Summary of Chapter 11: Of the Refrain.
This key chapter explores the concept of the “refrain,” though Emma Ingala argues, persuasively, that this would be better translated as ritornello (Ingala 2018). Ingala also points out that 1837 is the date of Schumann’s Études symphoniques (and Schumann fittingly reappears throughout the text, as a refrain/ritornello...). The image is Paul Klee’s Twittering Machine, very apt because it captures many of the chapter’s themes visually, and because Klee’s writings on art are one of the key interlocuting texts.
The chapter begins with three “aspects” of the refrain: a child whistling in the dark, a circle drawn to organize a space, and a crack opening for a venturing forth. In my initial notes (from who knows when) I labeled these as skip, (which “jumps from chaos to the beginnings of order in chaos” (311)), circle, and crack. Ingala terms them “in the dark,” “at home,” and “towards the world.” The central theme is how order is organized to protect against chaos, yet there needs also to be an opening to chaos, to prevent going to far into rigidity and death.
Every milieu is a refrain, “a block of space-time constituted by the periodic repetition of the component” (313). With the example of living things, they delineate four kinds of milieus (exterior, interior, intermediary, and annexed) which exist in relation to it:
Thus the living thing has an exterior milieu of materials, an interior milieu of composing elements and composed substances, an intermediary milieu of membranes and limits, and an annexed milieu of energy sources and actions-perceptions.
They then discuss this in term of their concept of transduction/transcoding, clearly based in part on Simondon’s transduction, though expanded in the Deleuzo-Guattarian manner. Whereas S’s transduction, as far as I can tell, connects technical elements through subsequent historical stages of technology, or from one ensemble to another, for D&G, is
the manner in which one milieu serves as the basis for another, or conversely is established atop another milieu, dissipates in it or is constituted in it. The notion of the milieu is not unitary: not only does the living thing continually pass from one milieu to another, but the milieus pass into one another, they are essentially communicating. The milieus are open to chaos, which threatens them with exhaustion or intrusion.
They insist on the difference between rhythm (good) and meter (bad); while the latter is mere repetition, the former is repetition with difference. This is also why, per Ingala, ritornello is a better translation into English (of French ritournelle), than “refrain.” While the latter invokes the repeated chorus of a song, the former is a recurring variation on a theme. So, it would be more like a chorus with at least some of the words changed each time, or a repeated phrase that takes on different meanings in new contexts? Because (as Ingala explains clearly), a home needs to protect against the chaos outside, but also be open to it, or else it becomes a prison. So, there is a structure that delineates a distinct space/time, but must be open and not fully predictable in content, etc. “Meter is dogmatic, rhythm is critical...”
A milieu does in fact exist by virtue of a periodic repetition, but one whose only effect is to produce a difference by which the milieu passes into another milieu. It is the difference that is rhythmic, not the repetition, which nevertheless produces it: productive repetition has nothing to do with reproductive meter. This is the “critical solution of the antinomy.” (314)
(This last is a reference to Kant.) The relation between refrains and territory/territorialization is then explored, through art, territorial motifs, and literature. “Professional refrains,” aka merchant’s cries, are interrogated as a key type. They give a general definition of refrain, which intentionally does not privilege sound:
we call a refrain any aggregate of matters of expression that draws a territory and develops into territorial motifs and landscapes(there are optical, gestural, motor, etc., refrains). (323)
A territory is always en route to an at least potential deterritorialization, even though the new assemblage may operate a reterritorialization (something that “has-the-value-of” home). (326)
They classify four types of refrain: 1) territorializing; 2) territorializing refrains that play a certain function in an assemblage 3) the same, in variation with each other, as in nursery rhymes sung differently in different neighborhoods; 4) “refrains that collect or gather forces, either at the heart of the territory, or in order to go outside it (these are refrains of confrontation or departure that sometimes bring on a movement of absolute deterritorialization: ‘Goodbye, I’m leaving and I won't look back’” (327).
Having drawn extensively on ethological accounts of bird songs, etc., they make an interesting argument for the advantage ethologists have over ethnologists, namely that “they did not fall into the structural danger of dividing an undivided ‘terrain’ into forms of kinship, politics, economics, myth, etc. The ethologists have retained the integrality of a certain undivided ‘terrain’” (328). To an extent it is, specifically, the structuralist ethnology of the mid-Twentieth century which they are criticizing, but more generally they could be making a case for not separating out the animal from the human as different realms to be understood separately (I have in the margin, “cf. Kropotkin,” no doubt for his insistence that anarchists can learn from the study of the natural world). D&G are also criticizing ethologists who rely on concepts like inhibition and release, or instinct, because these are also reductionist and are essentially giving up said advantage. In a larger sense, this is also a reflection of their deeper theme, the non-division of the world into separate realms that operate differently and are understood with different sciences; part of D&G’s agenda is to create one set of concepts and terminology which can discuss ethology, ethnology, economics, geology, linguistics, chemistry, etc. ... And so here, in counter to “instinct,” they proffer their own concepts of rhizomaticity, and “behavioral-biological ‘machinics.’”
They summarize the chapter so far:
We have gone from stratified milieus to territorialized assemblages and simultaneously, from the forces of chaos, as broken down, coded, trans-coded by the milieus, to the forces of the earth, as gathered into the assemblages. Then we went from territorial assemblages to interassemblages, to the opening of assemblages along lines of deterritorialization; and simultaneously, the same from the ingathered forces of the earth to the deterritorialized, or rather deterritorializing, Cosmos. (337)
They outline a theory of the stages of classicism, romanticism, and modernism, which bear affinity to the previously mentioned aspects of in-the-dark, at-home, and towards-the-world (and like these, they do not constitute an “evolution” (346)). In my review of the previous chapter I made the error of thinking the refrain/ritornello would play a similar role in music to that of the face in visual art; nevertheless, it is still apt that modernism (in art and music) is about resisting the sort of too-rigid refrain in the second aspect, that risks falling back into fascism or death; and this is the importance of the third, Modernist stage, with its openness to the “Cosmos,” aka the plane of consistency [though fascism is a modernist disease].
They now again classify types of refrains (347):
1) “milieu refrains, with at least two parts, one of which answers the other (the piano and the violin)”;
2) “natal refrains, refrains of the territory, where the part is related to the whole, to an immense refrain of the earth, according to relations that are themselves variable and mark in each instance the disjunction between the earth and the territory (the lullaby, the drinking song, hunting song, work song, military song, etc.)”;
3) “folk and popular refrains, themselves tied to an immense song of the people, according to variable relations of crowd individuations that simultaneously bring into play affects and nations (the Polish, Auvergnat, German, Magyar, or Romanian, but also the Pathetic, Panicked, Vengeful, etc.)”;
4) “molecularized refrains (the sea and the wind) tied to cosmic forces, the Cosmos refrain.”
5) “For the Cosmos itself is a refrain,”
6) “and the ear also (everything that has been taken for a labyrinth is in fact a refrain).”
(Though possibly 4, 5, and 6 were all intended as one type?) After mentioning ears (but not, alas, pursuing the idea of the labyrinth), they reject the “privileging of the ear;” as Ingala stresses, this chapter is not about music, in the sense that music is only one form in which refrains/ritornellos manifest. Nevertheless they end the chapter with a discussion of “the potential fascism of music” (348), and of types of refrains involved in music, and return finally to the importance of Schumann, whose name returns as a closing refrain.
Ingala, Emma (2018) “Of the Refrain (The Ritornello)” in Somers-Hall and Bell, eds., A Thousand Plateaus and Philosophy. Edinburgh University Press.
