Panel 1: Syncing Media Forms

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“ein leichtes delay –”: Ästhetische Eigenzeit and Resisting Social Acceleration in Kathrin Röggla’s wir schlafen nicht

Nicholas Courtman (University of Cambridge)

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In 2005, the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa published his landmark study Beschleunigung: Die Veränderung der Zeitstrukturen in der Moderne. In the book, Rosa argued that since the early 1970s, social acceleration had begun to reach a velocity that produced a series of pathological desynchronisations. Rosa’s work was extremely influential in the subsequent ‘temporal turn’, which has recently received a surge of attention in Anglophone German Studies (Leeder 2015, Fuchs & Long 2016, Göttsche 2016). Scholars in this context have argued that Rosa overestimates the dominance of acceleration, with Anne Fuchs accusing him of ‘undialectical determinism’. Fuchs argues that cultural objects provide a means of resisting the ‘tyranny of acceleration’ through affirmative representations of slowness or lateness. In my view, reducing literature’s capacity for resisting acceleration to affirmative representations of slowness fails to account both for literature’s capacity for negative critique, and for the ästhetische Eigenzeit of literary texts.

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Through a close reading of Kathrin Röggla’s wir schlafen nicht, I will show that literature need not deploy affirmative representations of slowness to resist social acceleration by focusing on Röggla’s critical portrayal of social acceleration in its late-modern pathological variant. Furthermore, I will show that her text derives its critical potency from Röggla’s play with the temporal minutiae of the text, showing that her manipulation of grammar, punctuation, mood, and syntax produce recurrent desynchronising jolts that break the flow of the text’s forward-motion and bring it – and the reader – to a halt. Attention to such effects encourages a reconsideration of one the critical commonplaces about the text – that it replicates the accelerated pace of the consultants it represents – and draws attention to the limitations of the understanding of literature’s potential to resist social acceleration that is currently circulating in German Studies.

 

Nicholas Courtman is a PhD student in German Studies at Jesus College, Cambridge. He is currently researching representations and conceptualisations of work and labour in German literature of the last thirty years (Braun, Goetz, Erpenbeck, Herrndorf, Röggla).

 

Sie erkennt die Krankheit, ehe es zu spät ist: Embodied Temporalities of Cancer in Krebs (1930)

Tyler Schroeder (University of Chicago)

 

The silent hygiene film Krebs (1930, Deutsches Hygiene-Museum) trumpets the positivistic, prescriptive optimism of an emboldened medical establishment armed with new oncological tools. Krebs articulates cancer as a problematic of synchrony between a variety of conscious and physiological time scales. The bodies the film portrays, discusses, and describes become sites of morbid emergence, surveillance, detection and treatment, as well as stages for the chronologies of healthy and productive living. My project gives equal weight to the film’s stentorian verbal rhetoric and its aesthetically adventurous post-Expressionist visual poetics. Regularity and Rechtzeitigkeit pervade the hygienic arguments of Krebs, while vigorous cutting, startling text/image interplay, oneiric effects and diagrammatic representation instantiate the problems of temporal convergence and spatial [in]coherence that separate health from illness.

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While the film itself may embody and deploy the technological tools of media modernity to sustain and modify its own rhythms and those of its spectator, its most striking intervention—and that most fertile for further study—is to form the human body, as a time-sensitive substrate for the temporal crisis of cancer, into a node of fragile synchrony at which manifold time-scales meet.

 

Intertitles repeat the film’s argument three times: Krebs ist heute heilbar. This Heute is nonetheless one in which per-capita cancer death rates increase jährlich. This trend may only be reversed, the film suggests, with regelmäßige preventive examination leading to rechtzeitiges detection and innovative treatment and even bringing cancer to a Stillstand. A graphical Lebensablauf contrasts death in middle age with good health into old age, separated only by the caesura of a visit to the doctor. If the film’s spectator-patient can keep his or her temporal responsibility, medical science will intervene rapidly and effectively: “Verpasse Du nicht den rechten Augenblick!”

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Tyler Schroeder is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. He is currently developing a dissertation on the aesthetics and poetics of health and embodiment in visual and networked media, rooted in German intellectual history from the 18th through the 21st centuries.

