Machinic Assemblages of Desire: Deleuze and Artistic Research 3 [Illustrated] 9462702543, 9789462702547

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MACHINIC ASSEMBLAGES OF DESIRE Deleuze and Artistic Research 3 Edited by Paulo de Assis and Paolo Giudici

Machinic Assemblages of Desire: Deleuze and Artistic Research 3

MACHINIC ASSEMBLAGES OF DESIRE DELEUZE AND ARTISTIC RESEARCH 3 Edited by Paulo de Assis and Paolo Giudici

Leuven University Press

Table of Contents

9 11

Editors’ Preface Introduction: Assemblage and Artistic Research Paulo de Assis

27

Cartographic Recording of Discourse: Mapping as an Emergent Rhizomatic Drawing Process Ron Wigglesworth

Part 1: Music 35

Guattari, Consistency, and Experimental Musical Assemblages Edward Campbell

55

Musical Interaction in the Tetravalence Chris Stover

77

Time Music between Lines and Images : Time In-between Silvio Ferraz

93

Abstract Cartographies and Assemblages of Minimal Sound Units: A “Body-Organon”? Clara Maïda

107

Sounds Flush with the Real: Mixed Semiotic Strategies in Post-Cagean Musical Experimentalism Iain Campbell

115

“Is Our Machines Learning Yet?”: Machine Learning’s Challenge to Improvisation and the Aesthetic George E. Lewis

129

Assemblages of Multivocal and Schizophonic Practices: Unleashing the Machined Voice Alex Nowitz

143

Travelling with Pēratape: Narrating Poetics of an Assemblage of Recording Guy Dubious

155

Machining the Bird Lilija Duobliene

5

Part 2: Art 165

The Dance José Gil

179

Kinaesthetics: From Assemblages to Fields of Circulation Thomas Nail

197

Ghastly Assemblages and Glittery Bodies without Organs in the Sculptures of David Altmejd Burcu Baykan

209

How to Dance with Robots Christoph Hubatschke

223

Machines with Organs: Model 5052 Vanessa Farfán

235

Recalcitrant Temporalities: Heterogeneous Time and the Simulated Image Paul Dolan

249

The Machinic Desire of Cinema Tero Nauha

261

Free Indirect Discourse and Assemblages: Literary Procedures in Deleuze and Guattari’s Style Annita Costa Malufe

273

The Intercessor or Heteronym in Gilles Deleuze and Fernando Pessoa Niall Kennedy

Part 3: Ecosophy 283

Assemblages, Black Holes, and Territories Ian Buchanan

297

Planetary Assemblages: From Organic to Inorganic and Beyond Audronė Žukauskaitė

309

Ethology of Images as Machinic Assemblages Anne Sauvagnargues

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319

The Transversality of Assemblages in Indigenous Australia and Alternative Environmental Struggles in France Barbara Glowczewski

339

Orquestra Errante: Improvising Assemblages Facing the Totalitarian Assemblage Rogério Luiz Moraes Costa

351

Subjectification, Desubjectification, Assemblages Peter Pál Pelbart

361

The Non-art of Tehching Hsieh: Art as Life/Life as Art jan jagodzinski

379

Decoding Surveillance Assemblages: How to Read Li Zi-Fong’s Lines and Hong Kong’s Eyes Hsiu-ju Stacy Lo

395

Addressing Problems of Our Capitalist Economies through Artistic Production Niamh Schmidtke

403

The Milieu and the Territorial Assemblage: Insights from Architecture Gareth Abrahams

419

Hecate: An Apparatus for Mapping Urban Complexity Yota Passia and Panagiotis Roupas

429

Appendix: Live Transmission Morgan O’Hara

445

Appendix: Online Materials

447

Notes on Contributors

455

Index

7

Editors’ Preface Machinic Assemblages of Desire is the third book in a mini-series dedicated to the encounter and productive interaction between artistic research and Deleuze and Guattari studies. As with the two previous volumes—The Dark Precursor (2017) and Aberrant Nuptials (2019)—it also originated from the biennial international conference on Deleuze and Artistic Research (DARE), held 9–11 December 2019 at the Orpheus Institute, Ghent. In addition to the invited speakers, selected conference delegates, most of them art or music practitioners, have been invited to rework their presentations, contributing to a discourse and dialogue that include the voices of artists, artist-researchers, musicians, and philosophers. Dedicated to Deleuze and Guattari’s logic of assemblage, this book aims to offer different insights into the wide usage of assemblage within recent artistic and musical practices, while looking for the relations and articulations that these practices have entangled with Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas. The first part of the book focuses on music; the second adjoins insights into visual, performing, and literary art; whereas the third part extends the logic of assemblage with what Guattari later called an ecosophical perspective, which links environmental ecology with social and mental ecology. Together with the first two volumes issuing from the DARE conferences, Machinic Assemblages of Desire concludes a cycle that followed a clear conceptual trajectory: from the differential interstices of the dark precursor to the emergent properties of aberrant nuptials, to the multiple agencies of assemblages. We hope that further conceptual foldings and artistic-philosophical transductions might happen in the future, opening new paths of artistic research and unpredictable encounters between art, music, and philosophy. We wish to thank all the authors for their commitment and their readiness to expand or revise their chapters. Our special gratitude goes—as always—to our indefatigable collaborator Edward Crooks for his serious and sensitive copy-editing. Paulo de Assis and Paolo Giudici Orpheus Institute, Ghent

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Introduction Assemblage and Artistic Research Paulo de Assis 1. On the Concept of Assemblage In his 1980 interview on the differences between Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze (2007, 177) affirms that the notion of “assemblage” constitutes the unity of A Thousand Plateaus. Whereas the central topic of critique in Anti-Oedipus had been a well-known, familiar, and pre-existing domain—the unconscious—there is no such clear target domain in A Thousand Plateaus, a book that is “more complicated” because it “tries to invent its own domains . . . [that] are not pre-existing [but are] mapped out by the various parts of the book” (175, translation modified). Thus, in the place of a unifying domain of reference, what makes the unity of A Thousand Plateaus is the concept of assemblage. Summarising its main characteristics, Deleuze notes that “in assemblages you find states of things, bodies, various combinations of bodies, alloys; but you also find enunciations, modes of enunciation, regimes of signs” (177, translation modified). The relations between bodies and enunciations are “pretty complex,” requiring careful investigation of their component parts: “in the most diverse domains, one has to consider the component parts of assemblages, the nature of the lines, the modes of life and enunciation . . .” (178, translation modified). Deleuze adds that the notion of assemblage “replaces the idea of desiring-machines” (which was central to Anti-Oedipus), that it substitutes the idea of behaviour (animal, territorial, and social), and it might contribute to a “general” logic: “the analysis of assemblages, broken down into their component parts, opens up the way to a general logic” (177). Finally, announcing future work, Deleuze suggests a clear research path: “Guattari and I have only begun, and completing this logic will undoubtedly occupy us in the future” (177). Even if Deleuze and Guattari didn’t actually continue this specific task after 1980, the concept of assemblage became increasingly relevant in the aftermath of their work(s), especially since the turn of the century—see, for example, Manuel DeLanda’s A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (2006), and Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor–Network Theory (2005). Applied in different disciplines and fields of practice, it has emerged as a central concept for addressing problems of stability/instability, determination/indetermination, structure/change, and transformations regarding social, political, economic, philosophical, and aesthetic phenomena. Moving beyond the notion of structure—that fails in the face of complex systems, especially when rapid changes, mutations, and transformations lead to unforeseen and unpredictable events—assemblage operates as a 11

Paulo de Assis relay concept, “linking the problematic of structure with that of change and far-from-equilibrium systems” (Venn 2006, 107). With its interplay between organisation and unpredictability, assemblage works as a dynamic concept, linking the problematic of structure with that of chance and continuous change. There is an assemblage whenever it is possible to identify a coupling made of an ensemble of material relations (content) and a specific regime of signs related to it (expression). Such couplings are not dialectically articulated; rather, they create two poles: a pole strata that is highly coded and territorialised, and a pole diagram (abstract machine) that is decoded and deterritorialised. Concrete machines—also called machinic assemblages of desire—belong more to the actual and are “attracted” towards the pole strata, while collective assemblages of enunciation pertain more to the virtual and are “attracted” towards the diagram (abstract machine). Between the two, there are infinite intermediate states and phases, contributing to the heterogeneity of the components of the assemblage, and to its continuous functioning, even when some components are stopped, replaced, or eliminated. Thus, an assemblage is a fluid entity, moving from one state to another, from one phase to another, from the actuality of concrete machines to the virtuality of abstract machines. A logic of assemblage, imperceptibly moving between these two poles has several consequences: the overcoming of unity in favour of multiplicity, of essence in favour of event, of being in favour of becoming, of elusive certainty in favour of informed inconsistency. According to Deleuze, philosophy consists of the creation of concepts, which he understands as being invented, constructed, fabricated, and subject to change and modifications as they are differently used and applied. From this perspective, concepts are imbued with an internal dynamic, having a history, a moment of birth, developments, inflections, and end of use. The concept of assemblage is no exception, and in what follows I will not trace its full history (that would be another book), but refer to four salient moments of its history: first, its seminal and almost indiscernible appearance in 1972, in the last chapter of Anti-Oedipus, and in a short text by Deleuze (see Deleuze 1972; Bénichou 1972), both of which indicate the term’s rooting in schizoanalysis; second, its definition as a philosophical concept by Deleuze (1975, in relation to Foucault), and by Deleuze and Guattari (1975, in relation to Kafka; 1976, in articulating the concept of rhizome); third, the massive expansion of the concept in A Thousand Plateaus (first published 1980), which points toward an extended logic of assemblage; and fourth, some of the numerous assemblage theories that emerged after Deleuze and Guattari, and that relate more or less faithfully to the authors’ definitions and to the concept’s seminal properties. 1.1. “Agencement” within “desiring-machines” Deleuze’s first use of the term agencement does not happen in the 1975 book on Franz Kafka (with Guattari), nor in his review of Foucault’s Surveiller et punir (also from 1975). Strikingly, it is used by Deleuze and Guattari already in 1972,

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Introduction in the last chapter of Anti-Oedipus,1 “Introduction to Schizoanalysis,” in which it appears in association with the term “machinic” (agencement machinique, see Deleuze and Guattari 1973b, 324, 342, 352, 386, 388) and with the notion of “desiring-machines” (agencement des machines désirantes, ibid., 345). In these early formulations, the notion of agencement is subordinated to and part of the concept of desiring-machines. As Deleuze and Guattari aimed to overturn psychoanalysis, moving away from the unconscious as a theatre of representation and analysing it as a locus of desire-production, the question of how desire is engineered became central to their task. Considering the brain from a physical perspective, Deleuze and Guattari note that proteins are “both products and units of production,” suggesting that “they are what constitutes the . . . autoproduction of the unconscious” ([1977] 1983, 290). Such proteins are thus seen as “the ultimate molecular elements in the arrangement [originally, agencement] of the desiring-machines” (ibid.). So, in its first formulation, the notion of agencement relates to the functional, machinic arrangements grasped in the context of their molecular dispersion. Indeed, Deleuze and Guattari (ibid., 324) wonder “how these conditions of dispersion, of real distinction, and of the absence of a link permit any machinic regime to exist—how the partial objects thus defined are able to form machines and arrangements of machines [agencements de machines in Deleuze and Guattari 1973b, 388].” Crucially, in this first definition of the concept, it is thought “only at the submicroscopic level of desiring-machines” (Deleuze and Guattari [1977] 1983, 288), the level on which “there exists a functionalism—agencements machiniques, an engineering of desire; for it is only there that functioning and formation, use and montage, product and production merge” (ibid., translation modified). This is why they claim that “desire is a machine”: because they grasp it as “a synthesis of machines, a machinic arrangement [agencement machinique]” (296). Desiringmachines are thus constituted by molecular machinic elements, their arrangements [agencements] and their syntheses. Note that at this stage of the concept, the syntheses are distinguished and separated from the notion of agencement. In this light, the choice of the word “arrangement” for the translation of agencement (as made by the translators of Anti-Oedipus) seems perfectly in order, as the concept is related (in this stage of its development) to concrete physical, molecular “choices, arrangements, and combinations” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983 [1977], 290). This idea was also addressed by Deleuze in 1972, in a short introductory text to Pierre Bénichou’s survey on prostitution and masochism (Bénichou 1972). In it, Deleuze argues for a new understanding of “desire,” crucially moving beyond the normative role of psychiatry and beyond the interpretative tradition of psychoanalysis, affirming a creative “functionalism” of the unconscious: “Today we are calling for the rights of a new functionalism: no longer what it means, but how it works, how it functions” (Deleuze 2004, 243). It is in this con1 I have to thank Ronald Bogue (personal communication) for making me aware of the use of the term agencement in the final part of Anti-Oedipus. This has passed vastly unnoticed because the term was translated in 1977 (by Robert Hurley and Mark Seem) as “arrangement.” Translation issues are discussed further below.

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Paulo de Assis text—and articulating three levels (the individual, the social, and the technological)—that Deleuze offers a definition of desire as assemblage, conveying the crucial passage from the concept of desiring-machines (in Anti-Oedipus) to that of assemblage (after Anti-Oedipus): “As if desire had nothing to say, but rather was the assemblage of tiny machines, desiring-machines, always in a particular relation with the big social machines and the technological machines” (ibid.). The extension to social and technological machines is crucial as it paves the way for a widening of the concept of agencement, which will develop itself from being a component part of the concept of desiring-machines (in Anti-Oedipus) to become an overarching concept that includes desiring-machines in its own fabric. This development explains the complete dropping of the term desiring-machines after Anti-Oedipus—more than replacing the notion of desiring-machines, the term is actually absorbed into a wider conceptual construction. 1.2. Agencement, rhizome, dispositif Next, it is indeed in the more well-known essays from 1975 that the concept of agencement is thoroughly presented: in the co-authored book with Guattari (Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature), and in Deleuze’s review of Michel Foucault’s Surveiller et punir (1975), where it is mentioned in relation to repression and ideology and as a synonym of Foucault’s term dispositif. The opening paragraphs of Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature immediately address the two basic components of an agencement, namely its “forms of content” and its “forms of expression” (see Deleuze and Guattari 1986, 3–4; see figure I.1). The concept of agencement is progressively developed throughout the book, culminating in the final chapter in the explicit formula “What Is an Assemblage?” In this way, the concept is defined only after detailed explanation of many other surrounding concepts, such as minor, desire, series, connectors, and intensities. In this sense, all these concepts exist within an ecology of concepts, and it is difficult to scrutinise them independently from one another. An example of this interplay and shared characteristics is the subtle relation between rhizome and agencement, leading Anne Sauvagnargues to affirm that “the concept of rhizome is a good introduction to the concept of agencement, because it pedagogically insists on the multiplicity understood as a package of lines” (2011, 176–77, my translation): a line of differentiation (molecular particles), a line of organisation (molar units), and a line of escape (the interstices between content and expression, potentiating cracks in the assemblage). With such lines, the rhizome (or the assemblage, or the dispositif) gains a kinetic and dynamic definition that renders it fluid and flexible, able to manifest itself in highly coded collective assemblages of enunciations (expression), as well as in machinic assemblages of bodies (content).

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Introduction

Figure I.1.

These two poles of the assemblage—“enunciations” and “bodies”—provide an associative bridge to Michel Foucault’s distinction between “words” and “things” (see Foucault 1966, 1975), between a system’s rules and prescriptions and its actual constitutive and functioning parts—notions that have been at the centre of his thought in The Order of Things (first published 1966, precisely as Les mots et les choses), and in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. The latter, first published 1975 as Surveiller et punir, was reviewed by Deleuze for the journal Critique (Deleuze 1975) in a text entitled “A New Cartographer,” which would become chapter 2 of his study on Foucault, published in 1986. Deleuze affirms a strong similarity between Foucault’s notion of dispositif and his own notion of agencement (assemblage), especially in relation to concrete assemblages: “it is for [this term] that Foucault most often reserves the term ‘dispositif ’” (Deleuze 1988, 37, translation modified). Foucault’s schools, workshops, armies, or prisons are understood to integrate “qualified substances” (children, workers, soldiers, prisoners) and “finalized functions” (education, services, defence, security), that is to say—in Deleuzian parlance—they are assemblages of bodies and collective assemblages of enunciations.2 1.3. The tetravalence of the assemblage After the essays on Kafka and Foucault, the concept of agencement gained additional features: to the notions of content and expression (which were thoroughly discussed in Kafka) Deleuze adds in Dialogues (first published 1977, see Deleuze and Parnet 2007) their respective coefficients of stabilisation and becoming, paving the way for the introduction of the notion of the tetravalence of the assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 89), which happens in A Thousand Plateaus (first published 1980). With it, the dimensions of territorialisation, deterritor2 Unfortunately, in the English translation, the first time the terms agencement and dispositif appear in the text they have been misleadingly translated as “organization” and “system,” respectively. Deleuze’s original sentence “la répression et l’idéologie n’expliquent rien, mais supposent toujours un agencement ou ‘dispositif ’ dans lequel elles opèrent . . .” (1986, 36) has been translated as “repression and ideology explain nothing but always assume an organization or ‘system’ within which they operate . . .” (1988, 29, my emphasis).

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Figure I.1. The polarity “content–expression” in Deleuze and Guattari’s 1975 definition of agencement.

Paulo de Assis ialisation, and reterritorialisation are added to the concept, enabling also the integration of the abstract machine (which was previously excluded from the definition of agencement) into an overarching logic of assemblage. The assemblage functions dynamically in two axes: content/expression and territorialisation/ deterritorialisation. As Deleuze and Guattari write (1987, 88): On a first, horizontal, axis, an assemblage comprises two segments, one of content, the other of expression. On the one hand it is a machinic assemblage of bodies, of actions and passions, an intermingling of bodies reacting to one another; on the other hand, it is a collective assemblage of enunciation, of acts and statements, of incorporeal transformations attributed to bodies. Then on a vertical axis, the assemblage has both territorial sides, or reterritorialized sides, which stabilize it, and cutting edges of deterritorialization, which carry it away.

Figure I.2.

The schematic representation of the tetravalence of the assemblage in figure I.2 offers a sort of map where the components and connectors of an assemblage can be situated. As a map, it suggests the possibility of navigating, analysing, challenging, and eventually changing any assemblage under scrutiny or construction. Critically, everything that belongs to the assemblage is in a permanent state of movement and change. As Deleuze writes in Foucault: “the

16

Figure I.2. Deleuze and Guattari’s 1980 definition of the “tetravalence” of the assemblage.

Introduction concrete machines are the two-form [content and expression] assemblages . . . , whereas the abstract machine is the informal diagram” (1988, 39). “It is as if the abstract [machine] and the concrete assemblages constituted two extremes, and we moved from one to the other imperceptibly” (40). Keep in mind that an assemblage is primarily defined as a multiplicity that connects heterogeneous component parts, and that it is not “a thing.” In its multiplicity, an assemblage “necessarily acts on semiotic flows, material flows, and social flows simultaneously” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 22–23). Such flows have different degrees of coding and different degrees of territorialisation; they are more or less concrete, more or less abstract, more or less stratified, and they more or less escape the assemblage. A single semiotic flow doesn’t produce an assemblage; it is always necessary to have several blocks, series, and segments of series to create a net of connections that finally enable the emergence of the assemblage (in this respect the intrinsic relation to the concept of rhizome becomes clear). Thus, an assemblage is made of components (series of flows that will never stop proliferating) and connectors. Like a topological figure, it can be stretched and folded. The heterogeneity of the assemblage’s components guarantees its functioning, even when some components are stopped, replaced, or eliminated. Thus, the assemblage is a fluid entity, moving from one state to another, from one phase to another. To grasp the nature of these movements, Deleuze and Guattari introduced the notion of the tetravalence of the assemblage (see figure I.2, above), which allows both for a mapping and for a cartography of its constitutive elements. They also insisted on the profound and inseparable interconnection between different notions that define an ecology of concepts: rhizome, strata, stratification, assemblage, plane of consistency, deterritorialisation, abstract machines, diagram, phylum, and mechanosphere. Together, as they are presented in the last and conclusive plateau of A Thousand Plateaus, all these concepts disclose a logic of multiplicities that is based upon the core concept of assemblage and that stresses the nomadic, fluid, and problematic nature of knowledge and of artistic practices. 1.4. Assemblage theories In the aftermath of Deleuze and Guattari’s work(s), diverse authors operating in varied disciplines have developed further theorisations that give continuity to their thought or explicitly depart from it towards new problems and new contexts. What is currently called “assemblage theory” (see DeLanda 2006, 2010, 2016; Buchanan 2015, 2017) comprises diverse approaches in the human and social sciences, which more or less explicitly refer back to Deleuze and Guattari’s foundational concept of agencement. While I would claim, on the one hand, that a “Deleuzian” assemblage theory (like a Deleuzian “theory of sense,” or “theory of sensation”) would be profoundly anti-Deleuzian, I think that, on the other hand, we have to recognise that there are several assemblage theories, that they are independent and autonomous from the thought of Deleuze and Guattari, and that they might very well produce interesting insights and novel perspectives.

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Paulo de Assis In his essay “Assemblage Theory and Its Discontents,” Ian Buchanan (2015) convincingly summarises many of the ongoing debates around assemblage theory. As he writes: “assemblage theory is rapidly gathering a significant following in the human and social sciences” (ibid., 382), and one could add that the emerging field of artistic research is another area of practice where uses and appropriations of the concept of assemblage are currently observable. If the original Deleuzo-Guattarian notion of agencement is the common basic denominator of such appropriations, recent developments and disseminations of assemblage theory also seem to be derived from two other sources: Bruno Latour’s, Michel Callon’s, and John Law’s actor–network theory, on the one hand, and Manuel DeLanda’s (2006, 2010, 2016) analytical readings of Deleuze, on the other. According to Buchanan (2015, 383), these authors (Latour and DeLanda) “cloud our understanding of Deleuze and Guattari and in that regard call for our critical attention.” Buchanan identifies and analyses the “two kinds of error” (ibid.) that these theories, in his view, incur in appropriating Deleuze and Guattari: the focus “on the complex and undecidable” (Latour), and the focus “on the problem of emergence” (DeLanda) (ibid., 382). Although these “errors” are assumed to derive from a wrong reading of Deleuze and Guattari, they might be considered as “providential errors,” in so far as they open up new lines of thought in their own terms (ibid., 382–83). More recent debates and essays (Nail 2017; Buchanan 2017) make an effort to clarify terms and definitions, in order to guarantee that a minimum relation to the original notions of Deleuze and Guattari remains, at least, plausible. At any rate, what the ongoing debate around assemblage theory demonstrates is that this concept has multiple sources, which can be separately identified but are not easy to disentangle from one another. Furthermore, it became apparent that there are diverse possible appropriations of the term that, even if “wrong,” can be productive.

Intermezzo: A note on translation For the sake of clarity, it is important to briefly address the issue of the English translation of the French word agencement as “assemblage.” As is well known today, this translation is problematic in many respects, especially because in most people’s usage it has the standard meaning of the English word. However, this common understanding creates the incorrect impression that the concept refers to a final product and not to a process. This is a problem that has been pointed out by several authors, such as Alliez and Goffey (2011a), Bogue (1989), Buchanan (2015, 2017), DeLanda (2006, 2016), Nail (2017), Phillips (2006), Posteraro (2020), and Wise (2005). As Thomas Nail (2017, 22) and Manuel DeLanda (2016, 1) precisely explain, the French word agencement and the English assemblage have completely different etymological roots: the French agencement comes from the verb agencer (the action of matching or fitting together a set of components, and the result of such action), while the English assemblage comes from the French assemblage (not from agencer), which in both languages means the joining of two or more things, thus pointing to a perfectly fixed final product. In his book on Deleuze from

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Introduction 1989, Ronald Bogue (174n1) remarked: “for agencement, translators of Deleuze and Guattari have suggested ‘assemblage,’ ‘arrangement’ and ‘organization,’ but no one of these is fully satisfactory.” While each of these three terms does not stand for all the expressive capacities of the original term agencement, each one of the terms on its own conveys certain important aspects. The first English translation of Deleuze and Guattari’s term agencement as “assemblage” was made by Paul Foss and Paul Patton in 1981, in the translation of the essay Rhizome from 1976 (see Deleuze and Guattari 1981). Their option for the word “assemblage” was retained by Brian Massumi in his 1987 translation of A Thousand Plateaus, in which the 1976 essay Rhizome is republished as the first chapter. Before that, in 1977, Robert Hurley and Mark Seem opted for “arrangement” instead of “assemblage” in the first translation of Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze and Guattari [1977] 1983); as I have mentioned above, they had good reason to, as “assemblage” would have been an odd choice in the context of the “Introduction to Schizoanalysis.” Additionally, in 1984, the American edition of a collection of essays by Guattari (Guattari 1984b) included a glossary especially written by Guattari for this purpose. In it, agencement is translated as “arrangement” in a short glossary entry that is worth recalling here: Arrangement (Agencement): This is a wider idea than those of structure, system, form, process, etc. An arrangement contains heterogeneous components, as well as biological, sociological, mechanical, gnoseological, imaginary. In the schizo-analytic theory of the unconscious, arrangement is conceived as replacing the Freudian “complex.” (Guattari 1984a, 288)

This means that (corroborating the above section on Deleuze’s understanding of desire as assemblage) the concept of agencement has a fundamental dimension rooted in psychoanalysis, a crucial aspect stressed by Ian Buchanan in an essay from 2015, where he writes: “Despite the fact it is Guattari himself who defines the assemblage this way . . . the connection between Freud’s complex and the concept of the assemblage has been almost completely ignored” (Buchanan 2015, 383). Furthermore, Buchanan claims that agencement is Deleuze and Guattari’s personal translation “or perhaps re-arrangement . . . of the German word Komplex (as in the ‘Oedipal complex’ or the ‘castration complex’)” (ibid.). Crucially, Freud’s Komplex does not necessarily require the consideration of a material object, thus moving the notion of agencement into the realm of a psychological construction. Two things are worth mentioning. On the one hand, it is obvious from Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature that the figure of Oedipus and Kafka’s relationship to his father as it is expressed in the “Letter to the Father” play a central role in the definition of the concept of agencement (at least in that book, in which chapter 2, “An Exaggerated Oedipus,” makes it rather obvious). Additionally, and to complicate things a bit more, the psychoanalytical notion that Deleuze and Guattari explicitly mention is not complex but condensation: “The judges, commissioners, bureaucrats, and so on, are not substitutes for the father; rather, it is the father who is a condensation of all these forces” (Deleuze and Guattari 1986, 12, my emphasis). On the other hand, in his glossary entry,

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Paulo de Assis Guattari clearly states that “Arrangement [agencement] is conceived as replacing the Freudian ‘complex’” (Guattari 1984a, 288, my emphasis). Thus, agencement would not be a translation (or a rearrangement) of “complex” but its replacement, its overcoming. To complicate things even further on the psychoanalytical front, one could mention that Lacan used the French term assemblage in relation to set theory, and that in Seminar XX he did so in a sense that is not dissimilar to Deleuze and Guattari’s agencement (session from 16 January 1973, see Lacan 1998, 47). Therefore, in order to avoid further complications, I think that it is wise to stick to “assemblage” as the translation of agencement, making clear the link to the original formulation whenever necessary.

2. Assemblage and artistic research Machinic Assemblages of Desire offers a collective space for creative and critical reflections on the interactions between different notions of assemblage and the making of art, with a special emphasis on music. Which bodies, regimes of bodies, actions, or intra-actions involving those bodies can we identify or generate in the arts? Which expressive acts, statements, regimes of signs, enunciations? Which modes of territorialisation and deterritorialisation, which strata and diagrams are at work in the concrete making of art? How does the general discourse of assemblage theory relate to the current aesthetico-epistemic regime? How do digital and post-conceptual art relate to notions that were first developed within an analogue world? How is it possible today, within a highly complex and hyper-informed society, to detect the imperceptible movements of an assemblage before such movements occur? How can they be critically exposed in unexpected actualisations, and how is it possible to create new modes of expression? How can the interstices be revealed, or indeed how can unforeseen cracks, inconsistencies, and lines of flight within existing, everchanging assemblages be produced? These are some of the questions that this book addresses from a plurality of voices and perspectives. Following a clear conceptual path that moved from the differential interstices of the dark precursor (first DARE conference, 2015) to the emergent properties of aberrant nuptials (second DARE conference, 2017), to the multiple agencies of assemblages, our title—machinic assemblages of desire—addresses the processuality and machinating powers of artistic activities, particularly in relation to the practice of art, the kind of human activity that paradigmatically exemplifies the active agency of different modes of expressive and material captures, constructing synthesis out of disparate elements. For the first edition of the conference, the dark precursor was chosen as the central topic, a concept that concerns the question of how communication between heterogeneous systems of couplings and resonance occurs without being predetermined. It is a highly poetic concept, that resists a definition, articulating the fundamental disparity of any given intensive system, connecting heterogeneous fields of forces, and having the transductive power of giving shape to several other events, encounters, and concepts. It establishes a dynamic system of relations, linking differences of intensity to one another. The dark precursor is the operator of a necessary com-

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Introduction munication between fields of different potential energy. Without the continuous tremblings produced by infinite dark precursors, no energy would flow between different series and actually nothing would happen in the world. Once the dark precursor opened a path between two systems of different energies and potentials, creating the conditions for an event to happen, what follows is some sort of aberrant nuptials between disparate matters and forces that will need some time for homogenisation and consolidation. Before the lightning occurs, there is only a difference of potential between two under-defined zones of indeterminacy. When the thunderbolt explodes, generating new intensities and assemblages of forces, the emergent entities disclose profoundly heterogeneous characteristics and behaviours, whose properties surprisingly surpass anything we expected beforehand. Once the lightning touches the ground, ignition happens, there is creation: two or more bodies enter a nuptial relationship, which is always aberrant, the result of a fortuitous—sometimes fortunate, sometimes unfortunate—encounter, a becoming-something-else, which is at the opposite poles of imitation, development, or filiation. More than imitation or representation, these encounters foster creative flows of energy, generating unprecedented material configurations and unpredictable responses. Aberrant nuptials expose and reflect the duality and openness inherent in artistic research. For aberrant nuptials are always creative, they point to future arrangements, to new modes of coding and unexpected reterritorializations. They enable the emergence of new planes of consistency, planes that do not follow the formalism of structures, nor the transformation of structures into other structures, but that make transversal modes of communication thinkable and materially graspable. As Deleuze put it in his conversation with Claire Parnet from 1977: There is no terminus from which you set out, none which you arrive at or which you ought to arrive at. . . . The question “What are you becoming?” is particularly stupid. For as someone becomes, what he is becoming changes as much as he does himself. Becomings are not phenomena of imitation or assimilation, but of a double capture, of non-parallel evolution, of nuptials between two reigns. Nuptials are always against nature. Nuptials are the opposite of a couple. There are no longer binary machines: question–answer, masculine–feminine, man–animal, etc. . . . The wasp and the orchid provide the example. (Deleuze and Parnet 2007, 2)

Thus, aberrant nuptials are assemblages of heteroclite things and codes, building inconsistent planes of consistency, planes of metastable consistency, that are neither consistent nor inconsistent. Such planes are populated and traversed by “the most disparate of things and signs” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 69), creating unexpected connections, and fostering the emergence of assemblages, which become recognisable both as collective assemblages of enunciation and as machinic assemblages of desire. Using Man Ray’s Dancer-Danger: L’impossibilité (1917–20) as its visual cue, the third DARE conference (2019) referred back to Deleuze and Guattari’s seminal example of artistic and literary assemblages, which they briefly discuss in the appendix to the second French edition of Anti-Oedipus (in 1973; see Deleuze

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Paulo de Assis and Guattari 1973a, 2009). Dancer-Danger is supposed to represent “the whirl of a Spanish dancer” (Deleuze and Guattari 2009, 91), but the machine depicted by Man Ray cannot execute any movement. Because its cogwheels and pinion racks are unable to operate, it is a non-functioning machine. At the same time, it is an elaborated depiction of a complex gearing system, suggesting creative modes of existence, of composition, and of com-possibility. It directly questions our fascination for machines, our rational deciphering of irrational relations, and our irrational passion for organised representations. What kind of assemblage is this? What assemblage could have produced it? Of which assemblage is this picture a critique? For Deleuze and Guattari (2009, 91), “the object is no longer to compare humans and the machine in order to evaluate the correspondences, the extensions, the possible or impossible substitutions of the ones for the other, but to bring them into communication in order to show how humans are a component part of the machine, or combine with something else to constitute a machine.” Thinking and exploring the notion of assemblage in the context of music and the arts offers unique opportunities for future work, especially in the field of artistic research, in which the making of art goes hand in hand with thorough reflection and precise investigations. On the one hand, the artist-researcher scrutinises the materiality and the connectors of her or his objects of practice (as a symptomatologist), while, on the other, he or she invents new relations, interactions, and transversal paths between them. With the concept of assemblage (which will be thoroughly discussed below), totally new modes of thinking and apprehending art objects emerge: not unitarian monuments, but heterogeneously constituted multiplicities; not primarily meaning-oriented realisations, but stimulating asignifying ruptures; not extensive measurements of quantities (mapping), but intensive explorations of qualities (cartography); not the search for an “essence” of the artwork, but an adventurous exploration of its manifold and heteroclite constitutive parts and flows. Assemblage offers the possibility for a thought and a praxis outside fixed structures, laws, and axiomatic principles, enabling the positive fabrication of new materialities issuing from intensive, dynamic processes, in ever-changing configurations, definitions, and modes of emergence. If one thinks the making of art as a really dynamic process—in the sense that assemblage theory enables—its processuality generates a continuous flux of forces and intensities, which reveal themselves only in the very moment of their transductive actualisation. These forces and intensities generate forms and matter, but it would be a mistake to think of them exclusively in terms of things and their qualities. Extension and extended magnitudes are only the result of the intensive genesis of the extended. Becoming is not becoming-Being, but a much more complex and elaborated process of permanent actualisation, of endlessly becoming-something-different. Fostering a crucial move beyond questions of being and identity, the concept of assemblage creates the conditions for a new image of artistic processes and of artistic results. The question changes from ontological-analytical queries (What is this artwork? What does it mean?) to an ontogenetic, transductive unfolding

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Introduction of matters and energies (How does it work? How does it move? How can we displace its temporary constitutive parts?). Art entities are always constructed, perceived, and known through concrete performative operations that (re)construct them anew every single time one is confronted with them. Such operations bring to the fore well-known structures, but also, and crucially, zones of indeterminacy, grey spots, cracks in the structure that no identity-based ontology is able to explain. The component parts of an artwork are not always perfectly formed, nor are they always conveniently packaged. They are fluid entities, which—more than having a clear shape—are in permanent processes of taking shape again and again. They have some sort of structure but are not totally defined. Any stimulating artistic practice always deals with the construction of the means specifically needed for that practice. Moreover, art objects can’t appear in the world independently of their environment. They come into the field of the visible and of the audible through new social, aesthetic, and cultural takes on them, which are also permanently changing and evolving from one state to the next. In this sense, a logic of assemblage also addresses ever-changing constitutions and perspectives of artworks, as well as their corresponding subject positions, from where they are perceived, received, or criticised. The object is changing, the environment where it is posited is changing, and the subject-receiver is changing. This requires new forms of conceiving the overall ecological network around any possible formalisation of an artistic artefact, forms that take into account its various components and that privilege the notion of permanent transformation. In the place of stabilised structures, this dynamic vision of things, concepts, and connectors makes it possible to keep a hold on complex systems, even if they manifest permanent change and variation. It is this understanding of the concept of assemblage that enables its expansion and application in all the innumerable fields of human practice and non-human modes of expression that populate A Thousand Plateaus, defining a sort of general logic of assemblage, which is not intended as a fully-fledged theory but as a sophisticated elaboration of descriptive and operative principles that allow creative problematisations of complex and far-from-equilibrium systems like those generated by artistic practices and outcomes. This book is intended as a space of presentation and problematisation of such creative practices.

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Paulo de Assis References Alliez, Éric, and Andrew Goffey, eds. 2011a. The Guattari Effect. London: Continuum. ———. 2011b. Introduction to Alliez and Goffey 2011a, 1–14. Bénichou, Pierre. 1972. “Sainte Jackie, comédienne et bourreau.” Les temps modernes 316 (November): 854–56. Bogue, Ronald. 1989. Deleuze and Guattari. London: Routledge. Buchanan, Ian. 2015. “Assemblage Theory and Its Discontents.” Deleuze Studies 9 (3): 382–92. ———. 2017. “Assemblage Theory, or, the Future of an Illusion.” Deleuze Studies 11 (3): 457–74. DeLanda, Manuel. 2006. A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. London: Bloomsbury Academic. ———. 2010. Deleuze: History and Science. New York: Atropos Press. ———. 2016. Assemblage Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1972. “Qu’est-ce que c’est tes ‘machines désirantes à toi?’” Les temps modernes 316 (November): 854–56. Republished 2002 in L’île déserte: Textes et entretiens 1953–1974, edited by David Lapoujade (Paris: Minuit), 337–39. Translated by Michael Taomina as Deleuze 2004. ———. 1975. “Écrivain non: Un nouveau cartographe.” Critique 343 (December): 1207–27. Republished as “Un nouveau cartographe (‘Surveiller et punir’),” in Deleuze 1986, 31–51. Translated by Seán Hand as “A New Cartographer (Discipline and Punish),” in Deleuze 1988, 23–44. ———. 1986. Foucault. Paris: Minuit. Translated by Séan Hand as Deleuze 1988. ———. 1988. Foucault. Translated and edited by Séan Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published as Deleuze 1986. ———. 2004. “Your Special ‘DesiringMachines’: What Are They?” In Desert Islands and Other Texts: 1953–1974, translated by Michael Taomina, edited by David Lapoujade, 242–43. New York: Semiotext(e). First published as Deleuze 1972. ———. 2007. “Eight Years Later: 1980 Interview.” Interview by Catherine

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Clément. In Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995, edited by David Lapoujade, translated by Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina, 175–80. New York: Semiotext(e). Book first published 2003 as Deux régimes de fous: Textes et entretiens, 1975–1995 (Paris: Minuit). Interview first published 1980 as “Huit ans après: Entretien 80” (L’Arc 49: 99–102). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1973a. “Appendice: Bilan-programme pour machine désirantes.” In Deleuze and Guattari 1973b, 463–87. Paris: Minuit. First published 1973 (Minuit 2 [January]: 1–25). Translated by Robert Hurley as Deleuze and Guattari 2009. ———. 1973b. Capitalisme et schizophrénie 1: L’Anti-Œdipe. Nouvelle édition augmentée. Paris: Minuit. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane as Deleuze and Guattari (1977) 1983. ———. 1975. Kafka: Pour une littérature mineure. Paris: Minuit. Translated by Dana Polan as Deleuze and Guattari 1986. ———. 1976. Rhizome: Introduction. Paris: Minuit. Translated by Paul Foss and Paul Patton as Deleuze and Guattari 1981. ———. (1977) 1983. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published as Deleuze and Guattari 1972. Translation first published 1977 (New York: Viking Press). ———. 1981. “Rhizome: Introduction.” Translated by Paul Foss and Paul Patton. I and C 8: 49–71. First published as Deleuze and Guattari 1976. ———. 1986. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Translated by Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published as Deleuze and Guattari 1975. ———. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as Capitalisme et schizophrénie: Mille plateaux (Paris: Minuit). ———. 2009. “Balance-Sheet for ‘DesiringMachines.’” Translated by Robert Hurley. In Chaosophy: Texts and Interviews 1972–1977, by Félix Guattari, edited by Sylvère Lotringer, translated by David

Introduction L. Sweet, Jarred Becker, and Taylor Adkins [et al.], 90–115. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). First published 1973 as “Bilan-programme pour machines désirantes” (Minuit 2 [January]: 1–25). See also Deleuze and Guattari 1973a. Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. 2007. Dialogues II. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Rev. ed. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1977 as Dialogues (Paris: Flammarion). Foucault, Michel. 1966. Les mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines. Paris: Gallimard. Translated by Alan Sheridan as Foucault 1970. ———. 1970. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon Books. First published as Foucault 1966. ———. 1975. Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison. Paris: Gallimard. Translated by Alan Sheridan as Foucault 1977. ———. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon. First published as Foucault 1975. Guattari, Félix. 1984a. “Glossary.” In Guattari 1984b, 288–90. ———. 1984b. Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics. Translated by Rosemary Sheed. New York: Penguin. Includes materials from Psychanalyse et transversalité: Essais d’analyse institutionelle (Paris: Maspero, 1972) and La révolution

moléculaire (Fontenay-sous-Bois: Recherches, 1977), as well as one essay from Les années d’hiver, 1980–1985 (Paris: Barrault, 1986). Lacan, Jacques. 1998. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan; Book XX: Encore 1972–1973; On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York: W. W. Norton. First published 1975 as Le séminaire de Jacques Lacan: Livre XX, Encore 1972–1973 (Paris: Seuil). Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor–Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nail, Thomas. 2017. “What Is an Assemblage?” SubStance 46 (1): 21–37. Phillips, John. 2006. “Agencement/ Assemblage.” Theory, Culture and Society 23 (1–2): 108–9. Posteraro, Tano. 2020. “Assemblage Theory and the Two Poles of Organic Life.” Deleuze and Guattari Studies 14 (3): 402–32. Sauvagnargues, Anne. 2011. “Deleuze: De l’animal à l’art.” In La Philosophie de Deleuze, by François Zourabichvili, Anne Sauvagnargues, and Paola Marrati, 2nd ed., 117–227. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Venn, Couze. 2006. “A Note on Assemblage.” Theory, Culture and Society 23 (2–3): 107–8. Wise, J. Macgregor. 2005. “Assemblage.” In Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts, edited by Charles J. Stivale, 77–87. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

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Cartographic Recording of Discourse Mapping as an Emergent Rhizomatic Drawing Process Ron Wigglesworth University of Alberta, Canada

This is an extract, an assemblage of traces, from my notebook during the DARE Conference on 9 December 2019 made at the presentation by the opening speaker, Paulo de Assis. It is my particular process of mapping presentations as a unique cartographic recording. I begin mid-page and spontaneously “record” key phrases and connecting ideas, while including notations and a thoughtmap of what is heard in the moment. Tertiary phrases or ideas are drawn and connected by lines as they emerge from the speaker’s discourse. The map/diagram develops in some kind of rhizomatic way; it is intended to record traces in the moment, to try to capture a talk. The result is not a question of right or wrong but of catching the impressions in some unanticipated rhizomatic form. The diagram grows out of itself as I map out traces of ideas and it might also incorporate lines of flight of impressions left by the speaker. I have developed the skill of writing/mapping legibly while not looking at the paper for extended periods during discourse. This opens a space for me to simultaneously watch the speaker and record/observe while my hand is continuously capturing an assemblage—mapping out the moment. The final outcome is meant only to be deciphered by myself. The same holds true if later I transcribe the map, redrawing the diagram: the traces follow an emergent rhizomatic process in becoming a cartographic recording.

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Part 1

Music

Guattari, Consistency, and Experimental Musical Assemblages Edward Campbell University of Aberdeen, UK

Guattari, consistency, and the musical assemblage Musical assemblages are composed from diverse milieus, of which musical sound is only one component.1 From this point of view, assemblage theory might first be thought of as involving the identification of the forces comprising any given artwork, an activity that itself can be understood as operating on more than one level. More specifically, innovative or experimental music is formed from all kinds of unexpected rhizomatic connections operating between social practices, the development of instruments and instrumental techniques, musical systems, notation, performance styles and practices, developments in technology, performance spaces, musical institutions, the recording and reproduction of music, relationships with literature, visual arts, and philosophy, and innumerable other factors. Each of these comprises a specific milieu from which elements are reterritorialised to form a musical assemblage. As a form of Deleuzian Spinozism, Amy Cimini (2010) notes that “listeners, performers, instruments, spaces, musical forms, and sonorous vibration” (137) can be thought of as bodies of equal value, capable of affecting and being affected by one another, in such a way that analysis of the musical work becomes the task of unpicking the relations of the respective bodies that have reached a unified, composite state in the artwork. All of which prompts questions regarding the precise nature of these bodies or “sound particles” (138) or of how we can think them as affecting one another with their “micro-movements” (144). Considering an experimental musical or mixed-media work as a DeleuzoGuattarian assemblage entails recognising that its “interest” or “success” is in some way the product of its consistency in the sense that it constitutes a successful, viable, meeting place of elements from these heterogeneous forces. We might then ask what we mean when we speak of the consistency of a musical or mixed-media assemblage or of musical assemblages as working or as succeeding on the basis of their consistency?

1 Unless otherwise stated all translations are my own.

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Edward Campbell

Guattari on consistency Deleuze and Guattari devote the final chapter of their book on Kafka to the question “What Is an Assemblage?” and the specific question of consistency is articulated at length in A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 327–37) where it is identified as “the manner in which the components of a territorial assemblage hold together” as well as “the manner in which different assemblages hold together, with components of passage and relay” (327). They suggest that “it may even be the case that consistency finds the totality of its conditions only on a properly cosmic plane, where all the disparate and heterogeneous elements are convoked. However, from the moment heterogeneities hold together in an assemblage or interassemblages a problem of consistency is posed, in terms of coexistence or succession, and both simultaneously” (327). In addition to his work with Deleuze, Guattari developed his own highly experimental understanding of the assemblage, molecularity, de- and reterritoralisation, consistency, and the rest, notably in The Machinic Unconscious (1979, see Guattari 2011), the posthumously published Lines of Flight (2011, see Guattari 2016) (written around the time of A Thousand Plateaus), Schizoanalytic Cartographies (1989, see Guattari 2013b), and his final book Chaosmosis (1992, see Guattari 1995). Guattari’s reflections on the assemblage are habitually ignored in the work of theorists such as Manuel DeLanda (2016) who, while making frequent reference to A Thousand Plateaus and the pre-assemblage Anti-Oedipus, as well as several of Deleuze’s solo writings and conversation books, makes no mention of Guattari’s later elaborations of the concept. Guattari nevertheless wrote about the assemblage with seemingly endless creativity, retheorising it in ways that defy simple reduction, and his reflections often touch on the question of consistency. With this kind of complexity in mind, Andrew Goffey (2013, xvii) suggests that his work calls for “experimental use.” In what follows, I begin by presenting a partial digest of Guattari’s statements and concepts that may be most pertinent and productive in relation to theorising the consistency of musical assemblages. Beyond the neglect of Guattari’s individual contributions to assemblage theory, it is equally notable that the question of the consistency of the assemblage has not yet received much attention in the general literature, never mind in enquiries relating more particularly to music. Consequently, in this chapter I set out the range of Guattari’s thinking on the consistency of the assemblage before considering how consistency may be viewed in relation to certain experimental musical works by Georges Aperghis, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and Anthony Braxton. That Guattari and Aperghis knew one another and expressed serious interest in one another’s work is sufficient reason for discussing Aperghis’s compositions and working practices in relation to the consistency of the assemblage. The selection of the Art Ensemble of Chicago and of Anthony Braxton is made in the conviction that both have produced some of the most heterogeneous, multiplicitous, and fluid musical assemblages anywhere in the world in the final third of the twentieth century and beyond. My hope is however that Guattari’s work on the consistency of the assemblage will

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Guattari, Consistency, and Experimental Musical Assemblages prove to be of wider interest and that it can provide some helpful concepts for articulating how it is that experimental musical works may be said to function successfully.

Molar/molecular/abstract consistencies In The Machinic Unconscious, Guattari relates the relative freedom within an assemblage to its machinic nucleus, recognising that the abstract machines of which it is composed “do not have any ‘real’ existential consistency” being “only infinitesimal indications hyper-deterritorialized from crystallizations of a possible between states of affairs and states of signs” (Guattari 2011, 47). He sets out three forms of “existential consistency”: (1) Molar consistencies in which “redundant elements are strongly crystallized and stratified, allowing flows of redundancies to develop,” and that comprise (a) “effects of weak resonance” and (b) “effects of weak interaction” (47). For Guattari, “the molar politics of stratification” is characterised by “a world of stratified, identified, or hierarchized objects and subjects, singularities and abstract machines there being held by systems of coordinates that authorize only the minimum degree of freedom necessary for the survival of the assemblages” (48). (2) With molecular consistency, “elements of redundancy are conveyed by substrates less stratified than the preceding, allowing flows of redundancy to develop”—(a) “effects of strong resonance” and (b) “effects of strong interaction.” He recognises that at this level, it is impossible to distinguish between “what forms a part of a component, an assemblage, or a field” since “all machinic interactions count, all redundancies overlap, and all sign-particle trajectories cross” (48). (3) With abstract (or absolute or intrinsic) consistency, “machinic elements escape systems of redundancy” and Guattari distinguishes (a) “the consistency of capitalistic abstractions,” among which he includes music, “as a cornerstone of signifying resonances and semantic fields” and (b) “the consistency of signs-particles that specifically defines the irreducible nuclei of the abstract machinic possible” (49). For Guattari, “this type of nucleus holds in reserve a ‘potential possible’” and “never dissolves into the universe of fields and components” (49). He concludes that “the machinic nucleus that specifies an assemblage is located at the crossing of two types of diagrammatic consistency,” namely “the fuzzy set of molecular consistencies (component—assemblage—field)” and “the undecidable abstract machinic set of intrinsic abstract consistency” (50).2 Posing the question “what holds the assemblages and their heterogeneous components together?,” one to which he returns often, Guattari (2011, 146) highlights the importance of rhythm, for example “the synchronization of biological rhythms.” He looks to Ludwig Klages’s3 opposition of “vital rhythm[s]” with “more cultural cadences” and his view that “humans were only able to 2 In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 333) state that “a machine is like a set of cutting edges that insert themselves into the assemblage undergoing deterritorialization, and draw variations and mutations of it. For there are no mechanical effects; effects are always machinic, in other words, depend on a machine that is plugged into an assemblage and has been freed through deterritorialization. What we call machinic statements are machine effects that define consistency or enter matters of expression.” 3 Ludwig Klages (1872–1956), German philosopher, psychologist, and co-founder of graphology.

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Edward Campbell assemble elementary rhythms in free spatial and temporal cadences.” As Klages puts it, “Life is expressed in rhythm: Spirit, on the other hand, through means of metric cadences, forces life’s rhythmic impulse to yield to the law which is proper to it” (quoted in ibid.). Guattari notes however that “chronobiology, rather than seeking to ‘attach’ trans-rhythmicity upon spirit and culture, endeavored, on the contrary, to derive it from a composition of basic molecular rhythms” (146). Interestingly, in A Thousand Plateaus, there is no mention of Klages. Instead, in the eleventh plateau, “1837: Of the Refrain,” after discussion of the “schema” from Nikolaas Tinbergen’s4 The Study of Instinct (1969), which involves rhythm, Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 329) theorise the possibility of “a superposition of disparate rhythms, an articulation from within of an interrhythmicity, with no imposition of meter or cadence,” but relate it to Eugène Dupréel’s5 theory of consolidation. Furthermore, they note that consolidation is “creative” and that it is the same as consistency in that “it is the act that produces consolidated aggregates, of succession as well as of coexistence, by means of . . . three factors . . . intercalated elements, intervals, and articulations of superposition.”6 The second part of The Machinic Unconscious, titled “Refrains of Lost Time,” is devoted to Proust’s great novel and takes the form of an exemplary assemblage analysis. Fixing his attention on the so-called little phrase from Vinteuil’s sonata, which is so important at key points in the novel, he traces nine “little phrase” assemblages, describing “the circumstances, the context that characterizes them, and also the various matters of expression which they set to work.” For each one he attempts to identify their “most significant micropolitical results. . . . for example, a dominant component, a component of passage, a rhizomatic opening, an effect of arborescence, black hole effects, etc.” (Guattari 2011, 241). In Guattari’s analysis, the first of these nine assemblages, which pertains to Charles Swann’s first hearing of the little phrase a year before meeting Odette de Crécy, stalls as a result of its “lack of consistency” (Guattari 2011, 245). He judges that the “syncretism between contents and expression remain fragile—‘impressions’ of all kinds which flutter around music are not truly attached to its perceptive texture.” The assemblage lacks a “black hole effect” and is restricted to “the default shutdown of existential consistency” (245). The third assemblage pertains to that period during which Swann visited Madame Verdurin’s salon regularly in order to see Odette there, his visits signalled by the young pianist’s playing of the little phrase. While the little phrase now works on him “like a love potion” (253) since he has “fallen into Odette’s trap,” Swann nevertheless “senses that he does not have the ‘means’ for his love” (254). In his analysis of this third assemblage, Guattari compares Swann with Proust’s narrator, judging that “the entire difference that separates them is based on a threshold of consistency which he [Swann] does not succeed in crossing” (254), 4 Nikolaas Tinbergen (1907–88), Dutch biologist and ornithologist. 5 Eugène Dupréel (1879–1967), Belgian philosopher. 6 Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 549n31) acknowledge that Dupréel “elaborated a set of original notions” including “‘consistency’ (in relation to ‘precariousness’), ‘consolidation,’ ‘interval,’ ‘intercalation.’”

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Guattari, Consistency, and Experimental Musical Assemblages though “the loss of the assemblage’s consistency” happens slowly over time, in this case over “several months” (257). All this offers insights for the production of music analysis.

Diachronic and synchronic consistency Of a sixth assemblage, which pertains to a moment “years after marrying Swann,” when Odette plays Vinteuil’s sonata for the adolescent narrator (Guattari 2011, 276), Guattari picks up on “two modes of the refrain’s existential consistency” (279). The first is “a mode of diachronic consistency,” the “various prototypes” of which “are set in orbit by successive assemblages of enunciation” (279). The second is “a mode of synchronic consistency” in which “all the forms of refrain act upon one another” (280). In the example discussed by Guattari, however, “it is in its final state, that which is the vehicle of the most diagrammatic abstract machinism, which is the most ‘connected’ to all the other components, that it attains an interactive mode of efficiency”; he concludes that “it is necessary that this final threshold be crossed so that, retroactively, the others can be crossed as well” (280). In Lines of Flight, Guattari (2016) notes that a schizo-analytic cartography needs to be concerned on the one hand “with the synchronic analysis of the components that constitute an assemblage at a given moment and polarise it towards such and such a behaviour, such and such an arborescent politics or rhizomatic connection” and, on the other hand, with “the diachronic marking out of the generation and transformation of assemblages” (195).7 Noting that “the two analytic series will constantly intersect, the same series of questions effectively traversing them both,” the task is to consider “links between assemblages that sketch out rhizomatic openings.” He suggests that “it is only by taking into account inter-assemblage transformations that one will . . . be able to make the true factors of rupture and mutation that work assemblages at the molecular scale and catalyse the ‘phase transitions’ or ‘percolations effects’ . . . discernible, and thus be able to intervene” (195). As Peter Pál Pelbart (2011, 79) puts it, “everything is passage, from one consistency to another, from one complex of possibilities to another, from one assemblage to another.” A notable example here would be Pierre Boulez’s tendency to reuse basic musical material created for one work in a number of others. Joseph Salem writes, for example, of Boulez’s “L’Orestie genus,” a group of works that are related genetically in the sense that they “all share common ‘DNA.’ In some cases, this means that actual notes and themes are borrowed from one work for use in another; in other cases, it merely clarifies that a certain fundamental sketch (including specific pitch material) was used as the basis for multiple works. In all cases, it means that the works in the L’Orestie genus share actual 7 In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) write that “the territorial assemblage is a milieu consolidation, a space-time consolidation, of coexistence and succession. And the refrain operates with these three factors” (329). Again, with consistency “heterogeneities that were formerly content to coexist or succeed one another become bound up with one another through the ‘consolidation’ of their coexistence and succession” (330).

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Edward Campbell notes and structures with one another that evolve over time” (Salem 2019, 245). To take another example, it would be interesting to trace the movement of multi-mediatic and micro-mediatic forces across a series of Georges Aperghis’s more recent assemblages, notably the oratorio Die Hamletmaschine (1999–2000) and the music theatre works Machinations (2000), Paysage sous surveillance (2002), Avis de tempête (2004), and Luna Park (2011). Aperghis is an intriguing example since he and Guattari knew one another and each was interested in the work of the other. Guattari first encountered Aperghis’s compositions in 1976 and they were in touch until Guattari’s death in 1992. In 1991 Guattari stated that what he found interesting in Aperghis’s spectacles was his manner of playing around with elements as it were, chaotically, as a way of writing music, of searching for focal points for creativity, which supposes taking an absolute risk, the risk that nothing will happen, that one will remain in an aleatory void, or perhaps that there might be what I call a “chaosmic line,” which is to say a foundational chaos that deploys not only lines of discursivity, of echoes, baroque elements, but also of referential links, affects, an existential dimension that is non-discursive, that gives itself not in a paradigmatic sense, but as [the] texture of another order. (Guattari 2013a, 33)

Aperghis in turn spoke of how he and Guattari had discussed the organisation of chaos, “how to identify islands [îlots] [and] markers [balises] with which to orient oneself ” (Aperghis 2013, 39), and conductor Georges-Elie Octors stated that “Aperghis’ works are held together by virtue of an internal obviousness which is a kind of flow, flux, fluid” (Octors and Plouvier 2004). Avis de tempête (Storm warning) (2004) results from collaboration with a librettist, a video artist, computer technicians, a scenographer, a conductor, four performers (two men, two women), and an instrumental ensemble. It is an assemblage in a state of constant deterritorialisation, in which the heterogeneous elements leap from one milieu to another and where, as Aperghis says, “an abstract sound becomes the voice of an actor, a phoneme becomes running water, a character [is] divided up and then reconstructed elsewhere” (Aperghis 2005, 16). Aperghis’s idea at the outset was the creation of a stage work dealing with all kinds of storms, pertaining not only to meteorology but also to war, the human passions, and the financial markets (Aperghis 2007, 53). He proposed it to musicologist and literary collaborator Peter Szendy (2007, 25) as a piece about “storms, meteorological storms, amorous [storms], stock-exchange storms, storms under a skull, in a glass of water.” While Szendy was invited to write a text for the work, and he in fact produced an essay on storms, the completed text was pieced together by Aperghis featuring multiple fragments from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, along with lesser borrowings from Kafka, Baudelaire, Shakespeare, Victor Hugo, and the Beaufort Wind Force Scale. Beyond this, the text is in French and English and much of it consists of molecularised phonemes. The piece is consequently constituted by assemblages within assemblages.

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Guattari, Consistency, and Experimental Musical Assemblages A number of contributors to Antoine Gindt’s 1990 book Georges Aperghis: Le corps musical (Gindt 1990a) draw attention to aspects of Aperghis’s practice that we might relate to the problem of consistency. Aperghis’s late wife, the actor Édith Scob, noted that in 1976, at a given moment in his career, with the production of the piece La bouteille à la mer, Aperghis was convinced that a new language had emerged and that with it “coherence imposed itself with the force of lightning” (Gindt 1990b, 44). Acknowledging that Aperghis works with sounds, gestures, and images in a medium that falls between theatre and music, Jean-Pierre Drouet recalled of Aperghis’s Conversations for two actors and percussionist (1985) that everything took shape during their rehearsals and that they experimented and eventually settled on the version that seemed the most successful to them (Drouet 1990, 80). As to why a given version was deemed the most successful one, he admitted that he did not know and that the decision was “very instinctive.” Actor Michael Lonsdale, who has worked a great deal with Aperghis, remarks that “it’s difficult to say why one performance [spectacle] works better than another. Very often it is linked to the fact that the encounter between people triggers a certain number of positive coincidences, which serve as the catalyst in the creation of situations, events, etc. Circumstances have to carry all of the team in the same direction. And that leads sometimes to nothing” (Lonsdale 1990, 98–99). He continues, making something with Georges Aperghis triggers some very unfamiliar, really inexplicable mechanisms, a little bit like in jazz when two musicians improvise with such ease that one is led to believe that everything is calculated, rehearsed. . . . As with improvisation, one can equally have days of complete blockage: nothing happens, one is not on the same wavelength, one needs to try all the possible combinations, the result is disappointing or indeed nothing results. It’s a rule which one has to accept: breakdowns happen, one must simply go beyond them, seek again the conditions necessary for creation, one never has a guarantee of success. (100–101)

Scenographer Yannis Kokkos, likewise noted that while he and Aperghis produced “extraordinary things” together, he could not explain precisely how this worked (Kokkos 1990, 131). For Lonsdale, one cannot omit any part or element of Aperghis’s music theatre works and to do so would render them “incomprehensible” (Lonsdale 1990, 101). And scholar Daniel Durney wrote that Aperghis always presents us with a world that is “a little ‘in delirium,’ or in tatters.” Indeed, Aperghis seems to doubt “that the world can exist other than as incoherent, ‘disarticulate’ or wacky. And who says that he is not justified in doing so?” (Durney 1990, 197). As Durney shows, Aperghis’s work features a range of “paradoxical figures: immobile movement, disrupted progression, vain restlessness, masked identity,” processes by means of which he “disturbs order, disrupts structure, ultimately to cast a radical doubt on the rationality and logic with which it is believed one can interpret reality” (223).

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Holding together The question of the consistency of the assemblage arises again in Lines of Flight, where Guattari asks, “what will ‘hold together’ this new world, where, in particular, will it draw the consistency of its collective power of labour from?” (2016, 51). In what could be an answer to his own question, he later writes: When abstract machines succeed in escaping the regime of the capitalist economy of flows (that is to say, when they free themselves from the institutional supervision, the equipment of power that hierarchise, ritualise and reterritorialise them according to an abstract and transcendent universal order). . . . they crystallise the knot of a problem, they guarantee the consistency of a “state of fact” which, at the level of concrete machines, will find itself fixed, “contingenced” in history and the social field. They metabolise passageways between different strata, they model the process of subjectivation—without it being a question here of a universal subjectivity—they open up or close down the possible, either by allowing sometimes miniscule lines of flight of desire, to escape, or by setting off revolutions in chain reaction, or by allowing themselves to be taken over by systems of stratification. (60–61)

While recognising that “diagrammatic assemblages already exist everywhere in capitalist societies,” he notes that “every effort is made to channel their creativity into the dominant territorialities of the system” so that “deterritorialising diagrammatism is ceaselessly recuperated, reterritorialised, hierarchised, impotentiated” (99). In musical terms, we think here of the efforts of musicians to work outside dominant significations in terms of musical systems, traditional instrumental ensembles, and institutional frameworks. Regarding the formation of assemblages and the establishment of consistency, Guattari (2016) distinguishes machinic consistency from logical consistency in such a way that it cannot be subsumed within any “logical category” (153) and he notes the existence of different kinds of consistency. “The different kinds of consistency—biological, ethological, semiological, sociological, etc.— . . . do not depend on structural or generative super-stratum; they are worked from the ‘inside’ by a network of machinic connections. Machinic consistency is not totalising but deterritorialising. It guarantees the always possible conjunction of the most different of systems of stratification” (154). Guattari also allows that not all the components comprising an assemblage of enunciation are of equal importance and that their relative weightings may vary according to circumstances (193–94). He recognises that some components “form constellations” and “are centred and hierarchised around a point of arborescence, which in some way programs the regularity of this return of the same assemblages and the consistency of an everyday mode and a mode of subjectivation that for better or for worse is always re-centred on the same self.” In addition to these reappearing elements, he observes that “other components behave as ‘trouble-makers’ or rather as ‘reality-troublers,’” making assemblages “tip over,” subverting their normal functioning and connecting “them to one another in unforeseen constellations” (194). This point appears also in A Thousand Plateaus where Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 331), writing of bird song, note that “from the standpoint

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Guattari, Consistency, and Experimental Musical Assemblages of consistency, matters of expression must be considered not only in relation to their aptitude to form motifs and counterpoints but also in relation to the inhibitors and releasers that act on them, and the mechanisms of innateness or learning, heredity or acquisition, that modulate them.”

Schizoanalytic Cartographies In Schizoanalytic Cartographies, Guattari (2013b) distinguishes two types of relations within “the ‘primordial soup’ of the chaotic Plane of immanence: relations of reference and relations of consistency” (105). Reference concerns “the pure passive connectivity of instances of being-there—whether they are territorialized or deterritorialized.” It operates as “holding together” and entails “co-existence, trans-existence, existential transitivity, transversality” but without anything being transmitted and “nothing ‘pass[ing]’ between the referring and the referred” (105). Consistency, in contrast, can be marked by either “infinite speed” (105) or “‘decelerated’ speed” (105–6). For Guattari, “‘deceleration’ (or reterritorialization)” characterises consistency as “a fundamental new dimension of Assemblages, whose operations begin in chaos” (106). Where infinite speed is synonymous with “zero consistency” since “the reiteration sequences here are infinitely short,” “decelerated and modulated reference speeds” are operative with regard to territorialisation. Indeed, “consistency expresses the fragility and precariousness of connective processes, their relative density, but also their finitude, their transitional, sequential character—which derives . . . from the fact that their existential distinctiveness is essentially tributary to contingent arrangements at heterogeneous levels” (106). In ontological terms, Guattari states that “Being is the modulation of consistency, the rhythm of putting together and dismantling [montage et démontage]. Its cohesion, if not its coherence, arises neither from an internal principle of eternity nor from an extrinsic, causalist framing that would hold existents together at the heart of the same world. Rather it results from the conjugation of processualities of intrinsic consistency, themselves engaging in generalized relations of existential transversality” (107–8). Guattari (2013b) further identifies the three functions of “smoothing, acceleration and specificity of effect” as “the correlate of a loss of ontological consistency that is synonymous with a deterritorializing opening onto new possibilistic Phyla” in terms of “the fields of the possible” and “mutations of virtuality” (108). He notes the possibility that “the same concatenation of entities” can “engage in consistencies with antagonistic definitions” (110). He further tries to specify “the genesis of proto-enunciative processes during their release in the very first steps of the composition of entitarian reduncancies in the ‘primordial soup’” (112) and what he describes as “the existential glue proper to the exo/endo-reference relation[, which] can be one of cold consistency, or pure passive territorialized connectivity, or of a hot, deterritorialized consistency” (113). For Guattari, “what gives Universes consistency . . . is the crystallization within them of a singular-singularizing Constellation . . . , the best illustrations of which are provided by Art” (160).

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Chaosmosis: “internal, material consistency” and “formal, diagrammatic consistency” Throughout his writings, Guattari regularly cites musical examples when illustrating the working of assemblages and in Chaosmosis he states that “the pathic apprehension of harmonic resonances based on the diatonic scale deploys the ‘foundation’ of consistency of polyphonic music” (Guattari 1995, 26). Again, he suggests that “from acoustics to polyphonic music, there is a divergence of constellations of expressive intensity” that “involve a certain pathic relationship, and convey irreducibly heterogeneous ontological consistencies. We thus discover as many types of deterritorialisation as traits of expressive materials” (38). He defines, among an infinity of forms of alterity, “the alterity of an internal, material consistency” and that of “formal, diagrammatic consistency” (45). For Guattari, “musical machines establish themselves against a background of sonorous Universes” that have been continuously modified since the rise of polyphony (47). Entering into “a Debussyst Universe” or “a blues Universe,” for example, entails crossing “a threshold of consistency” and encountering a “block of sensation,” a “nucleus of partial subjectivation,” a “becoming other” in which I am “carried beyond my familiar existential Territories” (93). Guattari (1995) asks once again, “How can we, in this sensory submersion in a finite material, hold together an embodied composition (be it the most deterritorialised, as is the case with the material of music, or the material of conceptual art) and this hyper-complexity, this autopoiesis of aesthetic affects?” (95). He possibly attempts something of an answer to this question in an interview with Olivier Zahm. Drawing on Debussy’s music as an example of “an aesthetic machine,” he suggests that with its many heterogeneous components— musical, literary, plastic, social, and so on—“this constellation of universes of reference forms an enunciator that gives consistency to the pentatonic notes, to the writing on the paper, to interpretations,” and that “there is something that holds all that together,” what he calls “the incorporeal nucleus of enunciation” (Guattari and Zahm 2011, 51–52). While asking once again what it is “that makes all the components hang together,” he acknowledges that not being an organism the aesthetic machine is incorporeal, and while stressing once again that “it is perfectly consistent,” he seems unable to go any further by way of an answer (52). Echoing his earlier ontological speculations in Schizoanalytic Cartographies, Guattari (1995) states in Chaosmosis that “Being is first auto-consistency, auto-affirmation” (109) and he sets out “two types of ontological consistency,” namely “heterogenetic being-quality and homogenetic being-matter-nothingness” (111). Ultimately, for Guattari, “the work of art . . . is an activity of unframing, of rupturing sense, of baroque proliferation or extreme impoverishment, which leads to a recreation and a reinvention of the subject itself ”; he concludes, “the consistency of subjectivity” is only “maintained by self-renewal through a minimal, individual or collective, resingularisation” (131).

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Guattari, Consistency, and Experimental Musical Assemblages

Consistency in experimental music assemblages The scope of Guattari’s reflections provide a number of pointers for rethinking the consistency of various assemblage types that are no longer unified coherently by tonality, key structure, form, or text. Questions of coherence and consistency arise in relation to the entire spectrum of musical assemblages, from the hyper-organicist model of a Goethian/Beethovenian/Weberian classicism to the Cageian anarchy of letting sounds simply be themselves. Musical systems such as modality and tonality, which, despite appearances, are never fixed, provide a formal diagrammatic consistency for compositions created using such systems. This is equally the case for Western art music, jazz, and pop, as well as traditional and art musics from Africa, Asia, and elsewhere, all of which have their own musical systems with their own multiple milieus from which distinctive assemblages are formed. For Arnold Schoenberg, following Kant, the genius of the composer produces something new, the coherence and consistency of which we can rely on, even if it takes a considerable time to be widely recognised. While the emergence of atonality in the early twentieth century posed new questions of coherence and comprehensibility, consistency was assured in many pieces since, despite the relinquishing of tonality and its hierarchies and a freer approach to pitch material, such compositions continued to adhere to many of tonality’s strongest conventions including the progression of individual voices, the exact or modified repetition of features, and the homogeneity of vertical and horizontal pitch collections. Schoenberg was in no doubt that his new musical assemblages were consistent and coherent and that, even if he was unable to specify the laws governing the functioning of a composition, some kind of underlying logic could be sensed, even it could not yet be explained. While Schoenberg’s experience suggests that the traditional guarantors of coherence and consistency were breaking down or even at their outer limits, it is arguably the case that twenty-first-century listeners encounter late-Romantic music in terms of Guattari’s molar consistency with its strong crystallisation of redundant elements, its hierarchies and minimal freedom. With Schoenbergian atonality, music entered into more molecular territory, but still with many of the gravitational functions and molar aspects of previous music still intact. For a number of modernist composers working after 1945, the consistency of the musical work was to be grounded in the power of numbers.8 Scientific models served equally well as generators of composition and guarantors of coherence.9 While these musics are demonstrably coherent/consistent in their formation, this is not always immediately evident in audition and while clearly structured, albeit idiosyncratically, they are nevertheless much more molecular in their consistency. 8 Examples include Boulez’s pitch-multiplication procedures, Xenakis’s statistical and stochastic processes, Peter Maxwell Davies’s use of magic square processes, or Harrison Birtwistle’s generation of random numbers. 9 For example with Xenakis’s applications of the Brownian theory of gases, György Ligeti’s musical appropriation of fractal theory, or compositional approaches based on the inner life of sounds, accessible by means of the harmonic series.

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Edward Campbell As Guattari acknowledged, the consistency of a musical assemblage may be provided by the predominance of one parameter, a role that most often historically has been performed by pitch; but this function can just as easily be filled by duration, rhythm, timbre, dynamics, instrumental grouping, spatial position, and so on. Karlheinz Stockhausen’s group composition capitalised on this principle, for example in Gruppen (1955–57) and Zeitmasse (1955–56), as did Boulez’s development of signals and envelopes in his later compositions, and the primacy of timbre in the music of the French spectral composers from the mid-1970s, is another case in point.10 In contrast with the proponents of musical organisation, John Cage came to the view that the works that resulted from his subjective compositional intentions and choices were failures; he therefore embraced chance operations from 1951 (Pritchett 1993, 1–2); however, he was never able to completely erase subjectivity, at least at the level of the setting out of options and the means of arriving at musical results. Despite this attempted erasure of intentional compositional organisation, Cage nevertheless acknowledged that he found some performances of his pieces more interesting than others (Cage and Charles 1981, 58–59). He justified his judgement that a particular performance had been beautiful on the grounds that the performers had “performed with great care to make sure that each sound was really itself ” (130). This interest in sounds in themselves was the basis of his criticism of Pierre Schaeffer, and he took issue with the French experimenter’s “concern for . . . the relationships between sounds” (76) and the inevitability of a return to a more traditional position whereby certain noises could “go only with certain noises and not with others” (77). In complete opposition to this, Cage worked to create “an entirely new situation, in which any sound or noise at all [could] go with any other” (77). While he accepted that “things interpenetrate,” he believed that “they interpenetrate more richly and with more complexity” when he himself did “not establish any connection” between them (78) and he stated that “the function of art at the present time is to preserve us from all the logical minimizations that we are at each instant tempted to apply to the flux of events” (80–81). Musicircus, a multimedia happening first held at the University of Illinois in 1967, Roaratorio, an Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake (1979), compiled at IRCAM in Paris, and the five Europeras (1987–91) were the most radical results of this thinking, where innumerable musical events occur simultaneously. With Cage, we arguably find ourselves in the domain of a more abstract consistency, marked by the absence of hierarchy and stratified elements, and where sign-particles are much freer in their passage; but this advanced molecularity is to be found equally in the kinds of free improvisation that emerged with jazz musicians such as Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor in the 1960s and the tradition of experimental music represented by groups such as the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians in Chicago (AACM). The pairing of John Cage and Sun Ra in a concert at Coney Island, New York, on 8 June 1986 10 The analysis of harmonic spectra became the compositional starting point and the generator of musical material and form, thus guaranteeing consistency and coherence in a completely novel way.

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Guattari, Consistency, and Experimental Musical Assemblages serves as testimony to these twin streams of musical creativity and their more molecular consistencies, though this event was long anticipated by Cage’s joint performance—“Imperfections in a Given Space”—with Joseph Jarman’s Quartet in Chicago in November 1965 (Lewis 2008, 129–31; Steinbeck 2017, 53–55). Having previously studied Cage’s music and writings, the experience was significant for Jarman and, according to Paul Steinbeck (2017, 55), demonstrated to him “that bodily movements and spatial relationships could change how listeners experienced music,” an insight that led him to experiment further with integrating music with a range of other art forms. In the 1960s the musicians of the AACM produced new hybrid assemblages integrating improvisation and composition. As George Lewis notes, the “AACM composers often sought to place their work in dialogue with diasporic traditions and histories from both Africa and Europe” and “were often drawn to collage and interpenetration strategies that blended opposed, or ironically juxtaposed” composition and improvisation (Lewis 2008, 361). Emerging initially from the AACM, the five members of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, ostensibly a grouping comprising two saxophones, trumpet, bass, and drums, produced much more spectacular instrumental assemblages. Under the blanket term “great black music,” Joseph Jarman elaborated: “we play the blues, we play jazz, rock; Spanish, Gypsy, and African music; classical music, contemporary European music, voodoo. Everything, really—because, ultimately, we play ‘music.’ We create sounds, ‘period’” (Jarman quoted in Steinbeck 2017, 76). Beyond hybridity of style and genre, the ensemble’s bass player Malachi Favors, inspired by a performance by Les Ballets Africains, the national dance company of Guinea, which he saw in 1959 in Chicago, introduced a number of “little instruments” into the Art Ensemble, enabling the production of much richer sound worlds (Steinbeck 2017, 45). In the course of its performances, the ensemble drew on hundreds of instruments, recited poetry, performed theatrical sketches, and wore face paint and masks, traditional African and Asian dress, and laboratory coats. For Steinbeck, “the Art Ensemble took AACM-style hybridity to a new level, developing a unique performance practice that combined group improvisation with intermedia (poetry, theater, costumes, movement) and a large repertoire of written compositions” (ibid., 3). Commenting on the ensemble’s first New York concert in July 1973, Robert Palmer of the New York Times compared its work to “developments in the visual arts; themes, variations, solos and ensemble passages alternate in a continuous flow that is comparable to a collage of apparently disparate objects and images” (Palmer quoted in Lewis 2008, 329). Paul Steinbeck (2017), who has analysed a number of recordings of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, notes that the album A Jackson in Your House (1969) includes a great variety of “sounds, musical styles, and compositional structures” with “verbal commentary, vocal sounds, theatrical scenarios, and poetry” (82). The album Live at Mandel Hall (1972) while containing “relatively few intermedia elements. . . . begins and ends with preselected compositions” while the hour of material in between these two points is based entirely on improvisation (7). Alternatively, the video recording Live from the Jazz Showcase (1982) features

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Edward Campbell music “inspired by the African diaspora, from Nigeria, Mali, and Morocco to New Orleans and New York” (7). Among the devices employed by the ensemble, Steinbeck identifies what I would take to be an important agent of consistency in the notion of the “intensity structure.” This is a “complex, dense, and highly energetic” (97) improvisational movement in which the musicians work gradually towards a point where “suddenly, there is no regular meter or tempo; each musician determines his own pacing independently of the others. They also shift from register to register, one timbre to another, with impressive speed, replacing stratification and coordination with a non-hierarchical structure that is ‘extremely dense, fast-moving, [and] ultimately static,’ as George E. Lewis put it” (Steinbeck 2017, 99, interpolating a quotation from Lewis 1998, 76). As Steinbeck (2017) notes, the members of the ensemble “could improvise in ways that were less about forging consensus and more about exercising autonomy” (ibid., 183). Roscoe Mitchell theorised this as a “multi-centered” approach to improvisation (ibid., 201), an approach offering “completely free choices for everyone” with “multi-centers” (Mitchell quoted in Steinbeck 2017, 201–2). Mitchell’s idea of “really free music” is a situation “where no one has any certain one thing they have to do. If everybody is building something constructive, it’s okay” (Mitchell quoted in Lewis 2008, 151). Anthony Braxton who, like the Art Ensemble of Chicago, emerged from the AACM, mixes composition and improvisation in numerous ways. His work has developed through several distinctive phases and musical systems, including the early Language Music, Collage Forms, Ghost Trance Music (from 1995), “Diamond Curtain Wall, Echo Echo Mirror House, Falling River and Pine Top Aerial musics” (Lock 2018, 404). Braxton’s music for quartet (reeds, piano, bass, and drums) from the 1980s and early 1990s is a particularly interesting example of how consistency can result from highly adventurous mixes of compositional and improvisational processes. Having produced a number of solo compositions, his work developed in such a way that his compositions for trio could incorporate his duos, the quartets could include the trios, and so on, in a collagist approach combining composition and improvisation. Graham Lock, who observed Braxton’s quartet during its tour of England in 1985, chronicled how with the collage form structures, two, three, or four performers were able to play two, three, or four compositions simultaneously (Lock 2018, 31). To structure this, Braxton set out the primary structural and conceptual territories (designated compositions) before a given performance and, then, during the performance itself, the performers would move from one territory to another by means of “open improvisation”, which he described as “the vibrational liquid, in between structurally defined regions” (ibid., 174). In addition to identifying pre-selected compositions, Braxton integrated “pulse tracks,” which are “notated rhythm tracks” (60) or “fixed metric sound events” into the structure (Braxton 1984). As double-bass player Mark Dresser noted, the pulse tracks indicated areas where the performer had “to play specific notes, specific rhythmic figures” before perhaps having several beats of improvisation and then moving on “to the next figure” (Lock 2018, 121). Braxton described them as “controlled, or positioned

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Guattari, Consistency, and Experimental Musical Assemblages improvisational spaces that last for seven, ten beats—the time-space between structured events changes” (ibid., 198), and while some were “completely aligned” others were “completely independent” (199). Whenever the individual players were not performing parts of Braxton’s designated compositions (the primary territories) or improvising on them, they had other composed material that they could use in whichever way they chose. Pianist Marilyn Crispell, for example, was equipped with Braxton’s Piano Piece I and the over 250 pages of his Compositions 30–33 for solo piano, from which she could select material (Lock 2018, 111). Consequently, while one performer was playing a designated composition, another would be improvising, a third could be playing a different composition, and a fourth may have had a pulse track structure (174). Crispell compared the effect to being on a street and hearing a number of diverse sounds emanating from different windows and merging together. While acknowledging that some listeners might find this “confusing or chaotic,” she enjoyed the simultaneity of sounds and events that was produced (183–84). She added: “if it merges in a certain way it works. But if you’re just playing the concept, reading through a bunch of solos, the dynamic will be static—there has to be something there to make it gel. It’s funny, ’cause you have less control than if you were totally improvising, but there is that element of interpretation. I do listen to what the other people are doing, and I shape the way I play the written music to the total sound that is going on” (184). Mike Heffley’s observation that pulse tracks function as “a rhythmic alternative to melodic-harmonic approaches to pitch generation” (1996, 363) underlines the importance of rhythm for the holding-together or consistency of Braxton’s collage compositions. Acknowledging that he generally only gave the musicians “just enough information to play the music” (Lock 2018, 224–25), Braxton’s intention was to provide “structural ingredients” that formed “a basis for setting up given vibrational properties” (232). As Mark Dresser noted of a particular performance: “there were moments when I was hearing myself, hearing [drummer] Gerry [Hemingway], we were playing a completely independent thing to Marilyn and Anthony, but at the same time I heard us and I heard them and it was as if it was completely scored, we went together like hand and glove. And it was to do with . . . that extra element, that thing that’s not written; making decisions, relating, leaving spaces for each other” (ibid., 123). By 1985 Braxton was articulating his desire “to throw all [his] structures into the quartet,” to create collages “of several different works all mashed together” (Lock 2018, 202) in what he described as a quest for “multiple logic musics” or “a music of multiple logics” (203). By 1988, he was stating that all his compositions or any of their component parts could “be played, simultaneously, all together or in any combination” (quoted in Heffley 1996, 329). Braxton finally realised this ambition in the colossal Sonic Genome (2003–), which he described as “an interactive musical environment, almost an avant-garde theme-park for performers and listeners alike” (quoted in Gottschalk 2016, 200). The Sonic Genome, which has been realised three times (Vancouver, 2010; Turin, 2015; Berlin, 2019), engages over sixty performers, divided into twelve small groups led by experienced Braxton collaborators from his Tri-Centric Foundation,

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Edward Campbell supplemented by large numbers of local musicians.11 Its three realisations to date have been from almost six to eight hours in duration, as the musicians worked through elements of around 450 of Braxton’s compositions. Ideally performed in a large venue with multiple spaces, the musicians move around in ensembles that modify themselves in the course of the performance as they “form and split apart like cells dividing and reforming into new organisms” (Sonic Genome Project 2019, 1). The audience members are equally mobile as they move around and choose what to listen to. The performers negotiate transitions from work to work by means of Braxton’s Ghost Trance Music system (GTM), responding to or ignoring the performed material of the instrumental groupings around them. Braxton conceived Ghost Trance Music as “a system of tracks, like a giant choo-choo train system that will show the connections, so where a soloist is moving along a track, that will connect to duo logics, trio logics, quartet logics” (quoted in Gottschalk 2016, 200). Ultimately, the consistency of the Sonic Genome is social in nature, the variously sized groupings working in analogous ways to a country with separate states and cities. For Steve Smith, the Sonic Genome and Braxton’s music more generally is “less a compositional strategy, and more a utopian model for an ideal democracy” (quoted in Sonic Genome Project 2019) as musicians forge their own pathways using Braxton’s music and linking strategies to channel their creativity. In advance of the 2010 performance in Vancouver, Braxton noted that the Sonic Genome would include “different degrees of density, from very dense sonic events to very thin sonic events” and he hoped that listeners would “visit the cellular activities, cellular activities being three [musicians] or less,” as well as the “combinational activities” (quoted in Considine 2010). Alexander Varty’s (2010) observation that listeners “need to make their own personal sense out of an event that’s so complex it might almost sound chaotic” suggests that the consistency or multiple consistencies produced in the Sonic Genome are not so far from what Marilyn Crispell identified in Braxton’s quartet performances from the 1980s.

Concluding remarks To take only the strictly musical components of the experimental music assemblage, consistency may be the product of a unifying sound, noise, pitch, harmony, timbre, or texture, which can be built up by the individual voices, entering and receding within an ensemble. It can emerge from a shared rhythm, albeit individual participants may contribute a disparate multiplicity of micro-rhythms. Commonality or compatibility of gesture may be the agent of consistency. There is the consistency of the constellation; constellations comprising two or more usually diversified instrumental sounds. As further instruments are added to the mix and the texture increases in density and complexity, the metaphorical spaces between the individual instrumental sounds become increas11 I’d like to thank Alex Nowitz who drew my attention to the Berlin performance of Braxton’s Sonic Genome.

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Guattari, Consistency, and Experimental Musical Assemblages ingly occupied. Consistency may then shift from that of the constellation to the amalgam or the swarm. The consistency of swarms may be formed of pointillistic sounds, lines, or sound masses that converge and diverge as with flocks of birds or swarming insects. The kinds of intensity structures and closing flourishes found in the performances of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, where multiple instruments have their own flamboyant gestures within the splash of the whole, are examples of the consistency of the swarm. Consistency can develop from points to lines to constellations or swarms and as a composition or improvisation continues, it can return to any of these stages in any order. Consistency can also comprise multiple micro-consistencies that knit together in the production of macro-consistency, which itself may be fleeting or of more extended duration. Such macro-assemblages are formed of subensembles, each of which finds its own consistency at the micro-level but each of which is also capable of holding together with others at points of macroconsistency. In this way, points, lines, constellations, amalgams, heterophonies, and swarms might occur simultaneously in different parts of the ensemble, as is the case, though in very different ways, with Cage’s Musicircus and Europeras as well as Braxton’s collage forms and Sonic Genome. While all these factors might be identified as tracing musical form—and it may be that they have this important function in engendering an extended musical event that is varied and of ongoing interest—they go beyond the formal in their operation. A composition or improvisation might resort at a given point to the kinds of consistency provided by older musical systems and styles, provided for example by more traditional melody (modal, tonal, or post-tonal), harmony (chord progressions, sound blocs), rhythm (recognisable time signatures, dance forms, or rhythmic styles), or combination of instruments (traditional jazz combo, string quartet) or style (jazz standard, blues, etc.). Alternatively, they may turn to noise, innovative instrumental sonorities, human speech, or vocal effects. In all, compositions/improvisations may be said to contain both vertical and horizontal consistency, the consistency of the moment or the extended moment or event and the consistency of the temporal totality in its collectivity of moments and events. Of course, not every composition or improvisation succeeds in achieving consistency. James Fei (2020) recalled that while Braxton’s Ghost Trance Music was a thrilling experience for him, “not all experiments worked.” Improvisor and composer Tim Hodgkinson (2016, 136) noted his own fluctuating responses as he prepared a recording of his composition Ici-bas for release on CD: “I begin to doubt, I listen again, get myself convinced that the piece works, then the next day I feel it fails. . . . I put the piece aside. . . . But suddenly I go back to it and start again, and everything falls into place.” Antoine Gindt noted that Aperghis’s composition Symplexis for orchestra and twenty-two jazz soloists (1970), in which the musicians were organised into five groups that were dispersed around the audience, “provoked jeers and whistles, a frightening noise.” For Gindt, the piece “failed” and did not “find its place” (Gindt 1990b, 42). At this point we are not so far from the traditional Kantian problem of taste and we might ask who, ultimately, is fit to decide whether a musical work, sec-

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Edward Campbell tion of a work, melodic line, harmony, sequence of chords, instrumental texture, structure or form, or conjunction of artistic media has consistency and consequently works or not. Might the question of what it means to say that a piece of music works be ultimately as pointless as seeking, after Duchamp, to identify a work of art? Whatever the answer to this question, there is nevertheless the enduring sense that all musical compositions and improvisations inevitably face such judgements. For artworks that operate within the boundaries of traditional means, the conceptual vocabulary for an answer already exists. The question becomes much more interesting and insistent with the music of modernity and beyond, where heterogeneous forces come together in unexpected ways and where we can no longer rely on the old answers. It is at that point that we find ourselves asking, how does it all hang together? References Aperghis, Georges. 2005. “Storms.” Translated by Jeremy Drake. Liner note for Georges Aperghis: Avis de tempête, performed by Ictus Ensemble, 15–18. Cypres: CYP5621, compact disc. ———. 2007. “Entretien avec Georges Aperghis.” In Houdart 2007, 53–67. ———. 2013. “Organiser le chaos.” Chimères 79: 37–43. Braxton, Anthony. 1984. “Pulse Track Structures.” Accessed 7 August 2020. http://www.mymusicbase.ru/PPS2/ sd_2519.htm. Cage, John, and Daniel Charles. 1981. For the Birds: John Cage in Conversation with Daniel Charles. English version prepared by Richard Gardner, edited by Tom Gora and John Cage. London: Marion Boyars. First published 1976 as Pour les oiseaux: Entretiens avec Daniel Charles (Paris: Pierre Belfond). Cimini, Amy. 2010. “Gilles Deleuze and the Musical Spinoza.” In Sounding the Virtual: Gilles Deleuze and the Theory and Philosophy of Music, edited by Brian Hulse and Nick Nesbitt, 129–44. Farnham, UK: Ashgate. Considine, J. D. 2010. “8 hours + 60 musicians = 1 Sonic Genome.” Globe and Mail (Canada), 27 January. Accessed 7 August 2020. https://www. theglobeandmail.com/news/national/8hours-60-musicians-1-sonic-genome/ article4303839/. DeLanda, Manuel. 2016. Assemblage Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1986. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature.

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Translated by Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1975 as Kafka: Pour une literature mineure (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Minuit). Drouet, Jean-Pierre. 1990. “Entretien avec Jean-Pierre Drouet: L’interprète et son double.” In Gindt 1990a, 73–83. Durney, Daniel. 1990. “La règle du jeu.” In Gindt 1990a, 183–245. Fei, James. 2020. “James Fei Interview” [James Fei interviewed by Narushi Hosoda in January 2020 for the Japanese magazine Jazz The New Chapter]. TriCentric Foundation. Accessed 7 August 2020. https://tricentricfoundation.org/ jamesfei-interview. Gindt, Antoine, ed. 1990a. Georges Aperghis: Le corps musical. Arles: Actes sud. ———. 1990b. “Quelques histoires, faits, dates et objets.” In Gindt 1990a, 25–55. Goffey, Andrew 2013. “Translator’s Introduction; The Artifice of Jargon: On Guattari’s Style.” In Guattari 2013, xv– xxiii. Gottschalk, Jennie. 2016. Experimental Music since 1970. London: Bloomsbury. Guattari, Félix. 1995. Chaosmosis: An EthicoAesthetic Paradigm. Translated by Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. First published 1992 as Chaosmose (Paris: Galilée).

Guattari, Consistency, and Experimental Musical Assemblages ———. 2011. The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in Schizoanalysis. Translated by Taylor Adkins. New York: Semiotext(e). First published 1979 as L’inconscient machinique: Essais de schizo-analyse (Paris: Recherches). ———. 2013a. “L’hétérogenèse dans la création musicale.” Chimères 79: 33–36. Accessed 10 October 2019. https://www. revue-chimeres.fr/IMG/pdf/chimeres38_ felix_guattari_derniers_entretiens_l_ heterogenese_dans_la_creation_ musicale.pdf. ———. 2013b. Schizoanalytic Cartographies. Translated by Andrew Goffey. London: Bloomsbury. First published 1989 as Cartographies schizoanlytiques (Paris: Galilée). ———. 2016. Lines of Flight: For Another World of Possibilities. Translated by Andrew Goffey. London: Bloomsbury Academic. First published 2011 as Lignes de fuite: Pour an autre monde de possibles (Paris: l’Aube). Guattari, Félix, and Olivier Zahm. 2011. “On Contemporary Art: Interview with Oliver Zahm, April 1992.” Translated by Stephen Zepke, revised by Andrew Goffey. In The Guattari Effect, edited by Éric Alliez and Andrew Goffey, 40–53. London: Continuum. Chapter first published 1994 as “Félix Guattari et l’art contemporain” (Chimères 23). Heffley, Mike. 1996. The Music of Anthony Braxton. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Hodgkinson, Tim. 2016. Music and the Myth of Wholeness: Toward a New Aesthetic Paradigm. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Houdart, Célia. 2007. Avis de tempête; Georges Aperghis: Journal d’une oeuvre. Paris: Éditions Intervalles. Kokkos, Yannis. 1990. “Les sons des ténèbres.” In Gindt 1990a, 139–41. Lewis, George E. 1998. “Singing Omar’s Song: A (Re)construction of Great Black

Music.” Lenox Avenue: A Journal of Interarts Inquiry 4: 69–92. ———. 2008. A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lock, Graham. 2018. Forces in Motion: Anthony Braxton and the Meta-reality of Creative Music. 30th anniversary ed. Mineola, NY: Dover. Lonsdale, Michael. 1990. “Entretien avec Michael Lonsdale: Le point de vue de l’acteur.” In Gindt 1990a, 95–101. Octors, Georges-Elie, and Jean-Luc Plouvier. 2004. “Entretien.” Accessed 10 October 2019. http://www.aperghis.com/avis.html. Pelbart, Peter Pál. 2011. “The Deterritorialized Unconscious.” In The Guattari Effect, edited by Éric Alliez and Andrew Goffey, 68–83. London: Continuum. Pritchett, James. 1993. The Music of John Cage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Salem, Joseph. 2019. “Teasing the EverExpanding Sonnet from Pierre Boulez’s Musical Poetics.” Music Theory Spectrum 41 (2): 244–70. Sonic Genome Project. 2019. “The Sonic Genome.” Accessed 7 August 2020. http://www.akamu.net/file/sonicgenome.pdf. Steinbeck, Paul. 2017. Message to Our Folks: The Art Ensemble of Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Szendy, Peter. 2007. “Sources: Rencontre avec Peter Szendy.” In Houdart 2007, 25–26. Varty, Alexander. 2010. “For Anthony Braxton, Music is a Sonic GPS.” Georgia Straight, 27 January. Accessed 7 August 2020. https://www.straight.com/ article-282221/vancouver/anthonybraxton-music-sonic-gps.

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Musical Interaction in the Tetravalence Chris Stover Griffith University, Australia; University of Oslo, Norway

. . . the sound component “refrain” has a stronger valence than the gestural component “grass stem” . . . —Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 325)

This chapter explores how the four dimensions across which Deleuze and Guattari define the operation of agencement, the assemblage—content and expression; de- and reterritorialisation—can function as a model for mapping music-improvisational interactions. Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 89) describe the assemblage as a “tetravalence,” referring to four forces that act on one another to constitute an ongoing context. In order to understand what work this constellation of concepts does, I will first examine what valence means in chemistry and in psychology and emotion studies. I will then carefully develop a few aspects of Deleuze and Guattari’s model by reading them through a redeployment of Klaus Scherer’s (1994) concept of affect bursts, which Nico Frijda ([2006] 2013) uses to theorise the specific arrangements of external and internal factors that effect changes in what emotion studies calls one’s affect valence. Finally, I will consider two nominally “solo” improvised music performances—one by trombonist and sound artist Stuart Dempster, one by myself—as posthuman assemblages of human performers, technologies, spaces and surfaces, and sounds in which valences are transformed within ongoing intra-active contexts. What is it that re-theorising yet again what happens in improvisational interaction is supposed to accomplish?1 Why Deleuze and Guattari, and why the assemblage? First of all, thinking in terms of assemblages allows us to revisit questions of communication and agency in musical interaction, such as Ingrid Monson’s (1996) suggestion that interaction takes place in some musicking contexts but not in others, or Gary Peters’s (2009) insistence that rather than exemplifying a kind of ideal democratic sociality, improvised music actually operates as a kind of radical “unsociability.” I suggest there are posthuman implications in Deleuze and Guattari’s formulation that redirect the question of what interaction is and how its effects manifest in ways that make questions of intention less crucial and perhaps elide them altogether. These implications have everything to do with the work affect does as an ongoing series of inten1 Interaction studies is a rapidly growing field, and draws upon a wide variety of theoretical perspectives from philosophy and social sciences. A brief roster of studies that focus on improvised-music contexts includes Berliner (1994), Borgo (2005), Cobussen (2017), Fadnes (2020), Hodson (2007), Michaelsen (2013), Monson (1996), Reinholdsson (1998), and Stover (2017).

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Chris Stover sive exchanges that precede action. Second, assemblages—as co-occurring coalescences into new territorial formations and as dissolutions into new constellations of potential connections, conjunctions, and disjunctions—always involve creative refigurings of situations and relational valences. Change is what is produced when transversal forces impinge on one another. Change (or the production of difference), therefore, is a collective operation. And third, by focusing on the ever-changing status of one’s valence within and toward that with which one is forming a context, we can foreground the passive (or affective) nature of constitutive relations—the just-happening aspects of how a particular context comes to be—that goes far beyond what, for example, cognition studies is able to tell us, not least by decentring the human in the assemblage, but also by theorising the contexts within which cognition occurs. In the simplest terms, improvised music’s content is produced by human or prosthetic human-instrument bodies. Say you, the reader, and I are playing music together. I play a musical gesture, as do you. The two expressions entangle and “stick” to one another in some way to form a kind of composite expression (without relinquishing the identity of either contributing gesture). They stick to each of us too, in potentially very different ways that have much to do with our individual affect attunements (Stern 1985),2 and in ways that may or may not have anything to do with the (human) intention behind their production. Sounds take on affective lives of their own as they intra-act with, impinge upon, and are impinged upon by other material bodies: other sounds, spaces and surfaces, other listening participants. There is a sense in which “everything is possible: endless connections, nonexclusive disjunctions, nonspecific conjunctions, partial objects and flows” (Deleuze and Guattari [1977] 1983, 54). That, though, is the utopian promise of improvised music that remains somewhat unfulfilled. The productive apparatus is mitigated by “the repression that the social machine exercises on desiring-machines, and the relationship of psychic repression with social repression” (ibid.).3 I’m less interested in repression as a psychoanalytic concept than on the social constraints policed by a micro-community of practitioners and internalised by individual participants. This is just one aspect of the work done by a collective assemblage of enunciation (more on this below). Those constraints are often not very clearly staked out, but they do real work: they contribute to an individual’s attunement, they partially direct what kinds of meaning-implications might be possible within a given sound-to-sound assemblage. Conjunctions of musical sounds, then, function as ongoing arrangements of collective enunciations; they flow between bodies, they precede meaning but can be taken up creatively in different meaning-orientations, and they contribute to the constitution of the very bodies that produce them. There are three types of bodies that especially interest me: human-instrument hybrid bodies, 2 I develop the concept of affect attunement for improvised music contexts in Stover (2018). 3 In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari more or less replace the desiring-machine with machinic assemblages of bodies (which I’ll return to below) on the content side of the content–expression axis. But their formulation here, which serves to set up the way in which the despotic signifier (or “sovereign Oedipus”) subjects open lively polyvocal processes to a single representational regime, is important for my argument.

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Musical Interaction in the Tetravalence the bodies of spaces and surfaces, and musical sounds conceived as bodies. All these participate in the lively constitution of a collective assemblage, which functions as “the murmur from which I take my proper name, the constellation of voices, concordant or not, from which I draw my voice” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 84). Note the sonorous implications of this entire constitutive process. Music is far from the only space where this movement operates. But as an explicitly sonorous and collaborative practice both its machinic-material and collective-enunciatory status are made especially manifest, and as what I call a paralinguistic practice it is always already escaping signification, thereby functioning more fully in the realm of desire-production.4 To reach a more practicable understanding of how all these different forces interact in the assemblage, I would like to focus on the concept of valence. While it appears occasionally, valence is far from a central concept in Deleuze and Guattari’s writings. But I will use it as a conceptual entry point, in order to focus on what it means to be “between” content and expression, “between” the machinic assemblage of bodies and the collective assemblage of enunciation, as a transversal liminality. It will be useful throughout to keep in mind an alternative translation of agencement that has been suggested, “arrangement,” as we will see that thinking in terms of valence means turning our attention to how change produces new material-semiotic arrangements, with new potentials for re-relating with and in new contexts.

Valence: two disciplinary takes While the concept of valence appears in many disciplinary contexts, its original usage in chemistry and the ways it has been taken up in psychology are particularly relevant. In chemistry, valence refers to an element’s ever-shifting capacity to newly couple with other elements it encounters. Bonds are the intensive nodes at which couplings take place. Any given coupling reconfigures the number of bonds an element has available for next connections; this is sometimes referred to as the element’s “combining capacity.” Chemical valence operates as a proliferation of causal processes: each new conjunction rearranges the ways in which each element can subsequently connect in a relatively predictable way, and chemistry has mapped the causal potential of constellations of elements pretty thoroughly. Here are three important aspects of chemical valence, taken from a recent textbook: “Valency refers to the ability of an atom or a group of chemically bonded atoms to form chemical bonds with other atoms or groups of atoms.” “The valency of an element is determined by the number of outer shell (valence) electrons.” “The valency of polyatomic ions . . . is the charge on the ion” (Dynamic Science 2020). We can productively translate some of these keywords into Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts. The “ability” of an atom to 4 This is a subject for another essay, but Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of desire as something continually produced anew through the precise operation of machinic conjunctions (rather than that which is caused by lack) is a compelling framework for thinking about musicking contexts where teleological development (or the ultimate achievement of a unity that was lacking) does not seem to be an animating force. See note 15 below.

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Chris Stover form chemical bonds with other atoms should be thought, non-metaphorically, as a kind of affective capacity in that it is the particular configuration of histories of conjunctions that conditions that ability in any singular instance. In each case, “the power of acting varies according to external causes for the same capacity for being affected” (Deleuze 1988, 50). The “formation of bonds” exemplifies the active production of machinic conjunctions that, in every iteration, deterritorialises both conjoining bodies, reterritorialising each as newly, differently valent. Rather than bonds, Deleuze and Guattari describe “relationships of intensities” that effect in each body “becomings, rises and falls, migrations and displacements” ([1977] 1983, 84). The notion that valence electrons form a kind of “outer shell” reiterates the idea that transformative activity occurs at the surface: “membranes . . . carry potentials and regenerate polarities. They place internal and external spaces into contact. . . . The internal and the external . . . have biological value only through this topological surface of contact” (Deleuze 1990, 103).5 And the ion’s “charge”—as its specific action-readiness, constituted by its very conjunctive history—is another way of describing its affect attunement. That is, affect attunement refers to the precise historical forces that condition a body (the ion-body, in the chemistry model) to be receptive to new conjunctions in particular ways. Guattari (1995, 2) at one point writes specifically of “contagious affective charges” (see also p. 84). Each key term in the chemistry definition of valence undergoes a particular conceptual transformation (which we might read as from material to intensive) in Deleuze and Guattari’s translation. In psychology, valence sometimes refers to one of two dimensional axes, along with “activation” or “arousal” (Russell 1980), invoked to describe how emotional states function and change.6 Lisa Feldman Barrett (1996, 48, 53) and many others use a “semantic-based circumplex” model to map relationships between the valence and arousal dimensions along these axes. Elsewhere four or more dimensional axes are theorised, for example “activation, relatedness, hedonic tone, and competence” (Davitz 1969, 127, capitalisation in original), where “hedonic tone” and valence are more or less synonymous.7 Most often valence is characterised in binary terms—positive or negative, pleasure or pain, toward or away from—referring to qualitative changes either in one’s emo-

5 On the following page, Deleuze quotes Gilbert Simondon at length, describing the “dynamic topology” of the surface or membrane where interiority and exteriority conjoin to produce “life.” Simondon develops this in explicitly temporal terms: “At the level of the polarized membrane, internal past and external future face one another . . .” (Simondon [1964] 1989, 226, as translated in Deleuze 1990, 104). See also Deleuze’s footnote on this passage (1990, 344n3), which outlines five themes derived from Simondon, “the potential energy of the field, the internal resonance of series, the topological surface of membranes, the organization of sense, and the status of the problematic,” which could also be analysed in terms of valence. 6 Valence seems to have first appeared as a concept in psychology in the 1930s, e.g., Lewin (1935). See Sorinas, Ferrández, and Fernandez (2020) for a recent study that closely examines an “affective valence scale” based on these two criteria, using empirical methods. 7 “The valence dimension typically refers to the hedonic quality of an effective experience (pleasant or unpleasant)” (Barrett 1996, 48). See also Lambie and Marcel (2002). Psychologists do not seem interested in pursuing further the potential of “hedonic tone” to connect with other affect-concepts like Heidegger’s Stimmung or Stern’s attunement (or Deleuze and Guattari’s refrain); this seems like a fruitful path for music studies.

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Musical Interaction in the Tetravalence tional state or in one’s experience of it.8 From this perspective, valence could be said to function much like Spinoza’s characterisation of affective modifications as joyful versus sad. Giovanna Colombetti (2005) critiques this dichotomous schema at length on the ground that it both simplifies and distorts complex reality, inducing one “to categorize, isolate and circumscribe what are complex and integrated phenomena, and to overlook their temporal developments” (122). She argues instead that only “real complexification” (123) can adequately account for the “variety and richness of experience” of emotional (or affective) states.9 Robert Solomon and Lori Stone (2002, 433) similarly question binary “appraisals” of valence from a series of nuanced critical perspectives; they clarify for example that “pleasure” and “pain” are in no way functional opposites: that opposites “depend on polarity, and polarity is just what is not available in even the simplest emotions.” There is also a lingering question in psychology of just what valence is referring to: to the emotional state itself (as what Charland [2005] calls a first-order phenomena), or to its felt effects in reflexive experience?10 As used in psychology, then, valence means something quite different: somewhat closer, in fact, to charge in chemistry. Colombetti illustrates how this usage stems from a problematic translation of Kurt Lewin’s (1935) Aufforderungscharaktere, which more accurately might be rendered as “affordance-character,” “borrowed from ecological psychology . . . and refer[ring] to properties of the environment that afford or invite a certain behaviour toward it” (Colombetti 2005, 105). The way valence has been deployed in psychology is probably not directly helpful for understanding Deleuze and Guattari’s usage, but it is worth ruminating on at length because of this resonance with affective connectivity, and also because in the best psychological studies valence does indeed refer to a kind of qualitative change from one state to another, which involves questions of succession, organisation (or assemblage), heterogeneity, and difference in kind (Deleuze 1991, 38). An influential theory in emotion studies is that of Nico Frijda, who conceives of emotions not as first-order phenomena nor in self-reflexive experiential terms, but relationally. For Frijda, affective valence is one of four “primary aspects of emotional reactions,” the other three being one’s “context appraisal,” one’s “action readiness,” and the actual felt understanding that one is being affected ([2006] 2013, 204).11 There are similarities to Davitz’s model here, but

8 This is more than the conventional phenomenological distinction; Louis Charland (2005, 231), for example, emphasises how the question of whether valence refers to an “objective, intrinsic property of emotional experience” or an “outcome” or “product” of that experience is poorly clarified in psychology. 9 While several “multidimensional” models (especially Lambie and Marcel 2002) on offer do good work to complexify the terrain, their particular solution amounts simply to a wide range of two-way polarities that, in the end, collapses back into the binarising system. This is part of Colombetti’s concern, as well as that of Solomon and Stone. 10 This question also applies to what the term affect itself refers to: contra Deleuze and Guattari (and much affect theory), most psychological studies locate affect as the felt effect of a change of emotional state (see, for example, Charland 2005, 232–35), rather than the force relations that cause that change. See also note 8 above. 11 Frijda’s theory is most fully laid out in Frijda (1986).

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Chris Stover also significant differences. In an important sense, these four aspects operate “in the middle” of ongoing contexts and enact transformations of those contexts. Several recurring themes in Frijda’s theory are relevant for developing a Deleuze-Guattarian conception of valence. For example, at one point Frijda defines emotions as “variants of interest” (37), which I read as a subset of or selection from within the generalised chromaticism of an ever-varying affective plane: affective valence in this sense does not refer simplistically to a binary spectrum of positivity or negativity (or joy or sadness), but a whole range of virtual factors that might in any given instant have an effect on how one’s (emotional) state changes. Or this evocative description: “Emotions in this full sense, what [Klaus] Scherer called affect bursts, are climactic crystallizations of . . . continuously modulated nonovert action readiness” (42).12 I’ll return to affect bursts below. Most important, Frijda writes: “Events are ‘real’ in the emotional sense when they affect one’s affective and bodily existence—when they involve embodiment” (10). Frijda, unsurprisingly, is not a Deleuzian: he suggests there are “laws” of emotions and is interested in uncovering mechanical processes of causal relations, albeit highly nuanced and at least nominally dynamic ones (cf., 20) rather than proliferating machinic conjunctions. And he insists on a one-directional subjection: “we are subjected to these mechanisms and obey the laws” (20). Deleuze and Guattari would be highly suspicious of this claim, not least because of its royal-science implications, but also because they would argue that affect and events are not particularly well suited as concepts for this kind of scientific inquiry. As Guattari writes, “Affect is a process of existential appropriation through the continual creation of heterogeneous durations of being and, given this, we would certainly be better advised to cease treating it under the aegis of scientific paradigms and to deliberately turn ourselves towards ethical and aesthetic paradigms” (Guattari 1989, 67). The implications of Guattari’s advice for artistic research are significant. Nevertheless, Frijda’s formulation should be extremely interesting both to Deleuze and Guattari scholars and to artistic researchers, and I hope I am not going beyond what is acceptable by bending some of his terms to make them do more (or different) work than originally intended. Because what Frijda is doing here is defining the “real”-ness of an event by the effect it has on a body—by both the corporeal and the incorporeal (affective) transformations that occur when an event transpires. Frijda describes this transformation as a change in a body’s valence, by which he means a change in its capacity for re-relating instantiated by each new eventful coupling. We’re moving beyond positive–negative polarity and fully into the realm of qualitative change in kind, activated by new relational conjunctions.

12 Frijda cites Scherer (2000) for this concept; see also Scherer (1994) and Krumhuber and Scherer (2011). In Scherer’s usage, affect bursts specifically refers to phenomena such as non-speech sounds (like laughter), gestures, or facial expressions that carry affective but not necessarily semantic meaning. Frijda seems to extend this usage to describe a wide range of affective events in the moment of their enactment, which is how I will use the term as well.

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Musical Interaction in the Tetravalence Here, then, are three moments in Deleuze and Guattari’s writing that suggest a related thematization: (1) “. . . a capture of code, surplus value of code, an increase in valence, a veritable becoming . . .” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 10); (2) “. . . the valence of the ‘and’” (ibid., 98); (3) “. . . Kafka’s continuous oeuvre in which intensities are produced and in which are inscribed all sorts of connections and polyvalences” (Deleuze and Guattari 1986, 87). Like Frijda, Deleuze and Guattari characterise valence not in terms of the simple positive/negative binary Colombetti critiques, but as an ever-shifting relationality and potential to newly conjoin through new arrangements. “Forms of expression and forms of content communicate through a conjunction of their quanta of relative deterritorialization, each intervening, operating in the other” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 88). “Emotions . . . emerge in actual interactions. They are elicited by events that are being appraised while actually dealing with them. . . . Moreover, emotions are rooted in the appraisal of events that affect . . . bodies in direct ways” (Frijda [2006] 2013, 106–7). While I would like to investigate much further the interesting displacement that occurs when we speak of “the valence of the ‘and’” and its function in the production of connections,13 I am especially drawn to the term polyvalence, which Deleuze and Guattari use to describe how the assemblage functions to produce intensities in the last chapter of their Kafka volume (Deleuze and Guattari 1986). Guattari elsewhere uses multivalence as a particular kind of existential mode that is suppressed by capitalistic structurings: “Archaic societies are better equipped than White, male, capitalistic subjectivities to produce a cartography of this multivalence of alterity” (Guattari 1995, 45). Beyond the general concept of polyvalence, though, I’m interested in a small pivot that occurs in the “Postulates of Linguistics” chapter of A Thousand Plateaus, where assemblage is described specifically as a tetravalent process. So let us move there, into the tetravalence.

“The tetravalence of the assemblage.” 14 In order to map their tetravalent schematic of the assemblage, Deleuze and Guattari begin with the poles of content and expression. Content refers to “actions and passions; an intermingling of bodies reacting to one another” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 88). Many kinds of bodies intermingle; Deleuze and Guattari give the example of feudalism, in which “the body of the earth and the social body; the body of the overlord, vassal, and serf; the body of the knight and the horse and their new relation to the stirrup; the weapons and tools assuring a symbiosis of bodies” (89) all participate in the working of the 13 To take one example, the nature of Deleuze and Guattari’s “and” is precisely the function described in the definitions from chemistry above, where the capacity to newly conjoin is a product of the actual and virtual capacities engendered by earlier conjunctions. Ands beget (or produce) ands. There is a singularity to any given process that speaks to how Ian Buchanan clarifies the operation of the assemblage, not as any and all couplings but as specific material-semiotic functions that produce newness in specific ways, with relational-political implications—see Buchanan’s contribution to this volume, chapter 19. It is in this sense that the “and” should be thought of as where valences operate. 14 Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 89).

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Chris Stover machinic assemblage. In music, the bodies of human performers and listeners, instruments and other technologies (microphones, amplifiers, pedals), spaces and surfaces, sounds, and more intermingle likewise. Content, as the material side of the transversal equation, refers to the specific ways this intermingling occurs in a given event; for this reason it is valuable to think less in terms of the bodies themselves as much as what Donna Haraway (2016) would call the sympoietic acts of constituting with and alongside one another. In other words, those sympoietic acts, between bodies, are what produces content. Expression refers to the semiotic side of the equation, to “acts and statements,” “incorporeal transformations attributed to bodies” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 88): the codes, discourses, logics, and spoken and unspoken rules of engagement that “intervene directly in productivity, in the form of a production of meaning or sign-value” (89). (Note that there is already a double impingement operating here in the way I am using acts to describe processes on both sides of the intensive relay.) Deleuze and Guattari carefully clarify what expressions are and are not: they are not themselves signs, they overspill regimes of meanings, although they “develop only in the alloplastic or anthropomorphic strata” (504). We’re already into a resilient posthumanism, resisting the agential interruption of the anthropocene by insisting that human communicative forms are but a small subset of how expression is produced and what work it does. These form a kind of transversal x-axis (figure 2.1) along which content (machinic assemblages of bodies, as what Deleuze and Guattari call a “pragmatic system” [1987, 504]) and expression (collective assemblages of enunciation, as a “semiotic system”) intervene in one another.

Figure 2.1.

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Figure 2.1. X-axis of content and expression.

Musical Interaction in the Tetravalence The axis is transversal because it maps not a linear continuum but a series of distributive relays, each rearrangement along which produces a new relational state. The actions of connection, conjunction, and disjunction (Deleuze and Guattari [1977] 1983, 6015) are what change the valence of a particular corporeal coalescence or of a statement singularly expressing the collective enunciation. That is, what changes is the capacity of a body or expression to newly, differently connect, conjoin, or disjoin. For example, in language there is not a justthere presupposition that grounds how a singular statement will function (this would be idealist and shallowly ideological); rather, through the movement between them the poles of content and expression reciprocally determine one another—their presupposing forces are themselves in constant modification, including by the movement of deterritorialisation that rearranges the ways in which they might connect. This movement is fundamental: deterritorialisation is precisely the process through which “contents and expression are conjugated” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 88). This amounts to a turn to variables (Frijda’s “variables of interest”): variables are the only constants (or, the only constant is that all is in variation); the bonds that determine valence are being newly produced or closed off. This extends Spinoza’s conception of substance and modes: “There are variables of content, or proportions in the interminglings or aggregations of bodies,” which Deleuze and Guattari extend to the incorporeal: “and there are variables of expression, factors internal to enunciation” (88). Again, neither is prior; expression in no way represents content—“representations are bodies too!” (86). Again, “forms of expression and forms of content communicate through a conjunction of their quanta of relative deterritorialization, each intervening, operating in the other” (88). This, then, is the y-axis that completes the tetravalent schematic (figure 2.2). Deterritorialisation is not the sole force that enacts the transversal relation between expression and content: “sequenced or conjugated degrees of deterritorialization” and “operations of reterritorialization that [momentarily] stabilize the aggregate” move through one another (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 88). Reterritorialisation amounts to the provisional establishment of a new set of valences.

15 See Deleuze and Guattari ([1977] 1983, 295–96) for a profound rumination on desire that explains much about improvised music’s aims: “Only fantasies are truly desired? What a perverse, human, all-toohuman idea! An idea originating in bad conscience, and not in the unconscious. Anthropomorphic molar representation culminates in the very thing that founds it, the ideology of lack. The molecular unconscious, on the contrary, knows nothing of castration, because partial objects lack nothing and form free multiplicities as such; because the multiple breaks never cease producing flows . . . because the syntheses constitute local and nonspecific connections, inclusive disjunctions, nomadic connections.” This passage speaks not only to the transversal relations between human and non-human participants, but also to an important conceptual apparatus that drives much improvised music: not the Romantic (State) teleology of Western music’s organicism but the continuous invention of ever-new (nomadic) relational conjunctions.

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Figure 2.2.

Deleuze and Guattari’s radical suggestion here is that this particular tetravalence can be used to diagram any event. The way I have laid it out graphically foregrounds two pairs of movements. I suggest the points where these dynamic lines converge are the affect bursts that Frijda describes (figure 2.3). We might call these affect bursts singular machinic processes. A machinic assemblage relates “to a precise state of intermingling of bodies in a society, including all the attractions and repulsions, sympathies and antipathies, alterations, amalgamations, penetrations, and expansions that affect bodies of all kinds in their relations to one another” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 90). This is an important passage, because it gets at what a machinic assemblage is, and because it foregrounds the singular nature of any given arrangement. There are always interminglings: everything is moving about this way and that, everything is affecting everything in some way, all is noise and motion. The machinic assemblage is a particular, contingent, local, spatio-temporally bound arrangement of forces (that produce and are produced by bodies)—a provisional capture or territorialisation of those forces such that we can, again provisionally, refer to them as being in a “precise state.” “Affect burst” seems to capture this multifarious, productive process well.

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Figure 2.2. X- and Y-axes (content and expression; de- and reterritorialisation).

Musical Interaction in the Tetravalence

Figure 2.3.

Sound in space Let’s pivot from here to a musical context. Trombonist Stuart Dempster’s “Standing Waves” was recorded in 1976 in the Abbey of St. Clement VI in Avignon. Before proceeding, I encourage the reader to listen to the recording, on a good sound system or with good headphones.16 “Standing Waves” is a posthuman ensemble improvisation. Dempster’s trombone tones each activate the venerable hall’s fourteen-second reverb, which in turn impinges on the performer, inspiring him to create layered, slowly changing melodic textures, beginning with single sustained pitches, built into dyads and then more complex chords (by producing additional tones before previous ones have decayed), and gradually adding extended techniques like multiphonics (vocalising a second pitch while playing) and vowel formant manipulation. There are roughly three kinds of bodies immediately involved: human-trombone (as a sort of prosthetic or cyborg body), the space of the abbey in all its material specificity (its shape and size, the texture of its surfaces, 16 “Standing Waves” is the original title Dempster gave this performance, as it appears on 1750 Arch Records LP S-1775 (1979) and the first CD reissue by New Albion Records in 1987. Later digital reissues included a second, later performance; most digital platforms now (including Spotify) list this one as “Standing Waves: 1976.” The recording can easily be found on Spotify, YouTube, and other online platforms (see Dempster 1987).

