Music of a Witch’s Line: Deleuze and Guattari, and Music Video Shreds

Abstract

A clip of Wynton Marsalis playing with a jazz orchestra on the Late Show with David Letterman appears on YouTube. As the performance progresses, Marsalis’s usual exquisite tone and virtuosic playing slowly starts to reveal a certain disjointedness, exhibiting wayward passages, mishit notes, and cracks. Meanwhile, while struggling to maintain some semblance of a swing beat, the musical background of the string-infused jazz orchestra playing behind Marsalis becomes increasingly dissonant, sounding even a bit ominous – as if some bewitching force has been injected into the performance. What is happening? Enter the world of music video shreds. Following Deleuze and Guattari’s work regarding “minor” languages, this essay addresses the relationship between music video shreds and their object as that of a “minoritarian becoming.” The music video shred “minorizes” the original music video clip by not only stripping the audio from the original music video clip and replacing it with entirely new audio, but by playing with our expectations concerning the congruence of sound and image. In other words, the music video shred has to do with both art and culture, with both aesthetics and performativity. For its part, the Urban Dictionary defines music video shreds, or “shreds” for short – the activity of which we would call “shredding,” or “doing a shred of...” – as follows: shred 1. inf verb: to extract the audio track from a video (usually featuring an overblown, over-rated rock guitarist) and replace it with perfectly synchronized, very well played rubbish. The joyful result of this painstaking process renders the featured musician looking even more totally fucking risible than they were already. 2. noun: A parody video clip likely to be removed from YouTube. To a greater extent than other new audiovisual aesthetic practices, as well as “user-generated content,” music video shreds seem to invite the question, “But is there more to it than that?” However, the more interesting, yet often neglected, issue whenever this kind of response is at play has to do with why we might want there to be “more to it than that” in the first place. In challenging and complicating our expectations and evaluation through a particular type of subversion with respect to the original video content, music video shreds, I wish to suggest, affirm both aesthetics and performativity. More specifically, they affirm aesthetic and performative possibility, or becoming (i.e. what art does, what art might be), instead of confirming what we think should be the case (i.e. what art is, what we think art should be). Minoritarian music videos Although it might just be the case that, were he alive today, Adorno would be horrified by shreds (whether because of their apparent amateurishness or what would likely be his generally cynical view of YouTube, the seemingly infinite and potentially unhinged origin of shreds), there is arguably a particular kind of political gesture with respect to shreds – a kind of politics out of that which is apparently apolitical. Shreds meet Schoenberg. His own commitment to Marxism notwithstanding, Adorno located the breakthrough and force of Schoenberg’s serial atonalism more broadly in how it did not submit to the socialist realism championed by some of his intellectual (and ideological) peers. Instead, for Adorno, what was radical was precisely Schoenberg’s insistence on his aesthetic, which is to say, on “formal” concerns. And yet, here again – and paradoxical though it might seem – it would also be misguided to consider Adorno’s emphasis (vis-à-vis Schoenberg) on autonomy and formalism as somehow representing a kind of strict autonomist formalism! Although it had been necessarily relegated to a secondary role with respect to the championing of Schoenberg as political, Adorno’s more explicit political commitment now returns in the form of Schoenbergian atonalism as cultural critique, as a bulwark against the “regressive listening” engendered by the commercial popular music of capitalist commodification, as a site of resistance to what, in his earlier, more Marxist (and Brechtian?) period, Roland Barthes called “mythologies.” However, beyond his contentious (to put it mildly) criticism of popular music in general, and jazz in particular, the immanent politics of Schoenberg’s atonalism was still, in many ways, a largely oppositional gesture. Hence a rather curious result: by insisting on its aesthetic, Schoenberg’s music was more immanently and subversively political; and yet, as uncompromising in its atonalism, Schoenberg’s music necessarily assumed a position of isolation (and its most devout followers staking out a kind of protectionism). Now, let me be clear – I am neither asserting any kind of evaluative claim with respect to the aesthetic or political significance of Schoenberg’s music vis-à-vis Adorno’s criticism nor suggesting that Schoenberg should have done anything other than what he