Derrida and drum machines

That which broaches, breaches

So, first of all, I stole the title and idea from this video by Jonas Čeika:

(I found it somewhere in the depths of

mtraven

’s Agency Made Me Do It site, which is a great source of interesting things.)

I highly recommend watching the video, but here’s a compressed version of the basic idea. Drum machines were originally designed to represent the sound of a drum kit. In this view, the drum kit is the ideal form, and individual drum machines are more or less faulty representations of the ideal. Deleuze would call this an “arborescent” structure, a tree with the drum kit as the single privileged root node and drum machines as the branches.

However, this isn’t the only way people use drum machines. Čeika gives the example of the early punk duo Suicide, who bought a cheap second-hand drum machine and, instead of trying to represent the sound of a real drum kit, picked a minimalist beat and cranked up the tempo as high as it would go. This created a frenetic mechanical rhythm that they wouldn’t have got from a real drummer. Instead of fitting into an arborescent structure, this use of the drum machine is closer to a non-hierarchical, “rhizomatic” structure, where any node of the structure can be the centre of a new elaboration, without reference to a distinguished root node.¹

This got me thinking about explaining Derrida with drum machines. I’ve been grappling with Derrida’s ideas about representation for some time now and find him frustrating to read but insightful enough to keep trying anyway. Drum machines looked promising as a rich source of examples of representation, and I was pretty sure I could use them to illustrate Derrida’s idea of iterability. And it seemed appropriate to take the Deleuze video as a starting node and branch off it in a rhizomatic sort of way.

First, though, I’m going to need to infodump about drum machines for a bit. I promise that the details are actually relevant!

What is a drum machine?

By “What is a drum machine?” I mean something like: “What sort of capabilities do we expect from a drum machine?” What would we count as one, and what wouldn’t we count as one? It’s going to be useful to have a few examples in mind, from canonical ones that everyone would agree count as drum machines, to weirder more marginal ones, to things that definitely aren’t drum machines.

I am definitely not an expert on drum machines, by the way. This is all stuff I learned from reading the wikipedia article, watching a few videos, and asking Claude some dumb questions.²

So, as a start, the drum machine that Suicide used is obviously a drum machine. It’s this one, the Seeburg Select-A-Rhythm:

The video demonstrates its entire range of functionality, which takes about three minutes because it’s pretty primitive as drum machines go. There are 18 buttons with different pre-programmed rhythms like “Cha Cha” or “Teen Beat”, plus an on/off switch, a dial to change the tempo and another dial to change the volume.

Any fancier features are clearly not necessary for something to count as a drum machine. For example, later drum machines often give you the ability to program your own beats, but you don’t need that feature to count as a drum machine, so we won’t consider it here.

Now for some obvious examples of things that aren’t drum machines. A guy playing the drums isn’t a drum machine. A single recording of that drummer is also not a drum machine. It’s closer to a drum machine than the original performance, because it’s portable: you can take it into a new context, and maybe play guitar over it and make a new recording. But fundamentally it’s a bit too limited, too lacking in representational power. You can only play over one particular drum solo at one particular tempo, for as long as that one particular recording lasts. For a drum machine to be satisfying, it needs the ability to play many different drum solos, at different rhythms and different speeds, for as long as you want.

Let’s construct a kind of marginal case of a drum machine by starting with that single recording and adding functionality until it feels drum-machine-like. We’re going to be weirdly specific and assume it’s an 8-track tape recording. The 8-track format has a looped tape that allows you to play it back continuously without rewinding. This would normally allow you to play a whole album on repeat, but for this example we’ll cut the tape down to a 1 minute loop of the drum solo. That solves the “as long as you want” part. Next, each tape allows for four of these drum rhythms (they need two tracks each for stereo sound). That still isn’t that many rhythms, so probably you want several tapes of rhythms. Now play the tapes back on a special player that allows you to switch between the four rhythms of the current tape, and also change the speed the tape is played back.

At this point, we’ve duplicated all the essential features of the Select-A-Rhythm, so we’ve got something that’s operationally a drum machine. And in fact this weird thing was made and sold as a real drum machine! Here’s the Bandmaster Powerhouse:

I had no idea that this machine existed when I started writing this post, but it’s perfect for explaining iterability. Although we’ve duplicated the main features of the Select-A-Rhythm, there’s still one important difference, which will turn out to be relevant later. If you turn down the tempo of the Powerhouse, you turn down the playback speed of the whole tape, which will mean each hit of the drums will take longer and the pitch will get lower. This is a pretty cool effect, and could be the starting point for a whole new rhizome of sound possibilities that depend on the details of this particular machine. But from the point of view of representing actual drums accurately, it’s not so great.

