Aberrant Nuptials: Deleuze and Artistic Research 9789462702028, 9462702020

Table of contents :
Aberrant Nuptials_frontcover
9789461663054
Introduction
Paulo de Assis
Part 1 - Sonic Nuptials: Sounds and Gestures of Time
Deleuze’s Synthesis of Time and Their Aesthetical Prolongations. Form, Style, and Achievement
Jean-Marc Chouvel
When Sounds Encounter One Another . . .
Zsuzsa Baross
Geomusic, Ecosophy, and Molecular Oscillators
Ronald Bogue
East Meets West in France. Catching the Musical Scent
Edward Campbell
Topography of the (One). Reflections on Musical Time in Composition and Performance
Stefan Östersjö, Christer Lindwall, Jörgen Dahlqvist
In the (Immanent) Event of Musical-Philosophical Thought
Steve Tromans
Music as a Reservoir of Thought’s Materialisation. Between Metastaseis and Modulor
Marianna Charitonidou
Machinic Propositions. Artistic Practice and Deterritorialisation
Henrik Frisk
Anders Elberling
A Ligetian Way to Make a Piano (or a Piano Piece) Stutter
Gustavo Rodrigues Penha
When Time Begins To Riot. Rhythm and Syncopation in the Work of Jonathan Burrows and Matteo Fargion
Jonas Rutgeerts
Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker - An Unbridled Activity of Vital Lines
Oleg Lebedev
Sonic Forms of Capture
Terri Bird
Part 2 - A Little Treatise on Becomology
The Wasp and the Orchid. On Multiplicities and Becomology
Anne Sauvagnargues
Beyond the Death-Drive,Beyond the Life-Drive. Being-Toward-Birthing with Being-toward-Birth;Copoiesis and the Matrixial Eros—Metafeminist Notes
Bracha L. Ettinger
Thought Beyond Research. A Deleuzian Critique of Artistic Research
Kamini Vellodi
An Avant-Garde “Without Authority”. The Posthuman Cosmic Artisan in the Anthropocene
jan jagodzinski
Pure Immanence and the Algorithmic Era. An Aberrant Nuptial
Emilia Marra
Mining the Aesthetico-Conceptual. Deleuze, Derrida, and Artistic Research
Spencer Roberts
Experimenting in Relation to the Anthropocene. An Image of Earth-Thought from a Symptomatic Earth Line
Paolo Vignola
Logic of Sens/ation. Two Conflicting Conceptions of Transdisciplinarity in Deleuze and Guattari
Guillaume Collett
Listening for a New Body. Thinking Change and Learning Reason with Difference and Repetition and Spinoza: Practical Philosophy
Antonia Pont
Outside-Interior: ?Interior
Suzie Attiwill
Encountering Fashion as a Practice of Subjectivation
Andrea Eckersley
A Theory of Becoming. Artistic Spatio-Temporal Experiences after Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, and Brian Massumi
Liana Psarologaki
Part 3
Mythopoesis, Fabulous Images, and Memories of a Sorcerer
Simon O’Sullivan
The Philosopher as a Line. A Deleuzian Perspective on Drawing and the Mobile Image of Thought
Janae Sholtz
For a Future of the Face. Faciality and Performance in the Dance of Marlene Monteiro Freitas
Lucia D’Errico
Elegy to an Oz Republic. First Steps in a Ceremony of Invocation towards Reconciliation
Barbara Bolt
Sound and Image in Artistic Flooding. Vladimir Tarasov, Bill Viola
Lilija Duobliene
Fictioning a Thought of Performance
Tero Nauha
Milieus of Locality. The Aesthetic of the Point of View
Sara Baranzoni
“A Life as an Open Landscape”. Systems of Codetermination in Three Robotic Shows
Zornitsa Dimitrova
Interspecies Sonification. Deleuze, Ruyer, and Bioart
Audronė Žukauskaitė
Desire, Temporality, “Liquid Perception”. Deleuze and the Films of Marguerite Duras
Katie Pleming
Photogenesis—Brokering World
Peter Burleigh
Garden of Small Nuptials
Elizabeth Presa
Appendix
Notes on Contributors

Citation preview

Recent titles in this series: –

Orpheus_Institute_Series_Aberrant_Nuptials.indd 2-5

INSTITUTE

ABERRANT NUPTIALS

SERIES

Deleuze and Artistic Research 2

INSTITUTE

Voices, Bodies, Practices: Performing Musical Subjectivities Catherine Laws, William Brooks, David Gorton, Nguyễn Thanh Thủy, Stefan Östersjö, Jeremy J. Wells 2019, ISBN 978 94 6270 205 9 – Futures of the Contemporary: Contemporaneity, Untimeliness, and Artistic Research Paulo de Assis and Michael Schwab (eds.) 2019, ISBN 978 94 6270 183 0 – Sensorial Aesthetics in Music Practices Kathleen Coessens (ed.) 2019, ISBN 978 94 6270 184 7 – Logic of Experimentation: Rethinking Music Performance through Artistic Research Paulo de Assis 2018, ISBN 978 94 6270 138 0 – Powers of Divergence: An Experimental Approach to Music Performance Lucia D’Errico 2018, ISBN 978 94 6270 139 7 – Transpositions: Aesthetico-Epistemic Operators in Artistic Research Michael Schwab (ed.) 2018, ISBN 978 94 6270 141 0 – Virtual Works―Actual Things: Essays in Music Ontology Paulo de Assis (ed.) 2018, ISBN 978 94 6270 140 3

Paolo Giudici is a philosopher and photographer (Royal College of Art London, UK) and Associated Researcher at the Orpheus Institute.

ORPHEUS

ABERRANT NUPTIALS

The Orpheus Institute Series encompasses monographs by fellows and associates of the Orpheus Institute, compilations of lectures and texts from seminars and study days, and edited volumes on topics arising from work at the institute. Research can be presented in digital media as well as printed texts. As a whole, this series is intended to enhance and advance discourse in the field of artistic research in music and generate future work in this emerging and vital area of study.

Paulo de Assis, Paulo de Assis is an experimental performer, pianist, and artistic researcher with transdisciplinary interests in composition, philosophy, and epistemology. A research fellow at the Orpheus Institute, Ghent, he is the author of Logic of Experimentation: Rethinking Music Performance through Artistic Research (LUP 2018), and the editor of Virtual Works—Actual Things: Essays in Music Ontology (LUP 2018), and of The Dark Precursor: Deleuze and Artistic Research (LUP 2017). He is the Chair of the international conference series Deleuze and Artistic Research (DARE), and is the editor of the book series Artistic Research (Rowman & Littlefield International).

ORPHEUS

Aberrant Nuptials explores the diversity and richness of interactions between artistic research and Deleuze studies. “Aberrant nuptials” is the expression Gilles Deleuze uses to refer to productive encounters between systems characterised by fundamental difference. More than imitation, representation, or reproduction, these encounters foster creative flows of energy, generating new material configurations and intensive experiences. Within different understandings of artistic research, the contributors to this book—architects, composers, filmmakers, painters, performers, philosophers, sculptors, and writers—map current practices at the intersection between music, art, and philosophy, contributing to an expansion of horizons and methodologies. Written by established Deleuze scholars who have been working on interferences between art and philosophy, and by musicians and artists who have been reflecting Deleuzian and post-Deleuzian discourses in their artworks, this volume reflects the current relevance of artistic research and Deleuze studies for the arts.

Edited by Paulo de Assis and Paolo Giudici

The Orpheus Institute has been providing postgraduate education for musicians since 1996 and introduced the first doctoral programme for music practitioners in Flanders (2004). Acting as an umbrella institution for Flanders, it is co-governed by the music and dramatic arts departments of all four Flemish colleges, with which it maintains a close working relationship. Throughout the institute’s various activities (seminars, conferences, workshops, and associated events) there is a clear focus on the development of a new research discipline in the arts, one that addresses questions and topics that are at the heart of musical practice, building on the unique expertise and perspectives of musicians and in constant dialogue with more established research disciplines. Within this context, the Orpheus Institute launched an international Research Centre in 2007 that acts as a stable constituent within an ever-growing field of enquiry. The Orpheus Research Centre is a place where musical artists can fruitfully conduct individual and collaborative research on issues that are of concern to all involved in artistic practice. It is important that at the centre of the international Orpheus Institute network is a place, a building, a community. As the concepts and methodologies of artistic research in music have evolved, work at the Orpheus Institute has found new structures. Since 2012, research has been consolidated into a number of groups focused on specific areas, each led by a principal investigator of substantial international reputation as a practising musician. The work of the Orpheus Institute is disseminated through events, publications, and musical performances, and through its active animation of discussion within the sector.

Orpheus Institute Korte Meer 12 B-9000 Ghent Belgium +32 (0)9 330 40 81 www.orpheusinstituut.be

31/10/2019 12:28

Aberrant Nuptials: Deleuze and Artistic Research 2

Aberrant Nuptials: Deleuze and Artistic Research 2 Edited by Paulo de Assis and Paolo Giudici

Leuven University Press

Table of Contents 9 Introduction Paulo de Assis

Part 1: Sonic Nuptials: Sounds and Gestures of Time 25 Deleuze’s Syntheses of Time and Their Aesthetical Prolongations: Form, Style, and Achievement Jean-Marc Chouvel

47

When Sounds Encounter One Another . . . Zsuzsa Baross

61

Geomusic, Ecosophy, and Molecular Oscillators

Ronald Bogue

73

East Meets West in France: Catching the Musical Scent

Edward Campbell

83 Topography of the (One): Reflections on Musical Time in Composition and Performance Stefan Östersjö, Christer Lindwall, Jörgen Dahlqvist

93

In the (Immanent) Event of Musical-Philosophical Thought

Steve Tromans

101

121

Music as a Reservoir of Thought’s Materialisation: Between Metastaseis and Modulor Marianna Charitonidou

Machinic Propositions: Artistic Practice and Deterritorialisation

Henrik Frisk, Anders Elberling

129

A Ligetian Way to Make a Piano (or a Piano Piece) Stutter

Gustavo Rodrigues Penha

137 When Time Begins To Riot: Rhythm and Syncopation in the Work of Jonathan Burrows and Matteo Fargion Jonas Rutgeerts

145 Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker: An Unbridled Activity of Vital Lines Oleg Lebedev

5

Table of Contents 163 Sonic Forms of Capture Terri Bird

Part 2: A Little Treatise on Becomology 177

The Wasp and the Orchid: On Multiplicities and Becomology Anne Sauvagnargues

183 Beyond the Death-Drive, beyond the Life-Drive: Being-towardBirthing with Being-toward-Birth; Copoiesis and the Matrixial Eros—Metafeminist Notes Bracha L. Ettinger

215 Thought beyond Research: A Deleuzian Critique of Artistic Research Kamini Vellodi

233 An Avant-Garde “Without Authority”: The Posthuman Cosmic Artisan in the Anthropocene jan jagodzinski

255 Pure Immanence and the Algorithmic Era: An Aberrant Nuptial Emilia Marra

261 Mining the Aesthetico-Conceptual: Deleuze, Derrida, and Artistic Research Spencer Roberts

273 Experimenting in Relation to the Anthropocene: An Image of Earth-Thought from a Symptomatic Earth Line Paolo Vignola

281 Logic of Sens/ation: Two Conflicting Conceptions of Transdisciplinarity in Deleuze and Guattari Guillaume Collett

289 Listening for a New Body: Thinking Change and Learning Reason with Difference and Repetition and Spinoza: Practical Philosophy Antonia Pont

6

Table of Contents 299 Outside-Interior: ?Interior Suzie Attiwill

307 Encountering Fashion as a Practice of Subjectivation Andrea Eckersley

317 A Theory of Becoming: Artistic Spatio-Temporal Experiences after Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, and Brian Massumi Liana Psarologaki

Part 3: A Garden of Small Nuptials: Images, Movement, and Fabulations 327 Mythopoesis, Fabulous Images, and Memories of a Sorcerer Simon O’Sullivan

341 The Philosopher as a Line: A Deleuzian Perspective on Drawing and the Mobile Image of Thought Janae Sholtz

357 For a Future of the Face: Faciality and Performance in the Dance of Marlene Monteiro Freitas Lucia D’Errico

371 Elegy to an Oz Republic: First Steps in a Ceremony of Invocation towards Reconciliation Barbara Bolt

389 Sound and Image in Artistic Flooding: Vladimir Tarasov, Bill Viola Lilija Duobliene

397 Fictioning a Thought of Performance Tero Nauha

405 Milieus of Locality: The Aesthetic of the Point of View Sara Baranzoni

413 “A Life as an Open Landscape”: Systems of Codetermination in Three Robotic Shows Zornitsa Dimitrova

7

Table of Contents 421 Interspecies Sonification: Deleuze, Ruyer, and Bioart Audronė Žukauskaitė

429 Desire, Temporality, “Liquid Perception”: Deleuze and the Films of Marguerite Duras Katie Pleming

437 Photogenesis—Brokering World Peter Burleigh

445 Sculpture Installation: Garden of Small Nuptials Elizabeth Presa

456 Appendix 457 Notes on Contributors 467 Index

8

Introduction

Introduction Paulo de Assis Orpheus Institute, Ghent, Belgium

Artistic research and Deleuze studies Aberrant Nuptials: Deleuze and Artistic Research 2 brings together a collection of essays originating from the second international conference on Deleuze and Artistic Research (DARE), held at the Orpheus Institute, Ghent, 20–22 November 2017. In addition to the keynote speakers, selected conference delegates have been invited to rework and expand their papers, contribut­ ing to a volume that aims to explore the diversity and richness of the inter­ actions between artistic research and Deleuze’s world, which we understand as including thinkers and artists that inspired him, and others that have been influenced by him, or that creatively departed from his thought. The funda­ mental aim of the DARE biennial conferences is to bring together two vibrant fields of thought and practice: artistic research and Deleuze studies.1 Beyond the specificities of their respective media, materialities, and institutional anchoring, a common characteristic of both fields is the prominence they give to the emergence and exploration of intensive forces rather than the ana­ lysis of extensive matters or the quest for meaning. Artistic research is not the same as art practice tout court, which doesn’t need a research component to be valid and productive; it is also not art theory, art history, or musicology, which don’t require their makers to practise art. Artistic research in its own right is a particular mode of research conducted through artistic practice that enables a more articulated comprehension of diverse “ethologies of forces.” If Anne Sauvagnargues is right in claiming that “if art exists, its effects cannot be limited to the imaginary, but they must be seized on the physical plane of an ethology of force” (2013, 181), artist-researchers—with their combination of artistic skills and intellectual rigour—appear as dynamic operators capable of articulating those “ethologies of forces,” actively merging sense and sensation into new modes of artistic and conceptual expression. Between Deleuze’s logic

1 Given the relevance and impact of Félix Guattari’s contribution to Deleuze’s thought after 1969, recent developments in the field tend to talk about “Deleuze and Guattari Studies.” While this is more than justified from a philosophical (and ethical) point of view, it risks giving priority to one moment of Deleuze’s path. There is a Deleuze without Guattari (prior to 1969), a Deleuze with Guattari (their co-authored texts), and a Deleuze after Guattari (Deleuze’s solo works after 1980). Moreover, from the perspective of today, one could actually talk about post-Deleuzian studies, which could include studies on Deleuze, Guattari, and Simondon (et al.), and all other thoughts and theories developed after them. In this sense, the expression “Deleuze studies” seems to be less prescriptive and more comprehensive, especially if one understands it as referring to a proliferating world of thoughts and pragmatics. One could even talk of a “Deleuze machine,” a proper name for an abstract machine like those suggested by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus: “the Einstein abstract machine, the Webern abstract machine, but also the Galileo, the Bach, or the Beethoven, etc.” (Deleuze and Guatta­ ri 1987, 511).

9

Paulo de Assis of sense and logic of sensation, artistic research could be the place for the unfolding of an operative logic of experimentation, exploring transversal modes of thought and practice. Questioning the boundaries between art, academia, philosophy, and science, artistic research is fundamentally transdisciplinary, enhancing multiple ontologies, developing different epistemologies and creating varied modes of presentation. It does not necessarily present objects of concluded knowledge but rather insists on unfinished thinking, stressing processes more than results. On the other side, the field of Deleuze studies has witnessed an impressive growth, both in terms of covered topics, as in relation to its openness to other areas of knowledge production, including artistic practices. This goes back to Deleuze’s fundamental belief in thought as a creative activity (with different modes of expression in philosophy, science, and the arts), and to Deleuze and Guattari’s constant borrowing of concepts from other fields of knowledge. This openness to look beyond one’s own discipline, venturing into other areas of creative activity, provides the starting move towards the arts, and it comes as no surprise that Deleuze’s impact on living artists and on different expressions of contemporary art has become so extensive. As Gregory Flaxman observed (in his introduction to a recent book on Deleuze and artistic practice [Attiwill et al. 2017]): “Deleuze’s influence and appeal [to artists today] are undeni­ able. Personally, I know of no other philosopher or thinker who assumes so prominent a place or inspires as much enthusiasm in the intellectual life of artists” (Flaxman 2017, 13). More recently, Jae Emerling (2019, forthcoming) converges with this idea, stating that “I remain convinced . . . that Deleuze and Guattari give us the conceptual language to best understand the history of art as re-search, that is, the history of art as a virtual ensemble of proper names, singularities, and events.” Similarly, in relation to the discipline of art history, Sjoerd van Tuinen and Stephen Zepke (2017, 8) identify the enormous impact of Deleuze and Guattari among artists, which they attribute to their transver­ sal mode of thinking: “Perhaps this is why Deleuze and Guattari have been so popular and influential amongst artists. They are able to conceptualise what appears in the materials of paint, or more than this, they are able to conceptu­ alise in art those aspects of its emergence that philosophy shares, although in an entirely different medium. It is precisely this aspect of transversality (as they call it) that makes it possible for philosophy to conceptualise a sensation (or art to create a sensation of a concept).” More than looking at disciplinary partitions and discipline-specific termi­ nologies, Deleuze and Guattari looked for cracks, for points of phase-shifting, change, mutation, transposition, or even deformation that could enable the emergence of something new, an event of illuminating consequences. Instead of thinking in terms of stabilised forms and matters, they preferred the study of dynamic systems, deeply characterised by modulatory and transductive processes. Another aspect that contributes to the impact of Deleuzian and post-Deleu­ zian thought on the creative arts is Deleuze’s central claim that philosophy is the creation of concepts and not an interpretation, recognition, or reminis­ 10

Introduction cence of something prior to our enquiries. Deleuze maintains that concepts are invented, constructed, fabricated, that they are the result of a process of think­ ing that generates an event. A singular concept, rigorously situated within a dis­ course, precisely located in time, gains a life of its own, which is independent from its origin. Considered in this way, concepts are imbued with an internal dynamic, having their specific history, moment of birth, development, inflec­ tions, and death. This dynamic notion of concepts is profoundly connected with the view that thought always starts with an encounter between something and something else exterior to it. To have a thought is to go outside oneself, outside a particular discipline, outside a given system of coordinates, outside socially con­ structed images of thought. In this sense, one can say that while there is a defi­ nite discipline of philosophy and several definite disciplines in the arts, these disciplines can only productively operate by reaching out beyond themselves. For philosophy, this means an encounter with that which is not philosophy; for the arts, the encounter with that which is not art; for music, with that which is not music (see Somers-Hall 2012, 5). Moreover, as Deleuze and Guattari wrote “even science has a relation with a nonscience that echoes its effects” (1994, 217– 18), an idea that resonates with Nietzsche’s famous remark that “the problem of science cannot be recognized within the territory of science” (1999, 5), thus pointing to transdisciplinary approaches avant la lettre,2 in what can be seen as a pre-announcement of Guattari’s profound critique of “Science (with a capital S) and the received disciplinary models of scientificity” (Alliez 2015, 142), and of his central notion of “transversality” (see Guattari 1965, 1972, 1992).

Logic of experimentation Obviously, the above-mentioned borrowing of concepts and discourses from one field into another carries some dangers that cannot be ignored. Guattari himself was well aware of them and acknowledged that “my problem is to extract elements from one domain in order to transfer them into other fields of application. With the risk, of course, that it may miscarry nine times out of ten, that it may turn out to be a theoretical mess” (Guattari 2009, 66). This “mess”—or better the danger of incurring such a mess—has been accepted and embraced by this book. In this sense, together with its predecessor— The Dark Precursor: Deleuze and Artistic Research (Assis and Giudici 2017)—this volume maps an experimental territory of experimental expression(s) fed by experimental thought(s) and experimental practice(s). More than being about dark precursors (2015), aberrant nuptials (2017), or machinic assemblages of desire (forthcoming 2019), what motivates the DARE conferences project is the explo­ ration and invention of an experimental thought that results from experimental practices and that is permeated by a logic of experimentation.3 In Deleuzian 2 On the theme of transdisciplinarity in relation to Deleuze and Guattari, see the forthcoming book edited by Guillaume Collet (Deleuze, Guattari, and the Problem of Transdisciplinarity, 2019), and Éric Alliez’s “Structuralism’s Afters: Tracing Transdisciplinarity through Guattari and Latour” (2015). 3 On this topic applied to artistic research in music, see my book Logic of Experimentation: Rethinking Music Performance through Artistic Research (Assis 2018).

11

Paulo de Assis terms: it is about creation and experimentation, and not about representation and interpretation; it is about pragmatics and not exegesis. It was probably Deleuze’s particular reading of Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise (1670) that paved the way for his own innovative theory of the sign, ena­ bling the passage from obedient exegesis to dynamic ethology, from significa­ tion to the study of relations of forces, from interpretation to experimentation. For Deleuze, signs require first and foremost a pragmatics, the exposition of power relations within which they emerge, and which they often consolidate and reinforce. Critical art—and even more so, artistic research—would have the power to expose those power relations and consistently counter them, opening new worlds of perception. As Anne Sauvagnargues writes (2013, 34): “if the effective force relations that signs use to produce their effects are exposed, experimentation as a principle of explication for art replaces interpretation or hermeneutics” (my emphasis). Artistic research differentiates itself from other modes of research in or for the arts, in that it doesn’t aim so much at offering explications (as Sauvagnargues claims) but at inventing further foldings of mat­ ters and forces, generating com-plications, intensive actions on physical matters leading to perception-challenging assemblages of forces, which are both phys­ ical and psychological. There is no “superior” sense to achieve, or from which to deduce art objects. Deleuze’s logic of sense crucially bypasses any notion of truth, refusing to con­ sider truth as a crucial factor of thought (see Bouaniche 2007, 120), while com­ bining sense and non-sense to express events that happen outside the domain of propositions. Thus, Deleuze’s logic of sense is inseparable from a theory of the event (see ibid., 123), which relates to continuous experimentation and to intensive unfoldings of energies and materialities. This, in turn, is precisely the link to Deleuze’s logic of sensation, in which sensation is understood mater­ ially “as a force that is exerted upon a body” (Sauvagnargues 2005, 107, my translation). Materiality and the body’s work with it are the crucial elements for connecting sense and sensation: sense understood as made of sense, nonsense, paradoxes, inconsistencies, and uncertainties; sensation understood as made of impacts, clashes, waves, and invisible/inaudible forces. Their encoun­ ter happens through continuous experimentation, and their effect is directly felt in the nervous system through a conjunction of two faces (Deleuze 2003, 34): “Sensation has one face turned toward the subject (the nervous system, vital movement, ‘instinct’ . . . ) and one face turned toward the object (the ‘fact,’ the place, the event).” Thus, there is always an (aberrant) coupling of sense and sensation, the exertion of a force on a body. Lewis Carroll’s paradoxes, Artaud’s schizo-screams, and Francis Bacon’s hysterical postures are nothing more than renewed expressions of the Spinozan aphorism “no one knows what a body can do” (Spinoza [1994] 1996, 71). A logic of experimentation precisely addresses this Spinozan doing, aiming at expanding what a body can do, and how it can relate to other bodies and powers. Instead of addressing homogeneous and consistent systems, experimenta­ tion fosters communication between systems that might be heterogeneous and actually full of inconsistencies. This might seem, at first, awkward or even aber­ 12

Introduction rant. However, when such communication occurs—when the “dark precur­ sor” (Deleuze 1994, 119) opens a productive path for energetic transfer—what emerges in the world as the result of experimental action does have some kind of “sense.” It defines certain sorts of intensities, events, structures, and entities that can become objects of (and for) thought. What was factually unforeseeable a priori becomes somehow graspable a posteriori. It is not about revealing a closed logical consistency, but about challenging thought through problematic conjunctures, bifurcations, hybridisations, contradictions, and paradoxes that, despite everything, still “make sense.” The logic behind this sense is not nec­ essarily rational; it can actually include irrational and aberrant components, as long as they are not arbitrary. When something anomalous appears in a given system, it enables the formation of a new synthesis, of new conjunctures, thus, of new sense. Critically, for artistic research, any productive practice can only make sense if it also generates sensations, if it directly addresses the nervous system, overflowing and traversing it before cognition happens and before meaning is discerned. Sensation is the immediate encounter of a force with a body exterior to it. It affects bodies, effectively impinging on them and moving them into new configurations. In art, sensation shifts attention from formal aspects of the artwork to the nature of its encounter with other bodies. In short, it concerns a vital movement of matter upon matter, taking place before the brain captures it. If understood as a practice, experimentation discloses a powerful logic of bodies in action and of actions leading to new thoughts, senses, and sensations. It enables experimental thought,4 which is precisely the mode of thinking that the DARE project aims to explore and further develop within the field of artistic research.

Art research versus artistic research As stated above, artistic research is not to be confused with “research on the arts,” or research on aesthetic matters, or research about the arts.5 It is not a subdiscipline of musicology, art history, or philosophy. However, there is no doubt that there can be musicologies, art histories, and art philosophies inspired, done, or conceptualised after Deleuze and Guattari. That’s perfectly thinkable, and it has already been compellingly explored in books such as those by Ronald Bogue (2003a, 2003b, 2003c) in relation to music, cinema,



4 The wording experimental thought is a possible descriptor of the kind of thinking developed by Deleuze and Guattari. For Deleuze, it could have been the fundamental trigger to the move away from his early focus on interpretation (with his books on Hume, Nietzsche, Proust, Kant, Bergson, and SacherMasoch) to a profound critique of interpretation (starting with Difference and Repetition and Logic of Sense), through a focus on schizoanalysis and politics (with Guattari, since 1970), up to his deep engage­ ment with art and creativity (from Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation onwards, including the books on cinema, on the Baroque, and on literature). 5 For a detailed discussion of different notions of artistic research, see Borgdorff (2012), and for a short introduction to the topic, see Frayling (1993). For a mapping of ongoing or recently finished projects in various disciplines, see Assis and D’Errico (2019, forthcoming), and for yet another overview of existing definitions of artistic research in general and in relation to performance art in particular, see Cull Ó Maoilearca (2019, forthcoming).

13

Paulo de Assis painting, and literature, Edward Campbell (2013) in relation to contemporary music, Zepke and O’Sullivan (2010) regarding contemporary art, Van Tuinen and Zepke (2017) on art history, or Catarina Pombo Nabais on literature (2013). All these volumes are extremely rich and well worth reading for anybody inter­ ested in the interferences between different art practices and the thought of Deleuze and Guattari. Yet, with the exception of some chapters in Zepke and O’Sullivan (2010), they do not centrally address the field of artistic research, which is a more specific field of activity where practitioners actively engage with and participate in discursive formations emanating from their concrete artistic practices. Critically, artistic research is conducted by artists, but by artists with the capacity to infuse research with a particular kind of energy, which comes from the intensive processes they use on a daily basis while making art. In this sense—and recalling Deleuze’s warning, “we do not listen closely enough to what painters have to say” (2003, 99)—the edited volumes Gilles Deleuze: La pensée musique (Criton and Chouvel 2015), Practising with Deleuze (Attiwill et al. 2017), and The Dark Precursor: Deleuze and Artistic Research (Assis and Giudici 2017) come to mind as important attempts to more closely listen to what painters, musicians, designers, dancers, film-makers, photographers, sculptors, and so forth, have to say. More than affects and sensations, they all explore different lines of experimentation with their working materials and agencies. Embracing transdisciplinary research-based practices (or prac­ tice-based research, or artistic research, as you like it!), most of the authors in those books move between certain logics of sense and certain logics of sen­ sation, defining a broad area of experimental thought and praxis in between. While Sjoerd van Tuinen and Stephen Zepke (2017, 8) are totally right when they state that “the logic of sensation is not art as a conceptual or interdiscipli­ nary research-based practice, however, but precisely the opposite: it is a rather old-fashioned plea for medium specificity”; one has to keep in mind that “inter­ disciplinary research-based practice” is not to be confused with consolidated modes of art-making confined to medium-specific practices, which were still the ground for Deleuze and Guattari’s reflections on art. “Research-based prac­ tice” is not intended as a generator of “sensations” per se (which can, arguably, still be the case in “art practice”). It must involve an experimental dimension that allows those practices to move beyond and outside themselves. Whereas “research” is primordially linked to a logic of sense, and “art practice” to a logic of sensation, artistic research—as discussed above—can be the site for a mixed logic of experimentation. This logic is not at odds with sense and sensation. It moves between one and the other, following concrete needs and targets of the creative-reflective process, being sometimes closer to rigorous analysis of data and source materials, and at other times closer to imaginative inventions and new arrangements of forces and matters. If consistently conducted at the artist’s working desk, this logic could lead to new artistic operations, includ­ ing more explicit epistemic dimensions within art practices. Work of this kind has been done in the past, for example in conceptual dance, including collab­ orations between artists and philosophers and even the use of philosophical materials in performance (William Forsythe, Jérôme Bel, Mårten Spångberg, or 14

Introduction Jonathan Burrows, among others). More recently, the project “Philosophy on Stage” has consistently placed philosophers “on stage,” addressing philosophy “as” an artistic practice. With Gregory Flaxman (2017, 2), I would argue for the relevance of such artistic and philosophical investigations: “If philosophers can address works of art, why shouldn’t artists address works of philosophy? . . . this eventuality is not only possible, nor even desirable, but absolutely vital.” This eventuality has been the driving motor of the DARE project.

The DARE Conference Series: The Dark Precursor, Aberrant Nuptials, Machinic Assemblages of Desire Initiated in 2015, the DARE conference series generally aims to enable encoun­ ters between artistic research and post-Deleuzian studies. More specifically, it aims to move beyond known territories and question boundary-work, explor­ ing productive transfers between different areas of knowledge and artistic pro­ duction. Thus, the conference welcomes musicians, artists, philosophers, sci­ entists, scholars, and researchers from as varied backgrounds as possible; and it accepts presentations in scholarly, artistic, and performative formats, stressing a principle of equivalence between Deleuze scholars, artist researchers, and art practitioners. The conferences usually include artistic practices from many disciplines and media, giving music a particular emphasis. Artists, composers, performers, and scholars are encouraged to experiment with different modes of presentation and to engage in all possible areas of interference between Deleuze’s world and artistic research, including presentations, exhibitions, performances, or installations, crucially moving beyond interpretations of Deleuze’s philosophy, and avoiding enclosed hermeneutic approaches. For the first edition of the conference in 2015, the dark precursor was chosen as the topic and title. It concerns the question of how communication between heterogeneous systems of couplings and resonance occurs without being pre­ determined. At the same time, it is a highly poetic notion, one of Deleuze’s most expressive inventions, a personnage conceptuel that resists definition, articulating the fundamental disparity of any given intensive system, connecting hetero­ geneous fields of forces, and having the transductive power of giving shape to several other events, encounters, and concepts. It establishes a dynamic system of relations, linking differences of intensity to one another. It is the agent, the force, the activator, the operator of a necessary communication between fields of different potential energy. Without the continuous tremblings produced by infinite dark precursors, no energy would flow between different series and nothing would be perceptible in the world. Once the dark precursor opens a path between two systems of different energies and potentials, creating the conditions for an event to happen, what follows is some sort of aberrant nuptials between disparate matters and forces that will need some time to homogenise and consolidate. As James Williams (2013, 32) noted: “The dark precursors announce and prepare the way for new creations, novel simulacra emerging beneath the illusion of a secure identity.” Before the lightning occurs, there is only a difference in potential between two 15

Paulo de Assis under-defined zones of indeterminacy, whose relation is by no means one of dependence or filiation. And when the thunderbolt explodes, generating new intensities and assemblages of forces, the emergent entities disclose profoundly heterogeneous characteristics and behaviours, whose properties surprisingly surpass anything we expected beforehand. Once the thunder touches the ground, ignition happens, there is creation: two or more bodies enter a nuptial relationship, which is always (at least in the first moment) aberrant, the result of a fortuitous—sometimes fortunate, sometimes unfortunate—encounter, a becoming-something-else, which is the opposite of imitation, development, or filiation. It is crucial to note that “becomings,” for Deleuze and Guattari, are not processes of “becoming-Being,” but of continuous, never-ending, perma­ nent becoming. As Deleuze in conversation with Claire Parnet clarified: There is no terminus from which you set out, none which you arrive at or which you ought to arrive at. . . . The question “What are you becoming?” is particularly stupid. For as someone becomes, what he is becoming changes as much as he does himself. Becomings are not phenomena of imitation or assimilation, but of a double capture, of non-parallel evolution, of nuptials between two reigns. Nuptials are always against nature. Nuptials are the opposite of a couple. There are no longer binary machines: question-answer, masculine-feminine, man-animal, etc. . . . The wasp and the orchid provide the example. (Deleuze and Parnet 2007, 2)

Aberrant nuptials is thus the expression used by Gilles Deleuze to refer to stim­ ulating and productive encounters between systems characterised by funda­ mental difference. More than imitation, assimilation, or representation, these encounters foster creative flows of energy, generating unprecedented material configurations and unpredictable responses. Taking it as the conference topic and the title of this book is another way to expose and reflect the duality and openness inherent in artistic research. The wording “aberrant nuptials” quotes Deleuze’s above-mentioned passage on the wasp and the orchid, pro­ posing the relation between art and research as a double-capture, for which Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne has been appropriated as an allegory. Passionately chased by Apollo, Daphne tries to escape him through an aberrant metamorphosis: a becoming-tree that rescues her, even if at the price of losing her human condition. Becoming-non-human, becoming-tree, becoming-bark, becoming-foliage, becoming-branches, becoming-roots are many of the modes through which Daphne herself becomes a zone of indeterminacy, a radicalised body without organs (literally), inaccessible to love, protected from desire. Yet, the wasp and the orchid work together for the fertilisation of other orchids: that is, they labour with a goal and purpose (actually contradicting Deleuze’s fundamental idea). In this sense, Apollo and Daphne offer a more extreme form of nuptials, one that radically excludes reproduction (mis)functioning only through pure flows of desire. They operate a complete deterritorialisation of the strata, making it difficult (if not impossible) to think their nuptials in terms of a plane of organisation. They point towards another kind of plane, one that doesn’t follow the arrangement of structures, nor the transformation of structures into other structures, but that makes transversal modes of commu­ 16

Introduction nication thinkable and materially graspable. It is the nomadic plane “of those who only assemble” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 24) looking for an adequate outside with which to assemble in heterogeneity, rather than a world to repro­ duce. Aberrant nuptials, thus, are assemblages of heteroclite things and codes, building inconsistent planes of consistency, planes of metastable consistency, that are neither consistent nor inconsistent. Such planes are populated and traversed by “the most disparate of things and signs . . . : a semiotic fragment rubs shoul­ ders with a chemical interaction, an electron crashes into a language, a black hole captures a genetic message, a crystallization produces a passion, the wasp and the orchid cross a letter . . .” (ibid., 69), creating unexpected connections, and fostering the emergence of assemblages, whether in the form of collective assemblages of enunciation or machinic assemblages of desire, which is the topic of the third DARE conference, held in December 2019.

Aberrant Nuptials: Deleuze and Artistic Research 2 This book comprises thirty-six chapters, including essays by established Deleuze scholars who have been working on interferences between art and philosophy such as Anne Sauvagnargues, Audronė Žukauskaitė, Bracha L. Ettinger, Edward Campbell, jan jagodzinski, Kamini Vellodi, Ronald Bogue, Simon O’Sullivan, and Zsuzsa Baross (among others), but also by musicians and art practition­ ers who reflect Deleuzian and Post-Deleuzian discourses in their artworks, such as Barbara Bolt, Jean-Marc Chouvel, Anders Elberling, Andrea Eckersley, Elizabeth Presa, Henrik Frisk, Lucia D’Errico, Stefan Östersjö, Steve Tromans, Tero Nauha, and Terri Bird. More than looking at philosophical and art prac­ tices separated from each other, all the chapters move internally between dif­ ferent areas of knowledge production, developing hybrid modes of thought that capture art-enhancing components in philosophical discourses and phil­ osophically intriguing tendencies in artistic manifestations. In this sense, and within different understandings of artistic research, the authors map current practices, contributing to a creative expansion of horizons, materials, and methodologies, offering a panoramic view at the intersection between music, art, and philosophy. Some authors can be situated more on the Deleuze studies side, others more on the side of artistic research. The important point here is that all of them are willing to look at the other side, to engage with other thoughts and practices, and to come to new modes of expression. The discip­ linary variety of the contributors (composers, architects, performers, phil­ osophers, sculptors, film-makers, painters, and writers) and their geographical diversity (Australian, European, Indian, Japanese, North and South American, South African) testify to the current global relevance and richness of both artis­ tic research and Deleuze studies, confirming the importance of events such as the DARE conferences. Every discipline and every cultural context bring their specific perspectives and unique contributions to ongoing debates on the arts. In addition to the printed part of this book, there are two online repositories accessible for free, containing: (1) the full video recordings of all the presenta­ tions as they were delivered during the conference; and (2) multimedia artworks 17

Paulo de Assis produced and presented by conference delegates at the conference (which are integral parts of their respective chapters in this book). Taken together, these two channels are intended as a comprehensive repository of recordings and images from the conference, enabling readers who were not at the conference to have a sense of what was originally presented. Ideally, readers of this book will pause at certain points and access the multimedia repositories for further insights. A hyperlink to all multimedia components is included as a QR code in the appendix to this book. Resulting from expanded versions of conference presentations and perfor­ mances, the thirty-six chapters presented here are very diverse. Even if relating (with different degrees of proximity or distance) to the overarching topic of aberrant nuptials, they are profoundly different and heterogeneous. Thus, there were several possible options in terms of ordering and structuring the collec­ tion. At the end, we decided to go for a tripartite grouping, following three related topics that clearly emerged from the reading of the final versions of the chapters: time, becoming, and movement. Many chapters, but particularly those related to music and performance give great relevance to different notions of time and temporality. As the Orpheus Institute is a centre for advanced stud­ ies (including research and education) in music, it seemed obvious and natural to start the book with this group of twelve chapters, reflecting varied sounds and gestures of time.6 Time is an explicit key topic in the chapters by Jean-Marc Chouvel (who explores the three syntheses of time), Ronald Bogue (on nonpulsed time and on the specific temporality of molecular oscillators), Zsuzsa Baross (on the notions of temporal break and novelty), and Steve Tromans (on the temporal immanence of the event). Other chapters that don’t overtly discuss time, do however make important statements regarding, for exam­ ple, the time of cross-cultural interactions (Edward Campbell), the continu­ ous variation of the line in dance (Oleg Lebedev), the rhythm of syncopated and unsyncopated playing (Jonas Rutgeerts), affective and physical (pianistic) stuttering (Gustavo Penha), the problem of synchronisation (Henrik Frisk and Anders Elberling), topographies of time (Stefan Östersjö, Christer Lindwall, and Jörgen Dahlqvist), the materialisation of time between music and architec­ ture (Marianna Charitonidou), and the temporal form of capture (Terri Bird). Moreover, throughout the essays, the reader will find references to many other Deleuzian music-related topics, such as rhythm, refrain, variation, difference and repetition, oscillators, and geomusic. Next, throughout all the chapters, we could identify a strong emphasis on the notion of becoming, which is certainly consistent both with the general aims of the DARE conferences and the specific idea of aberrant nuptials. Moreover, the concept of becoming seems clearly appropriate for a compilation of essays on Deleuze and the arts, stressing the processuality of creative practices. Focusing on essays with a dominant theoretical and philosophical tone, the next group of twelve chapters (part two) is intended as a little treatise on becomology. “Little” because it is by no means a fully-fledged “treatise”; “treatise” still, because these

6 I am grateful to one of the anonymous reviewers of this book, who suggested this subtitle to us.

18

Introduction chapters largely involve theoretical explorations of becoming; and “on beco­ mology” because they address numerous different ways of thinking the concept of “becoming,” crucially escaping the dangers of “ontology,” insisting on the modulatory power of thought and practices. “To become” is not “to become this and that,” it is a permanent movement of changing oneself into something different, without an end. Starting with Anne Sauvagnargues’s concise and incisive description of aberrant nuptials as one of Deleuze and Guattari’s most powerful inventions that led them to a fragmentary notion of knowledge and perception, this section continues with Bracha L. Ettinger’s artistic explora­ tions of the matrixial eros, moving beyond death-drive and life-drive towards “copoietic modes of becoming.” Kamini Vellodi investigates the relations between research and thought, arguing for the primacy of the latter and con­ testing dominant definitions of artistic research, while Spencer Roberts looks at Deleuze and Derrida through the aesthetico-conceptual lenses of artistic research. The Anthropocene and the becoming-earth of thought and art prac­ tices is at the heart of jan jagodzinski’s and Paolo Vignola’s essays, while Emilia Marra addresses the becoming-algorithm of our era (with its “algorithmic gov­ ernmentality” and “programmatic code”), and its implications on pure imma­ nence. The artists Antonia Pont, Suzie Attiwill, and Andrea Eckersley reflect on their own practice, offering insights on changing bodies and corporealities (Pont), on the becoming-interior of interior design (Attiwill), and on fashion as a practice of subjectivation (Eckersley). Guillaume Collett looks at two con­ flicting notions of transdisciplinarity in Deleuze and Guattari, and the visual artist Liana Psarologaki explores a “theory of becoming” bringing the thoughts of Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, and Brian Massumi into critical dialogue with one another. The last twelve essays deal with more varied and heterogeneous themes, including reflections on images, movement, and fabulations. They emanate from literature, painting, experimental music, theatre and performance, bioart, cinema, photography, and sculpture. In their colourful variety they resonate with the poetic title of Elizabeth Presa’s installation Garden of Small Nuptials, which we chose as the subtitle of this whole section. In such a garden, it is the Deleuzian concept of movement that seems to be mostly at work. There is the movement of drawing (Janae Sholtz), the movement of the face and its futures (Lucia D’Errico), the movement of cinematic time (Katie Pleming), the flux in a virtual domain of photographs (Peter Burleigh), and the movement of flesh becoming roots and bark (Elizabeth Presa). The movement from fiction and mythos to fabulation is sharply presented in relation to Deleuze’s “Memories of a Sorcerer” (Simon O’Sullivan) and to performance art (Tero Nauha). The power of transposing images from one realm to another is addressed in rela­ tion to painting by Barbara Bolt (reflecting on her own artworks), and by Lilija Duobliene (on Vladimir Tarasov and Bill Viola). Bioart is discussed in relation to Raymond Ruyer and sonification (Audronė Žukauskaitė), and concrete examples of robotic art are scrutinised in relation to Guattari’s concept of ecosophy (Zornitsa Dimitrova).

19

Paulo de Assis This tripartite division of the volume and its grouping of chapters under a common denominator is, of course, merely indicative, and only one among many different possible paths. The reader has the freedom to navigate the vol­ ume in any other way that she or he might find more productive, finding other links and connectors between the different topics and approaches. The index of names and titles offered at the end of the volume might be useful and worth exploring for such connectors and cross-references. To conclude, I would like to express my gratitude to all those that helped and contributed to the conference, all my colleagues and staff at the Orpheus Institute, and to the authors of the essays, especially for their willingness to actively rework their chapters. Personally, my warmest thanks go to Paolo Giudici for his indefatigable determination in bringing the conference to a safe port, and to Edward Crooks for his sensitive and intelligent copy-editing. A last word of thanks is due to the anonymous manuscript reviewers of this book, who offered highly valuable feedback and suggestions that very much improved its final version. References Alliez, Éric. 2015. “Structuralism’s Afters: Tracing Transdisciplinarity through Guattari and Latour.” Theory, Culture & Society 32 (5–6): 139–158. Assis, Paulo de. 2018. Logic of Experimentation: Rethinking Music Performance through Artistic Research. Orpheus Institute Series. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Assis, Paulo de, and Lucia D’Errico, eds. 2019, forthcoming. Artistic Research: Charting a Field in Expansion. London: Rowman & Littlefield International. Assis, Paulo de, and Paolo Giudici, eds. 2017. The Dark Precursor: Deleuze and Artistic Research. Orpheus Institute Series. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Attiwill, Suzie, Terri Bird, Andrea Eckersley, Antonia Pont, Jon Roffe, and Philipa Rothfield. 2017. Practising with Deleuze: Design, Dance, Art, Writing, Philosophy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Bogue, Ronald. 2003a. Deleuze on Cinema. New York: Routledge. ———. 2003b. Deleuze on Literature. New York: Routledge. ———. 2003c. Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Borgdorff, Henk. 2012. The Conflict of the Faculties: Perspectives on Artistic Research and Academia. Leiden: Leiden University Press.

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Bouaniche, Arnaud. 2007. Gilles Deleuze, une introduction. Paris: Pocket. Campbell, Edward. 2013. Music after Deleuze. London: Bloomsbury. Collet, Guillaume, ed. 2019. Deleuze, Guattari, and the Problem of Transdisciplinarity. London: Bloomsbury. Criton, Pascale, and Jean-Marc Chouvel, eds. 2015. Gilles Deleuze: La pensée-musique. Paris: Centre de documentation de la musique contemporaine. Cull Ó Maoilearca, Laura. 2019, forthcoming. “Artistic Research and Performance.” In Assis and D’Errico 2019, forthcoming. Deleuze, Gilles. 1994. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1968 as Différence et répétition (Paris: Presses universitaires de France). ———. 2003. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Translated by Daniel W. Smith. London: Continuum. First published 1981 as Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation (Paris: Éditions de la Différence). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as Mille plateaux (Paris: Minuit).

Introduction ———. 1994. What Is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1991 as Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Minuit). Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. 2007. Dialogues II. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Rev. ed. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1977 as Dialogues (Paris: Flammarion). Emerling, Jae. 2019 (forthcoming). “Theses on the Concept of Research.” In Assis and D’Errico 2019 (forthcoming). Flaxman, Gregory. 2017. “Introduction: Deleuze: In Practice.” In Attiwill et al. 2017, 1–15. Frayling, Christopher. 1993. Research in Art and Design. Royal College of Arts Research Papers 1 (1). London: Royal College of Art. Guattari, Félix. 1965. “La transversalité.” Revue de Psychothérapie institutionnelle 1: 91–106. Translated by Rosemary Sheed as “Transversality,” in Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics (London: Penguin, 1984), 11–23. ———. 1972. Psychanalyse et transversalité: Essai d’analyse institutionnelle. Paris: Maspero. Translated by Ames Hodges as Psychoanalysis and Transversality: Texts and Interviews 1955–1971 (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2015). ———. 1992. Chaosmose. Paris: Galilée. Translated by Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis as Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). ———. 2009. “So What.” In Soft Subversions: Texts and Interviews 1977–1985, edited by Sylvere Lotringer, translated by Chet Wiener and Emily Wittman, 64–80. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). First published 1985 as an untitled interview with Michel Butel (L’autre journal 6, June 12).

Nabais, Catarina Pombo. 2013. Deleuze: philosophie et littérature. Paris: L’Harmattan. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1999. “The Birth of Tragedy.” In The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, edited by Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs, translated by Ronald Speirs, 1–116. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. First published 1872 as Die Geburt der Tragödie (Leipzig: Fritzsch). Sauvagnargues, Anne. 2005. Deleuze et l’art. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Translated by Samantha Bankston as Sauvagnargues 2013. ———. 2013. Deleuze and Art. Translated by Samantha Bankston. London: Bloomsbury. First published as Sauvagnargues 2005. Somers-Hall, Henry. 2012. Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Deleuze, edited by Daniel W. Smith and Henry Somers-Hall, 1–12. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spinoza, Benedict de. (1994) 1996. Ethics. Edited and translated by Edwin Curley. London: Penguin. First published 1677 as Ethica in Opera posthuma (Amsterdam). This translation first published 1994 in A Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and Other Works, edited and translated by Edwin Curley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Van Tuinen, Sjoerd, and Stephen Zepke. 2017. “Introduction: Art History after Deleuze and Guattari.” In Art History after Deleuze and Guattari, edited by Sjoerd van Tuinen and Stephen Zepke, 7–20. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Williams, James. 2013. Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition: A Critical Introduction and Guide. 2nd ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Zepke, Stephen, and Simon O’Sullivan, eds. 2010. Deleuze and Contemporary Art. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Part 1

Sonic Nuptials: Sounds and Gestures of Time

Deleuze’s Syntheses of Time and Their Aesthetical Prolongations Form, Style, and Achievement Jean-Marc Chouvel IReMus—CNRS—Sorbonne Université, France

Introduction As is well known, music for a long time has been a central subject of investi­ gation for philosophers.1 Even if Deleuze did not publish a book specifically on music, as he did on painting or cinema, it is significant that one can find allusions to music or to sound in nearly all his philosophical works. This can be related to the central role of his philosophy of time, and its close relationship to the necessity of depicting the mental processes that lead to ideas and the creation of concepts. This necessity, and the investigation of the relationship between time and mental processes, is shared today by considerations devel­ oped for both musical analysis and composition. Even if they are less evident and widely spread than his influential models of the rhizome and multiplic­ ity or than the well-known opposition between the ritornello and the gallop, Deleuze’s propositions for a comprehensive philosophy of time have much to say to musicologists and composers, and imply a truly innovative way of think­ ing musical experience. I will try to give some evidence for this strong relationship, first on the cen­ tral theme of musical form—which is a reminder that my own proposition for cognitive analysis is contemporary with the publication of Difference and Repetition—and to get through the whole aesthetical ambitus of Deleuze’s philosophy, dealing with a truly challenging conception of style and artistic achievement.



1 Unless otherwise stated, translations are my own.

25

Jean-Marc Chouvel

The three syntheses of time and their relation to cognitive analysis We learn nothing from those who say: “Do as I do.” Our only teachers are those who tell us to “do with me,” and are able to emit signs to be developed in heterogeneity rather than propose gestures for us to reproduce. —Gilles Deleuze (1994, 23)

In the preface to the English edition of Difference and Repetition, Gilles Deleuze states that chapter 3, “The Image of Thought,” seems to him “now . . . the most necessary and the most concrete” (Deleuze 1994, xvii). “Finally, in this book,” he writes, “it seemed to me that the powers of difference and repetition could be reached only by putting into question the traditional image of thought.” And he continues: “I mean not only that we think according to a given method, but also that there is a more or less implicit, tacit or presupposed image of thought which determines our goals when we try to think” (ibid., xvi). It seems to me, and this is in any case the idea that I will try to explore, that what Deleuze says of thought is exactly transposable to what listening repre­ sents for music. Yet there is very little direct connection to music in Difference and Repetition. However, the chapter that serves as a prelude to his reflection on the image of thought is a very rigorous exposition of the problem of temporality, a philosophy of time that helps us understand many fundamental elements that characterise this complex phenomenon, this thought without words that music is. When I sought to deepen the notion of form of time, a schema appeared to me that was both a method—specifically a method for analysing music—and what I term a cognitive representation (Chouvel 1993, 2004, 2014). What is a cogni­ tive representation if not an image of thought? Cognitive analysis will always deal with this ambiguity, which makes it a very powerful interpretative tool. First it will be important to understand the two terms difference and repetition in Deleuze’s thought and in the field of music. This will lead to a proposal for an interpretation of the three syntheses of time that Deleuze developed as a prelude to his chapter on the image of thought in a musical context. Finally, it will be necessary to explore, on different levels, the powerful tools Deleuze’s philosophy can bring to the relationships between form of time and signification. It goes without saying that these are only areas for reflection. Deleuze’s thought involves the whole history of philosophy and we always have to guard ourselves against abusive analogies or simplifications. The construction that he proposes around the notion of time is both very original and inspired by powerful synthetic considerations that summon Plato or Kant with an ease that would be beyond a non-philosopher. It is developed in works of often imposing dimensions that call upon notions quite foreign to ordinary musicology. But it is also true that some of Deleuze’s remarks, even if he did not intend them to be applied a priori to the musical field, make it possible to give to musical theory a truly uncommon opening onto the concept and a new depth of perspective. The musical examples Deleuze himself provides show a relevance that musicol­ ogists can only admire. 26

Deleuze’s Syntheses of Time and Their Aesthetical Prolongations Deleuze’s thought is often reduced to a vision of morphology that is articu­ lated around specific figures such as rhizomes, ritournelles (ritornellos, refrains, or rounds), or molecularities that constitute very “mediated” and popular points of focus. Mireille Buydens’s (1990) book on Deleuze’s aesthetic revolves around the problem of form in his thought. The form is, in various ways, pre­ sented as a “dead line,” as a production that “is fraudulently passed off as the reflection of [the] given”; as the “source of the constituted systems’ despot­ ism,” it tends to “present as necessary what is only contingent.” Worse still is “to give form,” as “to make a drawing is to lose the thing and its dynamism” (Buydens 1990, 33). We find this same idea in Daniel Charles’s “La musique et l’oubli” (Music and forgetting). “The function of music today is therefore vital: music is anti-memory. In Deleuze and Guattari’s terms: the functionality of music can be ‘good’ if it releases molecular sound streams, as opposed to the large molar machines of the industrial age” (Charles 1976, 268). Deleuze said much the same to Claire Parnet: “Music is an anti-memory. It is full of becom­ ings, animal-becoming, child-becoming, molecular-becoming” (Deleuze and Parnet 1987, 33). But Daniel Charles draws concrete conclusions for musical aesthetics. According to him, if tonal music was “built on a functionalism of memory, Cage’s ‘pantonality’ substituted for it a functionalism of oblivion” (Charles 1976, 269). There is no point in returning to this debate here; instead, I would really like to reconsider the fixed conception of form and memory that seems to me absolutely improper and that could introduce a misunderstanding of the true plasticity of memories, especially in the context of music. This is not just a proposition from a musicologist: there is a strong relationship with actual considerations for musical creation.

Difference, repetition, and paradigm If I have chosen to focus on Difference and Repetition, it is because the book’s title summons up notions that seem fundamental to the theory of music. Musical analysts, whatever their object or method, in a conscious or non-conscious manner, deal with musical works according to these two axiomatic criteria. What is musical analysis but the identification in a work of differences and rep­ etitions? Does not the recognition of exogenous criteria, whether they relate to substances or forms, also operate in a categorisation system that involves differentiation and the identification of similarities? The schema of paradig­ matic analysis itself seems to be written as the demonstration of this principle. What is a paradigmatic analysis, if not writing, driven by time, difference, and repetition? We can understand it through the following schema:

Figure 1.1.

!

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Figure 1.1. Schematic diagram of a paradigmatic analysis of the sequence AABCACBA. In this kind of representation, called a formal diagram, difference between paradigms appears on the vertical axis, while repetition of the paradigm is visible on the horizontal axis.

Jean-Marc Chouvel Today, this schema might appear obvious to us. Considerable use was made of it within the framework of musical analysis (and beyond). Nevertheless, it deserves to be questioned on several points. The first point concerns what is meant by the original identification, A A, which is prototypical of what repeti­ tion is. “Repetition,” writes Deleuze (1994, 15), “is attributed to elements which are really distinct but nevertheless share strictly the same concept.2 Repetition thus appears as a difference, but a difference absolutely without concept.” It is easy enough to understand: the first A differs from the second, but only because of their successive presentation in time. They claim not a real identity but a psychological identity through being listened to: what is repeated has a very different nature from when it was discovered for the first time. On this sub­ ject, Deleuze quotes Hume’s famous thesis: “Repetition changes nothing in the object repeated, but does change something in the mind which contemplates it” (Deleuze 1994, 70). If some identity is concerned, it is an identity as a concept, and that is what is meant, in semiology, by the term paradigm. This is a very important remark for music, although it may seem trivial for philosophy. There is a structural level on which this remark is particularly crucial: that of the note. The note is indeed the first musical concept—a concept that allows music to free itself from sensitive realisation and be positioned on a mathemat­ ical level or on the level of the idea. Sensitive representation involves all perfor­ mance data, starting with the choice of instrument. It matters little, from the point of view of the idea, whether a piece by J. S. Bach or Tom Johnson is played on this or that instrument by this or that instrumentalist. The musical reality at stake is not that of the real sound. In example 2 from What Is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari, following Plato’s Parmenides, note a specific example of the concept of interesting time: [Plato] creates concepts but needs to set them up as representing the uncreated that precedes them. He puts time into the concept, but it is a time that must be Anterior. He constructs the concept but as something that attests to the pre-existence of an objectality [objectité], in the form of a difference of time capable of measuring the distance or closeness of the concept’s possible constructor. Thus, on the Platonic plane, truth is posed as presupposition, as already there. This is the Idea. (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 29)

The anteriority of the note is always unsaid, consubstantial with the presup­ position of the note as truth for the music. The musical universe of the note is therefore a Platonic universe. The note is precisely what allows the music to be repeated. But from the beginning of Difference and Repetition, Deleuze (1994) warns us of the essence of repetition: “In all these cases, that which repeats does so only by dint of not ‘comprehending,’ not remembering, not knowing or not being conscious” (16)—hence the implication of repetition in psychoanalytic theory. Deleuze notes the turning point of Freudian thought when, in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, “the death instinct is discovered, not in connection with the destructive tendencies, not in connection with aggressivity, but as a 2 Note that Deleuze’s expression could be the perfect definition of a paradigm.

28

Deleuze’s Syntheses of Time and Their Aesthetical Prolongations result of a direct consideration of repetition phenomena. Strangely, the death instinct serves as a positive, originary principle for repetition” (Deleuze 1994, 16). In addition to the apparent contradiction between death and the affirma­ tion that repetition implies, Deleuze raises another question, that of the rela­ tion between repetition and disguises. “The disguises and the variations, the masks or costumes, do not come ‘over and above’: they are, on the contrary, the internal genetic elements of repetition itself, its integral and constituent parts (16–17). “In short, repetition is in its essence symbolic; symbols or simulacra are the letter of repetition itself. Difference is included in repetition by way of disguise and by the order of the symbol” (17). If we return to paradigmatic analysis, this means two things: on the one hand, what musicians call variation, which is the equivalent of disguise over time, is inherent in paradigmatic equivalence; on the other hand, it is the repetition of something to do with the symbolic (we had a glimpse of it when speaking of the note) but also with the simulacrum. Deleuze (1994, 17–18) then insists on the very specific nature of repression that is at work in repetition: “Take an uncovered or bare repetition (repetition of the Same) such as an obsessional ceremony or a schizophrenic stereotype: the mechanical element in the repe­ tition, the element of action apparently repeated, serves as a cover for a more profound repetition, which is played in another dimension, a secret verticality in which the roles and masks are furnished by the death instinct.” One cannot help thinking of Giacinto Scelsi, incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital, tirelessly repeating on the piano the same note, A♭, before radically modifying his aesthetics and delivering to the world his Quattro pezzi su una nota sola (1959). Musical repetition is not a free game, it is not simply the acquisi­ tion or the maintenance of a formula, which would be innocuous, closed by the technicality of the gesture. It concerns the very foundation of the musical in the vital capacity that it expresses. After underlining the part of difference that any repetition bears, Deleuze brings it closer to another antagonism that runs through the entire musical body, of which we can probably even say that the music is the sonorous inscription: that between Eros and Thanatos. Music is a great device to repress (refouler) (not, as it is suggested, to entertain [défouler]), and the first instinct of listening is to stay deaf, even though the music is pre­ cisely where lived experience is mediated. The mask is the true subject of repetition. Because repetition differs in kind from representation, the repeated cannot be represented: rather, it must always be signified, masked by what signifies it, itself masking what it signifies. I do not repeat because I repress. I repress because I repeat, I forget because I repeat. I repress, because I can live certain things or certain experiences only in the mode of repetition. I am determined to repress whatever would prevent me from living them thus: in particular, the representation which mediates the lived by relating it to the form of a similar or identical object. Eros and Thanatos are distinguished in that Eros must be repeated, can be lived only through repetition, whereas Thanatos (as transcendental principle) is that which gives repetition to Eros, that which submits Eros to repetition. (Deleuze 1994, 18)

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Jean-Marc Chouvel Is musical hedonism merely the reverse of morbidity, repetition allowing movement from one to the other as one would change a glove? Deleuze is then led to differentiate a static repetition and a dynamic repetition and, further, a repetition measure and a rhythm repetition. Although this idea was inspired by Matila Ghyka’s book on the golden ratio (1931), which deals more with spa­ tial rhythms, this differentiation is immediately musical: the repetition meas­ urement is linked to isochrony while repetition rhythm is linked to the notion of figure. Here in Deleuze’s thought, it is fascinating to understand how he animates an affair that, in musical practice, is not visibly evident. As soon as a musician begins to make a sound, the musician inscribes something that com­ mits him- or herself: making music is not a vain hobby—it’s a matter of life and death. We have merely unveiled the subject of repetition. Even though we have seen that a radical conception of reality plunges the world into the systematic and absolute difference of everything, another use of difference is proposed by Deleuze in the second chapter of Difference and Repetition; nevertheless, we will not comment on that here. If we simply return to the diagram of the paradig­ matic analysis, the difference is marked by the appearance of element B—that is to say, of a sufficiently contrasting element that is not accepted in paradigm A. This heterogeneity, which is a conceptual heterogeneity, is never self-evident: it can only be guaranteed by an acuteness of listening. But listening may be unable to build it, unable to operate a reliable distinction. Bach then becomes always the same song, serial music a grisaille, and popular music merges, at best, with its genre. We need here to be very clear: only someone who comprehends the difference between these terms is in a position to enter music’s true finality, to produce in him or her the effect of this difference, which gives depth to the work, and, with the work, to one’s own existence. Scelsi, who spent so much time repeating an A♭, is said to have claimed that no one could pretend to be a pianist if he or she could not play the same note in fifteen different ways. However, in the conclusion of Difference and Repetition Deleuze gives another requirement for difference than its mere withdrawing from repetition: “If a dif­ ference is necessarily (in depth) part of the superficial repetition from which it is drawn, the question is: Of what does this difference consist? Is it not itself the most contracted degree or the most concentrated level of a past which coexists with itself at all levels of relaxation and in all degrees? This was Bergson’s splen­ did hypothesis: the entire past at every moment but at diverse degrees and lev­ els, of which the present is only the most contracted, the most concentrated” (Deleuze 1994, 286). Indeed, for B to be different from A, we must be able to stand before A, in the same present, in a co-presence, which imposes the moment of the present to reach a certain thickness. This is the essential and profound gesture of thought, as it is exercised most when we listen to music. The difference is constructed by thought, and is perpendicular to the superficial time of mere information transfer. Thinking, listening to music, is a complex mental act whose paradig­ matic “standard” presentation is only a first stage. Deleuze further specifies:

30

Deleuze’s Syntheses of Time and Their Aesthetical Prolongations The present difference is then no longer, as it was above, a difference drawn from a superficial repetition of moments in such a way as to sketch a depth without which the latter would not exist. Now, it is this depth itself which develops itself for itself. Repetition is no longer a repetition of successive elements or external parts, but of totalities which coexist on different levels or degrees. Difference is no longer drawn from an elementary repetition but is between the levels or degrees of a repetition which is total and totalising every time; it is displaced and disguised from one level to another, each level including its own singularities or privileged points. (Deleuze 1994, 286–87)

This passage is decisive, because what Deleuze describes here is precisely the notion of temporal structure; that is, the ability to split the flow and to group the elements in higher-level parts where they coexist. This operation is not a given of the flow itself: it is an act of the mind. This act of the mind, we can imagine, is oriented or prepared by various indices proposed by the flow. If the mind remains free to carry out its operations as it sees fit, it cannot be absolutely indifferent to the musical proposal (even if this obviously occurs in many lis­ teners): it must share with it something, some path. If not, how can one claim to have listened to the music itself and not to particular fantasies unrelated to the object of listening?3 This act of the mind is what we are from now on going to call the synthesis of time. The word synthesis here is obviously circumscribed by a reference to Kant. Yet what Deleuze develops in Difference and Repetition is probably clearer in a naive reference to the musical aesthetic act than it is in the context of philo­ sophical judgement.

The three syntheses: structure, memory, and the form of time Deleuze distinguishes three syntheses of time. He summarises the nature of these three syntheses as follows: The first synthesis, that of habit, constituted time as a living present by means of a passive foundation on which past and future depended. The second synthesis, that of memory, constituted time as a pure past, from the point of view of a ground which causes the passing of one present and the arrival of another. In the third synthesis, however, the present is no more than an actor, an author, an agent destined to be effaced; while the past is no more than a condition operating by default. The synthesis of time here constitutes a future which affirms at once both the unconditioned character of the product in relation to the conditions of its production, and the independence of the work in relation to its author or actor. (Deleuze 1994, 93–94)



3 In his course on Kant at Vincennes, Deleuze summarises the phenomenological upheaval introduced by Kant: “The subject does not constitute appearance, it is not constituent of that which appears to it, instead it constitutes the conditions under which appearance appears to it” (Deleuze 2019a, translation adjusted).

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Jean-Marc Chouvel Habit, memory, finality: along with the three classic “moments” of time, past, present, and future, the three syntheses maintain a specific relationship, which Deleuze explains, in another order, as follows: In all three syntheses, present, past and future are revealed as Repetition, but in very different modes. The present is the repeater, the past is repetition itself, but the future is that which is repeated. Furthermore, the secret of repetition as a whole lies in that which is repeated, in that which is twice signified. The future, which subordinates the other two to itself and strips them of their autonomy, is the royal repetition. The first synthesis concerns only the content and the foundation of time; the second, its ground; but beyond these, the third ensures the order, the totality of the series and the final end of time. (Deleuze 1994, 94)

All this may sound eminently abstract, and I will try to give each of the syn­ theses a meaning for the analysis of music, not as an analysis of the autonomous semiotic object that would be a score or the furrow of a disc, but as a phenom­ enon involving listening to a living subject. What is the first synthesis, the one that Deleuze assigns to habit and to the present? It is the one by which time is constituted. “Time,” writes Deleuze (1994, 70), “is constituted only in the originary synthesis which operates on the repetition of instants. This synthesis contracts the successive independent instants into one another, thereby constituting the lived, or living, present. It is in this present that time is deployed.” The first synthesis is, to give a concrete example, the one that occurs when we hear a note or a sound: we are not able to apprehend each vibration separately; we subsume the effect of the oscil­ lations of our tympanum in a homogeneous sensation. The first synthesis is done without noticing. It is, Deleuze says (1994, 70), “by no means a memory, nor indeed an operation of the understanding: contraction is not a matter of reflection.” This operation is infra-conscious. It is purely passive. It would be wrong, however, to limit it to a very low level of structure: it is very likely that this “passivity” attracts higher levels of integration; the stability of the vibra­ tions that makes it possible to synthesise a note in this way partakes of the same nature as the stability of the notes that makes it possible to fix a scale or a modal colour. The passivity of the first synthesis can thus gradually gain consistent registers of our listening habits. The questioning of these habits in the music of the twentieth century has met strong resistance. Because the passivity of the first synthesis is eminently comfortable, it is the location for all forms of conservatism. Deleuze’s thought gives us a formidable opportunity to return to an essential feature of structuralism, inherited from linguistics, which, if we follow Anne Sauvagnargues’s summary, says: “meaning is second and not first; it is formed of non-significant elements; it is unconscious and, finally, it is col­ lective or social, which implies at the same time it is theoretical and practical— that is, pragmatic—existence” (Sauvagnargues 2009, 178). “Each contraction, each passive synthesis,” writes Deleuze (1994, 73), “constitutes a sign which is interpreted or deployed in active syntheses.” What is the nature of this deployment? Deleuze (1994) describes it as being measured “by the combination of forms of repetition, by the levels on which 32

Deleuze’s Syntheses of Time and Their Aesthetical Prolongations these combinations take place, by the relationships operating between these levels and by the interference of active syntheses with passive syntheses” (73). This description is decisive because it describes what a structure in time is, a question structuralism has never been able to address because it did not know how to deal with a psychologically coherent model. On the other hand, Deleuze denounces the “illusions of psychology.” Psychology, he writes, has “made a fetish of activity. Its unreasonable fear of introspection allowed it to observe only that which moved” (73). He thus speaks of a primary “soul,” whose vocation would be “contemplative,” which would join, beyond or rather below sensory-motor habits, “the thousands of passive syntheses of which we are organically composed” (74). But what is interesting in relation to music is that it allows him to reconsider the notion of pleasure. “Elements of pleasure may be found in the active succession of relaxations and contractions produced by excitants, but it is a quite different question to ask why pleasure is not simply an element or a case within our psychic life, but rather a principle which exercises sovereign rule over the latter in every case. Pleasure is a principle in so far as it is the emotion of a fulfilling contemplation. . . . There is a beatitude associated with passive synthesis” (74). It is important to reflect upon the following questions in order to understand what many “contemplative” musics of the twentieth century have sought: Why is initial musical identification made through sound and why does it address our organs? How can sound be an element of synthesis sufficient for musical pleasure? Why does this kind of musical figure always aim not only at a pure present but a present that is of the type of self that Deleuze (1994, 78) qualifies as “dissolved self ”? Hence the need for “another time in which the first synthesis of time can occur” (79). It is memory that becomes the reference for the second syn­ thesis of time, because it “constitutes the being of the past (that which causes the present to pass)” (80). Deleuze then makes explicit reference, after working through the first synthesis citing Hume and Bergson, to Husserl’s retention4 and the idea that by memory “the former present finds itself ‘represented’ in the present one” (80). It is clear that the particularity of memory is caused by the ability it gives thought to go through time, where habitually it would be content to agglomerate it. Deleuze also speaks of “nesting,” and recalls the idea of Bergson’s cone: “When Bergson speaks of ‘successive stages’, successive must be understood figuratively as a function of the eye which scans his proposed drawing; for, in their own terms, all the levels are supposed to coexist with one another” (315n6). This image fits perfectly with the idea of structure as proposed by cognitive analysis. The ability to go through time, which is characteristic of the formal part5 of temporality—that which is particularly exercised by paradigmatic analysis—includes an implication that Deleuze (1994, 83) emphasises (in refer­ ence to Bergson): it is indeed a matter of projecting the “elements into a space

4 It is tempting to compare Deleuze’s three syntheses of time with Husserl’s three retentions. While not absolutely unrelated as a structural proposition, the main idea of retention remains within the second synthesis. 5 In the sense used in cognitive analysis.

33

Jean-Marc Chouvel of conservation and calculation. At the same time however, once it has become an object of representation, this repetition is subordinated to the iden­ tity of the elements or to the resemblance of the conserved or added cases.” Reminiscence, as described by Proust, is the infinite that carries the totality, highlighting an important aspect of the behaviour of memory: its ability to set in motion not only the object in its boundaries but also the grip of the network that structures its use. Deleuze (1994, 85) writes, “Why is the exploration of the pure past erotic.” In music, the great force that suggests a whole development from a small element, as a whole cadence is evoked from a note, actually reveals a structural link whose erotic nature is pregnant. The semitone relationship, because it summarises the entire diatonic structure, is undoubtedly a proto­ typical example of this erotic function of music. This is obvious in early Beethoven, in his first piano sonatas, for example, but it was probably already present in Bach, and well before Bach . . . Psychologists have introduced different types of memory: working memory, short-term memory, long-term memory, and so on. In any case, it is often a question of designating conscious manipulations of objects. If such manipula­ tions are necessary for musicians, it is not obvious that they are present as such in listeners. The whole problem is in the as such. We do not hear the subjects of a fugue as such, we do not understand, except as the result of a very particular education, a certain agreement or a certain theme as such, we do not understand the dodecaphonic series as such. If music is an exercise in arithmetic, the soul does it “without knowing how it does them,” as Leibniz so aptly says (Leibniz 1997, 105). There is something deeply disturbing here: as if all musical effort was an invisible ghost, but whose presence really haunts the works, as if the inhabitants lived in the wallpaper of their room without ever becoming aware of the bricks of which the walls are made. Is this the way to interpret distrust of music vis-à-vis representation? In Difference and Repetition, the presentation of the third synthesis of time begins with an eminent philosophical debate, involving Descartes, Kant, God, I, the cogito (“I think”), and so on. But it introduces a concept that can sharpen the musician’s curiosity: the form of time. What is the form of time? Deleuze begins by paraphrasing Kant: it is “the form under which undetermined exist­ ence is determinable by the ‘I think’ . . . my undetermined existence can be determined only within time as the existence of a phenomenon, of a passive, receptive phenomenal subject appearing within time” (Deleuze 1994, 86). He continues with a remark that resonates particularly for music if one replaces what Deleuze calls “activity of thought” with “listening”: I is an other, or the paradox of inner sense. The activity of thought applies to a receptive being, to a passive subject which represents that activity to itself rather than enacts it, which experiences its effect rather than initiates it, and which lives it like an Other within itself. . . . It is as though the I were fractured from one end to the other: fractured by the pure and empty form of time. . . . Time signifies a fault or a fracture in the I and a passivity in the self. (Deleuze 1994, 86)

34

Deleuze’s Syntheses of Time and Their Aesthetical Prolongations If the first synthesis leads to the dissolution of the ego, the second is that of the fractured self. Why is this of such interest to music? The answer is probably found in a remark that Deleuze makes about the second synthesis: The sign of the present is a passage to the limit, a maximum contraction which comes to sanction the choice of a particular level as such . . . among an infinity of other possible levels. . . . as if the philosopher and the pig, the criminal and the saint, played out the same past at different levels of a gigantic cone. . . . Each chooses his pitch or his tone, perhaps even his lyrics, but the tune remains the same, and underneath all the lyrics the same tra-la-la, in all possible tones and all pitches. (Deleuze 1994, 83–84)

Music would thus be the very structure of alienation, since one would never hear anything but the music one carries within oneself: as an uncontrollable habit (first synthesis), music frozen in the archetypes of the past, as memory immemorial (second synthesis), and—if one tries to become aware of music and to approach it as an act of thought—as a representation definitely doomed to stay away from the nature of the phenomenon. It is true that listening to music means being in unison with another thought, not with the distance of the language of words, but in the synchronicity of the act of thought, which is not quite the same thing—hence, the permanent referral of music to the question of affects. However, the problem of alienation does not arise only in the sense that the listener is under the influence of the musical thought of the composer. Composers, or improvisers, are not free from this alienation sim­ ply because of their status as “creators” of music. This is obviously quite sim­ plistic, first, because musicians are just as “tuned” to the public as composers, and most composers are subject to the opinions—the taste—of the market, whether mass or institutional, and, second, because they are impregnated with an aesthetic device, to use Helmut Lachenmann’s term, which directly affects their tools, their reflexes, and their compositional languages. With the third synthesis, Deleuze proposes another reading of the form of time: it is a form in which the beginning and end no longer coincide. “My end is my beginning,” sings Guillaume de Machaut’s trio. In his second course on Kant at Vincennes, Deleuze described ancient time as a cyclic figure subordi­ nate to movement, while Kantian time is a pure straight line. “Still speaking musically, I would say that with Kant time acquires a tonal character; it ceases to be modal” (Deleuze 2019b). To show the violence of the operation, Deleuze takes the metaphor of a spring that relaxes. “Time,” he wrote, “no longer limits the world, it will traverse it” (ibid.). Shakespeare’s “time is out of joint” ably encapsulates this operation that puts time out of itself (Hamlet 1.5, Shakespeare [1623] 2005, 691). However, it can be objected that this archaic circularity of tone is preserved in tonal music in its harmonic structure. Nevertheless, what develops, through the dominant and its resolutions, through modulations and developments, is indeed the idea of a course, it is the idea of a destiny. In a way, tonal music as such remains in the cycle limitation, transgression, repair; however, in reality what develops over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is the ability to deploy this scheme quite differently, to identify new plans of com­ 35

Jean-Marc Chouvel position, which may have less to do with the problem of tonal harmony. The time of modern consciousness, as put forward by Hölderlin—and, in music, by Beethoven—is thus opposed to that of ancient consciousness, for its linear form is marked by a break. “We may define the order of time as this purely for­ mal distribution of the unequal in the function of a caesura. . . . The caesura, along with the before and after which it ordains once and for all, constitutes the fracture in the I (the caesura is exactly the point at which the fracture appears)” (Deleuze 1994, 89). In formulating a cognitive model of musical listening, it was shown that hyphenation is a necessary element of structuring. The observation of the clos­ ing of the object, whether really lived or projected, is the condition of access to the higher level of the structure; that is, to a space where the form is consid­ ered from that of a higher-level temporal object. Hyphenation is the condition for the structuring to be realised in time, and not as a simple abstract scheme “outside time.” Hyphenation is therefore a moment of essential reconfigura­ tion, where the past is realised and loses its present value, and where the future opens and needs to be anticipated. The whole problem of music is whether it should anticipate itself according to a schema chosen in the past, or whether it should open itself up to other conditions of possibility. The fracture is there. It’s the moment of difference. This is the moment of creation. It is the moment when philosophy invents modes of existence and possibilities of life, accord­ ing to the formula that Deleuze and Guattari (1994, 71) in What Is Philosophy? borrow from Nietzsche. Deleuze is also reminded by Nietzsche of the idea of eternal return. “We produce something new only on condition that we repeat— once in this mode which constitutes the past, and once more in the present of metamorphosis. Moreover, what is produced, the absolutely new itself, is in turn nothing but repetition: the third repetition, this time by excess, the repe­ tition of the future as eternal return” (Deleuze 1994, 90). Deleuze (1994, 91) notes the two meanings of eternal return refused by Zarathustra: one before the devil (the eternal return does not concern the whole of time), the other before the animals (it is not a “rengaine”6). Hyphenation is the introduction of a dissymmetry between the future and the past; moreover, this dissymmetry can only occur with the occurrence of a new compositional plan and probably also a transition from extensive to intensive. “In [the third] synthesis of time, the present and future are in turn no more than dimensions of the future: the past as condition, the present as agent” (Deleuze 1994, 93). The third synthesis “ensures the order, the totality of the series and the final end of time” (94). And further Deleuze writes: “The complementarity between the narcissistic libido and the death instinct defines the third synthesis. . . . There is an experience of death which [it] corresponds to” (113–14).



6 Translated in Deleuze (1994, 91) as “a hurdy-gurdy song.”

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Deleuze’s Syntheses of Time and Their Aesthetical Prolongations Music, when it does not stop on the path of simulacra, tells us something fun­ damental about the consciousness of time. Not only the intimate consciousness of time, but the cosmic consciousness of time. Music is the intimate reflection of the metamorphosis of the self: it speaks of birth but also death. It speaks above all of the metamorphosis of consciousness, the metamorphosis of pleasure into desolation, and of desolation into pleasure. Music speaks of each of the three syntheses and all their possible metamorphoses, and through this it speaks of the unconscious. This is because the three syntheses are, according to Deleuze, “constitutive of the unconscious” (Deleuze 1994, 114). We can then state, in reverse, so to speak, Lacan’s axiom that the unconscious is structured as music (and not as language), which implies that music is not, in my idea, a language. The idea that music is inseparable from Deleuze’s three syntheses of time, which we have just explored in detail, only confirms this extremely strong link between music and the unconscious, even if the uncon­ scious sometimes gives the impression of having worries other than music. Likewise, dreams may seem to be without music or colour, where it’s like not being able to hear the music from a film. It is in this sense that it concerns the unconscious.

Form of time and signification If music says something about the unconscious, it is through analysis that we will be able to account for it. We will therefore try to return to the initial prop­ osition that we formulated (figure 1.1) to better understand how music, which is both a form of time and a form of thought, can be described in terms that emerge, through its determinations and the activity that underlies them, in the fundamental issues that Deleuze has exposed in Difference and Repetition.7 If we then take up the formal diagram (which I initially called the material/time diagram), we immediately want to find what is different and what is repeated on the two main axes of the diagram, the difference being perpendicular to the horizontal statement of the repetitions. But to obtain the paradigmatic analysis as it has been represented, we have taken into account the work, the infra-conscious, of the first synthesis, which is easy to understand because it is a habit that goes unnoticed. Whenever one takes into account the reality of the breadth, the diagram reveals this differentiation drawn from repetition, some­ thing you can find in innumerable kinds of music. A pulsation or a rhythmic pattern ensures a kind of stabilisation of the constitution of the phases of the apprehension of the musical discourse, and without doubt it provides also a guarantee of synchronicity with the pre-cognitive hearing capacities of the lis­ tener. Possible segmentation markers (breaths, transients, accents, percussion, etc.) generally always facilitate the first levels of structuring.

7 Deleuze (2019b) concludes his second lecture on Kant as follows: “In other words, the active determi­ nation of the ‘I think’ can only determine my existence in the form of the existence of a passive being in space and in time. Which amounts to saying that it is the same subject which has taken on two forms, the form of time and the form of thought, and the form of thought can determine the existence of the subject as the existence of a passive being.”

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Jean-Marc Chouvel

Figure 1.2.

!

Another aspect concerns the ambiguity of conferring a static, spatialised form to the deployment. Any differentiation implies holding together the differentiated elements. This is why music is always torn apart in its analysis between two dual entities: objects and transitions (e.g., notes and intervals). There is a specific difficulty with the fact of thinking time when the only representa­ tion available is space.

Figure 1.3.

!

The possibility of overlaying structural levels is much less limited in music, syntagmatically, than it is for language. A small piano piece by Mozart can easily create up to ten structural levels. The music can afford this, melodically as well as polyphonically. But the way to operate the real-time hyphenation that trig­ gers this structuring is not obvious. There are many viable solutions. Some vol­ untary ambiguities of certain musical parameters must be taken into account. Recognition, as well as the evocative potential of a particular musical material, is related to the memory of a subject—that is to say to his or her past. Criteria of segmentation, or grouping, which amounts to the same, are due to prefer­ ences, or specific training, and depend on cognitive personality. The idea of a “neutral” or “immanent” analysis dreamt up by semiology seems somewhat utopian. Musicians themselves, in their interpretations, often illustrate various possibilities of phrasing, the relative value of which is not always guaranteed by the logic of the indisputable work.

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Figure 1.2. The repetition substrate on which the difference is elaborated. S and ☐ are the markers of segmentation and the repeated supports of differentiation. Figure 1.3. The fact of differentiation presupposes that at least two successive entities are held together. These couples also define transitions.

Deleuze’s Syntheses of Time and Their Aesthetical Prolongations

A A B C A C B A set of paradigms 

A B C

A A

B

A C

C

B

time series

time

A

paradigms

A A B C A C B A S S s s s S s s s S

set of paradigms

silence breadth

A B C

A A

B

A C

C

B

time series

time

A

paradigms

!

Figures 1.4-5.

This means in fact that the work is to be considered as a conjunction of planes of consistencies, and not as a univocal schema. We have shown in several examples that the temporal trajectory of a work can thus have several dimen­ sions; this reinforces the idea that the type of metamorphosis of the subject that music involves not only is a kind of roadmap but also is concerned by a change in the criteria of consciousness.

!

Figure 1.6.

Time then becomes the parameter of a deployment, in a diagram that unfolds to give place to the transitions between the positions. This attempts to provide a representation where essence and existence are coordinated. 39

Figures 1.4-5. Various ways of constituting the structuring of a time series. Figure 1.6. Another coding of the time series in terms of transitions.

Jean-Marc Chouvel

!

Figure 1.7.

The representations, as paradigmatic diagrams that one thought to be defin­ itive, show here their real nature: they are only projections.8 They always ignore a dimension that is extra, even if they unconsciously contain the appropriate information. This is probably what analysis is about: the emergence of a new dimension. Let us consider a very common example, the sonagram. The sona­ gram has one dimension more than the waveform it comes from. This is due to the introduction of an analytical category: frequency. Moreover, it also implies a modification of the time scale, from the sample to the integration window. Here, it may be useful to give an illustration of what motivates “the great refrain [ritornello],” the one that traces, to quote Deleuze and Guattari (1994, 191), a “transversal” that is “irreducible.” But we must not see in these diagrams an effect of pure formalism: behind the diagram, we have to consider that there is a human brain listening to the music, and living it. When Deleuze analyses time, psychoanalysis is always in the background. And it is perhaps this kind of reading that must also accompany the formal diagrams. Something like that shown in figure 1.8.

!

Figure 1.8.

8 Even if the example shown is discontinuous, the concepts are valid in continuous spaces (see Chouvel 2006; see also Chouvel, Bresson, and Agon 2019).

40

Figure 1.7. Reading the paradigmatic analysis in terms of a phase diagram. The plane [0,t,x] corresponds to the paradigmatic diagram (formal diagram), the plane [0,x,x’] to the phase diagram. Figure 1.8. Interpretation of temporal structures carried by music.

Deleuze’s Syntheses of Time and Their Aesthetical Prolongations While neither very precise nor unmistakable, to be convinced that such an understanding of music is possible, the best experience might be to read the first two pages of Chapter 11 of A Thousand Plateaus, “Of the Refrain” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 310–12), while listening to Ravel’s La valse.

The meaning of temporality In spring 1984, Deleuze gave a lecture on “Truth and Time” at Vincennes University. It was part of a larger reflection on cinema. It was the second impor­ tant moment in Deleuze’s work, alongside Difference and Repetition, where phil­osophy of time appears as a central and profound topic in his philosophy. Music is considered more explicitly because some of Deleuze’s students at that time were musicians. In a more didactic way than in the founding essay that was his thesis, Deleuze throughout those lectures gave an impressive historic pano­ rama of the evolution of the concept of time, and of the difficulties it conveys. He dated the concept of synthesis back to Plotinus in a specific manner: The nun [eternal now] will clearly be the matrix of time, but why? All Plotinus’s genius—and I mean, all of it—to my knowledge, it is indeed the first, the first great text that tells us what the activity of the soul is as soul. The activity of the soul as soul is súnthesis, “synthesis.” Third Enneads, Chapter 8, Book 7 . . . of “Eternity and Time.”9 It is in this fundamental chapter that we learn that the fundamental activity of the soul is the nun, and, thus, synthesis. (Deleuze [1984] 2019b)

Returning to the possibility of the nun as the main activity of the soul is corre­ lated to the frame we gave to cognitive analysis. Of course, it comes from a very different point of view; however, the consequences are the same. Listening is in some way essential in the activity of the soul that converts the inanity of the passing present into a moment that is captured by a memory and that becomes a form (or the other way round). The form Deleuze and Guattari explored in relation to musical time was the ritornello, as I have just mentioned. Deleuze, in a genial moment of philosophical inspiration, introduces a kind of coun­ terpoint to the ritornello theme: the gallop. As he says, there are not only birds, there are also horses (Deleuze [1984] 2019a). How does that resonate in the mind of a musician?—I answer: there is not only the voice, there are also percussion instruments, there is not only melody there is also rhythm, there is not only the song of the sky there is also the beating of the earth, and so on. One can hear that as a poetic metaphor. But it is impossible to understand the pertinence of this point without keeping in mind the entire reflection about time that led to the synthesis. Right after introducing the notion of the gallop, Deleuze gives a brand new meaning to this dialectic by confronting it with the central dialectic involved in the psychology of time: life and death.

9 [We have been unable to locate the exact passage referred to by Deleuze—Eds.]

41

Jean-Marc Chouvel If what we see in the crystal—or, rather, in the sonic instance, what we hear in the crystal—is the very foundation of time, if time itself is what we hear in the crystal, if the crystal is the noise of time, then the noise must be doubled. And, indeed, what is the gallop? The gallop is the cavalcade of the present as it passes by: speed, accelerated. • The cavalcade of present moments passing by: that’s a gallop [a galop]. And the ritornello, what’s that? • The ritornello is the round of the past that is always the same. You see, I would like to have two representations of time that correspond to the gallop [a galop] and the ritornello [a round]. I don’t know the sign for each—the sign can vary. I mean, we must try to assign them. So we’ll introduce a new pair: life–death. What I want to show, as you already know, is how an idea can grow little by little. So here I am introducing two markers: a sign of life—a sign of death. And I tell myself that there are authors for whom life is aligned with the gallop [galop]. Life is the cavalcade of present moments passing by. I know one, at least, a great creator of films, for whom life is aligned with the galop [gallop] and who finds its perfect sonorous expression in the French cancan. That is [Jean] Renoir. And death—that is the unending ritornello [the round] that is always the same, and that presses upon us—melancholia, if you will. The little song that thrusts us into the past, that carries us back to the past, that brings us to tears. The little ritornello, that’s death. Another possibility: the cavalcade of present moments passing by makes us run. But run where? Not at all run in life: we run to the grave. And where do the present moments run? They run to the grave. And, in contrast, the little ritornello is true life. It is what saves us from racing to the grave. It is proof of the eternal. It is what adorns us like a halo, a sonorous halo, and exempts us, if only for a moment, from racing to the tomb. Here the signs are inverted: it is the ritornello [round] in which life abides, and the gallop [galop] that leads us to death. (Deleuze [1984] 2019a)

What Deleuze says about the ritornello and the gallop was already clear in the double nature of repetition and its relation to life or the death drive. The kind of reversibility that Deleuze underlines leads us to consider the possibility of both interpretations coexisting in a given piece, when it might be the way we emphasise “with our soul” a certain element that gives it one turn or another. This is another point about music, perhaps about art in general: the relation between meaning and form is not a precise denotation but involves strong con­ notations. Denotations are fostered by linguistic considerations. But connota­ tions are never guaranteed and are highly dependent on context. Nevertheless, the semantic power of a work of art is probably related to its capacity to confront the essential structures involved in its deployment. The example of Ravel’s La valse is perhaps characteristic of the way a ritornello can lead to a gallop, and how this gallop leads to catastrophe. Another very interesting example is found at the end of Berg’s Wozzeck: Marie’s son is riding his wooden horse singing “hop hop!,” simulating a gallop; he goes round in a circle, joining the round of the other children, who are singing “Ring-a-ring o’ roses /  A pocket full of posies,” a typical childish chorus; just then, another group of children arrives to announce Marie’s death. “Where is she then?” the child asks, continuing his carousel as if the ritornello disguised into a gallop was protecting him from taking into account the very fact of the drama. There are many other comments one could make about the whole situation, for example, the way Berg ends this 42

Deleuze’s Syntheses of Time and Their Aesthetical Prolongations moment by focusing on a mere oscillation between two notes. However, it is not my purpose here to multiply the examples, as in fact all music is concerned with what we are discussing.

The problem of style and the question of musicality As we now understand it, the playground of music is strongly related to the question of life and death. What is really puzzling is how Deleuze, who was neither a musician nor a musicologist, always manages to address precise prob­ lems of musical structure. One of the best examples is what he says about Édith Piaf and the question of style and novelty. “I think that Édith Piaf was a great singer, had an extraordinary voice, that in addition she had this thing of singing off-key and constantly catching up the wrong note, which is this kind of system of unsteadiness where you do not stop catching up, which seems to me to be the case of any style” (Deleuze and Parnet 1988–89). This is a very interesting remark. Undoubtedly, Deleuze’s analytical view of Piaf ’s vocal behaviour is perfectly correct; what’s more, he points out the sys­ tematicity of the unsystematic behaviour of Piaf ’s way of singing. Importantly, this means that we are not confronted with a mistake, which would be what is expected. Deleuze specifically pays attention to the lower levels: he speaks not about singing but about voice, and in doing so describes a detail that is in fact more important, and tells us more about Piaf, and “what she was looking at.”

Figure 1.9a–b.

The sonograms shown in figure 1.9 focus on her way of singing the word musique, and specially the que in two occurrences of the lyric “vraie tordue de la musique.” She repeats very precisely the same “error,” with a specific porta­ mento, for so long that one may feel she is “out of tune.” But the fact that it is so precisely the same strongly suggests that it is not an artefact but a precise figure conveying characteristic behaviour. The intentionality does not really matter, but that Deleuze understands it as a precise element of her vocal personality, allowing him to recognise it as a stylistic marker, is very important. 43

Figure 1.9a–b. Sonograms of Édith Piaf’s interpretation of her famous song L’accordéoniste (sonagrams realised with Sonic Visualiser).

Jean-Marc Chouvel

Figure 1.10.

In figure 1.10, the sonogram shows the lyrics “arrêter la musique.” The que begins with a slightly different portamento; however, because she sings a cap­ pella we can see even more clearly that the second harmonic is astonishingly emphasised. It was already the case in the other samples, and it tells us some­ thing very important about the way Piaf also uses the formants of her voice to shape the timbre and give a very specific sensation on this precise vowel (e muet), which in French ends the word musique. These details are not just details, of course: they support an intimate identity. Musicology will increasingly become involved in these kinds of discussion, which can be related to a kind of “micro-musicology” but which allows investigation of a notion that few trea­ tises take as their subject: musicality. Every musician knows the importance of such details: they come with hard work, because the musician recognises them as what gives the flavour of truth to what he or she plays and listens to. Style is determined in the lowest levels of structure, and thus is closer to sen­ sation; it escapes from perceptual formatting, telling us more about the body itself. It seems then that it is more related to the first synthesis, and this would make sense with the initial idea of stylus as the “way of writing.” But style is not only a “conservative” fact, a habitus: it implies movement, and as an impulse for novelty is very important in Deleuze’s ideas.

Artwork and achievement When I first read What Is Philosophy? I was very impressed by the cleverness of Deleuze and Guattari’s overall vision of compressing the complete history of thought into such a small volume. But what impressed me even more was what the authors present as the apotheosis or the key of the whole adventure. It comes in chapter 7, the last chapter, called “Percept, Affect, and Concept.” Moreover, it seemed to me that the entire edifice converged on a very delicate clue: “The artist creates blocks of percepts and affects, but the only law of cre­ ation is that the compound must stand up on its own. The artist’s greatest dif­ ficulty is to make it stand up on its own” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 164). In 44

Figure 1.10. Sonogram of Édith Piaf’s interpretation of her famous song L’accordéoniste.

Deleuze’s Syntheses of Time and Their Aesthetical Prolongations my opinion, this is the very matter of art. What does ça tient mean? It seems so fragile, so insignificant, so . . . subjective. All that for that! Nevertheless, within myself, it was a kind of confirmation of something I always knew, intimately, as an artist. Deleuze and Guattari elaborate on this small idea: And yet, in principle at least, sensation is not the same thing as the material. What is preserved by right is not the material, which constitutes only the de facto condition, but, insofar as this condition is satisfied (that is, that canvas, color, or stone does not crumble into dust), it is the percept or affect that is preserved in itself. Even if the material lasts for only a few seconds, it will give sensation the power to exist and be preserved in itself in the eternity that coexists with this short duration. (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 166)

And further on: We write not with childhood memories but through blocs of childhood that are the becoming-child of the present. Music is full of them. It is not memory that is needed but a complex material that is found not in memory but in words and sounds: “Memory, I hate you.” We attain to the percept and affect only as to autonomous and sufficient beings that no longer owe anything to those who experience or have experienced them. (Ibid., 168)

The corollary of all this is that not everything holds—there is a particular state, a particular connivance between matter and consciousness that is the very fact of art. Similarly, not all analyses are worthless: some hold, some do not. This condition, which is the unspoken and delicate core of thought, is at the centre of philosophical preoccupations. This is undoubtedly the reason why Deleuze wrote the following lines, which are central to understanding why he pushed his reflection on art so far: “The nonphilosophical is perhaps closer to the heart of philosophy than philosophy itself, and this means that philosophy cannot be content to be understood only philosophically or conceptually, but is addressed essentially to non-philosophers as well” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 41). It is in this sense that the philosophy of Deleuze is addressed to musicology and even more to music: it works essentially as part of the effort to explain the conditions of music’s existence. How is the effort of thought deployed to seize time, to make a synthesis of it? I have tried to show that it was this same effort that was played out in our musical consciousness, starting from the ephem­ eral sensation, starting from the nebula of evocation, from the mysteries of myth. The musical experience is very often referred to as the inexpressible, the unspeakable. The lesson of Deleuze, who was neither a musician nor a musicol­ ogist, may be: what we cannot speak about we must learn how to speak of.10

10 “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence” is the last sentence of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (Wittgenstein 1961, 74).

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Jean-Marc Chouvel References Buydens, Mireille. 1990. Sahara: L’esthétique de Gilles Deleuze. Paris: J. Vrin. Charles, Daniel. 1976. “La musique et l’oubli.” Traverses 4: 14–23. Chouvel, Jean-Marc. 1993. “Musical Form: From a Model of Hearing to an Analytic Procedure.” Interface 22 (2): 99–117. ———. 2004. “Structural Analysis and Cognitive Activity: Towards Real-Time Methods in Musical Analysis.” Journal of New Music Research 33 (1): 19–29. ———. 2006. “Ce que l’occident doit encore apprendre de l’orient: Peut-on lever les présupposés de l’analyse musicale occidentale?” In De la théorie à l’art de l’improvisation: Analyse de performances et modélisation musicale, edited by Mondher Ayari, 171–80. Sampzon, France: Delatour. ———. 2014. “Categories and Representation in Cognitive Musical Analysis.” Sonus 35 (1): 17–35. Chouvel, Jean-Marc, Jean Bresson, and Carlos Agon. 2019. “L’analyse musicale différentielle: Principes, représentation et application à l’analyse de l’interprétation.” Electroacoustic Music Studies Network. Accessed 26 June. http://www.ems-network.org/spip. php?article294. Deleuze, Gilles. (1984) 2019a. “Gilles Deleuze vérité et temps cours 58 du 20/03/1984—1.” Transcribed by Elsa Roques. La voix de Gilles Deleuze en ligne. Accessed 4 May 2019. http://www2. univ-paris8.fr/deleuze/article.php3?id_ article=337. ———. (1984) 2019b. “Gilles Deleuze vérité et temps cours 58 du 20/03/1984—2.” Transcribed by M. Sarrazin. La voix de Gilles Deleuze en ligne. Accessed 3 May 2019. http://www2.univ-paris8.fr/ deleuze/article.php3?id_article=338. ———. 1994. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1968 as Différence et répétition (Paris: Presses universitaires de France). ———. 2019a. “Sur Kant; Cours Vincennes: Synthesis and Time. Cours du 14/03/1978.” Translated by Melissa McMahon. Webdeleuze. Accessed 25 June. https://www.webdeleuze.com/ textes/66.

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———. 2019b. “Sur Kant; Cours Vincennes; Cours du 21/03/1978.” Translated by Melissa McMahon. Webdeleuze. Accessed 26 June. https://www.webdeleuze.com/ textes/67. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as Mille plateaux (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1994. What is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1991 as Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Minuit). Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. 1987. Dialogues. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1977 as Dialogues (Paris: Flammarion). ———. 1988–89. L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze. Filmed by Pierre-André Boutang. Paris: Montparnasse, 2004, 3 DVDs. Ghyka, Matila. 1931. Le nombre d’or: Rites et rhythmes Pythagoriciens dans le dévelopment de la civilisation occidentale. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. 1997. “Unpublished Comments on Bayle’s Note L (1705?).” In Leibniz’s “New System” and Associated Contemporary Texts, translated and edited by R. S. Woolhouse and Richard Franks, 96–107. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sauvagnargues, Anne. 2009. Deleuze: L’empirisme transcendental. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Shakespeare, William. (1623) 2005. Hamlet. In The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, edited by John Jowett, William Montgomery, Gary Taylor, and Stanley Wells, 2nd ed., 681–718. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Text based on the folio edition first published 1623 (London: Jaggard and Blount). Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1961. Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus. Translated by D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuiness. London: Routledge. First published 1921 in Annalen der Naturphilosophie.

When Sounds Encounter One Another . . . Zsuzsa Baross Trent University, Canada

This short essay is the third in a series of responses to an invitation/provo­ cation arriving from the Orpheus Institute, Ghent.1 It is also a hesitant, cau­ tious, but not timid entry to a foreign domain, not of music (as Deleuze would say, this would be “too much” for me) but simply sound, or music simply as sound. This transgression of discursive boundaries is not without precedent and draws upon the example of two formidable precursors. The first, indirect, justification comes from Deleuze himself, in his own conference presentation “Le temps musical” at IRCAM (see Deleuze 2015): non-musicians can encoun­ ter music—“despite their incompetence.” In so far as music renders audible invisible forces and organisations (precisely of time), it confirms something new in the domain of a philosophy that “finished believing in a hierarchy” that goes from the simple to the complex, from material to spirit . . . namely, that vital durées and rhythms hold their articulation by the molecular processes that traverse it (Deleuze [1978] 2019).2 The second lesson is by Foucault, who, in the preface to Boulez’s College de France lectures also admits “to [being] incapable of speaking of music”—both warning of the danger and holding out the promise of such a transgression. Unlike painting, theatre, or the cinema, “music was deserted by discourses from the exterior” (Foucault 2005, 19), but this desertion saved it from being taken to where it does not belong.3 The danger I assume is the domestica­ tion of the insolence of music that holds on to its irreducible heterogeneity to our habitual reflections on the great transformations in modern art in the twentieth century; or, rather, the danger for us (for music is impervious to such attempts of domestication) is the risk of falling back to our habits. At the same time, the promise of transgression is that it brings the unexpected, the gift of



1 Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own. 2 In the actual lecture, given under the different title “Rendre audibles des forces non-audibles par elles-mêmes” (Deleuze [1978] 2003, 2007a), on the occasion of an encounter organised by Pierre Boulez between philosophers (Barthes, Foucault, and Deleuze) and composers (Luciano Berio, Michel De­ coust, Gerald Bennett, and Jean-Claude Risset), Deleuze speaks of an encounter with musicians. But the writing itself encounters music in the rigorous philosophical sense. In his Dialogues with Claire Parnet (1987, 7): “To encounter is to find, to capture, to steal. . . . Capture is always a double-capture, theft a double-theft, and it is that which creates . . . an asymmetrical block, an a-parallel evolution, nuptials, always ‘outside’ and ‘between.’” 3 “La peinture, en ce temps, portait à parler; du moins, l’esthétique, la philosophie, la réflexion, le goût— et la politique . . .—se sentaient-ils le droit d’en dire quelque chose. . . . Le silence, cependant, pro­ tégeait la musique, préservant son insolence” (Foucault [1982] 2005, 19; Painting, at the time, promoted discourse; at least, aesthetics, philosophy, reflection, taste—and politics . . . believed they had the right to say something about it . . . Silence at the same time protected music, preserving its insolence.)

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Zsuzsa Baross a discovery. For while Foucault could not accompany the inventions Boulez brought to music as a contemporary, the chance encounter with the work, a chance brought about by friendship, took him to domains where he, by train­ ing and education, did not belong but where he discovered something new and foreign to his education: it is not sense (spirit) but form (matter) that is the bearer of the new. With these lessons in mind I begin. When sounds encounter one another, says my title: as an interrogative, this “when” asks about the conditions when or under which sounds may or will encounter one another—as opposed to colliding, bouncing off, or shattering, or falling off, or never arriving to take up position on an acoustic plane that other sounds, in their articulation, conjugation, com-position occupy and maintain, in time. (If a sound-object, writes Boulez, remains immediately iden­ tifiable with its source as noise, mechanical or machinal of motors, etc., and thus refers to the actual, the anecdote, and the real, it will absolutely isolate itself from the compositional context in which it is situated [Boulez 1963, 19]). On the other hand, occupying the adverbial position in the phrase, this same “when” refers to a time event, to what passes when sounds do encounter one another, in the strong sense of the term encounter: forming not an amalgam, as when individual notes of a harmonic scale simultaneously sounding together vanish into a single dominant tone, but giving birth instead to something new, a sound object or time event, an assemblage or a melody, a motive or a figure or a block of duration, whose composite elements reciprocally modify one another, but do not vanish without a trace, do not become absorbed by what they in common compose. Hence the second sense of the “when” concerns the time of the birth of something new, or the time event that passes when sounds—but not colours, or perfumes, or flavours—encounter one another. For they do encounter one another—vertically, horizontally, diagonally. And the vertical relations themselves further differentiate into three different groups.4 Sounds have an infinite capacity and a unique propensity—a talent and an active appetite—for encounters. Therein lies the secret and one of two pillars or conditions of the possibility of music, that there will be Music. Even the aleatory play of church bells ringing out simultaneously on Easter Sunday— on Godard’s soundtrack, in King Lear (1987): sublime music—or the random rhythm that cowbells on a mountainside compose: calling out, reaching out, anticipating and responding to one another, or resounding together. Or staying with Godard, the punctuated rattle of his electric typewriter (an IBM Selectric?) rhythmically replaying the last twenty characters composes a musical ritornello that rhythmically accompanies his images throughout Histoire(s) du cinema (1988–98). Or yet again, there is the “music” in typewriters (since music can find itself in no matter what object, as observes one of Roberto Bolaño’s characters in the famous novel 2666). Of the music of typewriters simultaneously at work Bolaño himself writes, magnificently, taking us back to the scene, when, long

4 “As with vertical relationships, they can be divided into three groups; from point to point, from a group of points to another group of points, and finally the relationships between groups of groups” (Boulez 1963, 25, as translated in Boulez 1971, 27).

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When Sounds Encounter One Another . . . ago, dozens of typists would be manipulating ([literally], by hand) with light­ ning speed the keys of their machines in the same room.5 Even speech may take up residence on a sonoric plane and on the reverse side of meaning, as do the cries of Artaud (that Derrida tried to imitate in reading his “Artaud le moma”6). In Nam June Paik’s Tribute to John Cage (1973/76) there is a long sequence of the extraordinary stutter of Alvin Lucier, a composer, who, speaking of Cage, repeatedly tries and retries and fails again and again for long seconds to launch the first syllable of his words but the sounds of this speech defect is purely musi­ cal. By contrast, the most fluent speech—an actress reciting a passage from Proust—can be transcribed to a partition and its alterations of pitch, cadence, and rhythm, and as Philippe Manoury shows in his College de France lectures (2017), can be played by computer as a musical instrument. And regarding writ­ ing itself as musical, one could mention the writing of Louis-Ferdinand Céline or Derrida, making the orality of language audible in the text. Even silences compose with one another, as in Cage’s 4'33", which is com­ posed of three unequal parts and, in the lived experience of a performance, with the sounds in the room, of living bodies, breaths, movements, coughs; and on Harvard Square, where in 1973 Cage sets up his silent piano, with the symphony of the city—turning the piece each time into a different live com­ position. (This does not amount to saying that there is no silence, as Cage said [1961, 8]. One hears the silence; it is silence—4'33"—that composes with sound.) In Éclat, Boulez (1965) thematises this very propensity of sound, makes it audible, turns it into music. In Répons (1981), he stages it: separates his solo instruments from the orchestra, which, on the occasion of its performance at the new Philharmonie in Paris in 2017, were placed high above the ground level, protruding above the audience, as if on different trays, dispersed in the auditorium, so that the instruments visibly call out, listen to, mirror, resonate with, answer the sound of the others, or wait for them to fall silent—in space (see Boulez 1981–84/85). (This same performance, the placing of different instruments in space, also stages space as that which makes sound, makes it perceptible as arriving or departing, from nearby or at a distance, as having a location, while at the same time, the same sounds make the creative force of space itself audible. It itself makes sound. I have no time here to discuss the strong analogy that exists between the force of sound that makes space audible and Heidegger’s notion of sculpture as an object that “spaces”: imposes a point of view, starting from which there is space: a far away and a close by and an around [Heidegger 2009]).





5 “At that instant, said Ingeborg to Archimboldi, I understood that there could be music in anything. Mrs. Dorothea’s typing was so quick, so particular, there was so much of Mrs. Dorothea in her typing, that de­ spite the noise or the clamor or the rhythmic beat of more than sixty typists working at once, the music that flowed from the oldest secretary’s typewriter rose far above the collective composition of her office mates, without imposing itself on them, but rather adjusting to them, shepherding them, frolicking with them” (Bolaño 2009, 825–26). 6 At the International Association of Literature and Philosophy conference, University of California, Irvine, 1993, Derrida read his entire text, originally prepared for the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in the high-pitched voice—or as the music—of Artaud.

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Zsuzsa Baross Unlike the grains of a tiny heap of sand held in the palm of a hand in the video Sondes by Ismail Bahri (2017)—which dance to/with the invisible sound waves passing through the heap, which they make visible but with which they do not copulate, compose, conjugate—sound objects have “affinity,” as particles have affinity, as molecules composing organic cells have affinity; the electronic hum of the refrigerator, the metallic sound of a tram (for this sound makes the materi­ ality of matter audible) turning at the corner penetrating my bedroom from a distance through the open window, just as the first vehicle starts up in the car park below . . . compose. A haecceity: it dawns, or in the words of Hölderlin: “Jeztz aber tagts!”7 This propensity for sound—acoustic or electronic, harmonic or inharmonic, voice or machine noise or musical tone . . .—not to remain solitary, standing alone, discrete and isolated, but to compose with its milieu, to compose (at the same time) vertically, horizontally, and diagonally with other sounds, points and clusters, to form non-directional assemblies or landscapes (which also give birth to the art form and sound objects called sound landscapes) . . . also accounts for the quest for new sounds, for the frenzied search for and research of sounds, for the creation of and experimentation with new sounds, of sounds that have never been heard, acoustic and electronic, for the exploration and the explosion of a universe of sounds, a sound universe, which now also includes the rediscovery of the most common and banal sounds. (Boulez recounts, with regret—for he was wary of both epigonal imitations of the new and of random, non-rational innovations—the example of John Cage as excessive: “I am think­ ing of poor John Cage who at the end of his life ate carrots with a microphone in front of his mouth in order to record the sound” [Boulez, Changeux, and Manoury 2014, 150]8). Before the war, Manoury says in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France (2017a), musical sound was characterised by four parameters: pitch, intensity, timbre, and duration. With the arrival of computers as instruments for making/ playing music, with the introduction of algorithms and the precise calculabil­ ity of durations and intervals, the pressure of the bow, the force of the piano’s hammer, and so on—things that are impossible to realise manually and often beyond the limit of human perception—one can now distinguish (and simul­ taneously manipulate) over sixty different parameters. But long before the electronic creation of sounds—outside both body and space, or before Edgard Varèse included an acoustic siren in his orchestration, or before a symphony was written for and performed on and by the Brooklyn Bridge, or the common use of instruments for purposes other than they were made, and so on—Berlioz wrote in 1843: “any resonant body that a composer puts to work is a musical instrument” (quoted by Manoury, 2017a).9 Boulez’s example above of an exception, for a sound not to compose with its milieu, will

7 “Jezt aber tagts! Ich harrt und sah es kommen,” “But now day breaks! I waited and saw it come” (Hölderlin 1998, 172, 173); in Lacoue-Labarthe’s beautiful translation, “mais voici le jour! je l’esperais, le vis venir” (Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe 1978, 206). 8 “Je pense à pauvre John Cage qui à la fin de sa vie, mangeait des carottes avec un microphone place devant sa bouche pour en enregistrer le son.” 9 “tout corps sonore mise en œuvre par un compositeur est un instrument musical.”

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When Sounds Encounter One Another . . . have been and continues to be contested by actual compositions: by Varese’s very identifiable siren, or by Philippe Manoury’s operas: his 60th Parallel (1995– 96) incorporates the metallic rotation and electronic buzz of an airport arrival panel; while his latest opera, Kein Licht (2017b), includes a live dog barking on cue onstage. (Hence the failure and isolation of which Boulez speaks would be better formulated in Deleuze’s language, not as the essential incompatibility of music and noise, but as the failure of becoming musical: to de- and reterrit­ oralise noise as sound. While, in contrast, Pierre Henry’s life work of musique concrète—indeed, a mass for the future—is an extraordinary demonstration of the limitless force of such de- and reterritorialisation.) In other words, the erasure not of the boundary but the opposition and hierarchy in Western music between noise and sound, between harmonic and inharmonic and sounds or bruit or noise has a long history. There are precur­ sors to Cage’s notion that “everything we do is music, or can become music” (Kostelanetz 2003, 74) or to Manoury’s definition (2017a): “music is born where it is received” (la musique nait là où on va bien l’accueillir). Cage himself receives the noises and voices of a whole city: converts Manhattan into a concert hall, asks where in that “hall” one should listen to it, and, using his I Ching random method, finds the three locations to perform each part of his “silence” (Paik 1973/76). But this receiveability, the possibility of “souffler sens,” breathing sense into sound, rests on a new sense of the sense of the musical: on what it means to deterritorialise sound from its banal anecdotal location and reterritorialise it on a new plane. Or better still, on assuming—as a project, as an unconditional compositional task, the question—paraphrasing Spinoza on the body:10 what is it that sounds can do? As if music after the war was saying we do not even know what is it that sounds can do, precisely in so far as, unlike grains of sand, they do encounter one another. In this reciprocal affinity and propensity for binding together lies the secret and one of two pillars of the condition of the possibility of a miracle: not of a Bach or Schoenberg but the miracle that there should be Music. The other pillar or condition is that there should be no pure sound. Not even or especially not in music. Deleuze: “Music has always had this object: individ­ uations without identity that form ‘musical beings’” (2007b, 296); and Boulez, cited in a footnote by Deleuze in the same text: “an object composed of the same absolute elements can . . . assume divergent functions” [ibid., 398n7]); and again Boulez, in Neurones enchantés: “A C sharp can take on a completely dif­ ferent sense depending on the context” (Boulez, Changeux, and Manoury 2014, 113; Un do dièse peut prendre un sens complément diffèrent selon le contexte). Boulez speaks of “sens,” Manoury defines music as “soufller le sens” to sound—sense, not meaning. “Sens sans sens,” as Nancy often says with regard to the sense of the body: a sense that comes before any “sense”—meaning or language or code or sign. That this sense should be immanent to the body is perhaps not insignificant, for the body’s own sounds—its souffle, precisely, its 10 “Experience has not yet taught anyone what the body can do” (Spinoza [1994] 1996, 71).

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Zsuzsa Baross breaths, whispers, songs, sobs, voices, speech, cries—the cry of Lulu, the sound of a throat singer, or what Hungarians call a siratò dal (crying over the body of the dead)—are situated on the limit. Not that they mark the beginning or ori­ gin of music, only that they are perpetually inclined toward becoming musical. Against the economy of Derrida’s differance, which is the law of the linguis­ tic sign, sound is fully present, present in the present (tense),11 despite the infinite variability of its sense, always defined/modified by its milieu, always in movement, following the movements of the composition of its (not) imme­ diate neighbourhood, its duration, intensity, timbre, . . . sound hides nothing, withholds nothing; yet, it is present each time differently, or as we can also say, it sounds differently each time in every different milieu. Even in the language of tonality, “aucune fonction ne se manifeste ainsi identique d’une série à l’au­ tre”—“not one function manifests itself as identical from one series to another” (Boulez 1963 48),12 which impurity or lack of identity provides for—for it is a provision, a gift—the infinite variability of the musical, of what is musical. This double pillar of the law means, on the one hand, that sounds will com­ pose with one another . . . form productive assemblages, blocks of durations, melodies, soundscapes, . . . which in turn will compose with others . . . ; and on the other, that these compositions are, despite Boulez’s adherence to a certain structuralism, sites of productive encounters or creations of the new. As we know, this double law does not apply uniquely to music alone, it is not here, not yet here, that the singularity of the musical lies. We may recognise the same law present, at work, providing for the possibility of infinitely produc­ tive relations by colours, for the production of new colours, and thereby the possibility of painting. (Deleuze himself often calls upon the analogy between painting and music. In A Thousand Plateaus we find: “Does the same thing, strictly the same thing, apply to painting?” [Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 298] and elsewhere in the same text, he links certain developments in painting to an encounter with music13). Of course, the becoming intensive of painting takes place on another plane than the conjugation and reciprocal play of colours, but it is on this latter level that becoming relies on coming first, without which there would be no painting.) On the one hand, colours also encounter one another, that is, reciprocally modify one another, without there being an original or pure colour. Giotto’s blue, the pale rose on my bedroom wall, the colour green, all are amalgams, the mixture of different colours that in their fusion correspond to the superim­ position (simultaneity) of different tones on the harmonic scale. On the other 11 Sound that is music, on the other hand, is not just present to perception, to the apparatus of hearing that is the ear. It “demands an expansion of perception to the limits of the universe” (“La musique est pure présence et réclame un élargissement de la perception, jusqu’aux limites de l’univers” [Deleuze [1986] 2003, 276, see also Deleuze 2007b, 296]). 12 Or again, Deleuze insists in “Occupy Without Counting”: “The fixed is not the Same and does not reveal an identity beneath variations. The contrary is true. It allows the identification of the variation, or individuation without identity” (Deleuze [1986] 2003, 277, as translated in Deleuze 2007b, 297; Le fixe, n’est pas le Même, et ne découvre pas une identité sous la variation, c’est le tout contraire. Il va permet­ tre d’identifier la variation, c’est-à-dire l’individuation sans identité). 13 “the didactic systems of Kandinsky, Klee, and Mondrian . . . necessarily imply an encounter with music” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 295).

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When Sounds Encounter One Another . . . hand, there is the ever-changing colour of the sea, the white of Cézanne’s table­ cloth, the turbulence of white clouds emerging from the thick forest of trees in a Monet—colours that are virtual, emanations that are the pure effect of encounters—of patches of yellows and greens that are themselves amalgams. An emblematic example is Simon Hantaï’s Tabula Lilas (1982)—white paint on a folded blank canvas. But in between the hollows of its folds, the colour lilac, which is not there, appears as a pure effect, it hovers over the canvas where it will not settle. For this same reason, the painting as an image cannot be repro­ duced here. Yet this effect is not musical. The musical of painting, of painting becoming music, is a time event.14 It is there, in the register of time, that the fault line between music and painting establishes or installs itself, and where the analogy between music and colour breaks down. The pure effect of Hantaï’s “lila,” or Cézanne’s white, this virtual presence, is instantaneous—that is, eternal; that is, timeless. Whereas, the encounter of sounds (which also distinguishes itself from their banal mixture or amalgam) never accomplishes itself. Always on course, that is, becoming, it has no end. No aim or finality. The melody itself, or the assemblage “it dawns,” or the 4'33" of silence certainly will come to an end, but this end is not a finality, which, once accomplished, will substitute itself for, negate, or otherwise render super­ fluous what has come before it. As Nietzsche says, a melody does not have an aim or an end, but in order to accomplish itself, it must reach its end (Nietzsche 1996, 360).15 Perhaps we can already say, while colours (are) encounter(s), music is a becoming. *

*

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The analogy breaks down, that is, we may discover something new (nothing new was ever born out of a comparison) where the plane of colour intersects with the voluminous dimension, with the space-time of sound or as Deleuze names this new concept, espace-temps sonore, which speaks with greater preci­ sion to a threefold relation, wherein sound’s relation to time and space is not that of a container, and “sonore” is the third face of a new dimension of an order of space-time. As for space—to hold for now the two faces of the same order apart (although as we will see this will not be tenable, even if Boulez, one of two principal interlocutors here, treats them separately)—sound has volume and in order to take place, it needs the space of volume. Manoury, as already mentioned, formulates this as “space constructs sound”: as distant or nearby, in movement, approaching or departing, or as present or absent, sounding from outside the frame [cinema], the stage or the concert hall. In contrast with all things visual, 14 For a lengthy discussion of an extraordinary example, Gérard Titus-Carmel’s Suite Grünewald, see Baross (2015). 15 “The end of a melody is not its goal; but nonetheless, if the melody had not reached its end it would not have reached its goal either.”

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Zsuzsa Baross the source of sound needs not be seen.16 Now this creative function of space may be masked or repressed, or on the contrary, made audible: the traditional spacing and placing of instruments are designed so that, regardless of the plac­ ing, each would sound equally well, as if coming from the space place in space; the architecture of the concert hall is designed to filter out all other sounds, to “de-noise” (de-bruite) the musical sound. In contrast, when contemporary music plays with placing and spacing as a resource, for an instrument has to be always placed, it composes with space: it makes its creative force, be it that of a concert hall or an empty space (a hangar, a cathedral or railway station or a water-filled well), audible; neither passive, nor inert, space makes sounds—not just echoes, but hollow or muffled sounds, pristine or cacophonic, interior or exterior, moving or stationary (which very sounds then make space itself) deep or shallow, closed or open . . . its quality, audible. As for time—and we can already see that the above distinction/separation of space and time can only be heuristic: qualities such as near or distant— intensities as approaching, departing, arriving, fading, dying out, and so on are irrecusably also time events. This is precisely what distinguishes them from the encounter with colours, imprisoned in a flat surface. Thus, we can say with greater confidence: while colours encounter, music is a becoming. With time, musical time, time becoming musical, our question becomes infinitely more complicated: the domain, the register of espace-temps sonore is a site of prodigious productivity: theoretical, conceptual, philosophical and musical, philosophico-musical.17 (That the boundaries of these distinct dis­ ciplines would become even more permeable, that the cross contamination would become the rule in the case of music more than with any other art is not surprising: for writing is the work site for a music that composes in writing and whose inventions, discoveries and experimentations—since long divorced from the imaginary—take place in, are made possible in/by, writing.) I will limit myself here to the example of Boulez—the composer-think­ er-writer who is the maître of Deleuze on matters musical, and whose conceptual inventions and interventions open up a new universe both for sounds to encounter one another differently and for a discourse that has abandoned music (Foucault) to approach it despite its incompetence (Deleuze). From the massive conceptual repertoire, I will address the two crucial interventions, each of which irrigates Deleuze’s thought.

16 For a discussion of the differential relation of the visible and the audible to space, see Cavell (1979). 17 “In meeting Proust, Boulez creates a group of fundamental philosophical concepts that spring from his own works of music” (Deleuze [1986] 2003, 279, my emphasis, as translated in Deleuze 2007b, 299; Dans sa rencontre avec Proust, Boulez crée un ensemble de concepts philosophiques fondamentaux qui s’élan­ cent de sa propre œuvre musical). Here we have yet another example of an encounter: the movement of an a-parallel evolution or a nuptial in a double capture, moving in between, without any priority: from the writing to music and from the music to the writing, simultaneously.

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When Sounds Encounter One Another . . . The first, the diagonal, a double gesture, pluralises time: (a) On the one hand, it cuts into the homogeneous flux of time, multiplies the temporal trajectories that run through/traverse/irrigate/conjoin sound elements into complex forms: “time,” just like pitch (hauteurs), has its three dimensions: vertical, horizontal, and diagonal. From this repartition of time, which proceeds equally by points, assemblies, and the assembly of assemblies (Boulez 1963, 25), without however running parallel with that of pitch or “hau­ teurs,” I will focus attention on this third dimension, the diagonal: an autono­ mous dimension of time. (b) On the other hand, with another gesture, Boulez cuts a line of division (or makes his double law the division) between two different orders of time: temps lisse (smooth, amorphous, or floating time) and temps strié or striated, pulsed, or pulsing time (and the translation here will be important). There is time that is discontinuous, numbered, or numerable; then there is time that is without measure, independent of metric rapports. In the floating time of duration, “one occupies time without counting,” whereas in striated time, “one counts time in order to occupy time,” writes Boulez, adding, “these two relations appear to me primordial” (Boulez 1963, 107; Ces deux relations me paraissent primordiales). (In between parentheses, I note again that Manoury, who, today, writes/ composes fifty years after Boulez’s Penser la musique aujourd’hui, already oper­ ates in a very different sound universe. Relying on computers both as musical instruments and as composing machines, simultaneously manipulating not four but sixty different characteristics, Manoury creates both new sounds and new concepts, refines Boulez’s binary classification into four: music, he says, can be inscribed into striated time, which is discontinuous and countable; into temps pulsé, which is continuous and uncountable [the intervals between the cuts or coupures can be so short that they become imperceptible]; to temps lisse, a continuous floating time without number, and to a time spreading out as if a landscape, without direction, permitting the listener to wander without any predetermined direction. Sound opens a temporal horizon, without heading toward or in the direction of an end [Manoury, 2017a]). *

*

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We, non-musicians, I dare not say “philosophers,” inherit two problematic notions from these musician-thinkers (here my discourse must guard itself against the danger of slipping into a “criticism” beyond its competence): (a) The enigma of the “diagonal.” We may think we have understood the ver­ tical/horizontal as corresponding to the melodic and harmonic lines, that is, the different partitioning and distribution of cuts in time’s continuum, verti­ cally and horizontally, but with regard to the third dimension the question is: how can it not be conceived precisely as a “line” connecting different points, traversing “diagonally” the same espace sonore conceived as a geometrical space? How can the line be liberated from its spatial coordinates, from the grammar of geometry, from its embeddedness in a surface? How can the temporal dimen­ sion be freed from its captivity through analogies/models of space? 55

Zsuzsa Baross (b) The term occupation, and its quasi synonyms, inscription (Manoury18), remplir (Deleuze) (which could also be translated as occupy, as in occupying, filling up one’s time) or giving expression (Boulez) to time, refer us to a similar problem in that they themselves “give expression” to time as a pre-constituted domain; music occupies it, takes possession of it as a territory, which it—unlike territor­ ialisation/reterritorialisation—does not constitute. (When time and space are conceived as different but strictly analogous domains—as it is even by Boulez, “Pulsation is for striated time what temperament is for striated space” [Boulez 1963, 104; La pulsation est pour le temps strié ce que le tempérament est pour l’espace strié])—it is time that is modelled after space: a surface, a line, a con­ tinuum, and distance between points. Neither the analogy nor the separation/ division of space-time into two domains is, however, surprising. For in the writing of music (and much of the music Boulez discusses depends on writing for the possibility of its creations), the musical notation marks each of the two aspects, on the same plane or sheet, separately, by different codes, manipulated separately. Moreover, the space of writing is essentially geometrical: it unfolds progressively, linearly, on a two-dimensional surface, and in chronological time. For this reason, it is not surprising either that it would be a non-musi­ cian, a philosopher, who admits his incompetence, who would abolish this separation and speak, as Deleuze does, of espace-temps sonore, a third order of reality. Two inhibitions or limitations follow from this notion of music that occupies time, with or without counting: it allows neither for the productivity of time itself (Bergson: time is nothing unless it does something [[1911] 1944, 371]) nor for temporalising, that is, music itself having the power or force of creating the temporalities and the orders of time (in which it unfolds). At first sight, Deleuze, who extensively draws upon Boulez’s writings (rather than his music) appears to recapitulate the composer’s schema, beginning with the “great division,” retaining the notion “occupation”: “Boulez defined a great alternative: to count to occupy space-time or to occupy without counting” (Boulez a défini une grande alternative: compter pour occuper l’espace-temps ou bien occuper sans compter); “to measure in order to effectuate relations or to occupy [remplir: also to fill and actualise] relations without measure” (Mesurer pour effectuer les rapport ou bien remplir les rapports sans mesure) (Boulez [1986] 2003, 272; 2007b,292, translations modified). As always, however, Deleuze intervenes, imperceptibly: composing with Boulez, he creates a conceptual personage and becomes imperceptible behind its mask (as he does in the case of his Nietzsche, his creation of a Foucault). In this case, he intervenes diagonally. For what is the sense, or, rather, what force or direction does Deleuze give to the concept of the diagonal? Certainly, there are several musical determinations. But after Deleuze’s intervention 18 Manoury, in fact, is intensely interested in the present, in music composed and played at the same time in the same present (tense). He stages encounters between a composing-machine (computer) and live performer(s) reciprocally responding to one another so that the music born is each time different and unpredictable. One wonders, however, whether his notion of inscription is supported or necessarily breaks down precisely in the instant and the instance of his own music.

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When Sounds Encounter One Another . . . these become instances, give expression to a fundamental act of creating some­ thing absolutely new by intervening in a system, an organisation, a set of estab­ lished codes: by pulling, shifting, dislocating, distorting (also in the sense of torsion) a structure, by cracking its coordinates—while all the while showing/ tracing the force of this very dislocation. A recent example comes to me as I am working on this text: Lucia D’Errico’s dissertation and the art of performance it invents. She calls it the performance “of,” a performance pulled from the orig­ inal, creating a new connection with it, one in which it is barely recognisable, yet not unrecognisable, and which moreover is unforeseeable by/undeducible from the work itself.19 I also imagine (visualise) such diagonal gests at work in Francis Bacon’s portraits, a shifting distortion, torsion of the lines/points of coordinates supporting a system of resemblance, pulling the face off its rep­ resentational coordinates so that this image is but this “torsion”—of the forces that deface. (I have no time to discuss the dangers of such diagonality here, except to mention the most obvious one: to go too far, to fall off the plane of operations, irreversibly.) I wonder whether the dark precursor is not also a diagonal in contre-temps. Where inside Boulez’s “system” does Deleuze apply such a diagonal pull? At the place of “occupation,” precisely. He stretches the concept’s occupation in its place in the system: “We use the word ‘occupy’ in the sense of ‘giving an occupation to,’ . . . assigning a function.” The example he gives is significantly not even musical but pictorial: “perspective is only a historical manner of occupying diagonals. . . . Lines of flight as perspective lines, far from being made to represent depth, themselves invent the possibility of such a representation” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 298). Several retroactive consequences follow from this reinvention/reversal of occupation: The first is a modifying precision: music that counts time is redefined as a temporalising machine—function and operation. It does not occupy in the common sense of the term, taking place in time, in time that is; it effectuates an order of time, time as number, at once a numerical measure (étalon) and itself measurable, by number, a number nombrable. . . . And if this “occupation” is not aggressively territorial but productive, if it does not simply fill up time but is productive of a particular order of time—which can be filled, counted, and counted down—then this time presses and strains against me, my durations, the rhythm of my breath, the beat of the heart and my body, forcing it to begin to synchronise with its rational, systematic, predictable cuts. “The potential fascism of music,” writes Deleuze: “Colors do not move people. Flags can do nothing without trumpets” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 348). Second, it generates a series of questions. I conclude by mentioning three: (a) Should we not speak of pulsing in place of pulsed time? Is it not sound that makes the space-time it occupies (makes use of, puts to work) tremble, creating of each time an “espace-temps sonore”? Is it not sound that like gravitational 19 Lucia D’Errico’s dissertation has since been published as Powers of Divergence: An Experimental Approach to Music Performance (2018).

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Zsuzsa Baross waves makes space-time tremble, makes it vibrate and contract and expand by virtue of its own force? (b) Is not Cage’s 4'33" silence the purest example of what Deleuze calls a bulle de temps, a distinct figure of a block of duration, of floating time? True, Cage stands next to his silent piano on Harvard Square, looking down at his stop­ watch. But clock time is only a demarcation, not a measure. It draws the bound­ ary of that block of duration that comes into being simultaneously with the “music”—rhythmic aleatory variations of familiar city sounds that only appear to be filling it. For rather than occupying the time-space inside the circle, it is the circle that is an “occupation”: it reterritorialises the banal/familiar, makes it heard, for the first time, as music. (c) And regarding the enigma of the third force, the diagonal: is it not itself an “occupation,” an operation in the service of a performative force? Of a dis­ location, a decentring gravity? For example, Deleuze imperceptibly shifting Boulez’s formulation of the great division by slipping in the concept “espacetemps sonore”? If so, then what is the “occupation” of Deleuze’s diagonal? First, it is the “line” (the texts liberate) that cuts through, breaks up, shat­ ters Boulez’s great division between temps lisse and temps strié, transforming this opposition of different planes into two opposing (opposite) poles. In between, there is movement: a flow, a fluctuation, an oscillation, circulation: “a musi­ cal becoming” precisely, which “implies a minimum of sound forms and even of melodic and harmonic functions; speeds and slownesses are meant to pass across them, and it is precisely these speeds and slownesses that reduce the forms and functions to the minimum” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 270, my emphasis). In other words, the difference/the differing is itself musical, so that Boulez’s great division between strié and lisse becomes less of a separation then a perpetual communication: a pulsation. Second, Deleuze’s diagonal, the performative geste, is the concept diagonal. Like all concepts, it cuts things in the world differently, recovers the diagonal line as the active force in every great creation: “free the line, free the diagonal: every musician or painter has this intention” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 295). One elaborates a system but with the aim of making it snap, of sending a tremor through it . . . there is no act of creation that does not proceed by a liberated line. It is this that recurs throughout Deleuze’s work (on painting, on cinema). And lastly, in a third dimension, Deleuze’s diagonal is a philosophical “occu­ pation” or operator, one of several: movement image, crystal of time, time image, to mention just a few of the concepts that reconfigure the act of creation in the cinema. Each time a different concept, each time a different operator, for one draws the line each time differently. The concept diagonal, once again, breaks with the spiritual—subject, author, composer—liberates the creative force of the material, the line, the block, the assemblage, the refrain, the mon­ tage, . . .

