Enjoy the Silence (The Sound of Micro-Revolutions)
“There is nothing major or revolutionary except the minor.”
That’s a thing that Deleuze and Guattari said once when they wrote about Kafka. I feel these words in my stomach (or maybe I’m hungry?) It is only in the tiniest micro-moments that revolution, that is to say true change, happens.
These minor moments are flowing everywhere, but also everywhere contained. (I tried to write about them once when I went to Texas.) For the most part, we have learned to ignore these moments; they are often hidden in plain sight. We keep “busy” (in fact, I think this is our newest status marker. “How are you?” “Good...so busy!”), which in turn obscures the minor from view. This, combined with the need to make sense (where is your point?!), creates a focus on meaning, on containment, on knowing.
Every so often, however, we might receive a minor shock; a dissonance; a moment of non-sense. This tiny shock to thought is what has the potential to jolt us from our habitual movements, from the repetition of the everyday. For me, it is here where true learning takes place. It is this notion of learning that I keep trying to articulate (I’m not sure if articulate is even the right word).
My enemy: language. Or, the word. Words are meaningless, and forgettable.
As Deleuze says, it is language that presides over sound, which for him is the object that the word designates. Language, in this way, reterritorializes sounds in sense, or meaning, and thus sound is no longer an organ of one of the senses, but rather it becomes an instrument of Sense. The irony of it is, I need this Sense, this language, to communicate. But, at the same time, it is this language that ultimately limits my communication.
So, one strategy I have found is to write about sound. Or rather, I am trying to write about sound. No, I am trying to write with sound. No, I am trying to think through sound. No, I am perhaps trying to free sound for what it is: a deterritorializing force.
That is to say, an object that has the potential to expose the minor, to come crashing in, into my little world.
