Introduction: Musical Encounters with Deleuze and Guattari
Pirkko Moisala, Taru Leppänen, Milla Tiainen and Hanna Väätäinen
According to Gilles Deleuze, one of the most influential philosophers of our time, Western frameworks of reasoning have crucially rested on the principles of identity, opposition, analogue and resemblance. In modern Western music cultures including music research, the logics of identity thinking can be detected most readily in the grounding of music in work identities and the figure of the composer–creator prevalent especially in the field of classical music. The way Deleuze conceptualizes encounters, for example, in his book Difference and Repetition (1994: 39–40) opens up another view to the world: encounters regarding contact with something in the world that perplexes existing categorizations and already established ways of being. They are the moments where an object or a process refuses to be immediately recognized in the terms of the already given, as similar or opposed to something familiar. In encounters, a thing can at first only be sensed. Its power to affect, and to make a difference is registered. Consequently, it poses new problems for thought. Considered in this manner, encounters are fundamental because they give us new sensations, experiences, ideas and modes of being. Our aspiration is to initiate such encounters where both Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking and the musical and sounding processes examined in the present volume could reveal revived or hitherto unnoticed aspects and potentialities in each other. In this endeavor, we draw inspiration from previous projects that, while working with Deleuze and Guattari, have explored the power of contemporary art practices in order to invite new possibilities of sensing, conceptualizing and being, instead of just representing or reshuffling already existing realities and meanings (see O’Sullivan 2005; Kontturi 2012).
The chapters in this collection of essays are about a variety of encounters between musical and sound-related events and the philosophy of Deleuze and his collaborator Félix Guattari, which stresses the primacy of immanence, processuality and variation across all forms of existence. As noted by the cultural theorist Claire Colebrook, ‘immanence … has no outside and nothing other than itself’ (2002: xxiv). For Deleuze and Guattari, immanence means processuality, which has no transcendent and stable foundation. As A Thousand Plateaus (1987), possibly the most significant volume co-authored by Deleuze and Guattari, powerfully exemplifies, everything in existence, all phenomena, thoughts and categories are formed as relations in constant processes of becoming. The challenge this philosophy sets to music and sound studies is this: instead of taking categories, identities or systems – pieces, performances, conventions, communities of music and sound – as given we should examine what kinds of components and forces – practices, ideas, beliefs, materialities, discourses – they are constantly formed and reformed from.
The set of essays presented takes the intellectual and political promise entailed by Deleuze and Guattari’s process philosophy seriously when addressing music and sound as becomings – as actors in assemblages and actualizations of potential or what they also call virtual, as yet unactualized, tendencies. The chapters included in the volume relate to cultural studies of music and sound, jazz and popular music studies, ethnomusicology, as well as dance, performance and disability studies. ‘Musical’, in the title of this volume, encompasses a wealth of actions, responses, actors, things, space-times and connections that somehow participate in the construction of music and sound as ongoing practices and ideas: as material, temporal and sociocultural forces. Expanding on Christopher Small’s (1998) concept of musicking – music as a verb – music and sound are understood here as heterogeneous and continuously occurring activities, relationships and thoughts rather than as phenomena foreclosed by any one pre-existing perspective. In the individual essays, this multiplicity of musicking and sounding ranges from new experimental music, reality TV singing competitions and moving human bodies to music-making in a Nepalese village milieu and the inaudible vibrational patterns that underlie the sonorous features and multimodal perception of sounds.
This volume particularly examines the methodological implications of Deleuze and Guattari’s work for various kinds of music and sound studies. The methodological practices that the contributors of our volume bring into contact with these thinkers span from musical ethnography to variants of performance analysis, approaches to listening and collaborative research methods. Besides exploring how engagement with Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas advances understandings of the musical phenomena and the situations studied, the chapters also enquire how the research methodologies at play can be reconsidered and taken in emerging new directions in conversation with their thoughts.
The volume at hand strives to expand music and sound studies through encounters between the music and sound events studied, the engaged music studies discussions and Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking. The key aim of this book is, then, to demonstrate how the processual Deleuzian-Guattarian philosophy works both as a meta-theory which guides the researcher to think differently, as well as how their concepts – particularly becoming, affect and assemblage – can function as transforming methodological tools in the research process. Deleuzian and Guattarian concepts are transformed into active powers both in analytical and fieldwork processes.
Instead of general conceptual exposition where examples mainly serve an illustrative function, we hope to put pronounced emphasis on how instances of sound and music – in media cultures, arts and everyday life –invite concepts and problems from Deleuze and Guattari’s thought, and how their thinking may in turn translate into important, yet situationally attuned, analytical tools. Several articles have this very dynamics of translation as their subject. Thus, the assembling of this volume has been guided throughout by the conviction that the encounters between music, sound, their study and Deleuze and Guattari are co-constitutively relational. The topics explored, the strands of music and sound studies that individual chapters invoke, as well as the insights of Deleuze and Guattari, each move and modulate one another within their mutual relations. Each re-emerges from these relations somewhat renewed, in ways only specific to that relationality and unknown prior to the encounter.
Deleuze and Guattari in music and sound studies
Since the 1990s, the work of Deleuze and Guattari has had a widening impact on numerous areas of the human and social sciences. Their thinking was acknowledged significantly more slowly than that of many continental theorists from the same generation, such as Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva or Jean-François Lyotard. Yet it has over the past decades influenced countless developments in film studies (see e.g. Shaviro 1993; Pisters 2003 and 2012; del Rio 2008; Herzog 2010; Väliaho 2010; Hongisto 2015), gender studies and feminist theory (Braidotti 1991, 1994, 2002; Grosz 1995, 2005a, b; Beckman 2013), media studies (Fuller 2007; Parikka 2007; Coleman 2009), cultural, political and ethical theory (Massumi 1992; Braidotti 2006, 2013; Bennett 2010; O’Sullivan 2012), cultural geography (McCormack 2007; Saldanha 2007), art theory (O’Sullivan 2005; Grosz 2008; Manning 2009), education (St. Pierre and Pillow 2000), theatre and performance studies (Cull 2012) and additional fields of the arts and literature.
The Deleuze Connections series of edited books has from the late 1990s explored Deleuze’s work in relation to an array of research topics and strands including race, queer theory, new technologies and qualitative methodologies in the social sciences and humanities (e.g. Nigianni and Storr 2009; Poster and Savat 2009; Coleman and Ringrose 2013a). Simultaneously, the many introductions to Deleuze’s ontology and concepts (e.g. Goodchild 1996; Marks 1998; Buchanan 2000; Colebrook 2002) and the increasing number of guidebooks on his particular works, in addition to the Deleuze Studies journal published since 2006, demonstrate aspirations of establishing a veritable field of Deleuze scholarship. At least they can be linked to such a tendency.
In comparison to the areas listed above, Deleuze- and Guattari-inspired approaches to music and sound began to emerge much later, that is, not until after the mid-2000s. During the past decade, there has however been an expanding growth in music and sound studies examinations elaborating upon and reoriented by the thinking of Deleuze, and Deleuze and Guattari. This holds for several branches of music and sound scholarship.
A volume edited by Ian Buchanan and Marcel Swiboda, Deleuze and Music (2004) was the first extensive presentation of Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking in connection with music and sound. The chapters in this book written by philosophers and cultural theorists, which focus on explaining key ideas and concepts of Deleuze and Guattari in relation to music, address many musical genres – popular and non-Western music as well as Western art music and jazz. The main area where Deleuze and Guattari-inspired developments have so far occurred encompasses the theory and philosophy of, and analytical approaches to, Western classical music. Sounding the Virtual (2010), a collection of essays edited by Brian Hulse and Nick Nesbitt, represents one of the first more wide-ranging attempts to bring Deleuze’s thinking to bear on music scholarship. The volume’s contributors consist of musicologists and theorists of Western art music and jazz. This means concentration on the highly specific repertoires and analytic traditions of these areas and on examinations of musical works created by one or few agents, usually the composer or virtuoso musicians. Aspects of musical structure that can be identified in the score have a central position in Gregg Redner’s Deleuzian discussion on film music in his monograph Deleuze and Film Music: Building a Methodological Bridge between Film Theory and Music (2010) that seeks to develop a methodology based upon and combining theories of music and cinema. Elaborating on Deleuze’s writings on the arts, he suggests that ‘while film music is often understood as sound, it is perhaps best understood … as pure sensation’ (23).
Deleuze and Guattari’s considerations of music frequently revolve around the repertoires and renowned composers of the Western classical tradition. However, their notion of music is not entirely restricted to structures of musical sounds organized by individual human subjects (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987: 299–350). According to Ronald Bogue (2003: 14), they extend the concept in some of their texts by arguing that music is an open structure that permeates and is permeated by the world. In his book Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts (2003: 14) Bogue stresses the interconnectedness of corporeal experiences and natural creative processes in Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualizations of music. He foregrounds their views on the material and rhythmic relationships between music and the cosmos. This collection resonates with these strands of Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking since several essays examine the interrelationships between bodily, environmental and milieu-specific processes in various kinds of musical events.