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When Sounds Encounter One Another . . . References Bahri, Ismaïl, dir. 2017. Sondes. Video, HD, 16/9, 16:00. Paris: Jeu de Paume. Baross, Zsuzsa. 2015. “159+1 Variations or Painting Becoming Music.” In Encounters: Gerard Titus-Carmel, Jean-Luc Nancy, Claire Denis, 17–63. Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press. Bergson, Henri. (1911) 1944. Creative Evolution. Translated by Arthur Mitchell. New York: Modern Library. First published 1907 as L’évolution créatrice (Paris: F. Alcan). This translation first published 1911 (New York: Holt). Bolaño, Roberto. 2009. 2666. Translated by Natasha Wimmer. London: Picador. First published 2004 as 2666 (Bercelona: Editorial Anagrama). Boulez, Pierre. 1963. Penser la musique aujourd’hui. Paris: Denoël/Gonthier. Translated by Susan Bradshaw and Richard Rodney Bennett as Boulez 1971. ———. 1965. Éclat, for 15 instruments. London: Universal Edition. ———. 1971. Boulez on Music Today. Translated by Susan Bradshaw and Richard Rodney Bennett. London: Faber and Faber. First published as Boulez 1963. ———. 1981. Répons. For 6 soloists, ensemble, and live electronics. London: Universal Edition. ———. 1981–84/85. “Répons, pour six solistes, ensemble de chambre, sons électroniques et électronique en direct.” Performed by Ensemble intercontemporain, directed by Matthias Pintscher, recorded at the Ircam festival ManiFeste—2015, Philharmonie de Paris, 11 June 2015. Accessed 6 May 2019. https://philharmoniedeparis.fr/en/ activity/concert-symphonique/14232repons-de-pierre-boulez. Boulez, Pierre, Jean-Pierre Changeux, and Philippe Manoury. 2014. Les neurones enchantés: Le cerveau et la musique. Paris: Odile Jacob. Cage, John. 1961. Silence: Lectures and Writings. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Cavell, Stanley. 1979. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film. Enlarged ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. (1978) 2003. “Rendre

audibles des forces non-audibles par elles mêmes.” In Deux régimes de foux: Textes et entretiens 1975–1995, edited by David Lapoujade, 142–46. Paris: Minuit. First presented 1978 at IRCAM. Translated by Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina as Deleuze 2007a. ———. (1978) 2019. “Conférence sur le temps musical—IRCAM—1978.” Accessed 27 June 2019. http://www.leterrier.net/deleuze/19ircam-78.htm. ———. (1986) 2003. “Occuper sans compter: Boulez, Proust et le temps.” In Deux régimes de foux: Textes et entretiens 1975– 1995, edited by David Lapoujade, 272–79. Paris: Minuit. Essay first published 1986 in Eclats/Boulez, edited by Claude Samuel (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou), 98–100. Translated by Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina as Deleuze 2007b. ———. 2007a. “Making Inaudible Forces Audible.” In Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995, edited by David Lapoujade, translated by Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina, 156–60. New York: Semiotext(e). For further bibliographic details see Deleuze (1978) 2003. ———. 2007b. “Occupy Without Counting: Boulez, Proust and Time.” In Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995, edited by David Lapoujade, translated by Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina, 292–99. New York: Semiotext(e). For further bibliographic details see Deleuze (1986) 2003. ———. 2015. “Le temps musical.” In Lettres et autres textes, edited by David Lepoujade, 240–44. Paris: Minuit. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Minuit). Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. 1987. Dialogues. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1977 as Dialogues (Paris: Flammarion). D’Errico, Lucia. 2018. Powers of Divergence: An Experimental Approach to Music Performance.

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Zsuzsa Baross Orpheus Institute Series. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Foucault, Michel. (1982) 2005. “Pierre Boulez, l’écran traversé.” In Pierre Boulez, Leçons de la musique: Point de repère III; Deux décennies d’enseignement au Collège de France, edited by Jean-Jacques Nattiez, 19–22. Paris: Christian Bourgois. First published 1982 in Dix ans et après: Album souvenir du festival d’automne, edited by M. Collins, J.-P. Léonardini, and J. Markovits (Paris: Messidor), 232–36. Essay translated by Robert Hurley as “Pierre Boulez: Passing through the Screen,” in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, edited by James D. Faubion (New York: New Press, 1998), 241–45. Godard, Jean-Luc, dir. 1987. King Lear. Santa Monica, CA: Cinematheque Collection/ Xenon Entertainment, XE CC 5000, VHS. ———, dir. 1988–98. Histoire(s) du cinéma. Paris: Gaumont, 4H24, 4 DVDs. London: Artificial Eye, ART 382, 3 DVDs. Hantaï, Simon. 1982. Tabula lilas. Acrylic paint on canvas, 290 × 470 cm. Private Collection. Heidegger, Martin. 2009. Remarques sur art— sculpture—espace. Edited by Hermann Heidegger. Translated by Didier Frank. Paris: Payot & Rivage. First published 1996 as Bemerkungen zu Kunst—Plastik— Raum (St Gallen: Erker). Hölderlin, Friedrich, 1998. “Wie wenn am Feiertage . . .” / “As on a holiday . . .” In Selected Poems and Fragments, edited by Jeremy Adler, translated by Michael Hamburger, 172–77. London: Penguin Books. Poem written 1799. Kostelanetz, Richard. 2003. Conversing with Cage. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge. Manoury, Philippe. 1995–96. 60ème Parallèle. Opera for nine singers, large orchestra, and electronics. Libretto by

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Michel Deutsch. Premiered at Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris, 10 March 1997. Accessed 6 May 2019. http://www. philippemanoury.com/?p=303. Recorded as 60th Parallel. Performed by Donald Maxwell and other soloists, Orchestra de Paris, and David Robertson. Naxos, 8.554249-50, 1997, 2 compact discs. ———. 2017a. “L’invention de la musique,” first lecture in the series “Musiques, sons et signes—Création artistique” at the Collège de France, 26 January. Accessed 6 May 2019. https://www.college-de-france. fr/site/philippe-manoury/inaugurallecture-2017-01-26-18h00.htm. ———. 2017b. Kein Licht. Thinkspiel for actors, singers, musicians, and electronic music in real time. Video installation by Claudia Lehmann. Libretto by Elfriede Jelinek. Premiered at Opéra Comique, Paris, 18 October 2017. Nancy, Jean-Luc, and Philippe LacoueLabarthe. 1978. L’absolu littéraire: Théorie de la littérature du romantisme allemand. Paris, Seuil. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1996. Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. First published 1878 as Menschliches, Allzumenschliches: Ein Buch für freie Geister (Chemnitz: Schmeitzner). Paik, Nam June, dir. 1973/76. A Tribute to John Cage. Video, 29:02, colour, sound. Spinoza, Benedict de. (1994) 1996. Ethics. Edited and translated by Edwin Curley. London: Penguin. First published 1677 as Ethica in Opera posthuma (Amsterdam). This translation first published 1994 in A Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and Other Works, edited and translated by Edwin Curley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).

Geomusic, Ecosophy, and Molecular Oscillators Ronald Bogue University of Georgia, USA

Deleuze’s most cogent statement of his views on music is his 1978 presenta­ tion delivered at a conference directed by Pierre Boulez at IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique). A print rendition of the lecture was distributed at the conference and reproduced in a slightly modi­ fied form in Two Regimes of Madness (Deleuze 2007). A significantly different, and to my mind more interesting, version, based on Deleuze’s lecture manu­ script, appeared in Lettres et autres texts (Letters and other texts) (2015). It is to the latter text that I will refer in my remarks.1 I believe that Deleuze’s approach to music is best understood as ecosophic, a claim that must seem an anachro­ nistic misappropriation, given that Deleuze never uses the term, and Guattari only adopts it in his late works—The Three Ecologies (1989), Chaosmosis (1992), and the essays collected in Qu’est-ce que l’écosophie (What is ecosophy?) (2013). I could just as well designate Deleuze’s musical aesthetic as chaosmic, and thereby invoke the term chaosmos, which he employed as early as Difference and Repetition (first published 1968; Deleuze 1994, 57), but I want to focus less on the position of music within emergent, dynamic systems far from equilibrium, than on its position within assemblages that may be construed as “ecological” in Guattari’s sense of the word, one that stresses transverse relations among heterogeneities and a general affective symbiosis of aberrant nuptials. By des­ ignating Deleuze’s views of music as ecosophic I want to propose first, that implicit in his IRCAM remarks is the theory of nature presented in A Thousand Plateaus, especially in the Ritornello Plateau (no. 11) (see Deleuze and Guattari 1987), and second, that A Thousand Plateau’s theory of nature receives its most fruitful development in the late work of Guattari. Although I only make a ges­ ture in this direction in this chapter, I am suggesting by using the term ecosophic that in this instance we reverse the usual subordination of Guattari to Deleuze and assimilate Deleuze’s approach to music within a Guattaro–Deleuzian con­ ceptual trajectory. On 23 February 1978, at the end of a week of evening sessions at IRCAM devoted to pieces by György Ligeti, Olivier Messiaen, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Boulez, and Elliott Carter, Boulez invited Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Deleuze to reflect on philosophy, music, and the question of “musical time.” In his response, Deleuze remarks first that the musical time of the five com­ positions performed that week “shows how non-pulsed time can restore a new

1 Unless otherwise indicated, translations are my own.

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Ronald Bogue type of variable pulsation” (Deleuze 2015, 240). Such a time is a durée, a time “liberated from measure, regular or irregular” (241), and the musical problem is that of articulating these durées, not through a transcendent, unifying metre, but through internal articulations between rhythms and durées. Citing the work of chronobiologists who speak of populations of molecular oscillators that “assure the communication of rhythms or transrhythmicity,” Deleuze posits the existence of “sonic molecules” and concludes that “a non-pulsed time is a time made of heterogeneous durées, whose relations rest on a molecular population, and no longer on a unifying metrical form” (241). He then argues that there is a kind of individuation that constitutes a second aspect of non-pulsed time, “in which there is no longer form or subject; it is the individuation of a landscape, or a day, or an hour of the day, or an event” (Deleuze 2015, 241–42). Deleuze observes that there is an associative mode of listening, whereby one links a phrase to a landscape, “groups of sounds and groups of colours,” or a motif to a person (“as in a first listening to Wagner”), and Deleuze sees nothing wrong with such associations. But he claims that beyond these associations is a musical mode of individuation that makes possi­ ble a “sonic landscape,” which is “so interiorised in the sound that it only exists within it”; “audible colours,” in which “durations and rhythms are in them­ selves colours”; and “rhythmic characters” [personnages rythmiques] that have “an autonomous life within a floating non-pulsed time” (242). “These three very different notions of sonic landscape, audible colours, rhythmic characters,” says Deleuze, are “examples of individuation, of the process of individuation, which belong to a floating time, made up of heterochronic durées and molecular oscil­ lators” (242–43). And then there is a third characteristic of non-pulsed time, Deleuze pro­ poses, that of “the birth of material liberated from form” (Deleuze 2015, 243). The classic conception of music implies “a certain hierarchy [of ] matter–life– mind/spirit [esprit],” brute, undifferentiated matter gaining complexity in life forms and additional complexity in musical compositions. What contemporary music discloses is a non-hylomorphic conception of music, in which sound is treated as “a very elaborated, very complex material,” which is “not subordinated to a sonic form” (243). Through the manipulation of this complex sonic material, composers render “sonorous or audible” non-sonorous forces and “the differ­ ences between these forces.” The “couple brute material–sonic forms” gives way to “an entirely different coupling of elaborated sonic material–imperceptible forces that the material renders audible, perceptible” (243). The disclosure of this new coupling does not occur all at once, but instead gradually emerges in the late nineteenth century and develops through the twentieth century, as composers increasingly engage in a “generalised chromaticism” (244) that treats all aspects of sound as elements for experimentation. Except for the notion of “auditory colours,” the fundamental concepts of Deleuze’s IRCAM analysis all appear in A Thousand Plateaus: non-pulsed time, sonic landscapes (rephrased as “melodic landscapes”), rhythmic characters, complex sonic materials that capture imperceptible forces and render them audible and perceptible, and generalised chromaticism. What is notably absent 62

Geomusic, Ecosophy, and Molecular Oscillators in this list is the concept of the ritornello—a striking absence, considering that scattered references to the ritornello had appeared in Dialogues the year before his IRCAM presentation (see Deleuze and Parnet 1987). No doubt Deleuze’s challenge was to respond to Boulez’s question about “musical time” and make time the unifying theme of his remarks, arguing that non-pulsed time is the time of individuation and that such a time “is the birth of a material liberated from form” (Deleuze 2015, 243). It is certain, however, that the ritornello, not non-pulsed time, is the central concept in Deleuze’s approach to music, and that its full articulation is found in A Thousand Plateaus. It is also evident that Messiaen is the central figure in Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of the ritornello as the conceptual motif that situates human music-making within the natural world. (As an aside, we may note that Messiaen’s presence pervades Deleuze’s IRCAM remarks: Deleuze [2015, 241] identifies Messiaen’s nonretrogradable rhythms as examples of non-pulsed time; “rhythmic characters” is a notion taken directly from Messiaen; Messiaen frequently evokes land­ scapes in his compositions, and he is well known for his insistence on indissol­ uble connections between sounds and colours; Messiaen speaks often of ren­ dering audible the forces of inaudible time; and his 1949 composition Modes de valeurs et d’intensités is frequently cited as a pioneering instance of what Boulez calls an enlarged chromaticism, which entails an experimentation with all sound elements.) Birdsong is clearly the pivotal component of Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of music. Messiaen’s practice of assimilating birdsong within his compositions, while modifying them to meet his strictly musical ends, serves as a paradigm of music as the deterritorialisation of the ritornello. The bird’s song itself is a constituent element of its territory. That sonic ritornello, Deleuze and Guattari assert, is only one component of the “machinic opera” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 330) of ritornellos that make up the bird’s territory—in the case of the “stagemaker,” the ritornello of the individual bird’s song is connected with the songs of conspecifics and those of other species, with the bird’s singing stick and display ground, with overturned leaves, the bird’s yellow neck feathers, its mating dance, and so on (ibid., 331). This extended sense of the ritornello as ter­ ritorial patterning of any sort, sonic or non-sonic, allows Deleuze and Guattari to treat animal territoriality in general as a function of the ritornello. And this expansion of the ritornello from birdsong to territorial patterning eventuates in the definition of the ritornello as the three coexisting moments of (1) the establishment of a point of order in the midst of chaos; (2) the demarcation of a territorial circle; and (3) the opening of an extra-territorial line of flight. The movement from chaos to “the threshold of a territorial assemblage” involves the “directional components” of an “infra-assemblage”; the organisation of the territory sets in motion the “dimensional components” of an “intraassemblage”; and the line of flight activates the “components of passage or even escape” of an “inter-assemblage.” The infra-, intra-, and inter-assemblages coexist, as do the forces that play through them: “Forces of chaos, terrestrial forces, cosmic forces: all of these confront each other and converge in the terri­ torial ritornello” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 312, translation adjusted). 63

Ronald Bogue By including in this definition of the ritornello not simply the demarcation of a territorial assemblage, but also a movement to the threshold of a territo­ rial assemblage and a movement beyond the territorial assemblage in a line of flight, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that the concept is pertinent to under­ standing not only territorial animals but all living beings. Although they dis­ tinguish milieu organisms from territorial organisms in the Ritornello Plateau and initially state that “the assemblage is fundamentally territorial” and that the ritornello is “any aggregate of matters . . . that draws a territory” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 323), they later speak of “milieu ritornellos” (ibid., 339, transla­ tion adjusted), and after speculating about the difference between matter and living entities, they say that “the distinction we were seeking was not between assemblages and something else but between the two limits of any possible assemblage, in other words, between the system of strata and the plane of consistency” (ibid., 337). This remark invites a subsumption of the Ritornello Plateau (no. 11) within the broad schema of the Geology of Morals Plateau (no. 3), in which assemblages are active throughout the non-organic, organic, and alloplastic strata. In such a case, music’s deterritorialisation of the ritor­ nello would be related to assemblages traversing all strata and to all forces, be they chaotic, territorial, or cosmic. And given that this schema includes the alloplastic stratum of humans, treating the strata and their assemblages from the perspective of a general ecology would entail an engagement with the three ecologies of the environment, society, and mentalities (and hence, in part, my assertion that Deleuze’ s approach to music is ecosophic, or at least proto-ecosophic). In his IRCAM presentation, Deleuze says little about music’s relation to nature, but he does cite a biological example to explain modern music’s heter­ ogeneous durées that are produced via “an articulation from the interior between these rhythms and durées.” Biologists, he observes, “when they study the vital rhythms of twenty-four-hour periods, reject articulating them in terms of a common measure, even a complex one, or in terms of a sequence of elemen­ tary processes, but invoke what they call a population of molecular oscillators, of oscillating molecules, coupled together, which assure the communication of rhythms or transrhythmicity.” Hence, he asserts that it is no metaphor “to speak in music of sonic molecules, coupled together, of races or groups of chords [accords], which assure this internal communication of heterogeneous durées” (Deleuze 2015, 241). Deleuze and Guattari also refer briefly to biological molecular oscillators in the Ritornello Plateau, citing two sources for their remarks: a general introduc­ tion to chronobiology by Alain Reinberg (1970), and an encyclopaedia article on biorhythms by Reinberg and Thérèse Vanden Driessche (1968). (There are only three passing references to biological molecular oscillators in Deleuze and Guattari’s works: the IRCAM lecture, the Ritornello Plateau, and Guattari’s posthumous Lines of Flight [2011, 292; 2016, 218].) This reference, however, is not directly related to music, but instead to the neuromuscular physiology of ter­ ritorial animals. In addressing the question of what holds a territory together, Deleuze and Guattari first summarise the ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen’s 64

Geomusic, Ecosophy, and Molecular Oscillators hypothesis that “a coded linkage of spatiotemporal forms in the central nerv­ ous system” governs territoriality (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 327). In this schema, a neural centre directing general appetitive behaviour (the search for food) triggers a second, territorial centre regulating new appetitive behav­ iour, after which “other subordinate centers are activated, centers of fighting, nesting, courtship . . . until stimuli are found that release the corresponding executive acts” (ibid., 327–28). As an initial stage in their critique of Tinbergen, Deleuze and Guattari say: in considering the system as a whole we should speak less of the automatism of a higher center than of coordination between centers, and of the cellular groupings or molecular populations that perform these couplings: there is no form or correct structure imposed from without or above but rather an articulation from within, as if oscillating molecules, oscillators, passed from one heterogeneous center to another, if only for the purpose of assuring the dominance of one among them. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 328, translation modified)

In their footnote to this sentence, Deleuze and Guattari make vague reference to neural experiments conducted by Walter Rudolf Hess and Erich von Holst and cite Reinberg and Vanden Driessche’s work on circadian rhythms as the source of their concept of “a population of [molecular] oscillators . . . forming systems of articulations from the inside, independent of any common meas­ ure” (ibid., 549n29). This rather loose and somewhat tangential exploitation of the concept of molecular oscillators is succeeded by one that is much more significant—a usage pertaining to the “consistency” of an assemblage. To understand this usage, we must first delineate the basic elements of circadian rhythms. In a given living entity, a circadian rhythm presumes the existence of an internal biological clock, an open-loop oscillator with a period of approximately twentyfour hours. That oscillator (1) persists in the absence of external stimuli; (2) synchronises, or “entrains,” with an environmental cycle (primarily the light– dark cycle); and (3) remains constant within a broad range of ambient temper­ atures. The autonomy of the oscillator ensures the regular function of systems within the organism; its entrainment to the light–dark cycle makes possible metabolic adjustments in response to changes in that cycle; and its indifference to temperature change provides internal stability across variations in weather and climate. The environmental cue (in this case, the light–dark cycle) involved in entrainment is termed the synchroniser or zeitgeber. Now, to the concept of consistency. After rejecting Tinbergen’s answer to the question of what holds things together in a territory, Deleuze and Guattari turn to Eugène Dupréel’s theory of consolidation to guide their response. Dupréel proposes that life arises through a process of consolidation, which involves three things. First, heterogeneous elements undergo “densifications, inten­ sifications, reinforcements, injections, showering, like so many intercalary events” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 328). Second, the intercalated elements enter into “an arrangement of intervals, a distribution of inequalities” (ibid.). And third, among the elements arises “a superposition of disparate rhythms, 65

Ronald Bogue an articulation from within of an interrhythmicity, with no imposition of meter or cadence” (ibid., 329). Deleuze and Guattari assert that “consistency is the same as consolidation,” and that consistency is what holds a territory together. Consistency is “the act that produces consolidated aggregates, of succession as well as of coexistence, by means of the three factors just mentioned: interca­ lated elements, intervals, and articulations of superposition” (ibid.). It is at this point in their argument that Deleuze and Guattari introduce the vocabulary of circadian rhythms. In a territory, “an increasingly rich and consistent ma­ter­ ial” engages “increasingly intense forces” and “holds heterogeneities together without their ceasing to be heterogeneous”; what holds them together are (1) “oscillators,” which are “intercalary synthesizers”; (2) “interval analyzers”; and (3) “rhythm synchronizers,” which “do not proceed by homogenizing and equalizing measurement, but operate from within, between two rhythms” (ibid., translation modified). The sense here is that in the coming-into-consist­ ency of a territory, populations of oscillating molecules enact intercalary den­ sifications of materials that provide a non-linear synthesis of elements without homogenising them, some unspecified agents analyse intervals, and synchro­ nisers establish the interrhythmicity of the territory. In this formulation, the notions of circadian oscillators and synchronisers receive their broadest exten­ sion. Rather than an organism’s oscillatory clock entraining with an external synchroniser, the territory as a whole oscillates in synthetic condensation, and it synchronises itself through an interrhythmicity that is between rhythms, while it organises its components according to intervals among elements. Oscillators, analysers, and synchronisers generate the consistency of a territory, and, Deleuze and Guattari conclude, “the ritornello operates with these three factors” (1987, 329, translation modified). In his IRCAM lecture, Deleuze cites circadian oscillators as biological ana­ logues of musical temporality. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari use components of the biological model to articulate the fundamental processes of territory formation and their relation to the ritornello, which suggests that the biological molecules and musical molecules of Deleuze’s IRCAM lecture are more than mere analogues and instead interconnected elements of a nature held together by assemblages and traversed by ritornellos. Yet in neither text do we find any discussion of circadian rhythms per se. It is worth elaborating fur­ ther on the topic since it provides at least one of many means of situating music within an ecosophic context. Circadian rhythms date to the Great Oxygenation Event, approximately 2.7 billion years ago, when cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae, began producing oxygen through photosynthesis (Dvornyk, Vinogradova, and Nevo 2003; Edgar et al. 2012). Cyanobacteria remain the only form of bac­ teria in which circadian clocks have been proven to exist, although recent research suggests that other bacteria may possess “proto-circadian” mecha­ nisms (Ma et al. 2016). Among archaea, which together with bacteria consti­ tute the two domains of prokaryotes, or single-cell organisms with no nucleus or any other membrane-bound organelles, evidence of circadian rhythms in some organisms has emerged over the last decade (Whitehead et al. 2009). Initially viewed as extremophiles living in harsh environments, archaea have 66

Geomusic, Ecosophy, and Molecular Oscillators now been isolated in a number of habitats, including the human gut. (This last fact is significant, given that a 2016 study indicates that the microbiome of the human gut, which consists of bacteria, archaea, viruses, and fungi, has its own circadian rhythm [Thaiss et al. 2016].) Among eukaryotes, or organisms whose cells have a nucleus and membrane-enclosed organelles, circadian clocks, with some exceptions, are ubiquitous. Such clocks are found in most plants, animals, algae, and fungi. Until recently, it was thought that circadian clocks operated solely through DNA transcription-translation feedback loops, with different sets of proteins involved in the cycles of cyanobacteria, plants, insects, and mammals. In 2011, however, circadian clocks were discovered in human red blood cells (O’Neill and Reddy 2011), which have no DNA, and other extraand post-transcriptional clocks have been documented as well. In humans, the suprachiasmatic nucleus of the brain plays an important role in coordinating circadian rhythms, but it is no longer seen as the master pacemaker (Hastings 1998). Rather, coordination of rhythms occurs through interactive communica­ tion among clocks in cells (such as red blood cells), molecules (such as glucose), organs (including the liver, pancreas, gut, and heart) and the suprachiasmatic nucleus (Ray and Reddy 2016; Sinturel et al. 2017; Reinke and Asher 2016). Heterogeneity and multiplicity abound in these findings. Diverse transla­ tion-transcription loops, as well as extra- and post-transcription loops, regulate circadian rhythms. Within complex organisms, multiple clocks communicate in decentralised networks. And within each circadian unit, system processes operate at different speeds and rhythms. If viewed from the perspective of the general ecology implicit in A Thousand Plateaus, this intra-organismic polytem­ porality forms part of the much broader polytemporality of assemblages travers­ ing the inorganic, organic, and alloplastic strata. Such assemblages demarcate transverse alliances, affective symbioses of aberrant nuptials, and suboptimal circuits that are “satisficing,” good enough for the here and now, as improba­ ble and eccentric as the Rube Goldberg machines Deleuze and Guattari repro­ duce in the appendix to the second French edition of L’anti-Œdipe (Deleuze and Guattari 1973, 464).2 And yet all these rhythms are entrained to a single georhythm, synchronised with the earth’s daily rotation and its annual orbit around the sun. If we adopt Jakob von Uexküll’s figure of the collective point and counterpoint of organisms and habitats as the grand symphony of nature (see Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 314), we could add that the music of this sym­ phony is a geomusic. I have argued that Deleuze’s approach to music is ecosophic, and that A Thousand Plateaus outlines the fundamentals of that approach. What is only implicit in A Thousand Plateaus, however, and what is made explicit and devel­ oped much further in Guattari’s late works, is not only the ecological ramifi­ cations of A Thousand Plateaus’ view of nature but also the ethical dimension of that view. Guattari’s ecosophy entails an “ethico-aesthetic paradigm,” and



2 This appendix is not included in the English translation, Anti-Oedipus. While the text of the appendix has been published in English translation as Guattari (2007), this translation does not reproduce the images discussed.

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Ronald Bogue the fundamental ethical choice facing all of us is clear: either Capital, which “smashes all other forms of valorisation,” or “the richness of the possible . . . processuality, irreversibility and resingularisation” (Guattari 1995, 29). At pres­ ent, there is no doubt that a choice for Integrated World Capitalism is also a choice for the eco-disaster of global warming, and it is in this context that consideration of the molecular oscillators of circadian rhythms is especially pertinent. Circadian rhythms are coexistent with aerobic life throughout its 2.7-billion-year history. Circadian clocks are autonomous, they entrain with the earth’s light–dark cycle, and they are “temperature compensated,” that is, stable across a range of temperatures. In the anthropocene, the rise of global temperatures directly or indirectly threatens the viability of diverse organisms and their bands of tolerable temperature compensation. In a worst-case sce­ nario, if the melting of the arctic permafrost releases large quantities of meth­ ane, the earth’s atmosphere may become uninhabitable for 80 or 90 per cent of the planet’s species. For both Deleuze and Guattari, I believe, the specifically musical ecosophic ethic is one of generalised chromaticism and the rendering audible of inaudi­ ble forces. The object of this experimentation is the invention of new possibil­ ities, of alternative modes of existence and ways of living, which may facilitate the creation of a new earth and a people to come. But we may also ask, how might this musical ethic engage the larger ecosophic problem of environmen­ tal degradation and global warming? One answer comes from John Luther Adams (not to be confused with the John Adams of Nixon in China). It would not be difficult to demonstrate that all the elements of contempo­ rary music mentioned in the IRCAM lecture and A Thousand Plateaus may be found in Adams’s compositions, simply by following the outline of his career that he himself has drawn up (Adams 2009, 1–3). The trajectory of his musical experimentation goes from an initial engagement with birdsong; to a decade of musical landscapes, filled with sonorous colours; to works of “sonic geog­ raphy,” which seek to capture the feel of a place and its socio-cultural associa­ tions; to an engagement with primal natural forces; to an embrace of “synthetic noise as the prima materia” (ibid., 3) of his compositions. Throughout, his abid­ ing concern has been to create music in resonance with nature and develop an ecology of music. Perhaps the most ecosophic of his compositions is Inuksuit from 2009, a work for nine to ninety-nine percussionists who play outside, moving in groups around the site, responding to each other and to the nonhuman sounds of the environment. But I will focus instead on another work, The Place Where You Go to Listen, completed in 2006, which, though not exemplary of all tendencies in Adams’s compositions, does show one way in which Adams’s music may be seen as geomusic. The Place Where You Go to Listen is a permanent sound-and-light environment installed in the Museum of the North, at the Fairbanks campus of the University of Alaska. The space of the work is approximately ten feet wide and twenty feet long, with a ceiling sloping from fifteen to thirteen feet in height. On one twentyfoot wall are five large light panels, over which broad fields of colour play in

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Geomusic, Ecosophy, and Molecular Oscillators slowly shifting patterns. The remaining walls and ceiling house multiple speak­ ers. The sounds of the space are generated from “pink noise synthesized with a random number generator” (Adams 2009, 114). The basic conception of the piece is to create “a virtual world that resonates sympathetically with the real world” (113). “In The Place, streams of data tracing natural phenomena (seismic activity, geomagnetism, cloud cover and visibility, the movements of the sun and moon) are transformed into sound,” not through a process of audification, which is “the direct rendering of digital data with inaudible frequencies into the audible range, using resampling,” but through “sonification,” which Adams defines as “the process of mapping data with some other meaning into sound” (113). Adams labels the five components of the composition the Day Choir and Night Choir, the Aurora Bells, the Seismic Drums, and the Voice of the Moon. External light sensors provide the data for the Day and Night Choirs, and the programs MoonAngles and MoonPhases, which track the moon’s position and phase, generate data for the Voice of the Moon. The Aurora Bells offer sonic transformations of data transmitted from five Alaskan magnetometer stations, which register fluctuations in the earth’s magnetic field. (Such fluctuations help produce the aurora borealis.) Five seismic stations across Alaska supply data streams for the Seismic Drums. The harmonic fields of the Day and Night Choirs are “tuned in twelve-tone equal temperament” (Adams 2009, 114); the Bells are “tuned in prime-number ‘just’ intervals”; the Drums “fluctuate con­ tinuously within a limited low-frequency range”; and “the sound of the moon is a narrow band of pink noise that floats freely over a wider frequency range” (115). In this work, the earth, moon, and sun are the performers. The composer con­ structs the instrument and plugs it into the sensors that enable performance. The composer also builds his composition into the instrument, carefully select­ ing sonic materials and specific random number generators, “sculpting, work­ ing and reworking a malleable substance of sound, space and time” (Adams 2009, 6) into discrete sonic relations that enable aleatory events within con­ trolled parameters. In this work, Adams clearly fulfils Deleuze and Guattari’s musical ethic, rendering audible the inaudible forces of earth, moon, and sun, and engaging in a generalised chromaticism, which, as Deleuze and Guattari specify in A Thousand Plateaus (1987), requires the “sobriety” (344) of a “cosmic artisan” (345), whose experimentation proceeds with “a sober gesture, an act of consistency, capture, or extraction that works in a material that is not meager but prodigiously simplified, creatively limited, selected” (344–45). The Place Where You Go to Listen is a composition that has neither beginning nor end, and the complex interrelations among the five sound components and the variations in the external data streams performing the composition rule out the possibility of exact repetition. Yet the work has the periodicity of circadian, circalunar, and circannual cycles. These broad georhythms are con­ stituents of the composition as a sound-light environment, and the biorhythms of the environment are provided by the museum visitors. Given the museum’s limited hours of access, humans cannot entrain with the work’s circadian geo­ rhythms, but visitors can sample large swaths of those rhythms, and if they visit 69

Ronald Bogue daily throughout the year, they can sample the full range of the Day and Night Choirs as the Choirs play in the extremes of Arctic summer days and winter nights. The time scales of daily, monthly, and annual cycles are too great for their rhythms to be perceived by museum visitors, but if the visitors stay for an extended period, they can see and hear correlates of a portion of these cycles. To do so, however, requires a special kind of listening, a long durée listening, and it is here that we meet an important element of Adams’s ecosophic ethic. Adams hopes The Place Where You Go to Listen may have a pedagogic function, that of inducing attentive listening and attunement with the environment. The Place, says Adams (2009, 7), is “a self-contained world connected to and reso­ nating with the real world,” and “like a place in the wilderness,” it “requires the visitor to enter into it, to take things on its terms, to pay attention and to find her own way.” The hope is that the enhanced listening and attunement devel­ oped in The Place may be carried by visitors out into the world. In his IRCAM lecture, Deleuze (2015, 244) says that matter may be more com­ plex than life, and that life’s “rhythms and vital durations” are articulated “from within,” by “molecular processes that traverse them.” As cosmic artisans, composers capture forces that traverse life and experiment with them in a generalised yet sober chromaticism. From an ecosophic perspective, such capture and exper­ imentation constitute an ethics. Oscillators, analysers, and synchronisers give territories their consistency, and molecular oscillators of various sorts, in het­ erogeneous and decentralised combinations, entrain most life forms with the circadian rhythms of the earth. Composers deterritorialise the refrains that pass through milieus, territories, and beyond. But perhaps in the anthropo­ cene, there is need of a cosmic reterritorialisation of music, an attentive attune­ ment of sonic materials in resonance with the georhythms of the forces of the earth and the geomusic of planetary life forms. Such reterritorialisation seeks not a return to a prelapsarian nature but the invention of a new earth, one, in Guattari’s words (1995, 29), replete with “the richness of the possible . . . pro­ cessuality, irreversibility and resingularisation.” References Adams, John Luther. 2009. The Place Where You Go to Listen: In Search of an Ecology of Music. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1994. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1968 as Différence et répétition (Paris: Presses universitaires de France). ———. 2007. “Making Inaudible Forces Audible.” In Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995, edited by David Lapoujade, translated by Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina, 156–60. New York: Semiotext(e). Lecture presented 1978 at IRCAM. First published 2003 as “Rendre

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audibles des forces non-audibles par elles mêmes,” in Deux régimes de foux: Textes et entretiens 1975–1995, 142–46. Paris: Minuit. ———. 2015. “Le temps musical.” In Lettres et autres textes, edited by David Lepoujade, 240–44. Paris: Minuit. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1973. Capitalisme et schizophrénie: L’anti-Œdipe. Nouvelle éd. Paris: Minuit. ———. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Minuit). Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet.

Geomusic, Ecosophy, and Molecular Oscillators 1987. Dialogues. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1977 as Dialogues (Paris: Flammarion). Dvornyk, Volodymyr, Oxana Vinogradova, and Eviatar Nevo. 2003. “Origin and Evolution of Circadian Clock Genes in Prokaryotes.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 100 (5): 2495–500. Edgar, Rachel S., Edward W. Green, Yuwei Zhao, Gerben van Ooijen, Maria Olmedo, Ximing Qin, Yao Xu, et al. 2012. “Peroxiredoxins are Conserved Markers of Circadian Rhythms.” Nature 485, 459–64. Guattari, Félix. 1989. Les trois écologies. Paris: Galilée. Translated by Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton as The Three Ecologies (London: Athlone Press, 2000). ———. 1992. Chaosmose. Paris: Galilée. Translated by Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis as Guattari 1995. ———. 1995. Chaosmosis. Translated by Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. First published as Guattari 1992. ———. 2007. “Balance-Sheet for ‘DesiringMachines.’” Translated by Robert Hurley. In Chaosophy: Texts and Interviews 1972–1977, by Félix Guattari, edited by Sylvère Lotringer, translated by David L. Sweet, Jarred Becker, and Taylor Adkins [et al.], 90–115. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). First published 1973 as “Bilan-programme pour machines désirantes,” Minuit 2 (January): 1–25. Also published as an appendix to Deleuze and Guattari 1973. ———. 2011. Lignes de fuite: Pour an autre monde de possibles. Paris: l’Aube. Translated by Andrew Goffey as Guattari 2016. ———. 2013. Qu’est-ce que l’écosophie. Edited by Stéphane Nadaud. Paris: Lignes. ———. 2016. Lines of Flight: For Another World of Possibilities. Translated by Andrew Goffey. London: Bloomsbury Academic. First published as Guattari 2011. Hastings, Michael. 1998. “The Brain,

Circadian Rhythms, and Clock Genes.” British Medical Journal 317. https://doi. org:10.1136/bmj.317.7174.1704. Ma, Peijun, Tetsuya Mori, Chi Zhao, Teresa Thiel, and Carl Hirschie Johnson. 2016. “Evolution of KaiC-Dependent Timekeepers: A Proto-circadian Timing Mechanism Confers Adaptive Fitness in the Purple Bacterium Rhodopseudomonas plaustris.” PLos Genetics 12 (3): e1005922. https://doi.org:10:1371/journal. pgen.1005922. O’Neill, John S., and Akhilesh B. Reddy. 2011. “Circadian Clocks in Human Red Blood Cells.” Nature 469: 498–503. Ray, Sandipan, and Akhilesh B. Reddy. 2016. “Cross-Talk between Circadian Clocks, Sleep-Wake Cycles, and Metabolic Networks: Dispelling the Darkness.” BioEssays 38 (4): 394–405. Reinberg, Alain. 1970. “La chronobiologie: Une nouvelle étape de l’étude des rythmes biologiques.” Science 1 (4): 181–97. Reinberg, Alain, and Thérèse Vanden Driessche. 1968. “Rythmes biologiques.” In Encyclopaedia Universalis, vol. 14, 568–72. Paris: Encyclopaedia Universalis. Reinke, Hans, and Gad Asher. 2016. “Circadian Clock Control of Liver Metabolic Functions.” Gastroenterology 150 (3): 574–80. Sinturel, Flore, Alan Gerber, Daniel Mauvoisin, Jingkui Wang, David Gatfield, Jeremy J. Stubblefield, Carla B. Green, Frédéric Gachon, and Ueli Schibler. 2017. “Diurnal Oscillations in Liver Mass and Cell Size Accompany Ribosome Assembly Cycles.” Cell 169 (4): 651–63. Thaiss, Christoph A., Maayan Levy, Tal Korem, Lenka Dohnalová, Hagit Shapiro, Diego A. Jaitin, Eyal David, et al. 2016. “Microbiota Diurnal Rhythmicity Programs Host Transcriptome Oscillations.” Cell 167 (6): 1495–510. Whitehead, Kenia, Min Pan, Ken-ichi Masumura, Richard Bonneau, and Nitin S. Baliga. 2009. “Diurnally Entrained Anticipatory Behavior in Archaea.” PLoS One 4 (5): e5485. https://doi.org:10.1371/ journal.pone.0005485.

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East Meets West in France Catching the Musical Scent Edward Campbell University of Aberdeen, UK

French modernism since Debussy has integrated within itself aspects of the music and culture of geographically diverse regions, including elements from China, India, Indonesia, Japan, and Vietnam.1 While significant aspects of Asian music are discernible in French musical modernity from Debussy onwards, this paper focuses on the work of the generations of composers who succeeded Olivier Messiaen, André Jolivet, Maurice Ohana, and Pierre Boulez, in exem­ plifying how French modernism and the musics of the world encounter one another in innumerable, innovative ways. On the French-born side, a number of composers, many one-time members of Messiaen’s celebrated class, have drawn on the East in their work. Jacques Charpentier used Indian Karnatic modes for his 72 études karnatiques for piano; Jean-Claude Éloy engaged with the music and cultures of Japan, India, and Tibet, in works such as Kâmakalâ, Shânti, Gaku-no-Michi, and Chants pour l’autre moitié du ciel. French-Canadian Claude Vivier integrated non-Western sounds into several of his works and others such as Marc Battier, Marie-Hélène Bernard, Allain Gaussin, Jean-Luc Hervé, François-Bernard Mâche, Laurent Martin, and Thierry Pécou continue to engage with other cultures. Such conjunctions are not the exclusive preserve of French-born composers and there are now several generations of Asian composers who have studied and worked in France. These include the Japanese composers Sadao Bekku, Makoto Shinohara, Akira Tamba, and Yoshihisa Taïra. Chinese composers include Hao Chang and Qigang Chen and there are the Vietnamese compos­ ers Tôn-Thất Tiết and Nguyen-Thien Dao. Some of these figures have worked, in turn, with their own French-based Asian students: among Taïra’s pupils are Chien-Hui Hung, Lin-Ni Liao, Mansoor Hosseini, and Malika Kishino. Other French educated and/or resident composers include Shuya Xu, Karen Tanaka, Fuminori Tanada, Misato Mochizuki, Kenji Sakai, Sanae Ishida, Mayu Hirano, Keita Matsumiya, Naoki Sakata, and Aki Nakamura. Beginning from this mapping out of the musical landscape, the task of this short study is to consider the nature of the rhizomatic workings operational in such musical engagements, the deterritorialisations and reterritorialisations, the movements of the macro and micro, molar and molecular forces of East



1 Unless otherwise indicated, translations are my own.

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Edward Campbell and West, which meet one another in ever-metamorphosing assemblages of cultural, linguistic, and sonic forces. At least since the time of Debussy, East and West may be thought of as part­ ners in a Deleuzian “aberrant nuptial,” and in this paper I consider how this operates, first, in the cases of Tōru Takemitsu and Jōji Yuasa, two Japanese com­ posers who neither lived nor studied in France, but for whom French music and culture have been crucial forces; and, second, in the work of Tôn-Thất Tiết and Nguyen-Thien Dao, two Vietnamese-born composers who studied and lived the greater parts of their lives in France. All this is considered in relation to the Deleuzian aberrant nuptial, the theories of Martiniquan writer and theorist Édouard Glissant, who drew on a number of Deleuzian concepts in his thinking of the relationships between global cultures, and, finally, the geo­ poetics of Scottish/French poet Kenneth White.

TŌru Takemitsu While in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, the Japanese for the most part favoured German music and its traditions, Tomojirō Ikenouchi (1906–91) studied composition at the Paris Conservatoire from 1927 to 1936, becoming, in turn, the teacher of younger Japanese composers who also looked to France. As Peter Burt (2001, 14) notes, the music of Debussy and Ravel “reflected back at them, from a European perspective, many of the preoccu­ pations of their own indigenous musical culture” including a “modally based, ‘non-functional’ harmonic idiom,” a “fondness for timbral finesse,” and a pen­ chant for “picturesque, naturalistic subject matter.” Indeed, Takemitsu later referred to this phenomenon as “reciprocal action,” whereby “musical art . . . was reimported to Japan.” For Burt, Takemitsu’s development as a composer is in part the history of a confrontation between Western and Japanese traditions, from the composer’s early rejection of Japanese culture through a period in which the two traditions confront one another experimentally, to a reflective integration of Japanese ele­ ments within a Western compositional model but “where the two cultures are no longer separately identifiable” (quoted in Burt 2001, 235). In his early work, Takemitsu rejected the nationalist approaches of the recent past, instead stud­ ying Western scores, particularly those of French composers including Albert Roussel, Gabriel Fauré and the Belgian-born César Franck (24). At this stage, he assimilated some aspects of Japanese tradition into Western composition via pentatonicism and non-functional harmony, and Debussy and Messiaen became extremely important for Takemitsu’s musical language, including his use of the octatonic scale (Messiaen’s second mode of limited transposition) (31–32). Takemitsu first used traditional Japanese instruments, the chikuzenbiwa (a lute) and the koto (a zither) for a documentary on the subject of Japanese kimo­ nos in 1961, and he blended the shakuhachi (a bamboo flute), shinobue (a trans­ verse flute), and ryūteki (a transverse flute used in the gagaku ensemble) “with the Western symphony orchestra in his music for the television drama series 74

East Meets West in France Minamoto Yoshitsune” in 1966 (Burt 2001, 110–11). In terms of his own compo­ sitions, Eclipse for biwa and shakuhachi was performed in 1966, and both instru­ ments were used again with symphony orchestra for November Steps in 1967. This was followed in 1972 by Distance for shō and solo oboe as well as Autumn for biwa, shakuhachi, and orchestra and Voyage for three biwa, from 1973. In an Autumn Garden for gagaku ensemble was completed in 1979 and Ceremonial—An Autumn Ode for shō and orchestra was composed in 1992. This is the totality of Takemitsu’s works for traditional Japanese instruments and in which aspects of East and West come together so obviously. While, for Kenjiro Miyamoto, Takemitsu eventually concluded that “it made no sense to unite Japanese music with European” (quoted in ibid., 111), Burt maintains that the aesthetics of tra­ ditional Japanese music continued to be an important influence. Takemitsu’s use of microtones in November Steps, in both the orchestral and the two solo parts, demonstrates that he was exploring “common ground between contemporary Western and ancient Japanese instrumental praxis” (Burt 2001, 116). At the same time, the Eastern and Western elements are kept largely separate and he stated that he wished “to blend some intrinsically mis­ matched instruments in one ensemble so as to reveal . . . their underlying dif­ ferences” (quoted in ibid.). Consequently, the work unfolds for the most part in alternate sections devoted either to the traditional Japanese instruments or to the Western orchestra, the two rarely being heard together. There are certain points of contact between them in terms of timbre, for example in the plucking of harp and biwa, the striking of the instruments, microtonal bending of pitches, and various percussive effects. In Autumn (1973) Takemitsu attempted to inte­ grate the instruments and, consequently, traditional soloists and orchestra per­ form together much more frequently than in November Steps (Burt 2001, 126). In an Autumn Garden for gagaku ensemble is Takemitsu’s most developed engagement with traditional Japanese music and Burt notes that the work’s E-Dorian mode “is identical with one of the three transpositions of the ritsu scale, hyōjō,” which suggests that, despite his intention of creating “a new musi­ cal language for gagaku,” traditional forms of expression continued to exert their force through their implication with performing techniques and the material constitution of the instruments (Burt 2001, 163). Traditional elements of gagaku performance found in Takemitsu’s piece include heterophony, canonic writing, use of percussion, and the “microtonal embellishment” of melodic lines for the hichiriki (a short, double-reed wind instrument) and ryūteki (164). Takemitsu composed only one work for traditional instruments after 1979. Takemitsu did not recognise any commonality linking Japanese music with that of other countries, which, to him, were as alien as Western music (Burt 2001, 128); however, his fascination for the music of Debussy did not abate, as can be seen from his Quotation of Dream—Say Sea, Take Me! for two pianos and orchestra (1991), in which extended passages from La mer are cited alongside material that is reworked, and he alludes to Debussy’s Sonata for flute, viola, and harp in And Then I Knew ’twas Wind (1992), composed for the same instru­ mental combination (221–22).

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Edward Campbell For Timothy Koozin, Takemitsu’s music surpasses the hybrid approaches of his predecessors and balances its contrasting forces subtly (Burt 2001, 235). Burt finds that Takemitsu’s work assimilates Japanese and Western traditions in a satisfactory union while avoiding any superficial “East–West ‘hybridisation’” (235) and, “for the most part . . . anecdotal ‘Japanese’ reference[s]” (236). He discovered common points of interest between Japanese culture and contem­ porary preoccupations among Western modernists, particularly in relation to timbre (238) and the importance of the individual sound event (239).

JŌji Yuasa Throughout his compositional career Jōji Yuasa has fused aspects of Western and Japanese music, marrying Western avant-garde procedures with Japanese Zen thought process and engaging with the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki, Matsuo Bashō, Motokiyo Zeami, and others. Having gained experience of both Japanese and Western musical traditions, the noh theatre has been particularly important for him throughout his life, his approach being one that challenges any simplistic opposition of the Western and Eastern while confronting the issue of their separation (Yuasa, cited in Galliano 2012, 6). Like his fellow composers within the Jikken Kōbō (experimental workshop) group, he listened “a great deal” to the music of Messiaen and Jolivet in the early 1950s, recognising a possible convergence between their music and aspects of Japanese Zen (Galliano 2012, 22). He was impressed by “the mineral quality” of Messiaen’s Préludes, their “metallic, brilliant character,” “inebriated sweetness” and sensuality, and more generally by the French composer’s use of modes and tone clusters (Yuasa, quoted in Galliano 2012, 23–24).2 While Messiaen’s modes are found in a number of Yuasa’s works, Jolivet’s irrational, cosmic music, with its seeming resistance to analysis, fascinated him more (ibid., 42), and he agreed with Claude Rostand that Jolivet “systematically stresses the orientalization of Western music that Debussy had begun more or less instinctively” (Rostand quoted in Galliano 2002, 151). Noh-based elements in Yuasa’s works include a dance in the last movement of Projection for 7 Players (1955, rev. 1956) (Galliano 2012, 14), the “isolation of sounds” in the second movement (16), and the cello solo at the opening of Projection VII which suggests the nōkan, the flute used in noh theatre (19). In Interpenetration I for two flutes (1963) he applied some aspects of noh, including “twenty fixed iri (‘knots’ of local synchronization between the performers of noh music following the mihakarai technique where no precise synchroniza­ tion exists between the flute and the voice, yet the two parts verify a reciprocal correspondence in the iri)” (44). Yuasa’s Projection—Flower, Bird, Wind and Moon for eight kotos and orchestra from 1967 is the first of his works to include tradi­ tional Japanese instruments and orchestra (51–52). “The eight kotos are divided into two groups of four,” the thirteen-stringed instruments tuned on a series of 2 The fourth projection (Projection for 7 players) is in Messiaen’s second mode of limited transposition (Galliano 2012, 17). There are references to modes 2, 4, and 7 in Cosmos Haptic (1957) (ibid., 26–27, 30).

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East Meets West in France twelve semitones, while those with seventeen strings are tuned to Messiaen’s second mode of limited transposition (52). The texts of the great Edo period poet Matsuo Bashō (1644–94) became very important for Yuasa in the 1970s (115–16), serving to reinforce his Japanese identity. In 1978 he composed 5 Haiku of Bashō for koto, seventeen-string koto and voice, once again writing for the instrument in a generally Western manner while creating a semblance of “tradition.” From the mid-1970s a more obvious interest is evident in materi­ als from Japanese culture. Ritual for Delphi (1979) is composed for shakuhachi, male choir and treble voices, percussion, electronic sounds, and dance groups; a section of the work Maibataraki was also transcribed at the time for shakuhachi, percussion, and dance and then rewritten for solo noh flute in 1987 (122). The influence of noh singing is pervasive in Composition on Nine Levels by Zeami for male choir (1984) (152). Cosmos Haptic III—Kokuh (Emptiness) (1990) is scored for twenty-stringed koto and shakuhachi (180). The symphonic suite The Narrow Road to the Deep North: Bashō for orchestra (1995) features aspects of Western and Japanese music with suggestions of the drum taiko while the woodwind writing “recalls the introductory music [jo] of traditional court music for mouth organ, flute ryūteki and oboe hichiriki” (171).

Tôn-Thâ�t Tiê�t Tôn-Thất Tiết was born in Hué in Central Vietnam in 1933, came to Paris in 1958, and studied with Jean Rivier (1896–1987) and with Jolivet from 1966, the latter describing his work as “a successful synthesis of the traditions of his native country and the possibilities offered by more evolved Western tech­ niques” (Bancaud 2010, 23). Rivier advised him to return to Asia to try to find his own way of composing, encouraging him to develop his knowledge of trad­ itional Asian music and to study “Oriental” philosophy. The rediscovery of his native culture, as part of which he listened to recordings of Vietnamese music and attended concerts of Asian music in Paris (Tôn-Thâ�t 2017), enabled him to develop a personal compositional style in which elements of East and West, Chinese humanism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism come together (33–34). For Tôn-Thâ�t Tiê�t, those Western composers who have been interested in the East “have not captured the profundity of oriental thought” (quoted in Bancaud 2010, 31) and, while he listens to works inspired by the East, they do not trans­ port him as do Indian or Tibetan music (32). He claims for his own music that its orchestral colour is “the light from Hué,” his native city, and that his long­ standing desire is “to revive the spirit of traditional Vietnamese music” in his own works through taking up aspects of its instrumental techniques while at the same time forming a distinctive and personal “musical language.” The court music from Hué influenced his use of percussion, for example in Les jardins d’autre monde (1987) (33). Unlike Takemitsu and others, however, Tôn-Thâ�t Tiê�t does not for the most part integrate traditional instruments and Western instruments, because of the lack of performers of traditional Vietnamese music in France. As does Takemitsu, he stresses the particularity of his own Asian cul­ 77

Edward Campbell ture, and emphasises the differences in cultures, musical systems, and under­ standings of Asiatic thought between himself and a Japanese composer such as Yoshihisa Taïra, who was also working in France (36). Tôn-Thâ�t Tiê�t acknowledges that his compositions after Prajña Paramita for six voices (or vocal ensemble) and Western instrumental ensemble (1988) draw increasingly on Buddhist texts (Bancaud 2010, 46). Again, he identifies that after Dialogue avec la nature for two guitars and Western orchestra (1993–94), his sub­ sequent works—such as Contemplation for viola and orchestra (1994/1997); Les sourires de Bouddha for chamber choir (2001); Chants d’ivresse for mezzo-soprano, flute, string orchestra, and traditional Vietnamese ensemble (2003–4); Poèmes for flute, viola, harp, and ca trù trio (who play an ancient genre of Vietnamese chamber music) (2004); Appel for soprano and string trio (2005); and Du haut de la montagne for cello, percussion, and string orchestra (2006)—are all attempts to draw closer to nature, an inclination he attributes to the thought of Chuang Tzu (Zhuangzi) (Bancaud 2010, 49). In 1994 he founded the asso­ ciation France–Vietnam pour la musique to safeguard traditional Vietnamese music and to help develop it in his native country (53–54), and he formed the Phu Xuan ensemble, fourteen musicians and a singer selected from the court musicians in Hué, to promote their traditional court music. Poèmes (2004), like Takemitsu’s And Then I Knew ’twas Wind, is composed for the Debussyian trio of flute, viola, and harp but adds a traditional music trio of singer, lute, and percussionist who perform ca trù (59). Tôn-Thâ�t Tiê�t’s chamber opera L’arbalète magique (2004) is written to some extent in the manner of the chéo, a type of musical theatre from North Vietnam, for an ensemble of flute, viola, harp, and percussion (bongos, tom-toms, wood blocks, and cymbals), and three danc­ ers, with the vocal solo part “in the spirit of the vocal technique of traditional Vietnamese music: many ornaments, a little ordinary vibrato and great supple­ ness” (Bancaud 2010, 60–61).

Nguyen-Thien Dao Nguyen-Thien Dao was born in Hanoi in 1940, came to France in 1953, a year before the end of the First Indochina War, and was a student in Messiaen’s com­ position class from 1967 to 1969. While, for Messiaen, the young Vietnamese was “an extraordinary composer” (Samuel 1986, 205), for Dao, his teacher was “more oriental than an oriental” (Dao, quoted in Halbreich 1980, 513). Dao observed with justification that contemporary Western music “is strongly influenced by the horizontal nature of the East” and, for the Vietnamese of his generation, France represented “the country of freedom” and “the rights of man” (Dao, quoted in Massé 2014, 9). He reflects that he carried two cultures within himself, Eastern and Western, noting that while “Asiatic composers can­ not write music without knowing Western writing techniques,” they belong for the most part to oral traditions (ibid., 12). Dao’s opera-oratorio Les enfants d’Izieu (1993) was commissioned by Radio France in memory of the forty-four Jewish children and seven adults who were arrested in Izieu on 6 April 1944, deported to Auschwitz, and killed, with only 78

East Meets West in France one survivor. Dao says: “Having myself known war, colonialism, humiliation as well as hope, freedom, struggle, I immediately felt very close to this tragedy” (quoted in Massé 2014, 24). While the work deals with a significant event in French history, for Dao the Vietnamese elements in the work are evident “in its colours, microintervals, and use of percussion: ‘a forest of glimmering sounds.’ . . . Chimes resound in the prologue. It’s a question of making the bells of the whole world sound” (25). As for the train journey to the camps, Dao speaks of “an oriental timbre produced by inflections, glottal stops, and microintervals” that is suggestive of crying souls, with a mix of vocal melismas: Western medie­ val and Far-Eastern ornaments signifying innocence. Falsetto voice is used for simplicity and poignancy and Dao seeks to avoid all “superficial influence and chintzy exoticism” (25). According to Dao, his thought “remained profoundly Vietnamese” (quoted in Massé 2014, 29). He cultivated this throughout his career; much of his work has its roots in Vietnamese music, and he attributed his use of microintervals, for example, to oral traditions (15). At the same time, Dao favoured a certain universality in approach and he insisted that a composer’s listening must encompass “Niagara Falls, the Nile, the Amazon, forests, pygmies, the biwa, gagaku, an immense culture . . . universal listening”; it is on this basis he that was interested in the work of Takemitsu and Jean-Claude Éloy (34). Dao believed that Western uses of percussion focused almost exclusively on percussive and decorative aspects and, while he welcomed the Western discov­ ery of percussion, he suggested that composers often used such instruments like children showing off a “mountain of playthings” (quoted in Massé 2014, 49). In the East, in contrast, percussion is also used lyrically and harmoni­ ously, and has “its own musical language,” for example in gamelan or in spe­ cific Vietnamese contexts (48), and is also valued in the production of complex, imprecisely pitched sounds (50). For Dao, the Asiatic veneration of Debussy is no accident (Massé 2014, 63); however, despite having studied Western chromatic harmony, he felt the need for another kind of harmony, a need he was able to satisfy with the use of micro­ intervals and the sound colours encountered in his timbral research (56–57). Where Western composers seek to master time, Eastern composers endeavour to “mould themselves in time,” and he suggests that both conceptions need to be united (quoted in ibid., 60). In place of any East–West synthesis, he pre­ ferred to speak of his music in terms of the combination of “Western écriture and Eastern thought” (75). He used traditional Vietnamese instruments in his work for the first time in the soundtrack he composed for the film Poussière d’empire in 1983, explaining that he had been reluctant to employ them previ­ ously for fear of a certain exoticism, an impulse that was only overcome by his “desire to renew writing for traditional instruments” (76).

Conclusions Each of these composers is very different from the others and there is no sense of an East–West coalition or any kind of unified aesthetic tendency, though ele­ 79

Edward Campbell ments of specific Asian cultures, Chinese, Japanese, or Vietnamese, are present in the works of some. As noted already, these four composers were selected for inclusion in this short study on the basis that their works display very particular relationships between France and the East; Takemitsu and Yuasa through study of French music and culture; Tôn-Thâ�t Tiê�t and Nguyen-Thien Dao through living in France and the contact they had with Messiaen, Jolivet, Maurice Ohana, and others. For Deleuze and Guattari, “becomings are not phenomena of imitation or assimilation” but of “double capture” and “non-parallel evolution” (Deleuze and Parnet 2007, 2). The aberrant nuptial involves “neither imitation nor resemblance” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 10), preferring processes of deter­ ritorialisation and reterritorialisation, “transversal communications,” the assemblage of heterogeneous elements (11), connection with an outside, and the overturning of the code that enabled its structuration in the first place (11– 12). It entails the opening up of “a rhizomatic realm of possibility effecting the potentialization of the possible, as opposed to arborescent possibility, which marks a closure, an impotence” (190). The becoming of the aberrant nuptial is a symbiosis “with no possible filiation” and “from which no wasp-orchid can ever descend” (238). Beyond Deleuze and Guattari, Martiniquan writer Édouard Glissant explores hybridisation and nomad identity, rejecting all cultural hierarchies. In a reflec­ tion that can easily be transferred to the musical domain, Glissant notes the importance of language and the divisions and linguistic oppositions within a given language, the problem of monolingualism and of monolingual countries that are intimidated by the presence of a foreign language and of bilingual countries with their own internal problems, as well as diglossic and multilin­ gual countries (Wald Lasowski 2015, 43). This mapping out of possibilities is to some extent akin to the existence of Western-based music in all its manifestations in Asia today. China, Japan, Vietnam, and every other Asian country has its own distinctive history and context for engagement with the West, socially, politically, culturally, and musi­ cally. Vietnam, former French colony, with its legacy of colonialism and subse­ quent wars with France and the United States; Japan, with its opening up to the West in 1868, its victory in wars with Russia and China, its pre-World War I Westernisation, the subsequent rise of nationalism, expansionism, and coloni­ alism, culminating in the cataclysms of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and ignomin­ ious defeat, the rejection of traditional Japanese culture that followed, and a new wave of Westernisation. Revisiting the terms used for the approaches of the four composers, Peter Burt (2001, 14) writes of the music of Debussy and Ravel as reflecting back at Japanese composers “from a European perspective, many of the preoccu­ pations of their own indigenous musical culture,” a phenomenon described by Takemitsu as “reciprocal action” whereby “musical art was reimported to Japan” (quoted in ibid.). I noted Takemitsu’s confrontation of Western and Japanese traditions, of reflective integration, assimilation, engagement, and implication, of the blending of instruments, of non-commonality, of not unit­ 80

East Meets West in France ing European and Asian music, of mismatches, of underlying differences, points of contact, some sort of unity, of transcending hybrid styles and avoid­ ing the anecdotal. With Yuasa, terms used included fusing, marrying, engaging, and possible convergence, but not simplistic opposition. For Tôn-Thâ�t Tiê�t, terms used included successful synthesis and non-integration of instruments, as well as the specificity of his own Asian culture and differences in individual Asian cultures. Finally, Nguyen-Thien Dao avoids “superficial influence and chintzy exoticism” (quoted in Massé 2014, 25) but rather talks of the combina­ tion of “Western écriture and Eastern thought” (75). While there is no one way, common threads are discernible. As a rhizomatic thinker, Glissant favoured “the meeting of civilisations” while resisting any kind of “uniform continuity,” cultural isolationism or self-sufficiency (Wald Lasowski 2015, 52–53). His concept of creolisation sup­ ported transformation, movement, hybridity, and mixity, and he holds that no language exists without openness to all others and “no culture, no civilisation attains its plenitude without being in relation to all others” (76). Creolisation is concerned with “the infinity of human becoming” which lies beyond cul­ tural “synthesis,” “co-presence” (86), or the contiguity of any multicultural model (98). For Aliocha Wald Lasowski, creolisation proceeds through “the hybridation of heterogeneous elements,” “weaving networks,” “unexpected alliance[s],” and “aleatory meetings” (143). It is unforeseeable and creates com­ pletely unexpected cultural and linguistic microclimates where languages and cultures come into contact with and act upon one another. Glissant’s notion of the archipelago questions and moves beyond Western cultural domination to put cultures dynamically in relation with one another, thus ensuring that no one element is central (144). Intent on de-exoticising East–West relations and syntheses, Kenneth White favours “intellectual nomadism”—“the intellectual nomad” being one who “abandons the highway of Western civilisation, and advances exploringly into landscapes-mindscapes neglected by that highway. He breaks trails, opens up paths, follows world-lines” (White 1996, 47–48).3 White suggests that there are two ways to renew a language, “either by archaeo-logical work on a language, or by an ‘exotic’ recourse to other languages with different metaphysics, dif­ ferent initial fictions” (White 2004, 157). Extrapolating from White, it may be that where the modernity of the Second Viennese composers (Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern) and others primarily favours the first approach, Debussy, Messiaen, and Jolivet all the way to Takemitsu, Yuasa, Tôn-Thâ�t Tiê�t, and Nguyen-Thien Dao and others prefer the second; as White (2004, 180) notes, “for the first time in the history of humanity, we have practically the whole of world-culture at our disposal,” all of which is available “for the intellectual nomad, for the world-poet, as a field of reference, as a hoard of elements, to be recomposed, reactualized.”

3 “Intellectual nomadism” was the subject of White’s 1979 PhD thesis, for which Deleuze was an examin­ er, and the resulting book L’esprit nomade was published in 1987 (White 1996, 58).

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Edward Campbell While, for White (2004), quoting historian Norman Davies, French culture is “the most influential and the most universal culture of the [European] con­ tinent” (185), he recognises that much of what Europe has to give came first from Asia, an insight illustrated powerfully by Ovid’s story of Europa (182).4 For White, this story of an abduction and voyage from East to West, indicates “how much Europe . . . owes to Asia” and “how much it wants to start out anew” (182). Perhaps with this in mind the following proverb from the Zenrin-kushū, quoted by Luciana Galliano (2002, iii) in her book Yogaku: Japanese Music in the Twentieth Century, is apposite: “The wild geese do not intend to cast their reflection. The Water has no mind to receive their image.” References Bancaud, Laurence. 2010. Tôn-Thât Tiêt: Dialogue avec la nature: Entretiens annotés et analyses de Laurence Bancaud. Paris: Cigart. Burt, Peter. 2001. The Music of Tōru Takemitsu. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Minuit). Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. 2007. Dialogues II. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Rev. ed. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1977 as Dialogues (Paris: Flammarion). Galliano, Luciana. 2002. Yōgaku: Japanese Music in the Twentieth Century. Translated by Martin Mayes. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. First published 1998 as Yōgaku: Percorsi della musica giapponese nel Novecento (Venice: Cafoscarina). ———. 2012. The Music of Jōji Yuasa. Edited by Peter Burt. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Halbreich, Harry. 1980. Olivier Messiaen. Paris: Fayard / SACEM. Massé, Isabelle. 2014. Nguyen-Thien Dao: Une voie de la musique contemporaine OrientOccident. Paris: Vandevelde. Samuel, Claude. 1986. Olivier Messiaen: Musique et couleur; nouveaux entretiens avec Claude Samuel. Paris: Belfond. Translated by E. Thomas Glasow as Music and Color: Conversations with Claude Samuel (Portland, OR: Amadeus Press). Tôn-Thâ�t Tiê�t’s. 2017. “Written Matters.” Tôn-Thâ�t Tiê�t’s Official Website. Accessed 4 March 2017. http:// tonthattiet.com/written-matters/ (site discontinued). Wald Lasowski, Aliocha. 2015. Édouard Glissant: Penseur des archipels. Paris: Pocket. White, Kenneth. 1987. L’esprit nomade. Paris: Grasset. ———. 1996. Coast to Coast: Interviews and Conversations 1985–1995. Glasgow: Open World in association with Mythic Horse Press. ———. 2004. The Wanderer and His Charts: Essays on Cultural Renewal. Edinburgh: Polygon.

4 The story is found in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Europa, a Phoenician princess and the daughter of the King of Tyre, “was carried off by Zeus in the guise of a white bull to Crete, where she became the mother of Minos” (White 2004, 182).

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Topography of the (One) Reflections on Musical Time in Composition and Performance Stefan Östersjö Piteå School of Music, Luleå University of Technology, Sweden

Christer Lindwall Independent composer

Jörgen Dahlqvist Playwright, theatre director, and senior lecturer at Malmö Theatre Academy, Lund University, Sweden

Introduction This chapter discusses a composition for eleven-stringed alto guitar by the Swedish composer Christer Lindwall. Titled Topography of the (One), this piece may be understood as a meta-composition that reflects on the pre-condi­ tions—both material and philosophical—for its stages of becoming. It thereby holds a special place in the compositional output of Lindwall, whose work has, since the late 1980s, been associated with the practices of New Complexity— composers such as Brian Ferneyhough and Richard Barrett. The conceptual nature of this composition, and its direct quotations from a series of contem­ porary French philosophers launched an interpretative process that led to a staging that would—as Steven Schick wrote in his discussion of the process of learning Ferneyhough’s Bone Alphabet—“shape and make inevitable an inter­ pretive context which steers the piece in performance” (Schick 1994, 133). The first performance was to take place in a production titled “Words and Music” during the Transistor Festival in Malmö, Sweden, curated by the Swedish playwright and director Jörgen Dahlqvist. A dialogue was launched between Östersjö and Dahlqvist that resulted in a staging that focused entirely on the creation of a sonic framework for the performance. The dramaturgical means were the addition of electronic sound, first by the creation of an introductory tape part, and, second, by doubling up the recited fragments with the sampled voice of the same performer, also creating a sonic questioning of the unity of

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Stefan Östersjö, Christer Lindwall, Jörgen Dahlqvist the “one.”1 The compositional strategies, launched by the composer’s phil­ osophical reflections, in turn become the source for a series of observations regarding musical time, which we address by returning to Deleuze’s writing in Difference and Repetition (1994).

Complexity in notation and performance The term New Complexity does not refer to a compositional school, but emerged as a descriptor of the work of a number of individual composers, most of whom came from the UK.2 This music caused strong debates in the late 1980s and 1990s, and was largely (mis)understood as an “over-notated” contin­ uation of serialist manifestations of high modernism. However, as argued by Paul Duncan (2010), composers like Ferneyhough have developed a composi­ tional practice that aims to counter the notion of performance as an activity, the artistic value of which lies in the relative success in achieving perfection in the representation of the information in the score. Instead, new complexity composers like Ferneyhough aim for “a coalescence of the dialogues between composer and score, score and performance, and performance and reception” (ibid., 138). Ferneyhough suggests that the identity of the work may be located in such a dialogue, set in the “realm of non-equivalence” which separates the composition from the notation. By the sounding out of this dialogue in per­ formance, the performer may articulate “the inchoate, outlining the way from the conceptual to the experiential and back” (Ferneyhough [1978] 1995, 13). Such a perspective on work identity presupposes an understanding of a listen­ er’s perception as co-creative, as expressed by Ferneyhough in the following reflection on the role of subjectivity in musical perception: I reckon the process of constructing a viable (if transitory) self to be extremely conflictual and chaotic in nature, so that the sort of desperate struggle to stay afloat in the turbulent “delay wake” of listening which I envisage strikes me as a pretty adequate paradigm for the engenderment of self-awareness. If the question is suggesting that the “inner witness” makes sense of an experience after the event by replaying it in more or less unaltered form, then I cannot agree. Whatever one actually experiences during a performance, the “piece” that one subsequently retains in the memory is usually a complete recomposition—edited, filtered, and reordered. (Ferneyhough and Boros 1994, 123)

But, perhaps most essentially, the music of Ferneyhough aims to create a dia­ logue between composition and notation through the interaction between musician and instrument, in which the density of inscription in the score 1 A video recording was recorded the day before the premiere at the Inter Arts Center in Malmö. This film is available in the media repository. 2 The origin of the term can be traced to an article by the Australian musicologist Richard Toop from 1988, titled “Four Facets of ‘The New Complexity’”; however, Toop claims not to have coined the term, referring instead to a pre-concert talk by Nigel Osborne around 1980, which introduced a composition by James Dillon (see further, Duncan 2010). Importantly, composers such as Richard Barrett, Chris Dench, James Dillon, and Michael Finnissy, whose music was discussed in Toop’s article, had no interest in being grouped together and never published any manifesto or claims regarding a shared agenda.

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Topography of the (One) demands a particular slowness and attention. The rhythmical complexity of the notation demands a multiplicity of approaches. In the initial stages, indi­ vidual figures need to be calculated, explored, memorised, and kaleidoscopi­ cally experienced in relation to other strata. Steven Schick (1994, 137) describes how, through his study of Ferneyhough’s Bone Alphabet, “the piece became a theatrical arena where physical gesture was not the simple by-product of per­ formance, but an integral part of a growing interpretive point of view.” The dia­ logue between performer and score within the framework of new complexity has the potential to intensify the interaction between analysis and embodi­ ment, which, in a successful performance may package “the intellectual energy of the score into meaningful physicality” (ibid., 133). It is in this oscillation between the conceptual and the experiential that Schick identifies the per­ former’s task of developing an interpretative framework in the dialogue with a complex score. We will return below to the notion of the interpretative frame­ work, but first turn to the role of complexity and the dialogical in the music of Christer Lindwall.

Musical time in Christer Lindwall’s music Christer Lindwall started his career as a composer in the electronic music field, working largely at the Electronic Music Studios in Stockholm (EMS). In the late 1980s he experienced both personal success (with the tape composition Points, which was performed at Warsaw Autumn in 1986 and released on the first vol­ ume of Wergo’s Computer Music Currents series in 1989) and an artistic crisis, which led to a turn away from tape music to chamber music. Wishing to create music that retained and refined the possibility of tape music to meticulously sculpt the individual sound objects while also containing the intensity and malleability of live performance, he developed a compositional practice that embraced multiplicity: To me, New Complexity offered the possibility of leaving a conformity inherent to the linguistic signification of musical materiality, that is, it was no longer necessary to compose an object that could be considered as a musical “being,” but instead was a prismatic “becoming” object, a situation where composer, performer, and listener must relate to time and materiality as contingent. In other words, a hyper-object without essentialist claims, in contradistinction to a musical praxis in which subject and object are cemented in a historically conditioned set of relations. (Lindwall 2018, pers. comm.)

Again, just as in Ferneyhough’s discussion of the dialogical, Lindwall artic­ ulates an inter-subjective perspective on the formation of a transitory self through musical practice. The perception of time constitutes one foundational perspective in such a reconfiguration of the practices of composition and per­ formance. Lindwall further describes how he finds the “outside-time” perspective in the act of composition, and its counterpart, the “intime” experience of music as performed, to be a dichotomy that is continuously

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Stefan Östersjö, Christer Lindwall, Jörgen Dahlqvist repeated and expanded into the constitution of a “musical reality.” These temporal concepts are fundamentals in the current artistic paradigm(s) of Western art music. An attempt to overwrite these concepts in a compositional and interpretative practice may therefore result in temporal concepts that are incompatible with paradigmatic conceptions of time. This in turn must lead to the development of a different notational praxis, in which fractions of “time,” “frequency,” reminiscences of language (carrying sonic as well as semantic meaning), and other materialities must be shaped and thought of as lines of flight from the current practice, which therefore necessarily demand new practices of interpretation and performance. (Lindwall 2018, pers. comm.)

The composers associated with New Complexity have all engaged with per­ formance in ways that have been at the heart of the creation of new perform­ ance practices in contemporary music; Christer Lindwall’s close collaboration, in particular with a number of dedicated soloists and chamber ensembles,3 have resulted in conceptually and musically radical artistic outputs. The com­ position discussed in this chapter relates to this practice by also examining its workings from the inside, and thereby aligns with an increasingly conceptual development in the composer’s output.

Topography of the (One) Topography of the (One) was composed in 2014–15 and the score, for elevenstringed alto guitar, also contains text fragments that should be recited by the performer, which are first introduced through short phonetic extracts from these texts (see for instance figure 5.2 below and video example 5.1). The pro­ gramme note by Christer Lindwall reads: “Musical form, and its signification in the linguistic materiality of political economy, constitutes the fundamental building block for the ‘sonic text’ of Topography of the (One). The repetition of ‘signifiers’ in the music is contrasted with a modality of non-isomorphic events. Fragments from quotations from Gilles Deleuze, François Laruelle and Gilles Châtelet create a resonance or coda on repetition and difference, on lines of flight and on the real and virtual in musical and linguistic matter” (Lindwall and Östersjö 2017, 87). The title refers to the non-philosophy of François Laruelle, and in particu­ lar to his Philosophies of Difference (2010). Here, Laruelle addresses fundamen­ tal questions of identity and difference, multiplicity and the One, through a reading of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, and Deleuze.4 Rocco Gangle (2013, 3 Among whom are the saxophone player Jörgen Pettersson and the Stockholm Saxophone Quartet; since the 1990s, Lindwall has collaborated with Ensemble Ars Nova in Malmö, for which Stefan Östersjö was artistic director between 1995 and 2012. See further, for instance, Lindwall (2005); Pettersson (1995). 4 The juxtaposition of texts by Laruelle and Deleuze within the framework of the composition is both logical and peculiar. It is logical since there is a strong affinity between their individual approaches to non-philosophy. Yet it is peculiar, since it brings with it the discord between these two philosophers, famously expressed through Laruelle’s letters (written 1988, 1995, see Laruelle 2012b, 2012a), but initiat­ ed in the critical (and in many ways one-sided) reading of Deleuze in Laruelle’s Philosophies of Difference (2010), first published in French in 1986. Deleuze and Guattari commented on the non-philosophy of Laruelle in What Is Philosophy? in 1991, and this was the source for Laruelle’s second letter “I, the Philos­ opher, Am Lying: A Reply to Deleuze” (2012a).

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Topography of the (One) 35) argues that “what must be discovered or invented is a new kind of distinc­ tion between this complex, self-inclusive structure Difference/One on the one hand and One-without-Difference on the other. Such a distinction is necessary for Laruelle because if the philosophical logic of the relation or unity of con­ traries . . . is itself universal for philosophy, then only a mode of critique that is not itself philosophical will be capable of critiquing this logic as such without begging the question.” Perhaps Christer Lindwall’s composition can be seen as an attempt at a different level of non-philosophy, as an articulation in musical practice of questions related to identity and difference, taking shape through experimentation with the perception of musical time.

Of repetition An immediately striking feature of the score to Topography of the (One) is the literal repetition of materials, a structuring principle that appears to have a conceptual significance. In essence, the composition can be understood as an exploration of difference and repetition, where the complexity of the detail in the score is countered by sometimes obsessive reiterations of its material. However, the nature of musical performance instigates a process in which the resemblance of individual phrases—indeed, even to the extent of exact repe­ tition of its notated values—still never becomes a repetition, and the resem­ blance is always incomplete: “The simulated external resemblance finds itself interiorised in the system” (Deleuze 1994, 302). In an attempt to emphasise the tension between music as performed and the material identity of musical com­ position as a notated artefact, Topography of the (One) builds on the assumption that “difference is valid, exists and is thinkable only within a pre-existing Same which understands it as conceptual difference and determines it by means of opposition between predicates” (ibid). But what then is the meaning of these repetitions? The immediate effect is that of questioning the principles of permutation and filtering, typical of seri­ alism and further developed in the framework of New Complexity; but the aim appears to be directed towards a reflection on time and memory in musical perception. The late compositions of Morton Feldman come to mind, in which repetition of individual bars, as well as of individual sound objects, are a fun­ damental strategy. Here, Brian Kane (2019) observes how Feldman highlights “the dialectical role of repetition: to enforce remembering by reiteration and to aid forgetting of the immediately past by asserting, and reasserting, the new.” While time is much more compressed in Lindwall’s composition, there is a sim­ ilar play with the perception of time, enforcing parallel processes of remem­ bering and forgetting, perhaps with the aim of bringing a heightened percep­ tion of the individual sound object. The active role of the listener in relation to the percept, and here Deleuze (1994, 70) questions the paradox of repetition, may “lie in the fact that one can speak of repetition only by virtue of the change or difference that it introduces into the mind which contemplates it[.] By virtue of a difference which the mind draws from repetition.”

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Stefan Östersjö, Christer Lindwall, Jörgen Dahlqvist Kane (2019) suggests that Feldman’s compositional practice formalises a dis­ orientation of memory, with the aim of disabling habit, and further aims “to shatter the desiccated formal and conventional shells, and allow for the recov­ ery of expression via involuntary memory. Feldman requires the suggestions derived from habit, to produce the aesthetic effect he is after: a pattern almost discoverable, shall we say an inscrutable pattern that, at the verge of announcing its directionality and functionality exposes itself as merely material—the sub-human murmurings of flux.” Literal repetitions of sound objects are frequent throughout the score of Topography of the (One), most commonly, through the immediate repetition of a single figure; however, it is essential for the large-scale form that some of these figures also reoccur as the piece unfolds.

F igure 5.1.

One such figure is presented for the first time in bar 69, and first repeated in its entirety in bar 70. It reoccurs in bars 76, 88 (without the final bass note), 187, and finally in bar 205, again without the final bass note (see figure 5.2). While before this such repetition of material was inconceivable in Lindwall’s compositional universe, here, they function as a material exploration of the philosophical concept of the repetition of difference.

F igure 5.2.

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F igure 5.1. Bars 68–73 of Topography of the (One). F igure 5.2. Bars 205–11 of Topography of the (One).

Topography of the (One)

Music and philosophy But if we were to think of Topography of the (One) as an articulation of a philo­ sophical problem, what exactly is the role of the discursive (as embodied by the recited text) in performance? In Musicality in Theatre, David Roesner presents different approaches to musicalisation of language in theatre. He states that in writing text for theatre performances, musicality is “more than a philosophical question” because it “also manifests itself within the descrip­ tions of a heightened sensitivity towards sound and silence that authors put forward and reflect on” (Roesner 2014, 129). Musicalisation is also an important component in rehearsals with actors. The German theatre director Michael Thalheimer describes the process of staging a text as creating “a very particular score, which eventually gets presented to an audience” (quoted in ibid., 238). When discussing the question of how music and words can work together, Ruth Finnegan (2015, 91) reminds us that “whatever the compositional origins, a song’s substance—it’s actualization—is also bound with how these elements are in practice enacted and experienced in the temporal moment of the per­ formance.” She claims that even in genres that might be labelled poetry rather than song, “performers draw on the acoustic and intonational arts of the voice, on non-verbal as well as linguistic resources, emotions as well as cognition” (96). She further adds that “Poetry and song can be seen as shorthand terms for the spectrum of ways that people deploy sonic properties in their vocal pres­ entations—musicalize them one might say, in diverse and relative ways across a series of overlapping and varying dimensions such as intonation, rhythm, tim­ bre, onomatopoeia and much else, sometimes in conjunction with instrumen­ tal sounds and multisensory expression” (96). In the collaborative work on staging the piece, our means were entirely musi­ cal. With a wish to emphasise the gestural component in the recitation, Östersjö and Dahlqvist decided to create new material using methods from theatre, just as Thalheimer claims that musicality in a performance “only makes sense as a ‘lived . . . and embodied part of one’s artistic identity’” (Roesner 2014, 240). By first situating and improvising with materials from the text, Östersjö eventually composed a short electronic music prelude. To further amplify the phonolog­ ical qualities in the vocal part, all vocal fragments were sampled and a perfor­ mance set-up was created that allowed these sound files to be synchronised with the live rendering of the text. Hereby, musicalisation became a tool for a further engagement with the semantic, phonological, and gestural qualities in the texts. But when the text is drawn into the musical domain, a further ques­ tion concerns the relation between music and philosophy. Elizabeth Grosz (2008) seeks an understanding of philosophy and art that could identify the points of connection between the two, an understanding that allows philosophy to work with art rather than merely reflecting on its nature. She proposes that, in artistic production, concepts are by-products and not its very material. But what then is the “common origin they share in the forces of the earth and of the living body”? She continues by suggesting that

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Stefan Östersjö, Christer Lindwall, Jörgen Dahlqvist What distinguishes the arts from other forms of cultural production are the ways in which artistic production merges with, intensifies and eternalizes or monumentalizes, sensation. Material production—the production of commodities—while it may generate sensation, is nevertheless directed to the accomplishment of activities, tasks, goals or ends. The production of commodities, even “artistic commodities,” directs itself to the generation of pre-experienced sensations, sensations known in advance, guaranteed to affect in particular sad or joyful ways. . . . Art enables matter to become expressive, to not just satisfy but also to intensify—to resonate and become more than itself. (Grosz 2008, 16)

Christer Lindwall’s Topography of the (One) constitutes an attempt to create such a resonance between art and philosophy, an articulation of questions regarding musical time, difference, and repetition that turns philosophical concepts into musical matter: into movement and gesture. References Deleuze, Gilles. 1994. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1968 as Différence et répétition (Paris: Presses universitaires de France). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1994. What is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1991 as Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Minuit) Duncan, Stuart Paul. 2010. “Recomplexifying the Function(s) of Notation in the Music of Brian Ferneyhough and the ‘New Complexity.’” Perspectives of New Music 48 (1): 136–72. Ferneyhough, Brian. (1978) 1995. “Aspects of Notational and Compositional Practice.” In Brian Ferneyhough: Collected Writings, edited by James Boros and Richard Toop, 2–13. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. First published 1978 in Semaine de Musique Contemporaine (Rome: Académie de France à Rome). Ferneyhough, Brian, and James Boros. 1994. “Composing a Viable (If Transitory) Self: Brian Ferneyhough in Conversation with James Boros.” Perspectives of New Music 32 (1): 114–30. Finnegan, Ruth. 2015. Where Is Language? An Anthropologist’s Questions on Language, Literature and Performance. London: Bloomsbury Gangle, Rocco. 2013. François Laruelle’s Philosophies of Difference: A Critical

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Introduction and Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Grosz, Elizabeth. 2008. Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth. New York: Columbia University Press. Kane, Brian. 2019. “Of Repetition, Habit and Involuntary Memory: An Analysis and Speculation upon Morton Feldman’s Final Composition.” Unpublished paper. Accessed 4 January. http://www.cnvill. net/mfkane.pdf. Laruelle, François. 2010. Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Nonphilosophy. Translated by Rocco Gangle. London: Continuum. First published 1986 as Les philosophies de la difference (Paris: Presses universitaires de France). ———. 2012a. “I, the Philosopher, Am Lying: A Reply to Deleuze.” Translated by Taylor Adkins. In The Non-philosophy Project: Essays by François Laruelle, edited by Gabriel Alkon and Boris Gunjevic, 40–74. New York: Telos Press. First published 1995 as “Résponse à Deleuze,” in La non-philosophie des contemporains, by Nonphilosophie, le collectif (Paris: Kimé), 49–78. ———. 2012b. “Letter to Deleuze.” Translated by Robin Mackay. In From Decision to Heresy: Experiments in NonStandard Thought, edited by Robin Mackey, 393–400. Falmouth: Urbanomic. Letter first published 1988 (La décision philosophique 5). Lindwall, Christer. 2005. Rhizome. Performed by Ensemble Ars Nova and Stefan

Topography of the (One) Östersjö. Phono Suecia, PSCD 154, compact disc. ———. 2018. Email to Stefan Östersjö, 29 December. Lindwall, Christer, and Stefan Östersjö. 2017. “Topography of the (One).” In Aberrant Nuptials: Dare 2017; Second International Conference on Deleuze and Artistic Reasearch, conference book, edited by Paulo de Assis and Paolo Giudici, 89–90. Ghent: Orpheus Institute.

Pettersson, Jörgen. 1995. Saxophone con Forza. Phono Sucia, PSCD 81, compact disc. Roesner, David. 2014. Musicality in Theatre: Music as Model, Method and Metaphor in Theatre-Making. Farnham, UK: Ashgate Schick, Steven. 1994. “Developing an Interpretive Context: Learning Brian Ferneyhough’s Bone Alphabet.” Perspectives of New Music 32 (1): 132–53. Toop, Richard. 1988. “Four Facets of ‘The New Complexity.’” Contact 32: 4–50.

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In the (Immanent) Event of Musical-Philosophical Thought Steve Tromans University of Surrey, UK

This paper was originally conceived as a lecture-recital mixing written text and solo-piano improvisation. It is therefore recommended that the reader/listener approach her or his engagement with what follows in terms of such an event, wherein questions of how these two different modes of presentation and enquiry may work together are explored in two different, though deliberately interrelated, ways.1

Intro Given my professional background as a music performer, it is perhaps inevi­ table that, in my academic enquiries, I find myself most attracted to the field of “practice-as-research” (or whichever of its various qualifiers one may prefer to use—practice-based, practice-led, research through performance, artistic research, practice research, etc.). Regardless of how it may best be labelled/ categorised according to different terminological criteria, a major concern of my research is the event of performance: where such an event is considered not solely as an object of interest, but also (and crucially) as a mode of academic enquiry in its own right. And, further, how such a mode may usefully intertwine with other modes of enquiry (for instance, and in this case, the written word) to produce what I am here calling “musical-philosophical” thought. In what follows below, then, it is important to consider both the textual and the musical practices as interrelated aspects in a parallel investigation. With this in mind, it would seem appropriate to begin that investigation with an instance of music performance, lest the spoken-word element be allowed to take its more commonplace epistemological “high ground” in relation to knowledge practices that operate beyond the parameters (however compli­ cated and diverse) of the discursive. > Listen to multimedia track 6.1: Piano Improvisation #1.

1 The two solo-piano improvisations presented in this paper were given as part of a performance at the research event “Beyond Application? Immanent Encounters between Philosophy and the Arts,” held at the Centre for Performance Philosophy, University of Surrey (UK), on 27 January 2017.

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1 In the improvisation the reader has just listened to, I limit the number of notes to a total of six: a low E♭, a B♭ a fifth higher, and an F a fifth higher than that— with each note doubled at the octave. Melodically speaking, the music holds little interest; harmonically, there is no progression beyond the sounding-out of two perfect fifths and occasional major ninths. As a result, the rhythmical takes centre stage in the musical “becoming.” I use the term becoming advisedly, since I want to evoke a sense of undertak­ ing musical-philosophical thought as a temporally-unfolding process—and, in so doing, to elucidate what can be achieved, musically, in philosophical terms (and vice versa). That music performances happen “in time” is, plainly, partand-parcel of their nature of being—or, rather, becoming. In my improvisation as just heard, movement was prioritised; however, it was not prioritised as a movement of melodic or harmonic progression, but as a rhythmic movement in and of itself: a movement in and of time, but without that which is moved. I am, here, deliberately alluding to the kind of movement theorised by Henri Bergson in his essay “The Perception of Change”: “There are movements, but there is no inert or invariable object which moves: movement does not imply a mobile” ([1946] 1992, 147). Bergson gives an example of the experience of listen­ ing to a musical performance, in the course of which we hear what he calls an “uninterrupted continuity of melody,” rather than a “juxtaposition of distinct notes” (147)—the latter practice spatialising the music in terms of how it might be represented on, for instance, the page of a score (147–48). Where Bergson speaks of melody I prefer instead to attend to rhythm, since it is through that which I am calling the immanent rhythmic that time is both expressed and con­ stituted—melody being merely a collection of notes outside its rhythmic artic­ ulation; while harmony is a “transcendent” system of synchronicity (and/or near-synchronicity) imposed from without. In employing the terms immanent and transcendent I am seeking to relate my musical-philosophical thought with the work of Gilles Deleuze, in whose philo­ sophical project the two terms are of prime significance. As James Williams (2010, 129) notes, in his contribution to The Deleuze Dictionary, a “philosophy of immanence,” for Deleuze, involves the promotion of “connections over forms of separation,” where such connections are constituted solely in “relations” rather than being the result of relations between “different identities.” In other words, in an immanent conception we attend to the relations of relations, rather than to the terms of such (if taken as discrete entities independent of the rela­ tional flux). Through such perspectives, we are enabled to conceive the event of musical-philosophical thought as constituted in movements of movements (à la Bergson), or in relations of relations (à la Deleuze), in which the rhyth­ mic constitutes the temporal operations of a dimension (or plane) of imma­ nence from which our understandings of the melodic and the harmonic—and, I should add, the disciplinary—are engendered.

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2 In encouraging the relations and movements of multimodal musical-philo­ sophical thought (in text and audio) in a paper such as this, a major concern is, plainly, one of coherence: how to build a coherent argument for the usefulness of such a mix, given that one major aspect of the multi-modal presentation (the improvisation) cannot be determined in advance of the event of its emergence. Additionally, in the specific argument I am building, here, I am seeking to enable a productive resonance not just between the practices of writing academic texts and improvising at the piano, but also between the modes of the musical and the philosophical. To maximise this notion of coherence and resonance between certain of the practices of music and philosophy, I turn to a parallel understanding of the event: on the one hand, in terms of a number of philosophers’ approaches to its conception; on the other, with regard to its primary ontological relationship to the act of performance itself. Of the latter, what better means of experienc­ ing a complex sense of the eventness of music performance than via the act of music improvisation? Such music is emergent in a particular place and time and, as such, is eventful in the most immediate respect. And what better means of understanding an event both in and beyond its singular act of emergence than by intertwining emergent and extant knowledge concerning the event/ eventness? After all, the event has been a focus of enquiry for a number of con­ temporary thinkers—not least as reflected in the writings of Deleuze (1990, 2001) and, more recently, Peters (2016), to which I now turn our attentions.

3 As the philosopher (and improvising musician) Gary Peters recently asked: “Is it possible for the performer, as creator, to sense the event-ness of the event in the live moment of performance; or . . . is the event only recognised and acknowledged after its occurrence”? (2016, 175). To rephrase, in line with the concerns of this presentation: Can an event of musical-philosophical enquiry, interweaving pre-composed text and music improvisation, contribute some­ thing new to our understandings of the event, despite (or, indeed, on account of) an insistence on foregoing the analytical/theoretical perspective afforded by the distance of time and frame? In the process of addressing this question, the formulation of the conditions of the event by Gilles Deleuze in “Immanence: A Life” is instructive. In this, his last published writing, Deleuze considers the event from the perspective of the relationship between virtual and actual, transcendent and immanent. “The event,” Deleuze (2001, 31) writes, “considered as non-actualized (indefin­ ite) is lacking in nothing. It suffices to put it in relation to its concomitants: a transcendental field, a plane of immanence, a life, singularities.” To co-opt the terms of Deleuze’s definition, then, for my own (specific) and our (more gen­ eralised) purposes: in the “aberrant nuptials” of the musical-philosophical, the event as such is deliberately geared towards engendering a unique singularity 95

Steve Tromans of experience; an experience garnered in the act of performance that attends not only to the event itself, but also to its condition of “eventness”—what Deleuze refers to as the event considered as “non-actualised.” It (the event) works this “aberrant” magic because of the relationship between two discernible, though inherently interwoven, movements of thought. The first of these is the transcendental resonance felt via the (multi-modal) affec­ tivity of two disciplinary fields in the emergence of the new (i.e., the prac­ tices of music and of philosophy “coming together” in the singular practice of musical-philosophical thought). The second is its progenitor: the plane of immanence in all its indefinite, virtual “purity.” The relationship between the pure plane of immanence and the transcendental field that emerges, however, should in no way be considered in hierarchical terms; this is ever an important point in Deleuze—and especially so in the case of my own research. In the argument I am putting forward, the “musical-philosophical” is less a process of bringing together certain notions from philosophy and certain acts of music-making in order to create something new (although this is, of course, important), but more to do with recognising something already possible in the prospect of the event of such novelty. With this assertion, I am aligning my thought with Henri Bergson, who, writing in the essay “The Possible and the Real,” asserts: “As reality is created as something unforeseeable and new, its image is reflected behind it into the indefinite past . . . it is at this precise moment that it begins to have been always possible” ([1946] 1992, 101). Bergson continues, adding how “its possibility, which does not precede its reality, will have preceded it once the reality has appeared” (ibid.). It is by this process, then—and, specifically, in my case of the musical-philosophical—that we are able to recognise, in retrospect, the possibility of such a mode of interdiscipli­ nary thought, despite its lack of actuality prior to its emergence as an event in time.

4 In a chapter of The Logic of Sense (“Ninth Series, Of the Problematic”), Deleuze asserts: “We can speak of events only in the context of the problem whose con­ ditions they determine” (1990, 56). In the context of the problem of musicalphilosophical thought as here practised, the conditions are those of the impro­ vised and the pre-scripted: their coming together and, hopefully, resonating in the event of a productive emergence. For such an emergence to be truly productive (in epistemological terms), we must be prepared to expand our understandings of the event, not after the event but—as I suggested before the improvisation just given—in the process in which we find ourselves in a condi­ tion of becoming with it: in rather than after its happening. Peters touches on much the same observation when he states how “it is not the nowness [of the live event] that is essential . . . but that it is happening now that needs to be sensed” (2016, 170). If the event of musical-philosophical thought is to be recognised as such, then, it is imperative that we retain our sense of awareness of its unfolding as it is unfolding before our senses. In other 96

In the (Immanent) Event of Musical-Philosophical Thought words, we are all—right of this moment—composing a synthesis of the musical and the philosophical, the improvised and the pre-written, by dint of the free play of the movement of thought between disciplinary fields. Since this move­ ment of thought is interdisciplinary in nature, it is impossible to categorise as belonging exclusively to either one of the two fields of practice that serve as its two extreme poles of attraction. This impossibility, however, plays directly into the interdisciplinary possibility alluded to earlier (via Bergson), in that its “aberrant nuptiality” (to allude to the overarching theme of this collection) is an event without that which moves but which is ever in motion. With such movements firmly in mind, it is essential that we focus our senses not exclusively on either improvised music-making or the reading of the pre-written discourse articulated alongside it but, rather, on the event of the two in parallel: the (emergent) event of musical-philosophical thought. As Peters (2009, 169) has worded it, in relation to the philosophy of improvisation (and to which I would add the relations between the written and the impro­ vised in the pursuit of the musical-philosophical), such an endeavour “has little or nothing to do with communication and more to do with ensuring that the channels of communication are kept open and alive.” Open (and immanent), that is, rather than defined in terms of the (closed/transcendent) categories of either the musical or the philosophical, alone. To examine why I favour this epistemological approach to our understandings of the practices of music and of philosophy, I return to Deleuze (and from there to Erin Manning and Brian Massumi).

5 During an interview in 1988, Deleuze argued that “When you invoke some­ thing transcendent you arrest movement, introducing interpretations instead of experimenting” (1995, 146). In my experiment in musical-philosophical thought, I am not seeking to interpret, apply, or otherwise “explain away” the musical via the philosophical, or the philosophical via the musical. Consider the following statement of intent: to return, time and again, to a particular set of relations; to explore the nuances of these relations via the techniques of one’s craft; to create with the movement of thought as it reiterates and articulates from differing perspectives the set of relations in question. With these words, is it to the philosophical or to the musical aspects of my experiment that I am referring? The answer is both—and neither. As I have repeatedly stated, I am working to experiment with the rhythmic expression of a movement between the musical and the philosophical, but where these two are themselves con­ sidered as movements rather than sedentary disciplines in a transcendent categorisation. If we adopt the perspective that music and philosophy are always in a condi­ tion of process—of becoming-philosophical, of becoming-musical—then we are able to think beyond the perceived limits of disciplinary specificity. This is not, however, to transcend them, but rather to experience their common groundedness in an immanent movement of movements: to conceptualise the 97

Steve Tromans rhythmic as that which it is—or, rather, that which it does. And what does the rhythmic do? It interrelates across the modalities: it is the immanent in action. As such, the rhythmic provides a temporal expression of the process of interrelat­ ing different modes of thought, with the aim of encouraging the emergence of a new mode of becoming-thought: the musical-philosophical. When I refer to “different modes of thought” in this context, I am mind­ ful of the work of Erin Manning and Brian Massumi in their book Thought In the Act, in which they argue how all practices are already “a mode of thought, already in the act”—and, importantly, that philosophy “has no exclusive claim to thought” (2014, vii). Indeed, for Manning and Massumi, the only claim any given practice can make towards a notion of disciplinary exclusivity is with regard to its own creative/investigative technique—where “technique” is, in the two authors’ words, understood as “an engagement with the modalities of expression a practice invents for itself ” (89). With regard to the experimental practice I am calling “musical-philosophical thought,” the techniques concerned are immanently constituted in their own event of emergence. To quote Manning and Massumi (2014): “Experimental practice embodies technique toward catalysing an event of emergence whose exact lineaments cannot be foreseen. . . . Technique is therefore immanent” (89). It is for this reason that I have, in this paper, deliberately avoided the kinds of framing exercises we tend to apply to our research as a matter of dis­ ciplinary convention: there has been no attempt made to parcel the various practices employed according to either music, on the one hand, or philosophy, on the other. Instead, the musical-philosophical, as an emergent, experimen­ tal process, has been actively encouraged to resonate with its own rhythms of becoming: to mix the media of investigation and presentation, not as a coming together of two separate disciplinary fields, but as a way of creatively evolving new techniques for a new practice.

Outro To conclude this paper, not with more words but with further sounds, I would like to introduce a final instance of solo-piano improvisation. In listening to what follows, I would encourage the reader to consider the improvisation in terms of its emergence as a mode of the musical-philosophical. In such terms, the practice relates not just to the previous instance of music-making (the track, Piano Improvisation #1) but also to the body of discursive thought invoked and evoked in the sections of this paper. This relation is one of rhythm: a crossmodal rhythmic relation of relations/movement of movements as discussed above (and explored in the presentation of this paper). The rhythms of this cross-modality are grounded in immanence: they are the immanent in action, in performance (in words as well as sounds, and the interactions between). By means of such action, the reader/listener is encouraged to feel the practice beginning to think—in the event of the musical-philosophical. > Listen to multimedia track 6.2: Piano Improvisation #2. 98

In the (Immanent) Event of Musical-Philosophical Thought References Bergson, Henri. (1946) 1992. The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by Mabelle L. Andison. New York: Citadel Press. First published 1934 as La pensée et le mouvant: Essais et conférences (Paris: F. Alcan). This translation first published 1946 (New York: Philosophical Library). Deleuze, Gilles. 1990. The Logic of Sense. Translated by Mark Lester with Charles Stivale. Edited by Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1969 as Logique du sens (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1995. Negotiations: 1972–1990. Translated by Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1990 as Pourparlers: 1972–1990 (Paris: Minuit). ———. 2001. “Immanence: A Life.” In Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life, translated by

Anne Boyman, 25–33. New York: Zone Books. Chapter first published 1995 as “L’immanence: Une Vie” (Philosophie 47). Manning, Erin, and Brian Massumi. 2014. Thought In the Act: Passages In the Ecology of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Peters, Gary. 2009. The Philosophy of Improvisation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2016. “What Is a Live Event?” In Experiencing Liveness in Contemporary Performance: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, edited by Matthew Reason and Anja Mølle Lindelof, 163–77. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Williams, James. 2010. “Immanence.” In The Deleuze Dictionary, edited by Adrian Parr, rev. ed., 128–30. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Music as a Reservoir of Thought’s Materialisation Between Metastaseis and Modulor Marianna Charitonidou ETH Zürich, Switzerland; National Technical University of Athens and Athens School of Fine Arts, Greece

How can communication occur between architecture, music, and mathemat­ ics? Analysing the approach of Iannis Xenakis—who was at once a composer, architect, and mathematician—may prove productive for reflecting on the nuptials between architecture, music, and mathematics and the potentialities of the “zones of indetermination” that emerge when these three domains of experience are thought together (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 173). My aim is to unfold how Iannis Xenakis, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari understand: (a) the assemblage of music-mathematics-space, (b) becoming-music, and c) the place of the notion of time within modern musical composition. I also intend to elucidate Xenakis’s conception of musical composition as materialisation of thought and Deleuze and Guattari’s emphasis on music’s deterritorialising forces. Deleuze and Guattari ask, “What does music deal with, what is the con­ tent indissociable from sound expression?” (1987, 299). In answer they assert that, in painting, we can refer to a distinction between form of content and form of expression, while in music expression holds content within itself. For Deleuze and Guattari, if we are to compare music and painting we should choose their deterritorialising forces as the criterion. They hold that “music . . . [has] a much stronger deterritorializing force, at once more intense and much more collective” (ibid., 302). Xenakis’s evaluation of musical composition is based on “the quantity of intelligence carried by the sounds” (1992, ix). For him, “the qualification ‘beau­ tiful’ or ‘ugly’ makes no sense for sound, nor for the music that derives from it; the quantity of intelligence carried by the sounds must be the true criterion of the validity of a particular music” (ibid.). As he argues, “to make music means to express human intelligence by sonic means” (ibid., 178). Where Xenakis links music to materialisation of thought, Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 300) associ­ ate it with the deterritorialisation of the refrain. For them, “music is a creative, active operation that consists in deterritorializing the refrain.”

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Reservoir of thought or reservoir of singularities? Xenakis (1992, ix) is attracted by “the effort to materialize movements of thought through sounds.” He mentions: “It is not so much the inevitable use of mathematics that characterizes the attitude of these experiments, as the over­ riding need to consider sound and music as a vast potential reservoir in which knowledge of the laws of thought and the structured creations of thought may find a completely new medium of materialization, i.e., of communication” (ibid.). Deleuze also elaborates on the notion of reservoir in Difference and Repetition, when he asserts: “The individual thus finds itself attached to a pre-individual half which is not the impersonal within it so much as the reservoir of its singu­ larities” (Deleuze 2001, 246). Christopher Hasty, in “The Image of Thought and Ideas of Music” (2010, 46–48) describes the virtual in Deleuze and Guattari’s thought as a global reservoir of potential, while Deleuze and Guattari, in What Is Philosophy? (1994, 36), note that “concepts are events, but the plane is the horizon of events, the reservoir or reserve of purely conceptual events: not the relative horizon that functions as a limit, which changes with an observer and encloses observable states of affairs, but the absolute horizon, independent of any observer, which makes the event as concept independent of a visible state of affairs in which it is brought about.” Deleuze and Guattari’s description, above, of the plane of immanence as a reservoir leads us to reflect on the relationship between the plane of immanence and the virtual. David Norman Rodowick in “The Memory of Resistance” (1999, 48) relates the concept virtual in Deleuze and Guattari’s thought to the potential of “a reservoir of unthought yet imma­ nent possibilities and modes of existence,” claiming that the resistant character of philosophy and art is based on the capacity of this reservoir to aspire utopia. More specifically, he asserts: Time’s direct image is not time in itself, but rather the force of virtuality and becoming, or what remains outside of, yet in reserve and immanent to, our contemporary modes of existence. The irrational interval does not signify or represent; it resists. And it restores a belief in the virtual as a site where choice has yet to be determined, a reservoir of unthought yet immanent possibilities and modes of existence. In this respect, the utopian aspect of philosophy and art is the perpetuation of a memory of resistance. (Rodowick 1999, 48)

The notion of reservoir appears in Le Corbusier’s conception edifice too. In Precisions on the Present State of Architecture and City Planning, Le Corbusier employs the concept of a “reservoir of acquired knowledge and experience” to describe the process of architectural creation: “The invention of proportions, the choice of solid or free spaces, the fixing of height in relation to a breadth imposed by the features of the terrain, emerges from lyrical creation: it is a work which springs from a deep reservoir of acquired knowledge and experi­ ence, and an individual creative force” (Le Corbusier 1991, as quoted in Pottage 1996, 66, emphasis removed).

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Music vis-à-vis outside-time structures Xenakis (1992) distinguishes two modes of musical construction: a first, which pertains to time, and a second, which is independent of temporal becoming­ ness (207). The latter includes “durations and constructions (relations and operations) that refer to elements (points, distances, functions) that belong to and that can be expressed on the time axis. The temporal is then reserved to the instantaneous creation” (207). For him, “the outside-time structures do exist and it is the privilege of man not only to sustain them, but to construct them and to go beyond them” (209). Xenakis believed that “it was Debussy and Messiaen in France who reintroduced the category outside-time”; how­ ever, he claims that the evolution associated with Debussy’s and Messiaen’s inventions “resulted in its own atrophy, to the advantage of structures in-time” (208). Xenakis poses the question: “What remains of music once time has been removed?” (1976, 211, my translation).1 He invites us to “distinguish structures, architectures, and sound organisms from their temporal manifestations” (1992, 192). As Amy Cimini (2010, 139) mentions, Iannis Xenakis and Gilles Deleuze attribute “the production of form to speed and movement.” They share their understanding of sound as materiality. Xenakis refers to Plato’s Timaeus when he analyses how the “movements of sounds . . . cause movements in us” (1992, 179). More specifically, he quotes a passage from the Timaeus, which explains how the movements of sounds “procure a common pleasure for those who do not know how to reason; and for those who do know, a reasoned joy through the imitation of the divine harmony which they realize in perishable movements” (178–79). Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 267) note: “Certain modern musicians oppose the transcendent plan(e) of organization, which is said to have dom­ inated all of Western classical music, to the immanent sound plane, which is always given along with that to which it gives rise, brings the imperceptible to perception and carries only differential speeds and slownesses.” They remark that in such a process of musical composition, forms are replaced by pure mod­ ifications of speed. Xenakis’s outside-time category could be understood as the immanent sound plan(e) to which Deleuze and Guattari refer in the passage above. As Dimitris Exarchos (2012, 1) claims, Xenakis “dealt with the question of time by denying its perceived centrality, in a way similar to the Parmenidean denial of the question of change” (2012, 1). Parmenides understands aion as a denial of the temporal distinctions past and future and as an affirmation of total present simulateneity (Peters 1967, 7). For Plato, “the stability and unity of aion are contrasted with the movement and plurality, or better, the numerability of chronos” (ibid., 31–32). The distinction between chronos and aion is related to “two modes of individuation, two modes of temporality” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 262). Chronos “is composed only of interlocking presents,” while aion “is



1 “Que reste-t-il de la musique une fois qu’on a enlevé́ le temps?”

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Marianna Charitonidou constantly decomposed into elongated pasts and futures” (Deleuze 1990, 62).2 Deleuze notes: “We have seen that past, present, and future were not at all three parts of a single temporality, but that they rather formed two readings of time, each one of which is complete and excludes the other: on one hand, the always limited present, which measures the action of bodies as causes and the state of their mixtures in depth (Chronos); on the other, the essentially unlimited past and future, which gather incorporeal events, at the surface, as effects (Aion)” (ibid., 61). Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus define aeon (“aion”) as “the indefinite time of the event, the floating line that knows only speeds and continually divides that which transpires into an already-there that is at the same time not-yet-here” (1987, 262). Xenakis (1992, 194) understood “the introduction of the calculation of probability” in stochastics as a way to respond to the fact that the “categories outside-time, in-time, and temporal, [were] unequally amalgamated in the history of music.” He believed that through stochastics, the above categories acquired “their fundamental significance” and built a “coherent and univer­ sal synthesis in the past, present, and future.” It thus becomes evident that the amalgamation of outside-time, in-time, and temporal categories in Xenakis’s thought is close to the notion of aion elaborated by Parmenides and reinvented by Deleuze (1990). Xenakis’s distinction could be related to the differentiation between the notions of aion and chronos. “Stochastics” invites us to overcome the “distinction between the vertical and the horizontal,” and thanks to the application of probability theory in music composition, “the indeterminism of in-time structures made a dignified entry into the musical edifice” (Xenakis 1992, 194).

Chance, mathematics, and artistic creation Christopher Butchers (1968, 3), analysing how Xenakis uses the notion of chance in his compositional process, notes: “Xenakis is . . . the first in any artistic field both to invoke the notion of chance and to use it in a way which is acceptable rigorously to modern logic.” In Xenakis’s composition Pithoprakta (1955–56), “pitch and duration are distributed probabilistically in the form of glissandi as the work progresses by means of the continuous and gradual transformation of the sound material” (Campbell 2013, 93). In What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari (1994, 195), commenting on modern music, note that apart from “the enlargement of chromaticism to other components of pitch,” modern music is also characterised by “the tendency to a nonchromatic appearance of sound in an infinite continuum (electronic or electro-acoustic music).” Xenakis (1992, 262) notes: “A smooth continuum abolishes time, or rather time, in a smooth continuum, is illegible, inapproachable.” He associates his understanding of the smooth continuum as “a unique whole filling both space and time” with Parmenides (ibid.).

2 “there are two times, one of which is composed only of interlocking presents; the other is constantly decomposed into elongated pasts and futures.”

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Music as a Reservoir of Thought’s Materialisation Xenakis notes: We should further define the sense of such a distribution and the manner in which we realize it. There is an advantage in defining chance as an aesthetic law, as a normal philosophy. Chance is the limit of the notion of evolving symmetry. Symmetry tends to asymmetry, which in this sense is equivalent to the negation of traditionally inherited behavioral frameworks. This negation not only operates on details, but most importantly on the composition of structures, hence tendencies in painting, sculpture, architecture, and other realms of thought. For example, in architecture, plans worked out with the aid of regulating diagrams are rendered more complex and dynamic by exceptional events. Everything happens as if there were one-to-one oscillations between symmetry, order, rationality, and asymmetry, disorder, irrationality in the reactions between the epochs of civilizations. (Xenakis 1992, 25)

In “L’espace indicible,” Le Corbusier (1946, 10) claims that “the key to aes­ thetic emotion is a spatial function” (my translation).3 He associates the phe­ nomenon of the “ineffable space” in architecture with mathematics and main­ tains that mathematics and the phenomenon of “ineffable space” share their capacity to provoke an effect of “concordance.” More specifically, he states, “A phenomenon of concordance occurs, exactly as in mathematics” (ibid.).4 Le Corbusier comments on an artist’s understanding of mathematics in “Architecture and the Mathematical Spirit”: To the artist, mathematics is not just the subject matter of mathematics. Mathematics is not a question of calculation perforce but rather the presence of royalty: a law of infinite resonance, consonance and order. Its rigor is such that truly a work of art results, be it a drawing by Leonardo, the startling exactitude of the Parthenon, the cutting of whose marble can be compared with the work done by a machine tool, the implacable and impeccable construction of a cathedral, the unity which Cézanne achieves, the law determining a tree, the unifying splendor of the roots, trunk, branches, leaves, flowers and fruit. Chance has no place in nature. If one has understood what mathematics is in the philosophical sense, all of the works of nature will henceforth reveal it. Rigor, exactitude are the means to a solution, the source of character, the reason for the harmony. (Le Corbusier 1948, 490, as translated in Le Corbusier 1971, 2:187, with one sentence adjusted)

In the above passage, Le Corbusier claims that “chance has no place in nature.” Such a thesis regarding chance contrasts with Xenakis’s elaboration of chance in compositional processes. As mentioned above, Butchers (1968, 3) notes Xenakis was a pioneer in introducing the notion of chance into musical composition “in a way which is acceptable rigorously to modern logic.” For Xenakis (1992, 25), “chance . . . is nothing but an extreme case of this controlled disorder.” Xenakis understands the composition of music as “a fixing in sound of imagined virtu­ alities” (ibid., 181). He regards his “musical, architectural, and visual works” as



3 “La clef de l’émotion esthétique est une fonction spatiale” (FLC B3-7-239-001, Fondation Le Corbusier, Paris). 4 “Un phénomène de concordance se présente, exact comme en mathématique” (FLC B3-7-239-001, Fondation Le Corbusier, Paris).

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Marianna Charitonidou chips of a mosaic, as “a net whose variable lattices capture fugitive virtualities and entwine them in a multitude of ways” (ibid., vii). In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze (1994) distinguishes chance from arbi­ trariness. He relates the conception of the process of learning or experimen­ tation as problem solving—following Raymond Roussel’s understanding of “equations of facts” (199)—to the affirmation of chance. His affirmative point of view towards chance is in opposition to Le Corbusier’s rejection of chance in “Architecture and the Mathematical Spirit.” Deleuze, in contrast to Le Corbusier, is against the “abolition of chance” (198). This becomes evident from the way he describes how mathesis is related to a affirmative conception of chance that is “renewable every time” (199): When Raymond Roussel poses his “equations of facts” as problems to be solved, as ideal facts or events which begin to resonate as an effect of an imperative of language, or as facts which are themselves fiats; when many modern novelists install themselves in this aleatory point, this imperative and questioning “blind spot” from which the work develops like a problem by making divergent series resonate—they are not doing applied mathematics, or employing a mathematical or physical metaphor. Rather, by establishing that “science” or universal mathesis immediately in each domain, they make the work a process of learning or experimentation, but also something total every time, where the whole of chance is affirmed in each case, renewable every time, perhaps without any subsistent arbitrariness. (Deleuze 1994, 199)

The possible in arts and life For Xenakis, “chance . . . is nothing but an extreme case of this controlled dis­ order” (ibid.). He understands the composition of music as “a fixing in sound of imagined virtualities” (ibid., 181). He regards his “musical, architectural, and visual works” as “a net whose variable lattices capture fugitive virtualities and entwine them in a multitude of ways” (ibid., vii). For Deleuze, “the possible does not exist, while the virtual does. It is real. . . . The possible is what might become or might have become real, but as yet has not. The virtual is already real. It does not need to have anything added to it in order to become real” (May 2005, 48). Deleuze notes in Difference and Repetition (1994, 208): “The vir­ tual is fully real in so far as it is virtual.” For Xenakis (1992, 258), “in musical composition, construction must stem from originality which can be defined in extreme (perhaps inhuman) cases as the creation of new rules or laws, as far as that is possible; as far as possible meaning original, not yet known or even forseeable.” Deleuze replaces the possible–real opposition with that of virtual– actual. For him, “the possible is opposed to the real,” in contrast with the vir­ tual (Deleuze 1994, 211). As Gregory Flaxman (2008, 13) mentions, for Deleuze, “the problem with the possible is that it contracts the future into a probabil­ istic and statistically governable determinable space, when in fact the future is defined by so many working paths.” The way Xenakis and Deleuze and Guattari associate the domain of the arts with the possible could be conceived as a place at which their theories meet. As Ronald Bogue (2007, 273) reminds us, crucial 106

Music as a Reservoir of Thought’s Materialisation for understanding Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of arts is the question of the relation of the possible to the virtual and the actual. To better grasp how the possible is related to art and life and the specificity of the possible for the arts, one should respond to the question: Why are the arts “neither virtual nor actual” but possible? Bogue notes: Philosophy begins with a disturbance of the senses, a break in commonsense experience that reveals the immanent virtual. It then extracts the virtual from the actual and engages the virtual by establishing its own virtual domain of concepts on a plane of immanence. The arts, by contrast, extract the same virtual that is immanent within the actual, but rather than engaging it directly, the arts invent a material embodiment of that virtual, the artwork having a kind of hybrid being at the intersection of the virtual and the actual, a being of sensation. What allows this mode of existence to emerge is the deterritorialization of sensation from its commonsense coordinates and its reterritorialization in a new material, that of an embodied possible world. (Bogue 2007, 284)

Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of the arts in What Is Philosophy? as the invention of the material embodiment of the virtual, to which Bogue refers above, is very close to Xenakis’s understanding of music as thought’s materi­ alisation. As Bogue notes, “for Deleuze the possible is the politics of the arts” (ibid., 285). Pivotal for shedding light on how arts invent “possibilities of life” is the thought that “the arts operate within the domain of sensation, which is that of the continuous passage of the virtual into the actual” and that, during the creative process of art-making, “invention of possible worlds proceeds through embodiment” (286). As Bogue (2014, 177) suggests, “in labeling art’s universe ‘possible,’ Deleuze and Guattari are in one sense simply reiterating the common argument that art creates imaginary worlds.” It is worth noting that Deleuze and Guattari define chaos as the sum of all possibilities. More specifically, in What Is Philosophy, they remark: “Chaos is defined not so much by its disorder as by the infinite speed with which every form taking shape in it vanishes. It is a void that is not a nothingness but a virtual, containing all pos­ sible particles and drawing out all possible forms, which spring up only to dis­ appear immediately, without consistency or reference, without consequence” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 118).

Art as passage of material into sensation As James Williams (2013, 197) claims, for Deleuze, “sensation is a necessary aspect of thought.” Deleuze argues that rhythm is essentially connected to sen­ sation. Xenakis’s understanding of music as thought’s materialisation is close to Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of art gestures as the passage of material into sensation. Deleuze and Guattari (1994, 166–67) affirm that “sensation is not realized in the material without the material passing completely into the sensation, into the percept or affect.” Xenakis (1992, 181) believed that “when . . . mathematical thought serve[s] music . . . it should amalgamate dialectically with intuition.” He underscores that “action, reflection, and self-transfor­ 107

Marianna Charitonidou mation by the sounds themselves . . . is the path to follow” (ibid.). As Edward Campbell (2013, 1) reminds us, “music is for Deleuze absolutely implicated with thought.” Xenakis invites us to “reascend to the fountain-head of the mental opera­ tions used in composition and attempt to extricate the general principles that are valid for all sorts of music” (1992, 155). Even so, he is sceptical of making “a psycho-physiological study of perception,” and rather is interested in under­ standing “the phenomenon of hearing and the thought-processes involved when listening to music” (155). For Xenakis, “to make music means to express human intelligence by sonic means” (178). The notion of intelligence, for him, “includes not only the peregrinations of pure logic but also the ‘logic’ of emo­ tions and of intuition” (178). Xenakis’s “The Crisis of Serial Music” (1955), originally published in Gravesaner Blätter5 (figure 7.1), marks his denial of the principles of serialism.6 Two thirds of Metastaseis, composed between 1953 and 1954, is based on a serial structure. As Anne-Sylvie Barthel-Calvet (2011), informs us, Xenakis refers to the idea of “diastémique sérielle” (serial diastemic). Why did Xenakis denounce serial music? Xenakis (1992, 182) notes: “In 1954 I denounced linear thought (polyphony), and demonstrated the contradictions of serial music. In its place I proposed a world of sound-masses, vast groups of sound-events, clouds, and galaxies governed by new characteristics such as density, degree of order, and rate of change, which required definitions and realizations using probability theory.” His disapproval of the “determinism of serial music” is related to his belief that “the virtually absolute determinism of serial music” constricted the new path opened by “the tonal function” (ibid., 4). His negation of serial music should be understood in conjunction with the distinction he proposed between outside-time, in-time, and temporal categories (ibid., 183). To better understand Xenakis’s critique of musical causality and serialism we should take into consideration that “in the early and mid-fifties . . . total serialisation was regarded as something of a compositional panacea” (Souster 1968, 6). Xenakis also criticised Boulez’s Structures I, which was the last and most suc­ cessful of Boulez’s works to use the technique of integral serialism (Hopkins and Griffiths 2001). Αs Mihu Iliescu (2002, 134) notes, for Xenakis “replacing traditional harmonic writing—discontinuous chordal entities—with continu­ ous lattices of glissandi was, in fact, a way of cutting the Gordian knot of serial hyper-complexity.”



5 The cover of this edition of the journal, in which Xenakis published his text setting him against Pierre Boulez’s serial music, was illustrated with Le Corbusier’s Modulor (figure 7.1). 6 Serialism is a technique of composition based on series of sound elements that makes it possible to compose atonal music. Atonal music challenges the grammar on which almost all Western music was based until the twentieth century, rejecting the tonal hierarchy. Serial composition is based on a succes­ sion of sounds: the series.

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Music as a Reservoir of Thought’s Materialisation

Figure 7.1

Modern thought: aesthetic criteria and problematic and axiomatic multiplicities Gilles Deleuze (1994, xix) underscores that “modern thought is born of the failure of representation, of the loss of identities” and claims “the primacy of identity, however conceived, defines the world of representation.” Xenakis related the processes of formalisation and axiomatisation to modern thought. He claims: “In reality formalization and axiomatization constitute a procedural guide, better suited to modern thought” (Xenakis 1992, 178). His understand­ ing of composition outside time is related to his intention to invent a mod­ ern conception of musical composition. This becomes evident when he says, “one can . . . design temporal architectures—rhythms—in a modern sense.” He perceived his approach as a “tentative axiomatization of the temporal structures placed outside of time” (264). Xenakis believed in the necessity “to change the ordered structures of time and space, those of logic” and relates this transformation to the reinvention of art and sciences that “should realize this mutation” (241).

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Figure 7.1. The cover of the journal Gravesaner Blätter, in which Xenakis published his text setting him against Boulez’s serial music, was illustrated with Le Corbusier’s Modulor. © Akademie der Künste, Berlin, and Fondation Le Corbusier, Paris.

Marianna Charitonidou As he declares in Formalized Music, the aesthetic criteria Xenakis (1992) set himself should be understood according to the following two principles: on the one hand, the artist should throw his criteria into question, searching at every instant “like a child with a new and ‘independent’ view of things,” free­ ing oneself “from any and all contingencies” (xi). On the other hand, the artist should insist upon “the incessant drive towards change, towards freedom” (xii). Xenakis’s view of the artist is one that is not reducible to an isolated under­ standing of forms and their changes; rather, in contrast, it aspires to embrace “the . . . vast horizon of knowledge and problematics.” He also refers to “Being’s constant dislocations” (xii). According to Christopher Butchers (1968, 3), “Xenakis shows how basically simple a step it is to return to the ideal Pythagorean marriage of music and mathematics.” As Le Corbusier claims in The Modulor: A Harmonious Measure to the Human Scale Universally Applicable to Architecture and Mechanics ([1954–58] 2004, 71), “Mathematics is the majestic structure conceived by man to grant him comprehension of the universe.” In the case of Deleuze’s work, mathemat­ ics has an important place in Difference and Repetition, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, and The Logic of Sense (Duffy 2013). Deleuze’s conception of mathemat­ ics is based on the distinction between two modes of formalisation—axiomat­ ics and problematics—which is related to the tension between extensive and virtual multiplicities, and the incessant translation of the latter into the former (Smith 2006; Duffy 2013). Axiomatics continually appropriates the contents of problematics, while the ontology of mathematics is not reducible to axiomat­ ics. Deleuze understood “the distinction between problematic and axiomatic multiplicities in a purely intrinsic manner” (Smith 2012, 289). Xenakis regarded mathematics and logic as the tools that should be used for the production of new processes of musical composition. He claimed: “In order to put things in their proper historical perspective, it is necessary to prevail upon more power­ ful tools such as mathematics and logic and go to the bottom of things, to the structure of musical thought and composition” (Xenakis 1992, 208). As Daniel Smith (2003) mentions, Deleuze associates axiomatics with “major” or “royal” conception science and problematics with a “minor” or “nomadic” conception of it. In What Is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari (1994, 128) maintain: “seeing what happens . . . has always had a more essential importance than demon­ strations, even in pure mathematics, which can be called visual, figural, inde­ pendently of its applications.” For Deleuze, the means of conquering the gen­ esis of truth is problematics, as Smith (2003) reminds us. Deleuze and Guattari write, in A Thousand Plateaus (1987, 143): “Above all, diagrammaticism should not be confused with an operation of the axiomatic type. Far from drawing creative lines of flight and conjugating traits of positive deterritorialization, axiomatics blocks all lines, subordinates them to a punctual system, and halts the geometric and algebraic writing systems that had begun to run off in all directions.” According to Deleuze and Guattari, problematics, in contrast with axiomatics, is intrinsically linked to sensation and the sensible, as Michael Jasper remarks in Deleuze on Art (2017). What is the relationship in Deleuze and Guattari’s thought between the problematic of aesthetic construction and the 110

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problematic of mathematics? Simon B. Duffy, in Deleuze and the History of Mathematics (2013, 132), maintains that “the redeployment of mathemati­ cal problematics as philosophical problematics is one of the strategies that Deleuze employs in his engagement with the history of philosophy.” Le Corbusier invented the Modulor, which is a system of universal propor­ tions, based on the Golden Section and the Fibonacci series (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, . . .), aiming at helping architects to find homogeneity in the general dimen­ sions of projects. As Jean-Louis Cohen (2014, 1) remarks, “the term Modulor was composed by the fusion of the notion of module with the notion of the golden section.” In Metastaseis, Iannis Xenakis applied certain tools from Le Corbusier’s Modulor system of proportion to the organisation of intervallic structures and the duration of dynamics and timbres. To respond to how the communication between mathematics, architecture, and music can occur, we could take as a starting point Xenakis’s use of the Modulor system in the compo­ sition and notation of Metastaseis. Regarding Le Corbusier, Xenakis remarked: “I discovered on coming into contact with Le Corbusier that the problems of architecture, as he formulated them, were the same as I encountered in music” (Xenakis quoted in Cross 2003, 145). Xenakis was interested in the Modulor because it was at once a geometric and an additive series.7 His compositional approach was based on a relationship between music and architecture that went beyond the metaphorical—his con­ ception of sound was spatial. In the composition of Metastaseis, the role of archi­ tecture was direct and fundamental by virtue of the Modulor, which found an application in the very essence of musical development. As Iliescu (2002, 134) notes, Xenakis’s “earliest glissandi resulted from a direct conversion into sound of a visual element, the line.” Following Makis Solomos, we could claim that “Xenakis’s central gesture par excellence may be the linear glissando” (1996, 155, my translation).8 For the notation of Metastaseis he used graphs of glissandi, which look like ruled surfaces or hyperbolic paraboloids, which he described as “ruled surfaces of sound” (Xenakis quoted in Evans 1995, 298) (see figure 7.2). The string glissandi of Metastaseis, which Xenakis drew in a graph, with pitch on the y-axis and time on the x-axis, look like the structural components he would later design for the Philips Pavilion (figures 7.3–4).

7 Metastaseis seeks equivalence between a geometric series and an additive series. 8 “Le geste xenakien par excellence est le glissando linéaire.”

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Marianna Charitonidou

Figure 7.2.

Figure 7.3.

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Figure 7.2. Notation for Metastaseis, 1954. © Collection famille Xenakis, all rights reserved. Figure 7.3. Xenakis’s initial sketches for the Philips Pavilion, 1956, 1954. © Collection famille Xenakis, all rights reserved.

Music as a Reservoir of Thought’s Materialisation

Figure 7.4.

Between Modulor and Metastaseis: when architecture meets music During his collaboration with Le Corbusier, which lasted from 1947 to 1959, Xenakis conceived the Philips Pavilion for the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels (figures 7.5–8, 7.10–11). For his design for the pavilion, he applied the hyper­ bolic paraboloids of Metastaseis’s glissandi (figure 7.9). As he told Varga (1996, 24): “In the Philips Pavilion I realised the basic ideas of Metastasis: as in the music, here too I was interested in the question of whether it is possible to get from one point to another without breaking the continuity. In Metastasis, this problem led to glissandos, while in the pavilion it resulted in the hyperbolic parabola shapes” (figure 7.9). Xenakis’s design for the Philips Pavilion was the first self-supporting hyperbolic paraboloid ever built (figure 7.11). Hyperbolic paraboloids by their nature are easy to calculate and construct and have their own structural integrity.

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Figure 7.4. Perspective drawing for the Philips Pavilion made by Iannis Xenakis on 19 October 1956. Fondation Le Corbusier 28583 © Fondation Le Corbusier.

Marianna Charitonidou

Figure 7.5.

Figure 7.6.

Figure 7.7.

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Figure 7.5. Le Corbusier, Louis Kalff, and Iannis Xenakis with a scale model of the Philips Pavilion, c.1957 (Source: Sharon Kanach and Carey Lovelace, eds, Iannis Xanakis: Composer, Architect, Visionary [New York: Drawing Center, 2010], 52). Credit: Philips archive, Eindhoven. Figure 7.6. Le Corbusier and Iannis Xenakis working on the Philips Pavilion project, Brussels. Credit: Philips archive, Eindhoven. Figure 7.7. (From left) Louis Kalff, Le Corbusier, and Edgard Varèse. Credit: Philips archive, Eindhoven.

Music as a Reservoir of Thought’s Materialisation

Figure 7.8.

Figure 7.9.

Figure 7.10.

Figure 7.11.

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Figure 7.8. Philips Pavilion, Brussels World Fair, 1958. Credit: Philips archive, Eindhoven. Figure 7.9. Xenakis’s notebook sketch of possible sound routes within the Philips Pavilion, c.1957 © Collection famille Xenakis, all rights reserved. Figure 7.10. Philips Pavilion, Brussels World Fair, 1958. Credit: Philips archive, Eindhoven. Figure 7.11. Philips Pavilion under construction, Brussels World Fair. Credit: Philips archive, Eindhoven.

Marianna Charitonidou

Repetition and modulation in modern music: rendering time sonorous and occupying without counting In 1978, while he was working on A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze participated in two seminars organised by IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique) on musical time, held at the Centre Georges Pompidou. In his talks, he analysed how he grasped musical composition and percep­ tion. As Timothy S. Murphy (1998, 69) states, “Deleuze refers to Boulez often in his works from 1977 onward, particularly in A Thousand Plateaus and The Fold.” Edward Campbell tells us that Deleuze refers to Boulez’s approach to make explicit that there is a distinction between the act of counting in order “to occupy space-time” and the act of occupying “without counting” (Deleuze quoted in Campbell 2013, 102). In “Occupy Without Counting: Boulez, Proust and Time,” first published in 1986, Deleuze notes: “Boulez has defined a great alternative: counting in order to occupy space-time, or occupying without counting. Measuring in order to effect relations, or filling relations without measure” (Deleuze 1998, 70). This process of occupying without measuring, to which Deleuze refers, is related to the plan(e) of immanence. Deleuze emphasises that in the case of Boulez’s musical composition, “number has not disappeared, but has become independent of metric or chronometric relations” (71). It would be interesting to relate this freeing of the compositional process from “metric or chronomet­ ric relations” to the outside-time mode of composition described by Xenakis. Deleuze, in this text, intended to grasp the process of “mak[ing] sound the medium which renders time sensible, the Numbers of time perceptible, to organize material in order to capture the forces of time and render it sonorous” (72). Xenakis compared this kind of compositional process with Olivier Messiaen’s project and understood Boulez’s stance as a continuation of such a procedure “in new conditions (in particular, serial ones)” (72). Deleuze was interested in how musical composition and perception render sensible the forces of time. Xenakis (1992, 156), like John Cage, conceived time as floating, referring to a process of “modulation of time”: “If it is emitted sev­ eral times in succession, the events are compared and we conclude that they are identical, and no more. Identity and tautology are therefore implied by a repetition. But simultaneously another phenomenon, subjacent to the first, is created by reason of this very repetition: modulation of time.” Deleuze (1994, 293) was also attracted by “the manner in which all the repetitions coexist in modern music.” For Xenakis, the power of musical composition resides in the expression of intelligence through sonic means, while, for Deleuze (1998, 73), the deterritorialising forces of musical composition are inextricably linked to the “functions of temporalization that are exerted on sonorous material that the musician captures and renders sensible the forces of time.”

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Conclusion: Xenakis’s composition as sensory becoming caught in a matter of expression In conclusion, it is significant to note that the incorporation of the notion of chance and the virtual into mathematics and arts, which is characteristic of Deleuze and Guattari’s approach, acquires a non-metaphoric and literal status in Iannis Xenakis’s case. Following Rosi Braidotti and Patricia Pisters’s claim in Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze (2012), we could hold that Deleuze’s stance is based on the intention to explore the territories of interferences between philosophy and non-philosophy, science and non-science, and art and nonart. Such a point of view makes clear why Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (1987, 300) maintain: “in no way do we believe in a fine-arts system . . . [but] in very diverse problems whose solutions are found in heterogene­ ous arts.” In Iannis Xenakis’s approach, an encounter between heterogeneous means, such as sonic, spatial, and mathematic dispositifs, is employed to address problems that occupy one’s thought. A characteristic of the concept of dispositif is that, beyond discursive forms of expression, it also refers to non-discursive forms of expressions, such as drawings. Whereas the notion of episteme is pri­ marily discursive in nature, dispositif is more heterogeneous and is intended to capture the links between discursive and non-discursive aspects. Gilles Deleuze defines Michel Foucault’s concept of dispositif as follows: “But what is a dispositif? In the first instance it is a tangle, a multilinear ensemble. It is composed of lines, each having a different nature. And the lines in the apparatus do not outline or surround systems which are each homogeneous in their own right, object, subject, language, and so on, but follow directions, trace balances which are always of balance, now drawing together and then distancing themselves from one another” (Deleuze 1992, 159). Xenakis conceived the different means as vectors of deterritorialisation, which are deterritorialised in order to be reterritorialised, forming new dispositifs, which are situated at the nuptials of mathematics, architecture, and music. These new assemblages—which are dispositifs that should not be classified in a reductive way in any of the fields mentioned above, that is, mathematics, archi­ tecture, or music—constitute a terrain where many concepts in Deleuze and Guattari’s approach acquire expression. To describe it more subtly, Xenakis’s heterogeneous dispositifs constitute a territory where we can explore sen­ sory becoming as “otherness caught in a matter of expression” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 177). References Barthel-Calvet, Anne-Sylvie. 2011. “Xenakis et le sérialisme: L’apport d’une analyse génétique de Metastasis.” Intersections 31 (2): 3–21. Bogue, Ronald. 2007. “The Art of the Possible.” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 61 (241): 273–86.

———. 2014. Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Braidotti, Rosi, and Patricia Pisters, eds. 2012. Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze. London: Bloomsbury Academic Butchers, Christopher. 1968. “The Random Arts: Xenakis, Mathematics and Music.”

