The Event of Beethoven’s Signature

by Arkady Plotnitsky,

Theory and Cultural Studies Program,
Deptartment of English, Purdue University

What is a signature, and what is an event? And what is Beethoven’s signature, and what is the event of Beethoven, which we celebrate this year? Every time there is a signature, there is an event, the event of this signature, and every event of a signature has a signature, this signature. On the other hand, not all events have a signature, at least a signature that survives. In the case of the event or (in the case his particular compositions) events of Beethoven, however, the co-presence of a signature and an event is restored, at least when it comes to his signature underneath his musical scores, although, as Marcelo Toledo’s new composition, “Unterschrift” [Signature], tells us, it is possible to think of all of Beethoven’s signatures as musical scores. I mean his personal signature, for Beethoven of course also has his musical signature, which distinguishes his work, one of the dictionary meanings of signature as well. (The word also has its specific meaning in music, as a set of signs in the beginning of a staff, which marks any score.) Each Beethoven’s musical score is an event in itself, signed by Beethoven twice, with his musical signature, defining this score and the musical composition thus inscribed as that of Beethoven, and his personal signature, which is also a composition. Then, there is also the event of Beethoven, defined by all his music and thought, which has a musical and intellectual signature shared by all of his work. We rarely think of a personal signature as a composition, but every time we sign, we compose our signature, unless reproduce it exactly, for example, by photocopying it or electronically. Toledo’s score, organized by the images of Beethoven’s signature, is an enactment of this interplay of Beethoven’s signature and the event of Beethoven, making both merge (bringing a few events of Beethoven’s particular compositions along, by integrating their parts into the score of “Unterschrift”), yet without losing the identity of each and thus their difference from each other. Toledo’s score also images, musically and visually, the temporality and rhythm of any signature, of compositions we call signatures. It takes time and rhythm, and sometimes music, to sign. Toledo’s score is an artistic enactment, musical and visual, of Beethoven’s musical and personal signatures in their complex interrelationships with each other, which intermingle their temporalities, graphics, and music, and bring the event of Beethoven and Beethoven’s signature together, even makes them indissociable.

Jacques Derrida considered the concept of signature as an event in his essay “Signature Event Context,” where he says: “The condition of possibility of [the effects of signature] is simultaneously, … the condition of their impossibility, the impossibility of their rigorous purity. In order to function, that is, in order to legible, a signature must have a repeatable, iterable, imitable form; it must be able to detach itself from the present and singular intention of its production. It is its sameness which, in altering its identity and singularity, divides the seal [of the identity of a signature].”[1] It follows from this sameness with a difference, a sameness that alters the identity and singularity of a signature every time it is signed is what makes a signature a signature, what gives it its certifiable authenticity, is the following, paradoxical, situation. While always the “same,” a signature is never identical to itself. It is different and singular, unique, each time. Every time we sign, we compose our signature at least slightly differently, just as, every time one plays a composition by Beethoven, it is different, while still the same by virtue of its musical signature, both as the signature of this composition itself and the musical signature of all of Beethoven’s music. The sameness of either signature, personal or musical, is maintained in and by its difference from itself, not its absolute identity to itself. Every signature is an interplay of identity and difference. It maintains itself by differing from itself, an interplay that Derrida called différance (with an a), his most famous neologism, in this case, the différance of a signature. The score of “Unterschrift” is an image and enactment, musical and visual, of the différance of Beethoven’s two signatures, while, at the same type, giving itself Toledo’s own musical signature, merged with Beethoven’s personal signature, integrating parts of Beethoven’s musical signature along the way.

While, however, Derrida considered and rethought the event of a signature and the nature of an event as singular and unique each time (and also the nature of context in view of this singularity or uniqueness of an event), he, intriguingly, never considered, in this essay or elsewhere, the signature of an event. It is intriguing because, the published version of Derrida’s essay in Margins of Philosophy is actually accompanied by a reproduction, a “counterfeit,” according to him, of his signature of one of his signatures, signing the essay and (as it is the last chapter of the book) the book itself thus suggesting that it is also the signature of the event of “Signature Event Context” and of Derrida’s philosophy, in the margins of philosophy (Margins of Philosophy, 330). Perhaps he bypassed addressing the signature of an event because he wanted to emphasize the singularity, unrepeatability of each event, including that of a signature, within the sameness and difference of its repetition. Perhaps he also realized that the two cases are different when it comes to a repetition. A signatures, the event of signature, must be repeatable, if always with a difference. By contrast, an event need not be repeatable even with a difference, and sometimes it cannot be repeated; nor does an event need to have a signature, in any case, a legible signature. Certain events, such as the event of Beethoven, often do, however, thus restoring the symmetry of a signature and an event, by making a signature an event and giving an event a signature.