In his monograph, Music after Deleuze (2013), Edward Campbell seems to proceed further than much of the research on music, Deleuze and Guattari mentioned above in challenging understandings of music premised on the concept of musical work and other object-based notions. Like in most previous Deleuzian music studies, his main focus lies in Western modernist art music, although the book also touches upon jazz and a couple of non-Western art music traditions. Campbell examines how Deleuzian concepts – such as difference, repetition, assemblage and rhizome – help us to rethink music ‘in a new way, no longer focusing on it as something static, unchanging, eternal, always the same, but as dynamic, changing and always shifting’ (33). He proposes that musical works should be ‘considered in terms of dynamic assemblages of multiple and heterogeneous forces, rhizomatic lines of flight that are deterritorialized and reterritorialized from various milieus’ (164). Campbell thus makes a valuable attempt to shift the concept and ontology of musical work – one of the most prioritized analytical units of musicological studies. In the present collection, the category of musical work is one important element of research among many instead of holding any kind of inherently primary position. At the same time, there are affinities with Campbell’s approach. Our essays, too, interrogate the continual return of difference, of variations, in the practices of performing, experiencing and making music.
To engage with Western art music differently through inspiration drawn from Deleuze and Guattari also drives Sally Macarthur’s book Towards a Twenty-First Century Feminist Politics of Music (2010). Expanding on feminist musicology, Macarthur approaches women’s participation in ‘new’ music composition in a novel, affirmative way. Instead of searching for a solution to the continued absence of women’s music in concert halls, she proposes new potentialities for thought and action by exploring ‘how it might become possible to conceive of the field of music practice in a state of flux, that is a non-hierarchical, non-profit making, non-individualistic, multi-differentiated model of interrelation’ (83). In Macarthur’s view (83), this Deleuze- and Guattari-inspired remapping questions the ways in which existing art music practices are learned and endlessly recycled through
‘deeply entrenched and repetitive actions’. Therewith, it encourages new practices and becomings. In the volume at hand, many of the musical and sounding practices explored are analyzed in states of flux, which, however, does not free them of hierarchies and the formation of individual subjectivities. Nonetheless, these practices display features that problematize ideas of self-enclosed individual subject and previous hierarchical distinctions pertaining to music.
Nearly all the chapters explore how Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts both help to engage with aspects underexplored by previous prevalent approaches to music and sound, and actively render the phenomena under inspection unrecognizable through pointing toward freshly emerging dimensions and dynamics within them. In addition, many of the chapters aim to account for such moments at which some aspects of the studied phenomena overflew the already built conceptions of music and sound. However, encounters do not necessarily denote grand revelations or breaks with the past. Even the tiniest variation within our settled and often complacent views of the music, musical and sound, which disturbs the dominance of the same, carries potential for novel ways of relating, thinking and living (cf. Herzog 2010: 206). The purpose of this volume is not to give a comprehensive account on Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking about music. As illustrated, many studies have already contributed to this task. Instead, we aim at rethinking musical and sonic phenomena as well as research methodologies with Deleuze and Guattari and with earlier scholarship concerning their philosophy and music in fresh ways in the sense that we seek to involve the areas of music and sound scholarship outlined above as true participants in these encounters. That is, we do not claim that engagements with Deleuze and Guattari entail a wholesale reconsideration, let alone abandonment, of music studies’ previous concepts and approaches. Rather, the aim is to show how these approaches both expand through the engagements and how they in turn affect the ways Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking can be understood.
Musicking Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts
For Deleuze and Guattari, philosophy meant the production of concepts. Within their work, both together and separately, they developed a plenitude of new concepts. Their method of formulating and using concepts readily exemplifies the processuality of their thinking, since they do not provide fixed definitions for any of these conceptualizations. Instead, their concepts acquire various elaborations, senses and contexts of use across their work. In their book What Is Philosophy? , Deleuze and Guattari (1994: 15–16, 19–22, 33–34) insist that each concept should be regarded as
a multiplicity. This is because practically all concepts involve several problems or aspects of a problem to which they seek to respond. These aspects may derive from different previous concepts and projects of thinking. At the same time, it is the dynamic interrelations between a concept’s aspects – the ways in which they continue to be evoked and developed when the concept is being used – which give each concept its specific orientation and character. Deleuze and Guattari call this specificity the endoconsistency of concepts.
In this introduction, we have chosen to concentrate on three focal concepts of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy as it is with these concepts that the individual chapters of the volume most intensely engage: becoming, affect and assemblage. Even though these are among the most well known and already prolifically explored concepts drawn from their thinking, they remain much less tested within music studies. This is the case especially in regard to the varied strands of music and sound scholarship, from ethnomusicological approaches to queer, feminist and disability theories related to music, which the present collection focuses on. As Claire Colebrook (2005: 1) notes, for Deleuze (and Guattari) concepts ‘do not gather together an already existing set of things (extension)’. Instead of stabilized propositions about reality, they are intensive in the sense of allowing for always further connections to phenomena and ongoing styles of thinking. From this angle, there is still a lot to be learned about the analytical and political powers of becoming, affect and assemblage, or about their several aspects. What these concepts can do remains an openended question, in music studies and beyond. Moreover, given that this volume seeks to address researchers of music and sound who are not yet deeply familiar with Deleuze and Guattari, becoming, affect and assemblage are of high importance since these concepts enfold some of the fundamental concerns and strivings of their thinking. Becoming summarizes Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of reality as non-teleological temporal and qualitative difference. Affect highlights the relational character and beginnings of all existence, which they swear by. Assemblage foregrounds their perception of any areas of reality as vibrantly heterogeneous: as consisting of co-influencing ‘semiotic flows, material flows, and social flows’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 25). The articles of this volume aim to produce, then, new senses with and out of the concepts of becoming, affect and assemblage in relation to diverse musical practices, sonorities and questions. In addition, individual chapters will engage with many further concepts from Deleuze and Guattari’s oeuvre – such as the body, Body without Organs, common notions, micropolitics, rhizome and rhythm – whose aspects connect and partly entangle with these three terms. Each of these concepts will be introduced separately in connection to their appearance in the text.
Becoming
Becoming is a practically unavoidable notion in Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking. As a concept, it appears both in some of Deleuze’s solo works (e.g. 1990 and 1994) and in their collaborative ventures, especially A Thousand Plateaus (1987). It also interlinks with Deleuze and Guattari’s various other concepts from affect to a plane of immanence. Ultimately, becoming is a premise that arguably saturates their whole ontological project. It connects to their insistence that in order to appreciate the temporal unfolding and related open-endedness of the world, images of thought premised on identity will need to be substituted with those based upon process and difference; that is, becoming. The notion of becoming thus denotes how no two instances of being are identical in the passage of time – an idea that Deleuze draws from Henri Bergson and Friedrich Nietzsche among others. A human body and mind, a plant, a milieu or a musical piece musicked into sounds cannot remain identical with themselves from one moment to the next. There will always be some newness and re-beginnings, some alterations and reconfigurations emerging from the elements and forces both past and present which come together and constitute just that moment. Deleuze and Guattari’s becoming equals, therefore, a repeated occurrence ‘of differential forces’ (Spinks 2005: 83) without definite beginnings and ends, or pre-given beings to which these becomings happen. It signals being as differing or the way identities are recurrently informed and transformed by difference. To cite Deleuze, ‘[r]eturning is being, but only the being of becoming. The eternal return does not bring back “the same”, but returning constitutes the only Same of that which becomes … Such an identity, produced by difference, is determined as “repetition” ’ (1994: 41).
When considered, for instance, in relation to the debates and theoreticalmethodological approaches of cultural music studies, becoming suggests some exciting new directions. Cultural studies of music have posed a challenge to various essentialisms. These range from ontological accounts of musical works in the Western classical tradition as self-contained entities supposedly independent in their meanings from sociocultural and interpretive circumstances to views of gender, race, sexuality and other axes of difference as unalterable aspects of human identity. Challenging such assumptions has defined ‘cultural musicology’ ever since the initiatives in the late 1990s to cluster approaches from diverse disciplinary locations under this rubric because of their interest in any music’s culturally contingent formation processes (see e.g. Middleton 2003: 1–8). Thus, these research strands do not need Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking per se in order to question notions of fixed and essential identity.
In the wake of poststructuralist and psychoanalytical lines of thought, many of these undertakings have approached identities – whether those of musical pieces, performers or listeners – as dynamic identifications with
established constructions of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and so on, or as critical reworking of such constructions (e.g. Kramer 1990, 1997, 1998; McClary 1991, 1992, 2000; Stokes 1994; Frith 1996; Monson 1996; Cusick 1999, 2009; Born and Hesmondhalgh 2000; Askew 2002; Bohlman 2004; Guilbault 2007; Shelemay 2009). Approaches in this vein can be said to resort to general categories behind individual ways of being, even if the categories at stake are conceived as culturally and historically variable rather than as stable essences. Deleuze and Guattari definitely do not deny the tendency of human societies to use generalizing classifications in order to govern reality and categorize human agents and other phenomena. They call this tendency the plane of transcendence (e.g. 1987: 270–271). They also acknowledge the very real socio-political power and hierarchies that such classifications exercise and impose. However, what their notion of becoming proposes is that these classificatory maneuvers are only ever secondary to the primary variation and heterogeneity of the characteristics of which human individuals and collectives, genders, bodies and sexualities, and myriad non-human beings, such as animal individuals, and natural locales, consist. Modes of being don’t derive from general categories so much as become captured within them, only to overflow them again in terms of their features. A single human gendered, sexed and racialized body or subject is always capable of more than what its placing within such categories or reductive stereotypes implies. Translated into a methodological guideline for cultural music and sound studies, as well as ethnomusicology, this facet of becoming encourages increasing attention to all the differences and unpredictabilities that may be noticed in the musical occasions, actors and relations examined. This noticing can be done without an immediate search for such established meanings and positions that the studied instances could be seen to represent, or signify anew.
