Angelaki: journal of the theoretical humanities 3:2 1998

boulez/deleuze: a relay of music

and philosophy
Timothy S. Murphy

During the night of 4 November 1995, Gilles

Deleuze leaped to his death from a window of his
apartment in the seventeenth arrondissement of
Paris. He had been very ill for several years, but
only within the previous year had he been ren-
dered truly "immobile," that is, unable to see
friends or to write. In the days following his
death, his friends and colleagues, including Jean-
Franpois Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc
Nancy and Giorgio Agamben, wrote moving
Downloaded By: [Cornell University Library] At: 23:15 20 September 2010

homages to him and his thought. On the evenings

of 19 and 20 January 1996, Pierre Boulez con-
ducted the Chamber Orchestra of Europe in a
concert "en hommage a Gilles Deleuze" which
included works by Stravinsky, Mahler, Bartok
and Boulez himself. In the notes to that program,
Boulez wrote these words:
Gilles Deleuze is one of the very rare intellec-
tuals who are profoundly interested in music.
In 1978, he participated with Roland Barthes
and Michel Foucault in a seminar organized
by IRCAM on musical time, while he was
himself engaged in the writing of A
Thousand Plateaus. In a brilliant presenta-
tion he showed the acute and perspicacious
manner in which he grasped the problems of
musical composition and perception. In
remembrance of this striking encounter, but
also in homage to his thought - which has
made many other territories fruitful - we ded-
icate this concert to him, our "errant com-
panion" of many years.
Boulez's concluding turn of phrase is not mere
rhetorical embellishment. His path and Deleuze's
crossed many times during the Seventies and
Eighties, not only at the IRCAM seminar but also
at the funeral of their mutual friend Foucault in
June 1984 (where they were photographed
together by Liberation).
Deleuze refers to Boulez often in his works
from 1977 onward, particularly in A Thousand
Plateaus and The Fold. In those texts as well as
in the essay that follows, Deleuze borrows and
gilles deleuze
BOULEZ, PROUST
AND TIME
"occupying without counting"
extends Boulez's concepts of smooth and striated
space-time, relaying them through his own phi-
losophy. Boulez acknowledged this relay process
X
in an interview: I
to
I myself am not educated in philosophy, but I
have forced myself to reflect upon composi-
tional practice, and I have tried to arrive at a
1
formulation of my ideas that is general enough
to be accessible to others. What I wrote, for
n
example, about the time of Wagner interested S
Deleuze; in this way my reflections could serve
as a point of departure for a philosophical
r
reflection.!
The following essay, "Boulez, Proust and Time:
'Occupying Without Counting,"' demonstrates
Deleuze's interest in Boulez's writing and music,
and takes both as points of departure for a burst 5
of philosophical creation that should itself be
called a composition rather than a reflection.
Deleuze's essay first appeared in Eclats I Boulez, a
volume edited by Claude Samuel and published
by the Editions du Centre Pompidou in 1986. It

