Introduction
As a lifelong musician, I have intimately experienced how music has shaped the way I approach life and see the world. My artistic life over the past 25 years has taught me that music is an effective vehicle of personal growth and transformation, and in recent times my work has been exploring how music can work to facilitate individuation[1] and generate the emergence of new sonic posthuman subjectivities. I understand vehicle of personal growth to mean how engagement with music has provided a field to explore my boundaries and horizons, and a praxis that transcends or extends these limitations. Music to me is much more than a field of study, discipline, tradition, or even a method of expressing something beautiful. It acts more like an existential field of becoming[2], or territory which presents musical problematics that require creative solutions. In this sense, engagement with music can be seen as a complex and heterogeneous field of becoming, in which a milieu of elements are in co-generative and interdependent relationships, for example; musical traditions, teachers/mentors, peers, the instruments, the concert hall/stage, sound-in-itself, musical theories and techniques, personal emotions. All these elements, and more, create a sonic-even, which is problematic field facilitating individuation.
I am a trained jazz saxophonist from Toronto, Canada, and inspired by the revolutionary musical cries of John and Alice Coltrane, I began looking for non-western ways of musical knowing. I fell in love with the culture of India and moved to Kolkata, India, to learn North Indian classical raga music with my Guru Shantanu Bhattacharyya in the Guru-Shishya parampara (Kay, 2016). I learned raga music as a form of spiritual sadhana based on the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo can be considered a modern yogi, and Integral Yoga was his attempt at formulating a yogic praxis that addressed modern questions of becoming (Banerji, 2020, p. 5). Integral Yoga gave me a traditional yet experimental framework in which to explore how music can act as a yogic praxis. This paper will develop an East-West philosophical lens based on the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) and the metaphysics of Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995). I will explore how North Indian raga music can be seen as a sonic-ritual that activates an architectonic interface with the outside of the human register. It will also develop a theory of how a raga can be understood as a process-relational and aesthetic model in which to cultivate an integral realization of the being-in-becoming.
Integral Yoga as Becoming-Posthuman
The work of both Sri Aurobindo and Deleuze engage in posthumanist questions of liberation beyond our habitual nature and constructed subjectivity, and both thinkers propose strategies of how one can arrive at a consciousness in which radical unity and radical plurality co-exist.
Sri Aurobindo conceived of integral consciousness as a supramental ontology representing an aporetic perspectival vanishing point in mental experience and a possibility for future evolution. Thus, an ‘integral consciousness’ is seen by him as a difference, not in degree, but in kind, from mental consciousness, one to which absolute unity and radical infinity are identical. (Banerji, 2020, p. 10)
Banerji (2020) points out that this seeking may be seen, in key ways, as equivalent to Gilles Deleuze’s “plane of immanence,” (p. 220) which Deleuze and Guattari define pithily, in the formula “monism = pluralism” (1987, p. 20). Therefore according to these thinkers, one can arrive at an a-perspectival vanishing point in which topological horizons on a plane of immanence can lead to the outside of thought, also called “the nonthought within thought […] the most intimate within thought and yet the absolute outside” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, p. 59).
Raga-Space
Colonial-era musicologists generally describe a raga as a mode, or a scale with ascending and descending movements (Ganguly, 1935, p. 1). This is largely considered out of date and contemporary scholars are exploring broader and alternative definitions, some saying that a raga is beyond definition (Van Der Meer, 1980, p. 3). My research shows that one must approach understanding a raga as a melodic being-in-becoming composed of a collection of intricate melodic phrases, I will call phraseology, informed by a governing architectonic structure (Kay, 2015). This paper develops a poststructural approach to theorizing raga-space which can articulate the process-relational and intricate relationship between the structure of a raga (being) and its genesis (becoming).
Raga-space can be seen as a heterogeneous site of becoming composed of affective multiplicities of musical and trans-musical elements. Musical elements can include: notes (swara), time (laya), rhythm (tala), structure (phraseology), lyrics (sahitya), mood (bhava), instruments. Inter-, supra-, and trans-personal/musical elements can include: the individual mood of performer, the guru’s training (talim), geo-cultural style (gharana), the time of day, weather, acoustics of the hall, audience of performance.
