Screenshot of Brittany Howard, “Stay High” music video. 

This article is part of the b2o: an online journal special issue “(Rhy)pistemologies”, edited by Erin Graff Zivin. 

Losing and Finding Death Drive’s Beat^[1]

Seth Brodsky

1

Brittany Howard’s “Stay High” was the second single off her 2019 solo album Jaime, released along with the video that summer.^[2] I recall finding it cute and sweet and then forgetting it; in 2021 it won a Zoom Grammy for best rock song. By then, it had swooped back into my memory while driving regularly with my kid from the city out to the bird sanctuaries of greater Chicagoland in late March 2020. “I already feel,” I’d sing in relief and exhaustion, “like doin’ it aga-aaaaa-in, honey.” It became, not an escape exactly, but a suspension bridge between the present and a “beforetime” which was also miserable but differently so. By contrast, this bridge was built out of happiness. Or more specifically, a trove of musical grammars and signifiers of “happiness”, easy life, incipience, tender humor. “To me,” Howard told the Song Exploder podcast, “the music is sunlight.”^[3]

This would include Robert Glasper’s glinting celesta, its trills oscillating between old toy and fairy dust. But also the song’s complex semiotic register, a stylistic pastiche of distinct idealized chronotopes: the early 70s sound of the Muscle Shoals Studio in Sheffield, Alabama, not too far from Athens where Howard grew up; the unflappable falsettos of Curtis Mayfield and Al Green; but also the triplets, figures, and harmonies of 50s doo-wop, even the early Sam Cooke of the gospel quartets. It is as if the song’s basic message—that “everything is, everything is, everything is … wonderful”—was so provocatively delusional in 2019 America that it lobbed the music backwards a half-century, not to the anthemic Cooke of “A Change is Gonna Come” but the guileless Cooke of “You Send Me.” Howard’s voice meanwhile snakes through deep-pocketed grooves seducing, preaching, above all enjoying itself, autoerotic, pressing melody and letter onto lungs, mouth, lips, teeth. To paraphrase Maya Kronfeld on Marvin Gaye, Howard is syncopation, syncopation as rhythmic displacement, rhythmic displacement as being itself. One could say she “weaves [her] melody through the spaces between the beats [as] the rule, not the exception”—especially when she lands on the downbeat.^[4] Songs are always in part coordinated slips. They time-travel, teleport, render any particular time and place a brief everywhere-and-elsewhere. This song quite so: already sounding like “beforetime” the year of its release, in lockdown, that effect likely telescoped for millions of listeners.

The song is a work song, a song to help you get by, about grind in all its polysemy and how there’s no escape from it, but that’s OK, soon enough, you’ll “already feel like doin it again.” So: a nice chunky piece of ideology. Floating from its original position in a pre-pandemic spleen to a new locked down panic, its soul pastiche accidentally transformed what Emily Lordi calls “soul’s recuperative logic, whereby suffering is made to pay off,” into a balloon floating above terror and despair.^[5] “I would play this song to and from work everyday for 17 days straight before I got a day off working 16 hour shifts as a Covid nurse at the peak of Covid,” wrote one among more than 12,000 YouTube commenters on the video. “This song was so comforting. Now every time I hear this song it reminds me of those tough days.”^[6]

But let’s not do ideology critique. This is shooting fish in a barrel. One could, for instance, dive into how Terry Crews laundered his persona in the song’s video—he plays a line worker at an actual poultry feed factory, the Aviagen Feed Mill in Howard’s hometown Athens—into a TikTok ad where he stunts as an Amazon warehouse picker—“@terrycrews ##ad @Amazon has got gigs (and benefits) for days. So, check them out. Like now!”^[7] Or one could analyze Howard’s status, hardly her own doing alone, as a compromise formation symptomatic of liberal establishment culture’s crisis during the first Trump era, her ascent along the Tiny-Desk-Concert-to-New-Yorker-Profile pipeline an especially ambivalent expression of elite capture.^[8] But neither approach would tell us anything new about liberalism’s endless exploitation of pictures of good life to neutralize actual good future; nor would they tell us much specific about this song and how it works.

I want to do something both less and more ambitious here: a formalist reconstruction of aspects of this song that seem so generic as to go unnoticed as anything other than “music,” and at the same time a little pocket general-theory-of-music as an art and activity of making repetition—and with it, rhythm, period, time itself—possible. As such, I want to focus on what insists more than expresses here, does more than says, what is so musically generic as to almost pass by. The opening guitar chords, for instance: they are the song’s motor, steadfast throughout the track, strummed gently with the flesh of the fingertip, just two chords, a tonic A and then subdominant D, triplets with no accents. Bassist Zac Cockrell adds the hook, Glasper responds on celesta. Producer Shawn Everett outfits a heavily reduced drum kit with small pressure mics stuck on with putty to help drummer Nate Smith get a bathtub-sized back-of-guitar sound, tacky and fibrous and super DIY.

These little components are already more complex than what I mean; I mean more the conceptual-sensual sound-knots one might do worse than to call “impulses” or, taking a page from Daniel K. L. Chua and Alexander Rehding’s recent book Alien Listening, “pieces”— “piece[s] of time,” woven by repetition into a Penelopean fabric, a warp-and-weft one generalizes as “musical” but also experiences only as “a particular configuration, making time uniquely present.”^[9]

Braided together by Howard’s voice, these little modules each induce and then enfold a gap. This gap-induction and gap-enfolding then produce a circuit which aims at—and gets—something which, in its getting, retrospectively reveals itself as not the aim. Repetition itself, this aiming and missing and aiming again, and the turning of that into a temporal circuit, a “time-piece,” becomes the thing. Each “piece” is hence the result of a kind of delayed activation, folding a gap into something which, because of that gap, retroactively becomes that something, helping weave a temporal fabric that expands in an almost fractal way. This process is most schematically laid out in Nate Smith’s drum track; note how its circuit, its “piece,” feels split between long-and-short—DAH de DAH de—and a solid triplet feel, marked by these sticky, gum-on-shoe ghost notes: DAH-ke-de-DAH-ke-de. The drums are an aural duck-rabbit, a thatchwork of two incompatible ways of hearing. But unlike the eye, the ear can hear both, if not exactly at the same time, then as a toggle for which the drums are themselves the rhythmic circuit. Music gives the duck-rabbit conundrum, not a solution, but something better: a tempo, a meter, an extracurricular enjoyment that laughs or dances at a cognitive problem. In this process, music installs a gap where there might otherwise be simply a tension, a confusion or impasse. It dilates that impasse, inflates it into something spaced rather then just smushed or stuck. But then music also fabricates, sutures even: it knits that gap into a larger sequence or cycle whose momentum and sustain suggest something other than circularity—a spiral, perhaps, aiming at and getting a kind of missing, on and on.

This fabricating expansion becomes literal in the video for “Stay High,” a process of medium-inversion: it is arguably not video that visualizes sound cues, but sound—these circuits of gap induction and enfolding—that musicalizes images. Everything the camera captures becomes music, which is to say, a Penelopean folding of gaps into time; time into repetition; repetition into pieces; and these pieces into an expanding social, cultural, historical, geographic tapestry. Factory machines become music. Poultry feed sloshing into bags become music. Push brooms, dust, punch clock and punched card. The way Terry Crews walks, his head and mouth, his need to sing even before he opens his mouth, becomes music. His old battered pickup truck becomes music, the door-seatbelt-gearshift montage its own little time-piece. And of course, driving is music: chugging cylinders, spinning wheels, snap conversions of a million years of liquified death into enough carbon to get you around. Parking lots, flatbed rims, loitering, supermarket aisles with wild kids and distracted parents: music. Cemetery tombstones and flowers are music; eager lines at Kreme Delite are music and so is their connecting network of streets and traffic lights. Wishful rapport between Black folks and white folks, citizens and police, strip and home, town and family. Music’s gaps enfold the living, the dead, and their infrastructure, issuing an elegant retort to Susanne K. Langer’s mantra that “music is our myth of the inner life.”^[10] Here music does not “play” or “run” so much as stick promiscuously to everything it touches, and make what it touches begin to stick together; it is arguably less expression here than adhesive, driving assembly, convening, spacing, building. Contrary to a Wagnerian-Nietzschean lineage that ascribes to music some originary force as the most immediate art, the only art that doesn’t dupe, a Faustian means of “binding the world’s innermost core,” music here is a portal or bridge between inside and outside. It affords an erotic weave of reality itself, and calls the bluff on a longstanding musical pseudo-formalism whose avatars—“tonally moving forms” and “purely structural relationships”—mask a fantasy of material immersion.^[11] “Stay High” proposes the inverse: a town, with all its residents and roads and parts, can be a tonally moving form.

On the one hand, song and video are pure pop: frictionless, easy, happy—again, “the music is sunlight.” And the video is an unreal picture of reconciliation, not just of people and peoples, but nothing less than family, civil society, and state. On the other hand, we end up in properly cosmological territory, Rumi’s place where “everything is music.” A speculative utopian mythology of music more proper to the Black radical tradition ends up underwriting the song’s otherwise pop-historical being. Underneath its easy sway, Anthony Braxton’s conviction that “everything is music in various densities and intensities”; or Cecil Taylor’s insistence that “music is everything that you do.”^[12] Behind the chuckling conundrum of Smith’s DAH-ke-de DAH-ke-de, Fred Moten’s constant citation of Cedric Robinson: “the preservation of the ontological totality” in the conceptual dissonance of the groove.^[13]

2

Drive is hard. It’s hard because sexuality, from which it is inextricable, is hard.^[14] Still, roughly a century after Freud’s now-canonical tanglings with drive—Trieb, infamously mistranslated as “instinct,” from which it signified a divergence—some things can be rehearsed more easily.^[15] Drive is not organic instinct; it doesn’t serve survival, of the individual or the species. It serves enjoyment. One could say that drive emancipates instinct, or better, perverts it. So the instinct to eat is not the drive to eat. The instinct to eat satisfies itself—which is to say, completes itself, brings itself to completion—by eating. The drive to eat originates at the intersection of instinct and speech, bodily demand and language. It is at this point that instinctual completion becomes impossible—as impossible as the final word, the final metaphor, the final meaning. It is at this point too that the instinctual object—in this case, food—recedes: it recedes into the infinity of language, metaphor, meaning. The instinct to eat satisfies itself with food, but the drive enjoys itself with unending objects: not just by eating, but by perverting the act of eating through language, enjoying the mouth but also enjoying using the mouth to order food off a menu; enjoying sucking, but also sucking all the air out of a room; devouring, but also devouring the competition, or digesting entire fields of knowledge, or drinking up every drop of praise.^[16]

Drives are sticky, promiscuous, matters of not of completion but compulsion—to go “beyond the pleasure principle,” to repeat and to seek satisfaction in repetition itself. Located, as Freud put it, “at the borderline of the psychic and the somatic,” drives seem to repeat (compulsively) that very borderline.^[17] Grasping for terminology and often coining it, Freud stumbles on the portmanteau Vorstellungsrepräsentanz, “ideational delegate,” to describe drives: they are nothing more or less than this savoring of the breach opened up between psyche and soma, symbolic and material, through the intervention of the signifier, which drives seize upon as a surface, rim, or limit to enjoy.^[18] Drives are hence neither mere flesh nor mere symbolic, signifiers taken for flesh or hardened into commodity or fetish. Unconscious, they nonetheless have no object of excavation. They are, as Tracy McNulty puts it, a matter of “ungivenness” and “the corresponding need to substantiate or construct it”^[19]—“mythical entities, magnificent in their indefiniteness,” Freud wrote: “our mythology.”^[20] So drives are, strictly speaking, neither historical nor material. And yet a material history of capitalism is also a history of driven being. Not least as the historical interaction, dialectic, or even polyphony between two forms of compulsive labor or “endless work”—one coercively beating down collective human life from above, the other welling up endogenously from inside individual life.^[21]

And yet it does seem like the present long moment is in an exceptional place with the drives. One figure in particular, “death drive,” is in great circulation these days, legion not just in theory but in journalism and social media, often in response to US political parties—the “Republican Party Death Drive,” the “Democrats’ Climate Death Drive,” “Trump’s death drive”—but also more generally: the “US death drive,” “Death drive nation,” “death drive capitalism.”^[22] Just before the 2024 US general election, Eric Reinhart warned of how the death drive, as a “compulsion toward destructive repetition,” remains “a basic force in not just psychic life but also politics.”^[23] Common to virtually all these accounts is a strange knot of conviction and despair: conviction that a primordial psychic force predestines humanity toward aggression and self-destruction, and despair at precisely this conviction. Simultaneously, the historical-material quandary of the drive is aggressively resolved: conviction, shaking hands with despair, receives as its consolation prize the consistency of a mass judgement whose satisfaction is incompatible with drive itself. We are here in the domain not of drive but of fantasy—that is, of drive’s emergent superstructure.

But there is a curious relation here. Drive, as a breach that gives way to fantasy as both its defense and employment, here becomes fantasy’s idealized device: drive as a paradoxical “object of desire,” of the kind mapped out in Anna Kornbluh’s recent critique of immediacy as a cultural style.^[24] As with many fantasms of immediacy, a neutralization of agency is rendered enjoyable, if not pleasurable, but at a significant cost; collective power denied us at every turn is redeemed as panoramic doomer-vision—gothy vitalism in the sheets, political paralysis in the streets. Reinhart’s essay, admirable in its commitments and exhortations, nonetheless continues this preemptive knee-capping logic: politics yes, but only after we sustain the fatalizing wound of humanity’s innately suicidal program. In this and countless other cases, it becomes the grim legacy of psychoanalysis to throw us into existential debt. We get caught in a bad bootstrap paradox, where any attempt to save our species first pays an impossible tab: we don’t want saving and are wired for losing.

