- Of the many forms of expression through which their thought
moves, flowing and multiplying without privilege or hierarchy,
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari number "pop"
among the most powerful (in the Spinozian sense, of that which
affords the greatest potential for further connection and ramification).
In what might at first seem a wildly inappropriate context—their
analysis of Kafka's production of a "minor literature"—they
define "pop" as:
An escape for language, for music, for writing. What
we call pop—pop music, pop philosophy, pop writing—Wörterflucht
[word flight]. To make use of the polylingualism of one's
own language, to make a minor or intensive use of it, to
oppose the oppressed quality of this language to its oppressive
quality, to find points of nonculture or underdevelopment,
linguistic Third World zones by which a language can escape,
an animal enters into things, an assemblage comes into play.
(Kafka 1986, 26-27)
"Pop," then, is for Deleuze and
Guattari a form of multiplicity, a rhizome; indeed, in A
Thousand Plateaus they insist that "RHIZOMATICS = POP
ANALYSIS" (A Thousand Plateaus 24).1
The rhizome, of course, is their well-known image of a decentered
system of points that can connect in any order and without hierarchy,
a term drawn from botany that names a network of stems, like
the strawberry plant, that grows horizontally and discontinuously
by sending out runners.
Pop can be conceived as a rhizome because it develops by fits
and starts, in a messy, practical, improvisational way rather
than in a refined, programmatic, theoretical way. The logic
of the rhizome is opposed to that of the tree, which is a hierarchical
structure centered around a fixed root, a structure that grows
continuously and vertically (A Thousand Plateaus chapter
1). If pop is a rhizome, then it may be helpful to think of
the Germanic tradition of formal composition from Bach to Schoenberg,
 along
with the classical musicology that studies that tradition, as
an example of the linear tree system: a continuous sequence
in which each successive composer extends the rigorous line
of harmonic development established by the previous composers
further in the same direction.
- Although a detailed comparative examination of the two models
would certainly be rewarding, it is beyond the scope of this
essay. We have chosen specifically to limit our discussion to
the pop realm or regime, defined as follows: the regime of music
production that is tied neither to the European composer/concert
tradition and its strict division of labor, nor to any of the
various historical traditions of indigenous music making around
the world, but rather to the bricolage of modern recording
technology (electric/electronic instruments, studios, overdubbing,
mixing, etc.) and its media of distribution. This definition
of pop obviously has little to do with the neo-Romantic "popist/rockist"
genre distinction that dominates many popular music studies,
and even less to do with market demographics; it’s intended
to be a productivist model that can in principle unite disparate
phenomena like dub, musique concrète, dance remixes,
electronica, and stadium rock along a coherent conceptual axis
without necessarily claiming that it can account for all the
differences among these phenomena. Because of the productivist
nature of our model, we will be dealing exclusively with recordings;
recordings are the unequivocally privileged form of production,
distribution, and consumption of this musical rhizome. We are
not particularly interested in whether the recordings in question
sell ten or ten million copies; pop in this sense is not essentially
a quantitative term but rather a qualitative one, just as it
is not a marker of generic distinction, but rather a productive
potential of all music. This is what Deleuze and Guattari’s
claim concerning "pop music, pop philosophy,
pop writing" demands.
- Their functional and differential theory of pop intersects
with more traditional critical definitions of the term at several
points, but it also escapes from tradition in a number of significant
ways, and provides contemporary musicians with new points of
departure for musical composition.2
Indeed, we propose that any valid theory of contemporary music
must be similarly double: descriptive of existing musics, and
enabling of future musics. Deleuze and Guattari’s theory
meets this criterion. We will first lay out the descriptive
elements of their general theory of music, which must be assembled
from a number of published sources since Deleuze and Guattari
never dedicated a text exclusively to the exposition of their
ideas on music. A second descriptive section will also attempt
to identify the specific pop music artifacts and experiences
from which Deleuze and Guattari drew the key elements of their
pop rhizome. This will serve as a transition to the final section
of our argument, which will examine a number of electronic pop
recordings explicitly dedicated to Deleuze and Guattari in order
to determine the ways in which their theory has enabled innovative
new forms of music to arise.
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