Rhythmic Parasites: A Virological Analysis of Sound and Dance
Stamatia Portanova, East London University.
Introduction
This paper sets out a conceptual analysis of rhythm as a
force of disruption and of re-organisation. By disentangling rhythm
from human corporeality, habits and purposes (rhythm as a prerogative
of human movement), we will propose its re-qualification as an attribute
of matter itself: rhythm as a galvanising current flowing in and
between all human, animal and technological, animate and inanimate,
organic and inorganic bodies, simultaneously dissolving their solid
organisations and re-modelling their fluid exchanges. Being supported
by an ontological dichotomy, most philosophical or musicological
theories have perpetuated the difference between rhythm as a mechanical
and broken repetition of units subject to physical laws (as in Plato's
essentialist theory of rhythm), and rhythm as an organic, uncontrolled
and continuously flowing expression of the natural world (coinciding
with phenomenological notions such as Henri Bergson's 'duration').
[1]In order
to escape this philosophical impasse, the aim of this paper is to
unravel the relation between the cuts and flows, the breaks and
continuities, the intensive and extensive moments which constitute
the ontological and physical status of rhythm.
In the specific case of sound and dance, the rhythm of a dancing
body (as a bio-physical, but also cultural and social entity) results
from an immanent virtual state of dis-solution (the body as a fluid
multiplicity of uncontrollable, infinitesimal particles intensively
stimulated and excited) and a simultaneous solid state of re-shaping
and re-structuring (the body as a solid whole extensively drawing
space with its own steps). Working as a virus, rhythm disrupts linear
bodily movements and clear perceptions, re-organising them after
its own order. This paper will analyse rhythmic infection and its
cohesive/dissolving effects in three directions. The first one is
bio-physical: focusing on the biological, anatomical and perceptual
dimensions of sound perception and movement, we will describe the
spread of rhythm across the cellular population of a body, as a
catalyst of biological and anatomical processes of disruption and
reorganisation. The second is cultural: mapping the insertion of
this bio-physical body/organisation into particular social and geographical
contexts, we will consider rhythmic diffusion across spatial confines
in and between human bodies and collective groups, as a catalyst
for the weaving of autonomous rituals, contacts and relations. The
third is technical: after a temporal leap (from old rituals to contemporary
dance events), we will investigate contemporary rhythmic engineering
through various digital machines directly plugging in the molecular
composition of a dancing body, trying to understand how the new
digital manipulation and diffusion of rhythm becomes a locus for
the capitalist, biological and social control of bodily movements,
but also for unpredictable self-organised events at both bio-physical
and cultural levels.
Rhythmic trans-coding
The Platonic theorisation of rhythm as a repetition of elementary
units (steps or beats) provided the philosophical basis for all
future definitions of rhythm as a meter of mechanical measurement,
comparison and judgement, and as an instrument of behavioural codification
allowing the prediction, control and regulation of bodily movement.
Distinguishing the disciplinary nature of all metric practices
aiming at the control and regimentation of movement from the undisciplined
character of rhythm, Gilles Deleuze and Fèlix Guattari write:
It is well known that rhythm is not meter or cadence, even irregular
meter or cadence: there is nothing less rhythmic than a military
march. ' Meter, whether regular or not, assumes a coded form whose
unit of measure may vary, but in a noncommunicating milieu, whereas
rhythm is the Unequal or the Incommensurable that is always undergoing
transcoding. Meter is dogmatic, but rhythm is critical; it ties
together critical moments or ties itself up in passing from one
milieu to another. It does not operate in a homogeneous space-time,
but by heterogeneous blocks. It changes direction. (Deleuze and
Guattari, 1992: 313)
Echoing Deleuze and Guattari's conceptualisation of this
rhythmic 'trans-coding' force, we can start to delineate
our definition of sound and dance rhythm as the spread of a physical
and cultural virus carried by sound molecules across and between
different bodies and groups, and whose propagation is also able
to undermine the linearity of all economic, cultural and political
meters. For this purpose, it is of crucial importance to highlight
the ambivalent nature of the rhythmic virus, and to grasp its double
role as an agent of homogenisation and of 'heterogenisation'.
By identifying the relation between meter and rhythm as an immanent
one, we can start to grasp the inextricable link between two different
but simultaneous processes of rhythmic dissolution and metric re-organisation.
These coexistent processes characterise the capitalist commercialisation
and control of sound through the diffusion, modulation and codification
of rhythm, and through its transformation into music, but are also
at the basis of an autonomous net of rhythmic self-organisations
and of sound/dance events.
In Deleuze and Guattari's words, the periodic repetition
of a unit realises a behavioural code, a metric reiteration which
allows the disciplining of the body and its movements through identification,
synchronisation and communication mechanisms. In other words, the
homogeneous and specular reproduction of constant units or copies
(as in the genetic, cultural or information codes) acts as an instrument
for the bio-physical identification of a human body, for its regular
functioning in a social environment and for its efficient control
of cybernetic systems. Metric reiteration is the accurate clock
which enables a body to recognise its organic and human identity
(the biological code as based on genetic and cellular reproduction),
to perform its ordered movements and interactions (the social code
as based on rigid behavioural structures) and to adapt technology
to its own aims (the digital code as based on clear information
exchange). In this sense, meter would correspond to what Deleuze
defines as 'generality', i.e. a set of immutable laws
regulating the identity and resemblance of subjects and their equivalence
to designated terms, while also allowing for political and economic
control. (Deleuze, 2001) Isolating rhythm and limiting it to the
field of human movement (intended as a linear sequence of positions
and steps), Western science and philosophy have theorised a categorical
difference between disciplined and undisciplined motion, reducing
rhythm to a sort of motor regulator.
