Weheliye, Alexander G.,  Phonographies Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity. New York: Duke UP, 2005. Print.

Intro:
Wow, what a theory/lexically heavy piece!  There’s a lot going on in the intro, so I’ll do my best to encapsulate what W. wants to do here.  First, he discusses the “digital divide” that puts white’s engagement with technologies (information technologies) on a high pedestal, while the “sound technologies” of A.A. are not regarded as even being “technological” at all.  To address this digital divide, W. wants to circumvent the divide by examining the “links and relays” between black cultural production in the 20th century and sound technologies like the phonograph and the Walkman.  In doing this intellectual work, W. hopes to demonstrate a “singular mode of (black) modernity” (3).  To achieve this, W. has a couple of different goals:

• a.    Survey the ways that Black engagements with sonic technologies were constructed as antithetical to modern structures
• b.    In the broadest sense, W. wants to “establish the centrality of both sonic blackness and black culture to Western Modernity” (5).
• c.    In tracing his project, W. will demonstrate how the “in/audibility” of blackness is sounded and heard by a wide range of cultural, philosophical, political, social, and economic discourses” (6).
• d.    In defining Afro-sonic Modernity, we get a couple of articulations:
• a.    Not so much a monolith of negritude as a series of compounded materiodiscursive echoes in and around black sounds I the West. . . . the dub version or remix of blackness precedes and envelops both temporally and conceptually any putative original over the last hundred years or so” (6).
• b.    What does sonic Afro-modernity answer?  “What new modes of thinking, being, listening, and becoming, what Amiri Baraka terms ‘the flow of is,’ are set in motion by all the cultural idioms included here” (10).
• e.    At the core of sonic Afro-modernity, W. establishes a particular tension.  He notes that “this disturbance [between the materiality and ephmerality of music] of the alleged unity between sound and source [should not be understood] as an originary rupture but as a radical reformulation of their already vexed codependency, which retroactively calls attention to the ways in which any sound re/production is technological, whether it emanates from the horn of a phonograph, a musical score, or a human body” (7).  Yet, the singularity of technological presence doesn’t remain the same.  The interplay between the materiality and the ephemerality of audio technologies (music) is the “central, nonsublateable tension at the core of sonic Afro-modernity” (7).  This blending of materiality and ephemerality instantiated through the technological development of the phonograph and other recording and disseminating technologies complicated traditional notions of what it means to be oral, literate, and aural/sonic.
• f.    The goal of W.’s work is also to demonstrate how black cultural producers have (re)mixed the divide between ephemerality and materiality.
• g.    W. mentions his method on 8-9.
• h.    We get a harkening back to Kelley in Freedom Dreams in the intro when W. describes the sonic as not a “sheer image of what is to come” as much as a making of “futurity audible in its circumvention of strictly mimetic technes” (11).  In other words, don’t replicate the theories of the past (he’s indicting Marx here); rather, see beyond and through the mirror into the possible “futurity.”
• i.    On a final note, W. heavily references D&G in the intro when discussing method.  He says he uses “ritournelle.”  For D&G the “ritournelle” is translated as “refrain” and W. defines it as “rhythmic pattern in a field of chaos,” “autopoetic vacillation of the universe,” and “That which acts upon that which is surrounds it, sound or light, extracting from it various vibrations, or decompositions, projects, or transformations.  The refrain has a catalytic function” (16).

Chapter One:  Hearing Afro-Sonic Modernity

Before I start the notes on this chapter, I want to do a bit of work with terms.  First, I let’s hit some of the essential Derridean terms.  So, Derrida:

• iterability – a nice example of this is the idea that when you get up in the morning you make a pot of coffee.  You have a single cup, then another.  Each cup of coffee is a singular cup, it’s unique; however, each cup is also the same in that it has the qualities of sameness – a trace of belonging to the general form of which that singular thing represents.  In essence, iterability it this repeatable feature.  It’s the idea that every instantiation of a thing is a singular event, but is repeatable; however, the repeated is singular also in its uniqueness.  Another great example is a sunset.  Through repetition, sameness is produced.  For Derrida, this sameness-in-difference is key to the constitution of a thing.  A subject relies on this “iterability” , this repetition-as-difference that constitutes the subject itself.    Because of this repetition-as-difference, the empirical or factual is impossible. .  a myth of sameness as sameness.  Only repetition of the subject-as-difference allows for presence.  There are large ramifications for this argument.  For example, iterability as a concept means that for anything to happen a first time, it must be able to be repeated (even if it’s never repeated empirically).  This means that an object’s “ideality” or ideal state is always tied up in its iterability (the repeatable difference of a same subject).  Hence, there can be NO CENTER from which to replicate sameness without difference.
• spectrality – This is the idea that just because you don’t believe in something it can’t effects you.  For example, a ghost.
• phonocentrism – This is tied up in an idea of the “absolute effacement of the signifier” or, in other words, the complete preference of the spoken over the written because of the interiority of voiced speech as being as close to human thought (and hence truth) as possible.  In other words, the truth can exist in voice without mediation – This is precisely why Plato was so keen on the voice instead of writing.  But phonocentrism and logocentrism are tied up in the bigger question of the speech-writing opposition.  But really this opposition is also a false binary.  Consider that every sign relies on another sign to constitute it’s meaning.  Derrida (a la Saussure) calls this the “arbitrary relationship between the signified and the signifier” in that each thing is arbitrarily defined by the sign assigned to it.  We rely on signs to define signs to define signs (or marks in Derrida’s language).  In this sense, no word, no mark can ever come into presence – EVER.  Instead, signs are embodied by the trace – the residue of the signs that came before it.  The fact is that even though you may write a sign – or even speak its name (think writing or speaking apple), this divide between speech and writing is artificial because both are referring to traces of other signs.  This is referred to as the “trace-structure” of the sign.  The concept completely disrupts the “writing-as-representation” and “speech-as-presence” divide.
• machinic ensemble – D&G – is primary in relation to [the individual elements that comprise it] . . .. The history of technology shows that a tool is nothing outside the variable machinic arrangement which gives it a specific relation of proximity with man, animals and things . . .. The [social] machine makes the tool, and not the reverse. (D 126)  On 36, W. discusses the phonograph as a machinic esnsemble.  For D&G the machinic esnemble is the

There are some central quotes I found useful in this section.  I’ll try to highlight the quote and unpack at each juncture.

• For black music is not merely a byproduct of an already existing modernity, ancillary to and/or belated in its workings, but a chain of singular formations integrally linked to this sphere, particuarly as it collides with information technologies (22-3).  Throughout this first chapter – and we’ll see this in more detail in a moment – W. is pushing the thesis that black cultural products weren’t a result of modernity; rather, they were singularities made possible through their own iterability – and this iterability was essential to the formation of modernity itself.
• The phonograph is central to W.’s discussion of iterability because it is an even  more obvious example of Derrida’s concept.  The phonograph was able to take speech – the so long enshrined disseminator of truth – and make it iterable.  This means that black cultural productions were able to inscribe and reinscribe themselves and future iterations as they were produced and reproduced across space-time.
• The phonograph disrupts a lot of communicative patterns/ways of consuming texts shortly after it’s invention because it disrupts a lot of binaries.  First, the sound/vision relationship was suspended.  Next, the sound/presence binary was also disrupted.  W. describes this tension as one between ephemerality (sound) and materiality (the machine that produced the sound instead of the body).
• In speaking again on iterability, W. mentions on the bottom of 32 that “Here the phonograph emerges as the machinic ensemble that accents the eventness of the (re)production of the source; the source is always (re)produced as an (anti)origin while also appearing as a differently produced occasion in each of its singular figurations.”  W. wants to take, as his program, how the phonograph transcends or overreaches Derridean emphasis on the written-in-the-spoken and work with the sonorous qualities of the human voice and its iterable translations/transformations through the phonograph (and other recording technologies).  To address the “writtenness” of the phonographic, W. wants to develop a theory of “phonography” (36).  This program will blend “perception” (object oriented experience) and “sensation” (perception of perception – i.e., the self-referential experience) and listen to the “variety and intensity” of their intermingling (36).
• The singing voice – “provides a means by which A.A. may exchange an expended, valueless self in the New World for a productive, recognized self” (37). The signing voice – represents the literacyof the white Enlightenment subject” (37).  In terms of iterability, the singing voice of the A.A. enacts iterablity – it is a stamp of the “spatial, material, dative, or enunciative action of voice.”  It produces and reproduces itself . . . and in the act of reproduction  inscribes future reproductions.  All that being said, W. is interested in what happens when that singing voice is disembodied through the medium of the phonograph.  In keeping with this query, W. asks “In what sense does the de/re/coupling of sound and source shift the central place of orality and music in the production, transmission, and reception of black culture?” (38)
• There is a good bit of work on the gaze in chapter one as well.  The gaze – or what DuBois anticipated in the term “double-consciousness” is what happens when the “white subject interpellates the black subject as inferior, which, in turn, bars the black subject from seeing him/herself without the internalization of the white gaze” (42).  Through this process, white subjects depend on how “whiteness is just as dependent on blackness in order to appear and function as whiteness” (42).  This is racial discourse rendered iterable.  In other words, visual components of racism that whites impose on blacks  interpellates (the process by which ideology addresses the (abstract) pre-ideological individual thus effectively producing him or her as subject proper) or renders them subjects.  By rendering them subjects of the ideology that subjects them, whites not only subject the A.A.s, but also subject themselves by subjection.  Because ideology (in this case racism) never says “I am ideology” the reciprocal process of interpellation renders both whiteness and blackness subjects, but the blackness cannot speak back (but informs the whiteness).  I need help here if anyone has it.
• In closing the chapter, W. lays out his mission.  He notes, “Black cultural production casts a sonic shadow on Western modernity only to return it recolored to its (im)proper place within said galaxy.  Put differently, these discourses are neither erased nor suspended; rather, they are significantly (re)created in their encounter with auditory blackness, which also undergoes substantial shifts in this assemblage.  In this way, niether of these energies can materialize without its spectral doppleganger:  no Western modernity without (sonic) blackness and no blackness in the absence of modernity” (45).  Also, “Phonography. . . circles around the doubleness, the vacillation between phono and graph, human and inhuman, sound and vision – that has been muted in and estranged from many modern discourses for far too long” (45).

