Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts

Ronald Bogue

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317827689
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della filosofia

Bogue provides a systematic overview and introduction to Deleuze's writings on music and painting, and an assessment of their position within his aesthetics as a whole. Deleuze on Music, Painting and the Arts breaks new ground in the scholarship on Deleuze's aesthetics, while providing a clear and accessible guide to his often overlooked writings in the fields of music and painting.

Part I
Music

Chapter One
Musica Naturans: Deterritorializing the Refrain

In an afterword to the English translation of Jacques Attali’s Noise, Susan McClary aptly notes that

it is quite clear to most listeners that music moves them, that they respond deeply to music in a variety of ways, even though in our society they are told that they cannot know anything about music without having absorbed the whole theoretical apparatus necessary for music specialization. But to learn this apparatus is to learn to renounce one’s responses, to discover that the musical phenomenon is to be understood mechanistically, mathematically. Thus non-trained listeners are prevented from talking about social and expressive dimensions of music (for they lack the vocabulary to refer to its parts) and so are trained musicians (for they have been taught, in learning the proper vocabulary, that music is strictly self-contained structure).

(McClary 150)

The issue McClary articulates, that of the contradiction between listeners’ personal experience of music and the professional theorization of music, points to a fundamental question: Is music strictly self-contained structure, or does it have some relation to that which is outside itself—to the emotions of human listeners, but also to their lives, their activities, and the myriad dynamic processes going on in the world around them? In A Thousand Plateaus, especially in plateau 11, “The Refrain” (“De la ritournelle”), Deleuze and Guattari argue that music is an open structure that permeates and is permeated by the world. They offer a reading of the relationship between the cosmos and music not as mechanical and mathematical but as machinic and rhythmical. Their point of departure is birdsong, a topic that might initially seem tangential to the business at hand. But this topic allows them to situate music within the general context of sonic and rhythmic patterning in nature and to suggest a continuity among human and nonhuman species in their modes of occupying space and establishing interspecific and conspecific relationships. It also allows them to develop the implications of some of the concepts and practices of the composer Olivier Messiaen, whose approach to rhythm and birdsong in his musical compositions and theoretical writings opens the way toward a conception of music as an engagement of cosmic forces. The object of this chapter is to outline the basic features of Deleuze and Guattari’s musical cosmology, and then to show through Messiaen’s work how this general theory may be related to musical composition per se. The next chapter concerns Deleuze and Guattari’s remarks on music history and their approach to periodization, and the third addresses the question of the relationship between music and nature, this time exploring the biological implications of Deleuze and Guattari’s musical cosmology.

Music and Cosmos in Antiquity

If contemporary music theorists generally treat music as a self-referential system divorced from psychological, social, and natural considerations, their Western predecessors from classical antiquity through the Renaissance tend to regard music as intimately tied to the order of microcosm and macrocosm. The disciplines of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music, which make up the medieval quadrivium, are already closely allied in much ancient thought, and the concept of the “harmony of the spheres,” which explicitly links music and cosmology, is regularly invoked throughout antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.¹ What is important to note is the extent to which these ideas are informed by many of the fundamental themes of Platonism.

Pythagoras is said to have been the first in the West systematically to establish the connection between musical and cosmic order.² Pythagoras and his followers noted that the relation between musical pitches may be expressed in terms of numerical ratios—the octave as 2:1, the fifth, 3:2, the fourth, 4:3, the whole tone, 9:8—and that similar proportional relations govern the structure of the created world. The Pythagoreans regarded number as the generative force of all geometric and physical forms, and they found both musical and numerical consonance in the movement of the planets, which, they claimed, emitted a celestial music as each sphere followed its perfectly proportioned course. For the Pythagoreans, the world is characterized by the two principles of peras, or limit, and kosmos, a word “which unites, as perhaps only the Greek spirit could, the notion of order, arrangement or structural perfection with that of beauty” (Guthrie 206).³ In the Pythagorean cosmogony, apeiron, or the unlimited, is the formless, boundless, and chaotic flux which precedes the cosmos, and which, by being submitted to the force of limit (peras), is transformed into a universe that possesses form, order, proportion, and wholeness. Apeiron, we might note, is also the source of time, but an unmeasured time that limit converts into chronos, or time that is numbered, measured, and submitted to the cyclical rhythms of the cosmos.⁴