From this perspective, raga-space activates a site of transduction[3] in which heterogenous gradients of becoming enter into individuating series. The raga bhava (mood) is developed slowly by the performer, and provides an aesthetic gravity in which to organize and integrate elements into singularities. This may develop into levels of sonic intensity which result in an aesthetic rupture, called rasa (sublime taste), in the performer, audience, and environment. This rupture may be of various natures, and can be considered an encounter with the outside in which one enters into union with the raga-deity.
Ritual-Space
A Hindu ritual (puja) can be considered an architectonic organization of spatial and temporal sacred materials which create an interface or sieve (diyas pade) (Aurobindo, 1998, p. 354) between the individual and cosmic being(s). This interface can open one to relationships with animistic forces of nature, archetypal gods, or the Universal Self (purusha). Sri Aurobindo develops these ideas in his psycho-cosmological interpretation of the Vedas (1998, p. 354).
The cosmic Powers act and exist; humankind takes them upon himself, makes an image of them in his own consciousness and endows that image with the life and power that the Supreme Being has breathed into His own divine forms and world-energies. (p. 269, my italics)
Sri Aurobindo points out that the cosmic powers are reflected in one as an image, but the question remains how to facilitate the emergence of such an image. How to make porous the horizon of our self-consciousness to allow for symbolic or affective exchange with the outside, the infinite, or divine consciousness? Sri Aurobindo interprets the Vedic sacrifice or ritual, as an unconditional offering and surrender to the Divine, accompanied by a psycho-spiritual architectonic.
The sacrifice is essentially an arrangement, a distribution of the human activities and enjoyments among the different cosmic Powers…It is the problem of the right arrangement and distribution of his works that presents itself to the sacrificer; for the sacrifice must always be according to the Law and the divine ordainment. (p. 267, my italics)
Ritual-space then can be understood beyond a relationship with a representational and absolute identity or essence of being, but a reciprocally determinative relationship between two planes: a plane of transcendence, or outside the human register, and a plane of immanence, the lived fullness of embodied experience. As O’Sullivan (2001) points out, a ritual can be a space-time machine to what lies outside the human register:
…the puja is not representational but something altogether different: a summoning of other beings – a space – and a practice of incarnation – in which the invisible (that which lies outside the human register, outside ‘the fantasies of realism’, outside mundane time’) is made visible. The puja operates as a portal into/onto these other worlds – precisely as a kind of space-time machine. (p. 117)
It is in this light that raga music can be considered a form of sonic-ritual that when the architectonics are actualized sufficiently can facilitate an interface (divaspade) with the outside. O’Sullivan (2001) again is illustrative:
Such a process involves a devotional aspect (worship creates sacred space-time). The ‘breaking down of the ontological curtain between objects and things’ (Guattari) entails a certain surrendering of one’s self to that which lies beyond oneself; the latter thought not as transcendent but as immanent. These other worlds are not possible but virtual; it is not a question of realizing them — but actualizing them. The puja performs precisely this actualizing function. This surrender also involves gratitude. (p.118)
The importance of surrender, gratitude, and an aspiration to forces beyond the human register for a sonic-event to activate an inside-outside interface is notable in both Aurobindo and O’Sullivan. From this perspective there lies a vital difference between one who opens themselves to the sonic-event as a site of transduction, and the connoisseur who is a consumer of raga flavours and a collector of cultural experiences. To the connoisseur, a raga performance is not necessarily an individuating event, but acts more as a cultural commodity which can be utilized as superficial sign of status within a elite class.
Sonic-Theurgy
Theurgy is understood as a magical ritual to evoke deities to achieve henosis (uniting with the divine) and perfecting oneself (Edmonds, 2019, pp. 314). This definition can illustrate how ragas as they are understood as sonic-deities can through a Hindu mystical ritual can be considered an act of theurgy.
