Harnessing the Virtual: Technology and The Rhythmachine in Response to the Problem of Metrical Time in Gilles Deleuze

Introduction

The role and position of music in the thought of Gilles Deleuze is multiple1. Deleuze, firstly, incorporates the vocabulary of music and sound into the construction of his metaphysical system, terms including refrain, rhythm, and resonance, being used more or less literally to express his own philosophical thought. Additionally, the ideas of musicians and theorists of music - most notably Pierre Boulez and Olivier Messiaen - are adopted and incorporated into Deleuze’s own thinking. This leads to concepts which are musical in nature being entered into composition with the conceptual products of a vast number of other fields within the formation of Deleuze’s wider system, a system which comes to span all of these fields and beyond.

What I wish to address in this article is, initially, how the aspects of Deleuzian musical thought which are derived from Boulez and Messiaen impose a limit on what the musical can be and how it can engage with the world, with a particular focus on matters of musical isolation and spiritualism, addressing a wider question of how these concerns are also applicable to Deleuzian metaphysics as a whole. To counter this negative perspective, however, I will look at the Deleuze-influenced musical theory of Kodwo Eshun and Steve Goodman, and move towards articulating a Deleuzian theory of music which maximises the active and creative potential of music and musical thought through an emphasis on the relations between actual, worldly bodies.

I will open with a brief exposition of Deleuze’s use of the musical-theoretical sources of Boulez and Messiaen. First I will discuss Boulez’s basic musical unit of the isolated and internally-defined sound block, and from this I will look at how Deleuze proposes that this isolation is countered in the theory of ethological counterpoint between isolated bodies put forward by Jacob von Uexküll. I will develop this into a discussion of Deleuze’s use of Messiaen’s own presentation of counterpoint, and suggest that this appropriation of Messiaen leads Deleuze towards difficulties both musical and metaphysical – the former insofar as his musical system appears to endorse a formless, ineffectual musical form, and the latter inasmuch as the tendency towards transcendence inherited from Messiaen contradicts his own proclamation of immanent metaphysics and amounts to his philosophical end-point being an ascetic transcendence. This end point leads to a detachment from bodily matters and the structures of the actual world, and is concerned only with a virtual creating rather than actual creation, as is also argued in the critical assessment of Peter Hallward.

By moving this discussion onto the role of time in Deleuze’s distinction between the actual and the virtual, I will then shift my discussion towards a positive repositioning of Deleuzian musical thinking. Deleuze, as Hallward notes, posits a strong distinction between the nonpulsed virtual time of aion and the pulsed (that is, metrical) actual time of chronos – it is in rethinking this distinction that I seek to reverse the excessive

1 It should be noted that throughout this piece I work, for the most part, on the basis of an essential consistency across Deleuze's thought, including his work in collaboration with Guattari. While I have not used Guattari's name in this introduction due to its wide-ranging claims regarding Deleuze's thought, I will attempt to refer to both collaborators throughout when appropriate.

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influences of Boulez and Messiaen in Deleuze’s thought. I will develop my discussion into a study of the notion of metrical rhythm, following the comments of the musician – and former student of Deleuze – Richard Pinhas in moving to assert a kind of pulsed aion, a metric time which yet holds a positive relation to the virtual. In considering Deleuze’s move to maintain the distinction between aion and chronos, I will suggest that Deleuze is maintaining an unnecessary and damaging bond to his musical influences, arguing that the strength of this distinction fundamentally misunderstands the role that metrical rhythm plays in music outside of the Western art tradition, particularly in African and Afrodiasporic musics.

From here I will look at the work of Steve Goodman and Kodwo Eshun, who move to constitute a concept of metrical rhythm which engages in a productive relationship with virtual forces. In their work, I will argue, a conception of metric rhythm as a tool for shaping intensive bodies, a process defined through the figure of the Rhythmachine, emerges within a Deleuzian framework. I will argue that this notion of the Rhythmachine does much to marginalise the elements of Deleuze's thought which neglect the centrality of immanence and de-prioritise the relations between bodies through either isolation or dissolution.

I will then focus on specific aspects of this relationality between bodies, particularly on the role of technology in the composition of music. It is only, I will argue, if we neglect the relations of bodies that we can have the absolute internally differentiating entity of the sound block defined only on its own terms, or the becoming-cosmic which exceeds all bodies. I will situate the relationship between human, technology, and world as one which is not a predictable mechanization of ordinary human activity, but is rather concerned with the unpredictable combination and extension of capacities in relation to the world that the human-technology relation constitutes. In this depiction I will draw Deleuze back in through discussion of Simondon’s linked concepts of individuation and technology, arguing that this aspect of Deleuze is a more apt perspective with which to consider activity in the world than those of internal differentiation or becoming-cosmic, and suggest that it is when he is most engaged in the virtual relations between actual bodies, rather than when his focus is predominantly on the virtual, that Deleuze both speaks most productively, and can most powerfully describe and engender transformative engagement with the world.

My goal here, then, is a relatively mild and modest one – namely, to adjust the focus of Deleuze’s thinking on music and its wider metaphysical consequences away from the vestigial isolation and spiritualism drawn from Boulez and Messiaen, respectively. In this modest move, however, I hope to suggest a Deleuze with a more robust engagement with the material world and its relations, which, as such, will move towards offering a defence against the common criticisms exemplified by the work of Hallward. My aim, then, is double. First, I will put forward a Deleuzian theory of music that can embrace a wider-ranging group of musics that Deleuze himself allows, and also offer the means for both the theorist engaging with music and the musician being influenced by Deleuzian thought to engage with Deleuze in a productive and thorough manner. Second, and in a wider sense, I aim to offer a perspective on Deleuze that enables a greater means of thinking activity within the actual through his system.

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Deleuze's Musical Lineage and its Consequences

Boulez and the sound block.

The “great musician”, as Deleuze and Guattari express Boulez's thought, forms a new way of conceiving the relationship between music’s vertical of the harmonic and the horizontal of the melodic such that the subsequent “diagonal” is freed from the organising structures of harmonic and melodic form. The constituted sound block, as Boulez terms the consequent basic musical unit with which the composer works, defined by neither harmonic nor melodic relations, “creates its own coordinates; and no longer forms a localizable connection from one point to another”2. The sound block, then, is a haecceity3, defined only internally, in terms of the relations of its internal elements – consisting “entirely of relations of movement and rest between molecules or particles, capacities to affect and be affected.”4 It is an individuality, expressed as an intensity, and can combine with other such intensities to form an individual. This individual is not ‘individual’ in the sense that a thing or a subject is - that is to say, it cannot be thought of in terms of its form, or as a point of stability, but rather it is defined as the consistent relation between heterogeneous terms – that is, the sense in which the terms are held together. The musician, then, corresponding to Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of the artist's freeing of the percept from perception in their final collaborative work, What is Philosophy?5, is as such put forward as one who is in a special position to ‘hate memories’, that is, to affirm a becoming that is one of pure sensation rather than relation to what has been or is to come. The sound block, in its movement of becoming, “no longer has a point of origin”6 – it is an in-between, defined not in terms of external relations but rather as an affective body of internally circulating intensity.

