A Thousand Plateaus for Music

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A Response to: “Deconstructing Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus for Music Education” jan jagodzinski One would have to be too “simple” to believe that thought is a simple act, clear unto itself, and not putting into play all the powers of the unconscious, or all the powers of nonsense in the unconscious.1

As someone who has taken out the time to study Deleuze|Guattari’s oeuvre,2 rather than targeting just one book, A Thousand Plateaus in such a superficial way, reading Estelle Jorgensen and Iris M. Yob’s “deconstruction” of this particular work has been a very painful experience, “painful” in the sense the way their text “screams” at them for their outright poetic mystifications, which many scholars have relished but which certainly has caused them great consternation.3 Deleuze|Guattari’s philosophy is discordant to their ears and sensibilities (“There is a darkness in their work. . . . The nomad is increasingly perceived as a figure of terror”; JY, 53). To contain the excesses of this noise that expressively emerges from this text, they have scrubbed it clean of its stark, piercing pitches they do not want to feel, nor hear or grasp, then packaged and boxed Deleuze|Guattari in by “explaining” their terms through their own clarifications so that they “can rescue several aspects that can contribute positively to our understanding of music education” (ibid., 50) and only then to “offer some critique to preserve what is helpful in their work” (ibid., 52). Thank heavens there are those who will “rescue” Deleuze|Guattari from themselves and “preserve” what is most useful for music education! In this response, I would like to take up their own challenge to readers of this journal: “[W]e prefer to see somewhat messy and dynamic pictures in which the resulting tensions, conflicts, and exclusions may energize music education as ideas are discussed, debated, and contested in the public sphere” (ibid., 51). We can turn their condemnation of Deleuze|Guattari around precisely at the point where their accusation is most profoundly stated: “There is an exclusivity, an in-crowd versus an outside mentality that is problematic in

jan jagodzinski is a professor of art and media education in the Department of Secondary Education, University of Alberta. He is the author of fifteen books. Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 50, No. 3, Fall 2016 © 2016 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

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102 jagodzinski its narrowness and alarming in its arrogance” (JY, 53). This is precisely how I have experienced their text as they did Thousand Plateaus. From my point of view, none of the three questions they ask has remotely been addressed: what Deleuze|Guattari are asking us to believe; their own assessment of Deleuze|Guattari’s contributions and detractions; and, finally, the implications of Deleuze|Guattari for music education. It may be even stronger to ask whether they have indeed “read” Deleuze|Guattari at all, for they present such a crass and crude reading of this work, more as a play with the book’s index rather than engaging directly with any of the concepts that are offered in any significant way other than as farcical dismissals. Their essay is a sad reminder that such essays are published on the pretence that academics, and now academic music educators, do not have to engage in such difficult reading material. They can write off Deleuze|Guattari after reading, what is then considered as a questionable and certainly worrisome example of scholarship. Deleuze|Guattari are not “postmodernists” as they claim (JY, 37).4 They do not celebrate nor subscribe to postmodernism: the self is not multiply fragmented but a “becoming” of creativity, an intensity of attributes (as in “whiteness” and not “white”), rather than a multiple formation of functions and characteristics to be deconstructed via proponents in cultural studies. The authors begin with the rhetorical claim of “fair-mindedness” (JY, 37), but then, as analytical philosophers (“our approach is consonant with an analytical tradition in philosophy” [ibid.]), they fail miserably at the task of “deconstructing” Deleuze|Guattari but are certainly adept at “translating” them into their own analytical frame of mind at the detriment to those music educational academics who would be willing to look at Deleuze|Guattari’s oeuvre seriously. They begin with a whopping generalization as to what Deleuze|Guattari “believe.” This “belief” is completely framed in negative terms, when one of the foremost aspects of Deleuzian philosophy is its affirmation and rejection of Hegelian negativity.5 Deleuze|Guattarian’s attitude (their “belief”) is summarized by Jorgensen and Yob thus: “The established approach to philosophy in Western European tradition represents that of the State: philosophers are domesticated servants . . . thinking those thoughts that are representative of . . . the State” (ibid.). Before TP and before Anti-Oedipus, which is volume 1 of the two-volume book that explores schizophrenia and capitalism, not mentioned (or read, I am sure), Deleuze published books on Hume, Kant, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bergson, Leibnitz, and Foucault among others.6 In his careful reading of these philosophers, not once was he “negative” or offered a critique (unlike the authors here); rather, he grasped their philosophical problematic—each philosophy asked different questions and posed different problems, as he carefully and lovingly worked through them toward his own stance.7 While certainly Deleuze maintained that philosophy has “played the repressors role,”8 he


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A Response to Deconstructing D|G 103 undertook the role of philosophy to create concepts,9 as had previous philosophers, thereby making it an affirmative and life-giving endeavor. If there is a “state” philosophy that supports capitalism today, that is neopositivism, which, sadly, falls under the analytic tradition. Their use of “inversion” is another glaring error on the part of Jorgensen and Yob (JY, 37, 38). The claim is made that Deleuze|Guattari are “inverting” structures, replacing one term with another. This error is made because the authors cannot get past the accusation that Deleuze|Guattari present dualisms, a very significant accusation to which I shall return later. The only legitimate use of “inversion” occurs when it comes to Platonic philosophy. Deleuze’s “inverts” Platonic philosophy via Nietzsche when working through the “simulacrum” that has true and false consequences for the Ideas in Plato.10 However, what is perhaps most annoying of the many glaring reductions of Deleuze|Guattari’s thought is the persistence and even insistence, throughout the entire essay, that Jorgensen and Yob refer to the concepts Deleuze|Guattari have created as metaphors. The word “metaphor” appears again and again, which results in the most blatant reductive literalizations of these concepts to just more representational forms, rather than as abstract machines doing the “work” that they are assigned to do, namely, to overturn representation and to constantly transform our engagement with the world. Concepts are neither true nor false but are, for Deleuze|Guattari, either “interesting, remarkable and important.” What makes a concept important is the manner in which it shifts the common sense of thinking—what it means to think. There is no “thinking” in this essay. Concepts are not ideas but created as the virtual forms governing a multiplicity of logics. The authors do just what precisely Deleuze|Guattari strive to expose and avoid— reduce thought processes to representation. The authors’ understanding of “machines and machinic” throughout the essay becomes literalized and reductive, understood in terms of mechanics.11 What they fail to grasp is the perverse usage of terms that Deleuze|Guattari utilize to overthrow representation as the common use of words are subverted:12 for instance, their use of “diagram”13 does not mean the usual common sense understanding of “map,” as the authors are so often prone to do;14 rather, it is more of a “nondiagram” in its usage, the capturing of forces that form the common understanding of diagram.15 Deleuze|Guattari employ two basic types of terms: intensive and extensive, which appeal to our senses and cognitive processes, respectively. Extensive terms have to do with affections and perceptions; such concepts, however, do not help us “think,” as they are categorical and representational. They do not “shock” thought. In distinction, intensive terms, the material affects and percepts of presubjective sensations (aistheis), have the potential force to disturb sensorimotor habits, thereby forcing thinking to happen. The quotation from The Logic of Sense that begins this essay addresses these