The application to the theory of Indian music, this doctrine of image-worship, i.e. the idea of invoking the presiding deity, or the spirit of the divinity by means of a dhyana-formula, an evocative scheme of prayers for contemplation, has led to the conception of the forms of ragas and ragini is in dual aspects, as audible Sound-Forms, and as visible Image-Forms. (Ganguly, 1935, p. 96)
How can we understand the structural and architectonic integrity of a raga, without reducing it to a structural analysis thereby eliminating the unique singularity of the present in which the artist spontaneously interprets the raga? Using Deleuzian metaphysics from his book titled Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (1970, p. 128) I will analyze a raga as two interconnected plan(e)s of structure and genesis:
i.) plane of transcendence/organization: The plane of organization can be considered the being of the raga. It can be realized through a praxis of musical contemplation on the raga being-ness which is composed of a specific constellation of musical phrases which are transmitted through the oral tradition. I will call this the organization of raga phraseology. This plane contains the genetic potential in seed form (bija), which can be likened to the image-form of the raga. This image-form can also be considered in a spatial sense, without duration, or becoming. Banerjee calls this an eternal-image (2019). In the Integral yoga of Sri Aurobindo, this can be understood as the yoga of purusha, in which one becomes the transcendental witnessing consciousness separated from the automatons of nature (prakriti).
ii.) plane of immanence/composition: The plan of composition, which can be considered the becoming of the raga in time is based on a process-relationality and relies on a specific aesthetic architectonic integrity of the raga phraseology. This plane can be considered a plane of temporality, where the structural phraseology and genetics of the raga is composed in duration according to a governing architectonic. This corresponds to the raga’s sound-form. In the Integral yoga of Sri Aurobindo, this can be understood as the yoga of prakriti (nature), in which from the freedom of the poise of the witnessing purusha, one sanctions and enters into prakriti (nature) as the ishwara (lord) of nature.
There are two notable elements that this approach can bring to light to deepen the understanding of a raga. The plan of organization (phraseology) is reciprocally dependent upon an intuitive conception of duration, or timing (becoming), and the plan of composition is reciprocally dependent upon an intuitive knowledge of the whole structure at all times. The fabric of what composes a raga can therefore be seen as these two interconnected and reciprocally determinate planes. Understood in the light of Sri Aurobindo’s first formulation of Integral yoga, this can be seen as the intersection of the two yogas: the yoga of purusha (being) and yoga of prakriti (becoming), in which a relational and simultaneous awareness and mastery of both yogas is considered as an integral realization. It becomes apparent that raga music develops an aesthetic, relational, and intuitive consciousness that can integrate both being (plane of transcendence) and becoming (plane of immanence) into one musical expression based on knowledge of the raga being-in-becoming.
Conclusion: Posthuman Interfaces
I believe this paper offers one way of understanding the dynamics of the sonic-ritual and the techniques of sonic-theurgy which can lead to an aesthetic rupture. This rupture is produced when one enters into relation to the raga-deity, not as a consumerist or intellectual connoisseur, but as an aspirant who is open to the raga as a site of transductive and integral individuation.
I have illustrated how Deleuze’s planes of organization and composition can be used to describe the process-relational nature of the raga and how the principle of architectonics governs the genesis of the raga to create an open (or pleasing) phenomenology of individuating elements in sound-space. This creates a sieve or an interface with the outside. According to the tradition, as well as in my experience, if all the elements of the ritual are organized according to the uniqueness of the moment in an act of surrender and devotion, then the possibility of a connection to the outside, or the deities, is possible. Therefore, this paper concludes that a raga musician can be thought of as an architecno-magician, who prepares raga-space that functions as an interface with the outside through sonic-theurgy.
This paper also shows that raga music is an ideal model to understand integral knowledge, made up of both jnana and vijnana. Jnana can be symbolized by the plane of transcendence/organization, and vijnana can be symbolized by the plane of immanence/composition. Raga music is therefore a mystico-immanent praxis that can illuminate the essential nature of such different forms of knowledge required to cultivate an integral posthuman consciousness.
References
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[1] I use the term based on the work of Gilles Deleuze, which concerns the genetic process of an individual, or how a subject becomes individualized (Parr, 2005, pp.129).
[2] Because individuation is never complete and always in becoming, a problematic field implies a complex set of relationships in which the individual becoming is situated.(Parr, 2005, pp.130).
[3] Gilbert Simondon’s definition of transduction: “By “transduction” we mean an operation—physical, biological, mental, social—by which an activity propagates itself, slowly but surely, within a domain, by grounding this propagation within a structuring of the operative domain from place to place: each constituted region of structure serves the next region as constitutive principle, such that a modification spreads progressively at the same time as this structuring operation […]. [T]he result is an amplifying reticular structure” (Simondon, 2005, p. 32)