Deleuze’s Lecture Series: Anti Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus V

On Music

 

Gilles Deleuze

 

Lecture Vincennes – May 3rd, 1977

Gilles Deleuze: You’re the one who’s introducing this notion of translation. In what music do you find it ?

Richard Pinhas: I couple this notion of translation with those of interference and harmonic resonance. It’s a music that plays tirelessly with speeds, slownesses, strong differentiations or a complex repetition, or even both at once, there’s nothing exclusive about it, it’s a music which is built on totally inclusive syntheses. I suppose that it’s the music I like, it goes from Hendrix to Phil Glass by way of Ravel, Reich, Fripp and Eno.

Deleuze: It makes a large group of problems, it’s very good. Shall we begin right here ? One thing disturbed me in what we did last time. We had spoken of the notions of mass and class, and of their utilization from the point of view of the problems which occupied us, and I tried to say a certain number of things. And then Guattari in turn said a certain number of things, and I was struck that we said opposite things. I told myself that it’s perfect, but have those who listened been as sensitive as me, or was it the opposite? Well then, we commence upon this story of time. It would be necessary to find a definition of “pulsation,” or else we cannot be understood. Or shall we bypass the difference between a pulsed time and a non-pulsed time? It’s quite variable….

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Deleuze’s Lecture Series: Anti Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus III

Dualism, monism and multiplicities

Gilles Deleuze

Lecture Vincennes – March 26th, 1973

Desire-Pleasure-Jouissance

In the Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault said some profound things about statements [énoncés] that concern several domains at once, even if not at the same time. I take two very vague examples. There is a moment in the Greek City when statements of a new type emerge, and these statements of a new type emerge within assignable temporal arrangements, in several domains. They can be statements concerning love, concerning marriage, concerning war, yet we feel that there is a kind of kinship or community among these statements. We have seen certain thinkers try to give explanations of how statements emerge in diverse domains that have this kind of kinship. In Greece, for example, during the “hoplite” reform, new types of statements concerning war and strategy emerge, but also new statements concerning marriage and politics. All this, it has been said, cannot be unrelated. There are some people who immediately say, for example, that there is a system of analogies or a system of homologies, and that perhaps all these statements refer to a common structure. They are called: structuralists. Others will say that these productions of statements depend on a certain domain which is determinative in relation to the others. Such people, for example, we will call: Marxists.

Perhaps it would be better to look for something else.

There’s a book from which one can learn many things, entitled Sexual Life in Ancient China [by Robert H. van Gulik (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1961)]. This book shows clearly that manuals of love and manuals of military strategy are indiscernible, and that new strategic and military statements are produced at the same time as new amorous statements. That’s curious. I ask myself: OK, how can we extract ourselves, at the same time, from a structuralist vision that seeks correspondences, analogies, and homologies, and from a Marxist vision that seeks determinants. I indeed see one possible hypothesis, but it’s so confused . . . . It’s perfect. It would consist in saying: at a given moment, for reasons that, of course, must still be determined, it is as if a social space were covered by what we would have to call an abstract machine. We would have to give a name to this non-qualified abstract machine, a name that would mark its absence of qualification, so that everything will be clear. We could call it — at the same time, this abstract machine, at a given moment, will break with the abstract machine of the preceding epochs — in other words, it will always be at the cutting edge [à la pointe], thus it would receive the name machinic point [pointe machinique]. It would be the machinic point of a group or a given collectivity; it would indicate, within a group and at a given moment, the maximum of deterritorialization as well as, and at the same time, its power of innovation. This is somewhat abstract at the moment, it’s like algebra. It’s this abstract machine which, in conditions that will have to be determined, it’s this machinic point of deterritorialization that is reterritorialized in this or that machine, or in this or that military machine, amorous machine, productive of new statements. This is a possible hypothesis. I have the impression that there are things in Leroi-Gourhan we could use here, we would have to see how that works. This machinic point would indicate a kind of speed of deterritorialization. There are systems of indices under which reterritorializations are made in qualified machines, war machines, machines of love, machines of marriage….