On real drums, if you slow down the tempo there’s a longer gap between each drum hit, but the actual drum sound stays the same. The Select-A-Rhythm works in the same way. On the oldest drum machines, like the Wurlitzer Side Man, you can see very clearly how it’s done (this thing sounds amazing by the way, highly recommend watching the video):

The drum sounds are controlled by that wheel of metal contacts at the top. The tempo is set by the speed of the arm that moves around the wheel, which can vary continuously, but each contact triggers the same sound each time whatever speed the arm turns at.³

In the Select-A-Rhythm the sequencing mechanism has been abstracted into electronic components so it’s harder to see exactly how it’s done, but there’s something called a diode matrix which you can see in this video. Anyway the effect is the same, changing the tempo changes the gap between each sound but not the sounds themselves.

In both the Side Man and the Select-A-Rhythm, the individual sounds are not recordings of a real drum performance, like they are in the tape machine. Instead they’re sounds generated by circuits in the machine itself, chosen to mimic the sounds of drums.

That’s nice, but what does it have to do with Derrida?

Derrida is best known for writing about writing, not drum machines. But his sense of “writing” is very broad and includes all kinds of symbolic or representational content. This can be pretty confusing at first, but there is some logic to it. Derrida is interested in any kind of system that has what he calls iterability, a kind of ability to be detached from its original context, in the way that writing can be detached from the original act of writing and read by someone else later:

My communication must be repeatable - iterable - in the absolute absence of the receiver or of any empirically determinable collectivity of receivers. Such iterability - (iter, again, probably comes from itara, other in Sanskrit, and everything that follows can be read as the working out of the logic that ties repetition to alterity) structures the mark of writing itself, no matter what particular type of writing is involved... A writing that is not structurally readable - iterable -beyond the death of the addressee would not be writing.⁴

For a drum machine, iterability means that it’s not locked to a single context, in the way that a specific performance by one drummer would be. The output of the drum machine has writing-like qualities, whereas the performance is more speech-like.

For a form of communication to be iterable in this way, it needs to be structured in a way that allows for reuse across different contexts. Derrida gives an example of two people who communicate with a secret code that only they know, and who then both die:

Imagine a writing whose code would be so idiomatic as to be established and known, as secret cipher, by only two "subjects." Could we maintain that, following the death of the receiver, or even of both partners, the mark left by one of them is still writing? Yes, to the extent that, organized by a code, even an unknown and nonlinguistic one, it is constituted in its identity as mark by its iterability, in the absence of such and such a person, and hence ultimately of every empirically determined "subject."

Derrida is pointing out that, even though nobody is alive to read the result any more, the marks the two subjects leave still have some organising principle of being generated by a code. There must be some sort of iterable elements that could be used in other situations, not just the particular set of marks that they happen to leave. For example, maybe there’s a cluster that means “dog”, which can refer to many dogs. The code might be very difficult to decipher, and in fact maybe nobody will ever decipher it, but it probably won’t be hard to recognise it as a code in the first place. There will lots of separate elements all clustered together, and some of the elements will be recognisably “the same” as other elements. Elsewhere in Signature Event Context, Derrida uses the phrase “chains of iterable marks” to describe this sort of system.

Compare this with an example where the two subjects meet up to, I don’t know, throw paint at the floor, Jackson Pollock style. (I just made this up, it isn’t in Signature Event Context.) They’d still leave the paint splashes behind after they die, but nobody would come across the result and expect it to be a secret code. Paint splashes overlap haphazardly, and each paint splash is different from all the other paint splashes. There are no iterable marks, just a bunch of raw particulars.

Iterable marks are the source of representational power. To represent something, you need to be able to refer to it in different places and times, and not just once. To do this, you need to be able to detach that reference from its original context. You need some sort of mark or symbol that’s portable and recognisable by the intended audience as “the same” each time:

… a written syntagma can always be detached from the chain in which it is inserted or given without causing it to lose all possibility of functioning, if not all possibility of "communicating," precisely. One can perhaps come to recognize other possibilities in it by inscribing it or grafting it onto other chains.

This freedom to recognise other possibilities is what Deleuze is talking about with his rhizome idea. The drum machine can be repurposed to make new sounds that don’t correspond to real drums. Derrida tends to instead emphasise the separation aspect, the way that representations can’t completely transmit the entirety of the concrete situation they are representing. The secret code has elements that are recognisably “the same”, but they can never be exactly the same in all particulars.

Broaching and breaching

Let’s look at how this works in the context of our drum machine examples. We’ve already seen that a recording of a drummer has a basic kind of iterability, a freedom that the original performance lacks. In the original performance the sound has to travel to the listeners’ ears, and if they miss it they miss it. The recording, though, can be repeated in the absence of the original drummer and the original audience.

It’s still a very limited kind of iterability, though, because the recording itself is locked to being exactly the way it is. All you can do is play it at different times. There’s nothing we can really distinguish as iterable marks in the recording in the way that we’d distinguish written letters on the page.

The drum solo itself probably has a lot of structured content like repeating patterns of beats, but the recording doesn’t have any understanding of that structure. It’s just a continuous chunk that treats everything that happens over the time span of the recording in an equal way, whether it’s the beats or the silence between them or the drummer coughing.