While there are cases of repeated events, sometime almost (arguably, never strictly) identically repeated and sometime repeated with a difference, in the way the events of the same signature are, there are some events, with or without a signature, that happen only once, without any repetition. At least they are assumed to have happened only once, because we can never be entirely certain that such a unique event was not a repetition, with or even without a difference, of some preceding event or events. Thus, the event of the origin of the Universe, at least the one we inhabit, the event sometimes known as the Big Bang, which occurred about 13.8 billion years, is commonly assumed to have occurred only once. It left a massive signature, in particular the so-called cosmic background radiation, which also allows us to date this event. Technically, this birth was a process, with its own temporality and rhythm, a sequence of events, however quick it might have been, about a 10-11 second long, as current theories of the early Universe tell us. The signature of this event is, too, a result of this process. This, however, is true, albeit rarely at this speed, of most events, such as that of a signature or of a musical composition, as each letter of a signature or a note of a composition is itself an event, a multiple event. Some versions of the present-day cosmology assume that the Universe was born literally out of nothing. This is hard to imagine, but it only needed to have happened once as a random fluctuation of nothingness. There are, however, alternative views. One of them makes the birth of the Universe merely a repetition, with a difference, of previous births of other Universes (followed by their deaths and, in these deaths, births of new ones). According to yet another view, the births of new (parallel) Universes as an ongoing process, which we cannot observe, but can hypothetically deduce assuming certain mathematical cosmological schemes. In sum, the uniqueness of the event may not be certain, but its signature is there, which defines its uniquely great significance for us, as an event.

Derrida would have recognized the special significance of certain events, such as the birth of the Universe or the event of Beethoven, although he tends to be hesitant to speak of radical breaks with past or radical innovations, which I would like to advocated here without, however, identifying radical with absolute. There is no such a thing as an absolute innovation, an unconditional origin of anything, apart possibly for the origin of the Universe itself, still, again, a process. Otherwise all “original” events, certainly, all human ones, are always events of a difference, along with a repetition. In some of them, however, the difference supersedes, sometimes radically, a repetition. Derrida’s definition of “event,” for example, that of a signature, does not single special, revolutionary events. Any signature, no matter how mundane, is an event, always singular, even in repetition, and the same is true for all events. This is a valid and conceptually rigorous theory of event, which I adopt here as well. I also assume, however, that there are radical, even revolutionary events, events that change our world, within one or another scope. Advocating the occurrence of such events is closer to thinking an event by several other recent theorists, such as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s view of the emergence of something new or even something that continues to always remain new in art, science, and philosophy, or to Alain Badiou’s understanding of an event [événement] as making us decide on a new way of being.

The event of Beethoven is such an event. It has an advantage for us insofar as, unlike in the case of the birth of the Universe, we can perform his music and thus “repeat,” give a representation, of his musical signature. This difference is not absolute either, because our mathematical cosmological models “perform” this event and its signature, just as the Pythagoreans related their mathematics and cosmology, the music of the spheres. It is also possible to think, as has been suggested sometimes, that some modern music, including Beethoven, contains the mathematical-like structures or signatures that are akin to the mathematical structures of the present-day cosmologies. This is the music of new geometries of the Universe, our Pythagorean music of cosmos. We can also compose new music with new signatures, which may be different but may still retain some rhythms (in either sense) of Beethoven’s musical signature. Toledo’s “Unterschrift” is the case in point, also musically and visually allegorizing this process. Such events of Beethoven, however, occur, as the births of new musical universes, each time the same and different, repeatedly in performing his music and in new compositions, which retains the traces of Beethoven musical signature. Not all musical compositions do of course, but these traces can make them more original, of which Toledo’s “Unterschrift,” is, again, both an example and an allegory of this process.

According to Badiou, an event, in this revolutionary sense (the French revolution is one of his example), responds to the need for “something to have happened, … that cannot be reduced to [an] ordinary inscription in ‘what there is’. Let us call this supplement [of existence] an event, and let us distinguish multiple-being, where it is not a matter of truth (but only of opinions), from the event, which compels us to decide [on] a new way of being.”[2] A new way of being, no less! And Beethoven’s music offers us no less, far beyond our being in music, and one need not think only of the ninth symphony and the last quartet to realize this, although it is difficult not to think in this connection the famous language and musical theme of his last quartet, Opus 135: “Muss es sein? Es muss sein!” [Must it be? It must be!]. “Muss es sein?” is written (as an “Unterschrift”) under the introductory slow chords of the last movement, to which the quartet responds with the faster main theme of the movements, “Es muss sein.” The movement as a whole has a heading “Der schwer gefasste Entschlus” [The Difficult Decision]. This might, perhaps must, be also read, by putting, or performing it with, an emphasis in “sein” as a statement on the nature of being (Sein), or even, to borrow Martin Heidegger’s most famous title, on the nature of Being and Time, Sein und Zeit, and on a decision, a difficult decision on a new way of being, difficult but made nevertheless, certainly musically, but quite possible on the new way of being in general.

