The Plane of Consistency and the Body without Organ
What is a body without organs?

Rewind. All of Deleuze’s philosophy is an effort to construct a post-theological, naturalist ontology that reconceives beings in terms of becomings and events, actual existents in terms of virtual potentialities, fixed forms in terms of mobile particles and flows, homogeneous structures in terms of heterogeneous aggregates and connections, and hierarchical organizations in terms of a smooth horizontal surface populated solely by dynamic singularities, affects, intensities, speeds, and haecceities.(註2) Beings, forms, structures, and organizations, Deleuze tells us, are simply ways in which an essentially fluid and heterogeneous nature is temporarily contracted, captured, contained, or slowed down to the point at which its movement is imperceptible.

The theologian or philosopher of being (the Platonist, the Christian, the Kantian) will always assert the existence and primacy of a transcendent plane (a “plane of transcendence” or “plane of organization,” Deleuze calls it) that directs, organizes, and forms nature and becoming from without. (The philosopher of being says: beings are what becomes, the subject organizes experience, providence or progress directs the movement of history, the score governs musical performances, etc.) Yet, true to the naturalism of his philosophical heroes—Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Bergson—Deleuze asserts that there is only one plane, “the plane of immanence” or “the plane of consistency,” and that the existence of all beings and organizations can and must be accounted for by reference to materials and processes operating on this plane alone.(註3)

“Plane of consistency” is one name for Deleuze’s basic conception of nature and the world. Another is the body without organs (BwO): “the unformed, unorganized, nonstratified, or destratified body and all its flows,” “that glacial reality where the alluvions, sedimentations, coagulations, foldings, and recoilings that compose an organism—and also a signification and a subject—occur.” In short, the BwO is the virtual field of the body, the domain of the basic particles and forces (“singularities,” “affects,” “intensities,” “ideas,” “perceptions,” etc.) from which an actual organism composed. “[I]n order to extract useful labor from the BwO,” Deleuze writes with Félix Guattari, the organism “imposes upon it forms, functions, bonds, dominant and hierarchized organizations, organized transcendences.”

Yet, Deleuze and Guattari insist that the BwO always subsists and reasserts itself: “the body suffers from being organized in this way, from not having some other sort of organization, or no organization at all”; hence “a body without organs [. . .] is continually dismantling the organism, causing a signifying particles or pure intensities to pass or circulate.”(註4) Through experimental practices, Deleuze and Guattari tell us, we can make ourselves BwOs.(註5)

So long as we think of the body as a given functional form, says Deleuze alluding to Spinoza, we will not know what a body can do, what it is capable of.(註6) To become a BwO is to destratify the body, to reconnect it with the intensive, impersonal, transhuman matter that composes and surrounds it, to open it up to new connections and assemblages, to explore the innumerable things it can do beyond the restricted set of habitual actions that characterize the organized body.(註7) When one does this, one transforms the body from a given entity with a specified functionality and direction of activity to a construction site of exploration and connection. One no longer actualizes merely the specific set of affects that constitute, for example, Man as a normal, rational, heterosexual, productive human being but the entire (or, at least a larger) range of affects of which this body is capable.(註8)

Fast Forward: An ontology of being—that is, an “arborescent,” taxonomical ontology of things, forms, and species—will insist on making distinctions between nature, the human body, and music. (Music, it says, is a particular product of human beings who are particular parts of nature.) But Deleuze’s ontology of events, becomings, and haecceities does not distinguish in this way. For Deleuze, a body is simply a contraction of forces and flows. “A body can be anything,” he writes; “it can be an animal, a body of sounds, a mind or an idea; it can be a linguistic corpus, a social body, a collectivity.”(註9) If music can be a body or an organism, so, too, can it become a body without organs, a plane of consistency, or plane of immanence. With reference to John Cage and the classic minimalists Steve Reich and Philip Glass, Deleuze and Guattari hint at this possibility:

Certain modern musicians oppose the transcendent plan(e) of organization, which is said to have dominated all of Western classical music, to the immanent sound plane, which is always given along with that to which it gives rise, brings the imperceptible to perception, and carries only differential speeds and slownesses in a kind of molecular lapping: the work of art must mark seconds, tenths and hundredths of seconds. Or rather it is a question of a freeing of time, Aeon, a non pulsed time for a floating music, as Boulez says, an electronic music in which forms are replaced by pure modifications of speed. It is undoubtedly John Cage who first and most perfectly deployed this fixed sound plane, which affirms process against all structure and genesis, a floating time against pulsed time or tempo, experimentation against any kind of interpretation, and in which silence as sonorous rest also marks the absolute state of movement.(註10)

Suggested by Deleuze and Guattari passing, it is this musical idea that I want to unfold here. In the process, we will see that Cage and the classic minimalists, to whom Deleuze and Guattari attribute this practice, mark only a few of the many efforts at making music a BwO. Indeed, over the course of the twentieth century, through a kind of uneven development and by way of clandestine connections, each of the major domains of Western music (classical, jazz, and rock) has been submitted to this process—a process that experimental electronica takes to its nth power.

