Sigur Ros: Sonic Immanence and Cultural Sustainability

Is there a connection between aesthetics and cultural sustainability? This is far more than a question I think. It is probably the outline for  a field of inquiry. But where would one begin to draw a link. The question may be reposed. Can a musicologist really say something about cultural sustainability in a way that is within the traditional confines of the discipline of musicology 0r even ethnomusicology? Ethnomusicologists have Steven Feld and his work with Keith Basso (senses of place). It seems that making the connection between anthropology and ecology/human ecology is easier. But musicology and ecology. I would make the argument that musicology is already involved in ecological and environmental discourse even if it is under-theorized and under-conceptualized. Cultural sustainability and ecology are an issue of aesthetics. But not of a passive sort. Ecology as immanence is a central, if unacknowledged, category of aesthetics.

Transcendence is part of art discourse. The experience is related, in important ways,  to the sublime, of being outside or beyond the limits of physicality and human-ness. Transcendence in my reading is an experience beyond the physical that moves towards the divine. Or an experience of the divine which is beyond human or other-than-human. Interestingly, and maybe alternatively, place is constructed by sound. The place-ness of sound, the territory that sound creates, is a space like this. Transcendence is beyond materiality. But Deleuze championed an alternative,  Immanence.

The Immanent space is a real conceptual challenge. But one, I think, makes the connection between the experience of the sublime and the creation of place-ness. So much art has been complicit in the creation of place. Sound has suffered from the incorrect notion that is has a lack of materiality. We know that sound is material. So sound is now a material place that you experience. Sound and music however can be, as Feld pointed out, about place-making. The place-making effect of music that is beyond human avoids what Nietzsche’s warning about being “human all-too-human”. So immanence is related to transcendence.

Michel Maffesoli in The Time of the Tribes suggested immanent-transcendent for the liminal experience that is often associated with ritual (see Victor Turner: ‘Liminal to liminoid in play, flow, and ritual: An essay in comparative symbology’. Rice University Studies 1974. 60(3):53-92). The dissolution of the individual that is associated with the liminal brings up an interesting question. Does the identity dissolve or become associated with a larger identity. Does the individual fuse in a spiritual sort of way with another beyond human identity.

This is why I have included this Sigur Ros trailer for their film Heima. My first reaction to the music of Sigur Ros was “sublime”. This music is often beyond human. But I never felt drawn to a transcendental sublime but an immanent sublime. Something that I have also experienced in my research on Pagan music (see Singing Me Into The Land). There is a dissolution of the identity that is not grafted onto a Judeo-christian divine but a conception of a spiritual physicality.  One could suggest a pagan spirituality that is without gods and goddesses and is populated by the experience of “within-place-ness”. The non-human connection to a place that is beyond “nostalgia” and cheap imitations.  Music may be a tool for the creation of this sort of physical-liminality, this immanence.

There may be an important point of connection between musicology, cultural sustainability, and aesthetics which goes beyond the comfort zone of each of the participating disciplines.  In the experience of making place and self in the dissolution of both. Sigur Ros Heima means home and homeland. I think it also could  mean the construction of self and other. The immanent connection to the physicality of placeness that is beyond human-ness may be an important point of connection between local cultural production, sustainability, and musicology.

Thinking Musically: Thinking the Rhizome

Thinking Musically: Thinking the Rhizome B

Wild Culture

Local and wild culture is a rhizome. Local culture is not just “like the wild” it IS the wild. It functions as a rhizome.  Individuals form neo-tribes and connect to each other, crossing over each other, and creating a fully overlayed and conceptually multidimensional carpet of communities. Members and ideas slip between the layers. There are no spectators only participants. All of this participation and sharing produces a wild (synonymous with) sustainable ecosystem, “Wilderness is a place where the wild potential is fully expressed” (Snyder 12).   Participation is not just a nice idea but an essential aspect. Eliminating or limiting participation creates cultural erosion. Like trees that are harvested no longer hold down the topsoil of hills. A limitation on local participation damages the health of local culture. Full participation leads to cultural health,  “When an ecosystem is fully functioning, all the members are present at the assembly. To speak of wilderness is to speak of wholeness” (ibid.).