The Deleuzo-Guattarian musical piece, then, is not a fixed totality in the form of an object of perception, but rather a kind of “atmospheric configuration”, to use Bogue’s phrase, of “interpenetrating elements in flux.”7 It is defined in terms of assemblage, that is, in terms of the basic element of intensive elements of speed and slowness drawn into a consistent unit: “[t]he minimum real unit is […] the assemblage.”8 The assemblage is as such defined by Deleuze as

a multiplicity which is made up of many heterogeneous terms and which establishes liaisons, relations between them across ages, sexes and reigns – different natures. Thus, the assemblage’s only unity is that of co-functioning: it is a symbiosis, a ‘sympathy’. (Deleuze and Parnet, 2006: 52)

2 Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 296)3 Following Deleuze and Guattari's appropriation of Duns Scotus' term, ibid, p. 2974 Ibid, p. 2615 Deleuze & Guattari (1994: 168)6 Deleuze & Guattari (1987: 296)7 Bogue (2003: 30-1)8 Deleuze and Parnet (2006: 380)

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The assemblage draws connections between multiplicities of different natures, and offers a consistency of expression for each of these disparate elements, individuating multiplicity without imposing identity – it allows the multiplicity to make a co-functional statement, as part of a collective agent9, by providing a kind of regulation of their relations. The movement of the musical piece as haecceity, then, is an exploration of its internal qualities – the sound block as haecceity acts to differentiate itself internally, that is, without reference to fixed points or an outside.

Uexküll, counterpoint, and the refrain.

When Deleuze and Guattari speak of the assemblage that is sonorous, or “‘dominated’ by sound”10, it is known as the refrain, and is put forward by Deleuze and Guattari as the starting point of music. The distinction is one of emphasis – the refrain is particularly defined by its relation to territoriality. As with the assemblage, the refrain is first an assembling of heterogeneous behaviours, but thought of in terms of the expression of their aggregation. This aggregation is expressed in the form of the drawing of a territory, through “territorial motifs and landscapes”11; that is to say, in the consistent expression of the behaviours of the heterogeneous terms making up the assemblage. This sense of territory and musicality can be understood in relation to the ethology of Jakob von Uexküll. Deleuze and Guattari draw on Uexküll's notion of the milieu (or, for Uexküll, the Umwelt) to define doubly the singular, closed unity of any particular assemblage and the manner in which this seemingly isolated body relates, or resonates, with other bodies. Uexküll describes his theory as “a stroll into unfamiliar worlds”12, insofar as an animal’s territory cannot be defined as part of a One that is the complete, objective ecosystem, but rather is inseparable from the animal’s particular relation to the world.

As Deleuze and Guattari note, each body, through its machinic rather than organic functioning – that is, in terms of an active relation to an object rather than fixed internal structure merely situated within an external world – can take the same material but imbue it with new connections. The same material enters into relations with different bodies and as such is heterogeneously manifest through these varied relations - what is relevant is no longer the study of the animal as an organic whole which relates to an external environment, as such, but rather the animal’s various relationships to the elements that make up its environment as, in their entirety, a particular type of machinic assemblage. The oak tree serves a different role for each Umwelt it bears relation to, from the fox’s roof to the bark-boring beetle’s nourishment, just as the sound wave has a different role in the Umwelten of the physicist than in that of the musician13. As such Uexküll’s method of studying animal behaviour, as per Deleuze and Guattari’s reading, is centred on the capacities to affect and to be affected that are present in the territorial assemblage of which the animal is

9 Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 37)10 Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 323)11 Ibid12 Uexküll (1957: 5)13 Ibid, p. 74-5, p. 78

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a part, that is, by the dynamic relations an animal holds with other bodies in its environment.

In Deleuze’s relational rethinking of ethology this means that “every point has its counterpoints: the plant and the rain, the spider and the fly. So an animal, a thing, is never separable from its relations with the world.”14 Counterpoint here is, for both Uexküll and Deleuze and Guattari, not simply a metaphor, but specifically musical in sense. For Uexküll, as Agamben notes, the territorial worlds of individual animal-assemblages are independent and monadically uncommunicating, but are yet, in a wider sense, linked together, as are musical voices in the contrapuntal piece, the territorial worlds forming at their absolute end the entirety of nature as a musical score15. In Deleuze and Guattari’s terms the territorial assemblage is staked out by the refrain, that is, by its particular rhythmic qualities, but in contrapuntal relation to other refrains it becomes – through deterritorialization, or the line of flight, the movement through which the assemblage removes itself from its self-enclosed territoriality and changes in nature through connection to other assemblages16 – thinkable in this wider sense is that of the “cosmic refrain”17. As Deleuze notes in The Fold, echoing Uexküll, “[a]t its limit the material universe accedes to a unity in horizontal and collective extension, where melodies of development themselves enter into relations of counterpoint, each spilling over its frame and becoming the motif of another such that all of Nature becomes an immense melody and flow of bodies.”18 The rhythmic resonance between bodies, between assemblages, is for Deleuze a step towards cosmically overcoming of the insularity of those bodies, while maintaining a sense in which the body is isolated from its outside.

Messiaen, Hallward, and the problem of transcendence.

In this cosmic deterritorialization there lies an apparent opposition, however, to the notion of transformative and productive relations. The individual body is eschewed in favour of an all-encompassing cosmic move. Important in this move is Deleuze and Guattari’s appropriation of Olivier Messiaen’s discussion of the cosmic. Messiaen’s take on the contrapuntal qualities of the refrain mirrors Deleuze and Guattari’s presentation of Uexküll, but takes a crucial, and, for Deleuze, troubling, step beyond this. Quoted in A Thousand Plateaus, the music theorist Gisèle Brelet notes that juxtaposition of chromatic durations in Messiaen’s work aims to “suggest the idea of the relations between the infinitely long durations of the stars and mountains and the infinitely short ones of the insects and atoms: a cosmic, elementary power that [...] derives above all from the labor of rhythm”19 – that is, the place of the rhythmic in bringing forth, or making sonorous, the vast musical score of Uexküll’s natural world is extended to the infinitely large musical score of the cosmos. Deleuze and Guattari’s indiscriminate appropriation of Messiaen’s cosmic conception of rhythm, however, is rendered questionable by their equally wholesale omission of the Catholic faith Messiaen deemed crucial to this element of his work. Catherine Pickstock argues that in not considering Messiaen’s Catholicism Deleuze and Guattari

14 Deleuze (1988: 125)15 Agamben (2004: 40-1)16 Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 9)17 Ibid, p. 34918 Deleuze (2006: 155)19 Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 309)

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neglect that his music was essentially transcendent – the line of flight in Messiaen as a literal ascent to heaven20. Her criticism of Deleuze and Guattari then, posed with an emphasis on Messiaen’s transcendent Catholic cosmos, is that the Deleuzo-Guattarian line of flight must, unlike Messiaen’s, return to the ground, resulting in a nihilism formed from the impossible attempt for a philosophy of immanence to reach a transcendent goal. Taking Deleuze’s thought as the point of approach, however produces the opposite problem: that a kind of transcendence circles the edges of Deleuze’s otherwise immanent metaphysics, that the goals of Deleuze’s philosophy detach themselves from the earthly interactions of bodies and lead towards formless, spiritual ends.

