"... ELSE LOOP FOREVER". THE UNTIMELINESS OF MEDIA In ...

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perception of a melody takes place on the basis of a microtemporalmechanism in consciousness, identifiable as neuronalcorrelation in the brain regions - a different, cybernetical dramaunfolding below the narrative level, closer to mathematicalcounting (of time).Linear time is characterized by sequentially unfolding, aimdirectedevents, with the singular events being linked causally toeach other unfolding. The effect is the impression (and ideology)of a temporal continuum created by a succession of events in whichearlier events imply later ones and later ones are theirconsequences . Ludwig van Beethovens' string quartettop. 135, for example, initially performs this step-by-stepintegration of apparent divergent moments, linearly aiming at aquasi-Hegelian dialectical synthesis at the end). These processesgive the movement a sense of forward motion through time.Sonic temporality (somewhat inbetween physical acoustics and thecultural semantics of music) is conditioned on the one hand by thephysical and physiological laws of acoustics, and by culturaltraining on the other. Kramer points to this cultural condition ofthis temporal aesthetics, as a function of the occidentalphilosophy of progress. 1 A process-oriented analysis of musicaldynamics in occidental musical art reveals that is has been mostlydirected towards an aim towards it unfolds progressively. Againstthis Eurocentristic temporality, Kramer describes non-lineartemporal aesthetics - a "temporal continuum that results fromprinciples permanently governing a section or piece", like knownfrom the isorhythmic motette with its constant pattern of therhythmical process (a "post-historic" condition). For severalreasons - one of which is the technomathematical development ofelectronic media itself - non-linear time has become the dominanttemporal figure in 20th century, where the dominant pieces ofcomposition do not causally unfold any more, neither do they endin a harmonic, conflict-resolving finale. This non-directedlinearity, "gestural time" (Kramer), is a semantic equivalent tomedia-technological Eigenzeit.Writing and TimeThe chrono-entropical directedness of physical (thermodynamical)time becomes "final destination" by the hypothesis of a discursiveimaginary called history; sense (ital. senso) und end thusconverge asymptotically. The frontispiece of Lafiteau's Moeurs dessauvages Ameriquains (1724) shows the encounter of writing andtime in a closed space littered with relics from both ClassicalAntiquity and the New World. The muse of history (Clio) holds thepen, the allegory of time (Chronos) the scythe (in German:1Hans-Ulrich Fuss, Musik als Zeitverlauf. Prozeßorientierte Analyseverfahren in der amerikanischen Musiktheorie,in: Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie 2/3 (2005); here quoted from the online-Versionhttp://www.gmth.de/zeitschrift/artikel/205.aspx (accessed July 2009)
"Sense", another senso); both tools approach each otherasymptotically without ever touching .The idea of historical time, according to Vilém Flusser, is animplication of alphabetic writing which reduced themultidimensionality of architecture and images to linear,sequential lines. According to Marshall McLuhan, the invention ofthe printing press, i. e. the mechanized form of alphabeticwriting as a further escalation, gave rise not only to perspectivein Renaissance painting, but as well "print produced the idea of apast in distant perspective" which isdirectional, end-orientated time. Historical consciousness, readthis way, is the direct function of a specific media technology.The loss of historical consciousness as reference for theselection of information in combination with the increasingtechnological manipulation of time leads of the simple storage ofall incoming data - starting with the E-mails on almost everyprivate computer desk. The end of history is the future of thearchive, a kind of post-historical condition not to thing inlinearities any more, but to calculate with discreet states.Storage, according to the mathematical theory of communicationengineering, is the pre-condition for all transfer.The moment when facts are disseminated by news media, they gain akind of kinetic energy which divorce them from their originalcontext and throw them into hyperspace where they loose anypointed direction, de-referentialized, with no more teleology(which is the condition for the discourse of history as sensedrivennarrative). When events are not only registered but as wellwritten (historio-)graphically with no more sense of ending, whatremains in the end are listings - a reduction of narrative to itsessentials, like On Kawara's "date art" paintings. The artisticwriting systems of Hanne Darbovens as well turn what used to benarrative historiography into lists of dates (e. g. Bismarckzeit,1978): pure serial writing (corresponding with the computationalhistoire sérielle in the Franch school of historians around thejournal Annales), pure description. Narrative elegance is beingreplaced by mathematical procedures of time series.Game timeLive is not really, but only symbolically organized in stories;this sense-giving machinery gets in ekstasy when the end ofnarrative texts coincides with the expecation of the end of time(a sense of ending).<strong>In</strong> traditional media the relation and distribution of linearityand non-linearity mostly converges with the patterns ofnarrativity. Narration produces in its classical structure ofbeginnging, midlee and end, a linearly unfolding sequence whichallows for non-linear couplings, differering according to the
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