David Rothenberg, a philosophy professor and Jazz musician, has been improvising with nonhuman animals for years, among his playing partners are birds and whales, known to be territorial animals. As Deleuze and Guattari propose that the origin of art is precisely the territorialising animal and more a function of nature than a specifically human cultural achievement, their concept of territory and rhythm offers a non-anthropocentric way of looking at these encounters. Rothenberg’s sonic experiments in resonance and interspecies interaction do not (...) rely on language, thus I argue that the human and the nonhuman animals form a temporary joint territory via sonic rhythms and engage in a mutual becoming by forming a rhizome. His sound thinking practice thus also helps in decentralising further anthropocentric models of music and art. (shrink)

The score of Piece Four of Sylvano Bussotti's Five Piano Pieces for David Tudor is the most important image in A Thousand Plateaus. It serves as a prefatory image not only to the Rhizome plateau, but also to the work as a whole. It functions as the book's musical score, guiding readers in their performance of the text. Embracing John Cage's graphism and aleatory practices, Bussotti created his own ‘aserial’ new music, one that celebrated passion and Bussotti's open homosexuality. The (...) visual elements of Piece Four include a deterritorialisation of the standard piano score, a diagram of the composition's abstract machine, and a drawing that Bussotti had produced ten years before writing Five Piano Pieces for David Tudor. The drawing itself is a rhizomic artwork, with details that echo visual motifs throughout A Thousand Plateaus. The superimposition of the drawing on the deterritorialised framework of the standard piano score conjoins the visible and the audible, faciality and the refrain, in a single artefact. (shrink)

ArgumentThis paper argues for the viability of a different philosophical point of view concerning classical Greek geometry. It reviews Reviel Netz's interpretation of classical Greek geometry and offers a Deleuzian, post-structural alternative. Deleuze's notion of haptic vision is imported from its art history context to propose an analysis of Greek geometric practices that serves as counterpoint to their linear modular cognitive narration by Netz. Our interpretation highlights the relation between embodied practices, noisy material constraints, and operational codes. Furthermore, it sheds (...) some new light on the distinctness and clarity of Greek mathematical conceptual divisions. (shrink)

Plural expressions of ‘belonging’ in postcolonial and multicultural societies give particular emphasis to a politics of cultural recognition. Within nations, diverse communities call for acknowledgement of their aspirations, for fair representation in public life and for protection of the distinctive cultural practices and beliefs that define and help to sustain minoritarian identities. Recognition is also important for group self-concept and cohesion, and so plays a vital role in the creation of stable platforms for political resistance. This essay explores Deleuze and (...) Guattari's concept of ‘faciality’ and their implied critique of the politics of recognition. I argue that their rejection of the ‘politics of the face’ does not simply dismiss or disregard the pluralist imperatives of the just recognition that is required for postcolonialism. In fact, their preference for ‘dismantling the face’ provides a perspective that can be useful in assisting efforts to rethink recognition in terms adequate to forms of pluralist political engagement and non-imperial forms of subjectivity and sociality. (shrink)

Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus traces the life of the composer Adrian Leverkühn, whose career culminates in the compositions Apocalipsis cum figuris and The Lamentation of Doctor Faustus. Mann treats Apocalipsis as the endpoint of a dangerous modernism allied to fascism, and The Lamentation as its partial antidote. From Deleuze and Guattari's perspective, however, Apocalipsis is a positive musical becoming-other and The Lamentation a regression. Crucial to the contrasting interpretations of Apocalipsis are two very different conceptions of modernity and fascism, that (...) of Deleuze and Guattari providing a means of valorising becoming as a mode of aesthetic and political invention and redefining modernism and fascism. (shrink)

In the plateau November 20, 1923: Postulates of linguistics, Deleuze and Guattari subvert the traditional confrontation between language and music, refusing to look at the latter for the constants that are usually thought to define the first and recognizing in both systems a regime of continuous variation. An example of this regime is Luciano Berio’s Visage, in which «despite what Berio himself says, it is less a matter of using pseudo constants to produce a simulacrum of language or a metaphor (...) for the voice than of attaining that secret neuter language without constants […].» This use of Berio against Berio himself is probably due to the declaration contained in Visage : «When I was composing Visage what attracted me […] was research intended as a way to expand the chances of bringing nearer musical and acoustic processes, and as a means to find musical equivalents of linguistic articulations.» Despite the apparent contradiction, D&G and Berio agree that music is not a form of sui generis language, nor, on the contrary, an expressive form without any relation to language, but rather a deterritorialization of the voice that produces a form of varied repetition of language, now devoid of meaning. (shrink)

