Appropriations and constraints in the Astronomer: experiment

By Tero Nauha

“There was a certain degree of compositional and mutual apprehension between the three performers in the Astronomer: experiment, present alongside limitations of discontinuity and dissociated image of the body, duration, objects, technical devices, audience’s bodies and materials.”

This exposition will present the methods used in a collaborative performance, which was made in São Paulo August 2013 by artists Cássio Diniz Santiago, Juha Valkeapää and myself. It will present the practical constraints, which were used in this six hour long performance and the theoretical background, which is laid on the schizoanalytic cartographies by Félix Guattari. The Astronomer: experiment was performed in the performance space of Sesc Pinheiros, August 17, 2013.

How will I perform? What can a performance do in the condition of cognitive, neoliberal capitalism? “Plasticity and performance: contagious performances in the context of cognitive capitalism” is my practice-based research that includes and disseminates three artistic works – “Loop Variations” (2008), “Life in Bytom” (2012) and “Astronomer” (2013).

All three parts investigate the different aspects of performative practices in relation to the transformation from industrialism to the post-industrial period, as well as the impact of this transformation on mental, physical, social, performative and environmental levels.

This is considered in relation to the newly developed artistic practice and its bearing upon potentialities to take form in actualities. In thinking about the production of an effect on other potentialities that might emerge from the work, either as singular or via a difference, it is important to reject the promise of repetition as sameness.

This is the final artistic work in my research, and intends to investigate my propositions for ‘schizoanalytic practice ’ and how can I distinguish such a practice from improvisation, authentic 1

movement or avant-garde practices. Moreover, I am asking how the audience can become aware of

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Notes

My approrpiation on schizoanalytic practice see artice in Journal of Artistic Research 3 (2013). Available at:http://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/26327/29049

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these differences? Namely, schizoanalysis, as being proposed by Guattari, aims to investigate boundaries, flows and non-discursive matter in processes - or the processual nature of singularization. Aside from constraints, compulsions and refrains this experiment investigates the role of contamination in collaborative practice and performance.

Background for the Astronomer: experiment

In 2012 Juha Valkeapää proposed a collaboration around the idea of “Astronome.” It is loosely based on the unfinished collaboration between Antonin Artaud and Edgar Varèse, L’Astronome (1932), 2

which intended to portray the annihilation of the earth and communication with the star Sirius. Albeit never concluded, this project came to be a source for collaboration between Mike Patton, John Zorn and Ontological-Hysteric Theater of Richard Foreman as Astronome: A Night at the Opera in 2009 .3

However, our attempt was not to compare ourselves with this project, but to use the libretto by Artaud as a starting point for our experiment. Astronomer: experiment was a metamodel of the astronomical, social and mental cosmologies of our times, but not only destructive, as it was mainly so for Artaud. We considered how reality is being composed, and how can we recompose, decompose or annihilate it through the powers of performance? In other words, how to find the ‘lines of flight’ through performance practice?

Since Santiago was living in São Paulo and Valkeapää and me in Helsinki, our collaboration was initially based virtual. We met briefly in Novemeber 2012, held a session with Valkeapää in January and had our first one-week rehearsal period in May 2013, in Helsinki. At this point, there was a rather large amount of theoretical ideas, concepts or more experiential affects collected, which we begun to approach in our practice at a rehearsal room in the Theatre Academy in Helsinki. Similar to my previous project Life in Bytom, (2012) I could recognize how the initial material would circle around in very abstract or theoretical questions, and the more practical and physical issues were somewhat avoided. There was no direct link with the above mentioned versions of Astronome. However, our starting-point for the performance was quite grandiose, including twelve musicians and a miniature velodrome.