Almost all the essays in this collection are informed by the idea of becoming as open-ended differing. Some of them elaborate on Deleuze and Guattari’s different conceptualizations of becoming more explicitly than others. This is the case with Sally Macarthur’s chapter that engages with the musictheatre work Rinse Cycle (2010) by Australian contemporary composer Moya Henderson. What interests Macarthur in this work are the ways in which its combinations of sonic and visual gags, performers’ corporeal movements, and diverse onstage objects, which do not customarily belong together (for instance a nun’s bonnet, peaches, plums and a chainsaw), evade conventional definitions of femaleness and femininity, although such definitions can be found at the project’s other levels as in Henderson’s program notes. According to Macarthur, the connections between these elements potentially unleash unforeseen formations of theatrical-musical agency, gender and audience experience. She describes the ‘unanticipated understanding of what it is to be woman’ enabled by this music-theatre assemblage with Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of becoming-woman and
becoming-imperceptible. These terms refer to the multiplying and as yet unknown forms, capacities, lived realities and conceptualized meanings that female, femininity or genders might assume in the future.
In his chapter, Janne Vanhanen asks how we can understand listening as a continual process of becoming in the sense of an open relation toward the sounds, vibrations, musical events and sensory world encountered. He enquires how it might be possible to encourage this sort of openness of listening, whereby auditory (and otherwise felt sonic) experiences are not instantly organized into established definitions of music, sound, musical creation and work. Instead, an experiencing subject actively seeks relations with auditory events and sound-making bodies ‘outside its habitual sphere of existence’. This will, in turn, incite the subject to become anew, as it may unlearn its previous modes of listening, feeling and thinking in new tangles of relations. Vanhanen suggests that this pedagogical path beyond the given may be fruitfully explored in connection with experimental music since it stresses ‘indeterminacy, improvisation or process, materiality of the sonic medium and uniqueness of the musical moment’. Using the practices of John Cage and Pauline Oliveros as his interlocutors, Vanhanen formulates the concept of the Inorganized Ear to designate the kinds of listening generative of new ways of musicking and being that he theorizes.
Macarthur’s and Vanhanen’s approaches point to a key aspect of becoming, namely, the way in which becomings, in Deleuze and Guattari’s scheme, always occur from within relations. Modes of being do not selfdiffer in a solipsistic fashion. Rather, becomings occur on what Deleuze (1994: 246–247, 257–259) calls after philosopher Gilbert Simondon the pre-individual level. On this level, the characteristics and capacities of actors and things configure anew within moving interrelations outside settled subject and object positions. The pre-individual concerns intensive changes in the involved entities’ relations and potentialities to become. These then result in actual – extensive – changes in their manners of being. Hence, becoming is about constant fluctuation between pre-individual relationality and what might come to pass – which Deleuze and Guattari call the virtual –and the ways that things, for instance human subjects, actually re-arise as separable beings from encounters which shape their potential. (See also Massumi 2009.) Deleuze and Guattari highlight the occurrence of preindividual relationality between varied realms and scales of being: human, animal, vegetal, artifactual, technological and so on.
The relationality intrinsic in becoming is central to another, more openly politicized, aspect of this notion. For Deleuze and Guattari, becomings worthy of the name must act to unsettle established dominant modes of being. As they state in Chapter 10 of A Thousand Plateaus focused on becoming, ‘there is no becoming-man’ (1987: 292). What this refers to is that man – especially the European, white and adult male subject – occupies a dominant societal position supported by a long history of exploiting humans
and non-humans different from him. Man has also been elevated into the primary model of subjectivity and humanness in most Western systems of thought. Therefore, he cannot provide impetus for multiple differences that would be appreciated in their own terms rather than as deviations from one norm. The production of such differences must happen in relation to ‘minoritarian’ terms. Deleuze and Guattari’s (291–292) minoritarian does not signal minorities in the numerical sense, but such beings and groups that hold a non-dominant, marginalized or subversive place within the given setting. In order for any of us to become, we must consequently enter into relations with terms that represent ways of existing beyond categories prioritized in hierarchical binaries and norms which exclude variegated alternatives. For Deleuze and Guattari (233–309) minoritarian modes of being range from things associated with women and femininity to animals and other nature. They also include, for example, ethnicities and sexualities outside the governing norms. Deleuze and Guattari (258) insist that becomings in relation to minorities cannot be achieved by mimicking them, fantasizing about them or by trying to appropriate their identity. They are about seeking such provisional interrelations with these terms that affect and may, however slightly, challenge our normalized, possibly privileged positions. While always shaped by chance, becomings should also aim to enhance the implicated minoritarian terms’ possibilities for being.
The concept of minoritarian resonates with many discussions concerning the relations of the self and the other, and the center and the periphery, which ethnomusicologists and feminist and cultural music scholars have significantly contributed to (see e.g. Barz and Cooley 1997; Agawu 2007; Aubert 2007; Moisala 2008; Koskoff 2014). As a consequence, this dimension of becoming could be productively tested and extended in the research practices of ethnomusicology and musical ethnography because of the nuanced ways in which scholars in these fields have considered the relationships between researchers and research participants, as well as between dominant and less powered cultures and agents. In the present collection of essays, Taru Leppänen elaborates on the idea of becoming as movement toward minoritarian terms and proliferating differences. Her chapter examines the music-making practices of the Finnish Deaf hip hop artist Marko Vuoriheimo, aka Signmark. Through engaging with these practices, Leppänen encourages change in some of the founding assumptions and hierarchies concerning musical authorship and phenomena that are held in music scholarship and copyright law alike. These are linked with reserving the production and experiencing of music mainly to hearing or non-Deaf people. Signmark’s music-making, which involves signed lyrics, other body movements, the vibrations of the sound he feels and the technologies that co-compose the sounds and vibrations, exemplifies, however, the manifold roles and relations through which Deaf people can participate in the creation of music. Leppänen asserts that music and sound studies should
move beyond audism, that is, approaches that privilege hearing, and explore increasingly the multifaceted and shared nature of music-making that Deaf peoples’ activities foreground. She proposes that this move can be pursued through processes of becoming-Deaf, whereby the perspectives of a Deaf or a Hearing person shift as they relate to specificities and forces attached to Deaf people.
Affect
One of the key concepts that interconnect with becoming in Deleuze and Guattari’s work is affect. The term does not within their thought denote emotion, although emotional states and experiences may be one outcome of affect (see Massumi 2002: 35–36). Rather, affect is a basic dimension in their relational and processual ontology. It refers, first, to encounters between two or more entities in which they influence each other’s states of being. Second, affect means the transitions from one state and capacity of being to another, somehow altered state that entities undergo as a result of such encounters. In his book Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (1988), in which he elaborates on Dutch seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza’s theories, Deleuze terms the first of these aspects, the relationship between the affecting and affected entities, as affection (49). The transitions and differences that these relationships incite in the relating terms Deleuze calls affects. In both of these senses, affect clearly comes close to DeleuzianGuattarian becoming. Their understanding of affect encompasses changes that concern capacities to relate, act, respond, feel and experience. They also concern shifts in an entity’s potential to become in as yet unknown ways in the future. (See e.g. Massumi 2002: 9 and 15; Shouse 2005.)
What the affect is like and how it is perceived by the affected entities themselves – for instance, how it is a change in both body and mind in the case of humans – depends on their existing constitution and pasts. Namely, as with becoming, affections can, according to Deleuze and Guattari, occur between heterogeneous terms stretching from fellow humans to humans, non-human animals, technologies, natural milieus, musical sounds and so on. They (1987: 260; Deleuze 1988: 123–128) call these diverse entities bodies. Instead of signifying only individual human organic bodies, the body can in these theorizations be any such configuration whose elements interrelate with each other in specific ways and which displays capacities to affect and be affected. For example, a group of music-making people, instruments and sonorities could be understood as an ensemble of mutually affecting bodies, or even as one body composed of various terms and their relations. To the extent that musical situations are approached as affective relations between entities, one important task befalling research is to enquire how different bodies are affected by each other in particular practices, times and places.
Do the given relations expand and enrich or diminish and obstruct the involved terms’ capacities and potential? How can we tell?
Deleuze and Guattari’s views of affect have already begun to inspire renewed approaches to music and sound as expressive, social and bodilysensorial processes. This is exemplified by Anahid Kassabian’s (2013) study on ubiquitous listening, which argues that the various kinds of often technologically mediated presences of music in our everyday lives have led to diverse modes of listening, attention and affective responses to music. The concept of affect is elaborated especially in the collection of essays Sound, Music, Affect (2013a) edited by Marie Thompson and Ian Biddle. Particularly, the latter work comes close to this volume in reaching beyond the focus on signification typical of previous cultural music and sound studies while engaging with Deleuze and Guattari’s and Baruch Spinoza’s notions of affect and affection. The difference between this volume and ours lies in diverging conceptions of music and sound. While Sound, Music, Affect (e.g. Thompson and Biddle 2013b: 10–12) approaches music predominantly as a sonorous phenomenon, the present volume seeks to further extend understandings of what or how music is by emphasizing its multisensory, other than aural, not yet actualized virtual and vibratory beyond the human characteristics. It is easy to imagine additional productive transactions between DeleuzianGuattarian theorizations of affect and several branches of music and sound research, such as musical performance studies both in ethnomusicology and cultural musicology (e.g. Kisliuk 2001; Cook 2013), everyday music (DeNora 2000), multi-disciplinary engagements with music, sound, the body and the senses (e.g. Austern 2002; Finnegan 2003; Eidsheim 2011; Tiainen 2013) and music and emotion studies (e.g. Berger 2009; Juslin and Sloboda 2011).