This tendency is reflected in Peter Hallward’s critical discussion of Deleuze in Out of this World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation, wherein Deleuze’s philosophical system is described as “spiritual” and “preoccupied with the mechanics of dis-embodiment and de-materialisation”21. This view is opposed to the ‘fleshy materialist’ view of Deleuze which posits his thought as having a strong concern with material and biological processes, or with cultural encounters, political activity, or “even ‘communitarian’ empowerment.”22 Hallward’s Deleuze, on the contrary, is concerned with not what is created, the actual, but rather only the dynamics of creation, the virtual. The ultimate goal of Deleuzian thought, and of Deleuzian life, is a becoming-imperceptible which is wholly aligned with the virtual in opposition to actual structure, representation, or form – the latter aspect is taken into consideration only insofar as the study of it can offer a means of a line of flight away from “actual constraints or territory that might contain them”23 and into the pure movement of the molecular or cosmic. Hallward notes that for Deleuze and Guattari no deterritorialization can take place without a subsequent reterritorialization, but stresses that primacy is always owed to the line of flight as it stands in relation to the virtual plane of consistency, that is, as a line of absolute deterritorialization24 - the actual stands only as a blockage in the activity of the virtual.

Further to this, Hallward discusses Deleuze’s privileging of the virtual in terms of the eternal time of aion being emphasised at the expense of the lived, actual time of chronos, with reference to discussions of time in Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense. The virtual creative time is opposed to the “creatural” time of the actual, and furthermore, at its limit, acts to overcome all remnants of the creatural – in his third synthesis of time, Deleuze “eliminates” the lived times of the first two syntheses25, forming a time that is full insofar as it is the condition for all creation, but also empty insofar as all that has been created is dissolved. Only when freed from the creatural restrictions of the actual present and its interruption and division of time can creative time reach its pure form26.

This conception of aion and chronos is expanded in A Thousand Plateaus with reference, again, to Boulez’s musical theory. Aion is associated with the sound block, constituting a time which is, musically speaking, nonpulsed and “floating”, and “has

20 Pickstock (2007: 57)21 Hallward (2006: 3)22 Ibid, p. 176n1023 Ibid, p. 1624 Ibid, p. 15725 Deleuze (1994: 297)26 Hallward (2006: 148)

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nothing but speeds or differences in dynamic”. Chronos, alternatively, refers to a “pulsed time” – not simply that of the metronome, but more widely that of measure, that of the territorial refrain27 - which is concerned with form, with function, and with marking the formation of an actual subject28. Deleuze and Guattari stress that these two times cannot be seen as distinct poles, “as though there were on the one hand formed subjects, of the thing or person type, and on the other hand spatiotemporal coordinates of the haecceity type”29 – rather, the haecceity, the individuation without identity that takes place through the time of aion, is put forward as something the subject is to yield to. They are of different worlds, different planes, but for Deleuze and Guattari the plane of aion is that which must be prioritised, the subject of chronos must allow itself to have its fixed boundaries rent by the “unformed elements” of the haecceity, and its relations of “movement and rest, speed and slowness.”30 Forms, following Boulez, “are replaced by pure modifications of speed.”31 The form of music suggested by this depiction, as will become important in the next section, is a peculiarly clichéd vision of a musical future. As Kodwo Eshun notes, the music of the fictional future is traditionally portrayed a beatless one – “[t]he music of the future is weightless, transcendent, neatly converging with online disembodiment. Holst’s Planet Suite as used in Kubrick’s 2001, Eno's Apollo soundtrack, Vangelis’ Blade Runner soundtrack”32. In adhering to a particular, seemingly stagnant, modernist notion of musical rhythm, and through this maintaining hierarchical modes of thought, Deleuze opens up polarities in which there can be no reconciliation between two undesirable extremes. A Deleuzian music, derived through these notions of temporality and transcendence, appears thus as something immaterial and isolated, the extension of the internally differentiating haecceity's connectivity through deterritorialization ultimately driving the musical only towards a lifeless dissipation in the cosmos.

Metrical Rhythm and the Harnessing of the Virtual

Aion and chronos revisited: Pinhas on pulsed aion.

In discussion with Deleuze at a 1977 Vincennes seminar, Richard Pinhas raised the question of the distinction between the times of aion and chronos33. In opposition to Deleuze’s strict association of aion with nonpulsed time and chronos with pulsed time, Pinhas proposes a pulsed time which is nevertheless on the side of aion, putting forward musicians including Robert Fripp and Philip Glass as using a strongly pulsed time which is on one hand heavily subjectivized, or territorialized, in its segmentarity, but on the other, through subtle shifts in accent and beat displacements, offers a particularly strong presentation of the differential relations of speed and slowness at work in the piece34. In opposition to this pulsed aion, Pinhas

27 Deleuze (1988)28 Boulez (1976: 68-71), Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 262)29 Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 262)30 Ibid, p. 26631 Ibid, p. 26732 Eshun (1998: 67)33 Pinhas is a former student of Deleuze and a musician most notable for his work at the centre of the prog rock band Heldon.34 Deleuze (1998)

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discusses the kind of absolute nonpulsed music that the prioritization of aion over chronos implies, suggesting that it emerges as nothing more than an empty theoretical exercise, “an exercise in style or a theoretical game of composing and of executing a music which will theoretically be on the side of a non-pulsed time, but which in fact will not bear it in itself any line of flight and any possible becoming; which will be in essence completely nihilistic.”35

In this discussion Deleuze maintains the strong distinction between aion and chronos, insisting that aion, as the nonpulsed or smooth, as something to be wrested from the restrictive pulse of chronos, or the striated. The pulsed is defined only negatively with relation to the nonpulsed, following the terms of Hallward’s critique that the created of the actual is only of concern insofar as the creative of the virtual can be drawn from it36. This distinction, however, is implicitly brought into question by Deleuze’s own discussion of Boulez’s concept of what Deleuze calls, in 1986’s ‘Occupy Without Counting: Boulez, Proust and Time’, “the universe of the Fixed”37. Deleuze does not explicitly refer back to his previous work, but in discussion of the fixed he is moving to, through Boulez, answer the question of the perception of the imperceptible. More precisely, this question concerns the manner in which the wholly smooth individual can relate to other individuals – the question, furthermore, of having a perception not defined by the structural ossification into identity implied in the striated. Deleuze’s description of Boulez’s ‘fixed’ closely resembles Pinhas’ depiction of the pulsed aion: “[t]he fixed is not the Same and it does not reveal an identity beneath variations. The contrary is true. It allows identification of the variation, or individuation without identity. That is how it extends perception: it makes the variations perceptible in a striated setting and the distributions perceptible in a smooth setting. Instead of bridging difference to the Same, it allows the identification of difference as such.”38 The fixed, then, is a particular structuring of the actual – Deleuze does not specify what the particular quality of this structuration would be – which makes virtual movement visible (or, in the musical case, sonorous) beneath it.

