

fication seem not only to divide the political subject but also to endlessly particu-
larize everyday experience in an “IBM land,” Hughes presents questions and an-
swers for musical listeners, musical readers, musical hands: black relationships.
Black liberation histories refract in mass-market packaging in differing
degrees; these histories figure in distinct iconologies pointing to relationships
between creative practices, musical production, and productions of identity spe-
cific to black histories and musics as well as to national and transnational ones.
Gilroy develops these antiphonies as defining modernity in terms of a counter-
modernity. Following W.E.B. DuBois but reframing “double consciousness” in
terms of transatlantic modernisms, Gilroy, too, argues that trauma is not inex-
pressible but rather spoken in terms of musical expression. Music emphasizes
“embodied subjectivity” as kinesics communicating but going beyond abstract
thought or text-based knowledge, pinpointing distinctive aesthetic components
of black communication.32
Poppa or Warmack in Passing Through or even Braxton’s self-presentation
on his album cover recalls Gilroy’s description of musical, “organic” intellectu-
als. Black music, for Gilroy, elaborates another articulation of a body politic
in dissemination, one that clarifies the antiphonies of cultural exchange that
Hughes draws as jazz poetry. Gilroy asks: “How are we to think critically about
artistic products and aesthetic codes which, though they may be traceable back
to one distinct location, have been changed either by the passage of time or by
their displacement, relocation, or dissemination through networks of commu-
nication and cultural exchange?” (80).
Braxton’s album cover folds his compositional labor against the reproduc-
tion of Kandinsky’s spiritual abstraction. This fold of the album sleeve enables
a flippant gesture, valuing jazz as creative labor while putting it in the place of
high art: a generative substitute for high modernism. Such covers diagram rela-
tions between the recorded sound, whatever futural promises the commodity
form may hold, and the auditory practices of listeners. Yet declining in influence
in its commodity form, how was free jazz to extend listening knowledge after
what Hughes called an “IBM land”? Clark’s Passing Through provides one ver-
sion of an answer.

A Poetics of Relating Ensemble and Solo

Given Passing Through’s precedents in American jazz cinema and the ways that
it so thoroughly breaks with them, it is clear that the film draws on a different
set of materials and intertexts than those of Hollywood for its frames, themes,
 Black Relationship / 169

motivations, and audiovisual strategies. Again, the film’s opening sequence

demonstrates a visuality cognate with graphic materials outside cinema history
but belonging squarely to the history of the mass media: jazz and record album
covers. The graphical parallels relevant to the colorized orchestration of Tap-
scott’s performance, for example, are primarily those of the photos seen on so
many jazz covers from the 1950s and 1960s.33
The optical overlays in the film’s introductory sequence, featuring the per-
forming hands of the jazz ensemble, are a prime example. Orchestration in jazz
here means invoking traditions of improvisation and of “following,” in the
musical or dance sense—of aligning with a movement already established by
another performer. By the time the sequence ends, the aural layers are crowded
with instrumental parts responding to the musical themes laid out, and a visual
cloud of colors follows the music. The image of the performers’ hands on their
instruments differs from narrative and documentary practices in that the musi-
cians are not individualized as persons before their performance but rather attain
musical identities inasmuch as they are participating in the elaboration of an
audiovisual orchestration. We do not see their faces or see them standing on
stage, as we might in an expressive shot of a musician during a “live” perfor-
mance. This sequence lays out a diegetic trajectory established through musical
line sense and not through a concert venue, club, or some other spatial con-
straining of musical cinematography. Above all, the musicians are not relegated
to a background scene in front of which others will dance or romance; their per-
formance is an end in and of itself, even as it prompts the narrative directly.
The visual intertexts here may be the optical overprinting typical of visual
music experiment, like the optical delay effects diagramming gestural streams
or visual “echoes,” whether in Gjon Mili’s Jammin’ the Blues (1944; see Chap-
ter 1) or in the cascading ballet dancers’ movements in Norman McLaren’s Pas
de deux (1968). In Passing Through, though, relevant prior media objects would
also include the two-color mood shots typical of many jazz albums—for exam-
ple, those of the Blue Note record label. These album cover photographs empha-
size affect and form, with jazz sound as a medium that can, as Boyd suggests
black music does more generally, fuse formal aspects of musical expression with
the vernaculars of specific inflections. The formal aspects of the photography
stress line and tone in what is almost a two-tone chiaroscuro. Performers’ articu-
lations are communicated through expressive facial gestures and their hand
movements as they play. Taken together, these values produce graphical com-
positions that stress instrumental mastery and emotional intensity. Often, the
musicians’ hands are shot according to a photographic convention that fore-
grounds them in relation to the rest of their bodies. In turn, this iconology of
artist as expression, gesture, and instrument foregrounds an articulatory moment
that, as often as not, points up the emotional meanings of the music in relation
to the visual compositions.34
170 / Chapter 5

The scene in which Warmack attempts to find his sound during rehearsal
also points up meanings of jazz thematized by the film and reflected in album
cover art. During this jam session, another saxophonist is improvising, and
Warmack appears to be trying to find a way into the music. He seems lost or
confused, wondering exactly what he is hearing and thus what he is to play. The
sound track here is processed with distortion and delay effects that depict the
sax man’s hearing as “out of sync.” The film repeatedly cuts away and returns to
the jam session, with each cutaway cued by sonic distortions in the sound track.
Warmack, dissociated from his own musical identity by his time in the peniten-
tiary, is able to intuit through this distortion the scene of Poppa’s passing and,
in so doing, begins to resolve for himself the steps he needs to take toward
refinding his signature sound. The film invokes jazz as a scene of performance
in which unexpected distortions can free up musical space such that a musician
does not simply follow the line but may hear the way to a new vision of the
musical legacy. The sound of jazz is a vibration, an emanation in the world—not
so much unifying transcendent temporality but a form that emphasizes the
place of the present in relationship to an immanent temporality that can reveal
identity, and become historical, by also calling toward a futural struggle.
These themes propose jazz as an irruptive ethical epistemology—that is,
where action and knowledge are mutually determining, ethical knowledge, as
“pure sound,” “resonance,” “distortion,” or “vibration,” exists as sonic material
to be heard penetrating through rationalized architectures that circulate exploi-
tation. As such, jazz communicates a musical knowledge to be reshaped by the
performer. Although in the film, these themes are developed vis-à-vis a performer
who is struggling for personal vision to be able to rejoin his musical colleagues,
similar notions of jazz (and of popular music more generally) exist as an irrup-
tive epistemology of vibration typical of album cover iconography.35
Revisiting the narrative climax of Passing Through, in which Warmack
ambushes the mobsters who have been sabotaging his efforts to organize his
musicians’ collective, the sound wave is similarly figured. After killing two at
close range, he chases the third, their leader—whose European accent suggests
the global scope of cultural exploitation—into a forest. Warmack’s gunshot,
aimed at the mobster’s back as he flees, reverberates, and with its echo comes a
freeze-frame of the man from the front, falling in midair. An optical zoom blurs
the frame toward the viewer as the sound of the gunshot resonates. Here, the
blurred zoom stresses the graphical composition as a visual counterpart to a
sound emanating from a musician and traveling through space. Agency resides
not necessarily with the man who has fired the gun but with the man whose
gun’s sound reaches the listener. This sort of sound event—no simple sound
effect, but one with significance because it is meant to be heard—is also an
album-cover art staple.36 Any synthesis of musical recording and political move-
ment is tentative and incomplete, of course—at best, a temporal diagramming
 Black Relationship / 171

rather than a completed, constitutive event. This synthesis has to be tentative,

in that it indicates a tentative ground at which to articulate changed conditions
and to make new demands; but, in becoming definitive, the music will have to
move on.

Expanding the Archive

This stylistic of synchronization requires not simply an account of the audience’s
grasp of formal elements in sound track or image track but that these elements
become accessible in the reception of time-based media layered as streams. In
speaking of audience gestures toward screen media or media distributed through
cinematic networks, instrumented through televisual networks, or articulated
through digital networks, one addresses the capacity to virtually touch what
Anne Friedberg37 calls the “virtual window” of the screen. As Friedberg shows,
with respect to the screen, the mobility the “virtual window” grants is condi-
tioned within the larger historical contingencies extending haptic and kines-
thetic engagements with streaming media. Mary Anne Doane suggests in her
discussion of cinema’s “cutting” of time as the shot that the cinematic stream of
time also archives time. For Doane, two simultaneous epistemologies are
archived in cinematic time: the shot as the lived time of the individual (Doane
suggests that in the works of such directors as Pier Paolo Pasolini, we see a nar-
rative epistemology) while cinema also archives an index, in the sense Charles
Pierce describes, as a thermodynamic datum (operating within a probabilistic
epistemology).38 These considerations indicate that mobility conditioned by the
shot and the reconfiguration of everyday life archived in cinematic time are at
stake, then, in the exhibition of streaming layered media. Where the stream of
cinematic time is projected via technical means to cut into the time of recep-
tion, more than liveness or the actual datedness of media streams is projected.
“Virtually touching” the simultaneously informatic and narratological episte-
mologies of inscribed media streams as they are animated and situated in recep-
tion, as I have shown, draws on the complex technical capacities of the media
installation and object as well as the complex affective capacities of receiving
audiences.
Affective labor is archived in technical reproducibility, then, while necessar-
ily being conducted in relation to it. The feeling of action we exert at the multi-
media screen is modal in the sense I have described of being divergent from, yet
contradictory within, the framing technics and architectures that partially deter-
mine our positions, postures, and movements during reception. No single the-
ory of spectatorship or audition can determine this doubled immanence of
affective labor, because it is always immanent to the ordering of an event within
some relation of contemporaneity and historiality. Considering the affective
labor of making sense and the polyform technical layering of streaming media
172 / Chapter 5

in reference to Deleuzian understanding of affect as actualizing virtual potential,

we can see, however, a clarification and a complication. Affective labor draws on
the immanence of virtuality, and the affective labor of the engaged audience is
never reducible to the technical operations of media exhibition. In this sense,
audience conduct and contact with streaming media means that the affective
experience of technical synchronization may be, in some cases or to some degree,
a stylistics or means of flight through technical reproducibility that is not depen-
dent or fully determined by it. And to the degree that events occur as technically
reproduced possibilities on the basis of synchronized streams—the sound effects
of visual montage or the haptic effects of audiovisual montage, for example—
technical means of reproducing media streams also capture virtuality and affec-
tive labor. In thinking through the ability, apparently promised by “paperless
technologies,” of the virtual to be archived, Jacques Derrida questions whether
transitions of inscription in media also suggest that the philosopheme of the
virtual has become unmoored from the absolute opposition to the actual that
it holds in Gilles Deleuze’s Bergsonism:39

What will become of this “full and effective actuality of the taking-place”
when it becomes necessary to remove the concept of virtuality from the
couple that opposes it to actuality, to effectivity, to reality? Will one be
obliged to continue thinking that there is no imaginable archive for the
virtual, for what happens in virtual space and time? It is hardly probable,
this mutation is in progress, but it will be necessary to keep a rigorous
account of this other virtuality, to abandon or restructure from top to
bottom our inherited concept of the archive. The moment has come to
accept a great stirring in our conceptual archive, and in it to cross a
“logic of the unconscious” with a way of thinking of the virtual which
is no longer limited by the traditional philosophical opposition between
act and power.40

For Derrida, the opposition between virtual and actual is in a long process
of shift toward “spectralization.” This tendency itself is ordered within a larger
historical process that is indivisible from writing, understood as the techno-
politics of hominization—that is, of the advent of the human. Where, for Deleuze
and Felix Guattari, the periodic table or musical scores are evidence of a signify-
ing diagrammatic relation41 ensuring the efficacy of affective labor that actual-
izes the virtual in lived corporeality, rather, Derrida argues, “information expro-
priation” produces a trembling, epochal shift.
But here, in jazz cinema, any such embodiment or shift is subjected to the
unfolding and recalling of historical epistemologies, ontologies, or ethics sus-
pended in traumatic experience, such as addiction, privation, or death, and,
more specifically, the biopolitics of personhood and transnational public being.
 Black Relationship / 173

Gilroy’s Black Atlantic (and see my summary in Chapter 1) is reworked in Passing

Through or Wattstax in terms of stylistics of synchronization deploying doubled
immanence: Affective labor is work on, working out of, the relation of contem-
porary to historical time. Jazz articulates the meanings of citizenship, the freedom
found in working in ensemble or as solo, the creativity of historical knowledge,
antinomies not only raced and gendered but also sexed, as Alexander Weheliye42
points out. In these senses, affective labor becomes the archive and the unfurling
of doubled potentiality. In such a film as Passing Through, composition and
reception along with exhibitional program are synchronized in a complex cloud
of temporal modalities requiring an improvisational interpretation to decipher.
The film creates a pragmatics of audience conduct and contact with the cine-
matic work for some nonteleological—that is, improvisational—relationship
with historical transformation determined in, and interrupting, bioinformatic
time. Passing Through expands the archives of cinema and of jazz by diagram-
ming a historical recording of the ways in which the shifting status of the virtual
between immanence and information was contested in terms of possibility.
The pathos vital for Deleuze in Eisenstein (see Chapter 2) or the pity in
Francis Bacon’s painting, which Deleuze sees as resolving tensions between
abstract and abstract expressionist painting, is diagrammed in diastolic, systolic
rhythms carrying hysteria through painting. 43 Passing Through draws a still
broader and more conflicted outline of musical immanence, global capitalist
temporal regimes, and corporeal discipline. More broadly, situating album cov-
ers as mediation between producers and audiences by way of a visuality that,
when grasped, leads to listening, I have suggested two black relationships
between 1970s free jazz and history that complicate Deleuze’s contemporary
theorization of rhythm and haptic image. First, Hughes’s Ask Your Mama or
Braxton’s album cover relates jazz to the bioenergetic modernisms typified by
such avant-garde figures as Kandinsky and suggests jazz as the displaced emblem
of dominant modernisms that recurs within bioinformatic temporalities as
mastery of historical temporalization. Second, Passing Through suggests the rela-
tionship of jazz to world politics and its own technological reproduction, revis-
ing recognitions of its localization in Los Angeles in terms of a larger Black
Pacific. Finally, I point out a third relationship underlying both of these: the
relationship of free jazz to its own history within black music—solo leadership
arising in an embrace of the ensemble.
In 1977, pianists Mary Lou Williams and Cecil Taylor released the concert
recording Embraced. The title is spaced across the cover, graphically uniting
photos of the two artists beneath. On the flip side, the concept: “A concert of
new music for two pianos exploring the history of jazz with love.” The cover’s
black background is continued in the fold of the double album, which opens to
reveal the artists’ notes and biographies. Williams recounts her life in jazz from
the 1920s on, hoping to “show the full seep and history of this music . . . together
174 / Chapter 5

with some of the musical struggles it has been up against.” Taylor claims, in
writing that is equal parts poetry and criticism, “growth as inherent right.”44
This cover acts out the project of the music: Williams composed most tracks
to rehearse developments in black music from spirituals to bop, going “Back to
the Blues” and ending ironically with the George Gershwin standard “Can’t Get
Started.” Here, the ensemble becomes a duo, and the jazz avant-garde literally
plays with its history as Taylor’s textured variations situate Williams’s more the-
matic material to expand its reach and demand. As jazz was languishing as a
genre, Williams and Taylor attempted to invigorate it within a musical embrace—
one of historiographical narration, not idealization.
For many years now, for a range of software and hardware devices, designers
and technologists have attempted to revive the culture of the album cover.
Album covers extended visuality and textuality in graphical, tactical objects to
call listeners’ responses; in these objects, musicians’ gestures, image and text, or
listeners’ gestures corresponded asynchronously and asymmetrically within
developing musical cultures. Distinct from synchronized audiovisuals, such as
film or television, as well as distinct from synchronized interactive forms, such
as video games, these correspondences happened out of bioinformatic time or,
more properly, within a fold in it. Album covers, strangely incomplete image
objects containing musical experiences, read two ways: as emblems of a particu-
lar moment in the economies and cultures of recorded music and emblems that
circulate musical meanings and knowledges. In the case of free jazz, arguing for
its continued relevance, three relationships usually considered as external to
music and to cinema become vital to the grasp of material history: jazz as a
transmedial idiom; jazz as localizing style and, in Passing Through, a cinematic
stylization of the Black Pacific; and jazz as a complex temporal relation of
ensemble to solo, of organization to leadership, of collective effort and indi-
viduation, of event to object to phenomenon. No wonder album-cover text and
graphics are redesigned for digital consumer music devices, and not just for
marketing reasons. They continue to suggest an opaque correspondence not
between a visual world and an auditory world but rather between a visual-
textual field45 and the instrumental meanings of “handling” music as time. They
effect, in the diagrammatic form of the commodity object, those legible, grasp-
able poetics of the ethics of musical circulation and of the commoditization of
historical and social meaning, and the affective labor conditioning the legibility
of fixed material labor. These are the themes of Passing Through, a film that situ-
ates Hollywood as the antagonist within a narrative of Los Angeles’ decoloniza-
tion, and as a historial datum within listening distance of decolonizing Africa,
and then proceeds to improvise through cinema’s stylistics to screen the music
of historical south Los Angeles.
6
Melos, Telos, and Me
Transpositions of Identity in the Rock Musical

It is as if in endlessly retracing the course of our disappointment, we might still keep

open those junctures where a different outcome still seemed possible, one on which,
say, Arnold won the contest, or Louise became Tulsa’s partner, or Rose, at the end of
the “Turn,” took off a wig. Hence, too, like Boy Rose, we turn and go off, in the Star
Mother’s train, to seek somewhere else, at some other show, the recognition that this
one has almost but not quite given us. . . . [W]ho can say it will never turn up?
—D. A. Miller, Place for Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical

I ain’t never goin’ back.

—Hedwig, in Hedwig and the Angry Inch, dir. John Cameron

Melos and Telos, or Origins of Love

On the way from a sideshow act entertaining scandal-seekers and startling
diners at an unlikely home-style-buffet-cum-rock-club in Kansas City to
star billing at a swank New York City rock club, where she delivers an anthe-
mic “last waltz,” Hedwig crosses territories familiar to and untrammeled
by filmic melodrama, musical biopic, rock musical, and rockumentary in
director and star John Cameron Mitchell’s 2001 film adaptation of his long-
running off-Broadway play, Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Hedwig’s audience
works through her trials and tribulations along the way: child abuse sexual
(by her father) and emotional (by her mother); surgical mutilation by a
crank doctor; betrayal and abandonment at the hands of a first love; lost
homes and irretrievable origins; sex experienced as illicit, sad, angry, and
failed relationships with gendered, raced, and classed conflicts; public
infighting and intimate divisions among band members, motivated in a
strange permutation of cold war geopolitics; delusions of star grandeur,
tawdry tabloid fame, and celebrity stalking; stolen authorship and misbe-
gotten millions at her own expense; emotional and physical manipulation
of her closest friends, her lover, and her agent; a terrible car crash; and an
apparently only imagined reconciliation with her “better half.” After all this,
176 / Chapter 6

her music stilled, the long-suffering, long-suffered Hedwig disappears, walking

alone, bare but for a small tattoo, toward the dim light of an empty street.
The film is more than a series of melancholic episodes interspersed with
rock-show spectacle, though. Hedwig proceeds not according to the narrative
rules of melodrama or musical but by subverting them in substance and in form,
whereby those classical film genres are filtered through postclassical formulae,
such as rock opera and rockumentary, to indicate, in retrospect, that the fates
of those earlier genres have long been sealed. The postclassical film genres Hed-
wig reworks come undone, too. Hedwig is hardly reverential of rock style as
spectacular transgression, as rock opera is. And the rockumentary’s “behind-
the-scenes” documentation of the elusive rock performer’s genius is mined to
produce a fictional demythification of rock genius as highly traded public
image. And as if Hedwig’s plundering of pop music, film style, and narrative
form were not enough, the film delightfully buttresses its combinatoire of drag
as sex-gender perplexity, its easy and constant deployment of marginal film and
video musical forms, and its encyclopedic proclivity for intertextual reference
with the outright bastardization of classical texts (Plato’s Symposium) and the
sacrilegious invocation of the Bible (apparently, standard and gnostic).
As we have seen for figures as disparate as Sergei Eisenstein, Oskar Fischinger,
Hanns Eisler, or Larry Clark, and in the numerous critical accounts I have dis-
cussed so far, works of time-based media and critical and cultural accounts of
music alike accord musicality a potentiality for and find within that potentiality
a critique of utopian and dystopian imaginings. For Theodor Adorno, musical-
ity speaks personhood and collectivity: Musicality says “we” in spite of musical
labor’s specific conditioning in material networks of commodity production.1
In comparison, Hedwig’s take on generic and gendered expression as extended
musical detour might seem more a dystopian crash of Deleuzian virtuality into
the ubiquitously mediated contemporary moment. The film is a jagged palimp-
sest of Western philosophy, spirituality, and sexed gender expression in a mediatic
scrambling of past, present, and future temporal modes, suggesting a lurching
narrative engine outputting personhood as murderous telos, a failing actualiza-
tion offset only in an occasional momentary kaleidoscope of selfhood exploding
as musical epiphenomenon. And, when Hedwig disappears, so disappears, per-
haps, our potential for identifying personhood as anything but a fragmented
contingent self-awareness, the blind spot of a media supersystem engineering us
in a program where retrospective melancholia defers future transformation.
In this chapter, I provide a reading of Hedwig as a temporal diagram of queer
personhood to clarify the pleasures it takes in an apparently punishing self-
expression. I am less interested in a reading of masochism or melancholia, here,
than in allowing the film to present a reading of the apparent rhetoric of realism
that such a bombastic, rhetorically extreme, and politically incorrect film invites.
How can it be called “realistic”—the word that one midwestern U.S. educator
 Melos, Telos, and Me / 177

used to justify his presentation of Hedwig to high-school students? And what is

it about Hedwig that inspires YouTube remixes of image and sound track, Web
fan pages, revivals of the original play in such locales as Seoul or Tokyo, and
audience performances of the film in the style of The Rocky Horror Picture Show
(1975)? The short answer is that what matters in the film is melos, not telos. By
melos, I do not necessarily mean the melodic shaping of acoustic material or the
properties of musical sequencing as opposed to those of unstructured noise. If
the film short-circuits the telos of personhood as a production of fixed, identi-
tarian subjectivity, the subject as fetish or fixation, then it is melos that provides
a musical path through identity as fetish, though experience as programmed
effect, such that personhood as fixation opens onto historical time. The film’s
melos, before giving a path to each scene of musical self-imagining, also provides
the vehicle for moving along the narrative path in order that one may pass along
toward larger ends less easily discernible (of narrative or of historical determina-
tion). In Hedwig, melos is something of a ruse, a mode of unfolding temporal
affect as historical movement, as the film’s narrative rhetorics arise out of and
collapse back into its performative aesthetics. Hedwig’s ruse of melos is twofold:
The film takes drag as the face of affective mobility, and it takes pop music as
the instance of having been affected: a musical diagram of historical corporeality
transforming its historical relation.
Hedwig’s drag is not melancholic heterosexual allegory. 2 Rather, drag in
Hedwig is the intimacy of a self becoming public in differential recapitulation
and repetition: the face of nonnormative sexed gender appearing as such, once
having been deferred in a reading of Stonewall as “gay liberation” but now
working as transdrag in such 1990s festivals as Wigstock or Wigstock: The Movie
(1995), the film documenting it, as well as screenings and DVD releases revisit-
ing San Francisco’s seminal Stonewall-era Cockettes performance group, such
as The Cockettes (2002). In the mass media of the early 1970s, the exuberant and
often informal performances of the Cockettes marked a dissolution of theatrical
genre; media format; and gendered, sexed social norms: Hedwig’s largely forgot-
ten transmedia “DNA.”
In a review, gossip journalist and television personality Rex Reed3 describes
the Cockettes as mostly “hippie drag queens” but also pregnant “women, mar-
ried couples, and infants” who together had produced a “landmark in the history
of the new, liberated theater” with their “nocturnal happening composed of
equal parts Mardi Gras on Bourbon Street, Harold Prince’s Follies, old movie
musicals, the United Fruit Company, Kabuki, and the Yale varsity show” (51).
Reed cites Truman Capote’s excitement over a Cockettes’ performance in which
Billie Holiday recordings vied with Sun-Ra posters for audience attention amid
the musical chaos, partly a result of the audience’s own getting in on the act:
“This is the only true theater,” Capote is reported to have said of a performance
where he was cheered by hundreds of cross-dressers from the theater balcony,
178 / Chapter 6

“where there is total participation from an audience that is part of the show
itself ” (52). In Reed’s review of the Cockettes’ chaotic synchronization of musi-
cal genre clichés with overturned norms of corporeal performance, the pathos,
ecstasy, or hysteria of the performance demonstrates the West Coast antithesis
of the “decadent,” “meaningless” Warhol scene (55).
In the early 1990s, then, Hedwig originates after the Wigstock festival had
been commercialized and as histories such as that of the Cockettes had begun
to be reexamined. In this context, Stonewall is historically reconceived: No lon-
ger the breakthrough moment of gay liberation’s visibility, it is reclaimed as a
tactical street battle fought by drag queens and kings, a motley milieu of gay,
lesbian, and (pre-Gender Identity Disorder) transpersons whose political affili-
ations would shortly coalesce out of homophile movements only to quickly
fragment once again. As recent research reminds us, in New York, the Gay Lib-
eration Front formed in 1969, but the single-issue advocacy group Gay Activists
Alliance quickly splintered off that same year, followed by Radicalesbians, Gay
Youth, and Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (S.T.A.R.) in 1970.4 Con-
trary to any number of accounts of drag as allegorizing heterosexuality or some
minoritizing relation to it, in Hedwig, queer drag allegorizes the generative and
fractious relations among sexed-gender displacements, distributions, and dif-
ferences. It enacts and exhibits a range of techniques and technologies for dia-
gramming the politics of voicing a sexed and gendered self-image and so, more
generally, of personifying personhood where personhood is not a given.
Rock music in Hedwig is also a matter of displacements, distributions, dif-
ferentiations: It is rock on radio, on record albums, or in cinema or other visual
media, and it is similarly reconceived. If rock in film often signals a historical
moment of cultural transformation, whether accurately or nostalgically, in Hed-
wig, rock is the public face of an anterior cultural transformation (such as “the
1960s” or “the sexual revolution”) whose rhetoric may be radical but that achieves
that radical profile only by renegotiating its displaced premises. The story, then,
is not quite that of rock recapitulated as sexual liberation but rather of 1970s
rock’s denial of its glam renovation being sourced from the queer cultures rock
would quickly and loudly disavow. In this film, the sexed and gendered image
of rock personified is not only that of David Bowie’s glamorous corporeal
ambivalence but also that of his commodified “bisexuality.” Simon Frith5 points
out that by 1970, rock had become a dominant commercial force in a recording
industry to which it had been marginal only a few short years prior. The new
rock’s denial of its complexly queer audiences is neither the moment of cultural
transformation rock likes to recount nor the musical speech of the rock star’s
individual genius but a cultural tendency within rock’s industrial integration
(witness Elton John’s detour from 1970s glam pop into tragic heteronormativity
by the mid-1980s, culminating in his tastefully public “gay marriage” in Decem-
ber 2005, or the more complete, if less spectacular, closeting of various other
 Melos, Telos, and Me / 179

rock personae).6 Rock’s expressive denial is a power not of production but of

reception; it is the audience’s betrayal of its own prerecorded desires, finally, its
differentiation of its own displacement. This same tendentious dynamic pro-
vides the narrative thematics of Todd Haynes’s Velvet Goldmine (1998), which
attempts more romantically and less successfully than Hedwig to recover 1970s
rock’s queer ear in the same millennial moment of rock-in-film revisionism.
Thus, drag and rock as accreted historical materials are not, primarily, pow-
ers of, sources for, or signs or symptoms of expressive productivity. Synchro-
nized in song, they speak the opposite, like the warped record functioning as a
menu on Hedwig’s DVD release. The audience becomes its own obstacle, a jam-
ming frequency within reception for expression of and for the audience, a block-
ing that the audience is neither able to incorporate nor to disavow. In this
chapter, “reception” does not refer to undertaking audience-member interviews
about what they remember liking or disliking in a film or a musical recording;
recovering personal letters as evidence for film or recording cultures; parsing
film or music criticism to reconcile critics’ tastes with historical developments;
or combing the Internet for evidence of conflicted, and so revealing, attach-
ments in fan production or authorial defense. In Hedwig, reception is the very
thematic of the film, its narrative impulse, and the form of its conclusions.
Hedwig thus provides a signal opportunity to revise theories of media recep-
tion by undertaking more of it—that is, by reflexively exploring the performa-
tivities of reception.
As many market researchers will admit, and as Hedwig presupposes, recep-
tion is simultaneously willed from within and forced from without. Hedwig’s
relation to her own personification, withheld all the more intensely as she ap-
proaches it all the more intimately, is analogous to the audience’s present-tense
relationship to its own history. In this chapter, then, I read Hedwig as a musical
diagram of deferred self-reception that displaces a representational mirroring
of deluded self-reflection. Because the histories of sexed, gendered personhood
continue to mediate the self-representation of sexed, gendered subjects as dis-
placed from history, reading Hedwig as narrating a complex process of deferred
self-reception also means receiving the film as a precise historical statement on
the capacities of media reception to relay personhood as self-displacement.
So, as a child, Hansel (Hedwig’s given name) listens, head in the chamber of
a gas oven, to rock on the radio in the walled-off concentration camp of 1960s
family life in an imaginary East Berlin;7 eagerly receives (orally/anally) first-love
Luther’s “candy,” which he gags on and spits out; and performs live as Hedwig
(John Cameron Mitchell) only to have a bigger star, Tommy Gnosis, break into
Hedwig’s act by singing the songs he has stolen back to her. Hedwig’s willing-
ness to constantly receive and to repeat her own commodified alienation is not
(simply) neurotic self-victimization or melancholic repetition of the traumatic.
Beyond that, it is also a proprioceptive strategy learned from and reapplied to
180 / Chapter 6

the task of traumatically navigating a displaced history of self-mediation. Musi-

cally receiving her own self-displacement aids Hedwig in ascertaining and
mobilizing the next step on a journey where another stop, another obstacle,
always waits on the self ’s reception and exhibition of personhood: “another
opening, another show.”
During her third-to-last stop (“Exquisite Corpse”) on this trip, the musical
personhood she had structured as “collage,” a “montage,” is entirely exhausted.
She shames herself before her public, giving it not the show of her breakdown
but its effects, as she berates her own worn musical self-image. Strained to
breaking point, the seams of her life show up in a kaleidoscopic frame barely
holding the contrary aspects of her life together. Then her self-reception and
self-exhibition breaks down entirely, replaying her past traumas and abuses in
flashbacks ordered entirely out of sequence. At this point, Tommy Gnosis breaks
into her fragmenting personhood while singing his alternate version of “Wicked
Little Town” from an entirely different venue. Hedwig’s musical personhood is
now more a scrambled radio broadcast than a coherently channelized film genre
or rock show. Hedwig then steps into Tommy’s distant arena to hear her own
song sung back to her, but this time directed at her. Tommy “rebrands” Hedwig
with the gnostic cross she once gave him as his trademark symbol. The final
musical number, “Midnight Radio,” ensues on a calmed, white stage decorated
with large-scale photographic stills of a boat caught rising on a stormy sea.
Here Mitchell no longer sings as Hedwig but as himself, and, as Yitzak (Miriam
Shor) is transformed into a female drag queen, he calls out the names of iconic
soul, pop, and rock singers—“Tina,” “Aretha,” “Nona,” or “Nico”—and empha-
sizes that the meanings of these names have as much to do with the iconic women
as with the rock-and-roll “misfits and losers” who have internalized their voices
as a strategy for everyday listening and everyday life. The film closes as Mitchell,
out of drag, leaves the stillness of the now-transformed club and walks away into
the night, accompanied by a reprise of “Origins of Love.” The camera slowly
cranes up as Mitchell’s nude body disappears, emphasizing the synoptic impor-
tance of this particular composition by Stephen Trask for the film as a whole,
along with the open-ended resistance to closure that its accompaniment of
Mitchell’s departure implies. This three-song sequence connotes reception forced:
the culture industries’ dialectic of enlightenment. But it connotes force only
insofar as reception is first willed altogether differently from the way it is forced:
reception as the antinomian praxis of listening as deferred, yet again immanent,
speech. Reception, then, for my purposes, is the corporeal reception of biopoli-
tics and archiving and actualization of the immanent speech therein prepared.
Neither of these dual faces of reception can be directly accessible to contem-
porary techniques of reception studies. As I show below, Hedwig offers a meta-
criticism of the dynamics that compel those techniques. Receptions of will and
of force are the dynamics of ascesis in mass mediation.8 These dual aspects of
 Melos, Telos, and Me / 181

reception entail a problematic of narrative rhetorics coupled with performative

aesthetics, animating the corporeal on both sides of a mediatic screen: specifi-
cally, queer praxes of audiovisual musicality presenting as listening and as vocal-
ization. Modeling immanent speech in terms of reception, Hedwig suggests
reception as an annunciatory dynamic.9 Within commodity culture, musical
reception as modulation or resonance, in coming up against the reaction for-
mation its own expression invites, is put on ice, so to speak. At the same time,
against its own partitioned history and its own false mediation, musical recep-
tion can profile a praxis of expression amid and against cultural reaction: The
commodity’s own frozenness points to a hardening reaction in culture and to
meaning’s hibernation below the popular horizon as it helps prepare the coming
thaw, the future. Taking this dynamic of mediatic contemporaneity as a problem
of “closet epistemologies” tends to produce hermeneutic inadequacy, suggesting
the absurd need to find a “gay Socrates,” as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick10 memorably
points out. More broadly, closet epistemologies ultimately fail, because they
direct a critical desire to discover the equivalent of slave narratives or female
voicing but instead find historical expressions of sexed corporeality becoming
emergent in divergent series and events. With the leading edge of sexed gendered
personhood being the screaming baby tossed out with the bathwater of the
hyperproduction of the musical self as megastar (Elton on your Walkman,
Madonna on your MP3 player), culture’s hardening reaction formation stands
alongside refigured marginalization but is also turned aside by historical being
undergoing continued transformation.
Hedwig draws on reception grounded not so much in memory or culture but
rather as resounding affect of sexed expressivity placed between a cultural rock
and mediatic ice. Presenting as rock revival and as drag transfigured, the film
stands and gives a contradictory face to Adorno’s musical “we,” a “me” delivered
from the morass between political marginalization newly reconfigured (after gay
and lesbian identity was largely depathologized in 1974, “Gender Identity Dis-
order” was termed by the American Psychiatric Association in 1980, with addi-
tional revisions in 1987 and 1994) and mediatic misrepresentations freshly
charged after HIV/AIDS.11 Stemming from the moment of punk’s expanded
production as grunge in the early 1990s, styling genre and gender as drag rock
makes so much sense. Drag and rock are not “new” idioms, and they are arresting
not because of their ability to marshal productivist political or musical expres-
sion but because they work through a contrary “paragrammatics” within received
systems of sexed gender and musical genre.12 The work of affective transitioning
is contrary, but sensible. Working gender expression against narrative genre gives
the fabrication of selfhood as a singing dancing distortion: the autobiographical
prosopopoeia Paul de Man13 describes as “defacement,” transposed by way of
the “walking alienation effect” Martin Rubin14 ascribes to Carmen Miranda.
Sensible: impossible to fix in or as representation, but so long overdue.
182 / Chapter 6

FIGURE 6.1 Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001): Audience sing-along (frame capture).
(Hedwig and the Angry Inch, dir. John Cameron Mitchell [Killer Films, 2001].)