Chapter Two : I am I be

Again, I need to articulate a couple of core concepts before I can understand a lot of what’s going on in this section.

• deterritorialization and reterritorialization – D&G – From 1000 Plateaus – This is the concept that says that assemblages are composed anti-hierarchically, rhizomatically.  When something becomes deterritorialized, it will eventually become reterritorialized; however, through this process the reterritorialization will change the original assemblage.
• mirror stage – Lacan – An explanation of the formation of the ego.  In the mirror stage, a baby can see it’s reflection, but cannot coordinate it’s body movements to match the reflection.  Hence, the baby sees the mirrored image as a fractured self.  The ego develops to resolve the tension between the reflection in the mirror and the reflected.

I found this chapter, much like the last two, challenging to say the least.  I’ll try to do my best to trace the useful outcomes and cut some of the tangential info.  Again, in bulleted form:

• Nice observations at the beginning of the chapter about how the subject as such begins to be dissolved in post-structuralist theory when the minority subject is just being constituted.  Very nice critique of what happens when Western metaphysics must recognize the Other as more than such.
• In this chapter, W. uses the prologue to Ellison’s Invisible Man to demonstrate why the invisible man listens to 5 separate phonograph’s to simultaneously listen to Armstrong’s Black and Blue.
• I am really, really confused by the discussions of subjectivity that occur in this chapter; however, I’ll try to lay out what I found interesting:
  • W. notes that the “self defined in terms of hearing rather than sight is a self imagined not as a point, but as a membrane; not as a picture, but as a channel through which voices, noises, and music’s travel. . . we might designate a subject of sonic Afro-modernity as a channel through which voices, noises, and music’s pass” (51).  This seems to point to the authors desire to create subjectivity through sound in Black cultural production.
  • This subject of sonic Afro-modernity is constituted in “I am I be.” (56).
  • W. notes that “identity (I be) refers to empirical social beings and is often thought in relation to some form of identitarian realpolitik, whereas the subject (I am) remains in the unsullied domain of lofty abstraction.  By yoking identity to the subject, as opposed to having one dialectically supersede the other, Hall asks his readers to contemplate how these seemingly contradictory and contentious terms depend upon one another, and therefore bring each other into being” (65).
  • Subjectivity is generated through sound for black agents.  According to W., “black music, in the form of varying techne-logical structures of sonic Afro-modernity, advances and constructs a singular subject, at once more and less than its attendant minor identity without which it cannot be thought or perceived.  Just as this subject occupies the regions between the sonic and the scopic, it correspondingly dislodges the subject/identity bifurcation in current debates within Anglo-American humanities by refusing to separate I am I be” (71).
  • So, in closing, I’m still not entirely sure what this chapter was about.  I think it says that A.A. identity/subjectivity are inseparable.  It also claims that black subjectivity is a result of the sonic  – and that that sonic has a hand in forming modernity. . . not coming to it later.

