P h i l o s o p h y a n d t h e R o c k C o n c e r t
a short modulation on Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze and live music
written by
Dick Whyte
annotated by
Phylis Johnson
dedicated to
Dave Record
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1. The Riff: Hey Ho, Let’s Go!
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This is a short essay about Henri Bergson’s “philosophical categories” (1) and the modern rock music experience. Before I deal with the “rock,” I will deal with the “roll,” the philosophical turning, tumbling, and rolling, which influences this work. Firstly, what are “philosophical categories”? Strictly speaking, they are a series of terms which have been arranged to express some aspect of “being” in general, which are useful in any study, in any personal act of gathering whatever it is we call “knowledge.” I am not trying to imply that Bergson’s categories are the only way of gathering knowledge, but that they are one way (of many). Not only this, Bergson’s categories could be applied in another way to the same content. I do not which to set anything in stone, but only to roll some ideas around, and to “rock out” on the experiences they offer.
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2. The Verse: The Drum Rolls!
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George Hegel’s categories, perhaps the most well known of any philosophy, are 1) Thesis, 2) Anti-thesis, and 3) Synthesis. Philosophical categorisation creates “word equations,” or “concept machines,” which produce more concepts, more words, more experience. Hegel’s indicates that wherever there is a “thesis,” there will be a mental “antithesis.” If I see a cup (thesis), I can mentally propose the notion of no-cup (antithesis). These two form a sort of “feedback loop,” a rolling and tumbling, a turning and twisting, which eventually must collapse into a “synthesis,” into a third thing, which is a mixture of the original two (2). I find Hegel’s work can provoke a great deal of inventive or “artistic” thinking, and is best understood as a language-game for developing new theoretical ideas. Say I put a cup in front of you and say, “What is that?” Most people respond, “A cup.” Then I say, “That is not a cup.” What do you do? Reject the notion as annoying, or look for a synthesis: the word “cup” which you supplied as your answer is not the “cup,” it is a word which we agree to refer to cups with. The cup itself is just there. A Buddhist answer to “What is this?” would be to open my arms to the cup, to place ones hand on its surface. The cup is my experience of the cup: my tactile co-existence with it. This is an “experience” I would not have had, unless I applied this way of thinking (26).
But I have gone too far. Let us start with something more basic. A synthesis can be crudely illustrated with orange and lemonade drinks. We might say that “orange” is a thesis (the healthy) and “lemonade” is an antithesis (the unhealthy). In order to form a synthesis we mix orange and lemonade, and we have a little of both. Since it is often said that “Everything is healthy in the small doses,” the synthesis seems appropriate.
The trouble with a “synthesis” is that there is always a “diathesis” which comes with it, a disposition for one of the sides. We mix the orange-juice certainly, but mum always mixes it with a diathesis for orange-juice. When a child mixes it, they “undoubtedly” put in more lemonade, with diathesis for the sweet. The trouble with writing about the synthesis is that we tend to generalise, and fail to recognise our own implicit dispositions (contained in the word “undoubtedly”). There is not one synthesis but four possible relations: 1) Mum has diathesis for orange-juice, 2) Mum has diathesis for lemonade, 3) Child has diathesis for orange-juice, and 4) Child has diathesis for lemonade. Not only this but the diathesis can differ from day to day depending on their various moods. Along with this we should include three more categories of ambivalence, ambiguity, and amiability (3).
The trouble with philosophy is that it is easy to get off track. Philosophy is like a tear in the space/time of language: it produces more than it contains, and is always getting off the beaten path. I like this metaphor of the forest path, which is a favourite of Heidegger. Art-works, and concepts, are like forests, and experiences are like forests too. There are so many paths already laid out for us (genres, types, kinds), and there are the experiences which we find for ourselves as we leave the well-worn, diverging here or there from expectation, from the narrow confines of the striated forest-track. I do not wish to beat a new path, but simply wander a little off track, and return to the main party later.
In spite of all these problems Hegel’s dialectic can enable us to take vast periods of history and “re-cognise” the otherwise random occurrences of history. Take the study of authorship in film, for instance. This displays a clear Hegelian dialectic over time. First we have an absent author, a “thesis,” and then, with the work of the French New Wave critics, we had a present author, the “anti-thesis” (this was the appearance of authorship studies). These two were synthesised into “structuralist” authorship (in which the author was considered a useful “name” under which to group a selection of films; neither an actual present person, nor an absentee, but “excused”). This created a new “thesis,” for which there was another antithesis. Enter Roland Barthes and “Death of the Author,” in which the author (of any kind) died, and we had instead a weaving of patterns and signs, a semiotic interlacing of past, present (and future) sign-events. These two were synthesised in “post-structuralist” criticism which concentrates on the traces an author leaves behind in the text (which are not an “excused-author,” or the “author death,” but an “author-function,” a term used by Michel Foucault in his essay “What is an Author?”). This becomes a thesis, to which there will be another antithesis, another synthesis, and so on, and so forth, forming an “eternal return,” a phrase of Nietzsche’s I picked up from Deleuze (4). This can be likened to a “drum roll,” in that it continually returns to the same interval, a rhythm which is metronomic, and plodding, with a sense of the inevitable. A beaten path. But no person can play the “drum roll” perfectly for ever, eventually someone has to miss a beat, or change the time.
