Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Voice/Style/Logoi/Deleuze/Spurious

Quoting a recent post from Spurious (link in Post Title)

"A new voice: the young Miles Davis tells his father he's dropping out of Julliard to play in jazz clubs. That's okay so long as you find your own style, says his father, or at least this is what's recounted in the autobiography. Your own style, your voice: then is style to be conceived in terms of individuality, as the mark of an original artist? Is it the result of deliberate effort, to be worked at or improved?

For Deleuze, style is to be thought as a way an idiom (language, music, painting ...) might be inhabited, and not in terms of the activity of a particular person. As Lecercle puts it in his account of Deleuze's thought, 'the subject is not the origin, but the effect of her style: the author does not have style, it is style that has an author, that is inscribed, and in a way embodied, in an author's name'. The subject can be understood as an individual, to be sure - as this author, this musician - but it is also a collective, an assemblage that speaks through her. 'If there is a subject, it is a subject without identity', Deleuze writes."

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