A NG E L A K I journal of the theoretical humanities volume6 number 3 december 2001
Art is thus confused with a cultural object and may give rise to any of the discourses to which anthropological data in general lend them- selves. One could do a history, sociology, or political economy of it, to mention just those few. One can easily show that its destination, anthropologically speaking, undergoes consid- erable modification depending on whether the artwork ÒbelongsÓ to a culture that is tribal, imperial, republican, monarchical, theocratic, mercantile, autocratic, capitalist, and so on, and that it is a determining feature of the contemporary work that it is obviously simon o’sullivan destined for the museum (collection, conserva- tion, exhibition) and for the museum audience. This approach is implied in any ÒtheoryÓ of art, for the theory is made only of objects, in THE AESTHETICS OF order to determine them. But the work is not merely a cultural object, although it is that too. AFFECT It harbours within it an excess, a rapture, a potential of associations that overflows all the thinking art beyond determinations of its ÒreceptionÓ and Òproduc- representation tion.Ó Jean-Franois Lyotard, ÒCritical ReflectionsÓ 93 ity over and above its existence as a cultural object. I want to claim that this excess need not ow could it happen that in thinking about be theorised as transcendent; we can think the Hart, in reading the art object, we missed aesthetic power of art in an immanent sense Ð what art does best? In fact we missed that which through recourse to the notion of affect. defines art: the aesthetic Ð because art is not an Before moving on, however, a backward object amongst others, at least not an object of glance. What happened? What caused this knowledge (or not only an object of knowledge). aesthetic blindness? In the discipline of art Rather, art does something else. Indeed, art is history there were, are (at least) two factors in precisely antithetical to knowledge; it works play. First, Marxism (or ÒThe Social History of against what Lyotard once called the Òfantasies of ArtÓ) and the propensity to explain art histori- realismÓ (The Postmodern Condition 93). Which cally, through recourse to its moment of produc- is to say that art might well be a part of the world tion. Second, deconstruction (or ÒThe New Art (after all it is a made thing), but at the same time HistoryÓ) and the propensity to stymie (histori- it is apart from the world. And this apartness, cal) interpretations, whilst still inhabiting their however it is theorised, is what constitutes artÕs general explanatory framework. Marxism and importance. deconstruction: understanding art as representa- In this paper I want to think a little about this tion, and then understanding art as being in the apartness; this ÒexcessÓ or ÒraptureÓ which, as crisis in representation; appealing to origins as Lyotard remarks above, constitutes artÕs effectiv- final explanation, and then putting the notion of
ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/01/030125-11 © 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd and the Editors of Angelaki DOI: 10.1080/09697250120087987
1 2 5 aesthetics of affect origin under erasure. First aesthetics fell foul of no denying, or deferring, affects. They are what Marxism. A disinterested beauty? A transcendent make up life, and art. 8 For there is a sense in aesthetic? Ideological! 1 Then it fell foul of decon- which art itself is made up of affects. Affects struction. The apparatus of capture that is decon- frozen in time and space. Affects are, then, to use struction: Derrida neatly reconfiguring the Deleuzo-Guattarian terms Ð and to move the discourse of aesthetics as a discourse of/on repre- register away from deconstruction and away from sentation. Aesthetics is deconstructed, and art representation Ð the molecular ÒbeneathÓ the becomes a broken promise. 2 Both Marxism and molar. The molecular understood here as lifeÕs, deconstruction were, still are, powerful critiques. and artÕs, intensive quality, as the stuff that goes However, deconstruction especially is negative on beneath, beyond, even parallel to significa- critique par excellence; indeed, it is implicitly a tion.9 critique of Marxism (so that Marx and Derrida But what can one say about affects? Indeed, will always be troublesome bed mates, at least in what needs to be said about them? Certainly, this sense). 3 in a space such as art history where deconstruc- Deconstructive reading is not itself a bad tive Ð let alone semiotic Ð approaches to art are thing; indeed, it might be strategically important becoming, indeed have become, hegemonic, the to employ deconstruction precisely to counteract existence of affects, and their central role in art, the effects of, to disable, a certain kind of needs asserting. For this is what art is: a bundle aesthetic discourse (deconstruction as a kind of of affects or, as Deleuze and Guattari would say, expanded ideological critique). However, after a bloc of sensations , waiting to be reactivated by the deconstructive reading, the art object a spectator or participant. 10 Indeed, you cannot remains. Life goes on. Art, whether we will it or read affects, you can only experience them. not, continues producing affects. What is the Which brings us to the crux of the matter: expe- ÒnatureÓ of affects, and can they be decon- rience. Paul de Man, as a more or less typical structed? Affects can be described as extra- spokesperson for that melancholy science that is discursive and extra-textual. 