National Symposium on Deleuze Scholarship #2
Asignifying
Semiotics:
Or
How to Paint Pink on Pink
Delft
May 29, 2013
The second one-day Symposium continues to
assess the state of Deleuze scholarship in The Lowlands, with a strong emphasis
on new directions of study and new generations of scholars operating under the ‘Affective
Turn’.
Host
Theory
Department (formerly known as DSD), Faculty of
Architecture,
TU Delft, The
Netherlands
Organising Committee
Deborah Hauptmann, Marc Boumeester and Andrej
Radman
Admission Free
Location
Faculty of Architecture, Berlage Zaal 1,
Julianalaan 134, 2628 BL Delft
Submission
Send your titled abstract (max.
250 words) with key words, your name, contact information and institutional
affiliation to a.radman@tudelft.nl before
1 March 2013 (e-mail
subject: Lowlands Two).
Scientific Committee
Rosi Braidotti, Rick
Dolphijn, Sjoerd van Tuinen and Andrej Radman
Key Note
Gary Genosko
In a
recent paper Lazzarato cautions against limiting the attention of scholarly
research to political economy
and invites to enter the field of subjective economy. [1] This politico-libidinal
approach resonates with Braidotti’s anti-messianic call to “operate from the
belly of the beast.” [2] The notion of ASIGNIFYING
SEMIOTICS which plays a dominant role in contemporary capitalism turns out to
be indispensable in creating the very conditions for its political critique. According
to Deleuze,
the credit for propagating the asignifying sign goes to the “greatest classifier of signs”,
namely, the pragmatist Peirce. His ‘semiology’ is not formed linguistically,
but aesthetically, "as a condition, anterior by right to what it
conditions". [3] After a long position
of dominance, language is finally relegated to being one of the many instances of the
general semiotic. [4]
The asignifying semiotics is not limited to the
semiotics of mathematics, stock indices, money, accounting and computer codes, but
includes the semiotics of music, art, architecture, cinematography, dance, and
so on. What they all have in common is their repudiation of the hegemony of meta-languages. By contrast to the cardologic, they are non-representative,
non-illustrative and non-narrative. [5] The assemblage is powered and amplified by the ordologic asignifying
semiotics which works within it. If in representationalism a signifier functions in the logic of discursive aggregates, then
in asignification it functions in the “machinic of bodies without organs.” [6] Narratives do exist from the point of view
of cartography (diagram), albeit as a very indirect product of motion and time,
rather than the other way around.
According to Peirce, semiology (his
term for semiotics) ought to be
treated
as a process. The
autonomy of the asignifying sign is paramount if a body – psyche, socius and environment - is to be
defined, not by its form or by its organs and functions, but by its capacity
for affecting or being affected: the affect. [7] In the asignifying semiotics, signs work directly on material
flows. They are not powerless as in the signifying semiotics because their
performance does not depend on the mediation (translation) of signification, denotation, and
representation. The ‘truth’ under this conception is solely a matter of
production (transduction),
not of adequation. There is no representation, only action –
theoretical and practical. [8]
The asignifying semiotics operates regardless of
whether it signifies something to someone. The vicious correlationist circle whereby one can only ever have
access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term
considered apart, is broken. [9] Instead
of referring to other signs, the asignifying signs work directly upon the real.
“The rainbow of oxidation that blooms on the heated surface of a polished steel
bar” [10]
is as good an example as is “the dance of the torero and toro.” [11] With the affective turn we abandon the semiotic register as the linguistic
distinction between sign and referent loses its relevance. More importantly, we
shake off the bad habit of anthropocentrism in favour of becoming posthuman.
The asignifying signs do not represent or refer to
an already constituted dominant
reality. Rather, they simulate and pre-produce a reality that is not yet there.
Existence is not already given, it is a stake in the experimental assemblages, be they
scientific, political or artistic. This is the task of cartography, with a caveat
that the transcendental must not be traced from the empirical. [12] Deleuze and Guattari’s Principle
of asignifying rupture calls for relinquishing the tautological and hence trivial effort of tracing in favour
of creative mapping:
The Pink Panther imitates
nothing, it reproduces nothing, it paints the world its color, pink on pink; this is its becoming-world, carried
out in such a way that it becomes imperceptible itself, asignifying, makes its
rupture, its own line of flight, follows its "aparallel evolution" [orchid and wasp] through
to the end. [13]
Notes:
1 Maurizio Lazzarato, “’Exiting Language’, Semiotic Systems and
the Production of Subjectivity in Félix Guattari” in Cognitive Architecture: From Biopolitics to Noopolitics; Architecture
& Mind in the Age of Communication and Information, eds. Deborah
Hauptmann and Warren Neidich (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2010), pp. 502-520.