This fatalism’s lure is understandable. It provides a pit orchestra for the present’s operatic disastrousness, characterized by so many drive-like logics now raised to highest values or greatest vices. It compels the larger construction that we live in an “age of the drive” defined by narcissism and autoeroticism; vibe, energy, compression; a corresponding hatred of fiction, mediation, infrastructure; intensity and pressure without break; inescapability; entropy; headlessness; and above all repetition, which seems to bind all the above into its juggernaut. This repetition already marks countless bodies as the cortisol shot after another instance of suicidal gun terror or extrajudicial murder by police; another political obscenity, sham ruling, ban, or broken promise; another round of neo-imperial saber-rattling and nuclear brinksmanship; another a Boschian vision of genocidal or ecocidal hell; another reminder that history repeats. After October 7th, 2023, death drive all too predictably becomes a conceptual concession for the Israeli genocide in Gaza: Zionism, ethnostate, Netanyahu, all death drive incarnate, all repeating themselves into preordained oblivion.^[25] Humans are just that way.

It is true that what makes all these forms and modes of repetition difficult, or more properly, impossible, is their disruptive intensity, how each iteration paradoxically feels like the end of the world. One could, after Anahid Nersessian, think of the mediations such repetition takes today as “calamity forms,” the present’s rehearsal of what early 19th-century lyric poetry registered, without being able to yet articulate, as an “‘apocalyptic rate of change and nature-loss’.”^[26] Alenka Zupančič gets at this end-looping with her sharp warning: “The world will surely end, but that won’t necessarily be the end of our troubles.”^[27] But these repetitions are also impossible in how they undo the very work of repetition, its binding of the otherwise sundry into greater consistencies, what Freud might call repetition’s erotic energy. Repetition today appears as an unbound energy in service to disunity, degeneration, contraction. There is a stultifying arrhythmia, a cadential havoc to repetition now, a hole in its pocket. One could formalize this as a double paradox: each repetition dooms like the last and shocks like the first.

Current drive discourse repeats, not so much Freud, but the same defense by which late Freud and some of his followers resorted to biologism: the dream of an unriven, selfsame material consistency operating with absolute exigency—all Sade, no Kant.^[28] This is a perfect inversion of how Jacques Lacan theorized drive in his “return to Freud.” There is, he maintained, only one drive, all drives are death drives.^[29] But this one drive is itself constitutionally partial: incomplete, self-split, nothing more than this self-splitting. This is why Lacan stressed Freud’s use of the phrase Vorstellungsrepräsentanz, “ideational delegate.” In this model, drives are not propulsive bodies that break into immaterial psychic life like headless beasts. They are rather the delegates themselves, which is to say missives mistaken for body; in a brilliant phrase, Joan Copjec called drives “traitorous delegates,” delegates who “betray [their] mandator.”^[30] In other words, “faithless electors” who, instead of sealing the deal of proper signification, get lost along the way, play hooky, get hooked on hooky. In this simple point Freud recognized language and letter—human fabrication, the nature-culture split, the metabolic rift—at the core of drive creation.

In so much death drive discourse, this difficult knotting of letter and body is conveniently covered over by biological fantasy. That fantasy is now writ large as grand-guignol destiny and given a material consistency perfectly at odds with the unnatural montage of the drive, its inorganic, undead self-inconsistency. Its surreality too: Lacan compared the drive to a “surrealist collage”; when you think of the drive, don’t think of pitiless, heaving throb, think instead of a mad contraption, like “a dynamo connected up to a gas-tap” in which “a peacock’s feather emerges, and tickles the belly of a pretty woman, who is just lying there looking beautiful.”^[31] Copjec similarly recalls the director David Cronenberg marveling: “What if you were born with lysergic acid as part of your metabolism?” It is, she insists, “no weirder than our actual circumstances” vis-à-vis the drives: “as humans, we are all born with the signifier as part of our metabolism.”^[32]

It is this bug of original absurdity that renders drive so resistant to theory. Drive is not a theory. It is instead a terrain, a topic, upon whose surface one traces the traitorous delegations of the signifier as it gets hooked on something else, some other satisfaction. This applies to conceptualization too: what after all is satisfaction without completion, energy without entropy, demand without end, mechanism without function, repetition without rhythm— “no day or night, no spring or autumn, no rise and fall” as Lacan put it; for Freud, an anti-biological konstante Kraft, “constant force.”^[33] Leon Brenner points out that instinct can be modeled by frequency, the rise and fall of the sine wave; drive, by contrast, is a straight line—a novel way of understanding Freud’s assertion that “the death drives are essentially mute.”^[34] Nowhere is drive theory more koan-like then when it comes to rhythm and time: the double conundrum of constancy without frequency and punctuation without period. What conceptual vandalism! And yet: what an elegant articulation of the fact that drive does not “add up”—that drive is not a concept but a kind of theoretical frottage, enjoying rubbing up against the rim of any concept that tries to clinch it. No wonder then that a culture already thick in ecocide might not want to struggle with these abysmal riddles, instead turning the clock back to Nietzsche (with the help of Foucault) and insisting that “there is only one kind of force”: power.^[35]

The Freudian-Lacanian legacy of drive is opposed to precisely this. Drive, as a self-splitting force, generates tension, teeming, life. Drive tries to close; it tries, paradoxically, to obey the pleasure principle: tension extinction. But its mechanism is the signifier, the ideational delegate, and signifiers don’t die, don’t know how to die, indeed, only know how, not to live, but to persist, insist, repeat. One could put it this way: the death drive doesn’t have it in itself to die, doesn’t have the guts. This weird alloy of strength and weakness, durability and incapacity, ultimately means that death drive persists because it fails, and it fails because the being through which it persists lives. Death drive is not suicide, it is failed suicide. It is, as Kornbluh memorably puts it, “the accumulation of the failure to die”; or as Aaron Schuster writes, it is the record of the human organism’s “failure not to be born.”^[36]

What this entails is not fate, program, agency, struggle, decision, but rather something small, partial, radically local and mobile, not building, not destroying, but repeating. And not repeating in service to others big and small but to no one. It is thus a kind of first, asocial sublimation, a sublimation for this no-one, the template of sublimation itself—“not something that happens to the drive under special circumstances,” as Copjec puts it, but “the proper destiny of the drive.”^[37] That’s a very drive-y way of putting it: drive’s destiny is its exile from fate. From nature and culture too, as Todd McGowan writes, which is our subjectivity “rather than an unfortunate condition we must overcome”; only through the drives are we “alienated into equality.”^[38] Or at least the “ungivenness” of equality, and “the corresponding need to substantiate or construct it.” Drive is, as such, the negative condition of possibility for fantasy and fantasmatic life generally, for the fabricating work it does, helpful and harmful. This is partly what it means to say the drives are “our mythologies.” And this is why drive harbors promise for a theory of rhythm and music more generally: as a form of impossible repetition, it is also a kind of un-time, a temporal ungivenness that, like a vacuum or undertow, gives way to time as its influx. Musically, one could call drive the unending anoriginal rim shot that trips us into a rhythmic being for which even the downbeat itself is already syncopation. “In the absence of time,” Fred Moten tells Harmony Holiday, “we made rhythm.”^[39]

3

The song did not return to my mind in March 2020 just as a simple sunlit “promise of happiness” during a difficult time. It also returned, of course, as something symptomatic, a way of preserving that difficulty in a more bearable, admissible way. Song and video aren’t just an escape into wish-fulfillment: say, the wish to be able to “work hard and grind all day” and, “at night,” still feel like “doin’ it again.” “Stay High” is also a quite self-conscious attempt to replace torpor with grind—to sublimate an unbearable repetition, a repetition of the impossible, with a repetition that at least makes sense, that makes possibility possible. In this sense, its sublimation is economic in nature: to substitute one economy—of desire, the pursuit of the unobtainable—for another: the economy of drive, the pressure of the inescapable.^[40] “Stay High” really is a “work song,” but a utopian one: its utopia is that good work is still possible, that work can still be and feel good, that grind is good.

One thing the song is not is—drive. No music is the drive, or rather: all music, any music, is precisely not the drive. A song, with its little teleporting circuits of extracurricular self-satisfaction, is still not a drive. The dictate that a drive toward self-destruction lies at the root of our civilization, or that we now inhabit an “age of the drive”: these are also not drives. What song and story each are, psychoanalytically speaking, is a fantasy. They each manifest a distinct register on which the psychic capacity for fantasy—for fabricating fields which transform drive’s inescapable pressure into desire’s pursuit of the unobtainable—can do its dilating and transpositional work. But a song and a conceptually derelict story of civilizational suicide are two very different kinds of fantasy. And their difference reflects back on the drive in an illuminating way. It points us toward something general—a theory of music as a foundational practice of driven beings—and something particular: a critique of the contemporary deployment of psychoanalysis in service to fatalism, and an argument for its alternate tradition, as a discourse and practice of human freedom.

If drive, in its aim-inhibition, is a first asocial sublimation, music might be considered a second, inherently social sublimation, worldly even in its cosmic departures and flights of abstraction. But it is a strange sublimation, as incomplete as the drive itself, a sublimation that remains aimed at, even fixated on, the drive it leaves behind—music as the drive’s angel of history, or Orpheus turning back to Eurydice; in any case happier and certainly more flush with enjoyment. This leaving behind one could imagine as music’s leap from drive into desire, from drive’s ineliminable intensities into the fugitive domains of representation and language. But music gets caught up in this leap, goes only halfway, stays suspended in air, its vibratory forms hovering between what cannot be avoided and what cannot be grasped.

At its most basic, music could be considered an inevitable consequence of being driven, a dialectical response to living with drives: the ongoing “work song” mediating the drive’s endless labors and the world’s unending coercions. More specifically, music becomes a mediation of the drive’s temporal ungivenness which preserves that ungivenness. A mediation, and a corresponding act of substantiation and construction—which nonetheless insists on gap and repetition. Music substantiates and constructs the drive’s own arrhythmias as rhythm; its impossible repetitions as possible; its flatline as frequency; its constant pressure as punctuation, perforation, ebb and flow. This isn’t just dreamwork, condensation and displacement, but something stranger: a Penelopean erotics whose weave neither escapes nor disavows the silence of the drive but rather induces it through frequency, putting that silence to work as gap, not a missing link but a linking through missing. Paraphrasing Freud on dreams as “the royal road” to the unconscious, Mladen Dolar has proposed the voice as “the royal road to the drive.” One should widen this infrastructure and imagine music tout court as such a royal road: not the drive itself, but a less impeded conceptual pathway, diminishing what keeps drive otherwise so unconscious, unimaginable, disavowed, “at bay.”^[41] At the least, music is Eros-work that refuses to antagonize Thanatos-work. It rejects the Manichaean contest of life and death, abstains from making drive’s immortal movement its mortal enemy. It makes a partner of drive, folds death into its vitality, makes nihil the spectral support of its peculiar brand of presence. “I just want to stay high … with you …”

Nothing is farther from our “age of the drive,” whose entire project could be better understood as an aggressive deployment of fantasy in order to plug up and smooth out the drive’s ineliminable negativity and disruptive tension—a cultural style. Fantasies are ambivalent, ambidextrous constructions, always aimed at transposing the drive from which they originate into some unreachable horizon. But in this case, fantasy wages a full counterinsurgency against the drive: the fantasy is a wishful dream of having eliminated the drive that induced it, not least by a kind of theoretical gaslighting that defines the drive as the very opposite of what it is. 

Such counterinsurgent logic against the drive ultimately spans from the annihilation of the conceptual gap to the annihilation of surplus populations. This annihilation of the gap occupies the entire political spectrum, and can be achieved as much through anesthetic disavowal or sweaty repression as through blatant aggression and sadistic arrest. Its primary mode is imaginary: an alternately rageful and tearful patching, stuffing, and collapsing of time and space into consolations and cruelties that brook no “absence at the heart of the address,” as Willi Apollon put it.^[42] A desperate, ultimately despairing exercise in fabrication, it is deeply related to music’s Penelopean erotics. But it is done as a hatred of music, a refusal of address, a rejection of the fragile act of listening itself. Repetition’s hegemonic forms today—shooting, streaming, scrolling, vibing, driving, capitalizing—could in this sense be understood as forms of music-hatred, or at least as fulcra where a mutual hatred of drive and of music meet. These forms practice repetition not to affirm it, but, repeatedly, to make it stop.

What we instead have in the Freudian-Lacanian legacy of drive is a singular account of freedom: a mythology of human destiny as exile from fate, the saving incapacity to not-sublimate, the comic failure to not be born, the inability to not-queer the libidinal aim. Such a mythology need not deny human history as a seemingly transhistorical struggle to overcome precisely this constitutional openness through the ambivalent, often reactionary power of fantasy. Drive is, again, radically promiscuous; drive drifts. It attaches itself even to dreams of its liquidation because the drive can enjoy anything. But precisely this is the best evidence of its freedom. And this freedom, this promiscuous incompleteness, must not be coopted for a tragic account of human fate. We cannot do our enemies’ work for them. Music provides one dialectical model, one royal road, toward reaffirming the freedom of the drive in an era that finds that freedom unbearable.

^[1] Deep thanks to the wonderful participants in the exploratory ACLA seminar that led to this essay, and especially to Erin Graff Zivin and Jonathan Leal for their generous work and guidance making it happen; thanks also to Tracy McNulty, Farah Bakaari, Nathan Gorelick, Mladen Dolar, and my Drive/Music seminar students Hiro Cho, Nathan Friedman, Juan Rivera, Yesha Shukla, and Alex Tripp for invaluable responses to previous versions; thanks finally to Anna Kornbluh, steadfast interlocutor in all things drive.

^[2] Brittany HowardVEVO, “Stay High,” YouTube, published July 16, 2019, accessed November 3, 2024: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfizQsGWOxI.

^[3] Thao Nguyen and Brittany Howard, “Episode 168: Brittany Howard, ‘Stay High,” produced by Hrishikesh Hirway, in Song Exploder, Sept. 18, 2019, podcast, MP3 audio, 18:33, https://songexploder.net/brittany-howard.

^[4] Maya Kronfeld, “The Philosopher’s Bass Drum: Adorno’s Jazz and the Politics of Rhythm,” Radical Philosophy 2/5 (2019), 43.

^[5] Emily J. Lordi, The Meaning of Soul: Black Music and Resilience Since the 1960s (Durham: Duke, 2020), 8.