Chapter Three:  In the Mix

• Key Terms
• Supplementarity – the idea that the object becomes itself more fully through a supplement to itself.  This means that anything “pure” or composed of “pure beauty” usually relies on a supplement to achieve that “pureness.”  Derrida uses the example of Lucretia by Cranache to demonstrate supplementarity via the paragon – the veil that covers her but enhances her at the same time.
• historicist – the idea that our knowledge of things is wholly or in part determined by their historicity (their position and function in the original historical context in which they were produced and in later developments they went through)
• weak messianic power – Benjamin refers to a ‘weak messianic power’ that relates each of ustoday to those who came and suffered before us. We are the chosen ones, as it were, whose present time was once the promised future of the past, and it is our responsibility to remember and redress the injustices that were suffered by those who made it possible for us to live.  In other words, this is rethinking the present in terms of the future to come based on our inheritance from the past.

In this mix is a chapter about the remix (shocking I know considering the title).  As W. states on 73, “In order to contextualize my argument about the temporalities of sonic Afro-modernity, I return to Ellison’s Invisible Man, where history appears as a groove that indexes both the indentations found on the surface of phonograph records and those somewhat more elusive grooves in the vernacular sense.  In addition, Water Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History” will serve as a sounding board for the consideration of the variable temporalities in the “tradition of the oppressed”  Finally, this chapter puts into practice what I call “thinking sound” by interfacing historically seemingly disparate texts in order to excavate their intensities, (which only emerge in the process of juxtaposition and recontextualization), much as DJs treat records in their mixes” (73).  So, let’s see how that works:

• Ellison’s Invisible Man – history appears as groove that indexes the surface of records and the vernacular.
• The weak messianic power that is discussed on 78-80 is a relation of multiple times to Ellison’s own time.  For Benjamin – and later Derrida – the weak messianic time (as defined above) means that every being has a stake in the future of all individuals.  It also means that the “spectrality” of the your present will also be present in the future.  This time – our present – is messianic because it is “shot through” with the past; however, it is also a promise of a future time – hence it’s messianicness.
• W. seems to be double-playing on this sense of messianic time and historical materialism in Chapter three.  In other words, when the invisible man here’s the “electric amplification of a phonograph record and not, to put it briefly, a ‘real’ live singer and/or musician” (80) after Clifton is killed, the “grooves of history”  -  or the production of black history – “transmogrifies from absolute erasure in writing to sounding from the loudspeakers on any given urban corner” (80).  To explain the “groove” W. gives two definitions: 1)  channels on the surface of phonograph record, or any long, narrow depression and 2) the groove of a piece of music (81).
• This second definition of the groove is more associative, more rhizomatic.  It cannot be pinned down and registers in the domain of “sensation” rather than “linguistic signification.”  So, for Ellison’s Invisible Man, after the moment of crisis, the protagonist is able to see how life is an intersection of “monadic cross-currents and discontinuities as opposed to a single and totalizing genus of history” (82).  He is, in other words, able to see how the messianic history chains out as an alternative to the historicist model of history that seems to imply linear relationships between all the world’s events. It provides a space for him to make sense of t he world. *********
• In demonstrating how Dubois’ epigraphs to each chapter in “The Souls of Black Folk” are present in the “groove” or the singularity of historical experience W. notes that “Dubois’s mix is not complete:  it is marked by a failure to represent sound in writing, which, in turn highlights the audiovisual rift set in motion by the technology of the phonograph.  This ‘failure’ or scratching, wherein noise intrudes into the temporal architecture of the linguistic text, allows Souls to be audible and legible as the first literary sound recording (phono-graph) of sonic Afro-modernity” (83).
• In a discussion of Dubois’ work, W. notes that the DJ is always doing two forms of mixing: 1) he’s mixing the records or sonic information, 2) he’s mixing his expectations and practices with the audience.
• W. says that Dubois’s epigraphs began to serve as the monadic cross-currents outside of time – outside of historicist modes of history – that are representative of messianic time – these spirituals serve as “future-past” significations for general Black American engagements with history.  (93).  They do this because they render the spirituals “as grooves in his own mix” (96).  In juxtaposing the “phono-epi-graphs” of the spirituals at the intersection of the poems in Dubois’s work, the “scratches in this textual mix radically alter the significations of the text(s) via their constitutive supplementarity” (97).
• The new groove that Dubois creates is multilayered – composed of: 1)  the spirituals change their format because they are recorded via musical notation and mediated by black and white discourses on the role of folk culture, 2) these transcriptions modified this system of notation itself, 3) the musical bars alter the meanings of the poems from the 19^th century British canon and vice-versa.
• Hauntology – What a lovely word!!!!!  This describes an ontology of the spectral – a remix of the past to represent the present in a formation of the future.  For W. Dubois’ work is a hauntology because it “transacts the confluence of differing and differential grooves that add up to a dub mix, a sonic hauntology of the temporal in which both the past and the future echo in/the present, only to transform its status as presence” (104).
• In summa, this chapter can be condensed into the following:  Ellison and Benjamin offer the tools for conjecturing non-historicist compilations of the temporal, especially apropos the tradition of the oppressed and the sonic; The Souls of Black Folk and DJing enact these principles in their respective media, which ought not involve any sort of deep rift between the theoretical and the performative, as opposed to sundry manifestations of analogous principles vis-à-vis temporality in different modes of discursive materiality” (104).