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Figure 2.3. Tetravalent schematic with “affect bursts” at dimensional conjunctions.

Chris Stover and so on), and sound as a kind of body in itself. None of these exist without the others: they are ever in processes of assembling through their enactments.17 Sound is a kind of body, and as such intermingles with human-instrument and spatial bodies to produce content. Sound is transformed by space: those shapes and surfaces have a material effect on a sound’s disposition, in terms of how it is heard and what effect it might have on a listening body. But sound faces the collective assemblage of enunciation as well. This is (potentially) true of all sound, but explicitly so of musical sounds, which even in the absence of verbal meaning (like lyrics or an extramusical programme) function on a kind of nonor para-semantic discursive plane. Dempster is not producing just any sounds: he is playing clear pitches in regular intervallic relationships with one another, most often expressing the simple epimoric ratios of the harmonic series. Those intervals have a history and an ideology (for example, through the way in which the harmonic series has been called upon to “naturalise” [Foucault 1978] the Western tonal music system as well as the ways it has been invoked to decentre that very system18). Dempster’s extended techniques contribute to a sort of double decentring: not only transforming the sound-assemblage’s harmonic profile (through vowel formant manipulation; through complex resultant tones brought about by co-present harmonic spectra in the reverberant room) but also calling into question what counts as a “proper” trombone sound in the first place. Furthermore, he uses the room’s reverberation to build chords of four or more notes—for example, a diminished-seventh chord starting at 1:37—which have implications for listeners accustomed to hearing harmonically. All this has meaning, even if not explicitly expressible semantically. Figure 2.4 is a visual transcription of what I’m calling the first six events of “Standing Waves.” It shows several key pieces of information: the pitches Dempster plays, their durational profile, an approximation of the direction he seems to be facing at any given time (shown by curved arrows), the relationship between played tones and their spatial reverberation (shown by vertical versus diagonal lines below each staff system), and relative loudness. For me, the most compelling aspect of this opening passage is not how Dempster uses the reverberation of the room to layer discrete tones and create chords, lovely as that is. Rather, it is how he crescendos through his initial sustained tones to create unison layers as the sound doubles back on itself, producing difference within a singular sonorous articulation. We hear this in the opening crescendo of each event: it is nearly impossible to tell when Dempster is actively producing a tone on the trombone and when we’re hearing only the room’s reverberation. This phenomenon marks the transformation from a musical connection—when two sounded events intermingle in the enactment of the assemblage—to a true conjunction in which two or more discrete bodies form a single, fragile entity. To this end, while I just wrote of a space transforming a sound, that’s not quite the right way to characterise it. A sound is already in a space, which means that spatial configuration and materiality are already part 17 There are more bodies beyond these: the technological bodies of recording devices and reproductive media, listening bodies, and more. Some of these bodies will figure crucially in the analysis that follows. 18 For example by just intonation advocates (e.g., Partch 1974).

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Musical Interaction in the Tetravalence of what a sound is. There is no primordial sound prior to its entanglement with the space in which it is enacted. The modulatory action of the room’s reverb deterritorialises Dempster’s trombone tone (and reterritorialises it as a particular conjunctive sound-space assemblage). But this also reinforces the point that sounds can only ever be enacted in spaces, and the material conditions of any given space are constituent parts of the produced sound.19

Figure 2.4.

The conjunction of sound and space is intensified by the ways Dempster changes his physical position in the room. There are some moments where the bell of the trombone is facing the stereo microphones, and other moments where he turns his body away. This simple motion, coupled with the nature of this particular space, amounts to a change of valence: a transformation of what sorts of connections the human-trombone-body is capable of. A rearrangement of spatial disposition permits a new kind of counterpoint—a counterpoint of 19 I am not particularly invested in the distinction between acoustic spaces and “virtual” environments constructed using digital means. The latter, for me, are simply spaces built using different sorts of materials, rather than ontologically discrete categories. When we turn to listening bodies, the putative distinction between acoustic and virtual spaces becomes even more meaningless.

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Figure 2.4. “Standing Waves,” opening six events (0:00 to 2:09), transcription by the author.

Chris Stover timbre—such that we hear new layered notes not as simply the doubling or tripling of a single instrumental sound (as we would hear were Dempster using an effect pedal to achieve a similar goal), but as an offstage echo, perhaps by another player entirely. This is what it means to voice a collective utterance between both human and nonhuman bodies: there is only one human musician present, but all sorts of agents are contributing, and all flow irreducibly through one another. To be in the tetravalent space-time of the assemblage is to take seriously first of all that its four dimensions—the machinic assemblage of bodies, the collective assemblage of enunciation, and the movements of de- and reterritorialisation—are indeed the forces or actions that arrange and are arranged by the event. And it is also to take seriously what these four dimensions are and how they function—to think of them as valences. Valences change—that’s the whole point. They change through their conjunctions—through the processes of conjoining that refigure how they are able to enter into next conjunctions. Thus, at one dimensional pole is the machinic assemblage of bodies. This is the space-time of affects and passions: affects flow, some of them stick to bodies and transfigure them; how they stick and whether they do so is largely conditioned by a given body’s valence, how it is attuned. In each event they also refigure that body, change its valence. Bodies of all kinds participate: human bodies, human-instrument cyborg bodies, the bodies of spaces and surfaces, musical sounds as bodies. The machinic assemblage of bodies enters into a proliferating series of relationships with the collective assemblage of enunciation. Dempster’s musical utterances are not really his own; each is a minor gesture that selects and redirects some aspect of the collective enunciation. The transversal conjunctions that refigure bodies and statements—that continually change their valences—are enacted through co-occurring processes of de- and reterritorialisation: coalescences into new capacities for further reconfigurations and co-extensive actions that break them open and prime them for new redistributions. Note that these are two different kinds of relations. While de- and reterritorialisation for Deleuze and Guattari do not have quite the dialectical relation that their names suggest, they do refer to a kind of contrary motion, a kind of counterpoint of forces in a delicate balance with one another, each acting on the other to variably direct the ensemble as a whole. But the machinic assemblage of bodies and the collective assemblage of enunciation are categorically distinct operations. This is why I hesitate slightly when I describe their relation as an axis—at any rate it certainly is not a Cartesian axis along which we can simply plot the point of a now-ongoing event. This is a transversal relation the terms of which, as Deleuze and Guattari describe at several points, intervene in one another.

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Musical Interaction in the Tetravalence

Tønder In 2013, while on tour in northern Europe, I gave a performance at the Sønderjyllands Kunstmuseet in Tønder, Denmark. The band arrived early to the venue, and I had time to leisurely explore the museum while the sound engineer set up for our late afternoon performance. I soon came upon the most intriguing room—perfectly round, perhaps twenty feet across and at least three storeys high, a concrete cylinder within which I could hear the echoes of my footsteps reverberating compellingly. I stopped and sang a few notes. What a remarkable sound! Not only did the shape and material construction of the room contribute to an eerily long sustained reverberation, but the sound seemed to swirl up and over, a three-dimensional sonorous dervish spinning in a clockwise helix as it dissipated. I left to retrieve my trombone—I had to hear what that would sound like! Here is our scene: me, my 1956 New York Bach Stradivarius trombone (still my go-to instrument), a sparsely populated but not empty museum (an offstage dog’s high-pitched bark reverberates at one point), with people occasionally poking their heads in and listening, and this altogether remarkable room—a tall concrete cylinder, like being inside a grain silo. And then to capture the moment, one more body: my antique iPhone 4 and voice memo app—the only recording technology I had easily on hand—which I propped up diagonally between the floor and wall and let record while I improvised for a total of about twenty minutes. I’ll return to this phone-body shortly. Then there was the actual improvisation, or to be more accurate, several improvisations, each around two to four minutes long. I left the recorder running for the duration, pausing for a few seconds between improvisational vignettes to think briefly about what I just heard and what might come next. So I launch forth, hazarding an improvisation. I start to develop a feel for what it’s like to play in this unusual space, but only by doing; immediately, the material and dimensional space of the room and my self-instrument assemblage intermingle, the sounds I think I’m intending to produce already radically transformed in the very event of their enactment, which in turn transforms my conception of how to respond. Like Dempster’s “Standing Waves,” this manifests first of all as a conscious decrease in auditory information—in order to produce something with some kind of sonic clarity, I would have to work closely in conjunction with the resonant space, let events happen, and respond patiently. I began with non-pitched sounds, a sustained intense wheeze, full of inharmonic resultant tones, produced when pushing a great deal of air pressure through nearly-fully closed lips, which in turn are pressed firmly against the instrument’s mouthpiece. A disjuncture, a wilful deterritorialisation of the instrument’s harmonic construction, a reterritorialisation on an inharmonic plane. This is an extremely precarious technique, hard to control, and its unpredictability was amplified (literally!) by the room, since every little adumbration became part of the sustained soundscape, part of that upward-directed sonic dervish. When discrete pitches would emerge from the inharmonic soundscape (first accidentally, then with increasing agential atten-

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Chris Stover tion), I would bend them using the trombone slide, working in conjunction with the space to create extremely complex collisions of harmonic spectra, with multiple layers of resultant “beats” further intermingling with one another. Here is one example of this process, cast in terms of the tetravalent schematic. At 1:03, one of those discrete-pitch interruptions emerges, echoing an earlier intrusion of the same pitch (B♭5).20 Both pitches were “accidents”: products of the precarity of the playing technique I was using. This second instance, though, marked a change in the direction of the improvisation—a conscious decision to make those sounds part of the improvisatory fabric. It was a change of valence, in a word, not only of my own participatory self but of the space-time of the assemblage itself, as this new pitch, significantly louder than what had transpired so far, transformed the sonorous capacity of the room in the moment. Thus, a concrete material event (a discrete pitch interrupting the prevailing inharmonic texture) led to a change in expression (or of expressive potential), which in turn folded back to transform the content to follow. In valence terms, each was reconfigured, primed for new constellations of connections. At 1:08 I follow that B♭5 with a slightly softer C6. B♭5 still lingers as a dervish-echo, and the harmonic spectra of the two tones intermingle complexly. Again, there is a change of valence as the superimposition of waveforms dance around one another in the cylindrical space. I repeat the C6, very lightly, and this time glissando back down to B♭5, deterritorialising the clash of harmonic spectra just heard (between harmonic series stemming from two clearly discrete pitches), transforming it into a complex roar. There’s a proliferation here, from pitch (the single B♭5 and its harmonic spectra), to the complex interplay of two co-occurring spectra, to pure inharmonicity. The particular way these manifested was of course directly attributable to the peculiar space as well. Figure 2.5 graphically represents these three events.

20 Timing numbers refer to the recording cited below. For reasons that will become apparent, I ask the reader not to listen just yet.

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Figure 2.5a–c.

Figure 2.5a–c. Three “affect bursts” transforming the valence of the ongoing context.

Chris Stover The sounds that the room and my prosthetic instrument-self were producing also provoked me to explore motion in space—to turn in different directions, to point up toward the ceiling and down at the floor, to move about and creatively occupy the space, to differently assemble with it and experience what new sounds might result. This led to many palpable results in the moment of performance, and also afterward, since my iPhone was fixed in one location and interpreted the incoming sonic signal not only as changes in directionality but also in amplitude (much like Dempster’s microphones), with the sonic source emanating from my trombone considerably louder when I was pointing in the phone’s direction, and the spatial reverberation often taking sonic prominence when I would point away. There were (probably) noticeable changes in the room at the time; but this was more a case of thinking toward future listenings, of orienting toward how a listener would experience the recorded product of the performance. All this took on a surprising additional register when, later that evening, my bandmates and I first listened to the recording. As Deleuze and Guattari ([1977] 1983, 8) insist, machines produce by breaking down, and we were pleasantly surprised by the result of a literal technological breakdown—my little iPhone microphone and voice-memo app could not handle the sonic input of the performance, and everything above a certain amplitude distorted wildly, as if run through a late-1960s fuzzbox. (At this point, I encourage the reader to listen to the first two improvisations, which can be found in the online repository, details of which can be found in the appendix on page 445.) What a marvellous turn: first of all, in the postmodernist spirit of improvised “happenings,” the original performance remains fully conjoined with that time and place, never to be heard again. But then a new body, an iPhone-body, was added to the mix, newly deterritorialising the human-instrument-space-sound assemblage, newly reterritorialising as a kind of electro-acoustic work. I enjoy playing this recording for people without saying anything about its genealogy—the assumption is almost always that some serious post-production was involved, which is not quite untrue, but it was a sort of accidental para-production, unfolding in the original moment of performance but only experiencable after the fact. Changes of valence occur through the interactions of bodies in a context. These are affective relations: affects swirl and flow between bodies, they “stick” to bodies and reprime them to connect, conjoin, and disjoin differently. That is to say, bodies themselves change in that their relational affordances within ongoing contexts change; thus, for example, while the shape and concrete materiality of the space remain constant, the ways they afford different kinds of next sonic utterances are in continuous flux. Those changes of affordances are themselves concrete machinic processes, but they also reflect ongoing enactments of assemblages of enunciation: sounds are themselves material bodies but they are also para-syntactic utterances that express meaning and are fully part of the nonverbal “language” of the context. The space takes on new layers of expressive meaning through our played conjunctions. My prosthetic human-trombone body is impinged upon by the ongoing heteroglossic mur-

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Musical Interaction in the Tetravalence mur, the action of which folds back to transform or rearrange my own genealogy. This, by the way, demonstrates the multidirectional action of Deleuze’s (1994) three syntheses of time: the improvisational moment cuts into and rearranges time, folding past and future into itself, while concurrently folding into and transforming the past. All this, finally, elides the question of intention, which remains such a fraught question in improvisation and interaction studies. There were intentional decisions made, but they really function as selections from within a generalised “just-happening”; passive intentionality, operating at the level of affect, is what grounds the active, or, what amounts to the same thing, active intentionality is a selection from within—or a particular kind of coalescence of—passive forces. In a sense, I’m asking a lot of a small word that Deleuze and Guattari only used on a few occasions. But valence is a word that does important work. For one, it clarifies how affect seems to function, which is always something of a cagey concept. It also reflects what it is that the transversal relation between the machinic assemblage of bodies and the collective assemblage of enunciation does, which is to change the capacity of each to newly connect, conjoin, and disjoin. This foregrounds relationality and liminality: change, and therefore identity (and subjectivity), is enacted precisely at the conjunctions of intensive forces produced between bodies. And, similarly, it clarifies what it is that de- and reterritorialisation do, which is to redirect bodily and expressive trajectories and reprime them to relate differently. References Barrett, Lisa Feldman. 1996. “Hedonic Tone, Perceived Arousal, and Item Desirability: Three Components of Self-Reported Mood.” Cognition and Emotion 10 (1): 47–68. Berliner, Paul F. 1994. Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Borgo, David. 2005. Sync or Swarm: Improvising Music in a Complex Age. New York: Continuum. Charland, Louis C. 2005. “Emotion Experience and the Indeterminacy of Valence.” In Emotion and Consciousness, edited by Lisa Feldman Barrett, Paula M. Niedenthal, and Piotr Winkielman, 231–54. New York: Guilford Press. Cobussen, Marcel. 2017. The Field of Musical Improvisation. Leiden: Leiden University Press. Colombetti, Giovanna. 2005. “Appraising Valence.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 12 (8–10): 103–26. Davitz, Joel R. 1969. The Language of Emotion. New York: Academic Press.

Deleuze, Gilles. 1988. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Translated by Robert Hurley. San Francisco: City Lights. First published 1970 as Spinoza (Paris: Presses universitaires de France), revised 1981 as Spinoza: Philosophie pratique (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1990. The Logic of Sense. Translated by Mark Lester with Charles Stivale. Edited by Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1969 as Logique du sens (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1991. Bergsonism. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Zone Books. First published 1966 as Le Bergsonisme (Paris: Presses universitaires de France). ———. 1994. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1968 as Différence et répétition (Paris: Presses universitaires de France). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. (1977) 1983. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert

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Chris Stover Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1972 as Capitalisme et schizophrénie: L’anti-Œdipe (Paris: Minuit). Translation first published 1977 (New York: Viking Press). ———. 1986. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Translated by Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1975 as Kafka: Pour une literature mineure (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Minuit). Dempster, Stuart. 1987. “Standing Waves: 1976.” MP3 audio. Track 1 on Stuart Dempster, In the Great Abbey of Clement VI. New Albion Records, NA-013. Dynamic Science. 2020. “Valency.” Accessed 12 August. http://www.dynamicscience. com.au/tester/solutions1/chemistry/ chemicalequations/valency.html. Fadnes, Petter Frost. 2020. Jazz on the Line: Improvisation in Practice. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality 1: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon. First published 1976 as Histoire de la sexualité. 1: La volonté de savoir (Paris: Gallimard). Frijda, Nico H. 1986. The Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. (2006) 2013. The Laws of Emotion. Hove, UK: Routledge. First published 2006 (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates). Guattari, Félix. 1989. “Ritornellos and Existential Affects.” Translated by Juliana Schiesari and Georges Van Den Abbeele. Discourse 12 (2): 66–81. ———. 1995. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. Translated by Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. First published 1992 as Chaosmose (Paris: Galilée). Haraway, Donna J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthuluscene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hodson, Robert. 2007. Interaction, Improvisation, and Interplay in Jazz. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Krumhuber, Eva G., and Klaus R. Scherer.

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2011. “Affect Bursts: Dynamic Patterns of Facial Expression.” Emotion 11 (4): 825–41. Lambie, John A., and Anthony J. Marcel. 2002. “Consciousness and the Varieties of Emotion Experience: A Theoretical Framework.” Psychological Review 109 (2): 219–59. Lewin, Kurt. 1935. A Dynamic Theory of Personality: Selected Papers. Translated by Donald K. Adams and Karl E. Zener. New York: McGraw-Hill. Michaelsen, Garrett. 2013. “Analyzing Musical Interaction in Jazz Improvisations of the 1960s.” PhD thesis, Indiana University. Monson, Ingrid. 1996. Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Partch, Harry. 1974. Genesis of a Music: An Account of a Creative Work, Its Roots and Its Fulfillments. 2nd ed. New York: Da Capo Press. First ed. published 1949 as Genesis of a Music: Monophony (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press). Peters, Gary. 2009. The Philosophy of Improvisation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Reinholdsson, Peter. 1998. “Making Music Together: An Interactionist Perspective on Small-Group Performance in Jazz.” PhD thesis, Uppsala University. Russell, James A. 1980. “A Circumplex Model of Affect.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 39 (6): 1161–78. Scherer, Klaus R. 1994. “Affect Bursts.” In Emotions: Essays on Emotion Theory, edited by Stephanie H. M. van Goozen, Nanne E. Van de Poll, and Joseph A. Sergeant, 161–94. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. ———. 2000. “Emotions as Episodes of Subsystem Synchronization Driven by Nonlinear Appraisal Processes.” In Emotion, Development, and SelfOrganization: Dynamic Systems Approaches to Emotional Development, edited by Marc D. Lewis and Isabela Granic, 70–99. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Simondon, Gilbert. (1964) 1989. L’Individu et sa genèse physico-biologique. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Solomon, Robert C., and Lori D. Stone. 2002. “On ‘Positive’ and ‘Negative’ Emotions.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 32 (4): 417–35.

Musical Interaction in the Tetravalence Sorinas, Jennifer, Jose Manuel Ferrández, and Eduardo Fernandez. 2020. “Brain and Body Emotional Responses: Multimodal Approximation for Valence Classification.” Sensors 20 (1). https://doi. org/10.3390/s20010313. Stern, Daniel. 1985. The Interpersonal World of the Infant. London: Karnac Books.

Stover, Chris. 2017. “Time, Territorialization, and Improvisational Spaces.” Music Theory Online 23 (1). Accessed 12 August 2020. https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.17.23.1/ mto.17.23.1.stover.html. ———. 2018. “Affect and Improvising Bodies.” Perspectives of New Music 55 (2): 5–66.

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Time Music between Lines and Images Time In-between Silvio Ferraz University of São Paulo and National Council for Scientific and Technological Research, Brazil

I would like my proposition in this chapter to be simple, even if it deals with a complex question, what I call the transversal meanwhile, and with difficult concepts, many of which are extracted from Deleuze and Guattari’s work.1 I’ll be using one of Deleuze and Guattari’s key concepts, assemblage (agencement). My idea is to use this concept to reveal the simplicity of the operation of assemblage, its direct visibility in the rhizome, and the clarity with which it appears in blocs of becoming. Then, I want to think time on the basis of this concept, to think it as a point, a rhizomatically unfolded point.

1. In the passages where Deleuze and Guattari sketch a definition of what they call agencement, they suppose a double movement: a movement of deterritorialisation underpinning one of territorialisation, on the basis of which bodies are connected and territories composed. It is precisely by being constituted on the basis of this double movement, of deterritorialisation/territorialisation, that assemblages refer, ontologically, to a machinic dimension of reality, both in our bodies and in the doing and undoing of territories. As Guattari proposes in The Machinic Unconscious: To think time against the grain, to imagine that what came “after” can modify what was “before” or that changing the past at the root can transform a current state of affairs: what madness! A return to magical thought! It is pure science fiction, and yet . . . In my view there is nothing absurd about attempting to explore these interactions, which I would also qualify as machinic . . . these abstract machines [and their deterritorialised interactions] traverse various levels of reality and establish and demolish stratifications. . . . [This causes the] coordinates of existence . . . to be decentralized in comparison to one another, while assigning them “territories of replacement” in spaces of coding. (Guattari 2011, 10–11)

1 Unless otherwise stated, all translations are my own.

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2. What matters here is that these machines both open and close territories. They can be thought of as gears in the large machinery that Deleuze and Guattari, in A Thousand Plateaus, call the refrain (ritournelle). The refrain works with formed and unformed bodies, stratified and unstratified parts, where even these “apparently formed” bodies are also, in themselves, assemblages of formed and unformed parts that constitute a territory. In the refrain, each one of these parts, formed and not formed, constitutes what we can call a milieu.2 What a milieu manifests is the simple fact that there is a code, defined by the minimum permanence of a periodicity. It is these codes, those energies of minimum permanence, that manifest milieus, that will enter into a modulatory process among themselves giving place to a new kind of territorial component: the rhythm. Milieu, codes, rhythms, all these territory components are always in collision, and rhythms can modulate milieus or codes. We could think also in transient codes out of milieus; in addition, these transient codes have the potency to participate in a modulation operation. As conceived by Deleuze and Guattari, the refrain is a territorial machine of assemblages that is formed by milieus, which have codes as components (milieu), and is open to chaos. The milieus’ “response to chaos” is rhythm. Two codes can modulate each other, giving rise to rhythms. In this way, on the one hand, we have components of milieus (the codes), and, on the other hand, the territory components (codes, milieus, and rhythms) (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 322–23). All actions occur in-between codes and milieus (“between two milieus, or between two intermilieus, on the fence . . .” [313–14]).

3. All these unformed and formed parts appear to us as images trespassed by our language, by the structures of numbers, by our body, the sound, the visual, the tactile, the proprioceptive sensations, means, rhythms, codes, and territories “perceived when my senses are opened to them, unperceived when they are closed” (Bergson [1911] 1991, 17). All these images are always in a mise en forme, where the collision of formed and unformed images is at stake. Seemingly complete and fragmented, the images are thus multifaceted; each of its faces has the potential to act on one another as independent images. Returning to the refrain, it will be the rhythm, this image that is born from the modulation between means and codes, between images, which defines what I call transversal time in-between. The complexity involved in this game is extreme, and even if “beyond the movement-image,” time-images nevertheless collide upon themselves and with movement-images. Transversal time in-between is the whirling of these collisions between image packages, all of them intercrossed, where 2 As observed by Brian Massumi in his translation notes to the English edition of A Thousand Plateaus, “milieu. In French, milieu means ‘surroundings,’ ‘medium’ (as in chemistry), and ‘middle.’ In the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, ‘milieu’ should be read as a technical term combining all three meanings” (Massumi 1987, xvii).

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Time Music between Lines and Images the collision can occur between overlapping or juxtaposed images, close or distant.

4. Why can in-between be thought as a transversal-time, a transversal meanwhile? We always face time as horizontal: our representation of time is horizontal, our occidental language is written horizontally, and it became a kind of aporia. As Bergson observed in his classes about the idea of time: “once the grammatical categories are fixed, they form a bed in which thought flows” (Bergson 2019, 16). Thus, the horizontality and functionality of words within a language, and writing techniques directed from left to right, are the main apparatus we have for thinking and representing time in a horizontal line. To think time as transversal, almost vertical, and in-between is to consider what happens between the lacks of movement. I will then assume this transversal time is not a line that relates stable objects or textures, as Daniel Charles observed Stockhausen’s vertical time to do: the time of the eternity, of stable and frozen moments, a timeless experience.3 On the contrary, the transversal in-between I’m proposing here, is the one where movements are vertiginous, there is no eternity, and objects are always in mise-en-forme. I propose to think transversal time as lived in-between codes, milieus, and even rhythms. Something close to Daniel Charles’s proposition of l’instant intensif: “Enjoyment of the instant—not as a present instant, but as one that is spread or staggered, displayed or deployed, delayed or distinguished” (Charles 1978, 265).4

5. Transversal-time is a privileged field for experimentation in musical listening and composition, and even in practices of instrumental music. Focusing on what happens between images, I do not talk about sound objects, musical gestures or formed musical figures, but about the subtle operations that take place in the interstices or intervals of the musical mechanism, and which refer to what I understand as constituting the machinism internal to music. Music in this sense is a machine that gives body to a very specific time: a time-music. This is a different time from the one grounding our everyday, which refers to time measured by seasons, ages, and so on. I think of this other time, time-music, the time of the music-machine, as being transversal, a time born from the verti3 “The verticalisation of the intensive instant is not recoverable through the Orientalism of Stockhausen, to whose dazzled eyes it might well signify, swimming, the irruption of eternity in each moment. No, one cannot pay for the intensive instant with any kind of Moment-form” (Charles 1978, 267; la verticalisation de l’instant intensif n’est pas récupérable selon l’orientalisme de Stockhausen, aux yeux éblouis duquel elle pouvait bien signifier, nagère, l’irruption de léternité dans chaque moment. Non, l’instant intensif ne se peut monnayer dans aucune Moment-form); or, as proposed by David Kramer (1988, 57): “Listening to a vertical musical composition can be like looking at a piece of sculpture.” It is also important to refer here to the notion of vertical time proposed by José Gil in A imagem-nua e as pequenas percepções (1996, 188). 4 “Jouissance de l’instant, mais non pas en tant qu’instant présent, en tant qu’instant étale ou étalé, déplié et déployé, différé et différencié . . .”

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Silvio Ferraz ginous linking of micropoints, where opposed or continuous forces are articulated. This time unfolds infinitely in a profusion of local images that, even if local, insist on a pure memory unaffected by action: the abyss, distances, the proprioceptive and exteroceptive relations that trigger the tactility of texture, the visibility of figures, the kinetics of gestures when listening to sounds. In this way, I propose going a little further and to think time outside the smoothstriated doublet proposed by Boulez, beyond the spatial hors-temps and the en-temps of chronological succession as thought by Xenakis.5

6. Perhaps, when faced with Deleuze’s insistence on the distinction between Aion and Chronos, we could think the presence of a third time. As Deleuze proposes: “The essential difference is no longer simply between Chronos and Aion, but between the Aion of surfaces and the whole of Chronos together with the becoming-mad of the depths . . . For if depth evades the present, it is with all the force of a ‘now’ which opposes its panic-stricken present to the wise present of measure; and if the surface evades the present, it is with all the power of an ‘instant’” (Deleuze 1990, 165). We have then a very complex image of time, a four-part image: both transversals, “now” and “instant,” are distributed over a horizontal line in two different senses. Deleuze also explores elements of this time, but only briefly. First, he discusses the idea of time as an interval that “indicates the smallest unit of movement or action” (Deleuze 1986, 32). Time as an interval would be in counterpoint to time as a whole, an open spiral, infinitely contracted (ibid.). Years later, in What Is Philosophy?, with Guattari, he introduces the idea of inter-time and then alludes to its transversality: “all the meanwhiles are superimposed on one another, whereas times succeed each other” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 158). Entre-temps (between times, “meanwhile,” “time as interval”)6 is a “dead time” that “does not come after what happens[, but] coexists with the instant or time of the accident” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 158): “It is no longer time that exists between two instants; it is the event that is a meanwhile [un entretemps]: the meanwhile is not part of the eternal, but neither is it part of time—it belongs to becoming” (ibid.). This time, the evil Chronos,7 is my starting point for thinking about the constant birth of time, its incessant foundation, at each cut, at each change, at each new action required of the listener:8 a point of collision, a transversal explosion spread across horizontal coexistences of eternity and measured time; the evil 5 On such propositions see Boulez (1995), specifically the third part of the book, “Penser la musique aujourd’hui (Suite),” and Xenakis (1971). 6 See Deleuze (1986, 32). 7 It is worth noting here the difference between Kronos and Chronos, as read by Michèle Simondon (1976, 223–32), stretching back to the Orphic tradition. 8 My reference here is to the three-phased time proposed by Deleuze in Difference and Repetition, comprehending its foundation in habit, its ground in memory, and its ungrounding: “the immediate reflection of the formless and the superior form which constitutes the eternal return,” which is very close to the idea of modulation and demodulation in Gilbert Simondon’s thought as the relation between two energy flows: a modulator and a modulated one (Deleuze 1994, 67).

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Time Music between Lines and Images Chronos spread across Aion and measured in Chronos (Kronos).9 In the terms that Deleuze borrows from the hypothesis of Plato’s Parmenides, at stake is the distinction between “instants” and “nows”: The essential difference is no longer simply between Chronos and Aion, but between the Aion of surfaces and the whole of Chronos together with the becomingmad of the depths. . . . For if depth evades the present, it is with all the force of a “now” which opposes its panic-stricken present to the wise present of measure; and if the surface evades the present, it is with all the power of an “instant,” which distinguishes its occurrence from any assignable present subject to division and redivision. Nothing ascends to the surface without changing its nature. (Deleuze 1990, 165)

Figure 3.1.

7. Meanwhile: The moment of interruption: concrete, real, but immeasurable. It is here between transitions and mutations that I have investigated musical invention. As Deleuze and Guattari (1994, 158) point out: “In every event there are many heterogeneous, always simultaneous components, since each of them is a meanwhile, all within the meanwhile that makes them communicate through zones of indiscernibility, of undecidability: they are variations, modulations, intermezzi, singularities of a new infinite order.” For me, the musician works with points of inflection, at the level of forces, and does not conform only to modelled objects, which a certain, dominant, 9 This image of time in Kronos is the same as Deleuze uses to define meanwhile, the dead time, and the Crystal of Time: “We see in the crystal the perpetual foundation of time, non-chronological time, Cronos and not Chronos” (Deleuze 1989, 81).

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Figure 3.1. The deep evil-Chronos, magma of instable images flowing, with his explosion cut vertically across, immeasurably spread in Aïon and measured in Chronos.

Silvio Ferraz music theory has long insisted on. This entre-temps (meanwhile) that I try to map here is like plunging into a game of modulation and demodulation. In his book Movimento total (Total movement), José Gil gives us something of this entre-temps when speaking of gesture in dance: a gesture is always recognised and interpreted by the tension between the point that closes in on itself and the one that opens itself up (Gil 2001, 140). The tension that constitutes this between as a “between-gesture,” we could call a non-figurative microgesture: such microgestures don’t represent anything, they only arrange the tendency from one point to the other, and when removed, it is a gesture of dance itself that remains. According to Steve Paxton, “something is produced that is too quick for thought” (1993, 65). The endpoint of a gesture is the beginning point of another, and these points, of “end-beginning,” are also between-gestures of other gestures. Even with a gesture such as lifting the arms, halting and then falling into the void, it is with the void that the gesture engages. What matters here is that at the assemblage point the tension between the previously formed actual and the unformed virtual do not imply a hierarchy: at every instant in the machinic assemblage, structures become operations and vice versa. We are faced with the simultaneity of a double becoming—becoming-structure and becomingoperation, modulation and demodulation, as proposed by Gilbert Simondon when explaining his allagmatic model ([1964] 2005). Indeed, when listening to music or any temporal art, our attention always turns to the collision between movement-images, as the embryonic or nascent point of time-images, which, in their turn, also collide among themselves and with the movement-images that triggered them, in a vertiginous absence of hierarchies or causal relations. That is to say, it is the “between” that is lived, in which the modulations taking place between the different milieus give birth to an intensive rhythm; in turn, these intensive rhythms will themselves also modulate and be modulated. Always immersed in visualities, spatialities, tactilities, and sonorities, art is the privileged place to experiment with assemblages, with this game of modulation and demodulation, as it is music that makes audible time-images and movement-images, which aren’t necessarily sonorous. It makes transversal time audible. Or as Paul Klee put it, it makes audible “an epic tempo as against the dramatic of the vertical” (Klee 1961, 212, my emphasis). To listen is something like to live the collisions between sounds and images.

8. But how does music work with this transversal time? It does so by assembling a complex picture of forces, by operating a complex binding of moments through micropoints that articulate opposed forces. There are always assemblages and transductive operations of demodulation and modulation when components of a territory are put together, when the provisional states of a thing, its “actuals,” are assembled and confronted with the virtuality of connections that whirl around these “things”—what we

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Time Music between Lines and Images ordinarily call the “future.” Time here folds itself infinitely, transversally, giving way to a profusion of local senses stemming from the tactility of texture, the visuality of figures, and the kinetics of gestures, and also from symbolic relations implicated in words, in discourse. It is no longer in a striated relation of succession, nor in a smooth relation of spatial presence outside time. In this moment of interruption, then, we have vertical time, the immeasurable abyss in which imagination takes place; a concrete, real moment, but one that cannot be measured.

9.

Figure 3.2.

10. “A force torn from the present, which precludes rest . . . [launched] towards realities where the actual sensation is not given” (Simondon 2008, 48). With these words, which belong to Simondon, I propose thinking the temporality of listening as a moment wherein only the present collisions are fact. Our listening operates over a very thin time—the “infra-mince” meanwhile—where the unformed coming-from future collides with the formed actuals. Considered this way, the assemblage that is internal to this point in the present is of a transversal nature. It is the point of pure repetition of difference, a “mutation point” or “passage milieu,” in which the actual and the virtual whirl around themselves, in constant modulation and demodulation, in search of points of contact. As an example, we can imagine melodic figures, textures, and gestures as images already designed by our listening, which operate as modulators of uniformed forces, which whirl and surround the actual. Unstructured forces in operation are converted by already existing structures, which then work as

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Figure 3.2. Diagram showing the idea of a transversal time (in-between).

Silvio Ferraz modulators converting the unformed into new or already existent images. It is in this sense that we can say that a high note that follows conducted polyphony can, at the same time, be polyphony in itself and convert the polyphony into a texture. Figure 3.3.

Figure 3.4a–b.

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Figure 3.3. A visual example of the collision between a polyphonic texture and a monodic line, showing possible modulated images of polyphony converted into a thick monodic mass and the monodic line converted into a micro-polyphonic structure. Figure 3.4a–b. Two graphical transcriptions taken from the musical repertoire: Gustav Mahler, Symphony No. 9, Adagio (mss. 99–103); and György Ligeti, Ten Pieces for Wind Quintet (Piece 7, mss. 34–41), which exemplify the collision between events in a musical flux.

11. In one of my recent compositions I tried to work with collisions between the already formed actuals and the unformed virtuals. In this sense, I worked with several breakpoints, each one opened as a possible birthpoint of lines.

Figure 3.5.

This transversal time is the place where gestures, textures, and figures are born. It is an interruption point, an invention point of listening, and a continuous invention point of other transversal times. As Simondon recalls, the interruption of a flux always requires the invention of a detour or deviation to restore continuity. If music needs continuity for the one who listens to feel at home, the continuity, however, is not given: it needs to be invented while facing suspension, rupture, and the abyss. It’s all these images that participate in this abyssal moment, unfolding in an immeasurable, intensive time, along a line without extension, almost a zero time or point, but which, nevertheless, is incessantly emerging, being born. It was this moment that Brian Ferneyhough thought in terms of a “tactility of time” (1993).

12. At stake when assembling is the relation between actuals and virtuals, a meanwhile full of micro-operations, of an allagmatic life, which includes syncretic

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Figure 3.5. In this example I show a passage from one of my string quartets (Pássaro de cordas), where I worked with several breakpoints, each one of which is an opened point to the birth of new musical images, and an extreme cut of the flow, where a sustained note contracts the polyphonic texture that is its antecedent (reproduced from Ferraz 2016).

Silvio Ferraz operations and analyses of modulation (the conversion of operators into structures) or demodulation (the conversion of structures into operators).10 The flux of listening is no longer limited to its objects or images because it is potentialised in a flux of energy: transitional points, modulation and demodulation, and the flux of micro-operations. The energy passes from one place to another, from one image to another, and I insist it does so between images (objects, events, things), through the infinite folds of each image our thought can hold. The fluxes of energy are always continuous; they exist, while in the operation of modulation and demodulation there is a constant collision between modulated (bearer) and modulating forces. At stake is a free flux of great energy (with a great potential of transformation, as a field of virtuals), which collides with a flux of low energy but with a high capacity for structuration (a high capacity for stratifying a plane of actuals and possibles). As pointed out by Simondon, these collision points are the meanwhile of the conversion of operators into structures, and vice versa. Time here is not understood as a succession of stops but as a flux of operations that is divided into three: (1) a horizontal chronological time, one of extension, where one operation depends on another; (2) a widespread and non-chronological intensive field of space-time, and (3) a transversal time where the operations are intensively implicated in one another. These are Kronos, Aïon, and Chronos. We are immersed in a flow of energy, in a flux of mutations and transitions; in an incessant shifting of modulations and demodulations between more or less oriented energies, in blocs with greater or less mutation capacity: “an assemblage of components irreducible to a formal description” (Guattari 2011, 16). But the flux is not conceived as a linear succession: the flux is only the present moment. It’s transversal—transversal time—a time that doesn’t include the past and future, which are only verbal aporias of the West. It is only a present time, then. It’s in transversal times that machinic assemblages are produced.

13. Of all the concepts Deleuze and Guattari left us, the rhizome is perhaps the one that most approximates what I’m thinking as transversal time. The rhizome designs a web without any specific point of entry or exit. It’s a diagram, a decentralised plane where metastable objects are confronted with live forces circulating at high speeds. The rhizome is a between/place of direct collision between collective assemblages of enunciation and machinic assemblages (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 6). It’s an abstract machine, a between/place of deterritorialised interactions that traverse various levels of reality, unveiling the different stratifications. It’s a place of birth and the dismantling of temporal bulbs, as Deleuze and Guattari propose in A Thousand Plateaus.

10 Simondon notices also the capacity of low energy to modulate high energy, in a relation of attrition. From here we can think the time of collision between virtuals and actuals as being a transversal time of modulations and demodulations (see Simondon [1964] 2005, 532–34, 559–61; 2010, 189–97).

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Time Music between Lines and Images

14. In a flux of the musical type, this machine, sometimes stratified sometimes not, is the very image of the rhizome as it enters into its deterritorialised flux as defined by Deleuze and Guattari (Guattari 2011, 10; Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 7). The provisional structures of phrases, of objects and ordered spaces, are necessarily undone in forces. A flux of energy is composed, flowing through points of transversal time, places of collisions between formed images and free forces, between actuals and virtuals.11 At stake is the potency of the constant passage between modulation and demodulation, which results from the encounter both of actuals and actuals or of virtuals and actuals in this primeval soup (the plane of immanence) in which we are immersed. Listening to music is always to be plunged into a listening fabulation. Thus, I’m proposing that listening to time is an act of a transversal mode: (1) the sounds of instruments are transmuted into colours, spectres, and visual images, into tactility, weights, speeds, words, and tastes (acidic, bitter, sweet); (2) small melodic sequences are transmuted into animal chants, screams, and noises; (3) rhythmic sequences make us dance the unknown in our bodies. And all this always happens at the same point, in transversal time, without before or after, in a point of mutation, composed of the crystals of the possible that catalyse connections, destratifications, and reterritorialisations both in the living and in the inanimate worlds (Guattari 2011, 16).

15. Music is a machine of transversal time. During a musical session, we have little room for remembering or for anticipating. Remembering a past or imagining a future is always of the order of the hors-temps, hors-flux. We would need to stop listening to what is between the flow of images to be able to accentuate the objects. We would have to freeze everything and remove the flux . . . but the listening machine, in the listening situation, doesn’t stop connecting and fabulating connections, modulating and demodulating. As a time machine, music is a machine of forgetting. As Deleuze and Guattari propose: “perception of a musical ‘phrase’ appeals less to memory, even of the reminiscence type, than to an extension or contraction of perception of the encounter type. It should be studied how each musician sets in motion veritable blocks of forgetting” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 545n87). In the point of inflexion on the immanent plane, contours and provisional objects collide with the dynamic disorder of machinic assemblages. This collision is between modulating and modulated forces. Simondon even suggests that we think of a game of demodulating operation systems and modulating operations in structures and systems.

11 Actuals, with long duration or permanence, such as resonances or those that depend on the memory of sound images, of a melody, a reiterated rhythm, a harmonic field, or a tonality, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, non-predictable virtuals, even if surrounded in a plane of composition.

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Silvio Ferraz I imagine, then, the process of musical composition as an art of dealing with and forcing assemblages of groupings of sounds in motion (gestures), tactile groupings (texture), and visualities (figures), all of which are provisionally grouped, and which collide with each other according to their individual tendencies. The more complex the assemblage, the stronger will be the tendencies involved in the different directions, the more dramatic will be the change. A point may at times appear as a glitch, at times, an eternity. Or, in the words of Paul Klee: “The juxtaposition of strong contrasts creates an expression full of strength. To introduce connections between these contrasts separates them from each other and weakens the expression. A greater force produces wider breaks than does a lesser force. Secondary contrasts weaken the force of the expression even if the juxtapositions are without links. The introduction of a link results in weakening by enriching and a decrease of tension” (Klee 1973, 319).

Figure 3.6.

16. As a false conclusion, I would like to propose something close to the practice that I have as a composer. In this sense, a question must be asked: what notions and concepts, such as those of machinism, refrain, and meanwhile (in-between), could contribute to thinking about musical composition? In what sense would these concepts help us leave the stable place of tradition in order to think not only about composition but also about musical listening itself ? The first and fast answer is that, in a musical machinic assemblage, like the one I showed above quoting Paul Klee (illustrated by the explosion that arises from the depth of the evil Chronos), we are referring simultaneously to multiple ideas of time. On the one hand, there is an extensive time, of speed of appearance, of the alternation and disappearance of musical objects (fastslow), the chronometric time taken to cross a frequential space (a glissando, an arpeggio, a sweep from low to high), and so on; on the other hand, there is the still extensive feeling of time, in terms of chronological duration.12 12 But care must always be taken not to make the work of Deleuze and Guattari an original from which to trace (décalquer). As Deleuze and Guattari often make use of notions arising from twentieth century art, there is always a danger of short-circuiting concepts. Often, an idea derived from phenomenology caused a leap in Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking, and the lack of understanding of this leap returns the

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Figure 3.6. Class notes by Paul Klee: “Curve of a movement taking into consideration the notions of ‘strong contrasts without connection’ [1], ‘connection’ [2], and ‘secondary contrast’ [3 and 3a]” (Klee 1973, 319).

Time Music between Lines and Images

17. Nevertheless, there is another way of thinking about time: no longer as extensive but as intensive. Duration in the Bergsonian sense, the duration itself, is unrelated to any other duration, which makes time an immeasurable sequence of heterogeneities (see Bergson [1911] 1991, 77). It is this intensive time I have tried to expose here through Deleuze’s notions of in-between and meanwhile: the punctual place of a machinic assemblage of collective listening (écoutes)—the meanwhile where all images of time occur in one unique instant-now; of time as a sensation, as a modulation of the various images “time” can virtually have. As a composer, I always considered time to be a set of images. The timeimage, like other images, is also multifaceted, and it brings with it at least five images, as I discussed above: the chaotic image of Chronos, the measured image of Kronos, the unmeasured image of Aïon, and the image of “instants” (which close) and “nows” (which open): “instants,” projected in the measured space and “nows” distributed in the space of duration.

18. From a more practical point of view, I take certain ideas into consideration: (1) Klee’s idea of composing as dealing with the balance between hard and smooth cuts in a space-time sequence of images; that is, the idea that music breathes in cycles, since its most primary rhythmic foot (pédes) alternates downbeats and upbeats (systoles with diastoles). The upbeat concentrates energy that is released on the downbeat, thus manifesting a musical and linguistic tradition of considering time as a clash between what is stopped and what moves. (2) That every sound carries an image of time, that frequencies are an image of time—a set of pressure variables in the order of succession. Thus, we are talking about time when we talk about musical notes, when we talk about rhythms, when we talk about objects, about the relationship between objects (long–short), and of listening vaguely through packages of sounds that are grouped and ungrouped. And (3) the fact that in machinic assemblages formed and unformed images of different natures and tendencies are always colliding. Transversal time, meanwhile, is just one more image among time-images, linked to actions of condensing to create “instants” and of spreading to create “nows,” and to the action of connecting and modulating such “instants” and “nows.” This set of actions is what I would propose here as a set of time-images in musical composition. It encompasses not only works with a single dimension, but also works with different dimensions and images of time. That is, time as a machinic assemblage deals with a plurality of images going beyond the direct or varied sensitive repetition of sonic-musical objects, their measured variations, or their free anamorphosis.

concept to the philosophy of representation from which they had taken it (see Ferraz and Malufe 2016).

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19. As an example, I return here to the same passage already quoted earlier from my string quartet. Above, I observed some inflections of time: from continuity by repetition of profile to continuity by abrupt cut; from continuity in the sequence of events to continuity between overlapping events. Thus, it is up to the composer to control not only his or her images, the sonorities the composer employs that link with his or her sound-affect history (habits, pleasures, references), but also the inflection points by imagining the different operations that are born between images and the rhythm that results from the birth, death, and return of images. In this sense, the time considered here is that of the deep evil Chronos, where images are always at the boiling point of birth, remaining, disappearing, and returning in constant intermodulation with one another. We have then something very close to Deleuze’s definition of chaos, which is “defined not so much by its disorder as by the infinite speed with which every form taking shape in it vanishes” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 118).

Figure 3.7.

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Figure 3.7. Multiple time-images, in a passage from my string quartet Pássaro de cordas (Ferraz 2016).

Time Music between Lines and Images Over the course of the twentieth century, composers went from diving into the musical note to diving into the sound, the instrumental gesture, and so on. Each musical particle has become autonomous from a unifying whole, free to connect to any other. The art of composition thus began to work not on objects but on the operators that give rise to such objects, or rather the sound images (the i-sounds proposed by François Bayle), the images deconstructed into operational fragments, opening the door to a different range of connections. Rather than deal with objects, shapes, matter, things, and the perception of things, composers moved to looking at what happens between the “molecules” of things, objects, and so on. The thought of Deleuze and Guattari, which we have considered here, is a thought of rigid, supple, and flying lines: “We have as many tangled lines as a hand. We are complicated in a different way from a hand. What we call by different names—schizoanalysis, micro-politics, pragmatics, diagrammatism, rhizomatic, cartography—has no other object than the study of these lines, in groups or as individuals” (Deleuze and Parnet 2007, 125). References Bergson, Henri. (1911) 1991. Matter and Memory. Translated by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer. New York: Zone Books. First published 1896 as Matière et mémoire: Essai sur la relation du corps à l’esprit (Paris: F. Alcan). This translation first published 1911 (London: George Allen and Unwin). ———. 2019. L’idée de temps: Cours au Collège de France 1901–1902. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Boulez, Pierre. 1995. Points de repère I: Imaginer. Edited by Jean-Jacques Nattiez and Sophie Galaise. Paris: Christian Bourgois. Charles, Daniel. 1978. “La musique et l’oubli.” In Le temps de la Voix, 256–69. Paris: J.-P. Delarge. Deleuze, Gilles. 1986. Cinema 1: The Movement Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. London: Athlone Press. First published 1983 as Cinéma 1: L’image-mouvement (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1989. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1985 as Cinéma 2: L’image-temps (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1990. The Logic of Sense. Translated by Mark Lester with Charles Stivale. Edited by Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia University Press. First

published 1969 as Logique du sens (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1994. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1968 as Différence et répétition (Paris: Presses universitaires de France). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1994. What Is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1991 as Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Minuit). Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. 2007. Dialogues II. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Rev. ed. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1977 as Dialogues (Paris: Flammarion). Ferneyhough, Brian. 1993. “The Tactility of Time.” Perspectives of New Music 31 (1): 20–30. Ferraz, Silvio. 2016. Pássaro de cordas, for string quartet. Unpublished score. Ferraz, Silvio, and Annita Costa Malufe. 2016. “Pensar junto al arte.”

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Silvio Ferraz Reflexiones marginales, dossier Deleuze. Accessed 31 December 2020. https:// reflexionesmarginales.com.mx/ blog/2016/07/01/pensar-junto-al-arte/. Gil, José. 1996. A Imagem-nua e as pequenas percepções: Estética e metafenomenologia. Lisbon: Relógio d’Água. ———. 2001. Movimento total: O corpo e a dança. Lisbon: Relógio d’Água. Guattari, Félix. 2011. The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in Schizoanalysis. Translated by Taylor Adkins. New York: Semiotext(e). First published 1979 as L’inconscient machinique: Essais de schizoanalyse (Paris: Recherches). Klee, Paul. 1961. Notebooks, Volume 1: The Thinking Eye. Edited by Jürg Spiller. Translated by Ralph Manheim. London: Lund Humphries. First published 1956 as Das bildnerische Denken (Basel: Schwabe). ———. 1973. La pensée créatrice. Paris: Dessain et Tolra. Kramer, David. 1988. The Time of Music: New Meanings, New Temporalities, New Listening Strategies. New York: Schirmer Books.

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Massumi, Brian. 1987. “Notes on the Translation and Acknowledgments.” In Deleuze and Guattari 1987, xvi–xix. Paxton, Steve. 1993. “Drafting Interior Techniques.” Contact Quarterly 18 (1): 61–66. Simondon, Gilbert. (1964) 2005. L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information. Grenoble: Jérôme Millon. First published 1964 (Paris: Presses universitaires de France). ———. 2008. Imagination et invention (1965–1966). Chatou, France: Éditions de la Transparence. ———. 2010. Communication et information: Cours et conférences. Chatou, France: Éditions de la Transparence. Simondon, Michèle. 1976. “Le Temps, ‘Père de Toutes Choses’: Chronos—Kronos.” Annales de Bretagne et des pays de l’Ouest 83 (2): 223–32. Xenakis, Iannis. 1971. “Trois Pôles de Condensation.” In Musique, Architecture, 26–37. Tournai, Belgium: Casterman.

Abstract Cartographies and Assemblages of Minimal Sound Units A “Body-Organon”? Clara Maïda Freelance composer

It is a lapping of waves, a rumor, a fog, or a mass of dancing particles of dust. It is a state of death or catalepsy, of sleep, drowsiness, or of numbness. It is as if the depths of every monad were made from an infinity of tiny folds (inflections) endlessly furling and unfurling in every direction. —Gilles Deleuze (1988, 115; 1993b, 86)1

Reading this excerpt from Deleuze’s book The Fold we have the sensation of being immersed in a potentially infinite whole set of micromovements of matter, a quivering of undulatory nano-vibrations that cross through the surface of a plane deprived of formal discernible limits. Since if the folds, the inflections, unfold their oscillatory trajectories in all directions, the very notion of spatiotemporal coordinates is no longer relevant here. The dimension of infinity underlines that, on the one hand, no outline, no edge, no boundary, can hinder or break the potential spatiotemporal expansion of this multitude of inflections, and that, on the other hand, the agitation of these micro-dynamisms could concern physical matter as well as the tiny and innumerable psychic and cerebral movements that traverse us. Contemporaneous with the expansion of nanosciences and neurosciences, Deleuze and Guattari questioned the microscopic forces that cross through any domain of investigation, either living matter (the microbiological, physicochemical, cosmic one, etc.) or the human being and the social field (psychic, artistic, socio-political dimensions, etc.). From the neuronal network to the rhizome, from the molecular machines observed by microbiologists to the molecular or machinic unconscious, both philosophers have crossed the “barrier” of disciplines (and not that of species) by proposing a kind of “nanometric cartography” of human phenomena. Throwing a bridge between various spheres of

1 Where two citations are given, the first citation refers to the original text, the second to the English translation.

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Clara Maïda research, their will to erase boundaries between definite identities and forms, and to claim the crossing, and the experience, of a field of “intensive quantities in their pure state” (Deleuze and Guattari 1972, 25; [1977] 1983, 18), that is, a field of force, opened a whole world of apprehension and numerous seminal concepts that artistic creation, and notably musical creation, had eventually to encounter. This mass of dancing particles of dust, this infinity of folds, echoes “a pure plane of immanence, univocality, composition, upon which everything is given, upon which unformed elements and materials dance that are distinguished from one another only by their speed and that enter into this or that individuated assemblage depending on their connections, their relations of movement” (Deleuze and Guattari 1980, 312; 1987, 255). A pure virtual field, both freed from any actualisation in the world and in individuals and opened to the potential infinity of all declensions, it spreads out forces of modelisation in the form of connective patterns with varying speeds, combinatorial shapes, and various assemblages. In The Fold, Deleuze proposes two couples of concepts, one opposing the virtual and the actual, the other opposing the real and the possible. The virtual is conceived as a prerequisite to any structuring, like an ensemble of differential elements whose links are potential. With no sensible shape, and consequently an open statement of the multiple, it is actualised by the connections woven between terms. The possible and the real are to be located at the level of an incarnation of the virtual structure in bodies (physical, chemical, sound bodies). Let us recall that the word virtual comes from the medieval Latin virtualis, itself derived from virtus (force, power). What is potential (in power) is virtual, is a power in becoming and not in act. The phenotype of a living shape, for instance, is virtually present in its genome. Any writing process that wishes to account for this concept of virtuality is always confronted with some impossibility and, consequently, with a paradoxical position. How can one give a perceptible consistency to what is not of the order of the sensible since the very act of writing already introduces in itself an actualisation process, a kind of breaking through that disrupts “the formless being of all differences, the formless power of the ground” (Deleuze 1968, 80; 1994, 57)? In my piece Holes and bones (2002), I explored both couples, the virtual-actual and the possible-real, by elaborating a kind of differential topological spacetime. A matrix generates the sound material, but it is meant to remain virtual since it will never be audible during the performance of the work (it is only its pre-processual step). Its function is to be a potential of modelisation, determining constraints that govern the organisation of the material (the authorised intervals between units, the place and the duration of interspersed time intervals, for instance). It can be compared to a genetic code whose genotypic structure would generate proto-phenotypic variants yet would not be embodied in living beings.

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Abstract Cartographies and Assemblages of Minimal Sound Units From very precise articulation rules, potentially varying combinations are actualised, but they do not yet have a value of sound materiality as it is perceived during the course of a work. The first step to elaborate a system of coordinates in the virtual multitude of sound frequencies can consist of selecting certain partials of a spectrum to get a kind of harmonic diagram that gives a framework for the other musical processes. The eight-frequency aggregate of the matrix is derived from the spectral analysis of two multiphonic sounds of a bass clarinet. In the graphic of the process further presented, each of the four instrumental voices enounces two superimposed layers (chains), each of which alternately unfolds two variants of a six-pitch micro-intervallic scale starting on two frequencies of the aggregate (intervals of the scale: ¼ tone–¼ tone–1 tone ¼–½ tone–¾ tones). Four kinds of permutations of the intervals of this scale are used for each instrument, but in this matrix, the option is to use them only in a descending movement. Two very short silences are inserted between the pitches of the scales, with a specific place of insertion for each of its variants. All the layers have different metrical schemes that gradually slow down at each repetition. Eight superimposed sound chains, organised in a system of insistences, thus return in a repeated device. Though submitted to virtual polarities, the links between the units can be slightly modified. Other options regarding the original aggregate’s frequencies, the permutations of the units, the displacements of the breaks in the sound continuum, and the speed variations could indeed be chosen within this same device. The sound particles flow repeatedly in a circular motion that could never end, since, like in a ceaseless loop, the variants of the scales could be repeated forever, with no slowing down process and no increasing gaps, for instance. But at each return of the chains on the original aggregate, whatever metrical schemes, durations of pitches, and silences are favoured, the various speeds of enunciation induce a readjustment of the superimposition, and the meeting points between the different layers are continually shifted. Within this extremely moving yet reiterative machinery, “the terms of each series are in perpetual relative displacement in relation to those of the other” (Deleuze 1969, 54; 1990, 38) and the texture is gradually torn apart by ever longer voids.

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Figure 4.1.

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Figure 4.1. Holes and bones. Excerpt from the virtual matrix: eight superimposed layers with a repeated descending movement and a slowing down process (two layers for each instrument). Process: Clara Maïda, 2002.

Abstract Cartographies and Assemblages of Minimal Sound Units Each repetition of the chains expresses the different degrees of power (Deleuze 1968, 60; 1994, 41), the declensions of this matrix. The alternation between sound units and voids, the endless circulation of minimal units that never find a definite place, manifest that “as in a game, we participate in the combination of the empty place and the perpetual displacement of a piece” (Deleuze 1969, 56; 1990, 41). The grip on the sonic reality consists of extracting a subsistence (and a substance) from these insistences. Both layers of each instrumental voice are merged together and produce a dense fabric. At various times of each merged layer, t1, t2 . . . tn, a cut occurs in the zones (or blocks) of momentary coagulation of the links between the sound units (indicated between brackets on the graphic below). Some condensates, as if temporarily frozen, are cut out from this repetitive whirl, producing consistencies, objects.

Figure 4.2.

However, what has been actualised from the virtual matrix could be actualised otherwise. The permutations of the intervals could be different, the flow could be ascending instead of being descending (or could be both ascending and descending), no silence or further breaks could be inserted, for instance. Besides, the actual does not constitute the whole real of the work. A part that is possible remains and could be realised in a whole different assemblage or a whole different cutting of objects from the elements of the machinery (longer or shorter cuts, for instance, and possibly occurring at other times of the matrix). “Therefore there exists an actual that remains possible, and that is not forcibly real. The actual does not constitute the real; it must itself be realized, and the

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Figure 4.2. Holes and bones. Excerpt from the virtual matrix: two layers merged into one single layer for each instrument. The first and the second objectiles played by the violin and the cello (image on the right) are cut out from both instruments’ layers and indicated between brackets in the process (image on the left). Process: Clara Maïda, 2002.

Clara Maïda problem of the world’s realization is added to that of its actualization. . . . The world is a virtuality that is actualized in monads or souls, but also a possibility that must be realized in matter or in bodies” (Deleuze 1988, 140; 1993b, 104). These times of agglutination taken in the matrix—these macroscopic, molar, cuttings, which generated rotary objects—are thus extracted from a microscopic, molecular plane (the articulation of micromovements), and will be effectuated, realised, in a series of sound metamorphoses throughout the work. This virtual sound matrix can be related to Guattari’s concept of an abstract machine. The characteristic of such a writing device lies in its capacity for always leaving the processing field open. “These abstract deterritorialized interactions, or, more briefly, these abstract machines traverse various levels of reality and establish and demolish stratifications. Abstract machines cling not to a single universal time but to a trans-spatial and trans-temporal plane of consistency which affects through them a relative coefficient of existence. Consequently, their ‘appearance’ in reality can no longer claim to be given all in one piece: it is negotiated on the basis of quanta of possibles” (Guattari 1979, 8–9; 2011, 11). Besides, through their rotary movement, these sound objects produced by the contingent assemblages of micro-dynamisms restore a trace of this constant motion of the quanta of possibles. No stratification can persist and in this regard, from a Deleuzian perspective, these sound objects must rather be defined as objectiles. Indeed, as they are provided with a paradoxical quality (they form and dissolve in one and the same movement), they are ephemeral since they keep metamorphosing throughout their repetition. They therefore imprint their unsteadiness on the sound field. Produced by a convergence of the circulation of particles, they then travel like gravitational blocks whose force of cohesion can be undone at any moment of the course. “The object is no longer defined by an essential form, but reaches a pure functionality, as if declining a family of curves, framed by parameters, inseparable from a series of possible declensions or from a surface of variable curvature that it is itself describing. This new object we can call objectile” (Deleuze 1988, 26; 1993b, 19, translation modified).2 In Holes and bones, two objectiles, played by the violin and the cello, first appear at bar 19 (and swing around their axis at bar 20). They return in another harmonic zone at bars 35–36. And from bars 57 to 65, they finally mutate step by step into a three-pitch pivoting motion.3 Each of their reiterations, each differentiating repetition, induces micro-variations, a gradual mutation of what can be considered as an elastic compound of space-time-matter-forces. “The new status of the object no longer refers its condition to a spatial mold—in other words, to a relation of form-matter—but to a temporal modulation that implies as much the beginnings of a continuous variation of matter as a continuous development of form” (Deleuze 1988, 2 Note that there is a mistranslation in the English translation of the text. The French word objet is translated as “goal.” But here Deleuze is not referring to an objective or a goal but to an object as an entity. That is why I modified the translation and replaced the word “goal” with the word “object.” 3 See the mutation process in the excerpt from the score of Holes and bones (see Maïda 2002 in the list of works cited at the end of the chapter).

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Abstract Cartographies and Assemblages of Minimal Sound Units 26; 1993b, 19). Thanks to their constant rocking around a centre of gravity that never stops moving together with them and to their modularity, these objectiles connect together and can thus propagate from one sound area to the next. On the one hand, they exert an attraction force that captures the sound particles and groups them in an assemblage, producing a local zone of condensation, a proto-territory with fleetingly consolidated contours. On the other hand, they hurtle through the sound space like projectiles provided with a derivative force and imprint their torsion on the musical matter. They are both the compounds of a rudimentary assemblage and the components of a new and more complex assemblage. As the real driving forces of a deterritorialisation, their ceaseless spatiotemporal modulation leads to a gradual dissolution that reveals their framework, an elementary movement that continually swings, overturns: a three-sound pendulum. This pendulum became a persistent abstract figure in my music and constitutes a first level of articulation whose functionality can be referred to as components of passage as defined by Guattari. We will be particularly concerned with locating the different types of “assembling” that enable a component to pass to the rank of component of passage. In this regard, three essential functions could be distinguished: —discernibilization of components: (example: the methods of semiotic magnification . . . , of acceleration, deceleration, thickening, and deformation of spatio-temporal coordinates . . .). —proliferation: a component begins to work on its own and detaches itself, if need be, from the assemblage within which it was stratified. . . . —diagrammatization: a component releases a mutational machinism capable of traversing heterogeneous domains from the perspective of their matters of expression. (Guattari 1979, 194; 2011, 188)

Apart from its repetitive temporal mode, this pendular figure presents several characteristics: its mobility, its oscillation around an axis that travels through the harmonic field; its modularity, its connectivity with other pendular variants and the elaboration of chains of pendulums, its possible “transplantation” onto other sound elements; the distortion of its contours (permutations, variations of amplitude and duration); its fragmentation and the loss of some of the particles that constitute it. In my string quartet . . . who holds the strings . . . (2004), two pendulums played by violin 1 and the cello gradually emerge from a texture formed by two variants of a seven-pitch scale that undergoes a liquidation process, losing units each time it is repeated (bars 31–36). Through a kind of discernibilisation process, the pivoting modules become ever more clearly audible. Once detached from this texture, both pendulums interlock four times with two other pendulums played by violin 2 and the viola (bars 42, 44, 46, and 48). They connect through one pitch in common and form a chain that travels from a low to a high register and then initiates a mutational course up to an extremely tense aggregate (bar 62). In Fluctuatio (in)animi (2006), Via rupta (2005), and . . . , das spinnt . . . (2013), twelve frequencies of a sound spectrum are grouped in threes and build four superimposed pendulums. Each of the four strings keeps repeating one specific pendulum,

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Clara Maïda more or less stretched according to its chosen metrical scheme. The increasing temporal distortion of the global envelope leads to another sound territory, either to a sustained aggregate (Fluctuatio, bars 138–47), or to a homorhythmic formula (Via, bars 190–214), or else to a repeated jerky pattern (. . . , das spinnt . . . , bars 86–130). In Mutatis mutandis (2008b), five layers of rotative figures with various speeds compose the same kind of elastic and mutative fabric until it is scattered (bars 210–68) and gives space to rebounding figures that vanish at very high registers (bar 279). In Doppelklänger (2008a), the pendular figures appear in different situations. Like gravitational poles, they exert their attraction force on the pitches of a scale while migrating through contiguous harmonic zones up to a dislocation (bars 24–50). They can be the starting points for an increasing proliferation and for breakaways (bars 212–30). However, the persistence of their discernible three-sound microstructure favours the perception of the successive metamorphoses of the musical matter, giving identifying marks that can be considered to be the moving coordinates of a diagrammatisation process. This is actually the function of the piano part in Doppelklänger at bars 108–29, Kinêm(a)bstract (2012) at bars 108–29, and Web-wave (2016) at bars 111–38. This pendulum is therefore a material force that has no origin, no fixed centre, and a derivative and unbalancing power. Thanks to its minimal quasigeometrical shape (three pitches, one of which is the pivoting unit), it becomes a kind of proliferating elastic point, a potential of curvature of matter-time. It induces both a multiplication of inflection points and a multiplication of “listening points.” “This is precisely what the rotative symbol is. It has neither beginning nor end, it does not lead us anywhere, and above all it has no final point, nor even stages. It is always in the middle (au milieu), in the midst of things, between things” (Deleuze 1993a, 65; 1997, 48–49). There are several levels of sound effectuation according to the crossed thresholds of consistency. On an infra-liminal level of assemblage, the whole set of possible particles is carried away in the flux of the abstract machine; it keeps returning in a paradoxical movement that can make potentially any sound figure or entity arise and disappear. On an intra-liminal level of assemblage, highly fluctuating vectorised abstract figures can emerge, repeat, combine, and condense in fleeting proto-territories. On an inter-liminal level of assemblage, forces of territorialisation/deterritorialisation manifest themselves (Deleuze and Guattari 1980, 384; 1987, 312), that is, whether they are forces of cohesion producing condensations, stratifications, space-times of saturation, towards a “solid state” of matter (sound territories), or whether they are forces of mutation, of the dissemination and dissolution of these territories, towards fluidity, a “liquid state” of matter (sound deterritorialisations). The varying density of the oscillatory figures composes an extremely malleable sound topology which crosses through transitions of phase and whose temporality is governed by repetition and by a plurality of speeds. A differentiating repetition displaces its inner dynamism step by step, on and between the superimposed pendular chains, contracting and dilating the gaps, accelerating and decelerating the paths in “the fluidity of matter, the elasticity of bodies, the spring system as mechanism” (Deleuze 1988, 7; 1993b, 4, trans-

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Abstract Cartographies and Assemblages of Minimal Sound Units lation modified).4 This repetition keeps producing and undoing the figures in one and the same instant. These rotary figures, articulated in a dense connective network (both a series of rhizomic assemblages and a rhizome of assemblages) have a micromachinic function that keeps pushing the sound matter to its limit of dislocation, as if a multitude of tensors/extensors were exerting antagonistic forces until the spring breaks. This disintegration of the consistencies is perceptible only because discernible yet ephemeral elementary figures (the pendular modules) expressed their reiterated presence, their insistence. The conclusion of Mutatis mutandis, for instance, on the sustained very high and ethereal harmonic sound (bar 281), manifests the last remains of a migration towards the higher registers, after a gradual pulverisation of the pendulums and a dispersion of the sound particles. This sudden fragility would not have such a striking effect if the work had not continually been traversed by an extreme agitation, a multiplication of rocking motions. This suspended line suggests that beyond sensible forms, a space-time of pure virtuality can be sensed, at the border of any effectuation of form, both an opening onto the potential infinity of sound materialisations and a closure (the inability to express this infinity through musical writing). As such, one of the functions of silence is to mark the absolute virtual of any music, its ultimate outcome, its horizon, in which the boundary of any sonification remains suspended at the threshold of all the possible pathways. What is aimed at is a becoming-imperceptible (Deleuze and Guattari 1980, 343– 44; 1987, 280–81), a space of pure vibration. The writing reveals the different levels of sound organisation. It constantly oscillates between a micro-plane, a microphysical or particular level of matter, and a macro-plane, the emergence of polarisations, the convergence of sound flows towards more or less lasting, more or less composite objects or objectiles. The four images presented in figures 4.3–6 visualise the relationships between micro- and macro-structure in Via rupta’s conclusion process. As in biology, micro-constituents linked together produce more consistency— sound masses. But the dilations and contractions of the numerous microarticulations between sound particles, their variation in density and speed, form a malleable tissue. On a molecular level (the micro-plane), the sequence can be perceived either as a moving assemblage of superimposed pendular figures whose contours become distorted, or as a cartography of flux (a flow) since the glissandi between the units and the permanent intense dynamics represent cohesion factors. On a molar level (the macro-plane), the pluritemporality of the four layers induces a perception either of two elastic sound envelopes that alternately rock between medium and very high registers or of one extremely mobile and distorted single envelope, stretched between two registers, which is very fragile since it can be torn apart if the coagulation is destroyed. 4 There is also a mistranslation in the English translation of this text. The French word ressort is translated as “motivating spirit.” But here Deleuze is not referring to a psychic motivation but to a spring mechanism, a model used in mathematics and physics to describe forces (the spring-mass system). I therefore replaced the words “motivating spirit” with the words “spring system.”

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Figure 4.3.

Figure 4.4.

Figure 4.3–6. Via rupta. Relationships between micro- and macro-structure on a molecular and a molar level (bars 190–215). Four three-pitch pendulums are superimposed and mutate through a rhythmical interpolation process (figure 4.3). Thanks to glissandi and intense dynamics, they are perceived as flowing and gradually distorted entities (figure 4.4). The accumulation of micro-mutations generates two elastic envelopes alternately heard in two registers (figure 4.5). Both envelopes are perceptually merged into one single malleable envelope that travels from the first to the last territory (figure 4.6).

Abstract Cartographies and Assemblages of Minimal Sound Units

Figure 4.5.

Figure 4.6.

Clara Maïda The sound texture, a series of variations, of modulations, can be considered as the whole set of possible trajectories that keep interfering with one another, produce connections and entanglements, or interruptions, breakaways, lines of flight (Deleuze and Guattari 1980, 9–10; 1987, 3–4). The bifurcations have a specific function: they indicate that some latent paths can suddenly be manifested and be exposed on the sound surface, at the intersection point between different courses. It is as if the real path were intertwined with virtual paths that give it new courses or trajectories. A map of virtualities, drawn up by art, is superimposed onto the real map, whose distances [parcours] it transforms. Such internal paths or courses are implied not only in sculpture, but in any work of art, including music: in each case, the choice of a particular path can determine a variable position of the work in space. Every work is made up of a plurality of trajectories that coexist and are readable only on a map, and that change direction depending on the trajectories that are retained. These internalized trajectories are inseparable from becomings. Trajectories and becomings. . . . (Deleuze 1993a, 88; 1997, 67)

The musical works discussed here are thus conceived as rhizomic cartographies whose sensible concrete pathways always seem shadow-lined by potential, virtual courses. Evoking pseudo-crystalline and kaleidoscopic constellations in which the division of atoms would be redistributed at each passage, they draw ceaselessly recombined configurations in becoming. This writing of flux makes us sense a pure game of forces, below representation, an energetic manifestation that would be related to the drive defined by Freud (Trieb) as a constant force with a pressure, a power factor. “It is a question of producing within the work a movement capable of affecting the mind outside of all representation; it is a question of making movement itself a work, without interposition; of substituting direct signs for mediate representations; of inventing vibrations, rotations, whirlings, gravitations, dances or leaps which directly touch the mind” (Deleuze 1968, 16; 1994, 8). And in this sound movement of the work, that unfolds its series of processual transformations, it is a question of both setting the psyche into motion and retracing the motion of the psyche, to make a micro-unconscious arise, to produce some unconscious (Deleuze and Guattari 1980, 27; 1987, 18). The writing catalyses the forces of a molecular, microphysical, machinic unconscious. It becomes a time of passage, an in-between, a rhizome, that not only spreads its ramified trajectories and its multiple assemblages, its micro-connections and its micro-ruptures throughout the musical work, blurring all the categories—matter, objects, textures, forms—but also produces a zone of indiscernibility5 between inside and outside, the subject and the object, psychic, physical, and sound matters.

5 My series Psyché-Cité/Transversales (2005–7) explores a zone of indiscernibility that superimposes two maps, that of the neuronal network and that of the subway. It develops a hybrid sound topology, at the intersection of the living and the machine, the psyche and the urban world, sound and noise, mechanical and fluid assemblages.

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Abstract Cartographies and Assemblages of Minimal Sound Units The work is “a rhizome . . . always in the middle, between things, interbeing” (Deleuze and Guattari 1980, 36; 1987, 25), and it extends its transversal flows between the psychic and the sound bodies, between the Body without Organs and a “body-organon.” “The body without organs is flesh and nerve; a wave flows through it and traces levels upon it; a sensation is produced when the wave encounters the forces acting on the body” (Deleuze [1981] 1996, 33; 2003, 45). Being vibratory, abstract, and kinetic, music gathers all the properties for a possible sound materialisation of this nomadic intensivity of the body. Relating Deleuze and Guattari’s concept to the Greek term organon from which the word “organ” (the musical instrument) is derived, I coined the term body-organon to indicate that the sound body is also a body of sensation. Not “flesh and nerves” yet “flux and forces,” it can be envisaged as an intensive sound body. References Deleuze, Gilles. 1968. Différence et répétition. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Translated by Paul Patton as Deleuze 1994. ———. 1969. Logique du sens. Paris: Minuit. Translated by Mark Lester with Charles Stivale as Deleuze 1990. ———. (1981) 1996. Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation. Turin: La Vue le Texte / Éditions de la différence. First published 1981 (Paris: Éditions de la différence). Translated by Daniel W. Smith as Deleuze 2003. ———. 1988. Le Pli: Leibniz et le Baroque. Paris: Minuit. Translated by Tom Conley as Deleuze 1993b. ———. 1990. The Logic of Sense. Translated by Mark Lester with Charles Stivale. Edited by Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia University Press. First published as Deleuze 1969. ———. 1993a. Critique et Clinique. Paris: Minuit. Translated by Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco as Deleuze 1997. ———. 1993b. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Translated by Tom Conley. London: Athlone Press. First published as Deleuze 1988. ———. 1994. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press. First published as Deleuze 1968. ———. 1997. Essays Critical and Clinical. Translated by Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published as Deleuze 1993a.

———. 2003. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Translated by Daniel W. Smith. London: Continuum. For earlier publication details, see Deleuze (1981) 1996. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1972. Capitalisme et schizophrénie: L’anti-Œdipe. Paris: Minuit. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane as Deleuze and Guattari (1977) 1983. ———. (1977) 1983. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published as Deleuze and Guattari 1972. This translation first published 1977 (New York: Viking Press). ———. 1980. Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie. Paris: Minuit. Translated by Brian Massumi as Deleuze and Guattari 1987. ———. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published as Deleuze and Guattari 1980. Guattari, Félix. 1979. L’inconscient machinique: Essais de schizo-analyse. Paris: Recherches. Translated by Taylor Adkins as Guattari 2011. ———. 2011. The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in Schizoanalysis. Translated by Taylor Adkins. New York: Semiotext(e). First published as Guattari 1979.

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Clara Maïda Works cited Maïda, Clara. 2002. Holes and bones for flute, clarinet, violin and cello. First piece of Order of release, border of relish, a triptych for four instruments (2002–4). Accessed 3 September 2020. https://en.claramaida. com/Holes-and-bones. ———. 2004. . . . who holds the strings . . . for string quartet. Second piece of Order of release, border of relish, a triptych for 4 instruments (2002–4), and first piece of www, a series for string quartet (2004–13). Accessed 3 September 2020. https:// en.claramaida.com/who-holds-thestrings. ———. 2005. Via rupta for flute, clarinet, trombone, violin, viola, cello, double bass, and electronics. Third piece of Psyché-Cité/Transversales, a series for five to seven instruments and electronics (2005–7). Accessed 3 September 2020. https://en.claramaida.com/Via-rupta. ———. 2006. Fluctuatio (in)animi for flute, violin, viola, cello, double bass, and electronics. Third piece of Psyché-Cité/ Transversales, a series for five to seven instruments and electronics (2005–7). Accessed 3 September 2020. https:// en.claramaida.com/Fluctuatio-in-animi.

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———. 2008a. Doppelklänger for solo prepared and amplified piano. Accessed 3 September 2020. https://en.claramaida. com/Doppelklaenger. ———. 2008b. Mutatis mutandis for twelve amplified strings. Accessed 3 September 2020. https://en.claramaida.com/ Mutatis-mutandis. ———. 2012. Kinêm(a)bstract for amplified flute, saxophone, prepared piano, and percussion. Second piece of Kinêm(a), a series for four to seven amplified instruments (2008–12). Accessed 4 September 2020. https://en.claramaida. com/Kinem-a-bstract. ———. 2013. . . . , das spinnt . . . for amplified string quartet. Second piece of www, a series for string quartet (2004–13). Accessed 3 September 2020. https:// en.claramaida.com/das-spinnt. ———. 2016. Web-wave for violin, viola, harp, prepared piano, and live electronics. Second piece of Web studies, a series for violin, viola, harp, prepared piano, live electronics, and interactive video (2016–17). Accessed 3 September 2020. https://en.claramaida.com/Web-wave.

Sounds Flush with the Real Mixed Semiotic Strategies in Post-Cagean Musical Experimentalism Iain Campbell University of Dundee, UK

“the word ‘experimental’ is apt, providing it is understood not as descriptive of an act to be later judged in terms of success and failure, but simply as of an act the outcome of which is unknown.” —John Cage, “Experimental Music: Doctrine,” in Silence (1961, 13) —quoted in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus ([1977] 1983, 371n)

When beginning to think about the relation between experimental music and the thought of Gilles Deleuze, this quotation seems to be a natural starting point. In Deleuze and Guattari’s affirmation of this phrase from John Cage they suggest a resonance between music and philosophy: in both fields the experimental approach entails a dismantling of predetermining codes and hierarchies, and with this arises the opportunity for an open-endedness that accommodates singular events and encounters. This understanding of experimentation, however, is not as transparent as it seems. In the context of the uptake and critique of Deleuzian ideas in the theorisation of music and sound, as well as recent re-evaluations of the milieu of “experimental music,” critics have argued that a range of normative demands, ideological assumptions, and metaphysical reductions undermine the purported freedoms of both Cagean and Deleuzian experimentalism. Here I can only deal with a small aspect of the wide historical and theoretical problem this involves; but in short my aim is to begin to construct a means through which Deleuze and Guattari’s thought can be used to help us examine some strategies that composers and performers in post-Cagean musical experimentalism developed to navigate around the demands, assumptions, and reductions of Cage’s thought. With these strategies these composers practically anticipated the more recent critical discourse on Cage. With a focus on the democratic music-making and collective listening practices of Pauline Oliveros, I will draw on Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of mixed semiotics and the collective assemblage of enunciation to highlight the importance to musical experimentalism of accommodating a plurality of sign regimes and 107

Iain Campbell in construing subjectivity as a practical, socially-embedded production. This will provide a sketch of a means of engagement between Deleuze-Guattari and musical experimentalism that is somewhat different from some of the most prominent contemporary approaches, opening up the Cage-Deleuze notion of experimentation to practices and modes of subjectivity it has been shown to have a tendency to occlude or exclude. To begin I will outline some aspects of the ongoing critical challenge to Cagean and Deleuzian experimentalism.

Challenging Cagean and Deleuzian experimentalism The musical-philosophical experimentalism suggested in the conjunction between Cage and Deleuze-Guattari remains prominent today in what has been called “Deleuzian sound studies.” Deleuze’s thought has been widely presented as a means for getting around closures inherent in widespread practices of cultural theory, as when Christoph Cox speaks of his sonic materialism going “beyond representation and signification” (2011), or when Bernd Herzogenrath demands a break with the “metaphysics of being, representation, and identity” (2017, 3). The premise here is that the methods of the mainstream of cultural theory are inadequate to deal with music, sound, and noise. From this perspective to concern ourselves with semiotics could seem outdated, and both Cox and Herzogenrath suggest that semiotics, the study of the work of signs, can depict the material reality of sound in only a secondary, representational way (Cox 2018, 15; Herzogenrath 2017, 3). Here, however, I will suggest the importance of a pluralistic sense of semiotics intrinsic to Deleuze and Guattari’s thought. This will offer the beginnings of a response to the significant line of critique that has followed this engagement between Deleuze and music, stemming from Brian Kane’s influential analysis of what he termed “Deleuzian sound studies”: Kane’s argument is that this line of research, with its focus on the nature or ontology of sound, does not go “beyond” representation and signification but rather fails to account for them, neglecting how sound as an object of study is inextricably bound up in historical, cultural, and institutional formations (Kane 2015, 15–16). The sound theorists Annie Goh (2017) and Marie Thompson (2017) have also made significant contributions to this line of critique, both separately taking Cox to task for failing to account for the cultural and political contingency of given epistemological situations. Their argument that Cox’s sonic materialism risks rendering invisible the racialised and gendered characteristics of our discourses on sound is directly relevant to Cagean experimentalism. Of particular focus in the critical discourse on Cage, as seen in work by George E. Lewis (1996), Lydia Goehr (2016), and Benjamin Piekut (2012), among others dating back to the 1960s, has been the pairing in Cage’s thought of a metaphysical elevation of “sound-in-itself ” and a subjective reification of an idealised performer and listener, stripped of social particularity. A constant refrain of Cage’s was to “let sounds be themselves” (1961, 10), an ostensibly inclusive call to allow any sound event to enter into musical contexts. Yet for Cage this call put stringent demands on the performer: to “let go of

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Sounds Flush with the Real his feelings, his taste, his automatism, his sense of the universal, not attaching himself to this or to that, leaving by his performance no traces, providing by his actions no interruption to the fluency of nature” (Cage 1961, 39). The focus on sound necessitates a thoroughgoing evacuation of subjectivity, and the exclusion of any features of individual personality. Lewis (1996) has acutely highlighted how this plays out in Cage’s “indeterminacy” entailing the othering and exclusion of jazz improvisation (99–100), with jazz improvisation’s “welcoming of agency, social necessity, personality, and difference, as well as its strong relationship to popular and folk cultures” (110) seemingly disqualified by Cage. The critical literature on Cage consistently stresses that the attempt to extract sound from the social can only obscure and reaffirm the social dynamics and power relations of musical practices. With the emancipation of sound comes a silencing of the social.1 This, then, is the same shape that the critique of “Deleuzian sound studies” put forward by Kane, Goh, and Thompson takes. From a certain perspective theorists like Cox are doubtlessly right to stress that a relegation of the determining role of the human subject (2018, 4), a “desubjectivation” of sorts (40), is crucial to Deleuze’s thought, as seen in the careful reflections on “subjectification” in A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 127–34), and that this notion offers much to our understanding of how sound has been dealt with in contexts of musical experimentalism. What I will suggest ahead, however, is that this cannot entail a return to anything like a presubjective “sound-in-itself,” and that subjectivity must be rethought rather than refused. While other approaches to this problem are possible, here I take the starting point of what I perceive in “Deleuzian sound studies” to be a partial adoption of Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the assemblage. Deleuze and Guattari are clear that the assemblage is a tetravalent notion, with its “horizontal” axis having on one side a “content” segment named the machinic assemblage of bodies and on the other an “expression” segment named the collective assemblage of enunciation (1987, 88).2 One way of posing the critique of “Deleuzian sound studies” is that it neglects the collective assemblage of enunciation in favour of the machinic assemblage of bodies, with this tending to be read as a kind of unbounded materiality. This work thus risks conflating what Guattari (1984b, 73), following the linguist Louis Hjelmslev, terms “matter” and “substance,” with matter indeed preceding the distinction between expression and content, but substance, while in touch with matter, always being semiotically formed. Following through on some consequences of Guattari’s interest in semiotics will lead us towards being able to rethink musical experimentalism, seeking to recover a semiotic polyvocality beneath the univocal structure that could be said to characterise both language-centric approaches and certain materialist accounts of sound and the world. This will allow us to consider music from the perspective of what Deleuze and Guattari call a “mixed semiotic” (1987, 118) or “transsemiotic” (136). 1 Also see here Kahn (1999, 165) and Joseph (2016, 187). 2 Paulo de Assis stresses the importance of this tetravalence in a musical context (2018, 81–85).

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Mixed semiotics From reflections beginning in the 1960s, through Anti-Oedipus, and ongoing throughout the 1970s, Guattari devoted much work to a retheorisation of signs. The most general issue for Guattari with regards to signs is that for him, congruent with “Deleuzian sound studies,” approaches that give primacy to signification, language, or the symbolic cannot adequately account for the real workings of the world. Yet Guattari’s move is to insist on a diversity of semiotic systems, suggesting that “one type of meaning is produced by the semiotics of the body, another by the semiotics of power (of which there are many), yet another by machinic semiotics” (1984d, 164). Guattari’s semiotic formulations vary throughout the 1970s, with him making diverse distinctions between different kinds of semiotic systems, but he consistently stresses that these systems cannot be easily distinguished, and that “one is always dealing with an interweaving of several such systems, with a mixture of semiotics” (1984d, 166). This informs the intricate relation between signifying and asignifying semiotics he produces in the 1976 presentation “Meaning and Power” (ibid., 170–72). This co-implication of semiotic systems brings Guattari to resist any quick distinction between a repressive signifying semiotics and a liberatory asignifying semiotics, and so while Christoph Cox, for example, celebrates the “powerful, asignifying materiality” (2018, 14) of the sonic, the complications that Guattari introduces incline me to be more hesitant. Guattari certainly wants to think beyond signifying semiotics, but his route is through, and not against, semiotics. We see this in his adoption of Hjelmslev’s distinction between expression and content, a distinction that Guattari directly sees as a means to produce “a direct conjunction between sign machines and real machines” (1984c, 91), that is, between signs and their material conditions: to make “signs work flush with the real” (ibid., 88, translation modified). In this light there is a crucial distinction to make. Guattari notes that “one must be careful not to confuse natural encodings with semiotic encodings” (1984d, 166), and Deleuze and Guattari later stress that “signifiance and interpretation are so thick-skinned, they form such a sticky mixture with subjectification, that it is easy to believe that you are outside them when you are in fact still secreting them” (1987, 138), and it is crucial for Guattari’s thinking of semiotics that asignifying semiotics are “post-signifying semiotics” (1984b, 75). In materialist and realist theories following Deleuze and Guattari, the presignifying regime, what Guattari had earlier spoken of in terms of the symbolic or iconic, has often taken precedence. Deleuze and Guattari describe this regime as “foster[ing] a pluralism or polyvocality of forms of expression that prevents any power takeover by the signifier and preserves expressive forms particular to content; thus forms of corporeality, gesturality, rhythm, dance, and rite coexist heterogeneously with the vocal form” (1987, 117). The appeal to theorists of the arts here is clear. Yet the study of semiotics and of regimes of signs would be for nothing if it were simply a matter of returning to this realm. As Guattari had argued, asignifying semiotics cannot involve a reversion into a prelinguistic

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Sounds Flush with the Real state. Asignifying semiotics, for Guattari, “does not therefore mean a return to the myth of a ‘natural’ semiotic. On the contrary, it means getting beyond semiotics centring upon human beings and moving irreversibly towards semiotics involving technological and theoretical systems that are ever more differentiated, more artificial, and further from primitive values” (Guattari 1984c, 98). On this account, asignifying semiotics cannot constitute a simple immersion into the flows that underlie, or precede, signification, but must be a critical and constructive procedure, one that aims to conceive of semiotics without either relying on signification or putting faith in a presignifying natural order. From this perspective Guattari can say that while we “make our interpretations with words,” we “do our experimenting with signs, machinic functions, and engagements of things and people” (1984c, 87). By affirming that “semiotic fluxes are just as real as the material ones, and in a sense the material fluxes are just as semiotic as the semiotic machines” (96), Guattari strives to develop an account of semiotics in which there is, in the end, no easy distinction between “nature” and signs, between “natural” fluxes and “artificial” machines (99).

Pauline Oliveros’s pluralistic sonosphere With this brief sketch of some aspects of Guattari’s engagement with semiotics, I intend nothing more than to stress that for Guattari, and for Deleuze and Guattari, it is crucial to recognise and work with the “multiplicity of . . . ‘sign behaviours’” (Grossberg and Behrenshausen 2016, 1006). If musical experimentalism is conceived through the nature of sound, a “sound-in-itself ” that is said to characterise Cage’s work, the risk arises of this appearing as a strange mirror of signifying semiotics, a semiotics of content alone, or bodies alone, that cannot countenance any autonomy of the realm of expression. But this is far from the final word on musical experimentalism. In contrast to Cox’s (2018, 93) reading of Cage, where he argues that Cage’s music is “always about the sonic real, sonic materiality itself,” post-Cagean experimentalism has, as Jennie Gottschalk’s (2016) survey has shown, a vastly plural nature, concerning itself not only with sound but with bodies, sites, texts, subjectivities, histories, and far more besides. Here I will close by taking the example of the work of Pauline Oliveros. Oliveros is known for many things—for her role in the foundation of the San Francisco Tape Music Center and the early tape and synthesiser music she produced in this context, for her development of collective practices of listening and sounding through her sonic meditations and deep listening (Oliveros 2005), and for her theorisation, drawing from a syncretic spirituality, of music as a holistic practice that puts listeners and performers in touch with the diverse energies of the world around us. In this theorisation she puts forward a notion that seems to correspond to “sound-in-itself,” that of the “sonosphere,” naming sound in its primordial materiality, “beginning at the core of the earth and radiating in ever increasing fractal connections, vibrating sonically through and encircling the earth” (Oliveros 2011, 163). With this comes an approach to improvisation that at first glance seems akin to the depersonalisation that Cage

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Iain Campbell demanded of his own indeterminate performances, with improvisation involving a “tuning” to the sonosphere. Yet in Oliveros’s work such a notion of the sonosphere is always coupled with the cultivation of subjective and intersubjective practices of listening and sounding. As Martha Mockus (2008) compellingly argues, there is a specificity of collective lesbian sociality in Oliveros’s work. For Mockus, Oliveros’s work stands as a “musical enactment of mid- and late-century lesbian subjectivity, critique, and transformation” (ibid., 2). Her sonic meditations and her practice of deep listening are founded on an inclusive process of community building, recognising and challenging the structures of listening and sounding imposed by Western art music. Her aim is to constitute listening and sounding anew, produced, as Julia Steinmetz has argued, not through individual reflection but rather an intersubjective, collective, circulation of sounding and listening (2019, 125–26).3 Rather than taking aim at the sonosphere or sound-in-itself alone, what we see in this image of Oliveros is a composer navigating between what Guattari (2000) would later call the “three ecologies” of nature, society, and subjectivity. Oliveros pluralises the ways we understand sound—it becomes entangled in a mixed semiotic, at once and irreducibly natural, social, and subjective in character. The concern is not only with sonic bodies but with a revision of our collective modes of expression. When the musicologist Kerry O’Brien (2016) remarked in her obituary for Oliveros that in the sonic meditations “experiments were not conducted on the music; the music was an experiment on the self,” she recalls Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 134) speaking of a work with signs, a diagrammatic work with signs, that would constitute an “experimentation in life . . . an emission of particles-signs.” By enacting a “transsemiotic” (ibid., 136) of creative translations in which signs pass between regimes, from the natural world into culture and society, Oliveros enacts a challenge to the standards of Western art music and its constitutive subjectivities, not to erase these but to renew the problem of musical and social subjectivity. In Guattari’s words, the promise is that “collective assemblages of enunciation emerge which will abolish the individuated modes of subjectification and beginning from which the previous micropolitical relations will be recoded and redefined” (2011, 177). George E. Lewis captures this image of experimentalism in his recent revisiting of the themes of indeterminacy and improvisation. For Lewis (2018) we can understand that “the experience of listening is an improvisative act, engaged in by everyone, that amounts to an expression of agency, judgment, and choice, conducted in a condition of indeterminacy.” For Lewis, as for Oliveros, it is not a case of evacuating subjectivity, but of recognising its conditions and capacities in collective contexts not determined by any single given semiotic. As Guattari could already put it in 1973, albeit before the concept of assemblage had been fully thematised, “a collective assemblage of enunciation is . . . in a position to deprive the spoken word of its function as imaginary support to the cosmos. It replaces it with a collective voice that combines machinic ele3 See also Rycenga (1994).

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Sounds Flush with the Real ments of all kinds—human, semiotic, technological, scientific, etc.” (1984b, 76, translation modified).4 This “etc.” could be elaborated on endlessly, and the effort towards this elaboration is one of the great continuing values of musical experimentalism.

References Assis, Paulo de. 2018. Logic of Experimentation: Rethinking Music Performance through Artistic Research. Orpheus Institute Series. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Cage, John. 1961. Silence: Lectures and Writings. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Cox, Christoph. 2011. “Beyond Representation and Signification: Toward a Sonic Materialism.” Journal of Visual Culture 10 (2): 145–61. ———. 2018. Sonic Flux: Sound, Art, and Metaphysics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. (1977) 1983. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1972 as Capitalisme et schizophrénie: L’anti-Œdipe (Paris: Minuit). Translation first published 1977 (New York: Viking Press). ———. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Minuit). Goehr, Lydia. 2016. “Explosive Experiments and the Fragility of the Experimental.” In Experimental Affinities in Music, edited by Paulo de Assis, 15–41. Orpheus Institute Series. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Goh, Annie. 2017. “Sounding Situated Knowledges: Echo in Archaeoacoustics.” Parallax 23 (3): 283–304.

Gottschalk, Jennie. 2016. Experimental Music since 1970. New York: Bloomsbury. Grossberg, Lawrence, and Bryan G. Behrenshausen. 2016. “Cultural Studies and Deleuze-Guattari, Part 2: From Affect to Conjunctures.” Cultural Studies 30 (6): 1001–28. Guattari, Félix. 1984a. Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics. Translated by Rosemary Sheed. London: Penguin. Essays published in Psychanalyse et transversalité (Paris: Maspero, 1972) and Le révolution moléculaire (Fontenay-Sous-Bois: Recherches, 1977). ———. 1984b. “The Role of the Signifier in the Institution.” In Guattari 1984a, 73–81. ———. 1984c. “Towards a Micro-Politics of Desire.” In Guattari 1984a, 82–107. ———. 1984d. “Meaning and Power.” In Guattari 1984a, 163–72. ———. 2000. The Three Ecologies. Translated by Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton. London: Athlone Press. First published 1989 as Les trois écologies (Paris: Galilée). ———. 2011. The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in Schizoanalysis. Translated by Taylor Adkins. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). First published 1979 as L’inconscient machinique: Essais de schizo-analyse (Paris: Recherches). Herzogenrath, Bernd. 2017. “Sonic Thinking—An Introduction.” In Sonic Thinking: A Media Philosophical Approach, edited by Bernd Herzogenrath, 1–22. New York: Bloomsbury. Joseph, Branden W. 2016. Experimentations: John Cage in Music, Art, and Architecture. New York: Bloomsbury.

4 Bruce Quaglia (2010, 248) puts this in touching terms in his reading of the work of Luciano Berio, where he writes that the desiring machine of the composer produces “a collective enunciation that is a polyphony of subjectivities—subjectivities of the virtual that can wash away the regimes of the past and the present in a violent forgetting. Thus, while music cannot stop or start the wars or feed the hungry, it can create the virtual subjectivity of the yet to come, to condition the willing listener and so create the opening for a revolution yet to come.”

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Iain Campbell Kahn, Douglas. 1999. Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kane, Brian. 2015. “Sound Studies without Auditory Culture: A Critique of the Ontological Turn.” Sound Studies 1 (1): 2–21. Lewis, George E. 1996. “Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives.” Black Music Research Journal 16 (1): 91–122. ———. 2018. “Rainbow Family: (Machine) Listening as Improvisation.” In “Machine Listening,” special issue, Technosphere Magazine 15. Accessed 24 August 2020. https://www.technosphere-magazine. hkw.de/p/5-Rainbow-Family5Aj9nAxzG6zFRAAd9icEvH. Mockus, Martha. 2008. Sounding Out: Pauline Oliveros and Lesbian Musicality. New York: Routledge. O’Brien, Kerry. 2016. “Listening as Activism: The ‘Sonic Meditations’ of Pauline Oliveros.” New Yorker, 9 December. Accessed 24 August 2020. https:// www.newyorker.com/culture/culturedesk/listening-as-activism-the-sonicmeditations-of-pauline-oliveros.

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Oliveros, Pauline. 2005. Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice. Lincoln, NE: iUniverse. ———. 2011. “Auralizing in the Sonosphere: A Vocabulary for Inner Sound and Sounding.” Journal of Visual Culture 10 (2): 162–68. Piekut, Benjamin. 2012. “Sound’s Modest Witness: Notes on Cage and Modernism.” Contemporary Music Review 31 (1): 3–18. Quaglia, Bruce. 2010. “Transformation and Becoming Other in the Music and Poetics of Luciano Berio.” In Sounding the Virtual: Gilles Deleuze and the Theory and Philosophy of Music, edited by Brian Hulse and Nick Nesbitt, 227–48. Farnham, UK: Ashgate. Rycenga, Jennifer. 1994. “The Uncovering of Ontology in Music: Speculative and Conceptual Feminist Music.” Repercussions 3 (1): 22–46. Steinmetz, Julia. 2019. “In Recognition of Their Desperation: Sonic Relationality and the Work of Deep Listening.” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 20 (2): 119–32. Thompson, Marie. 2017. “Whiteness and the Ontological Turn in Sound Studies.” Parallax 23 (3): 266–82.

“Is Our Machines Learning Yet?” Machine Learning’s Challenge to Improvisation and the Aesthetic George E. Lewis Columbia University, United States

The first part of the title of this essay refers to the frequent grammatical malapropisms of former US president George W. Bush, who was prone to saying things like, “I know how hard it is to put food on your family”; “Too many OB/ GYNs aren’t able to practice their love with women all across the country”; and the classic: “They misunderestimated me.” The second part of the title is adapted, grammatical complexities and all, from another classic Bushism: “Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?” The wide acceptance in experimental music studies of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concept of assemblage has prompted me to examine my own history with the concept, as listener, artist, and scholar. I begin with the Art Ensemble of Chicago, whom I first encountered as a teenager in Chicago in 1969. Their onstage forest of bright, brassy saxophones, oddly shaped horns, and strange percussion instruments, amounting to literally thousands of sound-making devices, expressed a methodology of “multi-instrumentalism,” with multiplicities of timbre animated by the squeals and raspberries from trumpeter Lester Bowie; the ominously painted face of bassist Malachi Favors Maghostous, unwinding long strings of melody and timbre; Joseph Jarman stalking the stage, perhaps naked to the waist; and Roscoe Mitchell, contentedly puttering about in a secret garden of percussion. For Deleuze, an assemblage is “a multiplicity which is made up of many heterogeneous terms and which establishes liaisons, relations between them” (Deleuze and Parnet 2007, 69). From the theoretical perspective of Bruno Latour’s actor–network theory, materials and sounds, encountered at particular architectonic levels, can be regarded as actants with agency. Assemblages of actants, whether in a physical work of art, a piece of music, or in other mutually articulated social/material formations, exhibit contingency, heterogeneity, nonlinearity, and the emergence of overall agency. In other words, these objects—whether organised in sonic or visual form—can have objectives of their own (Latour 2005, 63–86).

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George E. Lewis In that light, we can readily hear and see the Art Ensemble’s work as an orientation to assemblage, extended to the material used to produce the sounds as well as the sounds themselves. For every performance, each of the five members of the ensemble created his own individual onstage sound station. These stations, themselves assemblages with strong visual aesthetics, combined the individual musicians’ performances on conventional Western instruments with the AACM practice of performing on “little instruments”—complements of harmonicas, tambourines, whistles, bells, gongs, washboards, found objects, homemade instruments made from urban detritus, and miscellaneous percussion (Steinbeck 2017). The sound of Art Ensemble performances with the sound stations mirrored their material origins in assemblage-like processes, complementing the visual image of the Ensemble as an assemblage of performing bodies and performative objects (Art Ensemble of Chicago 1982). An extended example of this assemblage orientation is Roscoe Mitchell’s composition The Maze (Mitchell 1978), a meditative, twenty-minute work written for eight “percussionists.” In fact, only two of the performers—Famoudou Don Moye and Thurman Barker— were primarily active as percussionists. The rest—Anthony Braxton, Douglas R. Ewart, Malachi Favors, Joseph Jarman, Henry Threadgill, and Mitchell himself—perform on their personal assemblage stations, including Braxton’s set of large, carefully tuned trash cans and Threadgill’s “hubkaphone,” a collection of tuned hubcaps. The result sounded as much like the individual voices of the musicians as the compositional voice of Mitchell.1 The metaphor of the assemblage has gradually supplanted that of the network in actor–network theory, particularly in the writing of Georgina Born, for whom fundamental processes of mediation and remediation, bricolage and improvisation, become articulated through sound and image (Born and Barry 2018). Along these lines, I want to turn to the understanding of assemblage in the visual arts. Assemblage-like processes were deployed in the work of Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, Louise Nevelson, and Joseph Cornell; in the 1950s, Jean Dubuffet called some of his creations “assemblages d’empreintes (assemblages of impressions)” (Galenson 2009, 121). Noah Purifoy (1917–2004) was a key initiator of the African American assemblage art movement in Southern California in the 1960s and 70s, along with Betye Saar, John Outterbridge, and David Hammons. Purifoy’s large outdoor sculptures, often composed from ironic recycling of junkyard gleanings such as hubcaps and old toilets, exemplify how assemblages of actants, whether in a physical work of art or in other mutually articulated social/material formations, exhibit contingency, heterogeneity, nonlinearity, and emergence (Purifoy 2015). The Purifoy examples also invite us to consider the processes of mediation and remediation, bricolage and improvisation, through which these features are achieved. We can hear this in the work of the Art Ensemble, and see it in Purifoy’s frequent invocation of the machinic, demonstrating that the phenomenological features of assemblage cross the sound-visual barrier with alacrity. 1 For photos of the set-ups for the sound stations and The Maze, see Lewis (2015).

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“Is Our Machines Learning Yet?” The Rio Negro project, a collaboration between myself and Douglas R. Ewart created for a show at Chicago’s now-defunct Randolph Street Gallery (Ewart and Lewis 1992), exemplifies how computer-technological assemblages, such as interactive installations, can be not only performative, but improvisative, with (following Nicolas Bourriaud [2002]) relational propositions of sociability directed to the viewer by the computer system, with the system and the viewer acting in improvised collusion. Rio Negro embodies a metaphor of the Amazon rainforest, evoked by ghostly physical animation of the sounds of rainsticks. With the help of the technological artist Christopher Furman, then a graduate student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, this was accomplished via computer-controlled motors attached to the instruments. Rainsticks are usually encountered as small, handheld percussion instruments, but Ewart’s rainsticks range between four and six feet in length. With their complex blend of sonic and visual aesthetics, which reference the African-descended Jonkonnu performance traditions of his native Jamaica, Ewart’s rainsticks may be considered more as sound sculptures. The movements of the rainsticks, and the associated electronic sounds, were controlled by a computer program I wrote. In Rio Negro II, first created in 2007 for a show at the Contemporary Art Museum Houston, Douglas Repetto designed individualised robotics and microcontrollers for each of the rainsticks, while Ewart crafted giant bamboo chimes that were also mechanically activated by Repetto’s robotics. Electronic sounds created by me completed the sonicvisual assemblage (Ewart 2015; Hallwalls 2019).

Figure 6.1.

Michael Gallope’s liner notes for the 2017 recording of my chamber music work for nine players, Assemblage (2013), explain Deleuze and Guattari’s basic notion of agencement (with reference to Thomas Nail) as “a material being that

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Figure 6.1. Douglas Ewart, George Lewis, and Douglas Repetto: Rio Negro II. June 2017, Ojai Music Festival, Ojai, CA. Photo by George Lewis.

George E. Lewis is fundamentally the product of relation, exterior connection, change, and even corruption—not genesis, essence, purity or autonomy” (Gallope 2017, 8). There is an ironic tension here, because the English word “assemblage” has become the standard English translation of Deleuze and Guattari’s original French word agencement. As John Phillips (2006) points out, a slippage of meaning has separated the two concepts in important ways, as assemblage theory, while inspired by Deleuze, has moved in decisively different directions, notably in the work of Manuel DeLanda (2006). I’d like to suggest that along with what was lost in translation, something even more important was gained—along the lines of Harold Bloom’s notion of the clinamen, a form of poetic misprision. We are certainly familiar with the image of quasi-human intelligence in European cultural history. In particular, music was widely acknowledged as a signal characteristic of the human spirit. Thus, the construction of musical automata was of particular interest, and images and actual working constructions of humanoid automata turn up regularly, even as far back as the automatic flute player that was described in the ninth century by the brothers Mūsà in Baghdad, published in their Book of Ingenious Devices (Ibn Shākir, Ibn Shākir, and Ibn Shākir 1979). Later entrants include Vaucanson’s 1737 Flute Player, the Joueuse de Tympanon de Marie-Antoinette, built in 1784 and presented to Marie Antoinette a year later, and Maelzel’s 1826 automaton trumpeter (Reilly 2011). All these devices show the desire for, in Pamela McCorduck’s memorable phrase, “machines who think” (2018), and Deleuze’s notion of machinic desire helps us understand this ongoing trope. In “Your Special ‘Desiring-Machines’: What Are They?,” Deleuze declares, “Today we are calling for the rights of a new functionalism: no longer what it means, but how it works, how it functions. As if desire had nothing to say, but rather was the assemblage of tiny machines, desiring-machines, always in a particular relation with the big social machines and the technological machines” (Deleuze 2004, 243). Going further, Deleuze maintains, “Desire only exists when assembled or machined. You cannot grasp or conceive of a desire outside a determinate assemblage, on a plane which is not pre-existent but which must itself be constructed. . . . In retrospect every assemblage expresses and creates a desire by constructing the plane which makes it possible and, by making it possible, brings it about” (Deleuze and Parnet 2007, 96). This is ultimately a cybernetics-inflected argument. As Broeckmann points out, “Guattari and Deleuze took [Maturana and Varela’s] understanding of the autopoietic self-production and reproduction of machinic systems, which [they] had chiefly applied to explain the viability of living systems, and applied it . . . [to] the concept of ‘desiring machines’ . . . the adjective ‘machinic’ . . . describes the heterogenetic, open, and dynamic processes of coupling and decoupling that can occur in such diverse environments” (Broeckmann 2016, 20). Now, as Simon Penny (2016) has argued, “categorically new kinds of cultural practices [have emerged] in which the machine system is constituted as a quasi-organism that responds to changes or perturbations in its ‘Umwelt’” (401). “Nothing in the theoretical corpus of the fine arts prepares one for the task of designing an artifact that behaves” (406); “there is therefore a lack of

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“Is Our Machines Learning Yet?” relevant aesthetic theory regarding the interactive dimension of such practices” (402). Broeckmann (2016, 20) cites Deleuze’s sense that the machinic becomes both a field of potential agency and a field of potential subjectivation. Moreover, as Nicholas Cook (2018) has written, “instruments and scores ‘talk back’ just as human agents do. It is through these heterogeneous networks, or assemblages, that a social and collaborative concept of creativity can be extended to a tradition—that of western classical music—that was long seen as the epitome of solo creativity” (10); “the ghost is not in the machine, but is rather an emergent dimension of the man/machine assemblage” (145). Andrew Pickering’s view of early cybernetic machines as presenting “a vision of knowledge as part of performance rather than as an external controller of it” (2010, 25) can be deployed here to frame such assemblages as epistemological performers, diffusely articulated nodes of power that posit what counts as knowledge, negotiating and competing with other assemblages to form larger spheres of agential contention.

Figure 6.2.

Interactive music works, such as my own computer improvisation program/ composition Voyager (Lewis 2000; Steinbeck 2019) become assemblages of temporally articulated algorithmic actants whose desire becomes realised under the special conditions of improvisative performance. The program analyses aspects of the musical environment in real time, using that analysis to guide an automatic “improvisation” program that generates both complex responses

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Figure 6.2. George Lewis: Voyager (2019 version), main page. Visual layout by Damon Holzborn.

George E. Lewis to input and independent generative and analytic behaviour that arises in part from a large number of tuned and timed white-noise decision-making logic processes. These processes, among many others, run asynchronously to other processes and to each other throughout the operation of the program, but at times can group themselves to act in concert (Taylor 2020). The system is an independent improvisor with its own set of musical approaches. When it detects outside input, it takes what it finds into account as part of its decision-making process. However, it does not need outside input to create music. In interactive performance with a human player, the sonic behaviour of the system results not from hierarchical control, but from a negotiation between the improvising performer and emergent interactions between differentially timed subroutines. The result is a kind of personality and quasipredictability of behaviour in the long run, while introducing variability in the short run—in a word, metastability. In 2011, at a University of Michigan panel discussion following a performance with myself as trombonist, pianist Geri Allen, and Voyager performing on a second piano, one audience member’s probing exchange with Allen implicitly explored issues of personality and just that complex of issues, including Arnold I. Davidson’s (Lewis 2019) notion of social responsibility as doing something that helps the situation along: Audience Member: Is that to say that you didn’t feel like the machine was going to step in and hold you up if you were coming to a low point on your side? Geri Allen: I did feel that it was responding. I didn’t know how it was going to respond. But I knew it was going to. AM: So it was harder to predict than with a human associate, of course. GA: Uh, I don’t know if I would say that. (Lewis and Allen 2011)

Going further along this anti-essentialist path, the anthropologist of technology Lucy Suchman asserts, “I take the boundaries between persons and machines to be discursively and materially enacted rather than naturally effected and to be available, for better and worse and with greater and lesser resistances, for refiguring” (2007, 12). Similarly, Andreas Broeckmann (2016, 21) asserts that Deleuze’s conception of the machine is “a deliberate attempt at unhinging the dichotomous understanding of ‘human and machine’ or ‘organism and mechanism.’” Thus, it has come to pass not only that improvisations by creative musical machines are often indistinguishable from those created by humans, but also that they need not be so distinguished. For many, the idea that there is no need to essentialise machine difference is a truly unsettling prospect, not least because musical creation can no longer be portrayed as the exclusive and ineffable province of designated superpeople. Even so, Georgina Born has identified Voyager as part of a recently renewed interest in vitalism. Stemming from reconsiderations of Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead, for Born, these new vitalisms acknowledge, “more than Latour, the qualities of human agency as distinct from—if also caught in a web of—nonhuman, prehending and self-organising entities” (2012, 270). I would build on this observation to

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“Is Our Machines Learning Yet?” posit a kind of virtual vitalism in which the action of the creative machine suggests that Latourian notions of flat ontology and non-differential agency need to be revised to account for human–computer interaction at the intentional level. Certainly, the question of independent, intelligent machine agency is of long standing. To offer one example (and far from the earliest), in 1859 John Stuart Mill wondered, “Supposing it were possible to get houses built, corn grown, battles fought, causes tried, and even churches erected and prayers said by machinery—by automatons in human form” ([1859] 2003, 123). Composing machines were part of even earlier imaginings, notably with Ada Lovelace’s 1843 prediction, based on her understanding and work with Charles Babbage on his “Analytical Engine”: Again, it [the Analytical Engine] might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine. Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent. (Lovelace 1843, 694n)

Artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky (1927–2016), a virtuoso pianist and devotee of musical experimentalism, was one of the first to propose musical improvisation as a gateway to understanding larger issues of knowledge representation (Minsky [1981] 1993). I’ve often said that my models for interesting improvisation technologies are the Mars Rover and the problem of the self-driving vehicle. Driving is basically a kind of improvising, and I’ve always felt that much could be learned from the efforts to get computers to improvise music. In fact, a recent article on machine learning strategies for improvisation by musical AI pioneer Peter Beyls suggested a striking correspondence between flying a helicopter and open musical improvisation: “Metaphorically speaking, two improvising individuals fly through a common multi-dimensional musical space, connecting in many ways while equally trying to remain at a given musical distance—they connect and disconnect intermittingly, a wave-like pattern of mutual affinities emerges spontaneously over time” (Beyls 2018, 240). But some designers have other ideas—for example, the Guardium, an armoured land drone, or unmanned ground vehicle (UGV), as distinct from the more frequently discussed UAVs, or unmanned aerial vehicles. The Guardium was first deployed by the Israel Defense Forces in 2008, and various updated successor machines are still in use, for example, patrolling Israel’s border with the Gaza Strip (Reed 2012). Even though the Guardium doesn’t fly, it can be remotely piloted, and in this mode of operation, the machine is no different in principle from well-known models of interactive virtual instruments, such as Ableton Live. However, according to the manufacturer’s video, the Guardium and its successor, the Border Protector UGV, can also be programmed to “run

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George E. Lewis patrol on predetermined routes without human intervention” or “react to unscheduled events, in line with a set of guidelines specifically programmed for the site characteristics and security routines. . . . In case of suspicious activity, the Guardium can quickly respond,” using its sensors to effectuate “auto-target acquisition.” After the fashion of a police dog, the machine can “hold the suspicious elements back until manned troops arrive, or use various forceful methods to eliminate the threat” (Guardium 2016). Is the Guardium an improvisor? Certainly these technologies show us, as computer scientist Philip Agre put it, that “activity in worlds of realistic complexity is inherently a matter of improvisation. By ‘inherently’ I mean that this is a necessary result, a property of the universe and not simply of a particular species of organism or a particular type of device. In particular, it is a computational result, one inherent in the physical realization of complex things” (Agre 1997, 156). How different in principle is the Guardium from Voyager? “Creative machines” have been designed to stake out musical territory, assess and respond to conditions, and assert identities and positions—all aspects of improvisative interaction, both within and beyond the domain of music. What if we could simply send our autonomous Guardium off for a bit of joyriding without a fixed goal (and asking/telling it not to kill anyone), similar to musical improvisations where we both discover and posit direction and order? Perhaps one signal difference between the two machines is to be found in the realm of values and ethics, where Voyager proposes a hybrid, cyborg sociality that promotes nominally nonhierarchical, collaborative, and conversational musical spaces. A Voyager performance becomes a form of real-time world-making, a roughly delineated, reciprocal mediation between the exhibited behaviours of human and machine actants. With this in mind, I can borrow a conceit of David Harvey’s in conceiving of a fundamental “condition” of improvisation. In truth, I set a very low bar for ascertaining the presence of improvisation. In my own conception of the condition of improvisation, we are all agents, operating in a fundamental and continuous condition of indeterminacy, where we cannot fully know what will happen next; we analyse our environment for clues as to where we are and to seed judgements as to where we are headed—an activity which is itself improvised in that same condition; and finally, we make a choice. Before or after we make that choice, we can imagine it as proceeding from the analysis of the environment. However, we cannot be certain of either causality or correlation. I’d like to claim that the above elements—indeterminacy, agency, analysis, judgement, and choice—will be found in any improvised act whatsoever, artistic or not, by machines, humans, animals, and so on. Further, I’d like to suggest that these characteristics are sufficiently primordial that in a given proceeding, the absence of any one of them means that the activity in question is not improvised. Finally, I’d like to suggest that the condition of improvisation is permanent, quotidian, and as ubiquitous as contemporary critical methods allow us to assert.

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“Is Our Machines Learning Yet?” Perhaps nonmusical uses of machine learning, such as the self-driving car, can move us away from genre, aesthetics, and autonomous universalisms. This framework for recognising (if not defining) improvisation proceeds from the understanding that the study of improvisation opens up a vast field of salient comparisons to other improvisative behaviour beyond the aesthetic. Thus, even as we continue to explore the nature and practice of musical improvisation, maintaining the coherence of our ideas beyond the frame of music calls for a certain vigilance in guarding the freedom of the concept of improvisation from possible colonisation by musical and artistic models. In maintaining that vigilance, we allow the invocation of both the personal and the social on a broader basis, while allowing a cross-pollination between music and the wider world in which we can understand indeterminacy not as oppositional to improvisation, as in a post-Cage conception, but as an aspect of everyday life that is addressed improvisatively. Musical machine learning experts speak confidently of avoiding “errors,” but in many musical regimes, what constitutes an error is a higher-level concept than, say, playing the wrong chord. Thus, one of my current preoccupations is finding a way for my musical machines to do something that human free improvisors do routinely—use sonic negotiation and temporal awareness to create conclusions to their pieces. In a 2010 public discussion at the University of Chicago, pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach, who had just performed live with Voyager, quoted his long-time collaborator, saxophonist Evan Parker, in characterising the notion of a “mistake” in free improvisation not as a matter of “landing on the wrong note,” but as “missing the chance to do something” (University of Chicago 2011, 22:11)—for example, finding the ending to a piece. Schlippenbach’s observation makes common cause with Lydia Goehr’s notion of improvisation impromptu as “what we do at singular moments—in the moment—when we’re put on the spot, particularly when we’re confronted with an unexpected difficulty or obstacle” (2016, 46). In the kind of environment Schlippenbach is discussing, in all probability, simply converting a large set of endings into a corpus for transmittal to a neural net is unlikely to yield significant progress—although I would encourage interested parties to try this. Or perhaps I should get a machine-learning algorithm to listen to a corpus of Voyager-created pieces as a spur to creating more music in that vein. But if the output of the neural net is merely a set of variations on what seems to amount to an averaging and flattening of the contents of the corpus, how can we find or create novelty and real difference? Proceeding from Spinoza’s understanding that no one really has determined what a body can do ([1994] 1996, 71), neither in the machine case nor in a human case can we determine what the limits really are. We never find out why some people never learn calculus for example, despite the assumption that any human could do it if they were bright enough and work hard enough. On the other hand, if there is no prior aesthetic or processual model for an algorithmic composer/improvisor, how do we assess its competence or the musical value of its work? This brings me to my current collaboration at Columbia with behavioural neuroscientist Julia Hyland Bruno, who does

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George E. Lewis research on the songs of zebra finches from the perspective of improvisation (Hyland Bruno 2017), with programmer-artist Damon Holzborn. We are hoping that bringing together work on improvisation with the technology of machine learning will provide new perspectives on how birds (and perhaps humans) learn how to sing. Zebra finch song “bouts,” as they are called, exhibit within-individual diversity in both sequence and timing, as well as variability between individuals in the degree of this structural diversity. How such performance-level plasticity is acquired and whether it serves any social function is not known (Hyland Bruno et al. 2019). Hyland Bruno has proposed a biomimetic approach for probing zebra finch vocal interactivity by means of three different types of software-based “virtual birds” that can respond to real-time acoustic input from a live zebra finch. With VB #1, a human operator will aim to “sing” as much as possible without overlapping the live bird, selecting performance types or composing songs out of motifs and calls (and silences) in real time.2 VB #2 would incorporate rudimentary machine “listening” in order to respond autonomously. The VB’s singing style would be programmed in various configurations, either to always produce exemplars of a specific sonic phenotype, or to mimic the exemplar or phenotype produced by the live bird. VB #3 would also be an autonomous agent, but one that recycles and improvises on inputs from the live bird, an adaptation of real-time sequence modelling and statistical learning methods developed for human-computer musical improvisation. This is not a human-scale aesthetic problem, but it is one that we believe could be tackled by a combination of a Voyager-style algorithmic improvisor and a machine-learning strategy for improvisation similar to one of the most successful recent human–computer interactions in music, the Omax family of projects, pursued at IRCAM by Gérard Assayag, Georges Bloch, Marc Chemillier, Arshia Cont, Shlomo Dubnov, Jerome Nika, Bernard Lubat, and others (Assayag et al. 2006; Chemillier, Lubat, and Assayag 2020). In Omax, an improvisation-oriented musician–machine interaction system learns in real time from human performers, generating an improvisation from the learned model. As an article by the team maintains, an improvising performer is informed continually by several sources—his or her partners, him- or herself, and the instantaneous judgement that can alter plans on the fly to open up new directions in the music. Sound images of the musician’s present performance and of other performers are memorised, thus drifting back from present to the past. Figures from long-term memory also act as sources of material that can eventually be recombined to form new improvised patterns. The advent of musical machine learning has fully corroborated my observation from 2000 that “as notions about the nature and function of music become embedded into the structure of software-based musical systems and compositions, interactions with these systems tend to reveal characteristics of the community of thought and culture that produced them” (Lewis 2000, 33). 2 In fact, as of September 2020, we have already created a prototype that does this.