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Off The Grid: Asynchronous Moments in Contemporary Pop Music

Nikolas Lund (Independent Scholar)

 

Bloch’s The Spirit of Utopia portrays music as the fundamental synchronistic medium. For composers, music is a process of synchronization: an arranging of acoustic events into a unified unfolding. For listeners, music is an experience of synchronization: inviting rhythms and “catchy” repeating phrases entrain the body to grooves in the present and later, in the memory.

 

I here examine four 21st century musicians who challenge the synchronistic function(s) of music: Brian Eno, Wayne Shorter, Thom Yorke, and Kanye West.

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I show how each “interrupts” the temporal conventions of a broader historical context. I focus on moments where these artists go “off the grid” of quantized “ordinary” time, creating radically unique experiences of time for listeners.

 

I review Adorno’s critique of “musical standardization” ("On Popular Music," 1941) that delineates trends still evidenced by Western pop music. I argue however that Adorno has no practical or political solutions to his critique: 1) because of his own historical position; and 2) because the notion of “standardization” misses something irreducible about the essence of music that Susan McClary shrewdly unpacks in Conventional Wisdom (2000).

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Citing Gary Tomlinson’s A Million Years of Music (2015) and David Huron’s Anticipating Music (2006), I argue that music is a play with temporal, historical convention itself. Avant-garde pop evolves mutations that “seem” asynchronous to the moment, yet thereby appeal to the possibility of synchronizing more persons in a future, utopian time.

 

At present, it is widely asserted that asynchronous realities exist in heightened conflict with one another. We note how critical artists act as both representers and instigators of this “discord of asynchronicity.” Hakim Bey’s The Utopian Blues (1995) is cited in conclusion, helping to frame a constellation of inquiry between political protest, post Euclidean geometry, and the temporal phenomenology of popular music.

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Nikolas Lund recently concluded post-bacc studies in biochemistry at Cal State East Bay, and is now pursuing a degree in clinical psychology. He previously worked as a professional A/V engineer before co­-founding Canvas Chicago, a production company currently licensing interactive sound + image installations to clients like Art Basel Miami, Teach For America, Lollapalooza, and The Via Festival.

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Panel 2: Syncing Bodies and Voices

 

Drag Lip-Sync: A Voice from the Silence

Jacob Mallinson Bird (University of Oxford)

 

Lip-sync performance, the art of synchronising one’s mouth with the voice of another, forms the very foundation of the drag queen’s craft. In this paper, through an analysis of the work of Rodent Decay, a London-based drag queen, I will show that lip-sync is far from an act of passive ventriloquism, but rather a process through which the drag queen finds a voice of her own. I shall explore the ways in which lip-sync disturbs the current voice theory institution with respect to vocal production; given the displacement of the voice from its origin and its relocation within the performing body of the drag queen, I suggest that we draw a distinction between “speaking” and “voicing,” the latter delineating the physical processes that create voice and which can ascribe to it a visible source. Furthermore, I will question to what extent voice can be considered a definite marker of identity, and whether the drag queen is able to efface the identity of the singer through her performance, or whether there is a flexible relationship between the drag queen’s own identity and that of the singer. This dialogic feedback loop of identity that can arise through lip-sync—between performing body and original singer—is made manifold in Rodent Decay’s performance; by splicing multiple songs and audio clips together, Rodent affects a complex matrix of identities that engage and intersect polylogically between singer, drag queen, and the man behind the makeup.

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Jacob Mallinson Bird is a DPhil student in musicology at the University of Oxford. He is particularly interested voice theory and psychoanalysis; his current research focuses on the deconstruction of the voice in drag lip-sync performance, and the implications of lip-syncing for constructions of the self and queer identity.

