Critical text Gregorio Baremblitt, 2003
Beyond the Constrictions of Time and Space
A young video art specialist has been producing a series of pieces inspired by the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. But these cartographies are not merely singular semiotic versions of an extraordinary way of thinking, one which has led to a metamorphosis in the culture of the 21st century. These audiovisual inventions are part of a production and vehiculation device which genuinely expresses the ethical, aesthetic, and political paradigm that conspicuously dramatizes the revolutionary “spirit” of schizoanalysis. The videos are randomly distributed by mail, in an unusual bet on the power of chance. In this anonymous and generous device of chance, collective assemblages of enunciation and machinic assemblages of bodies unceasingly transmute into each other, constituting a war machine that is capable of hooking up incidentally with unexpected machines of beauty, love, and so forth, ad infinitum. The videos in this series enable viewers to perceive, IN ACTION, how philosophical categories and scientific functions occur, how they are become dramatized into simultaneous aesthetic variations, and how these variations, in turn, can be dramatized into innovative socio-political historical actions. The images and sounds in these videos function as multiplicities that proliferate unceasingly in every direction, changing its nature all the time. Its elements are simulacra, differences in an ongoing variation in which all identity is dissolved. Chaos, chaosmos, and cosmos suggest themselves as flames of immanence, as the viewer is affected by an eclipse and absorbed by the vibrations and velocities, from which he returns strangely and intensely changed. Producing and watching these videos is an experiment with no beginning and no end. Its effects cannot be foreseen or located. The performatic uses and viable connections of the experiment are countless. The first “job” that we (who write these lines) have assigned to these beautiful tapes was pedagogical. Deleuze and Guattari have said somewhere that “to praise or to discuss multiplicity is one thing, but to actually promote it is another thing altogether”. In our case, as “teachers” of schizoanalysis, upon defining multiplicity, these videos were useful so we could say, “this is multiplicity”. Being an admirer and a practitioner of schizoanalysis, I can only hail this work of art as a happening that confirms the power of life – in this case, young life. I am thankful that life has chosen this young man to do this, and I am thankful to this young man, who has allowed me to comment on this cartography, one of many that lie ahead for him. Gregorio Baremblitt Psychiatric Doctor and Professor at the Buenos Aires National University Medical School. Founding member of Félix Guattari Institute, in Belo Horizonte. Books published in Portuguese and Spanish: see www.fgbbh.com.br.
BAREMBLITT, Gregorio. "Beyond the Constrictions of Time and Space". Instituto Felix Guattari, Belo Horizonte, Brazil, 2003.