Abstract Chantelle Gray

Keynote talk

Deep attention: The synthesizer, modulation and constraint regimes

To live, as Maturana Varela might have said, is to be involved in processes of valanced sense-making or signification – movements of attraction, repulsion, regulation, and escape. Philosophers have theorized signification in various ways though, for Deleuze and Guattari, a crucial point is that signification is not necessarily tied to language, because signs are simply one type of formalization of expression. What they remind us of, then, is that there are sign-less or asemiotic expressions just as there are asemiological regimes of signs or asignifying signs – not only on the plane of consistency, but also on the strata. Their point is that while it is easy, and sometimes even necessary, to get caught up in the forms and substances, contents and expressions of the strata, part of the pedagogy of philosophy is to extract the intensities beneath the strata, to know how to extract these flows of deterritorialization without botching the BwO.

In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari argue for a different kind of logic – a logic of stuttering:  AND … AND … AND … For them, this logic is paradigmatic of a generalized chromaticism, or the capacity to immediately establish connections between heterogeneous elements. Deleuze, in his book on Francis Bacon, argues that the modular synthesizer provides a good example of this precisely because it consists of diagrams, whereas digital synthesizers operate integrally in that they are symbolically codified. But if modular synthesizers place all elements in a continuous variation, are they capable of producing ritornellos, or is there no determined structure? And what does this teach us about the pedagogy of philosophy, or howtothink?

Bringing together the action of making drone music with the method of Deep Listening – a meditative sonic practice of experience developed by the experimental accordionist and composer, Pauline Oliveros – I address this question by demonstrating how even generative drone music relies on constraint regimes that are self-organizing or immanent, while also being coherent and embodied actions of personal and collective sense-making. This has a number of philosophical implications, especially for thinking about the modulation of thought in digital and digitized societies of hyper-control on the one hand; and the production of intensities, affects, and haecceities on the other.