^[6] See comment from @143Chriztophur, accessed Nov. 3, 2024: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfizQsGWOxI&lc=UgyFJE44B78RnbLY7-V4AaABAg.

^[7] See the ad at https://www.businessinsider.com/terry-crews-amazon-ad-video-2021-11. See also a fine analysis of the song and video’s contradictions from David Yearsley at https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/09/13/joie-de-job-staying-high-at-work/.

^[8] See “Brittany Howard: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert,” filmed on Oct. 15, 2019, and posted on YouTube on October 23, 2019, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyW5Zz0w1zg&ab_channel=NPRMusic. See also Amanda Petrusich, “Brittany Howard’s Transformation,” The New Yorker, April 20, 2020, at https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/27/brittany-howards-transformation.

^[9] Daniel K.L. Chua and Alexander Rehding, Alien Listening: Voyager’s Golden Record and Music from Earth (Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2021), 191.

^[10] Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Harvard, 1957), 245.

^[11] See  Eduard Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, trans. Lee Rothfarb and Christoph Landerer (Oxford: Oxford, 2018), 41ff.

^[12] See “Anthony Braxton on the Radiance of Standards, his Search for Charlie Parker & the Forces that Divide America,” at https://www.grammy.com/news/2021-anthony-braxton-interview-12-comp-zim-quartet-standards; see also “Cecil Taylor on Music as Life/Life as Music,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvFyvPAWuug; both links last accessed Nov. 3, 2024.

^[13] See Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 168; see also Fred Moten, among other writings, “Criminality and Uplift,” in Stolen Life (Durham: Duke, 2018), especially 128–38. I thank Derek Baron for connecting Moten’s thinking here to Diedrich Diederichsen’s notion of groove as preserving the dissonance polyrhythmically rather than resolving it harmonically. See Diedrichsen, Freiheit macht arm: Das Leben nach dem Rock ’n’ Roll (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1993), 109.

^[14] On the specifically contemporary “difficulty” of sex, see among others Gila Ashtor, Homo Psyche: On Queer Theory and Erotophobia (New York: Fordham, 2021), Alenka Zupančič, What Is Sex? (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017), and Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman, Sex, or the Unbearable (Durham: Duke, 2014).

^[15] See especially Sigmund Freud, “Instincts and their Vicissitudes” (1915), in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 14, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), 109–140; and “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in Standard Edition 18, 1–64. Standard Edition abbreviated below as SE.

^[16] Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), 167.

^[17] Freud, “Instincts,” 120–21.

^[18] Freud first uses this phrase in “The Unconscious” (1915), in SE 14, 176. I take the substitute translation “delegate” (instead of the traditional “representation”) from Joan Copjec, Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (Cambridge: MIT, 2002), 37. For an exploration of Freud’s struggle with language around drives, see Rolf Flor, “On the Very German-ness of Freud’s Trieb,” in Dan Collins and Eve Watson, eds., Critical Essays on the Drive: Lacanian Theory and Practice (New York: Routledge, 2024), 43–52.

^[19] Tracy McNulty, “Unbound: The Speculative Mythology of the Death Drive,” differences 28/2 (2017), 88.  

^[20] Freud, “New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis” (1930), SE 22, 95.

^[21] For two distinct but systematic approaches to problems of drive, labor, and the history of capitalism, see Samo Tomsiç, The Capitalist Unconscious: Marx and Lacan (London: Verso, 1913) and Adrian Johnston, Infinite Greed: The Inhuman Selfishness of Capital (New York: Columbia, 2024).

^[22] There are too many examples to list here, but for a wide selection, see: Ben Ware, “The Death Drive at the End of the World,” e-flux 134 (March 2023), https://www.e-flux.com/journal/134/525929/the-death-drive-at-the-end-of-the-world/; Patrick Blanchfield, “Death Drive Nation,” Late Lite 1 (Nov. 2022), https://late-light.com/issues/issue-1/death-drive-nation; Liza Featherstone, “The Democrats’ Climate Death Drive,” Jacobin, June 12, 2019;

https://jacobin.com/2019/06/democratic-party-climate-2020-presidential-debate; Byung-Chul Han, Capitalism and the Death Drive, trans. Daniel Steuer (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2021). For a withering critique of this trend and a formidable list of further examples, see Anna Kornbluh, “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” Parapraxis 3 (Dec. 2023), https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/we-didnt-start-the-fire. All accessed Nov. 3, 2024.

^[23] Eric Reinhart, “Confronting the Death Drive in Trump’s America,” Jacobin, Oct. 27, 2024, https://jacobin.com/2024/10/death-drive-trump-freud-liberalism.

^[24] Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy: or, the Style of Too-Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 2024).

^[25] See for instance Neve Gordon, “The Myth of Israel’s ‘Most Moral Army’,” Al Jazeera, Oct. 16, 2023, https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/10/16/the-myth-of-israels-most-moral.

^[26] Anahid Nersessian, The Calamity Form: On Poetry and Social Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 3.

^[27] Alenka Zupančič, “The End of Ideology, the Ideology of the End,” South Atlantic Quarterly 119/4 (2020): 844.

^[28] For the best recent critique of Freud’s biologism, see Dan Collins, “Debunking the Drive,” in Critical Essays on the Drive, 1–39.

^[29] Lacan’s most complete account of the drive comes in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 161ff.

^[30] Copjec, Imagine, 37.

^[31] Lacan, Seminar XI, 169.

^[32] Copjec, “Editorial: Montage of the Drives,” UMBR(a): A Journal of the Unconscious 1 (1997): 11.

^[33] Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 164–65; see also Freud, “Instincts,” SE 14, 118.

^[34] Leon Brenner, “Autistic Rims and Their Vicissitudes,” European Journal of Psychoanalysis 9/1 (2022), https://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/articles/autistic_rims_and_their_vicissitudes/. See also Freud, “The Ego and the Id,” SE 19, 46.

^[35] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann & R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1968) 432.

^[36] Kornbluh, “We Didn’t Start the Fire”; Aaron Schuster, The Trouble with Pleasure: Deleuze and Psychoanalysis (MIT Press, 2016), 15.

^[37] Copjec, Imagine, 30.

^[38] Todd McGowan, Universality and Identity Politics (New York: Columbia, 2020), 176.

^[39] Harmony Holiday (@Harmony_Holiday), “In the absence of time we made rhythm. — Fred

Moten,” Twitter, August 13, 2023, 9:40pm, https://x.com/Harmony_Holiday/status/1690810634240446464. Cited with permission.

^[40] I am paraphrasing Jodi Dean’s distinction between drive and desire; see Dean, “Complexity as Capture: Neoliberalism and the Loop of Drive,” new formations 80 (2013): 139.

^[41] See Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 5, 608; see also Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (MIT Press, 2006), 157.

^[42] Willi Apollon, “Psychoanalysis and the Freudian Rupture,” trans. Tracy McNulty, differences 28/2 (2017), 16.

This article is part of the b2o: an online journal special issue “(Rhy)pistemologies”, edited by Erin Graff Zivin. 

Oppenheimer’s Arrhythmia – Between the Cinematic Image and the Atomic Bomb

Eyal Peretz

Clip 1. Opening of Christopher Nolan’s Memento. 

Christopher Nolan’s breakout film, Memento, opens with one of the paradigmatic images of Nolan’s cinema, namely one of those primal images embodying his obsessive conception of the image as such, around which everything else revolves. A decontextualized hand is holding a photograph showing a room, its walls splashed with blood, likely belonging to a man lying on the floor, his face unseen.

We have been given no context, so we cannot say when or where the event depicted in the photograph happened, what its place in a temporal and spatial order is, or whether it is the inauguration of a chain reaction that will now begin or whether it is already the result of a chain of events hidden from us. Most importantly, perhaps, we cannot say who is responsible for, or guilty of, this stain of blood on the wall, which we can designate as enigmatic, that is a stain that does not yet have a meaningful place in some contextual order.

Read allegorically, and doubtless too quickly due to our time constraints, we can say that the photograph itself, a technological product — namely something that emerges not in relation to any natural given order but out of something we can call a cut in existence, or perhaps existence as a cut out of any given order — here shows, in the stain deprived of recognizable meaning, something that haunts the very being of the photographic image as such: the fact of being cut out of any meaningful order. This stain, I suggest, can thus be understood as the inscription of the technological cut as such.

We can think of the photographic medium which is film, when understood as an artistic or poetic medium, as that which revolves around the creation of images that are fascinated by the technological cut, that is, images that — as opposed to regular images, which are interested mainly in the content given in the image rather than in the being of the medium — revolve around the exploration of the very fact that what is seen on screen always emerges first and foremost as a cutting out of a slice of the world from any spatial and temporal continuity and order. The cinematic-photographic medium as projection emerging out of technological cutting is, in this sense, when used poetically, that which is both the activation of, as well as the fascination by, what we can call a withdrawal from any specific temporal and spatial order and context, that is, fascination by mediality as such as something which is beyond any specific time/place and meaningful context, and thus beyond any determinate content (which is always in a specific time and place), a beyond out of which all possible contents emerge, and which is thus itself withdrawn from all content.

We can thus say that when used poetically film can be understood as the withdrawn (namely that which is grounded in a cut and that as such is in excess of any order and thus meaning) that is dedicated to exploring the very dimension of withdrawal, and the enigmatic stain itself — namely something distinguishable from a figure, that which has a meaningful place in a context — can thus be understood as a paradoxical content, the coming to appearance, indeed the memento, of the medium as the non-meaningful withdrawn in excess of all determinate content.

As the withdrawal from any specific temporal order, the medium as such can also be understood to carry with it the mystery of an excessive time, or something we might perhaps call pure time, a time out of joint and out of order, a time in excess of any recognizable and determined temporal organization. In this sense the stain, as the coming to paradoxical appearance of the withdrawn medium, is also the inscription of excessive time.

Since the enigmatic stain in this opening image is a bloodstain, it immediately connects us to the question of the wound — both bodily and psychic — and that of violence, which is to be thought of as the decontextualizing excessive event of disturbance to an ordered or organized formation. Such violent disturbance manifesting itself in the stain can be understood as the bringing about of an exposure — i.e., that to which one is subjected unwillingly — to the dimension of the medium as such, understood as pure excessive time.

The wound, then, in its most fundamental, call it psychic or mental aspect can be understood as the suffering of a violent exposure to pure time as such in excess of any specific temporal organization. What speaks most powerfully in the wound in Nolan’s cinema, the wound inflicted from its psychic aspect, is guilt. Guilt is the affect belonging to the wound-memento of the withdrawn medium, the excessive dimension of pure time that one suffers an exposure to.

This pure time of the medium expressing itself in guilt can be regarded as a fundamental, uncanny foreignness that haunts existence from outside, so to speak, precisely to the degree that, as in the case of the ghost (a prominent question in Nolan’s Interstellar), it cannot be placed or located in it, even as it is somehow present. This is the case since the medium, by definition, is foreign, or Other to, or outside of, any content emerging from it. The placeless enigmatic stain can be understood, then, as the inscription of this ghostly foreignness. The time that is out of joint, the pure time of the medium as such, is that which haunts existence as a fundamental foreignness, manifesting itself as guilt inscribed in the enigmatic stain.

We can say that this pure time, the foreign time of the withdrawn medium, a ghostly time in excess of any determined temporal ordering, is the condition for the possibility of the emergence of an infinite multiplicity of different temporal orderings, some of which will be actualized by coming to characterize the content that emerges out of the pure medium and that will populate the screen. From Inception onwards, Nolan’s cinema has increasingly been fascinated with the exploration of the co-inhabiting of a single cinematic work by a multiplicity of different temporalities. Perhaps the term to use for this multiplicity of temporalities is Bergson’s famous durée, in the sense that such temporalities are to be thought of in relation to an excessive openness that each expresses differently rather than according to a homogenized temporality in which all of them are ordered equally. These durées — for example the differentiation in Nolan’s Dunkirk among the time of the foot soldiers, the time of boats, and the time of planes — do not stand in a hierarchical relation to one another, precisely because their emergence out of pure time, out of the cut, expresses the very fact that there is no originary ordering.

If pure time, the medium as such, is to be transformed into different temporal organizations that will characterize the actual content emerging out of the medium and populate the screen, it will require a mediating agent that possesses, so to speak, two faces: one inscribing the ghostly outside of pure time as such, the other becoming that which a singular organization begins to gather itself around. We can call such a mediator a sovereign beat. The sovereign beat can be understood as a representative or messenger of pure time or as an inscriber of the openness of the medium — hence the epithet “sovereign,” since the medium is the background power upon which the emergence of anything depends — that becomes an axis around which a singular ordering of time, thus a specific way of expressing the medium, is called to gather, and to gather in such a way that each singular ordering can be said to be a specific activation of time. This singular organization around the sovereign beat is what we usually call rhythm. As representative of pure time, the time of the pure cut to which we are unwillingly exposed, the sovereign beat is a foreign agent (namely the agent of the foreign medium) in excess of our will and to which we are unwillingly exposed, and thus subjected. Possessed of two faces — one directed toward pure time, the other toward a singular organization of time as rhythm — each beat, as in the paradigmatic case of the heartbeat, is always under the pressure of the foreign excess of pure time which threatens it with arrhythmia and an attack, exposing it to a fundamental guilt.[1]

Since each rhythm is a singular organization emerging out of pure time that is also always under internal threat of foreign arrhythmia (or perhaps of a syncope, the missing of a beat, to allude to Nolan’s production company, Syncopy, a name that plays on this term), we can say that, always, a rhythm testifies to there being no ultimate One, in the sense both of one guiding hierarchical order, one sovereign beat, that will be the whole’s grounding medium, and of an occupant of the medium, one of the durées or rhythms emerging from the pure cut, which can be considered a fundamental unity, an atom, fully itself and thus not subject or exposed to the cut. Strictly speaking there is no fundamental atom, nothing that, as the word’s etymology suggests, cannot be subject to the cut. Every atom is subject to a cut and a split, every atom is subject to fission, exposing it to an explosion (the ex-, as in exposure, marking the presence of an ex-cessive outside that is pure time as the force of dissolution of any order) that has inscribed within it a fundamental guilt. 

