It's a pretty
well known fact that I'm a big fan of the philosophers, Deleuze
and Guattari. I wanted to send this out to the list 'cause I hope
it can inspire some of you to check out their work. Further info
on both of them can be found at Wikipedia (amongst many other
sources - but I like Wiki). - rc
Gilles Deleuze:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilles_Deleuze
Pierre Felix Guattari
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Félix_Guattari
The following is an interview with Carlo Simula for his
book
MILLESUONI. OMAGGIO A DELEUZE E GUATTARI
(Cronopio Edizioni)
Contributions will include Guy-Marc Hinant (Sub Rosa),
Philippe Franck (transcultures, le maubege), Bernhard Lang, Tim
Murphy, Achim Szepanski - and many others. I think it's an update
on some issues that have been percolating.
Smell the brew.
Paul,
Tunis, Tunisia 11/20/05
1) You've
often referred in your interviews to how much contemporary philosophy
has influenced your work. Foucault said "Un jour, peut-être,
le siècle sera deleuzien", how much and in which way
Deleuze and Guattari influenced you? And what you feel is interesting
in their work?
The idea of the "remix" is pretty trendy these days
- as usual people tend to "script" over the multi-cultural
links: the economics of "re-purposing," "outsourcing"
and above all, of living in an "experience economy"
- these are things that fuel African American culture, and it's
active dissemination in all of the diaspora of Afro-Modernity.
My take on Deleuze and Guattari is to apply a "logic of the
particular" to the concept of contemporary art. Basically
it's to say that software has undermined all of the categories
of previous production models, and in turn, molded the "computational
models" of how "cultural capital," as Pierre Bourdieu
coined it, mirrors various kinds of production models in a world
where "sampling" (mathematical and musical), has become
the global language of urban youth culture. Eduoard Glissant,
the Afro-Caribbean philosopher/linguist liked to call this "creolization"
- I like to call it "the remix." Philosophy is basically
a reflective activity. It always requires a surface to bounce
off of. We don't exist in a cultural vacuum.
Basically I look at Deleuze/Guattari as two figures who act as
translators of European philosophy and aesthetics into some kind
of exit for people who are concerned with humanism. Think: Frantz
Fanon wrote about this as a kind of update on Existentialism -
the "gaze" that defines the world today is "brown"
- but it is contained in a strange cadence. It's a visual rhythm
that extended the idea of philosophy into spectrums that have
yet to be mapped out. European philosophy has usually been totally
eurocentric for the last several centuries, and Deleuze and Guattari
are the two philosophers who have taken the idea of philosophy
past the limits of previous thinkers. Aristotle created the idea
of taxonomy for the West several thousand years ago. Deleuze and
Guattari have taught us to move beyond the categories he defined,
and have helped create tools for analyzing how complex out mediated
lives have become. I think of their concepts like the "Abstract
machine," the "body without organs," and the "immanent
plane" of action/realization as almost beyond the categories
of European philosophy. They are humanists who look for meaning
beyond the norms. That's where my music and their thoughts intersect.
Essentially, for me, music is a metaphor, a tool for reflection.
We need to think of music as information, not simply as rhythms,
but as codes for aesthetic translation between blurred categories
that have slowly become more and more obsolete. For me, the Dj
metaphor is about thinking around the concept of collage and its
place in the everyday world of information, computational modelling,
and conceptual art. All of them offer exits from the tired realms
of Euro-centric philosophy into some kind of pan humanism. That's
why I like Deleuze and Guattari's work. Other figures from the
European aesthetic realm like Ludwig Feuerbach (who promoted the
idea of "humanism" in his works of the mid 19th century),
Spinoza, and Giordano Bruno's exploration of Semiotics are also
influences, but the basic sense of "rhizomatic" thought
- thinking in meshworks, in nets that extend to other nets - it's
the driving force of my music and art. I think it's a great place
to start thinking about a philosophy of "the remix."