In this collection, Marie Thompson sketches a new approach to experimental music practices inspired by Spinoza’s conceptions of the body and Deleuze’s appropriations of them. Thompson suggests that much experimental music can be understood to explore Spinoza’s famous axiom according to which ‘no one has yet determined what a body can do’ (E II p2). This is because the capacities of bodies vary in relation to the other bodies they come into contact with. Thompson argues that while the performing and listening bodies have been central themes in cultural and feminist musicology, Spinoza and Deleuze’s non-anthropocentric notion of the body allows an increased understanding of how also other-than-human elements, such as the traditional and newly made instruments and media technologies of experimental music praxis, so affect and are affected by music-making. This encourages a move beyond the inadequate binary between active musicking subjects and passive musical objects. While discussing the projects of American composer Alvin Lucier, improvising cellist Okkyung Lee and composer and media artist Yasunao Tone, Thompson investigates
the audio-affective capacities that the instruments, media technologies and human actors of these examples attain within their mutual relations.
In her chapter, Pirkko Moisala elaborates on Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of affect in order to examine how the musical performances of the Āma Samuha (Mothers’ Society) in the Nepalese village of Klinu expand their participants’ powers to act, bodily experiences and the wider gender system and social life of the village. As Moisala proposes, the partakers of these performances – both the women who sing and play and the auditorspectators – are drawn into their specific space and time. This re-embodies, reorients and re-ontologizes the participants. What the concept of affect helps Moisala to highlight is how these performances are not mere vehicles for the renegotiation of the performing women’s socioeconomic status in the village society. It is the performances themselves that carry transformative potential with regard to the whole village milieu. Their relations between sounds, environments, human bodies and minds, and non-human materialities, such as musical instruments and other paraphernalia of the occasions, create new expressive embodiments and possibilities for feeling and thinking for those involved.
Assemblage
As one of the most important terms in Deleuze and Guattari’s oeuvre, assemblage undoubtedly opens up a key path for promoting Deleuzian-Guattarian methodologies for the cultural, ethnographic and ethnomusicological studies of music and sound. According to Ian Buchanan (2000: 120), Deleuze and Guattari use the concept of assemblage to reconfigure the staple sociological and philosophical issue of the relationship between the human and its world. As cultural theorist Brian Massumi writes, not only individuals and the society but the subject and the social are ‘strictly simultaneous and consubstantial’ (2002: 68ff).
An assemblage can be understood as any number of components, things, elements and aspects – forces, materialities, discourses, affects, expressions –forming an interacting and continuously transforming complex whole which does not have a permanent identity or an organization. Deleuze and Guattari define assemblage as the ‘very constellation of singularities and traits deduced from the flow – selected, organized, stratified in such a way as to converge … artificially and naturally’ (1987: 406). It is a ‘multiplicity which is made up of heterogeneous terms and which establishes liaisons, relations between them’ (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 69).
Within music and sound studies, the concept of assemblage encourages the examination of music and sounds as emergent, fluidly moving events which engage a multiplicity of social, cultural, bodily and material forces and elements. From this point of view, the concept of assemblage
obviously has relevance to and may inspire reconsiderations of the concept of culture. As the study of music as culture, ethnomusicology has favored anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s (1973) definition of culture as shared patterns of behavior and thoughts that are formed within a long period of time, socially controlled and individually applied. Even though the history of Western art music has been examined from the social perspective since it was first studied, musicology was much slower to recognize the thorough impact of cultural factors in music and music-making.
Considering Anglo-American musicology, it was famously scholars such as Lawrence Kramer (1990, 1996), Susan McClary (1991), Rose Subotnik (1995) and Richard Leppert (1995) who initiated and reconfigured the idea of musical meaning as music’s cultural signification in producing what can be called the cultural turn in musicology. By claiming that music’s cultural meanings are not innate, but something it accrues in its constant encounters with listeners embedded in specific psychological and sociocultural frameworks, the approaches at stake shifted the views of classical music’s ontology from pre-given artworks to a dynamic signifying process. Today –as popular music scholar Richard Middleton points out in the introduction to The Cultural Study of Music (Clayton et al. 2012) – the cultural approach to music has become so routine in all kinds of music and sound studies that it may be instrumentalized to death (1–2).
This notwithstanding, due to the complexity and multidimensionality of today’s cultural spheres it has become more and more necessary to carefully situate the studies of music and sound on particular localities and times. A particularly successful way of situating music and musicking as a relational event has been theorized by ethnomusicologist Jocelyne Guilbault (2005). Her concept of audible entanglements – which to us effectively echoes the Deleuzian-Guattarian assemblage – examines ‘sites, moments, and modes of enunciation articulated through musical practices. So, far from being “merely” musical, audible entanglements … assemble social relations, cultural expressions, and political formulations’ (20–21, original emphasis). The Deleuzian-Guattarian concept of assemblage may adjust her approach a little further by possibly observing a wider range of likely components, such as different kinds of materialities and non-human elements, while it stresses the necessity to examine what is produced by the entanglements, therefore asking what this assemblage does and what it makes possible.
Thus, the Deleuzian-Guattarian concept of assemblage provides a useful tool of thought for identifying the complexity of elements, processes and forces involved in music and sound events. The concept of assemblage may also advance understandings of performances of any kinds of music, also in such music cultures that are based strongly upon notation, that is, on detailed written production instructions and related notions of musical work. In these approaches, performances, in the sense of both sound production and associated activities, are not understood as reproduction of pre-existing
work identities, meanings or completed musical parameters. They are examined as occasions that generate meaning, sociality and relationships specific to their own unfolding (see e.g. Cook 2003, 2013; Tiainen 2012). As Nicholas Cook proposes in his extensive inquiry of music as performance, Beyond the Score (2013: 249, 324, 336), in music studies that aim to value performances as performances, everything that figures in or seems to affect a performance potentially counts. Deleuze-Guattari’s concept of assemblage provides these approaches with fresh nuanced means of grasping what dimensions of reality can indeed count within performances.1
The dimensions of assemblage theorized by Deleuze and Guattari as well as by many scholars following their path may therefore help to develop increasingly fine-grained ways of examining the processes involved in musicking and sounding. Importantly, the various components of the assemblage relate with each other and they are mutually catalyzing while they also maintain certain autonomy, so the components may be detached from it and plugged into different assemblages. As Deleuze and Parnet write, ‘[t]he assemblage’s only unity is that of a co-functioning’ (1987: 69). An assemblage can be examined from the perspective of its multiple effects, be they, for instance, aesthetic, bodily, constructive or consumptive.
Drawing on the creation of a sound art piece crafted in response to children’s feelings about their everyday places, Michelle Duffy’s chapter in this volume seeks to understand how we make sense of what we hear. Duffy notes that conceptualizing the sound art piece Images of Home and its listeners in terms of a listening assemblage facilitates an important shift in considering the workings of sound. Rather than a focus on what sounds mean or represent, she suggests that the notion of assemblage ‘allows us to acknowledge that the creative actions of composition give coherence to sound while simultaneously destabilizing and opening up what meanings may be attributed’. This inherent paradox allows us our varied and multiple entries into the sound world.
The same line of thought pertains to the relationship of music and sounds with culture and society. Drawing loosely from Deleuze, music anthropologist Georgina Born has used the concept of musical assemblage to address ‘the way that music’s mediation take[s] a number of forms – social, corporeal, discursive, visual, technological and so on –which cohere into constellations that endure and take particular historical shapes’ (2013b: 33f). According to her, the notion of assemblage ‘suggests that music has no essence but a plural and distributed socio-material
1The previously underexplored impact of Deleuze’s philosophy of immanent processuality and difference on understandings of performance has already been examined in the wider field of performance studies. See, for instance, Cull (2009, 2012). Musical and sonic performances do not figure prominently in these examinations.
being, enabling music to be cognized as a constellation of mediations of heterogeneous kinds’ (2012: 268). Aiming at expanding the previous conceptions of the social aspect of music, she identifies four different planes of social mediation that enter musical assemblages in dynamic ways. She asserts that, ‘such an analytics of social mediation makes it possible to distinguish between different degrees and kinds of co-present and virtual sociality, as well as of individuation and aggregation, privatization and public-isation afforded by today’s ramifying musico- or sonic-socialtechnological assemblages’ (32).