Even when we stick to the beaten path, what we will look at is individual to us, and particular to the way we are feeling, to our moods. This is Bergson’s greatest contribution to philosophy in my mind: he re-conceives “being” completely as “becoming,” in that he recognises that the “state” of things we experience is not static, not “one image” but something selected from the onslaught of sensation (what Bergson calls “data”). Bergson points out that we do not look at the whole of our vision, the whole field of experience, but choose from it, selecting certain things over others. He finds that there are three main selective modes. This can be extended to psychology in the sense that, perhaps, we might view the world dominantly in “one” way, and not know it. This selection, whether conscious, or unconscious, forms our outlook on the world. By knowing the different ways in which we do this, we can have the choice to look again, to see anew. When I talk to someone what do I choose to look at/think about: 1) I can look at their face, 2) I can drift off, thinking my own thoughts, or 3) I can look to something across the street. Each of these will dictate a different mode of “being” in that moment. Are we listening attentively, perceiving them? Are we otherwise preoccupied, turned inward? Or are we suddenly distracted by an action? This has an effect on the way people view us, and then subsequently treat us.
These are Bergson’s three categories: 1) perception, 2) affection, and 3) action. I came to understand these terms firstly by tackling Gilles Deleuze’s The Movement Image, and then reading Bergson’s Matter and Memory. Thankfully Bergson’s work is much easier to digest than Deleuze’s, but it is not as easily applied to aesthetics. It is Deleuze’s conception of Matter and Memory as it relates to the language of cinema experience which opens Bergson’s work onto art-theory proper. Bergson’s work is a theory of the image, and the image has three modalities (percept, affect and act). All art is an image. The rest is easy.
Bergson argues that there are 3 possible ways of extracting meaning, as thinking people. When I look at a person, for instance, there are three things I can see them engaged in: 1) “Perceiving,” watching something, 2) “Affection,” thinking of something, or 3) Doing some “action” which is dominating perception and affection. All of these revolve around our reading of the “face” as the primary sign. Bergson, and Deleuze, argue that we not only see faces as faces, but that when we look at objects we “faceify” them, in that we look at our image of the world as if it is “facing” us. Deleuze relates this to the way in which the construction of classical cinematic signs works (movement-images).
1) In the first place there is a “perception-image,” which is the image of characters looking at something. In a classical-fiction film the camera is invisible to the characters, and we watch it as if the camera was not there, as if we were looking straight into the film-world (called the diegesis). There are two perception-images: 1) the objective perception-image which shows characters looking, and 2) the subjective perception-image, which shows what the character sees, as if from their eyes (5). In both cases there is no “camera” there. This is equivalent to a cinematic form of classical literary narration, not unlike the Victorian novel. In the classical novel, like the classical film, the narrator (the writer holding the pen/cinematographer behind the camera) is “suspended,” and created as an “absence.” This is called “third-person narration,” and looks on the characters from a position not unlike that of “god’s eye,” in which we “suspend our disbelief” (the first tier of ‘belief’ being that of the story told by no-one, from no-where, the “third-eye” address).
2) Secondly there are “action-images” which dictate the tension between the various parts and the eventual conclusion of the film. Like the classical “equilibrium-disequilibrium-re/equilibrium” pattern, Deleuze’s action image accounts for the passage from the “situation,” to the “action” to the “restored-situation” (6). Take an “action-movie” (the primary example of a pure action-image): there is a situation (the normal world, the hero’s moral existence, equilibrium), an action (something goes wrong, a terrorist attack, a person is kidnapped, a building under siege, and the hero of the film being thrown into this action, into the disequilibrium) and a restoration of the initial situation (re-equilibrium) in which the hero saves the day. These “action-images” relate to the restoration of the “norm” for the characters, or, in the case of some films, no restoration of the “norm,” a modified-situation, a changed world (the difference between SAS, and SAS’).