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Marianna Charitonidou Tempo 85: 2–5. Campbell, Edward. 2013. Music after Deleuze. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Cimini, Amy. 2010. “Gilles Deleuze and the Musical Spinoza.” In Sounding the Virtual: Gilles Deleuze and the Theory and Philosophy of Music, edited by Brian Hulse and Nick Nesbitt, 129–44. Farnham, UK: Ashgate. Cohen, Jean-Louis. 2014. “Le Corbusier’s Modulor and the Debate on Proportion in France.” Architectural Histories 2 (1): art. 23. Accessed 24 June 2019. https:// journal.eahn.org/articles/10.5334/ah.by/. Page numbers refer to the PDF version. Cross, Jonathan. 2003. “Composing with Numbers: Sets, Rows and Magic Squares.” In Music and Mathematics: From Pythagoras to Fractals, edited by John Fauvel, Raymond Flood, and Robin J. Wilson, 131–46. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1990. The Logic of Sense. Translated by Mark Lester with Charles Stivale. Edited by Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1969 as Logique du sens (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1992. “What Is a Dispositif ?” In Michel Foucault: Philosopher, translated by Timothy J. Armstrong, 159–67. Hemel Hempstead, UK: Harvester Wheatsheaf. First published 1989 as “Qu’est-ce qu’un dispositif ?” in Michel Foucault, philosophe: Rencontre internationale, Paris 9, 10, 11 Janvier 1988, edited by François Ewald (Paris: Seuil). ———. 1994. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1968 as Différence et répétition (Paris: Presses universitaires de France). ———. 1998. “Boulez, Proust and Time: ‘Occupy Without Counting.’” Translated by Timothy S. Murphy. Angelaki 3 (2): 70–74. New York: Semiotext(e). Chapter first published 1986 as “Occuper sans compter: Boulez, Proust et le temps” in Eclats/Boulez, edited by Claude Samuel (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou), 98–100. Book first published 2003 as Deux regimes de fous: Textes et entreties, 1975–1995 (Paris: Minuit). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of

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Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1994. What Is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1991 as Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Minuit). Duffy, Simon B. 2013. Deleuze and the History of Mathematics: In Defense of the “New.” London: Bloomsbury Academic. Evans, Robin. 1995. The Projective Cast: Architecture and Its Three Geometries. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Exarchos, Dimitris. 2012. “Listening Outside of Time.” Accessed 10 May 2019. https://research.gold,ac.uk/15750/1/ MUS-Exarchos_2015.pdf. Paper later published in Iannis Xenakis: La musique électroacoustique/The Electroacoustic Music, edited by Makis Solomos (Paris: L’harmattan, 2015), 211–24. Flaxman, Gregory. 2008. “Sci Phi: Gilles Deleuze and the Future of Philosophy.” In Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New, edited by Simon O’Sullivan and Stephen Zepke, 11–21. London: Continuum. Hasty, Christopher. 2010. “The Image of Thought and Ideas of Music.” In Sounding the Virtual: Gilles Deleuze and the Theory and Philosophy of Music, edited by Brian Hulse and Nick Nesbitt, 1–23. Farnham, UK: Ashgate. Hopkins, G. William, and Paul Griffiths. 2001. “Boulez, Pierre.” In The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrell, 2nd ed., 29 vols., 4:98–108. London: Macmillan. Iliescu, Mihu. 2002. “Notes on the LatePeriod Xenakis.” Contemporary Music Review 21 (2–3): 133–42. Jasper, Michael. 2017. Deleuze on Art: The Problem of Aesthetic Constructions. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Le Corbusier. 1946. “L’espace indicible.” In “Art,” special edition, L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui: 9–10. ———. 1948. “L’architecture et L’esprit Mathématique.” In Les grands courants de la pensée mathématique, edited by François Le Lionnais, 480–89. Paris: Cahiers du sud. Translated by Helen Kline as Le Corbusier 1971.

Music as a Reservoir of Thought’s Materialisation ———. (1954–58) 2004. The Modulor: A Harmonious Measure to the Human Scale Universally Applicable to Architecture and Mechanics. Translated by Peter de Francia and Anna Bostock. Basel: Birkhäuser. First published 1948 as Le modulor and 1955 as Modulor 2 (Boulogne: Architecture d’aujourd’hui). This translation first published (London: Faber and Faber, 1954–58). ———. 1971. “Architecture and the Mathematical Spirit.” Translated by Helen Kline. In Great Currents of Mathematical Thought; Volume II, edited by François Le Lionnais, translated by Charles Pinter and Helen Kline, 174–88. Mineola, NY: Dover. Edition translated first published 1962 as Les grand courants de la pensée mathématique, edited by François Le Lionnais, enlarged ed. (Paris: Librairie Scientifique et Technique). ———. 1991. Precisions on the Present State of Architecture and City Planning. Translated by Edith Schreiber Aujame. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. First published 1930 as Précisions sur un état présent de l’architecture et de l’urbanisme (Paris : G. Crès). May, Todd. 2005. Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Murphy, Timothy S. 1998. “Boulez/Deleuze: A Relay of Music and Philosophy.” Angelaki 3 (2): 69–70. Peters, Francis E. 1967. Greek Philosophical Terms: A Historical Lexicon. New York: New York University Press. Pottage, Alain. 1996. “Architectural Authorship: The Normative Ambitions of Le Corbusier’s Modulor.” AA Files 31: 64–70.

Rodowick, David Norman. 1999. “The Memory of Resistance.” In A Deleuzian Century? edited by Ian Buchanan, 37–57. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Smith, Daniel W. 2006. “Axiomatics and Problematics as Two Modes of Formalisation: Deleuze’s Epistemology of Mathematics.” In Virtual Mathematics: The Logic of Difference, edited by Simon B. Duffy, 145–68. Manchester: Clinamen. ———. 2012. “Alain Badiou: Mathematics and the Theory of Multiplicities; Deleuze and Badiou Revisited.” In Essays on Deleuze, 287–311. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. First published 2003 as “Mathematics and the Theory of Multiplicities: Badiou and Deleuze Revisited” (Southern Journal of Philosophy 41 [3]: 411–449). Solomos, Makis. 1996. Iannis Xenakis. Echos du XXe siècle. Mercuès, France: P.O. Éditions. Souster, Tim. 1968. “Xenakis’s ‘Nuits.’” Tempo 85: 5–18. Varga, Bálint András. 1996. Conversations with Iannis Xenakis. London: Faber and Faber. Williams, James. 2013. Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition: A Critical Introduction and Guide. 2nd ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Xenakis, Iannis. 1955. “La crise de la musique sérielle.” Gravesaner Blätter 1: 2–4. ———. 1976. Musique. Architecture. 2nd ed. Tournai: Casterman. ———. 1992. Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition. Edited by Sharon Kanach. Rev. ed. Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press. First published 1963 as Musiques formelles: Nouveaux principes formels de composition musicale. Paris: Richard-Masse.

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Machinic Propositions Artistic Practice and Deterritorialisation Henrik Frisk Royal College of Music, Stockholm, Sweden

Anders Elberling Visual artist and film-maker, Copenhagen, Denmark

Introduction One of the great promises of artistic research is the way in which it allows an insight into the inner workings of artistic practices.1 Given an appropriate methodology, the researcher may tap into the artistic processes or into the actual performance itself. Although other research fields, such as art history, musicology, and ethnography, along with many others, have also shed light on some of the processes behind artistic production, what makes artistic research both challenging and interesting is the double role played by researchers/art­ ists. In part due to this special condition in artistic research or research focused on artistic practices, the research also frequently changes both the practice and the artist/researcher. In fact, this may be seen as one of its features (Frisk and Östersjö, 2013, 27).

1 All images in this text are screen dumps from the latest version of Machinic Propositions, an intermedia work and ongoing project by the authors.

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That changes in the processes that lead up to an artistic work may change the outcome may not come as a surprise. What is remarkable, however, is the extent to which the artistic work in Western culture is still often seen as an immuta­ ble object and the product of one single originator. Even relatively distributed artistic practices, such as film production, are often referred to as the work of a director. The perspective of the originator guides the apprehension of and, to some extent, also the understanding of the work of art. The points of refer­ ence in this view are theatre stage directors (rather than actors), and composers (rather than the musicians that play their music). For other fields, the config­ uration of the agents involved may be of a different kind, but the dominance of the artwork by a single originator is not to be mistaken, especially in music. There are, however, several indications that this view is slowly changing. In 2005, with reference to Lydia Goehr’s important work The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (1992), Georgina Born (2005, 8) theorised the changing ontology of music that has opened up to “an approach that incorporates understandings of the social, technological and temporal dimensions of music.” She points to several important aspects of this development relating to, among other things, the destabilising effect that music in itself may have on common dualisms such as subject–object and production–reception. This resonates well with some of the ideas proposed in this short chapter. Through artistic practice and con­ sistent artistic methodology, the rigid conceptualisation of music as an object rather than an activity may be questioned.

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Machinic Propositions

Machinic Propositions The duo Mongrel has worked for several years on numerous intermedia pro­ jects with the overarching ambition to critically examine the nature of the relationship between auditory and visual elements in intermedia works. Our works have been performed in the United Kingdom, Denmark, Sweden, France, Belgium, Germany, and Vietnam. Machinic Propositions, a project that we started in 2015, is simultaneously an artistic project and an attempt to criti­ cally examine Deleuze and Guattari’s theorems of deterritorialisation as found in chapters seven and ten of A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). Mongrel’s output has taken a few different shapes and has used different kinds of media such as text, live performance, and fixed media formats. Like much of our other works, Machinic Propositions is part of the attempt to counteract the predominance of one medium over another, in particular, video over audio. This is not to say that we necessarily strive to integrate them. Instead the ambi­ tion is to allow one to become the other under certain conditions, comparable to what Deleuze describes as “not an exchange, but ‘a confidence with no pos­ sible interlocutor’ . . . ; in short, a conversation” (Deleuze and Parnet 2007, 3). Furthermore, there are parallels between the way we work and the idea put forward by Deleuze of style as the ability to “stammer in one’s own language” (Deleuze and Parnet 2007, 4). Like any other artistic process, our working pro­ cess is situated in our personal conditions and flaws; but in Machinic Propositions we use them to gain access to the ability, discussed by Deleuze, to stammer in language while avoiding it in speech (ibid.). Among other things, we weave in Elberling’s dyslexia and use his misreading of the text as concrete material in the process allowing new meanings to rise from the mistakes. In this project, we looked at the relationship between the two media as a sys­ tem of de/reterritorialisation. This allowed us to depart from certain existing theories of sound and moving pictures, such as the empathetic/anempathetic distinction proposed by Chion (1994). Instead we attempted to detach both sound and image from their highly defined modes of engagement. We exam­ ined the ways in which the actual relations could be re-established within our systems of working, using a range of approaches. One way through, which we used to experiment with these issues, was to change roles in the work and per­ formance situation. Although we have our specific fields of competence—Frisk centred on sound, Elberling on video—we decided to change roles so that Frisk was in charge of the video and vice versa. As a result, our attitudes towards the material obviously changed. To some extent, this is a question of creating 123

Henrik Frisk and Anders Elberling usable interfaces for one another that in and of itself provokes a rethinking of practice. In this case the actual situation also changed our respective under­ standing of our practices consistent with our core ambition to deconstruct the relationship between sound and image. Concerning the theorems of deterritorialisation, certain interesting and immediate observations may be made relating both to the challenges of com­ bining audio and video in general and to our particular practice. For instance, theorem two quite literally has some bearing on the factual reality of digital sound and image: “The fastest of two elements or movements of deterritorial­ ization is not necessarily the most intense or most deterritorialized” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 193). The current rate of digital audio and video is in the region of 1764/1;2 yet video is commonly the dominant medium in this relation. Our practice, like many other practices, may be likened to a rhizome, a net­ work of ideas that in the beginning is spread out on a plane. The nodes repre­ senting these ideas are highly distributed in both space and time and appear to be unorganised. Eventually, through work processes and conceptual devel­ opment, a folding of this space takes place and virtual wormholes are created. Nodes that in the beginning may have been located far from one another may now be closely situated. This is to some extent a self-organising process that finds some resonance in A Thousand Plateaus. In the opening chapter, citing Rosenstiehl and Petitot (1974), Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 17) comment: “To these centered systems, the authors contrast acentered systems, finite net- works of automata in which communication runs from any neighbor to any other, the stems or channels do not preexist, and all individuals are inter­ changeable, defined only by their state at a given moment—such that the local operations are coordinated and the final, global result synchronized without a central agency.” Artistic work is to some extent a practice that takes place in material real­ ity, even if the perception of such actions may approach the virtual. In music, the practice often needs time to develop—although some processes are better developed outside time. Nevertheless, the way Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 12) talk about the rhizome as “a map and not a tracing” is, at least for the work method we have developed, both a fitting description and a useful mode with which to further develop our processes. Mapping the patterns we are cre­ ating—our own as well as each other’s—is a process that may be seen as the attempt to reduce the number of possibilities in our project, while at the same time attempt to increase the number of possible connections. Just before we started working on Machinic Propositions, we wrote in our work journal that “the solution lies rather in the attempt to move away from trying to synchronise the perception of sound and video, and instead focus on common processes that bind the elements together.”3 In other words, it is not how we attempt to syn­ chronise the mediums with one another but rather how the activities construct these mediums in the first place. 2 This obviously depends on the sample rate and the frame rate respectively; but, as a comparison, audio is sampled 44,100 times per second and the typical frame rate of video is 25 frames per second. 3 Project diary, 11 March 2015, translated from Swedish by the authors.

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Machinic Propositions Through the theorems of A Thousand Plateaus we began to work out an abstract intermedial work trying to maintain a critical attitude towards Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, specifically, and the very notion of using philosophy as the input to artistic processes, in general. With the use of the theory, we fur­ ther developed our conceptual tools, and more specifically, the way we used our senses to see and to hear in the way we tackled the theory. Together this helped create a zone of relative freedom that might provide possibilities for a new understanding of what we do as artists and researchers.

Conceptual deduction Our artistic method is one in which narrative and improvisation play central roles. It has grown out of our thinking about contemporary media and our attempts to critically examine both our own pro-technical approach and the hypermedia landscape we act and live in. The method has been developed on the basis of our artistic ideas, the needs of the projects we engage in, and the conditions of our respective practices. Our process is slow and meticulous. Work on Machinic Propositions began in 2015 and is likely to continue for another few years. In other words, what is commonly seen as the actual artwork—the work in performance—only materialises at the very end of a relatively long pro­ cess of interaction. Furthermore, in our method, it may continue to develop through numerous iterations long after that. However, the work in itself, in terms of a resulting performance, is in this context less important than the pro­ cess, to the point where there is almost a reversal of the two terms: the work is the process and the actual performance work is simply one of many possible parts of the process. This method of conceptual deduction is related to a variety of contexts and may primarily be associated with scientific research and systematic inquiry per­ haps not commonly referenced in the context of artistic research. In Monad Rrenban’s book on the early works of Walter Benjamin, he writes: “Benjamin suggests the practice of philosophy is not the conceptual deduction (deduction into concepts) characteristic of research but is also somewhat distinct from the 125

Henrik Frisk and Anders Elberling metaphorical determinateness . . . in the artwork” (Rrenban 2005, 117). For us, however, both metaphorical determinateness and conceptual deductions are part of the formative movement towards a performance. In Mongrel we use it freely, mainly as a tool to reason our way through the constructive phases of our artistic practice. In some ways, this is not so different from using improvisation as a method, as improvisation may also be concerned with the creation of mod­ els that contribute to bringing the negotiation of material forward. Hence, it is a process in which we align and synchronise the general ambition of the work; perhaps most importantly, it brings differences in our respective aesthetics to the surface in a way that is useful to us. We might start with an existing story, a fictional character, or a philosophical text, but we end up with something quite different. As it is artistic practice, the goal of the method is to create a perform­ ative platform that we share and that we later use to guide the development of material for our works.

Although it is a time-consuming process the strength of which is not always evident in the practice, it can lead to the kind of pivotal moments where the entire structure needs to be rethought. As was mentioned, the basic premise of the method, the way we use it, is that we start with a general story or concept that we explore together.

Discussion Part of our method is to improvise in the studio, as a means both for generat­ ing material and for evaluating the effectiveness of the performance situation. In these recorded sessions, the impact of the listening position is sometimes quite obvious. For example, the immediate memory of the quality of the play­ ing may be that it was highly consistent. Listening back to it later, however, the 126

Machinic Propositions impression of the performance may be rather different, such that several edits are necessary for it to work. In this project we have discussed this phenomenon as a process of deterritorialisation; the improvisation taking place in real time is deterritorialised into a hybrid composition in fixed time and a composition affords a different kind of listening than an improvisation. Ellestrom (2010, 11) comments, “the understanding of what a medium is and what intermedial relations actually consist of has vital implications for each and every inquiry in old and new fields of study concerning the arts and media: ekphrasis, cinema, illustration, visual poetry, remediation, adaptation, multi­ media and so on.” Unless we attempt to understand the underlying processes that come into play when an improvisation is recorded and then listened back to, we cannot use the information we get from listening to the recording in a way that contributes to our work. This process is similar to what is described in theorem five of A Thousand Plateaus: “deterritorialization is always double, because it implies the coexistence of a major variable and a minor variable in simultaneous becoming (the two terms of a becoming do not exchange places, there is no identification between them, they are instead drawn into an asym­ metrical block in which both change to the same extent, and which constitutes their zone of proximity)” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 306). The music, first improvised and then recorded, becomes a double articulation and the content in both contexts changes to a degree where neither may be understood in the way they could prior to the deterritorialisation. The recording expropriates the content transforming it from the original improvisation and it becomes a composition. The continuous iterations of practice–reflection feedback loops alongside the theory–method interactions that may surface as a result are among some of the most interesting aspects of artistic research. These may involve de/reterri­ torialising the borders between preparation and performance, between design time and playtime and between different media. In these lines or blocks of becoming there is an opening for a radical and experimental research practice that has social as well as political connotations; but most of all it contributes to our artistic practice.

For musicians, it may be second nature to understand and go beyond differ­ ences between modes of listening to the development of material and a com­ plimentary listening to the result of the same process. Partly, artistic research 127

Henrik Frisk and Anders Elberling is the attempt to extract the implications of the knowledge development in these and similar processes, collect the data, and then return and develop the musical possibilities that the new information allows. Nevertheless, it is also an attempt to understand the results outside the field of artistic practices. In this sense, artistic research is interdisciplinary, transformative, and deterritorialis­ ing. It opens up new perspectives on the roles of the various agents in the field of performance, such as the audience, sociocultural contexts, and many other. Even though the history of art practice is full of examples of practitioners who have worked in this very manner—and as a consequence this aspect of artistic research is not unique or new—the transformative aspect of artistic research should attempt to continuously move the borders of what is possible, in art as well as in research. References Born, Georgina. 2005. “On Musical Mediation: Ontology, Technology and Creativity.” Twentieth-Century Music 2 (1): 7–36. Chion, Michael. 1994. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. Edited and translated by Claudio Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1990 as L’audio-vision: Son et image au cinéma (Paris: Nathan). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Minuit). Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. 2007. Dialogues II. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Rev. ed. New York: Columbia University Press.

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First published 1977 as Dialogues (Paris: Flammarion). Elleström, Lars. 2010. “The Modalities of Media: A Model for Understanding Intermedial Relations.” In Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality, edited by Lars Elleström, 11–48. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Frisk, Henrik, and Stefan Östersjö. 2013. “Beyond Validity: Claiming the Legacy of the Artist-Researcher.” Swedish Journal of Music Research 95: 41–63. Goehr, Lydia. 1992. The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rosenstiehl, Pierre, and Jean Petitot. 1974. “Automate asocial et systèmes acentrés.” Communications 22: 45–62. Rrenban, Monad. 2005. Wild, Unforgettable Philosophy: In Early Works of Walter Benjamin. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

A Ligetian Way to Make a Piano (or a Piano Piece) Stutter Gustavo Rodrigues Penha Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul and University of São Paulo, Brazil

Hungarian composer György Ligeti’s main aim in the construction of his piano studies was to create a new way to articulate rhythm or a new genre of rhythmic articulation (Ligeti 1996; 2013a, 123; 2013b, 137). Ligeti referred to three key examples of complex rhythmic constructions in music that were important to him in the composition of his piano studies. One of these was certain African musical traditions, with which Ligeti shares the idea of equal and quick addi­ tive pulsations that are regularly and irregularly grouped in two or three pulsa­ tions to produce illusionary rhythmic patterns (Ligeti 1996; 2013a, 123; 2013b, 137). Through studying the research and analysis of musicologists including Simha Arom and Gerhard Kubik, Ligeti gained an understanding of the singu­ lar musical thought of certain African peoples. Conlon Nancarrow’s works for player piano are another important reference for the composition of Ligeti’s piano studies. Even if Ligeti had already worked with the idea of illusionary rhythms—in pieces such as Poème symphonique and Continuum—his encounter with Nancarrow’s music for player piano greatly affected his compositional thinking by increasing his capacity to conceive new complex rhythmic entanglements. However, where Nancarrow designed his pieces for a mechanical player piano, Ligeti sought to construct the complex rhythmic plans of his piano studies for a living performer—that is, for only one pianist—which implies a special and detailed attention to the piano technique of the instrument–instrumentalist coupling. Finally, another rhythmic construction reference that was important for Ligeti was Chopin’s and Schumann’s piano music, in particular their utilisation of hemiolas. From these Romantic composers, Ligeti took the rhythmic idea of the sensation of ambiguity produced by the superposition or juxtaposition of rhythmic motives grouped into two or three notes of an equal minimum value. The hemiola characteristic that interested Ligeti was the production of a sensa­ tion of three in a binary subdivision of a simple metre, or a sensation of two in a ternary subdivision of a compound metre. The hemiola rhythmic groupings in the music of these Romantic composers always have a measure as a reference; that is, they always occur in relation to a certain measure, as opposed to the African music traditions Ligeti studied, which do not have a pre-established

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Gustavo Rodrigues Penha measure, only a continuous flow of an equal and quick pulsation as the basis of the grouping process. It is not only this rhythmic aspect of Chopin’s and Schumann’s piano music that was important to Ligeti in the construction of his piano studies: Ligeti also brought to his own pieces the tactility of the piano playing that is funda­ mental to the idiomatic piano writing of these composers. Besides Chopin and Schumann, Ligeti also refers to Scarlatti and Debussy as paying special attention to idiomatic piano aspects in their own pieces. In Ligeti’s words: “A Chopinesque melodic twist or accompaniment figure is not just heard; it is also felt as a tactile shape, as a succession of muscular exertions. A well-formed piano work produces physical pleasure” (Ligeti 1996, 9). Therefore, Ligeti composed his piano studies in pursuit of this tactile con­ ception and of an acoustic-motor pleasure, directly testing and modifying his ideas at the piano, playing and experimenting with the techniques he wanted to employ in each piece. This experimentation stage of the compositional pro­ cess often made Ligeti adjust his original conception for a certain piece; that is, the coupling between the anatomic data of his hands and the piano keyboard configuration expressively transformed the product of his imagination (Ligeti 1996). In Étude III: Touches bloquées, Ligeti also worked with a continuous flow of equal pulsation that should be played as fast as possible, as indicated by the com­ poser in the performance notes of the score (Ligeti 1985). Ligeti often explored this procedure: playing an equal and very quick pulsation that emphasises the music’s mechanical character, as can found in Continuum for harpsichord solo, in which the composer almost produced an anti-harpsichordist work by trying to simulate on the harpsichord the operation mode of a sewing machine (Ligeti and Albèra 1997, 81). Thus, even if Ligeti did not give the indication mechanical in the score of Étude III, the writing of the piece itself—compared with Ligeti’s other works in which he used mechanical as a character marker—proposes this mode of mechanical operation created through regular and very quick attacks by the fingers. In Étude III: Touches bloquées, Ligeti explores a singular piano technique in which some keys are depressed and held by one hand while the fingers of the other hand stroke the depressed and held keys without producing the corre­ sponding sounds. This is the reason for the piece’s subtitle, Touches bloquées, which means “blocked keys.”1 At the beginning of the score, Ligeti writes the word stuttering as an expressive or affective marker. This word is not an indica­ tion of expressivity to be represented by the interpreter but a real event; that is, the composer suggests that the piano itself and the musical discourse should stutter during the piece. This idea of “stuttering” is not simply conceived as an external expressive character to be applied to some pre-existent musical materials; instead, it constructs and assembles the musical and instrumental materials themselves in a new affective and technical way. 1 In the performance notes of the score, Ligeti (1985) said the idea of exploring this mode of playing came from Henning Siedentopf ’s essay “Neue Wege der Klaviertechnik” (1973).

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A Ligetian Way to Make a Piano (or a Piano Piece) Stutter The act of stuttering plays an important role in Deleuze’s philosophy: it is related to the idea of the construction of new phonological, lexical, gram­ matical, and syntactical logics that create the singular Deleuzian conception of style. For Deleuze, to have a style of writing is not a question of obeying the norms and rules of a particular major standard, but of making one’s own language stutter by putting its elements into continuous variation. What is important in this process is the “creation of syntax that gives birth to a foreign language within language, a grammar of disequilibrium” (Deleuze 1998, 112). Deleuze suggests that writers or poets (or composers) develop a style through being foreigners in their own language and making the language itself stutter. Therefore, the importance of the idea of stuttering in Deleuze’s philosophy is already apparent. How does Ligeti make the piano musical discourse stutter in Étude III? How does he also make his own piano technique in itself stutter? Is this stuttering act in the piano technique of Étude III capable of producing something as a “grammar of disequilibrium,” as Deleuze proposes? How can the stuttering effect reverberate through singular musical thoughts and procedures? In the sound plan of Étude III’s musical discourse there are two key expressive lines that Ligeti transposes from the act of stuttering in verbal speech: the frag­ mentation of words and phrases in speech—that is, the characteristic breaks in fluency of the discursive flow—and the repetition of syllables and phonemes that contribute to its broken fluency. The fragmentation of the musical discourse can be precisely observed in the gaps produced by non-sounding strokes in the flow of sounding strokes (fig­ ure 9.1).2 These gaps in the flow of the sounding strokes also produce a rhyth­ mic irregularity that causes a sensation of instability in the musical discourse in comparison with the equal and quick finger motions that are continuously stroking the keys. Therefore, Ligeti constructs both a new rhythmical syntax and a new instrumental lexicon, given that the resulting sound is not caused directly by a reaction to a bodily gesture but depends on which keys are free to be stroked according to the physical limitation established by the fingers of one hand holding down certain piano keys. The silences implied by these gaps do not separate motifs or phrases but are themselves included in the motifs and phrases as if they were words with mute consonants, in this way constructing a new sonic and instrumental lexicon. The strange and rhythmically irregular effect of sounding and non-sounding stroke sequences is thus one of the ways in which Ligeti explores, in his own instrumental musical discourse of Étude III, the fragmentation of discursive flow so characteristic of stuttering.

2 In Étude III’s score, the small noteheads correspond to non-sounding strokes and normal noteheads correspond to sounding strokes.

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Gustavo Rodrigues Penha

Figure 9.1.

In the third part of the piece, Ligeti explores the characteristic fragmenta­ tion of stuttering by adding breath markers—noted with a comma—between the “bars”3 to produce another kind of broken fluency (figure 9.2). This part does not use silent depressed and held keys; it is therefore the breaths that interrupt the rhythmical continuity of the line movements to make the musical discourse stutter.

Figure 9.2.

Another way that Ligeti explores symptoms of stuttering is by repeating cer­ tain notes and motives as if they were repeated phonemes and syllables of ver­ bal speech. The lines Ligeti constructs in the first part of the piece, for example, have the general shape of a continuous ascending and descending movement in which repetitions of notes and motives are added to disturb these lines’ normal flow of continuity. It appears that the repetitions of notes and motives make the fluency of the ascending and descending movement stutter (as one

3 In the performance notes of the score, Ligeti wrote: “A bar-line is not intended in the piece. The barlines only serve as a means of orientation. They have no metric function nor do they indicate any artic­ ulation. The duration of individual ‘bars’ results only from the number of sounding and non-sounding keys struck in succession between two bar-lines; i.e. the ‘bars’ differ in duration” (Ligeti 1985, 20).

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Figure 9.1. Beginning of György Ligeti’s Étude III: Touches bloquées, bars 1–9. © SCHOTT MUSIC, Mainz. Figure 9.2. György Ligeti’s Étude III: Touches bloquées. Third part of the piece, in which the stuttering is created by pauses on the breath markers. © SCHOTT MUSIC, Mainz.

A Ligetian Way to Make a Piano (or a Piano Piece) Stutter can see in the diagram in figure 9.3).4 The repetitions occur not only as an echo or a canon but mainly as a reflexive connection that causes a tremble at the syntactical and logical organisations of the piece.5 Ligeti produced this effect of broken fluency on the ascending and descending lines of movement not as an intonation external to the organisation of the piece, but as something con­ stitutive of the new syntactical and logical constructions themselves; that is, the stuttering repetitions work as something that creates the piece’s own solfeggio, understanding solfeggio here as the strict correspondence between a composi­ tional logic and its perceptive effects on listening (Penha 2016, 73–151).

Figure 9.3.

Ligeti also makes his own piano technique stutter by stroking depressed and held keys without producing sound. The stuttering of the piano technique hap­ pens because this idea creates a third level of key position on the piano key­ board. Usually on the piano, there is already a difference in level between white and black keys, with the black keys positioned in a higher position in relation to the white keys. Ligeti introduces a third level of key positions corresponding to the position of the depressed white keys—a level lower then the white keys in a non-depressed position (figure 9.4). In traditional piano technique, the white keys are depressed to their lowest position in order to produce sound, but the fingers of the hand first touch the keys in their non-depressed position and thus stay in contact with the key throughout its depressing until it reaches its lowest position. In Étude III there is another (new) gesture: the fingers of the hand that strokes the already depressed keys do not touch the white keys at their highest position, only at their lowest position, which produces something of a false move on the finger stroke, as if the fingers stumbled. It is these false moves on the finger-strokes at a low, third level of the piano keys that can also be thought of as a mode of making the piano technique stutter. One can thus say that Ligeti makes the piano technique stutter by producing fingers stum­ bling on the piano keyboard.



4 In this diagram (the appendix to this chapter reproduces the diagrams for the whole first and second parts of the piece) the sounding strokes correspond to the circles followed by a horizontal line and the non-sounding strokes correspond to the dotted horizontal lines without circles at their beginnings. The continuous lines correspond to a legato articulation between different notes and the dotted lines correspond to a non-legato articulation. 5 On the disequilibrium caused to the language by the included disjunctions and the reflexive connec­ tions, see Deleuze (1998, 110).

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Figure 9.3. Diagram of the main line movements and the repetitions of motives and notes making the musical discourse stutter—bars 1–9 of Ligeti’s Étude III.

Gustavo Rodrigues Penha

F igure 9.4.

The stuttering takes some aspects of the musical discourse and piano tech­ nique to their limits. The action of the stuttering on the syntactical, lexical, and logical plans produces a tension that makes the language itself tremble. This creative and innovative tension gives direction to certain syntactical limits as an important correlated aspect.6 From the point of view of the piano tessitura— and thus from an extensive point of view—in the two first parts of the piece, Ligeti gradually shifts the ascending and descending movements towards the lower register of the piano. In the first part, this movement of the line toward the lower register of the piano gradually continues until “bar” 52, where this first part finishes. In the second part, which begins at “bar” 53, the main line concludes the movement toward the lowest note of the piano, in which this part finishes (at “bar” 71). It is as if Ligeti led the piano and its keyboard language to its outside. And if this second part finishes on the lowest note of the piano, the third part begins at the highest note of the keyboard (figure 9.5). By play­ ing with the extremes of the piano tessitura—jumping very quickly from the piano’s lowest note to its highest note at a formal cut between the second and third parts—Ligeti plays with the outside of the piano, which is not outside it.7

F igure 9.5

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6 On the correlation between tension and limit on language through the action of stuttering, see Deleuze (1998, 112–13). 7 On tension, limits, and the outside of language, see Deleuze (1998, 112–13).

F igure 9.4. The three levels of key positions on the piano keyboard. igure 9.5. Ligeti’s exploration of the tessitura limits of the piano keyboard in the divide F between the second and third parts of Étude III. © SCHOTT MUSIC, Mainz.

A Ligetian Way to Make a Piano (or a Piano Piece) Stutter Another case of a tensor that leads the musical discourse to its limit can be observed in the uses of silences from “bar” 106 to the end of the piece, in the fourth and final part. In this part, Ligeti initiates a rhythmically written rallentando in the sound plan, by which the sounding strokes are gradually rarefied and the non-sounding strokes are proportionally increased inversely. Thus, the rallentando mainly happens at the level of the sound plan, because the body gesture plan maintains a high activity index. If the silence is the outside of a language, here this outside is directly designed on the inside and put in contin­ uous variation, given that in the final part of Étude III there are still some finger movements producing non-sounding strokes (figure 9.6). “When a language is strained in this way, language in its entirety is submitted to a pressure that makes it fall silent” (Deleuze 1998, 113). It is therefore by reaching the outside through silence that Ligeti gradually finishes the piece, exploring another kind of relation between a tensor and a certain limit.

Figure 9.6.

Final considerations Paying particular attention to Deleuze’s theory of the creative power of stut­ tering as a process of syntactical, lexical, and logical creation, this chapter has shown how the affect of stuttering reverberates through the musical materi­ als and procedures of Ligeti’s Étude III for piano solo, and how in this piece it forms a becoming bloc between the stuttering act and certain musical pro­ cedures and variations understood as singularities of Ligeti’s piano style. The 135

Figure 9.6. György Ligeti’s Étude III: Touches bloquées, bars 108–15. Final sound rallentando, with a high activity index of finger gestures. © SCHOTT MUSIC, Mainz.

Gustavo Rodrigues Penha stuttering becomes musical at the same time as the music and musical thought stutter. The stuttering is thus not treated as ornamentation or an intonation external to musical elaboration, but it is constitutive of the piece’s lexical, syn­ tactical, and logical musical thought. References Deleuze, Gilles. 1998. “He Stuttered.” In Essays Critical and Clinical, translated by Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco, 107–44. London: Verso. First published 1993 as “Bégaya-t-il” in Critique et Clinique (Paris: Minuit). Ligeti, György. 1985. Études pour piano: Premier livre. Mainz: Schott. ———. 1996. “Études.” Translated by David Feurzeig and Annelies McVoy. Liner notes for Works for Piano: Études, Musica Ricercata; György Ligeti Edition 3, performed by Pierre-Laurent Aimard, 7–12. Sony Classical, SK 62308, compact disc. ———. 2013a. “Ma position comme compositeur aujourd’hui.” In L’atelier du compositeur, translated by Catherine Fourcassié, Pierre Michel, et al., 123–25. Geneva: Contrechamps. Essay first published 1985 as “La mia posizione di

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compositore oggi,” in Ligeti, edited by Enzo Restagno (Turin: EDT), 3–5. ———. 2013b. “Certains aspects de ma musique.” L’atelier du compositeur, translated by Catherine Fourcassié, 135–37. Geneva: Contrechamps. Written 2001; published as “Einige Aspekte meiner Musik,” in Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Monika Lichtenfeld, 2 vols. (Mainz: Schott, 2007), 2:136–38. Ligeti, György, and Albèra, Philippe. 1997. “Entretien avec György Ligeti.” In Musiques en Création by Philippe Albèra, 77–85. Geneva: Contrechamps. Penha, Gustavo. 2016. “Entre escutas e solfejos: Afetos e reescrita crítica na composição musical.” PhD thesis, University of Campinas. Siedentopf, Henning. 1973. “Neue Wege der Klaviertechnik.” Melos 40 (3): 143–46.

When Time Begins To Riot Rhythm and Syncopation in the Work of Jonathan Burrows and Matteo Fargion Jonas Rutgeerts KU Leuven, Belgium

In 2002, choreographer/dancer Jonathan Burrows and composer/musician Matteo Fargion decided to take their collaboration a step further. Although they had been working together on several projects, this time their collabo­ ration would be different.1 They planned to create a dance piece in which they would both be equally involved, not only in the co-creation but also in the performance of the piece. The outcome was not what one typically expects when thinking about a dance piece. Two middle-aged men with a non-athletic appearance sit on two chairs and remain sitting for almost the whole time, only executing minimal and highly delineated hand gestures for which they take their cue from a score that is positioned in front of them. The piece, aptly called Both Sitting Duet, marked the start of a long-lasting collaboration that has, until now, resulted in the creation of nine duets: Both Sitting Duet (2002), The Quiet Dance (2005), Speaking Dance (2006), Cheap Lecture (2009), The Cow Piece (2009), Counting To One Hundred (2011), One Flute Note (2012), Show and Tell (2013), and Body Not Fit For Purpose (2014). Rhythm plays a crucial role in the practice of Burrows and Fargion. Not only is it an important instrument for both individual artists, it also lies at the heart of their collaboration, which they describe as the building of “rhythmic rela­ tionships of materials and ideas” (Burrows and Fargion 2018). This interest in rhythm resonates with the experience of the spectator. The pieces are experi­ enced as expressing a “rhythmic exuberance” (Brennan 2015) or as pieces where “the rhythm is the boss” (Leucht [2010] 2019). At the same time, however, the rhythms that Burrows and Fargion propose divert from our traditional under­ standing of rhythm, which is marked by a strict dichotomy between rhythmas-metre and rhythm-as-flow. Traditionally, rhythm is understood either as the organisation of movement according to a pre-established metrical pattern, or as the natural, inner expression of the force of movement. In dance, the first

1 Before Both Sitting Duet, Fargion had already (co)created the musical score for Burrows’s pieces Singing (1999), Things I Don’t Know (1998), The Stop Quartet (1996), Our (1994), Very (1992), Stoics (1991), and Dull Morning Cloudy Mild (1989).

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Jonas Rutgeerts type of rhythm is typically connected to ballet, where a prescribed tempo is grafted into the body. The second type is connected to modern dance, which, rather than imposing patterns on the body, searches for ways to “awaken” or “listen to” the inner rhythms of body and life. The rhythms that appear in the work of Fargion and Burrows however can be understood neither as pre-estab­ lished metrical patterns, nor as inner expressions of the force of movement. Rather, they emerge in the relationship between the different patterns. In this chapter I will explore how rhythmic relations unfold in Burrows and Fargion’s work. To do so I will first elaborate on the role of rhythm in their pieces. In the second instance, I will turn to the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, more specifically to the concept of rhythm they develop in A Thousand Plateaus. Third, my attention will shift to the concept of syncopation as a way to connect Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of rhythm to a concrete performative practice. This will finally allow me to circle back to Burrows and Fargion’s practice.

Rhythm in Burrows and Fargion’s work Despite the differences between the pieces, there is a clear line that runs through Burrows and Fargion’s oeuvre: the fascination for and manifold use of pre-established patterns, which are written down in scores. Burrows and Fargion’s performances all use prescribed compositional patterns, which are most often grafted onto a beat. In Both Sitting Duet, for example, the performers follow the compositional structure of Morton Feldman’s violin and piano piece For John Cage (1982) and the speed of the original piece, “120 beats a minute” (Burrows and Fargion 2002). The Quiet Dance has a fixed speed of ninety beats per minute (Burrows and Fargion 2005). Finally, Cheap Lecture, The Cow Piece, and Counting To One Hundred are built around John Cage’s micro-macrocosmic structure in which a prescribed pattern is used to construct all levels of a piece. In each of these cases, Burrows and Fargion thus depart from a clear structure, which they re-enact, appropriate, and/or translate into different media. This fascination for pre-established compositional patterns is also articulated in the extensive use of scores. For every piece, Fargion and Burrows write a score. These scores not only are important for the execution of the piece—as they define the specific movements that are performed and the order in which they are performed—but also play a prominent role in the performance. They are almost always visually present onstage and also remain there after the perform­ ance so that spectators can take a closer look at them. As such, they are an inte­ gral part of the performance itself. At first sight this preoccupation with pre-established patterns might seem to lead us to the conclusion that the rhythms that Fargion and Burrows use should be understood as metrical. Movement seems to be organised according to a pre-written score, which “beats” movement and makes it behave in a pre­ dictable and repetitive way. In his Choreographer’s Handbook, Burrows (2010, 142) seems to refer to this metrical quality when he describes how scores function: “A score is one way to get an overview of time and materials. It freezes time in a 138

When Time Begins To Riot concrete form, allowing you to glimpse what can be hard to grasp perceptually in real-time experience” (emphasis added). However, this is not the whole story. Although Burrows and Fargion clearly start from a metrical organisation of movement in time, the movement of the performances can never be reduced to these pre-established patterns. There is always something that escapes the patterns. Time is frozen in the concrete mould of the score; but in the perform­ ance, there is something that escapes these moulds. In Cheap Lecture, Burrows and Fargion describe this escaping of time as follows: “This piece was written and is being performed in a line, starting at the beginning and continuing until the end. As soon as we begin to perform however time begins to riot” (Burrows 2010, 129). Even though time is written down in the score and is performed according to that score, it does not behave as expected. It starts to riot, runs out of hand, and creates a different type of movement. To understand this “rioting time” we will turn to Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, and more specifically to the eleventh plateau “On the Refrain [Ritornello].”

Rhythm and milieu: how rhythm operates through Burrows and Fargion’s duets As is well known, Deleuze and Guattari assign rhythm a crucial role in the con­ stitution and organisation of life. Two things are born out of chaos: milieus and rhythms (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 313). Milieus are structured material environments—homogeneous “block[s] of space-time”—that are constituted by the “periodic repetition” of a “code.” Rhythms on the other hand are con­ nected to the moments of communication or “transcoding” between different milieus. They emerge when there is “a transcoded passage from one milieu to another,” in the “communication of milieus” or “coordination between hetero­ geneous space-times” (ibid.). Rhythm thus situates itself between different milieus and “ties” them together. This tying together however should not be understood in terms of unity, but in terms of multiplicity. Rhythm doesn’t create a common ground. It ties together different heterogeneous blocks, but is not a part of any of the blocks. To understand this, Deleuze and Guattari refer to French philosopher Gaston Bachelard: “Bachelard is right to say that ‘the link between truly active moments (rhythm) is always effected on a different plane from the one upon which the action is carried out.’ Rhythm is never on the same plane as that which has rhythm. Action occurs in a milieu, whereas rhythm is located between two milieus, or between two intermilieus, on the fence, between night and day, at dusk, twilight or Zwielicht” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 313–14).2



2 The reference to Bachelard is remarkable, as Bachelard’s whole philosophy of time is framed as a critique of Bergson’s philosophy of duration. As such, this reference seems to be at odds with the dom­ inant understanding of Guattari, and especially Deleuze, as Bergsonian thinkers. Although, it would be wrong to conclude from this quotation that Deleuze and Guattari are actually Bachelardian rather than Bergsonian, this reference still reveals a substantial difference between Deleuze’s philosophy and the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari.

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Jonas Rutgeerts The plane on which the rhythm emerges is thus always different from the plane on which the action is carried out. Rhythm arises in the relation between milieus and, as Eugene W. Holland mentions, “this relation is one of differ­ ence” (2013, 67). In that respect, the example of twilight is telling. The moment of twilight belongs neither to the day, nor to the night. It is also not the product of a “simple addition,” or a blending of night and day (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 314). Rather, it emerges in the relation of difference that is constructed between two states that are present at the same time: night and day. Out of the chaos thus emerge two operational logics: milieus, which are defined by a code and create a stable and continuous environment, and rhythms, which emerge in the confrontation between the different heterogeneous milieus. With these conceptualisations in mind we can come to a better understanding of the functioning of rhythm in Burrows and Fargion’s pieces. What character­ ises these pieces is that the elements that are brought together don’t add up. They do not serve each other, or create a larger harmony in which all elements become one—like in a Gesamtkunstwerk. Quite the contrary, they run parallel and keep their own heterogeneous operational logic and quality. Rather than searching for a way to fuse the different elements of the performance into a larger unity, Burrows and Fargion thus always search for a mode of operation through which the different structures enter into a relation of difference. They create a precarious balance between making connection and maintaining dif­ ference, between heteronomy and relationality. They describe this quest for a relation of difference as research in counterpoint. This counterpoint is not understood simply as an opposition between the different elements; rather, it is defined by the simultaneous presence of distance and attraction. As Fargion mentions: “counterpoint assumes love between the parts” (quoted in Burrows 2010, 139). In my research, however, I use the term syncopation to describe this relation of difference.

Apart playing: rhythm and syncopation Traditionally syncopation is defined as an offbeat, a variation in rhythm that occurs when rhythmic accents lag behind or anticipate the standard beat of the piece. In this capacity, syncopation is seen as a tool to insert playfulness, jerki­ ness, and unpredictability into music. Syncopation makes the beat less rigid by introducing a factor of unpredictability and surprise. In Western musicology and music philosophy, however, the playfulness and subversive potential that syncopation proposes is most often understood as superficial. Syncopation can only create the feeling of freedom and playfulness, but can never really break free from the dominant pattern of the beat because it relies on that beat to establish its playfulness. In his writings on music, Olivier Messiaen describes the potential of syncopation as follows: “Jazz is based on a foundation of equal note-values. Through the use of syncopation, it also contains rhythms, but these syncopations exist only because they’re placed over equal note-values, which they contradict. In spite of the rhythm produced by this contradiction, the listener once again settles down to the equal note-values that bring great 140

When Time Begins To Riot tranquillity” (Messiaen 1994, 68). In a similar fashion philosopher and music theorist Theodor W. Adorno described the syncopation that is used in jazz music as a “‘false’ beat (Scheintakt)” (1989–90, 45). According to Adorno, jazz, which he defines as “syncopated music,” can never really break away from the basic rhythmic structure of the piece, as it is “not allowed to interrupt the basic meter” (46). As such, rather than breaking away from the suppressing beat, “it glorifies repression itself ” (50). However, there is an alternative conceptualisation of syncopation, which finds its origin in a non-Western approach to music. As writer and cultural critic Erik Davis (2005) mentions, the Western approach to music can be characterised as “divisive” because it divides the music into “standard units of time,” marked by the measure of the bar. From this perspective, it makes sense to conceptualise syncopation as something false, as it can only pretend to be outside the metri­ cal unit. A different “additive” approach to music can be found in West African music. This approach does not start from a pre-established standard unit of time that sets the tempo of the whole piece, but instigates a polymetric dia­ logue in which “complex percussive patterns bubble up from the shifting and open-ended interactions between many different individual drum patterns” (ibid.). Rather than reducing everything to one standard unit, the tempo of the music, here, emerges in the interrelation between the different metric patterns that are played out simultaneously. To create this additive approach to music, West African musicians practice “apart-playing” (Davis 2005). They maintain a “space of difference” and resist the constant temptation to fuse their patterns into a unified rhythmic “point.” This results in the production of a complex web of cross-patterns or a “dimension of difference” that emerges between the different elements that are them­ selves simple. Here, the role of syncopation is turned on its head. Rather than being a deviation from—or masking off—a dominant order, syncopation is now understood as a relation that unfolds between these different patterns. It ties these different elements together without merging them into an overall struc­ ture. In Davis’s words: syncopation’s “game is to push the beats to the edge of bifurcation without allowing them to settle into a singular basin of attraction” (ibid.). This definition of syncopation can be related to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of rhythm as it establishes a relation of difference between the differ­ ent milieus of the individual drumming patterns. Syncopation here ties these milieus together without fusing them into an overall metrical organisation.

Syncopation in Burrows and Fargion’s work We can now come to a better understanding of how rhythmic relations are pro­ duced in Burrows and Fargion’s choreographic work. These relations emerge between the different patterns. They are the relations of difference that are established between the different individual compositional scores. To enable these relations of difference Burrows and Fargion turn the traditional idea of choreographic composition on its head. Rather than starting from a dominant pattern and creating variations on this pattern, they start from different pat­ 141

Jonas Rutgeerts terns and tie them together. To establish this additive organisation they adopt different tactics of “apart-playing.” In what follows, I will elaborate on two of these tactics. A first tactic is the erasing or blurring of the overall organising principle of the piece. This strategy can be found in Both Sitting Duet. While creating this piece the choreographers were confronted with the fact that the piece became a closed metrical system. To quote Burrows, the piece became “to motoric: it became duf duf duf duf ” (Fargion in Motionbank 2019). To avoid this, Burrows and Fargion inserted “the rule that lifting the hands from the lap or placing the hands back on the lap must not be pulsed” (ibid.). Through the addition of this unpulsed gesture, the relation between the two patterns altered completely. The possibility of an overarching structure to organise the relation between the different patterns disappeared. Consequentially Burrows and Fargion were forced to “sensitise” their pattern. They had to start “playing in the gap” (Burrows in Motionbank 2019). This strategy is even more clearly present in The Cow Piece. Where Both Sitting Duet still starts from a metrical system, which is dissolved and traded for a more open system of communication, The Cow Piece immediately starts from a multiplicity of patterns. The piece, which takes the form of two solos that run parallel, explicitly pushes the idea of multiplicity to the maximum. There is not even a trace of an overarching structure to bring the different solos into a larger unity. Rather, the piece is brought together by multiple interrelations that bubble up between the different patterns. Burrows and Fargion call these interrelations “impossible moments to meet in the middle”: “It’s actually two simultaneous solos. When we first performed, it didn’t work very well. Because it [the score] is so complicated we just couldn’t make a connection ourselves, so the audience couldn’t connect it. And now, I can really watch Matteo and the pleasure comes in finding these impossible moments to meet in the middle” (Fargion in Motionbank 2019, emphasis added). Through their performance, Fargion and Burrows thus try to create meetings in the middle. This middle should, however, not be understood as a middle ground or a common denominator, but as a no-man’s-land, a space of differ­ ence that emerges when different patterns are present at the same time without fusing together into a larger unity. It is a meeting that is impossible, because it can only produce difference. The second tactic that emerges in Burrows and Fargion’s pieces relates to the use of the score. More specifically, it becomes manifest in the tension that is created between the score and the performance. As mentioned above, the score is present onstage in almost all performances. Burrows and Fargion also actively use the score, as they do not know the patterns by heart. However, this refusal to learn the movements should not—or at least not only—be under­ stood in terms of laziness. By refusing to learn the scores by heart and embody them, the interaction between the two performers and the score isn’t marked by ease and fluency, which so often characterises dance pieces, but rather by heightened concentration. Burrows and Fargion have to concentrate to keep up with the prescribed tempo of the piece. They often seem perplexed and puz­ 142

When Time Begins To Riot zled by their own score, displaying a “screen-saver expression of ‘counting-inthe-background’” (Etchells 2007). These moments make explicit the difference between the prescribed score and the performance, and draw attention to the space that is opened up between the paper plane of the score and the plane of the performative action. In Cheap Lecture, Burrows and Fargion (2012) elaborate on this difference. They describe the lecture they give as a “negotiation with the space of the page and the written form and the room we are in together.” These two elements “create the time in which this [the piece] is happening.” The temporality that is produced in Cheap Lecture is thus a negotiation between the pre-written pattern of the score and the actual here and now of the perfor­ mance that we create and experience together. The experience of this negotia­ tion is heightened by the fact that Burrows and Fargion are wearing earpieces that dictate the tempo of the piece. The performers simply repeat the words that are whispered into their ears. As such, the earpieces create a space of dif­ ference between the words that are spoken and the performers that are speak­ ing them. As they mention: “The earpiece distracts us enough, we hope, from ourselves, that ourselves might become visible” (Burrows and Fargion 2009). We can thus see that the space-time of the performance does not reside in the score but in the space of difference, or the impossible meeting, that is established between the different scores and between the score and the per­ formance. It emerges in the meantime, which Deleuze and Guattari (1994, 158) define as the “time of the accident,” as that which “belongs to becoming.” This is the time where “many heterogeneous, always simultaneous components” are “superimposed” and “communicate through zones of indiscernibility, of unde­ cidability” to constitute “variations, modulations, intermezzi, singularities of a new infinite order.”

In the meantime The rhythmic complexity that Fargion and Burrows propose in their works can thus be reduced neither to an overall metrical system nor to a natural, inner flow. Rather, it emerges as a relation of difference between the differ­ ent heterogeneous elements, as the production of a meantime or meanwhile. Rhythm here doesn’t provide an overarching structural unity, or a primary nat­ ural ground. Rather, it constantly throws us off balance. The rhythms that are present in Burrows and Fargion always seem to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. To conclude, we can refer to Gertrude Stein’s description of syn­ copation in jazz. For Stein, jazz transformed syncopation from a simple offbeat into “something that was nothing but a difference in tempo between anybody and everybody including all those doing it and all those hearing and seeing it” (Stein 1935, 95). As such, syncopation is more than just a simple trick to make music sound more playful. Rather, it is connected to the feeling of fundamen­ tal disturbance. Syncopation, according to Stein, is “what makes one endlessly troubled” (ibid., 94, emphasis added).

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Jonas Rutgeerts References Adorno, Theodor W. 1989–90. “On Jazz.” Translated by Jamie Owen Daniel. Discourse 12 (1): 45–69. First published 1964 in Moments Musicaux: Neugedruckte Aufsätze 1928–1962 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp). Brennan, Mary. 2015. “DIG Review: Jonathan Burrows/Matteo Fargion at Tramway, Glasgow.” Glasgow Herald, 27 April. Accessed 28 June 2019. https://www. heraldscotland.com/arts_ents/13211440. dig-review-jonathan-burrowsmatteofargion-at-tramway-glasgow/. Burrows, Jonathan. 2010. A Choreographer’s Handbook. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Burrows, Jonathan, and Matteo Fargion. 2002. “Both Sitting Duet (Score).” Accessed 13 May 2019. http:// www.jonathanburrows.info/#/ score/?id=5&t=content. ———. 2005. “The Quiet Dance (Score).” Accessed 13 May 2019. http://www.jonathanburrows.info/#/ score/?id=4&t=content. ———. 2009. Cheap Lecture. Motionbank video, 30:09. Accessed 13 May 2019. http://scores.motionbank.org/jbmf/#/ set/all-duets. ———. 2012. “Both Sitting Duet and Cheap Lecture.” In Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History, edited by Amelia Jones and Adrian Heathfield, 391–412. Bristol: Intellect. ———. 2018. “Burrows and Fargion Joint Biography 2018.” Accessed 13 May 2019. http://www.jonathanburrows.info/#/ text/?id=196&t=content. Davis, Erik. 2005. “Roots and Wires: Polyrhythm Cyberspace and the Black Electronic.” Accessed 13 May 2019. https://techgnosis.com/roots-andwires-2/. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987.

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A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1994. What Is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1991 as Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Minuit). Etchells, Tim. 2007. “Article by Tim Etchells on the First Trilogy of Duets.” Accessed 13 May 2019. http://www.jonathanburrows. info/#/text/?id=19&t=content. Holland, Eugene W. 2013. Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: A Reader’s Guide. London: Bloomsbury. Leucht, Sabine. (2010) 2019. “Review of Cheap Lecture and The Cow Piece: The Rhythm is the Boss: Jonathan Burrows and Matteo Fargion in the Muffat Hall.” Review first published in Süddeutsche Zeitung, 18 May 2010. Republished in “Cheap Lecture and The Cow Piece,” PDF document on Jonathan Burrows’s homepage. Accessed 13 May 2019. www. jonathanburrows.info/downloads/ CLCPNI2.pdf. Messiaen, Oliver. 1994. Music and Color: Conversations with Claude Samuel. Translated by E. Thomas Glasow. New York: Amadeus Press. First published 1986 as Musique et couleur: Nouveaux entretiens avec Claude Samuel (Paris: Belfond). Motionbank. 2019. “Counterpoint and Sequence.” Motionbank video, 8:04. Accessed 13 May 2019. http:// scores.motionbank.org/jbmf/#/set/ counterpoint-and-sequence. Stein, Gertrude. 1935. Lectures in America. New York: Random House.

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker An Unbridled Activity of Vital Lines Oleg Lebedev Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium

Geometry in Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s work Emphasis on geometry, rigorous mathematical structures, and abstract for­ mal parameters seem to be at the very core of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s style. Since the foundation of her own dance company, Rosas, in 1983, she has remained dedicated to exploring complex articulations of movement in part­ nership with other arts. The distinctive feature of her aesthetic, however, is the prominent use of geometry. This chapter is an attempt to come to grips with an important topic in dance theory: the connection between choreogra­ phy and drawing lines. Those lines form a figure each time dancers interact onstage or when one or more dancers are moving. The construction of lines on the floor plan varies according to the logic of creation proper to each piece. For instance, danced patterns are ubiquitous in Rain but seem almost absent in Verklärte Nacht. Nevertheless, if we endorse the statement that the method of creation is a way of thinking (that is, a way of posing a problem), and thus that choreography too is able to create its own concepts (Cvejić 2015), it becomes obvious that geometry is more than a central aspect, it constitutes the expressive concept concentrating De Keersmaeker’s thought. My hypothesis is that geom­ etry is one of the main philosophical problems she deals with, a problem bril­ liantly materialised onstage. This is not to say that her dance is conceptual (I will show the opposite), but that a certain mode of thought has ruled her work and defined her style for more than thirty-five years. A work is supposed to bring out problems. What precisely is the geometrical problem in which Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker finds herself caught? This ques­ tioning calls for an examination of her style and requires us to determine the system of signs peculiar to her work. The structuring of traffic between danc­ ers, in one single flow with seemingly unobstructed facility, where everything is highly scripted according to space, is a striking aesthetic feature of Rosas’ per­ formances: in the sequence “Violin Phase” from Fase, De Keersmaeker progres­ sively develops the marking of a central point into a complex circular pattern; in Rain and Drumming, squares, rectangles, and pentagrams are unambiguously pictured on the stage floor; in Vortex Temporum, a basic logic of shifting circles 145

Oleg Lebedev creates elliptical interwoven threads of rich intricacy. Henceforth, a quick glance at the geometrical inscriptions of the floor plan is often enough to give an idea of the choreographic configuration. The result of such scenography is that spectators often believe De Keersmaeker’s dance to be highly formalised, even minimalist, closer to a form of engineering that organises the architecture of movement than to the exhilaration so characteristic of a moving body. In that respect, her success would be one of structural achievement, patiently archived and documented in three publications titled A Choreographer’s Score, where vari­ ous sketches, schemes, and drawings reflect geometrical arrangements govern­ ing movements executed by dancers (De Keersmaeker and Cvejić 2012, 2014; De Keersmaeker, Cvejić, and François 2013).

Figure 11.1.

Within the duration of the performance, all these simple figures (squares, cir­ cles, straight lines) of different scales nevertheless seem to be submitting to a different internal, almost esoteric logic: that of the irrational golden pro­ portion, intimately interconnecting surface areas and the time needed for dancers to travel across them. One’s first impression when presented with this stiff, angular geometry is thus quickly overcome when performers begin to disregard the drawn lines and start moving in intricate revolving spirals and curves. These quick observations ensure that we analyse De Keersmaeker’s unflagging obsession for the Fibonacci sequence, in which the next number is found by adding up the two numbers before it (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34 . . .), the general rule of the sequence being: xn = xn-1 + xn-2 (for example: 34 = 21 + 13). First, squares drawn with widths obtained in the sequence allow the creation of a perfect spiral. This feature of the Fibonacci sequence explains for instance why danced loops are constantly reset according to precise positions in space. Second, the bigger the pair of Fibonacci numbers, the closer their 146

Figure 11.1. Rain © Anne Van Aerschot.

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker ratio to the golden number ϕ: 1.618034 . . . This irrational golden number, also found in the ratio within a pentagon, was thought by the Greeks to be the very expression of divine proportions. It appears many times in geometry (Euclid, Pythagoras), music (Bach, Bartók, Debussy, Satie,), architecture (Le Corbusier, Palladio), painting (Leonardo’s drawing of a human body), and natural pat­ terns (the logarithmic growth spiral of shells, or spiral arrangements in plant structures). As for De Keersmaeker, we find it for instance in all its splendour in Rain. Musically speaking, the breaking point in Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians—which serves as the musical material for the piece—occurs at the golden section, that is when we divide the total length of the piece into two parts so that the whole length divided by the long part is also equal to the long part divided by the short part.1 Moreover, and this time regarding the space generated by dance, De Keersmaeker creates several epicentres, one for each dancer, on the basis of which increasing squares are constructed; all obey the same Fibonacci sequence in an intimate connection to the same golden num­ ber ϕ we find in music. Although for a dance theoretician formulas and mathematics can seem bor­ ing and not worth the attention, this list of numbers is of upmost interest to De Keersmaeker herself. As we shall see, in her work there are no clear distinctions between a scientific notion, a philosophical concept, and art’s exploration of human experience. “Proportion . . . remains my entrance point to things. I never quite left a vague Pythagorean background. There are laws of self-organi­ sation in nature that manifest themselves at every scale, of which our bodies are a testimony. One should pay close attention to that as well” (De Keersmaeker and Plouvier 2012, 10, my translation).

Figure 11.2.



1 a/b = b + a/b.

147

Figure 11.2. Rehearsal session for Vortex Temporum © Anne Van Aerschot.

Oleg Lebedev At this point careful readers cannot but raise their eyebrows. What is the rea­ son for this esoteric and occult approach? We know the answer Western tradi­ tion gave to this question: if God is the geometer of the world, then His book of nature is necessarily written in a mathematical language, inspiring harmony in nature and the arts. But does such a fascinating albeit ancient (Pythagorean) conception fit De Keersmaeker’s aesthetic? The immediate consequence would be that there is a universal pattern (musica universalis), a platonic arche­ typal εἶδος, ruling over the structure of all sensible and spiritual beings. By embracing this, De Keersmaeker would become part of an already long and well-established relationship between art and science, obsessively searching for the ultimate formula of beauty, expressed in sacred geometry and beauty of proportion. Indeed, the universal design found in Rudolf von Laban’s cube often orders the movements of Rosas’ dancers within the icosahedron (see Laban 1926, 1966), while the spirals obtained through the Fibonacci sequence rule their displacement onstage. The premeditated rational structure would thus be the final word on her style, in such a way that nature, science and art would fuse in a kind of mystic identification. While this idea is not completely untrue, Deleuzian tools may help us better understand the logic of creation of her pieces and thus reveal another geometry—problematic, operative, and affective, rather than theoretical. This re-emergence of a “smooth” space beneath the “striated” space will provide a better response to the supposedly abstract nature of De Keersmaeker’s work. Therefore, the question we have to ask is: at what conditions can geometry become genetic and not simply formal?

Minor science and projective geometry In his Commentary on the First Book of Euclid’s Elements, the Neoplatonic thinker Proclus acknowledges geometry proceeds in a theoretical and immaterial man­ ner; nevertheless, he also pays particular attention to its relation to matter, so that sciences like geodesy, optics, catoptrics, mechanics, and even what he calls “scene-painting” emanate out of it, doing some good to “the life of mortals” (Proclus 1970, 32, 50). While maintaining the primacy of theorems over prob­ lems, Proclus defines the conditions of the problem in terms of an order of events and affectations, so that the main working method of a geometrician is differentiated into procedures of organising movement (removal, addition, substitution, expansion, and delimitation) (Proclus 1970, 159). This distinc­ tion between (1) a theorematic demonstration developing what was already inscribed in an axiom and (2) the construction/drawing of figures implied by the very nature of a geometrical problem is summed up in Difference and Repetition (Deleuze 1994), but runs throughout Deleuze’s thought (for instance in his re-evaluation of Kantian schematism with the help of Salomon Maimon or in the distinction found in A Thousand Plateaus between royal science and minor science [Deleuze and Guattari 1987]). Instead of analytical geometry returning to the initial, simpler figure at rest, Deleuze always promoted the real move­ ment of non-metrical multiplicities, where the synthesis is forced to compose consecutive principles. 148

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker In doing so, Deleuze exhibits the extent to which Euclid’s so-called theore­ matic science, in which intelligible figures organise surfaces and volumes, is not so far removed from a kind of mathegraphy (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 364). As opposed to matheology, this process compares drawing or writing (from the Greek γράφειν) to the sensible construction of mathematical and geometrical concepts rather than their clarification in theory or doctrine.2 Indeed, in Proclus’s reading of Euclid,3 while theorems are solved by deduc­ tions, problems are solved by construction. In theorems, the exposition of what is given is sufficient to show the truth of what is sought: the mind operates the demonstration by specifying what is taken for granted and deduces the conclu­ sion as being self-evident (it is good sense and commonsense at work). In doing so, the mind is unable to move from one object to another, but simply unfolds evidence. But in construction, the geometer draws lines (even in the mind) in order to discover what is sought. Here lies the distinguishing characteris­ tic of the problem as opposed to the theorem. In other words, construction and demonstration are needed for problems, but demonstration without con­ struction is sufficient for theorems. By construction, Proclus means the necessity, in a problem, to overcome conclusion as a simple consequence of the initial setting-out; here, we have to move our mind between what is given and what is being sought, and to plunge into a theatre of events taking place in logical matter.4 According to Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 212), such an approach con­ stitutes an “operative geometry in which figures are never separable from the affectations befalling them, the lines of their becoming, the segments of their segmentation: there is ‘roundness,’ but no circle, ‘alignments,’ but no straight line.” Interactions and variables are destined to supersede absolute centres and immutable essences, so that every geometrical figure can emerge from its own perspective, inseparable from its own deformations. For example, a straight line, in that regard, can only be obtained as the result of a set of approxima­ tions: that a straight line is also the “shortest” provides us with the rule of con­ struction of a line as being straight. That is, we need to produce (even in spirit) the experience of a line as being straight. Working in geometry is not solely working with concepts and predicates. Precisely, “the shortest” is not a predi­ cate but a rule for construction.





2 For examples of such geometrical writing, see Lemoine (1902); Reusch (1904). 3 See Deleuze (1990, 54), referring to Proclus (1970, 63–67). See also Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 362): “One does not go by specific differences from a genus to its species, or by deduction from a stable essence to the properties deriving from it, but rather from a problem to the accidents that condition and resolve it. This involves all kinds of deformations, transmutations, passages to the limit, operations in which each figure designates an ‘event’ much more than an essence; the square no longer exists independently of a quadrature, the cube of a cubature, the straight line of a rectification. Whereas the theorem belongs to the rational order, the problem is affective and is inseparable from the metamor­ phoses, generations, and creations within science itself.” 4 For an in-depth discussion on why the setting-out is not sufficient, and why the geometer does not know geometrical truths but produces them through construction, see MacIsaac (2014, 53).

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Oleg Lebedev

Figure 11.3.

For instance, if the end points A and B of a line are defined, we can find its golden section point by using a compass to draw circles and a set square to draw lines at right angles to other lines. No measurement nor extraction of constants are needed. A very simple five-step method is sufficient to determine the golden section as a singularity on a given line. In a very short demonstra­ tion, Hofstetter (2004) shows how we can overcome the discovery of the golden number through measurement, and rather generate the golden ratio through the formation of a problematic figure for the mind, where variables are placed in a state of continuous variation. It is therefore fascinating to discover how simple the construction of the golden section appears for projective geome­ try, but how complex and extremely irrational it seems to the representative understanding of royal science (for a schematic presentation of these concepts, see table 11.1 below) Royal science

Minor science

Theorematic model Primacy of fixed ideal essences

Problematic model Primacy of morphological (de-) formations Affective order Generation of space Construction

Rational order Representation of space Demonstration Compars Categories, representative understanding Function: give scientific solutions Form/matter

Dispars Intuition, sensible evaluations Function: create or invent problems Force/material

Table 11.1.

150

Figure 11.3. Mitten wir im Leben sind / Bach6Cellosuiten © Anne Van Aerschot. Table 11.1. Formal geometry and differential (or projective) geometry.

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker This shift from well-established Euclidian geometry to projective geometry also implies the shift from the contemplation of finished forms to the qual­ itative experience of forms, where movement, metamorphosis, and continu­ ous deformation prevail over calculus. Metrical concepts of royal science leave room for interwoven relationships with no need for a central point, since posi­ tion is now the key factor. Note that this is pretty much in line with Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of smooth and striated space: the latter is homogeneous, linear, derived from abstract representation, defined by equivalence of direc­ tions, subjected to a grid pattern. Every transformation within it is understood as constant and can be measured. However, in smooth space there is no direct connection between chunks of space, so that every infinitesimal element can only be comprehended in relation to its immediate vicinity. Therefore, the distinctive features of smooth space are the following: disparity, variability of directions, and a tendency to a process in which trajectories do not pre-exist projections. Since there is no univocal junction of parts within this smooth space, parts can be bound together in an infinite number of ways, but only from one part to another and step by step, which leads us to the last feature: this space is full of probabilistic phenomena, and if an individual occupies it, the individual can only be considered as a multiplicity that changes its nature with every transformation. Those familiar with De Keersmaeker’s work will recognise her aesthetic, which consists in establishing a fundamental link between geometry and the intense, peculiar disposition of dancers onstage. Nevertheless, before we come back to her style, a last detour by art theory is needed.

The Gothic line Worringer’s central place in Deleuze’s work is due to an innovative typology of lines found in Form Problems of the Gothic. Expressionism for Worringer is related to the multifaceted concept of the Gothic line, which is inseparable both from the formation of problems in geometry and from aesthetics. First, it is of utmost importance to stress that the concept of the “Gothic” for Worringer and Deleuze is not synonymous with the historical meaning, but rather linked to a certain psychology of style whose repercussions are broader than the Middle Age, and are also to be found in modern painting or in cinema. If we are to understand the Gothic or northern phenomena, we should empha­ sise that here the creator liberates complex energies that have to be canalised. With this kind of line, nothing is at rest: the spirit of the Gothic is the spirit of tempest or fire, although through this restlessness, the creator has no anxious relation to the outer world. In contrast, the Greek line is organic: it is defined by moderation, temper­ ance, a symmetry that creates elegant self-contained shapes. Natural bonds of organic motion are respected because of the presence of a centre that adjusts and pauses our feelings. The Greek line can be reproduced, but in a “calm char­ acter of addition” (Worringer 1918, 52). It is expressive, but that expression is of a kind that depends upon us: the beauty we see corresponds to our organic 151

Oleg Lebedev sense and to what our anatomical structure can endure. This line is to be found for example in Classical ornament, in vegetal wavy motifs. The Gothic line outstrips this organic movement. Its lack of a starting point makes it agitated, vigorous, and convoluted. Since it cannot provide us with natural satisfaction, its expressive power has to be autonomous, independ­ ent of us, bearing an “inherent expression which is stronger than our life” (Worringer 1918, 48): it passionately captivates mind and eye in its motion and compels us to follow its movement. Moreover, Deleuze and Guattari insist that “this streaming, spiraling, zigzagging, snaking, feverish line of variation liber­ ates a power of life” (1987, 499), in such a way that it frees itself from Euclidian geometry and is emancipated from the imitation of the visible. Contrary to the stability of formal geometric lines or to representative features of the organic line, the abstract northern line is animated by the playfulness of its own plas­ ticity: it is indifferent to symmetry, to unity, or to its own closure; endowed with a spiritual power of expression, it proliferates indefinitely. In quite a Deleuzian manner, I would like to give a “conceptual portrayal” of De Keersmaeker as a Gothic architect, since “the pathos of movement inher­ ent in [her] vitalized geometry—a prelude to the vitalized mathematics of Gothic architecture—forces our sensibility to an unnatural feat of strength” (Worringer 1918, 47–48). This defiance towards form so peculiar to Gothic aes­ thetics is expressly verbalised by De Keersmaeker: “Form is never a goal in and of itself. A Gothic cathedral also has a sophisticated design but its ultimate goal is that you experience it with a kind of self-evident admiration and allow yourself to be swept away by it. This choreography is also about creating a con­ tinuous stream by which people can allow themselves to be swept away with­ out necessarily understanding the construction” (De Keersmaeker and Bellon 2016). It is striking that when De Keersmaeker mentions the infinitely variable curve as the genetic principle of her work, she also alludes to Gothic architec­ ture. But it’s even more striking that she does so in terms not so far removed from Worringer, Proclus and Deleuze.5 Hence, the “problem-element” of the Gothic as opposed to the “theoremelement” of the Romanesque is the drawing of a line, the conquest of a smooth space, where calculus, forced to abandon the facilities of gridded striated space, becomes differential. It is as if Gothic forces were destroying rigid essences and equations as intelligible forms. What matters in Gothic construc­ tion is the “operative” logic of projection at ground level, the series of succes­ sive approximations with the compass, and the squaring on stone (équarrissage), all these operations making obsolete the plan or design drawn by the archi­ tects. Everything happens as if architecture was pure and not simply applied, as

5 See for instance Worringer (1918): “But when one enters a Gothic cathedral, he experiences something different from a sensuous clarification” (123). “If one is at all sensible of space, he never steps into the great Gothic cathedrals without feeling a dizziness because of the space” (124). “For, in fact, in the Gothic the structural processes are not directly intelligible to us at all by mere observation, but only indirectly intelligible, only by a sort of computation on the drawing board. As we look, we are scarcely conscious of the structural significance of the individual member of the Gothic building; on the contrary, the individual member affects the observer only as the mimic bearer of an abstract expression. In fine, therefore, the sum total of logical calculations is not offered for its own sake, but for the sake of a superlogical effect” (86).

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Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker if it was obsessed with an “objectless fury of construction” (Worringer 1918, 85) within the smooth space of progression. In Gothic architecture, Deleuze and Guattari (following here Anne Querrien) believe, “the static relation, form-matter, tends to fade into the background in favor of a dynamic relation, material-forces. It is the cutting of the stone that turns it into material capable of holding and coordinating forces of thrust, and of constructing ever higher and longer vaults. The vault is no longer a form but the line of continuous variation of the stones” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 364). The immediate outcome of this matter–force interaction is that the Gothic line breaks with the lifeless abstract space: it loses its Euclidian coordi­ nates to become expressive, filled with a vital force—a space that will affect us.

A joyous anarchy De Keersmaeker has a striking capacity to bring together a wide range of fields: science, music, dance, spirituality. When she transposes Bach’s musical scores to dance, she reminds us that Bach was indeed a child of the seventeenth cen­ tury, which was dominated by the idea of the infinite in its double aspect: the infinitely small and the infinitely large. It’s no coincidence that the emergence of projective geometry coincides with the emergence in the seventeenth cen­ tury of the idea of the infinite. But what are we to learn from geometry and metaphysical issues today? Disputes between Leibniz and Newton on the dis­ covery of differential calculus, the invention of new methods of exhaustion, and the absolute or relative nature of space were inseparable from controver­ sies among scholars on the presence of God in creation. In its unreserved long­ ing for harmony, the seventeenth century also rediscovered in us very special interwoven lines: these lines that twist in our organisms, taking our breath away or granting us a new respiration, connecting or disconnecting us from our capacity to act in this world (Deleuze 1993). This is the very reason why De Keersmaeker does not abandon those somehow obsolete discussions on the infinite, diffraction, divergence, folding and repetition. On the contrary, she intensifies these problems and grants them a new adventure, a new life in the twenty-first century. Suddenly, the spectator feels that the course of the planets in the sky and our internal biological rhythms are responding to each other (Somnia). This is because De Keersmaeker’s dance produces and explores the Gothic line, which amounts to a rediscovery of theological and metaphysical issues that remain so intimate to us today. In everything that is likely to grow or decrease, De Keersmaeker reminds us that a joyous anarchy is at work, that is, the constant struggle between determination and the indeterminate and the persistent disputing of established rules and fixed order. But how does the visual translation of the intimate movement of matter work in Rosas’ performances? Why do we (as spectators) feel that equilibrium is pre­ carious and only obtained by compensation of opposed forces? While symme­ try is often believed to be a universal law of nature, De Keersmaeker prefers an endlessly alternating form. Thus, the same Fibonacci sequence, structuring bodies at macro and micro level, can be used for regularity and constancy, where 153

Oleg Lebedev a line always delimits a clear contour in a striated space. But it can also be used for an unprecedented aesthetics of expense and the spawning of smooth space. In her exploration of Gothic line, De Keersmaeker takes this second path and investigates the unleashed power of repetition, explores internal accumulation of energies (until saturation), and constructs flows of forces rather than analy­ ses the fixity of forms. Her suspicion of perfectly equilibrated arrangements and well-behaving, centred forms explains why—contrary to what we would first tend to believe—there is so little unison and stability in De Keersmaeker’s choreographies. For instance, the group of dancers is often divided into une­ qual parts (6/5 or 4/7). Or, additionally, when a pentagon is drawn through movements in space, the constellations producing angles and new circles out of its five sides are never harmonious, but rather obey a dissymmetrical relation (3/2), thereby enabling the dance to develop in specific rotations and vortexes and all kinds of unrestrained spiral movements. This way of choreographing is irreducible to the Pythagorean obsession for clarity and mathematical order­ ing. Moreover, it brings out a certain conception of life and evolution.6 “What is nice about the golden ratio,” says De Keersmaeker, “is that it is an asymmetric ratio. If something is in perfect balance, it stays still. If something is asymmet­ ric, there is a tension that leads to change. Then there is more of the one than there is of the other and there is a possibility that the ratio will change or that the bigger part will push away or strengthen the smaller” (De Keersmaeker and Bellon 2016). In her choreography, this lack of regularity becomes positivity of life itself and “constitute[s] a vortical form always put in motion by renewed turbulence” (Deleuze 1993, 4). This explains the primacy in Rosas of the line folded into a spiral over a circle: while the circle is a closed figure bringing to mind fatality and repetition, the spiral is a liberating concept, which takes us back to the same position but where our place has nevertheless changed: “More precisely, I’m preoccupied by the idea of a double spiral, one opening up and the other closing up—and there is never a dead end, it keeps moving around” (De Keersmaeker 2016, 19). In other words, non-metrical and uncentred multiplicities are richer than the striation of space by unilinear steady figures. In that regard, symmetry is experienced as a limitation, while disjunctions (shifts in space or time, like De Keersmaeker’s famous kinok technique) create truly intricate repetitive pat­ terns, endlessly spreading in fan-like sequences and never coming to rest: the possibilities of opening and closing, of expanding and contracting, of dilut­ ing and gathering, become virtually infinite. Hence, this impression of endless release, when space unfurls and when one trajectory performed by one dancer

6 Deleuze (1994, 20–21) emphasises that life owes more to rhythmical gyrating movements than to static equilibrium. The arguments in defence of minor science (as opposed to the major one) and of the vital non-organic line (as opposed to the abstract or organic line) are inseparable from this need to overcome all the obstacles of disciplined geometry. “Indeed, it is through symmetry that rectilinear systems limit repetition, preventing infinite progression and maintaining the organic domination of a central point with radiating lines, as in reflected or star-shaped figures. It is free action, however, which by its essence unleashes the power of repetition as a machinic force that multiplies its effect and pursues an infinite movement. Free action proceeds by disjunction and decentering, or at least by peripheral movement: disjointed polythetism instead of symmetrical antithetism” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 498).

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Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker is enough to delineate and recompose the space for the rest of the group.7 The team of dancers is interwoven like a texture, with its own elasticity and points of rupture. This collective dance—in which each individual is distinct but nevertheless inseparable from the group because it is supported by it—is crucial. The group becomes dovetailed matter, so that the interactions between dancers are similar to molecular biology. In shows requiring a large number of dancers, movements are executed as if dancers were in a pack (meute) (as is the case in Rain or Vortex Temporum, where individuation as a process results from intricate movements), or as if the relationships between them were chemical. In that regard, De Keersmaeker’s dance is an art of waving and textures rather than an art of structures.

Figure 11.4.

If every visual work of art makes invisible forces visible, when attending a per­ formance by Rosas we sense above all forces of contraction, tearing, elasticity, release. Often, when dancers are on the line or in the act of drawing the line, they relate to all the other members of the pack (thus, the importance of the gaze in Rosas’ productions, and the interaction our eyes create between foreground and background). Every single choreographic construction is constantly on the point of rupture. It is as if the audience assisted a swarm pattern formation: “each individual moves randomly unless it sees the rest of [the swarm] in the same half-space; then it hurries to re-enter the group. Thus stability is assured in catastrophe by a barrier” (René Thom quoted in Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 245). The space involved in such a construction cannot be striated, it is gen­ erated through kinetics. Moreover, a dancer bearing an anonymous, collec­

7 The concept of the ritornello (refrain) in A Thousand Plateaus is of upmost interest in analysing this inter­ action between territory and the processes of de/reterritorialisations, but it is beyond the scope of this chapter.

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Figure 11.4. Vortex Temporum © Anne Van Aerschot.

Oleg Lebedev tive, and simply arithmetical power ceases to be a subjective expression and is individualised by dance merely through machinic assemblages. His or her movements are not coded according to emotions he or she has to convey, but according to functions such as insertion, bordering, encircling, shattering— pure strategy against psychology; vitalised geometry against the homogeneity of royal science; another movement, another space-time beyond our human perspective. Of space, Deleuze and Guattari say, “One does not represent, one engenders and traverses” (1987, 364). This is mostly in line with De Keersmaeker’s work, where space is constantly composed, transformed by friction, traction, gearing. While in axiomatised geometry the limit is conceived as a border, within which the figure lies, in living geometry limit only stands for a moving coordinate, hence generating space and time rather than being in space and time.8 Such a method is inseparable for De Keersmaeker from a profound under­ standing of the score (whether the music is spectral or minimalist or by Bach), since in musical composition too, symmetry and repetition of the same are only an outcome of a more recalcitrant phenomenon, namely rhythm. Rhythm forces the dancer to secrete space rather than fill it. As Fernand Schirren, a teacher at Mudra and then PARTS,9 who exerted a great and profound influ­ ence on De Keersmaeker, wrote in The Rhythm: Primordial and Sovereign: “A mediocre dancer dances in space, in time; space and time being just structures, mere abstractions. A mediocre dancer does not dance. A genuine dancer creates space and duration, dimensions and logics unknown, she or he generates a world that didn’t exist before, and that will never exist anymore” (Schirren 2011, 320–21, my translation). Thus, rhythm is always at work in our depth. It is the very principle of folding and unfolding matter. It is rhythm that makes everything (and even the non-organic) alive.

Rhythm in nature and spirit Returning to De Keersmaeker’s obsession for musica universalis, we should now ask how geometric patterns allow dance to communicate with other arts and with natural force-material interactions. As scientists have frequently observed, the Fibonacci sequence and the golden ratio are related to certain forms of spiral growth in nature (for instance in the successive spirals of a sea­ shell, in the shape of a human body, or within DNA structure). Nature, in that regard, could be the best designer. In a striking answer to a question about the creation of her piece Rain, De Keersmaeker said: “The starting point was a little orange-rose seashell I always have in my office. An extremely discreet object, but which forms a spiral of absolute perfection. Everything began there, so to speak” (2011, my translation).10

8 Similarly, Worringer (1918, 103) points out that “in the Greek epoch, space, as such, played no artistic role; Greek architecture, we saw, was pure tectonics, without intention of creating space.” 9 The Performing Arts Research and Training School, founded by De Keersmaeker in Brussels in 1995. 10 “Le point de départ était un petit coquillage orange-rose qui repose toujours dans mon bureau. Objet infiniment discret, mais qui dessine une spirale d’une absolue perfection. Tout est parti de là, si l’on veut.”

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Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker A mineral, for instance a crystal, obeys the same organisation of matter as living beings. Even rocks record within themselves dynamisms and telluric forces imperceptible from the perspective of human time. Through rhythmi­ cal construction of space, De Keersmaeker looks for the unity of all things, for the secret of repetition and change that has the sovereignty to develop every­ where in nature—from the skies to a seashell, from a seashell to music, from music to dance, from dance to forces in us, from forces in us to cosmogenesis. An order emerges and vanishes again. This is possible because the continuous folding and unfolding of matter became the leading principle, replacing old partitioning between realms of existence. How could it be otherwise, since De Keersmaeker’s main concern is the rhythm of elements rather than essential forms, and since rhythm is everywhere primordial and sovereign? All nature, in that respect, becomes an ornament, a pulsating composition of relations from living organisms all the way down to the molecular and the inorganic. “Regardless of contractions and distensions in dance or music, the same mov­ ing principle—rhythm—produces and reigns over sounds as well as over steps” (Schirren 2001, 24, my translation). The ubiquity of rhythm as a compositional force in nature and in human artefacts extracts the spirit of matter and reminds us of the polyphony of all things. The world too is a patchwork of folds, finding its ideal condition in the genetic principle of difference and repetition. A sea­ shell, understood as a piece of origami, can rightly become a model for science as well as for art: atoms in nature, sound molecules in music, and cells in dance take on the same differential rhythmic layers. De Keersmaeker, we believe, comprehends nature as melody, where counterpoints resonate and partici­ pate in the formation of physical individuals. Even in a seashell, the apparent monotonously revolving cycles are only an outward envelope of a deeper differ­ ence, based on the irrational golden ratio that creates something incommensu­ rable for our structure-oriented understanding. This is why attending one of De Keersmaeker’s pieces often seems like being present at a cosmogony, where form is in formation rather than being simply “given,” all prepared for my conceptual recognition: natura naturans rather than natura naturata. The infinity of the large constantly echoes the infinity of the small, the macrocosmic with the microcosmic. One danced phrase resonates and repeats in miniature the expression of the whole.11 The piece often starts from a very simple initial cell, but this embryo becomes differentiated through­ out the show: it grows and multiplies its various outcomes, until it folds again and comes back to a momentary rest, like waves breaking on the sand that are ready to regain the vastness of the ocean.12 Rain and Drumming develop as one single wave, one extended movement without suspension, where constructions (as opposed to structures) are constantly altered to their opposites until they end because of internal exhaustion.

11 On this interaction, see Worringer (1918, 131). 12 In that regard, a separate study of De Keersmaeker’s endings seems of particular interest. They often occur as a sublime moment of suspension or serene collapse, but indicate that dance could continue further, backstage, long after the lights went out.

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Oleg Lebedev

False dilemma of dance: abstraction or emotion Now, let’s consider whether our conceptual portrayal of Rosas’ performances can draw out some of the oddities found in the opposition of abstraction and emotion. I believe that this dilemma, often thought to be the very core of De Keersmaeker’s minimalist style, is wrongly understood: even emotions—of which melancholy is maybe the most important in De Keersmaeker’s work— are machinated in dance by moving bodies. Even intimate feelings (and there are many in her work) are an objective outcome of a movement dependent upon rhythmical relations in space and time. In doing so, she invents new material affects, rather than dramatically illustrating subjective feelings. In that way, De Keersmaeker creates specific “algorithms of desire” and accurate “mathemat­ ics of pleasure” (Plouvier 2011, 17), joining together abstraction and emotion, structure and affects, the passion for geometrical proportions and the passion for beauty: I wonder whether objective proportions are not the ultimate things a work of art can rely on. They are my basic motives in Rain and Drumming, the departure points for organising space and time. Indeed, it shows a certain formalism. But as far as I’m concerned, I cannot separate form from emotion. It is central to the writing system in my work, and I’m not afraid to place a bet on beauty. (De Keersmaeker, 2014, my translation) The most beautiful thing dance brings about is that one can include and incorporate through the body the most abstract things. (Ibid.)

In that regard, I believe the classical opposition between formalism and highly structured dance, on the one hand, and theatricality, emotion, or expression, on the other, has been extremely detrimental for understanding De Keersmaeker’s style. Of course, dance theoreticians employ this dichotomy to overcome it (for instance, they put emotions in structure and structure in emotions), but expressing the problem in these terms already supposes that we entail the structural, representational, and signifying mode of thinking. More in phase with her aesthetics, it should be stressed that it is the develop­ ment of vital lines that allows her the most direct—that is, rhythmic—“pathic” relationship to the world. There is a direct relation between (1) a geometric operation (shift, flipping, mirroring, a point of inflection on a mathematical curve, etc.), (2) a critical point in nature (fusion, congelation, boiling, conden­ sation, coagulation, crystallisation, acceleration, etc.), and (3) a human affect (fear, joy, rest, unrest, etc.). This is because geometrical operations, properties of matter and intense feelings all pertain to the discovery of singular points, be those points material, spiritual or our sensitive points: “points of tears and joy, sickness and health, hope and anxiety” (Deleuze 1990, 52). In a striking manner, Deleuze simply concludes: “The relation between mathematics and man may thus be conceived in a new way: the question is not that of quantifying or meas­ uring human properties, but rather, on the one hand, that of problematizing

158

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker human events, and, on the other, that of developing as various human events the conditions of a problem” (ibid., 55). The longing of four girls for a vertical position and their sudden final course in circles (Rosas danst Rosas), the sudden breach of the given space at the golden section of the score (Rain), the effect of centrifugal forces when dancers are asked to cross bigger and bigger space in the same amount of time (Drumming), the simple separation by distance of two lovers (Veklärte Nacht), the meticu­ lous disposition of dancer-instrumentalists onstage (A Love Supreme, with Salva Sanchis): these geometrical knots and intertwining lines refer of course to the physical properties of what is being seen; yet they also point to the ideal coordinates of our lives. In the vicinity of each singular point, a strong feeling is induced in the spectator. This is why we believe that De Keersmaeker’s style is reminiscent of Lewis Carroll’s idea of recreational mathematics: that shapes too can be young and impulsive, that lines can lovingly wend their way before being suddenly separated, that a pentagon longs to be inscribed in a circle, or that a curve suffers from the sections and ablations that affect it.

Figure 11.5.

Conclusion Thus, even when the formal structure of the choreography has been laid out, the formula ruling over the organisation and distribution of displacements in space and time has been discovered, and the relation of traced geometry to the musician’s score unveiled, the burning power of the vital line remains the unsurpassable secret or the mysterious element of De Keersmaeker’s work. This is why the understanding or calculating reason are never able to grasp the whole picture, as if the very precision of the method brought too much mad­ ness with it. In particular, her interest in the Fibonacci sequence and in the golden number closer to subversive geometry than to scientific normativity, 159

Figure 11.5. A Love Supreme © Anne Van Aerschot.

Oleg Lebedev force De Keersmaeker to explore alternative metaphysical lineages, vagabond scientific problems and complex theological issues. Those problems are not from centuries past, but are still ours today. This chapter aimed to establish the way in which Deleuze’s defence of vital lines and projective geometry (which science would like to turn into a mere practical dependency of analytic geometry) unveils an important issue in De Keersmaeker’s work. Unlike a scalpel, the power of which lies in reordering and coding, De Keersmaeker’s generation of space reveals subtle morphologi­ cal formations, affects working shapes from within. In that regard, we have seen how the seed of dissymmetry is always the secret principle of the quiet realm of immobile beings. Ultimately, to grasp De Keersmaeker’s aesthetics, the struc­ tural element should always be made dependant upon a problematic, “intui­ tionist,” or “constructivist” current in geometry and mathematics, emphasising a calculus of problems very different from axiomatics. Only on this condition will her choreography cease to be evaluated according to the simplicity of geometrical essences and will the abstract movement of representative under­ standing be reconnected with the real movement of life. One finds here, I believe, the conditions of her choreographic and philosophical problem. My analysis of the role of experimentation and construction in science as abstract as geometry thus served as the basis for unveiling the sensible, rhythmical ori­ gin of De Keersmaeker’s creations, as well as their highly spiritual components. De Keersmaeker’s dance is not an imitation of nature, but an attempt to penetrate the secret assemblage of all things, in order to make them appear as if they were being created in front of us. Instead of imposing a rational order, it is enough for De Keersmaeker to proceed in modesty—with this subtle Taoist touch13—by tracing her vital lines. As an outcome, we could say that her archi­ tecture of movement is motivated by the smooth space it engenders and by the singular points it explores. Thus, the question is no longer whether her aes­ thetic is formal or emotional, but whether the highest degree of abstraction can carry out intense human affects. Since De Keersmaeker raises “mechanical” relations and their tremendous power of repetition to the level of intuition, affects become in her work inseparable from deeper geometrical processes, working beneath personal expression or theatrical representation. Her vast constructions are more moving and effective the more abstract they become. In other words, the link between (1) the emotional, (2) the material, and (3) the geometrical is best realised in a multidirectional vital (but nevertheless inor­ ganic) line that delimits nothing. This link is simultaneously conditioned and resolved through specific choreographic devices. To see a Rosas performance is to experience the expressive power of the vital line as both something inde­ pendent of us and of upmost interest for us.

13 This influence can be seen in her floor plans in their relation to the Feng Shui art of geomancy, for instance through her use of the Lo Shu magic square, where every line produces a sum corresponding to the symbolic value of the yin (8 + 7) and the yáng (9 + 6) = 15. This magic square is additionally linked to the Pythagorean τετρακτύς, combining in a mystic manner (1) musica universalis, (2) four elements, and (3) dimensions in space. De Keersmaeker’s staging of Mozart’s Così fan tutte at l’Opéra de Paris is a good illustration of these intricate processes.

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Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker In the last instance, De Keersmaeker reminds us that to dance is not only to move, it is also to think—that is, to penetrate the coordinates of our lives in order to make thought visible, to embody it in a certain way of occupying space. We begin to understand now why geometry is no longer (and has never been) limited to geometricians. If God indeed calculates, we can affirm that with De Keersmaeker his calcu­ lations are never accurate, so that his accountancy becomes the source of an eternally flowing creation, the irrational golden number being the supply of natural and artificial beauty. This does not bring us back to mysticism or naive archaisms; on the contrary, it is about rediscovering the eminently modern idea that dissonance, difference, and disequilibrium are the concealed beating heart of established science, of musical harmony, or of Euclidian geometry. Difference is not phenomenon but the noumenon closest to the phenomenon. It is therefore true that 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. The world can be regarded as a “remainder,” and the real in the world understood in terms of fractional or even incommensurable numbers. Every phenomenon refers to an inequality by which it is conditioned. (Deleuze, 1994, 222)

The generative spreading of the vital line in De Keersmaeker’s artistic research underlines this volcanic potential, this power of differential relations, this secret of universal modulation too quickly covered by our human illusions and formal, universalising thinking. References Cvejić, Bojana. 2015. Choreographing Problems: Expressive Concepts in European Contemporary Dance and Performance. London: Palgrave Macmillan. De Keersmaeker, Anne Teresa. 2014. “Entretien avec Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker.” Danser canal historique. Accessed 15 May 2019. https:// dansercanalhistorique.fr/?q=article/ entretien-anne-teresa-de-keersmaeker/. ———. 2016. “Conversation with Steve Reich.” Accessed 3 July 2017. http:// www.rosas.be/data/public/dataset/ file-field/1/126.pdf (page discontinued). Article first published in La Monnaie Magazine. De Keersmaeker, Anne Teresa, and Michaël Bellon. 2016. “Here Comes the Rain Again,” interview with Michaël Bellon. Accessed May 13 2019. https://www.rosas. be/en/news/612-here-comes-the-rainagain.

De Keersmaeker, Anne Teresa, and Bojana Cvejić. 2012. A Choreographer’s Score: Fase, Rosas danst Rosas, Elena’s Aria, Bartók. Brussels: Rosas / Mercatorfonds. ———. 2014. Drumming and Rain: A Choreographer’s Score. Brussels: Rosas / Mercatorfonds. De Keersmaeker, Anne Teresa, Bojana Cvejić, and Michel François. 2013. En Atendant and Cesena: A Choreographer’s Score. Brussels: Rosas / Mercatorfonds. De Keersmaeker, Anne Teresa, and Jean-Luc Plouvier. (2010) 2012. “À propos d’Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker,” interview with Jean-Luc Plouvier. Accessed May 14, 2019. http://archives.legrandt.fr/saisons/ archives/2011-12/dossier_en_atendant. pdf. First published in La Monnaie Magazine, May 2010. ———. 2011. “Parlons travail,” interview with Jean-Luc Plouvier for L’Opéra de Paris. Accessed 28 June 2019. https:// 161

Oleg Lebedev www.ictus.be/blog/parlons-travail. Deleuze, Gilles. 1990. The Logic of Sense. Translated by Mark Lester with Charles Stivale. Edited by Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1969 as Logique du sens (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1993. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Translated by Tom Conley. London: Athlone Press. First published 1988 as Le Pli: Leibniz et le Baroque (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1994. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1968 as Différence et répétition (Paris: Presses universitaires de France). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Minuit). Hofstetter, Kurt. 2004. “Another 5-Step Division of a Segment in the Golden Section.” Forum Geometricorum 4: 21–22. Laban, Rudolf von. 1926. Choreographie: Erstes Heft. Jena: Hugen Diederichs.

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———. 1966. Choreutics. Edited by Lisa Ullmann. London: Macdonald and Evans. Lemoine, Émile. 1902. Géométrographie, ou Art des constructions géométriques. Paris: C. Naud. MacIsaac, Gregory. 2014. “Geometrical First Principles in Proclus’ Commentary on the First Book of Euclid’s Elements.” Phronesis 59: 44–98. Plouvier, Jean-Luc. 2011. “Convulsive Geometry.” Mouvement 59 (April–June): 17. Proclus. 1970. A Commentary on the First Book of Euclid’s Elements. Translated by Glenn R. Morrow. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Reusch, Jakob. 1904. Planimetrische Konstruktionen in geometrographischer Ausführung. Leipzig: B. G. Teubner. Schirren, Fernand. 2011. Le Rythme primordial et souverain. Edited by Alexia Psarolis. Brussels: Contredanse. Worringer, Wilhelm. 1918. Form Problems of the Gothic. New York: G. E. Sterchert. First published 1911 as Formprobleme der Gotik (Munich: Piper).

Sonic Forms of Capture Terri Bird Monash University, Melbourne

The many and varied practices of art engage in multiple processes of forming, involving conceptual, material, bodily, temporal, and spatial procedures. These processes of forming, as Gilles Deleuze makes clear in his book on the paint­ ings of Francis Bacon, are focused not on reproducing or even inventing forms but on capturing forces. In this chapter an exploration of capture will empha­ sise the forming practices in Geoff Robinson’s 2013 project Site Overlay/Acoustic Survey (see Robinson 2013).1 Robinson is an Australian artist who creates sitebased artworks that engage sound mappings and sculptural interventions, acti­ vated through performance. His practice investigates the potential of sound to disrupt the habitual relationships of spatiality and temporality through a sonic experience. These experimental processes have the potential to introduce a constitutive difference into their context or milieu, enabling the production of something new. This argument takes up Deleuze’s challenge to break with habitual ways of being in the world and positions art practices as having the potential to produce encounters that are not easily recognised or assimilated into what is already known. While Deleuze had little to say about sculpture in general or specific works,2 an exploration of the influence of Henri Maldiney and Gilbert Simondon on Deleuze’s understanding of art as a capture of forces will highlight the poten­ tial of extending this discussion to contemporary art practices that Deleuze did not address. In particular Maldiney’s emphasis on rhythm and sensation and Simondon’s articulation of individuation enable a focus to be brought to sculp­ tural practices. These practices connect art’s material operations to matter’s potential force and dynamics in forming processes that engage spatio-tempo­ ral operations. In his seminars on Immanuel Kant, Deleuze (2019) remarks, “an artist operates through blocks of space-time. An artist is above all a rhythmi­ cist.” Although the focus of Deleuze’s exploration of rhythm is through music and painting, he also observes that the way any group of people inhabit space and time has a specific rhythm, leading him to refer to rhythm as a block of space-time. These suggestive comments will be productive to the exploration of the territorialising rhythms generated by Robinson’s artwork through the displacement of sound events. 1 Robinson creates process-determined works that involve sound mapping and sculptural interventions. His practice investigates the transformation of sonic experiences into forms that chart the effects of duration through their displacement. Robinson studied media arts at RMIT University, Melbourne, completing a Master of Arts (Media Arts) in 2003. In 2018 he completed a creative practice PhD at Monash University, Melbourne. For further information go to https://www.geoffrobinsonprojects.com/. 2 The most interesting references to sculpture are to be found in the discussion of the vibrating sensa­ tions of stone and metal in What Is Philosophy? I explore this and other references to sculpture more fully in “Forming” (Bird 2017, 52). 163

Terri Bird

Forming procedures Site Overlay/Acoustic Survey comprised a series of events using recorded and live sound, performance, and installation to explore the potential of sonic rela­ tionships between three sites. The succession of events moved through built and botanical environments, with varying degrees and qualities of interiority. Robinson developed the work following an extensive period of research observ­ ing the differing material qualities and acoustic properties of each location: an inner-city educational building, an enclosed outdoor museum space, and an island in a botanical garden. The events took place over three consecutive days and the overlay of sounds recorded at one site to another was indicated by the placement of coloured poles. These poles marked the heterogeneous alli­ ances between the positioning of the field recordings made in one site and the location of their replaying in another. The resituated sonic residues were aug­ mented with the improvised sounds and movements of performers and audi­ ence in each iteration. For the duration of each event the accumulated sounds, movements, mapping, and remapping had the effect of re-forming each site through improvised processes of individuation.

Figure 12.1.

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Figure 12.1. Geoff Robinson, Site Overlay/Acoustic Survey, 2013, exhibition flyer. Design: Michael Bojkowski.

Sonic Forms of Capture

Figure 12.2.

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Figure 12.2. Geoff Robinson, Site Overlay/Acoustic Survey: Site Overlay, Design Hub, 2013, exhibition flyer. Design: Michael Bojkowski.

Terri Bird The discussion of Site Overlay/Acoustic Survey in this chapter will be limited to the initial performance that took place in the evening on the rooftop of RMIT’s Design Hub, which occupies one of the most prominent corners in the Melbourne central business district. The building has an outer skin of circular sand-blasted glass discs, held in place by metal hoops. It was aptly described as a “Glomesh Box” by the jury who awarded it Australia’s National Architecture Award for Public Architecture in 2013 (see Jury Citation 2013). The translu­ cent facade houses an uncompromising interior of largely metal mesh-lined walls, with a mix of concrete and timber surfaces. Pia Ednie-Brown (2015, 24) a creative practitioner and academic who works in the building, observes, that “repetitively patterned wall surfaces produce distracting visual effects (that amplify the longer you stay with them),” and “the acoustics frequently render group communication difficult.” While the building has garnered a litany of complaints regarding its inconveniences, she adds it is felt both positively as inspiring and enhancing and negatively as frustrating and diminishing. This interior presents a challenge to its inhabitants, as Ednie-Brown (ibid., 23) notes, “it makes and stakes a position with such clarity that it renders obvious the fact that buildings don’t just sit there, inertly. They act. Their actions are what you might call ‘virtual movements.’” It is these movements that are redirected in Robinson’s work through the transposition of selected sonic points. The effect of the transposed overlay is to activate the virtual movements of the building differently, by destabilising the functional and institutional codes habitually operating in the site. The event in RMIT’s Design Hub featured field recordings made at the final site in the series of Site Overlay/Acoustic Survey Long Island, in the Royal Botanical Gardens Melbourne. These recordings featured the calls of bell miner birds, a native honeyeater that lives in large colonies and delineates the perimeter of its territory by producing, what biologist Tim Low (2015) refers to as a “solid wall of sound.” Bell miner bird recordings also emphasise the impor­ tance of recording technology as a means of detachment. Robinson (2018, 33) argues that field recordings made using a directional microphone are a form of acousmatic sound. This is a term coined by Pierre Schaeffer, regarded by many as the “godfather of sampling” (Patrick 2016), to refer to sounds dissociated from their cause. Schaeffer (2006, 78) remarks that “the dissociation of seeing and hearing . . . encourages another way of listening: we listen to the sonorous forms.” The expressive potential of these sonorous forms is foregrounded as Robinson seeks out singular and dynamic sound events, which contrast with the ambient sound of the site. He takes advantage of the capacity of sound to both transform and be transformed, to be captured, replayed, and re-formed elsewhere. Deleuze (2007, 292–93) foregrounds this potential of sound and noise when he observes, their capacity to “detach from the characters, places and names to which they are first attached to make independent ‘motifs’ that constantly change over time, growing or shrinking, cutting or adding, vary­ ing their speeds and slowness.” Robinson mobilises the elasticity of his sonic fragments, teasing apart the connections between sound event and the milieu where it was captured, such that they enter into a relation that did not previ­ 166

Sonic Forms of Capture ously exist. This is the generative potential of art: to elicit something in the effect that was not already apparent in the cause. In his discussion of Bacon’s paintings, Deleuze (2003, 56) notes that the forces that are captured are not themselves perceptible, as he argues, “if force is the condition of sensation, it is nonetheless not the force that is sensed, since the sensation ‘gives’ something completely different from the forces that condition it.” In formulating this understanding, he draws on the writ­ ings of Paul Klee (1961, 76), who asserts “art does not reproduce the visible but makes visible.” To this Deleuze (2003, 57) adds, “music must render nonsono­ rous forces sonorous, and painting must render invisible forces visible.” This is a problem to which all the arts respond: how to harness these non-human forces of the cosmos that are themselves indiscernible. Undertaking this task engages artists in practices that Deleuze proposes are singular, yet populated with encounters. These encounters are with a whole terrain of people, move­ ments, ideas, events and entities, through which something passes that belongs to neither one nor the other. Becomings emerge from heterogeneous alliances that transform what each entity becomes, no less than what becomes. They are not a union but a double capture—interdependent and disjunctive. These becomings or nuptials, as Deleuze writes, “are the thing which is the most imperceptible” (Deleuze and Parnet 1987, 3). They are the outcome of encoun­ ters not oriented by outcomes but experimentations that disrupt assemblages from becoming homogeneous by inducing an opening onto non-human becomings.

Mobilising forces In order to render perceptible forces that lie beyond perception, or to cap­ ture in what is given the forces that are not given, Deleuze, writing together with Félix Guattari (1994, 164), argues that artworks assemble compounds or blocks of sensation producing affects and intensities. This focus on sensation draws on Maldiney, from whom Deleuze develops a logic of the senses, which exceeds the individual modes of sensation, visual, auditory, tactile, and so on, in a relation between sensation and rhythm. Maldiney (2001, 378) maintains, “rhythm takes place beyond the physical phenomena that are its fundamen­ tal elements” arguing that “concept and act are one.” This sense of rhythm, as Ronald Bogue (2003, 119) notes, is an unfolding pattern of perpetual transfor­ mation, a dynamic process of forming understood as a spontaneous self-shap­ ing in which form forms itself. However, rather than being explicitly separate from matter, as in a predetermined shape, form for Maldiney is a formative activity, the rhythm of matter. The basic constituents of this rhythm of matter emerge from the generative chaos that discloses the world of sensation, and from contracting systolic and expansive diastolic movements. Deleuze utilises this interplay in his discussion of Bacon’s paintings to account for the elasticity of sensation. This is not to suggest that movement explains sensation; instead, Deleuze (2003, 106) identifies “rhythm as matter and material.” These are indi­ viduations that are not reducible to a combination of form and material; rather, 167

Terri Bird the matter–form couple is replaced with the material–force couple that makes sensible and audible imperceptible forces (Deleuze 2007, 160). Tackling the insufficiency of the matter–form schema is also a task under­ taken by Simondon, whose philosophy of individuation contributes to Deleuze reformulating his understanding of art away from the realm of interpretation to a capture of forces. Anne Sauvagnargues (2013, 39) charts this trajectory through Deleuze’s writing, noting, “it is no longer a question of signifier or signified, nor form or matter, but forces and materials, in accordance with Simondon’s principle of modulation.” In place of what the hylomorphic schema separates, Simondon argues that modulation reformulates the understanding of individuation, such that form and matter enter into a common system, in which each are informed by a continuous transductive exchange. Simondon’s understanding revises notions of substance, form, and matter, as Muriel Combes (2013, 5) points out, such that “form and matter are now connected to an understanding of being as a system in tension, and are seen as operators of a process rather than as the final terms of an operation.” Simondon argues that the modes of existence for both objects and individuals are intertwined in their relationships with a milieu that they, as individuations, both emerge from and transform. Individuations are produced in response to the encounter between a meta­ stable system, consisting of at least two different dimensions or realities, and something that breaks its equilibrium. This is a key aspect of Simondon’s phi­ losophy that Deleuze (2004, 87) foregrounds—disparation or an intensive state of dissymmetry between discrete singularities as opposed to individuated beings. Disparation is not an opposition but a difference that initiates a pro­ cess of becoming as an actualisation of potential energies. Simondon under­ stands the process of individuation as a transductive operation. He insists, “The notion of form must be replaced by that of information, which presupposes the existence of a system in a state of metastable equilibrium that can individuate itself; information, unlike form, is never a unique term, but the signification that springs from a disparation” (Simondon 2009, 12). Simondon borrows the term disparation from the psycho-physiology of perception to describe this indi­ viduating operation, and extends it beyond the visual field to a general process of becoming. The problem that disparate realities pose is resolved not through the integration, resolution, or overcoming of difference but, as Deleuze (2004, 87) writes, “by organizing a new dimension.” This resolution gives rise to the emergence of a provisional individuation, which stabilises the ongoing tension of the situation’s dynamism through the interaction of a matter–energy–infor­ mation exchange. The transductive character of individuations means they are always in rela­ tion to multiple orders of reality. In the context of sound, transduction refers to the material transformations that sound undergoes as it moves through differ­ ent media; as Stefan Helmreich notes, recorded sound is inherently transduc­ tive. Using an antenna as an example, Helmreich writes (2015, 222), it “converts electromagnetic waves into electrical signals and when those are converted

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Sonic Forms of Capture via a loudspeaker into patterns of air pressure, we have a chain of transduc­ tions, material transformations that are also changes in how a signal can be apprehended and interpreted.” This process emphasises the constant modu­ lation of the signal, as energy in an interchange of continuous variability. The multi-phased structure of Site Overlay/Acoustic Survey, with multiple elements across three sites over consecutive days, amplified not only the material and sonic transformations but also their effects on the milieus that received them. Intrinsic to the practice Robinson has developed over the past twenty years is the collaborative engagement with others in the realisation of his projects. These collaborations introduce another layer of multiplicity into the form­ ing procedures of his artworks. His accomplices have included professionally trained practitioners, from various music, performance, or visual-art fields, or volunteers solicited from the communities within which the projects are located. What is important is the information they bring to the event of the work in their response to the invitation and/or accompanying instructions. His collaborators on the occasion of Site Overlay/Acoustic Survey were invited to “sound out” the acoustics of the Design Hub rooftop area and respond to the sounds recorded on Long Island that were playing through eight loudspeakers. These loudspeakers were positioned in relation to the sonic points where the field recordings were made, as marked by coloured poles that diagrammati­ cally mapped the relationship of the spatial overlay. Through this cartographic schema, Robinson charts an operative set of relationships comprising multiple layers of dynamic territorialisations. During the event, Robinson and fellow visual artist Helen Grogan moved throughout the rooftop pavilions utilising the mobility of various objects.3 Grogan draws on choreographic, photographic, and sculptural methodolo­ gies in a practice that works with spatial and temporal experience as material. Both artists deployed tables, chairs, metal rubbish-bin lids, and ceramic cups and saucers to activate metallic thresholds, timber decking and glass surfaces, in order to exploit the materiality of the interior for its sonic potential. They engaged with the architectural character and its functional potential to explore various attunements and discordant resonances. The site was approached as a situation that is inherently performative, such that the audience was incorpo­ rated into the event as they moved throughout the rooftop spaces. The dynamic processes evident in this work attest to both artists’ interest in processes of flux and layering as a means to stretch spatio-temporal configurations. Employing objects found on site, Robinson and Grogan activated them to resist their prescribed function and enact an ever-moving set of improvised tableaux as individuations.



3 A video documenting this event can be seen at https://www.geoffrobinsonprojects.com/Site-OverlayAcoustic-Survey-RMIT-Design-Hub-rooftop-pavilions-29.

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Terri Bird

Figure 12.3.

Figure 12.4.

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Figure 12.3. Geoff Robinson, Site Overlay/Acoustic Survey, 2013, event detail (Geoff Robinson). Photograph: Oscar Raby. Figure 12.4. Geoff Robinson, Site Overlay/Acoustic Survey, 2013, event detail (Rosalind Hall). Photograph: Oscar Raby.

Sonic Forms of Capture These actions were accompanied by the resonant sounds of Rosalind Hall playing a modified saxophone. Hall has developed a practice of exploring how space can be an extension of the body in order to transform a site. In this instance, she explored the acoustics of both the interior and exterior spaces of the rooftop pavilion. From her position on a walkway at the perimeter of the building, Hall played phrases that could be identified as musical sounds. The outside leaked in through this perforated space that opened up to the ambient sounds of its inner-city location and combined with the multiple reverbera­ tions generated by the interior activations. These activations included those by Matthew Davis, another Melbourne-based artist utilising sound technologies in his practice. Davis responded to the sonic landscape with sounds produced by a modular synthesiser using patch cords. He created resonances that echoed the bell miner bird calls from Long Island and a range of other sounds, such as one triggered by tapping a spring in a metal case. These were modulated through the synthesiser and amplified through a loudspeaker in one of the rooftop pavilions. The manipulated, ambient, and recorded sounds created an intensified sonic atmosphere, which charged the event with an unfurling tem­ poral ambience. The cumulative rhythms responded to the intricate spatial and temporal enfolding and unfolding of the disparate energies assembled. The resulting individuations acted through operations of transduction, highlight­ ing that what is transposed is not simply content transferred or assimilated into a new context but an overlaying of discrete singularities.

Transforming territories The interactions of the various elements in Site Overlay/Acoustic Survey utilise information in various forms: the replayed field recordings, the improvised movements and sounds generated by the performers, the reactions of the audience as they moved within the sites, and the overlaid diagram. Bringing together a flow of information as a physical system is a consistent feature of Robinson’s work. Conceiving his work as a system highlights the transfer of energy, material, and information that engages physical, biological, and social entities in dynamic interconnections constituting a provisional resonance. In the case of the Design Hub, the resonances confronted some of the building’s indifference to its inhabitants by amplifying its latent potential, or virtual move­ ments. Disregarding the prescribed function of the spaces and accruements of an educational workplace, the various performers, both human and animal, live and recorded, complicated and complemented the milieu to extract its virtual potential. Exploiting the opportunity that recording technology enables to reformu­ late the relationship between sound and space or more specifically motif and milieu, Robinson’s field recordings foreground the role of sound in territorial­ ising operations. This is a capacity of sound that Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 311–12) refer to in their discussion of the refrain (ritornello). A refrain they indi­ cate has three inseparable components: a fragile centre from which a point of order emerges; the demarcation of a field of influence; and an opening onto 171

Terri Bird forces of the future—a line of flight. Although a refrain is not exclusively sonic, it is a rhythmic regularity or motif that brings order out of chaos to fashion structure in a milieu, territory, or social field depending on the circumstances. They reject a mechanistic understanding of life, which would reduce birdsong for example to simply the defence of territory, to argue for its expressive capac­ ity—to see territory not so much as a place but as a process of territorialising. It is the possibility of deterritorialising components of a milieu that allows them to be reinscribed and take on expressive qualities. The functions of compo­ nents in a territory are not primary; Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 315) argue, “they presuppose a territory-producing expressiveness. In this sense, the terri­ tory, and the functions performed within it, are products of territorialization.” The territorialising activities of Site Overlay/Acoustic Survey harnessed the energy flows inherent in the Design Hub, to generate vibrating sensations, of strong and weak rhythms, that operated on a plane of forces and materials. It created an interactive communication between multiple dimensions to actu­ alise individuations in response to the constitutive difference that the reterri­ torialised field recordings triggered. Materials rubbed up against one another amplifying their specific acoustic qualities. Surfaces vibrated in contact with others to resonate. Various bodies reverberated, infiltrated from outside, shud­ dering and clanging, they reacted and were made to act, as they were insinuated into an intensified temporality. These rhythmic formations territorialised and reterritorialised matter–energy–information exchanges to produce a milieu— an expressive habitation for the duration of the performance. The experimen­ tal processes deployed in this artwork introduced disparities that reconfigured the metastability of the site in the manner of Simondon’s understanding of the dynamic movement of forces and materials, as a process of emergence or becoming. They acted as singularities initiating a constitutive difference that temporarily retunes the system with a sonic intensity in a continuous process of modulation. References Bird, Terri. 2017. “Forming.” In Practising with Deleuze: Design, Dance, Art, Writing, Philosophy, by Suzie Attiwill, Terri Bird, Andrea Eckersley, Antonia Pont, Jon Roffe, and Philipa Rothfield, 49–79. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Bogue, Ronald. 2003. Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Combes, Muriel. 2013. Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual. Translated by Thomas LaMarre. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. First published 1999 as Simondon, individu et collectivité: Pour une philosophie du transindividuel (Paris: Presses universitaires de France).

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Deleuze, Gilles. 2003. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Translated by Daniel W. Smith. London: Continuum. First published 1981 as Francis Bacon: Logique de la Sensation (Paris: Éditions de la Différence). ———. 2004. “On Gilbert Simondon.” In Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974, edited by David Lapoujade, translated by Michael Taomina, 86–89. New York: Semiotext(e). Essay first published 1966 as a book review of Simondon’s L’Individu et sa genèse physico-biologique (Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 156 [1–3]: 115–18). Book first published 2002 as L’île déserte: Textes et entretiens, 1953–1974 (Paris: Minuit).

Sonic Forms of Capture ———. 2007. Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995. Edited by David Lapoujade. Translated by Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina. New York: Semiotext(e). First published 2003 as Deux régimes de fous: Textes et entretiens, 1975–1995 (Paris: Minuit). ———. 2019. “Sur Kant; Cours Vincennes: Cours du 4 April 1978.” Translated by Melissa McMahon. Accessed 15 May 2019. https://www.webdeleuze.com/textes/65. Lecture given on 4 April 1978. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1994. What Is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1991 as Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Minuit). Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. 1987. Dialogues. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1977 as Dialogues (Paris: Flammarion). Ednie-Brown, Pia. 2015. “Critical Passions: Building Architectural Movements toward a Radical Pedagogy (in 10 Steps).” Inflexions 8: Radical Pedagogies (April): 20–48. Accessed 15 May 2019. http:// inflexions.org/radicalpedagogy/main. html#Ednie-Brown. Helmreich, Stefan. 2015. “Transduction.” In Keywords in Sound, edited by David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny, 222–31. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Jury Citation. 2013. “2013 National Architecture Awards: Public Architecture; RMIT Design Hub by Sean Godsell Architects in Association with Peddle Thorp.” Architecture Australia 102 (6): 47. Accessed 15 May 2019. http:// architectureau.com/articles/2013national-architecture-awards-public-1/. Klee, Paul. 1961. Notebooks, Volume 1: The Thinking Eye. Edited by Jürg Spiller. Translated by Ralph Manheim. London: Lund Humphries. First published 1956 as Das bildnerische Denken (Basel: Schwabe).

Low, Tim. 2015. “Where Birdsong Began.” Catalyst, ABC Television, 10 March 2015. Accessed 15 May 2019. http://www.abc. net.au/catalyst/stories/4194557.htm. Maldiney, Henri. 2001. “Gaze, Speech, Space.” In French Philosophy Since 1945: Problems, Concepts, Interventions, edited by Etienne Balibar and John Rajchman with Anne Boyman, translated by Arthur Goldhammer and others, 377–81. New York: New Press. Chapter first published 1973 in Regard, parole, espace: Essais (Lausanne: L’Âge d’homme). Patrick, Jonathan. 2016. “A Guide to Pierre Schaeffer, the Godfather of Sampling.” Fact Magazine, 23 February. Accessed 15 May 2019. http://www.factmag. com/2016/02/23/pierre-schaeffer-guide/. Robinson, Geoff. 2013. “Site Overlay/ Acoustic Survey—RMIT Design Hub (Rooftop Pavilions).” Accessed 15 May 2019. https://www.geoffrobinsonprojects. com/Site-Overlay-Acoustic-Survey-RMITDesign-Hub-rooftop-pavilions-29. ———. 2018. “Durational Situation: Rethinking Site through the Sound Event.” PhD thesis, Monash University. Accessed 15 May 2019. https://figshare. com/articles/Durational_Situation_ Rethinking_Site_through_the_Sound_ Event/7176122. Sauvagnargues, Anne. 2013. Deleuze and Art. Translated by Samantha Bankston. London: Bloomsbury. First published 2005 as Deleuze et l’art (Paris: Presses universitaires de France). Schaeffer, Pierre. 2006. “Acousmatics.” In Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, edited by Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner, 76–81. New York: Continuum. Chapter excerpted from Pierre Schaeffer, Traité des objets musicaux: Essai interdisciplines (Paris: Seuil, 1966; 2nd ed., 1977). Simondon, Gilbert. 2009. “The Position of the Problem of Ontogenesis.” Translated by Gregory Flanders. Parrhesia 7: 4–16. Accessed 15 May 2019. http://www.parrhesiajournal.org/ parrhesia07/parrhesia07_simondon1. pdf. First published 1964 in L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique (Paris: Presses universitaires de France).

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Part 2

A Little Treatise on Becomology

The Wasp and the Orchid On Multiplicities and Becomology Anne Sauvagnargues Paris West University Nanterre La Défense, France

This paper explores a possible relationship between Deleuze’s philosophy of multiplicity and the idea of aberrant nuptials.4 We can take as a starting point two encounters that were political: the first, between Deleuze and Guattari in 1969; the second, between Deleuze and various liberation movements in Paris in the 1970s, in particular, the French homosexual liberation movement FHAR (Front homosexuel d’action révolutionnaire), which was concerned only with male homosexuality and was thus very much a phallocratic movement—never­ theless, it was a movement to liberate homosexuality. Thus, there is, I believe, a philosophically important conceptual link between the political struggle for the rights of sexual minorities and philosophical inquiries that aim to trans­ form the status of interpretation and experimentation. My key idea here is that the question of art is not only a question of culture and the intellectual relationship between humans and artworks but also a metaphysical question that thinks about the question of production and reproduction. Therefore, it also thinks about the queer epistemological argument that makes it possible to understand sexuality outside the model of same and same, that understands this quality not as the reproduction of the same but as the production—the queer production—of something different. This has, I believe, been crucial for Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of art as fragmentary, as a multiplicity. Thus, there is a link between sexuality, queer theory, interpretation, and hatred of interpretation, and Deleuze and Guattari’s move from interpretation in their early years to experimentation. What I will explore here is this relation­ ship between the refusal of interpretation and its relation to a new model of production that is no longer a model of heteronormativity, which I think is the particular kind of queer transitivity in the philosophical theory of both Deleuze and Guattari. Let us consider this further through the relationship between Deleuze and Proust. Proust, of course, was not only a very important writer but also a princi­ pal figure for Deleuze for having completed the incredible project of writing a four-thousand-page novel about homosexuality. Thus, Proust is not just a very important figure for modern literation: he is the writer who tried to sculpt a monument to the physical and ethological exploration of homosexuality in his

4 This chapter is a transcript of Anne Sauvagnargues’s keynote lecture at the Second International DARE conference. The transcript was edited for publication by Edward Crooks.

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Anne Sauvagnargues book In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu). In the first edition of his 1964 book on Proust, published in English as Proust and Signs (Deleuze 2000), Deleuze depicts Proust’s work as being very classical. In this edition, Deleuze claims In Search of Lost Time “is presented as the exploration of different worlds of signs” (2000, 4). There is a kind of gradation, a kind of beautiful staircase with four different levels; one has to go through the first world in order to come to the second, and then to the third and the fourth. The first level, the first world, is “worldliness” (5), the world of social signs, the world of bêtise, the world of custom, snobbism, and social relationships. The second world is the world of love and jealousy, the world of affect and social relationships (7). The third world is the world of “sensuous impressions or qualities” (11): sensations and their relations to nature. And the fourth world, in this very early version, is the world of art (14). Deleuze describes a Platonist way that climbs up the mountain of art to reach the essence. Nevertheless, Deleuze’s understanding of In Search of Lost Time in the first edition of Proust and Signs was completely transformed in the second edition by the addition of a new part (first published in 1970), and again with the addition of a further new text written in 1973.5 In a sense, Deleuze rewrote his book three times, and each time it was completely rethought. It is this trans­ action, this transformation, that I am interested in. The first version with the four worlds leads us to the second version, where Deleuze (2000, 128) says there is no interpretation that is not transversal. It is thus the apparition of transversality, the concept of transversality, that appears literally in Deleuze’s text as a fragment. That one can reach transversality is referred to by Guattari in the 1970s, in the same period Deleuze wrote his sec­ ond version of Proust and Signs. Between the first edition of Proust and Signs in 1964 and the second in 1972, there is a significant move. In 1964, at a similar time to when he wrote his book on Nietzsche (see Deleuze 1983), he wrote, “To think is always to interpret” (Deleuze 2000, 97). But then in the 1970s he wrote, “Interpretation has no other unity than a transversal one” (Deleuze 2000, 128)—there is no other way to understand interpretation than transversality. Then, if one reads the book on Kafka that Deleuze and Guattari wrote in 1975, one will read, very briefly but profoundly expressed, that there is no other purpose in transversality than to avoid interpretation (Deleuze and Guattari 1986, 3; see also Sauvagnargues 2013, 78). As transversality is a way to avoid interpretation, we should ask, first, why it is so important to avoid interpretation and, second, what we avoid when we move from interpretation to experimentation. My idea is that this movement from interpretation to experimentation leads to a new theory of fragmentation. We now not only have a new theory of identity and unity, and a new under­ standing of sexuality that is no longer understood through the scheme of heteronormativity, we also have the very important moment in the second edi­

5 All these texts are included in the English translation (Deleuze 2000).

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The Wasp and the Orchid tion of Proust and Signs where Deleuze (2000, 174–75) tries to understand the relationship between Proust and sexuality. Deleuze refers to a fragment from the fourth volume of Proust’s novel, in which the narrator, Marcel, who is Proust as a young man, spies on two men, the tailor Jupien and Baron de Charlus, and by spying on them exhibits voyeurism. Proust explains this not only by referring to human sexuality but also by using the model of the bumblebee (or wasp) and the orchid (Proust 1992, 8–9, 32–33). We can consider that this brutal infraction or introduction of the biological model of the wasp and the orchid is in fact a case of symbiosis. And this sym­ biosis is a new theory of identity and of sexuality that allows us to understand not only that sexuality is no longer to be understood through the Aristotelian relationship between gender and individual but also that transversal relation­ ships are possible. Next, we have to come to a better understanding of transversality, which is quite easy if we refer to Guattari’s 1964 essay “Transversality” (Guattari 2015) and notice that the concept of transversality that Guattari coined in the 1960s is also about changing in theory and in practice. Guattari developed the con­ cept for psychotherapeutic purposes, to improve the relationship between patients and medical staff at the La Borde institution. Thus, transversality is first of all a political concept dealing with hierarchy and the social possibil­ ity of exploiting certain relationships between mental illness and institutions. Furthermore, for Guattari transversality is not only the possibility of under­ standing relationships in a vertical or horizontal hierarchy but also the capac­ ity to join any dot with any other dot. The concept of transversality and the possibility of replaying relationships leads to a social and political philosophy that allows us to distinguish between two kinds of groups, two kinds of organ­ isations. The first organisation is centred and is understood as the subjected group, a group under the power of the centre. The other type of group, which is the transversal group for Guattari, he called the groupe sujet or subject group; this group is capable of having a form of self-organisation that is not linked to the centralised power but is more or less anarchic (Guattari 2015, 107). Although for Guattari the relationship between transversality and politics is completely practical, for Deleuze transversality is not a political concept. Obviously Deleuze’s practice was not directly political at this time, and nei­ ther was he a practising psychoanalyst. Lacking this practical input, the idea of transversality for Deleuze is more or less the philosophical condition that allows the move from a centralised conception of literature to a new concep­ tion of literature that is no longer centralised. This is what I call the theory of fragmentation. This fragmentation is both the relationship between the wasp and the orchid that Proust took from reality in order to make his own novel implode with this new model of homosexuality and a model for production without reproduction. In other words, we have to consider the relationship between art and life. The way we understand sexuality is equally important for the theory of litera­ ture because both reproduction and production lead to the same philosophi­ cal problem: How can we deal with something new without being tempted to 179

Anne Sauvagnargues understand this new thing as being in the same realm or on the same canvasses as before? How can we understand real novelty? Here, the theory of sexuality that Deleuze coined after Proust is particularly important. In Deleuze’s theory of sexuality from the second edition of Proust and Signs, sexuality is not only het­ erosexuality. The heteronormative relationship between masculine and femi­ nine that would earlier have been considered normal reality is only a statistical level, it does not have effectivity or reality, it is only the gendered level of social domination; sexuality is not on the same level as full individualities (Deleuze 2000, 174–75). In this move from macro-sexuality to micro-sexuality, sexuality does not involve full social personas. You never make love with another person as a whole, Proust and Deleuze say: you are always linked by micro fragmenta­ tions of personalities that not only are at the level of whole personalities but also have some kind of micro fragmentation inside oneself. The level of sexual­ ity is therefore no longer that of plain subjectivities. The second level of sexual­ ity would be where homosexuality is possible between the two sexes. However, this second level of sexuality is dualism and this dualism is not really effective. We thus have to move from the first level of heterosexuality to the second level of homosexuality, where the difference between the sexes is taken to another level, which Deleuze (2000, 177), following Proust, called the third level. This third level is no longer under the power of social representations; in this level, it is no longer possible to distinguish firmly between masculine and feminine because feminine and masculine are social roles. In this level of real but fragmentary sexuality, Deleuze and Proust try to render a new theory of understanding ideas and new ways of affectology in literation. This explains why the novel for Proust or philosophy for Deleuze is no longer under the sign of unity but has to be understood as a fragment that is itself a fragment, a little part. One has two metaphysical possibilities if one consid­ ers fragments: one can say that the fragment has been torn apart and that the fragment is appealing to a new or old unity and identity. This would be a kind of Platonisation of fragment theory leading one to believe that the fragment is only an appeal to a former or bigger unity. In this transcendent theory of fragmentation, the fragment tries to lead one towards a new identity or unity. With Maurice Blanchot and Nietzsche, we have a completely different under­ standing of fragments. A fragment is no longer a piece that is alone and mis­ erable because of its solitude. Fragments are pieces happy to be alone because they don’t otherwise fit. They are pieces that don’t fit into an old system, or that oblige one to change a system according to the way in which they don’t fit the old world. Fragmentation is now like the mutation of DNA in biol­ ogy. Fragmentation leads us to a theory of novelty where we do not need to understand each piece or fragment as part of an ancient whole, but instead can understand it as a new way of proposing a theory that is not a theory of the unity of the sexes—the theory of heterogenesis. There is therefore a very important relationship between biology, sexuality, and art theory. This relationship not only implies and leads to the theory of desire, which I did not even explain here, but also leads us to a theory of production that on the same level is epistemo­ logical. Deleuze explained this theory of the model as being epistemological as 180

The Wasp and the Orchid well as political. We are moving from one kind of art theory to another. Art theory is no longer just a question of fine feelings and the expressivity of curators. It now has a far more crucial task: it has to change the way we understand production. It must change it both in a highly scientific way, to try to express our ideas, and prac­ tically, because art is a way for us to change our ethology and the way that we understand our relationships with one another. Here is a very practical way to change the theory of art. If art has no relation­ ship to the theory of systems and is not just a theory of representation, then it is taken as something real and has real effects. It is no longer something that needs to be interpreted because it tells nice stories that we love or because we bourgeois need something at the end of the day to soothe our tiredness. Art is no longer only something for the imagination and our public personalities. Deleuze and Guattari suggest a much more interesting way to understand art: as something that transforms the way we understand our subjectivities and our political relationships. While I think there is a queer theory in Deleuze, Deleuze was not a feminist, and nor was Guattari. We have to continue the struggle and we have to continue it on a new basis. This basis implies the rela­ tionship between fragmentation both in politics and philosophy and in poetry and art. References Deleuze, Gilles. 1983. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Guattari, Félix. 2015. “Transversality.” Translated by Hugh Tomlinson. London: Translated by Rosemary Sheed. In Athlone Press. First published 1962 as Psychoanalysis and Transversality: Texts Nietzsche et la philosophie (Paris: Presses and Interviews 1955–1971, translated by universitaires de France). Ames Hodges, 102–20. South Pasadena, ———. 2000. Proust and Signs: The CA: Semiotext(e). Essay first published Complete Text. Translated by Richard 1964 as “La transversalité” (Revue de Howard. Minneapolis: University of psychothérapie institutionelle 1). Book Minnesota Press. First published 1964 first published 1972 as Psychanalyse et as Marcel Proust et les signes (Paris: Presses transversalité: Essais d’analyse institutionnelle universitaires de France); 2nd edition (Paris: F. Maspero). published 1970 as Proust et les signes, Proust, Marcel. 1992. In Search of Lost Time; including a new text first published in Volume 4: Sodom and Gomorrah. Translated this edition (Paris: Presses universitaires by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence de France); 3rd edition published 1976 Kilmartin, revised by D. J. Enright. as Proust et les signes, including a new text London: Chatto and Windus. First first published in 1973 (Paris: Presses published 1920–21 as Sodome et Gomorrhe universitaires de France). (Paris: Gallimard). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Sauvagnargues, Anne. 2013. Deleuze and 1986. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Art. Translated by Samantha Bankston. Translated by Dana Polan. Minneapolis: London: Bloomsbury. First published University of Minnesota Press. First 2005 as Deleuze et l’art (Paris: Presses published 1975 as Kafka: Pour une literature universitaires de France). mineure (Paris: Minuit).