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104 jagodzinski paradoxes of language. So, while their created concepts seem pretentious and excessive there is a reason given that thinking involves locating change, novelty, or difference in-and-of-itself, which is never given, yet circumscribed in all that we say and do. Changes and differences are not something that can be observed or recognized, yet neither is change abstract but a real phenomenon paradoxically not strictly observable either. So, when Jorgensen and Yob dismiss and disagree with Deleuze|Guattari that “[i]t is in vain that we say what we see: What we see never resides in what we say” (TP, 67; quoted in JY, 37), they fail to comprehend Deleuze|Guattarian aesthetics and stylistics, the way they attempt to instigate the thought of difference.16 Jorgensen and Yob’s dismissal, as aestheticians of music no less, is all the more ironic as they are unable to grasp the sensibility of difference Deleuze|Guattari are after, namely, the “sensible,” which is not given but occurs within the given. Their telling failure appears toward the end of the essay when they write, “[Deleuze|Guattari] are also likely to have greater appeal to those who prefer to engage ideas impressionistically and intuitively, rather than propositionally and logically” (JY, 51). Deleuze|Guattari’s logic is illogical for them, as demonstrated in their confusions, perhaps most specifically on the closing pages where they again fall into mindless dualist accusations.17 For Deleuze|Guattari, ideas do not explain the given (what can be observed, remembered, and imagined). Rather the prereflective, preconscious sensible initiates, develops, and “explains” ideas. Such sensible forms are always serial, repetitive, and conflated or contracted by the nonconscious mind, rather than being consciously reflected upon, recognized, and remembered. For all the hoopla on the “affective turn” that has spread throughout the disciplines, used in all sorts of convoluted ways, the term “affect” does not appear throughout Jorgensen and Yob’s essay, not even once. To avoid affect when discussing music art education in the context of Deleuze|Guattari seems inconceivable. It seems the authors did not read Deleuze|Guattari’s own warnings when it comes to metaphors: “Metaphors and metonymy are merely effects; they are part of language only when they presuppose indirect discourse” (TP, 77). Metaphors “do” precisely what Deleuze|Guattari try to undo: namely, the displacement of one thing being like another. As they say, it belongs to an idealist philosophy that uses strategies of “series and structure” so as to produce degrees of resemblance and difference between a set of terms in two ways. In a carefully structured (translated) sentence, this is summarized quite succinctly in TP: In the first case I have resemblances that differ from one another in a single series, and between series. In the second case, I have differences that resemble each other within a single structure, and between structures. (TP, 234)


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A Response to Deconstructing D|G 105 Deleuze|Guattari put forward metamorphosis, instead of metaphor, which is in keeping with their entire philosophy of transformative becoming. While some scholars have argued that there is a slippage between the two, metamorphosis or becoming being an intensification of metaphor rather than a completely separate alternative, a difference of degree rather than kind, other scholars have argued the other way: becoming as a concept differs in kind from analogy.18 If there is continuity between these terms, the point is that the concept of becoming, as in metamorphosis, plays the dominant role in terms of temporality and tenor rather than representational metaphor as analogous comparison. It raises the mistaken dualism, which Jorgensen and Yob constantly bring up. One particular glaring example is difficult to bear, as they literalize the concept of machine (machinic) as being mechanical and rhizome as being organic, and then they bifurcate them.19 The rhizome is precisely an antiorganic concept, as it expresses an “anti-genealogy” (TP, 11), while “[m]achine, machinism, ‘machinic’: this does not mean either mechanical or organic.”20 Again, in Jorgensen and Yob’s usual rhetorical flare, the machinic is compared to “Star Wars, Star Trek” (JY, 44). Very sad indeed. What is most astonishing is that Deleuze|Guattari’s stress on becoming seems absent in the Jorgensen and Yob essay. It is not discussed in any significant way. In fact, the authors chastise Deleuze|Guattari for not being “sufficiently revolutionary or even paraxial in the transformative or Freiriansense of aspiring to change the world not only through a different way of seeing it but of acting in, with and upon it. . . . Deleuze and Guattari seem like prophets crying out in the wilderness” (JY, 38), which is almost incredulous in its arrogance. Like many other scholars,21 Deleuze|Guattari are accused of not providing “a practical plan” (ibid.). Jorgensen and Yob’s own political praxis remains squarely with representational thought. They have no understanding of Deleuze|Guattari’s micropolitical orientation, as developed via “minoritarian politics” within TP.22 Throughout their essay, Jorgensen and Yob dichotomize minority and majority in good-old representational fashion, as if Deleuze|Guattari are talking about a numbers game, which it appears they do when they juxtapose the terms the way they do. 23 Minority and minoritarian are not synonyms, and majority and minority are not dualisms either. In TP, Deleuze|Guattari provide a critique of representation through the concept of “majority.”24 Minority is a “people yet to come,” “a non-existent people to be created.”25 Art should contribute to “the invention of a people.”26 This is swhat they mean by a minoritarian politics when it comes to their ethico-political aesthetics. Difference and Repetition and the Logic of Sense were the result of Deleuze’s reworking Western philosophy from its overreliance on representation to forward the force of difference in-and-of itself, sometimes referred to as “pure” difference to make this distinction, but a distinction from difference


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106 jagodzinski within sameness that is found in representational thought. Difference as an opposition to sameness emerges, again and again, throughout this essay, slipped in through the imaginary of literalizations as each “metaphor” is “explained” and then dismissed as a dualism. It is Jorgensen and Yob’s insistence to box Deleuze|Guattari as Cartesians(!),27 as philosophers of exteriorization,28 and their questionable understanding of Deleuze|Guattari’s account of subjectivity in the dualisms of exterior-interior,29 literalized as a mechanical “machine.” Accusations like these are really difficult to bear, as the ethics of translation are so violent to anyone who has taken the time to work through their oeuvre. Sometimes, one is almost at a loss as to where to begin. All the dualisms that are listed,30 all twenty of them in a row to emphasize their claim, are noted as being “double articulations” (JY, 39). What is most extraordinary about this “list” is that they miss one of the most important “dualisms” (in their terms): actual and virtual. It appears as if Jorgensen and Yob were simply playing with the book’s index. Why would they not recognize these “dualisms” as just that: “double articulations”? The conjunction “and” appears between them. As Deleuze emphatically says, “[M]ultiplicity is precisely in the ‘and.’”31 Yet, after this listing, they state, “The currents that flow back and forth among these various poles cannot disguise and even require the presence of dualities in this new model. One set of dualities [the list is now confirmed as dualities] has been replaced by another in a philosophical sleight of hand” (JY, 39). There is no “sleight of hand here,” just another move on Jorgensen and Yob’s part to “frame” Deleuze|Guattari into something they are not. The double articulation is precisely correct, as Deleuze|Guattari utilize a both|and logic, not an “Either/Or” (that appears in capitals and in italic in Jorgensen and Yob’s essay [ibid.]). This forceful notation is meant to claim that Deleuze|Guattari’s notion of “ideas” is nothing but “abstract machines whereby people may think differently about what they are and do” (ibid.), as if Deleuze|Guattari are relativists or some such thing. The further accusation is that “the real test of their ideas is ‘how they are useful and what can be can be accomplished with them. The end justifies the means’” (ibid.). How can one take this as a serious comment on their work, when so many scholars have indicated, over and over again, that Deleuze|Guattari present us with an ethics of a “belief in this world”?32 The authors are basically accusing them of instrumentalism and worse, possibly fascism, when, as many scholars have pointed out beginning with Foucault’s preface to Anti-Oedipus,33 their work attempts to question fascism: how is it that people desire their own oppression? There are no dualisms in Deleuze|Guattari as envisioned by the authors. Their idiosyncratic terms, especially when they seem to be dualisms are either that one is expressing the other or the one is implicating the other. This logic is best developed by Deleuze’s concept of the fold (pli).34 How this logic