After the modern recuperation of Presocratic and atomistic ideas
(such as Lucretius's 'clinamen'), rhythm becomes an imperceptible,
quantic coagulation or dispersion of matter behind perceivable steps
and beats. Rather than to equality and equivalence, the development
of rhythm is more related to singularity and uniqueness, disruption
and trans-coding. 'Effective but lacking content, the [rhythmic]
'transmission' is not a [linear, interceptable] communication. It
is a 'transduction': a self-propagating movement seeding serial
self-organizations, ''. (Massumi, 2002: xxx) Linking together heterogeneous
blocks (of molecules, human populations, information units), the
transmission of rhythm opens every bio-physical, social or technical
organisation to identity contaminations, synchronicity disruptions
and communication disturbances. In this sense, we can define the
disturbing spread of rhythm as a viral propagation infecting all
biological, social or cybernetic bodies, engendering different material
organisations where each body does not form a new world closed in
on itself but, on the contrary, is constituted by coexistences and
interactions of different kinds. (De Landa, 2001)
The first of these rhythmic organisations is bio-physical, coinciding
with the constitution of the dancing body as a living, moving and
perceiving organism. Considering rhythm as an attribute characterising
the molecular, micro-physical dynamics of matter and its energetic
vibrations (i.e. rhythm as a continuous qualitative emergence spreading
from material, chemical reactions), the whole of matter loses its
static appearance and becomes an ensemble of dancing molecules.
This dancing matter becomes organised into inorganic or organic,
moving and perceiving bodies through particular hierarchical and
functional dispositions of elements. Sequences of molecules and
cells, neuro/chemical paths and a multiplicity of particles/signals,
organs, tissues and apparatuses align themselves in a particular
order, building up the biological con-formation of an organism and
its formal, anatomical structure, at the same time transforming
it into a host of parasiting processes. The evolution of the human
species happens then through a particular systematisation of organs
and through particular morphological (arms, legs, head), postural
(standing position) and kinetic features, gestures and movements,
together with the development of a particular sensori-motor system
and a perceptual/behavioural coordination.
At the same time, myriad molecular movements and relations perform
their own schizo/rhythmic development, provoking a sort of micro-kin-aesthetics
of imperceptible alterations and deviations. The spread of intensive
qualities from the movement of these particles is immanent to the
harmonic and functional equilibrium of the whole organism. In other
words, while the 'organic organisation' of a body is
based on the formation, specialisation and communication of all
its parts, at a microscopic level this organisation is continuously
de-coded and dis-articulated. Acting as a sort of physiological
viral development, the molecular propagation of energy (sound, light)
across a living/moving body can be seen as following the same rhythmic
patterns as those of an epidemic diffusion. This rhythmic vector
of energetic spreading cuts across the very organisation of the
body: the transversal weaving of intensive amplifications along
the linear sensori-motor circuit decentralises and trans-forms the
integrated image and coordinated actions of the body. In the muscular/skeletal
apparatus, the spread of rhythm happens as a viral energetic diffusion
through the nerves, in a sort of neural micro-dynamics fractally
composing movement and dance as a series of involuntary jerks, variable
speed relations and gravitational lines of flight. In the dancing
body, the energetic dance of electromagnetic and acoustic matter
produces a series of molecular alterations and generates multiple
local realisations, dispersion and excesses.
After this transformation and passage of rhythm from sound and
light waves to bodily movements, we can see how the performance
of movement becomes culturally organised among different social
groups. In its social dimension, dance is usually identified with
the movement of a collective body according to a common rhythm,
as the act of keeping time together for a prolonged period, "so
as to establish a regular beat".
[2] In evolutionary terms, this activity
is associated with the enhancement of group homogenisation and with
the dissipation of friction through imitation and synchronisation.
In this sense, dance becomes a kinetic, cultural and social organisation
aiming at the material preservation and cultural integrity of a
collective body. Uniform kinetic habits and corporeal regulations,
geographic confines and ethnic, sexual or class discriminations
constitute the rigid grid which entraps and moulds the free circulation
of rhythm inside and between social groups. At the same time, the
kine-topology of rhythm reveals how solid and stable social structures
are eroded by uncontrollable subterranean movements coinciding with
a micro (or local) level of aggregation of crazy particles/people
gathering or moving around particular speed attractors and drawing
a schizo/rhythmic map across cities, states and continents. Rhythm's
micro-physical turbulences determine a series of intensive alterations
in the social field, gathering or scattering masses of people in
crowds and tribes that move beyond the impermeable segmentations
imposed by cultural and socio-kinetic discipline. Disturbing the
social equilibrium of all identified groups, rhythm acts as a virus
whose propagation is often historically and socially linked to epidemic
diffusions along episodes of 'populational' contacts.
As a viral spreading or transversal weaving of sounds and dances
across cultural codes, rhythm galvanises the social organisation
of life, while decentralising and de-forming every rigid cultural
morphology or behavioural regularity through the molecular movements
of a collective body in continuous passage and change. On this social
layer, technological apparatuses emerge (from acoustic drums to
digital sampling and mixing machines), provoking acoustic or electro-acoustic
amplifications and turbulences that infect the bodily sensorium
and corrode the borders of regimented social relationality, while
freely travelling across time and space.
Beyond every metaphorical or analogical association, the definition
of rhythm as a virus infecting all physical and cultural organisations
beyond temporal and spatial confines is founded on the identification
of a common viral behaviour: on one hand, viruses carried by pathogenic
agents, breaking the linear genetic sequence and purity of biological
communication; on the other hand, sound fostering promiscuous contacts
between molecules, or between different populations and cultures,
through the explosion of dance as an intensive alteration and metamorphosis
of the physical and social body. Symbiosis constitutes the process
common to these viral dynamics. In her Serial Endosymbiosis Theory
(or SET), molecular biologist Lynn Margulis illustrates how heterogeneous
contacts and assemblages of molecules and compounds, cells, bodies
and species proliferate through a promiscuity which is at the very
basis of life:
The Darwinian logic of evolution, is substituted with a rhizomatic
recombination of information expanding through viral hijacking
of codes between singular machines of reproduction: a microbe
and an insect, a bud and a flower, a toxin and a human. (Parisi,
2004: 16).
All 'symbiotic' relations between beings of different
scales, species and worlds, and all webs of transversal relations
continuing across linear transmission processes are carried by a
viral and rhythmic spread of vibrations 'inside and between'
heterogeneous populations. At its molecular level, sound represents
an example of symbiotic contact. Travelling across bodies, seas
and historical eras, screens and sensorial surfaces, flows of sound
particles are carried by rhythm as an energetic wave. Entering the
body-organisation as a viral energetic flow, sonic rhythm opens
it to multiple side communications between different particles.