Surprised by the familiar sense of a scene that the audience nonetheless has
not seen before, of course it will want to sing along (and some members do)
when, during a key musical flashback, song lyrics appear on screen, timing indi-
cated by a bouncing wig (Figure 6.1). That number is “Wig in a Box,” during
which Hedwig remembers, before ever singing in public, being joined in her
lonely trailer-park home (in a “surprise” appearance) by the future members of
her band, whom she has not yet met. The band, the Angry Inch, forms out of a
nonsensical narrative event in which Hedwig’s vision of their future collabora-
tion (otherwise without exposition in the narrative) and memory of his own
abandonment commingle. Drag and rock are paragrammatically woven together
in a scene that can happen only somewhere between melodrama and rock opera,
but not within either. As the wig “comes down from the shelf,” Hedwig puts on
her makeup and immerses herself in the music of the 8-track player or, later, a
funky phonograph, while in come the band members, handing her the musical
implements of self-poiesis. They, too, come complete with their own toy instru-
ments, as if out of a box. Within the short space of the song, Hedwig moves from
singing about the power of listening to recoup the self ’s nonperforming invest-
ments in the workaday world (her life as supermarket cashier) to the lyric “I
ain’t never goin’ back,” whereupon the band blows down the side wall of the
trailer-home “box,” forming a rock stage complete with footlights to be stomped
out, Johnny Cash–style. Hedwig morphs numerous times, in sync with the lyr-
ics, presenting as Miss Beehive 1963, where her two-foot-tall wig suggests the
phallic cosmetology of the singing lipstick from 20th-Century Fox’s The Dolly
 Melos, Telos, and Me / 183

Sisters (1945) or, alternatively, the double-flip folds of Farrah Fawcett’s signature
1970s hairdo.
By the end of the number, Hedwig, backed by the band, appears as an all-
white Tina Turner and, shaking in controlled musical extasis, triumphs on the
rock stage of her imagination. “Wig in a Box” is also transfigured by this point:
The first tentative piano chords suggest the intro to Carole King’s “(You Make
Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman,” but the rousing conclusion suggests Turner’s
rendition of “Proud Mary,” performed with all the retro-rock brio of the finale
of Bowie’s “Suffragette City,” though with the menacing descending minor
chords of that tune replaced with the jubilation typical of a T. Rex stomper or
Rocky Horror’s “The Time Warp.” The wig here, as Michel Foucault observes of
sodomy, is a “confused category.”15 As a contemporary making up of the self,
it is strongly feminizing; further, signaling self-presentation as artifice and as
ascesis, it is phallicizing and invaginating, depending on lyrical orientation.
Hedwig’s hairpiece is antidote to and capstone of her body as wall and bridge,
her neither/nor, both/and corporeality a transposition of sexed desire and gen-
dered expression. Feminization itself is a transposition, keying gay-male recep-
tivity into post-op transgender contradiction.
Always, the careening narrative speaks as a monologue of Hedwig’s voice,
which—totalized in her transforming aspect, searching out, occupying, and
destroying melancholic, neurotic, or otherwise unsustainable subjectivities as
occasions for staging impossible movements between generic and gendered
identifications—returns mediated sociality as song. The set piece and perfor-
mance for “Wig in a Box” fold into the time-warped narrative line to motivate
Hedwig’s own relentless move forward against the melancholy continually pull-
ing her backward and to let the audience in on the joke: warped narrative sung
as speech reversed. So it motivates the audience to sing along with the warping
of mediatic expression, the deformed or scratched record of historical inscrip-
tion, and gives occasion to actively redress its own cinematic silence (and, per-
haps, its own reception of the programmed melancholia D. A. Miller16 insists is
a queer deferral written into the heteronormative Broadway musical script).
This musical negotiation, capable of deflecting subjective stasis and historical
incapacitation, is not dissimilar, although it is very far advanced, from Caryl
Flinn’s account of the utopian potentiality of nostalgic listening for Julie, the
heroine struggling with contradictions of maternal affect in the classical Holly-
wood melodrama Penny Serenade (1941).17
Flinn describes the musical negotiation of gender constraints as melancholic
immersion enduring for the length of the classical narrative. Penny Serenade is
a long series of episodic flashbacks narrated to outdated pop; only at the film’s
conclusion does musical nostalgia produce agency—a change, of course, for Julie.
In Hedwig, as with “Wig in a Box,” a single musical episode collapses and explodes
184 / Chapter 6

the impossible movement from inside (abandonment, melancholia, nostalgia)

to outside (publicity, vocality, ambition), typifying the kaleidoscopic temporali-
ties of the filmic road trip. The “making of the band” that occurs as Hedwig sings
“Wig in a Box” not only recognizes its own form as cognate with contemporary
media fabrication of musical commodities but also reveals its own artifice—it
lays bare its plan for an exit from the dialectics of media production superposi-
tioned over and against audience reception as it prompts its audience to affirm
its capacity to sing in recognition of our deferred historical presence.18
So Hedwig’s affectations, whether melancholic recluse or scandalous public
figure, are only larger or smaller degrees of staging the twofold ruse that allows
her to keep on talking. The horrors of losing the microphone, of losing her
musical support, of having Yitzak sing, of letting Phyllis decide the agenda, or
of allowing Tommy to ventriloquize her music—these constitute the obstacles
that the trajectory of the film must surmount. What, though, does the film’s
musicality affect? What does it feel? Neither the violations of history experienced
as melancholy nor a determined future projected as liberation on the identitar-
ian models of the right’s discourses of our historical past frame Hedwig’s back-
assed forward movement toward indetermination. Nor are the biblical or clas-
sical references gratuitous. Rather, Hedwig explains her narrative aim early on
by singing a properly etymological, anthropological, and metaphysical praxis of
affective interrogation: “I want to know / the origin of love.” Later comes the
antiphonic refrain. Over the end credits, after the rock-operatic catharsis that
reprises Zeus’s lightning bolt banishes Gnosis from Hedwig’s head, restores the
gnostic cross to Hansel’s forehead, and transforms that cross into a tattoo of a
Janus-like diagram of one self receiving its other only to be again transformed,
Mitchell’s voice is heard: “I am / the origin of love.” With the story told and
Hedwig out of the picture, the audience reads the long list of contributors to the
film, the transposition from vertiginous desire to affective mobility complete.
Rick Altman describes the transition between the film musical’s image-
centric diegetic reality, where oppositions are established in the narrative, and
its music-centric fantasy episodes, where cause-and-effect relation comes
undone, as an “audio dissolve.”19 It is on the basis of the transformation of
reality into fantasy via the audio dissolve that the musical obtains its ability to
reconcile ideological conflicts, and so, structurally, a critical hermeneutics of
the audio dissolve leads to viewers’ (the critics’) ability to grasp the syntactic
and semantic categories whose contents supply the conventions of the genre
and whose transformations indicate the rise and the fall of the genre over his-
torical time. Semantic contents become syntactic categories by virtue of becom-
ing familiar; when the development of semantics into syntax is finally flattened,
it indicates that the historical relevance of the genre has played out and that
the generic conventions have finally consumed their own narrative produc-
tivity. The musical’s mythological capacity to express “marriage” (of the male
 Melos, Telos, and Me / 185

and female leads, of the audience and the form) is depleted. The “interpretive
community” of the genre has moved on.
In Hedwig, though, the transition, which has to become “auditory” for Alt-
man to clearly “see” the musical’s syntactic and semantic categories and trans-
formations, becomes distended, repeats, and carries what will turn out to be
false nostalgia spectacularly entwined with futural movement. The film as a
whole obtains (as a macroform) an aesthetics of sensible (if not realistic) tran-
sition. And every single transition in the film—whether moving back to East
Berlin to introduce “The Origin of Love” or Junction City, Kansas, to find the
“Wig in a Box,” or moving forward to provide the “time is passing” modality of
Hedwig and Tommy’s burgeoning success as a duo—is musically motivated by
chordal strains and harmonic modulations borrowed from the musical material
of “The Origin of Love.” The transition, here, is not a category of meaning that
is collapsed as an auditory opportunity for interior character exposition or ideo-
logical reconciliation but rather is expanded to the task of complicating the
systematics (in Roland Barthes’s sense) of genre formation with those of gen-
dered audience formation.
So Hedwig’s microform (repeating kernels of nostalgic immersion and
futural movement) and its macroform (the trip from desire to affective knowl-
edge) do not mutually resolve the syntaxes of genre or identifications of gender
in a happy ending but transpose love from being a function of desire to being
affective expression. The musical “me” moves from wanting to know “the origin
of love” to becoming it. More, the film’s metacriticism of transitioning renders
the blocking-and-bridging mobility also instanced in Hedwig’s filmic body.
Since the film reflects that mobility within its narrative center, Hedwig’s body,
and its narrative course writ large, it presents a homoeroticism of the transposi-
tion: a queer reception of transgender expression. And if all these spiraling
transpositions make us dizzy, well, they should: These are nothing but the sex-
gendered dynamics programmed into Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), applied
to a reverse formatting of audience participation as a reception of mediatic his-
toricity and visualized as rock music. Hedwig is neither a classical musical trip-
ping toward Broadway triumph nor a cynical musical journey to America’s
overmediated heartland (as in Robert Altman’s Nashville [1975]). It is an angry,
loving bridge out of sexed and gendered Hell, and its convoluted course follows
because, in crossing that bridge, one is never afforded the immediate ability to
look back. As Hedwig sings, inviting Tommy and the audience to follow her
voice, “Remember Mrs. Lot, when she turned around.”
Finally, as Phyllis says (but not as she means), it is all about New York City,
the Oz where the original Hedwig stage show moved from off-Broadway to the
cinema screen. This denouement, recapitulated in the film’s conclusion to be as
surprising and as predictable as a reconciliation of the studied rock distortion
of Tommy (1975) with ABBA’s overproduced distraction, releases all in thrall to
186 / Chapter 6

FIGURE 6.2 Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001): The montage-collage of the self breaks
apart (frame capture). (Hedwig and the Angry Inch, dir. John Cameron Mitchell [Killer Films, 2001].)

move on—including Hedwig; her childish alter-ego, Hansel; her nemesis,

Tommy Gnosis; director/star Mitchell; and the audience. “Gnosis” as musical
affect is the expressive capacity to create and to disappear, to account for an
impassible history, and to gift an indeterminate future. Reception’s gift is love
granted as deferred knowledge of personhood; the work of affect, a poiesis
practiced as musical imagining that wrests vocality back from listening’s dis-
tant, mediatic origins. Hedwig’s gift of gnosis is the intimate knowledge of a
public self: queer glam personhood, screened in public, at last.
But this matters only because violences of mediation underwrite the musi-
cal film and the gendered personhood sacrificed to love within its story. Han-
sel’s failed sex-change surgery develops from a plan to alter his identity with a
“simple cut-and-paste” job on his mother’s passport; the lyrics and style of the
shattering penultimate song emphasize identity mediated in cinema and the
body as “collage, a montage” (Figure 6.2). Formally, techniques of collage and
montage have, time and again, been subject to deadening appropriation, as
David James notes. Speaking of rock theatrics in the music video promotional
clip, James suggests that the music video appropriates avant-garde film and
video strategies, but by way of producing a denial of the political project with
which such avant-gardes have been aligned: socialist revolution. MTV clips bor-
row from historical avant-gardes their nonstandard angles, palettes, and tex-
tures; their representations of supposedly deviant youth subcultures and minor-
ity groups; and their strategies of parodying commercial film and television
narratives. James observes that these stylistics, so claimed, tend strongly toward
a sense of closure against the open-ended techniques and parodic elements they
 Melos, Telos, and Me / 187

have appropriated and so deploy a lip-sync, for example, that helps assert the
presence of the performers’ voices: “the quasi-sexual center of pop’s power.” On
one hand, the multiplicity of musical strategies and the heterogeneous visual
accoutrements of rock culture make up one half of rock’s identity, James argues;
the other half is “its similarly diverse and similarly totalized functions within
the economic and ideological systems of capital.”20
Clarifying what is at stake for studies of commodity filmmaking and proj-
ects of popular music more political in their origins and intents, James suggests
that tracking sound-image relations during various periods (might) generate
the framework for a history of the rock-and-roll musical. Such a history would
consider various subcultures’ own attempts to produce themselves cinematically
in the context of the assimilation of rock music, stars, and so on into the indus-
trial cinema. The point is not to think of music film or music video merely as
the illustration of the music—which is inevitably routed via the recording and
so via the corporate form—but to investigate the degree to which the principles
that produced the series of social and aesthetic projects mobilized as popular
music were also manifested in film and in the practice of filmmaking.21
Hedwig’s transpositionality, especially in terms of its transformation from a
highly elaborated drag musical for the small stage of queer off-Broadway theater
to filmic rock musical, does exactly the kind of work that James describes, but
with a twist and an added difference: Hedwig clarifies contemporary possibilities
for queer speech even as it presents a heretofore subvocalized queer history of
rock, in a gesture of powerful distortion, as a music of spectacular visibility.
Eisenstein’s montage of pathos; Fischinger’s visual-music animation of ecstasy;
Eisler’s administrative dialectical stream of hysteria: Just as Clark’s Passing
Through develops the instrumentalities of jazz as revolutionary transmedium
by redeploying the classical stylistics of music-image relations, so does Hedwig
redeploy montage, visual-music animation, and dialectical stream toward an
origin story that culminates in a breakage and a departure. Hedwig’s origin of
love narrates individuation and personhood according to a queer ethics of
reception, where the audience’s psychic investment in spectacular subjectivity is
replaced with a musically mediated creative destruction.
Charting, then, along with its erotics, an ethics of reception, Hedwig suggests
a significant difference attributable to queer aesthetic praxes, which in this view
surmount the distribution of commoditized affectivity and commoditized iden-
tity. Hedwig shifts the conceptual orientation of lip sync as denial of audience
to an affirmative accounting of the affective antagonisms of queer listening for
identity in popular music. In doing so according to an ethos of reception as
opposed to one of production, though, it gives a non- or antirepresentational
figuration of a social, aesthetic, and corporeal project that has tended to surface
as contingent, arbitrary, sporadic, or fragmented. Hedwig the film mediates its
own theatrical rock performance as doubled potentiality to include, within the
188 / Chapter 6

trajectory of the rock musical that never was, the practice of lip sync and play-
back as a primary point of access for queer transpositions of the musical image.
The film plays with synchronization of image and voice across multiple forms
and processes of rock mediation, since part of what rock has mediated is gender
expression itself. And, finally, Hedwig uses rock as an audiovisual commodity
form to speak a musical cinema, tracing transpositions in gender that succeed
only in conflicted versions of individual history inasmuch as the corporeal
mediation of gender expression produces individuals apart from their own
totalized, commodified, and insufferable past identities. The film conclusively
marks the ways that sexed gendered personhood, through sociopolitical shifts
in gender expression and norm, is no longer necessarily defined against hetero-
normative sexuality. Deviance from heteronormativity opens onto transposi-
tions between gay or lesbian politics and transgender politics.
Throughout its compulsive recycling of the mediatic bargain bin of throw-
away audiovisuality, Hedwig’s “me” sings the audience’s deferred presentation of
its own history of reception. This matter of reception certainly does not surface
as art film or as avant-garde or aesthetic experimentation (the “modern”), nor
does it offer itself as a hypertextual resource immediately accessible for further
elaboration or dissemination in commodity production (the “postmodern”). Any
queer reception is powerful only to the extent that its complex sexing of identity
has been historically undervalued, erased, forgotten, misdirected, or misappro-
priated in reception and yet continues to inform and to transform in arenas of
reception that go relatively uncharted. Cultural and subcultural production re-
late to each other in a certain ratio of reception that divides the product of iden-
titarian fixity and continued marginalization with an ongoing series of charmed
transformations in the denominator: as if by a subject trapped behind a medi-
atic version of Berlin’s lost wall, as if the armed forces radio service had, once
upon a time, broadcast the message of rock as a call to transgender liberation.
Hedwig’s origin of love, then, is not in a Deleuzian refrain deterritorializing
telos in melos but in a receiving more nomadic and more grounded: Hedwig is
the refrain of barred personhood transposed into spectacular corporeality by
being vocalized as a demythification of sex-gender difference. Music’s deferred
“we” becomes the impossible, but no longer deniable, articulation of “me.” Hed-
wig fabricates the origins of love and forwards the dissemination of gnosis as
deferred historical knowledge (as, I explain below, rock musicals must); and yet
at the same time Hedwig actively indetermines love as futurity. The film indi-
viduates massified song all over again; following the bouncing wig indicating
the appropriate lyric to sing, audience members discover the images of their
voices (even if they do not actually vocalize sound) before the screen, as if recov-
ering from amnesia. From “we,” in spite of the narrative cinema, to “me,” wrought
in narrative design potentially as participatory as it is spectacular, as capable of
immersing its audience in the mass mediatics of the spectacular as it is of recog-
 Melos, Telos, and Me / 189

nizing the audience and its history, Hedwig’s narrative entertains a transposi-
tionality: transformations in sexed knowledges popular but inaccessible, being,
as they have been, frozen out.

Transpositions: Ethics and Erotics

If Hedwig’s musical transposition of the corporeal and the mediatic does supply
a metacriticism of reception, what would the implications of this be if, as I argue,
the film is resolutely ungraspable within media studies’ various productivist
frameworks, whether materialist, psychoanalytic, formal, or cultural? Annette
Kuhn’s reception study of British cinemagoers of the 1930s and 1940s is illumi-
nating.22 With regard to methodology and content, Kuhn’s study is synthetic—
materialist, feminist, and often confirming psychoanalytic concerns; but when
it is not, it draws productively on cultural studies accounts of audience or fan
reception. Filmgoers are identified as heterosexual and as either male or female.
Gendered sex means heterosexual identifications and courtship rituals; genres
are remarkably differentiable (“horror” opposed to “musical”), even when sub-
jects habitually attended and understood films belonging to different generic
types (film genre is an industrial and demographic designation, not a herme-
neutics of reception). Contradictions appear as heterosexual, national, and class
differences (although a small number of Jewish filmgoers are mentioned as sub-
jects as well—the study attends to “ethnicity”).
Viewer accounts of mediatic memory are vocalized, according to Kuhn, in
four enunciative modes: impersonal; past/present; repetitive; and anecdotal.
Impersonal accounts stress Fred Astaire’s dancing as professional, for example.
This mode allows viewer knowledge a “sociological” status: The Astaire musical
is an “impressive,” “beautifully executed,” exemplar of an American film industry
“thumping out these wonderful, spectacular films that they did do, that, em, the
people were living at the same time under the shadow of the cloud of war.”23
Was military activity shadow and cloud? Or is there more going on than Kuhn
can draw from the subjects whom she has chosen and the methodology chan-
nelizing their speech?
Next, past/present comparisons indicate the importance of cinema memory
as cultural memory; viewers remember musical films as being so much more
spectacular but see that contemporary musicals no longer “put the money on
the screen.” Third, repetitive enunciation indicates collective as well as habitual
audience response: “We all used to sit there and sigh”; or, men would watch
couples make out from the “back row” of the cinema—men gathered in the back
row to look at the screen and at heterosexual couples. This talk refers to narrative/
spectatorial effects, cinema as cultural memory, and film spaces. Kuhn suggests
that psychoanalytic readings in a limited way confirm the pleasure of specta-
torial effects, such as scopophilia. The “psychical configuration of fetishism,
190 / Chapter 6

which includes disavowal (simultaneous hanging onto and renouncing the

belief that the woman has a penis) is what fuels the fetishist’s perpetual fascina-
tion with what lies under the woman’s skirt.”24 Scopophilia applies to “crotch
shots” of Marlene Dietrich in Der blaue Engel (The Blue Angel; 1930) and to the
tunnel of dancers’ legs through which Busby Berkeley’s musical camera enjoyed
traveling, the “semantic unit par excellence” of the American film musical.25
Finally, anecdotal accounts narrate particular events: “On a particular movie-
going occasion, this event happened.” Here, the holder of the narrative places
himself as a protagonist of a particular memory of going to the cinema—for
example, being thrilled to have been with a particular (heterosexual) date.
Memories of the Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers musicals emphasize the third
mode of memory discourse, in which “repetitive-effects” types of stories are
recalled, Kuhn notes. Kuhn suggests that the Astaire/Rogers films are remem-
bered not simply as films but in relation to her respondents’ remembered experi-
ences of the dance hall as well. The musical cinema suggests an idealized version
of the kinds of movements one might have wished to make in the dance hall; in
this way, the cinema provides the “heterotopia” of which Foucault is supposed
to have written:

In [the Astaire/Rogers films’] elegant and apparently seamless combina-

tion of kinesis and heterotopia lies the ultimate dance fantasy: the every-
day, the local, the rooted, and the communal—for the adolescent of the
1930s, the crowds in the dance hall—all fade from consciousness as,
along with the dancers on the screen, you are carried into the space of
imagination where you are utterly graceful and where the dance of
courtship proceeds, with never a false step, towards its climax. The sen-
sation imbues your body, and carries you out of your local picture house
onto the familiar streets of your neighborhood, and you are moved to
dance along the pavement all the way home.26

Cinema’s heterotopic site of reception means, for Kuhn, that cinema memory
mediates cultural memory such that the past is “remembered as a landscape
across which cinemas are dotted like beacons in the night, and where all jour-
neys begin and end at home.”27
How does Hedwig map heterotopia (thinking that Foucault seems to have
had the bathhouse in mind when he coined the term, as David Halperin sug-
gests)?28 Hedwig “remembers” temporal improbability, not a supercoherent spa-
tial fantasy, as kinesthesia. In regards to the sociological register of memory,
where viewers remember the “professionalism” of American cinema, Hedwig
offers another point of view of the American media: At the cafeteria/rock club,
as the band members hungrily help themselves to all the trimmings, Hedwig
flashes a slide of a tabloid headline wherein she accuses Tommy of stealing her
 Melos, Telos, and Me / 191

songs and explains that it took this “hit piece” to make audiences take notice of
her authorship. “But,” as she snarls at two apparently closeted gay male diners
who defensively huddle into their plates, “now you’re interested, ha?” Hedwig
goes on, preparing a transition to the imaginary East Berlin that presents her
own “past/present” discourse as “The Origin of Love”—she remembers her abu-
sive heterochildhood as an excremental diary scrawled on toilet paper, animated
in the film as visual music.
In a subsequent cafeteria appearance in Miami Beach, after a sudden jump
forward from East Berlin, Hedwig stages her answer to the “repetition effect” of
scopophilia. She has just recounted how, as Hansel, she fell for American soldier
Luther and his gummy bears, the candy a “rainbow-colored carnage” that she
gagged on and spit out. Now, in this number, “Sugar Daddy,” Hedwig takes on
the uniform from waist up, presenting in a shimmery gray “military” blouse and
necktie, hair tightly coiffed: a wacked WAC. Earlier in the film, the “uniform”
appeal of American masculinity is suggested in Luther’s seductive black vocality,
rhetorics of fairness and equality transposed as interracial man-boy love. Now,
Hedwig’s costume expresses instead the rupturing conditionality that the desir-
ing dream of sexual equality imagined as “uniformity” covers over. Singing in
up-tempo country mode and high stepping, in sneakers, from one table of (Jew-
ish?) retirees to the next, she swings her cowgirl skirt over one elderly man’s head
and, rhythmically swishing its fringe, announces triumphantly as she obscures
the bespectacled customer in a scopophilic excess that is obscured to us: “It’s a
car wash, ladies and gentleman!”
If Berkeley’s crotch shot is the semantic unit par excellence of the show musi-
cal, Hedwig’s body replaces that syntax with her own rhythmic mood swinging:
Her tour of cafeterias is a musical series of present, transitional moments, each
only a momentary cathexis of impossible past and indeterminable future. Later,
after Hedwig’s music teaches Tommy love as musical poiesis, she demands that
he fulfill his part of the bargain and that he partake of the scopophilic pleasure
that would recognize her as love’s transformative potentiator, not as desire’s
operational object: “Love the front of me!” Telling the memory of her demand
might count as an “anecdotal” instance (in Kuhn’s terminology), something
that happened one day while listening to a neighbor sing out of a nearby trailer
window (Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You,” loudly, for three days, “on a
loop”). This anecdote about love only partially achieved and shortly denied
turns out to have supreme importance: It sends Hedwig on her “American tour.”
Tommy flees, having felt in his hand but never faced with his eyes the surgical
remainder that is less than a penis but more than a clitoris.
In Kuhn’s view, scopophilia in cinema is recalled according to a de Certeau-
vian rationale: It marks the ways that people “make do” and so “get by” on the
way to inscribing cinema memory as cultural memory. But while Hedwig’s
musical “angry inch,” like the cinema for Kuhn’s subjects, is all she has “to work
192 / Chapter 6

with,” it cannot be framed for recognition, authorship of self, or love, to say

nothing of untroubled recollection accessible to cultural memory. The prob-
lematics of her angry inching toward New York, though, replacing the semantics
of the musical with a transposition of genre against gender as she goes, is spec-
tacular. In these moments of nonpassablity becoming impossibly bridged, Hed-
wig puts its own “money on the screen.” Heterotopic kinesthesia here is neither
remembered nor acted out on the walk home. Hedwig’s heterotopia is that of
the rock listener seeing musical cinema in disjunctive transposition and of see-
ing oneself sing along. Her mediatic kinesthesia is a gesture leading not home-
ward but from a back alley, back to the street.
Hedwig’s disappearance from the musical stage at the film’s close indicates
that her impossible negotiation of “star status” as a thrice-complicated conflict
of author status, sex-gender expression, and historical becoming remain unfixed:
antitelic. The pleasures of song, of distortion, and of musical visuality suggest
not so much melodramatic nostalgia investing a search for personal origins only
finally to be denied but rather, as the film narrates the displacement of one
frustration by another, that the pleasure of vocalizing a trajectory through these
frustrations matters more than the narrative projection of melodramatic situa-
tion as fantasy. Hedwig replaces universalist critique with transpositional mobil-
ity, placing, as musical narrative, the melodrama of origins in relation to an
appropriation of originality and playing this relation against the ultimate telos
of identity fixed in cinema memory, or media memory more generally: audience
reception of generic expectations.
In the film melodrama, one is not supposed to know what one knows; the
viewer is the subject who is supposed to know ignorance. One cannot know that
which is nonetheless suspected and so hoped against: the end of the crisis of
origins. In the film musical, song and dance narrate continuity as surprise, the
suspension of cause and effect; one is supposed to hear as if one has never heard
before, to see as if one is doing nothing when hearing in this way. In the rock
show, the viewer may sing along, but “like you have never sung before,” because
while the beat will undoubtedly go on (on the CD, at the next concert in the
next city or town), the viewer will never be “here,” at this event, again. With
music television generally and the music video specifically, one may weigh in
with an interpretive or gestural literacy of the music involved, but only by way
of rendering musical response as lifestyle, youth cultural, or subcultural iden-
tification before, during, or after playback. So the gesture is deferred in favor
of the artist’s originality, as undeniable as it is commodified—until a certain
obviousness of repetition in production (“lack” of a presumptive cultural rele-
vance; warmed-over aesthetic craft; accidental exposure of lip sync, playback, or
music generation technologies, on the one hand, or their overuse, on the other)
works against affective engagement by destroying the illusion that the music, its
history, and its performance somehow precede the momentary engagement.
 Melos, Telos, and Me / 193

In Hedwig, by contrast, and by virtue of its imaginative investments in pre-

sentational artificiality, failed conventionality, and pseudofolk historicization,
one is supposed to know that the loss of historical presence is insufferable and
superable. By virtue of one’s presence as audience to Hedwig’s wiggy imperson-
ation of queer history as a process of mediatic reception, one is expected to sing
along; again at one point, the viewer is given the words to the song, as if one
needed only to be reminded of them. With the lyrics on screen, one can be sur-
prised by one’s own, possibly collective, voice. What is designed to surprise here
surpasses gender conventionality, the various generic syntaxes and semantics
of music in film, and the gestural conventions of rock’s audience response,
however and wherever it is mediated (in concert or as recording). Hedwig’s
surprise is history’s mediation of sexed gendered reception as musical styliza-
tion that elicits interarticulated popular knowledges within and in excess of
capital’s variegated production of “structures of feeling.”29
What surprises, though, is the historicity of and for affective expression as
such in the face of a commodified and propertized self: sex-gender, rock, cinema,
song. This surprise is, finally, the historicity of the audience’s surpassing its own
unremembered song and yet having access to that song’s technique. This musical
stylization of history’s mediation as audience knowledge is what engages, what
surprises, what opens up—like an unexpected, forgotten, or unwanted gift: a
“wig in a box,” as it were. Singing the song, it is as though, all along, one has had
access to the very histories of mediatic recognition that Miller traces as sus-
pended expectation.
Hedwig’s formal presentation in terms of the affective capacities that audi-
ence reception possesses for troubling sex-gender expectations indicates a queer
aesthetics, queer style. In traversing each situation, depicted as transition from
feminized gay youth to irreducible corporeal excess more than as male-to-female
transgender, receptive masculinity courts and counters an aggressively improb-
able phallic femininity to constitute musical allure, an openly brazen invita-
tion.30 Mitchell-as-Hedwig’s aggressively voiced masculine femininity speaks to,
and of, receptive masculinity, while harmonizing with Shor’s masculine backing
vocals keyed to a higher, “feminine” vocal register. Throughout the narrative,
forward motion comes as this antiphony dissolves the phobic trauma of recep-
tion for a gay male body. Hedwig’s songs project a fictive past for a contingent
present, leading to sudden unexpected futures that may recapitulate stasis or,
and often at the same time, indicate the unexpected spin of the future having
transformed the ground on which she stands. If queer subjectivity and queer
corporeality are radically contingent, this contingency comes via variegated his-
torical identifications in which any present movement takes shape in simultane-
ously retroactive (historicizing) and potential (futural) modalities.
A curious historical spiral blooms here. Generally, from the perspective of
disciplining heteronormative sex and gender within an economy of the “secret,”
194 / Chapter 6

the transsexual can appear to be the new homosexual. A number of sources

suggest that male femininities, evidenced in cross-dressing, the sexual behavior
of the “fairy,” or male homosexual subjects testifying to the desire for female
body, can be located in relation to the “instincts” of sexual subjects identifi ed,
after the mid-nineteenth century, as “homosexual.”31 Cross-gender desire for
either sexual or gender expression (the receptive male) once was parsed as
symptom of homosexuality; analytics of “inversion” collapsed, by virtue of a
double negativity embedded in that term, “inverted” sexual orientation and
gender expression: “homosexual” and “transsexual.” Recently, however, discur-
sive revisions of same-sex activities have meant desires once identified as
pathologically homosexual are no longer necessarily considered as such. Now,
rather than the transvestite being identified under the rubric of (homosexual)
inversion, the ground of feminist, gay and lesbian, and ethnic and racial inter-
ventions in the medical, legal, and religious spheres means that the transsexual
or transgender individual passes out of the realm of “inverted” sexual expres-
sion to occupy the more recently clarified ground of the transperson. The
transsexual now “comes out” as transgender.32 More recently, this reconfigured
dynamic figures clearly in such works as the Sundance Channel’s documentary
series TransGeneration (2005).33
Yet Hedwig suggests—against the disciplining of sex-gender expressivity as
cumulative deviancy in relation to class, race and ethnicity, and biological
gender—that dominant constructions of sex-gender deviance give way to nego-
tiations between plural sex-gender identifications in terms of one another and
are no longer relegated to an overdetermined negativity that would become
oppositional as generic deviance. That is, the new counterarticulation of sex and
gender as open resistance to the determination of sex-gender “secrecy” (con-
straints that the home, school, workplace, military, and media-saturated public
stage of celebrity, to mention those most relevant here, have historically hosted)
indicates that the discursive resources of coming out are now available to, say,
persons choosing gender reassignment surgery. The out gay or lesbian, within
the dynamic of dysfunctional logics of sexed and gendered closeting, is the old
transgender.34 In other words, in our histories of sexuality, the future of sex has
happened again, but historically this future is the elaboration of gender identi-
ties emerging against the backdrop of gay and lesbian sexualities determined in
relation to personhood and emergence, not to closeting, deviation, or transgres-
sion. Rather, these elaborations receive logics of audition and of visibility still
in contest but nonetheless transposable: coming, becoming, or being out, with
“outness” attaining the status of a powerful cipher demanding reading, as
opposed to “closetedness” being a powerful secret deferring it.35
Specifically in these ways, what Hedwig does with the “new” film musical is
radically different from various other exemplars collectively exhibiting much
interest in the powers of musical reception. Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark
 Melos, Telos, and Me / 195

(2000) deconstructs the audience reception of the Hollywood “show musical”

by transposing it against a dystopian version of the “fairy-tale musical.” Selma
Jezkova, entranced with the ideal America exhibited in the movie musical, dies
because she will not obey the logics of justice lived in the realist United States
that denies the value of her work and refuses to extend care in the event of her
son’s suffering. Dancer demands reception of an altogether different film from
the one it seems to present, one whose resolution would have a musical finale
that, as its final provocation to its audience makes clear, we cannot yet actually
hear: the sound of a U.S. anti–death penalty show musical that is historically
accurate. Danish director von Trier’s point is clear: For Americans, his decon-
struction of the show musical is to be received as the antithesis of an escapist
“folk musical.” Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! (2001) challenges its audience to
recognize the songs it receives from pop-music history—though one can sing
along only if one recognizes the remix and happens to know the words. Rob
Marshall’s Chicago (2002) puts the reception of the film musical through a post-
feminist lens, appealing von Trier’s judgment of U.S. musical-cinema ideology
(“guilty!”) by having singing, dancing murderesses escape the risk of state-
sanctioned death to join forces on an all-female, happily scopophilic stage (“not
guilty!”).
Hedwig’s troubling of sex and gender logics turns any genre revisionism, or
any epistemology of the closet, inside out—much as male-to-female gender
reassignment surgery turns the penis outside in—by articulating the unfin-
ishedness of transgender identity as a new route “to the street” for gay-male
expressivity. In Hedwig, interiority is less at stake than is the synthesis of person-
hood from processes of media reception. In the drag styles of the contingent
stages improvised in queer watering holes and nightclubs like those that inspired
Hedwig, the film mediates experience, from (fictive) intimate memories to (fic-
tive) public appearance, as a historical problematic of sex localized in the
individual body and gender located in public. Thus, the film frames the queer
aesthetics of personhood as a renewed mediation of corporeal geopolitics,
somewhere between diaspora and cosmopolitanism.36 What is crucial is that
Hedwig’s damning of denial (in rock, in film, and in film genre and reception
studies) merges high camp and low rock to claim a decidedly middlebrow
acceptance of sex-gender transpositions.
More than simply a revision of the Hollywood musical or biopic, then,
Hedwig’s elaboration of transgender-themed performance play as a new route
to the queer street makes great hay of the obvious debt it happily owes to Rocky
Horror (whose long post-release afterlife as late-night audience participation
cinema might have provided the paradigmatic example of interaction between
audiences as interpretive community and industrial exhibition of musical-genre
cinema for Altman’s study of the Hollywood musical but goes unmentioned
even in his exhaustive index of works).
196 / Chapter 6

Hedwig, whether in the stripped-down original theatrical version or the

larger-than-life, filled-out film version, mines the historical materials of filmic
rock opera for its grand transpositional gestures. For my purposes, the filmic
rock opera, never a coherent or conclusive category but a genre, concept, and
claim of invention all rolled into a stylistic, includes such films as Tommy, Rocky
Horror, Godspell: A Musical Based on the Gospel according to St. Matthew (1973),
Jesus Christ Superstar (1973), Phantom of the Paradise (1974), Lisztomania
(1975), and Hair (1979), among others. These films do not obey the generic,
syntactic, or semantic conventions of the film musical Altman lays out, although
they may well observe some of those tendencies. And, while they import many
of the semantics of the musical image of rock as a popular commodity form
into stage or film, these films also depart from the considerations of performer,
voice, and image that Frith, for example, discusses.37
Generally, the problematic of the rock musical and the basis of its audience
appeal are not, say, “coupling” and “marriage” (as Altman sees the primary ideo-
logical interest of the film musical) but rather “belonging” and “personhood.”
For the audience of the rock musical, the charmed musical body personified in
the sacrificial figure of the rock messiah or martyr, who gathers together a musi-
cally enlightened band of insiders (the audience by proxy), sorts out the problem
of belonging as musical revelation of finding identity lived as an aesthetic praxis
in mass-media culture (a lifestyle). And so, as a cultural form rather than as a
well-defined genre, the rock opera brings to bear a strangely direct meditation
on the problematics of belief in the capitalist narrative of the self to musical
subcultures outstripping their earlier places, communities, or cultural “sites”
(during the late 1960s and early 1970s, rock was a “Scorpio Rising,” to invoke
Kenneth Anger’s 1963 experimental film allegorizing this phenomenon: a para-
grammatic music and youth subculture undergoing industrial integration).
In this light, Hedwig is all the more interesting, for it expects the audience
not only to recognize generic and cultural forms but also to sing the tune of
musical self-knowledge, however traumatic. These musical knowledges may be
found in the discarded mediatic resources of the past, such as the rock opera,
and are later refigured, in this case, by 1990s queer rock (a different example
would be the 1990s return of 8-bit video-game music and its stylistic elabora-
tion in contemporary electronic music). Hedwig’s musical origins, she says and
shows, are found in outdated musical technologies, such as 8-track tapes or
cold war–era armed forces radio, and suggest a miscegenation between the inas-
similably hip past of glam rock, banal AM radio hits, and such regional musical
genres as country or urban. The film’s stylistic excess directs conflicts not only
between (ideological) narrative and (audience) enunciation but also between
masculinity and femininity, male and female bodies, expression and orientation,
property and propriety, and, most importantly for this film, between past and
 Melos, Telos, and Me / 197

future identities of sexual orientation (gay, lesbian, bisexual) and identities of

sexual transition (transsexual and transgender).
Hedwig’s nemesis, Tommy Gnosis, is a figure of the historical misrecogni-
tion of queer enunciation contributing to narratives of rock spectacle and of
the affective power of persons to affirm sex-gender expression being diverted
into formulations of “sexual deviance.” The glittering cross Gnosis bears on his
forehead was bestowed by Hedwig’s musical knowledges, a transaction leading
only to his disavowal of Hedwig. Having received the sacrament of knowledge
from Hedwig, Gnosis desires Hedwig as “she-male” but rejects her as transgen-
dered; his desire lasts only as long as he can imagine her as a deviant but intact
masculinity—that is, as long as she may have an “original” male phallus that can
penetrate him. And he fears and rejects her to the degree that her “angry inch”
signifies a remade, synthetic, and so impotent “female” phallus. As an example,
then, of a generic transition of the sexed gendered knowledges invested but dis-
avowed in the rock musical (and in the panoply of other audiovisual musical
forms upon which the film draws), Hedwig has a lot to sing—that is, to say. Most
notably, Hedwig’s struggle for the authorship of her story against the father-
conflicted, straight-identified, musical thief Gnosis concludes with her negotia-
tion of a path between the respective narrative conclusions of two 1970s-era
rock opera films, Tommy and Rocky Horror.
It is worth reconsidering some of the segments of the rock opera. The rock
opera, within which we might include Tommy, Rocky Horror, Godspell, Jesus
Christ Superstar, or Hair, varies widely in its use of popular music, narrative
syntax and semantics, musical representation, and invocation of musical per-
formance. As I have pointed out, these films by no means share what would be
generic conventions in the syntactical and semantic senses that Altman lays out,
and they clearly depart from the kinds of considerations of performer, voice,
and image that Frith discusses—their artificiality and obvious constructedness
tend to be too strong to speak simply to the embodied “grain” of the performer’s
voice, for example. But they do speak to what Altman calls the importance of
interpretive communities for the musical, although Altman’s concerns with
generic definition prevent his classic study from seriously considering the rock
opera. What can be seen precisely in filmic rock opera is the question of the
interpretive community in relation to musical speech. All the films I have identi-
fied as belonging to the classical rock opera speak to the importance of “the
interpretive community.” They reflect this concern through two important
qualities: They revolve around the idea of the secret and the sacred. Personhood
for the audience of the rock musical, embodied in the sacrificial figure of the
rock messiah, is a matter of revelation and belonging.
First, these films share a narrative telos that develops the premise of some
hidden knowledge and turns this gnosis into the basis for a social identity that
198 / Chapter 6

is to be understood within the cultural moment of the film’s production. Second,

popular musical cultures, especially those that can challenge dominant and estab-
lished film-music conventions, become the key for decoding the sacred message:
generally, of the outsider belonging, or, alternatively, of belonging to the outside
or to a nondominant group. So, however fantastic the film’s setting or style may
be, throughout these films, the pop star appears as excluded messiah (a messiah
who is also a pariah), or, more exactly, the pariah-messiah appears as pop star.
The conventional narrative pattern of these films, then, across wide variations
(which often exceed, and so easily come to parody, the conventions of the film
musical in particular or even the scored film more generally) is that the unveil-
ing and subsequent transmission of a hidden but life-changing knowledge takes
place as musical performance and so emanates from a sacred insider or band of
insiders to a wider, now musical, community (by extension, listening audience)
precisely in the overt technique of musical knowledge as sound-image synchro-
nization. A closed or esoteric subjectivity is opened up to the social, having been
contained within the sound-image body of the musical outsider. Our following
the revealed path to this transformation of the social that the central fi gure
almost always personifies means that the “sacred” knowledge of the social—that
is, a sense of understanding as belonging—is also reproduced for the mass of
followers, by extension, for musical listeners and thus for us, the audience.
Of course, the audience’s knowledge of the music animated in this way
preexists and provides the basis for the cinema’s depiction of it as the musical
dissemination of belonging, and so the rock musical is above all a tale of the
meanings of the reproduction of belonging, beyond either rock as recorded
music or film musical as cinema. This is the history at stake in the rock opera,
then: the story of audiences finding their own reproductions differentially,
between the twin towers of film and pop music as mass-cultural productions.
The mediatic corporeality of the musical messiah, the body-to-be-consumed
of the rock-and-roll outcast, is central to the way this genre mediates an audi-
ence’s sense of who it is and its sense of what brings it together in the face of a
disappearing, emergent, or nonexisting history over time. The narrative mode
here is not historical allegory but futural retrospection; and the point of view is
not one of individual nostalgia but a putatively collective point of view based
in recognition and recollection of having heard the music or its meanings before,
of having become able to recognize cultural values by having realized that one
can never truly remember not having been able to speak. Here, musical play
takes on a capacity for negation and for projection that would otherwise be
denied to the musical spectator of the cinema. And so in Tommy, the inacces-
sible interior world of an unseeing, unhearing boy whose various experiences
of social, substance, and sexual abuse all originate with the overlaying of a false
Oedipal narrative onto a false narrative of a nationalist parental authority is
 Melos, Telos, and Me / 199

once and for all shattered in a rock concert staged as a juvenile pinball tourna-
ment. In this film, mastery of a disabled masculine body (Tommy’s “cultural
autism”) equates directly to mastering the affective potentiality of a commod-
itized self: the youth who has learned to “play” rock music in post–World War
II youth cultures. From this point on, Tommy can now see and hear but will
teach his followers to experience and to express mediatized sound and vision as
a discipline of blindness and deafness. The musical body of rock here emerges
in the transformation of a socialized subjectivity gravitationally compressed to
the point of a black hole that has sucked up every possible pose of consumption,
only to ultimately reproduce them as nullity and distraction. Tommy’s rise to
fame explodes in an expressive musical gesture that satisfies only by playing an
appetite for mediatic musical mastery off a desire to satisfy the audience’s thirst
for excitement in the form of toppling the last flash in the pan. This play is
depicted precisely as the audience’s ability to see and to hear rock music, and
Tommy brings these gifts to those who, in turn, see and hear him but whose
identifications with his power must be shifted to some other rising star once he
becomes “established” as a figure of worship.
The musical messiah of the rock opera accords perfectly with karaoke capi-
talism’s congenital need for a momentary critique of the subjective and corpo-
real exigencies it activates in bringing sound and vision to audiences whose lis-
tening originates somewhere else and whose capacity for iconic recognition is
always ultimately extradiegetic. The rock musical’s messiah, then, is always writ-
ten into the filmic narrative as a demand to have recognized what has already
become popular knowledge, even as he or she must demonstrate the impossible
emergence of that knowledge after the fact. Here, the mode of spectatorship is
a paradoxical one in which the film does not defer history in allegorical displace-
ment but rather must invent (patently false) history as a series of futural revela-
tions phrased in the terms of grandly retrospective narratives whose meanings
are largely established before spectatorship can commence. The gestures of the
rock opera are always postmediatic, because for the present tense of the audi-
ence’s musical knowledge to be narrated, this present tense must constitute not
the audience’s past but the music’s future to exert a continuing hold on its audi-
ence; the music’s future can unfold only after, and in spite of, the obstacles
blocking its production. And so the filmic rock opera deploys that mediatic past
tense common to any recorded commodity, the sense of its having been heard
before, precisely because if it is any good, it will demand to be played again. This
future-past tense, which is embedded but denaturalized in the playback expe-
rience belonging to listening commodities (and which would only years later
become accessible to the video-store burnout), suggests not regressive listening
but recognition of having transitioned, because we have repeatedly heard it all
before. Distinct from either the impossible present tense of the garden variety
200 / Chapter 6

musical, in which song and dance emerge out of the thin air of ideologically
charged desire, or the nostalgic subjectivity anchored by the melodramatic
underscore, the affect of the rock opera finds its power in a futural past eliciting
the historical presence of the listening audience; this affect, the feeling of a
remembrance of an unknowable expectation that is at the same time nonethe-
less already consummated as expression, rests with the audience’s historically
present-tense capacity to hear a music whose rupturing power can be described
only by having first been depicted within the filmic narrative as coming out of
nowhere or as having been hopelessly out of reach.
As Hedwig puts this retrospective futural indicative to her listener Tommy
Gnosis, whom she reveals has “followed her voice” and left the “wicked little
town” of Junction City: “Remember Mrs. Lot, when she turned around.” The
conflict of pseudohistorical narration and interpretive extemporizing here is one
of biblical proportions, but this conflict always serves the interest of the rock god
or goddess (“Deny me and be doomed,” the film announces more than once). In
just this way, the retrospective narratives of this futural mode of the audience’s
backward glance are grand, indeed. In Jesus Christ Superstar, the body of the
musical rock star as transformative rupturing knowledge equates Jesus as a sen-
suous wrathful hippie leading his audience to salvation through a literal desert
of spectacular production numbers, shot on location in Israel. In Godspell, con-
versely, the gospel is rendered as a hippie commune of Jesus freaks tripping
through 1970s New York via production numbers that parody more than simply
the film musical, which has more than once provided a mediatic tour of musical
New York, notably in Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly’s On the Town (1949). Too,
the “canned” musical illustration and herky-jerky choreography of Godspell
invoke the musical accompaniments and quasi-robotic movements of early cin-
ema and generally make fun of the way in which cinema can only partially,
through sound-image artifice and the limitations of the frame, capture the living
(and dying) processes of the changing real. The location shoots of Godspell, in
particular, will never be attempted again, by definition: The most spectacular
number concludes with a helicopter-crane shot of the cast dancing on top of
one of the World Trade Center towers. Still, the potential of the rock musical’s
future retrospective mode is by no means universally applicable. By the time of
Hair, adapted for the screen some years after the filmic heyday of the rock musi-
cal and the end of the Vietnam War, the same pattern continues, but with the
fading political vibrancy of the counterculture overshadowing the present-tense
musicality of audience recognition. The film version of Hair becomes a nostalgic
look at hippie antiauthoritarianism and draft dodging, knowledges increasingly
impotent during the late stages of punk and the early stages of hair metal.
Like Tommy, which concludes with a convulsion of violence and the release
of the rock-star messiah to heavenly realms of celebrity irrelevance, Rocky Horror
 Melos, Telos, and Me / 201

confirms the way the rock musical mediates film genre, popular music form,
and audience formation as the dissemination of a sexed musical body. And, like
Tommy, Rocky Horror illustrates the sacrifice that is inevitably prescribed within
this particular regime of genetic differentiation (where mediatic dissemination
of the sacred gnosis implies that vital transformation takes place as mass-media
reproduction and so can be transpositioned as cinema’s mediation of musical
gestures, gestures that outstrip the localization of subjective identifi cations
before the screen to appear as collective knowledges driving “the music”—
actually the domain of popular-music production that must be exterior to cin-
ema for cinema to convoke it). While the reproduction of knowledge as social
transformation is always a question of contact with, coming close to, or touching
the outcast musical body, this body cannot live out the transformation it brings,
especially if that transformation is to become definite, historical, and susceptible
to narrative depiction. And so it is that the deviant bisexual Dr. Frankenfurter
confesses his sins to an apparently rather more mainstream audience (song-
wise, his sins might be “building a man,” engineering a “time warp,” and other-
wise enabling our view of sexual and historical identities as musical artifice) and
is zapped back to his home planet of Transylvania. If an ecstatic body always
appears in the rock opera—a spectacular musical image and an image of music
that is “out of sight” and difficult to contain within the frame, then, to the degree
that popular music provides that outcast body from outside cinema—then the
death of this sexed body marks cinema’s appropriation of popular listening
knowledges. Of course, in these terms, this death also suggests a potential musi-
cal rebirth to come in the context of the audience itself, as the music from the
film returns to other popular music reproductions: sound tracks, returns to the
Broadway stage or community theater, and, of particular interest for my pur-
poses here, the kinds of participatory postdistribution appropriation activities
for which Rocky Horror and Hedwig have become notable.
Generally, then, in the rock opera, as transformative musical knowledge
embodied in a charismatic figure becomes popular and threatens the authori-
ties, a sacrifice occurs. And this pattern suggests the commodified historicity
of the dynamics at stake: genre, gender, popular music. The rock opera thus
makes reflexive, usually camp tragedy out of the disciplined subjectivities of
youth culture in commodity capitalism; it allegorizes the limited lifespan inher-
ent to commodifying belief in the self as an undertaking into transcendent,
transparent subjective identity. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the rock
opera nicely folded together the problematic of a commodity counterculture
understood as entertainment and rock music understood as having liberatory
power.
The rock opera narrative complicates the older narratives of transcendent
musical selves as “stars,” such as that of A Star Is Born (1954) or Inside Daisy
202 / Chapter 6

