Machinic Assemblage Research Articles

The life of the cell membrane: A paradigmatic reading from Deleuze and Guattari

While the Fluid Mosaic model (FMM) is widely accepted as an account of the cell membrane's structure-function, its inability to explain certain phenomena has led to the lipid rafts hypothesis (nanodomains) that spontaneous spatiotemporal enriched zones of sphingolipids-cholesterol-protein exist within the membrane. In this text, we propose a novel approach that conceives the cell membrane as a living entity. The questions regarding the FMM revolve around the fact that, although these molecular components are present in many cell types, the membrane does not react in the same way to every external agent; for example, a virus evokes a particular response: why is there some marked specificity of virus (or toxin) attack on one (or some) of these cell types and not to other cell types that nevertheless have a similar membrane protein constitution? The crucial question, to explain this selectivity, would be what determines the specificity of attack on some cells and not others? While FMN assumes a dynamism between macrostates at the intramolecular, intermolecular, and/or collective levels in the membrane, the approach of the lipid raft model presupposes a much greater and more complex dynamics of microstates (even nano-states) of these molecular components. In other words, it implies higher and instantaneous mobility as assemblages ("intentional") and thus, of the membrane itself (as a collective), in response to changes in the internal and external physicochemical environment over a broad spatiotemporal scale. This suggests a mechanism of membrane adaptation in the face of evolutionary constraints. In this text, we propose a paradigmatic approach, from Deleuze-Guattari's philosophy: to conceive the cell membrane as living and not as a mere molecular conglomerate with particular functions and mechanical processes between molecules. For this, we employ the functional concepts of territory and machinic assemblage, whence the vitality of the membrane would allow us to postulate instantaneous updates, within wider spatiotemporal scales in its composition in contrast with the model that dominates as a more plausible explanation nowadays, that does not include smaller spatiotemporal events. If we resort to the concept of territory and its different media components, we could offer a more plausible explanation of the vigorous dynamism in the composition of the cell membrane since it would allow more subtle and complex differentiations between media and thus make visible the constant and instant changes. We propose that the model of nanodomains, understood as a process of dynamic territorialization, offers a more complex and subtle explanation of the instantaneous changes in the cell membrane's composition. This approach expands the explanatory framework for cellular phenomena and reveals their spatiotemporal complexity in accordance with other research.

Machinic assemblages—The role of school policies in producing children's sense of agency

AbstractThis paper presents an account of how children's sense of agency is produced in machinic assemblages. The ethnographic data used in this study originated in one elementary school classroom. By utilising children's own expressions of their agency and by examining the machinic assemblages in which these expressions were produced, we demonstrate that school policies are not merely a background for schools' mundane practices. Rather, when combined with other elements in a school setting, policies have heterogeneous consequences for children's sense of agency.