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A Response to Deconstructing D|G 107 works can be applied to the rhizome, the first “metaphor” that the author’s discuss in dualistic terms between rhizome and taproot, and end with their usual rhetorical flare of derision: “Are taproots useless, unproductive and unnecessary? Should taproots be dug up and thrown away, or should they too be allowed to flourish in the garden of knowledge?” (JY, 38). When it comes to the rhizome, there has been enough abuse already in the secondary literature as to its utilization.35 It has become an easy “metaphor” to use now that open-system thinking requires nonlinearity and interconnectivity, which has become popularized through Bruno Latour’s ANT theory and network theories in general. The authors add to this confusion through their continued literalizations of it, going so far as giving the taproot its due, as stated above. All this is simply wrong. The impression these authors, and much of the secondary literature, make is that the rhizome is somehow more freeing, liberatory, nonhierarchical, and so on. Deleuze|Guattari state that “smooth” or nonhierarchical spaces that are created are “not themselves liberatory. . . . Never believe that a smooth space will suffice to save us” (TP, 500). The rhizome is already populated by potentials for stratification. Deleuze|Guattari’s both|and logic comes into play, for, even when minoritarian groups form in collective protest, this does not necessarily mean that such groups can escape fascist or tyrannical images of life. The both|and logic applies to both deterritorialiations and reterritorializations that are in constant flux, forming the “diagram” of the rhizomatic assemblage that emerges. Diagram is not some structuralist map, but the forces that have come together in a particular assemblage held together by desire. Rhizomes are populated by lines of flight that can open things up, as well as lines that stop the flows of desire. As they write, “[T]here exists tree or root structures in rhizomes; conversely, a tree branch or root division may begin to burgeon into a rhizome” (TP, 15). So, neither rhizome (potential for new assemblages) nor the root-tree (stratifications, orders, taxonomies) is given primary status. Jorgensen and Yob give us a binary machine to make their point, precisely what Deleuze|Guattari strive to avoid. The other “metaphor,” which Jorgensen and Yob take the time to discuss, fares even worse: body without organs (BwO). Basically, they understand this concept as a process of subjective “dismantling” (JY, 40), a stripping down, by a teacher no less, of a student’s “sense of self, bodily worth, and psychic subjectivity” (ibid.), as if such violent ethics are being called for by Deleuze|Guattari in Plateau 6. Again, in their usual derisive manner, such dismantling “remov[es], the heart, kidneys, lungs, hands, and face to an empty trunk . . . to its shapeless intensities and energies so that something new can be constructed.” (ibid.). From here it is a short step to condemn Deleuze|Guattari from “draw[ing] their inspiration from psychopathology: hypochondria, schizophrenia, masochism, and anorexia. . . . In essence, we are all sick . . . pathetic” (ibid., 42). “[D]elusion and disarray can arise” (ibid.,


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108 jagodzinski 51), if their claims remain “not carefully examined” (ibid., added emphasis), for they “potentially [lead] to despair and madness [if they] are uncritically accepted” (ibid.). This “literalization” of the BwO does not stop there, as Deleuze|Guattari remain “confused” (JY, 40), presenting an either/or logic of construction or deconstruction, regarding its functioning just as in “developmental psychology . . . that is seldom given full credit” (ibid.). The authors are unable to grasp Deleuze|Guattari’s complementary logic. BwO literalization (as “organs”) is applied to “ethnic minorities” and to “women” (as a general category, in opposition to the general category “men,” to continue their dichotomous thinking), but now turning it into a representational psychological and phenomenological category: namely, “how the body is experienced” (ibid., 41) and “how bodies are different” (ibid.). The “body” is now slipped in as a legitimate critical move. For now “the reader has the freedom to interpret and critique the metaphor as we (and many other feminist writers) have done” (ibid.). This is all well and good if Deleuze|Guattari are boxed into the representational package the authors are stuffing them into. In the end, the BwO is dismissed for education in its failure as a “forward-looking concept” (ibid.) and for its lack of prescription as to what should be done. When it comes to the BwO, Jorgensen and Yob can be somewhat forgiven for their “confusion,” but certainly not for their harsh and incompetent assessment, only in the sense that so much of the secondary literature, even those authors sympathetic to Deleuze|Guattari,36 have been trapped by an overreliance on the body at the expense of the complementary inorganic matrix of the BwO and fail once more in seeing their perverse use of concepts to provoke attention, worry representation (subjectivity as identity), and continue the dynamic tension between the conceptual and aesthetic. The main error is the failure to grasp that bodies and bodies without organs are assemblages for Deleuze|Guattari37 (as are rhizomes): as such what needs to be grasped is the BwO is a consequence of the body, not its starting point as the authors have tried to do, ending up dismissing the “metaphor” BwO and relying on the body as such. This claim of complementarity cannot be understood if there is no understanding from where Deleuze|Guattari are developing this concept, and it is not only from Artaud that they draw it but, more importantly, from Spinoza, who asks the question that resonates throughout their oeuvre: “What can a body do?” (“After all, is not Spinoza’s Ethics the great book of the BwO?” [TP, 153]). Deleuze|Guattari’s interest in the “pathologies” listed by the authors is precisely to work through this question, given that they reject representation (the conscious representation of the self) and, hence, a split between body and self. Put another way, the Cartesian dualism of mind-body is replaced by body-language where the affective quality of language, referred to as a “sense-event” (their aesthetics), comes in contact with body as its “outside”: body and incorporeality are


