Deleuze, Music, and the Paradoxes of Modernist Mimesis

Deleuze, Music, and Modernist Mimesis

Eric Prieto, Santa Barbara

This essay centers on the function of music within a work authored by two of the most extreme champions of the anti-representational stance that came to characterize French postmodern theory during the 1960s and 1970s: Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. They employ music to meditate on the methods and objectives of their "nomadic" philosophical venture, which aims to upend the entire framework of representational thought inherited from the Aristotelian tradition. For these thinkers, music stands as an exemplary art form, and their initial goal is to propose it as a template for the other arts — and indeed for every mode of human inquiry, including philosophy and science — that would eventually surpass all types of thought in the representational tradition. However, their examinations of music unexpectedly produce the opposite outcome, prompting them to reintegrate representation into the core of their philosophy. It is this surprising reversal — wherein music paradoxically fosters a return to representational values — that captures my focus here.

Among all the arts, music surely offers the most compelling test case for grasping the role of representation in aesthetic communication. The absence of any fixed, codifiable referential mechanism of the sort present in language and pictorial representation has generated well-known yet persistent problems for artists and aestheticians seeking to comprehend how music creates meaning and whether it can — or should — teach us anything valuable about the extra-musical world. Some, capitalizing on this referential instability, have asserted that music cannot refer to the external world (as in Igor Stravinsky's frequently cited remark that music is "by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all") or that any effort to make it do so reveals a profound misunderstanding of music's fundamental character (as in Eduard Hanslick's anti-Wagnerian treatise On the Musically Beautiful). Yet even for those who reject such extremes, it seems evident that music presents the problem of referential meaning in an especially acute manner. This is likely why references to music frequently emerge in discussions about the various roles assigned to representation in the other arts, including literature.

Modernist writers, in particular, have discovered that music provides a useful point of reference in their efforts to break free from more conventional literary representation. Beginning with the French Symbolists and continuing through the first half of the twentieth century, many of the most prominent figures of literary modernism employed music to explain and validate their experiments with literary representation. Typically, music served them as a way to conceptualize the representation of consciousness. Consequently, we encounter diverse writers such as Stéphane Mallarmé and Thomas Mann, James Joyce and André Gide, Marcel Proust and Aldous Huxley discussing the workings of the mind — and their attempts to represent it — in terms of polyphony and counterpoint, symphonic orchestration, the leitmotif and motivic development, and the principles of repetition and variation. This connection between music and mind remained significant for the generation of writers who matured in the years following World War II, particularly in France, where writers like Samuel Beckett, Michel Leiris, and the French New Novelists pushed the representation of consciousness to its outermost limits. Like their forerunners, these postwar writers tend to see in music a repository of formal and expressive models useful for developing new, inwardly directed modes of mimesis capable of foregrounding the operations of consciousness over the objects of consciousness.

Throughout the twentieth century, then, modernist writers have used music to suggest — not an alternative to representation — but a variety of models for new and improved modes of representation more aligned with the modernist preoccupation with representing consciousness. Beginning in the late 1960s, however, a surprising new development emerges: an unprecedented drive to move away from this now-familiar emphasis on representing consciousness — not to revert to more traditional forms of representation, but to argue for the necessity of abolishing representation altogether. Once again, this movement is especially prominent in France. The Tel Quel group, led by Philippe Sollers, built its entire theory of literature on this anti-mimetic premise, neatly captured in Jean Ricardou's frequently cited injunction to write "not the narrative of an adventure but the adventure of a narrative." For these writers, theme, character, and indeed all forms of narrative content are considered mere pretexts, secondary by-products, or outright distractions from the pure play of linguistic signifiers and abstract verbal constructions. The radical challenge this theory of literary meaning poses to more traditional accounts of literature is clear: literature — the art most closely allied with representation throughout its history — is suddenly explained as an art that, like music, is fundamentally non-representational. But what led these thinkers to conceive of literary meaning this way? Why did they consider it so essential to go beyond representation? And how successful were they in their endeavor? To answer such questions, it will be useful to focus on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Among the primary philosophical exponents of this anti-representational school, their work most clearly demonstrates what is at stake in this theory of literature.