Clover (1965), a deconstruction of that earlier film. The rock opera shifts the
focus from the emergence of stardom to the emergence of an incarnate knowl-
edge of belonging that is closely aligned with and already recognizable by a lis-
tening audience. And so in these films, the devotion of listening others is as
dramatic as the central figure’s transmogrification. The emergence of this form
is explained with rock’s new status at the end of the 1960s. No longer a dance
music but a listening music, rock worked as a kind of musical avatar of coun-
tercultural populism, contributing to the idea that, since apparently revolution
would not be happening, countercultural values must have some inherent and
inevitable destiny of their own to fulfill in becoming mainstream commodities.
The combination of this simultaneously hermeneutic and declamatory power
gives the rock opera a special status: It is not simply a “rock star is born” varia-
tion on the stage or film musical but rather a musical commentary about shifts
in popular systems of knowledge in which genre and gender are intertwined in
the social production of belonging, of becoming a person, and whether this
becoming happens in series of exclusions or inclusions.
At the conclusion of Rocky Horror, Dr. Frankenfurter is sent back to “trans-
sexual Transylvania” after facing the straight audience and admitting the guilt
of his pleasures. Here, drag presents a feminized male who is predatory, vampi-
rizing both sexes—this transvestite is more bisexual than transsexual, as the
diegesis makes clear, speaking to the attraction and the difficulty of same-sex
identifications as well as to the overwhelming unlikelihood of transgender affil-
iations for the audiences of its day. Rocky Horror uses rock as cultural form to
narrate the emergence (and untenability) of sexual desire as heterodeviance. The
film presents the all-too-feared, but only to be expected, conclusion: expulsion.
Deviance is always too good to last. But the film’s sense of a future deferred
corresponds nicely with the retro style of that period of rock and roll. The film
joyously sends up as gothic sock-hop (“Let’s do the time warp again!”) the 1950s
rock and roll of its youth, even as it consigns its newly found sexual freedoms
to the formula of “transgression, contained.”
On the other hand, in Ken Russell’s adaptation of Tommy, an androgynous
rock star achieves a larger-than-life persona partially in response to the hetero-
sexual governmentality of the postwar British nuclear family but also in reaction
to sexual abuse at the hands of his pedophilic uncle, who is coded as gay and
perverse (this leering uncle, whose gapped teeth indicate his very facial expres-
sion as unsavory violation, reads the Gay Times when he is not incestuously
abusing Tommy). The film suggests an overlap in the innovations of the sexual
revolution (“gay liberation”) with the reactionary family structures that have
produced Tommy’s sensual autism in the first place (depicted early in the film
as a child with a cube over his head, searching for orientation as he wades aim-
lessly and dangerously on a seashore upon which the waves of the world are
breaking). At the film’s conclusion, Tommy reaches the heights of rock stardom
 Melos, Telos, and Me / 203

as he is rejected by his initial fans, who finally chafe at his innovations as yet
another set of constraints. He unexpectedly presides over the violence of their
subsequent rebellion as they revolt and move on to devote themselves to a new
musical icon on which to pin their desires. Elton John’s over-the-top perfor-
mance as the reigning pinball wizard, whom Tommy vanquishes during his own
rise to the top, illustrates, on the level of star discourses, the simultaneously
annunciatory and condemning discourses surrounding male homosexuality in
rock (and in film) of that time.
Like all rock operas, Tommy and Rocky Horror each mobilize the recently
recognized historical status of rock music as a rhetoric and aesthetics of cultural
and historical development more generally. And as “noise” or dissonance becomes
central to processes of integrating a new historical stage of popular music and
capital, rock is a prime exemplar of the fact that technocultures “reproduce” not
in terms of biology but in terms of historically complex diagrammatic relations
of labor, technology, culture, and capital. In relation to rock music, rock in film,
and our own (future) histories of sexuality, then, Tommy provides the opposite
trope to that of Rocky Horror. Tommy narrates rock’s historical moment of musi-
cal triumph in a vocabulary of desire displaced, of desire deviating from the
subject. Rocky Horror camps a “future sex” transgression to the backing track of
retro rock and roll that indicates from the outset that no future is in sight.
Tommy plays rock and roll as a momentary, and therefore ultimately either
contingent or false, historical triumph in the progression of musical genres,
genres undermined by desire wrongly displaced from the audience to the star-
as-screen erected in the institutionalization of social dysfunction as capitalist
family values. For the horror-show-sex-cult-family-values of Rocky Horror,
though, even the momentary, if illusory, future presented in Tommy was always
already over before it started, so the transgressions underlying the appearance
of a historical event as “star” are programmed to repeat upon the star’s demise.
Dr. Frankenfurter sings “I’m coming home” before being zapped back to Tran-
sylvania by alien storm troopers; Tommy sings “I’m free” as he finally escapes
the iconic identity placed upon him by his fervent fan base and the family cor-
poration profiting from his rock exhibitionism. Rocky Horror emphasizes gender-
sex deviance that is a transgressive, repeating blip, easily contained (as the
hybrid-cinema versions’ audiences know, as they are policed into their seats and
polled as to whether they are “virgins” of the show) in an interplanetary system
of sexed, gendered normativity: The dark castle of outlaw rock and roll is but a
fading “alternative” satellite moon in a globalizing musical economy in which
rock is already dominant. Tommy models the historical progression of pop
musical genres, with rock’s transgressive power bringing it to the top of the heap,
but questions masculine rock mastery as the teleological end of this progress
inasmuch as rock’s transgression depends on desires more expertly calculated
in terms of sex and gender. If Rocky Horror predicates its well-oiled sensibility for
204 / Chapter 6

tragedy by arriving at a ban on sexual transgression, Tommy finds gay-liberatory

values not so noticeably distinct from the bourgeois family values that originally
impelled the rock star toward musical transgression in the first place.
At the heart of this commutability of histories of sexuality and of rock music
as either transgressive or nostalgic, both films share territory. If Rocky Horror’s
Dr. Frankenfurter finally enters the space of audience reception to receive his
banishment, whereas Tommy’s fans finally ransack his music camp and flee, still,
each film narrates its conclusions as a confrontation between the iconic genius
(feminized to greater or lesser degrees) directing the musical spectacle and the
audience who receives his mastery of feminized masculinity. And, in spite of
their conclusions (Tommy emphasizing the fact of mediated reception, Rocky
Horror emphasizing the fiction of liveness), each of these films gravitates around
the potential for gender expressivity and sexual relational—and not gender fix-
ity and sexual identity—to underwrite the retrospective truths popular music
expresses to receptive knowing audiences.
Both films thus ultimately naturalize an identification between the cine-
matic work’s depiction of life as musical style and rock music’s claim to deliver
“the live.” They allow only indirect deferred self-recognition to their audiences:
that audience who watches, already knowing the songs (whether because audi-
ence members have heard the songs in the theater, on phonographs, or on the
radio or because they have attended numerous prior screenings of the film).
Both works transpose musical recording and cinematic narrative, setting cinema
to rock and rock to cinema, but use the operational artifice of synchronizing
music and image as speech or song to point to the specter of the “natural,” which
is hermetically sealed from the song or speech of the audience.38 Hedwig, clearly
traveling this primrose path but with a very different destination in mind, takes
a big risk in asking the audience to sing along and providing members with the
words. What if no one wants to? In other words, rock and cinema, rock and
visual media generally, tend to mediate gender and genre by defaulting to genius
and defer their own presentational value for the mass-media audience. Rock’s
genius for distortion is for the rock star to sing, and cinema’s genius for sex
occurs against the audience’s knowledge.
So, finally, it is not surprising that each film presents the rock musical as a
genre where gender conclusively naturalizes sexual relation before an audience
presumed to be silent and where this determination is achieved in an overtly
artificial synchronization of music and image. The upshot is that Rocky Horror
finally perversely denies the viability of any in-between or third mediation of
gender and waits for the theatricalized speech of its cinematic audience; Tommy
perversely heterosexualizes its hero at the expense of his own abuse and sends
its audience on to “the next big thing.” The potential for gender expressivity and
sexual relationality to depart from these tragic formulations might be demon-
strated, then, not with mere screen transgression or rock-and-roll social critique
 Melos, Telos, and Me / 205

but with another, more important feature of exhibition: Cinema and rock
would acknowledge their conventionality, speak to their own interpretation and
their own mediation, and invite their audience’s speech. Cinema might denatu-
ralize gender and sexual relationality by upsetting synchronization conventions
and asking audiences—who cannot be vocally timed or even warranted to
participate—to sing along. Rock in film might more explicitly acknowledge its
musical conventionality, forgoing its musical triumphalism and its annunciation
of genius, by acknowledging its own circulation amid audience knowledges right
alongside, say, the delivery of popular song on radio (largely lost to cinema). At
least, these are the knowing truths that Hedwig exhibits.
Taken together, Tommy and Rocky Horror form the apotheosis of the libera-
tory promises of the musicalized sexual revolution. Each in its own way marks
the point where the sexual revolution turns into a sexual counterrevolution.
Tommy contributes by revealing the spectacular work of sound and image syn-
chronization as finally counter to the aesthetics and values of rock perfor-
mance, suggesting that the fans’ departure from Tommy’s music camp results
from an excess of overmediation and results in a drive toward the next musical
genre as social movement. Rocky Horror suggests that for the fun to go on for
the audience, the tools of enforcement must be used against the transgressing
doctor to contain his excess. This containment continues to be literally per-
formed, albeit with different meanings, in the hybrid theatrical cinema of Rocky
Horror performance today, where cast members “police” the audience into
proper positions, giving them orders and largely directing the proceedings as
a scripting of the potential for transgression within a “compulsory heterosexu-
ality” that is, for the audiences I have observed, mostly a pseudonostalgic fiction.
Rocky Horror today seems to serve, among many other uses, as a pretext for
dressing up and acting out a participatory remaking of queer histories taking
place as “gay-straight alliances” somewhere between the cinema screen, the
audio playback device, the drama class, the community theater, the social net-
work, and the movie audience. Hedwig reflexively activates these gestures in
theatrical and cinema versions, and it is a testament to its success that cinema
audiences have adopted Hedwig, like Rocky Horror, as a performance script for
bringing live action into the movie theater. Hedwig has much to say about the
fate of the trajectory of the film musical’s reproduction of genre and gender
after rock.
Hedwig challenges its audiences to deny three deviations from any natural-
ized orders of generic identity in relation to genre. First, Hedwig differentiates
queer musical cinema from the film musical precisely by applying generic iden-
tifications originating in other cinematic forms than the musical: specifically,
rock theatrics and album covers, but also visual music animation and the melo-
drama. In other words, where the film musical tends to use music to suspend
cause-and-effect narration, Hedwig works through variegated sound-image
206 / Chapter 6

stylistics to narrate not impossible origins but undetermined futurity. Hedwig

transforms the ideologically suspect suspension of cause and effect in the film
musical, escapist precisely in terms of the generic limitations through which it
operates. Personhood is not figured in terms of a determination of biological or
naturalized sex sustained through generic variations on the theme of boy-meets-
girl. Instead, it is depicted in terms of the instabilities of rock and cinema medi-
ating gender expression and audience expressivity.
Reordering telos and melos to construct another “me” means that the media-
tion of gender expression does not operate within the formal boundaries of
narrative form but rather somewhat more like the way rock opera works in a
proscriptive allegorical mode and, without the additional props and pointers
Hedwig packs in, critically points to the cultural limits restricting gender expres-
sion and through which restrictions queer expression struggles. For example,
the film presents a trailer-trash nonconformant gender identity sung as country
music as a different mode within, but therefore analogous to, the histories in
which anti-black or anti-Semitic violence are naturalized. In doing so, it suggests
and problematizes affiliations between homophobic, classist, sexist, and racist
violences that are at least partially renewed through the very commodities of
mediatic identity inviting queer listening. In this way, the larger problematic of
gender mediation is centered between and received through other analytics.
These receptions are not necessarily appropriative productions of black kine-
sics or feminist politicizations of the personal in false or faulty identifications
but rather are transpositions taken up and expressed in the processes of mass-
cultural reception.
Second, Hedwig marks another transposition, one tangling with the ongoing
project of representing gay and lesbian histories. While belonging to a histori-
cally specific moment, and while replaying historical antagonisms between less
well-defined queer audiences and their identifications with media commodities,
in deploying moments of identification with musical mediation and turning
them against established alignments of sex, gender, and gender expression, the
film refuses to render its own moment in terms of established positions for gay
and lesbian identities. Rather, Hedwig turns productivities of media reception
grounded in musical affect to a nonrepresentational negotiation of gay and
queer identity or, perhaps more precisely, of the drag queen and the drag king—
a negotiation that would have been impossible in this way at an earlier historical
moment. The conclusion is that gay masculinity becomes mobile in terms of a
divorce from its own commodified agency; a queer male body is born thanks to
erotics and ethics shared with transgender politics, received in audible and visi-
ble conflicts of genre and gender expression.
Finally, a third transposition of identity accompanies these two: Hedwig
marks the difference of mediatic music and image by applying the active recep-
 Melos, Telos, and Me / 207

tion practices associated with Rocky Horror to the phobic critique of rock-
operatic corporeality epitomized by Tommy. At issue here is the way that Hedwig
emphasizes cinematized musical mediations of gender identity as denaturalized
image and sound: the lip-sync experience generally derogatorily associated with
drag and music television alike. So what are we to make of the proposal Hedwig
makes in the film to Tommy, and reflexively to us, about reconciling a glam
Aladdin Sane public image with a heartfelt Dolly Parton–style composition of
transgender politics capable of producing a queer male body? Hedwig’s mother
was wrong: It is not just a “simple cut-and-paste job.”
Hedwig’s transposition of listening against viewing requires, again, a praxis
of queer aesthetics as an ethical stylization of the erotic idiom of personhood. It
shares with contemporary queer theory an important demonstration of affect’s
power to resituate “historical” desires, acts, and narratives. But, by taking up a
transposition between gay-male vocality and transgender politics, it manages an
open-endedness, a futurity, as antiphon to a homophobic and transphobic past,
where present queer theorizations may refuse past, future, or both. The difference
is in receiving affective knowledge as a disjunctive musical ratio of the mediatic
and the corporeal versus grasping desire as heteronormative projection. The film
is hardly singular in these interests, though.
Miller rewrites the Broadway musical within his critique to refuse the seri-
ated disappointment the musical theater inscribes; he imagines, by refusing that
past, another kind of ending: perhaps one that Hedwig opens, with the help of
its audience.39 Lee Edelman,40 on the other hand, works against heteronormative
histories’ “futurist” desire, arguing that desiring futurity fundamentally works
against queer embodiment. To desire futurity as heteroreproductive “nature”
indicates a pervasive violent fantasy of salvation; the future of the child is a
projection exclusively screening a fictive heteronormative past while actively
negating queer corporealities in the present. Edelman’s synthesis of deconstruc-
tive and psychoanalytic analytics aims to reveal a “structural position” for a
queer critique of heteroreproductive futurism.41
Against that futurist fantasy, Edelman aims “sinthomosexuality,” a bastard-
ization of linguistic orders moving through language, through symbolic orders,
and through desire: The Lacanian sinthome is conjoined with and overlaps the
textual shape of “homosexuality.” The sinthome, he explains, is Jacques Lacan’s
intentional resurrection of an archaic writing of “symptom” to emphasize the
inscriptive mechanisms (more generally for my purposes here, the mediatic
operations of technesis) that enable the subject’s engagement with the pleasures
of the symbolic. Lacan’s archaic usage exposes repetition within the symbolic
order and, accordingly, the operations of the death drive, to deflate the subject’s
fantasy of immortality.42 Sinthomosexuality, then, is a queer “site where the fan-
tasy of futurism confronts the insistence of a jouissance that rends it precisely by
208 / Chapter 6

rendering it in relation to [the death] drive.”43 Where the future appears in the
face of the child, sinthomosexuality finds an “impasse” of language and history
disavowed in the fantasy of salvaging the body politic. To succeed in that dis-
avowal, homosexuality (and nonprocreative sexuality, generally) is called in to
die in place of the inevitable symbolic death of the subjects of language and his-
tory. Disfiguring this fantasy by revealing the means of its inscription, sinthomo-
sexuality can “pass beyond, pass through” the violent promise of salvation.44
The ungainly progeny of Edelman’s concourse between the texts he receives
and the writing device with which he prepares his reception by his reader (a
pronunciation guide), his linguistic and textual bastardization is born in the
negativity of the present he engages. Of course, queers must insist on equal rights,
insist on “our capacity to promote the social order’s coherence and integrity,” and
this insistence is for the present: We must not wait for a tomorrow that is “always
another day away.”45 When culture fantasizes its own continuance in the figure
of the child, the social order hears queer sexuality as violation, its own worst
nightmare; so Edelman writes out this violation as a demand. Sinthomosexual-
ity, a fabricated “word without a future,” is a queer site created for the reception
of a critical reading project—a synthetic rather than a Platonic or maternal
chora, perhaps.46 Edelman introduces this rhetorical device to derealize familiar
narrative fantasies that frame, one way or another, futurity against the intrusive
repetitive mechanism of the death drive.47 But the deployment of sinthomo-
sexuality as rhetorical device that can traverse and open out the narrative setting
of futural fantasy comes within a larger frame, operating between two important
movements in Edelman’s work. Edelman first introduces his aim of revealing
the violent irony at work in cultural identifications for which “the Child has
come to embody the telos of the social order” and concludes with the disastrous
effects of continued identification with puerile futurism: “endless blows. . . .
Somewhere, someone else will be savagely beaten and left to die.”48 Sinthomo-
sexuality, then, is a device for reflexive reception launched in reading queer irony
through to an identitarian telos in the social: continuing homophobic violence.
It travels between two powerful moments in the text: One affective gesture lays
bare the scene of queer reading, and another gesture punctuates its end.
In the first gesture, Edelman engages a literally orgiastic beratement of struc-
turing negativity. Irony is transvalued as an erotically charged textual assault
against symbolic futurism:

Fuck the social order and the Child in whose name we’re collectively
terrorized; fuck Annie; fuck the waif from Les Mis; fuck the poor, inno-
cent kid on the Net; fuck Laws both with capital ls and with small; fuck
the whole network of symbolic relations and the future that serves as its
prop.49
 Melos, Telos, and Me / 209

Symbolic Law, and laws, before capital, or Kapital, then: Edelman’s sinthomo-
sexual preference is for Lacan’s dialectic of desire over Adorno’s negative dia-
lectic. But the future bounces back. Because sinthomosexuality designates the
conjoined overlapping indicators of the technical and the sexual woven into
salvation fantasies organized around the figure of the child, sinthomosexuality
paradoxically continues to be organized in relation to that futurity: “What
keeps [sinthomosexuality] alive . . . is the futurism desperate to negate it.”50
“No future” cannot be simply a statement against phobic symbolization; it
is also a naming of demands for impossible recompense, for impossible justice,
of impossible coherence. And Edelman does not simply dispense with futurity
by diverting fantasies of symbolic control toward the death drive, which these
fantasies are already practiced in refusing to face, or toward the dumb pleasure
of “fucking negativity.” The future always boomerangs back into frame, even as
irony. Edelman shows that the ironic can point analytically to the inhuman real,
to the unintelligible catachresis of language or history. But if the tactical power
of an indeterminately oppositional queer theory rests in the ironic, the problem
is that the ironic is relentlessly allegorized as a legible past for futurity’s child.51
So the rhetorical movement of any merely oppositional queer theory is arrested,
held in bondage to the negating future it aims against. Negation recoups irony,
while hardly thinking about it.
So, in an affective gesture emblazoning the essay’s last words, irony turns to
escape language and suspends history, serving not its own ends but as a pivot at
which point writing sacrifices symbolic meaning and turns to musical sense:
“Somewhere, someone else will be savagely beaten and left to die—sacrificed to
a future whose beat goes on, like a pulse or a heart—and another corpse will be
left like a mangled scarecrow to frighten the birds who are gathering now, who
are beating their wings, and who, like the drive, keep on coming.”52 That scare-
crow on the fence might trivially be Dorothy’s symbolic prop on the child’s path
home through Oz but, at greater depth, is an unspoken invocation of Matthew
Shepard’s death. The name of this death is whispered as an anonymous index of
the universalizing violence of futurist fantasy. The point seems clear—Edelman
rewrites the universalist liberatory slogan “We are everywhere” in terms of a
universal disidentification with the future: “Futurism makes sinthomosexuals,
not humans, of us all.”53
The power of this argument lies, for me anyway, not so much in the design
of a laborious rhetorical device (the neologism “sinthomosexuality” seems
designed to be difficult to say or to rewrite) but in the way it frames the device
within affective gestures that work by essay’s end to suspend the symbols of
language within sensible gestures of its rhythmic reproduction. Edelman places
the rhetorics of irony in the hands of affect, and affect is never troubled by its
momentary totality; that is the only way affect can affect. So universal beratement
210 / Chapter 6

(“Fuck the whole network”) is answered by the “drumbeat” of continuing vio-

lence, a violence that nonetheless is suspended in ending.
Just as the catachreses of language or history disappear in irony’s being
allegorized away as futurity, the syntax of that last sentence finishes the seman-
tics of opposition in Edelman’s work to resolutely refuse familiar hope: “another
corpse being left.” Yet, in the same gesture, the writing takes another tack, mark-
ing a mediatic identification (Miller’s Oz?) and a historical trauma (the vio-
lence against Shepard’s body) by fluctuating between representation and
rhythm. Musicality picks up this opposition and provides sense against mean-
ing: Words turn and circle, repeating, hunting futurism’s subject between music
and language.
Rearranging Edelman’s phrases best telegraphs the musical effect I am
describing: “future’s beat,” “a pulse,” “a heart,” “a beating of wings,” “the drive,”
“still coming,” “goes on.” Violence’s meanings are suspended, almost visible, as
sense hums mechanically. If, in this suspension, Edelman’s time runs out, the
affect of this writing does offer more than rhetorical devices. It answers the telos
of identity, the symbolic identification achieved in projecting inaccessible his-
tory as legible future, with the melos of violence suspended. The beating dies
out, but the resonance of having followed that beat echoes as the reader hovers
now on the blank remainder of the page—along with the birds. In closing his
book by aiming the affective sense of queer theory between music and language,
Edelman leaves an opening for some future that cannot be written.
Who or what, after all, are these birds, beating wings, gathering “like the
drive”? The circulating warrants of queer embodiment’s violation? The ghosts
of the inhuman, murdered Shepards haunting the negative? Or does this “drive”
open dissolute history’s fantasy of our disappearance to indicate another time
as yet unsigned? Negativity, whatever its direction (homophobic or identitar-
ian, exclusive or oppositional), is apparently unidirectional only as regards the
sign so that it cannot offer irony as an affirming ground. Rather, moving writ-
ing into music by ending this way, something like horror—or like unfamiliar
hope—is subvocalized within beratement, as beratement stops speaking.
Immanence, another hope of futurity, lies here disturbed, the whispered rhythm
of the unwritten.
Sinthomosexuality is a rhetorical device for opening a “structural position,”
but the affective charge Edelman passes through the setting of murderous fan-
tasy suggests a larger calculus of erotics and ethics shared across queer aesthetics
as praxes. So let us call sinthomosexuality an instance within a larger set of
transpositional tactics or strategies, recognizable as they transpose musicality
for representationalism: The rhetorical effect here is not all metaphoric, cer-
tainly not merely metonymic substitution, but the passing, the massing, of lan-
guage and history into musicality as an affective disordering of phantasmatic
signification. This is not a rhetoric of hyperbole. This passing passes through
 Melos, Telos, and Me / 211

and beyond: It is a diabole, a moving expression of the powers of reception, a

labor of difference.
Hedwig, too, works reception as the immanence of an agency that can be
grasped as having become productive only after it becomes determined and
conflicted in material and technical labors. Where studies of reception such as
Kuhn’s cannot recover anything other than what has been written into cinema
or cultural memory, Hedwig suggests the praxis of an affective temporality dis-
tinct from that of historicizing force. Although this affective temporality of the
diabolic frustrates productivist frameworks, it is also not bound in or to histori-
cal violence and does not mark erasure. The affective labor of Hedwig’s trans-
positional corporeality implies a larger passional dimension of the present, sen-
sible, but not individual. Here, Gilles Deleuze’s exploration of sensible time is
relevant: “The future and past are rather what is left of passion in a body. But,
as it happens, the passion of a body refers to the action of a more powerful body.
The greatest present, the divine present, is the great mixture, the unity of cor-
poreal causes among themselves. It measures the activity of the cosmic period
in which everything is simultaneous: Zeus is also Dia, the ‘Through’ (l’A-travers)
or that which is mixed, the blender.”54 For Deleuze, here, a greater and divine
present is an affective corporeality that is the cause of its own differential expres-
sion. Hedwig’s achievement is to take this greater present into the moment of
audience reception and so to delineate the diabolic “Origin of Love” as a mixed
temporality delivering narrativity expressing speech as public knowledge: more
specifically, the song of the audience. That song, as the title of the penultimate
track indicates, is an “Exquisite Corpse”—Hedwig’s body as the object and
objective of Zeus’s fury. Expressing what would normally be a marginalizing
narrative as speech that is all too often barred in the very moment-to-moment
progress of cinematic reception, Hedwig’s transitioning body is a practical futu-
rity. This praxis of the powers of reception confounds productivism, futurist
fantasy, and historical heterodominance, suspending them in a commingling of
horror and hope to diabolic effect. Transition, transversal, transposition: The
diabole deploys reception against production and affect out of identity, trans-
poses orders of signification and sense: image into music, melos over telos.
Perhaps, then, the film anticipates Edelman’s critique of the child as futurist
fantasy: “And what if the child is queer?” Or what if the child is the ward of queer
kinship or simply grows up listening more closely to the distant wave of the
radiophonic than to the familiar legacies of the patriarchal image or the moth-
er’s mirror stage? Taking her own star turn, Hedwig turns away from the sexed
gendered expression of the musical as genre and turns that expression out:
“Look at me Kansas City: I’m the new Berlin Wall!” Hedwig extends the affective
work of the diabole, indicating the powers of reception out of which we craft
our emergence, our poiesis. Hedwig grasps a particular moment at which trans-
forming political struggles provide not merely identifications but affects of
212 / Chapter 6

love and of freedom to be received in transposition by gay or lesbian struggles

and to be transposed in further futural movements: transgender politics. In
setting these transpositions as musical image, Hedwig seeks a gay-male corpo-
reality continuing to receive its potential despite actual legacies of violence or
loss (whether personhood barred to the social generally or, more specifically,
continuing homophobic violence, HIV/AIDS as mismanaged crisis, new denials
of rights) via leaving the stage and granting the spectacularity of the wig to
female masculinities.
Hedwig is not “destiny’s child” but the bastard and bastardizing of history’s
sexed expression as transposition from bioenergetic to bioinformatic regimes:
liberation histories’ “love child.” If Hedwig finally exits to the street in Hansel’s
transformed return, with Mitchell now all grown up, that departure indicates
an immanent moment paradoxically grasped in reception, not a historical era-
sure. History’s bastard love child has gotten its legs. Its history, still struggling,
will come later. For now, and for as long as our present remains violently bound
to our past as its impossibility, the future is ours.
7
Stylistics of Hieroglyphic Time

Methods for Killing Time,

for Reanimating Musical Time: Biolabor
In this study, I have shown the ways in which musicality and gesture have
provided key terms, tropes, methods, concepts, and emblems for synchro-
nizing streaming media throughout recent periods of technological innova-
tion and media transitions. In each case, synchronizing streaming media for
audience reception using means of greater temporal precision suggests some
looming closure or totalization of media production, exhibition, or recep-
tion; in each case, musicality serves as a way of elaborating critical possibili-
ties for synchronization in a larger sense than solely the technical means of
registration and exhibition while forestalling any final totalized closed sys-
tem of media synchronization. We have seen that musicality seems to func-
tion as a complex temporal diagram: It relates the time of audience recep-
tion to the time of history per se, regardless of, and all the more emphatically
given, the spectacularity of the exhibition system in question. It relates con-
temporaneity to the historical time from which, but in terms of which, and
by virtue of spectacular technical exhibition, the present seems alternately
entirely exhausted or excessively new.
Musicality elaborates some serialization of praxis mediating social
structure and superstructure, where structure becomes superstructure in
the interest of elaborating a “historical apparatus” for critical method. Éric
214 / Chapter 7

Alliez points out one implication of Giorgio Agamben’s observation, in defense

of Walter Benjamin, that “the only materialist point of view is that which radi-
cally overcomes the separation of structure and superstructure, because praxis
is posited as the only single object in its original cohesion—that is, as ‘monad.’
. . . [T]he monad of praxis is presented above all as a ‘textual repertory,’ as a
hieroglyphic that the philosopher must construct in its factitious integrity, in
which elements of both structure and superstructure originally converge in
‘mythical rigidity.’”1 For Alliez, pointedly overlooking the dialectics of media-
tion that Adorno insists Benjamin fails to adequately grasp allows us to see that
it is in this disjuncture of structure and superstructure that the historical appa-
ratus is elaborated, recognizable in the nexus established between processes of
temporalization, functions of subjectivity, and systems of capitalization (the
“resounding system”):

In a praxis where one passes from one pro-position of time to another,

not by reason of external social and historical determinations, nor by a
dialectic of notions, but by an original motion—that is neither “origi-
nary” nor “derived”—of disjuncture by virtue of which what is held to
be aberrant in an arrangement produces a disequilibrium, a deflection
of time, or an intemperateness [intempérie], which will be invested in a
new apparatus. This investment is the presentation itself of time as an
active, “objective” temporality: as a potential-time that creates alterity
and alteration—multiple processes of temporalization exceeding on all
sides the metaphysical vulgarity of there being but one Western repre-
sentation of time, which in all rigor supposes the scientific method as
well as the neo-Kantian operation of subsuming being under Method.2

Capital begins its elaboration of the historical apparatus, Alliez argues, as the
linguistic sign is made to substitute for “singular and present things it designates
by lifting them to the rank of objects of an ‘objective nature,’” where “to be”
comes to mean “to be experienced by means of a representation” in the projec-
tion of things as objects in a world of efficient causes “for which only arbitrarily
manipulable signs can hope to account” (238). Thus, on the one hand, perspec-
tivalism, which Alliez notes in Erwin Panofsky’s work, characterizes the triumph
of objectification and control, the consolidation and systematization of the world
as space as well as the extension of the domain of the self, but also what lies
beyond perspective: the “outfitting, the transportation, the departure of being
from the ‘house’ of language (logos, vox), from the cosmo-theo-psychological
‘field’ of time (oikos, paupertas)” (238–239).
A premise central to this study, however, which I discuss at length with re-
gard to Sergei M. Eisenstein in Chapters 1 and 2, is that the expression of con-
temporary time as exhibition in some partial relation to historial ordering of time
 Stylistics of Hieroglyphic Time / 215

is that time-as-potential is doubled in the temporal exhibition of temporality.

As I have shown, Eisenstein’s method requires both “monadic” and “dialectic”
potential: It modulates the material temporal exhibition of time in time. His-
torical rhythms are subjected to cinematic rhythm to communicate historical
pathos: experience doubled in haptic spectacle effected in the projection of a
virtual image that is received concretely as possible gesture. This exhibition, in
turn, changes the cinematic-historical apparatuses of exhibition. If exhibition-
ary apparatuses are subject to a larger historical apparatus, they are “animated”
in time, too. Thus, for Eisenstein, computation or stereoscopy would provide
further means for cinema, and cinema would give way to some more powerful
exhibitionary apparatus. To the degree, though, that any such animation of
an exhibitionary apparatus over time would be ethical would depend on its
capacity to make pathos—that is, historical experience as suffering—palpable.
Musicality and gesture in Eisenstein’s pathos, in Oskar Fischinger’s ecstatic
musical synchronization, or in Hanns Eisler’s dialectical stream: Each of these is
a stylization of the double potential of streaming media as idiom. Affect condi-
tions, as historical suffering, and recoups, as ecstatic flight or in critical distanc-
ing, the exhibitionary value of the “technological media.” I have argued at length,
then, that affective labor does not typify a new stage of biopolitical capital but
rather conditions the transposition of one “historical apparatus” into another:
the transposition of bioenergetic ontologies, epistemologies, and ethics into the
bioinformatic ones that displace but rely on thermodynamic processes.
Consider, in this light, Natalie Bookchin’s recent Mass Ornament Two Point
Oh! (2009). For this digital-video installation, Bookchin animated hundreds of
YouTube clips to the sound tracks of Busby Berkeley’s 1930s Gold Diggers series
of films and Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935). Each clip is an instance
of user-generated content, and each depicts its author performing calisthenics,
stretching, or dance moves, often in the recognizable style of a well-known music
star or in the style of contemporary fitness regimens. Bookchin’s timed rhythmic
presentation of the rhythmic clips varies. One clip may play alone and then fall
back into a horizontal matrix of clips stretching across the width of the display.
At times, clips accumulate in patterns around the screen, the progression of the
patterned motif corresponding to a cadence heard in the sound track. Through-
out, we are presented with familiar activity in an unfamiliar configuration, and
Bookchin’s video-graphic animation draws our attention to a larger regime of
temporal coordination that she imposes upon them. A sense of dissonance pre-
vails in our recognition of a larger historical regime of fitness and self-discipline
and the contemporary discipline required to document the self and to upload
the document as a Web-ready clip. The montage of clips, presented as cut off
from the time in which they were composed; the sense of almost achieving a
continuous animation of a disparate persistently networked mass of dancing or
exercising figures; the critical dissonance that arises as we begin to worry about
216 / Chapter 7

whether we are exchanging a utopian self-image for a dystopian mass present:

Bookchin puts the classical stylistics of streaming media to use here in a com-
mentary on personhood and publicity mediated in the World Wide Web.
Mass Ornament Two Point Oh! presents (although without interaction on
the part of an interfacial agent) networked self-exhibition as a musical play
with biopolitical power. The title of the installation suggests the two musical
historical motives: self-instrumentalization as speculative gain and atrocity in
the annihilation of self-difference as potential cost. As Bookchin explains, “Each
YouTube dance reenacts a system that reaches further into private space in its
transformation of individuals into instrumental units performing partial func-
tions. At the same time, the dancers make small claims for embodiment and
publicness in the face of their seeming disappearance in the disembodied vir-
tuality of the Internet.”3
Here, media celebrity and normalizing distributions of obsessive self-image
determine limits of style, while the YouTube clip determines the idiom. Book-
chin insists on a modicum of user style to be observed in cross-comparison
from clip to clip, but she largely refuses her subjects any particular ability to
originate style or idiom. Mass Ornament presents a largely negative view of
synchronized media transactions, corresponding in some ways to the concerns
Bernard Stiegler raises about the “exhaustion” of diachronic time in synchro-
nized media networks, which I discuss at length below. The dystopian rhythm
of the energetic self, appearing in terms of informatic celebrity in Mass Orna-
ment, is relieved by Bookchin’s choice and reanimation of clips, in which each
figure appears to make “small claims” for embodiment and publicness. The
immanence generating “affective labor” as biopolitical resistance in Michael
Hardt’s4 account is seconded to, and reframed within, a more dialectical account
of mediation, where digital self-exhibition visualizes the work of maintaining
and exercising the self in the everyday “social structure” and where YouTube
visualizes the “superstructure” of what Stiegler calls contemporary “hyper-
industrialism.”5 Siegfried Kracauer’s oft-cited critique of the “mass ornament”
of synchronized dance troupes of the Weimar period is transposed to the con-
temporary gallery. Kracauer observes that the “bearer” of these animated linear
ornaments is not “the people” but “the mass.” Even if news of these large-scale
coordinations of masses of people as geometric pattern traveled through news-
reel networks to excite remote villages that had not yet seen them, the patterns
of “girl-units” themselves are drained of organic or erotic energy. The mass
ornament was an “end result . . . whose closure is brought about by emptying
all the substantial contents of their contents.”6 Bookchin, paradoxically, retains
a bit of “organic” energy in her ornament of persistently networked masses of
digital self-exhibitors. Her reanimated clips of “girl-units” present “small claims”
in her rhythmic reconfiguration of them, as she presents her own claims along-
side those whose self-exhibition she choreographs.
 Stylistics of Hieroglyphic Time / 217

Indeed, whether in Eisenstein’s work, Kracauer’s critique, Bookchin’s Mass

Ornament, or Stiegler’s account of hyperindustrialism, rhythmic musicality
contributes a common but still underrecognized trope or turn, the elaboration
of a critical historical apparatus distinct from economic, linguistic, discursive,
performative, or affective turns in critical thought and in historical practices of
time-based media. This musical turn is pervasive, if often critically underesti-
mated or undemonstrated. I note in Chapter 1 that for Alfred North Whitehead,
writing in 1925, the Pythagorean roots of “logical harmony” renewed and
redeemed an exhausted “scientific materialism.” Music rivaled philosophy in
articulating the limits of modern techno-science, and while Whitehead kept to
philosophy,7 less-reticent theories and practices, such as those of Eisenstein, did
not hesitate to turn to music as a way of animating the streaming media appa-
ratus in terms of affective labor. The resulting confounding musical hieroglyph
is the result of problematizing the critical historical apparatus: a stylization of
the hieroglyph not as text but as temporal diagram.
As I have shown in Chapter 3, Ernst Bloch’s speculative account of histori-
cal progression as musical synthesis, the “transcendent counterpoint” of carpet
motifs, sails over the stalled immanence of dialectic. The carpet motif travels to
where a monadic historical apparatus surfaces at the outer limits of material
history, bounding between ancient and modern temporalities, animating musi-
cal idiom, relaying and transforming musical styles. For Bloch, the modern crisis
of representation condemns the subject to interiority, closed off to worldliness
and to historical dynamism;8 musicality reopens the closed surfaces of modern
life, as if to a display of musical fireworks. Whitehead’s claim for philosophy as
music’s rival or Bloch’s turn to a musical-historical synthesis helps make the
larger point emphasized in the output of creative workers whose work I have
discussed. Across a wide range of media theories and practices of audiovisual
media, a musical turn has been deployed where a crisis of representation becomes
irremediable or irredeemable. But this musical turn has little to do with audition
or musical form in the conventional senses. Rather, the musical turn makes time
complex by animating it, channeling personhood and publicity in conflicts of
autonomy and sovereignty. The musical turn consists in relating the time of
media reception to historical temporality, the potentiality of the monad to the
potentiality of the dialectic, to configure work, text, subjectivity, corporeality,
conduct, national or transnational body politics, or even developmental domi-
nants as a return of affective labor through the screen that otherwise closes off
the subject from historical experience. “Closure” in this sense means not simply
alienation in industrial production but, more broadly, the equation of technol-
ogy with ontology.
Thus, when the streaming work (Eisenstein), the exhibitionary apparatus
(Fischinger), the site of reception (Eisler), the body politic (Larry Clark), the
body itself (John Cameron Mitchell), or, as I discuss in this chapter, affective
218 / Chapter 7

labor itself is found closed, fixed, alienated, or reified in some excess of pro-
grammed synchronization where diachronic time and, accordingly, historical
change are thus closed to critical intervention: In these cases, the musicalization
of the temporal diagramming of ontology as technology orchestrates an open-
ing in what is otherwise taken as a totally mediated duration of totally mediated
events. The musical turn diagrams time in time, subjecting technology-as-
ontology to historical observation and critical intervention in mediatic terms.
Yet “superstructure” and “social structure,” whether fused in monad or split in
dialectic, do not directly enough address what we may call “microstructure”: the
mediation of temporal processes at the receding limits of the infinitesimal,
where contemporary bioinformatics exhibit synchronization at deeper levels of
materialized temporality.
Consider the ways in which genomic scientists may work today as musical
amateurs who cut and paste DNA sequences to create Musical Instrument Digi-
tal Interface (MIDI) tracks. In “Gene2Music,” for example, Rie Takahashi and
Jeffrey Miller “convert genome-encoded protein sequences into musical notes
in order to hear auditory protein patterns” and “make protein sequences more
approachable and tangible for the general public and children.” 9 Takahashi and
Miller’s work, in technical terms, is known as “sonification”: rendering informa-
tion in auditory terms to express its form and significance. But their work goes
further than sonification, because they remap DNA sequences as MIDI tracks
that can be played back on any personal computer equipped with a sampler. In
fact, they are not really doing “sonification”—they are preparing “musicaliza-
tion” of DNA material, and the sonification itself is done through a software
protocol and personal computer hardware. The result is that tissue samples are
rendered in a bioinformatic recapitulation of the industrial player piano’s
scrolling paper in hopes of helping children better understand the techno-
biological sequencing of biotechnological life.
Alternatively, Rivane Neuenschwander’s 2006 video collaboration with fel-
low Brazilian Cao Guimarães, Quarta-Feira de Cinzas/Epilogue (Ash Wednesday),
presents a different attempt at biomusic and a different deciphering of the hiero-
glyphic of bioinformatic time. In this video, we see a single ant hauling a shiny
object across what looks to be a frosty white surface. Then, another appears,
and another, all dragging what turns out to be colored confetti across a micro-
landscape enlarged for us to see. In the gallery where I viewed the piece, the ants
appeared on a wall monitor that presented them at the size of small kittens—but
more determined. On the sound track, a samba rhythm plays in a tonality that
suggests the determined marching/dancing of the ants. Its sprightly, slightly
crunching sounds were achieved by tapping matchsticks on a tabletop. Here,
biomusic also appears as a kind of functional work, but the function is less
“cognition” of DNA and more the work of realigning the human capacity for
grasping the rhythmic correspondences associated with dance with a human
 Stylistics of Hieroglyphic Time / 219

FIGURE 7.1 Tischtänzer (Stephan von Huene, 1988–1993). (Installation photo courtesy of
ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany.)

perspective on natural processes.10 The musical tuning of biomusic in these

cases suggests bioinformatic processes brought to face the bioenergetic processes
they displace.
In this concluding chapter, I identify the musical turn at work in two recent
theoretical considerations of synchronized media, those of Stiegler and of
Donna Haraway, and bring these to bear on recent musical diagramming of
affective labor in Stephan von Huene’s Tischtänzer (Table Dancers [1988–1993];
Figure 7.1) and Steina Vasulka’s Voice Windows (1986; Figure 7.2). In the follow-
ing section, I consider the ways in which musical figuration informs Stiegler’s
analyses of historical diachrony and media synchronization in his multivolume
series, Technics and Time (1994–2001). A fundamental concern of Stiegler’s
larger aims in the series, argued out at length in the first volume, is that the
synchronized “real time” of global media networks produces a “no future,” a
dangerous, violent attenuation of diachronic time. Stiegler’s work in Technics
and Time 2: Disorientation (1996) provides a recent signal instance, as he dis-
cusses this attenuation of diachronic time with regard to a methodological
error he attributes to Marvin Minsky, Alan Turing, and, above all, Edmund
Husserl: No cognition can be construed apart from, nor can it be removed from,
the technical material ensemble that in some way allows it to become coherent.
220 / Chapter 7

FIGURE 7.2 Steina Vasulka’s Voice Windows (1986), with vocals by Joan La Barbara.
(Courtesy of Steina Vasulka.)