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Choreographic Multiplicity: Synchronicity and Abstraction in the Rockettes

Randi Evans (University of California, Berkeley)

 

The replication of the dancing female body can be most aptly seen in the advent of the chorine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Audiences and critics were, and continue to be, drawn to the optic pleasure of the multiple and conflicted by its signification of conformity and superfluity. Historically, the chorine has been classified as a representation of modernity and industrialization as well as an abstraction of the body. In the context of the United States, the Rockettes, the 92-year-old venerable institution known for their high-kicks, have not only embodied the uniformity and precision of choreographic synchronicity through their use of lines and grids, but have also teetered on representations of femininity and masculinity, all-American girl and showgirl, and American values and camp. Ultimately, though, they are always framed as a whole, not as individuals. That is, until recently when one dancer, Phoebe Pearl, made the decision to step out of line and object to performing for the recent US presidential inauguration. As news sources began to report on divergent claims from the Rockettes and their management at Madison Square Garden Company, multiple stories emerged about the enforcement of a brand through the dancers as well as the capacity to which dancers could refuse to perform. In this disconcerting moment of presidential transition, looking to the Rockettes and discourses around choreographic multiplicity and synchronicity might yield ways in which to consider questions such as: how bodies moving in unison reveal information about their historical context? When the individual becomes plural, and to a greater extent a replica, what unease or pleasure does that bring? What happens when that image breaks? What is the political potential of choreographic forms of synchronicity and when is the breakdown necessary? Lastly, how does this contemporary example from the Rockettes help us understand the role of dissent in the face of compulsory performance?

 

Randi Evans is a PhD student in Performance Studies at UC Berkeley. She has worked as an arts and culture administrator, community-based teaching artist, and a lecturer in contemporary performance practices at University of Washington Bothell. Current research interests include the movement of dance between proscenium and museum spaces and how this movement relates to historiography, curatorship, and institutional structures.

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Neoliberal Dance: Adrift in Berlin

Inesa Khatkovskaya (University of Toronto)

 

In my talk, I would like to address the relationship between labor, mobility and dance in Tatjana Turanskyj’s The Drifter (Eine Flexible Frau, Germany, 2010). The film centers on Greta, forty-year-old unemployed architect, who navigates restlessly through Berlin and tries unsuccessfully to find a job. Her drift presents a non-productive, a-functional engagement with urban space rather than motivated and goal-oriented movement. By this drift, Greta subverts her professional ties with that space and prevents any possibility to find a job. The peak happens in a scene where Greta performs a “free-fall” dance on outskirts of Berlin: she, surrounded by a natural landscape with the city as the distant background behind her body and under her feet, is taught how to fall gracefully. The film has been considered as a critique of current tendencies in urban development, or with regard to the incarnation of post-feminism in Germany (with its strong reliance on a neoliberal mode of rationality and its repudiation of the second-wave feminism), or in the context of the precarious labor condition under late capitalism and the role of creative labor in it. Departing from this multidirectional framework, I focus on the relationship between labor and mobility through Greta’s dance. Following Bojana Kunst, who stresses the connection between labor and dance by considering modern forms of dance of the early 20th century that focused on an individual liberated flexible body as opposition to the Fordist ornamental representation of “synchronized group dancing” and a site of resistance to rationalized forms of organization of labor, I situate Greta’s dance and the political potential of her a-synchronization with others in a post-industrial mode of organizing labor and current discussions on exhaustion of dance (A. Lepecki). I argue that Greta’s dance, which results in Greta’s fall and subsequent stillness, can be read as a critique of neoliberal and post-feminist demands for constant mobility and, more widely, as a critique of late capitalist modernity.

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Inesa Khatkovskaya is a second-year Ph.D. student in Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto. Her dissertation research focuses on landscape and, broader, spatial imagery in Soviet Belarusian cinema in the 1970s and 1980s.

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Saturday Morning Workshop

Presentism, Synchronization, and the Media: Hartog and the Crisis of History

Espen Ytreberg (University of Oslo), Bodhisattva Chattopadhya (University of Oslo) and Marijn Rombouts (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen)

 

Espen Ytreberg is Professor of Media Studies and Coordinator of the joint Ph.D. program at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Oslo. His research interests include media history, media events, media and communication theory. With Helge Jordheim he will head the upcoming "In Sync" project on synchronization and mediation for the Norwegian Academy of Sciences.

 

Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay is postdoctoral fellow in the SAMKUL research project “Synchronizing the World” at the Department of Culture Studies, University of Oslo. He works on science fiction and history of colonial science. His website is www.bodhisattvac.com.

Marijn Rombouts is a research master student in "Modern History & International Relations" at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, the Netherlands. Between August and December he did a traineeship in the research project "Synchronizing the World" at the University of Oslo. He is interested in the experience of time and will be writing his master thesis on late 19th century and early 20th century expectations of the future.