Our practice sessions comprised of going through the material from previous practices and physical experimentation with the topics. Our initial starting point was to work with ‘seeds’ or minor ideas to produces scenes, which would follow arbitrary or aleatory sequencing in performance. We decided to collect 36 such seeds, and that the duration of our performance would be six hours. We had created a

2 “Darkness. Explosions in the dark. Harmonies cut short. Raw sounds. Sound blurring. The music gives the impression ofa far­off cataclysm; it envelops the theatre, falling as if from a vertiginous height. […] Street cries. Various voices. Aninfernal racket. When one sound stands out, the other fade into the background accordingly […] A hysterical womanwails, makes as if to undress. A child cries with huge, terrible, sobs […] Sudden stop, everything starts again. Everyonetakes his place again as if nothing had happened […] Incomprehensible dream voice: GREAT DISCOVERY. GET YOURGREAT DISCOVERY. OFFICIAL. SCIENCE BEWILDERED. OFFICIAL. NO MORE FIRMAMENT. NO MOREFIRMAMENT […] SIRIUS … SIRIUS … SIRIUS […] THE GOVERNMENT URGES YOU TO KEEP CALM […] EARTHONLY MINUTE AWAY FROM SIRIUS. NO MORE FIRMAMENT. CELESTIAL TELEGRAPHY BORN.INTERPLANETARY LANGUAGE ESTABLISHED.” (Artaud 1932/1971, 79­85)

3 Hills 2010.

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system, but not much of content. At this point, we did not see any reason to continue with the musicians nor to have a velodrome, but decided to search for a gym in São Paulo for our performance.

Throughout the whole process, which eventually lead to very minimal means as props. It seemed that there was a fear of destabilization, which a lack of props or any other theatrical means produced. In the end, when we performed in the open space, on the balcony of Sesc Pinheiros, our only props were 36 pieces of grey EVA boards, which are used to create large, soft area as kind of puzzle pieces. We had only four lights, sound-system with microphone and Looper effect-box; a board to draw our ‘map’ of seeds and some chairs for the audience to sit on.

Practice period in São Paulo

We started our practice in São Paulo in the end of July 2013, which lasted for four weeks until the performances. Our practice place was at the SP Escola de Teatro in São Paulo. We settled to use as our site the balcony on the third floor of the Pinheiros. In our practice as SP Escola it was clear that during the break, we had been able to create interest to approach more directly the uncertainty of ‘improvisation.’ We became conscious of the obstructions on body, duration, space and materials and noticed that more often than not, we would end up doing the same act in the period of ten minutes. This reminded me with the toolbox of a book by Anthony Howell , in which he produces pedagogical 4

systems for a moment of lack of direction: how to use repetition, stillness, inconsistency or sabotage as tools. How can the presumably chaotic situation become productive, or in other words how to think, through the chaos by doing. In my mind I had become aware of the same danger that a system that I had previously used might produce. However, I was faced with the same questions Howell asked in reference to Deleuze and Lacan - repetition and difference. I will explicate the theoretical findings in relation to my practice and schizoanalysis in the last part of this exposition.

The stage of whatever kind, is not pure but always contaminated. Even more, our relations between each other as performers is contaminated – not to mention the relationship between the performers and audience. Improvisation may never reveal anything essential or authentic but the level of contamination of each performance, the event. Therefore in the practice we realized that we started to imitate each other and imitate ourselves The performance circled around the affects of contamination, refrain, forgetting and probing new. The practice slowly revealed the perversion of performance, which is based on weak and stale passions of essentiality and authenticity.

Method of constraint

After a week of practice, the seeds became too descriptive , and as such they created imitative 5

practice. On the other hand more abstract or too large ideas such as ‘sun’ or ‘outside’ lead us into position where nothing happened, where we started to analyse and not to perform physically or within our relations what these ‘seeds’ produced. Eventually, through my proposal we discarded the idea of

4 Howell 1999.5 Such as: human tower, machine, cleaning, pendulum, static, Atlas, slow disaster, etc

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a grid, and created a circle, which had 36 stops.

We used abbreviations of three-letter combinations, such as HPS, MCH, CTP or SLW. These referred to the actual seeds, which we had distilled from earlier practice. These abstract letter combinations were abstractions of the distillation. We would get to know these combinations, since after setting up the cycle we did not change but only few of them. The ordering was completely random and we would draw the ‘line of flight’, so to speak, following the pattern from each abbreviation to another, creating a visual map of each performance.

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Each abbreviation started to invite more variation and heterogeneity. We also made a rule not to explain to each other what these abbreviations signified. The abbreviation did not only signify, but rather it started to pick up refrains of our unconsciousness and affectability. This was in contagious relation to what had been the initial seed. This abstraction was both a productive device and a problematic constraint throughout.

The performance lasted for six hours, and the audience were invited to follow its structure in reference to the circular map. We chose letters randomly from separate cards, and the performance resulted in combinations of ten minute “seeds”. We had a recollection of their signification, yet the order and result was based on a variation of contamination, repetition and difference.