Haraway’s recent work, too, points out the ways in which bioinformatic regimes
depend on the bioenergetic regimes they displace. Where Stiegler diagnoses a
widespread condition of “symbolic misery” in contemporary hyperindustrial-
ism, Haraway offers instances in which feminist collaborations produce resis-
tance to biocapital.
Taken together, these accounts describe one or another form of affective
labor in hyperindustrial biocapital: symbolic misery in Stiegler, or, in Haraway’s
account of resistance to biocapital, a revelatory “ontological choreography” of
contact between humans and companion species (65), a “naturalcultural danc-
ing” arising in multispecies “respect” (27). As temporal diagrams of contempo-
raneity in historical terms, that these critical accounts imply expressions of
affective labor should not be surprising. Musicalizing the temporal diagram-
ming of a historical apparatus, wherein technology effaces ontology and cuts
the subject off from rhythmic historical diachrony, we find pathos without his-
tory, or “symbolic misery,” in Stiegler’s words. Alternatively, in Haraway’s read-
ing of broadly distributed, continuous historical resistance, we find ecstatic
contact between humans and between humans and animals. These are flags,
then, of those affective modalities arising in diagramming hieroglyphic tempo-
rality as broken or extended musicality.
 Stylistics of Hieroglyphic Time / 221

Von Huene’s Tischtänzer and Steina’s Voice Windows then allow me to clar-
ify the nonlinguistic exhibition of musical diagrams in bioinformatic regimes,
revealing (as Stiegler and Haraway reveal in distinct ways) bioinformatic regimes
to depend on the bioenergetic regimes they displace. These works allow me to
propose a summary diagram of my own by which we can characterize the
actions we take in the reception of streaming media: Music and gesture across
media diagram not simply “echo objects,” as Barbara Stafford suggests, nor bio-
energetic or bioinformatic industries or capital but rather, more generally, bio-
labor. Beyond money as fetishized labor in Marxian accounts,11 beyond repeti-
tions of statements as discourse in Foucauldean accounts,12 and certainly not a
transposition of money as data: Rather, the transition from one technical
ensemble to another or from one historical apparatus to another is animated in
modulations, differentiations, and displacements of biolabor.

Hyperindustrialism and Biocapital

In volume two of Technics and Time, Stiegler’s critique of hyperindustrialism
reconsiders Husserl’s phenomenology of temporal consciousness. Very briefly,
Husserl proposes a “flux” of consciousness for a transcendental subject capable
of temporal perception by virtue of primary (selecting) and secondary (recol-
lecting) temporal objects.13 By contrast, Stiegler argues that any “flux” of pri-
mary and secondary temporal objects necessarily requires an account of the
material substrate and technical formatting on which time consciousness
depends: “Time consciousness” is necessarily a “technical-time consciousness”;
“flux” is necessarily “montage flux.” Stiegler pursues this critique first through
a discussion of “rhythmic” syntheses of technocultural development and second
by insisting on the irreducibility of worldly melody to a transcendental con-
sciousness of pure tone. In Stiegler’s analysis, then, consideration of rhythm and
melody characterizes historical temporality as the musical hieroglyph of a phe-
nomenological subject, one that must be demystified and rendered as temporal
diagram. An important part of Stiegler’s aim is to critique the “symbolic misery”
he believes real-time media impose to the extent that they disallow adequate
time for instrumental mastery and successful individuation, whose hallmarks
would be stylistic variation and idiomatic specificity. And because he is con-
cerned with what he sees as the production of symbolic misery in global media
networks rather than what others describe as the augmentation of cognitive
capacity14 or material wealth,15 he provides in Technics and Time an extended
critique of cognition as social capital. Yet what interests me in Stiegler’s work,
as well as work by such contemporary critics as Haraway or historical figures
as Bloch, are the ways in which musical instrumentalities become crucial to the
critique of technological instrumentalities, and not in strictly musicological or
auditory terms. Musical instrumentalities in these widely disparate accounts
222 / Chapter 7

inform and at times even substantiate critiques of techno-scientific instrumen-

talities’ entanglements with the rationalizing logics of globalizing capital.
Haraway’s When Species Meet (2008) invokes musical instrumentalities in
distinct ways: Transpecies being is a “symphony” (2); the transpecies mesh of
life is animated in “an ontological choreography” of contact zones between
humans and animals (65).16 Stiegler’s and Haraway’s disparate invocations of
musicality are more than merely metaphoric or rhetorical. They constitute
recent entries in an important trajectory of critical attempts, at least since Bloch
and Eisenstein, to diagram, while intervening in, the increasing power of time-
based media to synchronize everyday gestures with media time at the expense
of historical time. This musical turn, which affords a critique of historical and
contemporary technoculture and proposals for critical innovation, revolves
around ostensive or explicit claims that musical relation somehow reopens an
exhausted, entropic, synchronic media time to a creative, negentropic, lively
diachronic historical time. Where synchronic patterning dominates diachronic
differentiation, time itself appears at risk. Stiegler’s and Haraway’s accounts
deploy musicality in critically diagramming a revitalization of everyday time.
Their musical diagrams, though, while possibly refiguring some aspects of
romantic or late-romantic thought, are actually only concretely thinkable after
two relatively recent developments: the standardization of planetary clock time
and the transnational distribution of time-based media products during the
mid- to late nineteenth century.17 With regard to the latter, phonography and
cinema are the origins of what Stiegler terms the industrialization—and now
hyperindustrialization—of memory. The implications of his argument are not
entirely dissimilar to Miriam Hansen’s18 observation that by 1929, Hollywood
dominated the export of media sensoria. Stiegler argues that Hollywood media
unified, via its mastery of the industrialization of memory, a global public image
and the memory of that publicity. In effect, where Hansen describes cinema as
one of a range of modern media vernaculars, Stiegler argues that the serial
streaming of public image as the image of public memory preempts those deter-
minations of memory and habit that would otherwise be articulated in locally
differentiated style and idiom.
Stiegler’s concerns begin, then, with synchronized global temporality as a
historical development, where style and idiom rather than style and medium
are crucial. He argues that what we call “real time” in effect kills diachronic his-
torical time in its increasingly precise synchronization of media production and
reception. This crisis reaches urgent proportions inasmuch as its intensification
in “virtual reality” media technologies displaces not only the development of
historically contingent and locally specific technical ensembles but further, and
what is worse, historical style and idiom at large.
Still, Hollywood itself has a locale, one that has never constituted a site of
production or distribution of clock registration, speed, or measure—even today’s
 Stylistics of Hieroglyphic Time / 223

differential version of globalized time.19 The ability to articulate style and idiom
and to extend the ethical capacities of time-based media is an artifact of “Holly-
wood’s” own multiple postcolonial locales in the world. Historical records and
the history of media production, in spite of the general neglect these suffer in
“Hollywood production,” demonstrate that time-based audiovisual media, like
Los Angeles itself, have often been the site of repeated attempts to innovate and
to intervene in the media sensorium Hollywood exports in terms of musical
style and idiom (see Chapters 3, 4, and 5).20
Two implications of the musical turn as it appears in Stiegler’s work are of
relevance here. The first is that even if Stiegler’s characterization of “Hollywood”
(in the third volume of Technics and Time) falls into one of Los Angeles’s own
favorite portraits of itself (all absorbing, impossible to turn away from), none-
theless, his account renews a long series of critical attempts at thinking of musi-
cality, instrumentality, and historicity in ways that are extraordinarily produc-
tive. Stiegler’s extension of Jacques Derrida’s treatment of the signature provides
a detailed proposal for understanding the ways in which media temporality is
programmed within a diagrammatic mode of production whereby contem-
porary bioinformatic materialities displace earlier bioenergetic ones. Second,
Stiegler’s argument demonstrates, in the course of delineating this displace-
ment, how musical instrumentalities help conceptualize the reopening of closed,
precision-synchronized temporalities to historical diachrony and the variega-
tion of style and idiom they might express.
Testing the streaming serial recording against the histories of technical
development as well as diachronic time, instead of merely against the finite
capacities of the receiving, cognizing, acting subject—perhaps we begin to open
audience time to the historical diachrony that gives everyday life its meaning as
time. Stiegler’s and Haraway’s musical troping indicates their execution of tem-
poral diagrams: relating affective labor at the time of reception to the material
labor displaced from the time of exhibition and to historical time (the stream
of observation, the serial stream of the work, and their mutual default of mem-
ory). As historical and recent critical and cultural theory along with a great
amount of historical and recent media art suggest, localizing this temporal dia-
gram and distributing the topicality of that localization have long been thought
to be a musical project.

Other Musics
Before describing the musical turn Stiegler’s argument entails, I need to clarify
his aims in Technics and Time 2. In this work, he clarifies the importance of the
“temporal objects” proposed by Husserl in his work on time perception: a
“primary” temporal object involved in selecting and attending to some stream-
ing phenomenon and a “secondary” temporal object involved in retaining it.
224 / Chapter 7

Together, these temporal objects allow the streaming phenomenon to be

grasped subjectively and, accordingly, socially and historically. As Arthur David
Smith explains, Husserl’s analysis of signs differentiates the Kantian notion of
a unified cognitive synthesis enabling temporal perception into two: Two tem-
poral objects are synthesized, in an “active,” calculating mode of cognitive syn-
thesis and a presubjective, “passive,” and essentially receptive mode of cognitive
synthesis.21
Stiegler’s critique points out simply (though in great detail) that Husserl’s
temporal objects do not stand on their own and that they also imply a third
temporal object: some orthothetic formatting of memory susceptible to techni-
cal intervention and to industrialization. This is the “industrial temporal object.”
Husserl shows that an objective correspondence of the “just-having-been” and
“the remembered” is possible; it allows Husserl’s transcendental consciousness
to become social, to become “we.” But if that is so, then that possibility of objec-
tive correspondence between given and remembered also allows the temporal
objects of time consciousness to be made reactive and to be reiterated. As a
result, “the possibility of ideality [is] sealed within”22 two other possibilities: that
of suspending the flux of worldly time and that of recommencing the flux of
time suspended or, again, that of inscribing the object that streams forth and
that of “playing back” the inscribed time. Some mode and means of technical
inscription condition time consciousness, attention, and memory. The con-
sciousness of attending to and remembering time that Husserl describes as
“inward,” then, depends for Stiegler on some orthographic prosthesis that always
situates culture and politics as preindividual and understands subjectivity and
technics as co-constitutive, at least potentially open ended in variegated techno-
cultural style and idiom. Accordingly, Stiegler resituates the passive syntheses
(of habit) and active syntheses (of calculation) Husserl proposes as modes of
cognition in terms of a history and politics of technocultural, socioethnic, and
biosocial change, because individuation and collectivity become possible in the
techno-politics of that evolution. Stiegler repeatedly returns to this techno-
politics of democracy, literacy, or industrialization in light of the productivity
of global programming industries in this series of works and elsewhere. He is
developing a Derridean insight: Attention and retention are subject to technical
intervention and to techno-politics. If industrial culture developed a third tem-
poral object as phonogram or cinematogram, it also transformed the politics of
memory.
Stiegler’s procedures in Technics and Time volumes one and two can fairly
be described as diagrammatic. His critique clarifies that if we accept Husserl’s
description of temporal objects, the subject’s time consciousness is never simply
“in the present”: Past and present time consciousness are synthetic, a “flux.” The
relevant comparison is Henri Bergson’s famous diagram of memory, a “cone”
of time suggesting that virtual duration is compressed as it passes into the
 Stylistics of Hieroglyphic Time / 225

momentary “disc” of actual memory.23 Stiegler points out that Husserl illustrates
the flux of time consciousness with a diagram of his own: a triangular vector
diagram depicting temporal perception and recollection as a singular dynamic
flux wherein past and present are not definitively divided. Stiegler resolves the
two diagrams: He suggests that the Bergsonian duration of virtual time is
inscribed in terms of and gives shape to an orthothetic framing of the flux of
consciousness Husserl describes in terms of temporal objects. As Stiegler puts
it, “The temporal object is a vortex within a flux—that is, a spiral.”24 Transposing
Bergsonian duration in terms of Husserl’s flux of temporal objects, in Stiegler’s
description, the spiral of an industrial memory disc—phonograph, film reel,
videotape cassette, or digital disc—appears to be wrapped in a spiral around the
subject’s apprehension of time, memory, perception, and technological instru-
mentality. Stiegler thus follows Paul Ricoeur’s reading of Husserl’s “cosmic con-
nectors” as needing to be recast as “technological connectors” (242). And, as a
technological connector, the industrial object of memory is also subject to fur-
ther technological development: It will be networked.
Stiegler’s subsequent work in the Technics and Times series and elsewhere
develops the implications. Hyperindustrial production of synchronized tempo-
ral objects unifies the production of material goods and spiritual “nourish-
ment.”25 Hyperindustrialism intensifies active syntheses projecting the calcula-
tion of regimes of memory in a synchrony that can never be localized and so
can never be adequately differentiated in diachronic situations allowing style
and idiomaticity to emerge. This synchronized unification incurs a symbolic
misery that typifies not contemporary capital’s power but rather its loss of spirit,
its loss of the transductive relationship between psychic individuation and col-
lective individuation. Or rather, the transduction of individual and collective is
“disarticulated” in today’s “cognitive capitalism.”26 This disarticulation has a
history and a capital: “Hollywood.”27 In these ways, Technics and Time provides
a distinct treatment of a global Hollywood that emphasizes Americanization
rather than economic policy or aesthetic considerations specific to cinema pro-
duction in Los Angeles: “A process of global unification takes place through the
cinema, which [Upton] Sinclair tells us could only have happened under the
leadership of North America.”28 Hollywood, not the networks of finance capital
or political capital, became the globe’s technocultural metropolis, the capital of
the industrialization of memory.
Whether we accept Stiegler’s description of the hyperindustrial exploita-
tion of memory, there is no denying that he prepares his critique of Husserl’s
active and passive syntheses by drawing heavily from André Leroi-Gourhan’s
account of corporeal rhythm as the source of social, cultural, and symbolic value
in Gesture and Speech.29 Active and passive syntheses are no longer modes of
cognition in Stiegler’s work. Instead, individual or collective being becomes his-
torical in an “epochal redoubling” expressing “rhythmic stabilities” at “specific
226 / Chapter 7

socio-ethnic and individual levels.”30 Rhythm in this larger (and unheard) sense
enables sustainable technological adoptions or appropriations as well as that
process of appropriation called “modernization”:

The operation of epochal redoubling (the addition of a new program-

matic level partially suspending previous levels’ effectiveness) is a passive
synthesis; it is also the genesis of the “what” in general. The second
epochal redoubling, an “appropriation” by the “who” of the first redou-
bling, is an “active” synthesis. We must use these quotation marks when
referring to appropriation and activity insofar as this redoubling of
redoubling is always already in the process of clearing a new path to the
technical tendency and to a new stage of passive synthetization.31

We can see here that Stiegler’s understanding of technocultural differen-

tiation relies on a very broad proposal of rhythmic-historical synthesis. With
active and passive syntheses established as technocultural processes rather than
cognitive ones, Stiegler proceeds to a critique of Husserl’s account of the apper-
ception of tone. He charges that Husserl reduces melodic heterogeneity and the
orthothetic (or technical) formatting necessary to make sense of heterogeneous
temporal phenomena to the false purity of tone perceived by a transcendental
“I.” Husserl, Stiegler argues, introduces a “unity where it is not yet established,
when on the contrary it is released, après coup, from the flux of a multiplicity”
(207). Husserl posits intersubjectivity “in advance as individual,” where for
Stiegler, individuation emerges “trans-individually” from “a pre-individual
base” (207). In a way, then, Stiegler’s critique implies that what Hollywood does
to local industrial productions of memory, Husserl’s transcendental phenom-
enology does to thought. Husserl eradicates idiomaticity as he “erases the musi-
cality of everything heard,” when in reality “all tone is individuated on the
pre-individual ground of musicality, all language ‘sings’; the smallest noise rises
up from the world’s symphony. The ear is originarily musical, and this is pre-
cisely its temporality. All temporal objects detach from this grounding, inces-
sant musicality from which they are projected and to which they are linked as
a ‘fade-in’” (210).
In Technics and Time 2, rhythmic musicality accounts for the sustained
metastability of historical technocultures through time; melodic musicality
accounts for the temporality of lived experience in time. Throughout, the decon-
struction of textuality, authorship, and archivization Derrida carries out at
length becomes for Stiegler a more pointed questioning of a crisis in historical
consciousness, corporeal habit, technological change, and technocultural mem-
ory. Herein lies the importance for Stiegler of Leroi-Gourhan’s analysis of the
supervention of traditional socioethnic programs by modern programming
technologies. Leroi-Gourhan is indeed concerned with the ways in which media
 Stylistics of Hieroglyphic Time / 227

networks have a normalizing power greater than the power of receivers to

respond to them, resulting in a schematically oriented superhuman time and
space corresponding to “the ideally functioning synchrony of all specialized
individuals, each in his function and his space.”32
If Stiegler’s extensive reliance on Leroi-Gourhan appears conservative in
some ways, his proposal of “epochal rhythms” of active and passive syntheses
enabling technocultural differentiation and individuation extends Derrida’s cri-
tique of Husserl’s phenomenology beyond textual criticism to media criticism
proper. The result is a critique of the subject along with a critique of the equip-
ment of that productive diagramming of relations between instrumentality and
historicity we know as technological modernity. Stiegler’s claim that program-
ming industries underwrite the activity of “the transcendental imagination”
means that the relation of temporal flux and subjectivity is prosthetic rather
than “transversal.” Still, this treatment relates instrumentality and historicity in
terms of rhythm and melody—that is, in terms of musicality. It invokes musi-
cality as nonsubjective (or preindividual) temporality. Or, at least, musicality
expresses the subjective and collective limits of historicity and instrumentality.
Technics and Time’s style and idiom consistently engage the characteristics
of the diagrammatic mode of the hyperindustrial production it critiques.
Stiegler’s great concern is that the contemporary crisis of hyperindustrialism is
enabled in its denial of any necessary substrate for “information”; if the cyber-
netic formulation of information denies the energetic materiality it depends on,
then our critique of it may aim at locating the historical error whose forgetting
enables this denial to proceed. Thus, Stiegler tests his conclusions diagrammati-
cally, bringing Bergson’s diagram of memory to bear on that of Husserl. His
formulation is also diagrammatic in that he describes a historical transforma-
tion that shifts from industrialism to hyperindustrialism through a reorganiza-
tion and intensification of orthothetic capacities: One historical structuration
shifts to another. Relating the musicality of its engagements—technocultural
rhythm, worldly melody, the deferral of prosthetic relation in phenomenological
thought, industrialization of memory—Technics and Time 2 enacts a long-form
rendition of the image of streaming media as musical hieroglyph requiring
elaboration as a temporal diagram of historical diachronic time.
Two striking concerns arise with regard to this diagramming of instrumen-
tality, musicality, and historicity in Stiegler’s work. First, Stiegler does not theo-
rize musicality according to musicological, auditory-cultural, or cinema-sound
studies. Instead, he draws on rhythm or melody as questions of the dynamisms
of historical epochality and durability and of expressive style and idiom. Each
of these dynamisms is dampened in the hyperindustrial programming of mem-
ory, he argues. Second, if musicality in Stiegler is temporal, material, technical,
preindividual, and expressive, but also industrial and hyperindustrial, then, like
so many others before him, Stiegler engages a musical turn not only to describe
228 / Chapter 7

the larger diagrammatic mode of media production reaching a point of plane-

tary crisis but also to defer the inevitable question that arises as to the historical
subject by asserting the primary diagnostic symptom of the problematic in
terms of affect. Primordially, that symptom indicates discordant melancholia,
as Stiegler adduces in Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus (1994). But
in subsequent works, and with regard to contemporary network media, that
symptom indicates “symbolic misery.” This contemporary condition of misery
in knowledge, labor, or recreation results from shared orientations toward space
and time undergoing upheaval with the intensification of global archiving sys-
tems enabled by digital networks after World War II. This intensification and
the symbolic misery characterizing it provoke “enormous resistances; funda-
mentalisms, nationalisms, neo-Fascisms, and other regressive phenomena are
the manifestations.”33
The concern with technocultural style and U.S. dominance, of course, is a
long-standing postwar concern.34 But Stiegler’s is a different account of affect
and biopower. In Stiegler’s analysis, hyperindustrialism proceeds according to
the imperatives and the affordances of techno-scientific capital; however, any
autonomous resistance in the form of affective labor, as Michael Hardt and
Antonio Negri propose, is not a given: “But we can thus ask whether there is not
in this new commerce an explosive contradiction, source of a loss of reasons—
we understand by that a loss of motifs, of capacities for projection.”35 Again, this
concern with loss and melancholia as symbolic misery is hardly new to techno-
cultural analysis.36 Yet few go as far as to retailor the technological-adoption-as-
modernity thesis to address the historical rise of U.S. media influence, on the
one hand, and “convergence theory” after Turing, on the other, in terms of musi-
cal instrumentalities.
Stiegler’s questions are centrally relevant in extending the critique of tech-
nological modernity to a critique of biopolitical personhood: Who commands
and controls the criteria according to which the models of synchronized simu-
lacra are orchestrated and disseminated? What capacities do such orchestrations
allow for differential adoption of techno-scientific equipment? Who owns the
past or determines how we synthesize the future out of it? His preoccupation
with grounding these critical questions in a thorough deconstruction of subject
and instrumentality along with the musical turn he deploys, while distinct in
method and in spirit, may be compared fruitfully to Haraway’s recent work on
transpecies encounters and biotech ethics.
Perhaps surprisingly, both Stiegler and Haraway invoke musical engage-
ments in a critique of biopolitical technics. Haraway’s concerns in When Species
Meet 37 begin with what she metaphorically refers to as the “symphony” of
human, animal, and machine co-constitution. If 10 percent of human cell mat-
ter is occupied by genomic material, she reasons, the other 90 percent is “filled
with the genomes of bacteria, fungi, protists, and such, some of which play
 Stylistics of Hieroglyphic Time / 229

in a symphony necessary to my being alive at all.” . . . [C]ompanion-species

approaches must actually engage in [what Isabelle Stengers described as]
cosmopolitics, articulating bodies to some bodies and not others, nourishing
some worlds and not others, and bearing the mortal consequences. . . . All of
this [respecere, looking back, holding in regard] is what I am calling ‘sharing
suffering.’ It is not a game but more like what Charis Thompson calls ontological
choreography. I act; I do not hide my calculations that motivate the action” (3–4,
88). Haraway and Stiegler, then, are concerned with biotechnological ethics
between theory and practice—what Stiegler calls a “passage to the act”38 or, as
Haraway puts it, “practices and imaginative politics.”39 Each diagnoses the affect
of suffering in contemporary cognitive capitalism: Stiegler relates the techno-
political ethics of its historical derivation, while Haraway relates that it is the
transcorporeal “sharing of suffering” demanded by mutual respect. Method-
ologically speaking, each wrestles with some version of what Quentin Meillas-
soux40 calls “correlationism,” which is “any current of thought which maintains
the unsurpassable character of the correlation [between thinking and being,
such that ‘we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and
being, and never to either term considered apart from one another’].”
Correlationisms inevitably hypostatize “some mental, sentient, or vital
term”: representation, nature, mind, will, will to power, memory, life (37). While
Haraway and Stiegler clearly attempt to avoid the tendency to hypostatize any
particular relation as general or universal, both nonetheless strain toward a poli-
tics of biotechnology in the present without positing either a “nonmetaphysical
absolute,” as Meillassoux does, or submitting engagement with techno-scientific
production to what Meillassoux sees as “the fundamental property or trait of
Galileism, which is to say, of the mathematization of nature” (113).41
For Stiegler, the key term in thinking the co-relation between human and
technology is “transduction,” a term adopted from Gilbert Simondon that in
Stiegler means “a relationship whose elements are constituted such that one
cannot exist without the other—where the elements are co-constituents.”42 For
Haraway, more broadly, relation as such is reflexively co-constitutive, such that
“companion species is a permanently undecidable category, a category-in-
question that insists on the relation as the smallest unit of being and of analy-
sis.”43 As well, “respect” for significant otherness means that Haraway under-
stands autonomy not in terms of autopoiesis but in terms of “trans-acting,”
where autonomy “is the fruit of and inside relation” (164); here, meaning arises
in a “web” of cross-species kinship transacting material-semiotic practices.
Haraway’s “ontological choreography” describes a tactics of respect wherein
diachronic, historically situated actions inform the value of any digital cultural
production. Haraway is moving toward, while attempting to critique, some
theory of value in biocapital. Her examples include citizen activists who edu-
cate themselves in genomic sciences, gathering DNA datasets and coauthoring
230 / Chapter 7

academic papers with open-minded academic researchers, and challenging the

proprietary, commodified breeding practices that have led to an increase in
genetic diseases even in only recently classified dog breeds (95–132). This cho-
reography of contact anchors and distributes the activist epistemologies in and
throughout the “symphonic” web of relations she describes. Her choreography
of contact fairly demands attention to stylistic and idiomatic variegation over
historical time. But to be clear in describing Haraway’s citizen biotech activism
as a tactics, we should specify that where the activist networks her production
at the digital interface, this tactics becomes teletactics and, to that degree, the
extended rhythmic transduction of technoculture in Stiegler may correspond
to some sustained choreographic transaction in Haraway, although for her,
respect makes suffering transindividual and transpecies.
Stiegler and Haraway, in spite of the vast differences in their approaches and
understandings, risk a correlationist engagement with contemporary biotech
understood in terms of global programming industries capable of determining
the texture and quality of affect in postgenomic everyday life: subject and tool
in Stiegler, human and animal (or human and machine) in Haraway. To avoid
hypostatizing the co-relation of one term to another, Haraway and Stiegler
invoke musicality and musical instrumentalities. For Stiegler, the redoubled
rhythmics of active and passive syntheses of historical technocultural produc-
tion provide the anchor for his account of synchronization producing non-
knowledges. But Haraway thinks that questions of technique or calculation “will
never take us into that kind of open where multispecies responsibility is at stake”
(81). Her question is how not to separate those who may kill and those who can
be made killable (89), and she finds her method in a “choreography of contact”
between bodies entangled in “braided, ontic, and antic relatings” (165). This
involves texturing the diachronic situation of any digital network within a larger
and much more complex cross-species web of kinship. Haraway asks, “How is
‘becoming with’ a practice of becoming worldly?” (95, 3). Her answer is a co-
relation of philosophy and play within a diffuse “dance of relating” (25) historic-
ity and musicality.
Stiegler’s rhythmic redoubling and Haraway’s choreographic web: One re-
animates historically and the other futurally a techno-species-being now out of
time. For both, the deadening temporality of corporeal motricity industrially
coordinated and programmatically synchronized in serialized sequences of
events distributed on a global scale precludes the improbable while reaping the
endless violences on which this factic, fictive empire feeds. Globalized media
temporality implies in both cases the entropy of historical time, where the
human animal is subjected to the removal of the human to accomplish the
technical abstraction of the animal, in a spectacular synchronized world picture
animated as biotechnological puppetry. Each critic presses his or her case dif-
ferently: a mortification of rhythm in Stiegler; the enlivened choreography of
 Stylistics of Hieroglyphic Time / 231

contact in Haraway; Stiegler’s rigorous refusal of U.S. technologists’ belief that

the body can be removed from its movements; Haraway’s ontological, episte-
mological, ethical dance.
But the time for a historical movement toward the present (Stiegler) and the
present movement toward a different future (Haraway) is musical temporality
for both. If Gilles Deleuze characterizes philosophy as an admixture of the detec-
tive novel and science fiction,44 these treatments might be described as resisting
falling into an unreflective admixture of the science-fiction novel and the musi-
cal. Cinema memory itself is beholden to corporeal memory, reinscribed on the
basis of not only “new technologies” harvesting its effects but also intervening
modalities of temporal change: a choreography of contact enacted across disci-
plines and instrumentalities, media memory and media reception.
Whether in works of interaction art, such as those of Bookchin or of Gene-
2Music, or in Stiegler’s or Haraway’s theories of time and action in hyperindus-
trialism and biocapital, a certain ratio of affect and instrumentality rendered as
musical play mitigates the instrumentalizing effects of techno-scientific rea-
son.45 The human-animal-machine whose memory of lived time is exhausted
in being synchronized to bioinformatic process is musically reanimated and
placed back in diachronic time, however ordinary, unfamiliar, or fractured. Syn-
chronized time closed to diachrony is opened up to a critique of models and
criteria, while the improbable destabilizes what Stiegler describes as the non-
knowledges of marketing or media programming. Musical play allows com-
modity subjectivity and corporeality to be resituated in terms of the historical
and the expressive. History returns, bearing a future.
Perhaps, though, media art diagramming contemporaneity and historiality
best emphasize the tensions between Stiegler’s and Haraway’s critical methods.
At stake in any analytics of a possible “alter-globalization” is the degree to which
only techno-scientific possibility preempts the virtual such that representational
schematisms enter into a general economy of equivalence to produce reason as
proprietary knowledge and, as a result, overdetermine the meanings and poten-
tials of media receivers’ actions, habits and memories, and everyday lives. If the
industrialization of memory instrumentalizes the virtual of duration as techno-
scientific reason’s retroactive possibility, then musical play matters beyond “play”
considered as rule-bound contact, exploratory agency, or the transfer of agency
learned in games to broader orders of everyday life organized as information
systems.46
Musical play in these accounts matters more for its temporal capacities and
affordances. Musical play affords the temporalities for a variegated adoption of
technocultural style and idiom, constituting a kind of teletactics, perhaps, for
the networked regime of conduct Stiegler refers to as “tele-action.” Any account
of musical diagramming, though, reaches its greatest value when revealing—
or positing—that techno-scientific mediation recoups all divisions of labor in
232 / Chapter 7

time, where the techno-ontological is programmatically hitched to the material

ontic, so that, conversely, musicality handles the ethical risk entailed in that
totalization of historical temporality. Musicality handles the risk, then, of con-
ducting historical memory and ethical futurity, and because writing is also a
teletactics, this risk is writ large in the accounts I have presented here. If, for
Haraway, an “other worlding” is possible by engaging in a choreography of con-
tact, for Stiegler, the cosmos is at risk in reducing the musicality of world histo-
ricity to a single global imaginary: “It is the heart of cultures and societies that
is in play, their most intimate relations with the cosmos, with their memory and
with themselves. To ignore or neglect this could have the most tragic conse-
quences. Because calendarity and cardinality are the elementary warp and weft
of vital rhythms, of beliefs, of relation to the past and to the future, the mastery
of apparatus of orientation will come to be that of the global imaginary.”47

To Play, to Play Back, to Play With

Here we can reconsider Bookchin’s claim, cited above, that the Internet consists
of a “disembodied virtuality” in light of Stiegler’s exposition of the performa-
tivities of the signature. Stiegler follows Bergson in equating virtuality with
temporality,48 but he argues that if the contemporary programming industries
have breached an epochal divide in which the possible is technicized, as in
Minsky’s problematic of “virtual space,” then this contemporary risk emanates
from techno-scientific reason’s belief in a removable body. Stiegler’s consider-
ation of performativity suggests that identifying possibility with its realization
results in a conflation of the virtuality of time as duration and some techno-
logically accomplished spatialization, with the result that the techno-scientific
possibility becomes an unquestioned virtue. As Stiegler argues in his reading
of Minsky, “the structure of the biological synthesis of the living being’s mem-
ory is perfectly homogeneous with . . . the absolute disruption of the biological
event’s status.”49
This homogeneity of the epistemology of the structure with the disruption
of its temporal ontology consists in the disruption’s retroactivity: “Must possi-
bility precede its real-ization? Must it be stated retrospectively that a possibility
was suspended there, before?” Yes: “Such a modern science crosses science, phi-
losophy, ethics, and politics even as it spans media. It is the question of fiction
out of which we must now think the possibility of truth.”50
What reality posits its own retroactive possibility where no possibility existed
before? This is the problem presented in the synchronization of techno-scientifi c
possibilities across geopolitical milieus, this catastrophe whereby the retroactive
performativities of techno-scientific possibility “materialize time”—that is, cap-
ture or take over the temporal virtual as the technical possible. “Digital interac-
tivity” is a statement of this capture in and as play, but its substance is not the
 Stylistics of Hieroglyphic Time / 233

cybernetic interface—it is biolabor. And the simultaneously thermodynamic

and informatic nature of biolabor is entangled in musical diagrams engaging
“technology” as “ontology” or as “natural history” in recent media art.
Von Huene’s (b. 1932–d. 2000) sculptural installations often critically deploy
musicality as thematic and aesthetic means for animating intermedial process
as a problem of bioinformatic reception. For von Huene, too, musicality is never
given in any conventionally musical way, as his Der Kaleidophonische hund
(Kaleidophonic Dog) and Tischtänzer sculptures make clear. Von Huene applies
tropes of musicality working across displacements, distributions, and differen-
tials of aesthetic labor to ask, as he does in a 1997 installation project, “What’s
Wrong with Art?”51 What is wrong with art in von Huene’s works is that it con-
flates creative and affective labor; they are indissoluble, but disjunctive. In mobi-
lizing this conflation as disjunction, von Huene demonstrates musicality as
mediatic gesture, turning art into a demonstration of informaticized everyday
life. In von Huene, the reception of art as experience manifests in a disjunctive
systems theoretic where music provides the necessary expressive and demon-
strative transpositions between two modes of aesthetic labor: creative produc-
tion and creative reception.
Von Huene’s Der Kaleidophonische hund (Kaleidophonic Dog; 1964–1967) is
an automaton of dissonance: It overlays wood carving and musical instrumenta-
tion in an upside-down “hell hound” whose legs and head move stiffly as if
running nowhere. For von Huene, Gregory Bateson’s system theories of cultural
expression as broadly “cybernetic” provide his point of departure from earlier
attempts at differentiating the process of making from the process of appercep-
tion.52 Drawing on information theory, for von Huene, art had become a matter
of differential symbolic expression.
The Tischtänzer sculpture dates from two decades later and encapsulates a
more specific techno-political history in its operations. The torsoless and head-
less dancing legs that compose the work are styled in masculine businesswear
trousers and hang above the viewer in a series of four pairs. While the attention
to sartorial effect suggests Joseph Beuys’s suits made out of felt, the ways that
political message, department-store technologies, and bureaucratic administra-
tion are deployed in this sculpture might remind a gallery visitor of the robotic
doubles used as concert substitute, album-cover graphic, and Web site icon by
the electronic music group Kraftwerk.
The four musical automata that perform in Kraftwerk’s stead in one por-
tion (generally a closing sequence) of the group’s live concerts comprise identi-
cal torsos and mechanical arms whose rods and pistons are visible, with indi-
vidual heads replicating the faces of each member of the group. As robotic
proxies of Kraftwerk’s players, their sweeping hand gestures seem to orches-
trate, in the musicians’ absence, the technicized production of Kraftwerk’s highly
sophisticated machine music. If Kraftwerk’s musical automata seem vaguely
234 / Chapter 7

bureaucratic, they are also vaguely futuristic, although in a slyly “old future”
way. Von Huene’s table dancers are the antithesis of Kraftwerk’s robotic admin-
istrators of dance music synchronized with image projection and commodity
circuit. Von Huene’s “table dancers” lack torsos entirely, and their costuming
suggests not a return to fantasies of the technological future but to an authori-
tarian past now distributed as wireless communication similar to that used in
supermarkets.
Tischtänzer demonstrates the ways in which postconceptual aesthetic
automata, immersed in systems theory and the circulation of electronic data,
have become coupled with the homeostatic feedback loops typified by late-
twentieth-century systems of consumption, political theater, and interactive
installations. The table dancers are activated by a wireless feedback loop between
gallery visitor and work. They are fully “interactive,” according to one paradigm
of interactive art installation. Visitor movement in the gallery is subject to sen-
sors that activate the artwork as an interactive system, but the artwork itself
moves according to a different set of affordances than the viewer’s own ambula-
tory movements. You walk; they dance.
Passing by the four pairs of legs trips wireless sensors that set off a mysteri-
ous “tap dance” by each. Spotlights throw the shadows of this dancing on the
white gallery walls. The viewer’s leg movements also trigger an accompanying
sound track, a loudspeaker symphony made up of sampled fragments of politi-
cal speeches by Joseph McCarthy. The 1950s department-store style of the legs’
trousers, then, is matched by the backing track of 1950s political pronounce-
ments. Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man (1964) is multiplied into a
quartet, and yet this “series” is fuzzy: The viewer’s gestures are not at all the same
movements as those of the tapping table dancers. The isomorphism suggested
between human-leg movement and the tap-dancing automata is nominal and
conceptual, but it is immediately differentiated in form, style, and meaning. The
material movements, the durations, and the meanings of the viewer’s gestures
and of those of the automata make sense in their difference. The process artwork
is, as in the work of Gerhard Rühm and others, displaced into a tension of sys-
tematization and disruption.
The dancers’ movements displace one’s own material labors; their technical
display distributes one’s input and propagates it across a time-based stream of
display; and the viewer is left to interpret the difference between those mediatic
gestures and his or her own embodied gestures. The invisible wireless commu-
nication between the viewer’s legs and those of the automata is, then, an inte-
grally expressive part of the display of this affective tableau presenting the var-
iegated labors of visitor movement, mechanical dance, and political theater.
Bureaucratic administration is projected as a historical shadow theater of the
art-technological work.
 Stylistics of Hieroglyphic Time / 235