4 Affects are deconstruction, writes: ÒIt is a temporal experi- moments of intensity, a reaction in/on the body ence of human mutability, historical in the deep- at the level of matter. 5 We might even say that est sense of the term in that it implies the affects are immanent to matter. They are necessary experience of any present as a passing certainly immanent to experience. (Following experience, that makes the past irrevocable and Spinoza, we might define affect as the effect unforgettable, because it is inseparable from any another body, for example an art object, has present or futureÓ (148Ð 49). upon my own body and my bodyÕs duration.6) As As with Derrida, so with de Man: present expe- such, affects are not to do with knowledge or rience Ð the moment, the event Ð is inaccessible meaning; indeed, they occur on a different, asig- to consciousness. All we ever have is its trace (we nifying register.7 In fact this is what differenti- experience ÒpassingÓ moments). If the affect ÒisÓ ates art from language Ð although language, too, precisely present experience, it could be said, can and does have an affective register; indeed, following de Man et al., that all we ever have is a signification itself might be understood as just a kind of echo, the representation of affect. Now complex affective function (meaning would be this is a clever and beguiling story, giving the the effect of affects). affect a logocentric spin. But, I wonder, is the Of course, from a certain perspective, affects affect really of this type? Is the affect transcen- are only meaningful within language. Indeed the dent in this sense (beyond experience)? Or, affect can be Òunderstood,Ó can be figured, as rather, is it not the case, as I have already always already a representation of what we might suggested, that the affect is immanent to experi- call the Ur or originary affect Ð the latter posi- ence11 and that all this writing about the affect is tioned as an unreachable (and unsayable) origin; really just that: writing. Writing which produces again, so much for deconstruction. And yet an effect of representation. (Parodying Derrida a affects are also, and primarily, affective. There is little, we might say that by asking the question
1 2 6 o’sullivan
Òwhat is an affect?Ó we are already presupposing an object as such, or not only an object, but that there is an answer (an answer which must be rather a space, a zone 14 or what Alain Badiou given in language). We have in fact placed the might call an Òevent siteÓ: Òa point of exile where affect in a conceptual opposition that always and it is possible that something, finally, might everywhere promises and then frustrates mean- happenÓ (84, n. 5). At any rate art is a place ing.) where one might encounter the affect. So much for writing, and for art as a kind of Such an accessing of the event might involve writing. In fact the affect is something else what Henri Bergson calls attention: a suspension entirely: precisely an event or happening. Indeed, of normal motor activity which in itself allows this is what defines the affect. It is not that de other ÒplanesÓ of reality to be perceivable (an Man (or Derrida for that matter) is wrong. As opening up to the world beyond utilitarian inter- subjects we can certainly be positioned, and posi- ests) (101Ð02). Following Bergson we might say tion ourselves, in de ManÕs temporal predicament that as beings in the world we are caught on a (a name for which is representation). This has certain spatio-temporal register: we see only what often been the way in the West Ð in modernism we have already seen (we see only what we are and in postmodernism. Indeed, we might say, interested in). At stake with art, then, might be following Michael Fried and his detractors, that an altering, a switching, of this register. New this oscillation between aesthetics and its decon- (prosthetic) technologies can do this. Switching struction has animated the discourse of art temporal registers: time-lapse photography history up to today. 12 But this deconstructive producing firework flowers and flows of traffic; mechanism, this way of thinking art (and slow-motion film revealing intricate movements ourselves), inevitably closes down the possibility which otherwise are a blur. And switching spatial of accessing the event that is art. Indeed, within registers too: microscopes and telescopes showing this mechanism art is either positioned as tran- us the molecular and the super-molar. Indeed, at scendent or, with deconstruction, is always this point the new media coincide with art: already positioned and predetermined by the indeed, the new media take on an aesthetic func- discourse that surrounds it Ð the event as always tion (a deterritorialising function). However, we already captured by representation. Art here need not turn to new technologies. The realm of becomes a broken promise, a fallen angel. affects is all around us and there are as many But is this the end of the story? Might there different strategies for accessing it as there are in fact be a way of rescuing art from this pre- subjects. For Deleuze and Guattari, these two dicament, this double bind, without necessarily sorcerers, it is a question of making yourself a returning to a traditional, transcendent, body without organs : in this context, a strategy aesthetic? Indeed, how might we think art as for accessing that which is normally ÒoutsideÓ event? This is a slippery area Ð and much recent yourself; your Òexperimental milieuÓ which philosophy has been written on how to think the everywhere accompanies your sense