Experiments in schizoanalysis: a new approach to analysis of conceptual music

Experiments in Schizoanalysis is a series of experimental critical texts that aim to seek an understanding of the works of conceptual music that are their focus by miming their effects rather than attempting to conceptually contain them via traditional forms of analysis. They do this by exploration of modes of schizophrenic thought and their means of communication, which can be seen to be closer to a form of musicality than standard ‘rational’ or analytical discourses. The textual material that is used as a kind of plastic matter with which to fashion this text-music is a discussion of certain avant-garde philosophical approaches to writing that serve as precedents for this type of methodology. Each experimental text seeks simultaneously to mime the action of a specific piece of conceptual music, whilst demonstrating aspects of the experience of a relevant symptom of schizophrenia via the exploration of a certain modern philosopher’s approach to the creation of a text that - like music - embodies its effect rather than proposing or arguing it. My thesis then, is that conceptual music can be used as a model for enacting an alternative (or ‘experimental’) form of music criticism (schizoanalysis). This is the process of conducting something akin to ‘ennacted thought experiments’. The specfic thought experiment that is being enacted in this text is an exploration of the hypothesis that music criticism can be a form of music. The first experiment - “Cata…” - uses the symptom of the ‘truth-taking stare’ to form a textual performance of Two Umbrellas, a conceptual piece by George Brecht, and focuses on the practice of ‘Applied Grammatology’ as defined by Gregory Ulmer with relation to the work of Derrida. The second - “Catachresis” - is an exploration of schizophrenic ‘disturbances of distance’ with their peculiar effect on language, which aims to mime the effect of John Cage’s text piece Mureau, using Wittgenstein’s theories of language where ‘the meaning is the use’. The third experiment -“Catastasis” - takes the symptom of ‘cognitive slippage’ as a means for exploring Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalytical techniques in their Capitalism and Schizophrenia project. Duchamp’s Large Glass (or, The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors Even), here viewed as a piece of music, is the subject of this chapter. Finally, “Catastrophe”, seeks to demonstrate the schizophrenic experience of auditory hallucination whilst exploring schizophrenic delusions of world catastrophe via Derrida’s musical philosophical work The Post Card