DISSERTATION BROADCASTS:
EIGHT SCRIPTS
Brian Baker
Track 1. Operating Instructions Manuel de Landa, in both his essay ‘Virtual Environments and the Emergence of Synthetic Reason’ and in War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (1991) proposes the elimination of linearity itself. De Landa writes: our intellectual habit of thinking linearly, whereby the interaction of different causes is seen as additive [...] also needs to be eliminated. So it does our habit of thinking in terms of conservative systems, isolated from energy and matter flows from the outside. Only dissipative, nonlinear systems generate the full spectrum of dynamic forms of stabilisation (attractors) and of diversification (bifurcations)’.1 The debate about non-linearity and complexity has particularly shifted into the fields of digital technology, of new media and electronic literature, where the forms and function of information technologies seemed to propose a model of user interaction that privileged multiple pathways and non-linear processing. In Hypertext 3.0 (2006), George Landow draws on the figure of Vannevar Bush, computer engineer and scientist who invented a hypertextual microfilm reader called the ‘memex’, to suggest that multilinear, associational connection is how human beings think: Bush wished to replace the essentially fixed, linear methods that had produced the triumphs of capitalism and industrialism with what are essentially poetic machines – machines that work according to analogy and association, machines that capture and create the anarchic brilliance of the human imagination. Bush, we perceive, assumed that science and poetry work in essentially the same way.2 In one rhetorical gesture, the ‘two cultures’ are welded together here. This rhetoric gains traction in the digital age. Non-linearity and associational jumps (what we might term the bifurcation points of cognitive leaps from one order of thought to another, either in dissipative systems or in poetry) were directly encoded, according to theorists of ‘new media’ (digital and networked information technologies, particularly Web 2.0) into the very forms of internet browsing and information processing, especially in the form of the ‘hypertext’. In Landow’s Hypertext 3.0, it is this technological functionality which is crucial to ‘hypertext’: Hypertext denotes an information medium that links verbal and non-verbal information. [...] Electronic links connect lexias “external” to a work – say, commentary on it by another author or parallel or contrasting texts – as well as within it and thereby create text that is experienced as non-linear, or more properly, as multilinear or multisequential. [...] The standard scholarly article in the humanities or physical sciences perfectly embodies the underlying notions of hypertext and multisequentially read text. (3) For Landow, ‘hypertextuality’ is a condition produced by the possibilities of textuality itself (‘multisequentially read text’); it is not necessitated by, or a technological consequence of electronic literature(s), or the formal properties of HTML (‘electronic links’), but finds its most visible expression in electronic form. Electronic hypertext works for the user in expressing the non-linearity or multisequentiality of human cognitive processing.
N. Katherine Hayles, in Writing Machines (2002), offers two linked concepts: ‘technotexts’ and ‘hypertext’. ‘Hypertext’ corresponds to Landow’s functionality: ‘Hypertext has at a minimum the three characteristics of MULTIPLE READING PATHS, CHUNKED TEXT and some kind of LINKING MECHANISM to connect the chunks’.3 Hayles has a materialist conception of text (a re-versioned development of Marshall McLuhan’s dictum ‘the medium is the message’): ‘the physical form of the literary artifact [sic] always affects what the words (and other semiotic components) mean (p.25, italics in original text). ‘Form’ and ‘content’ are mutually dependent. It is the ‘technotexts’ that make apparent this material inter-dependency: Literary works that strengthen, foreground, and thematize the connections between themselves as material artifacts [sic] and the imaginative realm of verbal/semiotic signifiers they instantiate open a window on the larger connections that unite literature as a verbal art to its material forms’ (p.25). Hayles argues that hypertext can be found in print, in encyclopaedias and in experimental fictions: function is dependent upon form, but it is not only digital forms that can operate hypertextually. In Cybertext (1993), Espen Aarseth also writes that the ‘cyber-text’ is not confined to e-literature. The ‘cyber-text’ is a mode of electronic writing but can also use codex form. Both are instantiations of what Aarseth terms ‘ergodic’ literature, where the text forces the reader to traverse it deliberately, to work upon constructing it. Recombinatorial textual practices, in the form of the mash-up, remix, cento, collage and so on, reveal the ways in which linear modes of narrative, ‘naturalized’ and codified literary and filmic forms (forms such as literary realism, or Hollywood continuity style cinema) are themselves constructions which circumvent the non-linear, collage-like potentialities of textuality. These textual practices have become the focus of recent critical and theoretical attention in a range of forms and media. In ‘Cybernetics and Ghosts’, Italo Calvino argues that combinatorial play added to conscious artistry (the author) added to unconscious ‘slips’ produces the literary text. Calvino asserts ‘that writing is purely and simply be process of combination among given elements’.4 He offers a more extended definition which runs: Literature is a combinatorial game that pursues the possibilities implicit in its own material, independent of the personality of the poet, but it is a game that at a certain point is invested with unexpected meaning, and meaning that is not patent on the linguistic plane on which the work in that has slipped in from another level, activating something that on the second level is of great concern to the author or his society. The literature machine can perform all the permutations possible on a given material, but the poetic result will be the particular affect of one of these permutations of a man endowed with a consciousness and an unconscious, that is an empirical and historical man. It will be the shock that occurs only if the writing machine is surrounded by the hidden ghosts of the individual and his society. (p.22) Espen Aarseth uses the image of the labyrinth in literature (familiar from the work of Borges, but also used by Calvino), but suggests that there are two kinds of labyrinth: unicursal and multicursal. Unicursal labyrinths have one path; multicursal have many. Aarseth suggests that in most literary
texts, the image or concept of the labyrinth is unicursal and few are in fact genuinely multicursal (although Pale Fire is indeed such a multicursal print cybertext). 5 As Hayles writes in Writing Machines, the codex form is not in itself deterministically linear and unicursal: ‘hypertext can be instantiated in print as well as in electronic media’ (p.26). In fact, according to Joseph Tabbi, ‘the mistake made by first-generation hypertext critics [...] was to reify the print medium, the better to contrast the emerging (but also short-lived) forms of programmable, born digital literature [...] the physical enclosure of a codex does not in itself guarantee narrative closure’.6 Setting up the straw man of print linearity to emphasise their arguments, early theorists of hypertextuality elided the non-linear capacities of print, especially of the codex. To organise the terms of the discourse: the ‘cybertext’ [Aarseth] and the ‘technotext’ [Hayles] are instantiations of print or electronic texts `that use, as functional potentialities and pathways, ‘hypertext’ [Landow] as a means by which to empower the reader/ operator/ user to create multilinear (‘multicursal’) paths/ readings and thereby construct their own texts [Fish]. Hypertexts enable combinatorial play [Italo Calvino] by the reader/user.
