Article | What I Hear is Thinking Too: Deleuze and Guattari Go Pop, by Timothy S. Murphy and Daniel W. Smith

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 The track, “Le voyageur,” 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

Following Deleuze’s suicide in November 1995, two record labels released memorial CDs in his honor. The first, Folds and Rhizomes for Gilles Deleuze (hereafter abbreviated FR), had been prepared by the Belgian label Sub Rosa prior to his death but did not reach stores until afterward.¹⁵ In the liner notes to that disc, label founder Guy Marc Hinant writes:

“L’Anti-Oedipe was written by the two of us, and since each of us was several, we were already quite a crowd.” It is on the basis of this sentence, the first in Mille Plateaux, that we conceived of Sub Rosa. From the beginning, we wanted to be more than a label; a machine perhaps, composed of rhizomes, of peaks and troughs, of tranquility and doubt… Obviously, this is not an official tribute to this great figure, one of the foremost of our time. It is only the fraternal salute of a few young people who admire him deeply, and who, better still, were one day helped in their lives and in their creations by his writings.

The disc contains tracks by five bands or artists, four of which also contributed tracks to the second memorial project, a two-disc, 27-track set entitled In Memoriam Gilles Deleuze (hereafter IM), from the Mille Plateaux label in Frankfurt, Germany. Founder Achim Szepanski describes the work of the artists on his label as “Becoming, so that the music goes beyond itself; this is the search for the forces of the minoritarian that the label Mille Plateaux is part of. In a letter Gilles Deleuze welcomed the existence of such a label” (IM, 5, trans. modified).

Both of these labels are independents, unaffiliated with the large multinational music corporations that dominate the international recording market. They are also “alternative” labels, in the sense that the music they circulate is not designed to compete directly with the “mainstream” music of multinational labels. In addition to the Deleuze tribute discs, Sub Rosa has also released recordings of sound experiments by William S. Burroughs, Antonin Artaud, Bill Laswell, and Richard Pinhas, among others, while Mille Plateaux specializes in dense techno dance/trance mixes and electronica.¹⁶ What they have in common is a focus on musicians who have been profoundly affected by the most recent computer revolution in music—the one that broke the monopoly of large, limited-access mainframe machines (and their bureaucratic administrators) over sound synthesis.¹⁷ The proliferation of personal computers through the Eighties and Nineties spawned an entire generation of musicians (and listeners) for whom sound is practically a tactile substance, digitally reproducible, malleable and storable, and consequently for whom traditional musical forms and notation have become increasingly irrelevant.¹⁸ own and in the process creates a seamless flow of music” (DJ Spooky, “Flow My Blood the DJ Said,” included as liner notes to his debut album Songs of a Dead Dreamer [1996], p.8).] Their music is pop, not in the Adornian sense of commodity music produced by corporate professionals and intended to impose a false universality upon consumers, but in a sense much closer to the old meaning of “popular”: an amateur, bricolage music arising from people’s everyday activities. In this regard at least, the contemporary cultural situation is similar to those that gave rise to the blues, or to the American counter-culture of the Sixties and the Italian one of the Seventies. Today, everyday activities for many people depend upon advanced digital technology, and the music that arises from, or mixes with, those activities constitutes an index of political potentialities that have yet to coalesce.¹⁹

What use were Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts to these musicians who were seeking new categories and forms for musical creation and social intervention? We turn now to discerning the ways in which certain musicians have detached concepts from, or grafted elements onto, Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical rhizome for use in their own creative activities. To do so, we must make a little machinic assemblage, a refrain or temporary musical territory, of our own: we must select a few tracks, passing over others in silence, and re-sequence them in order to make the breaks fall, not between the two memorial discs, but between our particular line of enquiry and other virtual lines. Our choice of line should be construed neither as an essentially privileged account of these recordings nor as a devaluation of other approaches to them, but simply as one stem of a rhizome. We do what we can with them, and leave it to other listeners to do otherwise.