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A Response to Deconstructing D|G 109 complementary phenomena that are “folded,” just like light as both wave and particle presents a “folded” logic. To accommodate this logic, an ethological account of the body replaces an aetiological one. It is not “sickness” that they are after; the anorexic becomes a “philosophical problem,” for it seems that she “willfully” destroys her body, but Deleuze|Guattari are not Cartesians where the “will” controls the body. The relationship between self and body is problematized outside the usual identity markers; namely, the body mapped by the usual representational cultural markers the authors mention: minorities, ethnics, feminisms; or subject to a body where it simply becomes a vehicle of the mind via a “body-image,” as the authors do. Pathologies open up our apprehension of the gap between self and body, which becomes a question of productive desire, another “word” that is found only once in the Jorgensen and Yob essay where it is understood only as a desire of the Other. This understanding comes at a “moment” (JY, 42) when reading TP becomes comprehensible for them. The quote they refer to in TP (153) identifies a poststructuralist subject that is constantly analyzed in cultural-studies research via discursive methodologies. But this is again a one-sided inadequate reading. Desire, as the authors simply understand it, refers to a process of striving toward BwO to achieve “freedom” (JY, 42) from the pathologies Deleuze|Guattari are exploring to reach “sanity” (ibid.). They simply do not and cannot grasp Deleuze|Guattari’s problematic.38 This approach does not adequately address why the bulimic is unable to tolerate food inside her body, yet has an intense interest in taste, or the anorexic’s jouissance over her own emaciation, or the masochist jouissance in the joy of suffering. Lacan grappled with these difficulties at the unconscious level of language but still relied heavily on the desire of the Other (social order, law) to explain the anorexic’s desire. The danger here is that, as in the categorizations of the psychiatric clinic, desire is then explained in terms of lack, with the added danger that Lacan’s mathemes, as abstract machines, become formulaic. Deleuze found another way by turning to the Spinozian question of bodily affect to “sever the traditional link between freedom and will”39 whereby the body’s actions are subordinated to the mind. Instead, the body is refigured as the sum of its capacities—not as a closed system of possible functions but as generating the potential of new ones depending on the assemblages created. In this formulation, the body is an a posteriori formation. The transformative sense requires the acknowledgment of the BwO, which brings into play Deleuze’s dictum (culled from Hume) that relations are external to their terms. Relations, being external, are not subject to an “I” that stands “before” them. This means entities are not constituted by their relations of identity as such. Anorexia is a particular assemblage, abstract machine, or BwO that creates a particular desire where there is no productive relation to food. This is not a “willed” relationship, in the classical sense; rather, this desire is coemergent with a “regime of signs” s|he finds herself


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110 jagodzinski in—that is, the variables that coalesce into an assemblage as a singularity. As Deleuze says, “Anorexia is a political system, a micro-politics: to escape from the norms of consumption in order not to be an object of consumption oneself. It is a feminine protest.”40 Given Jorgensen and Yob’s constant disparagement of Deleuze|Guattari as being “masculinist” (JY, 52),41 by constantly invoking neoliberal forms of feminist thought (for example, Carol Gilligan, Geraldine Finn), Deleuze’s commentary on the anorexic would certainly be contradictory and discordant to their ears, as would the entire discussion of “becoming-woman” (not in the TP index) that appears in TP,42 which has been explored by a range of feminisms.43 Unlike neoliberal forms of feminism championed by the authors that generalize between men and women as categories, Deleuze|Guattari’s present the complexity of n-1 sexes.44 And, rather than sickness that they think BwO refers to, again it must be discordant for them to cope with the way Deleuze|Guattari reformulate the question of health. As Deleuze quite explicitly says, “Illness is not a process but a stopping of a process.”45 Healthy becoming is the actual measurable capacity to form new relations: “Affective capacity, with maximum threshold and a minimum threshold, is a constant notion in Spinoza” (SPP, 124). What the body can do, as formulated by Spinoza, directly addresses affect and the ethical and political concern in the way a body affects and is affected. A body is not defined by its form, organs, function, substance, or as a subject, but a mode. BwO is of secondary importance in relation to this problematic. The body’s limits define the BwO, and not the other way around. It is the beyond of the physical limits of the body that is articulated by the BwO, a question of a threshold beyond which change happens. The shift from aetiology to ethology makes it possible to offer a cartography (which the authors are unable to make much sense of)46 that “map” or “plan”47 (not model) future directions that form extensive relations and “intense” capacities for power. The shift is toward speeds and slowness of body and thought (longitudes) and latitudes as a set of affects that occupy a body and thought at each moment. This applies to all bodies, not just human ones.48 The BwO mediates desire and the body; it is an unreachable limit as to what the body is capable of, always dependent on the assemblage (or desiring-machine) it finds itself in; it is a state of total desocialization. The “health” of becoming can turn into a deadly illness if desire becomes fixated, and there is no movement, like the anorexic. Pure, intense stasis is death, as desire involutes on itself. No connections are being made, no becoming as such. The anorexic’s involuted jouissance is deadly, not joyous. The bodily pathologies of addiction reduce the body’s capacity for affection. It is, rather, the movement more and more away from the BwO as the limit of its capacity, which becomes a way of extending it; the relational lines lead inward rather than outward, which is the affirmative side of Deleuze|Guattari. The body increases its capacity to


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A Response to Deconstructing D|G 111 be affected having more control and force. The body cannot move toward a body without organs but continues to struggle with it as it mediates the processes of actualization. Given such a position, all the one-sided silliness the authors present should be dismissed. For instance, “Things personal and spiritual seem to be swallowed up in the quest for exteriority and its inevitable requisite conquest and mapping of territory. . . . In the process, morality has lost humanity and become mechanistic, animalistic, and physical or elemental” (JY, 44).

Interconnectivity There is a further insistence throughout the Jorgensen and Yob essay that Deleuze|Guattari focus on the interconnectedness of things. After remarking that they have covered an immense number of disciplines, an observation many scholars have indeed made with astonishment, they then conclude, [T]hey assemble and defend them positively as if all things were united at the core. . . . [T]his unity is based in the energy and vibration . . . attraction and resistance evident throughout the cosmos, all the way from the “primal soup” to musical expressions . . . , and scientific and mathematical propositions. Since all things are interconnected literally and figuratively, it is important to articulate and map these interconnections. (JY, 40, emphasis added) Then, with their usual dissenting flare, they end: “as the lobster does upon God, the nomad does upon the State, the wolf does upon human behavior, or the machine does upon human thought” (ibid.). This is another unfortunate example of their dualist representational thinking. This accusation addresses Deleuze|Guattari as being philosophers of the One. Although univocity is not once mentioned in their essay, this is what they (perhaps unknowingly?) refer to. Alain Badiou, Deleuze’s nemesis, makes the same accusation but says it eloquently by throwing the same words back at Deleuze, which are found on the last page in Difference and Repetition: “A single and same voice for the whole thousand-voiced multiple, a single and same Ocean for all the drops, a single clamour of Being for all beings.”49 For Badiou, as a virtual sense or voice speaking in all beings, Deleuze’s One (for the authors, the synonyms are “organicism,” “interconnectedness,” “unity”) appears only through a multiplicity of names, such as the “dualist pairs” already mentioned. Further, this One is only a simulacrum as it is “difference without real status” (DCB, 26). From this, Badiou, much like the authors, can further maintain that they are incapable of thinking genuine revolution, as Deleuze wavers between unreality of actual beings and their reality.50 Many have taken Badiou’s reading to task;51 suffice it to say here, following Crockett,52 that Badiou fails to finish the rest of the sentence around which his frozen portrait of Deleuze is built. Deleuze continues, “on condition that each