Track 2: At the Mountains of the Moon Tangier And did those feet walk the labyrinthine streets of Tangier, star sky-machine wheeling in the phosphorous night, with two Berber women, skin a maze of bleach-blue tattoos, looking for kif and the crush-penny hotel, where she and the guitarist beamed laser-light bolts of tornado twisting across the sharp bright blue swimming pool and mezzanine, and pushed it as far as it would go to stage a scene and would not stop until he had smashed the room into a thousand frozen angelic pieces, and was abandoned there by friends and lovers while Gysin took him to Marrakech and a flying carpet of mejdoubi, the Square of the Dead, who sold him a kif pipe for a hundred dollars which he later threw into a bin at the airport, fearing a bust, while the guitarist and she disappeared in the car, driving away from him in the cool blue Moroccan night, in the same car where she’d sucked the guitarist’s cock, succubus, at midnight on the Autoroute, while he had been far out and away in a French hospital, crying, and Tangier, Interzone of Gysin and Bill Burroughs and Bowles, Bowles who’d taken one look at the ragged Stones and fled, horrified, while this group of holy fools, the Stones, sat and preened and smoked and thought him pretentious, but were blind to the whole cosmic day-hump of Satanic Majesties, half-assed, half-cocked, half-believing in magic and turning on, when the holy source, the Masters, there, the roots and soul of all, blown round and round and round, a dance, into the night of heart, like some cosmic time-trip, ecstatic release, repeating the biggest bang, therapeutic out of our heads and out of time, space, is where we found ourselves, not lost, not the cosmological zero but spiralled up, up and on, the Earth, the sky, dog moon man, some primal limit at the extension of the solar circle, the release of dark and light, djinn and angels, Pan and Allah, beyond the dread machine of days, and here, in Tangier, smoking kif, busted in London how many times? for a ball of resin the size of a fingernail, less, the black boots, remember, the black boots and blue suits, the Man, breaking in while he was tripping in the bed, nowhere, no-one, the spheres within, and before the judge, standing there, who did not himself believe, who discharged him with a fine, again, a theatre, a charade, ‘We Love You’, just as his life had been a theatre, a charade, where charm and china-cat smile had let all slide, time and again,7 but someone was tallying the bill and he would have to pay the piper, unless he time-tripped to these pipes, the pipes of Pan himself, God of Chaos, God of Energy,
and he would bring this back as a gift, the gift of life itself, to restore the Stones and the world and himself, a vision not a sacrifice, and that is what he would be, he knew, if he did not get out of time, get out of the prison of now, the black hole, because he knew, as brother John would say, who came before and would come after, they’re gonna crucify me. Jajouka You know your own music when you hear it one day, you tell yourself, the pipes of Pan, swirling in cold moonlight,8 as you climb like a mountain goat along a crooked path, the car abandoned, past fallen rocks, up and up into the sky, giant blue cactus like a rough fence, houses crouching low in their gardens, surrounded by wild men or ghosts, and you come through their maze to the broad village green where the pipes are piping, fifty wild flutes blowing up a storm,9 you, Brahmin Jones, Jajouka Rolling Stone, long blond hair over your pink eyes and red Afghani coat, boys dancing and laughing, goat-cheese and honey on golden bread, mint tea and kif pipes and flutes, blue kif smoke dropping in a veil, the faces of the boys and the faces of the jury, mad glee, a judgement, the frenzy and panic, God of the bonfire, and you shiver like someone walked over your grave, and the bonfire in the little square spins a circle, ozone and sea air and horses,10 new moon in the black vault, stars pinwheel, the vast cosmic night unwinds, the women open their throats and give forth ululation, screams and a smell of shit, pure Earth, the God and Goddess, lupercal, opening themselves to him, to become possessed, you own brotherhood and sisterhood, you are fulfilled, cleansed, wild dogs at your heels, catching and laughing, blue cactus, blue kif veil, blue night, dissolving into the blue ocean, as when you had visited Clarke, Ceylon blue,11 the feet of boys kneading your stomach as they kicked into the depths, far down, inner world of ocean and space, a trip, changing, transforming, metamorphosing into you and us and it, forever, to possess the stamina and will and soul to last the week-long chaos,12 resting the Uher, arm out, swirling, listening to the playback, the boys with headphones hearing themselves for the very first time, carrying the tapes back to London to unspool time and soul and release the clogged brittle hearts of English men and English women, transforming, magic made real, real Other Method, the revolution, the world revolves, up and up and out, come together into time and cosmos and ocean, the streams of the firmament, and you lie down and sleep, sleep as waking, one and one and one is three, in the soft dusty dawn, goats and herds on the mountain, out of time,
and later they bring kif, you rest your head in your arms and wonder where you are, where they are, and are sad they could not travel the same road to the stars, and the day fades into blue dusk, you sit in the cabin where your picture hangs, Jajouka Rolling Stone, they believe you are real, if not of this place, and you are taken to the place of eating, where they bring forth the goat to be slaughtered, a fringe of white hair over its pink eyes, blade glinting in the firelight, and you try to rise, try to speak, world without end, soul of my soul, sacrifice that you will eat of its flesh and succour, and you say, ‘That is me.’13 Who is Bou Jeloud? I choose, shivering, to be stripped naked, in a cave, and sewn into bloody warm skins, and masked with an old straw hat, 14 an empty black hole in a basket atop a jittery boy’s body, my body, his body,15 and I begin to feel him, a mighty demon, and I hear the music of the pipes, and he is confused and I am enchanted, we move,16 ten people inside me, not one, it is not just me anymore, voices, crazy, I have no control, angry, powerful, ugly, I leap and he spits and curses, growls, grins,17 and suddenly I am there, the crowd, I hit anyone, with branches and sticks, I charge, becircled, he hits children, any one near, running, laughter, crying, I am after you, he is after you, he is after me, after me, the moon and the screaming, sparks shower like hot rain in the sky, on my skin, I laugh, Father of Skins, father of children, possess and be fertile, male and female, animal sounds, on all fours I copulate, woman and boys, possess freely, God of chaos, God of energy, then Aisha Honolka, Asherat, Astarte, Diana, goatish legs and forked hooves, comes among us, and I smile or I am lost, unless I touch the glinting blade or plunge it into the ground between her legs,18 glint of the blade, this earth, this fire and smoke, he dances, unto death, into death, after me, dancing and running, not Ali, not Mohammed, not Brahmin, not Orpheus, shitkicker, hayseed, Taff, Brian Jones the beautiful damned face of the sweet sick sixties,19 and I will be taboo, cast out, I have transgressed, I have tried in my way to be free, but that is not to be free,20 then the sky opens, black hole, red boiling fuzz at the edge of the world, it turns and spins and recedes and goes out, forward, nothing, from the Earth into the cosmos, leaving the Sun, the solar system, extends, recedes, beyond Jupiter, beyond the infinite, solar winds blow through, my dust is star dust, my atoms a sun, a Nebula, coalesce, the birth of a new star, and as it is born it sings with holy joy of night and love and cosmos, my body is atom and universe, together, and what is in me is also in you, I speak to you across time, across stars and the black vault, the holy map of interconnected spheres, the moon and the sun, I am,