Von Huene’s automata take technologies routinely used in department

stores and political theaters and lend them to the task of critiquing interactive
art not as a “new medium” but rather as a systematic means of questioning his-
torical displacements, distributions, and differentials of laboring expression. His
point is not that interactive art is embedded within and indebted to capitalist
and nationalist circuits, although that is partly a concern. More importantly,
Tischtänzer makes the point that critical practices in the aesthetic institution can
activate an expressive force by means of which the difference between embodied
and mediatic gesture is displayed. The museum gallery is not simply a reweaving
of political or economic systems that are claimed to determine aesthetic practice,
because the viewer’s own movements are necessarily differentiated among the
material displacements and network distributions that can allow theaters of
consumption and politics to operate and to interoperate as art. The viewer’s
steps do not claim, “I dance the same old song and dance, too, the gallery is a
militarized version of the department store.” Instead, the viewer’s legs ask, as
von Huene does in his own writing, “What’s wrong with art?” Rather than pro-
ducing systematized information, then, the installation visitor produces a dis-
ruptive difference in the system of art exhibition. This inquiry, then, enacted in
the difference between one’s own steps in the gallery and the soft-shoe routine
of the automata, is an ethical one about technicized expression. Navigation of
the installation means diagramming its programmed potentiality, as one pro-
duces a dynamic display out of a static one by triggering a series of information
events captured by the sensors as one passes through a gallery space that, by
virtue of cheap commercial wireless technologies, becomes a hyperindustrial
site of creative, observer-generated aesthetic value.
Consider, in this light, Sven König’s more recent sCrAmBlEd? HaCkZ! (2005).
For this project, König uses algorithms to divide audio recordings or music
video by acoustic data, segmenting them into chunks like “notes” of different
duration and timbre. These chunks are compiled and mapped in a database
storing the resulting “cloud” of sound signatures. Inputting a sound signal into
the database results in the resequencing of original sound samples matched to
the input sound signal. Essentially, you are navigating a music-video database
by speaking or singing into it, and the database outputs a stream of sound, re-
creating the sounds you have produced. It does not understand sound or song;
it simply matches like sound signatures. This database “cloud” is made up of
discrete bit-based sequences of logical value. It is addressable by logical instruc-
tion derived from any auditory input, such as your voice.
The samples remain, in his demonstration, attached to the bits of video with
which they were originally synchronized, so that speaking or singing into the
microphone will output a jerky montage of, say, Michael Jackson “saying” what
you have said instead of what he was recorded saying. As König points out, vocal
236 / Chapter 7

input becomes concrete sound poetry: sCrAmBlEd? HaCkZ! recapitulates the

commonly made claim that cut-and-paste piracy is a distant offspring of the
historical avant-gardes. In König’s demonstration of the software, this poetry is
mapped through the “star bodies” of transnational music production to make
its point. Your vocalization is output as a cut-up of appearances or videos by
Jackson, Adamski & Seal, M. C. Hammer, and Kurt Cobain or Nirvana, in which
they seem to parrot back to you what you have said. The project can also be used
as a performance instrument.
Copyright violation expresses personal memory retained in relation to
global processes of media publicity. The “symbolic misery” Stiegler associates
with transnational media programming closed to reuse or redefinition is trans-
formed into the expression of concrete poetry for installation or DJ-based per-
formance in nightclub settings. König’s music machine can hardly compete with
the more powerful programming of lip sync prototyped in the mid-1990s in
Video Rewrite: Photorealistic Synthetic Lip Sync (see Chapter 1). But technical
automation of media production processes is not the point. As König describes
the project, the point is rather to put copyright infringement to work: to enunci-
ate transnational popular musical memory synchronized in propertized musical
data. sCrAmBlEd? HaCkZ! is “conceptual software” treating audio samples as
concrete musical memory. For König, growing up as an MTV viewer, “the music
and the video are inextricably linked” in personal memory. The choice of video
material compiled in the database of samples is instructive of the concrete mate-
rial making up König’s musical memory matter: A recent Michael Jackson inter-
view is demonstrated, probably from around 2005; otherwise, it is a 1990s
revival: Hammer’s 1990 “U Can’t Touch This,” Adamski & Seal’s 1991 “Killer,”
and Nirvana’s 1991 “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” sCrAmBlEd? HaCkZ! is organized,
then, as a conceptual mash-up not of sound and image but of copyright viola-
tion and interface design in a “mind music machine.” Artistic strategy here aims
at clarifying intellectual property laws and frameworks as discursive performa-
tivities: “sCrAmBlEd? HaCkZ! is the result of an effort to develop an artistic
strategy that could shed some light on evident but very confusing problems of
intellectual property. Intellectual property is a misconception deeply conflicting
with the basic principles of any cultural production because it is completely
negating its collaborative nature.”53
In fact, though, there is a slight delay, giving the musical gestus a stuttering
quality that König does not fully acknowledge in his explanation of the project.
Localized, “good-enough” “real-time” utility upsets the dream of globalized
music distribution as all-determining media event. But noticing this dissonant
gesture, the stutter between vocal input as animating energy and audiovisual
output as informatic montage, is crucial. sCrAmBlEd? HaCkZ! displays the prop-
ertized mediality of musical data in a disjunctive relation to the performer’s
 Stylistics of Hieroglyphic Time / 237

voice. It contests the process of consumption of streaming media objects in

transnational contexts by indexing those objects as archived cultural or personal
memory, not simply in terms of logical technical memory. The stutter of the
vocal input and the output of the musical sequence, a kind of anti-karaoke ges-
tus, localizes “concrete” musical memories in a collaborative demonstration of
biolabor. sCrAmBlEd? HaCkZ! argues against subjecting cultural or individual
memory, cognition, or performance to digital-rights management. It presents
an ethics of media by instrumentalizing the synchronized sound and image of
musical commodities for “personal” vocal recall as database navigation. Its use
from site to site—installation setting or club setting—means that its mediation
of personhood and publicity is modulated: This, too, is a modal practice of
digital media, where “symbolic misery” is turned into a musical exhibition of
shared, if unfamiliar, memory.
Steina’s (b. 1937) work also demonstrates an ethical, modal practice of
audiovisual interaction, particularly in collaborative modes of production. Stei-
na’s work provides an exemplar for an ethical, often collaborative, questioning
of that technocratic present tense that affords “participation” as a form of infor-
mal, unrecognized labor—and that often passes for aesthetic achievement, tech-
nical merit, or economic viability in digital media, installation art, or contem-
porary social media. Further, the ways in which Steina relates contemporary,
bioinformatic nature to the bioenergetic processes that produce it teaches us to
grasp bioinformatic temporality in relation not only to its histories but also to
futures otherwise closed off by the determination of possibility as technologi-
cal realization. Very often, Steina deploys musical instrumentalities to diagram
contemporary conceptions of information in terms of more broadly historical
processes whose exhibition suggests futures not yet made possible in terms of
technology. Like von Huene, König, and the subjects of previous chapters, then,
Steina masters the stylization of musical diagrams as media prototypes. And
often, this diagrammatic musicality is given over not to relating the personhood
of the user, observer, or audience to the digital production of publicity but to
engaging a call and response with the complex streaming materialities of the
complex world around us. Any notion of data simulation as self-generating or
of “bodies in code”54 is less important than a streaming ethics of interaction,
where “interaction” means some complex, deeply entangled contact between
action and transaction. What makes her work crucial to my purpose, then, is
its engagement with the questions Haraway has developed at length since her
1985 “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the
Late Twentieth Century.”55 “Modeling” the world as a bioinformatic simulation
relies on creating precomposed “tables” of database information that can be
parametrically modulated. Von Huene critiques this “tabling” of aesthetic expe-
rience in Tischtänzer as the commoditization of aesthetic experience in cold
238 / Chapter 7

war ideologies; König turns it into a “tabletop” hacking of musical media com-
modities in the interest of exhibiting and remixing shards of shared commod-
itized memory. Steina deploys musical instrumentalities to modulate interaction
with such tables in its own right as a problem of action and transaction. Key
instances of her work undertake musical diagramming of tabular media in
terms close to what Haraway calls “a choreography of contact.” These works take
the form of trenchant interrogations of technology-as-ontology’s hardened
temporal framing.
In July 1998, veteran media artist Woody Vasulka exhibited a series of six
cybernetic “tables” he titled The Brotherhood. As documented on the artist’s Web
site, the Daniel Langlois Foundation Web site, and in Nippon Telegraph and
Telephone (NTT) videotapes of the event, Internet protocols as well as MIDI
protocols provide the network architecture for the cybernetic machines; custom
code was created to operate these machines using Internet access over Ethernet
(local network). The operating system used is Linux, an open-source operating
system.56 Each of these hybrid object/image “tables” is outfitted with a combina-
tion of sensors, network technology, articulated sculptural elements, image pro-
jectors, and sound-producing capabilities.
The six robotic installations making up The Brotherhood have an intimate
relationship with military and consumer genealogies of the digital technologies
they repurpose. Each networked sculpture is conceived as a table, suggesting
database tables, the tables of mathematics or chemistry, or allegorical tableaux
vivants. They describe a range of responses to what is for Woody Vasulka an
apparently essential relationship between heteromasculine identity, technologi-
cal armament, and technologically determined estrangement or self-destruction.
The tables incorporate numerous rejected or neglected technological hardware
produced for war by U.S. firms, suggesting the interdependence between Ameri-
can technological progress and military prowess as well as the reuse of these
technologies for critical artistic intervention. The Brotherhood thematizes the
construction of heteromasculinity, then, as fraternal order by repurposing the
technologies built in quest of the domination of nature:

This [reorganization of nature] leads to conditions of polarization and

antagonism in various social and philosophical stratifications. Foremost,
it supports the male justification of warfare as an accepted and integral
part of human evolution. Repeatedly it banishes all concepts of human
utopia from its practices and in exchange, it offers male sexuality and its
perilous values, most explicitly in form of threats, posturing and eventu-
ally in conduct of war. The Brotherhood does not argue for a reformist
agenda or in a defense of male strategy. It stands sympathetically on his
side, but it cannot resist an ironic glance at his clearly self-destructive
identity.57
 Stylistics of Hieroglyphic Time / 239

Woody Vasulka’s tables deploy found hardware, including a plotting table,

calibration devices, projection systems, portions of bombing devices, automatic
data-writing machines, and other devices whose functions have been lost. Each
table is an interactive image object hovering between energetic materiality and
informatic computation (in regard to an earlier phase of The Brotherhood,
Woody Vasulka describes the spatial construction itself as a dialectical struggle
between “the real” and “the virtual”).58
Table six, “The Maiden,” is the only component featuring anything resem-
bling a human form, and the form is specifically gendered female. This mascu-
line construction of the female turns out to be a repurposed medical examina-
tion table outfitted with a skeletal articulation that appears to recline atop it.
It can flop its feet, has arm-like limbs, and can lift and drop its head. A pro-
grammed sequence of movements has been prepared, with interactive systems
driving the Maiden’s movements, triggered, like sCrAmBlEd? HaCkZ! by audio
signals that visitors to the installation speak into a microphone. The Maiden
in particular, then, diagrams techno-scientific knowledges “enunciating” femi-
nization as “hysterical” incorporation.
Viewer interactivity is via microphone but without specific rhetorical func-
tion on the level of object hierarchy, and so probably without producing imme-
diately coherent “response” for the interactor. Rather than a programmatic map-
ping of sound-to-action-to-object, interaction is on a more general level of
bodily gestural expression in vocal terms to animated networked action. One
speaks musically—any change in pitch will do, apparently59—and the body of
the cyborg Other moves. Here, the labor of synchronization is parametrical, but
it is also denaturalized and generalized from being a question of instrumental
control or production of lip sync. Further, the historical hardware and histori-
cizing feminist critique built into The Brotherhood tend to work against that
repetition identified by Rita Raley of “the same solitary, and sedentary, aes-
thetic” characterized in the “hollowness and emptiness of Space Invaders”60 that
is often risked in the tactical media projects she describes, despite their ethical
and poetic achievements.
Raley’s observation that tactical media attains “virtuosic” performance in
the sense of Paulo Virno’s description of activity finding its fulfillment without
objectifying itself (29) may be productively reframed here. The Brotherhood
radically objectifies heteromasculinity. Woody Vasulka stages virtuosity in his
fulfillment of diagramming the divergence of the installation’s historical com-
position and uses from the historical progression and resources on which it
draws. In this sustained divergence, The Brotherhood, too, indicates a modal
media practice, where the object experienced belongs as much to performance
as to animated sculpture. Its critical dimensions arise in the virtuosity of the
way it diverges from processes of material objectification. Collaborator David
Dunn, in his text on Woody Vasulka’s “electronic theaters,” emphasizes the
240 / Chapter 7

constraints of this staging of virtuosity in The Brotherhood. He notes that the

installation prioritizes the material labor of the artist in relation to the art
technological work and its functioning for the interactor, but, as Dunn puts it:
“The role of the viewer is conceived to be altogether different, the audience is
not readily invited to control the action like a video game and therefore enact
a preconceived ritual of pseudo-interactivity. [Woody Vasulka’s] environments
remain autonomous with only a potential for perturbation by an intruder into
their drama and therefore assert a specific kind of interaction: these are autono-
mous worlds that define their closure through their emergent language, forcing
the spectator to swim in the intrinsic cultural code of the machine.”61
From e-mail-coordinated processes undertaken between artist and curator,
to computing protocols used in the machines themselves to project documenta-
tion, and to the composition of the The Brotherhood project using off-the-shelf,
custom-built, open-source systems, “code” is as much memorial and cultural
as it is contemporary and “protocological,” in the sense developed by Alexander
Galloway.62 Drawing on a vast historical archive of culture and memory as code,
The Brotherhood extends this “archive” to a national-industrial archaeology of
hardware and to historical biosocial conditions typified by gendered, sexed iden-
tity. And although parts for The Brotherhood were gathered from surplus yards
from Buffalo to Los Alamos to Los Angeles over decades, their deployment may
have a critical, autobiographical, and memorial function as well: Woody Vasulka
recalls playing with detritus dropped from warplanes during World War II as a
child in what is now the Czech Republic.
The animated image objects of The Brotherhood, then, track the histories of
bioinformatic construction back to the bioenergetic demands that prompted
their contemporary derivation in bioinformatic terms. Too, the installation
develops concerns earlier and extensively explored in now-canonical works of
video art, such as Woody Vasulka’s Art of Memory (1988): The aesthetic and
cultural code programmed into these machines indexes the progression of both
Vasulkas’ interrogation of the video frame vis-à-vis the cinema frame since the
1970s. Intensively invested in “interaction” as a contemporary mediation of a
larger historical array of programmed temporalities, The Brotherhood stages
animated, networked, interactive sculpture in a virtuosic performance of “tacti-
cal media” diagramming complex relations of contemporary to historical time.
The “syntaxes” of action explored here are those of extreme instrumentalization,
bringing Woody Vasulka full circle, in Marita Sturken’s view, in terms of auto-
biographical memory, heteromasculine identity, and the destructive expression
of time.63
The staging of aesthetic research into material and computational incor-
poration in the tables of The Brotherhood suggests aesthetic fabrication and ac-
tion in ways resonant with Haraway’s discussion of “situated knowledges.” Hara-
way’s concern with the cyborg ultimately suggests more open-ended possibilities
 Stylistics of Hieroglyphic Time / 241

for intervention into the technological domination of “natureculture” or

“material-semiotic” processes: As Haraway famously puts it, “only a cyborg has
a chance”: “This world-as-code is, just for starters, a high-tech military field, a
kind of automated academic battlefield, where blips of light called players dis-
integrate (what a metaphor!) each other to stay in the knowledge and power
game. Techno-science and science fiction collapse into the sun of their radiant
(ir)reality—war.”64
For Haraway, in spite of the great mobilities and fluxes enabled in informatic
epistemologies, their standardization reflects their debts to patriarchy (168).
Because such mobilities are possible only once a higher standard is in place and
so already implies the prior work of marginalization, violence, or trauma, Hara-
way suggests “situated knowledges”—partial visions whose self-avowed limits
ensure that objectivity ensues only through the avowed interconnectedness of
those knowledges being situated (instead of self-generating systems). This no-
tion of interconnectedness is, again, more recently elaborated in terms of “cho-
reographies of contact” in which citizen activists collaborate with scholars to
intervene in the biocapitalist propertization of genomic data, as we have seen in
When Species Meet. Where Haraway has worked out a mesh of situated knowl-
edges as “choreographies of contact,” The Brotherhood suggests the staging of a
sited hermeneutic that is subject to modulation.
Steina’s July 1998 performance of The Brotherhood pushes Woody Vasulka’s
staging of material-informatic object networks into a “choreography of contact.”
They configure her MIDI violin to control the tables’ movements in response to
her musical gestures, thus animating and modulating The Brotherhood’s com-
plex historicity. As if resisting her commands, a harsh concrete music of machine
noise results as the tables begin to move. A shell-like contraption spreads and
contracts, as if a fan or an accordion—a physical, animated, musical icon for
Aphrodite, perhaps. Even more dramatic are the movements of the Maiden’s
skeletal armature, jerking in fits and starts to the gestures communicated from
the violin. Meanwhile, on a video projection screen, a man, clearly suffering
the psychic pain of something like hysterical amnesia, addresses the audience,
muttering or shouting words that make sense only to him. The video frame
places him within an institution cell of some sort, as if he is modularly isolated
and confined, his movements and speech subject to manipulation as if through
object-oriented programming. “I know who I am,” he cries. “Tell me who I am!”
Steina stands off to the side of the stage, to the audience’s left, dressed in black,
as if invoking a feminist Paganini puppeting the tableau of cyborg sculptures as
live performance instead of expressing the ecstatic or tortured interior of the
romantic listener.
After Manfred Clynes’s65 formulation of the cyborg as a prosthetic evolu-
tion necessary for travel to distant stars, Haraway’s influential treatment66 was
a determinedly ironic reworking of Clynes’s original suggestion: the cyborg as
242 / Chapter 7

“ironic allegory” of feminist socialist engagements with “the informatics of

domination.” Margaret Morse67 and N. Katherine Hayles68 each extend the treat-
ment of the cyborg. Hayles suggests that the instant that you notice your sub-
jectivity bound up in the interactive feedback loop of the digital instrument,
your subjectivity becomes “cyborg.” Morse, on the other hand, takes a more
suspicious stance: “What does a cyborg eat?” she asks, surveying the “smart-
food” culture of the mid-1990s (144–145). For Morse, the cyborg is more ironic
symptom than ironic allegory of resistance. At issue is rather the way the inter-
face, imagined to produce bodies not requiring actual sustenance, produces
immersive experiences that drown the body out.
In her response to Char Davies’s influential virtual reality installation Osmose
(1995), Morse describes the installation’s use of a harness tracking the user’s
breaths for upward or downward navigation as generating the corporeal threat
of suffocation. Osmose’s successful exhibition of corporeal “immersion” in simu-
lated data space causes Morse to experience the memory of her own asthma.
Rather than a sense of immersion in computationally plastic, navigable, natural-
ized “virtual space,” she experiences the fear of drowning—panic resulted from
the symbolic power of the breath-tracking display.69 Perhaps Osmose insuffi-
ciently historicizes its technical innovations; the notion of “navigating” by breath
gesture suggests the bioenergetic nineteenth-century pneumograph but outfit-
ted for virtual reality. The promise of a rhythmic “breath gesture” also recalls
the “breath gesture” Eisenstein claims to have composed with Sergei Prokofiev
in Alexander Nevsky (1938; see Chapter 2).
Yet such a breath gesture, whether bioenergetic or bioinformatic, is biolabor:
Whether Eisenstein’s or Davies’s breath gesture, each has as its larger motivation
what Haraway calls the “apparatus of bodily production”—the construction of
corporealities in material-semiotic terms in biocapital.70 As Steina composes the
Maiden to the video image of institutionalized “Man” in a “love duet,” she reveals
the deeply productive, if often profoundly depersonalizing, generativity of bio-
energetic and bioinformatic logics as biolabor. Musical gesture originating in
the affordances of the musical instrument is applied to the staging of hysterical
man’s creation of hysterical maiden. The gestures by which Steina animates this
“love duet” become a complex and dynamic emblem of the conjunction and
disjunction producing personhood and publicity in the transition of bioener-
getic to bioinformatic capital.
Steina’s noisy performance is virtuosic, then, in a way that is different from
Woody’s virtuosic installation staging. Her performance of the Maiden is con-
figured for remote control by live violin rather than by voice. And her perfor-
mance recalls and modulates her own long practice of using the gestural form
factors or musical sound of the violin-as-interface, dating back to the age of
laserdisc in such works as Violin Power (numerous versions). Steina’s perfor-
mance, then, deploys the musical instrumentalities of the MIDI violin within a
 Stylistics of Hieroglyphic Time / 243

long-sustained modal media practice to effect historiographical, critical, auto-

biographical narration as musical play. As we have seen, such films as Passing
Through (1977; see Chapter 5) and Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001; see Chap-
ter 6) similarly accomplish layered modes of narration and musical play by
deploying pragmatics of synchronization in which historical invisibility is dia-
grammed as powerfully informing affect. Seen in the same light, Steina’s perfor-
mance of The Brotherhood becomes legible as a neglected chapter of feminist
cyborg theory, but rather than in critical text in the virtuosic tactical perfor-
mance of biolabor: material, technical, and affective labor placed into complete
historical relation and made palpable.
The use of the violin as interpretive device here, too, mediates not simply the
memory of a romantic performing artist but also the memory of the nineteenth-
century inventor. As David Hounshell observes, nineteenth-century telegraph
pioneer Elisha Gray discovered the possibility of musical telegraphy, multiplex
telegraphy, and voice telegraphy by attaching an electric current to, first, the
body of a bathtub (noticed during his nephew’s play “taking shocks” with his
electrical conducting materials) and then to the body of a violin.71 This latter
configuration of the violin body as resounding receiver of electric current was
publicly demonstrated, Hounshell notes. Gray’s inventions inspired a contest
for patents on telephonic voice conduction with Alexander Graham Bell and
his backers, resulting in a settlement separating the telephony and telegraphy
industries. Steina composes her love duet using the software-authoring package
Image/ine, whose graphical interface allows for the mapping and filtering of
one stream of data to another. Navigating data using MIDI instruments mod-
ulates informatic simulation in and as media performance rather than deploy-
ing an energetic model of harmonic series for telecommunications. In Steina’s
hands, then, the MIDI violin reverses the historical relationship of heteromas-
culine identifications with technological control of time and space that Woody
Vasulka indicates as the thematic content of The Brotherhood.
Steina’s performance of Woody’s staging of The Brotherhood presents a
“sound figure” for her audience. History adds up, but differently: The hysteri-
cization of heterofeminine bodies modeled as violins is revealed to be a pro-
jection of the unreason of heteromasculine logics seeking to contain the world
as model. If irony tends to return the critical gesture toward its own sublima-
tion within dominant subjectivities, in this case, an ironic instrumentation of
musical gesture circulating through the cyborg tableau and placing it within
a historical stream it denies nonetheless holds surprising power to provide
that for which artist Stelarc claims there is no more time: “the meditative
moment.”72
Steina’s work routinely deploys musicality to diagram ways around the epis-
temological endgames of subject or object, monad or dialectic, observer or
observed that often trouble descriptions of informatic objects as autonomous
244 / Chapter 7

ends in their own right, whether the supposedly self-generating systems of

finance, military automata, or tactical media simulations. Generally, musicality
provides means for introducing a dimension of temporality into the sited her-
meneutic that itself is dynamized in historical relation as a result. The result is a
modal, autobiographical aesthetic faction—fabrication and action—of the real.
A final example of her work may provide a historical diagram for contem-
porary studies of the interactive, audiovisual, computational, networked inter-
face. Steina’s Voice Windows was made in collaboration with performance artist
Joan La Barbara, and it anticipates the choreography of contact toward which
Haraway has moved. It presents an orchestration of the audiovisual display as
traveling sound and image, animated in a call-and-response between vocal
performance (La Barbara) and video production (Steina). Steina captures the
perspective from a moving car as it travels out of a southwestern U.S. city
toward the desert, and La Barbara records a facsimile of birdsong. La Barbara’s
warbles and melodies, her chatter and calls, are transformed, using frequency
analysis, into a dynamic video-matte, jumping and scattering across the screen.
The dynamic vocal-matte, synchronized to the sound of La Barbara’s voice,
begins as bar lines keyed over a pure black screen, then over the city through
which the viewer moves. The energetic image of the moving panorama, sug-
gesting movement in immersive space, is filtered with the voice of birdsong
provided by La Barbara (who remains invisible). Where the dynamic shapes of
the frequency analysis are matted into the frame of the city, we see through to
the background scene “behind” it: a desert landscape. Animality as vox estab-
lishes the location toward which we are traveling, but as the background of
where we already are: We are displaced from, but head toward, the “natural
habitat” of the “bird” whose voice we “see through.” Dynamic locale is personi-
fied in an animal vox cutting through the panoramic image, even as our loca-
tion is displaced from belonging either to the human or the technical. Animal
vox touches human movement, but in a dynamic mutual displacement of mov-
ing sound and moving image from one another and visualized through the
complex apparatus.
The process at work in the matting of landscapes belongs to the practice of
listening: The ear picks up many sounds at once, and only if their frequencies
coincide does a nearer or louder sound mask a more distant or softer sound.
The process at work in the visualization of the audio and the framing of the two
layers of moving imagery, though, belongs to practices of seeing. And as the
practice of listening is applied to those of seeing, we are moved through not only
two different landscapes but also two different senses. The source of the sound
is never certain—so the disembodied omnipresent birdsong is more powerful
as an evocation or a message that can join one world with another. Voice Win-
dows is a rendition of sight interrupted by the sound for which sight strains.
What is exhibited, then, are two overlapping but distinct sensoria at once, at
 Stylistics of Hieroglyphic Time / 245

least when the birdsong is audible and visible. Musicality gives a historical
temporality to the heterogeneity of overlapping sensory worlds made legible in
song’s tension with moving image as speech. To return to the concerns with
which I begin this chapter, then, Voice Windows is a temporal diagram tracking
vox in flight from the house of technology-as-language, from the historical
apparatus where technology becomes ontology. Voice Windows suggests that
“interaction” begins when the displacing tendencies of apparatuses of techno-
logical production become graspable, developmental, and subject to use rather
than when they become “natural” as technicized ontology.
Musical diagramming, then, provides critical modes of making action pos-
sible. The production of temporality as fiction, whereby a symbolic epistemol-
ogy is programmed to the ontic materiality to accumulate risk while averting
the improbable or the indeterminable, this unhitching of rhythmic diachrony
in favor of technicized reason is a form of play: the capture and modulation of
the doubled immanence of monadological univocity and dialectical progres-
sion. This means that if the instrumentalization of reason proceeds through the
automation of judgment and the production of symbolic misery, it is also
accompanied by an instrumentalization of temporality whose ethical figure is
play as complex time—and very often, musical play. Play in this musical sense
is the differential instrumentality, the “certain ratio” not reducible to the instru-
mentality of techno-scientific reason.
Musical instrumentalities of rhythm or melody—that is, discrete or con-
tinuous change in time—allows the subject of play time to learn, and so, rather
than simply imposing a miserable experience of being out of diachronic time,
allows a critical and affecting, rather than miserable, experience of being out of
media time. The musical diagrams I have presented here combine the hetero-
geneous historical capacities of automaton with the visualization practices
associated with the nineteenth-century Chladni figure, whereby a small pile of
sand forms a harmonious visual pattern when activated with musical vibrations:
the instrumentation and revelation of unseen patterns of living energy in a
working, moving model. Since Bloch’s time, such temporal diagrams have
become deeply instrumental rather than “merely” rhetorical; routinely produced
as tertiary temporal objects, they now crystallize a third mode of synthesis: the
active reception of the dynamic audio-visual-gestural diagram that is the media
as interface. Musical diagramming of “monadic” and “dialectic” potential ani-
mating exteriorization and interiorization underlies the ways we grasp the
hieroglyphic time of a techno-political world. The worlds we live in, to some
degree, change in accordance with the temporal models we diagram in time,
but temporal nature also returns to destroy the instrumentalities we form.
From Eisenstein, Fischinger, and Eisler, or Clark, Mitchell, and Steina, the
“play” of doubled potential has allowed historical, futural, and present tempo-
ralities to be exhibited in terms of the pathos of trauma, ecstatic continuity, or
246 / Chapter 7

critical contemporary distance. Steina’s virtuosic tactical musical diagramming

continues and compounds such attempts to now function as a historical exem-
plar critical for the contemporary stylization of the interface as idiom.
The efficacy of this displacement makes it possible for “the technical ten-
dency” to operate as the generalized mediality of a political and social dominant
and as the remediation of the effects of that dominant: digital epochality and
its new medium. If bioenergetic materialism exhausts the bodies of workers and
bioinformatic materialisms exhaust their minds, musical instrumentalities allow
an opening for play in terms of material labor, technical operation, and affective
labor. Instrumentalizing the instrumentalities of techno-scientific reason in a
musical ratio of affect and ensemble reopens media time to that diachronicity
that gives it its ipseity while relating to its audience a play of style and idiom
allowing us to diagram lived, but illegible, hieroglyphic time.
In diagramming hieroglyphic time as musical play revealing energetic and
informatic biolabor, we find the resources marshaled in hyperindustrialism and
distributed in biocapital. The works I have discussed, as well as those of many
more critics or artists, provide critical exemplars for medial ethics. By situating
the hermeneutics of data modeling in a complex relation to the historical time
that has called it, perhaps we can avoid being destroyed ourselves, even as we
inevitably allow less useful models of information as immanence to be swept
away as a memory of so much cognitive rubble. To be sustained, to sustain in
the face of the disappearing world and the appearance of unknown bodies: The
musical diagrams of interactions with hieroglyphic time I present in Sync sug-
gest that interfacial composition and reception may be acts of love in a time of
destruction. In this time, we are concerned not with the interface as a site where
bodies are encoded in binary digits but with the interface as a site of historical,
contemporary, and futural synthesis. Sustaining this instrument is beyond the
capacity of the networked computer or the persistently networked mass; the
diagram is less than and more than, before and after, the program. Yet perhaps
with instruments invented through the faction of the aesthetic, we shall realize
the computer is a part of our loving destruction. Grasping this temporalizing
instrumentality, we may deprivilege the apparatus separating bioinformatic
nature from its bioenergetic history and determining lived time as a hieroglyph
where the technological realization of possibility displaces futural duration.
This other instrumentality will foreground, instead, those processes of biolabor
in which temporal nature arises—and will continue to naturalize itself.
 Notes

CHAPTER 1
1. Michael Cowan, “The Heart Machine: ‘Rhythm’ and Body in Weimar Film and Fritz
Lang’s Metropolis,” Modernism/Modernity 14, no. 2 (2007): 225–248.
2. For discussion of Metropolis and aesthetic modernisms, see Andreas Huyssen, After
the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana Univer-
sity Press, 1986), 65–81; for Metropolis in terms of modernity, spectacle, and technological
distance, see J. P. Telotte, A Distant Technology: Science Fiction Film and the Machine Age
(Hanover, NH: University Press of New England for Wesleyan University Press, 1999), 47–
71; for Metropolis’s gendered, anatomical gaze, see Allison Defren, “The Anatomical Gaze
in Tomorrow’s Eve,” Science Fiction Studies 36, no. 108 (2009): 235–265.
3. Christian Hite, “Eating Machine: Discipline, Digestion, and Depression-Era Gestic-
ulation in Chaplin’s Modern Times,” Spectator 21, no. 2 (2001): 40–55.
4. Rick Altman, McGraw Jones, and Sonia Tatroe, “Inventing the Cinema Soundtrack:
Hollywood’s Multiplane Sound System,” in Music and Cinema, ed. James Buhler, Caryl
Flinn, and David Neumeyer (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England for Wesleyan
University Press, 2000), 341.
5. Rick Altman, “Moving Image, Moving Target,” Music, Sound, and the Moving Image
1, no. 1 (2007): 5–8.
6. Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Cul-
ture of Listening in America, 1900–1933 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 295–316.
7. See Altman, Jones, and Tatroe, “Inventing the Cinema Soundtrack”; and Helen Han-
son, “Sound Affects: Post-Production Sound, Soundscapes and Sound Design in Holly-
wood’s Studio Era,” Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 1, no. 1 (2007): 27–49.
8. Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (New York: Columbia University
Press, [1990] 1994), 113.
248 / Notes to Chapter 1

9. Jean-Louis Comolli, “Machines of the Visible,” in Electronic Culture: Technology and

Visual Representation, ed. Timothy Druckery (New York: Aperture, 1980), 108–117.
10. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French
Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 484.
11. Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop Young
and Michael Wutz (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, [1986] 1999); and Friedrich
Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, trans. Michael Meteer (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, [1985] 1990).
12. Charles Altieri, The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects (Ithaca: Cor-
nell University Press, 2003).
13. See Felix Guattari, The Anti-Oedipus Papers (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006),
415; and see note 41, Chapter 5, herein.
14. See especially Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Vol.
1: Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, [1972] [1977] 1983); and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,
Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Vol. 2: A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, [1980] 1987). See also Guattari’s notes collected in
The Anti-Oedipus Papers.
15. Here I am referencing the manuscript version of Sobchack’s September 2005 talk
at New York University and gratefully acknowledge her for providing an electronic draft of
it. See also Vivian Sobchack, “Final Fantasies: Computer Graphic Animation and the
[Dis]Illusion of Life,” in Animated “Worlds,” ed. Susan Buchan (Eastleigh, U.K.: John Libbey,
2006), 171–182.
16. Vivian Sobchack, “Final Fantasies: Computer Graphic Animation and the [Dis]
Illusion of Life” (presentation at New York University, 2005), 10–15, manuscript version.
17. See Stephen Prince, “True Lies: Perceptual Realism, Digital Images, and Film The-
ory,” Film Quarterly 49, no. 3 (Spring 1996): 27–37.
18. Barbara Stafford, Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2007).
19. And see my discussion in Chapter 2.
20. Sergei Eisenstein, “Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today,” in Film Form [and] the
Film Sense, ed. and trans. Jay Leyda (New York: Meridian, [1944] 1957), 235. See also the
more recent translation in Sergei Eisenstein, “Dickens, Griffith, and Ourselves,” trans.
Michael Glenny, in Selected Works Vol. 3: Writings, 1934–1947, ed. Richard Taylor (London:
BFI, 1996), 193–238.
21. Collected as “Vertical Montage” in Sergei Eisenstein, Selected Works Vol. 2: Towards a
Theory of Montage, ed. Richard Taylor and Michael Glenny (London: BFI, 1994), 327–399.
22. Sergei Eisenstein, “Synchronization of Senses,” in Film Form [and] the Film Sense,
88. Additional citations here are also from the Leyda edition.
23. Eisenstein, “Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today,” 235.
24. Eisenstein’s citations of Whitman imply that what he is after in streaming montage
beg a treatment of Whitman rather than Griffith; Eisenstein, “Dickens, Griffith, and the
Film Today,” 231.
25. See Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism (New York: Zone Books, [1966] 1991), for a useful,
widely consulted introductory summary.
26. See Michael Hardt, “Affective Labor,” Boundary 2 26, no. 2 (1999): 89–100, for a
treatment of affective labor in post-Fordist production networks.
 Notes to Chapter 1 / 249

27. James Tobias, “Cinema, Scored: Towards a Comparative Methodology for Music in
Media,” Film Quarterly 57, no. 2 (Winter 2003–2004): 26–36.
28. Vuillermoz, quoted in Richard Abel, ed., French Film Theory and Criticism: Volume
1, 1907–1939 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 131 (emphasis added).
29. See Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001),
47; and see D. N. Rodowick’s critique of Manovich in The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 175–177.
30. Carl Beier, Jr., “A New Way of Looking at Things,” Hollywood Quarterly 2, no. 1
(October 1946): 1–10.
31. Leyda’s 1957 bibliography of Eisenstein’s writings in English indicates the broad
dissemination of the director’s writings and interviews in English by 1946, so some adapta-
tion of the Soviet director’s ideas may be in evidence in Beier’s proposal.
32. Beier, “A New Way of Looking at Things,” 2.
33. Eisenstein, “Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today,” 244.
34. See the discussion of Yutkevich and Eisenstein in Chapter 2.
35. The U.S. television industry followed the model that Lynn Spiegel outlines in her
1992 study of televisual flow and suburban sprawl, in part influenced by official or de facto
segregationist housing policies. In addition, creative responsibility in U.S. television has
tended to lie with producing roles rather than directing roles, which frequently change in
episodic television.
36. See my discussion in Chapter 3.
37. A digitized version of Jammin’ the Blues may be viewed at www.dailymotion.com/
video/xngw7_jammin-the-blues-by-gjon-mili-1944_music (accessed December 31, 2008).
38. Arthur Knight, “Jammin’ the Blues, or the Sight of Jazz, 1944,” in Representing Jazz,
ed. Krin Gabbard (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 11–53.
39. The approximately ten-minute length of the film comes close to approximating the
quarter-hour programming slots that radio broadcasting had programmed using large-
format transcription discs since the late 1920s and that had grown by the mid-1930s to a
large programming and library business, with important facilities and distributors located
in Los Angeles (who tended to regard network broadcasters as monopolistic). Since the
1920s, those same quarter-hour discs had also been used on Hollywood soundstages for
synchronizing performers’ movements to musical playback.
40. Clora Bryant, “Clora Bryant,” in Central Avenue Sounds Jazz in Los Angeles, ed.
Steven Isoardi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 357.
41. Horace Tapscott, “The East Side at High Tide,” in Isoardi, Central Avenue Sounds
Jazz in Los Angeles, 299.
42. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London:
Verso, 1993).
43. For the ways in which the politics of information during the blacklist era were
allegorized on screen in terms of confessions of information, see Jeff Smith, “The Robe as
Anti-Fascist Allegory,” in Un-American Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era, ed.
Frank Krutnik, Steve Neale, Brian Neve, and Peter Stanfield (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers Uni-
versity Press, 2007), 24.
44. Oskar Fischinger, “True Creation,” available at the Web site of the Fischinger Trust
and Archive, www.oskarfischinger.org/True%20Creation.html (accessed February 2009).
45. David James, The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cin-
emas in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
250 / Notes to Chapter 1

46. Archival documents of the production budget of his Rockefeller grant show that
he hired a conductor when recording the scores he composed; the films and film fragments,
of course, had been directed by sympathetic colleagues, such as Joseph Losey, whose A Child
Went Forth [The Children’s Camp] Eisler rescored as part of his Film Music Project.
47. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Mentor Books,
[1927] 1948), 20–39.
48. William Moritz, Optical Poetry: The Life and Work of Oskar Fischinger (Blooming-
ton: Indiana University Press, 2004), 137–147; and see Chapter 3 herein.
49. Examples of a range of prototypes designed by Mountford’s team, which included
Geoff Smith, Andrew Herniak, Amy Evans, Leo Villareal, and others, were demonstrated in
Palo Alto, California, and London in late 1994 and in 1995.
50. Christopher Bregler, Malcolm Slaney, and Michele Covell, “Video Rewrite: Driving
Visual Speech with Audio,” in Proceedings of SiGGRAPH 97 (New York: ACM Press, 1997),
353–360.
51. See Antonio Negri, Marx beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse (New York:
Autonomedia, 1991), 21–40.
52. See Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Seán Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, [1986] 1988), 1–22.
53. James Elkins, Six Stories from the End of Representation: Images in Painting, Pho-
tography, Astronomy, Microscopy, Particle Physics, and Quantum Mechanics 1980–2000 (Palo
Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008).