In Difference and Repetition, first published at the height of the countercultural movement and social unrest of 1968, Deleuze lays the philosophical groundwork for this anti-representational doctrine. He runs through a critique of the history of philosophy from Plato and Aristotle onward to argue that representation is not only a dull tool that has outlived its usefulness but is also linked to inherently repressive modes of thought. Twelve years later, in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze joins forces with Félix Guattari to illustrate the radical philosophical project proposed in Difference and Repetition, which demands nothing less than overturning the entire edifice of representational thought. Significantly, music plays a prominent role in the argument of A Thousand Plateaus, serving primarily as a way to reflect upon the means and ends of their larger, "nomadic" philosophical project.

Music, Deleuze and Guattari assert, provides an instructive model for literature and the arts, and indeed for philosophy, the sciences, and all other forms of human endeavor as well. It suggests to them an alternative mode of inquiry capable of overcoming more traditional forms of understanding that depend on representation. If their ultimate goal is to eliminate representational thought entirely, then music seems to offer a useful model for understanding the kinds of thinking that might replace it. This anti-representational use of music clearly runs counter to the modernist approach to music described earlier, which linked music to the development of new modes of representation, not its destruction. Indeed, some have argued that Deleuze's rejection of representation might define the moment when modernism flips over into postmodernity. My own research has convinced me, however, that important points of continuity exist between modernism and postmodernism, suggesting that the break between them cannot be defined so neatly. To show how Deleuze and Guattari's use of music relates to that of their modernist predecessors, I will focus on A Thousand Plateaus, which devotes two full chapters to music. Before turning to A Thousand Plateaus, it will be necessary to provide a brief overview of Deleuze's critique of representation in Difference and Repetition, since it provides the foundation for all that follows. This first part of my analysis will take us fairly far from questions relating specifically to music, but it is necessary if we are to understand the significance of music as a model for the "nomadic," "deterritorialized," "molecular" mode of thought that Deleuze and Guattari seek to promote in A Thousand Plateaus.

Antirepresentationalism in Difference and Repetition

It is Henri Bergson's philosophy of becoming that provides the initial impetus for Deleuze's critique of representation. Bergson famously noted that language is an inherently spatializing medium, blocking our intuitive understanding of time-as-becoming and making it nearly impossible to have any direct experience of the passing of time. Music, on the other hand, by asking us to focus on the ebb and flow of intensities experienced qualitatively, could help us grasp this essential aspect of time and temporality. Deleuze builds on Bergson's critique of language but extends it to the entire system of representation, while also drawing a number of political conclusions from it. For Deleuze, representation is inherently oppressive, responsible for the mental habits that allow the many institutionalized forms of political and social injustice surrounding us to prosper. For this reason, he argues, it is necessary to break out of the mental habits associated with representational thought if we are to think freely and effect any real changes in the current social and political order.

The first stages of his analysis in Difference and Repetition are fairly classic. Deleuze begins by pointing out that linguistic communication requires the use of concepts, and that concepts work by subordinating individuals — that is, any objects found in the empirical world — to the generality of the concepts by which they are named. To facilitate communication, they disregard the individuality of individuals, subsuming individuals and all the differences that distinguish them from one another into general categories. Few would care to dispute him on this point. But Deleuze then goes a step further, equating this conceptual subordination of the individual to the general with Platonic Idealism: just as — he argues — Plato considered all actual beings to be mere copies of originals found only on the plane of Ideas, concepts treat individuals as if they were merely examples of general categories. Deleuze argues that there is consequently an implied ontological hierarchy in the very use of concepts, which accords primacy to the general category, as if concepts were somehow more real or perfect than the individual members of the categories they define.

