KNOTTING THE HUMANIMAL ASSEMBLAGE. RACE; ANIMALS AND ART IN POSTSOCIALIST BELGRADE.

The aim of this article is to show how ontic difference between humans and animals is produced and maintained through weaving and knotting various bodies and flows of matter – the humanimal assemblage. Race and effects of capitalism play decisive roles in the formation of such differences and include humans, postsocialist condition, investment urbanism, state apparatus, non-human beings, artworks, etc. Those humans who are defined as non-white are socially produced as spatio-temporally closer to animals in the whole spectrum of material-semiotic registers. By close reading of the installation Gypsies and Dogs and the event of a death of a dog to which I was a witness, I show the ways in which art plays an important role in this humanimal assemblage, together with the institutions that surround it and enable its production. Using concepts created by Deleuze and Guattari together with Afropessimist thought, I show that humanimal assemblage produces ontological rigidity in the Roma people and their relation with the companion dogs, as well as ethnic Serbs and their dogs as pets. Each human-animal relation is an effect and constitutive part of humanimal assemblage that forcefully relates human and nonhuman animals and other bodies and flows of matter. By thinking transversally, we can see that racialization, postsocialist condition, nascent neoliberal capitalist order, and artworld function to capture flows of matter, singularities-in-constitution, and tie them together in a single assemblage. In conclusion, the knots of the humanimal assemblage need to be unraveled by critical attention to the moments of ontological heterogenesis, which is grounded neither in ontological plasticity nor ontological rigidity.

Roma and Serbs is usually thought about in ethnic terms. 1 However, such a conceptualization erases important processes of racialization in the production of differences for the purpose of setting up repressive and exploitative socio-political hierarchies. It ignores the ways in which race plays a part in the production of differences between human and nonhuman animals. It also avoids the issue of violent dominance of whiteness that is intertwined with the (re)production of reproductive heterosexuality, which needs to be critically addressed. 2 While it may seem surprising given the different historical and cultural context, I follow more recent work in Afropessimist thought in the approach to the phenomenon of race in South-East Europe and the Balkans. Namely, Serbia and Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia never took part in slavery. To the contrary, socialist Yugoslavia participated in the creation of the Non-Aligned Movement during the Cold War which actively fought against colonial oppression and capitalist exploitation. It is important to note that I am not setting up analogies between the historical and contemporary experiences of Black and Roma people. These racialized experiences are different. I am trying to think alongside the concepts developed within the Afropessimist thought. As explicated in more depth in the third section of this article, Jackson's 1 There are rare exceptions; see Baker, Catherine (2018). Race and the Yugoslav Region: Postsocialsit, Post-conflict, Postcolonial? Manchester: Manchester University Press. 2 I recognize the importance of gender and sexuality for the (re)production of capitalism and white cis-heteronormative socius. Besides the differences between living and nonliving, human and animal, nonwhite and white humans, there are also sexual and gender differences at work in these formations. For an explicit analysis and critique of relations between cis-heteronormative gender regime and capitalism, as well as for other consequences of this particular sex/gender regime see Gleeson, Jules J.; O'Rourke, Elle (Eds.) (2021). Transgender Marxism. London: Pluto Press. For specifically Roma perspectives on these issues see Kóczé, Agéla; Zentai, Violetta; Jovanović, Jelena; Vincze, Eniko (Eds.) (2019). The Romani Women's Movement: Struggles and Debates in Central and Eastern Europe. London / New York: Routledge, and Corradi, Laura (2018). Gypsy Feminism: Intersectional Politics, Alliances, Gender and Queer Activism. London / New York: Routledge. concept of ontological plasticity 3 cannot apply to racializing processes at work within/between/on Roma people. Roma people are produced as ontologically rigid. However, thinking alongside the Afropessimism enables novel insights about racializing processes at work elsewhere. 4 Thus, I follow Alexander G. Weheliye who defines whiteness and white supremacy as "a logic of social organization that produced regimented, institutionalized, and militarized conceptions of hierarchized 'human' difference", while blackness "designates a changing system of unequal power structures that apportion and delimit which humans can lay claim to full human status and which humans cannot". 5 According to him, racializing assemblages "construe race not as a biological or cultural classification but as a set of sociopolitical processes that discipline humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans". 6 Weheliye's analysis of relations between blackness and whiteness is much more on the point for what I am interested in -ontic differences between human and nonhuman animals -than established discourse of ethnicity studies, 7 as these presuppose that differences in ethnicity are always already between unmarked white human subjects and marked non-white subjects. Those humans racialized as non-white are socially produced as spatiotemporally and ontically closer to animals across the whole spectrum of material-semiotic registers, so much so that one can rather speak of humanimal assemblage in which identity and differences are produced and maintained based on previously (over)coded and knotted materialsemiotic body-flows. I follow Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their understanding of the concept of assemblage as consisting of vertical axis that includes becomings and horizontal axis consisting of bodies and their mixtures adding the flows of matter that are not organized as bodies to the horizontal axis. As they note, an assemblage "in its multiplicity, necessarily acts on semiotic flows, material flows, and social flows simultaneously", and it contains all sorts of multiplicities such as "human, social, and technical machines, organized molar machines; molecular machines with their particles of becoming-inhuman". 8 It should also be noted that assemblages can be of varying scope and of varying duration, including smaller or larger units of space (neighbourhood, local, glocal, global, planetary) and shorter or longer units of time. Assemblages are multimaterial -include various materialities such as bodies, signs, affects, and pluritemporal -as various elements of the assemblage possess different temporalities given their different materiality.
Art plays an important role in this humanimal assemblage, knotting together institutions that surround it and enable its production with processes of racialization, animalization and humanization. Zoran Todorović's Gypsies and Dogs (2009), an artwork that will be in the focus of the first part of the paper, enters as a constitutive element into this humanimal assemblage on the basis of previously produced differences between species and racial differences. While supposedly questioning the close relation of Roma people and dogs, this artwork shines a light on a network of various body-flows that actively participate in processes of racialization, animalization, and humanization.
Casting a more abstract look, one can critically analyze relations between various (over)coding processes that constitute this historically contingent humanimal assemblage. In that abstracted view, processes of overcoding and weaving/knotting body-flows enter into a relation of resonance and amplify each other in the urban ecology of Belgrade.
Instead of having a vertical ontological and axiological axis that would serve as a basis for substantializing identities and then critiquing it, the transversal movement of multiplicity of body-flows that make various assemblages (including the humanimal one) de-essentializes all categories insisting on ontopolitics of horizontal becomings. As Guattari writes, transversality is a process that "strives to capture existence in the very act of its constitution, definition and deterritorialization". 9 It is from there that transversal ethico-aesthetic practices should begin with their critical micro-physical work of unknotting in order to loosen the hold of the dominant humanimal assemblage, and produce lines of flight away from the intersecting processes of humanization, animalization, and racialization.
What follows in the next two sections are examples of transversality in action. In the first section, I describe the knotting together of the state apparatus, postsocialist condition, animals and racialized human animals. In the second section, I give a close description of the art world, the public, and the art work around which and in which multiplicity of material-semiotic processes knot and coalesce. The third section offers a theoretical explanation and reflection of what appears as the knotting of humanimal assemblage through these two case studies. In conclusion, I offer a concept of ontological heterogenesis as the unknotting for a critique of forceful relation of multiplicity of elements within the humanimal assemblage.