Marianne, I am, you see my face in your Melbourne mirror and in a dream you tell me that you must turn back, but I tell you that I must go on,21 and then I open my eyes, hard Californian sunlight on dead ash-grey concrete, weeds struggling sickly between flags and cracks, and before me a large building, behind, the refuse bins and cars and young men and women struggling over the fence, to join a small knot at the back door, spinning lines and lies because they just want to see their faces, the Stones, and turned away, each one, I wait until I approach the door and I knock, and to the guard I say, ‘I am Brian Jones’.22
Track 3. Notes on the Fourth Dimension The word ‘project’ is derived from two Latin roots: ‘pro’ (meaning forth or forward) and ‘Jacere’ (meaning to throw). To ‘project’ is therefore to ‘throw forward’. In English, however, it can be pronounced with two different stresses, which mean two slightly different things. One is a noun, one a verb; one refers to time, the other to space. My investigations into dimensionality have foregrounded the idea of projection. In the camera obscura, the 3-dimensional object, landscape or building is projected on to a 2dimensional surface in order for the correct perspective to be ascertained. Similarly, in the cinema, the 3-dimensional world/ illusion of narrative cinema is projected onto the screen. Most importantly here, in terms of maps, the curved, 3-dimensional surface of the Earth is projected onto the 2-dimensional sheet of the map. Anyone looking at a Mercator next to a Peters projection of the global map will see how certain decisions about how the flat map is scaled has a significant impact upon how we comprehend the continents and their relation. The same is true of the relationship between the third and fourth dimensions. In The Time Machine, H.G. Wells’ Time Traveller articulates how projection is crucial to the ways in which dimensionality has been understood. He says: ‘Space, as our mathematicians have it, is spoken of as having three dimensions, which one may call Length, Breadth, and Thickness, and is always definable by reference to three planes, each at right angles to the others. But some philosophical people have been asking why three dimensions particularly—why not another direction at right angles to the other three?—and have even tried to construct a Four-Dimensional geometry. […] You know how on a flat surface, which has only two dimensions, we can represent a figure of a three-dimensional solid, and similarly they think that by models of three dimensions they could represent one of four—if they could master the perspective of the thing. See?’ ‘Some philosophical people’ is the clue to his rather dismissive attitude to what is now called n-dimensional geometry. ‘The perspective of the thing’ identifies precisely the issue of projection, and how our capacity to visualise and understand a higher dimension is
limited by our own three-dimensional condition. It is a revealing word to use; it connects the novel directly to the art history of representations of space.
In the work of Wells and C. Howard Hinton, the Fourth Dimension is conceived of and articulated in very different ways. In the works of Hinton, especially in the pamphlets published between 1884 and 1886 collected as the Scientific Romances in 1886, of which ‘What is the Fourth Dimension?’ is one; and in The Fourth Dimension (1912), he conceives of the Fourth Dimension as a kind of higher space. In The Fourth Dimension, Hinton uses Plato’s allegory to suggest that we exist, as it were, watching four-dimensional shadows on the wall of our three-dimensional cave. Just as a two-dimensional being (existing in a ‘planeworld’ or ‘Flatland’) cannot conceive of three-dimensional existence, so we cannot really conceive of four-dimensional forms. In which case, a being in four dimensions would have to us exactly the appearance of a being in space. A being in a plane would only know solid objects as two-dimensional figures— the shapes namely in which they intersected his plane. So if there were fourdimensional objects, we should only know them as solids—the solids, namely, in which they intersect our space. (‘What is the Fourth Dimension?’, ch.3.)
The difficulty of this is demonstrated by the odd diagrams of the four-dimensional cube, the ‘tesseract’, that were contained in Hinton’s The Fourth Dimension. In The Time Machine (1895), the Time Traveller rejects this theory of higher or n-dimensions altogether. The Traveller explains to his invited audience of professional men that “’There are really four dimensions, three which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time. […] There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it”’. In fact, the Traveller rejects Hintonian projections of fourdimensional space and instead argues that it is a matter of human perception and ‘perspective’. A four-dimensional object, for Wells’ Traveller, is actually a three-dimensional one articulated through time.
The idea of projection, in relation to ‘throwing forward’ or to the reduction of threedimensional space to a two-dimensional plane in the creation of maps, is central to what Marcel Duchamp was investigating in the Large Glass, and directly relates to the quotation from Hinton above. D: Simply, I thought of the idea of a projection, of an invisible fourth dimension, something you couldn’t see with your eyes. […] The fourth dimension could project an object of three dimensions, […] Any three-dimensional object, which we see dispassionately, is a projection of something four-dimensional, something we’re not familiar with. […] “The Bride” in the “Large Glass” was based on this, as if it were the projection of a four-dimensional object. (40) As Mark Blacklock notes about the theorists of the Fourth Dimension in ‘The Higher Spaces of the Late Nineteenth-century Novel’ (2013), ‘All aimed to think through the experience of limited dimensionality in order to explicate the speculated experience of raised dimensionality’ (1). Hinton, E.A. Abbott in Flatland (1884) and many others, including Duchamp, used reduction in dimensionality (from three to two) to stand in metaphorically for an extension from three to four (and beyond). The Bride is both projected on and through the two-dimensional plane of glass, but is also manifested within the accompanying Green Box. The Large Glass and Green Box form a complex assemblage, a four-dimensional object.
One might think of Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (1912) as similarly presenting, in two dimensions, a higher-dimensional being. Wells anticipates this in The Time Machine: ‘I have been at work upon this geometry of Four Dimensions for some time. Some of my results are curious. For instance, here is a portrait of a man at eight years old, another at fifteen, another at seventeen, another at twenty-three, and so on. All these are evidently sections, as it were, Three-Dimensional representations of his Four-Dimensioned being, which is a fixed and unalterable thing.’ (ch.1.)
