RHIZOMES, DIFFERENCE & REPETITION

MUSIC IN PHASE SPACE 43:

Part 3 DELEUZE AND MUSIC

Deleuze takes a closer look at history and examines how we thought about things in terms of what he sees as static, simplistic notions, and he tries to offer a different perspective from the traditional methods we think of ontology or politics. The definition of’ rhizome’ by Deleuze and Guattari stems from its etymological sense, where’ rhizo’ means “combination of shapes” and the biological word’ rhizome’ describes a plant type that can spread through its tuber-like root system and develop new plants.

Rhizomes have no hierarchical order in their networks as opposed to descending evolutionary classification models. Rather, Deleuzian rhizomatic thinking acts as an

open-ended efficient structure in which random associations and interactions drive, sidetrack, and abstract component relationships.

So, a rhizome is an extremely chaotic subterranean plant stem, not a root. It follows, of course, that roots system networks are formed … and then these random root offshoots can often connect one root network to another in bizarre ways at times.With what the mathematician calls ‘ n-1 dimensions, the rhizome contains horizontal and smooth representations of the natural world.

‘ It is always a multiplicity; it has no genealogy; it can be drawn from different contexts including Freudian psychoanalysis.

Deleuze and Guattari derive some of their ideas on rhizomes from Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind in which biology and information theory are conjoined. Bateson argues that a person is not limited to her or his visible body. The brain shoots electrons traveling through circuits. The person interacts and reconnects with other people, animals and the environment through the transmission of differences.

There is no form or core in a rhizome. Models are both in construction and collapse. In a rhizome, any point, connecting to any other point, may act as a beginning or end.

The verb “to be” is dictated by an arborescent thought process. Rhizomatic thinking works with the “and” conjunction:

‘ Rhizome ‘ explains the links that exist between distant things, places and people; the mysterious chains of events that link people together: the sensation of ‘ six degrees of separation, ‘ the sense of ‘ being here before ‘.

Every part of a rhizome can be linked to another component, providing an atmosphere with no distinctive end or entry point.

SYSTEMS OF KNOWLEDGE: THE TREE

As we formulate information structures, we always follow a pattern that has dominated much of history in Western thought: The Tree. The tree is a plant having a a single usually elongate main stem generally with few or no branches on its lower part, ordinarily growing to a considerable height, and usually developing branches at some distance from the ground.

Now, a tree it’s rooted in one place. It doesn’t move. There are clear demarcation lines between the different parts. The roots are giving way to the trunk, the trunk is giving way to the branches, the branches are giving way to the leaves. This type of awareness D & G call arborescent (or “tree-like”).

The problem with that is that, a deeply rooted structure is incapable of movement. So how do we account with well-defined parts that make up it and perform various roles, such as the person, the government, the economy, laws these things all work together and play their part within a framework?

Hierarchies are replaced by the rhizome which consists of one element’ and’ another by virtue of addition. The rhizome lives in an infinite space and defies binaries or points which would be used to assign locations in large space. In a world that builds finite games, Deleuze argues that such structures/finite games constrain creativity and position things and people into regulatory orders.

The rhizome is a much more accurate metaphor when it comes to the relation between thought, ideas and movements. Where is the center? There’s not one, to Deleuze, just as there’s no beginning, middle and end to a systems of ideas … just people get tunnel vision on a little section of the wall and then make a case why they’ve found out the whole wall. This is the mistake of the philosophers of the last two thousand years. When somebody creates a hierarchical system of ideas we just have a little section of the elephant masquerading as the whole elephant.

It is not a single growth line, but a lot of different stories at very different rates progressing and regressing. Deleuze’s view of the world can get us out of philosophy of this linear way of thinking. The aim is to create a pluralism of modes of thought, not a simplistic confrontation.

Rhizomatic formations can serve to overcome, overturn and transform structures of rigid, fixed or binary thought and judgement — the rhizome is ‘anti-genealogy’.

Rhizomes are everywhere, not just in human ideas. It is said that the nervous system is a rhizome, an internet or a network. Ant colonies, rat burrows, termite nests, vast habitats, human societies, nervous systems, city architecture, people’s actions within the city, books are rhizomes, connected to other books, videos. Deleuze and Guattari see the promise of rhizomatic thought in Bateson’s research.

But just to demonstrate how difficult it is to nail Deleuze down. In spite of all this rhizome talk, he still has no issue at all with the tree.

Deleuze and Guattari write about a’ becoming-radio’ or’ becoming-television’ that can give rise to good or bad connections; constructive or destructive. The way they are being captured by capitalism and its multifarious redundancies makes them too often become ends in and for themselves, in a sphere of what Deleuze calls a generalized ‘techno-narcissism’.

DIFFERENCE AND REPETITION

Repetition; To Repeat is to begin again

The rhizome is subject to the principles of diversity and difference through repetition, which Deleuze discussed in his books Nietzsche and Philosophy and Difference and Repetition. Deleuze accepts the idea of eternal return as the constitution of things through repeated elements (existing bodies, modes of thought) which form a ‘ synthesis ‘ of distinction through the repetition of elements.