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112 jagodzinski being, each drop and each voice has reached the state of excess—in other words, the difference which displaces and disguises them and, in so turning upon its mobile cusp, causes them to return” (DR, 304, emphasis added). Deleuze is referring to Nietzsche’s eternal return, which he had developed earlier, to explicitly maintain that only what becomes returns; only difference returns as difference, rather than being caught by the same. The paradox, as Deleuze continues, is that everything is equal and everything returns. The One and its multiple are constantly surpassed “at the point at which the extremity of difference is reached” (ibid.). The authors further write disparagingly of Deleuze|Guattari’s discussions of territory and especially the “war machine” (JY, 44–45). Jorgensen and Yob claim that Deleuze|Guattari’s “militarism” is especially forwarded, “and survival becomes the raison d”être of existence” (ibid., 44). Maybe the authors should have a good look at the world they live in and access how peaceful it is, that life is precarious as so many have written.53 The usual ironic jab, analogical in this case, comes when they ask their readers if they have “read Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth or World without End” (JY, 45), as if these works shed light or sum up all one needs to know about Deleuze|Guattari’s geophilosophy. The authors cite Allsup’s essay to further repudiate Deleuze|Guattari’s position as promoting a war-mongering mentality.54 A bit of a diversion is necessary to examine his work as Allsup presents a critical position they support. Upon reading Allsup’s essay, one quickly surmises his skirting a discourse of moral panic in relation to several music exemplars he draws from in popular culture and schooling, a conservative ploy that has a long tradition in the arts, a concept that has been re-evaluated of late.55 Allsup sees “a culture that is morally corrupt” (“RP,” 35, 49), drawing, somewhat naïvely, on ideology critique. He refers, for example, to the sociological musical analysis of Christopher Small, offering a thinly disguised notion of false consciousness, which he calls “double vision” (ibid., 39, 50) or “double-consciousness” (ibid., 39, 41, 48). Evoking the metaphor of the “veil” throughout and relying on the Freudian notion of the unconscious, Allsup maintains there is a “truth” or “authentic-consciousness” (ibid., 36, 39) hidden behind the veil that can be exposed, like the “moment” that happened after the 9/11 attack. “Veil” is basically a synonym for being “blind” to what is happening around you, a repressed consciousness. Had Allsup read Lacan (and Slavoj Žižek), where the veil is also theorized, he would have to cope with a position that maintains “there is nothing behind the veil”56 and “the veil produces the effect of something hidden,”57 not “reality” as naïvely posited by Allsup but a fantasy formation. Be this as it may, from a Deleuze|Guattarian standpoint, Allsup’s two musical subcultures (krumping/clowning and the two examples of North American drum and bugle corps) would be treated as assemblages that have their own distinctive “regime of signs.”


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A Response to Deconstructing D|G 113 They would not be judged in terms of “morality,” rather in terms of what their political and ethical affects “do.” Krumping would be analyzed in relation to the forces that made it emerge as an art form within poor African American neighborhoods in South Central Los Angeles, as a minoritarian artform, as well as how this assemblage changes through repetition when it becomes appropriated by Madonna and company. The formations are different, as are their effects. The same would apply to the two examples of drum and bugle corps, each a separate assemblage. Politically, the fascism of these two forms would be shown to be molar assemblages that hold the State together, versus the ethical position of krumping as practiced in Los Angeles, versus its appropriation by the music industry. So, these assemblages “co-exist without conflict” (“RP,” 47), which bothers Allsup because of the loss of critical dialectics in the artistic bricolage world of postmodernity. He calls for as a return that would wake people up. A Deleuze|Guattarian shift toward understanding a “society of control”58 enables another more adequate minoritarian ethico-political stance. When it comes to popular music, for example, the performances of Raras on the streets of Haiti express the complex social and political situation, while racine music as a form of popular protest against the military coup that drove Aristide from office in 1991 would be another related, pertinent, and creative emergence. To continue with Jorgensen and Yob’s text after this slight diversion, the “mecanosphere is [not] a place of perpetual war” (JY, 44), which is another literal representation they confusingly utilize. For Deleuze|Guattari, the mecanosphere is the “given as given” or the “there is (il y a).” It points to the relational indifference the cosmos has to the human species. The chatter they initiate when discussing Compars and Dispars (JY, 45)59 becomes another dualism where “versus” replaces “and,” much as their discussion of the rhizome, a failure to grasp their foldings in flux, as if we exist only in the royal science of Compars. The same applies to “war machine,” another provocative term. The authors, citing Elizabeth Gould’s cautious use of the “metaphor,”60 are unable to think past its being “masculine and bellicose . . . antithetical to the kind of nomadic thinking that the world needs today” (JY, 46). Eugene W. Holland develops no less than six different variants of the war machine that are addressed in TP, not all of which have war as object or aim.61 Deleuze and Guattari insist that “the first theoretical element of importance is the fact that the war machine has many varied meanings” (TP, 422). Two meanings having nothing to do with war, two are strictly typological, and two are historical. The State war machine (the fourth variant) always has war as its exclusive object. In the sixth variant, global capitalism escapes the grasp of the State and envelops it. It is difficult to see how this variety can be dismissed as unnecessary to thinking that is needed today in a world dominated by global capitalism. Jorgensen and Yob, of course, think otherwise.