Both Duchamp’s and Wells’ figures suggest both flow and spatiality in paradoxical unity. Wells’ four-dimensional being is a single entity that flows from birth to death, segmented only by our incapacity to perceive it that way, as ‘our consciousness moves along’ time. There are very strong pre-echoes here of Bergson’s understanding of time as durée, and of Deleuze’s conception of cinema as the ‘cut’ (or in Wells’ word, ‘section’) which reveals to us time’s flow. In The Time Machine, however, time is space. A spatialization of time is precisely the method by which Wells imagines the way by which the Traveller moves in his machine from the world of late Victorian England to the year 801, 702. In a sense, writing in 1895, Wells’s ‘Four Dimensioned Being’ anticipates the developments in temporal representation that will come with the advent of Cubism and Duchamp’s interest in turning to painting the ‘four-dimensional’ figures of Etienne Marey’s chronograms. The chronograms, or Eadweard Muybridge’s series photographs, or the cartoon figures of protocinematic toys such as the zoëtrope or phenakistoscope, indicate the point at which the still representation becomes moving representation, where photography becomes cinema, where the static moment flows into time. The Time Machine was published at precisely the same moment as the Lumière brother first projected their films at the Café Royale in Paris: 1895. As the celluloid strip passed through the projector, and the ‘persistence of vision’ made the succession of still images into seamless movement, the relation between time and space was redefined, not least in art. Duchamp, in his conversations with Pierre Cabanne, when asked whether film influenced Nude Descending a Staircase (1912), replied ‘Yes, of course. That thing from Marey…’ (34). In fact, the first conception of The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (1915-23) was much closer to Nude Descending than its later form: Duchamp: The idea of the “Bride” preoccupied me. So I made a first drawing in pencil, “Virgin No.1”, then a second, “Virgin No.2”, touched up with wash and a little water-colour. Then a canvas, then I went on to the idea of the “Bride and the Bachelors”. The drawings I made were still the same type as the “Nude Descending a Staircase”, and not at all like the one that followed after, with the measured things. […] What we were interested in at the time was the fourth dimension. In the “Green Box” there are heaps of notes on the fourth dimension. (36-7; 39)
Track 4: Record/ Erase (Moog Modular mix) Friedrich Kittler reports: ‘reaching beyond the acoustic experiences of the so-called general public, the magnetic tape also revolutionised secret transmissions’ (Kittler 1999: 107). The Abwehr, upon capturing Allied agents, were able to disrupt communications fail-safes (signs of compromise) by recording their messages on tape and manipulating them before broadcast. These deadly Funkspielen (radio games) went on for years. Orpheus hears the poetry of secret broadcasts on the car radio in Orphée (1950), assuming the role of Resistance fighter. Ubiquity of ‘aether talk’ and ‘dead city radio transmissions’ (Toop 2004: 270) in the post-war world means tape operators cut into (‘hack’) secret communications that are a ‘ghostly presence all around us’ (Scanner 2008: 132). William Burroughs advocated the use of tape recording and playback as a means by which to confront and undo the programming of the ‘reality studio’ and the alienating viral occupation of ‘the Word’. The basic operation of recording, pictures, more pictures, and playback can be carried out by anyone with a recorder and a camera. Any number can play. Millions of people carrying out this basic operation could nullify the control system which those who are behind Watergate
and Nixon are attempting to impose. Like all control systems, its dependence on maintaining a monopoly position. (Burroughs 1974: 20) In ‘Electronic Revolution’, Burroughs sets out ‘some specific uses of prerecorded cut/up tapes played back in the streets as a revolutionary weapon’ (1974: 174). They include: (1) (2) (3) (4)
To spread rumours To discredit opponents As a front-line weapon to produce and escalate riots As entertainment
He also imagines how ‘scrambling’ technologies, as a metaphor for encoded (ideological) messages in mass media communications, ‘could be [used] to impose thought control on a mass scale’. ‘Remember’, he writes, ‘when the human nervous system unscrambles a scrambled message this will seem to the subject like his very own ideas which just occurred to him, which indeed it did’ (1974: 179). Technologies of psychic inscription, however, can be detourned, re-imagined: It’s all done with tape recorders consider this machine and what it can do it can record and playback activating a the past time set by precise association a recording can be played back in the number of times you can study and analyse every pause and infection of a recorded conversation [...] a tape recorder can play back fast slow or backwards you can learn to do these things record a sentence and speed it up now trying imitating your accelerated voice play a sentence backwards and learned to unsay what you just said (Burroughs 1985: 151) ‘You can learn to do these things’: Burroughs offers a practical apocalypticism. His texts ‘the invisible generation’ and ‘Electronic revolution’ are, to all intents, an apocalypse kit. Apocalypse Kit. Dr Baker studied the documents laid out on the demonstration table. These were: (1) a map of the London Underground; (2) fragments of a paper entitled ‘The Nelson Mandala’; (3) photograph of V-2 rocket bomb; (4) Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations for Wilde’s Salome; (5) J.G Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition and Iain Sinclair's Crash; (6) Max Ernst’s ‘Garden Airplane Traps’. He turned to the audience. ‘You say these constitute an apocalypse kit?’ (Baker 2004: 16) Radio games: Walter Murch, listening to WQXR, heard the musique concrete tape experiments of Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, ‘taking ordinary sounds and arranging them rhythmically, creating a kind of music on tape’ (Murch and Ondaatje, 2002: 7). This ‘music made from sound [...] [from] electronic music experiments’ (Toop 1995: 125) anticipated the development of a music increasingly distinct from the organic sounds and timbre of voice, wood, string and reed. Another sonic experimenter, the composer Edgard Varèse, ‘spent all his life envisioning instruments which could express the soundworld of his imagination’, to construct a music that ‘could incorporate the whole world, that obliterated the equal tempered scale, the written rules of harmony, the predominance of pitch over timbre and rhythm’ (Toop 1994: 81; 83).
