Being forced to sense and think difference: further issues concerning the artwork.
Dear Friends,
1.
I wanted to add some more thoughts about the subject under discussion and related to my ongoing study of ‘Difference and Repetition.’ The nature of differential mechanisms in the virtual is very important to this issue because if actualisation involves a synthesis of depth it can be hidden and covered over on the surface but never removed. Even the singular does not get away from this depth because the singular is universal thanks to its rooted-ness in this dimension. To understand the role of the artwork in transcendental empiricism we can look at this universality of the singular. This concerns our ability to dispense with general or natural laws that ignore this depth that is revealed though thinking difference itself. The actual is rooted in the virtual to the extent that every object has a double aspect. This is expressed by the coupling ‘clear-confused’ as an individuated or singular unit. This is a state of actualised individuality and it defines the individual as being both local and global. It is locally clear and yet also globally obscure. This follows because the universality of anything, according to Deleuze, is not at all an impersonal abstraction. If it were then we would have a simple and empty repetition. If repetition is a repetition of difference we must say that ‘The highest generalities of life, …, point beyond species and genus, but point beyond them in the direction of the individual and pre-individual singularities…’ [p. 249] The individual is in this way expanded since we can think its universality without resorting to a representation that removes its concrete singularity. This singularity relates to the instance of actualisation as a production of the virtual. If this is ignored the rooted-ness of the actual in the virtual is covered over and the singularity not seen in the vital context of its progressive determination. Individuality thus becomes part of a global process and is not seen as a closed and static object. The objectivity of what is actualised belongs to this process itself. This double nature as ‘clear -confused’ gives the object both its singularity and its global connection or implication. Whilst being made clear by the focus of its singular actualisation, it is confused by its connection with global movements and processes such that a zone of indetermination surrounds the individual. This makes it open confusedly onto the cosmos in a way that anticipates the more radical thinking present in ‘Capitalism and Schizophrenia.’
2.
Deleuze elaborates this idea by constituting the life of empirical reality through intensities. All intensities are implicated in one another so that each continues to express the changing totality of Ideas, the ‘variable ensemble’ of differential relations [p. 252]. This communication via implication is about the expression, production or incarnation of the actual. The connection of intensities opens up the product of actualisation to wider reality. At the same time, each intensity expresses clearly only certain relations or degrees of variation. It focuses upon these in its enveloping role. Yet as something enveloped and incarnated it still expresses all relations and all degrees, but confusedly. In this sense, the clear-confused is an expression of the production active in the virtual-actual circuit. This means that whilst the world is made coherent in a seemingly general and human way, ‘the advent of coherence is no more our own, that of mankind, than that of God or the world.’ [p. xxi] Since individuations are impersonal, the singular is universal in being produced continuously by a virtual depth and yet singular by virtue of being a specific and focused instance of actualisation. In this sense the event is both unique and rooted in a universal synthesis of depth and also of time (the eternal return).
3.
Perhaps the most concrete illustration of the clear-confused in ‘Difference and Repetition’ is Deleuze’s reference to Job at page 7. Job challenges the law by dismissing the general in order to reach the most singular as principle or as universal. This is not an example of existentialism. Instead it expresses an excess over the general ways of representing reality that would limit it to human forms of calculation and thought. Instead, that which escapes all calculation, prediction and explanation is invoked in concrete despair and attunement to the singular. Job’s experience of the universal had everything to do with this overflowing in the intensity of his singular situation. To return to the question of the artwork, it must be able to capture sensation that is singular and yet which embodies the universal in its very singularity. This is the ‘being of sensation’ that is in excess of general or natural laws. Only through the singular do we capture this excess that is lost in the representation of generality. The artwork is able to present this excess by avoiding the logic of representation in its harnessing of the forces of sensation.
4.