In this paper I trace pictorial acts that move beyond figuration and narration, particularly focusing on Gwen John's portraits of women and girls, the work of her maturity as an artist. In doing this I make connections between John's and Cézanne's letters about their painting techniques and direction. The analysis draws on Deleuze and Guattari's approaches to the work of art. I discuss in particular the concept of faciality in the Thousand Plateaus and the problem of painting forces in Deleuze's (...) work on Bacon, The Logic of Sensation. My argument is that an analysis that goes beyond phenomenology and semiotics opens new ways of seeing and appreciating a modernist woman artist's paintings, and sheds new light on the way her art allows the female figure to emerge as a woman-becoming-imperceptible within a patriarchal regime of signs. (shrink)

Animating Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological idea of the body as a pre-reflective organizing principle in perception, consciousness and language has become a productive and popular endeavor within philosophy of mind during the last two decades. In this context Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions of an embodied mind has played a central role in the attempts to naturalize phenomenological insights in relation to cognitive science and neuropsychological research. In this dialogue the central role of art and aesthetics in phenomenology has been neglected or at best (...) treated as a peripheral phenomenon. In this article I argue that the failure to place art and aesthetics at the center of thought within phenomenology leads to a neglect of the expressive primacy of the body in movement. In the current naturalization of phenomenology the questions related to expressive movement are often consigned to the notions of motor intentionality or gesture. However, in his book How the Body Shapes the Mind the philosopher Shaun Gallagher interestingly concludes, based on experimental results, that bodily movements of gesture cannot be accounted for by the phenomenologically adapted notions of ‘body image’ and ‘body schema’. Symptomatically, Gallagher ends his chapter on bodily gesture with a section title asking the relevant question that remains unanswered within a phenomenology of mind: Expressive movement from the beginning? The search for an answer to this question points, in my view, to the possibility of a more radical understanding of the embodied mind based on the primacy of expressive experimentation rather than representational experience, which makes the question of art and aesthetics a core issue. Following the image of thought in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze I argue that art, as the production of sensation through experimentation, presents us with a mode of thinking that accounts for expressive bodily movement as a constitutive force in subjective thought and experience. (shrink)

Ever since Lessing’s 1776 “Laocoön: An Essay upon the Limits of Poetry and Painting” aestheticians have been debating the essential differences between the temporal and the visual arts. Pace Lessing and his twentieth-century philosophical descendants, this essay explores the idea that the musical style cultivated by the American composer Elliott Carter in the years following World War II and the “action paintings” produced ca. 1947–53 by his compatriot Jackson Pollock in fact have quite a bit in common. The commonality, the (...) essay argues, is not so much anything contained in the works themselves as something perceived – perhaps even viscerally felt – by persons who experience the paintings and the musical compositions. Although their musical and painterly efforts are in most ways as different as night and day, both Carter and Pollock managed in their postwar works – perhaps uniquely – to create the potent illusion of multiple times that seem to pass at the same time. (shrink)

This article offers a sonic reading of Gilles Deleuze’s political philosophy. It argues that Deleuze adopts a sonic-musical vocabulary to account for the affective and corporeal dimensions of politics or the ways that bodies and nonconscious forces shape political and epistemological experience. Suggesting that sonic expressions operate on both the musical and the linguistic register and inflect bodies before being consciously recognized, the article thus explores how the sound flows involved in political assemblages also find entrance into philosophical concepts. To (...) make this argument, the article traces several sonic figures – most prominently refrain, rhythm, and resonance – throughout Deleuze’s _oeuvre_ and puts those into conversation with sound studies scholarship. With this, the article makes two wider contributions. First, it traces connections between Deleuze’s early philosophical works and his later more overtly political collaborations with Guattari by way of sound to establish a notion of the political as an aesthetic-ecological field composed with and beyond human activity. Second, the article outlines parameters of a sonic political philosophy centered on affective involvement, embodied listening, and experimental thinking, thus also articulating the relevance of sound studies scholarship for political theory and Deleuzian philosophy. (shrink)

