Deleuze and Music PDF
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Deleuze and Music Deleuze and Music Edited by lan Buchanan and Marcel Swiboda Edinburgh University Press © The contributors, 2004 Transferred to digital print 2008 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh Reprinted, 2006 Typeset in 10.5 on 13 Sabon by Hewer Text Ltd, Edinburgh, and Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 7486 1891 0 (hardback) ISBN 0 7486 1869 4 (paperback) The right of the contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Contents Introduction: Deleuze and Music 1 Ian Buchanan 1 Studies in Applied Nomadology: Jazz Improvisation and Post-Capitalist Markets 20 Eugene Holland 2 Is Pop Music? 36 Greg Hainge 3 Deleuze, Adorno, and the Composition of Musical Multiplicity 54 Nick Nesbitt 4 Affect and Individuation in Popular Electronic Music 76 Drew Hemment 5 Violence in Three Shades of Metal: Death, Doom and Black 95 Ronald Bogue 6 Becoming-Music: The Rhizomatic Moment of Improvisation 118 Jeremy Gilbert 7 Rhythm: Assemblage and Event 140 Phil Turetsky 8 What I Hear is Thinking Too: The Deleuze Tribute Recordings 159 Timothy S. Murphy 9 Music and the Socio-Historical Real: Rhythm, Series and Critique in Deleuze and 0. Revault d' Allonnes 176 Jean-Godefroy Bidima vi Contents 10 Cosmic Strategies: The Electric Experiments of Miles Davis 196 Marcel Swiboda Notes on Contributors 217 Index 221 For Sebastian James Buchanan, and Monica and Joseph Swiboda With thanks to Jackie Jones, Tanya Buchanan, Barbara Engh, Martin McQuillan, Will Rea, Simon O'Sullivan, Ola Stahl, Joanne Crawford, Kurt Hirtler and Tom Syson for their help and support. Introduction Deleuze and Music Jan Buchanan In no way do we believe in a fine-arts system; we believe in very diverse problems whose solutions are found in heterogeneous arts. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus Context If, as some Deleuzians like to think, A Thousand Plateaus is a contem porary version of that fabled key to all mythologies the poor misguided Mr Casaubon spent his life toiling over without ever finishing, then it is a key that is itself in need of a key. Its terminology is abstruse and difficult to engage with and the presentation of its argument so long and convoluted it tends to get lost in the exfoliation of the concepts themselves. Deleuze's citation of Leibniz's lament that just when he thought he'd reached safe harbour he found himself to be still all at sea has a prophetic quality for readers of his own work because it describes exactly how many readers are left feeling by their first encounter with A Thousand Plateaus.1 Yet if you read the conclusion carefully it is clear that the actual architecture of the argument is quite simple and the concepts you really need to understand few in number. This is the gambit of the pages to follow which endeavour to make Deleuze and Guattari's work useable without succumbing to the contemporary compulsion to make it 'user friendly'. In particular, what I aim to do is give the 'new' reader of Deleuze and Guattari enough conceptual know-how to get through the chapter on the refrain, which as this volume testifies several times over is one of the most important and interesting pieces of work ever done on music. I will have succeeded if the reader is able to grasp that while music is a problem of the refrain according to Deleuze and Guattari, the refrain itself is neither the begin ning of music nor in itself musical, but the properly anti-musical content of music (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 300-1). 2 lan Buchanan Deleuze and Guattari say that you can read the chapters of A Thousand Plateaus in any order you like, all except the conclusion which they say should be read at the end. The conclusion comprises concepts and the rules of their use stripped of supporting argument, or rather it is the concepts and rules of use operating in a world already understood from a Deleuzian point of view so there is no need of supporting argument. It is comparable in this respect to a scientific treatise. As they point out in What is Philosophy?, the difference between science and other discourses is that once an idea has been tested and proven it can then be accepted and used without further need for revision or explanation, that is, we don't need to prove Boyle's Law to use it. If Freud insisted until the end of his life that psychoanalysis was a science it was for this reason; thus Lacan and after him Zizek are entirely correct to insist in their turn that a dogmatic reading of Freud is the only proper way to read him. This doesn't mean it cannot be falsified, nor proven incorrect, only that one must take it as a whole. You cannot accept this part of Freud, his concept of the unconscious, say, and reject another part, like the oedipal complex, because the two are inextricably linked. The former is literally unthink able without the latter. For scholars habituated to the idea that Deleuze and Guattari are anarchic nomads for whom anything goes, it must be difficult to imagine either Deleuze or Guattari saying that one should approach their work in this apparently reverential way, even though Deleuze himself is adamant that one should treat other philosophers this way. Yet in spite of their protestations to the contrary, there is no other way: what they present is precisely a system of thought for understanding and engaging with the whole world. They might shy away from speaking of universals or truths but they have no problem putting forward concrete rules, and they have no difficulty saying this is how things really work. Having said that, one must take care not to over-emphasise the science elements in their work at the expense of the other discourses they draw on, especially history and archaeology. The point I'm making is that no single discourse, indeed no single component of their work, may be pulled out and used as an optic through which to view the whole. One must grasp the whole first, all at once, and use that to understand the concepts. That still leaves us with the question of how to read Deleuze and Guattari 'as a whole'. The answer does not lie as many seem to think in exhaustively sifting through their frequently arcane footnotes and case studies, nor in delving into the sources of these footnotes and the abstruse knowledge that inspired them. Reading up on botany will not bring us any nearer to an understanding of the concept of the rhizome. Studying particle physics
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