of self ( A event.13 It is almost a question of faith. Either Thousand Plateaus 149Ð66). For Deleuze and you side with deconstruction: the event as always Guattari this is a pragmatic project: you do not already constituted, determined by the scene of just read about the body without organs Ð you the event. Or you get a little more religious: the make yourself one. event as something genuinely unexpected. Georges Bataille talks about such a pragmatic Importantly, this need not involve a transcendent project in Lascaux, his book on the Lascaux cave aesthetic (no return to Clement Greenberg, no paintings. For Bataille, such a project, such a return to Kant). In fact there may be a way of ritual, can be understood as the creation of a reconfiguring the event as immanent to this sacred space. Indeed art, for Bataille, is precisely world, as not arriving from any kind of transcen- a mechanism for accessing a kind of immanent dent plane (and as not transporting us there) but beyond to everyday experience; art operates as a as emerging from the realm of the virtual. In the kind of play which takes the participant out of realm of the virtual, art Ð art work Ð is no longer mundane consciousness (hence BatailleÕs under-
1 2 7 aesthetics of affect standing of the Lascaux cave paintings as ÒsummoningÓ and making visible of forces precisely performative). This might involve a (What is Philosophy? 181Ð82).16 representational function (after all, we can recog- This world of affects, this universe of forces, is nise the animals at Lascaux), but representation our own world seen without the spectacles of is not these paintingsÕ sole purpose, and we miss subjectivity. But how to remove these spectacles, something essential about them if we attend which are not really spectacles at all but the very merely to their history (if we simply read them). condition of our subjectivity? How, indeed, to Jean-Franois Lyotard is perhaps most attuned to sidestep our selves? In fact we do it all the this experimental and rupturing quality of art. time Ð we are involved in molecular processes Lyotard calls for a practice of patience, of listen- that go on ÒbeyondÓ our subjectivity. Indeed we ing Ð a kind of meditative state that allows for, ÒareÓ these processes. 17 We Ò areÓ Ð as well as produces an opening for, an experience of the subjects (bound by strata) Ð bundles of events, event, precisely, as the affect. In Peregrinations bundles of affects (in a constant process of Lyotard writes: destratification). 18 At stake here, then, are prac- tices and strategies which reveal this Òother sideÓ [One must] become open to the ÒIt happens to ourselves; practices which imaginatively and thatÓ rather than the ÒWhat happensÓ É [and this] requires at the very least a high degree of pragmatically switch the register. After all, why refinement in the perception of small differ- not try something new? As Deleuze remarks in an ences É In order to take on this attitude you interview: ÒWhat weÕre interested in, you see, are have to impoverish your mind, clean it out as modes of individuation beyond those of things, much as possible, so that you make it inca- persons or subjects: the individuation, say, of a pable of anticipating the meaning, the ÒWhatÓ time of day, of a region, a climate, a river or a of the ÒIt happensÉÓ The secret of such asce- wind, of an event. And maybe itÕs a mistake to sis lies in the power to be able to endure occur- believe in the existence of things, persons, or rences as ÒdirectlyÓ as possible without the subjectsÓ ( Negotiations 26). mediation of a Òpre-text.Ó Thus to encounter This is artÕs function: to switch our intensive the event is like bordering on nothingness. register, to reconnect us with the world. Art (18)15 opens us up to the non-human universe that we And so this event, this affect, as Bataille also are part of. Indeed, art might well have a repre- teaches us, is not really about self-conscious- sentational function (after all, art objects, like ness Ð the representation of experience to everything else, can be read) but art also operates oneself; the self as constituted through represen- as a fissure in representation. And we, as specta- tation Ð at all. In fact we might say that the tors, as representational creatures, are involved in affect is a more brutal, apersonal thing. It is that a dance with art, a dance in which Ð through care- which connects us to the world. It is the matter ful manoeuvres Ð the molecular is opened up, the in us responding and resonating with the matter aesthetic is activated, and art does what is its around us. The affect is, in this sense, transhu- chief modus operandi: it transforms, if only for a man. Indeed, with the affect what we have is a moment, our sense of our ÒselvesÓ and our kind of transhuman aesthetic. Paul de Man notion of our world. might figure art as a shield from mortality, a This is, of course, to claim quite an impor- reassuring mirror to a fearful subject (and then, tance for art. Certainly it is to move far away of course, demonstrate that the shield is always from those postmodernists who assert that it is already broken). But in fact art is something time for art to be included within the Òbroader much more dangerou s: a portal, an access point, picture of representational practices in contem- to another world (our world experienced differ- porary societyÓ (Burgin 147). Indeed, it is to ently), a world of impermanence and interpene- claim a kind of autonomy for art. But this auton- tration, a molecular world of becoming. omy is not the same as, for example, AdornoÕs, According to Deleuze and Guattari, this, ulti- although it might appear similar. It is in fact a mately, is what makes painting abstract: the reconfiguration of aesthetics away from Adorno
