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Musical Modernism in the Thought of "Mille Plateaux," and Its Twofold Politics

2008; Perspectives of New Music; Volume: 46; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/pnm.2008.0009

2325-7180

Martin Scherzinger,

Art, Technology, and Culture

Musical Modernism in the Thought of MillePlateaux, and Its Twofold Politics 1 Martin Scherzinger Philosophy on the Model of the Synthesizer ti jriLLE PLATEAUX, the second volume of Gilles Deleuze and Felix 1Y1. Guattari's Capitalisme et Schizophrenie, is an elliptical and some what anarchic work. The book advances with clear-sighted urgency and a confidence of tone that lends it the character of a manifesto; indeed, the two-volume work Capitalisme et Schizophrenie iswidely understood as a call to political engagement following the student uprising in Paris in May 1968. Yet, for all this, the formal and narrative elusiveness of the book's argument, with its gamboling gamut of references and reso nances that range from geological formations to musical temporalities, and its fragmentary and inconsistent taxonomies of analysis, has pro duced an unruly array of conflicting critical commentaries both pro and Musical Modernism intheThought ofMille Plateaux I3 I contra. Arguably, the main thread of the book is a philosophical story precisely of changing plot, that is, of metamorphic synthesis.While the informing social context forMille Plateaux may have been the uprising in Paris a decade earlier, the book's informing technical principle was a new electronic instrument, a piano keyboard-based musical apparatus popularized at the time of the book's writing in the 1970s, commonly known as the synthesizer. For Deleuze and Guattari, this relatively easy to use (and then newly affordable) technological invention becomes a metaphorical model for away of thinking that replaces Kant's outmoded a priori synthetic judgment. The synthesizer operates on the basis of amalgamation, creating a variety of sounds by generating and blending signals of different frequencies. In the words of the philosophers, the synthesizer "places all of the parameters in continuous variation, gradu allymaking 'fundamentally heterogeneous elements end up turning into each other in some way.' The moment this conjuction occurs there is a common matter. It is only at this point that one reaches the abstract machine, or the diagram of the assemblage" (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, 109). Elsewhere, they describe how the synthesizer "unites dis parate elements in thematerial, and transposes the parameters from one formula to another" (343). In short, the synthesizer becomes a philo sophical entry point into the "immense mechanosphere" characterizing a new era: "the age of theMachine" (343). The advantage of thinking on themodel of themusical synthesizer is that philosophical discourse disentangles itself from the dialectics of "form and matter," opting instead for the synthesis of "the molecular and the cosmic, material and force," an unpredictable mode of thinking that blends traditionally stratified zones of conceptual inquiry into a destratified plane of consistency. "Philosophy is no longer synthetic judgment; it is like a thought synthesizer functioning to make thought travel,make itmobile, make it a force of the Cosmos (in the same way as one makes sound travel)" (343). Deleuze and Guattari label thought mobilized by metamorphoses of this sort a rhizome: "the rhizome connects any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature; it brings into play the very different regimes of signs, and even nonsign states" (21). Like the musical synthesizer, the rhizome is a proliferating machine intermingling diverse signifying practices no less than nonsignifying ones?'artificial' perhaps, but qualitatively new. Indeed, Mille Plateaux gains considerable traction precisely on its preoccupation with the latter "nonsign states," exemplified by music and sound. Thus Deleuze and Guattari unite changing mechanical techniques of sonic production and reproduction and (to a lesser extent) sonic reception with modern modes of 132 PerspectivesofNew Music knowledge formation, culture, and social organization. Theirs is the synthesizing hermeneutics of an abstract machine. Political Collectivism Everywhere Scholars have long attempted to disentangle an array of problems posed by this strange book, particularly the problem of finding stable points of identification and meaning in an argument that seems, at bottom, to accept the prospect of conceptual hybridization (synthesis) and rhizomic mobility (endlessness) with equanimity. How does a rhizome elude sedi mented categories of thought? Alternatively, how do lines of diagonal flightconfront their limit?And what are the imagined politics of striated space yielding to smooth space? Does the book present us with firm points...