Observations in relation with my theoretical questions

Astronomer: experiment was not articulated as a project, but an artistic experiment and research process. We needed to frame the experiment how it is related with time, durations, spatial limits, objects of any kind, performers and audience. An experiment eventually contains frustration and disappointment, but also satisfaction brought to us by probing with difference.

The structure clearly played a great deal in the process. I had used the OuLiPo writing devices both 6

6 OuLiPo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle) is a group of writers and mathematicians. It was founded by the French writerand mathematician Raymond Queneau in 1960. Other significant members of the group were Georges Perec, Italo Calvinoand Harry Mathews who edited the book Oulipo Compendium (2005) with Harry Mathews. This book with Queneau’sExercices in Style (1947/1981) was the base for my textual manipulations in the project Loop Variations.

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in my first artistic work Loop Variations (2008) and Life in Bytom. There was a link to be articulated 7

what is the place of an avant-garde tool in the practice or schizoanalysis – the metamodel of the models. In the practice some constraints were introduced which were similar to rules in any improvisatory practice. In the performance there is a need to focus on the action what I am doing. When I ended up in a situation, where I was not able to produce anything, it was better not to do anything; or to copy for a moment, what another performer was doing. I realized, that it was better not to repeat the same action in the following rehearsals, but rather search for a variation to each action. I needed to use my body, when feeling trapped with meaning making. I tried to focus on minor or miniature actions. Following Mick Wilson’s question on artistic practice , my intention was to find 8

out what is the role of refrains and contamination in my practice and performance, because it would teach me something about repetition and difference – about the processual nature of singularization. As tools I would have to use variation and concentration; focus on contamination, instead of focus on meaning of the actions.

Subjectivity in schizoanalysis: a question for the artist

In order to distinguish artistic practice from the overall knowledge production, I wanted to concentrate on mutations and variations, since there is no identical actualization of the potentiality; no authenticity but only interpretations and variations. The knowledge production systems of capitalism create predominant refrains , motifs, which are based on the promise and obstructions of 9

alternative articulations of potentiality. The dominant articulations organize the subjectivity in the present conditions of neoliberal and post-industrial semio-capitalism to produce a ‘home’ or ‘nest’, where only specific interpretations of the potential are nurtured, while minor are being reduced to repetition with the same.

What is schizoanalysis?

The concept of schizoanalysis was developed by Félix Guattari and Jean Oury at the clinique La Borde . Schizoanalysis has its origin in the heterogeneous and radical “anti-psychiatric” movement of 10

7 http://lifeinbytom.org8 Wilson 20119 Guattari on refrains: ”I would say that the refrain does not rest on the elements of form, material, or ordinary signification,but on the detachment of an existential "motif' (or leitmotif) instituted as an "attractor" in the midst of sensible andsignificational chaos.” (Genosko 1996, 200)

10 “Oury and Félix agreed on a general division of labour. The first was in charge of things medical and the psychoanalytictraining of personnel, the second with the institutional properly so­called, financial management, administration, andexternal relations. During the period extending as far as 1968, the allegiance to Freudo­Lacanianism and the Marxistsociological reference, united in an ambient structuralist syncretism, supported the distinction between two distinctalienations , the one individual and psychopathological, the other social . They were both present in the place of care,but the treatment of illness supposed a permanent combat against the pathogenic, the pathoplastic effects of the troublethat affected both the establishment and the carers. One sees here already the dialectical hypothesis of a constant to andfro between the symptoms of psychotics and the modes of reception of those who look after them – neurotic, perverse

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the late 1960s and early 1970s in Italy, France and England, and the militant Marxist attitude against the institutional psychiatry and namely (Lacanian) psychoanalysis. (Genosko 2002, 30-36) So far it has been seldomly used in practice, but some recent examples include the appropriation of schizoanalysis by the Ueinzz Theatre Group in São Paulo and the performance group Plastique Fantastique initiated by Simon O’Sullivan and David Burrows in the UK. Even at the clinique La 11