1 2 8 o’sullivan and the whole Kantian heritage. In Aesthetic genuinely creative act (as opposed to the realisa- Theory Adorno writes: ÒArtÕs utopia, the tion of the possible, which ultimately always counter-factual yet-to-come is draped in Black, it already resembles the real). 19 The virtual here goes on being a recollection of the possible with can be understood as the realm of affects. Art a critical edge against the real É It is the possi- precisely actualises these invisible universes; 20 or ble, as promised by its impossibility. Art is the at least it opens up a portal onto these other, promise of happiness, a promise that is virtual worlds (we might say that art is situated constantly being brokenÓ (196). on the borderline between the actual and the For Adorno, art operates as a utopian blink: it virtual).21 This gives art an ethical imperative, presents the possible through its difference to the because it involves a kind of moving beyond the existent. Indeed, art, for Adorno, is not really of already familiar (the human), precisely a kind of this world at all Ð it prefigures and promises a self-overcoming. world yet-to-come. Art, if you like, operates For Guattari this new ethico-aesthetic para- within Walter BenjaminÕ s messianic time . And digm pertains not just to art but to subjectivity yet art is inevitably doomed to frustration: the as well (in fact notions of subject and object promise (of reconciliation) is constantly being become blurred here). Guattari argues that by broken. Art operates within this melancholy allowing individuals access to Ònew materials of field. In fact it is worth noting that philosophy, expression,Ó Ònew complexes of subjectivationÓ for Adorno, operates on the same register: ÒThe become possible; new Òincorporeal universes of only philosophy which can be reasonably prac- referenceÓ are opened up which allow for what tised in the face of despair is the attempt to Guattari calls a process of resingularisation Ð a contemplate all things as they would present process of reordering our selves and our relation themselves from the standpoint of redemptionÓ to the world ( Chaosmosis 7). In such a prag- (Minima Moralia 247). In a sense, then, Adorno matic, and aesthetic, reconfiguration Òone creates has abandoned the existent (his is a forsaken new modalities of subjectivity in the same way an world). Indeed, this is what gives his work its artist creates new forms from a paletteÓ (ibid.). melancholy tenor. (For Guattari the La Borde clinic where he However, we might want to turn from Adorno worked, understood as a machinic assemblage , to Deleuze and to a more affirmative notion of was precisely a site of resingularisation. But in the aesthetic impulse. Here, instead of the exis- fact people resingularise themselves every day: tent and the possible as ontological categories academics plant allotments, manual labourers and as coordinates for art, we might utilise visit the theatre. Different activities take on DeleuzeÕs categories of the actual and the aesthetic, deterritorialising, functions.) virtual. In Difference and Repetition Deleuze This is to take art away from the Frankfurt outlines this shift, and the difference between the school register. For Adorno, artÕs importance lay, two sets of categories, as follows: at least in one sense, in its uselessness, its irre- The only danger in all this is that the virtual ducibility to conceptual thought. Art did not could be confused with the possible. The possi- partake in, and thus provided a critique of, ble is opposed to the real; the process under- instrumental reason and its accompaniment, the gone by the possible is therefore a world commodity system. With Deleuze and Òrealisation.Ó By contrast, the virtual is not Guattari and their allies we have a different opposed to the real; it possesses a full reality mapping of the world, and of philosophyÕs and by itself. The process it undergoes is actualisa- artÕs role within it. Philosophy is no longer to be tion. It would be wrong to see only a verbal understood as a utopian pursuit, 22 but is rather dispute here: it is a question of existence itself. to do with pragmatics: active concept creation in (211) order to solve problems (to get something done). At stake in art is not a utopian and, in some Likewise with art. Art is not useless but performs senses, negative aesthetic, but an affirmative very specific roles. 23 These roles or functions actualisation of the virtual Ð the latter being a differ, depending on the kind of art and the
1 2 9 aesthetics of affect milieu in which a work of art exists. Indeed, of transformation . Art is less involved in making conceptual art might have more in common with sense of the world and more involved in explor- what Deleuze and Guattari call philosophy (prob- ing the possibilities of being, of becoming, in the lem solving). Installation art, on the other hand, world. Less involved in knowledge and more might be a paradigmatic case of art as access involved in experience, in pushing forward the point to other worlds. Julia Kristeva arrives at boundaries of what can be experienced. 25 Finally, precisely this conclusion (here she is writing less involved in shielding us from death, but about contemporary installations at the Venice indeed precisely involved in actualising the possi- Biennale): bilities of life. Paradoxically the notion of an Òaesthetic functionÓ might well return us to a In an installation it is the body in its entirety productive utilisation of the term Òvisual which is asked to participate through its sensa- culture.