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It seems therefore that ecology is not merely a useful metaphor for cultural sustainability. The health of the commons is connected to its wildness. It may be of use  to consider organic metaphors and ecological thinking. It may have a great deal to offer. Kerouac transformed American literature by introducing wildness. Maybe nomadology may do the same for musicology and the rhizome for the map. Vernacular culture is the expression of the assemblage. Participation is key to the carnival and it is the central feature of the ecosystem. Total participation is wildness and Michael Taussig has remarked there are redemptive as well as destructive properties to wildness, “Wildness challenges the unity of the symbol…Wilderness pries open this unity and in its place creates slippage and a grinding articulation between signifier and signified”(Taussig 219). Wildness tears apart structures because of the constant creative negotiation contained in becoming. Is it no wonder, Taussig remarked, that wildness has been demonized for thousands of years. Bernheimer reminded that the central authority of the Roman Catholic church in the Middle Ages constructed wildness in opposition to, “Christian norms and the established framework of Christian society” 220.

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Being wild was to be outside of Christianity and therefore outside of all that is Good. This is still the case in Christian countries where the bible is still allowed to influence social discourse. Taussig commented that, “European ideas and sentiments separating pagans from the great chain of human being so that the pagan entered, with the utmost ambiguity, into a nether zone between the animal and the human” 215. Wildness is the rhizome that is human and more-than-human and therefore contradicts the Christian ontology. This observation has been made in other part of the “colonized” world but is rarely discussed within North American society even though since the 1970s America has inherited Britain’s place as the world center of modern paganism (Adler 2006, 233-6;Hutton 1999, 17 and 341) and especially the particular experience of feminist wicca that has become so influential (see my article American Goddess publication forthcoming). Taussig tells of the wild that is stolen out of the pagan world and reterritorialized in the church. But its connections to the rhizome cannot be completely cut off , “Her name was changed from the Wild Woman of the Forest to Our Lady of Remedies. Conquered and tamed, wildness yields its healing power. Today figures of seminaked Indians surround her image” 189.

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It is possible to trace the connections and establish the rhizome and to see how wildness has a long history of being written out of history. The writing of history is, as Foucault reminded, is the establishment of structure over experience. What would happen to History if the wild were permitted its rightful place? One implication would be the legitimation of the rhizome as a model for history and as an extension a transsubjective approach to subjectivity and community. Delezue, Snyder, and Taussig speak together when Snyder wrote, “The world is our consciousness, and it surrounds us…The depths of mind, the unconscious, are our inner wilderness areas, and that is where a bobcat is right now”[16].
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The rhizome is not new. It is only a new way to think about social life. If we now accept that the rhizome is useful we can come back to earlier terms to find new value in them. LIke a mythical journey Snyder supports these sorts of returns, “The heart of a place is the home, and the heart of the home is the firepit, the hearth. All tentative explorations go outward from there, and it is back to the fireside that elders return”[26]. We have now returned back to the hearth with a new appreciation of the wild, subjectivity and community. As we have agreed the individual and the community are locked in a process of becoming. It is time to develop a new approach to the idea of the folk. Instead of thinking about the folk as those who cut into the wilderness to build fort walls and bordered communities, on the side of the colonizers, maybe it is time to re-imagine the folk as those who live in sustainable independent communities before or just after colonialism. It is not too hard to believe that a society coming to terms with colonialism will return to pre-colonial articulations for a  post-colonial sociality. A post-colonial sociality might articulate itself in the terms that Michel Maffessoli describes in The Time of the Tribes.

Snyder, Gary. The Practice of the Wild (1990)

Taussig, Michael Shamanism. Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A study in Terror and Healing (1987)

The Commons and the Wild

Jack Kerouac, since my undergraduate introduction to him, has  been burning through the back roads of my mind in a 1958 Chev Impala.  I have never seen him and he has never spoken to me. He is a ghost rider content to kick up dust across wild frontiers and open fields. He is content to travel under the radar of my consciousness and has never really totally informed any phase of my thinking or my life. But he has continued to stay close. He is in the rhythm of my speech and the timbre of my conceptual life. Recently I was introduced to an old friend of his who I had read as Japhy Ryder in Dharma Bums. Ryder inspired me so much that I considered, for a summer, giving up a musical career to become a trail guide. It was a tough decision.

