Seeking Infinite Nonsense in the

New Aesthetic Paradigm

Tim Dixon

“…It always comes back to the idea that if you abandon the discourse of reason,
you fall into the black night of passions, of murder, and the dissolution of all
social life. But I think the discourse of reason is the pathology, the morbid dis-
course par excellence. Simply look at what happens in the world, because it is the
discourse of reason that is in power everywhere.” Felix Guattari, Schizo-Culture
Q&A

“The unconscious has its horrors, but they are not anthropomorphic. It is not the
slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but vigilant and insomniac ration-
ality.” Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus

“Blob blowing blobbing blob, rock, stone, pebble, the corners shaved off, smooth
rounded fucking blob.” Luke McCreadie, Blob content

***

In Luke McCreadie’s Blob Content (2012) a masked figure delivers a nonsensical speech
partially concealed by a sculpture. The imagery (spoken and illustrated) concerns
round shapes, blobs, rocks, the formless. Elsewhere, letters and grammatical symbols
lie de-contextualised around Untitled (Booth) (2013), an installation that becomes the
background for a conversation between two sculptures who found themselves together in
a photo-spread in a book about the history of British sculpture; one is a ‘green man’ from
a 14th century cathedral, the other sculpted by Jacob Epstein in the 20th century. In an
earlier work, words are effaced from a spider diagram with shelved objects in an attempt
to understand the process of making sculpture, while elsewhere a troupe of Henry-
Moore-form-sporting characters march solemnly to a hillside to enact a ritual involving
a monograph and some snack foods before one of the high-modern master’s sculpted
figures.

And now, a father teaches his sons the alphabet by having them mould the forms of letters
out of clay. Later they will listen to rocks and wonder about their dreams, the only source
of knowledge from the past is a collection of photocopied scraps from books.

McCreadie is an artist who creates works that, through both their form and their content,
interrogate our epistemological systems. The works are often eccentric in style, delving
gleefully into the absurd and nonsensical, but not without their own form of seriousness.
Throughout the work we find the artist probing questions around knowledge, language
and rationalism, but at the heart of the work, I would like to argue, he does not merely
ask questions, but performs possible solutions to the problems he identifies.

His recent video work In Hinterland (2014) is an exemplary example of this. We find in
it a narrative suffused with characters, scenarios and instances that point us towards a

