‘Music(ology) between bodies”
Paper given at the 13th Deleuze and Guattari Studies Conference (Prague, 2020—postponed to 2021 due to Covid-19)
In the Preface to his volume on Anti-Oedipus, Eugene Holland makes a provocative claim: that improvised jazz provides perhaps ‘the best concrete illustration of the process of schizophrenia’. He points to jazz’s supple structure, the spontaneity of its within-group interaction, and especially its desideratum of ‘produc[ing] something new and unique—something unheard-of which nevertheless still “makes sense”’ and its task of ‘tak[ing] just enough of what is already known … as a point of departure for the shared production and enjoyment of what is radically new’.
I’d like to consider what happens if we take Holland’s notion seriously and develop some of the productive implications of putting jazz to work to model a kind of schizoanalytic method. Holland puts this task thus: jazz not only presents ‘an ideal instance of human relations and interpersonal dynamics but actually suggests a social ideal: the use of accumulated wealth as a basis for the shared production and enjoyment of life in the present rather than the reproduction and reinforcement of power-structures from the past’. Following from this, I offer a modest experiment: what if we use jazz as a kind of schizo laboratory, ‘out for a walk’ rather than constrained to the analyst’s couch? How well does the in-time doing of jazz operate as a practicable model, and what can we learn from it?
The main outcome for this project is beyond the scope of this short talk, which is to develop a properly musical schizoanalytic method in order to refigure the landscape of disciplinary music theory and analysis, which tends to orbit around what we might call representation-and-deviation models. This involves a terminological and conceptual briar patch that I’ll save for another time. In short, I’m searching for a method grounded in difference, the productive syntheses of part-objects, and the refusal of representation as a material logic. A turn from representational logic in music theory and analysis, with its focus on structure, semiotic coding, hermeneutics, part-whole relations, and not least meaning, means relinquishing a great deal of methodological comfort and allowing oneself to grapple in the dark, improvising one’s own stabilizing song alongside the object of analysis. It also involves turning to the production of affect and what that production does to and in its contexts (I suggest that desiring-production and affective movement are more or less synonymous—or, rather, the production of desire is that which makes affective forces flow).
A secondary outcome is to think of how jazz’s practices operate if not quite like metonyms for mapping sociopolitical relation-implications, then perhaps like practicable case studies. In other words, while part of my interest lies in transforming music-analytic practices within my own discipline, I’m at least equally intrigued by what we can learn from jazz’s contexts in terms of how desire, affect, and different kinds of relational impingements operate in the constitution of complex, lively trans-subjective formations.
All of this requires a few axiomatic claims:
(1) That jazz is indeed improvised;
(2) That jazz’s particular form of improvisation is open-ended such that its practitioners never know quite what is being ‘produced’ ahead of time;
(3) That what I call different kinds of bodies—human bodies, musical-instrument bodies, song-bodies, the ‘bodies’ of sonorous shapes and gestures, freed of expressive determination or ‘meaning’—participate in the relational constitution of a given context;
(4) similarly, different kinds of codings—relationships to histories, pedagogical practices, performance etiquettes and norms—constrain what is possible or at least practicable within the formation of those contexts.
And then
(5) suggesting that jazz’s utterances are less about the inscription of musical ‘meaning’ than about ‘function’ or ‘use’: as Deleuze and Guattari insist, ‘the question posed by desire is not ‘What does it mean?’ but ‘How does it work?’’
This has implications for reframing how many jazz musicians describe what it is they think they are doing, including foregrounding the unconscious not as a kind of passive repetition of the already-known (as for example a ‘flow-theory’ analysis might suggest), but as a kind of factory for the inventive production of ever-new adumbrations on known materials.
I’ve been developing some ideas around the ‘tetravalent’ model Deleuze and Guattari introduce in their Postulates of Linguistics plateau, focusing on the term ‘valence’ and drawing upon chemistry and emotion studies to think about its implications and functionings. A simple schematic has the machinic assemblage of desire and the collective assemblage of enunciation operating along a transversal x-axis, with the forces of deterritorialization and reterritorialization positioned as a y-axis but really functioning as a pair of co-occurring conduits through which content and expression produce and transform one another, simultaneously coalescing into provisional forms and breaking those forms open. In other words, the ‘tetravalence’ maps the mutual transversal impingements of assemblage on assemblage, via the double movement of de- and reterritorialization. Through this mode of mapping, three themes emerge:
we start to understand how production is itself in every event a product of comings-together of transversal operations or forces;
we can grasp how a healthy-functioning identity amounts at once to an ongoing process of coalescence into a provisional ‘type’, and a rearrangement of or escape beyond the boundaries of what that type is capable of;
we can define what change actually is: a change of valence.
This last point foregrounds the relational, interactive nature of all becomings.