Boulez himself is more forthcoming on the particular features of this structural quality in his discussion of the realm of the fixed in relation to Wagner’s The Ring. Noting that there are “certain points in the musical discourse at which Wagner actually needs stabilizing elements to counteract the almost excessive mobility of other sections of his rhetoric”, Boulez looks into the relationship between what can be described as the constant, or the controlled variable, and the free variations around it. For Boulez, Wagner “fixes on, and makes use of, at least one main stabilizing element of the musical language, whether it is tonality, figuration, a rhythmic cell or, as sometimes happens, several of these ingredients combined”39. That is to say, the free – imperceptible – virtual movement of the musical figure is at all times being harnessed under the rubric of one compositional device or another, such that its free movement is enclosed as the line between the points of structure, and as such the movement itself is made perceptible. In the following I wish to address and expand upon the particular role of metric rhythm - that is, the time of chronos - as it relates to this notion of the actual’s productive relation with the virtual.

35 Ibid.36 Hallward (2006: 16)37 Deleuze (2006b: 297) 38 Ibid.39 Boulez (1986: 271)

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The distinction between simple and complex metrical rhythms, between, for example, the straight 4/4 of house and the syncopation of jazz, the polyrhythms of sub-Saharan African musics such as the griot kora music of Mali, or the metric modulation of many eastern European folk musics, is not addressed by Deleuze40. The time of chronos, of pulsed time, “has nothing to do with regularity” – the periodicity of the pulse bears no significance in the assignation of a time of chronos. Chronos, then, is not defined by qualities of regularity of periodicity, and “it can even have a relatively complex rhythm, it can have a metronomy, an irregular metrology”41. As Deleuze and Guattari note, “rhythm is not meter or cadence, even irregular meter or cadence”.42 . Rhythm’s transformative power is as such always in the guise of aion rather than chronos, “rhythm without measure”43, with the time of chronos a “dogmatic” one which defines a milieu as being self-enclosed and non-communicating. Aion, on the contrary, acts between milieus, defining the connections between and passages across them. In this move, Deleuze and Guattari echo Messiaen’s distinction between meter and rhythm and his consequent criticism of jazz, which he describes as “non-rhythmic music which is thought rhythmic”44 – syncopation is recognised as not strictly metric and therefore productive of rhythm, but only insofar as it is what Steve Goodman calls a “shadow” of the metric45, defined only in opposition to metric qualities. The result of this, for Messiaen, is to cancel out the rhythmic quality of syncopation through the listener’s inversion of the off-beat back onto the on-beat, a move in which the listener gives himself “great comfort.” Even complex metrical rhythm, for Messiaen and for Deleuze following him, is a stabilising, territorial act, a nullifying of genuine movement and becoming and a blocking of the line of flight.

Contrary to this stance, the ethnomusicologist John Miller Chernoff suggests that the dismissal of the rhythmic qualities of jazz’s syncopation (shared by Messiaen and Adorno and part of a wider vein of thinking within the European art music tradition46), neglects the function that metrical rhythm is playing not only in jazz, but furthermore, in the expanded African culture and its Afrodiasporic tradition movement across the globe47. Chernoff argues that syncopation and other rhythmic practices are misunderstood when treated as simply another aspect of the imposition of metric regularity. Rather, the metrical move of the syncopation or the polyrhythm serves to emphasize an in-betweenness. There is, for Chernoff as there is Pinhas, a pulsed aion at work in certain metrical musics, with a special role in Chernoff’s thought for the musics of Africa and the African diaspora, and in Pinhas’ for popular art musics such as progressive rock and minimalism. This shared quality between two disparate musics is not coincidental: key minimalist composers made use of the compositional techniques of traditional non-western musics. Steve Reich’s early work featured a strong influence of the rhythmic principles of Ghanaian and Ivorian drum music and

40 Deleuze and Guattari do argue that “waltz is not 1, 2, 3, music is not binary or ternary” (1987: 313), but this discussion is precisely to dissolve the role of the metric in that which is properly musical.41 Deleuze (1998). It should be noted that in his discussion with Pinhas, Deleuze does not appear to be using the term ‘rhythm’ strictly in the technical sense put forward in A Thousand Plateaus.42 Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 313)43 Ibid, p. 36444 Messiaen (1994: 68)45 Goodman (2010: 115)46 Bartók, with his research into the complexities of rhythm in Hungarian folk music, could be an example of a counterhistory within this history47 Chernoff (1981)

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Balinese Gamelan music48, while Hindustani classical music’s additive structure49 (in opposition to Western classical music’s divisive time structures) held a major role in the work of La Monte Young, Terry Riley and Philip Glass50. What is shared in these musics is an imposition of a limit to the initial materials, a precise fixed element across and around which intensities can circulate. This element is located, for example, in the rhythmelodic cell in many of Glass, Riley and Reich’s pieces (for example, Music with Changing Parts, In C and Music for 18 Musicians, respectively) or the almost exclusive focus on simple harmony at rhythm and melody’s expense for Young (for example, Drift Studies).

This move to forefront metric rhythm as a productive, creative aspect of a Deleuzian philosophy of music has a bearing not only on art musics and ethnomusicological studies51, but on a wider popular music world. As Drew Hemment notes of the strict 4/4 beat of house music, the metrical rhythm, as in the previous cases of minimalism and elsewhere52, serves as a form of capture53. The paradigm of house music brings into further question the distinction between pulsed and nonpulsed time. The displacement caused by techniques of rhythmic variation stands as a kind of pulsed aion, but the 4/4 house beat forms what Hemment calls a “mechanistic grid of digital clock time”54 in its incessant metronomic repetition, but in this emphasises the textural – rather than rhythmic or melodic – qualities, bringing forth a particular molecularity and singularity of the sonic matter that lies between the beat. The subtle qualities of this singularity, as in the case of Reich’s phase pieces, are made sonorous due to this isolation within a fixed framework – as Hemment argues, “nuance and inflection are heard because of a reduction of indeterminacy on another level.”55 It is not, then, that a musical piece becomes more affective the more its rhythmic qualities detach from the pulsed and move towards the nonpulsed – on the contrary, different rhythmic formations serve to maintain a body’s consistency in different ways, with the common purpose of allowing it to express its intensive qualities, to be made sonorous as an

48 Deleuze and Guattari’s term of the plateau, incidentally, is borrowed from Gregory Bateson’s use of it in describing the intensive field that Balinese Gamelan music works upon (Bateson, 1987: 133).49 Deleuze and Guattari are presumably referring to this classical music when they discuss “Hindu rhythms” in A Thousand Plateaus (1987: 312), although Hindustani music is traditionally a secular practice between both Hindu and Muslim performers. Deleuze and Guattari deem it to be a particularly territorial form of music, a notion which is complicated by its additive qualities – while its unified pieces are associated with particular regions, times of the day and so on, much like the music of the haecceity / assemblage Deleuze and Guattari allude to, that it consists of smaller units composed into a larger unit means it can be thought of as holding a double movement of the deterritorialization of singular elements and the composition into consistency in the territorial move. Indeed, that Deleuze and Guattari neglect the intersection between the Hindu and Muslim musical traditions that Hindustani music involves misses that the founding element is a deterritorialization, of two traditions in a state of becoming towards each other.50 Mertens (1983: 12). Riley and Young both studied under Indian raga master Pandit Pran Nath (Ibid, p. 88).51 Although as ethnomusicology is often only posed in distinction to the Western art music tradition its realm intersects with that of popular music studies and related fields – the line between, for example, Alan Lomax’s object of study in the folk music of the United States and its mutation as the countercultural popular folk of the 1960s, or between blues and rock ‘n’ roll, is a blurred one.52 There are important intersections between minimalism and the disco and dance music of the 1970s into the 1980s – Tim Lawrence’s Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-1979 offers a close tracing of these lines of intersection and influence.53 Hemment (2004: 86)54 Ibid, p. 8555 Ibid, p. 86

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affective force. The actual, unlike in Hallward’s depiction of Deleuze, plays a productive role in channelling the power of the virtual.

