Back to the refrain: nomos and music in Deleuze and Guattari

This essay explores the concept of nomos within the oe uvres of Deleuze and Guattari. To do so, it reviews the literature that has dealt with that concept in two directions: on the one hand, authors who mobilize Deleuze and Guattari as interpreters of the Western nomos; on the other, Deleuze and Guattari as inventors of a creative take of nomos. Both directions, however, are lacking in terms of two fields of problematization that illuminate each other: the interpretation of the nomos in a musical sense, resumed on the plateau on the refrain, and the emergence of societies of control, which transform the hylomorphic moldings of disciplines into continuous modulations of information and controls. With the refrain, Deleuze and Guattari discover the danger and potential sideration of the relative limits that circumscribe the nomos of information and control societies. More than sharing the earth or distributing beings, the musical sense of the nomos develops the political, ontological and legal enigma of modulating incompossible materials and giving consistency to disparate multiplicities.