Kerouac based Ryder on Gary Snyder. Snyder is an important American poet, introduced Kerouac to Buddhism, and has been a leading advocate of ecological thinking. Snyder has made significant artistic and philosophical contributions to the ecology movement. I was introduced to Snyder at an AFS (American Folklore Society) meeting. While at the book fair I was speaking to somebody (sorry don’t remember who to give credit for this) and was just figuring out my conceptualization of wildness as a productive concept. I was having a conversation with the right person. He suggested that I purchase “The Practice of the Wild” by Snyder. Out of the corner of my eye I saw some dust getting kicked up and I heard the unmistakable sound of spinning tires on dry gravel roads.

I met Ryder/Snyder again. This time however my interest in ecology is not separated from my interest in musical culture. It is like I followed Kerouac’s dust trail across conceptual space-time to meet up again with a possibility of myself. My work in ethnomusicology and my developing interest in the health and sustainability of  local music community has brought me back to my earlier interests in ecology. Snyder is the connection between Lessig’s Commons and ecology.

Snyder wrote, “Recovery of the commons—and this in a modern world which doesn’t quite realize what it has lost. Take back, like the night, that which is shared by all of us…There will be no tragedy of the commons greater than this: if we do not recover the commons—regain personal, local, community, and peoples’ direct involvement in sharing (in being) the web of the wild world” (The Practice of the Wild pg. 36). Isn’t this Lessig’s concern as well. Cultural sustainability in both the legal dimensions and its ecological dimensions agree. This is, I suppose, not surprising. But it does suggest an unlikely alliance. The court room, class room, board room, and field, “Understanding the commons and its role within the larger regional culture is one more step towards integrating ecology with economy” 37.

Snyder’s commons is a sustainable community. The model for this sustainability is taken from the wild. In a very powerful couple of pages early in The Practice of the Wild Snyder goes through the OED definitions of the wild and point out that they all are opposed to civility and civilization. The wild is not a concept that can stand on its own, “ uncivilized, rude, resiting constituted government” of individuals, “unrstrained, insubordinate, licentious, disolute, loose” of behavior “ violent, destructive, cruel, unruly, artless, free spontaneous” Snyder develops a counter definition for the wild, “Of societies—societies whose order has grown from within and is maintained by the force of consensus and custom rather than explicit legislation. Primary cultures, which consider themselves the original and eternal inhabitants of their territory. Societies which resist economic and political domination by civilization. Societies whose economic system is in a close and sustainable relation to the local ecosystem” (10). And he continues, “Of individuals—following local custom, style, and etiquette without concern for the standards of the metropolis or nearest trading post. Unintimidated, self-reliant, independent. “Proud and free.” “Of behavior—fiercely resisting any oppression, confinement, or exploitation. Far-out, outrageous, “bad,” admirable, artless, free, spontaneous, unconditioned. Expressive, physical, openly sexual, ecstatic”.

Lessing’s commons become a much more colourful space when they are described in terms of the relationship to wildness. It also, I think, provides a framework for a much more critical discussion of the importance of the commons as a creative place. The wild is an openly creative space and worthy of protection. The commons, if it is a town park, is nice but hardly supports the same sort of life affirming activity. It hardly excites the same protectionist impulse. Is cultural sustainability about making sure we have access to the town/city park or to cultural Rockies, ancient boreal forests, pristine prairies.  Lessig doesn’t really describe, in any detail, what we should protect. Snyder however is very clear. Local culture is not small culture. Local culture is the magic of ancient woodlands. Local culture is the wild.

Local and wild culture is a rhizome. Local culture is not just “like the wild” it IS the wild. It functions as a rhizome.  Individuals form neo-tribes and connect to each other, crossing over each other, and creating a fully overlayed and conceptually multidimensional carpet of communities. Members and ideas slip between the layers. There are no spectators only participants. All of this participation and sharing produces a wild (synonymous with) sustainable ecosystem, “Wilderness is a place where the wild potential is fully expressed” (12).   Participation is not just a nice idea but an essential aspect. Eliminating or limiting participation creates cultural erosion. Like trees that are harvested no longer hold down the topsoil of hills. A limitation on local participation damages the health of local culture. Full participation leads to cultural health,  “When an ecosystem is fully functioning, all the members are present at the assembly. To speak of wilderness is to speak of wholeness” (ibid.).

