The Pragmatic Constructions of Deleuze, Guattari and Miles Davis Marcel Swiboda Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of PhD. The University of Leeds, School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies. October 2002 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. 2 Acknowledgements Firstly, a big thank you to my longstanding friends in Birmingham: to Justin Eades, Richard and Barry Cartmell, Dean Deavall and Andy Vine. Many thanks also to the sedentary inhabitants of Leamington Spa: Nick Coonan, Simon Scott, Lisa Powell and Luther Howard, and to those presently located in London and environs: to Robert Clough, Lee Matthews, Fleur Darkin, Oliver Pine], Janie Atkins, Susan Kelly, Matt Rawle and Melanie Johnson. Extra special thanks go to Jemma Byrne and Simon 0' Sullivan. I would also like to express my appreciation for the friendship and support I have received both professionally and personally at Leeds: to my Parallax colleagues, Joanne Crawford, Cylena Simonds, and especially to Lynn Turner, for her inspiring commitment and her rigour, and to Paul Bowman, for his infectious humour and for his intellectual `sobriety'. Thank you also to David Fox, Kevin Vaughan, Ola Stahl, Ika Willis, Nick Chare, Shelley Budgeon, Alistair Rider, Katrin Kivimaa, Karima Laachir, Tom Tyler, Henry Fisher, Chris Emmett and Ken Hay. Further afield, many thanks to Elena di Giovanni and Janna Graham. I would like to offer my deepest gratitude to Tom Syson for reminding me I had a life outside of University, to Kurt Hirtler, whose kindness, generosity and support - both Engh, for personally and intellectually - has been beyond measure, and to Barbara standing by me through everything and for having had faith in my abilities that on many occasions surpassed my own. Lastly, I want to thank Monica and Joseph Swiboda. I dedicate this project to them. 3 Abstract The aim of the following investigation is two-fold. Firstly, the project takes as its focus the growing corpus of secondary literature written on the work of the French philosophers and theorists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, whose work has generated a great deal of interest in recent years and a proportionate amount of controversy. Much of this controversy can be attributed to simplifications and misunderstandings on the part of commentators who have in some instances neglected to approach Deleuze and Guattari with sufficent rigour and care, resulting in the perpetuation of so many misunderstandings regarding their work. Secondly, the project will seek to redress some of these misunderstandings by recourse to a pragmatic embodiment of Deleuze and Guattari's concepts and ideas through a case-study based on the life and work of the African-American jazz musician Miles Davis. In attempting to provide a new and challenging case as the basis for this investigation, the overriding aim is to assessthe pragmatic remit of Deleuze and Guattari's thought, in terms of aesthetics, ethics and politics, whilst remaining sensitive to the potential limitations and dangers of their project. 4 Table of Contents Introduction: A Conspiracy of Imitators? Re-assessingDeleuze and Guattari's Reception, p.6. Apprenticeship in (Non-)Philosophy: Making Do With Deleuzeand Guattari P.18. Chapter 1: Making the Casefor Deleuzeand Guattari p.27. Synthetic Trajectories of Thought p.29. Dispostions of Investment 1: Dis-positif p.46. Making the Case:The Exemplary Embodiments of Brian Massumi p.52. Dispostions of Investment 2, Or Whatever Floats Your (Processual)Boat: Massumi and Cultural Studies p.57. Taking Exception to the Case:Alain Badiou p.63. None, One or Several Guattaris?: The Pragmatic Constructions of the 'Other Guy' p.72. Chapter 2: The Refrains of Deleuze,Guattari and Miles Davis p.86. 'Deterritorializing the Refrain': Words and Music by Deleuzeand Guattari p.86. In A Silent Way: Words and Music by Miles Davis p. 126. 1956-1964:A Sonorous Trajectory: 'My Funny Valentine' p. 136. Transveralizing Adorno, Deleuzeand Guattari: The Signal: Noise Ratio of `My Funny Valentine' p. 154. Chapter 3: Strategies of Non-Philosophy: Lines of Flight, Segmentsof Power p. 170. Dispostions of Investment 3: The Libidinal Economy of Modal Miles and Monteverdi p. 170. The Machinic Ileterogenesis of Modality p. 180. 1945-1959:Treatise on Jazz Modality: A War Machine? p. 192. Percept, Affect and (the) Concept: The Russell Effect p.206. Gesturing Toward the Event: The Davis Effect and Becoming-Black p.220. Becoming-Black, Becoming-Woman and the Problem of Violence in Miles Davis p.250. Conclusion: 1968-75A.D. The Geology of Miles, or a Prolegomena to Any Future p.265. Deleuze-Guattarian Pragmatics. p.265. If This is Your Tune, ThereMay Be Several Ways to Play It. p.286 Bibliography p.298. Discography p.312. Video Resources p.314. List of Illustrations Figures 1-3 Diagrams of Guattari's Materalist Semiotics p. 80. Figure 4 Gary Genosko's 'Ages of the Artist' p. 116. Figures 5-6 Transcriptions of `My Funny Valentine' p. 149. Figure 7 Components of the Modal Jazz Assemblage p. 191. Figure 8 Insert image from L'ascenseur pour 1'echaffaud p. 258. Figure 9 Bitches Brew Cover Image p. 267. Figure 10 Agharta Cover Image p. 268. 