“Wait a Minute”: Reflections on [the] Pause

“Wait a Minute”: Reflections on [the] Pause Bernd Herzogenrath (bio) In this short essay, I would like to situate Jane Bennett’s take on the virtue of enacting a deliberate ‘pause’ in an assemblage of and encounter with other ideas and concepts, and use it as a cue for addressing the question of how this may relate to recent literary debates about critique and its possible alternatives. In 2004, Bruno Latour published a now-canonical essay on the state of criticism, in which he poses the rhetorical question of whether criticism has “run out of steam” (“Why Has Critique” 225). Latour paints a bleak picture of a practice of criticism couched in military terms (with “war,” “generals,” “projectiles,” “smart bombs,” “young recruits, young cadets”). This situation forces participants to take sides: between those who know and those who are fooled, between appearance and reality, between surface and depth, with the critic seeing himself or herself occupying the default position on the ‘right side’ of the trenches.1 If critique, as Latour suggests, is all about ‘letting off steam,’ then this will come to a natural, entropic end—steam machines don’t run forever, not without external energy. Or, to couch it in Jane Bennett’s terms—no efflux without influx, and, more important: not without the and in-between. “The ‘and’ of influx-and-efflux is immensely important: it marks the hover-time of transformation” (x). In the (often) either/or of critique, the and is conspicuously missing—and it is in the pause, I argue, where the and has a chance to enter. [End Page 1031] Bennett’s book is, on the face of it, (also) a book about Whitman, and in Whitman, the and sometimes seems to be an end in itself: both ‘literally’ and ‘conceptually’ (in his many enumerations), “and” is the building block of Whitman’s lists, the ‘ground-word’ of his paratactic discourse and politics. Here, the ‘I’ connects and is connected to everything in the universe: to the spread of one’s own body, and to the drift of conversation, and to the conduit of water and electricity, and to other people, and to the contents of a book, and to dung beetles, and to the stars and nebulae. The Whitmanian ‘I contain multitudes’ might thus be more than just a metaphorical figure of speech, referring to discursive contradictions—see Ed Yong’s book of the same name, on the life of microbes. The “and” is also the building block of what Gilles Deleuze has called an “assemblage” (in French: agencement), a rhizomatic and fragmentary multiplicity that never adds up to ‘One.’ It is by no means clear how the term “agencement” can be translated most accurately into English. Deleuze and Guattari coined this term in the late 1970s as an alternative to their often misunderstood concept of the machine. While linguistically oriented translations rendered it as “concatenation of enunciations,” it gradually became clear that it was actually about the complex linkages between sign and matter, technology and body, human and animal, etc. In his Dialogues with Claire Parnet, Deleuze gives us a shorthand of this idea: “Substitute the AND for IS” (Deleuze and Parnet 57)—a short motto which you could print on a T-shirt. In French, “est” (3rd person singular of “être,” “to be”) and “et” (in English “and”) are homophones. But this pun encapsulates what is at stake: to undermine or even substitute a transcendental logic of being with a processual logic of becoming: and … and … and … Relations have to be produced, forged—identity, of the subject and of a collectivity, is thus always only a fragmentary effect of the perpetual flux of the given. For Deleuze, the assemblage (as a result of the and … and …) is the basic ‘unit’ of the social, the “minimum real” (Deleuze and Parnet 51). Collective assemblages of enunciation are connected to a “machinic assemblage of bodies, of actions and passions; an intermingling of bodies reacting to one another” (Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus 88). It is the complex interplay of these two segments, the dynamic conjunctions of discourse and physics, that makes up the social field, that in fact ‘produces’ semi-stable subjects...

The affective flows of the sublime in Martina Menegon's new machinic subjectivity

What can the use of emerging digital technologies for the creation of art exploring subjectivity offer up for research into new affective flows within the temporal structures created by machinic assemblages? An examination of the work by the artist Martina Menegon who explores the self to engage with the problematics of representation, cognition and sensation within machinic assemblages using photogrammetry, raises ontological issues. Menegon uses photogrammetry to capture her body as data, to experience her body and represent her body as art in the digital virtual space, link the ontological, with the material and corporeal. This recent virtual reality output ofMenegon's explores emerging post screen digital aesthetics and manifestations of digital subjectivity, where “affect” becomes central to the form, content and reception of the work.Menegon uses the virtual digital space to take pleasure is confusing the boundaries of the body via its digital capturing, re-presentation and plays with notions of the self and its limits. Menegon's explorations can be positioned as action research within a theoretical framework of Donna Haraway and the assemblage theory of Giles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri where a new “image” of the self can be mediated or remediated and where Menegon can take responsibility for production and dissemination within her networks of distribution to consider what this entails. The temporal and affective relationships of production become key to this new machinic subjectivity.

Philosophy, education and visceral politics of the now

The essay looks into the pedagogical role of philosophy in shaping the practice of dissent. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s radical understandings of philosophy as a machinic assemblage, it redeploys philosophy as a pedagogical tool which gathers traction from social events and remains invested in a dissensual politics. As a machinic assemblage committed to a dissensual politics philosophy works alongside collective modalities of enunciation that operate outside conventional structures of the academia. Such assemblages of enunciation often inhabit a zone of critical inarticulacy brimming with the promise of new kinds of knowledge. How does philosophy critically interact with spaces of dissent along lines of gender, caste, ethnicity and nationalism to enable novel critical interventions? Deleuze and Guattari’s answer redirects us to a pragmatic engagement with philosophy which involves the manufacture of new pedagogical concepts as part of a schizoanalytic apparatus of protest. These concepts often emerge out of a visceral response to events unfolding around us. Needless to emphasize that such a philosophy which emerges out of a praxial encounter with life cannot be framed as an institutional staple, but takes shape as part of a visceral politics of the now. What then is the role of pedagogy in shaping an ethics of dissent and how can such a pedagogy mobilize plebeian acts of resistance in the sphere of the everyday?

