Professional Documents
Culture Documents
‘The Pleasure of the Pocket
Calculators’: Experiencing Jouissance
& the Sublime through Kraftwerk’s
Lyrical Texts
Thom Hosken
71070_33230058_1
MU71070A PM: Listening, Analysis and Interpretation
MA Contemporary Music Studies
...the goal of literary work (of literature as work) is to make the reader no longer a
consumer, but a producer of the text.1
‐ Roland Barthes
1
Barthes, R, S/Z (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974), p.4.
2 71070_33230058_1
Abstract: These are my intentions
This essay is an analysis of Kraftwerk’s ‘Pocket Calculator’, a song from the band’s
1981 album Computer World that exists in many remixed/remastered and alternate‐
language versions. I attempt to articulate how the lyrics and their delivery can evoke,
at least to me, feelings of jouissance and a sense of the sublime through both their
meaning and their sonic materiality. I argue that the lyrical content is a neglected
site of radicalism in Kraftwerk’s music, and is in some ways perhaps even more
transgressive than the instrumental e/affects that are the primary focus of existing
writing,2 though I am of course aware that neither music nor lyrics would function
properly without the other. It is debatable how successfully listeners can ‘isolate’ the
vocals from their backing even if this were desirable, and reproducing pop lyrics on a
page and attempt to interpret them as poetry is, I feel, generally unsatisfactory.3
My analysis is strongly dependent on an idea developed by Chris Kennett of
the listener/analyst‐as‐text. That is to say, the most honest thing I can do as a
musicologist is explain what I experience listening to the music and identify the
musical and personal reasons why this is the case. By embracing subjectivity, I can
make observations about the music and its effect on myself, without implicitly
dismissing other interpretations. Richard Middleton says of conventional analysis,
‘listening is monologic. What the analyst hears is assumed to correlate with “the
music”, and the possibility of variable aural readings is ignored.’4 The highly
subjective notions of jouissance and the sublime are congruent with my more
personal approach, one which is every bit as idioethnomusicological as Kennett’s
work, if perhaps not as idiosyncratic.5
2
See Albiez, S & Lindvig, K T, ‘Autobahn and Heimatklange: Soundtracking the FRG’ in Albiez, S &
Pattie, D, Kraftwerk: Music Non‐Stop (Continuum 2011), p.25 for a comprehensive account of writings
that have failed to address or even dismissed the importance of Kraftwerk’s vocals.
3
Though not because they are any less worthy. This was the implication of the criticisms leveled at
Cambridge University by the British tabloid press when an exam asked undergraduate literature
students to compare an Amy Winehouse song with a Walter Raleigh poem and discuss the meaning of
the term ‘lyric’. See Levy, A, ‘Cambridge students asked to compare Raleigh and Shakespeare with
Amy Winehouse lyrics in final year exam paper’, Daily Mail (27 May, 2008). Accessed at
<http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article‐1022238/Cambridge‐students‐asked‐compare‐Raleigh‐
Shakespeare‐Amy‐Winehouse‐lyrics‐final‐year‐exam.html> 25 April 2012.
4
Middleton, R, Reading Pop: Approaches to Textual Analysis in Popular Music (Oxford University
Press, 2000), p.4.
5
See Kennett, C, ‘A Tribe Called Chris’… and Kennett, C, ‘Is Anybody Listening?’ in Moore, A, Analyzing
Popular Music (Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp.196‐218.
3
On jouissance and the sublime
Concern with effect rather than meaning is a basic change of our electric time.6
‐ Marshall McLuhan
It begins with a tickle and ends up in a blaze of petrol. That’s always what jouissance
is.7
‐ Jaques Lacan
In my analysis, I make repeated reference to two related concepts: jouissance and
the sublime. I use these terms to describe the effect of ‘Pocket Calculator’ and its
versions on me (the analyst‐listener), as well as what the music says about/the role
Kraftwerk play in larger systems (communication networks, industry etc.).
The first concept, jouissance, is notoriously difficult to translate, though an
English equivalent might be ‘ecstasy’. It has been used to mean different things by
different thinkers. Jacques Lacan, who coined the term, used it to describe the
sensation of breaching the pleasure principle that regulates how much pleasure a
subject can tolerate. Beyond this point is not pleasure, but pain, or at least a painful
kind of pleasure. In Lacan’s own words: ‘Jouissance is suffering.’8 Slavoj Žižek draws
attention to the pun inherent in the word: ‘Jouissance is suffering, since it is jouis‐
sans’ i.e. without pleasure.9 Other thinkers on jouissance (notably Roland Barthes)
echo the idea of transgressing a symbolic order, but appear to attach less
pain/suffering to these moments of disruption. In The Pleasure of the Text and S/V,
Barthes used the terms ‘readerly’ and ‘writerly’ to describe texts that elicit,
respectively, plaisir and jouissance. As we have seen in my opening quotation,
Barthes saw jouissance in literature arising from texts that encourage the reader to
become more active, more ‘writerly’, in the interpretation process.
These differences in understanding are perhaps not surprising as Dylan Evans
points out that Lacan himself used the term to mean many things prior to 1960,
6
McLuhan, M, Understanding Media (MIT Press, 1997), p.26.