For our enquiry, the clearest line goes back to Deleuze and Guattari’s basic concepts, but we view it from the less systematic, more pragmatic and selective perspective of these musicians. Music is made of percepts, intensive sensory complexes which “are no longer perceptions; they are independent of a state of those who experience them… Sensations, percepts, and affects are beings whose validity lies in themselves and exceeds anything lived” (What is Philosophy, 164, trans. modified). But before the elements of music can be percepts, they must become perceptible. This becoming-perceptible complements or complicates the becoming-imperceptible of movement which Bergson described:

If movement is imperceptible by nature, it is always so in relation to a given threshold of perception, which is by nature relative and thus plays the role of a mediation on the plane that effects the distribution of thresholds and percepts and makes forms perceivable to perceiving subjects. It is the plane of organization and development, the plane of transcendence, that renders perceptible without itself being perceived, without being capable of being perceived. (A Thousand Plateaus 281)

This threshold of perception must be crossed for music to arise, and the work of the musician is directed toward making perceptible what is as yet imperceptible.

The crossing of the threshold is the object of two tracks on IM, Jim O’Rourke’s “As In” (disc 2, track 1) and DJ Spooky’s “Invisual Ocean” (disc 2, track 8). O’Rourke’s track takes almost three minutes to fade slowly into perceptibility, and as it does it gradually assembles a smooth continuum of modulated sound (to which we will return in a moment). This track assembles itself as a perceptible continuum, however, only through the accumulation and superposition of myriad instantaneous “little perceptions.” It is like the murmuring of Leibniz’s ocean:²⁰

we say that the little perceptions are themselves distinct and obscure (not clear): distinct because they grasp differential relations and singularities; obscure because they are not yet ‘distinguished,’ not yet differenciated. These singularities then condense to determine a threshold of consciousness in relation to our bodies, a threshold of differenciation on the basis of which the little perceptions are actualised, but actualised in an apperception which in turn is only clear and confused; clear because it is distinguished or differenciated, and confused because it is clear. (Difference and Repetition, 213)

As the little perceptions accumulate, their differences become audibly distinct from one another (to the perceiving subject), and in so doing they define a large-scale perception of the ocean. The perception of the ocean is clear because the little perceptions from which it is assembled are audibly distinct, but because the little perceptions are not fully individualized, this clear perception remains dynamically confused. DJ Spooky’s track assembles such an audible ocean, which remains “Invisual” (invisible or infra-visual, imperceptible to vision?), out of non-maritime sound elements in precisely this way. This ocean forms part of the larger sonorous and social territory that defines all his work: “I wanted to create music that would reflect the extreme density of the urban landscape and the way its geometric regularity contours and configures perception … The sounds of the ultra futuristic streetsoul of the urban jungle shimmering at the edge of perception” (DJ Spooky 7-8).²¹) is, after Richard Pinhas, the musician whose work is most consistently and closely bound up with Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy. Unlike Pinhas, who comes out of the Seventies progressive rock/ambient music scene, DJ Spooky is associated with the Nineties hip hop and “illbient” scene. See “Flow My Blood the DJ Said,” pp. 7 and 14.]

Once the threshold of perceptibility has been crossed, the assemblage of sound begins to actualize its space-time, its imperceptible plane of organization. Such a plane actualizes itself in terms of its breaks and cuts, or rather its resistance to them. A smooth, sonorously continuous space-time unfolds, as in O’Rourke’s “As In”: glissandi, continuous lines or gradients of sound that modulate from tone to tone without discontinuous jumps across the sonorous spectrum. The tracks by the German group Oval, “You Are * Here 0.9 B” (disc 2, track 2 of IM) and “SD II Audio Template” (track 3 of FR), also embody this smooth construction, at least temporarily. The Oval tracks also intentionally dramatize the process by which smooth space-time becomes striated and vice-versa. “Oval is a very strict and limited approach,” claims principal musician Markus Popp, “in order to make some new distinctions clear—and, in a way, to go beyond the music concept, the music metaphors underlying the concepts used in the digital instruments involved” (quoted in Weidenbaum). In “SD II Audio Template,” the continuously modulating tones are abruptly interrupted by punctual percussive events that sound like scratches on the surface of an LP. These interruptions obviously allude to the dialectic of tone and noise, consonance and dissonance that has defined modern music from Schoenberg to Cage, but they also have a more novel function. Despite their metric irregularity, these events introduce something like a rhythm or striation into the smooth plane. As Deleuze and Guattari point out, “Meter, whether regular or not, assumes a coded form whose unit of measure may vary…whereas rhythm is the Unequal or the Incommensurable”; this unequal element is the imperceptible “difference that is rhythmic, not the repetition” of perceptible meter (A Thousand Plateaus 313-14). These irregular striations are digitally “looped” to form a repeating metric phrase that constitutes the striated space-time of the Oval track. Thus metric irregularity at short intervals becomes rhythmic regularity at longer intervals or higher levels of scale.