69
 occupying without counting
is translated and published here by permission of
Madame Fanny Deleuze. Daniel W. Smith pro-
vided much-needed advice on the translation
itself, but any infelicities that remain are mine.
boulez, proust and time: "occupying
without counting"
Gilles Deleuze
B oulez has often posed the problem of his
relationships with writers and poets:
Downloaded By: [Cornell University Library] At: 23:15 20 September 2010
Michaux, Char, Mallarme... If it is true that the
cut [coupure] is not the opposite of continuity, if
the continuous is defined by the cut, one could
say that the same gesture constructs the continu-
ity of the literary text and the musical text, and
makes the cuts pass between them. There is no
general solution: in each case, the relations must
be measured according to variable and often
irregular measures. But Boulez maintains a whol-
ly other relationship with Proust. Not a more
profound relationship, but one of another nature,
a tacit, implicit relationship (even if he often cites
Proust in his writings). It is as if he knew him by
"heart," by will and by chance.2 Boulez has
defined a great alternative: counting in order to
occupy space-time, or occupying without count-
ing.3 Measuring in order to effect relations, or
filling relations without measure. Isn't his link to
Proust precisely of this second type: haunting or
being haunted ("what do you want of me?"4),
occupying or being occupied without counting,
without measure?
The first thing that Boulez seizes upon in
Proust is the manner in which noises and sounds
detach themselves from the characters, places and
names to which they are first attached in order to
form autonomous "motives" that ceaselessly trans-
form themselves in time, diminishing or augment-
ing, adding or subtracting, varying their speed and
their slowness. The motive was first associated
with a landscape or a person, somewhat like a plac-
ard, but it now becomes the sole landscape,
though a varied one, the sole character, though a
changing one.. Proust is compelled to invoke
Vinteuil's little phrase and music in order to
account for this alchemy, present throughout the
Search,5 and thereby to pay homage to Wagner
(even if Vinteuil is assumed to be very different
from Wagner). Boulez in turn pays homage to
Proust for having understood in a profound man-
ner the autonomous life of the Wagnerian motive,
as it passes through variable speeds, moves
through free accidentals [alterations], enters into
a continuous variation which assumes a new form
of time for "musical entities."^ Proust's entire
work is constructed in this manner: successive
loves, jealousies, periods of sleep, etc., detach
themselves so fully from the characters that they
themselves become infinitely changing characters,
individuations without identity, Jealousy I,
Jealousy II, Jealousy III... Such a variable, which
is developed in the autonomous dimension of
time, will be called a "block of duration," a "cease-
lessly varying sonorous block." And the
autonomous dimension, which is not pre-existent,
and is drawn at the same time as the block varies,
is called a diagonal in order to better mark the
fact that it is reducible neither to the harmonic
vertical nor to the melodic horizontal as pre-exis-
tent coordinates.7 Does not the musical act par
excellence, according to Boulez, consist in drawing
the diagonal, each time in different conditions,
from polyphonic combinations, passing through
Beethoven's resolutions and Wagner's fusions of
harmony and melody to Webern, abolishing every
frontier between the horizontal and the vertical,
producing sonorous blocks in series, moving them
on a diagonal as a unique temporal function that
distributes the whole work?* In each case the diag-
onal is like a vector-block of harmony and melody,
a function of temporalization. And the musical
composition of the Search, according to Proust,
appears in this way: constantly changing blocks of
duration, with variable speed and in free alter-
ation, on a diagonal that constitutes the only unity
of the work, the transversal of all the parts. The
unity of the trip will be neither in the vertical
views of the landscape, which are like harmonic
cadences, nor in the melodic line of the route, but
in the diagonal, "from one window to the other,"
which allows the succession of points seen and the
movement of point of view to dissolve in a block
of transformation or duration.9
70