7
Lacan, J, ‘The Lacanian Field’ in Lacan, J, trans. Grigg, R, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis: The
Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XVII (W.W. Norton, 1991), p.72.
8
Lacan, J, ‘The Paradox of Jouissance’ in Lacan, J, ed. Miller, J‐A, trans. Porter, D, The Ethics of
Psychoanalysis 1959‐60: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VII (W.W. Norton, 1986).
9
Žižek, S, Lacan: The Silent Partners (Verso, 2006), p.354.
4 71070_33230058_1
including the satisfaction of the master over his slave and the moment that a
biological or sexual need is satisfied (the word jouissance can mean ‘orgasm’ in
French), before establishing that jouissance necessarily involved pain.10 In the
context of music, John Gill, for example, defines the term as ‘rapture, bliss or
transcendence.’11 This is almost certainly too close a definition to the non‐
transgressive, order‐preserving forms of pleasure‐seeking that would be better
categorised plaisir, the term used by Roland Barthes. What is important to consider
is that jouissance involves some degree of loss (in psychoanalysis, it refers to the
moment a child leaves the sole protection of its mother and enters ‘the symbolic
order of social relationships, gendered identity and language’)12 and regression (to a
pre‐linguistic, perhaps even pre‐gendered state) as a consequence of the disruption
to a symbolic order.
In music, jouissance may arise through sounds/vocal ‘grain’ that draw
attention to their own materiality and are ‘felt’ bodily, rather than heard and
subjectively interpreted;13 incessant repetition that defies what Robert Fink calls the
‘discursive structure’ of conventional teleology;14 or lyrics that defy sense and
meaning but again draw attention to their materiality and behave as affective vocal
sound. My use of this concept comes with some fairly large caveats. Most notably, as
Robert Fink points out, if jouissance occurs outside a symbolic order, then it makes
little sense to employ the rational, technical language of a symbolic order (in this
instance, popular musicology) to attempt to comprehend why it has arisen, ‘One
can’t really talk about it, much less do analysis of it.’15 Fink also argues that the
analyst’s search for jouissance in a text, especially a popular music text (he is talking
about disco), will most likely involve ignoring more conventional patterns of desire
(plaisir) in the music’s construction and listener’s reception. Fink comes to the
conclusion that jouissance lends itself too readily to binary extremes – his example is
10
Evans, D, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanlysis (Routledge, 1996), p.93.
11
Gill, J, Queer Noises (Cassell, 1995), p.134.
12
Gilbert, J & Pearson, E, Discographies: Dance Music, Culture and the Politics of Sound (Routledge,
2006), p.64.
13
Michel Chion talks about the ability of sound to ‘overwhelm’ us in Chion, M, Audio‐Vision (Columbia
University Press, 1994), p.33. The importance of ‘overwhelming’ nature of sound will become
apparent in my discussion of the sublime.
14
Fink, R, Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice (University of California
Press, 2005), p.39.
15
Ibid.
5
the analyst viewing music as either discursive & teleological (plaisir), or else non‐
discursive and non‐teleological (jouissance) with no third way.
Kraftwerk are a complex, contradictory entity, that defy easy binary
categorization and it would be foolish to apply a rigid category system to their music.
However, I believe jouissance to be a useful critical term in this analysis as it gives a
name to the breakdown of symbolic orders and narrative meaning I strongly believe
occur in ‘Pocket Calculator.’ I therefore disagree with Fink’s assertion that it is a
restricting concept. Indeed, I am more inclined to agree with Juliet Maccannell that it
is quite liberating for the analyst; it allows us to be subjective, but not solipsistic. In
her own words, ‘Jouissance is completely subjective and individual and it is also
something everyone holds in common.’16 Maccannell goes on to state that
experiencing it gives us a ‘unique vantage point on communal structures that
misrecognize, repress, or band jouissance.’17 This will be useful when combined with
the sublime to discuss what Kraftwerk’s ‘Pocket Calculator’ says about larger
symbolic orders (communication networks, industry) and the roles of the individual
and community within these.
Kraftwerk sensed here a new version of the sublime, which they adapted into a
European context. Theirs was a communicational sublime which replaced the Caspar
David Friedrich mountain panoramas of the classical sublime with the neon vistas of
midnight cities and the intricacies of circuitry.18
‐ Mark Fisher
The sublime denotes an ineffable greatness that defies reasonable explication; it
overwhelms and awes. It is distinct from but also closely related to the beautiful, in a
relationship quite similar to that between plaisir and jouissance. Kant’s
differentiation between beautiful and the sublime (‘The beautiful in nature is a
question of the form of object, and this consists in limitation, whereas the sublime is
to be found in an object even devoid of form’)19 very much recalls Barthes’ two
modes of pleasure; plaisir conforming to the laws of a symbolic order and jouissance
16
Maccannell, J F, ‘”J” is for Jouissance’ in ed. Cohen, B & Kujundžić, Provocations to Reading: J. Hillis
Miller and the Democracy to Come (Fordham, 2005), p.10.
17
Ibid.
