an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 16, Winter 2018/2019, ISSN 1552-5112
Lines, Sounds and Colors of Flight: Deleuze, Guattari
and ‘kalamezhuthu pattu’
Introduction
Regarding eastern (Indian) music,
Deleuze and Guattari suggest, “to the transcendent,
organizational plane of Western music based on sound forms and their
development, we (should) oppose the immanent plane of consistency of eastern
music, composed of speeds and slownesses, movement and
rest” (1987:266). Further, “the ‘refrains’ of Indian music are quite unlike
those of the concert tradition - but like those of Celtic dance music, or
flamenco or jazz - in that they do not organize the territoriality of a music
event in the name of the laws of harmony, or of a composer’s Subjective
authority, or in the name of a posited divine order (Classicism) or a ‘People’
(Romanticism)” (Deleuze and Guattari:1987:338-9).
According to Jeremy Gilbert, these forms of
music (e.g. Kalamezhuthu
pattu) contain within themselves deliberately
open spaces for the insertion of ‘cutting edges’: the machinic interventions of
the performers and their instruments are enabled (Gilbert: 2004:133). By
contrast, Western concert assemblages limit the movement and expression of
performers and audience to the will of the composer. Opening onto a plane of
consistency which might be the meditative bliss of yoga or the multiple body
without organs of the dance (Deleuze and Guattari:
1987: 149-66), such music is outside the continent of classical Western
soundscapes. Jeremy Gilbert adds here that, such forms of music, while unique
themselves, nonetheless share a common objective in process with that of a
beat-matched DJ mix (Gilbert: 2004: 132).
Deleuze and Guattari who borrow the concepts of striated and smooth
spaces in music from Boulez, argue that music is itself the becoming audible of
the inaudible or expressing those sounds which are universally present but not
available to the senses. For them every expression, sensation, image, colour and language has a sound of its own which becomes
audible through music. “The pictorial is the musical, and it is this
reversibility of the senses composing amongst themselves (the act of listening
composes with the vision which itself composes with the tactile) that
characterizes the haptic vision. The composition of sounds that are music
becomes a composition of the senses; in
the act of listening, it is the sight and touch that are at play” (Bidima: 2004:179).
Music essentially conveys a
desire for marking a territory which through repetition deterritorializes or
vice versa. The essential autonomy of music is derived from a sonic model with
claims to a non-representational plane of consistency wherein “the sound
block…no longer has a point of origin” and is an ”immanent sound plane, which
is always given along with that to which it gives rise” (Deleuze and
Guattari:1987:296,267). They call it the refrain, or “the block of content
proper to music” (Deleuze and Guattari:1987:299) It is a refrain that brings
the source of music to a point of beginning every time it wants to repeat
itself; “music takes up the refrain, lays hold of it as a content in a form of
expression” and the refrain is also “a means of preventing music, warding it
off, or forgoing it,” (Deleuze and Guattari:1987:300) acting like a tune that
sticks in your head that can be easily whistled or hummed.
Music therefore enters as
both deterritorialization and reterritorialization in becoming a people.
“Deterritorialization is primary - stratification is secondary” writes Ian
Buchanan (2004:14) and then goes on to quote from Deleuze “reterritorialization
must not be confused with a return to a primitive or older territoriality: it
necessarily implies a set of artifices by which one element, itself deterritorialized, serves as a new territoriality for
another, which has lost its territoriality as well” (Deleuze and
Guattari:1987:174). Moreover, “……it is not the objective of music to stake out
a territory, to create an enclave shut off from the outside but, on the
contrary, to affect as do the colours of a coral fish and birdsong, to deploy attributes
intended to attract and not to repel” (Deleuze and Guattari:1987:316-17).
Conclusion
Kalamezhuthu
pattu
or songs of Thottam pattu
(translated as a thought, feeling, giving life to something, invocation and
popularly understood as festival in a bhagavathy, kali, devi or a goddess temple in parts of Kerala) is sung
for inducing possession as a means of deification and also healing of devotees’
supplication. Basic to the performance of the ritual is a kalam or a plot earmarked from the plain ground where an image is
drawn in colours, along with singing songs of thottam deified
(translated in verbal form as thottuka). The songs
and the music are but a movement which deterritorializes the audience into an
assemblage of listeners and then reterritorializes them in the form of cosmic
beings especially through a possession of the oracle. It is thought that the
bardic singer who performs the ritual, creates a ritual milieu by a seasonal
refrain indicated to him by a series of events, understood as historic aprioris of
which he creates assemblages in the form of songs.
an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 16, Winter
2018/2019, ISSN 1552-5112
Bibilography
Bidima, Jean Godfrey (2004) Music and the Socio-Historica
Real, in Buchanan, Ian (ed) Deleuze and Music, Edinburgh University Press.
Buchanan, Ian (2004) Introduction in Deleuze and Music,
Edinburgh University Press.
Deleuze and Guattari (1987) A Thousand
Plateaus, trans. B.Massumi,
Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.
Gilbert, Jeremy (2004) Becoming Music in Buchanan, Ian (ed)
Deleuze and Music, Edinburgh University Press.
Mukherji D P (1945) Indian
Music: An Introduction, Kutub Publishers, Bombay.