DANCE IS THE IMAGE OF THE UNIVERSE
Deleuze and Guattari identified that territory is established through the technology of the refrain. Rhythm acts as the Body of the Song: its beats are that to which the rest of the performance judges itself. Rates of re/deterritorialization are mapped onto the rhythmic strata, which is the mathematic plane of the refrain. Melody provides the expressive layer atop the rhythm: it is where the Body is subjectified into song.
Within the non-rhythmic milieu, there are movements towards territoriality (recursion of melody, set key, etc.,) and away from territoriality (key changes, improvisation, etc.). In the movement away, new territories are established in relation to the rhythm: fresh melodic patterns overcode prior ones within the rhythm’s structuralism.
Life is dance, the body is dance, the movement of the material is dance.
Dance is the movement of the actual, the Hari-Krisna sway of the Real. Dance is a-temporal: at every vitrified instance, all prior movements are infolding and all future movements are unfolding.
The virtual is built only through time, i.e. memory (the refrain of thought).
It builds each moment of dance out into a total picture. However, memory carries the same dangers of photography, albeit in far more fluid form: lens distortion, lighting, etc., all overcode some aspect of the Real.
Learning to play music (to dance with sound) is the process of temporally narrowing the virtual as much as possible into the extreme limit of the actual.
Between the body and the mind, the Cartesian barbed wire is vaulted over in the moments of absolute flow. Each note contains all prior notes and predicts all following notes. Even errors (like an untuned string) remain in flow as the negative aspect of a sonic milieu (that which is exterior to it, the colonial Other of music). Further, the whole sonic machine is in a state of absolute connection: each instrument is an emitter of sound-signs, which intermingle into a third term that is greater than the sum of its parts (the song is the n+1 assemblage of a sonic plane). Dancing is the same: the body is no different than an instrument; no instrument can act without a body, it is just a machinic extension, incorporating into the assemblage.
Nothing is more alien to absolute dance than performance.
Performance exists in the virtual: it is the simulation of flow, a television imitation of the becoming-dancer. Performance requires a subject-object relation in which there is an observer inscribing the becoming-dance flow into a being-dance image. Whether the performer is becoming-flow or becoming-image is immaterial to this procedure: it is the exterior subject that transmutes dance into performance in a primitive accumulation of the immediate spectacle.
The crowd is where dance flourishes.
The dancer is a factory, producing dance, connecting flows, parodying universal coitus in the movement of the pack. The Universal Body is one of total participation; every particle moves along its own refrain. Refrains concatenate, songs are built (bodies, monads, etc.) Within the total symphony of the material, each song is becoming in relation to every other song.
Dance synchronizes body and mind; it forgets Descartes and Christ simultaneously.
Empire is the browbeat of drums, war drums, on the horizon. It loudly drowns out the polyvocal melody of the word for a droll repetition; that which deterritorializes the rhythm grows decreasingly audible to all but to keen-eared madmen. Performance is the Universal History of Capital: it is that which transmutes the whole swirling refrain of the world into an image, a telos towards metropolitanism.
Revolution is Dance:
It is the movement between the rhythms;
It enunciates the desire of the crowd;
It is the revolutionary ego-death that builds collective subjectivity, the pure movement of revolutionary consciousness.
Neoliberalism is a danse-macabre: a dry funereal drum, marching forward the images of history towards hell. Revolution will only come through improvisation, immanent dance, which brings life back into this dead computer world.
as you said when i first asked you for help with a thousand plateaus, the goal shouldn’t be to understand d&g’s work completely and sequentially but rather to allow thought patterns that they introduce to take root in you and begin processes of proliferation. with this piece i can tell that im starting to taste the fruits grown by the conceptual vines sprawling across my brain. they’re delicious.
the use of dance as a lens is a good choice and has lots of emotional resonance for me, especially w/r/t the “third term” you’ve been talking about in interpersonal relations. i sense the possibility of a connection between that idea of an assemblage greater than the sum of its parts and hofstadter’s theory of consciousness, dm me if you wanna hear more.
love how it kinda decomposes into chanting, a perfect match of form and content—i can’t remember the last time that reading words made me feel goosebumps before this. it's so fucking cool that you made this and let us see it!!