Conversely, the striations can also reconstruct a smooth space/time through acceleration and accumulation; in “SD II Audio Template” this happens when the metric striations occur at shorter and shorter intervals until they begin to overlap, either in actuality or simply in the perception of the listener. As they do so, their differenciated or striated features begin to merge, to return to a smooth continuity or indistinguishability at a higher frequency. The track passes through a circular progression, from smooth sonorous continuity to striation and then back to smoothness via increasing striation. As a result of these exemplary transformations, this track by Oval can stand, as its title implies, as an “audio template” or abstract map because it reveals that all audio assemblages are in fact what Deleuze and Guattari call multiplicities: “A multiplicity has neither subject nor object, only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot increase in number without the multiplicity changing in nature.” Thus when the tempo of striation, the number of one of the track’s sonorous dimensions, increases, not only the speed of the piece but also its sound quality changes. “When Glenn Gould speeds up the performance of a piece, he is not just displaying virtuosity, he is transforming the musical points into lines, he is making the whole piece proliferate” (A Thousand Plateaus 8). Just as acceleration changes the nature of the piece, so does deceleration. Obviously, deceleration of a sound lowers its pitch and thus alters its tone quality, but it also alters all its other relationships and reveals qualitatively new features in them; if you slow down a passage of pizzicato strings, for example, you will find the continuous hum of a motor. To a certain extent, the Blue Byte track “Can’t Be Still” (disc 1, track 12 of IM) and the Bleed track “Pâtent” (disc 2, track 5 of IM) also embody this principle of audio multiplicity via acceleration and deceleration.²²

Another way that smoothness emerges from striation—in fact, the most common method employed on the Deleuze memorial discs—is via the superposition of a number of distinct metric patterns of striation. These superposed patterns intersect at a variety of singular inflection points, creating indirect harmonies and virtual melodies. Deleuze and Guattari describe it this way:

Certain modern musicians oppose the transcendent plan(e) of organization, which is said to have dominated all of Western classical music, to the immanent sound plane, which is always given along with that to which it gives rise, brings the imperceptible to perception and carries only differential speeds and slownesses in a kind of molecular lapping. (A Thousand Plateaus 267)

In this molecular (over)lapping the perceiving subject “hears” virtual sounds that have not actually been played and “counts” virtual beats that have not actually been measured. The amplified ensemble music of Philip Glass is the most well known example of this method of superposition; the track “The Grid” from his soundtrack for the film Koyaanisqatsi is representative. On the Deleuze memorial discs, the tracks contributed by Mouse on Mars, “Subnubus” (track 1 on FR) and “1001” (disc 2, track 3 on IM), provide examples of generative superposition in techno music.²³

Within the mutating smooth/striated space-time of the musical multiplicity, other concepts drawn from Deleuze and Guattari’s work also become productive. In his piece “Unidirections/Continuum” (disc 1, track 6 of IM), Christophe Charles makes use of the techniques of musique concrète pioneered by Pierre Schaeffer to construct a decentered sonorous rhizome according to principles of connection and heterogeneity. Musique concrète assembles not only pure sounds produced by wave generators but also everyday sounds not normally considered to be musical: the creaking of a hinge, a sigh. This heterogeneity follows from the musician’s recognition that all sonorous materials are available for use on this plane of development. The musician makes music by assembling “semiotic chains”:

Semiotic chains of every nature are connected to very diverse modes of coding (biological, political, economic, etc.) that bring into play not only different regimes of signs but also states of things of differing status… A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles. A semiotic chain is like a tuber agglomerating very diverse acts, not only linguistic, but also perceptive, mimetic, gestural, and cognitive… (A Thousand Plateaus 7)

Charles’ semiotic chains range from the unearthly mechanical purity of oscillator and wave generator tones to the entropic crackle of broadcast static and recording surface noise. Between the extremes, we hear pitched and unpitched percussion, sirens, the delicate movement of water and sounds of flight in field recordings; the heterogeneity of connected elements leads the listener across vast distances of sonorous intensity.²⁴

The final element of these memorials to which we must turn seems at first to be more intimate but is actually just as distancing as static: the voice. Up to this point we have focused on elements of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of music that have no clear correlatives in popular music criticism, but with the voice we move onto critical terrain that is currently dominated by methods and categories drawn from psychoanalysis, an interpretive strategy on which Deleuze and Guattari declared war in Anti-Oedipus. Our purpose here is not to rehearse that all-out assault, nor to intervene concretely in the ongoing musicological debates over the voice, but merely to identify the general limits of a psychoanalytic representational approach to pop music as a way of highlighting the originality of Deleuze and Guattari’s productivist perspective.

In psychoanalysis and the criticism derived from it, the voice functions like the gaze to address and thus subjectify individuals, to interpellate them as the subjects of a symbolic order whose structure their psyches reflect imperfectly.²⁵ Thus the recorded voice forms an “acoustic mirror” in which the subject (mis)recognizes him/herself, and the activity of listening to that voice becomes an unavoidably narcissistic enterprise.²⁶ Deleuze and Guattari accept the validity of this model as far as it goes, but they propose a more broadly based alternative that also opens up new territories and structures for music.²⁷ The narcissistic model of listening, they claim, is a fundamentally retrospective and representational one that cannot account for the production of novelty or innovation in music. Everything new gets cut down to fit the Procrustean bed of universal Oedipal triangulation (“papa-mama-me”) and the endless deferral of desire conceived as lack; every action is separated from its practical efficacy to become a pure dramatic signifier of the interminable desire for desire. The psychoanalytic unconscious is a Victorian theater of familial narcissism, a model of dialectical negativity that is incapable of escaping its own constitutive impasses, so Deleuze and Guattari propose instead a productivist unconscious that exceeds the representational model on all sides.²⁸ This affirmative model enables the prospective temporality of subjective improvisation as well as the negative abyss of psychoanalysis’ repetition compulsion.

The voice provides a good example of the interpretive consequences that this broader model entails. In much pop music, the voice is the fixed point of thematic reterritorialization around which the sounds temporarily deterritorialize (through distortion, feedback, overdubbing, etc.). “[A]s long as the voice is song, its main role is to ‘hold’ sound, it functions as a constant circumscribed on a note and accompanied by the instrument” (A Thousand Plateaus 96). Since the listener’s attention to the voice as a carrier of discursive content or meaning usually effaces its impact as sound or intensity, the voice most often functions to delimit and preserve the pre-established territories of the piece, both harmonically and conceptually. The voice tells us what the song is about, and it does this while doubling or harmonizing with its accompanying instrumental melody, and reproducing the more or less regular meter. The voice, especially the “good” or “trained” voice in pop music, addresses the listener, demands (mis)recognition and interpellates her/him as a docile subject precisely because of the power it gains by this process of harmonic/thematic reduplication or reterritorialization. This can be true even (and especially) when the voice sings or speaks of escape, of lines of flight out of its territorial constraints; think for example of the vicious irony of “I’m Free” from the Who’s Tommy (“I’m free/I’m free/And I’m waiting for you to follow me … “), which reterritorializes the newly-claimed freedom of the “I” in its control of the second person, the “you”). So far, Deleuze and Guattari would agree with Adorno, Althusser, and the psychoanalytic tradition.