For the Pythagoreans, then, music manifests the order of number, and cosmic harmony entails the circumscription of space and the mensuration of time, in that the proportioned parts of the cosmos are rendered harmonious through their participation in a delimited, macroscopic whole, and time is made regular through its subjugation to the periodic repetition of the same. Although Plato by no means embraces all aspects of Pythagorean doctrine in his writings, he does make frequent use of Pythagorean concepts of harmony and proportion, and he repeatedly affirms that order requires a subjection of the many to the one and the other to the same. In the Timaeus, the connection between music, mathematics, and cosmology is elaborately developed, and the ontological status of number, which remains uncertain in the Pythagoreans, is explicitly identified as ideal. In other dialogues, particularly the Republic, the concept of harmony is used to characterize psychological and social order, and philosophy itself is often seen as a musical activity. As Edward Lippman observes, the entire Platonic enterprise may finally be conceived of as a form of music: “The musician creates harmony in the pitch and duration of tone and in gesture; man creates harmony in the conduct of his life; the statesman creates harmony in society; the Demiurge creates harmony in the cosmos; the philosopher creates the harmony of dialectic and the music of discourse” (Lippman 41).

It is essentially this Platonic conception of music that Boethius develops in the Consolatio and De Musica and that numerous writers later reiterate throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance.⁵ In Boethius’s differentiation of musica instrumentalis (actual vocal and instrumental music), musica humana (the physical, emotional, and spiritual harmony of human beings) and musica mundana (the harmony of the spheres), one finds the entire range of Platonic analogies as well as the clear hierarchical ranking of physical and spiritual activities that renders actual music a mere sensual echo of the more significant music of mathematics and philosophy. And holding the entire system together are the notions of number and proportion as all-pervasive forms and cosmic order as the delimitation and regulation of a whole.

Rhythm and the Refrain

In virtually every regard, Deleuze and Guattari’s treatment of music is the antithesis of the traditional, Platonic approach to the subject. In their view, the cosmos with which music is intertwined is not a circumscribed totality but an open whole whose dimensions can never be given as such.⁶ The essence of music is to be found not in the macroscopic order of celestial cycles, but in the molecular domain of transverse becomings. The pulsations that play through music and the world are not measured recurrences of the same but ametrical rhythms of the incommensurable and the unequal. And the time disclosed in music is less that of chronos than aion, the floating time of haecceities and becoming.

Deleuze and Guattari describe music as “the active, creative operation which consists of deterritorializing the refrain [la ritournelle]” (MP 369; 300), a definition that obviously depends for its coherence on a full understanding of the concepts of the refrain and (de)territorialization. Musical refrains, they note, have venerable associations with territoriality, each of the ancient Greek modes or the “hundred rhythms” of the Hindu deçî-tâlas, for instance, being associated with a specific region or province as well as a particular mood and character. In this regard, musical refrains resemble birdsongs, which ethologists have long recognized as basic components in the delimitation of bird territories. Abstracting from these instances of geographically associated sonic motifs, Deleuze and Guattari extend the notion of the refrain to refer to any kind of rhythmic pattern that stakes out a territory. Three examples will suffice to indicate the basic ways in which this process takes place: (1) A child afraid in the dark sings a song to reassure herself, and in so doing establishes a stable point in the midst of chaos, a locus of order in a non-dimensional space; (2) a cat sprays the corners of his house and the trees and bushes in his yard and thereby demarcates a dimensional area that he claims as his possession; (3) a bird sings an impromptu aria at the break of day, and thus opens its territory to other milieus and the cosmos at large. A point of stability, a circle of property, and an opening to the outside—these are the three aspects of the refrain. Although the three may be differentiated from one another, they do not represent successive moments in an evolutionary or developmental sequence, but “three aspects of a single and same thing” (MP 383; 312), which manifests itself now in one form, now in another. As stabilizing point, the refrain creates an infra-assemblage with directional components; as surrounding circle, an intra-assemblage with dimensional components; and as opening to the outside, an inter-assemblage with components of passage or flight. “Forces of chaos, terrestrial forces, cosmic forces: all of these confront each other and come together in the refrain” (MP 384; 312).