3) Finally, there is the “affection-image,” or the “affect.” The affect is the close-up of the face, the face as it feels, and turns inward (7). Earlier I have placed this in the second position, but now I move it to its true place of thirdness. The affect gathers together the action and the perception into one thing: the affect. The inner world of the film is shown through a series of faces. In an action film there are the faces of baddies, and the faces of goodies. These faces show what the characters are thinking inside, rather seeing/doing on the outside. The affection-image is the space between seeing/doing, and is therefore not only a thirdness, but a one-and-a-halfness (between 1 and 2). It alternates between the two, a bifurcation point (8). There are two kinds of faces for Deleuze: faces which are thinking, and faces which are worried (9). A face can show, 1) qualities (wonder, realisation) or, 2) power (fear, control, surprise). The face in the action film oscillates between them: sometimes the character is trying to think of something (The face asks: “How can I solve this problem and save the day?” It is “wondering”), sometimes they are worried (The face asks: “Can I save the day before someone dies?” It can look “powerful,” or “fearful”).
In action-films we have a barrage of “power-faces” which carry with them traces of strength and judgement as it is distributed throughout the film. Shadows are also central to the construction of the semiotic-face (the face as cinematic language unit). The baddies face is drenched in shadows, just as the hero is, but only when they have learned knowledge which aligns them with the bad (a moral dilemma). For instance, in The Empire Strikes Back, when Luke Skywalker is about to find out his father is the Dark Lord Vader (creating a moral struggle) his face is cut in half with a thick black shadow. In film-noir (the cinematic equivalent of the detective novel) we see the culmination of the dark and shadowy affection-image. When the world becomes unseen (hidden in the shadows, a lack of perception-images) there is a constant ethical/moral struggle for the main character who must either jail the woman he has affection for, or act in some immoral fashion, in order to restore the “normal” morality of the world. Corruption is everywhere: so is the shadow (10). The shadow is certainly not anything natural in the film: it is placed there on purpose, in order to “sign” the information, a trace of the “author” left behind (11).
These three concepts (percept, affect, act) are so useful in analysing cinema, I feel, that they could be called a language, or more significantly, proof that the cinema has a genuine “language-system” (in the French, “langue,” rather than langage). But, it is not only the language of cinema. The three basic categories form one way of conceiving of a language of experience. These “categories” of Deleuze’s, borrowed from Bergson, not only conceptualise of cinema as a language, but all the arts, adding to them the potential for a universal, or common language of “movement.” This would be a sort of machine for creating languages of the various art forms. Deleuze starts by saying that all images begin as “movement-images” and “light-images” (the movement of something in reality, which the light captures and delivers to the eye). Since I will be talking only of sight today, I will retain his categories, but they could well be movement and “language” (or the Greek “logos,” in that all sights, sounds, smells, tastes and touches are a language unto themselves, which all together create the language of the interior world). A film, or any image, is moving, and light itself is re-presenting the image to us. Then we perceive the image.
Deleuze shows that the film (or art work) pre-selects our perception, acting as our perceiver. It selects if we see 1) a mid-shot (a character perceiving, or their perceptions), 1.5) the close-up, the face (emotions), or 2) the wide shot of the body in action (you can’t see a large action when you are framed in close). Hence classical film not only operates as a large-form percept-affect-action “machine” (third-person perception, power/quality faces, and restored-situations) but also as a small-form machine in which the character sees (percept), then thinks (affect), then does something (act), in every scene. These actions then have the potential to form a new perception, for another character, propelling the plot along (as in many soap opera’s which are a constant folding out of the movement-image, in a manner constantly rolling these three images around). In classical modes, all three images operate on a binary: 1) Percept = Objective/Subjective, 2) Affect = Power/Quality, and 3) Situation = Action/Situation). Though there are many more signs in Deleuze’s taxonomy of cinematic language, these are the only three I will approach today (12).
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3. The Chorus: The Guitar Rocks!
What does this have to do with rock-music and concerts? I spend a lot of time watching faces at rock concerts. One of the main things which I have interacted with over time, in terms of rock musicians, is their “faces.” I will always remember Slash’s face, the lead-guitarist from Guns ‘n’ Roses (one of my teenage favourites). The way he would leer, and yet sort of smile underneath it, showing me that the leer was only pretension, that it was only something he did for the “image,” for the “look.” Slash wasn’t dangerous to me (as the press seemed to want me to think) but sort of rebellious in a much smaller way. In Slash and Axl Rose, and Izzy Stradlin I saw through the “machine.” It was their tired, and fed up faces which let me into the fact that the glitter was nothing but grist, and that the rock ‘n’ roll dream they had always wanted was nothing but a sham.
