Part-sign performatives and machinic objects
PART-SIGN PERFORMATIVES AND MACHINIC OBJECTS
X-OP/Tomar/4.5.2010
Schizoanalysis
In schizoanalytic performance practice encounter glitches, ruptures and frustrations – inconsistencies.
Inconsistency: Form of innovation, and event, singular event. But also a catastrophe,
also a suicide, resistance to repetition. For psychoanalysts, a joke, surprise, lapsus. But
glitch is different, it is not predictable, it does not create homeostasis. But inconsistency
for Howell requires a repetition, a machinic repetition – but inconsistency may turn
into a refrain as well.
Speech-act
J.L. Austin’s theory of speech act functions as a basis for a linguistic performance theory. Speech act is a performative. There are illocutionary acts utterances such as “I do” in wedding ceremony. Then there are perlocutionary utterances that use force, in a Foucauldian sense. My question arises from this, the move from Foucauldian disciplinary society to control society, from order words to a-signifying commands and triggers; from humanist subject to a-humanic compositions. Where is resistance, then?
A-signifying semiotics
There are no clear, signifying messages, but commands that either enter or block. They are nonrepresentational and affectual. Yet without a meaning, there are real transformations in reality. For instance, the effects of stock-market transactions or a mobile-phone bombs. A-signifying part-signs bring together material without meaning. It is a trigger without a meaning, a plug-in or thickening. It is a refrain of performatives, also a glitch and a leakage. In a rigid macro level organization, in a traditional way, I would search for meaning, performatives in a humanist sense. A search for revealing something. In a micro political sense, there are commands, triggers, plug-in at works. Shortly, affects. I will recombine machinic and non-human aspects. Guattari and Deleuze write about Kafka, as a minoritarian.
“Minor literature is the gaze from outside, the gaze of somebody who observes the ritual without knowing the code, and thus understands its a-signifying nature.” Not to become official and officially understood – neither underground nor avant-garde. This is not at all related to identity, identity being something territorial – at least in some sense. Yet becoming minor is something essentially related to the subjectivation in process in the cognitarian, precarious working conditions. An very much in the art, as well.
Affects
Being sticky, and non-shareable. Emotions being something I possess, affect is something that will take over me, or stuck in me, but not with explicit meaning. In performance art, these would be non-shareable affectuations, not yet meaningful performance, yet connected into a swarm-behaviour such as stock market: affectual, yet very real consequences. Thus affects are very much at work in the building of a negative swarm, and in the very negative individuation leading to identities, such as fascistic nationalism or apathic psychopathologies. Affect is like a plugin or a part-signs.
Refrains
What is a refrain, or ritornello, it is a child singing in the night of his fear of the dark, trying to control the events, which are too quickly going out of hands. It is too quick proliferation of cosmos and chaos, the incorporeal universe. Refrains are also what each individual, each group, each nations equips themselves. It is repetition that is in the process of becoming fixed automatism. It is what we build identity upon. “through the refrain the process of subjectivation is realized”.
Schizoanalytic practice
In this practice I intend to trace the refrains, capitalist automatisms. Not to transgress, but to try some recombinations. But where am I, between the cables, ether, thoughts, affects and all? Schizoanalytic practice is a singular machine, singular psychogenesis as a background. Not universality, universal or archaic humanism.
Machines
Marx writes in Grundrisse, in the “Fragment on machines” that how human beings become merely supervising machines. How “General intellect is absorbed into capital, into machines” Eventually human abilities will be subsumed. What else is a machine? It is a refrain, ritornello of performatives. There are constant refrains and automatisms between the conscious organisms and other, non-human and technological machines, with abstract machines, and with semiotic constellations as well. This machinery builds a process of “subject”.
Resistance
In historical reading, every order has a historical reflection of the politics it represents, it is part of the device. It reflects the control society, semiocapital, infosphere, as well. In this way of rather structural thinking, public is stratified, not smooth. There is a struggle with hegemony and opposition. Yet, there is no discussion, no clear signals – or there are mixed signals in the cognitive capitalism. Too much information. In some antagonistic thinking there is still a base too much on identity and subjectivity, sensible and progressive subjectivity. This is all true, of course, but from the viewpoint of processual subjectivization, machinic subjectivity, identitarian subjectivity leads into fight for space and territory, a dialectical space. In my point of view, here, there are not identities, but an event of subjectivation. Which is exactly the milieu of capitalist subsumption. And what is an event? What are the conditions to make process of subjectivation and event possible?
“Events are produced in chaos, in chaotic multiplicity, but only under conditions, that a sort of screen” (Deleuze, “The Fold”, 76)
Chaos
being a sum of all possibilities. The question could be putted also:
“under what conditions does the objective world allow a subjective production of novelty, that is, a creation?”(Ibid.)
A micro political resistance is not based on identitarian subject, roots, self or ideals. It is neither a practice of being minority, strengthening of it. It is, as DG about Kafka, a look from outside, not knowing the code, not in opposition, not underground, not revealing something, truth, etc. This resistance is a mutaction, production without a stance or position, machinic and organic together. Language of art does not produce meaning, consensus and there after an action in the public. It is not a progressive process. But in comparison, what is a wave in the stadium? A swarm, cloud, mû. Is performance action something similar, singular action in public, can it form a collective articulation in this manner? And why in comparison to stadium an art event can be highly stratified, encoded and rigid? On the other hand, what is a value of a swarm without praxis, swarm without aim, but praxis of minoritarian deterritorialization, tracing of singular flight plans? When does an artistic practice turn from chaos and refrains to automatisms? If the composition or “soup” is made from organic, semiotic, electronics, chemistry, thoughts, emotions, affects, desires, electrons, where is the resistance? Resistance for automatisms? Is there a compassionate from machinic subjectivities in noosphere, for instance?
Exit
Esc(ape). Pathic or apathic escape, depression, panic, suicide. Or full compassion, transformation, and body without organs? This possibility of escape is in the core of subjectivity: already in Marx, workers leaving east coast to west. Exit is a swarm-factor, affectual event. How is a collectivity then possible? How should we perceive collectivity then, not as a hierarchical, historical unity, but unstable? In this process of subjectivation a schizoanalysis works as a plan of the plans (metamodelization): to trace singular flight plans, starting from the middle, with BWO – intensity yet without a meaning, but full of memory. There is not cure (therapeia), and no healing, no utopia, no enlightenment. It is a plan, how to exist in every singular situation, but moreover how to gain more autonomy, keeping in mind the arbitrary and machinic nature of subjectivity. This is not neo-liberal territorialinism based on firm subjectivity and identity. Only careers have an end.
Schizoanalytic practice is a compassionate mapping of glitches and flows divert and mutate the milieu, experiment with body temperature 37,5°C. It might be Dadaist without avant-garde, errorist, affective compassion, no wave, Kafka, Burroughs… This is the machine of partial-objects. These fragments are at play in the schizoanalysis, in the unfolding of subjectivities, subjective void. Schizoanalytic practice is a singular machine, singular psychogenesis as a background. Not universality, universal or archaic humanism. A process of mutant subjectivation, where no ontological “real” exists.
