Crystallization of culture through analysis: Deleuzian and psychoanalytic reflections

Abstract

Cultures do not exist in isolation, contained within regional or ethnic boundaries, or as immutable, ossified entities. The need to study their changes and interactions gives rise to the concepts of multi-/inter-/cross-/trans-/culturality (for the present purpose distinctions between these terms will not be addressed, with transculturality used as an umbrella term). Transculturality, however, is not (only) something that exists in a given cultural artefact, but arises through collaboration between various actors, and when music is concerned, the important role is played by the listener and the analyst. Different analytical approaches do not only illuminate, but effectively construct different aspects of the work, including those facets that can be ascribed to different cultures. The present essay examines how this plays out in music, with special emphasis on the pentatonic scale. Examples from various genres, regions, and styles will be used, the primary one being the composition Hadedas for cello and piano by Serbian composer Srđan Hofman. Freely borrowing certain concepts from Deleuze (and Guattari), I argue that pentatonicism, as part of diverse cultural assemblages, can be highly territorialized, yet possess nomadic qualities. The deterritorialization (“lines of flight”) – reterritorialization processes are “out-of-phase” activities of the composer and the analyst. Further along these lines, we can describe such processes in terms of what could tentatively be called (as per Manuel DeLanda) Deleuze’s ontological dimensions: virtual/chaotic – intensive (“molecular”, related to heat, velocity etc.) – extensive (“molar”, as an object given in time and space). Any cultural activity, whether emphasizing creativity, performance or interpretation, engages a field of interacting forces, where both individual works and individual cultures are established around certain pre-individual singularities, emerging as partially “crystallized” entities with fuzzy boundaries. Finally, in order to account for music’s remarkable predilection for embodying and blending diverse cultural contexts, the essay takes a psychoanalytic turn, and – assuming powerful connections between music and the unconscious – invokes primary-process mechanisms, particularly condensation, and subject-object ambiguity.