Translocation

Abstract

there is a collective assemblage of enunciation: a machinic assemblage of desire, one inside the other and both plugged into an immense outside that is a multiplicity in any case. The distinction to be made is not at all between exterior to interior, which are always relative, changing, and reversible, but between different types of multiplicities that coexist, interpenetrate, and change places--machines, cogs, motors, and elements that are set in motion at a given moment, forming an assemblage productive of statements. -Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980) ONE/MULTIPLE In La clameur de l'Etre (1997), Alain Badiou launched an attack on (Gilles Deleuze's ontology, criticizing his category of univocity as reinstalling transcendence. (1) Two years later, Mogens Laerke situated the Deleuzian ontology between being as the multiplicity of actual events, and being as a unitary virtual structure, namely, the One. (2) Univocity, argued Laerke, is not a principle but an affirmation of the multiplicity of reproduction and the production of sense. Badiou rejected all concepts of unity while insisting on multiplicity as such, being as multiple pur, the disordered and discontinuous ensemble of actual events. This debate outlines a crucial moment in both the thought and production of images as reflective of the constitution of self as an aggregated machine. Rooted in Friedrich Nietzsche, the dismantled amalgamate is described clearly in The Will to Power (1901) where Nietzsche argues that the I, the subject, lost faith in his own value when no infinitely valuable whole worked through him. ... (3) Nietzche's call to free the I from the illusionary assumption of unity became an Archimedian turning point that shifted the subject's self-establishment from the external transcendent to the multiple self. The recognition of the self as a plurality of events characterizes theories representing the human condition as heterogeneity folded within itself. This opposes an ontology predicated on the transcendent, i.e., an external establishing mechanism that demands unity. Two recent artworks, Shit in Your Hat--Head on a Chair (1990) by Bruce Nauman and Corps etranger (1994) by Mona Hatoum, embrace these ideas while revealing a ruptured, fragmented self as assemblage. These artists employ a practice of continuous synthesis, using fragmentation and later modification of the external and internal mental pictures that construct our world and self-perception. In these works, external systems are broken, while the human body, their underlying and guiding machinery, is dismantled and exhausted. They are unique in that they keep the spectator in constant flux, and cast aside the barriers to understanding the self as multiple. The desire to establish the self through the idea of unity is an ancient dilemma articulated in the tension between totality and its parts, between Metaphysics and Materialism. Consider, for example, the ancient Egyptian story of Osiris's bodily dismemberment as a revealing moment of divine and worldly transformation, where the idea of unity disables and taboos an aggregate perception grounded in multiple autonomous entities. Conversely, the early modernist concepts of rupture, wounding, splitting, and differentiation have given way to contemporary notions of multiplicity, disintegration, destruction, and fragmentation. These processes direct the focus internally, to the self, while appearing to maintain constant tension with the external source of authority. (4) TRANSLOCATED IMAGES The tension between the fragmented multiple and its unification operates through the constant act of dismantlement and construction of world images within the human mind. Here, human perception is bound to the operation of taking apart external images, reducing them to signals that in turn are transferred into different regions of the brain, only to be re-established into new electrical signals in the neuronal system that reconstructs and modifies a coherent picture. …