Intensities and Lines of Flight: Deleuze/Guattari and the Arts

by Antonio Calcagno (Editor), Jim Vernon (Editor), Steve G. Lofts (Editor)

Overview

The writings of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari offer the most enduring and controversial contributions to the theory and practice of art in post-war Continental thought. However, these writings are both so wide-ranging and so challenging that much of the synoptic work on Deleuzo-Guattarian aesthetics has taken the form of sympathetic exegesis, rather than critical appraisal.

This rich and original collection of essays, authored by both major Deleuzian scholars and practicing artists and curators, offers an important critique of Deleuze and Guattari's legacy in relation to a multitude of art forms, including painting, cinema, television, music, architecture, literature, drawing, and installation art. Inspired by the implications of Deleuze and Guattari's work on difference and multiplicity and with a focus on the intersection of theory and practice, the book represents a major interdisciplinary contribution to Deleuze-Guattarian aesthetics.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781783480333
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	05/08/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	234
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Antonio Calcagno is associate professor of philosophy at King's University College at Western University, Canada. He is the author of Badiou and Derrida (Continuum, 2007) and The Philosophy of Edith Stein (Duquesne University Press, 2007).

Jim Vernon is associate professor of philosophy at York University, Canada. He is the author of Hegel's Philosophy of Language (Continuum, 2007) and co-editor, with Karen Houle, of Hegel and Deleuze (Northwestern University Press, 2013).

Steve G. Lofts is associate professor of philosophy at King's University College at Western University, Canada.

Contributors: Jay Conway, Adjunct Professor of Philosophy (California State University, USA); David Fancy, Associate Professor of Theatre Praxis (Brock University, Canada); Gary Genosko, Professor of Communication (University of Ontario, Canada); David Jarraway, Professor of English (University of Ottawa, Canada); Jay Lampert, Professor of Philosophy (University of Guelph, Canada); Alphonso Lingis, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy (Pennsylvania State University, USA); Dolleen Manning, PhD Candidate (University of Western Ontario, Canada); Bryan Norwood, PhD Candidate (Harvard University, USA); Dorothea Olkowski, Professor of Philosophy (University of Colorado, USA); Jac Saorsa, Visual Artist and Writer (UK); Marian Tubbs, Visual Artist and PhD Candidate (University of New South Wales, Australia); Jim Vernon, Associate Professor of Philosophy (York University, Canada)
Antonio Calcagno is professor of philosophy at King's University College at Western University Canada.
Steve G. Lofts is Professor of Philosophy at King's University College at Western University, Canada. His publications include ErnstCassirer: A 'Repetition' of Modernity (2001).

Read an Excerpt

Intensities and Lines of Flight

Deleuze/Guattari and the Arts

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By Antonio Calcagno, Jim Vernon

Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.

Copyright © 2014 Antonio Calcagno, Jim Vernon, Steve G. Lofts and contributors
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78348-033-3

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CHAPTER 1

The Role and Place of Art in Deleuze's Philosophy

Jay Conway

For Joe Elias Tsambiras, artist

The conjunction "Deleuze and art" brings to mind two features of Deleuze's system. The first is his definition of art: art is the practice of creating sensations (percepts and affects); individual works of art are blocs or compounds of such sensations (WP 164). The second is the degree to which Deleuze references pieces of art: novels, poems, plays, paintings, musical compositions and films. Countless allusions to, and citations of, aesthetic sensations populate Deleuze's writings. In what follows, I underscore the importance of seeing each feature as philosophy in the Deleuzian sense of the word. Just as art is the practice of creating sensations, so philosophy is the practice of creating concepts. For Deleuze, philosophical concepts warrant the title of "creation" because they depart from established positions — from intellectual habits. Given this gap between concept and habit, the reception of the former is invariably divided. On the one hand, there is what Deleuze calls the "academic" reception or "malicious stupidity": the concept is rendered familiar through the imposition of pre-existing coordinates. On the other hand, there are "becomings". Concepts can serve as mediators; they can fracture intellectual habits and enable thought to be reorganized in novel ways. Here, too, the unfamiliar is rendered familiar. But this familiarity is indicative of the concept mutilating us, not us mutilating the concept.

