Memory and the Metaphysics of Music: Battersby's Move Away from Deleuze and Guattari

Abstract

This essay seeks to further elucidate and critically assess the distinct philosophical position of Christine Battersby through examining in closer detail her critique of Deleuze and Guattari. It begins by discussing Battersby's reading of Deleuze and Guattari's materialist metaphysics, which focuses on their evocation of the ‘refrain’ in A Thousand Plateaus. Through tracing their account of the material processes of repetition within the world of sound and music, Battersby acknowledges that Deleuze and Guattari offer an enticing alternative to the ‘top-down’ Kantian metaphysics of form over matter. However, she argues, the key problem is that Deleuze and Guattari seek to ‘bypass memory’, and end up establishing a false dichotomy between memory and repetition. In consequence, Deleuze and Guattari's ‘rhizomatics’ and ‘surface becomings’ block any investigation into the long-term patterns of repetition and memory that constitute specifically sexed, embodied modes of existence. Battersby turns instead to Kierkegaard's concept of repetition, which, she claims, brings memory and repetition together, showing that ‘repetition can mark out depths as well as surfaces’. The essay goes on to reassess Battersby's critique. It suggests a possible route for defending Deleuze against Battersby's charge that he seeks to ‘bypass memory’ by pointing out the pivotal role occupied by Bergson's concept of memory within Deleuze's solo-authored work. The essay concludes, however, by arguing that Battersby's critique of Deleuze as a resource for feminist philosophy nevertheless remains valid. This is because Deleuze's reworking of Bergson's concept of ‘virtual’ memory takes us no further towards the deeply ingrained material and historical patternings of female existence that Battersby seeks to give priority in her quest to overturn the androcentrism of western metaphysics.

Keywords:

• Christine Battersby
• Kant
• Deleuze
• Guattari
• feminist philosophy
• metaphysics
• music
• repetition
• memory

Notes

¹We can trace this idea to Difference and Repetition, where Deleuze (1994) focuses on ‘bare repetition’—the ontological dynamics of repetition ‘in-itself’.

²See, for example, various works by Rosi Braidotti, Clare Colebrook and Elizabeth Grosz.

³Deleuze draws a clear distinction between differentiation (difference imposed from without) and differentciation (self-becoming or originary difference) (Deleuze 1994: 258).

⁴We should note here that Deleuze and Guattari do not advocate a ‘wild destratification’ or ‘blowing apart’ of the strata: ‘Staying stratified – organized, signified, subjected – is not the worst that can happen; the worst that can happen is if you throw the strata into demented or suicidal collapse’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 178).

⁵Deleuze draws a distinction here between the ‘psychological unconscious’, which pertains only to the present, and the ‘ontological unconscious’, which pertains to the past.

⁶Adorno does not make the distinction between the ontological unconscious and the psychological unconscious, which Deleuze insists is essential to understanding Bergson's system; nor does he register Bergson's insistence that ‘intuition’ can operate not simply as ‘inspiration’ but as method.

⁷In contrast, Deleuze reads Nietzschean forgetting as an ahistorical stance—as a step beyond the realm of the historical towards the future.