It comes as no surprise that, among Badiou’s examples of events in this sense, music figures prominently, alongside the French revolution, some mathematical and scientific revolution, and even “a personal amorous passion”: “… Haydn’s inventions of the classical musical style … the invention of the twelve-tone-scale by Schoenberg … .”[3] Although not mentioned by Badiou, the event of Beethoven unavoidable in thinking of such musical events, both in general and as an event that connects and even helps the uniqueness, the event-ness of, along with itself, the events of Haydn and Schoenberg. There could be no event of Beethoven without the event of Haydn, any more than the event of Schoenberg without the event of Beethoven, or for that matter the event of Haydn (and a few events before and between: the event of Bach, the event of Mozart, the event of Brahms, the event of Bruckner, to name a few). Each of these events still has its unique signature, each time different, when their music is performed, or sometimes when new music is composed, and no only classical music. The event and signature of Beethoven’s music, an event of Trans-Being, as Badiou calls it, was an extraordinary case of placing our thought beyond the ordinary inscription of human being at the time, urging the whole of the humanity to decide on a new way of being, “Muss es sein? Es muss sein?” This trans-beingness of the event of music also reinstitutes the symmetry of the event of Beethoven and Beethoven’s signature, the symmetry manifested in “Underschrift.”

Does it do so more than other arts? Not necessarily! We have last year celebrated the event of Leonardo de Vinci, the 500th anniversary of his death (in 1519), which is (as such events also transcend such anniversaries) the event of his signature as the signature of his event. Much could be said about Leonardo’s signature, his many signatures (about 17 in kind are known), especially that in his Codex Antlanticus, which he wrote and signed by looking in the mirror, itself one of Leonardo’s signature event. Suffices it to say here that all his portraits are also his signatures, in a way always his self-portraits, although he has just his self-portraits (sometimes inscribed in other figures in his paintings), different and signed differently each time, just as Beethoven’s score are. Both are compositions, revealing the proximity between music and art, the proximity that Wassily Kandinsky put into play by entitling many of his abstract compositions “compositions,” alluding to the idea of a musical composition. In doing so, he also showed, by the abstractness and rhythm of these compositions, that they are events of signatures, no longer representations, and also signatures of their events, and of the event of Kandinsky. But they also tell us that, in Deleuze and Guattari’s words, “no [true] true art and no sensation has ever been representational.”  What is it then? Composition! “Composition. Composition is the sole definition of art. … and what is not composed in not a work of art,” they also say, the sole definition of an event of art and the ultimate signature of any art work—visual, literary, or musical.[4] Its composition defines and is the signature of Toledo’s “Unterschrift,” too.

In its musical and visual unfolding of Beethoven’s signature, Toledo’s “Unterschrift,” becomes a far-reaching allegory, musical and visual, of any event of celebration or, better, affirmation of Beethoven, of the event of Beethoven. In a certain sense, there is no other way to affirm this event. Beginning with Beethoven’s original acts of compositions (which are, however, are also always repetitions, even though always with a difference), any such event is an event of his double signature, musical and personal, in their complex interplay with each other, making them similar to and different from each other. This still can be said only to the degree that we can differentiate musical and personal here, for both signatures are personal, and both are even legal, and yet both are still and even in the first place musical.

To be sure, these two signatures are not entirely indissociable, given that Beethoven’s musical signature can, along with his compositions, function, live on apart from his personal signature. But could we, conversely, entirely dissociate them? Toledo’s “Unterschrift” (which has his double, musical and personal, signature in turn) suggests that we might want to think twice about this question, especially if one also thinks of the hand that created, composed, both signatures. There is both, something of Beethoven’s thought and music in the graphics of his personal signature and his signature in his thought and music. The rhythm and temporality of both signatures are inscribed in the graphics of his scores, and imaged, musically and visually, in Toledo’s score. All these graphics are still musical. For us, now, there is no Beethoven apart from music, nor music apart from Beethoven, the event of Beethoven, the event of his signature, the signature of his event. “Muss es sein? Es muss sein!”

[1] Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, tr. Alan Bass (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 328-329.

[2] Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, tr. Peter Hallward (New York: Verson, 2001), 41.

[3] Ethics, 41.

[4] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? tr. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 193, 191.