Gilles Deleuze and the Object of Sound Studies James Huitson

The Call For Sonic Thinking: Gilles Deleuze and the Object of Sound Studies James Huitson Lavender Submitted in Accordance with the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Leeds School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies September 2015 2 The candidate confirms that the work submitted is his own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. © 2015 The University of Leeds and James Lavender 3 Acknowledgements I would like to acknowledge to invaluable contributions of my supervisors Marcel Swiboda and Barbara Engh, whose support, advice and engagement was a source of both guidance and pleasure. There are many conversations, dialogues, debates and discussions that have underpinned the research presented in this thesis in ways that are, inevitably, impossible to specify other than as a general atmosphere that permeates a work; with this in mind, I would like to thank Iain Campbell, Simon Constantine, Swen Steinhauser, Fiona Allen, Agnieszka Jasnowska, Liz Stainforth, Lenka Vrablikova, Asa Roast, Oliver Thurley, Andy Moore and Stuart Robinson. Finally, I would like to thank Kate, without whom this would not have been possible. 4 Abstract This thesis proposes to define and to dramatize a relation between Deleuze studies and sound studies in terms of a conception of theoretical work as an experimental practice that bears not upon objects but upon Ideas—or rather, that reconfigures the sense of object in relation to a renewed conception of the Idea. This relation between two discourses will proceed through an engagement between the work of Gilles Delueze and that of John Cage, constituted as an “interference between practices”, with the intent of furnishing, to sound studies, a meta-theoretical reflection on the problem that sound poses to thinking, and on the conditions under which theory can respond to such a problem without, thereby, reducing it to something all-too-recognisable. 5 Abbreviations The following abbreviations have been used throughout; see the list of works cited for full references. WP Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? DR Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition KC Gilles Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy LS Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense PS Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs SPP Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy C2 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image TM Gilles Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995 DI Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953-1974 NP Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy F Gilles Deleuze, Foucault AO Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus LB Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque FB Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation CC Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical D2 Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II TP Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus DP François Zourabichvili, Deleuze: A Philosophy of the Event WT Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking? BW Martin Hediegger, Basic Writings DT Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking BT Martin Heidegger, Being and Time BQ Martin Heidegger, Basic Questions of Philosophy T1 Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus T2 Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time 2: Disorientation CPR Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason S John Cage, Silence FTB John Cage, For the Birds 6 YM John Cage, A Year From Monday MC John Cage with Joan Retallack, Musicage CWC Richard Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage 7 Table of Contents Introduction: The Contemporaneity of Sound Studies 9 1.Dramatizing the Sonic Idea 9 2. A Disciplinary Emergency: Sound Studies “Today” 14 3. Diagnosing the Delay: On “Not Yet” Thinking Sound 22 4. Calling and Responding: Sound as Provocation 30 Chapter One: The Tele-Phonic Call of Thinking 34 1. Answering the Call: Heidegger’s Silence 36 2. Listening Without Sound 44 3. “It” Calls” Conscience Between the Who and the What 49 4. Technics and “Our Time”: De-severance and Disorientation 64 5. “No Future”: Sounding Con-temporaneity 75 6. New Noise: Stockpiling and Retromania 85 Chapter Two: Sounding the Image of Thought 107 1. Beyond the Audiovisual Litany: On the Essence of Sound 108 2. Sound-in-Itself, or The Kantian Inheritances of Sound Studies 113 3. Implicit Presuppositions, or How to Begin? 121 4. “The All-Sound Music of the Future” 132 5. The Sonic Object = x 141 6. Critique or Communication 151 Chapter Three: Revaluating the Essence of Sound 166 1. Evaluating the Question: What is Sound? 