Rhythm and Refrain

Late-modern rhythm has been scanned by the ordered noise of the machine. Rock and punk music have inherited the knack for mechanical rhythm, although in the end they turn this gift into rage against the machine. In his book Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (2010), Steve Goodman describes the rhythmic aggression against social life:

From Hitler's use of the loudspeaker as a mechanism for affective mobilization during World War II, through to Bin Laden's audio-taped messages, the techniques of sonic warfare have now percolated into everyday. (Goodman 2002)

In order to describe the relation between the surrounding soundscape and the traces of singularity, Guttari speaks of ritournelle, or refrain. 

A child singing in the night because it is afraid of the dark seeks to regain control of events that deterritorialized too quickly for her liking and started to proliferate on the side of the cosmos and the Imaginary. Every individual, every group, every nation is thus "equipped" with a basic range of incantatory refrains. (Guattari 2011)

The refrain is an obsessive ritual that allows the individual - the conscious organism in continuous variation - to find identification points, and to territorialize herself and to represent herself in relation to the surrounding world. The refrain is the modality of semiotization that allows an individual (a group, a people, a nation, a subculture, a movement) to receive and project the world according to reproducible and communicable formats.

In order for the cosmic, social and molecular universe to be filtered through individual perception, semiotic filters must act, and we call them refrains.

The perception of time by a society is shaped by social refrains.

From his perspective, universal time appears to be no more than a hypothetical projection, a time of generalized equivalence, a "flattened" capitalistiv time. (Guattari 1995)

The main cultural transformation of modern capitalism have been the creation of refrains by temporal perception that pervade and discipline society: the refrain of factory work, the refrain of salary, the refrain of the assembly line.

The digital transition has brought along with it new refrains: electronic fragmentation, information overload, acceleration of the semiotic exchange, fractalization of time, competition.

The essential feature of refrain is rhythm, and rhythm is a special configuration of the relation between singular refrain and universal chaos.

Chaos is not the opposite of rhythm, but the milieu of milieus. There is rhythm whenever there is a transcoded passage from one milieu to another, a communication of milieus, coordination between heterogeneous space-times. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987)

Rhythm is the relation of subjective flows of signs (musical, poetic, gestual signs) with the environment: the cosmic environment, earthy environment, social environment.

Rhythm is everywhere in social life. Work, war, rituals, and social movements each have their special rhythm.

At the chaosmotic level, rhythm is the concatenation between breathing and the surrounding universe. In Guattari's parlance, refrain is the only way of creating this concatenation, this agencement between singularity and environment.

At the social level, rhythm is the relation between the body and the social concatenation of language.

The social environment is marked by refrains, repetitions of gestures and signs that simultaneously express the singular mode and the relation between the agency and the environment.

Mantra

The uprising against financial capitalism that began in the European countries in 2011 can be seen as a mantra, as an attempt to reactivate the conjunctive body, as a form of therapy on the disempathetic pathologies crossing the social skin and social soul. 

Upheaval, uprising, insurrection, and riots: these words should not be used in a militaristic sense. The organization of violent actions by the anti-capitalist movement would not be smart, as violence is a pathological demonstration of impotence when power is protected by armies of professional killers. Nevertheless, we'll be witness to massive explosions of precarious rage and violence, as in England in August 2011, as in Rome on October 15th.

The uprising will frequently give way to phenomena of psychopathic violence. These should not surprise us; we should not condemn these acts as criminal. For too long has financial dictatorship compressed the social body, and the cynicism of the ruling class has become repugnant.

The uprising is a therapy for this kind of psychopathology.

The uprising is not a form of judgement, but a form of healing.

And this healing is made possible by a mantra that rises, stronger and stronger, as solidarity resurfaces in daily life.

It is useless to preach a sermon to those who can only express their revolt in a violent way. The medic does not judge, but heals, and the task of the movement is to act as a medic, not as a judge.

What we should be able to communicate to the rioters, the looters, the black bloc, and the casseurs is a truth that we have to build together and to spread: that a collective mantra chanted by millions of people will tear down the walls of Jericho much better than a pickaxe or bomb.

-Franco "Bifo" Berardi The Uprising, On Poetry and Finance (2012)