 

 

Panel 3: Syncing Virtual Societies

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Threads of Enlightenment: Adorno and political subjectivity in the era of social media

Kumars Salehi (University of California, Berkeley)

 

Most of the critique of the role of mass media in social control developed by Theodor W. Adorno implies a categorical dismissal of the potential of mass media (and by extension, digital media like online social networks) to act as conduits for resistance and critical thinking. Nevertheless, in Adorno’s writings on the impact of mass media on political subjectivity, there exist moments of possibility, glimmers of hope that arise from the internal tensions in even the most apparently unshakeable structures of domination. In one key qualification, Adorno speculates that film may be able to counteract its manipulative tendencies—to throw the reproduction of ideology out of sync, and point beyond it—by lending objective expression to the modern subject’s interior stream of consciousness. The assertion of this subjectivity has the power to redraw the parameters of what is thinkable and what is thought, what is doable and what is done.

 

This paper contends that the most politically consequential social media platforms—Facebook and Twitter—contain within their grotesque architecture of pleasure and connectedness utopian moments of indeterminacy and contingency from which users, as the subjects of the culture industry’s current incarnation, can derive new and galvanizing forms of political agency and identity. Drawing on social media posts (and their reception in the popular press) about the 2016 US elections, this paper shows how the very fragmentation of the public sphere enabled by its displacement onto social media has produced unprecedented opportunities for collective political identification and mobilization. While Adorno helps us understand the ideological role of social media in delimiting our ability to even conceive of radical societal change, he also suggests a potential way in which people can assert themselves as critical subjects in the virtual public sphere that has emerged from our 21st century media landscape.

 

Kumars Salehi is a PhD student in German Literature and Culture at UC Berkeley. He has a BA in Cinema Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an MA in Cinema Studies from New York University.

 

Sharing One's Life: Siegfried Kracauer and the Present of Instagram

Jonas Teupert (University of California, Berkeley)

 

Living a life today – in the double sense of living in the current new media age as well as leading a life in synchrony with the present moment of others – seems to imply that one documents and exposes this life on social media. Instagram offers a platform for visual representations of one’s own singular life that, through instant “sharing,” can be received by others in synchrony with the events captured. The sheer number of self-images flooding the web betrays a certain affectual involvement in this process. It might be rooted in the promise of a heightened sense of one’s own life guaranteed by loops of recognition in the larger structure of the virtual online public. Put in negative terms, the drive for online exposure could as well lie in the fear of missing out completely fueled by neoliberal power structures that prompt self-marketing and individualization.

 

By constantly consuming the images of other people’s lives – some of which we might not know at all – we can get the impression of participating in a present constituted by a multitude of parallel lives while at the same time synchronizing ourselves with these lives that we witness. However, this sense of a presence is produced in the process of mediation on Instagram. The mediation inevitably alters the status of that which is being exposed by integrating it into an ornamental structure. Images posted on Instagram are being detached from those who are depicted in them and lose their ties to a singular life to which they no longer refer to. As a part of the ornament, these images appear above the individuals ready to be received by those who produce through them their own present. The question eventually is whether this could lead to a collectivized experience of the present or rather to a normalization of this experience.

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Jonas Teupert is a PhD student in the Department of German at UC Berkeley. He studied German and English at Humboldt-University Berlin where he wrote his Master’s thesis about the mediality and rhetoric of small forms in Heinrich von Kleist.

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Panel 4: Syncing Nonhuman Temporalities

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Spectral Synchronicities: The Contemporary Body in Preemptive Cybernetic Control

Gary Kafer (University of Chicago)

 