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Beyond the Death-Drive, beyond the Life-Drive Being-toward-Birthing with Being-toward-Birth; Copoiesis and the Matrixial Eros— Metafeminist Notes Bracha Ettinger Bracha L. L. Ettinger

Independent psychoanalyst Independent visual visual artist, artist, psychoanalyst European Graduate Global Center Centerfor forAdvanced AdvancedStudies, Studies,Dublin, Dublin,Ireland Ireland European GraduateSchool, School,Saas-Fee, Saas-Fee, Switzerland; Switzerland; Global

1 In the following metafeminist notes I continue to labour toward humanising the human subject by way of feminine matrixiality and redefining the concept of the subject.1 Being-toward-Birthing with Being-toward-Birth implies rethinking the concepts of death-instinct and death-drive as well as those of life-instinct and lifedrive, eros and liBido (where with instinct unBound energies are intended, while with drive Bound energies are intended). To talk about sublimation relating to the female body and elaborate a symbolic related to the real and the subreal of her corporeality including her morphology, her internal space, her sexual specificities, her gestation and maternal potentialities—whether materialised or not—brings me again and again to view gravidity as a model for thinking differences-in-alliance and exposing the resonance of the “extimated” inside of the womb space and the potential, virtual and actual co-emergence, co-fading, borderspacing, and borderlinking occurring on the psychic level during gestation and during its loss. Psychic “carriance” in carrying and miscarriage, in abortion and in birthing, enters human consciousness via the feminine by way of female pre-maternality. She “withnessed.” She is the witness. With the feminine-matrixial symbolic sphere that includes the sublimation of her real and subreality, we can move from subject qua being-toward-death (Heidegger 2010, 241–56) only, to subject qua being-toward-birth with being-toward-birthing as well. Is there 1

Some passages in this text are revised from “Carriance, Copoiesis and the Subreal” (Ettinger 2015), other passages are revised versions from “Metafeminist Notes, Psychic Birthing and Disbirthing. Being-toward-Birthing—A Language of Her Own” (Ettinger 2019).

still time to bridge the gap between thousands of years of civilisation that excluded the specificities of female-femininity? Is there still time to change the course of things, this racing toward either regressive symbiosis of any cell with any cell or the disintegration of the human organism (and other animals) in favour of only basic living substances? Is there time to slow down the racing toward entropy and aspire to a humane horizon?

2 Through feminine-matrixiality, human consciousness is imprinted with traces from a special kind of Eros, different from the one related to the classical life-drive. Here, Beauty, even while it relates to mourning and loss, leans on the suBlimation of a humanised depth-space of coexistence and its loss. Here the passageways to the other and processes of co-emergence and co-fading of I with non-I are related to longing and languishing, pain and joy, love and loss, eventuated in unconscious and non-conscious processes of Birthing, disBirthing (miscarriage), unBirthing (abortion), a-Birthing (childlessness, childfreeness), and Birth. The human individual subjectivisation testifies to a matrixial Eros that is different from the “classical” life-drive and represents a different kind of libido. Requiem and caRRiance are not in contradiction when they co-arise in one painful paradoxical cathexis (psychic investment) in compassion. Human consciousness is imprinted by traces arising from—and left over by—the matrixial Eros that is dynamised By com-passion.

3 Besides beauty as a screen that separates us from transgressing the frontiers that encircle death and separate us from it, beside this beauty that engages the suBlimation of the death-drive—according to Lacan (and also, in a different way, according to Deleuze)—there is another kind of beauty: beauty as the carrier of imprints of matrixial Eros where an aesthetic drive toward birth in beauty as a vehicle and vesicle of compassion arises through a time-slowing interweaving of aBstraction with the memory of oBlivion and with the traces of a wound.

4 Being-toward-birthing in resonance with being toward-birth does not correspond to the life-drive as we know it in freud, lacan, and deleuze and guattari—I claim in different ways that in the thought of each of these authors the life-drive is in fact some kind of deathdrive, but in disguise, in relation to the human-individuated organism. In Freud we can discover that the vital substance energised by the life-drive is based on the instinct to immortality of germ cells, unicells, protozoa (single-celled eukaryotes), and amoeBae, on animalculae and infusoria, and not on the

possible, imaginal, or actual life of a human-individuated organism, a singular human being. The life-drive in Jacques Lacan is patterned too, following Freud, upon germ cells, unicellular living substances, amoebae, and lamellae. In a brief passage in which I move from metafeminism to feminism, I must immediately add and emphasise the following: The “pro-life” anti-abortion idea, which denies female subjects their rights over their procreative body, emerged under the patriarchal regime of such a phallic kind of life-drive that in fact subserves the death-drive and is based on a human subject’s definitions that have foreclosed the feminine and archaic maternality. the “pro-life” anti-aBortion idea makes no ethical sense for many reasons. one of them is the denial of the female suBject’s right to Bodily autonomy. female Bodies matter. Not only does it have no ethical ground but, in my view, it is going against ethics. I will return a few times to this subject. It is crucial to mark the difference between, on the one hand, the early and mid terms of pregnancy, when the embryo is a living substance, a biological entity yet of the kind that would not be viable as an organism outside the body of this or that particular gravida-as-subject, and, on the other hand, the very late period of intra-uterine life when the foetus would be viable in principle also outside the maternal body. Regarding the first terms of gestation, we can’t relate to the embryo as a human subject; and the phallic law can’t regulate or control its fate since its language and concepts misregard gestation. Only the gravida feel-knows the sorrow of the embryo’s willed or unwilled loss; only the gravida’s transconnection to it matters. And society must support her in her choices and her painful decision that trembles between her own psyche and her spirit. The society that closes its ears to her desires and sorrows and denies the non-phallic stratum in the subject is barbaric. The subreal links at the early stages of pregnancy are transjective and not transuBjective or in inter-suBjective relationality. Only in the last stage of pregnancy, when the embryonic living substance becomes a viable organism that can survive outside the maternal body, can we talk of the gravida’s non-I in terms of a pre-subject. The retroactive sense of imprints of be-

ing cared-for and carried, the sense of becoming-with-in and through an-other, and the feel-knowledge of being imprinted by another, by a being-toward-birthing the subject has some grasp of, this uncanny sense of carriance—and we can talk of a matrixial womB-anxiety and carriance uncanny that the gravida must endure, and of which the subject has a sense, and of which only the mother can testify for the subject as its witness—relates to the very late pre-birth moments. This idea does not only support women’s rights and autonomy over their own bodies. To begin with, what is at stake here are the re-definition of the human life-drive and the redefinitions of subjectivity and of the human subject. In another short feminist rather than metafeminist note, I also wish to emphasise that the matrixial model doesn’t promote natalism and is relevant not to mothers only but indicates a substratum in the subject of any sex and gender; matrixial affect, sensing, effects, and awareness arise throughout life both during relationships and in solitude. It is the task of individuation not only to separate and reject but also to join-in-differences while becoming aware of some kind of transmission trans-sensed and affectively known beyond the threshold of cognition. This threshold takes place for the one-yet-several subjectivity (one’s own stratum of subjectivisation) via the attunement and correspondence to singular kernel-to-kernel Borderlinking to the human and the non-human, to another subject and another object and substance, to the evolving and the lost, to strangeness with-in and with-out. To ask oneself how one can channel the awareness of such borderlinking into pathways of desire, into compassion, into lamentation, or into all three is an ethical task. Trembling in a depth-space, the kernels of I and non-I interweave that space. I and non-I’s kernel-to-kernel entanglement is the basis for affective alliances in copoiesis and for knowledge in and of the other which is neither projection not appropriation but inspiration. Copoiesis informs autopoiesis in the individual subject: transubjectivity doesn’t mean relationality. The feminine-matrixial time-space is not the relational time-space even if it reappears, informs and transforms inter-subjectivity and social relations. Here, the duration of carriance is duration for inscription and diffraction of traces of encountering-eventing diffracted, transcripted, cross-inscripted, and co-scripted. The endurance, spacing, and duration of and in matrixial time-space in compassion and awe, alongside anxiety, are thus revealed to us as sources of another kind of uncanny: the matrixial uncanny. In this chapter, I offer a critique not only of some basic philosophical and psychoanalytical concepts (being-toward-death, life-drive, death-drive) but also of some current ideas concerning the overflowing of plasticity, the celebration of indifferent

symbiosis, and the model of a self-centred autopoiesis. The vision of non-affective symbiosis and endless plasticity leans indirectly on the (Freudian) death-drive’s aspirations to return to the phase of the early animaculae and the inanimate—for which no human vision and no human value, no art, no culture, and no sexual differences matter.

5 Autopoiesis relates to the self-maintaining chemistry at the cellular level (Maturana and Varela 1980) and revolves, as a metaphor, around a self for whom the non-I is an object of its interests (Ettinger 2005a, see also Ettinger 2015). Symbiosis can occur between any living basic substances. The ethics of copoiesis is not the ethics of symbiosis. copoiesis, unlike autopoiesis and symBiosis, means an affective of

humanising

differences,

alliance

differencia-

tion-in-jointness, and differin co-emergence that calls for sensuosity and sensibility, affective arousal and emotional cathexis, and human care: communicaring. entiation

6 To propose a humanised kind of life-drive we are passing through the feminine-matrixial sphere informed by corporeal female sexual specificities and informing the feminine of sexuality and of the psyche of all kinds of gender.

The humanised corporeal and psychic cohabitation-in-gestation occurs in and via the female womb, which is not a cocoon or a chrysalis to be left behind in the process of the metamorphosis from caterpillar to butterfly. I have chosen the term metramorphosis (Etting-

er 1992) to articulate processes of differenc/tiation-in-wit(h) ness of i with non-i, to signify a dimension in which psychic processes of transmission occur, processes in the course of which all participant partners, subjects, or pre-subjects at the level of partial-subjects are imprinted, “inscrypted” (imprinted without memory), and “transcrypted” reciprocally, but not in the same way or in symmetry—at depth. It is crucial to have a language suBlimated from her sexual specificities: a language of her own to inform all the genders. Through language one can individuate its psyche according to a symbolic field with imaginary approximations to virtual, potential, and actual processes that beyond corporeality concern the psychic effects of co-emergence, the apperception of an immanent and transcendent depth-space, the awareness to intimate alliances between I and non-I(s) in proximity and at a distance—processes and awareness that the phallic-symbolic field can hardly discern and should not be allowed to control.

7 Each and every individual actually born is informed by the desire of a singular human female individual to which we are affectively and otherwise, beyond the senses, transconnected, within whom we traversed the processes of becoming in the passage from non-human life into human life and Birth. This originary archaic metramorphosis affords us the aptitude, throughout our lives, to create alliances with the other in its difference and recognise durational instants of transjectivity and transubjectivity: co-emergence and co-fading with or from the inanimate intimate (subject or partial-subject as I with object or partial-object as non-I), the animate intimate (subject or partial-subject as I with object or partial-object or pre-subject as non-I

or other forms of life as non-I), and the human intimate, known or anonymous (subject or partial-subject as I with subject or partial-subject as non-I). The originary archaic metramorphoses endow us with an awareness of the option of recognising without rejecting the other throughout life. Such awareness is not regressive and not psychotic. The archaic metramorphosis leads us to participate in the singular jointness-in-different/ciating that occurs at each com-passionate encounter-eventing and to navigate our way through the net of imaginary and symbolic intimate co-inhaBit(u)ation and re-attunement of distance-in-proximity in an alliance that can trigger or inspire creative birth-with-birthing that is also at risk of betrayal and failing. failures to sustain our own Being-toward-Birthing, failures to arrive at a psychic reBirth, and failures to endure mental gestation are meaningful and mournful in the matrixial sphere.

8 With notions like autopoiesis and symbiosis we remain in the domain of the classical life-drive and death-drive, missing a major unconscious human field and the significance of the humanising feminine-maternal Eros and its unique qualities. A human female subject, the gravida, relates first to a cellular embryonic living substance, which cannot and must not be considered a human subject, which slowly turns—and sometimes abruptly does not turn—into a human pre-subject and, at the very last stage of gravidity, into a singular being-toward-birth. As long as the embryo is still a biological entity that would not and cannot be viable outside the gestating body, its human pre-subjectivity cannot be assumed. Gravidity is humanising thanks to the corporeal and psychic carriance of the gravida, the immemorial one who becomes the

subject-to-be’s archaic m/Other, that provides the primary singular affective, phantasmatic, and traumatic transconnectivity. The level at which the subject (the archaic m/Other) and her partial-subjectivities are linked to objects and partial-objects and to other forms of non-human living substances I have termed “transjectivity.” When traces of reality and suBreality of shareaBility and resonance are imprinted at the level of subject and partial-subjectivities matrixially allied to other subjects and partial-subjectivities, we are at the level of trans-sub-jectivity.

9 with the term copoiesis i have related Both to transjective trans-sensing and cathexis in oBjects, materials, and suBstances and to transuBjective affected encounter-events in which the subject, like the gravida in self-fragilisation, grasps the vulnerability of its non-I(s) when the other is imprinted by the subject and imprints it. Both transjects and transubjects can be metramorphosed in the shareable space. In each transjective affected conjunction, sensitive response-ability and withnessing are potentially creative, leading to an awareness that precedes witnessing. In each transubjective–affective conjunction, sensitive response-ability and wit(h)nessing are a potential for creativity, awareness, and, later, witnessing-with-responsibility. An intimate I with non-I

encounter-event is com-passionate in joy and in suffering, entering the subject in awe and in wonder and in lamentation, during an active passivity that indicates the labour of aesthetic proto-ethical Eros. Such Eros is activated in the humanised life-span, in the human organism’s time-space. Awareness of this active passivity stirs consciousness whose effects can be transmitted. It indexes a drive that circumvents the death-drive as the Freudian principle of individual human life. It indexes a drive that functions beyond the life-drive patterned upon the cellular immortality of germ cells that ignores the value of the individuated life while it is also related to the ego via the libido. The matrixial Eros marks a different kind of life-drive then, for which the language of germ cells and the idea of the principle of life’s longing for its inanimate and even inorganic origin is unfit, a different kind of life-drive that relates to the transgenerational as well as the horizontal transmissibility of traces of memory and oblivion to what was affected in/by the individual between birth and death. art—its creation and its effects and influence—is related to the matrixial eros Beyond the life-drive, Beyond the death-drive, and Beyond the phallic cognition.

10 art-working is different from creativity. art-working is never aBout aesthetics alone. art-working is swerving on the edges of creativity and aesthetics, at the crossroads Between aesthetics and ethics, at the level of proto-ethics. As a painter I experience gravidity and wit(h)nessing with-in my materials. I am invested in carriance (not a simple containing like an archive) and experience painful artistic miscarriances and abortions. Joy, devastation, and lamentation deepen the depth-space of my subject-matter that hovers between oblivions. I see the artist whose work resonates with my eye’s soul as a gravida in gestation (whether the artist is female, male, transgender, intersex, or queer). Each artwork, each painting that interests me, is a resonant womb-space.

11 If metramorphic processes appear in any encounter-event emotionally invested over time in some degrees of self-fragilisation, do we recognise them? Do we respect them? the aesthetic proto-ethic approach in art—art that can Be and mostly is produced in solitude, since metramorphosis is not relationality and transjectivity is not inter-suBjectivity—is a call to not reject the non-i, a call to recognise a space in which it is impossiBle not to share even when we are alone. As you are different/ciated-in-jointness with another human being on a relational field, and also with non-human beings, entities, and objects, freedom is the instant of trust when matrixiality informs and transforms each subject. to futurise upon trust with-in a matrixial differences-in-alliance—is this not the actualisation of a virtual Birthing-with-Birth? is it not the dwelling in and reproducing of a promise of humaneness? in such futurisation, different routes from the virtual

(here I mean virtuality

not in the media sense but in Deleuze’s sense, from the virtual “past”) reopen in the now, without ignoring the pain that allows a healing transformation of its traces—traces of a wound. We can now return anew, in our present historical time, to the classical philosophical question of Beauty and its links to truth in and after the age of scientific knowledge, in and after the era of virtual mass media and hyper-connectivity. We can think about art in terms of depth afteR the eRa of the suRface and about metafeminist human suBjectivity and suBject-relations in terms of a matrixial alliance of differences in seveRality, which resists the indifferent hyper-connectivity, on the one hand, and the ego on the other hand. In art, for me this meant questioning the modernist split between aBstraction and empathy (Ettinger 2005b) and announcing an abstraction with compassion. I view the attraction to the surface promoted by modern abstraction, mixed with the current virtual-media fascination as a foreclosure of feminine-maternal-matrixiality. With the approach of aBstraction with compassion, metafeminism declares a surface crisis. Depth in painting is no longer about perspective but about the multilayered subreality and the psyche, and the passage of the spirit of the other and of the cosmos with-in our souls.

my

art-working dynamises the depth-space of carriance with another kind of liBido, a feminine-Be-

yond-the-phallic liBido, By erotic copoiesis with the subject matters, in search of a beauty-to-come. This search

itself is already proto-ethical: its result futurises. The painting’s virtual gestation and the encounter-events it My artistic vision envisions not only each singular painting but also the space in-between paintings, the series that evolves in a spiral swerving open-endedly. For more than three decades my subject-matter is related to traces of mothers with-children executed during the Shoah (with the series Eurydice, Woman-Other-Thing, Ophelia, and others). Then suddenly my own shell shock re-emerged after about forty-five years of semi-oblivion and silence and entered the space of painting (with the series Eurydice—The Graces—Medusa, and now Eurydice—Pietà); both the visible traces and the invisible depth-weaving drew me into the invisible kernel(s) of the wounds that are, like the evaporation of the image, its heart. Revelation is glimpsed with-in the depth-space. The painting’s heart and wound resonate with the viewer’s subreal depth-space. proposes Become a space where aBstraction interweaves with compassion.

12 When emmanuel levinas suggested that the feminine ultimate is dying in giving Birth (Levinas and Ettinger 1997), even if the birth rather than the dying was emphasised—the possibility of the total disappearance of the feminine-maternal subject when the infant is born—the feminine in Levinas, as in Lacan, remains inside the limits of a sacrificial paradigm (ibid.). In these philosophical and psychoanalytic paradigms, the feminine-maternal is the aBject (both of the subject and of the theory); it is located as the sacrificed par excellence. What I have found important in Levinas’s formulae, however, is that the difference of the feminine was—for him—primary. And yet, in conceptualising this femininity Levinas finally reached not a difference but the binary opposition life/death. When speaking of natality, hannah arendt marks the moment of the subject’s natality as the new beginning (1998, 247), following in my view Franz Rosenzweig’s expression (1985, 49), which I criticise: “There has always been progeniture, yet every birth is something absolutely new” (emphasis added). thus, the gestating suBject, the gravida, was, once again, the aBject of the theory, and the emphasis was on Birth and the aBsolute newness of the suBject. Pregnancy and shareability indicate another ethics informed by primordial transubjectivity and differences-in-alliance. A meaningful beginning with-in an encounter-event means that it is not the new but the interweaving of the lingering Being-toward-Birthing with the emerging Birthed-Being that is a healing futurisation. Not subjugation but carrying/being carried: this is the meaning of a subject free from subjugation, a subject in concern, communicaring toward the other. Being-toward-Birth with Being-toward-Birthing: this is where we can locate ourselves at every moment of creativity and inspiration—the birth/birthing-being is dynamised humanely by matrixial Eros—a humanising factor of difference working in relation to objects and subject-matters, caring for humans and non-human animals, for the earth and for nature. In the matrixial feminine, nature can be and must be rethought anew, without abandoning and without appropriating. It is time to re-value nature in terms of the radical feminine difference as it is glimpsed at each symbolic copoiesis. As a perspective, these notes toward a metafeminist manifesto can be channelled toward different fields.

13 The relations of sublimation to the real, to the subreal, to individual and co-existing corporealities, to the female body with its specificities, its morphology, its internal spaces, and its potentialities (whether materialised or not), and the way the internal–external space of potential co-emergence and co-fading enters consciousness from the non-conscious sphere via the I’s archaic borderlinking to the female body-psyche—all these participate in the formation of the subject as a being-toward-birthing with being-toward-birth. human consciousness is offered the fruits

of the suBlimation of the transconnectivity to a female Body-psyche in the archaic encounter-eventing with-in it. each encounter-event informs singular depth-space.

The oblivion of her, and my own, coming into being by way of such a shareable passageway to an-other in her birthing-with-birth resonates as a kind of love, a different angst, a kind of promise to which we return in care, in concern, in trust, in shame, in guilt. In self-fragilisation the phallic subject recedes and the vulnerability of the other and the world resonates, ebbing and flowing between Lethe and Mnemosyne. Subreal elements and strings resonate with-in and in-between human beings humanely in touch with the cosmos. Invisible threads are co-weaved, they find venues into the visible plane and into consciousness. when this resonance is sensed or is rather trans-sensed and stirs our passions and reaches to our desire to dwell with this mystery long enough, the imaginary thus opened to and by the subreal enlarges the symbolic. art-working in an active-receptive reverie in a proto-ethical approach informed By transjectivity is a way to discern the copoiesis by which I am traversed. Emergence of a space and a critique of this same space paradoxically join together in the long and reoccurring passage from wit(h)nessing with-in it to witnessing. The human psyche, since it relates via trauma and phantasm to female corporeality, as it becomes aware of the possible sublimation of such transubjective borderlinking, can participate in a metramorphic copoiesis, whether in solitude or during relationships.

14 Modes of trust, wonder, and awe participate in copoiesis—in creativity that engages spiritual gravidity, the reverie in gestation, and the passage from passive containing to active carriance at the heart of a humanising dynamics of art-working. Our becoming into the world through a time-space of gestation in co-emergence with an other’s female body and psyche imprints in us the time-slowing of copoiesis, and this model offers a resistance to social pressures produced via hyper-connectivity and mass virtual media. Matrixial webs are activated by and motivated with-in our affective emotional cathexis in singular cared-for/caring entities. Webs of I and non-I slowly augment their linkages; the process involves emotional response-ability and it resists what in the 1980s I used to call the potential global Web of webs (my critique of the Web of webs, the endless connectivity of simulacra, by the suggestion of the matrixial weB of severality, seems to me even more relevant today than when I first pronounced it and the internet was not yet born). To talk about aesthetics in terms of depth after the era of the end of depth is to talk about an after of perspectival depth after the era of the surface—Blissful depth; surface crisis. Here, ethics goes hand in hand with moments of revelation of otherness-with-self in birthing/birth: the passage from withnessing to wit(h) nessing occurs in co-emergences, the passage from wit(h)nessing to witnessing engages our vision, this freedom-rift that links aesthetics with ethics.

15 Breakage through cruel violence or cruel sacrifice is possible only in a phallic kind of Bond. An ideal relationship based on the possibility of total splitting and irreparable breakage attests to a phallic underlined metaphysical paradigm as its support. In the phallic domain, even in empathy one might be sacrificed or sacrificing, ready to sacrifice—like aBraham—and then also sometimes choosing to not kill (hopefully.) This kind of ethics is by its nature reactive—a reaction to the urges of destructive impulses. Hereby my critique of levinas is indicated, and also my critique of Melanie Klein.

In a matrixial bond, even in solitude it is impossible not to co/inhabit(u)ate with that which is different on a meaningful level; it is impossible to abandon entirely the non-I(s). Here, total abandonment leads to tragedy. When this happens—and this might happen—it is not just the subject that is hurt but the matrixial web itself. Where gravidity, gestation, carriance, and sublimated copoiesis are assumed, love that goes together with sorrow always comes first; not after but either before or in parallel to, or even without a schizoid-paranoid phase. Loss enters the picture—a love with its pain and its price. Imagine the meaning of the passage from objectal biological living substance to a becoming-pre-subject as it is intuited by a female subject. the passage from non-human life to human life is a process glimpsed By the psyche of a female human Being.

A failed or broken passage from non-human life to human life is not equivalent and should not be compared to a human-being’s death. The matrixial Eros knows joys and knows sorrow. Its knowledge of depth challenges the modernist ideal of the flatness, of the surface, and of the flat surface. Compassionate loving-knowing is not protected from sorrow. The gravida is not protected from the shock of a loss, willed or unwilled. The I in fragility, sometimes abandoning sometimes abandoned, sometimes betrayed, still labours in trust even after the end of trust, trust that entails shame and guilt, the urge to betray, the impulse to abandon, pains of sorrow and regrets. The pain signals the impossibility of a breakage by a definite split. A split that occurs on a parallel level leads here to lamentation; in a matrixial borderspace it is impossible not to share, even in solitude. Even alone each one might enter this dimension where a subject can share with-in spiritual and cosmic consciousness. Its traces are inscribed not only on the level of individuation but are also transcrypted on social and historical threads mostly drowned in oblivion in our contemporary moments of hyper-mediated massive desensitisation.

16 feminine difference concerns language and metaphysics alike. freedom as the choice of miscarriance and carriance—unknown in advance—participates in art-working dynamics. A form with its crystalline gaze doesn’t just contain knowledge; it also transmits as it carries it. In my painting, a form metamorphosises into an image in the meeting with and through the disintegrating traces of images in itself metamorphosing with and through and into spectral forms, figuralities. Such a metramorphing process creates its shadowy depth-space, in which differences find healing together. This is the sacred site of shelter, a MISHKAN (Hebrew) among the things of the world. The light of light meets the light of darkness and the darkness of the darkness of history, and the shadow of the suBject is revealed to its awareness. In differentiation-in-jointness with what is non-I, even alone, mostly alone even—transubjectivity interpels the subject and the subject is informed by it. With this, choice, freedom, responsibility, and respect enter in particular ways—from the feminine—the concept of the subject. Freedom-rifts erupt when, in trusting, reverie, awe, wonder, fascinance, and compassion—that enduring fascinance with the other, the air, the water, the ocean that inspires and gives, that sensing via adoreability that breeds caring for the adorable and inspiriting otherness and frees the subject from the closed loop of fascinum (being frozen and controlled by way of illusional symbiosis in fascination) and leads the subject to gratitude and greater compassion—sustain the fragilised self and the vulnerable other and balance anxiety when an awesome and even catastrophic subject-matter or event is contemplated. Beauty related to com-

passion-beyond-empathy, beauty that doesn’t refuse the sublime—that awareness that some forces outside me are bigger than me and can birth me spiritually in terms of my psyche, soul, and spirit—is related to the apperception of abstraction that birthes figurality and to the grace provided to abstraction from the side of the remnants of trauma (of that which is unforgettable yet not remembered, the memory of oblivion that is looking for a subject who will yet again or anew care-carry). Such a beauty is now offered to one’s memory not as the retrieved but for the first time. Whereas empathy that addresses the other is excluding the others of the other, compassion-beyond-empathy is inclusive of the others of the other and is working against the unconscious mechanism of split. Art is a promise of such a freedom-rift when it engages with human wounds and history to transform their traces in the encounter-eventing with-in a vision and its abstracts. To paint is to be response-able and responsible, from minute to minute and over time, to that to which I self-relinquish myself in the process: materials and subject-matters alike; actively-passive and responsive, and passively-active—not reactive—at every brush stroke and breath. if this actualises or renews the link—oh so ancient—Between Beauty and truth, truth here in the psychoanalytical sense concerns the sensed mysterious link Between Body, psyche, and spirit, virtual and real and suBreal, and the horizons of the symBolic. this truth is Beside and after the age of scientific knowledge; it calls for our attention to our entanglement and offers the possibility of alliance with others, animate and inanimate, intimate and anonymous, based on a proto-ethical aesthetic insight.

17 In ancient Hebrew, one of the meaning of carrying is forgiveness. The subject as carriance-depth-space and the spacing, time-slowing subjectivity that carries the potential carrier are modi responsive to the subreal, to emotions and intuitions in the passages from singular transubjectivity to individual awareness and from there to consciousness. And even though such subjectivity welcomes the imaginal and renews it, it is resistant to the level of imaginary identity. In relation to this stratum and the differences it discerns, identity is secondary in terms of structure and time. Withdrawal from surface relationality, trans-sensing the borderlinking between inside kernels of different objects and subjects, and trusting the exchange between fore-images and spectral figuralities and forms bring forth the knowledge of the diffuse, diffracted, transmitted, transcrypted traces of the trauma of others, present or past, and also of traces inscribed and incrypted with-in or with-out me. Space-carriance as a subject matter labours from its layered heart inside me to resonate with the inside kernels of others, other subjects, other objects, and the viewer of the painting. a kernel is in resonance with other kernels beyond the threshold of visibility yet through/in the visible, struggling for a visual image via colours and lines similar to the way the audible thing of musicality longs to be birthed.

18 carriance and containing are different. care-carrying opens a future from the virtual—it futurises. it is often painful; the psyche-soul-Body is Bleeding still. Its overwhelmedness is invisible. Its denial hurts. the passage from transjectivity and transuBjectivity to suBject and oBject is a temporary withdrawal from the matrixial stratum—a withdrawal in the service of humanising the subject that can now find the desire for a passage from response-aBility to responsiBility, from wit(h)nessing to witnessing, from proto-ethical aesthetic revelation to suBjective agency. The subject thus informed by matrixiality and transformed by it assumes actual and symbolic carriance and miscarriance, loss willed or unwilled, birthing and lamentation in ways that the phallic stratum can’t reach and must neither regulate nor control. Turning once more from the level of the symbolic to the level of a corporeal gestation as it is experienced by a female gravida and from metafeminist notes to feminist notes, we can further understand the complex multi-passages from non-human-life to humanised life and the difference between non-human living substance and its loss, on the one hand, and human-life and

its loss, or death, on the other hand. We can respect the difference between non-life (as human organism) and death, and think each and every human being of any sex, gender, and identity in terms of a being that is Both a creative Being-toward-Birthing-with-Being-toward-Birth concerned and affected By uncanny compassion and awe and a Being-toward-death concerned and affected By uncanny anxiety.

19 art as the space of transmission and elaBoration of traces of trauma intermingled with new imprints arising from the unconscious and from an aBstract vision and aBstraction is revealed in com-passion. I am thence I was carried in the real, I had always already been wit(h)nessed by an-other. I carry therefore I am—glimpses of

transjectivity and transubjectivity enter the moment of subjectivisation—and then I carry the pain left in me from what I carried. The sublimation of a singular borderlinkage (reliance-bord) can form an object, a subject, a transubject, and a transject. compassion as a primary affect humanises life Beyond the (psychoanalytical) life-drive. An aesthetic Eros discerns its beauty. Beauty doesn’t need us—we need it. the suBlime doesn’t need us—it is there in the world—we need it to realise the mystery of the cosmos. awe as an affect renders our life humanised Beyond the death-drive. Art-working is in-with-for the humane when it touches the strings stretched between a being-toward-birth and a being-toward-birthing in birthing, in dis-birthing, in unbirthing, and in a-birthing. The painting like the painter struggles with the death-drive in its push to entropy and is labouring in a zone that is not covered by the kind of life-drive that is patterned upon germ cells and informs the ego. Copoiesis with an-other and with materials functions beyond these drives. In copoiesis, the subject is free from subjugation precisely when in self-fragilisation. The vulnerability of the other and of the materials and bodies of the world appears not at the level of the subject but at the transjective and transubjective level where being-toward-birth-with-beingtoward-birthing are discerned and discerning by a feminine-matrixial life-drive whose Eros is different not only from the Freudian and the Lacanian concept but also from the Deleuzian kind of libido that is motivated by such a life-drive moving toward a future that ignores the relevance of the humane. And yet, Eros does return in Deleuze precisely to address art with the human-being. When the I resonates with-in the non-I(s) in a copoietic birthing/birth-breathing, the matrixial Eros is engaged in the passage and rehumanises the future. A subject informed by the matrixial can resist the deathdrive and life-drive tendencies by paying attention to the affective borderlinking, inside which one is called upon. we can talk aBout futurising virtual potentialities when we glimpse the past without memory, and from its traumatic moments initiate the Bifurcation of a path not taken that will consequently influence reality in the now. such paths that work through potential routes open horizons. Here lamentation and hope enter via the trust that shines through the painting even when it reveals darkness. Requiems and carriance—this proto-ethical load invested in art and in one another announces a humanising horizon. It futurises reality from its beyond.

20 freud on liBido, amoeBae, and pseudopodia (1): Thus we form the idea of there being an original libidinal cathexis of the ego, from which some is later given off to objects, but which fundamentally persists and is related to the object-cathexes much as the Body of an amoeBa is related to the pseudopodia which it puts out. (Freud 1957, 75, emphasis added)

freud on liBido, amoeBae, and pseudopodia (2):

Throughout the whole of life the ego remains the great reservoir from which libidinal cathexes are sent out to objects and into which they are also once more withdrawn, just as an amoeba behaves with its pseudopodia. (Freud 1964, 150–51)

Here, human life drives are patterned on those of germ cells, unicells, metazoa, and amoebae, while the multicellular organism—the soma of human life, followed by its unconscious psyche—is declared as a being toward death. In articulating the matrixial space I went beyond Freud’s “drive theory” in ways. I have articulated not only another kind of life-drive, beyond the one presented in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1955), and another concept of libido, but also a different metapsychology in which our lived human female-maternal life cycle, and that of our ancestors, the materialised potentiality of gravidity through which we have been birthed as well as the non-materialised potentiality of gravidity in the human life cycle, is taken into consideration. In the matrixial, the psyche of the soma is toward-birthing, not only toward-death, and the feminine-maternal has the capacity to transmit traces of such an experience in ways that revitalise the psyche while suggesting each time anew the impossibility of not-sharing with the other, nature, and the cosmos. In his discussion of the repetition-compulsion that resists the pleasure principle, Freud elaborated on the distinction between quiescent (bound) and free-moving energy in relation to the life-drive (for immortality) of the germ cells and the death-drive (for mortality) of the singular living human organism in relation to the science of biology of his time. in freud’s discussion on the immortality of germ cells and the mortality of the soma, the pleasure principle seems directly to suBserve death-instincts: The greatest interest attaches from our point of view to the treatment given to the subject of the duration of life and the death of organisms in the writings of [August] Weismann. It was he who introduced the division of living suBstance into mortal and immortal parts. the mortal part is the Body in the narrower sense—the “soma”—which alone is subject to natural death. The germ-cells, on the other hand, are potentially immortal, in so far as they are able, under certain favourable conditions, to develop into a new individual, or, in other words, to surround themselves with a new soma. (Freud 1955, 45–46, emphasis added)

freud on death: “the aim of life is death” . . . [since] “inanimate things existed before living ones.” . . . the first instinct came into Being: the instinct to return to the inanimate state. . . . These circuitous paths to death, faithfully kept to by the conservative instincts, would thus present us to-day with the picture of the phenomena of life. . . . instinctual life as a whole serves to Bring aBout death. . . . the instincts of self-preservation, of self-assertion and of mastery greatly diminishes. They are component instincts whose function it is to assure that the organism shall follow its own path to death . . . the organism wishes to die only in its own fashion. (Freud 1955, 38–39, emphasis added)

This kind of life-drive defends, then, the life of elementary organisms and has no interest whatsoever in the individual human organism, its life struggles, and its cultural achievements. It is not interested in the individual animal body either. I am questioning the underlying idea suggested above, that archaic lifelessness is equal to death. non-life and lifelessness are different from death. Heidegger’s concept of the human subject as a Being-toward-death echoes the above Freudian statement. I consider the Freudian life-drive as a death-drive in disguise for the individual human being. freud on sexual instincts: the whole path of development to natural death is not trodden by all the elementary entities which compose the complicated body of one of the higher organisms. Some of them, the germ-cells, proBaBly retain the original structure of living matter. . . . These germ-cells, therefore, work against the death of the living suBstance and succeed in winning for it what we can only regard as potential immortality, though that may mean no more than a lengthening of the road to death. . . . The instincts which watch over the destinies of these elementary organisms that survive the whole individual . . . constitute the group of the sexual instincts. (Freud 1955, 40, emphasis added)

freud on suBlimations as the mask of the death-drive: the ego-instincts . . . seek to restore the inanimate state; whereas as regards the sexual instincts, though it is true that they reproduce primitive states of the organism, what they are clearly aiming at By every possiBle means is the coalescence of two germ-cells which are differentiated in a particular way. If this union is not effected, the germ-cell dies along with all the other elements of the multicellular organism. It is only this condition that the sexual function can prolong the cell’s life and lend it the appearance of immortality. (Freud 1955, 44, emphasis added)

Sexuality based on such metapsychology leaves no room for recognising the humanising differential of desires, sexual aims, genders, and finally sexual difference: In unicellular organisms the individual and the reproductive cell are still one and the same . . . death only makes its appearance with the multicellular metazoa. (Freud 1955, 46, emphasis added) If two of the animalculae, at the moment before they show signs of senescence, are able to coalesce with each other, that is to “conjugate” (soon after which they once more separate), they are saved from growing old and become “rejuvenated.” (Ibid., 48)

thriving in this way, life can continue on Earth with or without humans, with or without animals. But what is the meaning of a human life imagined with no respect for individuated human beings and animals, their vulnerability, desires, suffering, and pain and to their relations with one another? Ethics, sexual difference,

human sexuality and psyche, soul, and the consciousness of the spirit can’t be thought in terms of life-drives equated with the instinct for immortality of unicellular beings, germ cells, elementary organisms, and animalculae. The feminine and the maternal, as well as the passage time-space of gestation itself—in which the human female gravida’s desire gradually interweaves in the web, to which her own growing consciousness of intimate-yet-anonymous co-emergence and co-fading and loss contributes—can’t be thought in terms of life for the sake of life of the germ-cells. The feminine-matrixial sphere is a resistence to the phallic all-englobing consciousness, in which being-toward, and in fact any futurality, is thought in terms of being-toward-death in the form of either a fusing oceanic symbiosis of elementary forms, or entropy and indifference. Any humane recognition of the Other and of others thought in terms of the unicells leads to an ethical dead-end. Ethics that derives from these terms is unethical, since it contains neither the subject’s different desires nor the desire and even the life of other human beings. Sexuality in the humane, and even reproductivity, must not be reduced to these terms! Finally, Freud (1955, 51) adds: “The concept of ‘sexuality,’ and at the same time of the sexual instinct, had, it is true, to be extended so as to cover many things which could not be classed under the reproductive function.” Even so, Freud’s life-drive remained in the metaphoric land of infusorium and protozoa, while adult sexuality remained linked to the aim of conception. But the essence of the processes to which sexual life is directed is the coalescence of two cell-bodies. That alone is what

guarantees the immortality of the living substance in the higher organisms. (Freud 1955, 56) the most universal endeavour of all living substance—namely to return to the quiescence of the inorganic world. . . . at the Beginning of mental life there are no others . . . The plea sure principle seems actually to serve the death instincts. (Ibid., 62–63, emphasis added)

to the idea that “at the Beginning of mental life there are no others,” i reply in all simplicity that freud is wrong here. in death there are no others, But at the Beginning of mental life there are already, to Begin with,

i with Freud insists, concerning the life-drive in the service of the ego, on the principles of the cellular symbiosis of living substances leading to sexual copulation, thus on the life of the germ cells for the sake of life’s immortality. In the underlined metaphysics of his thesis there is no room for thinking human life in terms of an ethical civilisation, care, trust, and even aspirations for a future; death is the only orientation for the psyche of individual human living beings even though the unconscious, according to him, doesn’t recognise death. And the recognition of the other in Freud passes through, destroying the human other as an object, such that what the I rejects becomes its psychological other. The female gravida knows life differently. She feel-knows life, she feelknows death, she feel-knows the difference between human life and the non-human life of a living substance and the complexities of the passage from non-human life to human life and the passage from life to non-life and the passage from life to death. She transconnects with the immemorial and with oblivion. The embryo during early pregnancy is a kind of life-substance that cannot live on its own and can’t become a liveable human organism without the gravida and what is outside her body. The phallic law can’t speak in its name, and the whole matter of gestation can’t be addressed in phallic term. To not-bRing-into human life is not to kill. The concept of the non-human-life of an organism is different from the concepts of human life and of death. The gravida, consciously and unconsciously, transconnects with the passage of an entity from its non-human-life to either non-life and a return to the inanimate or the passage to birth with birthing. The relations are deep and complex between her as a subject and her non-I(s) as substances that are in a position of unknown things or transjects that might leave her body, willingly or unwillingly, painfully or not, or might remain inside her body and sometimes be unwillingly lost, and the supplementary relations between herself as a subject and her non-I(s) as pre-subjects in the last term of gestation. Their complexity doesn’t follow the structure of a subject as articulated by Freud and his followers. After conception and for at least the two first terms of gestation, the embryo is a kind of endosymbiotic organism, which might survive and move forward to being birthed, or might not survive and be lost. Only at the final period of gestation when this life substance is actually a viable organism even if it leaves the gravida’s womb can we talk about an embryo in terms of pre-subjective instances and relate it to the encounter between I and non-I in terms of the transubjective matrixial jointness of two (or several) different entities, separated-in-jointness. The matrixial transubjectivity is not symbiosis. Symbiotic transconnectedness is of a different kind. In symbiosis there is passive transconnectedness and undifferenciation. In psychic and symbolic terms the matrixial hovers alongside symbiosis and alongside phallic rejection and must be differentiated from them in terms of psychic mechanisms, affectivity, functioning, awareness, and consciousness. From the point of view of the matrixial, banning abortion is unethical. It is based on conceptual confusions concerning human life, on terms that mix up elementary organisms like germ cells with human beings. “Prolife” anti-abortion ideas rely on false basic assumptions. Freud’s life-drive is the drive of the germ cell, fit for an amoeba’s kind of life, which is not at all analogous to a human being’s life! These anti-choice (of the gravida) ideas collapse the difference between a living force in an elementary substance (for which the life of a human being doesn’t matter) and the idea of the life of a human subject. This kind of life-drive, which accords with the germ cell’s striving for conception no matter what, denies the value of the life cycle of any human being—not only that of the female or the female gravida. Nor could it account for and revise any cultural non-i in matrixial conjunction.

achievement and the possibility of transgenerational transmission of traces of personal and shared histories. Under the wings of the Freudian life-drive that supports either copulation or the ego, that is in fact a kind of death-drive, the subject’s body-psyche-mind engagement, her lived sexual and cultural life, her sexual difference and sublimation, and even the meaning of the proto-ethics of human shareability can’t be symbolised. the freudian life-drive is thus revealed to Be insufficient; it is a dehumanising factor. it dynamises dehumanisation. it is indifferent to human concerns and vulneraBility, to its history and future, to its desires, culture, passions, and aspirations; it is indifferent to human suffering, joy, and hopes, and it formulates the future in regressive terms. the Basic affect related to Both such a life-drive and the deathdrive is the affect of anxiety.

21 The Freudian life-drive and libido inspired Lacan and Deleuze (and Deleuze and Guattari) alike, though in different ways. We can see now how for Lacan following Freud the libido is this life-instinct pursuing immortality and patterned upon germ cells. And the lacking object, the objet a, is its representative. lacan: liBido, lamella, and the fertile egg: Whenever the memBranes of the egg in which the foetus emerges on its way to becoming a new-born are Broken, imagine for a moment that something flies off, and that one can do it with an egg as easily as with a man, namely the hommelette, or the lamella. The lamella is something extra-flat, which moves like the amoeBa. It is just a little more complicated. But it goes everywhere. And as it is something . . . that is related to what the sexed being loses in sexuality, it is, like the amoeba in relation to sexed beings, immortal—because it survives any division, any scissiparous intervention. . . . this lamella, this organ, whose characteristic is not to exist, but which is nevertheless an organ . . . is the liBido, qua pure life instinct . . . immortal life, or irrepressiBle life, life that has need of no organ, simplified, indestructiBle life. It is precisely what is suBtracted from the living Being by virtue of the fact that it is subject to the cycle of sexed reproduction. And it is of this that all the forms of the objet a that can be enumerated are the representatives, the equivalents. (Lacan [1977] 1998, 197–98)

22 Freud dismisses as illusionary the possibility that there is something primary (not secondary, not reactive) that pulls the human being in the direction of compassion and transcendence. Those for him are of necessity sublimations of primary needs. This means also, if we keep in mind Freud’s biological analogies and metaphors, that no cultural value achieved during a lifetime can enter the system of transgenerational transmission. When the focus shifts from germ cells and eggs to human gestation, other analogies can in my view enter the scene. Primary withnessing cathected by non-sexual Eros can transmute into witnessing. The project of art-working—by the human, for the humane—enters by such Eros. Healing enters by such Eros too. With it comes the possibility for the rediffusion and transformation of vestiges of human suffering and of traces of culture and remains of civilisation in/as beauty. A potential for a healing transformation that resists the death-drive, embedded in the consciousness that connects each individual

human to others and the earth and the cosmos, is revealed.

23 The argument over the loss of immortality that otherwise resides in bacteria, lamella, and amoeba first found its way into psychoanalysis through Sigmund Freud’s “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” Margulis’s idea that the bacterial world has retained the time when the organism was not dependent on packaged DNA like nucleated organisms resembles Freud’s ideas concerning amoebae-like mental inheritance. In correspondence with scientific new discoveries, the DNA took the elementary unicell’s place. Margulis and Sagan (1997) refer to the immortality of the freelancing bacterial DNA that did not become trapped in the nuclei of sexually reproducing species but remained flexible in a modular fashion. “Consisting of life, the environment is continually regulated by life for life” (94). “our first awareness of the microcosm was hostile. The bacterial lifestyle was described when and where it threatened human society” (95). “The concerted capacities of millions of microbes . . . evolved symbiotically to become the human brain” (34) (emphasis added). Cell activity that corresponds to the principles of life for life as well as symbiosis between elementary life substances evolve in indifference to the aspirations of any human being. According to Francisco Varela, hostility arises in the human being toward such substances when those units or cells (which in fact represent such an indifferent life-for-life principle) threaten a human’s health and life—the life of an individual for whom death does enter the picture by way of being born via sexual reproduction. In relation to the basic symbiotic levels, “The entire biosphere/Earth ‘Gaia’ has an identity as a whole, an adaptable and plastic unity, acquired through time in this dynamic partnership between life and its terrestrial environment” (Varela and Anspach 1991, 69). the trouBle with metaphors of symBiosis and plasticity when applied to the human being— where life for the sake of life thrives with no consideration for the human individual, its consciousness, memory, and pregnancy—when such vision concerns a human being considered from the perspective of autopoiesis, where each organism takes care of its own ontogenetic emergence in a defensive and hostile way—is that such symBiosis, such plasticity, and such a paradigm to think the other of the self undermine the possiBility of ethics. the feminine-matrixial liBido that Brings to light another dimension that sometimes supplements, sometimes complements, and sometimes contradicts the phallic model, is humanising, and opens a proto-ethical path. it is humane in the sense that it relates to the urge for Being with-through the other and with-through others during individual life time-space—a proto-ethical disposition—Beyond the scope of the liBido that attaches eros to the needs of the ego alone. it indicates cohaBitance without rejection and without fusion.

24 Reconsidering subjectivity that is infused by the matrixial calls for metaphors that address inscriptions

that take place during the individuated yet sometimes one-with-one, one-with-two, or one-with-several human lifetime. What shapes her consciousness is cross-crypted and transcrypted horizontally (like in telepathy) and vertically: transgenerationally. Here memory, oblivion, and future, traversed by moments of successful and failed copoiesis, become meaningful in each transubjective alliance.

25 In Deleuze, the death-drive is by definition related to repetition, which is a difference without a concept; the death-drive is affirmative. what individuates a human Being is the essence of things, and this essence calls us to individuate, in and By art; this art par-excellence offers the individuating event—the dead time of a meanwhile—which in turn is linked to an indifferent thanatos. Individuated life, then, is not life according to the life-drive. Individuating hovers between notions relevant to the death-instinct, the death-drive, Thanatos, and art. deleuze: The turning point of Freudianism appears in Beyond the Pleasure Principle: the death instinct is discovered, not in connection with the destructive tendencies, not in connection with aggressivity, but as a result of a direct consideration of repetition phenomena. Strangely, the death instinct serves as a positive, originary principle for repetition; this is its domain and its meaning. It plays the role of a transcendental principle, whereas the pleasure principle is only psychological. (Deleuze 1994, 16)

In short, repetition is in its essence symbolic; symbols or simulacra are the letter of repetition itself. Difference is included in repetition by way of disguise and by the order of the symbol. This is why the variations do not come from without, do not express a secondary compromise between a repressing instance and a repressed instance, and must not be understood on the basis of the still negative forms of opposition, reversal, or overturning. The variations express, rather, the differential mechanisms that belong to the essence and origin of that which is repeated (Deleuze 1994, 17). deleuze and guattari: The event is immaterial, incorporeal, unlivable: pure reserve. (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 156) It is the event that is a meanwhile [un entre-temp]: the meanwhile is not part of the eternal, but neither is it part of time—it belongs to becoming. The meanwhile, the event, is always a dead time; it is there where nothing takes place, an infinite awaiting that is already infinitely past, awaiting and reserve. . . . All the meanwhiles are superimposed. (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 158)

Deleuze looks to art as the only place where essences work to individuate. This idea strangely echoes Heidegger’s. In Deleuze, then, is it to art that we owe our humanisation? We will return to the question of art toward the end of this chapter, but what I would like to emphasise at this point is that even though art in Deleuze cannot escape the Freudian death-drive, it does escape, in my understanding, the Freudian life-drive, to the extent that it engages itself in the service of the death-drive while this death-drive, which is here manifested, as for Freud, in repetition, becomes for Deleuze a force of affirmation as repetition-and-difference. However, deleuze’s individuating is different from suBjectivising. Thus, trans-individuation that indicates the collective is not to be confused with my notion of transubjectivisation, and the pre-individ-

ual is not to be confused with the pre-subject.

26 Where the life-drive is modelled by Freud and others upon the germ cell, and in contemporary terms the I’s urges are modelled on DNA (Margulis) and the not-I is modelled on the microbe (Varela) in its indifference to beings that are born and are dying, by definition the Other is produced through rejection. Even Varela admits that the model of autopoiesis is too militaristic. Infinite plasticity, autopoietic and symbiotic, corresponds to the principle of life-for-life alone. Between symbiosis and autopoiesis, no humanising ethics can follow. The vulnerability of the gestating and birthing female individual is negated, and with it the meaning of human life between birth and death. To introduce gestation, birthing and psychic-mental transconnectedness by way of the female body-psyche is to bring forth and embed the uniqueness of jointness-in-difference of a Being-toward-Birthing with a Being-toward-Birth and the difference between transjectivity and transubjectivity into the concept of the Subject. The matrixial eros is beyond the death-drive, beyond the life-drive, and beyond the one-only libido à la Freud. It implies two kinds of liBido and the entry of proto-ethics to the scene of the unconscious. The matrixial Eros contributes to com-passion beyond the symbiosis/rejection binary. The foreclosure of any different libido that would be related to the feminine-matrixial difference—a foreclosure culturally inherited for many generations—bars us from recognising not only an authentic proto-ethical tendency to care but also the aesthetic libidinal search that informs subjectivity before and beyond the threshold of identity and gender.

27 For the embryo, a matrixial transjective—not yet transubjective or pre-subjective—jointness is first at work. A subject (m/Other) is transconnected first to a non-I substance that is not yet another subject nor even a pre-subject. The female gravida transconnects at the early stage of pregnancy not to another human being but to a biological entity that might— and also might not—Become to Birth. tRansubjectivity concerns the very last stage of pregnancy; only then is the maternal subject transconnected to a pre-subject and we can talk on pre-subjectivity and partial-subjectivity. During the earlier stages of gravidity, the embryo is a biological entity that is not viable on its own. The gravida as subject is first unaware of and is later transconnected to the unnameable thing as an object or partial-object or substance on a transjective level. (These metafeminist notes give philosophical and ethical support to the rights of the female subject over her own body with its potential gravidity while giving meaning also to processes of birthing, unbirthing, dis-birthing, and a-birthing, whether willed or unwilled, and making room for a range of phantasmatic and traumatic events relating to the desire to have, and the desire to not-have, a child.) On the symbolic level and in artistic practices, the transjective jointness-in-difference is feminine in and for subjects of all genders and sexualities. The passage from trans-

jectivity to transubjectivity is a complex process. The specific mechanisms of metramorphosis in transubjective relations imply that the potentiality for differences-in-alliance and alliances-in-difference with the vulnerable others in ethical practices is feminine in subjects of all genders and sexualities. The awareness of the subject after birth and in adulthood of its being-between-birth-and-death as a being-toward-birthing-with-being-toward-birth supplies ethics of responsibility for the future, future of the other and of its environment, which doesn’t lean on anxiety, shame, guilt, and reparation. This awareness supplements the subject’s awareness of its condition as a being-toward-death. Freudian discourse about the death-drive and the Lacanian metaphors for libido and its lack of objets—of which the gaze as phallic is a major one—are militant and sacrificial. When the gaze appears, the subject disappears. When the subject appears, the gaze disappears. The omission of the female-mother-woman corporeality and psyche from Freud’s discussion of life-instinct and death-instinct in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” is a manifestation of a colossal cultural repression in the service of patriarchy. Psychoanalysis veils the female humanised condition. Yet, knowledge concerning it can be accessed paradoxically precisely through what was foreclosed: both via the subreal related to feminine specificities and female pregnancy (on the one hand), and via those sexualities and desires that either do or don’t intend procreation (on the other hand). Moreover, the effects of affects and passions inform consciousness and the symbolic via the real, and can be transmitted and rediffracted by subreal strings and unconscious threads in further borderlinkage.

28 the matrixial copoiesis Bypasses Both ontogenetic autopoiesis and symBiosis. From this perspective connectedness occurs not only through membranous folds but through transitive mental vibrating strings. Thus, we cannot talk about an entirely lost object (as in the past and as either in me or in the m/Other). My idea of co-emergence and copoiesis brought about the transubjective kernel-to-kernel resonance, in which self and non-self join beyond any mechanism of symbiosis/rejection. The subject never completely loses the traces of a transject. In a matrixial space the “split” between the corporeal-psychic “eye” of the subject and the desired “gaze” as object becomes a spacing in the duration of passage and interval, a spacetime of/for encounter-eventing where withdrawal, new subjective boundaries, and joining coincide. Only a subject matrixially imbued, suffering-with-through (com-passioning) its non-I(s) and also lamenting their loss can be witness to-for them. We have to imagine the value of time-slowing with-in space.

29 In the matrixial sphere a lack of compassionate hospitality might retraumatise. Art is for-in the human. The artist takes a risk when sensing and trans-sensing subreal substances. In copoiesis, jointness is neither hostile nor symbiotic but might be painful. Carriance includes caring-carrying as well as their loss. If copoiesis is neither autopoiesis nor symbiosis, not everything can be linked to just everything. Human affect and time-slowing cathexis enters the process of sublimation of the passageways. The passage or unpassage from biological substance to organism is different from the passage or unpassage from non-humanised living substance to human pre-subjective life. The archaic m/Other is in contact with the immemorial where different modi of carriance in trust and in loss are suffered (passioned): birthing, unbirthing, dis-birthing, a-birthing—all might potentially occur, while the born-subject’s immemoriality concerns the oblivion of being-toward-birth-with-being-toward-birthing. Unbirthing, dis-birthing, birthing, and a-birthing enter consciousness and the symbolic through the feminine. The phallic law can’t interfere in a matrixial web or speak in the name of one of its transjects.

Both symbiosis and the defensive hostility of autopoiesis are indifferent to the humanised co-cathexis of being-toward-birth-with-being-toward-birthing in transubjective metramorphosis. In each singular imaginary and symbolic copoiesis, at least one subject with its psyche, spirit, and soul is engaged with its non-I(s), transjects, subjects, or objects.

30 aesthetics alone is not art. creativity alone is not art. In the components of the essence that “individuate” (to use Deleuze’s expression) the human being via art, freedom-with-responsibility is embedded. actively passive self-relinquishment in com-passionate hospitality marks an aesthetic proto-ethical desire. As a painter I fragilise myself and loosen my psychic boundaries to enter a field of resonance and receive vibrations arriving from the inside and from the inside of an outside, the inside of that which is not-me. And I join or participate in what is yet to come from the encounter-event; in what from the vir-

tual trails of the me and the thing and the other of the encounter is in the process of becoming-together. I wit(h)ness whatever arrives in the encounter-event; I feel the pain and the wonder, the longing and the fear of languishing. The depth-space of the painting works in the duration of its con-templation.

31 Art-working enacts what are otherwise impossible relations and virtual occurrences and realises the passage, onto a “screen” of vision, of psychic traces from what otherwise would be foreclosed from human consciousness (Ettinger 2006a). Through metramorphosis, the originary human potentiality for the reciprocal yet asymmetrical crossing-over of borderlines between I and non-I, and between phantasm, jouissance, and trauma, induces instances of co-emergence and co-fading in the now, toward a subjectivity now re-informed by the “subject” of the screen that had been transformed by it. Knowledge from the level of the subreal joins the affected forms. Art knowledge is a love-knowledge, even in critique. A transcryptum imprints enigmatic signs. In joining traumatically and in joy the consciousness of things, and by traversing through them, art-working trans-forms the signs and the hieroglyphs of the world. You join in-through-with the other by mental-affective phantasmatic and traumatic strings attaching the sensible and non-sensed corporeality to whatever transcends the corporeality of the individual human being-between-birth-and-death. Like the sensible, trans-sensible and

non-sensible knowledge is not cognitive, and the affect that accompanies it is vague. You access it in-by with that which is non-I (Ettinger 2006b, 157–60). The potentiality-for-being in a feminine-matrixial horizon indicates an inclusive vision of shareability in the outside as in the inside. The m/Other-subject is a witness to the womb-spatiality as a passage-site-duration of intimacy, anonymity, and alliance with the other, that which is foreign, where the womb is neither a space of lost and, retroactively, of deadly symbiosis, longed for to return to (or not), nor a retroactively phantasmatic, imaginary, and symbolic earth-grave or site of wholeness, the inside of a container; the shared first psychic object is not the place of blood-exchange, the placenta. (Lacan imagined the placenta as the first lost objet a.) Co/in-habit(u)ation indicates a being-with that morphs a space with its time, and subjectivises the encounter-eventing, where a passage, not wholeness, is shaped according to the limits of affectability that draws its boundaries. What is shared is not “identity.” Primal severality in co-emergence is in principle not a symbiotic two only, even when the birthingwith-birth concerns two entities. The womb with its sheltering carriance is not to be compared to the earth; the womb-space is not to be reduced to a “natural” place of belonging where, as in Hebrew, the joining-in-differenc/tiating, co-inhaBit(u)ating

man-being (ADAM, ‫ )אדם‬relates etymologically to earth (ADAMA—‫ )אדמה‬and to blood (DAM—‫)דם‬. By such metaphors, the feminine and the maternal are appropriated in the service of a phallic patriarchy. Rather, from the perspective of another kind of femininity, that of the matrixial Beyond the phallus, from the perspective of wit(h)nessing and alliance-in-differences, of being thus subjectivised by an-other human being, the metaphors of air and water, and of air upon the water in a dark abyss and in light, help drawing an other past-and-future horizon. The ocean and the air don’t “contain” but carry us. We don’t own them. Carriance implies an idea of freedom. They might not carry us if we exhaust their limits, if we use them as object-things and ignore the limits of their potential carriance and forget the asymmetrical reciprocity we owe them in the form of respect. The projective confusion of the womb with psychic symbiosis, earth-and-grave, and the positioning of the placenta as a primal mediator, object, and then lost object (objet a), are imaginations in the service of a phallic logic. Such ideas historically perverted the relation to the female womb and contributed to the foreclosure of the feminine difference, to the impossibility of imagining a matrixial Eros, and to the impossibility of presuming a different kind of libido. Such ideas are still contributing to the psychotisation of gestation and the aBjection of the archaic m/other. the suBstances in symBiosis and undifferentiation are different in kind from the pre-suBject in different/ciation-in-jointness humanised toward the end of pregnancy By the matrixial hospitality-in-compassion.

32 Matrixial desire is glimpsed. It touches me from before the clearly sensible, visible, and audible at the borders of think-ability. copoietic transformational potentialities evolve along aesthetic-with-ethical paths. The intra-psychic and intra-suBjective yet transuBjective connective sphere with-in and with-out the self in severality is transported onto inter-subjective relations while the subject is by it transformed. We can discern it, become aware of it, and conceptualise it in difference from the oceanic virtual consciousness that is driving towards enthropy. Trans-individual continuity between me and you withthrough the artwork via feminine-matrixial depth-screens emerges with-in and through it, in difference from the Baudrillardian kind of global imaginary-virtual endless phallic matrix of simulacres with its narcissistic surface-screen. Psychic and spiritual waves and intensities are realised, materialised,

and incarnated. Vibrations from different frequencies materialise, taking form and body as they are transformed by artworking and by the art work, the oeuvre, that in this sense is conductive and transitive. Knowledge of a specific web of transmissive affects “composed” from actual and virtual subreal strings enters spheres of consciousness in and by and through which the human spirit is embedded in and contributes to—participating in—its transformation. Thus, the human participates in the cosmic spirit and in moving the wheels of its evolvement beyond the death-drive and beyond the life-drive. In putting oneself in a position of proximity and vulnerability to the other and to the world—a move toward ephemeral sub-subjects and self-states in compositions of severality that reopen virtual fields, a move toward the dispersal and loss of the self-as-identity resulting in becoming sub-subjective and momentarily borderless—the fragility and “over” sensitivity to the other and the outside interweaved with temporary relinquishment of identity grants the human subject a passage through an art-and-healing encounter-event via birth and birthing as its future horizon before re-with-drawing and individual withdrawal into the horizon of being-toward-death in anxiety. Art is to me a conductible sphere of emission, reception, and transmission where waves and vibrations labour, where—temporarily and partially—strings and threads of spiritual consciousness are shared and transformed, then retransmitted onwards, to the world and to the subject. Carriance-subject-depth-space is its subject-matter-kernel. Dissolving while inventing strings and threads in withdrawal-and-borderlinkage, the affective psychic strings are finely or traumatically reattuned. Then, the eye of the space within the artwork is a com-passionate erotic aerial that opens my hands-heart and my womb-eye to the cosmos and the spirit.

33 Human consciousness in-of-from the feminine relates to a libido that is different in kind from the Freudian libido that is related to drives directed to the other as oBject. The pre-subject toward-birth senses the m/Other both as a primordial oceanic thing, and then also as an encounter-eventing sub-subject. Indifference is ruptured at this level already. The oceanic m/Other is both a transject and a transubject of-with-through a pre-subject differentiated slowly as being-toward-birthing-with-birth; she is the pre-subject’s subject-witness, a unique witness to that which will be the forever immemorial for the born-subject. Pregnancy is

a trauma, painful or joyful or both, that subjectivises the gravida anew. The archaic m/Other-thing is also the site of a nameless threat concerning the state of symbiosis before the kind of jointness-in-difference in late pregnancy, when the substance still between non-humanlife and pre-subjectivity could forever be a Being-to-Be-or-notto-Be. The limits of this being or non-being are not those of human death and are not to be confused with death. Non-life is not death. Non-becoming-into-human-life is not death. To think human-life is to rethink with this other life-drive—with the feminine, in the feminine. If beauty in art relates to the limits of life, and if it is trauma and love, it is also a promise of, it is also a promise, a promise of a love affair with the world at the horizons of symbolic birth-birthing and symbolic death. Beauty contributes a counter-traumatic vector to human-consciousness when, as for Plato, it is related to psychic truth: trauma is a truth of love. It is related to the truth of the relations between body and transcendence in the space-time between birth with an-other and the solitude in life, the solitude of death, the truth of the horizon of going-through instances of awareness to our being-toward-birth-with-being-toward-birthing and to our being-toward-death, the awareness to what individuates us in carriance. Individuation without splitting.

34 In art-and-healing eventing, artistic creativity intends the passage of human and non-human consciousness in-through the human. The artist is not a distant guardian of evolution or entropy. different art-and-life lines weave different matrixial weBs. The artistic is linked to and is a part of the birthing consciousness of depth and of the cosmos. With abstraction related to darkness, light, colour, and depthspace, while mattering abstraction, I approach the traces of trauma and work with-through its ashes and remains to transform them by their truth to beauty. Abstract patterns, always sensitive to my artistic vision, appear. The painting attests to and produces intimate encounters birthed in depth, and as such it brings the flat surface of modernity with its obsession for the bigger, the vaster, the immersive, and the monumental, into crisis.

References Arendt, Hannah. 1998. The Human Condition. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1st ed. published 1958 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Deleuze, Gilles. 1994. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1968 as Différence et répétition (Paris: Presses universitaires de France). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1994. What Is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1991 as Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Minuit). Ettinger, Bracha L. 1992. “Matrix and Metramorphosis.” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 4 (3): 176–208. ———. 2005a. “Copoiesis.” Ephemera 5 (X): 703–13. Accessed 4 June 2019. http://www.ephemerajournal. org/sites/default/files/5-Xettinger.pdf. ———. 2005b. “The Art-and-Healing Oeuvre.” In 3× Abstraction: New Methods of Drawing—Hilma af Klint, Emma Kunz, and Agnes Martin, edited by Catherine de Zegher and Hendel Teicher, 199–231. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ———. 2006a. “Art and Healing Matrixial Transference between the Aesthetical and the Ethical.” In ARS 06 Kiasma, edited by Tuula Karjalainen, 68–81. Helsinki: Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art. Published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name shown at Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, 21 January–27 August 2006. ———. 2006b. The Matrixial Borderspace. Edited by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2015. “Carriance, Copoiesis and the Subreal.” In Saltwater: Theory of Thought Forms, edited by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, 92–101. Istanbul: Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts. Published in conjunction with the 14th Istanbul Biennial. Also published in Bracha L. Ettinger, And My Heart WoundSpace (Leeds: Wild Pansy Press, 2015), 343–52, artist’s book for the 14th Istanbul Biennial. Reprinted in #Political 2016: 235–50. ———. 2019. “Metafeminist Notes, Psychic Birthing and Disbirthing: Being-toward-Birthing—A Language of Her Own.” Keynote presentation at the conference “Oxytocin, Mothering the World,” Kings College, London, 9 March. Freud, Sigmund. 1955. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVIII (1920–1922): Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and Other Works, translated under the general editorship of James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson, 1–64. London: Hogarth Press. Essay first published 1920 as Jenseits des Lustprinzips (Leipzig: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag). ———. 1957. “On Narcissism: An Introduction.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (1914–1916): On the History of the Psycho-analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, translated under the general editorship of James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson, 73–102. London: Hogarth Press. Essay first published 1914 as “Zur Einführung des Narzissmus” (Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse 6: 1–24). ———. 1964. “An Outline of Psycho-Analysis.” In The

Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXIII (1937–1939): Moses and Monotheism, An Outline of Psycho-Analysis and Other Works, translated under the general editorship of James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson, 139–208. London: Hogarth Press. Essay first published 1940 as “Abriss der Psychoanalyse” (Internationale Zeitschruft für Psychoanalyse und Imago 25 [1]: 7–67). Heidegger, Martin. 2010. Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. Revised by Dennis J. Schmidt. Rev. ed. Albany: State University of New York Press. First published 1927 as Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer). Lacan, Jacques. (1977) 1998. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton. First published 1973 as Le Seminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre XI: Les quartre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse (Paris: Seuil). This translation first published 1977 (London: Hogarth Press; New York: Norton). Levinas, Emmanuel, and Bracha L. Ettinger. 1997. “Que dirait Eurydice?/What Would Eurydice Say? Emmanuel Levinas en/in conversation avec/with Bracha Lichtenberg-Ettinger. Eurydice 1992–1996: oeuvres de Bracha Lichtenberg-Ettinger” (English and French versions). Paris: BLE Atelier. Published in conjunction with the exhibition Kabinet, shown at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 6 February–6 April. Margulis, Lynn, and Dorion Sagan. 1997. Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Evolution from Our Microbial Ancestors. Berkeley: University of California Press. Maturana, Humberto R., and Francisco J. Varela. 1980. Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. Dordrecht: Reidel. Rosenzweig, Franz. 1971. The Star of Redemption. Translated by William V. Hallo. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. First published 1921 as Der Stern der Erlösung (Frankfurt am Main: J. Kauffmann). Varela, Francisco J., and Mark Anspach. 1991. “Immuknowledge: The Process of Somatic Individuation.” In Gaia 2: Emergence; The New Science of Becoming, edited by William Irwin Thompson, 68–85. Aurora, CO: Lindisfarne Press.

Note on the Images The images in this chapter are reproductions from Bracha L. Ettinger, Notebooks (2013–2015), different sizes.

Thought beyond Research A Deleuzian Critique of Artistic Research Kamini Vellodi University of Edinburgh

The notion of artistic research implicates thinking—whether this thinking is conceived as reflection, critique, investigation, practice, or knowing—about what art is, what art does and what art can produce. Through artistic research, the kind of thinking in which art partakes—including the way it thinks about itself—is named, defined, assessed, and compared with other disciplines of thought. As such, artistic research has been celebrated for challenging the notion that what artists do is innate and beyond all possibility of measure or evaluation. It has also been celebrated for challenging the view that art has a purchase on creation and a particular kind of creative thinking that cannot be shared by other disciplines. Through the notion of research, supporters claim, the proximity of art to other disciplines, its intellectual value, and its value within the university, can all be defended. Nevertheless, it can also be argued that the notion of artistic research poses a certain risk to art’s practice as thought, in so far as it is assumed and given as part of the way—that is to say the “image”—that art has of how it thinks. Setting out with this intuition, this chapter argues for a return to the ques­ tion of thought, beyond research, drawing on the distinction made by Gilles Deleuze between thought with and without an image.

The problem of artistic research “Artistic research”—a term that today is so ubiquitous we at times lose sight of how its origins shape its current actualities—emerged in the UK and across Scandinavia in the 1990s to assess and evaluate artistic production within aca­ demia (Cazeaux 2017, 1–2; see also Sullivan 2005, 82). While that which today goes under the name of artistic research—and its interrelated nominations, such as “art-based,” “practice-based,” and “practice-led” research—encom­ passes a broad and diverse spectrum, the shift from which it stems was part of a culture of evaluation and assessment oriented towards the securing of public funding and the accommodation of changes in the education structure such

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Kamini Vellodi as the introduction of PhDs in art.1 A milestone in this changing landscape occurred in 1992, when for the first time UK art and design schools were eval­ uated on research performance (in what was called the Research Assessment Exercise [RAE], now known as the Research Evaluation Framework [REF]). As is well known, this shift was the consequence of a bureaucratic decision to rationalise government and public higher education funding (by bodies such as the Arts and Humanities Research Council [AHRC]) through assessment (Butt 2017, 74).2 By the late 1990s, similar assessment exercises were being conducted across the Nordic countries, parts of Eastern Europe and Australia. Even if they do not exhaust the practices of artistic research, the coordinates of these national research bureaucratic frameworks continue to shape the iden­ tity, recognition, and language of artistic research both within and beyond the academy. And although it has led to a host of intellectual debates and inquiry, it is difficult to deny that a major impetus of artistic research has been economic, policy-driven, and managerial (Elkins 2009). Addressing the ongoing impact of this is important for conceptualising alternatives. While the notion of research, as a systematic investigation to produce know­ ledge, has long been a tenet of scholarship, particularly within the sciences, it was not formalised, defined, and assigned agendas as a reality for arts and humanities disciplines until the late-twentieth-century transformations of the academy. To the traditional notion of research, the REF adds an empha­ sis on sharing, defining research as “a process of investigation leading to new insights, effectively shared” (REF 2019, 90). Even if research is undertaken by individuals, its significance in REF terms—and the terms of national fund­ ing and policy agendas—lies in its dissemination among and reception by a community—both the academic community and, increasingly, a community beyond the academy (evaluated through the criteria of “impact”). These distinctions and tensions assume a peculiar significance in the case of art. Research has long been one of the terms used by artists to describe what they do and by those thinking about what artists do. However, while artists may have always researched, they have not always practised “artistic research.” Leonardo researched anatomy, meteorological phenomena, and hydraulics; Delacroix researched colour, Goethe’s Faust, and French revolutionary poli­ tics; Kandinsky researched molecular biology and chaos theory; Kara Walker researches African American history and the craft of silhouettes; Philippe Parreno researches technologies of sound and light and the ecology of deepsea creatures. But surely such research was/is construed—both by the artists and by the recipients of their work—as only one element (typically, the intellec­



1 Borgdorff (2013, 146) points out the variety of expressions used to denote research in the arts, adding to this list “recherche-creation” in Francophone Canada, “research by design” in architecture and product design, and “performative research” in Australia. Borgdorff (2012, 34–35) outlines the institutional and bureaucratic factors in the emergence of artistic research agendas, noting the role of the Bologna process. 2 Clive Cazeaux (2017, 2) mentions the Coldstream Report, published by the National Advisory Council on Art Education in the 1960s, which recommended that art education move from its traditional focus on skills and craft-based training towards a “liberal education in art,” which involved historical and contextual studies, and eventually research.

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Thought beyond Research tual/cognitive element) of a multifaceted process. That is to say, with its know­ ledge-oriented connotation, research has historically not been a term used to designate the entirety of artistic practice. It has not been used to encapsulate other important aspects of art-making such as imagining, playing, failing, for­ getting, not-knowing, and all those innumerable activities that defy naming. Certainly, the dynamics and crossovers between art and research were con­ siderably affected and shaped by the modernist and avant-garde agendas of self-critique, self-reflection, and self-theorisation from the early twentieth cen­ tury onwards. The assimilation of theory into the art world in the later twen­ tieth century—not just as sets of concepts, but as practices of ideas (reflecting many theorist’s own understandings of what they were doing3)—was also key to these dynamics, playing an important role in the mutations from “art” to “practice” and the beginnings of research agendas that understood themselves as “practices.” But it is clear that we are no longer in that moment of crosso­ ver and exchange between conceptualist self-reflection, theory’s practice, and art’s expansion of its sites of practice (beyond the “object” or “work”), much of which took place across, or outside, the academy. The practice of theory that once supplied art with critical and subversive modes of working has also changed dramatically in nature since the 1980s. Both practice and theory have been subjected to changes in the academy, and become part of the professional­ isation and institutionalisation of the humanities (Melville and Readings 1995, 24). Describing artistic research as a practice is no less an institutionalised and institutionalising approach than describing artistic research as academic. So, when in the 1990s artists begin to define their practice as artistic research, or start to practice in the name of research, it becomes possible to say that the naming, extraction, definition, and attention to research as a distinct element of artistic practice are reflections of the institutional and increasingly academic reality and necessities that art faces.4 A telling symptom of this is that artis­ tic research has not simply provoked intellectual inquiry on the nature of art (although it has undoubtedly achieved this as well), but has been principally concerned with the nature of art in academic institutions, with art as an aca­ demic discipline.5



3 See, for example, Foucault’s view of theory as an instrument that “does not express, translate, or apply a praxis” but that is a praxis (Deleuze and Foucault 2004, 207); and Deleuze’s view that “theory is itself a practice, just as much as its object” (Deleuze 1989, 280) and that “praxis is a network of relays from one theoretical point to another” (Deleuze and Foucault 2004, 206). 4 Of course, there are those who disagree with this: cf. Mick Wilson and Schelte van Ruiten (2013): “different arts disciplines have given rise to research agendas and desires for art-as-research and artmaking-as-an-act-of-enquiry” (24)—such as theatre, film, the practice of theory itself, and new critical and theoretical paradigms, and writing as a practice. The heterogeneous genealogy of artistic research is not limited to its “determination by institution and policy imperatives” (25). 5 This is reflected in the literature. See the opening lines of Borgdorff ’s The Conflict of the Faculties (2012): “This book is about artistic research—what it is, or what it could be. And it is about the place that artis­ tic research could have in academia, within the whole of academic research” (2). On the following page, he defines artistic research as “an endeavour in which the artistic and the academic are united” (3). The essays in Schwab and Borgdorff ’s The Exposition of Artistic Research (2013a) also affirm this link between artistic research and the academic framing of art, while bringing new framings of this link, in part by attending to the longer histories of art as an epistemic activity.

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Kamini Vellodi As with the other academic disciplines and subject areas within the human­ ities and sciences, research has become the means by which art is measured, discussed, assessed, compared, critiqued, and taught as a production of knowledge whose value can be evidenced through criteria. If a discipline can be defined as a practice of thinking that has grounded itself in a set of identifi­ able characteristics (methods, concepts, discourses, theories, terminologies, problems), such that it can recognise itself and be practised by a community of thinkers, one might even say that artistic research has become a discipline of its own, complete with all the usual tropes of any discipline or sub-disci­ pline: self-identified practitioners (“artist-researchers”), journals, specialists, specialist publications, textbooks and reference books, conferences, websites, committed defenders, and critics (Quigley 2015, 95).6 What many have identi­ fied as the interdisciplinary nature of artistic research is also consistent with the interdisciplinary agendas of universities that have been a, in some cases enforced, feature of departmental life for several decades.7 Indeed, as James Elkins (2009, 113) has remarked, with a tone of a warning, artistic research has become increasingly naturalised and assumed as a given. It has “come to seem natural, as if research and new knowledge were . . . necessary to the considera­ tion of studio art.”8 What happens to art when it accepts this naturalisation of artistic research? One consequence is that it begins to practice in an image of what it recognises itself to be, perpetuating a reproductive rather than produc­ tive dynamic. Indeed, how can the obligation to do research not affect the nature and potential of art? One consistent element of the image of what artistic research recognises itself to be is “knowledge.”9 Insofar as research is understood in terms of knowledge production10 and artistic research as a branch/type of research, this is not surprising. Some have argued that art participates in a mode of know­



6 See also Mick Wilson and Schelte van Ruiten’s remark: “the development of a research infrastructure is key to discipline formation, and it may also have a strong bearing on research content” (2013, 28). 7 Henk Slager’s claim that “artistic research seems to continually thwart academically defined dis­ ciplines” and that “the most intrinsic characteristic of artistic research is based on the continuous transgression of boundaries in order to generate novel, reflexive zones” doesn’t adequately address the fact that even the thwarting of disciplines and such transgression of boundaries is also now recognised by the academy (under the rubrics of inter- or trans-disciplinarity) (Slager, quoted in Sullivan 2011, 100). 8 This naturalisation of “research and new knowledge … prompts authors to distort their own arguments by forcing them to fit concepts that seem natural and inevitable, but are in fact incommensurate with the author’s own ideas” (Elkins 2009, 113). Hannula, Suoranta, and Vad (2005, 11) indicate such natural­ isation when they remark that, “the meaning of [artistic research] is understood, and is without doubt seen as being important.” It is this “without doubt” that is of concern. 9 The majority of publications on artistic research associate it with knowledge production. Borgdorff (2012, 17) is just one of many commentators/theorists to present knowledge as an embedded value of artistic research, referring to “the unique nature of knowledge in art.” He further argues that the way in which research in the arts “distinguishes itself from other research” depends in part on the type of knowledge it participates in (along with its methodologies, and the nature of its research object) (31). “A question for those advocating practice-based research is not so much a concern for analyzing types of visual arts knowing and their effects, but the significance of art making as a site for knowledge con­ struction and meaning making itself ” (Sullivan 2005, 86). “The overarching preoccupations of the past decade have been questions of a broadly procedural and epistemological nature” (Wilson and Ruiten 2013, 25). 10 Many references could be cited here. One example is Helga Nowotny’s “Research is the curiosity-drive production of new knowledge” (2011, xix).

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Thought beyond Research ledge that is comparable to “scientific” knowledge,11 while others have argued for knowledge that is unique to art and distinguished from the sciences (Biggs and Büchler 2011; Borgdorff 2012). Some argue that knowledge is located in the art object/practice; others, that it is an effect occasioned by the art object/ practice. Some have argued for the separation of art and knowledge, returning to entrenched historical debates concerning the distinctions between aesthet­ ics and epistemology. Often, the question of knowledge is informed and seem­ ingly shaped by the formulations of the academy—that is, the systematisation of knowledge by disciplines and its practice, dissemination, and uptake by a scholarly community. This framing persists because the question facing artis­ tic research is not just one of ontology (what it is), but epistemology (knowing what it is) (Schwab and Borgdorff 2013b, 11). The REF defines research as “a process of investigation leading to new insights, effectively shared” (2019, 48). It is intriguing to see how close the scholarly definitions of artistic research remain to this bureaucratic defini­ tion.12 Some scholars have even written that they see “no reason not to” take the RAE definition of research “as a benchmark for research in the arts” (Borgdorff 2012, 42), a remark that suggests a curious acceptance of art as governed by academic and institutionalised requirements. A few examples of current defini­ tions of artistic research—which, while they necessarily cannot be exhaustive, indicate certain recurring traits—reveal this proximity: “a clear and conscious attempt to frame the practical enquiry in research terms, with a theory-laden question being explored through methodologically transparent experimental investigation, which is documented in written form for the research commu­ nity” (Butt 2017, 81); “the continuous transgression of boundaries in order to generate novel, reflexive zones” that produce new knowledge (Slager 2009, 51); “any kind of research is primarily a matter of being in accordance with the way it is exercised within the research community” (Friberg 2015, 25). Such identified characteristics of artistic research—that it involves some type of conscious reflection on itself, that it involves an identified/identifiable methodology, that it can be communicated to a research community, that it produces new knowledge—could together be said to contribute to the image of artistic research. I take this notion of image from Gilles Deleuze.

Deleuze and the image of thought The problem of thought with or without an image runs throughout Deleuze’s philosophy from his early work Difference and Repetition (1968, see Deleuze 1994) to What Is Philosophy? (1991, see Deleuze and Guattari 1994). It concerns the distinction between thought as production of the new, which to Deleuze is the 11 “Science and the arts are . . . much closer to each other than their currently institutionalized forms might lead one to expect. They share the creative impulse and their main driving forces of motivation: curiosity and imagination. . . . Uncertainty is therefore inherent in scientific research and in the artistic production of new knowledge alike” (Nowotny 2011, xviii). 12 According to Butt (2017, 80), artistic research “reflects a view of academia as a kind of Habermasian public sphere, where contributions can be clearly assessed by the community of experts against a known body of accumulated knowledge through the workings of communicative reason.”

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Kamini Vellodi aim of genuine thought, and thought as reproduction, which is an obstacle to genuine thought and is to be overcome. Thought as production affirms differ­ ence; thought as reproduction upholds identity. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze calls for the destruction of the image of thought (thought that is beset by presuppositions) and calls for a thinking with­ out image (thought that begins without presuppositions). Later, he will nuance this assertion. In the Preface to the English edition of Difference and Repetition, Deleuze writes that the task for philosophy is to challenge the traditional, dog­ matic image of thought and to think a new image of thought—a liberated image without presuppositions: it seemed to me that the powers of difference and repetition could be reached only by putting into question the traditional image of thought. By this I mean not only that we think according to a given method, but also that there is a more or less implicit, tacit or presupposed image of thought which determines our goals when we try to think. For example, we suppose that thought possess a good nature, and the thinker a good will (naturally to “want” the true); we take as a model the process of recognition—in other words, a common sense or employment of all the faculties on a supposed same object; we designate error, nothing but error, as the enemy to be fought; and we suppose that the true concerns solutions—in other words, propositions capable of serving as answers. This is the classic image of thought, and as long as the critique has not been carried to the heart of that image it is difficult to conceive of thought as encompassing those problems which point beyond the propositional mode; or as involving encounters which escape all recognition; or as confronting its true enemies, which are quite different from thought; or as attaining that which tears thought from its natural torpor and notorious bad will, and forces us to think. A new image of thought—or rather, a liberation of thought from those images which imprison it: this is what I had already sought to discover in Proust. Here, however, in Difference and Repetition, this search is autonomous and it becomes the condition for the discovery of these two concepts. It is therefore the third chapter which now seems to me the most necessary and the most concrete, and which serves to introduce subsequent books up to and including the research undertaken with Guattari where we invoked a vegetal model of thought: the rhizome in opposition to the tree, a rhizome-thought instead of an arborescent thought. (Deleuze 1994, xvi–xvii)

Deleuze claims that beneath “methods” and beneath “questions,” there is an image of thought that determines the way we think and the goals towards which thought is oriented. Traditionally, this is an image of thought as possessing a good or upright nature (which knows what it means to think and wants what is right or true) (ibid., 134), of the thinker as possessing a good will (someone who wants to think), and of thinking as a natural capacity (that everyone can think). To liberate thought from this traditional, dogmatic image requires not just the replacement of one method by another, or one question by another, but a total critique. In What Is Philosophy?, the liberated image of thought (which Deleuze and Guattari also call a “plane of immanence”)—an image that is no longer dogmatic and beset by presuppositions—is again characterised in opposition to method, a state of knowledge or opinions held about thought. The liberated image of thought is the means by which one finds one’s bearings in thought and its only trait is that it encompasses a movement that can be carried to infin­ 220

Thought beyond Research ity. Infinite movement is what thought “claims by right,” beyond the reference points of object and subject (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 37). We see then that for Deleuze it is not images themselves that are the prob­ lem, but the way images are uncritically assumed as determining the way thought thinks. It is not a particular image that concerns Deleuze, but thought as it is conceived through any fixed image. It is when an image upholds a set of presuppositions, or doxa, that it blocks genuine thought. Rather than pro­ ceeding according to an image that precedes it, Deleuze argues that genuine thought must create, and keep re-creating, its images as it takes place, such that images act only as plastic horizons for thought. So the point is not to replace, for instance, an arborescent image with a rhizomatic image but to affirm the image of a rhizome as dynamic, restless, and constantly changing. Deleuze begins his chapter in Difference and Repetition on the image of thought with the claim that in philosophy, “beginning means eliminating all presuppo­ sitions” (1994, 129). Whereas science begins with “objective presuppositions” that axiomatic rigour can eliminate, in philosophy, presuppositions are as much subjective as they are objective (ibid.). They are opinions, and not just internal to concepts. This makes them more insidious and harder to detect. For instance, Descartes succeeds in eliminating the objective presuppositions of the concept man, but he cannot avoid the subjective presuppositions of what is meant by self, thinking, and being. With the proposition “I think, therefore I am,” he presumes everyone knows what it means to think, what it means to be, and what is meant by the “self.” These presuppositions constitute the “prephilosophical image” of philosophy—something that philosophy assumes but does not critique before it begins. As such, knowledge is not simply an external goal for or outcome of thinking, but, more perniciously, is an internal presup­ position, an opinion, of what thought naturally is. That “everybody knows” in a pre-philosophical and pre-conceptual manner what it means to think and to be is a subjective presupposition that allows Descartes to assume the universality of his premises. The presupposition that everybody knows what it means to think implicates the three further presuppositions we have mentioned: that the thinker wants to think (his good will), that thought wants what is right or true (that it pos­ sesses an upright nature), and that everyone can think (that there is a natural capacity for thought). “It is because everybody naturally thinks [that thinking is part of human nature] that everybody is supposed to know implicitly what it means to think,” Deleuze (1994, 131) writes. The pre-philosophical image of thought is thus a “natural” image of thought, a “common sense” (defined by Deleuze as the subjective identity of the self with its faculties) in which every­ one supposedly participates and in which thought can recognise itself. Before thought even begins, then, it is subject to an image such that when it does begin it has the possibility of recognising itself in itself. Recognition— which Deleuze (1994, 133) defines as “the harmonious exercise of all the fac­ ulties upon a supposed same object” is inherently conservative insofar as it identifies through comparison with what is already known. Even if each fac­ ulty—perception, memory, imagination, understanding—has its own way of 221

Kamini Vellodi relating to the object, an object is recognised when all the faculties relate them­ selves to a form of identity in the object. This depends upon a subjective princi­ ple of collaboration of the faculties, a unity of the faculties, a common sense. As Deleuze explains, “for Kant as for Descartes, it is the identity of the Self in the ‘I think’ which grounds the harmony of all the faculties and their agreement on the form of a supposed Same object” (ibid.). This institution or grounding of the act of thought in its dogmatic image is the process by which the logic of identity, and the form of representation, as well as the act of recognition (which is closely related to representation), takes hold of thinking. Representation is a process that operates through the differ­ ent faculties and unites them through judgements based on identity and the exclusion of what cannot be identified (Williams 2013, 128). The concern raised by Deleuze is that what is unrecognisable or imperceptible cannot be thought as it cannot be recognised. The dogmatic, orthodox, and moral image of thought (it is moral in uphold­ ing values of truth, right, and the good) is not exclusive to philosophy. Art too has been subject, has subjected itself, at every stage of its history, to images of its own thinking, “pre-artistic” presuppositions that “everyone knows.” In fif­ teenth-century Florence, for instance, it might have been assumed that “every­ one knows” that disegno is a value of art. In European painting before the late nineteenth century it would have been assumed that “everyone knows” that painting is the application of paint on to canvas. Since the systematic rejection of rules and conventions from the early twentieth century onwards, it is harder to say what the image of art has involved, although both this “critical” qual­ ity and the mandatory element of the concept/idea are certainly strong con­ tenders.13 And today, it seems that what characterises artistic production is that artistic research is increasingly (at least in the UK, Australia, and Europe) the thing that “everyone knows.”

Artistic research as an image of thought I would argue that artistic research presents itself as an image of thought, and as one of the dominant images currently assumed by artistic practice of the kind of thinking that it does. One might say that artistic research is simply the latest in a historical sequence of images and sets of presuppositions about the nature of art; indeed, that the history of art can be understood as the chang­ ing sets of presuppositions over historical time. But in several ways, artistic research is more prone than other previous images to being dogmatic insofar as the values of recognition, common sense, and identification are embedded within it. Certainly, the dogmatic image does not exhaust the possibilities of the practices of artistic research and attending to the potential excesses of artistic research to its dogmatic image is vital for conceptualising future pos­ sibilities. However, this first requires an understanding of the ways in which 13 Contemporary art of significance after Duchamp is often that which “overthrows, displaces, abandons or subverts rules and conventions” (De Duve [1984] 2012, 27).

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Thought beyond Research artistic research can, and has, presented itself, and in many ways continues to present itself, as dogmatic. Practices of artistic research routinely investigate the objective presuppo­ sitions of terminology and concepts such as method, communication, and experiment, subjecting them to critique, analysis, and redefinition. Indeed, such “scientific” investigation is a familiar feature of the literature, which often foregrounds terms such as defining, methodologies, and concepts of . . . . However, it might be argued that less attention is given to the investigation of subjective presuppositions—the things that “everyone knows”—about research: for instance, that it is recognisable, communicable, communitarian, and know­ ledge-oriented; even that it involves research. Which is to say, while these notions might be attended to, this will usually be as concepts that need redefinition or even replacement, rather than opinions that need a total critique regarding the type of thinking they presume and upon which they are grounded. In a total cri­ tique, recognition, communicability, communitarianism, and knowledge—as presuppositions of artistic research—must be extracted, examined, put to the test, and possibly rejected. Without this, artistic research remains insufficiently critical, insofar as the ground of critique is established before critique even begins (the classic foreclosure that Deleuze identifies in Kant, Descartes, and others).14 Such is a foundationalist approach—assuming that research is a given and immediately present for thinking, rather than as a reality to be contested from the start. It is further possible to argue that artistic research upholds the three characteristics that Deleuze attributes to the dogmatic image of thought: good will, since the artist researcher wants to do something (wants, for instance, to think and create new knowledge); upright nature, since the aim of thinking about artistic research is to find the “right” or “effective” formulation/answer; and thinking as a natural capacity, since it is presented as a given that artists can all engage in artistic research and in thinking about artistic research, as though this were a natural and uncontentious thing to do. The claim might be made that artistic research upholds a type of thought about which one can say, or hope to say, that “everybody knows” certain things. Its aim is communal thinking, a thinking shared by a community—even if shared through dissensus, and even if the group of practices is disparate and heterogeneous. Research must be shared—more than one person must agree that it is research, and it is the assumption of the capacity for sharing that upholds a common sense.15 But even if one were to replace recognition, communicability, and knowledge-orientation with other propositions such as experimentation, misrecognition, and silence, this replacement in itself would 14 This dynamic of foreclosure is established even in Christopher Frayling’s essay Research in Art and Design (1993), widely considered to be foundational to the field. Frayling assumes research as a given, introducing a distinction (taken from Herbert Read) between “research into art,” “research for art,” and “research through art,” rather than deconstructing the association of art and research by attempting to show how the presuppositions of research have emerged and how they operate. 15 “Recently, we have seen the emergence of thematically coordinated presentations of artistic research, with conferences and publications beginning to adopt a more pronounced inter-relationship between papers and panels referring to objects of enquiry rather than simply presenting projects together as examples of artistic research” (Wilson and Ruiten 2013, 26).

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Kamini Vellodi not fundamentally alter the image of thought grounding these values. Although we might not yet know what artistic research is, the practices, discourses, and debates present it as knowable, and something that everyone can know (even if they disagree with what is known); and as recognisable, and something that can be recognised (even if what is recognised is rejected). That is, contests about the definition, meaning, and value of artistic research are “voluntary struggles for recognition” (Deleuze 1994, 135) that can only occur on the basis of com­ mon sense and established and shared values. Debating and replacing terms, methods, concepts, and opinions, and producing new criteria or paradigms, already presupposes a common ground. But to effect a total critique, this com­ mon ground must itself be called into question. Now, one might counter these remarks with the objection that artistic research is in fact a contested term, continuously being scrutinised, debated, and revised. For some it involves the commonality of art and science, along with their putatively shared terms (the experiment, the method, the epistemic output), whereas others feel it is distinct from scientific research practices in important ways. For some it is inextricable from the production of knowledge, while others feel it involves other types of production such as open-ended query, interpretation, or reflection. For some, all art has a research component while others wish to reclaim art as autonomous and distinct from research. In any case we can hardly say that “everyone knows” what is meant by artistic research—can we? Nevertheless, that there is no consensus on the meaning of a term does not mean that the ground for such consensus does not exist. It is insofar as it is made possible by the structure of thought that consensus may appear as a feature of thought. Two people may disagree but may nevertheless both think in such a way that one day they could agree. It is not what is agreed or disagreed about that matters (the “objective presupposition”) but the quality of thought that embeds agreement as a value (the “subjective” presupposition). For instance, debating what kind of knowledge artistic research is—whether it is scientific or artistic, tacit or analytical, determinate or experimental, and so on—does not obviate the fact that we assume this debating as a natural exercise, that thought wants to find the “right” answer, that the thinker (artist-researcher) wants to think, and the assumption of knowledge and research as presuppo­ sitions to our inquiry.16 In addition, whatever characteristics the debate might assume, artist-researchers surely do not doubt that they are thinking and do not doubt that they are thinking about, or in relation to, something called artistic research. The research model can be adjusted, augmented, distorted as much as one wants—but it is not abandoned—it is retained as a presupposition for the inquiries. In this way, the upright nature, good will, and putative natural capacity of artistic research’s image of thought is maintained. Representation, recognition, and identity need more than new opinions to be dislodged. But why should they be dislodged? Why should we be concerned 16 A fruitful line for further research might consider Deleuze’s critique of the relation between epistemol­ ogy, power, and the “ideological technocracy” of the university (Deleuze and Guattari 2004, 221).

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Thought beyond Research if artistic research functions as a dogmatic image of thought? Two possible responses might be proposed: first, by upholding this image, thought is con­ signed to reproduction, and risks remaining impervious to those encounters that escape recognition; second, art is subsumed into the image that thought has of itself as natural, upright, and something that “everyone knows,” and we are left with the assumption that artists, just like everyone else, can think about what they do, insofar as thinking is something we can all do naturally. But if we are all essentially thinkers in the same way, then what role does the singularity of art play in art’s thinking? Reactionary answers to this question, such as the view that what comprises art’s singularity has nothing to do with research, or that art is innate, beyond measures, criteria, and evaluation, are not adequate. For these constitute no less a dogmatic image of thought than the one that artistic research can present us with. The task is not to substitute or retrieve one set of criteria in place of another. We are instead obliged to ask ourselves about the singularity of art to and for the endeavour of thinking. At the same time, it might be fruitful to bear in mind provocations such as the following: What might be a practice of artistic research that could not be recognised as such, one that evaded discourse and other modes of communication, that could not be shared, made no move to contribute to knowledge, and did not practise in the name of artistic research? What might occur if it were impossible to do artistic research, or if an artist did not want to engage in research, or wanted to find the wrong answer, or wanted to produce something that only he or she can access?

Thought without image The thought which is born in thought, the act of thinking which is neither given by innateness nor presupposed by reminiscence but engendered in its genitality, is a thought without image. —Gilles Deleuze (1994, 167)

It has often been noted that what is singular about artistic practice for and as thought is its affirmation of the sensible. For Deleuze, the sensible is not just the medium for thought, or a component of thought, but the occasion for thought. Art “as the very being of the sensible” (Deleuze 1994, 57) is not just an object to be thought about, but the potential condition for thought with­ out presuppositions. This is the claim in Difference and Repetition. The being of the sensible is not exclusive to art as a discipline, institutionalised reality, or ontologically distinct object of experience, but constitutive of the artistic/ creative element of thought across disciplinary boundaries. This idea of art as the activity of producing something from the excesses of sensation already raises compelling potentials for artistic research—as a transdisciplinary reality beyond the discipline or institution of art, as a horizon of experience beyond established coordinates of art. In What Is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari (1994, 198) claim that art is a practice of thought that thinks through sensa­ 225

Kamini Vellodi tions. Between Difference and Repetition and this later text, then, we are alerted to a double function of art—first, that art thinks in sensations and, second, that when we encounter art as a being of sensation, we are forced to think. In the West, the idea that art thinks—and through this thinking poses a con­ frontation to the philosophical distinctions between aesthetic and concept, feeling and thinking—is by no means new. From the fifteenth-century notion of the concetto—the artistic concept—as a crucial component of painting’s liberal, intellectual character, the notion of thinking art has assumed various guises and levels of importance up to its affirmation by twentieth-century con­ ceptual art practices in which the content of the work was comprised by its con­ cept. Some feel that it is this legacy of thinking art to which today’s practices of artistic research are heir.17 However, “thought” does not necessarily mean cog­ nitive or conceptual thought, and the notion of thinking art does not require a cognitive element, or thinking through concepts. Thought involves sensibil­ ity, intuition, imagination, understanding, and can even involve paradox and stupidity. Deleuze’s view of thought as a rendering consistent of matter whose only attribute is infinite movement invites a theory of thought that circumvents the customary privileging of concepts, and affirms the non- or extra-cognitive aspects of art, while also overturning the binary between sensation and con­ cept by affirming thought as a passage between these two registers.18 For both the early and the late Deleuze, to think (to engage in genuine thought) is to eliminate all presuppositions. For this, thought must begin not with thought but with something outside thought. Thought must happen to thought as a violent, contingent, and involuntary event by which something outside thought ruptures what thought is. This element of the outside is prof­ fered by the sensible, understood as a field of flux, of difference. To begin thinking without presuppositions, then, is to think through the sensible, to think through the encounter with that element of change in the sensible that Deleuze calls difference or intensity. Such an encounter “calls forth forces in thought which are not the forces of recognition, today or tomorrow, but the powers of a completely other model, from an unrecognised and unrecognis­ able terra incognita,” an ungrounding that “strips thought of its ‘innateness,’ and treats it every time as something which has not always existed, but begins, forced and under constraint” (Deleuze 1994, 136). Such an experience cannot be decided in advance, and its advent cannot be planned. In the act of recognition, “the sensible is not at all that which can only be sensed, but that which bears directly upon the senses in an object which can be recalled, imagined or conceived. The sensible is referred to an object which may not only be experienced other than by sense, but may itself be attained by 17 “The emergence of conceptualism in the 1960s had a decisive impact, making the question of art as a form of cognitive activity central to practices within both certain art academies and different institu­ tional sites of the international art world” (Wilson and Ruiten 2013, 23; see also Nowotny 2011, xvii). 18 In this, Deleuze is part of a trajectory beginning with Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, and continuing with thinkers such as Hubert Damisch (1994), Roland Barthes (1981), and, more recently, Sveltana Alpers and Michael Baxandall (1994), John Rajchman (2006), Ernst Van Alphen (2005), and Hanneke Grooten­ boer (2011), all of whom have argued that art (and in Barthes’s case, photography) thinks, and in ways that are different from habitual thinking.

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Thought beyond Research other faculties. It therefore presupposes the exercise of the senses and the exer­ cise of the other faculties in a common sense” (Deleuze 1994, 139). But what if what we experienced of the sensible could not be recognised, and could only be sensed? In the experience of the unrecognisable, or imperceptible (insensible), sensibility finds itself before its own limit, and raises itself to a transcendent exercise (it would expand beyond itself) such that it could no longer align with the other faculties in a common sense. In turn, common sense enters into a dis­ cordant play; the faculties become unhinged and their limits exposed. To begin thinking without presuppositions, to think that which can only be sensed, is an activity that some of us are forced into, and which we cannot recognise when it happens. Such a moment signals, for Deleuze, the moment of art—art captures the difference in the sensible, and incites encounters that generate thought without image (or liberated images of thought) (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 197). Art does not just present us with sensible qualities, but exposes us to the sensible as an “intense world of differences,” a world in genesis that ordinarily goes undetected (Deleuze 1994, 57). It does this by exposing the real matter of sensation as constituted by heterogeneous forces (rather than simply the sub­ stance underlying form)—for instance, through modulations of colour, sound, words, or stone.19 When we sit down and think about artistic research, or debate it at a confer­ ence, we participate in the mode of recognition and representation. We presup­ pose, however loosely or vaguely, the thing that is thought about; we know that we are about to think about something, and we recognise that we are doing so (or not) when we begin. It is a voluntary and reasonable exercise. Recognition is upheld here insofar as the same object (the object of artistic research) is treated as at once sensible and experiential, conceivable and understandable. We can sense it and come to know it, imagine it and remember it. We can analyse it, reflect upon it, practise it, and forget it. Here the faculties are aligned in a com­ mon sense and act of recognition on an apparently self-same object. Indeed, it is this integration of all the faculties in the act of thinking that would perhaps account for the seemingly endless interchangeability of terms used to describe the type of thinking that artistic research is: investigation, interrogation, rep­ resentation, interpretation, reflection, evaluation, description, analysis, docu­ mentation. This is a symptom of a generalised image of thought applied to an object presumed to be the same. Artistic research is not reflection above all other things; it does not necessarily include reflection. We could just as well call it analysis. This lack of specificity, or rather necessity, is a matter of concern. That the thinking that art engages in, or occasions, is an ill-defined and gener­ alised image of thought says nothing of the singularity of art in the moment of thinking, and indicates the lack of any resistance or imposition upon thinking. Can experience alone be sufficient for artistic research? It is often expected that we must be able to do something with our experience of artistic research and its objects/practices—enter it into a discourse, discuss our findings in a community, arrive at consensus or dissensus, and so on. But what if we were to 19 For an elaboration, see Vellodi (2019b, 93 – 100).

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Kamini Vellodi remain with experience and that which is extreme in this experience—that ele­ ment of the unrecognisable or indiscernible? Deleuze’s ontology of art offers one position from which to argue for art’s capacity to escape, contest, and reinvent whatever image it has of itself, and in doing so renew that image. It is through art’s role in and for thought that artistic research might be liberated from its dogmatic image.

Concluding remarks This paper has argued that artistic research risks upholding what Deleuze calls a dogmatic image of thought, an image of thought that is grounded in pre­ suppositions. In doing so, it risks consigning thought—about art and through art—to a reproductive mode with the values of recognition, representation and identity at its core. It risks doing so through its retention of presuppo­ sitions such as knowledge, communality, and communication, and the good nature, good will, and natural capacity of thought. This naturalisation of artis­ tic research obstructs its productive value. Such presuppositions of knowledge, community, and communication are consolidated and sanctioned by the insti­ tutional frameworks of artistic research, which continue to supply a primary horizon for the self-definition, practice, and evaluation of artistic research. The challenges addressed by artistic research are generally what Deleuze calls “objective” (they concern definitions, terms, methods, and criteria) rather than “subjective” (entailing a total critique of the foundation of opinions). Terms such as knowledge, production, and even research itself are retained, even if their semantic content is altered. One consequence of this retention of presuppo­ sitions is that art is levelled to other forms of thought; the singularity of art is subsumed to a generalising image that can also characterise other ways of thinking. It is this generalisation that Deleuze helps us address and augment. Attending to the singularity of art involves affirming it as a being of the sen­ sible. Here, the sensible is not a determinate field, but the differential matter of experience that is given to be sensed, and which has no determinate cogni­ tive component. As the flux of difference, always changing, what it presents and occasions continually undermines fixed presuppositions and escapes acts of representation. Thus, the question is not to return to an idea of art as sen­ sory and nonrepresentational, made in the name of values such as the “the aesthetic” or the “new”: a return that would contain aspects of regression in an age when the reality of art—including its alignment with the reality of the university—has irrevocably changed. The concept of a thought without image is not an invitation to determine that content as something specific and name­ able—say “anti-institutional” or “critical” or “sensory.” Rather, it is to maintain an element of the outside in and for thinking—the nameless, imperceptible, unrecognisable element that through its imposition makes thought produc­ tive, and which retains the freedom of thought as infinite movement. The val­ ues that we assign to this element can and will continually change. This is what Deleuze means when he says that to begin with the pure being of the sensible is to begin without presuppositions. The thoughts that arise from 228

Thought beyond Research such encounters have no determined coordinates. They could be “upright,” but they could also be nonsensical, stupid, boring, or malevolent. What is singular about art is not to be located in any set of qualities, but in its production of a thought without image (or of a liberated image of thought, which for Deleuze and Guattari is the same thing). It is in this way that art might provide a function for artistic research, as a genetic element of mobilising thought. Indeed, the question is not to oppose one image of thought (artistic research) with another (art), which would only perpetuate ideologies. The problem facing artistic research is not artistic research itself, but artistic research as a dogmatic image, inscribed within and upholding a set of presuppositions as natural, communal, and recognisable—where many of these presuppositions are aligned with the institutional culture of academia and policy. As such, the role of art for artistic research would be as that element that unhinges artistic research from these presuppositions and keeps artistic research in perpetual disequilibrium by continually affirming the perspec­ tive of genesis. By repeatedly renewing art as the disruptive, outside force to its own image, artistic research might be made a reality in becoming; not a dominant image of artistic practice but one among the many heterogeneous realities mapped by art. Rather than practising in the name of artistic research, this would require us to attune our practice to the encounters that escape all recognition.20 Finally, if, rather than an institutional and historically specific reality, art functions as an event of the sensible, the genetic element of thought beyond works of art themselves, then it can be the occasion for productive thinking across disciplinary forms of thought. This has intriguing potentials for the dynamic between the disciplines in the climate of research. Instead of art being led or shaped by the definitions, realities, and agendas of disciplines other than itself (namely, the sciences), art could assume itself as the trans­ disciplinary element of thought, exceeding and retroactively augmenting the images that other disciplinary modes of thought have of themselves.21 References Alpers, Sveltana, and Michael Baxandall. Biggs, Michael, and Daniela Büchler. 2011. 1994. Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence. “Communities, Values, Conventions and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Actions.” In The Routledge Companion to Alphen, Ernst van. 2005. Art in Mind. Research in the Arts, edited by Michael Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Biggs and Henrik Karlsson, 82–98. Barthes, Roland. 1981. Camera Lucida: Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Reflections on Photography. Translated by Borgdorff, Henk. 2012. The Conflict of the Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Faculties: Perspectives on Artistic Research Wang. First published 1980 as La Chambre and Academia. Leiden: Leiden University Claire: Note Sure La Photographie (Paris: Press. Gallimard). 20 This resonates with Michael Schwab’s use of the term transpositions to think the differential, and multi­ ple, rather than identitarian and representational, nature of artistic research (2018, 7). 21 I develop this idea in Vellodi (2019a). See Michael Schwab’s remark: “rather, today something ‘artistic’ seems to be needed in other areas of research in order to realise the complicated relationships we have with knowledge objects” (2018, 9).

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Kamini Vellodi ———. 2013. “A Brief Survey of Current Debates on the Concepts and Practices of Research in the Arts.” In SHARE Handbook for Artistic Research Education, edited by Mick Wilson and Schelte van Ruiten, 146–52. Amsterdam: ELIA. Butt, Danny. 2017. Artistic Research in the Future Academy. Bristol: Intellect. Cazeaux, Clive. 2017. Art, Research, Philosophy. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Damisch, Hubert. 1994. Origin of Perspective. Translated by John Goodman. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. First published 1987 as L’origine de la perspective (Paris: Flammarion). De Duve, Thierry. (1984) 2012. “When Form Has Become Attitude—And Beyond.” In Theory in Contemporary Art Since 1985, edited by Zoya Kocur and Simon Leung, 2nd ed., 21–34. Malden, MA: Blackwell. First published 1984 in The Artist and the Academy: Issues in Fine Art Education and the Wider Cultural Context, edited by Stephen Foster and Nicholas DeVille (Southampton, UK: John Hansard Gallery), 23–40. Deleuze, Gilles. 1989. Cinema 2: The TimeImage. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1985 as Cinéma 2: L’image-temps (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1994. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1968 as Différence et répétition (Paris: Presses universitaires de France). Deleuze, Gilles, and Michel Foucault. 2004. “Intellectuals and Power.” In Desert Islands and Other Texts: 1953–1974, edited by David Lapoujade, translated by Michael Taormina, 206–8. New York: Semiotext(e). Interview first published 1972 as “Gilles Deleuze” (L’arc 49: 3–30). Book first published 2002 as L’île déserte: Textes et entretiens 1953–1974, edited by David Lapoujade (Paris: Minuit). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1994. What Is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1991 as Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Minuit). ———. 2004. “Deleuze and Guattari Fight Back . . .” In Desert Islands and Other Texts: 1953–1974, edited by David Lapoujade,

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translated by Michael Taormina, 216–29. New York: Semiotext(e). Interview first published 1972 as “Deleuze et Guattari s’expliquent” (Quinzaine litteraire 143: 15–19). Book first published 2002 as L’île déserte: Textes et entretiens 1953–1974, edited by David Lapoujade (Paris: Minuit). Elkins, James. 2009. “On Beyond Research and New Knowledge.” In Artists with PhDs: On the New Doctoral Degree in Studio Art, edited by James Elkins, 111–33. Washington: New Academia Publishing. Frayling, Christopher. 1993. Research in Art and Design. Royal College of Arts Research Papers 1 (1). London: Royal College of Art. Friberg, Carsten. 2015. “Can I Argue with a Gesture? About the Virtues of Doing Research.” In Artistic Research: Strategies for Embodiment, edited by Christine Fentz and Tom McGuirk, 21–33. Copenhagen: NSU Press. Grootenboer, Hanneke. 2011. “The Pensive Image: On Thought in Jan van Huysum’s Still Life Paintings.” Oxford Art Journal 34 (1): 13–30. Hannula, Mika, Juha Suoranta, and Tere Vadén. 2005. Artistic Research: Theories, Methods and Practices. Helskini: Academy of Fine Arts; Gothenburg: University of Gothenburg / ArtMonitor. Melville, Stephen, and Bill Readings. 1995. Introduction to Vision and Textuality, edited by Stephen Melville and Bill Readings, 1–29. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan. Nowotny, Helga. 2011. Foreword to The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts, edited by Michael Biggs and Henrik Karlsson, xvii–xxvi. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Quigley, David. 2015. “Syllabus for a Course ‘The History of 20th Century Artistic Research.’” Zeitschrift für Hochschulentwicklung 10 (1): 93–122. Rajchman, John. 2006. “Thinking in Contemporary Art.” Accessed 16 May 2019. http://www.1fagp6sworx55euh. prev.site/forart/wp-content/uploads/ sites/2/2006/01/Forart-Lecture-2006press-release.pdf. REF. 2019. “Guidance on Submissions: REF 2021.” Accessed 24 June 2019. https:// www.ref.ac.uk/media/1092/ref-2019_01guidance-on-submissions.pdf.

Thought beyond Research Schwab, Michael. 2018. Introduction to Transpositions: Aesthetico-Epistemic Operators in Artistic Research, edited by Michael Schwab, 7–21. Orpheus Institute Series. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Schwab, Michael, and Henk Borgdorff, eds. 2013a. The Exposition of Artistic Research: Publishing Art in Academia. Leiden: Leiden University Press. ———. 2013b. Introduction to Schwab and Borgdorff 2013a, 8–20. Slager, Henk. 2009. “Art and Method.” In Artists with PhDs: On the New Doctoral Degree in Studio Art, edited by James Elkins, 49–56. Washington: New Academia Publishing. Sullivan, Graeme. 2005. Art Practice as Research: Inquiry in the Visual Arts. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

———. 2011. “Artistic Cognition and Creativity.” In The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts, edited by Michael Biggs and Henrik Karlsson, 99–119. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Vellodi, Kamini. 2019a. “Diagrammatic Transdisciplinarity: Thought outside Discipline.” In Deleuze, Guattari, and the Problem of Transdisciplinarity, edited by Guillaume Collette. London: Bloomsbury. ———. 2019b. Tintoretto’s Difference: Deleuze, Diagrammatics and Art History. London: Bloomsbury. Williams, James. 2013. Difference and Repetition: A Critical Introduction and Guide. 2nd ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Wilson, Mick, and Schelte van Ruiten. 2013. SHARE Handbook for Artistic Research Education. Amsterdam: ELIA.

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An Avant-Garde “Without Authority” The Posthuman Cosmic Artisan in the Anthropocene jan jagodzinski University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada

The question I wish to explore in this chapter in a broad sense is whether there is sufficient evidence of a new Kunstwollen—a new “will to art”—the term first coined by the Austrian art historian Alois Riegl in the nineteenth century. The term, of course, is meant somewhat ironically as Riegl’s radical historicism was a total rejection of normative aesthetics and any fixed standard of artistic accom­ plishment. The term itself is not easily pinned down, subject to various possible interpretations (Zerner 1976). The will (Wollen) that gives impulse to form as an imaginary structure is as allusive as what Deleuze meant by “style,” which also refers to an imaginary. “Style animates the virtual structure to inhabit the species, classes and orders of representation in an individual way. . . . The style actualizes an image of the thought through linguistic, figural and narrative forms, but the style is a dimension of the image and not a deviation from these forms” (Meiner 1998, 167, 168). So, is there a growing and contagious delirium of desire, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, in this age named controversially the Anthropocene, where the anthropogenic activity of our species has presented an unprecedented problematic of our own making? I am entering, of course, what has become a crowded territory: there is no shortage of writings that address the Anthropocene, the avant-garde, and to a lesser extent quantum theory, a conversation that has now come to awareness through the writings of Karen Barad (2007). My thesis, drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) remarks concerning the cosmic artisan in A Thousand Plateaus, is that we might be able to identify the rise of an avant-garde without authority that addresses the problematic of the Anthropocene in a myriad of ways through any number of monumental artistic expressions—from poetry to architecture. Why “avant-garde” and why “without authority”? There have been any num­ ber of expositions written on the historical avant-garde, disputed claims like that of Peter Bürger (1974) who argues in the Theory of the Avant-Garde that these movements were about “the liquidation of art as an activity that is splitoff from the praxis of life” (56) placing the institutions housing art in jeopardy. Perhaps less controversial is the claim that the European avant-garde was the 233

jan jagodzinski first global expression in the field of culture, presented in its international guise. It did so through an accelerated imperialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that harnessed developments in technology (espe­ cially cinema and the phone exchange), and through colonial expansion that led to the emergence of anthropology as a human science. The West was able to “integrate”; that is, it could dominate the world on behalf of several competing imperial and industrialised powers—French, German, English, Russian, and Swiss technological prowess. All this is well known. More troubling perhaps was the intoxification as Walter Benjamin (1978) called it, of the surrealist principle of the marvellous that was drawn from artists and writers of the peripheries: the “intoxicating” cultures of the indigenous, and the ethnically superimposed populations of Africa, North and South America, and the Caribbean. It brought about the complicated entangled history of an appeal to a so-called primitivism by an avant-garde vanguard to regener­ ate European or Western civilisation from its supposedly decaying bourgeois civilisational roots (Yúdice 1999). Such autochthonous primitivism was linked to a reindigenisation as a struggle for hegemony on the part of emerging middle and proletarian classes and peasant and indigenous groups, those of the periphery that have now unfolded into a postcolonial diaspora and indige­ nous movements in the twenty-first century—now further complicated by the massive global migration movements herded into holding tanks for displaced peoples, these camps characterised as states of exemption, pervaded by “bare life.” The conceptual artist Ai Weiwei’s cine-essay Human Flow brings to the fore this global desolation, raising the horrors of this real-life exodus. This historical entanglement—the territory that is too troublesome to tread, and too dangerous for me personally to enter, as it worries me and raises how the human-rights-and-justice agenda is to be conceptualised—leads one to ask, in what way have contemporary anthropologists, notably Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (1998), who embrace indigenous wisdoms, Buddhist mindfulness, and indigenous sciences of holism been heralded as the inspiration for an eco­ logical fix to the Anthropocene? To what extent is this yet another repetition of a move that the periphery itself undertook in its response to the espirt nouveau or “shock of the new” of the then European/Western centre: for instance, in the Latin American context, the attempt to condemn being European’s “civ­ ilisational double,” or its “civilisational other,” was achieved by drawing on an autochthonous primitivism; or, there are the Mexican muralists, who, when declaring their independence from European and European art, presented the paradox of a nationalism that exalted the primitivism of indigenous culture (native and Indian), declaring that the art of great civilisations of the past was continuous with the indigenous culture of the moment, overlooking the chasm between the elite as the “muralists” of a “people’s art” and a native “popular” art. The muralist David Siqueiros, for instance, maintained that the wholesome spiritual expression of the world was directly related to the art of native (and essentially Indian) peoples. One should then ask, Is the contemporary call to indigenous animism quite different in its repetition today? Or, is it yet another redemptive (and anti-theoretical) stance in these precarious times? 234

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1 Raising such a question makes me nervous, and I do not wish to go there, because I am unable to sort this out as a repetition of difference or know what exactly the difference is that this repetition achieves. This question haunts the Anthropocene narrative when it comes to the celebratory arts of First Nations. In the Canadian context, for instance, there is a long history of appropriation of indigenous art as being iconically “Canadian” by the Hudson’s Bay Company; and recent claims to authenticity are in dispute as to who is and is not allowed to represent an indigenous viewpoint, or to use sacred tribal symbols. Who then is “authentic” enough to be allowed a voice? Joseph Boyden (2017) in lit­ erature and Bill Reid (O’Hara [1999] 2013) in art are two well-known Canadian examples of such disputes. Accusations of “going native” have also been lev­ ied against Canada’s West Coast icon, Emily Carr, just as they have been lev­ ied against Paul Gauguin’s colonialist Tahitian adventure (Brooks 1993; Searle 2010; Solomon-Godeau 1989). As Jorge Luis Borges (1964) once remarked on the centre–periphery dichot­ omy, providing us with an impossible topological figure: why not undermine the centre by stretching out the peripheries to infinity, extending them in such a way that the circumference now moves to being the nowhere of the every­ where. This would be the topological figure I would advocate for an avant-garde without authority—or, put otherwise, to recognise life as an extrinsic mutation, always going outside itself, perpetually peripheral, always becoming. The avantgarde is not a linear progression, but more a repetition of a spatio-temporal node, a foci of experimentation—cultural, political, aesthetic—which appears in different times and places, linked together through a complex meshwork of appropriations, allusions, remixes, remediations, and allusions. It points to an artistic mode that circumvents linearity and eludes any endpoint. We can go further with such topological stretching by thinking of the avant-garde without authority emerging in smooth spaces, or Foucauldian (1986) heterotopic spaces that are temporal, liable to collapse at any moment, placed within the back­ drop of a utopian nowhere, as Deleuze and Guattari (1994) develop in What Is Philosophy? With the appropriate spacing, nowhere becomes “now here.” Such space-times as happenings, as singularities, haecceities, or events, should be understood in afterlife terms; how long they are functional and sustainable remains indeterminate, subject to the flows of productive desire that sustain them. To echo Deleuze and Guattari, “Never believe that a smooth space will suffice to save us” (1987, 500). Finally, the qualifier: Without authority, besides dismissing an obvious van­ guardism of the historical avant-garde, suggests a globalised world of instant communicative networks and the internet as the planetary phone system. It points in the direction of a swarm intelligence (Kennedy, Eberhart, and Shi 2001), an acephalous animality where the many pre-exist the One that appears to operate most often by contagion. Without authority refers to the promise of a molecular revolution in the here and now, widely discussed and contested as a “coming multitude” (Hardt and Negri 2000)—a molecular epidemic (social, 235

jan jagodzinski technological, economic, and political) that through networks of contagion, transportation, vaccination, quarantine, and surveillance can bring about a topological intensification, wherein a metastable state can be reached that leads to a transformative change in values. Some have referred to this poten­ tial in affirmative nomadic politics, capable of at least stuttering the capitalist machinic assemblage (Braidotti 2005–6). The paradigm of such an approach here might be Maya Lin’s (2012) memorial to vanishing nature, the loss of biodiversity and natural abundance, an instal­ lation that attempts to make visible the disappearance of species diversity, which appears all too invisible to us. As we know, the map is not the territory, but Lin’s web-based What Is Missing? project features an interactive website dotted with a myriad of interactive sites, each in the form of a dynamic spiral against a black map of the world, where personal stories are assembled, his­ torically charting the ecological changes that have taken place at each site. In this sense, this memorial takes seriously Bernard Stiegler’s (1998) third form of memory—epiphylogenetic memory—to disrupt and intervene in the current dominant capitalist and media archive, to provide an alternative based on per­ sonal memory (visitors can add to the history), the input of ecological NGOs, and eco-artists. History and memory can be retrieved by visitors to the cybersite to recover what has been historically forgotten. Maya Lin’s project is, in this sense at least, acephalous and without authority. The project is never-ending, conditioned and changed as new information is added, layered, and charted on the map. By clicking on a site, visitors find themselves drawn into a wormhole, confronting extraordinary ecological treasures like the historical existence of shellfish twelve inches wide—six-foot-long lobsters—capable of cleaning the entire Hudson Water system. Maya Lin hopes that futurist green scenar­ ios can emerge on this site through the input of citizen scientists, a Deweyan movement that has been growing, especially in science education to cultivate responsibility and empathy for the environment (Mueller and Tippins 2015). Like microbial life, the conception “without authority,” as put into action by Maya Lin’s project, has nothing to do with scale per se where the micro versus the macro are in play; instead, it concerns action that is at once local and global, suggesting, like the phenomenon of quantum entanglement, that communica­ tion can take place seemingly at speeds greater than light—which raises ques­ tions of dark matter and energy that physicists know little about. The “given as given” operates at infinite speeds on the plane of consistency. In the indeter­ minacy of a perfect vacuum—the void of a dark universe of non-standard philo­ sophy as explored by François Laruelle (2013), and the time of Aion as Deleuze (1990) would have it—the distinctions of being and becoming as binaries are meaningless as time does not exist; the vacuum state, after all, is timeless, it is time off its hinges. The “given as given” becomes an undifferentiated surface, the sum total of all possibilities, the dark of science fiction, or summarily put in Karen Barad’s (2012, 214) terms, “every finite being is always already threaded through with an infinite alterity diffracted through being and time.”

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An Avant-Garde “Without Authority” Here we enter the quantum aspects of my thesis title, as it is the place of the multiple potential of quantum superimpositions, where the particle wave has yet to collapse. It is at the time of collapse that an event occurs in the “zones of indiscernibility” as Deleuze and Guattari hypothesise (1987, 101, 225, 280), the undoing of identity through the hospitality of difference. Affects and percepts can be thought within the context of quantum field theory. In David Bohm’s (1989) terms, all things unfold in what he calls an “explicate order” as they emerge from the implicate order, and then return to it. While particles exist, they are in a constant process of unfoldment and re-enfoldment, the quantum potential of enfoldment referring to the potential of any thing to affect itself and be affected by its quantum field. Affect and percept can be conceptualised in terms of this quantum implicate order, or virtual ontology, inhering in mat­ ter itself, as affect and percept appear on the interface between implicate and explicate order. Theorised this way, we have a better grasp, or perhaps no grasp at all, of Deleuze’s (1990) notion of “A Life” or the creative life of zoe; that is, “pure life” not subject to any constraints. The whole of the material world as an explicate order becomes entangled with the implicate order of cosmologi­ cal forces, it is a holomovement according to Bohm (1986), each part contain­ ing the whole, and is continuous with our sense experiences, nervous system, brain, and so on. It should be noted that Bohm’s ([1957] 1961) quantum theorisations differ from Niels Bohr’s and Werner Heisenberg’s representational theories where quantum phenomena are known only through experimental frameworks, inseparable from the apparatuses of measure (that is, representation). Analogy and probability become key mathematical issues as the physical world is rep­ resented only via mathematics. Bohm shifts the quantum field from episte­ mology to speculative ontology, and it seems that Karen Barad has done that as well despite her over-reliance on Niels Bohr, by suppositionally drawing on Derridean deconstruction and his ethics and justice-to-come. For Bohr the act of measurement produces determinate boundaries and the properties of things, which then produces the phenomenon through intra-actions. Exclusive and inclusive cuts are made forwarding epistemology over speculative ontol­ ogy, which is closer to the questions pertaining to chaosmogenesis. To what extent Karen Barad’s (2003) “agential realism” is still caught by representation is beyond the scope of this chapter. Is it queer enough, still caught by the dif­ fraction of light as it were? Is such a question even permitted, especially when placed against the backdrop of say the theoretical work of Luciana Parisi’s (2004) abstract sex, where we enter the dark recesses of endosymbiosis, and the uncertainties of creative mutation? My personal road would be to travel with Bohm and Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose’s (2014) development of the quantum nature of proto-consciousness, their so-called Orch OR theory that focuses on microtubes, which point in the direction of brain chemistry and the quantum Planck level. But, I leave it there as my levels of competency are rapidly fading.

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jan jagodzinski There are many eco-artists who continue Maya Lin’s eco-mind shift to make, after Paul Klee, visible the figurative forces that shape assemblages. Foremost among them is perhaps the Australian-born Natalie Jeremijenko (Hannah and Jeremijenko 2017), whose system design instalments attempt to reach out to the nonhuman Other, interspecies projects such as Amphibious Architecture, developed with architect David Benjamin, where the attempt is to “talk” to fish; or Mussel Choir, a glee club of bivalves that, with the aid of sensors and audio software, “sing” about the quality of the water as they filter it; or NoParks, her series of tiny parks around Manhattan’s fire hydrants to invite viewers to think of no less urgent catastrophes than “just” fire. There are many such projects: for example, Mel Chin’s well-known Operation Paydirt1 that works to detoxify New Orleans of contaminated lead by using organic phosphates that attach to lead-contaminated soil, rendering it harmless; or the ongoing Waterwash2 by sculptor Lillian Ball, who has been dealing with issues of water and liquid since the late 1970s and who also uses natural processes to heal the damage done by industrialisation and human development. Such artists certainly exemplify the link between art and the “tenor” of life, between the critical and the clini­ cal, exemplifying a symptomatological method as Deleuze (1997) developed it: artists as the “clinicians of civilization.” It is the “use” of their art that prolongs their worth in terms of the questions raised concerning the Anthropocene, inscribed between one pole where unresolved conflicts are laid bare and another pole where paths are invented that point to new resolutions for the future of humanity. But, what should we make then of the current genetic engineering projects to clone back to life species that have gone extinct, pejoratively called “resur­ rection ecology,” “species revivalism,” and “zombie zoology” (Wray 2017). The preferred term is de-extinction; Revive & Restore, a firm with the capacity to do such genetic engineering, presents its mission statement as “to enhance biodi­ versity through the genetic rescue of endangered and extinct species” (Revive and Restore 2019). This is the revival of dormant life or necro-life, life that is like death, an afterlife that continues to fascinate us through the figures of the living dead (zombies), the undead (vampires), disembodied spirits (or phan­ tasms), and possessed life by demons. On the other side of the ledger, what are we to make of the slough of living synthetic creatures engineered by the new synthetic aesthetic, the biomimicry of nature that has spread to all sectors of the arts, from bio-art to living architecture (Armstrong 2015; Benyus 1997; Ginsberg et al. 2014). All such projects have overcome the hylomorphism that Gilbert Simondon had critiqued (De Boever et al., 2013), which as we know so deeply influenced Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987, 345) own theorisations regard­ ing the cosmic artisan. I will leave this as a dangling question given its poten­ tial as a game-changing possibility for the Anthropocene, for it has become the playground of venture capitalism and the military, raising the twin threats of bio-terror and bio-error.

1 See http://fundred.org/. 2 See http://waterwash.org.

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2 The emerging conceptual persona for such a claim of an avant-garde with­ out authority is of course the cosmic artisan; the figure is a hybrid of art and science or art and technology, someone who problematises life, both in its passive and active forms of vitalism, the zoe–bios entanglement, where the extended mind in its panpsychic formations is no longer the distinct privilege of the human species. As is often remarked pejoratively: What is the human if our intestines alone contain 100 trillion micro-organisms? We are a living microbiome existing in a metastate. For some time now, we have been hear­ ing about the new materialism and vitalism within the broader question of deanthropomorphisation. Both developments are crucial to the task of the cos­ mic artisan within the Anthropocene problematic that challenges the constant coveting as to who has the privilege to be called “human” by any number of forces: from the transcendent claims of hierarchical religious, political, and social assemblages to the biologically rooted science of sociobiology where human exceptionalism lingers. The new materialism as technogenesis, and its accompanying vitalism, are two sides of an evolutionary coin that chart our species’ becoming against the longer durée of Earth time—temporality as process as opposed to its measurement; our species resonating with the Earth as one morpho-genical actualisation among others when it comes to this epigenetic evolutionary processes. I am reminded here of Katie Paterson’s extraordinary artwork Fossil Necklace (2013). Paterson describes the work as “A necklace comprising 170 fossils carved into spherical beads. It is a string of worlds, with each bead representing a major event in the evolution of life through the vast expanse of geological time. From the monocellular origins of life on Earth to the shifting of the continents, from the extinctions of the Cretaceous period triggered by a falling meteorite to the first blooming of flowers, Fossil Necklace charts the development of life on our planet” (ibid.). It should be added, per­ haps, that no necklace can ever be long enough or complete enough to join its ends, as the gaps between the fossils mark the heterogeneous emergence of life, the punctuated equilibriums of evolution, which remain non-represent­ able. The necklace, however, is a testament and a reminder, to follow Quentin Meillassoux (2008), of the “great outdoors,” what I would call an “ecology of the outside.” In the context of an avant-garde without authority, the task is to raise the problematic of the future, if there is to be one, as to the next phase-space of what is an open-ended, unfinished, and non-teleological path of Homo sapien sapiens, as evidenced by the biological materialist plasticity of the brain as opposed to the capitalist needs of its flexibility, as recently theorised foremost by Catherine Malabou (2012), among others. Plasticity suggests that the physi­ cal hardwiring of the brain can itself be deterritorialised through an evolution­ ary and involutionary entanglement with nonhuman (that is, inorganic and organic other) and inhuman (that is, AI), suggesting a breakdown of neuronormativity that pervades capitalist inflected neurosciences that have come dangerously close to new forms of phrenology, the form of the cranium now 239

jan jagodzinski replaced by the charting of brain scans to map our so-called emotional brain (Damasio 1994; LeDoux 1998). This speculation of physiological changes to the brain via invented technologies has been attempted before. The “bicameral mind” (Jaynes 1976) is thought to have emerged when the externalisation of speech as technology eventually became paradigmatic in the Chalcolithic age via the technology of a codified written language. Neurologists, for example, have known for some time that an infant at birth has more synapses (connec­ tions with neurons) than she or he will ever have in lived life (Gopnik, Meltzoff, and Kuhl 1999). Through synaptogenesis, synapses that are not used wither and die. It is also well known that shortened attention spans and multitasking have become prevalent in our current age of rapid speed and digitalisation; ganglia growth in brain areas associated with the fine-motor manipulation of thumbs via excessive texting among youth have been verified (East 2016). Perhaps, following Malabou (2008, 12), the avant-garde without authority must ask, “What should we do so that consciousness of the brain does not purely and simply coincide with the spirit of capitalism?” Here we could men­ tion Warren Neidich’s (2003) neuro-aesthetics and his attempts at experimen­ tal interventions into cognitive capitalism to deterritorialise the operation of vision from its “primary repertoire” as a genetically inherited microbiological brain architecture; how then can we interfere with the 40-Hz range of oscil­ latory activity of sensory consciousness (we generally perceive 40 conscious moments per second), which is imposed on us by cinematic images running at 24 frames per second (fps), and between 25 and 30 fps for video. Such speeds ensure a suspension of disbelief that what we are watching is not “real,” given that we are capable of processing 66 fps normally as believable reality. At 48 fps (a film such as The Hobbit for instance), moving images become more vivid and more animated. Through careful neurological manipulation and analysis, especially by marketers, animation has long since overcome what was consid­ ered the uncrossable “uncanny valley.” The science fiction of HBO’s Westworld is already an imaginary in the making. The capitalist move from formal to “real” subsumption via immaterial labour has enabled the capture of all inter­ net activity for profit ends; and, of course, we continue to feed its flow—more “battery power” for capitalism (Hardt and Negri 2000). Neuronal models of networking via brain studies now resemble the techno-economic organisation of global capitalism itself. How then can the microtemporal domain of sen­ sation—Deleuze’s transcendental sensibility—that the capitalist neurologi­ cal machine manufactures be jammed or resisted? Perhaps artists like Olafur Eliasson (Benson 2015) and Tobias Rehberger (Blazwick and Spira 2005) have tried to do this through developing a politics of sensation where light and motion in their digitalised installations become atmospheric environments that enable audiences to experience the creativity of changing microsensa­ tions? Is this too little, too late? How then can the plasticity of the brain be altered creatively so that it attunes itself differently from capitalism’s particular clamour heard on end­ less television shows that perpetually monitor an endless cycle of financial and stock-market graphs—a blend of economic mysticism with free market 240

An Avant-Garde “Without Authority” libertarianism—which Joshua Ramey (2016) has brilliantly identified as the politics of divination, the way chance is managed in global capitalism. How is a different attunement and attention generated by such an avant-garde without authority that resists the one capitalism is globally presenting via its modulations of patterns and schedules that lead to a 24/7 flexible labour time of sleepless sleep, so that “prosumers” can continue to produce the “battery power” by manufacturing even more smart apps to fuel capitalism’s produc­ tion of desire as lack—as in the film The Matrix where humans are maintained in quasi-foetal suspensions to generate the flow of energy needed to feed the supercomputer. Here, again artists are attempting a different attunement and attention to the sounds of the Earth, to intervene in the mechanosphere (Saldanha 2015). I am reminded here of “Schumann resonances”—not the classical composer Robert Schumann, who himself tried to escape the tyranny of the metre, but the physicist Winfried Otto Schumann (Dickenson 2013) who uncovered the global electromagnetic resonances of the Earth, generated and excited by lightening discharges in the cavity formed by the Earth’s surface and the ionosphere. The resonances are a set of spectrum peaks in the extremely low frequency (EFL) portion of the Earth’s electromagnetic field spectrum. There are many sound artists, many of whom who have attended the DARE confer­ ences, who are exploring and making audible the imperceptible sounds of our nonhuman outside, sounds in the electromagnetic spectrum that remain nonsonorous to our ears, requiring technological transpositions to make them audible. Such “sonic thinking” (Herzogenrath 2017) ranges from the nonhuman sounds of insects, plant life, and animal life to glacial life. I am reminder here of the recent Chicago exhibition on Riverside Plaza entitled White Wanderer,3 the nickname for giant icebergs, a sound art installation by Luftwerk that records the breaking away of a trillion-ton iceberg in Antarctica—the Larsen Ice Shelf—that has altered the shape of that continent. There are also, of course, sound artists and visual artists who effectively trans­ late big data through transduction—the interaction of mechanical and elec­ tromagnetic energies (a transducer is the transformative interface that allows the change from one energy state to another); as such, every sound experience in life has been transduced—connecting humans as “users” of mechanical and electromagnetic energy to objects and things and all organic matter, and thus to a larger energetic system that generates assemblages of diverse realities. Fabio Lattanzi Antinori’s The Obelisk (2012),4 for example, changes colour from opaque to transparent according to four main crimes against peace—gen­ ocide, crimes against humanity, crimes of aggression, and crimes of war—as online news data is fed into the sculpture. Such technologies deterritorialise, as Deleuze and Guattari (1987) put it, the datafication that is constantly cap­ turing attention from the extrinsic and intrinsic bodies, and marketing that experience. Transductive relations, lived electromagnetism, and technogenesis

3 See http://luftwerk.net/projects/white-wanderer/. 4 See https://vimeo.com/50488232.

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jan jagodzinski describe the co-evolution of human–nonhuman and human–inhuman trans­ ductions in an energetic continuum known as the electromagnetic spectrum. Of course, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) are at their best here, developing the ritournelle (ritornello or refrain), rethinking rhythm and gesture as cosmic sound, non-pulsed time in its pure state. Despite having close contact with my brilliant brother-in-law, Bernhard Lang (2000)—a well-known Viennese composer who uses computer technology and expanded media in his compos­ itions, which are influenced by jazz and rock idioms, and who is steeped in the questions we are currently considering having composed an entire series called Differenz/Widerholung, inspired by loops drawn from his reading of Difference and Repetition—I feel most inadequate here, and cannot go further, and leave this conversation to those who also compose cosmologically.

