Saturday, September 04 1999 about 9am
Kneeling on the cushions of the love seat, facing over its back and yelling at the closed window, Kendall is telling the kids on the street below to knock it off. "Be quiet! My dad is writing!" They cannot hear her, of course. She knows that. Her shout is for my benefit. Kendall came upstairs (into this cramped attic workspace) fifteen minutes ago and asked if she could stay if she was very quiet. And she was -- for about ten seconds. Actually, I was the one who broke those seconds of silence by laughing out loud when I looked over at her. Seated, just then, on my little workspace love seat, head cupped in her hands, leaning forward with elbows on her standard issue six-year-old knobby knees, she's pretending to just look off across the room into blank space or maybe it's some of her kitty drawings pinned to the opposite wall that are barely holding her attention. But she's looking from the corner of her eye to see if I'm looking. It's a little act ("watch me be good"). It's too much. Our mutual pretense is broken (pretending to be capable of writing, pretending to able to be quiet). I laugh and say, "You're a goose." Kendall replies, in a lilt: "Nah-uh, I'm a genie in a bottle, baaay-bee." And she is.

And I am. No longer writing, that is. But that's alright. I've long been a believer in Walter Benjamin's thirteen writing commandments from One-Way Street, especially the first bit about how after completing a stint of writing, one should deny one's self "nothing that will not prejudice the next" and his number seven which says, "Never stop writing just because you have run out of ideas." But I haven't exactly run out of ideas. Just time. So, I asked Gil about maybe running, with apologies, this now almost four-year old essay of mine from a very, very small (and now-defunct) southeastern Pennsylvania arts and politics magazine called 13. Between November 1994 to February 1996, I wrote a monthly column in 13 called "Fear of a Blank Planet." The idea, now, is that I'd continue with the same column title here in CULTSTUD-L-cyberspace (though, of course, with new material). However, the start of the fall semester and too many other ongoing projects (as well as the genie in a bottle yelling at the closed window) have conspired against me this time around. So, to head off any possible confusion: the presently six-year old Kendall is two-and-a-half years old in the essay below. And although Kendall is interrupting my writing at the moment, what follows is a song she taught me.

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Do you ever wonder what is music? Who invented it and what for and all that? And why hearing a certain song can make a whole time of your life suddenly just rise up and stick in your brain?
          Lynda Barry (1988: 7)

It is not just a matter of music but of how to live...
          Gilles Deleuze (1970/1988: 123)

In what has to be one of the more unusual but memorable pop songs of the last few years, Iceland's almost sole entry in the international pop stardom sweepstakes, Bjork sings, in her "Hyper-Ballad," about living at the top of a mountain and walking to the edge of a cliff every morning to throw things over the side. "Little things," she sings, "like car-parts, bottles, and cutlery or whatever I find lying around." It has "become a habit," she tells her lover: something that makes her "feel happier / to be safe up here with you." Then, at the end of the song, she has a flash of revelation. Listening to the objects one morning as they descend and smash fills her, suddenly, with a curious desire. What if she followed? "Imagine what my body would sound like / slamming against those rocks / And when it lands / will my eyes / be closed or open?"

The images that these words conjure up are funny and jarring and child-like in their fusion of wonder and mayhem. And Bjork's voice, as anyone who has heard it knows, is a glorious mess of warbles and swoops and growls and shrieks and purrs; she sounds less like someone living at the top of a mountain somewhere in Iceland and more like a visitor from another planet. But this voice fits the lyric imagery of most of her songs and she's finally found a background sound -- moving away from the skewered rock of her former band, the Sugarcubes, to the postmodern pulse and space of trip-hop -- that provides a more complementary atmosphere to her subject matter and singular vocal style. When my wife first heard Bjork's song, "Hyper-Ballad," her immediate response was "English isn't her first language, is it?" "No, I guess not," I remember responding. But what I want to add is this: English -- even (and, of course, especially) for those of us born in English-speaking countries -- isn't our first language either. Allow me to explain.