DELEUZE'S METAPHYSICS OF ART: SENSATION

The most explicit and sustained appearance of Deleuze's definition of art is found in chapter 7 of his 1991 What Is Philosophy? (co-written with Félix Guattari). There are, however, several areas of convergence between this chapter and Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation published a decade earlier. These "zones of indiscernibility" include the notion of art as sensation, the connection between sensation and becoming, the concept of aesthetic athleticism and the view that art's problem is that of capturing the non-sensible forces that condition experience. Furthermore, at precise (although surprising) moments in The Logic of Sensation, it becomes difficult to distinguish Deleuze's discussion of "matters of fact", "common facts", "force", the "body without organs", "catastrophe" and the Figure's relationship to time from passages in Empiricism and Subjectivity, Spinoza: Expressionism in Philosophy, Nietzsche and Philosophy, A Thousand Plateaus, Proust and Signs and "Michel Tournier or the World without Others" (WP 164, 172, 173; LS 14, 19–20, 31, 40, 48, 69). In short, Deleuze's definition of art is neither obvious nor simple. In its internal composition, and in the way it connects to other Deleuzian concepts, the concept of sensation possesses a tremendous density. A viable reconstruction of the concept would be a major undertaking. As a modest contribution to this effort, I would like to identify some of the concept's general features. Just as importantly, I want to do so in a way that underscores the concept's importance and originality.

Deleuze's definition of art is intended to be sufficiently general. It is intended to be valid for the history of art and valid across the different artistic mediums: "We paint, sculpt, compose, and write sensations" (WP 166; LS 48). Additionally, the definition's character is decidedly positive, metaphysical and normative. Understanding the concept of aesthetic sensations requires us to wrestle with each of these dimensions.

The negative determination of art is a longstanding tendency within philosophy. Frequently, philosophical definitions of art say very little about what art is; they only tell us what art is not. We find this tendency at work in Plato's opposition between the philosophical life and epic poetry — between authentic and counterfeit representations of justice. We find it in the logical empiricist use of the word "poetry": when grammatical correctness is confused with conveying propositional content, the result may be "non-sense" or "poetry". We see it in the deconstructionist or anti-foundationalist position that philosophy's delusions of grandeur should be contrasted with literature's honesty. If philosophies are advanced as authoritative explanations, literature is a self-consciously non-foundational enterprise. The anti-foundationalist may claim, however, to retroactively render philosophical writing and the history of philosophy honest. This is the theme of philosophy as art. This is the theme of philosophy as literature, a variation on the theme of scripture as literature (words are neither sacred nor foundational).

These negative definitions of art — the counterfeit, the non-propositional, the non-foundational — delineate philosophy's relationship to art as one of straightforward opposition. Even the position that philosophy is literature is, in a sense, the view that a philosophy demystified is a philosophy that has become its opposite. At the same time, the relationship between philosophy and art is situated within the parameters set by the notion of representation and its critique. To be philosophical is to represent authentically the Idea, or to differentiate the Idea's representations from pseudo-representations (e.g., Platonism). To be philosophical is to determine whether a sentence is a proposition or pseudo-proposition, a representation or pseudo-representation (logical empiricism). To be philosophical is to mistakenly believe that one's words constitute a definitive representation (anti-foundationalism). As for literature, it is deemed the counterfeit representation — the simulacrum (Platonism) or the pseudo-proposition (logical empiricism). Alternatively, "literature" denotes writing that occurs at a distance from philosophy's representational aspirations, or philosophical writing following the deconstruction of its representational aura (anti-foundationalism).

