Romantic Resonance

Posted by admin on May 30th, 2007 filed in theory

I found myself going over some of these problems in The Way in which the Earth was Formed.

I am easily drawn into what Deleuze calls romantic territory; origins in noise and a primordial resonance are recurring themes for me. The refrain offers something of a model, a form for this way of thinking about sound. Isolate a single point in chaos, from this point one can make consistent or consolidate elements of the background noise. Something like braiding is put to use, a process of forming a knot of consistency, channeling noise into signal or a matter of expression. This is a process of drawing signal from what Žižek has called the ‘murmur of the real’ (The Metastases of Enjoyment, 115). I keep coming back to this background noise or murmur. This is the mark of a universe bounded by a fundamental noise, noise at its ontological horizon. There is a Real connection between these two sonorous functions or fields, a connection that is made by Deleuze and Guattari in their identification of the machinic or destratifying effect of sound: ‘effects of this kind can be very diverse but are never symbolic or imaginary; they always have a real value of passage or relay’ (Thousand Plateaus, 367). This murmur is, for Žižek, what exudes from a real proximity, the threatening rumble of immanent rupture, it is also that which supplies the cutting force of the machinic phylum that Deleuze identifies in sound. This confusion of the real and machinic possibly misses something vital from both positions but it seems worth running with it for now, considering Žižek’s use of the virtual as an almost structural substitution for the real.

To localize this situation, to take from its cosmic reference an earthly commentary, identifying its role in matters of expression is to enter romantic territory. This brings with it a certain comfort zone that I find particularly useful as a creative catalyst, but the romantic notion is not to be completely ignored. A voicing of the earth, of the One-All, establishes a territory that ‘is haunted by a solitary voice; the voice of the earth resonates with it and provides it percussion rather than answering it’ (A Thousand Plateaus, 375). In this identification of the romantic territory there something of a warning against an indulgence in the notion of a voicing of the earth, a voicing of matter that stresses a kind of vicarious channeling of forces which inevitably return to the finitude of matter, following the arch of the death drive.

There is in this warning something reminiscent of Badiou’s aversion to ‘the servile and sonorous body’, the ‘body beset by rhythm’ (Handbook of Inaesthetics 59 - 62). But this is a rhythm confined to meter and cadence and not one of universal rhythm in counterpoint or of virtual motion between planes. Is it then necessary, in order to escape the romantic territory, to open up to a rhythm that is necessarily “out of this world”?