## Jay Hetrick (2014). *Video Assemblages: ‘Machinic Animism’ and ‘Asignifying Semiotics’ in the Work of Melitopoulos and Lazzarato*. : FOOTPRINT. Author(s): [[Jay Hetrick]] Zotero Link: [Video Assemblages: ‘Machinic Animism’ and ‘Asignifying Semiotics’ in the Work of Melitopoulos and Lazzarato](zotero://select/items/@hetrick_video_2014) Index: ### Related ### Summary: Angela Melitopoulos and the political philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato의 한시간 정도의 작업 Assemblages (2010)을 통해 멀티Modal을 통한 작업에서 보이는 들뢰즈와 가타리의 컨셉 assemblage를 알아본다. 그들의 수평축과 수직축이 crossing 하는데, 수평축은 가타리의 분역적 지도그리기를 기반으로 한다. 가타리는 서양의 decolonisation을 위해서는 애니미즘의 주관의 개념으로 돌아가야한다고 주장한다. ### Notes: ![[Angela-Melitopoulos-Courtesy-of-Centro-Andaluz-de-Arte-Contemporaneo.jpg]]![[csm_20106201_1_01_f3b69e2745.jpg]] Assemblages (2010) is an hour-long, three channel audio-visual ‘documentary’ installation about the French psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, co-created by the artist Angela Melitopoulos and the polit- ical philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato. The video unfolds through an abstract non-linear interweaving of sound, image and text in a way that is similar to Melitopoulos’s work of the past decade. Each screen is meant to highlight a different modality of reception: seeing, hearing and reading. (54) They conceive of the installation as an assemblage in the technical sense that it is a diversely constructed ‘diagonal cross section’ of the source material. (54) > To construct such a diagonal cross section of material means, for Melitopoulos and Lazzarato, ‘to think now in the vertical plane (layering and accumulation of the material, acoustic space), now in the horizontal one (sequencing, narrative)’. in which the category of movement is understood as migration and vagabondage, and is intimately linked to the dynamisms, rhythms, and physicality of the voice more than to its linguistic or purely narrative content. (54) > At the level of content, Assemblages presents Guattari’s own migrations to Brazil and Japan in the 1980s. He firmly believed that in order to 'decolonise’ our habitual ways of thinking and perceiving, the West needed ‘to go back to [...] an animist conception of subjectivity’, which should be under- stood as completely distinct from ‘a simple return to irrationalism’.([[@melitopoulos_machinic_2012]], 240) He further argues that, as such, these two cultures have provided unique conditions for developing ‘prototypical models of new capitalist subjectivities’. ^[Félix Guattari, ‘Regimes, Pathways, Subjects’ trans. by Brian Massumi in The Guattari Reader, ed. by Gary Genosko (London: Blackwell, 1996), p. 105.] ### Machinic Animism For Deleuze and Guattari, an assemblage consists of heterogeneous elements of all kinds that relate by ‘contagion’ or ‘unnatural participation’, which come together neither as an organic totality – in which parts are described as forming seamless wholes (Hegel) or structures (Lacan) -- nor as a lifeless, extensive set ([[Alain Badiou|Badiou]]). 그들의 아상블라주는 특별한 의미로 'machinic'의 조건을 갖추고 있다. 1. It is defined by its functional or pragmatic capacity to affect or be affected by other assemblages rather than any 'truth' value > A racehorse is more different from a workhorse than a workhorse is from an ox. [...] It is not a member of a species but an element or individual in a machinic assemblage [...] defined by a list of active and passive affects.... These affects circulate and are transformed within the assemblage: what a horse ‘can do’. ([[@deleuze_thousand_1987]], 257) 1. an assemblage as a kind of temporary collection of ‘plural facts’ as well as the ‘conjunctive and disjunctive relations’ between them, including facts and relations that might normally be occluded from everyday perception but are nonetheless experienced in altered states of consciousness. ^[William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), pp. 22-3.] 즉 관계는 그 밖에 존재한다. > ‘The machine has something more than structure [...] in that it does not limit itself to a game of interactions which develop in space and time between its component parts.’ ^[Félix Guattari, ‘On Machines,’ Journal of Philosophy and the Visual Arts 6 (1995), p. 10.] > A [[becoming]] is always in the middle; one can only get it by the middle. A [[becoming]] is neither one nor two [...] it constitutes a zone of proximity and indiscernibility [...] a nonlocalizable relation sweeping up the two distant or contiguous points, carrying one into the proximity of the other. [...] The line or block of [[becoming]] that unites the wasp and the orchid produces a shared deterrito- rialization: of the wasp, in that it becomes a liberated piece of the orchid’s reproductive system, but also of the orchid, in that it becomes the object of an orgasm in the wasp, also liberated from its own reproduction. ([[@deleuze_thousand_1987]], 293) 1. machin은 동시에 an ‘assemblage of bodies, of actions and passions, an intermingling of bodies reacting to one another’ and an ‘assemblage of enunciation, of acts and statements, of incor- poreal transformations attributed to bodies’. ([[@deleuze_thousand_1987]], 88) 여기에서 말할 수 있는 것은 [[Gilles Deleuze|Deleuze]]와 [[Félix Guattari|Guattari]]가 말하는 기계적 아상블라주의 '수평적 측'은 바로 (imbrication of the material and the semiotic) 존재-[[aesthetics|미학]]적(모든 종류의 물질적 사인 including asignifying articles of sensible affects) plane이다. 