Soul-assemblages are gatherings of beings organic and inorganic, material and immaterial, that enter into coalitions healthy and unhealthy. I derive the soul-assemblage from Leibniz’s concept of the dominated monad, a monad that is bound into a larger monad by a skin-like vinculum. From G.W.F. Leibniz, Gilles Deleuze, Alfred North Whitehead, biosemiotics, and technology theory, I argue for the usefulness of the concept of soul, as a private place from which to synthesize and prepare action, and propose that (almost) anything has a soul. Drawing from assemblage theory I argue that souls, or monads, assemble into larger monads to accomplish certain functions. The soul-assemblage concept also has roots in the thought of Édouard Glissant, David Bohm, and Sadr al-Dīn al-Shīrāzī. All these process philosophies hold in common a conception of a universe that is both ever-changing and interconnected, in which all entities share a single folded surface.

Soul-assemblages exist at hyper-local, planetary, and cosmic scales. They can be healthy, toxic, or, most often, a mix of the two. I’ll show how the concept is useful in aesthetics, activism, and personal improvement. Media too are soul-assemblages, gathering together infrastructures, movies, and audiences. Thinking of media as soul-assemblages draws attention to the contributions of technologies, labor, electricity, and energy sources to a movie, as well as those of audiences and many other elements. I will describe the particularly intensive and salubrious soul-assembled gathered around a small-file movie of no more than 5 megabytes, of the sort we screen at the Small File Media Festival.

Workshop 14:00, same location