The elements from which territories are formed are milieus and rhythms, which themselves are created out of chaos. As Deleuze insists at several junctures in his work, chaos is not the dark night in which all cows are black, an undifferentiated and unthinkable blur that is opposed to order, but a genetic medium from which order spontaneously emerges. Chaos has directional vectors from which a point of order may issue. Although we may usefully conceive of this locus of order as a geometrical point, it is not inert but mobile. Nor is it self-contained, but determined by its relations with other loci of order, and hence fluctuating and provisional. In all these senses, then, it delineates a directional space, which Deleuze and Guattari label a “milieu.” A milieu is a coded block of space-time, a code being defined by “periodic repetition” (MP 384; 313). Every milieu is in contact with other milieus, however, and “each code is in a state of perpetual transcoding or transduction” (MP 384; 313). We may describe an amoeba’s milieu, for instance, in terms of a series of submilieus—its surrounding liquid medium (external milieu), its organs (internal milieu), its exchanges between inside and outside across the cell membrane (intermediary milieu), and its relation to food, sunlight, and other sources of energy (annexed milieu). In each case we may determine the periodic repetition that encodes a given submilieu, the regular patterns that organize a particular block of space-time, and note the fluctuations in patterns that result from the mutual interaction of the various submilieus. The amoeba’s milieu is a locus of order in the midst of chaos, but it emerges from chaos along a directional vector, and it remains open to chaos from without and within. Thus chaos, far from being the qualitative antithesis of the milieu, is simply “the milieu of all milieus” (MP 385; 313).

Periodic repetition encodes a milieu, but one must distinguish the measure (or meter) of such repetition from the rhythm that occurs between two milieus, or between a milieu and chaos (as the milieu of all milieus). Measure implies a repetition of the Same, a preexisting, self-identical pattern that is reproduced over and over again, whereas rhythm “is the Unequal or Incommensurable, always in a process of transcoding,” operating “not in a homogeneous space-time, but with heterogeneous blocks” (MP 385; 313). Rhythm, in short, is difference, or relation—the in-between whereby milieus communicate with one another, within themselves (as collections of sub-milieus), and with chaos. Rhythm is not a secondary byproduct of a milieu’s measure, but a primary constituent of that milieu. Consider the human body. Its internal milieu is made up of various elements—the heart, lungs, brain, nerves, and so on—each with its own rate of periodic repetition. The rhythms of the body, however, take place between various milieus and sub-milieus, the heart’s regular measure, for instance, fluctuating in response to neural and hormonal stimuli, changes in breathing rate, alterations in the external environment, and so on. In a sense the heart’s periodic repetition produces rhythm, but not by reproducing an identical measure and not in isolation from other milieus. Its regular meter is a vital pulse, not a reproduction of the same, whose regularity and variability are inseparable from the intermilieu rhythms of difference. Hence Deleuze and Guattari assert that “a milieu does indeed exist by virtue of periodic repetition, but such repetition only has the effect of producing a difference through which the milieu passes into another milieu. It is difference that is rhythmic, and not repetition, which, however, produces it; but that productive repetition has nothing to do with a reproductive measure” (MP 385–86; 314).