In order to explore the claim Holland makes of jazz, I’d like to bring this schematic into dialogue with an earlier formulation, the ternary process through which Deleuze and Guattari suggest a properly material psychoanalysis operates. I’ll quickly gloss the three syntheses of the unconscious that animate the overarching argument of Anti-Oedipus—the connective synthesis of production, the disjunctive synthesis of recording, and the conjunctive synthesis of what Holland translates in hyphenated form as consumption-consummation.
The connective synthesis is where production happens. There’s a parallel here to how Deleuze describes his first synthesis of time as ‘foundational’ in Difference and Repetition, underscoring that it is not ‘first’ in a sequence, but that it locates us right where the action is, so to speak. Production happens via connections. What is connected are part-objects, and what happens when they connect is that each changes the valence of the other. In desiring-production terms, each new connection ‘causes flows to move and substances to be intersected’. In affective terms, each part-object affects the other and is affected in turn, and each changes in some way, meaning it is re-primed through the connective process to newly connect in a next event. In the context of an improvised musical performance, this might mean two performers each of whom produces a musical gesture; in the act of playing they also hear what the other is producing, which they internalize in some way depending on how they are ‘attuned’ to do so, which changes in some way their capacity for both playing and perceiving in the next co-created event.
The latter part of this process probably better characterizes the disjunctive synthesis of recording. In the disjunctive synthesis, a ‘break’ occurs (a ‘caesura’ in the language of the third synthesis of time) during which what is recorded are the effects of relation-networks on bodies. I’m interested in the implications of musical recording as they relate to the technology of the time (namely, tape), where each new re-recording mostly erases what was there previously, but which leaves a trace or palimpsest of earlier inscriptions. Or, better, the contemporaneous tape experimentations of Robert Ashley and others, where continuous re-inscriptions of the ‘same’ gradually transform the known into a quite radical alterity; a becoming-intensive of a prosaic discursivity that reveals the intensity that was already virtual in the original. The main point here is that relations are what are recorded.
In the conjunctive synthesis, subjectivity is produced as an after-effect of the interplay between the connective and disjunctive syntheses. As with the second synthesis of time, the conjunctive synthesis is oriented toward the past in that it foregrounds the singular way the past folds into and newly constitutes the present: this is, roughly the ‘so it’s me!’ that Deleuze and Guattari emphasize. As the perpetual re-inauguration of the subject, we now have a provisional agent of desire: not doing the desiring, but ‘enjoy[ing] or suffer[ing] part of what has been produced’; that is, the productive fruits of the desiring-machines’ operations. Here the doubled translation, consumption and consummation, is crucial. I like to read ‘consumption’ in the way Brazilian philosopher Mario de Andrade postulates antropófago, cannibalism, as a political-aesthetic force: the force of absorbing the cultural and ideological object one ‘consumes’ in order to transform oneself, making a metaphor of the purportedly cannibalist Tupinambá of the colonial portuguese imaginary. Consummation, then, confirms the singular nature of a given coupling and the subject it produces. As an operation on the unconscious, or rather, between the unconscious-as-BwO and the desiring-machine, it defines the particular way, in a given event, the unconscious is provisionally refigured or re-oriented. In what way its valence is changed to be newly open to next impingements; in what new ways in can affect those with which it newly connects.
As with Deleuze’s three syntheses of time, as with the three operations of the refrain, and as with the double movement of de- and reterritorialization in the tetravalence, the three syntheses do not operate as a linear sequence. They are always ongoing, differently bumping up against one another, each transforming the way the others operate and what is produced through the process. A transversal, dimensional schematic, as it were: each operation is different in kind, but each affects the others profoundly.
How does jazz express this schematic? Let’s turn back to my four axioms: jazz is indeed improvised, it’s at least partially unscripted, its enactment flows between many kinds of bodies, it is constrained by relatively fixed codes of various sorts.
The partially unscripted, improvised nature of jazz can be characterized as a continuous invention of musical material, not an anti-teleology per se, but a setting-aside of the question of teleology altogether—the end of an improvised jazz performance does not mark the fulfillment of a goal as, for example, we find in Western Euroclassical music. It marks, quite simply, a moment of consummation, a more or less determinable end of one event-constellation, a recognition that ‘that’s what that was!’. This is the first way Holland’s evocation of jazz as a productive schizophrenic process bears fruit: there is no closure to seek, no lack to fill. Think of John Coltrane’s mid-period improvisations: one blistering, exploratory chorus after another, not quite the pure intensity of his last work, but a kind of pure production enacted by the coupling of saxophonist, saxophone, harmonic progression, bandmates, and so on.
What is interesting about this account of jazz as desiring-production is that its musical substrate, most of the time, is profuse with what we might call micro-lacks. Most jazz is built around musical repertoires with very specific syntactic to’s and fro’s: oscillations between tension and resolution; normative phrase structures with beginning- and end-implications, and more. This is a material condition of jazz, which affects how a schizophrenic process might operate: much like that schizophrenic out for a stroll, there are real-world affordances, obstacles, behavioral expectations, and so on to couple with. The question becomes how one does so, and to what degree those conditions are taken to be laws (taken ‘rules of the game’ or ‘commandments’), whether they’re embraced as affordances with which to form new alliances and plug in new desiring-machines, or else ignored in acts of willful anarchy. There are potential ethical considerations for all three of these modes of connection that relate to the different kinds of bodies without organs one may make for oneself.