The Deleuzian-Guattarian assemblage is not only a territorial gesture but also a performative practice which carves out new routes of thinking. Deleuze and Guattari use the concepts of de- and reterritorialization to grasp the constant processes of transformation. According to them, social structures and processes undergo constant movements of territorialization, deterritorialization and reterritorialization. Basically, every assemblage is territorial – and includes processes of territorializing – because they are made of decoded fragments. A territory ‘ensures and regulates’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 353) and holds together the heterogeneous elements. By territorialization they are referring to acts of organizing phenomena into relatively stable forms that are differentiated from their outsides. However, ‘[t]erritories are not fixed for all time, but are always being made and unmade, reterritorializing and deterritorializing’ (Macgregor Wise 2005: 79); they are ‘as inseparable from deterritorialization as the code from decoding’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 556). Processes of deterritorializing act toward dissolving assemblages which may gain new forms through this process. Thus, lines of deterritorialization cut across assemblages as at their heart are the virtual machines of mutation and deterritorialization, which form their most profound ‘inner nature’ (Patton 2006: 35). Deterritorialization in its turn refers to movements by which one leaves a territory while it also is inseparable from the processes of reterritorializing. We may take Deleuze and Guattari’s assertions that ‘[t]he first concrete rule for assemblages is to discover what territoriality they envelope and that ‘[i]t is necessary to ascertain the content and the expression of each assemblage’ (1987: 555) as methodological instructions. One can add the need to pay attention to the diverse forces of deterritorializing taking place in an assemblage which enable the formation of new connections.
Social theorist Paul Patton (2006: 28) suggests that Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between two kinds of assemblages. There are extensive molar assemblages that are unifiable, totalizable and organizable. Patton characterizes them as arborescent, tree-like systems that are ‘hierarchical systems with centres of significance and subjectification’ (1987: 16). In music, one can identify such kind of systems, for example, in music schools, conservatories, orchestras, musical works and on different levels of music industry and administration. On the other hand, there are molecular
assemblages that consist of intensities and differences not settled into distinct and recognizable categories. These are rhizomic assemblages that lack unity and embody a fluid organization, and they operate by variation, expansion, offshoots and conquest. Thus, rhizomatic assemblages are defined ‘by the abstract line, the line of flight or deterritorialization according to which they change in nature and connect with other multiplicities’ (9). For instance, improvisatory musical performances and internet music communities illuminate such rhizomatic elements. Patton (2006) notes, however, that molar assemblages with tree-like structures and molecular assemblages with rhizomatic systems should not be separated from each other as a dualism but, instead, ‘tree structures have the rhizomatic offshoots and rhizomes have their own points of arborescence’ (30). Thus, instead of being a description of ‘real-life’ structure, an assemblage is a conceptual tool for mapping musical events and settings. Furthermore, assemblage allows us to grasp musical realities and situations in specific contexts without assuming, in advance, a particular set of logics that determines their form.
Different kinds of both rhizomatic and tree-like assemblages – and assemblages combining both kinds of elements – can be detected in every dimension of different kinds of sonic events, in musicking people, playing techniques, musical ensembles, performances and everyday situations, soundscapes, sound processings, digital networks and global markets. As an anti-structural concept, assemblage allows the researcher to approach emergence and multiplicity, and the decentered and the ephemeral in musical events (Marcus and Saka 2006). It also encourages the observation of music’s multiple simultaneous forms of existence.
One aspect of assemblage thinking is the way it enables the acknowledgment of the active agency of matter and non-human entities or forces. Echoing this, some chapters in this volume tentatively connect Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts to the burgeoning fields of new materialist and posthuman(ist) thinking. In her chapter, which focuses on the complexly collaborative vocal music, performance and media art project The Algae Opera (premièred in 2012), Milla Tiainen argues that the concept of assemblage may help in analyzing the growing nonanthropocentric and environmentalist approaches in Western performing arts. With its co-constitutive relations between an opera singer, the algae, a new biotechnological device and questions of ecological sustainability and future food economies, The Algae Opera both exemplifies and expands these tendencies. Tiainen further discusses that through its several aspects, the concept of assemblage may provide methodological support for reconsidering the nature and powers of many kinds of musical – or other arts and everyday – performances. In particular, she stresses the need to understand the notion of relations of exteriority integral to the concept of assemblage, as well as the ways in which assemblages act simultaneously
as machinic assemblages of material elements and processes and as collective assemblages of enunciation.
Deleuze and Guattari strive not to privilege the becomings of human existence at the expense of the wider living and inorganic world, which has been a recurring tendency in Western philosophy. Their thoughts seek to acknowledge the varied and mutually different ways in which diverse things exist as a process, ranging from human bodies, concepts and languages to, for example, micro-organisms and animal species or individuals. Due to both scientific-technological advancements and ecological crises the term ‘nonhuman’ that we use in this volume, as well as other terms referring to the same direction, such as more than human and posthuman, currently have broad currency in so-called posthumanist – or posthuman-centric –research that is burgeoning in many disciplines of the human and social sciences (e.g. Haraway 2007; Wolfe 2009; Bennett 2010; Braidotti 2013; Grusin 2015). Cultural theorist Erin Manning (2013) uses the term ‘more than human’ about similar types of forces with tendencies of their own. By more than human, she means the embeddedness of human beings in the forces of the becoming of their environment. Manning advises, ‘[g]o beyond the human and see the more than human coursing in speciations that exceed the mortal body to include different speeds and slownesses that cut across it, infinitely’ (146). The term ‘posthuman’ is also used by Deleuzian feminist theorist Rosi Braidotti (2013) who similarly refers to a form of subjectivity and to an ethics, which ‘rests on an enlarged sense of inter-connection between self and others’ (190). By this she means a sense of community, ‘which includes one’s territorial or environmental interconnections’ (190). For her, becoming-posthuman ‘is a process of redefining one’s sense of attachment and connection to a shared world’ (193).
Previous music studies have mapped various ways in which music relates with the non- or more than human. To point out some examples regarding the participation of nature’s sounds in music, their role in the creation of musique concrete and other postmodernist music has been analyzed by a number of musicologists. In ethnomusicology, the role of the sounds of ecological surroundings in music and musical assessments has been acknowledged since Steven Feld’s renowned study on Kaluli musicking (1990) and his attendant concept of acoustemology (1996). The Deleuzian-Guattarian notion of non-human becomings that we use also has connections with the growing research strand of eco/ethno/musicology (Guy 2009; Allen 2011; Pedelty 2012).
When referring to the non-human, political theorist Jane Bennett (2010) uses the concepts of vital materiality, vital materialism and vibrant matter in her analysis of non-human forces operating in the human body, in human artifacts and in nature. By drawing from Deleuze and Guattari’s and many other philosophers’ thinking, she examines how ‘political responses to
public problems [would] change were we to take seriously the vitality of (nonhuman) bodies’ (viii). By vitality she means ‘the capacity of things … not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own’ (viii). In the present volume, Marie Thompson, for example, writes about this kind of vitality of sound making things by drawing attention to the generative, creative potential of the material and the non-human in experimental music. One of Thompson’s examples, Lucier’s Music on a Long Thin Wire (1977), is a piece in which a wire extended across a large room, can be made to play itself in situations, where ‘the forces of the milieu cause the wire to vibrate in a particular manner’. In a Spinozan-Deleuzian framework, the relations or affects of which the wire is capable generate music in Lucier’s piece.
New ethics and politics for music and sound studies
Power, ethics and politics can be understood as both limiting and empowering potentials. For instance, cultural studies of music have mainly focused on analyzing and deconstructing subordinating and repressive manifestations of power even though power has also been analyzed as a generative phenomenon. In addition to approaching power as a restrictive force, the Deleuzian-Guattarian approach insists on affirmative politics (Braidotti 2013) in investigations of processes of musicking. It is ‘as much a mapping of what is impossible, what becomes stuck or fixed, as it is of flux and flow’ (Coleman and Ringrose 2013b: 9). Elaborating on this, the present book conceives the task of music studies to be about discovering what knowledges and identities related to music we may have unnecessarily fixed, who or what these stabilized formations may prioritize or marginalize and what as yet unrecognizable processes might be flowing within phenomena we thought we had grasped, which will propel our research approaches and engagements with music into reinvigorated becomings.
When musickings are explored as relational events, the logic of fairly stable recognition behind ‘knowing music’ may be complemented or replaced by ‘noticing musicking’, to use a notion coined by Kathleen Stewart (2007). The chapters in this anthology give some examples of how noticing stands not for finding the repeatable, more or less stable in musicking, but for opening up to the singularities that might change our relations with and thoughts about what musickings are and do. Thus, this anthology suggests that the premises of singularity and always partly unpredictable becomings provided by the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari inspire an
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Olcott came to a decision. “All right. You’ve got aces. Later, we can settle things—not now.”
Duncan turned to the star-map. “Fair enough.”
In the mirror he watched Olcott kneel beside the unconscious Hartman and break an ammonia capsule under the scientist’s nose. Yes, fair enough. He had Olcott in a trap. Dangerous as the man was —and Duncan made no mistake about that—he would scarcely be fool enough to cause trouble till his own safety was assured.
It wouldn’t be assured till the cruiser was back on Earth. Meanwhile, they were in free space—without Varra Helmets. Duncan shivered a little. His eyes sought the enigmatic blackness where Pluto swung in its orbit, invisible and menacing. The Plutonian mind-vampires. Apparently Hartman’s trick had worked. The creatures had not yet discovered the blacked-out cruiser.
Not yet. But the scope of their powers was unknown. After all, the Plutonians were the reason why space was forbidden.
Instinctively Duncan’s teeth showed in a snarl of savage defiance.
There was hilarious excitement aboard the Maid of Mercury. The big passenger-cargo ship had just crossed the Line—Luna’s orbit—and that entailed a ceremony involving those who had never crossed before. An officer, grotesquely costumed as the Man in the Moon, presided from a makeshift throne in the main salon, and Andrea Duncan, smiling a little, watched the victims each get their dose of crazy-gas. She’d already had her initiation, and the effects of the mildly intoxicating gas were wearing off.