Such is not the case, however, with respect to Scanner’s track “Without End” (disc 2, track 7 of IM). Here a hoarse voice whispers of events or hecceities, saying, “it is dawn eternally, time of prophecy,” while the process of sound assembly creates an unexpected auditory space-time that does not double or reflect the sonic contour of that voice. The slow, diffuse metric pulse of human breathing provides a foundation for the piece, a foundation upon which are laid layers of indistinct vocal sounds, ungraspable fragments of speech and angular melodic cells that constitute an unstable soundscape. The listener does not (mis)recognize her/himself in the vocal/harmonic pattern here, but rather must wait for some pattern to emerge, only to see it subside again into the constantly mutating mix. A similar procedure of discontinuous assemblage, though often without the intelligible lead vocal that provides thematic continuity and territorialization here, underlies all of Scanner’s work, including his piece on FR, “Control: Phantom Signals with Active Bandwidth” (track 4). Robin Rimbaud took the name “Scanner” from his primary enabling musical machine, the broadband scanner that intercepts the transmissions of radios, cellular telephones, and other broadcast machinery. His method itself is formally subversive and deterritorializing, in that he is transforming a surveillance technology—originally devised to allow police to monitor broadcast communications and intervene in that medium—into a generator of aesthetic affects and percepts. But it is also a new territorialization, as he has said:

A good way of putting it with the scanner stuff is mapping the city … it’s like mapping the movements of people during different periods of the day. It’s fairly predictable [during the day]…. Then in the evening, that’s where the riot happens. That’s when it gets really exciting because all hell gets let loose. The phone rates go down and people have the most surreal conversations. I’ve always been interested in the spaces in these conversations … It amazed me with these mobile phones, which are much more expensive than standard phones—you get these enormous gaps happening. They’re the points that really interest me. What’s happening in there. (cited in Toop, 35)

In deterritorializing the technology, he generates a new refrain and hence new spatio-temporal territory: a perceptual map of the city and the day. From his recordings of human voices snatched from these broadcast bands, Scanner often selects the least intelligible statements, those that are so unconventional and decontextualized that they carry no direct meaning even when they can be understood clearly; he also selects voices that have been so distorted in transmission that they cannot be understood at all. These voices, and even the static-filled gaps in conversations, are used as concrete sound, as in musique concrète. In other words, he uses the scanner as a source of raw sonorous material and not generally as a source of subjectively referential information, as the police do; the demand for stable reference and command that informs police use of surveillance technology is much closer to the territoriality of the traditional pop song form (and to psychoanalytic criticism of it) than to Scanner’s audio maps.

Scanner deterritorializes the voice by centering it in the mix, but depriving it of its direct signifying capacity and its continuous harmonic intensification. In his piece “Control,” we hear voices speaking, but often we cannot understand what they are saying. The voices become elements of the sound, values of timbre, without the privilege (and limitation) of discursive meaning. “Only when the voice is tied to timbre does it reveal a tessitura that renders it heterogeneous to itself and gives it a power of continuous variation: it is then no longer accompanied, but truly ‘machined'” (A Thousand Plateaus 96). The voice always has timbre, of course, but not all timbre is equally perceptible; indeed, the mark of the “trained” or “pure” singing voice is precisely its minimal noticeable timbre in comparison with the gruff, cracked or shrill vocal quality of blues or rock singers. By “machined” Deleuze and Guattari mean that the timbrally distinctive voice ceases to be tied to a stable harmonic structure or its attendant subjective form as limiting territories, and is instead opened up to a process of sonorous production that exceeds the expression of an individual psyche. The voice becomes an inhuman sound, a noise, and is no longer personal, subjective, or most importantly, subjectifying (interpellating). Like Adorno, psychoanalytic critics treat this inhuman vocality as a source of anxiety that must inevitably be repressed, only to return as an uncanny recorded double of the fractured self (Engh, 1994, 130-31). Deleuze and Guattari, on the other hand, find in this inhumanity, so unexpectedly close at hand, an affirmative and convenient step out of the straightjacket of normative subjectivity.