The State, Postsocialism, and the Animals
In the summer of 2018, together with a number of passers-by, I was a witness to the death of a dog. The attacking dog 'belonged' to a white Serbian family with a house nearby, while the attacked dog belonged to the Roma family living in a shack between the white Serbian family's house and my building. The police were also called to restore order. The Roma family was clearly alarmed, claiming that their dog was to blame for the attack (which she was not, she was barely moving being pregnant). Emergency animal rescue service, when they finally arrived, would do nothing but put her to sleep since she was 'ownerless'. This event took place in a street surrounded by recently made buildings, an effect of investment urbanism, an aspect of the postsocialist condition in Belgrade.
This event included several material-semiotic body-flows of different historical provenances that became particularly intensive in their weaving together. The state apparatus in the form of the police shined bright, as a couple of police officers tried to restore order in the group of gathered and highly emotional people. The affective atmosphere of the event was one of panic, fear, and sorrow, tightly relating the white people it has played out between apartment buildings built as a result of investment urbanism taking over a neighborhood that used to consist of smaller residential houses with plenty of space in between them to include grass fields that served as spaces for the Roma to raise their improvised residences. With the appearance of apartment buildings that space shrunk bringing white Serbs, state apparatus, animals, and the Roma ever closer. Important spatial difference, however, is that white Serbs cannot be moved, while the Roma are exposed to both civilian and state surveillance and the ever present threat of being evicted. 13 Whiteness of Serbs is also produced as a spatial effect of property ownership, that is, as an effect of investment urbanism and the postsocialist transitional socio-economic state.
12 For a study of invasive species of insects such as Asian lady beetles (Harmonia axyridis) and brown marmorated stink bugs (Halyomorpha halys) in urban ecology of Belgrade, which are also racialized, see Filipović, Andrija (2021). What made the public a part of the artwork throughout the years even after the installation was taken down after the end of October Salon is reaction on the piece that appeared in a post on a personal blog, the author writes that in Todorović's piece "there is a weird defeatism", and understands "this work as another image of misery I am seeing and that torments me". 22 Moreover, the author also feels "resigned" to the fact that "we are thinking of art concepts while Roma children from the settlement do not have fingers as they were bitten off by rats while they were babies". 23 Gypsies and Dogs, then, affects the bodies of the viewers inducing reactions across the whole emotional spectrum as well as enticing the conceptual bodily capabilities.