This is a delicate point philosophically, and to make his case Deleuze zeros in on Aristotle's theory of difference, as formulated in Book X of the Metaphysics. This is one of the most difficult and rewarding passages of Difference and Repetition. By paying special attention to the taxonomical procedures that characterize Aristotelian thought — where every individual is a member of a conceptual category and every category a member of a still more general category — Deleuze shows that Aristotle cannot conceive of difference on its own terms: individual differences are always conceived as a function of the categories to which the individuals belong; difference itself is defined as a function of identity. Deleuze then argues that this inability to conceive of difference without reference to identity has distorted the entire history of rational thought in the Western tradition, leading us to misunderstand seriously the very nature of individuality and difference, notably by leading us to undervalue the particularity of direct experience, which is always lost in the system of representation because it is subordinated to the generality of concepts.

There are a number of points on which we could contest this conclusion, but the main sticking point of Deleuze's argument is that Aristotle and his successors describe the generalizing function of concepts in strictly logical terms. Unlike Plato's conception of the Ideas, which explicitly subordinates empirical experience to the superior ontological plane of Ideas, Aristotle's descriptions of conceptual thought avoid making any explicit metaphysical or ethical claims. But Deleuze, who is aware of this objection, argues that Aristotle's logic is, if anything, even more insidiously oppressive than Plato's metaphysics, because it has, over the centuries, conditioned us to accept general categories as the primary data of thought, to substitute — at some subconscious level — concepts for the direct experience of individuals, thereby restricting and limiting every aspect of our relation to the world around us. For this reason, Deleuze actually finds Platonic metaphysics more palatable than Aristotle's logic:

With Plato the outcome is still in doubt; the process of mediation has not yet been automated. The Idea is not yet an object-concept that subordinates the world to the needs of representation, but rather a brut presence, which can only be evoked in the world by referring to what is not 'representable' in things. Moreover the Idea has not yet chosen to subordinate differences between individuals to the identity of a concept in general (Difference and Repetition, 83).

For Deleuze, then, the problem with representation is that it has become so entrenched in our thought patterns that it has become nearly impossible for us to think about individuals directly, without the mediation of the concept. As a result, all direct experiences of becoming and difference melt away before the abstractive, generalizing work of conceptual, representational thought.

Deleuze's analysis leads him to conclude that it has become necessary to undertake a complete renovation of our epistemological attitudes if we are to regain a more direct, unmediated relationship with the world around us. This, he believes, will require tearing down the entire edifice of representation in the Aristotelian tradition and replacing it with a mode of thought emphasizing the perceptual realm, which he describes in Bergsonian terms of differences, becomings, durations, intensities, and individuals. It is not clear, however, exactly how we are supposed to do this — even to Deleuze — and so we are left at the end of Difference and Repetition in the uncomfortable position of having to develop a whole new arsenal of tools that would enable us to think productively while also avoiding the temptation to structure the world according to the hierarchical categories of conceptual thought. Indeed, we might well ask if such a thing is even possible. How might we go about bringing such a non-representational regime into existence? Is it possible to think without representation? And even if we can imagine ourselves acquiring non-representational knowledge of the world, how would we go about communicating that knowledge to others? Indeed, given that language is an inherently representational medium, does not the very use of language by Deleuze and Guattari imply a contradiction at the heart of their philosophical project? These are some of the questions that Deleuze and Guattari attempt to answer in A Thousand Plateaus. And it is their attempts to answer these questions that will lead them to reflect upon the production of meaning in music.

Molecules, Moles, and Music in A Thousand Plateaus

The stated goal of A Thousand Plateaus is to revolutionize the field of "perceptual semiotics" — that is, to teach people to re-envision the world, to see it in new ways, by changing the cognitive tools with which they think. The epistemology Deleuze and Guattari promote there grows directly out of the Bergsonian ontology promoted in Difference and Repetition, with its emphasis on differences, becomings, and intensities over identity, being, and metric space. They also reject — or at least try to overcome — the use of hierarchical categories of conceptual thought in the Aristotelian tradition. It is for this reason that they call their way of doing philosophy "nomadic." In the Aristotelian tradition, as they explain it, the world is organized conceptually into plateaus or strata of analysis, where each stratum is defined by a small set of concepts related hierarchically to one another, according to the "arborescent" logic of family trees, corporate power structures, military rank, and, of course, Aristotle's own taxonomies. What they propose instead is to focus attention on the creation of transversal lines that move freely between strata, making often unexpected connections between them. They call these transversal lines "planes of consistency" and make them one of the central features of their methodology.