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114 jagodzinski There is a long “description” of what Deleuze and Guattari say in TP regarding assemblages, smooth and striated space, and so on as “dualism machine” (JY, 47). This goes on for a page and a bit, when Jorgensen and Yob almost hesitate and ask themselves, “[M]aybe they [Deleuze|Guattari] are really after some amalgamation of the two” (ibid.)! But, wait, this was just an intuition: “[I]n the end, however, our sense is that, notwithstanding some ambiguity in their ideas, they are really after the creation of smooth, nomadic, and rhizomatic spaces” (ibid., emphasis added). The only ambiguity regarding Deleuze|Guattari here rests with Jorgensen and Yob, as they continue to slap Deleuze|Guattari’s discussion of the “face” by conflating it with Ana-Maria Rizzuto, whose neo-Freudian psychoanalytic study concerning “the face of god” emerging during prenatal period “serves in much the same way as the face in Deleuze|Guattari’s sense” (ibid., 48). No, it doesn’t. To begin with, they have it wrong. Rizzuto neo- Freudianism extends “how individuals develop a father or God-image” (ibid., 47) to include not simply a displaced father but a displaced mother, sibling, and even the self. This has nothing to do with the “facial machine” Deleuze|Guattari discuss. Face, again, for Jorgensen and Yob is literalized and one-sided. They write, “But, can an individual live without any face?” (ibid., 48). Concluding that to “escape from the imperialism of State and Church . . . means one becomes faceless, even mandatorily giving up a face of one’s own making” (ibid.). Again, it is rather painful to read such reductionism. The facial machine is not shaped by a dualism of white wall of significance and black holes of subjectification as they seem to think. The black hole of subjectification presents a facelessness (“The face, what a horror!” [TP, 190]62) that has no signification against the white wall of signification, which is the surface of the system’s overcodings. In the Lacanian sense, this is the horror of the Real where no image or signifier holds (for example, the baby has a face only a mother can love). Deleuze|Guattari develop the notion of a “probehead” (TP, 210–11) to intervene in the facial abstract machine that forces identification and nonidentification into black or white terms, thereby creating a new becoming and escaping the racism that the machine constantly produces. Before they tackle Deleuze|Guattari’s relation to music education as adumbrated by a descriptive discussion of Sylvano Bissotti’s “Piano Piece for David Tudor,”63 they gingerly grant Deleuze|Guattari some concession as having “important political implications” (JY, 48). The small concession is the preference for the creation of smooth spaces associated with nomadic thought. But this concession is made on their agreement that summarizes their own stance: “In short, thought cannot be divorced from political and artistic implications and exercise of power” (ibid.). But, that’s not the entirety for Deleuze|Guattari. Their project is precisely to create the unthought to escape the molar working of the social order.


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A Response to Deconstructing D|G 115

Implications for Music Education Perhaps this section is a greater disappointment than the authors’ “deconstruction” of Deleuze|Guattari, as the potential of tenth and eleventh plateaus that concern music becomes reduced to a sliver that they nevertheless plan to “rescue” (JY, 50, 51) but that is not really worth bothering with, given their vision of the curriculum. Basically, Deleuze|Guattari’s views are dismissed: “Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas suggest a particular view of music education, that, when taken on its own, is, in our view, limited, alienating, depressing, and even hopeless” (ibid., 51). In this section, minority and majority remain opposites, both given their due, as is immanence and transcendence; the rhizome becomes synonymous with “hypertext,” while Deleuze and Guattari’s multiplicities are representationally understood as one and its multiple in commonsensical terms of numbers.64 Music, as they see it, is “subjectively and objectively as expressive and formal construct” (ibid., 50). Music education becomes a formalism: “To know music [is] to grasp it procedurally and propositionally, with reference to its syntactic as well as semantic elements—to know not only about it but how to do it” (ibid.). Such a music curriculum is “squarely” positioned as a hylomorphic form, repeating the tired old form of formalism, the absolute opposite of what Deleuze|Guattari suggest. Classical music to jazz improvisation may well be too harsh, but I am brought down to such a crass comparison myself out of frustration and concern. It is quite extraordinary that Jorgensen and Yob’s dismissal should be so emphatic. “These are truly big ideas that have yet to penetrate education to any depth,” followed by a caveat that states that “there has probably never been a more compelling time” (JY, 52, emphasis added), implying, “So why hasn’t this happened if Deleuze|Guattari are so important?” “This darkness is not something that will have immediate appeal to many educators” (ibid., 53). I think the authors have missed the parade or perhaps never wandered outside their field of music education. All facets of education have taken up Deleuze|Guattari’s work. There are literally hundreds of articles and books, plus a recent major conference “Deleuze and Education,” convened by Greg Thompson at Murdoch University’s School of Education, Australia, in December of 2013 that addresses their importance for education. Because of their dismissal of Deleuze|Guattari, Jorgensen and Yob never do engage in any way as to what significance Deleuze|Guattai’s work might have for music education. That is the true disappointment in all of this. Dismissing “difficult theory” and not taking the time to work through it to offer a deconstruction worthy of the name seems to be, as Doug Aoki writes, a “logic of repudiation with a human face, for it champions the causes of the reader and the student. It refuses jargon for the sake of clarity and accessibility, and it refuses danger through the enshrinement of the right to safety.”65 Aoki makes a case for how the academy tried to dismiss


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116 jagodzinski the writings of Lacan, to “clarify” him and put him into plain understandable language, in the name of (music) pedagogy, to dismiss what precisely cannot be clarified—the unthought, which is precisely what the authors have done. Space does not allow me to develop the concepts that Deleuze|Guattari develop in music that would involve a paradigm shift in music education. A number of books have addressed Deleuze|Guattari relation to music in a serious way.66 It is precisely deterritorialization of the refrain, which is their project for music and voice, the refrain being any rhythmic motif that helps structure an organism’s milieu, territory, social field. To create music, composers encounter and transform refrains. In this way, the transformative practice of “becoming-other” provides “transversal connections” (outside network, web thinking). It is a process whereby the unthought of music takes place. Music as a biological activity links up to a cosmological dimension that is ahuman and deanthropocentric, a cosmic music where Nature (the mecanosphere) as the “composer” emerges with the human art of music that opens up a wonder for those who are willing to reach out and hear.

Notes 1.

Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester (New York: Columbia University Press), 74. 2. This designation is used throughout this essay to allude to their “multiplicity.” Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari begin their introduction to A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), with the assertion that “[t]he two of us wrote Anti- Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd” (3). Cited hereafter as TP. Further references to this work will be cited in the text. 3. Estelle R. Jorgensen and Iris M. Yob, “Deconstructing Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus for Music Education,” The Journal of Aesthetic Education 47, no. 3 (2013): 36–55. Cited hereafter as JY. Further references to this work will be cited in the text. 4. In particular, Guattari objects to this characterization. See Félix Guattari, “The Postmodern Impasse, [and] Postmodernism and Ethical Abdication,” in A Guattari Reader, ed. Gary Genosko (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 109–13 and 114–17. 5. Jay Conway, Gilles Deleuze: Affirmation in Philosophy (New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 6. Deleuze’s philosophical heritage is formidable. See Graham Johnes and Jon Roffe, Deleuze’s Philosophical Lineage (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009). 7. There is an unfortunate misunderstanding of Deleuze when he once famously wrote that his method of interpreting philosophers was a form of “buggery” (enculage), “as sneaking behind an author to produce monstrous offspring.” This has been severely used to discredit him, especially by Slavoj Žižek in Organs without Body: On Deleuze and Consequences (London: Routledge, 2003). Žižek takes the English translation at face value and disregards all the qualifications and subjunctives in the French that Deleuze used to write this statement. The “sneaking behind” in the English, for instance, is closer to “arriving at the back” in French; for Deleuze, everything important happens behind an author’s back. Deleuze’s buggery comment appears in “Letter to a Severe Critic,” in


