In the Beginning There Was Chaos and Rhythm

• Main Author: Obsolete Capitalism
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: ACT 2019-12-01
• Series: La Deleuziana
• Online Access: http://www.ladeleuziana.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Obsolete10.pdf

In the 80s of the XX century some philosophical and artistic events marked the irruption of what can be defined as a late-twentieth-century version of ‘divergent subjectivity’. Such subjectivity experimented new forms of life that express political and artistic projects different from those of the revolutionary 70s. These new modes of existence, accelerated by the scandal of truth, became autonomous and radical expressions in the research of an authentic self-organized form of life: “an existence that seeks a physiognomy to reveal itself”(Klossowski 2019). Through works like A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze & Guattari 1987), Foucault (Deleuze 1988a) and The Courage of Truth (Foucault 2011) where the Deleuzian concept of “artistic will” (vouloir-artiste) lies, it will be possible to re-read chaos-operas1 like Learning to Cope With Cowardice (Mark Stewart & The Maffia 1983), In the Beginning There Was Rhythm (The Slits 1980), and the musical pictography Piano Piece for David Tudor 4 (Sylvano Bussotti 1970), the last one parodistically ushering in the new decade on the front page of Deleuze and Guattari’s plateau entitled Rhizome.