Goodman, Eshun, and the productive Rhythmachine.

Steve Goodman, in his project of “sonic warfare”, takes the war machine of A Thousand Plateaus as a sonic principle. The war machine, in Deleuze and Guattari’s description, is the nomadic assemblage56, that which draws lines of flight and engages in the deterritorialization, mutation, and transformation of that with which it enters into relation57 Goodman notes that if the rhythmic pack of the nomadic war machine is to be strictly opposed to the metric organisation of the state, conceiving of its shape and potential for affective capacity as a collective mobilization becomes problematic58. He as such reverses the hierarchy often erected by Deleuze and Guattari – headed by the smooth, aion, the virtual… – rather emphasising how these affective capacities can be mobilised in the actual. While Deleuze’s take on Messiaen positions the chaosmic – that is, the universe in terms of its formless pre-individuality – as a kind of end point or goal of earthly, bodily relations, Goodman’s musical perspective instead takes the “rhythmic reservoir”59 of noise, or sonic chaos, as only a site of potential for actualisation. For Goodman, the position to take in relation to noise is not to understand noise as a weapon in itself (as in the case of the Italian futurists) but rather to think in terms of a rhythmic consistency in which “vibrational force would be captured, monopolized and redeployed” in a movement of affective mobilization and contagion – the movement of a body towards transforming those state apparatus with which it comes into contact in its own image. The inversion of Deleuze’s position on chaos is manifest, then, as a concern with the shaping of bodies, and as such a prioritization of the formed body, rather than a movement towards their dissolution – chaos is positioned as a kind of tool rather than as a kind of goal60.

In Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, this act of sonic warfare in terms of the war machine is to form assemblages which are necessarily thought doubly – first in terms of their consistency, enacting a rhythmic synchronization between heterogeneous terms such as to hold them together in a relatively stable body61, and second in their capacity to transform, their cutting edge is oriented towards a deterritorialized chaos62. Deleuze and Guattari move to distinguish between machine and assemblage in terms of this cutting edge – the deterritorializing machine’s cutting edge plugs into the territorial-by-definition assemblage as a means of inducing deterritorializing movement63 - but

56 Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 4)57 Ibid, p. 22958 Goodman (2010: 116)59 Goodman (2010: 107)60 It is important to note that this inversion is not a step beyond or away from Deleuze, but only another description of the same process – but rather than the actual being, as per Hallward’s argument, only of value to Deleuze insofar as it contains insight into the potential of the virtual, we instead have a virtual that is only of value insofar as it offers the means for actual creation. Neither perspective represents Deleuze’s metaphysics wholly, but absolute representation can never be the goal – any single representation will itself be a single body which can affect or be affected (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 86). Any solid, fixed representation which is taken from Deleuze’s work is only to be posed against other representations, their individual, heterogeneous affective rhythms connecting with a consistency that is affective rather than representational.61 Deleuze and Guattari, (1987: 329)62 Ibid, p. 5763 Ibid, p. 333

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this distinction cannot hold if the primacy of bodies in relation is maintained. As the virtual’s dark precursor leaves the actual object’s seemingly closed edges frayed and thus open to connective and transformative processes, so the assemblage’s individuated constitution as a consistent grouping of heterogeneous terms is always, to varying extents, a supple kind of individuation64 which is, strictly speaking, always between the molecular and the molar rather than defined by either aspect. The distinction between machine and assemblage can, in the world of actual bodies, only be theoretical, with the actual body tending in a particular direction but while still holding the qualities of the opposed term. The individuated object is always defined by being, to use Simondon’s term, metastable rather than stable. For Deleuze, following Simondon, the individual can be individuated only insofar as there is a kind of stability prior to individuation, that is, on the level of the virtual65. The result of this is that the individuated object (in this case the assemblage) is never wholly territorial and always has elements of deterritorialization working at its edges. What this means is that the difficulty, as Goodman notes, in thinking the rhythmic war machine’s shape centre around its qualities oscillating between the two excessive tendencies in Deleuze I have posed here – first, in constituting an internally differentiating assemblage the territoriality of which makes its capacity for external connection and transformative capacity difficult to conceive – that is, in strictly distinguishing the machine from the assemblage; and second, in being situated as an opening to the cosmos, as a cutting edge, a move in which bodily affects are deemphasised - in being defined by its virtual, deterritorialized qualities rather than any actual, structural features.

In reconstituting the sonic war machine in terms of the capacities of actual bodies, Goodman moves to initiate a more robust and productive take on metrical rhythm than Deleuze and Guattari allow themselves. In this rhythmic theory Goodman makes use of Kodwo Eshun’s exposition of Afrofuturism66, and particularly Eshun’s concept of the Rhythmachine. Eshun argues that the late 20th century “Black Atlantian” African diasporic music – jazz, funk, techno, hip-hop – constitutes a new sensory paradigm in terms of music’s radically mobilizing and transformative capacities, that of the texturhythm:

The Rhythmachine captures your perception as it switches from hearing individual beats to grasping the pattern of beats. Your body is a distributed brain which flips from the sound of each intensity to the overlapping relations between intensities. Learning pattern recognition, this flipflop between rhythmelody and texturhythm drastically collapses and reorganises the sensorial hierarchy (Eshun, 1998: 21-22)

Texturhythm here is opposed to the previous paradigm of rhythmelody – the essentially Western classical valuing of unilinear progression within a piece to which I have previously opposed the principles of, among other practices, Indian classical music. Texturhythm, on the contrary, is found in a layering of heterogeneous materials, with, as Hemment later argued within the Deleuzian context, metric rhythm offering consistency to that which falls between the beat. The two paradigms of rhythmelody and texturhythm are, however, not simply opposed, but are rather folded onto one another; linear rhythmic patterns are recognised by the perceiving body, but

64 Deleuze (1994: 257), Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 41)65 Deleuze (1994: 246)66 That is, very roughly speaking, the movement to shift notions of black culture from the primitive earth to the technological cosmos

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this recognition is also interrupted by the manner in which heterogeneous intensities congeal between rhythmic points. The movement combining the texturhythm and the rhythmelody is simultaneously a music of narrative forward movement (of melody and its conjunction with the rhythmic) and of the intensive individuality of the haecceity - and, furthermore, this movement is also an entwinement of the two paradigms under the formational power of the Rhythmachine, which plays the role similar to that of Pinhas’ proposed pulsed aion – an actual figure which highlights particular movements of the virtual. What this entwinement entails is that the haecceity, conceived as a sound block, is at once internally differentiating and holistic between the beat, yet also part of a larger body of relations across the beat, individual haecceities drawn together under the shaping force of wider rhythmic qualities and narratives. The individuality of the sound block held between the beat is called into question by the figure of the rhythmic-as-Rhythmachine, in both its simultaneous isolation of a number of heterogeneous intensive qualities and its drawing together of these qualities into bodies moving with and against each other.

