Aesthetics and Thought according to Transcendental Empiricism
Dear friends,
I would like to offer a posting in response our continuing philosophy and art problematic and also as an attempt at a response to Scott's fascinating recent posting. I would like to be provocative in offering ideas from Deleuze that unavoidably conflict with the ideas from Badiou that Scott discussed. This is perhaps appropriate given that this is possibly the most pressing dichotomy in early twenty first century thought (if that is not too bold a claim).
I found very insightful the tracing of this whole problematic back to the Romantics and forward into Badiou's great syntheses. This transversal elicited in me both admiration and also stirrings of my Deleuzian sensibilities (perhaps I should say ‘of my Deleuzian pretensions’ since I feel myself to be merely at an early stage on the path towards grasping this great thinker). I hope that I can do justice to Deleuze's encounters with works of art.
Deleuze launches into a creative criticism of Kant in 'Difference and Repetition' by expressing dissatisfaction with the status and power given to sensations. They are already formed and given to a passive self. We might say that the Kantian epistemological machine seems to have something missing. For Deleuze the doctrine of the faculties is based upon a repression of the real nature of sensation. He wants to find sensations that force us to think (he sites this idea as a highly positive contribution by Plato). He uses the term 'sign' to denote sensations that are a shock to thought. Instead of sensation being finished and given it is challenge to our thought. Signs can only be sensed or felt since to allow them to be represented would be to falsify them. They are an element of reality neglected by representational thought. They are singular and cannot be generalised. They also bear a problem (for Deleuze a problem is not something defined by its ability to be solved but is a denial of general and common solutions [Deleuze (1994) p. 161f]).
The conclusion that Deleuze draws from this dissatisfaction with Kantianism, and representational thought in general (the dogmatic image of thought), is that we must innovate in our approach in order to liberate sensibility. He proceeds dramatically, in the pages of 'Difference and Repetition' and elsewhere, with the reunion - perhaps in the spirit in Kant himself - of the two senses of Aesthetics that appears in the Critical System. These two halves are said to be artificial because they limit the power of sensibility to be an activity of thinking itself. In the Transcendental Aesthetic we have a theory of the forms of experience and in the Third Critique we have the work of experimentation (cf. Daniel W. Smith, 'Deleuze's Theory of Sensation: Overcoming the Kantian Duality' in "Deleuze: A Critical Reader", 1996). The Kantian arrangement forces sensibility to play a part in the working of the faculties in two different positions that do not allow its genesis in the fully unity of its power and force. Now, the artwork is not a representation but is an experience and a way of exploring the sensible. Instead of being either a form of receptivity on the one hand and creativity within the sphere of aesthetic contemplation on the other, it is a full 'being of sensation'. This explains why Deleuze can say that his writings upon art are works of philosophy in a very literal sense.
In ‘Difference and Repetition’ we can grasp the in-itself of difference and repetition as repetition of difference within the work of art. If art were a mere matter of psychological activity it would remain separated from the activity of thought. Deleuze finds this artificial because it denies the autonomy both of sensation and thought. He tries to illustrate how everything removed from the continuum of living reality is mistreated and alienated. If we remove ourselves from this in our thinking we cannot think equally or adequately to the activity of sensation. This is elaborated in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ where music is said to harness the forces of cosmos. Music can become a ‘cosmic sound machine’ since it is not a representation of cosmic forces that are the elements of reality and constitute sensation. It is plugged into them and thus traversed by them. Unless thought is seen to be this transversal force to which the rhizomatic (open onto the outside, onto the multiple) is subject we cannot truly think. Whether we take the later or earlier vocabulary we find that art is a science of the sensible because the artistic composition of the sensible is affective in and of itself. If we consider the work of art from this viewpoint of creation then we begin with the being of sensation itself and this allows us to think immanently to this activity of sensation. It allows creation to have the autonomy as an event in itself and this makes the subjective processes and responses of the artist and viewer a secondary occurrence. To paint becomes not at all representation at a distance but a composition of forces in the work. This is a true apprenticeship to signs since it anticipates and presupposes nothing about the occurrences within sensation. Aesthetics achieves immanence to sensation and thus bypasses the categories of representation.