A second way jazz lives up to Holland’s claim is the degree to which many of its gestural processes might be described as unconscious, citing the speed at which they go by and many accounts by high-level practioners about going into a kind of automatic mode when conditions are right. As I suggested earlier this has been rather poorly theorized in terms of flow theory or ‘skillful coping’. Deleuze and Guattari’s account of the unconscious as a productive factory seems to me a profoundly more interesting and frankly accurate description—improvising music is not like learning to expertly wield a hammer such that one can always produce the right stroke to drive the nail in, since it involves manouevring through a constantly changing sonorous terrain, adapting accordingly, and inventing novelty rather than re-presenting existing know-how.
A third aspect of jazz practice that supports Holland’s claim, then, is the material specificity of each performative iteration and the vast constellation of micro-differences that determine what direction each takes. This is where those ‘multiple kinds of bodies affecting and affected by one another’ become most relevant.
Imagine the following event: In the context of an ongoing performance of a ‘tune’ (a repertoire piece), I play <gesture x> and you play <gesture y>.
By saying ‘I play x’, I mean at least the following connections are simultaneously enacted: myself and my instrument, my self-instrument assemblage and ‘the tune’, my relation to my own histories of listening and practicing and previous gigs and earlier moments in this performance, all of which conspire to produce my affect attunement in that moment. What is produced through these manifold connections? Possibilities: new capacities for re-relating, new desire-trajectories.
At least one especially important disjunction is also enacted: my musical gesture. I make a melodic utterance, itself a product of my attunement. As I’ve described elsewhere, a played musical gesture might have a particular agency behind it, even something that we might colloquially call an intended ‘meaning’, but once released into the wild takes on its own agential force: it is free to connect in manifold ways with other participating bodies, including my own. This utterance folds back to newly constitute my own past; in other words, in the act of its production, while a flow is produced by desiring-machine couplings, a break also occurs, which as Holland describes ‘interrupts or suspends existing productive connections’, ‘registers their diverse possibilities’, and ‘multiplies the relations among them’. The new BwO that is enacted in this process is different in kind from the one that preexisted this particular disjunctive synthesis—not a quantitative difference-in-degree in which the BwO is altered in some measurable way, but what Holland glosses as a ‘tabula rasa on which objects of drives and instincts register so as to multiply and differentiate’.
This is important, because of course a conjunction is also enacted, in which the forces produced through connective couplings and their registration on the BwO fold back to be reabsorbed, to produce a change in my attunement, to newly prime me for the next constellation of collective-disjunctive-conjunctive relations, and on and on. That tabula rasa is like a clearing in which new subjective residue can accumulate. A forgetting, in one synthesis, a recording in another, a production in yet another, all operating concurrently.
All of this is multiplied when my interlocutor, ‘you’, comes into the picture. You also connect with instrument, tune, histories, etc., and you also enact a melodic utterance: the co-occurence of our specific gestures, each a product of manifold force-relations, is what defines the singular event that is now taking place. This all obviously gets very messy very quickly. Untenable as a method, it might seem, if we want to have anything concrete to say. But as John Law insists, we ought to embrace methodogical messiness and resist the urge to move out of it and the falsifications of material reality that occur when we do so.
This is only the briefest of beginnings, but I’d like to conclude by enumerating a few ideas about why this might matter beyond the insular world of music studies. There is the overtly celebrated collective nature of jazz: the unconscious is a product of social investments, and the particular ways in which human and more-than-human socialities unfold in jazz are rich with possibilities for better understanding how desiring-machines do their productive work. This relates to what I’ll call two micropolitical implications. First, as I suggested, how jazz contexts might function as case studies for mapping relation-implications in very complex but not infinitely complex contexts. And second, how multiple agents, human and otherwise, enact what jazz historian John Szwed has described as follows:
The esthetics of jazz demand that a musician play with complete originality, with an assertion of [their] own musical individuality…. At the same time jazz requires that musicians be able to merge their unique voices in the … collective improvisations of polyphony and heterophony. The implications … are profound and more than vaguely threatening, for no political system has yet been devised with social principles which reward maximal individualism within the framework of spontaneous egalitarian interaction.
The material presence of jazz has further implications. Extremely important is the heterogeneity of its musical and extramusical parameters and the especially rich ways they lend themselves to transversal impingements and unexpected, even aberrant couplings: this is something I work on in my research on musical interaction: a change in timbre might effect a microrhythmic displacement; a dynamic accent might afford a change in melodic direction. And then there is sound itself, as an especially diffuse medium, at once material and incorporeal, which I suggest functions as a particularly effective carrier of affective forces.