3 Deleuze and Guattari distinguish three “ages” of art in A Thousand Plateaus: classicism, romanticism, and modernism. The Classical artist was charged with the task that was God’s own: he was to confront chaos and creativity, or organ­ ise raw and untamed matter to generate a stable relationship between form and content. In distinction, the Romantic artist, as the beautiful soul, was the privileged mediator of nature (the Earth); the genius artist was to produce the infinite and continuous variations of form, the privilege of adding to nature. But, as Deleuze and Guattari argue, the Romantics, following Kant’s Critique of Judgement, take the sublime as the expression of “personal longing” (Sehnsucht) for what is forever beyond the artist’s grasp: namely, the infinity of nature and the dynamic chaos of forces that can never be comprehended. Territory and the Earth (matter and spirit) are caught up in an organic dialectic as best exempli­ fied by Hegelian organicism. Human finitude is negated through art as a heroic and historic struggle between human spirit and the dynamics of nature claimed often as emancipatory praxis. The “modern” art that followed produced the progressively “new,” taken to heights by an avant-garde who were “ahead of their time,” projecting a future tomorrow. The postmodern variant of this was to eventually proclaim an “end of art” (Danto 1997) as it seemed that there had been a heterogeneity of practices that could no longer be signified by an out­ dated grand narrative of progress. There is a strong sense of hylomorphism that runs throughout these three ages, where form follows function in Aristotelian terms. Brute force is imposed on nature through hylocentric thinking, what is often referred to as a “heat, beat, treat” process, which uses 96 per cent waste and 4 per cent product. Deleuze and Guattari follow the critique of hylomorphism by Gilbert Simondon (2017), who maintained that matter is made up of immanent intensive energetic traits, forces he called “singularities” (Deleuze 2004). Their differential relations determine form and maintain an inherent dynamism of form through imma­ nent processes of “modulation.” It is precisely in this direction that the post­ human cosmic artisan operates. Matter for Deleuze and Guattari is chaosmic. It finds a consistency—or expresses equilibrium states—through ritornellos, 242

An Avant-Garde “Without Authority” repetitions of difference that produce various actualisations or individuations; these are certainly autopoietic, but with the proviso that such a becoming or actualisation happens at far-from-equilibrium states where there is no fidelity to relations of genus or species (see Pearson 1999, 170). The “modernism” promoted by Deleuze and Guattari is not the modern­ ism of “progress” and the “new.” Modernism, for them, announces an age of the cosmic and the minoritarian politics of chaos. Old distinctions between creation and consumption collapse here into a single place of social produc­ tion. It is a particular type of vitalist ontology that does away with any animistic residues. By this I mean that there is no transcendental force outside matter that gives it life (spirit). Matter is spirit (life). It is a commonist eco-politics of art, inseparable from aesthetic processes of creative forces that do away with any state authority, but seeks the “commonwealth” that belongs to all who inhabit the earth. It is an attempt to grasp as much inclusivity as possible in a constant deterritorialisation of the Earth as it is presently structured by forces of hier­ archy and transcendentalism. “We lack resistance to the present,” Deleuze and Guattari claim (1994, 108). The artisan “by means of material . . . wrest[s] the percept from perceptions of objects and the states of a perceiving subject, to wrest the affect from affections as the transition from one state to another: to extract a bloc of sensations, a pure being of sensations” (ibid., 167). The Earth as “nature” contains all the forces of the universe, constituting the “deepest” levels of reality. Deleuze and Guattari assume a molecular and chaotic mat­ ter. The forces that emerge are “Xpressed” (jagodzinski 2008) through the ritornello, through the rhythmic repetitions of difference that composes and Xpresses life—that is, matter itself. We, as a species, are the compositions of such matter, caught and captured by our own “entanglements” and “intrarelations” with our ecological assemblages (Barad 2007). It is not evolutionary adaptation, rather it is modification of our species-being that is at stake; at a minimum, the post-anthropological understanding needs to be recognised. The modernist problem for Deleuze and Guattari (1987) is “how to consoli­ date the material, make it consistent, so that it can. . . . capture . . . the mute and unthinkable forces of the Cosmos” (343). It is a “molecular pantheist Cosmos” (327). This requires the molecularisation of matter: its absolute deterritorialisation, so that immanent forces of chaosmos can be harnessed in consistent, composite, and autopoietic blocs of sensation. Finite sensations are composed as refrains or “subjectivations” that Xpress the forces of matter by constructing a chaosmic place of chaosmosis. The immanent forces of inor­ ganic life are rendered “visible,” as in the much heralded quotation from Paul Klee’s “Creative Credo” (1961, 76), “Art does not reproduce the visible; rather it makes visible.” In this way the finite creation of art points to the infinity of chaos(mosis), nature, the cosmos. Material (matter as living) is Xpressive and, thus, “it is difficult to say where in fact the material ends and sensation begins” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 166). A chaosmic, or molecularised material makes it possible to create the blocs of sensations, made of “inhuman” percepts and affects. Art becomes a “passage” from finite to the infinite (ibid., 180). “From depopulation, make a cosmic people; from deterritorialization, a cosmic 243

jan jagodzinski earth—that is the wish of the artisan-artist, here, there, locally” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 346). “The cosmic artisan [becomes] a homemade atom bomb” (ibid., 345), meaning that the potential for such immense and powerful deter­ ritorialisation rests with such a potential imaginary yet to be thought. This becomes the task of the cosmic-posthuman artisan as part of an avant-garde without authority. The “contemporary” artisan collapses art, science (technology), and phi­ losophy in a new “thought-brain” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 210), the brain becomes a “subject” only when it becomes “thought,” and “thought” only hap­ pens from the “outside,” when habits, opinions as doxa, and clichés are dis­ turbed. In the era of the Anthropocene and post-truth ontology, such “thought” might be understood in the broad sense of postconceptual art where the funda­ mental questions revolve around “life,” its creation, its endurance, its survival, and its death (Weinstein 2016). The most compelling examples are able to make the invisible forces that shape the Anthropocene visible. For Deleuze such concern is brilliantly and succinctly presented as “A Life,” the capital letters exemplifying its metaphysical and physical “entanglements.” The indefinite article A collapses or intertwines particularity with universalism (not “general­ ity”) to provide the specificity of the finite (location or the ecology of forces at play in any assemblage), at the same time projecting the inexhaustibility of the infinite (a new Earth to come): physicality and metaphysics are forever in a “disjunctive synthesis” with one another, a gap remains between them that raises issues of indeterminacy, ambiguity, contingency, paradox, and risk. It is that place of “quantum indeterminacy” as the physicist and philosopher David Bohm ([1965] 1989) referred to it.

4 Posthuman artisans are saddled by a seemingly inescapable capitalist entrepre­ neurship: the burden of a postcolonial past presses on them. They are further caught by the difficulties of access to technologies and instrumentation that are often cost prohibitive, and face overwhelming difficulties when it comes to fabulating a planet-yet-to-come. Those whom I would identify as belonging to such a minoritarian avant-garde without authority appear as singularities, as outliers and anomalies that can only be gathered up via networks to form emergent bodies of thought exploring critical values aimed at the precarious state of our species, otherwise they remain in isolation outside institutional support systems, or are caught by corporate interests that continue to push for profit from the potential patents that new biotechnologies offer, especially via the creation of new life forms. Many artisans toil using a DIY approach, relying on open-source software and a “maker culture” where electronic DIY becomes available, such as Massimo Banzi’s Arduino Project (Banzi 2008). This state of affairs can be usefully made graspable by commenting on the two decades of curatorial work by Paola Antonelli, who is the senior curator for MoMA (Museum of Modern Art in New York) for science, art, and technology exhibited by its Department of Architecture and Design. Her curatorial pas­ 244

An Avant-Garde “Without Authority” sion is clearly aimed at the “future.” Her three major shows, Mutant Materials in Contemporary Design (1995), Design and the Elastic Mind (2008), and an online curatorial work, Design and Violence (2013–15), chart a progression in her think­ ing from a conservative position that celebrates bio-technologism to at least the recognition that there is a dividing line, although always blurred, which can be identified in the way the posthuman artisan addresses the state of the precarious world order, and what I refer to as its commodified aestheticisation under “designer capitalism” (jagodzinski 2010). The plus side of Antonelli’s position is that she maintains an affirmative mode; the potential for change via design technology is possible. Pedagogically and politically she tries to pro­ mote this message through her many speaking engagements, which suits the global promotion of MoMA. In all cases, hylomorphic thinking has been left behind by these designers as the molecularisation of matter through a “synthetic aesthetic” (Ginsberg et al. 2014) that has been fully realised. Both Antonelli’s Mutant Materials exhi­ bition (1995)—a celebration of new synthetic materials that extend nature’s own creation—and her Elastic Mind exhibition celebrate the faith in a tech­ nofix, a subtle technological determinism that reveals itself as digital design applications to big data crunching via computation, generated algorithms that mimic nature, nanotechological applications, biodegradable living materials (e.g., growing mycelium bricks), “living” or “vibrant architecture” (Armstrong 2015), biomimesis (Benyus 2002; Baumeister 2015), and the release of designed organisms with “functional” lifespans into established ecologies to re-establish damaged ecosystems. This last initiative, forwarded broadly under the label of “synthetic aesthetics” (Ginsberg 2011), relies on venture capitalist investments and military support for its applications. In general, the message of biomimesis (or “bioneers”) is generally harmony, holism, and biophilic “love” with nature couched most often in capitalist “green” economy with an emphasis on sustain­ ability. There is a strong theme of the “control” of nature through symbiosis at the molecular levels by scientists and designers working together to gain control of information-based evolutionary processes by researching selforganising complex systems at every scale, understood to be life’s “operating manual”: molecular structure of DNA, growth potential of stem cells, compu­ tational algorithms that mimic natural processes, animated three-dimension­ ally printed models, and AI robots such as empathetic telenoids are celebrated as the future, with MoMA bringing this “news” to the “masses” via exhibits. This is the political and pedagogical role Antonelli’s research and development department has targeted.

5 The dividing line that I would present in relation to this entanglement is the grasp of life as a disjunctive synthesis that constantly presents our species with the dilemmas of an ethico-political aesthetic that can never go away, but should be recognised through a speculative design problematic, which is the role of the avant-garde without authority that I would advocate. Their role is to play with the 245

jan jagodzinski place of entanglement so as to raise “flights out” that provide the incompossi­ ble worlds needed for that post(anthropological) and post(ontological) imagi­ nation within a dying planet. It is the virtual dimensions of bio-art as proto-types that need exploration (see Kac 2007). That might be one such “flight.” The entanglement is in the indeterminate space between life as matter and matter as life: the emphasis on the first—life as matter—is metaphysical, nonhuman, and always in excess of what can be controlled; an infinite vitalism is available, subject to multiplier effects in energy gains when harnessed. It is “cosmological” in the truest sense of chaosmosis. The second—matter as life—is inhuman, technological, animistic, and controllable to a probable level. The transition from one to the other never escapes a risk factor that cannot be weighed in economic computational terms (profit), but is struggled with against the backdrop of the Anthropocene. It is only in the indeterminate space of this entanglement that a minoritarian fabulation emerges, where art and design become blurred, or, in the terms of the historical twentieth-century avant-garde, where art becoming life and life becoming art is grappled with. In this moment, when a left glove turns into a right glove through topologi­ cal stretching and mutation, a “true” problematic emerges: true in the sense that there are only questions that demand action. Vitalism (as zoe) and animism (as bios) become blurred at this point, the “uncanny valley,” for instance, dis­ appears and a Blade Runner world emerges where fabulated science fiction has become tangible, obliging us to hesitate and “to think” the ethics of such an event. Media (as in communication) and medium (as in biology) overlay each other (as mediation) and become indistinguishable. The developments in bio-art (Kac 2007), especially as articulated by the pio­ neers of tissue culture, Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr (2002) of SymbioticA fame, provide one such instance, exemplified by Catts and Zurr’s signature work: Victimless Leather: A Prototype of a Stitch-less Jacket Grown in a Technoscientific “Body” (2004). Such a bio-art experiment first appears as if Catts and Zurr are present­ ing an alternative possibility for growing synthetic food, thereby overcoming “cruelty” to animals. However, on closer examination their synthetic “leather” plays an ambivalent role: is it an ironic ploy as it takes more energy to pro­ duce and grow in vitro “meat” than at first assumed? The ecological footprint includes the “costs” of running their lab. Animal blood plasma is required as a nutrient for these “semi-live” objects, so there is no “victimless” existence: vic­ tims still exist but are pushed further away. All kinds of contradictions continue to stack up when this bio-experiment is critically examined, including the issue of life and death as the project further problematises the distinction between the living and the machine. These “semi-living things” highlight again the absurdities inherent in technological solutions and efficiencies, recalling once more the semi-living replicants of Blade Runner. Here the semi-living “thing” raises the spectre of zoe, and can be contrasted with any synthetic object whose functionality is in place to “heal” a damaged ecology or is produced to make our life easier.

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An Avant-Garde “Without Authority” The projects of The Tissue Culture and Art Project (TC&A) present the very dilemma an avant-garde without authority faces without a “solution.” Such dilemmas can only illustrate and bring to the brink the problematic of the age; it makes the task of the artisan that much more difficult, for such creativ­ ity is not ubiquitous, which is the usual rhetoric in both industry and school­ ing. This is not the same irony that flooded postmodernism. As Deleuze (1990, 138) argues, irony is not a critical response, for such a gesture seems to play into the mastery of the author-artist. Here there is no “authority.” We have the “bald” problematic actualised. TC&A are exemplars of “speculative design,” as are (perhaps) Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen (2013) who problematise “embodied energy,” the finity of bios in this case, where the human intrinsic and extrinsic bodily energies are being constantly harnessed by capitalism for productive (profitable) labour in the capitalist machine, and most recently ergonomically quantified to flood the market with all sorts of smart technol­ ogies that measure and report back the body’s expenditure—from heart rate monitors to electronic brainwave feedback devices. Formal subsumption of the labour process has now become “real,” it has penetrated all aspects of our lives (Read 2003). Cohen and Van Balen’s 75 Watts: Production Line Poetics (2013), presents a performative audio-video installation of Chinese assembly line fac­ tory workers putting together a mass-produced “useless” object as designed by the artists and the choreographer Alexander Whitley, who choreographs their movements intermittently into dance routines. 75 Watts is precisely the amount of energy an average worker can sustain throughout an eight-hour-long day on an assembly line. Playing in the indeterminate zone between zoe (the poetics of dance) and bios (the production of labour), Cohen and Van Balen present the problematic of posthumanist Taylorism, updating Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. The “object” on their assembly line now becomes a “thing”; it finds itself in a zone of indeterminacy: commodified functionless junk. It is to the credit of Paola Antonelli’s most recent online exhibit, Design and Violence (2013–15), that this indeterminate, contingent, risk-oriented dimen­ sion of human productivity is exposed by questioning the products that are being synthetically produced—from new synthetic materials to proto cells. Our species playing “god” becomes the question for all “global citizens” as to where we are headed as a species through our own design: to the hell of extinc­ tion or a new earth of affirmation. This is never resolved. We need an education in design and art to orient future artisans to such a post-anthropology and a post-ontology. As Alphonso Lingis (1986, 226) put it, “Responsibility is coex­ tensive with our sensibility; in our sensibility we are exposed to the outside, to the world’s being, in such a way that we are bound to answer for it.” Some main­ tain that this requires a reawakening of curiosity and wisdom, but few question the capitalist schizophrenia that makes these very values impossible to fulfil to begin with. All cosmic artisans toil within global capitalism’s accounting system. The cosmic artisan fabulates virtual lines of flight with the “want” of an incompossible New Earth. Whether one such flight is actualised is another matter. But our survival depends on it.

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6 The technicity that follows from the epiphylogenesis of Bernard Stiegler (1998) or the mechanology of Gilbert Simondon (1968) can be thought as the entwine­ ment of the nonhuman and the inhuman. These two sides of the coin are folded and entangled as to the virtual possibilities that may be actualised in the future. They fall into the forces of non-human and in-human becoming: the first is shaped by the way we currently grasp the vitialism of materiality in our rela­ tions to the non-human other; the second—the inhuman becoming—refers to our relations with artificial intelligence and artificial life, covering a range of smart technologies, a technogenesis that constantly exteriorises all aspects of our body-mind via exo-Darwinian means, as Michel Serres (2006) put it. The avant-garde without authority is charged with working with the transductions and resonances at this “pre-individual” or phaseless dimension of reality to cre­ ate new individuations where the microphysical and macrophysical levels are brought into a metastable state. In Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) terms, the mechanosphere undergoes a new phase change towards a transvaluation. Not to theorise this entanglement of the non-human and inhuman—that is, the entanglement between vitalist materialism and technogenesis in terms of our species becoming—is to fall into an either/or logic, rather than recog­ nising the necessity of this “both-and”—the doubled, layered nature of both forces that press on our species’ becoming. To dwell only on the forces of vital­ ism of non-human relations, especially as they are theorised as a one-sided active and transcendent vitalism, rather than as a passive vitalism of “A Life,” leads, I believe, to new forms of neo-Romanticism, new forms of organicism and holism—territory that is a political minefield to step on today as its iden­ tity politics are heated. On the other side, only valorising the inhuman—that is, AI and AL technologies—leads to the transhumanist fantasy of brains housed in nutrient vats as the next phase space of our species: a Blade Runner world of environmental and global control (Bostrom 2014). Algorithmic governmen­ tality (Rouvroy 2013) has now become pervasive, as any number of Deleuzian inspired theorists have pointed out, especially Luciana Parisi’s (2013) recent rethinking of Simondon’s technical object thesis. There are, of course, many apocalyptic narratives that present us with the endgame of our species. I will not venture into this well-trodden territory of Hollywood apocalypticism. But an apocalyptic scenario should not be dis­ missed, as Deleuze and Guattari did not. Scholars have traced their concerns with eschatological and apocalyptic themes, which run throughout their works (Tynan 2016). The claim is made that the absolute limit of the schizo-flows of capitalism, the ultimate decoding that leads to the desert, is the end of the world. This capitalist immanent eschaton is constantly staved off via the uncon­ ditioned object of capital that creates wealth. To contest this limit requires a schizoanalytic flight into the wilderness. As Deleuze and Guattari write in Anti-Oedipus ([1977] 1983, 176) “the body without organs is the deterritorial­ ized socius, the wilderness where the decoded flows run free, the end of the word, the apocalypse.” The history of desire requires a conception of an “end” 248

An Avant-Garde “Without Authority” of history, as desire always subsists at the very limits of the social, at that point of chaos where a system is liable to tip and transform. Delirium becomes the proper mode in which such a history of desire is written; the historical names of people and places are but affective states—the becomings that are traced in the dust of a desert earth. Hence, the question at the start of this chapter: Is there a growing and contagious delirium of desire in this age named controversially as the Anthropocene? Here the earth is not the same as the world, rather it is its figuration, its cos­ mic underbelly, or better still, its forceful dis-figuration, but not its complete annihilation. The positing of a new ground, a new foundation, a “new” Earth in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, requires the harnessing of the forces of the cosmos. As they say in A Thousand Plateaus (1987, 342), it is “a question of tech­ nique” that is a “direct relation [of ] material forces . . . The visual material must capture nonvisible forces . . . to capture forces that are not thinkable in them­ selves.” This then is the eschatological destiny of desiring production (when freed of the Oedipalised world that shapes the imaginary archive of history as we now know it). The unconditioned “desert of the body without organs” becomes the new ground to build on as the enigmatic figure of the new earth. Their question, can we “still believe in this world”? (Deleuze 1989, 172) points to this urgent political task. The avant-garde without authority is charged with this schizoanalytic project for a New Earth. They are precisely cosmological in the sense that the electro­ magnetic spectrum that preoccupies them speculatively harnesses the forces of the outside, that is, they are attuned to the ecology of the outside, which is always imperceptibly pervaded by quantum field theory via the intra-actions of matter, the liminality of nothingness as “A Life,” and the thingness and pattern­ ing of mind with which we resonate with at the quantum level. However, this is but one side; there is also the ecology of the Other, the way our technological machinic assemblages affect us through what we might call an ecology of the interior—the foldments and enfoldments of subjective individuation. These three ecologies: the ecology of the outside, the ecology of the interior, and the ecology of the Other would perhaps be a way to update what Guattari meant by his three ecologies: environmental ecology, mental ecology, and social ecology. This then is the delirium of an avant-garde without authority involved in the schizoanalytic project of a New Earth within the shadow of the Anthropocene. References Armstrong, Rachel. 2015. Vibrant Architecture: ———. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Matter as a Codesigner of Living Structures. Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Warsaw: De Gruyter Open. Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke Banzi, Massimo. 2008. Getting Started with University Press. Arduino. Sebastopol, CA: Make:Books. ———. 2012. “On Touching—the Inhuman Barad, Karen. 2003. “Posthumanist That Therefore I Am.” Differences 23 (3): Performativity: Toward an Understanding 206–23. of How Matter Comes to Matter.” Signs: Baumeister, Dayna. 2015. “Biomimicry: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28 Life’s Operating Manual | Bioneers,” (3): 801–31. TED talk. YouTube video, 31:01, posted 249

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Pure Immanence and the Algorithmic Era An Aberrant Nuptial Emilia Marra University of Trieste, Italy

The image suggested by Deleuze and Guattari’s term aberrant nuptial undoubt­ edly resounds powerfully and multiplies its meanings across their books. As a representation, it shows itself immediately as the movement of the celebrated wasp–orchid system. As a rhetorical example, it sounds like a new formula­ tion of the strange expression used by Deleuze to describe how he reaches his personal interpretation of other authors: “I saw myself as taking an author from behind and giving him a child” (quoted in Deleuze 1995, 6). As a work­ ing direction, it suggests abandoning the distinctions by which different fields are divided up in order to face thought in its entirety. Philosophical literature has discussed how different systems can be put into communication and artists have also explored these possibilities, performing the unsayable of becoming. However, the point I would like to discuss in a Deleuzian context moves away from Deleuze’s writing to focus on the potential of creativity and creation involved in the idea of nuptial to the obscure side of aberration. In its largest demoniac aspect, this aberration involves Deleuze’s whole philosophy, which becomes just one of the two parts of the nuptial. In other words, I would like to suggest that the Deleuzian philosophy of immanence risks becoming the conceptual base for the new form of social control that Antoinette Rouvroy and Thomas Berns (2013) in their works termed “algorithmic governmentality.” The danger of a complete misunderstanding of virtual and immanence moves closer, and the duty of questioning this particular aberrant nuptial calls for our attention. On the one hand, an aberrant nuptial is still a nuptial, so it concerns a region we may define, with Deleuze, as a “between-the-two,” a zone of indeterminacy, a region of creativity, perhaps, where instead of subjects we may find Spinozan speeds or Nietzschean forces. On the other hand, it is an aberrant one, so that it cannot be defined just as a pact of inseparability between two different and non-familiar systems; however, once this non-natural bond is established, a transformation in reality has begun, robbing us of the possibility of recognis­ ing two performers in a single intention. Here, the actual is combined with the virtual, equating it with virtual reality, giving access to headsets and keyboards, social networks and big data. Therefore, the era of absolute immanence has 255

Emilia Marra arrived with a computational face: the algorithmic governmentality has already taken every glimmer of the unexpected, transforming potential human possi­ bility into a programmed and programmatic code. Does this scenario correspond to the absolute immanence, the pure imma­ nence, described in Deleuze’s final text, “Immanence: A Life” (2001)? The inter­ est in the complex apparatus of capture termed big data does not lie in subjects; instead, it treats human beings as series of numbers, each series not indicating a fixed preference but stockpiling information to sell to the best buyer. As a result, it triumphs in the fight against subjectivity that French theorists have battled for decades. One needs only to consider the idea of a rhizomatic struc­ ture, a horizontal system not dominated by a vertical or horizontal hierarchy, where nothing but the middle exists: “any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 7). Connectivity as the main principle of a new social organisation is suddenly realised in the agreement between operative systems and users: users voluntarily offer infor­ mation such as geolocation, contacts from their phonebook and social net­ works, and photos and videos through platforms and apps. Spinoza wondered “what the body can do” ([1994] 1996, 71). Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 257) add: “We know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the affects of another body, either to destroy that body or to be destroyed by it, either to exchange actions and passions with it or to join with it in composing a more powerful body.” According to these necessary warnings, the question we have to answer concerns the concrete possibilities of this new system. Unfortunately, philosophical reflection seems incapable of facing this last point: the non-teleological direction of the rhizome involves the structural impossibility of prevention, and does not allow us to understand exactly the deep reason lying at the base of this accumulation. When this process started, and partially today too, it was a question of marketing. Nevertheless, even com­ pared with the demands of the market, the range of data we are now kindly asked to provide to the system is far more extensive: information is recorded about an individual user’s physical movements, most common internet searches, and favourite verbal expressions, even the user’s voice, weight, finger­ prints, number of heartbeats per minute, and so on are recorded and stored— and this information is gathered for everyone who at least has a smartphone. Just as an example, at the time of writing it is not long since Facebook posted a message to its users thanking us for having connected a global community of over two million people: at the least, it would be hard to deny that this entails an incredible quantity of data, a quantity that we cannot reduce to a marketing strategy. The huge unknown of the whole system is whether there is a defined strategy under this construction: it is not clear for what are we being thanked. Furthermore, the main structure of this algorithmic governmentality itself has no pilot, remaining autonomous of the data collection; humanity just needs to keep on providing larger and larger storage for its compulsive accumulation. Perhaps, it is mainly for this reason that we are not able to construct a real philo­256

Pure Immanence and the Algorithmic Era sophical reflection on this point. What will these data be used for? Nobody knows the answer yet; still, what we can reasonably affirm is that, whatever its purpose, we are the ones providing the raw material. Something is happening to us, and we have no tools to understand it and predict what will happen next. Accordingly, different fields of knowledge have grounds to fear that thought is imprisoned in circuits, locked on foreseeable paths: a theoretical and polit­ ical fight against this scenario, already described in Deleuze’s “Postscript on the Societies of Control” (1992), is today a transdisciplinary request. To answer this necessity, the affective side of reflexion should play a leading role. Once traditional categories have lost their relevance in offering an interpretation of reality, experimentations and crossbreeding between arts and theory become priorities. A practical example of this progressive modification of categories concerns time: algorithmic governmentality offers eternity as a possible tem­ poral condition for human beings. Of particular interest here is that personal online profiles do not follow bodies and minds into death; we thereby assist in a reconfiguration of the dichotomies of mortality/immortality and chrono­ logical time/eternity. Therefore, the whole structure described by Plato in his Symposium collapses on itself: for the Greek philosopher, the principal reason for love, procreating sons, and creating compositions, art, and even thought was the desire to endure after natural death. It seems today that the incredible world in which we are living gives us this chance without asking for any com­ mitment in arts and theory. If Plato was right, the result of this operation of disaffection will be the disappearance of humankind. Despite its pessimism, this comparison helps us realise that what is at stake here is the possibility of a future and understand that the time window we have is already closing. Another example of particular relevance comes from the most recent G7 meeting in Taormina (held in May 2017): Donald Trump’s declaration on the Paris Agreement can be thought of as another symptom of this general blind­ ness in the face of reasoning that involves themes such as sustainability, ecol­ ogy, and responsibility for generations to come. For instance, it is no accident that Guattari, in his Three Ecologies first published in 1989, dealt with Donald Trump (Guattari 2000, 43). Guattari first discusses an experiment conducted by Alain Bombard on a television show: Bombard showed two water tanks, the first of which contained polluted water as found in the port of Marseilles and an octopus full of life; the second contained pure unpolluted water. When Bombard moved the octopus from the first tank to the second, the audience witnessed the immediate death of the creature, brutally separated from its hab­ itat. After this example, Guattari insists: “Just as monstrous and mutant algae invade the lagoon of Venice, so our television screens are populated, saturated, by ‘degenerate’ images and statements. In the field of social ecology, men like Donald Trump are permitted to proliferate freely, like another species of algae, taking over entire districts of New York and Atlantic City; he ‘redevelops’ by raising rents, thereby driving out tens of thousands of poor families, most of whom are condemned to homelessness, becoming the equivalent of the dead fish of environmental ecology” (Guattari 2000, 43).

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Emilia Marra To continue, if our goal as researchers, artists, and activists is to answer the physical, ecological, and virtual invasion first theorised in Deleuze’s “Postscript,” in which he invites us to find new weapons against this reconfig­ uration of control, described as the “coils of a serpent” (Deleuze 1992, 7), we have to find a way to cut out a space of possibility from this saturation. What is very interesting and dangerous is that this permeation is representable precisely as the aberrant nuptial between the philosophical dream of a pure immanence and the algorithmic era. Guattari (2000, 43) suggests that this encroachment is not solvable if we persist in looking for an elsewhere, because the strongest characteristic of this era is precisely its pervasiveness. To fight the progressive depletion of cognitive abilities and space of action we have to stray into this polluted water transforming the “NowHere,” coordinates that make us predictable, into a “NoWhere,” an ideal but nonetheless real space of impersonal thinking that cannot be captured by big data. This strong mental experiment allows us to reconstruct the idea of transcendence in the absolute immanence, through at least two fundamental strategies: (1) third-person logic and (2) the valorisation of affects and percepts instead of concepts. After this trip to a virtual somewhere else, another time, with a different social and polit­ ical order, accomplished by an I that is at the same time an it, we come back with red eyes, able to look at the world from a different point of view—which is, according to What is Philosophy? (Deleuze and Guattari 1994), the becoming. For this reason, the thought hunted by all sides needs arts more than ever: “A work of art has nothing to do with communication. A work of art does not contain the least bit of information. In contrast, there is a fundamental affinity between a work of art and an act of resistance,” Deleuze explains in “What is the Creative Act?” (2007, 322–23). If we take this indication seriously, we can figure out why the arts are so important in our algorithmic era in their ability to argue and demonstrate that desires, thoughts, and possibilities are more than a list of numeric data. Despite the appearance of pure immanence, affects and percepts are not totally absorbed by algorithms; thus, if an act of resistance is possible in the computing era, it will start from the arts. References Deleuze, Gilles. 1992. “Postscript on the published 1973 in Michel Cressole, Societies of Control.” October 59 (Winter): Deleuze (Paris: Éditions universitaires). 3–7. Essay first published 1990 as “PostBook first published 1990 as Pourparlers: scriptum sur les sociétés de contrôle” 1972–1990 (Paris: Minuit). (L’autre journal 1 [May]) and republished ———. 2001. “Immanence: A Life.” In Pure in Pourparlers 1972–1990 (Paris: Minuit). Immanence: Essays on A Life, translated by Translation republished in revised form Anne Boyman, 25–33. New York: Zone in Negotiations: 1972–1990, translated by Books. Chapter first published 1995 as Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia “L’immanence: Une Vie” (Philosophie 47). University Press), 177–82. ———. 2007. “What Is the Creative Act?” ———. 1995. “Letter to a Harsh Critic.” In Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and In Negotiations, 1972–1990, translated Interviews 1975–1995, edited by David by Martin Joughin, 3–12. New York: Lapoujade, translated by Ames Hodges Columbia University Press. Essay first and Mike Taormina, 312–24. New York:

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Pure Immanence and the Algorithmic Era Semiotext(e). Chapter first delivered 1989 as Les trois écologies (Paris: Galilée). 1987 as a lecture (FEMIS film school), Rouvroy, Antoinette, and Thomas Berns. distributed on video as Qu’est-ce que l’acte 2013. “Gouvernementalité algorithmique de création? Book first published 2003 et perspectives d’émancipation.” as Deux régimes de fous: Textes et entretiens Réseaux 177: 163–96. Translated by 1975–1995, edited by David Lapoujade Elizabeth Libbrecht as “Algorithmic (Paris: Minuit). Governmentality and Prospects of Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. Emancipation: Disparateness as A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and a Precondition for Individuation Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian through Relationships?” accessed 20 Massumi. Minneapolis: University of May 2019, https://www.cairn-int.info/ Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as article-E_RES_177_0163--algorithmicMille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie governmentality-and-prospect.htm. (Paris: Minuit). Spinoza, Benedict de. (1994) 1996. Ethics. ———. 1994. What Is Philosophy? Translated Edited and translated by Edwin Curley. by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham London: Penguin. First published 1677 Burchell. New York: Columbia University as Ethica in Opera posthuma (Amsterdam). Press. First published 1991 as Qu’est-ce que This translation first published 1994 in A la philosophie? (Paris: Minuit). Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and Other Works, Guattari, Félix. 2000. The Three Ecologies. edited and translated by Edwin Curley Translated by Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University London: Athlone Press. First published Press).

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Mining the Aesthetico-Conceptual Deleuze, Derrida, and Artistic Research Spencer Roberts University of Huddersfield, UK

It has often been noted that the spider web implies that there are sequences of the fly’s own code in the spider’s code; it is as though the spider had a fly in its head. —Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987, 314)

Despite some rather pronounced philosophical differences, Deleuze and Derrida’s relationship would seem to have been broadly convivial in character. On the occasion of Deleuze’s death, Derrida suggested that there had been “a near total affinity” between their philosophies, and that he had never felt the “slightest objection” to any of Deleuze’s works (Derrida 1998, 3). Neither was this appreciation one-sided—when Deleuze cited Derrida it was for the most part with thanks and gratitude, and as a source of philosophical inspiration (Bearn 2000, 442).

Deleuze and Derrida’s philosophical allegiance Deleuze and Derrida were allied in their hostility towards conceptual stasis, overly linear approaches to temporality, and excessively centred notions of sub­ jectivity. Accordingly, they can be seen to have targeted a number of common philosophical opponents—most notably, they contested the conceptual gen­ erality of Plato and Aristotle, while also being influenced by what Bruce Baugh (1997, 127), citing Deleuze himself, refers to as the “generalized anti-Hegeli­ anism” of their time. Baugh claims that it is only with the philosophy of iden­ tity standing as a common enemy and as a force of mediation that we can see the two philosophers to have been united in their affirmation of difference. Indeed, as we shall see shortly, much of the secondary literature on this topic draws attention to the differences between these philosophers—contrasting the prominence of the concept of lack in Derrida’s philosophy with what is taken to be the more positive and fundamentally expressive mode of produc­ tion that can be found in Deleuze’s thought. Accordingly, despite their mutual claims to affiliation with Nietzschean affirmation, ultimately it is Deleuze who 261

Spencer Roberts is positioned by many commentators as Nietzsche’s rightful heir (Baugh 1997, 136–37; Bearn 2000, 454; Dickmann 2016, 69–70). With these problematics in mind, Deleuze and Derrida’s philosophical friendship must be seen very much as a post-structural alliance. That is, while there is a genuine resonance between their philosophical aims, it is important from the outset that we do not lose sight of the persistent tensions that accom­ pany what might, on the surface, appear to be a set of predominately harmoni­ ous or compatible relations. Accordingly, we begin this paper by asking how a Derridean critique of Deleuze’s philosophical enterprise might proceed, with the aim of utilising any points of contention that might arise as an opportunity to discuss some subtle methodological differences between each philosopher’s approach. We will pay particular attention to some telling stylistic differences in their use of philosophical neologisms, in a bid to shed further light upon the somewhat tensile relationship between their philosophies. Finally, in an attempt to find a way out of any seeming philosophical impasse, we will apply what has been learned to a discussion of the process of writing and the ques­ tion of argumentation in the context of artistic research.

Deconstructing Deleuze Perhaps the sharpest division between Deleuze’s and Derrida’s philosophi­ cal approaches can be found in their somewhat antithetical attitudes towards metaphysical enquiry. It is well known that Derridean thought is broadly opposed to the construction of metaphysical systems—Derrida notoriously castigated metaphysical thinking, aligning it closely with foundationalist, logocentric thought (Derrida 1997, 10–12). In stark contrast, Deleuze openly embraced metaphysical enquiry, ultimately going so far as to position himself as a “pure metaphysician” (Lawlor 2000, 72). For Deleuze, while there was a sense in which the dynamism of our internal psychological lives—the rise and fall of emotions and the transitional character of experiential qualities—might have a resonance with the form of intensive transformations occurring at a deeper ontological level, it was ultimately only through metaphysical enquiry that he believed we might arrive at a genuinely transcendentally empirical conception of difference, and a properly impersonal conception of sensation (Williams 2003, 8–17). Placing any notion of philosophical alliance aside for a moment, we might draw on John Mullarkey’s (2006) actualist criticisms of Deleuzian philosophy in an attempt to speculatively formulate a Derridean cri­ tique of the Deleuzian project. While expounding his own Deleuzo-Bergsonian thought, Mullarkey exposes aspects of Deleuze’s philosophy to criticism through a quasi-Derridean, decon­ structive lens (ibid, 13). That is, in accordance with Derrida’s deconstructive enterprise, Mullarkey identifies a series of binaries that are overtly present in Deleuze’s philosophical thinking—namely those of immanence/transcend­ ence, molecular/molar, virtual/actual, past/present, infinite/finite, and differ­ ence/repetition. Just as Derrida suggests that in any logocentric system, a set of fundamental binary oppositions are instituted, along with the valorisation of 262

Mining the Aesthetico-Conceptual one of the terms in each pair, Mullarkey notes the denigration of the actual that takes place in Deleuzian philosophy, and takes issue with what he takes to be the foundational aspects of Deleuze’s philosophical position. Mullarkey goes on to stress the affinity between Deleuze’s foundationalism and the philosophy of judgement (the philosophy that both Deleuze and Derrida attack) in a fash­ ion that is also strongly resonant with deconstructive critique (Mullarkey 2004, 470; 2006, 36). Thus, in the context of Deleuzian ethics, we are counselled to forget our actuality—to forget our molar identities, and to tend toward the imperceptible. Which is to say that we are exhorted to leave behind objectcentric, representational concerns, and to allow the virtual to work through us.

Derrida and the philosophy of judgement If a Derridean critique might position Deleuze—the anti-essentialist post­ structural philosopher—as a foundationalist or as the producer of a totalis­ ing metaphysical system, then the Deleuzian critique of Derridean philoso­ phy could be said to invert this context, while ultimately laying a very similar charge. For Deleuzian critics of Derrida’s project, such as Bearn, Baugh, and Dickmann, Derrida’s concern with alterity is ultimately compromised by his very insistence that we must stay within the frame of representation and con­ fine our discussion of difference to a set of actual concerns (Bearn 2000, 456– 59; Dickmann 2016, 76–77). Consequently, they suggest that Derrida remains caught within logocentric discourse, the philosophy of identity, and the consid­ erations of the purely conceptual difference that Deleuze associates with the philosophy of judgement. Thus, they are united in their verdict that Derrida is unable to properly address the operation of difference in itself (Baugh 1997, 136–37; Bearn 2000, 446–47; Dickmann 2016, 72). According to Bearn (2000, 446–47), Deleuze’s primary notion of repetition— the swarming differences that stand as the condition of the actual—provides a fundamentally positive, productive sense of affirmation that is ultimately absent in the thought of Derrida. He suggests that Derridean philosophy attempts to institute, as its guiding kinetic principle, the notions of perpetually thwarted desire, forever-deferred meaning, and the inherent incompleteness of signi­ fication (ibid., 454). Accordingly, for Derrida, it is an unrelenting short-circuit of meaning and desire that results not only in the urge to inscribe but also in the inherently iterable character of inscription. The situation is further com­ plicated because Derrida ([1973] 2004, 285–99), radicalising Saussure’s at once differential and relational linguistics, claims that our every utterance is always already other than itself—a negative space, participating in a vast semantic net­ work of grafted, viral signification. Following a similar logic, Dickmann has developed Derrida’s notion of pro­ ductive absence and perpetually frustrated representation through the figure of the mise en abyme (Dickmann 2015, 2016). Dickmann claims that Deleuze and Derrida both explore the operation of difference and iteration through this peculiar narratological device—in which a segment of a literary work apo­ retically and recursively reflects, reproduces, or pictures the whole in which it 263

Spencer Roberts is embedded. For Dickmann, when its poetics are fully embraced, the mise en abyme provides a performative principle of refractive and imperfect duplica­ tion—a seam that holds both the totalising text and its internal contestational other, resulting in an at once generative and retroactive form of narrative trans­ formation, which is frequently performed by characters within the fictional text itself (Dickmann 2016, 65). Developing the line of secondary commen­ tary that stresses the contrast between plenitude and lack in Deleuzian and Derridean thought, Dickmann suggests that it is only Deleuze who stays true to this genetic conception of the mise en abyme, while Derrida is depicted as oper­ ating with a diminished, “lacunal” form of failed self-picturing, which must be considered in some sense “degenerate,” and which is positioned as ultimately falling back into the philosophy of identity (ibid., 71). Dickmann and Bearn’s collective point seems to be that while it is the case that in the context of Derridean philosophy any given term is parasitic upon and reciprocally determined by others, it is still nevertheless parasitic upon and reciprocally determined by other terms. Thus, Dickmann suggests that Derrida’s conception of mise en abyme depends upon “discrete circuits” of repetition that must nevertheless perpetually fail. That is, in the context of the Derridean mise en abyme, every attempt at self-picturing is ultimately frus­ trated, as the institution of each successive level of representation results in yet another failure and yet another deferral. For Dickmann (2016, 78), Derrida’s reliance on these discrete, iterative circuits alongside the failure of repetition ultimately results in an embrace of the philosophy of identity, and it is this that consequently serves to thwart his “heterological” aims.

Differ(e/a)nce, differen(t/c)iation, and methodological divergence In an attempt to complicate questions of Deleuzo-Derridean resemblance, while exploring the power of the concept of the mise en abyme as an at once performative and comparative tool, we turn now to a question of philosoph­ ical method. More specifically, we turn to the role of neologisms in Deleuze’s and Derrida’s thought. A consideration of Derrida’s distinction between difference and différance (a neologistic, technical term coined by Derrida himself), alongside Deleuze’s own neologistic distinction between differenciation and differentiation, will serve to simultaneously identify and unsettle any straight­ forward notion of resemblance between their philosophies, while enabling an altogether different kind of comparative principle in the form of the at once productive and performative principle of the mise en abyme.

Derrida and differ(e/a)nce Derrida’s notion of différance in its conjunction of the concepts of difference and deferral was created to emphasis the elusiveness of the signified and to contest any overly centred notion of semantic foundations or any unduly stable conception of meaning as something that might be immediately pres­ 264

Mining the Aesthetico-Conceptual ent to consciousness (this is the substance of Derrida’s critique of Husserl). Importantly, for Derrida, the idea of semantic foundation is problematised by the way in which concepts are implicated, not only with a set of related terms but also with their polar opposites. Complicating things further, the endless deferral of meaning that results from the necessarily iterable character of writ­ ten (and by implication, spoken) inscription further contests any notion of origin, singular meaning, or presence. Thus, for Derrida, the at once allusive and vertiginous networked character of language, along with the contingent malleability of context that accompanies each re-inscription or re-presentation of any linguistic fragment, serves to problematise any naive notion of semantic purity or linguistic signification (Derrida 1997, 280–81). Both Deleuze and Derrida engage in more affective, playful, and performa­ tive kinds of writing. A brief consideration of Deleuze’s mode of philosophi­ cal dramatisation reveals a methodological use of word play and a neologistic construction of concepts that has an affinity with a number of Derridean strat­ egies. Indeed, Deleuze tells us that he “admires” the method of deconstruc­ tion, while at the same time distancing it from his own approach in a way that foregrounds a certain material–linguistic schism between his own philosophy and Derrida’s: “I do not present myself as a commentator of texts. A text, for me, is nothing but a little cog in an extra-textual machine” (as quoted in Bearn 2000, 461n6). Differences in material and linguistic affinity spread throughout Deleuze’s and Derrida’s philosophies—ambiently conditioning their works, and serving to inflect their philosophical methods. These differences become particularly apparent when we examine their respective approaches to some of their core neologistic constructions.

Deleuze and differen(t/c)iation When considering questions of identity, repetition, and difference, Deleuze makes an interesting distinction between what he terms processes of differen­ tiation and processes of differenciation (Deleuze 1994, 207). For Deleuze, the former (differentiation with a t) addresses the operation of virtual difference, while the latter (differenciation with a c) is oriented towards a discussion of our perception of actual, phenomenal things. In attempting to problematise the concept of representation, Deleuze typi­ cally proceeds by first drawing our attention to everyday empirical, differences. He begins by stating that “there is no individual absolutely identical to another individual” (Deleuze 1990, 266) before asking us to consider the distinctive qualities of individual calves, shellfish, grains of wheat, particles of dust, hands, typewriters, and revolvers (Deleuze, 1994, 26). Deleuze’s discussions of identities that are phenomenally given, however, serve only to pave the way for a radicalised version of this argument, which will stress the role of material differences that are both sub-representational and pre-empirical in character. Importantly, Deleuze claims that such pre-empir­ ical differences cannot be directly experienced—that the conceptually medi­ ated identities encountered in the phenomenally given, presuppose or are con­ 265

Spencer Roberts ditioned by “a pluralism of free, wild or untamed differences” (Deleuze 1994, 50). For Deleuze, then, actual identities are the products of richer, more funda­ mental, virtual processes of differentiation.

The extension and contestation of received usages of language While Deleuze and Derrida each resort to the construction of novel terms in the presentation of their arguments (différance in the case of Derrida and dif­ ferenciation in the case of Deleuze), they go about this in different ways. In particular, there is an interesting, and somewhat telling disparity in the align­ ment or contestation of their respective strategies of lexical or terminological construction with existing, received usage of language. When Derrida coins his term différance it is in an attempt to construct a con­ cept that is specific to his philosophy—for Derrida, différance will address his own notion of the aporetic play of networked inscription that is both temporally and situationally adrift (Derrida 1997, 68). With respect to the construction of a new philosophical vocabulary, Derrida’s methodological strategy is perhaps most obviously inspired by the work of Heidegger (Macquarrie and Robinson 1962, 13–14). That is, it begins from the premise that received language—the language of doxa—is inadequate to express what needs to be stated, and that as a consequence a new term must be created that is simultaneously haunted by the concepts of difference and of deferral and that famously incorporates a difference that can only be discerned when written—the silent, unpronounce­ able a (Derrida [1973] 2004, 281). In the case of Deleuze, however, the strategy is taken to further extremes through a more direct contestation and re-inscription of the received usage. That is, it addresses the more trivial, everyday forms of difference that can be located within actual, phenomenal experience, which Deleuze introduces in his own neologistic construction (that of differenciation). Deleuze’s con­ structed term is aimed not, as we might expect, at any metaphysical process or at anything particularly esoteric or conceptually specific to his own philosophy. Rather, it is directed at our more pedestrian understanding of actual, phenom­ enal repetition and our day-to-day perception of ordinary things. In contrast, what might be considered the more ordinary, everyday employment of the term (differentiation) is kidnapped and co-opted, becoming re-inscribed as a technical term in Deleuze’s metaphysics. This linguistic coup is not limited to the discussion of the subject of differentiation. Indeed, in the context of his dramatic method, Deleuze has a tendency not only to fuse terms that are tra­ ditionally considered opposites but also to hijack and subvert the meaning of existing concepts (Mullarkey 2006, 17). Thus, in Deleuze’s hands, repetition becomes the repetition of difference as opposed to the repetition of identity, and experience becomes a transcendental, material condition—something that is both sub-representational and, ironically, a priori in character—while essence is similarly repositioned as the engine of change.

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Mining the Aesthetico-Conceptual We have already seen how Derrida attempts to loosen a series of entrenched concepts through a form of temporal, semantic, and situational play. With this in mind, there is a way in which Derrida might be positioned as also problem­ atising the terms of received usage, notably through his strategy of implicating terms with their opposites—pharmakon becomes both cure and poison; the ghost or spectre is both present and absent; the hymen is between the inside and the outside of a body (Derrida 1981, 220–22). Deleuze is sometimes accused by his critics of proffering the most lais­ sez-faire of philosophies—a philosophy that diffuses any notion of opposition or argumentation. It seems curious then that it is Deleuze’s philosophy that is the more urgent and insistent of the two—instituting the more severe lin­ guistic recodings, and making the more grandiose philosophical claims. While Derrida conjures a picture of groundless, equivocal, and unstable semantics, Deleuze proffers a vision of entrenched, univocal, material difference and a close affinity between matter and sensation. This contrast between the semantic orientation of Derridean philosophy and the material orientation of Deleuzian thought perhaps goes some way to explaining the rather reductive depiction of Derrida as an idealist, as well as the charge of foundationalism that is sometimes brought against Deleuze.

Of void, abundance, and artistic research As we have seen, the difference between Derrida and Deleuze concerns, first, a dispute over the value of metaphysical enquiry and, second, a dispute over the power of abundance and lack. Interestingly, however, once we properly factor in Deleuze’s distinction between virtual and actual, Derridean absence and Deleuzian affirmation are drawn much closer together and consequently such distinctions have less critical force. While it is true that Deleuze goes to great lengths to stress the fecundity of the virtual, he nevertheless states quite bluntly that, given its ontological status, virtual differentiation is indeed “noth­ ing” with respect to the actual (Deleuze 1994, 47). With this in mind, it becomes harder to state a genuine conflict between Deleuze and Derrida’s respective positions. That is, while it is the case that from the perspective of the virtual Deleuze would seem to proffer a philosophy of unlimited creative abundance, it is also the case that when seen from the perspective of the actual, he could be said to proffer a philosophy of productive lack. In recent years, the emergence of artistic research has opened a space for enquiry, analysis, and critique that is arguably at once aesthetic and conceptual in character, while also being closely tied to material practice. Artistic research processes are distinctive in so far as they often involve a symbiotic relation­ ship between textual and aesthetic enquiry or intervention, and this is often undertaken in the service of alterity and difference. Given that Deleuze and Derrida both reject the philosophy of identity and that they contest notions of contradiction and the law of the excluded middle, it should come as no sur­ prise to find them withdrawing from narrowly conventional analytic forms of

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Spencer Roberts argumentation, blurring distinctions between the conceptual and the aes­ thetic, and in some sense prefiguring or anticipating the concerns of artistic research. Notwithstanding the association of Derrida with written inscription and Deleuze with material sensation, there is an inherent complexity to their performative practice that frequently serves to confound expectations. Thus, despite Deleuze’s preoccupation with sensation and affect, it is important to remember that he was predominately a writer—albeit a writer with an at once affective, performative, and corporeal agenda. Indeed, of the two philosophers, it was Derrida—the idealist deconstructor of texts—who most fully explored the aesthetic potentials of experimental writing in the typographic play of Glas (Derrida 1986). With this in mind, it seems reasonable to suggest that a Deleuzo-Derridean approach might go some way towards fulfilling the prom­ ise of artistic research. Accordingly, we will bring this paper to a close by con­ sidering some ways in which Deleuze’s and Derrida’s positions might ally or collude—not in any purely reflective or straightforwardly harmonious fashion, but refractively in the spirit of a mise en abyme. Turning initially to the question of writing and text, we have already seen how Derridean philosophy introduces the notion of a text as a complex, layered, differential construction, and how this position emerges out of a radicalisation of Saussure’s differential conception of language. Derrida’s comments on sup­ plement and deferral serve, first, to problematise the concepts of beginnings and expression and, second, to subordinate phenomena to a broadly linguis­ tic frame. This no doubt also informs the charge of idealism that is sometimes brought to Derrida’s door—despite the co-presence in his philosophy of a number of clearly materialist concerns (e.g., the materiality of inscription, and the employment of the virus as a metaphor). Corporeal concerns with vital matter and material sensation are neverthe­ less rather more prominent in Deleuzian thought. This arises partly out of Deleuze’s embrace of (a kind of) empiricism, and partly out of his affinity with a set of at once vital and systemic process-philosophical concerns. Long before the poststructural turn, process philosophers had addressed the emergent, developmental, and relational qualities of phenomena. In the opening to Art as Experience, Dewey ([1934] 1980) explicitly addressed the book as a processual artefact, noting how it “somehow becomes isolated from the . . . conditions under which it was brought into being” (1), drawing attention to the way in which “a wall is built around [it]” (2), while claiming that “to understand the flowering of plants,” we must examine “the interactions of soil, air, water and sunlight that condition [their] growth” (2). Similar observations occur later in the twentieth century with the turn to poststructuralism. Thus, for Foucault ([1972] 2002, 25–26) the book would become “a node within a network” that had no clear frontiers; while for Barthes (1977, 160) the text would hold the intertextual—“the text-between” of another text, quite different to its “sources.” Poststructural critique did however fur­ ther radicalise questions of relationality—problematising the bounded status not only of the text but also of the author and the reader. Thus, for Deleuze, a 268

Mining the Aesthetico-Conceptual book would become a “collection of bifurcating, divergent and muddled lines” that are “unattributable to individuals” (Deleuze 2007, ix–x) which had “only itself, in connection with other assemblages” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 4). Elaborating on this, Dickmann (2015, 22) draws attention to the way in which the semiotic and the pragmatic are fused together in Deleuze and Guattari’s account of the perpetually transcoding rhizomatic book, which becomes plu­ ralised through the material inscription of multiple processes of reading. While few others have explored the relational aspects of intertextuality more than Derrida, by taking into account Deleuze’s emphasis upon performativity, emergence, and onto-genetic construction, we are nevertheless able to supple­ ment Derrida’s account of textuality by addressing its neglect of the ontoge­ netic process of writing that focuses upon the emergence of a text. That is, in contesting the conception of a text as a static object or as a stable propositional structure, process philosophy draws attention to a complex productive history in the form of substitutions, redevelopments, and the emergence of ideas that take place over the course of its composition—reminding us that a text embod­ ies a developmental complexity of a logical, aesthetic, and semantic order. If Deleuze can offer Derrida a reminder of the importance of ontogenetic construction and the corporeal nature of a text, then perhaps Derrida can offer Deleuze—or at least Derrida might offer some Deleuzians—the gift of con­ testation and refusal that is all too often lost in the context of artistic research. That is, while many projects inspired by Deleuzian thought seek out new rela­ tions or incorporate experiments in living, the tendency towards impercepti­ bility can nevertheless serve to neuter any critical or political force. It is impor­ tant to note that this criticism cannot so easily be directed at Deleuze himself. We have seen how Deleuze’s inscription of creativity into the very essence of the world has been positioned as both foundationalist and fundamentalist by many of his commentators (Hallward 2006; May 1997; Mullarkey 2006)—and bearing in mind that Deleuze, like Heidegger before him, attempts to take the entire history of representational thinking to task, he can hardly be positioned as being in any sense critically or politically demure. How then can contestation and dissent be thought in the context of artis­ tic research? Refracting refusal through a Deleuzo-Derridean mise en abyme, we arrive at a rich mode of contestation that is nevertheless thoroughly crea­ tive in character. In What Is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari (1994) develop an operatic conception of the discipline in which they stress the need for the philosophical trinity of concept, percept, and affect, which Deleuze (1995, 165) goes on to describe as “the philosophical trinity” that is required “to get things moving.” In a closely related passage from A Thousand Plateaus—which is perhaps the nearest thing we have to a statement of method—we are counselled by Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 161) to “lodge [ourselves] on a stratum,” and “experiment with the opportunities it offers” in order to find “potential movements of deterritorialization.” Importantly for our purposes here, this passage ends with the assertion that it is only through “a meticulous relation with the strata,” that we might ultimately succeed “in freeing lines of flight.” 269

Spencer Roberts We have seen how Derridean deconstruction attunes us to the composition of a stratum precisely through its identification of potential movements and points of sensitivity—albeit Derrida primarily addresses movements apper­ taining to a somewhat molar and conceptual order—with only some relatively minor concessions to affect. It is important to recognise, however, that what Derrida takes from us with one hand, he gives back to us with the other: the loss of Deleuzian molecularity is in some sense recouped first through deconstruc­ tion’s distinctively molar contestation of molarity itself, and second through its creation of footholds for Deleuzo-Derridean lines of flight, that neither bind us nor blind us to negation and refusal. References Barthes, Roland. 1977. “From Work to Text.” In Image, Music, Text, edited and translated by Stephen Heath, 155–64. London: Fontana Press. Chapter first published 1971 as “De l’oeuvre au texte” (Revue d’esthétique 3: 225–32). Baugh, Bruce. 1997. “Making the Difference: Deleuze’s Difference and Derrida’s Différance.” Social Semiotics 7 (2): 127–46. Bearn, Gordon C. F. 2000. “Differentiating Derrida and Deleuze.” Continental Philosophy Review 33 (4): 441–65. Deleuze, Gilles. 1990. The Logic of Sense. Translated by Mark Lester with Charles Stivale. Edited by Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1969 as Logique du sens (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1994. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1968 as Différence et répétition (Paris: Presses universitaires de France). ———. 1995. Negotiations: 1972–1990. Translated by Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1990 as Pourparlers: 1972–1990 (Paris: Minuit). ———. 2007. “Preface to the English Language Edition.” In Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, rev. ed., vii–x. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as

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Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1994. What Is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1991 as Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Minuit). Derrida, Jacques. (1973) 2004. “Différance.” Translated by David B. Allison. In Literary Theory: An Anthology, edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, 278–99. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Essay first published 1968 in La voix et le phénomène: Introduction au problème du signe dans la phénoménologie de Husserl (Paris: Presses universitaires de France). Translation first published 1973 in Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press), 142–49. ———. 1981. Dissemination. Translated by Barbara Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. First published 1972 as La dissémination (Paris: Seuil). ———. 1986. Glas. Translated by John P. Leavey Jr. and Richard Rand. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. First published 1974 as Glas (Paris: Galilée). ———. 1997. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Corrected ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. First published 1967 as De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1998. “I’m Going to Have to Wander All Alone.” Translated by Leonard Lawlor. Philosophy Today 42 (1), 3–5. First published 1995 as “Il me faudra errer tout seul” (Libération, 7 November). Dewey, John. (1934) 1980. Art as Experience. New York: Perigee Book.

Mining the Aesthetico-Conceptual Dickmann, Iddo. 2015. “‘The Book as Assemblage with the Outside’—The Rhizomatic Book as a Radical Case of ‘Open Work.’” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 46 (1): 16–32. ———. 2016. “Using Mise en abyme to Differentiate Deleuze and Derrida.” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 48 (1): 63–80. Foucault, Michel. (1972) 2002. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. First published 1969 as L’archéologie du savoir (Paris: Gallimard). This translation first published 1972 (London: Tavistock). Hallward, Peter. 2006. Out of This World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation. London: Verso. Lawlor, Len. 2000. “A Nearly Total Affinity: The Deleuzian Virtual Image versus the

Derridean Trace.” Angelaki 5 (2): 59–71. Macquarrie, John, and Edward Robinson. 1962. Translator’s preface to Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, 13–16. Oxford: Blackwell. First published 1927 as Sein und Zeit (Halle an der Saale: Niemeyer). May, Todd. 1997. Reconsidering Difference: Nancy, Derrida, Levinas, and Deleuze. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Mullarkey, John (John Ó Maoilearca). 2004. “Forget the Virtual: Bergson, Actualism, and the Refraction of Reality.” Continental Philosophy Review 37 (4): 469–93. ———. 2006. Post-Continental Philosophy. London: Continuum. Williams, James. 2003. Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition: A Critical Introduction and Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Experimenting in Relation to the Anthropocene An Image of Earth-Thought from a Symptomatic Earth Line Paolo Vignola Universidad de las Artes, Guayaquil, Ecuador

Perhaps an entire book could be written about the direct or indirect relations between the philosophical and the macro- and micro-political: it would involve questions of geophilosophy and Deleuze’s text “Bartleby; or, The Formula” (1997a), in which he describes Herman Melville’s entire work as an embodi­ ment of pragmatist philosophy through literature. This imaginary book, which various authors have no doubt already attempted to write, however consciously, would most likely have as its main content and as a horizon the notion of a people to come, so often mentioned by Deleuze. Following the suggestions of geophilosophy, it is this minor, nomadic, and unfinished people that would have to become the new subject of philosophy. Nevertheless, what would make this book even more interesting, and capable of connecting with the ecologicalpolitical thinking of the twenty-first century, would be the range of questions stemming from the following quotation from What Is Philosophy?: “Subject and object give a poor approximation of thought. Thinking is neither a line drawn between subject and object nor a revolving of one around the other. Rather, thinking takes place in the relationship of territory and the earth” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 85). It is not difficult to see how this passage could function as a theoretical spring for several ecologico-political perspectives, in a strict sense, which is to say with respect to the environment, as well as in a broader sense, focused on relations of any kind between humans and non-humans. From Timothy Morton’s the­ ory of hyper-objects (2013) to the Amerindian perspectivism and multination­ alism described by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2017, chap. 4), via decolonial analysis and analyses of the Anthropocene, one can find the deconstruction of this surreptitious “line drawn between subject and object” that the tradition of Western thought has always regarded as assumed. The thread linking these explicitly or implicitly geophilosophical perspectives is precisely the critical thematisation of the line drawn between subject and object in order to put thinking into an immediate relation with “the territory and the earth.” Instead of describing these more recent geophilosophical peregrinations in detail, the 273

Paolo Vignola intention of this paper is to outline the main features of what could become a chapter of this imaginary book, highlighting, through a decolonial critique of the term Anthropocene, the future prospects still contained in Deleuze and Guattari’s perspective, and providing a possible aesthetic-(geo)political update of “Bartleby; or, The Formula” and its relation to American pragmatism. 1 0F

The coloniality and decoloniality of the Anthropocene Generally, the term Anthropocene is used to suggest that the growth of technol­ ogy and industrialisation has turned humanity into a fundamental agent of change to geological processes and the biosphere, to the point that the damage caused to the biosphere threatens the very possibility of humanity’s continued existence. Such a conception implies that humankind is thought of not only as a dominant and exceptional subject that controls and decides the fate of all non-human entities, but also as the victim of a kind of species-level autoimmune disorder whose actions produce side effects that prove immensely self-destructive. In this sense, the word Anthropocene is intended to embrace humanity as a whole, breaking with any and all local, cultural, economic, and epistemological boundaries, and confounding, within the signifier Anthropos, all civilisations, ethnicities, and socio-cultural processes. Nevertheless, such an Anthropos is not humanity as such, but only the subject of a directional line, trans-hemispheric and univocal, geo-epistemic and geo-political, crossing the globe from north to south, that is, from Europe and North America to all other places in the world, in order to enrich the former, conquer and pillage the latter, and dominate nature, considered as an object. From such a perspective, and following Jason Moore, who coined the term Capitalocene to challenge the prevailing discourse about the Anthropocene, it is easy to understand that “the endless accumula­ tion of capital and the endless appropriation of the Earth constitute, at the global scale, one and the same process” (Moore 2013, 18, my translation; see also Moore 2016). The concept of the Capitalocene, as an economic, historical, and political cri­ tique of the Anthropocene, underlines that the devastation of the Earth is the outcome of the activities of Homo sapiens in general; it derives from a particular nexus of epistemic, technological, social, political, and economic factors that coalesce to form a network with the biosphere. Far from coinciding with the whole gamut of human prehistory and human history, a multilevel nexus of exploitation has developed from the accidents that make up modern history and the history of colonisation, forming social relations of power whose epis­ temic effects are the basis of decolonial research. The features shared by the theory of the Capitalocene and decolonial thinking undoubtedly include the way in which the two perspectives summarise the relationship between moder­

1 For a general insight into the issue of the Anthropocene and Deleuzian thought, see Saldanha and Stark (2016); on Deleuze and postcolonial literature, see Aldea (2011); on decolonial thinking and the Anthropocene, see Bignali, Hamming, and Rigney (2016); Luisetti (2016); Schulz (2017); Todd (2015).

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Experimenting in Relation to the Anthropocene nity, thought, nature, and economy. According to both perspectives, capitalism, understood as a specific relationship between society and nature, has its begin­ nings in the formation of the sixteenth-century world system when Europe became the “centre” of a global network of knowledge and power. From the point of view of knowledge, nature is governed by the laws of mathesis universalis, in the sense that it is written in a universal, necessary, mathematical language, valid for every place and time. All nature’s attributes and values are drawn into the orbit of human interests—as part of that, a particular image of the human being, one that is decidedly Western, is implied. One might well conclude, therefore, that the fixation with Anthropos repeats the colonising pattern of an epistemic-political subject. It was with such a thought in mind that Santiago Castro-Gómez (2005) coined the expression “hybris of the zero point” to indicate the tendency of Western knowledge to “disembody” and “delocalise,” to strip knowledge of any corporeity and affec­ tivity in order to achieve the objectivity of reality and above all to legitimise itself in a hierarchical comparison with other non-Western forms of know­ ledge. These have been and continue to be systematically reduced to systems of “ethnic knowledge,” and, for this reason, on the one hand are considered to be “non-scientific” and on the other hand are taken as objects of Western knowledge itself. In other words, the zero point represents the beginning of the epistemological absolutism of the West that led to what Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2010, 68) defines as an epistemicide. Furthermore, Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Santiago Castro-Gómez describe such a Western epistemic hegemony in terms of an “abysmal line,” explaining that modernity has turned “non-Western experiences” into “cul­ tural waste” that effectively denies them the possibility of existing. The know­ ledge that lies above this abysmal line, which would supposedly be objective, neutral, universal, and valid for all people, corresponds to the model of whiteEuropean-capitalist-Christian-patriarchal-heterosexual man (Sousa Santos 2010; Castro-Gómez 2007). The abysmal line then reproduces the “line drawn between subject and object” that geophilosophy wants to put into question at the same time as it indicates a new subject of enunciation for contemporary philosophy, which is to say, for eternally minor people who, from Deleuze and Guattari’s perspective, by definition do not yet exist.

From the Western “zero point” to the “zero degree” of a people to come The claim of decolonial authors has to be understood as an “epistemic other­ ness” expressed through interstitial and hybrid forms, which in their hetero­ geneity draw the features of a “bordering episteme.” This epistemic-critical set embodies, on the one hand, the conflictual memories of colonialism and the contradictions of coloniality, while, on the other hand, promoting the pro­ duction of local, literally embodied knowledge originating from the spheres of ancestry, work exploitation, feminism, and gender minorities, which tries to avoid the pretence of neutrality and objectivity. The political commitment 275

Paolo Vignola of this frontier episteme is, then, obviously, to escape from the “zero point” of universal and Eurocentric knowledge (Castro-Gómez and Grosfoguel 2007, 21). According to Deleuze, literature has always had the role of drawing creative lines of flight and therefore counter-effecting the events of domination, colon­ isation, and violence occurring to the author and his or her community. Now, it is worthwhile recalling that the Anthropocene epoch has been conceived by philosophers and social scientists not just as an environmental issue but as an all-encompassing eco-social phenomenon. Being composed of a mix of climate change effects, old and new forms of colonisation, general impover­ ishment of resources, different traditions of knowledge, and political projects, the Anthropocene thus represents a major event with which critical thought, literature, and the arts have to deal. Confronted with this event, which also shows the failure of Western reason, and taking into account the perspective of Deleuze and Guattari, according to whom “thinking takes place in the relationship of territory and the earth,” one possible method of decolonial rescue seems to lie in Esteban Ponce Ortiz’s edited collection Grado cero (2016), a book that poses a sort of counter-effec­ tuation of collateral effects linked to the hybris of the zero point. Grado cero, the subtitle of which could be translated as “The equinoctial condition and the production of culture in Ecuador and other equatorial lengths,” offers the opportunity for a disorientation of Western thought, it also coordinates its geopolitical patterns. It is a disorientation that precisely concerns “the rela­ tionship between territory and the earth,” insofar as zero degrees latitude (the “equator”) draws a territory into the same interstice between North and South. The question then becomes, What geopolitical, cultural, and geophilosophical potentialities and reorientations can this equinoctial condition express? First, Grado cero describes the writers who traversed the equatorial line between their lives and their writings as a “community of imaginings,” by arranging Jules Verne, Edgar Allan Poe’s character Arthur Gordon Pym, and Melville’s books Moby Dick and The Enchanted Isles (The Encantadas) in rela­ tion to a heterogeneous group of Latin American authors, and particularly Ecuadorians, such as Leonardo Valencia and Jorge Carrera Andrade. Second, but perhaps even more interestingly, the book wants to appeal to a community larger than that of great writers, that is, a community that does not yet exist, like the “people [who] are missing” invoked by Paul Klee (Deleuze 1997b, 4, para­ phrasing Klee 1948, 54–55). Grado cero is an expression, then, composed of mul­ tiple levels of meaning in the face of the Anthropocene: it is a response to—or a counter-effectuation of—the hybris of the zero point, because the equatorial geopolitical line and the zero degree to which this notion refers are products of this hybris of Western reason. On the contrary, the line that Grado cero wants to redraw has to be understood as a plane of immanence for the creation of new universes of meaning. This plane, precisely like that of Deleuze and Guattari, intends to overcome the hierarchical relationship between the subject and the object of knowledge as well as of thought in general:

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Experimenting in Relation to the Anthropocene The space of the imaginary line, that which marks the balance of the hemispheres, also becomes the space where the psychic edges of the subject are ruptured. If, from the mere geodesic demarcation, equatorial space is a rigid geometric mark of unity and balance (equilibrium, universality), the equinoctial space passes from being a space of high symbolic condensation, to being that of a radical resistance to the Western rationalism that orders everything from the dictatorship of the subject and the subjection of the object. (Ponce Ortiz 2016a, 31, my translation)

At the same time, the book undoubtedly takes into account the risks associated with this operation, such as localisms and identity regionalisms, and intends to activate an “identification process in which the appropriation of some of the elements of national [Ecuadorian] pluriculturality is projected towards the universal” (ibid., 16). It would be an exercise of imaginary disorientation and of the imaginary going beyond Ecuador to build universal diversities and diversalities—that is, universal localities that in themselves express other points of view regarding supposed Western universality. Establishing a glance that can cross the galaxy of cultural universes and take in all its notable differences, while at the same time preserving its common setting under the full perpendicularity of sunlight, is an ambitious intercultural and postcolonial challenge and a certain source of reflective enjoyment in the fullness of equatorial tropicality, from the bustle of life, as life and as an idea of​​ life. Making visible the cultural landscapes of the central tropics as a whole thus becomes a strategy to bring this view of the planet to the mainstream and try to decentralise the dominant geopolitical perspective. Looking at the planet in its horizontal relations and from the equinoctial centre, which in no way coin­ cides with the geopolitical centres, affirms a possibility of intercultural approx­ imation from the latitude that is neither south nor north. This transversality, from the zero degree, suggests a possibility of dynamising East–West relations, from other poles, from decentralised cultural perspectives that are more per­ meable to the exercise of diversality (Ponce Ortiz 2016a, 19–20). The zero degrees latitude line, above which an alternative universal to the zero point and its hybris is understood to develop, encompasses the forests of the Amazon, the Congo, and Sumatra, as well as the Galápagos Islands, the Andes, the source of the Nile, the mountains of Kenya, and the nature reserves of Central Africa, that is, the localities where the maximum megadiversity of the planet can be found, a diversity that for this very reason more profoundly suffers the effects of the Anthropocene. In fact, it is the line of biological, zoo­ logical, and ethnological megadiversities that, today, is threatened by climate change. Finally, Grado cero also expresses the desire to establish a void of identity from which to rethink the very question of identity. It is in this void that one finds the theme of the people who are missing, of a people that does not yet exist. In the latter sense, Grado cero takes up Ecuadorian painting, with works focused on the equinoctial condition and its geometries, as a symptomatological agent capable of deconstructing the forms of identity imposed by Ecuador’s colonial heritage as well as by the intention of the state to conform a national and homogenising culture (Ponce Ortiz 2016a, 40). 277

Paolo Vignola While state culture cannot satisfy the idea of a people to come promoted by art, Grado cero imagines the root or the germ of this people in the figure of a community of imaginings, understood, following the decolonial perspec­ tive of Enrique Dussel, as unfinished transmodern subjects, witnesses of “a world in process” (Deleuze 1997a, 86). These subjects would be like islands con­ nected only by their distance, just like the Galápagos archipelago described in Melville’s The Enchanted Isles. Here we again encounter Deleuze’s perspective— an interdisciplinary encounter similar to those the philosopher himself posed. Indeed, in “Bartleby; or The Formula” Deleuze (2007a, 87) used The Enchanted Islands to define pragmatism as a “double principle of archipelago and hope.” It is the affirmation of a world in process, an archipelago. Not a puzzle, whose pieces when fitted together constitute a whole, but a wall of loose, uncemented stones, where every element has a value not only in itself but also in relation to others: “isolated and floating relations, islands and straits, immobile points and sinuous lines. . . . not a uniform piece of clothing but a Harlequin’s coat, even white on white, an infinite patchwork with multiple joinings” (Deleuze 2007a, 86). Deleuze’s operation, alongside Grado cero’s indirect suggestion, consists of taking the equinoctial condition and the equatorial line as geophilosophi­ cal components for a postcolonial world pragmatism, led by a community of explorer-imaginings. This new pragmatism, a pragmatism of the geopolitical patchwork in the time of the Anthropocene, “requires a new perspective, an archipelago-perspectivism that conjugates the panoramic shot and the track­ ing shot, as in The Encantadas. . . . It requires a new community, whose mem­ bers are capable of trust or ‘confidence,’ that is, of a belief in themselves, in the world, and in becoming” (ibid., 87–88). A patchwork is composed of irreducible diversities, and this could be thought epistemically as a composition of heterogeneous forms of knowledge, that is to say a kind of active epistemological complicity. Such a pragmatist patchwork, in a Deleuzian sense, is reflected in the programmatic introduction to Another Knowledge Is Possible: Beyond Northern Epistemology (Sousa-Santos, Arriscado Nunes, and Meneses 2007). For the authors, “epistemological diversity” means that there is no essential or definitive way of knowing the world: “The very action of knowing, as pragmatist philosophers have repeatedly reminded us, is an intervention in the world, which places us within it as active contributors to its making” (ibid., xxxi). A pragmatist sentence of this kind could be seen as a renewed geophilo­ sophical statement inspired by a community of imagining subjects; in this vein, it would serve to concretise Deleuze and Guattari’s suggestion about a future subject of enunciation. Indeed, if “the race summoned forth by art or philosophy is not the one that claims to be pure but rather an oppressed, bas­ tard, lower, anarchical, nomadic, and irremediably minor race” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 109), only literature, as a community of imaginings, may have the power to give life to such a people to come that “perhaps . . . exists only in the atoms of the writer, a bastard people, inferior, dominated, always in becoming, always incomplete” (Deleuze 1997b, 4). 278

Experimenting in Relation to the Anthropocene This people does not yet exist because it is incapable of belonging to nation states or to the global financial market; rather, it must rise from a new rela­ tion between the Earth and territory: this is what the current environmental and socio-political crisis requires, at least if we wish to continue to trust in the possibility of transforming this word. This is what, indirectly, Grado cero and geophilosophy seem to indicate, in Nietzschean fashion: “a new world that is neverending, that is always in the process of coming about—‘acting counter to time, and therefore acting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come’” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 112). References Aldea, Eva. 2011. Magic Realism and Deleuze: The Indiscernibility of Difference in Postcolonial Literature. London: Continuum. Bignali, Simone, Steve Hemming, and Daryle Rigney. 2016. “Three Ecosophies for the Anthropocene: Environmental Governance, Continental Posthumanism and Indigenous Expressivism.” Deleuze Studies 10 (4): 455–78. Castro-Gómez, Santiago. 2005. La hybris del punto cero: Ciencia, raza e ilustración en la Nueva Granada (1750–1816). Bogotá: Centro Editorial Javeriano. ———. 2007. “Decolonizar la universidad: La hybris del punto cero y el diálogo de saberes.” In Castro-Gómez and Grosfoguel 2007, 70–91. Castro-Gómez, Santiago, and Ramón Grosfoguel. 2007. “Prólogo: Giro decolonial, teoría crítica y pensamiento heterárquico.” In El giro decolonial: Reflexiones para una diversidad epistémica más allá del capitalismo global, edited by Santiago Castro-Gómez and Ramón Grosfoguel, 9–23. Bogotá: Siglo del Hombre Editores. Deleuze, Gilles. 1997a. “Bartleby; or, The Formula.” In Essays Critical and Clinical, translated by Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco, 68–90. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Book first published 1993 as Critique et clinique (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1997b. “Literature and Life.” In Essays Critical and Clinical, translated by Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco, 1–6. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Book first published 1993 as Critique et clinique (Paris: Minuit).

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1994. What Is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1991 as Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Minuit). Klee, Paul. 1948. On Modern Art. Translated by Paul Findlay. London: Faber and Faber. First published 1945 as Über die moderne Kunst (Bern: Bentelli). Luisetti, Federico. 2016. “Demons of the Anthropocene: Facing Bruno Latour’s Gaia.” Philosophy Kitchen 5: 157–69. Moore, Jason W. 2013. “El auge de la ecología-mundo capitalista (I): Las fronteras mercantiles en el auge y decadencia de la apropiación máxima.” Laberinto 38: 9–26. ———, ed. 2016. Anthropocene or Capitalocene: Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism. Oakland, CA: PM Press. Morton, Timothy. 2013. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ponce Ortiz, Esteban. 2016a. “La construcción simbólica de lo equinoccial en lo nacional y en una globalidad otra.” In Ponce Ortiz 2016b, 14–55. ———, ed. 2016b. Grado cero: La condición equinoccial y la producción de cultura en el Ecuador y en otras longitudes ecuatoriales. Guayaquil, Ecuador: UArtes Ediciones. Saldanha, Arun, and Hannah Stark. 2016. “A New Earth: Deleuze and Guattari in the Anthropocene.” Deleuze Studies 10 (4): 427–39. Schulz, Karsten A. 2017. “Decolonising the Anthropocene: The Mytho-politics of Human Mastery.” In Critical Epistemologies of Global Politics, edited by Marc Woons

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Paolo Vignola and Sebastian Weier, 46–62. Bristol, UK: E-International Relations Publishing. Sousa Santos, Boaventura de. 2010. Para descolonizar Occidente: Más allá del pensamiento abismal. Buenos Aires: CLACSO / Prometeo Libros. Sousa Santos, Boaventura de, João Arriscado Nunes, and Maria Paula Meneses. 2007. “Introduction: Opening Up the Canon of Knowledge and Recognition of Difference.” In Another Knowledge Is Possible: Beyond Northern Epistemologies, edited by Boaventura de Sousa-Santos, xvix–lxiii. London: Verso.

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Todd, Zoe. 2015. “Indigenizing the Anthropocene.” In Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies, edited by Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin, 241–54. London: Open Humanities Press. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2017. Cannibal Metaphysics: For a Post-structural Anthropology. Translated by Peter Skafish. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 2009 as Métaphysiques cannibales: Lignes d’anthropologie post-structurale (Paris: Presses universitaires de France).

Logic of Sens/ation Two Conflicting Conceptions of Transdisciplinarity in Deleuze and Guattari Guillaume Collett University of Kent, Canterbury, UK

Deleuze and Guattari’s aberrant nuptials relate to a double-becoming of hetero­ geneous components caught in a disjunctive synthesis. It is well known that this mechanism is central to their logics of immanence and becoming—in short, their metaphysics. What has been far less studied, however, is the extent to which this is also key to their conception of transdisciplinarity. Furthermore, I will show in this chapter that, for Deleuze and Guattari, among all the dis­ ciplines, the most aberrant nuptial pertains to the relation between philoso­ phy and art. Indeed, I will show that this point of disjunction concentrates Deleuze’s entire philosophical development from the 1950s to the 1990s. For the first Deleuze, that is the pre-Guattari Deleuze, philosophy and art can be said to enter into a convergent relation centred on the problems of expres­ sion, sense, and univocity. Deleuze wrote in his 1994 preface to the English edi­ tion of Difference and Repetition that, already in this book, disciplines were to be approached as irreducible (1994, xiv).1 This predates Deleuze and Guattari’s position in What Is Philosophy? (first published 1991), which assigns to philoso­ phy, science, and art irreducible disciplinary planes (Deleuze 1994). Yet, in the above-mentioned 1994 preface, Deleuze goes on to write: “Philosophy cannot be undertaken independently of science or art” (1994, xvi). Indeed, in The Logic of Sense, first published in 1969, art’s collaboration with philosophy seems to provide the very means by which the book’s crowning ontological thesis is realised, the so-called “speculative univocity of Being and language” (Deleuze 1990, 248).2 We find this articulated in the claim, made on the same page, that “humor constructs all univocity.” It is clear, here, that for Deleuze humour



1 “A philosophical concept can never be confused with . . . an artistic construction” (Deleuze 1994, xvi). On the “specificity” of philosophy, see also Deleuze (2004, 106). 2 One may object that this “speculative univocity” is just a linguistic iteration of his independently developed metaphysics of univocity, rather than integral to it. In response, one can consult the preface to the Italian edition of Logic of Sense, republished in Two Regimes of Madness, in which Deleuze (2007a) makes it clear that thanks to his redeployment of the notion of sense (or univocal sense) in that work, he manages to improve upon aspects of Difference and Repetition that were still not sufficiently immanent (i.e., not yet oriented in relation to the immanent “surface”).

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Guillaume Collett amounts to a transdisciplinary constructivism, replacing philosophy, which will have this function alone independently of art in What Is Philosophy?—namely, the function of constructing a plane of immanence, or in terms of Deleuze’s 1960s project, a univocal plane of incorporeal sense. He writes in the next sen­ tence, “It is necessary to imagine someone, one-third Stoic, one-third Zen, and one-third Carroll” (1990, 248).3 Clearly, if Deleuze and Guattari (1994) consider that philosophy and art entail irreducible methodologies and have distinct dis­ ciplinary objects, in the 1960s Deleuze considers the speculative univocity of being and language, or the univocity of being in short, to be itself irreducible to disciplinary enclosures. Indeed, the concept of univocity requires that disci­ plinary equivocity be bypassed in favour of an element able to ground such dif­ ferences. This points more generally to Deleuze’s late-60s logic of ontological difference and biopsychic repetition, according to which difference grounds its relata independently of them. But the question remains, is the difference between philosophy and art itself ultimately philosophical or artistic? Similarly, is univocity a genuinely transdisciplinary concept? It is necessary to pose these questions, and possible to answer them, because Deleuze himself identified his first formulation concerning transdisciplinar­ ity as ultimately idealist and insufficiently open to the body’s encounter with its exterior milieu, in relation to which he would later locate art. Part of this critique was Deleuze’s acknowledgement of his earlier over-reliance on 1960s French structuralism. Deleuze’s late-60s works pivot around the distinction between sense and reference, by means of which he articulates his metaphys­ ics of univocity. Endorsing the structuralist axiom that there exists a general­ ised excess of sense over reference, that one can always add one more signifier that reopens the signified’s closure onto a referent, Deleuze seeks to relo­ cate designated being to its very displacement within and throughout sense. Thus Deleuze reverses Gottlob Frege by considering sense, such as the names “Morning Star” and “Evening Star” in Frege’s famous example, to be expressive of its referent, here the planet Venus (Deleuze 1994, 35–36). “Morning Star” and “Evening Star,” or to give another example, two differing viewpoints on a city (Deleuze 1990, 173–74) express a third term as the effect of displace­ ment produced by the affirmation of their uncollapsible difference from one another. The sense–reference distinction is thereby folded into univocity itself, now understood as comprising a series of senses throughout which being, or univocal being, is endlessly displaced. Sense’s primary function, for Deleuze, is thus not to allow the proposition to denote an external body, signify a uni­ versal or general concept, or manifest the beliefs, opinions, and desires, of the person who speaks. These are all sense’s secondary, derived functions (see Deleuze 1990, 12–22). Rather, sense’s primary function is to construct a plane of immanence or univocity as the accumulation of senses extracted from their supposed referents, which ground any possible relation to them. It is thanks to structural­ 3 See also the following comment in Logic of Sense: when asked the question “‘what is philosophy?’ Dio­ genes responds by carrying about a cod at the end of a string.” Deleuze somehow relates this humorous formulation to “the problem of language” (1990, 135) within which Logic of Sense situates itself more generally.

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Logic of Sens/ation ism that Deleuze can develop a conception of univocity that is immanent inso­ far as it doesn’t presuppose either an analytic substantial unity or a synthetic subjective identity (see Deleuze 1990, 106). Structuralism’s elaboration of the pre-representational or intra-representational dynamics of the proposition demonstrate the excess of the signifying series over the signified one, and for the “first” Deleuze it is precisely here that an immanent conception of univoc­ ity can be located. Establishing humour as a transdisciplinary constructivism must be understood in this larger structuralist context centred on the prob­ lems of expression, sense, and univocity. It is clear that after his encounter with Guattari, Deleuze’s approach to the relation between philosophy and art fundamentally changed. I would argue, counter-intuitively, that this actually enabled Deleuze to fully realise his unique conception of immanence, even if this notion is nominally tied in their later work to philosophy alone. In What Is Philosophy?—although this is already pres­ ent in Deleuze’s pre-Guattari writings—immanence is conceived as a plane established by affirming the non-priority or absolute equality of the powers of thinking and being, image and matter, which returns us to the theme of aberrant nuptials (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 38). The plane of immanence, as becoming, is located between these two powers, as their mutual transgres­ sion of the difference separating them, but crucially without ever overcoming this difference, something that would cancel becoming and reinstate being. For those familiar with Logic of Sense, it is striking to what extent “sense” func­ tions as a prototype of the plane of immanence, as found in What Is Philosophy? Nonetheless, the problem with Deleuze’s 1960s project, which he quickly real­ ised after meeting Guattari, and thanks also to the contemporaneous works of Lyotard, Foucault, and other so-called poststructuralists of this period, is that his first formulation of the plane of immanence can be established only at the cost of hermetically sealing this plane within propositional sense, and more deeply within an Oedipal or phallic conception of sexuality anchored to the castration complex. It is thanks to the last that Deleuze manages in Logic of Sense to show how sexual bodies articulate with concepts through the medium of lan­ guage as structure inscribed in the unconscious. In short, a plane of immanence is indeed produced, in Logic of Sense, as understood in Deleuze’s later works as non-priority or equality of powers; but this can only be done by sealing this plane within a historically and politically conditioned enclosure. By enquiring into the genesis of this structure, with Guattari in Anti-Oedipus (first published 1972, see [1977] 1983), Deleuze manages to open his plane of immanence onto the historical and political outside. In other words, if the aim of Logic of Sense is to open language to the radically non-linguistic basis of language, namely sex­ ual bodies, and to locate univocal being in the constant oscillation in language between the proposition and its sexual outside, then the aim of Anti-Oedipus is to show that this is not really the outside at all. Consequently, the outside of language is no longer the nonsense of sexual bodies, but rather that which is anterior to the structural distinction between sense and nonsense. One of the outcomes of this new perspective, enabled by Deleuze and Guattari’s genealogy of structuralism, is an awareness of the anteriority within 283

Guillaume Collett language of the figural to the purely discursive. Unfortunately, little has been written on the influence of Lyotard’s 1971 work Discourse, Figure (see 2011) on Deleuze and Guattari,4 but this work seems to cross paths with Deleuze at this key crossroad when shifting from a linguistic univocal logic of becoming to what I argue is an anti-linguistic and now fully immanent logic of becoming. In this book, Lyotard (2011) aims to counter the Lacanian linguistic uncon­ scious by arguing for a strictly figural, non-discursive, dimension inherent to the discursive and accounting for its libidinal dimension. While at first glance seemingly close to Deleuze’s sexual nonsense as foundational to language, Lyotard appears to go further than Deleuze by not defining language’s resist­ ant outside in terms that are still ultimately linguistic:5 in short, nonsense is only nonsense in relation to sense, and thus Deleuze finds no positive way of grappling with language’s sexual outside independently of language itself.6 It is true that Deleuze’s shift away from a linguistic model to a non-linguistic one is fully anticipated by the thirteenth series of Logic of Sense, “The Schizophrenic and the Little Girl” (Deleuze 1990, 82–93), in which Deleuze pitches Artaud against Carroll, famously concluding the chapter by writing he would not “give a page of Artaud for all of Carroll” (ibid., 93). Artaud’s version of literary non­ sense, according to Deleuze, is not centred on univocity and propositional sense but rather directly meshes with forces affecting the body, without need­ ing the phallic structural mediation of castration anxiety and Oedipus, which underscores the rest of Logic of Sense.7 Nonetheless, it is only really in AntiOedipus that Deleuze first uses Artaud to articulate a non-linguistic alternative to structuralism. Co-articulating the reading of Artaud found in Logic of Sense’s thirteenth series with Lyotard’s Discourse, Figure, and third with Guattari’s heterodox psycho­ analytic re-interpretation of the work of linguist Louis Hjelmslev, Anti-Oedipus develops a new conception of “semiotic content” that is now fully irreducible to linguistic expression if necessarily co-articulated with it (Deleuze and Guattari [1977] 1983, 241–46). While Deleuze’s whole problematic of expressionism, as developed throughout his works of the late 60s, thoroughly articulates a logic of immanence, as I have said, it is, for the later Deleuze and Guattari, histori­ cally and politically myopic. From Anti-Oedipus onwards, the theme of expres­ sion will be sidelined and made to always articulate with semiotic content. Logic of Sense and A Thousand Plateaus (first published 1980, see Deleuze and Guattari 1987) superficially use the same tripartite schema to approach language, laying out a plane of content or bodies, a plane of expression or language, and between them a plane of consistency or sense. There is however a significant difference 4 An exception is Bogue (2003, 112–16). 5 For instance, Lyotard draws attention, in Serge Leclaire’s structuralist work on the syncope of the drive (which is to say its libidinal movement and articulation with language’s non-signifying phonemic basis), to the rhythmic notion of syncopation itself, which points outside language, and even beyond non-signi­ fying nonsense, to a purely figural dimension irreducible in principle to structuralism (see Lyotard 2011, 351–53). 6 Hence Deleuze and Guattari ([1977] 1983) consider Lyotard’s Discourse, Figure to provide the “first gener­ alized critique of the signifier” (243). 7 Artaud’s views on sexuality and the body are particularly frankly and vividly spelled out in his “Van Gogh: The Man Suicided by Society” (1965).

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Logic of Sens/ation which is that if in Logic of Sense bodies and language are articulated by means of structure, and ultimately by means of language, in A Thousand Plateaus expres­ sion is linguistically structured, content is non-linguistically structured (since content has an autonomous form separate from the form of expression), and what articulates them both is a non-castrated, anti-Oedipal, body without organs immanent to a social field, which functions by diagramming the relations of force affecting the social body. Furthermore, this anti-Oedipal semiotic strategy will directly inform Deleuze’s late aesthetics and later conception of transdisciplinarity, after 1980. The very first footnote in Deleuze’s 1981 monograph Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (2003) refers to Lyotard’s Discourse, Figure. The footnote explic­ itly states that arguably the central concept in The Logic of Sensation, namely the “Figure” (as irreducible and indeed opposed to the “figurative”), is to be understood how Lyotard understands it, which is to say as radically separate from language if implicated within or enveloped by it (Deleuze 2003, 173n1). Indeed, the work’s subtitle, Logic of Sensation, intentionally subverts the focus of the 1969 Logic of Sense and the aesthetics present therein. In both Bacon’s work and post-war cinema, which Deleuze explored in his 1985 book on the cinematic “time-image” (Deleuze 1989), Deleuze seeks to find a radically nonsyntactical approach to the image that breaks with the discursive, narratolog­ ical, and figurative, in short any determination that could bring it back to lan­ guage particularly when understood as structure.8 Now I want to return to my initial aim in this chapter, to highlight the tension in Deleuze and Guattari’s work between philosophy and art as the site of differ­ ence or tension within Deleuze’s overall development. I have stated that the structural articulation of nonsensical bodies and expressive language gave way to the relation between semiotic content and linguistic expression, and then to the tension between a linguistic logic of sense and a figural logic of sensation. The final piece of evidence supporting this schema is to be found in What Is Philosophy?, where philosophy is now strictly distinguished from art on the basis that they occupy irreducible disciplinary planes, of immanence and “composi­ tion,” respectively. Furthermore, as Éric Alliez (2004) has noted, the chapter on art in What Is Philosophy?, while mentioning literary examples, draws primarily on the visual and plastic arts. One could argue that Deleuze is simply summa­ rising his aesthetic writings in this chapter. However, this would be to ignore his previous twenty years of theoretical development.9 Moreover, philosophy and art are not simply two of the disciplines tackled by What Is Philosophy?: again they constitute polar opposites of the system put in place. This is prepared for

8 As one sees in his interviews with David Sylvester, Bacon is most concerned with sensation’s direct impression upon the “nervous system,” the act of painting, for him, consisting in attempting to stick as closely as possible to sensation when recording the “fact” of this impression (see Sylvester 1987, 82, 107, 164). As Bacon puts it, “I’m just trying to make images as accurately off my nervous system as I can. I don’t even know what half of them mean. I’m not saying anything” (ibid., 82). 9 Furthermore, Deleuze and Guattari are careful to spell out in What Is Philosophy? that not only art but also now philosophy is no longer to be considered in terms of sense, or in any way connected to the proposition, contra Logic of Sense (see Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 22–23), language being consigned primarily to the sub-discipline of logic in the 1991 work.

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Guillaume Collett by Deleuze’s 1988 book The Fold, on Leibniz and the Baroque (Deleuze 1993). Whereas in the 1960s Deleuze’s primary concern in his reading of Leibniz was the divergence of monads with respect to a centring viewpoint, in the 1980s Deleuze was more concerned with “Having a Body,” to allude to the third part of the book, namely the relations between monads and their bodies, continuing his concern with more decisively separating expression from content—or, as he put it in the later work, “a regime of expression and a regime of impression” (Deleuze 1993, 100). The actualisation and counter-actualisation of events now concerns monads, whereas what occurs to a monad’s body is of an entirely dif­ ferent order: it concerns the direct “realisation” of one of the event’s possible worlds. The couple actual–virtual pertains to monads but the couple real–pos­ sible relates to bodies (ibid., 104), even if in practice the two levels are insepara­ ble. This schema is entirely new to The Fold, and revolutionises Deleuze’s theo­ risation of the event, which in Logic of Sense had subsisted solely on the univocal surface that bypasses the very distinction between monad and body. Instead, The Fold widens the crack between the two levels and substitutes the principle of the fold for the 1960s ontology of univocal being or univocal sense. Now, Deleuze recounts in a 1988 interview included in Negotiations (1995) that it was thanks to his work on Leibniz in The Fold that he was able to “see better” how art’s radically non-conceptual “affects and percepts” and philoso­ phy’s concepts “are three inseparable forces, running from art into philosophy and from philosophy into art” (Deleuze 1995, 137), but always as two radically autonomous dimensions that can only ever interact indirectly. A new (“figural”) conception of art severed from concept and language thus enables Deleuze to expand his earlier (only supposedly transdisciplinary) approach to the philo­ sophical concept from the 1960s so it can reach further into its own outside and into being, no longer so contained within a solely “expressive” dimension or in a relation of expression to content that prioritises the former over the latter. Indeed, the two “floors” carefully distinguished in The Fold (monads and their bodies) are directly mapped onto the relations of the disciplines in What Is Philosophy?,10 which assigns concepts to the philosophical plane of immanence and to counter-actualisation and logical “prospects” (which are the result of applying the quantitative spatio-temporal principles of science’s “functives” to philosophical concepts) to the “plane of reference” and to actualisation; how­ ever, it consigns affects and percepts to the “plane of composition” of art alone, and to the realisation (or as they put it here “embodiment”) of events’ possible worlds in “a body, a life” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 177).11 Although What Is Philosophy? not only distinguishes but also theorises ways for the philosophi­ cal and artistic planes to “interfere” with one another across their dimensions or halves of the system (ibid., 216–18), it is perhaps in Deleuze’s final text, “Immanence: A Life” (2007b), that he most effectively articulates philosophy and art at a fully transdisciplinary level, no longer privileging either discipline. With the title’s precise formulation, co-articulating a philosophical plane of 10 I would like to thank Sjoerd van Tuinen for pointing this out to me. 11 Deleuze and Guattari (1994) make it clear that art does not actualise a virtual event but concerns the “existence of the possible” (177).

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Logic of Sens/ation immanence and an “artistic” notion of “a body, a life,” Deleuze seems to be gesturing towards a final (non-dialectical) synthesis of philosophy and art in the very colon (or fold) separating “immanence” from “a life.” Replacing the 1960s ontology of univocal sense, which reveals itself to be ultimately too philo­ sophical and idealist, we could suggest that the late notion of the fold therefore provides a now truly transdisciplinary and immanent articulation of thinking and being, philosophy and art, opening thought fully to its figural outside. References Alliez, Éric. 2004. “The BwO Condition; or, The Politics of Sensation.” In Discernements: Deleuzian Aesthetics/ Esthétiques deleuziennes, edited by Joost de Bloois, Sjef Houppermans, and FransWillem Korsten, 93–112. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Artaud, Antonin. 1965. “Van Gogh: The Man Suicided by Society.” In Artaud Anthology, edited by Jack Hirschman, 2nd ed., 135–63. San Francisco, CA: City Lights. Chapter first published 1947 as Van Gogh: Le suicidé de la société (Paris: K éditeur) Bogue, Ronald. 2003. Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Deleuze, Gilles. 1989. Cinema 2: The Time Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1985 as Cinéma 2: L’image-temps (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1990. The Logic of Sense. Translated by Mark Lester with Charles Stivale. Edited by Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1969 as Logique du sens (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1993. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Translated by Tom Conley. London: Athlone Press. First published 1988 as Le Pli: Leibniz et le Baroque (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1994. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1968 as Différence et répétition (Paris: Presses universitaires de France). ———. 1995. “On Philosophy.” In Negotiations, 1972–1990, translated by Martin Joughin, 135–55. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1988 as “Entretiens avec Raymond Bellour et François Ewald”

(Magazine littéraire 257: 16–25). Book first published 1990 as Pourparlers: 1972–1990 (Paris: Minuit). ———. 2003. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Translated by Daniel W. Smith. London: Continuum. First published 1981 as Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation (Paris: Éditions de la Différence). ———. 2004. “The Method of Dramatization.” In Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974, edited by David Lapoujade, translated by Michael Taormina, 94–116. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Chapter first published 1967 as “La méthode de dramatisation” (Bulletin de la Société française de philosophie 61 [3]: 89–118). Book first published 2002 as L’île déserte: Textes et entretiens, 1953–1974 (Paris: Minuit). ———. 2007a. “Note for the Italian Edition of The Logic of Sense.” Translated by James Cascaito. In Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews, 1975–1995, edited by David Lapoujade, translated by Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina, 63–66. New York: Semiotext(e). Essay first published 1976 as “Nota dell’autore per l’edizione italiana,” in Logica del senso (Milan: Feltrinelli). Book first published 2003 as Deux régimes de fous: Textes et entretiens, 1975–1995 (Paris: Minuit). ———. 2007b. “Immanence: A Life.” In Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews, 1975–1995, edited by David Lapoujade, translated by Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina, 384–90. New York: Semiotext(e). Chapter first published 1995 as “L’immanence: Une vie” (Philosophie 47). Book first published 2003 as Deux régimes de fous: Textes et entretiens, 1975–1995 (Paris: Minuit). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. (1977) 1983. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and

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Guillaume Collett Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1972 as Capitalisme et schizophrénie: L’anti-Œdipe (Paris: Minuit). Translation first published 1977 (New York: Viking Press). ———. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Minuit).

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———. 1994. What Is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1991 as Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Minuit). Lyotard, Jean-François. 2011. Discourse, Figure. Translated by Anthony Hudek and Mary Lydon. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1971 as Discours, figure (Paris: Klincksieck). Sylvester, David. 1987. The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon. 3rd ed. London: Thames and Hudson.

Listening for a New Body Thinking Change and Learning Reason with Difference and Repetition and Spinoza: Practical Philosophy Antonia Pont Deakin University, Australia

Beneath the general operation of laws, however, there always remains the play of singularities. Cyclical generalities in nature are the masks of a singularity which appears through their interferences; and beneath the generalities of habit in moral life we rediscover singular processes of learning. —Gilles Deleuze (1994, 25)

Introduction The quotation above comes from the introduction to Difference and Repetition (1994). Repeated three times, the two terms generality and singularity are coun­ terpointed, allowing Deleuze, among other things, to frame two operations— habit and learning—which pertain to two very different registers in which something that we imprecisely call change can feature. There are changes that constitute the fabric of our present and its continu­ ation—relentless, incessant, incremental change or variation—in the face of which the organism adapts. Or, to say it more rigorously: this very adaptation, in fact, constitutes the organism. Then there is another kind of change that Deleuze in his book has specifically helped us think. This change is not variation (sometimes he calls it selection). It has less to do with gratification, I’d argue, than with what we call elation, or joy. My broader research into practising investigates the second kind of change (its mechanisms, what hinders it, in what situations we court it), while clarify­ ing its relation to the first kind.1 This chapter uses some elements of Deleuze’s 1 Consider on this point of newness and types of change the following quotation from Rosi Braidotti ([2006] 2018, 24): “The much-celebrated phenomenon of globalisation and of its technologies accom­ plishes a magician’s trick: it combines the euphoric celebration of new technologies, new economy, new lifestyles, new generations of both human and technological gadgets, new wars and new weapons with the complete social rejection of change and transformation. In a totally schizophrenic double pull the consumerist and socially enhanced faith in the new is supposed not only to fit in with, but also actively to induce the rejection of in-depth changes.”

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Antonia Pont Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (1988), namely, his ethics and learning of reason, to consider how their relation might involve kinds of rhythms. Deleuze notes that, for Spinoza, bodies—that which we might identify as discrete and belonging to “selves”—are not defined “by a form or by functions” but as “relations of motion and rest, of speeds and slownesses” (ibid., 123), that is, they are produc­ tively deemed “rhythmic” rather than “functional.” Change—both dogged-/hyper-variation and this other kind of change—has something to do with difference. Given there are two registers at which these quite different changes occur, we appreciate why there are also two kinds of difference that Deleuze makes precise for us. By mentioning early in Difference and Repetition the notions of generality and singularity, Deleuze prepares his reader for this project of disambiguation. He will explain first that that which in the history of philosophy has typically been thought as “difference” remained within the bounds of a mere conceptual difference between identifiable things—but that there operates another regis­ ter of “difference” related but distinct, whose movement constitutes, and is the genesis of, these identified entities and categories. The second, less adjectival, logically precedes any “nouns” for which it would serve as a predicate. Rather more “verbal” (as in, behaving like a verb), for Deleuze it is a proper concept of difference—or “difference in itself ” (1994, 40). It will be, then, generality and its particulars that pertain to the register of representation where we can almost only ever encounter usual difference, that is to say, conceptual difference—we recognise things and then note how they are different (see also Dillet 2013, 257). Difference in itself, on the other hand, pertains to singularity and to what it conditions. The latter is an exercise in thought beyond representational frameworks. In Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, furthermore, we see a useful approach to “processes of learning” via Spinoza’s approach to reason. Crucial to this is his ethology in relation to affects—sadness as the idea of a dynamic decreasing in capacity, and joy as its dynamic increase. Spinoza’s reason, we note, differs in important ways from how reason might operate within representation more usually, relying initially, almost as its apprenticeship, on an apprehension of shifts in intensity rather than comparison of identified entities. Deleuze’s use of the term interferences in the quotation at the start of this chapter recalls music/sound, as well as the numerous registers at which rhythm operates: as waves of compression/rarefication; as the rhythm as such of identi­ fiable musical compositions; and, finally, as the time signature of our times and habitudes—us, as rhythms per se. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze seeks a difference that would not be of the register of habit and generality. In habit, change as difference is that which is integrated, made invisible and ploughed under, in order to preserve and continue the (adapting) self. Another kind of “learning,” as he invites us to call it, courts pure change, as empty form, and does not carry any self forward in an identifiable way; it “tears us apart” (Deleuze 1994, 192). Or, as Conor Heaney (2018, 384) has noted: “the learning process [that] the encoun­ ter can ignite is, of course, not a process of mimesis or the reproduction of a 290

Listening for a New Body certain proper methodology of thought, but rather involves experimentation and practice.” The operations of habit itself—via contractions of raw differences—how­ ever, produce the temporal mode of the present, its continuity, stability, and seeming intractability. In Deleuze, habit’s operation, too, ramified via memory and prediction, throws up the mirage that entities are ontologically primary, and that there is nothing other than representation’s order.

Generality and habit In Difference and Repetition Deleuze seeks the thought of a difference (in itself) logically preceding any identity whatever. This prior and historically silenced or elided difference constitutes the genesis for every other order of difference. Philosophy has tended to think conceptual difference, which pertains to both common and good sense (Deleuze 1994, 133 et seq.) and always traffics in gen­ erality and its particulars. Furthermore, the ontology from with Deleuze dis­ tances himself, according to Heaney (2018, 378), is one in which the “point of departure and point of arrival” are in-built, determined in advance. Difference within representation oddly appears as an apparently unchanging or stable order (at a general level) made up of relentless or incessant changes or differences (at the level of particulars). Particulars vary, superseded at an alarming rate, while our overall context—as we live it—may be experienced as quite intractable and robust, haunting those who endure it with either an inar­ ticulable sense of impotency (to change the relation to change) or, for those better placed within its order, it may foster illusory complacency. We have habits whereby we “select” the encounters that we have, and we may not select these, in Spinozan terms, according to (burgeoning) reason. We may not necessarily experiment with being on the lookout for joy. When we complain that nothing changes, we also mean—more rigorously— that the changes that we are seem to remain predictable. We stop neither chang­ ing nor integrating those changes in habitual ways. Doomed we are, then, to ourselves as change, to its inertia, and this consistency produces the effect of sameness or equality (see 1994, 223 et seq.). This order of change pertains to habit—a habit that is temporal beyond being “behavioural,” as Deleuze makes clear in Chapter 2 of Difference and Repetition. Its operation makes time. Habit, in other words, constitutes one of the orders of time, one of the ways in which one time of several is synthesised. Félix Ravaisson is another who articulates habit’s relation to change and con­ tinuity. In his work Of Habit from 1838, he writes “habit, in the widest sense, is a general and permanent way of being,” and “habit is thus a disposition relative to change, which is engendered in a being by the continuity of the repetition of this very same change” (Ravaisson 2008, 25). Habit, for Ravaisson, too is the compulsory mode for beings who can endure; it is the mode of their persevering. This way of being generalises into perma­ nency or continuity that which—at another level—is unrelated or discontinu­ ous. Habit stitches continuity and permanency from multitudes of difference. 291

Antonia Pont At the same time, it is a disposition relative to change such that we can sur­ vive the latter, adapt to it, and appear to continue—as a discrete identity/ entity—despite changes to our environment and the changes in “us” that these necessitate (see Grosz 2013). Deleuze takes this further. Habit pertains to a foundational order of time: the first passive synthesis (1994, 71–72). Habit, which integrates and makes live­ able these incessant differences, this order of changing-ness, also constitutes “us.” The operation of habit synthesises our “living present” (ibid., 72). It isn’t so much that we have habits, but that we are them (ibid., 73). “Good sense,” as Deleuze frames and critiques it, is also based on this synthesis of time (ibid., 224). Perhaps through habit we accumulate “good sense,” but we may not learn. We are unable to step out of habit easily, then, because we are the habits whose bonds we would like to slip. If habit were to change in another way, then we too would be no longer (known to) ourselves. We are already someone/something else. About the present, the time of habit, Deleuze writes: “The present is always contracted difference” (1994, 84). With this “contraction” (which is nothing other than habit’s manoeuvre), the conditions for a subsequent register, which will be that of representation will be found. A more originary difference thus comes out of solution, but in that same operation is ploughed into obscurity. Everything appears to “repeat” (our capacities may appear fixed), but this is a mirage thrown up by sheer pre-conceptual difference! The present, we read in Deleuze, is already generalised; the present that “we” can experience as a living present is by definition of the order of generality. It is always already a span of particulars drawn together, or “contemplated” (v.) into a generalised continuity. Upon this first passive layer, furthermore, is erected a second order of similar operations (particulars generalising), to produce the regime of representation. We find ourselves two steps removed from the swarm of instants (multiplicity or difference prior to identity), which have been contracted by dint of imagination’s function into a duration and which then, via reflection, become the register of representation where difference in itself is doubly concealed. Like Derrida’s crypt, difference is hidden twice (1977). What is thrown up is the mirage of rep­ resentation as seemingly primary, as foundational. How then might the operations, which we can wholly and rigorously call habitual, ever pause or rest in such a way that difference might be anything more than mere conceptual difference? How, in other words, can a hiatus be introduced into the habits of being that we are, that constitute our accessible worlds? How can we have learning that escapes habit, or have a new self or body? I turn now to Deleuze’s second book on Spinoza, where he gives us quite practical ways to think about the differences we endure, the inertias we are, and the unrepresentable changes we desire.

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Causes and effects; affects and learning Spinozan reason This is because the inadequate idea [for Spinoza] always has to do with a mixture of things, and only retains the effect of one body on another; it lacks a “comprehension” that would be concerned with causes. —Gilles Deleuze (1988, 68, my emphasis)

The regime of representation and its embedded syntheses with their basis in habit’s operation, lead us to a very practical, life-salient question concerning how we might understand and not unintentionally preclude the other order of change. How can we make a change to our habitual ways of enduring as change (read: continuing as we are)? How do we “be” or endure differently, to invite, or learn to welcome a different difference? This is the question of much art, of primary relations that are more than transactional arrangements, of emancipatory politics, and of real science, mathematics, and other inventive fields. Spinoza, according to Deleuze, highlights the distinction between that which is a cause and that which is merely an effect. Inadequate ideas are such that they form on the basis of the relations between effects and remain ignorant of the causes of the effects. “Immediate experience gives us the effects of this or that body on ours, but not the relations that compose these bodies” (Deleuze 1988, 118). It is here that the reason of Deleuze’s Spinoza arguably reverber­ ates with the critique in Difference and Repetition of representation’s “reason”: “There are four principal aspects to ‘reason’ in so far as it is the medium of representation: identity, in the form of the undetermined concept; analogy, in the relation between ultimate determinable concepts; opposition, in the relation between determinations within concepts; resemblance, in the determined object of the concept itself ” (Deleuze 1994, 29, emphasis original). These principles are the four heads of representation’s “shackles,” by dint of which difference is “mediated.” With representation’s “reason,” difference is re-presented in order for its amorality to be domesticated (ibid.). This unru­ liness is bedded down via at least two operations. Being’s immanence—as a kind of cause—then, becomes inaccessible as source of disruption or instability, but in the same manoeuvre can no longer be a wellspring of futurity and creativ­ ity. This is the conundrum associated with representation’s stability and con­ tinuity. If we remain with the logic of reason of its register, we bounce around arguably in the play of effects, failing to access the register that conditions real “learning.” The error we make as (self-)conscious beings is to keep attempting to initiate, or access the conditions of, change within the register of effects, whereas how things are, and therefore how they might change, stem from far more nuanced and subtended registers. Deleuze says: “The order of causes is therefore an order of composition and decomposition of relations. . . . But as conscious beings, we never apprehend anything but the effects of these compositions and decompo­ 293

Antonia Pont sitions: we experience joy when a body encounters ours and enters into com­ position with it, and sadness when, on the contrary, a body or an idea threat­ ens our own coherence” (1988, 19, translation modified). Deleuze’s Spinoza emphasises the relationship between bodies and the effects of these on each other, resulting in either an increase in a particular body’s power of acting or a diminution or even decomposition of that body. Only in this way can we, in Spinoza’s view, derive an assessment of good or bad for us that wouldn’t just fall back on “good sense” and conventional morality. This quotation brings into conversation our interest in causes and effects with the nuts and bolts of Spinozan ethology—sometimes known as a theory of affects—distilling their relevance for his take on reason, and how we can cultivate it. Excluded from any easy knowledge of causes, affect functions as one vantage point from which we can select encounters reasonably, on the basis of joy and not sadness. Along with these inadequate ideas (knowing effects, not causes), we might also take interest in Spinoza’s common notions, moving towards hav­ ing adequate notions. Learning is this layered field, involving the two defini­ tional limbs of Spinozan reason, a move from passion alone into perhaps pas­ sions and action: This is why Reason is defined in two ways, which show that man is not born rational but also how he becomes rational. Reason is: 1. an effort to select and organize good encounters, that is, encounters of modes that enter into composition with ours and inspire us with joyful passions (feelings that agree with reason); 2. the perception and comprehension of the common notions, that is, of the relations that enter into this composition, from which one deduces other relations (reasoning) and on the basis of which one experiences new feelings, active ones this time (feelings that are born of reason). (Deleuze 1988, 55–56, my emphasis)

By allowing for the body’s unknownness (how it will react in specific, exper­ imental instances), Spinozist thinking leaves us with a precise teaching as to where we can efficaciously focus our first efforts, given what is knowable, given the structure of inadequate ideas and their ubiquity. Awake to affects or mod­ ulations of intensity of puissance, we come to appreciate that the rhythms we appear to be, and which we sometimes long to alter, depend on rhythms at other registers, on their “causes,” so to speak. Philosophy, therefore, as Deleuze practises it, is also concerned with adequate ideas. What we can do, if I understand Deleuze’s reading, is to direct a kind of effort to noticing changes in what we call our capacity, and then bringing thought to bear on these observations, affects, and experimentations (see below). This is an embodied, experiential doorway to refined, even blessed (Deleuze 1988, 51) affects, and this opens spaces for perhaps the slow cultivation of Spinozan reason, operating beyond the sphere of the passions but, for the Deleuze of Practical Philosophy, going via them for its formation.

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Musical bodies and reason’s listening Thus, this modulation in capacity might constitute a kind of rhythm or fre­ quency. How could we learn to notice it, and to think with it? We read in Difference and Repetition regarding change and its relation to difference and inequality: “Every phenomenon refers to an inequality by which it is condi­ tioned. Every diversity and every change refer to a difference which is its sufficient reason. Everything which happens and everything which appears is correlated with orders of differences: differences of level, temperature, pressure, tension, potential, difference of intensity” (Deleuze 1994, 222, emphasis added, transla­ tion modified). “The practitioner” is she or he who remains alert to that which conditions change, to the other kind of difference underpinning the change that appears. Practising would also be that inflection of engagement that involves noticing how and when the rhythm of “our music” shifts, tracking modulations of puissance (potestas), even if they appear to counter our received knowledge, anticipations, or our “good sense.” To notice this is to attend to that register of change that is more pertinent to that which constitutes the body we are: “the kinetic proposition tells us that a body is defined by relations of motion and rest, of slowness and speed between particles. That is, it is not defined by a form or by functions. Global form, specific form, and organic functions depend on relations of speed and slowness” (Deleuze 1988, 123). If we want a new body, we will miss a lot if we approach the question by assuming the body as form or function, by being merely alert to new equalities and samenesses rather than to what was “cancelled” out (Deleuze 1994, 223) as these actualised: the inequality, the modulation. On a related point, in “What Is Called Thinking” in regard to the latter’s relation to learning as a forma­ tion (paideia), Dillet writes: “Thinking is not a voluntary activity but needs to be triggered by the unthought, or what Deleuze calls after Blanchot and Foucault, the outside. Collecting signs for Deleuze mostly means tracing the disjunctive relation between the sensible and the intelligible, between non-sense and sense, between unthought and thought. Only in their discord, when they are ‘out of joint,’ can the faculties produce the new” (Dillet 2013, 257, emphasised added). He continues, “Deleuze wants to move away from the model of recognition, since the maintaining of their accord fixes the faculties’ (ibid., my emphasis). Extending his intimation, I read that such a fixing limits our ability to learn, especially to learn as a creative mode, to encounter new thinkings. For Spinoza too, then, the body will be constituted by “relations of motion and rest” and hence we arguably might wish to listen closely, as if it were an unanticipated piece of music. To listen to the body—as artists, movers, think­ ers, and householders, at the cusps of “the sensible and the intelligible, . . . nonsense and sense, . . . unthought and thought” might allow us to notice encoun­ ters that increase our capacity for entering into relations. As Deleuze explains, for his reading of Spinoza, this is the first step in reason’s two limbs: choosing or selecting encounters that are conducive to life and—I’d extend this to— temporalities other than the habitual living present. Less inadequate notions do not, I’d contend, always come to us via loud or obvious amplitudes. 295

Antonia Pont This practising, this nuanced take on learning, might not exclude us from the outset from developing common notions, which Deleuze (1988, 119) con­ siders “an Art, the art of the Ethics itself: organizing good encounters, compos­ ing actual relations, forming powers, experimenting.” He emphasises that later in Spinoza’s Ethics we learn that: “the common notions are practical Ideas, in relation with our power; unlike their order of exposition, which only concerns ideas, their order of formation concerns affects, showing how the mind ‘can order its affects and connect them together’” (ibid., 119, emphasis added). In a moving passage that shows the reader that Deleuze is talking not about distant and ungrounded learnings but about ones with which we might have grappled our­ selves, we read: “Learning to swim or learning a foreign language means composing the singular points of one’s own body or one’s own language with those of another shape or element, which tears us apart but also propels us into a hitherto unknown and unheard-of world of problems” (Deleuze 1994, 192, my emphasis). We compose the points of our singular learning and it propels us—but torn, unequal to ourselves—into a new world that we haven’t heard before. The musi­ cal leaning of Deleuze’s prose here is striking. We might say we “listen” our way into a new self, towards a new body, via a sensitivity to, a sensibility for the unheard, the problematic, the unequal, and the different. Heaney frames it in relation to Deleuze’s larger project in this way: “Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism can be positively and practically defined as both ontologically experimentalist and epistemologically open. It is ontologically experimentalist insofar as it suggests that if we are to think or to learn—if thought is to become an object of practice—we must seek out encounters, be worthy of them, we must seek out our own ontological transformation” (Heaney 2018, 382, emphasis original). I would affirm this and argue further that, to leave the time of habit and the kind of change and learning proper to its register, we will lit­ erally change time signatures, perhaps to a signature not previously available in our repertoire. Our new music will play within another logic/rhythm altogether—outside the reach of recognition and resemblance. We can pursue this via the signposts of what Spinoza calls joy, which counter-intuitively come to us via often discordant or “out of joint” encounters.

Conclusion Via Deleuze’s Spinoza, what we grasp in Difference and Repetition is ramified, with a definition of reason that includes learning (or constantly becoming more fluent in) the mechanisms of this other difference as a noteworthy change. Via registering or acknowledging of either joyous or sad affects—the tangible traces left by causes—such crucial (and at times shocking or uneasy) choreogra­ phies of becoming might be articulated and actively responded to. As Deleuze writes: “Law, whether moral or social, does not provide us with any knowledge; it makes nothing known. At worst, it prevents the formation of knowledge. . . . At best, it prepares for knowledge and makes it possible” (1988, 24, my emphasis). By making more precise our thinking about the related but distinct orders where the rhythms of difference operate, this chapter has sought to clarify how 296

Listening for a New Body we can learn to invite interference—beyond a habitual compliance to laws— directing efforts in such a way that the singularities that subtend apparently fixed and predictable orders of generality are not, despite our most ardent and secret desires, inadvertently precluded. As Deleuze (1994, 163) puts it: “Underneath the large noisy events lie the small events of silence, just as under­ neath the natural light there are the little glimmers of the Idea.” References Braidotti, Rosi. (2006) 2018. “Transformations.” In Transpositions: Aesthetico-Epistemic Operators in Artistic Research, edited by Michael Schwab, 23–31. Orpheus Institute Series. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Chapter first published 2006 in Rosi Braidotti, Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (Cambridge: Polity Press). Deleuze, Gilles. 1988. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Translated by Robert Hurley. San Francisco: City Lights Books. First published 1970 as Spinoza (Paris: Presses universitaires de France), revised 1981 as Spinoza: Philosophie practique (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1994. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1968 as Différence et répétition (Paris: Presses universitaires de France). Derrida, Jacques. 1977. “Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok.” Translated by Barbara Johnson.

Georgia Review 31 (1): 64–116. First published 1976 as “Fors: Les mots anglés de Nicolas Abraham et Maria Torok,” in Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, Cryptonymie: Le verbier de l’homme aux loups (Paris: Aubier Flammarion), 7–73. Dillet, Benôit. 2013. “What Is Called Thinking? When Deleuze Walks along Heideggerian Paths.” Deleuze Studies 7 (2): 250–74. Grosz, Elizabeth. 2013. “Habit Today: Ravaisson, Bergson, Deleuze and Us.” Body and Society 19 (2–3): 217–39. Heaney, Conor. 2018. “Pursuing Joy with Deleuze: Transcendental Empiricism and Affirmative Naturalism as Worldly Practice.” Deleuze and Guattari Studies 12 (3): 374–401. Ravaisson, Félix. 2008. Of Habit. Edited and translated by Clare Carlisle and Mark Sinclair. London: Continuum. First published 1838 as De l’habitude (Paris: H. Fournier).

297

Outside-Interior: ?Interior Suzie Attiwill RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia

Deleuze and interior design Deleuze and interior design may seem an unlikely coupling. In Deleuze’s books, one comes across frequent dismissals of interior and interiority including a reference to a “hatred of interiority” (Deleuze 1995a, 6). Design is also a target because of that “shameful moment” when it along with other “disciplines of communication . . . seized hold of the word concept itself ” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 10) and promptly turned concepts into products. Interior design, for its part, when it engages with philosophers and theories, tends towards those that support ideas of interior and interiority in relation to working from an inside out—a subject-centric, phenomenological position. As an interior designer, I am curious to bring Deleuze together with interior design. The concepts of interiority and interior that Deleuze dismisses are the same as those that are accepted as self-givens and governing images in the disci­ pline of interior design: interiority as an essence that is embodied in things and in particular, an a priori subject inflected by phenomenological and Cartesian concepts of subjectivity; interior as enclosure and space as an a priori condi­ tion; and the relation of interior and exterior as binary and dialectical—either/ or (Brooker and Weinthal 2013; Weinthal 2011). However, a different refrain of interior, interiority, inside, and in also courses through Deleuze’s writing. As Constantin Boundas notes, Deleuze “combines a radical critique of interiority with a stubborn search for ‘an inside that lies deeper than any internal world’” (Boundas 1994, 99–100, interpolating a quotation from Deleuze 1988, 96). Bringing Deleuze and interior design together is not to set them in opposi­ tion, nor to apply one to the other, but to open up the potential for experi­ mentation in-between through various practices working with interior and interiority. While Deleuze and Guattari are disparaging about design as a discipline of communication, they encourage practice: “Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out con­ tinuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 161). This coupling of interior design with Deleuze’s philosophy brings to practice “a pair of glasses directed to the outside” (Deleuze and Foucault 1977, 208)—to what is outside the already existing interior–exterior pairing. As someone prac­ tising and wearing these glasses, the outside becomes vitalised in relation to the production of interior, inside, and interiority; and it does so in a way that is not 299

Suzie Attiwill determined by the dialectical and binary interior–exterior relation. Deleuze writes of “the inside as an operation of the outside” (Deleuze 1988, 97) and “the ultimate folding of the line outside, to produce an ‘expectant interiority’” (Deleuze 1995b, 112–13). As Jon Roffe (2005, 95–96) observes, “one of the great­ est aspects of Deleuze’s philosophical labour” is his insistence “that the interior is rather produced from a general exterior, the immanent world of relations.” Bringing interior design and Deleuze together through practising with as distinct from applying theory to practice and as a pair of glasses directed to the outside, interior and interiority are opened to new ways of thinking and practising, and the discipline of interior design becomes differently inflected as a practice of designing interior (Attiwill 2017). “We learn nothing from those who say ‘Do as I do.’ Our only teachers are those who tell us to ‘do with me,’ and are able to emit signs to be developed in heterogeneity rather than propose gestures for us to reproduce” (Deleuze 1994, 23).

Interior The theoretical and philosophical couplings made in interior design rarely pose interior as a question; rather interior is assumed as a given. Deleuze’s cri­ tique and dismissal of interior and interiority produces a “shock to thought” (Massumi 2002b) that forces one to think differently and generates a desire to experiment with how one might think and practise interior. However the con­ struction of a new concept—especially by a designer!—simply replaces one definition with another and produces the same kind of determining relation that one desires to move away from, which results in a definition that exists in advance of practising and knowing beforehand, before doing. Deleuze’s “Response to a Question on the Subject” is useful here. In reply to the titular question, he said that concepts don’t disappear “at whim” as they are intricately connected to internal variables (functions) and external variables (states of things, moments of history): “That is also why it is never very interest­ ing to criticize a concept: it is better to construct new functions and discover new fields that make the concept useless or inadequate” (Deleuze 2007, 349). The problem with posing this kind of question—What is interior?—led to a different kind of question than one seeking an answer of identification. ?interior is a pick-up from Deleuze’s ?-being, which he invented to interrupt the dia­ lectical relation and the negative implication between being and non-being, and to refunction “being” as a problematic: “There is a non-being which is by no means the being of the negative, but rather the being of the problematic” (Deleuze 1994, 202). In my pick-up, I lost the hyphen between ? and interior—an oversight perhaps because of my focus on the question mark in an attempt to shift from a what question—interior?—which directs one to define and answer in a categorical and universal way. However, ?interior becomes a hyphen that produces a pause and reposes interior as a problematic for, and in, practice (Attiwill 2013). ?interior is not a concept nor a product for interior design practice—it is empty in relation to any substantive meaning. Instead it functions and produces 300

Outside-Interior: ?Interior a pause: “a crack has opened in habit, a ‘zone of indeterminacy’ is glimpsed in the hyphen between the stimulus and the response. . . . Thought-in-becoming is less a willful act than an undoing: the nonaction of suspending established stimulus-response circuits to create a zone where chance and change may inter­ vene” (Massumi 1992, 99, as quoted in Grosz 2001, 191n27). Posing ?interior in current practice effects a pause between stimulus and response; it suspends the binary either/or relation, produces a gap where contingency, chance, and variation may enter. Curiosity and surprise are fostered. Posed as a problematic as distinct from a problem, ?interior is a question not in search of an answer so much as a creative problematic that finds its vitality in practices where interior and interiority inhere—curation, exhibition design, teaching, and interior design—as an ongoing provocation that invites a local solution each time anew and as such, produces and spreads a multiplicity.

Interior designing The practice of an interior designer—as defined by the discipline’s profes­ sional body, the International Federation of Interior Architects/Designers—is one of determining “the relationship of people to spaces based on psycholog­ ical and physical parameters, to improve the quality of life” (IFI International Federation of Interior Architects/Designers 2011). Reading this while wear­ ing Deleuze’s glasses, it is clear that the relation is predetermined in that it is between existing subjects and objects in space with effects determined in advance—that is, improvement and quality—on the basis of an assumption of a value system. While there are an array of definitions relating to interior design, the refer­ ences to people as psychological entities and identities and space as a pre-given physical entity are constant and consistent parameters. Bringing Deleuze into the territory of interior design, via ?interior and a pair of glasses directed to the Outside, produces a pause that problematises interior and interiority as givens and creates the potential to think otherwise than the binary relation of interior with exterior. The idea of “the inside as an operation of the outside” (Deleuze 1988, 97), “the Outside-interior” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 113), and “the ultimate folding of the line outside, to produce an ‘expectant interior­ ity’” (Deleuze 1995b, 112–13) invokes a different relation with interior as a pro­ duction of an Outside understood as force, chaos, as the plane of immanence. Deleuze, with Guattari, writes that “the choice is between transcendence and chaos” (1994, 51) where transcendence involves relations to something that is external and pre-existing, and chaos involves relations in the immanent world of relations, becoming, movement, change—time. This distinction between relation to and relation in is useful to think through interior designing as a difference between a practice that works with and asserts relations as existing between things—as relations to—and one situated in the midst of relations, as relations in where interior and interiority are produced in, and productions of, the Outside.

301

Suzie Attiwill Relations in are different in kind from relations to where practice becomes a process of mediation of “people to space”: a practice that makes relations of “opposition, analogy, resemblance”—all aspects of reproduction (Deleuze 1994, 29). Relations in open up a thinking for interior designing other than one of “determining the relationship of people to space.” Deleuze’s description of a spider in her web offers a trajectory: she “sees nothing, perceives nothing, remembers nothing,” she “answers only to signs” on a visceral level, respond­ ing to the slightest sensation of vibration and contracting a series of instants (Deleuze [1972] 2000, 181–82). Here forces and relations are exterior rather than between and sensation-signs produce a subject as distinct from subjectiv­ ity producing sense data where the subject is centred as the producer of experi­ ence. “Subjectivity is determined as an effect,” writes Deleuze (1991, 26). Here, we find the sensation of belonging to something and the sensation of being somewhere, an emergent subject and space, interiority and inter­ ior. Sensation is “always doubled by the feeling of having a feeling. It is selfreferential. This is not necessarily the same as ‘self-reflexive.’ The doubling of sensation does not assume a subjective splitting and does not of itself consti­ tute a distancing. It is an immediate self-complication. It is best to think of it as a resonation, or interference pattern” (Massumi 2002a, 13–14). Sensation is understood here as contraction composed of a series of instants: “the thou­ sands of passive syntheses of which we are organically composed” (Deleuze 1994, 74) where “each contraction, each passive synthesis, constitutes a sign which is interpreted or deployed in active syntheses” (ibid., 73). In this cou­ pling with Deleuze, techniques of interiorisation—selection, arrangement, intensification, making relations—are affirmed and redeployed. Every morning the Scenopoeetes dentirostris [tooth-billed bowerbird], a bird of the Australian rain forests, cuts leaves, makes them fall to the ground, and turns them over so that the paler, internal side contrasts with the earth. In this way it constructs a stage for itself like a ready-made; and directly above, on a creeper or a branch, while fluffing out the feathers beneath its beak to reveal their yellow roots, it sings a complex song made up from its own notes and, at intervals, those of other birds that it imitates: it is a complete artist. This is not synesthesia in the flesh but blocs of sensation in the territory—colours, postures, and sounds that sketch out a total work of art (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 184).

Practising with Deleuze and pausing between stimulus and response, the self-givens of practice such as representation and identification become appar­ ent as secondary rather than natural and essential; they become understood as habits—“a habitus, a habit, nothing but a habit in a field of immanence, the habit of saying I” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 48). While habits are necessary for living, they are also contractions that have become clichés through repeti­ tion and they fix creative practice in advance of practising.