The ultimate expression of the new status of art in the Deleuzian universe is its ability to think with a nobility equal to that of science and philosophy. Deleuze evokes the status and evocation of the work of art in words that he wrote with Guattari:
‘The thing has become independent of its “model” from the start, but is also independent of other possible personae who are themselves artists-things, personae of painting breathing this air of painting. And it is no less independent of the viewer or hearer, who experience it after, if they have the strength for it. What about the creator? It is independent of the creator through the self-positing of the created, which is preserved in itself. What is preserved - the thing or the work of art - is a bloc of sensations, that is to say, a compound of percepts and affects.’ (‘What is Philosophy?’ p. 164)
If percepts can exceed the strength of those undergoing them, sensations are beings in themselves and in excess of the postulates of the dogmatic image of thought (representational and similar). Just as Kant’s Ideas exceed cognition, Deleuze’s Ideas are signs that implicate sensation in a virtual object = x that is nevertheless immanent to the virtual-actual dynamism.
If we conceive of sensation as the realisation of differential relations, we open ourselves, in the experience of the artwork, to the full force of forms of thinking that are harnessed in the composition itself. In ‘Difference and Repetition’ Deleuze argues that ‘difference must be the element, the ultimate unity’ so that divergence and decentring must be affirmed (p. 56). The identity of everything is swallowed in difference so that each thing is only a difference between differences. For Deleuze thought that is equal to difference must express in itself the being of sensation and compel the apprentice to signs to follow its realisation of thought. Deleuze recognises in modern art a ‘theatre of metamorphosis and permutations.’ This ‘labyrinth without a thread’ is outside or in excess of the logic of representation because sensation is not formed or mediated but allowed to draw the viewer into the fullness of immanent sensation itself. Transcendental empiricism is Deleuze’s project and it is not simply assisted by the work of art but this is its very realisation. This non- representational thinking realises the life of sensation itself, it espouses vitalism by being itself a vital movement that shocks the subject. Thought becomes the realisation of signs occurring in situation, immanent to this continuum. The categories of the dogmatic image of thought seek to impose the values of representation, the similar, mediation, analogy and so on (a full list is given on page 167 of ‘Difference and Repetition’). This makes the work of art the immanent realisation of the undoing of this dogmatic system of postulates for the apprentice to signs.
Centring this issue around the thinking of difference, Deleuze makes clear that the repression of difference is the poison of many presuppositions with which philosophy begins. The work of art is a composition of differential relations and their realisation in the repetition of differences that includes difference without mediation. Rather than the giving of form to sensation it is a realisation of the forms of sensation themselves. This is involuntary and violent, it is a shock. Francis Bacon seems to concur with this when he writes of painting that:
‘The story that is already being told between one figure and another begins to cancel out the possibilities of what can be done with the paint on its own.’ (‘The Brutality of Fact’ p. 23).
Figuration can have a similar alienating role in painting as that which representation has in philosophy.
Deleuze extends his ideas to Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time.’ He latches onto the difference of the former present (as it was lived) and the present present. These two series have an identity and resemblance (the madeleine, breakfast, the taste that coexists across two moments) but this is not where the secret lies. This is the surface but at a certain depth is what the taste envelops, this is something = x, something without an identity. This is Combray as it is in itself, which exists or insists as virtual. It is essentially different and as differenciator it produces the identity and resemblance of the series. These coexist in relation to the Combray in itself as object = x which causes them to resonate. This movement of thought within the novel is not a something that can be represented by generalities. The singular manifestations of difference in the forces composed by Proust are signs that very literally carry their apprentice in his journey. They are productive of a resonance between the present present and former present as two different series where the workings of difference forces thought upon us. Involuntary memory is shown most truly in this composition that embodies the interaction between the virtual and the actual, it presents sections of this activity.
