Cultural Critique

“A horror story, the face is a horror story.”

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

“There’s no jungle in my mind I can’t escape from.”

Halloween Trés, Code Red Mixes, May 2016, “WWW”

Not quite philosophy, criticism, or journalism proper, this article becomes a sort of speculative wandering through a montage of textual, visual, and auditory ecologies. Think of this as a kind of Deleuzean journalism, sketches of encounters that continue to develop and change as the unfoldings report.¹ As such, what this article becomes, if successful, is an immersive consideration of how to use academic frameworks—the genre of the essay-geared-to-be-article, for example—to participate in the life of a specific creative community of musicians and performers in Baltimore, Maryland, using the resources at one’s disposal.

The co-participants enabling the encounters featured here are multiple and proliferating: Baltimore as a place of love and agonism; the soundscapes and performances of Halloween Trés; the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari; the academic community of Johns Hopkins University; and the world of academic publishing for starters. A three-person band whose star is in the ascendant in the small but dynamic local music scene, Halloween Trés operate on a number of shifting and conflicting planes all at once. Thinking these agonisms in Deleuzean terms gives this article the impetus and certain rhetorical formulations to be able to articulate aspects of Halloween Trés’s music and performance. Furthermore, thinking Deleuzean intensities [End Page 30] in Halloween Trés terms offers some of the tools necessary to parse what Deleuze could mean regarding the concepts of intensity, encounters, and the violence of thought.

A personally validating moment came in response to an earlier draft of this article from a Halloween Trés band member, Lucas Rambo. After reading what I’d then put together, he was floored by my descriptions of their performances: “we just do this shit, you actually tried to articulate it.” But I think of it in almost the exact opposite terms, I’m just trying to affectively understand the heavy lifting their performances seem to be doing. In some regards this is the entire point of the following performance of Deleuzean journalism, an attempt to participate in, and to understand, the shifting dynamics of a lively artistic community both in terms of its emergent affective [End Page 31] registers and through the repertoire of concepts provided by a Deleuzean lexicon.

The encounters I am interested in mapping here harbor a degree of intensity and contagion that open one to potent forces beyond one’s ken or ability to completely quantify, domains of what in Difference and Repetition Deleuze refers to as those of “wonder, love, hatred, suffering” (139). I posit this rhetorical agonism at the beginning of this project—especially important when considering Halloween Trés performances—to forestall the critique that neither all thought nor all encounters come about or emerge through fear and trembling, and certainly never only through terror/horror, which, at least in the moment of experiencing, often violently close down anything resembling thoughtfulness. The key to navigating such encounters together with their accompanying degrees of intensity, I will argue, is comportment and learning new ways of dwelling with the everyday unfolding of events that are always difficult to process or understand.² In this way no affective event is without some emergent form of agonism, whether or not it be consciously divined. Love becomes contagion, and contagion can, perhaps, become something like love.