It was difficult to believe that outside the hull lay empty space, dark and limitless. Andrea turned her mind away from the thought. But another came—Saul—and she bit her lip and caught her breath in a tiny gasp. Saul! Had Olcott managed the escape? Was Saul Duncan free from Transpolar?
He must be. Olcott wouldn’t fail. That meant that in a few hours Andrea must destroy the communication system. Olcott had told her the best way. Yes, she was ready. It would mean freedom for Saul. If she failed, Olcott had said, her husband would be sent back to Transpolar, with an additional heavy sentence—ten more years, perhaps. Well, she wouldn’t fail.
A man brushed past her. “Your hair’s mussed up—”
Instinctively Andrea lifted a hand, only to be checked by the hard plastic curve of her Helmet. It was an old gag, but she forced herself to smile. The necessity of wearing Helmets in space had become a joke to most of the passengers. Probably only the officers realized the true danger of the Plutonian mind-vampires.
Everyone in the salon, of course, wore a Helmet—even the Man in the Moon, under his disguise. Cumbersome as they looked, they rested lightly on the wearers’ shoulders, and were actually so light that one easily became accustomed to them. Andrea studied her reflection in a nearby mirror. Her small, heart-shaped face seemed dwarfed by the Helmet. Experimentally, like an interested child, she pressed a stud and saw the transparent, air-tight shield slide into place an inch from her nose. Within the ship the shields were not necessary, nor were complete space-suits. But the Helmets were vital.
Andrea knew little or nothing of the technical details. The secret of the Helmets lay in the luminous, intertron knob atop each one. It was this that provided a two-way hook-up with the Varra. She remembered what an officer had told her, when she had first donned a Helmet at the Atlantic Spaceport.
“Never done it before, eh, miss? Well, don’t be frightened. Let me help you.” He had adjusted the bulky Helmet. “The power won’t be turned on till we hit the Heaviside Layer. The Varra can’t safely enter our atmosphere, you know.”
“I didn’t know. It seems so strange—”
The officer chuckled. “Not really. It’s like being in radio communication with somebody. You see, when the juice is turned on, a Varra instantly hooks itself up to your Helmet. You can even talk to him—it —if you like. They’re intelligent; nice people, in fact.”
“Can they read thoughts?”
“Everybody asks me that. No, they can’t. The idea is that without a Helmet, you’d be exposed to the Plutonian mind-vampires. As it is, the Varra throws up a mental shield that protects you.”
Andrea hesitated. “It doesn’t always work, though, does it?”
“Almost always. You were warned of that—” His manner became officially rigid. “You signed a release blank, in case of accident. But there’s no danger to speak of. Space flight is exhausting; you’ll feel pretty bad by the time we hit Mars. Somehow there’s an energy drain that even the Varra can’t neutralize.”
“The Plutonians?”
“We think so. But without the Helmets—” He grinned in a comforting fashion. “You’ll be okay, miss.”
Later, at the Heaviside Layer, the power had been turned on in each Helmet. There was no apparent change, except for the sudden luminosity of the intertron knobs. But a voice, friendly despite its curious alienage, had spoken wordlessly inside Andrea’s brain.
“I’m taking over now. Don’t remove your Helmet or turn off the power till you’re in atmosphere again.”
“Atmosphere—” Andrea had spoken aloud without realizing it. The Varra answered her.
“Each planet has a Heaviside Layer, an electronic barrage that disrupts mental-energy vibrations. We find it dangerous to pass that Layer, but so do the Plutonians.”
Another passenger had told Andrea somewhat more—that the Varra, even before space travel, were not unknown to science. Charles Fort had been one of the first to collect data about them—inexplicable
balls of fire appearing on Earth, with their life-forces warped and harmed by the Heaviside Layer, moving at random out of their native element.
Two hours after crossing the Lunar Line Andrea slipped noiselessly into the radio room. The long space trip had told on her; like all the others, she was conscious of exhaustion and mental drain. Glancing at her chronometer, she realized that in a few minutes Saul would make contact with the Maid
She clicked off the power in her Helmet. She wanted no Varra spying on her now.
The radio operator did not turn. He had not seen her or heard her silent approach. Andrea’s hand poised over an intricate array of wires and tore the cables free.
A lance of cold fire plunged into her brain. It was too quick for pain. Her terrified thought, The Plutonians! was cut off instantly. Her mind drowned, as in dark water, chill and horrible.
The radio operator whirled, startled, at the thud of Andrea’s falling body.
CHAPTER THREE
Destination—Death!
“CQX! CQX! Calling Maid of Mercury!”
Saul Duncan looked up from the mike. “No answer. Their radio’s dead.”
“Your wife did her job,” Olcott grunted, fingering his mustache. He had regained his usual impassivity, though Hartman, in the background, had not. The scientist, without his daily quart of khlar, was a nervous wreck, puffing cigarette after cigarette in a vain attempt to calm himself.
“There she is.” Duncan nodded at the visiplate, where the bulk of the Maid lay, occulting stars. “We’ll use visual signals. First, though, we’ll have to—”
His fingers moved swiftly. A four-inch blaster cannon sent its bolt of electronic energy ravening through space, across the Maid’s bow. Lights on the cruiser’s hull blinked into rainbow colors.
Paralleling the Maid, steadily drawing closer, the smaller ship kept on its course.
Duncan said, “They noticed that. They’ll be watching the visiplate—”
“What are you telling them?”
“To send over the radium, or we’ll blast ’em to hell.”
“Good!”
But Duncan’s lips were tight. He was bluffing, of course. Blasting an unarmed ship full of passengers—well, if it came to a showdown, he could not do it, even if Andrea had not been on board. However, the Maid’s captain couldn’t know that. He wouldn’t dare take the risk.
Answering lights flashed on the larger ship’s hull. Duncan read them aloud with the ease of long practice.
“No radium aboard. Is this a joke?”
“Send another blast,” Olcott suggested.
Duncan’s response was to fire a bolt that melted two of the Maid’s stern tubes into slag. That didn’t harm anyone in the passenger ship, but it showed that he was presumably in earnest. And he had to get Andrea aboard now. She had smashed the radio, and probably was already under arrest. Well—
“Sending radium. Don’t fire again.”
“Send one of your passengers also. Jane Horton.” Andrea was booked under that alias, Olcott had said.
There was a pause. Then—“Jane Horton victim of Plutonians. Must have turned off power in Helmet. Found dead in radio room just before you made contact.”
Saul Duncan’s fingers didn’t move on the keys. Deep within him, something turned into ice. He was hearing a voice, seeing a face, both phantoms, for Andrea was dead.
Andrea was dead.
The words were meaningless.
He became conscious of Olcott at his side, talking angrily.
“What’s wrong? What did they say?”
Duncan looked at Olcott. The dead, frozen fury in the pilot’s eyes halted Olcott in mid-sentence.
Automatically Duncan’s hand moved over the keyboard.
“Send the body to me.”
Then he waited.
On the visiplate was movement. A port gaped in the Maid’s hull, the escape-hatch with which all ships were provided. Based on torpedotube principle, powered by magnetic energy, the projector was built to hurl crew or passengers out of the ship’s sphere of attraction. Sometimes the rockets would fail, in which case the vessel would crash on any nearby body. If that danger threatened, a man in a spacesuit, equipped with auxiliary rockets, could survive for days in the void, provided he was not dragged down with the ship. The projector took care of that.
Now, tuned to minimum power, it thrust a bulky object out into space, pushing it toward the cruiser Gravitation did the rest. The spacesuit dropped toward the smaller vessel, thudded against the hull. Duncan threw a series of hull magnets, one after another, till the suit was at an escape valve.
Five minutes later the space coffin lay at Duncan’s feet.
Through the bars that protected the transparent face-plate he could see Andrea, her long lashes motionless on her cheeks. Duncan’s
face was suddenly haggard. Olcott’s voice jarred on his taut nerves.
“What happened? Did they—”
“The Plutonians killed her,” Duncan said. “She turned off her Helmet, and they killed her.”
Hartman was staring at a lead box attached to the spacesuit. “They sent the radium!”
Duncan’s lips twisted in a bitter smile. With a quick movement he went to the controls and turned the cruiser into a new course. On the visiplate, the Maid began to draw away.
Olcott said, “How long will it take us to get back to Earth?”
“We’re not going back.” Duncan’s voice held no emotion.
“What?”
“Andrea’s dead. The Plutonians killed her. You and Hartman helped.”
Olcott’s big body seemed to tense. “Don’t be a fool. What good will it do to murder us? What’s done is done. You—”
“I’m not going to murder you,” Duncan said. “The Plutonians will take care of that.”
“You’re crazy!”
Briefly a flash of murderous fury showed in Duncan’s eyes. He repressed it.
“I’m taking this boat to Pluto. I’m going to blast hell out of the Plutonians. They’ll get us eventually, all of us. That’ll be swell. I don’t want to live very long now. But before I die, I’m going to smash as many of the Plutonians as I can, because they killed Andrea. And you two are going with me, because you got Andrea into this mess.”
Hartman said shakily, “It’s suicide. No ship can get within a million miles of Pluto!”
