[-empyre-] catastrophe: a destabilized assemblage

[Jordan Crandall]

I have not lately been thinking about catastrophe.  I've been thinking
about a dynamic of stability and destability.  Destabilizing shifts, as
necessary components of a dynamics of gathering.  Maybe it's a need to be
hopeful.  And so I've been less interested in negation than in
affirmation.  Less in lack than abundance.  Less in bust than boon.

Here is what I'm occupied with.  In one sense it's the opposite of
catastrophe.  It's not about flying apart but about getting sucked inside.
 Willingly.  I am interested in a certain sense of wanting to be "in"
something:  to participate in it, to connect with it, to synchronize with
it, to be caught up with it, rather than to visually possess it.  The
desire to be attuned to something that is happening, or that might happen
at any moment -- not necessarily as a conscious thought, but as a vaguely
felt expectation.  The desire to move toward something that is (or might
be) happening, in order to absorb its force, touch it, taste it, surrender
to it -- rather than simply to observe it.

What I'm talking about is an immersive, absorptive ecology that cannot be
understood primarily in terms of visual mastery or language.  It does not
privilege reading but readiness.  Rather than possessing something from a
distance, it is about a surrender to it -- an extreme intimacy, a merging.
 One does not look from afar, fortifying the self, but rather enters into
the fray, exposing the self.  This is an immersive dynamic that stands in
contrast to analytical models built on the primacy of voyeuristic
separation.  It challenges the dominance of a foundational condition of
spectatorship -- or the understanding of media in terms of its capacity to
produce a spectatorial relation.

To approach the matter, we have to "undress," slowly, undoing the
customary divisions we make of the world -- between observer/observed,
inside/outside, signifier/signified.  We can't rely on words so much as
the intangibilities of resonance -- mood, movement, sensual contact.  We
need to convey permissions through expressions that can show more than
say.

The strategy of approach I'm taking is found in the concept of the
"assemblage," as outlined by Manuel DeLanda, in his recent expansion of
Deleuze's original work.  I've been using DeLanda's formulation as a basis
of departure in order to develop one line of assemblage theory -- not as a
general ontology, but as an absorption/exposure ecology.  I've been
incorporating other references -- for example Brian Massumi's theories of
affect; the actor-network orientations of Vilem Flusser and Bruno Latour;
Jacques Lacan's notion of the "sinthome" by way of Zizek; Keller
Easterling's concept of "spatial formulas"; the fiction of Kathleen
Stewart -- and I'm developing the assemblage's erotics, understanding it
as a mechanism of desire.  For me the assemblage is a vehicle of obscene
enjoyment, conveying both routine and change, enticement and anguish.  An
undulating lustful thing, dripping.

As an ecology of absorption and exposure, the assemblage is both a thing
and an impulse: a forming-event, while a the same time, a mechanism of
desire for immersion and exposure within this forming-event.  On the one
hand, an event-in-formation -- a "something" happening or that might
happen.  On the other hand, a forming-event-thing that we want to be part
of, attune to, surrender to -- not necessarily consciously, but as a felt
expectation.  An event-in-formation that, in combining the reassurance of
the familiar with the thrill of the potential, works through both
stabilization and destabilization, repetition and variation, prohibition
and enticement.  An event-in-formation that is unknowable, infused with
anticipation.  An event-in-formation that cannot be relied upon to resolve
to a specific outcome, but rather, to continually engender a set of
possibilities -- or in other words, to exert tendencies.

In this sense, then, the assemblage is an anticipatory,
happening-something that exerts a gravitational pull -- an absorptive
energy can be understood in terms of desire.  This desire can take the
form of a belonging (that which we may want to belong to) or a longing
(that which we may long for).  Bound up with this is not an orientation of
visual mastery but of bodily surrender: exposure.  The assemblage is in
this sense an ecology of absorption and exposure -- one that conveys both
enticement and anguish, the anguish of temptation.

So in a sense it's the opposite of catastrophe: not a disintegration but
an integration.  Or rather both, because the assemblage accrues power by
way of its becoming actively destabilized and stabilized again.  So it
needs catastrophe to stay robust and not ridigify.  Perhaps we can glimpse
this in our own fascination with danger, our own lust for disaster.  We
are assemblages that crave the catastrophic.

Jordan