Generating symbiotic contacts and contagions between bodies (such
as the impact of sound vibrations on the molecular constitution
of a human body), rhythm becomes a viral catalyst of bodily movement
and transformation. In this sense, it is crucial to note how, in
order to realise and reproduce their mechanical energy, the replicating
mechanisms of sonic vibrations utilise a series of host media: from
air molecules to neural cells, the infection of sonic rhythm provokes
dance as its main pathology and cure. The social spread of sound
and dance in periods of epidemic diffusion makes the viral character
of rhythm even more evident. From this point of view, the biological,
anthropological and cybernetic dimensions of rhythm can be integrated
with a study of acoustic and epidemic phenomena, allowing for a
fractal understanding of sound and dance in terms of molecular packs,
viral spreads and pathological behaviours.
Bio-physical rhythm: Neural infections of sound and the
symptomatology of dance
The discovery of the DNA code, for example, is focusing on how
you can create different species of beings by starting from the
very smallest particles and their components,' Karlheinz
Stockhausen has said. 'That is why we are all part of the
spirit of the atomic age. In music, we do exactly the same. (Eshun,
1993:02[013])
In his multidimensional and interdisciplinary analysis of electronic
dance music, Kodwo Eshun describes the sound studio as a lab, a
research centre for the breaking down of the beat as the infinitesimal
sound molecule (Eshun, http://www.ccru.net/swarm3/3_abducted.htm).In
the lab, the Breakbeat is isolated and replicated, becoming the
DNA of rhythmic science and the matter of multiple sonic and cultural
mixtures. Through the digital sampler, a sequence of sounds can
be played for an infinite number of times, cut into small bits and
re-ordered, accelerated or slowed down. The separation of singular
elements and fragments forming the fabric of acoustic material is
realised as a 'granulation' of sound.
When translated into sonic terms, meter becomes a 'standard
unit ' that divides ' music; the ' rhythm
' counted evenly and stressed on every main beat.'
(Davis, http://www.technosis.com/cyberconf.html)
On the other hand, in the linear flowing of a 'pulsed'
sequence, the viral behaviour of rhythm appears as a molecular web
of relations between uniform metric lines, or as a swelling wave
connecting different critical moments of qualitative acoustic change.
As a rhythmic example, we can see (or hear) how the meter-grid of
either classical music beats or electronic sound BPMs (beats per
minute) is dis-organised by velocity or frequency shifts emerging
as critical moments in-between the pulses and weaving their own
organisation. At the same time, 'permanent conversations or
cross-patterns [emerge] between each [line], a dialogue which is
also a complex dimension of difference introduced between
elements that are themselves often quite repetitive and simple.'
(Davis, http://www.technosis.com/cyberconf.html)
In this sense, the rhythm of a sound track is tied together as a
continuous, intensive swelling or criss-crossing going on under
the linear development of meter.
The viral diffusion of rhythm as an intensive, energetic sound
wave across the body provokes a circulation of electrical signals
via the nerves. This neural diffusion of energy/electricity is the
source of a displaced and decentred movement, a multiplicity of
'local motions' and uncontrollable nervous jerks in
the rhythmically contaminated body system. Every quantifiable, measurable
and organisable succession of steps is fractally composed and de-composed
by multiple micro-electroshocks leading the body across various
critical points (such as sudden speed shifts or centrifugal and
centripetal transitions).
The first thing to do is to acknowledge that rhythm isn't
really about notes or beats, it's about intensities, it's
about crossing a series of thresholds across your body. '
When you hear a beat, a beat lands on your joints, it seizes a
muscle, it gives you a tension, and suddenly you find your leg
lifting despite your head. Sound moves faster than your head,
sound moves faster than your body. What sound is doing is triggering
impulses across your muscles. (Eshun, http://www.ccru.net/swarm3/3_abducted.htm)
According to Brian Massumi, movement is a continuous, qualitative
change of the body, a passage across various intensive thresholds.
A trajectory of successive displacements can only appear retrospectively,
when movement stops and the occupied positions emerge, in a sort
of progressive freeze-frame attempting to discipline and control
the body between beginnings and endpoints but failing to bring to
light its real changes. Steps and gestures, poses and positions
can only be plotted by subtracting movement. Movement itself lies
in the intervals, when the body in motion does not coincide with
itself but is in transition, never in any point and always in passage.
This transition is not decomposable into constituent parts: in Massumi's
words, it is a dynamic unity which dissolves the stasis/motion binarism
into a continuous emergence of different speeds. (Massumi, 2002:
8) Conceiving a body in terms of its rhythmic, intensive passages
allows us to go beyond its lived, accomplished experiences (which
are related, rather, to a phenomenology of movement), and to reach
the very conditions of those experiences, the continuous qualitative
metamorphoses which, once realised in space as positions and steps,
represent the controllable and controlled actions of a bodily identity.
Borrowing Deleuze's words, we can say that a body's
rhythm or duration is realised in the process of its dissolving,
showing how this body differs not only from other things, but first
and foremost from itself.
Rather than metricising a reiteration of steps, rhythm delineates
the elusive character of the body, its molecular self-differentiation,
its continuous dis- and re-appearing after all perceptual and spatial
changes. At this level, human perception, sensori-motor coordination
and cognition are indistinguishable from trance and hallucination.
The penetration and invasion of sonic timbres, pitches, textures
and speeds strikes and affects the kinesic equilibrium of the dancing
body, while the listener/dancer is in passage between different
dimensions, trying 'to explore a complex space of beats
[and] to follow any of a number of fluid, warping, and shifting
lines of flight.' [3] The
hindrance of rhythm puts gestures in a continuous variation, transforming
dance from the observable and controllable movement of a single
body/particle, to the unpredictable and imperceptible metamorphosis
of the body as a population of particles. Rather than offering the
body a regular hold to be followed with an ordered sequence of movements
and steps, rhythm leads the body to total dis-orientation. It con-fuses
its perceptual and motor capacities, breaking the coordination of
its steps and opening its movements to unpredictable and involuntary
realisations. Escaping the logic of mastery and organisation, the
body gets entangled and crippled, interposing itself into the series
of its continuous metamorphoses, forming and de-forming itself along
a line of continuous variation. [4]
Through rhythm, dance dissolves the system of power and dominance
which organises it as an expression and communication of physical
potency and as a tool for social control.