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distrust of scientific and empirical systems, ways of thinking, and the ways of interpreting
reality engendered by these regimes.
In Hinterland offers us a vision of a future society in which the systems of knowledge,
education and ultimately rationalism itself have begun to crumble. The dissolution of our
established epistemological orders in this imagined post-apocalypse have rendered our
systems of knowing questionable, enabling the (now formerly) dominant empirical and
scientific modes to give way to other possibilities. The lead character Herman offers us
alternative approaches through engaging with the imagination and intuition: an aesthetic
engagement with the world. It is this aesthetic engagement that I feel is proffered
throughout McCreadie’s work.
How are we to understand the difference between the aesthetic and the scientific? How
are we to conceive of the differences between art and science in terms of the questions
they pose and the answers they give?
* value down from on high. And what is more there is naturalisation of this process of
In his 1992 essay The New Aesthetic Paradigm Félix Guattari traces the role played by
aesthetic practices along a path through history to the present day and beyond. He
explores how the aesthetic realm has functioned in different types of society, constructing
three different models along the way - what he calls three ‘Assemblages of Enunciation’:
constructions and arrangements of beliefs, ways of thinking and doing, value systems, or
ways of being, that govern how we understand aesthetic products and the way they affect
and influence us and other domains of thought and action.
Each Assemblage is social, psychic, organic, machinic and cosmic, to adopt the
philosopher’s terms. In short they are ‘transversal’ – they cut across different disciplines
and create connections between them.
Guattari begins by observing that the specialised field of ‘art’ as isolated from other fields
(economics, politics, science or religion for example) is a relatively recent invention of the
Western world. The idea that we should go to a special building dedicated to the display
of objects that we call artworks is not natural or given. He argues that this sectioning off
of the aesthetic realm is linked to the development of capitalist societies. Capitalism, he
argues in his writing with Gilles Deleuze, operates through processes of separating off
(‘deterritorialising’) and abstracting (‘decoding’) in order ascribe and extract value. {1}
In archaic, primitive societies the aesthetic realm was so tightly tied in with ritual,
religion, medicine, dances, matrimonial rites or stories about gods and ancestors as to
be inseparable from these things. Art and life were intermingled, and individuals and
subjectivities were not so distinct from one another or from the objects that became
part of these practices, forming what he terms “collective territories” or a “territorialised
Assemblage”. This is the first Assemblage.
The second Assemblage comes about with the development of capitalist societies and
leads to the situation we find ourselves in today. Guattari is careful to emphasise that
these three assemblages are not chronological and can exist and co-exist at any time or
place.
To understand and contrast the difference between these two Assemblages we can think
of ethnological artifacts transported to the west. Masks created to be worn as part of
religious rites or carved sculptures that are imbued with personality and power operate
within the first Assemblage in their native context. When removed from this context and
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brought into a society operating under the second Assemblage their functions change:
they end up in museum collections, private homes, auction houses or dealerships,
re-purposed to serve as articles of anthropological study or as sought-after collectible
objects. We can think of the artefacts from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
(LACMA) that McCreadie takes as his departure point in his 8mm film Fragment
Dolphin (2014): a sculpted dolphin (from Syria or Palestine, circa 300 - 400 AD) and
a painted ceramic fragment (from late 12th or early 13th century Iran). Detached from
their original purposes and roles, their functions change with the shift in context. They
are bought and sold, exhibited, and eventually end up in the museum’s vaults, categorised
under arbitrary tags like ‘fragments’ and ‘objects’.
In the second Assemblage value is assessed by reference to transcendent figures. Where
the first Assemblage is rhizomatic, this one is arborescent, where relationships in the first
were horizontal and equal, here they are vertical and hierarchical. Guattari describes the
erecting of “transcendent poles” in each discipline, atop of which we find “transcendent
enunciators” (God, the market, the aesthetic ideal of Beauty, for example) that dictate
enunciation, such that it will seem that it is always already there, that it is the only
possible system of values.
Alongside the processes of deterritorialisation that are concurrent with the development
of capitalism there are equally processes of reterritorialisation. New territories are
formed. We find the establishment of the specialised disciplines mentioned above; the
partitioning off of domains of science, economics, religion etc. and the creation of a
specialised aesthetic sphere. Guattari refers to these as “spheres of valorisation”. Within
each distinct sphere we find creative forces at work, forces that cause mutations and
ruptures that can act transversally: a transformation in one domain can act across other
domains. The example he gives is the techno-scientific invention of the printing press and
its repercussions for the development of art and literature, another might be the birth of
the Internet.
Each of these spheres develops and evolves along its own trajectory, following its own
logic and rules. In Guattari’s terms: “Science, technology, philosophy, art and human
affairs confront respectively the constraints and resistances of specific materials which
they loosen and articulate within given limits. They do this with the help of codes, know-
how and historical teachings which lead them to close certain doors and open other ones.”
Guattari characterises the difference in the domains of science and art in terms of
human attempts to deal with and relate to the infinite. He views the universe as radically
contingent – there is little or no reason why it is the way it is and not any other way and it
is easy to understand this perspective. There are infinite possible universes, and infinite
possibilities within the universe, and yet we have a finite reality to deal with. We are finite,
limited beings, with finite brains and a limited time to live, and this is the world we must
live in.
Within science and art we find different ways of relating the finite world we occupy to
the infinite possibility of the universe; actualisations or realisations of virtual possibility;
transitions from the chaos of infinite possibility to the complexity of a finite but expansive
reality. What is unique about art in Guattari’s schematic is a propensity towards infinite
possibility proceeding from finite material, whereas what we find in the techno-scientific
mode is a propensity towards finite actuality from infinite possibility, through bracketing
out, categorising, objectifying, etc.
