The engagement with Deleuze and Guattari’s style of thinking was seminal for the project’s theoretical framework. In particular, the concept of ‘perceptual semiotics’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 23) has rekindled my interest in their ‘metaphysics of continuity’, as described by Brent Adkins (2015: 10) in his critical introduction to A Thousand Plateaus.
According to Adkins, ‘The creation of the new requires first and foremost a new way of seeing. Deleuze and Guattari’s claim is not that the world naturally divides into rhizomes and trees, but that every assemblage will have rhizomatic and arborescent tendencies […] the task it to create something new by focusing on the rhizomatic aspects’ (ibid.: 31–32). His analysis foregrounds the continuity thesis that underlies Deleuze’s metaphysics, which considers states of affairs to be dynamic rather than static and complete, as well as emphasizes the importance of ‘difference’ and multiplicity. The concept of difference refers to the unique and different qualities of each state of affairs or thing in the world; still, for Deleuze, it is not a matter of simple opposition or contrast but rather a positive and productive force that generates new possibilities and variations.
As Pablo and I perused D&G’s ‘Rhizome’ chapter, looking for connections to our respective research concerns, I found a link in what I had termed perceptual mannerism. This concept, drawn from ‘Sonic Peripheries: Middling With/In the Event’, represents ‘a mode of invention that is an expression of sonic thinking qua writing and experimentation’ (Klusmeyer 2019: 31). This approach is driven by a style of creation that tests the limits of what sound can do and how sound can be expressed and conveyed through media other than itself. (ibid.: 183) For ‘Sonic Peripheries’, my writing through sonic practices was not writing about a thing, but a practice of perceptual mannerism that attunes to things in the middle.
The po-ethical stance of schizopodcast builds on this methodology, but, as I will suggest, offers a fresh perspective that looks to D&G’s perceptual semiotics (Adkins’s emphasis) while extending the praxis of perceptual mannerism inspired by the proposition that ‘[s]ound is always already a middling of experience, a middling event that cannot be grasped as such’ (ibid.: vi). The statement implies that the sonic occupies an ontological liminal space between the sensible and the intelligible, assuming that both realms of being are continuous and interrelated. In short, sound ‘is’ the middle. It cannot be grasped and resists easy categorization. This project embraces this paradoxical nature of sound as a middling event, and explores the potential of the apparent schiz between feeling and thought, material and discursive, sense and nonsense that the podcast experience seeks to negotiate.
In practical terms, this means that I have attended to the rhizomatic tendencies and fictional aspects of sound in the encounter with philosophy, art practice, teaching, and life, more generally, which includes the fantastical in the mundane. Suffice it to say for now that, in my view, the purpose of this kind of generative podcasting is to condense sonic assemblages or milieus beyond recognition through repetition (‘remix through replay’). The result would be a sonic fiction that blurs the line between material and meaning, the discrete and the continuous, sensation and thought to the point of ‘becomings-imperceptible’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 248) and follows, if you will, the lines of flight of sound; a turn toward sonic fictioning that I will discuss in more detail below (esp. in section 4).