Fever Ray: Towards a Diagrammatic Conception of the Voice

A few notes, in relation to my writings on the course, as well as an earlier post on my personal blog. Hopefully, I will be able to organize this into more coherent pieces soon.

• Music is a molecular deterritorialization and machining of the voice, which pushes it away from language/signifying chains, and molar segments of man/woman.

• There is a question of a fully-real becoming other, which has nothing to do with imitation or symbolic representation.

• Taking DeLanda's reading of D&G's concept of the body without organs as a virtual body plan, out of which fully formed species and organisms differentiate, we have the basics for a diagrammatic conception of the voice (in the form of a neo-materialist idea of the genesis of the voice, opposed to the psychoanalytic idea of the maternal voice pre-birth).

• The problem is, then, how to differentiate the voice; to unfold its immanent virtualities, as opposed to (as Kaja Silverman does) localize points where it produces sexual difference.

• This, in turn, means conceiving of new media technologies not as "acoustic mirrors" (Silverman), or as the "analysts room" (Penman), but rather as a "possibility-space" (DeLanda), which is diagrammatic rather than fantasmatic, and which is characterized not so much by symbolic representation as by (what I'd like to call) electronic differentiation.

• In other words, it is all about rendering imperceptible forces perceptible (D&G).

• Fever Ray, in her music, uses sonic media in this way, in order to differentiate her voice electronically.

• It is no longer the voice of Karin-Dreijer Andersson, but a voice of a pure otherness, beyond the realm of fantasmatics.

• We do not yet know what a voice can do (modification of the Spinozist-influenced premise that Steve Goodman takes as his starting point in Sonic Warfare).

DeLanda on the Body without Organs

A long and in-depth talk on the body without organs, as well as several of the other things which were mentioned during the latest session, such as psychedelics, Spinoza's impersonal God, virtual diagrams and the question of the One vs. the Multiple (I really like the part near the end where he critizes Badiou and the student's are trying to dismiss it as false). Another important thing is Deleuze's use of science and mathematics, which is emphasized clearly in this talk, and which I think is important not to forget, since it is easy to just dismiss all of this as some kind of new-age thing, but that's far from the truth, as he points out.

Great session yesterday, particularly the discussion on the embodied voice in relation to Silverman (and D&G), which was something I hadn't thought of earlier. That will probably be useful for me when writing the essay(s).