This physical and anatomical level is then organised as a system
of codified gestures and steps forming the traditional behavioural
patterns of particular ethnic groups. At this level, the coherent
physical organisation of the dancing body becomes the instrument
for a linear, ordered sequence of gestural memes. As cultural units
of information, memes are cognitive and behavioural patterns copied
and replicated from one individual's memory to another. Habits
and traditions (such as the steps of a dance) become independent
creatures in symbiotic relationship with human cultures, replicating
themselves by using human hosts and influencing their behaviour.
According to the memetic model, social and cultural evolution work
along the same principles of biological evolution. The system of
linear memetic and cognitive communication between generations of
the same group via a mechanism of vertical transmission (limiting
for example the steps of a dance to a specific ethnic tradition)
is nevertheless disrupted by a horizontal spread of qualitative
traits (such as rhythm) between different individuals or populations.
Ancient worldwide navigation and contemporary information vectors
like radio or the Internet spread these cultural/rhythmic viruses
all around the globe, making them increasingly invasive and able
to influence a people's 'meme pool'. As highlighted
by Reynolds, hybridity becomes a problem only when thinking in terms
of purity and unnatural mixtures, when the physical (and metaphysical)
dangers of artificial grafts threaten a presumed original cleanliness
with the risk of infection, contamination and bastardisation. [5]
Ritual rhythm: Old infections and the becoming-animal of
dance
As a space of physical and cultural contamination, the Mediterranean
Sea has always been crossed by multiple vectors and exchanges of
ships, bodies, musical instruments. [6]
Across this woven space, millennia of migration
and colonisation have mixed not only people and cultures, habits
and tales, but also sounds and bacteria, germs and animals (many
of which, such as spiders, have never been domesticated) invading
and conquering alien ecosystems. (De Landa, 2001: 20) One particular
example of rhythmic spread across different times and places is
the contagion and propagation from North-African drumming rituals
to South Italy's Tarantella dances. From Southern to Northern
Mediterranean, hallucinogenic sounds and poisonous Tarantulae travelled
together with different instruments of perceptual amplification
(such as drums), across several miles and centuries of rhythmic
transmission.
After the first contacts with the Saracens (a North-African population
coming from the Maghreb desert in the 11th and 12th
centuries) and up to the 1960s, a dancing ritual spreads in the
whole Mediterranean, together with the belief that the bite of a
particular spider (the Taranta) provokes an illness which can only
be cured through music and dancing. Although the reactions to the
Taranta's poison can be very different according to the disposition
and physical constitution of the poisoned person and also to the
weather and the geographic area, after the tarantula's bite
the Tarantata (the person possessed by the Taranta, usually a woman)
falls into a state of catatonia and disordered bodily movements,
accompanied by other symptoms such as convulsions, fainting and
even delirium.
If the irruption of a physical and psychological crisis can be
considered as the manifestation of a disturbance in the usual flow
of life, a cure is needed to re-establish the natural cosmic order
and bring back the person to a healthy state. This cure is obtained
through a ritual in which the sounds of the tarantella, together
with the contemplation of particular colours, incite the Tarantata
to evoke and exorcise the force of the spider's poison through
dance. In the magic and sonic machine of this dance rite, the image
of a Spider's Web is echoed by the position of the Tarantata
as a central Black Body surrounded by sounding and rotating atoms
like thin layers describing a vibrant multicoloured web. Depersonalising
the subject as an element of the cosmic whole, the Taranta ritual
intervenes on the irruption of subjective and personal feelings
of sadness and exhaustion by assembling an animistic-sonic machine,
a microcosm where the orchestra, the sick person, sounds and colours
contribute to the reconfiguration of bodily and social relations
and to the restoration of the shattered equilibrium. Reconfiguring
the disordered agitations of the body, the intensive rhythms of
the tambourines and their dialogue with violins, guitars and street-organs
organise a multicoloured dance where the link between sequences
of neural excitations and affects provokes a continuous passage
from compact and crystallised identities to progressive states of
dissolution. Like a virus, sonic vibrations are transmitted to the
body and spread according to laws that establish different power
relations. In this sense, the tarantella dance performs a sort of
rhythmic bodily contamination, while social integration and physical
recovery can only be obtained, paradoxically, through the movements
of the infected and possessed body in a multifaceted 'viral'
and 'medicinal' dance. Accordingly, the contagious spread
of tarantella's rhythm across both physical and social levels
of the contaminated body determines a series of unnatural participations
troubling and re-organising social life in an autonomous, local
way.
According to Ernesto De Martino, Tarantism must be read as a cultural-religious
phenomenon going beyond its medical interpretation as a 'real'
illness (arachnidism [spider's poisoning], psychical disorder
or even sun stroke).(Milano, 2002) [7]
In De Martino's analysis, the main element
which contradicts the medical interpretation is the annual repetition
of seasonal crisis and musical therapy: after a first bite and after
its cure through music, dance and colours, the crisis and cure cycle
is renewed every year, producing a regular series of bites and de-toxifications
which could not be reduced to any toxic syndrome. Rather, this re-lapse
and repetition appears connected to the respect of a tradition and
to a seasonal repetition in which Christianity plays a fundamental
role, by bending a pagan event to its religious calendar and by
disciplining the emergence of the crisis through the introduction
of a more precise temporal cadence. De Martino's interpretation
gives the bite, poison, crisis and cure cycle the character of mythic-ritual
symbols culturally conditioned in their functioning and efficacy,
explaining how possessed people totally invent (or add to a real
toxic syndrome) a series of behaviours modelled by Tarantism and
imitating the real symptoms of a poisonous bite. The symbolic crisis
becomes autonomous from real intoxication in the course of a cultural
and religious history, exploding as a culturally shaped event in
particular critical moments of life such as epidemics, famine and
death.