CHAPTER 2
1. Sergei M. Eisenstein, Nonindifferent Nature: Film and the Structure of Things, trans.
Herbert Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
2. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Bar-
bara Habberjam (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, [1983] 1986), 32–40; and, Gilles
Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, [1985] 1989), 157–163.
3. The statement on contrapuntal sound, for example, indicates the ways in which
Eisenstein and his fellow montageurs understood the “coming of sound” not in terms of a
straightforward introduction of new cinema technology but as a broadening of expressive
potential for montage expression. See Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Grigori
Alexandrov, “Statement on Sound” [1928], trans. Richard Taylor, in Film Theory and Criti-
cism, 6th ed., ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004),
370–372.
4. Cf. in this regard Mary Anne Doane’s understanding of “cinematic time” as both
probabilistic and narratological; and see Chapter 5.
5. Walter Benjamin, “Moscow,” in Selected Works, vol. 2, trans. Rodney Livingstone et
al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 41. The trial in question was that of
a peasant woman charged with medical misconduct resulting in a mother’s death. She
received a two-year sentence, followed by dramatic and pedagogical pronouncements of the
need to build hygiene centers in rural areas.
6. Benjamin, “Introductory Remarks on a Series for L’Humanité,” in Selected Works,
2:21.
7. Benjamin, “Reply to Oscar A. H. Schmitz,” in Selected Works, 2:17.
8. Benjamin, “Moscow,” 30.
 Notes to Chapter 2 / 251

9. Benjamin, “Reply to Oscar A. H. Schmitz,” 18.

10. Benjamin notes in “Moscow” that with the proletariat class “protected” by the caste
dictatorship of the party, “message and subject matter are of primary importance” (38).
Everyday buildings, factories—the built, modern milieu—were “hopelessly sad” for Benja-
min (“Reply to Oscar A. H. Schmitz,” 17). See also Max Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics: Walter
Benjamin and the Play of Mourning (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), for
a discussion of Benjamin’s aesthetic dialectics as melancholia. Graham Greene addresses
the matter of national-imperial melancholia with regards to Eisenstein’s exuberantly violent
affect in October (1928) in a March 27, 1936, review in the Spectator, comparing October to
Berthold Viertel’s Rhodes of Africa (1936): “After ten days I can remember very little of
[Rhodes of Africa] but a sense of gentle titillation, of being scratched agreeably in the right
spot. But the talkies have come, and stereoscopy and colour no doubt will come, without
destroying the vivid memories of October” (which screened at the London Film Society in
1934). Its mass movements recalling Potemkin’s massacre on the steps, the vivid impres-
sions that “only a participant would have thought of presenting,” its playing revolution for
comedy—Rhodes’s “Cape to Cairo” ambitions are presented on film with no such “air of
happiness”: “Now as an Empire we are too old, the pride isn’t there, the heart seems to
have failed once too often.” Collected in Graham Greene, The Graham Greene Film Reader:
Reviews, Essays, Interviews, and Film Stories, ed. David Parkinson (New York: Applause
Theater Book Publishers, 1994), 86–88. Greene sees the Soviet revolution as openly impe-
rial but ecstatic in its vigorous transvaluation of icons of power. Technological progress—
stereoscopy, color—bores him in their inevitability.
11. Bernard Stiegler, La technique et le temps: 3. Le temps du cinéma et la question du
mal-être (Paris: Galilée, 2001), 30; a citation from Eisenstein provides an epigraph orienting
this volume of Stiegler’s work.
12. In part, the need to configure a critical logic of medial succession is a legacy of Karl
Marx’s determination of technology as an expression of objectified material labor and cre-
ative or interpretive labor—that is, affective labor—as symptoms of the ideological super-
structures within which labor power is objectified (and in Benjamin, whether by capitalist
or socialist authoritarianisms).
13. See, for example, the studies by Annette Michelson or David Bordwell cited
below.
14. Portions were published in the Leyda editions as “Synchronization of Senses.”
15. Sergei Eisenstein, “Vertical Montage,” in Selected Works Volume 2: Towards a Theory
of Montage, ed. Richard Taylor and Michael Glenny, trans. Michael Glenny (London: BFI,
[1939] 1994), 327–399, esp. 398.
16. Eisenstein also perhaps helps Eisler distance himself from charges of being a Soviet
agent that were leveled against him at the time Composing for the Films (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1947) was published; Graham McCann’s introduction to Composing notes
that Adorno removed his name from the book partly for this reason.
17. Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, [1968] 1974), 36–37.
18. Peter Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1972).
19. Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Cinema, Its Spectator, and the
Avant-Garde,” in Early Cinema: Frame, Space, Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser (London:
BFI, 1990), 56–60; and see the summary in David Bordwell, On the History of Film Style
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 125–128.
252 / Notes to Chapter 2

20. Marc Davis, “Media Streams: Representing Video for Retrieval and Repurposing”
(Ph.D. diss., MIT, 1995).
21. Nicholas Cook, Analyzing Musical Multimedia (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1998).
22. Marsha Kinder, “Screen Wars: Transmedia Appropriations from Eisenstein to A TV
Dante and Carmen Sandiego,” in Language Machines: Technologies of Literary and Cultural
Production, ed. Jeffrey Masten, Peter Stallybrass, and Nancy Vickers (New York: Routledge,
1997), 160–182.
23. Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (New
York: Routledge, 1992).
24. As Davis explains in a later article, “current cultural practices of re-purposing
popular media give us a glimpse of how people might use computational media in their
daily lives if video sequences could be quickly and easily assembled, retrieved, processed,
and transmitted like dolphins sending and receiving their sonar ‘movies’ or like the con-
versations of people raised to use computational video as a mother tongue.” Davis, “Garage
Cinema and the Future of Media Technology,” Communications of the ACM 40, no. 2
(1997): 42–48, esp. 46. Video computing software might transform media audiences into
a “landscape of ubiquitous participatory video” (46–47), whose early signal instances he
thinks include America’s Funniest Home Videos, the Rodney King videotape, and video
karaoke bars.
25. Kinder, “Screen Wars,” 160–161.
26. She writes, “By now it should be clear . . . that this essay reflexively traces the trajec-
tory of my own career, which began . . . with an essay on [Henry] Fielding’s experimentation
in the theater in relation to his novels, and then turned in succession through an ongoing
process of ‘promiscuous’ analogic thinking to movies, television, video games, CD-ROMs,
and other forms of popular culture” (180).
27. Sergei Eisenstein, “P-R-K-F-V,” in Sergei Eisenstein: Notes of a Film Director, trans.
X Danko (Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House, 1959), 149–167. If each piece of
“representation” has its own internal “canons,” so does Prokofiev. Eisenstein says that the
composer “listens and hears” something “within himself ” (158), which turns out to be a
“profoundly national” and “international” character (165), “Byzantine,” that has his proper
“place amid microphones, klieg lights, celluloid spirals of film, the faultless accuracy of the
meshing sprockets of synchronization, and mathematical calculations of length in fi lm
montage” (166). Eisenstein routinely made similar claims, mingling contemporary cultural
labor with distant art-historical references for his own work. His general point is that the
two artists share historical orientations and occupy the same laboring order, but further are
bound in some suprahistorical temporality to one another, toward mutual being in time
mediated and registered as temporal diagrams—of which one is the rhythmic audiovisual
montage of Alexander Nevsky (155).
28. For a discussion of Eisenstein’s concept of the “spherical book,” see Oksana Bulga-
kowa, “Eisenstein, the Glass House and the Spherical Book: From the Comedy of the Eye
to a Drama of Enlightenment,” Rouge 7 (2005), available at www.rouge.com.au/7/eisenstein
.html (accessed October 31, 2006).
29. Kinder in conversation (July 21, 2008) cites additional CD-ROMs from the period
aiming at a similar effect, such as Scrutiny in the Great Round, which uses QuickTime VR
less for perspectival navigation of a panoramic, quasi-immersive landscape than for the
presentation of navigable hypertext data.
 Notes to Chapter 2 / 253

30. Barbara Stafford, Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2007).
31. Stafford, Echo Objects, 84. Stafford’s strong cognitivist-realist reading of Eisenstein’s
montage as a diagrammatic emblem event unifying audiences does not account for the
historical range of interpretations I have surveyed here; see also the suggestion, in regards
to ¡Que Viva Mexico!, that Eisenstein’s corpus generally may be taken as a “multitextual”
production open to historical reeditioning. Barbara Evans Bixby, “The Weave of the Serape:
Sergei Eisenstein’s ‘¡Que Viva Mexico!’ as a Multitext” (Ph.D. diss., University of Florida,
1979).
32. See Russell Merritt, “Recharging Alexander Nevsky,” Film Quarterly 48, no. 2 (Win-
ter 1994–1995): 34–47. On correspondences, see also Eisenstein, “Vertical Montage,” 378.
33. See, for example, Karl Marx, Grundrisse: A Contribution to the Critique of Political
Economy, trans. Maurice Dobb (Moscow: Progress, [1859] 1970).
34. Sergei Eisenstein, Beyond the Stars: The Memoirs of Sergei Eisenstein; Selected Writ-
ings, vol. 4, ed. Richard Taylor, trans. Michael Powell (London: BFI, 1995), 589.
35. Prokofiev was also said by his wife to have had “homosexual tendencies”; and see
note 27, indicating the ways in which Eisenstein in effect made Prokofiev’s sensibilities into
a profoundly patriotic aesthetic trait.
36. On the energetics of human bodies and industrial machines around the problem
of fatigue, see Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1990).
37. On postgenomic bioinformatic corporeal ethics, see Nikolas Rose, The Politics of
Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-first Century (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2006).
38. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics,
Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
39. See Deleuze, Cinema 2, for his account of the “spiritual automaton” in cinema; and
Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Expressionism in Philosophy, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Zone
Books, [1968] 1990), for his treatment of the automatonic and the ethical in Spinoza.
Among numerous more recent accounts of popular cinema’s spectral past offered in
glimpses of mummies, androids, golems, somnambulists, and automata, see Eric G. Wilson,
The Melancholy Android: On the Psychology of Sacred Machines (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 2006).
40. Alan M. Turing’s foundational work on universal computation, for example, was
undertaken at the same historical moment Eisenstein turned back to the symbolic and
conditional aspects of Meyerhold’s theater. See Turing, “On Computable Numbers, with an
Application to the Entscheidungs Problem,” Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society,
Series 2 42 (1936–1937): 230–265, with corrections later published in Proceedings of the
London Mathematical Society, Series 2 43 (1937): 544–546. On nineteenth-century “cyber-
netics” as a model of social governance in France, see David Mindell, Jérôme Segal, and
Slava Gerovitch, “Cybernetics and Information Theory in the United States, France and the
Soviet Union,” in Science and Ideology: A Comparative History, ed. Mark Walker (London:
Routledge, 2003), 66–95.
41. Ronald Levaco, “The Eisenstein-Prokofiev Correspondence,” Cinema Journal 13,
no. 1 (Autumn 1973): 1–16, esp. 1, 9; these events are also discussed by numerous other
studies of the period cited here.
42. Deleuze, Cinema 1, 178.
254 / Notes to Chapter 2

43. D. N. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1997).
44. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 40.
45. “What relationship is there between human struggle and a work of art? The closest
and for me the most mysterious relationship of all. Exactly what Paul Klee meant when he
said: ‘You know, the people are missing.’ The people are missing and at the same time, they
are not missing. The people are missing means that the fundamental affinity between a work
of art and a people that does not yet exist is not, will never be clear. There is no work of art
that does not call on a people who does not yet exist.” Gilles Deleuze, “What Is the Creative
Act?” in Two Regimes of Madness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 324.
46. Important in regard to this play of possibility and virtuality in Eisenstein’s work
are the accounts by Annette Michelson of Eisenstein’s “epistemophilia” and, more recently,
by Anne Nesbet of the director’s “figural philosophy,” both of which have shown the great
capacities for epistemological excess resident within Eisenstein’s cinematic diagram. These
accounts of “epistemophilia” and “figural philosophy” show that Eisenstein’s various devel-
opments of montage practice develop alongside emergent scientific, economic, and artistic
epistemologies in the Soviet context. Michelson shows the ways in which Eisenstein’s sty-
listics in Old and New, a film made at the juncture of the NEP period and the succeeding
period of centrally planned economy, corresponds to the material ontologies of Soviet real-
ity. More recently, Nesbet’s discussion of epistemology in Eisenstein indicates the ways in
which a “figural” image of social knowledge in Eisenstein’s montage opens onto the corpo-
real and the affective, giving rise to interminable chains of possible critical interpretation.
For Michelson, see below; see Anne Nesbet, Savage Junctures: Sergei Eisenstein and the Shape
of Thinking (New York: I. B. Taurus, 2003).
47. Oksana Bulgakowa, “Spatial Figures in Soviet Cinema of the 1930s,” trans. Jeffrey
Karlson, in The Landscape of Stalinism: The Art and Ideology of Soviet Space, ed. Evgeny
Debrenko and Erik Naiman (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003), 53.
48. Joan Neuberger, “Eisenstein’s Angel,” Russian Review 63, no. 3 (July 2004): 374–406.
49. Stalin’s complaints in his meeting with Eisenstein included: “Ivan the Terrible was
very cruel. You can depict him as a cruel man, but you have to show why he had to be cruel.”
Richard Taylor, ed., “Stalin, Molotov, and Zhdanov on Ivan the Terrible Part Two,” in The
Eisenstein Reader (London: BFI, 1998), 161.
50. Oksana Bulgakowa, Sergei Eisenstein: A Biography (San Francisco: Potemkin Press,
2001), 210.
51. Bulgakowa, Sergei Eisenstein, 210–224. Bulgakowa argues that Eisenstein draws on
Otto Rank’s alternative to Freud’s Oedipal theory with a theory of the body’s emergence
from the maternal womb as trauma.
52. Sergei Eisenstein, “Montage in 1938,” in Sergei Eisenstein: Notes of a Film Director,
62–98. The BFI translation of this passage replaces the Bergsonist overtones of the discus-
sion suggested in the Russian translation of 1959 with “has to arise or be born from some-
thing else.” See Sergei Eisenstein, “Montage 1938,” in Selected Works, 2:309.
53. Eisenstein’s comments on Henri Bergson elsewhere make it clear that the Soviet
director believed, or could only say, that the significance of Bergson’s work had to be limited
to the conditions of production of its own, prerevolutionary context: that is, for Soviet
academicism, a presocialist, and therefore, possibly interesting but not entirely admissible,
source (“Charlie the Kid,” in Sergei Eisenstein, 171). Bergson was an early encounter for
Eisenstein, Bulgakowa shows (Sergei Eisenstein, 15).
 Notes to Chapter 2 / 255

54. Dziga Vertov, “I Wish to Share My Experience” (1934), in Kino-Eye: The Writings
of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson, trans. Kevin O’Brien (Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1984), 120; see also Annette Michelson, “The Kinetic Icon in the Work of
Mourning: Prolegomena to the Analysis of a Textual System,” October 52 (Spring 1990):
16–39, esp. 18. See also Michelson’s treatments of Eisenstein in “Camera Lucida/Camera
Obscura,” Artforum 11, no. 5 (January 1973): 30–31; “Reading Eisenstein Reading Capital,
Part 1” October 2 (Summer 1976): 27–38; and “Reading Eisenstein Reading Capital, Part 2”
October 3 (Spring 1977): 82–89; and “Eisenstein at 100: Recent Reception and Coming
Attractions,” October 88 (Spring 1999): 69–85.
55. David Bordwell, The Cinema of Eisenstein (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1993), emphasizes Eisenstein as stylist, and suggests that “musical analogies” were
deployed for organizational purposes of film style; see also Cook’s more detailed study of
musical analogy as cognitive metaphor in time-based media, discussed above.
56. Robert Weinberg, The Revolution of 1905 in Odessa: Blood on the Steps (Blooming-
ton: Indiana University Press, 1993), 132–133.
57. Here, as Stathis Kouvelakis explains, a rereading of Hegel’s Logic of Science led Lenin
to theorize that “Law is relation . . . relation of essences or between essences.” Stathis
Kouvelakis, “Lenin as a Reader of Hegel: Hypotheses for a Reading of Lenin’s Notebooks on
Hegel’s The Science of Logic,” in Lenin Reloaded: Toward a Politics of Truth, ed. Sebastian
Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis, and Slavoj Žižek (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007),
164–204, esp. 187. The treatment of dialectical material transformation here, for my pur-
poses, should be compared to the “diagrammatic” understanding of temporality, material-
ity, and change in Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s notion of “diagram.” Deleuze and Guattari
rework Charles Sanders Pierce’s notion of diagram as relation so that it becomes, more
specifically, an asubjective icon of relation operative across a range of forms of material
production: “Diagrammatic interactions . . . in our present terminology, are opposed to
semiological redundancies. The former make sign systems work directly with the realities
they refer to; they work at the existential production of referents, whereas the latter repre-
sent, by giving ‘equivalents’ that have no operational function. Examples: mathematical
algorithms, technological charts, computer programming, all participate directly in the
process of engendering objects, whereas an advertisement gives only an extrinsic representa-
tion of its object (though it is also producing subjectivity).” See Felix Guattari, The Anti-
Oedipus Papers, trans. Stéphane Nadaud (New York: Semiotexte, 2006), 419. Guattari men-
tions musical writing, computer syntax, and robotics (415) as examples of diagrammatic
production, indicating the broad applicability the authors intended with this asubjective
dynamics of relation.
58. Historicism requires an event, and “revolution,” a historical determination of the
transformative event whereby the party becomes the state, provides it. A triangulation of
party, state, and revolution come to determine and delimit the historical dynamism of the
political such that a larger political sequence becomes unthinkable in the historicization of
revolution as founding event. See Sylvain Lazarus, “Lenin and the Party,” in Budgen,
Kouvelakis, and Žižek, Lenin Reloaded, 260–261.
59. In practice, in the 1920s, the Soviet socialist economy proceeded to a state of ruin
compared to even pre-1914 levels. Christopher Read, ed., “Social Modernization,” in The
Stalin Years: A Reader (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 23–25, esp. 24.
60. Elizabeth Waters, “The Modernization of Russian Motherhood, 1917–1937,” in
Read, The Stalin Years, 25–38, esp. 32.
256 / Notes to Chapter 2

61. Dan Healey, “Sexuality and Gender Dissent: Homosexuality as Resistance in Stalin’s
Russia,” in Contending with Stalinism: Soviet Power and Popular Resistance in the 1930s, ed.
Lynne Viola (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 139–169.
62. At different points, a mixture of foreign lending or transfer and domestic innova-
tion, but by World War II, largely domestic.
63. Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia (New York: Metropoli-
tan, 2007), 192–226.
64. See Read, “The Great Fatherland War,” 145–148; and John Erickson, “Soviet Women
at War,” 148–168, both in Read, The Stalin Years.
65. Figes, The Whisperers, 157. The larger historical outcome, then, was that after exter-
nal debate and dissent had been destroyed by Lenin to achieve Bolshevik supremacy, the
Communist party itself would become the locus for the internal extermination of debate
and dissent after the revolution had become historicized. The project of building a contem-
porary socialism for the future was elaborated with all its contradictions in the relative
prosperity for an elite middle class in the early to mid-1930s (149–226).
66. Historical studies of industrial and cultural policy in this period show that a
“genetic” tendency (an evolutionary or adaptive socialism, based on education and cultural
production) competed with a “teleological” one (where social change was instrumentally
implemented in interventionist programs); see Daniel Peris, “The 1929 Congress of the
Godless,” in Read, The Stalin Years, 41–65; Read, “The Drive to Industrialize,” in The Stalin
Years, 66; and Alexander Erlich, The Soviet Industrialization Debate: 1924–1928 (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1960). These tensions are already evident, however, in Marx’s
observation that in capitalism, “the commodity form of the product of labor—or the value-
form of the commodity—is the economic cell-form.” See Marx, Capital (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1999), 3. Eisenstein, of course, famously conceives the “shot” as a montage
“cell” in “Beyond the Shot,” in The Eisenstein Reader, ed. Richard Taylor, trans. Richard
Taylor and William Powell (London: BFI, 1998), 82–92. Meanwhile, Soviet artist theorists
had also argued that by collapsing “economy” and “creativity” and embedding “genetic” and
“teleological” tensions in the analytical problematic of immanence and materiality, aesthetic
production would provide the means for collectivizing individuation. See Kasimir Male-
vich, “The Question of Imitative Art” (1920), in Art in Theory, 1900–1990, ed. Charles Har-
rison and Paul Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 294. The tragic reality, of course, was that
artists who advocated such yet-to-be-defined collectivism through creative individuation
became threats to the party as state.
67. For accessible histories of the period, see Figes, The Whisperers, 148–315; or Simon
Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson,
2003).
68. Even colleague Sergei Tretyakov criticized Eisenstein’s The Strike (1924) as “formal
experimentation” (Bulgakowa, Sergei Eisenstein, 50), a charge that was continually leveled
at the director throughout his life and continued after his death.
69. In Sergei Eisenstein, Bulgakowa catalogues a cascade of politicians and artists’
arrests, executions, or murders in 1939, including those of early Eisenstein collaborator
Sergei Tretyakov, mentor and theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold, and shortly afterward
his wife Zinaida Raikh, who had taught Eisenstein biomechanical theory and practice in
Meyerhold’s studio in the early 1920s. Bulgakowa’s account shows that the “script” of the
supposed “artist plot” against Stalin included the names of Eisenstein and Shostakovich as
conspirators, Trotskyites, and terrorists directed by André Malraux (Sergei Eisenstein, 200),
confirming the assertions Marshall makes in his 1983 introduction to the first English
 Notes to Chapter 2 / 257

translation of Eisenstein’s autobiography, Immoral Memories: An Autobiography, trans. Her-

bert Marshall (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983), and in Marshall, Masters of the Soviet
Cinema: Crippled Creative Biographies (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983).
70. Sergei Eisenstein, “How I Learned to Draw (A Chapter on Dancing Lessons),” trans.
Richard Taylor, in Eisenstein at Ninety, ed. Ian Christie and David Elliot (Oxford: Museum
of Modern Art Oxford, 1988), 62.
71. Eisenstein, “How I Learned to Draw (A Chapter on Dancing Lessons),” in Beyond
the Stars, 588.
72. Seton’s account gives Eisenstein his chance to reframe the question of homosexual
identity; she also helpfully includes an appendix of documents in which Soviet officials
disavow any homosexual identity as Soviet. Marie Seton, Sergei M. Eisenstein: A Biography
(New York: A. A. Wyn, 1952), 437; and see the appendix. Jacques Aumont reads the director’s
autobiography to find Eisensteinian ecstasy as jouissance at play, recycling desire constantly
in a production of mastery that is complicated by the recurrent figure of the repressed: by
far the more common reading of Eisenstein and sexuality in the West. See Jacques Aumont,
Montage Eisenstein, trans. Lee Hildreth, Constance Penley, and Andrew Ross (London: BFI,
1987). Hakan Lövgren reads a sublimated violence in Eisenstein’s drawings as a symptom
of traumatizing homophobia, similarly to Bulgakowa’s biographical claims of “creative sub-
limation.” Hakan Lövgren, “Trauma and Ecstasy: Aesthetic Compounds in Dr. Eisenstein’s
Laboratory,” in Eisenstein Revisited: A Collection of Essays, ed. Lars Kleberg and Hakan
Lövgren (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell International, 1987), 93–111. Taylor more
recently argues that homosexuality must have made Eisenstein and his cultural labor more
vulnerable to the Stalinist politics of terror; Richard Taylor, “Sergei Eisenstein: The Life and
Times of a Boy from Riga,” in The Montage Principle: Eisenstein in New Cultural and Critical
Contexts (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), 25–43, esp. 37. The question such claims raise, how-
ever, is: more vulnerable than whom? For the claim that rather than a novel theorization of
materialist, sexed affect, Eisenstein’s films are informed by concerns around gender, see
Chris Robé, “Revolting Women: The Role of Gender Sergei Eisenstein’s Que Viva México!
and U.S. Depression-Era Left Film Criticism,” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media
48 (Winter 2006), available at http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc48.2006/ (accessed Feb-
ruary 24, 2010).
73. Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in
East and West (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 184.
74. Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe, 184. For a useful discussion complicat-
ing identifying sexual identity as “sexual” or as “identity,” see Douglas Crimp, “Don’t Tell”
(1993), in Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2004), 239.
75. Eisenstein jokingly suggests that he is restraining the narration of his memories in
order not to offend U.S. readers, probably reflecting Eisenstein’s experience in Hollywood
and with Sinclair Lewis, who joked about his wife, who managed Eisenstein’s Mexico proj-
ect, as having no idea about “homos”; Lewis blackmailed Eisenstein in correspondence with
Stalin, stating in a letter that Eisenstein was homosexual; Eisenstein’s “joke,” then, is not too
difficult to understand; Nesbet’s account in Savage Junctures reviews some of these details.
76. Victor Shklovsky and Richard Sheldon, trans., Zoo, or Letters Not about Love (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1971), 136.
77. Healey, “Sexuality and Gender Dissent,” 189.
78. Meanwhile, Eisenstein received Meyerhold’s personal archive on request from the
daughter of Zinaida Raikh, Meyerhold’s teaching assistant and later wife, murdered in her
258 / Notes to Chapter 2

apartment after Meyerhold’s arrest in July 1939, hiding it in his dacha after Meyerhold had
been killed at Stalin’s orders. Bulgakowa, Sergei Eisenstein, 214.
79. Bordwell, The Cinema of Eisenstein, 22.
80. Eisenstein, more so; others, less so: “When Eisenstein was still in Mexico he gave
his friend Strauch written advice on how a film director should behave [toward those com-
manding the film industry]: ‘pressure them, be diplomatic, grovel, be sly, and then pressure
them again.’” Bulgakowa, Sergei Eisenstein, 150, citing Eisenstein.
81. Montefiore, Stalin, 530. The closing image of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò: 120 Days
of Sodom comes to mind: The politico-narratological sadism of Italian Fascism, and of that
film, is summed up by the ambivalent image of a slow dance between two young soldiers
in uniform.
82. Bulgakowa, Sergei Eisenstein, 220.
83. See Deleuze’s theory of the cinema as simulacrum and its “power of the false.” Gilles
Deleuze, “The Simulacrum and Ancient Philosophy,” in The Logic of Sense (New York:
Columbia University Press, [1969] 1990), 263. Of more than passing interest here with
regards to simulacral “machinery” and “the power of the false” is that Eisenstein and Deleuze
had a keen appreciation for Carrollian nonsense. See Sergei Eisenstein, “Charlie the Kid,” in
Sergei Eisenstein: Notes of a Film Director, 167–197, esp. 178.
84. Eisenstein’s memoirs or his early theater spectacles would not be the only “circus”
of “homosexual desire” in postrevolutionary Russia. For cosmopolitan youth coming of age
in St. Petersburg (as Eisenstein did), Healey explains, St. Petersburg’s Cinizelli circus was a
well-known center of the “little homosexual world,” whose architecture, route map, and
surveillance Healey documents for the period from the 1880s into the 1920s. Dan Healey,
Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 31–32, esp. 36.
85. Alma Law and Mel Gordon, Meyerhold, Eisenstein, and Biomechanics: Actor Train-
ing in Revolutionary Russia (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1996), 75.
86. In biomechanics, Meyerhold understood body movement as an object in and of
itself. Gravity, speed, orientation, movement, mass, and the relation between one body and
another become key factors in the actor’s dramatic projection. These qualities of biome-
chanical diagramming comprise not only a means to communicate the ontologies and
epistemologies of sound and acoustics in the time stream assembled as montage; their
modulation, since they no longer presume an autonomous, individual coherence of a single
body-anchored perspective, also tends to preempt subjective emotional refl ection. Law and
Gordon, Meyerhold, Eisenstein, and Biomechanics, 75. On Eisenstein and Meyerhold, see
also Kristin Thompson, Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible: A Neoformalist Analysis (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981). Nesbet’s analysis provides a philosophical treatment
for the excess of interpretation associated with Eisenstein’s work, in different ways, by
Michelson or Thompson.
87. Sergei Yutkevich, Kontrapunkt der Regie (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1965), 342–343.
88. Alma Law, “Meyerhold Speaks . . . ,” Performing Arts Journal 3, no. 3 (Winter 1979):
68–84.
89. Yutkevich, Kontrapunkt der Regie, 355–356.
90. Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema.
91. Yutkevich, Kontrapunkt der Regie, 356–357.
92. For example, those of Appia, documented more generally in the late-nineteenth-
and early-twentieth-century period by Jo Leslie Collier, The Transposition of Romanticism
from Stage to Screen (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1988).
 Notes to Chapter 2 / 259

93. Yutkevich, Kontrapunkt der Regie, 384.

94. Bordwell’s Cinema of Eisenstein suggests that Meyerhold exaggerated his influence
on Eisenstein (3) and that prevalent theories of reflexology or eurhythmics were a more
relevant influence. An earlier U.S. version of this view had been advanced in Malcolm
Eugene Bowes, “Eurhythmics and the Analysis of Visual-Musical Synthesis in Film: An
Examination of Eisenstein’s ‘Alexander Nevsky’” (Ph.D. diss., Ohio University, 1976), 73.
Eisenstein had studied eurhythmics prior to apprenticing with Meyerhold, but he claims to
have mastered it under Meyerhold. See Eisenstein, Beyond the Stars, 589. See also, with
regards to Kuleshov and Eisenstein, Kuleshov on Film, ed. and trans. Ronald Levaco (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1974). Buck-Morss also points out the influence of Tay-
lorism, another influential form of industrial physical culture in the early Soviet era, in
Dreamworld and Catastrophe.
95. Yutkevich, Kontrapunkt der Regie, 376, 380.
96. When making Old and New, Yutkevich recalls, Eisenstein became frustrated when
editing the famed milk-separator sequence and screened Potemkin by himself for nights on
end to isolate the effective principle of the Odessa Steps sequence, “but the mechanical re-
application of montage construction from one film to the other didn’t achieve the desired
effect. The exquisitely assembled scene remained expressionless” (Kontrapunkt der Regie,
382–383). Most critics seem to agree that the latter scene fails to reach the pathos of the
former but neglect to point out that the milk-separator sequence is designed to express the
other side of pathos: ecstasy. In any case, in Yutkevich’s view, montage as information fails
montage as immanence.
97. Healey examines the methodological obstacle of denial of access to archival materi-
als on such figures as Eisenstein and other cultural figures in Russian and Soviet empires.
Healey, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia, 267n12; Dan Healey, “Homosexual Exis-
tence and Existing Socialism: New Light on the Repression of Male Homosexuality in Sta-
lin’s Russia” GLQ 8, no. 3 (2002): 349–378. His historical method thus draws on canonical
queer studies, including Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1: Introduction
(New York: Pantheon, 1978); and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1990).
98. Eisenstein’s position as creative laborer, with an international reputation as well as
useful skills as a director, would have put him in a slightly different position than that of
others. In the postrevolutionary Soviet context, the Bolshevik party completely decriminal-
ized same-sexuality between 1918 and 1922 in the postrevolutionary overhaul of the civil
code; by the mid-1930s, recriminalization and uneven enforcement based on status, gender,
ethnic identity, or other informal factors produced largely incoherent effects at enforce-
ment, impacting the Soviet film industry as well as practices of everyday life. For example,
in 1937, when the second version of Eisenstein’s Bezhin Meadow was canceled two years
after the first version had been stopped, Ivan Siniakov, a Mosfilm executive, was arrested
and charged with having sexual relations with twenty military and seven civilian men
between 1927 and 1937 (whom Siniakov met in locales ranging from the stables of the
Moscow Circus to Sverdlov Square in front of the Bolshoi Theater); he was sentenced to
eight years of prison labor. Siniakov’s confession, however, allowed his partners, many of
whom were sailors or soldiers, to go unpunished, demonstrating the ways in which a suspi-
cious, unhealthy masculinity tended to be found guilty of corrupting otherwise “healthy”
masculine subjects after the 1933–1934 acts recriminalizing sodomy. See the various articles
mentioning the Siniakov case in Healey, “Homosexual Existence and Existing Socialism,”
365; Dan Healey, “Masculine Purity and ‘Gentleman’s Mischief ’: Sexual Exchange and
260 / Notes to Chapter 2

Prostitution between Russian Men, 1861–1941,” Slavic Review 60, no. 2 (Summer 2001):
233–265, esp. 261–263; and Healey, “Sexuality and Gender Dissent,” 139–169, esp. 160. For
comparison, too, consider that in the U.S. context, same-sex dissidence would not be fully
decriminalized until 2003, while sexual nonconformance currently remains a marker of
second-class status.
99. Nesbet, Savage Junctures, 79.
100. Bulgakowa, Sergei Eisenstein; Nesbet, Savage Junctures.
101. Versions range from the earliest ones produced by Upton Sinclair in attempts to
recoup his investment in the film, in, for example, Thunder Over Mexico (Lesser, 1933); to
Seton’s critically reviled version; to more recent restoration attempts, such as Alexandrov’s
¡Que Viva Mexico! (1979) or Oleg Kovalov’s A Mexican Fantasy (1998).
102. And see the analysis of Clark’s Passing Through in Chapter 5 herein.
103. As Healey’s work reveals at length, female same-sex desire was much less likely to
be named as prohibited and to produce punishments for transgression than male same-sex
desire in this period; on the other hand, homosexual desire in the non-European Soviet
republics was more likely to be disciplined than in the European Soviets.
104. Eisenstein, Beyond the Stars, 453.

CHAPTER 3
1. Michelle Snow, “User since Forever: Yoshi Sodeoka,” available at https://wiki.brown
.edu/confluence/display/mcm1700n/Yoshi+Sodeoka (accessed February 12, 2010).
2. Fischinger’s extensive museum and gallery exhibition record are a stark counter-
point to his relative marginalization in film theoretical or art historical studies of twentieth-
century cinema.
3. Carl Beier, “A New Way of Looking at Things,” Hollywood Quarterly 2, no. 1 (October
1946): 1–10.
4. Ralph Potter, “Audivisual Music,” Hollywood Quarterly 3, no. 1 (Autumn 1947): 66–
78. This article, or the Beier article cited above, are only two of several articles that appeared
in the early volumes of Hollywood Quarterly on the subject of visual music as a privileged
site for exploring problems of audiovisual synchronization; see also, on the Whitney Bros.,
Leon Becker, “Synthetic Sound and Abstract Image,” Hollywood Quarterly 1, no. 1 (October
1945): 95–96.
5. Stephen C. Beck, “Proposal for Investigating New Uses of Color Television” (unpub-
lished manuscript, 1969).
6. Judy Stone, “Bringing Video Art to the TV Screens,” San Francisco Examiner, March
20, 1976.
7. William Moritz, “The Films of Oskar Fischinger,” Film Culture nos. 58–60 (1974):
37–175, esp. 41; and William Moritz, Optical Poetry: The Life and Work of Oskar Fischinger
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 5–7.
8. Sergei Yutkevich, Kontrapunkt der Regie (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1965).
9. Moritz, “The Films of Oskar Fischinger,” 41.
10. Moritz, “The Films of Oskar Fischinger,” 53.
11. This last film especially would have satisfied Paul Klee, who also lived in Munich
during the time Fischinger lived there and who makes numerous references and analogies
to music in his private diary. Writes Paul Klee, an accomplished violinist, in March 1910: “I
must some day be able to improvise freely on the chromatic keyboard of the rows of water-
 Notes to Chapter 3 / 261

color cups.” Paul Klee, The Diaries of Paul Klee (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1964), 244.
12. Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
13. Oskar Fischinger, “True Creation,” The Fischinger Trust and Archive, available at
www.oskarfischinger.org/True%20Creation.html.
14. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 1984).
15. Moritz, Optical Poetry.
16. Erik Loyer, “Stories as Instruments” (public talk and demonstration at the Univer-
sity of California, Riverside, April 7, 2009).
17. Some of this footage was later included in R-1 (1927) and Spiritual Constructions
(1927) and, like the expanding or contracting senses of screen space in the Spirals fragments,
demonstrates the larger aims and trajectory of his work: animating a block of immanent
time by musically modulating its energies.
18. Moritz, “The Films of Oskar Fischinger.”
19. Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde.
20. Hans Richter, cited in Justin Hoffman, “Hans Richter: Constructivist Filmmaker,”
in Hans Richter: Activism, Modernism, and the Avant-Garde, ed. Stephen C. Foster (Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 76.
21. Richter, cited in Bernd Finkeldey, “Hans Richter and the Constructivist Interna-
tional,” in Foster, Hans Richter, 111.
22. Marion von Hofacker, “Richter’s Films and the Role of the Radical Artist,” in Foster,
Hans Richter, 127.
23. Moritz, “The Films of Oskar Fischinger.”
24. Hoffman, “Hans Richter,” 78.
25. The “Demonstration of Universal Language” would seem to be from 1920, the year
that Richter and Viking Eggeling first attempted to film the scrolls. However, while the mani-
festo explaining their intentions is dated from that year, the “Demonstration” is not dated,
nor attributed a date, in the Foster edition. Richter, compiled in Foster, Hans Richter, 191.
26. Ibid., 208.
27. Ernst Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, [1919]
2000), 34.
28. See Sergei M. Eisenstein, “Montage in 1938,” in Sergei Eisenstein: Notes of a Film
Director (Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House, [1939] 1958), 77; and my discus-
sion in Chapter 1.
29. Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, 141.
30. Moritz, “The Films of Oskar Fischinger,” 73.
31. The ritornello form is fundamental to The Brandenburg Concertos, and the Third,
used by Fischinger, epitomizes the classical type of ritornello, despite a historical resistance
to describing the concertos in these terms; see Malcolm Boyd, Bach: The Brandenburg Con-
certos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), esp. 48–49. Boyd also notes that the
Third Concerto is notable for calling for an improvisation in its “Adagio” movement (81).
32. Oskar Fischinger, “A Document Related to Motion Painting #1,” in Moritz, Optical
Poetry, 185.
33. For a selection of discussions in English, see the range of entries relevant to Fi-
schinger in The Film Index, Vol. 1: The Film as Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art Film
262 / Notes to Chapter 3

Library and H. W. Wilson, 1941); Roger Manvell and John Huntley, The Technique of Film
Music (London: Focal Press, 1957), especially with reference to synthetic sound; Richard
Whitehall, “Introduction,” in Bildmusik: Art of Oskar Fischinger (Long Beach, CA: Long
Beach Museum of Art, 1970), 4–16; Cecile Starr and Robert Russett, “Notes on the Origins
of New Art,” in Experimental Animation: Origins of New Art, 2nd ed. (New York: Litton,
[1976] 1988), 13–31; William Charles Wees, Light Moving in Time: Studies in the Visual
Aesthetics of Avant-Garde Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Moritz, “The
Films of Oskar Fischinger” and Optical Poetry; Robert Haller, Galaxy: Avant-Garde Film-
Makers across Space and Time (New York: Anthology Film Archives, 2001); David James,
The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); and Web sites maintained by the Center
for Visual Music: www.centerforvisualmusic.org/Fischinger/OFFilmnotes.htm; and www
.oskarfischinger.org (accessed February 14, 2010).
34. James, The Most Typical Avant-Garde.
35. See Moritz, “The Films of Oskar Fischinger” and Optical Poetry; James, The Most
Typical Avant-Garde, 254–261.
36. Walter Frisch, German Modernism: Music and the Arts (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2005), 174.
37. Hanns Eisler and Hans Bunge, Gespräche mit Hans Bunge: Fragen Sie mehr über
Brecht (Munich: Rogner and Bernhard, [1963] 1976).
38. Moritz, Optical Poetry, 202–204; and “The Films of Oskar Fischinger,” 44; and see
also Cindy Keefer, “‘Raumlightmusik’: Early 20th Century Abstract Cinema Immersive
Environments,” Leonardo Electronic Almanac 16, nos. 6–7, available at www.leonardo.info/
LEA/CreativeData/CreativeData.html (accessed February 14, 2010).
39. See, for example, Moritz, “The Films of Oskar Fischinger,” 139.
40. This title was later given to the meditative, silent work of 1942.
41. Moritz, Optical Poetry, 24.
42. Fischinger, “A Document Concerning PAINTING” (1956), reprinted in Moritz,
Optical Poetry, 188–189; and see also the earlier reprint in Moritz, “The Films of Oskar
Fischinger,” 188.
43. James, The Most Typical Avant-Garde, 257.
44. Erwin Panofsky, “Style and Medium in the Motion Picture” (1934), in Film Theory
and Criticism, 6th ed., ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2004), 289–302.
45. Whether Berkeley intentionally borrowed from Fischinger’s “original” would be
hard to prove; at any rate, such a line of argument might still overlook the fact that in the
cultural field, Fischinger solved a series of problems in musicalizing the cinematic stream
before Berkeley did, and with a quite different emphasis on graphical and painterly sophis-
tication. Berkeley tended to resolve these concerns through mechanized sets, clever camera
set-ups, montage, choreography, and a range of techniques considered “special effects.”
46. Allegretto uses what I term a “phrasal” style of synchronization; visual elements
have movements that correspond to instrumental phrases of the music, notably the melody
line carried by violins, reeds, or brasses. The film can be seen as an expressive “visualization”
of the sound track, because the phrase-by-phrase animation works to depict the flow, hence
“meaning,” of the musical composition.
47. According to Moritz, “The Films of Oskar Fischinger,” this film prepares the way
for the meditative films of James Whitney or Jordan Belson. Other effects in this film seem
to anticipate the structural and flicker films of the 1960s and 1970s.
 Notes to Chapter 4 / 263

48. Eisenstein, on the other hand, explains that his theory of “Vertical Montage” builds
on his earlier theorizations of interframe juxtapositions. Rhythmic or compositional line
can be traced across and through the frame as entire sequence.
49. Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 54.
50. Martin Rubin, Showstoppers: Busby Berkeley and the Tradition of Spectacle (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 163.
51. Robert Haller, “Oskar’s Hand,” in program notes for Kinetica-2: Abstraction, Ani-
mation, Music; A Centennial Tribute to Oskar Fischinger (Los Angeles: IotaCenter, 2000).
52. Akira Mizuta Lippit, “Digesture: Gesture and Inscription in Experimental Cinema,”
in Migrations of Gesture, ed. Carrie Noland and Sally Ann Ness (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2008), 113–132.
53. Moritz, “The Films of Oskar Fischinger,” 76.
54. Elfriede Fischinger, undated museum catalog; presumably compiled by William
Moritz.
55. Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude (New York: Random House, 2004).
56. Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude, 141.
57. Moritz, Optical Poetry, 148.
58. Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time Vol. 2: Disorientation (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2008); Bernard Stiegler, Acting Out (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2008); and see my concluding discussion in Chapter 7.
59. Stiegler, Acting Out, 55.