Deleuze's positive definition should be seen as an effort to move us beyond the tendency to determine art negatively; it is one expression of Deleuze's aversion to and critique of "negativity". Aware of the limitations of thinking difference as opposition, and aware of the lines of reciprocal influence running between philosophy and art, Deleuze refuses to identify art as philosophy's inverse (WP 199). Similarly, for Deleuze neither philosophy nor art can be captured by the notion of representation. Neither practice should be understood as the production of representations. But stating that conceptual systems and compounds of sensations are not representations will not suffice. Deleuze's rejection of the distinction between representational and non-representational art ("no art and no sensation have ever been representational") is part of a larger critique of the notion of representation (WP 193). And this critique is thorough in that it challenges the belief that we can adequately define philosophy or art as the inverse of representation. Saying a work of art or a philosophy is not a representation tells us very little. Of course, part of representation's appeal as a notion is that it relates philosophical and artistic works to the world. For Deleuze, the goal is not to deny that such a relation exists, but to redefine art and philosophy in a way that illuminates their character, including their relationship to the world, with greater precision. The notion of representation suggests transcendence (the representation is outside of the world it represents), passivity (the representation is a duplication rather than a creation) and sterility (the representation records rather than impacts). Deleuze's definition of the philosophical concept and his notion of counter-actualization provide a positive alternative to the view that philosophies relate to the world by representing it. The notion of sensation and the notion of extracting, wresting or liberating sensations provide a positive alternative to the view that art relates to the world by representing it.

The language of Deleuze's presentation suggests that sensation is a metaphysical or ontological concept. First, he repeatedly characterizes the work of art as a kind of entity — a being of sensations (WP 164–65). The question "What is a sensation?" is actually "What kind of being is a compound of sensations?" or "What kind of entity is a work of art?" Second, in answering this question, Deleuze employs the expression "in itself" (an expression drawn from the history of metaphysics). A work of art is a being that "exists in itself", a being whose "validity lies in itself", a being "preserved in itself" (WP 164). In terms of Deleuze's mediators, the reader is reminded of Spinoza's definition of substance as what is in itself and conceived through itself. Spinoza's definition was itself an echo of the kind of language historically used to link substantiality to ontological independence. Deleuze's allusion to Spinoza is reinforced through his incorporation of a phrase from part 1 of the Ethics: there is "roughly the same relationship between the barking-animal dog and the celestial constellation Dog". Both Spinoza and Deleuze invoke the notion of equivocal meanings in order to underscore an ontological gap. In the Ethics, the analogue of the referential distinction between canine and constellation is the distinction between substance and mode, or God and man. In What Is Philosophy?, the operative distinction is between aesthetic sensations and lived experience. Taking the phrases "being" and "in itself", as well as the echoing of Spinoza, as our lead, let us see if we can discern the basic contours of Deleuze's metaphysics of art.

For Spinoza, a being is only in itself and conceived through itself if the explanation for its existence, character and effects lies within it. If you explain a substance by appealing to an external principle, you contradict the very notion of substance as something that is in itself. Similarly, Deleuze elaborates on the "in itself" by describing blocs of sensations as "autonomous", "self-sufficient", "self-positing" and "standing on their own" (WP 168). In the Ethics, of course, Spinoza develops his definition of substance into the view that there can only be one substance, a substance whose relationship to everything else is that of an immanent cause. His opening statement — substance is in itself — becomes the position that everything else is within the one thing that is in itself. When Deleuze defines the work of art as a being in itself, the point is simply that true art possesses a certain kind of ontological independence relative to its outside. Referencing the outside risks concealing this independence.

Having stated that a being of sensations is in itself, Deleuze goes on to assert its independence from any external being that may have served as its "model", from the spectator (the viewer, listener, hearer or reader) and from its creator (the artist) (WP 163–64). Sensations are also deemed independent of lived experience in general. Lived experience includes the voluntary or involuntary recollection of lived experience and "opinion", which Deleuze defines as a function of lived experience (WP 164, 167, 170–71, 174–76). In his analysis of Bacon's art, Deleuze distinguishes between the sensation and the figurative. The non-figurative status of sensation includes its independence from "the lived body", and from the "figurative givens" that saturate the canvas prior to the act of painting (LS 10, 12, 39, 71–75). These givens are visual clichés — ready-made images — governing both how and what we see. Summarily put, for Deleuze, the substantial, in-itself quality of artwork is concealed when we think of sensations as representations of other beings in the world or of lived experience, when we confuse sensation with opinion or when we fail to recognize the distance between true sensations and pre-fabricated images, sounds and words.