QR codes and the sentient city

ABSTRACT A few days into the quarantines that ushered in the Year of the Rat, printed QR codes began to appear everywhere in Shanghai. This was the beginning of a QR code health registration scheme, which was used to manage population during the Coronavirus pandemic. Register and you were given a coloured QR code. A green code meant access to the city was open, with a red code the metropolis was locked. Ubiquitous QR codes are not new to China’s urban landscape. Starting around 2015 these simple black and white images, complex enough to encode characters, but cheap and easy to produce, created a virtual economy based on mobile-payments that has totally transformed city life. More than texting or talking, watching, listening or wayfinding, today, in China at least, QR codes are the cell phone’s killer app. This essay explores the machinic assemblage of cell phones + QR Codes which opens a portal into an emerging mediasphere that is fundamentally non-anthropomorphic in nature. Scanning a QR code is an embodied practice or sensing system that activates an all-pervasive locative media, transforming the previously inert physical landscape into the urban scale, distributed intelligence of the sentient city.

A Virtual Choir Ecology and the Zoom-machinic

Abstract covid-19 has changed the way we sing in choirs and has seen the extraordinary uptake of Zoom as a video chat platform across society. This is a reflective tale of four choirs members and their insights into how they improvised with traditional choir singing in a Zoom space. It consideres how zoom pedagogies allowed them to bridge social isolation during the pandemic. It includes the voices of the conductor; music teacher/technician; the voice of a media savvy artist choir member and finally the voice of a singing visual educator. The article embeds Deleuzoguattarian thinking. It draws on the concepts of the machinic assemblage and becoming as choir participants who embraced Zoom to facilitate song. Singing in a zoom virtual choir brings forth a burgeoning new relational way of being. To find ways to sing and imagine life and self without physical, temporal and spatial borders.

“He Proves by Algebra”: James Joyce's Post-Literary Incest Machines

Richard Ellmann's well-known assertion that "we are still learning to be James Joyce's contemporaries" carries with it a number of proscriptive implications for how we view the very possibility of a "writing after Joyce." We see these refracted not only within the Joyce Industry, but in the persistent haunting of contemporary (experimental) literature by what we might call a modernist false-consciousness, which is to say the false-consciousness of what continues to speak in modernism's name, as the determination of a cultural present that is always somehow both in arrears and yet to come. This proscriptive false consciousness is the focal point of the après-Wakean writings of Iain Sinclair, in particular Downriver, and of Alan Moore's excavations of Lucia Joyce's "institutionalization" in his recent anti-novel Jerusalem. Echoing Derrida's critique in "Cogito and the History of Madness"—Sinclair and Moore draw together questions of anachronism, hauntology, recursivity, totality, and incest in the proto-cybernetic Joycean text, into a reconceptualising of post-literary writing practice in Joyce's wake. In doing so, their work treats the amalgam of texts in which the signifier of Joyce is thereby inscribed, as a machinic assemblage—autopoietic, incestuous, metamatic—in which a cybernetic consciousness constructs itself in a retrospective projection. Joyce's anachronistic ghost is not in the machine so much as the machine is in it, in an incestuous involution of signifying production and consumption defining of a cultural economy over which the one exercises a spectral hegemony that the other simultaneously deconstructs.

The Strata/Machinic Assemblage and Architecture

Much of the literature exploring the intersection between Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophy and architecture have focused on abstract theory, experimental projects and practices at the margins of the profession. But, one may ask, what of the mainstream, commercial practices that produce the offices, housing, shops, schools and community buildings that we see and engage with in our day-to-day lives? What of the everyday design decisions made by professional architects and technicians sitting at their desks and drawing boards? Are these to be excluded from architecture's engagement with Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophy? As I will show in this paper, Deleuze and Guattari's proposals for the strata and the machinic assemblage are drawn from their underlying attempt to expand Hjelmslev's planar composition from a tool used to analyse language to a conceptual framework used to analyse the formation and evolution of all things. There is nothing within the conceptual framework of the strata/machinic assemblage to suggest, therefore, that they should not be used to analyse such practices. With this in mind, this article considers how these concepts can be translated through and help provide new insight into a real-world design sequence taken from mainstream, commercial architectural practice. In doing so it will show how such practices can offer Deleuzo-Guattarian scholars a more nuanced insight into this conceptual framework and the concepts that form it.