The blocks of duration, however, because they
pass through speeds and slownesses, augmenta-
tions and diminutions, additions and subtrac-
tions, are inseparable from metric and chrono-
metric relations which define divisibilities, com-
mensurabilities, and proportionalities: "pulse" is
a least common multiple (or a simple multiple),
and "tempo" is the inscription of a certain num-
ber of units in a determined time. This is a stri-
ated space-time, a pulsed time, inasmuch as the
cuts in it are determinable, that is to say of a
rational type (first aspect of the continuous), and
the measures, whether regular or not, are deter-
mined as magnitudes between-cuts. The blocks of
Downloaded By: [Cornell University Library] At: 23:15 20 September 2010
duration thus follow a striated space-time in
which they trace their diagonals according to the
speed of their pulses and the variation of their
measures. But from the striated a smooth or non-
pulsed space-time detaches itself in turn, one
which no longer refers to chronometry except in
a global fashion: the cuts in it are undetermined,
of an irrational type, and measures are replaced
by undecomposable distances and proximities
which express the density or rarefaction of what
appears in them (statistical distribution [reparti-
tion] of events). An index of occupation replaces
the index of speed.l" It is here that one occupies
without counting, instead of counting in order to
occupy. Can we not reserve Boulez's term, "time
bubbles," for this new figure, distinct from the
blocks of duration?!! Number has not disap-
peared, but has become independent of metric
and chronometric relations, it has become cipher,
numbering number, nomad or Mallarmean num-
ber, musical Nomos and no longer measure, and
instead of dividing up [repartir] a closed space-
time in view of the elements which make up a
block, on the contrary it distributes in an open
space-time the elements circumscribed in a bub-
ble. It's like the passage from one temporaliza-
tion to another: no longer a Series of time, but an
Order of time. This great Boulezian distinction,
the striated and the smooth, is less valuable as a
separation than it is as a perpetual communica-
tion: there is an alternation and superposition of
the two space-times, an exchange between the
two functions of temporalization, if only in the
sense that a homogeneous distribution [reparti-
71
gilles deleuze
tion] in a striated time gives the impression of a
smooth time, while a very unequal distribution in
smooth time introduces directions which evoke a
striated time by the densification or accumula-
tion of proximities. If we recapitulate the set of
differences enunciated by Proust between
Vinteuil's sonata and septet, it would contain
those which distinguish a closed plane from an
open space, a block from a bubble (the septet is
bathed in a violet mist which makes a rondo
appear as if "inside an opal") ,12 as well as those
which relate the little phrase of the sonata to an
index of speed, while the phrases of the septet
refer to indices of occupation. But more general-
ly, each theme, each character in the Search is
systematically susceptible to a double exposition:
the first, as a "box" out of which one draws all
sorts of variations of speed and alteration of qual-
ity, following epochs and hours (chronometry);
the second, as a nebula or multiplicity, which has
no more than degrees of density and rarefaction,
following a statistical distribution (even the two
"ways," Meseglise and Guermantes, are present-
ed then as two statistical directions). Albertine is
both at once, sometimes striated and sometimes
smooth, sometimes a block of transformation,
sometimes a nebula of diffusion, but following
two distinct temporalizations. And the whole
Search must be read smoothly and striatedly, a
double reading in accordance with Boulez's dis-
tinction.
The theme of memory then appears secondary
in relation to these more profound motives.
Boulez is able to take up Stravinsky's "praise of
amnesia" or Desormiere's phrase "I hate remem-
bering" without ceasing to be Proustian in his
own manner.13 According to Proust, even invol-
untary memory occupies a very restricted zone,
which art exceeds on all sides, and which has only
a conductive role. The problem of art, the cor-
relative problem to creation, is that of perception
and not memory: music is pure presence, and
claims to enlarge perception to the limits of the
universe. Such an enlarged perception is the
finality of art (or of philosophy, according to
Bergson). But such a goal can be attained only if
perception breaks with the identity to which
memory rivets it. Music has always had this
 occupying without counting
object: individuations without identity, which
constitute "musical entities." And no doubt, the
tonal language restored a specific principle of
identity with the octave or with first-degree har-
mony. But the system of blocks and bubbles
implies a generalized refusal of every identity
principle in the variations and distributions
which define it. 14 The problem of perception
consequently redoubled: how does one perceive
these individuals whose variation is incessant and
whose speed is unanalysable, or better yet, which
escape every point of reference in a smooth
milieu?15 The ciphers or numbering numbers,
Downloaded By: [Cornell University Library] At: 23:15 20 September 2010
escaping from pulsation as well as from metric
relations, do not appear as such in the sonorous
phenomenon, although they engender real phe-
nomena, but phenomena that are without identi-
ty. Could this imperceptible element, these holes
in perception be filled up by writing, and the ear
be relayed by a reading eye functioning as "mem-
ory"? But the problem rebounds again, for how
can one perceive writing "without the obligation
to comprehend it"? Boulez will find the answer
by defining a third milieu, a third space-time
adjacent to those of the smooth and the striated,
charged with making writing perceptible: the uni-
verse of Fixed Elements [Fizes], which works
sometimes by an astonishing simplification, as in
Wagner or in Webern's three-note figure, some-
times by suspension, as in Berg's twelve beats,
sometimes by an unusual accentuation, as in
Beethoven or Webern again, and which is pre-
sented in the manner of a gesture leveling out the
formal structure, or an envelope isolating a group
of constitutive elements. The relation of
envelopes among themselves creates the richness
of perception and awakens sensibility and mem-
ory .16 In Vinteuil's little phrase, the high note
held for two measures, "stretched like a curtain
of sound to veil the mystery of its incubation,"17
is a privileged example of a Fixed Element. With
regard to the septet, Mademoiselle Vinteuil's
friend had need of fixed points of reference in
order to write the work.18 Clearly the role of
involuntary memory in Proust is to constitute
envelopes of fixed elements.
One should not think that involuntary memo-
ry or fixed elements re-establish a principle of
identity. Proust, like Joyce or Faulkner, is one of
those authors who dismiss every principle of
identity in literature. Even in repetition, the
fixed element is not defined by the identity of an
element that is repeated, but by a quality com-
mon to the elements which could not be repeat-
ed without it (for example, the famous flavor
common to two moments, or a common pitch in
music...). The fixed element is not the Same, and
does not discover an identity beneath the varia-
tion, quite the opposite. It will allow one to iden-
tify the variation, which is to say the individua-
tion without identity. This is how it enlarges per-
ception: it renders perceptible the variations in
the striated milieu, and the distributions in the
smooth milieu. Far from leading the different
back to the Same, it allows one to identify the dif-
ferent as such: thus in Proust, the flavor as qual-
ity common to two moments identifies Combray
as always different from itself.19 In music as well
as in literature, the functional game of repetition
and difference has replaced the organic game of
the identical and the varied. This is why the fixed
elements do not imply any permanence, but
rather instantaneize [instantaneisent] the varia-
tion or dissemination that they force us to per-
ceive. And even the envelopes continuously
maintain a "moving relation" among themselves,
within a single work, or in the same block, in the
same bubble.
To enlarge perception means to render sensi-
ble, sonorous (or visible), those forces that are
ordinarily imperceptible. No doubt these forces
are not necessarily time, but they are intertwined
and united with those of time. "Time, which is
not usually visible..." We perceive easily and
sometimes painfully what is in time, we perceive
also the form, unities and relations of chronome-
try, but not time as force, time itself, "a little
time in the pure state."20 To make sound the
medium which renders time sensible, the
Numbers of time perceptible, to organize mater-
ial in order to capture the forces of time and ren-
der it sonorous: this is Messiaen's project, taken
up again by Boulez in new conditions (in partic-
ular, serial ones). But in certain respects Boulez's
musical conditions echo the literary conditions of
Proust: rendering sonorous the mute force of
72