168 2. “Our Time” is Out of Joint 171 3. Force and Sense: The Truth(s) of Time 182 4. The Listener as Spectator: Actions and Re-actions 188 5. Affirming the Whole of Chance 197 6. The Discordant Harmony of the Faculties 212 7. There is No Such Thing as Silence 218 8 Conclusion: The Others of Experimentalism 227 Works Cited 238 9 Introduction: The Contemporaneity of Sound Studies 1. Dramatizing the Sonic Idea This thesis is intended as a contribution to the fields of Deleuze studies and sound studies with regard to the question of practice. That is to say, it offers, on the one hand, an analysis of Deleuze’s early work in terms of his interrogation of what it means to think, and, on the other, considers how this analysis might function as a methodological intervention in sound studies; yet it is not simply a question of what a “Deleuzian” sound studies would resemble, but of the ways in which Deleuze’s work allows us to reconceive the practice of studying as such. What is at stake, then, is the status of theoretical work as a concrete activity, and the ways in which this work may or may not intersect or engage with a particular object; if sound constitutes a privileged case, in this respect, it is insofar as, as I will show, the disciplinary constitution of sound studies is inextricable from this very problem, a problem immanently posed by sound to thought. Finally, then, if Deleuze offers a renewed conception of thinking as a form of activity, this conception will allow us to pose to sound studies the nature and status of its own practice—as well as, ultimately, the “object” of this practice. As the title suggests, then, my interest, principally, is in approaching sound as what John Mowitt terms a ‘disciplinary object’, where this designates the ‘volatile zone of indistinction between the world […] and the institutionally organized production of knowledge’ (2011, 2), an indistinction that manifests in the ambiguity of the referent itself: when we refer to the object of sound studies, do we refer to that which it is “about”, or to its ‘aim or purpose’ (1)? Do these two senses correlate, or do they diverge? Not only is this ambiguity constitutive for sound studies, with regard to the seemingly essential indeterminateness of its own object, as well as the uncertainty over how we might come to scrutinize said object, but it also constitutes a central and defining theme of Deleuze’s oeuvre. If Deleuze’s work is defined by its continual intersection with “other” domains—references to literature, visual arts, music, mathematics and the physical sciences, amongst many others, abound throughout his work—then, on this basis, it is also preoccupied with the question of philosophy’s specificity. Famously, Deleuze’s “solution” was to define philosophy as a specific 10 practice with its own object: ‘philosophy is the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts’ (WP 2). It is this art of conceptual creation that Deleuze and Guattari1 had been “doing all their lives” (WP 1), under the name of philosophy (amongst many others).2 On this basis, I want to present this thesis as, on the one hand, an investigation of the implications of such a claim with regard to sound studies. The claim that philosophy creates concepts falls back not only on the concept of the philosophical object itself (as we will hear in Chapter Two), but also, in a related sense, the object of philosophy as that toward which it is oriented: at the same moment, the object of philosophy is positioned internally to philosophy itself, in the form of the concept, and projected out of the present, becoming its “goal”; philosophy as the ‘system of the future’ (DR 142). If philosophy is the creation of concepts, then, what of those other objects of philosophy—the objects of philosophy’s “others”? How might philosophy encounter the sonic work, for instance, if its true focus is the concept? 1 This thesis focuses largely on Deleuze’s early texts, principally his work on Kant and Nietzsche in the early nineteen-sixties, and the elaboration of this work in Difference and Repetition. For this reason, I will largely refer only to Deleuze, and when discussing the collaborative texts I will focus on their continuity with Deleuze’s work. While I acknowledge that, until recently, Guattari has undergone a ‘problematic subsumption’ as Deleuze’s ‘partner’, as Garry Genosko puts it (Genosko 2002, 1), and that, as Genosko puts it elsewhere, this subsumption has led to the treatment of the collaborations ‘as a whole determined by Deleuze alone’ (Genosko 2012, 154), nevertheless I justify my decision for two related reasons. Firstly, Deleuze himself remarked upon differences between his and Guattari’s understanding of certain concepts, such as the body without organs (TM 238) and on this basis, as Daniel W. Smith notes, one could read the concepts of the collaborative works as bearing distinct senses according to whether one reads them within the ‘trajectory’ of Deleuze’s work or of Guattari’s (Smith 2012, 124).

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