micropolitics: outside the message?

[Tobias <tobias@xxxxxxxxx>]

Philip and everyone,

A serious question, and I offer some digressions, and I apologise if these
digressions will become too much.

Thinking of microsound inevitably leads me to thinking of Deleuze and
Guattari. I've finally had some time to sink into this text, and I must say
there are some...intensities for music that I was not expecting. D&G place
much emphasis on the necessity for action in differing registers, in order
to affect a line of flight from one territorialisation to another. The line
becomes the movement of deterritorialisation. Music and politics as a
combination "and" affect a rhizomatics of deterritorialisation: I think it
is possible to affect a music that will escape the territories "politics"
and "music" while complementing each other as the line of flight (the
continous "and").

Such an escape is beyond representation. The idea here is to completely
rethink "politics" in the first place. So microsound becomes an escape that
does not hold "messages," be it verbal or otherwise. Simply put, messages
are direct representations (imagos) that play into the hand of either the
musical structure or the structure of politics. The most radical "political"
move would be to try and affect a change of registers, a line of flight,
that would escape structure (however briefly-- such is a "plateau of
intensity"). This could be heard in terms of non-structural sound (motifs,
themes, structured components) and non-circular sound (repetition,
beginnings and endings that return to a core element); not to say that a
beat-driven track could not be heard in terms of a line (insistent, moving,
nomadic) or a cyclic sound in terms of a spiral (fractal, aparallel,
curving).

It's like Joyce's Finnegan's Wake: nonrepresentational language. This
movement can also be thought of as D&G's "machine." When the machine becomes
appropriated and structured, you have Kafka's bureaucracy, the Haider gov't,
etc (appropriation of war machine, always necessary for the state,
incorporated fascism, etc). When the machine is let loose on a line of
flight-- and there is always the possibility of this becoming a line of
destruction, i.e. the intensity that was/is Nazi fascism --then the parts of
the machine constantly change and jump registers. The machine always
transforms.

Microsound, due to its limit-case, i.e. that it is a "sound" form that is
already at the limits of what Western culture considers music, is in such
(a)
position(s) that it could affect such a machine or line of flight. In other
words, it would be very possible, and I think this already is happening, to
affect plateaus of intensity through extreme sound manipulation that move
beyond "politics" and "music."

(What is implicit here is a critique of the ideological apparatuses that
create politics as politics and music as music and music under a certain
politics and politics under a certain music. But in a sense the rhizome is
beyond ideology as ideology is a dialectical apparatus of the State-machine,
the structure).

I think we've already seen glimpses of this in early break-in raves, etc.
But I think there is the possibility for a lot more now that the "music" has
reached levels of intensity that did not exist back in the acid house days.

Sutekh, who has an upcoming album on Mille Plateaux, was playing in seattle
this past thursday and I went down to see him and dj. I asked him about the
theoretical side, namely, had he read any D&G? He reported that he had not.
For a bit, I thought this was fascinating and ironic, for I would consider
that some of his experimental music begins to affect the kind of intensities
which D&G speak of (in many different forms and shapes), and I would have
expected that he would have known a bit about it. A friend of mine really
put this into perspective:

"interesting question about reading or not reading d&g. in a certain sense,
thousand plateaus is alot like the 21st century's being and time -- since
everybody lives it, very few need to read it."

So I hope this has not lead nowhere, except to mention that I will be
teaching a first year english-theory class about deleuze and guattari and
microsound and the rave scene-- because I think the connections, in a
"rhizomatic" way, are becoming heard.

If you've read this far, thanks for reading.

cheers,

tobias


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tobias|saibot
http://www.shrumtribe.com
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