Research-Creation | Instituting Power of Ritornello: Refrains of Becoming-womman
Musical Interpretation:
Bahar Ferdowsi, Voice
Ghazaleh Zarei, Nay
Kaveh Mirhosseini, Conductor & Percussion
Sahel Saleh, Voice
Nazanin Ahmadzadeh, Oboe
ABSTRACT
This project is comprised of a musical composition, a photo series and scholarly writing. Operating within a transversal or transdisciplinary framework that encompasses philosophy, art, and politics. we, as a “collective assemblage of enunciation”, explore thought processes, thought-feelings and technologies of refrain presented through blocs of sensation and philosophical concepts to develop micro-politics of rhythm. We expand this micro-politics of rhythm through Deleuzeʼs third synthesis of time and his conception of “disjunctive synthesis” as instituting agency of territory —referred to by Guattari as a "rupture in causality." Additionally, we delve into Becoming-woman as a refrain, inducing a rupture effect within the symbolic order of signs. Our methodology seeks to establish a connection between music and a new micro-politics of segmentarity in rhythm that ensures a deliberate separation from anterior "existential territories". Therefore, a macro-political interpretation of rhythms, characterized by symbolic repetition in Lacanian terms, provides the institution with a resonant and redundant "repetition of the same". In this way, the instituting power of refrains devotes itself to a "repetition mediated by difference," unable to reach a "difference in-itself," but rather remaining within the realms of politics concerning representation, identity, and resemblance. This static propels the institution or musical segment toward something akin to a "death drive," a concept Freud referred to as the "compulsion to repeat". Yet, the micro-politics of construction, or a-signifying semiotics, involves a vital energy of “difference in-itself” and can transform “repetition in-itself” of refrain to a “repetition for-itself” through its “eternal return” (retour éternel or ritournelle). This shift in lines turns the notion of the "death drive" into a Thanatos unveiled in the third synthesis of time, as elucidated by Deleuze in Difference and Repetition. The instituting power of the Outside manifests in the micro-politics of the ritornello.
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