The uncanny point of indiscernibility between human voice and inhuman sound can be reached in a number of ways. For example, it is what post-serial composers like Milton Babbitt and Luciano Berio have sought in their vocal and electronic works through the transformation of traditionally trained voices. Babbitt’s Philomel for soprano, recorded soprano and synthesized sound (1963) dramatizes the Greek myth of Philomel’s metamorphosis into a nightingale by continuously manipulating the soprano’s voice, sending it off down a line of flight toward one, then the other of the endpoints of its constant becoming: singing woman or synthesized bird. The sonic affirmation of flight from a constraining subjectivity counterbalances the mythic tragedy of Philomel’s punishment. Berio’s Thema: Omaggio a Joyce (1958) and Visage (1961),²⁹ both electronic manipulations of soprano Cathy Berberian’s voice on tape, occupy the same point of transition between voice as discursive meaning and voice as inhuman sound. Of Thema, which actualizes the virtual fuga per canonem in the “Sirens” chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses, Berio has written,

I was interested in developing new criteria of continuity between spoken language and music and in establishing continual metamorphoses of one into the other… [In Thema] it is no longer possible to make distinctions between word and sound, and between sound and noise; or between poetry and prose, and between poetry and music. We are thus forced to recognize the relative nature of these distinctions, and the expressive characters of their changing functions. (Berio 1998, 1)

Scanner’s work uses different techniques and different vocal timbres, but it forces a similar recognition upon us as well, one that complements the political subversiveness of his chosen medium: there is a becoming-sound of the voice that can draw the subject into a parallel becoming-other of the self, one that is marked not by primal castration anxiety but by prospective affirmation.

Even so, the indiscernibility of voice and sound in Scanner’s pieces often highlights, paradoxically, the subjectively expressive power of the voice even in the absence of intelligible meaning. The deterritorializing line of flight out of normative subjective structure may reterritorialize within something similar to the psychoanalytic paradigm. Even when we cannot understand the words or locate a melody in “Control” or “Without End,” we can sometimes still extract some signifying value by grasping the mood or tone of the sounds.

This reterritorializing aspect has also been explored by post-serial composers, most significantly by György Ligeti in his pieces Aventures (1962) and Nouvelles Aventures (1962-65), for three singers and seven instrumentalists. In these pieces, Ligeti uses an invented language to demonstrate that “All the ritualized human emotions that are expressed colloquially, such as understanding and dissension, [etc … ] can be expressed exactly in the a-semantic emotional artificial language.” In singing this artificial language, the performers produce “the opposite of what we were used to at the performance of an opera … : the stage and protagonists are evoked by the music—the music is not performed to accompany an opera, but an opera is performed within the music” (Ligeti 1985, 8-9). Here the accompaniment itself serves to interpellate the listening subject, even without direct address from the voice.

The reductio ad absurdam of this situation is surely the Residents’ album The Third Reich and Roll, which consists of two LP-side-long “semi-phonetic interpretations of Top Forty hits from the Sixties” (Residents 1979). On this album the Residents, perhaps the most important conceptual art band in pop, perform hit singles like the Rascals’ “Good Lovin’,” Lesley Gore’s “It’s My Party” and the Mysterians’ “96 Tears” as if they had only been heard over a poor quality AM radio; the melodies and arrangements are largely intact, but the words are reduced to “semi-phonetic” approximations at best, in acknowledgement of the historical and phenomenological experience of many actual listeners who would have encountered much of the most influential pop music of the twentieth century via low-fidelity AM radio.³⁰ The Residents’ method also ironically acknowledges the fundamental irrelevance of stable discursive meaning to the world of pop, where pure sound intensity and affective projection should rule.