The weird 8-track tape machine is similar to the recording in this sense. Everything in the one-minute tape loop is treated in the same way. In contrast, a drum machine like the Side Man or Select-A-Rhythm does split its output into a chain of iterable marks. We saw in the last section that the sounds of each drum hit are produced separately by the machine, and a given rhythm setting chains these sounds together with specified gaps between them.

In some ways, the weird tape machine is a much more faithful representation of a drum solo. It captures the whole of the drummer’s performance, not just the part around each beat. Also, each beat in the one-minute loop is an individual, differing in tiny ways from the other beats in the loop. The Select-A-Rhythm’s beats are much more uniform, much closer to being “the same beat” repeated multiple times. They’re generated by electronic circuits in the machine, rather than being fragments of a recording of a real performance.

You can hear this difference in the machines. The weird tape machine has a kind of murky lo-fi sound that has a lot of personality but lacks the crisp separation of a more standard drum machine. As you change the tempo further from that of the original recording, it gets increasingly distorted. The Select-A-Rhythm’s sound is more boring, but it’s also more versatile.

There’s a quote I really like that originally comes from Derrida’s Limited Inc a b c . . .⁵, translated by Samuel Weber:

Iterability is at once the condition and the limit of mastery: it broaches and breaches it [elle l'entame].

I love this use of “broaches and breaches”. It’s a clever translation: entamer seems to mean a lot of things, but they include “to start” (broach) and “to cut into” (breach), and Derrida wants both of these shades of meaning. Iterability broaches the possibility of representation by taking marks out of their current context and making them portable and reusable. Iterability also breaches any specific system of representation by allowing you to insert those iterable marks into different chains, where they can come to mean something else. That breach means that they can’t be perfectly faithful to their original context. Iterability is the cause of, and solution to, all of representation's problems.

The Select-A-Rhythm has breached the context of any specific recording by abstracting a drum solo into a series of beats. But this is also the source of its power. It broaches the ability to make complex rhythms by allowing you to chain sounds together in different ways.

Final thoughts

I’ve already spent a lot longer on this post than I meant to, and I should really stop thinking about drum machines now, but they work really surprisingly well as an example and I can see a couple of other directions I could take this in.

First, I could try and tackle some of Derrida’s other weird jargon, like différance⁶. I haven’t internalised différance as well as iterability, though, and also I’ve mainly picked up what I do know from secondary sources so I’d need to do more reading first. And reading Derrida is hard work and often very annoying, so I’m not sure whether I want to bother at the moment.

Second, this drum machine example makes me think of Brian Cantwell Smith as well as Derrida. I’ve written before about his idea of the middle distance, where representation takes place in the intermediate ground between direct causal contact and complete disconnection. One of his examples is a “super-sunflower”, which follows the sun while it’s out but then continues to rotate at approximately the same speed when the sun goes behind a cloud. Smith argues that this behaviour is a kind of proto-representation of the path of the sun: the super-sunflower is not just pulled around by the sun through direct causal contact, it’s doing work internally to maintain a relationship with it.

The drum machine also has patterns of causal connection and disconnection. You can maybe see this most clearly in the wheel of contacts on the Wurlitzer Side Man. Each contact triggers a drum sound, and then loses connection as the wheel rotates. In contrast, the weird tape machine is one continuous recording. In Smith’s terms, the Side Man is in the middle distance between direct connection (like the tape machine) and complete disconnection.

This middle distance idea has a lot of similarities with iterability – they are both about partial but not total detachment from a surrounding context – and it could be worth poking at this connection some more.

Anyway, that’s it for now. I hope you liked the weird machines even if the Derrida stuff was a slog.

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The cover image is this Wikimedia image of the insides of the Wurlitzer Side Man.

1. The video doesn’t go into this, but there’s also a link here to Deleuze’s other confusing phrase “the body without organs”, which I was trying to understand here a while back. I came to the conclusion that it was actually more like “the organs without the body”, where an individual organ (the drum machine, in this case) can be taken out of its original environment in the body (the organising principle of needing to represent drums), and become its own source of new ideas.

2. I’m not an expert on Derrida either. Why are you even reading this drivel?

3. I read somewhere that each concentric circle of contacts controls a different drum rhythm, but there are more rhythm settings than circles so I don’t know exactly how that works. There are 10 rhythm settings grouped into 2 sections, plus a metronome setting, and 5 concentric circles plus a sparser inner one. So maybe each of the 5 circles controls 2 different rhythms depending on some switch, and the inner one is for the metronome? I don’t know, I’m not convinced of my theory because that inner circle looks very unevenly spaced.

4. This quote and the following Derrida quotes are from Signature Event Context.

5. I have not read this. I got this quote second hand from a paper by Gordon Bearn, Derrida Dry: Iterating Iterability Analytically, which I wrote about in this notebook post.

6. Spelled with an “a”, for Reasons, but pronounced the same way as “différence”.