The Classical Work of Music and Its Deterritorialization

The 18th and 19th centuries in Europe saw the development and perfection of the classical work of music. Emerging from a fluid and non-literate musical practice, the classical tradition gradually instituted fixed works of art embodied in transcendent musical scores.(註11) Once thoroughly temporal and open-ended, existing only as evanescent performance and non-identical iterations, music became a thing, a being, a kind of Platonic model that governed performance from without and infidelity to which it was judged. This musical work (the score or Platonic ideal of the work) was (and is) not only a temporal but silent. Instantiated in musical performances, it nonetheless remained outside of their temporal and physical flow.

The classical work is governed by another transcendent mode of organization: tonality. The tonal system insures that musical unfolding is always tied to the tonic, from which it emerges, to which it returns, and which governs its selection of pitches along the way. Thus is musical becoming tied to being in the form of origin and telos; and thus is that thoroughly temporal art, music, transformed into a mere passage between those two fixed points. The sonata, song, and rondo forms that developed concurrently with the tonal system provided more overarching conceptions of development, tying musical becoming to formal and narrative expectations (absence-presence, conflict-resolution, etc.).(註12) Finally, the classical work found its apotheosis in the symphony, performed by an orchestra that is a vast hierarchy of parts, levels, and structures comparable to a military organization, governed by the authoritarian conductor, himself subservient to that absent (transcendent) genius, the musical composer.(註13)

Such was the elaborate organization of music at the beginning of the 20th century. And it is this that the vanguard music of the 20th-century slowly dismantled. Arnold Schoenberg accomplished arguably the first deterritorialization of the classical work. Between 1907 and 1909, Schoenberg abandoned tonality altogether, allowing his music to flow over the entire range of the chromatic scale. As such, his atonal pieces are fluid and without any inclination to resolve. No longer unfolding according to given external principles, they force the listener to follow their errant path from within. But Schoenberg would soon reterritorialize his music via the twelve-tone system, which again constrained tonal variation and directed musical development according to a pre-given scheme. Indeed, in the decades that followed, this reterritorialization became more and more severe, as Integral Serialism submitted every musical element (rhythm, dynamics, texture, etc.) to serial organ-ization.

Several other musical personae contributed to the deterritorialization of the classical work. Notable among them was Edgard Varèse, who freely abandoned the term “music” in favor of the description “organized sound,” calling himself “not a musician, but ‘a worker in rhythms,frequencies, and intensities.’”(註14) Varèse equally abandoned any real interest in form, pitch, or melody. Instead, he turned to the substance of sound itself, to the exploration of timbre, color, and loudness.(註15) In place of properly musical descriptions, he characterized his compositions in richly physical terms, drawing conceptual resources from chemistry, geometry, and geography. “Thinking of form as a point of departure, a pattern to be followed, a mold to be filled,” Varèse wrote, is a mistake. “Form is a result—the result of a process,” an impersonal process that, he believed, mirrors the formation of crystals:

There is an idea, the basis of an internal structure, expanded and split into different shapes or groups of sound constantly changing in shape, direction, and speed, attracted and repulsed by various forces. The form of the work is the consequence of this interaction. Possible musical forms are as limitless as the exterior forms of crystals.(註16)

Prophetically anticipating the advent of electronic music and noise composition, Varèse wrote in 1936:

When new instruments will allow me to write music as I conceive it, the movement of sound-masses, of shifting planes, will be clearly perceived in my work, taking the place of the linear counterpoint. When these sound-masses collide, the phenomena of penetration and repulsion will seem to occur. Certain transmutations taking place on certain planes will seem to be projected onto other planes, moving at different speeds and at different angles. There will no longer be the old conception of melody or interplay of melodies. The entire work will be a melodic totality. The entire work will flow as a river flows.(註17)

Varèse’s American successors, John Cage and Morton Feldman, further deterritorialized the musical work. Cage’s major contribution was to liberate music from human subjectivity, thereby opening up the “transcendental” or “virtual” field of music.(註18) Cage insisted that music precedes and exceeds human beings. “Music is permanent,” he wrote “only listening is intermittent.”(註19) “Chance” and “silence” were his transports into this transcendental domain. “Chance”procedures allowed the composer to bypass his subjective preferences and habits in order to make way for sonic conjunctions and assemblages that were not his own, or, indeed, anybody’s (an“impersonal” and “preindividual” music, as Deleuze would call it). And “silence,” for Cage,named a sort of musical plane of immanence: not the absence of sound (an impossibility, he pointed out), but the absence of intentional sound that opens our ears to liberated sound molecules.(註20)