302

Outside-Interior: ?Interior

Outside-interior The coupling of Deleuze and interior design produced ?interior, which inter­ rupts and intervenes, clears clichés, and introduces a problematic. The chal­ lenge becomes how to pause in an outside of chance and change and resist the forces of representation as relations of to which have “only a single centre, a unique and receding perspective, and in consequence a false depth. It medi­ ates everything, but mobilises and moves nothing” (Deleuze 1994, 55–56). Posing ?interior as a problematic opens practice to an outside of contingency, chance, and variation—and invites an interior designing each time anew. How to practise becomes a critical question. Practising with Deleuze, the interior designer becomes the “result of the folding of the outside, that is, of bend­ ing forces and making them relate to one another, the subject is the individual who, through practice and discipline, has become the site of a bent force, that is, the folded inside of an outside” (Boundas 1994, 115). Situated in a fugacious, fleeting, chaotic exterior, techniques of interiorisa­ tion re-pose the question “what is interior” as a question of how to practise, while assumptions about objects, subjects, and space as pre-givens are reframed as spatio-temporal compositions in the production of interior and interiority. Preparing this chapter, I have been caught in an encounter with the figures of Narcissus and Actaeon in Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition where he writes: “We do not contemplate ourselves, but we exist only in contemplating—that is to say, in contracting that from which we come. . . . We are always Actaeon by virtue of what we contemplate, even though we are Narcissus in relation to the pleasure we take from it. To contemplate is to draw something from. We must first contemplate something else—the water, or Diana, or the woods—in order to be filled with an image of ourselves” (Deleuze 1994, 74–75). Caravaggio’s painting of Narcissus (circa 1597–99) has been part of a col­ lection of pick-ups that has accompanied my practice. Caravaggio paints Narcissus leaning forward, as though projecting out of the frame into the space of the viewer, and gazing into a pool of water at a reflected image that he does not recognise as himself (Blanchot 1986, 125). Looking through Deleuze’s pair of glasses to an outside, Caravaggio’s Narcissus becomes a doubling of the Outside produced through contemplation—sensation and contraction. This is a strikingly different Narcissus from the psychological subject of Lacan’s nar­ cissism defined as symbolic identification with the Ideal. It is interesting then to think how this might inflect the IFI definition of the interior designer and her or his practice. Deleuze’s idea that “we are made of contracted water, earth, light and air—not merely prior to the recognition or representation of these, but prior to their being sensed” (1994, 73) in an imma­ nent world of relations re-poses practice within a passive synthesis. This invites practising and interior designing as experimentation engaged in techniques of interiorisation that pause and interrupt the chromatic circle that fixes and holds Narcissus—that capture, even if momentarily, the fleeting, fugacious Outside folded in Actaeon when he catches a glimpse of his becoming animal in a lake: Outside-interior nuptials. 303

Suzie Attiwill Deleuze’s ideas of sensation, contraction, and contemplation make regimes of representation and recognition apparent as secondary; in doing so, they open an opportunity—in the pause, in the middle—to intervene and experi­ ment. We could perhaps rethink the IFI definition of the interior designer with Deleuze: the brief would become something like: “the desert, experimenta­ tion on oneself, is our only identity, our single chance for all the combinations which inhabit us” (Deleuze and Parnet 2002, 11). References Attiwill, Suzie. 2013. “interiorizt.” In Brooker and Weinthal 2013, 107–116. ———. 2017. “Framing—?interior.” In Suzie Attiwill, Terri Bird, Andrea Eckersley, Antonia Pont, Jon Roffe, and Philipa Rothfield, Practising with Deleuze: Design, Dance, Art, Writing, Philosophy, 87–111. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Blanchot, Maurice. 1986. The Writing of the Disaster. Translated by Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. First published 1980 as L’écriture du désastre (Paris: Gallimard). Boundas, Constantin V. 1994. “Deleuze: Serialization and Subject-Formation.” In Gilles Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy, edited by Constantin V. Boundas and Dorothea Olkowski, 99–116. London: Routledge. Brooker, Graeme, and Lois Weinthal, eds. 2013. The Handbook of Interior Architecture and Design. London: Bloomsbury. Deleuze, Gilles. (1972) 2000. Proust and Signs. Translated by Richard Howard. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1964 as Proust et les signes (Paris: Presses universitaires de France). Translation first published (1972 New York: G. Braziller). ———. 1988. Foucault. Translated and edited by Séan Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1986 as Foucault (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1991. Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature. Translated by Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1953 as Empirisme et subjectivité: Essai dur la nature humaine selon Hume (Paris: Presses universitaires de France). ———. 1994. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York:

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Columbia University Press. First published 1968 as Différence et répétition (Paris: Presses universitaires de France). ———. 1995a. “Letter to a Harsh Critic.” In Negotiations, 1972–1990, translated by Martin Joughin, 3–12. New York: Columbia University Press. Essay first published 1973 in Michel Cressole, Deleuze (Paris: Éditions universitaires). Book first published 1990 as Pourparlers: 1972–1990 (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1995b. “A Portrait of Foucault,” interview with Claire Parnet. In Negotiations, 1972–1990, translated by Martin Joughin, 102–18. New York: Columbia University Press. Interview conducted 1986, first published 1990 as “Un portrait de Foucault,” in Pourparlers: 1972–1990 (Paris: Minuit), 139–61. ———. 2007. “Response to a Question on the Subject.” In Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995, edited by David Lapoujade, translated by Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina, 349–51. New York: Semiotext(e). Chapter written 1998. Book first published 2003 as Deux régimes de fous: Textes et entretiens, 1975–1995 (Paris: Minuit). Deleuze, Gilles, and Michel Foucault. 1977. “Intellectuals and Power: A Conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze.” In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, by Michel Foucault, edited by Donald F. Bouchard, translated by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, 205–17. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Chapter first published 1972 as “Les intellectuels et le pouvoir” (L’arc 49: 3–10). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian

Outside-Interior: ?Interior Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1994. What Is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1991 as Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Minuit). Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. 2007. Dialogues II. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Rev. ed. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1977 as Dialogues (Paris: Flammarion). Grosz, Elizabeth. 2001. Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space. Writing Architecture Series. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. IFI International Federation of Interior Architects/Designers. 2011. “IFI Interiors

Declaration.” Accessed 23 May 2019. https://ifiworld.org/programs-events/ interiors-declaration-adoptions/. Massumi, Brian. 1992. A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. 2002a. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———, ed. 2002b. A Shock to Thought: Expressionism after Deleuze and Guattari. London: Routledge. Roffe, Jonathan. 2005. “Exteriority/ Interiority.” In The Deleuze Dictionary, edited by Adrian Parr, 94–96. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Weinthal, Lois, ed. 2011. Toward a New Interior: An Anthology of Interior Design Theory. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.

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Encountering Fashion as a Practice of Subjectivation Andrea Eckersley RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia

Fashioned bodies are habituated bodies, bodies of habit, practice, and repeti­ tion. This chapter elaborates on the links between habit, fashion, and subjec­ tivity to extend analysis of the clothed body beyond the semiotic frames that have tended to dominate discussions of fashion across the social sciences and humanities (Entwistle 2015; Granata 2017; Barthes 1968). The goal is to begin to analyse fashion in terms of specific practices of subjectivation, drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s (1994) discussion of time, habit, and memory. Elizabeth Grosz (2013, 231) argues that habit describes the order by which “life accommodates materiality and brings its own materiality into coordination with the material forces that regulate its environment.” This formulation provides a way of investigating fashion and the clothed body in terms of habitual coordination between forms of materiality and the forming and modulating of the environ­ ments in which this coordination occurs. I will argue that such coordination inevitably entails a distinctive practice of subjectivation by which the clothed body is made subject in encounters between social, affective, and material forces. Simon O’Sullivan (2012, 1, emphasis added) writes that, for Deleuze, the subject “is both pragmatic and speculative in the sense that its production must be carried out in our contemporary world.” I wish to develop this point by way of a dis­ cussion of the role of fashion, or more precisely encounters with fashion, in the production of subjectivity in everyday life. I situate these encounters alongside a myriad of other everyday practices by which the subject emerges and endures, is disrupted, and becomes other than itself. Subjectivation occurs in practice, habit, and memory, and the everyday practice of being clothed provides com­ pelling instances of this process. This analysis also contrasts with more conventional analyses that construe fashion and the clothed body in terms of a representational or semiotic order by which fashion is interrogated in terms of the signs it may be said to emit, constitute, or effect (Entwistle 2015; Barthes 1983). In contrast, my interests concern the lived encounter between bodies and garments, between the social and affective spaces of the body, and the material and affective forms of fashion. I am interested in the habitual coordination of the body and clothing as this coordination emerges in encounters between bodies (human and nonhuman). The principal contention is that fashion may usefully be refigured in terms of specific spatial, temporal, material, and affective encounters that express the habits of coordination by which affects, memories, expectations, and desires are transmitted between bodies (human and nonhuman). This coordination 307

Andrea Eckersley expresses what John Protevi (2009) has called a distinctive mode of subjectivation according to the character of the encounters immanent to it. This discussion will be grounded in a detailed analysis of the work of Melbourne artist Fiona Abicare. Abicare’s site-specific installation- and performance-based practice often invokes the social, affective, and material aspects of fashion as each is instanti­ ated in encounters between bodies. Her work also points to the links between these encounters and the practices of subjectivation by which the fashioned body becomes other. In these ways, Abicare’s work plays on the force of mem­ ory in encounters with fashion, what Deleuze (1988, 104) has called the “rela­ tion to oneself . . . [in] the affect of self by self ” by manipulating the subject of memory in its twofold valence: whose memory of what feeling, force, or event? This chapter extends Deleuze’s (1994) account of habit and memory to high­ light how Abicare’s attention to the habits and memories of the clothed body exposes the distinctive practices of subjectivation that fold and form this body. Working across the disciplines of sculpture, photography, and interior design, Abicare presents her practice as a sequence of designed, performed, and docu­ mented outcomes. Rather than using the gallery simply as a site to present her work, Abicare’s creative process conceives space as an art object in itself, as a complete environment filled with evocative visual props (Bird 2011). Abicare pays specific attention to the material qualities of objects and how an audience might encounter their placement in space. Abicare rejects the classical distinc­ tion by which art objects are distinguished from design objects on the basis of some imputed set of intrinsic qualities that inevitably distinguish art from the functionality of design. For Abicare, objects circulate in relations of practice, valuation, and contestation, which establish the conditions by which certain objects may be treated as art, others as design, and yet more as disposable com­ modities (Bird 2011). Abicare’s work explores the ways objects are allocated to certain categories, and how these categorisations are contested over time. As we will see, fashioned objects are a feature of much of Abicare’s work, provid­ ing a range of insights into the links between fashion, habit, and memory in the way she presents encounters with fashion. In the work Covers (see figure 23.1) exhibited at Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, in 2008, Abicare cast a life-size headless figure of a woman wearing a silk blouse and linen trousers in acrylic resin with a matte finish, which then took on the appearance of ceramics. Also included in the exhibition was a pair of photographic images featuring a young woman seated at a shelf observing herself in a mirror (see figure 23.2). Writing about this exhibition, artist Terri Bird (2011, 9) notes that the woman “was dressed in an identical outfit to the headless figure, and the mirror also reflected [a] faux-rock surface of [a] screen and part of [a] curtain,” which Abicare also installed in the domestic environs of the exhibition space. By juxtaposing the cast outfit alongside images of the same outfit, with broader echoes in the identity between the images and the other installed elements, this exhibition calls attention to the ramifications of materiality, image, and desire in everyday fashion encounters. Fashioned garments constantly acquire and lose qualities, properties, and associations 308

Encountering Fashion as a Practice of Subjectivation in these encounters. Like Abicare’s play on the fashioned body encountering its own reflected image, alongside the same outfit cast in acrylic resin, fash­ ion is caught in a complex iterative relay between its flat two-dimensional rep­ resentations in media and the three-dimensional spaces of the fashioned body. Fashion constantly moves back and forth across and between these dimen­ sions, from the mirror to magazines and the smartphone screen to the move­ ments of the fashioned body experiencing its own fashioning. This relay may be observed in everyday encounters with fashion, as one gets dressed, and in the digital materialities that shape how fashion encounters circulate in mediated forms. Encountering fashion is a dynamic process that places the body in direct contact with a material outside itself: fabric, design, culture, the demands of the environment, desire. Sometimes these experiences are subtle and fleeting, at other times they are more significant and enduring. In either case, fashion is directly of the body in its subjectivations. In Covers, Abicare draws attention to the temporal and material entangle­ ments of the fashioned subject, juxtaposing the apparent artifice of the cast outfit and its echo in the exhibited photographs that suggest a time before the casting, when the garment was worn. For me, this work draws attention to the multiple ways bodies encounter fashion each day as, for example, bodies encounter the intensive experience of their own fashioned image in mirrors, in social media, and in reactions from others. This recursive echo of fashion and its images plays at the history and materiality of Abicare’s cast outfit, and the imaginary world that opens up between the various elements of the installation.

Figure 23.1.

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Figure 23.1. Fiona Abicare, COVERS, 2008. Heide Museum of Modern Art. Image courtesy of the artist and Sarah Scout Presents. Photography John Brash.

Andrea Eckersley

Figure 23.2.

I have found Deleuze’s work immensely useful for interrogating this fash­ ioned body and the practices of subjectivation it evinces. Deleuze insists that the subject is not a coherent entity that ontologically and epistemologically precedes the things that happen to it, the events it participates in, or the rela­ tions it experiences. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze (1994) replaces the more familiar unitary subject with an immanent account of a subject’s emer­ gence in the flux of time, habit, and relations. Deleuze grounds this account in a close reading of the work of David Hume, Henri Bergson, Gottfried Leibniz, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Immanuel Kant. Each thinker provides Deleuze with unique insights into the “preindividual” field in which the “singularities” that cohere in the constitution and expression of actual individualised subjects emerge and circulate (Boundas 1994, 102). These singularities are “preindi­ vidual and prepersonal elements”—affects, events, relations, signs, forces, and materials—in and through which the subject is enfolded as a distinctive “internalization” of forces (ibid.). The political theorist Nathan Widder (2012, 38) adds that these singularities are “molecular” or “virtual” entities that are “hidden” from subjective perception even as they are formally “constitutive of the actuality given to experience.” This suggests that the subject emerges as an immanent expression of a transcendental field that itself comprises innumera­ ble asubjective singularities. As I am not intending to review Deleuze’s enigmatic account of subjectivity in this chapter, I will rather focus on his account of the role of habit and memory in the accretions of subjectivity to generate useful insights into how embodied practices like fashion contribute to processes of subjectivation. By way of a dis­ cussion of time and its syntheses, Deleuze outlines in Difference and Repetition 310

Figure 23.2. Fiona Abicare, COVERS, 2008. Heide Museum of Modern Art. Type C photographs, aluminium, 530 mm × 500 mm. Image courtesy of the artist and Sarah Scout Presents. Photography John Brash.

Encountering Fashion as a Practice of Subjectivation the ways that habit and memory cohere in the formations of subjectivity. It is my contention that habit and memory are central to the everyday experience of fashion—certainly they are central to readings of Abicare’s depictions of fashion in her varied installation works. This is why I have found such value in thinking about encounters with fashion in terms of the habits and memories of subjectivation that Deleuze outlines in Difference and Repetition. In memory, the past is transformed from the “immediate past of retention” into the “reflexive past of representation, of reflected and reproduced particu­ larity” (Deleuze 1994, 71). In this transformation, memory moves from simply retaining the past to reflexively representing it to and for a subject. Memory, in this way, grounds the subject’s reflexivity, and the forms of representation and recollection by which the “illusion” of a relatively stable and temporally coherent subject/self is maintained in the mind. Habit, on the other hand, is the contraction of memory insofar as memory grounds the subject’s expec­ tations about the future, giving habit its constancy. Memory is the subjective foundation of habit insofar as habits are the subject’s “natural” response to its needs (Deleuze 1994, 79–80). As the mind contemplates the present, it is led to link the present instant, in imagination and recollection, with other past instants. This process underpins the development of “instinct and learning, memory and intelligence,” as the subject confronts the “urgency of life” as life unfolds in a succession of “active problematic fields” (ibid., 78). Life unfolds in the present as a series of problems (or needs) to be solved. Our familiar need for sustenance, solace, isolation, sleep, respite, and support are each defined by their repetitions, by their (temporary) abatement and return. Hence, the need for sustenance triggers the reflex to eat, just as fatigue triggers the reflex to rest. These reflexes establish the temporal ground of the body’s contraction of the present in the habits and practices by which its needs may be reliably satisfied, and its corporeality (re)formed. Yet it is critical to note that the repetitions of habit are never identical. While habit is the embodied contraction of the subject’s needs, as these needs emerge in time, the temporal specificity of these needs ensures that they are always satisfied differently. Habit, in this respect, is the repetition of difference, not of practice (Deleuze 1994, 73). Habit is never simply the return of the same, even if the recollections and reminiscences of memory create the illusion of continuity, as if it is always the same “I” that experiences the need that habit ostensibly satisfies. It is for this reason that Deleuze (1994, 86–87) refers to the subject as the “fractured I,” as a way of emphasising the difference that habit makes in the living present. Even as it implies the continuity of the subject—its temporal and spatial identity—habit cracks the illusion of the unitary subject by introducing difference to it, the difference of time and its variable syntheses, at the very moment of its apparent continuity. It is only the “habit of saying ‘I’” (Deleuze 1991, x) that conceals these fractures, as memory maintains the illusion of identity.

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Andrea Eckersley I contend that Deleuze’s account of habit and memory is especially useful for beginning to investigate how bodies encounter fashion, and the ways fashion is positioned in Abicare’s work. Her work is full of the memory of encounters with fashion, and the habits of the fashioned body. For this reason, I regard Abicare’s work to be an exemplary record of the practices of subjectivation that are so central, in my view, to any experience of fashion, from the mundane to the extraordinary. Abicare’s work is full of the relays between memory and habit by which the fashioned body is positioned in a social and affective field of relations between bodies, signs, and forces. Habits and memories are con­ stantly invoked, transformed, and reactualised in encounters with fashion—as the body encounters the materiality of the garment, its feel, silhouette, cut, and fit, the desires it activates or responds to, the aversions and prejudices it engenders. In each respect bodies are affected by habits and memories, some­ times very subtly, sometimes more profoundly. I would note that these affective transitions may also be said to occur in encounters with all digitally mediated fashion objects, online for example or via social media, though, of course, these encounters will differ in subtle and profound ways from encounters with the actual material object. In each case, encountering fashion involves an activa­ tion of habit and memory, in, for example, the proximity of bodies, the body of the fabric, the body of the dress, the body of the wearer, and the body of the space the body inhabits, its digital interfaces and material supports, and the memories and desires they each provoke. Some compelling illustrations of these processes are provided in Abicare’s installation and performance work Artist Actor, Artist Auteur (see figure 23.3). In this work Abicare etched brass, cast bronze, and carved spotted gum and hydrostone, along with collaborating with a dressmaker to make a red leather, georgette, and silk crêpe de Chine trouser suit. In one staging of this perform­ ance piece in the Front Gallery at Gertrude Contemporary, a young artist (not Abicare) was dressed in the outfit, and remained seated in the window for the length of the exhibition, ostensibly waiting in preparation to take spe­ cific body measurements to place orders for the bespoke outfit. The use of this site established a direct relationship between the window space and notions of design and display activated by the artworks produced for the exhibition. Each aspect exposes the roles of habit, memory, and practice in fashion encounters. The central outfit was designed from Abicare’s memories of costumes in films where actresses played artists. This design was etched on brass, displaying pro­ cess, alongside miniature draped cast maquettes and cast geometric objects. This selection and presentation reveals and yet complicates the relationship between the dressmaker, designer, and artist. The outfit worn by the young woman is reminiscent of a salon show, as the garment is made available for custom order. Each aspect plays on the complicated relationship between art and fashion, with echoes of debates about financial value, multiplication, and appropriation; yet the work also reveals in more subtle ways Abicare’s memory of the outfit, and her specific habits and practice of wearing fashion.

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Encountering Fashion as a Practice of Subjectivation

Fig 23.3.

As Abicare’s work highlights, fashion is deeply implicated in a kind of social memory that is played out in our individual relationships with fashion. These productive, porous relationships between dress and body open the body up to habits, memories, practices, affects, and desires that are never entirely its own. The practice of getting dressed each day can be understood as one way the body is made subject in habit, practice, and memory. This indeed is one way in which to introduce the problem of subjectivity to the study of fashion. It is also an example of the critical importance of practice when considering both fashion and subjectivity. Experienced through our entire body, our dressed body mediates the world we inhabit (Entwistle 2015). Encounters with fashion draw attention not only to the singular activity of being dressed but also to the habitual becomings that occur during the intensive act of getting dressed and undressed each day. Fashion encounters occur on the body and around the body and are of the body. In the work Act None, from 2011 (see figure 23.4) installed at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art for the group show New 11, Abicare once again plays on the productive, porous relationship between dress and body, pointing to the role of fashion encounters in the distinctive and specific practices of sub­ jectivation by which bodies become subject.

313

Fig 23.3. Fiona Abicare, Artist Actor, Artist Auteur, 2014. Etched brass, aluminium, cast bronze, spotted gum, hydrostone, leather, georgette, silk crêpe de Chine. Installation view Gertrude Contemporary. Image courtesy of the artist and Sarah Scout Presents. Photography Christian Capurro.

Andrea Eckersley

Figure 23.4.

In this group exhibition, Abicare commissioned garments, photographed them on models in the exhibition before the opening, sometimes in other artist’s installations, then displayed the images and the garments in the vari­ ous spaces of the gallery. The garments were hung on coat hangers or thrown around haphazardly and left as if that was where the models had taken them off. In my view, this installation points to the intensive, embodied aspects of fashion encounters, and relationships between the viewer, the wearer, and the garment that are central to these habitual encounters. This includes the ways garments are worn in a variety of spaces, and then neglected as discarded lifeless objects placed away awaiting our involvement again later. These depic­ tions of the ways bodies encounter fashion, as bodies, as objects, with garments being worn, and left behind, offers practical insights into the subject’s emer­ gence in specific, local practices of subjectivation. Fashion is a material practice of habit, just as it is caught up in desire, in memory. Subjectivity emerges in encounters like the ones reviewed. What can be found in Abicare’s work is a compelling dramatisation of the ways fashion may be regarded as a specific practice of subjectivation by which a particular subject emerges and endures. Abicare’s work situates fashioned objects within complex entanglements of memories and desires, practices and habits, reveal­ ing an intensive, affective dimension to the encounter with fashion that may be directly related to the extensive elements exhibited, but are not of it. It is these encounters between the body and fashion and the way it transforms both the body and the fashioned object that is central to the practices of subjectiva­ tion discussed. The subject of fashion is a materialisation of time in affective and corporeal form, shaped by the habits and memories of the encounters it experiences.

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Figure 23.4. Fiona Abicare, Act None, 2011. Steel, stainless steel, cement sheeting, cast polyester, Type C photographs, acrylic, silk crêpe de Chine, silk satin georgette, viscous satin. Installation view ACCA. Image courtesy of the artist and Sarah Scout Presents. Photography Christian Capurro.

Encountering Fashion as a Practice of Subjectivation References Barthes, Roland. 1983. The Fashion System. Translated by Matthew Ward and Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang. First published 1967 as Système de la mode (Paris: Seuil). Bird, Terri. 2011. “Figuring Materiality.” Angelaki 16 (1): 5–15. Boundas, Constantin V. 1994. “Deleuze: Serialization and Subject-Formation.” In Gilles Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy, edited by Constantin V. Boundas and Dorothea Olkowski, 99–116. New York: Routledge. Deleuze, Gilles. 1988. Foucault. Translated and edited by Séan Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1986 as Foucault (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1991. “Preface to the EnglishLanguage Edition.” In Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature, translated by Constantin V. Boundas, ix–x. New York: Columbia University Press.

———. 1994. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1968 as Différence et répétition (Paris: Presses universitaires de France). Entwistle, Joanne. 2015. The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Modern Social Theory. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Polity Press. Granata, Francesca. 2017. Experimental Fashion: Performance Art, Carnival and the Grotesque Body. London: I. B. Tauris. Grosz, Elizabeth. 2013. “Habit Today: Ravaisson, Bergson, Deleuze and Us.” Body & Society 19 (2–3): 217–39. O’Sullivan, Simon. 2012. On the Production of Subjectivity: Five Diagrams of the Finite– Infinite Relation. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Protevi, John. 2009. Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Widder, Nathan. 2012. Political Theory after Deleuze. London: Continuum.

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A Theory of Becoming Artistic Spatio-Temporal Experiences after Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, and Brian Massumi Liana Psarologaki University of Suffolk, Ipswich, UK

We are not in the world, we become with the world; we become by contemplating it. —Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1994, 169)

Larval thoughts The concerns of representational space and the placement of artworks in a particular context (installation art and installation of artworks) have histori­ cally brought art and architecture so close as to create conceptual and opera­ tional tensions and coalitions. These are not limited to installation art per se but have become progressively ever more related to the way space accounts for itself in the context of art and/or architectural experience. Since Rosalind Krauss’s essay “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” ([1983] 1985), the term installation art, although extensively used to describe art practices that decentre the object in favour of its spatial articulation, has become almost mundane. We can observe a fashionable interest towards the architecturalisation of contempo­ rary art (Osborne 2011) in its space manifestation. In response, I attempt to introduce a key vocabulary that theorises experience of architecturalised art as an intertwinement of and occurrence in space and place. The latter I define as chorotopical (choros [χώρος] meaning “space” and topos [τόπος] meaning “locus”), which is ontologically spatial as well as localised—inscribed in a physical place (architectural site), it is created for and experienced within.

Foldings and warpings The theorisation of experiences in this context requires critical thought and reflection on the practice of space- and place-making. The fundamental con­ tribution of thought itself to the becoming of experience implies the latter is a product of felt, thought, and practised process. The contextual base for the development of this chapter is presented by Deleuze in his study of the 317

Liana Psarologaki German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and the Baroque (Deleuze 1993), which gave birth to the first scintilla of modernist thought and praxis. Deleuze’s work presents complex spatial readings related to architectonics of place, most importantly the notion of “the fold” (le pli), ren­ dered by many as the primary texture of our physical and perceptible world (Conley 1993, ix). Nevertheless, it is a texture that becomes experience in the same way that experience itself is a becoming. As such, and particularly when Deleuze (1988, 111–12) discusses Foucault’s fold(-ing of thought), we observe a twist from phenomenology to ontology and topology with the existence of a being (subject) of sense (conveyed through foldings) and knowledge (conveyed through strata). The ontological elements of knowledge (of space and architecture in our con­ text), that is, spatial strata, become “the articulable and the visible” (Deleuze 1988, 49) and “the object not of a phenomenology, but of an epistemology” (ibid., 50). In contrast, and drawing on Walter Benjamin’s space of distraction, Anthony Vidler (2000, 225) successfully uses the term warped to describe spaces that are perceived or sensed as “contained and container” simultaneously. Vidler describes warped space as art perceived visually and experienced spatially, one that comprehends architecture as a critical part of the work—an “interme­ diary art” (ibid., viii). He adds that “in these works artists . . . extend the vocab­ ulary of spatial reference back into the lived world. . . . Architects, similarly, have self-consciously put the notion of the Cartesian subject at risk, with spa­ tial morphings and warpings that . . . construe space in post-psychoanalytical, postdigital ways” (ibid., 11). In our context, this warping defines the becoming of sense (folding) in the chorotopical as experienced space (and therefore as place and architecture).

The nuptial “kiss” Vidler’s warping as fold and Deleuze’s strata both concern the critical moment of becoming when art and architecture collide to create the chorotopical—that is, experience of a localised spatial practice—the same collision that for Sylvia Lavin takes place as a “kiss” (2011, 5). Lavin uses the term kissing to describe how art and architecture ontologically “touch” each other. This kiss is “the coming together of two . . . surfaces that soften, flex, and deform when in contact . . . a union of bedazzling convergence. . . . Kissing performs topological inver­ sions, renders geometry fluid, relies on the atectonic structural prowess of the tongue, and updates the metric of time” (ibid., 4–5). Lavin sees the two—art and architecture—as a dynamic tangent: one that is temporal and productive; a gesture of physical proximity and disciplinary intimacy; almost a threshold to a new becoming. It is important how this kiss operates for Lavin. It does not serve to amplify either of the two surfaces that perform and only affords tempo­ ral reformations. This kiss defines the existence of a temporally occurring (re) formation of structure, geometry, topology, and power—a fold, a nuptial event of eccentricity, multiplicity, and possibility; an event of no reliance and plastic effect; a becoming. 318

A Theory of Becoming

Genomenology: an epistemology of becoming In identifying the inadequacy of phenomenology to fully account for choro­ topical experiences that are site-reliant and embedded in the lived world (later defined as veomata), this investigation proposes an epiphenomenological approach based on the event and becoming (Deleuze 1993). The investigation incorporates the theories of the so-called philosophers of the event, from Alfred North Whitehead and the concept as reinvented by Deleuze, to its abstraction in Alain Badiou (2005) and its socio-political critique by Slavoj Žižek (2014). Deleuze (1993, 79) defines events (following Whitehead) as fluvia having four compo­ nents: extensions, intensities, prehensions, and ingressions, with prehension being “the form in which the datum is folded in the subject” (ibid., 78). The “event,” he argues, occurs as a “nexus of prehensions” that “is at once public and private, potential and real, participating in the becoming of another event and the subject of its own becoming” (ibid.). The theory of event becomes almost a topological ecology. Alain Badiou’s Being and Event (2005) is in Lavin’s terms (2011, 4–5) a “kissing” of mathematical, philosophical, and topological terms that explores various abstract extensions of the concept of event, one of them being localisation (but not territorialisation). For Badiou “an event can always be localized. . . . [and] no event immediately concerns a situation in its entirety . . . The event is attached, in its very definition, to the place, to the point, in which the historicity of the situation is concentrated. . . . But for there to be an event, there must be the local determination . . . a condition of being for the event” (2005, 178–79). Deleuze’s “becoming” (1993) and Badiou’s topology of “events” (2005) lead to the theorisation of conditional and situational occurrences received sensorily as veomata (βιώµατα, lived experiences). As such, one may consider the choro­ topical as a profound and personal event that goes beyond the appearance of things, towards the becoming of memorable occurrences (storia), emerging by synthesis and warping. Deriving from the verb γίγνoµαι (дí.дno.me, to become), I define genomena (Shrimpton 2007, 255) as personally lived and remembered events that ontologically occur or become. Approaching lived experiences as genomena creates a new methodological approach: genomenology (Psarologaki 2014; 2016, 4). Genomenology is more an epistemology of becoming with onto­ logical ramifications and less a phenomenology of the aestheton. However, it retains a fundamental root to the aesthesis as the trailhead for the lived empir­ ical condition. I will now negotiate these newly introduced terms against three art-project case studies: Hydor (2013), Cryptopology (2014), and Spatial Sea (2016). Hydor examines virtualities and actualities in space and the role of the artistic inter­ vention as a genomenon of notation on the architectural order. With Cryptology I will investigate the hinging of sensory triggering as co-aesthesia in a condi­ tion where artistic intervention is dominated by the topology and enhanced by the atmosphere of an architectural site that is timeless. Spatial Sea expands upon the concept of veomatic experience as a temporarily localised virtuality with sociocultural and mnemonic references.

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Hydor: veoma of actual–virtual genomenon Hydor (2013) was an in-situ ephemeral intervention in Canterbury Cathedral water tower and cloisters. It consisted of two different parts: a material object and its audio-visual recording digitally projected. The projection—which shows the object out of scale (figure 24.1)—creates a warped actuality, whereas the physical object becomes a perceptible reference of sensory immediacy. Studying Hydor, I approach the chorotopical as a folding of actual and virtual in which the two ontological means of presence (of the folded object) highlight the stratification of lived experience. This type of experiencing the chorotop­ ical presents intensities instead of measurable spatial properties. During the lived event, the virtual becomes a place of possibilities—a warped percept that is temporal, aural, and mystical. The projection becomes a spatial virtuality as the postproduction of a physical object, with the latter remaining the actual self of the object allowing the event to occur. The complexity of the virtual–actual manifold echoes Massumi’s (1992, 65) commentary on Deleuze’s ontology: “as the actual contracts . . . the virtual dilates.” On the other hand, the in-situ actu­ ality implies a temporal correlation (a kiss) between physicality and ethereality.

Figure 24.1.

Experiencing the virtual means allowing the enfolding to occur, permitting the kiss to take place, and empowering art and architecture to collide in a lived experience that creates a memory as a story: a veoma (βίωµα; from the ancient Greek βιόω / βιῶ, to exist, live). It then becomes evident that the subject (one­ self, the embodied mind) is what allows the lived and memorable event to occur. There is a sense of belonging and historicity that links the veoma to the person; therefore, the fragility of the lived is connected to a particular slice of the present, which becomes perception and memory and the intimacy that characterises the localised and timed (therefore spatialised) occurrence. The veomatic event as such becomes an occurrence of mnemonic production, 320

Figure 24.1. Liana Psarologaki, Hydor, 2013, 2017. Installation view: projection © Liana Psarologaki.

A Theory of Becoming in contrast to empirical occurrence, which may never go beyond aesthetic (phenomenological) perception. Time thus plays a critical role in the becom­ ing of the veoma. This will be further explored later in this chapter in the analysis of mnemonic veomata drawn from the installation Spatial Sea.

Cryptopology: veomatic co-aesthesia Cryptopology (2014) was a trans-sensorial journey in the crypt of St Pancras Church, London. The project consisted of subtle interventions in several of the crypt’s chambers. Each intervention created affective aesthesis via syn­ thetic triggering of different sensorial faculties: olfactory, ocular, auditory (and proprioceptive), thermoceptive, and haptic (figure 24.2). The work aimed to enable chorotopical experiences to manifest themselves via the abstract becoming of an environment and a dissolved reference to the material aspect of the place as architectural site. Cryptopology’s ontology intensified the affec­ tive exchange with the world taking place during the lived event, the veoma: because I experience the cosmos progressively, I attract the later around my embodied self. The experience of Cryptopology retained empathy for the spatial architectonics of the place (which remain in the veoma as a memorable event) and superimposed a transcendental topology of mediated and veomatic space through atmosphere. For Massumi (2002, 190), this enabled co-aesthetic (or synaesthetic) perception is actualised virtuality that hinges the sensory acts defining aesthesis. I define veomatic co-aesthesia as a complex aesthesis of space and atmos­ phere, via interrelated sensory systems situated within the somatosensory cor­ tex that do not give feedback (Mallgrave 2011, 200). Co-aesthetic perception becomes the condition enabling the veoma to occur. Although we agreed the veomatic goes beyond the empirical and aesthetic, it is very important to dis­ cuss what and how we sense and therefore how we live, as the grains of expe­ rience are still rooted in the granular matter of the sensed. The synergy of the senses that co-aesthesia implies is significantly fragmented by the commodifi­ cation of our spatial encounters. The hierarchy and reciprocity of the sensory faculties and their feedback as aesthesis, thought, and affect become degener­ ated and mediated. The chorotopical sustains the mental intrigue generated by space and place together in time. In Cryptopology, co-aesthetic perception— and therefore veomatic experience—intensify where orientation weakens and one’s physical and mental engagement deepens, until one reaches a metasta­ ble milieu in which virtual and actual co-resonated in equilibrium (Massumi 1992, 62). Experiencing Cryptopology entailed allowing space to take over so that movement, stories, and recollections could merge with new aesthetic and empirical matter.

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Figure 24.2.

Spatial Sea: mnemonic veomata Spatial Sea (2016) was an ephemeral site-responsive intervention in the Venetian fortifications of Heraklion, Crete. The subterranean passage in which the inter­ vention was sited resonated between body and cosmos (Loukaki 2014, 141–47), marking its significance through historical and current topological reference. Challenging the chorotopical within such architectural conditions meant highlighting chronotope, interrogating the historical, and allowing a “novel synthesis”: “a contact . . . between different milieus and registers” (O’Sullivan 2006, 17) that renders veomatic moments of situated and affective presence. Spatial Sea does this by presenting an effortless presence of light with reference to the political and cosmic topology of water inscribed strangely within a strict and archetypal architectural order. Reading Bart Keunen (2010, 40) and his commentary on Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of chronotope as the synthesis of “cultural context with the dynamics of human consciousness,” we return to the timely condition of the lived as associated with the aestheton and therefore spatial and temporal experience as experience of aesthesis. The veomatic, I propose, is a spatio-temporal haec­ ceity—a slice of chronic disconnectedness. It may occur in achronous or het­ erochronous sites with the capacity to evoke the Nietzschean untimely, “not as an escape from time but as an intervention in time” (Bogue 2010, 28)—a choro­ topical becoming. As Jacques Rancière (2013, x) notes, architectural condition­ ing in aesthesis “allow[s] for . . . an acceleration of rhythm, a pause between words, a movement, or a glimmering surface to be experienced as events.” This sensation is made of matter and is corporeal and felt, and thus noetic. Such sensation is a synthesis of pixels of experience—haecceities—the grains of our veomatic cosmos. To experience Spatial Sea is to experience an amplification of chronotopes where cultural and architectural contexts create a spatial con­ tinuum that sustains habit. The work attempted to encapsulate a folding of spatio-temporalities, creating a veoma open to social, political, and aesthetic 322

Figure 24.2. Liana Psarologaki, Cryptopology, 2014, St Pancras Church crypt, London, light installation view. © Liana Psarologaki.

A Theory of Becoming connotations and meanings. It established a becoming entailing the zeitgeist of the architectural site and the chronos of the experiencing subject’s intimate engagement and reading.

Figure 24.3.

Reflections In this chapter I presented a theoretical framework that responds to the con­ cept of becoming to contextualise a creative practice as the ontological occur­ rence of kissing between art and architecture, both of which were regarded as spatial and localised expressions of folding and event. The reflective analysis of the case studies attempted to examine art and architecture as two nuptial spatial practices, via the establishment of a shared theoretical vocabulary as a set of neologisms and a Deleuzian ontotopology. These neologisms encourage a shift in the agenda of conceiving art and architecture as two ontologically distinct domains of spatial becoming and promote interdisciplinary meth­ ods of thought and praxis. Notions were introduced regarding what and how experience of spatial practice occurs and how it is registered as memorable in reference to its topological and architectural parameters. Particular reference was made to Deleuzian thought by reflective application of neologisms (veoma, coesthesia, and genomenon) to two examples of practice that were defined as chorotopical. Such a reflection distinctively produced a discussion on notions of time, culture, sensation, and space via thought and language. In response, I noted that experience—inscribed and nurtured by architectural place and space—is born of grains of sensation, is enfolded in time, and becomes mem­ orable thought, constituting intimate realities that feed cosmic reality and our surrounding matter.

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Figure 24.3. Liana Psarologaki, Spatial Sea, 2016, St. George Gate, Heraklion, Crete. © Liana Psarologaki.

Liana Psarologaki References Badiou, Alain. 2005. Being and Event. Translated by Oliver Feltham. London: Continuum. First published 1988 as L’être et l’événement (Paris: Seuil). Bogue, Ronald. 2010. Deleuzian Fabulation and the Scars of History. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Conley, Tom. 1993. “Translator’s Foreword: A Plea for Leibniz.” In Deleuze 1993, ix–xx. Deleuze, Gilles. 1988. Foucault. Translated and edited by Séan Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1986 as Foucault (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1993. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Translated by Tom Conley. London: Athlone Press. First published 1988 as Le Pli: Leibniz et le Baroque (Paris: Minuit). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1994. What Is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1991 as Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Minuit). Keunen, Bart. 2010. “The Chronotopic Imagination in Literature and Film: Bakhtin, Bergson and Deleuze on Forms of Time.” In Bakhtin’s Theory of the Literary Chronotope: Reflections, Applications, Perspectives, edited by Nele Bemong, Pieter Borghart, Michel De Dobbeleer, Kristoffel Demoen, Koen De Temmerman, and Bart Keunen, 35–55. Ghent: Academia Press. Krauss, Rosalind. (1983) 1985. “Sculpture in the Expanded Field.” In Postmodern Culture, edited by Hal Foster, 31–42. London: Pluto Press. Book first published 1983 as The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press). Lavin, Sylvia. 2011. Kissing Architecture. Point: Essays on Architecture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Loukaki, Argyro. 2014. The Geographical Unconscious. Farnham, UK: Ashgate. Mallgrave, Harry Francis. 2011. The Architect’s

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Brain: Neuroscience, Creativity and Architecture. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Massumi, Brian. 1992. A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. 2002. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Osborne, Peter. 2013. Anywhere or Not at All: The Philosophy of Contemporary Art. London: Verso. O’Sullivan, Simon. 2006. Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thought Beyond Representation. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Psarologaki, Liana. 2014. “Towards Genomenology: The Lived Experience as an Input-Output Spatiotemporal Event.” In New Spatial Approaches: New Techniques and Theory in Contemporary Arts, edited by Ayşe Güngör and Efe Duyan, 152–62. Istanbul: DAKAM. ———. 2016. “A Theory on the Ontology of Site-Reliant Immersive Environments.” International Journal of Arts Theory and History 11 (3): 1–10. Rancière, Jacques. 2013. Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art. Translated by Zakir Paul. London: Verso. First published 2011 as Aisthesis: Scènes du régime esthétique de l’art (Paris: Galilée). Shrimpton, Gordon. 2007. “Knowledge and Accuracy in Early Greek Historical Writing.” In Science, Religion, and Society: An Encyclopaedia of History, Culture, and Controversy, edited by Arri Eisen and Gary Laderman, 2 vols, 1:251–61. London: M. E. Sharpe. Vidler, Anthony. 2000. “Skin and Bones: Folded Forms from Leibniz to Lynn.” In Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture, 219–34. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 2014. Event: Philosophy in Transit. London: Penguin.

Part 3

A Garden of Small Nuptials: Images, Movement, and Fabulations

Mythopoesis, Fabulous Images, and Memories of a Sorcerer Simon O’Sullivan Goldsmiths, University of London, UK

. . . theres some thing in us it dont have no name . . . it aint us but yet its in us . . . —Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker ([1980] 2012, 6)

What we’re interested in, you see, are modes of individuation beyond those of things, persons, or subjects: the individuation, say, of a time of day, of a region, a climate, a river or a wind, of an event. And maybe it’s a mistake to believe in the existence of things, persons, or subjects. —Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations (1995, 26)

Introduction In this chapter I want to talk about mythopoesis, which, very broadly, I use as a name for the “world-building” character of certain practices and presenta­ tions.1 Given our context I am going to focus especially on Deleuze’s writing in Cinema 2 (1989) and other books that I suggest develop key insights con­ cerning such practices (though Deleuze does not himself directly use the term mythopoesis). In particular I am interested in Deleuze’s idea that certain films and novels “are like the seeds of the people to come” (ibid. 221). Or, to put this another way, I want to suggest that mythopoesis is a name for a summon­ ing—or calling forth—of a people who are appropriate and adequate to those new and different worlds presented in art and other works. Departing from Deleuze’s definition somewhat—though attending to some of his other writ­ ings and especially his collaboration with Guattari—I also want to suggest that these “people” are not necessarily human, at least as this category is typically understood. There are other non-human forces—other becomings we might say—that are called forth by the mythopoetic function. In fact, as is suggested to Riddley Walker in the first of my epigraphs, mythopoesis might also name

1 What follows is indebted to ongoing conversations with David Burrows who contributed directly to some of the arguments that follow (as well as to their presentation in this chapter). A more recent version of some of the below appears in our co-written monograph, Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Art and Philosophy (Burrows and O’Sullivan 2019).

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Simon O’Sullivan an engagement with “some thing in us” (to use the phrase spoken to Riddley), something that is, perhaps, the potential of humans but that is often occluded by various regimes and habits. My chapter will then turn to Félix Guattari’s solo writings, specifically, the essay “Genet Regained,” in which Guattari develops his own parallel concept of fabulous images in relation to Genet (see Guattari 2013). These images, found in literature and life, operate as points of subjectification. Put simply, for Guattari, fiction is a resource in the production of different kinds of subjectivity and thus, again, of different kinds of worlds. Guattari’s account is quite technical, involving, as it does, different levels of operation (it attempts a more analytical account of how mythopoesis might invent a people), but the general point is similar to Deleuze’s: a certain image function can call forth something differ­ ent from within the same. The third and final section of my chapter turns to the collaborative writings of Deleuze and Guattari, specifically A Thousand Plateaus. This book utilises fic­ tion in its particular accounts of the individuation of worlds—as Deleuze tells us in the second of my epigraphs—but also has its own mythopoetic character insofar as it calls forth its own diverse worlds and modes of being adequate and appropriate to it. It is a book that performs its content in this sense. I’ll end my chapter by changing gear somewhat and focusing on a particular sec­ tion of A Thousand Plateaus, from the central Becoming plateau, “Memories of a Sorcerer” (1987, 239–52), which, it seems to me, especially evidences a certain “non-philosophical” character of Deleuze and Guattari’s collaboration: how their writing has a transformative traction on reality and, in particular, involves a shuttling across both philosophy and fiction.

Mythopoesis (and a people to come) For Deleuze then, mythopoesis names a particular kind of address to the future; again, it calls forth a “people to come.” As Deleuze also puts it elsewhere, in relation to visual art, certain practices and presentations are not necessarily for an audience already in place—they are not for us as we already are—but for a “people who are missing” (Deleuze 1997, 4). Mythopoesis names a “collective enunciation” in this sense, one that is for a people (even when there is only a single reader or participant) but also from a people (even when there is appar­ ently only a single author or artist). Indeed, it seems to me that mythopoesis can help summon this other people because it is in some senses also from them. Mythopoesis names a strange temporality in this sense: it involves a particular kind of feedback loop in which future images (of people and worlds) are mani­ fested within the present, in order to call forth new times and relations from within what is perceived or said to exist. Crucially, in this operation, mythopoesis involves a concomitant disruption of the more dominant fiction of the self. It “speaks” to the multiplicity that would deterritorialise our usual identifications (or, again, we might say, it speaks to the potential selves we also are), while also addressing us all as part of a wider collectivity—as potentially part of a community to come. As we shall see, it is 328

Mythopoesis, Fabulous Images, and Memories of a Sorcerer Guattari who is especially attentive to this “expanded idea” of a subjectivity comprised of other selves, although Deleuze also attends to this theme with his concept of larval subjectivities in Difference and Repetition (or “the thousands of passive syntheses of which we are organically composed” [Deleuze 1994, 74])— and, indeed, it is in play in both the Capitalism and Schizophrenia books. I would suggest that Deleuze himself develops the theme of mythopoesis in relation to what he calls (following Henri Bergson) “fabulation” (or the “storytelling function”). This concept is laid out in the last few pages of Bergsonism where it is portrayed as a particular mechanism that produces an interval within society through which “creative emotion” might arise (see Deleuze 1991, 106–12). Fabulation operates, in Deleuze’s reading of Bergson, to create “fictitious representations” (ibid., 108) that counter the more utilitarian prin­ ciples of human society and, indeed, of an intelligence that is premised on this. Fabulation then permits something non-human to arise within the human. It is a kind of platform, or, again, a mechanism, for the production of a different kind of affect. Another way of putting this is that fabulation involves resistance to the world as it is: “Art is resistance: it resists death, slavery, infamy, shame. But a people can’t worry about art. How is a people created, through what ter­ rible sufferings? When a people’s created, it’s through its own resources, but in a way that links up with something in art . . . or links up art to what it lacked. Utopia isn’t the right concept: it’s more a question of ‘fabulation’ in which a people and art both share” (Deleuze 1995, 174). To a certain extent there is a Romanticism to these claims; certainly it is not clear, today, how art might contribute to some of this resistance (against slavery for example). Deleuze’s ideas, at least here, are part of a particular avant-garde take on art, an avant-garde mythopoesis as it were. That said the concept of fab­ ulation, it seems to me, is important. As Deleuze remarks this is not the same as a utopia (especially when produced by a teleology) that can work to defer the production of a new people (always the receding horizon), but something that has a more pronounced traction on reality insofar as it is partly involved in the actual invention of a people in the here and now. Mythopoesis does not prom­ ise another world (or offer “escapism” from this one)—it is not a technology of transcendence in this sense—but helps set up further conditions, or contours and coordination points, for the production of a different mode of being (and thus, again, a different world) from within already existing ones. Elsewhere, Deleuze deploys the concept of fabulation more specifically in relation to this kind of political project where it operates as a bridge between an author’s subjectivity and his or her work, but also between the work and those it calls forth, as, for example, in the essay “Literature and Life” (from Essays Critical and Clinical) where he suggests that “It is the task of the fabulating func­ tion to invent a people” (Deleuze 1997, 4). The context here is American litera­ ture and the production “of a universal people composed of immigrants from all countries” (ibid.): “a minor people, eternally minor, taken up in a becom­ ing-revolutionary. Perhaps it exists only in the atoms of the writer, a bastard people, inferior, dominated, always in becoming, always incomplete. Bastard no longer designates a familial state, but the process or drift of the races” (ibid.). 329

Simon O’Sullivan I would say from the outset of my chapter that it is this impure remainder— always in a state of incompleteness—that interests me. Mythopoesis, at least in its radical form, involves an address to a minor people. In their joint writ­ ings, Deleuze and Guattari also attend to this fabulating function in relation to Kafka and what they call minor literature. The latter foregrounds the asignifying and affective character of language and writing. Minor literature also involves a future-orientation (once again, a minor literature is for a people to come) (see Deleuze and Guattari 1986, 16–18). Although Deleuze and Guattari develop their argument in relation to Kafka it seems to me the idea of a minor literature might well be broadened out and, indeed, thought in relation to non-literary fiction. Certainly the foregrounding of the affective—which is partly the means by which a minor literature calls to the future—is also at play in other kinds of fictions. In fact, elsewhere Deleuze (1989, 217) also suggests that different kinds of cinema—especially that kind that involves an imbrication of fact and fiction— has its own minor form and, as such, can contribute “to the invention of a peo­ ple” (or, in other words, posits a missing people): “This acknowledgement of a people who are missing is not a renunciation of political cinema, but on the contrary the new basis on which it is founded, in the third world and for minor­ ities. Art, and especially cinematographic art, must take part in this task: not that of addressing a people, which is presupposed already there, but of con­ tributing to the invention of a people” (ibid.). For Deleuze it is this that differ­ entiates modern cinema from classical cinema (which, rather, is for a people “already there” [ibid., 216]).2 In both these cases then—literature and cinema—there is the suggestion that mythopoesis operates as a counter to more dominant reality principles and sub­ jective productions. There are certainly questions to be asked around the way in which Deleuze tethers his notion of a minor form to the third world (at least in his books on cinema). However, Deleuze’s emphasis on a collective enunciation (pitched against the self-possessed and -centred individual subject) and a future orientation (mythopoesis is for an audience that is not yet in place) is impor­ tant, as is the idea that affect—or asignification—is involved in this operation insofar as it works both to disrupt more dominant signifying regimes and to produce a germ or seed of a new signifying regime, a new fiction or myth. We might also turn here to Deleuze’s comments on a further imbrication of fiction and reality in certain mythopoetic works (again, Deleuze has cinema in mind). Here real historical figures operate as interlocutors and, with that, there is “the possibility of the author providing himself with ‘intercessors,’ that is, of taking real and not fictional characters, but putting these very characters in the condition of ‘making up fiction,’ of ‘making legends,’ of ‘story-telling’” (Deleuze 1989, 222). As Deleuze goes on to say: “The author takes a step towards his char­ acters, but the characters take a step towards the author: double becoming. Story-telling is not an impersonal myth, but neither is it a personal fiction: it is

2 Deleuze has in mind Alain Resnais’s and Jean-Marie Straub’s films but also, in relation to the deploy­ ment of fiction as a kind of political method, the films of Glauber Rocha (Deleuze 1989, 218–19).

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Mythopoesis, Fabulous Images, and Memories of a Sorcerer a word in act, a speech-act through which the character continually crosses the boundary which would separate his private business from politics, and which itself produces collective utterances” (ibid.). Here, once again, mythopoesis breaks with a certain “reality principle,” espe­ cially that which separates public and private realms (again, it is a collective enunciation). But it also names a kind of nesting of fictions (where charac­ ters themselves become story-tellers) and, indeed, the way in which a fiction can speak back to its author—as if arrived from an “elsewhere” (this play with intention and non-intention seems crucial). Mythopoesis involves a performa­ tive element in this way, or a sense that different fictions are often traversed by a kind of staging, which, in itself, suggests the contingent—or fictional—char­ acter of our own consensual reality.

Fabulous images (and the production of subjectivity) In some of his own writings, Guattari attends to the idea of fiction as a kind of bridge—or transversal connector—between different regimes of life. In fact, in many ways Guattari is more attuned to fiction’s actual connections to lived life, perhaps partly because of his involvement with therapeutic work at La Borde (and the “hands-on” production of subjectivity) or, more simply, his own connections to an outside (when this is understood both in a literal sense—the outside of any given institution—and as something more abstract). As he puts it in an interview (from around the same time as the publication of A Thousand Plateaus): “For me, a literary machine starts itself, or can start itself, when writing connects with other machines of desire” (Guattari [1979] 1996, 208): “Writing begins to function in something else, as for example for the Beat Generation in the relation with drugs; for Kerouac in the relation with travel, or with mountains, with yoga. . . . Rhythms appear, a need, a desire to speak. Where is it possible for a writer to start this literary machine if it isn’t precisely outside of writing and of the field of literature” (ibid., 209). For Guattari, it is the way in which fiction has a traction on reality—it crosses over to life—that constitutes its importance as a kind of subjective technology. In his essay “Genet Regained” in Schizoanalytic Cartographies (2013), Guattari offers a more detailed account of, and inflection on, the connection of poetics to politics and the production of a people (Guattari, like Deleuze, is attending to what might be called an avant-garde mythopoesis here).3 In Genet’s case, Guattari suggests that there is a “subterranean process”—a kind of ur-proces­ suality—that characterises, but that is also prior to, the work and life of the author. It is this “ground,” Guattari argues, that provides a link between the two (a link between the clinical and the critical in Deleuze’s terms). This understanding of an intimate connection between art and life suggests that the former should not be considered as simply a representation of the lat­ ter, nor, again, can it be defined as a utopian imaging. Supplementing Deleuze’s use of the term fabulation, Guattari suggests that Genet offers not so much a

3 Thanks to Theo Reeves-Evison for first pointing me towards Guattari’s essay on Genet.

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Simon O’Sullivan “derealizing fabulation” as he does “fabulous images” (among other things) that are involved in a particular “image function” (Guattari 2013, 220). This function is itself part of a processual praxis that ultimately opens the reader up to what Guattari calls “new Universes of reference” and, consequently, the production of a new subjectivity (ibid., 225). Art is not simply an inert reflection of the worldas-it-is in this sense, but involves something more active and pragmatic. Guattari writes of Genet’s fascination with the Black Panthers as an example of this image function: “the ways of being and dressing of the Black Panthers, which almost overnight change the way that black people as a whole perceive the colour of their skin or the texture of their hair, for example” (Guattari 2013, 220). Assertions of this kind are problematic (there is a larger and longer history to be attended to in terms of these transformations and, indeed, such state­ ments belie a certain fetishisation of the “exotic”), but it does seem to me that Guattari has pin-pointed something important about the power of the image and how it has a traction in and on reality. Crucially, Guattari also suggests that: “one can legitimately broaden this expression to all the imaginary formations that, from this same perspective, acquire a particular—transversal—capacity to bridge times of life, existential levels as much as social segments, even—why not—cosmic stratifications” (ibid.). As well as operating to bridge different existential levels, the image function also offers up a point of inspiration (or, as I have already suggested, a “point of subjectification”) around which a differ­ ent kind of construction can begin to occur and, ultimately, attain consistency (a point around which to gather different components). Here fiction operates as the friction—the cohering mechanism—for the production of subjectivity. The first stage in this processuality—what Guattari calls “modular crystal­ lization”—involves the production of various images and names that collapse different universes together (including, crucially, a shuttling between signifier and signified, content and expression) (Guattari 2013, 222–25). Guattari sug­ gests that this is somewhat akin to what Freud writes about in his work on jokes and, more pertinently, on dreams (ibid., 223). It is the work of displacement and condensation. The second stage involves the production of “fabulous images” themselves (Guattari 2013, 225–27). According to Guattari these enlarge “fields of virtual­ ity,” allowing “new Universes of reference and singular modalities of expression to emerge by conjugating heterogeneous voices” (ibid., 225). Might we call this a form of looping connection between territories? These fabulous images— points of condensation that have become points of conjunction (achieving, it seems to me, a certain density and complexity as well as an autonomy)—oper­ ate as experimental devices (might we even call them probe-heads?) that then themselves map out “another real,” which, as Guattari suggests, is “correlative to another subjectivity” (ibid.).4

4 Deleuze and Guattari define probe-head in A Thousand Plateaus (1987, 190–91): “Beyond the face lies an al­ together different inhumanity: no longer that of the primitive head, but of ‘probe-heads’; here, cutting edges of deterritorialization become operative and lines of deterritorialization positive and absolute, forming strange new becomings, new polyvocalities.” For a discussion of this concept in relation to art practice, see O’Sullivan (2012, 189–92).

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Mythopoesis, Fabulous Images, and Memories of a Sorcerer The third and final moment is when these images themselves become “exis­ tential operators”—or what Guattari calls “synapses”—for new kinds of enun­ ciation whose “function is to produce a singular temporality, a specific way of discursivising subjectivity” (Guattari 2013, 229). This is when fiction—or might we say here fictioning—operates as what Guattari calls (in “The Production of Subjectivity”) a “poetic-existential catalysis” (Guattari 1995, 19). As he goes on to remark, this can be found “in the midst of scriptural, vocal, musical or plastic discursivities” where it “engages quasi-synchronically the enunciative crystallisation of the creator, the interpreter and the admirer of the work of art, like analyst and patient” (19). Guattari’s image function and, indeed, larger aesthetic paradigm involves both maker and participant in this production of a different kind of subjectivity: “Its efficiency lies in its capacity to promote active, processual ruptures within semiotically structured, significational and denotative networks, where it will put emergent subjectivity to work” (19). In relation to mythopoesis we might then say that fabulous images, ultimately, involve the presentation of a world (or even a presentation of a presentation)— they have a signifying content—but that they also operate to disrupt a given world. Indeed, the point of disruption is also the point around which a dif­ ferent subjectivity, and thus their world, might begin to gather (non-sense can produce new forms of sense): “A singularity, a rupture of sense, a cut, a frag­ mentation, the detachment of a semiotic content—in a dadaist or surrealist manner—can originate mutant nuclei of subjectivation” (Guattari 1995, 18).5 As Guattari goes on to remark: “In studies on new forms of art (like Deleuze’s on cinema) we will see, for example, movement-images and time-images con­ stituting the seeds of the production of subjectivity” (25). In the essay on Genet, Guattari (2013) also writes about a kind of self-fash­ ioning—or “self-divination” (229)—that proceeds from these points: “a prag­ matic effect, an existential surplus value, the release of new Constellations of Universes of reference” (230). This is then less the mirroring back of a subjec­ tivity already in place than a kind of abstract deterritorialisation of the latter and, as with Deleuze, a calling forth of something different: “Relations are now less identitarian, less personological—however tempting it may be to reduce them to Oedipus and incest. Henceforth, numen no longer affixes itself to the marrow of images, but finds itself distilled in much more molecular praxes, if you will, appropriate for transforming the everyday perception of the world and eschatological horizons” (230). With this stage, the transversal crossing is made from art to life. Fictioning becomes what Michel Foucault might call a technology of the self in so far as it provides a kind of anchor point for other practices of living. Indeed, here the poetic function meets the political one and art—as fictioning—announces and helps produce a new subjectivity alongside those worlds appropriate and adequate to it.



5 I have written at greater length about these mutant nuclei and how they cohere subjectivity around themselves (see O’Sullivan 2012, 96–103). For more on how these points might also involve collapse or operate as holes to an “outside,” see Burrows and O’Sullivan (2014).

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Simon O’Sullivan Guattari’s account of fabulous images is specific to his reading of Genet and, as such, I have taken liberties in extracting it from that context. It is also both highly abstract and technical (indeed, my own account leaves out some of the more difficult schema that are specific to the reading of Genet). As evident in the quotations above, Guattari also utilises terms and concepts that are unfa­ miliar and, indeed, which can sometimes be difficult to pin down (many are Guattari’s own neologisms). The difficulty of Guattari’s work—as evident espe­ cially in Schizoanalytic Cartographies—elides any easy “application” in this sense. It is not so much that Guattari is vague, but that he employs a very particular terminology that, it seems to me, means his writing itself calls forth a different kind of reader (or, certainly, makes demands on any existing reader). Another way of putting this is that the abstract nature of the writing is itself sugges­ tive but also foregrounds its character as writing. Might we even say it offers up its own fabulous images—its own “existential nuclei, autopoietic machine” (Guattari 1995, 106)—and, as such, operates itself to partly fiction a different subjectivity both for Guattari and his readers?

A Thousand Plateaus (as fictioning) For both Deleuze and Guattari it is especially literary fictions that can involve a certain mythopoetic functioning (or, in Guattari’s terms, lay out fabulous images)—although, as I have suggested, for Deleuze, cinema and art can also contribute to the invention of a people. But what about more directly concep­ tual work? Certainly, for Deleuze and Guattari, philosophy—alongside art— has its own future orientation, calls forth its own people.6 Deleuze and Guattari write about this in their final collaboration, What Is Philosophy?, where they sug­ gest that philosophy involves the “creation of concepts” which “in itself calls for a future form, for a new earth and people that do not yet exist” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 108). But it is in Capitalism and Schizophrenia, their previous collaborative project, especially the second volume, A Thousand Plateaus, that we have a case study of this concept creation that involves a “resistance” to the present and is pitched against what they disparagingly call “communication” (ibid.). As I have already suggested this idea is a key aspect of Deleuze’s more avant-garde take on mythopoesis. A Thousand Plateaus also abounds in references to fiction more directly. Literature in particular is utilised as a resource just as much as the history

6 In fact, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that art and philosophy converge specifically at this point: “the constitution of an earth and a people that are lacking as the correlate of creation” (1994, 108). This con­ vergence relates to the way in which both these forms of thought—and the third great form, science— involve a confrontation with chaos and, indeed, the production of a certain consistency from out of this chaos. What Is Philosophy? closes with some cryptic remarks about how the brain’s own submersion in chaos allows the extraction of a “people to come,” forms of subjectivity (or even, perhaps, non-subjec­ tivity?) that are wilder, untethered from the cogito. Indeed, in this place the three forms of thought become indiscernible (just as concepts, sensations, and functions become undecidable) (ibid., 218). I will return to this question of interference a little later in this chapter, but will note here that it is these different kinds of interference between different kinds of thought that characterise A Thousand Plateaus (and it is in this sense that it is the very last pages of What Is Philosophy? that most adequately account for the kind of “philosophy” a book like A Thousand Plateaus deploys).

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Mythopoesis, Fabulous Images, and Memories of a Sorcerer of philosophy. It is in fiction that another kind of individuation of the world takes place, and other, stranger modes of being are conjured into existence. The laying out of these other “non-philosophical” perspectives constitutes per­ haps the major difference between A Thousand Plateaus and other works signed “Deleuze,” “Guattari,” or, indeed, “Deleuze and Guattari.” Certainly these “examples” “flesh out” the philosophical architecture. They animate the con­ cepts. But, I think, something else is also at stake here: namely, the gesturing to an outside of philosophy per se. Indeed, A Thousand Plateaus, although clearly a work of philosophy, cannot be reduced to this (or, at least, it cannot be reduced to philosophy as it is typically understood). It mobilises other resources (and, again, offers perspectives from outside philosophy), and in so doing has trac­ tion on reality that is different to philosophy’s own more restricted terrain of operation.7 In part this no doubt explains some of the attraction of A Thousand Plateaus to non-philosophers, not least artists: it operates as both a toolbox and a construction site, and also as a case study of a creative work in and of itself. In Spinozist terms, A Thousand Plateaus is also itself composed of different speeds and rhythms, which give it a certain affective charge (and, as far as this goes, the question of how we encounter this book is crucial, whether it funda­ mentally “agrees” with our own affective make-up). Might we even say that its very form (the plateaus)—including the style in which it is written (alongside the very syntax it uses)—performs its content (to repeat a point I made earlier)? All this has been remarked on by other commentators, but it bears restating here: in reading, one enters into a kind of becoming with A Thousand Plateaus (providing one is “open” to that possibility). The processes A Thousand Plateaus describes, then, and itself initiates, do not proceed solely by reason, nor is the book itself about the human in what we might say is its habitual form. A Thousand Plateaus is not for us as we are typically constituted in this sense (the human figure drawn in sand as Foucault once had it), but for something we might become (or, to follow Guattari, it is for that molecular collectivity—again, the becomings—that constitute us alongside this molar self). Might we then suggest that in this particular metamodelisa­ tion of Deleuze and Guattari we are offered both fabulous images (which—why not?—might be of concepts) and a collective enunciation (which, again, is not entirely human) that is itself future oriented? Which is to say, in part, that a book like A Thousand Plateaus is itself mythopoetic.

7 A Thousand Plateaus is not simply “about” the world in this sense (at least as the world is typically perceived), but, rather, offers something more programmatic, even pragmatic. In this sense, it seems to me that A Thousand Plateaus is also concerned with what Guattari called the “production of subjectivity,” when this is the production of something specifically different to many of the models on offer, but also to the production of the human per se (understood as a particular historical configuration). In his own work Guattari brings this idea of the collectivity that constitutes us—a “social and mental ecology”— into a more pragmatic realm, especially in foregrounding more fluid analytic modellings (that privilege the encounter) which might allow people to “resingularise themselves” (Guattari 1995, 6). As such, might we say—rather obviously—that it is Guattari’s knowledges and experiences, especially from La Borde (itself a realm of heterogenetic encounters—or becomings), that also mark out A Thousand Plateaus’ singularity as a collaboration, or even as itself a work of collectivity (the two authors already being several, as the opening to A Thousand Plateaus remarks [Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 3]).

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Case study: “Memories of a Sorcerer” This mythopoetic character is most apparent in the central becoming plateau, which concerns itself specifically with a different individuation of the world (and of any entities within it): “between substantial forms and determined subjects, between the two, there is not only a whole operation of demonic local transports but a natural play of haecceities, degrees, intensities, events, and accidents that compose individuations totally different from those of the well-formed subjects that receive them” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 253). We might also note here Deleuze’s own remarks about A Thousand Plateaus, which I used as the second epigraph to this chapter and that, in some sense, offer a non-philosophical inflection on the above. Indeed, although the Becoming plateau begins with sections on Bergson and Spinoza as the two philosophers who have gone furthest in this project of de- and re-individuating the world, it is the “Memories of a Sorcerer” sections, which, it seems to me, play the most important role insofar as these sections foreground both a non-philosophical perspective and the more pragmatic idea of transformation of both self and world.8 The key resources in the first sorcerer section are, again, not philosophical concepts per se, but literature—fiction—with its authors and their invented avatars. Virginia Woolf experiencing herself “as a troop of monkeys, a school of fish” alongside H. P. Lovecraft’s Carter who lives a series of “human and non-human, vertebrate and invertebrate, conscious and mindless, animal and vegetable” becomings leading to more extreme inorganic—molecular and cos­ mic—ones (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 239–40). In the plateau, it is especially Lovecraft as much as Spinoza who is the thinker of becoming (any philosoph­ ical principles are, in this sense, always doubled by these literary examples). In terms of this use of fiction, we might briefly return to What Is Philosophy? and note Deleuze and Guattari’s comments about those intrinsic interferences between the different planes of thought, in particular, between philosophy and art. This is the second form of interference after a first, more straightforward one of philosophy, science, or art having a take, from its own perspective, on one of the others (as, for example “when a philosopher attempts to create the concept of a sensation” [Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 217]). An intrinsic inter­ ference, on the other hand, happens when, for example: “concepts and con­ ceptual personae seem to leave a plane of immanence that would correspond to them, so as to slip among the functions and partial observers, or among the sensations and aesthetic figures, on another plane. . . . These slidings are so subtle . . . that we find ourselves on complex planes that are difficult to qualify” (ibid.). Are not these “complex” planes also the plateaus of A Thousand Plateaus, made up as they are by these criss-crossings and interferences between dif­ ferent forms of thought? Certainly the Becoming plateau, in its deployment

8 In relation to this Deleuzian idea of sorcery as a transformative technology of the self, see also Hakim Bey’s T. A. Z. (1985), where sorcery is allied with “ontological anarchy” and defined as “the systematic cultivation of enhanced consciousness or non-ordinary awareness and its deployment in the world of deeds and objects to bring about desire results” (ibid., 22).

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Mythopoesis, Fabulous Images, and Memories of a Sorcerer of aesthetic figures as conceptual personae, involves precisely this grey zone between concept and affect, philosophy and fiction.9 In “Memories of a Sorcerer II” Deleuze and Guattari suggest that the first principle of becoming-animal—multiplicity and contagion—is invariably doubled by a second: alliance with something more singular: the anomalous, understood as that which borders the pack. Again, literary examples are cru­ cial in helping define this principle: Captain Ahab’s complex relation with the singular Moby Dick (the “white wall”) and Josephine, the privileged mouse singer of Kafka’s mouse society. Philosophically speaking these literary exam­ ples are doubled by a more abstract definition of multiplicity as constituted by its boundaries and borders, by “the lines and dimensions it encompasses in ‘intension’” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 245). The anomalous is the border of this multiplicity, the line of flight, or “cutting edge of deterritorialization” (ibid., 244). But even in these more abstract definitions the implication, it seems to me, is that this is a programme for life: one needs to find one’s own anomalous—follow a line of flight. Fiction operates as a kind of manual in this sense, or at least offers up case studies for a life that might be lived differ­ ently. And the philosophy itself—the invention of concepts (for example of an “intensive multiplicity”)—is precisely experimental and, once again, pragmatic (what will this concept allow one to think?). In “Memories of a Sorcerer III” becoming-animal is placed in sequence, with becoming-woman on the near side and becoming-molecular, ultimately, becoming-imperceptible, on the far side. Once again Lovecraft, this time along­ side Carlos Castaneda, is among the writers deployed, but Deleuze and Guattari also point to science fiction in general as a genre “on” becoming: “science fic­ tion has gone through a whole evolution taking it from animal, vegetable, and mineral becomings to becomings of bacteria, viruses, molecules, and things imperceptible” (ibid., 248). At its best, science fiction operates as philosophy’s own forward-hurled probe in this sense, at least when this philosophy is defined as itself future-oriented and as a creative and constructive pursuit. We might say then that the Becoming plateau in part draws out a programme, again of transformation, dependent on this very particular and precise ontol­ ogy, but developed through aesthetic figures (as conceptual personae) that “live” these transformations. This is not exactly a therapeutics, but it is cer­ tainly a form of practical analysis, when this is also understood as involving an ethico-aesthetics (or form of molecular politics in Guattari’s sense). In fact, in the plateau becoming is aligned more explicitly with schizoanalysis insofar as both are described as an experimental pragmatics concerning locating a “line of escape” from more striated space-times (“a new borderline, an active line that will bring other becomings”) (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 251). Indeed, becoming is pitched against “the great molar powers” that restrict the possi­ bilities of transformation: “family, career, and conjugality” (ibid., 233). This is dealt with in more detail in other plateaus (in particular “November 28, 1947: How Do You Make Yourself a Body without Organs” [ibid., 149–66]), but in the

9 See also footnote 6 above.

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Simon O’Sullivan Becoming plateau it is given its most abstract but also worked out and indeed philosophical form. There is also another practice gestured towards—or fictioned—here, of dia­ grammatics, that itself informs the criteria for this experimentation: “If mul­ tiplicities are defined and transformed by the borderline that determines in each instance their number of dimensions, we can conceive of the possibility of laying them out on a plane, the borderlines succeeding one another, form­ ing a broken line” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 251). Deleuze and Guattari con­ tinue: “Far from reducing the multiplicities’ number of dimensions to two, the plane of consistency cuts across them all, intersects them in order to bring into coexistence any number of multiplicities, with any number of dimensions.” Indeed, “all becomings are written like sorcerers’ drawings on this plane of consistency” (ibid.). Once again Lovecraft becomes the writer most capable of expressing this multi-dimensional but flat plane, although D. H. Lawrence’s apparently less cosmic writings, on the tortoise for example, also foreground this particular form of abstraction—or practice of diagrammatics (“Lawrence, in his becoming-tortoise, moves from the most obstinate animal dynamism to . . . abstract, pure geometry . . . he pushes becoming-tortoise all the way to the plane of consistency” [ibid., 251–52]). In their fictioning, Deleuze and Guattari also name this plane “the Planomenon, or the Rhizosphere, the Criterium. . . . At n dimensions, it is called the Hypersphere, the Mechanosphere. It is the abstract Figure, or rather, since it has no form itself, the abstract Machine of which each concrete assemblage is a multiplicity, a becoming, a segment, a vibration. And the abstract machine is the intersection of them all” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 252). Although couched in different terminology—and, indeed, requiring the invention of a different terminology—this is the univocity of Spinoza (individual modes as different expressions of the same substance) mediated through Bergson (the multiplicity of different durations in communication). However it is Woolf— “who made all of her life and work a passage, a becoming”—and her book The Waves that best shows this abstract machine at work (and ends the sequence of memories of a sorcerer) (ibid., 252).10 A Thousand Plateaus then offers up an abstract and speculative perspective (a kind of external point of view) that is accompanied by something more experi­ ential and experimental (a becoming that is firmly in and with the world). It is this conjunction of the abstract and concrete—of being apart from but also a part of the world—that defines the sections on sorcerers in the Becoming plateau (and indeed, A Thousand Plateaus more generally).11 Could we not also 10 Later in the plateau Deleuze and Guattari return to Woolf—alongside Charlotte Brontë and Michel Tournier—as a “lived” example of a fictioning of the world; following on from this, a particular form of expression or semiotic is mapped out that is appropriate and adequate to this peculiar individuation: “proper names, verbs in the infinitive and indefinite articles or pronouns” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 263). The proper name, for example, “fundamentally demarcates something that is of the order of the event, of becoming or of the haecceity. It is the military men and meteorologists who hold the secret of proper names, when they give them to a strategic operation or a hurricane” (ibid., 264). 11 As evidenced in the title of the concluding chapter of A Thousand Plateaus, “Conclusion: Concrete Rules and Abstract Machines” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 501–16).

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Mythopoesis, Fabulous Images, and Memories of a Sorcerer reframe this as a conjunction—or interference—between philosophy and fic­ tion, when both, each in their own way, announce a different individuation in and of the world from typical subjects and objects, and from different perspec­ tives? In fact, it seems to me in A Thousand Plateaus fiction becomes philosophy, but also that philosophy operates as itself a kind of fiction.12

Conclusion Both Deleuze and Guattari are attentive to the way in which certain works of fiction can have traction on reality up and beyond their character as literature. Fiction, for both, is a key technology in the calling forth of something differ­ ent in and from the world as it is. But A Thousand Plateaus, although it attends to this operation—writing about it (when this also includes philosophy’s own future orientation)—also performs it. A Thousand Plateaus is itself an exam­ ple of the world-making it writes about. It is partly this that gives the work its mythopoetic quality (and, again, why artists and art students respond so well to the book): it constitutes its own very particular space-time, its own world, as well as the terms by which that world might be approached (as such, it also has much in common with the practices of “worlding” recently discussed by Donna Haraway). A Thousand Plateaus is then both a collective enunciation and, it seems to me, for a people to come. Or, more simply, the book fictions another reality. In the larger project, from which this chapter has partly been extracted, the artist David Burrows and I turn to fiction (especially science fiction) as a resource. But we are also concerned, more specifically, with the kinds of work that fiction another reality, or perform a fiction from within the one we more typically inhabit. Indeed, for ourselves, it is the way in which certain practices and presentations call forth something different from within the same while also operating to counteract more dominant realities and projections that characterise them as mythopoetic. There can often be a kind of mismatch between theoretical and/or philo­ sophical writings about “art” and the practices themselves. Often the abstrac­ tions and generalisations of the former are unrecognisable to practices on the ground. But it is also the case that abstract work can itself be an example of practice. Such, I think, is the case with a work like A Thousand Plateaus, which, we might say, is abstract precisely in order to suggest (and help construct) another world (it performs its own kind of abstraction). Which is to say, once again, that A Thousand Plateaus fulfils all the criteria that Deleuze and Guattari lay out for a mythopoetic work.

12 In fact, this is to follow Deleuze when he remarks in the preface to Difference and Repetition: “A book of philosophy should be in part a very particular species of detective novel, in part a kind of science fiction” (Deleuze 1994, xx).

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Simon O’Sullivan References Bey, Hakim. 1985. T. A. Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia. Burrows, David, and Simon O’Sullivan. 2014. “The Sinthome/Z-Point Relation or Art as Non-Schizoanalysis.” In Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Visual Art, edited by Ian Buchanan and Lorna Collins, 253–78. London: Bloomsbury. ———. 2019. Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1989. Cinema 2: The TimeImage. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1985 as Cinéma 2: L’image-temps (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1991. Bergsonism. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Zone Books. First published 1966 as Le Bergsonisme (Paris: Presses universitaires de France). ———. 1994. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1968 as Différence et répétition (Paris: Presses universitaires de France). ———. 1995. Negotiations: 1972–1990. Translated by Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1990 as Pourparlers: 1972–1990 (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1997. “Literature and Life.” In Essays Critical and Clinical, translated by Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco, 1–6. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Book first published 1993 as Critique et clinique (Paris: Minuit). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1986. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Translated by Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First

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published 1975 as Kafka: Pour une literature mineure (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1994. What Is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1991 as Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Minuit). Guattari, Félix. (1979) 1996. “A Liberation of Desire: An Interview with George Stambolian.” Translated by George Stambolian. In The Guattari Reader, edited by Gary Genosko, 204–14. Oxford: Blackwell. Interview first published 1979 in Homosexualities and French Literature: Cultural Contexts/Critical Texts, edited by George Stambolian and Elaine Marks (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), 56–69. ———. 1995. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. Translated by Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. First published 1992 as Chaosmose (Paris: Galilée). ———. 2013. “Genet Regained.” In Schizoanalytic Cartographies, translated by Andrew Goffey, 215–30. London: Bloomsbury. Book first published 1989 as Cartographies Schizoanlytiques (Paris: Galilée). Hoban, Russell. (1980) 2012. Riddley Walker. London: Bloomsbury. First published 1980 (London: Jonathan Cape). O’Sullivan, Simon. 2012. On the Production of Subjectivity: Five Diagrams of the Finite–Infinite Relation. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

The Philosopher as a Line A Deleuzian Perspective on Drawing and the Mobile Image of Thought Janae Sholtz Alvernia University, USA

What is important for Deleuze about images, whether painting, drawing, or any visible creation, is not that they are representations of the visible, but instead that they make visible. Moreover, all thinking, acting, and creating is itself a pro­ cess of imaging. What is it that images make visible?—This is the question. To address it, I will follow a rather circuitous path, taking my own line of thought for a walk, through rumination on the figure of the philosopher, or rather the philosopher as conceptual personae. Here one must speak of the incessant glissement that Deleuze indicates, and performs, between the image and the concept, which one could interpret as a relation of double capture where art and philosophy enter into a zone of indeterminacy. A conceptual persona is an image of a philosophical system, a way of thinking, an overlaying that clarifies what Deleuze thinks philosophy itself is—the creation of concepts—and what he is particularly doing, which is providing a new image of thought. What is interesting is how he describes his own concept creation as a process of perpet­ ual drawing and revision, while also insinuating the impersonal within his own thought, an extraordinary exquisite corpse (corps exquis): “je ferais beaucoup de petits dessins, de faire des schémas, alors vous pourrez corriger les schémas, ce sera épatant, vous viendrez du fond et corrigera mes schémas” (Deleuze [1983] 2019).1 This description of thought, as incessant and semi-autonomous drawing, gives us insight into Deleuze as a conceptual persona—and, as well, elucidates his practice of layering upon layering of images in his own philosophy.2 What preoccupies Deleuze is the struggle to present an image of thought in motion that addresses the paradox of providing a concept that does not hypostasise itself—the point of a becoming predicated on aberrant nuptials: continuous

1 “I would do a lot of small drawings, make patterns, so you will be able to correct them, this will be amazing, and you will come up from the ground and correct my patterns.” 2 On the infinity of images: “Je crois qu’il y a un ensemble infini d’images variant les unes en fonction des autres, sur toutes leurs faces et dans toutes leurs parties, et à cet égard je me dis: tiens je suis un pur spinoziste” (Deleuze [1983] 2019, my translation; I believe that there is an infinite set of images that vary according to each other, on all their faces and in all their parts, and in this respect, I say to myself: I am a pure Spinozist).

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Janae Sholtz variation.3 The necessity of the double capture of concept and image is as fol­ lows: language as the method of expressing concepts does just this, it captures thought within its wordy husks. Of course, this explains the need to move beyond mere logos towards the affectivity of the image.4 Bridging the space between thinking and seeing is fundamentally important to this paradox, and is accomplished, I will argue, through a particular mode of drawing. Drawing becomes the proper image or form of the philosopher, and not just a drawing, but the act of drawing—the philosopher becomes an activity. But we can go even further. The kind of drawing defines the activity and Deleuze privileges the sketch, or diagram, to illuminate the unfinished, even incessant, process of drawing—an “infinite movement” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 157; see also 37, 197).5 Thus, the project herein is to develop an account of a new conceptual persona that draws sustenance from Deleuze’s theory of becoming as an aber­ rant nuptial between heterogeneous series. Bringing together concept and image, being and practice, human and artifice, we shall attempt to conceive philosopher as line—a persona characterised by depersonalisation, a line of flight away from any particular subjectivity. I seek to ground this reading by connecting several conceptual elements of Deleuze and Guattari’s own work, first the relationship between concept and image, next the mediating, historical functions of conceptual personae and faciality, then the status of the line, and finally the purpose of the diagram and what it means to draw it.

On the relationship between concept and image The relation between concept (text) and image has been of particular impor­ tance for postmodern theorists, who have questioned the status of visibility and the limits of representation and carved out new relationships between texts and bodies, probing the distance between affect and sense. While all these are worthy of consideration in their own right, I want to consider Vilém Flusser’s account, found in Towards a Philosophy of Photography (2000), of the advent of conceptual thinking, that is, the separation of image and concept, which then gave rise to a new kind of image, the technical image, which provides a new model for making the world of atomised information concrete yet nonetheless abstract. On his account, historical consciousness was born with the advent of linear writing and the demise of the fecund surface-world of the image: “The struggle of writing against the image . . . runs throughout history. With writing, a new ability was born called ‘conceptual thinking’ which consisted of abstract­ ing lines from surfaces, i.e. producing and decoding them. Conceptual thought is more abstract than imaginative thought as all dimensions are abstracted from

3 Frichot (2009, 251–53) insists that the image of thought Deleuze is most interested in conveying is one that claims or selects infinite movement or movement of the infinite. 4 “Affects, percepts, and concepts are three inseparable forces, running from art into philosophy and from philosophy into art” (Deleuze 1995, 137). 5 “The problem is ‘how does one speak of that which is always to come, which abides in the paradigm of missingness?’ . . . What this necessitates is a sketch that can never be filled in completely—a diagram, perhaps?” (Sholtz 2015, 265).

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The Philosopher as a Line phenomena—with the exception of straight lines” (Flusser 2000, 11, my emphasis).6 (I’ll return to this issue of straight lines later). It seems that Flusser associates the ability to create sense or meaning with textuality, while the imagination’s productions relate more directly to the enjoyment of concrete existence and the full presence of reality and an unchanging, eternal code that he associates with spirituality, magic, and myth. “History . . . is a progressive transcoding of images into concepts, a progressive elucidation of ideas, a progressive disen­ chantment” (ibid., 13) with the world as such, which includes the progressive introjection of the subjective viewpoint.7 But, Flusser claims, this transformation of the regime of the concept reached a point of crisis in the nineteenth century when texts themselves became incomprehensible. This is when the technical image was introduced to make texts comprehensible again (or rather to liberate the receiver from the neces­ sity of thinking conceptually) (Flusser 2000, 17). This new type of image, the technical image, is an abstraction, not from the concrete world, but from concepts themselves. The pretence of objectivity is what concerns Flusser, as the image now refers to a concept, but because of the status of the concept, this image becomes the paradigm of objectivity that absorbs all other images and texts, becoming a revolving eternal representation (the tendency towards massification). The danger is in assuming that the power and purpose of the technical image to represent objective reality—that is, the intervention of the apparatus—automatically operates to construct a visibility that then becomes entropic to the viewer (Flusser 2011, 19). Flusser’s concern is to think through the technical image as new media that ushers in a new universe or way of life; the transmutations that occur cannot be referred back to the traditional two-dimensionality of surface, context, and scene, but instead imply a post-historical dimensionless state. Technical images include the necessary intervention of the apparatus to gather the dis­ solute particles reflecting this dimensionless state of being.8 “This emerging universe, this dimensionless, imagined universe of technical images, is meant to render our circumstances conceivable, representable, and comprehensible” (Flusser 2011, 10). Yet we may wonder about the particular relation between image and con­ cept that this entails. Indeed, Deleuze is highly sceptical of the tendency to think image and concept in terms of the communication and circulation of information, and Flusser himself refers to the technical image as having a “hallucinatory power” (ibid.). This could lead us to consider the status of the



6 In “Lines and Surfaces” from 1973, Flusser associates surfaces with mass-produced images (a twodimensional immediacy that is consumed all at once) and written lines, which by compelling our attention to move from point to point produce a kind of temporality and disposition towards history (see Cooper 2008). 7 Interestingly, this changed the purview of imagination as well, as it became concerned with introducing new symbols and generating information, rather than transmitting it—Flusser (2011, 13) speaks of this as the infection of images with texts. 8 Flusser’s rejoinder to Towards a Philosophy of Photography, Into the Universe of Technical Images (first published 1985), is markedly more positive concerning the implications of the regime of the technical image: “we can only do justice to the fabulous new way of life that is now emerging around technical images if we delve into the very roots of our being-in-the-world” (Flusser 2011, 7).

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Janae Sholtz photographic image and the way that the adherence to the technical image model might obscure the ability to appreciate a more singular relation to the image.9 Or, more to the point of this chapter, we might choose to understand this in terms of its significance for drawing and images more generally, as a problem concerning both the domestication of the line and the obfuscation of the power of the image, shedding light on Deleuze’s invective for the line’s liberation and desire to reinvigorate the relation to the surface, to the affective, concrete dimensions to which images had referred. But rather than a simple return to the image, the task is to think the concept through the image, rather than the image as a reflection of the concept. The idea of image of thought reflects this paradigm shift: Deleuze is claiming not that he is able to use an image to reflect thought (or reality for that matter), but that every paradigm of thought operates according to an image that con­ strains it, moulds it, and provides its contours. This emphasis on construction rather than the presentation/presence of the image–thought relationship is evidenced in Deleuze’s model of concept formation, which is essentially tied to artistic production: inventive, sculptural, creative. Indeed Deleuze suggests in several places that concepts are themselves akin to, even inseparable from, affects and percepts.10 In “Cerebral Drawings between Art and Science: On Gilles Deleuze’s Philosophy of Concepts,” Schmidgen (2015) goes so far as to claim that Deleuze’s “concepts function like drawings and, vice versa, that his concepts are drawings” (ibid., 124). This is an interesting claim in that it neces­ sitates a return to the consideration of the line and figure itself, and reminds us of the lack of predetermination of the concept; the concept must be drawn, and the drawing does not pre-exist itself, at least not in a Deleuzian model of drawing. A more astonishing claim that I wish to affirm and defend is that “Deleuze’s use of concepts resembles the function of [Bataille’s concept of ] the informe”11 (Schmidgen 2015, 137; see also Bois and Krauss 1997, 9). That is, Deleuze wishes to introduce formlessness into the concept, “to bring things down in the world” by recognising that concepts are like frock coats giving form to a universe that “resembles nothing and is only formless” (Bataille 1985, 31). Bataille’s informe has been identified as an “impulse,” an “operational, performative ‘force’ of the ‘formless’” (Bois and Krauss 1997, 9); it is my claim that Deleuze’s intention is to infuse this force into the heart of the concept, an aberrant nuptial between form and formlessness. Now, at first glance, this may seem to be a mere reformulation of what many claim to be Deleuze’s early aim to think “thought without image” (Deleuze

9 The significance of the image may be at the surface of things, but a non-superficial survey of the surface takes the time to wander upon it (Flusser 2000, 8). The image is a multiplicity of elements that creates a spatio-temporal affect, and its repetitive relationality is replete with perpetually renewable signifi­ cances. Images are mediations that make the world comprehensible and simultaneously distance us; in­ stead of decoding or engaging images, we become subservient to them—we become images ourselves. 10 Philosophical concepts, concepts that arise along with percepts and affects: “Affects, percepts, and concepts are three inseparable forces, running from art into philosophy and from philosophy into art” (Deleuze 1995, 137). 11 The concept informe (formless) was developed by Bataille in a short fifteen-line article in the “Critical Dictionary” published in Documents in 1929.

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The Philosopher as a Line 1994), yet as Jonathan Dronsfield has noted (2012), Deleuze’s project changes, and his later work does not repudiate the idea of an image of thought but seeks to produce a new image of thought. One way of explaining this transition would be that, in Deleuze’s early work, image is equivalent to representation, and therefore any thought conceived in terms of image is considered representative rather than generative. Yet, through his engagement with art, Deleuze comes to think the image anew—as ontologically prior to representation, related to the generative processes of assemblages and multiplicities. By incorporating Bataille’s informe, I offer another more aberrant explanation: I contend that thinking “thought without image” is the new image of thought that Deleuze is trying to convey and that this represents a further radicalisation of the image (in the sense of the root of its generative potential rather than its final form or development); the image that Deleuze is concerned to conceive is that of the formless. Therefore, thought without image does not mean pure thought, or the absolute idea purified of all materiality or affectivity, but the force of the formless as processes of forming and unforming, as well as the pre­ cursor of form that is wrought from the realm of the sensible, that is, unformed intensive forces. This is the paradox that Deleuze has set before himself, one that I believe animates his entire corpus: to provide an image of the formless, which would then give us an image of thought as thinking in motion, and to theorise the zone of indeterminacy that is created in and through thought’s passage. Reflecting on the image–thought relation, there is a necessary and reciprocal supplementarity at play, the need for images to supplement words speaks to the singular difficulty of the particular concept—perhaps even the impossibility of conceptualising something that is constantly becoming and incessantly mobile. To accomplish this, we must look to the kind of images Deleuze begins to use to convey his thought: particularly, his meticulous description of the difference between his preferred image, the diagram, and other forms or figures, as well as the ontological priority of line as the compositional force of the diagram. For instance, Hélène Frichot focuses on a particular diagram in Deleuze’s Foucault (1988) that provides an image of thought as a constant becoming through its exposure to the furious winds of the unthought, an aberrant nuptial with its constitutive outside: “This will not be a static image of thought that freezes our capacity to feel and experience a life, instead it will be animated like the peri­ staltic folds of the plane of immanence itself ” (Frichot 2009, 248). She extends the diagram, arguing that the image in Foucault is but a snapshot of one sec­ tion, one small detail of a larger plane: one fold or “refuge” within the indef­ initely and infinitely unfurling plane (ibid., 251–52). From this, she recognises that the image of thought Deleuze is most interested in conveying is one that claims or selects infinite movement or movement of the infinite (see Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 37). But first, it is important to address the critical and destructive task that oper­ ates in Deleuze’s work. In Difference and Repetition, he says, “to think is to cre­ ate . . . but to create is first of all to engender ‘thinking’ in thought” (Deleuze 1994, 147). Yet, in response to the onslaught of modern consumer culture and 345

Janae Sholtz capitalist appropriations of information technologies, Deleuze insists that “creating isn’t communicating but resisting” (1995, 143). The guiding intuition here is that the first step to creation is to be aware of that which needs to be resisted, a diagnosis of sorts, consistent with the first stages of both pragmatics (A Thousand Plateaus) and schizoanalysis (Anti-Oedipus): identifying the regimes of signs and forms of expression and the ways in which our desires have been captured is to recognise the assemblages of which we are already a part. In this next section, I will connect this idea of resistance to the imperative of the form­ less, to resist the reification of forms of all kinds, conceptual personae, visual clichés, and even the visage itself.

Conceptual personae Deleuze conceives conceptual personae as illustrations of philosophers’ key ideas and presuppositions; as such, they reflect the imbrication of concept and image. The emergence of certain images of thought are tied to conceptual per­ sonae as the true agents of philosophical enunciation, which reflect not one concept but the concrescence of a whole system of concepts that serve as the filter through which we view the world and ideas at a given moment. Thus, they are not representations of the philosopher, but the image of a whole set of con­ cerns, values, and beliefs that animate a field of inquiry or way of approaching problems: “Conceptual personae carry out the movements that describe the author’s plane of immanence, and they play a part in the very creation of the author’s concepts. . . . even when they are ‘antipathetic’” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 63). Deleuze describes how a philosophical plane is laid out according to sympathetic (positive) and antipathetic (repulsive) movements that are indi­ cated by the conceptual personae. Deleuze’s use of both pathetic and anti­ pathetic suggests that philosophical concepts have an affective element and that they can be transmitted by a sort of involuntary contagion. Thought moves by affective encounters; these conceptual personae are like intellectual bod­ ies that bump up against each other for and through thinkers/readers, causing passage or transference (transversality). As such, conceptual personae are like diagrams that show “thought’s territories [i.e., affinities], its absolute deterri­ torializations [i.e., non-philosophy, otherness] and reterritorializations [i.e., transformations or becomings]” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 69). Conceptual personae are also indicative of particular images of thought within which we are always already caught and which always risk limiting our ability to think. Therefore, there is a wariness of conceptual persona. Thinkers such as Nietzsche may have the potential to completely change the image of thought through the dynamic force of their dramatic and creative use of con­ ceptual personae, but this is because their use never becomes implicit. That is, there is a reconstitution of thought by the selective yet never reductive or totalising invocation of conceptual personae. But is also possible that concep­ tual personae can function like clichés, which we must struggle to move beyond to stop them become inhibiting as they can be conveyors of presuppositions that define thought and how things are understood/perceived. Lambert (2015) 346

The Philosopher as a Line contends that Deleuze explicitly seeks to revive the tradition of dramaturgy through conceptual personae as a form of individuation that can resist cap­ italist society on the basis of the axiomatic of identity. Yet, for this to be so, conceptual personae have to be in movement or else “the act of thinking itself is reduced to an image that does not think” (ibid.). Thus, rather than being caught, so to speak, by identifying with one conceptual personae, “the reader herself appears as a new conceptual persona who must be produced or willed alongside the creation of the author’s conceptual personae for a philosophy of the future” (ibid.). In other words, rather than identifying with any one proper name, one must view conceptual personae as encounters, which can catalyse a deepened engagement with one’s own transformation. This kind of becom­ ing is aberrant because one must be ready to relinquish control of one’s own thought (proper name) to another in order to enter into a mode of transforma­ tion—like Deleuze’s description of his sketches that are taken over by another and another and another. Again, Nietzsche is Deleuze’s main guide in this prac­ tice: as he describes it, “there is [in Nietzsche] a kind of nomadism, a perpetual migration of the intensities designated by proper names, and these interpen­ etrate one another as they are lived on a full body” (Deleuze 2004, 257). Thus, Deleuze seems to be carving out a legitimate and illegitimate use of conceptual personae, where identification, rather than recognition of the otherness (and collective impersonality) of the persona, represents the first stage of illegiti­ macy. The model of Nietzsche also gives some insight in to how Deleuze may be using conceptual personae in his own work, layering them together, experi­ menting with new combinations, letting his thought become something other through its confrontation with the personae rather than seeing them as para­ digms of truth. Deleuze is quite adamant about the necessity of mediating figures for the translation of chaotic forces and relations into something thinkable, claim­ ing, “mediators are fundamental. Creation’s all about mediators. . . . I need my mediators to express myself ” (Deleuze 1995, 125); and “In philosophical enunciations we do not do something by saying it but produce movement by thinking it, through the intermediary of a conceptual persona” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 64–65). To think is to create movements, such as partitioning, turning away, or affirming, and the intermediary is a means of differentiating or giving an outline to these movements (Lambert 2015). Therefore, conceptual personae act as a filter that facilitates the concept; they make thought possible, even manageable. In this respect, the conceptual personae play much the same role as the face and faciality found primarily in A Thousand Plateaus.

Beyond faciality, the figural, formless, and futural We must take quite literally the idea that man is a face drawn in the sand between two tides: he is a composition appearing only between two others, a classical past that never knew him, and a future that will no longer know him. —Gilles Deleuze (1988, 89)

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Janae Sholtz The following consideration of the concept of faciality, its function, and its lim­ itations will provide the basis for constructing, or imagining, a new conceptual persona, one that is not a descriptive tracing of the past but instead derives from Deleuze and Guattari’s interventions concerning the nature of concept and the shift away from the binary faciality system that marks the authors’ proposed future direction of thought—thought as aberrant to this system of normalisation. Deleuze and Guattari explain the mediating role of faciality by focusing on the manner in which actual facial expressions become an integral part of conveying sense: “The form of the signifier in language, even its units, would remain indeterminate if the potential listener did not use the face of the speaker to guide his or her choices” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 167). The face is thus a filter that produces both certain kinds of affective/intellectual inter­ actions and, at the same time, a form of expression that limits and interprets significance. Language is always accompanied by faciality traits (115), reiterat­ ing the proximity between word/image that forms the substance of this study. Yet, faciality is more than the face: “Concrete faces cannot be assumed to come ready-made. They are engendered by an abstract machine of faciality” (168); that is, they have to be drawn, and they are drawn through the particular binary operations and selections of the abstract machine of faciality. Deleuze and Guattari describe faciality as a white-wall/black-hole system that signifies the intersection of two regimes of signs, significance, and sub­ jectification. The face takes shape on the white wall of the signifier (this wall is like a plane of immanence that has been carved out by a particular image of thought and selection of signifiers). Upon this wall or screen, holes are dug so that subjectivity can appear. Black holes are thus the locus of expression, or pro­ vide the possibility thereof. The hole is an interval that breaks up the smooth operation or circulation of signifiers, which breaks up the surface, suggesting some cavernous internality out of which consciousness and/or passion arrives. Significantly, as the two authors insist, the form of subjectivity “would remain absolutely empty if faces . . . did not conform in advance to a dominant reality” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 168). In other words, consciousness, our passions, and our “selves” depend upon and are delimited by “a field that neutralizes in advance any expressions or connections unamenable to the appropriate signi­ fications” (ibid.). They argue that the standard of the face has been constructed historically, from Christianity to the “white man.” If, in signifying regimes, every sign refers to another sign, it is the ordering and selections in/of the face that provide the anchoring; thus, Deleuze and Guattari’s political critique is that this pro­ cess is shot through with assemblages of power and dominance. It seems that faciality provides the substance (body) that allows such designations (signifi­ cations) to be transmitted: “the face crystallizes all redundancies, it emits and receives, releases and recaptures signifying signs” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 115). As Deleuze and Guattari explain, this standard extends beyond the face, to the body, to place. It is an imperialistic abstract machine that overcodes the

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The Philosopher as a Line face, and comes to define all surfaces,12 producing subjects and institutions that conform to the binary (white/black, man/woman, owner/worker). Even deviations from the binary are defined, in its terms, as deviant, thus never exit­ ing the system. Therefore, rather than an individual or personal attribute, the face is imposed upon us, overcoding us, determining our relations and our positionality. Today, binarisation is one of the most abiding conceptual elements and is thoroughly embedded in our image of thought. In “Year Zero: Faciality,” Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 167–91) use the concept of faciality to explain sev­ eral different regimes of signs, social institutions of domination, and forms of subjectivity, not the least of which is the racism that was spread through the European dissemination of faciality.13 In essence, the abstract machine of faci­ ality is an imposition of a binary system, which becomes a refrain repeated in multiple contexts, setting norms, making selections, and determining deviances on its basis: the dividing line of us and them. The face is miscon­ strued as natural, as personal, as human, yet it is none of these things—it is the inhuman, as it is always, already a mask (ibid., 115, 170), a series of surface inscriptions that Deleuze and Guattari want to reveal and challenge. To under­ stand why, aside from the obvious,14 we have to return to something that was said earlier: that thinking is linked first to resistance and then to creativity. These prerogatives match elements inherent in the philosophy as a pragmat­ ics that Deleuze develops in A Thousand Plateaus to identify the ways that cer­ tain abstract machines are effectuated in concrete assemblages, to diagram or map out the relation of regimes of signs (but in order to extract signs that have eluded formalisation), and to generate and transform regimes of signs by

12 “This machine is called the faciality machine because it is the social production of face, because it per­ forms the facialization of the entire body and all its surroundings and objects, and the landscapification of all worlds and milieus” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 181). 13 “Racism operates by the determination of degrees of deviance to the White-Man face, which endeavors to integrate nonconforming traits into increasingly eccentric and backward waves, sometimes tolerat­ ing them at given places under given conditions, in a given ghetto, sometimes erasing them from the wall, which never abides alterity” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 178). 14 I say this, given the passage just cited concerning racism. Deleuze spends ample time identifying the social and political institutions that thrive on the control mechanisms involved in constrictive systems such as these. I don’t think that they need to be rehearsed in order to make the case that this is more than just an arbitrary axiomatic for affirmation, escape, dismantling, and so on. Ultimately, it concerns freedom. Freedom is a quality of the virtual, recognising that “it could be otherwise” and learning to deterritorialise oneself in search of freedom by learning to trace lines of flight (Deleuze and Parnet 1987, 125). Constantin Boundas (2009, 242–44), for instance, is convinced that this is what Deleuze’s philosophy is primarily about, with the qualification that freedom is found in disrupting the flow of everydayness, not capitulating to what is the case (i.e., affirming the actual) in order to consider that which is not yet (i.e., affirming the counter-actualization of the virtual). Freedom is a quality of the virtual, which means “to come,” and requires the creative act to trace the virtual in order to draw new lines, new figures, new images of thought. Deleuze and Guattari speak about “escaping” and lines of flight not because they value them in and of themselves, but because it is part of our reality: constric­ tive, immobilising systems lead to entropy and death. It is imperative that we “get out” in order to live. Moreover, Deleuze and Guattari are pragmatists in that if we do not learn to do this, we will invariably be swept away regardless by some other machinations, assemblages; but, rather than being active participants therein, our roles would be either passive or reactive. (Thanks to Cheri Carr for helping me elucidate these points.)

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Janae Sholtz mixing or translating them into one another (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 139–45).15 The point is that thinking (in the Deleuzian sense of engendering thinking in thought) only begins when the formalisations of thought have been identified, first, as things constructed, and, second, as operating by a particular system—hence the critical, diagnostic aspect of their pragmatics. Yet, this is only the first step in engendering thinking, and it must be followed by a crea­ tive movement. Deleuze and Guattari insist on this creative aspect, made pos­ sible through resistance to and the destruction of these forms of control, yet always in excess. Thus, Deleuze’s imperative is to dismantle the face, to open up other possible modes of alliance, affective encounters, kinds of relations:16 “To the point that if human beings have a destiny, it is rather to escape the face, to dismantle the face and facializations, to become imperceptible, . . . by strange true becomings that get past the wall and get out of the black holes, that make faciality traits themselves elude the organization of the face” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 171). How does one dismantle the face, get past the wall and out of the black hole? Deleuze and Guattari have several enigmatic things to say about that, such as “no longer . . . look at or into the eyes but . . . swim through them, . . . close your own eyes and make your body a beam of light moving at ever-increasing speed” (1987, 187). This direction could be linked to breaking through by ceasing to be mesmerised by one’s own deep interiority and obviously resonates with the making of the body without organs and the importance of bodily experimen­ tation. Yet, keeping with the idea of the image of faciality that has been pro­ posed—white wall/black holes—let’s consider what it would be like to disrupt this binary system, what would this non-binary mediation look like? Because, as we have established, defacialisation does not mean eradicating the image altogether, as if removal of the mask (i.e., thought with no image) is even possi­ ble. Rather, the challenge is to think a new image that escapes the grips of this constrictive, reductive system. To attempt to sketch a more nuanced answer to this question, we have to return to the relationship between philosophy and art: “[Dismantling faciality] requires a whole line of writing, picturality, musicality . . . For it is through writ­ ing that you become animal, it is through color that you become imperceptible, it is through music that you become hard and memoryless. . . . art is never an end in itself; it is only a tool for blazing life lines” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 187). This quotation suggests that art, or the sensations extracted from art, is the mediation, the non-philosophy that philosophy must pass for it to begin to think once again. These affects that art produces are in the service of lines, 15 “Pragmatics as a whole would consist in this: making a tracing of the mixed semiotics, under the gener­ ative component; making the transformative map of the regimes, with their possibilities for translation and creation, for budding along the lines of the tracings; making the diagram of the abstract machines that are in play in each case, either as potentialities or as effective emergences; outlining the program of the assemblages that distribute everything and bring a circulation of movement with alternatives, jumps, and mutations” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 146–47). 16 Faciality performs a reduction of the multidimensionality of the body as a whole, which is what Deleuze wants to dismantle in order to get to a more polyvocal system and to realise greater permutations of thought (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 170).

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The Philosopher as a Line blazing (drawing) new lines or the contours of a life. Thus, if faciality is a mat­ ter of surfaces, we can say that defacialisation concerns the “art of surfaces” (Deleuze 1995, 87), because it requires transforming the surface, dismantling the face. Given that Deleuze’s Francis Bacon: Logic of Sensation (2003) is devoted to interrogating how the visible surfaces of paintings can avoid representative images, it is not surprising that defacialisation finds its pictorial equivalent in Bacon’s work, where these two, the surface and the face, come together quite literally in mutual transformation. Deleuze attributes Bacon’s success in elud­ ing figuration to his incorporation of the figural. The figural is introduced to explain Bacon’s paintings with specific reference to Lyotard’s Discours Figure (1971), and it has similar connotation to Bataille’s l’informe. For Lyotard, the figural refers to “a force that works through or works over established forms of codified discourse” and it is specifically that which eludes signification, the “trembling visuality” within the visible word or text (Bamford 2013, 49). In essence, the figural, for Lyotard, is a disruptive, non-signifying, and, thus, deforming force within discourse, but in the process, it reveals another layer to language, a visceral layer that simultaneously confounds and enriches. Likewise, the figural is used by Deleuze to distinguish the non-representative tendencies, or potentials, inherent in artworks; he is interested in liberating the sensual materials or potentialities within the various art forms—music, sonority; painting, figure, and colour (Sholtz 2015, 248–49)—a process that I will refer to as unforming. Deleuze takes the idea of the figural and applies it to painting and the problem of escaping the figurative (the painterly equivalent of escaping faciality). “[Painting] has two possible ways of escaping the figurative: toward pure form, through abstraction; or toward the purely figural, through extraction or isolation. If the painter keeps to the Figure, if he or she opts for the second path, it will be to oppose the ‘figural’ to the figurative” (Deleuze 2003, 2). For Deleuze the latter is preferable, because descending into abstrac­ tion, though it may reveal the chaotic forces that are normally hidden by the facade of the figurative, represents a complete abandonment of form (ibid., 84–86) from which there is no return. Deleuze is fascinated by Bacon’s abil­ ity to walk the line between pure chaos and form, because he is walking the same fine line—how to think an image of thought in motion without either petrifying it as an image or letting it disintegrate into chaotic indeterminacy. In Bacon’s case, he isolates the figure through the use of monochromatic back­ grounds, geometrical framing, and minimalist visual elements or extracts a particular element of the figure to amplify its intensity (the screaming pope is a good example of this) so that the disruptive forces of sensation become the focus rather than figurative/narrative content. In doing so, he is able to render visible forces that impinge upon, interact with, and denature the integrity of forms; he is able to attest to the invisible within the visible (what we might later associate with the virtual). The images that Bacon is able to create exemplify the processes of defacialisation, offering a way to understand what Deleuze means by no longer looking into the eyes—those black holes of faciality—but swimming through them. 351

Janae Sholtz The critical manner in which Deleuze appropriates the figural from Lyotard is quite illuminating. Bamford (2013, 50) writes cogently on this, saying that “having praised his celebration of the figural element as desire, Deleuze and Guattari question the role he gives to transgression, arguing that it results in deformation rather than transformation.” Deleuze and Guattari refuse the idea of transgression because it remains tied to the limit and therefore can be no more than a deformation of its own structure, in the same way that deviation is only an aspect of faciality. It is for this reason they write, “Lyotard is contin­ ually arresting the process, and steering the schizzes toward shores he has so recently left behind . . . ‘transgressions,’ disorders, and deformations . . . are sec­ ondary in spite of everything” (Deleuze and Guattari [1977] 1983, 243). Deleuze is interested in the forces/desires/affects that are unleashed when form is dis­ solved, rather than merely deforming the form itself. This is why I think it is important to return to Bataille’s concept of the formless, as it sheds further light on the significance of the figural for Deleuze. As addressed earlier, the formless is a force or impulse that displays irreverence towards forms. Bois and Krauss (1997) refer to it as “perverse slippage” (25), simultaneously lowering and liberating all ontological prisons (32).17 The formless is about recognising that forms are themselves illusory, thus pointing back towards forces of forma­ tion and deformation and pushing past deformation itself, which only arrests the process as the negation of the form. It is the reanimation of forces, as form­ less. What I think is crucial here is the absolute emphasis on creation without regard to representation that formlessness helps us think. The forming of the new image has to unfold out of formlessness.18 My intent has been to use these figures, like intermediary conceptual perso­ nae to create a series of aberrant nuptials that help us pass to another image, slowly disconnecting us from certain entrenched paradigms, clichés, about conceptual personae themselves. If moving beyond faciality requires defacial­ isation, a similar transformation of conceptual persona is necessary, where the conceptual persona becomes depersonalised, or impersonal. Given the argu­ ment that has been developed concerning what it would take to think thought in motion, to think through formlessness, we must now consider what form of conceptual persona constitutes a mediation of that thought, what image would be adequate to that thought. No image, in the sense of a final form or figure, will do. Moreover, given the propensity to be drawn back into faciality—“how tempting it is to let yourself get caught, to lull yourself into it, to latch back onto a face” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 187)—this conceptual persona can­ not be a face, nor a type of person, nor a figure, but instead must express the 17 Quoting Bataille: “It is not only an adjective having a given meaning, but a term that serves to bring things down (déclasser) in the world” (Bois and Krauss 1997, 18). It is just what we see in Bacon’s images: a “perverse slippage” between the human and the animal, the body and meat, the sacred and profane—it is the equivalent of Bataille saying “the universe is something like a spider or spit” (ibid.). 18 Indeed, Bacon explains his artwork as an attempt to capture the random forces of nature that work upon bodies, which he accomplishes through the diagram. To elude clichéd figuration, Bacon would be­ gin by throwing paint on the canvas haphazardly. The fact that “these marks, these traits, are irrational, involuntary, accidental, free, random” (Deleuze 2003, 100) suggests the importance of the formless as a part of the figural.

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The Philosopher as a Line sheer act of forming, imaging rather than image: the philosopher as a line, an aberrant becoming inhuman that is central to the transformation of the image of thought itself. This conceptual persona speaks to the infinitude of virtuality itself; never one with itself, never complete, it highlights the incessant force of becoming and the continuous variation that this book identifies as the genetic outcome of aberrance and indeterminacy.19

Conclusion In their description of art brut as the establishment of musical point and counterpoint,20 Deleuze and Guattari employ the language of image/draw­ ing, speaking of gestural lines, motion lines, loops, and knots, providing us with an image that vacillates between two forms of art (music and drawing), carrying both beyond their own proper forms. Specifically, they describe the process of territorial formation as rhythmic interchange between animal and environment that follows the paradigm of the musical score, moving between the inside and outside of the established (encircled) territory. The circle that is drawn establishes as a boundary for protection and acts as a kind of refrain, in which a centre (of individuation) appears (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 311). Deleuze and Guattari intimate that through the establishment of a stable space, the organism is now capable of addressing its milieu-surroundings in a different manner, one that is no longer merely a matter of self-protection but self-transformation: “The assemblage no longer confronts the forces of chaos, it no longer uses the forces of the earth or the people to deepen itself but instead opens onto forces of the Cosmos” (ibid., 342). In other words, Deleuze and Guattari stress the pragmatics of territorial art brut. When speaking of the formation of a milieu that happens from this counterpoint, relationality, there is a necessary, genetic transcoding, like the transversal lines characteristic of the diagram. Rather than closing us from the outside, it establishes a path to the outside. The drawing of the circle is never the final aim. It is always drawn with the intent to transform that space and make it a launching point for new becomings, lines of flight. What we have is a vacillating image that promises further generative becom­ ing, and this is exactly the point, to create an image of thought in motion. Deleuze and Guattari paint us a picture—from the point of germination (grey point) to the individuation of a space, to pulsating milieu, to intra-assemblage, then expanding to an immanent plane of rhythmic being—of a vibrating draw­ ing, a living drawing, which gives us the model for understanding the future practice of the philosopher as line, that is, drawing as an activity of perpetual image-making, or form-ing. Drawing is indicative of a kind of living and a kind of thinking that takes us outside ourselves and beyond the rote figures of the everyday, towards a life that is not prefigured nor preformed according to a transcendent standard. 19 “Placing elements of any nature in continuous variation is an operation that will perhaps give rise to new distinctions, but takes none as final and has none in advance” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 97). 20 Found in Chapter 11, “1837: Of the Refrain,” of A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari 1987).

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Janae Sholtz Not inconsequentially, Deleuze in his final writings equates “a life” with pure immanence. Drawing helps us think thought in motion rather than as a reflec­ tion of a preset concept/image; drawing as related to the diagrammatic helps us think the open-endedness (the pointlessness, as Gordon Bearn imagines in Life Drawing: A Deleuzian Aesthetics of Existence) that is necessary for truly engag­ ing the immanent field of existence of life: “without a project, when the flight was pointless, that was thinking at its best” (Bearn 2013, 47). If life is not a linear narrative, nor a universal concept, but rather a cosmic event in perpetual move­ ment, a morphing and transforming realm of forces like a twisting line, a zigzag, then this conceptual persona, the philosopher as a line (of flight), offers a method of mediation that does justice to it. References Bamford, Kiff. 2013. “Desire, Absence and Art in Deleuze and Lyotard.” Parrhesia 16: 48–60. Bataille, Georges. 1985. “Formless.” In Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, edited by Allan Stoekl, translated by Allan Stoekl with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie Jr., 31. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1929 as “L’informe” (Documents 7: 382). Bearn, Gordon C. F. 2013. Life Drawing: A Deleuzian Aesthetics of Existence. New York: Fordham University Press. Bois, Yves-Alain, and Rosalind E. Krauss. 1997. Formless: A User’s Guide. New York: Zone Books. Boundas, Constantin. 2009. “Gilles Deleuze and the Problem of Freedom.” In Gilles Deleuze: Image and Text, edited by Eugene W. Holland, Daniel W. Smith, and Charles J. Stivale, 221–46. London: Continuum. Cooper, Mark Garrett. 2008. “Vilém Flusser’s Writings,” review of Writings, by Vilém Flusser, edited by Andreas Ströhl, translated by Erik Eisel. Rhizomes 17. Accessed 29 May 2019. http://www. rhizomes.net/issue17/reviews/cooper. html. Deleuze, Gilles. (1983) 2019. “Vérité et temps, le faussaire. Cours Vincennes—St Denis: Le plan; Cours du 02/11/1983” [Séminaire: Image mouvement, image temps]. Accessed 29 May 2019. www.webdeleuze.com/php/texte. php?cle=69&groupe=Image%20 Mouvement%20Image%20 Temps&langue=1.

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———. 1988. Foucault. Translated and edited by Séan Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1986 as Foucault (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1994. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1968 as Différence et répétition (Paris: Presses universitaires de France). ———. 1995. Negotiations: 1972–1990. Translated by Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1990 as Pourparlers: 1972–1990 (Paris: Minuit). ———. 2003. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Translated by Daniel W. Smith. London: Continuum. First published 1981 as Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation (Paris: Éditions de la Différence). ———. 2004. “Nomadic Thought.” In Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974, edited by David Lapoujade, translated by Michael Taormina, 252–61. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Chapter first published 1973 as “Pensée nomade,” in Nietzsche aujourd’hui? 2 vols (Paris: Union générale d’édition), 1:159–74. Book first published 2002 as L’île déserte: Textes et entretiens, 1953–1974 (Paris: Minuit). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. (1977) 1983. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1972 as Capitalisme et schizophrénie: L’anti-Œdipe (Paris: Minuit). Translation first published 1977 (New York: Viking Press).

The Philosopher as a Line ———. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1994. What Is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1991 as Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Minuit). Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. 1987. Dialogues. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1977 as Dialogues (Paris: Flammarion). Dronsfield, Jonathan. 2012. “Deleuze and the Image of Thought.” Philosophy Today 56 (4): 404–14. Flusser, Vilém. 2000. Towards a Philosophy of Photography. Translated by Anthony Mathews. London: Reaktion Books. First published 1983 as Für eine Philosophie der Fotografie (Göttingen: European Photography). ———. 2011. Into the Universe of Technical Images. Translated by Nancy Ann

Roth. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press. First published 1985 as Ins Universum der technischen Bilder (Göttingen: European Photography). Frichot, Hélène. 2009. “On Finding Oneself Spinozist: Refuge, Beatitude and AnySpace-Whatever.” In Gilles Deleuze: Image and Text, edited by Eugene W. Holland, Daniel W. Smith, and Charles Stivale, 247–63. London: Continuum. Lambert, Gregg. 2015. “Who are Deleuze’s Conceptual Persona?” Plenary address at “Deleuze’s Mediators,” Deleuze International Conference, Athens, April. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1971. Discours, figure. Paris: Klincksieck. Translated by Antony Hudek and Mary Lydon as Discourse, Figure (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). Schmidgen, Henning. 2015. “Cerebral Drawings between Art and Science: On Gilles Deleuze’s Philosophy of Concepts.” Theory, Culture & Society 32 (7–8): 123–49. Sholtz, Janae. 2015. The Invention of a People: Heidegger and Deleuze on Art and the Political. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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For a Future of the Face Faciality and Performance in the Dance of Marlene Monteiro Freitas Lucia D’Errico Orpheus Institute, Ghent, Belgium

“The mask does not hide the face, it is the face” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 115). Dancer Marlene Monteiro Freitas’s programme starts from this aware­ ness: to multiply the masks, to saturate the mask’s emptiness through its own excess, ultimately, to dismantle the original mask that is the face. Dismantling the mask-face is by no means a return to a supposed “naked” humanity. As Hellenist Françoise Frontisi-Ducroux points out (1995),1 in ancient Greece there was no specific word for “mask.” To designate the mask, the word prosopon was used, the same word employed for the face of the living. In ancient Greek culture there was no conceptual and linguistic opposition between a face that would reveal the “interiority” of the self and a mask that would conceal it. Both face and mask “reveal,” provide a point of contact with the other. Or, at the same time, they both “hide,” as the repetition of the face in the mask is ide­ ally reproduced within the face itself: behind a mask, there is another mask, and so on, ad infinitum. To dismantle the face then, one has to start from this infinitely deferring surface that hides as it reveals, and not from a supposedly original and unmediated humanity that the mask would sclerotise, petrify, or conceal. The face is, on the contrary, already the sclerotised, the petrified: as we will see, it is a system that overcodes, translating and compressing into its surface an array of signs and strata—the inhuman par excellence. The paradoxical inhumanity of what is usually associated with “the human”— the face, charged as it is with implications of empathy, communication, and social and emotional contact—is made explicit through Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of faciality. To this concept they dedicate the whole seventh plateau of A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1987, 167–91), and it will later be reprised by Deleuze alone in relation to cinematic close-ups in Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1986, 87–101). In their formulation, the “faciality machine” occupies a specific place, in that it is located at the intersection of two of the main strata that are said to “bin[d] human beings” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 134): the stratum of signifiance and that of subjectification. The concept of faciality



1 Monteiro Freitas’s work is directly influenced by Frontisi-Ducroux’s book (Monteiro Freitas, pers. comm.). See also Balona (2017).

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Lucia D’Errico is therefore extremely fruitful for a reflection on performance, since perfor­ mance always starts from, or ends up in, one of these two big stratifications. In 2017, I asked Marlene Monteiro Freitas to participate in a performance as part of a research project centred on music, under the title Aberrant Decodings (D’Errico and Monteiro Freitas 2017).2 In this project, I addressed the prob­ lematics of the first “face” that always regulates music performance: that of the composer, who from a distance gives signifiance and order to the multitude of signs and materials inherent to performance in Western notated art music. Behind the surface of the score always lies the godlike presence of a composer, who acts as the centre of signifiance from which the signs to be interpreted are projected. It was my aim to problematise this presence through a musical prac­ tice centred on radical divergence between a score and its performance. But to liberate a positive line of flight away from this centre of signifiance it is not enough to escape the closed system of signs constituted by the score-composer apparatus: as we will see, the performer is in constant danger of entering a sec­ ond stratum, the stratum of subjectification. Similar to the faciality machine, the mechanisms that regulate music performance lie at the crossroads of signi­ fiance (brought about by the musical text) and subjectification (the “onstage­ ness” of the performer-subject). Music performance is haunted by faciality in the double form of the “white wall” of the score (the screen onto which the invisible face of the composer projects an infinite array of signs that need to be interpreted) and the “black hole” of passion and consciousness (the emotion­ ality and expressivity with which the performer gives life to the inert written score). Through my collaboration with Monteiro Freitas, my aim was to address these questions: how is it possible to be onstage—therefore finding oneself in a strongly subjectified position—and at the same time escape the stratifying power of subjectification? Is it possible to bring performance not only towards asignifiance, but also towards the dissolution of the subject? If so, what strate­ gies can be put into action towards the asignifying and the asubjective onstage? This chapter is divided into three parts: in the first, I will briefly present the concept of faciality as formulated by Deleuze and Guattari, particularly focusing on its implications for performance. Second, I will present the work of Marlene Monteiro Freitas as the dismantling of the mask-face, and conse­ quently as a path towards the asubjective. Third, I will connect the previous two points with considerations drawn from my collaborative work with Monteiro Freitas in Aberrant Decodings, and with reflections on the possible futures of the face in performance.

2 The term aberrant decoding was coined by Umberto Eco in his essay “Per una indagine semiologica del messaggio televisivo” ([1966] 2018). He invented this concept to define the case where a message elaborated by an artist or sender is interpreted in a different or “wrong” way, usually through the use of a different code, by a user. In this particular performance, the original meaning of the concept is partly retained in relation to the musical practice of “divergent performances” (see D’Errico 2018), namely performances of notated music that produce sonic and gestural results that radically differ from how the score’s composer meant it to be decoded by a music interpreter. Furthermore, the title of this performance resonates with the theme of aberrant nuptials chosen for this book and for the second international conference on Deleuze and Artistic Research (DARE 2017), of which this performance was part.

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For a Future of the Face

Faciality machine: at the crossroads of signifiance and subjectification The faciality machine as described in A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) is a system constituted by the intersection of two particular components: the “white wall” and the “black hole.” The white wall is a surface, a screen onto which signs are projected and reflected. The black hole is a pit where con­ sciousness and passion are captured. The human face does not coincide with this “abstract machine of faciality” (ibid., 168). Rather, concrete human faces are produced on it, “according to the changeable combinations of its cogwheels” (ibid.). The abstract machine has some traits that resemble a concrete face: white cheeks, or a clown’s face; the black hole of an eye or of a camera lens. However, the machine does not necessarily resemble “what it produces, or will produce” (ibid.). In Cinema 1 (1986), Deleuze attributes a special “facialising” power to close-ups in cinema, stating that a “facialisation” can occur potentially in every object, provided that it “sacrific[es] most of its global mobility and . . . gathers or expresses in a free way all kinds of tiny local movements which the rest of the body usually keeps hidden” (ibid., 87–88). The fact that it is not a concrete face that is reproduced and crystallised in the faciality machine, but rather the machine that organises the production of real faces, reinforces the notion that the human face is far from constituting “the original” version of the mask: instead, it stems from this machinic and menacing power that is capable of appropriating everything, including the human body, but also non-human objects that become “humanised,” often in uncanny and even violent ways. The face functions as a surface of overcoding. On its two-dimensional depth, the whole volumes of the body and the head are decoded from their polyvocal dimension, and recoded, “written” over and over again onto the face, in an accumulation of signs. Body and head are deterritorialised, but this deterrito­ rialisation, which in the process of overcoding is potentially absolute, is given a negative value in that it passes directly from one main stratum, the organism, to the other two main strata, signifiance and subjectification. Importantly, the two components, “white wall” and “black hole,” are directly correlated to the two latter strata. The faciality machine locates itself at the specific point where signifiance and subjectification intersect, or better are generated within one another. The face is therefore also the expression of a very particular mixed semiotics, one where the powers of signifiance and subjectification show their mutual corroboration. To understand the concept of faciality, it is important to underline how the strata of signifiance and subjectification are expressed by two particular “regimes of signs,” the former in the “signifying regime,” and the latter in the “postsignifying regime,” as thoroughly explained in the fifth plateau of A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 112–17, 119–37). The signifying regime is characterised by “a simple general formula . . . : every sign refers to another sign, and only to another sign, ad infinitum” (ibid., 112). The states of things that these signs designate are not important in themselves; all that matters are the relations that signs entertain with one another. Contents are abstracted, and what is signified is an “amorphous continuum” (ibid.) glid­ 359

Lucia D’Errico ing beneath the infinite network of signs. These signs, organised in circles, are all directed towards a centre of signifiance. This centre coincides with a des­ potic power, the invisible face of the Signifier (or god), an unreachable core that orients the infinite circles of signs. Being pure abstraction, the centre of signifiance exists only as lack or as excess, or in other words as pure principle— or nothing. The absence/excess of the supreme signifier is a necessary coun­ terpart of the infinite referral from one sign to the other. Yet, since this system is subjected to potential entropy (the signs multiply infinitely in a high degree of deterritorialisation), the signified needs a secondary mechanism: interpre­ tance or interpretation, where a portion of the signified is connected to a sign or group of signs, thus interrupting the amorphous continuum. Nevertheless, interpretation is a deception: “interpretation is carried to infinity and never encounters anything to interpret that is not already itself an interpretation” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 114). Although the signifier is pure principle, and tantamount to nothing, it is to be understood through a “substance of expres­ sion” (ibid., 115), namely faciality. The face orients interpretation: it gives “a body” to the centre of signifiance. In the signifying regime, the centre of signifiance has a counterpart: the scapegoat, which embodies the uncontrolled entropy in the system of signs. The scapegoat carries “everything that resisted signifying signs, everything that eluded the referral from sign to sign through the different circles” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 116). The scapegoat’s trajectory is one of intolerable and absolute deterritorialisation: as such, the trajectory must be blocked, and the scapegoat expelled by the system (figure 27.1).

Figure 27.1.

The scapegoat is faceless, and to the all-pervasive power of the god’s face it opposes its anus, a black hole in perennial escape towards the desert. Along this line of betrayal, a positive line of flight is traced. This move away from the centre in absolute deterritorialisation, which is given a negative value in the signifying regime, is the fundamental characteristic of the regime of signs cor­ related to the stratum of subjectification: the postsignifying regime. By liberat­ 360

Figure 27.1. The signifying system, after the drawing by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (1987, 135). The numbers indicate “(1) The Center or the Signifier; the faciality of the god or despot. (2) The Temple or Palace, with priests and bureaucrats. (3) The organization in circles and the sign referring to other signs on the same circle or on different circles. (4) The interpretive development of signifier into signified, which then reimparts signifier. (5) The expiatory animal; the blocking of the line of flight. (6) The scapegoat, or the negative sign of the line of flight” (ibid.).

For a Future of the Face ing the line of flight, by assigning it a positive value, the postsignifying regime seems to provide a productive alternative to the despotic system of the signi­ fying regime. However, the deterritorialisation that it pursues is not absolute. The line traced towards deterritorialisation is segmented, blocked by a point of subjectification that replaces the centre of signifiance. Consequently, in this tra­ jectory, faciality undergoes a profound transformation: in front of the betrayal of the scapegoat, the god averts his face. In response, the “betraying” subject averts its face as well. The two profiles opposite each other substitute the fron­ tal face of the god at the centre of signifiance, and the two profiles are traced along the betrayal line. In addition, the subject thus constituted becomes dou­ ble: subject of enunciation and subject of statement. The two subjects recoil into one another giving way to infinite linear proceedings that, albeit being traced along an infinite line of deterritorialisation, keep segmenting it, as if the subjects thus constituted were nodes into which the line would coagulate and clot—the black hole or holes of the faciality machine (figure 27.2).

Figure 27.2.

Nobody knows what a face can do “The face has a great future, but only if it is destroyed, dismantled. On the road to the asignifying and asubjective” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 171). To create a future for the face, the line of flight constituted by the scapegoat, its depar­ ture away from the centre of signifiance must be liberated from the blockages of the points of subjectification, and must avoid falling into the black holes of passion and consciousness. But again, this cannot be done through nostalgia and regression, by a return to what lies before or behind the face; as we have seen at the beginning of this article, behind the mask-face lies just another mask. Deleuze and Guattari’s suggestion is not “returning to animality, nor even by returning to the head,” but rather putting into action “quite spiritual and special becomings-animal, . . . strange true becomings that get past the wall and get out of the black holes, that make faciality traits themselves finally elude the organization of the face” (ibid.). In her work, Marlene Monteiro Freitas does embrace the face-mask and its omnipresent power. Her first gesture is to 361

Figure 27.2. The post-signifying system, after the drawing by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (1987, 137). Here the numbers indicate “(1) The point of subjectification, replacing the center of signifiance. (2) The two faces turned away from each other. (3) The subject of enunciation resulting from the point of subjectification and the turning away. (4) The subject of the statement, into which the subject of enunciation recoils. (5) The succession of finite linear proceedings accompanied by a new form of priest and a new bureaucracy. (6) The line of flight, which is freed but still segmented, remaining negative and blocked” (ibid.).

Lucia D’Errico abandon herself to the mask, to acknowledge that everything starts from the mask. An array of prostheses is interpolated with her face onstage, in order to bring about the power of the mask already operative in it: in Guintche (2010) Monteiro Freitas uses plastic lips, or latex gloves stuck in her mouth; in De marfim e carne (2014), she uses dental mouth openers. All these devices insist on the artificial­ ity of the face, and of the machine that operates inside it. Faces can be painted in vivid colours, to enhance the borders of the mouth and eyes and to make them even more explicit as components of a mask, such as the lower part of the face painted red in Jaguar (2015). Even the hands can contribute to this process, becoming the eyes of the mask, with the red-painted fingers becoming its lips. But once the overpowering presence of the mask is affirmed, accepted, and embraced, Monteiro Freitas starts putting into action a series of strategies to escape the faciality machine, to make it twitch and falter to the point where it starts losing its grip. At a certain moment of Jaguar, Monteiro Freitas and Andreas Merk—her long-term collaborator and dancing partner in this duo performance—turn their profiles to the audience and, facing each other, com­ bine them into a two-headed face. The audience experiences the sensation of a monstrous unity deriving from these two irreconcilably asymmetrical halves: neither one nor double but a strange compound, a face that is fractured in the middle and has thus lost its ordering power. The two halves of the face move “almost” in synchronicity, they look “almost” the same; but this central fissure has broken the integrity of the face, and with it the powers that Deleuze and Guattari attribute to it, “of biunivocalization, or binarization” (1987, 176). The compound face is no longer male or female, old or young, black or white: rather, it is a face that pullulates with ands. The mask-face also undergoes all kinds of becomings. First, there are many animal becomings in operation: Monteiro Freitas can “become” a fish, a mon­ key, or a rabbit, not by mere imitation, but rather by inserting in the organ­ ised mask-face some particles of fish, monkey, or rabbit. A small portion of the face escapes the facial organisation, it departs towards something else, it drives along its way, deforming the concrete face, pulling and pushing it in directions that the machine of faciality cannot stand. When the force of the escaping parti­ cle becomes too strong, the machine starts breaking. Yet Monteiro Freitas shat­ ters the face not only through the violence of deformation but also by means of the extraordinary speed through which her face is subjected to unceasing variation. Perhaps the most revealing example of this happens in Guintche. The word Guintche, as the dancer explains, is the name of a bird, the name of a prostitute, but it may stand as well for an attitude, that of someone who jumps from one event to another, lacking coherence in his or her choices. Guintche is attached neither to the past nor to the future, it is a being or a condition of the present. The same goes with the present of the performer and of the artist. Through its counterintuitive structure, Guintche responds like a wax sculpture: it melts, it solidifies, it breaks, changes form. . . . Yet, it keeps the same nature, that is to say, it remains the same wax. (Monteiro Freitas 2013, reproduced with minor adjustments)

362

For a Future of the Face However, unlike in Descartes’s Meditation,3 the “sameness” of this wax does not occur through the reconstruction of an intellect that claims access to true knowledge against the unreliability of the senses and of imagination, since the latter would be deceived whereas intellect is endowed with the principle of rec­ ognition and identification. This sameness, in its unceasing transformations, is rather the univocity of being that arises from the “clamour” of these proliferat­ ing transformations. The superimposition of different moods and grimaces, each germinating inside the other, happens at a speed such that the audience cannot experience for one single moment a state, a settlement—a statement. One is sometimes reminded of Marcel Marceau’s renowned performance The Mask Maker (1959), but in an extremely accelerated version: it is accelerated so much that it is not possible to distinguish one mask from the next, as they unceasingly sprout from one another. Therefore, Monteiro Freitas’s face cannot signify: by jumping from one substance of expression to the next, the unitary meaning bestowed by the face/centre-of-signifiance to the array of signs is lost until it subsides. This is what makes her performances disturbing but at the same time joyful, always pushing against an energetic threshold that is devastating and yet, like a blaze, is also the harbinger of an enormous creative force, a force that is as differenti­ ated and inconsistent as life itself. The body too can contribute to the dissolution of the face. Monteiro Freitas’s body refuses to comply with the overcoding of the face, living a life of its own, usually through robotic movements that make it jerk involuntarily. The body is machinised in turn: a new machine-body wards off the power of the face that wants to make all the world a face. “The entire body also can be facialized, comes to be facialized as part of an inevitable process. . . . Hand, breast, stom­ ach, penis and vagina, thigh, leg and foot, all come to be facialized” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 170). In front of this danger, the body has then to invent its own vocabulary, one that is machinic in turn and that does not obey the laws of signifiance and subjectification. In Jaguar, Andreas Merk “plays” with the face as if it were a football when his whole body “disappears” through extreme acro­ batics. The audience is presented with his face-mask dancing on two feet only, a puppet that has taken the liberty to dismember itself and place the face where it wants. The final affront of the body to the face happens in Bacantes—Prelúdio para uma Purga (2017), when the buttocks take on the role of the face: the body of the dancer, folded in two, turns its lower part into its upper one, which even sings a rock song to a microphone. The scapegoat, its anus facing the centre of signifiance, has affirmed the positive power of its escape. As a final strategy, the mask is undone through a saturation of its physical limits. If the face is the “countenance,” in that it contains and regulates what is acceptable (again the binarizing and biunivocalizing force of the faciality machine), Monteiro Freitas makes another kind of “content” ooze and spill from the micro-fissures that crack the concrete face. Facial bodily fluids— sweat, saliva, tears—are often part of her performances, becoming confused

3 See Descartes (1996, 20–23).

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Lucia D’Errico with the paint that borders the eyes and mouth of the initial mask, smearing and blurring it. Through these three strategies—cracking, variation, excess— Monteiro Freitas brings the mask towards its dissolution, towards a beyondthe-mask, towards another kind of inhuman, different than that of the faciality machine, and different from the concrete human faces that the latter produces. Beyond abstract and concrete faces, performance becomes the constitution of a future of the face—towards what nobody knew it capable of doing.