CHAPTER 4
1. Nicholas Cook, Analyzing Musical Multimedia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
2. Albrecht Betz, Hanns Eisler: Political Musician (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, [1976, 1982] 2006), 45.
3. Cook, Analyzing Musical Multimedia, 64.
4. On the tensions in the authorship of Composing for the Films and its different ver-
sions, see Philip Rosen, “Adorno and Film Music: Theoretical Notes on Composing for the
Films,” Yale French Studies no. 60 (1980): 157–182, esp. 157n2.
5. Hanns Eisler and Theodor Adorno, Composing for the Films (London: Athlone
Press, [1947] 1994), 76.
6. Theodor Adorno describes Paul Lazarsfeld’s gestural feedback device indicating lis-
tener like or dislike in “Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America,” in The
Intellectual Migration, ed. Bailyn Fleming (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1969), 344; and see Graham McCann, “New Introduction,” in Eisler and Adorno, Composing
for the Films, xxii; McCann’s introduction nonetheless misrepresents the actual production
of Eisler’s scores, which did include an evaluation component, Adorno’s later recollection
of Lazarsfeld notwithstanding. Reference to the screenings at which expert feedback was
generated appears in documents archived along with the rest of the Rockefeller Foundation
project documents. But see McCann, “New Introduction,” xxi–xxii. Eisler and Adorno
began the manuscript in 1942 and finished it in 1944. The translation of their German
manuscript appeared from Oxford University Press in 1947, but Adorno withdrew his name
in the midst of the political turmoil that resulted in Eisler’s testimony before the House
Un-American Activities Committee and his voluntary deportation in 1948. For Eisler’s ver-
sion, see Hanns Eisler, Gespräche mit Hans Bunge: Fragen Sie mehr über Brecht (Munich:
Rogner and Bernhard, 1976), 283.
264 / Notes to Chapter 4

7. Cited in John Fuegi, Brecht & Co.: Sex, Politics, and the Making of the Modern Drama,
2nd ed. (New York: Grover Press, [1994] 2002), 535.
8. Bertolt Brecht, “On Gestic Music,” ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and
Wang, [1964] 1992), 104–106. See also Kurt Weill, “Gestus in Music,” trans. Erich Albrecht,
in Brecht Sourcebook, ed. Carol Martin and Henry Bial (New York: Routledge, 2000),
61–65.
9. Eisler and Adorno, Composing for the Films.
10. See Eugene Lunn, Marxism and Modernism: An Historical Study of Lukács, Brecht,
Benjamin, and Adorno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); Annette Davison,
Hollywood Theory, Non-Hollywood Practice: Cinema Soundtracks in the 1980s and 1990s
(Surrey, U.K.: Ashgate, 2006).
11. See Walter Frisch, German Modernism: Music and the Arts (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2005), 145–148; and Arnold Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony (Berkeley:
University of California Press, [1911] 1983).
12. On Adorno’s rejection of Brecht’s politicized art and Eisler’s sense that Brechtian
approach could be integrated with a critical theoretical approach, see McCann, “New Intro-
duction,” xxix.
13. Archival documents indicate that Schoenberg received $300, and Brecht received
$250. “Statement of Expenses: Hanns Eisler—Rockefeller Music Fund” 4, in 200R New
School 62-42 1.1 200 260.3096.
14. Letter to Eisler from Samuel T. Farquhar et al., early 1945. In Folder, “Hollywood
Quarterly,” in the Eisler documents held in the Hanns Eisler archive of the Feuchtwanger
Library at the University of Southern California. The panel was to address the following
questions: “1. Is contemporary film music really contemporary? 2. Does it express today’s
attitude toward musical forms and aesthetics? 3. To what extent is the modern musical
idiom exploited on the screen? Does it work to the advantage of the film? Could its greater
use enhance the significance and enjoyment of pictures? 4. Has the use of music in Ameri-
can films kept pace with that of Europe, especially France and Russia? 5. How can film
musicians cooperate more closely with film writers? 6. How soon can we expect recognition
of the place of music as an integral part of film drama, and not merely as background or a
technical bridge?”
15. Hadley Cantril, “The Impact of Terror on the Radio Listener,” Rockefeller Archive
documents: PRR 1938 200R 1.1 Box 271 Folder 3236, which provides Cantril’s explanation
of listener panic. Shortly, theatrical sound designer Harold Burris-Meyer received funding
for further elaboration of sound-processing equipment, explaining in a proposal document
that “one use of sound effects in the Stevens Theatre produced what was really mass hyste-
ria”; Eisler’s Film Music Project was the third project funded at this time to investigate
audience reception of sound and music, after the Radio Research Project (which Lazarsfeld
took over from Cantril, employing Adorno for a brief period), and Burris-Meyer’s Sound
in the Theater, which shared staffer Harry Robin with Eisler for a brief period. A memo
from John Marshall to David Stevens makes it clear that Eisler’s Film Music Project was
coordinated as a parallel project for film music to Burris-Meyer’s sound design and the
much larger Radio Research projects. See Program and Policy—Public Opinion 1942: RG 3,
Series 911, Box 5, Folder 49, memo, March 26, 1940, “DHS from JM.” Further, Rockefeller
funded an expansion of the Radio Research project dedicated to monitoring German state
radio broadcasting in collaboration with the BBC and analyzing their contents. Rockefeller
Foundation Resolution Grant 42030 4/2/42. The former coeditor with Freud of Imago and
editor of the German edition of Freud’s collected works, Walter Ernst Kris, was tasked with
 Notes to Chapter 4 / 265

Hans Speier to head this effort, since despite his background in art history and psychology,
“the common problem being that of man’s reaction to the appeal of symbolic stimuli.”
16. Mark S. Micale, “On the ‘Disappearance’ of Hysteria: A Study in the Clinical
Deconstruction of a Diagnosis,” Isis 84, no. 3 (September 1993): 496–526.
17. Eisler and Adorno, Composing for the Films, 141.
18. Rockefeller Archives, 200 R New School for Social Research Music Filming 1939–
1941 RG 1.1, Series 200, Box 259, Folder 3097.
19. Hanns Eisler, “Fantasia in G-Men,” New Masses, October 14, 1947, p. 8.
20. And see David Blake, ed., “Chronology of Eisler’s Life,” in Hanns Eisler: A Miscellany
(Luxembourg: Harward, 1995), 467–470. Letters written by Louise Eisler, held in the
Feuchtwanger Archive of the University of Southern California, indicate that voluntary
deportation allowed Eisler to avoid being sent by U.S. authorities to the U.S.-administered
zone of divided Germany, where she feared that Eisler would be incarcerated with former
Nazis who might kill him.
21. An authoritative biography is available in Steven Smith, A Heart at Fire’s Center:
The Life and Music of Bernard Herrmann (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
22. For a summary account of Bernard Herrmann’s significance as auteur along with
Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro, and Paul Schrader on Taxi Driver, see Jonathan Rosen-
baum, Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity Press, 2004), 295–300. Herrmann was hired by the “New Hollywood,” though pre-
cisely because of his recognized status as auteur.
23. Edith Newcomb, letter to Constantin Bokoleinkoff, Feuchtwanger Library, Hanns
Eisler Archive.
24. See Jeff Smith’s contrary claim in The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film
Music (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998) of film-music marketing as essentially
a result of a convergence between Hollywood film marketing and that of the long-playing
record beginning in the late 1940s.
25. Evan William Cameron, Sound and the Cinema: The Coming of Sound to American
Film (Pleasantville, NY: Redgrave, 1980), 119.
26. Kurt London, Film Music: A Summary of the Characteristics of Its History, Aesthetics,
Technique; and Possible Developments, trans. Eric S. Bensinger (London: Faber and Faber,
1936).
27. Jane Feuer, The Hollywood Musical (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982);
Rick Altman, The American Film Musical (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).
28. Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1987).
29. Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cin-
ema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). Mary Ann Doane and Silverman argue
for attention to a psychoanalytically observed “voice” in cinema, and both locate this voice
primarily as the ideological construction of lip sync. In these formulations, the auditory is
read in a critical positioning of sound as necessary extra. Listening is not located as a prac-
tice of knowledge on the part of audiences but rather as a guilty pleasure bound up within
the operations of synchronization that might possibly signify a site for political reforma-
tions of cinematic practice.
30. Mary Anne Doane, “The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space,”
Yale French Studies no. 60 (1980): 33–50. As Doane puts it, little “space in the cinema” is left
over for anything else: “The supreme achievement of patriarchal ideology is that it has no
outside” (50).
266 / Notes to Chapter 4

31. Royal S. Brown, Overtones and Undertones (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1994).
32. These analyses also interrogate spectatorship in terms of cognition, as in Cook,
Analyzing Musical Multimedia, ch. 1.
33. Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York:
Columbia University Press, [1990] 1994); for an alternative point of view demonstrating
the avowed importance—for audiences and production workers alike—of music in “silent”
period cinemas, see Martin Marks, Music and the Silent Film: Contexts and Case Studies
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
34. Brown, Overtones and Undertones, 19: “The degree to which there is a tendency to
deny aesthetic status to the styles of the ‘everyday’ is the degree to which the cinema also
needed something to de-iconify its temporal and spatial images in order to justify its exis-
tence as an art form. Music is one, but not the only, way in which this was accomplished.”
35. Lawrence Kramer, Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1995), 111–112: “Emotionally suggestive and technically arcane, music
adds itself to the closed circle . . . of an acknowledged story. . . . The narrative circle breaks;
the music becomes the primary term and the story its mere accompaniment. Why bother
to follow all that stuff Wotan is saying to Erda when we can just listen to the doom-laden
procession of the leitmotifs?”
36. See Smith, The Sounds of Commerce.
37. Katherine Spring, “Pop Go the Warner Bros., et al.: Marketing Film Songs during
the Coming of Sound,” Cinema Journal 48, no. 1 (Fall 2008): 68–89.
38. For a range of useful essays, see Daniel Goldmark, Lawrence Kramer, and Richard
D. Leppert, eds., Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2007).
39. Claudia Gorbman, “Aesthetics and Rhetoric,” American Music 22, no. 1 (Spring
2004): 14–26. For Gorbman, Cook’s account of “metaphor” is crucial.
40. The Rockefeller Foundation declined to fund work proposed by Burris-Meyer for
“Music in Industry”; his “Sound in the Theater” project was suspended when Burris-Meyer’s
expertise and equipment were requisitioned by the U.S. military. After the war, Burris-
Meyer submitted a report to the foundation outlining his contributions to “Project Polly,”
which produced two distinct configurations of an airplane mounted with massive speaker
systems designed to broadcast messages to the battlefield while in flight. Burris-Meyer
claimed that “Polly” encouraged significant numbers of Japanese troops to surrender and
thus saved a significant number of U.S. soldiers’ lives in the process.
41. Annette Kuhn, Dreaming of Fred and Ginger: Cinema and Cultural Memory (New
York: New York University Press, 2002).
42. Digital games routinely assign significant value to programmed digital play in terms
of linearity: You are generally a “better player” the “faster” you get through a level or the more
levels you can complete; “levels” may be considered as “chapters”; and so on. Espen Aarseth’s
notion of “ergodic text” requiring nontrivial efforts of interpretation similarly neglects the
massive differences of use, interpretation, or repetition that accrue in any use of technically
inscribed memory. See Espen Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Balti-
more: John Hopkins University Press, 1999). Digital games do not necessarily require non-
trivial effort; however, they do routinely reward any measure of effort, awarding status or
points once that effort has become conventionalized in user gesture—that is, “mastered.”
43. In these ways, the film deploys as narrative design that larger historical transposi-
tion of late-romantic epistemologies to cinema design that Jo Leslie Collier documents in
 Notes to Chapter 4 / 267

From Wagner to Murnau: The Transposition of Romanticism from Stage to Screen (Ann Arbor,
MI: UMI Research Press, 1988).
44. Brown, Overtones and Undertones, 67. A joke can be played here, he points out: For
example, in Woody Allen’s Bananas (1971), Allen opens a closet door to find the harp that
is playing the cue.
45. Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia
University Press, [1982] 1999).
46. I’m referring to Brown’s usage of musical iconicity here.
47. Kathryn Kalinak, Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film (Madi-
son: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992).
48. Thus, the rhetorics of affect enabled through practices of consonant sync may
inform both the underscore and the completely musicalized film. On the other hand,
consonant sync also affords a renewed dream of an imaginary production device: cinema
as a graphical scoring machine allowing sonic material to be mapped to visual, and thus,
manipulable, signs; see the discussion of visual music in Chapter 3, herein, and Norman
McLaren, “Notes on Animated Sound,” Hollywood Quarterly 7, no. 3 (1953): 223–229;
Roger Manvell and John Huntley, The Technique of Film Music (London: Focal Press, 1957);
Roy Prendergast, Film Music: A Neglected Art (New York: Norton, [1977] 1992); Stanislav
Kreichi, “The ANS Synthesizer: Composing on a Photoelectronic Instrument,” Leonardo
28, no. 1 (1995): 59–62; and Douglas Kahn’s review of efforts around visual synthesis of
sound in the commercial and aesthetic modernisms of the 1920s in “Art and Sound,” in
Hearing History: A Reader, ed. Mark Michael Smith (Athens: University of Georgia Press,
2004), 36–50. Any device capable of completely translating sound and image, contrary to
new media rhetorics, is necessarily imaginary, because ultimately this proposal presumes
that the complex temporalities of the time-based work in reception can be entirely sub-
sumed to those of its production. Such a device, then, could never be perfected in the
instrumentalization of a merely parametrical or informatic process but rather suggests the
ability to abstract the affective labor of the audience itself as production labor: a dream of
total synchronization.
49. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, [1960] 1997).
50. Julian Brand and Christopher Hailey, eds., Constructive Dissonance (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1997), 149.
51. Theodor Adorno, “Letters to Walter Benjamin,” in Aesthetics and Politics: The Key
Texts of the Classic Debate within German Marxism, ed. Ronald Taylor (London: Verso,
1977), 129.
52. Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence, 1928–1940
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 130.
53. Brown, Overtones and Undertones, 30–31.
54. Richard Raskin, Night and Fog (Amsterdam: Aarhus University Press, 1987),
160–167.
55. Lazarsfeld had once briefed his senior staff on the “role of ‘deep’ psychology” in the
Princeton Radio project. The project’s heavy use of subjective interview material was useful,
though systematic analysis of such material was difficult at best, because “descriptions of
psychological processes” could be deduced from these interviews. In what appears to be
either a pragmatic framing or perhaps a reduction of Adorno’s contributions, Lazarsfeld
notes that the goals are indeed to arrive at generalizations, but to be useful these statements
have to be supported by interview material: “Dr. Wisengrund [sic; meaning Adorno] thinks
268 / Notes to Chapter 4

that the less ‘emotional’ a person’s attitude toward music is, the more he knows about it. It
is evident that even a few cases should prove or disprove such assumptions. It would be
worthwhile to conduct a systematic investigation as to where this kind of statement could
be found in the different sections of the project.” Paul Felix Lazarsfeld, “Princeton Radio
Research Project,” Princeton Radio Research Project 1938 RG 1.1, Series 200, Box 271,
Folder 3236.
56. Records at the archive of the Rockefeller Foundation show that the score for this
film, the film itself, and the other materials produced as part of the Film Music Project car-
ried out by Eisler at the New School for Social Research were all to be archived by the
Museum of Modern Art in New York City, but no record shows that the materials were
deposited there. Recent archival research in Germany has turned up scored materials that
appear to be those for Eisler’s experiments with The Grapes of Wrath, and it is probable that
whatever Eisler was able to take with him back to Europe, he did.
57. See Hadley Cantril’s letter to John Marshall of the Rockefeller Foundation explain-
ing the goals of what would become the Princeton Radio Project; Princeton Radio 1936
200R Box 271 Folder 3233, Letter to John Marshall, December 31 1936, 3.
58. See, for example, Lazarsfeld, “Princeton Radio Research Project,” a summary pre-
sentation on Lazarsfeld’s orientation of Princeton Radio and his achievements with the
project, filed May 12, 1938; Princeton Radio 1938 200R Box 271 Folder 3236, 7.
59. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert
Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, [1985] 1989).
60. Edith de Rham, Joseph Losey (London: Andre Deutsch, 1991), 47.
61. Eisler and Rockefeller administrator John Marshall discussed audience evaluation
and measurement techniques, but Marshall states in a memo his beliefs that no psychologi-
cal test exists that could measure results in this case and suggests instead gathering qualita-
tive feedback not from a lay audience but from the collection of statements characterizing
and describing the effects in question by articulate receivers aware of their emotional reac-
tions. He also mentions Lazarsfeld’s device developed at Princeton, which consisted of a
small box with two buttons: one pressed for favorable response, one pressed for a negative
response. These responses were recorded on a moving tape that could be synchronized with
movements of a musical score. Eisler was interested, and Lazarsfeld had already indicated
willingness to cooperate, so the $500 budget item for evaluation was projected for tests
using both qualitative feedback and Lazarsfeld’s device. However, compared with budget
items in both Lazarsfeld and Burris-Meyer, this was a very small amount of the total grant
funding.
62. That is, “14 Ways [the German Arten can also mean ‘styles’] for Describing Rain.”
63. Eisler, Gespräche mit Hans Bunge, 16.
64. Eisler and Adorno, Composing for the Films, 141.

CHAPTER 5
1. See, among many notable exemplars, Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black
Culture in Contemporary America (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England/Wesleyan
University Press, 1994); Lindon Barrett, Blackness and Value: Seeing Double (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), 55–93, esp. 63; Jed Rasula, “The Jazz Audience,” in The
Cambridge Companion to Jazz, ed. Mervyn Cooke and David Horn (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002), 55–68, esp. 60; or David Brown, Noise Orders: Jazz, Improvisation,
and Architecture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
 Notes to Chapter 5 / 269

2. Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985).
3. In a related context, see Marta E. Savigliano, Tango and the Political Economy of Pas-
sion (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995).
4. The designation of “transmedia” is generally attributed to the to digital production
processes informing contemporary knowledge production; see Marsha Kinder, Playing with
Power in Movies, Television, and Video Games: From Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja
Turtles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture:
Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006).
5. David James, The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cine-
mas in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
6. Michael Hardt, “Affective Labor,” Boundary 2 26, no. 2 (Summer 1999): 89–100.
7. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2000); Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitudes: War and Democracy in the Age
of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004).
8. Vorris Nunley, “From the Harbor to Da Academic Hood,” in African American
Rhetoric(s): Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Elaine B. Richardson and Ronald L. Jackson
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004), 221–241, esp. 223; and see Dara N.
Byrne, “The Future of (the) Race: Identity, Discourse, and the Rise of Computer-Mediated
Public Spheres,” in Learning Race and Ethnicity: Youth and Digital Media, ed. Anna Everett
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 15–38, esp. 17.
9. Todd Boyd, Am I Black Enough for You? Popular Culture from the ’Hood and Beyond
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997).
10. Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapo-
lis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).
11. Miriam Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacu-
lar Modernism,” Modernism/Modernity 6, no. 2 (1999): 59–77.
12. Moten, In the Break, 121.
13. Sergei Eisenstein, “How I Learned to Draw (A Chapter on Dancing Lessons),” in
Beyond the Stars: The Memoirs of Sergei Eisenstein; Selected Writings, vol. 4, ed. Richard
Taylor, trans. Michael Powell (London: BFI, 1995), 567–591.
14. As James observes, Passing Through allegorizes its contradictions as it attempts an
autonomous mode of black film production. He writes that the material and historical
premise of that attempt rests in the history of black feature filmmaking. Because the free-
form jazz musical style and often abstract aesthetic strategies of Passing Through do not
correspond with the popular black musical cultures of its time, James concludes that the
film envisions a jazz cinema that it could not itself achieve. See James, The Most Typical
Avant-Garde, 323.
15. Paul Gilroy, Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1993).
16. James, The Most Typical Avant-Garde.
17. Édouard Glissant, A Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, [1990] 1997).
18. See Frank Kofsky, Black Nationalism and the Revolution in Music (New York: Path-
finder Press, 1970), 145; or the somewhat earlier Immamu Amiri Baraka [LeRoi Jones],
Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York: Morrow, 1963).
19. Langston Hughes, Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz (New York: Knopf, 1961).
20. Moten, In the Break, 121, 139, 142.
270 / Notes to Chapter 5

21. The scenes in Passing Through in which a group of black musicians argue about
how to proceed with the project of producing their own music seem to be based on the
dialogical styles of discussion presented in portions of Wattstax.
22. Mark Anthony Neal, What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public
Culture (New York: Routledge, 1999), 86–88.
23. Angela Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie
Smith, and Billie Holiday (New York: Vintage Books, 1998).
24. As James explains, the histories of black film production have for the most part
been at loggerheads with mainstream Hollywood’s goals of international control of film
markets, to the detriment of articulating the voices of black communities. When inde-
pendent or experimental films borrow jazz as a model of direct expression or spontaneity,
they avoid an integral presentation of jazz performance. David James, Allegories of Cin-
ema: American Film in the Sixties (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); see
also Krin Gabbard, Jammin’ at the Margins: Jazz and the American Cinema (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1996), for extensive discussion of the entangled histories of
cinema and jazz.
25. For Jacques Derrida’s discussion of the pharmakon as medicine and poison, see his
Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
26. The composer of Passing Through’s sound track, Horace Tapscott, who also appears
in the film as one of the ensemble members, is one such musician, but many others built
collective performance ensembles and recording ventures around a notion of music as an
integral part of community, including Sun Ra and his Solar Arkestra; Muhal Richard
Abrams and the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (from which came
the Art Ensemble of Chicago); Steve Reid and his Mustevic label; Detroit’s Tribe, with
Marcus Belgrave, Byron Morris, and Unity; and Black Artists’ Group (BAG) with Oliver
Lake and Julius Hemphill (later of the World Saxophone Quartet).
27. For a discussion, see Braxton’s comments in Graham Lock, Forces in Motion: The
Music and Thoughts of Anthony Braxton (New York: Da Capo, 1988), 26, 65–70; for Braxton’s
explanation of composed improvisation as creative method, see Tri-Axium Writings, vols.
1–3 (Lebanon, NH: Frog Peak Music/Synthesis Music, 1985).
28. Theodor Adorno, “The Curve of the Phonograph Needle,” in Essays on Music, ed.
Richard D. Leppert, trans. Susan H. Gillespie (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2002), 271–287, esp. 274.
29. Thomas Levin, “For the Record: Adorno on Music in the Age of Its Technological
Reproducibility,” October 55 (Winter 1990): 39–41.
30. Uneven technological and media development, the gaps and fallows between the
industrial dominance and differing economies of scale, allow the industrial production of
oppositional or, at the very least, noncompliant cultural forms within one sphere (music
and recording, for example) as opposed to another (the film industry).
31. Langston Hughes, The First Book of Jazz (Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, [1955] 1997).
32. Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 74–76.
33. Specific to Passing Through is its emphasis on the musical form of jazz, its perfor-
mance and production of musical sound, and the orchestration of the image in terms of
instrumental parts. Unlike many of the experiments in visual music abstraction, here the
jazz performers’ bodies are integral to the production of the music heard in the film but
not restricted to literal views of musical performance.
34. Or see Grant Green’s Feelin’ the Spirit (Blue Note BST 84132, 1963), whose cover
portrays the artist toned in blue-gray against black, his hands on the guitar foreground, his
 Notes to Chapter 5 / 271

head thrown back in soulful, almost worshipful expression. Blue Note musicians photo-
graphed in such styles often appear alone in their cover shots, mythologized as sensitive,
exalted, or defiant jazz giants. The style of the photographs emphasizes them as artists who
have “found their sound” and seems to present this genius directly to the record buyer. The
scenes that open Passing Through borrow the conventions of the Blue Note iconography
but, significantly, deemphasize the individual performers to bring focus instead to the
sequential orchestration of the musicians’ coming together in ensemble performance.
35. Lee Morgan’s album Sixth Sense (Blue Note BST 84335, 1967) pictures overlapping
cascading square photographs of a forest, with Morgan standing in the center of the sound
event suggested by the “zoom” effectively created by the successive enlargements of those
photos. Morgan retains clarity in the overall design, suggesting that he is the source of the
sonic disruption. Here, the artist as hearer of the crystalline sound vibration produces the
surfeit of knowledge of time and space that is music. In a more or less contemporaneous
example from rock that is instructive for its difference, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s
Bayou Country (Fantasy 8387, 1969) also places the musicians in a forest scene, playing their
instruments. An optical zoom blurs the photo from the center out, suggesting an amplified
mind-altering music of distortion, with the band in this case blurred along with the “sound.”
Here, the listener identifies as a blurry distortion the identity of the band, not any larger
irruptive potential that would open a musical path to the future.
36. See, for example, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Bayou Country.
37. Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2006).
38. Mary Anne Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the
Archive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 107.
39. Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism (New York: Zone Books, [1966] 1988).
40. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
41. See also Deleuze’s and Felix Guattari’s derivation of Charles Pierce’s “icon” as
“a-signifying diagram of relation” producing sense without necessarily producing significa-
tion, meaning, or representation: “‘A-signifying semiotics’ work from syntagmatic chains
without signification, and so are susceptible of entering into direct contact with their ref-
erents in the context of diagrammatic interaction. An example of an a-signifying semiotics:
musical writing, a mathematical corpus, computer syntax, robotics, etc.” Felix Guattari, The
Anti-Oedipus Papers (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 415.
42. Alexander Weheliye, Phonographies: Grooves in Afro-Sonic Modernity (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2005).
43. Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, [1981] 2003).
44. Mary Lou Taylor and Cecil Williams, Embraced (Pablo 2620108, 1978). A fragment
of Taylor’s poetic critique of style as fashion: “Style in itself ringeth a most narrow paradigm
genuflecting to the cultural mores of a given time having as implied fact a temporal sense
easily dated and quick to age.”
45. Martin Jay points out the useful distinction psychologist James Gibson makes
between the visual field and the visual world: space as projected ocularly and space seen as
a world with depth. With the advent of perspectival painting, Jay writes, “the visual fi eld
now replaced the visual world.” Further, Jay suggests that “the differentiation of the visual
from the textual was . . . intensified by the differentiation of the idealized gaze from the
corporeal gaze and the monocular spectator from the scene he observed on the other side
272 / Notes to Chapter 5

of the window” (55–57). Perhaps, then, in album-cover art, these differences may be recom-
pressed as the visual field is put to work in communicating musical meaning to a listener.
The space of the record album cover provides for text and reproduction of painterly space,
but it almost always falls flat when it comes to providing visual depth. See Martin Jay,
Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1993).

CHAPTER 6
1. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 1997), 167.
2. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Rout-
ledge, 1992).
3. “The Cockettes,” collected in Rex Reed, People Are Crazy Here (New York: Dell,
[1974] 1975), 51–56.
4. See Stephen Cohen, The Gay Liberation Youth Movement in New York (New York:
Routledge, 2007).
5. Simon Frith, Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure, and the Politics of Rock ’n’ Roll (New York:
Pantheon, 1981).
6. For example, among many others, Chuck Panozzo of Styx and Rob Halford of Judas
Priest, who have in recent years come out.
7. “East Berlin” here is shorthand for all manner of historical ideations misrecognized
or misremembered: (1) perhaps, an homage to Nina Hagen, the former child singing star
of DDR television exiled along with her dissident stepfather; (2) Hedwig’s origins as a site
producing corporeal excess, “bridge and wall,” a counterpoint to the constrained and chan-
nelized circulation between binarized East and West at “Checkpoint Charlie”; (3) the unde-
terminable receivers of rock music’s meanings within military-industrial complexes—that
is, the creative listeners of “armed forces radio”; (4) the crumbling of the ideality of a tele-
visual present: The Berlin Wall, which is crossed in the film, as Hedwig watches it on televi-
sion news, comes down in a present tense that is for Hedwig, stuck in Junction City, very
far away. Generally, Hedwig the film mispronounces, misremembers, and misuses history.
For example, Yitzak describes Hedwig as the new Berlin Wall in the first number performed
by the Angry Inch in the film: “reviled, graffitied, spit upon.” Of course this description
would be inappropriate for any purveyors of Eastern Bloc rock. In East Berlin, the wall was
closely guarded, could not be approached by ordinary residents of East Berlin, and offered
no sustained access that would afford graffiti art or even spitting. Further, in West Berlin,
and in the Western geopolitical imagination, only one Berlin Wall existed. But the wall in
the East was doubled a few years after the initial construction: a smaller wall roughly a city
block away from the larger wall at the border with West Berlin was built, delimiting not the
perimeter of a line to be crossed but a vacant “no man’s land”—a zone of exception between
East and West. This smaller eastern wall visible to East Berliners was, in fact, a monochro-
matic gray-white.
8. I am thinking, here, of David Halperin’s reading of Foucauldian ascesis as a self-
discipline of transformation, though I depart from Halperin as I see such self-transforma-
tion as a problematic of expression in a more Deleuzian sense: ascesis as poiesis. See Michel
Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 3: The Care of the Self (New York: Random House,
1986); or David Halperin on Foucault’s ascesis in Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography
 Notes to Chapter 6 / 273

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); and on Deleuze and expression, see Gilles Deleuze,
Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (New York: Zone Books, 1990).
9. This suggestion is comparable in some ways with Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political
Economy of Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, [1977] 1985): the notion
of music as noise, though that account privileges not reception but “composition” in its
broad sense.
10. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1990).
11. See Kenneth J. Zucker, “Gender Identity Disorder in Children and Adolescents:
Introduction,” in Treatment of Psychiatric Disorders, 3rd ed., ed. Glen O. Gabbard, 2001,
available at http://online.statref.com/ (accessed February 5, 2006).
12. The term “programmatics” is from Roland Barthes, Sade/Fourier/Loyola, trans.
Richard Miller (Berkeley: University of California Press, [1971] 1976), who observes in
Fourier’s textual “systematics” a paragrammatic: “Namely, the superimpression (in dual
hearing) of two languages that are ordinarily foreclosed to each other, the braid formed by
two classes of words whose traditional hierarchy is not annulled, balanced, but—what is
more subversive—disoriented: Council and System lend their nobility to tiny pastries; tiny
pastries lend their futility to Anathema, a sudden contagion deranges the institution of lan-
guage” (93). For my purposes here, the paragrammatic materials in question are not classes
of language but of mediatic and corporeal orders: rock, film; sex, gender.
13. Paul de Man, “Autobiography as De-Facement,” in The Rhetoric of Romanticism
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 67–82.
14. Martin Rubin, Showstoppers: Busby Berkeley and the Tradition of Spectacle (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1992).
15. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New
York: Pantheon, [1976] 1978).
16. D. A. Miller, Place for Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical (Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard University Press, 1998).
17. Caryl Flinn, Strains of Utopia: Gender, Nostalgia, and Hollywood Film Music (Prince-
ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992).
18. In doing so, the film also presents a continuation of early cinema sing-along prac-
tices documented by Rick Altman in Silent Film Sound (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2004). Altman describes a range of uses of early cinema as a sing-along presentation
device facilitating live audience participation, although such sing-along directives turn up
later in “soundies,” in 1930s Chinese cinema, or 1950s and 1960s American television, for
example.
19. Rick Altman, The American Film Musical (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1987).
20. David James, Power Misses: Essays Across (Un)Popular Culture (New York: Verso,
1996), 235, 242.
21. Ibid., 245.
22. Annette Kuhn, Dreaming of Fred and Ginger: Cinema and Cultural Memory (New
York: New York University Press, 2002).
23. Ibid., 178.
24. Ibid., 178, 179, 162.
25. Ibid., 162; Altman, The American Film Musical, cited in Kuhn, Dreaming of Fred
and Ginger, 156.
274 / Notes to Chapter 6

26. Kuhn, Dreaming of Fred and Ginger, 192.

27. Ibid., 12.
28. Halperin, Saint Foucault.
29. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1977).
30. Following Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Guy Hocquenghem sees the homosexual as
“sliding towards the transsexual” in a process of desublimating phallic signification; “anal
desublimation” is one point on this slide. Here I am suggesting that receptivity in gay iden-
tity presented as excessive transgender identity (the phallus is lost, but an angry inch is
gained) indicates phallic and vaginal desublimation. Arguably, then, Hedwig is neither man
nor woman, but male-to-female and female-to-male, a problematic of orienting sexed
desire and expressing sexed gender. Guy Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire, trans. Daniella
Dangoor (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, [1972] 1993), 103.
31. For a range of useful academic discussions from different perspectives, see Henry
Minton, Departing from Deviance: A History of Homosexual Rights and Emancipatory Science
in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); George Chauncey, Gay New York:
Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic
Books, 1994); and the seminal analysis by Hocquenghem cited above.
32. For activist discussions in the period of Hedwig’s theatrical duration, see Pat Califia,
Sex Changes: The Politics of Transgenderism (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 1997); Leslie Fein-
berg, Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1996); and Kate Bornstein, Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of
Us (New York: Routledge, 1994), among others.
33. In avoiding the “closet” narrative or any other “before and after” narrative trajec-
tory, Hedwig has perhaps more in common with aspects of that series that are shared with
other recent transgender documents and features: namely, the thematic of the family, after
transgender politics, as a transposition for belonging. These new “transgender family val-
ues” works, such as Southern Comfort (2001), Transamerica (2005), or even MTV’s Real
World: Brooklyn (2009), wherein the family unit is replaced with an extended family of
friends selected by the network, look and sound nothing like Hedwig, but their emphasis
on family and questions of personhood and belonging rather than on “closet epistemolo-
gies,” visibility, and some supposed naturalness for a “heterosexual matrix” suggest the ter-
rain that Hedwig’s queer rock spectacle plows through.
34. See Foucault, History of Sexuality Volume 1; Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures
at the Collège de France, 1974–1975, ed. Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomini, trans.
Graham Burchell (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003); and Sedgwick, The Epistemology of
the Closet. For star discourse and sexuality, see, among others, Richard Dyer, Stars (London:
BFI, 1982); and Richard Meyer, “Rock Hudson’s Body,” in Inside/Out: Gay Theories, Lesbian
Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge, 1991), 259–288.
35. Or, to put it in terms of the reception of American Idol finalists, for example, the
preference for 2009’s Adam Lambert versus 2003’s Clay Aiken.
36. Such clubs as Squeezebox, where Hedwig originated, or other contemporary gath-
erings, such as Hippie Chix; in these locations, unlike in Butler’s 1992 formulation in Bodies
That Matter, drag was not performed as “heterosexual melancholy” but rather as aggressive
counternorm.
37. Simon Frith, Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1996).
 Notes to Chapter 7 / 275

38. See Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and
Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988); and Amy Lawrence, Echo and Nar-
cissus: Women’s Voices in Classical Hollywood Cinema (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1991).
39. Miller, Place for Us.
40. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2004).
41. Ibid.
42. Edelman explains, “As the template of a given subject’s distinctive access to jouis-
sance, defining the condition of which the subject is always a symptom of sorts itself, the
sinthome, in its refusal of meaning, procures the determining relation to enjoyment by
which the subject finds itself driven beyond the logic of fantasy or desire. It operates, for
Lacan, as the knot that holds the subject together, that ties or binds the subject to its con-
stitutive libidinal career, and assures that no subject, try as it may, can ever ‘get over’ itself—
‘get over,’ that is, the fixation of the drive that determines its jouissance” (ibid., 35–36).
43. Ibid., 35–38.
44. Ibid., 34.
45. Ibid., 29–30.
46. Here I am thinking partly of the vocal production by which Wayne Koestenbaum
rewrites what Catherine Clément describes as the operatic “undoing of woman”; see Cath-
erine Clément, Opera, or, the Undoing of Woman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, [1979] 1988); Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and
the Mystery of Desire (New York: Poseidon Press, 1993).
47. The narrative settings range from Charles Dickens’s opposition of Scrooge to Tiny
Tim through Jean Baudrillard’s treatment of reproductive technologies and end with Alfred
Hitchcock’s parable of a malevolent nature’s attack on children, The Birds.
48. Edelman, No Future, 11, 154.
49. Ibid., 29.
50. Ibid., 5, 66.
51. Ibid., 151–153.
52. Ibid., 154.
53. Ibid., 153.
54. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense (New York: Columbia University Press, [1969]
1990), 163.

CHAPTER 7

Acknowledgment: I gratefully acknowledge NTT Japan for providing me with the videotape
documentation of the performance and the additional three-hour workshop given by the
Vasulkas at NTT in July 1998.

1. Giorgio Agamben, “The Prince and the Frog: The Question of Method in Benjamin
and Adorno,” in Infancy and History: Essays on the Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz
Heron (London: Verso, [1978] 1993), 107–124, esp. 121–123; and see Eric Alliez, Capital
Times: Tales from the Conquest of Time (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, [1991]
1996).
2. Alliez, Capital Times, 241–242.
276 / Notes to Chapter 7

3. C.O.L.A. exhibition catalog (2009), 20.

4. Michael Hardt, “Affective Labor,” Boundary 2 26, no. 2 (Summer 1999): 89–100.
5. Bernard Stiegler, Mécréance et Discrédit, 3: L’esprit perdu du capitalisme (Paris:
Galilée, 2006), 18.
6. Siegfried Kracauer, “The Mass Ornament,” in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 76–77.
7. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Mentor, [1925]
1948), 20–39.
8. Ernst Bloch, Spirit of Utopia (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, [1919]
2000), 130.
9. Samples of the resulting scores and documentation of the project are available at
www.mimg.ucla.edu/faculty/miller_jh/gene2music/home.html (accessed May 3, 2007).
10. See also the review of Ash Wednesday in Kristin M. Jones, Frieze, January 1, 2007,
available at www.frieze.com/issue/review/rivane_neuenschwander/ (accessed February 14,
2010).
11. See Antonio Negri’s analysis of Karl Marx’s critique of money and value in the
Grundrisse in Negri, Marx beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse, trans. Harry Cleaver,
Michael Ryan, and Maurizio Viano (New York: Pluto Press, 1991), 21–40.
12. See Deleuze’s discussion of the statement in Michel Foucault’s development of
discourse analysis in Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Seán Hand (Minneapolis: Minnesota
University Press, [1986] 1988), 1–22.
13. The primary work Bernard Stiegler discusses in this regard is Edmund Husserl’s
On the Phenomenology of the Internal Consciousness of Time, trans. John B. Brough (Boston:
Kluwer, [1966] 1991), but he is careful to place this work in the context of Husserl’s phe-
nomenology as a whole.
14. See Pierre Lévy, Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace
(Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 1997).
15. See Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms
Markets and Freedom (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006).
16. Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2008). Haraway’s notion of “contact zones” is informed by Clifford’s elaboration of the
phrase in James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), esp. 204.
17. Clock time was globally standardized on the “Universal Time” of the Greenwich
meridian in 1884. Today’s common standard, Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) is a trans-
national undertaking by such agencies as the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Tech-
nology in Boulder, Colorado, which calculate it by periodically subtracting leap seconds
from International Atomic Time (TAI), measured since 1958 in Cesium electrons’ quantum
leaps to higher or lower levels of energy. Universal Time (UT1, the prior UT or Greenwich
standard) continues to be calculated on the basis of planetary rotation in mean solar days.
Relating “universal time” to “coordinated universal time” means composing a discontinuous
difference between distinct ensembles of time-keeping instruments, one of which operates
subatomic quanta, and the other, Earth’s rotational frequency. This differential universal
time is abbreviated as “DUT,” is calculated as “DUT1 = UT1 − UTC,” and is monitored by
the International Earth Rotation Service, available at www.iers.org/ (accessed May 31,
2009).
18. Miriam Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacu-
lar Modernism,” Modernism/Modernity 6, no. 2 (1999): 59–77.
 Notes to Chapter 7 / 277

19. See note 17.

20. See Chapter 5; and on history and place in Los Angeles, see Dolores Hayden, The
Power of Place (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997); on the specificities of geography and
policing in Los Angeles, see Steven Kelly Herbert, Policing Space: Territoriality and the Los
Angeles Police Department (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); on com-
munity production of music and jazz as local memory, see Steven L. Isoardi, The Dark Tree:
Jazz and the Community Arts in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006);
on independent cinemas in Los Angeles since the early twentieth century, see David James,
The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
21. Arthur David Smith, Husserl and the Cartesian Mediations (London: Routledge,
2003), 125–132.
22. Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time 2: Disorientation, trans. Stephen Barker (Palo
Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, [1996] 2009), 241.
23. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott
Palmer (New York: Dover, [1911] 2004), 211.
24. Stiegler, Technics and Time 2, 210–211.
25. Bernard Stiegler, Acting Out, trans. David Barison, Daniel Ross, and Patrick Crogan
(Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, [2003] 2009), 52–55.
26. Stiegler, Mécréance et Discrédit, 3, 26.
27. Bernard Stiegler, La technique et le temps, 3: Le temps du cinéma (Paris: Galilée,
2001), 67.
28. Ibid., 138.
29. André Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech, trans. Anna Bostock Berger (Cambridge
MA: MIT Press, [1964] 1993), 282–297.
30. Stiegler, Technics and Time 2, 107–108.
31. Ibid., 96.
32. Ibid., 91. Leroi-Gourhan’s concerns may be seen as the paleoanthropological artic-
ulation of the modernity thesis as a problematic of technological development and adop-
tion, an earlier form of the contemporary “new media thesis,” articulated by Victor Hugo
in Notre Dame de Paris: “This will kill that”—that is, the printing presses assumes the cul-
tural functions once associated with the cathedral. On the latter, see Elizabeth Emery,
Romancing the Cathedral: Gothic Architecture in Fin-de-Siécle France (Albany: State Univer-
sity of New York Press, 2001), 15–22. Leroi-Gourhan’s concern with innovation and media-
tion, then, is no longer simply national history and cultural legacy but cultural and ethnic
diversity in its deepest paleoanthropological sense and in relation to modernization grasped
as possibly appropriate technocultural development but, alternatively, as technological
imperialism.
33. Stiegler, La technique et le temps, 203.
34. As the mid-twentieth-century philosopher and poet Octavio Paz puts it in “The
Other Mexico,” drawing on Georges Dumézil in a critique of U.S. cultural “monolingual-
ism”: “[Intrahistorical] structures are the origin of the distinctive traits that are civilizations.
Civilizations: styles of living and dying.” In Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other
Writings (New York: Grove Press, 1985), 253.
35. Stiegler, La technique et le temps, 204.
36. Richard Coyne’s Technoromanticism: Digital Narrative, Holism, and the Romance of
the Real (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001) expansively documents a tendency for roman-
ticist metaphors and analytics in critiques of cyberspace generally. The claim that musicality
278 / Notes to Chapter 7

equates to preindividual temporality may well be an artifact of a larger reconfiguration of

nineteenth-century epistemologies in light of twenty-first-century prospects.
37. Haraway, When Species Meet, 3–4.
38. Stiegler, Acting Out, 8–9.
39. Haraway, When Species Meet, 89.
40. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans.
Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2008), 5.
41. See also Peter Hallward, “Reviews: Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on
the Necessity of Contingency,” Radical Philosophy 152 (November–December 2008): 51–57.
42. Stiegler, Technics and Time 2, 2.
43. Haraway, When Species Meet, 165.
44. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia
University Press, [1968] 2004), xix.
45. Cf. the discussion of democracy, politics, and play in Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two
Essays on Reason (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 25; 46.
46. In the sense discussed, for example, by Ian Bogost, Unit Operations: An Approach
to Video Game Criticism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006).
47. Stiegler, Technics and Time 2, 204.
48. Stiegler, La technique et le temps, 207.
49. Stiegler, Technics and Time 2, 152–154.
50. Ibid., 155.
51. For documentation, see the catalog raisonné: Stephan von Huene 1962–2000:
Klangkörper/Resounding Sculptures: Klangsculpturen, Objekte, Assemblagen (Ostfildern-Ruit:
Hatje Cantz, 2002); and www.stephanvonhuene.de/echo/wrong.html (accessed February
14, 2010).
52. See the documentation in Stephan von Huene.
53. See www.popmodernism.org/scrambledhackz/ (as of February 2010 no longer
available).
54. See Mark Hansen, Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media (New York: Rout-
ledge, 2006).
55. Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism
in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism
and the Privilege of Partial Perspective (New York: Routledge, 1991).
56. Project correspondence from Woody Vasulka to curator Hisanori Gogota at ICC,
Japan.
57. Woody Vasulka, “The Brotherhood: A Series of Interactive Constructions,” c. 1988;
available at www.vasulka.org/Woody/Brotherhood/Brotherhood.html (accessed February
14, 2010).
58. David Dunn and Woody Vasulka, “Digital Space: A Summary,” available at www
.vasulka.org/Woody/Brotherhood/Text.html#03 (accessed February 2010). I take this com-
ment to be a rough translation of the problem I describe in Chapter 5: shifts in the status
of the virtual. For Deleuze, of course, virtuality was the dyadic couple of “actuality.” “Real”
was coupled with “possible,” after Bergson. And yet, for Derrida, the status of the “virtual”
seems to be shifting in a long historical transition.
59. According to the curator’s description, pitch activates the installation.
60. Rita Raley, Tactical Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 30.
61. David Dunn, “The Electronic Theaters of Woody Vasulka,” available at www
.vasulka.org/Woody/Brotherhood/Text.html (accessed February 2010).
 Notes to Chapter 7 / 279

62. Alexander Galloway, Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization (Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002); and see Raley, Tactical Media, 11–12.
63. Marita Sturken, “Steina and Woody Vasulka: In Dialogue with the Machine,” in the
exhibition catalog Machine Media: Steina and Woody Vasulka, ed. Marita Sturken (San Fran-
cisco: SF Moma, 1996), 42.
64. Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and
the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of
Nature (London: Routledge, 1991), 185.
65. Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline, “Cyborgs and Space,” in The Cyborg Handbook,
ed. Chris Hables Gray (New York: Routledge, 1995), 29–34
66. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto.”
67. Margaret Morse, Virtualities: Television, Media Art, and Cyberculture (Blooming-
ton: Indiana University Press, 1998).
68. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Post-human: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics,
Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
69. Morse, Virtualities, 209.
70. Haraway, “Situated Knowledges,” 200. For biocapital, see Haraway, When Species
Meet; and Kauchik Sunder Rajan, Biocapital: The Constitution of Post-genomic Life (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2006).
71. David A. Hounshell, “Elisha Gray and the Telephone: On the Disadvantages of
Being an Expert,” Technology and Culture 16, no. 2 (1975): 133–161.
72. Stelarc and Marquard Smith, “Animating Bodies, Mobilizing Technologies: Stelarc
in Conversation,” in Stelarc: The Monograph, ed. Marquard Smith (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2005), 223.
 Index

Page numbers followed by the letter f refer to figures.