18
Fisher, M, ‘Soundcheck: Kraftwerk’, WIRE magazine (August, 2009), p.59.
19
Kant, I, ed. Walker, N & Meredith, J C, The Critique of Judgement (Oxford University Press, 2008), SS
23.
6 71070_33230058_1
transgressing them. Mark Fisher explicitly links the sublime with jouissance when he
says, ‘The sublime involves a particular kind of jouissance that derives from the
subject contemplating objects which overwhelm it.’20
We tend to associate the sublime with the awesome power of nature, but
thinkers like Jennifer Daryl Slack & John Macgregor Wise, Leo Marx and Mark Fisher
have transplanted the aesthetic concept onto technology. Accounts of this so‐called
technological/communicational sublime involve nature being supplanted by
technology as the dominant awesome power and focus of our fascination and dread.
Kraftwerk themselves appear to have alluded to this in their song ‘Expo 2000’ when
they sing ‘Man, Nature, Technology / Mensch, Natur, Technik’. New technologies of
overwhelming complexity (the intricate circuits described by Fisher, or the vast
digital/social networks that have no obvious physical presence, bar perhaps vast
servers stored somewhere far away from the networks’ participants) can awe just as
much as nature. What is perhaps even more relevant to the discussion of this
particular Kraftwerk song is the potential for a kind of ‘mini‐sublime’ as described by
Slack & Wise21 to occur when interacting with ‘”cool” or “neat” gadgets’ that wow
not because of their grandeur, but as a result of their apparent use value or
‘contemporary manifestation.’22 I think of the status of Apple products in the
twenty‐first century, but also of Kraftwerk’s interaction with low‐tech consumer
electronic products (musical calculators) in ‘Pocket Calculator’.
It is important to note that, according to Kant, the interpreter is the true
locus for the sublime, not the object itself: ‘…it is the disposition of soul evoked by a
particular representation engaging the attention of the reflective judgement, and
not the object, that is to be called sublime.’23 Similarly, in my analysis, I do not fail to
address the fact that any sensations of jouissance are happening to me, rather than
being objective features of the music itself; I, the listener‐analyst am as much of a
‘text’ as the recorded object I am contemplating.
20
Fisher, M, ‘Soundcheck: Kraftwerk’, p.59.
21
A term I immediately associate semantically with the French and Italian language versions of
‘Pocket Calculator’, ‘Mini Calculateur’ and ‘Mini Calcolatore.’
22
Slack, J D & Wise, J M, Culture + Technology: A Primer (Peter Lang, 2005), p.140.
23
Kant, I, The Critique of Judgement, SS 25.
7
This listener‐as‐text: Against normalizing rockist thought, against the restricting
categorization of Kraftwerk as dance music
It is tempting to attempt an understanding of Kraftwerk through the prism of
electronic dance music. My terms (jouissance, the technological sublime) are
certainly used in the contemporary discourse on this topic. It has been practically de
rigeur for recent authors on dance/rave cultures (Simon Reynolds, Jeremy Gilbert &
Ewan Pearson) to give Kraftwerk their dues in the opening pages. Reynolds puts it
plainly when he says, ‘The story of techno begins not in early eighties Detroit, as is so
often claimed, but in early seventies Dusseldorf.’24
However, this Lester Bangs quotation shows that there are others who have
sought to incorporate Kraftwerk into Rock n Roll narratives:
…our beneficent publisher hauled me into his office to answer the fish’s edition of the
perennial: ‘Where is rock going?’
‘It’s being taken over by the Germans and the machines,’ I unhesitatingly unanswered. And
this I believe to my funky soul.25
This is also evidenced by the lingering term ‘Krautrock’; a term coined by the British
music to describe the sound of psychedelic German rock bands like Neu!, Can and
Faust, as well as Kraftwerk (though the term is not often attached to the group’s
post‐Autobahn material).
There is nothing especially wrong with attaching Kraftwerk to either canon ‐
what is now called EDM (electronic dance music) or rock. A convincing case can be
made for both Kraftwerk‐as‐techno‐pioneers and Kraftwerk‐as‐rock‐iconoclasts. On
the one hand, they were almost certainly the first group to perform entirely with
electronic instruments, but on the other they were still recognizably a band, unlike
the DJ or laptop performer we associate with dance musics today. They wrote
lengthy, (largely) instrumental and improvisatory pieces such as ‘Autobahn’ but also
simple pop songs like ‘The Model’ and, arguably, ‘Pocket Calculator’, the track in
24
Reynolds, S, Energy Flash: A Journey through Rave Music and Dance Culture (Macmillan, 1998), p.2.
25
Bangs, L, ed. Marcus, G, ‘Kraftwerkfeature’, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung (Serpent’s
Tail, 1996), p.154.