It was in “affects” that I found myself surrounded, with posters of my favourite bands all over my wall (my high-school loves were Black Sabbath, Faith No More, Guns ‘n’ Roses, Metallica, Nirvana, Soundgarden and so on). With the music there were always faces which I looked at as I listened to the albums. Deleuze also writes of the manner in which the close-up can make an object into a “face,” for which the clock-face is the clearest illustration. However, he is not only talking of a literal “face,” but the way in which the “face” gathers together the various events of a “film,” and reflects on them. An affect/face thinks of the previous perceptions and situations in the film, gathering them all together suddenly in one look. When we see the close-up of a knife in a murder mystery (Deleuze’s example) it also asks questions, like the face (Where are we? Who will be killed?). And it speaks of eventual (virtual) actions to be made. In the space between the affect, and the eventual resolution of the action into a modified situation (of the death, or the capture of the killer) there is space for suspense, and fear for the audience, shown on their face.
In this way I think of the CD and record as a face, and the album covers as faces. I used to get them out and “read” them like you would a face, taking in all the various details of its contours, all the tiny little movements in the parts. The faces on these covers were gaunt faces, skull faces, afflicted, affectated and affected faces. The same goes for the video clips, which more or less resemble an extended series of affection-images of the musicians. When the GnR video-clip “Don’t Cry” came out, for instance, I noticed that a “face” was missing: where was Izzy Stradlin? At the end of the video one of the band held up a sign saying “Where’s Izzy?” with a smile on his face. I knew something was up. My face changed from enjoyment to concern. Not long after this I found out he was leaving GnR and forming his own band. He was always my favourite. It affected me. He seemed more real than the rest of them. Unlike Slash, who had the image but always let me know it was an image, and Axl who appeared to take the image too seriously, Izzy was never completely contained in the image. There was something about Izzy that destroyed “images.”
Thinking about this caused me to wonder whether or not Deleuze’s categories came into play in any other way? I remembered a Magnolia Electric Company gig I was at recently. I spent a lot of the time watching the lead singer and the guitarist, mostly because I couldn’t see the drummer (there was a large round pole in my way). People danced, but I was tired, and sat down in the back. Because the place was small, and there were only about 50 people there, I had a good view of the musicians faces. Because I go to a lot of small gigs focusing on mellow music, to be watched (rather than danced to) Deleuze’s analysis made a lot of sense to me. I found that, like Deleuze and Bergson’s analysis, the musician-face displayed three different modes, according to the triad of “percept-affect-act.”
1. The Percept-Face: When Jason Molina, the lead singer of Magnolia, stepped up to the microphone he would often open his eyes and look out at the audience. He would “perceive” us, and sometimes smile, or connect with us in some way with his facial expressions. As Deleuze writes, the affection-image is the realm of “expression,” and the percept-face is an expression of seeing you, making you feel “there” with the band, rather than “here” in the audience (or here with the band, once you are there). This moment is akin to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “intersubjective” experience. It is “here” in the look of the musicians faces to the audience, in the nod of the head, that we find the rock. Alternatively, the face can look at one of the other band members (in which we as the audience remain on the outside). This happens a lot in rock concerts: the two guitarists will get close together on the stage and say something, or make a facial expression you can’t see, and the other will smile to themselves, nod and drift back into concentrating on the song. This is the “objective percept-face” while the face that smiles at me in the audience is the “subjective.”
2. The Affect-Face: At other times he would close his eyes, or they would look upward, or cloud over, and he would become pure affect. In this state Molina displayed an interior emotion on the moon-like surface of his face (13). Turned upward it would catch the light, draped in round shadows, a constant waxing and waning of his moon-face, turning and twisting, no longer rocking but rolling.
3. The Action-Face: Finally there are moments when his face would turn in a different direction. When he would have to play something which might be difficult, or needed attention. When he was performing an action that was complex, he would twist his eyes and look to the guitar neck, and his hands. This is a face caught up in action. This face needs to keep focused on something to make sure that the rock can get to the roll, and back again. These moments were tense; as a musician I would feel a sudden sensation of worry. Once, the guitarist played a “wrong note.” His eyes were closed (an affect-face) and then suddenly they were open, from the affect-face to the action-face (a sudden impulse, as Deleuze and Bergson would put it). He adjusted the note, and then looked out to the crowd, and saw that no-one had noticed, smiled to himself, and then closed his eyes, drifting back into the affection-image, lost again in the music he was playing. This action-face happens when the musician needs to restore the “musical order” (the song as it should be) just as the action-image in cinema restores the “moral order” of the film’s world (the re-equilibrium, the way the world should be, according to the state/script/score).