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Deleuze’s Lecture Series: Anti Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus IV

Lecture Vincennes – January 14th, 1974

Gilles Deleuze

I must pass by a kind of terminological detour. This detour consists in recalling a certain terminology. We find that, in the whole current of the Middle Ages up to and including the seventeenth century, a certain problem is posed concerning the nature of being. And this problem concerning the nature of being adopted some very precise notions: equivocity, analogy, univocity.

At first sight these terms appear dead to us. They make up part of the great discussions of Scholasticism, but the great metaphysical disputes always hide something else: people are never burned or tortured over ideological questions, even less over metaphysical ones. I would like for us to try to feel what was very concretely in question in these stories which were presented under an abstract form: is being equivocal, is it analogical, is it univocal? And after all, this is not because today, except among the seminarians, we have abandoned these terms, not because we do not continue to think in them and through them. I would like to content myself with very simple definitions.

There are people who said: being is equivocal. They argued, they burned one another for things like that. But “being is equivocal” meant a precise thing: being is said in several senses. That means: being is said in several senses of that of which it is said. That is to say that the implication [sous-entendu] of the proposition was already: being is said of something. I’m not even interested in knowing if it’s an ontological problem; it’s a problem of utterances [ÈnoncÈs] as well. Being is stated [s'Ènonce] in several senses of that of which it is stated. Concretely, what does that mean? One assumes that a table is not in the same manner as an animal and that an animal is not in the same manner as a man; that a man is not in the same manner as God. Therefore there are several senses of being….

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Deleuze’s Lecture Series: Anti Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus II

Capitalism, flows, the decoding of flows, capitalism and schizophrenia, psychoanalysis, Spinoza   

Gilles Deleuze

 

Lecture Vincennes –  November 16th, 1971

What is it that moves over the body of a society? It is always flows, and a person is always a cutting off [coupure] of a flow. A person is always a point of departure for the production of a flow, a point of destination for the reception of a flow, a flow of any kind; or, better yet, an interception of many flows.

If a person has hair, this hair can move through many stages: the hairstyle of a young girl is not the same as that of a married woman, it is not the same as that of a widow: there is a whole hairstyle code. A person, insofar as she styles her hair, typically presents herself as an interceptor in relation to flows of hair that exceed her and exceed her case and these flows of hair are themselves coded according to very different codes: widow code, young girl code, married woman code, etc. This is ultimately the essential problem of coding and of the territorialization which is always coding flows with it, as a fundamental means of operation: marking persons (because persons are situated at the interception and at the cutting off [coupure] of flows, they exist at the points where flows are cut off [coupure])….

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Deleuze’s Lecture Series: “Musical Time”

Lecture 1978

Gilles Deleuze

I would like to make an initial remark on the method employed. Pierre Boulez has chosen five works: the relations among these works are not relations of influence, dependence or ***** [inaudible], nor of progression or evolution from one work to the other either. There would be virtual relations among these works, rather, which are only released [se dégagent] in their confrontation. And when these works confront one another in this way, in a sort of cycle, one specific contour [profil] of musical time X rises up. So it’s not at all a method of abstraction which would go towards a general concept of time in music. Boulez obviously could have chosen another cycle: for example a work by Bartok, one by Stravinsky, one by Varèse, one by Berio… This would then release another specific contour of time, or the specific contour of a variable other than time. Then we could superimpose all these contours, make a veritable map [carte] of variations, which would follow the musical singularities each time, instead of extracting a generality on the basis of what are called examples.

But in the precise case of the cycle chosen by Boulez, what one sees or hears is a non-pulsed time [which] is released from pulsed time. Work I shows this release by a very precise play of physical displacements. Works II, III and IV each show a different aspect of this non-pulsed time, without claiming to exhaust all possible aspects. Finally V (Carter) shows how non-pulsed time can restore [redonner] a variable pulsation of a new type.

Well, the question would be to know what this non-pulsed time consists of, this floating [flottant] time which is almost what Proust called “a little time in the pure state….