Deleuze elaborates this excess immanent to sensation when elucidating ideas of ‘the dice-throw’ that makes the point of actualisation aleatory and singular. With characteristic perversity Deleuze invokes a peculiar image of divine creation:
‘… God makes the world by calculating, but his calculations never work out exactly, and this inexactitude or injustice in the result, this irreducible inequality, forms the condition of the world. The world "happens" while God calculates; if the calculation were exact, there would be no world.’ [p. 222]
Without this preservation of difference in the unequal there would be no production of the new, no change, no occurrence. There would be simply stasis and no production of anything: ‘…the unequal in itself which testifies to the existence of a natural "remainder" which provides the material for a change of nature.’ [p. 238] The artwork is supposed to capture or harness universal forces active in sensation that testify to an excess of difference that covered over by representations of general and predictable laws. This makes difference the being of sensation and its sufficient reason. The artwork captures the rooted-ness of the singular in the universal workings of actualisation. In this way the universal is concrete and alive rather than being drained of all vital and immanent process as it is in representation. Deleuze elaborates this in terms of a ‘signal-sign system’ in which every phenomenon flashes. This is made up of at least two heterogeneous series that communicate with signals. Without the unequal, the differential that differentiates these systems of differences (object=x), there would be no reason or being of the sensible. If there were sameness and identity there would be no motor of actualisation and the artwork would just represent things and not actually think difference.
5.
An amusing comment by Deleuze proclaims that good sense is the ideology of the middle class [p. 225]. As such it is less acting that foreseeing and a belief in predictability. Perhaps this is rather apt when it comes to the artwork. The bourgeoisie protest that they like representational art because they want it only to be pleasant and perhaps soothing. They want it to flatter their own belief in the correctness of their way of life were everything or ordered for their material advancement without anything troubling their sense of self worth. Was there really ever any representational art other than that produced for the middle classes? Difference is for Deleuze that which cannot be thought. It is excessive and does not fit into the limit of our ability to comprehend it. Yet it is something that thought cannot avoid thinking about because as excessive and differentiating it is productive of sense and of the actual. The artwork embodies this un-thought or imperceptible that shocks us into thought. It is not given but which the given is given through depth that is differentiating, the un-grounding ground [p. 226]. We find in this the vocation of the artwork because as creator God is faced with interval and distances to fill (Deleuze offers these ideas whilst considering Plato’s Timaeus). He covers everything with intermediaries [p. 233-34]. Yet he ‘dances on a volcano’. This is the virtual depth constituted by difference. If in the artwork (Klee being a good example here) the abstract line is clear and yet confused it is because it is abstractly universal. The line captures the universality of movements that produced the singular line. It captures what we are forced to think without being able to fit it into manageable thought. The middle classes like to manage things and so management speak is utterly alien to the thinker and the artist.
6.
I hope this is clear. Deleuze weaves together his thought using very rigorous concepts and yet these are so complex that capturing this rigor in one’s own words is utterly difficult. My main purpose here has been to further my attempts to expound on Deleuze’s aesthetics via his ideas of depth and the virtual that continuously implicate the sensation that artworks capture or harness within something global. Deleuze complains that whilst Schelling and Schopenhauer think depth they do not manage to preserve difference within it. This is an issue we could go into in the future. For now, the question I suppose I would put to the Badiouians in our midst concerns the value of thinking difference whether in the artwork or in anything else. Deleuze’s approach seems to remove the problems of dualisms by making this difference not at all a problem but something to be positively affirmed and in which to find the vital mechanisms of life. I am not sure if I could give this up. Forgive me these bold statements.
Best wishes,
Edward
1.
