Murmuration (In-Formation)

Research doesn’t merely represent information, “returning constantly to the same supposedly foundational structures, the same archetypes … but rather compositions of the unconscious, contingent topographies, evolving with social formations, technologies, arts, sciences, etc.” (Guattari, 1989, p. 23). Lines of flight (Deleuze & Guattari, 2014) aren’t defined by the movement from point to point, nor are they simply moving in waves.

“The idea of a flock emerges from creatures that are completely unaware of their collective form, of its size and formation. A bird that joins a flock is blind to the grace and cohesiveness of the geometries of flight” (Berardi & Geraci, 2019, p. 57).

I adopt the Guattarian concept of collective enunciations (Guattari, 1995, 1989/2011) whereby the work of every project is considered as in-progress, and as part of a collective process, regardless of claims to ownership. A flock enunciates movement, sound, airflow, and energy in all forms, and can singularize their efforts to the degree that speaking about how they balance individual versus collective needs seems trivial. Deleuze and Guattari explain;

In a book, as in all things, there are lines of articulation or segmentarity, strata and territories; but also lines of flight, movements of deterritorialization and destratification. Comparative rates of flow on these lines produce phenomena of relative slowness and viscosity, or, on the contrary, constitute an assemblage. A book is an assemblage of this kind, and as such is unattributable. It is a multiplicity. (2014, pp. 3–4)

In my dissertation I paused on Berardi’s suggestion that a bird may be “blind to the grace and cohesiveness of the geometries of flight” (2019, np), with the goal of noting the relationship between the complex flock activities of birds and those of the interspecies collaborations of which humans are but a part.

Drawing on the similar themes, Dolleen Tisawii'ashii-Manning describes starlings’ murmuration from the point of view of her Ojibwe-Anishinaabe heritage, and the way they “interweave intricate cascading flight patterns around land, wind, and other flock formations without ever colliding” (2017, p. 216). She explains that,

...as a cohesion of particularized differences and a correspondent whole of communal indifferentiation, this theory of entanglement negates the possibility of any absolute indifference. I propose that a kind of autonomy does infiltrate this ‘reality,’ not as a bounded locus of knowledge, but as an externally conceived and torn co-responsiveness (2017, p. 205)

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New Alliances

An injury to one is an injury to all:

Supposing that an alliance was conceivable between traditional formations and the movements that are trying hard to give an organized expression to these new problems, to this new sensibility—in which way will the reciprocal influences work? In the direction of co-opting, of the bureaucratization of the marginal movements? In the direction of putting back into question, in a genuine way, the old political and union machinery. It would be too easy to content ourselves with responding: ‘Each to his own domain! Economics and politics to the unions and the parties, and daily life and collective desire to the new mass movements!’ It is impossible today to distinguish clearly between what belongs to income demands and what belongs to political and micropolitical questions. (Guattari, 2009, p. 96)

Guattari, F. (2009). Soft subversions, texts and interviews, 1977-1985. Semiotext(e)