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A Response to Deconstructing D|G 117 Negotiations, 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press), 3–13. In the same essay, he also writes when reading and interpreting a book that “speaks” to you: “This intensive way of reading . . . is reading with love” (7, added emphasis). 8. Gilles Deleuze, Repetition and Difference, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994) 13. Cited hereafter as DR. 9. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). “The object of philosophy is to create concepts that are always new” (5, added emphasis). 10. The complexity of this inversion is masterfully articulated by Daniel W. Smith, “The Concept of the Simulacrum: Deleuze and the Overturning of Platonism,” Continental Philosophy Review 38, no. 1 (2006): 89–123. 11. JY: “compared with constant references throughout the text to machines, the rhizome is organic” (38); “We are left not only with a vision of machines capturing the very ones who design, produce, and use them but of some invisible power in the machine” (44); “Deleuzian and Guattarian mecanosphere that threatens to extinguish life turns people into species of machines” (51). 12. Ronald Bogue, Deleuze’s Wake: Tributes and Tributaries (New York: SUNY Press, 2004), 11–15. Bogue, a consummate commentator and articulator of Deleuze|Guattari’s thought, does an excellent exposé when exploring the uncommon use of common terms that they create. 13. Diagram is a concept used throughout much of their writings, specifically Plateau 5 in TP where it is discussed extensively. 14. JY: “important to articulate and map these interconnections” (40); “instead, visual maps [diagrams] abound with grids” (43); “conquest and mapping of territory” (44). Their use of “map” in these sentences is one-sided and representational. 15. This is comparative to Jean-François Lyotard’s distinction between “figural” and “figure” in Discourse, Figures, trans. Antony Hudek and Mary Lydon (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). 16. On Deleuze’s style, see Carsten Henrik Meiner, “Deleuze and the Question of Style,” symploke 6, no. 1/2 (1998): 157–73. Meiner tries to show the context of style throughout Deleuze’s writing as addressing two dimensions simultaneously, linguistic and extralinguistic, in an effort to destabilize syntax from within the limits of language itself. Ultimately, says Meiner, Deleuze is addressing a modality of life, which is his “style.” His style is both an act of syntactic destabilization and a mode of life. 17. There are many examples. Here is but one: “The dualisms in [Deleuze|Guattari’s] account are not only a ‘problem of writing’” (TP, 20), as Jorgensen and Yob put it, “an accident of language, but fundamental to their point” (JY, 53). It is only a “problem” for them, not for Deleuze|Guattari. 18. Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Deleuze and Language (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). Lecercle discusses these tensions. 19. JY: “Compared with constant references throughout the text to machines, the rhizome is organic, a living or at least a potentially living form that can grow under the right circumstances” (38). 20. Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Diagloges II, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York, Columbia University Press, 2002), 104. “Mechanics is a system of closer and closer connections between dependent terms. The machine by contrast is a “proximity” grouping between independent and heterogeneous terms (topological proximity is itself independent of distance and contiguity)” (ibid.). 21. Here we have a host of scholars that accuse Deleuze|Guattari of not having any solid political activist plans in contrast to critical theory, which the authors are alluding to by mentioning Paulo Freire and the tradition that became developed after him, spearhead by Henry Giroux in the United States. Key opponents of Deleuze|Guattari has been Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, trans.


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118 jagodzinski Louise Burchill (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); and, most recently, Peter Hallward, Out of This World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation (London: Verso, 2006), influenced by Badiou’s work. Deleuzian scholars have pushed back all these accusations; for example, Clayton Crockett, Deleuze beyond Badiou: Ontology, Multiplicity, and Event (New York and Chichester UK: Columbia University Press, 2013). Had the authors read TP as needed, they would have found throughout the book as to why Deleuze|Guattari thought that “revolutionary thinking” was a faulty political endeavor. When Jorgensen and Yob write, “They would like to dismantle the State and its apparatus” (38), it is not along dialectical lines as is being suggested. 22. As developed in Plateau 4, but as “minor literature” and consequently “minoritarian arts,” it is best explicated in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 23. JY exemplars: “suppressing minority interests from the trajectory of the main-line majority thinking of white, educated males” (38); “who dwell on the fringes in the minority and are besieged by the all-powerful State” (38); “an ethnic minority very aware how bodies are different” (41); “by nomads who represent minority perspectives and peoples” (44, emphasis added); “to hold minority views” (44); “operate regardless of the particular majority or minority view involved” (44); “grasping minority as well as majority perspectives” (50). 24. “The notion of minority is very complex, with musical, literary, linguistic, as well as juridical and political references. The opposition between minority and majority is not simply quantitative. Majority implies a constant, of expression or content, serving a standard measure by which to evaluate it” (TP, 105). 25. Minoritarian politics that attempts to create a “people-yet-to-come” is discussed most profoundly in Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), as well as Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 26. See the discussion by Maryvonne Saison, “‘The People Are Missing,’” Contemporary Aesthetics, March 31, 2008, an informative essay that shows the touchstones and differences between Deleuze and Rancière’s political project as well: http://www.contempaesthetics.org, accessed February 25, 2016. 27. JY: “[T]his view is curiously Cartesian in its bifurcation of self and whatever lies beyond” (43). 28. JY: “Deleuze and Guattari’s emphasis on exteriority” (43); “swallowed up in the quest for exteriority” (44). 29. JY: “interior and exterior exchange takes place” (46). 30. JY: These appear on 39. 31. Deleuze, Negotiations, 44. 32. Kathrin Thiele, “‘To Believe in this World, as It is’: Immanence and the Quest for Political Activism,” Deleuze Studies 4 (2010), supplement: 28–45. 33. Michel Foucault, “Preface” to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Athlone Press, 2000); Brad Evans and Julian Reid, eds., Deleuze and Fascism: Security, War, Aesthetics (London: Routledge, 2013). 34. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibnitz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992). 35. Jason Wallin, “Rhizomania: Five Provocations of a Concept,” Complicity: An International Journal of Complexity and Education 7, no. 2 (2010): 83–87. 36. The BwO is often reduced to a phenomenology. For a review see John Mullarkey, “Duplicity in the Flesh: Bergson and Current Philosophy of the Body,” Philosophy Today 38 no. 4 (1994): 339–55. 37. See Ian Buchanan, “The Problem of the Body in Deleuze and Guattari: Or, What Can a Body Do?,” Body & Society 3, no. 3 (1997): 73–91. 38. “We are trying to extract from love all possession, all identification, to become capable of loving. We are trying to extract from madness the life it contains,