This kind of nomadic conceptual wandering between conceptual strata lies at the heart of their philosophical technique and is responsible for much of what is most exciting and interesting — but also at times exasperating — about that technique. Deleuze and Guattari are not systematic thinkers. On the contrary, they are self-consciously a-systematic thinkers: refusing to stay put in one field or metaphorical register, they roam constantly from one to the next, often without much explanation and often within the space of a single sentence. This is what makes their work so difficult and so provocative. By considering, for example, biological phenomena in geological terms, or social interactions in terms of chemical reactions, they hope to provoke new insights and energize new modes of thought that would eventually make it possible to escape from the hierarchically structured world of Aristotelian epistemology. In this sense, "nomadic" philosophy refers to a kind of interdisciplinarity gone wild. They not only disregard established disciplinary boundaries but work consistently against the grain, always cutting across established generic and disciplinary boundaries to create hybrid analytic tools, to which they give odd, anti-Aristotelian names like rhizomes, assemblages, the Body Without Organs, and planes of consistency.

So where does music come into all of this? For Deleuze and Guattari, music is an exemplary art form that provides the clearest practical example of the kind of nomadic thought they seek to promote. A temporal art, it puts emphasis on the Bergsonian dynamics of flux and becoming; a non-representational art, it brings our perceptual faculties into contact with our intellectual faculties in a way that does not require the mediation of concepts and representation. But above all, they argue, it is nomadic: it brings together different levels of analysis, enabling them to be contained within a single thought. By liberating us from the limitations of representational thought in the Aristotelian tradition, which it does primarily through its deployment of abstract rhythmic patterns that modulate the flow of time, music promises a more immediate form of insight, one unburdened by the conceptual framework that language seems to impose so inexorably. Indeed, Deleuze and Guattari are drawn to music for its ability to sidestep representation altogether.

And yet — to zero in on the guiding hypothesis of this essay — music’s function in this context is not as purely non-representational as Deleuze and Guattari would like it to be. For when they try to explain how music achieves its effects, they invariably end up describing those effects with reference to mental states and extra-musical concepts. By drawing attention to the "molecular" level of experience, they align music with bodily rhythms, biological processes, and perceptual awareness. This reintroduces the very psychologism and referential thinking they had set out to avoid. The line between the experience of music and the representation of that experience remains blurred. In short, when Deleuze and Guattari try to cash out what is most valuable about their musical model, they end up talking about minds and bodies — which is to say, about something beyond pure sound. They make music a metaphor for a non-representational mode of thought, but the very act of turning music into a model makes it function representationally. Music becomes a sign of something else, a vehicle for meaning that moves from the sonic to the conceptual, following a trajectory that seems difficult to distinguish from the representational paradigm they claimed to have overcome.

This is the compelling tension at the core of their enterprise: Deleuze and Guattari turn to music because it seems to free them from representational constraints, but in analyzing and promoting it as a model, they inevitably involve themselves in projects of description, metaphoric transfer, and conceptual packaging that fall squarely within the domain of representation. Their return to the representational is not a repudiation of the anti-mimetic impulse, but a deepened understanding that escape from representation may be neither possible nor desirable. Music does not succeed, finally, for them, by doing away with reference; it succeeds by providing a more supple and dynamic kind of referential relation — one compatible with the ever-processual, ever-becoming reality that Bergson described, and still far removed from the rigid taxonomies of Aristotle.

demands that we operate on a single conceptual plane at a time, music helps us grasp how, from interstellar expanses to subatomic particles, everything remains interconnected with everything else. In this sense, one might say that the musical experience Deleuze and Guattari describe represents a postmodern update of the Pythagorean harmony of the spheres.

