- Though
they do not limit their conception of pop to the traditionally
defined market sector of mass-produced pop
music, Deleuze and Guattari do emphasize that their thought
often passes or resonates by way of what any Anglophone reader
would immediately recognize as pop music.7
From their work in the Seventies onward, Deleuze and Guattari
demonstrate a familiarity with many of the most respected and
influential pop/rock songwriters and performers of the Sixties,
Seventies and Eighties that goes well beyond the superficial
humor and "street credibility" that such allusions
provide. Ultimately, their references to pop music provide them
and their readers with stabilizing refrains, points of connection
and passage for rhizomatic thought, that are often as complex
and functional as their more common readings of canonical European
philosophers and artists. The first significant connection to
pop music arises in the first chapter of Deleuze's 1977 collaboration
with Claire Parnet, Dialogues. In the only section of
the book explicitly signed by Deleuze alone (the remainder of
the chapters are unsigned, leaving the particular contributions
of the individual collaborators impossible to define, as they
are in Capitalism and Schizophrenia), he cites a poem
by Bob Dylan in an attempt to exemplify his conception of conversation
(and by extension teaching) as becoming, as double capture or
aparallel evolution. The most relevant portion of Deleuze's
citation is the following:
[…]
not t' worry about the new rules
for they ain't been made yet
an' t' shout my singin' mind
knowin' that it is me an' my kind
that will make those rules…
if the people of tomorrow
really need the rules of today
rally 'round all you prosecutin' attorneys
the world is but a courtroom
yes
but I know the defendants better 'n you
and while you're busy prosecutin'
we're busy whistlin'
cleanin' up the courthouse
sweepin' sweepin'
listenin' listenin'
winkin' t' one another
careful
careful
your spot is comin' up soon. (Dylan 112-13, quoted in Deleuze/Parnet
1987, 8-9)
Deleuze cites these lines from the Seghers edition of
Dylan's Writings and Drawings, but modifies the published
French translation, which suggests that he has taken some
pains to study them in the original idiomatic English (Deleuze/Parnet
1977, 14n1); otherwise he offers no specific commentary on
them. It is no hyperbole for him then to insist upon
How
proud and wonderful—also modest—is this Bob Dylan
poem. It says it all. As a teacher I should like to be able
to give a course as Dylan organizes a song, as astonishing
producer rather than author. And that it should begin as
he does, suddenly, with his clown's mask, with a technique
of contriving, and yet improvising each detail. The opposite
of a plagiarist, but also the opposite of a master or model.
A very lengthy preparation, yet no method, nor rules, nor
recipes. (Deleuze/Parnet 1987, 8)
Song, like
philosophy and teaching, requires a long apprenticeship, as
Deleuze has always insisted, though one that implies no master
or privileged subject who might dictate the prefabricated or
dialectical terms of the contract. Relations are produced by
improvisation, which is to say by the encounter with the unforeseeable
or "imprévisible" in each situation.
As free jazz innovator Ornette Coleman writes, "none of
these forms existed before their relation to each other"
(Coleman) yet they constitute as sophisticated and sensitive
a network of connections as any constructed according to the
prefabricated, hierarchical logic of notational composition.
Pop music too is music without an original, privileged form
or instance, music that exists entirely in its disseminated
actualizations, as Benjamin argued of film.
- In 1981,
Deleuze invoked the American New Wave band Talking Heads (and
their collaborator Brian Eno) in his study of Irish painter
Francis Bacon. In order to help explicate what he perceived
to be the system of becomings embodied in Bacon's paintings,
Deleuze offered a quotation from Talking Heads' song
"Crosseyed and Painless" from the album Remain
in Light:
There is indeed a change of form, but the change of form
is a deformation, that is, a creation of original relations
which are substituted for the form: the meat that flows,
the umbrella that seizes, the mouth that is made jagged.
As the song says, "I'm changing my shape, I feel like
an accident." (Deleuze 1981, 101)8
Change
of form, deformation, is here defined not as deviation from
or distortion of a normative or recognizable form, but as
the "creation of original relations," spontaneous
transversal re-formation, immanent invention or creativity.
Becoming is the externality and exteriorization of relations,
the accident that destructures the essential form and decenters
the substantial subject. The warped bodies
in flight from their own identities expressed in Bacon's paintings
find themselves captured, momentarily, in the aparallel images
of "Crosseyed and Painless": "Lost my shape—Trying
to act casual! /Can't stop—I might end up in the hospital/I'm
changing my shape—I feel like an accident…"9
Clearly, for Deleuze, pop music can serve as well as painting
or literature as an intensifier of becoming.