Borde schizoanalysis was not the basic therapeutic practice, but used as an experiment for social organization. The attention in schizoanalytic practice is on the group, rather than the individual – for Guattari it was a politically necessary move away from ‘bourgeois’ Freudian and Lacanian analysis. In the development of schizoanalysis Guattari was influenced considerably by his collaborator and friend Gilles Deleuze. These links have been researched by Janell Watson in her book Guattari’s Diagrammatic Thought: Writing Between Lacan and Deleuze (2009). Both her book and the more recent book on subjectivity and diagrammatic thought by Simon O’Sullivan (2012) provide thorough introductions to Guattari’s idea of metamodelization. Appropriation of schizoanalysis is a way to use these tools outside the therapeutic context. The event of performance is a site for potential possibilities to become actual. Schizoanalysis is not a manual for full potentiality, but an analysis of the subjectivization accommodated in the promise of infinity by late capitalism.

The process of singularization

In the process of singularization “human territoriality” loses its character for “becoming animal, vegetable, cosmos, becoming immature, multivalent sex, becomings incorporeal… Without entirely ceasing to be thinking reeds. ” Singularization takes place “at the junction of the facts of sense, of 12

material and social facts,” adjacent with an abstract machine, which will destabilize the ground of the subjectivity. (Guattari 2013, 20) These processes of singularizations are not conceived through the 13

signified language, but through material flux. These assemblages thus “call into question many other things than linguistic performances: ethological and ecological dimension, economic, aesthetic, corporeal, phantasmatic semiotic components that are irreducible to the semiology of language. ” 14

Schizoanalysis will refuse all neutral positions of a therapist, teacher, specialist or any authority, since they are part of the assemblage – of the dual process of deterritorialization/reterritorialization. Instead of a formal principle of the ‘thermodynamics’ of libidinal energy – the ‘pleasure principle’ – Guattari’s schizoanalysis presupposes a transversality between: 1) Flows (F) of signals, matter and 15

(if one uses the classical division of Freud), or normopath (as Oury ironically puts it).” (Polack 2011, 59)11 See http://www.plastiquefantastique.org12 Guattari 2013, 2013 Ibid.14 op.cit., 3915 ”Transversality in the group is a dimension opposite and complementary to the structures that generate pyramidalhierarchization and sterile ways of transmitting messages. Transversality is the unconscious source of action in thegroup, going beyond the objective laws on which it is based, carrying the group’s desire […] It is my hypothesis thatthere is nothing inevitable about the bureaucratic self­mutilation of a subject group, or its unconscious resort tomechanisms that militate against its potential transversality. They depend, from the first moment, on an acceptance ofthe risk – which accompanies the emergence of any phenomenon of real meaning – of having to confront irrationality,

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energy (intensities of play, joy, sadness and semiotics); 2) the abstract machinic Phyla (Φ) that preside over objective laws and changes (blueprints, plans, rules, and regulations , which do not only 16

regulate and organize the flows, but are in essence creative . 3) existential Territories (T), considered 17

from the angle of their self-enjoyment 4) incorporeal Universal reference (U), which escape from the energetic, legal, evolutionary and existential coordinates of the three preceding domains (non-signified and non-discursive domain of virtual content, unformed matter and the realm of potentiality) .18

The Flows are arranged in “Complexsions”; machinic Phyla as “Rhizomes”; Territories as “Cutouts” and Universes as “Constellations” in each, particular Plane of Consistency . These relations between 19

the four domains are in some sense economic, but do not follow the dualistic logic of Freudian thermodynamics of the libido. Here, Guattari and Deleuze propose altogether different concept of economy, and not the one of expenditure or balance nor gift, but rather similar to the speculative economy practiced today: a rhizomatic model and a rhizomatic, abstract machine of economy.

The question of non-discursive matter is essential, aside from the discursive signification. In addition to the horizontal division between real and potential, Guattari’s map is divided vertically, where it responds to the division between objective and subjective: the left side deals with the ‘given’ while right side is the domain of the ‘logic of body without organs’ . Artistic processes dealing only with 20

semiotic significations consequently produce more signification. In turn, artistic practice cannot reside only in the domain of potential Territories and Universes, since it requires machines, in other words significations of the material flows in the real. In order to produce changes and transformations both in the singular, existential territory or ‘how life seems’ and between the organizing power of machines and material fluxes practice should consider both signification and asignified potentials – the consistency of the singularization processes.