The "remix" is about certain kinds of polyphony - it's
about making multiple rhythms work together, synchronized, cut,
pasted, and collaged. That's the real "abstract machine"
- cross reference that with James Brown, think Garrett A. Morgan
(the African American inventor of the street light - the choreography
on every street corner of the global megalopolis), think Duke
Ellington with his "Afro-Eurasian Eclipse" jazz modernity,
think Albert Murray's essay "Spyglass Tree", think Detroit's
underground forerunners, stuff like Drexciya... the list goes
on. etc etc
2) I see many analogies between
your work and Deleuze and Guattari's, especially when they talk
about the "concept" as a way to define the world, defining
it as an "event." The production of a concept is therefore
the way philosophy builds the understanding of the real world.
It seems to me that in Rhythm Science you talk a lot about sampling
and the figure of the DJ as a manipulator of images, sounds, technologies
used to create, exactly, "concepts." What do you think
about it?
One of my favorite books of the last several years, African
Philosophy: An Anthology edited by Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze,
explores this kind of thing: how do we re-map the scripted territories
of Eurocentric thought to create new tools, new ways of thinking
about the multi-plex scenario any idealist will find at the end
of any investigation of philosophy in the 21st century. For Deleuze
and Guattari, and for me, the idea is always an "event"
- it presupposes a kind of frame of reference that closes one
action and starts another - they overlap and blur. For me "sampling"
is the same thing: thought event, sound event. Computers generate
algorithms that create tableaux of continuous uncertainty - the
screen is not a locked space. My work asks about how the networks
of creativity that we have inherited from the "bricks and
mortar" world of the 20th century, have imploded, evolved
and accelerated the "im-material" networks of the frequencies,
fiber optic networks, and mathematically driven world of the 21st
century. That's the real "dematerialization of the art object"
- it becomes patterns meshed, working between the spaces of pre-scripted
behavior. My book Rhythm Science looked at foundations
of contemporary thinking from the viewpoint of "how do we
make art out of patterns of culture?" It was meant to ask
more questions, not offer answers to contexts that are continually
changing. The landscape of contemporary digital media is undefined.
Anything that tells you it is "defined" is pretty much
making a false observation. The undefined defined? Heraclitus
said something like this years ago - dj culture tells us it has
become the way we organize information in a media ecology of unstable
subjectivity. My take on this is basically "pro-active"
- for me, music is all about creating tools for thinking - about
giving people systems to organize information outside of the European
categories of "rationality" and "universal subjectivity"
that drove the Enlightenment. That is what I learned from them.
Abstraction is the ultimate weapon. Multiculturalism is the ultimate
destabilizing category because, like sampling, it can absorb anything.
It defies limits, and posits "the subject" as an imploded
category - one that is, and always has been, basically a construct.
What other constructs - the nation state, the idea of the "self"
etc - are linked to this category that is slowly being pulled
apart by the centrifugal forces of digital media? Deleuze and
Guattari give us tools to think about this kind of stuff - they
posit these as fictions holding together other fictions. The mirror
is held up to another mirror, and we can see an infinite corridor
in either direction. I kind of want to break the mirror. Warhol's
"From A to B and Back Again" drifted as word dust through
the fiber optic cables and satellite transmissions of a world
of invisible meshworks. Stuff like that.
3) Among
other things the cd inside the book Rhythm Science is
a concentrated "improvisation" of the Subrosa archive,
a label which more than others promoted a certain genre of music
connected to art.. It reminded me, with the proper differences,
John Oswald's "Greyfolded", where he ends up building
a version of Grateful Dead's "Dark Star" from hundreds
of live versions. Thoughts?
The "fold" is about involution - it's about taking multiple
perspectives on an event - just like the "break" in
hip-hop, it's the break beat, the broken fragment of time recorded
on the sample that gives the "flow" of discourse its
meaning in this context. In dj culture, you create structure from
sequences. My style is the sound track to urban sprawl. It's my
way to look at compositional strategy in the era of digital media.
My favorite photographer, Etienne Jules Maret's "stop motion
photography" alludes to this kind of thing. The fragment
is greater than the interpretation of Deleuze and Guattari was
about, and if you look at John Cage's idea of "indeterminancy"
and it's relationship to turntables - the concept fits solidly.