It seems therefore that ecology is not merely a useful metaphor for cultural sustainability. The health of the commons is connected to its wildness. It may be of use  to consider organic metaphors and ecological thinking. It may have a great deal to offer. Kerouac transformed American literature by introducing wildness. Maybe nomadology may do the same for musicology.

Snyder, Gary. 1990. The Practice of the Wild. North Point Press, New York.

Deleuze and the Wild

Creativity is Also Destruction

The wild is an approach to relationships. Not just the relationships that one develops between each other but the biological floor upon which these relationships are maintained can be considered in terms of relationships. Individual and group subsistence is a basic requirement for group maintenance. A community relationship is partly organic. An as an organic entity the individual and group negotiate resources upon the strata of the earth. This strata is the absolute ground floor of existence. The body of the earth is the basic limit of the assemblage. The next step in the assemblage is the individual or the group. Political philosophy has a long history of arguing over this first level strata. Hobbes argued that without centralized rule life would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”(xiii). The individual, interested in his own existence, will struggle and fight for his own satisfaction. The state in the form of a social contract will ensure safeguards and the possibility of social harmony. Rousseau argued alternatively that community is the most basic form of existence. The genetic experience is the family unit that one is born into. The child is raised by a community even if it is just the family. One can not raise oneself without being completely marked as outside of society. Rousseau argued that the social contract is based on the relationship between people and nature. A successful life depends on the relationship between the force of the natural world and that of the family. He suggested that families joined together to form larger groups out of self interest. The social contract therefore, the first strata upon the body of the Earth, is ultimately social. Rousseau claimed that the Social Contract  would preserve life in community and individual freedom as well {Rousseau, 2003 #167} (9).
The community is a free association of individuals who do not give up their individuality to become community but retain this self expression and become something else. Assemblage theory, like Rousseau, does not allow for a dialectical dissolution of the individual into the group. The individual becomes a member of the group through negotiation of value. The negotiated individual freedom makes the individual a member of the group. This negotiation takes on an outward appearance and characteristics. Rousseau called this the General Will. He wrote that, “As long as several men in assembly regard themselves as a single body, they have only a single will which is concerned with their common preservation and general well-being”. This basic agreement should not be confused with some sort of primitive order of things. As social anthropologists have well established there is no primitive order from which any social order has descended {Kuper, 1997 #13} (231-244). The establishment of the compact and the general will is not a matter of inheritance but of group-becoming.