Aberrant Decodings: towards the asubjective in music Music performance, particularly in the context of Western notated art music, occupies a space that in many respects has resonances with the abstract machine of faciality. We could go as far as saying that traditional music perform­ ance finds itself at the crossroads of two performative “regimes” very similar to the “signifying” and the “postsignifying” regimes of signs described by Deleuze and Guattari.4 The performer starts from a closed system, the “white wall” of the score with its infinite array of signs. In order to be interpreted, the signs are oriented by a transcendental ordering principle, which can be identified with the absent face of the composer-god. The composer’s face regulates and monitors the interpretative efforts of the performer from afar (remote from the locus of performance, either in space or in time, usually being long dead). Obviously, live performance can never coincide with a score, if only because it is not inscribed in symbols and signs but takes place through concrete bod­ ily densities (the bodies of the performer, of the instruments, of the hall, of the audience; all traversed by the bodily perturbations of sonic waves). In his or her escape from the centre of signifiance lying behind the score, the tra­ ditional musical interpreter does indeed constitute a line of flight, produc­ ing partial decodings (sign-sound/gesture) and positive deterritorialisations. However, what happens most—if not all—of the time is that the performer is reterritorialised into the stratum of subjectification: captured by his or her own subjectivity, consciousness, and emotion, he or she is convolved into a black hole of passion. As a result, another “face” threatens music performance that is even more menacing than that of the composer, and the expression of an even greater transcendental ordering principle—the unitary “I” of the performer that is subjectified through his or her “onstageness.” In my research project as a music performer, I faced the first stratum of signi­ fiance by constituting, through the practice of “divergent performances” (see D’Errico 2018), a trajectory of escape from the closed system of signs of the score. I started collaborating with Marlene Monteiro Freitas when I realised the high risk of restratifying my performances into subjectification. The strat­ egy I pursued in dialogue with Monteiro Freitas in the design of the perfor­ mance Aberrant Decodings was fourfold, involving (1) duplicity, (2) immobility, (3) blindness, and (4) the tic.

4 For various considerations on traditional music performance inspired by these two “regimes of signs,” and for a proposal for an experimental performance practice that aims towards the “diagrammatic,” see D’Errico (2019, forthcoming).

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For a Future of the Face 1. Duplicity. As a first gesture, I decided to treat the presence of the dancer not as a body moving throughout the stage, but as a double of the music performer. I divided the stage into two parts. The right side is occupied by the body of the musician, exposing various degrees of involvement with sound production— from hyperphysical engagement with a musical instrument, to total immobility and “evaporation” into the sounds of electronic soundtracks. On the left side is the body of the dancer, not involved in sound production but rather traversed by the de-anatomising affective power of the sounds coming from the loud­ speakers and from the instruments. The two figures are both sitting, and have no communication with each other (figure 27.3); the symmetry of the stage underlines the two asymmetric halves occupying it.

Figure 27.3.

Their bodies react differently to the sonic environment, expressing various degrees of coding and stratification (the functional, coded body of the skilled performer; the deterritorialised body of the musician that produces sounds even without perceptibly moving; the body of the dancer-listener, decoding the musician it doubles; the deterritorialisation of sound on the body of the dancer through its affective impact; etc.). 2. Immobility. Both the musician and the dancer are confined to a very specific form of immobility, or rather, of movement in place. As for my part, I sought ways to emphasise the relative stillness that usually characterises the bodily postures of musicians. As a first plan, I thought about segregating my body from my face by means of a light design that would leave my face in the darkness, virtually “eliminating” it from the body. The musician “without a face” would then have been a sort of machine-body, reduced to its own functional move­ ments. On second thought, I decided instead to immobilise my appearance by embracing and insisting on the power of the faciality machine. My face during 365

Figure 27.3. The figures of the dancer and of the musician, both sitting, have no communication with each other.

Lucia D’Errico the performance is kept as immobile as possible, a veritable “white wall–black hole” system denying any form of expressivity or emotional involvement with the musical and sonic content (figures 27.4).

F igure 27.4.

The dancer too is confined to the chair: she never moves away from it, except at the very end of the performance (a very slow rising movement finishing with her abandoning the stage). In this forced immobility, her situation is akin to that of the “Figure” in the paintings by Francis Bacon described by Gilles Deleuze (2003), which “becomes a Figure only through this movement which confines it and in which it confines itself ” (14). This confinement of the bodies “excludes every spectator” (14). In this immobility and confinement of the figure, the aim is also “to eliminate every spectator, and consequently every spectacle” (13). The problem of subjectification in performance is therefore undermined also by means of this strategic attack on the spectacularisation that inevitably sub­ jectifies the occupants of the stage. In this immobility, the figure of Monteiro Freitas is far from being still. Through this confinement she starts exciting all the micro-movements that constitute her escape from the faciality machine. Her body is traversed by dif­ ferentials speeds that give rise to an unceasing exploration and experimenta­ tion in place. The restricted space allotted to her figure becomes “an operative field” (Deleuze 2003, 2) where the dismantling of the body-subject and bodyface can be planned and carried out.

366

F igure 27.4. A veritable “white wall–black hole” system.

For a Future of the Face 3. Blindness. The concrete eyes are constituted along the black hole of the faciality machine, where the line of subjectivity coils up and creates a tangle of consciousness and passion. The profundity of the eyes—their alleged con­ nection with a “depth of the soul”—has therefore to be negated in the search for the asubjective. Monteiro Freitas starts her performance with sunglasses on. Her head slightly reclined to one side, she moves only in small jerks, as if not seeing. This blindness reinforces the sense of isolation and immobility, and the consequent negation of spectacularisation—a strategy she also uses at the start of Bacantes, which opens with dancer Betty Tchomanga immobilised on a chair at the centre of the stage, with two white disks in place of her eyes. There is no contact with the environment, let alone empathic communication with the audience. As the music starts (a highly distorted version of a sixteenthcentury madrigal, played using synthetic sounds), Monteiro Freitas takes off her glasses with a pair of scissors—again, this gesture has nothing about it that is subjective, nothing “cinematic” or psychologically charged: it is the gesture of a machine, or of an insect, of a strange arm-hand-scissors compound. Only that, behind the sunglasses, there is not a pair of human eyes. Her eyes are petrified, wide open and fixed, reduced to their surface; they are eyes that prevent “see­ ing yourself in or gazing into in those glum face-to-face encounters between signifying subjectivities” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 171) (figure 27.5).

F igure 27.5.

In painting the screaming Pope, Francis Bacon puts in front of him a curtain. It is “not only a way of isolating him, of shielding him from view; it is rather the way in which the Pope himself sees nothing, and screams before the invisible” (Deleuze 2003, 38). What Monteiro Freitas “sees,” or rather “feels” when sub­ jected to the affective dimension of sound, is not to be “seen” by the audience, 367

F igure 27.5. Eyes that do not see.

Lucia D’Errico and therefore narrativised, communicated, and shared. It is precisely because her eyes do not see anything that the audience is contaminated by her sensa­ tion, through effects on the body that do not need to relate to the same cause in order to be transmitted to the audience. Sensation is then generated from effect to effect, without the mediation of a middle ground—be it intersubjec­ tive (narrative) or subjective (emotional). In this way, sensation eliminates the “‘sensational,’ that is, the primary figuration of that which provokes a violent sensation” (ibid.). 4. The tic. “What is a tic? It is precisely the continually refought battle between a faciality trait that tries to escape the sovereign organization of the face and the face itself, which clamps back down on the trait, takes hold of it again, blocks its line of flight, and reimposes its organization upon it” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 188). The figure of Monteiro Freitas is immobilised, her empathic contact with the environment and the audience severed, the emotional profundity of her eyes brought to the aconscious surface of blindness. From here she can ini­ tiate the active dismantling of the face. Her face starts twitching and deform­ ing, single traits of it begin to fight against its organisation similar to what is described by Deleuze and Guattari (figure 27.6).

Figure 27.6.

Every single trait of the face claims its independence: the eyes do not move in synchronicity, the mouth twists on either side, disrupting both symmetry and expressivity. Each piece of the music performance instigates a different form of tic. It is a sort of catalogue of possibilities, a list of escape plans. For every scenario, the deformations actuated by Monteiro Freitas are constantly dou­ bled by the “normative” face, the impassible mask of the musician. It is also by means of this ongoing comparison between what the face is and where it can be pushed towards that the trajectory of dismantlement can find its effect. 368

Figure 27.6. Single traits begin to fight against the organisation of the faciality machine.

For a Future of the Face

Conclusion: what future(s) for the face in performance? The face is a form of politics, and performance is an arena of politics too. From its specific situatedness between signifiance and subjectification, performance can be the perfect place to carry out the programme of schizoanalysis: “find your black holes and white walls, know them, know your faces; it is the only way you will be able to dismantle them and draw your lines of flight” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 188). But also, performance is in constant risk of being captured again by the faciality machine, of restratifying into subjectification. In running away from the wielder of signifiance, it risks being caught in a false escape towards a rediscovered “humanity,” the humanity of presence, of communi­ cation, of shared experiences and emotions. Commenting on her notorious performance at MoMA, The Artist Is Present (2010), Marina Abramović touches upon the importance of engagement in a mutual gaze in response to the “enor­ mous need of the humans to have contact” (Abramović 2012). One at a time, the museum visitors sat on a chair facing the seated artist; both artist and visitor showed their profile to the other museum visitors, looking into each other’s eyes. What Abramović discovered during the performance was that, subjected to the gaze of the artist, of the onlookers, and of the camera lens, for the vis­ itor “there is nowhere to go but into yourself ” (ibid.). This mutual eye-to-eye communication gave rise to strong emotional reactions, most often resulting in outbursts of tears. As it were, Abramović was giving people the chance to recover their lost or broken humanity through the intensity of this contact. But the tenderness and authenticity of this human (all-too-human?) encounter, if read against the concept of faciality presented so far, assumes quite different undertones, not so positively connotated, and important for a reflection on the politics that faciality imposes on performance. Are not these “glum face-to-face encounters between signifying subjectivities” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 171) constitutive of a “we” that puts into effect the binarising power of the faciality machine? A “we” that, as it unites (“we” humans, “we” participants in this event, “we” subjects, “we” united by the same fragility of life), inevitably excludes at the same time? As Deleuze and Guattari remind us, “In truth, there are only inhumanities, humans are made exclusively of inhumanities” (ibid., 190). The return to the “humanity” of the face has therefore to be read as a choice of one form of inhumanity over another. It is up to performance to decide which inhu­ manity to pursue: the “natural” inhumanity of the face, with its specific appa­ ratus of power and its consequent political programme of inclusion and exclu­ sion (again, the binarisation and biunivocalisation of the face), or another kind of inhumanity, one that gives deterritorialisation a positive value and refuses to get caught in the black hole of subjectivity. Beyond subjects and objects, white walls and black holes, meaning and consciousness, the face has a great future, and performance can be thought as the privileged space for the construction of such a future.

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Lucia D’Errico References Abramović, Marina. 2012. “Marina Abramović on Performing Artist is Present.” YouTube video, 3:07, posted by “Marina Abramovic Institute,” 5 March 2016. Accessed 31 May 2019. https://www. youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=U6Qj__ s8mNU. Balona, Alexandra. 2017. “Marlene Monteiro Freitas: Mensageira de Dionísio.” Público, 20 April. Accessed 31 May 2019. https://www.publico.pt/2017/04/20/ culturaipsilon/noticia/marlenemonteiro-freitas-mensageira-dedionisio-1769169. Deleuze, Gilles. 1986. Cinema 1: The Movement Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. London: Athlone Press. First published 1983 as Cinéma 1: L’image-mouvement (Paris: Minuit). ———. 2003. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Translated by Daniel W. Smith. London: Continuum. First published 1981 as Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation (Paris: Éditions de la Différence). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Minuit). D’Errico, Lucia. 2018. Powers of Divergence: An Experimental Approach to Music Performance.

Orpheus Institute Series. Leuven: Leuven University Press. ———. 2019, forthcoming. “Sound Beyond Representation: Experimental Performance Practices in Music.” In Handbook of Sonic Methodologies, edited by Marcel Cobussen and Michael Bull. London: Bloomsbury. Descartes, René. 1996. Meditations on First Philosophy: With Selections from the Objections and Replies. Translated and edited by John Cottingham. Rev. ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. First published 1641 as Meditationes de Prima Philosophia (Paris: Michaelem Soly). Eco, Umberto. (1966) 2018. “Per una indagine semiologica del messaggio televisivo.” In Sulla televisione: Scritti 1956–2015, edited by Gianfranco Marrone, ebook. Milan: La nave di Teseo. First published 1966 (Rivista di estetica 2: 237–59). Frontisi-Ducroux, Françoise. 1995. Du masque au visage: Aspects de l’identité en Grèce ancienne. Paris: Flammarion. Monteiro Freitas, Marlene. 2013. “FID 2013—07 Guintche,” interview on Guintche for FID Brazil. YouTube video, 3:39, posted by “FID Brasil,” 7 November. Accessed 31 May 2019. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=GX2eeg1pTjY.

Performances cited Abramović, Marina. 2010. The Artist is Present. MoMA, New York. D’Errico, Lucia, and Marlene Monteiro Freitas. 2017. Aberrant Decodings. Handelsbeurs, Ghent, 21 November. YouTube video, 58:12, posted by “Orpheus Institute,” 27 April 2018. Accessed 31 May 2019. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=P3hLQBVT9To. Marceau, Marcel. 1959. “The Mask Maker.” In The Art of Silence: Pantomimes with Marcel Marceau, Encyclopedia Britannica Educational Corporation, 1975, NTSC VHS, 4 VHS tapes, from a series of 13

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short films directed by John Barnes. Monteiro Freitas, Marlene. 2010. Guintche. Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon, 19 October. ———. 2014. De marfim e carne. Festival Montpellier Danse, Montpellier, 2 July. ———. 2013. “Guintche.” Accessed 26 June 2019. www.keyperformance.se/?page_ id=433. ———. 2015. Jaguar. Zodiak Theatre, Helsinki, 6 October. ———. 2017. Bacantes—Prelúdio para uma Purga. Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Brussels, 6 May.

Elegy to an Oz Republic First Steps in a Ceremony of Invocation towards Reconciliation Barbara Bolt University of Melbourne, Australia

Introduction This chapter brings into focus three paintings in Robert Motherwell’s series Elegies to the Spanish Republic—At Five in the Afternoon (1949), Elegy to the Spanish Republic 100 (1963–75), and Reconciliation Elegy (1977)—to address the ques­ tion: How might an artist “borrow” from Motherwell’s images to engage in an act of reconciliation now?1 What is at stake in such an act? Can one (ethically) invoke not just the name or the sentiment embodied in Motherwell’s Elegies to the Spanish Republic, but also the force that operates in the Elegies, in order to address the question of reconciliation in Australia today? Through reference to a series of figurative drawings, Black with No Way Out (after Motherwell), Study for Bourke Street 5pm (2012), Elegy to an Oz Republic (after Motherwell) (2012), and Reconciliation Elegy (2015), this chapter examines whether it is possible to draw on and activate the expansive forces operating in Motherwell’s Reconciliation Elegy as a gesture towards reconciliation. In doing this, the paper asks us not just to attend to what is pictured, but rather to address the conditions through which these works work. It proposes that, figured performatively, appropriation or citation of Motherwell’s Elegies to the Spanish Republic is not about re-present­ ing or reproducing forms, but rather is concerned with invoking the impercep­ tible forces beneath perception. Thus, the task of working with Motherwell’s compositions is not just technical, nor is it merely to invoke the name and his­ tory of Robert Motherwell.2 The act of appropriation asks that the artist attend to the ghosts operating in and through the work, unleash them, and allow them to come to bear upon us. In 2012, I completed a series of drawings and paintings that, while figurative in form, were structurally based on and derived their inspiration from the abstract paintings and lithographs from Motherwell’s series Elegies to the Spanish Republic 1 An extended version of this chapter was first published as “Reconciliation Elegy: Invoking the Ghosts of Motherwell’s Elegies to the Spanish Republic,” Cultural Studies Review 21 (2), September 2015. 2 In What Is Philosophy? Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1994, 65–66) differentiate between technical composition and an aesthetic plane of composition arguing that on an aesthetic plane of composition, it is the material that becomes expressive, not the artist.

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Barbara Bolt (1963–75). A large drawing, Black with No Way Out (after Motherwell) (figure 28.1), “borrowed” Robert Motherwell’s name (after Motherwell), the title (Black with No Way Out), and compositional structural elements from Motherwell’s litho­ graph Black with No Way Out (1983) (figure 28.2). The line work and massing rep­ etition of shapes in the drawing Black with No Way Out (after Motherwell) rhyme the rhythms of Motherwell’s works to create what Ashley Crawford (2014, 12) deemed an “apocalyptic mise on scène.” A second series of drawings, Study for Bourke Street 5pm (2012) (figure 28.6) and Elegy to an Oz Republic (after Motherwell) (2012) (figure 28.8), appropriate the form of Motherwell’s Elegy to the Spanish Republic 100 (figure 28.7). This wholesale “borrowing,” “quotation,” and “cita­ tion” raises the questions: What does it mean to engage in acts of appropriation now? And, more importantly, can such acts of appropriation draw on the spirit of the “original” work to make a (political) difference?3

Figure 28.1.

Figure 28.2.

3 Rex Butler problematises (1996, 13–15) the relationship between the original and the copy according to the logic of Deleuze’s simulacrum in his introduction to What Is Appropriation: An Anthology of Critical Writings on Australian Art in the ’80s and ’90s.

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Figure 28.1. Barbara Bolt, Black with No Way Out (after Motherwell), 2012, charcoal on arches, 114 × 390 cm. Photography Jeremy Dillon. Figure 28.2. Robert Motherwell, Black with No Way Out, 1983, lithograph printed in black and red from two aluminium plates sheet, 38.4 × 95.4 cm. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Gift of Kenneth Tyler, 2002. © Dedalus Foundation, Inc/ARS. Copyright Agency 2018.

Elegy to an Oz Republic Appropriation and its relation to reconciliation remains a vexed issue, particularly in the Australian context where the legacy of colonisation on Indigenous culture is so forcefully felt. In the art world, nowhere has this played out so clearly than in Imants Tillers’s infamous appropriation of Indigenous artist Michael Jagamara Nelson’s Five Dreamings (1982/4) in his painting The Nine Shots (1985). The appropriation, and the fact that it was made without Jagamara Nelson’s permission, prised open a deep cultural wound leading to a scathing reappropriation of The Nine Shots by the Indigenous Australian artist Gordon Bennett in The Nine Ricochets (Fall Down Black Fella, Jump Up White Fella) (1990). In a catalogue essay for the exhibition Imants Tillers: One World Many Visions, Howard Morphy (2006) notes that Tiller’s appropriation and Bennett’s response had revealed the simple fact that “all that has happened in the recent history of Australia has been made possible by the colonisation and often the deaths of Aboriginal Australians . . . the idea that there was a wrong that needed to be acknowledged and addressed.”4 While his more recent appropriations of Indigenous art and collaborations with Indigenous artists, including Michael Jagamara Nelson, may be in some ways viewed as acts of reconciliation (Morphy 2006), at the time that Tillers appropriated Five Dreamings, his attitude to appropriation was thoroughly post­ modern. He borrowed willy-nilly, and without conscience, from such artists as Sigmar Polke, Anselm Kiefer, Jiri Georg Dokoupil and Georg Baselitz, Julian Schnabel, David Salle, Sherrie Levine and Philip Taaffe, Giorgio de Chirico, Sandro Chia, Arakawa, and Richard Long. Their images become ready-mades for his use. According to Butler (1996, 27), Tillers’s aim was to send the images “back to their place of origin in order to render indistinguishable the original and the copy, to show that the original itself was only ever a copy.” In doing so, Tiller’s “remakes” evacuate the “original” of its context and power, so that his appropriations become the default against which the so-called original is seen. This attitude is summed up in an interview Paul Foss conducted with Tillers for Art & Text, two years after The Nine Shots was painted and a year after the image was reproduced in the catalogue for the Sydney Biennale.5 In Foss’s interview with Tillers, the artist spoke of his appropriation of Sigmar Polke’s work in the following way; “The reason I chose it was that it could quite easily have been a composite painting done by me. It was a ready-made Tillers done by Polke” (Foss 1987, 136). Thus it may also be that Michael Jagamara Nelson’s Five Dreamings is now forever known in terms of Imants Tiller’s The Nine Shots: a ready-made Tillers done by Jagamara Nelson. However, what many commentators at the time did not apprehend or con­ sider was that when one appropriates, one takes more than merely the image. To “invoke” an image effectively activates the spirits that inhabit the image. 4 The complex issues around Imants Tillers’s appropriation of Michael Jagamara Nelson’s Five Dreamings are synthesised in the catalogue essays that accompanied Tillers’s exhibition One World Many Visions at the National Gallery of Art in 2006. In particular, see Morphy (2006). 5 Hart (2006) writes that while The Nine Shots (1985) was not exhibited in the 1986 Sydney Biennale, curated by Nick Waterlow, it was reproduced in the catalogue where it caused the most heated debate. See also, Cormack (2012). Tressa Berman’s edited book No Deal! Indigenous Arts and the Politics of Possession (2012) deals with cultural appropriation in the context of Australia and the United States.

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Barbara Bolt In Indigenous culture, this always means enacting the performative or methexical6 power of the image.7 The artist is the custodian of particular symbols and imagery and this brings with it onerous responsibilities. As Morphy (2006) writes: While “borrowing from,” “being influenced by,” “finding inspiration in,” “learning from,” and “building upon” other people’s artworks is always going to be an integral part of art practice, it is never going to be without its dangers since art is not limited to particular kinds of objects. It is the case that some Aboriginal art produced for sale is sacred art; it is the case that under Aboriginal law the rights to produce those works might be limited to a small group of individuals; it is the case that the rights in such works might be vested in a group; it is the case that the breach of rights in and the unauthorised use of such artworks can be seen as a form of sacrilege that affects the fabric of the artist’s society. This does not mean that the works concerned are not artworks. It means, as has been the case throughout human history, that a work of art can be other things besides itself—in the case of some Aboriginal art it is a mark of identity, a title deed to land, a sign or instance of ancestral presence.

Thus, the artist and philosopher Robyn Ferrell (2012, 144) tells us, that the painting’s “intensity is . . . perceived through the figure of the artist, as their law, their history, their Dreaming” and its enactment as painting is to effect an order through aesthetic means. The “postmodern” moment that saw the flowering of appropriation in art initially did not appreciate the power of picturing. Jan Verwoert (2007) draws attention to the iconoclasm of the 1970s and 80s in the face of postmodern discourses that rehearsed the death of modernity, the death of history and his­ torical meaning, the death of painting, and the arbitrariness and emptiness of the signifier. In all this, the appropriative gesture of postmodernism mistook life forms for dead matter to be endlessly circulated and reused. This, as I will argue, is no longer the case in a post-appropriative context. To return to my own appropriations of Motherwell’s imagery introduced at the beginning of this chapter: What am I bound to execute? What do the images command? What are the “ghosts” in Motherwell’s work and how might one attend ethically to them and (to cite Derrida [1994]) give them back their voice and allow them to speak?8 Here we need a context. Between 1949 and 1991, Robert Motherwell painted more than 170 abstract works that consti­ tute what is now known to us as the Elegies to the Spanish Republic. Central to my ongoing investigation of Motherwell’s Elegies is a specific work in this series, the Reconciliation Elegy, a work painted in 1977 and hung in 1978. Reconciliation Elegy was commissioned for the opening of the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

6 Methexis is a non-representational principle that Paul Carter invokes to understand the performative nature of Indigenous Australian cultural practices. It involves “a concurrent actual production,” or “a pattern danced on the ground” (Carter 1996, 84). 7 For writings on the performative power of Indigenous cultural productions, see Biddle (2003); Bolt (2000); Carter (1996); Ferrell (2012); Martin (2014). 8 Verwoert draws on Jacques Derrida’s work on mourning in Specters of Marx (1994).

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Elegy to an Oz Republic

Figure 28.3.

Of the painting, Robert Motherwell (1980, 77) writes: “The Washington Painting was entitled Reconciliation Elegy for several reasons. Partly from a conversation the same year with the Spanish artist Tàpies chez moi about the new hopes for humanism in Spain—my Elegies to the Spanish Republic had been meant, on one level, as an elegy for the tragically missed opportunity of Spain to enter the liberal world in the 1930s. And for its tragic suffering then and for decades after.” Reconciliation Elegy points back to a specific event in history, the Spanish Civil War (1936–39). Historically, Picasso’s Guernica (1937), which addresses the bombing of the Basque town Guernica by German and Italian warplanes at the behest of the Spanish Nationalist forces on 26 April 1937, is seen as the most powerful anti-war painting of the twentieth century, in the way that it captures and expresses the horrors of war. The power of Motherwell’s Elegies, on the other hand, was nullified by the discourse of abstract expression­ ism and cold war politics (abstract expressionism is the art of a “free America”) and the reduction of abstract expressionism to “mute abstract shapes” that are purely aesthetic (see Saunders 1999). This “reading” remains alive and well. In his review of the exhibition Robert Motherwell: At Five in the Afternoon held at the National Gallery of Australia in 2014, art critic Christopher Allen talks of the “questionable claim to meaning made by the Elegy series [which] is intended to recall the Spanish Civil War.” Allen struggles to find “meaning” in the works, suggesting that, for example, in Motherwell’s lithographs “one senses a certain frustration that the abstract gestural marks are ultimately gratuitous and can never have the depth of mean­ ing of calligraphy” and that his work is “trying to mean more than it can” (Allen 2014, 6–7). In Allen’s assessment, Motherwell’s abstract shapes are reduced to “muteness”; in this, he argues, they offer no access to the viewer. But what if the Elegies are not just about meaning. What if their concern is with invoking a/effects? For Deleuze and Guattari, for example, art is not concerned with meaning or communication and a work of art is never trying to mean more

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Figure 28.3. Robert Motherwell, Reconciliation Elegy, 1978, acrylic on canvas, 304 × 914.4 cm. © Dedalus Foundation, Inc/ARS. Copyright Agency 2018.

Barbara Bolt than it can.9 This is not its job. Rather, art’s task is expressive, that is, to summon forth the invisible “forces of gravity, heaviness, rotation, the vortex, explosion, expansion, germination and time . . . [that] make perceptible the imperceptible forces that populate the world” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 181–82). Perhaps this expressiveness enables us to think differently about Motherwell’s works and the appropriations it inspires. How can one make perceptible the imperceptible forces that populate the world? At one level it may seem like a Faustian desire to know all, to reveal all. Here, though, I am not concerned with what is represented or what a painting “looks like.” Rather, what is at stake are the conditions through which picturing works, and how the image may affect us through the operations of the work of art. I can now return to my earlier question: What does it mean to invoke the ghost of Robert Motherwell in a series of figurative images? What is the injunc­ tion that the Spanish Elegies invoke? It is not just a question of invoking the name and history of Robert Motherwell through the linguistic sign “after Motherwell.” Nor is it an appropriation in the sense of a copy or a restatement of an original “Motherwell,” or even a question of a technical application of Motherwell’s compositions. Invoking Motherwell’s Elegies to the Spanish Republic involves acknowledging the conditions through which the Elegies work and put­ ting to work the expansive and compressive forces that operate to undo “the image” and produce something true to life. Motherwell’s first work in the series was originally titled At Five in the Afternoon (1949). This elegiac titling of the work has, for some, put into question the polit­ ical impetus for the work. As Elisabet Goula Sardà (2009, 85) notes: “in all the different interpretations critics have offered of the series, none has focused on what the title really expresses: the fate of the Spanish Republic. One of the main reasons for the scant success of a reading that would seem so obvious is that the title was the second choice after the original one of At Five in the Afternoon. Hence many critics never went beyond seeing Federico García Lorca’s poem as the essential, only reference for the series.”10



9 Deleuze and Guattari (1994, 196) don’t believe that art is concerned with communication and, while it might be concerned with expression, it is not the expression of an artist’s intention. In their thought, it is the material that is expressive, not the artist. 10 In her essay on the exhibition Robert Motherwell: At Five in the Afternoon, Jane Kinsman (2014, 15) observes that the profundity of the title of the work At Five in the Afternoon was lost on the New York crowd who “misconstrued [the] title as referring to the cocktail hour.”

376

Elegy to an Oz Republic

Figure 28.4.

The poem to which Sardà refers is Lorca’s Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, a deep outpouring of grief written by Lorca at the death of his friend, the bull­ fighter Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, who was mortally wounded in a bullfight in 1934. In the first section of the poem, Lorca (2007a) uses the power of repeti­ tion in the refrain, “At five in the afternoon,” as both an incantation of mourn­ ing and a force that relentlessly drives home the finality of death: The Goring and the Death At five in the afternoon. It was just five in the afternoon. A boy brought the white sheet at five in the afternoon. A basket of lime made ready at five in the afternoon. The rest was death and only death at five in the afternoon. The wind blew the cotton wool away at five in the afternoon. And oxide scattered nickel and glass at five in the afternoon. Now the dove and the leopard fight at five in the afternoon. And a thigh with a desolate horn at five in the afternoon. The bass-pipe sound began at five in the afternoon. The bells of arsenic, the smoke at five in the afternoon.

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Figure 28.4. Robert Motherwell, At Five in the Afternoon, 1949, casein and graphite on paperboard, 38.1 × 50.8 cm. © Dedalus Foundation, Inc/ARS. Copyright Agency 2018.

Barbara Bolt Silent crowds on corners at five in the afternoon. And only the bull with risen heart! at five in the afternoon. When the snow-sweat appeared at five in the afternoon. when the arena was splashed with iodine at five in the afternoon. death laid its eggs in the wound at five in the afternoon. At five in the afternoon. At just five in the afternoon. A coffin on wheels for his bed at five in the afternoon. Bones and flutes sound in his ear at five in the afternoon. Now the bull bellows on his brow at five in the afternoon. The room glows with agony at five in the afternoon. Now out of distance gangrene comes at five in the afternoon. Trumpets of lilies for the green groin at five in the afternoon. Wounds burning like suns at five in the afternoon, and the people smashing windows at five in the afternoon. At five in the afternoon. Ay, what a fearful five in the afternoon! It was five on every clock! It was five of a dark afternoon!

Deleuze and Guattari propose that the refrain is a movement that both ter­ ritorialises and deterritorialises.11 At one level, it calms and stabilises, offering some centre in the heart of chaos (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 311). On another plane, through improvisation, the refrain allows us to open out onto the chaos of the forces of the world; “one opens the circle a crack, opens it all the way, lets someone in, calls someone, or else goes out oneself, launches forth” (ibid.). For Deleuze and Guattari, to improvise is to deterritorialise and meld with the world, to lose boundaries and feel as and with the world. In her article “Grieving as Depicted in Federico Garcia Lorca’s ‘Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,’” Shelley Rockwell (2019) discusses the effects of the repetition in opening the personal out onto the world. She observes that this opening out builds a sense of shared grief, and as such is the first step in a col­ lective act of mourning. She analyses the building of momentum through rep­ 11 See the section “Of the Refrain” in Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 310–50).

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Elegy to an Oz Republic etition and demonstrates how the variations on a refrain in the last five lines of the section, create discontinuity that in turn works to “form a new continuity” (ibid.). She points to the fourth refrain, “It was five on every clock!,” arguing that it implicates each of us in the bullfighter’s death. For Rockwell, this “asserts the deadly hour as a communal event, felt by all. As though by virtue of owning or reading a clock that read ‘five in the afternoon’ one too suffers the ‘fatal’ hour. The mourner longs to believe that his loss is universal” (ibid.). The final refrain, “It was five of a dark afternoon!,” offers a poignant finale for this section of the poem. While it may symbolically represent the end of the day, the end of a life, despair, and the beginning of mourning a passing, its significance also relates to the place of “black” in Lorca’s lexicon (and also in Motherwell’s use of “black” in his Elegies). For Lorca “black” relates to the Spanish spirit of the duende (Shelley 2019). In his lecture “Theory and Play of the Duende,” Lorca speaks of the duende as a very specifically Spanish sensibility that is haunted by death. For the Spanish people, Lorca claims, duende is a “mysterious force that everyone feels” but which no one can harness or describe. It is not something that one can con­ sciously appropriate or perform, but rather one is taken over by duende. Duende “charges itself with creating suffering by means of a drama of living forms, and clears the way for an escape from the reality that surrounds us.” Lorca (2007b) is clear: “it is a force not a labour, a struggle not a thought.” How then might this spirit operate in and through a work of art? This brings us back to Motherwell. In the artist’s At Five in the Afternoon, we are caught up and implicated in the insistent and fractious refrain of the repeti­ tive black oval forms that jostle against one another and against the formidable verticals that impede their movement. In this heightened sense of tension, we don’t so much view the works as we kinaesthetically experience and are affected by the work. We become implicated. We must not forget that, for Motherwell, all the Elegies speak of a terrible death that must not be forgotten (Motherwell cited in Sardà 2009, 88). While they may refer specifically to the Spanish trag­ edy, we should not merely fix them in this time and place. As Motherwell points out, “Reconciliation has multiple meanings . . . Reconciliation . . . of the Spanish peoples, reconciliation with Death and Life. . . . The Reconciliation Elegy is not less for Spain but is also for all [hu]mankind” (Motherwell 1980, 77). We can finally return to the questions raised at the beginning of the chap­ ter: What, does it mean to invoke the spirit of Robert Motherwell in a figu­ rative work? How might or, more to the point, can an artist “borrow” from Motherwell to engage in an act of reconciliation now? In his 2007 article “Living with Ghosts: From Appropriation to Invocation in Contemporary Art,” Jan Verwoert argues that the task for the contemporary artist who appropri­ ates the work of another is to “approach and do things with ghosts” in such a way as to “do justice to [their] complex nature. . . . The task is to ‘learn to live with ghosts’” (Verwoert 2007, 7, interpolating a quotation from Derrida 1994). Further, he argues that artists need to learn how to let the ghosts speak, and more importantly, give them back their speech (ibid.). To do that, he says, we need to “acknowledge the performative dimension of language” (ibid., 6). 379

Barbara Bolt Verwoert’s “call” to artists to acknowledge the performative power of the image and hence take responsibility for the images that they produce, signals a significant shift in the way that appropriation has been thought and written about by art theorists and historians and the way that it has been practised by artists. Two key anthologies dealing with appropriation—Rex Butler’s What Is Appropriation: An Anthology of Critical Writings on Australian Art in the ’80s and ’90s (1996b) and David Evans’s Appropriation: Documents of Contemporary Art (2009a)—are imbued with a postmodern “spirit,” a sensibility and a theoretical and political positioning that rejects modernist notions of authorship, origi­ nality, and identity. For them the thought of acknowledging the ghosts in the work and allowing them to speak would appear an anathema. Evans identifies the exhibition Pictures, an exhibition curated by Douglas Crimp at Artists Space in New York in 1977, as the defining event that brought into focus a disregard for modernist values. In this pluralist postmodern epoch, photography-based mass media made a mockery of notions of origin and copy, and, as Evans (2009b, 12) observes, images became a “resource to be raided and re-used.” The influence of “cultural theory” on the making and interpretation of art through the 1970s and 1980s invigorated the debate around the conditions of possibility of “art” and the strategies employed by artists. Walter Benjamin’s article, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), Roland Barthes’s Mythologies (1957) and his essay “The Death of the Author” (1968), Michel Foucault’s “What Is an Author” (1969), Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (1967), Jacques Derrida’s Writing and Difference (1967), Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation (1981), and Gilles Deleuze’s essay “Plato and Simulacrum” (1983)12 became seminal texts that were compulsory reading for art theorists, art historians, and artists alike. In sum, art became meta-aware and invested in art as a form of cultural critique; a form that took into account the operations of power, the death of historical meaning, the impossibility of originality, the death of authorship, and the role of the spectator in the pro­ duction and multiplicity of meaning. The anti-aesthetic drive of postmodern­ ism saw artists adopting appropriation in its various guises—parody, allegory, and bricolage—in what Evans (2009b, 13–14) calls a “double-voiced” strategy through which art could offer a cultural critique of consumer society. However, as Evans notes, the stakes involved in the nineteen eighties and now are quite different: “One of the most fundamental distinctions between appropriation art in the 1980s and post-appropriation art today revolves around history itself. A recurrent theme in postmodernist debates of the 1980s was the supposed death of historical meaning, but major events like the implosion of the Soviet Union resulted in the ‘re-emergence of a multiplicity of histories in the moment of the new 1990s.’ The challenge for the appropriationist artist now is to discover new ways of dealing with these ‘unresolved histories’” (ibid., 22).13 12 It is impossible not to be aware of the gendered nature of the cultural theory that shaped postmodern practices, particularly when considered in the context of the identity and post-identity politics of the period. 13 In talking of the changed context for the terms of the post-appropriation era, Evans refers to Verwoert’s article “Apropos Appropriation: Why Stealing Images Today Feels Different” (2006).

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Elegy to an Oz Republic The question of “unresolved histories” relates to Verwoert’s arguments about the change in the stakes around the act of appropriation with an acknowledge­ ment that words and images don’t just signify: They have real material effects in the world. Verwoert identifies the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 as signalling the historical moment that enabled a shift that recognised that, even though words and images may be arbitrarily constructed, they may also “produce unsuspected effects and affects in the real world” (Vorwoert 2007, 6). Thus he says: “The shift in the critical discourse away from a primary focus on the arbi­ trary and constructed character of the linguistic sign towards a desire to under­ stand the performativity of language and grasp precisely how things are done with words . . . how language through its power of interpellation and injunction enforces the meaning of what it spells out . . . binds that person to execute what it commands” (ibid.). The realisation of the performative power of words and images—the acknowledgement that they not only signify but also produce manifest effects and affects in the world—(if taken seriously) has a critical impact on how we think and practise our imag(in)ings and picturings.14 And for Verwoert (2007) this also “means to understand the responsibility that comes with speaking to engage in the procedures of speech and face the consequences of what is being said” (6). He is critical of the approach both of art historians and of the­ orists who write about appropriation as if it was a mere “re-shuffling of a basic set of cultural terms” and artists who engage in appropriation willy-nilly (1). Given the performative power of picturing, appropriation can no longer be approached by analysis alone, nor can staging an object of appropriation “be contained [within] a moment of mere contemplation” (6). Rather, Verwoert argues, appropriation is an active and ethical encounter that needs to take into account the ghosts that hover within. This requires that artists take responsi­ bility for the “practicalities and material gestures performed in the ceremony of invocation” (6). Suggesting that appropriation is a “ceremony” or “invocation” leads us to ask: What are the responsibilities that one has in doing a ceremony so as to do justice to the spirit of the event? The question of taking responsibility for the images that one makes has not necessarily sat comfortably with postmodern and contemporary artists who, through their appropriation of other’s images, have seen appropriation as a strategy to provide a cultural critique. In this stra­ tegic use, images become resources to be used for political and cultural ends. In this context, I now turn to my own appropriative acts and the ghosts that lurk in Study for Bourke Street, 5pm (figure 28.5) and Elegy for an Oz Republic (after Motherwell) (figure 28.6). Both these works draw their structural, materialist, and political inspiration from Motherwell’s Elegy to the Spanish Republic 100 (fig­ ure 28.7). However, their political motivation and rage derives from the regres­ sive political landscape in contemporary Australia, which takes us back to the conservatism of 1950’s Australia and imaginatively to John Brack’s iconic paint­ 14 Judith Butler’s work on performativity and gender was to have a significant impact on the articulation of a performative paradigm in cultural theory and in the arts (see Butler 1990, 1993).

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Barbara Bolt ing Collins St, 5p.m. (1955) (figure 28.8). It is perhaps no surprise that the titles Collins St, 5p.m. (Brack) and At Five in the Afternoon (Motherwell) (figure 28.4) should mark such an elegiac time of day—sad, melancholic, plaintive, lament­ ing—an elegy, in fact.

Figure 28.5.

Figure 28.6.

Figure 28.7.

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Figure 28.5. Barbara Bolt, Study for Bourke Street 5pm, 2012, watercolour on arches, 45 × 113 cm. Photography Jeremy Dillon. Figure 28.6. Barbara Bolt, Elegy to an Oz Republic (after Motherwell), 2012, charcoal on arches, 114 × 310 cm. Photography Jeremy Dillon. Figure 28.7. Robert Motherwell, Elegy to the Spanish Republic 100, 1963–75, acrylic on canvas, 213.36 × 609.6 cm. © Dedalus Foundation, Inc/ARS. Copyright Agency 2018.

Elegy to an Oz Republic

Figure 28.8.

Here I return to Verwoert’s comments that staging an object of appropriation requires an active negotiation to accommodate the ghost, or should I say ghosts. Elegy for an Oz Republic (after Motherwell) draws on both Brack’s and Motherwell’s works to stage an act of reconciliation. In Study for Burke Street 5pm (figure 28.5) and Elegy for an Oz Republic (after Motherwell) (figure 28.6) we appear to have what at first glance looks like a group of people assembled, waiting for either a train or a tram: it is Burke Street Mall at five in the afternoon on a cold and wintry Melbourne evening in 2012. Here we need to get beneath the re-presentation being presented to us for, as Deleuze tells us, the function of painting (and drawing) is never representational. It is “never a matter of reproducing or inventing forms,” observes Deleuze (2003, 56), but rather a question of “capturing forces” and producing affects. This occurs through the expressivity of the material. By expressivity, Deleuze and Guattari (1994, 66) mean the conditions “under which the arts produce affects of stone and metal, of strings and wind, of line and color, on a plane of composition of a universe.” What are we to experience here? While loosely “composed” using the dynam­ ics of Motherwell’s Elegy to the Spanish Republic 100, Study for Burke Street 5pm doesn’t have the force and power of the massing black shapes pushing and shoving and weighing heavily on us as in Motherwell’s painting. Nor does it have the tightly compressed figures that make up John Brack’s oppressive Collins St, 5p.m. But what it does do is produce an almost imperceptible shift in perspective, one that operates through the rhythms created through the repe­ titions and subtle shift in viewpoint of each figure in the work. As writer Marion Campbell (2012, 11) has observed, this produces echoes of impressionists like Caillebotte and Renoir . . . in the chromatic shimmer on rain-slicked surfaces, and the rhythmic treatment of the accessories of weather, like the angled umbrella or the hood. These rhythms [are] amplified through the design of the negative spaces . . . where a virtual “arcade” is formed by the legs, straight, bowed, or at ease, in the group at the tram-stop in the foreground. The triptych references, in its title and its parallel frieze structure, John Brack’s famous

383

Figure 28.8. John Brack (Australia, 1920–1999), Collins St, 5p.m. 1955, oil on canvas, 114.8 × 162.8 cm, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Purchased, 1956. © Helen Brack.

Barbara Bolt parade of hatchet-profiled, jaundiced workers in Collins St 5 pm. Here, however . . . the compositional structure and the play of shadows in these works always intimates their propensity for dynamism and even for dance.

This is not the seamless one-point perspective image where the omnipresent viewer is placed at the centre of the universe, as in a “disinterested” Kantian viewer, nor is it an image simply ripe for a postmodern reading of signs. Each figure has its own positionality, its own rhythmic dynamic and vanishing point and we, as viewers, are required to accede to and acknowledge (even if at first unconsciously) the different viewpoints that the rhythms move us through. Here I refer to the shifting and multiple perspectives of David Hockney’s pho­ tographs,15 Picasso’s simultaneous perspective, and, earlier still, Cézanne’s inexplicable still-life paintings that hover and quiver under our gaze. Elegy for an Oz Republic (after Motherwell) asks us to consider our own positionality, not just as viewers but also as political beings. It niggles at us and gives (me) hope that imaging does have the power of interpellation and injunction; but this places a heavy responsibility on us as both makers and viewers of images.

Conclusion The power of invocation is the central concern of this chapter, which has pro­ posed an argument for the reconciliatory power of imaging. Thus, in any imag­ ing, we need to consider not just what the imaging is, but what the conditions are through which it works. If we can get beneath the re-presentation and enact the performative power of imaging, we may just be able to, as Verwoert (2007, 7) says, “invoke the ghosts of unclosed histories in a way that allows them to appear as ghosts and reveal the nature of the ambiguous presence.” Through this we may just come into contact with and even glimpse the forces beneath perception, affection, and especially opinion. Reconciliation Elegy (figure 28.9) provides a site from which the ceremony of invocation and reconciliation may begin. However, like Motherwell’s Elegies, it is an unfinished project, one that requires the artist to take responsibility for the practicalities and material ges­ tures performed in order to keep the question of reconciliation in Australia alive.

15 David Hockney intimates this shifting perspective on the webpage for his 2015 exhibition David Hockney: Painting and Photography at Annely Juda Fina Art, London, 15 May–27 June 2015 (see Annely Juda Fine Art 2015).

384

Elegy to an Oz Republic

Figure 28.9.

References Allen, Christopher. 2014. Review of Robert Motherwell: At Five in the Afternoon. Weekend Australian, 6 September, 6–7. Annely Juda Fine Art. 2015. “David Hockney: Painting and Photography.” Accessed 4 May 2019. http://www.annelyjudafineart. co.uk/exhibitions/painting-andphotography-david-hockney. Webpage published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name, shown at Annely Juda Fine Art, London, 15 May–27 June 2015. Barthes, Roland. 1957. Mythologies. Paris: Seuil. Translated by Annette Lavers as Mythologies (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972). ———. 1968. “La mort de l’auteur.” Manteia 5: 12–17. Translated by Stephen Heath as “The Death of the Author,” in Image, Music, Text, 142–48 (London: Fontana, 1977), 142–48. Baudrillard, Jean. 1981. Simulacres et simulation. Paris: Galilée. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser as Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994). Benjamin, Walter. 1936. “L’œuvre d’art à l’époque de sa reproduction mécanisée.” Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 5 (1): 40–68. Translated by Harry Zohn as “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, edited by Hannah Arendt (New York: Shocken Books, 2007), 217–52.

Berman, Tressa, ed. 2012. No Deal! Indigenous Arts and the Politics of Possession. Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press. Biddle, Jennifer. 2003. “Country, Skin, Canvas: The Intercorporeal Art of Kathleen Petyarre.” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art 4 (1): 61–76. Bolt, Barbara. 2000. “Shedding Light for the Matter.” Hypatia 15 (2): 202–16. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. ———. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge. Butler, Rex, ed. 1996. Introduction to What Is Appropriation: An Anthology of Critical Writings on Australian Art in the ’80s and ’90s, 13–46. Brisbane: Institute of Modern Art; Sydney: Power Institute of Fine Art. Campbell, Marion. 2012. “Streetwise.” In Barbara Bolt: Streetwise, 7–14. Published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name, shown at Catherine Asquith Gallery, Melbourne, 16 October–3 November 2012. Carter, Paul. 1996. The Lie of the Land. London: Faber and Faber. Cormack, Bridget. 2012. “The Ethics of Cultural Borrowing.” Australian, 18 December, 15. Crawford, Ashley. 2014. The Iconoclasts. Melbourne: Not Fair. Published in conjunction with the group exhibition 385

Figure 28.9. Barbara Bolt, Reconciliation Elegy, 2015, charcoal on fabriano artistico, 140 × 420 cm. Photographer Jeremy Dillon.

Barbara Bolt Not Fair 2014 curated by Ashley Crawford, Sam Leach, and Rebecca Richards, shown at the pop-up gallery 12 Peel Street Collingwood, in conjunction with the 2014 Melbourne Art Fair, 8 August–19 August 2014. Debord, Guy. 1967. La sociéte du spectacle. Paris: Buchet-Chastel. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith as The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1994). Deleuze, Gilles. 1983. “Plato and the Simulacrum.” Translated by Rosalind Krauss. October 27 (Winter): 45–56. First published 1969 in Logique du sens (Paris: Minuit). ———. 2003. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Translated by Daniel W. Smith. London: Continuum. First published 1981 as Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation (Paris: Éditions de la Différence). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1994. What Is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1991 as Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Minuit). Derrida, Jacques. 1967. L’écriture et la différence. Paris: Seuil. Translated by Alan Bass as Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). ———. 1994. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. London: Routledge. First published 1993 as Spectres de Marx: L’état de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle Internationale (Paris: Galileé). Evans, David, ed. 2009a. Appropriation: Documents of Contemporary Art. London: Whitechapel Gallery; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. 2009b. “Introduction: Seven Types of Appropriation.” In Evans 2009a, 12–23. Ferrell, Robyn. 2012. Sacred Exchanges: Images in Global Context. New York: Columbia University Press. Foss, Paul. 1987. “Mammon or Millennial Eden? Interview with Imants Tillers.” Art

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& Text 23–24 (March–May): 124–39. Foucault, Michel. 1969. “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur.” Bulletin de la Sociéte française de Philosophie 63 (3): 73–104. Translated by Josué V. Harari as “What Is an Author?” in The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books), 101–20. Hart, Deborah. 2006. “A Work in Progress.” Imants Tillers: One World Many Visions. Accessed 3 May 2019. http://nga. gov.au/exhibition/tillers/Default. cfm?MnuID=4&Essay=1. Published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name, shown at National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 14 July–16 October. Kinsman, Jane. 2014. “Painterly Prints: Robert Motherwell.” Artonview 78 (Winter): 10–15. Canberra: National Gallery of Australia. Lorca, Federico García. 2007a. Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías. Translated by A. S. Kline. Poetry in Translation. Accessed 3 May 2019. http://www. poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/ Spanish/FiveintheafternoonLorca.htm#_ Toc527959419. Poem first published 1935 as Llanto por Igancio Sánchez Meíjas (Madrid: Cruz y Raya). ———. 2007b. “Theory and Play of the Duende.” Translated by A. S. Kline. Poetry in Translation. Accessed 3 May 2019. http://www.poetryintranslation.com/ klineaslorcaduende.html. First given as a lecture as “Juego y teoría del duende” (Buenos Aires, 1933). Martin, Brian. 2014. “Immaterial Land and Indigenous Ideology: Refiguring Australian Art and Culture.” PhD thesis, Deakin University. Morphy, Howard. 2006. “Impossible to Ignore: Imants Tillers’ Response to Aboriginal Art.” Imants Tillers: One World Many Visions. Accessed 3 June 2019. http://nga.gov.au/exhibition/ tillers/Default.cfm?MnuID=4&Essay=5. Published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name, shown at National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 14 July–16 October 2006. Motherwell, Robert, with E. A. Carmean Jnr, Robert Bigelow, and John E. Scofield. 1980. Reconciliation Elegy. Geneva: Skira; New York: Rizzoli. Rockwell, Shelley. 2019. “Grieving

Elegy to an Oz Republic as Depicted in Federico Garcia Lorca’s ‘Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias.’” Accessed 3 May. http:// wdsreviewofbooks.webdelsol.com/ Rockwell.html. Sardà, Elisabet Goula. 2009. “Someone Who Did Not Forget: The Reception of Robert Motherwell’s Elegies to the Spanish Republic in Spain.” Forma; Revista d’estudis comparatius: Art, literatura, pensament 00: 77–91. Saunders, Frances Stonor. 1999. Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War. London: Granta Books. Verwoert, Jan. 2006. “Apropos Appropriation: Why Stealing Images Feels Different Today.” In Tate Triennial

2006: New British Art, edited by Beatrix Ruf and Clarrie Wallis, 14–21. London: Tate Publishing. Published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name, shown at Tate Modern, London, 1 March–14 May 2006. ———. 2007. “Apropos Appropriation: Why Stealing Images Today Feels Different” (online html version) / “Living with Ghosts: From Appropriation to Invocation in Contemporary Art” (PDF download version). Art and Research: A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods 1 (2). Accessed 3 June 2019. http://www. artandresearch.org.uk/v1n2/verwoert. html. Page numbers refer to the PDF version.

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Sound and Image in Artistic Flooding Vladimir Tarasov, Bill Viola Lilija Duobliene Vilnius University, Lithuania

In A Thousand Plateaus Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987, 314) use Jakob von Uexküll’s theory of transcodance in nature, in which nature is treated as music with “components as melodies in counterpoint.”1 They develop this idea by proposing an encounter between two different components, a wasp and an orchid, where the implication is reciprocal. As they assert, “whenever there is transcoding, we can be sure that there is not a simple addition, but the con­ stitution of a new plane, as of a surplus value. A melodic or rhythmic plane, surplus value of passage or bridging. The two cases, however, are never pure; they are in reality mixed (for example, the relation of the leaf, this time not to water in general but to rain” (ibid.). This quotation leads us to rethink water installations in art. Many artists experimenting with sound use water in different states (falling, dripping, and flooding). The sound of flooding provides a special opportunity to think about art from a Deleuzo-Guattarian perspective. Flooding opens territory into absolute chaos, it is “a catastrophe” in which “form collapses” (Zepke 2005, 191) and “everything changes direction” (ibid., 177). Flooding means that space is differently constituted, a transcoding that requires a fresh eye and a new understanding of things, of which positions they take. It creates conditions on a very broad scale: from contemplation to affectation, seeing, hearing, and being in different regimes at the same time, finding novelty that arises from an encounter between two apparently different elements that look as if there is variation in the singularities’ relationship. “The artist must ven­ ture into this catastrophe-chaos in order to bring something out of it, to con­ struct something of it” (ibid., 172). Although Deleuze in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (2003) emphasises that the type of catastrophe individual to the artistic process has little in common with dramatic catastrophes as wrought by destructive natural events, I prefer to work with flooding as a direct reference to natural catastrophes that confuse the senses. This opens new indiscernible zones that allow us to think and imagine the diversity of inscriptions of nuptials and the “possibility of fact” in different diagrams in art.

1 Research supported by the Research Council of Lithuania (Grant No.S- MIP-17-37).

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Lilija Duobliene In this chapter I will investigate different artistic approaches to catastro­ phes, in particular flooding. I am trying to discover how artists such as Vladimir Tarasov and Bill Viola use speed and varying intensities of sound and image in presenting a catastrophe to create different diagrammatic movements. Lithuanian artist Vladimir Tarasov, a drum player experimenting with the sound of water and aleatoric compositional subtleties, has created music for numer­ ous installations through which he has investigated the possibilities and limits of this type of sound (Incident at the Museum, or Water Music, 1992; Installation at Solitude, 1996; Music on the Water, 1996; The First River, 2007; Flood, 2009). His work gives impulses to the independent fluctuation and unpredictable logic of installations, combining sound and image as well as different perceptions of time and space. I will discuss this through describing the installation Incident at the Museum, or Water Music (1992, 1993, 1994), shown at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, the Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York, and other world galleries. The initial idea and visual realisation was implemented by Ilya Kabakov. Kabakov and Tarasov experimented with the sound of water dropping into buckets having created the impression of a major leak in the art gallery. As the water drops encountered metal and plastic, the variety of rhythms caused by the dripping gave Tarasov the impetus to perform a composition following this pattern. Incident at the Museum, or Water Music is documented in photographs, drawings, and writings on the website Fine Art Biblio (see Kabakov and Kabakov 1992):

Figure 29.1.

The exhibit consists of two large galleries of an old, respectable museum with a very good reputation, similar to the Louvre or to London’s National Gallery. . . . The light is concentrated on the “masterpieces” that are hanging around the room. . . . . . . that morning an extremely unpleasant incident occurred at the museum . . . water was streaming down from the ceiling in various places . . .

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Figure 29.1. Incident at the Museum, or Water Music, installation by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, 1992–93, music by Vladimir Tarasov. Courtesy of Ilya and Emilia Kabakov. © Ilya and Emilia Kabakov.

Sound and Image in Artistic Flooding . . . Initial “fire” measures are taken. “Circles” are arranged out of the chairs around particularly dangerous places. A plastic film is stretched over the chair and a hole is punched in its middle so that the water could run into the bucket placed under it. There, where the streams of water were smaller, jars are placed, troughs, everything that could be found at the moment. And the quiet of museum halls is suddenly transformed into a strange music, a music of falling water. Streams and drops in various ends of the halls form a complex, multi-voice polyphony, where in contemplated combinations the low “voices” of the streams, beating the stretched plastic like a drum, combine with the “bells” of the droplets which are falling into the metal buckets, with the “staccato” of the glass jars and the slow, rhythmic blows in the large, metal trough. (Kabakov and Kabakov 1992)

According to the exhibition announcement, at the time the catastrophe occurred, the gallery was displaying fourteen paintings by the early-twenti­ eth-century impressionist Sergei Yakovlevich Koshelev. However, this was not a real flood. It was “fabricated” by the artists. Moreover, the painter, Koshelev, is fictitious, though critics believed he was a real person (Tarasov, pers. comm., 3 June 2017). The idea of Tarasov as a composer and Kabakov as an artist was to draw attention to the sound and to induce a trans­ formation of the view: “A catastrophe, destruction, turns into construction, and contemplation with the sudden shift in point of view. Water, as the image of the all-destructive flood, self-propelling, turns into the image of a different flood—of the all-consuming element of music” (Kabakov and Kabakov 1992). One room was filled with the intense and frightening sound of cascading water while the other room was tranquil, with the ambient sounds of water dripping into different buckets and onto stretched plastic. The artists created the instal­ lation’s soundscape from everyday things they found around them (jars, buck­ ets, aluminium pans, an iron basin, plastic film). In Deleuze’s words: “Having a bag into which I [they] put everything I [they] encounter, provided that I am [they are] also put in a bag. Finding, encountering, stealing instead of regulat­ ing, recognizing and judging” (Deleuze and Parnet 1987, 8). The “unexpected” leak in the museum during the exhibition of works by the mythical Koshelev generated absolute deterritorialisation—functional and also aesthetic deterritorialisation. Visitors became not only listeners and observers but also part of the installation, leading them to behave in ways that would be unusual in a traditional gallery, joining the disorder and the chaotic forces between all the characters. The installation destroys things as they are by confusing the senses—this is the condition for transcoding, for a new function of gallery sound, a new hearing that consequently leads to a new glance. Tarasov (2008, 48) recalled that gallery visitors walked between and around objects, lis­ tening to how in different corners of the room the drops created rhythmic flow, polyrhythms; later, the visitors became calmer, sat down, and even fell asleep. Following Deleuze’s ideas on deterritorialisation in a catastrophe, I would like to emphasise the double function of the encounter between a water drop and a surface: one of them is designed to destroy things, transforming them and leading to death, while the other leads towards a unique polyphony of sound and rhythm deriving from efforts to protect by putting aluminium pans 391

Lilija Duobliene and large iron buckets on the floor and stretching plastic between chairs. Here, there is fluctuation between chaos and cosmos, death and birth, a change in intensity that allows power either to occupy the territory destructively or to create calm. As Kabakov and Kabakov (1992) explained, they intended to create “the impression of tension and release”: to show, how “chaos on one, lower level transforms into harmony on the next, higher level.” In Tarasov’s words, sound “has the capacity to create stillness in the viewer” (2008, 48). Returning to Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of encountering different com­ ponents and transcoding, mentioned above—the idea that “the two cases, however, are never pure; they are in reality mixed” (1987, 314)—I would like to focus less on the double function of a water drop than on the relation between water drops falling into dishes and the sound of their encounter with different materials. My interest arose from a recent and slightly different solo installa­ tion by Tarasov, which he named Water Music. I saw this modified installation at the Vilnius Gallery of Contemporary Art in 1996; it was later presented at the Tallinn Kumu Art Museum in 2016–17.

Figure 29.2.

Tarasov’s solo installation dispensed with the golden-framed paintings on the walls of the gallery, but retained the idea of leaking and falling water. The attraction and affection of this installation derives less from transforming the situation by using sound to change the way the exposed paintings or sculptures in the gallery are viewed, but focuses on the spectacle of observing the sound and sight of dripping water increasing in intensity. The visual installation turns into a sound installation, although the visual aspect of the scene is also important. If in his joint installation with Kabakov, Tarasov created a perfect effect of drips falling in relative speeds in two differ­ ent rooms, in his solo installation the unique rhythm and motifs of a combina­ tion of random characters created an absolute speed, which is important for 392

Figure 29.2. Water Music, installation by Vladimir Tarasov, 1996. Vilnius Gallery of Contemporary Art.

Sound and Image in Artistic Flooding the transformation of consistency and, eventually, artistic novelty. In Dialogues, Claire Parnet, following Deleuze’s idea, mentioned that an absolute speed “knows lines and not points” (Deleuze and Parnet 1987, 33), it is “the speed of movement between the two, in the middle of the two, which traces a line of flight” (31), which “is not an effect but a product” (33). In this installation, the product is created not only through an appearance of affects and percepts in the regime of fluctuation between virtual and actual, but through the intimate experience of an observer. What is the difference between a falling drip and a sounding drip in the orchestration of drips? The first has a potential sound, while the second is actual. Between visual dripping and audio encountering there is a zone of pos­ sible sounds. Falling droplets possess a virtual sonority, no less than droplets encountering a material. Eventually the visual experience transforms into a potential and actual sonic experience. The image instead becomes the sound that you can see. This nuptial stems not from an encounter between a water drop and the surface, as a witness of the fight between birth and death, but from somewhere in the zone of falling. The nuptial appears before the encoun­ ter; it pre-exists it and waits for the actualisation. American artist Bill Viola has made various different audio and video projects involving the idea of a flood. He has experimented with the sound and image of water with the help of media, for example, in The Raft (2004) and especially Five Angels for the Millennium (2001), and in other installations. Many narratives have been spread about the sacred content of Bill Viola’s art, that his work expresses the deepest and purest things in the universe, opening up unseen zones to observers. In his installations we see a unique method of working with the sound of water, movement-image, and time-image. While the movement-image “is based on rational cuts and linkages and itself sets forth a model of truth” and can be called an “organic system,” the time-image is “based on irrational cuts with only relinkings, and substituting for the model of truth the power of falsity as becoming” and can be called a “crystalline system” (Deleuze 1995, 67). In an installation, that effect appears especially where water occupies huge spaces. Viola’s video installation The Raft presents a catastrophe. As opposed to Tarasov’s installation, discussed above, The Raft is a media installation without live image or sound. The visualisation of an encounter between a tidal wave and a crowd of people on a platform is strengthened by an electronic soundscape of water. Viola appears to give priority to the image rather than the sound. The extremely powerful image of the wave hitting the crowd is accompanied by a quiet and inexpressive sound, maintained like an unrecognisable noise, the message of which is unreadable and disquieting. The encounter between the water and the crowd is initially perceived optically, not audibly. The movement of the image proceeds in a very slow rhythm. In an interview, Viola (2013) comments: “The Raft came from an idea that a group of innocent people face and fight off an enormous power that tries to destroy them. I chose water because it embodies the power and movement of the universe. It is both comforting and terrifying with its endless cycle of crea­ 393

Lilija Duobliene tion and destruction.” According to Viola, water gives life and takes it away. It is the beginning and the end, and it always sounds. In Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, Deleuze (1986, 80) indicated that the French school found in water the promise of another state of perception, “a more than human perception,” “more delicate,” “a molecular perception.” While I accept Deleuze’s point of view, I also agree with Viola’s idea of water as an “enor­ mous power that tries to destroy” people as well as giving them life. Keeping this double function of water in mind, I move from this idea using an element similar to one used in the interpretation of the previous installation, to focus on image and sound composition and Viola’s technique that transforms the movement-image and sound perception. Therefore, my understanding from a Deleuzian perspective only uses Viola’s thoughts in part. Viola plays with different speeds and intensities; his words “things are not what you see” (Viola 2009) are important when watching the video and audio installation The Raft. There appears to be a gap between two regimes of time: the time of the flood coming, the drowning of the crowd, and the time of the crowd moving away, the crowd’s reaction to the flood; or, in other words, the crowd’s reaction to the encounter with the wave. This temporal effect is due to the slow motion added in post-production: it is similar to David Claerbout’s expansion of time, but different from Jean-Luc Godard’s films and the Soviet film school as described by Deleuze. The gap between the first wave breaking and the crowd’s reaction allows comparison with the interval in Deleuze’s sense. Although the interval means the extraction of actions in time, in Viola’s slow motion it appears from the expansion of time and in this way transforms relations between actions: it is a reverse process. I suppose it is possible to view this transformation as a time-image. This is similar to the interval effect, where movement produces “the appearance as such of an image other than the movement-image” (Deleuze 1989, 34). “Aberrant movements” (ibid., 41) create condi­ tions that in Viola’s terms would be “empty space.” It is the space in-between the things, which according to Viola is a real space. This empty space is filled with chaotic forces, which Viola tries to catch and harness. Viola points out (2009) that the energy is harnessed only between the things. The Raft produces more than a visible flooding of the space. The image between an encounter of the two substances—the water and the crowd—in an unnatural continual extension of time opens up a virtual plane and gives rise to an aberrant nup­ tial—eventually things can be seen in a new regime. The sound is continuous and does not seem important. However, the soundtrack creates a special impression in relation to the image, transcoding the image. According to Rhys Davies (2004, 159), “To Viola the sound of being, heard from a distance, is the combination of all the disparate elements that make up the infinite variety of sensations and physicality, resolved into a con­ stant low rumbling—the frequency of existence.” In this case, the sonic inten­ sity, resembling noise, signifies the sound of a wave, a flood, fear, and power, and is inseparable from the sound of the crowd. The sound of the crowd, according to Deleuze and Guattari (1987), is cosmic, full of forces, and able to harness cha­ otic forces. This is expressed in the soundtrack, which sounds non-human or 394

Sound and Image in Artistic Flooding posthuman; we hardly hear any human voices or natural sounds, although the soundtrack expresses not only water but also the crowd. The sound becomes highly informative despite its rather simple modification. Its intensive vibra­ tion and encounter with the time-image (i.e., the sound and image) creates an absolute speed within the slow image picture of a catastrophe. Music gives to the image an internal rhythm (Redner 2011, 33) that has evolved from the empty space in a long encounter between the wave and the crowd and the image and the soundtrack. Both installations (Tarasov’s and Viola’s) present an encounter between dif­ ferent objects mediated by sound (natural, acoustic, electronic) or image (nat­ ural or created in post-production) in the process of a catastrophe. Tarasov works with a slow catastrophe and a small space. Viola also works with slow­ ness, but with grand spaces of water. Tarasov waits for performative transforma­ tion; he works with sound more as John Cage does, while Viola creates trans­ formation using slow motion, an empty space, and modification of sound in Edgard Varèse’s mode of sound creation. Both approaches show involutional creation “in the domain of symbioses that bring into play beings of totally differ­ ent scales and kingdoms” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 238). They appear not in the encounter between a wasp and an orchid, but somewhere on the way to this encounter, in an unfixed place and time. References Davies, Rhys. 2004. “The Frequency of Existence: Bill Viola’s Archetypal Sound.” In The Art of Bill Viola, edited by Chris Townsend, 142–59. London: Thames and Hudson. Deleuze, Gilles. 1986. Cinema 1: The Movement Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. London: Athlone Press. First published 1983 as Cinéma 1: L’image-mouvement (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1989. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1985 as Cinéma 2: L’image-temps (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1995. Negotiations: 1972–1990. Translated by Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1990 as Pourparlers: 1972–1990 (Paris: Minuit). ———. 2003. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Translated by Daniel W. Smith. London: Continuum. First published 1981 as Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation (Paris: Éditions de la Différence). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian

Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Minuit). Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. 1987. Dialogues. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1977 as Dialogues (Paris: Flammarion). Kabakov, Ilya, and Emilia Kabakov. 1992. “Incident at the Museum, or Water Music.” Fine Art Biblio. Accessed 6 June 2019. https://fineartbiblio.com/artworks/ ilya-and-emilia-kabakov/910/incident-atthe-museum-or-water-music. Redner, Gregg. 2011. Deleuze and Film Music: Building a Methodological Bridge between Film Theory and Music. Bristol: Intellect. Tarasov, Vladimir. 2008. “Sound Games: Installations by Vladimir Tarasov.” In Vladimir Tarasov: Between Sound and Image, edited by Tautvydas Bajarkevičius, 46–90. Vilnius: Baltos Lankos. Viola, Bill. 2009. “The Movement in the Moving Image,” lecture at the Center for the Humanities, University of California, Berkeley, 28 September. YouTube 395

Lilija Duobliene video, 1:31:26, posted by “UC Berkeley Events,” 24 October 2011. Accessed 25 June 2019. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=t0RCkNugozU. ———. 2013. “Transcendence and Transformation: Q+A with Bill Viola,” interview with Camille Hong Xin. Art in

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America, 13 February. Accessed 13 June 2019. http://www.artinamericamagazine. com/news-features/interviews/bill-violamoca-north-miami/. Zepke, Stephen. 2005. Art as Abstract Machine: Ontology and Aesthetics in Deleuze and Guattari. New York: Routledge.

Fictioning a Thought of Performance Tero Nauha Theatre Academy of the University of the Arts, Helsinki, Finland

A performance has a complementary register of “restored behaviour” (Schechner 1985, 35–38), in which performance is not real, nor does it exist as a copy of the real. A performance is not fiction, but rather an indefinite fictioning, that is, it is not a narrative way of telling the same thing differently. Fictioning is based on the term fictionale, or philo-fiction, coined by Laruelle (2013a, 232), which does not position the real, but acts from the real. Through fictioning, I propose a shift in performative thinking, by which practice is fictioning, in con­ trast to fiction. Fictioning is not a resemblance to or mimesis with the real or with reality.1 In the sense of thought as an abstraction and artistic practice as the abstrac­ tion of the real, abstractions create “conditions for thought” that return to the world as reality. They mostly resemble proper gestures of thought, not unlike a work of fiction represents the world. Fictioning does not represent the world, nor does it create an abstraction of the world; rather, it is abstract and even lacks existence. It is futuristic in that it “is not in motion [but] the radical future is a-temporal” (Laruelle 2015, 111). Fictioning lacks duration, or it is indetermi­ nate without an analogue in or resemblance to the world. We could consider how the nature of fictioning is in superposition or diffraction, where the “ges­ tures of thought” function as measurements of the experiment. Fictioning is superposition with the gestures of thought, which function as “measurements.” It is a superposition of ontologically indeterminate states. We can see that this indeterminate “particle” is part of a performance or performative act—as what is material but not representational, as restored behaviour, or rather as a “clone”2 of the performance-in-performance. Performance is thus a clone, but it is not “alive” in the sense of fictioning, which also means that in theory it truly can be repeated, or at least cloned. In theory, a performance will not dis­ appear, in contrast to Phelan’s ontological argument on performance (Phelan 1993, 146–48). For fictioning in performance, all gestures, even potentially pos­ sible or actualised ones, are equally real. Performance not only represents the 1 The key question in my postdoctoral research is to ask through artistic research, how does performance think? Do the different registers boil down into one as a universal thought? My proposition concerns the two concepts of fictioning and cloning, both in performance art practice, where bodies are central, and in philosophical thought, represented by Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and François Laruelle. My reading of fictioning is slightly different from that presented by David Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan in their book Fictioning (2019). 2 For Laruelle (2013b, 32) the clone has an identity as a double without synthesis or connection to the real, where cloning is not a refusal of the real, but “a thinking based on that ‘criterion’ of foreclosure.”

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Tero Nauha body through fiction but also clones the body in fictioning. There is no first knowledge or “standard” aesthetics about art, but a generation of the forms of thought. *

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The given world is always an abstracted and composite relation, which only has possible solutions and options. The world is a given possibility. If beings are closed in themselves, they are not closed possibilities in the world; however, they differentiate themselves in the process of their actualisation. They become in the movement in which they receive material forms. The virtual is not found in the actualised forms in resemblance; and beings or things do not resemble the virtual, they embody it. The intellect captures these movements of other lines of divergence through fabulation, which Deleuze regards as a “story-telling function” but for a people to come, and not as the representation of a possibly imagined world (Deleuze 1991, 110). Aligned with Bergson, Deleuze views fab­ ulation alongside creativity as an interval between social pressure and intelli­ gence, as the actualisation of the virtual, where humans become creators in this actualisation via a creative emotion where creation is the process of divergent actualisation of the virtual universe and cosmic memory. In What Is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari write, “Creative fabulation has nothing to do with a memory, however exaggerated, or with a fantasy. In fact, the artist, including the novelist, goes beyond the perceptual states and affective transitions of the lived” (1994, 171). In Soul of the Documentary (2016), Ilona Hongisto articulates the connection between the term fabulation and documentary cinema. Fabulation is part of the creative processes of an interval, or a method of thinking in durations. Fabulation is a way to emerge from our duration to recognise other durations of different kinds. Creation as fabulation is the capacity to emerge when sin­ gular living beings close themselves (Deleuze 1991, 104). Fabulation is a com­ positional modality; in documentary cinema, “it occupies the space in between people who tell stories and the documentary camera that observes these fabu­ lous acts. The relationship between the two creates documentary visions that undo the antagonistic dichotomy between the true and the false” (Hongisto 2015, 67). In documentary cinema, Deleuze (1989, 150) writes, “the real charac­ ter . . . himself starts to ‘make fiction,’ when he enters into ‘the flagrant offence of making up legends’ and so contributes to the invention of his people.” Hongisto (2015, 67) explains that “the flagrant offence of making up legends” (in the French original, “en flagrant délit de”) “has a direct legal connotation to ‘being caught in the act.’” Documentary cinema is not a recording or capturing device, but it fabulates in generative relationality, where “investigations of the observational begin from the shared moment of filming” (ibid.). Hongisto (2015) writes how fabula­ tion comprises “‘hallucinatory fictions’—that have real effects” (68). These fab­ ulations are, for Bergson, regulatory and negative, but Hongisto sees that fab­ ulation transposes “from enhancing extant social conditions to envisioning 398

Fictioning a Thought of Performance collectivities beyond those that exist in actuality” (69). Fabulation does not exist in the connection between true and false, but rather between virtual and actualisation. It is not a possibility or potentiality, that is, a power to do some­ thing; rather, it only what may be actualised not in resemblance to the virtual real. In fabulation, we are “being caught in the act” as in the restored behaviour of performance. This connection with actualisation is abstract, but it is rarely an abstraction of something. Actualisation is a process of translation in a move­ ment where recollections need to be embodied in the present. The actualis­ ation does not resemble a memory or, in the last instance, the virtual; it is not an abstraction of a possible universe or utopia. The virtual is distinguished from the possible because the possible has no reality. Therefore, in fictioning, and not in fiction or imagination (or the image of thought), the embodied abstraction is a clone, as in a superposition. It is like fiction in one sense, but like actualisation in another. In a certain position it is possible and perceivable, but fictioning is also the only abstract gesture of thought. Deleuze writes, “the rules of actualization are not those of resemblance and limitation, but those of difference or divergence and of creation” (1991, 97). The possible realises the real in the likeness of an image, but actual does not resemble the virtual, it only differentiates in actualisation. It is a clone or restored behaviour. From the vantage point of Schechner’s performance studies, a performance functions in postures, attitudes, and strips of behaviour. These “strips of behaviour” extend cultural and personal boundaries, but need to be restored and can even be taken out of the context; moreover, they have no “originality” (Schechner 2003, 324). Every strip, no matter how small, brings some of its former meanings to its new context. Their “memory” is what makes ritual and artistic recombina­ tions so powerful, Schechner (2013, 34) argues. Such restored behaviours can have long or short duration and take place in rituals or fleeting gestures sepa­ rate from subject or identity. The real has no image nor is one possible. It is not given. However, for the possible or potential real, the real turns into a composite, or a “ready-made” reality of the world. To be exact it turns into a concept, which is necessary for all gestures of thought, such as performance and artistic practice; on the other hand, these gestures are equally clones of the real. The possible is the image of the real as resemblance. Both fabulation and “fictioning” depart from this, because ontologically speaking they are impossible and have no relation with reality. *

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Fictioning takes place in the interval, but it is not to be confused with the “as if ” of the performance—a fiction or fictional act. Laruelle uses the term fictionale, or philo-fiction, to distinguish it from the “fictional,” which is “a mixed or empirico-transcendental concept formed under the ‘unitary’ authority of philosophy” (Laruelle 2013a, 231). The fictionale is non-thetic and non-position­al; it is neither an object nor real. Laruelle continues that the “fictionale 399

Tero Nauha ‘presupposes’ the real in a non-thetic way and also conditions it without ever positing it or inscribing it in Being or the World[.] We no longer posit or dom­ inate this primitive space of fiction, and thus it does not dominate us” (ibid., 232). Through fictioning, I propose that performance art is immediate, with­ out the mediation of philosophy or difference. Fictioning has no distance to the “object” of fictioning. On the non-thetic nature of the fictionale, Laruelle (2010, 19) writes: “It is strictly non-reflexive, that is to say absolutely singular and autonomous as such before any universal (form, meaning, relation, syntax, difference, etc.). It is this ‘unarity’ inasmuch as it is distinguished from ‘unity’: unarity is inherently immanent (to) itself, and non-thetic (of) itself, while unity is always both immanent and transcendent, nearly identical to Difference.” Such “performance thinking” does not have the properties or existence to be considered an image of thought. John Ó Maoilearca (2015, 118) has argued for a correlation between non-philosophy and the noneism of Alexius Meinong, who claims that we can say some true things about non-existent objects, even though they have no existence: “they have a Sosein even though they haven’t any Sein” (Chisholm 1982, 39). As these objects do not correlate with the image of thought, Meinong (1972, 23–25) describes it instead as adverbial thinking. In performance thinking, actualisation provides a perceptual experience of “performance thinking,” but without the idea or property of an object. “Performance thinking” is a probabilistic process of uncertainties. It does not follow a standard determination of either/or; rather, performance thinking is always both/and. We may witness performance art “as performance” in the regu­ lar basis; however, the proposition here is that there is not one standard proce­ dure or measuring device for performance as uncertain and probable. If performance thinking is only an adverbial idea, we may at some point produce a critical thought, which in performance thinking has never existed as there is no way to determine an “experience” of performance thinking. It may be non-existent yet it still acts as a function. It only insists on its pres­ ence or possible absence, with no correlation with the Real. Performance per­ forming—what I call performance thinking—is not a sufficient presentation or reflection on its material: what could a performance do. It is a superposition of performing and reflection, performance and withdrawal. Properly speak­ ing, it makes no sense. Philosophy correlates with most things that do not exist because “it is unthinkable that the unthinkable be impossible,” as Quentin Meillassoux (2008, 41) says in his argument against strong correlationism. The idea of performance thinking exists when we can speak about it in the philo­ sophical sense, as the “performance in-itself ”; however, performance thinking itself would be impossible without identity and property. Following Meinong’s theory of objects, Richard Routley (1980, 413) argues that although ideas are not identical with objects, we may still have ideas of them. For Graham Priest (2005, 106), if to exist means that something has a relationship to existence, then existence itself only has subsistence, it is an abstract object. Nevertheless, some objects do not have non-existence, Priest continues, but have only Nichtsein (ibid.). Noneism is not about knowing things, or whether they exist and whether we should correlate this with the proposition of 400

Fictioning a Thought of Performance performance thinking; thus, it is not about knowing whether performance thinking may have ever existed, but about accepting that performance think­ ing has a similar adverbial nature to non-existent objects. In a proper sense and according to this standard of thinking, performance thinking is not a pro­ duction of knowledge. All non-existent worlds are equally thought, but not necessarily through standard philosophical gestures of thought. All nonexistent worlds may have particular characteristics without correlating with the actual world, which suggests that we may philosophise on these noneist worlds without a standardised argument. A performance may be a “non-standard clone” of philosophy, in how “NonPhilosophy is produced by the effect of the presupposed Real within philos­ ophy” (Laruelle 2015, 52). Cloning is a device for fictioning, but not through resemblance. Performance clones itself as a flattening of thought—instead of transcending thought, it is a “flat hallucination of thought” from the real, according to John Ó Maoilearca (2015, 140). In cloning, nothing is destroyed or negated; rather, it is postured, where the posture is a divergent affirmation (175). In cloning, performance is closer to rendering and posture, which do not cut off thought from matter, but correspond to the real without resemblance. The proposition here is that all thoughts are from the Real, happen alongside the Real, but cannot represent the Real. The Real is foreclosed from thoughts. In this radical sense the Real is not the domain of things in themselves, or that which our symbolic language cannot grasp; rather, it is something utterly indif­ ferent to these philosophical systems. It also means that there is no system with a better comprehension of the Real; instead, all thoughts produce their own protocol that they begin to define as reality or the world. Cloning is not the production of philosophical statements, doubles, or replicas to resemble philosophy. Performance—or shall we call it non-performance, alongside the non-philosophy of Laruelle—does not mimic philosophy but is a fictioning. Performance as fictioning using cloning is not a reproduction of the possibil­ ities of philosophy; rather, it is performative because it clones philosophy in the body and in matter. The real is what is presupposed by thought and perform­ ance in the fictioning of performance. If so, fictioning performance will have nothing to say about truth, the real, or existence; thus, it has ties with fabula­ tion because it is not a sufficient thought of the performance or the possibil­ ities of performance. Fictioning has no meaning in a performance, or in what performance or a body can do. The cloning is the performance itself. In the “flattening” of thought proposed by John Ó Maoilearca, there is think­ ing that is not philosophising—where a performing body, objects, and things may think from the presupposed real. Fictioning does not resemble, connect, knot, plait, or stitch a performance with reality, or about the real. The other side of cloning and fictioning, as with fabulation, is that it is a posture of truth. The intellectual performing with a theremin is philosophising. This is a possi­ ble reading of the performance and how it sufficiently connects. The intellec­ tual is doing what he says he is doing. Fictioning is not an active or reactionary connection with hegemony. When fiction works with representation, abstraction, and resemblance, or what is 401

Tero Nauha happening, and what we can imagine or envision, their fiction produces an event. In such cases, fictioning is not representational but abstract, virtually utopian, and without proper vision. On the one hand, the performance reflects the world, which generates representations and concepts through philosophi­ cal procedures—reflection, withdrawal, analysis, and reduction—on the other hand, the performance is not a material or intellectual reflection of the world, but a flat, opaque, and indeterminate cloning. It is a fictioning from the real, but not about it. There is no way to determine what fictioning would be, but only that fictioning leaves different traces from fiction or philosophical thought. The question of action and materiality in a performance generates the figures of the agency. The action needs positions and the impact of the per­ formance is generated through agential positions. This is the event of per­ formance. Performance thinking—both fictioning and fictionale—may not capture this event. Only the posture resembles the event of knowledge pro­ duction and the event of the agencies—the traces of the advent. The event of performance thought resembles any other form of speculative thought—for instance, Guattari’s schizoanalysis, where the emphasis is on a‑signified semi­ osis and transversal correlations. Not all standard forms of thought resemble discursive significance. Performance thinking is not a form of liminal thinking between states; rather, it is an advent of practice, in the practice of posture or cloning of ges­ tures of thought. It is not fiction, narrative, philosophy, or performance aes­ thetics. Fictioning is not a mixture of philosophy and practice, where concepts mix with actions or thoughts with bodies; however, it is in superposition with thought and practice. Even gestures of thought that measure ethically, aesthet­ ically, or philosophically are equally indeterminate. Mixtures of fact and fiction are not entanglements, they are the claimed property of a sufficient thought. The measurements of performance thinking collapse into a mixture: it is an experimentation with thought itself. References Burrows, David, and Simon O’Sullivan. 2019. Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Chisholm, Roderick M. 1982. Brentano and Meinong Studies. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Deleuze, Gilles. 1989. Cinema 2: The TimeImage. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1985 as Cinéma 2: L’image-temps (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1991. Bergsonism. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Zone Books. First published 1966 as Le Bergsonisme (Paris: Presses universitaires de France).

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Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1994. What Is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1991 as Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Minuit). Hongisto, Ilona. 2016. Soul of the Documentary: Framing, Expression, Ethics. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Laruelle, François. 2010. Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Nonphilosophy. Translated by Rocco Gangle. London: Continuum. First published 1986 as Les philosophies de la difference (Paris: Presses universitaires de France). ———. 2013a. Philosophy and Non-Philosophy. Translated by Taylor Adkins. Minneapolis,

Fictioning a Thought of Performance MN: Univocal. First published 1989 as Philosophie et non-philosophie (Brussels: Mardaga). ———. 2013b. Principles of Non-philosophy. Translated by Nicola Rubczak and Anthony Paul Smith. London: Bloomsbury. First published 1996 as Principes de la non-philosophie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France). ———. 2015. Intellectuals and Power: The Insurrection of the Victim. Translated by Anthony Paul Smith. Cambridge: Polity Press. First published 2003 as L’ultime honneur des intellectuels (Paris: Textuel). Meillassoux, Quentin. 2008. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Translated by Ray Brassier. London: Bloomsbury Academic. First published 2006 as Après la finitude Essai sur la nécessité de la contingence (Paris: Seuil). Meinong, Alexius. 1972. On Emotional Presentation. Translated by Marie-Luise Schubert Kalsi. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. First published 1917

as Über emotionale Präsentation (Vienna: Hölder). Ó Maoilearca, John. 2015. All Thoughts are Equal: Laruelle and Nonhuman Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Phelan, Peggy. 1993. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge. Priest, Graham. 2005. Towards Non-being: The Logic and Metaphysics of Intentionality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Routley, Richard. 1980. Exploring Meinong’s Jungle and Beyond: An Investigation of Noneism and the Theory of Items. Canberra: Australian National University. Schechner, Richard. 1985. Between Theater and Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ———. 1988 (2003). Performance Theory. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge. This edition first published 1988 (New York: Routledge). ———. 2013. Performance Studies: An Introduction. 3rd ed. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.

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Milieus of Locality The Aesthetic of the Point of View Sara Baranzoni Universidad de las Artes, Guayaquil, Ecuador

Technologies of perception In recent times, we have become familiar with a range of critiques of how tech­ nological devices have altered and transformed social, aesthetic, and political relations. If the emergence in the nineteenth century of new technological forms of spectacle, display, animation, and recording undoubtedly gave rise to changes in perception and attention,1 it is with the twenty-first century explo­ sion of pervasive digital technologies and ubiquitous computing that sensation and cognition seem to have become totally subject to technological conditioning; that is, they have become dependent on a multitude of machinic systems. Smart phones, augmented reality, algorithmic technologies, and social net­ works together seem to radically change human experience, both expanding and expropriating our perceptual possibilities, hence becoming the subject of critique but also a handy scapegoat for the complex sources of our increasing sense of isolation, loss of cognitive diversity, and, in Bernard Stiegler’s words (2015), “the catastrophe of the sensible” in general.2 In fact, however, technological conditioning is nothing new. Gilbert Simondon (2012, 3) argued that “there is a continuous spectrum that connects aesthetics to technics,” and Stiegler explains this spectrum by noting that the technical management of processes of aesthetisation finds its condition of pos­ sibility in the very structure of consciousness itself, precisely because the for­ mation of consciousness can occur only by passing through mnemotechnical systems, which are in their very essence reproducible, and therefore industri­ alisable (Stiegler 2011). The delegation of cognitive and sensory functions to technological apparatus, then, is not something that became possible only with modern communications technology, but is, in fact, a tendency and possibility that is inherent to that species arising from the process of hominisation. If we agree with Stiegler that prosthetic delegation is nothing new, because human existence is technically constituted and conditioned from the outset, we (and Stiegler) can nevertheless also agree with Jonathan Crary’s assertion

1 For a further analysis of this point, see Crary (1999). 2 For a wider critique of the relationship between technology and sensibility, see Stiegler (2015). The importance of Stiegler’s approach resides in its pharmacological character: technologies are always and at the same time a poison and a remedy in relation to human cognitive faculties (Stiegler 2013).

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Sara Baranzoni that each epochal transformation of the technologies of perception inevitably brings with it a larger reshaping of subjectivity: “Vision and its effects are always inseparable from the possibility of an observing subject who is both the histor­ ical product and the site of certain practices, techniques, institutions, and pro­ cedures of subjectification” (Crary 1990, 5). This account of optical experience can, of course, be extended to the other senses, and thus to an enlarged sensory modality in general. One key component in the background of the modern Western subject is the development of linear perspective during the Renaissance, a complex system of visual representation springing out radially from the locus of a gazing subject. Considered both the “most natural” way of seeing the world and the most tech­ nically correct depiction of the geometry of perception, linear perspective has been seen as a mathematical “trick” the discovery of which enabled representa­ tional access to the real itself, a new possibility of unmatched visual fidelity to the world. Through it, an observer becomes capable of measuring reality through the calculated application of his or her own gaze. By directing one’s attention according to perspectival techniques, focusing consciousness to exclude all non-linear forms or aspects of the gaze, a particular organisation of the sensible emerges. Perspective acts in two contradictory directions: it estab­ lishes a distance between a human being and things while at the same time eliminating this distance. By absorbing the whole universe into the gaze of a single eye, linear perspective asserts the centrality of the human being through the exactness and certainty of the mathematical rules to which representation is reduced, rules that nonetheless wholeheartedly depend on the individual qua set of psychophysical conditions of perception and localisation in the world. In Stiegler’s terms, we can comprehend the invention of perspective as the technical exteriorisation of a way of conceiving the world, which, in its turn, informs, changes and produces the very way we perceive, operating through a corresponding reinteriorisation of the exteriorised that amounts to a new way of knowing the world. Perspective provides the technological conditions of pos­ sibility for a certain way of structuring understanding in terms of correspond­ ences: as a technics of representation, perspective involves and creates corre­ spondent social roles and structures, where the observer (the subject) is always opposed to the observed—as the object, constantly descending beneath the subject and his or her point of view. The subject, then, “invents” or “constructs” the object: it classifies, analyses and marks connections, organising the world. This underlines the centrality of human beings with respect to knowledge of nature—point of view as a positioning allowing the cognitive process of grasping the world—to the point that the creation of an objective mathematical space of perspective has, over the centuries, proceeded in parallel with a hyper­ trophisation of the self, more and more coincident with its personal vision, and has deployed a specific relation to the world, where the capture of perceptual data corresponds to an enframing in terms of measurement, calculation, and categorisation. It may therefore appear that the rules of perspective are completely sub­ verted by the advent of digital technologies: the passage from analogue media 406

Milieus of Locality to the contemporary media ecology—made of sensors, implantations, motion controls, and computer-generated imagery—seems to completely reconfigure the observer’s relation to its own modes of representation. The acceleration of technical mediation seems to create an unprecedented affirmative condi­ tion: finding themselves plunged into hyperconnected settings and wrapped in a cloud of self-produced, self-collected, and self-published data, subjects may feel that their faculties have expanded, that they are capable of operating at the raised level of an environmental dimension (Hörl 2012, 70). In such a state, per­ ception seems to have a decreasing need to pass through any conscious noetic process, because intelligent devices capture experiential events directly, micro­ temporally, and subperceptually—that is, outside the scope of human modes of awareness, and through cognitively impenetrable operations (Hansen 2015, 64). As such, the sensory data produced by people and situations becomes immediately and operationally meaningful, and their correlation, no longer requiring the interpretation of any human actor, seems to reach the kind of absolute objectivity that machines alone can provide, bypassing empirical test­ ing. The very continuum of sensory apprehension would thus be processed, worked, and edited in a sort of “mediatechnological engineering” that opens a new dimension of “sensory ecological” experience that is moulded at the very moment of its occurrence. But if this leads to a world extending far beyond the limits of human inten­ tionality, is this same world itself not the complex result of the automated management of data supplied, knowingly or unknowingly, by these very same humans, to which are applied high-performance computing operations, algo­ rithmically correlated to anticipate (preventing or pre-empting) almost all phe­ nomena, including human behaviour? If Deleuze (1992, 4) already declared that the mechanisms of control form “a system of variable geometry the language of which is numerical,” today it is clearer that ciphers have become the main polit­ ical and economic grammes. They build a code capable of seizing and incorpo­ rating any detail of existence by subsuming it into a digital grid of information, to be played on a very particular kind of chessboard, where every movement is determined, and as such can be previewed. The “datafication” of everything is the main weapon deployed in what Bernard Stiegler has described as the society of hyper-control, which not only realises what Deleuze could only have predicted, but updates it through the application of what Antoinette Rouvroy and Thomas Berns (2013) have called “algorithmic governmentality,” a form of governance based on the surgical calculability and predictability of behaviours obtained through the algorithmic correlation of data given and produced by our previous behaviours, movements, perceptions, bodies, choices, purchases, and intentions. In this supposed expanded sensibility, are we not simply feeding the ancient means of perception known as perspective, which was already a key element in the domination of every aspect of the world? Can we still not recognise the modalities of its conception of space, embedded in the visual structure that it had hegemonically organised since the fifteenth century? And isn’t the math­ ematical calculation of the real a sign of the persistence of a superior subject 407

Sara Baranzoni with a detached viewpoint and a normative vision, able to subsume the whole world into a point of view—now through its algorithmic reduction? But is this not also reminiscent of a Leibnizian world, with its need for universal compre­ hension, where the multitude of individual differences finally becomes a func­ tion, and in respect to which everybody becomes essentially definable?

Geometries of perception and the dividuation of subjects If linear perspective for centuries represented one particular way of seeing the world, its opening through Leibniz’s perspectivism seems to mark both a discrepancy and an enhancement. Leibniz’s need to comprehend the world in terms of a conceptual justification, realised through the construction of a system of levels supposedly capable of explaining everything—fold after fold, as Deleuze (1993) puts it—culminates in a sort of pyramidal cosmology where everything has its reason, even if unknown. Leibniz strives to build a perfect mathematical system of relations, of order, where everything is governed by the principle of “sufficient reason,” by which every predicate (every speakable truth about a subject) is already contained in the notion of the subject—the monad. Proceeding in this way, Leibniz ends up folding the totality of the world into the subject itself: “That is the real definition of the individual: concentration, accumulation, coincidence of a certain number of converging preindividual singularities (it being said that singular points can coincide in a same point, as the different summits of separate triangles coincide at the common summit of a pyramid)” (Deleuze 1993, 63). The singularity of the monad lies in its ability to express the entire world, “but obscurely and dimly because it is finite, and the world is infinite” (ibid., 86). The world does not exist outside the monads that convey it, but only insofar as it is included in each of them in the form of perceptions or “representatives.” This implies that the monad is essentially perception, and that the world itself lacks material existence, except in the multiplicity of perspectival representa­ tions—it is the common expression of all individual substances. All opaque microperceptions or representations of the world are little folds that unravel in every direction: it is only their correlation that gives sense to the world as identity—as macro- or molar perception. The clarity of the world arises from the differential relations among the set of minute perceptions, each of which plays a contributory role. And what differentiates one individual from another is precisely the fact of conveying the world from a specific point of view—a localised and enlightened region. The world, Leibniz said, is like a single city seen from different aspects, almost multiplied in perspective, so that, with the endless multiplicity of the monads, there seem to be many different universes, while they are, in fact, only the pros­ pects of a single universe, derived from each monad’s singular point of view (Monadology 57, see Leibniz 1898, 248). This is what “perspectivism” means: not just the relativism of “to each his own truth,” mere subjectivity, but the estab­ lishment of a point of view as the condition of possibility for the manifestation 408

Milieus of Locality of truth. In this sense, as we are told, the monad has need neither of windows nor of doors: the gaze is addressed to what is already contained within it—this is its truth. This is the final cause of the fold: things are made to be inserted in a container, to be im-plied, as related to something, which is the individual, or subject, that occupies the point of view. We can now begin to see how this perspectivism implies a renewal of per­ spectival theory, no longer as the expression of a predetermined subject’s way of gazing out at the world, but as the creation of the subject at the same time it creates the world, a subject as locus of a set of perceptual variations. But we can also feel the resonance between our contemporary world, governed by the necessity engendered by the immanence of algorithmic relations, and a world where every determination is already inscribed in the definition of the indi­ vidual (even if, in our case, rather than “subject” we should speak of “profile”), where everything is managed by a system on the basis of the combination of given possibilities, ruled by convergences and divergences of series, and domi­ nated by what can be called divine play, or, more simply, calculus. In this sense, “the profile” could perfectly correspond to the point that holds the states of the world engendered by our microperceptions together, the condition of truth in things. And what has become the Leibnizian God that contains every perspec­ tive if not the algorithmic leviathan that, according to Stiegler (2016), exerts its power over the entire earth through its ability to continually outstrip and overtake common awareness? What a strange multiplicity, where everything is already defined inside the monads, between which there’s no real possibility of exchange, because each one already contains its own principle of relation and correlation, according to the best of all possible worlds. More than that, it is in this that “individuals have become ‘dividuals,’ and masses, samples, data, markets, or ‘banks,’” as Deleuze (1992, 5) says. Isn’t everything only unfolding what has already been folded within it as its possibility? Does the monad lack doors and windows because it is itself an opening, a point of view on the world, or because it has to shelter the strings of code and hide the predefined actions that define what one may or may not do with it—a mask on its baroque facade to protect the interior? If so, we should ask what remains of our possibility of perceiving after the advent of this supposedly expanded sensation. And, finally, is there some place for re-aestheticising the possibility of feeling the multiplicity?

From closed to open If the problem of Leibniz’s perspectivism is its closure, I would like, by way of conclusion, to attempt an opening through the intersection between the philosopher Deleuze considers Leibniz’s successor, Alfred North Whitehead,3 and an artistic practice that explores anti-perspectival disorganisation. Spanish performing artist Jaime del Val’s project Metabody tries, precisely, to rethink

3 I would like to specify that the goals of my interpretation of Whitehead are far from Hansen’s; see for instance my critique in Baranzoni (2017).

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Sara Baranzoni perception, body, and movement as a practice of taking care of our aesthetic possibilities in the age of digital culture, and beyond the laws of perspective and algorithmic control. Questioning the homogenisation of expressions induced by current com­ putational technologies, which threaten plurality by reducing actions to pre­ dictable behaviours, not only at the level of content but in their very struc­ tures, and particularly in the organisation of perception, Metabody aims to explore and elaborate minoritarian sensibilities, proposing to reinvent them pharmacologically, and to do so through the same digital and computational technologies. For this, a particular wearable interactive architecture is used, which, through a complex system of sensors and multi-focused micro-cameras, highlights the role and diversity of micro-perceptions and micro-expressions in all their physical and digitalisable aspects. The projection of these microworlds captured by the camera on the fluctuating surface of the architecture, which is at the same time internal and external, allows a continuous variation of dynamic environments, enabling the emergence of a metastable, undeter­ mined space-time. The multiple possibilities of focus, and the co-composition (concrescence) of world and subject in their “concrete act of relatedness” (prehension), are both what is new in Whitehead and his Leibnizian echo (see Whitehead [1929] 1978). I refer in particular to the definition of prehension, which is the articulation of a series of data-capturing acts. Prehension should not be confused with per­ ception, and the prehended, or the datum, is not a simple percept realised by a single monad: rather, it is a concrete “fact of togetherness” (ibid., 20), thanks to which “subjects” enter into the process of becoming and form a “nexus,” or “society.” In other words, each prehension, whether physical or conceptual, positive or negative, “functions” in respect to the determination of a subject by integrating other prehensions, realised in antecedent phases or prehended by other members of the nexus, in a chain of prehensions denoting the logic of the event. As Deleuze (1993, 78) puts it, “the event is inseparably the objectifica­ tion of one prehension and the subjectification of another; it is at once public and private, potential and real, participating in the becoming of another event and the subject of its own becoming.” Indeed, according to Deleuze, the sin­ gularity of prehension resides in its being immediately public—that is, that it is capable of entering into relation with another’s point of view, and vice versa: “Everything prehends its antecedents and its concomitants and, by degrees, prehends a world. The eye is a prehension of light. Living beings prehend water, soil, carbon, and salts. At a given moment the pyramid prehends Napoleon’s soldiers (forty centuries are contemplating us), and inversely” (ibid.). By saying that the data of prehension immediately becomes public, Whitehead assumes the subject—or superject, so-called precisely because of its overflying position—as something not already achieved in itself, but rather taken in a processuality of exchanges with other entities that come to consti­ tute its co-definition (concrescence). Putting it schematically: the aspect of “B” from the point of view of “A” participates in its own composition (Whitehead [1925] 1948). This opens a new possibility of thinking relations and relativity, 410

Milieus of Locality one where spatio-temporal relations are not understandable in terms of “sim­ ple location,” that is, the situation in which things or materials can be said to be here in space and here in time in a perfectly definite sense—which makes things self-sufficient and without needing to refer to other entities (ibid., 50). There’s no longer a perspective, but a multiplicity of multisensorial focuses that not only seize but also define each other by means of their relationality. And it is the conjunction of convergent series, the nexus of prehensions, that establishes space and time as the conditions of possibility for concrescence. This is what I call a milieu of locality: a challenge to all previous forms of localisation. In this way, through Whitehead, we can begin to imagine a way of escaping the vicious circle in which any possibility is already enclosed within the dimension of the monad. To again quote Deleuze (1993, 81), if, for Leibniz, “bifurcations and divergences of series are genuine borders between incompossible worlds,” for Whitehead, on the contrary, “bifurcations, divergences, incompossibilities, and discord belong to the same motley world that can no longer be included in expressive units, but only made or undone according to prehensive units and variable configurations or changing captures. In a same chaotic world diver­ gent series are endlessly tracing bifurcating paths. . . . The play of the world has changed in a unique way, because now it has become the play that diverges. . . . It is a world of captures instead of closures.” A sense of what this means can be glimpsed in Metabody: entering this world of “changing captures,” allowing not one, but manifold perceptual ecologies to be explored—here, the power to structure reality is constantly challenged, put in to question, reinvented. References Baranzoni, Sara. 2017. “Aesthesis and Nous: Technological Approaches.” Parallax 23 (2): 147–63. Crary, Jonathan. 1990. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. 1999. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1992. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October 59: 3–7. First published 1990 as “Post-scriptum sur les sociétés de contrôle” (L’autre journal 1 [May]). ———. 1993. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Translated by Tom Conley. London: Athlone Press. First published 1988 as Le Pli: Leibniz et le Baroque (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1995. “Postscript on Control Societies.” In Negotiations: 1972–1990, translated by Martin Joughin, 177–82.

New York: Columbia University Press. Book first published 1990 as Pourparlers: 1972–1990 (Paris: Minuit). Hansen, Mark B. N. 2015. Feed-Forward: On the Future of Twenty-First-Century Media. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hörl, Erich. 2012. “Le nouveau paradigme écologique: Pour une écologie générale des médias et des techniques.” Translated by Guillaume Plas. Multitudes 51 (4): 74–85. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. 1898. The Monadology. In The Monadology and Other Philosophical Writings, translated by Robert Latta, 215–77. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Written 1714 in French without title; first published 1720 in German translation as Lehr-Sätze über die Monadologie (Jena: Meyer). Rouvroy, Antoinette, and Thomas Berns. 2013. “Gouvernementalité algorithmique et perspectives d’émancipation: La disparate comme condition

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Sara Baranzoni d’individuation par le relation?” Réseaux 177 (1): 163–96. Translated by Elizabeth Libbrecht as “Algorithmic Governmentality and Prospects of Emancipation: Disparateness as a Precondition for Individuation through Relationships?” accessed 16 June 2019, https://www.cairn-int.info/ article-E_RES_177_0163--algorithmicgovernmentality-and-prospect.htm. Simondon, Gilbert. 2012. “On TechnoAesthetics.” Translated by Arne De Boever. Parrhesia 14: 1–8. Written 1982 as a letter to Jacques Derrida. First published 1992 as “Sur la techno-esthétique” (Papiers du Collège Internationale de Philosophie 12). Stiegler, Bernard. 2011. Technics and Time, 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise. Translated by Stephen Barker. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. First published 2001 as La technique et le temps 3: Le temps du cinéma et la question du mal-être (Paris: Galilée). ———. 2013. What Makes Life Worth Living:

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On Pharmacology. Cambridge: Polity Press. First published 2010 as Ce qui fait que la vie vant la peine d’être vécue: De la pharmacologie (Paris: Flammarion). ———. 2015. Symbolic Misery: Volume 2, The Catastrophe of the Sensible. Cambridge: Polity Press. First published 2005 as De la misère symbolique: Tome II, La catastrophe du sensible (Paris: Galilée). ———. 2016. Automatic Society: Volume 1, The Future of Work. Translated by Daniel Ross. Cambridge: Polity Press. First published 2015 as La société automatique, 1: L’avenir du travail (Paris: Fayard). Whitehead, Alfred North. (1925) 1948. Science and the Modern World. New York: Pelican. First published 1925 (New York: Macmillan). ———. (1929) 1978. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. Edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. Corrected ed. New York: Free Press. First published 1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

“A Life as an Open Landscape” Systems of Codetermination in Three Robotic Shows Zornitsa Dimitrova Independent scholar, Germany

This chapter links Arne Naess’s vision of ecospheric belonging and Félix Guattari’s concept of an ecosophy to approach three robotic shows by Survival Research Labs (SRL) from 1979, Assured Destructive Capability, Food for Machines, and Noise.1 These works, often staged within urban environments, address notions of embodied interaction, the possibility of relating to a milieu, and the question of artefactual autonomy. Such figures of nonhuman response offer a starting point for a revision of notions of interaction as a communal activity of “living” beings. The self-propelled kinetic artefacts put on display infra-subjective practices of co-alignment. In doing so, they invite us to think of the possibility of an eco-philosophical body across the continuum of what is nominally known as the “living” and the “non-living.” Within this scenario, it is no longer the organism that determines the formation of a biome but the responsive poten­ tial of a given entity (or non-entity). The conceptual core of this argument encompasses (1) a shift from ontological scenarios that favour actuality to ones favouring ontologies of the virtual and (2) a shift from forms of artistic produc­ tion designated as “artworks” toward forms that are “onto-ecological,” that is, amalgams of philosophical, political, and ontological features that carry within themselves an ethics of sustainability. Within this shift, what we habitually call “the body” is seen to undergo a dispersal that defines an entity or a non-entity not so much by the concept of a self but by the concept of a radical attunement. SRL’s enhanced quasi-military machines are installed on open grounds within residential areas. The only humans to be seen during the shows are audience members. The performance space is taken by the interactions of machines or 1 Parts of this chapter first appeared in Zornitsa Dimitrova, “Robotic Performance: An Ecology of Response,” Performance Philosophy 3, no. 1 (2017): 167–77. Impressions from these early shows by Survival Research Labs can be gleaned from the following sources: for Assured Destructive Capability see http://srl. org/shows/archive/assdest/pix/; for Food for Machines see http://www.srl.org/shows/archive/food/; for Noise see http://srl.org/shows/archive/noise/pix/. Assured Destructive Capability took place on 11 March 1979 at Union Square, San Francisco, California, while its counterpart, Food for Machines, was staged on 20 May 1979 at United Nations Plaza, San Francisco, California. Noise took place on 21 September 1979 in San Francisco at Golden Gate Bandshell.

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Zornitsa Dimitrova machine-like apparatuses and special effects equipment. Most of the mechani­ cal creatures are of gigantic proportions; they are constructed out of industrial and military debris. Hence the arbitrary shape of SRL’s creatures—their form is dictated by the materials that could be found and scrambled together at the time. Here the materials disentangle themselves from their status as objects to be used in military operations or in industrial settings but also display a certain withdrawal of the organic. Biological matter within the show space is almost exclusively reduced to piles of undifferentiated debris, either inert or incapable of resistance. Human presence is suspended: here only machines move and act. In encountering these creaturely forms within urban landscapes, one enters zones of enhanced atmospheres that evoke questions raised by Arne Naess and distilled in the term ecosophy, or deep ecology, questions Naess first raised in “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement” (1973). Ecosophy is a paradigm for ecological reasoning rooted in ontology while retaining a clear axiological throughline. The word ecosophy combines the Greek oikos and sophia, “household” and “wisdom.” Oikos, however, designates something far more expansive than a household; it refers rather to oikos as the Earth in its entirety, as a habitat and a world. An ecosophy is a philosophical construct that joins questions of belonging, inhabiting, and relating to an expansive ecosphere. Naess prominently evokes ecosophy in Ecology, Community, and Lifestyle (1989), in which he proposes not only an ontological framework but also an engage­ ment with everyday action. This amalgamation of onto-ethics with concrete action is what Naess calls a lifestyle. Naess (1989, 32) defines ecosophy as “a total view inspired in part by the science of ecology,” but also as a social move­ ment that is not scientific; “its articulation must be permeated throughout with declarations of value and value priorities” (32). In stating this, Naess shifts from ecology to ecosophy, which he describes as an “energetic environmentalism” (35) allowing us “to move from ethics to ontology and back” (67). Naess quotes J. Baird Callicott (1982, 174): “ecology changes our values by changing our con­ cepts of the world and of ourselves in relation to the world. It reveals new rela­ tions among objects” (as quoted in Naess 1989, 67). Similarly, looking at the performing apparatuses, what is revealed is not so much an adherence to the habitual conceptual structuring of the relationship between beings and their surroundings but a shift toward a growing expansiveness. A being ceases to be a thing in an environment. Rather, beings—as defined by ecosophy—become “juncture[s] in a relational system without determined boundaries” (Naess 1989, 79) as we have a “relational system [that] connects humans, as organic systems, with animals, plants, and ecosystems conventionally said to be within or outside the human organism” (79). Traditional ecology relies on concepts such as symbiosis as a feature in eco­ systems—an interdependence for the benefit of each constituent. Such con­ cepts, according to Naess (1989), provide us with “a cognitive basis for a sense of belonging” (168), making it possible to conceptualise phenomena such as the tie of kinship, but also giving us a material basis to think togetherness and cooperation. Ecosophy goes one step further, however, as it shifts toward an ontology. Ecosophy “develop[s] a sense of belonging with a more expansive 414

“A Life as an Open Landscape” perspective: ecospheric belonging” (168). This perspective prompts us to seek new practices and regimes of co-alignment, new valorisations of our modes of togetherness with what we nominally designate as other “beings,” up to the point that Homo sapiens may even become capable “of recommending its own withdrawal as the dominant living being on earth” (169). Along these lines, the robotic creatures of SRL’s shows are not so much an encroachment, a disruption of the narrative of human dwelling, but a revision of this narrative and its adherence to notions of utility. When we think in terms of utility (a concept closely linked to the concept of symbiosis), everything is subordinated to the concrete inhabitant; habitats are thought in terms of being useful for (human) beings or suitable for (human) self-preservation. With these works, however, as Naess reiterates in Life’s Philosophy (2002, 1), we have a “life seen as an open landscape”: “Everything is conceivable, anything can happen. . . . Confronting life can be quite brutal. We are flung into it at birth, then flung further in ‘encounters’ that can be everything from the vile to the sublime.” It is precisely this ontological precarity that is reiterated here: “We travel through this landscape on expeditions big and small. . . . We cannot move entirely by ourselves, any more than we can always bask in the sun” (ibid.). What is shown both in the trope of the open landscape and in these early machine perform­ ances is the high degree of co-immersion of a variety of systems engaged in perpetual practices of co-alignment, putting on display the necessity to think co-habitation in terms that are not only biological (as traditional ecology entails) but also conceptual. The concept of ecosophy that Félix Guattari developed between 1985 and 1992 is somewhat more political as it sees itself as an integrated paradigm tak­ ing into account three ecologies—environmental, social, and mental—as a “vast ecology or aesthetics of cosmic interaction” (Bateson 1987, 311). Just like Naess, Guattari suggests that an ecosophy is more than an abstract system of thought. Not only does it invite us to question speciesism, the divide between an organism and its environment, living and artefactual, and concepts of superi­ ority, it also calls for concrete involvement with other modes of belonging. This new ecology aligns not so much with inter-human or human-habitat relations but incorporates the larger concept of a terrestrial biome. Within this expan­ sive habitat, humans and artefacts co-create their environments and co-alter the established conceptual frames within which they operate. This regime of co-immersion clears a territory for a cohabitation that takes place exclusively in the open togetherness of two networks exposed to one another in such a way that a singular confluence becomes palpable in their co-alignment. It is impos­ sible to speak of entelechy here since nothing is prefigured; habitation takes place in the mutuality of the exposure. There is no striving toward a particular outcome; the particularity derives from each milieu’s individual intensities and the very ways in which given systems respond to one another. Immersion in these robotic performances prompts us to construct extended, non-bodily concepts of response within such perpetually co-aligning networks. Rather than bodies, we have permeable milieus, and rather than the bifurca­ tion between organic and nonorganic, we have thresholds of matter. These 415

Zornitsa Dimitrova networks incorporate a relationality of space, spectatorship, and performing system. Particular beings—whether human or artefactual—do not strictly dissolve but undergo an expansion. What was previously (epistemologically speaking) a subject or an object now becomes “an expanded relational self ” (Braidotti 2013, 60). For these expanded selves the notion of species is just as obsolete as the divide between the organic and the non-organic, organism, and artefact. Instead of species formations, one turns to a state of creative inter­ dependence. Herein “life” does not merely designate self-organising organic matter capable of reproduction but shifts across the organic-artefactual divide to encompass whole participatory networks capable of response. Here one becomes capable of envisioning bodies that extend beyond any boundary to become equivalent with a biome in its entirety. Such expansive co-immersive bodies can be conceptualised in terms of what PhilippopoulosMihalopoulos calls an “open ecology” (2011, 9), an amalgamation of social, bio­ logical, and ecological processes that calls for maximal disciplinary openness. Such quasi-autonomous kinetic work shows this practice of co-alignment in constructing relational milieus, and in inviting us to think of the possibility of an eco-philosophical infra-body across the continuum of what is nominally present as the “living” and the “non-living.” Within this scenario, the formation of a biome is no longer determined by an “organism”; instead, it is determined by one’s partaking in practices of perpetual co-alignment of thresholds of matter as well as the responsive potential inherent in such participatory work. This is a type of expansion that first becomes available through the visionary medium of artistic practice. It recasts artefactual utility into newer forms of habitation. And this is also, it seems, what Guattari envisions with the term virtual ecology: An ecology of the virtual is thus just as pressing as ecologies of the visible world. And in this regard, poetry, music, the plastic arts, the cinema—particularly in their performance or performative modalities—have an important role to play, with their specific contribution and as a paradigm of reference in new social and analytical practices . . . Beyond the relations of actualised forces, virtual ecology will . . . engender conditions for the creation and development of unprecedented formations of subjectivity that have never been seen and never felt. This is to say that generalised ecology—or ecosophy—will work as a science of ecosystems, as a bid for political regeneration, and as an ethical, aesthetic and analytic engagement. It will tend to create new systems of valorisation, a new taste for life, a new gentleness. (Guattari 1995, 91–2)

This “ecology of the virtual” speaks to an infra-bodily and infra-human level of response that operates across individuals and relates us to pre-personal ways of partaking in a world. Here Guattari prompts us to turn to the genera­ tive force of the arts to envision forms of habitation that surpass actual states of affairs. His concept begins as an ontological proposition to bring forth reformed notions of ethics, aesthetics, and politics within an expansive milieu that encompasses a “social ecology, mental ecology and environmental ecol­ ogy” (Guattari 2000, 41). Something similar takes place in these robotic shows, 416

“A Life as an Open Landscape” as here a generalised ecology works as a system of response-making that incor­ porates forms of inorganic “living.” So what are the stakes for an onto-ecology of artistic practice? Thinking in terms of the virtual allows us to think concepts of matter and the living in a different way. Rather than resorting to questions of hylomorphism, Deleuze (following Simondon) sees matter as capable of its own morphogenesis. This is what takes place in the present works: as a participatory practice aligning organic and inorganic porous bundles habitually designated as “bodies,” mat­ ter takes its own course, becoming generative. As Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 512) write, “unformed matter, the phylum, is not dead, brute, homogeneous matter, but a matter-movement bearing singularities or haecceities, qualities and, even operations.” The robotic shows make palpable a form of nonhuman dynamic that consists entirely of thresholds of matter and gradations of move­ ment. We have a maelstrom of haecceities—or intensive forces—affecting one another to form a locale of a continuous response without an end and without a subject.

The response In “Insensible Worlds: Postrelational Ethics, Indeterminacy and the (k)Nots of Relating” (2013), Kathryn Yussof asks what constitutes a response. In con­ cluding that the question of response takes us to an expanded realm beyond regions of intelligibility, the article forces us to think “between natures.” Here we reach toward a conceptual region between natures that can be perceived as matter-forming and as allowing for a co-habitation of incongruent worlds. The response engages the question of relating (whether in terms of nonhuman worlds, of artefactual life or simply in terms of a lack of epistemological access) as a value in and for itself. A universe is not composed of solid entities with some sort of vacuity between them, whereby the act of relating would be one possible scenario in which entities could choose to engage. Rather, we have networks that are continually co-constituted through the act of relating itself and the responsive receiving within a relation. Here one can take up the issue of “enabling . . . responsiveness” (Barad 2010, 265) as an onto-ecological question. The argument here is that the question of artefactual agency needs to be reworked in relation to the virtual and ecolog­ ical dimensions of matter—if the goal is to be responsive toward a world: “To put it another way: there exists an urgent need to find modes of recognition beyond ‘our’ abilities to make nonhuman worlds intelligible” (Yussof 2013, 209). Thus, here the ecology of the virtual could be a form of co-habitation that opens up entities not only to their own potentiality but also to the forms of relatedness they co-shape with an expansive environment. The ecology of the virtual becomes a radical “being toward” that brings new modes of response allowing us to peer into regions that were previously unintelligible, and to partake in the very gesture that takes place between definitive states. Just as Guattari states that “an ecology of the virtual is . . . just as pressing as ecolo­ gies of the visible world” (1995, 91), a practice of response recomposes existing 417

Zornitsa Dimitrova ecological arrangements bringing forth new spheres of attention, and a new gentleness toward the same old world. As Guattari notes, “It is less a question of having access to novel cognitive spheres than of apprehending and creat­ ing, in pathic modes, mutant existential virtualities” (ibid., 120). Therefore, this attunement toward the response also signals an orientation toward an ontolog­ ical critique and, with this, a new orientation toward a world. This orientation allows us to think not in terms of the intelligible but in terms of that which is “between natures,” “not just about more-than-human natures, or posthuman­ ist, or material and virtual, or inhuman and organic, alive and dead natures, but rather that we begin to think the space between these sensible entities, as a spacing” (Yussof 2013, 216) where a being becomes gestural as it opens beyond its provisional outlines to become a “being-toward-something” (Nancy 1997, 7). Here we encounter the space of response inherent in an ecology of the virtual, and this space becomes the articulation of the very threshold between a being and a world. At the same time, this ecological alignment strictly entails not beings but rather aggregates of response that continually engage in a mutual genesis. The concept of response thus draws together such infra-bodies interwoven with their worlds and perpetually generating even more elaborate worlds. Within the robotic performances, this relationality gains an extra dimension. Here it even more forcefully reveals a level of participatory ontogenesis—insofar as the latter designates “the character of becoming of being” (Simondon 2009, 5)— not necessarily linked to human intervention, indifferent to human presence, and yet having an impact on the entirety of a(n human) environment by alter­ ing the texture of the given. In these robotic performances, on the one hand, machines pose as “figures of complexity, mixture, hybridity and interconnectivity” (Braidotti 2006, 49). On the other hand, a countermovement pulls toward a zone wherein one becomes not this particular being but a being. In Braidotti’s interpretation, this pre-formative zone is the domain of zoē. Impersonal and infra-subjective life is inextricable from the living (Aristotle, De Anima, see Aristotle 2016), inherent in and constitutive of living creatures. In providing a ground for the connec­ tion of these two forces, interconnected complexity and élan, a body becomes a diffuse intermediary. A “body” ceases to be something finite, an entity, but is understood broadly to mean an aggregate of responsive features capable of forming relations. This constitutive connectivity allows bodies to become dis­ sipative structures, successions of indefinite states but rarely entities as such. One such state of expansion enables them to participate in a terrestrial biome affirmatively. A body is no longer contained within its provisional outlines but incorporates the entirety of the networks it builds in interaction. Maximally open bodies thus become capable of ecological attunement. Here a body is an imaginary ground that is groundless, a nothing in-between. In this open­ ness, such infra-bodies begin to gesture toward virtuality. Their becoming is grounded in the mutuality of the very particular “style of being” (MerleauPonty 1968, 139–40) that they co-create with their networks of response. These ecosophical spheres of co-alignment work toward a perceived “disappearance” 418

“A Life as an Open Landscape” of the body. A body undergoes an expansion and stretches out toward its coun­ terparts only to foreground the responsive middle ground occurring amid the systems that it co-creates. References Aristotle. De Anima. 2016. Translated by Christopher Shields. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Barad, Karen. 2010. “Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of Inheritance: Dis/ continuities, SpaceTime Enfoldings, and Justice-to-Come.” Derrida Today 3 (2): 240–68. Bateson, Gregory. (1972) 1987. Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution and Epistemology. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson. First published 1972 (New York: Ballantine Books). Braidotti, Rosi. 2006. Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 2013. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press. Callicott, J. Baird. 1982. “Hume’s Is/Ought Dichotomy and the Relationship of Ecology to Leopold’s Land Ethic.” Environmental Ethics 4 (2): 163–73. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Minuit). Guattari, Félix. 1995. Chaosmosis: An EthicoAesthetic Paradigm. Translated by Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. First published 1992 as Chaosmose (Paris: Galilée). ———. 2000. The Three Ecologies. Translated by Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton. London: Athlone Press. First published 1989 as Les trois écologies (Paris: Galilée). Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible. Edited by Claude Lefort. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston,

IL: Northwestern University Press. First published 1964 as Le visible et l’invisible (Paris: Gallimard). Naess, Arne. 1973. “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement: A Summary.” Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 16: 95–100. ———. 1989. Ecology, Community and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy. Translated by David Rothenberg. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Contains translations of some parts of the 5th ed. of Økologi, samfunn og livsstil: Utkast til en økosofi (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1976). ———. 2002. Life’s Philosophy: Reason and Feeling in a Deeper World. Translated by Roland Huntford. Athens: University of Georgia Press. First published 1998 as Livsfilosofi: Et personlig bidrag om følelser og fornuft (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget). Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1997. The Sense of the World. Translated by Jeffrey S. Librett. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1993 as Le sens du monde (Paris: Galilée). Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Andreas. 2011. “‘. . . The Sound of a Breaking String’—Critical Environmental Law and Ontological Vulnerability.” Journal of Human Rights and the Environment 2 (1): 5–22. Simondon, Gilbert. 2009. “The Position of the Problem of Ontogenesis.” Translated by Gregory Flanders. Parrhesia 7: 4–16. Written 1954–58. First published 1989 in L’individuation psychique et collective [Psychic and collective individuation] (Paris: Aubier). Yussof, Kathryn. 2013. “Insensible Worlds: Postrelational Ethics, Indeterminacy and the (k)Nots of Relating.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 31 (2): 208–26.

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Interspecies Sonification Deleuze, Ruyer, and Bioart Audronė Žukauskaitė Lithuanian Culture Research Institute

Unnatural participations In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari famously argue that becoming is a non-linear connection between heterogeneous elements. As they point out, “we oppose epidemic to filiation, contagion to heredity, peopling by contagion to sexual reproduction. Bands, human or animal, proliferate by contagion, epidemics, battlefields, and catastrophes. . . . Unnatural participations or nup­ tials are the true Nature spanning the kingdoms of nature. . . . These combi­ nations are neither genetic nor structural; they are interkingdoms, unnatural participations” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 241–42). Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of “unnatural participations” is often misinterpreted as a literary fantasy, coming from examples of modern literature (Franz Kafka, Herman Melville, H. P. Lovecraft) and modern cinema (Daniel Mann). However, the connection between Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy and the field of biology is much deeper than that: in their works they often refer to the philosophy of biology of Raymond Ruyer and his theory of organic consciousness and melodic mor­ phogenesis. Following Ruyer, Deleuze and Guattari define every living being as a self-organising and self-surveying activity. In this sense, the development of every living organism is a creative activity that resembles the creation of an artwork, and vice versa: to create an artwork (and this is the case of bioart), the artist has to create a dialogue with other species and follow their biological development. In this chapter I will discuss three main characteristics that artis­ tic activity shares with biological organisms: self-survey, melodic morphogene­ sis, and equipotentiality. The continuity between artistic activity and biological organism will be discussed in relation to Ursula Damm’s artworks.

Raymond Ruyer: organic consciousness In his books Neofinalism (first published 1952, see Ruyer 2016) and La genèse des formes vivantes (The genesis of living forms) (1958), Ruyer defines an organism as a primary consciousness that has the capacity of self-organisation, selfaffection, and self-enjoyment. Primary consciousness is an organising activity, which is characteristic of all organic entities at the molecular level; in addition, we have the secondary cerebral consciousness of the non-human animal, which 421

Audronė Žukauskaitė has a nervous system and sensory organs, and is living in a certain Umwelt, and the secondary cerebral consciousness of the human, which has values and lives in a world. However, primary or organic consciousness furnishes all types of consciousness, both primary and secondary, because it has unique capacities of self-survey, morphogenesis, and equipotentiality. It is important to stress that for Ruyer the cerebral or neuronal consciousness is derived from organic consciousness: our brain has the capacity of perception and cognition only because it is made of organic tissue and possesses the characteristic of primary consciousness. Ruyer defines primary consciousness in terms of self-enjoyment and selfsurvey. In other words, primary consciousness knows itself without mediation and externalisation. As Ruyer points out, the Cartesian approach explains perception as being geometrical, quantitative (or divisible), and dimensional, because it always needs one more dimension to be proven. Cartesian percep­ tion resembles the “mythical” third eye, used in photography, or cinematog­ raphy, which “observes” the interaction between the perceiving subject and a perceived object. In contrast, Ruyer argues that our perception is indivisible and in no need of any supplementary dimension. For Ruyer, when we perceive an object, perception, consciousness, and the perceived object merge into one sensation of self-survey, without division or separation. Organic consciousness is defined by this “inner cinematography,” which has no other actors or agents than itself. As Ruyer points out, “the fundamental paradox, which is the origin of all the others, is that a domain of primary consciousness is in ‘absolute sur­ vey’—that is to say without any need of an external scanning—that it possesses a kind of autovision without gaze. . . . It is very difficult to admit that a protoplasm, a molecular edifice, an embryo, an organic tissue or a cortex, are conscious of themselves (possess their own form) before becoming, by added modulation, conscious of the form of other beings, and without being obliged to pass by this detour” (Ruyer 1966, 167, as translated in Grosz 2017, 224). This autovi­ sion without a gaze does not provide visual perception in the Cartesian sense; nevertheless, it implies that organic consciousness is in immediate contact with itself. Thus, not just human consciousness but all organisms have this capacity for self-survey. Ruyer concludes that “there is at bottom only a single mode of consciousness: primary consciousness, form-in-itself of every organism and at one with life” (2016, 98). Primary consciousness is an organic consciousness, whereas secondary consciousness is sensory and cerebral. This statement changes not only our understanding of the brain and consciousness, but also our understanding of subjectivity. If consciousness is defined not by someone’s capacity to perceive the world or itself as an external object, but by immediate self-survey and self-enjoyment, then the notion of subjectivity could be dra­ matically extended. What is important to understand here is that the capacity for self-survey is itself a microbrain that is in no need of a brain behind the brain or subject behind the subject. As Grosz (2012, 6) points out, “it is a pri­ mary consciousness, not of objects, as phenomenology suggests, but of itself in its immediacy. . . . Its consciousness is without a ‘subject-individual who would 422

Interspecies Sonification be the proprietor of the consciousness,’ a consciousness without proprietor.” In this sense here we encounter a kind of subjectless subjectivity (Bains 2002), which embraces not only humans but all living beings, capable of self-enjoyment and self-survey. In this sense, every living being is seen as a living form, capable of self-formative activity. However, we need to explain how a living form participates in the formation of organisms. Ruyer suggests that every living being is involved in morphogen­ esis, which can be imagined as a musical melody: the musical melody or musical theme can be known in advance, and in this sense it is potential, transtemporal and trans-spatial; however, in the process of its actual performance this theme is open to improvisations and adjustments. In a similar way, a living being, undergoing its morphogenesis, is not simply repeating a pre-existing form, but is performing its own theme and creating its material existence. As Jakob von Uexküll has pointed out, “every organism is a melody that sings itself ” (quoted in Ruyer 2016, 201). In other words, for Ruyer the morphogenesis of a living entity must presume the existence of a formative theme or melody, which leads and directs its development. As the organism grows, the developmental theme becomes more and more actualised and “embodied.” In other words, the morphogenetic development proceeds according to a certain melodic theme, which is at the same time “vertical” and “horizontal.” As Bogue points out, “according to Ruyer, morphogenesis proceeds in a tem­ poral, ‘horizontal’ sequence, but always according to a ‘vertical,’ trans-spatial and transtemporal theme, ‘an individualized melodic theme which can either be repeated as a whole or can be distributed in variations, in which the initial, repeated theme serves as its own “development” (in the musical sense of the term)’” (Bogue 2003, 63, interpolating a translated quotation from Ruyer 1958, 96). In other words, the organising theme exists in a virtual domain, but is not completely determined or pre-formed. However, by invoking a trans-spatial thematism, Ruyer does not replace a mechanical pre-formism with a meta­ physical pre-formism. The living being, undergoing this actualisation, does not simply repeat the existing form, but performs its unique actualisation; as in a musical performance, the artist, following the collection of scores, can create his or her unique and singular performance. For example, an embryo has a cer­ tain memory of how to make itself into a fully grown-up organism; but in the process of its development it is open to variations, improvisations, and adjust­ ments (a field that is now well researched by epigenetics). In other words, a melodic theme is a virtual idea, which may be actualised in many different and divergent ways, as it is open to variations and adjustments. Thus a living being, or life in general, has the potential for improvisation, which Ruyer names equipotentiality. Equipotentiality means that in the early stage of organisation embryonic cells are capable of developing in multiple ways. In the process of development, the cells become more and more specific in their function: “at a certain point a given cell might be capable of forming only a limb, or even later, of forming only a right thumb” (Bogue 2009, 309). Equipotentiality, which echoes Deleuze’s virtuality (1994), can be thought of as a certain melodic theme, which can be performed or actualised in many dif­ 423

Audronė Žukauskaitė ferent ways. Today we know this phenomenon as the pluripotentiality of stem cells. However, not only a stem cell but also the brain is capable of equipotenti­ ality and can diminish or expand its capacities. Nevertheless, even if there is a certain analogy between embryonic and cer­ ebral equipotentiality, there are some important differences. When the organ­ ism finishes its development, its form remains irreversible, whereas the brain retains its capacity to reverse its form. The brain is the place of negotiations between the primary consciousness of self-survey and the secondary con­ sciousness of perception. Thus the notion of equipotentiality reveals that there is an intimate relation between the organic form and the brain. As Ruyer points out, “if we want to grasp the facts, we have to become used to dissociating con­ sciousness and brain and to associating consciousness and organic form. The brain is not an instrument for becoming conscious, intelligent, inventive, or reminiscent. Consciousness, intelligence, invention, memory, and active final­ ity are tied to the organic form in general. The brain’s ‘superiority’ or its distinc­ tive character is that it is an incomplete organ, an always-open network, which thus retains equipotentiality, the active embryonic consciousness, and applies it to the organization of the world” (Ruyer 2016, 75). Being always incomplete, the brain is open to becoming and potentiality.

Deleuze and Guattari: organisms with microbrains Deleuze and Guattari invoke Ruyer’s notion of organic consciousness in What Is Philosophy?, in which they relate Ruyer’s notion to the idea of a concept and the act of thinking. Deleuze and Guattari argue that a concept (which is another name for multiplicity and thinking in general) is always in a state of selfsurvey, and in this respect it is close to organic consciousness. Thus thinking and the brain are not the locus of rationality and the mind, but the place where the brain has immediate contact with itself, a self-forming activity: “It is the brain that thinks and not man—the latter being only a cerebral crystallization” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 210). Thus the brain for Deleuze and Guattari is a self-forming organism, which is capable of creating new connections, new cerebral pathways. Ruyer describes every organism as an organic consciousness having the capacity of self-survey, whereas Deleuze and Guattari argue that the brain is an organism capable of self-survey and self-awareness. The brain can be characterised as “a state of survey without distance, at ground level, a selfsurvey that no chasm, fold, or hiatus escapes. It is a primary, ‘true form’ as Ruyer defined it . . . ; it is an absolute consistent form that surveys itself independently of any supplementary dimension, which does not appeal therefore to any tran­ scendence, which has only a single side whatever the number of its dimensions, . . . and which makes of them so many inseparable variations on which it confers an equipotentiality without confusion” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 210). Similar to the organism, which develops according to its melodic morphogenesis, the brain follows its inseparable variations. Thus the brain is considered as a certain activity, as a brain-force connecting human and non-human, organic and inorganic worlds. Deleuze and Guattari 424

Interspecies Sonification assert the existence of vital activity, which connects and reconnects living beings at different scales: “Of course, plants and rocks do not possess a nervous system. But, if nerve connections and cerebral integrations presuppose a brainforce as faculty of feeling coexistent with the tissues, it is reasonable to suppose also a faculty of feeling that coexists with embryonic tissues and that appears in the Species as a collective brain. . . . Not every organism has a brain, and not all life is organic, but everywhere there are forces that constitute microbrains, or an inorganic life of things” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 212–13). Thus the brain is not the locus of subjectivity and consciousness, but a form-taking force, at the same time capable of self-survey and self-proximity. The brain for Deleuze and Guattari expresses the vital activity that characterises and organises both organic and inorganic matter. This activity, first, establishes the brain’s rela­ tionship with itself, its self-awareness and ability to follow its own change and condition; second, it establishes the brain’s relationship with the outside world and other species. Ruyer’s influence on Deleuze and Guattari may also be felt in A Thousand Plateaus, where they develop a consistent theory of organic stratification and destratification. Similar to Ruyer, who makes a distinction between aggregates and living forms, Deleuze and Guattari differentiate between an organism and the body without organs. If an organism is a solidified and actualised form (organism with its organs, forms, and functions), then the body without organs is a constant becoming and potentiality. Similar to Ruyer’s concept of morpho­ genesis, Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of becoming is a creative endeavour, an act of creation, leading to becoming-music, becoming-molecule, or becom­ ing-insect. This potentiality of different becoming is termed the body without organs. The organism belongs to the plane of organisation, whereas the body without organs populates on the plane of consistency. As Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 269–70) point out, “the plane of consistency or immanence . . . implies a destratification of all of Nature, by even the most artificial of means. The plane of consistency is the body without organs. Pure relations of speed and slowness between particles imply movements of deterritorialization, just as pure affects imply an enterprise of desubjectification.” Thus the body without organs is a virtual state, which haunts every actual entity or organism. As Daniel W. Smith (2012, 209) points out, “the body without organs is the model of Life itself, a powerful non-organic and intensive vitality that traverses the organism; by contrast, the organism, with its forms and functions, is not life, but rather that which imprisons life.” For Deleuze and Guattari the body without organs is the potentiality of the body, which enables the lines of becoming and qualitative change. In other words, for Deleuze and Guattari both the organism and the brain (as a specific kind of organism) have the potential for change and simultaneously remain in contact with themselves through self-survey. As Grosz points out for Deleuze and Guattari, the brain is not just a property of vertebrates, an acquisition of higher beings in their evolutionary march, but a property of materiality itself that all living beings capitalize on in their different ways. . . .