Next to rock and roll pioneer Roy Orbison, Bjork is the favorite singer of our two-and-half year old daughter Kendall. Perhaps it is not easy to understand why she'd like two singers who -- at first listen -- seem thousands of miles apart in lots of ways: geographically, lyrically, respirationally, rhythmically, etc. But I'd argue that Kendall's pleasure in their music can probably be attributed to the fact that both singers are so seemingly otherworldly in their vocal mannerisms and so excessive in their style. Like Bjork, Orbison's voice is so wildly expressive that it can serve as an odd-shaped but flexible container for all sorts of disparate images and emotions: goofiness and grace, vulnerability and aggression, wonder and terror, dread and joy. Both Orbison and Bjork have voices that communicate, first, as pure, almost undisciplined sound (although both singers also clearly demonstrate a high degree of vocal control at the same time) before their voices convey recognizable words that signify any particular meaning.

Because Kendall is just learning to speak -- learning to form her lips to the correct shape, learning to perch her tongue at the right spot against her palate, learning how to put her teeth together (or keep them apart) by adjusting the upper and lower jaws, learning to breath in the way that is proper for separating out consonants and vowels and syllables -- she is currently attracted, I believe, not so much to what people say but how they say it. This attention to how manifests itself within and across different senses: in particular, hearing, touching (e.g., putting hands to someone's face as they speak), and seeing. One of the other things that my wife and I have noticed is that Kendall is particularly attentive to music videos that display close-ups of the performer's faces (especially their mouths): so that she can also get some additional sense of how one's face should look (the variety of facial postures assumed) as the words are sung. We rarely think of the physical act of speaking or singing as "machinic" but it really is this unique combination of sinewy levers, rubbery modulators, fleshy gears, and enamel air-flow disrupters. In short, Kendall is seeking clues about how this whole language thing is done and that is precisely what Roy Orbison and Bjork are offering.

Orbison's vocal approach is to elongate his words, to take unexpected flight toward the upper reaches of his voice range, to quiver with palpable emotion through certain notes or phrases, and, perhaps best of all (for Kendall anyway), he enunciates very distinctly. Meanwhile, Bjork's singing is like a warped lesson in phonetics; she vocally works over the space within and between words, teasing out extra sounds from the almost infinite mixture of postures for the teeth, tongue, lips, and palate. Hearing Kendall attempt to sing along with Bjork's "Army of Me" is a pure joy and provides insight into Bjork's rather unorthodox English pronunciation skills. The chorus of the song is "And if you complain once more / you'll meet an army of me" but Kendall sings "Enif ooo gumlane unmower / ooo mia ah-me ahh me." And that's actually a pretty fair approximation. Without the lyric sheet in front of me, I couldn't have done much better.

Again, Kendall is drawn to the vocal techniques of Roy Orbison and Bjork because their highly individualistic styles manage to convey something more than the actual words that they sing. It is this "something more" -- this "virtual" excess (overfull with the variety of potentials lodged in-between) over "the actual" signification -- that Kendall has latched onto. This extra-presentational style actually works in two interrelated but slightly different manners. First, as I have already tried to outline, there are its more purely physical properties (the "machinic" aspects of speaking and singing).¹ The second aspect is, however, slightly harder to describe because, although it still can have particular physical manifestations and effects, it is much more closely involved with feelings and emotions that can act on the entire body rather than just those aural and visual markers that reveal something about the language-producing apparatus of mouth-face-vocal chords-and-lungs.

