Nonhuman Melancholy: Objects of Decay, Darkness, and the Computational Gaze
Abstract
Is it possible to conceptualize a new interpretation of melancholy, one that pertains not to subjective experience but to the nonhuman? Through various case studies of contemporary art, I approach this question through a speculative realist interpretation of Deleuze and Guattari’s machine ontology, Levi Bryant’s machine-oriented ontology, and Reza Negarestani’s conceptions of decay. Nonhuman melancholy is ultimately conceived through several characteristics of disintegration: withdrawal, disintegrative asignifiance (asymbolia), temporal indeterminacy, and corpo-motor retardation (deceleration). Each case study focuses on different manifestations of nonhuman melancholy. First, melancholy is embodied in objects on a material level. On a larger scale, its symptoms are engaged within the unstable operations of capitalism. Lastly, melancholy is observed in digital procedures. Objects, or machines, are haunted with varying degrees of darkness in relation to the death drive and varying levels of antiproduction seeping from the body without organs. Memento mori in this context serves both as a diffracted trope in visual culture and as a process of substantial decomposition. Nonhuman melancholy’s operational purpose is proposed as a series of procedures serving the anti-rigidity and softening of substance, whether this is manifested in material decay, in the shifting systems of capitalism, in digital images, or in the algorithmic black box of the computational gaze.