6 Introduction A Conspiracy of Imitators? Re-assessingDeleuze and Guattari's Reception. XXIII: Emulation is a desirefor a thing which is generatedin us becausewe imaginethat othershave the samedesire. Exp.: If someoneflees becausehe seesothers flee, or is timid becausehe seesothers timid, or becausehe seesthat someoneelse has burned his hand, withdraws his own hand and moveshis body as if his hand were burned, we shall say that he imitates the other's affect, but not that he emulatesit - not becausewe know that emulationhas one causeand imitation another, but becauseit had comeabout by usagethat we call emulousonly one who imitates what wejudge to be honorable,useful or pleasant. Benedictde Spinoza' It is not by meansof an exegeticalexercise that one could hope to keepalive the thoughtof a great thinker who haspassed away. Rather, sucha thoughtcan only be kept alive through its renewal,by putting it back into action [... J Felix Guattari2 There is somethingquite telling about the fact that, after a belatedand lengthy initial period of gradualfiltration into the realm of Anglophonetheory, the work of Deleuzeand Guattari hasover approximatelythe last ten yearsacquired and continuesto acquirea growing following in contemporary philosophical and cultural theoretical circles, albeit one that is 3 far from unequivocal in its response to the work. What makes this telling is the way that the work of these authors has generated a 'burgeoning field'4 of secondary works that 1Benedict dc Spinoza,Ethics, III, 'Of the Affects' Def. XXXIII, cited in Edwin Curley [ed.], A Spinoza Reader(Princeton: Princeton University Press,1994), p. 194. 2 Cited in CharlesJ. Stivale, The Two-Fold Thoughtof Deleuzeand Guattarl: Intersectionsand Animations (New York: Guildford Press, 1998),p. 1. 3 In an incisive and important essayon the translation and receptionof Dclcuze in the English-speaking world, BarbaraGodard demonstrates in somedetail reasonswhy the establishmentof the work of Dclcuze was such a long time in coming, when comparedto that of someof his more recognizedcontemporaries: 'Deleuze has madehis way acrossthe linguistic borders independently.Most obviously, the difference may be observedin the lack of personalinvolvement in the process.In contrastto Derrida and Foucault,translation of Deleuze's texts has not followed upon lecturesor teachingin North America which contributed to the disseminationof their ideasand arouseda demandfor translations.Nor has Dclcuzc involved himself as directly in the translation processas has Dcrrida, for instance,both in the selectionof translatorsand the active intervention in relation to copyrights', cf., BarbaraGodard, 'Dclcuzc and Translation', in Parallax 6: 1: 2000, pp.69-70. Other differencesbetween Delcuze and Dcrrida will be drawn on briefly in chapter 1. The 'burgeoning field of Deleuze-Guattaristudies' is an expressioncoined by CharlesJ. Stivale in his appraisalof a recentcollection of essayson their work, cf., Brian Massumi [ed.], A Shockto Thought: Expressionafter Deleuzeand Guattari (London and New York: Routledgc,2002). This book contains some in continually grow number, taking up ever more shelf-space in the philosophy and cultural studies sections of academic bookstores, and in recent times this has often taken place by the month. Given that Deleuze and Guattari were striving to promote a creative and critical approach to their work, one that challenges the hegemonic levelling of heterogeneity and diversity, the exponential growth in secondary texts is perhaps telling more for negative reasons than positive ones. Deleuze himself might have called it `the conspiracy of imitators'5, a phenomenon unfortunately liable to be accelerated by the audit culture of in the humanities, in Britain contemporary academic study arts and at least, and one which - in the language of Deleuze - serves to engender a repetition of the same rather than one of difference. 6 Given the specific orientations of the single- and jointly-authored works of Deleuze and Guattari as attempts to survey? the `immanent' and `materialist' complexes they find in very interesting and important work by Massumi and other contributors, but will not be used to any extent here on account of having been published during the final stages of this project's completion. s This expression provides the subtitle to one of the sections from Deleuze's essay 'Mediators', in which he begins with the question '[H]ow can we define the crisis in contemporary literature? ', to which he provides the following response: '[M]any bookshops are already becoming like the record shops that only stock things that make it into the charts.