Amy Herzog,
Dreams of Difference, Songs of the Same: The Musical Moment in Film.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8166-6088-9
US$25.000 (pb)
296pp
(Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press)

Skipping Along the Groove: Landscaping with Amy Herzog’s Dreams of Difference, Songs of the Same

Rareness unlike originality defines itself. Originality escapes definition by taking flight, rareness exists (it is grounded) but is hard to find. This review plays with definitions in the way that Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari unearth their concepts. As Deleuze and Guattari argue in What is Philosophy? concepts should not be applied, instead they should emerge through the process of their creation.[1] In this way, and perhaps in a self-acknowledging contradictory fashion, a concept should be both original and rare: the concept is the horizon in which the riches of the earth meet the expansive sky.

Amy Herzog in her Dreams of Difference, Songs of the Same also likens the original and the different by invoking an image of flight. However, rather than arguing for the importance of the encounter, such as the meeting of the sky and earth at the horizon, Herzog instead argues that difference, as flight, emerges from the repetitive, and for her grounding, acts of the same. As Herzog states at the conclusion of her Introduction in relation to the musical, “[t]he musical film may remain rooted in the striated layers of the representative, measured time. But by allowing ourselves to be introduced into the flows of difference to which it aspires, we may wrest something from its repetitions that is entirely unexpected.” (p. 38) In many ways Herzog’s book, by focusing on films from “the margins of the genre” (p. 203) attempts to “wrest something” that is unexpected from her predominantly Deleuzian engagement with musical texts. This textual approach draws interesting parallels to the act of writing a review, a process that is also marked by the desire to wrest something unexpected by engaging in what is otherwise a repetitive procedure.

Review

The first substantive definition of “review” in The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) highlights that it is an inherently repetitive process. A review is “[t]he act of looking over something (again), with a view to correction or improvement; a revision (of a book, etc). Now rare.”[2] While the seventh substantive definition is the conventional conception of a “review” in its written form, “[a] general account or criticism of a literary work, a musical or dramatic performance, etc.,”[3] this first definition allows us to rethink the review as a process of landscaping, rather than as a means of accounting for, an event. The second-half of the sentence, at least at first, highlights that this definition is probably not appropriate for the act of writing a review as we do not think of reviews as correcting or improving an “original” work. However, if we think of this “looking over”, this “re-viewing”, as re-engaging a book (or work) into a field of inquiry and in doing so as challenging or changing the method of “viewing” that work, we can see how reviews can actually alter the original landscape, that they can create difference from the repetition of the same.

Repetition

The importance of the repetition to the re-viewing process is reinforced through the definition’s bracketed “again”, an inclusion which carries its own sense of exhaustion. This sense of exhaustion, of something being done to death, however is at odds with the final point of the definition, the surprising “[n]ow rare,” a final statement that apparently mimics Herzog’s conception of the unexpected as arising from the repetition of the same. A review is the transformation of something that is “over-done” to something that is “rare”: more than just re-viewing a piece of work, a review demands (or perhaps more generously allows) a complete re-viewing, or re-aligning of the stakes that define the field. A review, in this way, perhaps should not re-fence already over-worked pastures (further repetition) instead we should see the review as a landscaping that nurtures the earth’s potential rather than binds the earth to (eventually) unsustainable (re)production.

Groove

Herzog begins her book with a quote and discussion of Jean-Paul Sartre’s conclusion of Nausea, highlighting in particular where the narrator Roquentin “contemplates a small skip in the recording”.[4] The image of a needle skipping its groove becomes one of the underlining conceptual principals of Herzog’s book, setting up, as it does, the tension between the same (repetition) and the potential for (sudden) difference highlighted above. (p. 2) In this way Herzog’s inference of the groove plays on its dual meaning as “[t]he spiral cut in a gramophone record … which forms the path for the needle” and “[a] channel or routine of action or life”.[5] Throughout her argument Herzog likens the musical texts being studied in a way that plays on the different definitions of a groove given above. For example, in concluding her book Herzog argues that the musical film “sinks its teeth into the matter of the everyday” and highlights how its subject matter takes from the “realm of the personal – the individual romance, the domestic drama, the folk narrative”. (p. 205) However, while the musical appears to channel the everyday Herzog then argues that musicals do “not merely communicate information about the everyday as it is, for it jams the circuits of the present with pockets of incommensurability, with time out of joint.” (p. 205) This potential of the musical to put time out of joint makes it an interesting object of study and one that she demonstrates is particularly appropriate for the temporal driven philosophical work of Deleuze, Guattari and Henri Bergson. The manner in which time is misaligned or dislocated is attributed to what Herzog calls the musical moment.

The Musical Moment

The musical moment is a concept composed of tension: an aggregate of affect, particularly dislocation, and temporality. Herzog’s analysis of various analogous media – jukebox films (Chapter One), filmic adaptations of Carmen (Chapter Two), the films of Jacques Demy (Chapter Three), and the musical spectacle, with a focus on “Esther William’s swimming vehicles” and the cinema of Tsai Ming-liang (Chapter Four) – consistently reinforces the importance of an affective misalignment or misfiring that is generated by the cracks that emerge from repetitive processes that are either inherently (process of playback) or purposefully (process of adaption) faulty. This attention to misalignment is highlighted by Herzog’s focus on “impossible embodiments”, “dissonance” and to an extent “perversity”, ideas that draw on a desire to re-figure, rather than oppose, given representational systems and in doing so landscape a new territory by taking flight (Herzog draws on Deleuze and Guattari’s approach to territorialization) into what has thus been unthought. By taking this approach, and by focusing on how difference emerges from the repetition of the same, Herzog’s analyses of the various musical texts are generally illuminating (we see the same text differently) and stimulating (it enables thoughts to be provoked). However, by privileging the potential of taking flight, of skipping the groove, and by undertaking a process of re-territorialization Herzog’s book does spend a lot of time establishing the various grooves to make this jump. The result of this is that while we skip (not skim) through Herzog’s analyses of her chosen musical media, we do find often ourselves playing-back but rather partaking in a landscaping (or terraforming) process of Deleuze’s and Guattari’s conceptually driven philosophy.

The potential for the groove to be skipped and generate affective dissonance functions as the philosophical core of the book; this is an (un)timely argument that allows the musical film, in particular its affective moments, to be seen in a different light. Unfortunately, the potential for the book to generate its own philosophical rhythm from the cracks generated through the meeting of the various approaches, philosophies and media discussed is perhaps not taken up as fully as it could be. By replaying rather than transforming Deleuze’s, Guattari’s and Bergson’s concepts the potential of Sartre’s image of the horizon given at the beginning of the book – “the other world which you can see in the distance, but without ever approaching it, a little melody began to sing and dance” – faded before it was perhaps necessary.[6]

Luke Robinson,
King’s College, London, UK.

Endnotes

[1] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchill (London & NY: Verso, 2003 [1991, 1994]), 33.
[2] The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001 [1989]), VIII, 830.
[3] OED, 830.
[4] Herzog, 1; see Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, trans. Lloyd Alexander (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1964),175-76.
[5] OED, VI, 867.
[6]Herzog, 1; quote from Sartre, Nausea (1964), 175-6.

Created on: Thursday, 4 November 2010