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“Is Our Machines Learning Yet?” These communities of thought and culture now include whoever and whatever the machine and its programmers happen to be learning from, whether it be Google Magenta’s early ideology of using machine learning to create “compelling” art and music (Eck 2016) or the example of Tay, the Microsoft Twitter chatbot whose tweets quickly devolved, within hours of its going live, into racist, sexist, and even genocidal diatribes, before it was quickly disconnected from the internet (Hunt 2016). Thus, the virtual bird strategies beg a number of important questions: How can we move from the virtual bird that creates variations to the virtual bird that creates something new? Dominant methodologies for machine learning depend crucially on imitation, typically of a corpus of behaviours. If algorithms that “listen” to a corpus of behaviour and “learn” to produce structures that create variations on that behaviour are ultimately reproducing the cultural values embedded in that music, how can we create new musical and cultural values from an existing corpus? And what might those values end up becoming? Can we move beyond the corpus, beyond imitation, to realise in machine improvisation John Stuart Mill’s observation that “Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing” ([1859] 2003, 124)? In an article on improvisation, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the inventor of the concept of flow, observes that judgements on creativity are made by two groups: first, a domain or symbolic system, which is defined by “some group entitled to make decisions as to what should or should not be included” (Csikszentmihalyi and Rich 1997, 47), and second, “the field,” composed of so-called expert raters who “rely on past experience, training, cultural biases, personal values, and idiosyncratic preferences” (ibid., 45). But can imitation of certified existing creativity really provide insight into what creativity is? Under such a regime, creativity is what authorised entities say it is; thus, ascriptions of creativity can be decidedly political, the outcome of a communitarian or even institutional theory. However, we do not yet possess an aesthetic canon for zebra finches, as distinct from the many attempts at generating jazz improvisation via machine learning techniques. In the end, we can say, as Thomas Nail does in his chapter in the present volume, that the assemblage is in a permanent state of movement. This is because, as a consequence of its open-ended, deterritorialising nature, processes, systems, and animate subjects encountering the assemblage become part of it. For me this brings up a notion of the fundamental process of assemblage, not as simple iteration, but as recursion, along the lines of Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence. In a further extension of Nail, I would include the hermeneutic and phenomenological aspects of the assemblage, where intentions do matter after all. This move by assemblages to become all-encompassing could be called opportunistic, a characteristic that both Stephen Greenblatt (2005, 227) and Alexander von Schlippenbach regard as fundamental to improvisation: “I mean, sometimes you can decide to do nothing,” Schlippenbach observed in the 2011 panel discussion in Chicago. “But of course there are points that require some-

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George E. Lewis thing. And you should do something. And when you miss this, then it’s gone. It’s not like an interpretation of written music; you can make many definite mistakes. But a mistake in this music is something different” (University of Chicago 2011, 22:27). Here, assemblages become not just epistemological performers, but improvisors. Indeed, it is the assemblage itself that self-fashions, improvisatively. References Agre, Philip E. 1997. Computation and Human Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Art Ensemble of Chicago. 1982. Live from the Jazz Showcase. Andorra: EFOR Films, 2869005, 2004, DVD. Assayag, Gérard, Georges Bloch, Marc Chemillier, Arshia Cont, and Shlomo Dubnov. 2006. “OMax Brothers: A Dynamic Topology of Agents for Improvization Learning.” In AMCMM ’06: Proceedings of the 1st ACM Workshop on Audio and Music Computing Multimedia, October 2006, 125–32. New York: ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/1178723.1178742. Beyls, Peter. 2018. “Motivated Learning in Human-Machine Improvisation.” Proceedings of the International Conference on New Instruments for Musical Expression (NIME 2018), Virginia Tech, 238–43. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1302565. Born, Georgina. 2012. “Digital Music, Relational Ontologies and Social Forms.” In Bodily Expression in Electronic Music: Perspectives on Reclaiming Performativity, edited by Deniz Peters, Gerhard Eckel, and Andreas Dorschel, 163–80. New York: Routledge. Born, Georgina, and Andrew Barry. 2018. “Music, Mediation Theories and ActorNetwork Theory.” Contemporary Music Review 37 (5–6): 443–87. Bourriaud, Nicolas. 2002. Relational Aesthetics. Translated by Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods with Mathieu Copeland. Dijon: Presses du réel. First published 1998 as Esthétique relationnelle (Dijon: Presses du réel). Broeckmann, Andreas. 2016. Machine Art in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Chemillier, Marc, Bernard Lubat, and Gérard Assayag. 2020. Le jazz et l’intelligence artificielle: De la présence aux traces;

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Expériences en improvisations cyber-humaines. Cristal Records, book and compact disc. Cook, Nicholas. 2018. Music as Creative Practice. New York: Oxford University Press. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, and Grant Jewell Rich. 1997. “Musical Improvisation: A Systems Approach.” In Creativity in Performance, edited by R. Keith Sawyer, 43–66. London: Ablex. DeLanda, Manuel. 2006. A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Deleuze, Gilles. 2004. “Your Special ‘Desiring-Machines’: What Are They?” In Desert Islands and Other Texts: 1953–1974, edited by David Lapoujade, translated by Michael Taormina, 242–43. New York: Semiotext(e). Essay first published 1972 as “Qu’est-ce que c’est tes ‘machines désirantes à toi?’” (Les temps modernes 316 [November]: 854–56). Book first published 2002 as L’île déserte: Textes et entretiens 1953–1974 (Paris: Minuit). Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. 2007. Dialogues II. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Rev. ed. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1977 as Dialogues (Paris: Flammarion). Eck, Douglas. 2016. “Welcome to Magenta!” 1 June. Magenta. Accessed 16 September 2020. https://magenta.tensorflow.org/ blog/2016/06/01/welcome-to-magenta/. Ewart, Douglas R., and George Lewis. 1992. “Rio Negro 2, 1992, by Ewart and Lewis.” YouTube video, 0:44, posted by “lacin t.,” 14 November 2015. Accessed 15 September 2020. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=szsIZ1kM4ns. Ewart, Douglas R., George Lewis, and Douglas Repetto. 2015. “Rio Negro II (2015).” Vimeo video, 02:28, posted by

“Is Our Machines Learning Yet?” “Douglas Repetto,” 14 October 2015. Accessed 15 September 2020. https:// vimeo.com/142433004. Galenson, David W. 2009. Conceptual Revolutions in Twentieth-Century Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gallope, Michael. 2017. “George Lewis: Temporal Assemblages as Critical Forms.” Liner note for George Lewis: Assemblage, performed by Ensemble Dal Niente, 2–11. New World Records, 80792, compact disc. Accessed 15 September 2020. https:// nwr-site-liner-notes.s3.amazonaws. com/80792.pdf. Goehr, Lydia. 2016. “Improvising Impromptu, or, What to Do with a Broken String.” In The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, Volume 1, edited by George E. Lewis and Benjamin Piekut, 458–80. New York: Oxford University Press. Greenblatt, Stephen. 2005. “The Improvisation of Power.” In Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, 222–54. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Guardium. 2016. “Guardium—Autonomous Security Vehicle.” YouTube video, 4:35, posted by “Veterano MalvinasZDC,” 10 June. Accessed 16 September 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYD4ArAW1s. Hallwalls. 2019. “Douglas Ewart, George Lewis, and Douglas Repetto: Rio Negro II.” Accessed 15 September 2020. https:// www.hallwalls.org/visual/6131.html. Hunt, Elle. 2016. “Tay, Microsoft’s AI Chatbot, Gets a Crash Course in Racism from Twitter.” Guardian, 24 March. Accessed 16 September 2020. https:// www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/ mar/24/tay-microsofts-ai-chatbot-gets-acrash-course-in-racism-from-twitter. Hyland Bruno, Julia. 2017. “Song Rhythm Development in Zebra Finches.” PhD thesis, City University of New York. Accessed 16 September 2020. https://academicworks. cuny.edu/cgi/viewcontent. cgi?article=3449&context=gc_etds. Hyland Bruno, Julia, Seth Cluett, Ben Holtzman, and George E. Lewis. 2019. “Learning How to Sing: Developing a Virtual Bird to Probe Zebra Finch Vocal Interactivity.” In VIHAR 2019: Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Vocal

Interactivity in-and-between Humans, Animals and Robots, edited by Angela Dassow, Richard Marxer, Roger K. Moore, and Dan Stowell, 15–17. Accessed 16 September 2020. http://vihar-2019.vihar. org/assets/VIHAR_2019_proceedings. pdf. Ibn Shākir, Muhammad ibn Mūsà, A hmad . . ibn Mūsà ibn Shākir, and Hasan ibn Mūsà . ibn Shākir. 1979. The Book of Ingenious Devices (Kitāb al-Hiyal). Translated and . annotated by Donald R. Hill. Dordrecht, Netherlands: D. Reidel. Written ca. 850. Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor–Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lewis, George E. 2000. “Too Many Notes: Computers, Complexity and Culture in Voyager.” Leonardo Music Journal 10: 33–39. ———. 2015. “Expressive Awesomeness: New Music and Art in Chicago, 1965–75.” In The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now, edited by Naomi Beckwith and Dieter Roelstraete, 115–27. Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in association with the University of Chicago Press. ———. 2019. “Listening for Freedom with Arnold Davidson.” Critical Inquiry 45 (2): 434–47. Lewis, George, and Geri Allen. 2011. “George Lewis: Interactive Trio.” Video of performance and discussion, Institute for the Humanities, University of Michigan, 20 October 2011, 44:18. Accessed 16 September 2020. http://leccap.engin. umich.edu/leccap/viewer/r/lfJTeH. Lovelace, Countess of (Augusta Ada King), trans. and notes. 1843. “Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage.” By L. F. Menabrea. In Scientific Memoirs Selected from the Transactions of Foreign Academies of Science and Learned Societies and from Foreign Journals, Volume III, edited by Richard Taylor, 666–731. London: Richard and John E. Taylor. McCorduck, Pamela. 2018. Machines Who Think: A Personal Inquiry into the History and Prospects of Artificial Intelligence. 2nd ed. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press. Mill, John Stuart. (1859) 2003. On Liberty. Edited by David Bromwich and George Kateb. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. First published 1859 (London: Parker and Son).

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George E. Lewis Minsky, Marvin. (1981) 1993. “Music, Mind, and Meaning.” In Machine Models of Music, edited by Stephan M. Schwanauer and David A. Levitt, 327–54. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Essay first published 1981 (Computer Music Journal 5 [3]). Mitchell, Roscoe. 1978. L-R-G / The Maze / SII Examples. Nessa, Ncd-14, 1989, compact disc. Penny, Simon. 2016. “Improvisation and Interaction, Canons and Rules, Emergence and Play.” In The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, Volume 2, edited by George E. Lewis and Benjamin Piekut, 401–23. New York: Oxford University Press. Phillips, John. 2006. “Agencement/ Assemblage.” Theory, Culture & Society 23 (2–3): 108–9. Pickering, Andrew. 2010. The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Purifoy, Noah. 2015. Junk Dada. Edited by Franklin Sirmans and Yael Lipschutz. Munich: DelMonico. Published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name shown at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Reed, John. 2012. “Israel’s Killer Robot Cars.” Foreign Policy, 12 November. Accessed 16 September 2020. https://foreignpolicy. com/2012/11/20/israels-killer-robot-cars/. Reilly, Kara. 2011. Automata and Mimesis on the Stage of Theatre History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Spinoza, Benedict de. (1994) 1996. Ethics. Edited and translated by Edwin Curley. London: Penguin. First published 1677 as Ethica in Opera posthuma (Amsterdam). This translation first published 1994 in A Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and Other Works, edited and translated by Edwin Curley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Steinbeck, Paul. 2017. Message to Our Folks: The Art Ensemble of Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2019. “George Lewis’s Voyager.” In The Routledge Companion to Jazz Studies, edited by Nicholas Gebhardt, Nichole Rustin-Paschal, and Tony Whyton, 261–70. New York: Routledge. Suchman, Lucy A. 2007. Human–Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions. 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, Gregory. 2020. “An Interview with George Lewis and Damon Holzborn.” Cycling ’74: Tools for Sound, Graphics, and Interactivity, 7 July. Accessed 16 September 2020. https://cycling74.com/ articles/an-interview-with-george-lewisand-damon-holzborn-part-1. University of Chicago. 2011. “George Lewis—Artspeaks.” YouTube video, 45:42, posted by “The University of Chicago,” March 2. Accessed 16 September 2020. https://www.academia.edu/3035586/ Vocal_Extensions_Disembodied_Voices_ in_Contemporary_Music_Theatre_and_ Performance.

Assemblages of Multivocal and Schizophonic Practices Unleashing the Machined Voice Alex Nowitz Composer and vocal performance artist, Potsdam, Germany

There are many passions in a passion, all manner of voices in a voice, murmurings, glossolalia. —Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 77, translation modified)

Introduction A multivocal voice, the perfect object for contemporary vocal performance art, has two salient sides: it creates oral and vocal assemblages of non-linguistic enunciation; and it creates machinic assemblages of vocal-cybernetic expression. Taking this statement—which alludes to the opening lines of “What Is an Assemblage?” (Deleuze and Guattari 1986, 81)—as a motto, this chapter is driven by two questions: (1) What is the potential of the “musical voice” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 304) today in the realm of contemporary vocal performance art operating with and beyond linguistic semantics? (2) What outcomes are generated if one expands the range of vocal expression applying sampling techniques through sensor-based and gesture-controlled live electronics? Over a period of three decades, I have been exploring vocal potential in many compositions and vocal art performances, some of which will be discussed below. In relation to the concept of assemblage (agencement),1 the notion of machining (machination), and other concepts elaborated by Deleuze and Guattari, this chapter provides entryways into the mapping of a practice of multivocality. I introduced the notion of the multivocal voice as part of my doctoral thesis, “Monsters I Love: On Multivocal Arts” (Nowitz 2019a), in order to investigate the underlying premises and principles of contemporary vocal performance art. My practice as a vocal performer is based on the desire to discover unknown vocal territories, which inevitably leads to intricate 1 Regarding the translation of the French agencement into the English “assemblage” see Nail (2017) and Assis (2019, 76–77); in the present volume, see also Assis’s introduction, pp. 18–20, and Nail’s chapter, p. 180.

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probing procedures and to the elaboration of idiosyncratic, interactive, and intermedial techniques. In applying the thinking of Deleuze and Guattari, another aim of this chapter is to investigate my artistic practice as a concept. This implies starting to carve out a taxonomy of the contemporary performance voice and to discover the points of transferability for other artists and researchers within and outside the field of vocal performance art. Accordingly, I wish not only to instigate discourse on the topic but also to foster the interaction between art and philosophy. However, as Deleuze and Guattari corroborate, “the concept belongs to philosophy and only to philosophy” (1994, 34). Thus, an artist speaking up in the philosophical domain encounters risks. But, precisely because the conception of multivocal arts has strong philosophical connotations, I want to reveal the concealed in-depth knowledge that this artistic practice brings. Moreover, to demonstrate the insights and to underline the arguments, this chapter provides hands-on examples through links to audio and video documentations of live and studio performances of my compositions, to which the reader will be invited to watch and listen. At any rate, it should be understood that I speak first of all as a composer-performer in this chapter—that is, from the perspective of a practitioner executing divergent techniques as they appear in vocal performance art today, including oral, vocal, bodily, or electro-instrumental and sensor technology-related practices. I must also mention the umbilical relation between this text and the performance “Unleashing the Machined Voice: A Lecture-Performance on Schizophonic Practices and Assemblages of New Vocality,” which took place on 9 December 2019 as part of the third DARE conference. That performance was an attempt to compose a collage of vocal multiplicities by applying a variety of different voices and presentation formats ranging from amplified, non-verbal utterances to acoustic presentations through spoken and sung words, from the playback of pre-recorded audio material and video documentation to slide presentations giving additional information on what is presented by the live voice. In this sense, that performance was, in itself, an assemblage of multivocal arts, be it associative or complementary, musical and theatrical, and elucidative, but enigmatic and multi-layered, ramifying in many directions and highly subjective while, at the same time, searching for comprehensibility, cross-references, and pathways of transferability.

1. Toward a taxonomy of multivocal performance 1.1. The multivocal voice The characteristic trait of what I call the multivocal voice is to define the performance voice on the basis of continuous and mutual interaction of four categories: the singing voice, the speaking voice, the extended voice, and the disembodied

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Assemblages of Multivocal and Schizophonic Practices voice.2 The first category includes all kinds of singing techniques, while the second contains all sorts of speaking practices, basically representing the actor’s voice. The third category comprises the extended voice by applying so-called extended vocal techniques and/or live electronics. It is worth remembering that the term extended vocal techniques was coined in the 1960s to delineate vocal techniques beyond established Western singing practices, especially bel canto. Finally, the last category, the disembodied voice (sometimes, after Schaeffer [1966], also called the acousmatic voice), is characterised by being detached from the body and played back by machines—such as record, compact disc, or tape players and computers in conjunction with interfaces transforming digital data into analogue signals—projected through loudspeakers. An example of the multivocal voice is my piece Labyrinth (Nowitz 2013), an electroacoustic work for eight loudspeakers and no light. Apart from bass clarinet and double-bass clarinet passages, and spoken-word passages featuring translations into various European languages of Sonja Kloevekorn’s poem Minotaurus, the composition’s material is derived from one single vocal apparatus, which is modified and multiplied with the aid of gesture-controlled live electronics, namely the stimmflieger (voice kite), and edited afterwards in the studio.3 Labyrinth combines the speaking, singing, extended, and disembodied voice as well as juxtaposing different variants of an alinguistic machinery that, in conjunction with the application of live technology, antagonises the singing voices as displayed in a few registers, most prominently that of the countertenor. Listen to Labyrinth for eight loudspeakers and no light (14:22). https://soundcloud.com/alexnowitz/labyrinth.

The concept of the multivocal voice presupposes a thinking in conjunction with a vocal practice of continuous and gradual passing from one part of the vocal apparatus to another. This might not always be possible simply due to anatomical constraints, which arise because different muscle parts distant from one another have to be surmounted (consider those used for Tibetan chanting compared with the completely different muscle parts needed to perform Western singing traditions). However, the concept of the multivocal voice still aims at the mutual and gradual pervasion of different vocal practices. In this way a diversity of voices are evoked and yielded by one vocal body. Permeable at the boundaries of different vocal territories, the multivocal voice comprises heterogeneous vocal multiplicities from different aesthetic backgrounds and a variety of techniques allowing and, at the same time, demanding a constant and continuous flow that alters and melds into one another. Vocal multiplicities are intentionally thrown, by the composer-performer, into an incessantly 2 Sometimes I use the term multivocal in a metaphorical sense to address or describe a matter possessing a “manifold” aspect or quality. But most of the time I refer to and apply the term in its literal meaning indicating “many voices.” It is worth noting that I don’t claim authorship for the term multivocal, which is ascribed to Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834). 3 For more information on the stimmflieger using two wireless remotes as gestural controllers, see Nowitz (2008).

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Alex Nowitz varying vocal continuum or, in Deleuze and Guattari’s words, into “continuous variation” (1987, 94–110). 1.2. The alinguistic voice-machine A crucial aim of the concept of the multivocal voice is to reach out for new ways and forms of vocal expression. One way to achieve this is by non-verbal means belonging to the musical rather than the linguistic realm. If heterogeneous forms of vocal expression based on an understanding of the voice solely as a sound-producing apparatus are applied, then a voice comes to the fore that, unusual and against the norm, may appear uncanny, feral, libidinal, comic, or provocative. Operating beyond linguistic semantics always implies a political dimension. Often this approach stands in stark contrast to conventional singing practices as they appear in Western culture, such as, most prominently, the bel canto voice of the bourgeois opera of the nineteenth century. This particular voice reflects two characteristics: the horizontal and linear extension of vowels, and the fact that the singer, accompanied by the instrumentalist/s, interprets words from poems or libretti previously set to music by a composer. Unlike these two characteristics, there is an other voice, a voice off the beaten track. Elaborating upon the “very precise space . . . of the encounter between a language and a voice” (Barthes 1977, 181) and, in so doing, on differentiation between classical singers, Roland Barthes emphasises that “the ‘grain’ is the body in the voice as it sings, the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs” (ibid., 188). Pushing the notion of the “grain of the voice” further brings us to a performance voice that, operating beyond linguistic semantics, is identified by consonantal and percussive, noisy and opposing, iterative and pointillistic forms of vocal expression. We might call this other voice the noise voice, corresponding to what music and cultural theorist Pieter Verstraete refers to as “radical vocality”: “Contemporary vocality finds much of its radicalisation in postmodern performance and the poststructuralist theories of scholars like Julia Kristeva and Michel Poizat to the extent that the voice’s autonomy from language is emphasised. This radical vocality can be understood as a pervasive multiplicity of vocal art forms, orality, choral and vocal modalities, that is predominantly a project to recuperate the voice’s distinct sounding and corporeal qualities from its signifying properties” (Verstraete 2011, n.p.). Following Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the machine (1987, 4–5), I propose to indicate assemblages of enunciation that apply non-linguistic, sonorous, and musical elements as an alinguistic voice-machine. To provide an insight into an example of such, I’d like to draw the reader’s attention to a short video documentation of my piece Panache. Accompanied by its score, it appears as part of the artistic research project “Monsters I Love: On Multivocal Arts” (Nowitz 2019a). Watch Panache: Oder über konsonantische Rasanzen (Panache: or on consonantal rapidities) for solo voice (1:34). https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/492687/492987/126/80.

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Assemblages of Multivocal and Schizophonic Practices Entering the realm of sound and music, this particular voice type deploys para- and pre- or post-linguistic elements. Surplus language constitutes the materiality of the composition, creating and shaping both content and expression. The alinguistic voice-machine represents an event in which content becomes expression and expression becomes content. In the case of Panache, content is defined by a vocal materiality that engenders and shapes the sonorous elements of the voice, whereas expression presupposes that the performer exposes a desire for an impact. Like any other vocal performance art form, this one defines a “machinic assemblage of desire.” What is crucial, in relation to artistic vocal works featuring the alinguistic voice, is that content can become expression and expression can become content: if both poles come close to each other to such an extent that they meet on a congruent plane, then content is expression and expression is content. 1.3. Deterritorialising language in compositions for solo voice In some of my text-based compositions, I focus on the process of gradually dissolving words and turning them into mere sounding entities. Step by step, the linguistic elements are decomposed to the point where only its derivatives as consonant particles or vowel components remain, as in Mönche am Meer: Eine konsonantische Auflösung (Monks by the sea: a consonantic dissolution), a piece that deterritorialises language inasmuch as it gradually de-composes the words by favouring the vowel properties. Watch Mönche am Meer: Eine konsonantische Auflösung (Monks by the sea: a consonantic dissolution) for speaking voice and video (7:11). https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/492687/493272.

By repeating the poem while its components, one after the other, deteriorate by losing their linguistic references, the composition also shifts its meaning. By increasing volume and density it gains intensity. Little by little, a process of becoming-animal uncovers connotations of a human monstrosity. Schaumspuren [Traces of foam] is another example of language decomposition. The difference is not the unfolding of its vocalic derivatives, but the chiselling open of the consonantal material of language, through which unprecedented consonantal assemblages emerge and take shape. During the performance of the work, the consonantal sound qualities of the originating poem are excavated by gradually dropping the vowels. What is revealed are sonorous meanings that, mostly nonsensical, may have a comical quality due to their allusive characteristics. During the performance of Schaumspuren, the language of the opening poem is deterritorialised. In effect, the composition unveils a transformational process starting with concrete linguistic components, decomposing the voiced sphere and finally reaching a regime of signs that is emptied of its linguistic semantics. What remains is an assemblage of consonants articulated through whispered and unvoiced enunciations. In a Deleuzo-Guattarian sense it is a minor voice that emerges, which, in this case, shows aggressive qualities,

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Alex Nowitz but in turn is fuelled by continuously increasing intensity and musical valence. The more the vocalic, that is, the realm of vowel sounds, becomes less prominent, the more intense the sound needs to be projected by the performer. This applies even more if it needs to be articulated in an unvoiced or whispered manner to become audible and thus perceptible for the audience. Watch Schaumspuren for solo voice (3:58, especially after 1:59). https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/492687/560212/0/0.

During the course of the composition’s presentation, the formerly concrete linguistic units transform into an abstract machine of consonantal sounds that, in turn, create their own semiotics and sonic semantics. Progressively, the new narratives introduced in the work belong to the realm of music. Variations of the noisy, iterative, and percussive qualities, all of which are provided by consonantal sounds, lead to a newly constituted sense related to and triggered by the sounding matter. The deterritorialisation, in this case of concrete components of language, results in sonic abstractions. Instead of a vocal practice denominated by the vocal cords, an oral practice emerges demonstrating that the mouth, consisting of lips, tongue, and palates, is the main sound-producing source.4 Sounds created by that part of the vocal apparatus applying predominantly vocal cords are now disempowered. Instead, an oral regime of sounds is introduced. We can therefore conclude that the composition Schaumspuren traces the process that the speaking voice goes through becoming a musical voice. 1.4. The musical voice What determinants of a musical voice relate to the context of music performances? Referring to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 96) provide an axiomatic explanation: “The voice in music has always been a privileged axis of experimentation, playing simultaneously on language and sound. Music has linked the voice to instruments in various ways; but as long as the voice is song, its main role is to ‘hold’ sound, it functions as a constant circumscribed on a note and accompanied by the instrument.” Of course, there is more to the notion of what a “musical voice” (ibid., 304) is. It goes beyond the fact of just belonging to a musical context and “holding” sound. The question is what happens when the voice leaves the territory of the “song”? When does a voice become a “musical voice” that is no longer related to a regime of linguistic signs? I claim that there is a continuous line of varying degrees and differing forms of how the musical voice can present itself ranging between the two poles of song and abstract music composition. In conjunction with instruments, as Deleuze and Guattari argue, the musical voice in the realm of the song “holds” the sound. Nevertheless, in compositions such as Schaumspuren and Mönche am 4 For the distinction between oral (mouth related) and vocal (vocal-cord related) sound sources, see “Doing Things with the Mouth” in Nowitz (2019a). For another source that illuminates this differentiation, see LaBelle (2014).

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Assemblages of Multivocal and Schizophonic Practices Meer, it equally stays connected with the verbal sphere. On the other hand, if the voice no longer “holds” any connection to words, only to sound, then the musical voice becomes an instrumental voice. The more the voice submits to the deterritorialising force of music by offloading the linguistic components of language, the more it becomes a musical instrument. Reaching the end of the process of becoming-music in turn implies that in conjunction with other instruments the musical voice can no longer be accompanied by the musician. For, once the voice loses its privilege of having access to both language and sound, the relationship between vocalist and musician is reterritorialised. The former hierarchy is dismissed. Therefore, given that the suspension of the double privilege of the voice in music performances is actually possible and realisable, the claim then is that both fields, one yielded by the vocal performer and the other by the musician, can now meet on the same plane of sonic and/or musical consistency. If there is no hierarchy, there can be no accompaniment. If there is no accompaniment, there is no hierarchy. However this might be—even in the most abstract form of a musical appearance that a voice can take on—there will always be traces, be they allusive, connotative, or associative, that refer back to a regime of signs that is dominated by the embedding culture that, even though concealed, inescapably brings along traces of linguistic codes. 1.5. Machining the voice Music has the power to disrupt the ties to language. Examining the triangle language-voice-music, and introducing the notion of machining the voice, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) emphasise that music’s deterritorialising force on the voice has always been the focus during music-making processes involving the voice: “The voice with its auditory correlates (the ear is itself a refrain, it is shaped like one) concerns music. Music is a deterritorialization of the voice, which becomes less and less tied to language” (302). “The becoming-woman, the becoming-child of music are present in the problem of the machining of the voice. Machining the voice was the first musical operation” (303). Elucidating the characteristics of the voice-music relation, Deleuze and Guattari also provide the main principles for a vocal performance applying all kinds of contemporary forms of vocal expression, which applies also to the concept of the multivocal voice. “Only when the voice is tied to timbre does it reveal a tessitura that renders it heterogeneous to itself and gives it a power of continuous variation: it is then no longer accompanied, but truly ‘machined,’ it belongs to a musical machine that prolongs or superposes on a single plane parts that are spoken, sung, achieved by special effects, instrumental, or perhaps electronically generated” (96). Similarly, the machined voice is the result of an opening up to the musical machine. This is achieved through the application of timbral diversification, the display of sonorous heterogeneity and continuous variation. Machining the voice is an inherent part of a multivocal practice gaining a polyphonic performance voice (Nowitz 2019b, 93). What the multivocal voice always strives for is a utopian quality deterritorialising the function that the voice usually takes

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Alex Nowitz on in the surrounding culture. Machining the voice by applying unapparent, concealed, or remote strategies is a way to overcome cultural presuppositions and conventions. As an example of the notion of machining the voice by applying unusual methods, the following video composition establishes a musical machine by means of those elements that, normally, at first glance, are not considered to belong to the musical realm or, at least, not explicitly. What this work reveals is the enactment of an assemblage of consonantal sounds that, depleted of the pure forms of vowel sounds, accentuate the sonorous and heterogeneous matter of consonants, all of which constitute the material of the composition. Watch Mundfundstücke: Das Konsonantenvokabular (Mouth found objects: the consonant vocabulary) for screen and two loudspeakers (8:50). https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/492687/495760/0/112.

2. Into schizophonic practices 2.1. The “truly” machined voice Once technical devices are deployed in order to multiply vocal sounds, and to extend and manipulate the voice, the prerequisites for a “truly” machined voice have been achieved. A special case of the truly machined voice shows itself if live sampling techniques are applied or, in other words, if the live voice, copied during a live performance, is replayed through the application of technological means. To signify “the split between an original sound and its electroacoustic reproduction,” Canadian composer and music philosopher R. Murray Schafer coined the term schizophonia ([1977] 1994, 88–91). By applying sampling techniques to the vocal arts, the performer is able to reproduce recorded vocal sounds immediately after their emission. The techniques of instant aural mirroring of oneself are at the core of what can be called schizophonic practices. The schizophrenic aspect of the term schizophonic comes to the fore even more if the original and its reproduction are juxtaposed with little delay. An example of such a live sampling practice is the video documentation of my work Playing with Panache for voice and live electronics, involving the strophonion, a custom gesture-controlled digital musical instrument developed at STEIM in Amsterdam (for more information on the strophonion, see Nowitz 2016). Both the title and the material refer to Panache for solo voice. This example provides insights into the practice of playing with aural copies of the voice through the application of finger actions and hand and arm gestures, all of which interact with the live voice. Watch Playing with Panache for voice and live electronics (strophonion) (6:38). https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/492687/493917/306/669.

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Assemblages of Multivocal and Schizophonic Practices For the listener it may be difficult to differentiate the copy from the original. The line between the two can easily become blurred. Often, when applying this performance practice, the question of which is which comes to the surface. What is important to note is that the copy, or the double—the aural clone or the doppelgänger—gains a status of agency only if the control of its sounding and musical parameters through gestures is executed in such a way that the actions can be clearly assigned by the observer, applying the senses both of hearing and of seeing, to the resulting sound. A productive method to examine the sound potentialities of the voice is to dismantle the boundaries between original and copy and for the performer to discover what creates the difference between the live human voice and its reproduced machinic counterpart. This implies that the practitioner of schizophonics needs to know—or notice—when the human and the machinic voices come close to simulating each other. Schizophonic practices imply the sounding out of the space in-between the real and its artifice. The artistic means applied have to operate on a microtimescale during which, on the basis of continuous variation, three actions take place: producing vocal sounds (as a vocal performance artist), simultaneously recording (as an engineer), and consecutively playing them back (as an electronic musician). This case goes beyond the notion of the multivocal voice in the literal sense of a many-voiced voice. In fact, the performer becomes a multivocal agent in the sense of a multi-agential agent who, in addition, enables the emergence of a myriad of different cases and overlapping events. The sounding result is of a highly complex nature, which is even more the case if the whole procedure of producing vocal sounds, recording, and playing them back is kept very short and thus on a molecular level, and if various sampling techniques, such as resampling (additive) and over-sampling (substractive), are employed, while the next action takes place instantaneously or simultaneously. On the auditory level, the process of using and incorporating the doppelgänger’s voices on a continuous basis models an augmented, multivocal sound character. For some of the audience, the result may be monstrous, excessive, or even terrifying, or just ridiculous. However, leaving aside the emotional impact on the recipient for a moment to instead observe what takes place, we can say that fields of sonorous, heterogeneous vocal elements emerge. What matters when examining schizophonic practices is that the human voice constantly intermingles with the artificial doubles, all of which trace back to one single source; in so doing, the voice forms new sounding entities and creates multivocal assemblages of one and the same voice. In playing gesture-controlled, wireless instruments in vocal performance art, the main challenge is to discover how to mediate in a performative, elegant, and thus convincing manner between, on the one hand, the technologically driven practice generating abstract soundscapes and, on the other hand, the mere presence of the multifaceted nature of the live human voice that in contrast produces concrete, emotion-bound material.

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Alex Nowitz 2.2. Machinic assemblages of vocal-cybernetic expression Using a variety of forms and elements of a pre-, post-, and paralinguistic vocality, combined with the simultaneous application of gesture-controlled live electronics, manipulation through live-sampling procedures, and experimentation with the resulting material, multivocal arts not only lay bare the sonic potential of the voice but also delve into new types of sonorities mediated by the performer’s full-body movements. As far as this is so, how can we expose an arrangement of diversified voice fields in an artistically coherent way? What forms of deterritorialisations of the voice take shape during the performance, and how does the performer handle them? Furthermore, what is the body’s role in these procedures? Instead of answering through a written account, I invite the reader to view one final video documenting a live performance. Watch Untitled for voice and strophonion (3:29). https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/492687/560292.

The schizophonic practice of self-sampling entails two aspects of which the vocal performer should be aware: one, the notion of enjoyment, the other, risk-taking. There are joyful moments of becoming: becoming-bird by applying the lower-lip whistling technique (see Nowitz 2018, 389); becoming-child through the countertenor voice; and becoming-machine through gesturecontrolled, sensor-based, and computer-mediated technologies. On the other hand, schizophonic practices carry the risk of the performer being absorbed by the sound of the doubles. During the process of self-mirroring, one could fall into a concealed narcissistic trap. Whether the performer is able to overcome this difficulty depends on performance skills, long-term experience, and how one meets the challenges as they appear. At the same time, to constitute a viable artistic statement, the performer is called upon to deterritorialise his or her own critical agency. Beyond that, during the ongoing musical process, the vocal performance artist needs to acquire the ability to listen to sonic details and to how both the live and the duplicated voices show themselves in order to shape the outcome in a coherent manner. One also needs to learn to decipher the different powers and energies of assemblages of unfamiliar, uncommon, and, thus, new vocalities that may come into being, and to pay close attention to their underlying subtleties. 2.3. Voice-induced sound dance I coined the term voice-induced sound dance to indicate a practice involving interaction between voice, body, and gesture-controlled live electronics applying both sensor and touch technology (see Nowitz 2019a, especially the glossary). This kinetic variant of vocal performance art strives to integrate different ways of moving the body, all of which are driven by generating sounds that originally were based on the repertoire of the human voice. Voice-induced sound dance is a performance practice in which the material and sound parameters of the voice of the double, that is, the disembodied voice of the performer, are con-

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Assemblages of Multivocal and Schizophonic Practices trolled, worked on, and further developed by the hands and arms of the performer. The material of the live human voice, be it oral (mouth related) or vocal (vocal-cord related), is extended as well as juxtaposed by forms of bodily enunciation stimulated by the use of sensor and touch technology. In turn, these movements initiate actions with the technology, so that stimulation, reaction, and action all flow into another multiplicity or, in other words, multi-agential agencies. As a whole, the performance practice of voice-induced sound dance creates assemblages of vocal, bodily, and electro-instrumental expression, each of which requires the application of its own control mechanism that simultaneously feeds into and interacts with the others. In this light, it can be said that the artistic practice of vocal sound dance creates machinic assemblages of vocal-cybernetic expression. To understand this thought better, we can look to the French otorhinolaryngologist and researcher of the voice and its mechanism Alfred A. Tomatis, internationally renowned for treating classical singers and, moreover, disclosing the complex interplay of physiological and psychoacoustic processes that take place during the act of singing. Referring to Plato, he provides an all-encompassing definition of the term cybernetics, based on the analysis of the functionality of the human body: “Cybernetics is the science of the mechanisms of control. . . . It is based on principles as old as time. . . . [which] are as impossible to transgress as they are timeless. In cybernetic terms, a system is regulated when its functioning is subject to a control. Each organ of the human body controls a specific function” (Tomatis 2005, 65). During the process of recording, the live voice is extracted from the body and becomes disembodied. In a sense, when playing back the recorded material with the use of gesture-controlled live electronics, the voice is inserted into the body again. A process of disembodying and re-embodying takes place. It is an act of reanimation, as the mere acousmatic, technically reproducible voice becomes alive again when the recorded vocal material is played back and manipulated through the application of gestures and movements. The corporeal extremities reactivate the inert, disembodied voice. One could say that the performer is operating and communicating with his or her own departed voice. On both counts, spatially and temporally, a process of continuous interplay between the deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation of the voice and the body is on display.

Conclusion It is noticeable that in vocal performance art today, different vocal practices and aesthetics co-exist next to one another. The more contrasting the vocal content of a performance is, I claim, the more likely it is that the performance will be an exciting experience for the audience. However, to make this happen during a solo situation, the performer needs to cope with transiting between different vocal material and related techniques. Whereas, under capitalism, vocal art is treated as a commodity and a product, Deleuze and Guattari remind us of the “pure process that fulfills itself, and that never ceases to reach fulfillment as it proceeds—art as ‘experimentation’” ([1977] 1983, 371). As is inherent to all art

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Alex Nowitz disciplines based on ephemerality, contemporary vocal performance art practices emphasise process and experimentation. The potential of the performance voice grows increasingly if we enable and create “decoded and deterritorialized flows” between vocal objects of different energetic content (ibid., 379). In fact, this conceptual thought is indispensable if the vocal performance artist is to discover and cultivate new terrain of expression. Therefore, I propose to tackle vocal explorations from different angles, aiming to embrace all kinds of imaginable sound possibilities while at the same time raising awareness of historically grown and culturally imbued preconceptions. On the basis of this line of thought that pursues an inclusive approach represented by the concept of the multivocal voice, a plethora of possibilities arise that the contemporary vocal performance artist can take hold of, be it exposing many voices residing in one vocal mechanism or the extension of the range of vocal and bodily expression achieved through intensified human–computer interaction. Hopefully, the outcome of these endeavours—assemblages of multivocal and schizophonic practices—as presented in this chapter and in the audio and video examples provided, will have surprised and inspired the reader, and given new insights into the potentialities of vocal performance art today. References Assis, Paulo de. 2019. Logic of Experimentation: Rethinking Music though Artistic Research. Orpheus Institute Series. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Barthes, Roland. 1977. “The Grain of the Voice.” In Image, Music, Text, edited and translated by Stephen Heath, 179–89. New York: Hill and Wang. Chapter first published 1972 as “Le grain de la voix” (Musique en jeu 9: 51–63). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. (1977) 1983. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1972 as Capitalisme et schizophrénie: L’anti-Œdipe (Paris: Minuit). Translation first published 1977 (New York: Viking Press). ———. 1986. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Translated by Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1975 as Kafka: Pour une literature mineure (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Minuit).

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———. 1994. What Is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1991 as Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Minuit). LaBelle, Brandon. 2014. Lexicon of the Mouth: Poetics and Politics of Voice and the Oral Imaginary. London: Bloomsbury. Nail, Thomas. 2017. “What Is an Assemblage?” SubStance 46 (1): 21–37. Nowitz, Alex. 2008. “Voice and LiveElectronics using Remotes as Gestural Controllers.” eContact! 10 (4). Accessed 15 August 2020. http://econtact.ca/10_4/ nowitz_voicelive.html. ———. 2013. “Labyrinth.” Soundcloud mp3 audio, 14:22, posted by “Alex Nowitz,” 17 February 2014. Accessed 28 April 2020. https://soundcloud.com/alexnowitz/ labyrinth. ———. 2016. “Designing and Playing the Strophonion: Extending Vocal Art Performance Using a Custom Digital Musical Instrument.” eContact! 18 (3). Accessed 15 August 2020. http://econtact. ca/18_3/nowitz_strophonion.html. ———. 2018. “Manifesto for the Multivocal Voice: Principles for a Performance Voice in the Vocal Arts (Abridged Version).” In Artistic Research Will Eat Itself: The

Assemblages of Multivocal and Schizophonic Practices 9th SAR International Conference on Schafer, R. Murray. (1977) 1994. The Artistic Research, edited by Geoff Cox, Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Hannah Drayson, Azadeh Fatehrad, Tuning of the World. Rochester, VT: Destiny Allister Gall, Laura Hopes, Anya Lewin, Books. First published 1977 as The Tuning and Andrew Prior, 380–94. Research of the World (New York: Knopf ). Catalogue. Accessed 16 August 2019. Tomatis, Alfred A. 2005. The Ear and the Voice. https://www.researchcatalogue.net/ Translated by Robert Prada and Pierre view/512748/512749/0/0. Sollier, freely adapted by Robert Prada ———. 2019a. “Monsters I Love: On and Francis Keeping. Lanham, MD: Multivocal Arts.” PhD thesis, Stockholm Scarecrow Press. First published 1988 as University of the Arts. Accessed 15 August L’oreille et la voix (Paris: Laffont). 2020. https://www.researchcatalogue. Verstraete, Pieter. 2011. “Vocal Extensions: net/view/492687/559795/0/0. Disembodied Voices in Contemporary ———. 2019b. “Zur vielstimmigen Stimme.” Music Theatre and Performance.” Public Musik & Ästhetik 23 (1): 91–95. Sound #2: Vocal Extensions. Rotterdam: Schaeffer, Pierre. 1966. Traité des objets De Player. Also available online at musicaux: Essai interdisciplines (Paris: Seuil). https://www.academia.edu/3035586/ Translated by Christine North and John Vocal_Extensions_Disembodied_Voices_ Dack as Treatise on Musical Objects: An Essay in_Contemporary_Music_Theatre_and_ across Disciplines (Oakland: University of Performance. California Press, 2017).

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Travelling with Pēratape Narrating Poetics of an Assemblage of Recording Guy Dubious Independent sound artist, Tel Aviv, Israel

The mechanic is a part of the machine, not only as a mechanic but also when he ceases to be one. —Deleuze and Guattari (1986, 81)

Equilibrium speed The model of recording, as constructed through the technological set-up of the phonograph, dictates that recording is judged primarily by its ability to preserve and re-present sound. Such a construct entails that the event of recording itself (henceforth, “REC” [recording]) can only be apprehended or measured via a mediation process in the following moment (henceforth, “REP” [replay]). Edison’s model, as portrayed in the patent papers received on 19 February 1878, sets up the principle of phonography, which will affect the construction of all subsequent recording machines: “The invention consists in arranging a plate, diaphragm, or other flexible body capable of being vibrated by the human voice or other sounds, in conjunction with a material capable of registering the movements of such vibrating body by embossing or indenting or altering such material, in such a manner that such register-marks will be sufficient to cause a second vibrating plate or body to be set in motion by them, and thus reproduce the motions of the first vibrating body” (Edison 1878). It is by staging a mechanical equilibrium between the two bodies that REP emerges as the fixed audio image—the movement of the two bodies is uniformly exact in speed. The reproduction of the image in recording does not rely merely on the inscribed surface as the content of the record; equally important is a set of parameters or directions that dictates the mechanical execution of such a “reading.” REP, as the positive, gathers its “gravitas” from the idea that the moment of REC is merely an objective mechanical procedure, where the physicality of sound waves impress themselves on the plastic matter of the recorded surface. Hence, phonography builds an ethos of recording as a procedure that captures sound “prior to any semiotic order and linguistic meaning” (Kittler 1999, 16). In short, it delivers a deep cut between the event and its

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Guy Dubious representation, between a fleeting moment with all its particularities and its universal image. Phonography begins with an act of erasure as the concealment of its form. This concealment is made possible because of the presupposition that REC has an affinity with the real (Deleuze 1994, 131). Such a view is grounded within a perception that recognises recorded physical impressions in the audible image, stored as the “data” of inscription, which “were cut into the master disc and then pressed into the vinyl under the rule of cause and effect in a physical world” (Rothenbuhler and Peters 1997, 246). Through this affinity, recording orients itself towards the world, and it is because of that affinity that whatever recording recognises in the world becomes authorised by its REP—its represented audio-image. The authority as such validates the technological ability to make a universal claim regarding its objective inclination: that the machine “recorded indiscriminately what was within the range of microphones” (Winthrop-Young and Wutz 1999, xxvi). The truth of the phonographic record is found in its ability to give rise to a mirroring image, which for everything recording encounters exists only insofar as its construct (Heidegger 1977, 27). Considering recording, mostly, according to a single principle of representation created a problem of practice; thinking of recording in this way will always begin after the “fact,” taking as a given a phonographic construct of the audio image as the materiality of recording. This grounds the process by raising the inscribed surface to the level of principal causality. It is not merely an act of translation of the sonic, but tunnels the natural forces of the physical sound itself; it is “inseparably committed to the sound that inhabits this and no other acoustic groove” (Adorno 1990, 59). The image of recording overshadows the event of it mechanical performance, its poesis. Yet, “Technē belongs to bringing-forth, to poiēsis; it is something poietic”; it is within these technical arrangement, that an aberration can take place (Heidegger 1977, 13).

Poetic mechanics Pēratape emerged from an exploration of the technical arrangement of recording, specifically its mechanical performance. This listening process enables an encounter with different variations in the mechanical work of the machinic assemblage. Listening here is not passive, it is a manner of practice that dives into the problem, described above, of the event of recording. Without the urge to solve anything, listening paves a way by following the variations and differences that emerge in the event. It is a particular manner of working with technology, a way that strays from conventional composition. It is closer to Evan Parker’s description of composition as merely different ways of “putting together music” (Parker 2014, 1, punctuation adjusted). This means that composition always already exists in the plural form, inseparable from the musical event; at the same time, and partially because of that plurality, Pēratape questions the whole notion of composition as a frame for musical discourse, or oeuvre.

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Travelling with Pēratape The problem of composition as it becomes part of an assemblage of technology is discussed by Ron Kuivila and David Berhman in Composing with Shifting Sand (1998), in which they critically consider the meeting point of technology and music, processing their encounter via David Tudor’s electronic circuits and revealing their entangled relations. Their way of thinking is situated within Cage’s philosophy, specifically the problem of detaching the composer, or the composition, from the inclination towards fixed or steady sound relations—“championing an unstable relationship between a notation and its resulting sound” (Kuivila and Behrman 1998, 14). Kuivila considers such a relation to be a consequence of the age of recording as “in this context, it was quite natural to begin to consider the time-based behaviour of an electronic configuration as the identity of a musical composition” (ibid). In other words, one encounters sound and music together with a particular technological configuration, and it is under these relations of inseparability, of intra-activity, that new ways of practice emerge. One of the intersections where the figure of David Tudor emerges concerns Kuivila’s project of reconstructing Tudor’s electronic circuits in the form of software. It touches an underlying theme at the heart of Kuivila and Behrman’s conversation: the tension between analogue and digital electronics, or computerbased electronics. Without discussing the whole problem in detail, the key point of their conversation for this chapter is found in the way Tudor describes his manner of working with electronics. “I try to find out what’s there—not to make it do what I want, but to release what’s there. The object should teach you what it wants to hear” (quoted in Collins 2010, 7). This point deserves clarification, because it can be mistakenly read to suggest that Tudor’s efforts were focused on discovering the essential characteristics of objects, as if each object has its own image of sound waiting to be uncovered. What Tudor means by “there” is not any specific content, but rather something that is more existential, concerning the way certain electronic configurations—electricity, the environment, and other agencies—come to interact. Whatever that object is— an instrument, an electronic circuit—a score needs to be discovered, “through the exploration of all possible points of variation” within their assemblage (Tudor quoted in Viola 2004, 54). Thus, in describing his efforts to rebuild Tudor’s live-electronic circuitry through software engineering, Kuivila specifies that his goal was not to reconstruct the effects of the original machines but rather “to reconstruct the ‘moves’—the set of musical questions—that the pieces create” (Kuivila and Behrman 1998, 14). What Kuivila means by “moves” is that what exists in there, within those circuits, is not any particular sound, but rather questions, choices, whose consequence is experienced in sound. According to Kuivila, diving “into” Tudor’s circuitry implied grasping the movements embedded in the pieces but not as a set of causal relations that lead to a single result. Such movements within the electronic circuits, or any other mechanics, were the problems that Kuivila was striving to reconstruct. Kuivila emphasised this point when saying: “Tudor’s music is to be practiced, not preserved” (ibid., 14). These moves-as-questions can be considered an impasse to the dynamics that would otherwise lead to the totalisation of the

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Guy Dubious piece, preserving it in an authoritative interpretation. It treats the circuits not as a memory but as an entanglement with their “recording” process. “To practise” as Kuivila does is to embrace the technological situation, the inseparability of the artist’s work and the working of the machine. The work is embedded in the working, and yet such embodiment does not produce a form of synonymy or complete immersion between the artist and technology; rather, it performs “a kind of non-ego embodiment, one without completion or totalising mastery, but nevertheless able to invent” (Golding 2016, 265). The embodied logic of the assemblage is at once recording (REC) and sounding (REP), while also simultaneously being their encounter with one another and other forces in the assemblage. Together, they create a plurality within the immersive operation of recording, preventing it from closing upon itself through the production and repetition of a singularised image. Hence, when Kuivila reconstructed Tudor’s circuitry, he was attuned to the questions that the movements of the hardware created, rather than skipping to the solution. Kuivila dives into Tudor’s electronic circuits in a slowing-down movement, by which the effort towards fulfilment of a specific goal is suspended. Instead, what is performed is a manner of attunement, where the slowing-down movement breaks the spell of the unified structure, following instead the circuits’ mechanics and bringing forth the flows, impasses, and connections that make up the circuit. As such, the circuits are not merely tools; they are not means to an end. “What is at stake here is ‘giving to the situation the power to make us think,’ knowing that this power is always a virtual one, that it has to be actualised” (Stengers 2013, 185). Here, this means that actualisation is not a general outcome of a structure but a unique appearance, “a decision without a decisionmaker which is making the maker” (ibid.). Thus, it is not merely one’s own creativity that manipulates a surface to make music; instead, a fundamental encounter forces creativity as a form of urgency. Within Pēratape’s box are different recording devices operating simultaneously; “These devices are in touch with the physical world of pressure waves that dissipate in the air as well as with an endless electrical signal that need never end as long as it is connected to an energy source” (Van Eck 2017, 16). Pēratape builds upon the peculiar challenge that REC, as in the mode of recording, forces upon a situation. Any sonic vibration that happens to touch its surface immediately entangles the source of that movement. This encounter brings together, via an amplification process, bodies and objects that can be remotely positioned in space. REC has the potential for wrinkling and folding the space in which it operates by putting physical distances into motion. In the equilibrium state, the machine mutes the event of REC, concealing its chaotic potential. However, within the set-up of Pēratape, the image of the sound being recorded is (almost) simultaneously being transmitted back, exposing the event of REC to an immediate feedback loop. The flow of waves going back and forth between the devices and elements forms a hybrid motor of both acoustical sound and a one-dimensional electric current. Recording in that sense is not a compositional act directed upon phenomena outside itself, it is the manner of becoming through that motor, through the entangled relation it forms with the

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Travelling with Pēratape world. As such, Pēratape traverses the representational logic of recording into an existential modality, where one becomes part of the unfolding of an event, without the possibility of retracing its course. What makes creativity committed to action is a feeling of sensuous urgency that comes with existence; “they know that there is a more urgent question— but they do not know what it is” (Deleuze 2007, 317). A troubling question, though unknown, is pressing things to matter; emphasis is being made here on the movement of becoming. Hence, records are not merely the sum of their inscriptions (matter being pressed, indented), but must include their process of mattering, as the multiplicity of effect/affect between the “writings,” the sound, the technological set-up, and other agencies that comes into play. It is not the recording of a thinking process, nor thinking about the recording process (Barad 2007, 133); rather, it is a line of indeterminacy formed by their encounter, where multiple heterogeneous movements take place along that curve: together, side by side, back and forth, and other feedback loops that produce, irreversibly, their bodily difference (Cage 1961, 9). Recording is the practice, the art, of thinking/making that attunes one to the ongoing activity of matter as it changes with touch. Such a transformation of matter is ultimately the corresponding “problem” to which musical practice is committed to and slowly develops.

Slowing down The slowed-down body becomes attuned to different resonances that spread in and around the set-up; it can no longer be held in separation to those resonances. The slowed-down body simultaneously observes these resonances and absorbs them, constantly creating them anew. As it further slows down, these new movements seamlessly take their place, shifting the situation from dwelling into an exertion, as if the body “waits to escape from itself in a very precise manner” (Deleuze 2003, 15). A slowed down tape “gallops” the mechanical assemblage, breaking down the univocal structure of the machine. For example, beginning with one as the equilibrium speed and reducing the rotation speed by half, the structure of the content will be sustained with a lower tonality. However, when further reducing the speed—for example, by another half—the previous structure will dissipate, and the voice, or the song, will emerge as a strange viscosity of sounds accompanied by other previously unheard frequencies (Epstein 2014, 29). The reason for such an unpredictable transformation is because, in the process of REP, there is a calibrated correlation between the energy picked up from the recorded surface and the mechanical movement: “Magnetic playback heads apparently convert magnetic energy of the recording into electrical energy at the output terminals. (More correctly, it is not the magnetic energy that is converted, but rather the mechanical energy that moves the tape magnets past the head)” (Camras 1988, 149). Thus, from a certain point slowing down can no longer be thought in terms of manipulation, as a direct affect imposed on the mechanics. Rather, the mechanics are slightly unhinged, being freed to a

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Guy Dubious degree that causes them to become expressive, meaning that they gather different manners of irregularities. Such a transformation brings forth a multiplicity of velocities and volumes that breaks away from the productive body, generating a completely different set of movements, which suspend the playback of the image. It reveals the dynamics in what was previously thought as an immobile inscription—mainly the entangled situation of that image within its technological set-up. This reveals a population, its relations, and its lives within the assemblage.

Figures 8.1–4.

Slowing down tapes affects the way the problem of recording is staged; the setting and the record can now be perceived as they are: as independent velocities through which, upon their encounter, an image is created. Slowing down has been used by Isabelle Stengers as a marker for local turning points in scientific practice, postponing habits of practice, creating a new space for emergence: “‘slowing down’ the problem in order to distinguish its various components” (Stengers 2011, 142). Furthermore, “instead of being formulated once and for all, the problem of the identity of the system evolves over time” (Stengers 2011, 140). Thus, research is a manner of enlarging the problem and making

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Figures 8.1–4. Guy Dubious, Pēratape. Performed at the DARE 2019 concert, Orpheus Institute, Ghent, 10 December 2019.

Travelling with Pēratape it more complex, not of creating a definitive answer or solution. To put this slightly differently, by attending the mechanical forces of the machine and their effects—for example, surface noise, electrical hums, and the speed variations of its cogs—slowing down interferes with the causal image of recording. Such a manner of practice suspends the machine’s abstract logic; by so doing, a different kind of listening emerges, one that partakes in the commotion of the becoming-image, or becoming-record (Deleuze and Parnet 2007, 104). Sound, as the matter of recording, is no longer being extracted from the technological set-up. Instead, through recording, it is actively differentiated: “Differentiating is not about radical exteriority but rather agential separability. That is, differentiating is not about othering or separating but on the contrary about making connections and commitments” (Barad 2007, 392). Sound becomes an agent of change, and it changes as a consequence of its involvement. It is not an object that becomes identified through recording, but an agency through which one can define the boundaries of the apparatus, and by the same token, traverse them. Pēratape moves sideways, encountering the mechanical poetics of the machine to form a path of exploration. Instead of assuming the technology of recording will be the necessary unification between the sonic and a recording plateau, Pēratape is a set-up that “captures” the disjunctions and intensities of an assemblage. “The disjunctive synthesis of recording therefore comes to overlap the connective syntheses of production. . . . when it attracts to itself the entire process of production and serves as its miraculate, enchanted surface, inscribing it in each and every one of its disjunctions” (Deleuze and Guattari [1977] 1983, 12–13). It is not the recording, but the recording of the recording; the first names the production of phonograms, the latter, a feedback loop that bifurcates the recording into a multiplicity. These are not two complete separate moments: their lines of flight overlap and merge into one another, like waves rippling the surface.

Nomadic tape Pēratape does not create a new model for recording. What it does is prepare a leap for recording from set-ups of either/or, REC/REP. The inseparability of recording-image from recording-body creates an indeterminacy that prevents the image’s signification. Pēratape makes recording visible through tactile relations as it unpacks the concealed and standard body of recording machines. Visible is used here not in the sense of sight but as a thought process by which for example a concept, such as recording, is diffracted into different components, which compose its assemblage (Deleuze 1995, 96). For its operation, Pēratape requires attunement to the things being gathered along the path, without the need to identify them, or connect them (Cage and Charles 1977, 27). Such particularities belong in the realm of the event, marking the emergence of REC. There is no certainty in direction here. The path REC is producing splits rhizomatically between air and electricity; a feedback loop that intensifies any communication line established upon the surface (Van Eck, 2017). There is

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Guy Dubious no use in trying to figure out what exactly is happening as the rate by which things change and transform is beyond the speed of recognition. However, it is from such a commotion that a peculiar and specific logic begins to emerge, one that can only exist in an assemblage situation: becoming by recording and becoming recorded by it. Gathering forms the path upon which one is moving (Heidegger 1977, 3).

Figures 8.5–8.

The hands, as well as the rest of the body, contribute to the ordering and reordering of the different slices of the machine at work. They shape and modulate the “signals” travelling within the assemblage and affect the travelling of Pēratape in the gallery space. As a result, Pēratape travels within the box, around my hands and body, through my travelling voice, between the different speakers it feedbacks with, and upon the magnetic loop. These movements do not all happen at once. Some occur simultaneously, and some do not; some are made sticky by others, while some remain separated for a while. Through “an entire constellation of motions, all of which suggest forms of transience and trespass,” the assemblage of recording becomes tangible (LaBelle 2016, 48). The propagation of the “gears” at once projects an image and enters the image

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Figures 8.5–8. Guy Dubious, Pēratape. Performed at the DARE 2019 concert, Orpheus Institute, Ghent, 10 December 2019.

Travelling with Pēratape being created. In the assemblage of recording that is Pēratape, the elements are connected in some way, but they are also suspended, floating in an inexplicable manner as if waiting for something to happen. There is no indication of direction, or emphasis on any particular form of relation; perhaps something is already happening and is waiting to be touched and affected. The assemblage is indifferent.

Poetics as minor resistances The minor form was proposed by Deleuze and Guattari as a key concept to grasp the practice of art as an act of resistance, using the figure of Kafka and his literary output as a way to articulate a becoming machine as a poetic act, both impersonal and political (Deleuze and Guattari 1986; 1987, 95–110, 291–93, 360–73, 469–73). Defeating the desire for proxy control is the first step taken with Pēratape; this allows these variations to affect the machine not just through the content of its production, but also through its mechanics. These variations do not serve as a pretext for a reordering of recording; they inform a manner of poetics that is attuned to the literal effects recording generates, operating “as an experimental machine, a machine for effects, as in physics” (Bensmaïa 1986, xi). Recording articulates a unique situation of agency: one not entirely human nor fully automated. Pēratape, rather than being that which records, is that which becomes through recording, described also as recording matter. Recording as an (ongoing) encounter with “something which passes or happens” does not yield into a fixed state, a matter of representation, because “an encounter is perhaps the same thing as a becoming” (Deleuze and Parnet 2007, 6). All the things one encounters have proper names; still, it is not the name that one encounters, it is that which passes, by which one transforms and by which one is transforming. This movement “towards the minor” makes it possible to summarise the transformation of recording from a representation machine to a “recording without an image,” and without substituting one image with another image(less) image (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 3–7). The gears of Pēratape are tape machines themselves: furthermore, they are assemblages: a recording within a recording and a machine within a machine. They are not, however, ordered in a hierarchy, as in a matryoshka doll. Rather, each component is integrated within the whole of Pēratape, and at the same time, each tape, a slice, keeps that whole from forming a totality (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 16). The impasses Pēratape poises on the image of recording create the demand, or the “calling,” for a practice that will be able to make sense. One needs to dive into whatever entry is available at a given moment and keep on moving with it. Practising Pēratape requires establishing the very connections that make the machine and the very elements that also dismantle it, resisting the formation of the “originating” ground (Deleuze and Guattari 1986, 82). These movements of resistance emerge from the encounter between different diffractive patterns, of the machine and of the body. The assemblage is the continuous

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Guy Dubious movement of differentiation that fractures the functional totality of a machine, that requires becoming-“foreign” while being at home; travelling while being at one’s place of arrival. References Adorno, Theodor W. 1990. “The Form of the Phonograph Record.” Translated by Thomas Y. Levin. October 55: 56–61. First published 1934 as “Die Form der Schallplatte” (23: Eine Wiener Musikzeitschrift 17–19: 35–39). Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bensmaïa, Réda. 1986. “Foreword: The Kafka Effect.” Translated by Terry Cochran. In Deleuze and Guattari 1986, xi–xxi. Cage, John. 1961. Silence: Lectures and Writings. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Cage, John, and Daniel Charles 1977. “For the Birds.” Semiotext(e) 3 (1): 24–43. Camras, Marvin. 1988. Magnetic Recording Handbook. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold. Collins, Nicolas. 2010. “Introduction: Improvisation.” Leonardo Music Journal 20: 7–9. Deleuze, Gilles. 1994. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1968 as Différence et répétition (Paris: Presses universitaires de France). ———. 1995. “Life as a Work of Art,” conversation with Didier Eribon. In Negotiations: 1972–1990, translated by Martin Joughin, 94–101. New York: Columbia University Press. Book first published 1990 as Pourparlers: 1972–1990 (Paris: Minuit). Interview first published in French in Le Nouvel Obsevateur, 23 August 1986. ———. 2003. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Translated by Daniel W. Smith. London: Continuum. First published 1981 as Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation (Paris: Éditions de la différence). ———. 2007. “What Is the Creative Act?” In Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995, edited by David Lapoujade, translated by Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina, 312–24. New York:

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Semiotext(e). Chapter first delivered 1987 as a lecture (FEMIS film school), distributed on video as Qu’est-ce que l’acte de création? Book first published 2003 as Deux régimes de fous: Textes et entretiens 1975–1995, edited by David Lapoujade (Paris: Minuit). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. (1977) 1983. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1972 as Capitalisme et schizophrénie: L’anti-Œdipe (Paris: Minuit). Translation first published 1977 (New York: Viking Press). ———. 1986. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Translated by Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1975 as Kafka: Pour une literature mineure (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1994. What Is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1991 as Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Minuit). Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. 2007. Dialogues II. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Rev. ed. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1977 as Dialogues (Paris: Flammarion). Edison, Thomas A. 1878. Phonograph or speaking machine. US Patent 200,521, issued 19 February 1878. Epstein, Jean. 2014. The Intelligence of a Machine. Translated by Christophe Wall-Romana. Minneapolis: Univocal. First published 1946 as L’intelligence d’une machine (Paris: Jacques Melot). Golding, Johnny. 2016. “In the Shadow of Akimbo Corporatism: Arched Athleticism

Travelling with Pēratape and the ‘Becoming-Human’ of a People.” Deleuze Studies 10 (2): 263–79. Heidegger, Martin. 1977. “The Question Concerning Technology.” In The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, translated by William Lovitt, 3–35. New York: Garland. Essay first published 1954 as “Die Frage nach der Technik,” in Vorträge und Aufsätze (Pfullingen: G. Neske), 13–44. Kittler, Friedrich A. 1999. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. First published 1986 as Grammophon Film Typewriter (Berlin: Brinkmann & Bose). Kuivila, Ron, and David Behrman. 1998. “Composing with Shifting Sand: A Conversation between Ron Kuivila and David Behrman on Electronic Music and the Ephemerality of Technology.” Leonardo Music Journal 8: 13–16. LaBelle, Brandon. 2016. “The Sonic Agent.” In Dirty Ear Report 2: Sound Multiplicity and Radical Listening, 44–51. Berlin: Errant Bodies Press. Parker, Evan. 2014. Introduction to Soundweaving: Writings on Improvisation,

edited by Franziska Schroeder and Mícheál Ó hAodha, 1–8. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Rothenbuhler, Eric W., and John Durham Peters. 1997. “Defining Phonography: An Experiment in Theory.” Musical Quarterly 81 (2): 242–64. Stengers, Isabelle. 2011. Cosmopolitics 2. Translated by Robert Bononno. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1997 as Cosmopolitiques vols. IV–VII (Paris: Decouverte). ———. 2013. “Introductory Notes on an Ecology of Practices.” Cultural Studies Review 11 (1): 183–96. Van Eck, Cathy. 2017. Between Air and Electricity: Microphones and Loudspeakers as Musical Instruments. New York: Bloomsbury. Viola, Bill. 2004. “David Tudor: The Delicate Art of Falling.” Leonardo Music Journal 14: 49–56. Winthrop-Young, Geoffrey, and Michael Wutz. 1999. “Translators’ Introduction: Friedrich Kittler and Media Discourse Analysis.” In Kittler 1999, xi–xxxviii.

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Machining the Bird Lilija Duobliene Vilnius University, Lithuania

A Starling (2016), a video by Paolo Giudici and Andi Spicer (1958–2020), rethinks an art machine that produces (a)synchronised images of folding an origami bird, which is multiplied and accompanied by electronic music that reinterprets fragments of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 17 in G major, K. 453. How does the (a)logic of artistic assemblage relate to Deleuzeo-Guattarian machinic movement and aesthetico-functional thinking? Although some time had passed since I saw the video presented in Rome in 2016,1 I felt involved in the piece both academically and personally, trying to decode, interpret, and in some sense become the imaginational co-author of the piece. In so doing, I wished to overcome any dualism in visuality and sound and to enter a space for multiplicity in multimodality. Both the chatter of Motzart (the name of the caged starling) and the refrain from the opening of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 17 make one rethink not only the territory marked by the motif but also the movement, the process of becoming: becoming a bird, becoming music, becoming sound that Deleuze and Guattari described. Becoming is never imitating; it is becoming-other. Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (1987, 304) write, “it is the accents that form the diagonal in Mozart, the accents above all. If one does not follow the accents, if one does not observe them, one falls back into a relatively impoverished punctual system. The human musician is deterritorialized in the bird, but it is a bird that is itself deterritorialized, ‘transfigured,’ a celestial bird that has just as much of a becoming as that which becomes with it.” This reminds one of the special style of Mozart’s compositions and calls on one to talk of dynamics, live interpretation, and, in following Deleuzeo-Guattarian becomings, diagonals, and unpredictable links in the machinic process. Image and sound are not easily separable in this piece—they are interconnected, even though it seems they run in different regimes when they begin with the rhythm of sound, which, in the words of Redner (2011, 33) gives the image an internal rhythm. Later, the process is reversed and visuality lends rhythm to the sound.

Visuality The visual material of the piece demonstrates the lengthy process of folding the starling from a sheet of paper with different sides: one side is blank and 1 Premiered 13 July 2016 at “Virtuality, Becoming, and Life,” 9th International Deleuze Studies Conference, Department of Philosophy, Communication, and Visual Arts, University of Roma Tre, Rome (11–13 July 2016). The video can also be viewed on YouTube (see Giudici and Spicer 2016).

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Lilija Duobliene one is decorated in a Baroque style. As we view it, we see multiple repetitions, a series of folding images, a kind of mirror reflection, distorted, delayed reflections, a synchronically asynchronised folding in series. The number of images increases in the progression 1–2–4–8–16–32–64: a rational, metrical rhythm. Nevertheless, the process leads to a new consistency. The sheet of paper becomes a figure and is transformed first into a beak (mouth) and then into a paper bird—a baroque décor/plateau/milieu, accompanied by Mozart’s Concerto No. 17—and is finally transformed into a flock of live birds, flying above a Baroque cupola, accompanied on the electronic soundtrack by the murmuring of starlings. I would like to focus on two moments in this creational process of the image, two thresholds in the process of folding: the becoming of the beak (mouth) and the origami becoming a flock of birds, in addition to two musical refrains—one small, the other great. In The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in Schizoanalysis (2011), especially “The Time of Refrains,” Guattari discusses abstract machines, which are dynamic, working in nature as well as in the socius and in every environment, including the world of technology. They work as magic. An abstract machine creates and folds schemas, links elements, creates a kind of machinic engineering, complexity, and multiplicity that is not separated from the actual world. Through these machines, Guattari tries to explain the life of birds: rituals, mating, delineating territory, and melodies. He is interested in the dynamic of passing from one level or order to another, but not in the hierarchical relations between components and not in predictable movements. According to him, “abstract machines cling not to a single universal time but to a trans-spacial and trans-temporal plane of consistency which affects through them a relative coefficient of existence. Consequently, their ‘appearance’ in reality can no longer claim to be given all in one piece: it is negotiated on the basis of quanta of possibles” (Guattari 2011, 11). Furthermore, “they would belong to no one” (ibid., 131). Guattari is not discussing a predictable, semiotically understood and explained world of signs, but non-prognostically linking elements and signs from biological, ecological, physical, and other fields and from different intensities. He destroys the codes of psychoanalysis and structuralism. Guattari talks about all species of birds, also mentioning specific species of birds; however, that is not what matters in his statement. Birds are of the same importance as leaves, blades of grass, or other elements of nature. In What Is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari (1994, 20) state: “The concept of a bird is found not in its genus or species but in the composition of its postures, colors, and songs; something indiscernible that is not so much synesthetic but syneidetic.” How does that relate to A Starling? A machinic regime can be recognised in this piece, the operation of an abstract machine. I would maintain that one of the thresholds in this process of machining the bird with a serial movement of folding images is creating the beak of the bird, which in human terms would be named a faciality. In The Machinic Unconscious, Guattari (2011, 130) discusses “a hypothesis that assemblages of faciality necessarily ‘precede’ the existence of animal mouths and human faces, in other words that the expressive machines

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Machining the Bird ‘precede’ the means of expression (free so that these means interact in turn upon the machinisms in question).” The formation of faciality signifies individualisation, a common trait in Western cultures that emphasise the head and the voice, quite unlike archaic cultures, which above all emphasised spirituality and the soul. In the socio-political sense, the face is a sign of power, structure, an individual, or an assemblage of individuals, whereas in the context of our project it has the image of a beak, which in the lives of birds refers to the strengthening of individuals and their structural organisation. In this project, it constitutes only one of the thresholds that must be overcome on the path toward the others. It is important to note that the beak constructed in the piece’s abstract machine is not created from the paper but by the hands (human fingers) that fold the origami (figure 9.1).

Figure 9.1.

Therefore in the piece we see not only the folding of birds but also the flexing of fingers, which far from being merely a tool become the birds themselves. In this way, the human is involved in the regime of the abstract machine. The human becomes a bird or, on the contrary, the bird becomes a human through faciality and individuality, as described by Guattari. The fingers of a human become only an element of a machine; they are organs without a body, or rather bodies without organs; they are a kind of animated tool, or they are unrecognisable animals, half-human, but which are also birds, and they lose their faciality in the following phase of becoming the flock (figure 9.2).

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Figure 9.1. A Starling. Still, 8:40.

Lilija Duobliene

Figure 9.2.

In Deleuze’s words from The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1993, 125), the basic image comes from a series; a bird is therefore an event that is “related to a history or to a series.” Thus, when Deleuze asks, “Where is the fold moving?” (ibid., 119), he answers that it does not move only between essences and existences. It surely also flows between the body and the soul, flowing clearly between the inorganic and the organic in the sense of bodies, and between the “species” of monads in the sense of souls. The meaning of monad, which is important for understanding the construction and functioning of reality, is taken by Deleuze from Leibniz. Monad refers to a unity between object and subject, and erases the distinction between inside and outside, body and soul; it denotes the oneness that envelops a multiplicity. Deleuze explicated the borrowed concept of monad in its relation to Baroque folding; in his view, the contemporary world changes the understanding of monadology. Priority is given to dynamics and movement between different worlds and units, as well as different planes, allowing transversal lines to appear between different elements on different planes. The monad “now opens on a trajectory or a spiral in expansion that moves further and further away from a center. . . . The two begin to fuse on a sort of diagonal, where the monads penetrate each other, are modified, inseparable from the groups of prehension that carry them along and make up as many transitory captures” (Deleuze 1993, 137). The event of becoming a bird and a flock of birds is thus the second threshold overstepped in the series of foldings, leading to a new assemblage and, most importantly, a new consistency. This is a threshold in art performance, combining natural and artificial, actual and virtual, factual and imaginary.

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Figure 9.2. A Starling. Still, 10:50

Machining the Bird

Sound line A Starling is multimodal in nature, not just visual. It actually starts with a sound effect: the quite recognisable effect of Mozart’s musical motif, which is repeated again at the end. Although the middle section is completed by different electronic and live sounds, from the chatter of a starling to a noise like rubbing or grinding, it seems that something is producing a braking effect and trying to regulate the sound, to find a proper tune. The sound is the combination of live and artificial sounds as well as musical and non-musical material; different kinds of sounds overlap. The process of transformation and deterritorialisation may even seem a little annoying, an effect that occurs simultaneously in the series with the aesthetic folding of images containing a strong rhythm (2–4–8–16– etc.). This is the process of becoming: sounds that are still unclear are covered by impurities, being largely distant from Mozart’s refrain. They are artificial, but no less valued, because, according to Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 302), “the difference between noise and sound is definitely not a basis for a definition of music, or even for the distinction between musician birds and nonmusician birds.” Most interestingly, according to scientists, starlings can sing two melodies using two different refrains at the same time (Baptista and Keister 2005, 438). Guattari (2011, 147–48) also mentions the research of ornithologist W. H. Thorpe, who found that birds learn how to repeat melodies but frequently finalise melodies themselves, as if improvising. Even more interestingly, starlings very easily imitate street noise and urban sounds (Zimmer 2006). It is not clear which idea was adopted by the authors of A Starling, but neither is this particularly important, since we are considering a machine that involves the authors in the process, where they perhaps lose their tools, identities, and, at least for a little while, become birds in the machinic process. In The Fold, Deleuze says that harmonisation that comes after pain is expressed as discordance, moving through the stage of spontaneity to concertation. He outlines in particular that folding today is different from in the Baroque, because there is a different understanding of home and nature, and there is a movement toward harmony not through monadology but through nomadology and diagonals. In this way, the piece combines the Deleuzian critique of a Baroque understanding of harmony and the search for possible modern understandings of harmony— that is, without a strict distinction between vertical harmony and horizontal melody, instead using diagonals (despite many scholars questioning Deleuze’s understanding of modernity)—with a Guattarian rethinking of the semiotics of signs and new assemblages of signs. These links create the machinic process where “‘theme’ was variation from the start,” as Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus put it in describing the rediscovering of Mozart. “Varèse explains that the sound molecule (the block) separates into elements arranged in different ways according to variable relations of speed, but also into so many waves or flows of a sonic energy irradiating the entire universe, a headlong line of flight. That is how he populated the Gobi desert with insects and stars constituting a becoming-music of the world, or a diagonal for a cosmos” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 309).

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Lilija Duobliene The next threshold in the piece’s machinic regime is more crucial in leading to the second type of refrain. In other words, the sound in combination with the image gradually leads to the second type of refrain, as described in A Thousand Plateaus, drawing a line of flight from earth to the cosmic: “Crystal: the becoming-bird of Mozart is inseparable from a becoming-initiate of the bird, and forms a block with it. It is the extremely profound labor dedicated to the first type of refrain that creates the second type, or the little phrase of the Cosmos” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 350). That little phrase is already heard at the beginning of Mozart’s concerto, but here it is sung by a man’s voice, that of Nikolaus Harnoncourt, director of the Vienna Philharmonic, and is followed by a short fragment played on piano by Lang Lang, the soloist with whom the orchestra is playing. When it appears in the second type of circle, its consistency has changed and it is now played by the orchestra (by the crowd). That should be understood as becoming cosmic, becoming the flock of starlings through deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation. It is a new machinic territoriality, working in an absolutely new regime—the regime of multiplicity. As I agree with the “cosmisation” of the refrain, I find the threshold that opens a cosmic zone in the project not at the exact moment of the repetition of the refrain in the second version, performed with orchestration, which is heard synchronically with the image of the flock flying above the Baroque cupola, but a little later when the recognisable phrase transforms into a continuity of electronic sound, more similar to noise than to musical sound. Perhaps this could be better expressed as the stage of the transformation of a clearly recognisable motive into prolonged sounding, going back from actual to virtual, somewhere in between. The artistic intrigue thus comes through the territorialisation of the “bird face” and, inversely, the deterritorialisation of the “bird voice.” In the machinic regime of folding, all elements (origami, human fingers, the bird voice, the Mozart fragment, and electronic sound) are activated by becoming a bird in the Deleuzeo-Guattarian sense. This erases any boundaries between artificial and natural, virtual and actual, freedom and imprisonment, creating a flock territory beyond any dichotomy. The second type is the great refrain, which, in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense, is cosmic and also promises the final end of music (1987, 350). The ending of A Starling is perhaps less Deleuzo-Guattarian: the second type of refrain is overwhelmed by the continuation of noise, the murmuring of the flock of starlings, which reaches to infinity in the style of Varèse. For some Deleuzian interpreters, it is a little pretentious to talk about a cosmic refrain, and especially to claim some end of music, expecting it to be actual when “the cosmic force was already present in the material, the great refrain in the little refrains” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 350). But, at the same time, it may “produce a deterritorialized refrain as the final end of music, release it in the Cosmos—that is more important than building a new system” (ibid.). Jim Vernon (2014) questions this idea of music standing on its own; according to him, it stands through the efforts of musicians.

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Machining the Bird What is Giudici and Spicer’s position and the diagrammatic movement of their artistic machine? On the one hand, they allow us to think that the cosmic refrain is virtual, enabling us to hear numerous formed or non-formed sounds and their assemblages, which are simultaneously different and parallel in a non-formed way. In Deleuzeo-Guattarian texts, it is said that these forces are present in material. In A Starling there is a long, sustained tone. Giudici and Spicer begin with a small refrain (the singing bird and Harnoncourt’s voice, and then the piano music fragment) as a replica or a germ for the great and cosmic refrain. This is actualised as a variation and as the work of separate “variable relations of speed, but also into so many waves or flows of a sonic energy irradiating the entire universe, a headlong line of flight,” as Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 309) said of Varèse’s music. I believe the same can be said of A Starling’s sonic effect. The sound is heard after a “great refrain,” after “finalization,” after the “final end of music,” and, it seems, beyond any finalisation. It is the travelling of sound itself, an “emission or wave without harmonics” (ibid., 344). It is a refrain of a sound machine (349). In accordance with Gallope (2010, 90), a sound machine turns into a virtualisation, reorienting the creator and listener back to the virtual, despite the realistic view of the documentary image and the kind of noise or long electronic tone in the piece. I would maintain that it is the same abstract machine mentioned by Guattari when rethinking the world of animals and birds and their territorialisation; it pre-exists any start and is beyond any finalisation. Instead, it is the enunciation of a new consistency and another life form, another kind of being and way of thinking, another way of creating within the lines of different directions—not in closed and hierarchical systems. It is way of being in a crowd, flock, or pack. A flock of starlings is assembled in such a way that all the birds are equal in their functions, without leaders. Each bird is mobile in its own way: a particular bird will sometimes be in the centre and sometimes on the edge; it will not be found in a predicted place. It will be able to react very fast in its communication (Potts 1984) as it is in a territory that is dynamic and not centred or directed in a particular way. The flock is plastic, transformative, intangible, and elusive. The murmuration of the flock looks like an event, while its murmuring is the cosmic sound in Giudici and Spicer’s vision and creation. As observer and creator, one is fortuitously involved in the prolonged process of an abstract machine as the starling’s image and the bird’s voice are seen and heard for reasons that one doesn’t know and doesn’t need to know. The most important thing, then, is that we are better able to see at least one of the diagrams move between the ethical-aesthetical refrain of music (culture) and the functional refrain (nature). Both combine into one assemblage, in which one is deterritorialised and reterritorialised by the other diagonally, thus helping us understand music standing on its own.

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Lilija Duobliene References Baptista, Luis Felipe, and Robin A. Keister. 2005. “Why Birdsong Is Sometimes Like Music.” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 48 (3): 426–43. Deleuze, Gilles. 1993. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Translated by Tom Conley. London: Athlone Press. First published 1988 as Le Pli: Leibniz et le Baroque (Paris: Minuit). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1994. What Is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1991 as Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Minuit). Gallope, Michael. 2010. “The Sound of Repeating Life: Ethics and Metaphysics in Deleuze’s Philosophy of Music.” In Sounding the Virtual: Gilles Deleuze and the Theory and Philosophy of Music, edited by Brian Hulse and Nick Nesbitt, 77–103. Farnham, UK: Ashgate.

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Giudici, Paolo, and Andi Spicer, dirs. 2016. A Starling. YouTube video, 15:41, posted by “Andi Spicer,” 18 July 2016. Accessed 19 August 2020. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=QGouc9QQrUw. Guattari, Félix. 2011. The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in Schizoanalysis. Translated by Taylor Adkins. New York: Semiotext(e). First published 1979 as L’inconscient machinique: Essais de schizoanalyse (Paris: Recherches). Potts, Wayne K. 1984. “The Chorus-Line Hypothesis of Manoeuvre Coordination in Avian Flocks.” Nature 309 (5966): 344–45. Redner, Gregg. 2011. Deleuze and Film Music: Building a Methodological Bridge between Film Theory and Music. Bristol: Intellect. Vernon, Jim. 2014. “Deleuze on the Musical Work of Art.” In Intensities and Lines of Flight: Deleuze/Guattari and the Arts, edited by Antonio Calcagno, Jim Vernon, and Steve G. Lofts, 55–66. London: Rowman and Littlefield International. Zimmer, Carl. 2006. “Starlings’ Listening Skills May Shed Light on Language Evolution.” New York Times, 2 May. Accessed 19 August 2020. https://nytimes. com/2006/05/02/science/02song.html.

Part 2

Art

The Dance* José Gil NOVA University Lisbon, Portugal

1. Metastability and danced movement Dance aims to compose in a stable movement all the movements of the body that threaten to unbalance it. The body starts from a normal balance situation, standing or sitting, in motion or motionless. This situation implies movements and positions that result from what can be called an “infra-language”: the corporeal scheme induces directions in space that obey Cartesian coordinates, an orientation and a displacement that reduce the body itself to a material object. Setting in motion the sequences of positions of parts and of the whole body, the act of dancing gives up the balance of the body, creating metastable trajectories, that is, between the stability of the useful, normal body, and the instability that leads to chaos and the stopping of the movement. The metastable systems, according to Gilbert Simondon ([1954–58] 2013), are located on the edge of stable equilibrium. Dancing is moving in a metastable situation. It is a dynamic balance that only achieves stability through gaining a certain speed of movement. Unbalancing the infra-language, taking to the extreme the “natural movement,” “until making it artificial”—as the dance master to Louis XIV, Pierre Beauchamps (1631–1705), said (Bourcier 1978, 114)—penetrating the border zone of the metastable, this is the first principle of dance movement. Not by chance, dance in medieval Europe was close to acrobatics, both being exhibited at fairs. The bond that unites the acrobat and the dancer is metastability, with the difference that the former seeks to reach an end—acrobatics—while the dancer’s movement has no other purpose than the perpetuation of the movement itself. Matisse perfectly understood the relationship between metastability and danced movement. In his 1910 painting Dance,1 five dancers form a wheel that rotates at great speed and energy. Everyone is holding hands except for two figures in the foreground, who have unchained themselves and disconnected their hands, causing a female dancer to almost fall on her back. What the painter tells us is that danced movement exists only in precarious, unstable balance, always on the verge of collapsing. For there to be dance, the movement must circulate on the edge of the abyss. Suppose that the wheel had no flaws—the five dancers would seem to move in a stable system of balance, repetitive, obeying a pattern, * 1

Translated from the Portuguese by Paulo de Assis. The painting can be seen at https://www.hermitagemuseum.org/wps/portal/hermitage/digitalcollection/01.+Paintings/28411/?lng=.

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José Gil without life. What, in the frame, animates the movement is the failure in the chain, the constant possibility of the disruption, through speed, of the movement itself. Another trait stands out in Matisse’s picture, while a continuous and sliding movement runs through the entire wheel. The two dancers of the second plane, those facing the spectator, raise their right feet, marking a “position” or static “figure,” whereas the dancer on the far right, who raises his left leg, does not seem in tune with the other two. It is extraordinary that the gesture Matisse chose, among the thousands possible, repeats the matrix “form” that, in ancient Greece, provided the unitary measure of music and poetry. To quote Jerome Pollitt (1974, 138–39): Rhythmoi were originally the “positions” that the human body was supposed to assume in the course of the dance, that is, the patterns or schemata performed by the body. Throughout a dance, certain evident patterns or positions, such as lifting or lowering a foot, were naturally repeated, thus creating intervals in dance. Since the music and singing were synchronized with the dance, the recurring positions taken by the dancer in the course of his movements also marked distinct intervals in the music; the rhythmoi of the dancer thus became the rhythmoi of the music. This explains why the basic component of music and poetry was called pous, “foot” (Plato, Republic 400a [2004, 82]), or basis, “step” (Aristotle, Metaphysics 1087b37 [2016, 240]), and why, inside the foot, the basic elements were called arsis, “lift, stand up” and thesis, “land, foot down.”

For the Greeks, rhythm was the form of certain gestures that, condensing and concentrating the energy of the previous movements, projected that energy into the continuous current of the following movements. It is exactly what happens with the lifting and lowering of the feet that, seeming to mark a suspension of movement, soon imprints a renewed impulse. Therefore, rhythm as a finite “form” induces infinite movement, “combining the limited and the unlimited” (as Socrates says in Plato’s Philebus [see Phil. 25a–26d, Plato 1997, 412–15]). This property of rhythm comes from its intimate connection with metastability: on the edge between static and dynamic, between rest and movement, always beyond stability and always below instability, rhythm is really the form of the formless, the guarantee of the consistency of the multiplicities of movements that follow and overlap each other. We are assuming there are two types of movements, some form gestures with meaning—which derive from the body as infra-language, opening in space places and directions designated by verbal language—and others form gestures without meaning, minimal movements or micro-movements without which there would be no significant macro-movements. We can establish an analogy with the monemes and phonemes of articulated language: micro-movements correspond to phonemes and macro-movements to monemes. From the outset, a radical difference between the two systems shows the impossibility of forming a language with body gestures: the minimum movements, in gestures, are determined by vast movements, with meaning, and not inversely. When the knees are bent in the “squat” gesture, the movement of the whole causes

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The Dance micro-movements of the muscles, the skeleton, and so on. In verbal language, phonemes articulate to compose monemes—which is not the case with the minimal movements of the body, not least because they are infinite. And there is no double articulation, as in language, because it is not possible, neither on the micro plane nor on the macro plane, to isolate discrete movements, since body movements slide into one another, overlapping and mixing. Nevertheless, we attribute to the gestures of the body a linguistic expressiveness, in irrefutable analogy, it seems, with verbal language: we see gestures with meaning distinguish themselves from other gestures, we see the limbs unfold in a certain way to catch an object, to run, to jump, in such a way that these sequences of movements not only take the form of syntagmas, but even become assignable by propositions: for example, “he runs to grab the balloon.” Certain gestures imply other gestures that are, in turn, distinguished from other gestures, according to a kind of grammar of body movements: the minimal movements of “squatting” do not match those of “waving.” But from a certain configuration of the gesture, one enters a zone of indeterminacy: I do not know whether a man bending his knees is crouching or preparing to jump. All this results from the anatomico-physiological constitution of the human body, in which infra-language is rooted. And if the body does not constitute entirely an infra-language, at least the perception of certain of its movements seems to induce us to consider it so. The truth is that a double regime of movements intersects in the perception of the body: on one side, the macro-movements of useful gestures with meaning (resulting from infra-language) and, on the other, the micro-movements that are not perceived in the image of the other body but, rather, are felt in one’s own body. For example, I see the other’s body bending its knees and crouching down. How do I know that bending one’s knees implies the gesture of squatting and not crouching or kneeling? “From the outside,” my gaze does not distinguish well the gesture of “squatting” (the macro-movements also belong to the vector space of “kneeling,” of “anchoring oneself ”); however, at the level of micro-movements, sensed “inside,” through kinaesthetic sensations, I can differentiate each sequence of gestures. (This is why “sign language” is not a language: the general level of meaning is never achieved by a gesture because it only stands out from the set of related gestures when it is singularised thanks to the sensations “inside,” to the minimum movements). The perception of macro movements, with meaning, then stems from my internalisation of the point of view of the other and from it crossing with the point of view of my kinaesthetic and proprioceptive sensations (these are projected in the image of the other in me). When I see someone bending her knees to squat, I know that she is crouching down because that’s what I do (macro gesture); I simulate in my own body the sensation the other body is feeling, and from this simulation I receive sensations that refer back to the first image. To put it another way, the image of the whole of the gestural sequence— because a local gesture implies the whole body—is projected into the sensations of the micro-movements: first the sequence is projected and then, the whole body follows virtually. When the knees are bent, the movement of the

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José Gil legs seen from the outside (but internalised) is projected in the corresponding kinaesthetic sensations. The rotation of the tibia and femur are felt only through this projection (which includes, abstractly or virtually, the entire body, with the feet, the torso, and the mass, weight, and balance of the body). The feeling does not induce a pure internal image but corresponds to the position of a whole that projects itself in the kinaesthetic sensation. If I say, then, that “I have bent my knees,” I have crossed two points of view, one internal and the other external. In perceiving the movement of the other, like in the self-perception I have of my own movements, totalities are formed: sets of concrete movements paradoxically closed, that is, complete, to the extent that I see a sensitive image given, and incomplete, unfinished movements; thus, I assume in what I see a multitude of movements not given, virtual, more or less invisible. The perception of the body of the other is, in general, more defined in macro gestures than that of the image of my body, which is more accurate in micro-movements, accompanied by sensations. This double set characterises the nature of totality: if, on the one hand, it tends to close, on the other, the force of the micromovements always keeps it open. In fact, the totality of the movements inexorably escapes the will to close it: it is a fugitive totality. It already manifests itself in the image I have of my body, incomplete, partially sensitive, visible, perceived, and partially hidden, but present, invisible or imprecise. The whole of this mixture of virtual and actual forms a paradoxical totality, because it is unified and yet escapes closure in multiple ways. “In multiple ways”: what escapes from this strange totality is not an image of my body, to which I am unable to give visible and defined contours, it is a multiplicity of virtual “images” that it is possible to update in each concrete sensory-motor situation, because in every situation I have the feeling of the whole of my body. I cannot say, like Kant, that it is a “scheme” capable of offering me a sensitive image of a concept (here, of the “body”), because the problem is not to find an image for a concept, but to form, in each case, the feeling of having a body (fragmented) even though endless images of it and its parts escape me. That is, at the intersection of the point of view of the other that I internalise and my own kinaesthetic sensations, a kind of image of my body emerges that has no figure or contours except as a sensation. Between the sensation and the image, less than the image and more than the sensation, there is not an image of movement, but a movement that does not belong exclusively to me (sensations) or the other (image), but to both simultaneously in me. It is the movement of virtual singular sensations, something like a “scheme” of movement that would multiply infinitely. In fact, it is necessary that this non-moving image, which makes possible all concrete images of the movement of the body, forms an infinite virtual multiplicity so that one can have, in any situation or singular movement, the feeling of a single body. This ghost image allows, in each case, the virtual movement to trace the actual, concrete movement of the body and its members. Note that the action of the scheme diverges according to the regime of movement followed by the body. If the body travels through the space to impinge it with a pragmatic rationality, it is as an infra-language that offers language the

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The Dance means of capturing the body, because it exposes the singularity of the body’s movement to the manipulation of the generalising word. Moreover, the action of the scheme allows the discontinuous chain of macro gestures to grasp and treat the continuum of space, offering the pre-discrete tracing and separator of the infra-language to the language. Language can then fragment space without breaking it, that is, without losing meaning through verbal movement. The regime of the danced movement is different. While infra-language brings verbal language to the body, moulding it, composing a finite variety of useful and expectable movement, the metastability of dance opens the totality to a multitude of assigning micro-movements. These push the system into imbalance, and imbalance raises the proliferation of minimal movements, counteracting the trend towards the stability of the closed macro totality. Therefore, the spectator of dance (especially modern, but also ancient) is always seeing meanings that are born in the midst of movements that mean nothing, and that die with the eruption of sequences without verbal meaning (but which may correspond to “affections of vitality,” as shown by Daniel Stern [(1985) 2018, 53–61]). Marcel Duchamp’s painting Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, from 1912,2 gives a profound view of the complexity of corporeal movement. Though Duchamp was inspired by Marey’s and Muybridge’s chronophotographs, there is an obvious difference: while the photographers’ images presented series of separated bodies in successive positions, the painter’s nude shows a single image containing multiple sketched positions, glued to one another, of the same body. No clear contours, or limbs, legs, and arms, well situated and distinct, are distinguished. Only the last sketch, at the end of the ladder, shows the figure of a head, a torso, an arm, hips, and one (or two) leg(s). We would say that the total image, made of visible parts viewed from the side and “at three quarters,” of a single body going down a staircase, consists of a multiplicity of other hidden parts, absent, but virtually present. And, inside the contour, other multiplicities of minimal movements, suggested movements of bent knees, of pelvis, of shoulders, of arms, combine in infinite virtual sets—which contributes decisively to the impression of movement: movement is there, but beyond the visible. It is, of course, a fugitive totality, closed and open at the same time. Interestingly, a double kinetic regime commands the movement of the body: one, proper to the infra-language, crosses the canvas from top to bottom, in two convergent diagonals that mark the direction of the body going down the stairs. The other, made of micromovements, is distributed by the total staining of the body and seems to go in several directions: the micromovements are delayed, advanced, overlap, rotate on themselves, fall, precipitate, hold back. They are and they are not within a Euclidean three-dimensional space. Like the successive positions of the whole body, the multiplicities of minimal movements are all co-present in the image of the painting. What Duchamp tells us is that each point of body movement brings with it the previous movements it 2 The painting can be seen at https://philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/51449.html.

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José Gil recalls and the later movements it announces. This also contributes to making the perception of the corporeal movement a fugitive totality. In fact, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 describes almost a danced choreography. On the one hand, we see a mixture of macro- and micromovements as a general movement with a direction, that of going down the stairs. On the other hand, we see how an undefined figure seeks to balance itself by performing a certain downward movement: the first body leans forward to compensate for the contrary impulse that the stairs cause on the legs, and the last figure leans backwards to counterbalance the inertia of all the movement that tends to project the body forward. The two positions, of contrary vectors, indicate two orientations marked by micromovements and the global sketches of the bodies. Between the “forward” contours and the “backwards” contours, lies the axis of balance, which the painter pointed out with dotted semicircles. In fact, more than the representation of a single axis in a single equilibrium situation, these are variable positions of an axis that appears to be the spine and the femur below it. The nude going down the stairs must deal with multiple equilibrium situations. Paradoxically, this painting presents a body in metastable equilibrium that tends towards immobility—a kind of dance that a body in usual movement rehearses until it restores the macro balance of the immovable position (as is clearly shown in the last position, which immobilises the entire weight of the tendential fall forward). It is not dance, they are almost-danced movements necessary to the action of going down the stairs, but they end up providing metastable balance to the stable equilibrium of normal gait. Duchamp’s painting aims, after all, at establishing a balanced tension between two balances, the metastable and the stable, or between the body walking on flat ground and the body forced to move down stairs. That is how Gerhard Richter understood it, taking up Duchamp’s theme in the 1960s. In Woman Descending the Staircase, from 1965,3 the equilibrium situation is established between the woman’s body and dress and the series of stair treads. This series goes “down” and the woman, slightly tilted back, at the bottom of the stairs, locks the downward movement. While in Duchamp’s painting the steps of the staircase remain almost imperceptible to the viewer, appearing only in the background, faded in the corners of the canvas, in Richter’s image the staircase acquires central relevance. Its steps respond to the reflections of light and shadow of the woman’s dress, as if to show that the body drags with it all the bodies, all the balances, that were necessary to reach the end of the descent. The blurring of the image, characteristic of Richter, is equivalent to Duchamp’s overlapping bodies. Ema (Nude on a Staircase), from 1966,4 goes even further in the media economy. Blurring the entire image, the stairs and the body, the contrast between the two balances is concentrated between the opposition between a single, verti3 The painting can be seen at https://www.artic.edu/artworks/147003/woman-descending-thestaircase-frau-die-treppe-herabgehend. 4 The painting can be seen at https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/art/paintings/photo-paintings/ nudes-16/ema-nude-on-a-staircase-5778.

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The Dance cal body and the staircase seen from the front, extending upwards, indefinitely endless. There are multiple oppositions of balance: metastability now comes from the series of steps behind the woman, and stability is embodied in the naked body, front, vertical, without any inclination; the obscurity of the stairs and clarity of nudity, the multiplicity of steps and oneness of the body. Here too, as in Duchamp, the painter seeks a tense, metastable balance between the stability of the human figure and the metastability of the infinite micromovements of the staircase. The metastable balance in dance modifies the state of the body and consciousness. In acrobatics, gymnastics, or athletics, metastability is transient because it is at the service of a goal. In dance, without pre-established goals or durations, the movement is, in principle, endless. That is why it derives from an internal impulse, with no external cause. But to dance, it is not enough to create a metastable balance, it is necessary that the dancer let her- or himself be carried away by the dance (so that the body, with its weight, its volume, and its limited agility does not constitute an obstacle to movement). To allow oneself to be carried away means to lose one’s spatial coordinates of reference (of the infra-language), “to inebriate” oneself in space, to stop inhabiting the three Euclidean dimensions of gait and common movements. Dancing, the body can extend itself to two, three, or four dimensions at the same time. The paradoxical body wakes up, activates itself, and opens up itself in various directions. Space and body enter an osmotic relation: space becomes material and corporeal; the body becomes spatial and immaterial. When the dancer turns on her- or himself, the blind spots on the dancer’s surface disappear, the body no longer has a back, there is no longer “behind” or “ahead.” Spatial references are confused and have evaporated, the dimensions of the body’s space dissolve, one’s own identity (corporeal and psychic) fades, seeping through the median axis, becoming a vector and arrow. As pushed by a propeller, the wire body flees upwards. What happens? For viewers, a kind of cylindrical mass now offers itself to their perception. A whole well situated and well delimited in space (topological), closed on itself, with a rotating speed that concentrates it in itself. The movement is paradoxical: the faster it gets, the closer it gets to visual immobility. However, the very perception of the whole is paradoxical: there is a totality with the visible contour of the whole, and yet its parts, its organs, its details are not distinguishable. It launches up and disappears into space (extending into invisible virtual space). The dancer who turns on her- or himself at high speed composes a fugitive totality. Having the perception of a fugitive totality or living as a fugitive totality—as the dancer does—means that one entered a particular state in which the rationality of the consciousness of the body has crumbled. And that one is about to move on to other kinds of dimensions. Modern dance, like modern art in general, follows an aesthetic of difference. It is therefore normal that it insists more on the discontinuities and ruptures of the chain of movement than on its continuous and harmonious figuration. Nevertheless, in the choreographies of ballet and classical dances that aim to present large ballet companies in perfect movement, it is possible to discover

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José Gil discontinuities and failures, or imminences of slips, breaks, and deviations. It is the very nature of the movement that implies this double tendency (continuity and rupture). In particular, in the danced movement, this tendency reveals the difference between the total movement that transcends the dancers and the movements they perform individually. There is no dance without dancers who strive to move, and there are no dancers without the general movement of dance, which surpasses each of the individual gestures. The dance does not result from the sum of the individual movements of the dancers, who do not dance without “entering the dance” that leads them all to a virtual totality. After all, the aim is to form fugitive totalities in maximum adequacy (differential or by similarity) with limited sets of actual movements. The paradox is that the individual gesture only becomes “danced” when it is inserted in the general movement. Even in a solo, the dancer dances with a multiplicity of virtual dancers: each gesture supposes one or more bodies with which she or he connects. Finally, the oneness of the dancer’s body that rotates over itself tends to show that it can be a multiplicity, because the body that the viewer sees multiplies, almost hallucinatorily, spinning before his or her eyes.

2. Assemblage [agencement]: a brief note on the concept If dance weaves a continuity between discontinuous sequences of movements, how does continuous movement take shape? By the assemblage [agenciamento]5 of heterogeneous sequences. It is in the contact between two different gestures that energy flows, changing its regime of intensity without losing strength. One kind of energy is passed on to another without homogenising them, preserving, or even accentuating their heterogeneity. Because the movement in metastability is not linear, but shaky and trembling, the assemblage between two sequences is not limited to a simple connection or mechanical articulation of planes of certain dimensions (2, 3, or n dimensions). The concept of assemblage is directly linked to that of the rhizome and the multiplicity of heterogeneous components. In A Thousand Plateaus, in which the concept is largely explained, Deleuze and Guattari show how rhizomatic totalities are radically distinguished from “unifying totalities.” For example, according to the “principle . . . of connection and heterogeneity” that governs the dynamics of the rhizome, “any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 7). This means that the connections and agencies [agencements] of a multiplicity of writing traits (of a novelist, for example) must be linked to other-natured, biological, political, and economic traits. It is not a method of “multidisciplinary” or “holistic” interpretation, but an assemblage of the very thing, of writing not only as a semiotic code but also as a “state of affairs,” reality. If we want to seek a foun5 Translator’s note: translating the word agenciamento from Portuguese to English poses exactly the same problems as translating the French agencement to English. In keeping with the topic of this book, in most cases, I translated the word as “assemblage,” and when it is verbalised as “assembling.” Whenever there could be double readings, I added “agencement” in square brackets.

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The Dance dation for this principle of organisation of the rhizome, it is in the immanence of culture and nature that we will find it. It is the very texture of the fragment or element of multiplicity that requires it. The fragment is not a well-adjusted piece, with polished contours, of a unitary set, but a free and wild piece that connects not in a “harmonious” way (Deleuze and Guattari [1977] 1983, 42), but with “unmatched edges violently bent out of shape, forcibly made to fit together, to interlock, with a number of pieces always left over” (43). The nature of the fragment decides the dynamics of rhizomatic totality and of the movement of its becomings. Heterogeneity is not only the case of multiplicity and its elements, but also of the “traces of expression” within a territory. Resuming the analyses of the ritornello in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari develop, in What Is Philosophy?, a conception of art and nature that gives an accurate idea of the bond that unites one heterogeneous element with another. Nature is described as “melodic, polyphonic, and contrapuntal” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 185). The model is musical: between two heterogeneous elements, between the wasp and the orchid, between the tick and the mammal on which it falls, a relationship of counterpoint is established that extends like a natural continuum. “There is counterpoint whenever a melody arises as a ‘motif ’ within another melody, as in the marriage of bumblebee and snapdragon” (ibid.). Thus, a plan of free circulation of heterogeneous elements is formed, whose mechanism turns sometimes to stratification, sometimes to deterritorialisation: “The orchid deterritorializes [itself ] by forming an image, a tracing of a wasp; but the wasp reterritorializes on that image. The wasp is nevertheless deterritorialized, becoming a piece in the orchid’s reproductive apparatus. But it reterritorializes the orchid by transporting its pollen. Wasp and orchid, as heterogeneous elements, form a rhizome” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 10). They do not imitate each other. In fact, it is a circulation of intensities between heterogeneous elements that makes them mix with each other, translating them and leading them to a becoming. One must describe the bond that unites one heterogeneous element to another as being in a logic of perpetual becoming. It is “a veritable becoming, a becoming-wasp of the orchid and a becoming-orchid of the wasp. Each of these becomings brings about the deterritorialization of one term and the reterritorialization of the other; the two becomings interlink and form relays in a circulation of intensities pushing the deterritorialization ever further” (ibid.). What causes a heterogeneous element to mix with another, transforming it? What contrapuntal assemblage makes them become something else? Pure intensities, that is, forces. In nature as in art, the line of the becomings follows a plan of symphonic composition: “This is because the territory does not merely isolate and join but opens onto cosmic forces that arise from within or come from outside. . . . [It is a] plane of composition . . . [that] supports the force of light, which can attract the insect to the end of a branch to a sufficient height, and the force of weight with which it lets itself fall onto the passing mammal. . . . [And] sometimes [the] forces blend into one another in subtle transitions, decompose hardly glimpsed; and sometimes they alternate or conflict with one another” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 185–86). It goes from microsensation to

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José Gil the universe, in a vast plan of composition that assembles one heterogeneity to another, one becoming to another, up until the cosmic level. Everywhere, in this immense movement of transformation, there are forces that assemble the elements, so that the contrapuntal melody composes a continuum of intensities and matters. A composition assembling heterogeneous elements opens infinitely, always returning to itself. It is the movement of immanence: the counterpoint that goes back and forth from the wasp to the orchid involves one and the other, like two sides of the same coin. The composition combines the elements and their multiplicities by brokering them in such a way that their different materials and dimensions converge on the same plane, which should be called a plane of immanence. How do multiplicities work? Their forces are translated into one another, each totality enters into symbiosis with the others, its dimensions are chained together, the “pack of wolves . . . becomes a swarm of bees, and a field of anuses, and a collection of small holes and tiny ulcerations,” as in the case of Freud’s Wolf-Man, commented Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 249). Each multiplicity is a multiplicity of symbiosis and becoming, a diversity in constant movement, in intensive transit. From multiplicity to multiplicity, assemblages follow each other in linear series. The movement maps a continuous line—a “line of edge” or contour—that describes the transformations of the multiplicities’ becomings. This is how a continuum of multiplicity in becoming is weaved together. Each row of contours forms a “fiber” and “every fiber is a Universe fiber” because each transformation of a multiplicity contains all other transformations, thanks to the immanence of the plane in which it operates (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 249). “Far from reducing the multiplicities’ number of dimensions to two, the plane of consistency [as a plane of immanence of all immanence planes] cuts across them all, intersects them in order to bring into coexistence any number of multiplicities, with any number of dimensions” (251). The whole universe is but a huge construction of multiplicities that are assembled and that transform themselves, from sensations to cosmic movements. The universe is the “Mechanosphere” (514).

3. The body in Marlene Monteiro Freitas’s Bacantes Let’s see how the dancer and choreographer Marlene Monteiro Freitas proceeds in the choreography of Bacantes: Prelude to a Purge (2017), a piece that operates multiple different elements in a powerful movement of life.6 Monteiro Freitas builds an original machine that allows her to operate with an unlimited number of assemblages. This machine is the body. It is a machine full of life, to the point that it can pass, without ruptures of mechanical movement, to the movement of a dancer (which only a human body can perform). The machine itself is a mixture of puppet, robot, and body. That is, the machine results from a series of assemblages, consists solely of assemblages, and assembles in all dir6 See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dp3D2S2H_dU.

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The Dance ections (sonic, gestural, rhythmic). It opens “his” eyes (man), it turns his head mechanically (robot), it oscillates in gestures and marching (puppet). This type of body is constantly in an imbalance that recovers, performing its movements always in metastable balance. How can this way of walking be characterised? The movements are those of cartoon dolls that advance cautiously with great strides so as not to make noise, and to escape unnoticed. Marlene Monteiro Freitas takes these dolls, exaggerates their movements, contaminating the whole body, and rhythmises it by moving the neck and head in correspondence with the legs, in the manner of an animal, such as a horse or a bird. Through this rhythmical gait, one enters a becoming-animal that evokes certain movements of an unspecified animal. It is necessary that it be an animal of a vague species but with precise movements because this builds a fugitive totality, open to other possibilities of becoming, that is, to assemblages of other heterogeneous totalities. That is what happens in Bacantes.

Figure 10.1.

What is an assemblage? A machine of energy translation, inside another machine (in Bacantes, the “fragment”). The assemblage translates by making energy flow, modulating and transforming it. Two requirements are crucial: that the assemblage’s own gear fosters the energy, not hindering it but reinforcing its flow, that is, that the assemblage produces energy; and that it also functions as the operator of the translation. In dance, metastability provides the best conditions for these requirements to be met. The balance thus obtained makes vibrate the media through which the energy flows: the musical instruments, the oscillations of the bodies, of the voices, of the eyes, the mouth, the relationship of the bodies with the objects and the bodies among themselves, and the music, objects, and bodies. Each sequence of Monteiro Freitas’s movements presents a vibrant set of multiple unstable assemblages; the whole moves in a

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Figure 10.1. Marlene Monteiro Freitas, Bacantes. Photo: Laurent Philippe.

José Gil dancing balance that is on the verge of collapsing. Of course, all this movement stems from the micromovements that shake the bodies. They are the ones that cause the metastability and the continuous variation to which the assemblages give energy: by giving pulsing discontinuities to the energy, boosting it, and by varying it, they translate it. The assemblage combines a fragment, a snip, with other fragments and snips helping their creation. That is, an assemblage involves two sides, two gears that are brokered to form a machine for the production and translation of energy—it is a machine inside machines. Examples of assemblages in Bacantes include the following: When the intensity is low and near the zero point, the music shatters, it is broken, destructured, it decomposes itself, dissonances appear, cacophonies and fragmented sounds arise. Intensification creates bonds and nexuses, the deintensification unmakes them. From there, one can start from scratch, that is, from chaos: the machine assembles through disassembling. Another type is the combination of musical rhythm with gestures, screams, phrases, and facial mini-expressions in motion. Each of these levels is brokered with the others (it is what Deleuze and Guattari [1987, 312 and passim] call intra-assemblages). A sequence of one movement makes all these elements vibrate in a continuum and combines with another sequence as fugitive totality(ies). Rhythm builds the plane in which the choreography develops, and the sequences follow one another. The result is a great struggle for breath (as seen at the end of the rhythm of Ravel’s Bolero that sums up the entire Bacantes).

Figure 10.2.

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Figure 10.2. Marlene Monteiro Freitas, Bacantes, entry of Marlene.

The Dance A characteristic feature of the bodies that dance in Bacantes is that their parts can be connected in multiple ways, making even the human body unrecognisable. That is, the device makes possible a multiple becoming: becominganimal, becoming-robot, becoming-mother. As Deleuze and Guattari showed, art invests a territory. Each type of dance evolves in its own territory that assembles movements, music, subjectivities. Monteiro Freitas obtains an extreme deterritorialisation, through this poly-hybrid body, composed of assemblages [agencies]. Right at the start, the bent body of a dancer enters the stage marching fourlegged like an animal, with her buttocks and sex facing the audience, her head wrapped in a wig. This bizarre “face” speaks, screaming, into a microphone that a hand puts before her sex. The vagina speaks; she has always been silenced. The rest of the body hides behind this head. What body is this? Not that of a freak, which would be a deviation from normality, but another autonomous and self-sufficient body, a female body like never previously seen, which stirs and vociferously shouts before us, towards us, against us. This body that dances is in a world that subverts ours. It assembles the buttocks with the gait and the hammering on the bench, with the speech, the music, the surface of the face, the sex, and the microphone. And this network of agencies deterritorialises the body of the dancer and announces a new territory. This body of assemblages is ready to connect with multiple heterogeneous elements (machines, appendages, other bodies). Marlene Monteiro Freitas’s body produces sound, colour, movement, rhythm, and connections with all kinds of objects. At the same time, it is the great deterritorialising machine of Bacantes: it extracts melodies and musical sequences from various territories (reggae, bossa nova, popular dance, Satie, Ravel, etc.) but also includes dance gestures and banal activities to form a new world. It deterritorialises the music, territorialising it in a more “abstract” rhythm. And at the end of it all, Ravel’s ritornello from the Bolero involves all the rhythms, all the gestures, all the bodies in a great cosmic vibration of sound.

Figure 10.3.

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Figure 10.3. Marlene Monteiro Freitas, Bacantes, Tutti with music stands. Photo: Laurent Philippe.

José Gil That body-head-sex from the beginning seems to usher in a new way of decoding body movements—in relation to the numerous attempts to do so that guide the history of modern and contemporary dance. Monteiro Freitas builds a body that invests and denies the classic model of the body, which has been understood as one’s “own” body, which is autonomous and the receptacle of an “I.” The dancers’ bodies, always connected to appendages (tubes, sticks, horns, prostheses), do not end up in the bodies’ contours; they march and dance without functional intentions, motivated only by impersonal impulses. They move like animated machines, ready to transform, ready to stutter, to scream, to become puppets or classical dancers. They can even give birth, as humans do. The agencies of these bodies deterritorialise multiple ritornellos and multiple dances. The new land that Marlene Monteiro Freitas proposes does not yet have a territory. All that is known is that it assembles the deterritorialised body with rhythm, with the animal, machines, and the cosmos (vibrations of sounds, colours, light, and the gaze). References Aristotle. 2016. Metaphysics. Translated by C. D. C. Reeve. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Bourcier, Paul. 1978. Histoire de la danse en occident. Paris: Seuil. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. (1977) 1983. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1972 as Capitalisme et schizophrénie: L’anti-Œdipe (Paris: Minuit). Translation first published 1977 (New York: Viking Press). ———. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1994. What Is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1991 as Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Minuit).

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Plato. 1997. Philebus. Translated by Dorothea Frede. In Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper with D. S. Hutchinson, 398–56. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. ———. 2004. Republic. Translated by C. D. C. Reeve. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Pollitt, Jerome Jordan. 1974. The Ancient View of Greek Art: Criticism, History, and Terminology. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Simondon, Gilbert. (1954–58) 2013. L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information [Individuation in light of the notions of form and information]. Grenoble: Jérôme Millon. Contains texts written 1954–58. This collection first published 2005 (Grenoble: Jérôme Millon). Stern, Daniel N. (1985) 2018. The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. First published 1985 (London: Karnac Books).

Kinaesthetics From Assemblages to Fields of Circulation Thomas Nail University of Denver, United States

The concept of assemblage is one of the most fundamental ideas in Deleuze and Guattari’s writing. It has an extraordinarily broad scope of application across many scales of reality and offers us a genuinely better way of seeing the world’s nested organisational structure. In this chapter, however, I would like to address some of its limitations and offer a slightly different way of building upon its critical insights from a more movement-oriented perspective. I would like to think about assemblages much more kinetically. Instead of the “fragments,” “divergences,” and “singularities” that define the assemblage, according to Deleuze and Guattari, I would like to think about the flows, folds, and patterns that move through works of art. As a concrete example, I show how the fascinating work of Morgan O’Hara and Tara Donavan, among others, is better understood from a kinetic perspective than an assemblage one. In the early twenty-first century, every primary domain of activity, from nature and society to the arts and sciences, has become increasingly defined by patterns of motion that precede and exceed human agency. We can no longer continue with the same old theoretical tools under these circumstances. The humanities need new tools that no longer start and end with humans and human systems (language, society, culture, the unconscious, and so on). More than ever, it is apparent that humans are not the only agents on this planet. Humans and their structures are shot-through and exceeded by material processes and patterns that are more primary. These processes and patterns are part of much larger meta-stable patterns of motion. Materials, both living and non-living (geological, geographical, literary, sonic, climatological, biological, technological, and so on), are not passive objects of social construction. Humans and non-human beings are two dimensions or regions of the same systems of collective agency or patterns of motion. Studying these patterns does not mean that we should abandon the study of human agency and structures, far from it. The challenge of what is now called posthumanism or new materialism, of which I see my work as part, is to provide a new theoretical framework to help us think through the entangled continuity of human and non-human agencies that now confront us. 179

Thomas Nail The natural sciences have mainly treated these structures as independent objects of subjective knowledge. The sciences often fail to attend to the active role that matter has played in the shaping of scientific knowledge itself (for a full critique, see Barad 2007). The sciences, just as much as the humanities, require a new theoretical foundation that takes seriously the collective agency of humans and non-human systems as dimensions of something else—assemblages, or what I call kinetic systems. The anthropocentric project has come to an end (see Braidotti 2012). We have crossed the threshold of a new Copernican revolution. My chapter’s contribution to this larger project is to show some of the aesthetic consequences of this new posthumanism (for deeper considerations on this topic, see Nail 2018). In so doing, I hope to bring the theoretical humanities closer to a more posthuman and movement-oriented perspective. The chapter proceeds in three parts. Part one motivates the recent shift in the theoretical humanities away from thinking about anthropocentric systems. I begin with Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of assemblages. Part two then defines and argues for a shift toward a movement-oriented perspective for thinking about art and aesthetics in particular. Part three provides a concrete example of how this new perspective helps us think about a couple of specific works of art.