- If we
have so far established that pop music is potentially an important
element in the assemblages of expression according to Deleuze
and Guattari, we have not established the sources or causes
of this sudden, apparently unphilosophical interest. We might
expect that Guattari, as the more directly engaged and militant
of the two at the outset of their friendship, was the conduit
that brought pop music into the collaboration through his contacts
with members of the French student movements before and after
May '68. This expectation would not be entirely accurate, however
plausible it may seem (though Guattari certainly did bring to
the collaboration a sensibility that made connections with pop
more conceptually productive); in fact, it was apparently Deleuze
who had the first direct contact with the regime of pop music
through the intermediary of his student and friend Richard Pinhas.
- From the
point of view of the American reception of French theory, Pinhas'
career constitutes a veritable rehearsal of the coming era.
He studied history at the University of Paris X—Nanterre
for a year starting in late 1968, then switched to sociology
and ethnology, in which he received a master's degree under
the tutelage of Jean Baudrillard. In 1969 he began to study
philosophy under Jean-François Lyotard; ultimately he
received a doctorate in that field in 1974, and taught briefly
at the University of Paris I—Sorbonne.
He met Deleuze in 1970, at Lyotard's dissertation defense, and
followed Deleuze's courses from that moment until Deleuze's
retirement from the University of Paris VIII—Vincennes/St.
Denis in 1987. Along the way, Pinhas became friends with Serge
Leclaire, head of the Vincennes department of psychoanalysis
who was later forced out by the Lacanian "coup" of
1975, and through Leclaire's influence became a member of Lacan's
École freudienne de Paris (from which Pinhas resigned
in 1976).10
Pinhas is also the author of several published and unpublished
texts on music and philosophy that figure strongly in Deleuze's
writings on music and aesthetics in general; for example, much
of Deleuze's discussion of analogical and digital language in
chapter 13 of Francis Bacon is drawn from Pinhas' unpublished
manuscript Synthèse analogique, synthèse
digitale (Francis Bacon, 75-76), while the discussion of
the refrain in plateau 11 of A Thousand Plateaus makes
use of Pinhas' article "Input, Output" from 1977 (A
Thousand Plateaus 551n53).
- But the
influence of Pinhas' philosophical writing on Deleuze (and Guattari)
would concern us little were it not for Pinhas' primary activity
as a rock musician. In the early Seventies Pinhas formed a progressive
rock band called Schizo, which released two singles before metamorphosing
into Heldon, one of the most original and influential French
bands of the era. Heldon
might best be described as a sort of Gallic King Crimson: a
band that based its musical productions not only on the permutational
structures of blues and pop but also on the improvisational
openness of jazz and the timbral experiments of electronic music
synthesis. Pinhas was to Heldon what Robert Fripp has been to
King Crimson: a restless experimenter driven not by the demands
of the music market, but by a desire to create new sounds and
new structures that is, from Deleuze and Guattari's point of
view, the fundamental drive of all philosophy. Like Bacon, Boulez,
or Jean-Luc Godard, Pinhas is an example of an artist who creates
an art-philosophy, a set of percepts, out of the materials of
his/her art rather than one who attempts to imitate or represent
established philosophical concepts in aesthetic terms.
- In fact,
Deleuze himself participated in such an act
of musical philosophy when he joined Pinhas and his fellow musicians
in a Schizo recording session in 1972. At a studio sixty kilometers
from Paris, the musicians laid down a bolero-like backing track
over which Deleuze recited a passage from the final aphorism,
"638: The Wanderer," in the first volume of Nietzsche's
Human, All Too Human (Nietzsche 203-04).11
This track, "Le
voyageur," [Requires Real
Player] was one of the two Schizo singles released in 1973,
and was shortly thereafter incorporated into Heldon's first
full-length album, Electronique Guerrilla (Heldon 1973).
This album, which was re-released on compact disc by Cuneiform
Records (U.S.) in 1993, sold quite well upon its initial
release in France and allowed Pinhas and Heldon to commit themselves
to music full-time. They built a private recording studio and
subsequently released six more albums between 1974 and 1979.
As of 2001 Pinhas has also released nine solo albums, several
of which (Rhizosphere [1977], L'Ethique [1981],
on which Deleuze also appears, Cyborg Sally [with John
Livengood, 1994] and De l'un et du multiple [1996]) show
clear Deleuzean influences. Deleuze and Pinhas remained close
friends until Deleuze's death in November 1995. Thereafter Pinhas
established the Deleuze
Web, an Internet archive containing transcriptions of Deleuze's
seminar sessions, and joined the editorial board of Chimères,
the journal founded by Deleuze and Guattari in 1987. He has
recently toured Europe and the U.S. with his current project,
Schizotrope,
which consists of live and tape-looped electronic music accompanying
readings of unpublished texts from Deleuze's seminars.