The imperative to deterritorialize the voice, to use it timbrally rather than harmonically or referentially, must include even the voice of the philosopher who articulates that imperative. There is a difference, however imperceptible it may be, between the randomly sampled voices used by Scanner, or the rigorously disciplined voices required for the performance of Babbitt’s, Berio’s, and Ligeti’s pieces, and the singular voice of Deleuze himself. It is the difference between the deterritorialized voice and the deterritorializing voice, between hearing a voice become an inhuman sound and actually becoming an inhuman sound via that voice. Deleuze once said,

Some of us can be moved by certain voices in the cinema. Bogart’s voice. What interests us is not Bogart as subject, but how does Bogart’s voice function? What is the function of the voice in speaking him? … It can’t be said that this is an individualizing voice, even though it is that also … I deterritorialize myself on Bogart … It’s a kind of metallic voice…a horizontal voice, it’s a boring voice—it’s a kind of thread which sends out a sort of very very very special sonorous particles. It’s a metallic thread that unwinds, with a minimum of intonation; it’s not at all the subjective voice. (Vincennes Seminar, 215)

Deleuze’s own voice was also such a non-subjective “metallic voice” through which others deterritorialized themselves. At his death, his friends and colleagues uniformly evoked his familiar gruff voice, which Richard Pinhas described as “difficult but beautiful” (Heldon 1973), and two of the artists on the memorial discs make use of that deterritorializing voice in their compositions. Hazan + Shea, in “Rhizome: No Beginning No End” (track 5 on FR), sample Deleuze’s voice from the Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze television broadcasts. In the first section, “End,” they use Deleuze’s voice as pure timbre, setting its isolated phonemes against a synthesized ensemble of keyboards, strings and percussion; in the second section, “Beginning,” the voice re-emerges as a signifying instrument as the sentences broken down into timbral elements in section one are cited in their entirety. Hence the inversion of sequence: (no) end before (no) beginning. Wehowsky/Wollscheid’s “Happy Deterritorializations” (disc 1, track 2 of IM) “reformulates … an auratic sound, once recorded by a French rock band accompanied by a reciting Gilles Deleuze [sampled from “Le voyageur” by Heldon on Heldon 1973]. Pieces of this archetypal sound are projected onto different contemporary sound matrixes and merge with their sonic corpora” (Wollscheid in IM, 9). Wehowsky/Wollscheid enfold and unfold Deleuze’s voice by sampling, resequencing and overdubbing his performance with Heldon to create a multiplied, polyphonic, deterritorializing/reterritorializing Deleuzean voice distanced from and in conversation with itself.

Richard Pinhas’ latest recordings, released by Sub Rosa and Cuneiform, constitute a third memorial disc, though they are not billed as such, and they too are organized around Deleuze’s words and voice. For this project Pinhas recruited the musicians (and science-fiction writers) Norman Spinrad and Maurice Dantec to form a unit called Schizotrope, subtitled “The Richard Pinhas & Maurice Dantec Schizospheric Experience—French Readings of Gilles Deleuze’s Philosophy with Metatronic Music and Vocal Processors” (Schizotrope 1999 & 2000). Much of these discs reprise Pinhas’ earlier collaborations with Deleuze: either Deleuze’s words, read by Dantec, are set to music, or Deleuze’s voice itself is set. They differ in the form the musical setting takes. On the initial Heldon recording of “Le voyageur,” the music can be described as progressive rock, as bands like Heldon and King Crimson were inventing it in the early Seventies, music which we have described as “bolero-like” in structure and sound. Schizotrope’s music, however, is quite different from that. Instead of repeating metric and harmonic forms in regularly striated space-time, the new music is smooth and ambient. Drawing on experiments from his previous solo album De l’Un et du Multiple (1996), Pinhas has created a contemporary style that owes equal amounts to the Nineties explosion of sampled, computer-generated techno music, and to the pioneering Seventies/Eighties “Frippertronics” work of King Crimson founder Robert Fripp.³¹ Eric Tamm defines Frippertronics as follows: it is

the technological setup whereby two reel-to-reel tape recorders were connected together and to…electric guitar; [and it is also] the musical style, that is, the potential for creatively shaping ever-fluctuating masses of sound in real time, ordinarily upon a tonal, pandiatonic, modal or multi-modal basis; and the various uses of Frippertronics—as music performed solo, or as one timbral/structural element within a more conventional song, or as a “thematic sound” used to unify a large musical collage … (Tamm 1990, 115)