By placing all its components in continuous variation, music [...] enters the service of a virtual cosmic continuum [...]. This ferment came to the forefront and made itself heard in its own right; and, through the molecular material thus wrought, it made audible the nonsonorous forces of the cosmos that have always agitated music – a bit of Time in the pure state (Proust), a grain of absolute Intensity [...]. Music is not alone in being art as cosmos and in drawing the virtual lines of an infinite variation. (95-96)

Their primary reference in this passage is to twelve-tone music, but they argue that all music — or at least all genuine music — possesses this capacity to connect us with every link in the great chain of being, whether human, animal, vegetable, mineral, or otherwise, and to illuminate how these various levels interact with one another. Thus:

The properly musical content of music is plied by becomings-woman, becomings-child, becomingsanimal; however, it tends, under all sorts of influences, having to do also with the instruments, to become progressively more molecular in a kind of cosmic lapping through which the inaudible makes itself heard and the imperceptible appears as such: no longer the songbird, but the sound molecule. (248)

It is this “molecular” scale of infra-conceptual relations — set in opposition to the “molar” scale of conceptually defined resemblances — that captures their attention. When examining bird-song on the molecular level, what matters is not the bird or the song themselves (the molar units, considered indivisible) but rather bird molecules and sound molecules, which operate in ways independent from conceptual units such as “bird” or “song.” It is evident, for example, that the sound molecules comprising bird-song interact according to laws operating on numerous planes — including, among a potentially infinite set, the laws of acoustics and natural selection, along with the neurological and physiological laws governing sound production and reception. Music facilitates our understanding of such interactions by compelling us to sharpen our perceptual faculties, encouraging liberation from the cognitive constraints of molar thought erected by concepts like “bird” and “song.” This constitutes the first major point to retain from the account of musical communication in A Thousand Plateaus: music aids our thinking on the molecular level of infra-conceptual relations.

Music as a Nomadic Art

This “molecular,” nomadic, quasi-Pythagorean theory of music draws heavily — and often uncritically — from Pierre Boulez’s writings on music history. Like Boulez, Deleuze and Guattari view the arrival of the twelve-tone system as a pivotal moment in musical history. Yet significantly, for both parties, twelve-tone music should not be interpreted as a radical departure from traditional diatonic tonality but rather as a logical outgrowth of the broader project Webern termed the “ongoing conquest of the tonal field” (cf. The Path to the New Music, passim). Deleuze and Guattari rehearse music history on multiple occasions — citing innovations from medieval polyphony through Romantic chromaticism to Darmstadt-era serialism — to demonstrate that music’s entire history reveals an art most tellingly defined by ongoing renewal, of which twelve-tone music represents merely a particularly revealing turn.

The Viennese school is exemplary of this kind of diagonal, this kind of line-block. But [...] [t]he important thing is that all musicians have always proceeded in this way: drawing their own diagonal, however fragile, outside points, outside coordinates and localizable connections, in order to float a sound block down a created, liberated line, in order to unleash in space this mobile and mutant sound block, a haecceity (for example, chromaticism, aggregates, and complex notes, but already the resources and possibilities of polyphony, etc.). (297)

For them, music serves as an exemplary art because it continuously reworks its own materials from within, striving to comprehend the fundamental principles and deep structures governing the art. They locate these principles on the “molecular” level, opposing them to the “molar” units of music defined by whatever local conventions — such as diatonic tonality — happen to be in effect at a given moment. Ultimately, they contend that twelve-tone music simply clarified a tendency always present in music: the nomadic inclination to perpetually question existing codes as part of its quest to unveil underlying structures.

[T]he important thing is certainly not to establish a pseudobreak between the tonal system and atonal music; the latter, on the contrary, in breaking away from the tonal system, only carried temperament to its ultimate conclusion (although no Viennese stopped there.) The essential thing is almost the opposite movement: the ferment in the tonal system itself (during much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) that dissolved temperament and widened chromaticism while preserving a relative tonality, which reinvented new modalities, brought a new amalgamation of major and minor, and in each instance conquered realms of continuous variation for this variable or that. (95-96)

This constitutes the second point to retain from their account of musical communication: for them, music stands apart among the arts for its unwavering dedication to the work of nomadism. Music perpetually generates new planes of consistency whose primary value lies in how they cut across existing boundaries, dismantling barriers between different levels of thought and establishing fresh, unforeseen connections. What most distinguishes music from the representational arts, in their view, is its commitment to revealing the underlying codes governing its expressive language, its willingness to constantly challenge accepted conventions, categories, and compositional techniques. And this, they argue, is precisely what nomadic philosophy offers more established forms of scientific inquiry: an ongoing, self-perpetuating critique of established conventions that enables better understanding of phenomena at the microscopic, molecular level by deconstructing accepted categories of molar thought.