Clip 2. Opening of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. This clip is not yet fully available online. This particular clip unfortunately covers over the soundtrack with Nolan’s narration. 

We might say that Nolan’s Oppenheimer revolves around three interrelated questions: 1) What is the atomic bomb and how are we to think of its historical and philosophical significance?; 2) What exactly is the nature of the guilt inscribed in Oppenheimer’s biographical adventure — a question that dominates the film’s final part, consisting of Oppenheimer’s hearing before the security committee, presenting in many ways the film’s central enigma, namely Oppenheimer’s voluntary agreement to these proceedings; and 3) What is the cinematic medium’s relation to these questions? 

The opening scene immediately brings these three interrelated questions to the fore, orchestrated in relation to all the issues mentioned above. We cannot delve fully into the complexity of this scene, but there are a few things I would like to highlight, starting with the visual component of these images.

In what is undoubtedly an echo of the opening of Tarkovsky’s Solaris, the film begins with a vision of a decontextualized surface of water on which raindrops are falling. The lack of context means that everything that strikes the surface, every drop, arrives enigmatically, that is, as inscribing within itself the mystery of the withdrawn medium. As such, each drop already contains something of the nature of what we have called a stain and is therefore not experienced as a fully meaningful figure within a particular context. In this sense each drop is already a source of what we have called fascination, acting as a messenger of the withdrawn, the medium, which we have also associated with pure time. Because each drop carries the withdrawn and is not a figure in a context or in a unified whole, it also immediately acts as a singular member of a multiplicity or plurality that cannot be brought under an organizing One. Thus, much like the organized soldiers on Nolan’s decontextualized Dunkirk beach, who, upon the arrival of a plane from beyond the screen, from an empty sky without orientation and thus from the direction of the withdrawn, start to disperse and fragment, no longer part of their formations, here each drop, arriving from a sky not experienced as orientation, expresses the fragmentation of the forming One. We can see that as singularities without the One, each inscribing, indeed we might say expressing the withdrawn medium or pure time differently, each drop striking the surface of the water can also be said to be characterized, at least to a degree, by its own singular rhythm, its own durée expressed in the manner of its expansion into differing circles upon hitting the surface. Thus one aspect of rhythm that this scene in particular, as well as Nolan’s cinema in general, will be interested in is what we can call (very inadequately) material consistency. Even though each drop of water possesses its own distinct rhythm, we can nevertheless talk perhaps about the rhythms of the rain, and later of fire, gas, or, elsewhere in the film, wind, earth, dust, etc. Such a differentiation of rhythmic consistencies increasingly fascinates Nolan and is evident in his cinematic experimentations with relative temporalities.

Having opened with the question of the multiplicity of temporalities and singular rhythms implied in the dissolution of the One brought about by the technological cut and its decontextualized surface, the movie continues to explore the question of rhythm and temporal organization through its bringing the question of the cut to the forefront, most importantly via the question of the way that the cut, most essentially here as an editing cut (though a cut between the visual and the auditory as well, something we won’t be able to explore), implies the emergence of a series, a series of cuts.

I have started to suggest that the question of the pure time of the cut is related to what I have called a sovereign beat, that representative of pure time around which singular organizations of time start to emerge. At the heart of a sovereign beat is the activation of the cut, thus of pure time, but if it is to become rhythm the cut must be part of a series. Only when becoming part of a series do the editing cuts start to function as sovereign beats, namely as inscriptions of the pure medium — that which cuts out of any order —  the forming of the relations between which establishes a specific way for a temporal organization to emerge out of pure time.

However, the dimension of the poetic, we saw, involves the fascinated exposure not to this or that rhythm, or not only, but also, and most essentially, to the dimension of the medium as such, its being as pure cut in excess of every specific rhythm emerging out of it, even as it is the beating source at the heart of all these rhythms. We might thus say that the medium as such can only be opened to via the tension of the differences between singular rhythms, the tension in between the singular drops, so to speak. As such the poetic dimension will always have to activate the double side of the sovereign beat, that of the excessive medium beyond any specific rhythm, and that of the series that is the source of characterization of everything that emerges in relation to the pure medium. This means that the poetic dimension always needs to circulate around an a-rhythmia, or a syncope, namely around the tension between the emergence of rhythms and the excess of the pure medium, a tension also internal to every rhythm insofar as it is exposed to pure time. The dimension of the poetic is always on the verge of a heart attack or a fainting spell due to a missed beat.

Thus, following the opening image and its singularly differentiated raindrops, we experience an editing cut, the film’s first, indicating an exposure to the medium emerging out of the differences between singularities. Out of this first cut Oppenheimer is born, so to speak, into the world, his eyes opened to it, causing him to be fascinated by what he sees: the decontextualized, singularly differentiated raindrops. Oppenheimer is a fascinated watcher to the degree that, being sensitive to the fragmentation of the One into the differences of incommensurable singularities, he is exposed to the cut, the pure medium as such. This fascination, of course, immediately echoes our own fascinated look, namely the look of those in whom a poetic cinematic watching opens due to the cutting exposure to the medium.

This fascinated look, born of the first cut, will also be characterized by the exposure to a series of beats that immediately follow this cut, as if these beats were marking the opening of the world according to the question of rhythm. Yet this series of cuts/beats that follows, which rhythmically characterizes Oppenheimer and us as well, is irregular, since each segment’s length and breath is different. Thus exposed to a series of irregular beats — an irregularity at the heart of his vision, characterized by sensitivity to the differences between singularities and to the excessive pure medium, due to the collapse of the regulating One — Oppenheimer’s existence, and our own existence as cinematic watchers, opens under the sign of an a-rhythmia, a syncopated fainting, even a heart attack. We might mention that later in the film, at the moment of the Bomb’s explosion during the Trinity test scene (with “Trinity” already announcing the mystery of the split in the one), as the rhythm of the music keeps increasing in intensity and changing, Oppenheimer says that these things are hard on your heart. We might also mention that Emily Blunt, one of the film’s stars, has described the film as a three-hour heart attack.

If the dimension of the One implies the dimension of a Whole, the encompassing of existence in its entirety and its placement under the sign of what has been called a cosmic order or rhythm, then we can think of this opening scene, which exposes us to a thinking beyond the logic of the One, as introducing a cosmic a-rhythmia, an entropic decomposition, to be distinguished from the harmonious and proportionate music of the spheres. We can also think of the film, and the irregular series of its cuts that expose us to a cosmic arrhythmia beyond the logic of the One, as itself being the activation of a fission, in the sense that every dimension of unity — including the most basic, the atom — is split. The film itself can, in this sense, also be understood as an ex-plosion (the activation of a pure outside, the ex, that decomposes and fragments the whole), which at its extreme limit we can characterize as atomic.

In such a cinematic-atomic explosion, as this opening scene already demonstrates, each fragment, each segment emerging in between the irregular cuts becomes decontextualized. We do not know how one segment refers to the next, and all become enigmatic stains filled with wounds and guilt — hence our scene ending with the question of judgment — in an a-rhythmatic cosmos bereft of all unity and order, a cosmos where God plays dice.

In this explosive, a-rhythmic, and polyrhythmic cosmos we are increasingly exposed to the pure cut, the medium, in such a way that time is fully out of joint and out of order: nothing is in its place and no thing has a given place, not even a clearly marked before and after, there is a constitutional non-linearity. It is therefore unclear whether this fragmentary vision, this cinematic ex-plosion following Oppenheimer’s introduction is something that has already happened or is something that will happen, or perhaps it might only be a hallucination of someone collapsing amid a heart attack, as seemingly suggested by the view of Oppenheimer’s face almost sinking into the enigma of the watery surface. It is the atomic bomb itself, which this scene in a way already is, that expresses in this sense the extreme limit of this out-of-jointness and rhythmic decomposition. In splitting the cosmos into decontextualized fragments, sub-atomic particles in a way, it is no longer clear whether the Bomb has happened, will happen, or has always already happened in a time out of time, in a Big Bang.

This temporal out-of-jointness is most powerfully expressed in this opening scene in the auditory dimension, which I do not have time to elaborate upon, especially in the accelerating beats that toward its end arrive seemingly out of nowhere and interrupt any formation of regulated rhythm. Only much later on, in a logic of aprés-coup that structures much of the film, in a scene following the Hiroshima bombing, will we, in a way, understand these accelerated beats. They arrive almost as if they were attacking Oppenheimer at the moment of his utmost guilt, where he seems to realize, in a hallucinatory moment on the verge of collapse, the significance of the Bomb he brought into the world. The accelerating beats, as if they were leading up to a heart attack, thus mark both Oppenheimer’s explosive guilt and, through the first scene’s highlighting of their decontextualized nature, the non-place and non-time of the guilt associated with the Bomb, an existential guilt that has always already happened, way before its actual explosion, and that perhaps is what is responsible for bringing it about.

Yet here is precisely where we can start to glimpse the difference between the Bomb’s explosion and the cinematic medium, itself developed by Nolan, as we saw, according to the a-rhythmatic logic of the explosion, the bringing to its limit the logic of the One, a logic we can call also metaphysic-theological. For if film as Nolan develops it marks the explosion of the logic of the One this does not mean that it is without some mysterious new unity that allows the whole to cohere, a unity that has to do with our never losing sight of the withdrawn, the medium, in excess of all the fragments and all the singular durées emerging from it. The film achieves its unity by being guided by the medium in excess of all the explosive fragments. It is the excess that unites, in that, though not consisting in any ordering or completion, it nevertheless functions as that which allows all the fragments to communicate, to share in existence by being exposed to one another through the irregularity of their beats, in a new way[2].

We can call such communication through excess, and indeed of excess and thus of the medium itself beyond any specific rhythmic order and contextual meaning, music, perhaps atonal music, which, as we heard, opens the film before we encounter any visual image and in many ways holds it together. Music as a poetic medium — which is not limited to any specific sensory modality since it is the activation of a fundamental aspect of a general logic of temporality — is the communication of non-meaningful excess achieved through the exposure of multiple rhythms to one another at their a-rythmatic limits. In the film’s second scene, in an essential encounter with Niels Bohr — the pacifist physicist who will refuse to join the project to develop the Bomb, opting instead to try to keep the post-Bomb world together so that it does not annihilate itself – Bohr tells Oppenheimer: “Algebra’s like sheet music, the important thing isn’t can you read the music, it’s can you hear it? Can you hear the music, Robert?” Oppenheimer responds: “Yes I can.” Yet there are reasons to suspect that the Oppenheimer we encountered in the first scene, subjected to explosive a-rhythmia and fragmentary vision, cannot fully hear the music, since he is too much under the sign of stain and guilt, if we understand guilt not only as the affect of the exposure to the excessive dimension of the withdrawn medium or pure time, but as the desire to bring the fragmentation of existence entailed by such exposure back into the fold of the logic of the One, in the manner of Hamlet’s desire to restore the Father. In this sense, the development of the Bomb is not simply the expression of the insight into the new a-rhythmatic cosmos but the attempt to restore the theologico-metaphysical One at the moment of its radical annihilation or nihilism. The Bomb is the ultimate extension of nihilism’s logic and attendant will to power, its desire to restore a lost One through the will, and this perhaps accounts for Oppenheimer famously naming the first bomb test Trinity, unconsciously sensing the relation between the Bomb and the desire for the theology of the One. If we do not want the Bomb to be the ultimate result of the discovery of the a-rhythmatic cosmos, the film suggests (and thus do not want, as in the opening of Tenet, for the concert to be replaced by destruction), we need to go beyond guilt and move toward the condition of music (as the musical therapy recommended to Vertigo’s Scottie, haunted by his guilt, seems to point to). Rather than succumbing to nihilistic destruction, it is in attempting to be such a polyrhythmic, a-rhythmatic, and atonal musical communication that this explosive movie relates itself to, as well as distinguishes itself from, the atomic bomb.

Notes

[1] https://suddencardiacarrestuk.org/2023/09/cardiac-arrest-guilt/

[2] Gilles Deleuze has famously characterized such logic connecting in a new way unity and dispersal as a disjunctive synthesis.

The rhythm of anti-fascist protest: author’s own photo taken during fieldwork at a demonstration against Le Front national in Aubervilliers in 2017. 

This article is part of the b2o: an online journal special issue “(Rhy)pistemologies”, edited by Erin Graff Zivin. 

Deconstruction’s Hemiolas

Naomi Waltham-Smith

I

Steve McQueen’s 2020 film Mangrove is an historical drama about the racism of the criminal justice system and Black resistance against police repression in London in the late 1960s and early 1970s, through the prism of the trial of a group of demonstrators known as the Mangrove Nine. One scene set in April 1970 shows a young Darcus Howe, recently returned from Trinidad, trying to educate a distracted Frank Crichlow, the owner of the eponymous Caribbean community restaurant in Notting Hill that was subjected to a dozen police raids in the period January 1969 to July 1970: “Trinidad has been remade, Frank. I saw it. I heard it. The revolution has changed the very rhythm of the people’s speech, talking with greater deliberation, pausing before speaking and such. As if it has provoked an unconscious social patience. It was truly something to behold” (Siddons and McQueen n. d.: 34). It was fitting to cite this passage in a paper given in the city of Montréal.[1] The immediate spark for the Black power revolution in Trinidad was a demonstration against the visit of the Canadian Governor-General in solidarity with students from the West Indies at Sir George Williams University in Montréal who had been singled out for arrest after an occupation on campus protesting a professor’s racial prejudice.

Before he can invoke C. L. R. James, Howe is interrupted by the phone ringing. Crichlow’s speech, as he complains in vain to his local MP about police harassment of a Black business, is hurried and marked by increasing exasperation, cutting across the measured rhythm delivered by revolutionary action that Howe extols. Frustrated by the impunity with which the police engaged in racial targeting and violence, members of local community, together with Black Panther activists, organized a demonstration on August 9, 1970 at which the Mangrove Nine were arrested. They were later charged with incitement to riot in what was widely seen among Black communities and leftwing allies as a deliberate strategic attempt to put a halt to the emerging Black power movement in Britain. One of the striking features of the trial was that Howe, who would become a prominent anti-racist campaigner, writer, and broadcaster, and Altheia Jones-LeCointe, who was the leader of the Black Panther Movement, would choose—against the advice of the majority of the defendants’ white lawyers—the radical tactic of self-representation. Toward the end of the film, Howe, played by the British second-generation Jamaican actor Malachi Kirby, delivers what a newspaper at the time described as a “‘blockbuster’ defence closing speech” at the Old Bailey (Post Mercury 1971).