In my last entry I offered some tentative perplexities about Nietzsche. He does not seem to offer any of the great workings out of approaches and of the workings of reality as Deleuze does in a systematic and pluralist fashion. Yet he is a pluralist (in the sense of an empiricism that is open to the divergent and multiple manifestations of life and the world) and this seems to overwhelm our attempts to get hold of him. Deleuze’s book on him is a reasonable approach to grasping the workings of the Nietzschean reality (feel free to attack me on this point). If we limit Nietzsche by claiming that he avoids all systematic thought on principle, it seems that he fails to cope with the disorder that he recognised as the great challenge for thought. Yet what did not kill him could only make him stronger. This strength suggests an engagement with this challenge; the attempt to capture in thought something that is too strong for us. Perhaps this can only be done in a limited and embryonic way or as a shadow (if it is only the overman who is to experience thought fully).
I take Scott’s point that metaphors such as a ‘symphony of thought’ resolve the problem by simply deferring it. This I think points to the need for Deleuzian reading of metaphor as metamorphosis. If the work of art is a composition of sensation or force, we avoid ending up with a metaphor that is a form of representation artificially disembodied and isolated from the forces that composed it. The same goes for metaphors used in philosophy, creation with concepts rather than sensations.
The problem that Scott dramatizes in terms of two opposed receptions of Nietzsche’s philosophy, as either a ‘gleeful aesthetic dance’ or taking Nietzsche as metaphysician is I agree important and unsatisfactory (what indeed, could be more tame than a mirror to represent our own enthusiasms). If aesthetics is separated from philosophy (as a sober continuation of metaphysics or as its successor) then Nietzsche seems to be lost in this division. Yet with Deleuze I think we see a way into reading Nietzsche without needing to make this moribund separation.
The issue of the finite and the infinite is a fascinating transversal. Deleuze’s thinking attempts, using diverse materials and encounters, to establish the unity of thought and art in the immanent workings of difference. Artistic experimentation produces instances of this incarnated unity. Deleuze would perhaps argue that the infinite should not be presupposed through temporalisation as Badiou suggests in one of the quotations Scott uses. Instead the Eternal Return should be the formless being of difference since only in this synthesis is difference affirmed as it should be. The work of art as an immanent section of sensation testifies to the mechanisms of difference. Ultimately, the virtual object = x, through itself, is the differenciator of difference. The fully adequate and fully immanent excess. Deleuze warns that a conversion of the excess to the void would reintroduce the transcendent. He prefers the dice-throw (involving the affirmation of chance not as probability but as fate) on the site as a power of ‘making’ the event. Otherwise……
‘philosophy thus seems to float in an empty transcendence, as the unconditioned concept that finds the totality of its generic conditions in the functions (science, poetry, politics, and love). Is this not the return, in the guise of the multiple, to an old conception of the higher philosophy?’ (‘What is Philosophy?’ p. 152-53)
Badiou is criticised for his theory of multiplicity because it does not offer two multiplicities (two types) from the start. This is necessary according to Deleuze because multiplicity happens between the two and this avoids the need for the transcendence that Badiou offers to compensate. These two types of multiplicity are one beside or against the other and not one above the other.
I expect violent condemnation from the rhizome that Brian and Scott have formed with Badiou (don’t spare me insults).
Best wishes,
Ed
I would like to offer a posting in response our continuing philosophy and art problematic and also as an attempt at a response to Scott's fascinating recent posting. I would like to be provocative in offering ideas from Deleuze that unavoidably conflict with the ideas from Badiou that Scott discussed. This is perhaps appropriate given that this is possibly the most pressing dichotomy in early twenty first century thought (if that is not too bold a claim).
I found very insightful the tracing of this whole problematic back to the Romantics and forward into Badiou's great syntheses. This transversal elicited in me both admiration and also stirrings of my Deleuzian sensibilities (perhaps I should say ‘of my Deleuzian pretensions’ since I feel myself to be merely at an early stage on the path towards grasping this great thinker). I hope that I can do justice to Deleuze's encounters with works of art.