Part 1. From human to posthuman systems My aim in focusing on patterns of circulation or systems of motion is to contribute to posthumanism and new materialism. Both take the agency and creativity of non-human matters seriously. My kinetic new materialism aims not to strip agency from humans but instead to locate it within broader patterns of collective movement in which humans are part. Movement is something that all matter does. Instead of beginning our studies with language, consciousness, power, or even life, I argue that starting with motion provides a shared materialist basis for posthuman systems analysis. Assemblage Perhaps one of the most important precursors to the study of posthuman systems and agencies is the concept of agencement, developed by Deleuze and Guattari and translated into English as “assemblage.” The French word agencement comes from the verb agencer, “to arrange, to layout, to piece together.” The noun agencement thus means “a construction, an arrangement, or a layout,” in contrast to the English word assemblage, meaning “the joining or union of two things.” Noting this difference, I will continue to use the English term “assemblage” but with the original French meaning. Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the assemblage makes three significant contributions to any future posthuman system theories.

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Kinaesthetics Heterogenesis The first significant contribution is that it provides an alternative to the theory of unities. The concept of organic unity is the linchpin of anthropocentrism and “closed systems.” If we treat humans as closed unities whose external influences can be theoretically separated from their internal systems, then we risk ignoring the agency of the rest of the world. This method treats humans as separate from nature. Unity is the intrinsic relation that various parts have to one another as a whole. A unity is an organic whole whose parts all work together like the organs of the human body. Each organ performs a function in the service of reproducing its relations with the other parts and, ultimately, the harmony of the whole organism. A heart separated from a body does not survive as a “heart.” This is because the function of a heart is to circulate blood through a body. Similarly, the organism does not survive without a heart since it is the nature of the organism to have a heart. The unity of an organic system occurs in advance of the emergence of its parts. It subordinates the elements to an organising principle or spirit. Unities can develop themselves, but they never change the whole of what they are. We cannot alter unities without destroying them in the process. On the other hand, when parts subsist independently from their internal relations within a unity, they cease to be unities and become mechanisms defined only by external relations. As Hegel writes ([1969] 1999, 71), “This is what constitutes the character of mechanism, namely, that whatever relation obtains between the things combined, this relation is extraneous to them that does not concern their nature at all, and even if it is accompanied by a semblance of unity it remains nothing more than composition, mixture, aggregation, and the like.” In contrast to organically unified systems, assemblages are more like machines, defined solely by their external relations of composition, mixture, and aggregation. In other words, an assemblage is a multiplicity, neither a part nor a whole. If the elements of an assemblage are defined only by their external relations, then they can be added, subtracted, and recombined with one another ad infinitum without ever creating or destroying an organic unity. This is what Deleuze and Guattari (1994) paradoxically call a “fragmentary whole” (16). The elements of the assemblage are “not pieces of a jigsaw puzzle” (35) they say, but like a “dry-stone wall, and everything holds together only along diverging lines” (23). Each new mixture produces a new kind of assemblage, always free to recombine again and change its nature. Thus, as Deleuze says, “in a multiplicity what counts are not the terms or the elements, but what there is ‘between,’ the between, a set of relations which are not separable from each other” (Deleuze 2007b, viii). The assemblage is an alterable set of relations between fragments. These relations are what Deleuze calls “singularities.” “The system,” Deleuze says, “must not only be in perpetual heterogeneity, it must also be a heterogenesis” (2007a, 361, italics original). Humans and human systems, for Deleuze, are not discrete unities cut off from the influence and agencies of the material world.

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Thomas Nail Event The assemblage’s second significant contribution to posthuman systems is that it provides an alternative to the logic of essences. The essence of a thing is what uniquely and necessarily defines it, in other words, what it is about a thing that makes it what it is such that it is not something else, that endures despite all its unessential aspects. If all things have essences it is then possible to organise all beings according to how faithfully each being actualises its essence in the world. In the Western great chain of being, God realises his essence most completely, then men, then women, then animals, and at the bottom, matter. Due to its mobility and mutability, matter largely fails to stay true to any single essence in the same way that higher forms retain their shape. To the degree, then, that humans and animals fail to realise their true essence, it is the fault of the materiality. The problem with the idea of essences is that it requires us to assume the existence of essences before the process that produced them. Essences are merely assumed to exist a priori. In other words, essences identify the enduring features of a thing through history and then retroactively posit them as unchanging and eternal features that pre-existed the thing. In contrast to this, Deleuze and Guattari do not ask, “What is . . . ?” but rather how? where? when? from what viewpoint? and so on. These are not questions of essence, but questions of events. An assemblage does not have an essence because it has no eternally necessary defining features, only contingent, and singular characteristics. If we want to know what something is, we cannot presume that what we see is the final product or that it is somehow independent of the network of social and historical processes to which it is connected. Systems are relational. For example, we cannot extract the being of a book from its vast historical conditions, such as the invention of an alphabetic language, the distribution of paper, the invention of the printing press, and literacy. We have to include all the social contingencies that made our inquiry possible, including all the book’s singular features (colour, lighting, time of day, etc.). A vast network of processes continues to shape the book, and thus there is no final product. We do not know what the book might become or what relations it may enter into, so we do not yet know its universal or essential features. We know only its collection of contingent features at a certain point in its incomplete process. As Deleuze says, “If one insists, the word ‘essence’ might be preserved, but only on condition of saying that the essence is precisely accident, the event” (1994, 191). Collective agency The assemblage’s third significant contribution to posthuman systems is that it provides an alternative to anthropocentric theories of agency in which only the human acts. The idea that only humans have free action is ancient but lies at the heart of humanism. Human agency is linked not only to the unity of the human subject but also to the essence of the human being, distinct from others, having free conscious action. Anthropocentrism has tied agency to freedom, and free-

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Kinaesthetics dom to consciousness, which is possessed only by humans. Anthropocentrism has used this theory as a weapon to subordinate the actions of all beings without consciousness. Humans act freely, but animals, plants, and minerals work by necessity. Non-humans move, but this movement is not genuinely free or agential. A contemporary version of this persists in various structuralisms and post-structuralisms grounded in collective human agency. In contrast, Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of the assemblage offers a truly posthuman theory of collective agency. There are geological, biological, and technological assemblages just as there are political, literary, and musical ones. They all mix freely, collectively transforming one another. Metal, for example, has a geological and material agency that humans follow into the earth, and that changes them collectively: metallurgy. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) thus describe “the immanent power of corporeality in all matter,” “a material vitalism” (411). “Because metal is the pure productivity of matter, those who follow metal are producers of objects par excellence . . . metallurgists have relations with ‘the others,’ those of the soil, land, and sky” (412). Metal liberates itself from mines using humans and has particular agencies that allow it to take on many hardened forms: weapons, armour, housemounted weapon assemblages, and so on. Humans and their social structures are the way they are partly because of their particular location near metal mines, their relations with metallurgists, and whether they are wealthy or poor, powerful and weak. The human-metal assemblage is a collective one in which humans act through metal and metal acts through humans. These are the three significant contributions of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of assemblage to posthuman systems theories. They are the beginning from which posthumanism emerged from poststructuralist theories of language, power, economy, and the unconscious. However, there is much work yet to do, and new moves still to make beyond Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of assemblages.1 My unique contribution to this growing tradition is to focus on systems or patterns of motion and mobility. In particular, I would like to argue in this chapter that such a movement-oriented approach allows us to see something fundamental about art and aesthetics.

Part 2. Kinetic systems Within the thriving posthuman systems tradition, one way of thinking about systems is by looking at their motion—what I call “kinetic systems” or kinetic structures. A kinetic system is different from the “structures” found in both structuralism and post-structuralism. A kinetic system is not an anthropocentric structure that explains all the others (power, language, economics, the unconscious, and so on). Nor is it a single total structure with no “outside” to it, or even some combination of such structures like various Freudo-Marxist (post) 1 For example, much important work has been done by Rosi Braidotti (1994) and Patricia MacCormack (2012).

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Thomas Nail structuralist positions. Kinetic structures are not anthropocentric because what is in motion are matters both human and non-human with their kinetic agency. Since all matter is in motion, the study of kinetic systems or structures allows us to look at both. Kinetic structures are not reductive or total because what is primary is not the kinetic structure itself but the flows of matter that compose, decompose, and recompose the emergent patterns. Kinetic systems theory is thus both inspired by and distinct from new materialist vitalism and Deleuzian nomadism.2 Kinetic systems are distinct from “vitalist new materialisms” in which the motion and activity of matter is explained by recourse to something else: ontologically “vital powers” or “forces” of the Spinozist or Deleuzian variety (see Bennett 2010; Connolly 2013; Coole and Frost 2010). Kinetic systems are also distinct from the Deleuzian theory of nomadism, defined by the “immobility” of speed and the “motionless voyage” of the nomad.3 Kinetic systems theory is not a theory of powers, forces, or immobile speeds, but empirically and historically emergent patterns of motion.4 The study of kinetic systems is thus not an ontology of becoming. It is a practical and historical study situated in the present. Like the owl of Minerva, theoretical practice flies at dusk after the day is done, and looks back on its immanent conditions. However, once it has seen the practical and historical conditions of its own appearance, it then descriptively transforms them, not from nowhere, but precisely from the very point from which it is at: the present. Theoretical description is thus always backward-looking, like Walter Benjamin’s kinetic reading of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus (1920). The angel of history theoretically faces the past but is continually and blindly propelled forward into the future. As Marx writes of his method in the “Postface to the Second Edition” of Capital: “Of course, the method of presentation must differ in form from that of inquiry. The latter has to appropriate the material in detail, to analyse its different forms of development and to track down their inner connection. Only after this work has been done can the real movement be appropriately presented. If this is done successfully, if the life of the subject-matter is now reflected back in the ideas, then it may appear as if we have before us an a priori construction” (Marx 1976, 102). Kinetic systems are, therefore, historical. That is, they are immanently extracted from the past, from the perspective of the present. This practical approach is different from the more “conceptual” approaches found in certain ahistorical versions of structuralism and poststructuralism.5 2 I am in agreement with Rosi Braidotti (1994, 256) when she writes, “From Aristotle to Freud woman has been described as immobile, that is to say passive, or quite inactive.” I see much to praise in Deleuze’s theory of nomadism, but for the same reason Braidotti cites, I must part company with Deleuze on the existence of the immobility or “immobile journey” that Deleuze and Guattari explicitly attribute to the nomad. 3 “It is thus necessary to make a distinction between speed and movement: a movement may be very fast, but that does not give it speed; a speed may be very slow, or even immobile, yet it is still speed” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 381). Hence the nomad’s “motionless voyage” (ibid., 159, 197, 199). 4 I do not mean to imply that Deleuze and Guattari are not interested in history, but that “power” and “force” seem to be more primary than motion for them. Becoming seems more primary than history for them as well. 5 For a full discussion of the three differences between “kinetic systems” and Deleuze’s assemblages (history, becoming, and vitalism), see Nail (2018a, chap. 3; 2018c).

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Kinaesthetics Systems-in-motion Movement is a common feature of all posthuman systems. It is in contrast to essences, forms, and structures, which are defined by stasis, stability, and anthropocentrism. I define kinetic systems by their flux, mobility, and circulation.6 Kinetic systems are not just “open” or “closed” at their limits, but the whole system is in continual meta-stable motion. Every aspect of the system is a continuously reproduced flow in a mixture of centripetal, centrifugal, tensional, elastic, and pedetic motions. A kinetic system, like Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage, is heterogeneous, non-essentialist, non-teleological, and defined by collective agency. However, a kinetic system is not the same as an assemblage of heterogeneous or even heterogenetic elements. A kinetic system is instead composed of ongoing processes: flows, folds, and fields of kinetic patterns or regimes of circulation, which continuously reproduce and transform matter. Assemblages, Deleuze and Guattari (1994) say, are “fragmentary wholes” (35) where “everything holds together only along diverging lines” (23) and that are composed of “singularities.” Kinetic systems, however, are not defined by their fragments or wholes but by their ongoing iterations and folds. They hold together not by divergence but by knotting and knotworks. Their collections are not defined by singularities but by confluences, conjunctions, and circulations.7 The goal of what follows is to describe kinetic systems theory and its consequences for art and aesthetics, or what I have called elsewhere kinaesthetics. I do not adopt the typical anthropocentric categories of aesthetics (form, function, interpretation, representation, and so on). Instead, I believe that there are numerous important implications for shifting our perspective on aesthetics from anthropocentric systems and cultural structures to one of materialkinetic systems. For example, if we define aesthetic systems by their patterns of motion, we can provide a much better analysis of their distributed agency, process, and materiality.8 Kinaesthetics Kinaesthetics is the theory and analysis of sensuous motion: the aesthetics of movement. Instead of analysing the arts as primarily static, spatial, or temporal, kinaesthetics understands them primarily as “regimes of motion.” Art is always in motion: directing people and objects, reproducing their sensuous conditions. It circulates.

6 Flow is a central concept in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus but these flows are fundamentally broken up by static “cuts.” In this chapter I cannot go into all the differences between my concepts and those of Deleuze and Guattari; thus, I must refer the reader to Nail (2018a, chap. 3), where I offer a full textual account. 7 For a complete account of this theory, see Nail (2018a, book 1). 8 Theories of collective agency have so far been largely captured by liberal political theory and grounded in colonial statism. This has restricted collective agency to citizens (against migrants), Western colonial states (against the colonised), and humans (against the devalorisation of nature, women, animals, and the colonies). On the further critique of this restricted notion of agency, see Bignall (2010).

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Thomas Nail In this sense, it is possible to identify something like an aesthetic theory of movement. However, an aesthetic method based on movement, not derived from stasis, time, or space, will also require the definition of some conceptual terms important for this analysis. The core concepts in the description of aesthetic motion are flow, fold, and field of circulation. After we describe these concepts in part two, we can look more closely in part three at the concrete consequences this theory has for our understanding of how aesthetics works. Flow The conceptual basis of kinaesthetic systems is the analysis of aesthetic flows. The critical characteristic of flows is that they are continual movements. In this sense, the philosophical concept of flow parallels the historical development of the fluid sciences, aerodynamics and hydrodynamics.9 In fluid dynamics, a flow is not the movement of fixed solids analysed as discrete particles, as it is in solid mechanics; the presupposition of the fluid sciences is ongoing processes.10 However, measuring “a” flow is difficult because a flow, like a river, is indivisible and continually moving. Thus, there is never only one flow or any total of flows, but a continuous process. A flow is, by definition, a non-unity and non-totality whose study we can never complete because it keeps moving along to infinity like a curved line. However, regional stabilities composed of a particular confluence or flowing together of two or more moving streams do exist (Serres 2000, 141). One flow does not totalise or control the other, but the two remain mixed like different regions in the same fluid. Confluent flows are diverse but also continuous and thus overlap in a kind of open collection of knots or tangles. In this sense, flows are not only physical and metabolic but also aesthetic. Kinaesthetics is precisely the analysis of sensuous flows. A flow is not a probability; it is a process. An aesthetics of flows is an analysis of their bifurcations, redirections, vectors, or tendencies—not their unities or totalities. For this reason, flows include chance, uncertainty, and events. Every point or node in a network already presupposes a more primary process that made it. A point, node, or singularity is simply something passed through and traversed by flows. This also explains why aesthetic flows are not about inclusion and exclusion. Nothing is done once and for all: a flow is only on its way to something else. Finally, flows are just as difficult to study as they are to control. They are not controlled by blocking or stopping them, but rather by redirecting or slowing them down. Every systemic aim for totality confronts the process and non-totality of flows that leak from the system’s periphery. The control of flows is a question of flexible adaptation and the modulation of limits. Accordingly, I define the aesthetics of movement first and foremost by analysing ongoing movements, changes in speed, and the redirection of flows.

9 Fluid dynamics also has its conceptual origin in the work of Lucretius, as Michel Serres argues in The Birth of Physics (2000). See also Nail (2018b). 10 In fluid dynamics the density, pressure, and velocity of fluids are assumed to be well defined at infinitesimally small points, which vary continuously.

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Kinaesthetics Fold The second primary conceptual term of kinaesthetics is “folding.” If all sensuous reality comprises ongoing flows, folds explain the phenomenon of relative or perceived stasis. However, this relative stasis is always secondary to the primacy of the social flows that compose it. A fold is not something other than a flow; it is the redirection of a flow back onto itself in a loop or junction. In this way, the fold is distinct from a confluence. A confluence is an open whole of overlapping flows, but a fold occurs when a single flow loops back over itself. A fold remains a process, but a vortical process that continues to repeat in approximately the same looping pattern—creating a kind of mobile stability or homeorhesis.11 A fold is the joining together of a flow with itself. The point at which the flow returns to itself is an arbitrary one. However, it is also one that constitutes a point of self-reference or haptic circularity that yokes the flow to itself. The fold then acts as a filter to allow some flows to pass through or around the circle. Other flows become caught in the repeating fold of the circle. The movement of the captured flow can then be connected to the movement of another captured flow and made into all manner of mobile technologies: a vehicle for travel, a tool for moving the ground, or a weapon of war. The concept of the fold stands in contrast to the concept of a node, developed in spatial location theory and the geography of movement. For example, Lowe and Moryadas define movement as the routes between prior discrete nodes. Movement is purposive, and “each bit of movement has a specific origin and destination. . . . Our schema is predicated on the existence of nodes prior to the development of networks and movement. . . . Without nodes, why is there movement, and where is it consigned?” (Lowe and Moryadas 1975, 54). Kinaesthetics offers an alternative to this sort of static and spatialised theory, which has been thoroughly critiqued elsewhere, for example by Cresswell (2006, 27–29). One could effortlessly invert Lowe and Moryadas’s question and ask, Without movement, how did nodes or stable points emerge in the first place? Placing the fixed nodes first means that movement is always already yoked to an origin and destination, so there is no fold. Bergson (1912, 53) argues that we will never understand movement beginning with immobility. My argument is that we cannot understand movement as a route between presupposed origins and destinations.12 Junctions are not static nodes given in advance of movement.13 Folds, as the joining of flows, are secondary to the continuous movement of those flows.

11 Michel Serres (2000, 16) develops a similar theory of vortices: “The vortex conjoins the atoms, in the same way as the spiral links the points; the turning movement brings together atoms and points alike.” Deleuze and Guattari then further develop this under the name of “minor science” in A Thousand Plateaus (1987, 361–62). 12 Deleuze and Guattari, following Bergson, also say that smooth space has to have precedence over points. 13 Peter Haggett (1966, 31) puts movement first, but only arbitrarily: “It is just as logical to begin with the study of settlements as with the study of routes. We choose to make that cut with movement.”

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Thomas Nail Field The third primary term of kinaesthetics is the field of circulation, which connects a series of folds into a more general curved path. This curved path continually folds back onto itself, wrapping up all the folds together. Circulation is the regulation of flows into an ordered knotwork of folds. Flows are indivisible, so circulation does not divide them but rather bifurcates and folds them back onto themselves in a series of complex knots. Since flows are continuously variable and the junctions are vortical, circulation is dynamic. It acts less like a single ring than like an origami object that brings together multiple folds, changing the neighbourhoods each time it folds. Even to remain the same, circulation has to keep changing at a relatively stable rate. Since flows have no absolute origin or destination, neither does circulation, which always begins in the middle of things. Circulation, just like flows, is not well understood by using the concepts of exclusion and inclusion. The conceptual basis of circulation is that something goes out and then comes back in again and again. It is a continuum. In this sense, circulation is both inside and outside at once. It is a multi-folded structure creating a complex system of relative insides and outsides without full inclusions and exclusions. The interiors and exteriors are all folds of the same continuous process or flow. Each time circulation creates a fold, it also creates a new inclusion and new exclusion. However, circulation itself is not reducible to just these two categories. The aim of circulation is not only to redirect flows through a network of multiple folds but also to expand them. Just as flows curve into folds, so folds are conjoined together through circulation. The folds remain distinct but flows tie them together. Through circulation, some folds act together (by connecting flows) and become larger; others separate and become weaker. Circulation turns some folds away and merges other folds in an expanding network. As a circulatory system increases the power and range of its folds, it increases its capacity to act in more ways. It becomes more powerful. Circulation is more complicated than movement in general or harnessed movement (fold); it is the controlled reproduction and redirection of movement.

Part 3. Art and motion With the basic terms of kinaesthetics in hand (flows, folds, and fields of circulations), we are now able to see two examples of how this helps us better understand two art phenomena. Morgan O’Hara Morgan O’Hara’s work exemplifies process aesthetics.14 It is neither figurative nor abstract, neither representational nor expressionistic. It is neither conscious nor unconscious but is kinetic and performative. To understand it, we 14 See also Morgan O’Hara’s appendix to this volume, pp. 429–43.

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Kinaesthetics have to move beyond or at least think about assemblages much more kinetically than is typical. O’Hara describes her work in the following way: The live transmission drawings are a record, performed in real time, of the vital movement of living beings. They transcend both figuration and abstraction. I draw methodically with multiple razor-sharp pencils and both hands, as timebased performance, executing a direct neural transmission from one human action into another. I condense movement into accumulations of graphite line, which combine the controlled refinement of classical drawing with the unbound sensuality of spontaneous gesture. . . . The most immediate sign of life is movement. live transmissions render visible normally invisible or fleeting movement patterns through seismograph-like drawing done in real time. . . . This is done simultaneously and as much as possible without “thinking.” This is not automatic drawing, but its opposite, requiring great concentration and focus. . . . . . . On occasion other signs of life are also drawn: movement of leaves on a tree, light reflections on water, of animals on a farm, movement of the incoming tide, whatever presents itself in a given moment. (O’Hara 2020)

The kinaesthetic work of art is not reducible to its model or final product. O’Hara is not copying a model figuratively, nor is she producing an abstract work of art. Instead, the work of art is the entire kinetic performance. Her work “flows” in the sense that it is a continual process of transformation, including the artist’s motions, the medium, and everything in the world. Her aim is not an attempt to arrest motion or to represent motion but to enter into it and to become entrained with it. As a “direct neural transmission,” O’Hara follows the flow of matter without capturing. She traces without modelling. As the flows of matter begin to cycle, iterate, and fold, so do her hands and brain. Her body becomes entrained in the rhythms of microscopic motions. Her body amplifies and “render[s] visible normally invisible or fleeting movement patterns.” These are not geometric forms, but metastable forms, or “kinoforms.” There are no static forms in nature, only “time-based performances” and coordinations between patterns. We do not know nature through immaterial or static ideas but through material entrainments. O’Hara’s work thus offers a new materialist or posthumanist orientation to aesthetics where humans are de-centred participants entrained in the world. Even when we think we are representing things, we are only entraining things in feedback loops. We can see these folding iterations throughout nature in the way that plants and crystals grow. We can also see it in the loops and iterations made by O’Hara’s pencil as it entrains with dancers on a stage.

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Figure 11.1.

Figure 11.2.

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Figure 11.1. Morgan O’Hara, Live Transmission: movement of the hands of Sankai Juku company dancers / Act III of Hibiki / Theatre de la Ville / Paris, France / 28 December 2000. Graphite on Fabriano drawing paper, 23 × 33 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Figure 11.2. Morgan O’Hara, Live Transmission: movement of the hands of Nam June Paik while performing with video and piano / Fluxus Festival Anthology Film Archive / New York City / 30 October 1994. Graphite on Bristol paper, 35 × 43 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Kinaesthetics Through her work, we discover the immanent patterns of motion of a dance performance. We normally miss these because of our human-centric tendency to treat the dance as a representation of something else. But art has no meaning that is independent of its doing. Art is what art does. O’Hara’s work takes this seriously and tries to lay out the patterns or “fields of circulation” that we tend to miss because we tend to view the world in “chunks.” We see “people” moving “files” in an office or a soba master making noodles (figure 11.3).

Figure 11.3.

A process is a tricky thing to describe or see because it is not a thing. It is something that we can only undergo. O’Hara’s drawing of staff members moving files in an office shows us how they sustain the iterative loops of their being. Everything is continually iterating itself, but we don’t see it. O’Hara’s work shows us a world of invisible processes. Tara Donovan Tara Donovan’s work shares a similarly kinaesthetic emphasis that lends itself more to a movement-oriented analysis. It is a heterogeneous assembly of singularities without essence or static form, but it also produces a kinetic pattern or what she calls a “field of visual activity.” Here is how she describes her work: I prefer the phrase “site-responsive” to describe the affiliation of my works to the spaces they inhabit. While this term makes a convenient allusion to the chameleonic

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Figure 11.3. Morgan O’Hara, Live Transmission: movement of the hands of soba master Kashiwagi Kuniaki while preparing soba flour and cutting the noodles / Nippon International Performance Art Festival / Nagoya, Japan / March 2001. Graphite on Bristol paper, 81 × 106 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Thomas Nail visuals I prefer to exploit, it also suggests a dependence on the architectural particulars and lighting conditions of a given space that environmentally impact the growth of my work in terms of scale, direction, and orientation. This reliance on spatial conditions is primarily responsible for forming the understanding of my works as “fields” of visual activity, which have been compared to everything from landscapes to biomorphic forms and even cellular structures. (GMU Art Research Project 2012)

Donovan takes enormous amounts of simple materials such as index cards, Styrofoam cups, plastic straws, and wooden pencils and assembles them, usually in a gallery or museum space. Part of her work is the live performance in the museum of her creating site-specific installations. Each work is singular, performative, and responsive. Donovan entrains herself into the flow of matter around her. The flow of light, air, and people coming and going in the museum, and the flow of material brought in by the palette-load are all entrained. Donovan does not have a model for her sculptures in advance, but like Ariadne, she weaves in response to the flows of matter at hand. Her method, like O’Hara’s, is iteration. One note card is stacked on another until, after tens of thousands of iterations, a form begins to emerge from the heaping process. As the patterns begin to emerge, the context and the artist can direct them a bit. What is so fascinating is that the object’s materiality is what takes priority in the emergence of form. This is precisely why her works look so “organic.” Heaps of index cards become stalagmites; pencils become honeycombs; Styrofoam cups become wasps’ nests. Bits of metal loops become fractal and iridescent bubbles in the museum light.

Figure 11.4.

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Figure 11.4. Tara Donovan, Untitled (detail), 2008, polyester metallised film tape, installation dimensions variable. Photograph by Mark Waldhauser, courtesy Pace Gallery.

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Figure 11.5.

Figure 11.6.

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Figure 11.5. Tara Donovan, Untitled (Mylar), 2011, Mylar and hot glue, site specific, installation dimensions variable. Photograph by G. R. Christmas, courtesy Pace Galley. Figure 11.6. Tara Donovan, Untitled (Styrofoam Cups) (detail), 2003/2008, styrofoam cups and glue, installation dimensions variable. Photograph by Dennis Cowley, courtesy Pace Gallery.

Thomas Nail Through the simple act of picking up an index card from one box and putting it down on top of some others on the floor, a whole world of differences and repetitions emerges. After tens of thousands of iterative folds or cycles of “pick up, put down,” a pattern of kinetic process emerges from the singular relation of artist, material, and site. Geological and biological processes do not produce with a form in mind. They iterate through cycles and habits. It is a question of “figuring out what it is that the material can do” (Donovan and Kwun 2015, my emphasis). Donovan’s work is successful because it takes posthuman agency seriously and lets the matter act through her. Unsurprisingly, when matter is freer to organise itself through iterations, it tends to produce fractal and “natural” looking patterns. Jackson Pollock had a similar technique. He did not try to represent nature but tried to do what nature was already doing. He let the turbulence of the wind, and the simple iteration of slinging paint on the canvas do what it could do. The result was fractal patterns found all through nature (Taylor et al., 2011). By letting matter work through her iteratively, Donovan’s method allows kinetic patterns or fields of action to emerge. Her sculptures have emergent, metastable, and kinetic forms.

Conclusion The age of the human, as the sole origin and end of the theoretical humanities and sciences, is over. The twenty-first century marks a Copernican turn toward the emergence of new posthuman systems. Motion is at least one major defining characteristic of these systems with relevance for every kind of material agency.15 Aesthetic theory, in particular, cannot go on as if humans and human social structures were not part of much larger kinetic and material agencies. Climate change, mass migration, landscape, and environmental transformations, digital media, and the agencies of the matters and critters that populate and suffuse all events.16 In this chapter, I have tried to briefly introduce some critical methodological concepts and practical consequences I have developed for thinking about aesthetics as entangled kinetic agencies, beyond merely human agents or human systems. Future work is needed not only to create other posthuman aesthetic theories but also to apply those currently available to new domains. I look forward to participating in the invention of a “new humanities.”

15 This is not strictly unique to the twenty-first century. Only now because of its predominance do we realise that the processes have been at work the whole time. 16 For several interesting examples of such interspecies politics, see Haraway (2016, chap. 1).

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References Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bergson, Henri. 1912. An Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by T. E. Hulme. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. First published 1903 as “Introduction à la métaphysique” (Revue de métaphysique et de morale 11 [1]: 1–36). Bignall, Simone. 2010. Postcolonial Agency: Critique and Constructivism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Braidotti, Rosi. 1994. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press. Connolly, William E. 2013. The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Coole, Diana, and Samantha Frost. 2010. “Introducing the New Materialisms.” In New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, edited by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, 1–46. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cresswell, Tim. 2006. On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Deleuze, Gilles. 1994. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1968 as Différence et répétition (Paris: Presses universitaires de France). ———. 2007a. “Letter-Preface to Jean CletMartin.” In Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995, edited by David Lapoujade, translated by Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina, 361–63. New York: Semiotext(e). Essay first published 1993 as “Lettre-Préface de Gilles Deleuze” in Jean-Clet Martin, Variations—La philosophie de Gilles Deleuze (Paris: Payot & Rivages). Book first published 2003 as Deux régimes de fous: Textes et entretiens, 1975–1995 (Paris: Minuit). ———. 2007b. “Preface to the English Language Edition.” In Dialogues II, by Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet,

translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, rev. ed., vii–x. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1994. What Is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1991 as Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Minuit). Donovan, Tara, and Aileen Kwun. 2015. “Tara Donovan Talks Process, Inspiration, and Her Place in the Art World.” Surface, 15 July. Accessed 23 August 2020. https://www.surfacemag.com/ articles/2015106tara-donovan-talksplanning-inspiration-and-her-place-inthe-art-world/. GMU Art Research Project. 2012. “Artist’s Statement.” Tara Donovan: GMU Art Research Project. Accessed 23 August 2020. http://refritsch1.blogspot.com/p/ artists-statement.html. Haggett, Peter. 1966. Locational Analysis in Human Geography. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1969) 1999. The Science of Logic. Trans. by A. V. Miller. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books. First published 1812–16 as Wissenschaft der Logik (Nuremberg: J. L. Schrag). This translation first published 1969 (London: George Allen & Unwin). Lowe, John Carl, and S. Moryadas. 1975. The Geography of Movement. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. MacCormack, Patricia. 2012. Posthuman Ethics: Embodiment and Cultural Theory. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Marx, Karl. 1976. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy; Volume 1. Translated by Ben Fawkes. London: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review. First published 1867 as Das Kapital, Erster Band (Hamburg: Otto Meissner).

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Thomas Nail Nail, Thomas. 2018a. Being and Motion. New Translated by Jack Hawkes. Edited by York: Oxford University Press. David Webb. Manchester: Clinamen ———. 2018b. Lucretius I: An Ontology of Press. First published 1977 as La naissance Motion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University de la physique dans le texts te Lucrèce (Paris: Press. Minuit). ———. 2018c. “The Ontology of Motion.” Taylor, Richard P., Branka Spehar, Paul van Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Donkelaar, and Caroline M. Hagerhall. Sciences 27 (1): 47–76. 2011. “Perceptual and Physiological O’Hara, Morgan. 2020. “Statement; live Responses to Jackson Pollock’s transmission: Attention and Performative Fractals.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience Drawing.” Accessed 23 August. https:// 5 (60). https://doi.org/10.3389/ www.morganohara.com/statement.html. fnhum.2011.00060. Serres, Michel. 2000. The Birth of Physics.

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Ghastly Assemblages and Glittery Bodies without Organs in the Sculptures of David Altmejd Burcu Baykan Bilkent University, Turkey

This chapter explores the intricate entanglement of human-animal-plantmineral life in the sculptural practice of the Canadian artist David Altmejd. Altmejd gained international stature in the 2000s for his exquisitely detailed sculptural installations of fragmented human forms that combine a diverse mix of media. Through the use of a startling range of materials—from gold chains, multi-coloured crystals, and mirrors, to sparkling stones, taxidermy animals and blossoming flowers—Altmejd investigates how the human body can be amalgamated with multiple non-human strata in unforeseen juxtapositions that, in turn, create unsettling alterations of the organism. Full of macabre details that are at once captivating and disturbing, his work derives a visual vocabulary from occult, mythological figures, horror films, fantastic imagery, and early modern science; hence, the art critic Jerry Saltz accurately describes it as “modern Gothic” (2004). Employing this Gothic tradition to capture the unusual beauty of corporeal decay, Altmejd alludes to the constant interplay between entropy and renewal. The artist’s entire enterprise hints at bodily ruin and decomposition, yet his interest in germinating processes like crystallisation and vegetation, as well as dense layers of glitter, gleaming gems, and jewellery, equally conveys ideas of rebirth and resurgence. The three works on which this chapter focuses are all exemplary of his artistic practice.

The New North, The Index, The Holes The New North (2007) depicts a four-metre-tall hairy shape-shifting giant, seemingly in an advanced stage of decay, with punctures and cavities throughout his body.1 From the big abyss on his upper torso grows a pile of mirror stalactites, transforming the rotting flesh into something shiny and new. Covered in horsehair, quartz crystals, and geometric mirrored shapes, The New North portrays an appalling yet strangely enchanting figure that simultaneously integrates human 1 The New North is part of the sculptural installations entitled Giants—a series of four-metre standing figures that were exhibited at Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, 3 May–14 June 2008.

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Burcu Baykan and animal forms, natural landscape, and science-fiction imagery. Another mixed-media work featuring a similarly repulsive and alluring body is The Index (2007), which consists of a larger-than-life semi-reclining figure covered with myriad natural and fabricated elements: sedimentary rocks, fake plants, gold necklaces, and nests with eggs scattered here and there.2 From the fissures in its head, chest, and legs, large mirrored pieces, glittery stalactites, and artificial blossoms erupt, almost absorbing and subsuming the figure. Its decaying body parts do not seem to perish or putrefy; rather, they enthral with crystalline eruptions, shimmering mirrors, and jewellery. This is a chaotic yet fertile environment: a meticulously detailed but haphazard combination of mineral specimens, exotic birds, squirrels, skunks, plastic flowers, and mushrooms, all of which become the inhabitants of the gaps and orifices of the colossal fragmented figure. The Holes (2008) is another large-scale installation that consists of a reclining hairy and glittery body, replete with jewels and crystalline formations.3 Pine branches sprout beside the decomposing torso; sharp crystal stalagmites protrude from its punctured chest, and white shards of minerals emerge inside its limbs. Altogether, the scene is a bewildering realm, full of contrasting details—from hairy extremities and decaying flesh to shiny metallic surfaces and precious stones.

Figure 12.1.

2 The Index was exhibited in the Canadian pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale, 2007. 3 The Holes was displayed at Tate Liverpool as a part of the 2008 Liverpool Biennale.

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Figure 12.1. David Altmejd, The New North, 2008, wood, foam, expandable foam, resin, paint, epoxy clay, glue, mirror, horsehair, wire, quartz crystal, 145⅜ × 53⅛ × 42⅛ inches. (Courtesy of the artist, photography by Ellen Page Wilson.)

Ghastly Assemblages and Glittery Bodies without Organs

Figure 12.2.

Figure 12.3.

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Figure 12.2. David Altmejd, The Index, 2007, steel, foam, wood, glass, mirror, Plexiglas, lighting system, silicone, resin, taxidermy birds and animals, synthetic plants, synthetic tree branches, bronze, fiberglass, paint, burlap, leather, pine cones, horse hair, synthetic hair, chains, wire, feather, 131 × 510½ × 363¼ inches. (Courtesy of the artist, photography by Ellen Page Wilson.) Figure 12.3. David Altmejd, The Holes, 2008, wood, jewellery, mirror, glue, plaster, foam, metal wire, epoxy clay, epoxy resin, paint, horsehair, synthetic branches, synthetic flowers, pine cones, glass beads, quartz, quail eggs, glitter, and snail shells, 291.5 × 883.9 × 518.2 cm. (Courtesy of the artist and Xavier Hufkens, Brussels.)

Burcu Baykan

Figure 12.4.

Taken together, Altmejd’s engrossingly complex body sculptures present a constant preoccupation with the theme of metamorphosis operating at the dynamic junctures between human, animal, vegetal, mineral, and technical matter. They conjure up a sculptural world that investigates the human body’s material couplings with diverse natural and human-made things, and its various states of mutation that arise from these couplings. Amid such overlapping phenomena, the clear-cut distinctions between biological and artificial, organic and inorganic orders become increasingly nebulous. In this chapter, I trace the rich environmental interpenetrations between different species, phyla, and kingdoms, as well as the resultant continuity between human and non-human modes of life in Altmejd’s work, through an engagement with Deleuze and Guattari’s interlinked concepts of assemblage and body without organs.

Ghastly assemblages An assemblage—the name given to complex systems that draw together any number of disparate components—may be described as operating along two axes or lines. “On a vertical axis, the assemblage has both territorial sides, or reterritorialized sides, which stabilize it, and cutting edges of deterritorialization, which carry it away” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 88). Hence, the territorial characteristics of assemblages concern the movements that always unmake and remake territories—movements defined by Deleuze and Guattari as deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation. As a dynamic conglomerate of different strata of reality, an assemblage is always realised through the ongoing swing

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Figure 12.4. David Altmejd, The Holes, 2008, detail. (Courtesy of the artist and Xavier Hufkens, Brussels.)

Ghastly Assemblages and Glittery Bodies without Organs or connection between these two tendencies; as such, “the two movements coexist in an assemblage” (Deleuze and Parnet 2007, 72). On the horizontal axis, it is composed of two segments or dimensions: on the material segment there is a “machinic assemblage of bodies”; on the expressive segment we have a “collective assemblage of enunciation” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 88). Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 90) associate the machinic or material dimension of assemblages with “a precise state of intermingling” that includes “alterations, amalgamations, penetrations, and expansions that affect bodies of all kinds in their relations to one another.” As such, assemblage points to the heterogeneous coming together of seemingly distinct elements with differing intensities, speeds, and durations—a constellation that disturbs and unsettles the rigid categorisations of groups. Being “made up of many heterogeneous terms,” it designates an acentred multiplicity that “establishes liaisons, relations between them, across ages, sexes and reigns—different natures,” like the well-known symbiosis or unnatural participation between the wasp and the orchid (Deleuze and Parnet 2007, 69). Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 36) write: “we will note that assemblages have elements (or multiplicities) of several kinds: human, social, and technical machines. . . . We can no longer even speak of distinct machines, only of types of interpenetrating multiplicities that at any given moment form a single machinic assemblage.”4 Crucial to this model of assemblage, then, are heterogeneity and an extended state of relationality; the model focuses on the transversal associations and conjunctions between potentially innumerable domains, whether organic forms or manufactured artefacts, human or non-human, animate or inanimate registers. As Ronald Bogue (1989, 129) traces in Deleuze and Guattari, such assemblages “penetrate all strata and assemble men, women, animals, plants, and minerals in heterogeneous, functioning circuits that link man and nature, the organic and inorganic, the mechanical and non-mechanical, in a single sphere of interaction.” An assemblage, therefore, is the complex arrangement of divergent fragments, flows, and particles that combine their affective capacities to function and interact with one another in a becoming. Of particular relevance to this discussion is that the assembled realm is neither a static composition nor a stable unity, since it goes hand in hand with the temporal processes of becoming and the continuous construction of transversal relations. As such, this is less a collection of fixed and predetermined objects than an open-ended and kinetic whole that “necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 8). The DeleuzeGuattarian assemblage, then, is not a closed aggregate or a resultant formation that can be unified into a sedentary organisational structure. It rather keeps its constituent parts together without reducing their dynamic differing to a fixed totality with some sort of closure. As a result, an assemblage denotes a processual configuration of elements that are incessantly interacting, affecting, and resonating with one another. Thus, it is not directed towards an identitarian conclusion or an end product. For this reason Deleuze and Guattari 4 See also Deleuze and Parnet (2007, 132): “What we call an assemblage is, precisely, a multiplicity.”

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Burcu Baykan describe assemblages as undergoing “constant variation”; they are “themselves constantly subject to transformations” (1987, 82). Following their line of reasoning, Elizabeth Grosz (1994) details that the “law” of assemblages is “rather the imperative of endless experimentation, metamorphosis, or transmutation, alignment and realignment” (167); hence they are “essentially in movement, in action” (167–68). Tauel Harper and David Savat also specify that “it is the ongoing and unceasing organisation . . . of the connections that is key to understanding the formation, the production, of assemblages” (2016, 24). It is therefore crucial to emphasise that the concept of assemblage refers to an active state of interconnectivity that cannot be reduced to the representative sum of its parts. It constitutes itself in the dynamic interactions or interstitial passages between divergent elements, in the milieu of becomings rather than static states of being. As Paulo de Assis (2008, 100) succinctly puts it, “the overcoming of unity in favour of multiplicity, of essence in favour of event, of being in favour of becoming” are among the major consequences of the logic of assemblage. It thus entails a different logic from a mere recombination of parts, which eventually rigidifies into a site of completeness by acquiring stasis and positionality. Evoking an explicitly dynamic model of gathering, the formulation of assemblage provides an apt theoretical grounding to understand how bodies interact with one another in Altmejd’s The New North, The Index, and The Holes; as such, it echoes strongly the operational logic of the composite figures seen in his work. The preceding section detailed the myriad ways in which Altmejd’s sculptural embodiments incongruously combine human, animal, vegetable, and mineral worlds, as well as the domains of artifice and technics. The body parts such as furry torsos and fleshy legs remain entwined with rock formations, mirrored glass, multi-layered vegetation, animal figurines, and the sparkle of metal and jewellery. Given these prolific environmental connections and complicated entanglements between disparate realities, one begins to understand the heterogeneity and multiplicity that the embodiment in Altmejd’s work displays. This sense of multiplicity can also be conceived as parallel to the artist’s belief that the body is a “little world” of its own or “a total universe” (Altmejd quoted in Saltz 2008), whose viewing experience is “like walking in nature and being able to see the landscape as a whole and then zooming in on a mushroom and being fascinated by the fact that things are infinitely complex” (Altmejd quoted in Buck 2008, 43). Indeed, losing their subjective unities and fixed essences, the human forms here become increasingly plural and compound, resonating with Deleuze’s argument that “our body is a type of world full of an infinity of creatures that are also worthy of life” (1993, 109). Yet, this compound body imagery that Altmejd constructs in The New North, The Index, and The Holes is irreducible to a static cluster or community, since it undergoes durational and continuous processes of change through the mirrors, rocks, and plants growing from the decaying corporeal forms. Altmejd’s rendition of the body as a multi-media amalgam of deteriorating and germinating fragments, in turn, begins to mobilise Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas of the assemblage, “which is always collective,” bringing into play within us “populations, multiplicities, territories, becomings, affects, events” (Deleuze

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Ghastly Assemblages and Glittery Bodies without Organs and Parnet 2007, 51). In his sculptural compositions, inorganic crystal shards, mineral deposits, stuffed creatures, and organic sprigs of greenery all come together to jut out from the puzzling cavities and recesses of the rotting human organisms. In this fashion, one can also observe the simultaneous processes of breakdown and renewal, degeneration and regeneration, as the disintegrating and splintering flesh in Altmejd’s sculptural universe gives rise to crystalline and floral growth. In relation to the simultaneity of degenerative and regenerative changes in his work, the artist contends that “there is the idea of transformation. Things grow: crystals growing on things, plants growing, birds flying, so that you have the impression that the piece is alive and if you went away and came back a week later, it would look different” (Altmejd quoted in Amy 2007, 27). Curator Staci Boris also observes the manner in which Altmejd’s artistic strategies incite a politics of mobility. According to Boris (2007, 32), “what looks like a corpse seems to be attempting to generate new life, accentuating processes of transformation rather than stagnation.” Indeed, the techniques Altmejd employs to execute his sculptural fabrications accentuate the idea that apparently static materials can create an ongoing dynamic, so that the motionless sculptural body still accommodates motion and change within itself. The fact that the forms here appear decaying and growing—unfolding and transforming over time—indicates a shift from a spatial aesthetic regime to a temporal one that implies speeds, flows, and durations. In other words, the constant oscillation between degeneration and regeneration of materials—glittering crystals, clusters of gems, and tree branches germinating from the interiors of decomposing torsos and heads—induces a felt movement or a durational intensity in the still sculptural form, emphasising the processual quality of Altmejd’s composite sculptures. Amid this continual interplay of innumerable heterogeneous fragments and their multiple durations (like processes of decay and growth, deterioration and germination), there is no inert, definitive, or conclusive bodily form as such, only dynamically mutating constellations “tying together orders, species, and heterogeneous qualities” akin to the symbiotic conjunction between the wasp and the orchid (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 330). In fact, the figures that comprise the artist’s works in question provoke an event-based complexity that is held together in a temporal tension by the “coexistence of very different ‘durations’” (ibid., 238). This complexity is nothing but an assemblage that functions as a dynamic multiplicity transforming itself in a state of becoming. This temporal aesthetics crafted by Altmejd, which oscillates between disfiguring and refiguring body imagery, also relates in interesting ways to the double-sided processes of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation operative in every assemblage: “Movements of deterritorialization are inseparable from territories that open onto an elsewhere; and the process of reterritorialization is inseparable from the earth, which restores territories” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 85–86). The deterritorialisation of corporeal forms is implied in Altmejd’s work via the processes of decay and decomposition, the sweeping up of particular territories, such as the torsos and extremities full of holes and apertures. Yet, as the artist himself states, “the decay becomes a sort of positive thing because

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Burcu Baykan it’s also a form of regeneration” (Altmejd quoted in Buck 2008, 43). Indeed, the decomposing human remains in his sculptural settings do not mark a catastrophic end; rather, this sweeping movement breeds the emergence of new territories, the creation of something else: the fusion of a multitude of fauna, flora, and geology sprouting from the bodily orifices and cavities. By embellishing these disfiguring fleshly forms with crystalline stalagmites, glinting stones, gilded chains, tropical birds, and multi-coloured flowers, as well as multiplying their reflections with faceted mirrors and theatrical spotlighting, Altmejd manages to afford them a transformative and constructive potential. In this fashion, one can observe the concurrent destructive-creative tendencies constitutive of the acts of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation that continually affect and depend on each other in the realisation of an assemblage. By creating “a flux,” which is “intensive, instantaneous and mutant—between a creation and a destruction” (Deleuze and Parnet 2007, 50), Altmejd’s body-oriented sculptural praxis offers a valuable instance of the vitalistic character of transformative becoming, and a profoundly dynamic interaction between the unmaking and remaking of bodily territories. This, in turn, as Grosz (2008, 100) details, reflects “precisely the kind of territorializing, deterritorializing, and reterritorializing structure, hovering between the animal and the human, between the earth and territory, that Deleuze has claimed is the basis of all of the arts.” Given the presence of these durational processes—movements of decomposition and recomposition, destruction and reconstruction, deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation that are in constant exchange with one another— Altmejd’s sculptural pieces no longer convey closed sets or stable givens, but rather characterise a more dynamic blending of disparate fragments. These disparate bits always seem to be in the midst of passing into something else— from human to animal, animal to plant, plant to mineral parts—endowing these works with a disconcerting yet kinetic appearance, and an active state of transition. Within this schema, Altmejd’s sculptural bodies unfold as ghastly assemblages of diverse human and non-human body parts, “an intermingling of bodies reacting to one another” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 88) that are always in the process of shaping prior to their sedimentation and coagulation into fixed subject positions. They thus retain their potential to transform or become with other beings and things.

Glittery bodies without organs Since these composite and processual sculptural assemblages emanate from an experimentation with undoing the homogeneity and the biological unity of the body, Altmejd’s projects also recall the body without organs (BwO) “which is continually dismantling the organism” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 4). As such, assemblage exists in connection with the BwO, since the dismantling of the organism that goes with this notion paradoxically entails “opening the body to connections that presuppose an entire assemblage, circuits, conjunctions, levels and thresholds, passages and distributions of intensity” (ibid., 160). To become a BwO, then, is to disorganise the body, and through such a process,

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Ghastly Assemblages and Glittery Bodies without Organs to conjoin it with the larger flows of life, to open it up to new affects, alignments, linkages, and assemblages beyond the limited set of habitual actions or configurations at stake in the organised body. Hence, instead of “a body deprived of organs,” the BwO rather designates “an assemblage of organs freed from the supposedly ‘natural’ or ‘instinctual’ organ-ization” (Holland 2013, 94). Therefore, I will also consider the implications of this concept that inevitably comes into play in Altmejd’s intricate sculptural assemblages. The New North, The Index, and The Holes variously visualise how the human body—with its specific organic and pre-existent organisation—is dismantled so as to be opened to far-reaching relationships with other animal, floral, mineral, and artificial matter. Altmejd’s depiction of the body as disintegrating, decomposing, sprouting, and growing fragments exceeds the organic envelope of the body, as well as the fixed determination of its organs. However, when speaking of the sculptural arrangements in his giants, the artist insists that they should still be regarded as “organisms,” stating that “the constructions I make are very sparse; there are a lot of objects but they’re always self-contained on the platform . . . I want the sculpture to be seen and understood as one organism” (Altmejd quoted in Enright 2004, 72). Yet, against the grain of Altmejd’s own stated premises, I argue in favour of approaching the bodies of giants as unstructured and unorganised BwOs, rather than as self-enclosed and unified organisms. Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the BwO emerges as a strategy to go beyond the body as an organic, closed, and bounded entity. It indicates the disorganisation and disarticulation of the fixed strata that constitute humans (the organism, signification, and subjectification) and coagulate multiplicities into neatly organised or unified totalities that evoke a well-ordered structure. Creating a BwO, therefore, is a matter of dismantling the hierarchical and systematic “organization of the organs we call the organism” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 161) to attain the “unformed, unorganized, nonstratified, or destratified body” (43). Yet, the BwO is more than a challenge thrown to the organism. In dismantling the preconfigured biological organisation of the self and disarticulating these strata, the body is opened to an immanent relationality with the world and assembled with other bodies, their various parts and organs, stretching beyond itself in a ceaseless process of becoming. As an experimentation with the body’s affective capacities, the BwO is further conceptualised by Deleuze and Guattari as an “uninterrupted continuum” (1987, 154) which is “permeated by unformed, unstable matters, by flows in all directions, by free intensities or nomadic singularities, by mad or transitory particles” (40). Given these elaborations of the BwO, Grosz characterises this notion as Deleuze and Guattari’s endeavour to “denaturalize human bodies and to place them in direct relations with the flows or particles of other bodies or things” (Grosz 1994, 168). For Audronė Žukauskaitė, as well, it is “a platform or an intensive spatium which engenders a qualitative change” (2014, 80). Even if Altmejd’s emphasis is on self-contained structures that unify into a singular body, and he regards his sculptural creations as organisms, the artist’s comments on his own work underestimate the degree of fragmentation and

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Burcu Baykan disintegration of his constructions. As such, they are quite distinct from, and cannot be subsumed within the logic of the organism, which is founded on a fixed organisation of the body with clearly defined organs. Instead of remaining as organic wholes, the bodies that comprise The New North, The Index, and The Holes are in the process of being disorganised, disarticulated, and disintegrated in order to combine with other intensities, particles, and elements in the creation of an assemblage. Considering the web of heterogeneous couplings between the fleshy human remains and the pieces of flourishing plants, animals, and crystals—not to mention the indeterminate or displaced bodily organs through perplexing recesses and fissures—Altmejd’s sculptural displays are bound to be dispersed and scattered units that lack a coherent organisation or unitary structure. Thus, they undo the containment and domination of the organism in a certain way. Therefore, I argue that his sculptural figures also constitute instances of uncanny yet glittery BwOs, which necessarily imply a fleeting “collectivity (assembling elements, things, plants, animals, tools, people, powers, and fragments of all of these . . . )” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 161). Due to this assemblage of transitory particles, in this intensive spatium that is the BwO, the human form is qualitatively changing beyond its traditional biological organisation. In order to back up this argument, one also has to look at the details of production of Altmejd’s sculptural assemblages. Curator Louise Déry notes that their “manufacture retains traces of rough, even sloppy work. . . . [with] paint and plaster drips, fragments of cracked mirror, ill-fitted joints, sections of bare wood and ruptures in scale” (2007, 74). The art critic David Velasco also observes that the sculptural embodiments Altmejd fabricates, emerge as “puzzles, deliberately unfinished, with seams and glue still showing” (2005, 35). This way of haphazardly gathering things together without being interested in a finality of form, or a neat completion leads to a “fragmentary whole” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 16) that does not adhere to an organic totality or welldefined unity. The unsystematic or shoddy construction of Altmejd’s sculptural assemblages, which highlights the fuzzy borders, visible seams, loose points of contact and misaligned joints, contradicts the very idea of an organism understood as an organised, unified, hierarchised, and identitarian experience. In a Deleuze-Guattarian mode, this is rather indicative of a non-organic body whose being is precisely in the act of becoming “with no fixed identity, wandering about over the body without organs” (Deleuze and Guattari [1977] 1983, 16).

Ecologically grounded selves: towards non-polarising human–Earth relations Deleuze and Guattari’s relational ontology of becoming formulates all life as a vast continuum rather than segregated between human and non-human life, or organic and inorganic life. Since this notion also encompasses artificial matter as a part of the same continuum,5 it does not conceptualise the plane of nature 5 See Deleuze (1995, 155): “Any distinction between nature and artifice is becoming blurred.”

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Ghastly Assemblages and Glittery Bodies without Organs as separate from that of culture. This results in an expanded ontology that conceives humans in relation to all material particles of the universe, by which, according to Rosi Braidotti, the body becomes “an ecological unit” (2016, 43). As Braidotti goes on to detail, this Deleuzian body, which is configured by “intensive interconnectedness,” is also “marked by the interdependence with its environment” (ibid.). The temporal enfolding of heterogeneous matter in Altmejd’s sculptural propositions eschews the dualistic constructions associated with oppositional discourse, so that the static hierarchies between what is normally considered as human and nature, human and non-human, no longer seem to be valid. In this way, the artist’s assemblages and BwOs, which are produced by durational and connective becomings among heterogeneous bodily fragments, provide the possibility to observe such environmentally interdependent selves in artistic expression. Amid these excessive and mutating territories shared by disparate particles, one can no longer discern any proper human subject, only an ecologically grounded sculptural terrain disseminated among earthly materiality. Altmejd’s sculptural BwOs-assemblages, in turn, are no longer strictly human-oriented; the idea of the human as ontologically distinct and isolated from the other elements of the natural landscape is replaced by a concern with an environmental relationality and continuity that stretches across divergent strata. It is in this regard that these assemblages, which for Deleuze and Guattari “respect neither the distinction between orders nor the hierarchy of forms” (1987, 336) might suggest a rethinking of the human experience, as well as human–Earth relations in more reciprocal and less hierarchical terms. To expand upon this argument, the decaying human forms that are ever-present in Altmejd’s sculptural scenarios might be read as a destratification of the human as a self-centred, unique, exclusive, and individualistic unit, followed by its restratification in composite assemblages with the complex materiality of life—other species, plants, crystals, and human-made artefacts. As such, humans “never [stop] animal-becoming, tool-becoming, environment-becoming . . . within these very assemblages” (Deleuze and Parnet 2007, 73). Hence, the artist’s compositions become the visual materialisations of the many ways in which humankind as a stable centre in the universe is decaying—both in material and conceptual terms—while it is growing in decentred, ecological networks. According to Braidotti, “read with Deleuze, this mode is anything but negative,” as it “expresses . . . the co-extensivity of the body with its environment or territory” (2005–6). It is, in turn, this constructive transformation, which delineates the body co-extensive with its habitat, that might pave the way for the expansion of the human beyond its usual territories: a move away from a solely human experience to a “becoming-Earth” of the human. This translates into the human body’s immanent participation and mergence with its ecological, geological, and technical others; “thus disorganized, disarticulated, it worlds with the lines of a rock, sand, and plants” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 280).

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Burcu Baykan References Amy, Michaël. 2007. “Sculpture as Living Organism: A Conversation with David Altmejd.” Sculpture 26 (10): 23–29. Assis, Paulo de. 2018. Logic of Experimentation: Rethinking Music Performance through Artistic Research. Orpheus Institute Series. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Bogue, Ronald. 1989. Deleuze and Guattari. London: Routledge. Boris, Staci. 2007. The New Authentics: Artists of the Post-Jewish Generation. Chicago: Spertus Press. Braidotti, Rosi. 2005–6. “Affirming the Affirmative: On Nomadic Affectivity.” Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge 11–12. Accessed 23 September 2020. http://www.rhizomes.net/issue11/ braidotti.html. ———. 2016. “Posthuman Affirmative Politics.” In Resisting Biopolitics: Philosophical, Political, and Performative Strategies, edited by S. E. Wilmer and Audronė Žukauskaitė, 30–56. New York: Routledge. Buck, Louisa. 2008. “Artist Interview.” Art Newspaper 195 (October): 43. Deleuze, Gilles. 1993. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Translated by Tom Conley. London: Athlone Press. First published 1988 as Le Pli: Leibniz et le Baroque (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1995. Negotiations: 1972–1990. Translated by Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1990 as Pourparlers: 1972–1990 (Paris: Minuit). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. (1977) 1983. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1972 as Capitalisme et schizophrénie: L’anti-Œdipe (Paris: Minuit). Translation first published 1977 (New York: Viking Press). ———. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Minuit).

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———. 1994. What Is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1991 as Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Minuit). Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. 2007. Dialogues II. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Rev. ed. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1977 as Dialogues (Paris: Flammarion). Déry, Louise. 2007. David Altmejd: Métamorphose / Metamorphosis. Oakville, Ontario: Oakville Galleries. Published in conjunction with the exhibition of same name held at Oakville Galleries, January– March 2007. Enright, Robert. 2004. “Learning from Objects: An Interview with David Altmejd.” BorderCrossings 92 (November): 67–74. Grosz, Elizabeth. 1994. Volatile Bodies: Toward A Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2008. Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth. New York: Columbia University Press. Harper, Tauel, and David Savat. 2016. Media after Deleuze. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Holland, Eugene W. 2013. Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: A Reader’s Guide. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Saltz, Jerry. 2004. “Modern Gothic.” Village Voice, 27 January. Accessed 23 September 2020. https://www.villagevoice. com/2004/01/27/modern-gothic/. ———. 2008. “Statuary Story.” New York Magazine, 29 May. Accessed 23 September 2020. http://nymag.com/arts/art/ reviews/47369/. Velasco, David. 2005. “Monsters in the Closet: Learning to Love David Altmejd’s Werewolves.” Art Papers 29 (4): 34–37. Žukauskaitė, Audronė. 2014. “Intensive Multiplicities in A Thousand Plateaus.” In Understanding Deleuze, Understanding Modernism, edited by Paul Ardoin, S. E. Gontarski, and Laci Mattison, 75–89. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

How to Dance with Robots Christoph Hubatschke University of Vienna, Austria

What is human in humanoid machines? Oh! to dance with her—with her—that was now the aim of all Nathanael’s wishes, of all his desires. . . . He had always thought that he kept good and accurate time in dancing, but from the perfectly rhythmical evenness with which Olimpia danced, and which frequently put him quite out, he perceived how very faulty his own time really was. —E. T. A. Hoffmann (1967, 205–6)

In this scene from the famous novella “The Sandman” by E. T. A. Hoffmann from 1816, the protagonist, a rather naive student named Nathaniel, falls in love with his professor’s mysterious daughter, Olimpia. Of course, most people know this famous story: Olimpia turns out to be an automaton and the revelation drives Nathaniel crazy as he loses the ability to distinguish humans from automatons. Hoffmann’s novella is one of the best known works of German Romanticism, and is an important example of the fascination with artificial humanoid machines, an obsession that can be found throughout literature, mythology, and pop culture. In the eighteenth century, as automatons like the Chess-Playing Turk1 were built and presented to the public, the trope of the autonomous puppet became one of the defining tropes of the century. If humans and humanoid machines are perceived as indistinguishable, it not only opens the problems of social interaction these stories explore, but also poses the question of what the human him- or herself even is. What makes humans so special, when a machine can act, think, and dance as good as or even better than a human? Today, it is not only science fiction but also science policies that are obsessed with such topics: both artificial intelligence and humanoid robotics are some of the most talked about and highly funded new technologies. Often the introduction of these autonomous technologies does not lead to the exploration of new possibilities or the creation of new imaginations, but rather to the reproduction and reinforcement of existing biases in societies—for example, a machine learning system implemented in US criminal courts proposed significantly harsher sentences for black people than for white people (Angwin 1 In particular, the automatons of Wolfgang von Kempelen and Jacques de Vaucanson inscribed themselves in the collective imagination and defined the discussion on automatons. For an overview of the importance of these automatons in Romantic literature and culture, see Nielsen (2020).

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Christoph Hubatschke et al. 2016), and job-applicant screening software used in Amazon’s hiring department recommended men over women for research as well as tech jobs (Dastin 2018). There are many more examples of AI systems developing or rather “getting programmed with” racial, gender, ableist, and classist biases.2 The same can be said for humanoid robotics. From the early automatons of the eighteenth century3 to the high-tech robots of today, robot design is often dominated by gendered and racialised body norms, which are also often related to the fields robots should be implemented in, such as a predominance of female-shaped robots with female voices produced and designed for carework settings (Weber 2005). How to design but even more how and when to implement these technologies is therefore not a technical nor a solely ethical but predominantly a political question. What Michel Foucault describes in Discipline and Punish in regard to early automatons can therefore also be said for current humanoid robots or AI for that matter: “The celebrated automata, on the other hand, were not only a way of illustrating an organism, they were also political puppets, small-scale models of power” (Foucault 1977, 136). In this sense humanoid robots or artificial intelligence not only reproduce existing power relations but also reinforce a certain image of the “human.” It is a specific concept of “the human” that becomes the goal, the ideal, the norm. But what does this human norm look like? What kind of body images, what notion of autonomy, and what kind of intelligence are strived for and are therefore uncritically reproduced? That we even can develop the idea that a technical artefact can be humanlike exemplifies already the historicity of the concept of “humanness.” As literary scholar Louis Chude-Sokei in his study of black technopoetics The Sound of Culture suggests, this flexibility of humanness is found in the very core of a racist colonial logic:4 “If humans could be rendered sub- or inhuman, then machines by that same logic could be rendered sentient, human, raced” (Chude-Sokei 2016, 129). Already the word robot itself refers to this very logic, as the word robota means “unfree,” “forced labour,” “corvée,” “the labour that servants do.”5 With Deleuze and Guattari, we ought to be sceptical of notions such as individuality, autonomy, humanness, and so on. And it is exactly in the concept of machinic assemblages that we can find a theory that argues for a different understanding of technologies as well as humanmachine relationships, an understanding that may help us ask about the

2 For a condensed collection of examples and a study on how biases enter the machine, see the report by the AI Now Institute on discrimination and biases in AI (West, Whittaker, and Crawford 2019). 3 On the question of gender and race in early automatons and the connection between the discourse on automatons with colonial discourse, see Reiss (2001). 4 For more on the manifold relations of humanoid robots with colonial logic, see Eshun (1999) and Chude-Sokei (2016). 5 The word robot first appears in its modern meaning in 1920 in the Czech playwrite Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R. (Rossums Universal Robots) ([1923] 1961). Derived from the Slavic root rab, which means “slave,” in the creation of the word—which would become the hegemonic term for androids as well as automatons—Čapek already makes very clear that robots are part of the hierarchical and exploitative realities of capitalist economies.

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How to Dance with Robots manifold “intra-actions”6 of these technologies with that which used to be called human. To critically reflect on these “intra-actions,” I will first develop some central ideas of a philosophy of technology in the work of Deleuze and Guattari, and especially the role of technology in their concept of the machinic assemblage. In the second part I will discuss a dance-performance by the transdisciplinary artistic research group H.A.U.S. (Humanoids in Architecture and Urban Spaces). The performance Doppelgänger brings together a human dancer and two humanoid robots and draws its inspiration from the German Romantic poet Jean Paul, as well as Japanese Bunraku theatre. Reading the performance through a Deleuzo-Guattarian perspective of political and technological entanglements not only will help develop an alternative view of human–robot interactions but also may be helpful to criticise a certain problematic understanding of the “human” itself.

What is the machine in humanoid machines? He assured me that the mute gestures of these puppets gave him much satisfaction and told me bluntly that any dancer who wished to perfect his art could learn a lot from them. . . . . . . For affectation is seen, as you know, when the soul, or moving force, appears at some point other than the centre of gravity of the movement. —Heinrich Kleist (2003)

Six years before Hoffmann wrote “The Sandman,” in 1810 Heinrich Kleist wrote a short and rather strange text called “On the Marionette Theatre” in which a professional dancer praises the exact and precise dancing of marionette puppets. The dancer states that a marionette’s nearly weightless movements and emotionless way of dancing is exactly the goal that every dancer wants to achieve—at least according to him. It is the inhumanness of marionettes and their movement that makes them better dancers than humans; thus, the dancer dreams of artificial body parts to make him more puppet-like, and therefore more precise in his art. Once again it is technology that is seen as the better dancer. The human is not the ideal; rather, the puppet is. In the Dialogues with Claire Parnet, Deleuze exemplifies one important part of the concept of machinic assemblages7 through a metaphor of movement taken from Kleist’s

6 Intra-action here refers to the work of the physicist and feminist science-theory scholar Karen Barad. In contrast to the notion of interaction, “which presumes the prior existence of independent entities or relata” (Barad 2007, 139), Barad’s neologism of intra-action highlights that relata do not precede their relations. In fact, it is only through intra-actions that boundaries and properties materialise. “That is, the agential cut enacts a resolution within the phenomenon of the inherent ontological (and semantic) indeterminacy. In other words, relata do not preexist relations; rather, relata-within-phenomena emerge through specific intra-actions” (ibid., 140). 7 For a concise and clear overview of the concept assemblage see Assis (2018) and Nail (2017).

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Christoph Hubatschke short text:8 “What defines a machine assemblage is the shift of a centre of gravity along an abstract line. As in Kleist’s marionette, it is this shift which gives rise to actual lines or movements” (Deleuze and Parnet 2007, 104). In the following I will discuss the relevance of the concept of machinic assemblages for an understanding of technologies and through the reading of a danceperformance ask about these “movements” in the human-machine assemblages Deleuze talks about in regard to Kleist. Machinic assemblages, although in part a technological metaphor, are of course not reducible to technological aspects, and yet technologies play an important part here. As I will argue, technologies can always only be understood as part of specific machinic assemblages, which will open up the notion of technologies9 to focus on the combinations and arrangements they are part of and they can become part of. The context and the relations are therefore primary to a specific technology, the machinic assemblage comes first, as Guattari argues in his late text “On Machines”: In the history of philosophy the problem of the machine has generally been regarded as secondary to a more general system—that of techne and technique (la technique). I would propose a reversal of this point of view, to the extent that the problem of technique would now only be a subsidiary part of a much wider machine problematic. Since the “machine” is opened out towards its machinic environment and maintains all sorts of relationships with social constituents and individual subjectivities, the concept of technological machine should therefore be broadened to that of machinic agencements. (Guattari 1995, 9)

The machine therefore is not a technological term but rather technologies are created, used, and applied in different machines, in machinic assemblages. With Deleuze and Guattari we can always only talk about specific combinations, specific assemblages of which specific technologies are a part. Therefore, there is no such thing as technology, as we always need to look at specific technical objects and technologies in the specific assemblages in which they are created, produced, implemented, and used. This view of technology is of course the complete opposite of many prominent positions in the philosophy of technology, be it technological determinism10 or the theory of the autonomy of technology, or, most crucial of all, the idea of something like an essence of technology,11 as most prominently proposed by Martin Heidegger (1977). In contrast to Heidegger who searches for the very core of all technology, for Deleuze and Guattari technologies are, as William Bogard (2009, 15) put it, “multiplicities

8 Kleist’s marionette theatre text is quite important for Deleuze, as references to this text can be found throughout his work. For an in-depth discussion on Deleuze and Kleist’s text, especially in the context of dramatisation, performativity, and artistic research, see Wiame (2016) and Uhlmann (2009). 9 Assemblages, as Deleuze and Guattari clarify in A Thousand Plateaus, always act simultaneously on semiotic material as well as social flows (1987, 22–23). 10 What Deleuze states regarding sexuality may also be stated for technologies: “No assemblage can be characterized by one flux exclusively” (Deleuze and Parnet 2007, 101). 11 As Paolo de Assis argues in Logic of Experimentation, the concept of assemblages is directed against the very idea of something like an essence. The “logic of assemblage” therefore means overcoming “essence in favour of event” (Assis 2018, 100).

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How to Dance with Robots without an essence”:12 “the principle behind all technology is to demonstrate that a technical element remains abstract, entirely undetermined, as long as one does not relate it to an assemblage it presupposes” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 397–98). Here, once again, there is a shift away from the technical object to the assemblage, to the composition of bodies, to what they call the machinic assemblage. I continue the quotation from A Thousand Plateaus: “It is the machine that is primary in relation to the technical element: not the technical machine, itself a collection of elements, but the social or collective machine, the machinic assemblage that determines what is a technical element at a given moment, what is its usage, extension, comprehension, etc.” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 398). In other words, taken from Deleuze’s Foucault book, “Technology is therefore social before it is technical” (Deleuze 1988a, 40). Through this complex notion of the machine we see not only that technical objects are not isolated things that work autonomously all on their own, but also that technologies are always intrinsically related to the milieu or machinic assemblage. It is the specific assemblage that chooses (Deleuze 1988a, 39) or “machinises” (machinés) (Deleuze and Guattari 2007, 110, translation adjusted) the technical element. Understanding technologies as always situated and embedded in specific machinic assemblages shifts the focus away from the question of what technology is, to the Deleuzo-Spinozian question of what a specific technology can do, what it is capable of in a specific assemblage. And indeed it is the Deleuzian reading of Spinoza’s Ethics that helps us understand the “logic of assemblage” (Assis 2018, 100), the logic of combinations and capabilities. But focusing on machinic assemblages questions not only the autonomy of the technical object but also the autonomy of what we call the “human being.” It is only in the process of a machinic assemblage that distinguishable parts emerge or individuate, and yet they can never be understood if we look at them as isolated entities. For Deleuze and Guattari not only are technical objects secondary to the machinic assemblage, but so are certain ideas and concepts of “humanness,” as they write in “Balance-Sheet for ‘Desiring Machines’”: “For man and the tool are already components of a machine constituted by a full body acting as an engineering agency, and by men and tools that are engineered (machinés) insofar as they are distributed on this body” (Deleuze and Guattari 2007, 110). Machinic assemblages therefore combine both specific technologies and specific ideas of “humanness.” The specific combinations in the assemblages limit possibilities but at the same time make things possible, which may not be intended or planned but that would otherwise be impossible. Seen from the perspective of a machinic assemblage, we cannot distinguish between the capabilities of the machine parts, as everything is always already part of at least one machinic assemblage and as it is the combinations that make things possible or impossible. It is all 12 “Heidegger’s questions lead him to an essence of technology, Enframing, or the potential to convert all of Dasein into ‘standing reserve.’ . . . Deleuze and Guattari’s problematisations of machines lead them, by contrast, to a concept of a multiplicity without an essence—or better, with a ‘nomadic essence’—a complex configuration of machinic and enunciative elements called an ‘assemblage’” (Bogard 2009, 15).

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Christoph Hubatschke about combinations and arrangements, conscious and planned ones but also more particularly unconscious, unplanned, and maybe even unrecognised ones. A technology therefore is not something already defined but something always already situated. And as not everything is combinable, not everything can be part of an assemblage as Spinoza says: some things are poison in specific combinations, destroying other bodies, and some things affect them positively, empowering bodies and their power of activity. That is why Deleuze says the Ethics is not a book about morality but a political book, as the question of composing, of what to combine, is a political question: “That is why Spinoza calls out to us in the way he does: you do not know beforehand what good or bad you are capable of; you do not know beforehand what a body or a mind can do, in a given encounter, a given arrangement, a given combination” (Deleuze 1988b, 125). We do not know beforehand, we might add, what a specific technical element is capable of, what a technology can do. As Deleuze states: “We have no a priori knowledge of relations of composition; they require experimentation” (ibid., 116–17n12). Deleuze exemplifies this point in the Dialogues with Parnet through the example of a human-machine assemblage, more specifically, in regard to Kleist, a human-machine-dance assemblage: It may be said that the machine, in this sense, points to the unity of a machine operator. But this is wrong: the machine operator is present in the machine, “in the centre of gravity,” or rather of speed, which goes through him. That is why it is useless to say that certain movements are impossible for the machine—on the contrary, these are the movements such a machine makes because one of its parts is a man. Take the machine that has a dancer for one of its moving parts: one should not say that the machine cannot make some movement that only man is capable of making, but on the contrary that man is incapable of making this movement except as part of a certain machine. (Deleuze and Parnet 2007, 104)

I now want to further explore machinic assemblages, where one part is a human dancer, by looking at a specific dance performance cycle called Doppelgänger by the transdisciplinary research group H.A.U.S.

Dance of/with humanoid machines For it is not a poetic figure of speech, but the cold, naked truth, that we human beings are mere machines, in the service of higher creatures . . . by and by did they [angels] invent this and then that machine, or, as we like to say, human beings. —Jean Paul ([1785] 1974, 1028, translated by Sebastian Michael from H.A.U.S.)

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How to Dance with Robots Let me start with some introductory remarks on the transdisciplinary research group H.A.U.S., of which I am also a member.13 H.A.U.S. is an acronym for “Humanoids in Architecture and Urban Spaces”; and, of course, it also plays with the notion of the house, a nod to the spatiality of the human lifeworld as well as the spatiality of technologies. H.A.U.S. was founded in 2014 at the Technical University of Vienna with members coming from disciplines such as architecture, engineering, sociology, human–robot interaction, art, and philosophy. The group is interested in the manifold ways new technologies, especially AI and humanoid robotic systems, enter and thereby change—or, to speak with Henri Lefebvre (1991), “produce or co-produce”—space, and more importantly how their emergence changes the power relations regarding different spaces. Understanding technologies as they are outlined in this chapter, H.A.U.S. wants to explore human-machine assemblages through artistic research. In the following I want to focus on one specific performance cycle H.A.U.S. developed and performed between March 2018 and June 2019. The dance performance Doppelgänger evolved from small-scale movement studies with humanoid robots at the start, to improvisations between the dancer and the robots steered by the engineers, finally to become a twenty-five minute choreographed piece14 that was presented in various different contexts.15 The performance cycle was heavily inspired by the Romantic fear of and fascination with mechanical humanoid automatons; we tried to update some of these tropes and stories in the context of current debates on humanoid robots and AI. The main references were two specific yet very different artistic products of the eighteenth century. The first inspiration was a short text called “Human Beings are the Machines of Angels” written in 1785 by the German Romantic poet Jean Paul. In this text, a few sentences of which were quoted at the beginning of this section, Jean Paul, impressed by the automatons of his time, entertains the idea that the human itself is also only a machine, an automaton, but one infinitely more complex, so complex that, Paul suggests, it must be a divine machine, a machine built and steered by angels. The humanoid automatons of his time are therefore mere imitations of these real humanoid machines, namely humans—the machines of machines. Just as humans play and experiment with their automatons, angels also play and experiment with their human machines. Provoked by the technologies of his time, Paul therefore questions the human subject while at the same time asking what it means when humanoid machines like us think that they are autonomously acting independent subjects.

13 For more information on the research group, see https://h-a-u-s.org/. 14 A video recording of one of the performances can be viewed at https://h-a-u-s.org/index. php/2019/06/29/posthuman-flux-2/. 15 The performance was given at many diverse venues, from conferences on humanoid robotics to independent theatres, to the Volkstheater Vienna.

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Christoph Hubatschke At the same time Paul wrote his text, a new art form was on the rise in Japan called Ningyō jōruri or Bunraku,16 a high-art tradition of puppet theatre. Of particular interest here, in Bunraku one puppet is “played” by three puppeteers, and the puppets are nearly life-size humanoids. In Bunraku, therefore, the movement and gestures even of an individual puppet are played and steered by a group of people.17 While Paul writes about humans being steered by other creatures, Bunraku as an artistic as well as highly technical practice explores the difficulties of steering a humanoid puppet. A puppet is always already a “groupuscule” (Deleuze and Foucault 1977, 206); it is an assemblage of technical puppetry, a group of puppeteers, a specific form of accompanying music, story elements, and strict artistic, cultural, and social codes. Although the puppeteers steer the humanoid puppet, they are not free in their movements; instead, they have to coordinate with one another and can only operate within a certain range of movement, namely the movement the puppet itself is capable of. Both these references18 discuss in very different yet related ways questions of human-humanoid machine relations, questions of who is imitating whom, who is playing whom, and who steers and controls whom, which thereby question the very idea of autonomous movement and furthermore the idea of autonomy, individuality, and subjectivity itself, as well as the boundaries between technical artefact, the human, and humanoid shape. Both references discuss in their own particular way specific human-humanoid machinic assemblages, assemblages of doppelgängers. The dance-performance, four moments from which are shown in figures 13.1–4, was developed by the theorist Oliver Schürer and Eva Maria Kraft, a classically trained dancer and choreographer interested especially in contemporary improvisational dance. Kraft developed the choreography together with three engineers from H.A.U.S., Helena Frijns, Clara Haider, and Darja Stoeva. The humanoid robots that were used are two identical models of the first mass produced humanoid robot, Pepper.19 Eva Maria Kraft started her work by testing the possibilities of movement of the humanoid robot models, looking at the radius of every motor and every joint. Only after that did she develop a choreography that pushes the movement of these machines to their very limit. Inspired by the limited way the robots can move, but also by the movements they can easily make, which no human being would be capable of, she then developed her own choreography. The narrative of Doppelgänger follows Jean Paul’s text, which is read aloud by the actor Sebastian Michael. Every paragraph of the story was discussed in the group and then translated into motifs as well as a specific atmosphere or emotion. Affected by the tone of each paragraph, a dance scene was developed that

16 For a general introduction to Ningyō jōruri see Ortolani (1995); on the story elements of Bunraku see Brazell (1998). 17 In Cinema 2, Deleuze (1989, 268) writes about the “mechanical movement” of the puppets in “Japanese theatre” and relates it directly to Kleist’s “On the Marionette Theatre.” 18 For more on references and their importance for the performance cycle, see Schürer (2019). 19 The robot is produced by SoftBank Robotics, for more information see: https://www.softbankrobotics. com/emea/en/pepper.

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How to Dance with Robots focused on a specific form of interaction between the robots and the dancer. The specific movements, however, are strongly inspired by movements from Bunraku theatre: the typical movements of the puppets in the play but also the movements of the puppeteers themselves, movements that are normally invisible in a play. In a performance of Doppelgänger these different movements are juxtaposed in different scenes, following the motifs of Paul’s text as well as the motif of steering puppets. In some scenes, the movement of the dancer is triggered by certain not fully determined movements by the robots; in these scenes, the engineers cede control of the robots to the dancer, who physically forces the movement of the robot. There are also scenes of highly synchronised movements that become faster and more asynchronic over time, scenes of intimate closeness between the dancer and the robots, and scenes where the movements of the dancer and the robots are quite detached from each other. During the process, each new challenge for the robot and therefore for the engineers inspired the dancer to think about the coordinated movement and in turn inspired the engineers to rethink the robot’s programming. It was therefore a learning process on both sides, but at the same time also a kind of unlearning, as the engineers had to change their approaches to problemsolving, and the dancer simultaneously had to change her typical approach to choreographing a piece. Working on and performing Doppelgänger therefore is not about individual movements, the individual mastery of the dancer or the engineers, but rather the possibilities of movement in the specific human-machine assemblage. As Deleuze states in regard to Kleist’s text, the question of who controls whom, which humanoid body is capable of which movement, cannot be answered by only looking at one part of the assemblage, because movement becomes possible only “as part of a certain machine” (Deleuze and Parnet 2007, 104). Drawing on a Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophy of technology, experimenting with this human-machine assemblage—working on as well as discussing and staging the performance—was an exploration of a specific technology in a specific assemblage, asking what this technology is and is not capable of, speculating over which assemblages this technology could or could not be part of. But furthermore the performance also questioned the idea of clear boundaries between what is called “the human” and machines of different kinds. Focusing on movement, especially in relation to intimate closeness and remote control, also raised questions of body norms and ideals implemented in the particular humanoid robots we experimented with. Doppelgänger not only helped develop new perspectives on the technology of humanoid robots and new approaches to these very machines, but also questioned the autonomy and independence of what is called a “human subject.” Working on the performance helped us explore new perspectives on all too familiar fields of research and at the same time unlearn limiting boundaries of our respective disciplines.

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Christoph Hubatschke

Figures 13.1–4.

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Figures 13.1–4. Eva-Maria Kraft and humanoid robots performing Doppelgänger in the Volkstheater Wien, May 2019 (photos by Christine Miess).

How to Dance with Robots Conclusion The history of this automaton had sunk deeply into their souls, and an absurd mistrust of human figures began to prevail. Several lovers, in order to be fully convinced that they were not paying court to a wooden puppet, required that their mistress should sing and dance a little out of time. —E. T. A. Hoffmann (1967, 212)

Working with humanoid robots, we soon reached the limits of the machine. Although we used high-tech robots, the performance was not at all predictable, even though some parts were programmed. Nevertheless, every iteration of the performance, just like in the development phases in between, was an unpredictable event. It was especially inaccuracies of movement caused by wear to the motors that throughout the many sessions of dancing together individuated the robots, leading them to develop different mannerisms specific to their embodiment—one robot moves slower, one cannot stretch its left arm as far as the other, and so on. Although we repeated the same choreography again and again, through the individuation of the robots and the experience gained by the dancer and engineers of dancing with them, every iteration produced new movements: robot arms stopped moving, started moving at entirely new speeds, or suddenly started to perform unprogrammed movements. Dancing in time with robots is rather hard; thus, in contrast to Nathaniel from “The Sandman,” who isn’t able to keep exactly in time with the machine due to its rhythmic precision, the problem we had was exactly the opposite. In contrast to mainstream robotic research, Doppelgänger doesn’t simply research whether people are afraid of or fascinated by robots, whether they find specific robots uncanny or cute, or where these technologies could be used and would be accepted. Our approach isn’t simply interested in making these technologies work, but in questioning the assemblages through which these technologies are invented, researched, produced, experienced, and used. Free from questions of technical functionality, the project opens new possibilities and fields of imagination, for the engineers as much as for the dancer and for theorists like me, to think about these technologies. The project researched not only specific assemblages with humanoid robots but also how these assemblages can be newly rearranged, cut, and assembled against the grain. Working outside a typical laboratory setting we can experience intimateness, presence, and different combinations of humans and machines, and deterritoralise these dichotomies—in short, we can create a machinic assemblage in action. The Deleuzo-Guattarian concept of the machinic assemblage urges us not to search for the essence of humanness, the essence of technology, but rather to actively explore different assemblages and relate new ideas about certain technologies as well as our relations to them. Although Doppelgänger was quite successful, both as research and as an experiment and as a performance piece that was constantly changing, bringing in new elements and dropping others with every new iteration, there was still a clear distinction between the developmental phase and the choreographic training,

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Christoph Hubatschke on the one hand, and the performance as a kind of provisional staged piece, on the other hand. In the current new performance cycle that H.A.U.S. is developing and performing, one of the goals is to blur this very boundary. Focusing on specific non-mechanical movements like breathing, the current performance cycle is focused on improvisational dance, thereby embracing the spontaneity of the movements of the robots. Provoking new combinations, adding new objects, agents, and elements into human-machine assemblages, the current cycle also focuses more on human-machine merging than on the Romantic motif of the doppelgänger. To not only question the technologies and what they are capable of in specific assemblages and question the humanoid form of these technologies, but also question the “human” as a specific historical concept, we have to leave behind questions of mirroring and imitating, of steering and controlling, to explore new forms of collectively. In his reading of Spinoza, Deleuze emphasises actively experimenting and arranging assemblages. He writes, “The art of the Ethics itself: organizing good encounters, composing actual relations, forming powers, experimenting” (Deleuze 1988b, 119). Experimenting with always new combinations and arrangements produces knowledge of different “relations of composition,” and therefore knowledge of specific technologies in specific assemblages, yet it also opens up new questions of the agency of humans and machines. It questions what the machine and the human can be in specific machinic assemblages and asks where the lines between these categorises not only are blurred but also vanish. As Jean Paul asks in his text: Who then are the machines? Who are the robots and who is producing whom? Who is constructing the very image of “humanness”? Who is dancing with whom? References Angwin, Julia, Jeff Larson, Surya Mattu, and Čapek, Karl. (1923) 1961. R.U.R. (Rossum’s Lauren Kirchner. 2016. “Machine Bias.” Universal Robots). Translated by Paul ProPublica, 23 May. Accessed 25 August Selver. Adapted for the English stage 2020. https://www.propublica.org/ by Nigel Playfair in R.U.R. and The article/machine-bias-risk-assessments-inInsect Play, by Josef and Karel Čapek, criminal-sentencing. 1–104. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Assis, Paolo de. 2018. Logic of Experimentation: R.U.R. first published 1920 as R.U.R. Rethinking Music Performance through (Rossum’s Universal Robots): Kolektivní Artistic Research. Orpheus Institute Series. drama o vstupní komeddii a třech aktech Leuven: Leuven University Press. (Prague: Aventinum). This translation Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe first published 1923 (London: Oxford Halfway: Quantum Physics and the University Press). Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Chude-Sokei, Louis. 2016. The Sound of Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics. Bogard, William. 2009. “Deleuze and Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Machines: A Politics of Technology?” In Press. Deleuze and New Technology, edited by Mark Dastin, Jeffrey. 2018. “Amazon Scraps Secret Poster and David Savat, 15–31. Edinburgh: AI Recruiting Tool that Showed Bias Edinburgh University Press. Against Women.” Reuters, 10 October. Brazell, Karen, ed. 1998. Traditional Japanese Accessed 25 August 2020. https://www. Theater: An Anthology of Plays. New York: reuters.com/article/us-amazon-comColumbia University Press. jobs-automation-insight/amazon-scraps-

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How to Dance with Robots secret-ai-recruiting-tool-that-showedbias-against-women-idUSKCN1MK08G/. Deleuze, Gilles. 1988a. Foucault. Translated and edited by Séan Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1986 as Foucault (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1988b. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Translated by Robert Hurley. San Francisco: City Lights. First published 1970 as Spinoza (Paris: Presses universitaires de France), revised 1981 as Spinoza: Philosophie pratique (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1989. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1985 as Cinéma 2: L’image-temps (Paris: Minuit). Deleuze, Gilles, and Michel Foucault. 1977. “Intellectuals and Power: A Conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze.” In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, by Michel Foucault, edited by Donald F. Bouchard, translated by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, 205–17. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Chapter first published 1972 as “Les intellectuels et le pouvoir” (L’arc 49: 3–10). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Minuit). ———. 2007. “Balance-Sheet for ‘DesiringMachines.’” Translated by Robert Hurley. In Chaosophy: Texts and Interviews 1972–1977, by Félix Guattari, edited by Sylvère Lotringer, translated by David L. Sweet, Jarred Becker, and Taylor Adkins [et al.], 90–115. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). First published 1973 as “Bilan-programme pour machines désirantes” (Minuit 2 [January]: 1–25). Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. 2007. Dialogues II. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Rev. ed. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1977 as Dialogues (Paris: Flammarion). Eshun, Kodwo. 1999. More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction. London: Quartet Books.

Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon. First published 1975 as Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard). Guattari, Félix. 1995. “On Machines.” Journal of Philosophy and the Visual Arts 6: 8–17. First given as a lecture 1990; first published 1993 as “A propos des machines” (Chimeres 19: 85–96). Heidegger, Martin. 1977. “The Question Concerning Technology.” In The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, translated by William Lovitt, 3–35. New York: Garland. Essay first published 1954 as “Die Frage nach der Technik,” in Vorträge und Aufsätze (Pfullingen: G. Neske), 13–44. Hoffmann, E. T. A. 1967. “The Sand-Man.” Translated by J. T. Bealby. In The Best Tales of Hoffmann, edited by E. F. Bleiler, 183–214. New York: Dover. Short story written 1816 as “Der Sandmann.” Kleist, Heinrich von. 2003. “On the Marionette Theatre.” Translated by Idris Parry. Southern Cross Review 9. Accessed 25 August 2020. http://southerncrossreview. org/9/kleist.htm. Essay first published 1810 as Über das Marionetten Theater (Berliner Abendblätter, 12–15 December). Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell. First published 1974 as Production de l’espace (Paris: Anthropos). Nail, Thomas. 2017. “What Is an Assemblage?” SubStance 46 (1): 21–37. Nielsen, Wendy C. 2020. “Romantic Tales of Pseudo-Automata: Jacques de Vaucanson and the Chess-Playing-Turk in Literature and Culture.” In Romantic Automata: Exhibitions, Figures, Organisms, edited by Michael Demson and Christopher R. Clason, 87–105. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press. Ortolani, Benito. 1995. The Japanese Theatre: From Shamanistic Ritual to Contemporary Pluralism. Rev. ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Paul, Jean. (1785) 1974. “Menschen sind die Maschinen von Engeln” (Human beings are the machines of angels). In Sämtliche Werke, Abt. 2, Bd. 1, 1027–30. Munich: Carl-Hanser Verlag. Text written 1785. Reiss, Benjamin. 2001. The Showman and the Slave: Race, Death, and Memory in Barnum’s

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Christoph Hubatschke America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Schürer, Oliver. 2019. “Doppelgänger: A Dance Performance Research Cycle on Humans and Humanoids.” In Tanz der Dinge / Things That Dance, edited by Johannes Birringer and Josephine Fenger, 77–80. Bielefeld: Transcript. Uhlmann, Anthony. 2009. “Expression and Affect in Kleist, Beckett and Deleuze.” In Deleuze and Performance, edited by Laura Cull, 54–70. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Weber, Jutta. 2005. “Helpless Machines and True Loving Care Givers: A Feminist

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Critique of Recent Trends in HumanRobot Interaction.” Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society 3 (4): 209–18. West, Sarah Myers, Meredith Whittaker, and Kate Crawford. 2019. “Discriminating Systems: Gender, Race, and Power in AI.” AI Now Institute. Accessed 25 August 2020. https://ainowinstitute.org/ discriminatingsystems.html. Wiame, Aline. 2016. “A Thought without Puppeteer: Ethics of Dramatization and Selection of Becomings.” Deleuze Studies 10 (1): 33–49.

Machines with Organs Model 5052 Vanessa Farfán Bauhaus University, Weimar, Germany

Determinism is the only way to imagine the world. And indeterminism is the only way to exist in it. —Paul Valéry (1973, 531, my translation)

Arrangements in a machine with organs (mWo)

Figure 14.1.

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Figure 14.1. Portuguese man-of-war. (Source: Islands in the Sea 2002, NOAA/OER.)

Vanessa Farfán Portuguese man-of-war (Physalia physalis) Kingdom: Animalia Phylum: Cnidarians (Cnidaria) Class: Hydrozoans (Hydrozoa) Order: State jellyfish (Siphonophorae) Family: Sea bubbles (Physalia) Genus: Physalia Species: Physalia physalis Polymorphism is chiefly interesting as an example of the extraordinary ability of animals to produce an almost infinite number of variations upon a given theme. . . . The argument here adopted has been that a siphonophore or a compound Hydroid is a colony and that its parts represent, morphologically speaking, individuals connected by a common intermediate tissue. . . . The alternative view, that everything which results from the development of a single egg is an individual animal, however much it may subdivide asexually, and that gastrozooids, bracts, and the rest are nothing more than the organs of this animal, seems relatively satisfactory when applied to such a form as the adult Velella.[1] . . . . . . the individuals of a Siphonophore represent morphological individuals which have suffered a loss of independence similar to that of the component cells of any multicellular animal, which later may be regarded as having been derived originally from a colony of individual single-celled animals (protozoa). In a physiological sense on the other hand the Siphonophore colony is a unity and may be regarded as an individual system. (Stephenson 1929, 7–8)

The Portuguese man-of-war is a colony of symbiotic organisms that Deleuze and Guattari would consider an assemblage (Posteraro 2020, 421–28).2 Its body consists of individual polyps that have devolved particular biological functions to other polyps that are specialised in tasks that must be performed by the organism that together they are building. How the joined polyps change into organs has generated interesting discussions at the scientific level. These discussions led to the study of protozoa as single-celled beings. Deriving their name from the Greek proto (first) and zoon (animal), protozoa have been described as “provocative objects,” as the eighteenth-century French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, once placed them in the boundary between “individual being” and “the ‘organic parts’ that constitute the individual” (Schloegel and Schmidgen 2002, 619). A curious fact regarding aesthetics is that while there is no evidence that protozoa possess sensory organs, they display a form of pleasure and pain in their reactions (Schloegel and Schmidgen 2002, 623). Speaking at the conference “Zellseelen und Seelenzellen” in March 1878 in Vienna, the German naturalist, philosopher, and artist Ernst Haeckel advanced the theory that every cell has a psyche and that the basic psychological functions are unconscious (Haeckel 1909; Schloegel and Schmidgen 2002, 623). Haeckel’s popular book

1 Velella belong to the class of Hydrozoa, as does the Portuguese man-of-war. 2 This research is part of the PhD project I begun in 2018 at the Bauhaus Universität Weimar with the working title “Machines with Organs.”

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Machines with Organs Die Welträtsel (The Riddle of the Universe) (1899), which defended the principles of monistic philosophy, went on to influence significant scientific research during the twentieth century, mainly in the field of psychology. I remember a situation I experienced in Mexico City in 2016. While walking the streets of the city centre, I spotted a street cleaner holding a sack full of aluminium cans a few metres before a traffic light. He approached the traffic flow, which in this part of the city was reduced to two lanes. Taking advantage of the absence of cars at that moment, he emptied the sack on the street. Dozens of cans now lay on the road. With his broom, he lined up the cans and waited. As the first cars approached and slowed down, the street cleaner signalled with his hand, “go, go.” It took a moment for the car drivers to understand that he wanted them to drive over the cans and crush them. Many of the drivers laughed and some even honked in a gesture of greeting. The street cleaner answered with a gesture of thanks and continued to gather the cans with the broom from time to time until all were completely flat. Afterwards he collected the flattened cans, returned them to the sack, and walked away pushing his rubbish trolley. I realised I was witnessing a didactic representation of how Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage could work. Looking at the whole dynamic was fascinating: the street cleaner and car drivers were like small organisms building a “crushing cans system.”

Figure 14.2.

Unpredictability as a condition for the machine with organs Our perception of the world and how we place ourselves in it depends considerably on how we use our digital machines—that is, where in our assemblage they are located and what role they play; whether they are extensions of our body or whether they replace a specific “organ.” Ideally, our digital machines (computers, smart phones, tablets) profile the space of the contin-

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Figure 14.2. A street cleaner in Mexico City uses passing cars to crush aluminium cans. Video still: Vanessa Farfán, 2016.

Vanessa Farfán gency through calculable processes and results. Digitalisation is on many occasions taken as a synonym for “smartification.” Smart is a marketing term that means controlling everything using digital devices connected via a permanent internet connection. Convenience, certainty, safety, and efficiency are the main promises of digitalisation; however, on many occasions such promises are overtaken by Mexican reality. In Mexico, inconvenience, uncertainty, and inefficiency are factors that one has to deal with; nevertheless, these factors too have a significant potential to solve everyday problems. Lack of infrastructure, corruption, crime, and even cultural features of the Mexican people, such as the difficulty of long-term planning, are factors that permit the mobility of laws, spaces, and social dynamics. Arranging relations in Mexico City is agile: everything moves quickly, everything could change without warning. One lives there with the paradox that in Mexico City the only predictable thing is unpredictability. This may be why Mexicans have developed a kind of polymorphism not only in the way they resolve everyday problems but also in the way they conceive what a problem is in itself. As a Mexican and an artist, creativity is a complex process full of uncertainty, strain, and inefficiency. The potential for errors, individual cases, undetermined factors, and accidents belongs to the artistic process. In this sense, I am often confronted with the conditions that digital space creates in our everyday lives. Processes, standards, classifications, and digital systems become more visible when they break down. I remember that when I was seven my father bought a second-hand car. The car was in perfect condition except for a hole in the backseat floor. My sister and I enjoyed riding in that car sitting in the back, observing through the hole all that appeared in front of our eyes as we travelled through the streets of Mexico City. This small car and its hole became a tiny physics lab for me. Together with my sister, I planned and prepared the objects we would need for our next trip: bottles with water or paint, long wooden sticks that would wear out, stones to mark a path, and so on. It was at that time that I discovered the potential and the utilitarian value of the broken. In Das Ideal des Kaputten (The ideal of the broken), Alfred Sohn-Rethel (2018) describes the culture, mentality, and attitude to technology of people in Naples during the 1920s. Similarly, people in contemporary Mexico give the impression that some objects and situations only begin to work when they break.3 How open would a digital system need to be to integrate unpredictable states into processes? What form could the concept of error take when confronting its role as a trigger of invention in human creativity with its status as something to be avoided in machines? In 2016, these questions alongside Marcel Duchamp’s artistic experiment Three Standard Stopages (Trois stoppages étalon)4 3 Such situations and machines may tell us something about autonomy. If a machine without organs is possible, does the structure of a machine with organs need to be broken for it to be possible and, if so, how can it be broken? There are still questions for me. 4 For this work made in 1913, Duchamp dropped three one-metre-long threads from a height of one metre onto a canvas, the threads absorbing the third dimension as they fell: “the straight line becomes a curved line without at all losing its title of nobility: the metre” (Duchamp quoted in Molderings 2010, 41).

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Machines with Organs inspired me to begin researching possible structures that allow new interactions between human and digital agents. I call such a container for complex processes a machine with organs (mWo).

Model 5052 and the machine with organs: an experiment in analogue-digital art In Philosophie der Maschine (Philosophy of the machine) (2018), Martin Burckhardt questions the utilitarian meaning of computers as tools: “While the purpose of a drill is to drill holes in the wall, the purpose of a computer cannot be clarified with certainty; this depends on the program it works with. This indeterminacy leads to a shift in perception. Instead of a finite tool, we are confronted with a space of possibilities, with a workshop” (Burckhardt 2018, 31, my translation). This amplified view of a computer as a workshop, as a “tool container,” cannot be related to the idea of an artist’s workplace (workshop, studio, atelier); instead, an artist’s workplace is a space for experimentation in which autonomy (as an inalienable factor of art) takes place.5 In this sense, we might question whether the range of experimentation left by the algorithmic architecture in the tools of the “computer workshop” even has a trace of autonomy.

Figure 14.3.

5 Autonomy as a concept may be given a broader perspective if we consider Deleuze and Guattari’s cosmological view of it in A Thousand Plateaus (1987) as something belonging to the individual in relation to the many. Deleuze and Guattari’s vision can also be associated with the art process itself if we think of it as a great process of becoming in which the steps taken toward the completed artwork (which I call nodes) function as small autonomous individuals who cannot exist without the others.

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Figure 14.3. Model 5052. Image: Vanessa Farfán, 2018.

Vanessa Farfán An mWo is a dynamic system with flexible nodes. It is a hybrid machine that has been created based on a long, slow, and possibly infinite algorithm. Comprising biological (e.g., human), physical (e.g., electricity and gravity), and digital agents (e.g., computer language) as “organs,” an mWo is a non-standardised system that can be coded and re-coded through its operation. Its structure can be perceived not only in a concrete physical form but also as a process. Model 5052 is a device, a part of an mWo, an intermezzo (see Farfán 2020). It is run by an electric motor, lead pellets, gravity, and graphite paper. The device, Model 5052, is neither the “final product” nor the creator of the artwork. It and its output are only steps in the process. Its function is to obtain, by means of an aesthetic interpretation of contingency, concrete forms of the possible. These concrete forms are prismatic shapes that are also part of the mWo. Model 5052’s creation process is a complex composition of materials, actions, and circumstances in which several artworks have been emersed. All these materials, actions, circumstances, and artworks constitute the mWo. Like Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome (1981) or a basic form of algorithmic geometry, this mWo could be described in terms of recursivity, as the cause and the effect of itself (as in the thought of Schelling) (see Hui 2019). In an mWo, contingency plays an important role. The mWo as a whole process that includes Model 5052 could be perceived as a single artwork, a complete artwork (Gesamtkunstwerk)6 with autopoietic features (Varela, Maturana, and Uribe 1974). As in all human-made machines, in Model 5052 autopoiesis remains at the level of fiction; nevertheless, if this is an illusion of autopoiesis, one may wonder what is so fascinating about machines. In their book Media after Deleuze, Harper and Savat (2016, 32) write: “The key issue for Deleuze, which he pursues in a variety of ways throughout his work, is that thought is precisely not binary, not a representation, not an imitation and not the thought of the One.” Paradoxically, compared with the concept of the rhizome, Model 5052 plays the role of a trigger whose aesthetic quality of synthesis (a requirement of any model) accelerates the interaction process between different forms of binary segmentation: male/female, predictability/unpredictability, encode/decode, input/output, mechanical/organic. In fact, the process for conceiving Model 5052 started with a coin as a binary trigger. In 1854 mathematician George Boole developed a calculation system by which certain logical reasons could be expressed in mathematical terms. Boole developed a logic of the universe based on 0 and 1 that does not express a number but absence and presence. Inspired by Boolean algebra and probability as a value between 0 and 1, I designed and made a coin. On one side of this coin is a large form representing “one”; on the other side the square is a form that represents “zero.” By tossing the coin for one hour, I could obtain a random binary code. This process is described by Downey and Hirschfeldt in Algorithmic Randomness and Complexity (2010, xxi).

6 The concept of a Gesamtkunstwerk was theorised by the philosopher Friedrich Schelling and was taken up some years later by Richard Wagner. I address this concept in a formal sense since an mWo involves several art media: visual, spatial, and performative art. 228

Machines with Organs

Figure 14.4.

Process as a colonial organism I began this project without intending to start a new artistic project. I merely wanted to understand the physiognomy of digital machines by making small artistic and aesthetic experiments. By the end, I had got not only the idea to build a machine (Model 5052) but also the idea of mapping the whole process as an analogy of a colonial organism, where every step (in which artistic works and experiments arise) would correspond to the small individual who specialises in one function of the greater “organism”: an mWo with the structure of a rhizome. Synthesised in eleven steps (so far), the process does not end with the conception and construction of Model 5052: it is a process without beginning or end. In this sense, an mWo is closer to a process than a device and it is impossible to calculate the number of steps such a process is made of. The process to construct Model 5052 started with tossing a coin for one hour. The result of this action, written in sequences of 0 (heads) and 1 (tails), generates a “random binary code.” The random binary code was then translated into text through an online binary-text translator. The resulting text was then put through an internet search engine; as a result, I obtained an ASCII code archive of 9,361 pages. To reduce the large number of pages, I decided to add the four digits composing 9,361 (9 + 3 + 6 + 1 = 19) and then the two numbers generated (1 + 9 = 10). With the help of an online random number generator, I selected 10 pages from among the 9,361 pages. I wrote the number of the 10 chosen pages on small pieces of paper, put them in a tombola drum, and drew one out: I got the number 5,052. I took page 5,052 from the ASCII code archive to make a punch card of it; then, I started my aesthetic experiments using different forms of stacked structures and light. Finally, I obtained the final structure for Model 5052. If one considers the number of ASCII code pages, it means that only 9,361 different devices similar to Model 5052 could exist.

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Figure 14.4. Coin. Image: Vanessa Farfán, 2017.

Vanessa Farfán

Figure 14.5.

Figure 14.6.

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Figure 14.5. Material tests with the punch card of page 5,052. Photo: Vanessa Farfán, 2017. Figure 14.6. A “concrete form of the possible.” Photo: Vanessa Farfán, 2018.

Machines with Organs Model 5052 is a vertical stacked structure formed by eight punch cards. Connected to an electric motor, the first card constantly slides back and forth. The user of the machine drops ten lead balls (here the number ten also corresponds to the sum of the number 9,361) that, under the filtration principle, fall through the holes in the punched cards. The impact of the balls that succeed in passing through the eight layers are registered as points due to a sheet of graphite transfer paper located at the base of the machine. The points marked on the paper are interpreted by the artist in two-dimensional forms (graphs) and three-dimensional forms (similar to prismatoids) under the name “concrete forms of the possible.” A total absence of marks on the paper is open to a wider aesthetic interpretation. The 300 × 300 × 300 cm black box where Model 5052 is installed does not just serve the technical and aesthetic requirements of the machine. This is not only an analogy of the digital device but also an analogy of empty space (which even lacks light), the space where every act of theatre—and I would add performance—takes place (Brook 1968).7 This is a “Schrödinger’s cat” space in which every image arising from speculation on the processes inside the opaque digital device called the black box could be real.

Figure 14.7.

7 In my experience as a lighting designer for theatre (2000–2020) I became familiar with scenic spatial concepts. The British theatre director Peter Brook in his book The Empty Space (1968) discussed the idea of any empty space being a space for an act of theatre.

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Figure 14.7. Part of the Process of an mWo. Image: Vanessa Farfán, 2020.

Vanessa Farfán An mWo has no beginning or ending. The mWo that is comprised between tossing the coin and the construction of a black box is only one part of the “infinite algorithm.” This process presents binary dichotomies, yet it is in agreement with what Deleuze and Guattari say about the brain: it is “much more a grass than a tree” (1987, 15).

Figure 14.8.

References Brook, Peter. 1968. The Empty Space. London: MacGibbon and Kee. Burckhardt, Martin. 2018. Philosophie der Maschine. Berlin: Matthes & Seitz. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1981. “Rhizome: Introduction.” Translated by Paul Foss and Paul Patton. I and C 8: 49–71. First published 1976 as Rhizome: Introduction (Paris: Minuit).

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Figure 14.8. Sketch. Image: Vanessa Farfán, 2019.

———. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Minuit). Downey, Rodney G., and Denis R. Hirschfeld. 2010. Algorithmic Randomness and Complexity. New York: Springer.

Machines with Organs Farfán, Vanessa. 2020. “Vanessa Farfán: About ‘Model 5052.’” YouTube video, 8:22, posted by “farfan330,” 23 April. Accessed 2 September 2020. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=sGwUIJqL5hM. Haeckel, Ernst. 1899. Die Welträtsel: Gemeinverständliche Studien über Monistische Philosophie (Bonn: E. Strauß). Translated by Joseph McCabe as The Riddle of the Universe at the Close of the Nineteenth Century (New York: Harper, 1900). ———. 1909. Zellseelen und Seelenzellen: Vortrag, gehalten am 22. März 1878 in der “Concordia” zu Wien. Leipzig: Alfred Kröner Verlag. Harper, Tauel, and David Savat. 2016. Media after Deleuze. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Hui, Yuk. 2019. Recursivity and Contingency. London: Rowman and Littlefield International. Molderings, Herbert. 2010. Duchamp and the Aesthetics of Chance: Art as Experiment. Translated by John Brogden. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 2006 as Kunst als Experiment: Marcel Duchamps “3 KunststopfNormalmaße” (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag).

Posteraro, Tano. 2020. “Assemblage Theory and the Two Poles of Organic Life.” Deleuze and Guattari Studies 14 (3): 402–32. Schloegel, Judy Johns, and Henning Schmidgen. 2002. “General Physiology, Experimental Psychology, and Evolutionism: Unicellular Organism as Objects of Psychophysiological Research, 1877–1918.” Isis 93 (4): 614–45. Sohn-Rethel, Alfred. 2018. Das Ideal des Kaputten. Edited by Carl Freytag. Freiburg: Ça-ira-Verlag. Stephenson, T. A. 1929. “Hydrozoa.” In Encyclopædia Britannica; Volume 12: Hydroza to Jeremy, Epistle of, 14th ed., 1–8. London: Encyclopædia Britannica. Valéry, Paul. 1973. Cahiers I. Paris: Gallimard. Translated by Paul Gifford, Siân Miles, Robert Picking, and Brian Stimpson as Cahiers/Notebooks 1, edited by Brian Stimpson, Paul Gifford, and Robert Pickering (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2000). Varela, Francisco G., Humberto R. Maturana, and Ricardo Uribe. 1974. “Autopoiesis: The Organization of Living Systems, Its Characterization and a Model.” Biosystems 5 (4): 187–96.

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Recalcitrant Temporalities Heterogeneous Time and the Simulated Image Paul Dolan Northumbria University, UK

This chapter documents the results of practice-based research that uses assemblage theory as a framework for understanding how time in computersimulated artworks (CSA) is heterogeneously constructed across human, non-human, material, and virtual domains. Through the production of three “real-time” simulated environments, programmed to change over extended durations, assemblage theory is used to challenge the simplicity of “real time” as a definition, and instead offers a framework for time that is ontologically distributed across domains. This framework of “recalcitrant temporalities” is used to examine the specific ranges of time manifest within CSA—from the micro temporalities of computer-generated imagery to the expansive durations of the minerals and materials used to produce them. The artworks discussed in this chapter were created with a variety of animation and game engine software and exhibited within gallery settings. An iterative, action research-based methodology was employed to reflect on each artwork in relation to existing theories of simulation, materiality, and time. A brief overview is provided of the different artworks and approaches to constructing time, followed by a longer discussion of the framework and its philosophical implications.

Time logic one Wireframe Valley (2014) is a real-time simulated landscape, programmed to slowly reveal its wireframe construction over a three-month period. It was first commissioned by Queens Hall, Hexham, and exhibited in 2014. The time logic in Wireframe Valley (2014) was constructed using a visual scripting system called Flowgraph in the CryEngine game engine software interface. Visual scripting is a pictorial, node-based approach to coding, in which variables, functions, and connections are created by visually connecting different nodes together into graphs. In this work, a “counter” system was created, which used “clock” nodes to count to a specific time and change the visual appearance of the scene when a specific time range was encountered. For example, debug mode one, the first in the sequence of thirteen debug modes, was active between zero and 12,096,000 seconds, or two weeks. Debug modes are different ways of visualising virtual 235

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Figure 15.1.

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Figure 15.2.

Figure 15.1. Wireframe Valley (2014) in situ at Queens Hall, Hexham, Northumberland, UK. Figure 15.2. The progression of debug modes in Wireframe Valley (2014), indicating the amount of days each mode was visible for, and the name of the debug mode.

Recalcitrant Temporalities scenes so that videogame developers can optimise virtual environments to run on computers of different processing power. For example, a debug mode can highlight erroneous virtual actors that are too processor intensive and require a 3D artist to reduce the number of polygons it contains, or reduce the size of a texture map attached to a 3D object.

Time logic two The previous time logic was modified for use in Floating Point (2016) and Wood for the Trees (2016). Floating Point (2016) is a real-time iceberg that slowly degrades and melts into a simulated ocean over the duration of the exhibition. The visual scripting system in the Unreal Engine interface was used to program how time behaved in the work. Unlike Wireframe Valley (2014), which was continually processing on a computer in the gallery space, Floating Point (2016) had a more sophisticated time system that could be switched off after the gallery closed and reopened from the same point on a virtual timeline. A menu interface system was created inside Unreal Engine and programmed to appear when the software was opened. This menu allowed gallery staff to start the work from a specific point in the twelve-day timeline. Each day the appropriate day was chosen from the menu, and the work appeared to continue from where it left off. This constituted a practical improvement in exhibiting long-duration simulations, but still meant that the work was “hard coded” to run for twelve days. A practical aim was to create a time system that could play the work back over any duration, so the game engine would not need to be recompiled for different exhibitions. Recompiling the work involves packaging or exporting the game scene from the software interface to a stand-alone app or program file—just like a commercial videogame. The process can be difficult and is often error prone. This new method for time construction had a different impact on the speed of the work. Instead of the frames per second slowly decreasing under the strain of code being rewritten again and again over three months, Floating Point (2016) ran at sixty frames per second for the duration of the work, with no perceived slow down.

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Figure 15.3.

Figure 15.4.

Figure 15.3. Production still from Floating Point (2016). Figure 15.4. Composite showing the sequence of disappearance in Wood for the Trees (2016).

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Time logic three

Figure 15.5.

Finally, the fourth approach to time logic occurred during the remaking of Wireframe Valley for Dundee Contemporary Arts in 2018. In comparison to the continuous time logic of the original Wireframe Valley (2014) and the fractured time logic of Floating Point (2016), the timeline of Wireframe Valley (remade, 2017) is parametrically scalable. In other words, it can be programmed to last for any duration using the menu interface that appears when the file is opened. A single abstract timeline is re-entered at different points on each day of the exhibition, controllable via a menu interface that appears when the work is launched. Instead of using hard-coded, fixed values for the duration of the work and the triggering of events, variables are used to represent each of these values. The duration of the artwork is now mutable until executed within the gallery. At that stage, the assemblage reconfigures to match a specific duration. The events within the artwork will scale to accommodate a shorter or longer duration, maintaining the same distances between them. The artwork could be programmed to last any duration and still the animations of trees, vegetation, and other elements would move at a normal, realistic speed. Only the material opacity change would speed up to match the different duration, so the materials could fade over one day or one thousand days.

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Figure 15.5. Screenshot of the menu interface that controls the inner time logic of Wireframe Valley (remade 2017).

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Figure 15.6.

Recalcitrant temporalities—a framework The next section proposes a framework for understanding the temporal behaviours of simulated artworks, and switches from a descriptive mode to an ontological mode. The claim is that CSA time is recalcitrant and relational in nature—it is always understood in relation to the other actors within its assemblage configuration and withdraws from simplified descriptions such as real time. The philosophical implications of the framework are considered with reference to assemblage theory, media materiality, and horology. Figure 15.7 shows a spatialised description of the recalcitrant temporalities of CSA. The key domains of temporality—human, non-human, virtual, and material—are adapted from the language of assemblage theory. Each actor within an artwork is interrelated to one another, in multi-directional lines of agency that cut across all four domains. The connections stretch off in all directions, meaning that the diagram illustrates a selection or configuration of actors that comprise a temporary temporal assemblage. The duration of the temporary state is dependent on the speed and agency of other actors in the assemblage.

Figure 15.7.

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Figure 15.6. Wireframe Valley (remade, 2017) in situ at Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee, Scotland. Figure 15.7. Diagram depicting a temporary configuration of temporal multiplicities across the temporal domains of the human, non-human, material, and virtual.

Recalcitrant Temporalities

Virtual time The term real time, commonly used in relation to computer simulations, implies reality via an equivalence of speed, although speed is not time, and the use of a singular definition masks the complexity of temporal mechanics and the interactions at play. The research outcomes from the making of Wireframe Valley (2014) demonstrated that there are multiple time frames, durations, and logics manifest within CSA at a software level, and they cannot be accounted for by the overarching and singular ideas of time in the prevailing postmodern temporal rhetoric of simulation theorists such as Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio. Although Virilio’s concept of dromology, or “logic and impact of speed” (Armitage and Virilio 2000), provides a route into thinking about how time and speed relate to contemporary life, it does not possess the granularity required to account for varying speeds and temporal difference. This is especially true of time frames that sit outside Virilio’s military, capitalist, and cinematic contexts—the extended durations of geology and biodegradation, for example. The way in which multiplicitous temporalities cut across virtual and material actors is also significant. It is not only virtual time that manifests in multiplicitous and complex ways. The complex biological systems that manage our perception of time are similarly distributed across multiple areas of the brain and body (Hammond 2013, 54). Furthermore, our daily experiences of time are assemblages of real and virtual actors that exhibit such complex agential interactions it is difficult to disentangle the two. This corresponds to Deleuze’s notions of asymmetry, multiplicity, and process, where time is “irreducibly complex” (Williams 2011, 5) and impossible to determine from a singular perspective. The multiplicitous and distributed nature of CSA time within a complex adaptive system forms the first characteristics of temporal recalcitrance, as time cannot be singularly defined, nor attributed to any particular domain without reference to another.

Material time To understand the nature of CSA temporalities, it is necessary to adopt a materialist viewpoint that can accommodate the different timelines, logics, and durations of computer materials, their processes, and human experiences of them. Geology has played a significant role in identifying the natural processes involved at the various points of CSA lifespans, despite being largely neglected “[in the fifty plus] years since commercial semi-conductor and computer manufacture began” (Grossman 2006, xi). The broadening of media to include geology is a tactic developed by Jussi Parikka and supported by other media materialists such as Sean Cubitt: “Mediation is the primal connectivity shared by human and nonhuman worlds” (Cubitt 2017, 4). Materials support and construct the interactions of the assemblage. This is one way of thinking about my recent work Spruce Pine, North Carolina (2018)—a simulation of an American mine that provides Intel

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Paul Dolan with silicon dioxide for producing semi-conductors—the sand mined from this location is a direct mediator between the earth and digital processing. “On its own, silicon is not electrically charged, but its chemical structure makes it ideally suited to transformation into a semiconductor—a device that can be made to carry highly sophisticated patterns of charges by adding various chemical ‘impurities’” (Grossman 2006, 35).

Figure 15.8.

The manufactured components of the computer also affect temporal capacity. The era in which videogames/simulations are programmed to work with particular operating systems and hardware means that older games played on high-specification computers are sometimes too fast to play, whereas new games on old computers can be too slow to play (Zagal and Mateas 2010, 855). This is the result of an imbalance between the clock speed of the CPU and the way in which the code was written to work with particular hardware speeds. It underlines CSA as a recalcitrant assemblage that is always temporally dependant on its material entanglements. Thinking of time in material ways offers an advantage from the language and speed-oriented apocalypses of Baudrillard and Virilio in which human agency is nullified by overarching abstraction. In the dire ecological circumstances we currently inhabit, a focus on specificities and materials are crucial tools in reconfiguring the way in which humans exist in the world—particularly in relation to media. Media devices require large amounts of energy and natural resources to make and operate. They are not infinite or immaterial, but entirely dependent on the natural resources of our planet (Cubitt 2017).

Non-human time In the artworks, extended duration is used as a method for moving the time frame of the simulation beyond human perception. The non-human domain of time is a key component of the recalcitrant temporalities of CSA—principally through the extreme differences in scale and speed that exist outside

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Figure 15.8. Production still from Spruce Pine, North Carolina (2018).