It is this tendency towards the infinite that I find at play in McCreadie’s scrambling of the
systems of knowledge, of linguistic signs and of art historical information and museum
artefacts. Freed from the task of acting as illustrations or symbols with specific given
meanings, they are allowed to run amok, to try out something new and what they do
might not always make sense to us, but it intrigues and fascinates. We can only imagine
what they might be able to do, given the freedom and chance. The possibilities are
endless!
In McCreadie’s hands the fragment and the dolphin from LACMA are set free from their
museological shackles and allowed to roam California. I think of the Epstein and the
Green Man sculptures in conversation, wondering how and why they ended up on the
page together. Of course there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for this: a historian
might tell you that they are there to illustrate a particular story about the development
of sculpture, or that it was an old book and so the printing processes of the time meant
that all the photographic plates had to be printed together on a few specific pages and
there is actually no reason that they are together. But a non-rational or an aesthetic
approach might open up other doors that lead to some very different - and maybe
interesting - conversations. I think of Herman in In Hinterland fashioning letterforms
into sculptural shapes, allowing letters to become solid forms to be handled and not just
lines on a printed page. Through engaging in aesthetic modes, meanings and readings
can be loosened up, allowed to articulate, and maybe re-fashioned into something quite
different.
Words, images and objects placed in relation to one another in uncanny assemblages
no longer function as we expect them to. Language becomes unlocked and unstuck and
starts to do things it ‘shouldn’t’ or normally wouldn’t. In this respect the work inherits
not a little from the legacy of the Surrealists and writers like Arthur Rimbaud, for whom
“The idea [of becoming a poet] is to reach the unknown by the derangement of all the
senses,” or Samuel Beckett who sought to short-circuit rational interpretation, delivering
dialogue at the speed of thought, or Gertrude Stein whose repetitions make the familiar
unfamiliar.
We can consider this differential relationship between the finite and the infinite when we
look at two motifs that run through In Hinterland, straddling the gap between the finite/
real world and an infinite/imaginary one: the unicorn and the narwhal. These creatures
that, in the world described by the film, might or might not be real, are both imbued with
a somewhat mythical status, defying the scientific understanding of their (future) time.
For centuries it was believed that unicorns were real, with narwhal tusks being bought
and sold as their horns. Marco Polo even reported sightings in Sumatra (it turned out to
be what we now call a rhinoceros). We see again in these examples a movement between a
finite reality in which things are understood, explained, categorised, and an infinite world
of virtual possibility and potential with the scientific or rational approach delimiting and
narrowing, and the aesthetic acts of fictionalising and imagining moving in the opposite
direction. A striking aspect of the premise of McCreadie’s film is to imagine a future in
which we know less and not more, something that aligns it perhaps with Russell Hoban’s
‘Riddley Walker’ in which a future human kind has been reduced to an Iron Age existence
following some uncertain disaster.
* Guattari.
Guattari’s third Assemblage is prospective and speculative. In 1992 when he wrote the
essay he said he could already see parts of it in operation, though it had much further to
go. I find it in Luke’s work, and in the work of other artists who offer visions of a more
unstable and less rigidly defined world, who seek to cut through the everyday ways in
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which we operate within and interpret the world we find around us, who plant seeds in
our consciousness that might grow into something altogether a little stranger and more
fascinating.
In Guattari’s third Assemblage the aesthetic becomes autopoietic, processual and
productive. It no longer needs to refer to the transcendent universes of value of the second
Assemblage but forms “enunciative nuclei” capable of spreading and forming their own
universes. Art here moves against its own boundaries and “…engenders unprecedented,
unforeseen, and unthinkable qualities of being.” The aesthetic becomes a process, and
not an end. It is ‘machinic’ in the sense used by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus
[“Everywhere it is machines—real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other
machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings
and connections. An organ-machine is plugged into an energy-source-machine: the one
produces a flow that the other interrupts. The breast is a machine that produces milk, and
the mouth is a machine coupled to it… an eating-machine, an anal machine, a talking-
machine, or a breathing machine… all the time, flows and interruptions.] {2} Producing
itself in this manner, it moves away from the transcendent functions of before, becoming
immanent to itself, creating “enunciative nodes” that act on their own. The aesthetic
realm here is not marginalised, but is in a crucial and important position, inflecting and
informing other disciplines with its creative force.
The aesthetic in this new assemblage takes on ethical and political dimensions as well, but
without reaching to authoritative transcendent enunciators. The responsibility for the new
forms that emerge must come from within the creative process itself. If these processes are
offering new possibilities, there must be a responsibility for the new forms of life that are
created. Guattari is not clear on how this might happen, just that it should. I would hope
that the unfettered creative force he describes might itself lead to creative new ways to
organise power as well.
In the third Assemblage the artwork and its power do not end at the doors of a gallery, but
can spread virally from there to other parts of life. The artwork and its ways of being and
thinking can plant themselves into your consciousness and carry on working and creating
there, influencing other disciplines and affecting how they influence you. It can disrupt
your assumptions and show you new ways of thinking, acting, feeling and being
It would seem contradictory to articulate a challenge to reason in the language of reason;
to rationalise against rationalism. The argument must be articulated in a different way,
and it is in this sense that I find the solutions to the problems that Luke McCreadie
seems to be wrestling with performed in the work itself: only by engaging non-linearly,
by scrambling codes and misappropriating articles from other fields, by acting non-
scientifically or against the common sense of our time, might we create a new way of doing
things. Thinking, acting, being and understanding aesthetically might be a way to do that.
With Special thanks to Dr Simon O’Sullivan, whose writing and seminars have helped shape my reading of
Notes
1. For a detailed analysis of this, see Deleuze & Guattari, Anti-Oedipus §3, Savages, Barbarians and
Civilised Men
2 Anti-Oedipus, page 1.
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