2 Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, “Interview with Rosi Braidotti”
in New Materialism: Interviews &
Cartographies, eds. Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin (Open Humanities
Press, 2012), pp. 19-37.
3 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema
2; The Time-Image (London: The Athlone Press, [1985] 1989), p. 28.
4 Félix Guattari, "Towards a Micro-Politics of
Desire" in Molecular
Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics (London, Penguin, [1975] 1984), pp.
87, 96. "[T]he 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.
[...] abstract machinism in some sense 'precedes' the actualization of the
diagrammatic conjunctions between the systems of signs and the systems of
material intensities."
5 Gilles
Deleuze, Francis Bacon: the Logic of Sensation (London: Continuum, [1981] 2005), p 71.
6 Charles
Stivale, “Pragmatic/Machinic:
Discussion with Félix Guattari (19 March 1985)” in Pre/Text 14.3-4 (1993), pp. 215-250.
7 Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies
(London: Continuum, [1989] 2008).
8 Michel
Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, “Intellectuals and Power,” in Language, Counter-Memory and Practice, eds. Donald F. Bouchard
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 205–207.
9 Meillassoux asks provocatively whether the
self-proclaimed Copernican revolution of the Critical turn was not in fact a
"Ptolemaic counter revolution". See: Quentin Meillasoux, After Finitudes; An Essay on the Necessity
of Contingency (London, New York, Continuum, [2006] 2008).
10 Jesse Reiser and Nanako Umemoto, Atlas of novel Tectonics (New York:
Princeton Architectural Press, 2006), p. 172.
11 Hélène
Frichot, "Bullfighting, Sex and Sensation” in Colloquy 5 (September 2001).
12 Gilles Deleuze, Cours Vincennes: "the actual infinite-eternal, the logic of
relations" (March 10,
1981), <http://www.webdeleuze.com/php/texte.php?cle=42&groupe=Spinoza&langue=2> (accessed January 7, 2013).
13 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (London, New York: Continuum [1980] 2004), pp. 9-12.
Schedule:
09:30 – 12:00 | i/iv KICKOFF
10:00| Deborah
Hauptmann
10:15| Welcome
10:15| Gary
Genosko
11:00| Key Note
11:00| Andrej
Radman
11:30| Respondent
11:30| Marc
Boumeester
12:00| YEN: prosaic propensity; a-signifying
singularity
- break -
12:15 – 13:45 | ii/iv PHILOSOPHY
Moderator: Deborah
Hauptmann
12:15| Patrick Healy
12:45| Lucretius
in Bergson and Deleuze
12:45| Louis Schreel
13:15| The Erewhon of the image: On sense and
sensation in Deleuze's aesthetics
13:15| Arjen
Kleinherenbrink
13:45| Houses, signs, affects: Deleuze and
Kierkegaard
- lunch -
14:45 – 16:15 | iii/iv PEDAGOGY
Moderator: Andrej
Radman
14:45| Gregory
J. Seigworth
16:15| Affect
theory as pedagogy of the ‘non-‘
15:15| Agnieszka Anna Wołodźko
15:45| Affect That
Matters
15:45| Piotrek Swiatkowski
16:15| Gothic ontology or how to think constructivism? – a discussion between Deleuze and Spuybroek
- break -
16:30 – 18:00 | iv/iv ART
Moderator: Marc
Boumeester
16:30| Stella Baraklianou
17:00| Moire, noise, clipping: the ‘index’ of the
digital image
17:00| Tom
Idema
17:30| A Thought
Beyond Knowledge? Rethinking Communication with Contemporary Science and SF
17:30| Nur Ozgenalp
18:00| Becoming Echo: Micropolitics of Dollhouse
- break -
18:15 – 19:00 | ROUND TABLE
Moderator: Deborah
Hauptmann
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