'It has been shown, ', that being possessed derives
from a training; that the gestures, words, or cries of the possessed
are coded; that the beginning of the crisis is governed by a set
of rules.' (Gil, 1998: 136-7) In Josè Gil's anthropological
analysis of dance rites, cultural training codifies the behaviour
of dancers, but it is not enough to explain the mysterious trance
of the possessed body: how can a discourse act on a body and its
organs in such a powerful way? How is this 'remote control'
possible? In Gil's words, what transforms a ritual into something
more than a symbolic structure is the link between signs and forces,
and the investment of energy which the body imposes on symbols.
In this sense, being possessed by a spider derives from the transmission
of a force (rhythm) infecting the body and provoking a pathological
condition physically and socially realised and resolved through
dance. The symbolic imitation of a poisoned person or of the spider's
movements dissolves then into an energetic contamination relating
the dancer to the qualitative traits of a particular Taranta, i.e.
to the particular colours and sounds by which she is possessed.
On the same theoretical line, Deleuze and Guattari oppose to cultural
symbolism and imitation the notion of 'becoming' as
an alliance, an energetic symbiosis between beings of totally different
scales, species, worlds (from sound molecules and human cells to
animal and human bodies). (Deleuze and Guattari, 1992) From this
point of view, the Taranta rite appears as a 'becoming',
a transversal communication or a contagious event. Beyond human
identification and beyond cultural resemblance or imitation, the
'becoming-spider' of the dancing body lies in itself,
in the metamorphic process cutting across all fixed positions (woman-tarantula).
Deleuze and Guattari's notion of 'becoming' highlights
the modes of expansion, occupation and contagion of a body as a
molecular population. Through its becoming-spider, and then its
becoming-sound and colour, the fascinated and possessed self of
the Tarantata reaches a molecular dimension of imperceptible sound
and light molecules. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1992: 248) Following
a continuous line of energetic (chromatic, acoustic) waves and vibrations,
she stretches from human to animal, from animal to molecules, from
molecules to particles, up to the imperceptible:
It is already going too far to postulate an order descending
from the animal to the vegetable, then to molecules, to particles.
Each multiplicity is symbiotic; its becoming ties together animals,
plants, microorganisms, mad particles, a whole galaxy. Nor is
there a preformed logical order to these heterogeneities. '
That is how ' sorcerers operate. Not following a logical
order, but following alogical consistencies or compatibilities.
(Deleuze and Guattari, 1992: 250)
Beyond essential forms and determined subjects (human-animal),
the Tarantata is subject to different degrees (of heat, color, speed
etc), where each degree gives her a distinct individuality and puts
her into composition with other degrees and other individualities.
The constituent particles of a Tarantata's body are only distinguished
by relations of movement and rest and by degrees of speed and slowness
which determine its continuous becoming. In this way, the sonic
and dancing assemblage of the tarantella ritual weaved a series
of social relations 'prior to' the separation between
individual members or different groupings and to the creation of
a subjective identity and space. Compared to the rigid and closed
borders and to the individual cubicles of the social gridlock, the
kinetopology of the Taranta rituals worked as a much more wide-mesh
filter, allowing uncontrollable rhythmic contaminations among people
and between different territories, overcoming institutional as well
as perceptual apparatuses of subjectification.
Cybernetic rhythm: contemporary becomings-digital of sound
and dance
From acoustic drumming to contemporary electronic drumming, the
assemblage of the 21st Century dance ritual (made of
digital sonic machines and dancing bodies, sounds and colours) realises
a different depersonalising and de-subjectifying becoming of the
physical and social dancing body, this time through perceptual and
kinetic amplifications which undergo the codifying and de-codifying
effect of digitalisation. In these modern dance rituals, digital
machines work at both bio-physical and cultural levels, provoking
physical turbulences and speed amplifications which infect bodily
sensorial systems and cross the borders of social relationality.
By re-enacting the exorcisms once accomplished by the Tarantella,
rave parties represent new dance rituals with their own rhythmic
qualities, as particular forms of technological becoming triggered
into the body by its simultaneous passage across acoustic cyberspace
and across the molecularisation of new chemical substances such
as Ecstasy or Speed. The main aspect of the twenty-four hour plus
rave experience appears then as a state of trance in which the dancer
is totally possessed by a rhythm which catalyses her energies as
a way to access unknown parts of her body-mind.
With their combinations of acoustic amplifications, visuals, techno
sounds and drugs, techno-parties give the sound/colour ritual assemblage
a new realisation, technologically amplifying the possession and
trance state of tribal dance.
This [is] music as a matter of modifying states of mind, perceptions,
bodies, brains; ' music that remember[s] the techniques
of dance and drumming, rhythm and trance, and anticipate[s] the
sense that music has more to do with sound and frequency than
with melody and meaning. ' the drug [is] the music,
and the music w[as] a means to engineering and exploring its effects.
(Plant, 1998: 166)
Chemically speaking, the effect of Ecstasy is an increase in the
production of dopamine and serotonin, the neurotransmitters conducting
electrical impulses between neurons. An excess of dopamine stimulates
locomotor activity and creates a state of euphoria, while excessive
serotonin intensifies sensorial perception, almost to the point
of hallucination. [8] Transforming
the body into a hyper-sensitised membrane responding to certain
frequencies and degrees, Ecstasy amplifies the infinitesimal, affective
potential of technology. In Eshun's words, you are 'drugged'
by the beat and beaten by the drug', while your body is totally
fascinated and possessed. Rather than escaping the body, the sound-drug
experience allows the body to escape the structures and boundaries
that keep it organised.