It is not, then, that metrical rhythm acts as a blockage of the virtual’s movement, but rather that it shapes this movement into sonorous form. Following rhythm’s new guise as a Rhythmachine involved in the constitution of affective bodies from diverse intensive materials, Eshun disassociates the drum machine from the time-keeping capacity of the drum, rather positioning it as a rhythm synthesizer, “programming new intensities from white noise, frequencies, wave forms”67. In Eshun’s synthesized paradigm-assemblage of texturhythmelody68 the virtual material and its actual formation become indistinguishable. The beat is at once the framework for intensive relations and an affective body in itself. Mirroring the contrapuntal cosmic movement which Deleuze and Guattari take on following Uexküll and Messiaen, Eshun describes the processes by which heterogeneous rhythms combine, but with two crucial emphases which distinguish him from Deleuze and Guattari:

First, the emphasis on the transformation of perceptual bodies – for example in funk’s loose-limbed and amiable automotion as an invasive transformation of familiar routes, the receptive body acting as an extended mind, a move which in turn reverses back into the neural pathways enacting mental change as an aspect of a body succumbing to other rhythmic bodies69 - hence Parliament’s churning funk being accompanied by the familiar nursery rhymes of Mothership Connection’s Star Child, the mutation of the rhymes into surreal cosmic fiction70 and the formation of a new sonic world under the mask of the motoring groove goes barely noticed. Likewise in hip-hop and techno’s beat displacement, the oscillation between the habituation of a bodily rhythm and its subsequent fracturing serves as a means to form an ever more constricted but ever more intense and potentially explosive rhythmic unit71.

67 Eshun (1998: 78)68 Ibid, p. 9069 Ibid, p. 82, p. 14470 Nonsense, incidentally, plays the same role for Parliament as it does for Deleuze in The Logic of Sense, that of, as Williams notes, “the dual function of breaking with the demands of denotation, manifestation and signification, and opening up an additional realm of sense” (Williams, 2008: 68). In their engagement with the nursery rhyme, or Funkadelic’s with the Bible verse, there is a breaking apart of particularly formed and fixed aspects of common sense thinking with the goal of replacing these forms with a new cosmic fiction (“[P-Funk] creeps in under the cover of nonsense, rearranges the furniture of your mind, leaving you feeling probed and palpitated.” Eshun, 1998: 144)71 Ibid, p. 89

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Second, the emphasis on technology in the formation of new rhythmic qualities – Eshun cites the composer Edgar Varèse’s desire for a new music of the machine (expressed in 1936) which would allow for the possibility of “humanly impossible” rhythmic divisions as a precursor to the capacities of the drum machine / rhythm synthesizer72. Technology separates sound and rhythm from the perceptive restrictions of the human producer, and in doing so disrupts the stability of the perceptive body – a concise example of this would be in Steve Reich’s early phase pieces such as ‘Come Out’, wherein what listener perception hears as simple repetition is soon transformed through the phase-shifting characteristic of Reich’s early work. The differential action of the two tapes offers a rhythmic movement not, then, of human perception and its strictures, but of tape-head perception, unrestricted by human perceptive limits. No longer are the rhythms it perceives in accordance with its territorial rhythms, but they are instead something altogether alien, mutated - following Guattari, Eshun posits thinking inflected by technology as a necessarily mutant thinking73. For Eshun, and for Goodman following him, new approaches to rhythm literally form new bodies. Citing Bachelard, Goodman situates rhythm as offering a diverse means of shaping bodies from formless chaos, not to divest chaos of its intensive qualities, but rather to maintain these qualities between its formational barriers74. The body, then, is affected and transformed as a consequence of entering into connections with disruptive rhythms and the particular formations of intensity they harness – through technology music can form new bodies that are not quite human, but are rather a kind of posthuman people in which the human is inflected with the machine75. What this relationship to technology underlies, however, is more generally an emphasis on the relationship between singular human composer and the tools with which they work. The topic of concern becomes the relationship between bodies, and the processes through which, from bodily relations, musical creation emerges.

Central to all of the musical practices described in this discussion is an emphasis on an anchor or sorts, a relatively fixed element, which serves to emphasise particular movements at work. They are as such in direct opposition to the notion that “the beat is the ballast which prevents escape velocity”76, that is, the argument that metrical rhythm is essentially restrictive, a notion as I previously noted is ascribed to commonplace ‘futuristic’ conceptions of music and which is suggested in the ametrical musical form Deleuze and Guattari appear to endorse. The beat, the quality of pulsed aion, is concerned with forming actual bodies which harness active forces, and so turns against the wholly incorporeal mysticism towards which Deleuze and Guattari tend in their adherence to the principles of line of flight and deterritorialization and their debt to Messiaen’s essentially Catholic spirituality. This move is not a simple reversal of the prioritization of the nonpulsed time of aion, but rather a transversal move, in which the movement of aion, of the virtual, is made sonorous precisely by, and within, the formative, territorial powers of chronos. Deleuze’s philosophy must always takes place between the earth and the cosmos,

72 Ibid, p. 7973 “The forms of thought assisted by computer are mutant, relating to other musics, other Universes of reference.” (Guattari 1995: 36)74 Bachelard (2000: 134)75 It is perhaps in this manner, as Deleuze and Guattari fleetingly suggest, that “the sound molecules of pop music are at this very moment implanting here and there a people of a new type” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 346).76 Eshun (1998: 67)

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between form and chaos - in adopting Messiaen’s musical thinking, however, the line of flight is put on a path towards tearing loose from its moorings and evaporating, rather than being forced to engage with the difficult and slow task of dragging those very moorings on its flight without leaving them behind altogether. In their prioritization of the body, I believe Eshun and Goodman adhere more closely to Deleuze’s immanent prioritisation of individual modes over a holistic substance77 than Deleuze often does: the move to prioritize bodies in relation is precisely a move to put the modes before substance, to maintain a robust immanent grounding in the material.