From Milieus to Territories

A milieu, however, is not a territory, for a territory “is in fact an act that affects milieus and rhythms, that ‘territorializes’ them” (MP 386; 314). Such an action is essentially artistic and appropriative, one whereby milieu components emerge as qualities, and rhythms become expressive. Consider, for example, the brilliant coloring of various species of territorial tropical fish. In many fish, hormonal responses to sexual stimuli or external threats trigger alterations in external body coloration, but such changes are transitory and linked to a specific milieu function. In territorial fish, by contrast, coloration expresses a relation to a given space and attains a temporal continuity that does not vary with the activities within that space. Konrad Lorenz, a pioneer in research on territoriality, observes that the spectacular color displays of tropical fish are like posters ostentatiously signaling the presence of the fish and its claims to a particular area of the coral reef. The more brightly colored the fish, the more aggressively territorial is the species. A similar emergence of expressive qualities is evident in the stagemaker (Scenopoeetes dentirostris), a bird that picks leaves from a tree, drops them to the ground, and then turns them upside down to reveal their pale underside and thereby demarcate a territory.⁷ Each leaf is a milieu component that has been removed from its milieu and converted into a quality, and the stagemaker’s action constitutes a rhythm that is no longer simply a function of a milieu but has become expressive. The leaf is like a poster, a form of art brut that declares the oneness of the bird with its proper territory.

With the establishment of a territory, then, “a milieu component becomes at once quality and property, quale and proprium” (MP 387; 315). A directional milieu becomes a circumscribed, dimensional space, but it is the territorializing function of the expressive quality/property that establishes the dimensional space, not the space that determines the function. It is at the same moment that a quality is abstracted from a milieu component, a possession is declared, and a dimensional space is established. Territory “is in fact an act” (MP 386; 314), although such an act obviously is not necessarily intentional or conscious. (It is doubtful that the stagemaker decides to pluck the leaves, and the tetra certainly does not choose to don its brilliant markings.) Rather, territorialization “is the act of rhythm that has become expressive, or of milieu components that have become qualitative” (MP 388; 315). Rhythm itself—the differential, incommensurable relation between milieus—creates the territory, and with it expressive qualities that stake out a possession.

Ethologists have long stressed the possessiveness of territorial creatures, but Deleuze and Guattari insist that such animals are also artists. “Property is first artistic, because art is first placard, poster” (MP 389; 316). The territorial marker is a signature, an expressive quality that creates a domain and names its owner. (Such an owner, we should note, is not a preexisting subject; rather, the owner as subject and the territory are both constituted at the same time through the delineation of an expressive quality.) “One puts one’s signature on an object as one plants a flag on a plot of land” (MP 389; 316). Art, then, is connected to property and possession, but not in the reductive sense that art is an outgrowth of a primal acquisitiveness rooted in a self-preservation instinct. Quite the reverse. “The expressive is primary in relation to the possessive” (MP 389; 316). Art, as the disposition of expressive qualities, is the active agent in the formation of territory and the establishment of its occupant’s proprietary identity.

What is crucial in the establishment of a territory is the autonomy of qualities and rhythms. In Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, a certain level of decoding or deterritorialization must take place if a territory is to be formed. The coloration of the tropical fish must be divested of any fixed connection with sexual or aggressive stimuli if it is to serve as a territorial marker. In the case of the brown stagemaker, if leaf plucking were a constant periodic activity, then all places would be indifferently littered with leaf debris, but since leaf plucking has a certain autonomy and indeterminacy, one space may be differentiated from all others and established as a territory. The establishment of a territory, then, entails a certain degree of decoding, or “unfixing” of qualities and rhythms, and a subsequent recoding of those qualities and rhythms in terms of a specific domain.

Autonomy is evident as well in the shifting relations that link various qualities within a given territory. Qualities and relations occur not in isolation from one another but in complexes that “express” the relation of the territory to the internal milieu of impulses and the external milieu of circumstances. Internal relations constitute territorial motifs and external relations form t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I Music
• Part II Painting
• Part III The Arts
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Chapter Works Cited
• Chapter Index