Recalcitrant Temporalities human spatiotemporal perceptual ranges. These ranges negotiate the level and scope of human access to non-human assemblages. For example, the microtemporal electronic frequencies of computer processors that occur in milliseconds and the macro-temporal ranges involved in geological activities such as the stratification of rock sediment form the lower and upper ranges of temporal activity accessible to human cognition. The subjectivity of human temporal perception is a key factor in what makes CSA time “recalcitrant.” Human temporal perception—the ability to count, measure, and conceive of time—is limited to particular time frames (Hammond 2013, 16). The lower threshold of human temporal perception—“the now”— is around 0.3 seconds; anything less is “the time of digital information flow” (Hansen 2004, 235). The difficulties humans face in attempting to comprehend micro and macro time frames also apply to visualising volume. The colossal volume of natural resources involved in the production of computer simulations are too large to comprehend and are often conflated with being infinite (Cubitt 2017, 7). Conversely, micro scales are equally difficult to comprehend and become conflated with being immaterial—although as Grossman reminds us, “miniturization is not dematerialization” (2006, 9). Both issues relate to the perceptual points of contact between humans and the material world—and how the limitations of human perception can tend towards understanding CSA as immaterial entities. This leads to the third aspect of temporal recalcitrance. Conceiving of CSA as being in excess of human perception indicates that we only ever experience a specific temporary configuration of their form. The extremes of scale in the non-human time domain also limit our understanding of time to the ranges of human perception.

Human time Cristián Simonetti suggests our ideas of time are situationally dependent on environmental factors—such as gravity (2015a, 69) and on shared language that we use to describe our processes and engagement with materials and tools. He uses verbal and gestural analysis to show how English and Spanish archaeologists talk of time “being under their feet” and Japanese archaeologists of “going up in time” (Simonetti 2014, 297). Such an approach could help make sense of the connections between artists and software. Perhaps time is at the fingertips of the artist as opposed to under the feet of archaeologists. The experience of choreographing time in 3D animation software such as Autodesk Maya can feel horizontal, owing to the historic design conventions of the timeline interface. Frequent animation tests occur in periodic bursts of simulated time. The part of the graphical user interface used to move through time, the playhead, is “played” or “scrubbed” horizontally on the timeline to get a sense of the movement or activity in the scene and is then returned to the start of the timeline to begin another test from the first frame in the sequence.

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Paul Dolan The experience of creating time in the visual scripting interface of a game engine is different. Nodes are plugged into each other to form a network. A node is a visual representation of compartmentalised software functionality, usually taking the form of a simple box or rectangle with inputs and outputs. For example, separate nodes may visualise the computer functions that control the speed and length of an artwork. The outputs and inputs from each node can be attached to other nodes to create complex networks of software functionality. The sequence and order of connections between nodes are significant and often reference one another within their operations. In this sense, time is more clearly visualised as a relative system or network. Software engineers use debugging tools to visualise the flow of activity between nodes. White flashing dotted lines indicate the successful completion of operations, whereas red lines indicate a problem or error. Each play-through of a CSA, depending on the level of emergence or indeterminacy in the scene, can lead to completely different outcomes. Key frames and parameters are also set for specific actors in the scene via a separate interface, which further fractures a coherent sense of direction between past, present, and future. There is a disconnect between the control of time via software tools and the embodied personal experience of sitting in front of a computer for long stretches of time. Choreographing the artworks in this study required consideration of micro-temporal increments (how many frames per second each actor moves at) and macro-temporal increments (how many weeks a phase of an artwork should elapse over). The variations in scale and time logics feel more like a spatialised network of grids and points, with different levels of agency flowing between them, rather than possessing a particular directionality. Simonetti’s work helpfully bridges notions of geologic time with the corporeal experience of working with materials in specific environments (2015b, 141). He calls for an embodied sense of time, an increased awareness of how scientists’ involvement with their material surroundings influences the circulation of temporal concepts. He argues that “concepts of time are not abstract entities, fixedly stored inside the mind, but sentient acts of conceptualization that depend on the dynamic field of forces in which things and people become entangled” (Simonetti 2015, 69). This approach offers insight into how the broader principles of Deleuze’s philosophy of time—asymmetry, multiplicity, and process (citations)—can be enacted within a research methodology. This leads to the fourth aspect of temporal recalcitrance—that CSA time is highly situational, dependent on the practices, language, and concepts employed by the artist. It is also often spatialised in order to make sense of it.

Ontology and time The recalcitrant properties of time are deeply interconnected to the broader ontological instability of the CSA. Assemblage theory is particularly useful in conceiving of time as complex interactions between material and virtual, human and non-human actors. This section seeks to address speculations about how time may be constituted at an abstract, ontological level.

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Recalcitrant Temporalities CSA time is distributed between multiple connections between actors. The “temporal frames” (Zagal and Mateas 2010, 854) of videogame studies are compatible with this approach, identifying instances of temporal configuration without claiming for a unified or overarching limit to how time can exist. In the case of CSA, the programming logics and node-based software interface mirror such an organisation, via the ability to create multiple, overlapping, and interconnected time logics, with the ability to specify the impact of each logic on other actors in the scene. Time is often determined through spatial metaphors or descriptions (Innis 2008, 24; Simonetti 2015b, 139; Sharma 2014, 11). This is evident in figure 15.7, which attempts to visualise the CSA assemblage as a rhizomatic network of actors. The rhizome structure challenges the pervasive hierarchical arborescent “tree of life” theory of evolution on the principle that lateral or horizontal agency occurs in the world (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 505–6). In this research, the rhizome helps visualise the temporal and material connections between human, non-human, virtual, and physical actors. Simonetti (2015b, 156–57) acknowledges the shape of the rhizome, and by extension, the assemblage, although he questions what shape time may be if it is to include both hierarchy and horizontal rhizomatic structures. “It also has the risk of erasing the constant influence of the forces of the environment, particularly the vertical gravitational axis that most life has to deal with, as we lie forward to excavate, down to rest or move across with our pens to write” (ibid., 157). Perhaps the rhizomatic structure of time in the CSA assemblage does not have to indicate that all time is subject to the same spatial direction, but that each actor can contain a nested directionality—such as the horizontal timelines of 3D animation software and the networked, multidirectional nodes of game engines. The question of what time is in the assemblage is difficult to address without spatial metaphors, although the experience of making this work suggests that time is distributed within and across actors, in the virtual, material, human, and non-human actors and their interconnections. Time can be said to be the mechanism of difference in the CSA assemblage. Through constant reconfiguration of actors via multidirectional agential flows, difference is propagated. Difference in this sense draws upon Deleuze’s ontological use of the term—as an inherent characteristic of all things, copies and simulacra (Deleuze 1994, 200). This approach permits the circumvention of problematic essentialist ontologies, and instead allows a more equal rule of comparison between human, non-human, material, and virtual actors. In other words, the virtual components of the artworks and their corresponding temporal processes are as real as any of the material components, and this condition of ontological equivalence is intrinsic to the temporal processes that connect them. In this sense, time can be considered as the connecting force between actors, the lines of travel between different scales and durations of activity within the assemblage. There is no part of the assemblage outside time—it is manifest within objects and between them.

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Paul Dolan Time is inherently difficult to materialise in isolation of the effects it has on the world. We can continue to develop an ontology of time, but Deleuze’s temporal concepts allow us to identify and question issues that are worthy of our attention in the meantime. By researching them we gain access to insight into the human, machine, and hybrid temporalities that contain imbalances of power and equality.

Conclusion Computer simulations are often conceived of as real time, an oversimplified term that masks complex interrelated temporalities. The research outcomes of this study indicate that CSA possess recalcitrant temporalities—they are complex adaptive systems undergoing constant change and entanglements of human, non-human, material, and virtual time logics. The temporal intractability of CSA can be explored through the use of duration in art practice, and also used to address the ethics and politics of duration—the exploration of entangled, material temporalities that occur within CSA and their lifespans. Thinking about computer simulations in terms of lifespans is a simple but significant way to consider temporalities beyond the screen, and the time frames in which simulations exist as functioning media devices. Mining, manufacturing, labour, computer simulations facilitated by media devices, eWaste, recycling, cloud storage, and other “immaterial” aspects of digital culture are then activated as potential sites for understanding the ways in which time and materiality connect simulations to the world. It is dangerous to overstate the temporal and ontological recalcitrance of computer simulations, in that it can lapse into the ultra-relativity of simulacra that this chapter has criticised at length. Instead of making the invisible visible, and drawing out the mechanics of CSA temporalities, they instead become too complex and changeable to understand or know. This is where agency and ethics become important considerations in seeking to operationalise an ontology of CSA for a useful purpose in the world. The complexity and relativity of time should serve the flexibility and applicability of a deployable research methodology and art practice rather than obfuscate. The temporal recalcitrance of CSA is their greatest gift to artists, as they offer a temporal toolkit for exploring complex temporal interactions in the world. The findings of this research correlate with general principles of Deleuzian time philosophy—here summarised as asymmetry, multiplicity, and process— although further work is required to unpick the underlying mechanics and language of Deleuze’s writings on time in Difference and Repetition (1994).

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Recalcitrant Temporalities References Armitage, John, and Paul Virilio. 2000. “CTheory Interview with Paul Virilio: The Kosovo War Took Place in Orbital Space.” CTheory, University of Victoria. Accessed 11 June 2020. https://journals.uvic.ca/ index.php/ctheory/article/view/14599. Cubitt, Sean. 2017. Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technologies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1994. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1968 as Différence et répétition (Paris: Presses universitaires de France). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Minuit). Grossman, Elizabeth. 2006. High Tech Trash: Digital Devices, Hidden Toxics, and Human Health. London: Island Press. Hammond, Claudia. 2013. Time Warped: Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception.

Edinburgh: Canongate Books. Hansen, Mark B. N. 2004. New Philosophy for New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Innis, Harold A. 2008. The Bias of Communication. 2nd ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Sharma, Sarah. 2014. In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Simonetti, Cristián. 2014. “With the Past under Your Feet: On the Development of Time Concepts in Archaeology.” Anuário Antropológico 39 (2): 283–313. ———. 2015a. “Feeling Forward into the Past: Depths and Surfaces in Archaeology.” Time and Mind 8 (1): 69–89. ———. 2015b. “The Stratification of Time.” Time and Society 24 (2): 139–62. Williams, James. 2011. Gilles Deleuze’s Philosophy of Time: A Critical Introduction and Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Zagal, José P., and Michael Mateas. 2010. “Time in Video Games: A Survey and Analysis.” Simulation and Gaming 41 (6): 844–68.

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The Machinic Desire of Cinema Tero Nauha Theatre Academy of Uniarts Helsinki, Finland

For the Third International Conference on Deleuze and Artistic Research, Machinic Assemblages of Desire, in December 2019, the film scholar Ilona Hongisto and I curated a film night titled “The Machinic Desire of Cinema.” This event was presented at the Sphinx Cinema, Ghent, on 10 December. The programme included two films, Citation City (2018) by Vicki Bennett and In Search of UIQ (2013) by Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson. Before screening the films, there was a short discussion with Maglioni and Thomson about their film-making practice. Citation City is an audio-visual collage by the British artist Vicki Bennett.1 Working under the name People Like Us, Bennett is a pioneer in sampling, appropriation, and cutting up found footage, original sources, and archives. The second film in the programme, In Search of UIQ, is part of a trilogy that Maglioni and Thomson begun with the film Facs of Life (2009).2 The trilogy occupies the indistinct field between documentary, fiction, essay, and video art; it began with an archival project based on video footage of Deleuze’s courses at Vincennes (1975–76), and continued with a collaborative project with the Ueinzz Theatre Group, São Paulo, and mollecular organization, Helsinki, based on Guattari’s screenplay “Project for a Film by Kafka” (2009b), out of which Maglioni and Thomson created the feature film Disappear One (2015). The trilogy aims to evoke the “missing cinema” practice Guattari connected with schizoanalysis. Cinema as an art form occupies a significant place in the thought of Deleuze and Guattari, and references to film directors in their works are frequent. Until recently, however, Guattari’s individual contributions to cinema, and to television in particular, have remained obsolete, even though Guattari had quite actively pursued becoming a film-maker himself. The aim for this film night was not to present a “Deleuzo-Guattarian” take on cinema, through a curated seance of films that Deleuze or Guattari had written 1 Citation City, 2015–18. Film version of audio-visual performance by Vicki Bennett. Colour, 42 minutes. World premiere at transmediale, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 29 January 2015. Colour and B&W, stereo audio. Film website: http://peoplelikeus.org/2014/citationcity/. 2 In Search of UIQ, 2013. Written, directed, and edited by Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson. With Benjamin Abitan, Julien Bancilhon, Novella Bonelli-Bassano, Cécile Duval, Julia Gouin, Daphné Heretakis, Erik Herson-Macarel, Silvia Maglioni, Francesca Martinez Tagliavia, Nina Negri, and Graeme Thomson, and the special appearance of Félix Guattari and Robert Kramer. France, Italy, United Kingdom: Terminal Beach. 72 minutes. colour and B&W, stereo audio. World premiere: REDACT, Los Angeles, 28 February 2013. Film website: http://cargocollective.com/terminal-beach/In-Search-of-UIQ. A short teaser trailer (2:27) is available in the online repository (see page 445).

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Tero Nauha about, nor to present films that explicitly reflect on Deleuze’s cinema books. Rather, we thought of selecting two films that used a “machinic” practice of scriptwriting, cinematography, mise en scène, sequencing, or editing. Moreover, we approached cinema from altogether different points of view: while Hongisto is a film scholar focused on documentary cinema (2015), I am a performance artist and media artist in artistic research, interested in schizoanalytic practice. The focus in this text is less on a scholarly attempt at cinema and more on the potentially schizoanalytic view of some of the aspects of artistic practice.

The speed of a citation Speed of thought in cinema is parallel with the speed of cuts, sequencing, and editing of film as material. The strips and the frames of film are “materialized and made to think in one and the same gesture. Speed of thought becomes the speed of cutting, but not as an input for human inferences, but as its own nonhuman form of thought” writes John Ó Maoilearca (2015, 116). These strips, Ó Maoilearca continues (ibid., 253–54), refer to the performance studies concept of “strips of behaviour” theorised by Richard Schechner ([1988] 2003, 324). These strips extend cultural and personal boundaries, which are restored but in being taken out of their context have no originality (ibid.). Every strip, large and small, brings some of its former meanings into the new context. These strips may have variable durations and could take place in rituals or only in fleeting gestures separate from the identity of the performer. Ó Maoilearca regards strips of behaviour in the cinematic context as strips of thought, where editing correlates with speed of thought. Nevertheless, unlike for Schechner, speed of thought is not limited to the human but is ontologically plural and not determined by the humanist idea of “thought.” In the context of Guattarian cinema, speed of thought is an “infra-quark” wave-packet of thought. In early experiments on the behaviour of electrons and photons, Arthur Compton and Louis de Broglie proposed in their concurrent experiments during the 1920s that light behaves as both a wave and a particle. These experiments were not based on classical physics; instead, quantum physics proposed a dual aspect of particle and wave that can be present simultaneously in matter and in radiation. The quantum in radiation or light is emitted in packets of energy, as in quanta. Particles and waves of quanta complement each other. A quantum particle does not fit into the classical system of physics; small things do not behave like smaller versions of larger objects. The reality is ontologically strange: it does not follow the standard or logical classical rules of physics. The double-slit experiment on electrons, performed by Clinton Davisson and Lester Germer at Bell Laboratories in 1927, showed that electrons do not behave according to Newtonian physics; rather, a pattern will build up over time. The subatomic particles do not behave like waves, billiard balls, or anything else we may have seen. The “real” world does not behave like the everyday world we perceive. The strips are edited, but they are also indeterminate, unconventional, crimped, and entangled; the strips build up postures and positions of thought,

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The Machinic Desire of Cinema gestures, and performance. The clusters create patterns, habits, conventions, collective enunciations, and cultures. Allan Kaprow stated that the work of an artist is “performing life,” not as the process of producing knowledge, but as something less determinate and secure. It builds up an uncertain posture. In his happening practice, Kaprow was attentive to life that embodies speed of thought and that creates clusters of thought like wave-packets. The emphasis for Kaprow, in his life practice, was on the attentiveness and surroundings for activities of all kinds, where happenings also take place, but his practice focused on the residues too—the spillovers that create collectives and cultures (Kaprow [1979] 1993, 198). These residues in coming together are quanta that behave strangely. In the cinematographic practices of film and video, speed of thought may also behave like quanta of particles that make things strange. Editing and cutting conditions materials as postures or positions: where film thinks in speed, that is the nonhuman speed of film. One proposition that I present here is to look at cinema as “quanta” of particles, as clusters of percepts and affects, and the other one is to look at cinema as citational and performative. In the film Citation City by Bennett, the strips of behaviour are performative, citational, and convention-driven. Yet, all citations are partially infelicitous, and that’s why they build performances. In terms of performativity, the citations are “parasitic” and non-standard; they are postures that rather are derivatives of various items and speculative attributes, which fail to reach the level of the seriousness of a proper enunciation (Derrida [1977] 1988, 90–91). The citations created by editing the strips, packets, affects, and percepts are an improper but etiolated form of performance practice. Such citational practices undermine the serious positions of the standards and conventions and these strips of thought appear as feigned, derived, and invented. The citationality rebukes the general assumption that each standard performs through the form of “as if ”—“as if ” there were culture, or “as if ” there were cinema. Cinema is an invention that counterfeits reality as in collective fabulation and fictioning. Since 1991 Vicki Bennett has been working across the field of audio-visual collage and is recognised as an influential and pioneering figure in the still growing area of sampling, appropriation, and cutting up found footage and archives. As People Like Us, Bennett specialises in manipulating and reworking original sources from both experimental and popular music, film, and radio. In 2006 she was the first artist to be given unrestricted access to the entire BBC Archive. Within Bennett’s larger body of work, Citation City belongs to what could be called audio-visual performance. This forty-two-minute piece uses material from three hundred major feature films either set or filmed in London. Citation City begins as Benjaminian time-travel through recurring themes and locations; however, as the labyrinth-like structure unfolds, the focus moves from the city’s arcades to its psychosocial depths that spin out of control in the accelerated pace of the city’s urban ecology. What is perhaps most fascinating in this piece, then, is the way in which it uses London’s cinematic archive to imagine an emergent urban ecology that speaks directly to social relations and subjectivity. In sampling audio-visual fragments of London, the film creates an ecological imaginary where the city’s urban

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Tero Nauha sprawl comes to mark unhinged subjectivities and impossible social relations. As the film moves through recurrent themes and iconic locations, we encounter characters stuck in endless chases, repeating the same gestures over and over again. Similarly, social encounters are not fulfilled, but rather suspended in-between edits. Towards the end of the film, both the characters and we viewers are caught up in a relentless refrain that literally causes heads to spin. The film imagines an urban ecology bound to insistent repetition and suspended gestures. This is an imaginary that breaks with narrative cohesion to capture the accelerated pace of the urban environment to express its intertwinement with sociability and subjectivity. In this cinematic ecology, Mary Poppins meets Walter Benjamin after a cup of tea with James Bond. The citations are transversal derivatives of cinematic conventions. These derivatives bind future to the present, but also bind present to the future. Anthropologist Roy Wagner has written on the habu ceremony of the Daribi people of Papua New Guinea. Focused on mourning the dead, the purpose of the habu ceremony is to bring ghosts back to the community (Wagner 1972, 145, 152). What is significant is not exactly the ritualistic play of the ceremony— or the strips of behaviour of the community—but how habu men are taken as transversals between the convention whereby humans and ghosts are distinctive; this comes about not through a convention of “representing” the ghosts, but rather by regarding the habu men as “human-as-ghosts” or as “strips” of a ghost (Holbraad and Pedersen 2017, 88). Citationality like this is not founded on conventions but rather on “obviation” of established meanings: making things obvious. The humans-as-ghosts, the habu men, involve an invention in which the innovation itself is made obvious. In the other context of cinematic practice, the innovation in citational cinematic practice, or its speed of thought, obviates the original, conventional speed of thought, but no longer as the point of reference but as cinema-as-cinema. In Roy Wagner’s use of the concept obviation, the already established meanings of things are “made obvious.” The invention of humans-as-ghosts involves the invention of “the very meanings upon which it innovates (‘humans,’ ‘ghosts’)” making them obvious, when new meanings are refigured upon them (Holbraad and Pedersen 2017, 90). When the performers establish themselves as ghosts, they also remind the community that they are normally human. Obviation means unpacking meaning and not adding more meaning to performance. It is obvious that in the practice of performance, the performers (in most cases) are humans. This needs to be overcome in the way that new meanings are not added upon but refigured upon the performer. We do not have to make a connection between the parts of, say, a human performer and performance materials, because obviation will not create a whole by adding up or breaking down. What obviation does “is not a matter of stringing together meanings that are already available . . . but rather one of substituting—destroying, exhausting, ‘killing’—those meanings by transforming them dialectically into new ones,” where the statement “we are ghosts” “invents them and, in the process, also ‘counter-invents’ the original assumptions against which this invention makes sense . . . the relationship between parts and wholes becomes one of mutual

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The Machinic Desire of Cinema generation” (Holbraad and Pedersen 2017, 93). In a similar way, performance and cinema obviate thinking and reinvent thinking, which in the mode of “as if ” thinking is not an imitation of thinking. Obviation makes obvious the conventions and what we—and Daribi people in the case of the habu ceremony— take for granted as cinema or performance. A performance is not merely a transfiguration of the structures of culture, but a performance is explicitly anticonventional: an invention. The citational cinema of Bennett invents the affects and percepts of these citational strips “as-if-cinema.”

The infra-quark of cinematic thought Regarding the infra-quark speed of thought in the cinema, the approach is different from citation. The screen is not a site for the conventional or secured appearance of affects and percepts; rather, it is a screen for probable appearances, as in quantum mechanics experiments. The cinema is a screen on which there are probable places where we might find “wave packets” or clusters of thought, affect, or emotion, and then also postures, gestures, scenery, or plot. According to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, where the act of measuring introduces disturbance and a limit for our knowledge, and the principle declares that our ability to make accurate measurements or to observe is delimited, there is thus a conceptual limitation to determining the properties of a particle. We cannot determine the properties of two particles or two attributes at the same time. In the synopsis of his screenplay A Love of UIQ, Guattari wonders why we never ask ourselves whether alien life forms would come not from way up in the stars but from the universe smaller than protons or quarks, from the universe that is capable of “causing grave disturbances to Hertzian communications systems!” (Guattari 2012, 49). Guattari imagines how such an all-powerful intelligence could be completely helpless faced with human emotions of love, sexuality, and jealousy. It would only be “a cognitivity constituted on the scale of quarks” (Guattari 1995, 52). An infra-quark cinema is an instrument of producing subjectivity, it is politically connected to class struggle; thus, as Guattari writes, “it takes sides in the micro class struggle that concerns the reproduction of models of desire” (2009a, 246). Each frame, cut, edit, and sequence is a decision—a decision between conventions of capitalistic production and a revolution or non-standard decision—but also an infra-quark asignifying escape. Guattari regarded his screenplay A Love of UIQ as being closely related to his ideas of schizoanalysis, where the “unconscious is inseparable from the means of reading and analysis that give us access to it” (Guattari 2012, 53). The object of research is effected by the apparatus that is reading it, as in the early propositions of quantum mechanics. Each singular problem then needs to receive a specific “cartography” of the probabilities of cinema, and not a map of a conscientious system. Cinema is a process of fabricating images and producing subjectivity. In the screenplay of UIQ, machinic subjectivity is “hyperintelligent and yet irredeemably infantile and regressive” (ibid., 58); it is the infra-quark universe, a “pure” machinic subjectivity with no persona or orien-

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Tero Nauha tation. Guattari writes how “The drama evoked here runs parallel to the one our societies are currently undergoing, where the rise of computerized forms of thought, sensibility, imagination and decision-making, the digitization of a growing number of material and mental operations, is not always easy to reconcile with the existential territories that mark our finitude and desire to exist” (ibid.). In the end, the heroine of the film is drawn to the “passage to transcendence,” eternally drifting outside human communication, and what is left is like the contaminated diary of Marie Curie, “which like its author was irradiated to such a degree that even now it remains perfectly capable of mortally contaminating anyone who dares to read it without taking the necessary precautions” (Guattari 2012, 59). Thomson and Maglioni are film-makers whose practice interrogates potential forms of cinema that emerge from the ruins of the moving image. Their work, which includes short and feature films, exhibitions, soundworks, film-performances, radio shows, vernacular technologies, and books, often makes use of cinema in expanded or exploded form to reactivate lost or forgotten archives and histories and to create new modes of collective vision and engagement with contemporary thought and politics. They used schizoanalysis as a form of production that is woven into every decision of the film—in screenwriting, editing, scenography, and directing. The focus is on the machinic desire of the cinema, for example, characters without a film—like the lost cinema of Guattari. We can regard this as a machinic reconfiguring of the strips of behaviour mentioned earlier, where positions are as significant as more indeterminate postures, quanta, or particle packets. The ideas, enunciations, and decisional reductions appear from the virtual of the cinema, whereas conventions and standards appear only in the decomposition and decompression process of the film—too early or too late. Their films are austere, as if they were made for characters that never arrived, or who came too early to rehearsals or too late for a scene that was already cut. What is left is the film. Carrying on the infra-quark metaphor, the virtual of the cinema—and cinema-thinking—is a vacuum filled with leptons and bosons, which creates a zigzag movement for the fundamental particles, “like trying to walk through a crowded pub—one gets buffeted from side-to-side and ends up taking a zigzag path towards the bar” (Cox and Forshaw 2012, 207). Notwithstanding the opaqueness of the vacuum in the atoms, there is no empty space, only matter. Yet, following the repoliticisation of the cinema of the infra-quark, cinema is not a materialistic experiment on the light and sound of cinema; instead, formally, the infra-quark is a micropolitical cinema of matter and a political economy of thought—noopolitics. The cinematic desire in these films by both Bennett and Thomson and Maglioni suggests a motility different from the capitalistic process of exchange and transaction and the derivative market of capitalism. The collective enunciation in cinema depends on a different ontology of the screen than the commodified form of genres, such as science fiction, comedy, or drama. I will now investigate a possibility of the power of cinema through various anthropological concepts that may elucidate this proposition.

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The powder of cinema An idea is a wave collapsed into a particle. It is a node in the rhizomatic entanglement, like a crimped lock of hair that we perceive as a pattern. In his research on Afro-Cuban Ifá divination practices, which originated in the Yoruba religion and have a common background with Santerían and Afro-Brazilian practices of Candomblé, anthropologist Martin Holbraad returned to the concept of mana. Mana is not a thing distinct from its concept, but is both a thing and a concept (Holbraad 2007, 191). It references the phenomena it signifies, but it is the ambiguity itself that makes the motility of magic—mana is that which arises. “In communal life, these emotions, impressions, impulses are ceaselessly produced and give rise to the idea of mana,” as Marcel Mauss writes in A General Theory of Magic ([1972] 2001, 171). Thus, we may regard mana as an analytical tool in its own right; and, at least for Mauss, mana is vague, almost untranslatable, inconceivable. “The idea of mana, in so far as it is implied in all kinds of magical propositions, becomes, as a result, an analytical concept,” constructed by collective powers or suggestion (ibid., 156). In his research, Holbraad discusses the Afro-Cuban divination concept of aché as a cousin of mana. Aché is the grace of Orula (the patron deity of Ifá) that is kept by the Ifá priest in his saliva, or it is a white powder full of virtues spread on the Orula’s divining board. These powders are prepared in different ways, according to the task that is to be performed or the deity that is being consecrated. It is the powder that provides the capacity enabling babalawos, the Ifá initiates, to divine. The powder in the board results in divinatory configurations that are referred to in Yoruba as oddu; these are connected to a series of myths, which in turn are interpreted by the babalawos in the divinatory seance. Aché is power and powder, abstract and concrete, and a concept and a thing in a nonantinomical way (Holbraad 2007, 204). A babalawo without aché is not a babalawo, and powder that is not properly consecrated is not aché. Conventionally, the anthropologist’s task would be to analyse the relationship between the powder and power, the thing and the concept. Our task would be to interpret, reduce, and analyse their external relationship and to ask what makes powder powerful. Is it the transcendent relationship with Orula, which followers believe is contained in the white powder? The logical result would be to declare Ifá a system of belief. Yet, viewed in this way, I would not take seriously the different ontology given to power and powder by the Ifá diviners; instead, I would aim to explain why babalawos do what they do, without really knowing what that is: how powder is power?3 The question in the end, then, is not to ask why people believe in it, but to accept that I do not know what powder these people are talking about. I need to assess my own assumptions instead of aiming to discover the secret of the Aché. I need to stay equivocal and not presume univocality or fix external relations between concepts and things. 3 Martin Holbraad and Morten Axel Pedersen write, on the basis of Holbraad’s field research: “One might say, then, that the double formula for Ifá diviners is ‘no powder no power’ and ‘no power no powder.’ Their power lies in the powder while, conversely, the powder is power” (221). “Cuban diviners do not ‘believe’ that powder is power, but rather define it as such” (222).

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Tero Nauha Holbraad writes that the oracle’s practice is “an ontological rather than an epistemic operation” (2012, xviii). The meaning lies in inherent motility. What is significant is that deities do not travel, but are “themselves distances of ontological travel . . . giving logical priority to motion over rest, . . . what I shall call the ‘motile ontology’ of divinatory practice in Ifá” (ibid., 146). Rather than travelling between transcendence and immanence, or time and place, they are relations as ontologies, not relations with something like powder. The deities are motilities and not identities, where babalawos or orishas are their “paths.” Aché is not a thing, it is a space for ontological transformations, and where “babalawo’s fingers move through the powder to reveal the oddu—[it] is not an ex post facto representation of an already pertaining state of affairs, but rather an act of ontological transformation in its own right, or it is in this act that the oddu is ‘substituted’ as an immanent presence in the séance” (Holbraad 2007, 211). The matter of the powder displays motility in its perviousness, which allows deities to be rendered immanent in the divination ritual. The particles of powder are intensive in oddu, but are not representations of deities. This motility is immanent in the particles as “things-as-concepts”—like quantum packages or quarks. The ontology of powder is power—concepts and things as differential motilities. The specks of powder are a multiplicity in which the motility of Orula speaks through oddu, as through the forces of participation. The babalawos are manifestations of a specific modulation of certain aché—the babalawos are dividual beings. The discussion above, while describing a different onto-epistemological context from cinema, aims to show how the thing-as-concept of powder may resonate with the thing-as-concept of the “infra-quark” in cinematic practice. It is not imaginary suggestion that causes the problem of “magic”; however, what then is the motility of filmstrips, cuts, and edits? How can it be that the “infra-quark” is the power and powder of the film as the motile force of cinema? The infra-quark of the film does not represent the power or desire of cinema, but is the thing-as-concept of film, like the specks of powder in the Ifá divination. The cinema as force is in the film’s own perspectives—the strips of film of cinematic London and Guattari’s script on the infra-quark—that are bodies that see different things in the same way. Motile bodies activate different bodies of the film’s viewers; they radiate like the notebooks of Marie Curie. The particle emissions affect different bodies differently, rather than in the same way. In the end, my proposition barely elaborates a comprehension of what these two films are about; instead, I have tried to see what their perspectives might be. Can we take cinema seriously without requesting statements on what a cinema can do? In my proposition, these films exist as motile quasi-objects or perspectives that perform. The films are comparisons themselves; they are things as concepts. My material body has a different affective perspective than does a film—or a film camera, or its lens—and this perspective is bound to a different body and orientation; or, it has been obviated by different kinds of “editing” and “montage.” What I see is a “probability” of a film, from my infinitely partial perspective, where I am a “viewer-as-film.” We can also see this in the

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The Machinic Desire of Cinema saying “I thought I was in a film,” or “I saw my life passing as if it were a film.” The partiality is instead in obviated access to the motility and performativity of these things as concepts. Cinema is not only the divination of desire but also the killer of memory truncating time. In his article “Smuk Is King: The Action of Cigarettes in a Papua New Guinea Prison,” Adam Reed explains not only how cigarettes can have the function of a currency but also that smoking can be an act of defiance, a source of consolation, and provide a moment free from anxiety. Smuk is king, because it “‘kill[s] memory’ and ‘shorten[s] time’” (Reed 2007, 23). Smuk alters a person’s state of mind in a way that is not reducible to its chemical effect or its status as a form of currency; nevertheless, smuk is a thing as a concept. As Reed writes, “Smuk moulds men by having them transform its material state (it is the smoke of the cigarette, not its solid matter, that acts upon the minds of inmates)” (ibid., 42). Nevertheless, he emphasises that this happens specifically in the context of the prison. After being released from the prison, smuk loses its meaning for the former inmates. If we regard smoking in prisons as having the function of a belief system, then we aim to reduce smoking to fit into conventional concepts. From this point of view, a cigarette is a thing that has a social and economic exchange value that can be hedged; however, we cannot properly see how smuk has the capacity to kill time. We are unable to perceive the intension of the thing. The “ordinary” cigarette has a different affective capacity in a different world from my own, for the reader of the anthropological article by Reed. I could transpose Reed’s ideas into film and cinema, where this would mean regarding the ordinary and conventional material of film simply as magic—like the magic of cinema in Vicky Bennett’s archival practice with Mary Poppins, Jack the Ripper, and James Bond. However, cinema as powder or smuk is an altogether different thing as a conceptual endeavour. The inmates at the Bomana prison are not just metaphorically wasting time, which also is the case while we are sitting in the darkened space of a cinema or watching videos on a computer screen in a darkened bedroom. As in the divination seance or the prison, these are “consecrated” and performative spaces. If cinema is smuk, it kills memory and shortens time, providing only a probability of where we will end up being. Smuk provides a way to lose thoughts; it alters the ontology of thinking and the body. If we take cinema as desire seriously, we need to accept that we do not know what the power of powder or smuk is that kills memory in cinema; we do not know what the motility of infra-quark cinema is. I have a partial idea due to the particular material perspective that I have, but this is an equivocal discourse with these motilities—I do not aim to discover the secrets of cinema. As was observed above, when inmates have been released, they may as well stop smoking, since smuk has no place outside the prison walls; similarly, when reaching out for help from the Orula, one needs to have a question. Therefore, I already need to have a desire for cinema, so that I have the partial capacity to be affected by it. A desire is a thing-as-concept that is in motion. Like radiation, it is not only perceived—desire is also a thing-as-concept: desire is comparison in itself, not

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Tero Nauha with what it is lacking or missing, but as comparison in motion. In Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica’s practice of creating parangolés, inspired by the samba schools in the favelas of Rio, the materials are to be danced with, not just to be observed. This is practice as a “sensuality test,” where conventional perspectives are obviated, where practice is a motility—it is “smuk” and “powder.” Such a practice, I propose, is a material-discursive ontology of artistic practice: “a matter of relative ontic distances” (Holbraad and Pedersen 2017, 277) that is not rupture, crisis, or revolution. In a rather complicated way, I would determine practice as the motility of relative and ontic distances, and as that which has not regressed to lack, trauma, or distress; it is practice as probability—the practice that invents its ontology in motility. In the most thorough articulation of the theory of schizoanalysis, in Schizoanalytic Cartographies, Guattari develops the machinic and metamodelisation of collective enunciations, transversality, and the axiomatic: the clusters of disjunctive and conjunctive flows, caught between the discursive and the machinic in groupuscules and the production of subjectivity. Guattari postulates how these “stochastic linearizations” or “minimal memories” have no proper relation to the production of constellations, but remain in a state of non-discursive repetition and intensity (Guattari 2013, 119–22). In this existential coherence, the fully charged collective articulations are productive; in other words, the information creates knowledge, signified correlations, and then cultures, whereas the non-discursive matter remains as the advent of potential accidents, ruptures, or meltdowns—but also as a probability to be danced with or smoked, or for divination on the cinema screen. References Cox, Brian, and Jeff Forshaw. 2012. The Quantum Universe: Everything That Can Happen Does Happen. London: Penguin Books Derrida, Jacques. (1977) 1988. “Limited Inc a b c . . .” Translated by Samuel Weber. In Limited Inc, edited by Gerald Graff, 29–110. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. First published in English translation 1977 (Glyph 2). Guattari, Félix. 1995. Chaosmosis: An EthicoAesthetic Paradigm. Translated by Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. First published 1992 as Chaosmose (Paris: Galilée). ———. 2009a. “Cinema of Desire.” Translated by David L. Sweet. In Chaosophy: Texts and Interviews 1972–1977, by Félix Guattari, edited by Sylvère Lotringer, translated by David L. Sweet, Jarred Becker, and Taylor Adkins [et al.], 235–46. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). First delivered as a paper 1973, Bologna.

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First published 1977 in La révolution moléculaire (Paris: Union générale d’éditions). ———. 2009b. “Project for a Film by Kafka.” Translated by Jakub Zdebik. Deleuze Studies 3 (2): 150–61. First published 2007 as “Projet pour un film de Kafka,” in Félix Guattari, Soixante-cinq rêves de Franz Kafka (Paris: Lignes). ———. 2012. A Love of UIQ. Translated by Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson. Minneapolis, MN: Univocal. Written ca. 1986–87 as In amour d’UIQ. ———. 2013. Schizoanalytic Cartographies. Translated by Andrew Goffey. London: Bloomsbury. First published 1989 as Cartographies schizoanlytiques (Paris: Galilée). Holbraad, Martin. 2007. “The Power of Powder: Multiplicity and Motion in the Divinatory Cosmology of Cuban Ifá (or Mana, Again).” In Thinking through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically, edited

The Machinic Desire of Cinema by Amiria Henare, Martin Holbraad, and Sari Wastell, 189–225. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. ———. 2012. Truth in Motion: The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Holbraad, Martin, and Morten Axel Pedersen. 2017. The Ontological Turn: An Anthropological Exposition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hongisto, Ilona. 2015. Soul of Documentary: Framing, Expression, Ethics. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Kaprow, Allan. (1979) 1993. “Performing Life.” In Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, edited by Jeff Kelley, 195–98. Berkeley: University of California Press. Essay written 1979, first published 1980 in Performance Anthology: Source Book for a Decade of California Performance Art, edited by Carl E. Loeffler with Darlene Tong (San Francisco: Contemporary Art Press). Mauss, Marcel. (1972) 2001. A General Theory of Magic. Translated by Robert Brain. New York: Routledge. First published 1902 as Esquisse d’une théorie générale de la magie by

Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss (L’année sociologique 7: 1–146). This translation based on the text published in Sociologie et anthropologie (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1950). Translation first published 1972 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul). Ó Maoilearca, John. 2015. All Thoughts Are Equal: Laruelle and Nonhuman Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Reed, Adam. 2007. “‘Smuk Is King’: The Action of Cigarettes in a Papua New Guinea Prison.” In Thinking through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically, edited by Amiria Henare, Martin Holbraad, and Sari Wastell, 32–46. London: Routledge. Schechner, Richard. (1988) 2003. Performance Theory. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge. 2nd ed. first published 1988 (New York: Routledge). Wagner, Roy. 1972. Habu: The Innovation of Meaning in Daribi Religion. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

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Free Indirect Discourse and Assemblages Literary Procedures in Deleuze and Guattari’s Style Annita Costa Malufe Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo, and National Council for Scientific and Technological Development—CNPq, Brazil

We are alive, intense, and able to think only to the extent that at least one other thinks within us. —François Zourabichvili (2012, 133)

In this chapter, I discuss free indirect discourse (discours indirect libre) as a special writing procedure in Deleuze and Guattari’s style. At the same time that it constitutes their main literary strategy by creating a performative language, free indirect discourse also implies their philosophy’s conception of language. It is here that we find the concept of assemblage (agencement), which assures us of a heterogeneous and non-mimetic concept of language. My aim in this chapter is to present certain excerpts from Deleuze and Guattari’s texts in which we can see this procedure and through which we can think about their treatment of language as something that is not lateral to their philosophical creation. Simultaneously, this non-ornamental style suggests a reading posture and requests a literary reader, as the quotation from François Zourabichvili at the start of this chapter suggests. Such a reader performs the text and doesn’t look for metaphors: he or she is an experimenter, not an interpreter. This is reading as a map—a map and not a tracing, as Deleuze and Guattari conclude in “Rhizome” (1987, 10). As the authors say, a map is always a matter of performance.1 When I decided to write this chapter, I had in mind a few ideas I’ve been working on over the last ten years or so, since my early post-doctoral research, which dealt precisely with the question of literary procedures in Deleuze.2 My focus has been on developing a literary analysis of Deleuze’s texts, including— perhaps, especially—the texts he wrote with Guattari. I have also included 1 “The map has to do with performance, whereas the tracing always involves an alleged ‘competence’” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 12–13). 2 Developed at PUC-SP (Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo, Brazil), with the supervision of Peter Pál Pelbart, and the subvention of FAPESP (Foundation of Support for Research of the State of São Paulo), 2008–10.

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Annita Costa Malufe dialogues with other authors, such as Samuel Beckett, who appear to have influenced his writing style. Beyond this, my research has been concerned with other problems; nevertheless, I’ve been working on this question ever since. For example: What is literary analysis and what should literary reading and criticism be, on the basis of Deleuze and Guattari’s immanent thought? What implications can we take from the concept of sense as an “event,” as Deleuze proposes in The Logic of Sense (1990) and throughout his writings, with or without Guattari? What are the pragmatic consequences of operating with this concept of sense?

Style in philosophy This chapter’s starting point is my belief that style plays a vital role in Deleuze’s work. As Deleuze insists, style doesn’t only mean a textual form, it is always also a lifestyle. A style is not just a way of writing; it is simultaneously a way of thinking, of feeling, of perceiving and relating. It is a way of living. As Deleuze argues: “great philosophers are great stylists too. Style in philosophy is the movement of concepts” (1995, 140). Therefore, for Deleuze, concepts don’t exist outside the movement of the language they are embedded in; they don’t exist independently from style. At the same time, they are attached to sensations, attached to affects and percepts, which they have the power to produce, as Deleuze and Guattari insist many times in What is Philosophy? (1994), especially in chapter 7, “Percept, Affect, and Concept.” Conceptual creation, then, does not occur without syntactic creation. New ways of thinking aren’t separable from new ways of understanding and feeling—and, therefore, from new ways of expressing and producing statements. Hence the importance, in my view, of taking into consideration not only what Deleuze and Guattari think about language, but also how they use language; how their offbeat style, always in excess, in acceleration, allows them to make language embody what escapes it, leaks through it. As François Zourabichvili used to say, it would be contradictory for thought that proposes an immanence between thought and language to use writing in a representational mode. It would be contradictory, therefore, for thinkers who formulated the idea of a “minor” treatment of language to operate in a majoritarian or standard way.3 The challenge is how to effectively do immanence, and not only talk about it in a transcendent way. Language in this case, far from being a representation of the real, is, in fact, its production. Language as excess, nonsense, affect, at once an abyss and the creation of reals, of potencies affecting bodies and unexpected modes of living. This is part of what seems to be a search for a new style in philosophy capable of wrestling with the old treatment of language as representation. “To treat writ3 “Immanence is not something that can be affirmed without being made (it would be contradictory to simply give a representation of it, which would subvert the order of representation by replacing it with production)” (Zourabichvili 2008, 247; L’immanence n’est pas quelque chose qui puisse s’affirmer sans se faire (il serait contradictoire d’en donner simplement une représentation, elle qui subvertit l’ordre de la représentation pour lui substituer la production)).

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Free Indirect Discourse and Assemblages ing as a flow, not a code,” as Deleuze put it (1995, 7). Deleuze himself understands that this is what he has been doing since Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense, which is where his own philosophy truly begins. Since Difference and Repetition (originally published 1968, see Deleuze 1994), Deleuze has insisted on the necessity of a new style for a new philosophy. Philosophical writing should be a kind of “science fiction,” using concepts as if they were part of a plot, creating a drama. Thus, the main problem when we work with this philosophy of immanence is the difficulty of separating the concepts from the plane of immanence of which they are on. We cannot separate the concepts from the plot in which they are characters who act and construct a drama. And here we find the important concept of style, which is developed in this philosophy, as well as the importance of a new conception of reading that it implies.

Free indirect discourse From within this larger view, which deals with the modes of using and thinking language in Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, I want to focus specifically on the question of free indirect discourse as a privileged literary procedure in their style and strategy of composition. I will begin with a passage from Difference and Repetition’s preface, which unsurprisingly underscores the need for a new style of philosophy: The time is coming when it will hardly be possible to write a book of philosophy as it has been done for so long: “Ah! The old style. . . .” The search for new means of philosophical expression was begun by Nietzsche and must be pursued today in relation to the renewal of certain other arts, such as the theatre or the cinema. (Deleuze 1994, xxi)

Notice Deleuze’s use of quotation marks in the expression, “Ah! The old style. . . .” Deleuze later evoked this expression at other times and in other texts, when the question at stake was the need for a stylistic renewal of philosophy. The expression itself refers explicitly to a motto of one of Beckett’s characters, Winnie, in the play Happy Days (1961). Deleuze employed it ironically in at least two lectures, as well as in the essay dedicated to Beckett, “The Exhausted” (Deleuze 1997). Regarding Beckett, we can trace Winnie’s expression back to the famous “German Letter,” also quoted by Deleuze, where Beckett speaks ironically of the obsolete grammar and style of the “old English” in classical literature, insisting on the need for the literature of his time to strive against “fine writing”: It is indeed becoming more and more difficult, even senseless, for me to write an official English. And more and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn part in order to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it. Grammar and Style. To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Victorian bathing suit or the imperturbability of a true gentleman. A mask. Let us hope the time will come, thank God that in certain circles it has already come, when language

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Annita Costa Malufe is most efficiently used where it is being most efficiently misused. As we cannot eliminate language all at once, we should at least leave nothing undone that might contribute to its falling into disrepute. To bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it—be it something or nothing—begins to seep through; I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today. (Beckett quoted in Connor [1988] 2007, 19)

Thus, in Deleuze’s text, the expression “Ah! The old style . . .” could be read as an example of free indirect discourse that puts Deleuze’s voice together with Beckett’s, as an implicit dialogue with Beckett’s ideas. Even if between quotation marks—or, perhaps, precisely because of it, as the expression makes no reference to where it was extracted from—we can note and feel the intervention of a new voice. Let us recall that, as an expedient that began being used in modern literature, free indirect discourse refers to situations where the character’s speech isn’t reported, neither directly—as when one uses a dash to report what the characters say literally—nor indirectly, as when a narrator adopts the third person to paraphrase, in his or her own words, what is said by the character. Free indirect discourse would, then, refer to a third modality of discourse, which for Bakhtin (with whom Deleuze and Guattari agree in this respect) shouldn’t be understood as a midpoint between direct or indirect alternatives, but as something else entirely.4 Far from being a mix between direct and indirect discourse, at stake here is a modality of reported speech based on the mutual interference between the voices of the narrator and of the characters. The narrator adopts the character’s tone, while also giving his or her own tone to them. It’s especially this sound aspect that is implied in Bakhtin’s theory valorised by Deleuze and Guattari: “Bakhtin’s theory of the novel goes in this direction by showing, from Rabelais to Dostoyevsky, the coexistence of contrapuntal, polyphonic, and plurivocal compounds with an architectonic or symphonic plane of composition” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 188). The operation here is a contamination of voices, an inter-contamination. It is expressed as a polyphony of voices. Thus, by laying hands on Winnie’s Beckettian motto, “Ah! The old style . . . ,” which even supposes a certain orality (as it’s being said rather than written), Deleuze triggers a modulation in the sentence, making a new tonality intervene, as if a different voice traversed it. The result is a sentence in which different tonalities coexist in intermodulation. Beckett seems to be a privileged character in Deleuze’s work, to whom he appealed in free indirect discourse while defending the urgency of a new style. This style gives us new visions and sounds; it works along the very limits of language, where language is body, affect. This style is reiterated by both Beckett and Deleuze in “The Exhausted,” their voices being almost indistinguishable: the tone of one twisting and contaminating the tone of the other. This is precisely what occurs in free indirect discourse, where the voice, while reporting the voice of the character, appears to adopt the character’s tone, and vice versa. In “The Exhausted,” Deleuze’s voice, in its flux, intersperses passages from 4 Deleuze explains this in Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1986, 73): “The linguist Bakhtin . . . states the problem clearly: there is not a simple combination of two fully-constituted subjects of enunciation, one of which would be reporter, the other reported. . . . There is no mixture or average of two subjects” (ibid., 73).

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Free Indirect Discourse and Assemblages Beckett, from his poems and letters, from his characters, in what defines a zone of proximity, a sort of mutual interference, of a stylistic nature, even perhaps of a syntactic one. Deleuze will find, for instance, that “Beckett became less and less tolerant of words” (Deleuze 1997, 172). Speaking like this, Deleuze seems to adopt, in his voice, in free indirect discourse, a sensation he himself has experienced while writing. Something like a sensation of his own, lived in the encounter with Beckett, in the rarefaction of words, in the scarcity of language, in the search for a failed syntax, a syntax of the non-word (“non-mot”). A saying “worse missaid,” as we see in Worstward Ho: “Say for be said. Missaid. From now say for be missaid” (Beckett [1983] 2009, 81). In this Beckett prose text first published in 1983, the project of failing the language reaches its peak, and it is explicitly mentioned throughout the text: “All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better” (ibid.). This programmatic project, led by Beckett, aims to dismantle language, to “contribute to its falling into disrepute,” as we read above in the “German Letter.” In Deleuzian terms, this would correspond to making the conventions of majoritarian language fail. It’s no surprise, then, that Deleuze’s texts appear also to breathe intolerance into words in their explanatory, denotable, signifiable dimensions. And, as Beckett did over the years, Deleuze will increasingly make use of strategies to twist language, undermining the code: “to treat writing as a flow, not as a code,” as Deleuze said (1995, 7). These strategies extract new senses and possibilities of sensations beyond the words. As we have also seen in the quotation from Beckett’s letter, an excerpt from which Deleuze reproduces in “The Exhausted”: “To bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it—be it something or nothing—begins to seep through” (Beckett quoted in Connor 2006, 17).

Multiple voices Deleuze’s partnership with Guattari seems only to have intensified this writing in continuous flux, cut across by the most heterogeneous voices connected in free indirect discourse. We can say that the philosophers not only talked about the “minor treatment of the standard language, a becoming-minor of the major language” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 104), but also always experimented with that becoming in their own writing. They wrote in a minor way and invented a minor language, by sending “the major language racing” (ibid., 105); they made the major French language race. It is in this sense that I propose we can talk about a poetics in their philosophy—a poetics of immanence, as an interdependence and a co-production between language and thought. The result of this creation that perhaps had the most radical affect on language and thought was Anti-Oedipus, the first book they wrote together (originally published 1972, see Deleuze and Guattari [1977] 1983), which uses the procedure of free indirect discourse precisely by making the process of desire one of connecting disparates. Zourabichvili also points to this: Anti-Oedipus not only speaks of the process of desiring as flux and the cutting of fluxes, but it

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Annita Costa Malufe dramatises the very desiring process by embodying it in its writing. The book, Zourabichvili (2008, 249) continues, becomes a fabric, not a theatre; it becomes a desire machine. One only needs to pay attention to how Anti-Oedipus cuts through Beckett, Proust, and Artaud, or how it too is cut by multiple discourses (ibid., 251). Open the book at any one of its pages and you will find other voices enmeshed in Deleuze and Guattari’s discourse: How could this body have been produced by parents, when by its very nature it is such eloquent witness of its own self-production, of its own engendering of itself ? And it is precisely here on this body, right where it is, that the Numen is distributed and disjunctions are established, independent of any sort of projection. Yes, I have been my father and I have been my son. “I, Antonin Artaud, am my son, my father, my mother, and myself.” (Deleuze and Guattari [1977] 1983, 15)

In the English translation of Anti-Oedipus, the translators felt compelled to add a footnote not included in the original, to inform the reader of the identity of the author being quoted, Artaud in this case. But it is important to note that in the original there is no reference. This occurs also the next time we encounter an excerpt from a text by Artaud: it is detached from the poem it originated from and enters without direct attribution. The quotation enters as part of Deleuze and Guattari’s text, in italic. But it simply cuts the reported voice of president Schreber, reported by the authors also in free indirect discourse, without been announced: Je ne crois à ni père ni mère Je na pas à papa-mama (Deleuze and Guattari 1972, 21)

Whereas, in the English translation, the reader is informed, before the poem, that “As Artaud put it . . .” (Deleuze and Guattari [1977] 1983, 14). Thus, instead of free indirect discourse, we have reported speech: As Artaud put it: I don’t believe in father in mother got no papamummy

In both cases, the lack of reference to Artaud in the original in French allows Artaud’s voice to interrupt Deleuze and Guattari’s voice and to connect with it; the very absence of any reference makes explicit the presence of free indirect discourse. The lack of source information is an intentional feature of Deleuze and Guattari’s style. It is a strategy to intersperse voices and tones and to favour the flux between them. In a way, it seems to be what happens with all the references present in the book, which compose a sort of patchwork. The voices of others are like patches, cut and assembled by Deleuze and Guattari to compose the text’s own surface, its skin.

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Free Indirect Discourse and Assemblages Put this way, it becomes evident that, in reality, the other authors’ words aren’t quotations at all, or, as Zourabichvili also notices, there’s nothing in AntiOedipus to suggest fidelity to the original. The authors used by Deleuze and Guattari are rather fluxes of voices that cut and flow, that allow Anti-Oedipus’s voice to flow, and that build its voice on the basis of all these displacements. Thus, even when there are footnotes, their function is only to briefly indicate the whereabouts of those voices, where they came from. Anti-Oedipus’s text seems to dismiss any originary relation with the truth, through this generalised use of free indirect discourse. By connecting Beckett and Artaud in the same scene, by enmeshing their voices in the same flux, far from a remission to some sort of truth, what we find to be at play is the production of new reals, new fluxes, new planes of immanence: At the end of Malone Dies, Lady Pedal takes the schizophrenics out for a ride in a van and a rowboat, and on a picnic in the midst of nature: an infernal machine is being assembled. “Under the skin the body is an overheated factory,/ and outside,/ the invalid shines,/ glows,/ from every burst pore.” (Deleuze and Guattari [1977] 1983, 3)

Even if, this time, a footnote informs us that the part between inverted commas refers to Antonin Artaud’s Van Gogh, it is Artaud’s voice that is combined with Beckett’s character, from his novel Malone Dies. And with it, a new binding is produced, which would be unthinkable before coming across this paragraph. The text seems to do precisely what it says: a new combination, a new assemblage, in which Artaud becomes one of Beckett’s characters, under Deleuze and Guattari’s narration: “an infernal machine is being assembled.” But what is important to emphasise is the presence of “narrators,” or of a “Deleuze and Guattari” narrative voice that offers the characters new terms: terms other than their own, contaminating them with their concepts. Neither Beckett nor Artaud spoke of “desiring machines” or of “assemblages,” for instance—hence the mutual interference, typical of free indirect discourse, as a literary strategy. Twist sources, cut them out, recreate them: use them to produce a new real that no longer depends on the original plane from which they were extracted.

Performance and assemblages It is this conjugation of heterogeneous fluxes that is present in the other works Deleuze created with Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus deals explicitly with the concept of free indirect discourse, which connects it with what Bakhtin says about Dostoevsky’s polyphonic novel.5 Bakhtin also believes free indirect discourse defines the basic mechanism of language, resulting in a collective and polyphonic flux of the speaking subject. The Russian linguist is quoted by Deleuze

5 Bakhtin develops the concept of polyphony in Dostoevsky’s style in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1984). He finds a multiplicity of voices in Dostoevsky’s style, irreducible to a unity, which is relevant to conceiving a real heterogeneity, in which the coexistence of the different points of view of each character results in a polyphonic style.

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Annita Costa Malufe and Guattari in the plateau “Postulates of Linguistics,”6 where they emphasise that “the ‘first’ language, or rather the first determination of language, is not the trope or metaphor but indirect discourse” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 76–77). Beside Bakhtin, the Italian film-maker Pier Paolo Pasolini is also a reference here for them, as he defended a singular mechanism of free indirect discourse in the cinema. In Pasolini’s case, the procedure corresponded to a free indirect subjective camera, which was neither subjective nor objective.7 Both Pasolini and Bakhtin also provide the basis to defend this mechanism as the fundamental act of language in Deleuze’s cinema books (Deleuze 1986, 1989). What is important in our case is that, as shown in the following excerpt from Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, free indirect discourse defines language as a heterogeneous system: “It is no longer metaphor which is the fundamental act of language, inasmuch as it ‘homogenises’ the system; it is free indirect discourse, inasmuch as it testifies to a system which is always heterogeneous, far from equilibrium” (Deleuze 1986, 73). As we saw, for Deleuze and Guattari, the multiple voices that constitute any single voice are responsible for this heterogeneous linguistic system, in disequilibrium. At the same time, this heterogeneity concerns nature itself in a way of understanding language that is not exclusively linguistic. Thus, we must see that in Deleuze and Guattari this strategy of free indirect discourse supposes a more molecular, imperceptible movement than in Bakhtin’s theory. According to Zourabichvili, the theory of free indirect discourse taken by the philosophers does not assume already constituted subjects, but refers to a mode of enunciation that is, in its origin, plural: a mode “where distinct but indiscernible voices ‘complicate’ themselves, . . . presiding over the individuation of subjects” (Zourabichvili 2012, 133). And this is the relevance of the concept of assemblage [agencement] in A Thousand Plateaus: “I always depend on a molecular assemblage of enunciation that is not given in my conscious mind” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 84). The concept of assemblage allows us to conceive a complex relationship of forces, always molecular, that acts behind the constituted forms. Thus, there is always a multiplicity in movement, acting as a motor behind an enunciate. That’s why Deleuze and Guattari invert things and make the distinction of subjects a later phenomenon, dependent on the dynamic of assemblages: “Indirect discourse is not explained by the distinction between subjects; rather, it is the assemblage, as it freely appears in this discourse, that explains all the voices present within a single voice” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 80).

6 Deleuze and Guattari quote here Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, a work sometimes attributed to Bakhtin but published under the name of his disciple V. N. Vološinov, the first edition of which came out in 1929 (Vološinov [1973] 1986), the same year that the first version of Bakhtin’s Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics was published. 7 “This is why Pasolini, for his part, used a linguistic analogy. It might be said that a subjective perception-image is a direct discourse and, in a more complex way, that the objective perception-image is like an indirect discourse. . . . Now Pasolini thought that the essential element of the cinematographic image corresponded neither to a direct discourse, nor to an indirect discourse, but to a free indirect discourse” (Deleuze 1986, 72).

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Free Indirect Discourse and Assemblages Nevertheless, it is relevant to observe that Deleuze, writing about and in free indirect discourse in Cinema 1, also affirms that an assemblage dynamics is present in Bakhtin’s theories. After saying that Bakhtin affirms that free indirect discourse is “not a simple combination of two fully-constituted subjects of enunciation,” he praises him: “It is rather a case of an assemblage of enunciation, carrying out two inseparable acts of subjectivation simultaneously, one of which constitutes a character in the first person, but the other of which is present at his birth and brings him on to the scene. There is no mixture or average of two subjects, each belonging to a system, but a differentiation of two correlative subjects in a system which is itself heterogeneous” (Deleuze 1986, 73). Thus, Deleuze saw in Bakhtin’s free indirect discourse the presence of a becoming mechanism, in which we wouldn’t have constituted subjects but subjectivation processes in differentiation. At stake here is that first-person speech is produced from this collective soup. And this at the point that the philosophers affirm there is no individual discourse, no subject of enunciation, “all discourse is indirect”;8 thus, there is always a multiplicity of voices. This only serves to emphasise the relevance of this procedure both for the theory of language developed by Deleuze and Guattari and for their philosophy in general: “so many beings and things think in us,” as Deleuze had said in The Logic of Sense (1990, 298). Or, as Deleuze and Guattari put it: “My direct discourse is still the free indirect discourse running through me, coming from other worlds or other planets” (1987, 84). It is important to make clear that this entire discussion relates closely to Zourabichvili’s work on literality in Deleuze and Guattari. According to him, the mode of writing implicated in a philosophy of immanence would be the literal one, “to the letter,” in opposition to metaphor and the metaphorical mode. As we have already remarked, a philosophy of immanence couldn’t use language in a regime of representation. Zourabichvili unpacks Deleuze’s insistence that we always speak “literally” and that, in fact, metaphors don’t exist. At stake is Deleuze’s fight against the metaphorical mode of treating language, as well as his conviction that the basic mechanism of language isn’t at all metaphor but free indirect discourse, understood as the conjugation of heterogeneous voices on the same plane of immanence. Conceived as such, free indirect discourse is at the basis of a literal writing, and it is the dynamics implicit in the collective assemblages of enunciation introduced in A Thousand Plateaus: “there is always a collectivity, even when you are alone” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 152). The concept of assemblage here, as we have just seen, assures us of a heterogeneous conception of language, even as it avoids a mimetic one. As an assemblage, language produces the real movement, always in connection with the assemblage of bodies. Both assemblages—the machinic assemblage of bodies and the collective assemblage of enunciation—are always working together. Bodies and 8 “There are many passions in a passion, all manner of voices in a voice, murmurings, speaking in tongues: that is why all discourse is indirect, and the translative movement proper to language is that of indirect discourse” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 77). It’s interesting to note the resonance with the following quotation, written by Deleuze years before: “There is always another breath in my breath, another thought in my thought, another possession in what I possess, a thousand things and a thousand beings implicated in my complications: every true thought is an aggression” (Deleuze 1990, 298).

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Annita Costa Malufe statements, bodies and words, are inseparable. This is entirely different from understanding language as an ideal double, or mirror, of bodies and ideas—of a real commonly conceived as possessing more reality than language, and to which language would always be lagging behind, standing in debt. They produce relations and produce reality in real time. The assemblages produce discourses and senses—senses that are incorporeal effects affecting bodies in the real word and in real time. It is a production of reality—nothing to do with representation. To conclude, I want to emphasise that this displacement, from metaphor to free indirect discourse, implies accentuating the pragmatic, performative, and illocutionary character of language. The language in this regime of immanence is the one that proposes the literal mode: in which the words find the opportunity to “happen” for the first time in each statement. That’s why I wish to highlight the need for a literal reading of Deleuze and Guattari: to perform new senses and provoke new effects each time. Style in their philosophy concerns the necessity of a performative pressure, a performative preoccupation or intention. That is to say that the concept, in a philosophy of difference, coexists with its performance. It has to be performed at each statement, each speech. Each situation, for example the situation of a reading, has to be the occasion to put the concept in movement again, repeating its power of putting things in movement, in change. References Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Edited and translated by Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1963 as Problemy poétiki Dostoevskogo (Moscow: Sovetskij pisatel'). Beckett, Samuel. 1961. Happy Days. New York: Grove Press. ———. (1983) 2009. Worstward Ho. In Company; Ill Seen Ill Said; Worstward Ho; Stirrings Still, edited by Dirk Van Hulle, 79–104. London: Faber and Faber. Worstward Ho first published 1983 (London: John Calder). Connor, Steven. (1988) 2007. Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text. Aurora, CO: Davies Group. First published 1988 (Oxford: Blackwell). Deleuze, Gilles. 1986. Cinema 1: The Movement Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. London: Athlone Press. First published 1983 as Cinéma 1: L’image-mouvement (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1989. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of

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Minnesota Press. First published 1985 as Cinéma 2: L’image-temps (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1990. The Logic of Sense. Translated by Mark Lester with Charles Stivale. Edited by Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1969 as Logique du sens (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1994. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1968 as Différence et répétition (Paris: Presses universitaires de France). ———. 1995. Negotiations: 1972–1990. Translated by Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1990 as Pourparlers: 1972–1990 (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1997. “The Exhausted.” In Essays Critical and Clinical, translated by Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco, 152–74. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Essay first published 1992 as “L’Épuisé,” postface to Samuel Beckett, Quad et autres pièces pour la télévision (Paris: Minuit). Book first published 1993 as

Free Indirect Discourse and Assemblages Critique et Clinique (Paris: Minuit). la philosophie? (Paris: Minuit). Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Félix. 1972. Vološinov, V. N. (1973) 1986. Marxism and Capitalisme et schizophrénie: L’Anti-Œdipe. the Philosophy of Language. Translated Paris: Minuit. Translated by Robert by Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik. Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane as Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Deleuze and Guattari (1977) 1983. Press. First published as Marksizm i ———. (1977) 1983. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism fiolsofija jazyka, translation based on and Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert 2nd ed. (Leningrad: Priboj, 1930). This Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. translation first published 1973 (New Minneapolis: University of Minnesota York: Seminar Press). Press. First published as Deleuze and Zourabichvili, François. 2008. “L’Écriture Guattari 1972. This translation first littérale de L‘Anti-Œdipe.” In Ateliers sur published 1977 (New York: Viking Press). L’Anti-Œdipe, edited by Nicolas Cornibert ———. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Jean-Christophe Goddard, 247–56. and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Milan: Mimesis; Geneva: MetisPresses. Massumi. Minneapolis: University of ———. 2012. Deleuze: A Philosophy of the Event; Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as together with The Vocabulary of Deleuze. Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie Translated by Kieran Aarons. Edited by (Paris: Minuit). Gregg Lambert and Daniel W. Smith. ———. 1994. What Is Philosophy? Translated Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham First published 1994 as Deleuze: Une Burchell. New York: Columbia University philosophie de l’événement (Paris: Presses Press. First published 1991 as Qu’est-ce que universitaires de France).

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The Intercessor or Heteronym in Gilles Deleuze and Fernando Pessoa Niall Kennedy Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

In an ongoing project I have been investigating the central importance of the figure of the author to the work of Gilles Deleuze in philosophy, literature, visual art, and cinema. My ultimate intention is to further define the features of that “author,” and to determine how we can use the philosophy of Deleuze, among others, to redefine what authorship or authority means. Thus, my aim is to create a new and contemporary philosophical definition of the author, using the work of Deleuze and Félix Guattari as a point of entry, arguing that it makes a genuinely original contribution to the ongoing debate. One of the key defining characteristics of the Deleuzian author I wish to highlight is the relationship between that author and a major character or persona, known as the “intercessor.” This concept marks a significant contribution by Deleuze to the debate on authority. However, any attempt to fully delineate the importance of the intercessor to Deleuze’s theories of art and philosophy is hindered by the profusion of different, but related, terms that he employs throughout a series of texts. These range from “conceptual persona” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 61–85) to “figure” or “aesthetic figure” (ibid., 65–66; Deleuze 2003, 2–4), partial observer (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 129–32), and “original character” (Deleuze 1997, 82–83), all of which, nevertheless, are forms of the intercessor. This has led to a very partial picture of the concept being presented in current criticism (see, for example, Stivale 1998; Marshall 2000), a problem which I intend to address. The intercessor is not a concept restricted to Deleuze’s philosophy of film, though it makes its first appearance in the Cinema books (Deleuze 1989), nor to art in general. Instead, it is vital to thought’s functioning in all its major divisions. In What Is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari make clear that the most profound thought operates by means of an internal division between the thinker and the intercessor or “friend.” Certain theorists, such as Charles Stivale (1998), define the Deleuzo-Guattarian intercessor as a kind of interlocutor, a philosophical “friend”—such as another participant in a seminar or online discussion group—who challenges our thinking and interposes a different perspective or frame of reference. Deleuze and Guattari’s own collaboration could serve as a model for this kind of relationship. In a letter to Kuniichi Uno, 273

Niall Kennedy Deleuze described his collaborative process with Guattari at length, detailing in particular their method of reading extensively together from a wide range of fields, then writing to each other long letters in which each would develop particular concepts and issues arising from reading in different directions. Gradually what Deleuze terms “autonomous” concepts with a “powerful coherence” would emerge as a result of this process of co-philosophising, even if each theorist continued to have a subtly different understanding of that concept: “Working together was never a homogenization, but a proliferation, an accumulation of bifurcations, a rhizome” (Deleuze 2007, 239). However, another reading of the concept of the intercessor is that far from being an entirely separate person to the author, thinker, or artist, the intercessor should more readily be seen as a persona who is another aspect of that author. Deleuze and Guattari’s presentation of the concept in What Is Philosophy? lends credibility to this interpretation. The relationship they describe between the philosopher and the conceptual persona is much closer than that between two collaborators. As Deleuze and Guattari (1994) write, “the philosopher is only the envelope of his principal conceptual persona and of all the other personae who are the intercessors” (64), while “Conceptual personae are also the true agents of [philosophical] enunciation” (65). That conceptual personae are not autonomous or independent of the philosopher is shown by the fact that they are described as “belonging fully to the plane that the philosopher in question lays out and to the concepts that he creates” (63). The division between philosopher and conceptual persona is an internal division that exists within thought and within the thinker: “It is thought itself that requires the thinker to be a friend so that thought is divided up within itself and can be exercised” (69). The initial process of division within the thinker is thus fundamental in a way that Deleuze and Guattari do not explicitly outline. This chapter will attempt to explore the meaning of this division and to reconstruct the model of the Deleuzian author with the notion of the intercessor at its core. To do so, I propose to examine the work of Portuguese modernist poet and philosopher Fernando Pessoa. Pessoa’s most important philosophical contribution was his elaboration of his concept of heteronyms, and his description of their profound influence on his creative process. Heteronyms are the distinct poetic personae that Pessoa adopted during the writing of his poems, and who were presented as their true authors. Deleuze and Guattari write little about Pessoa, limiting themselves in What Is Philosophy? to a couple of brief mentions referring to his search for sensation as being: a subject vital to Deleuze’s discussions of modern art (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 167), and in which he mainly serves to draw a contrast with Marcel Proust, without explicit elaboration of his literary method. Notwithstanding this, José Gil (1999) has argued that What Is Philosophy? is proof of a much more profound Pessoan influence on Deleuze and Guattari’s work, noting that it was written after a wave of enthusiasm for Pessoa’s recentlypublished writings swept France. Far from proposing simply a one-sided relationship between Deleuze (and Guattari) and Pessoa, in which the philosophers’ concepts are used to explain what is obscure or difficult about the poet’s literary

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The Intercessor or Heteronym in Gilles Deleuze and Fernando Pessoa works, Gil argues that Pessoa’s work also offers a means of elucidating and clarifying central Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts such as the plane of immanence and the Body without Organs. Gil further underlines that the Pessoan term heteronym is explicitly used by Deleuze and Guattari in relation to their notion of conceptual personae: as they write, “Conceptual personae are the philosopher’s ‘heteronyms’” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 64). Pessoa’s use of what he termed heteronyms in both the writing and promotion of his own work provides a productive model for what Deleuze could mean by his deployment of the constellation of “intercessor” concepts. Intercessors thus are best described as distinct intellectual personae through which the author accomplishes the task of writing. In Pessoa’s description of his own heteronymy,1 or group of heteronyms, through which he accomplished his literary production, the four principle personae interrelate and operate as a multiplicity, which also includes what Pessoa termed the orthonym. This orthonym refers to his own legal name, Fernando Pessoa, under which some poems were written, but that nevertheless represents another poetic personality that carries within it a difference from the real person. Thus the four principle poetic personae of Pessoa’s heteronymy are: Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, Álvaro de Campos, and Fernando Pessoa-himself (Pessoa 1982, 2001), to which we could also add Bernardo Soares, a figure to whom Pessoa attributed the authorship of his “factless autobiography,” The Book of Disquiet (Pessoa 2002). Deleuze, following the model of Maurice Blanchot (1982), first of all stresses anonymity and impersonality as the condition of the literary author, arguing at various moments in Essays Critical and Clinical that “Writing is a question of becoming, always incomplete, always in the midst of being formed, and goes beyond the matter of any livable or lived experience” (Deleuze 1997, 1) and “It is not the first two persons that function as the condition for literary enunciation, literature begins only when a third person is born in us that strips us of the power to say ‘I’ (Blanchot’s ‘neuter’)” (ibid., 3). It is passages like these that have led some critics, incorrectly, in my view, to see the Deleuzian author as merely a cipher, one that operates according to a process of non-thinking, and one that is distinguished by having no personality and a nonstyle. Such a critical position is often expressed in a discussion of what Deleuze and Guattari termed “the bachelor author” (see, for example, Lambert 2002). Donald Cross (2014), for example, explicitly identifies what he terms an author’s “nonstyle,” as distinct from “style,” as being inherently Deleuzian. For Cross, nonstyle is non-communicative, minor and minorising, alienated, and thus rhizomatic, operating without reference to a predetermined principle. Style, on the other hand, arranges the different elements of a work into a whole that is totalising and uniform (ibid.). Gregg Lambert relies on Deleuze and Guattari’s statement (in reference to Franz Kafka) that there is a relation between literary talent, particularly in the context of “minor literature” or the literature produced by a marginalised or displaced people, and the condition of being a bachelor, that in fact there is nothing more artistic “than the bachelor in his mediocrity” 1 Balso (2011, 16) attributes the origin of this word to Pessoa himself.

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Niall Kennedy (Deleuze and Guattari 1986, 71). This condition of being a bachelor implies withdrawal, social isolation, and a lack of personal relation, and moreover implies that the writer creates by the erasure of his or her own personal history. Such a starting point allows Lambert to define stupidity and forgetting as fundamental characteristics of the modern bachelor-author. He further argues that this author is marked by a process of withdrawal from familial and conjugal relationships and from living and lived situations, and by existence on the periphery of a social group: “Both stupidity and forgetting are the forces that define the writer’s strangeness and estrangement from ‘the lived and the livable’” (Lambert 2002, 134). While ample textual support can be found from the work of Deleuze and Guattari for this position, is this all that they have to say on the question? Deleuze’s essay on T. E. Lawrence in Essays Critical and Clinical lays out a more complicated view of authorship: that, contrary to the views of Blanchot, the process of writing does not stem merely from the death of the ego, but is a more complicated two-step process in which an alternate “ego” is constructed. This can be determined in two passages he uses to describe Lawrence, though he also uses very similar language when writing of, for example, Herman Melville or Proust. First: “It is an infinitely secret subjective disposition, which must not be confused with a national or personal character, and which leads him far from his own country, under the ruins of his devastated ego” (Deleuze 1997, 117). This quotation retains the anonymity or depleted ego of the bachelor author, an ego that Deleuze argues Lawrence destroys, while still maintaining a “subjective disposition,” which is something other than a “personal character.” The second quotation explains Lawrence’s creativity further: “It would rather be a question of a profound desire, a tendency to project—into things, into reality, into the future, and even into the sky—an image of himself and other so intense that it has a life of its own: an image that is always stitched together . . . to the point where it becomes fabulous. It is a machine for manufacturing giants, what Bergson called a fabulatory function” (ibid., 117–18). Lawrence therefore engages in a process of self-fictionalisation that works in tandem with the depletion of his real personality, with his tendency to appropriate for himself an exaggerated or invented heroism. The singular conditions of perception that Deleuze argues the finest writers possess operate in tandem with the images they project of themselves, which “is not a deceptive image, because it has no need to correspond to a preexisting reality” (Deleuze 1997, 119). Deleuze thus draws a distinction between a fictionalised “character” and the reality of the ego, arguing that “at the most profound level of subjectivity, there is not an ego but rather a singular composition . . . marking the unique chance that these entities had been retained and willed, that this combination had been thrown. . . . It is this combination that is named Lawrence” (ibid., 120). These entities are emotions, visions, ideas, dispositions, and they operate, for Deleuze, as a constellation or multiplicity that defines Lawrence, and which, at a certain level, Lawrence chooses. We can see a clear relation between Deleuze’s treatment of Lawrence and those films he uses in Cinema 2 to introduce the notion of the intercessor (Deleuze 1989). One obvious example is

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The Intercessor or Heteronym in Gilles Deleuze and Fernando Pessoa Jean Rouch’s Moi, un noir, which features actors playing highly fictionalised and idealised versions of themselves: Oumarou Ganda becomes Edward G. Robinson, for example. Significant common ground can be found between Deleuze’s discussion of this process of self-fictionalisation, and Pessoa’s discussion of the impact of the heteronyms on his writing process. Pessoa’s heteronyms were distinguished by writing styles and philosophical predilections, as well as by the medium (poetry or prose) they preferred to write in. They formed relations with one another as rivals or as master and disciples. Of his most well-known heteronyms, Alberto Caeiro is distinguished by his rejection of metaphysics, and Ricardo Reis by his preference for Latin and Greek classical styles. Yet it would be wrong to view them as mere protagonists in the prototype of a postmodern game. Pessoa’s most significant and in-depth explanation of the heteronyms comes in his famous 1935 letter to Adolfo Casais Monteiro. In that letter, he describes how the heteronyms “have their origin in a deep-seated form of hysteria” (Pessoa 2001, 254). More tellingly, he refers to them thus: “the mental origin of my heteronyms lies in my relentless, organic tendency to depersonalization and simulation” (254). It seems that these two processes—depersonalisation and simulation—go, as with Deleuze’s Lawrence, hand in hand. Only when the (bachelor?) author undertakes the destruction of his own ego can the heteronym emerge: but equally, Pessoa was only able to begin writing once that third person had been born within him. As Pessoa says, “in Álvaro de Campos I placed all the emotion I deny myself and don’t put into life” (253–54) and “in all of this it seems that I, who created them all, was the one who was least there” (257). Pessoa at different times throughout his creative life attempted to write poems consciously as if he were one or another heteronym: to write as they would write. The poem “Opiary,” for example, is described by Pessoa thus: “I suggested . . . that I write an ‘old’ poem of Álvaro de Campos’s—a poem such as [he] would have written before meeting Caeiro and falling under his influence. . . . in which I tried to incorporate all the latent tendencies of Álvaro de Campos that would eventually be revealed” (257). As Deleuze and Guattari argue in What Is Philosophy?, genuine acts of philosophical creation operate via the intermediary of an adjacent third person: “I think as Idiot” or “I will as Zarathustra” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 64). One only really speaks when one speaks through, and as, a third person. However, Pessoan heteronymy is more complicated than merely the adoption of pseudonyms or the arraignment of various psychosocial or literary types. In other words, the heteronyms do not act merely as personifications of literary styles. The most significant inclusion within the heteronymy is that of what Pessoa terms the “orthonym”—that is, the original name, Fernando Pessoahimself, denoting a persona that is a fictionalised version of the author. It is this inclusion that turns the poetical accomplishment of the heteronymy into a profound philosophical meditation on the nature of being. For philosopher Judith Balso, it is the inclusion of the orthonym that makes the heteronymy such a profound and radical contribution to our understanding of authority. As she argues, “It is because there exists an orthonym amongst the four poets

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Niall Kennedy that the heteronymy is not reduced to a collection of false names hiding that of the author, but is capable of radically displacing any name of the author” (Balso 2011, 122); and thus, “This is the only way the heteronymy finds itself constituted as a consistent multiplicity” (ibid.). The heteronymy is thus a machine without a centre, or a collection of parts that do not add up to a totalised whole. Following Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus, we may want to henceforth speak of an “author-machine,” in which case we could say: “And if we discover such a totality alongside various separate parts, it is a whole of these particular parts but does not totalize them; it is a unity of all of these particular parts but does not unify them; rather, it is added to them as a new part fabricated separately” (Deleuze and Guattari [1977] 1983, 42). The author-machine, or the heteronymy, is a multiplicity and as such, is the only basis, according to Deleuze and Guattari, for desiring-production. As Pessoa writes to Casais Monteiro, “I subsist as a kind of medium of myself, but I’m less real than the others, less substantial, less personal, and easily influenced by them all” (Pessoa 2001, 262). The diminished figure of the orthonym, Fernando Pessoa-himself, is more anonymous and in a sense less real than the heteronyms; indeed, his literary production begins only as a reaction to his initial eclipse by Alberto Caeiro, rather than proactively. It is to underline the fictitiousness of being that a fictionalised version of the poet’s real name—the orthonym—joins the constellation of heteronyms: not as a centre, or anchoring personality, and not as their opposite, but as one fictional persona among others. Thus Balso argues: “Ontologically, what the orthonymy thus exhibits, starting from the invention of Fernando Pessoahimself, is the fictitious character of being and the original mark in him of non-being” (Balso 2011, 123). Pessoa’s rejection of metaphysics, through the persona of Alberto Caeiro, puts into question the fundamental and ontological basis for the heteronyms, in a problematisation of the process of artistic and philosophical creation that has profound implications for our study of and our deeper understanding of Deleuze and Guattari. As Balso argues, “These four poets who ‘passed,’ as Pessoa writes, ‘immaterially through his soul’ contain an unheard of affirmative power: beyond the shattered core of metaphysics, they poetically bear a renewed thinking of being” (2011, 280). When thinking therefore of the process of artistic and philosophical creation, fundamental ontological questions are raised that the work of Pessoa and his heteronyms can begin to answer. The division between object and subject, thing-in-itself and thing-for-itself—the basic Platonic distinction between essence and appearance—is rejected by both Pessoa and Deleuze, so too is the basic Kantian position of the unified subject encountering the world as phenomenon. Instead of a basic division between the thinker and the “truth” that he uncovers, or between the thinker and the thought, for both the Portuguese poet and the French philosopher thought is engendered by a division within the thinker. This has an effect on the work produced too: by separating thought from the thinker and forcing a divide in the thinker, Pessoa’s heteronymy allows the poem to become the site of a non-thinking.

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The Intercessor or Heteronym in Gilles Deleuze and Fernando Pessoa Balso, analysing Pessoa’s orthonymous poetry, argues that “Forcing themselves to grasp a conjoined being of non-being and being, most of the orthonymous poems constantly divide themselves becoming, during the course of their development, ‘two’” (Balso 2011, 124). This constant process of division permits the presence of nothingness in both the thought and the thinker. Moreover, it permits deeper changes too: ones that change the poem from being a site of self-reflexion or self-expression into another kind of production. “It is not a reflexive but immanent process; the poem strives to deeply modify itself as a poem. It becomes the poem of the act of seeing, of things, of prose, against expressivity, the ulterior-motive, dual meanings” (Balso 2011, 269). Deleuze and Guattari’s exhortations against the artwork (or work of philosophy) as a site of mere self-expression—as the place to re-rehearse clichéd Oedipal family dramas, personal neuroses, secrets, and concerns—is well documented. In Essays Critical and Clinical, Deleuze argued that “To write is not to recount one’s memories and travels, one’s loves and griefs, one’s dreams and fantasies” (1997, 2). This obsession with personal neuroses, with Oedipal dramas and squalid secrets, is, for Deleuze and Claire Parnet, a defining characteristic of French literature (Deleuze and Parnet 2007, 46–47). French literature, described as “narcissistic,” and “hysterical” by Deleuze and Parnet, is inferior to literature written in English precisely because of its identification with the personal traumas and experiences of the author—concerns projected onto the work by critics and held up as its true meaning in a reductive and simplistic process of interpretation. Far from opening itself up to the flows of life, a literature preoccupied with personal self-expression in fact expresses merely the blockages and interruptions in that flow caused by these personal neuroses (Deleuze 1997, 3–4). So too, in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, Deleuze’s exhortation is for the painter to rid himself of the clichés existing in his head, to bypass his controlling intelligence, so that he can paint directly sensations that speak to the nervous system rather than the brain (Deleuze 2003). In both cases the production of art relies not on the expression of cliché and of commonplace concerns, but on their destruction, and the withdrawal from preoccupation with them, which must take place before the projection or fabulation of a new ego. In What Is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari argue that “The role of conceptual personae is to show thought’s territories, its absolute deterritorializations and reterritorializations” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 69). The creation and description of the new, in philosophy and art, and the ability of each to break through the limitations imposed by the reproduction and representation of old forms and old concepts—the old “image of thought”—is a defining theme linking together all Deleuze and Guattari’s work. Thinking Deleuze together with Pessoa allows us to open up the possibility of how this can be done, by pointing us to Pessoa’s heteronyms as a productive model for our understanding of the Deleuzian intercessor, and, thus, the Deleuzian author. This perspective further allows us to appreciate how absolutely central the Deleuzian author in all its specificity and theoretical distinctiveness is to Deleuze’s theories of philosophical creation and of literary and artistic production.

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Niall Kennedy References Balso, Judith. 2011. Pessoa, the Metaphysical Courier. Translated by Drew Burke. New York: Atropos Press. First published 2006 as Pessoa, le passeur métaphysique (Paris: Seuil). Blanchot, Maurice. 1982. The Space of Literature. Translated by Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. First published 1955 as L’espace littéraire (Paris: Gallimard). This translation first published 1982 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press). Cross, Donald. 2015. “What Is Nonstyle in What Is Philosophy?” In Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Literature, edited by Ian Buchanan, Tim Matts, and Aidan Tynan, 82–98. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Deleuze, Gilles. 1989. Cinema 2: The TimeImage. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1985 as Cinéma 2: L’image-temps (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1997. Essays Critical and Clinical. Translated by Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1993 as Critique et Clinique (Paris: Minuit). ———. 2003. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Translated by Daniel W. Smith. London: Continuum. First published 1981 as Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation (Paris: Éditions de la différence). ———. 2007. Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995. Edited by David Lapoujade. Translated by Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina. New York: Semiotext(e). First published 2003 as Deux régimes de fous: Textes et entretiens, 1975–1995 (Paris: Minuit). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. (1977) 1983. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert

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Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1972 as Capitalisme et schizophrénie: L’anti-Œdipe (Paris: Minuit). Translation first published 1977 (New York: Viking Press). ———. 1986. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Translated by Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1975 as Kafka: Pour une literature mineure (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1994. What Is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1991 as Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Minuit). Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. 2007. Dialogues II. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Rev. ed. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1977 as Dialogues (Paris: Flammarion). Gil, José. 1999. Diferença et negação na poesia de Fernando Pessoa. Lisbon: Relógio D’Água. Lambert, Gregg, 2002. The Non-philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. London: Continuum. Marshall, Bill. 2000. Quebec National Cinema. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Pessoa, Fernando. 1982. Selected Poems. Translated by Jonathan Griffin. 2nd ed. London: Penguin. ———. 2001. The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa. Edited and translated by Richard Zenith. New York: Grove Press. ———. 2002. The Book of Disquiet. Translated by Richard Zenith. London: Penguin. First published 1982 as Livro do desassossego (Lisbon: Ática). Stivale, Charles J. 1998. The Two-Fold Thought of Deleuze and Guattari: Intersections and Animations. New York: Guilford Press.

Part 3

Ecosophy

Assemblages, Black Holes, and Territories Ian Buchanan University of Wollongong, Australia

The territory is the first assemblage, the first thing to constitute an assemblage; the assemblage is fundamentally territorial. —Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987, 323)

There are two ways one can interpret this passage from A Thousand Plateaus, both of which have interesting implications for our understanding of the concept of the assemblage. It can be understood to mean either that there were no assemblages at all until there were territories, which we might think of as its historical or evolutionary sense, or that assemblages undergo stages of transformation such that they begin in one form and develop into another (and another, and another, and so on). And in fact, evidence can be found in Deleuze and Guattari’s work to support both readings. I will not pursue these thoughts further here, except to say that it is important to remember that this means assemblages begin not as collections of things, as they are often portrayed, but as organisations, or better yet arrangements, of signs. For that is essentially what territories are, they are arrangements of signs, but that barely begins to explain their importance to Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking, much less how they function. The real key to understanding the concept of territory is chaos defined as an existential condition rather than a physical state of affairs (though it can be that too). This is ground zero for schizoanalysis. We see this very clearly in the chapter on the refrain in A Thousand Plateaus which despite its title, is really about the concept of territory. In a nice turn of phrase, Elizabeth Grosz defines the refrain as a “kind of rhythmic regularity that brings a minimum of liveable order to a situation in which chaos beckons” (2008, 52). Grosz does not expand on the phrase “liveable order” herself, but in what follows I will try to expand upon it as a way of understanding territory. Territory is a liveable order produced and sustained by a refrain. For Deleuze and Guattari, chaos is an ever-present potentiality in both our mental lives and the physical world. All that we have, and all that we are, even the most stratified aspects of our lives, is nothing but a temporary victory over the relentless forces of chaos, which are like a ground bass to our very existence. Deleuze and Guattari conceive chaos as both the absolute foundation for all thinking (it is the beginning and end of thought) and as a kind of relative dissolution of the senses and the sensible. It is, in other words, an ever-present possibility, but one that is only realised in particular sets of circumstances. But it is never far away. It can never be entirely forgotten or ignored. Deleuze and 283

Ian Buchanan Guattari speak of chaos threatening, stalking, and trying to reabsorb the hard won sensibility of the concept (1994, 16). But, even though they often speak of chaos as something to fear, and to ward off, they are equally adamant that without it, at least a bit of it, we would stultify and die. Chaos is both life and death. In What Is Philosophy?, a book that is essentially organised around the notion of chaos, Deleuze and Guattari depict the disciplines of art, philosophy, and science as being locked into an ageless battle against chaos. Each one fights chaos in its own way, but chaos is nevertheless the constant enemy. However, the aim of these battles is never to win completely, to shut out chaos altogether, because to do that would be to induce creative stasis, a form of death-in-life. The artist has to confront chaos and let it in and then try to give it form. “Chaos is not an inert or stationary state, nor is it a chance mixture. Chaos makes chaotic and undoes every consistency in the infinite. The problem of philosophy [we could also say of life itself ] is to acquire consistency without losing the infinite into which thought plunges (in this respect chaos has as much a mental as a physical existence)” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 42). There is, however, an art of dosages when it comes to chaos: one needs chaos, but only so much, and not too much: just enough to disrupt “normal service” and allow creativity to flow. As they often caution, one should not deterritorialise (i.e., allow chaos in) too quickly, and never completely; one needs to hold onto just enough territory to rebuild a life (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 270). Deleuze and Guattari offer a vivid thumbnail sketch of this process in their account of the career of the great English painter J. M. W. Turner—his lifelong dance with chaos is depicted as courting breakdown in search of a breakthrough (Deleuze and Guattari [1977] 1983, 132). The danger of chaos is that it is attractive to us, under certain circumstances, and if we fall too deeply into it we may never escape it. This is why Deleuze and Guattari also refer to chaos as a black hole (it “captures you and does not let you get out” [Deleuze and Parnet 2007, 17]). Far from being a blank, undifferentiated morass, chaos has “its own directional components, which are its own ecstasies” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 313). One sees this clearly in Artaud’s work: I suffer hideously from life. There is no state I can attain. And it is certain that I have been dead for a long time, I have already committed suicide. . . . I have no appetite for death, I have an appetite for not existing, for never having fallen into this interlude of imbecilities, abdications, renunciations, and obtuse encounters which is the self of Antonin Artaud, much weaker than he is. The self of this wandering invalid which from time to time presents its shadow on which he himself has spat, and long since, this crippled and shuffling self, this virtual, impossible self which nevertheless finds itself in reality. No one has felt its weakness as strongly as he, it is the principal, essential weakness of humanity. To destroy, to not exist. (Artaud 1976, 103)

The temptation of the black hole is the temptation to opt out of life, to refuse to participate in its daily frustrations and inconsistencies, and instead plunge into a lightless world of disengagement.

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Assemblages, Black Holes, and Territories The black hole does not pre-exist our actions, it is the product of our actions—it is, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, “a machine effect in assemblages” (1987, 334). Everything we do (insofar as it is an action of desire) carries this risk of plunging us into a black hole. In this sense then territory should be understood as a defensive concept because it describes our means of getting out of the black holes we sometimes find ourselves in, either because we chose to go down a dark path or somehow our actions inadvertently led us there. Deleuze and Guattari borrow F. Scott Fitzgerald’s notion of the “crack” from his short autobiographical piece “The Crack-up” to illustrate this idea. In life, according to Fitzgerald, there are three ways of cracking up, that is, three ways the black hole can make itself felt in our daily lives (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 198–200). First, there are the big blows that hit you from the outside, that often present themselves in terms of choices—if only I hadn’t drunk so much, if only I’d kept my mouth shut, and so on. The changes that ensue, loss of love, loss of employment, loss of respect, and so on, stay with you forever, but also feel strangely alien because one feels that if one had made different choices things wouldn’t be the way they are. Then there are the micro-cracks that occur when things seem to be going well—one might not even notice them at first. It is the corrosion that happens in one’s soul when a thousand slights resonate together and ramify. The first time someone calls you “fat” or a “loser” you might not even notice the hurt it caused, but the damage is done, and every repetition of that slight causes the hurt to magnify as it resonates within. Last, there are “clean breaks”; these are the breaks you cannot come back from because they destroy all connection to the past. This is what people mean when they say about a former relationship that there is no “us” anymore, there is nothing to go back to, the past has been volatised. We can also see that these are the types of situation that could drown us if we didn’t have some kind of lifeline: territory is that lifeline. In each case, the crack isn’t to be found in the state of affairs, which may appear unchanged to the outside observer, despite the tumult within; the crack is in the territory, which is our existential means of occupying the state of affairs, of making it liveable. “Us” isn’t a state of affairs, it is a territory that combines two or more worlds, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, we make love with our worlds ([1977] 1983, 294). Our “life” isn’t a state of affairs either, it is an intermeshing of multiple territories. The cracks Fitzgerald speaks of are fissures in our most fundamental territory, namely our “self,” that allow too much darkness, too much chaos, to enter, and incapacitate “us,” temporarily or permanently. Deterritorialisation, the process of leaving our territorial fortress, which defends against the despair of the potential black holes populating our existence, is thus highly dangerous, as Deleuze and Guattari frequently remind us. In its fullest sense, deterritorialisation means functioning without territory, freefalling into chaos without a safety net or harness, which is why whenever we deterritorialise we immediately seek opportunities to reterritorialise. So much so that we effectively only deterritorialise in order to reterritorialise, which is what happens when we change our minds or fall in love— we leave one territory so that we can immediately enter another. Deleuze and

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Ian Buchanan Guattari stipulate that there are three forms of deterritorialisation, three ways of leaving our territory, or what they also call lines of flight (a line of flight is the path of a particular deterritorialisation): (1) negative; (2) relative; and (3) absolute. The negative deterritorialisation is one that is overlaid by reterritorialisation, which amounts to saying it is a form of change one undergoes in order to remain the same. The relative deterritorialisation overcomes the inertia of reterritorialisation, but can do so only in an ad hoc way, which means it never entirely escapes reterritorialisation and sometimes ends up in a black hole all over again. Deterritorialisation is absolute when it succeeds in creating a new earth, a new beginning, one that does not lead back to old territories—but just as this is the higher path, as it were, it is also the most dangerous because one form of absolute escape is death (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 508–10). We cannot say that one of these three lines is bad and another good, by nature and necessarily. The study of the dangers of each line is the object of pragmatics or schizoanalysis, to the extent that it undertakes not to represent, interpret, or symbolise, but only to make maps and draw lines, marking their mixtures as well as their distinctions (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 227). Following Nietzsche and Carlos Castaneda, Deleuze and Guattari identify a variety of dangers associated with each species of line of flight. The short list of the most important dangers includes fear, clarity, power, and disgust. We fear losing our security, all the comforts we have grown accustomed to, which define the very order of things (“the binary machines that give us a well-defined status, the resonances we enter into, the system of overcoding that dominates us—we desire all that” [Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 227]). We retreat in the face of the unknown and harden ourselves against the call to change. We speak of the old days and call for a return to the way things were (the fantasy of lost certainties). Clarity is the feeling of knowing everything, of seeing through everything, of being taken in by nothing. Instead of the great paranoias generated by fear we have a multitude of microparanoias (which are every bit as damaging), of seeing threats in even the smallest details, “we are trapped in a thousand little monomanias, self-evident truths, and clarities that gush from every black hole and no longer form a system, but are only rumble and buzz, blinding lights giving any and everybody the mission of self-appointed judge, dispenser of justice, policeman, neighbourhood SS man” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 228). Think here of the thousands of people at Trump rallies shouting “lock her up” or “send them back,” or the people who voted in favour of Brexit because they saw Europe as a mass of minor inconveniences and disagreeable regulations rather than a grand project that ultimately benefited them. Power moves between these two points of view (fear and clarity). “Every man of power jumps from one line to the other, alternating between a petty and a lofty style, the rogue’s style and the grandiloquent style, drugstore demagoguery and the imperialism of the high-ranking government man” (ibid., 229). He wants to stop the lines of flight that elude his control, but can only do so by creating a void. The fourth danger, the great disgust, is in many ways the most important. Here they invoke Fitzgerald again, specifically his famous line that his “selfimmolation was something sodden-dark,” as a prelude to asking: “Why is the

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Assemblages, Black Holes, and Territories line of flight a war one risks coming back from defeated, destroyed, after having destroyed everything one could?” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 229). Why, in other words, does the attempt to escape from a black hole only increase the power of that black hole? Why instead of a way out does the line of flight turn out to be a way down? For Deleuze and Guattari it is only by recognising the strange power of attraction of this particular line of flight, replete with its dangers, that we can understand fascism. “Unlike the totalitarian State, which does its utmost to seal all possible lines of flight, fascism is constructed on an intense line of flight, which it transforms into a line of pure destruction and abolition” (230). Fascism is suicidal rather than totalitarian, Deleuze and Guattari argue (following Paul Virilio). “Suicide is presented not as a punishment but as the crowning glory of the death of others” (231). This is why the people cheered Hitler, they argue, because “they wanted that death through the death of others” (230). As they argued in Anti-Oedipus, there is no false consciousness or deception here: “at a certain point, under a certain set of conditions, they wanted fascism, and it is this perversion of the desire of the masses that needs to be accounted for” (Deleuze and Guattari [1977] 1983, 29). The line of flight toward abolition and the black hole it terminates in should not be compared with or equated to the death drive. “There are no internal drives in desire, only assemblages. Desire is always assembled; it is what the assemblage determines it to be. The assemblage that draws lines of flight is on the same level as they are, and is of the war machine type” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 229). In other words, what we call fascism is immanent to the assemblage, that is, it is generated by the assemblage, and not the unleashing of primeval instincts for violence and death. As such, it may be better to speak of the desire called fascism. The question at hand is how it is possible for the ordinary-seeming assemblages of everyday life such as prevailed in Germany in the 1930s to have sent an entire nation along the suicidal line of flight that precipitated World War 2 and all the ensuing horrors. Unfortunately, they only hint at an answer to the question, but their speculation (also borrowed from Virilio) is that the manifold miseries of daily life (clarity) snowball into a longing for a “clean break.” Exit polls following both Brexit and Trump’s election pointed to exactly this type of desire: people wanted change, they wanted disruption for a million different reasons, and so they voted for the disruptors, regardless of whether they believed it would be a change for the better. Many commentators have speculated whether this turn of events constitutes the appearance of a new stage of fascism. Whether or not Trump, in particular, is a fascist is the subject of considerable debate amongst leftist commentators without anyone being able to decide one way or another. In large part this is because the historical comparisons don’t really stack up. Trump’s regime has neither been as murderous as Hitler’s nor as ideologically uniting. Hitler’s popularity at the start of his reign greatly exceeds Trump’s, even amongst his most ardent supporters. And Hitler was also obviously in favour of war which Trump, to his credit, does not seem to be. Indeed, in his early campaigning in 2015 he spoke against America’s invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, describing it as self-defeating. Umberto Eco’s proposition that every age has its own fascism, which Lawrence

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Ian Buchanan Grossberg (2018, 139) cites approvingly, is very useful here because it sets aside the tedious problem of historical comparison and allows us to focus instead on the new ways in which the desire for power manifests itself. But in contrast to Grossberg, who argues that American fascism is “defined by its reconfiguration of the nation and the state” (ibid.), I want to suggest instead that it is defined in terms of the particularity of its line of flight toward death. One could point to a variety of examples to evidence this, but the starkest illustration of this line of flight I’ve seen (precisely because it is so banal and benign seeming) is Disney’s appropriation and transformation of Star Wars characters into theme park attractions. A couple of days before Donald Trump was inaugurated as the forty-fifth president of the United States of America, I took my kids to that most American of places, Walt Disney World in Orlando. This was in early 2017, five years after Disney purchased Lucasfilm and two years before the dedicated Star Wars section of the park, Galaxy’s Edge, opened. There were a couple of makeshift Star Wars themed areas and rides open at this stage. However, every hour or so, the familiar “da, da, da, da, da-da” refrain of the Emperor’s march would suddenly blast from loud speakers all over the park and a platoon of stormtroopers led by Captain Phasma would assemble in the main square and then proceed to march in formation down Main Street USA. I remember being surprised by this because intuitively one would expect to see the “good guys,” that is, the rebels, marching and not the “bad guys.” And yet at every turn we were far more likely to see representatives of the dark side, from the ubiquitous stormtroopers to Darth Vader and Kylo Ren, than we were the heroes of the good side, such as Luke Skywalker or Princess Leia. This was true even in the many merchandise outlets, where Darth Vader and the stormtroopers were easily the most frequently represented characters on T-shirts, coffee mugs, and backpacks. As surprised as I was to see the prominence given to stormtroopers and Darth Vader in the happiest place on earth, the more I thought about it the more fitting it seemed. Maybe it was because the Trump inauguration was only days away, but I couldn’t help but think that in a country like the United States, which is many ways the most powerful imperial nation in history, it is apt that the dark side of the force should be attractive to so many people (and not just to Americans, I hasten to add, since millions of overseas tourists like myself also visit Disney theme parks). It appeared to be living proof that black holes do indeed have their own directional components, which are its ecstasies. It is not the ecstasy of some vague evil, however. The appeal is, I think, quite specific. The appeal of stormtroopers is the appeal of planet destroyers. It is doubtless no accident that the central plot of every Star Wars movie has been to save entire planets from literal obliteration. The Death Star in all its incarnations is the ultimate black hole—it not only brings death, it invites us to marvel at its power, to feel its libidinal tractor beam, and recognise it as the embodiment of everything that we fear and desire: death as life. The environment has always paid the price of human advancement, but it is only in the last few decades that humanity has become collectively conscious of the fact that our actions are pushing the planet in a direction that will no longer support life as we know it. This is our

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Assemblages, Black Holes, and Territories situation now. The technology exists to switch most of our energy needs to renewable sources, but governments and corporations everywhere resist this because it would spell the end of a multi-billion-dollar industry. The fact that multi-billionaires like Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos are fantasising about colonising Mars (as Rhodes once did) is of a piece with this because it similarly embraces and actively seeks to profit from the end of the world as we know it. We territorialise because we need to and we need to territorialise because we have to confront chaos, both in its originary form and in the form of black holes. The territory transforms not only the elements constituting it but its inhabitant as well (as both the territory’s creator and primary beneficiary). We not only act differently in our territory from the way we act outside it, and we effectively are different and we derive a specific surplus value from being this way—for example, the feeling of “comfort” we experience in our home is a surplus value of the specific kind of territory we call “home,” and not merely an affordance derived from the material circumstances of our accommodation. I do not mean to deny the importance of affordance, a concept that is lately very fashionable indeed, but I do insist that it is a secondary consideration. We have to be wary of turning affordances into efficient causes. We adapt our sense of homeliness to fit our circumstances and not the other way around, which is why a hovel can be homely and a mansion unhomely. It is also why words like saudade exist: there is no more keenly felt lack than the exile’s feeling of lacking a home. To feel “at home” is not the same thing as being “at home” and the difference between the two is not simply a matter of affect. The territory is composed of elements it borrows or steals from the environment we find ourselves in (our milieu) and organises into new worlds. These elements are signs, or even more basically perceptual stimuli, which can of course take a number of different forms, from visual displays of plumage, to odours, to songs, and even elaborate physical constructions such as the stagemaker bowerbird’s stage made of twigs and upturned leaves (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 315; 1994, 184). The elements by themselves do not constitute the territory; they have to be arranged with what we might usefully describe as territorial intent. Doubtless this word intent will trouble many, but it is clear from the examples Deleuze and Guattari work through that territory is not happenstance, it is produced quite deliberately with a precise set of effects in mind. This does not mean, however, that territories are optional, or incidental to our lives. On the contrary, as Deleuze and Guattari conceive it, territory is not something we can do without—our whole lives are spent building, enlarging, escaping, remodelling, or leaving our territories. Life is a constant, ongoing process of territorialising. As such, it should be clear by now that territory is neither a spatial concept, nor a material concept. This does not mean that it does not entail either spatial or material components, I hasten to add, but it is to say that in Deleuze and Guattari’s work these aspects of the concept of territory are not considered primary. Counter-intuitively, Deleuze and Guattari argue that material components are not used to create a territory, rather it is the territorialising process (the T-factor as Deleuze and Guattari put it [1987, 316]) that transforms materials into signs and thereby paves the way to the

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Ian Buchanan production of territory. Similarly the space of the territory cannot easily be mapped or correlated with the proverbial “facts on the ground.” In many cases the territory has no specific spatial dimension, it is all “in our heads,” and it is better understood as a feeling, or better yet a sense of purpose. Rather than regard them as spaces, it would be more useful and accurate to see territories as subjective states in a psychological sense, which is how the ethologist Jakob von Uexküll, one of the key theorists from whom Deleuze and Guattari lifted the concept of territory, suggests we should see them.1 He writes, “Territory is purely a problem of the environment because it represents an exclusively subjective product, the presence of which even the most detailed knowledge of the surroundings offers no explanation at all” (Uexküll 2010, 103). We can literally hum or whistle them into being, no matter what our actual circumstances are. Despite their frequent recourse to the work of animal behaviour studies theorists (e.g., Lorenz, Tinbergen, and Uexküll), and their terminology, Deleuze and Guattari do not simply lift the concept of territory from ethology and apply it tout court to the analysis of the everyday lives of humans. Nor do they propose, as Lorenz did, that animal behaviour (broadly understood) can be used to explain human behaviour, as though all species were somehow the same at a deep instinctual level. In fact, they vigorously dispute ethology’s construction of the concept of territory in terms of aggression (Lorenz) precisely because it would make aggression “the phylogenetic evolution of an instinct” and offer their own version of it as a corrective (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 315–16). In fact, the inspiration for the concept of territory seems not to have been animal-related at all, rather it appears to have been clinical, as the following passage from the refrain chapter in A Thousand Plateaus would seem to suggest—“Two schizophrenics converse or stroll according to laws of boundary and territory that may escape us” (ibid., 320).2 It is apparent from the behaviour of schizophrenics—but not only schizophrenics—that the basic tenets of behaviouralism are too narrowly conceived to account for the abundant variety of ways of being in the world that are evident all around us. One cannot fully fathom the logic of the schizophrenics’ territory merely by observing them; one must also know what they are thinking, and how they are seeing the world. Deleuze and Guattari move away from physiological models of behaviour premised on some variety of stimulus and response and its cognates such as inhibition and release, and replace them with productive desire understood as an assemblage-making process, precisely because those models cannot cope with what we might think of as the imaginative and symbolic dimensions of everyday life. Their basic complaint against standard behaviouralist ways of thinking is that it is too linear because it follows a kind of billiard ball logic of causality, whereas their model is compositional (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 332). The territory is an artwork, or better yet an art event (317).

1 For detailed accounts of Deleuze and Guattari’s appropriation of Uexküll, see Buchanan (2008, 151–86). 2 Anne Sauvagnargues (2016, 128–29) similarly traces Deleuze and Guattari’s interest in the territory and the refrain to a clinical source, namely Lacan’s reinterpretation of Freud’s grandson’s so-called fort/da game (which she misattributes to “Little Hans”).

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Assemblages, Black Holes, and Territories For Deleuze and Guattari, territory is essentially a pragmatic concept (ethology, in their view, would be better served if it paid more attention to pragmatics). As I have already indicated, territory has a clinical meaning in Deleuze and Guattari’s work as well; they use it to explain how we manage intersubjectivity, particularly the feelings of anxiety this can occasion. The link between these two conceptions of territory (pragmatics and the clinic) is the refrain understood as a performative (in J. L. Austin’s sense of the word) and not just as a little ditty one plays or sings; that is, it is that which brings the territory into being by power of its performance. When we whistle to ourselves to allay our anxiety or just announce to the world that we’re happy we are performing a self-transforming act, which is at once pragmatic and psychological in its effect. Our whistling has purpose as well as meaning. “A child hums to summon the strength for the schoolwork she has to hand in. A housewife sings to herself, or listens to the radio, as she marshals the antichaos forces of her work. . . . For sublime deeds like the foundation of a city or the fabrication of a golem, one draws a circle, or better yet walks in a circle as in a children’s dance, combining rhythmic vowels and consonants that correspond to the interior forces of creation” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 311). In sum, territory is an act, a passage, not a space (314, 323). It is the composition of one’s own world. Territorialising is world-making (black holes are the unmaking of worlds). It is in this sense that it is appropriately understood as a form of pragmatics. Deleuze and Guattari’s version of pragmatics, a word they use interchangeably with schizoanalysis as the global name for their methodology, is drawn from Austin’s theory of performativity, as I mentioned, but it also incorporates the insights of Deleuze and Guattari’s contemporaries Émile Benveniste and Oswald Ducrot. However, Deleuze and Guattari take the theory of performativity much further than any of these scholars did, outside the narrow confines of pure linguistics and into the varied realms of everyday life. Austin saw the performative as a peculiar part of speech that no one else until then had noticed or written about. He was interested in it because it is a form of language that literally accomplishes something outside itself, and indeed outside the usual jurisdictions of linguistic concern such as the production of meaning and sense-making. The expressed of a performative is an action rather than a meaning. For example, when a judge passes sentence on someone at a trial their words do much more than make meaning, they bring about an actual change in the circumstances of the convicted subject, which is then no longer a matter for linguistics but instead belongs to the domain of a new discipline Deleuze and Guattari call pragmatics. Austin did not take this step himself, but it is the inevitable next step as Deleuze and Guattari and several other commentators have observed. “As long as linguistics confines itself to constants, whether syntactical, morphological, or phonological, it ties the statement to a signifier and enunciation to a subject and accordingly botches the assemblage. . . . As Vološinov [Bakhtin] says, as long as linguistics extracts constants, it is incapable of helping us understand how a single word can be a complete enunciation” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 82). There has to be something else that is beyond linguistics, but not beyond language that can explain this. “The order-word

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Ian Buchanan [i.e., the performative] is precisely that variable that makes the word as such an enunciation” (ibid.). Deleuze and Guattari describe the process initiated by the performative as an incorporeal transformation because—to continue with the same example— the corporeal body of the convicted remains the same, but it takes on new (social) attributes, which change the way that person can interact in society (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 81). Although Deleuze and Guattari are often portrayed as theorists of the body, they were actually more interested in the way the non-bodily, that is, words, can transform the body, without ever penetrating beneath the surface. For Deleuze and Guattari, it is the instantaneous nature of the transformation (which they suggest can be projected back to the origin of society), which is of uppermost importance—it is the reason all the plateaus are precisely dated (ibid., 81). This line of thinking can be traced back to Deleuze’s discussion of the Stoics in The Logic of Sense (Deleuze 1990). The Stoics were the first to theorise the form of content and the form of expression as autonomous but interacting functions. “The form of expression is constituted by the warp of expresseds, and the form of content by the woof of bodies” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 86). When a knife cuts flesh, or someone climbs a mountain, there is an intermingling of bodies—knives, flesh, mountains—but the statements “the knife is cutting flesh” and “Mallory attempted to climb Everest” express incorporeal transformations of a very different order, which are nonetheless attributed to bodies. “In expressing the noncorporeal attribute, and by that token attributing it to the body, one is not representing or referring but intervening in a way; it is a speech act” (86). That is the uncanny power of the performative. Austin always treated the performative as a part of speech and never ceased to think of language as primary, but Deleuze and Guattari reject this for not being abstract enough. In their view, the performative is the condition of possibility of language itself (106). Performatives disclose the fact that the outside of language—not merely the circumstances in which language is used, but the social acts language accomplishes—is always already immanent to language. Performing acts with and through language is not simply one of the things we can do with language, it is why we have language. “The only possible definition of language,” according to Deleuze and Guattari (1987), “is the set of all order-words, implicit presuppositions, or speech acts current in a language at a given moment” (79). Doubtless this claim seems a little extreme, but that is to misunderstand the deeper point Deleuze and Guattari are trying to make, which is to overturn the widespread assumption in structuralist linguistics (which was dominant in France in the 1970s when they were writing A Thousand Plateaus) that language is a universal in its own right, capable of being explained and understood in the absence of non-linguistic enabling conditions (111). They acknowledge that it is difficult to assign language a non-linguistic starting point, but argue that this is because language is not inherently representational. It does not move between something seen or felt and something said, but rather flows from one saying to another saying (76). “Language is not content to go from a first party to a second party, from one who has seen to one who has not, but necessarily goes from a second party to a third party, neither

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Assemblages, Black Holes, and Territories of whom has seen. It is in this sense that language is the transmission of the word as order-word, not the communication of a sign as information” (77). But it is not speaking subjects who issue the orders that language transmits, it is language itself (providing we understand that language is not primary, the order-word is), or what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as the collective assemblage of enunciation. “There is no individual enunciation. There is not even a subject of enunciation. Yet relatively few linguists have analysed the necessarily social character of enunciation” (79–80). This becomes clear, they argue, when we examine how free indirect discourse functions in literature. Even when the usual markers of who said this and thought that are absent and we are not told whether it is thoughts, dreams, fantasies, or words spoken silently in someone’s head, we can nonetheless make sense of what we read because the underpinning assemblage makes the distribution of subjects and statements clear. What we call direct discourse is extracted from indirect discourse, not the other way around (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 84). Deleuze and Guattari argue that this is true of all language use. The “statement is individuated, and enunciation subjectified, only to the extent that an impersonal collective assemblage requires it and determines it to be so” (80). It is in this sense that “I is an order-word” (84). When we say I we extract a Self, a proper name and even a cogito, from the constellation of voices that constitutes the collective assemblage of enunciation. But we could not say I if the position I did not exist in our society as the expressed of the statement “I am.” We take it for granted that the I is the starting point for all thinking about the nature of society, but that assumes what must in fact be explained. This is why, too, Deleuze and Guattari always say writing (particularly literature) takes place at the level of the real, and not the imaginary or the symbolic. They are not saying the performative is therefore the origin of language (it is merely a language-function in their eyes); nor are they saying the explicit order or direct command is the only form the performative can take (they are merely the most common variants of the performative). In fact, the performative in its guise as order-word is to be found everywhere in language where an act is linked to the expressed of a statement by power of social obligation. And, according to Deleuze and Guattari (1987), every statement displays this link, including that most foundational of statements “I am” (79). The expressed of an expression is not its meaning; it is the transformation of the world the expression instantiates. When the judge says “you are guilty” to someone, the effect on that person is not merely semantic: from that moment on he or she literally is no longer free, the person is a convict, and is tarnished with all the associations our society makes with that state of being. His or her whole world is changed and so is ours because the person’s place in it has been altered. The expressed of the statement “you are guilty” is the transformation of the subject of that statement—the “you”—who is instantly repositioned in society as being on the “wrong side of the law.” To be sure, not everyone who utters this phrase will be able to induce this effect—only properly authorised people can do it—but that does not alter the fact that at an abstract level the expressed of an expression is always a transformation of the subject of the

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Ian Buchanan expressed. Moreover, that authorisation is itself the expressed of several interconnecting statements—you have a law degree, you are appointed judge, you are empowered to decide this case, and so on. Underpinning this state of affairs is the material fact that this is a society in which there are such things as laws, judges, and convicts and that it is organised in such a way that statements of the “you are guilty” variety are not merely possible, but are in a certain sense redundant because we take it for granted that a person’s place in society can and should be distributed according to their relative position in relation to an abstract ideal of guilty or not guilty. The example of the judge passing sentence highlights the rarely acknowledged dualism at the heart of assemblage theory. “If in a social field we distinguish the set of corporeal modifications and the set of incorporeal transformations, we are presented, despite the variety in each of the sets, with two formalizations, one of content, the other of expression. . . . Precisely because content, like expression, has a form of its own, one can never assign the form of expression the function of simply representing, describing, or averring a corresponding content: there is neither correspondence nor conformity” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 85–86). We can think of this as the relationship between two kinds of event, the ongoing and essentially linear process of the time of the body, which we think of as “aging,” unfolding according to a regular schedule and enacting gradual modification, and the sharp, instantaneous interventions and disruptions of incorporeal categories like the “age of majority.” Your body may not feel any different the day before and the day after you turn eighteen but its situation has been completely changed: it has passed from childhood into adulthood all without changing anything in a physical or physiological sense. The assemblage theorises the possibility of this juncture between these two temporalities. In other words, the assemblage is neither the prisoner’s body (content) nor the judge’s sentence (expression), nor even their combination: rather, it is the set of conditions that enable someone to lose their freedom, perhaps their life, because of the say so of another person. The assemblage takes the form of a reciprocal presupposition between two formalisations—content and expression—brought together by power of the intervention of a form of expression into a form of content in answer to a destabilisation or problematisation of the social field. This way of thinking, which owes a great deal to Foucault’s work, can be seen clearly in Foucault’s histories, especially his work on madness, which charts the different ways madness has been produced as a “problem,” which has in turn led to the generation of a vast discourse about madness (expression) as well as the various forms of confinement of people designated as mad (content). In contrast to Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari are not specifically concerned with either expression or content; they are interested rather in the articulation of the two. This articulation mechanism is the assemblage. Territories appear where they are required, and the T-factor is mobilised. The T-factor is not an emergent property, as many versions of assemblage theory seem to think; it is not something that spontaneously “just happens” when certain materials come together; rather, it is an intrinsic capacity of the assemblage, or better yet, it is one of the reasons why assemblages exist.

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Assemblages, Black Holes, and Territories Territorialising is necessary to our existence as social beings. “The territory is first of all the critical distance between two beings of the same species: Mark your distance. What is mine is first of all my distance; I possess only distances. Don’t anybody touch me, I growl if anyone enters my territory. . . . Critical distance is a relation based on matters of expression. It is a question of keeping at a distance the forces of chaos knocking at the door” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 319–20). When chaos threatens, we create a territory using the resources we have to hand. “If need be, I’ll put my territory on my own body, I’ll territorialize my body: the house of the tortoise, the hermitage of the crab, but also tattoos that make the body a territory” (320). Critical distance is the minimum amount of separation two creatures of the species require in order to co-exist in proximity to one another. Harold Garfinkel’s breach experiments offer a vivid illustration of this point. For example, in one experiment he asked his students to ride elevators in office buildings and stand as close as possible to the other people in the car and record their reactions. In crowded elevators people barely noticed, but in empty elevators it was seen as an encroachment and generally provoked negative reactions from unsuspecting test subjects. As this example illustrates, territory has two key functions: it regulates the coexistences of subjects by defining how much space they need for their comfort and security and it maximises the number of co-inhabitants of a particular space by assigning them “specialist” roles. This in turn has two key effects: the reorganisation of functions and the regrouping of forces (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 320). In social terms, these two territorial effects are registered in the formation of occupations and trades (reorganisation of functions) and the founding of belief systems (regrouping of forces). In doing so, the territory, or rather territorialising, “unleashes something that will surpass it” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 322). The territory transforms forces of chaos into forces of the earth— the territory is the “new earth” Deleuze and Guattari often speak of. It is not merely the ground beneath our feet, but an intense centre, a “natal” where we feel “at home.” In this moment, when the territory comes into being the milieu components cease to be directional (i.e., functional) and instead become dimensional (i.e., expressive) (Grosz 2008, 20). The key difference between functional and expressive signs is this: the latter cannot be reduced to or thought of as the “effects of an impulse triggering an action in a milieu” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 317). Expressive signs are “auto-objective,” which means they “find an objectivity in the territory they draw” (ibid.). This means they change the dynamic of the interaction between the signal emitter and their circumstances from a mechanistic stimulus-response scenario (or what Deleuze would later call in his books on cinema the sensory-motor scheme) to a more complex interior-exterior scenario (or what Deleuze later called the time-image). The boundary the territory constructs is not spatial—though it may take a spatial form—but subjective: the territory is the “space” in which my interiority (i.e., “my” subjectivity as “I” experience it) can be experienced as my “home” and everything that is not “homely” to me is confined to the exteriority of what we refer to as our circumstances.