Where free verse operated in an ‘open field’, Varèse ‘composed with basic materials: rhythms, frequencies, intensities, blocks of sound’ (Toop 1994: 83). Electronic music assumed Bergsonian flow. 1964: Bob Moog operated his modular synthesizer; oscillators, filters and modulators ‘patched’ to form sounds, voices, noises, ‘the sounds of which would be transformed a few years later by Sun Ra into astroblackness, a sea of sounds, the energy of distant winds, the lyric initiative of electricity, new worlds on earth’ (Toop 1994: 86). Kittler quotes Thomas Pynchon in noting that ‘Robert A. Moog, with his electronic talents and the “American vice of modular repetition,” was able to equip all the sound studios of this world with synthesizers’ (Kittler 1999: 48). The ‘vice of modular repetition’ can be seen at work in popular music, where David Toop describes how the application of mixing and editing technologies to dance music in the age of disco led to the ‘decomposition’ of music into ‘modular and interchangeable fragments, sliced and re-patched into [a] new order [...] [that] was designed to suit the nocturnal rhythms of a participatory, ecstatic audience’; ‘songs became liquid [...] musicians became technicians’ (Toop 1994: 43-44). The remix was able to re-order, emphasise, strip back, stretch, or otherwise alter or enhance elements of the modular framework of the dance track, and the DJ, in the club, doing this live, ‘on the fly’: ‘The DJ (often mistakenly elevated to shaman): librarian, bricoleur, scryer’ (Toop 1994: 44). Brian McHale uses the concept of the module to analyse the experimental fictions of J.G. Ballard. In Postmodernist Fiction, he proposes that ‘a fixed repertoire of modules, many of them repeated from the earlier apocalyptic novels, are differently recombined and manipulated from story to story’ (McHale 1987: 70). ‘All this suggests,’ argues McHale, the game-like permutation of a fixed repertoire of motifs – “art in a closed field” – which is precisely the organising principle of The Atrocity Exhibition. [...] The protagonists of these stories are all obsessed with the problem of isolating a “modulus”, a single abstract form which is repeated in a series of unrelated and apparently formless or irregular phenomena: photographs, erotic poses, urban landscapes. This theme of the “modulus” at the level of story-content in The Atrocity Exhibition exactly duplicates the formal organization of the stories. (McHale 1987: 70) Ballard’s fictions, particularly his ‘condensed novels’ of the late 1960s, rely upon repetition, iteration, as a structuring device. The modular construction of the texts – while each has an order they can be
reordered – encodes a particular mode of reader reception, a form of work. In a sense, they correspond to what Calvino calls the ‘combinatorial game’: Literature is a combinatorial game that pursues the possibilities implicit in its own material, independent of the personality of the poet, but it is a game that at a certain point is invested with unexpected meaning, and meaning that is not patent on the linguistic plane on which the work in that has slipped in from another level, activating something that on the second level is of great concern to the author or his society. The literature machine can perform all the permutations possible on a given material, but the poetic result will be the particular affect of one of these permutations of a man endowed with a consciousness and an unconscious, that is an empirical and historical man. (Calvino 1989: 22). Ballardian texts such as The Atrocity Exhibition are ‘literature machines’, effecting a series of iterations, permutations, recombinations of the Ballardian ‘set’ (set as setting, as sound-stage, as numerical grouping). Ballard’s late 1960s texts both diagnose and illustrate the coming predominance of what, in relation to digital media artefacts, Bill Seaman calls ‘recombinant poetics’: ‘modular media-elements of image (both still and time-based), text (both spoken and presented graphically), as well as sound/music [...] dynamically explored via a new interface metaphor by engaged interactants’ (Seaman 2001: 425). Seaman himself suggests analogies between the literature of constraint theorised and produced by the OuLiPo group (which included Calvino) and the remix culture of digital media, both of which are informed by mathematical processes. In The Atrocity Exhibition, Ballard often describes a kind of ‘kit’; in fact’ eleven times in all. These are variously described as ‘terminal documents’, ‘secret transmissions’, a ‘sex kit’ or, several times, a picture or portrait. These could be identified as multiple icons of McHale’s ‘modulus’, an artefact constructed from a set of objects, objects that only produce meaning in combination with other elements in the set. Typical elements of a Ballardian kit can be found in the paragraph ‘But isn’t Kennedy already dead?’: (1) Spectro-heliogram of the sun; (2) tarmac and take-off checks for the B-29 superfortress Enola Gay; (3) electroencephalogram of Albert Einstein; (4) transverse section through a preCambrian trilobite; (5) photograph taken at noon, August 7, 1945, of the sand-sea, Qattara Depression; (6) Max Ernst’s ‘Garden Airplane Traps’. (Ballard 2006: 46-7) The ‘kit’ itself, a textual Cornell box, contains motifs of Ballard’s concerns throughout his fiction: the Cold War and the long shadows of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the biological sciences, and particularly evolution; the sun as icon and emblem; Surrealist art. The titled paragraphs of The Atrocity Exhibition form a kind of proleptic remix, naming several Ballard texts (Crash, Notes Towards a Nervous Breakdown, The Sixty-Minute Zoom) yet to be written, as well as from the text’s ‘past’ (The Concentration City). The Atrocity Exhibition itself constitutes a literature machine, a ‘Ballard kit’ that one may use to produce an infinity of Ballardian texts, an exhibition itself outlined by Burroughs in The Ticket That Exploded: The Exhibition shaded into a vast amusement park with orchestras and rides and movie screens, stages and outdoor restaurants – All music and talk and sound accorded by a battery of tape recorders recording and playing back moving on conveyor belts and tracks and cable cars spilling the talk and metal music fountains and speech as the record is moved
from one exhibit to another [...] A writing machine that shifts one half one that text and half the other through a page frame on conveyor belts [...] permutating through page frames in constantly changing juxtaposition the machines spits out books and plays and poems – the spectators are invited to feed into the machine in the pages of their own text in fifty-fifty juxtaposition with any author of their choice any pages of their choice and provided with the result in a few minutes. (Burroughs 1985: 53-4) Readers are hereby invited to feed the literature/ writing machine(s)
Track 5. remixthebook 1. a fluid idea radical work / is converted / into ideas Thermodynamics / predict / work flow predict / the dynamics / of dissipated energy the way / energy / shows direction will flow / as / a measure a measure / of [dis-] / order a room / to pump in / energy 2. entropy [ex]cited probability led to / chaos/ or [dis]order an imaginary being / proposed a Demon this Demon / would gain / information the Law / is violated Maxwell / suggested / Crying 3. [dis]order exists equilibrium / can be produced / without transgressing / chaos [dissipative] order / jumps / a threshold within states / into / a new kind of recognizable / chaos The Garden / of time / re-imagined 4. consider whorls of turbulence doom / suggests an /overload of entropy-information-death mass media / flow / communicated more random / information ideas / assumed the / creation of living things the human / computational device was central to / multi-disciplinary / think-ins In the year 2525, researchers will discover The Bestiary of Books, a fanciful account of mythological monsters are made of paper and glue.