time. It is by developing functions of temporal-
ization that are exerted on sonorous material that
the musician captures and renders sensible the
forces of time. The forces of time and the func-
tions of temporalization unite to constitute the
Aspects of implicated time. In Boulez as in
Proust, these aspects are multiple, and cannot
simply be reduced to the opposition "lost-
regained." There is lost time, which is not a nega-
tion but a full function of time: in Boulez, this
would be the pulverization of sound, or its extinc-
tion, which is a matter of timbre, the extinction
of timbres, in the sense that timbre is like love,
and repeats its own end rather than its origin.
Downloaded By: [Cornell University Library] At: 23:15 20 September 2010
Then there is "time re-explored [le temps re-cher-
che],n the constitution of blocks of duration,
their progression in the diagonal: these are not
(harmonic) chords, but veritable hand-to-hand,
often rhythmic, sonorous and vocal holds in
which one of the wrestlers prevails over the
other, each in turn, as in Vinteuil's music; this is
the striated force of time. And then there is time
regained, time identified, but in the next instant
it is the "gesture" of time or the envelope of
fixed elements. Finally, "the time of Utopia,"
Boulez says in homage to Messiaen: it finds itself
after having penetrated the secret of Ciphers,
haunted the giant time bubbles, confronted the
smooth - by discovering, following Proust's
analysis, that men occupy "in time ... a very con-
siderable place compared with the restricted one
which is allotted to them in space" (or rather
which belongs to them when they count), "a
place on the contrary prolonged past mea-
sure...'^ In his encounter with Proust, Boulez
creates a set of fundamental philosoph-
ical concepts which arise from his own
musical work.
Translated by Timothy S. Murphy
notes
1 Boulez, "From the Domaine Musical to IRCAM:
Pierre Boulez in Conversation with Pierre-Michel
Menger" in Perspectives of New Music 28.1 (winter
1990): 9. Translated by Jonathan W. Bernard. This
interview originally appeared in Le Dbat 50 (Aug.
1988): 257-66.
73
gilles deleuze
2 [Translator's Note] Par vo/ont et par hasard [by
will and by chance] is the French title of Clestin
Delige's volume of interviews with Boulez (Paris:
Seuil, 1975), translated into English as Pierre Boulez:
Conversations with Ckstin Delige (London:
Eulenberg, 1976).
3 Boulez, Boulez on Music Today (London: Faber,
1971) 94. Translated by Susan Bradshaw and
Richard Rodney Bennett.
4 [TN] "Sonate, que me veux-tu?" [Sonata, what
do you want of me?] is the title of Boulez's exege-
sis of his Third Piano Sonata in Points de repre
(Paris: Bourgois, 1981, 1985); it is translated by
Martin Cooper in Boulez, Orientations (Cambridge:
Harvard UP, 1986) 143-54.
5 [TN] In this translation I follow Richard
Howard's lead (in his translation of Deleuze's
Proust and Signs [New York: Braziller, 1972] In.) in
rendering the title of Proust's work as In Search of
Lost Time, rather than Remembrance of Things Past.
Happily, the Modern Library, publishers of the
standard English translation of Proust, have recent-
ly followed suit, though I continue to cite the earli-
er version of their translation in this translation.
6 Boulez, "Time Re-Explored [Le Temps re-cher-
ch]" in Orientations 260-77 (specifically, 269).
7 On the diagonal and the block, see the articles
"Counterpoint" and "Webern" in Boulez's
Stocktakings from an Apprenticeship (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1991). Also Boulez on Music Today 119,
55 ("a block of duration will thus have been
formed, and a diagonal dimension will have been
introduced, which cannot be confused with either
the vertical or the horizontal dimensions"), and
Orientations 151.
8 On Wagner, Orientations 266-69. On Webern,
Stocktakings from an Apprenticeship 297, 300-01.
9 The unity of the Search is always presented as a
diagonal. Cf. Proust, Remembrance of Things Past [A
la recherche du temps perdu], vol. 1 (New York:
Modern Library, 1981) 704. Translated by C.K.
Scott Moncrieff with Terence Kilmartin.
10 On cuts, the striated and the smooth, see
Boufez on Music Today 84-95. It seems to us that,
 occupying without counting
on the one hand, the distinction between irra-
tional and rational cuts according to Dedekind
and, on the other hand, the distinction between
distances and magnitudes according to Russell
agree with the difference between the smooth and
the striated according to Boulez.