Dancers do not dream or trip but are possessed, faceless and
anonymous, by rhythms and speeds, disorganised and dispersed beyond
individuation, overwhelmed by connectivity. The techno-Ecstasy
combination steals identity away, but it also throws its users
into new connective tissues of dance, movement, rhythm, sound,
'. It [is] the interior technology for the digital age,
' the molecular adjustment that allow[s] a generation
to explore the new machine interface. (Plant, 1999: 168)
As in old drumming techniques, the repetitive and regular meter
of contemporary techno unfolds an important relation with the irregular
and intensive character of rhythm: techno rhythm swells in virtual
amplification under each beat and propagates itself in the lines
of flight between different sequences, or in the affective encounters
between sound and chemical drugs. At a perceptual level, the combined
effects of drugs and of sampling and mixing techniques elude any
cognitive and decoding attempt made on the basis of a Cartesian
interpretative reason, disrupting the listener's and dancer's
subjective perceptual states (stratified visions, hearings and organised
motions) into a collective web of multiple sensations. Electronic
sound runs as a flow through the body: not an equilibrated, ordered
and harmonic sequence but a mutating and non-hierarchical plateau
of rhythms never totally measurable, fully organizable or perceivable
from a unique static point. By electronically blinding, jamming,
deceiving, overloading and intruding into the conscious circuits
of subjectivity, these technologies trigger a resonant mechanism
which complicates the linearity of subjective processes. It is no
longer a matter of a listening subject tending his ear towards the
linear development of musical sequences from a determinate point
in space, but of a multiplicity of 'ambient sounds'
coming from all directions, sensations crossing the whole body and
dispersing it into scattered sensations. In these apparently chaotic
and disordered movements, the sonic-machine system (or sound-system
of organic membranes, electric sensors, electronic or computer screens,
drugs) produces its own self-organisations. Contemporary electronic
sound as an 'on going event' implies autonomous processes
of destratification and deterritorialisation that disentangle it
from its historical, geographical and musical identifications and
from recognizable causes or origins. Its unfinished, unfixed and
contingent character gives the machinic sound system the character
of an independently living and changing cosmos, as the enveloping
reality of a new technological ritualisation.
Beyond their apparent function of formal copy and reproduction,
the amplifications performed by digital machines generate a fundamental
process of bodily re-qualification and re-invention. Catalysing
a series of infinite multiplications and proliferations of sounds,
these machines contaminate the sacred, untouchable realm of the
human body, liberating it from the essentialist idea of a pre-determined
organic, cultural and technological originality. At the same time,
unleashing an unlimited potential for corporeal metamorphosis and
'mediatic parthenogenesis', digital technology allies
itself with the invasive and subliminal power of contemporary capitalism.
As Luciana Parisi argues, by spreading and modulating a proliferating
flow of (genetic, cultural, cybernetic) information, digital machines
trace a hazy line which reconciles the rigidity of control strategies
and total incorporation with absolute speed and uncontrollable diffusion.
'Bio-informatic' capitalism generates an assemblage
of communication modalities and a multiplication of transmission
lines between different beings such as genes and human bodies, animals
and computers. Without replicating whole bodies/images in order
to produce an integrated ideology, technology intervenes on their
microscopic variations, at the same time multiplying and re-mixing
them. The molecular control-net woven by contemporary capitalism
does not oppose but feeds on the proliferation of information, at
the same time capturing, selecting and optimising it through a modulation
of the intervals (i.e. the instants of virtual and potential states,
of creative and affective tendency) between information units (genes,
images, bits). [9] The
aim of this capitalist modulation is to reach an absolute predictability
of physical and cultural behaviours through a minute control of
potentials and through multiple technical manipulations directly
intervening on bodily flesh, from its embryonic stage to its more
specialised dynamic functions.
As a technique for deciphering, re-ordering and re-combining the
genetic material of bodies, key elements of bio-technology emerged
in the late '70s and early '80s (for example with Herbert
Boyer and Stanley Cohen's experiments on the recombination
of DNA molecules) as a way to map genetic sequences and make them
manipulatable and reproducible ad infinitum. By replicating pieces
of DNA and by combining them among each other, bio-technologies
of genetic manipulation intervene in the genetic and biological
rhythms of the organism, opening up a vast field of repercussions
and effects that resonate at the molecular and cellular level of
bodily organisation. The alteration of adrenal gland activity, enzyme
levels and other hormonal functions and the consequent changes in
physical and behavioural characteristics, capacities and performances
(such as sensitivity, or the velocity and resistance of the body
in motion) constitute an example of the transformative potential
unleashed by such rhythmic manipulations. Transplants, prostheses
and, more recently, telerobotics and the realisation of bodily remote-control
constitute another modality of technological intervention on the
anatomical and kinetic organisation of a body and on its dynamic
performances. Directly tapping into the level of neural transmission
and sensori-motor coordination, these technologies influence the
physiological basis of human rhythm and motion, behaviour and social
relationality, transferring them to a more complex dimension of
electro-digital stimulation and de-centred control. Contemporary
technologies of acoustic amplification then institute a further
level of bio-digital modulation. By digitally generating, manipulating
and reproducing sound, these technologies (from synthesisers, mixers
and turntables to sonic composition software) allow us to perform
infinitesimal rhythmic alterations on the soundscape and the acoustic
sensosphere, redefining the perceptual experience and intensifying
the sensations and motions of the human body. Simultaneously multiplying
and modulating infinitesimal variables of behaviour, bio-informatic
capitalism is founded on a double articulation, an immanent condition
between decodification and metricisation, between the liberation
and acceleration of uncoded information flows, and the continuous
attempt at quantification, measure and control. On one hand, the
transmission of information at both macroscopic (images and sounds,
people and goods) and microscopic levels (genes and bacteria, memes,
bits) happens as an epidemic spread and a simultaneous modulation
of physical and cultural contagions (from diseases to pop music),
delineating the viral rhythm of contemporary capitalism. On the
other hand, a meter of biological and economic, social and political
exchanges and equivalencies acts as a control and measurement grid
on the combinatorial and transformative potential of all bodies,
limiting bodily capacities and tastes and blocking their actual
behaviours and movements.
According to Jacques Attali, sound/noise participates in the capitalist
process as an orderable and codifiable matter. Becoming an undifferentiated
and anonymous commodity, sound follows the social and economic dynamics
of capitalisation, where 'its appropriation and control is
a reflection of power.' (Attali, 1996: 6) Power (and the possibility
of subversion) are generated together with music, i.e. with the
writing of codes which analyse, restrain and repress the disordered
sounds of bodies and tools (i.e. noise).
All music, any organization of sounds is then a tool for the
creation or consolidation of a community, of a totality. It is
what links a power center to its subjects, and thus, more generally,
it is an attribute of power in all of its forms. ' noise
and its endowment with form. Among birds a tool for marking territorial
boundaries, ' it indicates the limits of a territory
and the way to make oneself heard within it, '. (Attali,
1996: 6).