The Bestiary of Books speaks of entire forest of trees, leaves that grew and fell so that precursors to books could be made of paper. Why think of remixes in terms of different content mixed together. But what about different forms? A paper book with the head of an iPod?23
(1) Italo Calvino characterises literature as ‘combinatorial play’; these combinations are recognized as having special significance by the author (unconsciously). Calvino posits discontinuity against flux, combination against flow. Mark Amerika places the ‘flux personae’ in a Deleuze and Guattari-influenced rhizomatic assemblage, remixing ‘on the fly’: recombination as flux. (2) Manuel De Landa uses the idea of the bifurcation point to re-insert agency; Calvino’s idea of the author is not dissimilar. Both are like Maxwell’s Demon, sorting elements into new orders/ combinations from a finite set/ system. Amerika’s remixologist also does this. (3) N. Katherine Hayles, in Writing Machines, uses the language of surgery: cut-up, operating on source texts, treated, treatment. The body of the text is to be opened up by the artist/ surgeon in a(nother) kind of operation. Brian Dettmer’s ‘book autopsies’ also insist upon this materiality by opening the interior of the book to the analytical gaze.24 The book is a body. One of the premises of Mark Amerika’s remixthebook is that it takes text from Amerika’s own previous work (articles, blogs) and remixes them with elements of other texts by other people. The book is accompanied by a website in which other critics and artists themselves remix remixthebook in various forms, including academic essays, net art, artist’s books and short videos.25 The book itself, its materiality and formal structures, become dispersed across an array of media. Gary Hall, in a response to remixthebook, asks: ‘what do we have the right not to call a book?’26 Hall proposes a future, particularly for academic publishing, which incorporates dispersal across media. No longer is the book a codex, ‘bound’: a ‘liquid book’ (composed of wikis, re-written and updated by users) or a ‘living book’ (a dispersed collection of texts indexed by an online ‘book’) are contingent, dynamic, in flux.27 Hall connects this to the politics of open access and the ‘gift economy’ which informs much of the radical edge of new media discourse. The ‘book’ is expanded beyond the bound state of the codex: it encompasses e-literature, blogs, websites, wikis, and other forms of digital media. If the ‘book’ is redefined in this way, this would seem to correspond to the diagnosis N Katherine Hayles performs in How We Became Posthuman, where she suggests that the era of the posthuman is characterized by a shift from a metaphysics of presence to one in which ‘pattern/randomness’ is crucial. For Hall, the book does not have to be present materially in a bound, codex form: it can be dispersed, networked, and not only transmitted via pdf, Kindle, e-pub or other format. The book becomes a pattern of contingent texts indexed by an editor to form a kind of discursive rhizome.
Track 6: Orpheus (transmitting) [Rilke’s] mind, at times, resembles nothing so much as that of a giant articulate insect. He described the experience of writing the Sonnets [to Orpheus] as ‘enigmatic dictations’, and indeed working at that speed, it could not have felt otherwise. [...] Rilke [might be called] a prophet of sorts, if what you mean by prophet is someone so sensitive that they become not only a lightning rod for all the crackling static of the culture, but also a satellite-dish, a ‘receiver’ (to use a Rilkean favourite) for things a less precisely tuned and calibrated sensibility would never be aware of.1 i. I have no wife my mistress is a lyre with which I drowned the siren-song beauty is a lash to scourge the ear I have no limbs they are scattered to irrigate the dead and grow, from dusty ground, like dragon’s teeth I have no child the women tore me I would not sing my head, alone drifts downstream
1
Don Paterson, ‘Afterword’, Orpheus: A Version of Rilke (London: Faber, 2006), pp.61-2.
my tongue vibrates a cone, blood-black voice intoxicates and thickens emanates from black bone without movement I have no mouth to tell you that I am dead I have no lyre; the song remains
ii. I hear machines the voice of Rilke flutes in brass pipes frequencies transmitted in luminiferous aether sound waves vibrating from the coronal suture. von Kempelen’s discovery (after twenty years) of synthesized sound: broadcast machines scatter my seed, birth new worlds,
savage and mysterious. The pure ear stirs reason into ecstatic revolution, once more.
iii. do not look for me in the West you will not find me there nor in the South where once I dwelt in al-Andalus, the groves of stone cool to the touch in the summer heat where courtyard pools reflect palace walls and may be dissolved with a sigh iv. the lyre seduces the stones, traduced, turned against nature, fall from their arc and the Bacchante are disappointed. While trees and cloven beasts bend down in season’s circle to hear my song,
no art of mine undoes the satyr’s suit. I move the stones but not to my own will. The lyre is Aeolian. v. Apollo’s gift (his priest) I practiced upon unto perfection accursed hands that turn to stone, unmanned who calls me soft? afraid to die for love, when love lay dying, virginal in a viper’s nest? I braved the Gods and song seduced the shades; a game. All was lost and was before I journeyed there. The lyre deceives. I have no art. vi. divine the hearts
of metal men their ears receiving signals words that ghost the world surround all song with white noise derives the signal derives the noise I am no man the song remains
Track 7: ‘Transmission, Death, Technology’: a McCarthy Cut-Up 1. exquisite finds silence and playback avian transmissions some mathematical formula ‘I invented phrases and numbers an aesthetic of repetition. écoute,’ says Cégèste, écouter et répèter, écoute, listen picking up and retransmitting analog phone conversations attempted radio and tape contact with the dead Konstantin Raudive and Friedrich Jurgenson a polyglottal cacophony
all transmission is a dispatching from one place to another ‘the question of power’ ‘is first of all that of the post and
telecommunications’ counter-recording and playback ‘mix yesterday in with today and hear tomorrow’ 2. coded messages
en claires
a ‘transcription
key’ contained in a line of poetry
frequencies of repetition mutations and transportations repetition frequencies Tokyo at night dots and bleeps and dashes communication systems
the ‘master code’ a death code he kept picturing the dead ciphers and encoded wireless broadcasts
already dead.
space of code is to be
to dwell within the
alexander graham bell made a speaking automaton it could say ‘ma-ma’ the brothers
stripped its larynx
whichever one survived the other would build a device capable of communicating with the dead. 3. ‘source words’ ‘seemed to confer on them a genuinely magic power’ the non-place electric for us, the conventional notions of Radio Station or Broadcasting Unit are not enough. what is Bell’s invention but an open wound. radio would cause mental
disturbance madhouses radio propagandist Ezra Pound
felt
that the top of his head had been cut off fragments
radio jingles
‘white noise’
‘bedlam’ Bell’s invention brought to his door a steady stream of schizophrenics wanting to share with him their own ‘invention’ for hearing voices lodged inside their skulls fearing lunacy fending off madness
4. the culture of ancient Egypt spreads out upon a two-dimensional surface history’s repetition frequencies the space from which transmission comes ‘Odettian Sphinx’ ‘light code’ an insanity whose symptoms included hearing mutating snatchers of old poems and conversations played in a polyglottal cacophony of voices. The Egyptian stuff: the sphinxes
heard the call. I am preparing.’