It may sound like I didn’t listen to the music while I was there, but I don’t mean to say that this was all I thought about. Most of the time I drifted into pure affection myself, closing my eyes for periods, absorbed in the music. I went outside for a cigarette at one point, and listened to a song through the wall. Much of these thoughts came to me afterwards, when I was reading Deleuze’s The Movement Image. The categories seemed to bring back memories from concerts which I thought I had forgotten: faces and looks. I remember being at the GnR concert with my dad and uncle when I was 13. I was sitting in the stadium, and there were two giant screens on which I could watch the affection-images of the band on a live camera feed. It was on Waitangi Day (a New Zealand holiday) which also happened to be Axl Rose’s birthday. In the middle of the show the band brought out a cake for him, and we were treated to a special case of the affection image. Axl actually looked touched, and the screen gave us the chance to see it close-up, a true “movement-image.” This was something unique, which the audience got to take away with them, something not every (maybe any) audience got before or again. This created an affection-image which remains with me, unlike the others, which often all blur into one (all the affection-faces of Slash soloing are one “face,” none of them containing anything which differentiates them from the last).
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4. The Bridge: But I Just Wanna Rock Out?!
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Not only are there all these faces, but there is the body, and the way in which the body comes alive to music, to the feeling of musicality. For Deleuze, the affect can also become a “tactile space,” a fragmented rhythm, a body experience (14). When I put a CD on at home, I turn it up loud, I feel the hands of the musician. I mould my arms to theirs, acting as if I am playing the guitar for a moment (or any instrument). My movements are an act of imitating my hero’s hands and arms. It is a phantasy in which I imagine a guitar where there is none. I begin to “rock out” a little. Rock music is nothing if not tactile.
My body was organised to play guitar long before I ever learned to. Ever since I saw someone play one, I mimicked playing along. It doesn’t seem to matter if you have any intention of playing a guitar: rock music makes people “play along,” and imitate what they cannot do. It was in arranging my body to the music while I listened, miming the songs, and playing air-guitar that I rocked, rolled, and revelled for the first time.
But what of those moments in rock concerts when I just lose it, and “rock out,” not organising my senses, or perceptions at all. What happens when I no longer perceive the imaginary guitar, and just go nuts? I do this at home all the time. When I know everyone else is out I turn the music up really loud and dance. But I don’t dance really, I just thrash around to the music (often I listen to Metallica’s And Justice For All when I want to do this, a classic “thrash” metal album). When I do this I feel a pure form of energy, where I am nothing but a body, a body emptied of all those other thoughts, all those ways of arranging perceptions and affections I see. No longer am I perceiving faces, and no longer am I lost in my own affect. This is an action-image for me, the audience. In the action-audience-image all the previous categories vanish. This brings us to the edge of what Deleuze and Guattari call the “Body-without-Organs” (BwO) in A Thousand Plateaus (25).
The organisation of my body into a guitar “pose” as I listen is done to mimic the musician’s original pose in some way. I am not only feeling the music, I am cognitively imitating it with my body. When I sing along I am trying to hit the notes of the song: when I sing along to Metallica, I want to organise my throat the way James Hetfield did, I am becoming-Hetfield (to use D&G’s term). I am not just singing along, but singing to “become” them in the act of singing, to reproduce the “affect” of their voice. I am always thinking in terms of the “sensible” when I imitate, when I reproduce.
When I start to loosen the body, and empty it of making sense, then I begin to become the BwO, a body that is differently organised. This body is not organised to make sense of visual experience (like the affect-face which is always a question of sensible answers to sensible questions: to make sense of the face) but to become sensual experience itself, a body emptied in order to be filled with waves and folds of intensities. I think instantly of the way my body is always “folding” while I “thrash around,” arms and legs splayed in all directions. In order to stay in time with the music I continuously fold, always being in-between-folds, each action of the body smoothing the space of action, becoming a bodily sensation of space (rather than being “in” space). For Deleuze and Guattari folds, smooth spaces, vibrations, waves and intensities, all constitute the way in which one is becoming a BwO.
“Smooth space” is set against “striated space.” A “striate” is a “narrow, lengthwise mark, [a] stripe, channel, groove.” (24) The neck of the guitar is the “striated space,” a narrow length which has marks and grooves on it, which we groove with. “Grooving” is not “rocking out.” Grooving performs a cool, and refined action, in a limited space, of going from “one point to another… arranging a closed space for oneself” (the neck of the guitar). “Rocking out” is an action which exceeds the striated-space of the groove, in which the arms are no longer imitating a restricted movement along an imaginary guitar-neck. The “smooth-space” is defined by movements constantly arising in any place, with no predetermined organisation, “arraying oneself in an open space… maintaining the possibility of springing up at any point.” (15) When I start to “rock out” I create “smooth space.”