The cycle of Astronomer: experiment

I would like to make a short analysis of the performance in relation with the schizoanalytic metamodel, based on the above mentioned articulation. I would not like to make an interpretation, but rather pick up some of the singularization processes and look at different points of the process.

death, and the otherness of the other.” (Guattari 1984, 22­23)16 “The Phyla [of machines] supply the plans and diagrams, which must be realized in the matter and energy of the Flows[...] The full cycle of assemblages is not complete until the Universes and Territories also become involved,incorporating both machinic proto­subjectivity and human experience.” (Watson 2009, 131)

17 op.cit., 12618 ”Concrete, oniric, pathological, or aesthetic […] universe[s] [are] constellation[s] of values, of nondiscursive references,of virtual possibility, not real and not actualized, and yet necessary to any process of actualization and realization.Crystals of singularization.” (op.cit., 124­129)

19 Guattari 2013, 5620 Watson 2009, 125

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The discursivity in the domain of Flows (F) function as a kind of starting point, where “the world presents itself in the form of fluctuation” of signs and matter . Flows are “smooth” and “intensive” 21

where they are “cut into discrete figures” in the existential territory, as ‘types’, so to speak. Guattari 22

mentions the link between the action of using an ATM card in the machine, which triggers a-signified codes, economic flows and physical changes . Another example is a particle accelerator, which is 23

established at the meeting point of Flows of algorithms, concrete, steel, glass, energy, monetary signs, and, finally, particle . In so far as it is a crystallization of the real, the possible and the necessary, 24

Being is essentially a machinic product.25

We have three performers in the Astronomer: experiment – alive figures and singular cut-outs or crystallizations. They function with different affectual abilities, which work different ways in relation to their passions and actions. When a new letter abbreviation is noticed in the beginning of a new ten-minute section, it triggers in similitude with an ATM card various expressions of each singular existential territory. When we are hungry, exhausted or contained with inexpressible passions incompatible with another performer’s action, then our intensive flows do not produce an intensive ‘scene’, but a sense of frustration – something that a performer is used to avoid. In the performance situation our existential territory is cut-out in a particular way, which leads us often to analyse ourselves, and think what to avoid or to do better next time. ATM is fairly simple machine, comparing with the intensities and flows that a performer is going through in each singularization process.

When Guattari and Deleuze write about machines and machinic they do not mean ‘robotic’ beings without consciousness . Guattari writes that “each technical or semiotic machine is inseparable from 26

the machines for which it is substituted and from the machine that it prepares for the future […] rhizome of machinic implication [and] each machine is inseparable from its overall environment. ” 27

The abstract and concrete machine requires the non-discursive universe of reference, and in turn generates each particular existential territory, the cut-out from the material and signaletic flows. Machines are “the locus for the generation (the heterogenesis) of singular positions of existence. ” 28

The concrete machines are “mixture of territorialized Flows and deterritorialized Phyla,” and they are

21 Guattari 2013, 7522 ibid.23 op.cit., 8924 op.cit., 8425 op.cit., 9126 In “Machine and Structure” Guattari writes: "The essence of the machine is precisely this function of detaching asignifier as a representative, as a 'differentiator', as a causal break, different in kind from the structurally established orderof things. It is this operation that binds the machine both to the desiring subject and to its status as the basis of thevarious structural orders corresponding to it. The machine, as a repetition of the particular, is a mode ­ perhaps indeedthe only possible mode ­ of univocal representation of the various forms of subjectivity in the order of generality on theindividual or the collective plane. […] The voice, as speech machine, is the basis and determinant of the structural orderof language, and not the other way round. The individual, in his bodiliness, accepts the consequences of the interactionof signifying chains of all kinds, which cut across and tear him apart. The human being is caught where the machine andthe structure meet." (Guattari 1984, 114)

27 Guattari 2013, 73­7428 ibid.

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“putting into function of Flows and existential Territories. ” The capitalist abstract machine is 29

deterritorializing, in other words dislocating the subject from the territory. It dislocates and rearranges according to plans, diagrams and rules. In the experiment there were also some concrete machines such as microphones, looped effect-box, mixing-board, dimmer, lightning and so forth. These abstract and concrete machines signify the action, since they are Real and discursive by nature. Us three performers end up facing more and more rules and plans, which appear either in discordance with the machines or flowing with them. Such pressure on the existential territories in the practice may appear as presence of depression, anxiety or fear, in other words as forms of reterritorialization. Reterritorialization, on the other hand does not mean such thing as ‘grounding’, in practice. The machines organize the flows, according to some discursive plans. A Capitalist abstract machine is homogenizing and synthetic, which “must unceasingly recreate the void, reproduce the splitting and isolation of a individuated subject in relation to assemblages of enunciation. ” It must function as a 30

system of neutralization and overcoding. Brian Holmes writes about Guattari’s idea of the collective speech:

