The Melancholy Assemblage: Affect and Epistemology in the English Renaissance

Epilogue

229 Epilogue Disassembling Melancholy Melancholy never stops, but this book must. Before it does, I wish to both recapitulate and extend my argument, placing a final pressure upon the question of melancholy as “matter,” in order to think about how and why melancholy still matters, and where it continues to circulate, today. At the risk of droning melancholically on, I hope to do four things: First, I hope to simply rehearse the multiple definitions of the phrase “melancholy assemblage ” in play throughout this book. Second, I hope to locate melancholy ’s curiously polychronic position within neuro-reductionist research into the brain science of emotion. Third, I want to sharpen the profile of melancholy as an epistemologically troublesome kind of matter by placing it against the hostile ontological backdrop of recent work in “object oriented ” philosophy. Finally, I want to track the material poetics of melancholy assemblages at the present time through readings of two particularly expressive examples drawn from music and film: the “depressive black metal” of Striborg and Lars Von Trier’s film Melancholia (2011). In both Striborg’s music and von Trier’s film, melancholy as a personal emotional stance is connected to the materiality of “earth” as elemental, environmental , and planetary ground, offering up case studies in how the interpretive/ affective knot of the melancholy assemblage carries forward and outward into the present. It is my hope that in the case of all these final gestures, the uncanny persistence, generativity, and recalcitrant critical force of the melancholy assemblage emerges anew, modeling in different ways not only what kinds of assemblages melancholy can bind together, but also how the intractably variable limits of what we can know about melancholy as physical and discursive “matter” are themselves integral to that polymorphous continuity. 230 Epilogue: Disassembling Melancholy The titular phrase “melancholy assemblage” has resurfaced throughout the preceding chapters of this book, with the term risking a certain elasticity of application as it has expanded or contracted across scalar registers. At its close, permit me to revisit the polysemous field of overlapping senses accumulated so far. In this book, I have variously defined a melancholy assemblage as: 1. The melancholy body arranged in space as an iconic, instantly legible object for interpretation. The body itself, particularly when organized into the self-propping stance that links Dürer to Hilliard to Oliver to Ader, constitutes a basic melancholy assemblage, but this basic object can then be looped in a modular manner into relationship with the grounding earth upon which it is posed. 2.The social network defined by a scene of symptomatic presentation, in which a potentially melancholic body is made available for the diagnostic labors of others through solicitation, display, or self-disclosure. From Armado to Biron to Antonio to Hamlet to Samson, the melancholy assemblage expands outward from the scene of presentation to include those nearby who spectate and speculate upon the interiority of an allegedly melancholic body.This expansion process includes the viewers of paintings and plays and the readers of texts within the radius of the assemblage. From a psychoanalytic perspective,“scene” can also be translated as “symptom” and “fantasy.” 3. A text composed of found fragments whose organization generates an affective intensity that registers loss, despair, or anxiety. In the case of both Burton and Benjamin, the solicitation and frustration of interpretative energy becomes a defining rhythm or grammar of presentation through which their texts manifest a melancholic form of negative authority. The experience of reading constitutes a scene of diagnosis in relation to an implied authorial presence. 4. A community of witnesses, mourners, spectators, or readers who are constituted through the identificatory legacy generated by a melancholic person or text, sharing in what I have termed its perceptual community. This community is constituted by the mingling of affective flows and epistemological speculations, producing both investment and skepticism in its percipients. Whether we are mourning Hamlet or Samson or simply looking at an emotional body, the burden of our own coparticipation in the feelings and knowledge of others constitutes a social assemblage that includes us in what we see, read, and experience. Epilogue: Disassembling Melancholy 231 At varying levels of organization, the phrase “melancholy assemblage” can thus denote a body, a symptom, a fantasy, a scene, a text, and a community , and the total set of relations possible across and between these distinct levels. The inclusion of some definitions inside of others is intentional and...