What this explanation of various levels of multimaterial network called
Gypsies and Dogs shows is that the production of humanimal assemblage is a hypercomplex process that entails codifications and overcodifications across multiple scales, materialities, and temporalities.
Overcodifying processes of racialization, animalization, and humanization are effective on the level of the virtual, the level of pure potentiality of the body to act and be acted upon. Then, after shaping the individual bodily sensorium, overcodifying reaches over to noncorporeal networks of institutions. The movement is both diachronic and synchronic, and also simultaneous, actualizing at the moment of encounter with the artwork. Production of identity and differences within the humanimal assemblage concerns in equal measure both intensive and extensive aspects of becoming, with various nodes playing more important roles at one point changing with time and across space.

Knotting the Humanimal Assemblage
What then does the humanimal assemblage do? It weaves and knots a multiplicity of multimaterial and pluritemporal material-semiotic bodyflows in such a way that it produces ontic differences between human and nonhuman animals through overcodifying processes of racialization, animalization, and humanization. Since racializing processes are quite different between the Blacks in the United States and the Roma people in Serbia, the effects are also different. Zakiyyah Iman Jackson writes about "ontological plasticity" as the result of racialization in the United States, meaning that Black individuals can at the same time be attributed such cultural characteristics as to appear subhuman and superhuman. More precisely, plasticity is defined as "a mode of transmogrification whereby the fleshy being of blackness is experimented with as if it were infinitely malleable lexical and biological matter, such that blackness is produced For Jackson, the aim of plasticity is to "fluidify life" and "fleshy existence", it is "a praxis that seeks to define the essence of a black(ened) thing as infinitely mutable, in antiblack, often paradoxical, sexuating terms as a means of hierarchically delineating sex/gender, reproduction, and state of being more generally". 25 A specific kind relation between human and nonhuman animals follows from this ontological plasticity that pertains only to the Black people. Namely, according to Jackson "the African's humanity is not denied but appropriated, inverted, and ultimately plasticized in the methodology of abjecting animality", meaning that "the discourse on 'the animal' is formed through enslavement and the colonial encounter encompassing both human and nonhuman forms of life". 26 Blackness comes to signify animalized humanity, that portion of humans that are included in universal humanity but as "lower" humans, those humans who are closer to animals. Plasticity, then, names this ontological malleability of blackness that at the same time is both human and animal, and that enables the very difference between these forms of life.
The Roma in Serbia, on the other hand, never appear superhuman, except perhaps when they are used for children of Serbs to be scared into obedience by their parents. Thus, it follows that the Roma are not made ontologically plastic but rigid. Their ontological status is produced as subhuman through the processes of racialization and it remains as such.
The Roma are still human, though excluded from the socius, and thus produced through various spatio-temporal racializing technologies as subhuman. The dogs that live with them are produced as their companion animals, and they are also excluded. More precisely, capitalism is what rearranges elements within the assemblages of body-flows in such a way as to not only enable differences between species and racial differences but also to intensify them for the purpose of extraction of value.
Art here plays an important role across several material-semiotic registers in the production of racial and ontic differences between human and nonhuman animals. As seen in the second section, Gypsies and Dogs affectively produced an entire network of actors across timemost importantly, confirming in their reactions class, racial, and species differences of various actors. Art plays a constitutive role in the workings of the humanimal assemblage, at one point producing differences between humans, at another differences between human and nonhuman animals. Todorović's piece takes part in the production of ontological rigidity within humanimal assemblage that sets the racialized darkness of the Roma apart from the humanized whiteness of ethnic Serbs. It rigidifies each of them into the position of ontic closeness and remoteness, respectively, to the animals, which are differentially produced as pets or mere companions. And by working across a whole network of multiplicity of actors, Gypsies and Dogs affectively includes them -the artworld, NGO system, the university, mediasphere -in the workings of the humanimal assemblage.

Conclusion: Toward the Unknotting
Reading the production of racial differences between the Roma and white Serbs alongside the Afropessimistic thought shows that the way to begin to unravel the humanimal assemblage and the role art plays in both lays neither in the direction of ontological rigidity nor ontological plasticity. Ontological plasticity as a theoretical and critical move would mean repeating repressive conceptualization that has arisen from the conditions of slavery. Ontological rigidity, on the other hand, would mean the repetition of the very ground that produces oppressive and exploitative socio-political hierarchy within the postsocialist socius.
Where does that leave us? Can we find a way out of binary opposition between rigidity and plasticity?
A possible answer lies in the concept of transversality, the thinkingacross, as described in the introduction. As we must not think in terms of plasticity or rigidity, we need to think across these terms, which is also an "ecologic" logic. Considering that both rigidity and plasticity are violent and forceful apparatuses, we need to look how these come into being and how are singularities constituted in relation to them. Rigidity and plasticity are "constructed and maintained by multiple assemblages of enunciation", 28 with territorializations that capture singularities-inconstitution. From this point of view, racialization, postsocialist condition, nascent neoliberal capitalist order, and artworld, all of them function to capture flows of matter, singularities-in-constitution, and tie them together in a single assemblage. Thus, the knots of the humanimal assemblage need to be unraveled by critical attention to the moments of ontological heterogenesis, which would disclaim any pretension to plasticity or rigidity by releasing the elements of the humanimal assemblage from being forcefully related to each other.