In many ways, the 20th Century can be regarded as art’s attempts to escape the “tyranny of meter”. Is there a way to think about the rhythm otherwise? Maybe the answer to this all-too-human tyranny of the repetition of the same is something inhuman – in|human rhythms. With the examples of works by John Luther Adams, David Dunn, and Richard Reed Parry, this essay tries to show how with the idea of the human becoming a geological force itself, art has (...) the responsibility to create an awareness of how we live not only in the world, but also are part of that world. A music that ‘performs’ these ‘cosmic dimensions’ of the interdependence of human and nonhuman, by focusing on the in|human of the concept ‘human’ might also teach us something in regard to artistic form – these rhythmic ‘relations of velocity’ ultimately reveal rhythm as the in|human nonlinear pulsation of ‘a life.’. (shrink)

Šiame straipsnyje pasitelkiant refreno konceptą siekiama struktūruoti pagrindinius Gilles’io Deleuze’o ir Félixo Guattari muzikos teorijos aspektus. Straipsnyje refrenas bus siejamas su teritorine aplinka, ir pagal skirtingus kosmoso įveikos būdus bus išskirtos trys refreno sudėtinės dalys. Keliami klausimai: Kodėl teritorijos negalima pavaizduoti žemėlapyje? Kas sieja ritmą ir teritoriją? Ritmą ir refreną? Kodėl refrenas yra savarankiškas teritorijos išraiškos judesys? Kaip atsiranda neretrogradinis ritmas? Kada ir kodėl metras tampa nereikalingas? Kokias metamorfozes pereina teritorinis refrenas? Kuo skiriasi intraasambliažo ir infraasambliažo judėjimai? Kaip siejasi refrenas (...) su destratifikacine įstrižaine? (shrink)

The rise of the sitar from a limited accompaniment instrument used in the regional courts of Northern India to an internationally recognized cultural icon underscores its importance both as an instrument and a cultural symbol—the sitar mirrors India’s social complexity. This story encapsulates the social, political and economic trauma resulting from the dismantling of Mughal empire to the partition of Pakistan, reflecting contesting social narratives and Hindu/Muslim cultural heritages through the distinctive musical styles modern India. A musical instrument and material (...) object of contested origins, the sitar extends from wood, gourd, wire, and ivory into complex social and cultural networks. I argue that the sitar, as object, cannot be reduced to either an empirical or phenomenological entity; it is a space of potentiality, the actualization of a virtual object. I examine the sitar as both byproduct and narrative, demonstrating how it defies attempts to limit its constantly rupturing borders with imposed cognitive frames, and how materiality and philosophical systems can inform ethnographic practice. (shrink)

This paper tests the aesthetic theory presented in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation against the Foucauldian Turn in art in the 1980s and Damien Hirst's early artworks, in order to ask if the concepts taken from the more general aesthetics to be found in A Thousand Plateaus and What is Philosophy? are better suited to an understanding of contemporary art, before returning to the question of whether there is something truly significant at work in this folie à deux between (...) painter and philosopher. (shrink)

Ever since the time of Hegel, there has been a growing philosophization of art in which artists increasingly make works where visual/formal concerns are supplanted by philosophical questions concerning the definition of art itself. At the same time, however, an equally vociferous defence of art against its subsumption by philosophy has been made by theorists such as Nietzsche, Sontag and Barthes who have sought to rescue the sensuous immediacy of art from the abstractness of philosophical thought by advocating a more (...) spontaneous and less rationalistic response to works of art. While it may seem paradoxical that two such diametrically opposing conceptualizations of the relation between art and philosophy should coexist, it is argued that they are in fact two sides of the one coin and reflect the fundamentally contradictory nature of the project of art in modernity. Furthermore, both conceptualizations are one-sided insofar as they fail to grasp the essentially antinomous nature of the relationship between the two in which art is inescapably dependent upon philosophy at the same time as it is irreducible to it. (shrink)

This article divides into two roughly equal parts, both of which aim to address the act rather than the art of drawing. The second part focuses on a theoretical discussion of drawing. The first bears on a number of themes including the role of drawing in colonial history, drawing and data collection, and drawing and memory. It begins by describing an episode that unfolded as an encounter between two worlds, and two ages—an episode whose meaning and effects are still controversial (...) today. (shrink)