That is, Kendall not only responds to Bjork or Orbison because they seem to offer good language-making models for her to try and duplicate but, additionally, because -- as singers or, more importantly, as sound -- they have found a way to somehow touch or resonate with her body in a special way. Like you or me, Kendall likes certain music simply because it is more fun or is more "intense" (like Bjork's screams, for instance, in "It's Oh So Quiet" or Orbison's wailing falsetto in "It's Over") and, thus, often unusually pleasurable. But this pleasure still has nothing to do with language as words, sentences, structure or syntax (i.e., Kendall -- although bright for her age -- still couldn't make sense of half of the lyrics even if I read them to her). This second aspect, this "other" language of resonances and intensities, is what -- I want to argue next -- we learn long before English or whatever our particular "native tongue" might happen to be. At an early age, even when we (as very young children) may not yet be 'experts" on how the whole mouth apparatus works to produce words and meaning, we have already become quite fluent -- both as "speakers" and interpreters -- in this language of resonances.

Psychologists, neurologists, philosophers, Lawrence Grossberg, and others have regularly referred to this other language as "affect." Our ability to comprehend and participate in this "language" of affect has a direct bearing on how we process emotion and feeling and how we come to make "sense" of our surrounding environment -- not just as children -- but throughout our entire lives. Without a doubt, affect is our first and remains, throughout our lives, as our most fundamental relationship to the world around us.

An early word of caution, though, might be in order here -- one should not confuse affect with emotion. While they can be and often are linked, affects and emotions are not synonymous. Affect is primary, while emotion is secondary; one might even say that the former is more immersive or "immanent," whereas the latter marks the emergence of a separation between foreground/background, subject/object, inside/outside and is, thus, "transcendent." Affect is the term that describes the passages of intensity (or the seeming relative lack thereof) that accompany the experience of living. Although it does contribute to such things, affect itself is neither happy nor sad nor angry nor is it, in any straightforward way, especially mood-like: as emotions often are. In his book, Descartes' Error, neurologist Antonio Damasio writes that affect -- which he calls "bodily background feeling" (1994: 150-155) -- is what happens "between emotions" and is always prior to or otherwise outside of conscious thought. More than consciousness and more than emotion, it is affect that gives us our "sense of being" or, better, our "sense of being alive."

Before this gets too abstract, stop and consider this: we (or, at least, I) can sometimes go for fairly long stretches of time without thinking any thoughts in particular or feeling any especially strong emotion but, in spite of this, we (or I) do not fall apart nor does our world crumble. But if you lose contact, even briefly, with affect (and I doubt that this has ever actually happened to many of us), it is almost as if a shadow has fallen, momentarily, across your soul or it is as if you have been, somehow, hollowed out. Without that steady state of background pulse and faintest hum of life, the sense of connectedness to our "selves" and the world around us immediately evaporates.

In fact, in an essay entitled "The Disembodied Lady," clinical neurologist and best-selling author Oliver Sacks describes a woman who has lost the ability to perceive the on-going physical states of her own body. Ever after, her most basic day-to-day functions (sitting, walking, smiling, talking) require a great deal of mental concentration (e.g., she must look at her legs and will them to move, etc). The woman (whom Sacks refers to only as "Christina") has lost touch -- because of irreparable damage to a certain network of key nerve fibers -- with her body's sense of "proprioception." As Sacks defines it, proprioception is the "continuous but unconscious sensory flow from the movable parts of our body (muscles, tendons, joints), by which their position and tone and motion are continually monitored and adjusted, but in a way which is hidden from us because it is automatic and unconscious" (1987: 43). Christina remarks, "I feel my body is blind and deaf to itself ... it has no sense of itself. . . . It's like something's been scooped right out of me, right at the centre" (51). But, as Sacks notes, her emotions are still very much intact: "her inner emotions were of full and normal intensity" (50). Notice here that the variety and fluctuations of emotion can continue, even without the body as background. Emotion, in this case, is not what has turned up missing. Instead, affect has. Affect is what accompanies the body, not unlike a kind of incorporeal body-double (hence why it is sometimes not very difficult to slip from affect toward a discussion of the "soul"), as it moves through lived/living space and time.²

Body and soul: no longer think of them as two supposedly separate things -- like the different floors of a house -- but, rather, as intimately folded together. Affect serves as their connector: a connector that can operate in any number of potential ways -- passive link, active passage, generating motor, double hinge. Further, I should stress that affect belongs as much to what is outside of us (even if that "outside" is sometimes our own bodies!) as to what is inside of us. An emotion, meanwhile, transpires much more decidedly on the interior: as a "subjective" moment of lived experience undergone by a someone. Thus, while an emotion ultimately belongs to you, affect constitutes a belonging to the outside, a becoming with the world.