“What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more’ … and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence — even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself.

Nietzsche

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Nietzsche talks about the eternal recurrence through the voice of a group of animals that are yelling at and taunting Zarathustra.

“Behold, we know what you teach: that all things recur eternally, and we ourselves too; and that we have already existed an eternal number of times, and all things with us. . . .I come again, with this sun, with this earth, with this eagle, with this serpent –not to a new life or a better life or a similar life: I come back eternally to this same self same life . . .”

All things recur eternally. The significance of this change is Deleuze’s interpretation of Nietzsche about the difference of being vs becoming. Traditionally the category of “being” has always referred to things within our perception of reality that are constant that act as a solid foundation, things that aren’t going to change. Now this concept of “being” is always contrasted with a concept that philosophers have called “becoming”…which are all the things about existence that are constantly changing, or in flux.

How do you generate repetition?

Deleuze turns his back on a teleological conception of repetition and alternatively, maintains that the foundations of the Nietzsche cycle are much more complex than that: the return is an aggressive reinforcement that intensifies as it comes back.

He was not interested in the whole platonist concept of repeating, in order to produce copies. Deleuze refuses to look for an original point from which repetition will repeat itself cyclically. For Deleuze this approach is deeply flawed because it subsumes the creative nature of difference.

“If the world had a goal, it must have been reached. If there were for it some unintended final state, this also must have been reached. If it were capable of pausing and becoming fixed, of ‘being,’ if in the whole course of its becoming it possessed even for a moment this capability of ‘being,’ then all becoming would long since have come to an end . . .”

Nietsche

Deleuze says

Repetition is created by difference, not mimesis. It’s an ungrounding mechanism that avoids transforming into an inert replication system.

It compares with the majority of Western philosophy tradition, Deleuze’s entire philosophy is based on the primary importance it places on constant variation. That is to say,

difference is continuous variation.

Perhaps the fundamental point comes in connection to the theme of difference-in-itself. Rather than seeing difference as a difference between two things, difference must be thought of as the continual movement of self-differing, like the continual variation of a sound rising and lowering in pitch without stopping at notes in a scale.

The concept of ‘repetition’, encompasses a variety of other concepts such as ‘difference’, ‘differentiation’, ‘deterritorialisation’, and ‘becoming’. To begin with, it should be noted that for Deleuze, repetition is not a matter of the same thing occurring over and over again.

To repeat is to begin again; to affirm the power of the new and the unforeseeable. In so far as life itself is described as a dynamic and active force of repetition producing difference,

DIFFERENCE

Deleuze proposes (citing Leibniz) that difference is better understood through the use of dx, the differential. A derivative, dy/dx, determines the structure of a curve while nonetheless existing just outside the curve itself; that is, by describing a virtual tangent.

Deleuze encourages us to think of in terms of ‘becoming’. Forces incorporate difference as they repeat giving rise to mutation. Repetition is productive process that produces variation in and through each repetition. Repetition is thus better understood in terms of exploration and experimentation; it allows for the emergence of new perspectives, results, and expressions.

that this is the ‘power of beginning and beginning again’

(D 1994: 136).

What is being repeated?

First, it is important to note that repetition is not unidirectional, there is no object of repetition, no ultimate goal to which it can be said to guide everything that repeats.

What therefore repeats is not models, styles or identities, but the full force of difference in and of itself, those pre-individual singularities that radically optimize difference on an immanent plane.

Becoming is so to speak what is being repeated. Being, identity, any static system of thought, these are just attempts by people to grow roots in the ground and reduce the rootless, complexity of the rhizome to a hierarchical simplicity. For Deleuze, the truth is that identity isn’t just an easy concept and talking about identity that just leads to problems when we try to impose these old ideas of the enlightenment era on constructing the world in which we live.

What Deleuze takes from this reading of Nietzsche is that he thinks identity is a derivative of difference, not the other way around. The appearance of being, or what we’ve mistaken as constants of the universe, is only possible to categorize as a result of us seeing what is truly fundamental and what is really fundamental is the constant process of becoming.

This is a far cry from Sigmund Freud who suggested that we are compulsively repeating the past, where all of our repressed subconscious material drives us to replay the past in all its discomfort and pain. In reality, psychoanalysis restricts repetition to expression, and what therapy is meant to do is to fully stop the process along with the illnesses it causes.

On the other hand, Deleuze urges us to repeat as he sees in it the potential of reinvention, i.e. repetition dissolves personalities as it transforms them, producing something unrecognizable and efficient. That’s why he maintains repetition is a positive transitional force.

REPETITION AND MUSIC

Complex repetition has a multi-faceted relationship with time, a fact that influences how we conceive of rhythmic repetition in music. In this respect, Messiaen and Boulez strongly influenced the theories of Deleuze.

Deleuze takes up this distinction, relating it to the Stoic concept of time, whereby time consists of two modes: Chronos, the time of ordered and successive moments, as found in music that includes normal meters; and Aion, the time of the Universe which pre-exists our numerical “clock-like” order of time-this is the free-floating time beyond the amounts of metric division.