Deleuze launches into a creative criticism of Kant in 'Difference and Repetition' by expressing dissatisfaction with the status and power given to sensations. They are already formed and given to a passive self. We might say that the Kantian epistemological machine seems to have something missing. For Deleuze the doctrine of the faculties is based upon a repression of the real nature of sensation. He wants to find sensations that force us to think (he sites this idea as a highly positive contribution by Plato). He uses the term 'sign' to denote sensations that are a shock to thought. Instead of sensation being finished and given it is challenge to our thought. Signs can only be sensed or felt since to allow them to be represented would be to falsify them. They are an element of reality neglected by representational thought. They are singular and cannot be generalised. They also bear a problem (for Deleuze a problem is not something defined by its ability to be solved but is a denial of general and common solutions [Deleuze (1994) p. 161f]).
The conclusion that Deleuze draws from this dissatisfaction with Kantianism, and representational thought in general (the dogmatic image of thought), is that we must innovate in our approach in order to liberate sensibility. He proceeds dramatically, in the pages of 'Difference and Repetition' and elsewhere, with the reunion - perhaps in the spirit in Kant himself - of the two senses of Aesthetics that appears in the Critical System. These two halves are said to be artificial because they limit the power of sensibility to be an activity of thinking itself. In the Transcendental Aesthetic we have a theory of the forms of experience and in the Third Critique we have the work of experimentation (cf. Daniel W. Smith, 'Deleuze's Theory of Sensation: Overcoming the Kantian Duality' in "Deleuze: A Critical Reader", 1996). The Kantian arrangement forces sensibility to play a part in the working of the faculties in two different positions that do not allow its genesis in the fully unity of its power and force. Now, the artwork is not a representation but is an experience and a way of exploring the sensible. Instead of being either a form of receptivity on the one hand and creativity within the sphere of aesthetic contemplation on the other, it is a full 'being of sensation'. This explains why Deleuze can say that his writings upon art are works of philosophy in a very literal sense.
In ‘Difference and Repetition’ we can grasp the in-itself of difference and repetition as repetition of difference within the work of art. If art were a mere matter of psychological activity it would remain separated from the activity of thought. Deleuze finds this artificial because it denies the autonomy both of sensation and thought. He tries to illustrate how everything removed from the continuum of living reality is mistreated and alienated. If we remove ourselves from this in our thinking we cannot think equally or adequately to the activity of sensation. This is elaborated in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ where music is said to harness the forces of cosmos. Music can become a ‘cosmic sound machine’ since it is not a representation of cosmic forces that are the elements of reality and constitute sensation. It is plugged into them and thus traversed by them. Unless thought is seen to be this transversal force to which the rhizomatic (open onto the outside, onto the multiple) is subject we cannot truly think. Whether we take the later or earlier vocabulary we find that art is a science of the sensible because the artistic composition of the sensible is affective in and of itself. If we consider the work of art from this viewpoint of creation then we begin with the being of sensation itself and this allows us to think immanently to this activity of sensation. It allows creation to have the autonomy as an event in itself and this makes the subjective processes and responses of the artist and viewer a secondary occurrence. To paint becomes not at all representation at a distance but a composition of forces in the work. This is a true apprenticeship to signs since it anticipates and presupposes nothing about the occurrences within sensation. Aesthetics achieves immanence to sensation and thus bypasses the categories of representation.
The ultimate expression of the new status of art in the Deleuzian universe is its ability to think with a nobility equal to that of science and philosophy. Deleuze evokes the status and evocation of the work of art in words that he wrote with Guattari:
‘The thing has become independent of its “model” from the start, but is also independent of other possible personae who are themselves artists-things, personae of painting breathing this air of painting. And it is no less independent of the viewer or hearer, who experience it after, if they have the strength for it. What about the creator? It is independent of the creator through the self-positing of the created, which is preserved in itself. What is preserved - the thing or the work of art - is a bloc of sensations, that is to say, a compound of percepts and affects.’ (‘What is Philosophy?’ p. 164)
If percepts can exceed the strength of those undergoing them, sensations are beings in themselves and in excess of the postulates of the dogmatic image of thought (representational and similar). Just as Kant’s Ideas exceed cognition, Deleuze’s Ideas are signs that implicate sensation in a virtual object = x that is nevertheless immanent to the virtual-actual dynamism.
