Assembling the Assemblage: Developing Schizocartography in Support of an Urban Semiology

You can access this Humanities Journal open access article here. Below is the abstract:

This article looks at the formulation of a methodology that incorporates a walking-based practice and borrows from a variety of theories in order to create a flexible tool that is able to critique and express the multiplicities of experiences produced by moving about the built environment. Inherent in postmodernism is the availability of a multitude of objects (or texts) available for reuse, reinterpretation, and appropriation under the umbrella of bricolage. The author discusses her development of schizocartography (the conflation of a phrase belonging to Félix Guattari) and how she has incorporated elements from Situationist psychogeography, Marxist geography, and poststructural theory and placed them alongside theories that examine subjectivity. This toolbox enables multiple possibilities for interpretation which reflect the actual heterogeneity of place and also mirror the complexities that are integral in challenging the totalizing perspective of space that capitalism encourages.

This article is part of a special edition edited by Les Roberts: Spatial Bricolage: Methodological Eclecticism and the Poetics of 'Making Do' and focuses on the concept of bricolage:

This is a proposal for a Special Issue of the journal Humanities, on the theme of ‘Spatial Bricolage’: the art and poetics of ‘making do’ (de Certeau 1984: xv) in spatial humanities research. Expanding on themes explored in an earlier Humanities Special Issue on ‘Deep Mapping’ (Roberts 2015/16), this follow-up collection places firmer emphasis on questions of method: the ‘how’ rather than the ‘what’ that variously informs the doing of deep mapping and spatial anthropology. Provisionally organized around the twin concepts of cultural bricolage and the researcher/practitioner as bricoleur, this Special Issue aims to collate and provoke critical discussion trained on spatial bricolage as an interdisciplinary (or ‘undisciplined’) nexus of practices and pick-and-mix methods. Claude Lévi-Strauss described bricolage as ‘[the making] do with “whatever is at hand”… [; to address oneself] to a collection of oddments left over from human endeavours’ (2004: 17, 19). If eclecticism informs a deep mapping practice increasingly oriented around the embodied and embedded researcher, then it is one that correspondingly finds its creative expression in the art and poetics of ‘making do’. As a ‘maker of quilts’, or, as in filmmaking, ‘a person who assembles images into montages’ (Denzin and Lincoln 2011: 4), the researcher-as-bricoleur makes do insofar as what it is she or he is ‘mapping’ is recast as a representational and affective assemblage. In the same way that calls for a ‘more artful and crafty’ sociology are underwritten by a push towards more ‘open methods’ in the social sciences (Back and Puwar 2012: 9), approaches in the interdisciplinary field of spatial and geo-humanities strive to embrace a methodological eclecticism adaptable to the qualitative dynamics of experiential, performative or ‘non-representational’ (Vannini 2015) geographies of place. Engaging with deep mapping ‘in all its messy, inclusive glory’ (Scherf 2015: 343), contributions for this Spatial Bricolage Special Issue are therefore sought from a wide range of fields that address questions that speak to issues of methodological eclecticism in spatial/geo-humanities research. Papers are especially welcome that examine the role of autoethnographic methods and practices, performance and gonzo ethnography, digital methods, or which address some of the ethical questions and constraints thrown up in relation to urban cultural bricolage as a mode of critical spatial research within the academy.

Schizoanalytic Cartographies Part 2: Guattari on Enunciation

This is the second of my series of blogs on Guattari's Schizoanalytic Cartographies. Please click here for part one: Psychoanalysis and Religion Thanks for all the hits on my first blog in the series, I hope this one is as popular.

I'd just like to define a couple of terms before I include an interesting section on enunciation by Guattari, where he provides a neat analogy with the conductor of an orchestra.

Assemblage
For Guattari (and Deleuze) individuals are multiplicities which come together briefly through movement and rest. The parts that make up the individual are not constant but are continually formed, disassembled and re-formed in different combinations. These parts do not belong to the individual, they only temporarily constitute her and emanate from the environment of that particular situation. This is an assemblage. Assemblages do not just refer to individuals but to any collection of this kind, and operate on a “plane of consistency”, which is not hierarchic in nature. At the point people are considered to be communicating, Guattari describe this as an “assemblage of enunciation”.

Deterritorialization
These types of topographical terms are what is great about Guattari's work in applying it to urban space and psychogeography, in the way that it enables me to do with schizocartography. Anyway...I am going to cheat with this definition as I don't have one of my own to hand. Here's Guattari's from The Anti-Oedipus Papers: "Territory describes a lived space, or a perceived system in which a subject 'feels at home'. Territory is synonymous with appropriation, subjectification closed in on itself. A territory can also be deterritorialized, i.e. open up, to be engaged in lines of flight, and even become deleterious and self-destructive. Reterritorialization consists of an attempt to recompose a territory engaged in a process of deterritorialization."

Enunciation is like the conductor who sometimes accepts his loss of control of the members of the orchestra: at certain moments, it is the pleasure of articulation or rhythm, if not an inflated style, which sets out to play a solo and to impose it on others. Let's emphasize that if an Assemblage of enunciation can include multiple social voices, it equally takes on pre-personal voices, capable of brining about aesthetic ecstasis, a mystic effusion or an ethological panic - an agoraphobic syndrome, for example - as much as an ethical imperative. One can see that all forms of concerted emancipation are conceivable. A good conductor will not attempt despotically to overcode all the parts on the score, but will be looking for the collective crossing of the threshold at which the aesthetic object designated by the name at the top of the score is attained. 'That's it! You've got it!' Tempo, accents, phrasing, the balancing of parts, harmonies, rhythms and timbres: everything conspires in the reinvention of the work and its propulsion towards new orbits of deterritorialized sensibility...(page 210)

Part three of the blog is here: Guattari on Postmodernity