In the absence of surviving court transcripts, the screenplay drew on extensive documentary research: a newspaper that serialized the proceedings, other publications at the time, and the files of the radical white lawyer Ian Macdonald representing one of the other defendants which contained a copy of Howe’s closing statement (Siddons 2020). The screenwriters punctuate Howe’s speech with iterations of the phrase “it’s closing time” to signify that, while the case may be coming to an end, it marks the opening up not only of specific issues but also, irreparably, of British history as a whole to Black consciousness. It marks, in short, the necessary possibility that any closure or teleology be interrupted. This is what brings the rhythm of speech into critical dialogue with the rhythm of history’s unfolding and of the metaphysical unfolding of the concept of history. As if to analyze this asynchronicity, Howe prefaces his rhetorical triple strike with a reference to Hamlet, scribbled by his co-defendant and partner Barbara Beese on the top of his script and itself a syncopated repetition in that it displaces the white sovereign subject of politics and thereby disrupts the rhythm of Shakespeare’s line, itself an interruption of verse by prose: “The time is out of joint. O cursed spite, / That ever a Black people were born to set it right” (Siddons and McQueen n.d.: 87; emphasis mine).

This is a film in part about rhythm and its syncopation. A letter from 1946 to his second wife Constance Webb shows that Howe’s hero, C. L. R. James, is very much attuned to rhythm. While James is more interested in Shakespeare and other European examples, he shares with Caribbean musicians an awareness of how rhythm can not only materialize racial and class oppressions but also analyze them critically and express the struggle for liberation (James 1992: 151–52).[2] This may seem paradoxical for a close reader of Hegel such as James. The German philosopher reserves the radical capacity for openness to the other and for negativity to the white European, leaving Africa without relation and without history, as Rei Terada (2023) has argued. And yet James continues to think the syncopated rhythm of revolutionary history with, not against, speculative logic. His idiosyncratic reading of Hegel and its ramifications for his politics are beyond the scope of this article, except to note that, in his close readings of the Logic in his Notes on Dialectics, the self-movement of the dialectic in the mutual implication of subjective consciousness and object—what in the Preface to the Phenomenology is figured as “the immanent rhythm of the concept” (1977 [1807]: 36; trans. modified)—lies at the heart of James’s theory of historical development and working-class emancipation (1980 [1948]).[3] What I will, however, suggest is that the radical rhythmic action of the Mangrove Nine, on the streets and in court, participates in a heterodox syncopation of Hegel that has affinities with deconstruction, without collapsing into or being exhausted by it. There are, if you like, syncopated deconstructions.

In what follows, I will analyze the key sections from the Phenomenology’s Preface and then, with reference to a few passages where Derrida speaks to the notion of rhythm, I will assess to what extent the self-differentiation of Hegel’s speculative proposition might be said to anticipate or even already to march in step with deconstruction’s law of spacing. Baart Zandvoort (2020), for example, summarizes the issue at stake—namely, whether there is another difference whose contradiction would not be merely a moment on the way to self-identity—while also questioning whether Hegel and Derrida can be so cleanly distinguished on this point.

Where is the point where arrhythmia breaks away from rhythm to be located? How can we be sure the arrhythmic pulsation of the arrest will not be resolved once again in a more rhythmic rhythm? The impossibility of deciding on such a point, which Derrida elaborates again and again, is already fully prefigured in all its baffling complexity in Hegel (Zandvoort 2020: 368).

Especially given Derrida’s idea of the trace as re-marking, as a double strike, the thought would be that that a genuinely radical rhythm necessarily remains at least somewhat arrhythmic, that it would always already have to have interrupted even itself and have ruined any teleology—and, with it, any Eurocentrism—in advance. The idea that the concept is irreducibly syncopated is not unique to deconstruction. But deconstruction may nonetheless be the movement of philosophical thought that is most passionately moved by, even finds its own engine in, the rhythming of the concept—in its beating, spasming, jerking, pulsating, vibrating. In its syncopated re-marking, rhythm resists being subsumed by the totalizing and exclusionary point of the concept. This gives deconstruction an affinity with other heterodox modes of conceptualization—decolonial, Black-radical, anarchist, queer thought that is inextricably rhythmed with practice and syncopated against Hegel.

II

Hegel invokes the metaphor of rhythm as a way to distinguish two ways of thinking or reading. The difference between speculative and ordinary proposition is likened in §61 to “to the conflict that occurs in rhythm between meter and accent” (Hegel 1977 [1807]: 38).[4] The notion of rhythm had been introduced in §56, which asserts that logical necessity just is the “self-moving” and “self-differentiation” of the subject in its being its own concept (34), and in §60 the concept is said to “present itself as the coming-to-be of the object” (37). This “rhythm of the organic whole” is characterized as an interruption of what Hegel calls “picture-thinking [Vorstellung],” as well as of formalism. In each of those kinds of thinking there is a degree of stasis or stability. In the ordinary propositions of representational thinking, the subject relates to the content as predicate or accident, “remaining inertly over against it” as a “fixed self,” “passive” in the face of a multiplicity of passing predicates (37–38). Formalist argumentation, in §58 meanwhile, is “freedom from all content, and a sense of vanity towards it” (35), turning its presentation into the “principle of the content” (36).

Speculative thinking and reading, Hegel contends in §60, leaves this “solid ground” “shaken” (37). Once the subject has passed over into the predicate, it finds there is not a predicate as such but the substance of the concept and that, instead of being able to float freely above, it has entered and is absorbed into the content. As the predicate becomes the organic whole, it has the effect of weighing down thinking, depriving it of a sovereign liberty. The effect is akin to a rhythmic jolt. Thinking, which at the same time “in reality feels itself checked by the loss of the Subject” as something that is not already implicated in its own otherness, “missing it, is thrown back on the thought of the subject” (38). In §62, Hegel repeats the same propulsive metaphor in conclusion: “Thinking therefore loses the firm objective basis it had in the subject when, in the predicate, it is thrown back on to the subject, and when, in the predicate, it does not return into itself, but into the subject of the content” (38).

The speculative proposition is said to “destroy” the ordinary proposition in a “counterthrust [Gegenstoß]” against the distinction between subject and predicate that it presupposes (37–38). Katrin Pahl expressly reads speculative logic as a syncopation of ordinary representational thinking, disrupting its grammar’s triple strike of “A is B” by failing to deliver the predicate’s expected third-beat accent (2012: 111–12). Figured as a dance in Pahl’s analysis, speculative logic leaves the choreography tottering by throwing the subject back on the other foot, only for it to miss its own first-beat accent in an “awkward pirouette.” Pahl wants to read Hegel as a deconstructionist avant la lettre.

To assess the extent to which Hegel’s rhythm is already arrhythmic, let us read closely what he says in §61 about the rhythm of the concept and the conflict between meter and accent:

Rhythm results from the oscillating midpoint and the unification of the two. So, too, in the philosophical proposition the identification of Subject and Predicate is not meant to destroy the difference between them, which the form of the proposition expresses; their unity, rather, is meant to emerge as a harmony. The form of the proposition is the appearance of the determinate sense, or the accent that distinguishes its fulfillment; but that the predicate expresses the Substance, and that the Subject itself falls into the universal, this is the unity in which the accent dies away. (Hegel 1977 [1807]: 38)

Translating Hegel’s “schwebende Mitte” as “juggle,” Pahl contends that “this harmony, to be sure, amplifies dissonance, interference, and syncopation” and that “for Hegel, this conflict [between identity and difference] does not have to be (dis)solved but can be made productive as a harmonic disunity in oscillating motion” (2012: 109–10). On this interpretation, speculative logic balances the two rhythms by treating syncopation as a kind of counterbalancing act. And yet, Hegel openly concedes, this unifying harmony results in accent dying away. Notwithstanding the argument she wants to make about the priority of syncopation in Hegel’s conception of rhythm, Pahl’s metaphorical footwork illustrates precisely this point: that, far from creating, say, a hemiola, any off-beat accentuation actually falls away in the harmonious unity of a vibration. This raises an interesting question about the rhythm of reading—one which preoccupies Derrida in Geschlecht III (2020b) where he employs a tactic of leaping and zigzagging when reading Heidegger so as to head off the risk of collapsing its different and sometimes conflicting beats into consonance. When a text declares A to mean B, not simply does it allow for a strong reading “C” that it says without meaning to; it has perhaps already gone so far as to declare that A is C. Does this rhythm of reading Hegel itself exhibit the juggle that Pahl attributes to Hegel?

III

Writing in the left-hand column of Glas about the “ternary rhythm of the ‘potencies’” in Hegel’s philosophy of nature, Derrida takes a different view:

What Hegel says about the structure of the Potenz—which will also be true of the dialectical moment—explains to us how he, Hegel, intended to be read. One can transpose what he states about each Potenz to each organized totality of his text, which both repeats and anticipates, and yet marks a leap, a jump, a rupture in repetition, all the while ensuring the continuity of the passage and the homogeneity of a development. A plurality of continuous jolts, of uninterrupted jerks: such would be the rhythm. (Derrida 2020a: 121b)

Derrida’s reading depends on the way in which “the absolute totality arrests itself,” much as, in §58 of the Phenomenology, Hegel describes how the subject, in order to “sink [its] freedom in the content,” in a “refusal to intrude into the immanent rhythm of the concept,” must exercise a measure of restraint “which is itself an essential moment of the concept” (Hegel 1977 [1807]: 36).

Derrida analyzes the way in which the concept holds itself back under the heading of what he calls here and elsewhere “stricture,” a self-strangulation that makes the gl catch in the throat and which logic, he claims, “organizes Hegel’s text”:

Any commentary would disqualify itself that, qua commentary, did not follow its prescription or that dragged its feet hesitating between explication and rupture, within all the oppositional couples that sustain in general the history of the historians of philosophy. There is no possible displacement of this history without displacement . . . of what in Hegel’s text imposes this rule of reading, i.e. a displacement that itself would escape the dialectical law and its strict rhythm. It seems like we are not there yet; and this can no more be done in one blow than by continuous approach. The event cannot be as noisy as a bomb, as flashy or burning hot as metal placed in the fire. Even if it were an event it would here be—stricture against stricture—unobtrusive and marginal. (Derrida 2020a: 123–24a)

In the right-hand column, Derrida glosses the gl as

a voiceless voice stifling a sob or clot of milk in the throat, tickled laugh or gluey vomit of a gluttonous baby, the imperial flight of a bird of prey swooping down all of a sudden on the back of your neck, the sticky, frozen, cold piss name of an impassive Teutonic philosopher, with his well-known stammer, sometimes liquid and sometimes guttural and tetanic, with swollen or cooing goiter, everything that rings strange in the tympanic pit or canal, spit or paste on the soft palate, orgasm of the glottis or uvula, clitoral glue, abortion cloaca, spermchoke, rhythmic hiatus of an occlusion, staccatodance spasm of an eruptojaculation, syncopated valve of the tongue and lips, or a nail falling in the silence of the milky voice” (137–39b).

The displacement of Hegel’s rhythm would entail neither continuous transformation nor rupture but stricture against stricture, the syncopation of stricture. Instead of one rhythm against another, there would be arrhythmia against arrhythmia, and a redoubling of speculative logic. Or as he puts it in his introduction to Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s Typography, if rhythm’s double bind “is still too linked to opposition, contradiction, dialectic . . .  to that kind of undecidable that derives from calculation and from a nervous dialectical contraction . . . it would be necessary to think an other undecidable, to interrupt this double bind with a gap or a hiatus—and recognize in an arrhythmic caesura the respiration of rhythm” (Derrida 1989: 34–35). The “antirhythmic” rhythm that Derrida thinks with Hölderlin and Lacoue-Labarthe interrupts interruption as oppositionality (1989: 42).

Glas is replete with references with spasmodic rhythms. In a key passage it refers back to one of Derrida’s earliest and most extensive discussions of rhythm in “The Double Session,” which I am proposing to read as elaborating a way of breathing rhythm into arrhythmia, less as a transcription of the voice than of a machinic pneumatics. Rhythm is involved early on with a footnote to Émile Benveniste, who emphasizes its pre-Socratic conception as movement rather than form: “what . . . works toward the decapitation or ungluing of the text is the regular intervention of the blanks, the ordered return of the white spaces, the measure and order of dissemination, the law of spacing, the rhuthmos” (Derrida 1981: 171). Rejecting the hypothesis of an infinite undifferentiated polysemia, Derrida speaks of “a kind of poverty, I would even call it a very singular and very regular monotony,” which is rigorously distinguished from the totalizing power of the concept to pin down multiplicity to a single point (251). Rather, the blank folds back upon or re-marks the play of meaning. This mark, imprint, or strike belongs to the series that it might be added to or subtracted from without being its transcendental origin or end while pointing to the blanks, gaps, or spacing between the terms in the series (252–254). It thus “re-marks” the syncopations that make the series possible through the relations among the elements that unite them in their dispersion—syncopations on account of which seriality, as identity, is impossible.

Rhythm is also at the front of Derrida’s mind in Geschlecht III where his theme is, as already mentioned, reading “in abrupt jumps, leaps, and [this time—NWS] zigzags” (2020b: 1).  Setting deconstruction against the rhythm of metaphysics, he upbraids Heidegger for gathering the plurality of poetic tones into the harmonious resonance of the fundamental tone or Einklang, which literally means sounding as one (71). Analyzing the distinction that Geschlecht III draws between polysemia and dissémination, Geoffrey Bennington provocatively suggests that deconstruction’s rhythmic re-marking or re-striking may yet invite a closer comparison than Derrida might want with the harmony of metaphysical logic.