This problem in Deleuze’s thought is, I believe, particularly entwined in two questions: first, in Deleuze’s engagement with musical thought as part of his wider metaphysics, and second, in the act of musical creation in general. In musical composition the affective element, the created product, is not always entwined in the moment of composition as it is in, for example, writing and painting. The compositional moment of the writer is in direct contact with the medium, of language - likewise the painter with canvas and paint. The composer, however, does not necessarily deal with the sound block in itself, rather putting thought to paper representationally, with sound itself only coming later. While this is, of course, not necessarily the case – the musician playing an instrument or utilising another sound-creating device is through his or her connection to that device in a relation with the sound itself – the composer putting pen to paper, rather than the musician with instrument in hand, appears to be Deleuze’s musical paradigm. Deleuze’s depiction of music, as Jeremy Gilbert notes, is strictly one of a composer rather than a performer. In their clearest depictions of the process of creating music, Deleuze and Guattari remain in the abstract78 – the musician who “invents a kind of diagonal”79, who “float[s] a sound block down a created, liberated line”80, rather than the musician who relates to a concrete object in the world and engages with the abstract through an act of connection and mutation, fusion and fission, between two concrete bodies. Deleuze, as Gilbert notes, unusually tends towards the modernist singular genius-figure depiction of the composer. This depiction is again an aspect of Deleuze’s appropriation of Boulez - the human composer is not put into a place of risk, of mutation and transformation in engagement with the world. The veneration of the individual genius that stifles Adorno’s musical thought leaves its traces, perhaps, in Deleuze through his engagement with Boulez.

The result of this is an isolation of musician from sound, the effects of which are double - on the one hand the musician is placed in distinction from their material creation, denying the physical, corporeal, visceral element of the sound block and the wider musical work, and driving Deleuze towards the free-floating but powerless music of aion. On the other hand, the composer is posed as a closed body, for whom there is no becoming and no relation to a wider world, only the expression of what Hemment calls “a sonic radicalism that is like an internal combustion engine with no connecting rod […] not even disturbing the air around it”81. The musician is not thought of as one whose perceptual limits are deformed and expanded by their engagement with the technology of musical instruments, playback devices, or acoustic

77 See Deleuze (1994: 40)78 Gilbert (2004: 121)79 Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 296)80 Ibid, p. 29781 Hemment (2004: 79)

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space. If it is posited, then, that only sonic bodies are affected in the musical piece, as Boulez’s musical structuralism and Deleuze and Guattari’s consequent discussion of the sound block appear to suggest, there is no connection between music and the wider social and cultural worlds. To discuss this question and ask how Deleuze and Guattari could otherwise engage with the question of musical creation, I will close by offering some remarks on the role of technology and relations between bodies in the creative musical act.

Technology and Its Functions, Bodies and their Relations

The introduction of musical technology is often presented as a means of making the musician’s job ‘easier’ – taking difficult and problematic tasks from the flawed hand of the musician to the flawless efficiency of the machine. While the mechanization and especially the digitization of music does indeed serves a role in removing the aleatory elements of musical performance (for example, the stamina of a performer, or the uncontrollable acoustics of an instrument or sound space) from the piece, the genuinely productive role of the machine in music is, I believe, to be found elsewhere. Following Eshun’s argument, the machine increases the affective capacities of the musician, extending the materials with which the musician can work, in a manner beyond the control of either musician or the creator of sound technology. Or, rather, beyond simply extending the musician’s materials, the machine extends the musician, beyond the form of the single isolated human creator – the history of musical creativity cannot be reduced to a list of canonical names, but rather it becomes a series of connections, accidents, and chance encounters between the human and the wider non-human world.

The goal of sonic fidelity in the invention of new technology, as manifest in the removal of chance or ‘human error’, is always traversed by a counter-movement, an alternate history of sound production formed from the extraction and exposition of recording and playback technology’s limitations. Technology is abused for the sake of the freeing of sound, from the unwanted sonic artefacts of the early recording process82 becoming the core materials of electronic sound manipulation, to hip-hop’s abuse of the turntable’s smooth rotary mechanics. Eshun’s depiction of the fundamental musical building blocks of the turntablist stands in stark contrast to the somewhat ethereal sound block that Deleuze and Guattari adopt – for Eshun the theory of turntablism starts not with an abstraction, but rather with the concrete material that is the vinyl record itself. Each moment within a vinyl record is in a position to be sampled and as such opens the possibility of “finding the universe in a grain of sound”83 – the sound block becomes literal, concrete, but without losing any of its abstract qualities or powers. The physical vinyl sample becomes a molecule of sound, its double quality of brevity and complexity demanding it be explored, extended, and combined, in the act of forming new rhythms and new bodies84.This 82 Ibid, p. 7783 Eshun (1998: 180). Eshun here states that he is referring to the words of Mark Sinker, but I have not been able to locate an original Sinker quotation.84 A counter-argument concerning the ethereal digital bits of technological music production could be made against this concept, but here I am inclined to follow Brian Massumi in arguing for what he calls “the superiority of the analog” – digital code is only digital prior to its translation into sound, and the

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counter-history pertains not only to recording and playback technologies, but to all attempts to transmit a pure sound signal. The musician moves to transform an act of communication beyond recognition – from the aleatory procedures behind Cage’s prepared piano, stripping its keys of their tonal communicative function to one that is beyond the absolute control of either composer or pianist, to the literal distortion of the guitar’s signal as a result of Willie Kizart’s damaged amplifier in Ike Turner’s 1951 recording of ‘Rocket 88’, to the abuse of the Roland TB-303 and TR-808’s failure to replicate ‘real’ instruments in the emergence of techno. A key musical movement in relation to technology, in both ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, is the rejection of the smooth narrative of technological development – that is, in terms taking musical activity out of human hands and mechanizing it through efficient machinery – replaced instead by a pinpointing and fracturing of points of tension in the imposed narrative so as to move creatively in diverse directions.

This perspective on the technological is shared by Jacques Attali, who notes that “[o]ne produces what technology makes possible, instead of creating the technology for what one wishes to produce”85 - that is to say, the relationship between human, technology and nature is not of technology being used to extend the human subject’s dominance of the object of nature, but rather of the unanticipated - and indeed impossible to anticipate – possibilities opened in the relationship between human and nature by the introduction of a third, mediating term in the form of new technology. Furthermore, for Attali each tool86 implies a certain sound field, a milieu in which to explore87. This repositioning of the artist’s role is contrary to notions of the singular genius, and as such is a difficult proposition for the artist – he or she who does accept the dissolution of the human-world subject-object relation risks alienation, inasmuch as their labour, driven by the goal of self-expression, is forked, deviated and mutated in the process – “the producer becomes a stranger to what he produces.”88

This notion of the technological relation between human and world can be read in Deleuze as the passage of a line of flight, a double movement of transformation, or becoming, between subject and object (and the consequent dissolution of this polarising distinction), and explicated through his engagement with Gilbert Simondon’s conception of technology in conjunction with his theory of individuation. The relation of becoming is not here a purely virtual qua immaterial flux movement, as Hallward and Žižek89 suggest, but a material relation, the fixed identities of the

audible is analogue (Massumi 2002). This is not to simply dismiss the notion of the digital, but rather to encourage a detailed look at the relationship between analogue and digital, a relationship Goodman calls the sonic plexus (Goodman, 2010: 198). This relationship holds likewise, I believe, for the actual (correlating to the structured digital) and the virtual (correlating to the flowing analogue) in Deleuze’s thought – even insofar as a musical piece is placed within strict structural parameters, it is received only in an affective manner. This, incidentally, also relates to Deleuze’s turn to Boulez’s notion of the fixed in looking for a musical perception not defined by striation and ossification. It seems to me that this is a peculiar question to ask of musical forms, and indicative again of Deleuze’s overestimation of the power that metric subjectivization holds in the musical form. Even at its most populist, music is never fixated by representational understanding. While lyrical content may remain more or less within narrative form, and certain structural, genre-based tendencies will be maintained, there is always an excess which makes music essentially affective, even from the perspective of contemporary common sense understanding (if perhaps not from that of some strands of musicological understanding).85 Attali (1985: 115)86 Attali does not, it should be noted, distinguish between theoretical and concrete tools87 Ibid, p. 13388 Ibid, p. 13589 Zizek (2004)

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subject-object relation of human to nature connected and reconfigured in the tripartite superject90 of human-technology-nature. In using technology, a person opens a new milieu which extends the reach of his or her body into that of the technologies in use, forming an ensemble of the human and the technological which, like Deleuze’s assemblage, is self-regulating in its functions and is differentiated only internally91.

