Juan Arturo Brennan: Tribute to the jukebox

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while a substantial number of “entertainment journalists” and “media critics” (the quotation marks are mine and very malicious) dedicate effort, keyboard, sweat and sighs to glossing over the deep and transcendent meaning of the orange color in the most recent iteration of Taylor Swift, a color that according to them is exuberant and welcoming, full of positive vibrations and is all goodness, the Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han proposes a sharp and reflective look at a sound and musical subject that is certainly more interesting and relevant. In his book Non-Things: Bankruptcies of Today's World , Han analyzes the growing detachment of current society towards the tangible objects that anchor us, define us and build our memory of the physical world, while we plummet towards the abyss of the virtual and nonexistent. The final chapter of No-Things is titled A Digression on the Jukebox (another name for that noble device that is the jukebox) and in it, the author makes a series of illuminating reflections on his central thesis, in which he points out that the world is running out of things, to be filled with false, lying, biased and irrelevant information.

A minor bicycle accident in Berlin's Schöneberg neighborhood leads the philosopher into the peculiar world of jukeboxes, when he stumbles upon a shop called Jukeland. ( Jukebox is the English word for jukebox.) This chance encounter leads Han on a journey back in time, to the heyday of these gadgets. He immediately detects the sensuality in the jukebox's visual appearance, whose design he compares to that of some vintage cars. Fascinated, he buys the jukebox that most caught his eye and installs it in his austere apartment, where the only other furniture is a grand piano, on which he incessantly practices the Aria from Bach 's Goldberg Variations , and a table. He then proceeds to consider various aspects of emptiness and silence, and defines the latter as an intense form of attention, which is subverted daily, at all hours, everywhere, by the intrusion of a noisy, excessive, verbose and incontinent society: we live surrounded by things that prevent and/or destroy silence.

Contemplating his newly acquired jukebox leads Byung-Chul Han to see in it a captivating luminous presence, the reflection of whose lights in the darkness of the room seems to produce an almost erotic sensation; the jukebox offers those who look at it and listen to it a visual, auditory, and tactile experience. It is here that Han addresses the central part of his discourse in this concluding chapter of his book No-Things : confronting the material, corporeal, and present sound of the jukebox with the incorporeal, flat, and absent nature of digital sound in all its manifestations.

Here, I add this observation of mine: how depressing modern jukeboxes powered by compact discs are compared to the traditional ones that hypnotically handled the old 45 rpm records. From there to jukeboxes that play cold, homogeneous digital files is just a step. The philosopher proceeds to marvel (and enjoy) the fact that his jukebox works with the noise of things: the drop of inserted coins, the selection and placement mechanism of analog records, music itself and, by extension, the scratch , the hiss , and the pops, as inevitable as they are endearing. In the course of his discussion, Byung-Chul Han frequently refers to Peter Handke's Essay on the Jukebox , from which he draws some points in common with his own ideas. Among these, one of the most suggestive is that the jukebox is an automaton with a physical presence, while Alexa and her peers are nothing more than empty and absent infomats.

In short, what Han proposes in No-Things , and particularly in the chapter "A Digression on the Jukebox," is nothing more and nothing less than a defense of the solid and the tangible against a society of the disembodied, the digital, and the virtual. Of course, the selection of playlists played on jukeboxes in diners, clubs, bars, cantinas, and dives is a different story altogether, and it's no small matter.