We might still wonder if the monos of the monotonous re-mark does not invite a more generous re-reading against all the unifying or gathering motifs that Derrida is so suspicious of in Heidegger, and even whether that kind of monotony (or writing, textuality, trace, dissemination, différance . . . ) is really so clearly distinguishable from what Heidegger repeatedly characterizes in terms of oneness, unity, uniqueness, Einklang, and so on. (Bennington 2020: 435)

IV

Is there, though, a political urgency to syncopate monotonies? For Rebecca Comay and Frank Ruda (2018), the syncope in the speculative dialectic is re-marked by a mark—the dash that comes at the Phenomenology’s closing time, signaling, if not a lapse of consciousness, then digression and also propulsion. But one ought not be seduced by its monotonous regularity into reducing the Derridean blank to the simplicity of self-propelling speculative thought, “having its otherness within itself” (Hegel 1977 [1807]: 34). One consequence of Derrida’s rhythming of arrhythmia, his syncopated stricture, is that there is no “the” deconstruction that would march to the same beat but rather multiple deconstructions each choreographed to rhythms out of step with one another and even with themselves, a series of deconstructions only by virtue of the spacings that separate them. Every other is every bit other.

These multiple, syncopated deconstruction give rise to a vertiginous precipitation, as Derrida might put it—as the kind of accelerated rush to close embodied in the hemiola as we approach a cadence. Rushing headlong into these syncopations, then, Jean-Luc Nancy’s rhythm of the senses—which must also be understood as the syncopations that disjoin them—and his deconstruction of Hegelian dialectic do not coincide with Derridean dissémination but tend more toward an “archaic propulsion” or primordial recitative that opens up the space of the subject (Nancy 2013: 254–55). Nancy’s transcendental vibration is rhythmed, Bennington suggests, even to the point of noise—“rhythm’s scum,” he quips (Bennington 2011: 19). Even Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe’s twin embraces of rhythm as condition of possibility subtly beat against each other, one drawn toward haptocentrism, the other psychoanalysis.

Then there is Hélène Cixous’s virtuosic meditation on the rhythms of puppetry, in which every person and object involved in the theatre is imagined as being “put into movement by . . . the gentle shocks of the puppeteer” (Cixous 2016 [1999]: 66). Puppetry is a metaphor not only for writing, reading, and staging but further, I am suggesting, for speculative rhythm. The playwright dreams of being a drumskin on which characters stamp out a rhythm with puppet steps (64). The movement of the puppet, “so abandoned to the motilities and movements of its puppeteer that it no longer bangs at the edges,” enjoys a suspended freedom, not weighed down by having to tap its feet on the ground (68). Equally, on its immobile face there is “a scrolling through of all the great tragic grimaces” (72). The puppet must be “two-but-one” in a simple, exact unfolding of the dance, without jerking (70–72). But it also has a double rhythm that evokes the blanks of “The Double Session” without collapsing into them: “The puppet writes with time, in full intervals, in (invisible) whites [blancs], separating and tying together the regular full stops, the sentences, the lines, the bonds of passion, drawing the space from which will burst forth the shout, the crisis, the access, disjoining, cutting” (Cixous 2016 [1999]: 72).

Cixous’s description of punctuation as outburst, as the release of vibrational anticipation, like “the leap of the cat crouching for a long time in the vibrating body” (72), brings me to my final example. Fred Moten’s explicitly political filtering of the Derridean deconstruction of dialectical oscillation as a “deconstruction of the machinery of exclusion” in his reading of Amiri Baraka’s essay “The Burton Greene Affair” (Moten 2003: 125). In Moten’s reading, Baraka’s essay is all cross-rhythm, syncopation, and stammering in a recalibration of the “rhythmic marking of racial difference” (127). In turn, the vibration of improvisation and Black aesthetics in Moten’s thought is set—in syncopated resonance with and resistance to Derridean deconstruction—against the “interminable and systematic opposition and oscillation” of European metaphysics between identity and difference, collection and division (132), which, he reminds us, “begins and ends at the illusion of the originary” (130). In an interesting re-punctuation of Derrida’s assault on the gathering power of the logos, Moten’s focus is the question of “ensemble.” Via this concept, he reminds us of the political stakes of rhythm and its deconstruction: that the question of rhythm and its interruption is also that of community and belonging, of being together. Situating Baraka’s particular variant of nationalism amid the neocolonial capture of Third World liberation movements, amid “a certain economic world picture in which the dual motion of fragmentation and homogenization, exclusionary differentiation and metaphysical sameness, are evident” (130), Moten underscores the possibility of “obfuscate[ing] the ensemble in the spirit of an other tradition, one that would read, reflect, and transcend the interinanimation of being, language, race, and (the crisis of European) humanity” (131).  This ensemble, he exhorts, “will have been given in the cut between rhythms . . . in the arrhythmia that separates these rhythms” (127).

The ensemble of hemiolas that I have enumerated—more in precipitous haste toward closing time than measured rhetorical strikes—likewise resists any unity or gathering into a harmonious resonance. There is no “the” deconstruction of Hegelian rhythm. And deconstruction and Black radical thought, if they make an alliance, it is not in a traditional convergence of struggles under a single banner or a unity of tactics. Rather, it comes only in the negotiations, the tension of one thread or string beating against the other, even as they become more or less tightly entangled. If there is any single strike, any monotony, among this scattered or shattered set of arrhythmias, it is found only in the syncopations that separate their deconstructions. And politics perhaps just is the insistent sustaining of these hemiolas.

References

“Why I’ll fight the heavy mob.” 1971. Post Mercury, December 17. The National Archives, catalogue ref: MEPO 31/21. Accessed March 1, 2024. https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/mangrove-nine-protest/source-eight/.

Bennington, Geoffrey. 2011. “In Rhythm: A Response to Jean-Luc Nancy,” SubStance 40, no. 3: 18–19.

Bennington, Geoffrey. 2020. “Geschlecht pollachos legetai: Translation, Polysemia, Dissemination,” Philosophy Today 64, no. 2: 423–39.

Cixous, Hélène. 2016 [1999]. “Theatre Surprised by Puppets” [Le Théâtre surpris par les marionettes].” In Cixous, Politics, Ethics and Performance: Hélène Cixous and the Théâtre du Soleil, bilingual edition, edited and translated by Lara Stevens, 64–79.Melbourne: re.press.

Comay, Rebecca and Frank Ruda. 2018. The Dash: The Other Side of Absolute Knowing. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Derrida, Jacques. 1981. “The Double Session.” In Dissemination, translated by Barbara Johnson, 176–285. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Derrida, Jacques. 1989. “Désistance.” In Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, translated by Christopher Fynsk, 1–42. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Derrida, Jacques. 2020a. Clang. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington and David Wills. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Derrida, Jacques. 2020b. Geschlecht III: Sex, Race, Nation, Humanity, edited by Geoffrey Bennington, Katie Chenoweth, and Rodrigo Therezo, translated by Katie Chenoweth and Rodrigo Therezo. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Hegel, G. W. F. 1977 [1807]. Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ilieva, Evgenia. 2024. “Notes on Dialectics: C. L. R. James’s Hegel.” Hegel Bulletin 45, no. 1: 144–65.

James, C. L. R. 1980 [1948]. Notes on Dialectics: Hegel, Marx, Lenin. Westport CT: Lawrence Hill & Co.

James, C. L. R. 1992. “Letters to Constance Webb.” In The C. L. R. James Reader, ed. Anna Grimshaw, 151–152. Oxford: Blackwell.

Mahabir Joy A. I. 2002. “Rhythm and Class Struggle: The Calypsoes of David Rudder.” Jouvert: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies 6, no. 3: 1–22.

Moten, Fred. 2003. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2013. “Récit Recitation Recitative.” In Speaking of Music: Addressing the Sonorous, edited by Keith Chapin and Andrew T. Clark, 242–55. New York: Fordham University Press.

Pahl, Katrin. 2012. Tropes of Transport: Hegel and Emotion. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Siddons, Alastair. 2020. “How Research Allowed Co-Writer Alastair Siddons to Nail Every Detail for Steve McQueen’s ‘Mangrove.’” Interview with Joey Moser. Awards Daily, November 25. Accessed March 1, 2024. https://www.awardsdaily.com/2020/11/20/how-research-allowed-to-alastair-siddons-to-nail-every-detail-for-steve-mcqueens-mangrove/.

Siddons, Alastair and Steve McQueen. n.d. Mangrove screenplay (Small Axe Films Ltd.). Accessed March 1, 2024. http://tvwriting.co.uk/tv_scripts/2020/Drama/Small_Axe_1x01_-_Mangrove.pdf.

Terada, Rei. 2023. Metaracial: Hegel, Antiblackness, and Political Identity. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Zantvoort, Bart. 2020. “Arrested Development: On Hegel, Heidegger and Derrida.” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 28, no. 3: 350–69.

Notes

[1]   I first presented this essay at the 2024 Annual Conference of the American Comparative Literature Association as part of a seminar, organized by Erin Graff Zivin and Jonathan Leal, on “(Rhy)pistemologies: Thinking Through Rhythm.” I am most grateful to the comments and questions made by participants and auditors.

[2]   On the political significance of rhythm in Caribbean music, especially Trinidadian calypso, see Mahabir 2002.

[3]   For a discussion of James’s reading of Hegel’s Logic, see Ilieva 2024.

[4]   Throughout I have modified the translation of this text in various places for clarity.

Overlooking the Sierra Gorda Queretana. Photo Credit: Alex E. Chávez.

This article is part of the b2o: an online journal special issue “(Rhy)pistemologies”, edited by Erin Graff Zivin.

Sonorous Present

Alex E. Chávez

Often, we think of elegies as commemorations, as moments of sadness.

But really, an elegy is about the praise of something.

You can’t mourn something you don’t love.

— Roger Reeves

break

Art both feels and is witness to how life unfolds as a relational universe of individuated and collective experiences that together form the political subject. Art can intervene across this social surround, across literal and figurative borders—the divides of nation-states, the threshold between life and death. Art bears witness. Art bears witness. Art takes up the call to elevate the seemingly ordinary—like mourning and grief—those moments when we all feel that lump in the throat. Knot in the chest. Knees buckle. Chin trembles. Hollow stomach—an emotive and cognitive stream that flows, empties out, elsewhere, beyond “here,” leaving only tracings of its own imaginings.

Like many, a fair amount of trauma lives in me. Most of it concerns death and dying. My sister—a fatal victim of domestic violence, gunned down in our home when I was eleven. My mother—died suddenly in Mexico fifteen years ago. My father also died suddenly two years ago. This, it seems, has shaped much of what I have created over the years as an artist and musician, for nothing is quite what it seems when you are mourning. This is often so because the proper space to grieve escapes you. Such has been my experience. In those moments, I found myself taking care of and being strong for those around me, keeping it together for them. Thus, I’ve held space for myself elsewhere—creating through loss, through the disturbance, at the prophetic edge of wreckage, when things aren’t quite right. Truth be told, we all move through loss in our own way. This struggle takes on many forms.

And so, over these past few years—particularly in the wake of COVID-19 and the death of my father—I crafted a suite of compositions attuned to my own grief; songs of border-crossings, sunrises, and mournings: Sonorous Present. This was/is a mediation,

a eulogy

an apology

a conversation

provocation

oral history

fiction

confession

testimonio

an offering

an attempt, an urge, an inclination

A center

An edge

A Border

A Break

Thinker, writer, and philosopher Fred Moten (2003) speaks to us about the break, the unique epistemological standpoint where we construct other possible worlds through art, worlds that perform the necessary work of amplifying presence and choreographed collective memory that offers political possibility. The break in which broken bodies and broken memories dwell, defy, endure, refuse, bear witness, and heal. These compositions broke my heart. Yet, I believe we all need to dwell in heartache sometimes. It has the capacity to open a space for healing. And so, Sonorous Present invites listeners into this space, this break—to meditate, to mourn, to celebrate a memory.

Indeed, aesthetic enactments put on display lived-in worlds of attunements—interpretive, imaginative, relational, contingent, improvisational experiments that louden the resonance of memories (Berlant and Stewart 2019). In this instance, my memories of music, migration, rhythms, scenes, encounters, and grief have come to form and inform my creative process. This is what Gloria Anzaldúa (2015) elsewhere describes as conocimiento:

Skeptical of reason and rationality, conocimiento questions conventional knowledge’s current categories, classifications, and contents … . A form of spiritual inquiry, conocimiento is reached via creative acts—writing, art-making, dancing, healing, teaching, meditation, and spiritual activism—both mental and somatic (the body, too, is a form as well as a site of creativity). (119)

As epistemic practice, conocimiento grounds theory in everyday life, interweaving history, art, culture, the compositional, world-making, and the self, forming the basis of what she terms autohistoria-teoría. She continues:

Autohistoria is a term I use to describe the genre of writing about one’s personal and collective history using fictive elements, a sort of fictionalized autobiography or memoir; and autohistoria-teoría is a personal essay that theorizes (Anzaldúa 2009b: 578).

This set of approaches is in dialogue with the adjacent scholarly project of ethnography, in particular auto-ethnography, wherein the present-tense social entanglement of our storied selves and others’ stories is the space where ethnography becomes “a point of impact, curiosity, encounter” (Stewart 2007: 5). However, autohistoria-teoría includes and expands beyond autobiography and cultural narratives: theorizing from the margins of scholarly convention, opening up a bridge between art and scholarship, voicing knowledges and experiences that open up sites of struggle and connection. Sonorous Present is inspired by these ideas.

More broadly, my ethnographic engagements concern regimes and practices of amplifying, surveilling, and displacing sound, particularly as these intersect with histories of migration and racialization of Latinxs in the United States. I’ve approached these topics with an interest in sound and aurality in the borderlands to consider: what sonorous phenomena abound/resonate as you move through/across borders? And as we listen, what assumptions are we making, what aural connections? And how are these evaluative processes shaped by social relations? What histories undergird them? And how might all of this evidence the way “sound appears simultaneously as a force that constitutes the world and a medium for constructing knowledge about it” (Ochoa 2014, 3).