Ó But this will be a return marked by its tions, through vision obviously, but also hear- ing, touch, on occasions smell. As if these passage through aesthetics, through Adorno and artists, in the place of an ÒobjectÓ sought to Deleuze especially. In a sense this passage Ð this place us in a space at the limits of the sacred, championing of art as an autonomous, aesthetic and asked us not to contemplate images but to practice Ð was only the first moment, the second communicate with beings. I had the impres- being a detachment of the aesthetic from its sion that [the artists] were communicating this: apparent location within (and transcendent that the ultimate aim of art is perhaps what attachment to) certain objects (the canonical was formerly celebrated under the term of objects of art history). This immanent aesthetic, incarnation . I mean by that a wish to make us as function, can now be thought in relation to a feel, through the abstractions, the forms, the variety of objects and practices. So, yes, perhaps colours, the volumes, the sensations, a real we can speak of a kind of visual culture after all, experience. (Quoted in Bann 69) not through the notion of a general semiotics, but For Kristeva, art (in this case installation) is a rather through the notion of a general aesthetics. bloc of sensations made up of abstractions, How might this effect the practice of art forms, colours, and volumes. This art is also a history? A certain kind of art history might sacred space whose aim it is to give us a real (in disappear: that which attends only to artÕs signi- this case, multi-sensory) experience. Kristeva fying character, that which understands art, posi- talks about these installations not in terms of tions art work, as representation. Indeed, these representation but in terms of their function, a latter functions might be placed alongside artÕs function of incarnation . For Kristeva, this other asignifying functions Ð artÕs affective and aesthetic function is the Òultimate aim of art.Ó intensive qualities (the molecular beneath, This is in a sense to move to a post-medium within, the molar). In this place art becomes a notion of art practice, in that it is not so impor- more complex, and a more interesting, object. tant what the specifics of a medium might be (no And the business of art history changes from a Greenbergian truth to materials, no more asking hermeneutic to a heuristic activity: art history as Òwhat is art?,Ó Ò what is painting?Ó and, thus, no a kind of parallel to the work that art is already more deconstructions); rather, what becomes doing rather than as an attempt to fix and inter- important is what a particular art object can do. pret art; indeed, art history as precisely a kind of In relation to aesthetics and affects, this function creative writing. So I end this paper, this skir- might be summed up as the making visible of the mish against representation, with the outline of a invisible, of the making perceptible of the imper- new project: the thinking of specific art works, ceptible or, as Deleuze and Guattari would say, as the writing on specific art works, as exploration the harnessing of forces. 24 Another way of saying of artÕs creative, aesthetic and ethical function. 26 this is that art is a deterritorialisation, a creative This will involve attending to the specificity of an deterritorialisation into the realm of affects. art work, and the specificity of the milieu in Art, then, might be understood as the name which the art object operates. This is not a retreat for a function: a magical, an aesthetic, function from art history but a reconfiguration of its prac-
1 3 0 o’sullivan tice Ð a reconfiguration which might well involve, Massumi is right: there is no vocabulary of affect. as one of its strategies, a return to those writers However, it is not so simple as inventing one. To who have always seen the invent a language for/of affect is to bring the latter into representation – and hence to invite decon- aesthetic as the function of art, struction. In a sense there is no way out of this and to those writers who might predicament except to acknowledge it as a prob- not be art historians but who lem – and move beyond it. Which is what this are nevertheless attuned to the paper attempts to do. aesthetics of affect. 6 See Deleuze’s “Spinoza and the Three Ethics,” where “affect” is defined as the effect affections notes have on the body’ s duration, the “ passages, becomings, rises and falls, continuous variations of My thanks to Angelaki’s reviewers. power (puissance) that pass from one state to 1 Indeed, there is a “tradition” of positioning crit- another. We will call them affects, strictly speak- ical art history as a form of ideological critique, ing, and no longer affections. They are signs of and specifically as a critique of aesthetics. See, for increase and decrease, signs that are vectorial (of example, Kurt Foster’ s polemical essay, “Critical the joy–sadness type) and no longer scalar like the History of Art or a Transfiguration of Values.” affections, sensations or perceptions” (139). 