기계적 아상블라주의 "수직적 측"은 (movement of de- and re-territorialisation, capacity to create the new) 거시적 레벨로 윤리-[[aesthetics|미학]]에 존재한다. > a category which helps us grasp the necessarily ethical and ultimately political aspect of machinic assemblages. (57) 두가지의 축은 present ‘permanent renewal of the assemblage, a verification of its capacity to welcome asignifying singularities [...] and a constant readjustment of its transversalist opening onto the outside world’. ([[@guattari_chaosmosis_1995]], 71) ### [[Félix Guattari|Guattari]]'s Animism and Asignifying semiotics It should be clear that what Guattari means by animism is not some kind of pantheistic cult religion but rather something that points to an elaborate [[Ontology]], which is the logical conclusion of his conception of machinic assemblages. (60) ==Animism points to== a world populated not by magical spirits, but by ==proto-subjective, autopoietic haecceities of all kinds that transversally interact with each other across the artificial divides between nature and culture, subject and object==. > daily commerce with particles of the self or perhaps with non-living bodies, of bodies outside the self, which does not pose a problem at all. It’s like a natural exercise. And if you don’t understand it, a schizophrenic might think of you as a moron. [...] There is a certain very particular “animist” sensibility that one could call delirium. ^[Jean-Claude Polack in Angela Melitopoulos and Maurizio Lazzarato, Assemblages, 2010 (video).] There can be no romantic return to an original nature because nature is itself populated by a motley anarchy of machinic assemblages [...] There can only be a continual, future-oriented, machinic participation in and with these assemblages. This point cannot be overemphasised: the concept of the machine in Deleuze and Guattari disallows any recourse to a naively ‘vitalist’ conception of nature. (61) > ‘For every type of machine we will pose a question, not about its vital autonomy – it’s not an animal – but about its singular power of enunciation.’ ([[@guattari_chaosmosis_1995]], 34) **four main semiotic registers in the Deleuzo-Guattarian system** (by Maurizio Lazzarato)^[Maurizio Lazzarato, ‘Existing Language, Semiotic Systems, and the Production of Subjectivity in Félix Guattari’, in Cognitive Architecture. From Bio-politics to Noo-politics, ed. by Deborah Hauptmann and Warren Neidich (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2010), p. 512.] 1. DNA or crystallinestructure 2. symbolic (or pre-signifying) semiologies that include bodily gestures and the rituals of archaic societies 3. the representational, signifying semiology of [[Ferdinand de Saussure|Saussure]], 4. and asignifying (or post-signifying) semiologies, which include mathematical fomulas, stock quotes, and computer languages, but also the rhythms, durations, and intensities of music, art, and film. Because asignifying signs plug in directly to material flows without mediation through signification, denotation, or representation -- and because they indeed are simultaneously both mate- rial and semiotic – they are the elements of an assemblage that we can most confidently qualify as machinic. And indeed Guattari refers to the elements of asignifying semiotics – recalling in the same sentence artistic, religious, and shamanic practices – as ‘power signs’. ^[Félix Guattari, Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics, trans. by Rosemary Sheed (London: Penguin, 1984), p. 127.] ==These signs are understood as material particles that do not pass through linguistic chains, but rather plug into the body directly through pre-conscious affects, perceptions, desires and emotions.== ### Lazzarato and Cinema Lazzarato는 크게 들뢰즈의 베르그송적 필름-철학을 따르지만 또한 그는 비디오 기술이 더 탈영토화를 이끈다고 믿는다. 이것은 비디오 기술이 움직이는 이미지뿐만 아니라 이미지 자체의 조건, 비디오 이미지와 물리적 세계 그 자체 모두의 중심에 있는 전자기파의 '시간-물질'을 표현함으로써 이러한 흐름의 추가적인 탈영토화를 가능하게 한다. > ‘Video technology is a mechanical assemblage that establishes a relationship between signifying flows ( waves) and signifying flows (images). It is the first technical means of producing images that reflects the general decoding of the flows. 비디오 기술은 의미하는 흐름(파동)과 의미하는 흐름(이미지) 사이의 관계를 설정하는 기계적 집합체다. 또한 이것은 흐름의 일반적인 디코딩을 반영하는 이미지를 생성하는 최초의 기술적 수단입니다. ^[Lazzarato, ‘Video, Flows, and Real Time’, p. 283. ([[@hetrick_video_2014]], 64)