These questions are quite prescient, particularly given the intensified attacks on asylum seekers and migrant communities amidst the challenges of transnational migration. Most recently, we are bearing witness to mass deportation efforts pulling children out of schools, families from their homes, and people from their places of work; the stationing of federal troops along the U.S.-Mexico border; and assaults on sanctuary cities. All of this currently made possible by a series of unlawful gambits and the hostile takeover of the administrative state in the service of “totalitarian fantasies of racial, gendered, and sexual purification” in which, for instance, shipping migrants to Guantanamo Bay and rescinding the birthright citizenship clause of the 14^th amendment are key components (Rosas 2022: 184). Relatedly, the discourses that brace these extreme actions, I’ve argued elsewhere, are part of a long-standing rhetorical project, or a well-worn genre in US-American racial talk, evincing a deep-seated discursive enterprise that has produced “the savage” or “illegal” in the American racial imagination as necessary to the project of white supremacy. In Aurality, Ana María Ochoa explores how listening has been central to the production of notions of language, music, sound, and the voice—determining the politics of life at the juncture of the human and nonhuman and in service of the construction of notions of personhood. Here, I am also reminded of Sylvia Wynter’s writings concerning the violence that the genre of the human as man performs as ontological ethno-class index for the species. These works help particularize Western-centric voice studies’ ostensibly universal claims; that is, they provincialize Western ontologies regarding the voice in order to understand how both race and language are situated enactments within specific histories of European colonialism and its various modes of governance. Returning to migration and the U.S.-Mexico border, anti-immigrant rhetoric performs the cultural work of perpetually positioning migrants—particularly from Latin America and the global south—outside the boundaries of national belonging, a type of linguistic violence that goes hand-in-hand with the US-Mexico border as a physical site, as a literal theater of violence.

My ethnographic work has born witness to this spectacular terror, yet beyond telling the story of suffering in a country that outstrips (Robbins 2013), I’ve loudly voiced stories of intimacy, of struggle, of refusal. For a critical aurality is necessary—an always urgent listening to the whole of America amid the deafening swell of a lethal white supremacy, a critical aurality that beckons us to situate necro-subjection to the center of analysis. Or as Gilberto Rosas (2022) describes:

Making dead in order to live is part of a project of documenting and expressing contemporary brutalities without exacerbating the obscene suffering of border crossers and demands to revictimize them both in legal proceedings and engaged traditions of scholarship, so that we analyze, recognize, and ultimately struggle against violence and oppression, both spectacular and mundane. (177)

Making dead to let live is attuned to conditions of existence at the margins wherein those subjected as illegal, criminal, etc. “are situated socially, materially, discursively, and ideologically closer and closer to death” in order that they may live (190).

 Although most of my immediate family—my mother, my father, and older sister—are now dead, they lived. They survived the border. Their stories of crossing always seemed impossible to me: my mother crossed Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua/El Paso, Texas in the trunk of a car; my father survived the crossing in Ojinaga, Chihuahua and a week-long trek across West Texas in the dead of winter. They lived. These stories defined much of who my mother and father were. They’ve long become a part of me. And over the years, sounds have attached themselves to them. Sonorous Present is the culmination of these memories, it chronicles this universe of story, of family, of borders, of trauma, of migration—through sound, lyric, poetry, theory, verse, ethnography, autohistoria, and rhythm. A break to remember, mourn, and heal.

qualia

Ethnography is an affective experience, always in tension with the seemingly elusive attempt to render the feeling of being there in textual form. Songwriting is not too dissimilar, yet in being less script-centric, it opens up the possibility of translating and expressing experience through sonic and performative registers. Ultimately, Sonorous Present is an album—an aesthetic statement that integrates my experience and talents as an artist, educator, musician, and scholar in order to reimagine what a studio recording should sound like and the forms scholarship should take. While artistic and scholarly practices are often treated as discrete domains, Sonorous Present manifests robust articulations between heterogeneous modalities with little regard to disciplinary distinctions. In this way, it puts on display the possibilities of multi-modal scholarship and ethnographic songwriting to expand our understanding of what arts-based methodologies can achieve.

Similar to a conventional ethnography, an album requires refinement and attention to production. Further, “if ethnography is understood not as a science but as an interpretive art,” to quote Kristina Jacobsen (2017), “then it is in the interpretation and the craft of writing about a lifeworld with compassion, depth, and nuance where the greatest skill—and challenge—arguable lies” (116). In my case, my ethnographic songwriting was an attempt to honor the memories of family members that have passed, touch on the topic and politics of immigration, source the sounds of Mexican folk traditions, and connect this world of personal story and sound to my long-standing research on both sides of the border. And so, what began as an experimental, collaborative, and improvised performance in 2019—inspired by the music and poetics of my book Sounds of Crossing: Music, Migration, and the Aural Poetics of Huapango Arribeño (2017)—was subsequently reimagined as a studio album in collaboration with Grammy Award-winning producer Quetzal Flores. Recorded in Los Angeles and Chicago, dynamic explorations of Mexican Regional and Latin American sounds and traditions are deepened on Sonorous Present by avant-garde jazz arrangements and field recordings, alongside poems written and recited by renowned author and poet Roger Reeves. Featuring luminaries from the worlds of traditional Mexican son, jazz, and R&B—including, Martha González, Aloe Blacc, Matt Ulery, Ramón Gutiérrez, and Lucía Gutiérrez Rebolloso, among many others—this suite explores an aesthetic terrain that is worlds away from the projects I am most known for. Nevertheless, I source the sounds of Mexican musical traditions I am familiar with and have been a student of for years, including huapango huasteco, huapango arribeño, and son jarocho. These sounds are rooted in communities of practice that have long utilized music as a form of healing in the face of brutal circumstances. In the end, to honor and grieve—for me—was to fully, honestly, and vulnerably engage in a process of elevating the seemingly ordinary—like grief—through music, rhythm, and verse; that is, to lend sounded significance to the everyday of migration and amplify the desire to mourn through “dramaturgical voice” (Ihde 2007: 167). 

Writing and recording Sonorous Present provided an avenue to deeply explore co-creative methods alongside producer Quetzal Flores. While I have worked with producers in the past and have recorded with countless other music projects, Sonorous Present is the first to solely feature my music and my stories. Beneath the surface of what we were able to craft exists a well of musical and cultural reference that—with the aid of Flores—was always in play, as we both pushed at the edges of traditional sounds and ethnography. We electrified traditional instruments like the guiarra de son; recorded, sampled, and looped the zapateado dance footwork directly from the wooden tarima stomp box; incorporated field-recordings from my research into the sonic and compositional scaffolding of several songs; re-interpreted Mexican son rhythms in asymmetrical time signatures; and combined traditional instruments with seemingly disparate elements. These strategies were integral to our multi-modal approach to songwriting as ethnographic and ethnography as aesthetic—all part of a sonic border-crossing methodology through which we explored a world of sonic possibility unachievable through conventional ethnographic means alone.

cómplices de luto (accomplices in mourning)

In my writing and songcraft, one question remains constant, a concern that continues to shape my thinking: what makes this sound possible? An adjacent query emerges in response: what are the possibilities of (this) sound? Sonorous Present crosses the emotional landscape of these ideas, telling of migrant lives across seemingly disparate places through sound, song, poetry, rhythm, and lyric. And indeed, as Claudia Rankine (2014) reminds us, America’s lyric is racism, and so we must continue to grapple with it in the face of being told to accept brutality as the condition of “how you are a citizen” and to “Let it go. Move on” (151). Sonorous Present refuses to move on.

Sonorous: capable of sound; in the offing.

Present: occurring now; impermanent; gift.

Sound must exist in time. “Acoustic feedback in the process of auditory inscription” (Ochoa 2014: 82) is constituted by the interdiscursive temporal movement and interplay between repetition, replay, and relay. Yet, in inviting listeners into the space of “lasting presence” (Chion 2016: 29), Sonorous Present asks us to stay put (in space) and to be still (in time) in order to honor the process and possibility of (sonic) mourning in a bordered world. For amid the repeating violences and numbing political rhythms so much a part of life in the United States of America, we must pursue conceptual, political, and artistic breaks in order to get free. Resting in the break to heal, to mourn, to remember, enacts an analytical push away from normative analysis of what counts as research within dominant knowledge formations. Resting in the break is an attempt at sounding out the possibilities of the unrecognized, of the unheard and thus carries with it longstanding “legacies as minoritarian subjects of/with the dead in constant acts of mourning (Ruiz 2024: 5).

My dead. Personal, political, unconventional, communal, past, present, and future-oriented, Sonorous Present seeks to mourn in common.

References

Anzaldúa, Gloria. 2009. “now let us shift … the path of conocimiento … inner works, public acts.” In The Gloria Anzaldua reader, ed. Ana Louise Keating. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Anzaldúa, Gloria. 2015. Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity,  Spirituality, Reality.  Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Berlant, Lauren and Kathleen Stewart. 2019. The Hundreds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Chávez, Alex E. 2017. Sounds of Crossing: Music, Migration, and the Aural Poetics of Huapango Arribeño. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Chávez, Alex E., and Gina M. Pérez. 2022. Ethnographic Refusals, Unruly Latinidades.Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press.

Chion, Michael. 2016. Sound: An Acoulogical Treatise. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Ihde, Don. 2007. Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Jacobsen, Kristina. 2017. “Songwriting as Ethnographic Practice: How Stories Humanize”. In Arts-Based Research Education: Foundations for Practice, Second Edition, ed. Melissa Cahnmann-Taylor and Richard Siegesmund. London: Routledge.

Moten, Fred. 2003. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Ochoa Gautier, Ana María. 2014. Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth- Century Colombia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Rankine, Claudia. 2014. Citizen: An American Lyric. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press.

Robbins, Joel. 2013. “Beyond the Suffering Subject: Toward an Anthropology of the Good.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19 (3): 447–462.

Rosas, Gliberto: 2022. “Witnessing in Brown: On Making Dead to Let Live” In Ethnographic Refusals, Unruly Latinidades, ed. Alex E. Chávez and Gina M. Pérez. Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press.

Ruiz, Sandra. 2024. Left Turns in Brown Study. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Stewart, Kathleen. 2007. Ordinary Affects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Wynter, Sylvia. 2003. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation–An Argument.”  The New Centennial Review 3(3): 257-337.

This article is part of the b2o: an online journal special issue “(Rhy)pistemologies”, edited by Erin Graff Zivin. 

Drone, Groove, and the Specificity of Musical Sound – A Conversation

Michael Gallope and Edwin Hill

May 9, 2024

USC Dornsife Experimental Humanities Lab/Art Share LA

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and readability. 

Edwin Hill: Thank you. That was beautiful, powerful. I’m not sure beautiful is too simple of a word—unless we think about also the expansiveness of beauty that Maya [Kronfeld] brought up with respect to avant-garde experimental music practice, which is definitely something you’re engaged in. I had a couple of questions that I wanted to start with and then open it up for discussion. And the questions are really built from the discussion that we’ve already been having—really all semester—as we engaged with all of your work, but also, today, with different topics that came up. And in a lot of this, I’m borrowing the language [from the] the words that have been coming up.

I wanted to start asking you to talk more about what it means to perform in an academic space, which, on one level is a surface question: Why is it meaningful to you? What sorts of things does it allow for? And why do you think it’s typically so difficult to do? But beyond the surface level, of course, as we got a chance to think about reading your work and the work of others—it relates to a “deep refrain”—and your thought that has to do with the interrogation of the paradoxes—or impasses or seeming irreconcilable relations—between musical praxis, the limits of language, ineffability, and the production of knowledge. And that’s what we’ve been talking about a lot. As Erin [Graff Zivin] was summarizing our discussions from this morning, she talked about the question of what’s legible or audible, or what is otherwise able to be registered—maybe not always in expressible and satisfying ways. But what do we do with the break, between what’s registered in hearing and playing and what’s registered in discourse? I see this performance as engaging with this, so I want to note, also for all of you—that at one point Michael said—I don’t want to talk. I was like, oh, he’s really struggling with this thing right now, you know what I mean? At one point you wanted to make a point not to speak, as maybe a continuation of this interrogation that you’re doing in written words, [as a] kind of performance strategy, with what you shared and how we experienced. So, what does it mean to perform in an academic space and what can you say about it?

Michael Gallope: Thanks so much, Edwin. I think it’s a really tricky question. From the most sociological level, music departments are not places where there’s a lot of creative work, right? It is mostly a kind of cultural industry for music education and classical music—training musicians in a professional context. There are some institutions that do jazz extremely well in different kinds of ways. It’s interesting—Why is that the case? Why could you get an MFA in poetry and do avant-garde poetry in an academic context in the 60s and 70s, but in music, the institutions were based in an academic style of composition, and this was racialized in a very particular way in the United States to exclude figures like Ornette Coleman who probably could have worked as professors—or Alice Coltrane—but would not have been hired [at the time]. So, when we think about music and the production of knowledge, there are very specific historical questions about the way these institutions have been built that have made certain kinds of legitimacy—and again, in a way that is deeply racialized—that made that [legitimacy] complicated and difficult and unequal. It’s an ideological question, in an institutional sense.

And me being the dialectician I am, I think, okay—so what about me personally? How do I feel about that? Michael [Love] and Maya and I were talking about this outside. I had become very used to doing my music in another context and doing my creative work in another context at Zebulon over here [in Los Angeles], or at cultural institutions, or clubs, or whatever, in places where the whole semiosis of the scene and the situation makes sense. And the kind of music I play is not going to support me, so I never looked at it as something that I could commit myself to, but it always existed in a separate space for me and in a separate social space for me. One of the things I couldn’t help reflect on, seeing the incredibly powerful performances [over the past two days], is first of all, all the work and the artistry that Maya and Michael did to synthesize that duet, and to have their work speak to each other. But just the techne and the existential intensity of presenting work in a context where—maybe this is just me being the grizzled academic that I’ve become—but it is very easy to sit here and give a paper and talk about ideas, and it is very challenging to present work in a context that doesn’t historically seem to square with what that object is.