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Ian Buchanan References Artaud, Antonin. 1976. “Inquiry: Is Suicide a Solution?” In Selected Writings, edited by Susan Sontag, translated by Helen Weaver, 102–3. Berkeley: University of California Press. Text first published 1925 as part of the multi-author article “Enquête: Le suicide est-il une solution?” (La révolution surréaliste 2: 12). Buchanan, Ian. 2008. Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. London: Continuum. Deleuze, Gilles. 1990. The Logic of Sense. Translated by Mark Lester with Charles Stivale. Edited by Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1969 as Logique du sens (Paris: Minuit). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. (1977) 1983. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1972 as Capitalisme et schizophrénie: L’anti-Œdipe (Paris: Minuit). Translation first published 1977 (New York: Viking Press). ———. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie

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(Paris: Minuit). ———. 1994. What Is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1991 as Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Minuit). Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. 2007. Dialogues II. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Rev. ed. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1977 as Dialogues (Paris: Flammarion). Grossberg, Lawrence. 2018. Under the Cover of Chaos: Trump and the Battle of the American Right. London: Pluto Press. Grosz, Elizabeth. 2008. Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth. New York: Columbia University Press. Sauvagnargues, Anne. 2016. Artmachines: Deleuze, Guattari, Simondon. Translated by Suzanne Verderber with Eugene W. Holland. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Uexküll, Jakob von. 2010. A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans. Translated by Joseph D. O’Neill. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1934 as Streifzüge durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen (Berlin: Julius Springer).

Planetary Assemblages From Organic to Inorganic and Beyond Audronė Žukauskaitė Lithuanian Culture Research Institute, Vilnius, Lithuania

What does assemblage owe to organism? The concept of assemblage comes from Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of agencement, which “refers to the action of matching or fitting together a set of components (agencer), as well as to the result of such an action: an ensemble of parts that mesh together well” (DeLanda 2016, 1).1 The English translation captures only the second meaning and refers more to a product than a process. Referring to Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of agencement, Manuel DeLanda argues that the notion of assemblage encompasses a variety of entities ranging from atoms and molecules to biological organisms, species, and ecosystems. However, even relying on biological examples, the notion of assemblage helps us tackle the organismic metaphor that is used to explain the functioning of the human body or society. Thus, in contrast to organismic totalities, based on relations of interiority, assemblages are composed of parts that are connected by relations of exteriority. “These relations imply, first of all, that a component part of an assemblage may be detached from it and plugged into a different assemblage in which its interactions are different. In other words, the exteriority of relations implies a certain autonomy for the terms they relate, or as Deleuze puts it, it implies that ‘a relation may change without the terms changing’” (DeLanda 2006, 10–11). Furthermore, in totalities the relationships between its components are logically necessary, whereas in assemblages these relations might be only contingently obligatory. Thus, even though Deleuze remains hostile to the notion of the organism, he successfully reconceptualises the organism in terms of an assemblage. “In this way assemblage theory deprives organismic theories of their most cherished exemplar” (ibid., 12). However, this does not mean that assemblages are deprived of their organic nature and become purely a mechanical collection of parts. As Deleuze points out, assemblages are distinct from both organic functions and mechanical relationships and are “machinic,” which means that they work together: “the assemblage’s only unity is that of co-functioning: it is a symbiosis, a ‘sympathy.’ It is never filiations which are important, but alliances, alloys; these are not suc1 This project has received funding from the Research Council of Lithuania (LMTLT), agreement No S-MIP-17-32. 297

Audronė Žukauskaitė cessions, lines of descent, but contagions, epidemics, the wind” (Deleuze and Parnet 2007, 52). In this sense we can argue that even if the notion of assemblage deconstructs organismic totalities, it still owes a lot to organism, taking biological symbiosis or development as its theoretical model. Organismic theories help account for another feature defining the assemblage—that of emergent properties. These are the properties of a whole that emerged from the interaction between its parts. Emergent properties are the creators of novelty and qualitative change—they are a key characteristic of all living systems. These emergent properties create structures—from living organisms to human communities—which may be called emergent structures (Capra and Luisi 2014, 319–20). DeLanda also analyses emergence in Assemblage Theory (2016), in which he draws a distinction between properties and capacities: assemblages possess certain properties, which are actual, existing here and now. At the same time, they also have “dispositions, tendencies and capacities that are virtual (real but not actual) when not being currently manifested or exercised” (DeLanda 2016, 108). In other words, every actual assemblage may change or expand and in this sense reach an extensive boundary—the boundary of a neighbourhood or an ecosystem, or a boundary of our own bodies, our skin, for example. But at a certain point this extensive boundary may become an intensive boundary, a critical point at which quantitative changes become qualitative. DeLanda observes that Deleuze was the only modern philosopher who grasped this distinction and established a genetic relation between the quantitative and qualitative and conceptualised a qualitative change. In this sense every assemblage is a collection of actual properties and virtual capacities or tendencies. Virtual capacities or tendencies form a virtual “diagram,” which is also described as the “space of possibilities.” A good example of such a “diagram” is a pluripotent cell that can develop into two hundred different cell types. “As the embryological process that transforms a fertilised egg into a multicellular organism proceeds, a single cell progressively differentiates into bone and muscle, nerve and blood, and over two hundred more different cell types” (DeLanda 2016, 125). At the end of progressive differentiation, every cell is actual and “locked” in a specific state; but in its virtual state, a pluripotent cell is a possibility space with two hundred potential cell types. Some of these possibilities are actualised, and others are not. Following Deleuze, DeLanda argues that biological transformations, such as embryology, can define the emergent properties of any assemblage. A good example is the tetrapod limb: “We can think of this component of an animal assemblage as an undifferentiated virtual limb that can be actualised as a bird’s wing, as the single-digit limb of a horse, or as the human hand with its opposable thumb” (ibid., 151). Thus, the tetrapod limb virtually contains different possibilities, while the genetic coding selects only one possibility at once—it can be a whale, a bird, a reptile, or a human. In this sense both the Deleuzian theory of progressive differentiation and DeLanda’s theory of emergent properties follow the model of biological transformation.

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Planetary Assemblages In this chapter I want to follow organic features present in different kinds of assemblages. First, I will discuss organic assemblages, such as the body without organs or symbiosis, which play an important part in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1987) and also connect their philosophy with recent developments in biology. Second, I will discuss inorganic or technological assemblages, which include both organic components and tools or machines. The notion of organology, originally derived from George Canguilhem’s “Machine and Organism” (2008) and later elaborated by Gilbert Simondon, Bernard Stiegler, and Yuk Hui, reveals the genetic relationship between the biological organ and the technological organon. These relationships encompass interactions between humans and tools (or technologies) but they also can be extended to a planetary scale. Thus, in the last section I will examine planetary assemblages, such as cosmotechnics (Hui) and the Gaia theory (Lovelock and Margulis), which reveal the close interaction between biological, technological, and geographical systems. These planetary assemblages engender specific capacities, such as recursivity and self-regulation, which make them closer to living organisms than machines.

Organic assemblages: the body without organs and symbiosis In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari discuss two types of organic assemblages—the body without organs and symbiosis. The notion of the body without organs involves a major reconceptualisation of the organism in terms of an assemblage. As Bennett and Posteraro (2019, 12) point out, “the organism might be understood as an assemblage in just this sense: it consists of a coordination among various parts sourced from elsewhere, acquired both vertically, by heredity, and horizontally, through its integration in an environmental haecceity; and it is structured on the basis of an abstract diagram that outlines possible parts and the functions that would enlist them.” Thus Deleuze and Guattari’s reconceptualisation of the notion of the organism in terms of an assemblage opens many productive ways to discuss their philosophy in the context of recent developments in biology, such as the theories of developmental plasticity or symbiosis. For Deleuze and Guattari the body without organs refers to “the unformed, unorganized, nonstratified, or destratified body and all its flows: subatomic and submolecular particles, pure intensities, prevital and prephysical free singularities” (1987, 43). Deleuze and Guattari differentiate between two planes or two principles: the plane of organisation, which is the genetic plane of evolutionary developments with their organisations, and the plane of consistency, or the body without organs, which describes the interrelations between unformed elements and particles of all kinds (ibid., 265–66). It is the plane of consistency on which the principle of genetic determinism and of linear causality is replaced by the principle of assemblage: “There are only haecceities, affects, subjectless individuations that constitute collective assemblages. Nothing develops, but things arrive late or early, and form this or that assemblage depending on their compos-

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Audronė Žukauskaitė itions of speed” (ibid., 266). On this plane the distinction between the natural and the artificial vanishes and assemblage-like connections replace linear causality. In this respect, the body without organs is a virtual tendency, which haunts every actual organism. As Ansell Pearson (1999, 154) points out, we can think a body without organs not as an opposition to the rigid organization of organs, but as a tendency or a phase that the organism might take: “there is a body without organs of the organism that belongs to its stratum. . . . Creative processes inform both the body without organs and processes of stratification.” In other words, the organism might tend to become the body without organs and vice versa: the body without organs might be captured and become an organised organism. Thus stratification and destratification, or the plane of organisation and the plane of consistency, express two tendencies, which run through organisms and bodies. As Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 269–70) point out, “the plane of consistency or immanence . . . implies a destratification of all of Nature, by even the most artificial of means. . . . The plane of organization is constantly working away at the plane of consistency, always trying to plug the lines of flight, stop or interrupt the movements of deterritorialization. . . . Conversely, the plane of consistency is constantly extracting itself from the plane of organization. . . . breaking down functions by means of assemblages or microassemblages.” Thus the body without organs is a tendency that expresses the very vitality of life, whereas the organism expresses a still life, devoid of change and creativity. In this respect Deleuze and Guattari oppose the Darwinian model of evolution, which is based on filiation and descent, and introduce their novel concept of creative involution, which includes heterogeneous assemblages and symbiotic connections. “It is thus a plane of proliferation, peopling, contagion; but this proliferation of material has nothing to do with an evolution, the development of a form or the filiation of forms. Still less is it a regression leading back to the principle. It is on the contrary an involution, in which form is constantly being dissolved, freeing times and speeds” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 267). However, even if involution strives towards the dissolution of forms, it is important to prevent involution from turning into a regression to the undifferentiated primordial soup. Some forms and functions are still necessary to form an assemblage or to make an alliance. In other words, involution means that organic forms are created not according to the lines of filiation, but according to assemblage-like relationships between heterogeneous entities. These insights resonate with certain discoveries in biology, such as the theory of symbiosis. Lynn Margulis, the founder of symbiosis theory, argued that biological innovation cannot be accounted for in terms of Darwinian evolution and must have another origin—it is the symbiotic interaction between heterogeneous organic forms. For example, cellular mitochondria originated from different bacteria that symbiotically merged about two billion years ago. The new alliances and cooperation between different living forms create functional novelty, which isolated individuals would never have had. As Barry Allen (2019, 27) points out, “microbial symbionts carry out many chemical reactions otherwise impossible for their hosts to perform. Collectively they photosynthesise,

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Planetary Assemblages fix nitrogen, metabolise sulphur, synthesise amino acids, provide vitamins and growth factors, and ward off pathogens. . . . Virtually all mammalian and insect herbivores would starve without cellulose-digesting bacterial symbionts.” A good example of such symbiotic cooperation is the termite Mastotermes darwiniensis that eats wood but does not have a genome that would allow it to digest it. Actually, the wood is eaten by a symbiotic protist, Mixotricha paradoxica, that lives inside the termite’s gut. Mixotricha paradoxica is a composite organism that consists of a protist and four different types of bacteria, all of which have different genomes (Margulis and Sagan 2001, 38). This example clearly proves that symbiosis enhances new metabolic capacities in the host organism and provides new possibilities for all partners of the assemblage. Symbiosis is an important reference in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, where it is opposed to forms of descent and filiation: living systems connect not by filiation, but by co-functioning or assemblage-like connections. “We oppose epidemic to filiation, contagion to heredity, peopling by contagion to sexual reproduction, sexual production. Bands, human or animal, proliferate by contagion, epidemics, battlefields, and catastrophes. . . . Unnatural participations or nuptials are the true Nature spanning the kingdoms of nature” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 241). If filiation connects more or less homogeneous beings, then symbiosis or contagion occurs between beings that are entirely heterogeneous: “a human being, an animal, and a bacterium, a virus, a molecule, a microorganism” (242). Each becoming implies a multiplicity, and multiplicity, in its turn, implies a symbiosis: “Each multiplicity is symbiotic; its becoming ties together animals, plants, microorganisms, mad particles, a whole galaxy” (250). However, only those multiplicities that are profitable, increasing the partner’s potential, are considered to be symbiotic; others, as with contagion, diminish the host’s potential and might be lethally dangerous. Writing in the days of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is obvious that certain heterogeneous assemblages, such as those that appear in epidemics, might diminish our potential to live. Thus, the theory of symbiosis, or “unnatural participation,” questions the dogma of bounded individuals and also the presumption that each individual is determined by its genetic code. In some cases, a biological individual, such as Mixotricha paradoxica, is composed of five different organisms with different genomes; in other cases, the same element, such as a virus, can transversally cross species boundaries and connect to different organisms. In both cases a biological entity is understood as a multiplicity formed of heterogeneous elements, which are not subsumed by a higher supplementary dimension (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 267). These insights are supported not only by Margulis’s theory of symbiosis, but also by its recent development in the works of Scott F. Gilbert. Gilbert introduces the concept of the holobiont, which means the organism plus its persistent symbiotic microbial communities. “This concept disrupts the tenets of individualism that have structured dominant lines of thought not only within biology but also in fields as diverse as economics, politics, and philosophy. The holobiont is powerful, in part, because it is not limited to nonhuman organisms. It also changes what it means to be a person”

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Audronė Žukauskaitė (Gilbert 2017, 75). We can conclude that the notion of the holobiont with its symbionts questions the dogma of the biological individual and also forces us to rethink what it means to be an autonomous human individual.

Organic-inorganic assemblages: organology Deleuze and Guattari discuss not only organic assemblages (for example wasporchid) but also machinic assemblages made of organic and inorganic parts (such as horse-rider-stirrup). We can ask whether these assemblages that include tools or technologies are qualitatively different from symbiotic assemblages. For example, Allen (2019, 33) argues that machinic assemblage is different from symbiosis: “the artifacts do not have a vitality in which the organisms cooperate. Tools would not exist apart from our need, and we and those needs would not exist apart from tools. But that is a mutual condition of existence, not a symbiosis.” However, what is important here is not the difference between the organic and inorganic, natural and artificial, but the different possibilities these assemblages have to enhance the potential. “Tools remain as they are unless we change them. Symbionts struggle together, cooperatively, to become all that they can be. When I enrol a tool, I become more effective at what I already am. When I form a symbiotic relation with a second centre of life I enhance my potential, acquiring qualitatively new tendencies” (ibid., 34). However, I would argue that our relationships with tools are far from being so simple. The tool can effectively change what I am, or I have to change myself effectively in order to become a part of a machinic assemblage (or smart technology). The reconceptualisation of tools is at the centre of Bernard Stiegler’s Technics and Time (1998) project. Stiegler argues that both organic biological beings and inorganic technical objects are organised in a specific way; thus, there should be a certain analogy between biological and technological development. Following André Leroi-Gourhan (1993), Stiegler analyses technical objects in terms of technological lineage or technological phylum (the level of classification), which is close to zoological classifications. The comparison between technological and zoological facts, between technical objects and living beings, is crucial for Stiegler’s hypothesis. He argues that a technical object is an “organized inorganic matter that transforms itself in time as living matter transforms itself in its interaction with the milieu. In addition, it becomes the interface through which the human qua living matter enters into relation with the milieu” (Stiegler 1998, 49). In other words, a human (as a living being) interacts with a technical object and through this technical object it interacts with the milieu. In this sense the technical object is understood as an extension of a living being, or as an exteriorisation of a human body. Relying on the investigations of Leroi-Gourhan, Stiegler draws an analogy between an organ as a part of a living organism and organon qua technical instruments. Through technical extension, a human being can create an exteriorisation of its body, which, in a paradoxical way, is an act by which its interiority is constituted. In a quasi-Derridian manner, Stiegler argues that interiority and exteriority are related in a double bind, because the interiority (human) is created by the exteriority (tools as technical

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Planetary Assemblages objects). The common-sense opinion is that the human (who) creates technics (what), but Stiegler argues that it is technics (what) that creates the human (who). “The movement inherent in this process of exteriorization is paradoxical: Leroi-Gourhan in fact says that it is the tool, that is, tekhnē, that invents the human, not the human who invents the technical. Or again: the human invents himself in the technical by inventing the tool—by becoming exteriorized techno-logically” (Stiegler 1998, 141). In this sense, the origin of technics and the origin of the human coincide in a single moment: that of exteriorisation, which is at the same time the moment of interiorisation. Stiegler creates a theory of “general organology,” which can be considered as a new version of assemblage theory. “General organology” encompasses and arranges biological organs, technical objects (organon) and the organisation of society. The term organology was suggested by Canguilhem in his text “Machine and Organism” (2008), in which he argues that machines can be considered organs of the human species. For Stiegler the term general organology is derived less from Canguilhem’s philosophy of life and more from musicology (Hui 2019, 200). Stiegler (2010, 34) defines general organology as “a theory of the articulation of bodily organs (brain, hand, eyes, touch, tongue, genital organs, viscera, neuro-vegetative system, etc.), artificial organs (tools, instruments and technical supports of grammatization) and social organs (human groupings . . . , political institutions and societies, businesses and economic organizations, international organizations, and social systems in general . . .).” In this sense, organology is an assemblage theory which includes biological, psychosocial, and technical components. On a different occasion, Stiegler (2017, 130) points out that “general organology is a method of thinking, at one and the same time technical, social, and psychic becoming, where technical becoming must be thought via the concept of the technical system, as it adjusts and is adjusted to social systems, themselves constituted by psychic apparatuses.” In this sense organology deconstructs the common sense view that humans invent and use tools for their needs; it reveals that tools and technical systems invent us as humans and enhance our new psychic capacities. For Stiegler (1998, 17), technics is the necessary condition for life maintenance: “technics is the pursuit of life by means other than life.” A different relationship between the organic and the inorganic occurs in the case of cybernetic machines, such as the Turing machine. As Hui points out, such a machine is neither mere mechanism nor a living being. “Instead, it is an organo-mechanical being: a mechanical being implemented in an organic form” (Hui 2019, 145). In this sense cybernetics expresses the intimate relationship between an organic being and technology. As Norbert Wiener ([1954] 1988, 26) points out, “it is my thesis that the physical functioning of the living individual and the operation of some of the newer communication machines are precisely parallel in their analogous attempts to control entropy through feedback” (also quoted in Hui 2019, 124). This analogy allows Wiener to define both the organism and the machine with the help of the concept of feedback, meaning the circularity between a (living or mechanical) being and its environment. However, cybernetics (or mechano-organicism) is criticised by many authors,

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Audronė Žukauskaitė including Simondon, for reducing the functioning of both living beings and machines. For this reason, Hui suggests moving to a new organology—a philosophy of life—which avoids taking the analogy between machine and organism in terms of equivalence and suggests finding a strategy for coexistence (Hui 2019, 146–47). Hui suggests that the organic (including human) can be maintained only through the organisation of the inorganic, through the invention of tools and machines. Stiegler’s organology examines organised inorganic beings in terms of technical objects, whereas Hui’s organology attempts to rethink technical objects in their organising capacity. “What we are witnessing today is a shift from the organized inorganic to the organizing inorganic, meaning that machines are no longer simply tools or instruments but rather gigantic organisms in which we live” (Hui 2019, 28). In this sense Hui incorporates Stiegler’s project into his own organology, but extends it further to smart technologies— smart homes, smart cities, and the Anthropocene. Hui argues that technical objects are becoming organic in the sense that they incorporate organic properties, such as recursivity and contingency. Thus, organology is a theory that explains technology through the model of the organism and inscribes technology into the continuum of living beings. Hui makes an interesting comparison between the reflective judgement of German idealist philosophy (from Kant to Fichte and Hegel), where the mind comes back to itself to determine itself, and the recursive movement (feedback) operating in cybernetic machines; thus, he implies that cybernetics is a continuation of metaphysics rather than its end, as suggested by Heidegger. As Hui (2019, 4) asserts, the concept of feedback in cybernetics does not refer to a mere mechanical repetition: “it is characterized by the looping movement of returning to itself in order to determine itself, while every movement is open to contingency, which in turn determines its singularity.” In other words, just as the reflective judgement constantly comes back to itself to determine itself, feedback in cybernetics refers to a self-regulatory process, during which a machine adapts itself to a spontaneous finality. In this sense, the concept of recursivity (and feedback) questions linear causality and introduces a new temporal structure, “one that was no longer based on a linear form but was rather more like that of a spiral” (Hui 2019, 238). This means that recursivity is closely related to contingency: in the mechanical mode of operation, based on linear causality, a contingent event may lead to a collapse, whereas in a recursive mode of operation contingency is integrated in such a way that it enriches the system and allows it to progress and develop. In this sense we can argue that cybernetic machines are becoming-organic by integrating the recursivity of living beings into the functioning of learning machines.

Planetary assemblages: cosmotechnics and the Gaia theory These insights lead us to the conclusion that the distinction between organic and inorganic assemblages is far from clear; it even disappears in the case of organology, where organic beings, such as human organs, are extended by tools

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Planetary Assemblages and machines, or are integrated into the environment of learning machines. In both cases, machines function either as extensions of a living organism or as an autonomous being, exercising the capacities characteristic of living beings, such as recursivity and self-maintenance. In this sense, the technical object can be reconceptualised as an autonomous being, having its own ontological condition and not being dependent on human use. Gilbert Simondon (2017) argued that the technical object is ontologically autonomous and has its own “mode of existence,” whereas Stiegler compromised this insight by insisting that technics and humans are coexistent. Hui takes these insights further by suggesting that nature and technics define each other not only in certain specific phases of technical development, but also as an a priori condition of each other: “I suggest, firstly, to consider the technical a priori in the concept of nature, which allows us to abandon a pure and innocent image of nature and gives us a ‘second nature’; and, secondly, the cosmic a priori in technological development, meaning that technics are always already cosmotechnics from the beginning” (Hui 2017, 11). Hui takes Simondon’s example of the Guimbal turbine: the turbine produces so much heat that it would destroy itself unless it is cooled; therefore, it needs a natural element, namely a river, to be integrated. The current of the river forces the turbine to move and, at the same time, it cools it down and prevents it from overheating. In this sense, the technical and the geographical milieus are connected by recurrent causality: the stronger the current, the more heat the turbine produces, and because the water is flowing faster, the cooling process is more efficient (Hui 2019, 191). We can therefore argue that the technical object adapts to the environment and creates an associated milieu. The interaction between the cosmic (geographical) order, moral order, and technicity Hui terms cosmotechnics (Hui 2016; 2017, 4). Cosmotechnics not only reconceptualises the coexistence between the geographical milieu and the technical milieu, but also decentralises the role of human activity. For this reason, cosmotechnics is in the same theoretical territory as the Gaia theory, which is another way to approach planetary assemblage. The Gaia hypothesis was formulated by the chemist James Lovelock in the 1970s and was later significantly remodelled through Lovelock’s collaboration with biologist Lynn Margulis. Lovelock’s hypothesis states that the Earth is able to regulate the temperature and other planetary conditions just as living organisms are able to regulate their own body temperature. He asserted that chemical, physical, and biological processes taking place on the Earth seek a homeostasis, or optimal conditions for life. All biological, chemical, and physical processes are kept at an optimal level through feedback loops operated automatically by the biota. To prove the hypothesis that the Earth is able to regulate its temperature, Lovelock and his former student Andrew Watson developed a computer model called Daisyworld—a computer model of a planet, which is warmed by the Sun with increasing heat. Thus, Daisyworld reduced the environment to a single property—temperature—and the biota to one species, namely daisies. The crucial question Lovelock asked himself was, will the evolution of the Daisyworld ecosystem lead to the self-regulation of climate? (Harding 2014,

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Audronė Žukauskaitė 166). The purpose of this model was to demonstrate that feedback loops interlinking non-living and living systems (temperature and plants) can regulate climate and achieve the most favourable conditions. At the same time, Margulis, a microbiologist, was working on similar questions and investigating the smallest microorganisms. Margulis argued that the Earth’s atmosphere is transformed by biological organisms and that bacteria play a crucial role here. “During the first billion years of evolution, bacteria— the most basic forms of life—covered the planet with an intricate web of metabolic processes and began to regulate the temperature and chemical composition of the atmosphere so that it became conductive to the evolution of higher forms of life” (Capra and Luisi 2014, 351). All life is dependent on the metabolism of microbes that modulate the biosphere in which we live. Thus, Margulis helped Lovelock revise his theory and admit that Gaia is not a single organism but a symbiogenesis of a variety of organisms. “Gaia itself is not an organism directly selected among many. It is an emergent property of interaction among organisms, the spherical planet on which they reside, and an energy source, the sun” (Margulis 1998, 119). Thus, Gaia can be seen as a self-regulating system, which connects the metabolic processes of microorganisms and atmospheric processes of the Earth in feedback loops. In this respect there is no clean separation between the organic and the inorganic, between an organism and its environment, because an organism is constantly creating and changing its environment. However, the Gaia hypothesis was met with strong criticism. Many critics have claimed that Gaia theory was unscientific because it was teleological. As Capra and Luisi (2014, 165) point out, “the scientific establishment attacked the theory as teleological, because they could not imagine how life on Earth could create and regulate the conditions for its own existence without being conscious and purposeful.” Lovelock responded to this critique by creating his mathematical model of Daisyworld, whereas Margulis replied to it by pointing out that life can simply repeat certain patterns as in computer algorithms. “Life produces fascinating ‘designs’ in a similar way by repeating the chemical cycles of its cellular growth and reproduction. Order is generated by nonconscious repetitious activities. Gaia, as the interweaving network of all life, is alive, aware, and conscious to various degrees in all cells, bodies, and societies” (Margulis 1998, 126). In this sense Gaia can be seen as an assemblage where heterogeneous components connect and produce qualitative changes through feedback loops. To paraphrase Stiegler’s words, we can say that, in order to continue, life needs technology that is the pursuit of life by means other than life. To conclude, we can ask what makes an assemblage and what specific characteristics it has. After examining these different examples, we can confirm that assemblages are composed of heterogeneous parts, organic and inorganic, human and non-human, organised and organising, and that these parts exist autonomously and retain relations of exteriority. Another important point is that these parts produce emergent properties, new tendencies and capacities, which wouldn’t have been produced outside this assemblage. In this sense, assemblages function as a possibility space, a space producing qualitative chan-

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Planetary Assemblages ges. Assemblages contrast with totalities (defined by relations of interiority) and aggregates (defined by relations of exteriority that cannot produce new properties). Assemblages are immanent and self-maintaining, emergent and recursive. Thus, assemblages function like living systems. This statement could be turned upside down by asking: are all living systems assemblage-like? Can’t we say that an assemblage-like property is the main characteristic of any living being? References Allen, Barry. 2019. “Unnatural Nuptials.” In Deleuze and Evolutionary Theory, edited by Michael James Bennett and Tano S. Posteraro, 23–41. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Ansell Pearson, Keith. 1999. Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Bennett, Michael James, and Tano S. Posteraro. 2019. “Introduction: Historical Formations and Organic Forms.” In Deleuze and Evolutionary Theory, edited by Michael James Bennett and Tano S. Posteraro, 1–22. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Canguilhem, Georges. 2008. “Machine and Organism.” In Knowledge of Life, edited by Paola Marrati and Todd Meyers, translated by Stefanos Geroulanos and Daniela Ginsburg, 75–97. New York: Fordham University Press. First published 1965 as La connaissance de la vie (Paris: Vrin). Capra, Fritjof, and Pier Luigi Luisi. 2014. The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DeLanda Manuel. 2006. A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. London: Bloomsbury. ———. 2016. Assemblage Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Minuit). Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. 2007. Dialogues II. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Rev. ed. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1977 as Dialogues (Paris:

Flammarion). Gilbert, Scott F. 2017. “Holobiont by Birth: Multilineage Individuals as the Concretion of Cooperative Processes.” In Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, edited by Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt, 73–89. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Harding, Stephan. 2014. “Daisyworld.” In The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision, by Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi with guest essays, 166–68. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hui, Yuk. 2016. The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics. Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic Media. ———. 2017. “On Cosmotechnics: For a Renewed Relation between Technology and Nature in the Anthropocene.” Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology 21 (2–3): 1–23. ———. 2019. Recursivity and Contingency. London: Rowman and Littlefield International. Leroi-Gourhan, André. 1993. Gesture and Speech. Translated by Anna Bostock Berger. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. First published 1964 as La geste de la parole (Paris: Albin Michel). Margulis, Lynn. 1998. Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution. Amherst, MA: Basic Books. Margulis, Lynn, and Dorion Sagan. 2001. “The Beast with Five Genomes.” Natural History: 110 (5): 38–41. Simondon, Gilbert. 2017. On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. Translated by Cécile Malaspina and John Rogove. Minneapolis, MN: Univocal. First published 1958 as Du mode d’existence des

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Audronė Žukauskaitė objets techniques (Paris: Aubier Montaigne). 2009 as Pour une nouvelle critique de Stiegler, Bernard. 1998. Technics and Time, l’économie politique (Paris: Galilée). 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Translated by ———. 2017. “General Ecology, Economy, Richard Beardsworth and George Collins. and Organology.” Translated by Daniel Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Ross. In General Ecology: The New Ecological First published 1994 as La technique et Paradigm, edited by Erich Hörl with James le temps, 1: La faute d’Epiméthée (Paris: Burton, 129–50. London: Bloomsbury Galilée). Academic. ———. 2010. For a New Critique of Political Wiener, Norbert. (1954) 1988. The Human Use Economy. Translated by Daniel Ross. of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society. Cambridge: Polity Press. First published New York: De Capo.

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Ethology of Images as Machinic Assemblages Anne Sauvagnargues University Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense, France

On the concept of rhizome Let us jump right into the middle. Deleuze and Guattari are important for all of us—for both the writers and the readers of this book—they allow us to construct new relationships between art, politics, and so forth for the twenty-first century. However, I believe there is a very important misunderstanding in the reception of Deleuze because people frequently reterritorialise Deleuze into a kind of ontology, as if we were easily capable of jumping into “the virtual”—as if the virtual were a new Platonic term capable of addressing art using Deleuze’s terminology but retaining the exact frame of eighteenth-century continental art theory. To provide an example of what I mean, I will start from Rhizome, the text that Deleuze and Guattari wrote together in 1976 and that became the first chapter of A Thousand Plateaus in 1980 (see Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 1–25). Rhizome is not only a theory of co-writing, it is also a theory of reading. It is a theory of reading-writing, and in addition a theory of systematic understanding of this two-way method to bring up ideas and reality together. Let us outline the six principles of the rhizome as Deleuze and Guattari explain them in A Thousand Plateaus. Deleuze and Guattari begin their discussion of the six principles of the rhizome by saying that the first and second principles go together: they are the principles of “connection and heterogeneity.” Now we have to jump as we don’t have six principles anymore, we only have five. The third principle is that of “multiplicity.” The fourth principle is that of rupture asignifiante, the “asignifying rupture,” or asignifying cut. This is very important: asignifying. The fifth and six principles also go together: the principle of “cartography” versus “decalcomania.” While this is a theory of writing and reading, it is also a theory of how we understand philosophy. The first principle is double, and it means that to be capable of connecting, one needs heterogeneity. However, this contradicts what we used to think before Guattari and before Deleuze because, “normally,” every type of connection is about producing a unity. Connection was never about heterogeneity, it was about synthesis, unity, unification. Thus, it is no wonder that after the first and second principles, a third principle is given, that of multiplicity.

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Anne Sauvagnargues What does multiplicity really mean? As far as we are concerned in relation to the six principles, it means that to understand multiplicity as something capable of connecting and transforming, to unify this concept of multiplicity, you need to take multiplicity as an “asignifying cut.” This means that multiplicity has no unity before one forms it or before one creates it. Therefore, the fifth and sixth principles are extremely dualistic, and people now say, “We are cartographers. We can relate to the minor, we can do immanence and transcendentality.” Nevertheless, to do so is to fall into the Platonic situation of having built up a new ontological model—which Deleuze and Guattari would have hated—that sparks the capacity of art to reach something that could be called “the truth.” But if we take Guattari and Deleuze seriously, we need to abandon this vocabulary of truth, which does not mean we do not seek consistency. Without holding to this rash opposition, we can have a formal consistency, as in contemporary mathematics and contemporary logics, or a scientific consistency that has accuracy. Briefly, Deleuze and Guattari’s presentation of the rhizome is molar. I want to utilise here the very important distinction between molar and molecular. This distinction is never well understood because it relates to the epistemology of chemistry. Chemistry is a most interesting science because not only is it language designated, it operates on a quantic level. Chemistry is really the missing link between the nineteenth-century physics of molar bodies and of thermodynamics and the quantum physics that is our reality nowadays. It means that the molar level of individuated bodies—your body, this or that piece of furniture, a book—and so on, are only the statistical boundaries that form momentary entities. What I want to stress in this first introduction (the second introduction follows below) is that even though we all read Deleuze and Guattari, and we are all interested in their work, we tend to rephrase it in a totally molar way as if the six principles of the rhizome were not a theory against dualism. In fact, it is also a theory that allows us to understand how we can deal with oppositions without seeking a philosophy (or art theory) that tells “the truth.” Instead, we can say, “No, we don’t need an ontological position where we think that art should reach the absolute.”

On the concept of image And here I come to the second introduction, which is about what I call the ethology of images. By this I refer to Deleuze’s work, especially the concepts developed in the books on cinema (see Deleuze 1986, 1989) that allow us completely to transform the relationship between art and theory. My key point here is that, in previous explications of what a rhizome can be (that is, the six principles), you could end up hating trees and loving rhizomes. You could end up saying, “We have the rhizomes, we do not need trees anymore”; however, it is clear that if you do say this, you transform the rhizomatic molecular diagram of a new type of systematicity into the old frame, where you seek to find a path to reach an absolute level. This is precisely why the concept of image in Deleuze’s theory of the cinema should be examined in an ethological-

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Ethology of Images as Machinic Assemblages systematic way. What do I mean by ethological and systematic? Ethological means . . . well, if you want to make a new proposition or to say something about Deleuze, you have to seek and you have to read his books. Let us interrogate the question: —Do you find the term ontology in Deleuze after 1968? Never. —Is there a reason? Probably not, because maybe he had something else in mind. —What term, then, does he use instead? He used the term ethology and ethology is quite a different thing from ontology.

Ethology is important for my topic because of the term image, which Deleuze uses first in his book on Nietzsche (originally published 1962, see Deleuze 1983), then in his book about Kant (originally published 1963, see Deleuze 1984), and then in his book on Proust (originally published 1964, see Deleuze [1972] 2000). Image is a very important topic in these books, where it means only the old image, that is, it means image as being capable only of representing one reality. In Deleuze’s term image of thought, “image,” in this sense, is related to the old definition, or better, to the relation between the copy and the model. When Deleuze uses the expression image of thought—in 1962, 1963, 1964, up until Difference and Repetition in 1968 (see Deleuze 1994), it is always negative. He urges us to find a “better” image of thought. Then after Difference and Repetition the term image disappeared; however, it reappeared in A Thousand Plateaus, in which we find the expression “thought without image”—a thought “without” image, as if “image” would be something not so good for thought. What Is Philosophy? (originally published 1991, see Deleuze and Guattari 1994) again features the topic of the image of thought, but in a completely different sense. In What Is Philosophy?, image of thought is now the presupposition of the way in which thought is individuated. Thus, in the earlier texts (on Nietzsche, Kant, Proust, and Difference and Repetition), image is considered less as a representation than as something that is an indication or imitation of something. It is something that supposedly draws the link between two different things. But after Cinema 1 (originally published 1983, see Deleuze 1986), image takes on a different set of problematics, which I (not Deleuze) call individuation. Therefore, I frequently say that in Deleuze’s theory, image no longer appears as an organisation, but as an individuation. If I say that image is individuation, everything is image. This is a problem also for art theory, because if we say, for example, “you are an image,” “I am an image,” “this is an image,” “this is a technological image,” “this is part of the image,” we have nothing but images.

The Vertov case I believe there is a part of Deleuze’s cinema books that we have often read but have insufficiently understood. Here, I would like to propose a new type of metaphysics: a metaphysics that is ethological and related to an ethology of images. First, let us examine what I call the Vertov case. In the fourth chapter of

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Anne Sauvagnargues Deleuze’s Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, we suddenly get the impression that cinema gives us a new understanding of subjectivity. What does it mean really to say, “Yes, cinema is the new metaphysics”? “Who” is “image” in the cinema books? What is the meaning of the image in the cinema books? How should we understand it? Do we believe that the subject image in the cinema books is the camera itself ? Is it the camera? Yes, of course the camera plays a role because, otherwise, we wouldn’t have had the age of cinema. But is the subject image the camera? Is it the camera, the cinema, or “the artist”? It is most embarrassing for us, as people of the twenty-first century—especially for women who are convinced of feminist epistemology—to realise that even Deleuze, our hero, remains in the frame of modernist art theory, and continues to address the question of art behind the question of “the great figures” of artists. At certain points one may get the impression that Deleuze’s writings are still rooted in conventional art history, that is, the art history of masterpieces, meaning that in order to write a history of cinema, one has to deal with Dziga Vertov, Orson Welles, and all the big cinema directors, and that all the rest of us are not considered in the same frame. We are not artists because we have not been “artified.” This history of “great artists” is an epistemology that is related to the figure and individuality of the genius, something that Deleuze and Guattari demolished in their work on history, which is a part of their work that is very important but is not well known. In the cinema books, however, the point of subjectivity is not “the artist” Vertov, nor the camera, nor the camera Vertov uses. Vertov films another man with another camera on a train. The subject is the fact, but there is no subjectivity that is not related to the definition of the machine that Deleuze and Guattari have given in Anti-Oedipus, before the cinema books, and where they say—this is the definition of the machine—that the machine is a cut of the flow (une coupure de flux) (Deleuze and Guattari [1977] 1983, 36). But this is exactly the definition of the cinematic image: the machine as a cut of the flux. The cut is the frame. The frame is a framing (cadrage), which opens up the question of a subjective perspective, but of a subjective perspective that is no longer related to the level of the individuated body of the human on the level of the macro-molar perception of individuated bodies. We also have to change the definition of the body, and—much more importantly— we have to start addressing epistemological questions such as, what is the assemblage? The assemblage is a logical frame that permits us to begin to move away from metaphysical critique. If one views this on the molar level, then one will agree with Rancière’s interpretation of Deleuze’s cinema books, which is not only completely wrong, but also a bit mean. Rancière says—and this is the reason he states there is no aesthetics in Deleuze’s work—that between the “movement-image” (Cinema 1) and the “time-image” (Cinema 2), there is a historical shift marked by World War II: “movement-image” would refer to the cinema before the Second World War, while “time-image” would refer to cinema after the war (Rancière 2004). Second, Rancière believes that in using the example of Dziga Vertov, Deleuze seeks to reach a level of perception that would be the ground level, the zero

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Ethology of Images as Machinic Assemblages level, of perception, which would be the level of “matter” (Rancière 2014, 34–35; 2017, 206). Is this really possible? In that view, World War II would mark a historical shift—a political disaster, a war—after which Deleuze would be capable of taking an example of a global image (incidentally, as Vertov worked in the first half of the twentieth century, Rancière’s argument doesn’t work at all) to express that Italian postwar neo-realist cinema would be the disintegration of subjectivities. And this is the point I want to make. Rancière takes the molar level and thinks that the time-image is the disintegration of the molar into a molecular disappearance, such as the crystalimage or the time-image; thus, this would be the jump into the absolute, as if the time-image were the way for cinema to escape itself, revealing it’s “true” nature. This is not “completely” wrong, as there is a reason for thinking it. Rancière is taking Deleuze into the modernist frame of modern art. In fact, Deleuze does have a slight tendency to remain in this frame.

The painting-image Let us examine another example. Just before the cinema books, Deleuze wrote the book on Francis Bacon (originally published 1981, see Deleuze 2003). This work is important for an ethological epistemology of images because there are no images at all in this book. What one has is a critique of illustration. In the Bacon book, image is somewhat on the side of representation: Deleuze says that Bacon as a painter is capable of painting free from representation, from illustrative narratives and literature. This is not untrue, but what does it in fact mean? It means that, in the Bacon book, Deleuze remains within the art theoretical frames of the 1920s and 50s, and that he says there was a war then, a struggle—the struggle for abstraction. This was important in the twentieth century, but I believe that now—in the twenty-first century—we are passed this point. Therefore, I would like to introduce the new concept of “painting-image” into the Bacon book. What will this concept do? It will show that—just as in the cinema books, in which Deleuze says that the camera is capable of transforming human perception—any painting or any music is capable of transforming human perception. If painting and music are indeed equally capable, we are therefore no longer part of the modernist story, we have moved on. The twenty-first century is not embroiled in the battle between representation and abstraction; instead, it is ensconced in the battle for digital modes of existence, modes that have absolutely nothing to do with the modernist story. It’s very different, even if it is historically related. In the modernist story, what you have is the idea that art, painting, and literature should struggle against molar representation. This is quite true, but what is important is that it is the reason why Rancière suspected Deleuze of being a theologian and of bringing us back to the acme of God, as a Christian image of the void, of disintegrated individuation (Rancière 2004; on Vertov, see Rancière 2017, 206). Here, Rancière fails to consider three matters. The first is on the level of semiotics: Rancière remains totally in what I call the analogical model of art,

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Anne Sauvagnargues which Deleuze shut down, I would say, in his first book on Spinoza (originally published 1968; see Deleuze 1990). Second, Rancière does not understand the relationship between individuation and subjectivity (this is really the crux of the matter). And third, he is completely uncomprehending of the importance of the distinction between the molar and the molecular levels. Therefore, he believes that what Deleuze calls “molecular” would be our disappearance— would be the destruction of the bourgeois philosopher. But this is not the case. There are two ways to address the question of multiplicity. One can address it in a molar way, in which one is interested in the way that a particular individuation transforms itself on the molecular level. This is the way of disappearance, disintegration, dis-something. This would be, for example, as if in modernist music the dodecaphonic turn were nothing less than the destruction of harmony; however, this is total rubbish because the dodecaphonic composers had something else to say, which was much more important than destroying the molar harmonic system of Bach. There is another way to do art history, and to make art, and to do philosophy— through the molecular path. On the molecular path, things are completely different. On the molecular level, we are interested not in the destruction of molar form but in the construction of everything that is molar. We are not struggling with works. We can discuss pieces, and we can transform them, but it’s never about the pieces. It’s always about discourses on the pieces. Pieces that do not interest me are not pieces. It is very simple. Those pieces that interest me are art, and I do not need anyone to establish a distinction between high and low art.

Artmachines I now need to explain, or better to disentangle, what we have discussed in relation to Deleuze’s theoretical account. Deleuze’s theory itself has two levels. Let’s say that Blanchot’s “uncertainty” is because he himself is an integral part of the modernist tale. This relates to the relationship between writing and poetry. For Blanchot, to write is to be capable of restoring the capacity of language “to say”; therefore, he is totally on the modernist side. In The Book to Come, Blanchot (2003, 198–201) says that poetry is about the uneasy quest for the source. Thus, there is a source, and poetry is about that quest for its own source. This is typically related to the Western “artmachine.” I use artmachine here not really in the sense that I used in my previous book (Sauvagnargues 2016), which is now old. By artmachine I do not mean art in relation to the concept of machines; instead, I use artmachine in a specific sense that relates to the way in which Western art has been constituted—it is exactly the same as capitalism, it covers the same period, the same history. Art was capable of drawing a line, and to be read retrospectively, universalised for everybody else, but since the Renaissance it has been constructed into the European frame.

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Ethology of Images as Machinic Assemblages I now need to explain three different problems within European art that I believe we have seen since the Renaissance. The first is the distinction between techniques and art, which allows us to specify that art has nothing to do with the pure final production. This allows a distinction to be drawn between “this is not art” and “this is art.” Second, as a consequence of this, we have the distinction between high and low art. And this brings us to the third problem, the dimension of the individual artist, which is to say, the bourgeois artist. These three aspects are highly important, as only in the West have they been brought forward for such a long period, at least since the Renaissance. I do not mean to say that I’m against it. We have developed like that, but the end of this history (technics versus art; high versus low; the individual genius) is a text by Oscar Wilde in which he writes that “Nature also imitates Art” (Wilde [1891] 1921, 53). He means that when we see nature, we’re “framing nature” in the categories of art. Wilde says, “The only effects that [Nature] can show us are effects that we have already seen through poetry, or in paintings” (ibid.). This means that all perception is not individualised. It is collective, structured, and it can be collectively structured by an artist.

Perspection Bringing together all the previous points, I turn now to my term perspection, an assemblage between perspective and perception. Perspective because I believe that in the cinema books Deleuze suggests we need a new perception of sensibility, of aesthetic, of technics. I would say this is an aesthetique conception of aesthetic. It is also strongly related to the first question because when Wilde says that when we see nature, we frame it in the artist’s eye (remember too the masterpieces of Deleuze), we are framing it from an individualistic perspective. Now the question is, How do we address the way in which our perception is socially and historically formed? Consider that in Deleuze’s work this question has always been important. In his Proust book (see Deleuze [1972] 2000), Deleuze says that there are different worlds of science although there is a collective semiotics, but we do not know how this collective perception functions. Deleuze never addressed this question because he remained in a certain general frame. He does not address the question of how this perspective functions. But I believe we need to address this today, especially because of the first cinema book—as long as one takes Chapter 4 of Cinema 1: The Movement-Image seriously, and one takes seriously the fact that subjectivity means every time something is framed, every time you have a perception, you have a perception that is perception-and-action together. This is what Deleuze has called the first step of subjectivity, and he says that this first step of subjectivity is a “subtraction.” If perception is subtraction, meaning that it is a frame, I do not perceive everything. What I perceive is only what I am capable of perceiving on the level of my individuated, temporary, highly transforming body. The other question is whether, if we do take seriously the idea that this perspection is a new theory of connectivity, we will gain a new ethology of images.

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Conclusion: the sensory-motor scheme and the expressivity of the earth In conclusion, let me review certain results and why I think that these reflections lead to a new relationship between art and reality. If we take seriously the idea that subjectivity is a cut related to perception and motricity, that it is a sensory-motor cut, then this sensory-motor cut has an auto-affection, because its perception-action is related to it through its effect. This means that in the cinema books, Deleuze proposes an art that would no longer rely on the modernist story of the subject, of the individual artist who is capable of addressing the question of perception, reviewing our ways of perception. What the cinema books show us, is that we have to move from a semiology of art to a geology of art. Or, to explain it in a different way, in A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari write in the third plateau that we have to move to a geology of morals. I think we have to move toward a geology of art. If in the cinema books the camera has a role to play, this transforms the whole theory of art of the Western world, because it means—contrary to all discourses—that technique and art are not discernible. The camera is technical, is it not? It is because the camera has been taken as technical. It is because of this that photography and cinema were very difficult to integrate into Western artmachines because they were “reproduction.” They were like photocopies, only mechanical. Because of Deleuze and Guattari’s work, we can understand something quite different: that the camera provides a part of subjectivation that is also a point of individuation. This means that, once the cut is made, every art, not only cinema, can be retrospectively repurposed, thereby transforming all art history. It means that art has always been an untold genesis, or untold poetic, or autopoiesis, in Varela’s terms. Art has always been related to the biological capacity of perceptions, and to technological capacities of perception. Since the beginning of what we call art—let’s say from the Lascaux cave paintings—art has always formed a link between the human and the nonhuman. This leads me to my conclusion. If we understand the cut of cinema, and if we understand that the cut of cinema means that art is no longer the question of addressing the real dimension of reality, but of “connecting,” and therefore producing heterogeneity and heterogeneous experiences that are taken as multiplicities, then we are also making an asignifying cut—and by asignifying we have to understand that the cut cannot be taken as having the same dimensions as it had before. The cut has to be nothing at the edge of one’s categories. If we take the cut as being natural or normal, and not as a rupture, as a nonsignifying operation, the cut has been forsaken. We have framed our multiplicities before the cut. The cut needs to be asignifying because we need this asignifying moment to be capable of testing the question of whether sense is produced rather than regained, restored. If we want the chance to maintain art’s capacity to create sense, we need to move from the modernist story to a new artmachine, which would be a digital one. In this artmachine, images don’t only involve a symbiotic coevolution that

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Ethology of Images as Machinic Assemblages involves technical agencies as modes of existence (Simondon 2018), technical agencies as capacities of non-human perception and motricities. We know that new devices allow us to transform on levels unforeseen by earlier theories. We have to see these technical agents not only as servants that obey our orders but also as co-agents that we are implicated with in a symbiosis that is now completely non-human. This would be a new definition of art: it would concern humans gaining non-human perceptions in order to have a symbiosis that involves not only humans but also collectives of humans. I have not considered this on the collective level of societies, as Barbara Glowczewski does in her chapter in the present volume. Rather, here, I am discussing the collective level of transformed perception. If our perception can be transformed, we need a new historical theory of perceptibilities in art. Deleuze did not achieve this because he remained in Merleau-Ponty’s relationship between the visible and the invisible. We can glimpse it in Deleuze’s magnificent book on Foucault (see Deleuze 1988). In The Birth of the Clinic, Foucault writes of an archaeology of the medical gaze, as if the medical gaze would be capable of change (Foucault [1973] 1989). This means that there is a reciprocity, a social transformation of perception, that a social meaning not only is shared by everybody but also is social and differently created. It does not apply only to the gaze, to the eye, because in our digital era, we have to take whole sentences as one continuum of data. Art has always been about symbiosis, and in art what is important is that technical agencies are pro-social agencies. A long time ago I asked how a camera is built. The building of a camera mirrors the same problem as the formation of an eye. The geology of images, the ethology of images, goes in two directions: first, the integration of technical agency; second, understanding images as being the long story of the operation of perception and motricity on Earth. This leads to a natural history of images, where art, like Western art, is part of the story but not the whole story. Such a natural history of images is capable (beyond the distinction between biology and art history) of taking every type of expression on Earth as something that can help us understand what we do when we try to make art. References Blanchot, Maurice. 2003. The Book to Come. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. First published 1959 as Le livre à venir (Paris: Gallimard). Deleuze, Gilles. (1972) 2000. Proust and Signs. Translated by Richard Howard. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1964 as Proust et les signes (Paris: Presses universitaires de France). Translation first published 1972 (New York: G. Braziller). ———. 1983. Nietzsche and Philosophy.

Translated by Hugh Tomlinson. London: Athlone Press. First published 1962 as Nietzsche et la philosophie (Paris: Presses universitaires de France). ———. 1984. Kant’s Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. London: Athlone Press. First published 1963 as La philosophie critique de Kant (Presses universitaires de France). ———. 1986. Cinema 1: The Movement Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. London: Athlone

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Anne Sauvagnargues Press. First published 1983 as Cinéma 1: L’image-mouvement (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1988. Foucault. Translated and edited by Séan Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1986 as Foucault (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1989. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1985 as Cinéma 2: L’image-temps (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1990. Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. Translated by Martin Joughin. New York: Zone Books. First published 1968 as Spinoza et le problème de l’expression (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1994. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1968 as Différence et répétition (Paris: Presses universitaires de France). ———. 2003. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Translated by Daniel W. Smith. London: Continuum. First published 1981 as Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation (Paris: Éditions de la différence). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1976. Rhizome: Introduction. Paris: Minuit. Translated by Paul Foss and Paul Patton as “Rhizome: Introduction” (I and C 8 [1981]: 49–71). ———. (1977) 1983. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1972 as Capitalisme et schizophrénie: L’anti-Œdipe (Paris: Minuit). Translation first published 1977 (New York: Viking Press). ———. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as

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Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1994. What Is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1991 as Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Minuit). Foucault, Michel. (1973) 1989. The Birth of the Clinic. Translated by A. M. Sheridan. London: Routledge. First published 1963 as Naissance de la clinique (Paris: Presses universitaires de France). Translation first published 1973 (London: Tavistock). Rancière, Jacques. 2004. “Is There a Deleuzian Aesthetics?” Translated by Radmila Djordjevic. Qui Parle? 14 (2): 1–14. ———. 2014. The Intervals of Cinema. Translated by John Howe. London: Verso. First published 2011 as Les écarts du cinéma (Paris: La fabrique). ———. 2017. “The Indecisive Effect.” Interview with Patrice Blouin, Élie During, and Dork Zabunyan. In Dissenting Words: Interviews with Jacques Rancière, edited and translated by Emiliano Battista, 205–20. London: Bloomsbury Academic. First published 2005 as “L’affect indécis” (Critique 692–93). Sauvagnargues, Anne. 2016. Artmachines: Deleuze, Guattari, Simondon. Translated by Suzanne Verderber with Eugene W. Holland. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Simondon, Gilbert. 2017. On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. Translated by Cécile Malaspina and John Rogove. Minneapolis, MN: Univocal. First published 1958 as Du mode d’existence des objets techniques (Paris: Aubier Montaigne). Wilde, Oscar. (1891) 1921. “The Decay of Lying: An Observation.” In Intentions, 1–54. London: Methuen. First published 1891 (London: Osgood, McIlvaine).

The Transversality of Assemblages in Indigenous Australia and Alternative Environmental Struggles in France Barbara Glowczewski National Scientific Research Center (CNRS), Paris, France

“The creative process emerges with the entrance of a singularity that can come from an individual but also from a sub-group, or from something else that has nothing to do with the group but that comes from an aesthetic conjunction, an external intrusion, a cosmic assemblage that begins to speak, a voice from elsewhere,” Guattari said in 1985 during the weekly seminar he held in his flat in Paris (Glowczewski and Guattari 1987, 106).1 How to stimulate “cosmic assemblages” is more than ever an urgent question for academics, artists, and citizens, as I have shown in Indigenising Anthropology: “radical alterity is not about exotism and exclusion but about imagination in terms of how to weave different worlds in respect of their singularities always in becoming, how to recreate outsideness in our minds” (Glowczewski 2020a, 77). For Deleuze, assembling is “being in the middle, on the line of encounter between an internal world and the external world” (Deleuze and Parnet 1987, 52). Erin Manning comments: “radical empiricism experiments with assemblages such as the associated milieu, an environmental in-between that never preexists the force of its taking form” (2009, 98); she further notes that “Deleuze uses the word agencement to evoke the relational aspects of collective individuation. Agencement is translated as assemblage for lack of a better word. While assemblage does connote the co-constitutive aspects of agencement, it does not convey its force” (ibid., 237n71). Indeed, for Deleuze all assembled elements have an agency, becoming active agents through interaction, whether they are individuals, collectives of humans, or other than humans, such as machines but also affects, desires, and places. It is also a force of affirmation and transformation that is at stake in the collective assemblages of enunciation that Guattari advocated in the 1980s, when he supported the free radio movement in Italy and France, the micropolitical resistance of Brazilians against dictatorship, and the struggles for 1 Unless otherwise stated, all translations are my own.

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Barbara Glowczewski territorial recognition of Palestinians, Armenians, Basques, Native Americans, and Australian Aboriginal people, but also when he denounced French racism against children born in France from parents who came to work from French colonies in North and Sub-Saharan Africa. Guattari wrote in Les années d’hiver: Transversality, singularization, and new alliances; here are the three ingredients that I would like to see poured profusely into the pot of freedoms. Then we can see the famous “immaturity” of Europe and its well known “archaisms” change their color. I dream of the day the Basques, the clandestines of Ulster, the Greens of Germany, Scottish and Welsh miners, immigrants, Polish pseudo-Catholics, Southern Italians and the nameless packs of dogs who refuse to understand or know anything that is offered to them will start screaming together: “Yes, we are all archaic and you can put your modernity where you want!” So the passivity and demoralization will turn into a will to freedom and freedom into a material force that is able to change the course of a nasty history. (As translated in Guattari 2010, 127)

The power that minorities can enact to question the way anthropology framed them in colonial dualities and to rebel against forced homogenisation by the state was advocated by Guattari, who also recognised that “external antagonisms have certainly led nationalitarian movements (Basque, Corsican, Irish) to turn inward and neglect other molecular revolutions, such as women’s liberation, environmental ecology, etc.” (Guattari 1989, 146). “Nationalitarian” was differentiated from “nationalist” by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus: And the birth of nations implies many artifices: Not only are they constituted in an active struggle against the imperial or evolved systems, the feudal systems, and the autonomous cities, but they crush their own “minorities,” in other words, minoritarian phenomena that could be termed “nationalitarian,” which work from within and if need be turn to the old codes to find a greater degree of freedom. The constituents of the nation are a land and a people: the “natal,” which is not necessarily innate, and the “popular,” which is not necessarily pregiven. The problem of the nation is aggravated in the two extreme cases of a land without a people and a people without a land. How can a people and a land be made, in other words, a nation—a refrain? (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 456)

Over the past decades, in most nationalitarian movements, feminist as well as ecological issues have become driving forces, especially exemplified by the Kurds in Rojava, the Zapatistas in Mexico, and many Indigenous women activists across the globe (Allard et al. 2019). During forty years of anthropological work with Indigenous Australians and the struggles of Indigenous peoples in French Guiana and French territories in the Pacific, I insisted on the transversality and alliances that connect different Indigenous people in the affirmation of their creative singularities, gender balance, and dynamic cosmovisions that challenge the homogenising state (Glowczewski and Henry 2011). Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2016) defines Indigenous Brazilians as Os involuntarios da patria (The unvolunteers of the fatherland) and calls for the “decolonization of thought” (2014). He relies on Deleuze

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The Transversality of Assemblages but assumes his structuralist filiation from Lévi-Strauss, despite the fact that Deleuze and Guattari were critical of structuralism both in anthropology and in psychoanalysis. Their critique of structuralism was related to the criticism of the signifier as used respectively by Lévi-Strauss and Lacan. After his analysis with Lacan, Guattari developed a theory of the asignifying that I will return to later. Guattari’s primary concern with Deleuze and in his own work was to explore the possibilities of the actualisation of new forms of collective enunciation. A few weeks before his death on 29 August 1992, he wrote: “Most older methods of communication, reflection and dialogue have dissolved in favor of an individualism and a solitude that are often synonymous with anxiety and neurosis. It is for this reason, that I advocate—under the aegis of a new conjunction of environmental ecology, social ecology and mental ecology—the invention of new collective assemblages of enunciation concerning the couple, the family, the school, the neighbourhood, etc.” (Guattari 1996, 263). To bind these three ecologies and analyse new collective assemblages of enunciation in what he called an ecosophical way, Guattari used schizoanalytical cartographies based on an aesthetic paradigm that he defined as also ethical. During a filmed conference in a Los Angeles art school he explained that this aesthetic paradigm is not an aestheticisation of the social and the political but the invitation to pay attention “to a production of the self that can only be conceived as an open and indeterminate process, in the manner of a performance” (Guattari [1991] 2011). As I have shown elsewhere, “The transversality of social, artistic and ecological practices called for by Guattari also confronts the debates involving the recent notion of the ‘Anthropocene’” (Glowczewski 2020b, 187). The anthropocentrism of the past industrial centuries pretends to erase the way different civilisations, especially those of Indigenous peoples, have resisted colonisation on the basis of their various collective assemblages where the sharing of different human becomings with animals, plants, water sources, winds, spirits, and places in the land, the sea, or the sky is at the heart of their fight against the destruction of their milieu: their cosmocide and global ecocide. We will see examples of some alternative collective assemblages who also fight against the current acceleration of the destruction of the planet. Many movements are more attentive nowadays of the way colonisation produced the acceleration of environmentally and medically destructive extractivism based on the spoliation of Indigenous lands all over the planet and the exploitation of enslaved Africans and indentured labour from India and Melanesia deported to work in plantations (the Americas, Australia, French overseas territories). Neo-liberal capitalism (and its greenwashing) continues to colonise the life of the victims of all forms of extractive development through mining, wide-scale extraction of natural resources, industrial agriculture, and any local labour exploitation. This is why it is important to work within the framework of a “decolonial ecology,” as proposed by French Caribbean philosopher Malcom Ferdinand (2019), who also shows that the decolonisation of ecology simultaneously implies a struggle against capitalism, racism, patriarchy, and the Western or non-Western exploitation of humans and other than humans (Kirk 2020).

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Barbara Glowczewski Decolonisation was at the heart of the “poetics of relation” of another famous French Caribbean writer, Édouard Glissant (1990, 1997), whose friendship with Guattari has been long ignored. I will discuss here that legacy, and the use of Guattari’s ecosophical cartographies to understand some current experiences of alternative collectives in France where I live, as well as the recent struggle of Native Americans from French Guiana and some Indigenous Australians with whom I have been working since 1979.

Figure 22.1.

New transversalities In “Remaking Social Practices,” Guattari calls for “the promotion of a new transversality between productive assemblages and the rest of the community” (1996, 270). He gives the example of Chile where “militants of ‘territorial unionization’ are not only preoccupied with the defense of unionized workers, but also with the difficulties encountered by the unemployed, by women, and by the children of the neighbourhood where the company is located. They participate in the organization of educational and cultural programs, and involve themselves in the problems of health, hygiene, ecology, and urbanism. . . . groups for the ‘ecology of retirement’ devote themselves to the cultural and relational organization of the elderly” (ibid.: 269). Guattari would probably be happy to see that in November 2019 a regional collective, Le Syndicat de la Montagne Limousine (the Union of the Limousin Mountain), was established in France that aims to respond to all aspects of life and defend the land and the forest against destruction by specific forms of agroindustry: “A collective force that is more than the sum of its constituent parts, that can oppose the powers that give shape, behind our backs, to the future of our territory, the

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Figure 22.1. Édouard Glissant and Félix Guattari, Paris, 1986 (courtesy of Sylvie Glissant).

The Transversality of Assemblages banks, the various administrations, the local, regional, and international economical lobbies” (Syndicat de la Montagne Limousine 2019, [2]). The Syndicat de la Montagne Limousine defined six aims: (1) relocalise the use of territorial resources (water, energy, forest, food); (2) allow access to land and housing for all (buying land collectively); (3) defend existing infrastructure (public services) and acquire all vital services (for distribution, communication, energy, health); (4) self-organise against the violence of the system, economy, and arbitrary administration; (5) establish a local right of asylum; (6) stop the destruction of living humans and nonhumans. Many lines are transversal to this territory, such as the fight against the desertification of the region and industrial forestry, the existence of an old alternative sawmill collective in the village of Faux-La Montagne, solidarity with the Yellow Vest Movement that emerged in 2018 everywhere in France, and hospitality and activism to host migrants seeking asylum. A group was formed to think about funeral ceremonies and asked a local mairie (town council) for an area of woodland in which to perform them. Some inhabitants organise carnivals and other feasts, and search out new and old rituals, sensitive to local ancient, maybe Celtic or pre-Celtic, spirituality, such as the healing tradition of the bonnes fontaines (good fountains). Christian influence associated these curing waters with different saints, and many people still search for a cure under the guidance of healers or visit them during annual pilgrimages to assure rain or the health of their cattle (Faure, Cavaillé, and Vignaud 2012). One of the collectives inhabiting this region was a group of young activists who opened a bar and food shop in Tarnac called the Magasin général (Dufresne 2012); eight men and women nearby were arrested in November 2008 on suspicion of intending to derail a train. They were persecuted for years and not allowed to communicate until a highly publicised trial declared them innocent in 2018 (Cross 2018). Only two people of the original group still live in the region; however, Tarnac crystallised a historical trace of alternative resistance and hope for a revalorisation of the commons that attracted many women and men, now a group of sixty, who formed a collective to buy the shop. The village of Tarnac has become a new “machinic phylum” (a machine of recomposed genealogy) for many activists who have read The Coming Insurrection, a book published under the authorship of the Invisible Committee (2009) and translated into many languages. More and more young people come to live in the region desiring to invent another way of life that challenges economic and environmental destruction and takes special care of humans and other than humans. Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 409) define the machinic phylum as “materiality, natural or artificial, and both simultaneously; it is matter in movement, in flux, in variation, matter as a conveyor of singularities and traits of expression.” According to Manning (2009, 10), “for Guattari, the machinic expresses forces of creativity.” It is that type of creativity that is at stake in current activist movements that reterritorialise their struggles, just as Indigenous people and many other minorities do. French history shows that France was constructed as a nation through a systematic process of eradication of local cultural identity, not only in its overseas colonies but also by forbidding, for example, the use of

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Barbara Glowczewski languages such as Breton, which was spoken in Brittany, a big Celtic region of North-West France, or Occitan, the langue d’Oc, which was spoken in Occitanie, a wide region crossing the Limousin and extending to the south west. Breton has been revived thanks to the creation of special Diwan schools by regional activists and is taught at the European University of Bretagne which has Breton departments in several campuses including Nantes, home to the first Breton university in 1461 (Kernalegenn 2016). The transmission of Occitan is more difficult to integrate in official education; however, bilingual Occitan schools exist near the city of Toulouse, and some families would like to open one in Tarnac, while musicians singing in Occitan are very popular.2

French colonial assemblage In French Guiana, the Wayana and Teko people of Amazonia ask for bilingual secondary schools to be built in their own villages to prevent having to send their children to the towns where, cut off from the practice of their own people’s cultural teachings, they face mistreatment and suicide. Native Americans in French Guiana survived a genocide that after five centuries of colonisation left only six ethnic groups out of thirty. The survivors designed a common flag—bearing the name of each of the six surviving tribes—and, since the 1980s, have called in strong statements for the recognition of their people, who spread across the frontiers of Suriname and Brazil. It was only after the 2017 social unrest in Guiana that the French government signed an agreement with various promises including returning 400,000 ha of land back to Native American and ancient Maroon communities. The social unrest involved a street alliance of all segments of Guianese society, a very mixed population with a Creole majority, many migrants, including Hmongs from Indochina (the old French colony that is now Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos), and the Bushinengue Maroons, descendants of escaped slaves; Indigenous people represent only 3 per cent of the population of French Guiana, even though they are the majority in the Amazon forest, which covers two-thirds of the country. Clandestine gold miners from Brazil and Suriname swell the population by thousands; their use of mercury has dangerously polluted the rivers of the Amazon basin, including in the Guiana Amazonian Park, where Indigenous villages have been asked to stop eating the poisoned fish that provoke serious sickness in adults and malformation in babies. The French Guiana 2017 civil protests were the result of terrible economic and social conditions. Despite the very different interests of the various segments of the population, some thirty collectives (supported by seventy international NGOs) also joined in the movement, called Or de question (Gold out of the question) to fight against the industrial gold mining megaproject la Montagne d’Or, the Gold Mountain consortium, a joint venture of the Canadian Columbus and Russian Nordgold companies. 2 See, for example, the following webpage on musician Manu Théron: www.occitanie-musique.com/en/ manu-theron/. See also, Cocanha, a group comprising three women singers and percussionists: Caroline Dufau, Maud Herrera, and Lila Fraysse.

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The Transversality of Assemblages Gold mining on this scale not only threatens to destroy part of the Amazon rainforest and its biodiversity, but also to further pollute the water table through the leaching of cyanide that replaced the old mercury technique. While the gold industry promises a few jobs, it threatens the very existence of dozens of Indigenous villages that already struggle with drugs and prostitution brought by the clandestine gold traffic. At the Tribunal of the Rights of Earth that took place in Bonn at COP23 in November 2017, the Gold Mountain project—supported by the French government—was denounced by a young Kali’na Indigenous man, Yanuwana Christophe Pierre, a film-maker and the founder of the activist youth movement JAG (Jeunesse Autochtone de Guyane) who became vice-president of the Big Customary Council, which was created to deal with Indigenous land issues and other matters. The French government was summoned by the UN to consult with the Indigenous peoples; thanks to the campaigns, France announced early in 2019 that the project so far had not met proper environmental conditions.

Figure 22.2.

The struggle against industrial gold mining provides a very strong example of a new collective assemblage of enunciation that aims to transform not only the territory where the actors live but also the way current capitalism works hand in hand with the United States, France, Canada, Russia, and their private multinationals, as well as China, which has taken over most consumer trade in the French Amazon. The Or de Question movement continues to struggle against the multiplication of mining licences that is destroying French Guiana, the

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Figure 22.2. Young activists from French Guiana protest with their Native American flag, Paris, April 2017 (courtesy of Ludovic Pierre for the JAG).

Barbara Glowczewski expansion of clandestine gold mining, and the general lack of housing and services in the face of growing migration from Haiti and South America, which was exacerbated early in 2020 by the French government destroying long-standing informal accommodation on the outskirts of some towns, leaving thousands of people without shelter. In France, until the mid-twentieth century the integration of the first generation of cheap labour from Southern Europe (Italy, Spain, or Portugal) or Eastern Europe (Poland, former Yugoslavia, etc.) proved difficult; the same was true for French Asian refugees after France lost Indochina. Algerian independence in the 1960s is still a national wound in France, and until recently the many Algerians drowned in the river Seine in Paris during the war of independence was a taboo subject. The perception that French civilisation resulted from centuries of ethnic mix is not shared by the majority of French people, despite the popularity of many Black French sportsmen, such as the soccer players Zinedine Zidane, of Algerian Kabyle descent, and Christian Karembeu, a Kanak man. In affirming an “indivisible republic” that refuses to value its diversity, the French state continues to deny its colonial history and the input made by old and new waves of migration. Shortly after the 2008 US elections, Édouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau (2009), two famous writers from Martinique, a French Caribbean island, wrote L’intraitable beauté du monde: Addresse à Barack Obama (The intractable beauty of the world: a letter to Barack Obama); in this short text they invite readers to create a new world beyond the discrimination produced by many states. Glissant proposed the concept of tout-monde (one-world) to understand the world not as a whole but as archipelagic. Glissant’s poetics and philosophy of relationality express a desire to leave behind any form of exclusive essentialisation of Black versus White; Glissant (1997) advocates creolisation as a process different from creolity as an essence. Relationality is the valuing of difference against the ideology of assimilation inherent to the constitutionally “indivisible” Republic of France and its process for acquiring citizenship, which in France is called “naturalisation”—an ironic way to affirm the expected integration into a hypothetic national identity. In 2016 a special issue of Chimères was dedicated to Glissant and Guattari’s friendship; unfortunately they had not had time to write the book they were planning together (Noudelmann 2010; S. Glissant et al. 2016). In a group discussion, Anne Querrien, one of the founding editors of the Chimères journal, commenting on Glissant’s work, said that African people, especially through slavery, saw their “machinic phylum” broken and had to develop other people’s tools; but here Glissant’s widow, Sylvie, objected: rather than tools I would talk of “traces” that, for Édouard [Glissant], needed to be recomposed by the Caribbean islands’ inhabitants [the Antilles]. As for history, the rupture constituted by slave traffic does not abolish history, on the contrary. Édouard had to find a new way, a non-linear way to write history, to live it and to visit it in its ruptures, its opacity . . . Félix and Édouard were very close in this relation to traces that, in creation and in art, are always productive. (S. Glissant et al. 2016, 22)

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The Transversality of Assemblages During this discussion, Monique Zerbib remarked that “The body, the land, the dream, the rhythm, are the basis and the medium of such traces” (S. Glissant et al. 2016, 22), while Sylvie Glissant quoted Glissant’s Poetics of Relation (1990, 1997) where he refers to Deleuze and Guattari: “they oppose the rhizome that is a multiplied root, extended in networks in the earth and the air, without the intervention of a predatory irretrievable stump. The notion of rhizome would allow rooting, but recuses the idea of a totalitarian root. Rhizomatic thought would be the principle of what I call the poetics of relation, where all identity is extended in a relation to the Other” (É. Glissant 1990, 3, quoted in S. Glissant et al., 25–26). When interviewed by Maurizio Lazzarato and Angela Melitopoulos for the three-screen video installation Assemblages dedicated to Guattari at the Animism exhibition in 2010, I also insisted on the trace in relation to lessons I gained from my work with Warlpiri hunters and gatherers from Central Australia, which I shared with Guattari in the early 1980s. The trace is the only proof we have that an action took place. So it’s the truth par excellence. We are beyond any symbolic system, beyond a system of positions between signifier and signified. We are in the truth of action. Obviously there are a thousand ways to interpret it, but the fact is that the [Aboriginal people] read the earth through its traces. This constitutes their culture: reading the trace like a detective, searching for clues. So when Deleuze spoke about becoming animal in the way he developed the idea with Guattari, he meant it in this sense of sitting on watch. It’s not only the predation—the fact of trying to catch prey or to be aware of not being caught. It’s also about knowing how to read traces. (Glowczewski in Melitopoulos and Lazzarato 2012)

I concluded this interview by stating that it is not enough to isolate nature as it needs to be taken care of through different usage: That which appear[s] natural to us—springs, rocks—are loaded with history for the Aboriginal peoples, who practice forms of totemism, and are thus cultural and non-natural. . . . There are those here among us who function this way even more today than in the past, because we have less and less apprehension regarding what is natural, while the category that philosophy contributed to setting up opposes humans to untouched nature. And the greater the desire was to leave it untouched, the more it was developed. This sort of opposition no longer really makes any sense. The nature/culture opposition nevertheless constricts our thinking a great deal. It is still our paradigm, since we continue to fantasize about natural peoples, natural environments, about the fact that we must preserve nature. And as much as we think this way, I think we are wrong when it comes to the solutions to be found for the different problems. For example, the question of the environment is not really about protecting nature by stopping pollution. On the contrary, it is necessary to invest it with new forms of assemblages and cultural mechanisms. (Glowczewski in Melitopoulos and Lazzarato 2010, 107–6)

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The age of minorities It is the Indigenous concept of non-metaphorical traces that Guattari was attracted to when in early 1983 he read my thesis about the Warlpiri people of Central Australia. Traces are vital for desert Aboriginal people, above all because their life was based on tracking to hunt and collect food. Traces are also the basis of their cosmovision that considers human or animal footprints and other traces as the only proof of an action. Performance is the only evidence while meaning is a question of interpretation. This is exactly what Guattari called non-signifying or asignifying during a joint seminar we did in 1985: It is not only the fact that there is, in a contingent fashion, a fact of non-sense or a rupture of signification, but that it has to be actively rendered non-signifying so as to function as a means for what I call existential territorialization. And it is precisely these non-signifying elements which will constitute what I call the transversality of assemblages: they are what will traverse heterogeneous modes of expression from the point of view of their means of expression, or from the point of view of their content, mythical content, for example. (Glowczewski 2011, 108)

Traces are first indexes of action and are not meaningful. For the Warlpiri people of Central Australia, traces are kuruwarri, which I translate as “imageforces” (or force-images); they are not only marks in the land but also stories that unfold to link these marks with the actions of totemic ancestral travellers. Force-images thus form constellations that are cartographies of totemic travels that are painted on bodies and, since the 1980s, on canvases for the international contemporary art market. The kuruwarri are part of Jukurrpa, the Dreaming space-time that is multiplied on earth through thousands of Dreaming lines. Dreamings are materialised through singular sites—waterholes, rocks, mountains, rivers—found throughout the landscape that are identified as “traces” of hybrid ancestors. Such traces are sacred sites because of the visual evidence of a past memory of non-human actions performed by geological ancestral forces that are designated by the names of relevant ancestral animal, plant, Rain, Wind, or Fire ancestral beings in becoming. Dreamings are concepts actualised as nomadic lines crisscrossing the landscape. As I showed in the early 1980s, the rhizome of Australian Dreaming paths is not a metaphor but a real image of the becoming-yam, which, for Indigenous Australians, is one form of totemic becoming among many others (Kangaroo, Rain, Star, or Honey becomings). Such totemic becomings are ritually actualised by body-painting, dancing, and singing (Glowczewski 2020a).

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The Transversality of Assemblages

Figure 22.3.

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Figure 22.3. Kuruwarri lines connecting totemic sites for Digging Stick Women (top left: Agnes Napanangka), Goanna (top right: Gladys Kungariya Napangardi), Honey and Owl (bottom left: May Yiripanta Napaljarri), Plum and Possum (bottom right: Barbara Nakakut Nakamarra) (Photos: © B. Glowczewski, 1984).

Barbara Glowczewski Deleuze and Guattari took their inspiration from birds in order to describe the concept of the refrain (a ritornello in music) as “any aggregate of matters of expression that draws a territory and develops into territorial motifs and landscapes” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 323). The Warlpiri and their neighbours from Central Australia also rely on a multitude of visual and sonic traces that they turn into songlines, painted cartographies, and dance choreographies. All these ritual matters of expression mark the territories that connect them with hundreds of sacred sites. Interestingly, ethnoastronomy has recently helped confirm the striking spiritual and ecological correlations some Aboriginal groups made between certain stars and specific birds, the dingo, the thorny lizard, or a type of spider: records made at the beginning of the twentieth century have shown that more or less over a period of six weeks the movement of some stars corresponded to the season when the related bird laid eggs or other animals bred. Signs in the sky were thus used as a calendar for the earth. Today, seasonal indications that connect some birds to stars and some animals to specific plants are being disturbed by the ongoing transformation of the climate. How can new transversal assemblages respond to such planetary disruptions? Julien Pallota (2019), in the postface to Viveiros de Castro’s book on Pierre Clastres, reminds us that Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (1997, 469) proposed to call their time “the age of minorities,” which they defined as “multiplicities of escape and flux” (470): “We have often seen capitalism maintain and organize inviable States, according to its needs, and for the precise purpose of crushing minorities. The minorities issue is instead that of smashing capitalism, of redefining socialism, of constituting a war machine capable of countering the world war machine by other means” (472). They further add that it is about “revolutionary movement (the connection of flows, the composition of nondenumerable aggregates, the becoming-minoritarian of everybody/everything)” (473). Deleuze and Guattari’s opposition between major and minor defines the minor as the power to transform the major. Minor in this sense is the power of the multiplicity of Indigenous peoples to transform their governance by the state. Minor is also the power of the multiplicity of current movements fighting for environmental and social justice against the neoliberal destruction of the planet with extractivism and big development projects. For example, the Zone to Defend (ZAD) of Notre-Dame-des-Landes in France, whose occupants after a decade of struggles and the support of many people, individually and in groups, in January 2018 won their fight to halt construction of an airport on 1650 ha of bocage (mixed woodland, pasture and cultivated plots separated by hedgerows) in Brittany. They claimed that they were not defending nature but, as made famous by their popular banners and stickers, that “we are the nature that defends itself,” or we could say “herself ” like the French feminine article la used for the word nature. But is nature a subject and female? This has been the trend recently by identifying the current concept of “Nature” (absent from most cultures) with the “Earth” conceived as a goddess, like the Greek Gaïa, the Earth (who married her son Ouranos, the sky), or the Andean Pachamama Mother Earth (in Inca culture pacha is space-time, while in Bolivia today Pachamama embodies

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The Transversality of Assemblages all connections with the Earth for general good-living, buen vivir). Like some others, I prefer to say that nature should not be divinised or essentialised but rather understood as a becoming-nature, a concept that should free itself from its Western scientific opposition to culture. The challenge of the French ZAD movement, who advertised their fight as being “against the airport and its world,” was to affirm the possibility of alternative worlds against the acceleration of a global neo-liberal economic model that is destroying the planet. They won partly by demonstrating the biodiversity of the Notre-Dame-des-Landes bocage, stopping the airport, while many still inhabit the area to continue to build together an experimental way of life. A writing collective called Mauvaise Troupe (Bad troop) was created in 2014 to publish books such as Defending the Zad, in which some of the inhabitants explain their use of the word we: We are some of the inhabitants of the zad of Notre-Dame-des-Landes and accomplices in tune with its rebellion. With Mauvaise Troupe we have been working for several months harvesting and disseminating stories which will be published in a series of interviews and a book this spring. But from a sense of urgency, we have decided to pick up our pens to spread far and wide how important it is to defend the zad. In a world ruled by the “I” we aspire to speak as “we.” But the “we” here on these pages goes beyond us, during the telling of this story it might embody one of the many collective voices of the movement whose strength lies in its diversity and differences. This is not its only voice, but an attempt to put into words what is being built in common amongst us, something that can never be uprooted, the living entanglement of our disparate experiences and views. (Mauvaise Troupe Collective 2016, 5)3

In April 2018, three months after the airport construction project was abandoned, 2,500 policemen were sent to Notre-Dame-des-Landes to evict the 200 squatters who since 2008 have been building an alternative life and holding annual gatherings of up to 50,000 people to discuss various issues and celebrate through music and dance. The inhabitants were strongly affected by the violence of the military police destroying numerous self-constructed wooden houses and mixed-material huts (Graton 2019). Despite this destruction, the ZAD inhabitants resisted, and some 150 people continue to occupy and work the land, in squatted farms, self-constructed cabins, and caravans; they look after cows and sheep, grow medicinal plants, run two bakeries, a carpentry workshop, and a library, and practise various crafts. A big shed was constructed by a group of Basque supporters, the Ambazada, where many events have been organised, such as the visit of three French Polynesian artists who presented a film on nuclear testing and collectively engraved Polynesian designs on an Unu, a three-metre-high board traditionally erected in the ground.4 The inhabitants also host hundreds of campers when they organise large forums, such as the 2019 and 2020 Summer Intergalactic Week or ZadEnvies weekend, with the 3 See also Mauvaise Troupe Collective (2018). Some inhabitants of the ZAD are members of the Laboratory of Insurrectional Imagination who also stimulated actions against fossil fuel companies in the administrative councils of art institutions like the Tate Modern gallery in London and the Louvre in Paris (see Evans and Smith 2016). 4 14–15 December 2019, workshops with artists from the Centre des Métiers d’Art (CMA) of Papeete, see https://zad.nadir.org/spip.php?article6680.

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Barbara Glowczewski support of many people across France and overseas. The difficult negotiation of innovative land agreements allowed the ZAD inhabitants to gain a nine-year lease on 320 ha of land and they created a collective fund (Fonds de dotation) called La Terre en commun (The land in common) to function without named owners as a collective body to administer the buying of further land and buildings, such as the old farms or stone houses that they had renovated (Lundimatin 2019).5 The successful occupation of Notre-Dame-des-Landes to recreate a commons has stimulated the multiplication of other ZAD groups across France, becoming a very productive and transformative machinic phylum for new alternative assemblages, despite various conflicts and dissensus.

Figure 22.4.

Ecosophical hopes Deleuze’s and Guattari’s work advocating for new collective assemblages has been ignored—even rejected—by a generation of French anthropologists, while Deleuze’s worldwide success often overlooks his partnership with Guattari. It seems that many scholars have in particular missed the anthropological and political potential of Guattari’s writings, whether through ignorance or incomprehension of the evolution of his concepts. The notion of “collective assemblages of enunciation” was complexified through Guattari’s ecosophical project and concept of transversality (Genosko 2009). Guattari (1986, 292) insists that a “collective must not just be understood in the sense of a social group: it also implies the entry of diverse collections of technical objects, material and energetic fluxes, incorporeal entities, mathematical and aesthetic idealities, and so on.” 5 For news from La Terre en commun, see https://encommun.eco/; for the history of the project and updates, see https://zadforever.blog/ and the monthly magazine Zadibao, launched in June 2018, at https://zadibao.net.

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Figure 22.4. A violinist during the police attack at the Notre-Dame-des-Landes ZAD. Photograph by Philippe Graton, April 2018. © Philippe Graton, used with permission. A selection of photos and more information can be found on the publisher’s website: https://www.filigranes.com/livre/carnets-de-la-zad/.

The Transversality of Assemblages Guattari’s linking together of the three ecologies (environmental, social, and mental) echoes with the ecology of mind developed by US anthropologist Gregory Bateson (Bateson [1980] 1991; Shaw 2015); however, Guattari distanced himself from Bateson’s systemic approach to ecology because he found it too closed off, structuralist, culturalist, and behaviouralist. For Bateson, healing is posited as a question of “communication,” most notably in relation to the schizophrenics that he assisted. For Guattari, communication is not the primary concern with regard to the cure. It is not about representation but expression through self-referential emergence, the condition of enaction. Guattari thought of self-reference or feedback not as a metaphor but, on the contrary, as an action of conscious and unconscious affects (between refrains or incorporeal universes of value and existential territories) and effects between fluxes (flows) and machinic phyla: “That of machine is there to give a dimension of cybernetic retroaction, of autopoiesis, meaning an ontological self-affirmation, without falling into animist or vitalist myths, such as Lovelock and Margulis’s Gaïa hypothesis; for it is precisely about linking the machines of the ecosystems of material fluxes to those of the ecosystems of semiotic fluxes. Therefore, I try to widen the notion of autopoiesis, without limiting it, like Varela does, solely to the living system, and I consider that there are proto-autopoïeses in all other systems: ethnological, social, etc.” (Guattari 2013a, 72, as translated by Andrew Goffey in Glowczewski 2020a, 115). Guattari extended Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana’s notion of autopoiesis to the analysis of human societies traversed by ethnic, cultural, religious, political systems and so on confronted with colonisation, and by what he called Integrated World Capitalism. For Guattari, as for me, there is a hope for new assemblages of creative resistance: “new transcultural, transnational, and transversal earths [terres, in the sense of lands or territories] and universes of value may be formed, unencumbered by the fascination of territorialized power, that can be separated from the outcomes of the current planetary impasse” (Guattari 2015, 98). The ecosophical project should be understood in relation to the transforming individual and collective assemblages matrix that Guattari constructed in Schizoanalytic Cartographies (2013b), in which his four concepts of dimension correspond to four transversally and temporally interrelated poles: the economy of Flows (libido, signifier, capital, labour) corresponds to the actual real, the machinic Phylum (Phyla in plural) to the actual possible, the incorporeal Universes of Value to the virtual possible, and the existential Territories to the virtual real. The relation between Flows and Phyla generates objective deterritorialisation processes while, between Universes and Territories, a subjective deterritorialisation can emerge as an enunciation to allow the (re)creation of the virtual possible with new contents: a promise of new assemblages against Integrated World Capitalism—what today is also called neo-liberal globalisation. During forty years of anthropological research with Indigenous Australian men and women, I have been impressed by their creativity in weaving inherited traditions with new transversal strategies, spanning across all four semiotic regimes defined by Guattari (2000, 137–38). First, at the economic level (Flow),

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Barbara Glowczewski in the mid-1980s they started to paint for the global art market and developed community art centres. Hundreds of artists and thousands of art pieces can be found in contemporary art museums and collections worldwide. Family groups accepted royalties for some mining exploration on the land they had won back. If terrible conflicts of interest divided communities, in the light of the land destruction and lack of water, the opposition of young generations against uranium mining and fracking is now part of their claim for sovereignty. Second, at the techno-scientific level (Phylum), since the 1990s Indigenous Australians have used the internet to participate in various programmes that promote using their traditional knowledge in conjunction with new technologies, such as GPS and drones, to manage the land and its non-human inhabitants while practising micro-fire-burning to reduce carbon emissions from uncontrolled fires. Third, at the juridical level (Universes of Value and refrains), a Torres Strait Islander, Eddie Mabo, had the idea to challenge in court the notion of terra nullius, which was finally abolished by the federal government in 1992; when the Native Title Act 1993 was passed, a Native Title Tribunal was created to examine land claims. Commonwealth tools are being used, like the Stolen Generation Royal Commission that led to an official apology from the government in 2008. Indigenous Australians also challenged their constant criminalisation and police violence: Lex Wotton, for instance, was condemned to six years in jail for leading a riot in 2004 on Palm Island; however, he won a class action in 2018 with an official apology from the Queensland government and Aus$30 million in compensation to share between the 447 claimants against illegitimate police intervention and arrests after their protest following a violent death in custody (Glowczewski and Wotton 2010). Finally, at the level of subjectivation (Existential Territory), which for Guattari included town planning, Aboriginal people had to superimpose the Western model of elected councils onto their traditional political system of collective governance. Valuing traditional expressions of dissent, for over forty years they have been questioning the way those councils and other political, administrative powers operate; thus, they engage in long-term negotiations. Such a dissensus is a form of cultural distrust of hierarchical systems of representation, as well as of ongoing colonial effects. Indigenous peoples in Australia or elsewhere do not need to be DeleuzoGuattarian to think through the middle (milieu), that is, the space they live in, which is made of currents and flows of people and things, songs, or dances, whether it is the ocean, the desert, the forest, or the city. When people defend values of sharing together, but each in their own ways, they can hold on to singularities always in becoming, the affirmation of which requires new ways of existing. The Indigenous peoples that struggle, such as Australians and Native Americans in French Guiana, Brazil, the United States, Canada, or Chile, impress by way of their creativity that relies simultaneously on an ancestral heritage and on new alliances to oppose the destructive impact of the contemporary globalised world. For me, they create a hope for the future that parallels people who stand up to protect another possible world, like the ZAD of NotreDame-des-Landes, the collectives of the Limousin Mountain, and movements

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The Transversality of Assemblages of poor suburban youth who want to be recognised as French at the same time as Black African, Caribbean, Arab, Asian, or other. The same can be said for the Quilombola descendants of escaped slaves and other Black and mixed-race people in Brazil or other American countries who face misery but nevertheless attempt to resist against a state machine that wants to destroy them. In fact, we all need to find alternative ways to inhabit territories and re-enchant ancient knowledge to reconnect with the milieu. References Allard, LaDonna Brave Bull, Salim Dara, Eve Ensler, Sabine Lichtenfels, Tiokasin Ghosthorse, Alnoor Ladha, Gildardo Tuberquia, et al. 2019. “We Stand in Solidarity with Rojava, an Example to the World.” Guardian, 1 November. Accessed 3 August 2020. https://www.theguardian. com/world/2019/nov/01/we-stand-insolidarity-with-rojava-an-example-to-theworld. Bateson, Gregory. (1980) 1991. “Men are Grass: Metaphor and the World of Mental Process.” In A Sacred Unity: Further Steps to an Ecology of Mind, edited by R. E. Donaldson, 235–42. New York: A Cornelia and Michael Bessie Book. First delivered as a conference paper, 1980. Cross, Tony. 2018. “French Anarchist Sabotage Trial Turns to Farce.” RFI, 17 March. Accessed 4 August 2020. https:// www.rfi.fr/en/20180317-french-anarchisttrial-turns-farce. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Minuit). Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. 1987. Dialogues. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1977 as Dialogues (Paris: Flammarion). Dufresne, David. 2012. Tarnac, magasin général: Récit. Paris: Calmann-Lévy. Evans, Mel, and Kevin Smith. 2016. “Imagining a Culture Beyond Oil at the Paris Climate Talks.” In Ecologising Museums, edited by Nataša PetrešinBachelez and Sarah Werkmeister,

L’internationale Online. Accessed 13 January 2021. https://www. internationaleonline.org/research/ politics_of_life_and_death/46_ imagining_a_culture_beyond_oil_at_ the_paris_climate_talks/. Faure, Jean-Paul, Jean-Pierre Cavaillé, and Jean-François Vignaud, dirs. 2012. En Lemosin, le pays des bonnes fontaines (Lu país de las bonas fonts). 7aLimoges video, 18:51. Accessed 4 August 2020. https:// www.7alimoges.tv/En-Lemosin-Le-paysdes-bonnes-fontaines_v813.html. Ferdinand, Malcom. 2019. Une écologie décoloniale: Penser l’écologie depuis le monde caribéen. Paris: Seuil. Genosko, Gary, ed. 1996. The Guattari Reader. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 2009. Félix Guattari: A Critical Introduction. London: Pluto Press. Glissant, Édouard. 1990. Poétique de la relation. Paris: Gallimard. Translated by Betsy Wing as Glissant 1997. ———. 1997. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. First published as Glissant 1990. Glissant, Édouard, and Patrick Chamoiseau. 2009. L’intraitable beauté du monde: adresse à Barack Obama. Paris: Galaade. Glissant, Sylvie, Anne Querrien, Lucia Sagradini, and Monique Zerbib. 2016. “Conversation autour d’un rêve de Glissant et Guattari,” transcribed by Aude Haiducu. In “Avec Edouard Glissant,” special issue, Chimères 90: 19–31. Glowczewski, Barbara. 2011. “Guattari and Anthropology: Existential Territories among Indigenous Australians.” Translated by Andrew Goffey. In The Guattari Effect, edited by Éric Alliez and Andrew Goffey, 99–111. London:

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Barbara Glowczewski Continuum. First published 2008 as “Guattari et l’anthropologie: Aborigènes et territoiresexistentiels” (Multitudes 34). ———. 2020a. Indigenising Anthropology with Guattari and Deleuze. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ———. 2020b. “Guattari’s Ecosophy and Multiple Becomings in Ritual.” In Deleuze, Guattari and the Art of Multiplicity, edited by Radek Przedpelski and S. E. Wilmer, 187–212. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Glowczewski, Barbara, and Félix Guattari. 1987. “Warlpiri Dreaming Spaces: 1983 and 1985 Seminars with Félix Guattari.” Translated by John Angell. In Glowczewski 2020a, 81–113. First published 1987 (Chimères 1 [1]), accessed 3 August 2020, available online as “18/01/83: Félix Guattari, Barbara Glowczewski; Espaces de rêves (1), Les Warlpiri,” https://www.revue-chimeres. fr/18-01-83-Felix-Guattari-BarbaraGlowczewski-Espaces-de-reves-1-lesWarlpiri; “26/02/1985: Félix Guattari, Barbara Glowczewski; Espaces de rêves (2), Les Warlpiri,” https://www.revuechimeres.fr/26-02-1985-Felix-GuattariBarbara-Glowczewski-Espaces-de-reves2-Les-Warlpiri. Glowczewski, Barbara, and Rosita Henry, eds. 2011. The Challenge of Indigenous Peoples: Spectacle or Politics? Oxford: Bardwell Press. Glowczewski, Barbara, and Lex Wotton. 2010. Warriors for Peace: The Political Condition of the Aboriginal People as Viewed from Palm Island. Accessed 6 August 2020. http://eprints.jcu.edu.au/7286/. First published 2008 as Guerriers pour la Paix: La condition politique des Aborigènes vue de Palm Island (Montpellier: Indigène). Graton, Philippe. 2019. Carnets de la ZAD. Trézélan, France: Filigranes. Guattari, Félix. 1986. Les années d’hiver: 1980–1985. Paris: Barrault. ———. 1989. “The Three Ecologies.” Translated by Chris Turner. New Formations 8: 131–47. ———. (1991) 2011. “Produire une culture du dissensus: Hétérogenèse et paradigme esthétique” (To produce a culture of dissent: heterogenesis and aesthetic paradigm). CIP-IdF / Commune Libre d’Aligre, 21 April 2011. Accessed 3 August

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2020. http://www.cip-idf.org/article. php3?id_article=5613. Transcription of a conference paper given in 1991. ———. 1996. “Remaking Social Practices.” Translated by Sophie Thomas. In Genosko 1996, 262–72. First published 1992 as “Pour une refondation des pratiques sociales” (Le monde diplomatique, October: 26–27). ———. 2000. The Three Ecologies. Translated by Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton. London: Athlone Press. First published 1989 as Les trois écologies (Paris: Galilée). ———. 2010. “The New Spaces of Freedom.” In New Lines of Alliance, New Spaces of Liberty, by Félix Guattari and Antonio Negri, translated by Michael Ryan, Jared Becker, Arianna Bove, and Noe Le Blanc, 116–27. New York: Minor Compositions / Autonomedia / MayFlyBooks. Essay written 1984, first published as “1984— Des libertés en Europe: Intervention au colloque de Montréal sur les libertés en Europe, octobre 1984,” in Guattari 1986, 55–70. ———. 2013a. Qu’est-ce que l’écosophie. Edited by Stéphane Nadaud. Paris: Lignes. ———. 2013b. Schizoanalytic Cartographies. Translated by Andrew Goffey. London: Bloomsbury. First published 1989 as Cartographies schizoanlytiques (Paris: Galilée). ———. 2015. “Ecosophical Practices and the Restoration of the ‘Subjective City.’” Translated by Kuniichi Uno et al., revised by Gary Genosko. In Machinic Eros: Writings on Japan, edited by Gary Genosko and Jay Hetrick, 97–115. Minneapolis, MN: Univocal. First published 1989 as “Restoration of the Urban Landscape,” in Proposal from Nagoya, edited by Riichi Miyake (Nagoya: Japan Institute of Architects, 1989), 85–95. This translation based on the revised version first published 1992 (Chimères 17: 1–18). Invisible Committee. 2009. The Coming Insurrection. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). First published 2007 as L’insurrection qui vient (Paris: Fabrique). Kernalegenn, Tudi. 2016. “Les universités bretonnes.” Bretagne Culture Diversité / Sevenadurioù Breizh. Accessed 9 August 2020. http://bcd.bzh/becedia/fr/lesuniversites-bretonnes.

The Transversality of Assemblages Kirk, Rachel. 2020. “Tackling Environmental Dilemmas Requires Integrating the Legacy of Colonialism.” State of the Planet, 24 January. Accessed 4 August 2020. https://blogs.ei.columbia. edu/2020/01/24/malcom-ferdinandenvironment-colonialism. Lundimatin. 2019. “Prise de terre(s).” 23 September 2019. Accessed 9 August 2019. https://lundi.am/ZAD. Manning, Erin. 2009. Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Mauvaise Troupe Collective. 2016. Defending the Zad. Translated by the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination. [Paris]: L’éclat. Accessed 5 August 2020. https:// mauvaisetroupe.org/IMG/pdf/zad-en-a5. pdf. First published 2016 as Défendre la zad ([Paris]: L’éclat). ———. 2018. The Zad and NoTAV: Territorial Struggles and the Making of a New Political Intelligence. Translated by Kristin Ross. London: Verso. First published 2016 as Contrées: Histoires croisées de la zad de NotreDame-des-Landes et de la lutte No TAV dans le Val Susa ([Paris]: L’éclat). Melitopoulos, Angela, and Maurizio Lazzarato. 2010. “Machinic Animism.” In Animism, Volume I, edited by Anselm Franke, 97–108. Berlin: Sternberg Press. Published in conjunction with the exhibition Animism, shown at Extra City—Kunsthal Antwerpen and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp (MKHA), and Kunsthalle Bern. ———. 2012. “Assemblages: Félix Guattari and Machinic Animism.” E-flux 36. Accessed 4 August 2020. https:// www.e-flux.com/journal/36/61259/ assemblages-flix-guattari-and-machinicanimism/#:~:text=The%20trace%20 is%20the%20only,in%20the%20 truth%20of%20action.

Noudelmann, François. 2018. “Félix Guattari.” Édouard Glissant.World, 29 January. Accessed 4 August 2020. https:// edouardglissant.world/lieux/guattari/. Pallota, Julien. 2019. “Postface: Viveiros de Castro au-delà de Clastres; Vers un Brésil mineur ou un alter Brésil.” In Politique des multiplicités: Pierre Clastres face à l’Etat, by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, translated by Julien Pallota, 111–51. Bellevaux, France: Dehors. Petrešin-Bachelez, Nataša, and Sarah Werkmeister, eds. 2016. Ecologising Museums. L’internationale online. Accessed 5 August 2020. https:// internationaleonline.org/ library/#ecologising _museums. Shaw, Robert. 2015. “Bringing Deleuze and Guattari down to Earth through Gregory Bateson: Plateaus, Rhizomes and Ecosophical Subjectivity.” Theory, Culture and Society 32 (7–8): 151–71. Syndicat de la Montagne Limousine. 2019. “Pour un Syndicat de la montagne limousine.” Accessed 8 August 2020. https://www.montagnelimousine. net/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/ pre%CC%81sentationSyndicat_weblight. pdf. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2014. Cannibal Metaphysics: For a Post-structural Anthropology. Edited and translated by Peter Skafish. Minneapolis: Univocal. First published 2009 as Métaphysiques cannibales (Paris: Presses universitaires de France). ———. 2016. Os involuntarios da pátria. São Paulo: n-1 ediçoes. Text of a lecture delivered at a public conference during Indigenous April, Cinelândia, Rio de Janeiro, 20 April 2016.

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Orquestra Errante Improvising Assemblages Facing the Totalitarian Assemblage Rogério Luiz Moraes Costa University of São Paulo, Brazil

Introduction Orquestra Errante1 is an experimental group linked to USP—Nusom/Sonology Research Center, which is dedicated to the study and practice of improvisation.2 The orchestra that I founded in 2009 is composed of performers from various musical backgrounds and features varied musical formations. Its activities include the realisation of the creative proposals of its members who, in general, develop research on the connections between improvisation and other areas of study. Activities are developed in a democratic and nonhierarchical way and are based on interaction and collective creation. In this chapter, I relate the machinic assemblages that occur in the creative environment of Orquestra Errante to the strategies of insurgency proposed by Brazilian psychoanalyst Suely Rolnik,3 against what she terms the pathology of the colonial capitalist regime. A detailed examination of the assemblage of this laboratory of creation and improvisation reveals modes of micropolitical cooperation that establish a kind of clinical-aesthetic-political pragmatics among its members. This improvising assemblage acts as a kind of antidote against the corruption of the desire undertaken by the macro- and micropolitics of contemporary capitalism, here thought of as a kind of totalitarian assemblage.

1 See http://www.orquestraerrante.eca.usp.br/, http://www2.eca.usp.br/nusom/node/236, www.soundcloud.com/orquestraerrante, and www.facebook.com/orquestraerrante. 2 Unless otherwise stated, all translations are my own. 3 Suely Rolnik started her academic training as a social science student at the University of São Paulo. After being arrested by the military dictatorship in 1964, she went into exile in France where she did most of her academic training. She graduated in philosophy and social sciences at the University of Paris 8, and gained MA and PhD degrees in clinical human sciences at the University of Paris 7 (Diderot). During this period, she was a patient of and later worked with Félix Guattari at the Experimental Clinic of Cour-Cheverny (La Borde). She attended classes and seminars by Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Pierre Clastres, and Roland Barthes. After the amnesty law, she returned to Brazil in 1979 and founded the Center for the Study of Subjectivity in the postgraduate programme in clinical psychology at PUC-SP. From 2007 to 2015 she was a visiting professor in the independent studies programme at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona.

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The totalitarian assemblage I begin by analysing the contemporary social-political context that unfolds from the policies of domination of global financial capitalism that, in Brazil, are characterised by the reaffirmation and deepening of huge economic and social inequalities. This situation has deep historical roots related to the country’s colonisation process, but it is important to spell out the peculiar characteristics of the present historical moment. After an intense campaign of destabilisation and economic sabotage conducted by the mainstream media, the judiciary, and the parliament with support from part of the middle class, President Dilma Roussef was overthrown by a controversial process of impeachment in 2016. Shortly thereafter, former President Lula, who in two consecutive terms carried out reforms aimed at reducing the country’s enormous social inequalities, was accused of corruption, convicted, and sent to prison in a legal process full of controversial inconsistencies and illegalities. The whole process culminated in 2018, with the election of Jair Bolsonaro, a president with strong neo-fascist tendencies.4 Now, in 2019,5 after a long process that included a cultural war waged through the massive spread of fake news, we have in Brazil a political situation in which there is an ultra-liberal economic project associated with an authoritarian regime with a clear neo-fascist tendency. From an ideological perspective, this situation is supported by a hegemony of the main values of contemporary neo-liberal capitalism—egocentrism, individualism, meritocracy, consumerism, productivism, and commodification of everything—combined with and buttressed by a discourse of hatred characterised by intolerance, racism, misogyny, machismo, and homophobia. According to Rolnik (2018), this new format of neo-liberalism associated with neo-fascism promotes the colonisation of desire, capturing it to make it impotent and captive. The desire thus corrupted is used to reproduce the status quo, contributing to the composition of new scenarios for the accumulation of capital. As a complex and totalitarian assemblage involving various dimensions (economic, legal, media, parliamentary, ideological, religious, educational, markets, etc.), it aims to forcibly implant its economic project, requiring a project 4 In 2020, a year and a half after Bolsonaro’s election, Brazilian social scientists have already produced consistent research relating his government’s procedures to historical fascism. The central point is that the main features of the regime are very similar to Italy’s historical fascism. It is no longer a matter of personal opinion and we can, without fear of making mistakes, define Bolsonaro’s political project as neo-fascism. See, for example the article “Bolsonarismo: O novo fascismo brasileiro” produced by the Politics, Behaviour and Media Laboratory at PUC/SP (Pontifícia Universidade Católica) (Laboratório de Política, Comportamento e Mídia 2020). 5 This chapter was written in 2019. If the situation was already serious at that time, now in 2020, with the coronavirus pandemic, the situation is much worse. Jair Bolsonaro’s government, supported by openly fascist groups, is advancing more and more explicitly in its struggle against the democratic institutions that still resist in Brazil. The governors of the states of the federation, Congress, the Supreme Court, the press, universities, and artists are his preferred targets. The political crisis adds to the chaos in public health due to the government’s denialist attitude. Even with a high degree of under-reporting, at the time of writing Brazil has one of the highest numbers of people infected and killed by coronavirus of all countries in the world. The threat of a militia-military coup is increasingly concrete and frightening. Even sectors of the right that initially supported the election of Bolsonaro are now frightened by the rise of authoritarianism and the government’s undemocratic violence.

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Orquestra Errante of political control6 and homogenisation7 and the consequent extermination of differences. The extermination of differences that leads to the submission of minorities was clearly spelled out in a campaign speech by Bolsonaro in 2017: “God above all! There is no such story of a secular state. The state is Christian and the minority who is against it must change! Minorities have to bow to majorities” (YouTube 2017). The consequences of this situation for the Brazilian population are not only social and political but also psychological, giving rise “to a historical pathology of the unconscious” (Rolnik 2018, 14). For Rolnik “in its financialised fold, the colonial-capitalist regime exerts its perverse seduction upon desire, ever more violently and finely, causing it to surrender itself even more joyfully to abuse (consumerism, hedonism, individualism, entrepreneurship, egocentricity, productivism, ‘creative economy,’ etc.)” (ibid., 25). This capture of desire promotes a state of forced adaptation, domestication, alienation, and repression, and consequently generates psychopathy, sociopathy, and apathy. At the ideological level, marketing and advertising are important tools for this project of the domestication of desire, which, once captured and sublimated, begins to manifest itself only as a desire to participate in the ubiquitous consumer society. Desire ceases to be a vital force that makes the emergence of difference possible and becomes a repetition impulse that manifests itself in the desire to buy and possess material goods and exhibit wealth and status. In this scenario everything becomes a commodity, everything is put up for sale, and desire falls ill, is captured and trivialised. According to Rolnik, to resist it is necessary to reactivate the desire: “an alarm signal goes off in subjectivities: the drive is set in motion and desire is summoned to act. And when it is possible to keep the reins of the drive in hand, a collective work of thought-creation tends to break out which, materialised in actions, seeks to make life persevere and gain a new balance” (Rolnik 2018, 25). This reactivation of desire must aim at a collective reappropriation of the vital power of life through a new kind of micropolitical activism that faces the totalitarian capitalist assemblage: “In addition to not being subject to institutionalisation, the new type of activism does not restrict the focus of its struggle to an expansion of equal rights—macropolitical insurgency—as it expands it micropolitically to affirm another right that encompasses all the others: the right to exist or, more precisely, the right to life in its essence as a creative power. Its target is the reappropriation of the vital force in the face of expropriation by the colonial-capitalist regime” (Rolnik 2018, 24). These micropolitical 6 In recent decades, globalised capitalism has promoted an extensive homogenisation of hearts and minds through the imposition of a macropolitical agenda of a productivist, extractive, meritocratic character that produces a scenario of extreme economic and social inequality combined with catastrophic environmental devastation. This process generally happens with uncritical support from the majority of the population, who are unable to reflect on the situation due to either the precarious conditions of survival or being in a situation of economic and social privilege, or who naturalise the state of affairs as being inevitable, because of human nature. 7 This process of colonisation, of the extermination of differences and homogenisation occurs through the imposition of radical White-male-Christian-Western cultural and epistemological paradigms. The president’s statement regarding minorities mentioned at the beginning of this item clearly demonstrates the ideological bias of this government.

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Rogério Luiz Moraes Costa practices of resistance are necessarily collective and therefore can be thought of as a collective assemblage of enunciation: thinking and rebelling become one and the same practice . . . although such a practice can only be carried out, in principle, in the context of each existence, it does not occur in isolation . . . such practice feeds on resonances from other efforts in the same direction and on the collective strength they promote. . . . Such resonances and the synergies they produce create the conditions for the formation of a common collective body whose potency of invention, acting in singular and variable directions, can come to have enough strength to contain the power of the forces that prevail in other constellations—those that are composed by bodies that try to pimp the vital pulse of others. . . . . This is precisely the perspective of a clinical-political pragmatics . . . mobilised by the urgency of facing the high degree of perversion of the regime. (Rolnik 2018, 38–39)

Rolnik then proposes thinking of art as a privileged field for these insurgency practices: “Dribbling the power of the colonial-capitalistic unconscious. . . : activating the clinical-political power of art” (ibid., 39). Next, I describe the environment and functioning of Orquestra Errante, characterising it as a machinic assemblage of desire and a collective assemblage of enunciation that arises as a micropolitics, a continuous action of resistance with a determined clinical-political power in confronting this corruption of desire undertaken by the micropolitics of contemporary capitalism, particularly in Brazil in 2019. I will try to demonstrate that in the trans-territorial environment of Orquestra Errante it is possible to reappropriate the force of creation and cooperation since “the reappropriation of the impulse of creation depends on it affecting the actions of desire” (Rolnik 2018, 35).

Improvising assemblages Free group improvisation is always a collective assemblage of enunciation8 that is sketched from a complex game of forces between musicians and non-human actors in the environment (architecture, instruments, etc.). With regard to the human actors in this assemblage, it is worth highlighting the asymmetries inherent to the rhythms between the milieus (in Deleuzian terms). These asymmetries are of various natures and result from what each musician brings to the performance—his or her personal and musical biography—and also from the impressions, sensations, and actions of each musician in the face of the flow that is delineating in the present. In the living process of improvisation, the performers deal with a multiplicity of times and images: the distant past that 8 I have already developed this idea in my PhD thesis and in other texts in which I reflected on the type of assemblage that characterises most free improvisation practices. Here I quote my 2016 book Música errante: “It is necessary, therefore, to outline the improvisation environment that enables and prepares this pragmatics, which is the collective assemblage of improvisors’ enunciation. It is in the context of this pragmatics that a constant and fruitful becoming can be outlined. It is also in it that the rhythms between the milieus are established and styles emerge. It is, therefore, a matter of subtracting, restricting the constants and placing them in variation, emptying the form and overloading: replacing the matter-form pair with the material-energy pair” (Costa 2016, 11).

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Orquestra Errante constitutes the subjects (their biographies and personal personalities) brings long-term memories and images (systems and languages with their materials and procedures); the immediate past (which includes what is produced by the other improvisors) brings memories and images of the present performance and enables real-time decisions that aim for the future. This same past allows, to a certain extent, some planning of future actions. In this sense, improvisation takes place in an environment of multiplicities as several mental images are generated simultaneously. The performer’s awareness continues to make choices that result from focusing on processes (intentional perception). In view of the profusion of mental images (sound, visual, tactile, etc.) generated in the performance environment from the sound flow, the floating attention must make choices in real time that are necessarily conditioned by emotional factors. Thought wanders through different mental planes: perception, attention and focus, concentration, meditation, emotion, affects, and intuition. In an improvisation, the idea is to exist in the collective, in the crowd: the individual only produces him- or herself in the collective by producing something with others. From another perspective, improvisation is of no use, in the commercial and pragmatic sense of the term. It does not create products to be sold. Free improvisation is an end in itself. Perhaps it will establish a conduct, be it a cure, a policy, or a pedagogy—but a pedagogy in which no “content” is taught. In it, dynamisms, relationships, processes, and flows are at work. As a metaphor of thought or thought itself, improvisation is clearly a collective assemblage of enunciation. In a more explicitly political way, free improvisation can also be thought of as a kind of anarchic territory analogous to the idea of a temporary autonomous zone (TAZ)9 in which there is no place for private ownership of the means of production, copyright, the mystification of competences, or the sacralisation and fetishisation of the work of art or the figure of the artist as a genius. It is possible to further deepen the relationship between the concept of assemblage and the geographical ideas of territory, environment, location, and zone, since free improvisation can also be thought of as a heterotopy. This is a concept of human geography, elaborated by the philosopher Michel Foucault, which describes places and spaces that function under non-hegemonic conditions, as attainable temporary utopias. The machinic agency of free improvisation could therefore be thought of as this type of mobile and provisional place where actions take place. To quote Hakim Bey, “the TAZ is like an uprising which does not engage directly with the State, a guerrilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere/ elsewhen, before the State can crush it. Because the State is concerned primarily with Simulation rather than substance, the TAZ can ‘Occupy’ these areas 9 According to John Jordan, editor of the anarchist website Beautiful Trouble, the term temporary autonomous zone (TAZ) was coined in 1990 by poet, anarcho-immediatist, and Sufi scholar Hakim Bey; it seeks to preserve the creativity, energy, and enthusiasm of autonomous uprisings without replicating the inevitable betrayal and violence that has been the reaction to most revolutions throughout history. The answer, according to Bey, lies in refusing to wait for a revolutionary moment, and instead to create spaces of freedom in the immediate present while avoiding direct confrontation with the state (Jordan 2020).

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Rogério Luiz Moraes Costa clandestinely and carry on its festal purposes for quite a while in relative peace. . . . As soon as the TAZ is named (represented, mediated), it must vanish” (Bey [1991] 2009, 80).

Figure 23.1.

Orquestra Errante as assemblage: an environment of resistance

Figure 23.2.

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Figure 23.1. An occupation in the city of São Bernardo, Brazil, next to a middle-class neighbourhood. Homeless worker’s movement (MTST). Figure 23.2. Orquestra Errante: performance at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism, University of São Paulo, Brazil, 10 October 2019.

Orquestra Errante Figure 23.2 shows a presentation by Orquestra Errante at the University of São Paulo; one can see the rhizomatic nature of the machinic assemblage that connects architecture, bodies, individuals, groups, instruments, movements, objects, looks, and so on. As I have stated in another text: The collective free improvisation of the Orquestra Errante can be considered as a smooth space. It is smooth because there are no stretch marks. There are no measurements, hierarchies, pre-established functions and previous stratifications. In the performances of the orchestra form is formed from the immanent movements of performance. In performance thought as smooth time space, heterogeneous flows and energies confront their potential differences and asymmetries. It is this game of differences that enables the movement and composes the assemblages. These assemblages come about through listening, talking and gaming of differences. The free improvisation of the Orquestra Errante is not intended to be universal, but rather local. Absolutely local and open to contingencies. It is a singular and shared space of public and private experience, of negotiation of alterities and subjectivation. (Costa 2019b, 549)

Figure 23.3.

In another photo from the same presentation (figure 23.3) it is possible to see musicians interacting in an unconventional way in a unique space that is not traditionally focused on musical performances; this image clearly introduces the idea of a machinic assemblage that integrates and relates human and non-human elements (bodies, emotions, instruments, space, architecture, acoustics, audience, works of art, etc.). Deleuze and Guattari write:

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Figure 23.3. Orquestra Errante: performance at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism, University of São Paulo, Brazil, 10 October 2019. Orquestra Errante: performance at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism, University of São Paulo, Brazil, 10 October 2019.

Rogério Luiz Moraes Costa On a first, horizontal, axis, an assemblage comprises two segments, one of content, the other of expression. On the one hand it is a machinic assemblage of bodies, of actions and passions, an intermingling of bodies reacting to one another; on the other hand it is a collective assemblage of enunciation, of acts and statements, of incorporeal transformations attributed to bodies. Then on a vertical axis, the assemblage has both territorial sides, or reterritorialized sides, which stabilize it, and cutting edges of deterritorialization, which carry it away. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 88)

In free improvisation music is always thought of as an action, a becoming. In Deleuzian terms we could say that the environment of free improvisation could be thought of as a plane of consistency composed as a block of space-time, indefinable in its contours, where improvisors perform and where different energies, singular attitudes, thoughts, connections, and personal and collective stories coexist. From this perspective, the plane is pure virtuality while each performance is a possible actualisation. And the plane depends essentially on desire. Therefore, improvisation itself could be thought as a machinic assemblage of desire.10 Given the dynamic nature of the plane of improvisation, one can see how much it depends upon the assemblage of desire and the extent to which desire is the necessary and almost sufficient condition for the practice of free improvisation. It is from the activation of desire that the environment of free improvisation will be constructed. It is what makes it possible to connect disparate and independent components and lines. To quote Deleuze and Guattari again: “The assemblage is between two layers, between two strata; on one side it faces the strata . . . , but the other side faces something else, the body without organs or plane of consistency” (1987, 40). As an empirical relational musical practice, performances are temporal and spatially localised in the here and now. This here is multidirectional and this now is an intense present crossed by the energies of various pasts—of the individual members, of the relationships between them, the memories of the whole group—that cross it (this now) and compose it, and by the future that it projects. Mariana Carvalho, a member of Orquestra Errante, in an informal interview11 remarks: “it is a space in which I feel very comfortable . . . I do not know . . . depending on the day, letting flow what is happening inside me. . . . For many years I went to the rehearsals soon after therapy. Together with the research that I was doing about eutonia, playing in the orchestra began to be a laboratory for me. I would think: ‘Ok, I will not think too rationally, I will let it manifest what is happening inside me’” (in Costa 2019b, 545, reproduced with emendations).

10 I have elaborated this relation between desire and improvisation in my 2016 book Música errante: “It can be seen . . . , given the dynamic nature of the plan, how much [the plan] depends on an assemblage of desire and to what extent desire is the necessary and almost sufficient condition for the practice of free improvisation, since this is a doing, a continuous action. Desire is what moves the process and gets to be confused with it. It is from the desire that the environment of free improvisation will be built. It is what makes it possible to connect disparate and independent components and lines” (Costa 2016, 71). 11 The interviews from which the three following quotations were taken were conducted informally in Portuguese by me with members of the group and were published in English in Costa (2019b).