It is not just a matter of exchange reciprocity. Deleuze suggests that the relationship runs much deeper than this. The relationship between the group and the individual is a mutual becoming. This becoming is not marked by over legislative coercion but of another type of negotiation. Deleuze asserts that,  “Customary rules (nomos) govern group behaviour without being deliberately founded as legislation or explicitly represented to it in the form of law (logos)” {Holland, 2004 #4} 21). Group behaviour establishes modes of conduct and approaches to life. The personal is not the base expression of individual desires but a more complex, more sophisticated negotiation between individual and group. The personal, “ is composed of—or, in Deleuze’s terms, passively synthesized from—experiences and therefore cannot be separated from them” {Buchanan, 1999 #15}  6). Passively sythesized though in no way takes away from the status of the individual. The creative existence of the individual is established within the dynamic of the group membership. Membership is not the denigration of individual creativity but the expression of it. The group is an assemblage and in Assemblage theory the negotiation of Rousseau’s General Will is not alien to the individual. This negotiation of group personality is the same as the individual negotiation at a different level. The individual is not on one side of the binary individual-group. Thisbinary is incorrect. The individual is always already in the group even if it is only a group of one.
The subject does not become less important but arguably more important. The establishment of individual affect is an expression of part of the will of the group, “The smallest scale comprises a population of individual persons, but the subjectivity of each of these persons must itself be conceived as an assemblage of sub-personal components”  {DeLanda, 2006 #7} 253. DeLanda suggests that, “A subject crystallizes as an assemblage through the habitual grouping of ides via relations of contiguity, their habitual comparison through relations of resemblance, and the habitual perception of constant conjunction in the case of linear causality which allows one idea (that of the cause) to always evoke anther (the effect)” 253-4 Deleuze argued that that contiguity, causality and resemblance constitute the principles of association which transform the mind into a subject {Deleuze, 1991 #19} 98-101 {DeLanda, 2006 #7} 254. Subjectivity for Deleuze is not a subject but an effect arising or growing out of the principles of subjectivity. The mind becomes aware of the subject in the association of ideas that are “connected in the mind not by the mind” {Deleuze, 1991 #19} 24.
This does not reassert a division between subject and object but firmly denies any possibility of such a distinction. The subject and object exist in relation to one another and mutually create meaning for each other. But this seems to suggest a deadlock. Where is the engine which moves these pieces into action? If the subject is established by a collection of objects how is the subject pushed into definitive action. Action is not part of a collection of objects nor is it an essence of the object. The mind is affected by the social and the passional. The social is an object that the subject must come to terms with. The relationship between the subject and the social is therefore a necessary negotiation. The subject is affected by this negotiation just as the negotiation itself defines the community. The social and the subject are therefore mutually dependent and mutually foundational.
But this does not suggest that the community is without hierarchy. The negotiation that occurs in community is the establishment of hierarchy and difference. Not necessarily the hierarchy of government, class, tradition. The creation of the subject is the awareness of difference. Thinking is the act of coming into awareness of difference and community. It is not therefore, I am, but “we are and I am” that is established in thought. But difference is not negation. Difference is positive difference, “In its essential relation with the “other” a will makes its difference an object of affirmation” {Deleuze, 1962/1983 #20} 9. The subject is established in difference but difference is established by thought. Deleuze suggested that, “ To think is to create this is Nietzsche’s greatest lesson”  {Deleuze, 1962/1983 #20} xx. Thinking is a creative negotiation of hierarchy. The creative difference that establishes group relationships. This is a retelling of Rousseau’s founding premise but for Deleuze, “Hierarchy is the originally fact, the identity of difference and origin” {Deleuze, 1962/1983 #20} 8. The social contract is not merely an establishment of a force to satisfy shared needs but is also the establishment of hierarchy and morality.
The subject is established not merely in relation to their environment but in reaction to it. The creation of the subject, its becoming, is always and already in reaction, “Consciousness is essentially reactive” {Deleuze, 1962/1983 #20} 41. And this reaction is the creation of difference, or hierachy, and of the subject itself, “We do not feel, experience or know any becoming but becoming reactive” {Deleuze, 1962/1983 #20} 64. But becoming reactive is not the negation of creativity. Creativity is expressed in the negotiation unleashed by becoming-reactive. The act of becoming therefore is always in relation to something else. Since the community and the environment are all outside of the subject, and since the subject is defined by their reaction to what is outside, then it is unnecessary and even misleading to suggest that there is a special set of negotiations between people and objects. Everything is an object to the mind and the minds negotiations and creative reactions with all of these objects affect the individual. Therefore the natural world, people, art, ideas are all particles that are synthesized in the establishment of the subject and subjects are synthesized into community.
Delezue used Nietzsche’s thought to replace the binary good:bad with an alternative. Deleuze said that everything is already reactive. But even in reaction there is, what Nietzsche called a will to power being expressed. The will is not  Hobbes’ General Will . It is not a trancendental expression of community or humanity that  motivates and activates the community through the individual. The will, according to Deleuze, is not merely the desire for power or the need for self aggrandizement. The will is not something so simple and selfish. The will to power is the, “genetic element of force” 53. And the force is a response in reaction. Reaction therefore is more than simple response. Reaction has two possibilities. Reaction, which defines the subject, defines the subject’s relationships as well. The will to power, says Nietszche is not without morality. But it is not the morality of the Church or the State. Nietzsche claims that he has invented a new conception of the will. A will that does not finds its essence outside of itself but in the relationship between self and the world. The relationship may take two forms. It must either be reaction as subservience or reaction as creation. In either case creativity remains the constant. The will is the expression of creativity. The will to power is creativity.
Nietzsche, through Deleuze, is a philosopher of  creativity. There is no God as a metaphysical engine. Nietzsche taught that “god is dead”. But it is not the death of something concrete. Not even of something divine. But it is the death of exteriority.  Replaced by an inner creativity that is no less theistic, monotheistic and polytheistic. God has been replaced by creativity and being creative. There is no longer a need for a metaphysical driver if creativity itself is the engine of all desire. The desire to create is the will to power. Creativity itself is not the act of the arts or the intuition. Creativity is the act of thought. Thought is creativity. Thought is the basic experience of life.Through Delezue Nietzsche states that, “ the will to power is essentially creative and giving…power is something inexpressible in the will (85). This is the role Nietzsche plays for Deleuze. Through him Deleuze is able to find a way to ground french deconstruction in the Spinoza-Nitzscheian critical heritage.
Deleuze claims that Nietzsche’s genealogy is a critical but ultimately creative discourse. Morality is dependent, not upon socially constituted rules and norms but in the evaluation of creativity. The will to power is expressed. Creativity is expressed by everyone. But everyone does not express creativity equally or, to use moral terminology, in an equally upstanding way. The good is the creative and the joyful and the bad is the creative that is bounded and without freedom. Creativity that is reactive-active or reactive-reactive. A reactive-active creativity occurs in critique, “Critique is destruction as joy, the aggression of the creator. A creator of values can not be distinguished from a destroyer, from a criminal or from a critic: a critic of established values, reactive values and baseness” (87).
But Deleuze opens himself to criticism here. He claimed to avoid the role of judge. But through Nietzsche he established a criterion to judge value. But to do so he tore down class, community, tradition, and even revolution and replaced it all with a morality of creativity. Ranciere suggested that this philosophy runs into a dead end. Zizek is troubled because Deleuze attempts to always dissolve the contradiction to never allow the ultimate moment of pure negativity. But Deleuze does this to avoid the dialectic. The judge is the dialectic. The will to power, creativity, does away with the need for the judge. There is no need to choose between becoming a or becoming b. In the reactive-active many options are created, a multiplicity. The multiplicity is the expression of creativity and the choice is the creativity in reaction. Choices are inventions and inventions are creations. Deleuze used Nietzsche to dissolve the subject:object binary, to establish a creative deconstruction called genealogy, and to deny the binary creating dialectic. The good is defined by free creativity.
Free creativity can be described in another way. Nietzsche’s good genealogy has a lot in common with composting. The breaking down of items to create from their debris a fertile ground from which new life can spring. Composting is life affirming and destructive. Intellectual composting, the act of destroying to affirm life, is a more active genealogy. Deleuze would prefer composting. It is a creative, life affirming act that demonstrates immanence. If Deleuze had been born in America instead of France his orientation may have been different. If genealogy is translated through deconstruction to composting then Deleuze may have more of a connection with contemporary ecology than one may think. Free creativity is the wild.