That’s been an instructive lesson for me in terms of just thinking about music. Because the fear and anxiety and intensity of just doing it, that is, to me, the ontology of the medium. If you take that out, if you take the risk that one puts in—the risk of humiliation, the sense that you’re going to totally fuck your life up by committing to music—if you’re going to go down that road, you’re being honest with what music is—which is this thing that reveals Being, right? It reveals the deepest pain, and it’s trauma and it’s inequity, and it’s utopia, and it’s ecstasy, and it’s these things layered together in all kinds of uncomfortable ways that we don’t even—we’re not very good at even interpreting it most of the time. And I think maybe there is something about the way academic spaces have been set up that are just—it’s easier to domesticate the art form than it is to live with some of the political, social, [and] erotic intensity of [music’s ineffability] that is just part of the production of the art. And so, I think, in all my work, I’m trying to recall that. And in this most recent book [The Musician as Philosopher: New York’s Vernacular Avant-Garde, 1958–78] I’m trying to think like that when I go through the archive. I try to listen for those traces of people feeling like their life is at stake in order to get their thing out there.

Hill: I think that’s really powerful. Sometimes I wonder if, on the one hand, we’re thinking about, bringing the academic and this other space together, and then sometimes there’s part of me that’s thinking—but maybe it’s nice if they’re not [together]. Maybe this other place is this safer place or allows me room to do things I couldn’t do and I kind of like that. And maybe I don’t want to introduce myself as a professor, you know, because that will mess the vibe up, you know what I mean? And I don’t want people to think I know things, for example. Do you struggle or think about that aspect also? That’s part of the risk of bringing these together is that maybe that other world is now your world, and therefore it doesn’t serve as a refuge in the same way as before.

Gallope: This is interesting; it has changed for me over the last ten years. When I first started, I had this very paranoid [impulse]—okay, I’m not going to tell anybody if I go on tour or do something. And at the time I was playing with this Sierra Leonean musician, Janka Nabay, and I was managing. And it was an intense kind of West African, Afro-beat style of electronic dance music, and I was playing keyboards in it. And it was just as far away from the academic world as you could imagine in terms of the situations that we were in, and so I had become very used to separating them. And then, maybe it is something about being in a state university, the University of Minnesota, and also being in a department community who all have different perspectives on what means to be, a lefty, right? And there are a lot of students that actually don’t see a distinction [between the academic and non-academic world]. They do creative work. They live praxis in all these different ways. And so, when they meet you and they’re in a teaching space and then they see you in a show, they’re like—this is great. So, part of it was the community wore down some of those boundaries in Minneapolis, where the public institution—my attitude became that it’s less of a distinctive realm. It’s more like a public good. And in order for it to remain a public good, it should be available in many ways as possible, and I don’t want to draw boundaries around it. And but it took me a while to come to that.

Hill: I’m glad you are talking about your other experiences too, and just like the programming of this event has been kind of interesting—the musical playlists that’ve gotten put together and I feel like there is a logic or coherence that maybe is coming after the fact. I want to talk about groove. Can we talk about groove? And grooves? I was thinking about the talks this morning about fragments and shattered pieces, and I started wondering about grooves as sites of a kind of cut, but that are also where and how things might fit together. And Maya was talking a little bit about groove also in that presentation. We can think of course, along with Alex Weheliye about the imbrication of rhythm and grooves of history and sound technologies and we can ask how rhythmic feeling good can serve in the suturing of historic trauma, the suturing of the body as was mentioned this morning, and some of the comments are of an aesthetic, but also maybe suturing the human and the machine. So that’s a general question I wanted to ask. Since we’ve been discussing repair, how do grooves do reparative work, how they afford possibilities of reconciliation or perhaps open possibilities for reincarnation after death? And more specifically, I would love to hear you talk about how groove, rhythmic feeling, a certain kind of way, how grooves manifest and work within the aesthetic, temporal, and spatial contexts of drone music, experience, and performing. I am also curious about the performance of the music. How does your music put you in a groove, a groove of Being, a groove of feeling, and also speculation? But take it wherever you want.

Gallope: What I played today didn’t have much groove obviously. It is sort of anti-groove. There is a lot of emptiness, and something happens, and you don’t really know what it is. And there’s language-like stuff, maybe. I don’t know if it is a conversation. I want to create something that I don’t understand. So that’s what I’m searching for, and it’s very much about reincarnation. I’m searching for—Michael [Love] and I were talking about creating metaphysics. Sometimes it’s not going to happen, you know? Otherwise, it wouldn’t… that’s what music is—trying to find that. I think there is a parallel to groove. I find groove very hard. I have played a lot of dance music. And I am the kind of person—after I’ve recorded, I’m doing little edits, and pushing stuff behind the beat just because I can’t [play it the way I’d like]—[so] I [edit it in the way I] want it to be—[and, when I listen, I think] oh my gosh, I wish I could do that live. [I want to] just have that kind of—whatever it is. Maybe if I had a bigger body and I had more [of a sense of] relaxation or something, I could find that side of the groove that was a little behind the beat, and I just can’t do it. But when it works—it’s like, you know, consciousness is open or something. There is this disclosure when it’s happening and when it’s dancing. I was feeling that a lot, you know, during various moments like of this collaboration [with Janka Nabay]. And it’s about volume and there’s a fragility to it. And then when it’s locked in, it’s like—I don’t know—there’s the historicity in terms of forms, in terms of the break, in terms of Blackness and the way we were talking about Michael Sawyer’s talk earlier, with respect to [Fred] Moten and all of these metaphors of formal displacement and thinking. When that groove is truly alive, that thinking is suddenly three-dimensional to me and there’s a whole lot happening. But it’s very tricky to put it into shape. I guess I’m very respectful of people that specialize in it because it’s an incredible thing to find that attunement, and to be able to be with it. There’s a certain, almost passivity to it—like letting it happen.

Hill: After you performed, I almost wanted to say that it was glorious, but then I was remembering… Alice Coltrane, Ornette Coleman… it could make you hear a musical history, when you listen to electronic music and its experimental dimensions and you think about the play of tone that’s happening with artists that you’re citing, and it was really interesting to think about these kind of genealogies. But I also know that you push back against a utopian notion of music, or an essentializing of music. One way I read your work is that it’s kind of a critique of the audio-visual litany that Jonathan Sterne talks about and the way the music is kind of figured in a certain way with respect to Judeo-Christian philosophies and histories. Before we turn it over, I wondered if you could talk a little bit more about the notion of paradox within this.

Gallope: I’ve been accused of being a sonic or a musical exceptionalist—maybe I am sort of—but I don’t even know what that means. I think, in my work, I am trying to [respond to my past experience] going to school and learning about semiotics and being a part of this “linguistic turn” and using language as a metaphor and model for everything. I think part of me was trying to push against that and understand the specificity of sound in its inconsistency—how it operates. Because it’s obviously filled with all kinds of language-like things, but there’s also a difficulty that one has—I always say it’s like an embarrassment. Okay, you could talk about music for a while, but when you press play, or Maya goes and sits at the piano, or Michael turns on the [iPad], there’s just pppshhhhh—just this surplus. It’s impossible to remember, you know? It’s just like, oh, I forgot how complicated that groove is when we were breaking down. Just looping this single thing [as Alex Chávez asked us to do yesterday] and finding the multidimensionality in it. I think in my work I am trying to sustain attention—not like I’m some sort of theologian for music that believes it exists in some totally separate space—but [I am] just trying to call attention to the character of the depth of it, and the oddity of it, and the multidimensional inexhaustibility of it. You sit down and you find that magnetic groove or a loop of something, and you could sit there and listen to it for—Alex [Chávez] was talking about what, 16 hours? Until 5 a.m.? How does that happen, right? That’s a kind of fascination.

Hill: Let’s open it up for questions.

Q1: Thank you so much. That performance for me really expanded a lot of categories. I wanted to ask you, Michael, what is it like to play music where overtones are—it’s hard to call it overtones—are the primary thing? I was really struck with the care with which you set up what then became a drone. There were so many choices you made in the beginning to support what was to come in terms of how you were honing those opening tones that then became the basis for more playing. To me, that’s where the groove really resided, is in that whirring—what would erroneously be taken as a single tone. And all the movement in the groove, it seemed like you had so much patience in really not proceeding to the next phase until you had kind of laid that kind of groundwork. And so, I was just wondering what it’s like to hear and prepare in that way.

Gallope: That’s helpful. This keyboard is the drone keyboard. And it’s a Casiotone from the 80s, but—this is one of the things where 90% of the sounds [on the keyboard] I don’t like, but there’s a few things that are just magic. You know, there’s metaphysics on a couple of these buttons for some reason. And these only cost $100, and they’re made like toys; you can just throw them around and they don’t break. But it’s an 80s keyboard, and then you put it on top of the Yamaha organ drone, and then suddenly you just see this instability, right? And then you can kind of just take a few variables and play with that. There’s a lot of drone music that—in the scene in the Twin Cities you have laptop-based stuff, you have modular synthesis—which is a whole other can of worms in terms of indeterminacy—you have live performance, you have homemade instruments. I was interested in the idea of—a keyboard like an organ is going to make one sound and then, you can layer drones and do things. And people kind of hear your decisions, and maybe they’re listening with you, or you want them to listen with you. And that became an interesting thing for me, to find a way to move through it and build it and make it—I think of it as a kind of sculpture.

Q2: The Brazilian scholar and musician José Miguel Wisnik’s book O som e o sentido (1989) [Sound and sense] has this wonderful moment at the beginning where he derives pitch, and then harmony, from rhythm, right? An oscillation. And this also goes to what Maya was mentioning in terms of beats. But I also noticed that just before the sort of ending if you wanted to call it when the car alarm took over, your piece entered into what we might call a rhythm section, right? Pitch sort of fell away, and you’re really asking us to focus on that more oscillatory part that’s no longer pitched. So, I was wondering, not necessarily just that moment—How does this allow you to think through rhythm, given that that’s one of the focuses today? This is also ostensibly arrhythmic—I mean, it isn’t but, right?

Gallope: At the end, I am doing what are referred to as “difference tones.” When you [have] low frequencies where the frequency is not that fast, when you have two dissonant frequencies, they phase with each other, and you start hearing this prrrrrrrrr. You never know how it’s going to sound; it is all dependent on the system. If there are sub[woofers], it could make the whole floor [vibrate], and also the resonance of the room. So, there’s a lot of indeterminacy there. But it’s a little bit like—I know, in the 80s, you know those old TVs, where you’d turn the channel, and it would be static? I’m very into those kinds of things where you just turn it and there’s some weird thing on the television. So, they’re kind of cuts, in a way.

Hill: There’s shapes, right? There’s contours in the sound.

Gallope: Yeah. Just to make sure, in case you were confused that I was trying to express something, this makes it clear I wasn’t, you know, it’s crrrrrr—the TV’s off.

Q3: This was super interesting in terms of how there seemed to be a narrative without this stable temporal architecture. And especially this last part that I perceived it as a narrative through some kind of mimicry, let’s say the sound of shotguns or helicopters or something like that, so how there was a sense of suspense building up, but how that is usually these specific affects of uneasiness and anxiety are usually attached through Hollywood representations, these kind of tones that follow, let’s say, police chasing or something like that, or shot guns. So, how that sense of in a way that it was—you said empty space, but how much that empty space creates affect and what it does to our bodies. I just felt my hormonal oscillations kind of attuning to what you were trying to say or express but also shaped by these other cultural notions that we had attached to these particular notions of suspense or sound. What do you think that your music does, for you, or for your audience?

Gallope: It is a kind of terrifying way to end it. It’s like being caught between two big fans or something like that. But what I’m interested in a sequencing, you use the word narrative, and I think, there’s no causality, right? If we take Aristotle’s definition of narrative that has causality—right, a beginning, a middle, and an end. When you change the TV, there’s no causality, other than you switching it so there is a cut. I’m interested in the way that affects your memory of what you heard before you know. So, it’s like: Oh, what was that? That was excessive and weird and then, after this happens, what was that thing? That’s where maybe the language-like stuff comes into the fore, because these things are obviously not related to each other, but they also are related to each other—and you don’t want to solve that, you know?

Q4: From a different angle, one thing that strikes me about understanding drone and various types of ambient music in general is that it works around temporal dilation and makes us sit with maybe that discomfort right? There’s usually a kind of acclamation period like in the first minute or two—are we really doing this? Two or three minutes after that, yeah we are. And I think about something like the temporal dilation in the moment. And then I think about your other main profession on the page, on the various types of temporal compression and dilation that are required in either narrative or argumentative discourse. On one side you can have the story of [Gabriel García Márquez’s] 100 Years of Solitude compressed into 400 pages—a whole century. Or you could have the Joycean Ulysses story of a single day sprawling over hundreds of pages. I’m just curious, to boil down the question for you, given [where] your musical and aesthetic sensibilities are taking you: Do you feel like you write slower? Are your sentences doing different things with time because of the way you’re playing?

Gallope: That’s a great question. I don’t think so. Now I’m thinking about Aristotle for some reason—thinking about narrative—but my teaching is really Aristotelian. It’s organized. And my writing—when I write it’s just like—shhhhhhhh—I am just editing. I don’t know if other musicians feel this way—the music/writing difference—which is that for my writing I can sit there and keep working on it and I can trust that it’ll always be getting better the more hours I put in on it. I’m finding more things and fixing little sentences. But music—you can go down a hole and make it a lot worse. And all the best music that you write is the stuff that happens by accident. It’s like: oh yeah that was the throwaway tune and then we took the beat out and it was actually great. [When writing a] lot of music, I choose not to play for a while in order not to listen. I can’t listen to a lot of music especially in the age of streaming. I actually have listened to less just because—I just can’t do it. It kind of crowds me out. So [music and writing] have two different economies for me in a weird way but that doesn’t mean they don’t affect one another. What [music] really has affected are the things I pay attention to as a writer. It’s like—what is the that surreal unconscious depth of why someone would come out to hear music? The strangeness of that and the metaphysics that people are trying to incarnate. If I am going to write about music, I need to make sure that particularity is alive in some way, that I’m listening to the archive in a way that’s attentive to and affected by what I pay attention to. I am not spending as much time like labeling chords like a music theorist would. There are lots of biographies in my book, and there is lots of history and backdrop, but when I talk about the object, I’m trying to recover those [musical] decisions and those moments that my practice is helping me think about.