If we conceive of sensation as the realisation of differential relations, we open ourselves, in the experience of the artwork, to the full force of forms of thinking that are harnessed in the composition itself. In ‘Difference and Repetition’ Deleuze argues that ‘difference must be the element, the ultimate unity’ so that divergence and decentring must be affirmed (p. 56). The identity of everything is swallowed in difference so that each thing is only a difference between differences. For Deleuze thought that is equal to difference must express in itself the being of sensation and compel the apprentice to signs to follow its realisation of thought. Deleuze recognises in modern art a ‘theatre of metamorphosis and permutations.’ This ‘labyrinth without a thread’ is outside or in excess of the logic of representation because sensation is not formed or mediated but allowed to draw the viewer into the fullness of immanent sensation itself. Transcendental empiricism is Deleuze’s project and it is not simply assisted by the work of art but this is its very realisation. This non- representational thinking realises the life of sensation itself, it espouses vitalism by being itself a vital movement that shocks the subject. Thought becomes the realisation of signs occurring in situation, immanent to this continuum. The categories of the dogmatic image of thought seek to impose the values of representation, the similar, mediation, analogy and so on (a full list is given on page 167 of ‘Difference and Repetition’). This makes the work of art the immanent realisation of the undoing of this dogmatic system of postulates for the apprentice to signs.
Centring this issue around the thinking of difference, Deleuze makes clear that the repression of difference is the poison of many presuppositions with which philosophy begins. The work of art is a composition of differential relations and their realisation in the repetition of differences that includes difference without mediation. Rather than the giving of form to sensation it is a realisation of the forms of sensation themselves. This is involuntary and violent, it is a shock. Francis Bacon seems to concur with this when he writes of painting that:
‘The story that is already being told between one figure and another begins to cancel out the possibilities of what can be done with the paint on its own.’ (‘The Brutality of Fact’ p. 23).
Figuration can have a similar alienating role in painting as that which representation has in philosophy.
Deleuze extends his ideas to Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time.’ He latches onto the difference of the former present (as it was lived) and the present present. These two series have an identity and resemblance (the madeleine, breakfast, the taste that coexists across two moments) but this is not where the secret lies. This is the surface but at a certain depth is what the taste envelops, this is something = x, something without an identity. This is Combray as it is in itself, which exists or insists as virtual. It is essentially different and as differenciator it produces the identity and resemblance of the series. These coexist in relation to the Combray in itself as object = x which causes them to resonate. This movement of thought within the novel is not a something that can be represented by generalities. The singular manifestations of difference in the forces composed by Proust are signs that very literally carry their apprentice in his journey. They are productive of a resonance between the present present and former present as two different series where the workings of difference forces thought upon us. Involuntary memory is shown most truly in this composition that embodies the interaction between the virtual and the actual, it presents sections of this activity.
In my last entry I offered some tentative perplexities about Nietzsche. He does not seem to offer any of the great workings out of approaches and of the workings of reality as Deleuze does in a systematic and pluralist fashion. Yet he is a pluralist (in the sense of an empiricism that is open to the divergent and multiple manifestations of life and the world) and this seems to overwhelm our attempts to get hold of him. Deleuze’s book on him is a reasonable approach to grasping the workings of the Nietzschean reality (feel free to attack me on this point). If we limit Nietzsche by claiming that he avoids all systematic thought on principle, it seems that he fails to cope with the disorder that he recognised as the great challenge for thought. Yet what did not kill him could only make him stronger. This strength suggests an engagement with this challenge; the attempt to capture in thought something that is too strong for us. Perhaps this can only be done in a limited and embryonic way or as a shadow (if it is only the overman who is to experience thought fully).