Deleuze and Guattari use the game of “Chess” (striate) and the Japanese game of “Go” (smooth) to illustrate this difference (16). In chess all the pieces have pre-determined moves, and they are arranged in a hierarchy of importance. In the rock concert when I idolise the affect, when I live to imitate a play on this neck and face, I am encoded in a hierarchy in which the musician is the focus of all perception, the head of the organisation. For Chess this is the “king,” and the music industry has their king of rock (Elvis), their king of pop (Michael Jackson), as well as their queen of rockabilly (Wanda Jackson) and their Prince (to name a few). These labels, and mug-shots (I actually have Elvis’s face on a mug) are used to sell the image, the “affect” of the musician. This is a striated, organised space of capitalist consumerism. As Deleuze and Guattari write, “Chess is a game of state, or of the court.” (17) It is in the courts that the faces of dead stars are striated in the closed space of capitalism.
The record companies are also called labels, what I would call “labellers.” They promote their music by labelling everything the “latest and greatest record,” the “newest such-and-such,” the “best since so-and-so.” The “face” of the star is used as a literal “label” and stuck onto anything which is saleable, much like the movie industry post Planet of the Apes and Star Wars. For me, 1900 – 2000 was the century of the affect, and Andy Warhol’s brightly painted faces were the “question” in between, reversing the modern dilemma of confusing affects with impulses (the “impulse-buy,” and the “affection-add”: only effective when confused). Warhol’s faces become pure “icon,” which is the realm of the painting, of the drawing, of the impression, of the imaginary (18). Warhol’s icon-faces become, for me, infra-red pictures of the face’s moon surface, and we, like astronauts, float along the smooth spaces, sending pictures back to earth. This is why Warhol and Bowie are so similar, and in a sense, Elton John too. We see only the smooth curves, only the light of the moon, and never feel the grains (19). I see the circle, and not the crater.
Deleuze and Guattari talk of the body as a series of machines. There is the mouth-machine, the foot-machine, the hand-machine, the heart-machine, and so on. Rather than thinking of the self as one (the organised body), the self can be multiple, and various (BwO). Each machine is a series of machines: the mouth is an eating machine, a kissing machine, a puking machine, and so on. When we experience art it can bring the body into contact with itself, to inspire the machines to do things which are not organised according to “useful” action (often “work” of some description). Here we plunge ourselves into “free-time,” into feeling. In music I become a tapping-machine, movement slowly taking over my whole body until I am pulsing with sound. The body becomes one huge tapping machine, and then the tapping begins to shake, to rattle, and to roll. As I begin to open the space wider and wider, my body folds and curves in the smooth space of dance.
As Deleuze and Guattari write, “the BwO is… full of gaiety, ecstasy and dance.” (20) Fed up with seeing the concert (perhaps I can’t even see), and leaving the worry of “What will people think of me if I rock out?” behind I enter the dance which is not a dance, a kind of dancing which is often called moshing, what I have called thrashing. “Is it really so sad and dangerous to be fed up with seeing with your eyes, breathing with your lungs… Why not walk on your head, sing with your sinuses, see through your skin.” (21) As William S. Burroughs sings/drawls, “It ain’t no sin, to take off your skin, and dance around in your bones.” (28) The body leaves behind its separation from the world and becomes one with the vibrations of the music, one with intensity. The Body-without-Organs, as Deleuze and Guattari write, “is made in such a way that it can be… populated only by intensities. Only intensities pass and circulate.” (22) I leave the face and the dreams of being a rock-star behind: the BwO “has nothing to do with phantasy.” (23) I do not arrange myself according to imitation, but perhaps feel the genuine intensity which the musician intended me to feel: the movement of my body as a pure wave of modulation.
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5. The Refrain: For Those About to Rock…
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This short work is nothing but a modulation on Bergson and Deleuze’s analysis of faces, as it relates to my phenomenological experience of rock concerts, and my experience of musical-faces in general. Phenomenology, and especially “existential phenomenology” (such as that practised by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Vivian Sobchack) concentrates on the body as it is “lived” and “embodied.” They are a huge influence on my thinking. But Merleau-Ponty and Sobchack’s work lacks a certain ideological dimension, which I find Deleuze and Guattari’s work offers, in terms of the bodies experience of art. The body is always being organised, and there are always ways in which bodies are re-organising, and challenging classically organised bodies. One only needs to think of Johnny Rotten, Sid Vicious, Iggy Pop and any number of other punk rock singers, to see the way in which we can be encouraged to organise ourselves differently from the “state.” All of these singers cut themselves on stage, becoming literal Bodies-without-Organs (Deleuze and Guattari specifically use the “masochist” body as an example). But what happens when this body is sold back to us, when the BwO is re-organised as it is becoming? How does it change the BwO when it is spectacular, and “staged” for others. Can we even call it a BwO? What happens when we find out that Iggy Pop doesn’t cut himself at home? That it was all an act, another phantasy? Have we, as D&G would say, “botched” the Body-without-Organs?