I wanted to add some more thoughts about the subject under discussion and related to my ongoing study of ‘Difference and Repetition.’ The nature of differential mechanisms in the virtual is very important to this issue because if actualisation involves a synthesis of depth it can be hidden and covered over on the surface but never removed. Even the singular does not get away from this depth because the singular is universal thanks to its rooted-ness in this dimension. To understand the role of the artwork in transcendental empiricism we can look at this universality of the singular. This concerns our ability to dispense with general or natural laws that ignore this depth that is revealed though thinking difference itself. The actual is rooted in the virtual to the extent that every object has a double aspect. This is expressed by the coupling ‘clear-confused’ as an individuated or singular unit. This is a state of actualised individuality and it defines the individual as being both local and global. It is locally clear and yet also globally obscure. This follows because the universality of anything, according to Deleuze, is not at all an impersonal abstraction. If it were then we would have a simple and empty repetition. If repetition is a repetition of difference we must say that ‘The highest generalities of life, …, point beyond species and genus, but point beyond them in the direction of the individual and pre-individual singularities…’ [p. 249] The individual is in this way expanded since we can think its universality without resorting to a representation that removes its concrete singularity. This singularity relates to the instance of actualisation as a production of the virtual. If this is ignored the rooted-ness of the actual in the virtual is covered over and the singularity not seen in the vital context of its progressive determination. Individuality thus becomes part of a global process and is not seen as a closed and static object. The objectivity of what is actualised belongs to this process itself. This double nature as ‘clear -confused’ gives the object both its singularity and its global connection or implication. Whilst being made clear by the focus of its singular actualisation, it is confused by its connection with global movements and processes such that a zone of indetermination surrounds the individual. This makes it open confusedly onto the cosmos in a way that anticipates the more radical thinking present in ‘Capitalism and Schizophrenia.’
2.
Deleuze elaborates this idea by constituting the life of empirical reality through intensities. All intensities are implicated in one another so that each continues to express the changing totality of Ideas, the ‘variable ensemble’ of differential relations [p. 252]. This communication via implication is about the expression, production or incarnation of the actual. The connection of intensities opens up the product of actualisation to wider reality. At the same time, each intensity expresses clearly only certain relations or degrees of variation. It focuses upon these in its enveloping role. Yet as something enveloped and incarnated it still expresses all relations and all degrees, but confusedly. In this sense, the clear-confused is an expression of the production active in the virtual-actual circuit. This means that whilst the world is made coherent in a seemingly general and human way, ‘the advent of coherence is no more our own, that of mankind, than that of God or the world.’ [p. xxi] Since individuations are impersonal, the singular is universal in being produced continuously by a virtual depth and yet singular by virtue of being a specific and focused instance of actualisation. In this sense the event is both unique and rooted in a universal synthesis of depth and also of time (the eternal return).
3.
Perhaps the most concrete illustration of the clear-confused in ‘Difference and Repetition’ is Deleuze’s reference to Job at page 7. Job challenges the law by dismissing the general in order to reach the most singular as principle or as universal. This is not an example of existentialism. Instead it expresses an excess over the general ways of representing reality that would limit it to human forms of calculation and thought. Instead, that which escapes all calculation, prediction and explanation is invoked in concrete despair and attunement to the singular. Job’s experience of the universal had everything to do with this overflowing in the intensity of his singular situation. To return to the question of the artwork, it must be able to capture sensation that is singular and yet which embodies the universal in its very singularity. This is the ‘being of sensation’ that is in excess of general or natural laws. Only through the singular do we capture this excess that is lost in the representation of generality. The artwork is able to present this excess by avoiding the logic of representation in its harnessing of the forces of sensation.
4.
Deleuze elaborates this excess immanent to sensation when elucidating ideas of ‘the dice-throw’ that makes the point of actualisation aleatory and singular. With characteristic perversity Deleuze invokes a peculiar image of divine creation:
‘… God makes the world by calculating, but his calculations never work out exactly, and this inexactitude or injustice in the result, this irreducible inequality, forms the condition of the world. The world "happens" while God calculates; if the calculation were exact, there would be no world.’ [p. 222]
Without this preservation of difference in the unequal there would be no production of the new, no change, no occurrence. There would be simply stasis and no production of anything: ‘…the unequal in itself which testifies to the existence of a natural "remainder" which provides the material for a change of nature.’ [p. 238] The artwork is supposed to capture or harness universal forces active in sensation that testify to an excess of difference that covered over by representations of general and predictable laws. This makes difference the being of sensation and its sufficient reason. The artwork captures the rooted-ness of the singular in the universal workings of actualisation. In this way the universal is concrete and alive rather than being drained of all vital and immanent process as it is in representation. Deleuze elaborates this in terms of a ‘signal-sign system’ in which every phenomenon flashes. This is made up of at least two heterogeneous series that communicate with signals. Without the unequal, the differential that differentiates these systems of differences (object=x), there would be no reason or being of the sensible. If there were sameness and identity there would be no motor of actualisation and the artwork would just represent things and not actually think difference.