In Messiaen’s case, Deleuze shares with him the idea that rhythmic music in fact rejects simple numerical repetition; instead, it puts rhythm in a constant state of variation, producing unequal length chains. To Boulez, the comparison between what he terms “pulsed time” and “non-pulsed time” brings out this distinction.

Conceiving time through this opposition has its origins in Classical Antiquity, whereby Greek philosophers may talk of the period before there was time. Deleuze saw that both Messiaen and Boulez wrote music involving Aion’s time, or non-pulsed time:

VARIATION

Deleuze deploys the idea of variation to focus on what may be his most basic theme, namely that life is not solely characterized by continuity, but rather by a constant sense of motion and transition. That is, it is becoming. Therefore, the units and structures we find in life are the result of this fundamental movement being organized, and not the other way around.

Deleuze offers a number of examples for the concept of ‘variation’ in his work, one of which is music. Music is traditionally understood on the basis of scales that are fixed moments of pitch extracted from the whole range of frequencies. In western music, there is also the concept of the octave that divides sound up into repeatable scalar units. For Deleuze, we must consider these structures to be secondary in relation to the movement of sound itself, which has no intrinsic notes or scales.

Essentially,

there is only the continuous pitch variation, a simple, identity-free movement of difference.

Rather, like the use of words, depending on the context of their use, often changes, Deleuze and Guattari identify this as the inherent language variation in A Thousand Plateaus. The fact that language use is not static but dynamic is the very essence of language itself.

BECOMING

The fact that a man wants to be a guitar player depends entirely on his open-ended nature as a machine seeking connections, and then on the connections that he sought to make as that machine. Note also the fact that the only thing that will decide if in five years this guy will still be a guitar player is ALSO completely dependent on the connections he makes.

Should he watch the movie that inspired Django Reinhardt to be the greatest guitar player ever? Will there be a local punk band asking him to play with them every week. When he enters the music store and brings up casually how he was playing guitar does the woman behind the counter seem to be more interested in him?

The point is: there is not a static pre-planned identity that determines that this guy is a guitar player, only the connections made when interacting with a world that is constantly growing, unfolding and moving … and this SAME dynamic applies when it comes to all other aspects of a person’s identity … whether it’s a a city being organized and planned, or a person in a music store.

So often people find themselves in the trap of just conforming to their parents ‘ identities. Or make the best impression of a character they like on a television show. And if they were playing the guitar just copying the way guitar players played the guitar before them… just parroting the people who came before you with the same notes, the same scales, the same riffs and transitions… what happens when you live your life in the same comfortable, pre-planned way so many people play music?

What happens is: your life becomes a rhizome that has been blocked. It becomes impossible to have a random root shoot off and make a new, exciting connections to another network. It becomes impossible to play new music with your life. You become a tree, rooted in one place, limited to the same riffs and transitions for the rest of your life that you can not see new possibilities.

Similarly, in relation to transcendence, the whole past of philosophy has tried to explain ontology by hyper-focusing on a small tree-sized rhizome section, and then spend the rest of their lives looking at things from their narrow, one-dimensional, hierarchical view of the world making statements about how things are.

To Deleuze people want a third-party identity that tells them how to live… a city planner for their own identity, someone to answer the question for them: what does it mean to be me? That’s why it’s so common for people to want answers to these old questions. People are desperately looking for a response to the question: how should a person live?

Deleuze, would never even think to try to answer such a question. This is why, knowing what we know now, the question that’s far more relevant to Deleuze is the question “How might a person live?” What possibilities exist, what connections can potentially be made?

We shouldn’t engage in living with the expectation that there is some way that we “should” be living that we’re going to arrive at because the planet is essentially a moving machine. Emerging, or becoming, or in flux at all times. To allow the emergence of your identity from within rather than accepting it as a gift from someone else.

To affirm existence is to embrace difference. Deleuze work is an invitation to consider seeing the whole world in terms of distinction, not self. For if the universe is essentially immanent and in motion and rhizomatic, Accepting the immanence and movement and the fractal nature and interconnectedness of the rhizome is affirming life rather than negating existence by hiding behind identities and hierarchical thought structures.

ACTUAL VS VIRTUAL

To become other than ourselves is to enter into the flow of experience prior to the ordering of human perception; it sets in motion an ambiguous engagement with the multiple differential flows of life. So Deleuze proposed a modal distinction as a replacement for the problematic real-possible dichotomy commonly used in philosophy.

The possible presupposes that everything that is real must also be possible (which rules out a great number of conceptual inventions, consigning them to the ontologically lesser category of the unreal, or impossible), and it is unable to explain why that which is possible has not already come into being.

For Deleuze, both the actual and the virtual are fully real — the former has concrete existence, while the latter does not, but it is no less real for that fact. The importance of this distinction can readily be seen by giving thought to the state of being of an idea: it may only exist in our heads, or on paper, but its effects are fully real and may also be fully actual too.

Life is not defined by the real conditions of possibility, but rather by a creative flow of virtual potential, or virtual difference.