did. On the contrary, certainly for someone like Adorno, the stakes might have arguably been seen as much too high to not be uncompromising and oppositional in the fight for aesthetic autonomy. But then, this is the crux of the matter, isn’t it? Assuming there is, in fact, a “culture industry,” can we think and create beyond it? How does culture as politics proceed? The deeper concern with respect to the discursive practices and advertisements concerning a range of cultural products and events that Barthes investigated in Mythologies was that they made these products and events – familiar though they might have been – appear natural. Barthes’ critique, then, is a theoretical intervention of immanence as subversion, a move to de-familiarize, or, what is similar, to make the familiar strange. Similarly, in Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari write: [1] Minor languages are characterized not by overload and poverty in relation to a standard or major language, but by a sobriety and variation that are like a minor treatment of the standard language, a becoming-minor of the major language. The problem is not the distinction between major and minor language; it is one of a becoming. It is a question not of reterritorializing oneself on a dialect or a patois but of deterritorializing the major language. Meanwhile, in his later Essays Critical and Clinical, Deleuze reiterates that “the effect of literature on language [is that] it opens up a kind of foreign language within language...a becoming-other of language, a minorization of this major language, a delirium that carries it off, a witch’s line that escapes the dominant system.” This minorization makes language “scream, stutter, stammer, or murmur.” Our wager, broadly construed, is that music video shreds make the “language” (or perhaps “signification”) of their subject matter – i.e. the images, gestures, movements, and so on that comprise the performative apparatus and dominant representations of celebrity, stardom, or “success” – scream, stutter, stammer, or murmur. But before we address how shreds accomplish these gestures, four general points of clarification with respect to Deleuze and Guattari’s discourse on minor literature might be needed. First, for Deleuze and Guattari, the distinction between major and minor – or, “majoritarian” and “minoritarian,” respectively – is not necessarily (and sometimes not at all) a quantitative one. Rather, the distinction has to do with that which is the norm, the standard, etc. and, by contrast, that which pushes up against that norm – but precisely as immanence, as subversion, from within, not as opposition, per se: “We must distinguish between: the majoritarian as a constant and homogeneous system...and the minoritarian as a potential, creative and created becoming. The problem is never to acquire the majority, even in order to install a new constant.” Second, and proceeding from the first point, the terms “reterritorialization” and “deterritorialization” also employed by Deleuze and Guattari are so named precisely because they have to do with the notion of a territory, which is to say that around which we stake a claim, around which we draw a boundary. Thus, to “reterritorialize” is to come back to a territory – i.e. to reinforce a claim and a boundary – while to “deterritorialize” is to uproot a territory – i.e. to challenge or resist its claim and boundary. Third, in both pairings – major/minor and reterritorialization/deterritorialization – the relationship is, again, not so much one of opposition, but rather an immanent production of forces, tensions, shifts. This is why it would be more fitting to say something to the effect that music video shreds “push up against” their subject matter rather than simply that they work “against” (oppose) their subject matter. Nevertheless, to push up against something is still a gesture that embodies contingency and relationality. “It is in one’s own language that one is bilingual or multilingual,” write Deleuze and Guattari. “Conquer the major language in order to delineate in it as yet unknown minor languages. Use the minor language to send the major language racing.” Finally, when Deleuze and Guattari speak of minor languages as “delineating as yet unknown languages” and “sending the major language racing,” we take these as creating so many “becomings”: “There is no becoming-majoritarian; majority is never becoming. All becoming is minoritarian.” In other words, minor languages create disruptions, resistances, possibilities, connections, perhaps newer territories, and newer problems. It is in this sense that minor languages are also political, but not in terms of representing any specific ideology or following a certain political program. Aesthetic subversion meets immanent critique. Following Deleuze and Guattari, I thus envision the relationship between music video shreds and their object as that of minor to major, respectively. That is, the music video shred “minorizes” (through its “shredding”) the “ma