[microsound] FOR DISCUSSION...

[David Powers <dpowers3@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Is microsound a form of "pop" music?  Before you answer, see below (maybe some of you have seen this essay before but I have not).

http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/echo/volume3-issue1/smithmurphy/smithmurphy1.html

EXCERPT from the essay's beginning:

Of the many forms of expression through which their thought moves, flowing and multiplying without privilege or hierarchy, Gilles Deleuze and F*lix 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—W*rterflucht [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.

David Powers
Secretary
DePaul University, School of Education
Department of Leadership in Education, Language, and Human Services
773-325-4806


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