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Orquestra Errante Orquestra Errante is a space of subjectivation and interaction. Free improvisation is thought of as a machinic assemblage of desire in an environment in which collective, cooperative, and shared creative powers are exercised, where empirical activism takes place through listening, playing, and conversation. In one example that can be listened to on SoundCloud (Costa 2019a), the Orquestra Errante used a popular Paraguayan song as a trigger for its improvisation. This performance is part of Migue Antar’s PhD research, which is being developed under my supervision. The process of interference between free improvisation and the idiomatic territory of Paraguayan music involves an emotional, rational, and corporal experience with the repertoire. To guarantee this type of involvement, the group was prepared for the performance through a process that involved listening to recordings of the song, learning about its socio-cultural context, and reading a score prepared by Migue. Only after that did the orchestra give the performance. Migue’s proposal unleashes in the Orquestra Errante environment an interactive process of collective creation that unfolds from his musical and personal biography. This kind of experience reinforces the idea of Orquestra Errante as a space of collective subjectivation. From the point of view of the individual performer, this space of subjectivation is activated through relationships and interactions with the other: other performers, spaces, instruments, architecture, and audiences. About this kind of environment Migue Antar, says that: it influences a lot, it changes ways of thinking, ideas of music, the conception of musical making. . . . The doing and thinking about music are collective. . . . This is very cool because it is in this exchange of ideas that we are forming these new conceptions of music. . . . There is a very strong political issue, which is to give voice to the collective . . . in this exchange there is a growth that influences me today in all other musical contexts where I act. An aesthetic ideal is more a sensation of freedom. It means to be able—from nothing, or from any proposal, or from the use of triggers—to discover this aesthetic of doing together. (Costa 2019b, 547, reproduced with emendations)

The ideas of judgement and evaluation are absent from our free improvisation practices. In place of right and wrong and the judgements derived from reference repertoires, there is collective creation in real time driven by asymmetries and potential differences. This type of environment, built collectively and collaboratively, is clearly related to a political and ethical positioning that questions power structures and promotes modes of micropolitical cooperation that, evoking Rolnik’s thought, establish a clinical-aesthetic-political pragmatics among its members, acting as a kind of antidote against the corruption of the desire undertaken by the macro- and micropolitics12 of contemporary capitalism. Stênio Biazon is another member of Orquestra Errante; he says: 12 On the relations between macro- and micropolitics, Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 204) say: “Supple segmentarity has nothing to do with the imaginary, and micropolitics is no less extensive or real than macropolitics. Politics on the grand scale can never administer its molar segments without also dealing with the micro-injections or infiltrations that work in its favor or present an obstacle to it; indeed, the larger the molar aggregates, the greater the molecularization of the agencies they put into play.”

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Rogério Luiz Moraes Costa “I’m interested in the anti-institutional side, in the anarchist sense that it is necessary to do in the present what you would expect from politics. Orquestra Errante realises these relations in a horizontal way and it is a field open to contestation . . . it is a place of intense discussion. Horizontal relations require that nothing be inviolable. This is part of a certain ethical project of life that [Orquestra Errante] is doing in the present” (Costa 2019b, 548, reproduced with emendations). Let me briefly describe the general characteristics of the day-to-day activities of Orquestra Errante: There are regular rehearsals every Thursday from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. at the Music Department of the university. There is practically no institutional link between the group and the university. Most members of the group are graduates or undergraduate students of the Music Department, but there are also members from outside the department and even outside the university. No registration is required, there is no selection or evaluation processes, no grades or lists of presence, no discipline syllabus or programme of activities. It is an autonomous and horizontal group that remains active, solely and exclusively, due to the commitment of its members. The members become part of the group as soon as they decide to participate in the rehearsals with some regularity. In another text, I wrote of this structure: In fact, participation in this orchestra could become an obstacle to a type of training focused on excellence, rigor and homogenization of an instrumental technique that aims to create musicians who are entirely dedicated to the reproduction of the traditional European repertoire. [Since the group does not aim for excellence] there is no right or wrong, no minimum technical level is required and musicians are encouraged to extrapolate traditional techniques. In [Orquestra Errante] the instruments—which can be traditional, hybrid, invented, etc.—are like tools of the interactive game of creation in real time and can be regarded as “power plants” of sound, territories of experimentation. (Costa 2019b, 555n16)

The power relations in Orquestra Errante take place in the most dialogical, democratic, and horizontal way possible. Through the discussion and conversation processes that occur during the rehearsals, Orquestra Errante members themselves establish criteria for collective evaluation that include responsibility and commitment. It is worth mentioning the informality and freedom with which these conversations are conducted, which makes each rehearsal a unique story. There is no right way of conducting rehearsals and conversations are constituted as relaxed and humorous moments for the exchange of ideas, sensations, and experiences. At the same time, they are a fundamental part of the orchestra’s activity and guarantee the dialogical, democratic, non-hierarchical, and horizontal character of this environment. Therefore, the artistic activities13 of the Orquestra can be thought as an assemblage that functions as a strategy 13 The presentations are held on a non-regular basis following proposals by members of the group (didactic concerts held at the Music Department of the University of São Paulo, cultural centres, schools, or spaces dedicated to experimental music) or are given at events related to the activities organised by the research group to which Orquestra Errante is linked, NuSom (see http://www2.eca. usp.br/nusom/producoes-musica).

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Orquestra Errante of resistance, and also because it takes the form of a rhizome. In the account above, I hope to have shown that the practices developed at Orquestra Errante constitute a type of improvising assemblage capable of facing, in its proportions, the corruption of desire undertaken by the macro- and micropolitics of contemporary capitalism, thought here—especially in Brazil 2019, during Bolsonaro’s term—as a kind of totalitarian assemblage. References Bey, Hakim [Peter Lamborn Wilson]. (1991) 2009. TAZ: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism. Anarchist Library. Accessed 17 September 2020. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/ library/hakim-bey-t-a-z-the-temporaryautonomous-zone-ontological-anarchypoetic-terrorism.pdf. First published 1991 (New York: Autonomedia). Costa, Rogério. 2016. Música errante: O jogo da improvisação livre. São Paulo: Editora Perspectiva. ———. 2019a. “Improvisação sobre canção paraguaia.” Soundcloud audio file, 8:02, posted by “rogerio moraes costa,” 25 January 2019. Accessed 17 September 2020. https://soundcloud.com/ rogeriomoraescosta/improvisacao-sobrecancao-paraguaia. ———. 2019b. “Orquestra Errante: A Musical Practice Deeply Rooted in Life.” In Sonologia: Proceedings of the International Conference on Sound Studies, edited by Fernando Iazzetta, Davi Donato, Henrique Souza Lima, and Valéria Bonafé, 542–62. São Paulo: Nusom, University of São Paulo.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Minuit). Jordan, John. 2020. “Theory: Temporary Autonomous Zones.” Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution. Accessed 17 November. 2020. https:// beautifultrouble.org/theory/temporaryautonomous-zone/. Laboratório de Política, Comportamento e Mídia. 2020. “Bolsonarismo: O novo fascismo brasileiro.” Off·lattes. Accessed 17 September 2020. https://offlattes. com/archives/2975. Rolnik, Suely. 2018. Esferas da insurreição: Notas para uma vida não cafetinada. São Paulo: N-1 Edições. YouTube. 2017. “‘As minorias tem que se curvar para maiorias’—Bolsonaro.” YouTube video, 0:58, posted by “¡Viva la Revolución!,” 12 October 2017. Accessed 17 September 2020. https://youtube.com/ watch?v=nmApqz0OgAs.

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Subjectification, Desubjectification, Assemblages* Peter Pál Pelbart PUC São Paulo, Brazil

In this chapter, I will discuss the relationship between life, subjectification, and assemblages before showing their articulation by means of a specific artistic example, which will occupy the second part of this chapter. Deleuze said he was a vitalist, a claim he repeated throughout his life. From a philosophical point of view, in Deleuze’s writings there isn’t a concept of life in general; rather, we can talk of dominant types of life, as in Spinoza or Nietzsche: high/low, noble/slave, hyper-abundant/impoverished, healthy/sick, intense/ inert, active/reactive, affirmative/negative, fortunate/unfortunate, strong/ weak. Each couple ought to be understood in a manner almost contrary to common sense. Let’s take an example from the Dialogues: In life there is a sort of awkwardness, a delicacy of health, a frailty of constitution, a vital stammering which is someone’s charm. Charm is the source of life just as style is the source of writing. Life is not your history—those who have no charm have no life, it is as though they are dead. But the charm is not the person. It is what makes people be grasped as so many combinations and so many unique chances from which such a combination has been drawn. It is a throw of the dice which necessarily wins . . . . Thus, through each fragile combination a power of life is affirmed with a strength, an obstinacy, an unequalled persistence in the being. (Deleuze and Parnet 2007, 5)

Awkwardness, frailty, stammering, none of these are a deficiency or a sign of vital decline; on the contrary, they are conditions for the manifestation of a different power. To set free other intensities, it is sometimes necessary to undo the athletic armoured organic body and its constituted form. When functional organisation is too balanced, it prevents drifts and inflections. What variation is still possible? What becomings? What experiments? In more conceptual terms: to what differentiations is this life, this body, individual or collective, still open? What virtuality does it bring? What degree of creativity or surprise does it contain or is it capable of sustaining? How can it escape the straitjacket of its current form, its organisation, its consolidated structure? If creative plasticity is one criterion for assessing the type of life present in the body, the other is the

* Translated from the French by Paolo Giudici.

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Peter Pál Pelbart degree of intensity, because intensity is, ultimately, the immanent criterion for assessing one type of life or another, its “height.” Hence the question, how will this or that existence attain its proper power, or fulfil it? These questions cannot have theoretical answers; rather, they involve a practical experimentation that each singular life must pursue, without any model ever being able to serve as an example or formula. Any ideal would send us back to what we are trying to avoid: transcendence. Hence, the necessary detours, internal and external, sometimes enigmatic or aberrant (crossing the wall, undoing the face, undoing the body), the logic of which only appears after the fact, sometimes when one reaches a certain life note (like a music note), vibration, intensity, affect. Deleuze’s books are full of examples, literary or not, from schizophrenics to nomads, from small children to the dying, from traitors to misfits, from Nietzsche to Artaud, from Chaos to Chaoids (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 208), from Lenz’s walk to knight errants (Deleuze and Guattari [1977] 1983, 2). In all cases, there is an excess, a line of flight, a movement of deterritorialisation, an aspiration towards the outside, a collapse, or the so-called “aberrant movements,” to which David Lapoujade (2017) gave a central role. But there is also a vital collection, as of honey (Deleuze and Parnet 1997, 2–3): “to release what can be saved from life, that which can save itself by means of power and stubbornness, to extract from the event that which is not exhausted by the happening, to release from becoming that which will not permit itself to be fixed in a term. A strange ecology, tracing a line of writing, music or painting. These are ribbons stirred by the wind. A little air passes” (ibid., 75). Against a Deleuzian vulgate with an over-excited, positive, productive, active vision, one cannot exaggerate in Deleuze’s writings the importance of a more sober and passive series: “improduction” (the body without organs) (Deleuze and Guattari [1977] 1983, 8), contracted contemplation (the sunflower that “contemplates” the elements of the cosmos from which it originates), stupidity (Flaubert, individualisation, and the ground), illness (Nietzsche and the prospects that a diseased condition opens up), exhaustion (Beckett and the end of possibilities), the penultimate sigh (Dickens’s drowned man who, having once touched death, places himself beyond good and evil, a life). The challenge is to tear life out of its human, all too human straitjacket (scientificist, organicist, determinist, finalised, anthropocentric) and return life to the material and immaterial, semiotic and biochemical assemblages in which non-linear processes envelop it. To quote François Zourabichvili (2012, 185): “There is no life in general—life is not an undifferentiated absolute but a multiplicity of heterogeneous planes of existence.” Further, this is what prevents an individual from coinciding with itself because, as for Gilbert Simondon, potential energy is not exhausted during a process within an actual individual that is nothing but a moment in a ceaseless process of individuation. This boundary between the limit and the unlimited (apeiron), the split between the individual and the meta-stable matter from which it issues and that, at the same time, composes and accompanies the individual, shows how far away one is from a reunion with identity. The matrix

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Subjectification, Desubjectification, Assemblages of non-coincidence-with-oneself, which was almost a cliché in contemporary thought even before Freud, does not necessarily throw us into negative egology (so close to a negative theology), despite being frequent in some psychoanalytical or metaphysical theorisations on the subject as lack-of-being. On the contrary, it points towards an excess from which we often witness an overflow in various clinical, aesthetic, and even political situations. This is how Josep Rafanell i Orra comments on the non-coincidence-withoneself: An individual cannot consist of itself. We are beings only in ways of being [manières d’être], or in the relationships of composition that derive from the fact that to exist is to make exist the existence of other beings. What matters to us here is not what “is,” but the ways in which what is can become within relationships of existence. In other words, it is the virtuality of the experience of beings that has the most reality, since it is through it that worlds are realised as they are made [en train de se faire]. We never experience what we are, but always what we are becoming somewhere. (Rafanell i Orra 2018, 73, my translation)

Such a dimension of virtuality of existence depends on an unpredictable actualisation, which is directed towards how rather than what we are, and above all towards what we are becoming. And this is how Tiqqun puts it: “‘My’ form-of-life does not relate to what I am, but to how . . . I am what I am” (2010, 23). In other words, beyond attributable predicates that appear as facts (large, ugly, intelligent, old, useless, chatty), what matters is identifying modality. This is perhaps the most difficult thing to grasp in a life: the difference between the fact and the how that the fact is covering up. It is indeed the singularity of each life that is erased when it is “represented” by categories that intend to define its identity. Finally, Deleuze and Guattari say the same in their own way: “the individuation of a life is not the same as the individuation of the subject that leads it or serves as its support” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 261). It is clear that life and subject do not unfold on the same plane and, thus, that they produce two series: on the one hand, life, plane of consistency, affects, event, Aion; on the other hand, subject, substance, form, Chronos. To capture the passage from one plane to the other, or vice versa, we must start from the somewhat vague notion of subjectivity. We will, therefore, generate two opposite but sometimes simultaneous movements: desubjectification and subjectification. This is not the right place to trace the occurrence of these notions in Deleuze’s work; suffice it to say, its first appearance comes rather late in his oeuvre and is partly indebted to his association with Guattari and his book on Foucault. Let’s get to the central questions: what are the effects of subjectification or desubjectification on the vital matter they inflect? Does desubjectification crush a vital dimension, or is it the condition of its emergence? More specifically: What does a capitalist desubjectification destroy? What does a schizo-desubjectification release? On the other hand: What does an identitarian subjectification close? What does a nomadic subjectification open?

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Peter Pál Pelbart Let’s consider the destructive effects of colonialism on Indigenous or Black cultures during slavery, or simply the deterritorialising effects of capitalism. These are brutal, destructive desubjectifications; however, one cannot dissociate them from the processes of subjectification operating within the affected populations that start from the heteroclite fragments through which these populations subjectify themselves differently under given conditions, such as jazz or candomblé for black diasporas, the indigenous becoming of “whitewashed” populations, or, on the contrary, chauvinism and religious fundamentalism in East European populations after the fall of the Berlin Wall. One might sketch from there a simple typology: on one side, identitarian subjectifications (subjected) and heretical subjectifications (non-subjected); on the other side, capitalist desubjectification (subjected) and nomadic desubjectification (non-subjected). We get the following scheme:

Subjectification

Subjected (negative)

Non-subjected (positive)

identitarian (reterritorialising)

heretical (deterritorialising)

Desubjectification capitalist

nomadic

The affinity between negative desubjectification and identitarian subjectification is evident, for instance in capitalist deterritorialisation and in ethnic or medical reterritorialisation, as in “I am Hungarian” or “I am HIV-positive.” Less obvious, however, is the relationship between nomadic desubjectification and heretical subjectification. Here is Nijinsky’s example quoted in Anti-Oedipus: “I am Apis. I am an Egyptian. I am an Indian. I am a Red Indian. I am a Negro. I am a Chinese. I am a Japanese. I am a foreigner and a stranger. I am a sea bird. I am a land bird. I am Tolstoy’s tree. I am Tolstoy’s roots.” “I am both wife and husband. I love the wife. I love the husband” (Deleuze and Guattari [1977] 1983, 77, quotation as translated in Nijinsky 1999, 44, 46). This does not lead to a subject but is a war machine in itself. Don’t we see in it a heretical or schizosubjectification that effectively operates as a war machine? Deleuze and Guattari used the terms subjectification and desubjectification in a much less systematic way than these remarks suggest. The couple deterritorialisation-reterritorialisation precedes and even fulfilled the function of what one might have later called desubjectification and resubjectification. Subjectivity was present in Deleuze’s lexicon since his first published book, on Hume, long before this notion was extended with Guattari to also cover a collective plane (communist subjectivity, capitalist subjectivity, etc.). Nevertheless, since the book on Nietzsche, the subject suffers a philosophical suspicion that will lead to completely different notions in Difference and Repetition and Logic of Sense. The best explanation of the method behind these terminological displacements can be found in Deleuze’s contribution to the journal Topoi in response to Jean-Luc Nancy’s question “who comes after the subject?” Deleuze answered: “a concept is not created and does nor disappear at whim, but to the

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Subjectification, Desubjectification, Assemblages extent that new functions in new fields dismiss it relatively. That is also why it is never very interesting to criticize a concept: it is better to construct new functions and discover new fields that make the concept useless or inadequate” (Deleuze 2007, 349). Isn’t this what Deleuze did with the concept of subject throughout his writings instead of criticising it? Thus, the subject that concentrated both universalising and individualising functions gives way to a transcendental field without subject, characterised by pre-individual singularities, non-personal individuations, and haecceities. Its very notion becomes incidental, if not obsolete, as Deleuze replaces the grammatical, psychological, and epistemological subject with a field unfolding on events within a determined assemblage (Zourabichvili 2012, 145–47).1 This being said, it is legitimate to ask what the point of getting rid of the subject is—one of the major effects of Deleuze’s philosophical project—if one needs to meet subjectifications and individuations later on. Except when subjectifications are in close relationship to desubjectifications, they usually refer to events. In answer to Antonio Negri’s question “What politics can carry into history the splendor of events and subjectivity?” (Deleuze 1995, 176), Deleuze replies, “One might equally well speak of new kinds of event, rather than processes of subjectification: events that can’t be explained by the situations that give rise to them, or into which they lead” (ibid.). Changing the context, I wonder whether we could not think in these terms of Marielle Franco, the politician and human rights activist in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro who was assassinated in 2018. Was she a subject or, rather, a necropolitical desubjectification and nomadic subjectification? She was not a personalist leader who became a political subject; rather she is a voice that carries several minor voices, several tribes, several struggles of women, Black, homeless, lesbian, dispossessed but also empowered women: the becoming-woman of politics, the becoming-Black of activism. When negative desubjectification triggers a non-identitarian, heretical subjectification, it can refer to a collective assemblage and several events. We can even consider the example of Brazilian ex-President Lula da Silva, who declared he had become an idea going beyond his individualised constituency that, like a gas, could not be imprisoned or contained but would spread, as the idea of the Arab Revolt did with Lawrence of Arabia. The strength of an event is that it does not belong to anyone, because what belongs to it is the power of collective desubjectification and subjectification, a biopolitical war machine in collision with dominant necropolitics.

1 “The individual is constituted only by being assembled [en s’agençant], it exists only insofar as it is caught up from the outset in assemblages. The field of individual experience oscillates between a retreat into preconceived (and consequently social) forms of thinking and behaving, and a spreading out across a plane of immanence where its becoming is inseparable from the lines of flight or the transversals it traces among “things,” freeing their power [pouvoir] of affection and in this way recovering a power [puissance] to feel and to think (a mode of individuation by haecceities that is distinct from the individual’s way of orienting itself by means of identifying characteristics—ATP [Deleuze and Guattari 1987] 260 ff )” (Zourabichvili 2012, 146).

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Peter Pál Pelbart I conclude this part with a quotation from Giorgio Agamben, which brings us closer to the topic of the second part, the artistic field. He takes up, in his own way but not without interest, the binomial subjectification-desubjectification in the work of Fernando Pessoa, the great Portuguese poet whom José Gil introduced to Deleuze. Agamben (1999, 119) wrote about what he calls Pessoa’s “incomparable phenomenology of heteronymic depersonalization” according to which there is a “psychosomatic” Pessoa, a radical desubjectification, a subjectification of Alberto Caeiro, and a return to Pessoa who no longer is the individual we started from, but someone who must “respond to his own desubjectification” (ibid.). This would be “a genuine ethos of poetry” (ibid.).

Ueinzz I now come to theatre. It has been twenty-two years since I became part of Ueinzz, a theatre company composed of fragile, vulnerable lives in the balance that one insists sometimes on calling psychotic. We also have in our group professional artists, psychologists, psychoanalysts, performers, philosophers, and costume designers. Nevertheless, the company functions in such a way that all these titles or diagnoses fall away from the very beginning and collapse (nomadic desubjectification) in favour of other configurations (heretical subjectifications, individual or collective). The multiple voices, delusions, soliloquies, silences, ruptures of meaning, stuttering, and cries come into contact according to a logic that is non-identitarian, non-psychological, non-intersubjective, and I would even say, non-theatrical. Rather, it is an open assemblage where massive or wandering bodies, shrivelled or open to all that comes, enter a situation of reciprocal affection allowing schizoscenic movements and events. This is the most extravagant example: In 2011, the tiny Guattarian mollecular organization from Helsinki, coordinated by the fertile imagination of Virtanen Akseli, proposed a cruise from Lisbon (Portugal) to the seaport city of Santos (close to São Paulo, Brazil). The idea was that during the journey we would together (the members of Ueinzz and mollecular organization and the French collective presqueruines) make a film on the ship and stage a play, both of which would be inspired by Kafka’s novel America. When Akseli asked me if he could confirm the booking of the cruise, he added a little savoury note: is this project impossible enough to be good or even desirable? It is not a bad criterion, desirability . . . it is almost like a revolution. . . . What Kant admired in the French Revolution wasn’t the concrete outcome, but that the emotion of knowing the revolution was happening increased its desirability among those who contemplated it from afar . . . but we should be more modest. . . . The film project was taken from a short text by Félix Guattari entitled “Project for a Film by Kafka” (2009) in which he tries to imagine what a film by Kafka would look like. As soon as we landed in Lisbon on 24 November 2011, our three collectives embarked on Splendour of the Seas. This is, very succinctly, the context of our micropolitical experiment. To understand it, however, we need briefly to consider what a cruise is, a mode

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Subjectification, Desubjectification, Assemblages of travel I had absolutely ignored before this adventure. Almost two thousand people confined in the pseudo-luxury of a ten-storey floating hotel, velvety corridors, immense chandeliers hanging everywhere, gilded flights of stairs, panoramic elevators, open-air pools surrounded by giant screens, imperial saunas, bars, casinos, and restaurants everywhere, music and shows, bingo and balls, themed poolside parties, dinner with the captain, equator-crossing ceremonies with clinking glasses. The hallucinogenic overdose of entertainment stimuli, incessant gastronomic filling, and imperative of pleasure produce a complete saturation of the physical, mental, and psychic space of the passengers. This true semiotic bombardment cannot be escaped, even in one’s personal cabin, where the sound penetrates from the corridor speakers announcing the next game of bingo on the fifth floor, and where the television only transmits details of the new features of the ship itself (in the pool, for instance) through the voice of the journalists onboard. It is capitalist desubjectification, touristic bulimic subjectification. The floating entertainment machine, however, is nothing extraordinary, only the condensation of our daily world, of contemporary capitalism in its optimal functioning. It is the imperative of enjoyment, “your smile is my smile”—which one of our actors fittingly translated as “your card is my card.” Of course, all this works only thanks to an army of seven hundred underpaid employees available to customers 24/7, living in a basement forbidden to passengers and circulating everywhere with a smile on their lips. Personally, I experienced our embarkation as an individual and collective shipwreck. Of course, we were stunned by the dimensions, gigantism, and abundance, and the actors were often amazed to be greeted with such kindness and care—if someone, in the middle of the meal, asks the waiter for ten desserts, the waiter brings him ten desserts. Ultimately, the goal is to satisfy the customer, as absurd as his or her whims may appear. However, this kind of inclusion through consumption and its grotesque side only served to highlight the contrast between our group, with its singular fragility, and the luxury everywhere conspicuous. Here were two poles, two worlds, brought into an inevitable friction, an asymmetrical battle in which we were defeated in advance. We could not face the fight; we barely knew if we would survive it. It is the triumphant fascist industry of political exposition, as Pasolini said (Didi-Huberman 2009, 32). Surely enough, we had a project; we weren’t just passengers or tourists. Even though the context was unfavourable to the project, it led us to double our efforts in carrying out the tasks towards “completing” the mission: the objective, the goal, being that of extracting the most from this context of containment and availability (for once, all members of the group were finally together all the time with no way to escape). This allows, at least theoretically, a work to be made. On the other hand, below the surface, there is an irritation against this compulsion to perform tasks at all costs, to make, conclude, infuse meaning beforehand in a context that was deprived of it. . . . For my part, I was seized, not by laziness, but by a kind of Bartlebian refusal, as if “I would prefer not to” make a film, stage a play, succeed—an anarchistic desire, or rather, the desire to dive into another, non-productive dynamic, a desire for desubjectification,

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Peter Pál Pelbart dissolution, “improduction,” disconnection. Gradually, we realised that everything we had planned had not succeeded, had worked badly, or had simply revealed its laughable or absurd dimension, leading us to the troubling, inevitable, and necessary question, what exactly are we doing here? What a crazy idea to put ourselves in such a labyrinth of coercion and suffocation, in the midst of two thousand tourists, in what an actor rightly called “a contemplastic world”! One could not define this impotence any better, forced to contemplate a world made of plastic. . . . And now, how could we escape from this situation of saturation as there was no exit, surrounded as we were by a sea that is only decoration, and that does not evoke any externality, any outside? It ought to be said: everything on the liner is made to turn us away from the sea. It is the absolute inside, pleasure and consumption impervious to all externality: the hypnosis of the casino, the giant screen at the open-air pool projecting precisely what is close by, the sea, and so on. At some point, in the room on the fourth floor where we rehearsed and took refuge to resist the athletic or flaccid normopathy that surrounded us, something undoubtedly dissolved inside us, between us. Everything was derailing: roles, functions, guides, goals, senses, reasons. A kind of viscous collapse, which called into question the “what,” “what’s the point,” “how,” “where,” “when,” and “who,” even if we occupied a delimited space, according to our routine: rehearsals in the morning, filming in the afternoon, conversations at night. Despite this consensual grid, some of us experienced an involuntary chaotisation, a subtle catastrophe, with terrors, anxieties, nausea, and claustrophobia, and “nothing is possible” breaking in; as one of the actors put it, “we had everything to make it better.” She had been walking crooked like the tower of Pisa since she boarded; every time she found herself in front of a huge corridor looking for her room among hundreds of other rooms, she whispered between her teeth, “death row.” In any case, from this collective chaosmotic desubjectification, we expected nothing more. While the ship was operating perfectly, we had been shipwrecked. Was it necessary to oppose such invasive surroundings with a play, even if inspired by Kafka (which author better than him to express such claustrophobia, an army of servants, such a labyrinth of meanings) . . . to make a film that would rival the becoming-cinema of the world, this contemplastic world? Or rather, instead of adding something, should we simply subtract, evade, relying on tiny detours, interruptions, even on the roar of an exhausted actor if necessary, sunk in the minimum of the minimum, of a bare life. We had to learn how to navigate this other non-predicative vital plane. When Deligny defines his attempts with autistic people as a raft, he explains how important it is that in this rudimentary structure, the logs are “tied rather loosely, so that when mountains of water come crashing down, the water passes in between the outspread logs” (Deligny [1978] 2007, 1127, my translation). And he adds, “When problems come crashing down, we do not close ranks—we do not join the trunks—to form a concerted platform. Quite the opposite. We only maintain the project that ties us together. Here you can see the fundamental importance of the ties, the way of connection, and also the distance that logs can have between each other. The tie must be loose enough and not become loose” (1127–28, my translation).

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Subjectification, Desubjectification, Assemblages I would say that the tie must be loose enough to not get loose. So, to go on a postmodern cruise, perhaps you need to reinvent the raft. On our return, we parted ways with our director, who needed the spectacularisation of a cruise but could not bear a raft. Perhaps the formula that best describes the process we went through on the ship and its solution can be found in Deleuze and Guattari.2 It is n – 1 where n represents a multiplicity (actors, materials, words, ideas, affects, group contours, etc.) and 1 represents an instance that overcodes the multiplicity by placing itself at its centre (the director). The same can be found everywhere: on one side, the people (multitude) and on the other, the president, the pope, the leader (but also a watchword, a doctrine, God, Oedipus, capital, the signifier, progress). Now, n – 1 consists precisely in the operation by which the One is subtracted, returning the multiplicity to itself. The n – 1 operation corresponded to a kind of desubjectification, where we abandoned the identity cloak that had identified us. Perhaps this is a condition for a new collective composition less centred on the subject, the I, or intersubjectivity, and more open to connections of a different order. It is not by chance that one of the strongest moments of the piece Quay of Sheep (later renamed Sheep Chaos) was created by an actor afflicted by upsetting thoughts while standing on a chair. Unlike Rodin’s Thinker, he holds his restless head with clenched hands, as if something was trying to break out. The others around him wonder what is happening, trying to guess the meaning of his gestures, “he meditates,” “he whispers a prophecy,” “he wants to send us a secret message,” “he just landed from another planet,” and so on. Suddenly, he lies down on the floor, moaning in pain. A tangle of red wool comes slowly out of his belly and is pulled in all directions. There are now a dozen of us, entangled in the middle of a red network, shapeless, moving, monstrous. Finally, we realise he has given birth to a thought. Here is a thought as an impersonal event, covered in blood, belonging to nobody, especially not to the person through whom it had to pass in order to be born. On the other hand, it is us who belong to this tangle of wool, to this thought, provided we drop our I. This event-thoughtnetwork, which in its material, emotional, and aesthetic density resembles the work of Brazilian artist Lygia Clark,3 will give rise to a plastic collective subjectification. It will hold for a while before fragmenting in other ways. Ultimately, we are not interested in the “who” (who thinks, who acts, who gives birth, the subject, the self, the actor, the actant, the company) but in life overflowing us all, the event to which the collective assemblage of enunciation gives rise— impersonal life, nomadic desubjectification, heretical resubjectification. This is how, in short, one might describe the movements of our schizoscenic raft. 2 “The multiple must be made, not by always adding a higher dimension, but rather in the simplest of ways, by dint of sobriety, with the number of dimensions one already has available—always n – 1 (the only way the one belongs to the multiple: always subtracted). Subtract the unique from the multiplicity to be constituted; write at n – 1 dimensions. A system of this kind could be called a rhizome” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 6). 3 For examples of Lygia Clark’s work, see the documentation of her major retrospective Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art, 1948–1988 (MoMA, New York 10 May–24 August 2014) at https://www.moma.org/ calendar/exhibitions/1422.

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Peter Pál Pelbart References Agamben, Giorgio. 2000. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. New York: Zone Books. First published 1998 as Quel che resta di Auschwitz: L’archivio e il testimone (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri). Deleuze, Gilles. 1995. “Control and Becoming.” In Negotiations: 1972–1990. Translated by Martin Joughin, 169–76. New York: Columbia University Press. Chapter first published 1990 as “Le Devenir révolutionnaire et les créations politiques” by Gilles Deleuze with Antonio Negri (Futur antérieur [1, Spring]: 100–108). Book first published 1990 as Pourparlers: 1972–1990 (Paris: Minuit). ———. 2007. “Response to a Question on the Subject.” In Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995, translated by Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina, edited by David Lapoujade, 349–51. Cambridge, MA: Semiotext(e). First published 1988 as “A Philosophical Concept . . . ,” translated by Julien Deleuze (Topoi 7 [2]: 111–12). Also republished in Who Comes After the Subject?, edited by Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy (London: Routledge 1991), 94–95. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. (1977) 1983. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1972 as Capitalisme et schizophrénie: L’anti-Œdipe (Paris: Minuit). Translation first published 1977 (New York: Viking Press). ———. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1994. What Is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1991 as Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Minuit). Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. 2007. Dialogues II. Translated by Hugh

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Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Rev. ed. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1977 as Dialogues (Paris: Flammarion). Deligny, Fernand. (1978) 2007. Le croire et le craindre. In Oeuvres, edited by Sandra Alvarez de Toledo, 1087–224. Paris: L’Arachnéen. Le croire et le craindre first published 1978 (Paris: Stock). Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2009. Survivance des lucioles. Paris: Minuit. Translated by Lia Swope Mitchell as Survival of the Fireflies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesita Press, 2018). Guattari, Félix. 2009. “Project for a Film by Kafka.” Translated by Jakub Zdebik. Deleuze and Guattari Studies 3 (2): 150–61. First published 2007 as “Projet pour un film de Kafka,” in Félix Guattari, Soixantecinq rêves de Franz Kafka (Paris: Lignes). Lapoujade, David. 2017. Aberrant Movements: The Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. Translated by Joshua David Jordan. Cambridge, MA: Semiotext(e). First published 2014 as Deleuze, les mouvements aberrants (Paris: Minuit). Nijinsky, Vaslav. 1999. The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky: Unexpurgated Edition. Translated by Kyril FitzLyon. Edited by Joan Acocella. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. First published 1995 as Nijinsky Cahiers (Arles, France: Actes Sud). Rafanell i Orra, Josep. 2018. Fragmenter le monde: Contribution à la commune en cours. Paris: Divergences. Tiqqun. 2010. Introduction to Civil War. Translated by Alexander R. Galloway and Jason E. Smith. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). First published 2001 as “Introduction à la guerre civile” and “Comment faire?” (Tiqqun 2). Zourabichvili, François. 2012. Deleuze: A Philosophy of the Event; Together with The Vocabulary of Deleuze. Translated by Kieran Aarons. Edited by Gregg Lambert and Daniel W. Smith. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. First published as Deleuze: Une philosophie de l’événement (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1994) and Le vocabulaire de Deleuze (Paris: Ellipses, 2003).

The Non-art of Tehching Hsieh Art as Life/Life as Art jan jagodzinski University of Alberta, Canada

Time One of the most obvious issues and paradoxes in performance art is the need to document the “happening.” The question of time plays a crucial role as the artist’s “presence” becomes represented in the mechanisms of capture: film, video, tape recording, in brief, documentation of all kinds. Time is a dominant trope in all performances, especially those of performance artist Tehching Hsieh (b. 1950). The time-image is a crucial factor in all performance art. To recall, Deleuze (1984) recognised that the time-image was already pre-figured in Kantian thought. As he says: “Time is no longer related to the movement which it measures, but movement is related to time which conditions it: this is the first great Kantian reversal in the Critique of Pure Reason” (ibid., vii). Yet, another Kantian reversal in this very Critique is the time relationship between the I that “thinks” and the ego. Although the ego is in time and is constantly changing, it is passive rather than active. In distinction, the I that “thinks” is active carrying out a synthesis of time, which happens “in” time by dividing up the past, present, and future at every instant. I and ego are related but are separated by a line of time under a condition of fundamental difference. The startling consequence is that “existence can never be determined as that of an active and spontaneous being” (Deleuze 1984, viii, emphasis added). You can’t necessarily “will” a change of the ego. The supposed determination of I think implies an indeterminate existence of I am. The I am (ego) that changes in time is not subject causally to the I think. One cannot constitute oneself “as a unique and active subject, but as a passive ego” (ibid., viii–ix). This split—active I and passive ego—can remain veiled over, simply as I am one in the chronological habituated time of a movement-image. Either they remain stitched together or this “split” is exposed when “time is out of joint” (Shakespeare [1623] 2005, 691). It is only when such a split happens—as an event—that the “I” affects the ego. Only then does “mind affect itself ” (auto-affection). Thought another way, it is only then that the Body without Organs (BwO) undergoes change at the neuronal level. There is an interiority (inner sense) of never-ending immutable time that is always dividing as an I and a non-I, and an exteriority of space that 361

jan jagodzinski supersedes any geometric co-ordinates. The movement back and forth over this “split” is a constant never-ending modulation, with an “event” happening in an in-between zone of indeterminacy. Thinking is thought through concepts (philosophy), functions (science), and sensations (art). From this initial insight from Kant, Deleuze draws various “both-and” variations in time as enfolded by Chronos-Aeon: movement-image and time-image. The consequences of Deleuze’s reworking of Kantian insights for performance raise many questions, which will help us grasp Hsieh’s performances as unique singularities.

Art as life Becoming animal? Tehching Hsieh’s six performances provide an extraordinary insight charting the transformation of “art as life” into “life as art,” a journey through various relations of speed and slowness (longitudes) and the intensive affects of becomings (latitude). In the first one-year performance, Cage Piece, the chronological passing of time is transformed into a virtuality of thought as all external inputs are withdrawn (no books, radio, television, magazines, as stated in his artistic contract); his movement is confined to a cell whose spatiality becomes inside as well as outside, as the cell is separated by an imaginary boundary he drew with his mind. His 54th Biennale retrospective in Venice in 2017, Doing Time, was appropriately named as there are many allusions to incarceration in Cage Piece: a photo of the scratch marks on the wall behind his bed to count the passing of days, the construction of the cell itself, the small single bed, the prisoner-like clothes he wore, and the numeric representation of the dates of his performance—9307892979—which was a label on his “prison overalls” and written on the wall behind him, suggesting both a prisoner number and possibly a social security number, which has an extra digit—as suggested by Frazer Ward (2012, 138). Hsieh lived and hallucinated in his head. Here “art as life” manifests itself as a collapse into Idea, but not into conceptual art (Zepke 2006). Rather, it leads to an auto-affection that is so deeply intensified that the “I” that thinks becomes delirious in its own right. We can imagine that Hsieh’s thoughts would be memories of his past and future. There is no record of what he actually thought, only a statement in which he says that such thought was “art time.” Hsieh also called this “wasting time,” by which he meant “free-thinking” about desires and dreams (nothing to do with “freedom” in the usual sense of free speech or imprisonment). His attempt was to “bring art and life together in time, and to be in this as process” (Hsieh quoted in Heathfield 2009, 329). But, as Leonard Lawlor (2009) has speculated, such auto-affection can lead to a becoming that is in tune with the animal. Hsieh is caged, he is a fugitive, he “captures” himself in this performance, he has to survive, just like a caged animal. When “let out of his cage” after a year, one has to suppose that Hsieh freed himself by “becoming Other,” with more choices open to him than when he first self-imposed his own

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The Non-art of Tehching Hsieh rules, suspending the (state) law as such and the identify of an “illegal alien” or “deportable alien.” Hsieh was not suicidal; a threshold would have to have been crossed for that to happen. The performance did not “break him,” but allowed him to make a “cut.” We can compare his ordeal with that of Nelson Mandela, whose incarceration also set the stage for his extraordinary leadership when it came “time.” Such a reading of Tehching Hsieh’s becoming-animal draws on quite a different grasp of the Duchampian ready-made than conceptual art finds its inspiration and justification in: namely, Duchamp’s ([1961] 1973, 141) insistence on the “anesthesia” of the object as information, promoting an anti-retinal antiaesthetic. As Stephen Zepke (2009b) shows, Félix Guattari’s (1995) version of a ready-made is quite the opposite: it becomes a refrain (ritornello), the double register of a detachment of the material object from its self-evident form, function, and meaning, opening up the ready-made to an assemblage of sensory affects that generate involuntary memories (reminiscences). Guattari calls this way of being, autopoietic heterogenesis. The affects generated by the ready-made go beyond the correlation of subject-object; rather “heterogeneous durations are produced as experience” (Zepke 2009b, 34, original emphasis). Zepke continues by showing how this way of understanding the ready-made (as an affectual phenomenon as opposed to a conceptual one) is already at work in animal behaviour that Deleuze and Guattari articulate in A Thousand Plateaus (1987). The animal singles out a material element from its surroundings and incorporates it into a refrain (ritornello) that express an existential territory. “Territorial marks are readymades. . . . the base or ground of art” (ibid., 316). The readymade’s expressive status seems confirmed when Hsieh says, “I was a prisoner in my studio, and felt very isolated. . . . [Cage Piece] was a way of making a form for how I felt” (Johnston 2010). The ready-made is the ground for the ontogenetic process that also includes within its aesthetic paradigm how “spectators” experience his caging—however, they do so only on certain invited days—like visitors to a zoo viewing a caged animal. His visitor-spectators (in effect) see “nothing”—only Hsieh lying or sleeping on his narrow bed. In this reading, Hsieh’s cell, as a ready-made, presents the transformation of “art into life” as an animal expression. It remakes the world as the cell becomes an element that is “cut” out of his studio space in Brooklyn. The performance becomes an aesthetic practice against the state—a “war machine” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 357). Joan Kee (2016) provides a compelling analysis of the “contracts” Hsieh writes for his one-year performances in the way they set out the set of rules and self-imposed orders that generate a “law” at odds with the state law, to the point of mocking the state by making an imitation wanted poster for his third performance, Outdoor, which reads, “Wanted by U.S. Immigration Services.” It provides a picture of Hsieh, a description of his physical characteristics, his violation (illegal entry to the US without a visa), and then a set of ten fingerprints with a number to call should he be spotted.

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jan jagodzinski Becoming an automaton The next performance, Punch Time Clock Piece, also recorded in Hsieh’s studio, is an inversion of the first: from incorporeality to corporeality. In relation to Deleuze’s Kantian reconstruction of the “cracked-up” subject, this would be the shift from the Cage performance that intensifies the ego (art as pure contemplation—“I am,” BwO set at 0), suspending the “I think,” to the intensification of the body: my body “thinks,” but my mind does not as it is unable “to think” anything other than a repetitive routinised ritual. The virtuality of mind is replaced with the actualisation of the body confined to the ritual of repetitively punching a timing clock (as found in a factory) every hour—Hsieh missed only 133 punches because he slept in, despite the eight alarm clocks to ensure otherwise. In the accompanying film, in which one snapshot is taken of Hsieh for every “punch,” these missed occasions appear as blank (dark) photos. These “misses” could be interpreted as “glitches”—precisely what prevents this piece from ever becoming “complete” as the ruptured excess always escapes documentation and can never be contained. Wearing a worker’s uniform displaying a number prominently, he became a “mindless automaton.” In the context of the ready-made, we do have the instrumentalisation of the punch clock machine as the apotheosis of Duchamp’s ([1961] 1973) strict claims that a ready-made is described “as a reaction of visual indifference,” subject to no judgement of taste, “a complete anaesthesia” (141), “it’s lack of uniqueness . . . delivering the same message” as information (142). There are no flights of the imagination here as in the Guattarian becoming-animal reinterpretation of the ready-made, but its inverse. The punch-clock is at centre stage of the performance, part of Hsieh’s assemblage of repetitive action, as is the camera that records the “history” of each “punch.” Placed on the left side of the image taken, it whirls menacingly in comparison to the body on the right, which flitters and fluctuates, like an animated Francis Bacon portrait. We have a remarkable, strange juxtaposition of the ready-made as a technological supplement that controls and interacts with Hsieh’s withering body: AI at its most simplistic, and in this case, most controlling. In terms of Michel Serres’s thoughts on exo-Darwinism where technics are a supplement (Watkin 2020), this AI machine does not widen the motility of the body, it shuts it down, interfering with, eliminating, and regulating the diurnal rhythms of light and dark, and the circadian rhythms of sleep, confirming the dividualism of the capitalist society of control, which in the 1970s had begun to harness immaterial labour, not just physical work paradigmatic of the assembly line. The so-called “exodus” by conceptual art to “critique” this model was but another way of confirming the shift to cognitive capitalism that was on its way (Zepke 2009a). The recorded six minute time-lapse (8,267 photograms) 16 mm film of Hsieh daily punching the clock attempts to capture the impossible time of aging. This documentation is a visual version of the scratches the artist made on his cell wall. The invisible time of his bodily cells dying and renewing themselves happens in chronological time, but the process is interiorised and hidden. All we see is hair growing, his face becoming more and more pallid, yet Hsieh’s gaze remains steadfast and piercing, bordering on a limit, but not crossing over it.

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The Non-art of Tehching Hsieh When viewing this film, one doesn’t “see” very much; there is nothing to see other than the speeded up “history” of his aging. Except—and this is crucial— Hsieh is buffeted from the inside by the forces of affect that become identifiable as emotions registered on the face, too fleeting to catch. The strange vitality recorded by the film machine through coded photos one hour apart shows the absent-presence of the body “aging.” Time simply lapses as it relates to its many other states that are equally elusive: collapsing, relapsing, elapsing. As Lawlor explains, drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s What Is Philosophy? (1994), “while aging is the agent which puts in place the condition of the demolished molar form of the subject, the motive or motor of becoming is the affect. . . . The imperceptible events of aging undo the molar form of oneself, which allows one to choose a clean break [desubjectification as “rupture” in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms], in other words, to choose to become” (Lawlor 2009, 7–8). There is a peculiar sort of “love” involved in this: a love for the “minor.” A minor existence is one that undergoes “abominable sufferings” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 110). As Deleuze and Guattari write: “The artist or the philosopher is quite incapable of creating a people, each can only summon it with all his strength. A people can only be created in abominable sufferings, and it cannot be concerned any more with art or philosophy” (ibid.). Becomingminor has “resistance in common—their resistance to death, to servitude, to the intolerable, to shame, and to the present” (ibid.). Hsieh is quite clear that he is no masochist. “I don’t think that I want to bring more suffering to myself, but to work is difficult and in some ways that brings suffering” (Grey et al. 2012, 909). And more clearly: “the reason why my work concentrated on pain and risk was more related to my inner struggle. You certainly can interpret this through a sociological view or other perspectives. But I didn’t think of it that way while I was doing it” (Hsieh in Heathfield 2009, 324). Becoming minor Can Tehching Hsieh’s becoming minor be substantiated? Hsieh felt alone, he did not know anyone, he felt shame, unable to speak English well, hiding out from the authorities, surviving through menial “after-work” jobs like cleaning restaurant floors and dishwashing for cash, doing labour that was feminised in the context of the 1970s—ethical and political issues that the performance artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles investigated in this period. Hsieh said he was “frustrated and depressed” (Hsieh in Johnston 2010). These first two performances, as inversions of one another, were two strategies of the war machine, two approaches of resistance. The first (Cage) is the extraordinary intensification of “I think” (the incorporeality of the mind). This performance piece greatly affects the passivity of the “I am” (the ego): what “I” become through this event. In the second, the extraordinary intensification of “I am” (the corporeality as an automaton) leads to its profound questioning, given that “I think” is in full suspension, never given an opportunity to rationally function in any way as the delirium of sleep deprivation sets in. The 133 missed punches out of a possible 8,769 are the supplement of this performance. While they “obviously”

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jan jagodzinski mark the tension between circadian rhythms (biological time, a year) and clock time, this is a limited reading, given that biological body time begins to conform and adjust to the 24/7 routine. Rather, they mark breaks when limits have been reached in the “suspension” of “I think.” To cross over into a threshold of total body “breakdown” would lead to madness or suicide. Although there is an unstated risk of such a possibility in this performance, no suicide attempts (that we are aware of) ever happened. (Here we might compare Hsieh’s performance with the spate of suicides, especially in 2010, amongst iPhone production line workers in the low-paying industrial park in Shenzhen, China, known as Foxconn City.) Ward Frazer (2012), drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s concepts of homo sacer, bare life, and state of exception (state power to suspend the law), has articulated Hsieh’s status as a “limit-case identity,” caught between illegal and alien. Under the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) rules, the signifier illegal alien is ultimately defined by two vectors: the first vector of judgement focuses on the signifier illegal. An illegal alien is one who has entered the United States illegally and would be deported if apprehended. The second vector stresses alien. An alien may have entered the United States legally, but this status can be rebuked and then the person can be deported. Added to these nuances, illegal alien is signified under the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) where this designation was primarily defined in terms of justice, given that the Department of Justice made this ruling. But then, the Department of Justice became part of the Department of Homeland Security, whereby issues of justice morphed into matters of security grounded in a new signification: deportable alien. Hsieh’s identity over the years was subject to the intersections of economic, judicial, and political systems; “undocumented workers” were especially targeted. Hsieh’s “war machine” generates his own “state of exemption” and takes “bare life” into his own “hands,” so to speak. As for homo sacer, Hsieh suspends himself in both performances: in the first performance, Cage, like a “detainee,” he wilfully suspends himself in a liminal position of being both inside and outside the law at once (the inverse of the sovereign state that can create such a space outside the law), and in the second, he over-emphasises the undocumented factory worker. Oddly then, in the first two inverse performances, by over-intensifying the mind over the body (the multiplicity of the virtual) and then the body over the mind (the reduction of motility to a single gesture), the Cartesian basic premise has been effectively “schizophrenianised,” or in François Laruelle’s (2013b) terms, it’s philosophical decision, “I think therefore I am,” becomes suspect, pushing toward a non-art position (as argued later in the chapter). Hsieh presents an anti-psychological and anti-subjective mode, quite different from the usual autobiographical subjective staging of performance artists such as Allan Kaprow, Chris Burden, Vito Acconci, and Marina Abramović, who had high profiles during this period. In the cases of these artists, “art as life” prevailed as happenings and performances of all kinds were framed under the institution of art despite attempts to go beyond gallery and museum walls by staging performances in studios.

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The Non-art of Tehching Hsieh Becoming nomad Hsieh’s next two performances (Outdoor and Rope), which were the inverse of each other, interrogate the other aspect of the Kantian Copernican “revolution”: space or spatiality. Kant was unable to work past his geometrical grasp of space, as Deleuze and Guattari managed to do (Flaxman 2005). In the first two pieces, spatiality is confined to the cell in the artist’s studio, and then to spatial proximity outside his studio that he could reach in fifty minutes or so, as he had to punch the clock every hour. Space, in effect, was still attached to the art institution where spectatorship and audience participation is recognised but is of little import for Hsieh. For the Cage Piece, visitors were invited to visit, but only on certain days. But, what did they “see”? Hsieh sleeping, eating, or perhaps defecating? Only his friend Cheng Wei Kuong would have been a more consistent witness. Watching him “punch a clock” was also not that interesting, only repetitive and boring. With his Outdoor Piece, the spatiality of the city, Lower Manhattan, becomes interesting, an exterior space for exploration as the “parallel” world that the “homeless” occupy opens up—the grasping of an interior space within an exterior space that co-exist as Hsieh spends a year “outside.” This lends itself to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of nomadology where striated and smooth spaces are enfolded within one another. The first thing to note is that this performance has nothing and everything to do with the homeless. Hsieh was not homeless—“houseless,” certainly—but this is not an activist piece, which has led some writers to dismiss the performance because it does little to bring the plight of the homeless to attention. It seems intuitively right that Hsieh’s Outdoor Piece raises the problematic of “home” or what place is for him—after all he left Taiwan and had no “place” in the US as an illegal alien. He was dis-placed. The rethinking of spatiality by Deleuze and Guattari was through geophilosophical thinking where concepts of the nomad and the sedentary come into play: the entanglement of smooth and striated spaces. The nomad is characterised as unfixed, wandering, zigzagging, in contrast to the stable, constraining rigidity of sedimentary existence. Such a binary was never in play given Hsieh’s life course, but his nomadic process certainly affirmed difference. Hsieh wandering in lower Manhattan produces a nomadic distribution of space; it also produces his own laws as this space is traversed and then mapped each day by red lines on an actual striated map of the city. Each day’s nomadic mappings and encounters necessary for survival (eating, defecating, sleeping) present a remapping, each mapping being an intensive qualitative transversal stemming from the one before: a repetition with a difference. The nomadic process is both rhizomatic and qualitative, each repetition subject to a transversal of space in the distribution of the explored milieu that is “actualised” by Hsieh’s maps. For Deleuze and Guattari and Hsieh, such a nomadic process happens in the “middle of things,” in between and in the borders of the binary pairings territorialisation and deterritorialisation, molar and molecular, striated and smooth. The nomad (Hsieh) must be grasped as a qualitative multiplicity: “Neither subject nor object, only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot increase in number without the multiplicity changing in nature (the laws of

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jan jagodzinski combination therefore increase in number as the multiplicity grows)” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 8). Qualitative changes open up and increase or contract the assemblage; they are not subject to quantitative extensive multiplicities that map out geographical spatiality. Instead, qualitative multiplicities are temporal and internal—rather than spatial; they are virtual assemblages of intensities and sensations—affects and percepts. In this regard, one incident Hsieh undergoes, being arrested by the police and forcefully taken inside the police station, violating his contract of not being inside, changes the assemblage. The question remains as to what intensive differences Hsieh encountered that changed or transformed him through the Outdoor Piece? What intensive differences during his year’s journeying gave rise to extensive differences and boundaries? Nomads, as Deleuze and Guattari tell us, have no history—they only have geography. As opposed to hunters and farmers, the nomad joins the animal in its kinetic force, its speed and movement. Such a movement in space follows a set of points that, when linked together, become a trajectory. This trajectory can be random, or it can involve a sequence of locations that create a shape, a territory wherein each position is revisited at certain intervals. In his Outdoor Piece, Hsieh established a territory by repeating and revisiting certain places where he ate and slept, thereby establishing a refrain (ritournelle). Each performance is a “line of flight,” an escape from the pull of the dogmatic image of thought. It is an escape from confining systems, a flight charged with desire—the generation of what might be next. But what happens when the flight is blocked? During the Outdoor Piece, Hsieh had an altercation with the law that resulted in his arrest. The court case over Hsieh’s possession of a criminal weapon (nunchucks) and second-degree assault on the owner of a building who threw an iron rod at him for sitting on the corner of a private doorstep (see Kee 2016, 83–84) shows how striated space can be smoothed, which plays a significant dynamic in Hsieh’s Rope Piece, discussed next. Judge Martin Erdmann, recognising that Hsieh was engaged in a form of artistic “play,” having read a piece about him in the New York Times, allowed him to remain outside the courtroom as his lawyer discussed his case. Eventually, the judge gave him a lesser sentence, only a fine. What was an overcoded molar institution (the law, the court) is now decoded—a small crack of smooth space had opened up. But the assemblage had qualitatively changed. Becoming woman? The performance of the Rope Piece (his fourth) inverts the nomadic spatiality explored in the Outdoor Piece: Linda Montano and Hsieh were “chained” to each other for a year. What happens when all the smooth, rhizomatic space is taken away and you are only left with striated spaces that each of them establishes? Or, when smooth spaces clash? Could they co-exist together without communication? When is a line of flight impossible? When is the rope (as interval, boundary, border, or bridge) not functioning? These are the problematic questions that surround their co-existence with one another. Smooth and striated space can only exist in relation to one another: as push and pull, a

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The Non-art of Tehching Hsieh bleeding of constant reversal and transversal, where smooth and striated exist simultaneously in the same space. Smooth and striated are not specifically distinguished by special contexts but by relationships. It’s the way spatial realms are utilised within physical spaces. Creative virtual forces that are in play can produce what Deleuze and Guattari call “the strangest of reversals” (1987, 480): striated space can become smooth, smooth space can become striated. The different modes in approaching and inhabiting space are at stake and not the creation of physical and spatial “geometricised” contexts. Was it possible for Montano and Hsieh to navigate such flows as overcoded male/female–white/Asian–legal/illegal binaries? Improvisation is what is at stake here. The “milieu of exteriority” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 51) is subject to becoming as it shifts from the interiority of striated rules to the exteriority of fluid and flexible trajectories of smooth spaces. The interactions between Montano and Hsieh open up and close the mobile and mutating entwining of territorialised and deterritorialised functions and spaces. It becomes a game with them involving play, subject to experiment. How can they work through qualitative change together by playfully deterritorialising the rules? (See Deleuze 1994, 24.) The rules they lived by had to be made, negotiated, disbanded, reasserted—art as life. The distribution of power that fluctuates between molar (coded) and molecular (decoded) space reverberates across that two metres of rope that separates them. Whoever has control sets the “molarised agenda” for the day, which must be negotiated and decoded for the next “event” together. Being (molar) and becoming (molecular) must also be stabilised at some point to establish a metastable system so that they both can co-exist as two heterogeneous worlds: in brief a reterritorialisation “must” occur. Yet, this is still subject to the next “event” forming “micro-cracks” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 198) or supple molecular lines in their relationship that will prove to be both disruptive and negotiable. In some instances, they did not talk to one another for three weeks. In such cases, the subject has to be “undone” (ibid., 400). The Rope Piece again brings out the possibility of “becoming animal.” As Hsieh says, seriously joking, Linda Montano was his “cage” (“We become each other’s cage. . . . This piece is about being like animal, naked. We cannot hide our negative sides” [Grey et al. (1984) 2012, 907, 911]). When Montano was asked about how their relationship progressed, she answered that there were four stages to their communication, beginning with a verbal phase (they talked six hours a day). Phase two was communication through the rope—yanking and pulling it through various antagonisms and signs. Phase three became less physical, in which communication was reduced to “gestures” such as pointing; and finally in phase four (certainly, the most interesting when it comes to becoming animal) there were only grunts and audible moaning sounds, communication became non-verbal. In relation to performance art in general, autobiography is of utmost importance. With Hsieh, the opposite is the case. While (as we have seen) a case can be made about his alien immigrant status, his works are devoid of personal psychological expression. His refusal of personal and psychological expression

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jan jagodzinski is revealed in the expressionless gaze as recorded in the 16 mm film (Clock). Nothing was released about his biography for the Cage Piece (he gave no interviews). With the Outdoor Piece, he became semi-invisible, on several occasions meeting for chance conversations, and taunting the law with his poster. In the Rope Piece, Hsieh made it clear that this was not about him and Montano as a couple, but as two independent generic “humans” (people) who had to live with each other: “So I wanted to do one piece about human beings and their struggle in life with each other. . . . We are not a couple, but two separate people” (Grey et al. [1984] 2012, 907). The recorded conversations between them were blocked and sealed, never to be played back. Further, the few days when they were fighting, or thought there was nothing to photograph, the tapes were left as “gray green blanks” (Carr 2008, 7), and only the world “fight” was photographically documented. As with the 133 missed photos in the Clock performance, it shows the impossibility of a complete recording. A complete map to capture the fullness of reality is a folly that repeats itself over and over as a supplement, remainder, or empty signifier (Deleuze’s [1990, 113] “object = x”) because the paranoia of structural imbalance is forever present. How Hsieh’s impersonal approach differs from an autobiographical approach comes across strikingly in Linda Montano’s answers to the interviewers’ questions about the piece (Grey et al. [1984] 2012). Montano answers in precisely the opposite way to Hsieh, personally reflecting on her life and how Rope Piece met her understanding of “art as life,” in which everything one does is “art,” thereby essentially promoting the claim that it’s just a matter of how one aestheticises life itself. Montano’s focus on her autobiography has continued well into her 70s, in the development of her Art/Life Institute for performance artists and culminating in her wish for someone to purchase her archive for prosperity. For Hsieh, the self is taken as material only insofar as it resists subjectivity as a central problematic. Hsieh personally struggles to communicate with people, but he turned this into an experiment to explore this problem in a generic way. His biological life, as it intersects with various mechanistic processes, remains impersonal, devoid of style. Towards the end of the Rope performance, Montano and Hsieh reconciled, creating a new bond between them. The piece went through “resistance,” servitude, shame, and intolerance—an entire range of emotions and relations; in brief, Montano and Hsieh went through a “revolution” together. As Deleuze and Guattari would say, this performance exemplified “the victory of a revolution . . . even if these bonds last no longer than the revolution’s fused material and quickly give way to division and betrayal” (1994, 177).

Life as art Becoming imperceptible Hsieh’s fifth and sixth performances are inversions of one to four. Performance five (No Art) consisted of the artist not making, talking, reading, or viewing art or participating in it. There is no evidence of what he did. The institution of art

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The Non-art of Tehching Hsieh would have to accept his contracted “word” on the basis of the previous four performances. It was his first step to becoming imperceptible, which only full emerged in his final performance, which lasted thirteen years. In the Thirteen Year Plan or Earth Piece, the artist stated he would make art from his thirty-sixth to forty-ninth birthdays, but not show it publicly. The hint that the sixth performance would reverse the previous performances can be gleaned from Hsieh’s statement, which varies from the previous ones in two ways: First, it is printed on black paper with white ink, in distinction to white paper with black ink. The black, a sign of non-representation or invisibility “quotes” the 133 black missed images in Clock and the blank recording from Rope (when Montano and Hsieh were fighting). Second, the location of the performance was listed on the bottom of his previous statements: New York was the address given for the Outdoor and No Art pieces and 111 Hudson St., 2Fl, NYC 10013, his studio address, was given for the Cage, Clock, and Rope pieces; the address for this sixth piece is simply given as “earth.” The only material output for this piece was a black poster showing a blank rectangle covering perhaps half the poster, featuring Hsieh’s name and the length of the performance (31 December 1986–31 December 1999) at the top of the blank rectangle, and then all the years of the performance below it. At the very bottom, “earth” appears. The final poster is the same, except that the blank white rectangle now bears a message in collage-style cut out coloured letters that reads: “I kept myself alive. I passed the Dec. 31, 1999.” The cut out letters (like a ransom note to someone) confirms his anonymity, yet at the same time it is signed by Hsieh underneath, dated 1 January 2000. The complete series of posters for Hsieh’s sixth performance can be found in Adrian Heathfield’s Out of Now: The Lifeworks of Tehching Hseih (2009, 300–315). Again, no evidence exists as to what happened during that long span of time. Thirteen of these posters were left blank. Hseih admits, at one point, that after his fifth one-year performance (No Art), he was not sure of his next work. It’s as if he were “stopped dead” or frozen, which for Hsieh would mean an impoverishment of life. How can we come to grips with this last performance? One approach is to consider No Art and Earth as a shift from “art as life” to its inversion: “life as art.” The first, still under the influence of the institution of art, legitimates the performance—no matter how absurd it might be, it remains “art.” Montano would be the apotheosis of this: as a performance artist, she states that her life is “art.” Hsieh’s performance No Art already raises (perhaps?) a question for him as to what art is in relation to his life. How can we go beyond this problematic? For Deleuze, “To think is to create—there is no other creation—but to create is first to engender ‘thinking’ in thought” (1994, 147). The “desert” becomes a stark metaphor. For Deleuze and Guattari, the desert is where concepts wonder, an ungrounded place of multiplicity. “The desert, experimentation on oneself, is our only identity, our single chance for all the combinations which inhabit us” (Deleuze and Parnet, 2007, 11). Montano appears to be favourable to such a concept when she says, “I was sealed in a room for five days as five different people” (Grey et al. [1984] 2012, 909). The desert, a trope that runs throughout Deleuze and Guattari’s writings, provides some insight into Hsieh’s Earth performance. The Earth becomes “desert-

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jan jagodzinski desire” (Deleuze and Guattari [1977] 1983, 378), a nomadic topography that produces a particular kind of place where desire is freed from its investment in social reproduction—in Lacanian terms, as developed in Seminar XXIII (1975–76) (Lacan 2016), desire freed from and of the Other. Hsieh, the artist, becomes his own sinthome (like Joyce), as I maintain in the companion chapter to this (jagodzinski 2019). The Earth as desert becomes the “pure” surface, the unground to ground anew, a “universal ungrounding” (Deleuze 1994, 67). In solitude, Hsieh “wandered” on Earth for thirteen years, “ready to begin the world anew” (Deleuze 2004, 11). The Earth, in this performance, is like a desert island, a site of a second origin and a new beginning: the subject becoming landscape (percept) (see, Tynan 2016). Hsieh’s earlier performance, the Outdoor Piece, already exemplifies the rhizomatic grasp of space: it is a space that produces “multiple entryways” that are “entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real,” this active mapping “is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 12). Hsieh’s rhizomatic journey works through the systems—the structures of organisation—that are in place. His rhizomatic plane of consistency traverses through the identifiable plane of organisation to generate an assemblage. In this way it also provides camouflage from the state’s law in a way that is furthered only in his last performance, Earth, where he becomes imperceptible for thirteen years. Hsieh performs his own schizoanalysis and becomes free of the burden of signification. Ayelet Zohar’s analysis of camouflage in relation to becoming imperceptible is helpful here: “Camouflage visuality enables the creation of an alternative (nomadic) presence that constantly becomes ‘the embodiment of smooth space.’ In other words, the meaning of camouflage is to become-smooth in an act of nomadization, the reduction of the striated system (that differentiates between subject and background), into a smooth continuity, to become a plateau of flat space, a space that contains no permanent objects, depths or altitudes, just the multiplicity of the lines underlying it” (Zohar 2014, 185, original emphasis). Camouflage, maintains Zohar, is the procedure that converts the subject from striated into smooth existence into what he sees as a levelling of the body into a “Body without Layers” (2014, 186). Such a body is “beyond the concepts of time and place: a static, present-perfect body. . . . [It] escapes aging and deterioration, existing only ‘here’ and ‘now’; . . . [it] is the consciousness that goes beyond the separation of me, mine and Other, and the re-mergence of consciousness and the unconscious to become art of the flattened world in a smooth format of the rhizome. Camouflage acts as the epitome of the passage from psychoanalysis to schizoanalysis, from body without organs to Body without Layers, from genealogical to rhizomatic structures” (186, original emphasis). Zohar’s Body without Layers provides a possible way to grasp Hsieh’s final two performances that push nomadology further than the Outdoor and Rope performances. Zohar maintains that camouflage should be understood as schizoanalysis. Surface, smoothness, and rhizome were to replace self, genealogy, society, and state. Camouflage as a concept is a “flattening process.” It deflates the sur-

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The Non-art of Tehching Hsieh face to become a rhizome. The result of this camouflage process is to attain a complex mode of existence, a network of dispersed multifocal modes of connectivity (knots). Schizoanalysis as camouflage, then, becomes a “constant progression of change and nomadism, disperse and dissolve, and shattering of the individual self into a continuous background” (Zohar 2014, 187). Thirteen years of life led as art could be thought as simply active experimentation that is immanent throughout our lived experience: life simply led creatively. I “survived.” “I kept myself alive,” Hsieh tells us. He “thrusts” himself into the complete outside—the logic of this space as Earth, as multiplicity itself—not unlike a time-image: Hsieh radically experiments by abdicating the institutional claim “this is art.” Going beyond Duchamp, and into Guattari’s redefinition of the ready-made, as Stephen Zepke (2017, 763) deftly points out, evokes “mutating becomings” (Guattari 2013, 205) or “heterogenesis” (204), enabling the aesthetic object to act as a “reappropriation, an autopoiesis of the means of production of subjectivity” (Guattari 1995, 13). “The readymade . . . is the way contemporary artistic practice accomplishes a resistant form of spiritual automation, deterritorializing subjectivity into its components of molecular matter and cosmic force, and reterritorialising these into a people to come” (Zepke 2017, 763). As Deleuze and Guattari poetically put it: “vectors of a cosmos that carries them off; then the cosmos itself will be art” (1987, 346, also quoted in Zepke 2017, 763). Such a possibility gives us a clue as to whether Hsieh’s performance of “life as art” becomes non-art. Non-art? Many have pointed to the last pages of What Is Philosophy? (e.g., Plotnitsky 2006), where the question of “non-” comes up. Deleuze and Guattari (1994) reference the work of François Laruelle (2013a) and finish by discussing the significance of non-philosophy, non-art, and non-science in terms of the interrelations that are involved. In this last section, I wonder whether Hsieh’s fifth and sixth performances push in this very direction. Performance five (No Art) is a vow not to do any art, while performance six (Earth) is a way to completely rethink art simply as an “encounter,” a position that approaches Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of contemporary art (Zepke 2009a). However, Hsieh’s nonart is unlike the non-art forms that Deleuze and Guattari reject (representational photography, conceptual art, and early forms of digital art), which are all too “intellectual,” what Peter Osborne calls “postconceptual” (2018), and make use of “post-aesthetic poetics” (Zepke 2017). Laruelle’s non-philosophy is complicated. I do not intend to rehearse what many have done to get a grasp of his project. However, there are a number of things to be said. To say that Hsieh enacts a singular universal is equivalent to Deleuze’s “A Life” (2001) so well articulated near the end of his life (jagodzinski 2019). Can we ask, like Laruelle, Are performances 5 and 6 no longer an “aesthetics of life” but a “life of aesthetics”? If we follow this claim, are we caught by a dematerialisation of art, making it simply coextensive with life, reducing and treating something and anything as art. Here I am reminded of Linda

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jan jagodzinski Montano’s claims: “this idea of allowing my life to be a work of art. I lived with different people and called that art. I wrote the Living Manifesto in 1975 and later turned my home into a museum so everything I did there would be framed as art” (Grey et al. [1984] 2012, 909). Can we say that Hsieh avoids making the “decision” of art (as does non-standard philosophy?). Laurelle’s “human-inhuman” and “man-in-person” are figures where the “human” is undecided. In brief, the human lived life without the “subject”—without philosophy articulating what precisely the human is. The human in Laruelle’s non-standard philosophy is a figure of the Real of human life that cannot (and should not) be reduced to a discourse of knowledge or power. Thus, the generic artist is without definition and beyond definition: an existent concrete, living allegory of non-art. We can say Hsieh uses the materiality of art (the singularity of his life) to make an art of materiality. Much of Laruelle’s non-philosophy is enigmatic and allusive. To quote one recent attempt to exemplify non-aesthetics: “Nonaesthetics ceases to be non-aesthetics if it decides on the nature of art for art is immanent to the Real [the Real is foreclosed] which is determinant in the last instance” (Fardy 2020, 156). This gives one the sense that any definition of art is doomed to failure. I can only ask whether Hsieh is the living allegory of “life as art” where the frames of the gallery and institution of art have fallen away, no longer legitimating “art as life”? Was this his line of flight? What, for him, acts like a dark precursor, as the quasi-cause of his transformations? To recall, the dark precursor is the indecipherable conductor of the rhizomatic image of thought, a catalyst of desire for creative transformation toward a life to come, a transformation of a milieu . . . a “breakdown”; a roll of the dice of experience into virtual difference, embracing chance. Given that it comes from the unground of the “desert,” it simply eludes any further exploration as it is a retroactive phenomenon. We only have hints of it when it has already happened. The Body without Organs (BwO) in these two last performances can also be thought through as a “generic” human after Laruelle. There is a BwO that has yet to “become”: the BwO as desert (Tynan 2016), ready to renew itself. It is without a representational image. This BwO at 0 is a BwI (Body without Image) that is generic to the “human.” It is an imageless, non-productive organless “essence” connected to antiproduction. The BwO manifests the potentiality of a virtual body—an “overlay” of the physical body—as body’s potential to become. This would be thinking “without image” (Deleuze 1994, 167). Perhaps for Hsieh, the last performance was to work only with “encounters.” In an often-repeated quotation, Deleuze says: “Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but a fundamental encounter. . . . it is opposed to recognition” (ibid., 139). For life to be art, non-art, it cannot be “thought” as a known activity, thing, or commodity. For the thought of “art” to happen, it has to remain simply by a force or encounter that is not “recognised” but sensed. When Hsieh encounters an event of the outside, it enables the creation of new thought. This also means that an “encounter” creates a self-awareness through such lived experience. It calls on us to be on the lookout and sensitive to challenge the dogmatic image of thought that shapes

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The Non-art of Tehching Hsieh us through territorialised molar structure, striation, habit, and sedimentation. Non-art becomes only “encounter.” Hsieh enters back into the empirical world as a conscious experiment of lived experience—to encounter virtual difference and then to extract sensations from these “disruptive” encounters. I take this to be the sum of his enigmatic “I kept myself alive.” To end: one wonders what happens when Hsieh, as a minoritarian artist, is/ was “discovered.” He readily admitted on a number of occasions how he felt before and after the millennium. Here are three significant statements: “My work was not part of any art movement. . . . I was an outsider in the art world— and in reality.” And, “Being overlooked by the art world didn’t bother me, I made a living through worker’s jobs. That suits my character better” (Oralkan and Hsieh 2020). And, finally: “Then I stopped doing art altogether after 2000 when the Thirteen Year Plan had finished. I went back to life itself, and it became an exit for me. Artists live for making art, or totally retreat from the art world, otherwise death can be a clear answer. I still have a voice in the art world, but more as a witness. I’m a sub-artist” (Hseih and Abramović 2017, added emphasis). One is left with the impression that Tehching Hsieh “arrived” through the praise and support of performance artists like Marina Abramović and the New York art institution. This has left him somewhat displaced. If indeed he wandered into the desert of non-art—the ungrounding of art—during his last performance, then the retrospectives that have begun to present his work begin to haunt his absence and disappearance. He seems conflicted and caught now that he is back “in life.” References Carr, Cynthia. 2008. On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century. Rev. ed. Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1984. Kant’s Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. London: Athlone Press. First published 1963 as La philosophie critique de Kant (Presses universitaires de France). ———. 1990. The Logic of Sense. Translated by Mark Lester with Charles Stivale. Edited by Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1969 as Logique du sens (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1994. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1968 as Différence et répétition (Paris: Presses universitaires de France). ———. 2001. “Immanence: A Life.” In Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life, translated by

Anne Boyman, 25–33. New York: Zone Books. Chapter first published 1995 as “L’immanence: Une vie” (Philosophie 47). ———. 2004. Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974. Edited by David Lapoujade. Translated by Michael Taormina. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). First published 2002 as L’île déserte: Textes et entretiens, 1953–1974 (Paris: Minuit). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. (1977) 1983. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1972 as Capitalisme et schizophrénie: L’anti-Œdipe (Paris: Minuit). Translation first published 1977 (New York: Viking Press). ———. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Minuit).

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jan jagodzinski ———. 1994. What Is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1991 as Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Minuit). Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. 2007. Dialogues II. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Rev. ed. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1977 as Dialogues (Paris: Flammarion). Duchamp, Marcel. (1961) 1973. “Apropos of ‘Readymades.’” In The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, edited by Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson, 141–42. New York: Da Capo Press. Chapter first delivered as a talk at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 19 October 1961. Fardy, Jonathan. 2020. Laruelle and Art: The Aesthetics of Non-philosophy. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Flaxman, Gregory. 2005. “Transcendental Aesthetics: Deleuze’s Philosophy of Space.” In Deleuze and Space, edited by Ian Buchanan and Gregg Lambert, 176–88. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Grey, Alex, Allyson Grey, Linda Montano, and Tehching Hsieh. (1984) 2012. “One Year Art/Life Performance: Interview with Linda Montano and Tehching Hsieh.” In Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings, edited by Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz, 2nd ed., 907–11. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Interview first published 1984 as “One Year Art/Life Performance: Alex and Allyson Grey Ask Questions about the Year of the Rope” (High Performance 27: 24–27). Guattari, Félix. 1995. “Machinic Heterogenesis.” In Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, translated by Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis, 33–57. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. First published 1992 as Chaosmose (Paris: Galilée). ———. 2013. Schizoanalytic Cartographies. Translated by Andrew Goffey. London: Bloomsbury. First published 1989 as Cartographies schizoanlytiques (Paris: Galilée). Heathfield, Adrian. 2009. Out of Now: The Lifeworks of Tehching Hsieh. London: Live Art Development Agency; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Hsieh, Tehching, and Marina Abramović. 2017. “Interview: Tehching Hsieh and Marina Abramović in Conversation.” Tate Etc., 17 June. Accessed 22 September 2020. https://www.tate.org.uk/tate-etc/ issue-40-summer-2017/interviewtehching-hsieh-marina-abramovic. jagodzinski, jan. 2019. “The Excessive Aesthetics of Tehching Hsieh: Art as A Life.” In Art, Excess, and Education: Historical and Discursive Contexts, edited by Kevin Tavin, Mira Kallio-Tavin, and Max Ryynänen, 55–75. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Johnston, Jill. 2010. “Tehching Hsieh: Art’s Willing Captive.” Art in America, 22 September. Accessed 21 September 2020. https://www.artnews.com/art-inamerica/features/tehching-hsieh-artswilling-captive-2-62858/. Kee, Joan. 2016. “Orders of Law in the One Year Performances of Tehching Hsieh.” American Art 30 (1): 72–91. Lacan, Jacques. 2016. The Sinthome: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XXIII (19751976). Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by A. R. Price. Cambridge: Polity Press. First published 2005 as Le séminaire de Jacques Lacan, livre XXIII: Le sinthome (Paris: Seuil). Laruelle, François. 2013a. Philosophy and Non-philosophy. Translated by Taylor Atkins. Minneapolis, MN: Univocal. First published 1989 as Philosophie et nonphilosophie (Brussels: Mardaga). ———. 2013b. Principles of Non-philosophy. Translated by Nicola Rubczak and Anthony Paul Smith. London: Bloomsbury. First published 1996 as Principes de la non-philosophie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France). Lawlor, Leonard. 2009. “Auto-Affection and Becoming (Part 1): Who Are We.” Environmental Philosophy 6 (1): 1–20. Oralkan, Jessica, and Tehching Hsieh. 2020. “In Conversation: Tehching Hsieh’s Thirteen Year Plan.” Collecteurs, curated by Adam Carr, the Collective Museum of Private Collections, 13 February 2020. https://www.collecteurs.com/interview/ tehching-hsieh-thirteen-year-plan. Osborne, Peter. 2018. The Postconceptual Condition: Critical Essays. London: Verso. Plotnitsky, Arkady. 2006. “Chaosmologies: Quantum Field Theory, Chaos and

The Non-art of Tehching Hsieh Thought in Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy?” Paragraph 29 (2): 40–56. Shakespeare, William. (1623) 2005. Hamlet. In The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, edited by John Jowett, William Montgomery, Gary Taylor, and Stanley Wells, 2nd ed., 681–718. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Text based on the folio edition first published 1623 (London: Jaggard and Blount). Tynan, Aidan. 2016. “Desert Earth: Geophilosophy and the Anthropocene.” Deleuze Studies 10 (4): 479–95. Ward, Frazer. 2012. No Innocent Bystanders: Performance Art and Audience. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press. Watkin, Christopher. 2020. Michel Serres: Figures of Thought. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Zepke, Stephen. 2006. “The Concept of Art When It Is Not a Concept: Deleuze and Guattari against Conceptual Art.” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical

Humanities 11 (1): 157–67. ———. 2009a. “Becoming a Citizen of the World: Deleuze between Allan Kaprow and Adrian Piper.” In Deleuze and Performance, edited by Laura Cull, 109–25. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ———. 2009b. “The Readymade: Art as the Refrain of Life.” In Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New, edited by Simon O’Sullivan and Stephen Zepke, 33–44. London: Continuum. ———. 2017. “‘A Work of Art Does Not Contain the Least Bit of Information’: Deleuze and Guattari and Contemporary Art.” Performance Philosophy 3 (3): 751–65. Zohar, Ayelet. 2014. “Strategies of Camouflage: Depersonalization, Schizoanalyis and Contemporary Photography.” In Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Visual Art, edited by Ian Buchanan and Lorna Collins, 173–201. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

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Decoding Surveillance Assemblages How to Read Li Zi-Fong’s Lines and Hong Kong’s Eyes Hsiu-ju Stacy Lo Independent writer, Taiwan

How are we to make sense of a constantly updated human identity that is encoded in a sea of algorithm apps? Are “lines of flight” still possible when the “app-lified” selves are regularly monitored and held in check? This article explores along the lines of vision of Chinese artist Li Zi-Fong, taking its readers from the surveillance assemblages of Beijing and Hong Kong to everexpanding AI (artificial intelligence). Li’s calculated yet random construction of a miscellany of intricate images tells modern fables about identity in an environment increasingly dominated by AI that insinuatingly mimics and alters human consciousness. Halfway through the chapter, this artificially enhanced (read impaired) vision will be intercepted by a physically impaired vision of a woman in Hong Kong, and this image will be replicated by a demonstrating crowd in 2019. This montage turned into a movement-image as it gave rise to “a seeing function” (Deleuze 1989, 19) that could “replace, obliterate and re-create the object itself ” (ibid., 12). Machinic assemblages, however invisible, could be undone, by liquid forces that flow like rivers and lakes. Vignettes of a digitally configured consciousness are constellated in Li’s contingents of images. Here, worldly bodies and mythical creatures East and West are put together to form assemblages, each being a “constellation of singularities and traits deducted from the flow—selected, organised, stratified—in such a way as to converge (consistency) artificially and naturally . . . into extremely vast constellations constituting ‘cultures,’ or even ‘ages’” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 406). These constellations are already coded by the artist’s design but they seem capable of decoding and recoding the reality on the streets—in a movement. By veiling each piece of subject matter with virtually infinite straight lines generated by a purpose-built computer program, Li “re-veils” modern-day online identity in flux and in reproduction. Untouched by the artist’s hand, the seemingly sketch-like images in black and white portray the contemporary human condition: app-ily enabled and reproduced while men and women are being manipulated and incarcerated. Identity/reproduction explores the estrangement of people from their flesh and humanity as human identity 379

Hsiu-ju Stacy Lo mutates and multiplies in the age of big data. Through algorithmic programming, Li uses “lines” as a metaphor for life’s infinite point-to-point connections. The mannered, somewhat unnatural “straight lines” feature in various mysterious images and frame this body of work. As the primary element of these images, the intricately patterned lines are sets of data matrix generated at random in parametric equations, reflecting the images’ deconstructed and recomposed identity. They resemble particles and waves of consciousness as applications of super-string theory.1 The various states of consciousness grow and multiply in waves of fluctuation and acceleration. Does the artwork imply that human consciousness is imbricated with the all-encompassing artificial intelligence? Li offers a prophetic vision for our time. In particular, one image of a concealed eye (or I?) corresponds to a real-life figure in Hong Kong, the appearance of which was soon emulated to counter the omnipresent surveillance apparatus. The last section of the chapter introduces the concept of jianghu as a mix of techniques and tactics of disrupting the machinic assemblages of state desire.

Human-machine col-labor-ation Two different methods of image generation were considered from the outset. One was a technique called “image data augmentation,” which can be used to artificially expand the size of a training data set by inputting multiple versions of images in the data set. For example, horizontally flipped and slanted images, images that are brightened, darkened, or modified in other ways would constantly be incorporated into the memory storage. The data set would then be employed for deep-learning neural networks consisting of a series of algorithms modelled loosely on the human brain. Designed to learn things and recognise patterns, artificial neural networks can adapt to a changing library to make logical decisions on the basis of the existing output criteria. This way, knowledge is gathered through experience rather than programming. A facial recognition system is an application of “image data augmentation” capable of learning all facets of human faces. A ticketless parking management system is another.2 In the same vein, the ImageDataGeneration class, a commonly used program, would have allowed Li to “auto-generate” images by generalising across the inserted images in the data set. It would have learnt patterns and associations of the input data, processed the data, and then generated modified images or close facsimiles of the originals all on its own. And it would have been a legitimate work of contemporary art. Phrases such as “a complete machine takeover of human labour” would have been part of the artist’s statement. But Li did not do that. 1 Superstring theory is often labelled a “theory of everything,” as it aims to address various theoretical conundrums. In the words of NASA, superstring theory “attempts to explain all four forces observed in nature” (NASA 2017). The four forces are gravitational, electromagnetic, strong, and weak. Instead of elementary particles, superstring theory models them as vibrations of tiny super-symmetrical strings, the fundamental constituents of matter. 2 See for example the ticketless parking system of Sensor Dynamics, https://www.sensordynamics.com. au/parking-enforcement-services/.

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Decoding Surveillance Assemblages Instead, he opted for coding. Li worked closely with computer engineer Zhang Shiran to create a unique program based on algorithms using primarily a two-symbol system: 0, 1, 0, 1, and so on. This is called basic coding. The sketches—drawn originally by the artist himself—were then transformed by the program, which is a paradigm that treats computer programs as mathematical functions. Different combinations of codes result in different images. Li set the codes and ran commands without knowing how the images would turn out looking; neither did the computer engineer know how they would look. The work was determined partly by design, and partly by accident or chance. Some early experiments turned out brilliantly; however, some were lacklustre. Adjustments—or more precisely, unknown modifications—were made by changing the codes in the settings. In the process of image-making, Li relied on the architecture of the program and his technical intuition about codes, but in the end it was the artist himself who made decisions about the composition of the work. The current collection of over fifty images is a result—as well as a process—of accidental coding; some of the images were made at first try. The process of image-making remains a bit of a mystery to Li. The collection was only assembled after all the images had been produced and viewed by the artist. Li’s task was to make the final selection of those semi-random, semi-automated constructs, keeping within his vision of human–machine “col-laboraction.” He maintains that compared with the former method that implies total dependence on big data and artificial intelligence (AI), this new method better reflects the concept of “integration (or union) of human and machine” (renji jiehe) in contemporary life. Humans and machines will be inseparable halves in the future. We’d better get used to it. The whole set of images is stored as a completely digital collection on the cloud. This implies that the artist can print out the images in the venues where he shows his work. All the images are scalable vector graphics, which means that the quality and the resolution of the printout images are not determined by the size of the paper. Unlike raster graphics, the other common type of graphic representation, the resolution of this vectorised collection will remain the same when printed, however large or small the paper. Not only does this add flexibility and mobility to the preparation for a physical exhibition, it is also an apt method of materialisation for the artist’s conceptual work.

Eye, body, and i-dentity in Li Zi-Fong’s work This body of work deals with the question of human identity and viscerality in the age of big data. When the details of our identity have been amassed, reproduced, calculated, and analysed, does the gaze of the algorithm reveal, conceal, or even blind us? How is the self seduced by the aura of their digitally reconfigured identity—the aura of the copy? Every IP address hosts a technologically enabled yet simultaneously confined soul that takes a gamble on the artwork’s digital fate. Our senses are confronted with deconstructed and recomposed eyes, tongues, bones, faces, and intellects when we come face to face with each of the artist’s computer-generated images.

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Hsiu-ju Stacy Lo Li’s opening gambit is to take the viewer on a journey to hang out with Cézanne’s compatriots in Provence. Two Cézannes is adapted from the postimpressionist artist’s Card Players (1893, Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, New York). After the death of his father in 1886, Cézanne returned to his hometown of Aix-en-Provence and started painting the people and objects around him. Before this, he had painted in Paris for many years, but his works were rejected by the official Paris Salon every year from 1864 to 1869 and ridiculed by art critics in the French capital. Eventually, he reluctantly returned to Provence. He pondered the meaning of life in the image of two card players, revealed in a letter to a friend. Cézanne’s melancholy is inexplicable. The scene, front and centre, is quiet, with the men looking down at their cards rather than at each other. We do not really know what is going on in the characters’ minds, or what cards they hold. But it is the recognition of the strangeness of selfhood in Cézanne’s work that proved to be prophetic for Li’s modern vision. Li believes that Cézanne hoped to reflect upon his own life through making this painting. He adapted this work because he wanted Cézanne’s consciousness to enter into the algorithmic equation, to reflect on Cézanne’s own reflections about identity and fate. Two card-playing farmhands become two Cézannes in Li’s work. One is the Cézanne of Paris, and the other the Cézanne of Aix. One life gambles on/with his other life. The only image in the series in colour, this work sets the tone for Li’s collection, where the question of identity has expanded from consciousness of one’s class and place of origin to that of authenticity and avatars. I wonder whether Li secretly identifies with Cézanne’s talent and fate.

Figure 26.1.

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Figure 26.1. Li Zi-Fong, Two Cezanne’s, 2019, digital output, variable sizes. (Courtesy of Li Zi-Fong.)

Decoding Surveillance Assemblages The image The Copy was inspired by the fiction film Searching (Chaganty 2018), in which a Silicon Valley engineer named David Kim searches for his missing daughter in all realms of digital reality. All the virtual traces bear testament to her existence in another parallel universe. But where is she? Judging from today’s advancements in science and technology, we will perhaps have our own copies one day. This copy will learn—through analysis of big data and machine learning—more about you than you know yourself. Moreover, it will remind the self when to do things as it will screen selves for mood, temperature, blood pressure, and other biological details. To some extent, the copy has come to manipulate, imprison, and reproduce the self. Biological monitoring devices are being used globally at this time for (human) cases of coronavirus during the pandemic. “Cases” of the virus are isolated, masked, and locked down while the biological details of the human hosts are under mass electronic surveillance. Under these circumstances, the self often knows less about itself than does the copy. In connection with this, in Li’s artwork The Copy, two physically identical faces are set next to each other, reminding people of the multiplicity of the self ’s identity. The two faces in this image, identical as they are by design, could appear dissimilar depending on the light level and the position of the viewer in relation to the faces. Thus, sometimes “the copy” could look brighter and more animated than “the original.”

Figure 26.2.

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Figure 26.2. Li Zi-Fong, The Copy, 2019, digital output, variable sizes. (Courtesy of Li Zi-Fong.)

Hsiu-ju Stacy Lo

Figure 26.3.

Digital Foundation Makeup discusses a similar topic. Applying make-up can be seen as a process of identity transformation. For hours every day, we hold our smart devices up to illuminate our faces, leading to endless retouching and filtering of ourselves on different apps. In such a digital ambience, we are predisposed to forget our selves, which continually hide behind a virtual reality.

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Figure 26.3. Li Zi-Fong, Digital Foundation Makeup, 2019, digital output, variable sizes. (Courtesy of Li Zi-Fong.)

Decoding Surveillance Assemblages Moving beyond the double and “face value,” the next work by Li, Deflesh, is concerned with the relationship between sign and corpo-reality. Every word in human language carries some kind of bearing, and the signifier comes with a “ring flash” reminiscent of what Walter Benjamin calls an aura.3 For instance, when we praise the “goodness” of something, we subconsciously accept the information emanating from the word. The word in question also represents a departure from the word itself as a pure signifier, as it carries a mass of information and aura. It is in this process that identity undergoes transformation. In the contemporary context of a fragile, or even broken, supply chain, the artist performs an (artistic) cut-up of the Chinese character 肉—an ideogram meaning “flesh” that was developed from the pictogram for “cut meat”—using algorithms and vectors in an attempt to see and feel whether it penetrates its pre-existing aura.

Figure 26.4.

3 Walter Benjamin used the term aura in the essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” originally published in 1936 and later included in the collection of essays Illuminations (Benjamin [1976] 2007). He insisted that “even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be” (ibid., 220). The aura Benjamin referred to was the reproduction’s unique cultural context in time and space.

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Figure 26.4. Li Zi-Fong, Deflesh, 2019, digital output, variable sizes. (Courtesy of Li ZiFong.)

Hsiu-ju Stacy Lo Here, an intriguing vision of the shared future for humankind—if it will indeed be shared, and if it will actually have a future—illustrates Li’s gallows humour. The narrative of Li’s Salamander-Merfolk goes like this: Salamanders are mostly hermaphrodites. They usually reproduce when females clone themselves through parthenogenesis. The creatures value genetic components in sperm and select certain elements of the genetic make-up to recompose and reproduce themselves. Sometimes they steal sperm from near relatives, ensuring that 90 per cent are their own and 10 per cent are from another member of the species, to increase their own genetic diversity. Today, humans select quality sperm from a sperm bank to reproduce outside a relationship. Some even want to edit their own genes, much like the salamander family, who appeared on Earth around the same time as Homo sapiens, more than seventy-five million years ago. In Li’s Salamander-Merfolk, two salamanders are swimming toward a high place, as if they were swimming past concrete steps built by now-extinct humans in an imaginary future. The future world imagined by the artist is the Earth back in the Cretaceous period.

Figure 26.5.

Another piece tracing the origin of humanity, Mother, comprises five bones that look like totem poles. But they could equally be seen either as weapons or as skeletal remains. There is something elemental and primal about this image, but it is of central importance in the artist’s conceptualisation of identity construction and transformation. For philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the self is an embodied subjectivity made of flesh, senses, and experiences. “The

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Figure 26.5. Li Zi-Fong, Salamander-Merfolk, 2019, digital output, variable sizes. (Courtesy of Li Zi-Fong.)

Decoding Surveillance Assemblages theory of the body is already a theory of perception” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 203). Here, human consciousness stems from a lived body that bears witness to its existence.4

Figure 26.6.

When Homo sapiens first came down from the trees, they only knew how to use simple bone and stone cutting tools. Physically, they could not compete with larger animals such as jackals, wolves, tigers, and leopards. What they ate, then, was the bone marrow left over from the high-protein meat already chewed up by the beasts. Bones are the mother of life and reproduction. They are the ancestors of our ancestor, the mother of our mother. Bones carry some of the earliest unconscious memories of humans: nourishment, competition, violence, and hierarchy—all these are still deeply embedded in human DNA today. In this way, “mother” implies not only a nutrition-giver but also a violence-perpetrator. Merleau-Ponty’s existentialism is in stark contrast to Descartes’s rationalism, famously exemplified by the concept of the cogito (Cogito, ergo sum). Descartes insists that everything in the world can be explained by mathematics. Therefore when putting on Cartesian headgear, anyone can appear to be a sage, taking on a different identity and a new perspective for observing his or her world. The human is then equipped to reconstruct the real from the vantage point of a detached knowledge system. 4 In contrast with theories of rationalism and empiricism that hold reason and mental perception as the basis of the self, Merleau-Ponty argued that the physical body is an important component of what makes up the subjective self.

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Figure 26.6. Li Zi-Fong, Mother, 2019, digital output, variable sizes. (Courtesy of Li ZiFong.)

Hsiu-ju Stacy Lo

Figure 26.7.

Extending the primal-futuristic allegory, Li’s work The Four Quadrants of an Elephant sees four people positioned at four different parts of an elephant’s body. The four people each occupy a quarter of the image, illustrated by four blindfolded heads and upper bodies. Each person describes their own version through a small window, like blind men touching an elephant. Now, the algorithm tells us that what our eyes can see is not sufficient to verify the existence of things. Welcome to the era of VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity). Is it time for your eyes to evolve?

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Figure 26.7. Li Zi-Fong, The Cartesian Headgear, 2019, digital output, variable sizes. (Courtesy of Li Zi-Fong.)

Decoding Surveillance Assemblages Humans evolved from apes, yet the mythical Monkey King, Sun Wukong— from the sixteenth-century Chinese classic Journey to the West—is a character who wants to break free from all human bonds and the normative expectation of self-restraint. Li’s image Sun Wukong in the Matrix could be read as depicting an ape wanting to be and evolving into a human, or a creature that is a cross between a human and a monkey refusing to be fully human. Two conflicting identifications overlap in one time and space. It is an image of the human psyche in our digital age, pulled at once towards greed and fear.

Figure 26.8.

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Figure 26.8. Li Zi-Fong, The Four Quadrants of an Elephant, 2019, digital output, variable sizes. (Courtesy of Li Zi-Fong.)

Hsiu-ju Stacy Lo

Figure 26.9.

Figure 26.10.

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Figure 26.9. Li Zi-Fong, Sun Wukong in the Matrix, 2019, digital output, variable sizes. (Courtesy of Li Zi-Fong.) Figure 26.10. Li Zi-Fong, Your Left Eye Is My Right Eye, 2019, digital output, variable sizes. (Courtesy of Li Zi-Fong.)

Decoding Surveillance Assemblages

Envisioning tactical fluidity and undoing machinic assemblages A stark and striking image: Your Left Eye Is My Right Eye sets up a face-to-face mirror image with the viewer. When one looks directly at the image, one’s left eye meets her right eye. This work is intended to direct the viewer’s attention to the right eye in the work. However, the supposed right eye is hidden in the data matrix. Even though you cannot see it, it is staring at you. This work inspects the vision of people today, hinting at a technologically impaired view. But what could this all-seeing face be? Siri on your iPhone? The Chinese state government? In October, an image released by the luxury jeweller Tiffany as part of an advertising campaign was accused of supporting the anti-government protests in Hong Kong, while another face with an injured right eye became a symbol of the protests. All eyes were on Hong Kong when an Indonesian journalist was shot in her right eye. A cinematic montage jolted the demonstrating crowd into action: a movement-image. Protestors across Hong Kong quickly identified with visual impairment as the news spread. The “eye-for-an-eye” protest moved swiftly from the streets to the airport, and eventually to hospitals. This tactical fluidity, known as “be water,” has been a guiding philosophy, inspired by Hong Kong’s own action icon, Bruce Lee. No longer fixated on the occupation of landmarks, the demonstrators devised a highly fluid style of mobilisation and dispersion to counter the police force, physically and digitally. This “collective assemblage of enunciation” that sought to disconnect itself from the machinic surveillance assemblage was the demonstrators’ way of impairing the all-seeing state government, of “de-territorialising” the power of a state (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 88) equipped with the location of every IP address. Surveillance assemblages that consist of “tools” form part of what Deleuze and Guattari call a “social machine,” characterised by its “amalgamations” rather than by its “tools” (ibid., 90).

Figure 26.11.

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Figure 26.11. This image, which was part of Tiffany & Co.’s advertising campaign in 2019 and was accompanied by the text “Eye spy new Tiffany T True designs . . . ,” was removed after it was accused of being linked with anti-government protests in Hong Kong. (Source: Twitter.)

Hsiu-ju Stacy Lo “Water can flow or it can crash,” Hong Kong action hero Bruce Lee explained about his style of martial art on the television programme Longstreet (Silliphant and Rogosin 1971–72). Yet in a city highly reliant on digital connection, technology has from the start been embedded in the battlefield where the ebb and flow of communications can propel or block movement. If to “be water” means fluidity, fluency, and fast-movement, it entails cultivating ever-evolving daily techniques online and offline, as part of a forward-looking community that needs always to think one step ahead. Requiring great linguistic, spatial, and corporal dexterity in the use of smartphone apps and social networks, these everyday “skills” are what I call jianghu practices (Lo 2018). Jianghu practices are cynical in essence, that is, they outwardly mimic normative signs while quietly subverting dominant codes in practice. Digital surveillance and censorship such as facial recognition and the removal of online discussion have vastly transformed the aesthetics and communications of resistance movements across diverse sectors of Hong Kong society; this shift has prompted Hong Kong youth to “code” mundane activities such as reading, writing, speaking, and listening in order to facilitate a deeper level of communication. Building on my doctoral dissertation (Lo 2018) about contemporary Chinese jianghu in Beijing and the widespread cynicism that accompanies this originally Daoist concept, my project attempts to think through the philosophy of “be water” by analysing a variety of communication strategies and mobilisation tactics adopted by the protestors. Literally translated as “rivers and lakes,” jianghu was originally coined by the fourth-century BCE philosopher Zhuangzi to refer to the space of nature away from court politics and officialdom. Commonly understood as a collective fantasy world comprising disenfranchised or marginalised groups across a wide range of social spheres, the idea and image of jianghu spread stealthily across the Chinese-speaking world. Long famous for films in the crime and martial arts genres (sometimes known as wuxia [knight-errant] films), Hong Kong has—after a number of mass demonstrations against encroachment on residents’ political rights by the People’s Republic of China—become a city of jianghu, where dissident subtexts slide under the official radar. Jianghu’s process of deterritorialisation requires constant navigation and negotiation between normativity and alterity, between palpability and obscurity in various domains of reality (Lo 2018). Operating in this world requires an astute reading of the powerful, an ability to roam in and out of the zone of state power by means of mimesis, taking on the responsibility of protecting this world’s invisible yet changing boundaries, and demonstrating yiqi, or the spirit of righteousness. By engaging in surreptitious activities, the simulators of jianghu train these actors to simulate the mindset of the authority. Their ability to organise themselves while simultaneously conforming to disorder and averting the gaze of the authority is a demonstration of perspicacity acquired from the subordinate position. The Hong Kong demonstrators sought to disconnect the “weapons and tools assuring a symbiosis of bodies—a whole machinic assemblage” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 89)—from the “collective assemblage of enunciation” in the protestors’ performance and acts of resistance against

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Decoding Surveillance Assemblages the normative regime of signs. Expression continued to find its contents and mould into them, as the protestors carried on their line of flight, which “carrie[d] away all of the assemblages but also under[went] all kinds of reterritorializations and redundancies” (ibid.). The discursive practices of jianghu that comprise its habitus, to use Pierre Bourdieu’s term, are reminiscent of what Michel de Certeau calls “an art of the weak” (1984, 37), of anthropologist James C. Scott’s “hidden transcript” (1990), and of Michael Taussig’s concept of mimesis as “the nature that culture uses to create a now-beleaguered second nature” (1993, xv). The mimetic faculty in the case of Hong Kong is built on the performance of conforming to (dis)order. Implicit in these concepts is the ability to mobilise an astute reading of the powerful, and thereby reorient the gaze of the authority. From the jianghu perspective, power’s every visibility lends itself to the promise of stability and transparency, which allows little space for deception and trickery. Jianghu practices are therefore kynical—to borrow Žižek’s term (1989, 29)— and “in-habited.” Indeed, it is the necessity to navigate quotidian life under a regime of surveillance and censorship that produces insights and drives the wealth of a collective assemblage of enunciation. Despite its association with covert operations, jianghu can be insidious and pervasive, extending into mainstream society. To flow like water on the ground requires coded but crowd-sourced information, such as the recently removed HKmap.live app for tracking the movements of police and protestors, the Bluetooth-enabled Airdrop for anonymously distributing information while circumventing digital surveillance, and sign language for swift and direct communication in precarious situations. Nevertheless, the playbook needs to be quickly rewritten when a code has been cracked. While the artist’s straight lines serve as a metaphor for countless invisible point-to-point connections, Hong Kong’s demonstrating crowds formed themselves to “be water” in opposition to the tightening grip of the state government. “Lines” and “water” constitute enigmatic puzzles prompting us to question whether humans can be resensitised by the very technological forces that lulled us into submission. The eye-catching case of Hong Kong shows that interstices in the diverse machinic assemblages, if they can still be found or even created, will offer us cues for escaping an enclosed order. References Benjamin, Walter. (1968) 2007. “The Certeau, Michel de. 1984. The Practice of Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Reproduction.” In Illuminations: Essays F. Rendall. Berkeley: University of and Reflections, edited by Hannah Arendt, California Press. translated by Harry Zohn, 217–52. Chaganty, Aneesh, dir. 2018. Searching. New New York: Shocken Books. Essay first York: Bazelevs Company; Culver City, CA: published 1936 as “L’œuvre d’art à Screen Gems; Stage 6 Films. l’époque de sa reproduction mécanisée” Deleuze, Gilles. 1989. Cinema 2: The Time(Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 5 [1]: 40–68). Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and This translation first published 1968 (New Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich). Minnesota Press. First published 1985 as

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Hsiu-ju Stacy Lo Cinéma 2: L’image-temps (Paris: Minuit). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Minuit). Lo, Hsiu-ju Stacy. 2018. “Crossing Rivers and Lakes: The Art of Everyday Life in Contemporary China.” PhD thesis, Columbia University. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London: Routledge. First published 1945 as Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard). NASA. 2017. “Big Questions: Superstrings.”

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Imagine the Universe! National Aeronautics and Space Administration Goddard Space Flight Center. Accessed 14 September 2020. https://imagine.gsfc. nasa.gov/science/questions/superstring. html. Scott, James C. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Silliphant, Stirling, and Joel Rogosin, producers. 1971–72. Longstreet. Los Angeles, CA: CBS Television Distribution. Taussig, Michael T. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York: Routledge. Žižek, Slavoj. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso.

Addressing Problems of Our Capitalist Economies through Artistic Production Niamh Schmidtke Goldsmiths, University of London, UK

Introduction My artistic enquiries are driven by a desire to expose and understand the gap between financial capitalism and our everyday “lived” economies. I make pieces by working through the many problems that arise from this gap, three of which informed the construction of the works Plane No. 7 and The Homeless Line: the scale of our economies, statistics as a visualisation tool, and how such data could become graspable. First, we live inside our economies. They are so massive that they appear invisible, their scale making it impossible for us to grasp or accurately depict them. For example, if I asked you to come up with an image of a capitalist economy what would you think of ? A currency symbol? A rising stock chart? A homeless person? It is impossible to gain a full picture of our economy, yet unless we strive to do just that it will remain invisible to us. Addressing this invisibility, I investigated Timothy Morton’s theory of hyperobjects (2013) which describes an object that is massively distributed in time and space, relative to humans (ibid., 1). While these “massive” objects can be broken into smaller sections, those sections cannot express the vastness of the object that they have been taken from, due to the minimised scale they now perform at. This exposes a key question behind the work presented here, how can neoliberal economics that require invisibility be visualised? Morton suggests statistics as a visualisation method, which leads to the second problem that I am addressing here, statistical visualisation and the immateriality of graphs and figures. Although statistics can provide a view of our economic frameworks, they are flat and cold and do not authentically depict the way the “real” world works. In the object Plane No. 7, I used the Irish Consumer Price index, taken from the European Central Bank’s inflation dashboard. Online, they show a clean yellow line, moving through space, sitting on a flat, immaterial plane. It is possible to locate the point at which the Irish boom, the Celtic Tiger, began and where it completely unravelled, by following the rise and fall of this statistical line. What this graph does not show is the rising number of homeless people on Irish streets, it does not show you the property price spikes, it does not show protests over water charges, or demonstrations over abortion. It gives no accur-

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Niamh Schmidtke ate picture of what it means to inhabit the Irish economic system, merely an abstracted form that better determines neoliberal modes of success. In considering these inaccuracies in how we commonly view economics, Deleuze and Guattari’s descriptions of rhizomes and planes provided a basis from which to rethink how statistical charts might reveal their own representational inadequacies. Through the lens of rhizomic thinking the stiff and intangible forms of economic data are made malleable within artistic practice, via translations into drawings and sculptural sketches. This also became relevant for the third problem, namely the question of how such information could be grasped; as an artist, I took on the challenge of translating economic data into an object. The object became an attempt for the information to physically occupy a room and for this objectification of data to generate a feeling of what these types of visualisations may lack. Taking into consideration how such graphics could become 3D directed my decision to use the visual and physical languages of flat-pack furniture, as a mode of making that is configured for mass production and high profit margins. Choosing this method of making was also linked to how design regenerates through current invisibilities in neoliberalism, both as a feature that allows reconfiguration and in how the final object might be made without the skill of a craftsperson. In discussing these three problems in relation to the works Plane No. 7 and The Homeless Line, I intend to show that artistic interventions can open a space where it becomes possible to have a meaningful dialogue about our economies, through the particular combinative processes that contemporary art allows.

Problem 1: scale of capitalist economies As previously stated, we live inside our economies; they are so large that they have become invisible to us. The issue here is that this system is so all encompassing, we lose our political agency over what is happening (Morton 2013, 20). In Timothy Morton’s 2013 book he critically examines the new term hyperobjects. He ascribes several attributes to these massive objects, the most important one here being that hyperobjects are “non-local,” meaning that these objects always exist at a remove. It is this characteristic that allows economies, and more specifically capitalist and neoliberal economies, to remain invisible in order to maintain their power structures. Morton also argues that “Hyperobjects provide great examples of interobjectivity—namely the way in which nothing is ever experienced directly, but only as mediated through other entities in some shared sensual space” (Morton 2013, 86). Graham Harman makes a similar point in Object-Oriented Ontology: “Objects are not identical with their properties, but have a tense relationship with those properties” (2018, 9). Here it is important to note that I am talking about objects in Harman’s sense that “an object is anything that cannot be entirely reduced either to the component of which it is made or to the effects that it has on other things” (ibid., 43). What I am pointing to here is that economy works in a way that is not known, and due to how large our economic systems are, will never be known. In relation to art production, the issue in using this as material for making, as Morton puts it,

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Addressing Problems of Our Capitalist Economies “trying to evoke the objectness of hyperobjects,” is that they are “primordially in their being prior to thinking” (2013, 20). Morton does, however, show one way to visualise these hyperobjects, by abstracting them through statistics (ibid., 48).

Figure 27.1.

Figure 27.2.

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Figure 27.1. A drawn translation of a statistical graph, using rhizomatic thinking to breakdown the sections and components of a graph into more malleable sections. Figure 27.2. A drawn translation of a statistical graph, using multiplicities to reconnect points of data and to visualise the space between data sets.

Niamh Schmidtke

Problem 2: statistics as a visualisation tool This leads to the second problem. Statistics are an abstraction of the world we live in because they are removed from how we inhabit our planet. They exist on flat and immaterial planes and show the world from a cold and “non-local” perspective. It was this issue that caused me to examine Gilles Deleuze’s theories of planes and rhizomes, within his co-authored book with Félix Guattari A Thousand Plateaus. Their thoughts on capitalism as a “crossroads of all kinds of formations” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 20) led me to a new understanding of the ways we investigate our economies. Using this image of the multiplicities of capitalism I began critically investigating the structure of a rhizome, as something that “connects any point to any other point” (ibid., 21). In order to deconstruct the language within A Thousand Plateaus, I began using drawing as an instinctual translation and application of their concepts into my visual language. By applying rhizomatic thinking through line and pen I could dismantle the way I viewed statistics (figures 27.1–2). Through a series of investigative drawings that aimed at deterritorialising the flatness of statistical data, I was able to arrive at Plane No. 7 (figure 27.4) through this issue of flatness.

Figure 27.3.

Working through drawing resulted in sections of statistical data being materialised into a series of planes (figure 27.3). This format of production allows the object to be reconfigurable. Over time, planes can be added or removed, allowing the object to change with our economy and, in effect, to never be complete. The object is made from bright yellow Perspex, which references not only the colour of the statistical line it was determined from but also the slick, and commercial displays of capitalist neoliberal economies. Plane No. 7 uses the language of commodity production to make a statement about these systems’ invisibility.

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Figure 27.3. Layout for final digital file, displaying how the statistical graph is broken into a series of buildable planes.

Addressing Problems of Our Capitalist Economies

Figure 27.4.

Problem 3: grasping data While this process meant that I was able to objectify data from our economies, there was still the issue of how this information could be graspable for a viewer. While working through how to materialise this statistical data, I was simultaneously looking for issues in how the work might be accessible, or graspable, for a viewer. This led to a return to A Thousand Plateaus. Deleuze and Guattari discussed capitalism as existing in “all kinds of formations” (1987, 20), or, to put it another way, in multiplicities. This led to the simultaneous production of another work. Taking the view of the rhizome as something that is “always detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exits and its own lines of flight” (ibid. 1987, 21). I began using the book as an object with a particular set of codes; a beginning, middle, and end, a set of pages, a cover, and so on. By using a recognisable format, I was able to more explicitly show how rhizomatic thinking could modify objects. As a result, this book, The Homeless Line (figure 27.5), broke down ideas into planes. Acting as a series of 3D folds, each plane of thought was allowed to exist and connect through the viewer’s reading of the book. The viewer’s interaction with the work becomes a way to play with the process of making, as a physical manifestation of how the sculptural object was thought through and formed. When this object exists with the sculptural work, there is more encouragement for the viewer to interact and “play” with the meaning of the piece. It also allows space for greater meaning creation, since there is no clear format for how the work should be received. In a typical sense, this book acts as a quasi-reader, or com-

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Figure 27.4. Exhibition documentation of Plane No. 7 on display at Limerick School of Art and Design during the 2019 Graduate Degree Show.

Niamh Schmidtke panion piece, to the sculptural object, displaying my drawn translations of A Thousand Plateaus and the previous sculptural experiments that led to Plane No. 7. The works blend against one another through a process of deterritorialising and reterritorialising each other.

Figure 27.5.

Conclusion The method of making work presented here critically applies Morton’s hyperobjects and Deleuze’s rhizomes as explorative tools to dissect the economic systems we inhabit, shaping the production of physical objects. While using academic texts to reimagine societal structures, such as economic systems, is typical in the sphere of contemporary art, breaking down these processes through artistic research allows further analysis into processes of production, providing new methods of working across other disciplines, such as computation or institutional planning. A benefit of infusing Deleuze’s writings within my artistic practice is that they do not belong to any one field, not even

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Figure 27.5. Exhibition documentation of The Homeless Line on display at Limerick School of Art and Design during the 2019 Graduate Degree Show.

Addressing Problems of Our Capitalist Economies solely to philosophy. By cross-referencing art production and my understanding of economics with Deleuzian theory, the process of making work becomes as open as the ways in which the final piece can be interacted with. The dynamic that results from this process causes the nature of these objects to exist in multiples and be reconfigurable. The works exist rhizomatically, with many entry and exit points to the viewer and to one another.

Acknowledgement I am particularly grateful for the assistance given by Fiona Woods, for her invaluable critique and support in the writing of this text. I would also like to thank my parents for their continued support in all my artistic and academic endeavours. Lastly, I would like to thank the Sculpture and Combined Media department in Limerick School of Art and Design and Gerard Walsh in the Limerick FabLab who were integral to the realisation of the two works Plane No. 7 and The Homeless Line. References Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Minuit).

Harman, Graham. 2018. Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything. London: Pelican Books. Morton, Timothy. 2013. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.

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The Milieu and the Territorial Assemblage Insights from Architecture Gareth Abrahams University of Liverpool, UK

Introduction In chapter eleven of A Thousand Plateaus, “1837: Of the Refrain,” Deleuze and Guattari present us with a development sequence that takes us through the formation, development, organisation, and dissipation of a territorial assemblage. While they cover each of these stages in detail, it is the shift from the milieu into the territorial assemblage, the “infra-assemblage,” that seems to attract most of their interest. As they note, “We always come back to this ‘moment’: the becoming-expressive of rhythm, the emergence of expressive proper qualities, the formation of matters of expression that develop into motifs and counterpoints” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 322). The emergence of expression is not only interesting from a conceptual and philosophical perspective. As the above quotation notes, this transition marks the point when expressiveness emerges out of a functional milieu and is “essentially artistic” (Bogue 2003, 19). For those of us working within spatial-artistic disciplines such as architecture, the emergence of expressiveness is fundamental to the way we direct creative processes (Garoian 2017, 90). This “moment” as conceptualised by Deleuze and Guattari, therefore, presents a unique opportunity for advancing architectural design theory. But while we can identify several attempts to conceptualise architectural spaces and cities as milieu(s) (Ballantyne 2018; Smith 2012) or assemblages (Dovey and Fisher 2014; Daly and Smith 2011; McFarlane 2011), the transition between these two states has attracted very little (if any) attention within the literature. In an effort to fill this gap, this chapter will develop a novel interpretation of the milieu, the territorial assemblage, and the “moment” that connects them by developing a close reading of the eleventh chapter of A Thousand Plateaus and linking this with a hypothetical scenario set within architectural design practice. In doing so, this chapter is offered as a contribution to both DeleuzoGuattarian scholarship and architectural design theory.

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The milieu as a pre-assemblage All milieus, Deleuze and Guattari tell us, are composed of “an exterior milieu of materials, an interior milieu of composing elements and composed substances, an intermediary milieu of membranes and limits, and an annexed milieu of energy sources and actions-perceptions” (1987, 313). But before we can navigate this composition, we must first appreciate the distinction Deleuze and Guattari make between an exterior milieu of formed “molecular materials” and the unformed matter that sits outside this milieu in the plane of consistency. The distinction between these materials, we are told by Guattari in his earlier essays, can be understood according to two different kinds of sense.1 In the case of the latter, sense is not something that is imposed upon, or used to order and structure matter. Rather, in such instances this sense is directed by the inherent tendencies and potential capacities of unformed matter, or what Deleuze and Guattari also refer to as “singularities” (1987, 40) or “actions and passions” (88). If unformed matter is driven by these tendencies and potential capacities alone, they argue, then it should be conceived as a plane of flows. This is not to say that these flows are uniform. Through this sense, unformed matter is able to continuously connect and disconnect within flows, producing intensities that manifest and dissipate over time. This inherent sense, or what Guattari had termed “machinic sense” (1984, 96), changes as we make the conceptual transition from the unformed matter in the plane of consistency to the formed matter populating an exterior milieu (figure 28.1). Here, unformed matter is selected, organised, and structured not only by an inherent or “machinic” sense but also by an imposed sense. While this sense varies in different instances and across different parts of Deleuze and Guattari’s2 conceptual framework, such variations are underpinned by the same principle. Namely, that the inherent tendencies and potential capacities of unformed matter can be translated into and adapted to serve a functional role within the complex compounds that form intermediary and interior milieus. But what does this mean in real-world terms? First, it is worth noting that we are complex compounds formed within a range of milieus. And as such, we are unable to directly access the unformed matter/sense of the plane of consistency. But we can, and often do, engage with the molecular materials, substantial elements, and complex compounds that form a given milieu. To illustrate and navigate this, I would like to draw on an example from architectural practice and have selected a traditional roof design in the UK for this purpose.

1 This use of sense in this chapter is derived from Guattari’s distinction between “machinic sense” and “signifying sense” developed in response to his study of Hjelmslevian semiotics. These concepts are developed in Guattari’s essays leading up to A Thousand Plateaus (see the essay, “Towards a Micro-Politics of Desire” for example [Guattari 1984, 96]). It should be noted that this Guattarian concept of sense does not fully align with the often-cited Deleuzian concept of sense as developed in his seminal text The Logic of Sense (Deleuze 1990). While there are conceptual alignments between the two concepts, it is beyond the scope of this chapter to unpack these in sufficient detail. 2 And Guattari’s individual corpus.

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Figure 28.1.

The principal building materials used in this traditional roof design typically include slate tiles, timber battens, timber rafters, mineral wool, and plasterboard. These building materials form the exterior milieu of the roof, and have identifiable tendencies and capacities3 that provide a functional role in the roof as a complex compound (interior milieu). Thus, when used as a building material, timber has the capacity to resist imposed loads, can be cut into many different shapes without compromising its capacity, and is able to flex to absorb changes in applied load. At the same time, timber tends to expand and contract under variable humidity and temperature conditions. Unlike timber, slate is highly impermeable and maintains its form when wet but is unable to flex in response to variable loading conditions caused by wind, snow, and rain. The fourth component, mineral wool, has the capacity to retain heat and can be moulded into a range of shapes; but these capacities are mirrored by its inability to retain heat when wet and to maintain its form without additional support. The final component, plasterboard, has the capacity to retain its rigidity over a large surface area and, unlike timber, can absorb and release large quantities of moisture without significant deformation. The configuration of these materials within this interior milieu aims to maximise the functional role played by these inherent tendencies and capacities in the roof design. Slate tiles, for example, are positioned in a lapped configuration to maximise slate’s impermeability and, thus, control the passage of water across the outer surface of the roof compound (figure 28.2). This configuration is also used to ensure that all materials within this interior milieu support and maximise the tendencies and capacities of other materials. Thus, the impermeable slate tiles function as weatherproofing to the principal structure below, resisting the timber’s tendency to deform in wet conditions, 3 Identifiable tendencies and capacities of formed materials rather than the inherent (and unidentifiable) tendencies and potential capacities of unformed matter.

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Figure 28.1. Unformed matter and formed materials.

Gareth Abrahams while the timber battens and rafters ensure that these individual slates can move without cracking. The mineral wool batts around the timbers and below the slate tiles act as an insulant to further resist any deformation in the timber rafters caused by changes in temperature. The plasterboard to the underside of the rafters provides support for the mineral wool batts, and a uniform surface to the inner room. Its capacity to absorb water without deformation lends itself to the absorption of water-based paints used as surface treatment, as well as the capacity to absorb and emit moisture into the inner room to respond to periods of high and low humidity (figure 28.2).

Figure 28.2.

This provides us with a simple example of a complex compound configured through a specific arrangement of formed building materials. The important point I would like to draw from this is that the configuration is not coincidental, nor is it fully created in situ. This is because each material in the configuration has been formed specifically to serve these or similar functional roles. If we take slate tiles, for example, each tile is manufactured to a specific length, width, and thickness. These dimensions are determined by a number of possible lapping configurations. The timber battens below have also been sized to facilitate these lapping arrangements, and to provide a fixing for the tiles. What this shows us is that the external milieu is formed by an imaginary transition to a pre-conceived, possible interior milieu.4 But, of course, any transition between exterior and interior milieu cannot be achieved in a single step. As with all construction processes, it must pass through a series of intermedi4 I have used the term possible here in line with the traditional idea that such materials are formed out of “already conceptualized [imagined] possibilit[ies]” (Smith 2012, 253; see also Adkins 2015, 62). It should be noted that this is distinct from the term potential, which is identified with the plane of consistency and reflects the idea of a virtuality that produces something new when actualised (Smith 2012, 253).