“The point was to suggest how a group can act to ‘metamorph itself’, to escape from the overcoding that tries to fix it in one position, and to produce new figures, forms, constellations – in short, original material and cultural configurations that are inseparable from collective statements. This is what Guattari calls an agencement collectif d’énonciation […] ‘an articulation of collective speech’. ”31

In the Astronomer: experiment, it is this strenuous junction between the intention for probing our collective speech – with the audience, as well – and the destabilizing signification of the abstract machines. Here, Guattari is adamant about the requirement of consistency, in which Territories, Flows, Phylum of Machines and Universal references may produce a singular event. Therefore, I do not intend to search for practice free from structure and I use such methods as proposed by OuLiPo. There is no essential authenticity, which would not be contaminated with any abstract machine of signification. Obstructions and constraints are these kinds of necessary abstract machines.

The virtual Universes are constellations of values or virtual possibility. Universes are pure potentiality and not real or actualized. They are necessary for any process to become in realization. Since they are not signified, non-finite, and their “essence is to exist, ” they are necessary for the singularization 32

process.

Crystals of singularization and bifurcation points may serve as the point of emergence of new “mutant universes of reference”. Guattari calls these variously ‘incorporeal Universes,’ ‘Universes of reference,’ or ‘Universes of enunciation.’ They are constituted by something that is repeated, that is affirmed, that is neither localized nor finite nor discursive, but which is singular, or better, irreversibly singularizing. These virtual Universes are nondiscursive and non-localizable, yet necessarily existing –

29 Guattari 2013, 95, 9730 Guattari 1979/2011, 5331 Holmes 2006, 42132 Guattari 2013, 159

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“it is their essence to exist. ” They are not plans or rules.33

In the practice, this part is the most difficult to discern or to describe, since it is not about values, plans or rules and it is not Real. More like an affect, a refrain may function as a “trigger for a Constellation of Universes of reference,” where the refrain functions in similitude with a Benjaminian aura, without, which “the objects that surround us would lose their ‘air’ of familiarity and would topple into an anguishing strangeness. ” It is the constellation of virtual and pure essence, and not 34

limited with the passion of a subject. Deleuze writes on Spinoza, that

“in every passive affection there is something imaginary which inhibits it from being real […] our force of suffering is simple the imperfection, the finitude, the limitation of our force of acting itself. Our force of suffering asserts nothing, because it expresses nothing at all […] our power of suffering is in fact our impotence, our servitude, that is to say, the lowest degree of our power of acting […] as long as our capacity to be affected is exercised by passive actions, it is reduced to a minimum, and exhibits only our finitude and or limitation […] active affections are indeed the only ones that really and positively exercise our capacity to be affected […] the power of action by itself expresses essence […] In existing modes, essence is the same as power of action, and the power of action the same as the capacity to be affected. ”35

In other words, there are limited singularities on stage at the Astronomer: experiment, whose intention is to recognize their own impotence and suffering; their limited ability to trigger Universe of reference with their habits and refrains; with their abstract machines.

Lastly, it is the Existential territory – affects, refrains, passions and suffering or the life as it seems - where “possible becomes necessary. ” It is the relationship between the Territory and Universes 36

where there is no “difference against the others,” or alterity, and which may constitute a hyper-complexity and self-affirmation in the process of heterogeneity .37

Some less than conclusive notes on schizoanalytic practice in Astronomer: experiment

Guattari writes about the discontinuity between the dreams and sketches of Leonardo da Vinci and

33 “A Universe is a constellation of values, of nondiscursive references, or virtual possibility, not real and not actualized,and yet necessary to any process of actualization and realization. Crystals of singularization and bifurcation points mayserve as the point of emergence of new “mutant universes of reference”. Guattari calls these variously ‘incorporealUniverses,’ ‘Universes of reference,’ or ‘Universes of enunciation.’ They are constituted by ‘something that is repeated,that is affirmed, that is neither localized nor finite nor discursive, but which is singular, or better, irreversiblysingularizing.’” (Watson 2009, 129)