“This ship can. It’s dead black, with rocket screens. And the Plutonians haven’t found us yet—which proves something. Hold it!”
The gun flashed into Duncan’s hand as Olcott jerked forward. “I’ll kill you myself if I have to, but I’d rather let the Plutonians do it.” He
motioned the others to the back of the cabin as a light flashed on the board. After a moment Duncan nodded.
“That was the Maid. They managed to repair their radio. Andrea didn’t have time to smash it thoroughly before. They’re talking to a patrol boat.”
Olcott’s teeth showed. “Well?”
“We don’t want to be stopped—now.” Duncan fingered the controls. The bellow of rockets grew louder. A shuddering vibration rocked the little cruiser.
“Not too fast!” Hartman said warningly. “This ship crashed once. It’s still weak.”
For answer Duncan only increased the power. The thunder of the tubes grew deafening. Already they had crossed the Lunar Line, heading outward in the plane of the ecliptic.
Duncan rose and went to the spacesuit that held Andrea’s body. He wrenched the intertron knob free from the Helmet.
“We want no Varra spy here.” The knob was not glowing, and, without power, the Varra was not en rapport with the Helmet, but Duncan was taking no chances.
Grimly he went back to the controls. Hartman and Olcott watched him, vainly trying to fight back their fear.
The heavy, crashing roar of the rockets mounted to a deafening crescendo.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Destroying Avenger
Named after the Greek god of the underworld, desolate, lifeless and forbidding as Hell itself, Pluto revolved in its tremendous orbit, between thirty-seven hundred million and four thousand million miles
from the Sun. Such distances are staggeringly inconceivable when we attempt to use human yardsticks. Men cannot stand the strain of such voyages without special precautions. Suspended animation is usual on the long hops, and Duncan had made use of the cataleptic drug he found at hand in the cruiser’s emergency supply locker
For a long time the three men had been unconscious as the ship, with increasing acceleration, hurled itself toward Pluto. Duncan had carefully measured the Sherman units of the drug, calculating so that he would awaken hours before the others. But he forgot one thing— the terrific resistance khlar builds up within the human body
So it was Rudy Hartman who first opened his eyes, groaned, and stared uncomprehendingly about him. He was strapped in a bunk, Duncan and Olcott near by. Memory came back.
Sick and weak from the long period of catalepsy, Hartman nevertheless forced his aching limbs into motion. Staggering, he presently reached Duncan and took the latter’s gun. That done, he searched for a means of binding his captive securely.
The bunk-straps were of flexible metal—not long enough, but they might serve a purpose. Hartman, scarcely conscious of his actions, fumbled at a panel and slid it back. Within the cubicle space-suits were stacked, each with its Varra Helmet, Olcott had ordered them removed when Hartman was repairing the vessel, but the scientist had not obeyed. He had not felt entirely certain that the cruiser would not be detected by the Plutonians, and perhaps he had felt a twinge of compunction at the thought of sending a helpless man to possible suicide, if his theory proved wrong. So he had concealed the Helmets behind a panel. Now he blessed the lucky chance that had made him do so.
Duncan was still unconscious. Hartman rolled him out of the bunk and dressed him in a suit, fitting the Varra Helmet in place. With the flexible straps he bound Duncan’s arms to his side; a makeshift job, but it would serve. Finally he pried the intertron knob from the Helmet and sighed with relief.
Hesitantly he went to the controls. The star-map told him little, except that they were approaching Pluto. Should they begin deceleration?
Hartman’s fingers hovered over the studs—Damn! He dared not alter the course. He wasn’t a pilot, and it took trained hands to control a spaceship.
Well, that didn’t matter. There was another way—with the Varra Helmets.
He broke an ammonia capsule under Olcott’s nose and applied artificial respiration. After a time Olcott stirred.
“Hartman?” His tongue was thick. “Where—what’s happened?”
“A great deal. Lie still and get back your strength. I’ll tell you—”
But Olcott struggled to rise. “Duncan!”
“He’s safe.” Hartman nodded toward the bound figure. Then he sucked in his breath and sprang up. Duncan’s eyes were open.
“Stay where you are,” Hartman said, showing the gun. “I won’t hesitate to kill you, you know.”
Duncan grinned. “Go ahead. You can’t pilot this ship. I can wait.”
Olcott got up unsteadily. “You’ll pilot it—back to Earth. Damn you, Duncan—”
“I’ll pilot it to Pluto. Nowhere else.”
Hartman intervened. “Wait. Listen, Duncan. We have several Varra Helmets aboard. You didn’t know that.”
“So what?”
“We do not need you as a pilot. If we make connections with the Varra, we can chart a course back to Earth by letting them instruct us.”
Duncan’s eyes changed.
He said, “You’re crazy.” But his voice lacked conviction.
“The Varra!” Olcott scowled. “But—”
Hartman whirled on him. “I know! It will mean giving up the radium. But there’s no other way. We’re near Pluto. The Plutonians may detect us at any moment. If they do—” He shrugged. “We can keep the radium and die here. Or we can use the Helmets, summon the Varra, and have them guide us back to Earth.”
“Can they do that?”
“Easily. If they had tangible bodies, they could pilot spaceships as well as Duncan, or anyone else. As it is, they can tell us how to handle the controls.”
“We’ll lose the radium. It’ll mean prison too.”
“Not necessarily. Our lives are worth more than the radium—eh? And the Varra can’t read minds. Suppose we have a convincing story to tell? We planned this space-flight as a scientific expedition, nothing more. We didn’t know Duncan was an escaped convict. We didn’t know he planned to hi-jack the Maid—”
Olcott rubbed his mustache. “Plenty of holes in that. But you’re right. We can fix up some sort of story. And there’ll be no legal proof—”
He looked toward the helpless Duncan. “Except him. We don’t want him talking.”
Hartman touched the gun, but Olcott shook his head. “No. Listen. Duncan. You’re licked. We can get back to Earth, with you or without you. But if we get the Varra to help, we lose the radium. Why not be smart? Play along with us, and you’ll still get your half a million credits.”
“Go to hell!” Duncan suggested.
Hartman said, “We’ve no time to waste. We’re not far from Pluto—” He didn’t finish, but there was a suggestion of panic fear in his voice.
“Right. This ship’s got an escape hatch, hasn’t it? Good.” Olcott hurriedly began to don spacesuit and Varra Helmet. At a gesture, Hartman followed his example.
“Don’t use the power yet. Help me.” Olcott picked up Duncan by the shoulders. Grunting and straining, the two men carried their captive into the air-tight bow chamber, sealing the valve behind them. The
magnetic projector, looking like an oversized cannon, faced the circular transparent port through which they could see the starry darkness of empty space.
“Know how to work one of these?”
“They’re simple,” Hartman said. “This switch—” He indicated it. “Obviously it closes the circuit. Yes, I can operate this.”
Duncan remained silent as he was roughly thrust into the projector’s gaping muzzle, feet-first. Olcott bent over him.
“You’ve got auxiliary-suit rockets and enough oxygen. And you can untie yourself, if you work fast, before you hit Pluto. You can make a safe landing—till the Plutonians find you. Well?”
Duncan didn’t answer.
Olcott said, “Don’t be a fool! You’ll die rather unpleasantly on Pluto. You know that. Will you take us back to Earth?”
There was a long silence. Abruptly, with a muffled curse, Olcott snapped Duncan’s faceplate shut, and then his own. Hartman did the same, and, with a wry face, touched the power-button on his Helmet that would summon the Varra.
In a moment the intertron knob began to glow, with a cold, unearthly brilliance. Olcott hastily turned the power on in his own Helmet. Now there was no time to waste. Soon the Varra would come....
Cold eyes dark with fury, Olcott gestured. Hartman, in response, swung the projector’s muzzle into position; both men closed their faceplates. The transparent shield of the bow port slid aside, and the air within the escape hatch blasted out into space.
Hartman moved a lever. Electro-magnetic energy blasted out from the projector, blindingly brilliant. One flashing glimpse the men had of Duncan’s bound, space-suited body hurtling into the void—and then it was gone, racing toward Pluto at breakneck speed.
Hartman closed the port and pumped air back into the tiny chamber. Abruptly a voice spoke within his brain.
“Who are you? Why do you summon the Varra? And why are you so near to Pluto?”
Olcott had heard the message too. He framed the thought: “You are a Varra? We need help.”
“We are Varra. What help do you require?”
Olcott explained.
He had fallen for many minutes. Beneath him the jagged darkness of Pluto lay, cryptic and forbidding. It was time to use the rockets, but still Duncan hesitated, though he had freed himself from his bonds. The flares would certainly attract the attention of the Plutonian mindvampires, and then—
A shadow occulted the stars. For a moment Duncan thought it was a meteor; then he recognized the cruiser. Jets screened, almost invisible, it was still driving on its course toward Pluto!
He did not stop to ponder the reason. Instinct sent his gloved fingers to the studs built into his suit. The tiny emergency rockets burned white in the darkness of space. Duncan was hurled toward the cruiser. Involuntarily he held his breath, looking downward at the vast circle of Pluto. Would he die now?
The rockets had flared only briefly; perhaps they had not been noticed. He did not use them again. Instead, he waited, moving steadily onward with no atmosphere to slow him down by its friction. The gravitation of Pluto pulled at both man and ship, but each fell at the same rate—no! The cruiser was pulling away! That meant its masked tubes were still on.