- Our focus
on Deleuze's relations with the world of pop music does not
imply that Guattari did not forge his own links to that world,
but that he did so in less simple and continuous ways. Though
references to pop music are rare at best in his writings, Guattari
was involved for most of his public life with militant mass
movements in France and abroad, movements that were themselves
constituted in part by the circulation of pop protest music
through the international student communities. Among the left-wing
groupuscules, French student life before May '68 may have been
poverty-stricken, but it was not without a soundtrack cribbed
from British, American, and local rock bands. Likewise, and
more relevantly, elements of the Italian leftist Movement of
'77 with which Guattari was directly associated coalesced around
unlicensed "pirate" radio stations like Radio Alice
in Bologna. A contemporary report sets the scene:
Radio
Alice's broadcasts are an amalgam of music (rock, jazz,
some classics, many folk and political protest songs), news
(reports on left-wing and working-class struggles in Italy
and abroad, reports on the local student movement, readings
from newspapers published by groups of the "extra-parliamentary"
left, up-to-the-minute accounts of activities organized
by feminists, homosexuals, and radical civil-rights activists),
and comments on a wide variety of topics by anyone who cares
to telephone or drop in to the station's headquarters. These
consist of two dilapidated rooms located on the top floor
of an apartment building in a rather run-down residential
section of Bologna. (Cowan, 67)
This "Free
Radio" movement, one of the components of the Movement
of '77 (others included the "Metropolitan Indians"
who registered their dissatisfaction with the politics of austerity
and the Historic Compromise between the Italian Communist Party
and the reigning Christian Democrats by adopting "primitive"
fashions and lifestyles), used pop music as one of the elements
of its subversive assemblage. Guattari wrote a laudatory preface
to a book documenting the stormy career of Radio Alice in which
he characterized the station as "Alice. A radio line of
flight. Assemblage of theory—life—praxis—group—sex—solitude—machine—affection—caressing"
(Guattari 380). That is, for Guattari, Radio Alice was a kind
of cultural metonym, a spontaneously generated territory assembled
out of dissident subjective and affective points, freed from
the margins of society, and articulated in the context of a
broad political movement. The special issue of Semiotext(e)
that is dedicated to Italy and Autonomia contains a summary
manifesto by the organizers of Radio Alice, Collective A/Traverso,
which includes a photograph of Guattari working with station
staff in September 1977, just prior to the day it was shut down
on charges of obscenity. The manifesto concludes with an imperative
that alludes directly to Deleuze and Guattari's theory of desire:
"Let's not talk about desires anymore, let's desire: we
are desiring machines, machines of war" ("Radio Alice-Free
Radio," 133-34).
- The Movement
of '77 also produced its own directly musical regime of expression,
in affiliated pop singers like Eugenio
Finardi (who had a hit with his tribute to the fledgling
free radio movement, "La Radio," in 1976—see
Finardi) and Claudio Lolli who articulated some of the partial
perspectives and desires of the new militants.12
The earlier Autonomist militants had been involved primarily
with jazz and avant-garde musicians, exemplified in Autonomist
novelist/poet Nanni Balestrini's collaboration with composer
Luigi Nono on the electronic tape piece "Contrappunto dialettico
alla mente [Dialectical Counterpoint in the Mind]" (1967-68)
and Nono's own "La Fabbrica illuminata" ["The
Illuminated Factory"] (1964) and "Non consumiamo Marx"
["We Do Not Consume Marx"] (1969). Though these connections
between aesthetic avant-gardists and political radicals persisted,
the involvement of pop musicians substantially broadened the
reach of the social movements, much as similar contacts between
pop musicians and student radicals in the United States precipitated
the counter-culture of the Sixties through the proliferation,
hybridization, and feedback of mass expression. And like the
American counter-culture, the Italian mass movements were hobbled
by disagreement within their ranks and constrained by
incomprehension, ignorance, and hostility from without. In short,
both movements were in the middle, like refrains, and their
musics (among other elements) also acted as refrains that both
deterritorialized the enforced social relations
of capital, and provided hooks for the reterritorialization
of alternate futures.13
Certainly this connective quality, which made of the movements
what Deleuze calls in French "intercesseurs,"
contributed not only to their protean vitality but also to their
ultimate dissolution in the face of the rigidities of State
control (Pourparlers, 165ff).14
|
|