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Deleuze’s Lecture Series: Anti Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus I

The nature of flows

Gilles Deleuze

Lecture Vincennes – December 14th, 1971

I would like to pursue the problem of the economy of flows; last time, someone wanted a more precise definition of flows, more precise, that is, than something which flows upon the socius. What I call the socius is not society, but rather a particular social instance which plays the role of a full body. Every society presents itself as a socius or full body upon which all kinds of flows flow and are interrupted, and the social investment of desire is this basic operation of the break-flow to which we can easily give the name of schizz. It is not yet important for us to have a real definition of flows, but it is important, as a starting point, to have a nominal definition and this nominal definition must provide us with an initial system of concepts. As a point of departure for our search for a nominal definition of flows, I’ll take a recent study by a specialist in the flows of political economy: “Flows and stocks,” by Daniel ENTIER. Stocks and flows are two primary notions in modern political economy, remarked upon by Keynes, such that we find in Keynesian economy the first great theory of flows in his “General theory of employment, interest and money.” Entier informs us that, “from the economic point of view, we can call flows the values of the quantities of goods and services or money that are transmitted from one pole to another”; the first concept to be placed in relation with that of flows is that of pole: a flow, inasmuch as it flows on the socius, enters by one pole and exits by another. At our last session, we had tried to show that flows implicated codes, in the sense that a flow could be called economic insofar as something passed, and where something else blocked it and made it pass; the example given was that of the rules of alliance in so-called primitive societies, where taboos represent a blockage of the flow of possible marriages; the first permitted marriages, i.e. the first permitted incests, called preferential unions, which are, in fact, hardly ever realized, represent something like the first modes of passage: something passes, something is blocked (this blockage taking the form of incest taboos), something passes, the preferential unions, something blocks it and makes it pass, for example the maternal [utérine] uncle….

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Deleuze’s Lecture Series: “Theory of Multiplicities in Bergson”

Lecture – 1970
by Gilles Deleuze

Gilles Deleuze

… I wanted to propose to you an investigation [recherche] into the history of a word, a still very partial, very localized history. That word is “multiplicity.” There is a very current use of multiplicity: for example, I say: a multiplicity of numbers, a multiplicity of acts, a multiplicity of states of consciousness, a multiplicity of shocks [ébranlements]. Here “multiplicity” is employed as a barely nominalized adjective. And it’s true that Bergson often expressed himself thus. But at other times, the word “multiplicity” is employed in the strong sense, as a true substantive, thus, from the second chapter of Time and Free Will onward, the number is a multiplicity, which does not mean the same thing at all as a multiplicity of numbers.

Why do we feel that this use of multiplicity, as a substantive, is at once unusual and important? (The concept of multiplicity, Time and Free Will 224-26) It’s because, so long as we employ the adjective multiple, we only think a predicate that we necessarily place in a relation of opposition and complementarity with the predicate ONE: the one and the multiple, the thing is one or multiple, and it’s even one and multiple. On the contrary, when we employ the substantive multiplicity, we already indicate thereby that we have surpassed [dépassé] the opposition of predicates one/multiple, that we are already set up on a completely different terrain, and on this terrain we are necessarily led to distinguish types of multiplicity….

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“Public Screens and the Transformation of Public Space,” by Scott McQuire, Nikos Papastergiadis & Sean Cubitt

Abstract: This article maps and investigates the potential for large electronic screens to contribute to the formation of new modes of civic agency in public space. It examines the ‘Public Space Broadcasting’ project in the UK as an alternative to the predominantly commercial orientation of publicly sited screens.

Introduction: Contemporary public space is increasingly constructed through the articulation of physical and electronic spaces. Since the 1980s, the roll-out of digital networks, the proliferation of mobile phones and the installation of large electronic screens in urban centres has created novel forms of mediated interaction within the public sphere. The emergence of this shift reverses the previous dominant trajectory in which broadcast media such as radio and television ‘privatized’ the public sphere by relocating key processes of civic engagement from public to domestic space (McQuire 2006). It also represents a further stage in the redefinition of cultural institutions such as art galleries and museums, as their content migrates from enclosed sites with defined audiences into the public domain at large (McQuire and Papastergiadis 2005; Papastergiadis 2006). While there are distinct regional and national inflections to these developments, the general trajectory is manifestly global. Large public screens have rapidly become a symbol of contemporary urban…

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