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Figure 28.2. Typical roof configuration in the UK.

The Milieu and the Territorial Assemblage ary states, meaning that these imaginary, possible states must also be accommodated in the formation of a given building material. Expanding DeleuzoGuattarian terms, we may say that materials in the exterior milieu are formed not only by a pre-conceived, possible interior milieu but also by pre-conceived, possible intermediary and associated milieus. We can appreciate this point by returning to the simple example of the slate tile. As I noted above, every tile in a builder’s yard is formed to a specific thickness, length, and width to accommodate different lapping arrangements; but these dimensions are equally determined by the processes used to produce this configuration. For example, it is highly likely that in any given roofing project a number of tiles will need to be cut to accommodate the width and length of the individual roof, as well as some of the junctions within this roof design (such as valley gutters, roof hips, and so forth), and it is likely that all such tiles will need to be drilled to accommodate fixings into a substrate (like a timber batten). The conventional tile cutting tools and drills used on most building sites are able to cut or drill holes into slates of a given thickness. If the slate is thicker than this, such tools will not be able to cut or drill through the tile, but if it is any thinner, it is likely to crack. These considerations must also be balanced against the processes used to handle and position the tile. The density of slate determines the weight of a tile of a given size, which, in turn, determines the ability of the roofing contractor to handle this slate with sufficient accuracy to position it within the roof compound. One could extend this example further to consider the process used to store, package, and transport these tiles, the process used to move these tiles around the site, the process used to maintain or replace the tiles in the future and so forth. With this in mind, I would like to draw out three connected and novel observations about Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the milieu. First, it helps us extend the diagram in figure 28.1 to include all milieu components. As figure 28.3 shows, each exterior milieu of materials is formed in two ways: by drawing in materials from the plane of consistency on the basis of their inherent tendencies and potential capacities, and by drawing on a number of possible intermediary, associated, and interior milieus each capturing different design scenarios. Second, it shows us that milieu components cannot be understood in isolation or as part of a hierarchical sequence. For the design/construction process, this means that we do not simply “add in” milieu components as we move from the exterior milieu through the intermediary milieu/associated milieu and interior milieu. Rather, all milieu components exist at all points in this process in either possible or actualised states. Taking this into account, we can now expand the diagram in figure 28.3 to include a “possible” path, such as the one used to form an exterior milieu, and an actualised path, which captures the in-situ process of developing a project in practice (figure 28.4).

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Figure 28.3.

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Figure 28.4.

Figure 28.3. The possible milieus and the actual exterior milieu. Figure 28.4. Actual and imagined possible paths within the milieu.

The Milieu and the Territorial Assemblage Third, it suggests that all building materials within an external milieu are coded by a set of assumptions regarding their role in a possible intermediary milieu and a possible interior milieu. These codes define the limits, or “membranes,” for forming actualised intermediary and interior milieus. These membranes define the point when the material is no longer able to perform its functional role in the roof configuration or when the configuration must change to accommodate interactions with an associated milieu. At these points, we can say that a new iteration, or intermediary state of the roof configuration, is produced. Fourth, this example shows that codes within the milieu allow us to form and refine building materials to high levels of accuracy. Above I have shown that a slate tile can be coded in this way because one can make strong assumptions about how it will act and function in a range of possible configurations. These assumptions are based on the knowledge that from one moment to the next a tile in a given roof configuration will continue to act and function in specific ways. If one were to exchange that tile with another it would repeat the same functional role. Similarly, if one were to then remove that tile and use it in a similar configuration it would also repeat these same functions. In DeleuzoGuattarian terms, therefore, periodic repetition is used to define and refine the material’s code and thus the milieu itself (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 313; see also Bogue 2003, 18). These observations provide us with useful insight into a single milieu (a roof-milieu) and the milieu components that form it. But of course, it is highly unlikely that one would develop such a roof in isolation. The limit of a roof usually carries over into an eaves-milieu, which also relates to the top of a wall operating within a wall-milieu, which in turn links into a floor-milieu, a foundation-milieu, and so forth. This chain could be equally explained in the opposing direction depending on the specific design or construction sequence. What matters, is not which milieu leads to another, but what makes this transition possible, that is, what directs and facilitates the transition from a roof-milieu to an eaves-milieu, for example. While a milieu is developed through repetition, Deleuze and Guattari tell us that the passage from one milieu to another (“rhythm”) is achieved through difference. Importantly, repetition and difference are not to be treated as distinct, but rather part of the same process: “A milieu does in fact exist by virtue of a periodic repetition, but one whose only effect is to produce a difference by which the milieu passes into another milieu. It is the difference that is rhythmic, not the repetition, which nevertheless produces it” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 314). But how is this possible? Above I noted that to form and reform a building material like a slate tile or a timber rafter, one must select and operationalise the inherent tendencies and capacities of matter to serve a functional role in the development of a possible roof configuration. This means that only some of the inherent qualities and tendencies of slate and timber are utilised in the intermediary and interior milieus. Extending this further, this means that some of these tendencies form the basis for periodic repetition, while others do not (and thus remain different).

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Gareth Abrahams We can see this in the example above. In my description of the roof, I showed how timber’s tendencies and capacities were translated into a series of functions within a roof design. But we can also identify other capacities and tendencies that are not needed in this configuration (such as timber’s capacity to act as a structural cantilever). Some are replicated by other entities within the milieu (such as timber’s capacity to act as an insulant when processed into wood fibre insulation) or deemed undesirable within the milieu (such as timber’s capacity to burn). This distinction is described by Deleuze and Guattari (1987) as the “margins of the code” (322, 332), or in other words, between tendencies and capacities that are valued within the milieu and those that represent “surplus value” (314). It is this surplus value, this difference within the code, that forms the basis of rhythm. In such instances, surplus value is transferred across milieus, such that “one milieu serves as the basis for another, or conversely is established atop another milieu, dissipates in it or is constituted in it” (313). One can appreciate this by expanding the hypothetical scenario introduced above.

Rhythm: from milieu to milieu Most traditional roofs like the one described above terminate in an eaves. The primary function of the eaves is to transport rainwater from the roof along a controlled path away from the building (usually via a gutter and downpipe). As the roof turns into an eaves, the formed materials within the roof configuration assume different functions by drawing on different tendencies and capacities. The timber rafter’s capacity to cantilever beyond a support had laid dormant in the roof milieu but becomes fundamental to its new role within the emerging eaves milieu as it cantilevers beyond the external wall. Its capacity to be shaped in different ways allows it to be notched over a timber wall plate. This capacity within timber is also extended beyond the body of the rafter, as the rafter turns into a fascia board. As engineered timbers, this fascia is, itself, formed through a combination of two materials: timber and glue. The latter provides greater stability in moist environments while retaining the former’s capacity to be reshaped in different ways and to absorb and hold onto galvanised nails within its fibre composition. This combination of glue and timber provides an ideal substrate for an aluminium gutter, which has a capacity to resist water corrosion and absorption as well as the capacity to be shaped to high levels of accuracy. By projecting away from the building, the eaves milieu also activates the timber rafter’s capacity to act as an insulant. In this emerging milieu, these timbers resist heat transfer through “cold bridging” (figure 28.5).

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The Milieu and the Territorial Assemblage

Figure 28.5.

This example shows how surplus values within a building material’s code are transferred into a newly emerging milieu, forming the basis for new functions and for the introduction of other formed materials. As with the roof milieu, the materials drawn into the exterior milieu of the eaves (like guttering and fascia boarding) are also formed according to a number of assumptions regarding their role and interaction with other materials and tools in the construction process. This shows us that the surplus value (difference) within the code of a material in one milieu transfers and forms the basis for another. And it is this transfer that determines the creation of a new exterior milieu, which presupposes possible intermediary and interior milieus (figure 28.6).

411 Figure 28.6.

Figure 28.5. Detail of a typical eaves. Figure 28.6. The passage from milieu to milieu through rhythm.

Gareth Abrahams If we were to extend this sequence further, we would see a similar act of rhythm from the eaves-milieu into a wall-milieu, the below-ground drainage-milieu, and so forth. Taken together, this passage from one milieu to another through surplus value forms a continuous rhythm that “ties together critical moments, or ties itself together in passing from one milieu to another. It does not operate in a homogeneous space-time, but by heterogeneous blocks. It changes direction” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 313). This last point is important as it emphasises the fact that the passage from one milieu to another (rhythm) does not follow a linear path. While the roof milieu may pass into other milieus at any point in the process, the rhythm may change direction. Surplus code in the below-ground drainage-milieu may pass back into the eaves-milieu or the roof-milieu or another milieu altogether. This illuminates Deleuze and Guattari’s argument that exterior and interior milieus can exchange places at any time and are not limited to the confines of a single milieu (1987, 50).

Infra-assemblages: from milieu to territorial assemblage Surplus value is not only used to form and direct new milieus. It can also give rise to a second path: the formation of a territorial assemblage, or what Deleuze and Guattari also term the infra-assemblage. Deleuze and Guattari argue that this second path only occurs when a material, substance, or compound operating within a milieu changes in a fundamental way: “There is a territory precisely when milieu components cease to be directional, becoming dimensional instead, when they cease to be functional to become expressive. There is a territory when the rhythm has expressiveness. What defines the territory is the emergence of matters of expression (qualities)” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 315). Deleuze and Guattari explain this transition from the functional to the expressive by comparing territorial and non-territorial birds and fish. In the latter, colouration is a primary function and contributes to the animals’ tendencies and capacities (or actions and passions) such as aggression, sexuality, or flight. In such instances, the coloured limb is one of many formed materials that serve a functional role in the bird’s behavioural, reproductive, or flight milieus. The colouration in birds becomes expressive, they argue, when its surplus value is used to mark-out a territory: to act as a “territorial . . . signature” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 315). When this occurs, this expressive quality changes how materials, substances, and compounds interact. Rather than prioritising primary functions, their functional role “presuppose[s] a territory-producing expressiveness” (ibid.). In other words, all functions in the territory serve, or are derived from the expressive qualities that mark out a territorial assemblage. To appreciate how surplus value can form a territorial assemblage rather than a milieu, I would like to return to the hypothetical scenario set out above.

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The Milieu and the Territorial Assemblage In many parts of the UK, a traditional roof formed with timber rafters, slate tiles, mineral wool, and plasterboard may only need to be designed at a 35-degree pitch to achieve its primary functions within the building-milieu, that is, to offer shelter from the elements. This pitch provides the roof with the capacity to resist the rafter’s tendency to buckle under snow-loading, to allow water to run from the roof at a sufficient rate for the gutters to collect and direct surface water, and to resist wind loading and the pressures of wind up-lift on the slates. The eaves-milieu is also determined by its primary function in the building-milieu: to transport water away from the building envelope. One can imagine that to perform this primary function, the eaves may need to project 100mm beyond the building envelope. If the roof and eaves were configured in this way, then one may argue that this simply reflects the core functions/code of the roof and eaves-milieus each contributing to a broader building-milieu. However, one can also imagine that, instead of setting the roof at 35-degrees, the architect decides to set the roof at 55-degrees. And instead of a 100mm eaves projection, the architect extends and adapts this to form a 350mm “bellcast” eaves (figure 28.7). This steeper pitch and additional overhang do not serve a functional role in the roof-, eaves-, or building-milieu. These additions are entirely surplus to the functional requirements of the building. Unlike the surplus value that allowed the roof-milieu to pass as rhythm into the eavesmilieu, this surplus value does not lead to the formation of a new milieu and the selection of other materials that serve functional roles in this milieu. Instead, this surplus value creates, what Deleuze and Guattari term an “expressive quality” (1987, 318), or what designers might term “an architectural statement.” Like the coloration in territorial birds, this statement marks and produces a territory. And, in doing so, these architectural statements (expressive qualities) transform the building-milieu into a territory. However, as Deleuze and Guattari note, this expressive statement does not, alone, produce a territorial assemblage. This assemblage is created, they note, when the materials, elements, and compounds within the roof- and eavesmilieu are reconfigured to serve the emerging territory and the expressive qualities (statements) that territorialise them (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 316). Thus, to achieve a 55-degree roof pitch, the rafters become steeper. A sprocket rafter is fixed to the side of each principle rafter to support the change in angle required to form the bellcast eaves. The timber rafter’s capacity to cantilever shifts to the sprocket along with its capacity to be shaped as a fixing for the fascia board. As with the relationship between emerging milieus discussed above, these expressive qualities facilitate the introduction of other expressive qualities. To further express the bellcast eaves, for example, the architect may expose the sprocket rafters and reposition the fascia board. The amended angle may be further expressed through changes to the profile of the gutter and so forth (figure 28.7).

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Figure 28.7.

This hypothetical scenario outlines two key observations regarding the milieu and the transition to a territorial assemblage. First, the milieu and the territorial assemblage share a similar underlying composition. In my review of the milieu, I noted that all building materials are formed according to possible intermediary and interior milieus. In the territorial assemblage, we can see that the focus may have shifted from function to expression, but these pre-conceived, imaginary uses and interactions still limit what can and cannot be produced within a territorial assemblage. Like the milieu, we can equally imagine that the actualised development of a territorial assemblage must also pass through a number of intermediary states by engaging with other components within an associated milieu. As Deleuze and Guattari note: “A territory borrows from all the milieus; it bites into them, seizes them bodily (although it remains vulnerable to intrusions). It is built from aspects or portions of milieus. It itself has an exterior milieu, an interior milieu, an intermediary milieu, and an annexed milieu” (1987, 314). If the first observation concerns their similarities, then the second observation I would like to make focuses on their differences. While the milieu and the territorial assemblage may share the same underlying composition, they are driven by different forces. The milieu is directed almost entirely by the functional utility of formed building materials and compounds; but in the ter-

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Figure 28.7. Roof design as territorial assemblage.

The Milieu and the Territorial Assemblage ritorial assemblage, these functions become supportive to the formation and development of expression. As the above example shows, the introduction of expressive qualities (statements) changes the way formed materials, elements, and compounds function within the territorial assemblage. As in the milieu, they continue to operate according to their respective tendencies and capacities (timber rafters still act as structural support, slate tiles still act as weatherproofing, and mineral wool still acts as an insulant), but within a territorial assemblage, these materials also function in ways that support and facilitate the expressive qualities within the roof and eaves design (Abrahams 2020). Thus, while a territorial assemblage may contain an exterior milieu of materials, these materials are chosen according to their capacity to form and reinforce an expressive statement as well as their capacity to serve a functional role (figure 28.8).

Figure 28.8.

So, one may ask, how does this expressive statement expand within the territorial assemblage? If the territory was initiated by an architectural statement, then the developing of this statement forms the basis of “style” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 317). For Deleuze and Guattari, the transition from signature to style is not simply a question of scale: from one expressive quality to an aggregate of multiple expressive qualities. This stage in the infra-assemblage, they argue, also marks the point when expressiveness itself starts to take on an autonomous role in the development of an emerging building-assemblage: “What we wish to say is that there is a self-movement of expressive qualities. . . . To express is not to depend

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Figure 28.8. The territorial assemblage and milieu components.

Gareth Abrahams upon; there is an autonomy of expression” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 317). One can appreciate this self-movement of expressiveness by imagining how the architect might continue to express the roof as a territory in the emerging building-assemblage. A steeper pitched roof may lead the architect to include accommodation within the roof space. For this roof space to be fully habitable, the architect adds a series of dormer windows along the length of the roof. He or she then reiterates the initial architectural statement used to form the roof territory by introducing a 55-degree roof to each dormer and terminating them in a bellcast eaves (figure 28.9).

Figure 28.9.

In this sequence we can see how the expression of the roof territory is used to fix an aggregate of expressive qualities (55-degree pitch and bellcast eaves) and repeat this configuration in different scenarios (the dormers). Deleuze and Guattari refer to the formation and use of such fixed aggregates as territorial motifs (1987, 318). These territorial motifs reduce the architect’s input into the design process by allowing him or her to continue working at the level of the infra-assemblage. In this sense, the territorial motif shifts the balance of agency from the architect to the expressiveness of the roof-territory. But for this territorial motif to operate as an expression of the territory, Deleuze and Guattari argue it must be developed alongside territorial counterpoints that “place the circumstances of the external milieu in counterpoint” (1987, 317). At the level of the building, this exterior milieu refers not only to building materials but also to the urban environment surrounding the emerging building and the broader milieus of societal change and the architectural movements that respond to such change. Thus, for example, the roof-motif may

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Figure 28.9. Dormer design as an expansion of the roof territory.

The Milieu and the Territorial Assemblage form a counterpoint with the buildings that surround it, which we can imagine are all designed with flat roofs and walk-in gutters behind parapet walls. By reiterating an aggregate of expressive qualities identified in the Arts and Crafts movement from the late 1800s, the roof-motif also counterpoints existing normative assumptions developed from post- and late-modernism. Given that this aggregate is adapted to include modern materials to meet modern performance requirements and is set within a unique configuration specific to this contemporary building, this same roof-motif also places original Arts and Crafts buildings in counterpoint. Thus, for Deleuze and Guattari, the expansion of expressiveness through territorial motifs is always formed alongside a unique set of territorial counterpoints operating across a range of milieus formed at different scales and timeframes. The above insight captures a sequence of developments that take us from an expressive statement to the production of motifs and counterpoint as the basis for style. These act as key stages in what Deleuze and Guattari term “the alignment” or “line of expression” (1987, 59).

Conclusion This chapter is offered as a novel interpretation of the milieu, the territorial assemblage, and the “moment” that connects them. As a contribution to Deleuzo-Guattarian scholarship, this chapter posits that the milieu and the territorial assemblage should be considered as distinct conceptual “bodies” that occupy different positions within Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptual framework. But while they can be distinguished conceptually, they are not fundamentally different and cannot be treated as simple binaries. Both are underpinned by the same milieu components and both can be produced within a single development sequence (such as in architecture). The distinction between them, I have argued, lies in the forces that drive and shape them. The milieu is directed by function: in translating the inherent capacities and tendencies of unformed matter into functional roles within the milieu. The territorial assemblage also creates such translations. But these functions are used to support the core driver within the assemblage—namely, the formation and development of an autonomous line of expression. For those of us working within the threshold between Deleuzo-Guattarian scholarship and architecture, this chapter opens-up a number of difficult questions: Is the transition from the milieu to the territorial assemblage a conceptual equivalent to the transition from building to architecture? If the development of the territorial assemblage is defined by a shift from the formation of an expressive (architectural) statement to the autonomy of expression, does this reflect a shift from the architect as the principal agent of architecture to architecture as self-production? Such questions are fundamental to the architectural process, and offer the basis for future studies in Deleuze-and-Guattariinspired architectural research.

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Gareth Abrahams References Abrahams, Gareth. 2020. “The Strata/ Machinic Assemblage and Architecture.” Deleuze and Guattari Studies 14 (4): 604–33. Adkins, Brent. 2015. Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: A Critical Introduction and Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Ballantyne, Andrew. 2018. “Schizoanalytic City.” In Architectural and Urban Reflections after Deleuze and Guattari, edited by Constantin V. Boundas and Vana Tentokali, 29–44. London: Rowman and Littlefield. Bogue, Ronald. 2003. Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Daly, Andrew, and Chris L. Smith. 2011. “Architecture, Cigarettes AND THE Dispositif.” Architectural Theory Review 16 (1): 22–37. Deleuze, Gilles. 1990. The Logic of Sense. Translated by Mark Lester with Charles Stivale. Edited by Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1969 as Logique du sens (Paris: Minuit). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and

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Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Minuit). Dovey, Kim, and Kenn Fisher. 2014. “Designing for Adaptation: The School as Socio-Spatial Assemblage.” Journal of Architecture 19 (1): 43–63. Garoian, Charles R. 2017. “Performing The Refrain of Art Research and Practice.” In What Is Art Education? After Deleuze and Guattari, edited by jan jagodzinski, 83–93. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Guattari, Félix. 1984. Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics. Translated by Rosemary Sheed. London: Penguin. Essays first published in Psychanalyse et transversalité (Paris: Maspero, 1972) and Le révolution moléculaire (Fontenay-Sous-Bois: Recherches, 1977). McFarlane, Colin. 2011. “The City as Assemblage: Dwelling and Urban Space,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29 (4): 649–71. Smith, Daniel W. 2012. Essays on Deleuze. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Hecate An Apparatus for Mapping Urban Complexity Yota Passia and Panagiotis Roupas School of Architecture, National Technical University of Athens, Greece

Introduction While space is generally perceived—within complexity and assemblage theory—as a nexus of dynamical relations between parts that connect at various spatial and temporal scales, we are unable to perceive it or describe it in those terms. This chapter aims to reconceptualise space and the built environment as a dynamical landscape of potentialities where futures emerge from within fields of relatedness and connectedness. Conceptually experiencing this dynamical landscape pushes the limits of our cognitive capacities to further understand and visualise the different levels and kinds of spatial change as normal, relational, and intensive. This topological field of emergence resembles an “anticipation apparatus” that recursively calculates differentials and ʹ uncertainties (Parisi 2012, 167). The apparatus is named Hecate (’Εκάτη) after the Greek goddess of extensive and intensive thresholds. Hecate is variously associated with borders, crossroads, and entrance-ways of the extensive realm. She is also believed to hold the master key to the three mythological realms of the living, the dead, and the gods—a “liminal” goddess mediating between intensive regimes. Hecate becomes in this context the city’s apparatus; she is the means through which all traces of information—past, present, and future—resurface and associate anew, topologically interconnecting hitherto disparate continuums of space and time. Hecate is a conceptual tool for analysing concrete assemblages and modes of existence regarding space and the city. This task is inevitably tied to the analysis of sociospatial formations, or what Deleuze terms an “assemblage” (agencement) and Foucault an “apparatus” (dispositif) (Deleuze 2007, 343). Hecate explains how and why space changes while visualising the spatiotemporal dynamisms that produce social relations and design ecologies “in order to access lines of flight of desire where machinic, communicational, and aesthetic deterritorializations, engage us” (Guattari 2015, 99). To create maps of those lines, the first section introduces the theoretical framework needed, focusing on Deleuze and Guattari’s principles of cartography and decalcomania. This section follows Manuel DeLanda’s cartographic strategy and elaborates on 419

Yota Passia and Panagiotis Roupas cartographical maps and their relevance to articulate the city’s moments of unfolding: the extensive, the intensive, and the virtual (DeLanda 2016, 110). The second section elaborates “the power of abstraction” outlining a translation process that transcribes the city’s layers of significance into networked maps of patterned potentialities pointing to them as Hecate’s variable components (Smith [1997] 2012, 218). The final section explores “the power of creation” that invents ever-new relations between these components establishing for them a means of communication and mutual connectedness. Hecate becomes the city’s virtual map, both its intensive and variable elements and the structure of their spaces of possibility (DeLanda [2002] 2013, 10).

Figure 29.1.

On cartography According to Bergson, space is a retrospective construct and we could only think about space or even measure it once we stop thinking of its extensive and metric character ([1911] 1914, 211–13). Unless we allow for the world’s continuity and movement, Brian Massumi notes, “we are looking at only one dimension of reality” (2002, 6). To fluidify the spatial object and map the continuity of its transformation we need to start thinking not about the extensive space but rather its intensive enabling. Here, the emphasis lies on the object’s processual indeterminacy rather than on its signification. According to Massumi, “the field of emergence of experience has to be thought of as a space-time con-

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Figure 29.1. “Hecate_A Virtual Map of Athens.” (© studioentropia architects.)

Hecate tinuum, as an ontogenetic dimension prior to the separating-out of space and time” (2002, 15). Thus, the challenge is to think of spatial assemblages as intensive, to articulate the processes of their formation and dissolution. Considering mapping as a perpetually transforming process of converging and diverging lines, a cartography—as described by Deleuze and Guattari— does not represent a static state of an object, but rather is a map of a field of forces (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 253). Cartography (mapping) and decalcomania (tracing), constituting the fifth and sixth principles in Deleuze and Guattari’s description of the rhizome, respectively, are pivotal in this context. Deleuze and Guattari note: “What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real” (ibid., 12). Mapping has a creative capacity because it remains open to contextual mutations and new constructions as it has the ability to represent the relations of exteriority between the components of the assemblage it depicts. Tracing, on the other hand, is the means of selection among the components of a map, transforming the map into a representational object. As maps are in constant flux, tracing is the way of translating a map into an image. As Jakub Zdebik states: “And so the tension between the map and the tracing, cartography and decalcomania, could be that of representing the unrepresentable” (2019, 42). In this sense, the map is construed as process while the tracing translates this process into an image, the former’s significance lying in tracing forces while the latter points to its finality. Reza Negarestani notes, “each spatial configuration of forces delineates a new grasp of space through which the material domain can be rendered intelligible and the horizon of thought can be expanded and reshaped” (2014, 17). To that end, we turn to cartography to both extend our minds’ consciousness regarding the city and expand the city’s consciousness towards intensity, transformation, and change as other modalities of spatial relations and structural dynamics. Cartography maps relations or interactions between the city’s possible and actual entities while at the same time explaining how these entities structure the movements and becoming of one another (Bryant 2014, 6). As cartographical maps bring forth invisible environments, they are expected to expand our possibilities of intervening to allow for change and achieve ecological self-awareness. Cartography is considered here to be mainly diagrammatic, representing an anexact vision of the city with its own indeterminacy, and not a solid representation of an ideal spatial assemblage. The task is not to invent an ideal future that may not ever come nor to return to a former or less developed state of the past, but to extract via a diagrammatic process, the possible futures latent in the present while allowing for new thinking to emerge. As Radman and Sohn (2017, 11) note: “Neo-materialist cartography is not to be mistaken for tracing a fully constituted reality, but mapping the potential for (auto)catalysis, a function of (continuous) variation that is causal in the (quasi) formal not efficient sense.” According to Manuel DeLanda, the three ontological aspects that constitute the Deleuzian world are the actual, the intensive, and the virtual. Following his cartographic strategy, we elaborate on these significantly different maps. Extensive maps capture spaces that are bounded by natural and artificial exten-

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Yota Passia and Panagiotis Roupas sive boundaries that extend in space up to a limit marked by a frontier (e.g., a lake). These spaces have extensive or metric features, defined by both their extensive and their qualitative properties. Intensive maps, on the other hand, capture differences in the intensity of a particular property as well as the dynamic phenomena that are driven by such intensive differences, for example a weather map (DeLanda 2010, 115). The spaces captured on these maps are non-metric or topological, intensity zones bounded by “critical points of temperature, pressure, gravity, density, tension, connectivity, points defining abrupt transitions in the state of the creatures inhabiting those zones” (DeLanda 2005, 80). Intensive and extensive spaces are intricately connected: the former is the site of processes that produce the latter. Virtual maps capture the structure of possibility spaces, the dynamical landscape of the city’s complex system, including its patterns of behaviour and the thresholds where it changes patterns (Bonta and Protevi 2004, 19). The intensive and the virtual are also intricately connected: the virtual is the site of potential transformations that structure intensive morphogenetic processes. The virtual map is a differential field of potentialities, its architecture defined by the multiplicity and connectivity patterns of its local spaces where one can specify neighbourhoods and articulate proximity without having to use rigid lengths or metric quantities (Sha 2013, 100). Following these more technical details, we can now explore Hecate’s dynamical landscape further in terms of its intensive neighbourhoods and their patterns of communication. For the first part, intensive maps are produced, each capturing differences in the intensity of a spatial variable regarding the city. Through a power of abstraction, each intensive mapping is translated into a networked map of communication pointing to its patterns of proximity and relatedness. For the second part, through a power of creation, a system of communication between intensive mappings is established. The system’s structure is Hecate, a virtual map of the city’s intensive variables, closely following their relations, interactions, and becomings. In that sense, Hecate represents continuous and continuously varying fields, articulating urban assemblages as they shape and dissolve in those fields (Sha 2013, 90). Hecate can then be used to reconceptualise how space is produced as well as capture the different possible states in which it can exist. This both enhances our cognitive capacities via a new digital aesthetic and possibly unlocks potentialities for spatial change that is latent in the urban environment.

On abstraction To move away from the city’s metric spaces of extensive and qualitative properties and thus move closer to its potentialities of becoming—its tendencies and capacities—we first need to tap into the city’s intensive realm. Philosopher Tristan Garcia (2018, 42) notes: “From then on, ‘intensity’ simultaneously meant the variation of a quality, the measure of comparing a thing with itself, the measure of change or becoming, and a pure difference that allowed us to explain the sensitivity and the desire of the living. Intensity was what justified

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Hecate the liveability of life and the value of all that escaped quantity and extension— it was an electric brilliance.” According to Manuel DeLanda ([2002] 2013, 66), while properties are actual, tendencies and capacities have not yet been exercised and thus remain in the virtual. As both tendencies and capacities define objective entities equally—here, space and the city—intensive thinking proposes that to gain knowledge about those entities one should create representations of the city on the basis of its properties while performing interventions on it to force it to manifest its tendencies. Also, one should get it to interact with other entities so that it exhibits the vast repertoire of its capacities (ibid., i). To that end, intensive parameters that define the city’s important “ways of changing” are thoroughly examined and mapped. For this chapter, four such intensive dimensions were sampled from the city’s milieu: urban density, inclination versus latitude, urban exteriority, and visual intensity. They represent formal and perceptual variables guiding the actualisation of urban space and are used to differentially define it. They are the city’s genetic elements, each one monitoring a layer of significance within the city. While many such critical parameters affect the becomings of space such as material, social, political, economical, and so on, they are purposefully omitted for the scope of the current articulation, along with their respective maps.

Figure 29.2.

Each piece of cartography becomes further intensified as it transforms into a map of qualitative tensions to represent the textured gradient of its becoming (figure 29.2). Mapping techniques using lattices or matrixes are used to rela-

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Figure 29.2. “Urban Density_Textured Gradient.” (© studioentropia architects.)

Yota Passia and Panagiotis Roupas tionally measure each intensive variable as it fluxes between its maxima and minima. The resulting patterned gradients monitor the intensity of a spatial property, its patterns of behaviour, and critical points of change. Maps have by now become intensive, their transformational patterns inscribed into relational fields of varying variables. Through this process, intensive and variable structures have been extracted from the city’s extensive unfoldings. While maps now monitor the city’s variable entities, their structure does not seem to allow for the entities’ mutual communication. To elaborate how entities contribute to the becomings of one another, affording and constraining possibilities of movement and interaction, intensive maps are topologised (Bryant 2014, 9) (figure 29.3). Translating their textured gradients into geo-referenced information fields allows for their topological architecture to emerge. Networked maps of communication are produced on the basis of the number of points populating a specific area and the proximity of these points. To elaborate on each map’s topology, we take a closer look at its topological, net-like structure of nodes and lines. Networks of interconnected nodes point to each entity’s form and function, where form refers to the patterns of the relation between its points, and function becomes the speed by which information flows from point to point (Lury, Parisi, and Terranova 2012, 18). Each networked map is itself variable in the sense that it continuously receives information regarding the environment, adapting its structure to accommodate for its resilience and entropy resistance. The maps’ lines and measurable speeds constitute an assemblage according to Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 4).

Figure 29.3.

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Figure 29.3. “Urban Density_Topological Map.” (© studioentropia architects.)

Hecate Through the abstraction process, Hecate approaches materiality and materialised networks on the basis of continuity between the city’s actual and possible entities, their properties, tendencies, and capacities (DeLanda [2002] 2013, 66). It reimagines the city as “‘mecanospheres,’ that is, as force-fields composed of constantly evolving machinic assemblages” (Farías 2017, 45). Hecate articulates the city’s complexity by intensively mapping its affective subspaces along with the patterns and thresholds of their behaviour. New cartographical maps offer a scaffolded approach to the city’s most significant morphogenetic movements, those that drive its actualisation patterns. Networked maps retain the performance capacity of elastic urban fabrics throughout their lives, continuously associating anew both existing and emerging urban structures.

On creation In this section, we shall tap into the power of creation “capable of inventing ever-new relations between these differential or genetic elements”: the city’s intensive maps (Smith [1997] 2012, 220). Through this process, the city’s dynamical landscape of potentialities will be conceptually experienced as a nexus of mutually interconnected variable entities. Hecate will further explain how the city changes concerning networked patterns of communication between its intensive parameters, themselves variable and mobile. In this part, networked maps of communication are placed on the same immanent plane where they are able to relate to one another freely (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 251). On this plane, they are allowed to interact—empathise with one another—rather than stick to their materialistic autonomy. Hecate allows for their coexistence and mutual connectedness despite the elements’ initial differentiated and heterogeneous population. In this framework, Hecate’s dynamical landscape is an assemblage consisting of a nexus of communicational patterns between its various components, at different levels and moments of unfolding. As any component of an assemblage is always part of a larger assemblage, it has the capacity to interact with other components of the same assemblage or from a different one. Thus, Hecate consists only of relations of exteriority among its components, relations that are developed by a component’s capacity to interact. This capacity might result from the component’s properties, but it cannot be reduced to them, as properties themselves cannot explain the relations that are exterior to the components. Via this mapping process, we can trace both the variability of the components and the underlying processes that territorialise or deterritorialise any assemblage. According to Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 100): “The assemblage negotiates variables at this or that level of variation, according to this or that degree of deterritorialization, and determines which variables will enter into constant relations or obey obligatory rules and which will serve instead as a fluid matter for variation.” The city’s intensive regimes, mapped by means of networks of interconnected nodes, are now actively superimposed. Networks are controlled by protocols and set the city’s patterns of behaviour as well as the intensive boundaries where the city changes patterns. Taking a closer look

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Yota Passia and Panagiotis Roupas at Hecate’s landscape, it now resembles “a relational field of emergence” where one can specify neighbourhoods of continuity, connectedness, and sameness (Parisi 2012, 167). In this mobile connectionist model, Hecate’s nodes of varying intensities are the centres of any incoming or outgoing information on the system. The nodes have a local reach and the ability to move around or change their behaviour according to the local information that is available to them. They are the city’s new control and sensory centres, a virtual network that behaves like a living organism, “attached” to the actual city yet always linking it to its possible futures. While the complexity of information remains high, the mappings are being further compressed to enhance their representational efficacy towards better articulating the information available. Relationally mapping the city’s available information results in a new coordinate system for the city based on its informational strata and patterned potentialities. Through this mapping process, the city’s varying intensity and density fields are rendered visible in the form of varying gradients (figure 29.4). Their distribution and power points to areas within the urban context that are variably saturated. The research points to spaces where fields of information densify and amplify one another as the city’s most affective regimes, its islands of affordances.

Figure 29.4.

As new layers of significance enter the virtual map, urban constellations change and adapt, informing their structures and the information flows between the system and the city. Continuously performing a recurring process of collecting information and redistributing it in the city, Hecate creates a virtual

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Figure 29.4. Relational field of emergence. (© studioentropia architects.)

Hecate network of affective neighbourhoods that interact and connect while attached to the actual city. This is an attempt to formulate a topological model of articulation and computational design that monitors the city’s various communities and environments as they emerge and dissolve into continuous material fields of media and matter. This continuous topological surface constantly adapts to urban, social, and material changes, in real time. Hecate becomes the city’s ecological infrastructure, an interactive connected landscape that explains the production of the city as a nexus of communicating, overlapping, intersecting entities of continuous variation entangled in the various social, political, and material strata. Using evolutionary algorithms to construct a simplified ontogenic model we seek to represent the correlations and their qualitative tension.

Conclusions The project theorises the city as a meta-data environment of digital and physical media and bodies while at the same time attempting to establish for them continuity and mutual connectedness (Parisi 2012, 166). It reconceptualises the built environment as living continua in constant variation, mapping “objects that come into being, as they emerge from continuous and continuously varying fields of media-material and then dissolve again into those fields” (Sha 2013, 90). In this sense, Hecate allows the actualisation of space to be further perceived and conceptually experienced. The concept of assemblage is now endowed with parameters—the city’s intensive variables—that define its zones of intensity and critical points of change. When intensive thresholds are reached, the assemblage undergoes a transition to become a stratum, both the intensity zone and the crossing of the threshold being actual states and events. Such a construction, according to DeLanda (2016, 127), contains all the different elements of an ontology of assemblages: “a topological continuum that becomes progressively more rigidly segmented, passing through several stages of decreasingly less supple segmentation.” Nonetheless, the apparatus itself is not introduced “for the purpose of providing a truer model of reality or even perception but as a mode of articulation” (Sha 2013, 182) for thinking about different levels and kinds of spatial change as normal, relational and intensive. Through the apparatus, space is articulated as a field of connectedness composed of nested fields of connectedness where change can be perceived as immanent and relational, while space itself becomes intensive. Spaces on those fields—of both existing and possible entities—do not define spatial relations but rather enable the vast repertoire of their variability at different levels and moments of unfolding. Modelling them into an ecosystemic continuum will generate more ecological, dynamic, and adaptive urban assemblages. More than a mere aesthetic experience, the city is here understood as the matrix of the topological forces that formulate it, its different actors coming into play, their territories constantly in the making. As Elizabeth Grosz notes: “Forces become more subtle, less easily identifiable, shifting terrains, with their points of intensity, dark spots, strange attractors, and vectors and gradients of differentiating forces” (2017, 172).

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Yota Passia and Panagiotis Roupas References Bergson, Henri. (1911) 1944. Creative Evolution. Translated by Arthur Mitchell. London: Macmillan. First published 1907 as L’évolution créatrice (Paris: F. Alcan). This translation first published 1911 (London: Macmillan). Bonta, Mark, and John Protevi. 2004. Deleuze and Geophilosophy: A Guide and Glossary. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Bryant, Levi R. 2014. Onto-Cartography: An Ontology of Machines and Media. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. DeLanda, Manuel. (2002) 2013. Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. London: Bloomsbury Academic. First published 2002 (London: Continuum). ———. 2005. “Space: Extensive and Intensive, Actual and Virtual.” In Deleuze and Space, edited by Ian Buchanan and Gregg Lambert, 80–88. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ———. 2010. Deleuze: History and Science. New York: Atropos Press. ———. 2016. Assemblage Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 2007. Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995. Edited by David Lapoujade. Translated by Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina. New York: Semiotext(e). First published 2003 as Deux régimes de fous: Textes et entretiens, 1975–1995 (Paris: Minuit). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Minuit). Farías, Ignacio. 2017. In Urban Theory: New Critical Perspectives, edited by Mark Jayne and Kevin Ward, 41–50. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Garcia, Tristan. 2018. The Life Intense: A Modern Obsession. Translated by Abigail RayAlexander, Christopher RayAlexander, and Jon Cogburn. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. First published 2016 as La vie intense: Une obsession modern (Paris:

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Autrement). Grosz, Elizabeth. 2017. The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism. New York: Columbia University Press. Guattari, Félix. 2015. Machinic Eros: Writings on Japan. Edited by Gary Genosko and Jay Hetrick. Minneapolis, MN: Univocal. Lury, Celia, Luciana Parisi, and Tiziana Terranova. 2012. “Introduction: The Becoming Topological of Culture.” In Theory, Culture & Society 29 (4–5): 3–35. Massumi, Brian. 2002. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Negarestani, Reza. 2014. Torture Concrete: Jean-Luc Moulène and the Protocol of Abstraction. New York: Sequence Press. Published in conjunction with the exhibition Jean-Luc Moulène: Torture Concrete, held at the Miguel Abreu Gallery, September–October 2014. Parisi, Luciana. 2012. “Digital Design and Topological Control.” Theory, Culture & Society 29 (4–5): 165–92. Radman, Andrej, and Heidi Sohn. 2017. “The Four Domains of the Plane of Consistency.” In Critical and Clinical Cartographies: Architecture, Robotics, Medicine, Philosophy, edited by Andrej Radman and Heidi Sohn, 1–20. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Sha Xin Wei. 2013. Poiesis and Enchantment in Topological Matter. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Smith, Daniel W. (1997) 2012. “Life; ‘A Life of Pure Immanence’: Deleuze’s ‘Critique et clinique’ Project.” In Essays on Deleuze, 189–221. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. First published 1997 as the translator’s introduction to Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, translated by Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), xi–liii. Zdebik, Jakub. 2019. Deleuze and the MapImage: Aesthetics, Information, Code, and Digital Art. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Appendix

Live Transmission Morgan O’Hara artist, New York, United States, and Venice, Italy

with

Gerhardt Müller-Goldboom composer and musician, Berlin, Germany

1 The live transmission series consists of approximately three thousand drawings, mainly done with graphite on paper. The smallest drawings measure 10 × 15 cm, the largest 80 × 100 cm. I began with hard pencils on soft paper and this evolved toward soft pencils on hard paper because the latter is a much more responsive combination and results in a more sensitive seismographic drawing. Another series, form and content, is based on the live transmission drawings. This consists of an edition of nine series, each composed of thirty-six works, of ink drawings on paper based on silhouettes of the dense live transmission graphite drawings. 429

Morgan O’Hara time studies: a fifty-year accounting of how I have used my time, beginning in the early 1970s. Hundreds of small notebooks exist with detailed daily entries plus many drawings in which the daily entries have been colour-coded and made more visible as drawings. The earliest colour-coded drawings are from 1972, the most recent from June 2020. portraits for the twenty-first century, from 1978 to 1998, are drawings based on peoples’ geographic displacement patterns. Starting with an individual’s birthplace, a record was made of all his or her travels since birth, on as many scales as were necessary to convey the various levels of lived experience. If a particular journey or path had special significance to the individual being portrayed, this was evidenced by a thicker or differently drawn line. Areas that were densely traversed were indicated by shaded areas or cross-hatching.

For the final drawing, all the maps used and marked were superimposed on top of one another with the principal city in the life of the person as the axis. The lines were then traced onto one piece of paper and this was the configuration of lines that formed the basis of the portrait. The title of each portrait includes the name of the individual, his or her birthplace, birth date, and profession, and the city and date of the interview.1 1 At this time, I am interested in placing this work in an institutional archive with an established digital representation so as to make it available to scholars and artists worldwide.

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2 In 1961, I accidentally walked into a rehearsal in progress with six string players and a conductor. The conductor was formally dressed in a white shirt and tie and conducted the musicians by moving his arms as if they were the hands of a clock. Interesting. Three of the musicians looked very excited and the other three were upset. The intensity of this polarisation increased; the conductor

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Live Transmission totally ignored the emotional reactions. At some point I got up to look at the score and understood immediately the source of the polarised reactions: multiple choice options at many junctures forced the musicians to confront the unknown, live. My later research took me to Silence, just published by Wesleyan University Press, augmenting the inspiration that has lasted well beyond John Cage’s life. Facing and moving with the unknown is the basis of my live transmission drawings. When I begin, I have a specific series of things to check: numerous razorsharpened soft lead pencils (2B–8B) ready to work, a hard paper surface (Bristol, hot pressed paper rolled flat and smooth), a hard surface underneath the paper, and most importantly my spine must be straight and my arms and shoulders relaxed. This physical posture is essential to keep the flow and to avoid stiffness in the drawing. I roughly establish on the page a visual centre of the activity I am about to draw. Since I have no idea where the line will go or how, I relax and wait and then follow the trajectory of movement as it occurs, wherever it goes. The process can be visualised from above, the paper becoming the stage on which movement is acted out. Mine is a post-studio practice. I do not isolate myself in order to work—the accepted functional sense of an artist’s studio. A live transmission cannot be other than performative because I must be physically present to witness a life activity in progress in real time. This work is not something seen and later reconstructed. It is analogous to the inbreath and outbreath. No two are the same. Breathing cannot be rehearsed and done later.

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Live Transmission The audience is not important to me the way it is for a musician. If someone is watching me work, I accept this, but mainly because I can’t avoid it. As an introvert, I would prefer the privacy of drawing unobserved; but because my practice has evolved in this way, I accept the public aspect of it. I hear the music even more intensely when I am drawing, but the music itself doesn’t directly influence the drawing. I am not interpreting the music and I am not working from or with my emotional response to the music. Twenty years of aikido, a Japanese martial art, has strongly influenced my drawing practice, simultaneously developing the left and right sides of both body and brain.

My practice is neither like nor unlike that of a musician. I do not repeat and rehearse. I do not know in advance what will happen. Probably jazz is the closest I come to a musician’s practice: a rough idea of method, a development of a theme, expansion, contraction, and duration in time. An improvising musician is influenced by the playing of other musicians but makes an individual personal and intuitive response to what is going on. I also depend on nonverbal communication. Perhaps in both cases, collaborations are based on a mix of randomness and choice. Gerhardt Müller-Goldboom, cellist, composer, founder, and director of Work-in-Progress Ensemble, Berlin, has written about this work from a musician’s perspective.

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3 O’Hara’s careful observation triggers a mimetic drawing process with a few pencils on paper, generally one pencil in each hand. This mimetic movement projects a spatial motion onto a flat surface, reducing four dimensions (height, depth, width, time) into two dimensions (height and width). A specific physical performance space has a precise locus on the page. A specific point on a stage will always be depicted at the same point on the page. Since the specific position of a performer’s hand is consistently represented by the same position on the page, the result is a continuous accumulation of layers above that point. But here we have a reduction not only by two but also by three dimensions. It is the aspect of time that connects these drawings to musical activity in more than one specific way. As music needs a period in which to be performed and perceived, so does a Live Transmission. In musical notation, a precise indication of finger movements, a tablature, gives the positions where the musicians’ fingers should be placed at a specific moment. A tablature differs from a score, which gives different information, different aspects of the musical intention of the composer. As far as the Live Transmission of musical performances is concerned, we could call these drawings stratified tablatures, since the movement of the performer’s hands is depicted precisely. But the Renaissance invention of tablature also gave a precise indication of moments in a defined period for each of the intended movements. This precise function is missing in the Live Transmission series. Instead, the totality of accumulated time is represented in one image. Here we have a paradoxical situation with an exact representation of movement, on the one hand, which leads to a seemingly dissociated image, on the other. The layers of pencil lines result in an abstract visual object, often enigmatic at first glance.

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This is a new kind of mimesis, rigorous with regard to specific details, and delivering totally abstract shapes. Schooled in reading different types of signs, we can find in these drawings a great deal of specific information: representational details of the performer, performance methodology, and even quasi-anecdotal qualities, which appear as different grades of abstraction. The artist chooses a period of time and a physical position for her tracking. The duration of a drawing is identical to that of the performance: the time needed to perform a complete composition, a single movement, or a session. As for the artist’s position, we find situations where she sits near a musician onstage, or views the performance from a higher place such as a balcony, or whatever position is made available to her by the musicians and the auditorium manager. All these factors have an impact on the outcome of the drawing. Perception is altered by the viewer’s position, whether from a closer or more remote position. The instrumental performance of music is realised by repeated movements of the musicians’ hands and bodies. The specific way in which these repetitions appear as details in the drawings often reveals information similar to that of a representational painting. The high and low notes on a piano keyboard define the horizontal extension of the keyboard and encompass the reach of the pianist’s hands. The live transmission of hands performing on keyboards have a certain similarity. They reveal on the page a flat horizontal rectangular object of different sizes and varying grey scales resulting from different densities of drawn lines. And they change as the expressivity of the pianist causes the hands to move not only laterally across the keys but also vertically in the space above and below the keyboard. They all differ in detail, delivering something visual that comes very close to a kind of portrait of each musician.

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4 I have been asked to describe my practice, comparing it to that of a musician. I have been doing live transmission drawings for thirty-nine years and have drawn shoemakers, dancers, cooks, performance artists, children at play, scientists, visual artists, gardeners, animals, Venetian mask-painters, leaves on trees, birds in flight, glass-blowers, florists, politicians, poets, monks, ministers, priests, the incoming tide, graphic designers, martial artists, furniture restorers, and musicians. The largest category in terms of number is musicians. This method of drawing synthesises directional, territorial, and line-of-flight methodologies and each drawing is identified by time–space coordinates running along the bottom of each page, clearly identifying the source of each drawing. In this chapter I present live transmission drawings that are based on the hand movements of musicians performing opera, jazz, classical, and contemporary music, including soloists, conductors, and ensembles. The methodology for each drawing has been consistent. Holding a pencil in each hand, I face a piece of paper on a table or on a drawing board on my lap and further away, the musicians. I do not look at the paper as I draw except to be sure my lines haven’t wandered out of the field. When the musicians begin, I begin. When they end, I stop. Each drawing is a real-time seismograph. This work is culturally contextualised in the practice of drawing as a fundamental human endeavour and is continuous with the time-honoured prac-

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Live Transmission tice of drawing from life. It requires connection, direct observation, and live transmission. I draw from and build on the historical continuum of the field. Through this work, I transcend arbitrary oppositions between abstract and figurative art, between purely gestural expression and documentary intent, creating narrative work that results in a final product that is not figurative. The drawings themselves become a third actor or mediator in the experience. That which was beneath notice becomes concretised on the page as the paper receives the image. The method I have developed requires close observation and actual drawing in real time with multiple razor-sharp pencils and both hands. The movement I observe becomes a condensed accumulation of graphite lines combining the controlled refinement of classical drawing with the sensuality of spontaneous gesture. Live transmissions render visible or fleeting movement patterns through seismograph-like drawing. The theoretical base for the work is a visual transmission of the principle of vitality. As the writer Alessandro Cassin (2005) has put it: “There is boundless beauty and mystery to be found in all forms of human life. O’Hara strips the subject to its bare essentials in order to expose the astonishing wonder, absolute dignity and endless variation by which life reveals itself through movement. Her drawings constitute a radically new approach to accounting for, describing and narrating who we are, starting from the slightest movement of the hand to touch the broader movement of our souls.”

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Morgan O’Hara References Cassin, Alessandro. 2005. “live transmission: Toward a Comprehensive Mapping and Joyful Celebration of Human Activity.” In live transmission Macau. Accessed 24 August 2020. https://www.mam.gov.mo/oldmam/showcontent2.asp?item_id=20050224010203&lc=3. Published in conjunction with the exhibition Morgan O’Hara: live transmission in Macau, shown at the Macau Art Museum, China, 2004–5.

List of Works Page 429 Live Transmission: movement of the hands of essenTiaL music ensembLe while performing Christian Wolff ’s work merce / Takefu Cultural Center / Takfu, Japan / 21 November 2000. Graphite on Bristol paper, 35 × 43 cm (14 × 17 inches). Page 430 Live Transmission: movement of the hands of musicians performing Cage’s composition five4 main hall in the Hamburger Bahnhof / Berlin, Germany / dress rehearsal / 18 February 1999. Graphite on Bristol paper, 35 × 43 cm (14 × 17 inches). Page 431, above Live Transmission: sound check: movement of the hands of buTch morris conducting an orchestra of jazz musicians / Texaco New York Jazz Festival / 12 June 1998 / New York. Graphite on Arches print paper, 58 × 73.5 cm (23 × 29 inches). Page 431, below Live Transmission: movement of the hands of Pierre bouLez while conducting the London symPhony orchesTra in sTravinsky’s petrouchka (1911 version) / Boulez’s 75th birthday concert / Carnegie Hall / New York / 13 March 2000. Graphite on Bristol paper, 35 × 43 cm (14 × 17 inches). Page 432, above Live Transmission: movement of sound engineers, musicians, LighTing Technicians, grouPies, organizers, barTenders and various wandering friends during soundchecks / Maria von Ostbahnhof / Berlin, Germany / 14 December 2000. Graphite on Bristol paper, 35 × 43 cm (14 × 17 inches). Page 432, below Live Transmission: movement of the hands of anThony braxTon conducting the Tri-Centric Ensemble in composition 102 / performing at the Knitting Factory / New York City / Sunday 26 November 1995 / including hand movements of large puppets. Graphite on Arches print paper, 58 × 73.5 cm (23 × 29 inches). Page 433 Live Transmission: movement of the hands of musicians gian Luigi diana on laptop, mike Pride on percussion, ben gersTein on trombone and piano, morgan o’hara on pencils / The Firehouse / Brooklyn, New York / 27 September 2013. Graphite on Arches print paper, 58 × 73.5 centimeters (23 × 29 inches). Page 434, above Live Transmission: movement of the hands of musicians in the wiLLiam hooker QuinTeT / performing at The kniTTing facTory / February 1998 / New York City. Graphite on Bristol paper, 35 × 43 cm (14 × 17 inches).

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Live Transmission Page 434, below Live Transmission: movement of the hands of pianist hugues LecLère while performing Book II of Debussy’s Preludes / interleaved with contemporary compositions based on the Preludes / Chelsea Music Festival / New York / Park Avenue Armory / 21 June 2012. Graphite on Arches print paper, 58 × 73.5 cm (23 × 29 inches). Page 435 Live Transmission: movement of the hands of okinawa rinken band performing the rowing song / Sabani / Japan Society / 10 April 2002. Graphite on Bristol paper, 35 × 43 cm (14 × 17 inches). Page 436, above Live Transmission: movement of the ACJW Ensemble (Academy of Carnegie, Juilliard and Weill) and guests performing Louis andriessen’s work from 1976 de staat / John adams conducting dress rehearsal / Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall / New York / 10 May 2010. Page 436, below Live Transmission: movement of the hands of frederic rzewski while performing with piano and voice his work de profundis / Opera Plaza Recital Hall / Tokyo, Japan / 16 November 2000. Graphite on Bristol paper, 35 × 43 cm (14 × 17 inches). Page 437, above Live Transmission: movimento delle mani di pianista marTha argerich mentre suona con l’orchestra del Festival Pianistico Internazionale / Concerto 1 in Do opus 15 di Beethoven / Teatro Sociale di Brescia / 11 giugno 2001. Graphite on Bristol paper, 86 × 106 cm (34 × 42 inches). Page 437, below Live Transmission: movement of the hands of Jane eagLen (brünnhiLde), James morris (woTan), deborah voighT (siegLinde), and the waLküries / performing Act III of die walküre by richard wagner / Metropolitan Opera House / New York / 24 March 2004. Graphite on Bristol paper, 35 × 43 cm (14 × 17 inches). Page 438 Live Transmission: movimento delle mani di radu LuPu mentre suona il sonata in MI minore opus 90 di Ludwig von Beethoven / Teatro Donizetti / Bergamo, Italia / 29 maggio 2002. Graphite on Bristol paper, 86 × 106 cm (34 × 42 inches). Page 439 Live Transmission: movement of the hands of randy wesTon on piano, aLex bLake on bass, neaL cLarke on percussion / The National Museum of Natural History / New York City / 9 November 2001. Graphite on Bristol paper, 35 × 43 cm (14 × 17 inches). Page 440 Live Transmission: movement of the hands of Chilean percussionist esTeban robLedo while doing a Live Transmission performance / Comune Mapuche / Santiago Chile / 2nd Bienale de Performance / 15 November 2008. Graphite on Bristol paper, 58 × 73.5 cm (23 × 29 inches). Page 441 Live Transmission: movement of the hands of musicians performing Cage’s composition ryoanji / main hall in the Hamburger Bahnhof / Berlin, Germany / 18 February 1999. Graphite on Bristol paper, 35 × 43 cm (14 × 17 inches).

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Appendix

Online Materials

As further reference to chapters 2 (Stover), 4 (Maïda), 8 (Dubious), 9 (Duobliene), 13 (Hubatschke), 14 (Farfan), 15 (Dolan), and 16 (Nauha) in this book, an online repository of audio/video recordings was created to enhance the reading of the relevant chapters. The material is hosted on the website of the Orpheus Institute, Ghent. These examples, which should be viewed in connection with a reading of the relevant articles, may all be accessed under the URL: www.orpheusinstituut.be/en/machinic-assemblages-media-repository.

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Notes on Contributors Gareth Abrahams first developed an interest in Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy in 2001 while studying at the Ecole d’architecture, urbanisme and paysage in Lille. Three years later he qualified as an architect and went on to design and deliver many complex architectural schemes in a range of different sectors. In 2014 he completed a PhD exploring opportunities to translate some of Deleuze and Guattari’s ontological concepts into new tools that could improve planning practice. He later published a monograph, Making Use of Deleuze in Planning: Proposals for a Speculative and Immanent Assessment Method (Routledge, 2017). His academic interest is now directed at developing this research further by finding new ways to explore Deleuze and Guattari’s core texts and to consider how these insights might influence the decisions made by architects and planners sat at their desks and drawing boards. Paulo de Assis is an artist researcher (pianist, composer, music philosopher) and full-time research fellow at the Orpheus Institute, Ghent. Burcu Baykan is Assistant Professor of Visual Communication Design with a special interest in contemporary art theory and practice at Bilkent University, Turkey. Before coming to Bilkent, she was a graduate fellow at Trinity Long Room Hub Arts & Humanities Research Institute at Trinity College Dublin where she earned her PhD in 2017. Her doctoral dissertation is a Deleuze-Guattarian investigation of non-human transformations in contemporary visual arts, including performance art, video art, installation, sculpture, bio-art, and interdisciplinary collaborations within these fields. She has published in various edited collections and journals; most recently, she co-authored the article “Becoming-Animal in the Narrative and the Form of Reha Erdem’s Kosmos” for CINEJ Cinema Journal (vol. 8, no. 1 [2020]) and has written articles that use the theoretical insights of Gilles Deleuze, Donna Haraway, and Jane Bennett to explore the Turkish media artist Pınar Yoldaş’s work on speculative post-human biologies and the Australian visual artist Patricia Piccinini’s sculptural installations. Ian Buchanan is Director of the Institute for Social Transformation Research, University of Wollongong, Australia. He is the author of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: A Reader’s Guide (Continuum, 2008) and Deleuzism: A Metacommentary (Edinburgh University Press, 2000) and editor of the journal Deleuze and Guattari Studies. Edward Campbell is Professor of Music at the University of Aberdeen and co-director of the university’s Centre for Modern Thought. After studies in philosophy and theology, he took a BMus degree at the University of Glasgow and a PhD at the University of Edinburgh. He specialises in contemporary European art music and aesthetics including historical, analytical, and aesthetic approaches to European modernism, the music and writings of Pierre Boulez, contemporary European opera, and the interrelation of musical

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thought, continental philosophy, critical theory, and psychoanalysis. He has been working recently on the developing relationship between East and West particularly in relation to musical, philosophical, and literary modernism. He is the author of the books Boulez, Music and Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and Music after Deleuze (Bloomsbury 2013) and coeditor/contributor/translator of Pierre Boulez Studies (Cambridge University Press, 2016). The Cambridge Stravinsky Encyclopedia, of which he is co-editor, was published in 2020. He is currently working on a monograph, East-West Encounters in Music in France since Debussy, and on various articles on aspects of contemporary music and aesthetics. Iain Campbell is a visiting researcher at the Reid School of Music, University of Edinburgh. He has written on topics across philosophy, music, sound studies, and art theory for publications including parallax, Deleuze and Guattari Studies, and Contemporary Music Review. He received a PhD from the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University London in 2016, with a thesis exploring experimental practices of music and philosophy in the work of John Cage and Gilles Deleuze. He has lectured in philosophy, politics, and art at the University of Brighton, is a member of the Scottish Centre for Continental Philosophy, and is on the editorial board of Evental Aesthetics. Rogério Luiz Moraes Costa, professor, composer, performer, and researcher, is an associate professor at the Music Department of the University of São Paulo. His main topic of research is music improvisation and its connections with other areas of study such as philosophy and technology. Nowadays, he develops research projects concerning the environment of free improvisation with electroacoustic interaction in real-time, creative processes, and collective creativity. His most important current artistic project related to this research is the Orquestra Errante. In this group, besides being the coordinator, Costa is an improvisor on the saxophone. He also plays saxophone and flute in other groups devoted to experimental music and idiomatic and free improvisation. During his doctoral research (2002–3), as an improvisor, Costa co-founded and performed with the free improvisation group Akronon in partnership with Silvio Ferraz and Edson Ezequiel. In 1990 he founded the Brazilian jazz group Aquilo Del Nisso, with whom he performed for fifteen years and recorded five CDs. His extensive academic writings on improvisation are published in journals, conference proceedings, and books. In 2016, Costa published a book on improvisation, Música Errante: O jogo da improvisação livre (Errant music: the game of free improvisation). rogeriocosta.mus.br/bio. Annita Costa Malufe is a professor at the PUC-SP (Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo) in the Department of Literature and Literary Criticism and a researcher at the National Research Center of Brazil (CNPq). She received a PhD in literary theory from the University of Campinas. She 448

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developed two strands of postdoctoral research: at PUC-SP, with Peter Pál Pelbart, on the poetry and writing of Gilles Deleuze, and at USP (University of São Paulo), with Fábio de Souza Andrade, on the relationship between the styles of Deleuze and Beckett. She has published six volumes of poetry, two books of essays, and several articles on poetic theory and Deleuze’s thought. Paul Dolan is an artist living in Newcastle upon Tyne. He is a senior lecturer of animation and Programme Leader of the Animation BA course at Northumbria University. His work explores the points of contact between digital and natural environments, often with an ecological purpose. Through use of photography, computer simulation, game engines, and visual scripting, Dolan explores the material properties of “immaterial” digital images, especially in relation to ecology and the natural world. paulmichaeldolan.com. Lilija Duobliene is a professor at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Vilnius, Lithuania. Her research topics are in philosophy and ideology of education, creativity and cultural encountering, and art education. Her work is based on the theories of Foucault, de Certeau, Dewey, and Deleuze and Guattari. She is the author of many articles and several monographs, among them articles developing Deleuze’s philosophy. For two years she was involved in the research project “Gilles Deleuze: Philosophy and Art,” which culminated in the monograph Rhythm and Refrain: In Between Philosophy and Arts (2016), written with co-authors. A new monograph, Posthumanist Education: To Decode, was published in 2018. Vanessa Farfán is a Mexican-born German artist based in Berlin. She received an MFA from the Kunsthochschule Berlin Weißensee and since 2018 has been a PhD candidate at the Bauhaus Universität, Weimar. Her work has been exhibited in the Fluxus Museum+ in Potsdam (Germany), Galerie Weisse Elefant Berlin, the Beijing Cultural Exhibition Center, and the Madou Tower of the European Commission (Brussels), as well as in other venues in Mexico, Spain, Switzerland, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Czech Republic. She has presented her artistic research at conferences, symposia, and art festivals. Since 2015 she has curated several art exhibitions in Berlin and Mexico City. From 2013 she writes essays and exhibition reviews for the internet journal Europa Focus. vanessafarfan.de; instagram: vanessaforfun. Silvio Ferraz is a composer and full professor of music composition at the University of São Paulo (USP). He received his PhD in semiotics from the Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC/SP) and was a researcher at FAPESP and CNPQ. He is the author of several articles focused on Deleuze’s thinking about art, mainly music. He studied composition with Brian Ferneyhough, Willy Correa de Oliveira, and Gérard Grisey. His music has been performed by ensembles such as the Arditti Quartet, Nash Ensemble, Smith Quartet, Iktus, Taller Musica Nova de Chile, New York New Music Ensemble, and various Brazilian ensembles. 449

Notes on Contributors

José Gil was born in Mozambique. He studied philosophy in Paris and became Professor of Philosophy at the New University of Lisbon. He was Programme Director at the International College of Philosophy in Paris and taught at the PUC in São Paulo and at the New School for Dance Development in Amsterdam and Arnhem. He published several books on Fernando Pessoa, aesthetics, dance, political philosophy, and philosophy of the body, including Metamorphoses of the Body (University of Minnesota Press, 1998), Fernando Pessoa, ou, La métaphysique des sensations (Éditions de la différence, 1988), and La corse entre la liberté et la terreur: Étude sur la dynamique des systèmes politiques corses (Éditions de la différence, 1984). Paolo Giudici is an artist-researcher (Italy) and an associate researcher at the Orpheus Institute, Ghent. Barbara Glowczewski is a Polish-born French anthropologist, she is a professor at the National Scientific Research Center (CNRS), is a member of the Laboratory of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France, and teaches environmental studies at the EHESS. Since 1979 she has done regular fieldwork with Indigenous peoples in Central Australia (gendered oneiric creativity in ritual and art), in the Kimberley (territorial conflicts and ritual revival), and on Palm Island (social justice and healing). She also worked in Brazil. She is the author of many books including Indigenising Anthropology with Guattari and Deleuze (Edinburgh University Press, 2020) and Desert Dreamers (Univocal, 2016). Some of her audiovisual archives can be accessed at odsas.net and on her vimeo page. Christoph Hubatschke is a DOC Fellow of the Austrian Academy of Science. From 2017 to 2018 he was a visiting research fellow at the Department for Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths University, London, as well as a PhD researcher at the University of Vienna, where he is finishing his PhD thesis on the philosophy of technology in the work of Deleuze and Guattari. His research focuses on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, philosophy of technology, artistic research, political theory, new technologies (humanoid robots and AI), and social movements. He is also one of the founding members of the trans-disciplinary artistic research group H.A.U.S. (Humanoids in Architecture and Urban Spaces). jan jagodzinski has been a professor for thirty-six years, teaching visual art and media in education. He has published sixteen books. https://apps.ualberta. ca/directory/person/jj3.

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Niall Kennedy works as a teaching fellow in the Department of French, Trinity College Dublin. He completed his PhD in 2017 at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University London, with the thesis “Deleuze and the Author,” which can be viewed at https://tcd. academia.edu/NiallKennedy. His area of expertise is contemporary French philosophy, particularly the philosophy of literature, film, and the arts. He is currently working on a monograph, based on his PhD thesis, on the figure of the author in contemporary French philosophy, with particular reference to Deleuze. George E. Lewis is the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. Lewis studied composition with Muhal Richard Abrams at the AACM School of Music, and trombone with Dean Hey. A member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) since 1971, Lewis’s work in electronic and computer music, computer-based multimedia installations, and notated and improvisative forms is documented on more than 150 recordings. Lewis has served as Fromm Visiting Professor of Music, Harvard University; Ernest Bloch Visiting Professor of Music, University of California, Berkeley; Paul Fromm Composer in Residence, American Academy in Rome; Resident Scholar, Center for Disciplinary Innovation, University of Chicago; and CAC Fitt Artist in Residence, Brown University. He is the co-editor of the two-volume Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies (Oxford University Press, 2016), and his opera Afterword (2015) has been performed in the United States, United Kingdom, and Czech Republic. Lewis has been Professor at Columbia University since 2004, having previously taught at the University of California, San Diego, Mills College, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Koninklijke Conservatorium Den Haag, and Simon Fraser University’s Contemporary Arts Summer Institute. After completing a PhD in anthropology at Columbia University, New York, Hsiu-ju Stacy Lo was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of History at Peking University. She is currently an independent writer based in Taiwan. Her publications include the co-authored book Beijing Time, the short story “Flight of Fancy,” and translations of texts on art, history, literature, and beyond. Clara Maïda is a French composer living in Paris and Berlin since she was the guest of the one-year Artists-in-Berlin programme of the DAAD in 2007–8. She studied music and psychology. She holds a PhD in composition (University of Huddersfield, UK). Maïda works at the intersection of music, psychoanalysis, Deleuze’s philosophy, and nanosciences. She has received several international awards and grants, such as the Berlin Senat Grant, the Stuttgart and Berlin-Rheinsberger composition 1st Prizes (Germany), and an Honorary Mention at Prix Ars Electronica (Austria), as well as many 451

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commissions from famous institutions and festivals. Her pieces have been performed by numerous contemporary music ensembles and broadcast on radio all around the world. She has given lectures and conferences in many countries. Two CDs of her music have been released. Thomas Nail is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Denver. He is the author of Returning to Revolution: Deleuze, Guattari and Zapatismo (Edinburgh University Press, 2012), The Figure of the Migrant (Stanford University Press, 2015), Theory of the Border (Oxford University Press, 2016), Lucretius I: An Ontology of Motion (Edinburgh University Press, 2018), Being and Motion (Oxford University Press, 2018), and Theory of the Image (Oxford University Press, 2019), and co-editor of Between Deleuze and Foucault (Edinburgh University Press, 2016). His publications can be downloaded at http://du.academia.edu/thomasnail. Tero Nauha is a performance artist, Professor of Live Art and Performance Studies (LAPS) at the Theatre Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki, and a postdoctoral fellow at the Academy of Finland on the research project “How To Do Things With Performance?” He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies in 2017. He defended his doctoral research at the Theatre Academy of the University of the Arts in Helsinki in January 2016. Alex Nowitz is a vocal performance and sound artist, composer, improvisor, and artist-researcher from Germany. In April 2019 he received a PhD in performative and mediated practices with specialisation in opera from the Stockholm University of the Arts. His vocal, instrumental, and electroacoustic music includes chamber music pieces, orchestral miniatures, full-length operas, installation concerts, and music for dance and spoken theatre. Classically trained as a tenor in Germany and the USA, he appears also as a countertenor, whistling virtuoso, and performance artist applying a variety of extended vocal techniques and collaborating with a number of composers, musicians, and vocal performers on the international stage. Nowitz has developed a series of solo formats using custom, gesture-controlled live electronics developed at STEIM in Amsterdam and presents them at a large number of internationally renowned festivals, such as Warsaw Autumn, the 100 jahre bauhaus at the Academy of Arts Berlin, and the Eroica at the Alte Oper Frankfurt. For his work he has received numerous awards, residencies, and grants. In summer 2021 he will be artist in residence at the Villa Aurora in Los Angeles. nowitz.de. Morgan O’Hara was born in Los Angeles, grew up in Japan, earned a master’s degree in art from California State University at Los Angeles, and had her first solo exhibition in the Musée Cantonal des Beaux Arts in Lausanne, Switzerland in 1978. She began working internationally at performance art festivals in 1989, did her first site-specific wall drawings at De Fabriek in 452

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Eindhoven, the Netherlands, and began to practice the Japanese martial art aikido in the same year. O’Hara teaches masterclasses in drawing and the psychology of creativity in art academies in the United States, Europe, and Asia. She has done many international residencies including two sessions at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire and is the recipient of grants from many foundations. Her work is in the permanent collections of many institutions in the United States, Europe, and Asia. She lived in Italy for twenty-one years. O’Hara became a member of the Elizabeth Foundation in 2010. Yota Passia is an architect (MSc, PhD) and design theorist, currently working on a field-based approach to map cities and monitor their metabolism. She currently tutors in undergraduate design studios and postgraduate studios focusing on “research through design” methodologies. Since 2007 she has been co-partner at studioentropia, an architecture and research practice in Athens. The studio participated in Documenta14 with Hecate, a large-scale installation that maps the intensive visual field of the city’s layout, and was shortlisted for Superscape 2018, a biannual award for projects that speculate on the cities of the future. Peter Pál Pelbart is a Hungarian philosopher, essayist, professor, and translator living in Brazil. He graduated in philosophy from the Sorbonne, has a master’s degree from the São Paulo Catholic University, and a PhD in philosophy from the University of São Paulo. He is a professor in the Philosophy Department and in the Subjectivity Studies Center in the clinical psychology post-graduate course at the São Paulo Catholic University. His work focuses on contemporary philosophy, specifically on Deleuze, Foucault, time, insanity, subjectivity, and biopolitics. He coordinates the Ueinzz Theater Company, which comprises psychiatric patients from the day hospital A Casa, mental-health-service users, therapists, actors, performers, playwrights, and philosophers. Panagiotis Roupas holds two professional degrees, one in graphic arts (2001) from the Technological Educational Institute of Athens and another in architecture (MA, 2006) from the National Technical University of Athens. He completed his MPhil degree (2016) at NTUA, where he focused on the modulation of form through the asignifying semiotics model. He is currently undertaking a PhD in which he is cartographing the form’s capacities to affect and be affected, within the context of spatial assemblages. He is a teaching associate on NTUA’s School of Architecture undergraduate and master’s programmes. Anne Sauvagnargues is Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense. A specialist in aesthetics and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, she co-directs the series Lignes d’art with Fabienne Brugère for Presses universitaires 453

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de France. She is the author of numerous works, including Deleuze and Art (Bloomsbury, 2013), Artmachines: Deleuze, Guattari, Simondon (Edinburgh University Press, 2015), and Deleuze: L’empirisme transcendental (Presses universitaires de France 2010, forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press). Niamh Schmidtke is a visual artist with a dual heritage between Ireland and Sweden. Originally from Dublin, she is currently studying at Goldsmiths on the MFA Fine Art programme in London. She recently completed her BA in sculpture and combined media studies at Limerick School of Art and Design. Her work facilitates her interest in the intricate workings of economic systems and the ways they interact in our daily lives. Through poetic transformations of material, informed by philosophic theories, her practice seeks to show the invisibility of our economies. niamhschmidtke.wixsite. com/artistwebsite. Chris Stover is a composer, improvising trombonist, and assistant professor of music theory at Arizona State University. His writings on Deleuze and Guattari appear in Perspectives of New Music, Music Theory Online, Media and Culture, Deleuze and Children, and elsewhere. He is co-editor of Rancière and Music (Edinburgh University Press, 2020). chrisstovermusic.com. Ron Wigglesworth is a PhD candidate, SSHRC Scholar, and GRA Rice Scholar in Secondary Education Art and CTS at the University of Alberta, Canada. Audronė Žukauskaitė is Chief Researcher at the Lithuanian Culture Research Institute. Her publications include the monographs Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Philosophy: The Logic of Multiplicity (in Lithuanian, 2011), and From Biopolitics to Biophilosophy (in Lithuanian, 2016). She also co-edited (with S. E. Wilmer) Deleuze and Beckett (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and Resisting Biopolitics: Philosophical, Political and Performative Strategies (Routledge, 2016, 2018). Her research interests include contemporary philosophy, biopolitics, biophilosophy, and posthumanism.

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Index A

Abrahams, Gareth, 403–18 Abramović, Marina, 366, 375, 376 Acconci, Vito, 366 ACJW Ensemble, 443 Adams, John, 443 Adkins, Brent, 406n4, 418 Adorno, Theodor W., 144, 152 Agamben, Giorgio, 356, 360, 366 Agre, Philip E., 122, 126 Akseli, Virtanen, 356 Allard, LaDonna Brave Bull, 320, 335 Allen, Barry, 300, 302, 307 Allen, Geri, 120, 127 Alliez, Éric, 18, 24 Altmejd, David, 197–200, 202–7 Giants, 197n1 Holes, The, 198–200, 202, 205, 206 Index, The, 198–99, 202, 205, 206 New North, The, 197–98, 202, 205, 206 Amy, Michaël, 203, 208 Andriessen, Louis, 443 De Staat, 443 Angwin, Julia, 220 Animism (exhibition), 327 Ansell Pearson, Keith, 307 Antar, Migue, 347 Aperghis, Georges, 36, 40–41, 51, 52 Avis de tempête, 40 bouteille à la mer, La, 41 Conversations, 41 Hamletmaschine, Die, 40 Luna Park, 40 Machinations, 40 Paysage sous surveillance, 40 Symplexis, 51 Argerich, Martha, 443 Aristotle, 166, 178, 184n2 Metaphysics, 166 Armitage, John, 241, 247 Artaud, Antonin, 266, 284, 296, 352 Van Gogh, 267 Art Ensemble of Chicago, 36, 47–48, 51, 115–16, 126 Jackson in Your House, A, 47 Live at Mandel Hall, 47 Live from the Jazz Showcase, 47–48 Assayag, Gérard, 124, 126 Assis, Paulo de, 9, 11–25, 27, 29, 31, 109n2, 113, 129n1, 140, 165n*, 202, 208, 211n7, 212n11, 213, 220 AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians in Chicago), 46, 47, 116 Austin, J. L., 291, 292

B

Babbage, Charles, 121 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 314 Bacon, Francis, 313, 364 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 264, 267–69, 270, 291 Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 267n5, 268n6 Ballantyne, Andrew, 403, 418 Ballets Africains, Les, 47 Balso, Judith, 275n1, 277–79, 280 Baptista, Luis Felipe, 159, 162

Barad, Karen, 147, 149, 152, 180, 195, 211, 220 Barker, Thurman, 116 Barrett, Lisa Feldman, 58, 73 Barry, Andrew, 116, 126 Barthes, Roland, 132, 140, 339n3 Bateson, Gregory, 333, 335 Baudelaire, Charles, 40 Baudrillard, Jean, 241, 242 Baykan, Burcu, 197–208 Bayle, François, 91 Beauchamps, Pierre, 165 Beckett, Samuel, 262, 263–67, 270, 352 Happy Days, 263 Malone Dies, 267 Worstward Ho, 265 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 45, 443 Piano Concerto No. 1 in C Major, op. 15, 443 Piano Sonata No. 27 in E Minor, op. 90, 443 Behrenshausen, Bryan G., 111, 113 Bell Laboratories, 250 Bénichou, Pierre, 12, 13, 24 Benjamin, Walter, 184, 251, 252, 385, 393 “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, The,” 385n3 Bennett, Jane, 184, 195 Bennett, Michael James, 299, 307 Bennett, Vicki, 249, 251, 253, 254, 257 Citation City, 249, 251 Bensmaïa, Réda, 151, 152 Benveniste, Émile, 291 Bergson, Henri, 78, 79, 89, 91, 120, 187, 195, 276, 420, 428 Berhman, David, 145, 153 See also Kuivila, Ron, and David Berhman, works by Berio, Luciano, 113n4 Berliner, Paul F., 55n1, 73 Bey, Hakim (Peter Lamborn Wilson), 343–44, 349 Beyls, Peter, 121, 126 Bezos, Jeff, 289 Biazon, Stênio, 347 Big Customary Council, 325 Bignall, Simone, 185n8, 195 Birtwistle, Harrison, 45n8 Blake, Alex, 443 Blanchot, Maurice, 275, 276, 280, 314, 317 Book to Come, The, 314 Bloch, Georges, 124, 126 Bloom, Harold, 118 Bogard, William, 212–13, 220 Bogue, Ronald, 13n1, 18–19, 24, 201, 208, 403, 409, 418 Bolsonaro, Jair, 340–41, 349 Bonta, Mark, 422, 428 Boole, George, 228 Borgo, David, 55n1, 73 Boris, Staci, 203, 208 Born, Georgina, 116, 120, 126 Boulez, Pierre, 39, 45n8, 46, 80, 91, 442 Bourcier, Paul, 165, 178 Bourdieu, Pierre, 393 Bourriaud, Nicolas, 117, 126 Bowie, Lester, 115

455

Index

Braidotti, Rosi, 180, 183n1, 184n2, 195, 207, 208 Braxton, Anthony, 36, 48–50, 51, 52, 116, 442 Compositions 30–33, 49 Composition 102, 442 Piano Piece I, 49 Sonic Genome, 49–50, 51 Brazell, Karen, 216n16, 220 Broeckmann, Andreas, 118–19, 120, 126 Broglie, Louis de, 250 Brook, Peter, 231, 232 Empty Space, The, 231n7 Bryant, Levi R., 421, 424, 428 Buchanan, Ian, 17, 18, 19, 24, 61n13, 283–96 “Assemblage Theory and Its Discontents,” 18 Buck, Louisa, 202, 204, 208 Buffon, George-Louis Leclerc, comte de, 224 Burckhardt, Martin, 227, 232 Philosophie der Maschine, 227 Burden, Chris, 366 Bush, George W., 115

C

Cage, John, 45, 46–47, 51, 52, 107–9, 111–12, 113, 123, 145, 147, 149, 152, 433, 442, 443 Europeras, 46, 51 Experimental Music: Doctrine, 107 Five4, 442 Musicircus, 46, 51 Roaratorio, an Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake, 46 Ryoanji, 443 Silence, 433 Callon, Michel, 18 Campbell, Edward, 35–53 Campbell, Iain, 107–14 Camras, Marvin, 147, 152 Canguilhem, Georges, 299, 303, 307 “Machine and Organism,” 299, 303 Čapek, Karel, 210n5, 220 R.U.R. (Rossums Universal Robots), 210n5 Capra, Fritjof, 298, 306, 307 Carr, Cynthia, 370, 375 Carvalho, Mariana, 346 Casais Monteiro, Adolfo, 277, 278 Cassin, Alessandro, 441, 442 Castaneda, Carlos, 286 Cavaillé, Jean-Pierre, 323, 335 Certeau, Michel de, 393 Cézanne, Paul, 382 Card Players, 382 Chaganty, Aneesh, 383, 393 Searching, 383 Chamoiseau, Patrick, 326, 335 See also, Glissant, Édouard, and Patrick Chamoiseau, works by Charland, Louis C., 59, 73 Charles, Daniel, 46, 52, 79, 91, 149, 152 Chemillier, Marc, 124, 126 Chude-Sokei, Louis, 210, 220 Sound of Culture, The, 210 Cimini, Amy, 35, 52 Clark, Lygia, 359 Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art, 1948–1988, 359n3 Clarke, Neal, 443

456

Clastres, Pierre, 330, 339n3 Cluett, Seth, 124, 127 Cobussen, Marcel, 55n1, 73 Cocanha, 324n2 Coleman, Ornette, 46 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 131n2 Collins, Nicolas, 145, 152 Colombetti, Giovanna, 55n1, 59, 61, 73 Compton, Arthur, 250 Connolly, William E., 184, 195 Connor, Steven, 264, 265, 270 Considine, J. D., 50, 52 Cont, Arshia, 124, 126 Cook, Nicholas, 119, 126 Coole, Diana, 184, 195 Cornell, Joseph, 116 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 180, 194, 367 Costa, Rogério Luiz Moraes, 339–49 Música errante, 342n8, 346n10 See also Orquestra Errante Costa Malufe, Annita, 261–71 Cox, Brian, 254, 258 Cox, Christoph, 108, 109, 110, 111, 113 Crawford, Kate, 210n2, 222 Creswell, Tim, 187, 195 Crispell, Marilyn, 49, 50 Cross, Donald, 275, 280 Cross, Tony, 323, 335 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, 125, 126 Cubitt, Sean, 241, 242, 243, 247 Curie, Marie, 254, 256

D

Daly, Andrew, 403, 418 Dara, Salim, 320, 335 Darwin, Charles, 300, 364 Dastin, Jeffrey, 210, 220 Davidson, Arnold I., 120 Davies, Peter Maxwell, 45n8 Davisson, Clinton, 250 Davitz, Joel R., 58, 59, 73 Debussy, Claude, 44, 443 Preludes, 443 DeLanda, Manuel, 11, 17, 18, 24, 36, 52, 118, 126, 297–98, 307, 419–20, 421–23, 425, 427, 428 Assemblage Theory, 298 New Philosophy of Society, A, 11 Deleuze, Gilles, works by Bergsonism, 59 Cinema 1, 80, 249, 264n4, 268–69, 295, 310, 311–12, 313, 315, 316 Cinema 2, 81n9, 216n17, 249, 268, 273, 276, 295, 310, 312, 313, 315, 316, 379 Desert Islands, 372 Difference and Repetition, 73, 80n8, 94, 97, 144, 151, 182, 245, 246, 263, 311, 354, 369, 371, 372, 374 “Écrivain non,” 12, 13, 14 “Eight Years Later: 1980 Interview,” 11 Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature, 354 Essays Critical and Clinical, 100, 273, 275–76, 279 “Exhausted, The,” 263–65 Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, 313–14

Index

Fold, The, 93, 94, 97–99, 100, 158, 159, 202 Foucault, 213, 317, 353 Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, 105, 147, 273, 279, 313 “Immanence: A Life,” 373 Kant’s Critical Philosophy, 311, 361 “Letter-Preface to Jean Clet-Martin,” 181 “Life as a Work of Art,” 149 Logic of Sense, The, 58, 80, 81, 95, 97, 262, 263, 269, 292, 354, 370, 404n1 Negotiations: 1972–1990, 206n5, 262–63, 265 Nietzsche and Philosophy, 311, 354 “Preface to the English Language Edition” in Dialogues II, 181 Proust and Signs, 311, 315 “Response to a Question on the Subject,” 354–55 Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 58, 220 Two Regimes of Madness, 274, 419 “Your Special ‘Desiring-Machines,’” 118 Deleuze, Gilles, and Michel Foucault, works by “Intellectuals and Power,” 216 Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari, works by Anti-Oedipus, 11, 12–14, 19, 36, 56, 58, 63, 72, 94, 107, 110, 139–40, 149, 173, 185n6, 206, 265–67, 278, 284–85, 287, 312, 352, 354, 371–72 “Appendice: Bilan-programme pour machine désirantes,” 22 “Balance-Sheet for ‘Desiring-Machines,’” 22, 213 Capitalisme et schizophrénie 1: L’Anti-Œdipe, 13, 21—22, 266 “Control and Becoming,” 355 Foucault (English), 15, 16–17 Foucault (French), 15 “hétérogenèse dans la création musicale, L’,” 40 Kafka: Pour une littérature mineure, 12 Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, 14, 15, 19, 36, 61, 129, 143, 151, 276 “New Cartographer (Discipline and Punish), A,” 15 “Qu’est-ce que c’est tes ‘machines désirantes à toi?,’” 12, 13 “Rhizome: Introduction” (English), 19, 228 Rhizome: Introduction (French), 12, 19, 309 Thousand Plateaus, A, 11, 12, 15–17, 19, 21, 23, 36, 37n2, 38, 39n7, 42–43, 55, 56n3, 57, 61–64, 78, 86, 87, 94, 100, 101, 104–5, 109, 110, 112, 129, 132, 134, 135, 151, 155, 159–61, 172–74, 176, 183, 184n3, 185n6, 187n11, 200–205, 207, 212n9, 213, 227n5, 232, 245, 261, 265, 267–69, 283–87, 289–95, 299–301, 309, 311, 316, 320, 323, 330, 346, 347n12, 353, 355n1, 359n2, 363, 368–69, 369, 372, 373, 379, 391–93, 398–400, 403–4, 409–10, 412–17, 421, 424–25 What Is Philosophy?, 80, 81, 90, 130, 156, 173, 181, 203, 206, 262, 264, 273–75, 277, 279, 284, 289, 311, 352, 365, 370, 373 Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet, works by Dialogues, 319 Dialogues II, 15, 21, 91, 115, 118, 149, 151, 201, 202–3, 204, 207, 211–12, 214, 217, 279, 284, 298, 351–52, 371 Deligny, Fernand, 358, 360 Dempster, Stuart, 55, 65–68, 69, 72, 74 “Standing Waves,” 65–68, 69 Derrida, Jacques, 251, 258

Déry, Louise, 206, 208 Descartes, René, 68, 165, 366, 387 Diana, Gian Luigi, 442 Dickens, Charles, 352 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 357, 360 Disney (The Walt Disney Company), 288 Walt Disney World, Orlando, 288 See also Star Wars (franchise) Dresser, Mark, 48, 49 Drouet, Jean-Pierre, 41, 52 Dolan, Paul, 235–47 Floating Point, 237–38, 239 Spruce Pine, North Carolina, 241–42 Wireframe Valley, 235–41 Wood for the Trees, 237–38 Donavan, Tara, 179, 191–94, 195 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 264, 267 Dovey, Kim, 403, 418 Downey, Rodney G., 228, 232 Downey, Rodney G., and Denis R. Hirschfeld, works by Algorithmic Randomness and Complexity, 228 Dubious, Guy, 143–53 Pēratape, 144, 146–51 Dubnov, Shlomo, 124, 126 Dubuffet, Jean, 116 Duchamp, Marcel, 52, 116, 169–71, 226, 363, 364, 373, 376 Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, 169–70 Three Standard Stoppages, 226 Ducrot, Oswald, 291 Dufau, Caroline, 324n2 Dufresne, David, 323, 335 Duobliene, Lilija, 155–62 Dupréel, Eugène, 38 Durney, Daniel, 41, 52

E

Eaglen, Jane, 443 Eck, Douglas, 125, 126 Eco, Umberto, 287 Edison, Thomas A., 143, 152 Enright, Robert, 205, 208 Ensler, Eve, 320, 335 Epstein, Jean, 147, 152 Erdmann, Martin, 368 Eshun, Kodwo, 210n4, 221 Essential Music Ensemble, 442 Euclid, 169, 171 European University of Bretagne, 324 Evans, Mel, 331n3, 335 Ewart, Douglas R., 116, 117, 126 See also, Lewis, George E., and Douglas R. Ewart, works by

F

Fadnes, Petter Frost, 55n1, 74 Fardy, Jonathan, 374, 376 Farfán, Vanessa, 223–33 Model 5052, 227–32 Farías, Ignacio, 425, 428

457

Index

Faure, Jean-Paul, 323, 335 Favors, Malachi, 47, 115, 116 Fei, James, 51, 52 Ferdinand, Malcom, 321, 335 Fernandez, Eduardo, 58n6 Ferneyhough, Brian, 85, 91 Ferrández, Jose Manuel, 58n6 Ferraz, Silvio, 77–92 Pássaro de cordas, 85, 90 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 304 Fisher, Kenn, 403, 418 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 285, 286 “Crack-up, The,” 285 Flaubert, Gustave, 352 Flaxman, Gregory, 367, 376 Forshaw, Jeff, 254, 258 Foss, Paul, 19 Foucault, Michel, 12, 14–15, 25, 29, 32, 66, 74, 210, 221, 294, 317, 318, 339n3, 343, 353 Birth of the Clinic, The, 317 Discipline and Punish, 15, 210 mots et les choses, Les, 15 Order of Things, The, 15 Surveiller et punir, 14, 15 See also, Deleuze, Gilles, and Michel Foucault, works by Franco, Marielle, 355 Fraysse, Lila, 324n2 Frazer, Ward, 366 Freud, Sigmund, 19, 30, 32, 104, 174, 183, 184n2, 290n2, 353 Frijda, Nico H., 55, 59–61, 64, 74 Frijns, Helena, 216 Frost, Samantha, 184, 195 Furman, Christopher, 117

G

Galenson, David W., 116, 127 Gallope, Michael, 117–18, 127, 161, 162 Ganda, Oumarou, 277 Garcia, Tristan, 422–23, 428 Garfinkel, Harold, 295 Garoian, Charles R., 403, 418 Genosko, Gary, 332, 335 Germer, Lester, 250 Gerstein, Ben, 442 Ghosthorse, Tiokasin, 320, 335 Gil, José, 79n3, 92, 165–78, 274–75, 280, 356 imagem-nua e as pequenas percepções, A, 79n3 Movimento total, 82 Gilbert, Scott F., 301–2, 307 Gindt, Antoine, 41, 51, 52 Giudici, Paolo, 9, 155, 159, 161, 162, 351n* Giudici, Paolo, and Andi Spicer, works by Starling, A, 155–61 Glissant, Édouard, 322, 326–27, 335 Poetics of Relation, 327 Glissant, Édouard, and Patrick Chamoiseau, works by intraitable beauté du monde, L’, 326 Glissant, Sylvie, 326–27, 335 Glowczewski, Barbara, 317, 319–37, 320 Indigenising Anthropology with Deleuze and Guattari, 319 Glowczewski, Barbara, and Félix Guattari, works by, “Walpiri Dreaming Spaces,” 319

458

Goehr, Lydia, 108, 113, 123, 127 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 45 Goffey, Andrew, 18, 24, 36, 52, 333 Goh, Annie, 108, 109, 113 Golding, Johnny, 146, 152 Gottschalk, Jennie, 49, 50, 52, 111, 113 Graton, Philippe, 331, 336 Greenblatt, Stephen, 125, 127 Grey, Alex, 365, 369, 370, 371, 374, 376 Grey, Allyson, 365, 369, 370, 371, 374, 376 Grossberg, Lawrence, 111, 113, 287–88, 296 Grossman, Elizabeth, 241, 242, 243, 247 Grosz, Elizabeth, 202, 204, 205, 208, 283, 295, 296, 427, 428 Guardium, 121–22, 127 Guattari, Félix, works by années d’hiver, Les, 320, 332 Chaosmosis, 36, 44, 58, 61, 253 “Cinema of Desire,” 253 “Ecosophical Practices and the Restoration of the ‘Subjective City,’” 333 Glossary to Molecular Revolution, 19–20 Lines of Flight, 36, 39, 42 Love of UIQ, A, 253–54 Machinic Eros, 419 “Machinic Heterogenesis,” 363, 373 Machinic Unconscious, The, 36, 37–39, 77, 86, 87, 98, 99, 113, 156–57, 159, 404 “Meaning and Power,” 110 “New Spaces of Freedom, The,” 320 “On Machines,” 212 “Produire une culture du dissensus,” 321 “Project for a Film by Kafka,” 249, 356 Qu’est-ce que l’écosophie, 333 “Remaking Social Practices,” 321, 322 “Ritornellos and Existential Affects,” 60 “Role of the Signifier in the Institution, The,” 109, 110, 113 Schizoanalytic Cartographies, 36, 43, 44, 258, 333, 373 “Three Ecologies, The,” 320 Three Ecologies, The, 112, 333 “Towards a Micro-Politics of Desire,” 110, 111, 404n1 See also Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari, works by; Glowczewski, Barbara, and Félix Guattari, works by Guattari, Félix, and Olivier Zahm, works by “On Contemporary Art: Interview with Oliver Zahm, April 1992,” 44

H

Haeckel, Ernst, 224, 233 Welträtsel, Die, 225 Hagerhall, Caroline M., 194, 196 Haggett, Peter, 187n13, 195 Haider, Clara, 216 Hammond, Claudia, 241, 243, 247 Hammons, David, 116 Hansen, Mark B. N., 243, 247 Haraway, Donna, 62, 74, 194n15, 195 Harding, Stephan, 306, 307 Harman, Graham, 396–97, 401 Object-Oriented Ontology, 396 Harnoncourt, Nikolaus, 160, 161

Index

Harper, Tauel, 202, 208, 228, 233 Harper, Tauel, and David Savat, works by Media After Deleuze, 228 Harvey, David, 122 H.A.U.S. (Humanoids in Architecture and Urban Spaces), 211, 214–16, 220 Doppelgänger, 211, 214–20 Heathfield, Adrian, 362, 365, 371, 376 Heffley, Mike, 49, 53 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 181, 195, 304 Heidegger, Martin, 58n7, 144, 150, 153, 212, 213n12, 221, 304 Heisenberg, Werner, 253 Hemingway, Gerry, 49 Henry, Rosita, 320, 336 Herrera, Maud, 324n2 Hertz, Heinrich, 25 Herzogenrath, Bernd, 108, 113 Hirschfeld, Denis R., 228, 232 See also Downey, Rodney G., and Denis R. Hirschfeld, works by Hitler, Adolf, 287 Hjelmslev, Louis, 109, 110, 404n1 Hodgkinson, Tim, 51, 53 Ici-bas, 51 Hodson, Robert, 55n1, 74 Hoffmann, E. T. A., 209, 219, 221 “Sandman, The,” 209, 219 Holbraad, Martin, 252–53, 255–56, 258, 259 Holland, Eugene W., 205, 208 Holtzman, Ben, 124, 127 Holzborn, Damon, 119, 124 Hongisto, Ilona, 250, 259 Hooker, William. See William Hooker Quintet Houdart, Célia, 53 Hsieh, Tehching, 361–76 Doing Time (exhibition), 362 One Year Performance 1978–1979 (Cage Piece), 362–67, 370–71 One Year Performance 1980–1981 (Punch Time Clock Piece), 364–66, 370–71 One Year Performance 1981–1982 (Outdoor Piece), 363, 367–68, 370–72 Art/Life One Year Performance 1983–1984 (Rope Piece), 367, 368–72 One Year Performance 1985–1986 (No Art Piece), 370–71, 373 Tehching Hsieh 1986–1999 (Thirteen Year Plan) (Earth Piece), 370–73, 375 Hubatschke, Christoph, 209–22 Hugo, Victor, 40 Hui, Yuk, 228, 233, 299, 303–5, 307 Hunt, Elle, 125, 127 Hurley, Robert, 13n1, 19, 266 Hyland Bruno, Julia, 123–24, 127

I

Ibn Shākir, Ahmad ibn Mūsà, 118, 127 . Ibn Shākir, Hasan ibn Mūsà, 118, 127 . Ibn Shākir, Muhammad ibn Mūsà, 118, 127 . Innis, Harold A., 245, 247 Intel, 241 Invisible Committee, 323, 336 Coming Insurrection, The, 323 Israel Defense Forces, 121

J

jagodzinski, jan, 361–77 Jarman, Joseph, 47, 115, 116 Jeunesse Autochtone de Guyane (JAG), 325 Johnston, Jill, 363, 365, 376 Jordan, John, 343n9, 349 Joseph, Branden W., 109n2, 113 Journey to the West, 389 Joyce, James, 372

K

Kafka, Franz, 19, 29, 32, 40, 151, 275, 356, 358 America, 356 Kahn, Douglas, 109n1, 114 Kane, Brian, 108, 109, 114 Kant, Immanuel, 45, 51, 168, 278, 304, 311, 356, 361–62, 364, 367 Critique of Pure Reason, 361 Kaprow, Allan, 251, 259, 366 Karembeu, Christian, 326 Kee, Joan, 363, 368, 376 Keister, Robin A., 159, 162 Kempelen, Wolfgang von, 209n1 Kennedy, Niall, 273–80 Kernalegenn, Tudi, 324, 336 Kirchner, Lauren, 220 Kirk, Rachel, 321, 337 Kittler, Friedrich A., 143, 153 Klages, Ludwig, 37–38 Klee, Paul, 82, 88, 89, 92, 184 Angelus Novus, 184 Kleist, Heinrich, 211–12, 214, 217, 221 “On the Marionette Theatre,” 211, 212n8, 216n17 Kloevekorn, Sonja, 131 Minotaurus, 131 Kokkos, Yannis, 41, 53 Kraft, Eva Maria, 216, 218 Kramer, David, 79n3, 92 Kristeva, Julia, 132 Krumhuber, Eva G., 60n12, 74 Kuivila, Ron, 145, 146, 153 Kuivila, Ron, and David Berhman, works by Composing with Shifting Sand, 145 Kwun, Aileen, 194, 195

L

LaBelle, Brandon, 134n4, 140, 150, 153 Laboratório de Política, Comportamento e Mídia, 340n4, 349 “Bolsonarismo: O novo fascismo brasileiro,” 340n4 Laboratory of Insurrectional Imagination, 331n3 Lacan, Jacques, 20, 25, 290n2, 321, 372, 376 Ladha, Alnoor, 320, 335 Lambert, Gregg, 275, 276, 280 Lambie, John A., 58n7, 59n9, 74 Lane, Helen R., 266 Lang Lang, 160 Lapoujade, David, 352, 360 Larson, Jeff, 220 Laruelle, François, 366, 373–74, 376 Latour, Bruno, 11, 18, 25, 115, 120–21, 127 Reassembling the Social, 11 Law, John, 18 Lawlor, Leonard, 362, 365, 376 Lawrence, T. E., 276, 277, 355

459

Index Lazzarato, Maurizio, 327, 337 Leclère, Hugues, 443 Lee, Bruce, 391–92 Lefebvre, Henri, 215, 221 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 158 Leroi-Gourhan, André, 302–3, 307 Lévi Strauss, Claude, 321 Lewin, Kurt, 58n6, 59, 74 Lewis, George E., 47–48, 52, 108–9, 112, 114, 115–28 Assemblage, 117 Voyager, 119–20, 122, 123, 124 Lewis, George E., and Douglas R. Ewart, works by Rio Negro, 117 Lewis, George E., Douglas R. Ewart, and Douglas Repetto, works by Rio Negro II, 117 Lichtenfels, Sabine, 320, 335 Ligeti, György, 45n9, 84 Ten Pieces for Wind Quintet, 84 Li Zi-Fong, 379–91 Cartesian Headgear, The, 388 Copy, The, 383 Deflesh, 385 Digital Foundation Makeup, 384 Four Quadrants of an Elephant, The, 388–89 Mother, 386–87 Salamander-Merfolk, 386 Sun Wukong in the Matrix, 389–90 Two Cézannes, 382 Your Left Eye is My Right Eye, 390–91 Lo, Hsiu-ju Stacy, 379–94 Lock, Graham, 48–49, 53 London Symphony Orchestra, 442 Longstreet (TV programme), 392 Lonsdale, Michael, 41, 53 Lorenz, Konrad, 290 Louis XIV (king), 165 Louvre Museum, 331n3 Lovelace, Countess of (Augusta Ada King), 121, 127 Lovelock, James, 299, 305–6, 333 Lowe, John Carl, 187, 195 Lubat, Bernard, 124, 126 Lucasfilm, 288 Lucretius, 186n9 Luisi, Pier Luigi, 298, 306, 307 Lula da Silva, Luiz Inácio, 340, 355 Lupu, Radu, 443 Lury, Celia, 424, 428

M

Mabo, Eddie, 334 MacCormack, Patricia, 183n1, 195 Maelzel, Johann Nepomuk, 118 Maglioni, Silvia, 249, 250 Maglioni, Silvia, and Graeme Thomson, works by Disappear One, 249 Facs of Life, 249 In Search of UIQ, 249 Mahler, Gustav, 84 Symphony No. 9, 84 Maïda, Clara, 93–106 . . . , das spinnt . . ., 99–100 Doppelklänger, 100 Fluctuatio (in)animi, 99–100 Holes and bones, 94–99 Kinêm(a)bstract, 100 Mutatis mutandis, 100–101

Psyché-Cité/Transversales, 104n5 Via rupta, 99–103 Web-wave, 100 . . . who holds the strings . . ., 99 Mallory, George, 292 Malufe, Annita Costa, 88n12, 91 Mandela, Nelson, 363 Manning, Erin, 319, 323, 337 Marcel, Anthony J., 58n7, 59n9, 74 Marey, Étienne-Jules, 169 Margulis, Lynn, 299–301, 305–6, 307, 333 Marie Antoinette, Queen, 118 Marshall, Bill, 273, 280 Marx, Karl, 183, 184, 195 Capital, 184 Massumi, Brian, 19, 78n2, 92, 420–21, 428 Mateas, Michael, 242, 245, 247 Matisse, Henri, 165–66 Dance, 165–66 Mattu, Surya, 220 Maturana, Humberto R., 118, 228, 233, 333 Mauss, Marcel, 255, 259 General Theory of Magic, A, 255 Mauvaise Troupe Collective, 331, 337 Defending the Zad, 331 McCorduck, Pamela, 118, 127 McFarlane, Colin, 403, 418 Melitopoulos, Angela, 327, 337 Melville, Herman, 40, 276 Moby Dick, 40 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 317, 386–87, 394 Michael, Sebastian, 214, 216 Michaelsen, Garrett, 55n1, 74 Mill, John Stuart, 121, 125, 127 Minsky, Marvin, 121, 128 Mitchell, Roscoe, 48, 115, 116, 128 Maze, The, 116 Mockus, Martha, 112, 114 Molderings, Herbert, 226n4, 233 mollecular organization, 249, 356 Monson, Ingrid, 55, 74 Montagne d’Or (Gold Mountain) (consortium), 324–25 Montano, Linda, 365, 368–71, 373–74, 376 Art/Life Institute, 370 “Living Manifesto,” 374 See also Hsieh, Tehching: Art/Life One Year Performance 1983–1984 (Rope Piece) Monteiro Freitas, Marlene, 174–78 Bacantes, 174–78 Morris, Butch, 442 Morris, James, 443 Morton, Timothy, 395–96, 400, 401 Moryadas, S., 187, 195 Moye, Famoudou Don, 116 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 155, 156, 159–60 Piano Concerto No. 17 in G Major, K. 453, 155, 156, 159–60 Müller-Goldboom, Gerhardt, 435, 438–39 Muybridge, Eadweard, 169

N

Nail, Thomas, 18, 25, 117, 125, 129n1, 140, 179–96, 211n7, 221 Nakamarra, Barbara Nakakut, 329 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 354 Napaljarri, May Yiripanta, 329 460

Index Napanangka, Agnes, 329 Napangardi, Gladys Kungariya, 329 NASA, 380n1, 394 Nauha, Tero, 249–59 Negarestani, Reza, 421, 428 Negri, Antonio, 355 Nevelson, Louise, 116 Newton, Isaac, 250 Nielsen, Wendy C., 209n1, 221 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 125, 263, 286, 311, 351, 352, 354 Nijinsky, Vaslav, 354, 360 Nika, Jerome, 124 Noudelmann, François, 326, 337 Nowitz, Alex, 50n11, 129–41 Labyrinth, 131 Mönche am Meer, 133, 134–35 “Monsters I Love: On Multivocal Arts,” 129, 132, 134n4 Mundfundstücke, 136 Panache, 132–33, 136 Playing with Panache, 136 Schaumspuren, 133–34 “Unleashing the Machined Voice,” 130 Untitled, 138

O

O’Brien, Kerry, 112, 114 Octors, Georges-Elie, 40, 53 O’Hara, Morgan, 179, 188–91, 192, 196, 429–42 Form and Content, 429 Live Transmission, 189–91, 429–41 Portraits of the Twenty-First Century, 430 Time Studies, 430 Oiticica, Hélio, 258 Okinawa Rinken Band, 443 Oliveros, Pauline, 107, 111–12, 114 Ó Maoilearca, John, 250, 259 Omax, 124 Oralkan, Jessica, 375, 376 Or de question (movement), 324–25 Orquestra Errante, 339, 342, 344–49 Ortolani, Benito, 216n16, 221 Osborne, Peter, 373, 376 Ostbahnhof, Maria von, 442 Outterbridge, John, 116

P

Pallota, Julien, 330, 337 Palmer, Robert, 47 Parikka, Jussi, 241 Parisi, Luciana, 419, 424, 426, 427, 428 Parker, Evan, 123, 144, 153 Parnet, Claire. See Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet, works by Partch, Harry, 66n18, 74 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 268, 357 Passia, Yota, 419–28 Passia, Yota, and Panagiotis Roupas, works by Hecate, 419–20, 422, 425–27 Patton, Paul, 19 Paul, Jean, 211, 214–17, 220, 221 “Human Beings are the Machines of Angels,” 215 Paxton, Steve, 82, 92 Pedersen, Morten Axel, 252—53, 255n1, 258, 259 Pelbart, Peter Pál, 39, 53, 261n2, 351–60 People Like Us. See Bennett, Vicki Penny, Simon, 118–19, 128

Pessoa, Fernando, 274–75, 277–79, 280, 356 Book of Disquiet, The, 275 “Opiary,” 277 Peters, John Durham, 144, 153 Peters, Gary, 55, 74 Phillips, John, 18, 25, 118, 128 Picasso, Pablo, 116 Pickering, Andrew, 119, 128 Piekut, Benjamin, 108, 114 Pierre, Yanuwana Christophe, 325 Plato, 81, 139, 166, 178, 278, 309, 310 Parmenides, 81 Philebus, 166 Republic, 166 Plotnitsky, Arkady, 373, 376 Plouvier, Jean-Luc, 40, 53 Poizat, Michel, 132 Pollitt, Jerome, 166, 178 Pollock, Jackson, 194 Posteraro, Tano, 18, 25, 224, 233, 299, 307 Potts, Wayne K., 161, 162 presqueruines, 356 Pride, Mike, 442 Pritchett, James, 46, 53 Protevi, John, 422, 428 Proust, Marcel, 38, 266, 274, 276, 311 In Search of Lost Time, 38–39 Purifoy, Noah, 116, 128

Q

Quaglia, Bruce, 113n4, 114 Querrien, Anne, 326, 335

R

Rabelais, François, 264 Radman, Andrej, 421, 428 Rafanell i Orra, Josep, 353, 360 Rancière, Jacques, 312–14, 318 Ravel, Maurice, 176, 177 Bolero, 176, 177 Ray, Man, 21 Dancer-Danger: L’impossibilité, 21–22 Redner, Gregg, 155, 162 Reed, Adam, 257, 259 “Smuk Is King,” 257 Reed, John, 121, 128 Reilly, Kara, 118, 128 Reinholdsson, Peter, 55n1, 74 Reiss, Benjamin, 210n3, 221 Repetto, Douglas, 117, 126 See also, Lewis, George E., Douglas R. Ewart, and Douglas Repetto, works by Rhodes, Cecil, 289 Rich, Grant Jewell, 125, 126 Richter, Gerhard, 170–71 Ema (Nude on a Staircase), 170–71 Woman Descending the Staircase, 170 Robinson, Edward G., 277 Robledo, Esteban, 443 Rodin, Auguste, 359 Thinker, The, 359 Rogosin, Joel, 392, 394 Rolnik, Suely, 339–42, 349 Rothenbuhler, Eric W., 144, 153 Rouch, Jean, 277 Moi, un noir, 277 Roupas, Panagiotis, 419–28 461

Index See also Passia, Yota, and Panagiotis Roupas, works by Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 134 Roussef, Dilma, 340 Russell, James A., 58, 74 Rycenga, Jennifer, 112, 114 Rzewski, Frederic, 443 De profundis, 443

S

Saar, Betye, 116 Sagan, Dorion, 301, 307 Sagradini, Lucia, 326, 327, 335 Salem, Joseph, 39–40, 53 Saltz, Jerry, 197, 202, 208 Satie, Erik, 177 Sauvagnargues, Anne, 14, 25, 290n2, 296, 309–18 Savat, David, 202, 208, 228, 233 See also, Harper, Tauel, and David Savat, works by Schaeffer, Pierre, 46, 131, 141 Schafer, R. Murray, 136, 141 Schechner, Richard, 250, 259 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 228 Scherer, Klaus R., 55, 60, 74 Schlippenbach, Alexander von, 123, 125 Schloegel, Judy Johns, 224, 233 Schmidgen, Henning, 224, 233 Schmidtke, Niamh, 395–401 Homeless Line, The, 395–96, 400 Plane No. 7, 395–96, 398–400 Schoenberg, Arnold, 45 Schreber, Daniel Paul, 266 Schürer, Oliver, 216, 222 Scob, Édith, 41 Scott, James C., 393, 394 Seem, Mark, 13n1, 19, 266 Sensor Dynamics, 380n2 Serres, Michel, 186, 187n11, 196, 364 Shakespeare, William, 40, 361, 377 Sharma, Sarah, 245, 247 Shaw, Robert, 333, 337 Sha Xin Wei, 422, 427, 428 Silliphant, Sterling, 392, 394 Simondon, Gilbert, 58n5, 74, 80n8, 82, 83, 85, 86, 87, 92, 165, 178, 299, 304, 305, 307, 317, 318, 352 Simondon, Michèle, 80n7, 92 Simonetti, Cristián, 243, 244, 245, 247 Smith, Chris L., 403, 418 Smith, Daniel W., 403, 406n4, 418, 420, 425, 428 Smith, Kevin, 331n3, 335 Smith, Steve, 50 Socrates, 166 SoftBank Robotics, 216n19 Sohn, Heidi, 421, 428 Sohn-Rethel, Alfred, 226, 233 Ideal des Kaputten, Das, 226 Solomon, Robert, 59, 74 Sorinas, Jennifer, 58n6, 75 Spehar, Branka, 194, 196 Spicer, Andi, 155, 159, 161, 162 See also Giudici, Paolo, and Andi Spicer, works by Spinoza, Benedict de, 35, 59, 63, 123, 128, 184, 213, 214, 220, 313, 351 Ethics, 213, 214, 220 Star Wars (franchise), 288 Steinbeck, Paul, 47–48, 53, 116, 119, 128 Steinmetz, Julia, 112, 114 462

Stengers, Isabelle, 146, 148, 153 Stephenson, T. A., 224, 233 Stern, Daniel, 56, 58n7, 75, 169, 178 Stiegler, Bernard, 299, 302–6, 308 Technics and Time, 302 Stivale, Charles J., 273, 280 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 46, 79 Gruppen, 46 Zeitmasse, 46 Stoeva, Darja, 216 Stoics, 292 Stone, Lori D., 59, 74 Stover, Chris, 55–75 Stravinsky, Igor, 442 Petrouchka, 442 Suchman, Lucy, 120, 128 Sun Ra, 46 Syndicat de la Montagne Limousine, Le, 322–23, 334, 337 Szendy, Peter, 40, 53

T

Tate Modern, 331n3 Taussig, Michael, 393, 394 Taylor, Cecil, 46, 128 Taylor, Gregory, 120 Taylor, Richard P., 194, 196 Terranova, Tiziana, 424, 428 Théron, Manu, 324 Thompson, Marie, 108, 109, 114 Thomson, Graeme, 249, 254 See also Maglioni, Silvia, and Graeme Thomson, works by Thorpe, W. H., 159 Threadgill, Henry, 116 Tiffany & Co., 391 Tinbergen, Nikolaas, 38, 290 Study of Instinct, The, 38 Tiqqun, 353, 360 Tomatis, Alfred A., 139, 141 Tri-Centric Ensemble, 442 Tri-Centric Foundation, 49 Trump, Donald, 286, 287, 288 Tuberquia, Gildardo, 320, 335 Tudor, David, 145–46 Turner, J. M. W., 284 Tynan, Aidan, 372, 374, 377

U

Ueinzz Theatre Company, 249, 356 Quay of Sheep/Sheep Chaos, 359 Uexküll, Jakob von, 290, 296 Uhlmann, Anthony, 212n8, 222 Ukeles, Mierle Laderman, 365 Uno, Kuniichi, 273 Uribe, Ricardo, 228, 233

V

Valéry, Paul, 223, 233 van Donkelaar, Paul, 194, 196 Van Eck, Cathy, 146, 149, 153 Varela, Francisco G., 118, 228, 233, 316, 333 Varèse, Edgard, 159, 160, 161 Varty, Alexander, 50, 53 Vaucanson, Jacques de, 118, 209n1 Velasco, David, 206, 208 Venn, Couze, 12, 25

Index Vernon, Jim, 160, 162 Verstraete, Pieter, 132, 141 Vertoz, Dziga, 311–13 Vienna Philharmonic, 160 Vignaud, Jean-François, 323, 335 Viola, Bill, 145, 153 Virilio, Paul, 241, 242, 247, 287 Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo, 320–21, 330, 337 Voight, Deborah, 443 Vološinov, V. N., 268n6, 271, 291 Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, 268n6

Wise, J. Macgregor, 18, 25 Wolff, Christian, 442 Merce, 442 Wotton, Lex, 334, 336 Wutz, Michael, 144, 153

W

Z

Wagner, Richard, 228n6, 443 Die Walküre, 443 Wagner, Roy, 252, 259 Ward, Frazer, 362, 377 Warlpiri people, 327–30 Watkin, Christopher, 364, 377 Watson, Andrew, 305 Weber, Carl Maria von, 45 Weber, Jutta, 210, 222 Welles, Orson, 312 West, Sarah Myers, 210n2, 222 Weston, Randy, 443 Whitehead, Alfred North, 120 Whittaker, Meredith, 210n2 Wiame, Aline, 212n8 Wiener, Norbert, 303, 308 Wigglesworth, Ron, 27–32 Wilde, Oscar, 315, 318 William Hooker Quintet, 442 Williams, James, 241, 247 Winthrop-Young, Geoffrey, 144, 153

X

Xenakis, Iannis, 45nn, 80, 92

Y

Yellow Vest Movement, 323 Zagal, José P., 242, 245, 247 Zahm, Olivier, 44 See also Guattari, Félix, and Olivier Zahm, works by Zdebik, Jakub, 421, 428 Zepke, Stephen, 362, 363, 364, 373, 377 Zerbib, Monique, 326, 327, 335 Zhang Shiran, 381 Zhuangzi, 392 Zidane, Zinedine, 326 Zimmer, Carl, 159, 162 Žižek, Slavoj, 393, 394 Zohar, Ayelet, 372–73, 377 Zone to Defend (ZAD) of Notre-Dame-des-Landes, 330–32, 334 Terre en commun, La, 332 See also Laboratory of Insurrectional Imagination; Mauvaise Troupe Collective Zourabichvili, François, 261, 262, 265–69, 271, 352, 355, 360 Žukauskaitė, Audronė, 205, 208, 297–308

463

Editors Paulo de Assis Paolo Giudici Authors Gareth Abrahams Burcu Baykan Ian Buchanan Edward Campbell Iain Campbell Rogério Luiz Moraes Costa Annita Costa Malufe Paul Dolan Lilija Duobliene Vanessa Farfán Silvio Ferraz José Gil Barbara Glowczewski Christoph Hubatschke jan jagodzinski Niall Kennedy George E. Lewis Hsiu-ju Stacy Lo Clara Maïda Thomas Nail Tero Nauha Alex Nowitz Morgan O’Hara Yota Passia Peter Pál Pelbart Panagiotis Roupas Anne Sauvagnargues Niamh Schmidtke Chris Stover Ron Wigglesworth Audronė Žukauskaitė

© 2021 by Leuven University Press / Universitaire Pers Leuven / Presses Universitaires de Louvain. Minderbroedersstraat 4 B-3000 Leuven (Belgium) ISBN 978 94 6270 254 7 eISBN 978 94 6166 360 3 https://doi.org/10.11116/9789461663603 D/2021/1869/6 NUR: 664

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The Orpheus Institute Series encompasses monographs by fellows and associates of the Orpheus Institute, compilations of lectures and texts from seminars and study days, and edited volumes on topics arising from work at the institute. Research can be presented in digital media as well as printed texts. As a whole, the series is meant to enhance and advance discourse in the field of artistic research in music and to generate future work in this emerging and vital area of study.

Recent titles in this series: – Performance, Subjectivity, and Experimentation Catherine Laws (ed.) 2020, ISBN 978 94 6270 231 8 – Listening to the Other Stefan Östersjö 2020, ISBN 978 94 6270 229 5 – Voices, Bodies, Practices: Performing Musical Subjectivities Catherine Laws, William Brooks, David Gorton, Nguyễn Thanh Thủy, Stefan Östersjö, and Jeremy J. Wells 2019, ISBN 978 94 6270 205 9 – Futures of the Contemporary Paulo de Assis and Michael Schwab (eds.) 2019, ISBN 978 94 6270 183 0 – Sensorial Aesthetics in Music Practices Kathleen Coessens (ed.) 2019, ISBN 978 94 6270 184 7 – Logic of Experimentation: Rethinking Music Performance through Artistic Research Paulo de Assis 2018, ISBN 978 94 6270 138 0 – Powers of Divergence: An Experimental Approach to Music Performance Lucia D’Errico 2018, ISBN 978 94 6270 139 7 – Transpositions: Aesthetico-Epistemic Operators in Artistic Research Michael Schwab (ed.) 2018, ISBN 978 94 6270 141 0 Orpheus Institute Korte Meer 12 B – 9000 Ghent Belgium +32 (0)9 330 40 81 www.orpheusinstituut.be

The Orpheus Institute has been providing postgraduate education for musicians since 1996 and introduced the first doctoral programme for music practitioners in Flanders (2004). Acting as an umbrella institution for Flanders, it is co-governed by the music and dramatic arts departments of all four Flemish colleges, which are strongly involved in its operation. Throughout the Institute’s various activities (seminars, conferences, workshops, and associated events) there is a clear focus on the development of a new research discipline in the arts, one that addresses questions and topics that are at the heart of musical practice, building on the unique expertise and perspectives of musicians and maintaining a constant dialogue with more established research disciplines. Within this context, the Orpheus Institute launched an international Research Centre in 2007 that acts as a stable constituent within an ever-growing field of enquiry. The Orpheus Research Centre is a place where musical artists can fruitfully conduct individual and collaborative research on issues that are of concern to all involved in artistic practice. Its core mission is the development of a discipline-specific discourse in the field of artistic research in music.