Non-Representational Theory - Part 2: 'Challenging Ossified Systems of Power'

Edited by Candice P. Boyd and Christian Edwardes, Non-Representational Theory and the Creative Arts has just been published by Palgrave MacMillan in 2019.

Below is an abstract for my own chapter in the book - a photo essay - 'Psy(co)motion: Anti-Production and Détournement in Affective Musical Cartographies'. And below that is a list of contents for the book:

This chapter discusses the musical compilation series psy(co)motion in the context of a Guattarian analysis. It introduces the set of psychogeographically-oriented CDs within the mix-tape/CD phenomenon while situating it as a form that challenges ossified systems of power. The chapter goes on to discuss whether psy(co)motion manages to successfully recuperate itself through the molecular creation of the object, and via its virtual and physical dissemination.

CONTENTS

Foreword

Non-Representational Dreams

Nigel Thrift

1          Creative Practice and the Non-Representational

Candice P. Boyd and Christian Edwardes

Part 1  Situated Practices in Art, Craft and Design

2          Geo/graphic design

Alison Barnes 

3          Geologic Landscape: A Performance and a Wrecked Mobile Phone

Veronica Vickery 

4          Micro-Geographies of the Studio

Christian Edwardes 

5          Making, knowing and being made: hand-stitching beyond representation  

Emma Shercliff 

6          Feeling Queer Art in Public:  The Gay Liberation Monument

Martin Zebracki

Part 2  Artistic Engagements with Geography

7          Affecting Objects:  Enacting Gesture Within a Performative Research Enquiry

Sarah Bennett

8          Circadian Rhythms, Sunsets, and the Representational Thresholds of Time-Lapse Photography

Kaya Barry

9          ‘Call That Art?  I Call It Bad Eyesight’:  Seeing or Not Seeing in the Context of Responsive Art Practice

Annie Lovejoy

10        Forward, Back, Together – and the Materialities of Taking Part

Simon Pope

11        Where Does ‘Your’ Space End and the Next Begin?  Non-Representational Geographies of Improvised Performance

Candice P. Boyd with Yan Yang, Juana Beltrán, Clinton Green, Jordan White, Carmen Chan Schoenborn, Elnaz Sheshgelani, Chun-liang Liu, Michael McNab, and Ren Walters 

Part 3  Geographers Exploring Artistic Practice

12        Making Theatre That Matters:  Troubling Subtext, Motive, and Intuition

Ruth Raynor

13        Creativity, Labour, and Captain Cook’s Cottage:  From Great Ayton to Fitzroy Gardens

Tim Edensor 

14        Material Conditions in the Post-Human City

Andrew Gorman-Murray 

15        Attuning to the Geothermal-Urban:  Kinetics, Cinematics, and Digital Elementality

Matthew Shepherd 

16        Thresholds of Representation:  Physical Disability in Dance and Perceptions of the Moving Body

Michelle Duffy, Paul Atkinson, and Nicola Wood

Interlude

Supervising

Harriet Hawkins and Rachel Hughes

Part 4  Sound, Music, and Creative Mobilities

17        Audio Recording as Performance

Michael Gallagher

18        Psy(co)motion: Anti-Production and Détournement in Affective Musical Cartographies

Tina Richardson 

19        Walk with Me

Jeffrey Hannam and Lawrence Harvey 

20        Imaginal Travel:  An Expedition in Fine Art Practice in Search of the Loneliest Palm

Gayle Chong Kwan 

21        Fragments (formerly Tales from the Asylum)

Thomas Jellis and Joe Gerlach

22        On Edge:  Writing Non-Representational Journeys

David Bissell

Afterword

Sensing the World Anew

Barbara Bolt

What is Schizocartography?

Schizocartography offers a method of cartography that both questions dominant power structures while at the same time enabling subjective voices to appear from underlying postmodern topography. Schizocartography is at once the process and output of a psychogeography of particular spaces that have been co-opted by various capitalist-oriented operations, routines or procedures. It attempts to reveal the aesthetic and ideological contradictions that appear in urban space while simultaneously reclaiming the subjectivity of individuals by enabling new modes of creative expression. Schizocartography challenges anti-production, the homogenizing character of overriding forms that work towards silencing heterogeneous voices.

Anti-Production

This quote appears in Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics (1972). The use of the word 'anti-production' pre-dates the definition developed by Deleuze and Guattari together in their Capitalism and Schizophrenia series:

It is impossible to separate the production of any consumer commodity from the institution that supports that production. The same can be said of teaching, training, research, etc. The State machine and the machine of repression produce anti-production, that is to say signifiers that exist to block and prevent the emergence of any subjective process [...]. (1984: 34).

In regards to the university, the “consumer commodity” would be considered the knowledge that is being 'sold' to the student and which is produced at the end of a course in the form of awarding a degree which can be exchanged for a job, ideally one of capitalist-orientation. It is even the case that the student could be conceived of as the commodity, rather than the knowledge gained which appears in the form of the degree. Guattari is saying that any process that is antithetical to that of the capitalist project will be prevented from emerging (as much as is possible). The signs that capitalism creates, discourage any singular processes of individuation and attempt to reroute subjective desires back into capitalist production: this is anti-production. Although I am reluctant to use dialectical terms like outside/inside when discussing post-structuralist themes, it appears from this definition that anti-production is a process instigated outside the individual, by capitalism.

In the work that Deleuze and Guattari carried out together, anti-production represents a moment in production that occurs as a result of primal repression. For them anti-production appears to be autonomous but is not: it operates alongside production but is liable to being rerouted into the dominant productive processes and becoming recoded into the forms of representation used by that system. This definition, takes the form of an internal process that can become hi-jacked by capitalism.

(I would welcome any feedback from Deleuze and Guattari experts)

Bibliography
Guattari, Félix. 1984. Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics, trans. by Rosemary Sheed (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books).