8 71070_33230058_1
question here. Their music is rhythmic, but often melody and harmony appear to be
foregrounded.26
I have little interest in contemplating further the cases for Kraftwerk as the
starting point of a new techno narrative or an offshoot of the rock canon. There are
strong arguments for Kraftwerk being part of both lineages, but I feel their presence
is complicated in each case. I believe that rockist thought remains too much in the
throes of modernism (teleological notions of progress, outdated attitudes towards
authorship and disproportionate value placed on coherent, totalizing structures) to
truly get to grips with such a postmodern group,27 certainly when it is lyrics that are
the focus of my analysis. Simon Reynolds, talking about rave music which is rarely (if
ever) narrative in form, says:
Analysing rave music involves a fundamental break with rock, or at least the
dominant English lit and socialist realist paradigms of rock criticism, which focus on
songs and storytelling. Where rock articulates an experience (autobiographical or
imaginary), rave constructs an experience. Bypassing interpretation, the listener is
hurled into a vortex of heightened sensations, abstract emotions, and artificial
energies.28
Paula Carabell echoes this sentiment when she states that vocals in dance music
operate ‘in total distinction to the role of the word in rock, where it continues to
retain its narrative function.’29 The lyrics to ‘Pocket Calculator’ are certainly non‐
narrative, but I hesitate to call the music dance music. Its performance space is more
likely to be the concert or the home stereo (which it is for the purposes of this
analysis), not the dancefloor. And whilst the music is hypnotically repetitive and the
sounds corporeal, leading to sensations of jouissance, I understand the vocals as
something other than (just) an invitation to dance.
Clearly, Kraftwerk have a complex, often contradictory identity. In order to
make sense of their music, I find myself categorizing them alongside – in Philip
26
This is sometimes even neo‐classical in character, representative of the ongoing dialectic between
tradition and the future in their music.
27
It is often claimed that Kraftwerk had aspirations of being modernist composers in the style of
Karlheinz Stockhausen, before embracing popular electronic music.
28
Reynolds, S, Energy Flash, p.xix.
29
Carabell, P, ‘These Are My Intentions’, Art Journal, Vol. 59, No. 2 (Summer, 2000), p.57.
9
30
Tagg’s terminology, my ‘interobjective comparison’ is with ‐ bands like Scritti Politti
and even Tears for Fears who used overtly popular forms and production techniques
as a vehicle for their ideology and sociological/political observation. Kraftwerk’s own
penchant for theory, principally the overarching Mensch‐Machinen (‘Man‐Machine’)
complex with its echoes of Donna Harraway’s Cyborg theories and Marshall
McLuhan’s concept of technological prosthesis, means I am probably not guilty of
attempting to justify the music’s quality or exaggerating its cultural capital with
highfalutin critical terms. Nor am I trying to highlight the band’s theoretical bent to
undermine their ‘pop’ credentials; it is clearly an essential part of their pop status
and concept/ideology is of course integral to pop itself. Rather, I believe that the
main theoretical tools I use for analyzing ‘Pocket Calculator’ – jouissance and the
sublime – are useful precisely because they can accommodate Kraftwerk’s apparent
contradictions, allowing for their meaning to be unstable, even irrational, and they
enable me to articulate how I subjectively come to understand the music.
I have no desire to attempt to objectively state what the music means as it is
clear that Kraftwerk mean very different things to different people (say, the
resolutely rockist Lester Bangs and lapsed‐rockist‐turned‐rave‐enthusiast Simon
Reynolds). Kraftwerk’s music means such different things to different people that it
is worth considering each individual listener as a ‘text’ him/herself, and perhaps this
is exactly what Reynolds and Bangs are doing in their own ways. It might even make
sense to think of the group as plural; there existing multiple possible Kraftwerks.
Music, as Tia De Nora has pointed out,31 is an archetypal example of what Michel
Foucault terms ‘technology of the self’32 and it therefore stands to reason that
‘selves’ are supremely important to how we conceive music ‘itself’. As Chris Kennett
says, ‘Change the listener’s demography or prior lived experience, and you change
the very nature of the text. Indeed, in such situations, there is no music ipse, as the
individual listening experience becomes the text.’33
The conclusions of my analysis are inevitably highly specific to me, shaped by
my own experience and bias (the listener‐analyst, me, becomes the text), but the
30
Tagg, P, ‘Analysing Popular Music: Theory, Method and Practice’ in Middleton, R, Reading Pop:
Approaches to Textual Analysis in Popular Music, pp.82‐83.
31
de Nora, T, Music in Everyday Life (Cambridge University Press, 2000), p.40.
32
See Foucalt, M, ‘Technologies of the Self’ in ed. Martin, L H, Gutman, H & Hutton, P H, Technologies
of the Self (Tavistock, 1988), pp.16‐49.
33
Kennett, C, ‘A Tribe Called Chris: pop music analysis as idioethnomusicology’, Open Space Magazne,
Vol. 10, No. 1 (2008), p.17.
10 71070_33230058_1
ease with which this is possible should reveal something fundamental about the
group; they present ‘open’, perhaps even incomplete works that seem to invite
audience interpretation, participation and completion.34 A large part of their project
involves playing with texts, whatever these may be.35
Analysis: The Pleasure of the Pocket Calculators
Part I. I’m the operator? Lyrics and agency
Some rock groups, including Kraftwerk, have evidently been successful abroad and
are recognized for their pioneering electronic techniques rather than for their lyrics.36
‐ Osman Durrani
My analysis takes issue with most of the above; that Kraftwerk are a rock group and
that their commercial/musical success is in no way because of their lyrics. This
argument is deeply rockist and stems from the ideological position that songs ought
to be narrative in form.37 Kraftwerk’s songs rarely ‘tell a story’, but that does not
mean they have nothing to say. Let us look at the text of the English‐language
version of ‘Pocket Calculator’. Appropriately enough for this song about calculators, I
have assigned cute, coloured buttons to each line of text.