Metaphysical Primitives: Machines and Assemblages in Deleuze, DeLanda, and Bryant

AbstractSome variants of Object-Oriented Ontology define entities in terms of their powers. Such variants are rooted in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theory of “machinic assemblages”. This article asks whether such entities can be metaphysical primitives with regard to similarity and change. This is the case if no further existents are needed to account for these two features of reality. According to Levi Bryant’s machine-oriented ontology, entities defined in terms of powers are such primitives. According to Manuel DeLanda’s assemblage theory, they are not. DeLanda therefore holds that further metaphysical primitives must exist. After reconstructing the key features of the theories involved, I argue that Bryant’s position is ultimately more parsimonious, and that DeLanda’s theory confuses epistemological models with ontological realities.

Words (are) matter: generating material-semiotic lines of flight in environmental education research assemblages (with a little help from SF)

We address the aims of this Special Issue by exploring, critiquing, and responding constructively to the emergence and potential significance of new materialist thought in environmental education research and the broader theoretical landscape in which such research is situated. We offer some productive possibilities for advancing postparadigmatic materialist theorising in environmental education research by deploying concepts selected from Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘box of tools’ (namely, ‘machinic assemblage’ and ‘lines of flight’), supplemented by concepts associated with SF (science/speculative fiction)—namely ‘cognitive estrangement’ and ‘object-orientated thought experiments’—to generate new lines of flight in material-semiotic environmental education research assemblages.

Video Against the Machine: Lens-Based Interventions in The Refugee Crisis

This article studies the military-industrial-surveillance complex at Europe’s borders as a machine that functions alongside and in response to the so-called refugee crisis, but that in itself is not in crisis at all. Following philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato’s definition of machinic systems, I conceptualize the machine as anapparatus that does not depend on techne perse, but as aseries of intertwined discursive/semiotic as well as non-discursive/material elements. When viewed through the lens of machine theory, the reduction of refugees to calculable formula and neatly arranged data packets cannot be seen as an isolated, purely discursive matter. It is part of a large machinic assemblage in which economic, judicial, social and technological components work together, producing material, immobilizing, de-subjectifying, as well as oftentimes lethal consequences for the human beings involved. Only after carefully studying the workings of this refugee machine , I argue, will it become possible to uncover possible modes of resistance against this controlling and objectifying system. In order to analyse the military-industrial-surveillance complex at Europe’s borders as a machinic system, I turn to two art-house documentary films which do exactly that. Nathalie Loubeyre’s Flow Mechanics (2016) and Morgan Knibbe’s Those Who Feel the Fire Burning (2014) will be read as forms of machine analysis that are very much in line with Lazzarato’s machine theory, as they map intertwining parts of a large refugee-controlling system at work in Southern European countries.

The Building as a Deleuzoguattarian Strata/Machinic Assemblage

What do we mean when we say that a building is an assemblage? To answer this question, we must first decide what we mean by ‘the assemblage’ and which areas of Deleuze and Guattari’s corpus we will use. In this paper I focus on one of two kinds of assemblage from A Thousand Plateaus: the machinic assemblage. Drawing on the third chapter of this core text, I show how and why this concept should be understood as complementary yet distinct from the often-neglected concept of the strata. I then illustrate these concepts through the architectural design process by discussing the creation of a physical and functional building, acts of (architectural) expression and as a contribution to one or more architectural languages. Using this insight, I argue that architecture provides us with a way to usefully illustrate and explore some of the complex and abstract concepts within Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy.

Machinic Assemblages of Publicness

© 2018 Urban Research Publications Limited This article discusses the concept of publicness through the lens of Deleuze and Guattari’s machinic thinking. Centring on the case of the Bearpit, a roundabout and public space in the city of Bristol (UK), I examine recent shifts and transformations in public culture and narrate the ways in which relatively small interventions facilitate new connections and organize public assemblages. The article makes four main contributions. First, it develops an approach to the study of publicness that highlights the interactions of machinic assemblages of material and immaterial component parts. Second, it suggests that specific forms of publicness are mediated by bright objects which stitch together and organize ecologies of connected machines. Third, it outlines publicness as a dynamic, plastic social form. Finally, it argues that the struggles for a compassionate public culture in the Bearpit are not necessarily set on a fixed trajectory toward co-optation or a return to revanchism, but rather are part of an incessant process of unfolding and becoming public where the concerns and contestations of publicness are made visible.