Perhaps a famous literary example will also help to clarify some of what I mean here. In "Swann's Way," the famous opening volume of Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past (or, its more literal translation: In Search of Lost Time), the novel's narrator bites into a tea-soaked madeleine that suddenly triggers childhood memories of his early life in the town of Combray. The narrator could not have remembered this portion of his childhood without the cake provoking his senses and sending him reeling back through the years. Unlike a voluntary memory, there is nothing particularly conscious or "mental" about the act of recall that Proust describes. This memory -- an involuntary memory -- was produced by the chance re-encounter of his body with the cake. Proust's main character could not voluntarily bring forth these particular memories from out of his own head because they were contained in the interaction of cake (because it was similar to those that he'd regularly eaten as a child) to body (the body's senses can remember in ways that the conscious thought cannot). So, again, there are two things to consider about affect: (1) affect more immediately resides/subsists in bodies than in minds but (2) more than residing in bodies, affect takes place most often at the intersection of you (outside of the subjective person that says "I" and, instead, works via the more impersonal "you": the any-"you"-whatever) and potentially anything outside of it.

Need another example? Please return to the opening quote from Lynda Barry and try this experiment. Pull some old song that you haven't heard in several years off of the shelf or, better yet, have someone else surprise you by picking something -- again, preferably a few years old -- out of your music collection at random. In the first few notes of this long-forgotten song, do you notice a subtle change in your body chemistry? Maybe you cannot consciously recall any specific past incident involving the song (good or bad or indifferent) nor can you remember any particular emotion that is connected to the song (like you were in love or feeling alone or angry) -- and, in fact, my point is better demonstrated if neither of these things (neither a recalled image or particular emotion) presents itself -- but the song effects a change upon you nonetheless. This is what happens when your current affective body-state brushes up against, often unexpectedly, an earlier affective state: one from which it has since evolved but never entirely shed.

I like what Lynda Barry says about the affect of music. Why is it, she asks, that "hearing a certain song can make a whole entire time of your life [though nothing especially specific] suddenly just rise up and stick in your brain?" You realize that the affective power of music lies in its ability to fold the space of lived contexts into temporal moments in your lived history. Music and this kind of involuntary/(in)corporeal memory don't interact to necessarily always deposit specific events or consciously perceived emotions into your mind and/or onto your body: such an occurrence is probably more rare than you'd think. But, instead, they gather up aspects of a particular context or duration ("a whole entire time of your life"), and, rather than anything especially specific or eventful, it is the "aura" of this lived space-time that is retained.

Imagine this: imagine that you could revisit a house where you spent a good deal of time while growing up. What would climbing the stairs to the attic or gazing out of the living room window into the backyard conjure up that you could not do just by consciously trying to remember everything that might have happened there? Who knows? Perhaps a particular affect waits for you in those spaces: a chance encounter with lost time. Certainly, you might -- right now -- be able to recall certain significant events: like the time that you were coming down the stairs from the attic and you heard the news that your grandfather had just died or the time that you looked out the living room window and saw your mother teaching your little sister how to make snow angels. But affect isn't really about such notable or "significant" events. Affect arises from out of the slow, steady, and continual accumulation of seeming insignificances: the very stuff that slips beneath your conscious attention because it is barely worth noticing, the stuff that registers without any particular emotion getting attached to it. It is, in fact, these affective insignificances that make up more (much more!) of who you are and how you act (and re-act) than those other bigger events and powerful emotions that are supposed to mean so much.