I’m the operator with my pocket calculator [x2] A
I am adding and subtracting / I’m controlling and composing. B
By pressing down a special key, it plays a little melody. C
34
We recall Barthes terms works like this ‘writerly’.
35
Their song forms are open for live improvisation; they use interviews, photoshoots and artwork to
create a fictionalized image of themselves; their music veers between minimal and maximal extremes
(the title of their 2005 live album is Minimum‐Maximum) that encourage us as listener‐participants to
‘fill in the gaps’ or try to make sense of sensory overload respectively.
36
Durrani, O, ‘Popular music in the German‐speaking world’ in ed. Phipps, A, Contemporary German
Cultural Studies, (Hodder Arnold, 2002), p.198.
37
We recall the Reynolds quotation about this earlier in the essay.
11
Below is a timeline of when and where these lyrics occur in the song (1981 Computer
World English‐language version):
C
A A A
B B
00:00 00:30 01:00 01:30 02:00 02:30 03:00 03:30 04:00 04:30 05:00
Fig. 1.
Looking at the chart, we probably identify fragment ‘A’ (‘I’m the operator…’)
as a chorus. The fact that the song’s title is mentioned and it happens three times
during the song should confirm this. However, the role of the fragments marked ‘B’
and ‘C’ are far less clear. Were this a conventional pop song, ‘B’ would be a verse
and ‘C’ a bridge or middle 8. It feels perverse to label these as such, though, despite
the ‘middle 8’ happening in the middle of the song. ‘Pocket Calculator’ bears these
faint hallmarks of what Adorno terms ‘standardized’38 pop form and this is easy to
see when visualized on the page, but the effect of actually listening to it is rather
different.
The music appears to propel itself along, ‘always different, always the
same.’39 There is no real sense of narrative development, of teleology. It merely
appears to occupy a moment and then end. In fact, the track fades out, which
suggests the cyclic repetitions could have continued (and did in the studio) were it
not for the limitations of the medium (LP). Slavoj Žižek draws a comparison between
this circular drive and the figure of Sisyphus, who rolled a stone up a hill, only for it
to roll back down again, ‘…drive’s ultimate aim is simply to reproduce itself as drive,
to return to its circular path, to continue its path to and from the goal. The real
38
Adorno, T, ‘On Popular Music’, Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, Vol. IX (Institute of Social
Research, 1941), pp.17‐48.
39
Goddard, M & Halligan, B, Mark E Smith and The Fall: Art, Music and Poltics (Ashgate, 2010), p.8.
12 71070_33230058_1
source of enjoyment is the repetitive moment of this closed circuit.’40 The circuit
metaphor is one we will return to.
The music remains grounded on a single B♭ dominant seventh chord
throughout. A sequenced bass plays octaves in an improvised rhythm:
Fig. 2.
And changes its pattern to include a flattened seventh the first time we hear
fragment ‘B’:
Fig. 3.
All parts (instrumental and vocal) interchange quite freely in this piece, and are
heavily improvised, albeit within strictly defined parameters. The bass always plays
the same notes, but in different rhythms, whereas the notes of the main keyboard
melody (below) are rearranged more and more as the song goes on:
Fig. 4.
The vocals interject the instrumental texture too in a spirit of playful cooperation
that happens both on a micro and macro level. During the ‘choruses’, after Ralf
Hütter’s announcement ‘I’m the operator with my pocket calculator’, a chirping,
random sequence on a monophonic synthesizer (seemingly playing the part of
‘calculator’ in this dialogue) responds. On a larger scale, the vocals arrive and depart
seemingly at will, with instrumental parts making way to avoid a cluttered mix and to
allow Hütter to perform the lines with a quiet, sprechgesang delivery and the same
kind of intimate, dry, vocal production that Nicola Dibben associates with Björk.41
I am aware that I am endowing instruments and sounds with apparently
human agency. This is because I believe ‘Pocket Calculator’ to be fundamentally
40
Žižek, S, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture (MIT, 1992), p.5.
41
Dibben, N, Björk (Equinox, 2009), p.108.
13
about such an exchange of roles. The ‘calculator’ synthesizers appear to improvise
like quasi‐humans whilst Hütter delivers his lines mechanically, varying only slightly
his verbal inflections. Of course, the synthesisers are still recognizably machines, and
Hütter obviously still human, but it does appear that the narrator is testing the
boundaries of a symbolic order (the established hierarchy of man over machine) and
showing signs of regression (repeating ‘I’m the operator’ when it is not altogether
clear how in charge of proceedings he is). The upwards vocal inflections on the word
‘calculator’ make the statement ‘I’m the operator with my pocket calculator’ sound
almost like the question ‘I’m the operator with my pocket calculator?’