One of Deleuze’s favoured descriptions of this relationship is that around the invention of the stirrup – the bodies of knight and horse are both redefined through their new connection of the stirrup, which in turn is a new object in relation to a wider world, up to the entire social world of feudal society92. In this relationship there is a “symbiosis of bodies” into a machinic assemblage. As such individuation, properly speaking, takes place not in fixed individuals, but rather in a movement between objects in the formation of new relations, new objects, by what Simondon calls a transduction. In the technological relation, there is opened a new means by which the human can relate to the world, an engagement with a voice of the world which was previously unknowable and unreachable – it is this aspect of Deleuze, the side which is concerned with relations of bodies, the mutations between them and the new bodies formed in these transformational encounters, that I believe Deleuze’s musical thought would benefit from a greater engagement with.

Drawn into the artistic realm, these consequences are mirrored in Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of the artist – in contrast to the implied self-enclosed individual of the composer I have previously attributed to Deleuze and Guattari, this artist is no longer an isolated genius expressing his or her individuality, but rather an artisan93, a bricoleur rather than a shaman, in the manner of David Toop’s discussion of the disco DJ. For Toop, the DJ holds the molecular sonic material of the collection of vinyl records, and from this constructs a plateau, moulding an intensive mass of heterogeneous bodies, both of the vinyl and of the bodies on the dancefloor, maintaining an enclosed circulation of intensity over a period of hours94. However, Deleuze and Guattari’s artist, in contrast, is specifically a cosmic artisan, charged with “leav[ing] the milieus and the earth behind.”95 In this conception Deleuze once more leans towards a denial of the relationship between bodies. A complex material relation is at work between the heterogeneous artistic materials congealed into consistency, between this consistency and the perceptive audience, and between this perceptive audience and wider social and cultural matters. Deleuze, however, appears to leave the details of this complex relation aside and instead again makes the cosmic leap. The knight relates to the horse through the stirrup in a sober manner, embracing the creation of a body of certain capacities which should be maximized, but aware of the potential for the dissolution of this body, and the relationships between artists, art, audience, and wider world should be no different.

Concluding Remarks: Consequences Metaphysical and Musical

90 This being Whitehead’s term for the subject as following rather than preceding the process of creation, that is, the subject as a production of its experiences (Whitehead, 1978: 29)91 Simondon (1980: 67)92 Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 89), Deleuze and Parnet (2006: 54)93 Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 345)94 Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the plateau, incidentally, is borrowed from Gregory Bateson’s use of it in a musical situation, that of describing the intensive field that Balinese Gamelan music works upon (Bateson, 1987: 133).95 Ibid.

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In discussing the Body without Organs (BwO), that is, the field of immanence or plane of consistency on which the virtual passage of intensive bodies takes place96, Deleuze and Guattari remark on a particular risks involved in the process of its construction.Opposed to stratified form and – corresponding to their interpretation of Uexküll – the self-enclosed organism, the construction of a BwO aims to disarticulate these structural wholes in favour of an intensive body which is open to all possible connections and transformations. This is a task which must be approached with care, with a fine file rather than a sledgehammer97, such that these disarticulations do not result in the absolute destratification of the organism. This absolute destratification - the violent dismantling of the organism - constitutes nothing more than “demented or suicidal collapse”98, that is, the death of the acting body. The organism, positioned in terms of its sustenance through the structures of stratification, signifiance, and subjectification, must be maintained such that the line of flight, as an opening to connections, does not enter this “black hole” in which both all coherence and all connection is lost, dissolved: “[y]ou have to keep enough of the organism for it to reform each dawn”99. The stratified body which is utterly shattered by destratification becomes “a body of nothingness, pure self-destruction whose only outcome is death”100.

Music, for Deleuze and Guattari, has a particularly strong relationship to death – “there are times it necessarily gives us a taste for death; not so much happiness as dying happily, being extinguished”101 – and, as such, musical thought and creativity, or thinking and creativity that takes the musical as its starting point, appears particularly susceptible to this negative relationship with the BwO. Furthermore, the approach to destratification, in the form of the deterritorialization of the refrain as the becoming-cosmic of Deleuze’s musical Messiaenism, appears to valorise the excesses that are considered with care and caution in the discussion of the BwO. In this, I believe we see the consequences of Deleuze’s dematerialization of the musical. In failing to address the actual material body in both his discussions of music and his appropriation of musical sources, Deleuze puts his thought on a path towards, at worst, dissolution and death and, at best, a mystical asceticism. Eshun and Goodman’s theories of rhythm and technology, however, offer a means of thinking reterritorialization as a productive force in itself rather than as a stifling of intensities. The relations of bodies are thought through in terms of the three figures of territoriality, deterritorialization, and, in a figure neglected in the cosmic line of flight to death, reterritorialization. To think in this manner is to think of bodies in terms of both their self-sufficient and self-contained individuality and their capacities for transformation and openness to being transformed, and the formation of new bodies from these relations. In emphasising the active role of reterritorialization as a channelling of virtual creativity, Eshun and Goodman counter Hallward's argument that Deleuze's philosophy is necessarily concerned only with the virtual at the expense of the actual. Robust metrical rhythmic innovation as a territorializing agent shapes forces, filters potential, and enacts active and creative bodily relations between material bodies.96 Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 153)97 Ibid, p. 16098 Ibid, p. 16199 Ibid, p. 160100 Ibid, p. 162101 Ibid, p. 299

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The deterritorialization and reterritorialization of both technology and of a wider realm of bodies thought in this sense becomes central to thinking an alternative Deleuzian perspective of music. This alternative musical philosophy is one which both escapes the isolated musical body and the self-enclosed composer and avoids the dissolution into gaseous nothingness that is the end point of becoming-cosmic. This new perspective, emphasising metrical rhythm and other fixed forms, social connections, and the relations between bodies, rather forges wider connections and opens the production of sound to the production of new social bodies and new peoples. The musical form is one which remains particularly deterritorializing, particularly inclined towards death, but insofar as this inclination is carefully channelled, moulded, and grounded in the reterritorializing act, in the musical there lies enormous power for change and the creation of the new.

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