5.
An amusing comment by Deleuze proclaims that good sense is the ideology of the middle class [p. 225]. As such it is less acting that foreseeing and a belief in predictability. Perhaps this is rather apt when it comes to the artwork. The bourgeoisie protest that they like representational art because they want it only to be pleasant and perhaps soothing. They want it to flatter their own belief in the correctness of their way of life were everything or ordered for their material advancement without anything troubling their sense of self worth. Was there really ever any representational art other than that produced for the middle classes? Difference is for Deleuze that which cannot be thought. It is excessive and does not fit into the limit of our ability to comprehend it. Yet it is something that thought cannot avoid thinking about because as excessive and differentiating it is productive of sense and of the actual. The artwork embodies this un-thought or imperceptible that shocks us into thought. It is not given but which the given is given through depth that is differentiating, the un-grounding ground [p. 226]. We find in this the vocation of the artwork because as creator God is faced with interval and distances to fill (Deleuze offers these ideas whilst considering Plato’s Timaeus). He covers everything with intermediaries [p. 233-34]. Yet he ‘dances on a volcano’. This is the virtual depth constituted by difference. If in the artwork (Klee being a good example here) the abstract line is clear and yet confused it is because it is abstractly universal. The line captures the universality of movements that produced the singular line. It captures what we are forced to think without being able to fit it into manageable thought. The middle classes like to manage things and so management speak is utterly alien to the thinker and the artist.
6.
I hope this is clear. Deleuze weaves together his thought using very rigorous concepts and yet these are so complex that capturing this rigor in one’s own words is utterly difficult. My main purpose here has been to further my attempts to expound on Deleuze’s aesthetics via his ideas of depth and the virtual that continuously implicate the sensation that artworks capture or harness within something global. Deleuze complains that whilst Schelling and Schopenhauer think depth they do not manage to preserve difference within it. This is an issue we could go into in the future. For now, the question I suppose I would put to the Badiouians in our midst concerns the value of thinking difference whether in the artwork or in anything else. Deleuze’s approach seems to remove the problems of dualisms by making this difference not at all a problem but something to be positively affirmed and in which to find the vital mechanisms of life. I am not sure if I could give this up. Forgive me these bold statements.
Best wishes,
Edward
posted by edward willatt at 11:31 am
2 Comments:
A suggestion that the Deleuzian intensive vitalist machine is more productive than the Badiouian generic set?
As always Ed I found this a clear and compelling introduction to significant aspects of Deleuze. I am particularly pleased to learn more about Deleuze's conception of excess.
There's a bit of the old shadow-boxing of Badiou going on in the background. A bait perhaps?
Thanks to Nietzsche 11 and Scott for their comments. I agree with Nietzsche 11 to some extent about Badiou's 'Deleuze: The Clamour of Being.' This book does neglect the complexity of the virtual-actual circuit. However, Badiou does raise some problems, such as Deleuze's anti-Platonism, that need to be addressed. In any case, it out ranks Zizek's recent 'Bodies Without Organs' by 110%. The latter work has no engagement at all with the rigor and detail of Deleuze's thought. Perhaps the challenge is to get inside Deleuze before there can be major attacks upon him. Badiou has done this to some extent and seems therefore able to raise problems that we will I am sure be debating soon on this blog site in the coming academic year. I have to admit to Scott that I was shadow-boxing with Badiou but I don't claim to be able pronounce confiedently on the issue, only to query and puzzle over his trajectories.
Best wishes,
Ed
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