The interpretation I have arrived at highlights the limitations of these written
representations (timeline, text transcription and probably even my score examples).
Graphic representation in the form of reproduced lyrics gives some sense of the
subject‐matter, but none of the possible ambiguity, the questionable reliability of
the narrator and the real nature of his relationship with the technology (is he really
‘controlling’ or is he being controlled? Indeed, is he willingly allowing himself to be
controlled?). On the page, it appears self‐explanatory and ‘readerly’, but when the
fragile, human vocal is paired with the confident, electronic backing, this text
becomes open to interpretation, subjective and ‘writerly’ in the extreme. In addition,
the possibility for jouissance and sublime experiences become altogether more
likely, as the next section explores.
Part II. Jouissance and minimal‐maximal sublimes
By changing…lyrics, language and form in a bid for commercial success, Kraftwerk
turned [their] back on [their] national identity.42
‐ John Littlejohn
One of the stated aims of this essay was to argue the case for Kraftwerk’s lyrics (that
have clearly been denigrated by some) being as or more transgressive than the
music they are paired with. I do not seek to talk down instrumental e/affects as a
consequence of confirmation bias. I have already noted, for example, that the music
appears to largely abandon conventional patterns of desire‐construction (plaisir) in
42
Littlejohn, J T, ‘Kraftwerk: language, lucre, and loss of identity’, Popular Music and Society, Vol. 32
No. 5 (December, 2009), pp.6
14 71070_33230058_1
favour of thrilling repetitions and ‘random’ reorganizations (novel manipulations of
material that may hint at jouissance in their reconfiguration of traditional musical
relationships). Provocatively, thrillingly, the machines behave with something
resembling autonomy, which is a challenge to our own identity as humans, for better
or worse. An argument can be made that Kraftwerk tend to foreground melody and
harmony (though chordal harmony is largely absent in ‘Pocket Calculator’) over
rhythm and bass, though I think this is guilty of projecting the values of
contemporary dance music (Afrocentric rhythm, foregrounding of bass) onto one of
its sources.
Without the expressedly43 human element for the machines to rub against,
the track would be something quite different; or, as Sean Albiez and Kyrre Tromm
Lindvig put it, a vital ‘aspect of Kraftwerk’s Gesamtkunstwerk’ is lost.44 For sure,
Kraftwerk’s instrumental tracks can and do evoke a sense of the sublime, of being
overwhelmed by techno‐culture. ‘Spacelab’ from previous album The Man‐Machine
conveys a beautiful sadness and perhaps indeed what Mark Fisher calls the
communicational sublime, or ‘tele‐pathos: the enjoyable melancholy of seeing things
from far away.’45 But pure instrumentals are a rarity in Kraftwerk’s canon (at least
the officially‐designated post‐Autobahn Kraftwerk), and it is their use of vocal effects
beyond the vocoder (which does not feature here) that is sorely under‐explored, or
outright ignored in literature. I resist the idea that the vocals (especially in English
language) exist solely for commercial reasons, as John Littlejohn is suggesting here.46
I seek also to debunk the notion that they function as the ‘pop’ foil to contrastingly
arty musical backing, which is somehow ‘more technological’47 and the true site of
meaning. What follows is a discussion of the jouissance of sung language and its
sublime implications.
We have already gleaned a certain amount from the literal meaning of the
(English) words, and rather more from reading between the lines (creating a new,
personal text). I have outlined my experience of jouissance as traditional roles are
43
As opposed to the hidden human presence of keyboard performance, or even
programming/sequencing that necessarily involves man(ual) input.
44
Albiez, S & Lindvig, K T, ‘Autobahn and Heimatklange: Soundtracking the FRG’ in Albiez, S & Pattie,
D, Kraftwerk: Music Non‐Stop, p.25
45
Fisher, M, ‘Kraftwerk’, p.59.
46
In fact, I go on to argue that in the case of ‘Pocket Calculators’ they are in fact a great deal to do
with commerce, but not in the sense that Littlejohn intends.
47
See Gilbert, J & Pearson, E, Discographies…, p.112 for a discussion on ‘technological status’.
15
swapped, the momentary thrill of doing so and the potentially harrowing long‐term
implications for our autonomy. Two linked sublimes are evoked by the lyrical text:
one minimal, the other maximal. The lyrics extol the virtues of the kitsch, seemingly
‘useless’ pocket calculators,48 but reading deeper, I (after Fisher) link this play to the
whole network of consumer electronics and contemplate the increasingly important
role electronics play in our lives, as prosthetic extensions of ourselves. As Fisher says,
‘the vast, unfathomable object that Computer World contemplates is nothing less
than the digital systems of control and communication which would soon be
embedded into everyday life.’49 In this sense, I believe Littlejohn is right to link
Kraftwerk to commerce, though this interpretation is clearly not what he intended. It
is worth noting that Kraftwerk made use of almost exclusively consumer electronics
(especially on this album, Computer World with its musical use of electronic toys), as
opposed to the specialist, high‐end equipment at institutions such as IRCAM and the
Columbia‐Princeton Electronic Music Center.
