The paper discusses the problem of the relation between historical memory and artistic practice, which comes to the fore in practices enacting engagements with multiple temporal scales and "the historical past". Such practices are frequently conceived academically as either simple acts of historical re-presentation of a prior moment or 'the uses of the past' guided by the vicissitudes of a present moment. In order to account for such practices, and indeed in order to understand art's potential in the project of decolonisation, one has to decolonise the binary opposition between historicism and presentism, the virtual and the actual, which traditionally grounds (Western) art-historical thinking. In their final co-authored book What Is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari write provocatively that "memory plays a small part in art (even and especially in Proust)" and claim that what is at stake in art is not memory but "creative fabulation". As I argue, this is neither a statement of high modernism or an evacuation of the past but an affirmation of art's trans-historical power to instigate qualitive change and to unfold as a multiplicity of ontologies (also understood as neuroplasticity, in the sense of Catherine Malabou). Such cosmopolitical proposal resonates with Karen Barad's vision of quantum humanities that effect actions at a distance. The Deleuzoguattarian reading of art and memory encapsulates a larger philosophical trajectory that incorporates (1) Deleuze's nuanced reading of Proust through the three passive syntheses of time (the latter reworked by Stiegler); (2) Guattari's engagement with Barbara Glowczewski's anthropological research on Australian Aboriginal Dreamings; as well as (3) the Deleuzoguattarian intervention into Marxism in Anti-Oedipus which thinks art as a "world-historical delirium", a contingency that at the same time diagnoses the social field. Deleuzoguattarian encounter with art and memory partakes in the ongoing project of decolonisation, and strongly resonates with Reza Negarestani's "theory-fiction", Jason Mohaghegh's vision of "future-in-delirium", or Quantum Black Futurism's evocation of a motto from Amiri Baraka: "the future is always here in the past".
My presentation stages an encounter between the Deleuzoguattarian philosophy of multiplicity, insofar as it relates to art and memory, and Think Crazy. Think Crazy is a singular neo-avant-garde idiom developed in 1974 by Warsaw-based engineer-turned-artist Marek Konieczny, whose work engages with aspects of art and culture of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. My presentation offers new paradigms of engaging with memory in neo-avant-garde practices in People's Republic of Poland beyond essentialist binary thinking, including those which tackle historical themes. Stanley Bill considers the development of postcolonial framework in Poland "a stillborn theory". As I argue, this symptomatic impasse calls for ways of thinking otherwise and thinking multiplicity. One of such ways could be overcoming the primacy of literature studies by the inclusion of a more sustained focus on non-textual and non-discursive media; renouncing Polonocentricism in favour of dialogical engagements; attending to art's political power of speculative world-building; diagramming nuanced and nested intersectionalities; foregrounding not only performativity and the immediate context but also multi-scalar temporalities and multiple ecologies in the Guattarian sense: environmental, mental and social.