11 [TN] Boulez, Boulez on Music Today 58.

12 [TN] Proust, vol. Ill, 261; the sonata and septet

are contrasted on 250-67.

13 [TN] Deleuze is alluding in both cases to essays

by Boulez on musicians who influenced him:
"Stravinsky: Style or Idea? In Praise of Amnesia"
Downloaded By: [Cornell University Library] At: 23:15 20 September 2010

and "Roger Dsormire: 'I Hate Remembering,'"

both of which appear in Orientations.

14 Boulez on Music Today 46: "In the serial system,

on the other hand, no function appears identical
from one series to another... an object composed
of the same absolute elements can, through the
evolution of their placing, assume different func-
tions."

15 Boulez on Music Today 42-43, 85; "where parti-

tion [coupure] can be effected at will, the ear will
lose all landmarks and all absolute cognizance of
intervals; this is comparable to the eye's inability
to estimate distances on a perfectly smooth sur-
face" (85).

16 Cf. the essential article "L'criture du musicien:

le regard du sourd?" in Critique 408 (mai 1981).
And on markers in Wagner, Orientations 271 ("sta-
bilizing elements").

17 [TN] Proust, vol. l, 230.

18 [TN] Proust, vol. lll, 263-65.

19 [TN] Proust, vol. l, 50-51.

20 [TN] Proust, vol. Ill, 905 (trans, modified).

21 Proust, vol. Ill, 1107 (trans, modified). Proust

establishes an explicit distinction between this
aspect of time and time regained, which is anoth-
Dr Timothy S. Murphy
er aspect. (On "utopia," Messiaen and Boulez, cf.
Department of English
Orientations 411-17.)
University of Oklahoma
760 Van Vleet Oval, Room 113
Norman, OK 73019-0240
USA
E-mail: murphy@angelaki.demon.co.uk