2 Jacques Derrida performs precisely this decon- 7 As Félix Guattari observes in an interview: struction of aesthetics in “ The Parergon,” in his The same semiotic material can be function- The Truth in Painting 37–82. ing in different registers. A material can be 3 For a more affirmative mapping of Derrida’ s both caught in paradigmatic chains of produc- contribution towards thinking the art object, see tion, chains of signification … but at the same my “Art as Text: Rethinking Representation.” time can function in an a-signifying register. So what determines the difference? In one 4 They can be described as extra-discursive in the case, a signifier functions in what one might sense that they are “outside” discourse under- call a logic of discursive aggregates, i.e. a logic stood as structure (they are precisely what is irre- of representation. In the other case, it func- ducible to structure). They can be described as tions in something that isn’t entirely a logic, extra-textual in the sense that they do not what I’ve called an existential machinic, a logic produce – or do not only produce – knowledge. of bodies without organs, a machinic of Affects might, however, be understood as textual bodies without organs. (“Pragmatic/Machine” in that they are felt as differences in intensity . 15) 5 For Brian Massumi, in “ The Autonomy of 8 For Guattari, affects can be understood precisely Affect,” affects are likewise understood as as what makes up life. They establish a kind of moments of intensity – which might resonate with centre or “self-affirmation” that occurs parallel to linguistic expression but which, strictly speaking, the discursive (what Guattari terms “linear”) are of a different and prior order. For Massumi, as elements of subjectivity. For Guattari, this affec- for myself: “approaches to the image in its relation tive element is present in Freud’ s theory of the to language are incomplete if they operate only on drives, but has been overlooked by “ the struc- the semantic or semiotic level, however that level turalists” (Guattari has Lacan in mind) (“ On is defined (linguistically, logically, narratologically, Machines” 10). Guattari writes: ideologically, or all of these combinations, as a Symbolic). What they lose, precisely, is the event – I consider that limiting ourselves to this coor- in favour of structure” (ibid. 220). dinate [i.e., linearity] is precisely to lose the Massumi identifies the realm of affect as one of element of the machinic centre, of subjective increasing importance within “media, literary and autopoiesis and self-affirmation. Whether art theory” but points out the problem that there located at the level of the complete individual is “ no cultural–theoretical vocabulary specific to or partial subjectivity, or even at the level of affect,” indeed, our “entire vocabulary has derived social subjectivity, this element undergoes a from theories of signification that are still wedded pathic relationship by means of the affect. to structure” (ibid. 221). From one perspective What is it, then, that makes us state phenom-
1 3 1 aesthetics of affect
enologically that something is living? It is ing to the object’ s history. The problem arises precisely this relation of affect. This is not a because ideology and history are here synony- description, nor a kind of propositional analy- mous. In a sense “The Social History of Art” and sis resulting from a sense of hypotheses and art history in general could not, cannot, put this deductions – i.e., it is a living being, therefore language together: they are working within the it is a machine; rather an immediate, pathic horizon of signification. A language of material and and non-discursive apprehension occurs of matter would, for them, be a fetishisation – an the machine’ s ontological autocomposition emptying out of meaning or of that trope of mean- relationship. (Ibid.) ing: history. They would be guilty of the very ideo- Interestingly, in “On Machines” Guattari develops logical mystification of which they are against. It is the notion of a non-discursive, affective, foyer, only within a different model or paradigm that a which has much in common with Bergson’s notion language of materials and matter makes sense. of living beings as affective “centres of indetermi- 11 Massumi is useful in rethinking the relationship nation” (28– 34). between the event, as intensity, and experience: 9 Lyotard addresses this double functioning of the Although the realm of intensity that sign in “ The Tensor.” Like Guattari (see note Deleuze’s philosophy strives to conceptualise above), Lyotard’ s point of departure is Freud’ s is transcendental in the sense that it is not theory of the drives. Lyotard merely points out directly accessible to experience, it is not that the sign can operate within two (or presum- transcendent, it is not exactly outside experi- ably even more) economies: metonymic and ence either. It is immanent to it – always in it metaphoric systems but also affective ones: “It is but not of it. Intensity and experience accom- at once a sign that creates meaning through diver- pany one another, like two mutually presup- gence and opposition, and a sign that creates posing dimensions, or like two sides of a coin. intensity through strength and singularity” (11). Intensity is immanent to matter and to 10 events, to mind and to body and to every [T]he work of art is … a bloc of sensations, level of bifurcation composing them and that is to say, a compound of percepts and which they compose. (226) affects. Percepts are no longer perceptions; Hence, intensity for Massumi is indeed experi- they are independent of a state of those who enced “in the proliferations of levels of organisa- experience them. Affects are no longer feel- tion it ceaselessly gives rise to, generates and ings or affections; they go beyond the regenerates, at every suspended moment” (226). strength of those who undergo them. Sensations, percepts, and affects are beings 12 For a tracking through of this oscillation, see whose validity lies in themselves and exceeds the debates around allegory in the visual arts any lived. ( What is Philosophy? 