Music, the Refrain, and Representation

Before proceeding further, it is crucial to recognize that Deleuze and Guattari do not present music as an abstract, contentless, or non-representational art. On the contrary, they insist that all music possesses thematic content of a kind inseparable from its form — content not essentially different from that found in literature. They identify this content with the refrain in music.

What does music deal with, what is the content indissociable from sound expression? It is hard to say, but it is something: a child dies, a child plays, a woman is born, a woman dies, a bird arrives, a bird flies off. We wish to say that these are not accidental themes in music […] much less imitative exercises; they are something essential [...]. We would say that the refrain is properly musical content, the block of content proper to music. (299)

The concept of the refrain provides the point where their theory of musical meaning most interestingly resonates with their antirepresentational philosophical stance. For Deleuze and Guattari, the refrain marks the representational moment in music — the moment when the work’s thematic content expresses itself most clearly. Yet what makes music a model for the arts, philosophy, and the sciences is neither its apparently abstract tonal surface nor its foregrounding of temporal performance, but rather the nomadic manner in which music develops the refrain. Since this constitutes the key point emerging from their account of musical thought, it merits close examination.

Again: for Deleuze and Guattari, the refrain signals the representational moment in music. Considering the role of refrains in song — from primitive chants to nursery rhymes to the art songs of Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann — illustrates what they mean: the refrain marks the moment of greatest stability in a song. When we ask what a song is about, we begin by humming its refrain. When we have forgotten all other lyrics, we return to the refrain. However, the particularity of musical thought for Deleuze and Guattari lies in music’s doing everything in its power to destabilize the refrain — to “deterritorialize” it, in their terminology. Indeed, music owes its exemplary status to its tendency to subordinate the refrain to various processes of musical development. This is the third crucial point to retain from their account of music: the refrain may be the most basic, easily recognized feature of a musical work, but precisely for this reason it represents an obstacle to the kind of meaning that interests Deleuze and Guattari. The refrain is that which must be overcome for genuinely musical communication to occur.

We are not at all saying that the refrain is the origin of music, or that music begins with it. It is not really known when music begins. The refrain is rather a means of preventing music, warding it off, or forgoing it. But music exists because the refrain exists also, because music takes up the refrain, lays hold of it as a content in a form of expression, because it forms a block with it in order to take it somewhere else [...]. Music is a creative, active operation that consists in deterritorializing the refrain. Whereas the refrain is essentially territorial, territorializing, or reterritorializing, music makes it a deterritorialized content for a deterritorializing form of expression. (300)

This idea of deterritorializing the refrain leads them to conclude that music’s essence lies not in song, the voice, or the refrain itself but in the use of all those processes of development and variation characteristic of instrumental music within the art music tradition. Again, it is easy to grasp what Deleuze and Guattari mean: in sonata development sections, contrapuntal treatment of fugue subjects, progressive transformations in variation form, the principle of continuous development dear to Boulez and the serialists, and even shifting patterns of repetition used by minimalists like Philip Glass and Steve Reich, art music tends to subject its refrains to ever more complex processes of development and variation, moving the work progressively farther from its refrain-based starting point.