Composers have been using the "fold" for many centuries
- the main issue is that they haven't had the tools to describe
the process. D&G gave us those tools - I guess I look more
to stuff like Grand Master Flash's "Adventures on the Wheels
of Steel," Steinski and Double D's "Hip-hop Lessons"
than John Oswald, but we're both driven by the same concept. The
idea of collage drives my mixes - that's the point. Contemporary
art - art that explores the economies of scale that software allows
us to explore - points to the idea of the "input-output"
schemata that Delueze and Guattari talked about with their concept
of the body without organs. I think it's a good analogy. I really
want to set music up as a platform - I want to make sure to remind
people, that yes, I'm an artist... It's really weird how much
people are set against the idea of existing in multiple contexts.
Mono-reality... something like that. It's boring. Again, the D
& G connection about multiple situations occurring simultaneously
- reflects the "post post modern" scenario - it's not
about "deconstruction," but reconstruction - of building
a new vision of how we can live and think in the info ecology
we've built for ourselves. And so on, and so on, and so on...
4) I find very interesting that
in "Cinema 1-Movement and image" Deleuze talks about
D.W.Griffith cinema, referring to image-action (the example he
refers to in particular is "Intolerance"), and Griffith's
articulation of the narration, that offers two examples of "civilization":
(black people/white people). It almost seemed to me that your
remix of "Birth of a nation", especially when played
live, originates, with the obvious differences, from Deleuze's
same critical ground... your opinion on that..
Civilization, as Freud pointed out so long ago, is about rules
and boundaries but it also inspires a kind of continuous renewal.
At heart, civilizations are control mechanisms - they're psychological
more than they're physical. They are meta-tools. For me, at the
moment, it seems like the West is in a serious crisis of meaning.
The Enlightenment went dark in the mass mechanized warfare of
the two world wars, and the shattered remains were burned in the
fire of Vietnam. Pretty much nothing remains. My music asks: how
do we create new forms of meaning from these hollow ideals? We've
moved far past Plato's Republic into a realm where the "civic"
aspects of culture as software are the new frames of reference.
Software (credit card debt, individual assigned names on line,
domain names, DNS routers, encryption, computer aided design that
builds airplanes, routes electricity, guides DNA analysis etc
etc there's alot more but you get the point) regulates individual
behavior - both on and off line - in the post industrialized world.
Software for thinking: it's an invisibly coercive concept. I like
Deleuze's take on "Intolerance" but you have to remember
that film acts as a crucial myth device for a world based on the
consumption of images. I think that we need to analyze film from
the viewpoint of not only what the Situationists called "psycho-geography"
- a place that posits movement between radically different environments
as a causal principle in the way that we organize information,
but what Deleuze and Guattari posit as "deterritorialization"
is essentially a kind of nomadic response to media overload -
finding ways through the information data-cloud. Griffith was
essentially a propagandist for state repression - he created "cut-up"
cinema as a tool to portray multiple situations - but exactly
for the opposite of what Deleuze and Guattari would think about.
He used it to lock down perception. They use it to open things
up. Juxtapose the two, and you can see why two radically different
thinkers like Sergei Eisenstein and Guy Debord liked to think
of Griffith as the essence of American cinema. That's the dj situation
- origin, and destination blur: they become loops, cycles, patterns.
The way to explore them is through the filter of woven meaning.
Black culture has been the world's "subconscious" for
most of the last several centuries - it has been the operating
system of a culture that refuses to realize that its ideals have
died long ago. The threads of the fabric of contemporary 21st
century culture, the media landscape of filaments, systems, fiber
optic cables, satellite transmissions, and so on - these are all
rhizomatic. They are relational architectures - the move in synchronization.
The meshwork needs to be polyphonic. The gears move in different
cadences, but they create movement. They need to be pulled apart
so that we can break the loops holding the past and present together
so that the future can leak through. Perhaps this is where we
break with the old situation of "black" "white"
- that stuff is really dumb any way. It's all a lot more complex
than that dualism. This is the new "operating system"
I envisage when I remixed "Birth of a Nation" - the
collapse of Wagner, the collapse of the Western scripts of linear
progress, the renewal of a world where repetition is a kind of
homage to the future by respecting the past.
Paul D. Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky that Subliminal
Kid
Tunis, Tunisia - 11/20/05