164) carried out in October, in particular Craig Owens’ In their chapter on art in What is Philosophy? “The Allegorical Impulse: Towards a Theory of Deleuze and Guattari map out a theory and Postmodernism” and, most impressive, Stephen language of art outside of representation. I want to Melville’s “ Notes on the Reemergence of note here an interesting dovetailing of their theory Allegory, the Forgetting of Modernism, the with a kind of aporia which “The Social History of Necessity of Rhetoric, and the Conditions of Art,” and in particular T.J. Clark, finds itself/himself Publicity in Art and Art Criticism.” in. Suffice to say that Deleuze and Guattari’ s 13 See, for example, Andrew Benjamin’s The Plural language – of movement, materials, and matter – is Event. For another interesting take on this prob- precisely the object of art history’s secret desire lematic, especially in relation to Deleuze’s project and fear; a language of art which is no longer to do of thinking multiplicity, see Alain Badiou’s Deleuze: with signifiers and signifieds (poached, as Clark The Clamor of Being . himself remarks, from film theory). Unfortunately, all materialist art historians (“The Social History of 14 For Deleuze and Guattari in What is Philosophy? , Art”) eventually, and inevitably, hit an aporia art is a zone: “a zone of indetermination, of indis- which, very briefly, goes like this: how to attend to cernibility, as if things, beasts, and persons … the material object behind the ideological veils endlessly reach that point that immediately (the cultural readings/meanings), whilst still attend- precedes their natural differentiation. This is what
1 3 2 o’sullivan is called an affect … Life alone creates such zones 19 For a thorough working through of this logic of where living beings whirl around, and only art can the real and the possible, the virtual and the actual, reach and penetrate them in its enterprise of co- see Deleuze’s Bergsonism 96–98. creation” (173). 20 As do philosophy, science and, as we have seen, 15 In general, Lyotard tends to configure this prosthetic technologies. By altering our temporal unknown event in Kantian terms, specifically in and spatial registers new technology opens worlds relation to the sublime. As we shall see, there previously invisible to us but not worlds non-exis- need not be a recourse to the transcendent in tent. We might say something similar about pure order to allow for the possibility of a beyond to mathematics: abstract equations as a way of actu- everyday experience. alising events and processes which cannot be represented (indeed, this actualisation is a form of 16 John Rajchman has also written on this notion problem solving). of the abstract, and on its difference to the more typical, one might say Greenbergian, notion of 21 As Massumi remarks: “It is the edge of the abstraction as reduction and purity. For Rajchman virtual, where it leaks into the actual, that counts. abstraction must be understood as a realm of For that seeping edge is where potential, actually, possibilities, of potentialities, prior to figuration. In is found” (236). order to paint “one must come to see the surface not so much as empty or blank but rather as 22 For Deleuze and Guattari philosophy is not a intense, where ‘intensity’ means filled with the utopian pursuit in the sense of positing transcen- unseen virtuality of other strange possibilities” dent (and thus authoritarian ) utopias. However, (Rajchman 61). The question of how to “ paint philosophy might be figured as utopian if we outside force” is, according to Rajchman’s reading understand by this term immanent, revolutionary of Deleuze, “the basic question of modernity” (60). utopias. Indeed, for Deleuze and Guattari, political philosophy is this kind of utopian practice which 17 This insight can be experienced. Through involves a “ resistance to the present,” and a drugs, through meditation, through anything that, creation of concepts which in itself “ calls for a if only for a moment, dissolves the molar aggre- future form, for a new people that do not yet gate of our subjectivity. exist” (What is Philosophy? 108). Although not within the scope of this paper, a reading of 18 As Deleuze and Guattari remark in “ 587 Frankfurt school utopias via Deleuze and B.C.–A.D. 70: On Several Regimes of Signs,” the Guattari’s notion of immanence would be an inter- “principal strata binding human beings are the esting and productive project. Deleuze and organism, signifiance and interpretation, and Guattari themselves seem to have this in mind subjectification and subjection” ( A Thousand when they footnote the writings of Ernst Bloch in Plateaus 134). It is the function of the next chapter, What is Philosophy? (224). “How to Make Yourself a Body without Organs,” to offer strategies for destratification. This chapter 23 A good example of rethinking art away from might also be considered as a mapping through of the horizon of instrumental reason (and of the a series of experimental strategies for accessing latter’s critique) is Ronald Bogue’ s “ Art and the realm of affect. It is worth noting Deleuze and Territory.” Bogue, taking his lead from Deleuze’s Guattari’s warning here, against “wildly destratify- notion of the refrain, argues