It is this musical emphasis on processes of variation — identified with becoming — that they wish to reintroduce into philosophy and the sciences. Unsurprisingly, Deleuze and Guattari generalize from this insight, using the metaphor of musical deterritorialization to justify and explain their own practice of nomadic philosophy. Indeed, for those familiar with Deleuze and Guattari’s work, it will be apparent that their descriptions of music could equally serve as descriptions of their own philosophical method. Their chapters organize around recurrent motifs functioning much like refrains, yet their analysis shifts constantly from one conceptual level to another and from one subject to another, often without clearly signaling transition points or overarching themes that might explain movement from one development to the next. Rather than progressing systematically from point to point in hierarchical fashion, as philosophers in the Aristotelian tradition do, Deleuze and Guattari proceed through a process resembling free association. They constantly deterritorialize their refrains, allowing momentary associations rather than systematic argument or global theme to determine their chapters’ shape. And music history appears to them to justify this choice. Works in the classic Aristotelian representational tradition, they argue, tend to cling desperately to their refrains — akin to more elementary song forms, which treat variation, development, and exploration as necessary evils, no-man’s-lands to be traversed only to reach the next refrain statement. But Deleuze and Guattari align themselves with continual development.

Their mode of philosophizing emphasizes deterritorialization, conceiving of the refrain as a necessary but somewhat dull resting point on the journey of nomadic thought. Consequently, nomadic philosophy affirms the importance of becoming over being. Whereas Aristotelian-tradition thinkers tend to emphasize being and stasis — the refrain itself — thinkers in the tradition Deleuze and Guattari espouse use their a-systematic, improvisational, associative style to underscore the significance of flux and becoming.

Music can thus be said to serve for Deleuze and Guattari much the same purpose it served for the modernist writers evoked in the preamble: as a model for representing a mode of thought. In this case, it functions as a metaphor for their way of doing philosophy, opposed to the more systematic analyses characteristic of the Aristotelian tradition. This should not, of course, imply anything inherently musical about Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophizing. Rather, it would be more accurate to say that their descriptions of music are largely overdetermined — one might even say distorted — by their philosophical practice. They emphasize only those aspects of music that prove analogous to their preferred mode of philosophy, ignoring or downplaying the rest. In this sense, music serves primarily as an oppositional marker, a convenient metaphor for explaining what they regard as distinctive and noteworthy about their brand of philosophy.

Does this mean we should discount their protracted musical analyses in A Thousand Plateaus, arguing that the chapters-long developments on music provide little more than rhetorical maneuvering — strategic metaphors whose sole function is to help make a polemical point? Not necessarily. But to overcome such an objection, it should be possible to demonstrate that music makes some positive contribution to their philosophy — that it has enabled them to say something they could not have said otherwise. Does music contribute to their argument in this way? Yes, but not exactly what one might expect given their antirepresentational starting point. In fact, the clearest sign of music’s influence on their philosophical system is that it leads them to renounce the antirepresentational aspects of their original project. For if their initial intention in introducing music was to bolster their claims for nomadic philosophy as an antirepresentational alternative to the Aristotelian tradition, music actually ends up having the opposite effect, leading them to abandon the very position they were trying to defend. The analysis of music in A Thousand Plateaus ultimately prompts a retreat from their initial antirepresentational stance.

Music and the Return to Representation

Toward the end of their discussion on music, Deleuze and Guattari realize that if even music possesses a territorializing, content-oriented, representational dimension — that of the refrain — then there must be something necessary about representation and territory that even their militantly nomadic philosophy cannot do without. This realization leads them to add a significant qualification to the attacks on representation found elsewhere.

The fact that there is no deterritorialization without a special reterritorialization should prompt us to rethink the abiding correlation between the molar and the molecular: no flow, no becoming-molecular escapes from a molar formation without molar components accompanying it, forming passages or perceptible landmarks for the imperceptible processes. (303)

This amounts to saying that we cannot dispense with representation. Yes, music allots a smaller role to representation than other arts, but even music cannot do without it entirely. We must always reintroduce representation at a certain point — if only to explain to others what we think is happening in a work. It can no longer be a matter of effecting “the ruin of representation” (as Dorothea Olkowski titled her study of Deleuze) to open a utopian realm of pure difference and becoming. Instead, Deleuze and Guattari find themselves forced back to a much more moderate position: merely reversing the traditional hierarchy between representation and difference, placing emphasis on the differential moment while allowing that there must always be an eventual reterritorialization — a return to representational values. Thus, although they continue to insist that “becoming is never imitating,” they immediately concede that imitation nevertheless plays an essential role in becoming: “One does not imitate; one constitutes a block of becoming. Imitation enters in only as an adjustment of the block, like a finishing touch, a wink, a