‘I have
A secret, silent word. 5. The transmission-reception circuit brings about Orphic disintegration and elaborate displacements. nothing has happened. body can become an artist. but only if you tune in to the right station.
every-
Track 8: the Signal I dream about my grandmother occasionally. I speak to her. Or rather, she calls me on the telephone. I take the call – always on the landline – in the hallway of our house, but I never otherwise dream in ‘real’ spaces. The first time I had this dream, I was almost overcome with emotion by hearing her voice, her soft Durham accent, and I thought ‘My Nan is alive!’ But she isn’t. She died ten years ago. She has spoken to me in my dreams several times since, always on the phone, always on the landline, just as she did when she was alive. She’s checking in on me, wanting to hear I’m okay. One time she gave me a code-phrase to remember, but of course I have forgotten it. The telephone is one of the sound technologies which came into being in the second half of the 19th century, which also included telegraphy, recording via phonograph cylinders (principles later developed into the gramophone/ phonograph, and audio tape), and radio. Jonathan Sterne, in The Audible Past (2003), has argued that sound recording is continuous with the 19th century’s cultures of death, in that it seeks to preserve the voice of the dead subject and prevent decay. Sterne connects this to the development of canning technologies in the food industry and also to the arts of embalming. In a sense, preservation of the voice is then a way to efface or overcome time and its depredations (allowing that the recording technologies themselves do not degrade over time). Sterne argues that emblematic of the reifying imperatives of what he calls (derived from Matei Calinescu) ‘bourgeois modernity’, a way of ‘managing time’ itself: sound recordings offer ‘repeatable time within a carefully bounded frame’.28 However, Sterne goes on to suggest that ‘the scheme of permanence [...] was essentially hyperbole, a Victorian fantasy. Repeatability from moment to moment was not the same thing as preservation for all time’.29 Recorded sound offered the possibility of repetition, of playback of the voice after death; however, playback itself, on cylinders or gramophone records, relies on the same technologies of material inscription that constitute recording: the needle touches the vinyl groove, and in touching, marks it, degrades it. Repeated playback is another slow fade into white noise, undifferentiation, and death. The term ‘white noise’ is drawn from the frequency spectrum. Within the audio range, we hear different tones or notes when a particular frequency length predominates. When all frequencies within the audible range are equally present, resulting in a ‘flat’ sound spectrum , then what the human ear hears is ‘white noise’. White noise is undifferentiated sound, deemed ‘white’ through analogy with light, where the presence of all visible frequencies results in white light. The relation of transmission or signal to white noise is one that that has haunted analogue sound reproduction technologies from their inception. Most notably, Jeffrey Sconce has investigated the history of this ‘haunting’ with regard to sound and vision technologies. In Haunted Media (2000), Sconce outlines three recurrent ‘cultural fantasies’ that have accompanied the development of telecommunications technologies: (1) ‘these media enable an uncanny form of disembodiment’; (2) the imagination of a ‘sovereign electronic world’, an ‘electronic elsewhere’; and (3) ‘the anthropomorphization of media technology’, most visible in a fascination with androids and cyborgs.30 In his chapter on radio, Sconce suggests that ‘enthusiastic celebration of the emerging medium [was accompanied and challenged by texts ] suggesting an eerie and even sinister undercurrent to the new electronic worlds forged by wireless’.31 In fact, we
might suggest that sound broadcast technologies enabled an uncanny form of embodiment through tele-presence, the belief that the other was somehow present in the room as you spoke to them via radio or telephone. In either sense, we can ascertain that telecommunication technologies disrupted the ‘metaphysics of presence’ diagnosed by Jacques Derrida and others as central to Western metaphysics, a privileging of speech over writing, of the voice over text, that makes the voice the embodiment of truth and of authenticity. In this phonocentrism, as Derrida called it, writing is seen to be derived from a pre-existing orality, a ‘natural’ form of communication that is prior to ‘the fateful violence of the political institution’.32 Derrida, of course, sought to undo this binary which privileged voice over writing, and argued that writing preceded, and was the condition and ground of speech. After the advent of telecommunications technologies, voice itself becomes disembodied, no longer physically connected to a subject who speaks. Tele-presence is at one and the same time presence and not-presence, offering the fantasy of ‘instantaneity of contact’ but at the same time emphasising that the other speaker is not there. When talking with Bernard Stiegler about television in Echographies of Television (2002), Derrida asserts that technologies of the image are bound up with acts of ‘magic’ or ‘faith’, ‘by our relation of essential incompetence to technical operation’.33 ‘For if we don’t know how something works’, Derrida continues, our knowledge is incommensurable to the immediate perception that attunes us to technical efficacy, to the fact that “it works”; we see that “it works”, but even if we know this, we don’t see how it “works”; seeing and knowing are incommensurable here. [...] And this is what makes our experience so strange. We are spectralized by the shot, captured or possessed by spectrality in advance. [...] What has [...] constantly haunted me in this logic of the spectre is that it regularly exceeds all the oppositions between visible and invisible, sensible and insensible. A spectre is both visible and invisible, both phenomenal and nonphenomenal.34 Although Derrida uses the discourse of visibility here, his addition of ‘sensible and insensible’ crucially extends the idea of the ‘specter’ to the frequency range of audio, in its disruption of presence. In his attempt to situate the problematic of how telecommunication technologies in relation to human knowledge, Derrida allows media to escape discourses of science, the rational (or of knowledge itself) and so it enters the numinous, the ‘electronic elsewhere’, where our relation to it can only be uncanny (and/ or theological: we must believe that it works, even if we don’t know how it works, a ‘technical efficacy’ that must always elude us.) Telecommunications technologies, broadcast media, are then spectralized, ‘haunted’, by this strangeness. In terms of the developing communication technologies of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, both transmission and reproduction of sound are ‘haunted’ by ghosts. Recording the voice, according to Sterne, is part of a culture of preservation and memorialization of the dead; Joe Banks, in ‘Rorschach Audio’, reports that ‘Edison and Marconi both believed that radio technology might enable contact with the afterlife’.35 In his short story ‘Wireless’ – analysed by Sconce and Warner – Rudyard Kipling imagines a young man who, entering into a kind of fugue state, becomes a kind of human ‘receiver’ (or we might say ‘medium’) for the transmission of one of Keats’ poems, which he writes down as if transcribing a message: a poem the young man does not consciously know. The