Thus, years from now, if Kendall should perhaps hear a song by Bjork or Roy Orbison, maybe she will smile and maybe she'll feel some unlocatable sense of safety and warmth and joy. And, perhaps, she will pause to wonder why it is that she feels this way and where exactly this sensation is coming from. And, perhaps, she will try to remember something (a certain time, a particular place) that never ever really presented itself to be forgotten.

Retrace, Unfold
But, now that we've gone this far, it seems necessary to correct a slight misunderstanding that I may have already created about the nature of affect. In the account as just given, I have probably made affect seem too "wistful": like it is merely some kind of accident of bodily memory. However, there is a great deal more to affect than just this affiliation with the different interworkings of body and memory. (Memory is merely one of the most convenient ways to begin talking about affect: because, most usually, we can all find something in our own lived experiences -- with memory and forgetting, in particular -- that reveals certain affective characteristics.) Indeed, affect helps to constitute, not only a body's relation to its past, but to its present and future potential as well. Affect isn't only about what -- and maybe where -- you've been. Even more, affect contributes to what -- and maybe how -- you're becoming.

When you really think about it, if affect is related to the steady accumulation of daily insignificances, then the past isn't something that you just cast off and leave behind: like last summer's sunburned skin or that snapshot of yourself as a geeky fourteen year old. Instead, the past continues to persist right alongside the present: like a filmstrip slowly winding onto its take-up reel, where the previous hour (of lived space-time) is only a few layers away from the present one ... and the future is continuing to spool off of the supply reel.

To be more accurate, affect is not actually the most precise term to use in designating this ongoing accumulation of everyday time and space.³ Affect, in its less wistful and more forward [future] looking guise, is more about what happens when this accumulation reaches a certain density or when it is struck by a vibrancy that causes the collection to behave like an unsettled atmosphere: moving, now, toward a moment of condensation. When these insignificances have added up to something that is no longer so seemingly insignificant or when these insignificances have jostled together in such a way that they cross a threshold to become something (an entire accumulation contracted into a singular point) at least dimly felt by a body or impinging on the fringes of consciousness, then, this is affect. Sometimes it might arrive like a boom(!), like thunder and lightning. Most other times, a much more subtle and ongoing kind of soul-realignment results. Regardless of how its arrival is announced, this crossing of a threshold, as a "continual melodic line of variation," is what more properly counts as affect.⁴ Thereafter, you are no longer exactly the same as you were just a moment before.

The best "popular" illustration that I can think of here is the movie Groundhog Day. In it, Bill Murray's lead character, Phil, is forced to continually live out the banal events of the same day over and over again. When he wakes up tomorrow morning, it will still be yesterday but, yet, he has to live it once more as if it were his present time. And what happens? Phil begins to accumulate these insignificances: at first, his character resists but -- eventually -- he discovers (and acts upon) those things that are life-affirming within these insignificances. When Phil has learned to affirm this entire accumulation (this eternally repetitious, lived duration of twenty-four hours), he wakes up one morning to discover that it is, indeed, tomorrow and that he is no longer the same person that he was before. Affect is like that; it speaks to the variably lived infinities of the past, to the resolute urgency of the living present, and to your potential to become what you're not.

A great deal of this essay as told above is indebted to the writings of both Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (whether writing together or alone). Perhaps no one more than these two has done quite as much to find and follow out the innumerable trajectories where affect can lead. And, as I have come to discover, affect can send you off in some of the most unforeseen directions. Its arrival can quite often come as either the most welcome or unwelcome kind of surprise. In fact, it must be noted that, in the midst of writing the original version of this brief essay, a moment of what I can only call the most sadly ironic and unfortunate serendipity transpired: an event. Instantly, within that moment and without really changing a word of my text (except for its last paragraph), a short magazine essay that I'd intended only as a sort of homage to someone who, as I was prepared to argue, deserved to be part of that very, very short list of the world's greatest living philosophers was instantaneously and incorporeally transformed into an unintended eulogy for Gilles Deleuze.