Free Jazz and a Spiritual Quest for Meaning

I received an incredibly interesting email question the other day from a student. I thought I would share the question and the response as it condenses some of my thinking about Deleuze and musicology.

Q.I came to free jazz just from curiosity, and realized that people such as Coltrane and Sun Ra had some interesting and possibly wise stuff to say aside from their music. How do you consider them helpfull in such spiritual quest for meaning (I like the Victor Frankl terminology)?

A. I’m really interested in your question. One that I think is really important but very difficult…of course it is…difficult and important seem to go hand in hand…simple and important…maybe…but I guess it’s also simple and important – that’s part of what Frankl was getting at.

Spiritual quest for meaning – as you say – is a very loaded term. Let me start by saying that I think meaningless is nearly impossible. I don’t think we are capable of meaningless or at least we really have to work at it. My reading of some Buddhism has convinced me of that. It seems that a number of styles of meditation focus on the disruption of meaning – a quest of a meaningless that it a type of psychological cleanser – so that one can look with new eyes on the how one constructs meaning. Ultimately, here’s the point. How do you construct meaning. What are your habits of mind – that form the world into a consistency you can deal with. What options do you have in your thinking – and how do you break free if you want to. How do you find structures?

Enter Coltrane – and free jazz more widely. Music structures work on the mind in the same way social structures do. Something sounds right, not because it is right at its core – there is no “essence” or “true” rightness in music (or in the social world) only socially constituted right-ness. Free jazz runs headlong into the walls of musical correctness and shows you the limits of socially constituted correctness. The fascinating thing about this is that it is now bound in something called free jazz – so when Coltrane went way out he was liberating – but soon after even this new journey became bounded by walls – so even free jazz has become a style – I love this about the human mind.