mystery of this act is maintained by the short story until the end: the act of transmission itself, a kind of aetheric emanation picked by a ‘sensitive’, remains unexplained. The telephone is another one of those technologies, developed in the 19th century, which constitute a continuum of mediation and re-mediation that frames our imagination of audio ghosts, spectral sound. (Will Byers, lost in Stranger Things, calls his Mom on the telephone. On the landline.) In ‘Phantasia and Technē and the fin-de-siècle’ (2005), William Uricchio identifies ‘the parallel histories of storage media (photography, phonograph and gramophone, the motion picture) and transmission media (telegraph, telephone, and television), both rooted in the media technologies of the first decades of the 19th century’ (31) [my emphasis], with the latter identified as implicated in a metaphysics of presence. Uricchio writes: The telephone, (ideal-typical) television, and camera obscura all operate in “real” time, maintaining the temporal simultaneity of the viewing subject and the world viewed. Moreover, they construct a kind of spatial contiguity, connecting distant spaces through sight lines, wires, or radio waves. By contrast, media such as film, photography and recorded music are predicated upon temporal displacement, bringing images and sounds from the past into the viewer’s present. Because of this temporal disjunction, they have the privilege of premeditation. (37) The telephone – central to the conceptualization of media in the work of Avital Ronell and Tom McCarthy, among many others – presents an insistent simultaneity, or instantaneity of communication. On the telephone, you feel the presence of the other speaker, there at the same time as you. But where is that other speaker, at the other end of the line? Tom McCarthy notes that Alexander Graham Bell, in developing the technology of the telephone, had in mind that he might use it to speak to his dead brother. The telephone, an uncanny and haunted technology, was presumed to enable speaking with the dead. (Joe Banks, in ‘Rorschach Audio’, reported that ‘Edison and Marconi both believed that radio technology might enable contact with the afterlife’.)36 Jeffrey Sconce, of course, investigated the history of this ‘haunting’ with regard to sound and vision technologies. In Haunted Media (2000), Sconce outlined three recurrent ‘cultural fantasies’ that have accompanied the development of telecommunications technologies: (1) ‘these media enable an uncanny form of disembodiment’; (2) the imagination of a ‘sovereign electronic world’, an ‘electronic elsewhere’; and (3) ‘the anthropomorphization of media technology’.37 Sound broadcast or transmission technologies enabled an uncanny form of embodiment through telepresence, the belief that the other was somehow present in the room as you spoke to them via radio or telephone, no matter where they were. Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska in Life After New Media (2012) attempt to renegotiate an understanding of mediation not as a translational or transparent layer or intermediary between independently existing entities (say, between the producer and consumer of a film or TV program). It is a complex and hybrid process that is simultaneously economic, social, cultural, psychological, and technical. Mediation, we suggest, is all-encompassing and indivisible. This is why “we” have never been separate from mediation. (xv)
Drawing on Deleuze and Bernard Stiegler, Kember and Zylinska ‘read mediation as an intrinsic condition of being-in and becoming-with the technological world’ (xviii), a ‘media flow’ from which both subjects and institutions are instantiated. From this they propose a ‘vitality of media’: a ‘lifeness of media — that is, the possibility of the emergence of forms always new, or its potentiality to generate unprecedented connections and unexpected events’ (xvii). In this paper, I will propose a more radical ‘life after media’, a mortality of media in which the continuum of being is expanded beyond considerations of life and death, and in which media technologies do indeed enable us to speak of and travel with the dead. What connects tape and telephone is presence. What connects presence and tape is transmission. What connects transmission and tape is voice. Tape, transmission, telephone and voice constitute a circuit. This circuit loops through death and life, emanating from the conditions of mediation, a flow from which technology and subject is instantiated. A mortality of media is a circuit in which the boundaries between life and death, between cinema and tape, between subject and object, are re-articulated through transmissions which are both from inside and from outside, are present and are absent, are present (and are past and are future).
I’m waiting for the next call.
Notes 1
Manuel de Landa, ‘Virtual Environments and the Emergence of Synthetic Reason’, Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture (Durham and London: Duke University Press), pp.263-286 (pp.281). 2 George Landow, Hypertext 3.0: Critical theory and new media in an era of Globalization (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), p.13. 3 N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machine (Cambridge MA and London: MIT Press, 2002), p.25 (caps in original). 4 Italo Calvino, ‘Cybernetics and Ghosts’, the Literature Machine (London: Picador, 1989), pp.1-28 (p.17). 5 Espen Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), pp.1-9. Aarseth also writes: ‘The footnote is a a typical example of a structure that can be seen as both uni- and multi-cursal. It creates a bivium, or choice of expansion, but should we decide to take this path (reading the foot-note), the footnote itself returns us to the main track immediately afterward’ (pp 7-8). 6 Joseph Tabbi, ‘’New Media: Its utility and Liability for Literature and for Life’, ‘remix’ of remixthebook, http://issuu.com/remixthebook/docs/new_media_use_abuse, section II. Accessed 28 November 2011. 7 Nick Kent, ‘Brian Jones, Tortured Narcissus’, The Dark Stuff, p.129. 8 Brion Gysin, cd liner notes to Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Joujouka (1971, Rolling Stones Records; 1995, Point Music) 9 Phrases from previous lines from Brion Gysin, liner notes to Brian Jones Presents... 10 Phrases from previous lines from Brion Gysin, liner notes to Brian Jones Presents... 11 Stephen Davis, Old Gods Almost Dead: ‘Brian visited visionary 2001 author Arthur C. Clarke [in January 1969]’, p.280. 12 Brian Jones, cd liner notes to Brian Jones Presents... 13 Stephen Davis, cd liner notes to Brian Jones Presents... 14 Gysin, liner notes to Brian Jones Presents... 15 Davis, Jajouka Rolling Stone, p.63. 16 Davis, Jajouka Rolling Stone, p.257. 17 Davis, Jajouka Rolling Stone, p.254. 18 Phrases from previous lines from Brion Gysin, liner notes to Brian Jones Presents... 19 Nick Kent, ‘Brian Jones, Tortured Narcissus’, p.131. 20 ‘Over and over that day [of Brian Jones’s death] the flimsy record player in the Stones’ office played Tim Hardin’s Bird on a Wire’, Stanley Booth, The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones, p.480. 21 Booth, True Adventures, p.481. 22 Robert Greenfield, Stones Touring Party: A Journey Through America With The Rolling Stones (London: Aurum, 2010), p.84. 23 Tweets by Mark Sample using the username @remixthebook, 12/11/11 24 See Brian Dettmer’s home page, http://briandettmer.com/; the Centripetal Notion page on Dettmer’s book autopsies, http://centripetalnotion.com/2007/09/13/13:26:26/; and Dettmer’s flickr photostream, http://www.flickr.com/photos/briandettmer/. 25 See http://www.remixthebook.com/. 26 Gary Hall, ‘Force of Binding: On Liquid, Living Books (Version 2.0: Mark Amerika Mix)’ http://issuu.com/remixthebook/docs/gary_hall_remixthebook_contributionvfinal; downloaded as pdf. 13 pp (p.8). 27 See The Open Humanities Press site, http://liquidbooks.pbworks.com/w/page/11135951/FrontPage; also see the JISC/ Open Humanities Press project, Living Books About Life, http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/. 28 Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2003), p.310. 29 Sterne, p.332. 30 Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2000), pp.8-9. 31 Sconce, p.62. 32 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (1967), trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p.36. 33 Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television, trans. Jennifer Bajorek (Cambridge: Polity, 2002), p.117. 34 Derrida and Stiegler, p.117.
35
Joe Banks, ‘Rorschach Audio: Ghost Voices and Perceptual Creativity’, Leonardo Music Journal, 11: 2001, 7783 (p.83). 36 Joe Banks, ‘Rorschach Audio: Ghost Voices and Perceptual Creativity’, Leonardo Music Journal, 11: 2001, 7783 (p.83). 37 Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2000), pp.8-9.