Chapter Four:  Consuming Sonic Technologies

This chapter was about how sonic technologies construct spatial relations.  Instead of discussing temporalities or subjectivities, in this chapter W. discusses how recorded sound technologies – a la  phonographs, Walkman, etc. – construct the spaces that we inhabit of subjects.  In considering the level of the “sounding technologies” (how loud is it?), this chapter looks to urban dwellers in learning how sound structures environments.  In W.s words, “Focusing on how electronically mediated music plays an integral part in constituting private and public spaces, I analyze consumption of recorded music and its role in protecting listeners from urban noise, which is not deemed a part of the private space of the subjects in the two texts (Ellison’s and I Like It Like That)” (107).  Not a lot here as in other chapters – especially in the way of high-theory.  Anyhow, a bulleted list of the big takeaways in quoted form:

• The conclusion of the chapter, as W. states is, follows: “the music and the technologies the music is transmitted through provide the means for both Ellison and Martin’s protagonists to create and recreate space through sound as it is articulated at the interstices of the private and the social.  Just as with my previous ruminations on the temporality of “sonic Afro-modernity,” here space appears as a series of competing and sometimes conflicting spheres that cohere at certain junctures only to fall apart or, at other points, vehemently oppose one another” (108).
• Sound, in the urban milieu, is used as a shield from the aural onslaught of the modern (noise) through the form of music.
• In his analysis of I Like It Like That, W. basically says that sounding or the sonic structures Lisette’s subjectivity – through the bathroom, through her position as a record exec assistant, through the Walkman – she constantly uses sound (or frames her subjectivity through sound) to constitute her self.  In this way, sound is not only constitutive of social spaces and the boundaries between public and private, but it is also a way to constitute the self in terms of spatial environs.  This self is ever changing based on context/interaction; however, the realities of sound and its effects on space remain (142-4).

Chapter Five – Sounding Diasporic Citizenship

Some key terms for the chapter:

• Erasure – From Heidegger, this is the idea that there is presence and absence in meaning in language.  As such, the process of erasure is the crossing out of a word, but leaving the word crossed out visible.  For Derrida, erasure is tied up in an impossibility of presence altogether.  Words are never present in toto because of the inability of signifiers to ever contain all of their meaning.  This means, for Derridean deconstruction, that the entire process of signification is always under erasure.

This chapter deals with three instances of “diasporic citizenship” in contemporary (or fairly recent) black music.  The bullets continue:

• Instead of getting wrapped up in the two definitions of citizenship in the current era (the nation-state surpassed by the supranational entity or the nation-state as central to the formation of supra-national entities), W. hopes to demonstrate how “transnational movements work through the conduit of the nation-state and vice versa” (147).
• To do this, W. turns to non-white voices in hip-hop to demonstrate the shifting meanings of blackness as well as “other forms of social and political identification” (146).  By looking at “diasporic citizenship” W. wants to demonstrate how the “abjected” are often engaged in the process of recasting the boundaries of tha nation/s that make them invisible or “abjected” in the first place.  Instead of relying on “race” or “color” to do this, W. wants to demonstrate the federation on the principle of “identity of passions.”  This idea is that there is a “shared hatred for the alienation forced upon us by Europeans during the process of colonization and empire and we are bound by common suffering more than by our “pigmentation” (148).
• Because of this qualification in definition, W. diaspora is “inessential” in that it is a “communication of singularities” that maintains its solidarity because of suffering, not any essentialist categories (148).  W. calls this shared diasporic inessentialism “cosmopolitical.”
• The “spaces” that the author discusses in this section are representative of the three broad sections that he lays out at the beginning of the book.  In a sentence, this chapter will investigate the “spaces” (not physical) and temporalities (not linear) that compose the subjectivities of black diasporic citizenship.  The legwork in the previous chapters seems to be in anticipation of carrying it forward and out in this section.
• Group One: The Fugees
  • The Fugees – through their music and the visual representations they include in album covers, etc., disrupt the typical image of the “refugee,” complicating the distinction between economic and political asylum seekers.  They also radically alter the nation-state citizenry by encouraging them to see themselves as refugees.  In other words, they complicate the regular image of refugee and refigure it to include the citizen introspectively.
  • Use their position on the border to complicate things.
  • Group Two:  Adavanced Chemistry
    • AC claimed their “Germanity” without giving up their racial embodiment.  This process challenged hegemonic Germans conception of their own national identity and encouraged an embrace of “particularity” in the composition of the citizen.
    • They achieved this identity through identification with hip-hop outside of Germany.
    • Use their position “squarely inside the border” in order to fight German public disourse (182)
    • Group Three: Tricky
      • According to W., Tricky does this:  counterposes “a racialized bio-politics of fucking” with an aestethics of “fucked-upness” that grows out of representation of black diasporic subjects incapable of and/or unwilling to submit their psyches and bodies to the rigors of late capitalism, suggesting a different way of imagining and performing the black body politic, one that doesn not rest on the hubris of its discreteness or integrity.  Rather, Tricky and Martina’s conception of embodiment highlights its own deterritorialization and erodes any and all residual phantasms of completeness” (184).
      • In this sense, Tricky and Martina are an exercise in “fuckedupedness” or at least the postmodern subject.  Instead of reifying either racist ideas of the black subject or the traditional black subject as envisioned by the black subject whole, T&M “suggest a maniacal black subjectivity.  In other words, they emphasize the pain and negativity of negotiating between different poles of identification instead of concealing them. . . . T&M not only fuck with diasporic identification as it relates to questions of blackness and the nation-state in the West but also explode both the individuated person and couple as subject from within these structures, thus underscoring the messiness of these categories, which cannot be subsumed by either celebratory incantations or hybridity or determinist notions of oppression” (197).

Outro:  Thinking Sound/Sound Thinking (Slipping into the Breaks Remix)

This outro is a nice justification of W.s method and his mission.  W. claims that he did not want to read artifacts as extensions of previous artifacts. So, using this logic, W. claims that his chapter on Dubois and DJs aren’t reading one onto the other – or in W.’s words, “not because there exists some nebulous and predetermined correlation between them, either historical or scholarly” rather, he wants to demonstrate how “the act of thinking them together establishes both the logic and reasoning for doing so. . . Hence, the fusion attains an originary status within the confines of this particular argument, shifting the emphasis to the manner in which Du Bois’s texts and DJing infiltrate each other, using Du Bois as a way into the practice of DJing and rethinking Souls as a form of textual mixing” (202-3).  Yet, I don’t necessarily see how he doesn’t do what he claims he’s not doing.  Anyhow, other interesting points of note in this outro:

• W. infuses his method with techniques of close textual reading and historical contextualization.
• W. claims that he has rethought technology.  Instead of conceiving of technology as 1) material limit cases frozen in time and space or 2) discursive constructs always already waiting to be appropriated (204), he claims to have demonstrated how “technology used against its intended function” is a central aim of technological tracing.  But how is this different from #2?
• He wants to challenge the notions of histories of technology that are 1) productivist [machines are approached from the position of captains of industry- Ford] or 2) appropriated [takes in what is done with these gadgets by users.  Rather, he wants to demonstrate how each of these technological machines has an AGENCY.  W. describes this thusly:  “the interplay between the materiality of the apparatus and its discursive dimensions ceases to transact the binary drama it has hitherto enacted and splinters into a series of relational singularities that refuse to signify any ontological consistency before and beyond” (205).  In other words, technologies aren’t simply appropriated and used toward ends, rather, technologies often appropriate the user and use them to conduct the formation of the future of both.  This is directly and intimately tied to Derrida’s “iterability” from far earlier in the book.
• By conceiving of history as series of singularities instead of particularities, historians of minority studies can get beyond “particularlian logic and identitarian thought” to produce histories where minority relations are key to the formation of the history itself . . . instead of merely relational to that history (207).