Aarseth, Espen, 266n42 Afro-diasporic, 134, 154–166

abandonment, 148, 175–183 Agamben, Giorgio, 214
ABBA, 185 “Aladdin Sane” (Bowie), 207
Abrams, Muhal Richard, 270n26 album: long-playing, 121; musical recording, 56,
absolute cinema, 26, 81, 93 149, 157–174, 178, 205, 233; photography, 151
abstraction: of general labor, 57, 66; logical, 61, Alexander Nevsky (Eisenstein), 45–74, 46f
147, 168, 230; in visual imagery, 20, 84–87, Alexandrov, Grisha, 67, 260n101
166–173; visual music, 85, 97–100 algorithm, 31, 57, 235, 255n57
abuse: of authority, 70; economic, 39; physical Allegretto (Fischinger), 21, 26, 81, 90–99, 262n46
or sexual, 142, 175–204; of substances, 160 Altieri, Charles, 10
acoustics, 7, 247n6 Altman, Rick, 6–8, 123, 184–185, 195–197
action: as gestural-technical interaction, 13–18, ambient cinema, 110
33–59, 215–245; as pathic and rhythmic act, amnesia, 188, 241
17–19, 39–74, 142; as teletactics, 230 Amplitude (Harmonix), 73
activism: aesthetic, 28, 84, 113–119; biotech, anachrony, 110
230; musical, 28, 139; party, 41 anal sublimation, 179
addiction: as affective labor or biolabor, 162– anarchism, 85, 135
172; to drugs, 153, 161; as technocultural Anders, Merry, 30
symptom, 12, 160 androgyny, 63, 202
Adobe Systems, 51, 57 anger, 60, 71, 117, 150, 185, 192
Adorno, Theodor, 1, 9, 27–29, 33, 45–48, 56, Anger, Kenneth, 196
109–118, 125, 135–136, 146, 164–166, 176, anguish, 68
181, 209, 214, 251n16, 263n6, 264n12, 264– animals: animality as vox, 244; children and,
265n15, 267–268n55 140, 143; humans and, 220–222, 230–231
affective labor, 3, 18–36, 37–39, 41, 43, 54–75, animation: CGI, 11; corporeality as, 134, 215;
115, 126, 134, 144, 146–162, 171–174, 211– historical time or experience as, 14, 27, 215, 222,
246 231; interactivity and, 54–55; montage and, 55;
282 / Index

animation (continued) Auroratone process, 78

sculpture and, 240; videographic, 215–217; autism, 199, 202
visual-music, 21, 27, 30, 33, 76–108, 117, 146, autobiography, 50–51, 68, 97, 181, 240, 244
187, 191, 205 automata: physical, 21, 49, 71, 233–245, 253n39;
ANS synthesizer, 267n48 spiritual, 59–61. See also Deleuze, Gilles
antiphony, 156, 149, 167, 168, 184, 193, 207 automatism, 5, 12
apparatus: historical, 34, 213–217; musical, 30, autonomy, 2–4, 35–38, 47, 62, 118–121, 135,
79, 164; political, 67; sociotechnical, 22; tech- 141, 157, 217, 229
nical, 5, 9, 48, 79, 85, 88, 95, 104, 115, 133;
theories of, 8, 12 bacchanale, 64
Appia, Adolphe, 125, 258n92 Bach, J. S., 27, 81, 89–94, 117; Bachian carpet
Apple Computer, 83 motif, 89
archaism, 63, 80, 207 Bacon, Francis, 88, 173
architecture of exhibition and reception, 29, bacteria, 228
117–123, 127, 131–145, 171, 238 BAG (Black Artists’ Group), 270n26
archive: cinema as, 33, 148, 171; Fischinger Trust “Ballad of the Sackslingers” (Eisler), 28
and Archive, 249n44; footage, 161; Hanns ballet, 46, 48, 169
Eisler Archive of the Feuchtwanger Library, Ballet mécanique (Léger/Murphy), 50
264n14, 265n20, 265n23; history or temporal- band: of animated lights, 105; as musical, social
ity and, 9, 21, 68, 72, 91, 158, 162, 166, 171– ensemble, 146–174; as pop/punk group,
173, 226–228, 237, 259n97; personal, 54, 69; family, or community, 175–212; sensory, 49;
Rockefeller Archives, 77, 114, 118, 250n46, of workers, 31
263n6, 264n13, 265n15, 265n18, 268n56 banishment, 184, 204, 238. See also abandonment
arrangement: familial, 100; historical, 214; musi- Baraka, Immamu Amiri, 269n18
cal, 93; seating, 127 barbershop, 159
ascesis, 180, 272–273n8 Barnet, Boris, 39–42
Ash Wednesday (Neuenschwander and Guima- baroque era, 162
rães), 218–219 Barthes, Roland, 185, 273n12
Ask Your Mama (Hughes), 166–168 bass, 160
association: cognitive, 13; in interaction design, bastardization, 176, 207, 208, 212
53–55; in montage, 51 Bateson, Gregory, 233
Association for the Advancement of Creative bathhouse, 190
Musicians, 270n26 Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein), 15, 37, 71, 111
Astaire, Fred 189–190 Baudelaire, Charles, 49
asynchrony, 174 Baudrillard, Jean, 275n47
Atkins, “Magic” Juan, 146 Baudry, Jean-Louis, 8
atomic fission, 99 Bayou Country (Creedence Clearwater Revival),
atomic space, 101 271n35
Attica uprising, 154 BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), 264–
audibility, 19, 122, 206, 245 265n15
audio, 139; dissolve, 184; playback device, 205; bebop, 23
production, 165; samples, 235–236; as sepa- Beck, Stephen, 79–80, 105
rable track, 51, 57, 127, 141, 244; setting, 23; becoming: historical, 18, 73; a sexed person, 177,
trigger for interactive installation, 239 181, 185, 192, 194, 202; worldly, 230
audiovisual diagramming, 1–35, 36–74 Belson, Jordan, 79, 262n47
audiovisual display, 4 Beneath the 12-Mile Reef (Herrmann), 119
audiovisual representation of racial or ethnic Benjamin, Walter, 9, 35, 37, 41–52, 135–136, 214
identity, 24–26, 146–174 Bergson, Henri, 2, 10, 18, 63, 72, 224–227, 232
audiovisual stream, 23–24, 79, 83, 97, 108, 109– Berkeley, Busby, 20, 23, 98–103, 190–191, 215
145 Beuys, Joseph, 233
audiovisual synchronization, 6, 45, 75 Bezhin Meadow (Eisenstein), 72, 259–260n98
audition, 19–24, 46–51, 82, 113, 120, 165, 168, biocapital, 220–246
171, 174, 185, 194, 217–218, 235. See also bioenergetics, 3, 16, 33, 44–45, 58–59, 68, 72, 75,
listening 104, 145, 173, 215, 219–221, 237–246
auditoria, 127 bioinformatics, 3, 33, 44–45, 51, 58–60, 75, 104,
audivisual music, 22, 78, 260n4 145, 173, 174, 215, 218–223, 233–246
 Index / 283

biolabor, 34, 213, 221, 233, 242–243, 246 cardinality, 232

biomechanics, 38, 59–60, 70–71, 80, 147, 256n59 cassette, 225
biomusic, 218–219 Castel, Père, 16
biopic, 195 CGI (computer-generated imagery), 10–12
biopolitics, 3, 18, 34–35, 38, 43–45, 64, 74, 81, Chaplin, Charlie, 5–8, 15, 35
149, 152, 161–162, 165, 172, 180, 215–216, Chicago (Marshall), 195
228 Child Went Forth, A (Losey), 112, 112f, 115–126,
biosocial change, 224 139–144
biosocial conditions, 240 Chion, Michel, 8, 123, 130
biotechnology, 218, 228–229, 230 chord: dissonant, 128–129; in pop music, 183–
bisexuality, 63, 178, 197, 201–202 185
blacklist (in U.S. arts and media), 26 choreography: of cinema as labor, 2–9, 22–24;
black musical epistemologies, 146–174 of cinema as musical medium, 30, 61, 92, 99,
Black Relationship (Kandinsky), 162, 164 101–103, 147, 160; of dance for cinema, 25;
Bloch, Ernst, 87–108, 156, 217, 221–222, 245 of digital media art, 217; jitterbug, 22; as
blocking and bridging, 179, 199 ontological, 220–232
block of time, 82, 84–88, 94, 97 chorus: line, 100; worker’s, 28
blog, 76 cineplastics, 22
blood, 42, 50, 64, 73, 90 Circles (Fischinger), 89
Blue Angel, The (von Sternberg), 190 circus and masquerade, 63–74
blues, 22, 159 Citizen Kane (Welles), 119–120
blue-screen stage, 50 clarinet, 136
Bolshevism, 41, 67, 256n65 Clark, Larry, 75, 148–174, 187, 218, 245
book: as jazz, 166–168; as panoramic, 54; Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Spielberg), 83
as spherical, 53 Clynes, Manfred, 241–242
Bookchin, Natalie, 215–217 Coachella Music Festival, 82
Bordwell, David, 251n19, 255n55, 259n94 Cobain, Kurt, 236
Bowie, David, 178, 183 Cockettes, 177–178
Boyd, Todd, 154, 169 Cocteau, Jean, 71
Brahm, John, 127–128 commoditization, 8, 58, 96, 134, 145, 151–174,
Brandenburg Concertos, The (Bach), 89–90, 176–206, 231–237
261n31 Comolli, Jean-Louis, 8–9
Braxton, Anthony, 162–168, 173, 270n27 composition: aesthetic, 88, 170, 239–240; audio-
breath gesture, 19, 45–58, 63, 97, 242 visual, 23, 38, 56, 169, 263n48; authorial, 98;
Brecht, Bertolt, 49, 94, 97, 113–118 electronic (or digital), 20, 50–52, 107; ethical,
broadcasting, 20–26, 40, 79, 95, 118–123, 142, 27; framing, 15, 92; interfacial, 246; labor of,
180, 188, 249n39, 264–265n15, 266n40 16–19; music, 28–29, 47, 53, 109–145, 163–
Broadway musicals, 183–187, 201, 207 168, 180, 207, 262n46; optical, 100; streaming,
Brotherhood, The (Woody Vasulka) 238–243 24; supratemporal scheme for, 70; synchro-
Bryant, Clora, 25 nized with exhibition and reception, 39, 74,
Bryant, Marie, 22–26 104, 147, 273n9
Bulgakowa, Oksana, 63–72 computation, 4–8, 9–12, 31–33, 36, 38, 44, 50–
Bürger, Peter, 82, 84, 101 58, 79–83, 124, 148, 215–246
Burnett, Charles, 148 computer gaming 12, 50, 57, 79, 83, 124–125,
Busoni, Ferruccio, 93 152, 174, 196, 231, 240, 252n26, 266n42,
byt, 41, 72 269n4
Byzantine character, 252n27 computer graphics, 10–12, 19, 33, 50, 52, 79–80,
82–83, 104, 106, 124, 215, 244
calculation, 36, 55, 84, 104, 165, 203, 224–230, “Concerto Macabre” (Herrmann), 128–130
252n27 conduct: media reception as, 12–28, 60, 65–66,
calendar, 27 72, 77–78, 97, 126, 133, 142–143, 171–173,
calendarity, 232 217, 231, 238
camp: children’s, 113, 204–205; concentration, conduction, 243
137–144; humor, 179, 195, 201, 203; prison, 66 conductor, 21–22, 28, 78, 120, 121, 127, 250n46
Cantril, Hadley, 264–265n15, 268n57 consonant synchronization, 126, 132–144,
Capote, Truman, 177–178 267n48
284 / Index

Constructivism, 60, 70, 84 ecstasy, 26–27, 29, 33, 63–68, 74, 91, 101, 104–
contemporaneity, 1–34, 39–44, 53–74, 84, 90, 97, 105, 107–108, 145, 147, 178, 187, 201, 215,
146, 150, 156–157, 171, 173, 176, 181, 214, 231 220, 241, 245–246, 257n72, 259n96
continuity, 15, 23–30, 37, 78, 81, 93, 102, 109, Edelman, Lee, 207–211
192, 246 Eggeling, Viking, 76, 84–85, 261n25
cosmopolitanism, 195, 229 Eisenstein, Sergei M., 13–27, 36–75, 76, 87–88,
Cowan, Michael, 2 91, 96–97, 106–108, 109–122, 140, 145, 146–
Coyne, Richard, 277–278n36 149, 154–155, 173, 176, 187, 214–215, 217–
craft production, 92–94, 101, 135 218, 222, 242, 245
cyborg, 59, 86, 134, 237–243 Eisler, Hanns, 19, 27–30, 33–34, 38, 45–48, 56,
74, 77, 94, 97, 106, 108, 109–145, 146–149,
Dada, 85 153, 176, 187, 215, 218, 245
dance, 2–3, 23–26, 58, 64, 70, 73, 90–91, 95, 98– empathy, 13–14
99, 117, 169, 181, 189–190, 192, 199–200, 202, entropy, 12, 37, 41, 55, 72, 79, 222, 230
215–219, 230–235, 257n70, 258n81 ethics, 9, 16, 19, 22, 27, 34–35, 37, 41, 43, 52, 59,
Dancer in the Dark (von Trier), 194–195 60, 62, 65, 74, 80, 93, 107, 117, 132, 133, 134,
Darnell, Linda 129 147, 149, 152, 155, 159, 160, 162, 170, 172,
database, 33, 53, 235–238 174, 187, 189, 206, 207, 210, 215, 223, 228,
Davis, Angela, 159 229, 231, 232, 235, 237, 239, 246
Davis, Bette, 92 ethnicity, 24, 189, 194, 224, 226, 259–260n98
Davis, Marc, 33, 51–55
Davis, Sammy, Jr., 160 Fantasia (Algar et al.), 47, 56, 77, 83, 91, 95, 110,
Debussy, Claude, 120 133
decolonization, 150–174 fatigue, 59, 253n36
Deleuze, Gilles, 10, 14, 37, 42, 59–62, 88, 140, Faye, Alice, 99–100
171–173, 176, 188, 211, 231 feminization, 2, 5, 40, 183, 193, 202–204
democracy, 107, 224, 278n45; democratic inter- Feuer, Jane, 123
national ideal, 36; practices that relate person- Fischinger, Oskar, 21–22, 26–27, 29–30, 31, 33,
hood and publicity democratically, 75 34, 38, 50, 74, 76–108, 109, 117, 145, 146–149,
Deren, Maya, 23, 26 187, 215, 218, 245
Derrida, Jacques, 172, 223–227 Flinn, Caryl, 126, 183
Detour (Ulmer), 126 Forrest Gump (Zemeckis), 33
diabole, 211 Fortress of Solitude, The (Lethem), 106
diachrony, 216–246 Foucault, Michel, 183, 190, 221
diaspora, 134, 154–156, 166–167, 195 Franklin, Aretha, 180
digital media, 1, 4–5, 13–20, 34, 38–39, 44, 45, Frequency (Harmonix), 57
50–59 Freud, Sigmund, 118
Dionysian, 70 Frisch, Walter, 93–94
disco, 163 Frith, Simon, 178, 196–197
Disney, Walt, 47, 56–57, 77–78, 85, 91, 95, 110, Fuegi, John, 116
133 fugue state, 128–130, 153
dissonant synchronization, 109–145, 146–150, futurism: heteronormative, 207–211; Italian, 81
153–156, 215, 233–235
dissynchronization, 107 Gang’s All Here, The (Berkeley), 23, 99–103
DJ, 82 gesture: in Eisenstein, 36–75; in Fischinger, 30,
DNA, 177, 218–219, 229 94, 97, 98–105, 145, 147, 215; gestus, 117–122,
Doane, Mary Anne, 33, 123, 171, 250n4 236–237; interactive, 213–246; jazz, 23, 146–
Dolly Sisters, The (Cummings), 182–183 174; musicality and, 8–10, 17–18, 30, 33–34;
drag, 175–212 queer, 175–212
drugs, 151–160 Ghost and Mrs. Muir, The (Mankiewicz), 120,
drum, 160; drumbeat, 210 122
DuBois, W.E.B., 168 Gilroy, Paul, 25–26, 155, 159–160, 168, 173
Dunn, David, 239–240 Girl with the Hat Box, The (Barnet), 39–41, 40f
Glissant, Édouard, 156
echo: audiovisual, 154, 169–170, 210; objects, gnosis, 87, 179–207
13–20, 35, 55, 221 Goddard, Paulette, 7
 Index / 285

Godspell: A Musical Based on the Gospel accord- Hugo, Victor, 45

ing to St. Matthew (Greene), 196 Husserl, Edmund, 219, 221, 223–227
Gold Diggers series (Berkeley), 215 Huyssen, Andreas, 247n2
Gorbman, Claudia, 123, 124 hyperconsumerism, 159
Gorky, Maxim, 69–70 hyperindustrialism, 107, 216–220, 221–246
gospel: the gospel, 200; singer, 159 hypertext, 188, 252n29
Grable, Betty, 25 hysteria, 29, 108, 112, 113–145
Gray, Elisha, 243
Greenaway, Peter, 53 idiom. See style: and idiom
Greene, Graham, 251n10 immanence, 14, 17, 27, 39–74, 85, 90, 110, 147,
grunge rock, 181 155, 161, 165, 171–173, 210–211, 216–246
Guattari, Felix, 10, 14, 172, 255n57 immersion, 13, 20, 50, 54, 141, 182–188, 234,
Guimarães, Cao, 218 242–244
guitar, 270–271n34 improvisation, 21–26, 78–79, 145, 148–149,
Guitar Hero (Harmonix), 57, 83 152–174
Gunning, Tom, 49 incarceration, 157, 161
individuation, 67, 152, 156, 187, 221, 224–227,
Hair (Forman), 196 256n66
Haller, Robert, 104 Inside Daisy Clover (Mulligan), 201–202
Halperin, David, 190, 272–273n8 instrument: cinematic apparatus as, 14, 20, 31,
Hammid, Alexander, 26–27 33, 52, 53, 62–74, 79–88, 103–105, 132, 135,
Hampton, Lionel, 105 140, 216, 222–246; MIDI, 218; musical per-
Hangmen Also Die (Lang), 113 formance, 23–26, 141, 150–170, 236–238, 243
Hangover Square (Brahm), 112, 120, 126, 127– interactive media, 20, 50, 53, 54, 82, 83, 144, 174,
143, 144 234, 235, 239, 240, 242, 244
haptics, 2, 17, 64, 131, 155, 167, 171, 172, 173, 215 Internet, 76, 83, 179, 216, 232, 238
Haraway, Donna, 59, 219–244 involuntary, the, 59
Harder They Come, The (Henzell), 158 involuntary animation, 134
Hardt, Michael, 149, 216, 228 iPhone, 83
harmonic form, 28, 95, 120, 121, 130, 141, 142, irony, 119, 136–138, 174, 208–210, 238–242, 243
160, 185 isomorphism, 19, 45–47, 56, 68, 109–110, 234
harmonic recurrence in montage, 17 Ivan the Terrible, Parts One and Two (Eisen-
harmonic series, 17, 30, 94, 114, 243 stein), 45, 60, 63, 70
harmonic social relation, 59 Ivens, Joris, 28, 110, 113, 137, 140
harmonic views, 99 I Walked with a Zombie (Tourneur), 134
Harrison, Rex, 120
Hayes, Isaac, 159 James, David, 27, 93, 97, 148, 156, 186–187,
Hayles, N. Katherine, 59, 242 261–262n33
Hedwig and the Angry Inch (Mitchell), 175–212, Jammin’ the Blues (Mili), 22–27, 29, 77, 79, 169
182f, 186f Jay, Martin, 8, 271–272n45
Hemphill, Julius, 270n26 jazz, 16, 21–29, 78–80, 95–96, 145, 146–174, 187
Herrmann, Bernard, 109–145 Jenkins, Henry, 51
heterotopia, 190–192 Johnson, Alvin, 125
hip-hop, 154
Hippie Chix (club promotion), 274n36 Kaleidophonic Dog (von Huene), 233
historiality, 5–26, 38, 141, 171, 174, 214, 231 Kaleidoscope (TV series), 105
historicity, 11–18, 36, 37, 39, 43, 44, 61–65, 84, kaleidoscope effect, 100, 176, 186f
88, 106, 144, 155, 159, 185, 193, 201, 223, 227, Kalinak, Kathryn, 133
230, 245 Kandinsky, Wassily, 91, 93, 162–164, 168, 173
historiography, 20, 155, 174, 243 Kang, Kristy H. A., 53–55
Hitchcock, Alfred, 114, 119, 185, 275n47 karaoke, 133, 199, 237, 252n24
Hite, Christian, 5 Kesting, Edmund, 91
HIV/AIDS, 181, 212 keyboard, 22, 31, 150, 260–261n11
hominization, 172 Kinder, Marsha, 53–58, 252n26, 252n29
homoaffect, 38, 64–74 kinesics, 25, 30, 152, 155, 164–166, 206
Huene, Stephan von, 219–238 kinesthesia, 140, 147, 190, 192
286 / Index

King Kong (Cooper/Schoedsack), 133 Marxian view, 2, 18, 34, 57, 221
kitsch, 50, 135, 136, 165 Marxisms, 63
Klee, Paul, 91, 254n45, 260–261n11 masculinity, 2, 26, 72, 126, 130, 132, 156–160,
König, Sven, 235–238 191–199, 203–206, 212, 233–239
Kovalov, Oleg, 50–51, 76, 260n101 mash-up, 13, 76, 236
Kracauer, Siegfried, 134, 216–217 masochism, 68, 151, 176
Kraftwerk, 233–234 Mass Ornament Two Point Oh! (Bookchin), 215–
Kuhle Wampe (Dudow), 117 217
Kuhn, Annette, 126, 189–191, 211 materialism, 18, 30, 63, 135, 217, 246
Kuleshov, Lev, 70–71 maternal, 183, 208, 254n51
mathematics, 57, 86, 106, 238, 252n27, 255n57,
Lang, Fritz, 1–3, 95, 113–114 271n41
Lazarsfeld, Paul, 20, 116, 118, 125, 139, 263n6, matriarchy, 73
264–265n15, 267–268n55 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 38, 70–73
leisure, 2–3, 7, 25, 40–41, 152, 159 McLaren, Norman, 78, 169, 267n48
leitmotif, 142, 166, 266n35 mechanicism, 14, 17, 34
Lenin, Vladimir, 62, 65–67, 72, 255nn57–58, Meillassoux, Quentin, 229
256n65 melancholia, 43–44, 100, 140–141, 176–184, 228,
Leroi-Gourhan, André, 225–227 251n10, 274n36
lesbians, 178, 181, 188, 194, 197, 206, 212 Melchior, Ib, 30–31, 79
Lethem, Jonathan, 106 melodrama, 132, 175–200
Levin, Thomas, 165 melody, 99, 135, 166, 221, 227, 245, 262n46
Liebesspiel (Fischinger), 76, 81, 83, 94–95 melos, 177
Lippit, Akira, 104 mensuration, 88
listening, 20, 29, 31, 40–42, 67, 74, 85, 88, 111, Meshes of the Afternoon (Deren/Hammid), 23,
113–145, 148, 157, 162–174, 179–207, 211, 26–27
241, 244 metastability, 66, 226
Lisztomania (Russell), 196 Metropolis (Lang), 1–10, 22, 225
literacy, 12, 107, 192, 224 Metz, Christian, 8, 48–52
locality, 4, 24–27, 73, 80, 104, 126, 145, 147–152, Mexican Fantasy, A (Kovalov), 260n101
154, 157–174, 190, 195, 201, 222–226, 236– Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 59–80, 253n40
237, 244, 259–260n98 MGM, 85, 95, 102
loop, 31, 33, 191, 234, 242 Michelson, Annette, 36, 254n46
Losey, Joseph, 21, 112–113, 122, 126, 140–143, microphone, 24, 184, 235, 239
250n46 military, 15, 101, 189, 191–194, 238, 241, 244,
loudspeaker, 234, 266n40 259–260n98
love, 40, 67, 76, 83, 90, 100, 105, 121, 122, 126, mimesis, 15, 133
128, 138, 150–173, 175–212, 242–246 miscegenation, 196
Loyer, Erik, 83 misery, 107, 220–221, 225, 228, 236–237, 245
Luhrmann, Baz, 195 Mitchell, John Cameron, 75, 175–212, 218, 246
Lumigraph (Fischinger), 31, 79, 104–106 Modern Times (Chaplin), 5–12, 6f
Lye, Len, 78, 96 modulation, 15, 26, 55–58, 65, 70–73, 89, 116,
lyrics, 6, 28, 102, 182, 186–193; lyrical diagram- 128–129, 154, 181, 185, 221–245, 258n86
ming, 71; lyrical fissuring and fusing of his- monadic historical apparatus, 217
tory, 65; lyrical line, 73; lyrical orientation, monadic potential, 145, 215
183; lyricism, 18–19, 57 monadic seriation, 87
Mondrian, Piet, 91
machine: cinematic, 103, 161; cliché, 124; co- montage, 15–27, 33, 36–75, 81, 97, 108, 115–122,
constitution, 228, 230–241; cybernetic, 48; 145, 146, 148, 150, 154–156, 164–165, 166,
Dionysian, 70; entertainment, 152; exhibi- 172, 180, 186–187, 215, 221, 235–236
tion, 122; graphical, 86; industrial, 59, 65; Montagu, Ivor, 124
love, 105; rhythm, 161; temporality, 2–18 Morgan, Lee, 271n35
machinic generativity, 70 Moritz, William, 31, 33, 80–84, 93–95, 105–106
Man Called Adam, A (Penn), 160 Morse, Margaret, 242
Man with the Golden Arm, The (Preminger), Motion Painting No. 1 (Fischinger), 26–27, 81f,
160–161 81–97
 Index / 287

Moulin Rouge! (Luhrmann), 195 Paz, Octavio, 277n34

Mountford, Joy, 33, 250n49 penitentiary, 170
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 87–88 Penny Serenade (Stevens), 126, 183
MTV, 186, 236, 274n33 Phantom of the Paradise, 196
Murphy, Dudley, 50, 76 phonography, 1, 126, 222
musicals (film), 24, 123, 184–205 pianist, 22, 127–131, 150, 173
Muzak, 7, 125 piccolo, 131
Pierce, Charles Sanders, 10–14, 48, 171, 255n57
Narboni, Paul, 8 playback, 188, 192, 199, 205, 249n39
navigability, 11, 54–55, 242 pneumograph, 242
Neal, Mark Anthony, 158 polytopic field, 91
necrosis, 107 postbop, 160, 166
negentropy, 79 potentiality, 39, 61, 74, 96, 141, 162, 173, 176,
Negri, Antonio, 149, 228 183, 187, 199, 217, 235
NEP (New Economic Plan), 39–42, 66, 72, Potter, Ralph, 78–80
254n46 precarity, 68–73
network, 3, 8–15, 21–29, 38–44, 52–55, 83–85, Preminger, Otto, 160
107, 123, 132, 145–149, 168, 171, 176, 208– Privilege (Watkins), 151–152
246 Prokofiev, Sergei, 45, 53, 60, 63, 69, 140, 242
Neuenschwander, Rivane, 218 prosthetics, 102, 105, 224, 243
neuro-cognitive aesthetics, 13–18, 35 prototype, 5, 33, 55, 58, 79–81, 84–85, 98, 105,
“Nico,” 180 236–237
Niemansland (Trivas), 117 publicity, 1–89
Night and Fog (Resnais), 109, 112–113, 136–138 puppetry, 230
nightclub, 82, 100, 159, 195, 236 Pythagorean, 30, 77, 217
Nirvana, 236
nomadic reception, 188 queer theory, 207, 210, 225
noncontemporaneity, 90, 97 ¡Que Viva Mexico! (Eisenstein), 72–73, 253n31,
nostalgia, 126, 137, 183–198 260n101
Novalis, 16
Nunley, Vorris, 153 Rabinbach, Anson, 81
race, 25, 146–174, 194, 210; racism, 17
October (Eisenstein), 71–72, 251n10 radiance, 84
Opertoons, 83 radioactivity, 26, 86, 95, 105
Optical Poem (Fischinger), 81, 90, 97, 99, 101 radiophonics, 25, 26, 42, 147, 211
orchestration, 22, 121, 138, 144, 169, 228, 244 “Raidon,” 95
organicism, 4, 14, 18, 60 Raikh, Zinaida, 256–257n69
Osmose (Davies), 242 Rain (Ivens), 110–115, 140
ratio, 4, 11–12, 18, 21, 30, 38, 61, 88, 129, 131–
Panofsky, Erwin, 90, 97, 214 132, 188, 207, 231, 245–246
panorama, 53, 54, 72, 244 rave, 82
pantomime, 46 Rebay, Hilla, 89, 92
pantonality, 139–141 recapitulation, 156, 177, 218
Parade (Cocteau), 71 Rechy, John, 53–55
parallelism, 85, 110, 133 recombinant media, 51, 119
parameter, 47, 51, 56–58, 62, 70, 72, 84, 124, 147, remediation, 246
155, 237–239, 267n48 remix, 4, 51–58, 82, 107, 177, 195, 238
parody, 28, 40, 120, 186, 198–200 Resnais, Alain, 109, 112, 113, 136–138
participant, 70, 251n10 rhizomatic connection, 156–157, 159
participatory (media), 50–52, 163–166, 188, rhizomatic transversality, 155
201–205 rhizomic form, 25
Pas de deux (McLaren), 169 rhythm, 2–5, 15–23, 29–30, 40–46, 56–58, 64–74
Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 171, 258n81 Rhythmus 21, Rhythmus 23, and Rhythmus 25
Passing Through (Clark), 75, 148–168 (Richter), 84
pathos, 14–19, 27–35, 36–74, 76, 87–88, 108, 145, Richter, Hans, 78, 84–102
146, 150, 173, 187, 215, 220, 245, 259n96 Ricoeur, Paul, 225
288 / Index

Riefenstahl, Leni, 215 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Disney), 133
Rimbaud, Arthur, 16, 140 Sobchack, Vivian, 10–14, 19
ritornello, 90 sodomy, 183, 259–260n98
Robin, Harry, 125, 264–265n15 software, 51–58, 76, 107, 174, 218, 236, 243,
Rockefeller archives, 118 252n24
Rockefeller Center, 7 Solar Arkestra (Sun Ra and his), 270n26
rock opera, 152, 176, 182–184, 196, 197–220 solo, 24, 103, 136, 152–174
rockumentary, 175–176 song(s): birdsong, 244–245; “bird song motion,”
Rocky Horror Picture Show, The (Sharman), 78; blues, 159; in cinema narrative, 6, 23, 28,
197–205 99–102, 114, 117, 126, 129, 179–211; film as,
Rodowick, D. N., 61 65, 90; nursery, 141; popular recording, 165,
romanticism, 136, 142 235
Ruttmann, Walter, 78, 109, 136 Song of Heroes (Ivens), 28
Rybczynski, Zbigniew, 50–52 Sorenson, Vibeke, 106
soul music, 158–159, 163, 165, 180
sadism, 43 soundproofing, 7
sadomasochism, 68 sovereign power, 18, 25–26, 72, 217
samba, 218 spatialization, 89, 98, 232
sampling (digital), 76–78, 218, 234–236 Spellbound (Hitchcock), 121
schizophrenia, 129 spiral: graphical form, 26, 89–99; technical
Schoenberg, Arnold, 29, 94, 109, 114–120, 135– form, 64
139 Spirals (Fischinger), 89
scopophilia, 189–191, 195 spontaneity, 21–26, 66, 136, 270n24
Scorpio Rising (Anger), 196 Squeezebox (club promotion), 274n36
sCrAmBlEd HaCkZ! (König), 235–239 Stafford, Barbara, 13–20, 35, 55, 110, 111, 221
scream, 71, 128–130, 151 Stakhanovism, 66
Scriabin, Alexander, 71 Star Is Born, A (Cukor), 201–202
Scroggins, Michael, 106 Steamboat Willie (Disney), 133
scroll or scrollwork, 53, 80, 85–86 Steina, 75, 219–220, 221, 237–246
Sedgwick, Eve, 181 Steiner, Max, 133
segmentation, 48 Stengers, Isabelle, 229
segregation, racial, 25, 249n35 Steps (Rybczynski), 50
sensorium, 121, 154, 222, 223, 245 stereoscopy, 36, 215, 251n10
sensors, 234–235, 238 stereo sound, 47, 77
Sergei Eisenstein (Katania), 45 Stonewall riots, 177–178
Sergei Eisenstein: Autobiography (Kovalov) 50– Strike, The (Eisenstein), 62–63, 72
51, 76 Sturken, Marita, 240
serialism, 116, 120 style: and idiom, 65, 76, 83–98, 104–105, 107–
sexuality, 25, 36, 54, 63–69, 128–129, 156, 178, 108, 139, 146–149, 174, 207, 215, 216–217,
188, 194, 203–210, 238 222, 223–231, 246; montage as, 38, 60, 67–75
Shepard, Matthew, 209–210 stylistics, 23, 34–35, 39, 60, 62, 74–75, 97, 105, 108,
Shklovsky, Viktor, 68–70 109, 116, 117, 132, 139, 140, 144–145, 146–155,
Shor, Miriam, 180 172, 173–174, 186, 187, 206, 213–246
shriek, 7, 130, 133 “Suffragette City” (Bowie), 183
signature, 53, 98, 105, 119, 150, 170, 182, 223, “Sugar Daddy” (Trask), 191
232, 235 supratemporality, 70, 156
Silverman, Kaja, 123 symphony, being as, 222–228
Simondon, Gilbert, 229 synaesthesia, 49, 77, 80, 82, 106–107
simulation, 237, 243, 244 synchronome, 5
simultaneity, 24, 87, 171, 179, 190, 193, 202–203, synchrony, 15, 17, 225, 227
211, 249n39 syncopation, 28
Sinatra, Frank, 160 synesthesia, 49, 77, 80, 82, 106–107
Siniakov, Ivan, 259–260n98 synoptics, 14, 131, 144, 180
siren, 28
Sisters (de Palma), 120 tactics, 8, 64–68, 143, 210, 229–230; tactical
Six Compositions: Quartet (Braxton), 163f media, 239–240, 243–244; tactical musical
 Index / 289

diagramming, 246; tactical objects, 174; tacti- Vasulka, Steina, 75, 219–220, 221, 237–246
cal street battle, 178. See also teletactics Vasulka, Woody, 238–243
tactile diagrams, 165 Verfremdungseffekt (alienation or defamiliariza-
Takahashi, Rie, 218 tion effect), 116
tango, 148 vernacular, 49, 59, 64, 83, 154, 169, 222. See also
Tapscott, Horace, 150, 270n26 style
Taylor, Cecil, 146, 173–174 Vertigo (Hitchcock), 144, 185
teletactics, 230–232 Viertalrad (Kesting), 91, 91f
temperament (audiovisual), 26, 89, 94, 104, 126 Vierzehn Arten den Regen zu beschreiben (Eisler),
tempo, 15, 21, 28, 127, 130 140
terror, 137, 160, 208, 256–257n69, 257n72, 264– violence, 15, 19, 31, 42, 57, 63–64, 129–131, 138,
265n15 144, 153, 158–159, 186, 200–203, 206–212
Tierney, Gene, 120 violin, 40, 78, 128, 130, 131, 133, 141, 241–243,
timbre, 235 260–261n11, 262n46
Time Travelers, The (Melchior), 30–31, 32f, 33, virtuality, 18, 61, 65, 172, 232, 254n46, 278n58
79, 105 visual music, 21, 26–27, 29, 31, 33, 74, 76–108,
Tischtänzer (von Huene), 219f, 219–220, 233– 117, 135, 145–155, 156, 191, 205, 260n4,
238 267n48, 270n33
Tommy (Russell), 197–205 vocality: listening and vocalization, 181, 244;
tonality, 94, 218 as public speech, 183, 186–188, 191, 192, 207,
touch, 29, 61, 80, 105, 171, 201, 244, 245 210; vocal composition, 23; vocal gesture, 33,
trans-African musical idiom, 163 236–237; vocal performance, 26, 40, 166, 159,
transatlantic epistemologies, 155–168 193, 205, 275n46
transcodability, 20, 63, 77 voice: actors, 33; contrapuntal, 56; as speech,
transduction, 225, 229–230 40–42, 158, 161, 166, 180–200; voice-over,
transgender, 183–207 23–24, 45, 113, 136, 142; as “vox,” 214, 244–
transition: affective or corporeal, 181, 193–211; 245
technical, historical, economic, or medial, 8, Voice Windows (Vasulka/La Barbara), 219–221,
11, 12, 14, 21, 26, 49, 80, 123, 149, 154, 172, 220f, 244–245
213, 221, 242, 278n58; visual, auditory, or volume (amplitude), 6, 24
narrative, 60–61, 78, 129, 184–185 von Huene, Stephan, 219–238
translation: of aesthetic modes, 49; of musical voodoo, 134
epistemologies into narratological ones, 151; Vuillermoz, Emile, 19
of musical into graphical forms, 89; of psy-
chological or perceptual states, 80; of static Wagner, Richard, 49, 88, 90, 120
into dynamic forms, 86 Warhol, Andy, 178
transmedia, 20, 38, 53, 121, 147–149, 174, 177, Wattstax (Stuart), 158–159, 173, 270n21
269n4 Wax Experiments (Fischinger), 84, 94
transnationality, 49, 104–105, 145, 151–152, 153, web of relations, 229–230
156, 168, 172, 217, 222, 236, 237 Weheliye, Alexander, 173
transpecies, 222, 228 Welles, Orson, 21, 96, 118, 119, 142
transperson, 178 Whitehead, Alfred North, 30, 217
transpositionality, 34, 59, 64–67, 70, 125, 130– Whitman, Walt, 16, 18, 141, 143, 248n24
131, 162, 175–212, 215, 221, 233, 274n33 Whitney, James, 21, 77–79, 96, 262n47
transsexuality, 194, 197, 202, 274n30 Whitney, John, 21, 77–79, 96
transvestite, 178, 194, 202 Wigstock: The Movie (Shils), 177, 178
trauma, 19, 62–64, 139, 168, 172, 179–180, 193, Wollen, Peter, 11, 14, 48–49, 52, 71
196, 210, 241, 246, 254n51, 257n72 World Wide Web, 1, 11, 13, 26, 83, 177, 215–216,
trumpet, 160 233, 238
Turner, Tina, 180, 183
TV Dante, A (Greenaway), 53 Yutkevich, Sergei, 71, 259n96

Untouchables, The (de Palma), 49–50 zombie, 50, 134

James Tobias is Associate Professor of Cinema and Digital Media Studies
in the English Department at the University of California, Riverside.