34 Guattari 2013, 20935 Deleuze 1990, 224­2536 Guattari 2013, 15937 Guattari 2013, 165­66

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the “techno-scientific state of things of his epoch, ” where his dreams did not acquire the 38

consistency or collective enunciation of his time. Expressions engender existential mutations, but only until there is a functioning abstract and concrete machine involved. They are performative only if they can acquire the consistence of collective enunciation, in other words, when ‘a dream’ requires abstract machine and involvement of the virtual Universes in order to function. “The Concorde was never very successful because its economic Universe lacked consistency,” he writes.39

What is performance in accordance with the real Flows, possible Phyla, virtually real Territories and virtually possible Universes? During the performance my attention to action is not focused or open to possibilities; it does not confer with a narcissistic body-image, but rather it resembles the description of the psychotics presented by Gisela Pankow:

“The neurotic can recognize the missing parts of his body or those which are separated as well as the whole to which these belong, even if his way of talking about his body makes it appear mutilated or cut up. Thus one part of his body can come to represent the whole without dissociation and without the entire body being destroyed. The psychotic, on the other hand, has a dissociated image of his body: he can no longer recognize a part of his body as precisely a part of it; the body as it is experienced is no longer an entity. ”40

The performing “constituted social temporality ” of this particular experiment was constituted from the 41

Flow of real by the possible real of the abstract and concrete Machines in the Phyla. The performative is put into being in the existential territory, which has a particular consistency. Moreover, each practice session and the actual performance of the Astronomer: experiment was a singular smoothing of the Flows: a sort of existential homogenization. However, the domain of the particular Territory of the performance was not only a reduction of the potentials, but also site for the cognitive, memorial, affective and imaginary experimentations. Not one formula functions the same at different occasions. Therefore, different signals and matters have to have some compositional and mutual apprehension between each other, in order any performance or performative to take place. These was a certain degree of compositional and mutual apprehension between the three performers in the Astronomer: experiment, and at the same time limitation of discontinuity and dissociated image of the body, duration, objects, technical devices, audience’s bodies and materials.

38 Guattari 2013, 14239 “Concorde simultaneously involves: a diagrammatic Universes with plans of theoretical ‘feasibility’; techonologicalUniverses transposing this ‘feasibility’ into material terms; industrial Universes capable of effectively producing it;collective imaginary Universes corresponding to a desire sufficient to make it see the light of day; political and economicUniverses leading, amongst other to things, to the release of credit for its construction … But the bottom line is that theensemble of these final, material, formal and efficient causes will not do the job! The Concorde object moves effectivelybetween Paris and New York but remains nailed to the economic ground.” (Guattari 1995, 48)

40 Pankow 1974, 40741 Butler 1988, 519

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About Tero Nauha

Tero Nauha is a performance and visual artist. He is a doctoral student at the Theatre Academy of

Art University in Helsinki. His research interests are subjectivity and performance in the context of

cognitive capitalism. This research aims to accommodate theoretical discourse of Félix Guattari in

artistic research. It consists of three artistic works: “Loop Variations” in Helsinki, 2008; “Life in

Bytom” at the CSW Kronika in Bytom, Poland in 2012 and “Astronomer” in São Paulo, 2013. In the

past fifteen years he has presented his work in several venues in Europe, South America, North

America and Asia.

Works Cited

Artaud, Antonin. 1932/1971. “There is no more firmament.” Collected Works Vol. 2. Translated by Victor Corti. London: Calder & Boyars, 79-85)

Butler, Judith. 1988. "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory" in Theatre Journal. Vol. 40, No. 4 (Dec., 1988), pp. 519-531. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Deleuze, Gilles. 1990. Expressionism in Philosopy: Spinoza. Translated by Martin Joughin. New York: Zone Books.

Guattari, Félix. 1979/2011. The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in Schizoanalysis. Translated by Taylor Adkins. Cambridge: The MIT Press.Los Angeles: Semiotext(e)

Guattari, Félix. 1984. “Transversality.” Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics. Translated by Rosemary Sheed. Middlesex: Penguin Books.

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