By transmitting and recording noise, sound technology manipulates
and channels culture, realising a significant political concern
for tonalism and melody and a distrust for new languages, codes,
instruments. Bio-informatic capitalism captures, modulates and sells
sound through a double system of record companies and private dance
clubs, cutting the rhythmic flow at both its producing and receiving
ends. By regimenting sonic experimentation, production and purchase
costs and pirate trading, corporate music producers create an ordered
flow of music and money. On the other hand, a parasitic world of
dance clubs constitutes another grid of regulation and control,
capturing the sonic, chemical and social alterations provoked by
the free flowing of sounds, drugs and people through systems of
volume control and through identification and personal search procedures.
In this way, the high-tech apparatus of clubs inserts itself into
the capitalist dynamics of a regulated physical, social and economic
exchange. Digital machines (amplification systems, electronic I.D.
control and personal data processing) become fundamental for the
capitalist control and exchange net, by allowing the control but
also the modulation and combination of infinitesimal components
(from low frequency sounds to dangerous chemical molecules and human
bodies) and, consequently, to commercialise affective responses,
movements and transformations. Oppression, as Gilles Deleuze argues,
is not a violation of our eternal values but a restriction of our
movements. Blocking and re-territorialising the intensive potentials
of sound and dance, various strategies of control and management
are promoted, trying to entrap movement (as either dance or nomadism)
into predictable deterministic trajectories, trajectories of migration
enclosed between starting and arriving points, and also capitalist
trajectories in which music and dance become innocuous exchange
products.
These strategies of physical, social and economic control are nevertheless
undermined by subterranean forces which do not simply resist the
capitalist biopower but re-organise its own processes:
The process of stratification points to the molecular constitution
of the hierarchical organizations, the continual flow of variation
that runs beneath molar aggregations. The "apparatuses of
information-capture run parallel to the mesh-works or autocatalytic
loops of " reproduction ceaselessly declining from stationary
states. (Parisi, 2004: 143)
A multiplicity of microscopic and virulent parasites infest their
host capitalist body, a swarm of micro-physical, molecular forces
constructing an alternative organisation of flows and moving at
their own rhythm, producing random trajectories and virally infecting
the 'distributed nervous system of cybernetic capital.'
(Goodman, 2004) The very dynamics of capitalisation is linked to
the capacity of its constituent particles (sound molecules, human
bodies or information units alike) to organise themselves autonomously,
and the emergence of a hierarchical capitalization does not eliminate
the micro-organisations at the basis of its macro-order of exchange.
Sound and dance are an example of this alternative, autonomous organisation.
At a microscopic, bio-physical level, sonic and bodily rhythm-analysis
shows the diffusion of rhythm beyond grids and meters and in 'new,
non-Newtonian terms that are incompatible with a trajectory description
and instead require a statistical, probabilistic description':
at every step the probability is ½ that the particle will
go to the left and ½ that it will go to the right. At every
step, the future is uncertain.' (Prigogine, 1997:42-43) [10]
At the same time, the rhythmic relation between technology, techno
and dance and the continuous movements of the ravers-travellers
across nations transforms the party scene into a social nomadic
practice or a combination of extensive and intensive random voyages.
The old public/private confusion and ritual convergence is re-embodied
through the contemporary overcoming of the private dimension and
the emergence of moving assemblages or sound-system tribes with
their unfaithful followers travelling and dancing while spreading
the rhythmic contagion all around the world. Beyond styles and divisions,
rave parties unite generations, classes and races, all inextricably
bound by sound, drug and technology. Putting to an end four hundred
years of bourgeois individualism in music, techno-parties also cause
an economic stir in the music industry. Famous DJs condemn them
as a virus, a contagious illness, a bubonic plague of the record
industry which cannot find in raves those charismatic leaders or
guitar heroes, those recognisable faces and motives indispensable
for the sale of its products. Rather, the de-individualising experience
of electrified techno multiplies the number of possessed and infected
bodies wandering in the autonomous, collective and independent microcosm
of the rave, as a prolonged pause and a temporary upsetting of social
and economic rules.
Conclusion
Around the idea of sound and noise as 'unformed matter'
musically codified in the cultural and economic organisation of
society, this article has woven a theoretical net of biological/philosophical
relations. Considering the record industry and dance clubs as the
main corporate institutions using high-tech apparatuses for the
physical and social disciplining of sound and dance and for their
transformation into exchange commodities, rhythm appears as a double
conceptual axis of simultaneous regimentation and subversion. On
one hand, the definition of rhythm as sonic and behavioural meter
is revealed as the philosophical tool for the discipline and commercialisation
of sound and dance. On the other hand, identifying rhythm with a
viral spread allows us to grasp its contaminating character, illustrating
how both capitalist organisation and subversive re-organisations
capture and modulate a proliferation of rhythmic viruses by respectively
blocking or feeding them.
Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Fèlix Guattari's differentiation
between meter and rhythm, this viral analysis of rhythm illuminates
its functioning in the organisation of linear communication systems,
but also its viral action of disruption and interruption in contemporary
capitalism: rhythm as a physical, cultural and economic virus. This
epidemiological behaviour of rhythm cannot be interpreted through
any simple metaphorical reading of formal analogies and similarities;
rather, it emerges from an interdisciplinary connection between
philosophical and biological research. Bringing to light the common
behaviour of biological and sonic viruses, the relation between
Deleuze and Guattari's philosophical notion of rhythm and
Lynn Margulis' scientific theory of symbiosis explains the
viral contamination of sound and dance as a symbiotic merging between
particles, molecules, people and cultures along a continuous line
of transmission and modulation working at different levels.