But what of the spirit? I think I’ve been inspired indirectly or by osmosis by Buddhism. I do not believe in a transcendental spirituality. I believe in an spirituality (even this is not quite the right word) of the world – what Gilles Deleuze calls an Immanence  – not a transcendence. You know the feeling that you get at a great show or playing your instrument  that moment beyond personality – that for me is a spiritual or hyper material place.

Getting back to meditation. You do not become empty of mind and personality to transcend your material existence. But to get more in touch with your materiality – your materialism can be your sacred place. I think music can establish this sacred place. Just as free jazz established itself in opposition to socially agreed upon sound order – certain music can establish itself in opposition to transcendental music for the sacred. Music of the spirit is sacred  – music of the body may also be sacred but one needs to work towards creating that space. This is the meditation of the body sacred.

special thanks goes to Lonnie Jones for those late night conversations in smoky coffee shops…

Gilles and I: Music and Territory by halfsharpmusic – ToonDoo – The Cartoon Strip Creator – Create, Publish, Share, Discuss!

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The Beatles and the Fold

I have been confronted by desire since the new Beatles cd box set  was released in September. But I’ve only come to appreciate the Beatles recently.  I do not own a single album in any form. Which may be why the box set is so intriguing. But I am no stranger to their music. Far from it actually. My lectures on the Beatles and Bob Dylan are two of my strongest. But I have only come to appreciate them. My relationship with Dylan is much the same. When I began teaching popular music a few years ago I had already, I thought, formed my opinion. Both bodies of work were very good and very important but I was not interested in either. But that has changed. I have fallen in love with both Dylan and the Beatles.

I am uncertain why I have suddenly began to take so much pleasure in this work. I suppose part of it has to do with giving it the appropriate amount of listening. The other, I think, is the appropriate amount of thinking. The pleasure  I get increases with my grasp of what and who Dylan and the Beatles are. I am experiencing a density of desire. As I learn more, I appreciate more, I share more, I care more. If I could externalize my feelings for the Beatles in the form of a plant it would have had a pretty meager beginning. A very thin and hollow stock. But I have been feeding that plant with interest, thought, and listening. It’s walls have grown denser as its roots have dug deeper. My plant, my desire, is now dense and healthy.

I have not, however, become a fan of Dylan or the Beatles. Nor do I think, that goining Beatles fandom is necessary. I have no desire to retreat from fandom but equally have no desire to count myself as a member of a fan scene or group. Even in my own imagination. Fandom is quite unnecessary. Instead something else is happening.

The Beatles have helped to create for me a clearer picture of an aspect of myself. I have nurtured a rebellious aspect of my personality. A changeable, argumentative, dynamic, fluid aspect of myself that is creative; that is a chameleon. I have embraced this dynamism and this fluidity. As a new academic searching for my place in the university system, in the classroom, in the conference room, I am becoming:instructor-student-researcher-musician-writer-listener-speaker-composer-lecturer-performer. I am becoming. Delezue suggests that this becoming is unfolding.

I am unfolding into myself. A new myself than I was before. I have learned something about Dylan and the Beatles that I needed to learn in order to continue to unfold. I have learned a new lesson about unfolding so that I may unfold myself. Deleuze in Empiricism and Subjectivity and The Fold provides a framework for this understanding.

My relationship with the world is of the world. A separation between subjectivity and the objectivity of the world is illusory. Our inner world is not a separate space shut away from the outside. The inner voice, inner child, inner world is not apart from what you say, read, and watch. I am in a dynamic relationship with all of my experinece. I know this. I know that my inner world is part of the outer world. But I have learned to accept the illusion that I am an individual. Even when everything in my life suggests the contrary. I am not an individual…but what am I?

Deleuze suggests that I am a fold. I think this is helpful. If I can begin to imagine all of the world as a plane of consistency, like a blanket, made up of all things, I am one fold of its fabric. I am unfolding now into something new and wish to watch the Beatles unfold themselves. The Beatles produce this unfolding across a plane of consistency. The Beatles unfold across the 1960s and help me understand unfolding in time.

Inventions: Anti-Noise | GOOD

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