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 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, 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 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 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 anti-conventional: 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 “hyper-intelligent and yet irredeemably infantile and regressive” (ibid., 58); it is the infra-quark universe, a “pure” machinic subjectivity with no persona or orientation. 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.
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 has 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.
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 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 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).
Guattari, Félix. 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. First published 1977 in La révolution moléculaire (Paris: Union générale d’éditions).
Guattari, Félix. 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).
Guattari, Félix. 2012. A Love of UIQ. Translated by Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson. Minneapolis, MN: Univocal. Written ca. 1986–87 as In amour d’UIQ.
Guattari, Félix. 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 by Amiria Henare, Martin Holbraad, and Sari Wastell, 189–225. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
Holbraad, Martin. 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.
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Endnotes
[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 Ben- jamin 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).
[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).
Link to publication: https://orpheusinstituut.be/en/publications/machinic-assemblages-of-desire