A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari

Author:Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari [Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Felix]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: philosophy
ISBN: 9780826476944
Google: B9xLrS6mpGoC
Amazon: 0816614024
Publisher: A&C Black
Published: 1987-12-20T23:00:00+00:00

1837: Of the Refrain

A child in the dark, gripped with fear, comforts himself by singing under his breath. He walks and halts to his song. Lost, he takes shelter, or orients himself with his little song as best he can. The song is like a rough sketch of a calming and stabilizing, calm and stable, center in the heart of chaos. Perhaps the child skips as he sings, hastens or slows his pace. But the song itself is already a skip: it jumps from chaos to the beginnings of order in chaos and is in danger of breaking apart at any moment. There is always sonority in Ariadne’s thread. Or the song of Orpheus.

Now we are at home. But home does not preexist: it was necessary to draw a circle around that uncertain and fragile center, to organize a limited space. Many, very diverse, components have a part in this, landmarks and marks of all kinds. This was already true of the previous case. But now the components are used for organizing a space, not for the momentary deter mination of a center. The forces of chaos are kept outside as much as possi ble, and the interior space protects the germinal forces of a task to fulfill or a deed to do. This involves an activity of selection, elimination and extrac tion, in order to prevent the interior forces of the earth from being sub merged, to enable them to resist, or even to take something from chaos across the filter or sieve of the space that has been drawn. Sonorous or vocal components are very important: a wall of sound, or at least a wall with some sonic bricks in it. A child hums to summon the strength for the schoolwork she has to hand in. A housewife sings to herself, or listens to the radio, as she marshals the antichaos forces of her work. Radios and televi sion sets are like sound walls around every household and mark territories (the neighbor complains when it gets too loud). For sublime deeds like the foundation of a city or the fabrication of a golem, one draws a circle, or bet ter yet walks in a circle as in a children’s dance, combining rhythmic vowels and consonants that correspond to the interior forces of creation as to the differentiated parts of an organism. A mistake in speed, rhythm, or har mony would be catastrophic because it would bring back the forces of chaos, destroying both creator and creation.

Finally, one opens the circle a crack, opens it all the way, lets some one in, calls someone, or else goes out oneself, launches forth. One opens the circle not on the side where the old forces of chaos press against it but in another region, one created by the circle itself. As though the circle tended on its own to open onto a future, as a function of the working forces it shel ters. This time, it is in order to join with the forces of the future, cosmic forces.

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