that bird song, as a ing” (A Thousand Plateaus 160) – this can end kind of art practice, involves processes and move- merely in empty, botched bodies without organs ments of territorialisation, deterritorialisation, (or worse). In fact, “you have to keep enough of and reterritorialisation. Which is to say that art is the organism for it to reform each dawn; and you not here involved in a logic of the possible, but is have to keep small supplies of signifiance and to do with function, a function of deterritorialisa- subjectification, if only to turn them against their tion. own systems when circumstances demand it … and you have to keep small rations of subjectivity 24 Ronald Bogue has outlined this “aesthetics of in sufficient quantity to enable you to respond to force,” as he calls it, in relation to painting and, the dominant reality” (ibid.). See also my “ In more interestingly, in relation to music (see Violence: Three Case Studies Against the “Gilles Deleuze: The Aesthetics of Force”). Bogue Stratum.” reads Deleuze as offering an “open system” of the
1 3 3 aesthetics of affect arts where at stake is less a definition of art or any Bogue, R. “ Gilles Deleuze: The Aesthetics of demarcation between the aesthetic and the non- Force.” Deleuze: A Critical Reader . Ed. Paul Patton. aesthetic, but rather a general function of art as Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. what “harnesses forces” (ibid. 268). This is partic- Bogue, R. “Art and Territory.” A Deleuzian Century . ularly the case with painting, and of course Ed. Ian Buchanan. Durham: Duke UP, 1999. Deleuze outlines this theory in relation to the paintings of Francis Bacon. However, the function Burgin, V. “The End of Art Theory.” The End of Art of music is also involved in forces. As Bogue Theory. London: Macmillan, 1986. remarks: “The basic function of the refrain is to territorialise forces, to regularise, control and de Man, P. “ Literary History and Literary encode the unpredictable world in regular Modernity.” Blindness and Insight . London: patterns. But the refrain never remains purely Routledge, 1989. closed and stable. Its emergence from the chaotic Derrida, J. The Truth in Painting . Trans. Geoff flux is only provisional and its rhythms always issue Bennington and Ian McCleod. Chicago: U of forth to the cosmos at large” (ibid. 265). Chicago P, 1987. This larger function of deterritorialisation is precisely a “line of flight” into the molecular. It is Deleuze, G. Bergsonism. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson this – an affective line (and, I would argue, an and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Zone, 1991. aesthetic one) – that defines art. Deleuze, G. Negotiations: 1972–90 . Trans. Martin 25 This is precisely Lyotard’s point in “Philosophy Joughin. New York: Columbia UP, 1992. and Painting in the Age of Their Experimentation: Deleuze, G. Difference and Repetition . Trans. Paul Contribution to an Idea of Postmodernity” : Patton. London: Athlone, 1994. “Today’s art consists in exploring things unsayable and things invisible. Strange machines are assem- Deleuze, G. “Spinoza and the Three Ethics.” Essays bled, where what we didn’t have the idea of saying Critical and Clinical . Trans. Daniel W. Smith and or the matter to feel can make itself heard and Michael Greco. London: Verso, 1998. experienced” (190). Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus . 26 I attempt such a project, albeit briefly, in this Trans. Brian Massumi. London: Athlone, 1988. paper’s companion piece, “Writing on Art (Case Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari. What is Philosophy? Study: The Buddhist Puja).” Trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson. London: Verso, 1994. bibliography Foster, K. “ Critical History of Art or a Transfiguration of Values.” New Literary History Adorno, A. Minima Moralia . Trans. E.F.N. Jephcott. (spring 1972): 459–70. London: Verso, 1978. Guattari, F. “ Pragmatic/Machine.” Interview with Adorno, A. Aesthetic Theory . Trans. C. Lenhardt. Charles J. Stivale.
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Lyotard, J.-F. “The Tensor.” Trans. Sean Hand. The Lyotard Reader. Ed. Andrew Benjamin. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. Lyotard, J.-F. “Philosophy and Painting in the Age of Their Experimentation: Contribution to an Idea of Postmodernity.” Trans. Maria Minich Brewer and Daniel Brewer. The Lyotard Reader. Ed. Andrew Benjamin. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. Lyotard, J.-F. “Critical Reflections.” Trans. W.G.J. Niesluchawski. Artforum 24.8 (1991): 92–93. Massumi, B. “The Autonomy of Affect.” Deleuze: A Critical Reader. Ed. P. Patton. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Melville, S. “ Notes on the Reemergence of Allegory, the Forgetting of Modernism, the Necessity of Rhetoric, and the Conditions of Publicity in Art and Art Criticism.” October 19 (1981): 55–92. O’Sullivan, S. “ In Violence: Three Case Studies Against the Stratum.” Parallax 15 (summer 2000): 104–09. O’Sullivan, S. “ Writing on Art (Case Study: The Buddhist Puja).” Parallax 21 (forthcoming). O’Sullivan, S. “ Art as Text: Rethinking Representation.” Art History (forthcoming). Owens, C. “ The Allegorical Impulse: Towards a Theory of Postmodernism.” October 12 (1980): 67–86. Rajchman, J. “ Abstraction.” Constructions. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1988.
Simon OÕSullivan Department of Historical and Critical Studies Goldsmiths College New Cross London SE14 6NW UK E-mail: s.oÕ[email protected]