Living Plants, Dead Animals, and Other Matters: Embryos and Demons in Porphyry of Tyre

ABSTRACT This article uses the notion of the body as “machinic assemblage” in the works of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari as a lens through which to approach the complex nature of embodiment in the work of the third-century Platonist and student of Plotinus, Porphyry of Tyre. In particular it focuses on the many assemblages Porphyry's embryonic and demonic bodies make with other beings and forces in the late ancient cosmos. It concludes that by using this lens, we are invited to shift our attention away from approaches to ancient discussions on embodiment that focus on ontology and questions of static, singular essences and organisms, and instead focus on multiplicity and becoming. This approach, the article argues, gives rise to a more nuanced and complex picture of ancient cosmological and taxonomic thinking.

The ship as assemblage: Melville’s literary shipboard geographies

ABSTRACTThe article introduces the Deleuze-Guattari concept of the assemblage to the study of literary shipboard geographies in nineteenth-century Anglo-American sea narratives. The concept of the assemblage operates as a critical snapshot of how a ship’s organization upholds or challenges broader social, political, historical or artistic configurations in a given narrative. Secondly, it serves as a comparative analytical platform between different authors, literary-historical periods, national literatures, or sea-themed works within a single author’s oeuvre. Most importantly, the logic of the assemblage as a co-functioning of heterogeneous elements enables tracing emancipatory agendas articulated in sea narratives’ (re)configurations of shipboard geographies. This is especially evident in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and “Benito Cereno,” which are analyzed in the wider Deleuze-Guattari conceptual framework, centered around the concept of the ship-assemblage and accompanied by the maritime model of smooth and striated space, and the distinction between machinic enslavement and social subjection. The labor contract is identified as a frequent structural device in Melville’s sea oeuvre, instrumental in sailors’ empowerment to take their labor in and out of circulation aboard different ships. The Pequod and the San Dominick are examined both as machinic assemblages and assemblages of enunciation, exposing the links between language, shipboard geography and power. The two ships rework their given formulas (A dead whale or a stove boat! and Seguid vuestro jefe) and redefine the labor contract from two opposing positions, egalitarian and despotic, to reassemble as more liberated social machines. In conclusion, the article situates the concept of the assemblage within the wider stock of literary-critical terminology used to examine the place of the ship in sea literature, outlining their joint potential in tracing how spaces of otherness (re)define empowerment in social machines beyond sailing.

Glitch Perfect: Malfunction and the Machinic Assemblage of Girlhood

Abstract This short experimental article, which can be accessed at http://www.press.uillinois.edu/journals/var/media/43.1/wolfgang/, introduces a concept of Glitch Feminism as a digital tool of creative resistance that disrupts a normative gendered identity and fabricated female body in 21st-century digital cultures (Russell, 2012; 2013). It showcases video work by adolescent girls in a juvenile arbitration program who used glitch effects to “break” music video clips by popular female artists and their own self-directed videos, to thereby render female bodies on screen as ambiguous, flawed, and indistinguishable. This action of glitching challenged surveillance and fetishization of female bodies in social media and popular digital cultures and allowed girl participants to play with self-representations outside of the institutional labels of “law offenders” and girls “in trouble.” To better represent the complex entanglements and intersections of theory and the girls’ digital productions, we use the interactive storytelling format of Twine (https://twinery.org), linking text and still and moving images in a nonlinear fashion, and prompting the reader to continuously move back and forth between the conceptual ideas and visual representations to embrace incompleteness, ambiguity, and inquiry.

James Baldwin’s <em>Another Country</em> as an Abstract Machine

This article on James Baldwin’s third novel, Another Country , examines how abstract machines diagram an unfolding flow of desires in a bipolar process of becoming that produces two distinct genres in Baldwin’s novel, a protest-literature narrative and an asubjective text. One abstract machine, described as a machinic assemblage by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia , shapes the perceptions (cognition), significations (meaning), and language (representation) of a protest-literature narrative that takes place in Greenwich Village during the late 1950s. Embedded within this text is an abstract machine described by Deleuze and Guattari as a collective assemblage of enunciation. Its bipolar movement interrupts Baldwin’s novel by rupturing the stable surface with neurologically based emotions expressed by a chain of significations that enable it to become a new text, and in doing so, unbecome what it was. Consequently, this article examines how these abstract machines shape a novel that generates new meanings for the reader as a result of this encounter of discourses.