These are questions I wish to leave unanswered, while acknowledging their critical importance. So often philosophy collapses under the weight of its own judgements, of its own bias conclusions, of its reliance on absolute closure. In response, this essay is nothing but an opening, a prolegomena to the language which philosophy has developed over time to convert the “concert of experience” into poetry. This is nothing but a quick ditty, a pop song, a little phrase, an a-side, with many implications, many edges, many folds, which I hope provoke other minds to think of these questions as open to discussion.
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-Liner-Notes-
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(1) Presented in Bergson’s Matter and Memory (1896).
(2) This is a well known formula, often referred to as a “dialectic.” In a “dialectic” two concepts come into contact, like in a “dialogue,” or a “diathesis.”
(3) Hence there are two sets of two qualities (Mother/Child, and Orange-juice/Lemonade). The synthesis of “O/L” is determined by either M or C, meaning that we have a binary series of relations, each expressing that O/L = D(o/l) (every mixture of Orange and Lemonade has a Diathesis toward either O or L). But this separates into four possible relations, which are C (D=o/l), C (D = l/o), M (D = o/l) and M (D = l/o). Hegelianism is, at base, a reverse Kantianism, providing the ground for Kantian analysis. Once we have chosen a synthetic (a perception, an expression, a substance, a view), then we can return to the two qualities from which this idea was formed (a backward analysis). Once these are established we can create a Kantian synthesis in which there are always four possible outcomes. Kant, as with the above example, moves from “two sets of two qualities” (noumenon/phenomenon and space/time) to four synthetic intermixtures which are P (t/s), P (s/t), P (s/s) and P (t/t). These are the categories quantity (ts) , quality (st), relation (ss) and modality (tt). The “noumenon” is not the object of Kant’s study, he concentrates on the mixtures of space and time as phenomenon. All binary systems, once they cease to simply subdivide, produce four categories of experience. Hence we move from “one,” to “two,” to “four” (the phenomenological thought-machine). Though this formula is repeated throughout philosophy, because it is different each time, we do not often notice the pattern. Roman Jakobson is the only philosopher I have seen who directly applies this mathematical pattern when analysing language (the synthetic) into the code and the message, which then have four mixtures: CC, MM, MC and CM. It is also similar to the logic of the yin-yang symbol.
(4) In Difference and Repetition.
(5) Deleuze writes, “The perception [is] double, or rather had a double reference. It can be objective or subjective. But the difficulty lies in knowing how an objective perception-image and a subjective perception-image are presented in the cinema. What distinguishes them?” (MI, p71) Crudely, an objective perception-image can be defined as an image in classical-cinema which “remains external to [the] set,” in the third-person. A subjective-image is an optical ‘point-of-view’ in which we see the diegetic world from the perspective of a character “who forms part of that set.” (MI, p71)
(6) Deleuze, The Movement Image, p141-159.
(7) Deleuze, The Movement Image, p87-122. “The affection-image is the close-up, and the close-up is the face. Eisenstein suggested that the close-up was not merely one type of image among others, but gave an affective reading of the whole film. This is true of the affection-image: it is both a type of image and a component of all images.” (MI, p87)
(8) The difference between the “1.5 Affect” and the “3 Affect” is the difference between what Deleuze calls the movement, and the time-image. This view differs from Deleuze, who maintains that the affect is strictly “firstness.”
(9) “There are two sorts of questions you can put to a face depending on the circumstances: what are you thinking about [a quality]? Or, what is bothering you, what is the matter, what do you sense or feel [a power]?” (MI, p88)
(10) In his books on cinema Deleuze never addresses the ideological implication of the “language of cinema signs.” It is true that we use shadows to indicate “evil,” but why do we do this? Is this not a throwback to the racist notion that the Devil is the “dark” lord, a kind of “blackness” to be feared? I am not saying movies which set bad faces in the shadows are racist, of course not. I am only suggesting that our reliance on this as a standard, naturalised metaphor might bespeak of a continuing cultural problem with (mostly white) media codification of “darkness,” “blackness,” and “otherness.”
(11) Deleuze’s study of cinema is a synthesis of 1) Foucault (the traces of an author) and 2) Vivian Sobchack (the film is a self creating body sans author, an antithesis to Foucault’s authorship study) in a sense. However, it is important to point out that Sobchack had not written her work when Deleuze wrote his. The most striking feature of synthesis at the end of the twentieth-century (and the beginning of the twenty-first) is that they have started to arise in unusual orders, working backwards and in tangents, overlapping, superimposing and entangling. This makes sense, as Bergson’s work reversed Hegel, who reversed Kant, who reversed Aristotle, who reversed Plato, who reversed Socrates, and so on, and so forth. We are always in both a repetition machine, and a difference machine. We repeat with difference; we differently repeat. Regardless: we are always repeating, and we are always finding some way to differentiate between the repetitions. Think of genre in classical story telling: they all repeat the same story-mode, which can only end in 1) success, or 2) in failure (a binary system). But dressed in new clothes we perceive difference (I like this kind of film, and not this kind, even though they are in a way exactly the same film).