At a physical level, the viral propagation of rhythm works through
an energetic diffusion across the body's neural system. This
electrification/infection of neural cells by sound provokes a series
of continuous qualitative passages and metamorphoses of the body
along its measurable and quantifiable movements. Involuntary jerks
and speed variations constitute then the symptomatic picture of
a rhythmically incited, pathological behaviour as the sub-stratum
of synchronised and organised dance as a kinetic power system, delineating
dance as a bodily becoming along the affects of different intensive
(chromatic and acoustic) traits. The cultural organisation of dance
as a system of precise postures and traits, gestures and steps (or
kinetic habits) characterising an ethnic group happens then through
the codification of particular behavioural patterns, where every
ordered sequence of steps is simultaneously composed and microscopically
dis-organised by a multiplicity of micro-gestures incited by rhythmic
contamination.
Travelling across continents, seas and millennia, the speeds and
kinetic traits of different dances carry the viral diffusion of
rhythm between different communities, where the social organisation
of local and national life is disrupted by the explosion and travelling
of rhythmic viruses and by the ab-normal behaviour of dancing bodies.
Crossed by simultaneous waves of sound, ships and pieces of technical
equipment such as drums or computers, the Mediterranean Sea becomes
the host of political and commercial routes, but also of subterranean
rhythmic transmission. The rhythmic passage from African drumming
and dancing rituals to the North Mediterranean Tarantella dance,
up to contemporary rave parties, represents one of the vectors of
this epidemiological rhythmicity, carrying across the waves a microphysical
environment of bodies, tales, beliefs, animals, chemical substances
and musical instruments flowing across time and space and transversally
crossing the capitalist grid.
Rather than simply identifying the viral diffusion of rhythm with
a liberating and revolutionary movement opposed to the ordered,
metric structures of capitalism, this paper has tried to highlight
how, depending on the concrete conditions of its realisation, the
viral behaviour of rhythm is simultaneously organised by practices
of potential modulation and total control, censorship and commercialisation,
or by a different, alternative ecology of biological and cultural
transmission through the forces of sound and dance.
Author's Biography
Stamatia Portanova is a PhD candidate at the East London University.
Her article “Tessiture digitali” (“Digital Textures”)
has been published in Donne e multiculturalismo (Women and Multiculturalism),
Naples, Liguori, 2004. The subject of Stamatia’s research
is the relation between rhythm, dance and technology in all its
forms, from tribal rituals and rave parties to contemporary cyberdance
performances and video dance.
Notes
[1] In its pre-socratic etymology, ‘rhythm’
is the emergence of a shape out of a flow, or the improvised, momentary
and modifiable pattern realised by every living organism. Restoring
order and rigidity in this too fluid etymology, Plato’s philosophical
theory intervenes to restrict the rhythmic quality to the performance
of human movement and, in particular, to those continuous activities
(like walking or working) which can be divided into elementary units
(or steps) and rigidly ordered according to the regular meter of
an alternate timing, as in a military march. For a historical and
philosophical analysis of the notion of rhythm (from the pre-socratics
and Plato to contemporary philosophy), see Paul Fraisse, Psicologia
del ritmo (Milano. Armando, 1996). [back]
[2] According to William Mc Neill, in-between animal
and human species, certain animals like chimpanzees have acquired
the same patterns of behaviour (bipedal posture, foot stamping,
arms and face gestures) which are typical of human dance. See Mc
Neill, Keeping together in Time. Dance and Drill in Human Evolution
(Cambridge and Massachusetts, Harvard U.P., 1995). [back]
[3] This is an additive ‘polyrhythm’
or ‘interdimensional play of milieus – a mutating array
of splices folds and fusions, an acoustic hyperspace. In Deleuze
and Guattari’s words, ‘One milieu serves as the basis
for another, or conversely is established atop another milieu, dissipates
in it or is constituted in it.’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1992:
313) [back]
[4] For an analysis of bodily performance as continuous
bodily variation, see Carmelo Bene and Gilles Deleuze, Sovrapposizioni
(Macerata, Quodlibet, 2002).[back]
[5] See Simon Reynolds, ‘Pure Fusion. Multiculture
versus Monoculture’, in http://members.aol.com/blissout/purefusion.htm
[back]
[6] The image of a criss-crossed Mediterranean
derives from Paul Gilroy’s notion of the ‘Black Atlantic’,
as one of its cultural and geographic ramifications. To denote the
‘webbed network’ of the African diasporic culture that
penetrates the United States, the Caribbean and, by the end of the
twentieth century, the UK, Gilroy considers the Black Atlantic as
a modernist countercultural space, a space that, for all the claims
of black cultural nationalists, is not organised by African roots
but by a ‘rhizomorphic, routed’ set of vectors and exchanges:
ships, migrations, creoles, phonographs, European miscegenations,
expatriot flights, dreams of repatriation. The image of the criss-crossed
Atlantic ocean is essential for Gilroy’s purpose, which is
to erode the monolithic notion of roots and tradition by emphasising
the ‘restless, recombinant’ qualities of Afrodiasporic
culture as it simultaneously explores, exploits, and resists the
spaces of modernity. For an interpretation of Gilroy’s notion
of the ‘Black Atlantic’, see Davis, ‘Roots and
Wires’. [back]
[7] For a symbolic interpretation of Tarantism
in Southern Italy, see De Martino, La terra del rimorso. Il
Sud tra religione e magia (Milano, Il Saggiatore, 2002). [back]
[8] ‘All music sounds better on E –
crisper and more distinct, but also engulfing in its immediacy.
House and techno sound especially fabulous. The music’s emphasis
on texture and timbre enhances the drug’s mildly synaesthetic
effects, so that sounds seem to caress the listener’s skin.
You feel like you’re dancing inside the music; sound becomes
a fluid medium in which you’re immersed.’ Simon Reynolds,
Energy Flash (London, Picador, 1998), XXVI [19] On the copy/simulation
difference, see Brian Massumi, ‘Realer than the Real: The
Simulacrum According to Deleuze and Guattari’, http://www.anu.edu.au/HRC/first_and_last/works/realer.htm
[back]
[9] See Luciana Parisi, Abstract Sex: Philosophy,
Bio-Technology and the Mutations of Desire (London, Continuum,
2004), 129. [back]
[10] At this level, resonances are not local (i.e.
occurring at a given spatial point or instant and with a predictable
trajectory) but diffusive. See Ilya Prigogine, The End of Certainty.
Time, Chaos and the New Laws of Nature (New York, The Free Press,
1997), 42-43. [back]
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