By the Nineties, the technological setup had changed to include DAT recorders and digital signal control, but otherwise the description remains accurate (though, significantly, Fripp changed the name of the activity to the more territorial “soundscapes”). The interconnected recorders produce cyclic loops of varying durations that grant a periodicity to even the most irregular meters. At the same time, the “thematic sound” gradients of modulating tone and timbre establish smooth lines of sonorous continuity against which Deleuze’s words and voice are set. Pinhas’ work here is at once the most territorial of the pieces we have examined, in that Deleuze’s concepts and the grain of his voice clearly function as continuous centering elements in the sound assemblage (see A Thousand Plateaus 96), and also perhaps the most conceptually radical in its extensive deployment of Deleuze’s thought according to its own internal logic and rhythm. Instead of the repetitive interpellations of harmonic doubling, we find pure differences of sonorous intensity.

Our analysis of the contemporary productive potential of Deleuze and Guattari’s musical philosophy cannot be as complete as our account of their borrowings from—and participation in—historical pop music was, in part because that potential is still in the process of being realized in diverse concrete forms, but also, more importantly, because its mass political threshold has yet to be crossed. At present there is no broad-based socio-political movement, comparable to the counter-cultures of the Sixties and Seventies, in which that potential can find smooth, open territory for large-scale experimentation and composition. So far it has found only small and temporary autonomous territories, hemmed in by the market or the state and sustained precariously by the local refrains of DJ Spooky, Richard Pinhas, and other musicians. But the market and the state are themselves nothing more than temporary territories, legitimated by advertising jingles and national anthems, and yet ominously prone to mutation whenever enough people call a different tune. Plato recognized this instability in the Republic when he warned that “the introduction of novel fashions in music is a thing to beware of as endangering the whole fabric of society, whose most important conventions are unsettled by any revolution in that quarter” (Plato 115). If for the moment such a revolution is effectively contained at the local level, its deterritorializing effects summarily reterritorialized in musical niche markets, the potential for its intensification and spread remains, awaiting the bigger and better assemblage that we will have to construct in order fully to realize it.

For now, though, we have the brief audio assemblages dedicated to Deleuze. They are not models to be imitated, but rather distinct cases of realization for the conjoined potentials of sound and society. Guattari would call them molecular revolutions. We have scarcely begun to explore the richness of invention contained in these memorial discs and the related works of the musicians in question, but we hope that our analysis has at least sketched a provisional answer to our question: what use were Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts to these musicians? In brief, the musicians extracted concepts like tools from the Deleuze-Guattari toolbox and used them to intensify or amplify their own thinking and performing in sound. This is not a matter of simply applying or illustrating philosophical ideas in another medium, but of thinking in and with what we play, what we sing, and what we hear. Atom Heart captures this idea neatly in “Abstract Miniatures in memoriam Gilles Deleuze” (disc 1, track 7 of IM): as the track opens, a deadpan, synthesized voice says, “What I see is thinking. What I hear is thinking too.”

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Timothy S. Murphy, currently assistant professor of English at the University of Oklahoma, is the author of Wising Up the Marks: The Amodern William Burroughs (California 1997) and the general editor of the scholarly journal Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture. He has published essays on improvisation in the works of Pierre Boulez and Ornette Coleman, on James Joyce and post-serial composition, and on other issues in twentieth century literature and culture.

Daniel W. Smith is currently a Vice-Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. He has authored numerous articles on topics in European philosophy, and is completing a book on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. He has also translated several books from French to English, including Deleuze’s Essays Critical and Clinical (with Michael A. Greco), Pierre Klossowski’s Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, and Isabelle Stenger’s The Invention of Modern Science.

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