(12) Films can confuse all these categories, and create new kinds of images, which are not standard binary forms, but poetic inter-mixtures of the terms. Just as all poems phrase things differently from narrative fiction (unless it is a grand narrative-poem, or a poetic-novel, in which the two are intermixed, the diathesis of the synthesis) so there is a form of poetic film in which the phrasing of images is reversed, and made fresh. The poet is called upon to break with the use of clichés, to represent the world, and the language with which we come to experience the world, afresh. The first example is the “free-indirect-discourse” (FiD) category of the “perception-image.” FiD involves the confusion of the subjective and perception-images, for either the character, or the audience. An example of this is David Cronenberg’s Existenz in which, by the end of the film, as an audience, we are unable to tell if any of the film has happened in the “real” world, or if the film has happened entirely in the “game” world. It is possible to make a decision (if you want) but it would never be possible to absolutely rule out other possible solutions to the puzzle.
(13) Deleuze speaks of the “lunar spaces” of the “any-space-whatever,” (MI, p121) a special case of the affection image, the ‘affect qua affect’, a “faceffect.”
(14) The affection-image has the potential to shatter the face, to enter the fragmented spaces of the Any-Space-Whatever. As Deleuze writes, “It is the construction of a space, fragment by fragment, a space of tactile value… [which] dethron[es] the face.” (MI, p108)
(15) Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p389.
(16) D&G, A Thousand Plateaus, p389.
(17) D&G, A Thousand Plateaus, p389.
(18) Peirce developed a triad very similar to Bergson’s of 1) Index, 2) Icon, and 3) Symbol. The “index” is an image like a photograph, or a film. In both of these the image has an material link to its previous reality. In the drawing there is no material link, it has become the “icon,” and has only a resemblance. Letters and words, for Peirce, are neither an icon, nor an index, but is instead a “symbol,” which has no pictorial relation to reality.
(19) There are two ways of thinking of the moon: 1) From here on earth where it looks smooth, as if made of light, or 2) From on the moon itself, with the moon-dust in between your toes and between your fingers, in your hair. These form a crude description of the difference between Einstein’s “Relativity” (the smooth, open curves of light) and “Quantum Physics” (sub-atomic particles: the grainy, the gritty). Equally we can think of the Earth from up there (a smooth surface so far away) and down here (where it is lumpy). Neither of these positions can be synthesised: they must be maintained as “two.”
(20) D&G, A Thousand Plateaus, p167.
(21) D&G, A Thousand Plateaus, p167.
(22) D&G, A Thousand Plateaus, p169.
(23) D&G, A Thousand Plateaus, p169.
(24) H.C. Wyld, The Universal English Dictionary, p1198.
(25) “November 28, 1847: How Do You Make Yourself a Body Without Organs?” in D&G, A Thousand Plateaus, p165-184.
(26) Note: This is not only “Hegel’s” way of thinking, but a way. Hegel is the philosopher who wrote it most clearly, who spoke most loudly. Fichte, another German philosopher, actually wrote this equation earlier than Hegel, and Hegel himself references him, but this is usually ignored when the thought is transmitted in culture (much like the way in which William Burroughs is credited with “inventing” the cut-up, when he clearly states that Brion Gysin gave it to him as a present). But it is also anyone’s idea, had at any time. Past ideas should not lay claim to firstness (I was here first, it’s my idea) but form a vast web of knowledge which we can use at our whim, to take our thoughts further.
(27) William Burroughs on Tom Waits’ album The Black Rider.
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-Band-Members-
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Henri Bergson
Matter and Memory (1896: Zone Books, 1991)
Gilles Deleuze (* with Felix Guattari)
The Movement Image (Minnesota University Press, 1986)
The Time Image (1985: Athlone Press, 1989)
A Thousand Plateaus (1980: Continuum, 2004)*
Guns ‘n’ Roses
“Live in Auckland” (Mount Smart Stadium, 1993)
George Hegel
The Essential Writings (Harper Torchbooks, 1974)
Roman Jakobson
“Shifters, Verbal Categories and the Russian Verb” (1957), in Selected Writings II: Word and Language (Mouton, 1971)
Magnolia Electric Company
“Live in Wellington” (Bar Bodega, 2007)
Metallica
And Justice for All… (Elektra Records, 1988)
“Live in Auckland” (Mount Smart Supertop, 1995)
Nirvana
Nevermind (Geffen Records, 1991)
Vivian Sobchack
The Address of the Eye (Princeton University Press, 1992)
© Dick Whyte and Solar Metaphysics, 2007