Our 21st century data milieu is saturated by real-time information processing systems, which – through feedback mechanisms – not only analyze events as they occur, but also attempt to control the future orientation of lived social spaces: to synch the present with an indeterminable future. If, as Kittler argues, the ghosts of twentieth century media were recorded representations from the past, the specters that haunt these new feedback technologies rather visit us as recoded future potentials. However, in algorithms of data-based surveillance, data production and use are two separate procedures, which cannot be reduced to a linear or synchronous process of real-time feedback and storage. Data only becomes data in the moment that a request is made to the computational program, such that this new analytic then influences the current state of the data algorithm, and those future states to come. This paper will thus take up the claim that data is non-representational with regards to the social space to which it ostensibly refers, since vague data patterns and connections are expanded, contracted, and mobilized in widely varying contexts. Rather than accounting for specters as recoded futures brought to bear in the present, through a cross-reading of Tobias Matzner’s work on performative data and Luciana Parisi’s writing on the topological space of cybernetic control, I will argue that the ghosts of contemporary media environments are the subjectivities that emerge in the voids of nonsynchronous potentials that coalesce around the citational effects of power relations dispersed across the techno-cultural field. The stakes of this argument, rather than merely redefining the spectral technologies of the contemporary computer age, strike a substantial chord with a broader biopolitical arena, and thus gestures to possibilities for interrogating these nonsynchronous sites where certain bodies are turned into ghosts in the construction of the speculative neoliberal present.

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Gary Kafer is a PhD candidate in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. His research interests include histories and practices of surveillance, queer theory and cinema, and visual neuroscience and perception. His work has been published in Surveillance & Society, Contemporaneity, and Film Matters.

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The Time of the Divine: Christianity, Secularism, Absence

Aaron Eldridge (University of California, Berkeley)

 

In Robert Orsi’s recent work, History and Presence, he cites the problem of the gods’ presence, its resolution into an anxious absence, as foundational to secular modernity. Animated through particular divisions within Western Christianity, Orsi shows how the formation of modern secular subjects in capitalist democracy is dependent upon the uneasy caesura captured in the Catholic syntagma ‘real presence’, i.e. reality and its representation. Taking up this question in terms of temporality, I consider the ‘time’ of absence and presence as critical and complementary to the spatial division of the world into nature and supernature. In this sense, the punctum of nature (this world) by supernature (the world to come) is a managed danger that produces a homogenous, historical time. Following conceptually from Walter Benjamin’s notion of Jetztzeit (‘now-time’), I retrace a Christian itinerary of presence found in the writings of Eastern Orthodox scholar, Gregory Palamas. Outlining his rebuke of Western Scholasticism, one which proceeds from an apology for an embodied apophatic (negative) theology, I ask after the temporality engendered therein. How might we conceptualize Divine time and the time of this world without resorting to a transcendent division of presence and absence? That is, as a cosmography in which Divine time is always-already enfolded within the time of this world?

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Aaron Eldridge is a PhD student in Socio-Cultural Anthropology and Critical Theory at UC Berkeley. His doctoral research concerns Eastern Orthodox Christianity, discursive tradition, and the politics of secularism in Lebanon.

 

The Mountain’s Refrain: Rhythmanalysis and the films of Werner Herzog

David Michael Lamme (University of California, Irvine)

 

The final work of Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, cements his place among philosophers of difference and, according to Stuart Elden, serves as the “de facto fourth volume” of his Critique of Everyday Life. Yet, the ways in which this brief work might be utilized and expanded are just now emerging; basic questions concerning the nature and function of rhythm and rhythmanalysis must still be answered if it is to develop into a new science as Lefebvre hoped. My research seeks to put Lefebvre’s proposed science in conversation with Deleuze - in particular his work on cinema and his efforts alongside Guattari. My central question is to ask if and how a rhythmanalysis of cinema might be possible and what practical consequences might arise from its undertaking. For my presentation, I attempt a rhythmanalysis of The Mountain in the films of Werner Herzog, focusing on three of his films: Fitzcarraldo (1982), Scream of Stone (1991), and one of Herzog’s newest films Into the Inferno (2016). I am interested in” mapping” the polyrhythmias, eurhythmias, and arrhythmias of modern subjectivity that emerge from “listening” in the Lefebvrian manner to the rhythms of Herzog’s mountains as opposed to “viewing” them as signs. By granting a common denominator of rhythm to The Mountain and the subject, I argue that a rhythmanalysis of The Mountain opens up new lines of thought concerning the ecomateriality of the modern subject and new lines of flight for that same subject. Simply put, I ask not what is The Mountain’s refrain is, but what does it do? How might its song, its repetitions and rhythms, help put us in sync with the subjective and objective realities of the modern world? Herzog's Mountains themselves reply.

 

David Michael Lamme is a PhD student in European Languages and Studies (German) at the University of California, Irvine. His research explores German and French philosophies of difference, as well as 20th and 21st century German literature and film.

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