Feldman, too, dedicated himself to exploring this “transcendental” sonic field. Claiming no interest in musical systems, structures, or forms, Feldman tried simply to provide a space for the experience of sounds themselves: their births, lives, and deaths. “I don’t have any secret,” Feldman once remarked, “but if I do have a point of view, it’s that sounds are very much like people. And if you push them, they push you back. So, if I have a secret: don’t push the sounds around.”(註21) As a result, Feldman’s compositions (or “assemblages,” as he preferred to call them(註22)) drift, devoid of syntax or connective tissue, concerned only with the growth and decay of sounds, which glide by a different rates and speeds.(註23)

Musique Concrète and Elektronische Musik: Schiz/Flux and the Univocity of Sound

An even greater shock to the classical musical work came with the advent of electronic music in its two basic forms: musique concrète (the tape composition that emerged from Pierre Schaeffer’s Paris studio in the late 1940s) and elektronische Musik (the classic electronic music of the European and American studios established in Cologne, Milan, and Princeton during the 1950s).

Both practices bypassed musical notation and the standard chain-of-command that ran from the composer through the conductor to the performer and listener. Instead, concrète and electronic compositions were experimentally constructed in the studio by a composer who was also the sole performer. At the same time, musique concrète and elektronische Musik foregrounded the univocity of the aural plane. Recording tape effectively dissolved the distinction between “music,” “sound,”and “noise,” providing a neutral surface that could register any sound whatsoever and make it the raw material for composition. Hence, musique concrète could dispense with the entire tonal and instrumental apparatus, ignoring traditional musical sonorities and the various discrete instruments and instrumental families that produce them. The electronic signal equally affirmed the univocity of sound, folding the entire musical apparatus back onto a stream of electrons generated by an oscillator. Emerging from this univocal sonic phylum, electronic sounds are distinguished solely by speeds and slownesses, by the contraction or dilation of flows by way of filters and modulators—a fact beautifully illustrated in Stockhausen’s Kontakte, where, half way through the piece, a gurgling sweep is slowed down to the point at which it is heard as a woody pulse.

Though distinguished by the sources of their material (musique concrète works with found sounds, elektronische Musik with sounds built, or “synthesized,” from scratch), both compositional practices operated essentially by way of collage or montage: the cutting and splicing of sonic fragments to create musical assemblages. As such, they very literally model the “schiz” and“flux” that characterize Deleuze and Guattari’s “desiring machines,” those basic connections between singularities and intensities that arise from and dissolve back into the body without organs. Indeed, in relation to the highly regulated and controlled body of classical music, musique concrète and elektronische Musik are polymorphously perverse, celebrating the ability to connect any part (or sound) with any other. This is particularly evident in musique concrète, which (like its heir, turntablism) delighted in connecting, for example, piano tones and percussive knocks with the sounds of train whistles, spinning tops, pots and pans, and canal boats.(註24) As such, a musique concrète composition is what Deleuze calls a becoming or a rhizome,

a pure and dispersed anarchic multiplicity, without any unity or totality, whose elements are welded and pasted together by the real distinction or the very absence of a link.(註25)

Like Cage and Feldman, musique concrète and elektronische Musik also disclosed music’s transcendental dimension. Though they began with documentary material, musique concrète composers such as Pierre Schaeffer celebrated the fact that tape music could give access to sound itself, liberated from source or reference.(註26) Via various techniques (eliminating a sound’s attack or decay, slowing it down or speeding it up, playing it backwards, etc.), Schaeffer and others succeeded in abstracting sounds from their sources, thus eliminating all referentiality and short-circuiting the auditory habits of listeners. Their ability to do this was aided by the fact that tape music was “performed” without any visual element to speak of: no performers or instruments, just pure sonic matter emitting from loudspeakers.

As such, electronic music is often criticized as “cold,” “impersonal,” “dehumanized,”“abstract.” Indeed, these descriptions are apt. Electronic music is anti-humanist music and ought to be affirmed as such. It opens up music to something beyond the human, the subject, and the person:the veritable non-organic life of sound that precedes any actual composition or composer, the virtual realm of preindividual and prepersonal sonic singularities and affects. Rather than a music of human desire (the singer, the performer), it is a music of machinic desire: the desiring machines of music and of the musical body without organs.