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A Response to Deconstructing D|G 119 while hating the madmen who ceaselessly bring death to that life, turn against itself. We are trying to extract from alcohol the life which it contains, without drinking.” Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 53. 39. Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (London: Athlone Press), 69. Cited hereafter as SPP. Further references to this work will be cited in the text. 40. Deleuze and Parnet, Diagloges II, 110. 41. This barrage of gendered criticism is strongest at the end when they trash Deleuze|Guattari’s particular vocabulary just after talking about taking “responsibility” and “trust” regarding philosophical works. “There is a distinctive masculinity about TP . . . [a few lines later] . . . The masculinity of the text is not gender specific.” Perhaps the authors should have thought about why that is so. But then a few lines later, “[T]he mechanistic and militaristic and male-dominated images are problematic” (JY, 52). The categorical male|female dichotomies that the authors use are a throwback to the early days of neoliberalist feminism. 42. TP: “All becoming is minoritarian. Women, regardless of their numbers, are a minority, a definable as a state or subset; but they create only by making possible a becoming over which they do not have ownership, into which they themselves must enter; this is a becoming-woman affecting all of mankind, men and women both” (117, added emphasis). This dismisses the nasty generalization Jorgensen and Yob make at the end of their essay: that TP is a “universal and totalizing” text that leaves out the “silent and the marginalized” and “women’s absence” (JY, 52). They obviously have a very s(t)uperficial understanding of Deleuze|Guattari’s position concerning sex/gender. See Frida Beckman, ed., Deleuze and Sex (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011). 43. See Ian Buchanan and Clair Colebrook, eds., Deleuze and Feminist Theory ( Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000). 44. Hanjo Berressem, “n-1 sexes,” Rhizomes 11/12 (Fall 2005/Spring 2006): http:// www.rhizomes.net/issue11/berressem/, accessed February 25, 2016. 45. Gilles Deleuze, “Literature and Life,” trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco, Critical Inquiry 23, no. 2 (1997): 225–30. 46. The lament is offered in JY, 43. 47. Deleuze discusses two contrary conceptions of the word plan. There is the organization of a plan that comes from above, which he refers to as a “theological plan,” and a plan that is constantly in the making (SPP, 128). 48. Developed in SPP, 126–28. 49. Badiou, Deleuze, 11. Cited hereafter as DCB, as quoted in Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Athone Press, 1994), 304. Cited hereafter DR. 50. This particular accusatory line is worked out by Hallward, in Out of This World. Hallward has been equally taken to task for his one-sided appraisal of Deleuze’s virtuality. His title says it all. There are many critiques of Hallward. See, for instance, Joshua Delpech-Ramey as he addresses art in his response, “Without Art: Peter Hallward’s Out of This World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation,” Journal of Cultural and Religious Theory 8, no. 3 (2007): 136–45. 51. Among many, see especially, Crockett, Deleuze beyond Badiou; Nathan Widder, “The Eights of Simulacra: Deleuze and the Univocity of Being,” Continental Philosophy Review 34 (2001): 437–53. 52. Crockett, Deleuze Beyond Badiou, 11–26. 53. The literature in this area has exploded as any Internet search makes evident. For example, see Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004). 54. Randall Everett Allsup, “Rough Play: Music and Symbolic Violence in an Age of Perpetual War,” Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 8, no. 1 (2009): 35–53. Hereafter “RP.” All further citations to this work will be cited in the text.


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120 jagodzinski 55. A summation of this literature on moral panic, which involves the contestation of values and behavioral goals in relation to establishing a set of societal morals, can be found in Charles Krinsky, ed., The Ashgate Research Companion to Moral Panics (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2013). The moral-panics model has now been incorporated as a similar but distinct phenomenon emerging within societies of “risk” as outlined by the German sociologist Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, trans. Mark Ritter (London: Sage Publications, 1992). 56. Jacques Lacan, “What Is a Picture,” in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin Books), 105–22. 57. Not to go far afield as this is a vast literature. Slavoj Žižek’s How to Real Lacan (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007) is a good place as any to understand fantasy formation based on “veiling.” This does away with the pesky problem of a false consciousness (“double consciousness” or “double vision” for Allsup) where morality is evaluated in terms of good and evil, true and false. Deleuze|Guattari are not interested in morality (Law) but ethics. Much like Paolo Freire, whom the authors allude to, “false obviousness of everyday practice” (Allsup, 41) is what Allsup thinks music education should expose, in this case a critical theory that regresses to a form of Marxism developed by the Frankfurt School in their critique of the cultural industry. 58. Gilles Deleuze, “Control and Becoming” and “Postscript on Control Societies, in Negotiations, 169–82. 59. “Compars” and “dispars” refers to Deleuze|Guattari discussion of scientific models of social development. “Compars” refers to a constantly progressive development in Western society, whereas “dispars” follows the principle of nomadic existence where space is tactile, rather than visual, and time is cyclical. 60. Gould’s essays attempt to put the war machine to work in the realm of feminism. In an earlier work, she explores its usage in relation to the lesbian writings of Monique Wittig and the “hetero” writings of Luce Irigaray. See “Difference out of Place: Feminist War Machines in Music Education,” Visions of Research in Music Education 11: http://www-usr.rider.edu, accessed February 25, 2016. In this essay, Gould is aware that the nomadic war machine as Deleuze|Guattari use it “is neither feminist nor postcolonial” (20). In “Women Working in Music Education: The War Machine,” Philosophy of Music Educational Review 17, no. 2 (2009): 126–43, Gould makes a stronger case to utilize the war machine in a distinctly feminine way. Like Rosi Braidotti who is unwilling to let go of sex/gender to arrive at the n-1 sexes as Deleuze|Guattari suggest, Gould too has to state a caveat in her footnotes: While women are addressed here as a group in terms of interlocking sources of oppression (race, sexuality, age, and ableness, for instance), this is not to suggest that all women’s experience in music educational are identical or even necessarily similar. (emphasis added) This is the sort of trouble that emerges when residual identity remains as an excess that does not accommodate the Deleuze|Guattarian position. Gould continues to qualify: “Because other groups also may be constituted nomadically in the profession, the term ‘women’ is used here primarily as problematics for addressing issues of women working in music education and universities, and secondarily as signifier for non-hegemonic or resistive practices in music education” (140n3, emphasis added). Sexuation (not gender) in the Deleuze|Guatarrian context remains virtual; the actualizations happen as many sexualisations or, as Elizabeth Grosz cleverly put it, “a thousand tiny sexes” (“A Thousand Tiny Sexes: Feminism and Rhizomatics,” Topoi 12, no. 2 [1993]: 167–79). 61. Eugene Holland, Nomad Citizenship: Free-Market Communism and the Slow-Motion General Strike (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2011), 24–29. 62. The authors turn to this phrase to begin their critique of faciality (JY, 48)


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A Response to Deconstructing D|G 121 63. This seems like a standard description. There is no criticism per se. 64. As Jorgensen and Yob write in reference to Jorgensen’s Pictures of Music Education: “Merely substituting one value set for another does not address the multiplicities of value” (51). For Deleuze’s exploration of the term, see “Theory of Multiplicities in Bergson,” http://www.webdeleuze.com, accessed February 25, 2015. 65. Doug Aoki, “The Thing Never Speaks for Itself: Lacan and the Pedagogical Poetics of Clarity,” Harvard Educational Review 70, no. 3 (2000): 348. 66. To start, see Ian Buchanan and Marcel Swiboda, eds., Deleuze and Music (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004); Brian Hulse and Nick Nesbitt, eds., Sounding the Virtual: Gilles Deleuze and Theory and Philosophy of Music (Surrey, GB: Ashgate, 2010).


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