Duncan risked another jet. This time his space-boots thumped solidly on the hull. He levered himself toward the side port, which could be opened from without, unless it had been locked. True, when the valve
slid aside, the ship’s air would be lost in space, and anyone within the cruiser would die. Duncan grinned savagely. Bracing himself awkwardly, he tugged at levers.
The port opened. Duncan was almost flung away from the ship by the blast of air that gusted out. He recovered his balance, swung himself across the threshold—
At his feet lay two space-suited bodies, Olcott and Hartman. The faceplates of their Varra Helmets were open, but they had not died of lack of oxygen. That was evident. The frozen, strained whiteness of their features told a different story that Duncan read instantly. The Plutonians had brought death to Hartman and Olcott; they had died in the same manner as Andrea.
Duncan closed the port behind him, his face expressionless. Inwardly he was tense as wire, in momentary expectation of cold fury striking at his brain. He stood waiting.
The star-map on the instrument panel flared. That meant atmosphere ahead. Duncan was at the controls in two strides. His number might be up, but he had no intention of dying in a crash—not while there was still a possibility of revenging himself on the Plutonian creatures.
He checked the ship’s course, decelerating as much as he dared. So keyed-up were his nerves that he jumped sharply when a voice spoke inside his brain.
“Who
are you, Earthman? Why are you here?”
Before Duncan could frame a response, he felt a thrill of sudden urgency flame through him. Something, cold and deadly as space itself, reached into his mind. There was an instant of sickening giddiness—
It was gone. The sky-screen flamed crimson. The cruiser was within Pluto’s atmosphere blanket.
Duncan gasped for breath. He was scarcely conscious of manipulating the cruiser, leveling off into a long, swooping glide. Death had touched him very nearly—and had been avoided miraculously by a fantastically small margin. The implications of what had happened turned Duncan white with incredulous shock.
For the thing that had been en rapport with his mind had tried to kill him. And that thing had been not a Plutonian, but a Varra! Duncan was certain of that. In his space-piloting days he had been in close touch with the Varra, and had learned the distinctive feel of the creatures—there was no other word—within his mind.
But the Varra were friendly to Earthmen!
The rough terrain of Pluto lay below. A cold, bluish radiance, almost invisible, seemed to flicker here and there. Duncan set the ship down with trained skill, landing on a broad plateau at the base of a high range of alps.
He was on Pluto, shunned and feared by Earthmen for a hundred and fifty years. He was in the very lair of the mind-vampires.
And nothing happened.
Slowly Duncan rose and turned the valves on the oxygen tanks. He divested himself of his spacesuit and made a careful examination of the two bodies. Both Olcott and Hartman had been killed, apparently, by the Plutonians. They had the stigmata.
But Duncan was thinking a rather impossible thought—that there were no Plutonians.
With half of his mind he made tests. There was atmosphere, almost pure chlorine. Nor was it unduly cold. An electroscope gave him the answer. Pluto was a radioactive planet, warmed from within by the powerful radiations of the ore.
Duncan took the dead Olcott’s helmet and adjusted it upon himself. Turning on the power made the intertron knob glow, but there was no other result. The Varra, of course, could not safely venture within the Heaviside Layer of any planet, and Pluto had a Layer, since it had an
atmosphere. Chlorine—radium—Duncan shook his head, trying to fit the puzzle together.
There were no Plutonians. Why, then, had the Varra fostered the legend of the mind-vampires? Creatures composed of pure energy could not exist on a radioactive planet; the radiations would be fatal to their complicated electronic structures.
Duncan thought for a long time. At last he had the answer, so astoundingly simple that he found it difficult to believe. But it checked. And that meant—
He rose and went slowly to where Andrea’s body lay, still in the spacesuit, her face composed and lovely in death. Duncan’s lips twisted. He knelt.
“Andrea—”
She was trying to tell him something, he thought. What?
“Tell Earth what I’ve found out? Is that it?”
He hesitated. “It’s no use. We’re forty thousand million miles from the Sun. The radio won’t carry that far, even if it’d get through the Heaviside Layer on Pluto. There’s no way to send a message back.”
There was no way. Nor could the cruiser retrace its course. There was not enough fuel left. The jets would be exhausted before Saturn’s orbit was reached, and the speed would increase as the ship plunged Sunward, increase to a point where deceleration would be impossible.
“There’s no way, Andrea. I can’t send the message—”
Duncan stopped. There was a way, after all, though it meant death.
He seated himself before the radio-recorder and adjusted it to automatic-repeat. His message would be imprinted on metal wiretape, and continue to be sent out into the void till the ship itself was destroyed.
Duncan pulled the microphone toward him. His voice was coldly emotionless.
“CQX. CQX. Recorded on Pluto. All ships copy. Relay to proper authorities. Pluto is uninhabited. Its atmosphere is pure chlorine. No life-form known to science can exist in a chlorine atmosphere or on a radioactive world. The Plutonian mind-vampires do not exist. The legend was created by the Varra for their own purposes. The actual mind-vampires are the Varra themselves.”
Now it would be theorizing, but Duncan was certain that his guess was correct.
“The Varra live on life energy. When man conquered space, they foresaw danger to themselves. They are vulnerable, and if Earth suspected their motives, they’d be relentlessly destroyed. So—as I see it—they pretended to be friendly, and blamed the mind-vampirism on imaginary creatures living on Pluto. The Varra can communicate with us without the need for Helmets. They can kill too. But they seldom do that. Instead, pretending to protect space-travelers from the Plutonians, they drain a certain amount of life-energy from each person wearing a Helmet. We’re like cattle to them. We think they’re friendly, and so far we haven’t suspected the truth. As long as we didn’t suspect, the Varra were safe, and could keep on vampirizing us, without our knowledge. Once in a while a Varra badly in need of energy would drain too much, which would kill its host.”
That was what had happened to Andrea. The Varra had tried to stop her from wrecking the Maid’s radio, and—Duncan’s teeth showed.
He went on telling his story, explaining what had happened. He made no excuses; there was no need for them now.
Finally he said: “The Varra can be destroyed. And we can protect ourselves against them. That’ll be up to the scientists. If this ship gets through, it will mean that the Varra couldn’t stop me. I’ve got radium aboard. So I’ll put a Heaviside Layer around the cruiser—and blast off Sunward.”
Duncan clicked the switch. No need to say more. Earth would understand, would believe.
But now—
He opened the port, after donning a suit and Helmet, and let the ship fill with the chlorine atmosphere. It would be better than oxygen, for his purposes. Iodine vapor would be even more effective, but he could not create that. If only he were a scientist, a technician, he could probably discover some other way of creating an artificial Heaviside Layer.
But it didn’t matter. This way was surest and quickest, and there would be no machinery to fail him.
Sealed within the ship once more, Duncan found the shipment of Martian radium, hi-jacked from the Maid, and removed it from its thick leaden container. He left it exposed, and went to the controls.
The cruiser lifted from the surface of the plateau. It slanted up through the chlorine atmosphere, rockets bellowing.
There was no need for split-second timing or unusual accuracy— within certain limits. He was heading Sunward. Nothing more was necessary. Except power—
The tubes thundered with ravening fury. The cruiser blasted up, acceleration jamming Duncan back into his seat. Then they were out of the air-envelope, in free space, controls locked. There was nothing more to do now but to drive on. The rockets would blast their fury into the void till the fuel was exhausted. Even then, the ship would speed on, into the tracks of commerce and the orbits of the inhabited planets.
On the visiplate specks of light glimmered, resolving themselves into a nebulous cloud—the Varra.
It was the final proof. Duncan was the first man who had ever landed on Pluto. The Varra intended to destroy him, giving him no opportunity of telling what he knew to Earth.
Duncan checked the radio. It was repeating his message, sending it steadily into space. At this distance from the Sun there was no chance that it would be picked up. But later—
He clicked the power on in his Helmet. There was no response. The Varra, as he had thought, could not penetrate his artificial barrier, his pseudo-Heaviside Layer.
It was nothing, actually, but a blanket of ionization. But the Varra could not break through it. Duncan glanced at the exposed radium on the floor. A pound of it, sending out its powerful emanations, gamma, beta and electrons, ionizing the chlorine even more effectively than it would have affected oxygen—invisible armor, protecting Duncan from the Varra.
They were massing ahead, determined to stop him. Thoughts began to penetrate his mind, furtive, random, but indications that the group power of the Varra was stronger than he had expected.
Duncan seated himself at a panel, the one controlling the blaster cannons. His face, haggard and strained, twisted in a bitter smile.
“Okay, Andrea,” he whispered. “I’m taking the message back for you. But I’m doing this—for myself! Because they killed you, damn them —”
The chill tentacles probed deeper into Duncan’s brain. He swung a cannon into position, pressed a stud, and watched a streak of electronic energy go blasting across space, silent thunder in the void, smashing relentlessly at the Varra. It struck in a maelstrom of flame.
“Vulnerable!” Duncan said, “Yeah, they’re vulnerable as all hell!”
The Varra closed in. Through their massed ranks the cannon blazed and pounded, till space seemed afire. The rocking recoil of the blasts, mingled with the booming of the rockets, thudded in Duncan’s ears even through the Helmet.
And he fought them. There were no witnesses to that battle, none to see the black cruiser plunging on through the cloud of attackers, belching Jove’s lightning, shaking with the vibrations of its murdermadness. For the spaceship was mad, Duncan thought, a relentless,