On November 4, 1995, Deleuze joined that far longer list of great but deceased philosophers. But, needless to say, Gilles Deleuze -- like Félix Guattari, who passed away August 29, 1992 -- is dead only in the most mundane sense of now-inert flesh. But, because Deleuze and Guattari wrote books and essays so brimming over with life and joy -- so many truly life-affirming writings between them -- they will continue to be something more than just another name or pair of names to add to or check off some list. Best of all, Deleuze and Guattari (almost literally) tore the head off of most other philosophy. As Deleuze liked to say: we have, in essence, spent too much time wondering about what happens inside of our heads and that it is time to also find out what a body can do. Additionally, Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy is musical: not because they wrote about music very much (although they did on more than one occasion) but because the force of their thought can produce a similar kind of affect/effect. That is, nothing else, so far as I know, can move you -- body and soul -- like a great pop song but Deleuze and Guattari's work is often capable of accomplishing the same.⁵ How does philosophy or thought move and what gets it to move (and, thus, makes it moving)? Affect, as Deleuze and Guattari knew, can provide answers to these questions by revealing that, in the end, they aren't really separate questions at all but, rather, one and the same question.

Although I refuse to dwell on the nature of Deleuze's own death (because, again, there will always be such an abundance of life in his writings), there are more than a few cruel ironies about it -- especially when they are placed in relation to the Bjork song that opens this introduction -- that I feel sincerely compelled to mention. Deleuze died at age 70 and, by most accounts, the last years of his life were apparently lived in a good deal of pain. Known almost as much for the vibrant intensity of his lectures and his "flowing and complex" speaking style as for the actual contents of his philosophy, lung cancer and a tracheotomy eventually stole away much of Deleuze's own language-producing apparatus of mouth-face-vocal chords-and-lungs.⁶ Further, in his writing, Deleuze would often remark on the role of "habit" played in our everyday lives -- "we are nothing more than habits, the habit of saying 'I,'" Deleuze wrote (on occasions too numerous to cite, from the first book to the very last): habits as just a way to start the day, a necessary zone of safety from which we could dare to venture out toward other territories. But, even more, all of Deleuze's writings, like Guattari's, are filled with desire: a desire to find out how objects and the object-world speak to us, through us: a life, a single plane, immanence. Standing at the edge of her cliff every morning, Bjork wonders what her body will sound like slamming into the earth below. When Gilles Deleuze leapt from his Paris apartment window on November 4, 1995 he found out.

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Notes

^*For Jackie, who knows the refrain and all of the verses. [back]

1. See Felix Guattari's "Machinic Orality and Virtual Ecology" (1992/1995: 88-97), an essay to which this writing owes one of its most immediate debts. [back]

2. It will be necessary to subtract the word "bodily" from Damasio's phrase "bodily background feeling." The problem with such a conception is that the body merely becomes the newly substituted site for the theoretical space that the mind has traditionally been held to occupy. Just as the old "brain in a vat" view of neurology has fallen by the wayside so, too, shall it be necessary to move beyond a maneuver that simply resituates the brain within the body. Nothing much will be gained if we throw out theories that presuppose the "brain in a vat" and put in their place new arguments that do little more than envision the 'body in a vacuum.' That is, in the end, we will learn next to nothing if we simply ask "What is a body?" Instead, as Gilles Deleuze maintains (following Spinoza), we must ask "What can a body do?"