It is when I experience this song in alternate languages that these sensations
of jouissance and sublime are magnified. There is undeniably a certain jouissance in
experiencing the music of those for whom English is a second language; the main
hook ‘I’m the operator with my pocket calculator’ feels slightly awkward, the
preposition ‘with’ functioning like the ‘beside’ of ‘Beside the victory / That’s our
destiny’ in Abba’s ‘Winner Takes It All’ that Chris Kennett so enjoys.50 However, what
is more interesting to me is the jouissance of a foreign language to an Englishman.
Here, what little literal meaning the text contains dissolves into materiality, pure
sound, as a consequence of my own linguistic ignorance.
‘Pocket Calculator’ exists in multiple English and German versions, as well as
Japanese (‘Dentaku’) and lesser‐known French and Italian versions. The full texts of
these are attached as an appendix to this essay and I have transcribed the first lines
of all these below:
48
The wow factor of the mini‐sublime.
49
Fisher, M, ‘Kraftwerk’, p.59.
50
Kennett, C, ‘A Tribe Called Chris’, p.14.
16 71070_33230058_1
Sprechgesang
'Pocket Calculator'
Computer World
I'm the op - er - a - tor with my po - cket cal-cu - la - tor
'Pocket Calculator'
The Mix,
Minimum-Maximum
(live) I'm the op - er - a - tor with my po - cket cal-cu - la - tor
Taschenrechner
Computerwelt
Ich bin der mus - i - kant mit ta-schen - rech - ner in der hand
Unpitched, vocoder
'Dentaku'
Computer World (Japan),
The Mix
Bo - ku wa on ga - ku ka Den - ta - ku ka - ta - te ni
Mini-Calculateur
Je suis l'o - per - a - teur du mi - ni cal - cu - la - teur
Mini-calcolatore
So - no l'o-per-a-to - re del mi - ni - cal - co - la - to - re
Fig. 5.
There are sound commercial reasons for these multiple versions and, from the
appreciative crowd noise on live album Minimum‐Maximum, Kraftwerk appear to
delight their audience by singing in their language, though we cannot be sure they
are celebrating the greater level of comprehensibility. Certainly, my strongest
reactions to this music arise not from moments of increased intelligibility, but
lessened. My experience of these versions is like Marshall McLuhan’s ‘global village’
in action, thrilling at both the similarities and differences between the different
17
related texts, what they reveal about the text with which I am familiar and how they
contradict it.
Most striking of all is the Japanese language ‘Dentaku’. The language itself is
unfamiliar and Other and the whole meaning appears to change in my mind. Whilst I
know rationally that the text is an accurate translation of the original German text
and corresponds to the English text with which I am familiar ‐ with the exception
that the first line translates as ‘I’m a musician’, not ‘I’m the operator ‐ I cannot
experience the lyrics as anything other than gleefully meaningless, phonemic sound‐
events. I cautiously suggest, wary of the Orientalist implications of such an
argument, that Kraftwerk had a similarly material experience of these word‐sounds,
so different as they are to the Germanic and Romantic‐language versions of the
song. The miniature sounds of the Japanese language, already associated in the
Western psyche with consumer electronics (Sony, Yamaha etc.) and strange
prosthetic extensions of ourselves,51 seem to be the perfect vehicle for expressing
the mini‐sublime. Indeed, even from looking at my transcription (fig. 5.), we can tell
the delivery is more confident – on the original 1981 single, it is delivered by multiple
Ralf Hütters, some of whom are vocoded; and in the versions found on the almost
entirely English‐language albums The Mix (1991) and Minimum‐Maximum (2005), it
takes on a universal, almost anthemic quality.
The 1980s were boom years in Japan, predicated largely on the rapid
expansion of technological industries. The culture as a whole seemed and perhaps
still seems less ashamed of their prostheses; the missing evidence in Slavoj Žižek’s
party piece idea about the link between toilets and ideology52 is the Japanese toilet,
playing tinny recordings of Beethoven piano sonatas and washing/powdering
backsides. The Japanese narrative voice in 1981’s ‘Dentaku’ seems less shy or fearful
than the Europeans’ at that time (though I know both narrative voices are Ralf
Hütter), as if through the other side of the symbolic order and celebrating their
technological selves. However, I also sense that ‘Dentaku’ rubbed off on later
versions of ‘Pocket Calculator’ on The Mix and Minimum‐Maximum as if our
globalized society had turned a little more Japanese.53 On both records, ‘Pocket
Calculator’ segues into ‘Dentaku’ with a stronger, more danceable beat and more
51
We think of Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson finding themselves ‘lost in translation’ in the film of
the same name.
52
Žižek, S, ‘On Toilets and Ideology’, Accessed at
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwTJXHNP0bg> 30/04/12.
53
With regards the mini‐sublime, I certainly think it has.
18 71070_33230058_1
declamatory vocals. I no longer hear ‘I’m the operator…’ as a possible question and it
seems that the cautious, hesitant 1981 experience of the mini‐sublime has given way
to a stronger man‐machine relationship, but also perhaps a diminished sense of the
sublime (are we still wowed by pocket calculators or do they now belong to the
realm of the kitsch?) and a more conventional route to jouissance (dance).
