Paneles 1-6

INTRODUCTION

. . . the machinic assemblage of desire is also the collective assemblage of enunciation. (Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature)

In the last decades, the concept of assemblage has emerged as a central tool for addressing problems of stability, instability, determination, and transformations regarding social, political, economic, philosophical, and aesthetic phenomena. Coined by Deleuze and Guattari in their joint book on Kafka (1975), and further expanded in A Thousand Plateaus in relation to different fields of knowledge, human practices, and nonhuman arrangements, assemblage is variously applied today in the arts, in human and in social sciences, under different labels (assemblage theory, logic of assemblage, actor-network theory) that more or less explicitly refer back to Deleuze and Guattari’s foundational concept of agencement.

After “The Dark Precursor” and “Aberrant Nuptials,” “Assemblages” (in its two inseparable manifestations as “machinic assemblages of desire” and “collective assemblages of enunciation”) is the theme of the third international conference on Deleuze and Artistic Research (DARE), to be held in Ghent (BE) at the Orpheus Institute, December 9–11, 2019. Using Man Ray’s Danger/Dancer (1917–1920) as its visual cue, the conference refers back to Guattari’s seminal example of artistic and literary assemblages (1973). On one side, the machine depicted by Man Ray cannot execute the movement of the Spanish dancer it is supposed to represent, and on the other, “this machine component can only be a dancer.” Danger/Dancer is a non-functioning machine as its cogwheels and pinion racks are unable to operate and, at the same time, it is an elaborated depiction of a complex gearing system, suggesting creative modes of com-possibility. Particularly focusing on the concept’s use, translation, and appropriation for music and the arts DARE 2019 invites artistic and scholarly presentations that discuss and challenge different notions of assemblage, or that propose new ones.