Let us take a closer look at the statement that a compound of sensations is independent of the artist. Clearly, the artist is responsible for bringing the compound into existence. Is the message, then, that creating is a matter of one being producing another that is spatially and temporally distinguishable? This is the point Sartre makes in the course of contesting subjective idealism. The reduction of objectivity to subjectivity, of being to being-perceived, is incoherent because one can only "conceive of a creation on condition that the created being recover itself, tear itself away from the creator in order to close in on itself immediately and assume its being". Although this line of interpretation is tempting, especially when Deleuze refers to aesthetic compounds as "standing on their own", it fails to capture his criterion of art. Spatial and temporal distinctness is not a sufficient condition for aesthetic independence. Moreover, it may not be a necessary condition. It seems to me that Deleuze's aesthetics can accommodate the notion of artwork that is both in itself (i.e., independent of the artist) and composed on or out of the artist's body. Consider, for example, the references to acting and performance art in A Thousand Plateaus (TP 274).

Percepts and affects are creations in a much stronger sense — a Bergsonian one. Creativity involves bringing something radically new into existence: creation versus re-presentation. Even the notions of realizing a pre-existing possibility or reserve of potentiality are incompatible with such a notion of creativity (the Deleuzian virtual is not potential). When Deleuze describes Proust's fiction as adding affects to the world, we should be reminded of Bergson's notion of interior, qualitative multiplicities (WP 175). These are genuinely novel, and thus unnameable, progressions of disparate, albeit interpenetrating, states. The in-itself of beings of sensations is, therefore, their irreducibility to what pre-exists them. This includes the lived experience of the artist. In Spinoza's metaphysics, the notion of an external cause causing substance is at odds with the definition of substance as in itself. In Deleuze's metaphysics, the notion of a sensation representing lived experience contradicts the in-itself character of beings of sensations. Moreover, Deleuze wants us to regard representations of lived experience as extraordinarily derivative. This is because he conceives of lived experience as itself derivative. Lived experience is itself a re-presentation. By "lived experience" or the "lived body", Deleuze means the dominant, entrenched structure of experience. In The Logic of Sensation, this structure is referred to as the order of clichés or figurative givens. These givens are not only "ways of seeing" but also "what is seen, until finally one sees nothing else" (LS 24). Lived experience represents or conforms to the order of the cliché. Deleuze's concepts of "opinion", "conversation" and "debate" are tied to this conception of lived experience. An "opinion" is a generic viewpoint expressed by a generic subject. "Conversations" and "debates" involve an exchange of opinions or clash of opinions (i.e., platitudes).

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Intensities and Lines of Flight by Antonio Calcagno, Jim Vernon. Copyright © 2014 Antonio Calcagno, Jim Vernon, Steve G. Lofts and contributors. Excerpted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd..
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Table of Contents

Introduction / Part I: Aesthetics, Concepts and Critical Appraisals / 1. The Role and Place of Art in Deleuze’s Philosophy, Jay Conway / 2. Do Sheets of Past Exist?, Jay Lampert / 3. Deleuze on the Musical Work of Art, Jim Vernon / 4. Deleuze and Guattari, Architecturality, and Performance, David Fancy / 5. Concepts and Colours, Alphonso Lingis / 6. Birth in Beauty and the Power of Sensation, Dorothea Olkowski / / Part II: Artistic Practices / 7. Drawing Out Deleuze, Jac Saorsa / 8. Radical Finitude - Difference as Strategy, Marian Tubbs / 9. Transversal Television: For Guattari, By Kafka, Gary Genosko / 10. ‘In Any Event’: A ‘Literary Resonance’ Between Painting and Architecture, David Jarraway / 11. Working on a Diagonal: Towards a New Image of Architecture History, Bryan E. Norwood / 12. The Becoming-Human of Buffalo Bill, Dolleen Manning / 13. Some Questions in Lieu of Conclusions, Jim Vernon / Notes on the Contributors / Index

Editorial Reviews

Drawing together an impressive array of thinkers, Intensities and Lines of Flight shows how Deleuze and Guattari’s thought affects art theory and artistic practice. Yet, Intensities and Lines of Flight differs from so many of the books and volumes on Deleuze’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s aesthetics. The essays collected in Intensities and Lines of Flight take us far beyond the art forms that Deleuze and Guattari favored. We can only thank Calcagno, Vernon, and Lofts for making us think — perhaps it is not music but television that calls forth a people to come and a land to come.

Leonard Lawlor