One encounters a highly telling turn of phrase here. For even if imitation contributes only an “adjustment,” a “wink,” or a “signature” to the process of becoming, and even if they hasten to add that “everything of importance happens elsewhere,” it is still imitation that seals the work, supplying the “finishing touch,” the “signature” that the work would otherwise lack. Imitation, in other words, not merely plays a role; it has the final word, even in music.

Given the sweeping denunciation of representation in Difference and Repetition, this amounts to a remarkable concession. Throughout the later work, similar concessions appear, ultimately forcing a severe curtailment of the entire philosophical project. Indeed, near the end of A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari allow that the whole theory of nomadism should be interpreted, not in antagonism to mainstream science and conventional modes of representation and analytic reasoning, but inside the field of representation, as a moment of unrest that feeds into scientific inquiry and conceptual thought in the lineage of “royal” science.

What becomes apparent in the rivalry between the two models is that the ambulant or nomad sciences do not destine science to take on an autonomous power, or even to have an autonomous development. They do not have the means for that because they subordinate all their operations to the sensible conditions of intuition and construction – following the flow of matter, drawing and linking up smooth space […]. However refined or rigorous, “approximate knowledge” is still dependent upon sensitive and sensible evaluations that pose more problems than they solve: problematics is still its only mode. In contrast, what is proper to royal science, to its theorematic or axiomatic power, is to isolate all operations from the conditions of intuition, making them true intrinsic concepts, or “categories.” That is precisely why deterritorialization, in this kind of science, implies a reterritorialization in the conceptual apparatus. (373)

Passages like this one reveal that Deleuze and Guattari have abandoned their initial aim of surpassing representation, falling back onto the far more moderate undertaking of reforming representation from the inside, a reform that operates by shifting emphasis away from conceptual stability—which they view as a fleeting moment in thinking—and toward the inherent instability and flux of the becoming of ideas.

In this sense, despite the more incendiary rhetoric of the work, it is actually a far more conservative, more representational text than The Fold.

Paradoxically, then, A Thousand Plateaus might be said to confirm the fundamental resilience of the representational model Deleuze and Guattari initially set out to dismantle. By subjecting it to the fiercest critique and then retreating in the face of undeniable evidence, they give us even more reason to trust representation and conceptual analysis in the Aristotelian tradition. And it is their examination of the refrain in music that sows the seed that will eventually guide them to this verdict.

Nevertheless, one need not interpret this defeat of antirepresentationalism as a failure for the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari. Although they were mistaken in forecasting the imminent end of representational thought, they were unquestionably right to highlight the necessity of continually refining and reforming representational practices. Their work significantly advances this process of reform, yet it does so from the inside rather than the outside, adopting the critical, combative stance of the loyal critic rather than the destructive, murderous posture of the revolutionary insurgent. The very fact that they are willing to concede the fundamental strength of representational thought, despite having intended to demonstrate the opposite, indicates their ambition to make a genuine contribution to philosophy’s slow progress toward true understanding and fundamental truths.

Even more important than this, however, are the real conceptual and methodological contributions they make to the toolkit of representational thought. By forging new kinds of concepts—among them the rhizome, the simulacrum, the assemblage, the plane of consistency, and all the other transversal, hybridizing notions that work by cutting across established conceptual boundaries—their work has enabled us to perceive the world in novel ways, allowing us to identify objects that would not have been recognizable using the more conventional categories of traditional philosophy. In this manner, their work has made significant contributions to the analytic labor of representation, enhancing its range, depth, and the fineness of distinctions it can draw. And ultimately it is the nomadic structures of their analyses, inspired in large part by how music uses variation and development to

deterritorialize its refrains, that makes this kind of hybrid, border-crossing vision possible.