The Still, Sad Music of Humanity in Doom Metal's Romanticizing Machine

The Still, Sad Music of Humanity in Doom Metal's Romanticizing Machine Atene Mendelyte (bio) The still, sad music of humanity,Nor harsh, nor grating, though of ample power —William Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey This essay was inspired by Ronald Bogue's pioneering Deleuzian reading of the three types of metal music—death, doom, and black. The scholar avoids the traps of oversimplification obvious in previous (mostly sociological) studies of such music that tend to concentrate on the threat of inducing violent behaviour. Such a stance by now has become a cliché and has little analytical value. I see a great potential in further developing this type of Deleuzian listening as it can offer a better understanding of metal music. It needs to be mentioned that there have been other analyses hinting at a more positive potential of metal music, such as musicologist Robert Walser's against the grain observation that metal music "creates communal attachments, enacts collective empowerment, and works to assuage entirely reasonable anxieties"1 or Nicola Masciandaro's experimental attempt to merge the discourses of black metal and theory.2 The essay collection edited by Niall W. R. Scott and Imke Von Helden The Metal Void: First Gatherings (2010)3 includes many varied explorations of metal music. The journal Glossator has a number of interesting articles on black metal, and another online journal Helvete is entirely dedicated to black metal theory. But such a surge of analytical readings tends to cluster around black and death metal while doom metal remains on the outskirts of scholarly interest. What is then lacking, I suggest, is a close(r) attention paid to individual doom metal practices. This is where my approach differs from Bogue's, since, unlike him, I think that each type of metal practice has to be understood on its own terms instead of comparing them based on a more transcendental or general basis. The practice that will be scrutinized in this essay is that of the [End Page 469] legendary British doom metal band My Dying Bride since, as mentioned above, doom metal, in comparison to death and black metal, has received by far the least interest in academia and non-academia alike. Even in Bogue's illuminating essay it remains the least explored subgenre, which is a direct consequence of the basis chosen for comparison; if one specifically discusses musical intensities and avoids focusing on the connection between lyrics and voice, one is bound to conclude that doom metal is both less technical, less virtuoso than death metal and less visceral than black metal. The lack of interest and doom metal's underdog status follow from that. But the center of gravity in doom metal is precisely the relation between lyrics, vocal modalities, and musical accompaniment, which makes it an entirely different kind of assemblage from the other types of metal. Moreover, I wish to argue, it is exactly where the greatest and most interesting musical thought potential lies. The machinic assemblage produced by My Dying Bride's practice is of a peculiar sort. I shall be referring to it as "the romanticizing machine" because it brings to fruition the principal logic of British Romantic poetry and European Romantic music. The processual aspect of the given title is pivotal as well, since the machine works by combining musical, textual, conceptual, affective, temporal, dramatic, and other elements and repurposing them for the sake of drawing its own plane of immanence and consistency, engaging in its musical world-making. Musical Deterritorialization and Reterritorialization My Dying Bride strives to create a total poetic experience. The band provides atmospheric musical plateaus that work to produce a mood, an affective space rather than a metric, rhythmic, musically progressive experience. The lyrics are highly poetic, often spoken in a narrative voice. Vocal delivery is used in a multiplicity of its modalities: sung vocals, death metal grunts, spoken word, whispers. Speech itself is modulated; it can either be a narrative voice, as in the closing lines of "Hail Odysseus," or a more poetically expressive voice, as in most songs on A Map of All Our Failures (Peaceville Records, 2012). The voice is made to exude despair, sadness, and other strong feelings via emphatic intonation...

Non-anthropocentric creative mechanisms in multispecies symbiotic assemblages

Abstract ‘So well established was the cliché which connected TB and creativity that at the end of the century one critic suggested that it was the progressive disappearance of TB which accounted for the current decline of literature and the arts’. Some biochemical evidence does indeed invite a hypothesis that M. tuberculosis originally joined the human holobiont as a brain evolution-enhancing endosymbiont, thus possibly contributing towards the development of human consciousness and creative potential. Exploring the complexity of mycobacteria’s entanglements within human corporeality leads us to questions that challenge anthropocentric conceptions of creativity in a twofold manner. As noted above, the tubercle bacillus forms machinic assemblages and operates as an endosymbiont with human bio-systems. It is possible that these endosymbiotic assemblages contribute towards human creativity and destabilize simple notions of its origin. In a double reflection, the concept of creativity itself could be revisited along alternative lines: it can no longer be considered only as the production of human cultural artefacts and experiences, but rather it can be understood as ubiquitous activity performed by heterogeneous highly dynamic machinic assemblages (comprising of human, animal, computational, social, molecular, bacterial, viral and other processes), which lead to the production of novel modes of existence.