I take Scott’s point that metaphors such as a ‘symphony of thought’ resolve the problem by simply deferring it. This I think points to the need for Deleuzian reading of metaphor as metamorphosis. If the work of art is a composition of sensation or force, we avoid ending up with a metaphor that is a form of representation artificially disembodied and isolated from the forces that composed it. The same goes for metaphors used in philosophy, creation with concepts rather than sensations.
The problem that Scott dramatizes in terms of two opposed receptions of Nietzsche’s philosophy, as either a ‘gleeful aesthetic dance’ or taking Nietzsche as metaphysician is I agree important and unsatisfactory (what indeed, could be more tame than a mirror to represent our own enthusiasms). If aesthetics is separated from philosophy (as a sober continuation of metaphysics or as its successor) then Nietzsche seems to be lost in this division. Yet with Deleuze I think we see a way into reading Nietzsche without needing to make this moribund separation.
The issue of the finite and the infinite is a fascinating transversal. Deleuze’s thinking attempts, using diverse materials and encounters, to establish the unity of thought and art in the immanent workings of difference. Artistic experimentation produces instances of this incarnated unity. Deleuze would perhaps argue that the infinite should not be presupposed through temporalisation as Badiou suggests in one of the quotations Scott uses. Instead the Eternal Return should be the formless being of difference since only in this synthesis is difference affirmed as it should be. The work of art as an immanent section of sensation testifies to the mechanisms of difference. Ultimately, the virtual object = x, through itself, is the differenciator of difference. The fully adequate and fully immanent excess. Deleuze warns that a conversion of the excess to the void would reintroduce the transcendent. He prefers the dice-throw (involving the affirmation of chance not as probability but as fate) on the site as a power of ‘making’ the event. Otherwise……
‘philosophy thus seems to float in an empty transcendence, as the unconditioned concept that finds the totality of its generic conditions in the functions (science, poetry, politics, and love). Is this not the return, in the guise of the multiple, to an old conception of the higher philosophy?’ (‘What is Philosophy?’ p. 152-53)
Badiou is criticised for his theory of multiplicity because it does not offer two multiplicities (two types) from the start. This is necessary according to Deleuze because multiplicity happens between the two and this avoids the need for the transcendence that Badiou offers to compensate. These two types of multiplicity are one beside or against the other and not one above the other.
I expect violent condemnation from the rhizome that Brian and Scott have formed with Badiou (don’t spare me insults).
Best wishes,
Ed
posted by edward willatt at 3:42 pm
2 Comments:
Thanks Ed.,
I've just had my first read through and found it a very stimulating and enjoyable contribution. I think this will provide a real opening from which to hammer out some of the essential differences between Badiou and Deleuze. How far D&G's comments in "What is Philosophy?" (one feels a little for those who pick this book up thinking it's an introduction to philosophy) are compelling to Badiou remains to be seen. The same might well be said in reverse of Badiou's treatment of Deleuze in "Deleuze: The Clamour of Being." As for the question of the singular infinite versus two conceptions of infinite, well I think this could be critical, but when understood from an analysis of two types of excess - which BS will no doubt bring our attention to in the near future.
On another issue, I've just watched Werner Herzog's film "Heart of Glass" recently (which may unfortunately bring memories of an 80s pop sensation to mind) but which is in fact very interesting (something of a hallucinogenic/mad prophetic encounter) and I believe Deleuze talks about it - though I will have to look up quite what he says. With respect of this I may write a little piece on the film and draw out a few quotes for our collective interest/amusement (of course in good taste). If I have the time one fine day (or month) I would like to write a much broader (philosophically waged)investigation of Herzog's work/technique, but for the moment I wish merely to alert present company to his existence (for those who are not already aware of him).
Very interesting Ed, I was just about to sit down and write an unrelated piece on the two forms of excess in the work of Alain Badiou, and the history of philosophy, but now it seems I will be able to seemlessly weave this into the current debate.
It seems to my mind, as a somewhat good Badiouian, that the spectre of the 'One' haunts the work of Deleuze precisley because he starts with two types of multiplicity. But you will have to wait for my full response to know more.
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