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Audronė Žukauskaitė Not only are all higher vertebrates engaged in a process of brain-becoming, even plants, rocks, and crystals are part of a process of becoming-brain to the extent that they contract within their boundaries forces that are outside them, and insofar as they constitute a mode of self-survey or immediate proximity. This constitutes a world of things and events, along with living beings, becoming-brain, becomingthought. (Grosz 2012, 9)

As Deleuze and Guattari point out, not every organism has a brain, but every­ where there are forces that constitute microbrains; in other words, every organic activity expresses the capacity for self-organisation, self-survey, and potentiality. Similar to Ruyer, who argues that every organism possesses an organic consciousness, Deleuze and Guattari assert that every living being is engaged in becoming-brain. This becoming-brain is explored in some works of bioart, which is the meet­ ing point between biological research and artistic creation. As I asserted else­ where (Žukauskaitė 2019), bioart opens new fields of knowledge by creating new sympoietic modes of existence with non-human animals (such as hybrid­ isation, microchimerism, and cohabitation). However, what is important in such artworks is the necessity to ask the right “question” in order to get the appropriate “response,” in other words, to engage in real and not in illustra­ tive communication. Such careful examination of partner species can be found in Ursula Damm’s works, which seek to create interspecies communication by establishing sonic assemblages with insects. Visiting her former home in the small village of Diedesfeld in Germany, Damm was surprised by the silence— the buzzing of insects was missing. Acknowledging that human impact has diminished the former insect population by up to 80 per cent, the artist asks what the role of other species in our habitat is. In Insect Songs (2018)1 the artist observed a species of chironomid midge, Chironomus riparius, and studied their songs, which last as long as their lives do. Damm decided to find out how the midges react to the sounds of human instruments in a series of performances. In the first performance, Christina Meissner used a cello to stimulate midges and start them swarming. In the second performance, Damm established a sequence of “questions and answers,” an interspecies communication based on sonic affects. The third performance expressed a sonic dialogue between the two species in a direct feedback situation (see Damm 2018). In a different project, Drosophila Karaoke Bar (2018),2 the artist investigated the songs produced by fruit flies (Drosophila). Fruit flies are used in medicine and brain research because scientists see flies as proxies for human brains. With the help of neuroscientist and fly researcher Birgit Brüggemeier, Damm explored the meaning and structure of fly songs and invited the audience to lis­ ten to them by amplifying the sound. However, the installation also invited the audience to sing back to the flies using a technical interface—a vocoder—that transforms the human voice into signals perceived by flies. The fly activities are monitored visually onscreen, which helps the potential karaoke performer

1 See http://ursuladamm.de/insect-songs/. 2 At MOMusieum, Vilnius, in 2019, see http://ursuladamm.de/drosophila-karaoke-bar-2018.

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Interspecies Sonification see the real effect on fly behaviour. In this respect, both artworks create a sonic assemblage allowing interspecies communication: the humans have to observe and research the morphogenesis of insects, whereas the insects expand their melodic morphogenesis by interacting with and responding to human instru­ ments and vocals. The artworks create “unnatural participations” enabling the becoming-insects of humans and becoming-music of insects. These artistic examples help us rethink the nature both of biological organ­ isms and of artistic activity. The biological organism is open to potentialisation, to melodic improvisations and change; at the same time it retains the continu­ ity of its development through self-survey. Artistic improvisation is also open to potentialisation, which through the artwork cohabits with other species and recreates the virtual (extinct but virtually present) buzzing of insects. In this case both the organic consciousness of insects and the cerebral consciousness of humans mingle into a continuum of life, into a single sonic experience. This sonic experience functions as an assemblage, interweaving different territories and milieus of human and non-human living beings. As Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 341) point out, “music is not the privilege of human beings: the universe, the cosmos is made of refrains; the question in music is that of a power of deter­ ritorialization permeating nature, animals, the elements, and deserts as much as human beings. The question is more what is not musical in human beings, and what already is musical in nature.” In this respect, these artworks create interspecies sonification, a new sonic assemblage, which allows us to redefine what is natural in art and what is artificial in nature. References Bains, Paul. 2002. “Subjectless Subjectivities.” In A Shock to Thought: Expression after Deleuze and Guattari, edited by Brian Massumi, 101–16. London: Routledge. Bogue, Ronald. 2003. Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. ———. 2009. “Raymond Ruyer.” In Deleuze’s Philosophical Lineage, edited by Graham Jones and Jon Roffe, 300–320. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Damm, Ursula. 2018. “Third Performance: Swarming Midges with Christina Meissner.” Vimeo video, 25:36, posted by “resoutionable,” 16 March. Accessed 18 June 2019. https://vimeo.com/260452958. Deleuze, Gilles. 1994. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1968 as Différence et répétition (Paris: Presses universitaires de France). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and

Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1994. What Is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1991 as Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Minuit). Grosz, Elizabeth. 2012. “Deleuze, Ruyer and Becoming-Brain: The Music of Life’s Temporality.” Parrhesia 15: 1–13. ———. 2017. The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism. New York: Columbia University Press. Ruyer, Raymond. 1958. La genèse des formes vivantes. Paris: Flammarion. ———. 1966. Paradoxes de la conscience et limites de l’automatisme. Paris: Albin Michel. ———. 2016. Neofinalism. Translated by Alyosha Edlebi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published

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Audronė Žukauskaitė 1952 as Néo-finalisme (Paris: Presses universitaires de France). Smith, Daniel W. 2012. Essays on Deleuze. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Žukauskaitė, Audronė. 2019. “Hybrids, Chimeras, Aberrant Nuptials: New Modes of Cohabitation in Bioart.” Nordic Theatre Studies 31 (1): 22–37.

Desire, Temporality, “Liquid Perception” Deleuze and the Films of Marguerite Duras Katie Pleming University of Cambridge, UK

In Marguerite Duras’s cinema, excessive desire recurs as a figure for rethink­ ing the subject, ethical relations, and society. Across Duras’s filmic corpus, this desire surfaces at the margins of society, in liminal spaces where bodies and the gaze are unharnessed from the domesticated Oedipal narrative, as her work imagines positions of desire for a new kind of desiring subject. Deleuze’s philosophy of desire is essential to the advancement of such a project, as it conceptualises the liberation of desire from the Oedipal framework. In his philosophy of cinema, Deleuze explores the ways film responds to the crisis of representation following the Second World War, looking in particular at how film form is put to work in (re)thinking time, narrative, society, and the subject. As such, Deleuze’s Cinema books contribute to his wider philosophical project (see Deleuze 1986, 1989). In his work with Félix Guattari, Deleuze conceives of the Oedipal model of desire predicated on lack as a myth constructed to ensure the continuing operations of phallocratic capitalism (Deleuze and Guattari [1977] 1983, 28). For Deleuze and Guattari, “there is no fixed subject unless there is repression”: the perpetuation of the organising myth of Oedipal lack is dependent on the social unconscious’s investment in identity categories such as those denoting class and gender (ibid., 26). However, if “no society can tol­ erate a position of real desire without its structures of exploitation, servitude, and hierarchy being compromised,” unleashing the non-Oedipal desire of the unfixed subject has revolutionary potential (ibid., 116). Thus, for Deleuze and Guattari, “if desire is repressed, it is because every position of desire, no matter how small, is capable of calling into question the established order of a society: not that desire is asocial, on the contrary. But it is explosive” (ibid.). Through representations of desire that exceed Oedipal models of spectatorship, Duras’s films herald a revolutionary future where the socius is disrupted by ungoverna­ ble flows of desire, and the subject is opened up to becoming.

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Katie Pleming Reading Duras’s experimental films with Deleuze’s philosophy, I explore the ways in which desire emerges as a liberatory, revolutionary force for the subject. I draw on “The Components of the Image” from Cinema 2, especially those moments where Deleuze explores the relationship between image, time, and space (Deleuze 1989, 225–61). Mapping Deleuze’s readings, as he situates Duras and her oceanographic images within a modern cinematic crisis of rep­ resentation, I suggest that in her film La femme du Gange (1974), Duras creates a cinematic mode proper to forms of experience that might exceed a classical “masculine” mode. I explore the possibility of a film-making mode predicated on fluidity as a strategy for representing desire unharnessed from its Oedipal conception as lack. I look in particular at the flows of time, movement, and desire in relation to bodies onscreen. Drawing together montage, gesture, and mise en scène, I examine Deleuze’s philosophy of the time-image in relation to Duras’s “liquid” representation of temporality, trauma, and madness. As desire is liberated from a logic of lack and redrawn as productive “schizo-flow,” I look at the way Duras’s film imagines the ethical relation outside this Oedipal model, drawing on notions of community drawn from Anti-Oedipus.

Fluidity, desire, “liquid perception” As many critics have noted, Duras conceived her written work as in some way fluid. Leslie Hill cites Duras’s own description of her writing as “fluid . . . écri­ ture flottante” (Hill 1993, 17; floating writing), while James S. Williams (2000, 9) recalls Duras’s self-definition of her work as “écriture courante [flowing writ­ ing], Duras’s answer in the 1980s to écriture féminine.” Thus, through her writ­ ing, Duras constructed a “capacious” style that, if not in conscious opposition to phallogocentric literature, was certainly predicated on multiplicity and the breakdown of reified literary categories (ibid.). It is important to note that such an alignment of the feminine with fluidity might invite essentialising read­ ings; indeed, as Rosi Braidotti (1996, 310) suggests, the basis of Luce Irigaray’s critique of Deleuze is his perceived co-option of (“female”) qualities of “flu­ idity, non-being, liminality and marginality” for liberation through becom­ ing-woman, given that these qualities are already “part and parcel of women’s history of oppression.” Such a critique might also be made of Duras’s female subjects, who are so often aligned with these qualities. However, if Deleuze’s and Duras’s representations of the female body tread a narrow line between essentialising and liberation (a critique that has indeed been made of Irigaray— perhaps indicating this “narrow line” as a site of productive thinking), I suggest that their shared interest in the philosophical potential of fluidity is worth investigating. Exploring the notion of a cinematic mode predicated on fluidity, I read desire as it is understood by Deleuze and Guattari: as a productive force, which, through its very refusal to be reduced to a single figure or object, is reminiscent of the linguistic figure of multiplicity—and—which represents, for Deleuze (1995, 45), a “line of flight” along which “things come to pass, becomings evolve, revolutions take shape.” Exploring how notions of identity and community are 430

Desire, Temporality, “Liquid Perception” troubled by the figure of desire, as “making love is not just becoming as one, or even two, but becoming as a hundred thousand” (Deleuze and Guattari [1977] 1983, 296), I read Duras with Deleuze, mapping the link between cinematog­ raphy and revolutionary desire, and drawing Durassian cinematic liquidity towards anti-Oedipal territory.

Voices and temporality In “The Components of the Image,” Deleuze (1989) builds on his discussion of modern cinema, exploring an “irrational cut” which occurs not at the level of montage, but rather in the relationship between the very elements of the cin­ ematic experience: image track and sound track (249). For Deleuze, “modern cinema implies the collapse of the sensory motor schema” (242–43). A break is effected, as a result of which speech “withdraw[s] from the image” (243). The “visual image,” for its part, becomes marked by a renewed focus on space and its “strata,” elements of the visualisation of space qualified by Deleuze as “those silent powers of before or after speech” (243). If, in the cinema of (male) film-makers like Alain Robbe-Grillet, these modern visual images are classified as “archaeological, stratigraphic, tectonic” (243), Duras’s images are awarded their own epithet: “oceanographic” (259). But what, precisely, does Deleuze mean by this? Although it is certainly true that many of Duras’s films refer to or focus around bodies of water—lakes, rivers, oceans—the “oceano­ graphic” quality proper to her films goes beyond such literal representation. The Durassian image’s oceanographic quality, I suggest, can be thought in rela­ tion to time and trauma, space and experience, movement and desire. If, as Deleuze suggests in “The Components of the Image” (1989, 243), strati­ graphic images “take [the viewer] back” to “the deserted layers of our time which bury our own phantoms” (244), the specific intervention of Duras’s visual oceans might be their refusal to formulate time into strata; Duras’s images might thus be read as so many time-images evoking Bergson’s durée, wherein virtual and actual coexist, as moments of past and present surface, mir­ roring the workings of the unconscious. Indeed, later in the chapter Deleuze states that Duras’s intervention is to create a visual image that goes “beyond its stratigraphic or ‘archeological’ values towards a peaceful power of river and sea which stands for the eternal, which mixes up strata and carries away statues” (258). Such a connection suggests a possible reading of Duras’s anti-narrative cinematic style, where action and linear progression are replaced by circularity, repetition, and static staging. La femme du Gange represents Duras’s first experiment with desynchronisa­ tion. The film opens with a brief statement from Duras, in which she affirms that we are in fact given “two films”: “the film played out in images,” and a “purely vocal film, unaccompanied by images” (Duras 1974, my translation). Duras “warns” the spectator that the two extra-diegetic “voix-off ” voices do not belong to the characters who appear in the visual image; these latter are unaware of the presence of the off-screen speakers. Thus, in the film, we are presented with six principal characters (played by five actors): the woman in 431

Katie Pleming black; the young, sick woman, referred to as “la jeune fille de S. Thala”; “le fou” (the madman); a second man; a male traveller sometimes (mis)recognised as Michael Richardson; and the traveller’s wife (played by the same actress as the woman in black). Even this brief dramatis personae begins to reveal the com­ plex structuring of identity within the film; however, in addition to these visible characters, there are two voices who intermittently seem to describe the images onscreen, and to discuss events we are told occurred seventeen years in the past—events that recall those of Duras’s 1964 novel Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein. In this tale, which, in the film, is recalled collaboratively by the voices but never staged visually, a young girl at a ball named Lola Valérie Stein loses her fiancé Michael Richardson to an older woman “with a German name” (later identified as Anne-Marie Stretter). The new couple formed by Stretter and Richardson depart for India; Lola never recovers from the trauma of the ball. Thus, as Duras effects a split between sound and image, the cohesive subject of traditional cinema is replaced by a multitude of bodies and voices in dialogue. As speechacts confuse any attempt to map a linear narrative, time becomes layered and durational, and the primacy of the visual is undermined by the comparative omniscience of the invisible women in dialogue. Chronological time is troubled through speech, as, through the prolifera­ tion of verbal tenses used in the voix-off dialogue and between the characters onscreen, time becomes layered. The (day)time of the figures on the beach stands in parallel to the time of the voices, who at times refer to and react to the world of the visual image (for example, when the woman in black starts at a sudden diegetic banging noise, the voices ask “what’s that noise?”), but who also refer to a separate, “deserted” world in which only they exist. Nested tem­ poralities proliferate, as both the diegetic and extra-diegetic voices refer to the devastating events of the ball, as well as making vague references to later events in colonial India. On the level of the image, irrational cuts between empty daytime and night-time shots of the beach, drawn out in static long takes, interrupt any sense of coherence or progression in the action played out by the characters, who appear in daylight. Verbally, too, time markers take on new meanings. In one confusion of tem­ poralities, near the end of the film, a fire siren wails, and the woman in black remarks “it often burns,” thus aligning the apocalyptic with the repetitive and quotidian (Duras 1974, my translation). This apocalyptic temporality appears too in a moment of overdetermined interaction between the visual and the ver­ bal, when we observe the traveller handwrite a letter (which, it is later revealed, is destined for his wife); he writes that he will “stay at S. Thala. Forever. Forever here.” The implication (later confirmed by the woman in black) is that this eter­ nal commitment is one until death, as infinite duration takes on a deadly sig­ nificance. The terms are reversed in the traveller’s encounter with his wife: she asks how long his desire for another woman has been going on, and he responds “forever,” before adding that he has known “for a few days.” As the apparent contradiction between eternity and the time-frame of the film’s narrative is redirected through the prism of desire, temporal strata are broken down as speech refuses to corroborate the “myth” of chronology in a representational 432

Desire, Temporality, “Liquid Perception” narrative, gesturing instead towards an affective, durational temporality pred­ icated on desire and death. If the traveller and the woman in black occupy multiple temporal positions through language, they might be said to occupy the position of the anti-Oedi­ pal schizophrenic. Frederic Jameson’s discussion of the relationship between temporality and schizophrenia is useful here. For Jameson (1983, 119), “schizo­ phrenic experience is an experience of isolated, disconnected, discontinuous material signifiers which fail to link up into a coherent sequence. The schizo­ phrenic thus does not know personal identity in our sense, since our feeling of identity depends on our sense of the persistence of the ‘I’ and the ‘me’ over time” (see also Peretti 2010). For Deleuze and Guattari, the schizophrenic’s refusal of the construction of (temporal) continuity through a rejection of the self-sufficient ego results in a subject who is “nomadic” and “polyvocal.” In a productive, capitalist society, the “polyvocal real”—the illogical, irrational flows of desire of which reality is formed—is flattened “in favor of a symbolic relationship” between the capitalist production system and the reproduction of the social, familial unit (Deleuze and Guattari [1977] 1983, 101). Deleuze and Guattari condemn all “historical or prehistorical origin[s]” of capitalist society as “completely ideological”; they assert that, in a society that has no originary past, the only possible future is one “fabricated to meet the requirements of an aggregate of departure constituted by a social formation”: the functional capitalist society exists only to reproduce itself (ibid.). In the schizophrenic community of La femme du Gange, just as originary history is troubled by mul­ tiple retellings and insecure temporal mapping, so too is any possibility of a reproductive “destination” foreclosed (ibid.). Duras’s polyvocal and nomadic subjects affirm their instability in time and space: the “madman,” for exam­ ple, repeatedly declares that he is “lost,” at one point announcing desperately, “I have exceeded the distance. The time. The sea was rising” (Duras 1974, my translation). Here the sea acts as a marker of the progression of chronological time while also representing the mutability of space, as it threatens to engulf the beach and its wandering, nomadic figures.

Movement, flow, desire If, for Deleuze and Guattari ([1977] 1983, 105), “desire is present wherever something flows or runs, carrying along with it interested subjects . . . toward lethal destinations,” the workings or flows of desiring-production with capi­ talist society can be interrupted, diverted, towards a revolutionary horizon. These questions thus inevitably open up the question of how a community might operate outside the Oedipal-capitalist structure that operates accord­ ing to a logic of lack. Drawing on, and departing from, Laura McMahon’s read­ ing of La femme du Gange’s community of lovers, I suggest that Duras sets up desiring communities in which sexuality exits the “bedroom of Oedipus” for “wide-open spaces,” in order to “cause strange flows to circulate that do not let themselves be stocked within an established order” (Deleuze and Guattari [1977] 1983, 116). 433

Katie Pleming In Cinema and Contact, McMahon (2012) reads the ethical encounter between lovers in Duras’s Détruire, dit-elle (1969) in terms drawn from Maurice Blanchot, describing how, in the film, the “radical erosion of the self ushers in the disso­ lution of propriety” as the film enacts an “interweaving of desire, death and destruction in a space beyond identity, between interchangeable ‘points of singularity’” (McMahon 2012, 79). For McMahon, the viewer is engaged in this “unworking of fixed identity” (79) through the mise-en-scène, as long takes, static frames and, in later films, desynchronisation of image and sound, create a “plurality of viewing positions” (80) both diegetically and for the spectator. In La femme du Gange, the line of the sea acts like the frames of the image, delim­ iting the space of the visible image while gesturing towards that which exceeds the visible. Indeed, through the use of static frames that refuse to follow vec­ tors of movement, Duras plays with off-screen space as an unstable horizon of possibility. In the moments that follow the madman’s outburst, the woman in black seems to ignore the madman’s words and remarks to the traveller that the sick woman will die if she does not sleep. The traveller does not return the woman in black’s insistent look, but looks down at the crouched figure of the sick woman, who in turn is watched by the man holding her in a gentle embrace. Following these words, as the madman begins to walk back towards the sea, the sick woman begins to follow. Her beige shearling coat, black trousers, and boots match the block colours of the madman’s clothing; as she follows, the perspective makes their bodies merge and separate in the deliberate, measured pace of their respective movements. The merging of bodies in movement gestures towards sexual consummation, as the sick woman refuses the demand of stillness in sleep as an antidote to death. However, as the distance grows between their bodies, the two mirrored figures exit the screen separately; the static camera refuses to follow either body, as the prophecy of the woman in black is played out through the tem­ porary extinguishing of the sick woman’s visual presence. The scene recalls Deleuze’s assertion that “it is at the point where river and sea meet that com­ munication between the sound-image as speech-act, and the visual image, will be constantly shattered” (Deleuze [1985] 2019, my translation). Here, any cohe­ sion between speech and image is disrupted: although the staging represents a rare moment of physical proximity between the five principle characters, any possibility of dialogue is interrupted as the incoherence of vectors of desire; or, in Deleuzian terms, “schizo-flows” that “run free” in the “wilderness,” are represented through a multiplicity of looks that never result in the meeting of gazes (Deleuze and Guattari [1977] 1983, 176). For Deleuze and Guattari, sexual desire in capitalist society is repressed under the sign of Oedipus due to its revolutionary potential. The fluid circu­ lation of Duras’s lovers—the multiplication of vectors of desire through the choreographed bodies and the desiring look—thus represent a potential stag­ ing of subjects whose refusal of Oedipal lack represents a refusal of a society in which “repression, hierarchy, exploitation, and servitude are themselves desired” (Deleuze and Guattari [1977] 1983, 116). Revolution is the product of such a desire’s refusal to submit to the prohibitions of the socius: “real desire” 434

Desire, Temporality, “Liquid Perception” (as opposed to the desire of repression) “does not ‘want’ revolution,” but “is rev­ olutionary in its own right, as though involuntarily, by wanting what it wants” (116). Thus, through their excessive, multiple desires, Stretter and her lovers form a marginal community, at the limits of the socius. As such, they form a schizo-community in which “the self and the non-self, outside and inside, no longer have any meaning whatsoever” (2). For Deleuze and Guattari, the revo­ lutionary power of desire unhinged from Oedipal desire is not “asocial,” but it is “explosive,” posing a threat to established social order (116). Thus, antiOedipal desire is compatible with the communities Duras constructs, in which “partial objects lack nothing and form free multiplicities as such”; in which syntheses between desiring subjects “constitute local and nonspecific connec­ tions, inclusive disjunctions, nomadic conjunctions” (295). In his close reading of Duras’s cinematic style, Deleuze (1989, 259) explores the ways in which her films use image and sound to elaborate a “marine per­ ception” that exceeds traditional representational modes. Spaces are emptied out and clock-time deconstructed as Duras’s Atlantic subjects are set adrift in an immanent plane of desire. Reading the Cinema books alongside Anti-Oedipus reveals the revolutionary potential of Duras’s fluid cinema. Via the elaboration of desiring communities at the limits of the socius in La femme du Gange, Duras explores the potential of revolutionary sexuality predicated on the breakdown of intersubjective boundaries. Revolutionary desire—as the point of intersec­ tion between politics and ethics—remains central in the two films that imme­ diately followed the release of La femme du Gange: India Song (1975) and Son nom de Venise dans Calcutta désert (1976); the three films make up what Lucy McNeece (1996, 4) has termed the “India Trilogy.” However, as the final part of the trilogy shows, in its absenting and emptying out of the other films’ human focus, the multiplication of desire shared across bodies and subjectivities comes at the cost of the destruction and erasure of these bodies, as both film and philosophy bear witness to the risks inherent in the revolutionary desiring project. References Braidotti, Rosi. 1996. “Nomadism with a Difference: Deleuze’s Legacy in a Feminist Perspective.” Man and World 29 (3): 305–14. Deleuze, Gilles. (1985) 2019. “Cinéma et Pensée cours 90 du 28/05/1985.” Transcribed by Pauline Grenier. La voix de Gilles Deleuze en ligne. Accessed 19 June 2019. http://www2.univ-paris8.fr/ deleuze/article.php3?id_article=301. ———. 1986. Cinema 1: The Movement Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. London: Athlone Press. First published 1983 as Cinéma 1: L’image-mouvement (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1989. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and

Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1985 as Cinéma 2: L’image-temps (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1995. Negotiations: 1972–1990. Translated by Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press. First published 1990 as Pourparlers: 1972–1990 (Paris: Minuit). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. (1977) 1983. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1972 as Capitalisme et schizophrénie: L’anti-Œdipe (Paris: Minuit). Translation first published 1977 (New York: Viking Press).

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Katie Pleming Duras, Marguerite, dir. 1974. La femme du University Press of Florida. Gange. [France]: Sunchild Productions. Peretti, Johnah. 2010. “Towards a Radical Hill, Leslie. 1993. Marguerite Duras: Apocalyptic Anti-Capitalist Schizophrenia?” Desires. London: Routledge. Critical Legal Thinking: Law and the Jameson, Frederic. 1983. “Postmodernism Political. Accessed 19 June 2019. http:// and Consumer Society.” In The Anticriticallegalthinking.com/2010/12/21/ Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, towards-a-radical-anti-capitalistedited by Hal Foster, 111–25. Post schizophrenia/. Townsend, WA: Bay Press. Williams, James S. 2000. “Introduction: McMahon, Laura. 2012. Cinema and Contact: Revisioning Duras.” In Revisioning The Withdrawal of Touch in Nancy, Bresson, Duras: Film, Race, Sex, edited by James Duras and Denis. London: Legenda. S. Williams, 1–18. Liverpool: Liverpool McNeece, Lucy Stone. 1996. Art and Politics University Press. in Duras’s “India Cycle.” Gainesville:

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Photogenesis— Brokering World Peter Burleigh University of Basel, Switzerland

I want to start my paper with an anecdote, or rather with a literary incident— well a coincidental moment: recently, I was struck by an apt passage from Dead Man’s Folly, a 1956 Agatha Christie murder mystery. The moment comes in the hiatus after the detective has narrowed down the range of possible suspects, yet the mystery is seemingly as insoluble as ever: Hercule Poirot sat in a square chair in front of the square fireplace in the square room of his London flat. In front of him were various objects that were not square: that were instead violently and almost impossibly curved. Each of them, studied separately, looked as if they could not have any conceivable function in a sane world. They appeared improbable, irresponsible, and wholly fortuitous. In actual fact, of course, they were nothing of the sort. Assessed correctly, each had its particular place in a particular universe. Assembled in their proper place in their particular universe, they not only made sense, they made a picture. In other words, Hercule Poirot was doing a jigsaw puzzle. He looked down at where a rectangle still showed improbably shaped gaps. It was an occupation he found soothing and pleasant. It brought disorder into order. It had, he reflected, a certain resemblance to his own profession. There, too, one was faced with various improbably shaped and unlikely facts which, though seeming to bear no relationship to each other, yet did each have its properly balanced part in assembling the whole. His fingers deftly picked up an improbable piece of dark grey and fitted it into a blue sky. It was, he now perceived, part of an aeroplane. “Yes,” murmured Poirot to himself, “that is what one must do. The unlikely piece here, the improbable piece there, the oh-so-rational piece that is not what it seems; all of these have their appointed place, and once they are fitted in, eh bien, there is an end of the business! All is clear. All is—as they say nowadays—in the picture.” He fitted in, in rapid succession, a small piece of a minaret, another piece that looked as though it was part of a striped awning and was actually the backside of a cat, and a missing piece of sunset that had changed with Turneresque suddenness from orange to pink. If one knew what to look for, it would be so easy, said Hercule Poirot to himself. But one does not know what to look for. And so one looks in the wrong places or for the wrong things. He sighed vexedly. (Christie 1956, 150–51)

Starting with such an image of thought projected through Poirot gives me a double leverage. First, it thematises a vexedness in front of the compostable evidence; what can inhabit rather than invade, what can belong rather than possess, what can tether to, and be a contributing member of this “muddle?” Second, it looks at the constituency of this vexedness, at its logic in the face of the “improbable, irresponsible, wholly fortuitous,” “violently and impos­ sibly curved.” Framed by a neatly ordered, nested, square world, Poirot occu­ 437

Peter Burleigh pies a liminal, transient zone straddling the virtual—or as he characterises it, the “improbable, irresponsible, and wholly fortuitous” and the actual where “assessed correctly, each had its particular place in a particular universe. Assembled in their proper place in their particular universe, they not only made sense, they made a picture.” There is in Poirot’s puzzling, indeed in com­ pleting any jigsaw puzzle, a process whereby the seemingly incoherent random aggregation—from which individual items are drawn to an attractor—merges into a sensible whole. In the logic of the jigsaw puzzle there is asymmetry: dif­ ference with its irresponsibility, the concrete with its “propriety”; a differenti­ ation in one direction, a differenciation in the other, flip-flopping across the emerging image that governs both domains of the virtual and actual. Such are the credentials of the Dead Man’s Folly as a tool to feel a way through, to yoke with intensities, to adopt a compostable tangle; they are the warrant to “bring disorder to order.” Poirot is all well and good you might think as bedtime reading, but how can this puzzling image of thought be ingrained into the photographic, the task of my chapter. Poirot’s vexation in the face of “not know[ing] what to look for, and so look[ing] in the wrong places or for the wrong things” is precisely the predic­ ament—the apparent impossibility of a description of the photographic—that puzzles me. For in my understanding of the manner of the history of photogra­ phy, of the writing of that history and of the critique of consequent historiogra­ phies, such knowledge production is rather too self-evidently grounded in the image. This would seem to be a truism, an image of thinking photography that need not be challenged—for isn’t it self-evident that photography is “about” precisely the image or images that it produces, circulates, and even consumes. Isn’t photography, well—photographs. These photographs were disgorged into the first half of the nineteenth century, and are most remorselessly present today in an impetuous manner, eating away at any remaining originary auratic experience, regurgitating that regime as the quotidian. A photograph is a form of image, be it the nineteenth-century product of the desire to be “fetter[ed] by the spells of our ‘natural magic,’ and [fix] for ever in the position which it seemed only destined for a single instant to occupy” (Talbot 1839, 14), or the completely reversed “poor image,” turned inside out in a deliberate vacuity and dissipation of any value—“an illicit fifth-generation bastard of an original image. Its gene­ alogy is dubious. . . . It is passed on as a lure, a decoy, an index, or as a reminder of its former visual self ” (Steyerl 2009). In this trajectory, an initial matrix of deceleration at the origin of photogra­ phy has become supplanted by an escalation that effects a differing of evanes­ cences: the petrifieds of that primal 1830s drive to overwhelm time, themselves now overwhelmed by revirtualisation as fast circulating fugitives in a culture that embraces the thrill of disappearance. Now our understanding of photogra­ phy, which had centred on the image it produces and the consequent values and functions, shifts to a thinking of the economies of distribution, accelera­ tion, dissipation, indeed, as Steyerl (2009) suggests, to the question of whether it is an “image at all.”

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Photogenesis—Brokering World Yet in such an image of thought, it seems to me that there is only a portion and at that a divisible portion of the scene imagined of Poirot by Christie. For principally it is a product once “there,” concrete and actual, now thin and waiflike that had focused our attention and deliberation in the past and now still haunts it in the present, rather than the generative process that underlies the slices of any real so produced. Such understandings of the photographic are the parts of the puzzle that fit together always-already made as image. That is, the pieces that are complete, when we draw away and see the “part of an aero­ plane,” “the backside of a cat,” the “missing piece of a sunset.” What is visible is simultaneously an a priori given and an a posteriori outcome. It is the friction of these temporal circumstances that masks what remains invisible—the ontol­ ogy of photography: “[the] improbably shaped and unlikely facts which, though seeming to bear no relationship to each other, yet [do] each have [their] prop­ erly balanced part in assembling the whole” (Christie 1956, 150). My claim, then, is that to visualise an image of thought of photography, to approach beyond the curve of experience, we must withdraw from the notion of the photographic as the maker of images of the given world, recording, witnessing, slowing down, speeding up. Instead we must think of the photographic as an event that generates the world as image, wherein such functions of genesis bring about an extensive multiple iterated and/et, but crucially more so an intensive multiplicity also/être. It is such a concept that shifts the photo-graphic to the photo-genetic. From its inception, what became named photography was characterised as the production of images “impressed by Nature’s hand” (Talbot 1844, 2). This technology was without want of human agency, although the earliest full proc­ lamation of photography published by Henry Talbot in a scurry to claim the priority of his “art of photogenic drawing” following Louis Daguerre’s earlier announcement in January 1839 is replete with the reconstruction of human agency: a reflection back in time, documenting Talbot’s discovery of the pho­ togenetic after the event. Precisely such after-the-eventness centred in its histori­ ography gives the lie to photography as a natural medium. Along a durational trajectory, the photographic is the (amassed) residues of the recording of world that are evidently a posteriori. This is what we see in the billions of images we now produce. It is the specular visibility of a seemingly automatised tech­ nique—mostly banal, unary, mundane, an andness. The wonder of those early after-the-event ruptures in time and space, Talbot’s sun drawings, are grounded in his inductive reasoning for finding an indeterminate chemical process that immunises a material’s response to light—specifically to remove sensitivity to sunlight. In the minutia of the differences his image genesis made in the world, there are capsules, islands of meaning—small time machines—which together comprise a shifting, moving mass of sensation that is still cast as theoretically challenging. For the photographic also renders visible the photogenic event, and does so with every instance of genetic graphology. That is, it makes visi­ ble—actualises—flows of difference bringing the world into image form. The inducement to stabilise the world to capture with the photographic has to rad­ ically shift its virtual mechanism from being grounded in the necessarily induc­ 439

Peter Burleigh tive technique that Talbot read as representing the world, to instead being a primarily virtual medium intervening in making the world. In Towards a Philosophy of Photography Vilém Flusser locates technical images in a historical sweep of materialism. He suggests that authentic, magical imag­ es—a visual form, perhaps, of the Lacanian Real—were first demystified by a regime of text tying them to explication, to then be superseded by techni­ cal images (photographs) that function in a radically different way from that text and from those primal images: technical images, then, to quote Flusser (2000), “absorb the whole of history and form a collective memory going end­ lessly round in circles” (19–20). They replace a “prehistoric . . . ritualization” (17) that operates myths with “a new kind of magic, i.e. the programmed kind” (19): “rather than replace [traditional images] with reproductions, . . . [technical images] displace them and, rather than make hermetic texts comprehensible . . . they distort them by translating scientific statements and equations into states of things, i.e. images” (19). Under this paradigm, the way images work parallels mutations in the means of the reproduction of capital, indeed of the whole social superstructure, in that those means are masked by the forms in which images circulate. Photographs are renditions of the world that appear to return to a magical domain—the image as such in the world—yet are actually encodings of the world through the transcription of text as image, obscuring that complexity behind the myth of realism. In this respect, photographs occupy an uncomfortable, thus, inter­ esting territory between opaque myth-making and a naturalism that tells the world how it is. On one side, the strata of photographs face the machinations of production and the reproduction of that production—for which read a particular ideological social formation—such machinations remaining unc­ ognised; on the other side, the strata are instruments of a particular realism that tells the world what obtains as visible. The plane of photography folded on itself is then a kind of echo platform, whose reverberations across the strata seem to be operated by a post-subject proclivity for a common-sense reality. The agentive human hand might be removed from the particular mechanism of photography, but it becomes reinscribed in the mode of capital that exactly desires to excoriate any subjective interpolation. Under this guise, then, the Frankfurtian wariness, a fascinated dis/mistrust of the photograph in Flusser’s readings of its materialist history, still seems to bear critical fruit. Adopting a differently sceptical position is Deleuze’s approach to the photo­ graphic image, resisting what he sees as the calcified “dreary” signifier (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 116) of the fixed photograph. Through a glaring absence in his discourse, Deleuze centralises the photograph at the core of the despotic regime of the inevitability of the sign as signifier of a something/when. In A Thousand Plateaus “On Several Regimes of Signs,” he and Guattari give the ontol­ ogy of that sign a quotidian form (even if not a declaredly photographic one): the signified is given without being known. Your wife looked at you with a funny expression. And this morning the mailman handed you a letter from the IRS and crossed his fingers. Then you stepped in a pile of dog shit. You saw two sticks on

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Photogenesis—Brokering World the sidewalk positioned like the hands of a watch. They were whispering behind your back when you arrived at the office. It doesn’t matter what it means, it’s still signifying. The sign that refers to other signs is struck with a strange impotence and uncertainty, but mighty is the signifier that constitutes the chain. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 112)

Breaking this inevitable signifying chain is what I am calling the photogene— an actualisation of virtual multiplicities and differences that circulate in the technical diagram constituting the photogenetic event—which cuts into the world with a very particular signalisation occupying an ontological space quite different in kind from that of the crude trace of the photograph. A photogene (as actual as a concrete photograph), although given a signification governed by the despotic, the mighty signifier S, and at the same time being rendered by that signalising regime as a curator of such a despotic regime—both belong­ ing to and determining the set in a folding in on itself—is the material resi­ due, the concrete matter, the actual disposition of a differenciation from the virtual: it is thus more than just a trace of a given world. As the resident and residue of an event, it is and points crucially to that specific singularity that makes world: to itself as inhabiting the diagrammatic make-up adjacent to a plane of composition. The diagram is the code of a larval potential to come into being as an image of anything, anywhere, anytime: a multiplicity of pos­ sibilities; the plane of consistency (PoC) is the substance of the material form they will become in the second articulation, the folding around an attractor in actualisation. Together, diagram and PoC are the body without organs of the virtual domain, through differenciation, an actualisation as an affective assem­ blage in the lived domain: a cherished image of me, for instance. No longer a dreary trace, a singular technical image is one intensive, importantly intensive actualised-as-a-unary-surface, rendering of a multiplicity of potential forms that flux in a virtual domain. It seems then that both Flusser and Deleuze do touch on the generative possibility of the photograph, but with a sense of utopic disappointment in the image not making the radical connections it might. In this respect, they are right—even if they come to an ontology of the image that I think is wrong. A solution to the dilemma to keep a transcendental empiricism grounded in materialist conditions is to turn perhaps to Walter Benjamin’s mechanically reproduced artwork (Benjamin [1968] 2007). Benjamin’s argument placed the regime of the photographic at the centre of a catastrophic political, ethical, and moral crisis. Contingent to those historical circumstances, his argument still holds weight in the trajectory of the photogenetic image. An explosion of mechanical reproduction extracted image from its auratic locus, bring­ ing it nearer to the observer, and sending it on a trajectory of watered-down experience substituted by an initiation of an economics of circulation. John Berger extends this argument, thinking how the freed-up artwork becomes image, both relocated in juxtapositions outside its originating circumstances and simultaneously coming into play with other images. This flux of image that starts to bombard the subject is a revirtualisation wherein any combination and circumstance might confront us. Now not only close, but overwhelmingly 441

Peter Burleigh and constantly so, the image takes on the function of force-feeding world to us. Hito Steyerl’s poor image makes Benjamin’s auratic object for others and for itself fully obsolete. For, in Steyerl’s reading, what is crucial is the economy of the image, avariciously exiling the original, and abandoning the l’art pour l’art image. We are now embedded in the intense accelerated glare of images of immense multiples of extension, where image does not copy the world, it makes world. The payoff for a diversion with evanescence—seduction by scin­ tillation—is that a loss of referentiality has opened up a gap now usurped by a neo-liberal capitalisation of time and space as image. Under this economy, the making of world that first operated in the photo­ genetic diagram is, however, not restricted to planar photographs. That which radically shifted visual paradigms from the mid-nineteenth century on is now played out in material ways far beyond this specular diagram, yet still crucially founded in it. It is grounded in a process of image becoming world. And its prev­ alence is not just in its concrete rendition as a flood of images, but in its under­ lying constitution as a maker of world. Photographic space is thus extruded out of a planar image, out into an economic form of architectural space. We shop, socialise, travel in spaces that are of course filled with images; but far more crit­ ical than the extension, the multiplication, of images around us in such spaces is the intensity of those spaces that are enacted as image. In other words, the incorporation by the late-capital mechanism of the image as architecture, as process, as result (think Starbucks, McDonald’s, H&M) is a particular form of intensity. This is the intensity wherefore a post-subject mechanism of rendering the world extracts lived life from a specific location with a specific contingency and attendant vicissitudes, and reterritorialises experience entirely as image. Such intensity is a mimesis of the constantly changing vectors of an extension in the world the and and and of events with their accompanying folding over be be be of intension. Critically it is not a radical, hopeful de- and reterritorialisa­ tion, a springboard to progress as Benjamin may have desired for the image; rather it is the calcifying mechanism of capital to make the lived experiences of the subject universally exchangeable and verifiable against the contemporary uncertainty and precarity of dislocation in space or time. Fly anywhere and have coffee in one of Starbucks’ 29,324 locations because you know, like, and are familiar with their caramelised latte. Such experiences have become calcified traces superintended by the despotic signifier, the photograph with its seem­ ing grasp on the real as a record of experience. It is thus that corporate spaces, which are the architectural form of a reproducible image of the world, train our experiences and expectations, narrowing them to a reduced field of sensations in a disposition of extension that depletes intensity, bringing experience to the same plane of exchange as capital. In so doing, globalised incorporation makes experience exchangeable with local variations of intensity that mask for the consumer the dominance of extension in capital, capital in extension. Thus, along one burgeoning strand of a trajectory of image there is the sus­ ceptibility to the mores of capital: the selling of individual experience and the misconstrual of self as an individual with choices. This is the optimism of capi­ tal—a false optimism that distracts self from the values of connection and rela­ 442

Photogenesis—Brokering World tion, of the intersectional disposition that forms the subject. Along such a tract, a whole unified exchangeable unit of identity splices neatly into the workings of capital—compared with the awkward emerging dysfunctional self that thrives only in difference, that resists. So need we be totally wary of the regime of signs we are in, governed by a dominant photographic sign that, masked by the machinations of capital, makes world? Well yes and no. Yes, because it makes sense, if I understand Deleuze correctly, to be critical, to find the ground of dif­ ference, to seek difference itself to inhabit even if only momentarily a domain for virtual compossibilities to reactualise in new territories around new attrac­ tors. And no with the yes, because we can take a different stance outside utopic disappointment by exactly deconstructing the apparent reproduction/render­ ing of the world and understand it as a production. A guerrilla attack on this mechanism of capital starts in thinking the regime of the photographic sign as exactly that: a hugely dominant regime and as a regime that makes our world and not just relates our world. In that case, if images make world and if we can operate that making, we can make a difference. This is how we do actually effectu­ ate something: through making the seemingly unfit pieces fit. There is so much more to say here, in terms of ways to act and how to be in a world that is dumbfounded in the face of capital. For brevity, and to bring my polemic to a close, I just want to go back to my starting point but differently. Deleuze helps in “November 20, 1923: Postulates of Linguistics”: “It’s easy to stammer, but making language itself stammer is a different affair” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 98). What I try then is not to make images of stammering, nor to make images stammer, but rather to make the regime of image stammer. Invoking the genetic rather than the graphic digs out the production of world in image; allowing the graphic to supersede this genesis and claim mere extension of the world, mere reproduction, impersonates and veils the act of an intensive mimesis. Without a deconstructing imperative, this mimesis wipes the world over with one single form of the corporate image. The stammering then has to restore genesis to take an “improbable, irresponsible, and wholly fortuitous” path, while realising that perhaps “in actual fact, of course, [it is] nothing of the sort.” A detective at the scene of violence enacted by image must try putting the pieces together in unexpected ways, perhaps knowing where to look in the wrong places, making world anyway. For finally as Poirot puts it: “All is—as they say nowadays—in the picture.” References Benjamin, Walter. (1968) 2007. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn, 217–52. New York: Shocken Books. Essay first published 1936 as “L’œuvre d’art à l’époque de sa reproduction mécanisée”

(Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 5 [1]: 40–68). This translation first published 1968 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich). Christie, Agatha. 1956. Dead Man’s Folly. London: Collins. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian

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Peter Burleigh Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Minuit). Flusser, Vilém. 2000. Towards a Philosophy of Photography. Translated by Anthony Mathews. London: Reaktion Books. First published 1983 as Für eine Philosophie der Fotografie (Göttingen: European Photography). Steyerl, Hito. 2009. “In Defense of the Poor Image.” e-flux 10. Accessed 19 June 2019.

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e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defenseof-the-poor-image. Talbot, William Henry Fox. 1839. “Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing, or the Process by Which Natural Objects May Be Made to Delineate Themselves without the Aid of the Artist’s Pencil.” Read before the Royal Society, 31 January. London: R. & J. E. Taylor. ———. 1844. The Pencil of Nature. London: Longman.

Sculpture Installation

Garden of Small Nuptials Elizabeth Presa University of Melbourne, Australia

I am writing the final draft of this paper from the Goldfields of Central Victoria in Australia. The temperature outside my mud-brick house approaches 45°C. Winds of 100 km/h shift in all directions. I watch as the fur of a hare catching the sun with a momentary prismatic sheen moves in a crazed choreography against waves of dry grass. Mud islands rise in the large dam. Water bubbling with frenzied insects shows life intensified to the nth degree. A blue-tongue lizard with its heavy golden belly drags itself beneath a planter containing cacti. It closes its eyelids—slits of skin in a sleek flat skull—and sinks into primordial consciousness. Blowflies crawl into the shadows and into the darkness of its half-opened mouth. An hour or so later several miniature replicas of the liz­ ard writhe, medusa-like, about her skull. (Apparently blue-tongue lizards give birth to autonomous young in contrast to most reptiles who lay eggs.) Two bot­ tles of mineral water filled from a nearby mineral spring turn orange as the iron, magnesium, copper, and sulphur dissolve. Sunlight penetrates the plastic receptacles revealing galaxies of gaseous liquids and gyrating particles perhaps millions of years in forming. Three weeks ago, in a temple in Tibet, I had seen hundreds of plastic bottles containing spring water placed next to torma, small sculptures made of yak butter depicting lotus leaves and flowers. The neatly placed bottles formed prisms radiating lines of illumination across the altars where giant Buddhas, draped in colourful fabrics, sit in glass vitrines. It is believed the torma originated when Tsongkhapa, a Buddhist saint and philoso­ pher, instructed the lamas to represent a dream he had had of withering plants turning into countless diamonds shining within the depth of thorny branches. Due to the lack of sculpture materials, the lamas used butter. To prevent the butter melting while moulding and carving it, it is necessary to dip one’s hands constantly into buckets of freezing water, thereby risking frostbite while car­ rying out what is considered a devotional act. In a similar act of introspection and devotion to materials and subject matter, the Florentine artist Cennino Cennini (c.1360–c.1427) advised artists to set their hands in plaster for three weeks prior to commencing a fresco. Indeed, Cennini’s treatise on art, Il libro dell’arte, with its richly detailed technical descriptions for mixing pigments and casting and gilding methods reads as if God, the saints, angels, and other divin­ ities might themselves, and not just their images, be made of gold, egg white, animal fur, boiling gesso, fish glue, azure, quicksilver, and sulphur, and that 445

Elizabeth Presa therefore an artist’s role is that of staging alliances between heterogeneous systems, process and materials. It seems all manner of aberrant nuptials and strange becomings are always, everywhere, unfolding.

Figure 36.1.

There is always an intimate relationship between matter and form. Jean-Luc Nancy (2005, 12) writes “matter is first mother (materies comes from mater, which is the heart of the tree, the hardwood), and the mother is that from which, and in which, there is distinction: in her intimacy another intimacy is separated and another force is formed.” Matter, whether it be flesh, fur, milk, butter, leaves or branches, clay or minerals, unfolds into incredible differentiations of colour and texture, weight, density, luminosity, and transparency. But there is always also some touch, some gesture or action—carving, shaping, placing, biting, scratching, breaking, or binding—that exerts a generative force on matter, that makes it distinct. While reflecting on the painting of Simon Hantaï (1922– 2008), Deleuze (1993, 35) writes of the fold that ceases to be mere representa­ 446

Figure 36.1. Elizabeth Presa, Garden of Small Nuptials, installation, dimensions variable, 2017, Orpheus Institute, Ghent.

Sculpture Installation: Garden of Small Nuptials tion and becomes a “‘method,’ a process and act.” The fold, which is indeed the very subject of Hantaï’s work, is actualised through the folding, binding, and pleating of raw and painted canvas itself. The fold simultaneously becomes the ground, the image, the process, and the force of the work. “Matter,” Deleuze writes, “that reveals its texture becomes raw material, just as form that reveals its folds becomes force. . . . the coupling of material-force is what replaces matter and form” (ibid.). Hantaï’s folded paintings become, for Deleuze, pure force expressive of the joyousness of the soul, the heart, and the senses.

Figure 36.2.

An image of Bernini’s sculpture Daphne and Apollo accompanied the announcement of the 2017 DARE conference “Aberrant Nuptials.” This sculp­ ture famously depicts the moment when Daphne, fleeing Apollo, launches into a line of flight entailing strange and unnatural becomings. In the original sculpture in the Galleria Borghese, exquisitely carved forms appear to oscillate 447

Figure 36.2. Elizabeth Presa, Garden of Small Nuptials, installation, dimensions variable, 2017, Orpheus Institute, Ghent.

Elizabeth Presa between the marble’s frozen translucence and the movement of flesh and hair becoming roots, bark, branches, and foliage. Before commencing carving in marble, Bernini experimented with full-size clay models. The Vatican museum holds two such clay models for the Ponte Sant’Angelo angels, comprised not only of clay but also of plant fibre, hair, and bundles of reeds. They still bear the impressions of Bernini’s fingerprints. The physicality of the materials and the immediacy of the processes—modelling wet clay over plant and other organic matter—compel wonder. For they make evident that the world, in its most mundane sense, holds within it potential for remarkable transformation, whereby even some dirt, clump of straw, or stone can take on the character of a wing or flesh, or the transcendence of mystical experience. Deleuze (1993, 9), in quoting Leibniz, reminds us that “each portion of matter may be conceived as a garden full of plants, and as a pond full of fish. But every branch of each plant, every member of each animal, and every drop of their liquid parts is in itself likewise a similar garden or pond.”

Figure 36.3.

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Figure 36.3. Elizabeth Presa, Garden of Small Nuptials, installation, dimensions variable, 2017, Orpheus Institute, Ghent.

Sculpture Installation: Garden of Small Nuptials What connects this account of matter as infinite plenitude—a garden and pond teeming with life—to a thematic of strange and unnatural nuptials, such as might occur between heterogeneous systems, organisms, geographies, and mythologies? Australia, as an ancient continent, could be said to teem with such aberrant nuptials, where primordial strata permeate life and experience. Consider the ancient figurative Gwion Gwion,1 rock paintings from the Kimberly in northwestern Australia, whose vibrant colours are produced by “living pig­ ments” of red cyanobacteria and black fungi. Legend holds that the painted images found on the most inaccessible rock walls were etched into the rock by Kujon, a black bird, who struck his beak against the rock so that it would bleed and who then used the blood to paint finely detailed human-shaped figures wearing elaborate head ornamentation carrying baskets and spears. The original pigments in Gwion Gwion cave paintings have been replaced by a biofilm of living, naturally pigmented micro-organisms whose growth and regeneration accounts for the longevity and vividness of these ancient works of art. These micro-organisms sustain a process of symbiosis and equilibrium while simultaneously etching the paintings deeper into the rock.2 The sticky substances secreted by the rock-adapted fungi and cyanobacteria aid adher­ ence to the rock and resistance to dehydration, keeping the art in a state of per­ petual (re)incarnation—a “living” prehistoric art (Mircan and Van Gerven Oei 2015). The symbiosis between biological metabolisms, chemical secretions, and mineral deposits reveals an art that is simultaneously dead and alive, that cannibalises itself, and is both prehistoric and contemporary. In a movement from the ordinary to the remarkable, gestures in clay and ochre, and allegories of metamorphoses and flight, shape and mark out strange anatomies and becomings. Rock becomes flesh—a biofilm of bacteria—as hair becomes plant, filaments, and fibres. Secretions of sorrowful tears and sticky liquids sustain gardens of living pigments to catch intensities of light, with each work a register of shifting fidelities. My suburban garden in Melbourne contains various species of indigenous and exotic trees, plants, herbs, shrubs, and weeds, as well as beehives, silkworm colonies, a fishpond, and various native and exotic birds and insects. It often forms some unexpected relationship or encounter with my sculpture. Indeed, much of my work is made within the vibrating hum of the beehives against the outside wall of my studio.

1 Gwion Gwion art is dotted across approximately 100,000 sites spread over 70,000 square kilometres. The unique Gwion Gwion rock art was first seen by a European—namely, the pastoralist Joseph Bradshaw— in 1891. The Gwion Gwion paintings could, though, be anything between 5,000 and 50,000 years old. Until recently, it was considered that the lack of organic matter in the paintings effectively ruled out the radiocarbon dating techniques habitually used to date most cave paintings, though testing has been done of wasps’ nests built over parts of the original paintings. A neuroscientist has however proposed dating the art by using DNA sequencing extracted from colonies of micro-organisms that have replaced the pigment in some paintings (Pettigrew et al. 2010). 2 “The black fungi . . . [are] an extremely conservative group of rock-adapted fungi that replicate without hyphae by cannibalising their predecessors in situ. . . . Their suite of conservative traits could explain why the sharp contours of Bradshaw art have not been corrupted by fungi growing beyond the edges of the image” (Pettigrew et al., 2010).

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Elizabeth Presa

Figure 36.4.

The installation Garden of Small Nuptials (2017) continues an investigation into the potential of art to evoke and map something of the complexities and sensitivities of organic life. The garden itself has often provided the materials for my practice. When making life-sized clay figurative sculpture, I often con­ struct armatures from materials found in the garden such as large branches, sticks, and dried plant fibre, since clay adheres well to such materials. Some years ago, when first encountering Bernini’s clay angels in the Vatican museum, I recognised a process I knew well—the provisional and largely invisible first step in a sculpture process that culminates in the clay’s translation or trans­ formation through carving into marble or casting into plaster or bronze. Yet this first step in clay and plant material is, in fact, the original expression of the work, the moment it comes into being.

450

Figure 36.4. Elizabeth Presa, Garden of Small Nuptials, installation, dimensions variable, 2017, Orpheus Institute, Ghent.

Sculpture Installation: Garden of Small Nuptials

Figure 36.5.

With the Baroque as a starting point, I drew on Deleuze’s interest in Leibniz and the monad to frame an understanding of organic life. In so doing I was confronted with questions of plant intelligence, neuro-botany, and the poten­ tial of phytopoetics to provoke new biological, social, and political perspec­ tives. Plants struggle to establish themselves and compete for resources while providing habitats and food for the local fauna, including native and imported species. Which species and varieties of plants are allowed, which are merely tolerated, and which are culled, is a classification regulated by various levels of legislation; a quick scan of plants listed as weeds indicates my garden mostly comprises invasive species including bamboo, arum lilies, ivy, agapanthus, and acanthus. Life manifests in unexpected ways in the shadows and most inhospi­ table corners of the garden. For this installation I collected organic materials including leaves, twigs, honeycomb, floss from silk worms, small plants including parsley, dandelions, and capeweed and these plants’ root systems. These were placed into vats of 451

Figure 36.5. Elizabeth Presa, Garden of Small Nuptials, installation, dimensions variable, 2017, Orpheus Institute, Ghent.

Elizabeth Presa undiluted bleach to lighten the chlorophyll, weaken their cellular structure, and remove any bacteria.3 After several hours they were removed, washed, and sprayed with glycerine to prevent dehydration, then laid on sheets of paper for drying and storage. The plants appear in a liminal state, neither fully alive nor dead. The installation of the work in an exhibition requires the plants to be set out on the floor in uniform patterns much like traditional bleaching fields.4

Figure 36.6.

Sometimes unexpected insights unfold as processes and materials in my prac­ tice perform a forensic operation. In this case bleaching the organic materials produced an etiolation of the leaves, branches, and root systems, but only in the exotic plant species. In a strange turn, the plants indigenous to Australia— grevilleas, eucalypts, acacias—darkened in colour when subjected to the same bleaching process. It is well known that Australian plants are well adapted to 3 Chemical bleaches have strong bactericidal properties, and are used to control bacteria, viruses, and algae. 4 Bleekveld in een dorp (Bleachfield in a Village), 1650, by Jan Breughel the Younger depicts such a place, with rows of linen set out in large paddocks to be bleached by the sun.

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Figure 36.6. Elizabeth Presa, Garden of Small Nuptials, installation, dimensions variable, 2017, Orpheus Institute, Ghent.

Sculpture Installation: Garden of Small Nuptials harsh climatic conditions and are resistant to extremes of temperature, bush­ fires, and drought. Yet this process unfolds another resistance, described per­ haps as a primordial genetically programmed resistance to whitening—chem­ ical or otherwise. Deleuze (1995, 158) writes, “That an organism is the theater and principle of its endogenous folding is something that comes out at the level of molecu­ lar biology, as well as embryology . . . morphogenesis is all about folding. The complex notion of texture has taken on a fundamental importance in all sorts of fields.” I take this to mean that all manner of physical and psychic processes may enter into relationship with an organism to produce new biological iden­ tities and their political, cultural, and environmental effects. Garden of Small Nuptials shows something of the moment when the light and heat of the sun fold into a relationship with death—a necessity for biosecurity and passing borders—but also the moment when the biological folds into the political. Through chemical processes, life unfolds in different forms. Horizons shift and reorient . . . but, as with any etiolation in nature, plants spread their “shoots only where determinate effects take place” (Zourabichvili 2012, 209).

Figure 36.7.

453

Figure 36.7. Elizabeth Presa, Garden of Small Nuptials, installation, dimensions variable, 2017, Orpheus Institute, Ghent.

Elizabeth Presa References Deleuze, Gilles. 1993. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Translated by Tom Conley. London: Athlone Press. First published 1988 as Le Pli: Leibniz et le Baroque (Paris: Minuit). ———. 1995. “On Leibniz,” conversation with Robert Maggiori. In Negotiations: 1972–1990, translated by Martin Joughin, 156–63. New York: Columbia University Press. Chapter first published 1988 as “La pensée mise en plis” (Libération, 22 September). Book first published 1990 as Pourparlers: 1972–1990 (Paris: Minuit). Mircan, Mihnea, and Vincent W. J. van Gerven Oei, eds. 2015. Allegory of the Cave Painting. Milan: Mousse Publishing. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2005. The Ground of the Image. Translated by Jeff Fort. New York: Fordham University Press. In part, first published 2003 as Au fond des images (Paris: Gaililée).

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Pettigrew, Jack, Chloe Callistemon, Astrid Weiler, Anna Gorbushina, Wolfgang Krumbein, and Reto Weiler. 2010. “Living Pigments in Australian Bradshaw Rock Art.” Antiquity: A Review of World Archaeology 84 (326). Accessed 20 June 2019. http://www.antiquity.ac.uk/ projgall/pettigrew326/. Zourabichvili, François. 2012. The Vocabulary of Deleuze. In Deleuze: A Philosophy of the Event; Together with The Vocabulary of Deleuze, translated by Kieran Aarons, edited by Gregg Lambert and Daniel W. Smith, 137–221. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. First published as Deleuze: Une philosophie de l’événement (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1994) and as Le vocabulaire de Deleuze (Paris: Ellipses, 2003).

Appendix Online materials

As further reference to chapters 1–8, 10–32, and 34–36 in this book, an online repository of audio/video recordings was created to enhance the reading of the relevant chapters. The material is hosted on the website of the Orpheus Institute, Ghent. These examples, which should be viewed in connection with a reading of the relevant articles, may all be accessed under the URL: https:// orpheusinstituut.be/en/aberrant-nuptials-media-repository.

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Notes on Contributors Paulo de Assis is a musician (pianist, composer, experimental performer) and artist researcher, a senior research fellow at the Orpheus Institute, and the chief-editor of the book series “Artistic Research” (Rowman & Littlefield International). Suzie Attiwill is Associate Dean Interior Design in the School of Architecture and Urban Design, RMIT University, Melbourne. Since 1991, her practice has involved exhibition design, curatorial work, writing, and teaching. Projects pose questions of interior and interiority in relation to contempo­ rary conditions of living, inhabitation, subjectivity, and pedagogy. Sara Baranzoni received a PhD in performance studies with a dissertation on Gilles Deleuze, was a research fellow at Bologna University, and is cur­ rently Prometeo Researcher at the Universidad de las Artes, Guayaquil, Ecuador, where she teaches “Philosophy and the Theatrical Event.” Her research interests concern contemporary French philosophy (Deleuze, Foucault, Stiegler), performance theory, and philosophy of technology. She is co-founder of the philosophical journal La Deleuziana and collaborates with many journals and networks. Baranzoni has published several essays in Italian, English, and French, and edited three collective books. Zsuzsa Baross is Professor at the Cultural Studies Department, Trent University, Canada. She is the author of Posthumously: For Jacques Derrida (Sussex Academic Press, 2011) and Encounters: Gérard Titus-Carmel, Jean-Luc Nancy, Claire Denis (Sussex Academic Press, 2015) and has published numerous essays in anthologies and journals, including Derrida Today, Deleuze Studies, Angelaki, International Studies in Philosophy, and New Literary History, and given many presentations and seminars. Terri Bird is an artist and associate professor in the Department of Fine Arts at Monash University, Melbourne. She works collaboratively with Bianca Hester and Scott Mitchell as Open Spatial Workshop (osw.com.au). In 2017 OSW exhibited Converging in Time at MUMA, Melbourne, which explored connections between materiality, histories of shaping territories, and the various politics inscribed in place. She has recently co-authored the book Practising with Deleuze: Design, Dance, Art, Writing, Philosophy with Suzie Attiwill, Andrea Eckersley, Antonia Pont, Jon Roffe, and Philipa Rothfield. She has also published essays in Deleuze Studies Journal, Angelaki, and Studies in Material Thinking focusing on sculptural practices. These essays explore the influences between matter’s potential force and dynamics and art’s material operations, in order to discuss forming processes that connect spatio-temporal operations with social assemblages.

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Notes on Contributors Ronald Bogue is Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at the University of Georgia. His books include Deleuze and Guattari (Routledge, 1989), Deleuze on Literature (Routledge, 2003), Deleuze on Cinema (Routledge, 2003), Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts (Routledge, 2003), Deleuze’s Wake: Tributes and Tributaries (State University of New York Press, 2004), Deleuze’s Way: Essays in Transverse Ethics and Aesthetics (Ashgate, 2007), Deleuzian Fabulation and the Scars of History (Edinburgh University Press, 2010), and Thinking with Deleuze (Edinburgh University Press, 2019). Barbara Bolt is a practising artist and art theorist at the VCA University of Melbourne. She is the author of two monographs, Art Beyond Representation: The Performative Power of the Image (I. B. Tauris, 2004) and Heidegger Reframed: Interpreting Key Thinkers for the Arts (I. B. Tauris, 2011), and has co-edited four books, Material Inventions: Applying Creative Arts Research (I. B. Tauris, 2014), Carnal Knowledge: Towards a “New Materialism” through the Arts (I. B. Tauris, 2013), Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry (I. B. Tauris, 2007), and Sensorium: Aesthetics, Art, Life (Cambridge Scholars Publishers, 2007). Her publications build a strong dialogue between practice and theory. Peter Burleigh teaches English culture, language, and linguistics at the University of Basel, and critical and aesthetic theory at the HGK, Basel. His interests lie in the theories and histories of photography, and forms of visual representation. He is currently working on a post-Deleuzian framing of photography: while exploiting Deleuze’s conceptual toolbox, he attempts to undo Deleuze’s scepticism towards photography, in particular thinking how the graphic paradigm can be replaced by genesis. Publications include an essay in the European Month of Photography 2014 catalogue. Edward Campbell is Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of Aberdeen and co-director of the university’s Centre for Modern Thought. He is the author of the books Boulez, Music and Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and Music after Deleuze (Bloomsbury, 2013), and is co-editor of Pierre Boulez Studies (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and the forthcoming The Cambridge Stravinsky Encyclopedia, He is currently working on a book pro­ visionally titled East–West Musical Encounters in France since Debussy. Marianna Charitonidou is a PhD candidate in philosophy and history and the­ ory of arts and architecture at the University of Paris West Nanterre and the National Technical University of Athens and a member of the Architectural Association, London. She was a visiting scholar at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation and holds mas­ ter’s degrees from the Architectural Association, the School of Architecture of Aristotle University, and the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Paris and a post-master’s degree from the National Technical University of Athens. She has presented her research at many international confer­ 458

Notes on Contributors ences and has published several articles. Among her recent publications is “Neorealism and Ugliness: The Aesthetic Appreciation and Appropriation of the Postwar City in the Work of Aldo Rossi, Bruno Zevi and Ludovico Quaroni” in Architecture and Ugliness: Anti-Aesthetics in Postmodern Architecture, edited by Wouter Van Acker and Thomas Mical (Bloomsbury, 2019). Her research focuses on the relationship between Deleuze’s philosophy and arts. Jean-Marc Chouvel is Professor at Paris-Sorbonne University and a researcher at IReMus (Institut de Recherches Musicologiques—UMR 8223). He is a member of the consulting board of SFAM and has published papers and books on musical analysis, particularly on its connection to cognitive science. Guillaume Collett is a research fellow at the Centre for Critical Thought, University of Kent. He is the author of The Psychoanalysis of Sense: Deleuze and the Lacanian School (Edinburgh University Press, 2016), editor of Deleuze, Guattari, and the Problem of Transdisciplinarity (Bloomsbury, 2019, forthcom­ ing), and has authored a number of chapters and articles on twentiethcentury French philosophy, psychoanalysis, and political thought. He coedited an issue of Deleuze Studies on “Deleuze and Philosophical Practice” (2013) and serves on the editorial committee of the journal La Deleuziana. Jörgen Dahlqvist is a stage director, playwright, and film-maker. He was a founding member of Teatr Weimar in Malmö in 2003 and remains its artistic director. He has written more than fifty plays for stage and radio. Beside staging and directing many of his own works, he has also staged and directed works at theatre institutions such as Dramaten and Helsingborgs Stadsteater. His works have performed in Sweden and other countries, including Belgium, Germany, Poland, France, Norway, Denmark, Finland, and Iceland. Dahlqvist was Head of Department at Malmö Theatre Academy in 2009–2012, where he is currently a senior lecturer. As an artistic researcher he participated in the two-year research project “The Anatomy of the Moment” (2012–2014), funded by the Swedish Research Council. Lucia D’Errico is a musician and artistic researcher. She performs on guitar and other plucked-stringed instruments, with a particular focus on Western notated art music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A research fellow at the Orpheus Institute, Ghent, Belgium, from 2014 to 2018 she was part of the research project MusicExperiment21, with which she explored notions of experimentation in the performance of notated music in the Western tradition as an expansion of/in opposition to traditional practices of musical interpretation. She holds a PhD from KU Leuven (docARTES programme) and a master’s degree in English literature, and is also active as a graphic artist and video performer.

459

Notes on Contributors Zornitsa Dimitrova is a doctoral graduate of the University of Münster and holds degrees in Indology, philosophy, and English literature from the universities of Sofia and Freiburg. Her PhD dissertation, “Expression as Mimesis and Event,” sketched out an emergentist dramatic theory gov­ erned by interweaving ontologies of immanence and transcendence. She is the author of Literary Worlds and Deleuze (Lexington Books, 2016); her work on theatre has appeared in Deleuze Studies, New Theatre Quarterly, JDTC, and Skenè. Lilija Duobliene is Professor at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Vilnius, Lithuania. Her research in philosophy and the ideology of education, cre­ ativity, and cultural encountering is based on critical theory, postmodern­ ism, and posthumanism. Recently she has been working on Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy, applying it to the field of education and art. She is the author of many articles and two monographs. For two years she was involved with the research project “Gilles Deleuze: Philosophy and Art” which culminated in the co-written monograph Rhythm and Refrain: In Between Philosophy and Arts (Lithuanian University of Educational Sciences, 2016). Andrea Eckersley is an artist and lecturer in Fashion Design at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. Primarily interested in the way the body interacts with abstract shapes, Andrea’s work treats surfaces, affects, and materials as central to the realisation and experience of an artwork. Eckersley recently co-authored the book Practising with Deleuze: Design, Dance, Art, Writing, Philosophy (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), is the art editor of the Deleuze and Guattari Studies Journal, and exhibits regularly in Australia. Anders Elberling is a visual artist, photographer, innovator, instructor, and art director. Originally educated as a photographer (Paris 1985–89), he uses visual objects and sound objects as tools to create artistic installations. Due to dyslexia, Elberling has developed an imaginative access to com­ munication through the creation of narratives using pictures and sounds. An important condition for his artwork is artistic expression that evolves through interaction between different art forms. Hence, Elberling typically collaborates on projects together with other artists—for example, compos­ ers, sound artists, and electronic and video artists—with whom he creates micro-communities for the negotiation and composition of digital material through artistic practice. His work is predominantly presented at exhibi­ tions and performances, concerts and theatre productions, and in broad­ cast, publications, and installations. Bracha L. Ettinger is an international artist-painter, artist-theorist, psycho­ analyst, and philosopher working in oil painting, drawing, photography, notebooks and artist’s books, video art, conversations, lecture-perform­ ances, and encounter-events. She has held numerous solo shows at galleries and museums, including in Amsterdam, Angers, Antwerp, Barcelona, 460

Notes on Contributors Gothenburg, Helsinki, Istanbul, Katowice, London, Moscow, New York, Paris, Stockholm, St. Petersburg, Turin, and Washington DC. Henrik Frisk is a performer (saxophones and laptop) of improvised and con­ temporary music and a composer of acoustic and computer music. He has a particular interest in interactivity, most of his projects exploring interac­ tivity in one way or another. Interaction was also the main topic of his artis­ tic PhD dissertation “Improvisation, Computers, and Interaction.” Frisk is Associate Professor at the Royal Academy of Music, Stockholm, and an affil­ iate of Malmö Academy of Music, Lund University. He has performed across Europe, North America, and Asia. As a composer, he has received commis­ sions from numerous institutions, ensembles, and musicians and made many recordings for American, Canadian, Swedish, and Danish record labels. Frisk is currently a member of the collective Kopasetic Productions, an independent record label owned and run by improvising musicians. Paolo Giudici is a photographer (Royal College of Art London, UK) and an associated researcher at the Orpheus Institute. jan jagodzinski is Professor in the Department of Secondary Education, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada, where he teaches visual art and media education and curricular issues as they relate to postmodern concerns of gender politics, cultural studies, and media (film and televi­ sion). Among other books, he is the author of Television and Youth: Televised Paranoia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), The Deconstruction of the Oral Eye: Art and Its Education in an Era of Designer Capitalism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), Misreading Postmodern Antigone: Marco Bellocchio’s Devil in the Flesh (Diavolo in Corpo) (Intellect Books, 2011), Psychoanalyzing Cinema: A Productive Encounter of Lacan, Deleuze, and Žižek (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), Arts-Based Research: A Critique and Proposal (with Jason Wallin) (Sense, 2013), and Schizoanalytic Ventures At the End of the World: Film, Video, Art, and Pedagogical Challenges (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), and editor of What Is Art Education? After Deleuze and Guattari (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), The Precarious Future of Education (Palgrave Macmillan 2017), and Interrogating the Anthropocene: Ecology, Pedagogy: The Future in Question (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Oleg Lebedev is a teaching assistant in philosophy at the Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium. His research interests focus on cinematic realism (especially among French theoreticians and critics influenced by André Bazin, such as Serge Daney or Jean-Louis Comolli), and on the conceptualisation of the link between politics and aesthetics proposed by Jacques Rancière. His current research pertains to the theory of subjectivity and individuation in Gilles Deleuze’s thought.

461

Notes on Contributors Christer Lindwall is a Swedish composer. With the exception of participating in a courses with Jan W. Morthenson and Rolf Enström at EMS (1982–83) and the international summer course at Darmstadt in 1986, Christer Lindwall is self-taught as a composer. After experiencing an international break­ through with the electronic music composition Points (premiered at Warsaw Autumn 1986) he turned his focus to chamber music, characterised by his extreme attention to detail and aesthetic similarity to New Complexity. Lindwall has a long history of collaborative work with the Swedish guitarist Stefan Östersjö, for whom he has composed a series of chamber works and two concertos, one for 6-string guitar and small ensemble and White Nights for alto guitar and sinfonietta. In recent years, he has developed a strict and attentive relationship with text and language, expressed in the hörspiel Praxis (2014), with texts by the Swedish poet Johan Jönson. Emilia Marra holds a master’s in “Philosophies allemande et française dans l’espace européen” from Europhilosophie Erasmus Mundus (UTM, UCL, BUW). She is currently a PhD student at the University of Trieste investi­ gating the concept of the actual infinite between Hegel and Spinoza and their contemporary French interpreters. Her research mainly investigates contemporary French Spinozism, with a special focus on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. Her writings have been published in journals such as Esercizi filosofici, Interpretationes, Philosophy Kitchen, and La Deleuziana, of which she is member of the editorial board. She recently translated into Italian Pierre Macherey’s Hegel ou Spinoza. Tero Nauha is a performance artist, Professor in Performance Art and Theory (LAPS) at the Theatre Academy of the University of the Arts, Helsinki, and a postdoctoral fellow at the Academy of Finland. In 2015, his first fic­ tion novel, Heresy and Provocation, was published by Swedish publishing house Förlaget. His performance art projects have been presented at the Frankfurter Kunstverein, Theatrediscounter, Berlin, CSW Kronika, Bytom, Poland, Performance Matters, London, and the New Performance Festival in Turku, among other venues. Stefan Östersjö is a leading classical guitarist specialising in the performance of contemporary music. Since his debut recording in 1997 he has released more than 20 CDs and toured Europe, the USA, and Asia. He has been part of numerous collaborations with composers, but has also participated in the creation of works involving choreography, film, video, performance art, and music theatre. Since 2006 he has been developing inter-cultural artis­ tic practices with the Vietnamese/Swedish group the Six Tones as a plat­ form. As a soloist he has worked with conductors such as Lothar Zagrosek, Peter Eötvös, Pierre-André Valade, Mario Venzago, and Andrew Manze. He received his doctorate in 2008 and became a research fellow at the Orpheus Institute in 2009. He is chaired Professor of Musical Performance at Piteå Academy of Music as well as Associate Professor of Artistic Research at the 462

Notes on Contributors Malmö Academy of Music. Since 2009 he has been involved in, and princi­ ple investigator of several international research projects, of which “(Re) thinking Improvisation” (2009–12) and “Music in Movement” (2012–15) were funded by the Swedish Research Council. He is a member of the eco­ logical sound art group Landscape Quartet, which started as an artistic research project funded by the AHRC. Simon O’Sullivan is a theorist and artist working at the intersection of con­ temporary art practice, performance, and continental philosophy. He has published two monographs with Palgrave Macmillan, Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thought beyond Representation (2005) and On the Production of Subjectivity: Five Diagrams of the Finite–Infinite Relation (2012), and is the edi­ tor, with Stephen Zepke, of Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New (Continuum, 2008) and Deleuze and Contemporary Art (Edinburgh University Press, 2010). His collaborative art practice (with David Burrows and oth­ ers) Plastique Fantastique is a “performance fiction” that investigates aesthetics, subjectivity, the sacred, popular culture, and politics through performance, film and sound, comics, text, installations, and assemblages. Plastique Fantastique have performed and exhibited widely in the UK and abroad and are represented by IMT Gallery in London. O’Sullivan is currently working on a collaborative volume of writings, with Burrows, Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy (Edinburgh University Press, 2019). Gustavo Rodrigues Penha was born in São Paulo, Brazil. He received a bachelor’s degree in musical composition from FASM and master’s and PhD degrees in music from UNICAMP, and studied at the University Paris 8. His compositions have been performed at several events in Brazil and abroad, in England, Italy, France, and Canada. He teaches at UFMS and is a post-doctoral researcher at USP. Katie Pleming is a PhD student in French at the University of Cambridge, UK, writing about the films of Marguerite Duras in relation to twentiethand twenty-first-century French philosophy—in particular Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Rancière, and Édouard Glissant. She is currently writing about questions of politics, sound, and community. Antonia Pont is a poet, yogi, essayist, and scholar. She is Senior Lecturer in Writing and Literature at Deakin University, Australia, and founded the yoga school Vijnana Yoga Australia in 2009. She is a co-author of Practising with Deleuze (Edinburgh University Press, 2017). Her wider research proposes a theory of practising that deploys Deleuzian frameworks and practice-based methodologies to ask questions about habit, time, change, desire, and the future. She holds a PhD on early Derrida and creative writing from the University of Melbourne. In 2019 she contributed collaborative work to the Venice Biennale. 463

Notes on Contributors Elizabeth Presa is a visual artist based in Melbourne where she teaches in the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. She has an ongo­ ing project entitled Apian Utopias: Small Architecture for Bees, with iterations in Tokyo with the Ginza beehives, Pilchuck Glass School, where she was artist in residence, and Minzu University, Beijing. In 2018 she was visiting professor at CAFA, Beijing. She is currently working on a project mapping indigenous and exotic plants in the central Goldfields of Victoria and Emily Dickinson’s garden in Amherst, Massachusetts. Liana Psarologaki is a Greek artist, architect, and academic based in the UK. She holds a PhD from the University of Brighton (2015) sponsored by the University for the Creative Arts, a combined master’s in architecture from the National Technical University of Athens (2007), and before her MA in fine art at UCA Canterbury (2010) practised architecture. Awarded many times for academic excellence, her work is presented and published internationally, contributing to the current debate on the empirical ontol­ ogy of architectural space. Psarologaki is a senior lecturer and Head of Architecture at University of Suffolk, Ipswich, UK. Spencer Roberts is Senior Lecturer and an artistic researcher in the Department of Art and Communication at the University of Huddersfield, UK. He currently teaches art, design, and animation theory, exploring the application of post-structural thought in the context of the visual arts. His doctoral thesis defended the legitimacy of the non-traditional thesis in the context of artistic research. It contested the design-led critique of practice-led modes of research while constructing an alternative model of research practice informed by post-structural, process-philosophical think­ ing. In recent years, he has published a number of journal articles and deliv­ ered a series of papers and artworks exploring Deleuzian thought in the context of art, design, and animation.  Jonas Rutgeerts is a dramaturge and performance theorist. He studied phi­ losophy (KU Leuven) and dramaturgy (University of Amsterdam) and is cur­ rently working on a PhD entitled “Rhythm as an Artistic and Theoretical Tool in Contemporary Choreography” (KU Leuven). His research is situated at the junction between dance studies, philosophy, and cultural studies; his main interests involve temporalities of performance, social choreog­ raphies, and choreopolitics. As a dramaturge and researcher he collabo­ rates with, among others, Ivana Müller, David Weber-Krebs, Arkadi Zaides, Needcompany, and Clément Layes. He is the author of the book Re-act: Over re-enactment in de hedendaagse dans (Tectum, 2015). Anne Sauvagnargues is Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense. A spe­ cialist in aesthetics and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, she co-directs the series Lignes d’art with Fabienne Brugère for Presses Universitaires 464

Notes on Contributors de France. She is the author of numerous works, including Deleuze and Art (Bloomsbury, 2013), Artmachines: Deleuze, Guattari, Simondon (Edinburgh University Press 2016), and Deleuze: L’empirisme transcendental (Presses uni­ versitaires de France 2010, forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press). Janae Sholtz is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Coordinator of Women’s and Gender Studies at Alvernia University, the author of The Invention of a People: Heidegger and Deleuze on Art and the Political (Edinburgh University Press, 2015) and co-editor of Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Feminism (Bloomsbury, 2019). She collaborates with the SSHRC Interdisciplinary Research Team, Deleuze and Cosmology, and has published numerous arti­ cles on the continental tradition, feminist theory, and current aesthetic and ethico-political trends. Steve Tromans is a professional pianist and composer who has given over six thousand performances, composed in the region of one hundred works, and released thirty albums to date. In recent years, he has undertaken musical-philosophical research, exploring certain of Deleuze’s concepts by means of his own music practices. Tromans is currently completing his doctoral thesis at the University of Surrey, UK. His music, in a variety of composed and improvised projects, can be heard at https://stevetromans. bandcamp.com. Kamini Vellodi is an academic with a background crossing philosophy, art history, fine art, and visual culture and a practising artist working mainly in painting. She is a lecturer in contemporary art practice and theory at Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh, and an honorary lec­ turer at Exeter University. She completed her PhD in philosophy under the supervision of Peter Osborne and Éric Alliez. Her research focuses on the critical implications of Deleuze’s philosophy for art history, with a focus on early modern visual arts. Her work has appeared in publications including Art History, Parrhesia, Zeitschrift fur Kunstgeschichte, and Deleuze Studies. She is completing a monograph on Tintoretto and Deleuze’s philosophy of con­ structivism titled Tintoretto’s Difference: Deleuze’s Concept of the Diagram and the Problem of Art History (Bloomsbury Academic). Paolo Vignola holds a PhD in philosophy and is currently a Prometeo researcher at Universidad de las Artes of Guayaquil, Ecuador, where he teaches phi­ losophy of literature. He is a scholar of contemporary French philosophy, aesthetics, moral philosophy, and philosophy of technology. He is the co-founder of the journal La Deleuziana and collaborates with many jour­ nals. Vignola has published several essays, edited five books, and authored four monographs: Le frecce di Nietzsche: Confrontando Deleuze e Derrida (ECIG, 2008), La lingua animale: Deleuze attraverso la letteratura (Quodlibet, 2011), Sulla propria pelle: La questione trascendentale tra Kant e Deleuze (Aracne, 2012), and L’attenzione altrove: Sintomatologie di quel che ci accade (Orthotes, 2013). 465

Notes on Contributors Recently he edited a special issue of Ethics & Politics dedicated to Deleuze’s political actuality (2016) and with Sara Baranzoni a special issue of Aut Aut dedicated to Bernard Stiegler’s philosophy of technology (2016). Audronė Žukauskaitė is Head of Research at the Lithuanian Culture Research Institute. Her recent publications include the monographs From Biopolitics to Biophilosophy (2016, in Lithuanian) and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Philosophy: The Logic of Multiplicity (2011, in Lithuanian), and an edited vol­ ume titled Intensities and Flows: Gilles Deleuze’s Philosophy in the Context of Contemporary Art and Politics (2011, in Lithuanian). She also co-edited (with S. E. Wilmer) Interrogating Antigone in Postmodern Philosophy and Criticism (Oxford University Press, 2010), Deleuze and Beckett (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), and Resisting Biopolitics: Philosophical, Political and Performative Strategies (Routledge, 2016).

466

Index A Abicare, Fiona, 308–14 Act None, 313–14 Artist Actor, Artist Auteur, 312–13 Covers, 308–10 Abramović, Marina, 369, 70 The Artist Is Present, 369 Adams, John, 68 Adams, John Luther, 68–70 Inuksuit, 68 Place Where You Go to Listen, The, 68–70 Adorno, Theodor W., 141, 144 Agon, Carlos, 40n8, 46 Ai Weiwei, 234 Human Flow, 234 Albèra, Philippe, 130, 136 Aldea, Eva, 274n1, 279 Allen, Christopher, 375, 385 Alliez, Éric, 11, 20, 285, 287 Alpers, Svetlana, 226n18, 229 Alphen, Ernst Van, 226n18, 229 Anspach, Mark, 205, 214 Antinori, Fabio Lattanzi, 241 Obelisk, The, 241 Antonelli, Paola, 244–45, 247 Design and the Elastic Mind, 245 Design and Violence, 245, 247 Mutant Materials in Contemporary Design, 245 Arakawa, 373 Arendt, Hannah, 193, 214 Aristotle, 179, 242, 261, 418, 419 De Anima, 418 Armstrong, Rachel, 238, 245, 249 Arom, Simha, 129 Arriscado Nunes, João, 278, 280 See also, Sousa-Santos, Boaventura de, João Arriscado Nunes, and Maria Paula Meneses, works by Artaud, Antonin, 12, 49, 284, 287 “Van Gogh: The Man Suicided by Society,” 284n7 Asher, Gad, 67, 71 Assis, Paulo de, 9–21 Attiwill, Suzie, 10, 14, 19, 20, 299–305 B Badiou, Alain, 319, 324 Being and Event, 319 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 28, 30, 34, 51, 147, 153, 156 Bachelard, Gaston, 139 Bacon, Francis, 12, 57, 163, 167, 285, 351, 352nn, 366, 367 Badiou, Alain, 19 Bahri, Ismail, 50, 59 Sondes, 50 Bains, Paul, 423, 427 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 322 Baliga, Nitin S., 66, 71 Ball, Lillian, 238 Waterwash, 238 Balona, Alexandra, 357n1, 370 Bamford, Kiff, 351–52, 354 Bancaud, Laurence, 77, 78, 82 Banzi, Massimo, 244, 249 Barad, Karen, 233, 236, 237, 243, 249, 417, 419

Baranzoni, Sara, 405 Baross, Zsuzsa, 17, 18, 47–60 Barrett, Richard, 83, 84n2 Barthel-Calvet, Anne-Sylvie, 108, 117 Barthes, Roland, 47n2, 61, 226n18, 229, 270, 307, 315, 380, 385 “The Death of the Author,” 380 Mythologies, 380 Bartók, Béla, 147 Baselitz, Georg, 373 Bashō, Matsuo, 76, 77 Bataille, Georges, 344, 351, 352, 354 Bateson, Gregory, 415, 419 Battier, Marc, 73 Baudrillard, Jean, 211, 385 Baugh, Bruce, 261–63, 270 Baumeister, Dayna, 245, 249 Baxandall, Michael, 226n18, 229 Bearn, Gordon C. F., 261–64, 265, 270, 354 Life Drawing: A Deleuzian Aesthetics of Existence, 354 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 34, 36 Bekku, Sadao, 73 Bel, Jérôme, 14 Bellon, Michaël, 152, 154, 161 Benjamin, David, 238, 385 Benjamin, Walter, 125, 234, 250, 318, 380, 441–42, 443 “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 380, 441 Bennett, Gerald, 47n2 Bennett, Gordon, 373 Nine Ricochets (Fall Down Black Fella, Jump Up White Fella), The, 373 Benson, Richard, 240, 250 Benyus, Janine M., 238, 245, 250 Berg, Alban, 42, 81 Lulu, 52 Wozzeck, 42 Berger, John, 441 Bergson, Henri, 13n4, 30, 33, 56, 59, 94, 96, 97, 99, 139n2, 262, 310, 329, 336, 338, 398, 431 “Perception of Change, The” 94 “Possible and the Real, The” 96 Berio, Luciano, 47n2 Berlioz, Hector, 50 Berman, Tressa, 373, 385 No Deal! Indigenous Arts and the Politics of Possession, 373 Bernard, Marie-Hélène, 73 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, 16, 447–48, 450 Apollo and Daphne, 16, 447–48 Berns, Thomas, 255, 259, 407, 411 Bey, Hakim, 336n8, 340 T. A. Z., 336n8 Biddle, Jennifer, 374n7, 385 Biggs, Michael, 219, 229 Bignali, Simone, 274n1, 279 Bird, Terri, 10, 14, 17, 18, 20, 163–73, 308, 315 Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, dir.), 246, 248 Blanchot, Maurice, 180, 295, 303, 304, 434 Blazwick, Iowona, 240, 250 Bogue, Ronald, 13, 17, 18, 20, 61–71, 106–7, 117, 167, 172, 284n4, 287, 322, 324, 423, 427 Bohm, David, 237, 244, 250 Bohr, Niels, 237 Bois, Yves-Alain, 344, 352, 354

467

Index Bolaño, Roberto, 48, 59 2666, 48–49 Bolt, Barbara, 17, 19, 371–87 Black with No Way Out (after Motherwell), 371, 372 Elegy to an Oz Republic (after Motherwell), 371, 372, 381–84 Reconciliation Elegy, 371, 384–85 Study for Bourke Street 5pm, 371, 372, 381–83 Bombard, Alain, 257 Bonneau, Richard, 66, 71 Borgdorff, Henk, 13n5, 20, 216n1, 217n5, 218n9, 219, 229–30, 231 Conflict of the Faculties, The, 217n5 See also Schwab, Michael, and Henk Borgdorff, works by Borges, Jorge Luis, 235, 250 Boros, James, 84, 90 Born, Georgina, 122, 128 Bostrom, Nick, 248, 250 Bouaniche, Arnaud, 12, 20 Boulez, Pierre, 47–58, 59, 61, 63, 73, 108, 109, 116 Éclat, 49 Penser la musique aujourd’hui, 55 Répons, 49 Structures I, 108 Boulez, Pierre, Jean-Pierre Changeux, and Philippe Manoury, works by neurones enchantés, Les, 51 Boundas, Constantin V., 299, 303, 304, 310, 315, 349n14, 354 Boyden, Joseph, 235, 250 Brack, John, 381–84 Collins St, 5p.m., 382–84 Bradshaw, Joseph, 449nn Braidotti, Rosi, 117, 236, 250, 289, 297, 416, 418, 419, 430, 435 Braidotti, Rosi, and Pisters, Patricia, works by Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze, 117 Brennan, Mary, 137, 144 Bresson, Jean, 40n8, 46 Breughel the Younger, Jan, 452n4 Bleekveld in een dorp (Bleachfield in a Village), 452n4 Brontë, Charlotte, 338 Brooker, Graeme, 299, 304 Brooks, Peter, 235, 250 Brüggemeier, Birgit, 426 Büchler, Daniela, 219, 229 Bürger, Peter, 233, 250 Theory of the Avant-Garde, 233 Burleigh, Peter, 19, 437–44 Burrows, David, 327n1, 333n5, 339, 340, 397n1, 402 Burrows, David, and Simon O’Sullivan, works by Fictioning, 327n1, 397n1 Burrows, Jonathan, 15, 137–43, 144 Choreographer’s Handbook, 138 Dull Morning Cloudy Mild, 137n1 Our, 137n1 Singing, 137n1 Stoics, 137n1 Stop Quartet, The, 137n1 Things I Don’t Know, 137n1 Very, 137n1 Burrows, Jonathan, and Matteo Fargion, works by Body Not Fit For Purpose, 137 Both Sitting Duet, 137, 138, 142

468

Cheap Lecture, 137, 138, 139, 143 Counting To One Hundred, 137, 138 Cow Piece, The, 137, 138, 142 One Flute Note, 137 Quiet Dance, The, 137, 138 Show and Tell, 137 Speaking Dance (2006), Burt, Peter, 74–76, 80, 82 Butchers, Christopher, 104, 105, 110, 117 Butler, Judith, 381n14, 385 Butler, Rex, 372n3, 373, 380, 385 What Is Appropriation: An Anthology of Critical Writings on Australian Art in the ’80s and ’90s, 372n3, 380 Butt, Danny, 216, 219, 230 Buydens, Mireille, 27, 46 C Cage, John, 27, 49–51, 58, 59, 116, 138, 395 4'33", 49, 53, 58 Caillebotte, Gustave, 383 Callicott, J. Baird, 414, 419 Callistemon, Chloe, 449nn, 454 Calvert, Jane, 238, 245, 251 Campbell, Edward, 14, 17, 18, 20, 73–82, 104, 108, 116, 118 Campbell, Marion, 383, 385 Caravaggio, 303 Carr, Cheri, 349n14 Carr, Emily, 235 Carrera Andrade, Jorge, 276 Carroll, Lewis, 12, 159, 282, 284 Carter, Elliott, 61 Carter, Paul, 374, 385 Castaneda, Carlos, 337 Castro-Gómez, Santiago, 275, 276, 279 Catts, Oron, 246, 250 Catts, Oron, and Ionat Zurr, works by Victimless Leather: A Prototype of a Stitch-less Jacket Grown in a Technoscientific “Body,” 246 Cavell, Stanley, 54n16, 59 Cazeaux, Clive, 215, 216n2, 230 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, 49 Cennini, Cennino, 445 libro dell’arte, Il, 445 Cézanne, Paul, 53, 105, 384 Chang, Hao, 73 Changeux, Jean-Pierre, 50, 59 See also Boulez, Pierre, Jean-Pierre Changeux, and Philippe Manoury, works by Chaplin, Charlie, 247 Modern Times, 247 Charitonidou, Marianna, 18, 101–19 Charles, Daniel, 27, 46 Charpentier, Jacques, 73 72 études karnatiques, 73 Châtelet, Gilles, 86 Chen, Qigang, 73 Chia, Sandro, 373 Chin, Mel, 238 Operation Paydirt, 238 Chion, Michael, 123, 128 Chirico, Giorgio de, 373 Chisholm, Roderick M., 400, 402

Index Chopin, Frédéric, 129–30 Chouvel, Jean-Marc, 14, 17, 18, 20, 25–46 Christie, Agatha, 437, 439, 443 Dead Man’s Folly, 437–39, 443 Chuang Tzu (Zhuangzi), 78 Cimini, Amy, 103, 118 Claerbout, David, 394 Cohen, Jean-Louis, 111, 118 Cohen, Revital, 247, 250 Cohen, Revital, and Tuur Van Balen, works by 75 Watts: Production Line Poetics, 247 Collett, Guillaume, 11n2, 19, 20, 281–88 Combes, Muriel, 168, 172 Conley, Tom, 318, 324 Cooper, Mark Garrett, 343n6, 354 Cormack, Bridget, 373n5, 385 Crary, Jonathan, 405, 411 Crawford, Ashley, 372, 385 Crimp, Douglas, 380 Pictures (exhibition), 380 Criton, Pascale, 14, 20 Crooks, Edward, 177n4 Cross, Jonathan, 111, 118 Cull Ó Maoilearca, Laura, 13n5, 20 Cvejić, Bojana, 145, 146, 161 D Daguerre, Louis, 439 Dahlqvist, Jörgen, 18, 83–91 Damasio, Antonio, 240, 250 Damisch, Hubert, 226n18, 230 Damm, Ursula, 421, 426, 427 Drosophila Karaoke Bar, 426–27 Insect Songs, 426–27 Danto, Arthur C., 242, 250 Dao, Nguyen-Thien, 73, 74, 78–80, 81 enfants d’Izieu, Les, 78–79 Poussière d’empire, score for, 79 David, Eyal, 67, 71 Davies, Norman, 82 Davies, Rhys, 394, 395 Davis, Erik, 141, 144 Davis, Matthew, 171 De Boever, Arne, 238, 250 Debord, Guy, 380, 386 Society of the Spectacle, The, 380 Debussy, Claude, 73, 74, 75, 76, 78, 79, 80, 81, 103, 130, 147 mer, La, 75 Sonata for flute, viola, and harp, 75 Decoust, Michel, 47n2 De Duve, Thierry, 222n13, 230 De Keersmaeker, Anne Teresa, 145–48, 151–61 Choreographer’s Score, A, 146 Così fan tutte, 160n13 Drumming, 145, 157, 158, 159 Face, 145 Love Supreme, A, 159 Mitten wir im Leben sind / Bach6Cellosuiten, 150 Rain, 145, 146, 147, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159 Rosas danst Rosas, 159 Verklärte Nacht, 145, 159 Vortex Temporum, 145, 147, 155 Delacroix, Eugène, 216

Deleuze, Gilles, works by “Bartleby; or, The Formula,” 273, 274, 278, 279 Bergsonism, 329, 340, 398–99, 402 Cours Vincennes, 31n3, 35, 37n7, 41–42, 46, 163, 173, 341, 354, 434, 435 Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, 357, 359, 370, 394, 395, 429, 435 Cinema 2: The Time-Image, 217n3, 230, 249, 250, 285, 287, 327, 330–31, 340, 394, 395, 398, 402, 429–31, 435 Difference and Repetition, 13, 20, 25, 26–37, 41, 46, 61, 70, 84, 87, 90, 102, 106, 109, 110, 116, 118, 148, 154n6, 161, 206, 214, 219–22, 224, 225–27, 230, 242, 265–67, 270, 281–82, 287, 289–93, 295–97, 300, 302–3, 304, 307–8, 310–11, 315, 329, 339, 340, 344–45, 354, 423, 427 Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature, 302, 304 Essays Critical and Clinical, 238, 250, 329 Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, 110 Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, The, 116, 153–54, 161, 286, 287, 318, 319, 324, 408, 410–11, 446–48, 454 Foucault, 299, 300, 301, 304, 308, 315, 318, 324, 333, 345, 347, 354 Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, 12, 20, 13n4, 163, 167, 172, 285, 287, 351, 352n18, 354, 367, 370, 383, 386, 389, 395 “He Stuttered,” 131, 133, 134nn, 135, 136 “Immanence: A Life,” 95–96, 99, 256, 258, 286, 287 “Letter to a Harsh Critic,” 255, 258, 299, 304 “Literature and Life,” 276, 278, 279, 328, 329, 340 Logic of Sense, The, 13n4, 95, 96, 99, 104, 110, 118, 149n3, 158, 161, 236, 237, 247, 250, 265, 270, 281–86, 287 “Making Inaudible Forces Audible,” 47, 59, 61, 70 “Method of Dramatization, The,” 281n1, 287 Negotiations: 1972–1990, 97, 99, 269, 270, 286, 327, 329, 340, 342n4, 344n10, 346, 347, 351, 354, 393, 395, 430, 435 Nietzsche and Philosophy, 178, 181 “Nomadic Thought,” 347, 354 “Note for the Italian Edition of The Logic of Sense,” 281n2, 287 “Occupy Without Counting: Boulez, Proust and Time,” 51, 52n12, 54n17, 56, 59, 116, 118 “On Gilbert Simondon,” 168, 172, 242, 250 “On Leibniz,” 453, 454 “On Philosophy,” 286, 287 “Portrait of Foucault, A,” 300, 301, 304 “Plato and Simulacrum,” 380, 386 “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” 257–58, 407, 409, 411 “Preface to the English Language Edition” of Dialogues II, 269, 270 “Preface to the English Language Edition” of Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature, 311, 315 Proust and Signs, 178–80, 181, 302, 304 “Response to a Question on the Subject,” 300, 304 Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 290, 293–96, 297 “temps musical, Le,” 47, 59, 61–62, 64, 66, 70 Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995, 166, 168, 173, 281n2 “What Is a Dispositif ?,” 117, 118

469

Index “What Is the Creative Act?,” 258 Deleuze, Gilles, and Michel Foucault, works by “Intellectuals and Power,” 217n3, 230, 299, 304 Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari, works by anti-Œdipe, L’ (2nd French ed.), 67, 70 Anti-Oedipus, 248, 251, 283–84, 287, 329, 346, 352, 354, 429–31, 433–35 “Deleuze and Guattari Fight Back . . . ,” 224n16, 230 Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, 178, 181, 330, 337, 340 Thousand Plateaus, A, 9n1, 17, 19, 20, 41, 46, 52, 57, 58, 59, 61, 62–69, 70, 80, 82, 101, 103, 104, 110, 116, 117, 118, 123–24, 127, 128, 138–40, 144, 148–49, 152, 153, 154n6, 155–56, 161, 171–72, 173, 233, 235, 237, 238, 241–44, 248, 249, 251, 256, 259, 261, 269, 270, 284–85, 288, 299, 304, 328, 329, 332, 334–39, 340, 342, 346–50, 352–53, 355, 357, 359–63, 367–69, 370, 378, 386, 389, 392, 394, 395, 417, 419, 421, 425, 427, 440–41, 443 What Is Philosophy?, 11, 21, 28, 36, 40, 44–45, 46, 86n4, 90, 101, 102, 104, 107, 110, 117, 118, 143, 144, 163n2, 167, 173, 206, 214, 219–21, 225, 227, 230, 235, 243–44, 251, 258, 259, 269, 270, 273, 278, 279, 281–83, 285–86, 288, 299, 301–2, 305, 317, 324, 334, 336, 340, 345, 347, 355, 371n2, 376, 383, 386, 398, 402, 424–25, 427 Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet, works by Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze, Le, 43, 46 Dialogues, 27, 46, 47n2, 59, 63, 70–71, 167, 173, 349n14, 355, 391, 393, 395 Dialogues II, 16, 21, 80, 82, 123, 128, 269, 304, 305 del Val, Jaime, 409 Metabody, 409–11 Dench, Chris, 84n2 D’Errico, Lucia, 13n5, 17, 19, 20, 57, 59, 357–70 Powers of Divergence: An Experimental Approach to Music Performance, 57n19 D’Errico, Lucia, and Marlene Monteiro Freitas, works by, Aberrant Decodings, 358, 364–68 Derrida, Jacques, 19, 49, 52, 86, 237, 261–70, 292, 297, 374, 379, 380, 386 Glas, 268 Simulacra and Simulation, 380 Specters of Marx, 374n8 Descartes, René, 34, 221–22, 223, 299, 318, 363, 370, 422 Meditations on First Philosophy, 363 Dewey, John, 236, 268, 270 Dickenson, Ingrid P., 241, 251 Dickmann, Iddo, 262–64, 269, 270–71 Dillet, Benôit, 290, 295, 297 Dillon, James, 84n2 Dimitrova, Zornitsa, 19, 413–19 Diogenes, 282n3 Dohnalová, Lenka, 67, 71 Dokoupil, Jiri Georg, 373 Dronsfield, Jonathan, 345, 355 Duchamp, Marcel, 222n13 Duffy, Simon B., 110–11, 118 Deleuze and the History of Mathematics, 111 Duncan, Stuart Paul, 84, 90 Duobliene, Lilija, 19

470

Dupréel, Eugène, 65 Duras, Marguerite, 429–35, 436 Détruire, dit-elle, 434 femme du Gange, La, 430, 431–35 India Song, 435 ravissement de Lol V. Stein, Le, 432 Son nom de Venise dans Calcutta désert, 435 Dussel, Enrique, 278 Dvornyk, Volodymyr, 66, 71 E East, Susie, 240, 251 Eberhart, Russell C., 235, 251 Eckersley, Andrea, 10, 14, 17, 19, 20, 307–15 Eco, Umberto, 358n2, 370 “Per una indagine semiologica del messaggio televisivo,” 358n2 Edgar, Rachel S., 66, 71 Ednie-Brown, Pia, 166, 173 Elberling, Anders, 17, 18, 121–28 See also Frisk, Henrik, and Anders Elberling, works by Elfick, Alistair, 238, 245, 251 Eliasson, Olafur, 240 Elkins, James, 216, 218, 230 Elleström, Lars, 127, 128 Éloy, Jean-Claude, 73, 79 Chants pour l’autre moitié du ciel, 73 Gaku-no-Michi, 73 Kâmakalâ, 73 Shânti, 73 Emerling, Jae, 10, 21 Endy, Drew, 238, 245, 251 Ensemble Ars Nova, 86n3 Entwistle, Joanne, 307, 313, 315 Etchells, Tim, 143, 144 Ettinger, Bracha L., 17, 19, 183–214 Eurydice, 192 Eurydice—The Graces—Medusa, 192 Eurydice—Pietà, 192 Ophelia, 192 Woman-Other-Thing, 192 Euclid, 147, 149, 151, 152, 153, 161 Evans, David, 380, 386 Appropriation: Documents of Contemporary Art, 380 Evans, Robin, 111, 118, 380 Exarchos, Dimitris, 103, 118 F Facebook, 256 Fargion, Matteo, 137–43, 144 See also, Burrows, Jonathan, and Matteo Fargion, works by Fauré, Gabriel, 74 Feldman, Morton, 87–88, 138 For John Cage, 138 Ferrell, Robyn, 374, 386 Ferneyhough, Brian, 83, 84–85, 90 Bone Alphabet, 83, 85 FHAR (Front homosexuel d’action révolutionnaire), 177 Finnegan, Ruth, 89, 90 Finnissy, Michael, 84n2

Index Flaxman, Gregory, 10, 15, 21, 106, 118 Flusser, Vilém, 342–43, 355, 440, 441, 444 Into the Universe of Technical Images, 343n8 Towards a Philosophy of Photography, 342, 343n8, 440 Forsythe, William, 14 Foss, Paul, 373, 386 Foucault, Michel, 47–48, 54, 56, 60, 61, 117, 217n3, 235, 251, 268, 271, 283, 295, 299, 335, 380, 386 “What Is an Author?,” 380 See also, Deleuze, Gilles, and Michel Foucault, works by Franck, César, 74 François, Michel, 146, 161 Frayling, Christopher, 13n5, 21, 223n14, 230 Frege, Gottlob, 282 Freud, Sigmund, 28, 184–85, 187, 190, 199–208, 214, 332 “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” 200, 205, 206, 208 Friberg, Carsten, 219, 230 Frichot, Hélène, 342n3, 345, 355 Frisk, Henrik, 17, 18, 121–28 Frisk, Henrik, and Anders Elberling, works by Machinic Propositions, 121n1, 123–25 Frontisi-Ducroux, Françoise, 357, 370 G Galliano, Luciana, 76–77, 82 Gangle, Rocco, 86, 90 Gaschon, Frédéric, 67, 71 Gatfield, David, 67, 71 Gauguin, Paul, 235 Gaussin, Allain, 73 Genet, Jean, 331–32, 333, 334 Gerber, Alan, 67, 71 Ghyka, Matila, 30, 46 Ginsberg, Daisy Alexandra, 238, 245, 251 Giotto, 52 Giudici, Paolo, 11, 14, 20 Glissant, Édouard, 74, 80, 81 Godard, Jean-Luc, 48, 60, 394 Histoire(s) du cinema, 48 King Lear, 48 Goehr, Lydia, 122, 128 Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, The, 122 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 216 Faust, 216 Gopnik, Alison, 240, 251 Gorbushina, Anna, 449n1, 454 Granata, Francesca, 307, 315 Green, Carla B., 67, 71 Green, Edward W., 66, 71 Griffiths, Paul, 108, 118 Grogan, Helen, 169 Grootenboer, Hanneke, 226n18, 230 Grosfoguel, Ramón, 276, 279 Grosz, Elizabeth, 89–90, 292, 297, 301, 305, 307, 315, 422, 425–26, 427 Guattari, Félix, works by “Balance-Sheet for ‘Desiring-Machines,’” 67n2, 71 Chaosmosis, 11, 21, 61, 68, 70, 71, 333–34, 335n7, 340, 416–18, 419 “Genet Regained,” 328, 331–34, 340

“Liberation of Desire: An Interview with George Stambolian, A,” 331, 340 Lines of Flight, 64, 71 Psychanalyse et transversalité, 11, 21 Qu’est-ce que l’écosophie, 61, 71 Schizoanalytic Cartographies, 331, 334 “So What,” 11, 21 Three Ecologies, The, 61, 71, 257–58, 259, 416, 419 “Transversality” (La transversalité), 11, 21, 179, 181 See also Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari, works by Gwion Gwion (cave paintings), 449 H Habermas, Jürgen, 219 Halbreich, Harry, 78, 82 Hall, Rosalind, 170–71 Hallward, Peter, 269, 271 Hameroff, Stuart, 237, 251 Hannah, Dehlia, 238, 251 Hannula, Mika, 218n8, 230 Hansen, Mark B. N., 407, 409n3, 411 Hantaï, Simon, 53, 60, 446–47 Tabula Lilas, 53 Haraway, Donna, 339 Hardt, Michael, 235, 240, 251 Hart, Deborah, 373n5, 386 Hastings, Michael, 67, 71 Hasty, Christopher, 102, 118 “Image of Thought and Ideas of Music, The” 102 Heaney, Conor, 290–91, 296, 297 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 242, 261 Heidegger, Martin, 49, 60, 86, 183, 206, 214, 226n18, 266, 269 Heisenberg, Werner, 237 Helmreich, Stefan, 168, 173 Hemming, Steve, 274n1, 279 Henry, Pierre, 51 Hervé, Jean-Luc, 73 Herzogenrath, Bernd, 241, 251 Hess, Walter Rudolf, 65 Hill, Leslie, 430, 436 Hirano, Mayu, 73 Hjelmslev, Louis, 284 Hoban, Russell, 327, 340 Riddley Walker, 327–28 Hobbit, The (Peter Jackson, dir.), 240 Hockney, David, 384 David Hockney: Painting and Photography (exhibition), 384n15 Hofstetter, Kurt, 150, 162 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 36, 50, 60 Holland, Eugene W., 140, 144 Holst, Erich von, 65 Hongisto, Ilona, 398, 402 Soul of the Documentary, 398 Hopkins, G. William, 108, 118 Hörl, Erich, 407, 411 Hosseini, Mansoor, 73 Hume, David, 13n4, 28, 33, 310 Hung, Chien-Hui, 73 Husserl, Edmund, 33, 265

471

Index I Ikenouchi, Tomojirō, 74 Iliescu, Mihu, 108, 111, 118 Irigaray, Luce, 430 Ishida, Sanae, 73

Laruelle, François, 86–87, 90, 236, 251, 397, 399–401, 402–3 Philosophies of Difference, 86 Lavin, Sylvia, 318, 319, 324 Lawlor, Len, 262, 271 Lawrence, D. H., 338 Lebedev, Oleg, 18, 145–62 Leclaire, Serge, 284n5 Le Corbusier, 102, 105, 106, 108n5, 109, 110–11, 113–14, 118–19, 147 “Architecture and the Mathematical Spirit,” 105, 106 “espace indicible, L’, ” 105 Modulor, The, 108n5, 109, 110–11 Precisions on the Present State of Architecture and City Planning, 102 LeDoux, Joseph, 240, 251 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 34, 46, 153, 286, 310, 318, 408–11, 448, 451 Lemoine, Émile, 149n2, 162 Leonardo da Vinci, 105, 147, 216 Leucht, Sabine, 137, 144 Levinas, Emmanuel, 193, 194, 214 Levine, Sherrie, 373 Levy, Maayan, 67, 71 Liao, Lin-Ni, 73 Ligeti, György, 61, 129–35, 136 Continuum, 129, 130 Études, 129–30 Étude III: Touches bloquées, 130–35 Poème symphonique, 129 Lin, Maya, 236, 238, 251 What Is Missing?, 236 Lindwall, Christer, 18, 83–91 Points, 85 Topography of the (One), 83, 86–90 Lingis, Alphonso, 247, 252 Long, Richard, 373 Lorca, Federico García, 376–77, 379, 386 Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, 377 “Theory and Play of the Duende,” 379 Loukaki, Argyro, 322, 324 Lovecraft, H. P., 336, 337, 338, 421 Low, Tim, 166, 173 Lucier, Alvin, 49 Luftwerk, 241 White Wanderer, 241 Luisetti, Federico, 274n1, 279 Lyotard, Jean-François, 283–85, 288, 351–52, 355 Discourse, Figure, 284–85, 351

J Jagamara Nelson, Michael, 373 Five Dreamings, 373 jagodzinski, jan, 17, 19, 233–53 Jaitin, Diego A., 67, 71 Jameson, Frederic, 433, 436 Jasper, Michael, 110, 118 Deleuze on Art, 110 Jaynes, Julian, 240, 251 Jeremijenko, Natalie, 238, 251 Amphibious Architecture, 238 Mussel Choir, 238 NoParks, 238 Johnson, Carl Hirschie, 66, 71 Johnson, Tom, 28 Jolivet, André, 73, 76, 77, 80, 81 K Kabakov, Emilia, 390–92, 395 Kabakov, Ilya, 390–92, 395 Kabakov, Ilya, and Emilia Kabakov, works by Incident at the Museum, or Water Music, 390–92 Kac, Eduardo, 246, 251 Kafka, Franz, 330, 421 Kalff, Louis, 114 Kandinsky, Wassily, 52n13, 216 Kane, Brian, 87–88, 90 Kant, Immanuel, 13n4, 26, 31, 34, 35, 148, 222, 223, 242, 310, 384 Critique of Judgement, 242 Keunen, Bart, 322, 324 Kennedy, James, 235, 251 Kerouac, Jack, 331 Kiefer, Anselm, 373 Kinsman, Jane, 376n10, 386 Kishino, Malika, 73 Klee, Paul, 52n13, 167, 173, 238, 243, 251, 276, 279 Klein, Melanie, 194 Koozin, Timothy, 75 Korem, Tal, 67, 71 Kostelanetz, Richard, 51, 60 Kubik, Gerhard, 129 Kuhl, Patricia K., 240, 251 Krauss, Rosalind E., 317, 324, 344, 352 “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” 317 Krumbein, Wolfgang, 449nn, 454

M Ma, Peijun, 66, 71 Machaut, Guillaume de, 35 Mâche, François-Bernard, 73 L MacIsaac, Gregory, 149n4, 162 Laban, Rudolf von, 148, 162 Macquarrie, John, 266, 271 Lacan, Jacques, 37, 184–85, 193, 199, 204, 208, 210, 214, Maimon, Salomon, 148 303, 440 Malabou, Catherine, 239, 240, 252 Lachenmann, Helmut, 35 Maldiney, Henri, 163, 167, 173 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 50n7, 60 Mallgrave, Harry Francis, 321, 324 Lambert, Gregg, 346, 347, 355 Mann, Daniel, 421 Lang, Bernhard, 242, 251 Manning, Erin, 97, 98, 99 Differenz/Widerholung, 242

472

Index Manning, Erin, and Brian Massumi, works by Thought in the Act, 98 Manoury, Philippe, 49, 50–51, 53, 55–56, 59, 60 Kein Licht, 51 60th Parallel, 51 See also, Boulez, Pierre, Jean-Pierre Changeux, and Philippe Manoury, works by Marceau, Marcel, 363, 370 Mask Maker, The, 363 Margulis, Lynn, 205, 207, 214 Marra, Emilia, 19, 255–59 Martin, Brian, 374n7, 386 Martin, Laurent, 73 Massé, Isabelle, 78, 79, 81, 82 Massumi, Brian, 19, 97, 98, 99, 300, 301, 302, 305, 320, 321, 324 See also, Manning, Erin, and Brian Massumi, works by Masumara, Ken-ichi, 66, 71 Matrix, The (the Wachowskis, dirs.) Matsumiya, Keita, 73 Maturana, Humberto R., 187, 214 Mauvoisin, Daniel, 67, 71 May, Todd, 106, 119, 269, 271 McMahon, Laura, 433–34, 436 Cinema and Contact, 434 McNeece, Lucy, 435, 436 Meillassoux, Quentin, 239, 252, 400, 403 Meiner, Carsten Henrik, 233, 252 Meinong, Alexius, 400, 403 Meissner, Christina, 426 Meltzoff, Andrew N., 240, 251 Melville, Herman, 273, 276, 278, 421 Enchanted Isles, The, 276, 278 Moby Dick, 276, 337 Melville, Stephen, 217, 230 Meneses, Maria Paula, 278, 280 See also, Sousa-Santos, Boaventura de, João Arriscado Nunes, and Maria Paula Meneses, works by Merk, Andreas, 362, 363 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 226n18, 418, 419 Messiaen, Olivier, 61, 63, 73, 74, 76, 78, 80, 81, 103, 116, 140–41, 144 Modes de valeurs et d’intensités, 63 Préludes, 76 Mircan, Mihnea, 449, 454 Miyamoto, Kenjiro, 75 Mochizuki, Misato, 73 Moore, Jason W., 274, 279 Mondrian, Piet, 52n13 Monet, Claude, 53 Mongrel, 123, 126 Monteiro Freitas, Marlene, 357–58, 362–68, 370 Bacantes—Prelúdio para uma Purga, 363, 367 Guintche, 362 Jaguar, 362, 363 marfim e carne, De, 362 See also, D’Errico, Lucia, and Marlene Monteiro Freitas, works by Mori, Tetsuya, 66, 71 Morphy, Howard, 373, 374, 386 Morton, Timothy, 273, 279 Motherwell, Robert, 371, 374–76, 379, 386 At Five in the Afternoon, 371, 376, 379, 382

lack with No Way Out, 372 B Elegy to the Spanish Republic 100, 371, 372, 382, 383 Reconciliation Elegy, 371, 374–75 Robert Motherwell: At Five in the Afternoon (exhibition), 375 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 38, 160n13 Così fan tutte, 160n13 Mueller, Michael P., 236, 252 Mullarkey, John, see Ó Maoilearca, John Murphy, Timothy S., 116, 119 Murray, Alex, 238, 250 N Nabais, Catarina Pombo, 14, 21 Naess, Arne, 413–15, 419 Ecology, Community, and Lifestyle, 414 Life’s Philosophy, 415 “Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement, The” 414 Nakamura, Aki, 73 Nancarrow, Conlon, 129 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 50n7, 51, 60, 418, 419, 446, 454 Napoleon, 410 Nauha, Tero, 17, 19, 397–403 Negri, Antonio, 235, 240, 251 Neidich, Warren, 240, 252 Nevo, Eviatar, 66, 71 New 11 (group show at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art), 313–14 Newton, Isaac, 153 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 11, 13n4, 21, 36, 53, 56, 60, 86, 180, 255, 261, 279, 310, 322, 347 Nowotny, Helga, 218n10, 219n11, 226n17, 230 O Ohana, Maurice, 73, 80 O’Hara, Jane, 235, 252 Olmedo, Maria, 66, 71 Ó Maoilearca, John, 262–63, 266, 269, 271, 400–401, 403 O’Neill, John S., 67, 71 Osborne, Nigel, 84n2 Osborne, Peter, 317, 324 Östersjö, Stefan, 17, 18, 83–91, 121, 128 O’Sullivan, Simon, 14, 17, 21, 307, 315, 322, 324, 327–40, 397n1, 402 See also Burrows, David, and Simon O’Sullivan, works by Ovid, 82 Metamorphoses, 82n4 P Paik, Nam June, 49, 51, 60 Tribute to John Cage, 49 Palladio, Andrea, 147 Pan, Min, 66, 71 Parisi, Luciana, 237, 248, 252 Parmenides, 103, 104 Parnet, Claire, see Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet, works by Parr, Adrian Deleuze Dictionary, The, 940

473

Index Parreno, Philippe, 216 Paterson, Katie, 239, 252 Fossil Necklace, 239 Patrick, Jonathan, 166, 173 Pearson, Keith Ansell, 243, 252 Pécou, Thierry, 73 Penha, Gustavo, 18, 129–36 Penrose, Roger, 237, 251 Peretti, Johnah, 433, 436 Peters, Gary, 95, 96–97, 99, 103, 119 Petitot, Jean, 124, 128 Pettersson, Jörgen, 86n3, 91 Pettigrew, Jack, 449nn, 454 Phelan, Peggy, 397, 403 Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Andreas, 416, 419 Piaf, Édith, 43–44 accordéoniste, L’, 43–44 Picasso, Pablo, 375, 384 Guernica, 375 Pisters, Patricia, 117 See also, Braidotti, Rosi, and Pisters, Patricia, works by Plato, 26, 28, 103, 178, 180, 213, 257, 261 Parmenides, 28 Symposium, 257 Timaeus, 103 Pleming, Katie, 19, 429–36 Plouvier, Jean-Luc, 147, 158, 161, 162 Plotinus, 41 Enneads, 41 Poe, Edgar Allan, 276 Polke, Sigmar, 373 Ponce Ortiz, Esteban, 276–77, 279 Grado cero, 276–79 Pont, Antonia, 10, 14, 19, 20, 289–97 Pottage, Alain, 102, 119 Presa, Elizabeth, 17, 19, 445–54 Garden of Small Nuptials, 446–48, 50–53 Priest, Graham, 400, 403 Proclus, 148–49, 152, 162 Commentary on the First Book of Euclid’s Elements, 148 Protevi, John, 308, 315 Proust, Marcel, 13n4, 34, 49, 54n17, 177–80, 181, 220 In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu), 178–79 Psarologaki, Liana, 19, 317–24 Cryptopology, 319, 321, 322 Hydor, 319–20 Spatial Sea, 319, 321, 322–23 Pythagoras, 110, 147, 148, 154, 160 Q Qin, Ximing, 66, 71 Querrien, Anne, 153 Quigley, David, 218, 230

Ravel, Maurice, 41, 42, 74, 80 valse, La, 41, 42 Ray, Sandipan, 67, 71 Read, Herbert, 223n14 Read, Jason, 247, 252 Readings, Bill, 217, 230 Reddy, Akhilesh B., 67, 71 Redner, Gregg, 395 Reeves-Evison, Theo, 331n3 Rehberger, Tobias, 240 Reich, Steve, 147 Music for 18 Musicians, 147 Reid, Bill, 235 Reinberg, Alain, 64, 65, 71 Reinke, Hans, 67, 71 Renoir, Auguste, 383 Resnais, Alain, 330n2 Reusch, Jakob, 149n2, 162 Revive & Restore, 238, 252 Riegl, Alois, 233 Rigney, Daryle, 274n1, 279 Risset, Jean-Claude, 47n2 Rivier, Jean, 77 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 431 Roberts, Spencer, 19, 261–71 Robinson, Edward, 266, 271 Robinson, Geoff, 163–66, 169–71, 173 Site Overlay/Acoustic Survey, 163–66, 169–72 Rocha, Glauber, 330n2 Rockwell, Shelley, 378–79, 386 “Grieving as Depicted in Federico Garcia Lorca’s ‘Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,’” 378 Rodwick, David Norman, 102, 119 “The Memory of Resistance,” 102 Roesner, David, 89, 91 Musicality in Theatre, 89 Roffe, Jon, 10, 14, 20, 238, 250, 300, 305 Rosas, 145, 148, 153–55, 158, 160 Rosenstiehl, Pierre, 124, 128 Rosenzweig, Franz, 193, 214 Rostand, Claude, 76 Rothfield, Philipa, 10, 14, 20 Roussel, Albert, 74 Roussel, Raymond, 106 Routley, Richard, 400, 403 Rouvroy, Antoinette, 248, 252, 255, 259, 407, 411 Rrenban, Monad, 126, 128 Ruiten, Schelte van, 217n4, 218nn, 223n15, 226n17, 231 Rutgeerts, Jonas, 18, 137–44 Ruyer, Raymond, 19, 421–25, 427 genèse des formes vivantes, La, 421 Neofinalism, 421 S Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von, 13n4 Sagan, Dorion, 205, 214 Sakai, Kenji, 73 Sakata, Naoki, 73 Saldanha, Arun, 241, 252, 274n1, 279 Salle, David, 373 Samuel, Claude, 78, 82 Sanchis, Salva, 159 Sardà, Elisabet Goula, 376, 379, 387 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 76

R Rajchman, John, 226n18, 230 Ramey, Joshua, 241, 252 Rancière, Jacques, 322, 324 Ravaisson, Félix, 291, 297 Of Habit, 291

474

Index Satie, Erik, 147 Saunders, Frances Stonor, 375, 387 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 263, 268 Sauvagnargues, Anne, 9, 12, 17, 19, 21, 32, 46, 168, 173, 177–81 Scarlatti, Domenico, 130 Scelsi, Giacinto, 29, 30 Quattro pezzi su una nota sola, 29 Schaeffer, Pierre, 166, 173 Schechner, Richard, 397, 399, 403 Schibler, Ueli, 67, 71 Schick, Steven, 83, 85, 91 Schirren, Fernand, 156, 157, 162 Rhythm: Primordial and Sovereign, The, 156 Schmidgen, Henning, 344, 355 “Cerebral Drawings between Art and Science: On Gilles Deleuze’s Philosophy of Concepts,” 344 Schnabel, Julian, 373 Schoenberg, Arnold, 51, 81 Schulz, Karsten A., 274n1, 280 Schumann, Robert, 129–30, 241 Schumann, Winfried Otto, 241 Schwab, Michael, 217n5, 219, 229nn, 231 Schwab, Michael, and Henk Borgdorff, works by Exposition of Artistic Research, The, 217n5 Schyfter, Pablo, 238, 245, 251 Scott, Ridley Blade Runner, 246, 248 Searle, Adrian, 235, 252 Serres, Michel, 248, 252 Shakespeare, William, 35, 46 Shapiro, Hagit, 67, 71 Shi, Yuhui, 235, 251 Shinohara, Makoto, 73 Sholtz, Janae, 19, 341–55 Shrimpton, Gordon, 319, 324 Siedentopf, Henning, 130, 136 Simondon, Gilbert, 9n1, 163, 168, 172, 173, 238, 242, 248, 252, 405, 412, 417, 418, 419 Sinturel, Flore, 67, 71 Siqueiros, David, 234 Slager, Henk, 218n7, 219, 231 Smith, Daniel W., 110, 119, 425, 428 Solomon-Godeau, Abigail, 235, 252 Solomos, Makis, 111, 119 Somers-Hall, Henry, 11, 21 Sousa-Santos, Boaventura de, 275, 278, 280 Sousa-Santos, Boaventura de, João Arriscado Nunes, and Maria Paula Meneses, works by Another Knowledge is Possible: Beyond Northern Epistemology, 278 Souster, Tim, 108, 119 Spångberg, Mårten, 14 Spinoza, Benedict de, 12, 21, 51, 60, 255, 256, 259, 290, 291, 293–96, 335, 336, 338, 341n2 Ethics, 296 Theologico-Political Treatise, 12 Spira, Anthony, 240, 250 Stark, Hannah, 274n1, 279 Stein, Gertrude, 143, 144 Steyerl, Hito, 438, 442, 444 Stiegler, Bernard, 236, 248, 252, 405, 407, 409, 412 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 61 Stockholm Saxophone Quartet, 86n3

Straub, Jean-Marie, 330n2 Stubblefield, Jeremy J., 67, 71 Sullivan, Graeme, 215, 218nn, 231 Suoranta, Juha, 218n8, 230 Survival Research Labs (SRL), 413–15 Assured Destructive Capability, 413 Food for Machines, 413 Noise, 413 Suzuki, Daisetsu Teitaro, 76 Sylvester, David, 285n8, 288 SymbioticA, 246 T Taffe, Philip, 373 Taïra, Yoshihisa, 73, 78 Takemitsu, Tōru, 74–76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81 And Then I Knew ’twas Wind, 75, 78 Autumn, 75 Ceremonial—An Autumn Ode, 75 Distance, 75 Eclipse, 75 In an Autumn Garden, 75 Minamoto Yoshitsune, score for, 75 November Steps, 75 Quotation of Dream—Say Sea, Take Me!, 75 Voyage, 75 Talbot, William Henry Fox, 438, 439–40, 444 Tamba, Akira, 73 Tanada, Fuminori, 73 Tanaka, Karen, 73 Tàpies, Antoni, 375 Tarasov, Vladimir, 19, 390–92, 393, 395 First River, The, score for, 390 Flood, score for, 390 Incident at the Museum, or Water Music, score for, 390–92 Installation at Solitude, score for, 390 Music on the Water, score for, 390 Water Music, 392 Tchomanga, Betty, 367 Thaiss, Christoph A., 67, 71 Thalheimer, Michael, 89 Thiel, Teresa, 66, 71 Thom, René, 155 Tillers, Imants, 373 Imants Tillers: One World Many Visions (exhibition) Nine Shots, The, 373 Tinbergen, Nikolaas, 64–65 Tippins, Deborah J., 236, 252 Tissue Culture and Art Project, The (TC&A), 247 Titus-Carmel, Gérard, 53n14 Suite Grünewald, 53n14 Todd, Zoe, 274n1, 280 Tôn-Thất Tiết, 73, 74, 77–78, 80, 81, 82 Appel, 78 arbalète magique, L’, 78 Chants d’ivresse, 78 Contemplation, 78 Dialogue avec le nature, 78 haut de la montagne, Du, 78 jardins d’autre monde, Les, 77 Poèmes, 78 Prajña Paramita, 78 sourires de Bouddha, Les, 78

475

Index Toop, Richard, 84n2, 90 “Four Facets of ‘The New Complexity,’” 84n2 Tournier, Michel, 338n10 Tromans, Steve, 17, 18, 93–99 Trump, Donald, 257 Tsongkhapa, 445 Tynan, Aidan, 248, 252

Williams, James R., 15, 21, 94, 99, 107, 119, 222, 231, 262, 271 Williams, James S., 430, 436 Wilson, Mick, 217n4, 218nn, 223n15, 226n17, 231 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 45n10, 46 Woodward, Ashley, 238, 250 Woolf, Virginia, 336, 338 Waves, The, 338 Worringer, Wilhelm, 151–53, 156, 157n11, 162 Form Problems of the Gothic, 151 Wray, Britt, 238, 253

U Uexküll, Jakob von, 67, 389, 423 V Vadén, Tere, 218n8, 230 Valencia, Leonardo, 276 Van Balen, Tuur, 247, 250 See also, Cohen, Revital, and Tuur Van Balen, works by Vanden Driessche, Thérèse, 64, 65, 71 Van Gerven Oei, Vincent W. J., 449, 454 Van Ooijen, Gerban, 66, 71 Van Tuinen, Sjoerd, 10, 14, 21, 286n10 Varela, Francisco J., 187, 205, 207, 214 Varèse, Edgard, 50, 114, 395 Varga, Bálint András, 113, 119 Vellodi, Kamini, 17, 19, 215–31 Verne, Jules, 276 Verwoert, Jan, 374, 379–81, 383, 384, 387 “Apropos Appropriation: Why Stealing Images Today Feels Different,” 380n13 “Living with Ghosts: From Appropriation to Invocation in Contemporary Art,” 379 Vidler, Anthony, 318, 324 Vignola, Paolo, 19, 273–80 Vinogradova, Oxana, 66, 71 Viola, Bill, 19, 390, 393–96 Five Angels for the Millennium, 393 Raft, The, 393–94 Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo, 234, 253, 273, 280 Vivier, Claude, 73

X Xenakis, Iannis, 101–17, 119 “Crisis of Serial Music, The” 108 Formalized Music, 110 Metastaseis, 108, 111–13 Pithoprakta, 104 Philips Pavilion, 111–115 Xu, Shuya, 73 Xu, Yao, 66, 71 Y Yuasa, Jōji, 74, 76–77, 80, 81 Composition on Nine Levels by Zeami, 77 Cosmic Haptic, 76n2 Cosmic Haptic III—Kokuh, 77 5 Haiku of Bashō, 77 Interpenetration I, 76 Maibataraki, 76 Narrow Road to the Deep North: Bashō, The, 77 Projection—Flower, Bird, Wind and Moon, 76 Projection for 7 Players, 76 Ritual for Delphi, 77 Yúdice, George, 234, 253 Yussof, Kathryn, 417–18, 419 “Insensible Worlds: Postrelational Ethics, Indeterminacy and the (k)Nots of Relating,” 417 Z Zeami, Motokiyo, 76 Zepke, Stephan, 10, 14, 21, 389, 396 Zerner, Henri, 233, 253 Zhao, Chi, 66, 71 Zhao, Yuwei, 66, 71 Žižek, Slavoj, 319, 324 Zourabichvili, François, 453, 454 Žukauskaitė, Audronė, 17, 19, 421–28 Zurr, Ionat, 246, 250 See also, Catts, Oron, and Ionat Zurr, works by

W Wachowskis, the Matrix, The, 241 Wagner, Richard, 62 Wald Lasowski, Aliocha, 80, 82 Walker, Kara, 216 Wang, Jingkui, 67, 71 Waterlow, Nick, 373n5 Webern, Anton, 81 Weiler, Astrid, 449nn, 454 Weiler, Reto, 449nn, 454 Weinstein, Jami, 244, 253 Weinthal, Lois, 299, 304, 305 Weismann, August, 200 Westworld (HBO series), 240 White, Kenneth, 74, 81–82 esprit nomade, L’, 81n3 Whitehead, Alfred North, 319, 409–11, 412 Whitehead, Kenia, 66, 71 Whitley, Alexander, 247 Widder, Nathan, 310, 315

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Editors Paulo de Assis Paolo Giudici Authors Suzie Attiwill Sara Baranzoni Zsuzsa Baross Terri Bird Ronald Bogue Barbara Bolt Peter Burleigh Edward Campbell Marianna Charitonidou Jean-Marc Chouvel Guillaume Collett Jörgen Dahlqvist Lucia D’Errico Zornitsa Dimitrova Lilija Duobliene Andrea Eckersley Anders Elberling Bracha L. Ettinger Henrik Frisk jan jagodzinski Oleg Lebedev Christer Lindwall Emilia Marra Tero Nauha Stefan Östersjö Simon O’Sullivan Gustavo Rodrigues Penha Katie Pleming Antonia Pont Elizabeth Presa Liana Psarologaki Spencer Roberts Jonas Rutgeerts Anne Sauvagnargues Janae Sholtz Steve Tromans Kamini Vellodi Paolo Vignola Audronė Žukauskaité

Production manager Heike Vermeire Managing editor Edward Crooks Series editor William Brooks Lay-out Studio Luc Derycke Cover design Lucia D’Errico Cover image © Bracha L. Ettinger Typesetting Friedemann bvba Press Wilco B.V., The Netherlands

© 2019 by Leuven University Press / Universitaire Pers Leuven / Presses Universitaires de Louvain. Minderbroedersstraat 4 B–3000 Leuven (Belgium) ISBN 978 94 6270 202 8 e-ISBN 978 94 6166 305 4 DOI https://doi.org/10.11116/9789461663054 D/2019/1869/41 NUR: 663

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