For more on proprioception and its conjunctions with affect and the virtual/actual circuit, see Brian Massumi's essay, "The Bleed: Where Body Meets Image" (1996). Massumi's "Autonomy of Affect" (1995) has also been very crucial to several of the ideas in this essay. And for more on minds- and brains-in-vats, see Bruno Latour's Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (1999: 1-17). [back]

3. The name that has been given to this processual "accumulation of everyday space/time" is "the virtual." The precipitation of this virtual accumulation into a single point/lived-living moment of individuation is called "the actual" (the end-product of this precipitation) and "actualization" (the process of precipitation itself). See Brian Massumi's User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1992: 167-170) for more on this vocabulary. What I am alluding to here is an argument that Massumi makes about how "[a]ctualization does not coax virtuality out of its impassivity, but instead holds its explosiveness in check, gingerly perturbing a potential out of it when it needs one" (169).

However, I also feel the need to pull back slightly from what might seem, in Massumi's account, to be an overly dramatic rendering of virtual/actual and affect. If one turns, for instance, to Deleuze's work in The Fold, it is possible to find a more temperate rendering of affect's workings and its connection with the virtual/actual planes. Deleuze conceives a subtlety of affect that need not always pass through a register of explosiveness and shock (which often turns problematic because it seems almost inevitably to end in hypotheses about a necessary "repression" that must arise in reaction to such shocks and similar psychic calamities). What if, for instance, the unconscious is less about trauma and repression and more about the active character of forgetting and the ever-unfolding commonplace of banality which transpire simultaneously within every passing moment? [back]

4. In a lecture on Spinoza, Deleuze (1978/1997) describes affect (or "affectus," in Spinoza's original Latin derivation) in the following way:

it is necessary to imagine Spinoza strolling about, and he truly lives existence as this kind of continuous variation: to the extent that an idea replaces another, I never cease to pass from one degree of perfection to another, however minuscule the difference, and this kind of melodic line of continuous variation will define affect [affectus] in its correlation with ideas and, at the same time, in its difference in nature from ideas.

[back]

5. See Deleuze's interview, "On Leibniz." He says, "Music -- are philosophers friends of music too? It seems clear to me that philosophy is truly an unvoiced song, with the same feel for movement that music has" (1990/1995: 163). [back]

6. Even the New York Times obituary (Whitney, 1995: D21) for Gilles Deleuze calls attention, in particular, to both his lectures at the University of Vincennes and his speaking style: described as being as "intoxicating" as the contents of thought that it expressed. And, in fact, Deleuze's voice has been incorporated into musical recordings released by a few progressive and electronic music groups. Ironically (especially given Bjork's geographical origins), one of the tracks -- on an album called Rhizosphere/Live at Bobino: Paris, France 1982 -- features an electronically reprocessed version of Deleuze's speaking voice. The song is entitled "1992: Iceland: The Fall" [Cuneiform Records, 1994]. [back]

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References

Barry, Lynda (1988) The Good Times Are Killing Me. Seattle: The Real Comet Press.

Damasio, Antonio (1994) Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons.

Deleuze, Gilles (1988) Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Trans. Robert Hurley. San Francisco: City Lights Books. (Originally published 1970).

----- (1993) The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Trans. Tom Conley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. (Originally published 1988).

----- (1995) Negotiations. Trans. Martin Joughin, New York: Columbia University Press (Originally published 1990).

----- (1997) "Seminar on Spinoza." Trans. Timothy Murphy. Deleuze Web [On-line], Available: http://www.imaginet.fr/deleuze/TXT/ENG/240178.html (Original lecture delivered on January 24, 1978).

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix (1994) What is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchill. New York: Columbia University Press (Originally published 1991).

Guattari, Félix (1995) "Machinic Orality and Virtual Ecology," Chaosmosis. Trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Latour, Bruno (1999) Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press.

Massumi, Brian (1992) A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

----- (1995) "The Autonomy of Affect," Cultural Critique 3: 83-109.

----- (1996) "The Bleed: Where Body Meets Image." In John Welchman (ed.) Rethinking Borders. London: Macmillan.

Sacks, Oliver (1987) The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. New York: Harper and Row.

Whitney, Craig (1995) "Obituary of Gilles Deleuze," New York Times, 7 November 1995: D21.