Conclusions
Are these feelings of jouissance and the sublime really ‘bypassing interpretation’ as
Simon Reynolds says? I would suggest not, as writers stretching back to Kant and
before have used language to attempt to interpret and understand supposedly
ineffable experiences. I find myself interpreting the bodily affects of hearing this
music in concert (as I did at Bestival, 2010) and on record after the event, if perhaps
not during. The mind‐body/meaning‐materiality gap is not as distinct as is often
made out in metaphysical discourse. As Gilbert & Pearson write, ‘how can we…talk
about “the body” as a site of ‘direct’ experience, somehow separate from
intellectual and discursive experience?’54 One can certainly learn from experiences
outside the symbolic order; jouissance can be political as Reynolds and Gilbert &
Pearson point out about ravers whose lives were altered by their club/drug
experiences. The jouissance of the sublime moment here, on considering the
impossibly small intricacies of a consumer good (the calculator) and the
unfathomably vast networks of production, commerce and marketing that brought it
into being, makes me think about my own reliance on technological prostheses and
the vital role prostheses play in society in general.
The seductive affects of ‘Pocket Calculator’ (repetition, mantra‐like refrains,
charmingly naïve timbres) make it impossible, for me at least, to resist. To borrow an
idea from Steve Goodman (aka electronic music producer Kode9), the listener‐
analyst (me) becomes a transducer plugged into the same circuit as Kraftwerk,
resonating in sympathy, rather than standing aside, ‘detached…isolated from…sonic
objects’.55 As a transducer, I transform the energy received from the music into a
response. In doing so, I too enter the Man‐Machine complex.
54
Gilbert, J & Pearson, E, Discographies, p.48.
55
Goodman, S, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (MIT, 2010), p.46.
19
I locate Kraftwerk between the binaries outlined in this essay –
plaisir/jouissance, meaning/materiality, song/track, pop/techno,56 readerly/writerly.
Postmodernism and idioethnomusicology allows for Kraftwerk to be any of these
things, all of them or none of them to the listener‐analyst. The moments of plaisir in
the music (it loosely conforming to standardized pop form of verses, choruses and a
middle 8 with a now‐customary percussion ‘break’) do not negate the moments of
jouissance to me. In fact, how I perceive the group’s tension/rub/noise between
opposite poles is what gives Kraftwerk their identity in my mind and what gives me
the freedom to negotiate my own position in relation to them. In Richard
Middleton’s terms (after János Maróthy), this tension between unity and difference
‘widen[s] the field of gestural reference’57 and is the locus of meaning.
In ‘Pocket Calculator’ and their other material dealing with the role electronic
extensions of our selves58 play in quotidian life, Kraftwerk outline a sublime object
and symbolic order, probe the boundaries and, arguably, sometimes, break through.
I share with Kraftwerk the thrill of testing the symbolic boundary between man and
machine in ‘Pocket Calculator’ and wondering at the moment of interaction with this
sublime object. However, unlike the confident, technological Japanese voice in
‘Dentaku’, or the seemingly more techno‐optimistic Kraftwerk of recent years
evidenced by The Mix and Minimum‐Maximum versions of ‘Pocket Calculator’, I
worry about the loss of autonomy and privacy in our digital age, and the potential
for jouissance‐as‐suffering as a result of our increasing loss of autonomy to
technological extensions of ourselves.
56
We note the title of Kraftwerk’s next album Techno Pop elides the two.
57
Middleton, R, ‘Popular Music Analysis and Musicology: Briding the Gap’ in ed. Middleton, R,
Reading Pop: Approaches to Textual Analysis in Popular Music (Oxford, 2000), p.111.
58
Principally transport (Autobahn, Trans‐Europe Express, Tour de France) and domestic/industrial
man‐machine interaction (Radio‐Activity, The Man Machine, Computer World, Techno Pop).
20 71070_33230058_1
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Appendix
‘Pocket Calculator’
I’m the operator with my pocket calculator.
I am adding and subtracting.
I’m controlling and composing.
By pressing down a special key, it plays a little melody.
‘Taschenrechner’
Ich bin der Musikant mit Taschenrechner in der Hand.
Ich addiere und subtrahiere.
Kontrolliere und Komponiere.
Und wenn ich diese Taste drück, spielt er ein kleines Musikstück
‘Mini Calculateur’
Je suis l’operateur du mini calculateur.
Je fait le compte et le decompte.
Je compose et decompose.
En touchant ce bouton‐ci, il joue une petite mélodie.
‘Mini Calcolatore’
Sono l'operatore del mini calcolatore.
Io sottraggo e aggiungo.
Io controllo e compongo.
Se io spingo un bottone, lui fa' una canzone.
‘Dentaku’
Bokuwa ongakuka dentaku katateni.
Tashitari, hiitari
Sousashite, sakkyoku suru.
Kono botan oseba, ongaku kanaderu.
23
MU71070A POPULAR MUSIC: LISTENING, ANALYSIS AND
INTERPRETATION
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